“Hello?” says the male voice from San Francisco, a hint of uncertainty in its tone. “Hi, I’m Priscilla!” responds Priscilla, with gusto. “Calling from Abilene, Texas, the most conservative town in the country!”

Priscilla and Nick, her Californian conversation partner, wouldn’t appear to be natural confidants. They live 1,500 miles away, and politically, they’re from different universes.

But they have entered into a social experiment with a bold but simple premise. In a country that hasn’t felt more divided in living memory, what would happen if Democrats and Republicans just … talk?

For much of 2026, two free payphones – strategically placed in deep blue and red pockets of America – have connected the country’s most polarized communities. Called the Party Line project and run by a mental health startup, Matter Neuroscience , the experiment has given liberals and conservatives a direct line into each other’s lives.

The project began when the company bought two cheap payphones, restored them, connected them to each other and placed them in two polarized cities: San Francisco, where four in five people voted for Kamala Harris in the 2024 presidential election; and deep-red Abilene, where 74% of voters in surrounding Taylor County supported Donald Trump.

When someone picked up one of the phones, it automatically rang the other — and for a few minutes at a time, two perfect strangers stopped to listen to the other side.

The callers talked about their families, shared their ambitions and whispered secrets, sending private snippets of their lives to a person they’ll likely never meet. Together, the hundreds of conversations reveal something surprising about America: The country is more united than many think.

And listening to every chat were two experts in the science of happiness. They shared audio of several of those conversations with CNN – you can listen to them throughout this story – and they hope their project can create a blueprint for a better country.

The project's organizers set up this free payphone in Abilene, Texas, to connect callers with people in San Francisco. Courtesy Matter Neuroscience

But even the project’s architects weren’t sure it would work. “I was completely against it,” said Axel Bouchon, a neuroscientist who made happiness his specialty after suffering from depression. “I said, ‘You’re crazy.’ This will be kind of an amplification of aggression and riot.”Bouchon said he believed those two trigger words – Democrat and Republican – had become so entrenched that any effort to bring the warring tribes together would fall flat. And in a contentious midterm election year, he braced himself for anger. “So, I think the person most surprised about the results was me.”

Jared and Ben begin their conversation the way many people do: They talk about the weather. On this day, it’s colder in Abilene than in San Francisco. They talk about their surroundings: a bookstore on a Texas main street, and the heart of the bustling Mission District. They talk about these two strange payphones, which appeared in their neighborhoods out of nowhere. And then something interesting happens: They go deep.

“So what are you looking for, Ben?” asks Jared from Texas, as though this is a first date. It seems to catch Ben off guard for a moment. But then he returns serve: “What would make you happy right now?” he asks Jared. “What do you not have in life that would make you happy?”

Jared tells Ben about his book club, and the novel the group just read about two elderly women who explore the world together.

“I would like to travel more,” Jared says. “I desperately want to get away from where I am, even just for a little bit … I always want to see more than I see now.”

“You know, you saying that makes me kind of realize something,” Ben says. “I kind of live in a bubble here … It’s a really comfy bubble … but I don’t know what 2026 is like in the rest of America.”

The two men speak for seven minutes, but their conversation goes to places that discussions with co-workers, friends and families rarely do. It’s exactly what Bouchon and his business partner, the American entrepreneur Ben Goldhirsh, hoped would happen when they purchased two battered old payphones on Facebook Marketplace and formulated their project – even if Bouchon didn’t believe it.

Organizers bought the payphones online, refurbished them and programmed them to call each other. This one is being set up in San Francisco. Courtesy Matter Neuroscience Their start-up, Matter Neuroscience, was founded in 2019 with the mission of better understanding what makes humans feel good. “We have to decrypt the code of happiness,” Bouchon says.

As with the strangers who picked up their phones, the two partners seem an unlikely pair. Goldhirsh speaks with the smooth ease of a tech bro, while the German-born Bouchon rhapsodizes about the brain with the eccentricities of a mad scientist. When CNN spoke with them, Bouchon was in Munich and Goldhirsh was nine time zones away, in his daughter’s bedroom in Santa Barbara, California.

But together they have watched as the United States drifted further apart into two bitterly divided factions. A survey by Pew last year found that four in five Americans disagree with the other side not just on policy, but on “basic facts.”In another 2025 study, the research nonprofit found that half of Democrats and Republicans say the other party makes them feel angry . And a Gallup poll last year revealed a majority of Americans feel that both parties have gone too far in their use of inflammatory rhetoric to criticize their opponents.

Bouchon and Goldhirsh said they realized something had gone very wrong in the way people in the US talk about politics.

Bouchon explains it scientifically: Political arguments lead to spikes in cortisol, the brain’s primary stress molecule, he says, essentially putting the brain into fight mode. Once there, we’re no longer hearing each other’s viewpoints because the brain is filtering out information that isn’t relevant to our survival.

“In a political fight, nobody’s listening anymore,” Bouchon says. “Because they cannot listen anymore, neurologically.”But Goldhirsh felt there was a better way to have these conversations.

