Good Life Project - Amanda Ripley | How to Navigate Conflict With Greater Ease

Episode Date: September 19, 2022

Life today can feel like wall-to-wall conflict. And most of us, well, we plain hate the feeling it gives us. Thing is, some conflict is not only good, but necessary and important. While other conflict, high conflict, is pretty much a road to othering, isolation, and devastation. Question is, how do you know the difference? And once you do, how do you step into good conflict with more grace and ease, that both helps you breathe, but also leads to a genuine resolution that leaves everyone better for it?My guest today, Amanda Ripley, offers her wise counsel as a New York Times bestselling author, investigative journalist, and co-founder of Good Conflict, a conflict meditation business. Her most recent book, High Conflict: Why We Get Trapped and How We Get Out, explores the complexities of high conflict through storytelling and interviews featuring a dozen people in three countries who escaped destructive conflicts to gather lessons for the rest of us in our polarized world. If you've grappled with high-stakes conflict before or wondered how we've all ended up in such a divided state, you'll discover a lot in this episode that'll hopefully help you see the bigger picture.You can find Amanda at: WebsiteIf you LOVED this episode you’ll also love the conversations we had with Susan Piver about the Buddhist Enneagram and how that can help you understand yourself and others in a way that eases conversation.Check out our offerings & partners: My New Book SparkedMy New Podcast SPARKEDVisit Our Sponsor Page For Great Resources & Discount Codes Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Good conflict in homage to what the late John Lewis used to call good trouble. It's the kind of conflict where questions get asked, you experience anger and frustration, and maybe even fear and sadness. But then you cycle through flashes of understanding and curiosity, maybe even humor, and then back to anger. And you can see this in the data, which is cool. In the conflicts that are good conflict, there is movement and you can feel it, right? In yourself, there's some movement. Whereas high conflict, you're stuck, like you're having the same fight over and over and you're not remotely curious. So life today can feel like wall to wall conflict.

And most of us, well, we plain hate the feeling that that gives us. The thing is, some conflict is not only good, but necessary and important. While other conflict, high conflict, is pretty much a road to othering, isolation, and devastation. Question is, how do you know the difference? And once you do, how do you step into good conflict or turn high conflict into good conflict with more grace and ease that both helps you breathe, but also leads to a genuine resolution that leaves everyone better for it. My guest today, Amanda Ripley, offers wise counsel here. So Amanda is a New York Times bestselling author, investigative journalist, and co-founder of Good

Conflict. Her previous books include The Smartest Kids in the World and The Unthinkable, and her most recent book, High Conflict, Why We Get Trapped and How We Get Out. It explores the complexities of high conflict through storytelling and interviews, featuring a dozen people in three countries who escaped destructive conflicts to gather lessons for the rest of us in our polarized world. And Amanda also writes for Politico, The Atlantic, Washington Post, and other outlets. And she hosts the weekly Slate podcast, How To. She has a decade of experience writing about human behavior for Time Magazine in New York, Washington, and Paris. And now, Amanda is also a trained conflict mediator. In our conversation, we uncover the critical distinction between good conflict and its antithesis, high conflict,

with a dive deeper into some of the big questions like, what's the purpose of conflict anyway? And how do we step outside of our own beliefs and paradox and biases to see each other more clearly? If you have grappled with high stakes conflict before or wondered how we've ended up in such a divided state, you'll discover so much in this episode that will hopefully help you see the bigger picture and understand how to navigate good conflict in a way that changes you and the world around you. So excited to share this conversation with you. I'm Jonathan Fields, and this is Good Life Project. The Apple Watch Series 10 is here.

It has the biggest display ever. It's also the thinnest Apple Watch ever, making it even more comfortable on your wrist, whether you're running, swimming, or sleeping. And it's the fastest-charging Apple Watch, getting you eight hours of charge in just 15 minutes. The Apple Watch Series 10, available for the first time in glossy jet black aluminum. Compared to previous generations, iPhone XS or later required, charge time and actual results will vary.

