 Welcome to a discussion of Amanda Ripley's new book, High Conflict, which is brought to you by Future Tense, a collaboration of New America, Slate Magazine, and Arizona State University that explores the impact of technology on society. I'm David Plotz. I'm the CEO of CityCast and one of the hosts of the Slate Political Gabfest. Amanda Ripley is an investigative journalist. She's a New York Times bestselling author. She has spent her career trying to make sense of complicated human mysteries, what happens to our brains in a disaster, how we navigate high conflict. Her first book, The Unthinkable, who survives when disaster strikes and why, was published in 15 countries and turned into a PBS documentary, which I've not seen, which I got to see that. Her next book, The Smartest Kids in the World, and How They Got That Way, was a New York Times bestseller. Amanda is a super interesting journalist and is very unusual because she is focused on taking actual real-world problems and trying to help people solve them. She is more focused on solutions than practically any journalist I've ever met. And she makes her a really interesting thinker, as well as we'll see today. All of this is to say we're very lucky to be able to have her here today to discuss her newest book, High Conflict, Why We Get Trapped and How We Get Out. It's a beautiful red cover. Amanda, welcome. Thanks so much, David. It's really good to be here. So we're going to do a poll at the start of this, a poll that we have a series of questions about how you feel about conflict that we're going to ask them now. We're going to use these extremely unscientific results to make conclusions about you and your personality. Now, we'll use these to help see the conversation. As that poll gets started, Amanda, what is high conflict? Okay. So high conflict can start small, but it gradually escalates into the kind of conflict where our brains behave differently. And the conflict starts to have a momentum on its own. It sort of operates on autopilot. Different rules apply. We tend to make mistakes about ourselves and the other side and the possibilities. And eventually everyone suffers to different degrees in high conflict. So it's very different from what you might consider like good or healthy conflict. I want to go much deeper into this because I think it's like understanding the distinction between the conflicts that we live in every day and these particular kinds of conflict is critical to understanding your book. So talk about what characterizes a regular, normal, everyday kind of conflict or disagreement. Yeah. So I mean, I went into this just kind of desperately looking for hope. It just seemed like there was so much conflict that wasn't going anywhere in the country in politics, social media. And I wanted to find people who had gotten out, like people in communities who had gotten out of conflict. I quickly realized that that was actually the wrong question because to your point, it's not about getting out of conflict. It's about getting out of this thing high conflict. It's very different. And so good conflict can be stressful, heated, unpleasant, lots of anger. It's not like kumbaya, right? But it goes somewhere like it's productive. There are flashes of curiosity, questions get asked, right? You may still disagree afterward, but typically people in the research who have encountered good conflict, like I'm describing, leave the conversation much more satisfied, right? So there's a sense of movement, of possible movement, whereas high conflict is the destination. Did you coin the term high conflict? Is that yours? Or is that an industry term? No. So it comes from the concept of high conflict divorces. So it's around the 80s, lawyers and mediators started noticing that there was about a quarter of American divorces were high conflict, which in that case meant just kind of year after year of going to the courts of no progress characterized by extreme emotion, a sense of revenge and that kind of circular feedback loop that you can get into in conflict. So another term for this in the research is intractable conflict. So when you talk about the Israeli-Palestinian crisis or now our polarization, right, I didn't like the word intractable because I feel like it sounds like impossible, like nothing can be done. And that's just not the case, right? So yeah, I sort of applied the term high conflict to this from the family law world. You know that whether, so you're saying in the 70s or 80s when this was done, or a quarter of the divorces were like that, is that a steady number if you look today or a quarter of divorces like this? It's a really good question. I don't know. And the research isn't there. I wish that we knew it's tricky to define, but so that's just an estimate. There are people who look at high conflict personalities. So this is another kind of offshoot of this research, you know, and there's some estimates that about 10% of people tend to have high conflict personalities, which usually means they also have a personality disorder, right? So now we're getting into. It's overlaps, but it's slightly different, right? And there is these people that I've talked to who study that do believe it's increasing. So the chances of having a high conflict personality, but again, there's not really good evidence for that. That's anecdotal. I would think with divorce, it's decreasing because of the rise of mediation and alternatives, but it's probably very slow. Well, we're going to get into some examples of high conflict in a second. Maybe I'm putting a cart ahead of a horse here. But is high conflict something that all of us are equally likely to be subject to? Is high conflict something that is super structural and outside of us as human beings, or is it like very distinctly dependent on what we are like as people? Yeah, I think it's, I hate this answer, but it's both, right? So it interacts. So there are cultures and systems, companies, neighborhoods, religions that houses of worship that really sort of create the conditions for good conflict and that create the conditions for high conflict. And then there are people who because of their history and other things are more tending towards high conflict. So in the book, I sort of focus more on the internal world and how people need to make that internal shift. But there are of course big structural changes that need to happen simultaneously. So you kind of can't do one without the other. Like a lot of work and research and books about peace and war and conflict really focus on those systemic changes like peace treaties and so forth, which are super important, but often what gets neglected is the internal like the hearts and minds piece of the equation. It's like, how do you get people out of high conflict once you've helped create it in a lot of cases? Right, I mean, I think one of the things that, again, we'll get to in the course of this wide ranging discussion we're going to have is the fact that this