You Have Been Triggered.

If you’ve been following my Instagram lately, you’ve seen a series of short clips from a longer conversation I recorded with a sheriff along the U.S.–Mexico border.

The topic was immigration, one of the most controversial issues in the United States.

Each clip was edited to provoke a reaction. To irritate. To frustrate. To polarize. Left or right.

And it worked.

Many of you got angry.

That wasn’t an accident.

This is how the content world operates now. Short-form media is engineered to agitate. To simplify. To pull you into outrage before you have time to think. I’ve resisted this for a long time, and I still wrestle with it.

Before podcasting, I was a photographer. Some of you might remember my old page, The Don Shoots. I eventually walked away from it because I felt like I wasn’t contributing anything meaningful, just more noise, more distraction, more reasons to stay glued to a screen.

What brought me back wasn’t a love for content. It was the belief that long-form conversation still matters.

My hope is that the friction created by short clips might interrupt your scrolling just long enough to push you toward something deeper, something slower, more human, and more honest.

The full conversation was with Sheriff Thaddeus Cleveland, an elected lawman responsible for one of the most heavily trafficked border counties in the country.

He surprised me.

He held far more moderate views than I expected. He showed real empathy for migrants. He spoke openly about the moral weight of his job.

One of the hardest moments we shared was one I wrote about a few weeks back. It was when we went searching for a body that had been reported missing. We found pieces of clothing. We tied a cross. We prayed. We stood there and cried over the last resting place of someone who was simply trying to build a better life.

That experience matters.

Because it complicates the story.

The sheriff sees his duty as both humane and necessary, saving lives where possible, enforcing the law where required, and protecting the citizens he swore to serve. He doesn’t fit neatly into the caricature most people have already decided he is.

And that’s the point.

If you only listen to people you already agree with, you’re not informed, you’re entertained.

This isn’t about adopting someone else’s beliefs. It’s about understanding them. About replacing contempt with context. About trading certainty for clarity.

So take this as a challenge.

Listen to someone you probably don’t agree with.
Not to argue or shame them.
But to understand how they arrived where they are.

You might find a little more peace on the other side of that effort.

Below is the full conversation.

— DR