Mayday, mayday, we've been compromised. The pilot's a hitman. I knew you were going to be fun. On January 24th. Tell me how to fly this thing. Mark Wahlberg. You know what the difference between between me and you? You're going to die. Don't shoot him. We need him. Y'all need a pilot. Flight risk. Super excited to dive in. You know, I would imagine that nobody hits the middle years of their life having not had at least one therapy session where the topic of conflict comes up. And often throughout

life, we start to either get labeled or label ourselves in some relationship to the notion of conflict. And I would imagine that most of us have a negative association just with the word itself. So I'm excited because you've gone deep into not just the word, but the experience and also given it some alternate frames that I think show the value, but also show how perilous it can be. I think maybe a good starting point for us is to explore the question, what are we actually talking about when we talk about conflict? Yeah, I often ask people, what is the first conflict encounter you can remember? And usually it's your parents or someone in your household, your siblings fighting, right? So in that definition, I guess conflict would be where there is some kind of clash, right? It could be over scarce resources,

it could be over beliefs, values, hurt feelings, but it's a clash between people that creates kind of tension that's palpable, right? And what I've learned though is that there are different kinds of conflict and that the kind of conflict really matters. Yeah. And I want to go deep into that. What I'm also curious about is what conflict does to us on sort of like a root level, because if so many people feel like this is this thing that they don't want to feel or experience, my deeper question is why?

Like, what is it actually doing to us on an emotional level, on a physiological level that makes us so not want to engage with it? Yeah, right. And I think that's a good question because there are deep evolutionary reasons to not want to have conflict, right? I mean, I think when we feel space open up between us and people we love or between us and our neighbors, it is profoundly uncomfortable. And partly that has to be because we evolved to be in groups. Right. That is in our survival interest. And it is dangerous, quite literally, to be outside of your group. This is something we know from decades and decades of research is that humans are really wired for groups. They will favor their groups in experiments, even if they're totally arbitrary. I think part of why conflict is so uncomfortable is because it unto itself can be a danger. Yeah. There's a survival element to it that makes our brains say, along with this, there's literally a threat to life and limb potentially.

I wonder what role stakes play in conflict. So I see this in the context of people navigating uncertainty. When people have to make choices or decisions or take action in the face of uncertainty, I don't have enough information. As a general rule, we don't struggle with that when the stakes are low, right? It's no big deal. Paralyzing is not generally the thing that happens to us when we have to figure out what restaurant we're going to for dinner or what we're going to order. Although granted, there are those times, right? Well, it depends in New York City, yeah. That's usually more about the paradox of choice.

And it's when we have to do that in the face of uncertainty and as the stakes rise, that it really has an effect. Do you feel like conflict has a similar sort of correlation to that? Right. That's interesting. Sometimes you can clash with someone. You can have very different values or beliefs, and it just rolls right off of you. Like you don't really, you don't really care. Right. So I definitely think there's a, there's a couple

ways in which the stakes matter, right? One is if it's someone very close to you, so then you're vulnerable. If it's your partner or your parent or your kid, you're vulnerable, right? If you love this person and you, or depend on them in any way. And that would certainly raise the stakes in a way that, you know, a stranger might not. But on the other hand, right, where do we get most sort of agitated behind the wheel of a car would be one place, right? Or on an airplane, right? And that's often with strangers. So there's a threat there and we don't know them, you know, is partly because there's a sense of a lack of control. Like, let's take the airplane example. Right. So the stake might be low relatively depending. I mean, obviously, if the plane is going down, the stakes are high. But usually the friction is around, you know, who's using the armrest to put their seat back, whether the flight's delayed. And that's when we're in a kind of control deficit, right? Like we feel like we don't have enough control of our surroundings,

stress level is stacked and getting higher because of other things. So I guess stakes can be created by not just relationship and dependence, right? But also previous experience where if you're stressed out over other things, then any small infraction can lead to a blow up. Yeah. It's like, you're not just arguing about the thing you're arguing about the hundred things that preceded it, which I know is actually something that you explore a lot, you know? And maybe that's one of the things that sort of like deepens conflict in a way that makes it more destructive than constructive is this notion that you describe as like, what's the underlying thing here?

You know, so often we're arguing about something and then, but that's not really the thing, but it's the thing that maybe feels most available to us at the time of the conversation. Yes. I call this the understory and it's really fascinating to think about in my own life and also as a journalist. So every divorce lawyer can tell you a story about some object that a couple just goes to war over in the divorce settlement that seems to be out one thing and is usually not just about that. Right. So I talk in the book about a couple that went to war over the Legos, like who got their children's Legos.