book is so interesting because it does get to how individual human beings can act to change their circumstances, even if the overall structure of society may not change with them, that they can make decisions. But we'll talk more about that. So let's get into some of the specifics of the book. Why don't you pick one example of high conflict that you explored? And tell us, tell us who the players are and what that high conflict meant in actual lived experience for everybody. Right, so there's about a half a dozen people I followed from an environmental activist in England to a novice politician in California to a former gang leader in Chicago to a member of the FARC guerrilla forces in Colombia. I think maybe for this audience, maybe the most relevant might feel like the politician. So let me talk about Gary Friedman. Gary Friedman, actually, we have a picture of Gary McKinley, if you don't mind pulling that up while I talk. So Gary Friedman is a conflict, one of the world's most renowned conflict experts. He actually helped start the field of conflict mediation. And he started out as a lawyer and just got very burned out on the legal system and decided there had to be a better way to do conflict. And so he knows pretty much everything there is to know about conflict. I met him because I did about 80 hours of mediation training for the book with him. Really thoughtful, interesting guy. Just unusually adept at dealing with explosive conflicts. He's helped 2,000 people deal with divorces, labor strikes, neighborhood conflicts, all manner of unpleasantness. So in 2015, a few of his neighbors in his beautiful small town in Northern California asked him to run for local volunteer unpaid office in his town because it had gotten kind of ugly, just like national politics. People had started calling each other names. It was really adversarial. It was just really unpleasant. Nobody wanted to go to the meetings anymore. So they figured who better than Gary Friedman to go into this. So he did, he ran for office to try to change politics in his little tiny corner of the country. And he did a lot of things right. But as he puts it, it took him about an eighth of a second before he got pulled into high conflict in politics. And he lost two years of his life to these sort of petty political feuds in his neighborhood. He, two years of his peace of mind, he calls it his personal derangement when he talks about it. And it was very humbling for him to see how hard it was to resist the pull of conflict. He did eventually realize what had happened. Like a lot of people who shift out of high conflict, it happened after a saturation point, which is sort of like hitting bottom, which we can talk about. But it also was really important that his family helped pull him out. So in every high conflict I've looked at, family is often an important player. They're the people right outside the conflict, right? Who aren't actively engaged in it. And they're the ones who tell you that it's gone too far. The loss is outweigh the gains. And it's not enough to say that, right? But it helps. So you painted that very nicely, but you left out specifics. So I am specifically interested, as I think the participants are, what, like, it's a beautiful, it's like an idyllic sounding place that he lives. Everyone is well off. Like there's not a lot of sort of economic distress. People are, you know, they're, he has all the tools. So what exactly happened that caused the conflict? Yeah, I used it when he first started telling me about this. He told me that he'd run for office and it wasn't going how he had hoped. And so I went out there and followed this for a while. And it was just baffling at first, you know, like, what is the deal? And why is this guy getting, you know, sort of. It's almost like you're bewitched, you know? So one of the things that happened is he early on relied on a neighbor and friend of his who happened to be a seasoned political organizer, who we call Tanya in the book. And she, you know, used all the strategies and practices of high conflict politics, which is, you know, what we have in this country right now. So, you know, they knocked on all the doors. They had talking points. They talked a lot about fighting and winning and losing and war. I know it sounds silly, but this is why I love this story, because it's like a shoebox diorama, right, for political polarization. And soon Gary started talking about us and them, which is always like red flag. Not good, right? But he sort of started referring to himself and his allies as the new guard. They were like the upstarts, the change agents. And the other side was the old guard, right? The incumbents who, you know, just were disaster. And once you do that, we know from all the research that humans once sorted into two oppositional groups tend to behave really badly in conflict. Okay, lots of reasons for that, but like that's what happened. One of the things that happened. So he had a conflict entrepreneur in his orbit, which was Tanya. And then he had, he had these sort of binary false binaries where he was dividing people into these two groups. And his was superior, right? So that idea of supremacy is also important. And he had a buried understory, which is he had a lot to prove. It wasn't really just about like, you know, unpaid volunteer service in his little town. He was trying to fix politics based on his lifetime career, like three books he's written, taught at Harvard and Stanford. Like this was like a lot. And he also felt like he was doing a huge heroic service, also a red flag, right? So he expected appreciation, reverence, success, and your expectations going into a conflict are really important for what happens next. So when he was sort of mocked by some people, because he set up all these rules for like how the meetings would go and you weren't allowed to roll your eyes and all these things. And people would make fun of it is like Gary's psycho babble, you know, and when people push back on him for having like time limits to how long people could talk, he really took it as as much more of a sort of ostracism than you might normally expect because there was this extra underappreciated quest that he was on, right? And that's also very common to high conflict. There's usually the thing we are arguing about and the thing it's really about. And so for him, the stakes are much higher than he had admitted even to himself. When you look back at what he went through, what would have avoided the high conflict? Actually, no, you know what? Scrap that question. What were the consequences of that high conflict? Who cares? Like, you know, so he had a bad couple of years. Okay. So this is the thing that's probably most chilling about every high conflict in the book and everyone I've studied is eventually you start to mimic the behavior of your adversaries. So you start to do the thing that you went into the fight to stop, right, to different degrees. But in Gary's case, he explicitly