“I have friends who are Democrats (and) I have friends who are Republicans. We don’t actually hate each other,” he says. “I think you’re far less likely to be an a**hole when you’re actually connected with someone.”

It quickly became clear that something unexpected was happening, Bouchon and Goldhirsh said.

Most conversations followed a typical pattern. The two strangers would usually begin with safe, easy topics: the weather, their jobs, what they were doing that day.

Then, many would switch to politics – but without devolving into anger. Bouchon theorized about why: After easing into the discussions, cannabinoids – chemicals that regulate functions like mood, sleep and pleasure – blocked the fight-or-flight effects of cortisol.

Soon, the researchers say, many strangers would realize that neither fit entirely into the labels “Democrat” or “Republican.”

And then they’d start sharing. A mother in Abilene tells her California conversation partner that she has a trans child. “But I have to say it quietly. I have to say it really quietly,” she says through nervous giggles.

In another conversation, Matt in San Francisco tells Aubrey about his love of motorbikes. “You are so cool!”Aubrey says effusively in response. “I hope that you know that.”

“Hella love going from San Francisco to Abilene, Texas right now,” Matt replies.

Not every call was profound. But even the mundane conversations were remarkable in their unremarkableness. People weren’t arguing. They weren’t slamming down the handset. They were talking.

As Californians and Texans spoke to each other, Bouchon and Goldhirsh were gathering data on their conversations.

Out of roughly 400 chats, 80% were positive, Bouchon says, while just 5% were negative. Just over half included laughter; around 70% involved some kind of agreement or affirmation. The word “love” was mentioned 398 times; “Trump” was said 64 times. And the f-word, says Bouchdon, wasn’t even heard once.

Those figures were gathered by Matter Neuroscience and have not been verified by CNN. But Bouchon and Goldhirsh say their company has handed over the set of conversations to Pepperdine University, in Malibu, California. After researchers there study its impact, every transcript will be made public, they say.

Bouchon thought the experiment would lead to people “smashing the phones” in anger, but it led him to a different conclusion: “We can disagree without fighting.”

So, Matter Neuroscience ran two more experiments. One project, carried out over the spring, connected “Zoomers” – students on the campus of Boston University – with “Boomers” at a senior living facility in Reno, Nevada.

This free payphone on the campus of Boston University connects "Zoomers," or members of Gen Z, with "Boomers" at a senior living facility in Nevada. Courtesy Matter Neuroscience Again, the phones connected disparate worlds.

The conversations often touched on loss, grief and the unpredictability of life. “What advice do you have for a young 20-year-old?”Sylvie asks the 66-year-old Valerie in one conversation shared with CNN. “Oh man, have fun while you can,” replies Valerie.

“All of a sudden, bam, (I) woke up and here I am.”Valerie’s partner of a decade died after overdosing on fentanyl, she says over the course of the 15-minute conversation. “I got a knock on the door, and your whole world changes,” she says.

“You better find somebody to take care of you when you get older,” Valerie adds. “Because you know what, it’s tough when you’ve got to do it by yourself.”

More recently, Matter launched a third project, aiming to link the “99%” with the “1%” by placing a payphone in the trendy Abbot Kinney shopping district of Los Angeles’ Venice neighborhood and pairing it with another in Watts, a lower-income neighborhood south of downtown.

“We’re right here in the heart of it,” a community resource coordinator in Watts says on her first day of work, in one of the conversations.

“The surroundings that I see is probably different from yours, she says … Just people trying to get by.”A woman talks on a free payphone installed in the Watts neighborhood of Los Angeles. The phone is connected to another in trendy Venice, another L.A. neighborhood by the beach. Calla Kessler/Matter Neuroscience Another call begins bluntly. “Hey, I need some money,” a man in Watts says. He’s met with an awkward laugh.

“So do I,” says the woman in Venice. Goldhirsh and Bouchon say the payphones project has restored their faith in the country at what feels like a pivotal time. Goldhirsh says he “slept better” after hearing the conversations.

“A meaningful slice of America was like, ‘f**k yeah, we’re Americans, and we’re dope humans, and we want to connect as humans,” he says. “We don’t want to be framed as this malicious group of tribes that are at each other’s necks.”

And as a bitter midterm campaign season enters its final weeks, Bouchon and Goldhirsh understand the stakes.

Goldhirsh hopes that politicians are listening. Over the course of the year, he says he has presented his project’s findings to state governors and other political leaders and encouraged them to lower the temperature in their messaging.

“I’m an optimist,” he says. “So, I think we’re going to see leaders move towards those areas where we can find common ground.”But he believes the shift towards a happier America can start with all of us.

“We have to be proactive at reducing cortisol,” he says. “You can’t fight it with fire … You have to fight it with humor. You have to fight it with affection. You have to fight it with friendship.”And the payphone callers seem to agree.

“I think it’s a great idea … I think conversation and community is the tops of what’s going to save us,” Priscilla in Abilene tells Nick during their chat. “I’m glad you’re out there, and I’m glad I got to talk to you.”