Right. And, you know, they were spending obviously many times on lawyers what it would take to buy more Legos. But the Legos represented their child's affection, right, where their child most wanted to be. And often people who are in the conflict don't even know what the understory is. There isn't the space to ask, typically, which is why you want to ask different questions, which is why good conflict mediators and divorce mediators ask different questions to try to get underneath the usual talking points. But Esther Perel, who is a podcaster and psychotherapist, she says that there's basically three big categories of things that all recurring fights in a marriage are usually about. And it's like care and power or control and respect and recognition, right? So care and concern, power and control or respect and

recognition. Those are kind of the big categories. And if you think about like, you know, the other night I was getting really annoyed. I know this is cliche, but it's true. I was getting very annoyed because of the way my family is loading the dishwasher. And, you know, I have to ask myself, like, what is this actually about? Like, what would a Sarah say? And I think it's about, believe it or not, feels obviously a little bit about control, but also it felt at the time like respect, which is insane. Right. But I'm like, oh, my gosh, you guys don't even respect the dishwasher and like the need that we share these. If you do it this way, they're not going to get clean. There's a total lack of respect, which is, you know, bananas. But it's important to at least notice it, right? One thing I have learned, and I think I'm guessing you've also learned this, is that there's a ton of research that humans are very good at identifying when something is wrong, like bugging them, but they're really terrible at interpreting what it is. So

you'll blame the thing that's right in front of you or that feels most proximate or doable. It's just very hard to sort through, especially under stress, to figure out like, what is really bugging me here? Yeah. No, I think everybody can understand that, especially because when you're under stress, you have probably the smallest amount of resources available to really harness, to navigate the moment, which probably pushes you even more to just look for the obvious surface level thing to point to because like, boom, I can point to this. I'm just going to go to town on this one thing, rather than actually having like taking the extra cognitive juice to try and say like,

what's really happening here? Let me zoom the lens out, which, you know, maybe after a couple of decades of meditation, like you get a little bit better at. But it is interesting that there's three buckets. I never heard that actually. That's fascinating that it's almost like if you're arguing about something which is almost circumstantial or seems surface level, like if you could catch yourself and just keep asking yourself, okay, which one of these three buckets could I drill this down to, to really understand what's happening here? Yeah. John Dickerson, who's a friend and fellow reporter, he started doing this with his wife. So they both graciously read my book, High Conflict. And in that book, there's a story about a couple that goes to war, this time

over a crockpot that they'd gotten for their wedding that they'd never used, right? But the wife inexplicably really wanted this crockpot. And so the husband wanted it too because she wanted it, right? This is often the spiral we get into. And it turns out if you ask the right questions and create enough space for listening, you find out that the wife had grown up in a household where every Sunday her family would cook using the crock pot. It would fill the house with these amazing smells and they put it on their wedding registry. And in her mind, like she had wanted to create a home like that and they never

had. So she was still kind of holding onto that ideal without even consciously maybe articulating it. But then once the husband heard that in the mediation, he could let it go. He could say, you know what? You can have it. Because actually, he doesn't care about that. What he cared about was that she wanted the whole divorce and he didn't, right? So he's trying to claw back whatever he can. And so surfacing that can open up a bunch of possibilities and then you can have the right fight. Let's have the fight about how you wanted a divorce and I didn't instead of about the crockpot. Like right now, and you see this around the country, around the world, we're having a lot of the wrong fights with the wrong people at the wrong time. And one problem with that is we're not

having the right fight, like the fight we really need to have. Sometimes we don't even know what that is. So anyway, let me circle back to John Dickerson. And he was saying how now he and his wife, if they find themselves caught in an argument, maybe they keep having the same one, or it's kind of escalating at a pace they didn't expect. They all say, what is the crock pot here? And it's sort of a shorthand to say, what is going on here? Yeah. Like what's really happening. And you bring up this notion also of not all conflict being bad, conflict about what it really is about and in the right construct and the right container and with the right mechanisms and ways can actually be pretty good.