went into politics to make it less toxic and more inclusive, right? Very noble goals. And within a few months, he'd made it more toxic and less inclusive. So as an example, we have all the audio recordings from these community meetings and you can just hear the tension ratchet up each month as he became the president of the board. And so he's leading the meetings and he got very fixated on controlling how long people could talk. So there's a lot in these recordings about you've used up your three minutes, you know, and you shut people down, right? So that was exclusionary. It made people feel rejected, which led to hostility. And then in exchange, Gary would feel, you know, defensive and reactive. And so you just sort of keep upping like this all progress sort of stopped. They had various roads projects and other things going on for the town. They had some serious problems. You know, it's a drought prone location, very remote location. So there were things that really needed to be dealt with, which Gary very much wanted to deal with and plan to deal with. But the paralysis of high conflict is a trap, like you can't get out. And so you can't actually function in high conflict. You can't get things done, even the things you agree on as we keep seeing right in Congress. So it is literally a trap and it's very hard to get out of once you're in, although he did eventually do that. Do you want to talk about how we got out, or do you want to save that for later? Let's save it for later, like a dessert. Does high conflict have any relationship to idealism? I think one thing if you if you surveyed people who are engaged in high conflict, they might say, well, I have these principles. It's like my, you know, it's like we have to abide by these principles. And you know, to compromise this would be to sell out our very existence. Is idealism the problem or a problem or a connection or no? I think it's, I guess the word that is seems more apt to me is righteousness, like orthodoxy, purity. Those are the times where you get into trouble with high conflict. You can be, you can have like radical ideas, right? Like Mark Linus, the environmental activists they followed, he still is quite radical. You know, I follow him on Twitter and he's still quite, he is in the fight on climate change in particular, but other things. And he doesn't hold back, you know, so he is a fighter. But what's happened is as he shifted into good conflict, he found that he could actually fight more effectively about the things that people actually disagreed about. So when you get into the righteous purity zone, which is different from necessarily radical ideas, right, or anger, anger is all good, but that righteousness can kind of you lose your peripheral vision and you'll often start fighting with people who should be your allies, right? So you drain a lot of your energy and spiritual health to fights that are actually not the main problem. And that's the trap, right? The magnetism of the conflict. Why is anger all good? So anger, you know, there's a psychologist and researcher named Aaron Halpern in Israel, who does really cool research on like applied research on emotion in intractable conflict. And what he's found is that anger you can work with. Like anger is, you know, when you're angry at someone, you want them to be better on some level. You expect more, right? You're still, there's some kind of relationship, however, freed, hatred, contempt, dehumanization, those are things, humiliation, those are much harder to work with in conflict, right? So anger is very motivational. It's not enough, right? But it's initiatory, and it can be very constructive if it doesn't tip into those other emotions. Yeah, I mean, I've heard you talk a bit about contempt and humiliation and they, they just seem terrible. I mean, how does contempt come up? How do, how do we become contemptuous of others? What, what, what are the process that makes us that way? Yeah, so I think the marriage research is really helpful here. And I actually find it's helpful all the time. Like we really should have like somebody who studies marital conflict at every newspaper on politics. But so John and Julie Gottman are sort of the most well known people who study marital conflict at their love lab in Seattle. Thousands of married couples have come through and they can, you know, these are the people who can figure out within 10 minutes if you're going to get divorced, which I find very frightening. But anyway, they can figure that out. And so contempt is one of the horsemen, the four horsemen they identify as really problematic. So if you think about contempt and humiliation, humiliation is also is one of the like fire starters in the book, the things that tend to lead to high conflict. Both of them assume a sort of hierarchy, right? Like you're up high, and someone else is down low. And something's happened to make you feel like you're being brought down low. Okay. So it's a really complicated emotion that's very much informed by the people around you and your history and your identity and like how you consider yourself. Like Nico Frieda has done some really interesting research on Holocaust survivors and humiliation. And he's found that, you know, there were many survivors who may interviewed from the same camp. And the all of them male and female had been harassed by the guards to make and remake their beds over and over again. And the male survivors tended to describe this as humiliating. Whereas the female survivors described it in other ways, right? Like harassment of noxious, you know, offensive, but not humiliating, right? So there's probably a gender dynamic where it felt like they were being brought low by being forced to make and remake their beds. So you can see how important culture and leaders are, right? In framing things as contemptible or humiliating. We saw this with President Trump, who would repeatedly, some people are almost addicted to humiliation, like you repeatedly would describe things as being humiliating for America, right? Or for him. So that's a classic kind of technique to turn regular conflict into high conflict and an important one to just avoid at all costs, because not only does it escalate the conflict in ways that are destructive, but you're literally handing your opponent a trunk full of weapons. I mean, it is going to come back around sooner or later. And that's why shaming and those kinds of things are so ineffective, typically. One thing I don't understand is, and I never really understood this with Trump, was the identification of oneself as the humiliated one. Like, wouldn't you want to humiliate other people if you're a person who likes that? Why would you, why would you try, why wouldn't you try to, if someone's humiliating you, wouldn't you try to shift that away because you want to be humiliated? Right. Like it almost, it admits that you've been lowered, right? That you've been brought low, whereas if you just act like you're not