Larry Rosen, founder and host of The Enemies Project, joins Live and Let Live to explore one of the defining challenges of our time: how do we stop seeing people on the other side as enemies?
Larry has spent years bringing people with fiercely opposing political and moral views face-to-face—not to debate or force agreement, but to help them understand the human being sitting across from them. His work is rooted in a simple conviction: we cannot solve the world’s biggest problems while we hate each other.
In this conversation, Robbie and Larry explore political polarization, empathy, conflict, manipulation, peacebuilding, tribalism, emotion, reason, spirituality, and the psychology of reconciliation. Larry explains what he calls the “enemy’s trance”—the way threat shuts down empathy and makes us vulnerable to believing the worst about other people—and how political and media “enemy makers” can exploit that tendency.
Larry also walks through the practical method he uses with opposing participants: first, let them fight and express their authentic anger; then leave politics behind and reconnect as human beings; rebuild the political disagreement through that human understanding; and finally have each person switch roles and genuinely advocate for their supposed enemy.
The conversation ultimately asks whether peace requires agreement at all—or whether the deeper task is learning to understand, respect, and cooperate with people whose beliefs may remain fundamentally different from our own.
Live and Let Live is a movement grounded in the belief that peace on earth is possible when we commit to equal freedom under the law and choose to treat one another with excellence.
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Learn more about Larry Rosen and The Enemies Project:
https://www.enemiesproject.org/
Watch The Enemies Project and support its work. Larry says attention is the most important resource the project needs as it tries to demonstrate that even people who see one another as enemies can rediscover the human being on the other side.
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In this video:
05:25 – Larry’s Mission
08:11 – Humanizing Enemies
11:55 – The Enemy’s Trance
14:29 – Selling Peace
17:10 – America’s Polarization Trap
20:24 – Healthy Conflict
23:28 – Leaders and Empathy
27:09 – Let Them Fight
32:02 – Opposing Values
37:13 – Reason and Emotion
About Larry Rosen:
Larry Rosen is the creator and host of The Enemies Project, a project that brings people with deeply opposing worldviews together in direct conversation to move beyond hatred and toward genuine understanding. His work is informed by years of conflict resolution and mediation, as well as his own experience growing up as both the bully and the bullied.
Through The Enemies Project, Larry has found that when ordinary people are given the opportunity to move beyond threat and genuinely enter one another’s experience, reconciliation is remarkably common. In the interview, he describes the project’s success rate in generating greater goodwill as “nearly a hundred percent.” His broader goal is not to eliminate disagreement, but to help create a society capable of disagreeing without turning neighbors into enemies.