And you make this distinction between good or useful conflict and capital H high conflict. And I'm curious, do you see this as a sort of like a spectrum where like you slowly move from one to the other? Or is there like a bright line test where it's like, oh, this is bad, this is good? That's a good question. I think it, because almost everything is a spectrum, I'm inclined to say yes. On the other hand, there are certain key indicators that you're in high conflict that are bright, like flashing red indicators. So contempt is a sign of high conflict. Whereas anger, anger can be good. If you're angry with me, you want me to be better. You haven't totally given up on me. Whereas contempt is,

in the research on conflict, contempt is very hard to work with. Same with disgust. Disgust is very hard to work with. So there are certain correlates of high conflict that are undeniable. And in my experience, once you know to look for them, you can't unsee them. So humiliation tends to lead to high conflict, whereas a lack of recognition can be fixed, right? So it is a bit of a spectrum, but also not fuzzy in my experience. And I think you hit the nail on the head in saying it's not that conflict is bad. Conflict is something we need. We need conflict to be pushed, to challenge each other. I think about it like working out, right?

You need to put your body under stress to get stronger. And the same is true with a family or a company or a neighborhood. That's how we push each other and that's how we get pushed. But that's the kind of conflict I like to call good conflict in homage to what the late John Lewis used to call good trouble. It's the kind of conflict where questions get asked, you experience anger and frustration and maybe even fear and sadness, but then you cycle through flashes of understanding and curiosity, maybe even humor and then back to anger. And you can see this in the data, which is cool.

In the conflicts that are good conflict, there is movement and you can feel it, right? In yourself, there's some movement. Whereas high conflict, you're stuck. Like you're having the same fight over and over and you're not remotely curious. Yeah. The difference between the two is palpable. And what keeps popping into my head as you're describing it is, is there the possibility of growth? Have we reached a point where that's just off the table now? It's just about who's going to win this thing regardless of like, or is there some possibility of growth within the process? Even if it doesn't end the way that you thought it was going to end or could wanted it to end the beginning. Have I in some way, or have we in some way grown and changed? And have we been transformed in some meaningful way by the process? To me, when I think about conflict, I'm not somebody

who loves conflict. Most people don't. Right. But it's something that I say yes to it if in the process of that, the stakes are deeply meaningful to me. And there is the process of transforming either the experience, the moment, the culture, myself personally, the conversation. But if I feel like that's not possible, then it just feels like you're fighting for the purpose of fighting. Right. It's just conflict for conflict's sake. Right. And I happen to have a few friends who love that. They love the sport of that. A couple of people I went to law school with in a very past life, literally, well, just they're trial lawyers. They love nothing more than conflict for conflict's sake. There are some

people that are just wired that way. But my strong take is that most of us aren't. You brought up contempt also, which I think is fascinating because that is one thing that I have heard through a number of sources over the years is about as close to being something that is non-recoverable from as anything. If there's one thing that can start to be felt between two individuals or groups of people that is as close to being non-recoverable as anything else, it's contempt. And I've often wondered why that is. Yeah. I think with contempt, there's a sense in which you have given up on the other person or the other side, and the only solution is total victory or annihilation, right? So that creates a huge threat to the other side, other person. You stop listening, you stop asking questions, and you make big mistakes, right? So even when someone literally

is a threat to you, if you allow yourself in your own head into high conflict, you start to make a lot of mistakes. And the research on this is really fascinating. So just to take one example, you actually lose your peripheral vision, right? So you're literally and figuratively missing things, missing opportunities that might arise, missing the fact that people do actually change. So one of the things that happens in high conflict is people have a fixed mindset about each other. And that means that, you know, you are going to give up on people because they've let you down in so many ways and proven themselves untrustworthy. But in fact, there are lots of examples of people shifting out of high conflict, of people changing how they feel about the other

side or the other person. So you foreclose on that opportunity if you allow, even in your own head, if you allow high conflict to sort of capture your thinking. Yeah, that makes a lot of sense to me. I mean, when I think about what's going on so often in the world these days, this phrase identity, political scale has become so centered in the conversation so often. And it's not just about politics. I think it's also about conflict in general. But I often wonder, when a conflict is on the level of values and beliefs, that feels like something that is more step-intuible as a conversation for me, potentially resolvable. When it exists on a level where you perceive somebody else not just seeing the world differently or believing differently or having different values, but literally on an identity level,

they're incompatible with you and the way you see the world. That seems to me to be such a furious, such a source fuel for this high conflict, which is it's conflict for conflict's sake almost, because when you see it on an identity level, it's almost like you're assuming it's not resolvable because you literally have to change who the person is on an identity level to get anywhere. And that is a heavy lift. Yeah. I mean, it is.