humiliated then, yes. So this is where you get into high conflict personalities, and that's where you get into personality disorders. So typically, people who repeatedly frame things as humiliating, right, are using it as a way to be the victim, right, and the hero. So, and it's not just people with personality disorders, like just to be clear, but that's where you see it's our most extreme case. Evelyn Lindner, who studies conflict and war, she's a psychologist and physician, she describes humiliation as the nuclear bomb of the emotions. And I think it's underlying every major global conflict, gang violence, street violence, domestic violence, somewhere in there, if you look at the research, there's humiliation. So it's something we should probably talk about more because it's in everyday discourse because it's often powering a lot of the behavior. And if we just talk about the Confederate flag or something, we're not actually getting underneath the thing. You have this concept in the book. Also, instantly, great thing that Amanda does in her book is she has a glossary of terms, which like terms that she uses throughout the book, and it's so useful, very, very good. I recommend all people anticipating writing a book, and I'm sure there are many on this call to do this. But you have the term conflict entrepreneur, and you've used it already in this discussion. What is that, and who is an example of a conflict entrepreneur? And isn't entrepreneurship good? Yeah, that's why I like this phrase. It's kind of like double edged, but conflict entrepreneurs really, this phrase comes from work on conflict in war zones, typically. And it's the people or companies or media outlets that intentionally kind of delight in the conflict that exploit it. Sometimes it's for profit, social media outlets, a lot of news outlets, any attention economy. But often I find it's actually for a sense of purpose, camaraderie, power, like more subtle, but equally powerful things. So in every conflict I studied, the people who shifted from high to good conflict distanced themselves from the conflict entrepreneurs in their life. So it's going to be different tactics depending on the person. With Gary, he stopped relying on Tanya, the political organizer, and started actually relying on his wife, who had a much better sense of how to see people as like three dimensional humans. And she had a very different way of looking at the conflict. Curtis literally moved across town in Chicago where he was a fairly high ranking gang leader. And he just by distancing himself from the conflict, you slow it down, which is super important. So when his cousin, who was also his business partner in the narcotics trade, was brutally murdered as he was trying to shift out of conflict, he didn't know who did it for a while because he wasn't close to the conflict entrepreneurs. And that slows it down so that that reflects to take revenge because you've been humiliated is less likely to lead to action. So a lot of what he does now, he works for Chicago cred with Arnie Duncan, the former education secretary in Chicago, working with young men and women who are most likely to get shot or shoot other people in conflicts in Chicago. A lot of what he does is trying to distance people from conflict entrepreneurs, often from social media in this case, and slow down the conflict. So we know that gang members spend much more time on social media than other young people their age. And that much he estimates about 70% of the violence in Chicago today stems from social media posts. That's where it starts dehumanizing, humiliating posts, which, you know, or in rap songs on YouTube, other like all kinds of ways this is happening constantly on social media. And so a lot of what he does is trying to to slow that down and prevent those posts. So a lot of, are you saying that in general, high conflict is being accelerated by social media? Yes. So that's part of where how we got here, right, is that we've we've now created like a conflict industrial complex between our politics, our legal system, our journalism, and our social media platforms and tension economies, all these things, reward conflict entrepreneurs, right? And there's not a lot of disincentives at this point. And so if it introduced disincentives, talk a little bit about sort of how you can take each intern media, the legal system and social media, practically accelerate or intensify conflicts. Yeah, so Gary, with the legal system, you know, anytime again, you've got two sides, you have to collapse a lot of complexity. That's what really bothered him about being in, you know, various trials. He was a very successful lawyer in Connecticut, actually. And he just felt like every time he was being forced to create a binary that wasn't right, you know, and and that's how that system is designed. It's an adversarial system, right? And so when he helped invent conflict mediation as an alternative where everybody's in the room together talking about the problem, and it's not so sorted, right? Then you create an alternate world, like a different universe. It's not using the same rules. And this is what I think is really cool. And this is a huge success story, by the way, like all over the world, conflict mediation is happening, you know, and it is not always done well, right? But it is often saving people thousands of dollars and a lot of misery, especially for kids, right? So this is an example of taking an adversarial conflict entrepreneur driven system and not trying to tweak it, but like literally inventing something else, which I think is what he did not do in his own political conflict. He was still working within the adversarial system. He was still using the political organizer and the conflict entrepreneur, right? So that's what he's now realized. It's very hard to tweak it from the inside, following the same adversarial rules, if that makes sense. Right. Actually, I want to ask you a three-part question, but ignore the rest of it. I want to move to the way I think that high conflict affects most of the people, perhaps on this call, and the way that I think this topic became vivid to you, which is that the American political system appears to be in a state of high conflict. So is that the case? If that is the case, describe the characteristics of the American political system right now that you think are high conflict. Yeah. So, and I'd be curious if you disagree, David. So we should be, you know, but I mean, I think you understand our politics. I have nothing but contempt for you. Okay. McKinley, can we pull up the slide that compares high and good conflict? And that may be helpful here. But these are some of the ways you can tell the difference, right, for any given conflict that you're in, personally, professionally, politically, whatever. So generally, high conflict, if you look on the right here, it's the same emotions over and over again. I don't know if you've had this experience, but for I'd say the past four