And I think what you're saying, if I'm understanding right, is if somebody has a worldview that suggests you don't have a right to exist, then that's hard to work with. Is that what you mean? Right. Your point of view doesn't have a right to exist. And it is fundamentally not your opinion, but it is who you are as a human being. Therefore, you as a human being have no place, like not only in my life, but in the world, which is like a devastating thing. Right. Totally devastating. I would agree. And I would still argue that staying in good

conflict in your own head is going to be a less miserable place to be. That doesn't mean you engage this person. That doesn't mean you have to talk to them or listen to them, right? Like sometimes you don't have a choice, but it does mean you have boundaries and guardrails and all those things. But in your own head, just for the sake of your own peace of mind, for your own ability to sleep, for your own ability to not be eaten alive by this conflict. And it's hard. I'm not suggesting that it's easy, right? But I will say that even when people have an identity that seems to foreclose basic decency towards other groups. I have interviewed many people who have shifted out of that identity. So it's not always going to happen, but all of us carry around multiple identities in our heads,

right? Again and again, whether I'm in, you know, Columbia after 50 years of civil war or in Chicago, working with people who try to interrupt gang violence or in politics, what you see is that people who shift out of high conflict, it's partly because someone has lit up one of their latent identities, often as a parent, not always, sometimes as a child, right? Or as a Colombian or as a pet owner, for God's sake. I mean, I've seen crazy things happen where those other identities that have kind of gone dark or gotten faded out by the primary conflict identity resurface. And if they have a place to go,

and they don't always, then people will shift. It's a way to create an opening, which doesn't, again, doesn't make it easy. But just as a reminder, nobody is just one thing. Yeah. And I think that's important. Not always the easiest thing to connect with when you're in it. Never the easiest. Yeah. Mayday, mayday.

We've been compromised The pilot's a hitman I knew you were gonna be fun On January 24th Tell me how to fly this thing Mark Wahlberg You know what the difference between me and you is? You're gonna die

Don't shoot him, we need him Y'all need a pilot Flight risk The Apple Watch Series 10 is here It has the biggest display ever It's also the thinnest Apple Watch ever, making it even more comfortable on your wrist, whether you're running, swimming, or sleeping.

And it's the fastest-charging Apple Watch, getting you 8 hours of charge in just 15 minutes. The Apple Watch Series X. Available for the first time in glossy jet black aluminum. Compared to previous generations, iPhone Xs are later required. Charge time and actual results will vary. On that same level, our brains are really weird when it comes to sort of like exploring behavior and identity. I remember reading research that showed that when we do a bad thing,

we view ourselves as good people who made a bad choice. When somebody else we may not be connected to and we have no desire to want to like, does that exact same bad thing, we view them not as a good person who's done a bad thing, but as a bad person. Right. Totally. So it's really interesting how we have this completely different way that we see ourselves doing the exact same thing, simply because it reinforces the box that we want to put somebody else in. And we always want to see ourselves as, oh, I may have done something harmful or bad or stupid or whatever it is,

but I'm a good person. Right. I had all these reasons, right? Like all these circumstantial evidence that I could point to. And yeah, the technical term is fundamental attribution error, but I find that's just a really artless term. So I like to call it the idiot driver reflex because it's basically like when I do it, it's an honest mistake. When they do it, they believe they're above the law and have like a reckless disregard for human life. So you can really see it when you're driving. Yeah. And that also just kind of like brings up the notion of we don't see ourselves or the world clearly, but we think we do. You know, that's the whole field of cognitive bias.

You know, like this is one of the things that you're talking about here. It just, it skews ourselves. We like to think of ourselves as objective and rational, but in fact, we've got like layers of scripts running all day, every day that completely obscure anything remotely related to objectivity, but we don't ever see it or acknowledge it. I know it's almost terrifying when you really notice it, right? Because then you start thinking, well, what am I getting wrong right now as we speak? And it is true. We are looking at the world through, you know, a million lenses,

only some of which we can guess at. I thought it was sort of most apparent with COVID because, you know, I had to admit, even within myself, that every day I had a different risk calculus, right? Like it was inconsistent and also inconsistent with other decisions I was making about risk, right? And so were all my friends. It's easier to see in other people, right? But then you have to ask yourself, you know, like I have a friend who was like going on these long road trips with her family because she was so worried about getting COVID. And, you know, all the research shows that in fact, you're much more likely to get into a car accident in most of the situations she was in. But you can't tell her that because

it's just going to, you know, backfire. But I would do that myself. You know, there are certain times where I would find myself being really risk averse and uncomfortable in crowds. And then other times where I would be totally relaxed and vaguely annoyed with friends or family who were feeling so risk averse. So you just start to see how slippery this all is and how much of the story we're telling ourselves at any given moment can change our perception. I feel like we perceive ourselves as fully formed and relatively static, and really we're just like these blobs that are sort of like perpetually shaping shift, and we don't really pick up on it. You bring up this notion also in the realm of conflict of

paradox, which I thought was fascinating, right? And you identify sort of like a series of these paradoxes that exist in the world of conflict. One of them being that we are simultaneously animated by high conflict and also pretty much like absolutely haunted and repelled. Yeah. It's funny, right? We want in and we want out. Everyone I've ever met who is trapped in high conflict, whether it's members of Congress or gang members or activists, there is a certain level of misery that you can sense. It's very similar from person to person. They want a way out if only they could find it, right? A yearning for something else. And at the same time, a real attachment to the conflict, right? To how it orders the world, how it connects them to their side, how it helps them make sense of things that don't make sense, right? And gives them a sense of belonging and clarity, right? Which is a human need. So yeah, there is a strange

paradox in human behavior in high conflict. Yeah, it was interesting. I was thinking about that in the context of Maslow's hierarchy. And I think on the one hand, it gives you belonging, as you just described, which lies sort of like right at the middle. It's the third tier of the five tiers and the hierarchy of needs. And it also gives you what, to me, you were describing as a sense of purpose, which is right at the top of that pyramid. But at the same time, it potentially threatens the base, your safety and security. So it's like you're constantly... If you buy into Maslow's hierarchy of needs, you're like, okay, so I kind of have to have... There's a certain thing that I have to have to feel like I can wake up in the morning and breathe and feel safe and get through the next day. But there are other parts of that, that I

deeply aspire to just as a human being wanting a meaningful existence. And it's like conflict, it keeps moving you up and down the levels of the hierarchy. And it's sort of like simultaneously making your head spin, but also moving you into the different domains of need that you kind of have to have to feel like you're fully alive. I'd never really thought about how it applies to Maslow's hierarchy of needs. And I think you're right. And I like how the idea that it's moving you up and down, and it's like operating on different levels at the same time that are in conflict with each other, right? And I think that's why it's so uncomfortable when a loved one has different views on politics or something we care deeply about because it's like clashing, right? It's creating this real strain on our sense of safety in multiple ways. And I think for me, it's been helpful to first

just notice that because before I would just let myself take the bait and be fixated on how they could be so wrong and so ignorant. And it's a lot easier to first notice, oh, I'm upset about this because I care about this person. I want to feel close to them. And this creates a real wedge between us. So starting from there and even actually acknowledging that, it really bums me out because I feel like we agree on so many things, but this one we don't agree on. And I hate that. I like to feel aligned with you and just kind of putting it out there so that it's not operating underneath. The last few years, like in particular, if you haven't been brought face to face with that experience, you have now, you know, there's somebody in your life who you love, who you adore, who you like, you thought you saw the world the same way. And all of a sudden you realize, well, 80% of it you do. And then there's this one thing, which is so big. It feels like it's determinative of

everything else. And you're willing to throw out the other 80%. And I think so many of us, whether it's friends or family or colleagues, have had to grapple with like, can I hold this duality? Feeling deeply connected on certain ways, whether it's just a sense of obligation to family or just values and beliefs, the way that we share history, knowing that we are fiercely divided on this other issue and still like, how do I hold that and still feel like, how do I make peace with that and not just completely walk away? Or does it make sense to completely walk away? Yeah. I mean, the best advice I've gotten on this