years, I can read the headline of most stories and I don't need to read the story. Like I know what's, I know it's very predictable. It's very boring in a lot of ways. It's it, it produces fear and outrage and sometimes contempt, but, but not much else, right? So there's a rigidity to it. There's a sense of certainty, like things become very clear, right? It's also a chronic stressor. So people in high conflict, they experience surges of stress hormone and they don't get to recover, whereas with good conflict, yeah, yeah, you experience surges of stress hormones, of course, but you're able to recover, which is super important for just our mental and physical health. So those are some of the differences with our political system. What you see is that, you know, facts and policy and those things have stopped mattering for not everybody, but many people, right, who are in the high conflict, especially the most engaged political activists and the politicians, right? So there's not any chance of anything surprising happening, typically in, in high conflict, in politics, and you see a paralysis set in. So it's most obvious when like Congress, when the government shuts down, right? The federal government, that's an example. You know, I remember, you know, we both live near the national zoo, right, David? And I remember, you know, I used to go running in the zoo and then it was, it kept getting shut down because of government shutdowns and just seeing, I would see kids like staring in the bars, the zoo, and I'm like, so everybody suffers in high conflict to different degrees, right? This is one of the most diabolical parts about it is that once you are in this trap of high conflict, you become so fixated on the threat of the other side and the fear and the loathing that you will do things that are actually against your own interests and the things you care most about, right? So the shutdown of the federal government is, you know, one example of that. But also the fact that, you know, everything you would do that you would think would help us end the conflict tends to make it worse, which is also a sure sign of high conflict. So, you know, I think the Washington Post is that counted all of Trump's lies, right? Which is fine. Like that's a good archive to have, you know, for historians, but it's not going to change anyone's minds, right? Like there's no, no effect from that that I could discern. And it's so, it's so heartbreaking, I think, as a journalist or as somebody who cares about policy, to see that the work, the sort of trade craft that you've done for so long doesn't work. It's very hard, very hard. Why do you think we ended up in this situation? Why are we in this situation? It doesn't seem like it's inevitable that the United States would have to be in a state of high conflict over its politics. But maybe it is inevitable. I don't know. No, I don't think it's inevitable. I mean, I think part of it is, you know, as boring as the fact we have a winner take all electoral system, you know, like Lee Drotman wrote a very nice book about getting out of the political doom loop, I think it's called, and about how in other countries that have, you know, proportional representation and rank choice voting and other parties, there tends to be less polarization and more trust and more a sense that the system, the electoral system is fair because it is more fair, right? Like you're not sorting, you know, 300 million people into two buckets, which is just insane, right? Like the best research on Americans' political opinions, it looks at like six or seven different categories as an absolute when you just can't get lower than that without collapsing the real complexity of Americans. So that's one sort of easy to fix problem that, you know, Maine and Alaska and other places are, you know, New York City is having rank choice for its mayoral vote this summer. So this is something that we could fix that didn't have to be this way and that the founding fathers didn't, you know, necessarily want to happen. So that's one example. I mean, I think there are lots, but that would be one thing that we've sort of structurally set up for high conflict. What's give another one? Yeah, I mean, I think the level of inequality, the amount of sort of the fact that we have these deep fissures along racial lines, right? Those things make it really easy for conflict entrepreneurs to exploit our divisions, right? So you see this in every country that falls into high conflict. Sometimes it's over ethnic differences. Syria, right, was not an ethnic war at first. It really wasn't. And it was intentionally sort of nudged in that direction by readers because people when they feel threatened will tend to resort to their group, their tribe or whatever, and see the other side as threatening. And so politicians can really play into that fear. So for a lot of reasons, we have sort of created a political system that is prone to high conflict at the national level. I don't think that's as true at the local, right, or state level. Right. Actually, I think I forgot to say this at the top. I think you can put questions in the chat. There will be a brief Q&A in the last few minutes. So if you have questions, put them in the chat and we'll pull them in. So let's move a little bit towards solutions. You're really good on solutions. So I find when it comes to American politics, one of my solutions for dealing with what I find such a painful situation is I've withdrawn. I mean, I host a project, so I get withdrawn all the way and I run a company that deals with political journalism. But I just don't want to be part of it. I just don't pay that much attention. I like minimize the amount of time I spend thinking about what it is that people who outrage me are doing. I don't know. That's not a solution for society. What are solutions either for societies or for individuals to help us get out of high conflict? I'm so glad you admitted that because I also have withdrawn from a lot of political news and I feel very conflicted about it, right? Because I feel like it's my job as a journalist to know what's going on. But I also can't function in that space anymore. And it's not enlightening. It doesn't illuminate very much. And I've been doing a lot of media interviews for this book and people will, you know, this happened like four or five times in the last week. I'll be talking to a national reporter of some kind and they'll do, okay, this is high conflict. And then the interview ends and they ask me to stay on the line and they say the same thing. They say, you know, I can't, I can't read the news. I'm avoiding the news. I can't deal with social media. Like there's a real sense of despair, I think, out there. And I think it's way more common than we know. So news avoidance is higher in the United States than any other country. So think about what that means. You just make that up or that's like no, that's real. There's some OECD research on this and, you know, is it perfect research? No. But, you know, it suggests that it goes along with polarization and polarization at this level is another word for high conflict, right? So when you get into this trap of high conflict, what happens is all the people who are sort of more flexible and open and not totally sort of stuck in conflict entrepreneur or stuck in high conflict, they flee the scene. This happens right on Twitter and other things. They don't want to, they don't want to deal with it. And so you end up turning over the narrative to extremists. And this is the risk, right? So like I used to tell people, oh, get rid of social media. And sometimes you should do that, right? But maybe better to change your feed, change how you interact with people because we don't want right now, you know, eight out of 10 Americans do not use Twitter. But you know who uses it? Journalists. Journalists use it, including me, right? So you have to be very careful about calibrating what you see on these platforms and assuming that you can generalize it out to all of America. Twitter is basically made up of activists, extremists and journalists at this point, right? And bots. So is that a good place for journalists to be spending time? And where is the soul searching? Like I keep weeding and hoping that it'll happen. Like where is the soul searching among national media outlets? Like, huh, you know, we have people actively avoiding the product we produce. We work very hard to produce, avoiding it like it is a virus, you know, all over the country. So maybe we should use it differently. You know what I mean? So there is this problem where in hyperpolarization, you end up with relentless negativity in the news. So just putting aside, you know, all the other problems with the news writ large, there is a relentless negativity that takes hold across platforms like Fox News, CNN, New York Times, especially at that sort of high profile level. And it does really start to chip away at people's hope. And they just eventually give up. They tune out. Okay, so let's, but I didn't give you a solution. Let's start around some solutions. Let's get to some solution. So yeah, I think one is to distance yourself from the conflict of entrepreneurs that could be people in your life, right? That could be people on your feed. To not engage with them in a way that's humiliating, like that is not helpful. To be very conscious of slowing down conflict and thinking a lot more about, you know, what is the understory of this conflict? Like what am I really fighting about? So I talk in the book about the crock pot, which is like, you know, a couple's going to war over their possessions and a divorce. And what is, why are they fighting over this stupid crock pot, right? And it turns out it represents something deeper to each of them, right? So figuring out what that is, that's in particular, how journalists could be more helpful, how advocates could be more helpful. So when we talk about immigration, we should be talking about fear, right? When we talk about gun control, we should be talking about fear. Like I do think there should be a fear beat, fear and loneliness beat at news outlets. And then we might get somewhere interesting. We'd talk much more to people who study collective. Last time I talked to you, you wanted a humiliation. I know I cheated. You have a humiliation, a fear beat. Maybe you could do them all. Hey, I cover fear, humiliation and loneliness. So yeah, those are some of the things. And then, you know, really resisting binaries. So if you run an organization and you don't want to sort people into two groups, you want to keep the groups really malleable and fluid, and like have people change spots. I remember when I used to write about education, this is like a really small example, but in Finland, it was just routine for the principal in a school to step in as a substitute if a teacher was sick, which you really never see in any school I've looked at in the United States. But the effect of that is that the teacher gets, the principal gets to remember what it's like to be a teacher. The teachers get reminded that the principal doesn't think she's above them, right? The kids also get to experience. So like you've kind of done this tiny sort of structural change that makes the groups more fluid and there are lots of ways to do that. Yeah, yeah. That's a really good example. That does feel like something that a lot of us could do in our work lives or just in our lives, generally is take on roles that other people are taking on. Although isn't one of the problems with high conflict that you actually don't interact with those other people? Like the other people are like physically distanced from you, geographically distanced from you. Because I think one of the things that's poisonous about the American political division is that people are living in different worlds from each other too. And so it's easier to become contemptuous of someone you don't ever actually deal with. Right, absolutely. So we're less likely to date, to marry. Like the stats on marrying across political lines is shocking. Like it's down 50% from when I was a kid. So that's a huge difference. A huge difference for kids, right? If they're in their household never hearing anyone sort of represent the nuance of the other side. That probably has more of an effect in the research on polarization than Facebook, right? So it's a huge deal. It predates Facebook. That's part of why. But anyway, yes, huge problem is that in our political worlds, we often don't have opportunities for the kind of contact that would lead to a reduction in prejudice and a reduction in a high conflict. There's certain kinds of contact that do help reduce prejudice in like, there's been like 500 experiments on this all over the world. It's called contact theory. But you have to have certain conditions present, right? And one of them is that it can't be just a one-off thing. You have to try to solve a problem together. You have to be on equal footing in the room, if not in society. So there's certain things that we could do. Like I think, again, to be sort of policy wonky, a national service plan would be an obvious way, right? To create a structural opportunity for that kind of domestic exchange to happen and to create also a common identity, right? Across our many divides. Yeah. I wonder if, do people who look at the 1950s where there's a relatively less sort of social and political conflict? I mean, obviously that you had, you know, this enormous race crime of racism and systemic racism that overhangs it, but that there was a general less conflict. Is there a theory that it's because, is there any theory that it's the draft and the experience of World War II carries through? Well, that's a really interesting one because, you know, if you look at the military, I did this piece a couple months ago about why is it the military is the only institution left in America that the public trust and the public trust it more now than it did in the 80s, right? So once the draft went away, trust actually went up in the military. And that's partly because you don't know it, right? Like if you don't interact with the military, you don't know all of its flaws and strengths and wonders and problems. And so there's in that case, you can see how there's a lot of paradoxes in conflict. And one of them is sometimes distance can create more trust. And sometimes it can create extreme prejudice and segregation, right? So it's very tricky. But I think certainly there were more groups we know from like Robert Putnam's research, there was more sort of social connection groups where people interacted the Kiwanis Club, you know, my dad's in the Kiwanis Club in Portland, Oregon, they recently had to shut it down because they just couldn't sustain it. So those kinds of service organizations are really important because again, you have to have some projects, some problem you're trying to solve. And that kind of creates a subconscious, alternate identity that you share. So even if it's like, you know, Republicans and Democrats, black and white, if we're all trying to like fix this house or build a new school or playground, like there's a new identity that's created and it's way easier to create a new identity outside of conflict than to get rid of an old one. So in the last few minutes before we go to the questions, you talk about this idea of looping and you wanted to demonstrate it with me as your victim, not victim, partner. We're on equal footing. Tell me, what is looping? Yeah, okay. So this, I want to, I like to talk about this because it's like something you can, news you can use, like tonight, this afternoon, people may, some people may know about different active listening techniques. This is one that Gary Friedman actually taught me, the conflict expert, and I've now taught hundreds of journalists this. So most of us who do interviews for a living think that we're pretty good at listening. And that's certainly what I thought. And I went into these trainings and realized pretty quickly that there's a whole like varsity level of listening that I just was not aware of. And it's not just like nodding and smiling and saying, I hear you, you know, it's, it's showing with your words that you're truly trying to understand someone, even if you totally disagree, there is a difference between agreement and understanding, right? So looping is a technique that basically has three steps. First, you listen to what the person's saying. And you really listen for what seems most important to them, which is very counterintuitive for journalists, I found, not to you. And then you distill what they've said is the most elegant language you can muster, play it back to them. And then this is like really easy to forget, you check if you got it right, like, like with genuine curiosity, which is also hard for journalists. But you ask, you know, is that right? And if they say pretty much anything other than exactly means you need to keep working. And it's an iterative process where you say, okay, what did I miss? And then they'll, they'll tell you more. And in the research, which is really cool, when people feel heard in this way, they tend to say less extreme things afterward, they're more open to information they didn't want to hear, right? They acknowledge ambivalence that's internal, which is where the good stuff is, right? Especially for journalists, but for any conflict. So I use it as a parent all the time, I use it at my best when I'm arguing with my husband, we both use it. And it is, it does slow down the conflict. And it's kind of like this key to the kingdom, because it makes the other person kind of open, lower their guard a little bit. So it's a big deal. I'm going to practice it here with you. And then we'll, we'll do Q&A. But so I'm going to ask you a question. And I'm going to try looping you. And we'll see how it goes. Okay, so this would be different from how I would interview you five years ago. Okay, so I use this now in all my interviews. Okay. Okay, David Plox, good to see you. Thanks for being here. Can you, I'm curious, like, we're talking about conflict today. What's one of the silliest things you've ever, you've argued about recently, like, you know, we all have conflicts that are on the surface seem very silly. One that I've argued about recently and argued over the years is that silly is pandas. I just think pandas are an incredible waste of emotional energy of the public, their waste of public resources we spend. Sorry, you said pandas, like the animals. Pandas, pandas, the animal. I do live next door to the zoo. And one of the things that happens when you live next to the zoo is you go to the zoo a bunch and I grew up in DC and like the zoo a bunch, you're dragged whenever you go to the zoo, you're dragged to see the pandas. And the pandas are like, they have this reputation of being beautiful and cute in it, but they're ill tempered. They are, they just sit lumpishly. They don't seem to want to survive as a species. So we spend good zillions of dollars. The world is spending billions of dollars better spent on almost anything else, trying to get this species to reproduce itself when they clearly don't want to, they don't want to reproduce. They don't want to live. And we, you know, the national zoo and the other zoos pay an enormous rent to the Chinese government or to Chinese authorities to get these pandas and get the reporters, the public, you know, your average school teacher goes gaga over these dumb animals. And I'm just like, let's, let's spend some time spending, let's spend some time loving an animal that wants to survive and that like does something. Okay. So it basically sounds like you feel like pandas are almost an insult to your intelligence, to your community. And there's like this collective delusion that everybody's suffering from and you're alone in seeing or sounds like seeing that these creatures are nowhere near as amazing as people seem to think. They suck resources and attention. And, you know, nobody seems to be thinking critically about this. Is that right? That was beautifully put. I will say exactly. That's exactly right. That's exactly right. Did I miss anything? What do you think it is about that collective delusion that bugs you so much? Like what is it about that? Like what? I think maybe it goes back to like, as a sort of a average or below average looking Joe, like my resentment at beauty, like this evaluation of beauty over like activity, productiveness, utility, like energy, Vim, like pandas just don't, they pandas like are coasting, like, like coasting on their good looks in a way that I really resent, I think. Yeah. So it's like the popular, you know, jock in high school who just like everything comes easily to him. He doesn't have to, you know, actually do the work and be, you know, think critically and do the things that you should have to do to garnish that kind of respect in society and power. Is that right? Yeah. Yes. And last question. If you were to wake up tomorrow in this panda delusion, like somebody waved a wand and took us out of this collective spell we're under with pandas, what would that look and feel like? It would look and it would, it would just be that the panda, not every sign of the zoo would point you towards pandas. It wouldn't, the Washington Post wouldn't write 17 stories every time a panda burped or farted. And there wouldn't be the zoo, like there would be some other set of charismatic, interesting animals that were getting attention at the zoo and attention in the world. It wouldn't be much of a change in the world. But it would feel like things were a little bit more rightsized, like as far as the meritocracy of animals. Exactly. Exactly. Okay. So how did that feel to be looped? Did you see what was happening there? It was great. It was awesome. Because usually people just like, it's such a cranky stupid tradition that I have that usually people just make fun of it. But it was great. Right. Like they laugh and they're like, Oh David, I love panda. Well, that was fun. Thank you for letting me. So you can see that I'm trying to really be there with you. It doesn't, and by the way, you didn't think that I agreed with you, did you? I kind of did. I kind of did. Yes. Okay. Maybe that's a problem. Yeah. Well, I don't know. I mean, I definitely felt heard. I really felt heard. Yeah. Yeah. So what we want most of all in conflict is to feel heard. So let's see if we can give people that more often. It's again, very good with kids because you don't have to fix it or argue it or go to the mat. You can just make them feel heard. Check if you got it right. Move to next. All right, Amanda, we have like just a handful of minutes left. There's some great questions here. So I'm going to throw a couple of great questions that you've tried to do them quickly so we can get through. Let's say three of them set some low. Do you, Biden is giving a speech tonight. It's 100 days. Do you see Biden and his administration being able to lessen a high conflict from within? This comes from Pamela. Good question. I've just been trying to write something about this. So I think he's done some obvious things to turn down the temperature, right? Like, he doesn't typically humiliate his opponents. He's had a couple slips, like the Neanderthal comment was probably not great. But some of the things that tend to lead to or exacerbate high conflict like humiliation, he doesn't do. He doesn't tend to engage in the kind of binary thinking that high conflict entrepreneurs do. He does often speak to an American identity that is common and he does it with pride, which is actually quite different than some of the people in his base, like the most active, activist progressives do not feel pride in being an American, but seven out of 10 white, black, and Latino Americans do. So he's speaking there to the exhausted majority and he's doing it like authentically. You sort of believe him, right? I mean, most people I think would say that he does feel some pride in being an American and then he's drawing on this alternate identity that's outside of the red-blue conflict. He's also playing to the exhausted majority with his legislation that he's supporting, right? So he's sort of bypassed the conflict entrepreneurs in Congress to the degree he can and is doing things that are popular among regular people who are less locked into high conflict. So that's all good. It's nothing he could do at this stage to totally upend high conflict, but it's not also not enough, I would say. If he were to bring in, I think, the smartest researchers into collective emotions and conflict polarization, they would say that he needs to think much bigger, right? So there should be a massive initiative on rebuilding trust in American institutions and it should be based on evidence and experiments and listening at a huge scale. So one thing Biden is actually pretty good at is listening and empathizing, you know, with exceptions, but typically, you know, going around like really shrinking some of the gap between the public and the government, right? It's something that we have to do. We just we cannot thrive as a society until we work on trust and I don't see enough of that happening, but that's something he could potentially do from the White House is to really get very focused on that because nothing otherwise, you know, would just be back in four years with the next version of Donald Trump. Okay, we're going to do two more quick ones, okay? Okay, sorry. Karan Martinez asks, one of my biggest headaches and discussions when people are factually wrong and they have facts from a terrible sketchy source or they default to everybody knows or just insists they're right and the very premise of their argument is completely wrong, how to begin unpacking that? Yes, it is. So I just want to acknowledge totally, it is unbelievably frustrating and also painful. Like it depends on the person, like if it's a stranger over Twitter, that's one thing, but if it's someone in your family or a friend, someone you care about, I mean, I think it's important to acknowledge that some of the discomfort from that is because you feel like a wedge between you and your group and that's really painful, it's really hard. And so first just sort of realizing what's happening psychologically is that we don't want to feel a gap between ourselves and our people and you're going to feel those gaps in high conflict and if you don't, you're probably doing something wrong. So then it's like, okay, what is underneath this? Can I get curious about what, you know, often with conspiracy theories, for example, we know from the research that it correlates with loneliness, with anxiety, with uncertainty, a lack of control, a lack of belonging, not always, but often. So like, what's underneath, what is driving this sort of belief in these set of facts, in addition to the fact that it's coming at them from very believable sources, right? So that's a hard problem. But, you know, understanding that and trying to speak and ask questions with genuine curiosity about that understory. Actually, Amanda, with that, we're going to make that our last question. So before we go, check out Amanda, she's going to be on an upcoming episode of Slate's Advice podcast, How To, which is hosted by investigative reporter David Epstein. It's a great way to hear about how she takes high conflict and applies it to a relatable situation, which is apparently fighting with your spouse over picking up tomatoes. That episode is out May 11th. You can find it all, all episodes of that podcast and How To's podcast feed. So Amanda Ripley, the author of High Conflict, check it out. The book is great. It's also a really, it's a well-written book filled with story, too, in addition to being useful. So Amanda, congratulations. Thank you. Thank you so much, David. I really appreciate it. It was fun. Thanks for everyone.