is from a Zen Buddhist poet named Norman Fisher, who he told me once that he has relatives that he disagrees with dramatically on politics, and he enjoys talking to them about it. And I said, how do you do that? What do you say to yourself before you go in the room at Thanksgiving or whatever? And he said, oh, yeah, I just remind myself that we're all going to die one day. That's how he says it, like super matter of fact. But if you could hold that in your head, right, it would be a little easier because you realize, you know what? This is a moment in time. I will not be on this ride forever. Neither will they. And I don't know everything. You know, it's kind of a shorthand,

hopefully, for all those things. Which kind of brings us to one of the other paradoxes that you referenced, which is this notion that so often we enter conflict and we really, really, really want the other person or group to change. We want them to see the world the way that we see it. We want them to change their point of view. And we do it by basically just trying to hammer our point of view into them. And there's this paradox that you described where functionally, nobody's ever going to listen to a word that we have to say, and maybe they never will. But even as an opening move, we've got to first actually let them feel seen and heard, accepted as they are, which is this paradox, because we want nothing more than for them to be different. And yet the pathway there is to just embrace them in this moment as they are.

It's incredible, right? I am again and again astounded at how different our intuition for what's going to work to persuade someone is from the reality. Our intuition for how we should convince them when they're wrong is just useless. It almost always backfires. So doing any intuitive thing in high conflict is going to make the conflict worse. So what does that leave you with? You have to do counterintuitive things, which include, to your point, listening, making the person feel heard, truly trying to understand them, not faking it. And then they might listen to you, right? But it is kind of like a game of chicken, like who's going to listen first. And it's totally counter to how we think. I mean, you look at all the institutions like op-eds, right? How we think op-eds are going to persuade people, right? They don't. How we think social media is going to be persuasive. How we think even, you know, organized debates, right? Assume a sort of, you're not

really listening to the other side. You're just trying to prove how smart you are and like, you know, bring together a bunch of shiny facts. And that's not how people change their mind, especially when there's any amount of emotions or values involved. And to the contrary, you know, I was talking to a professional interrogator. I mean, this comes up in so many different places. It's amazing. But I was talking to a professional interrogator. So he used to work for the FBI. Now he works for companies where they know someone's stealing, but they don't know who, and they need to get a confession. And he's written a book about this,

which is great. And it's basically, he goes in and talks to them. And what does he do? Does he use coercion, threats, control? He does not, because he's found the hard way that that does not work. So he tries to connect with them on a very human level. And how does he do that? He listens to them with genuine delight and curiosity to figure out the best version of themselves. Like who do they most want to be on their best day? And once they feel like he sees them in that light, truly, they tend to confess because everyone wants to be a good person. Like most people, not everyone, most people think of themselves as trying to be good. And so if you give them a way out of the pickle they're in and you help them be seen and heard,

it lowers their guard. And that's an extreme case, right? But I have found in every interaction involving any amount of emotion, really making sure to listen first in ways people can see changes the whole rest of the conversation. Yeah, that makes so much sense to me. My sense is over the last decade or so that so many people have had the experience of feeling increasingly invisible. Sure, like the shiny, happy social media facade of who you want to be perceived as is out there and people see that and maybe accept that. But the real you, we're just hiding more and more and more. And that the pace of life has accelerated so dramatically, that the cycles of being able to actually just pause long enough to observe, to see, to be seen, because it takes time and it takes space and it takes safety. And connection, like relationship, right? Right. And life just doesn't support that these days unless you make it support it.

I feel like increasingly that experience of feeling seen and understood and embraced is so increasingly rare that when we experience it, it's almost like magical. And that opens so much possibility. But we go into these conversations so often with the exact opposite. Let me bang something out of somebody else or some other group of people. Let me just force, force, force, rather than just tell me who you are as a human being. And then maybe we can take it from there. And I wonder if part of it is just due to this sense of, we don't have time to be human on that level anymore. So let me just

try and force an outcome because maybe I can just barrel through somebody in the moment. It's just something intuitively feels like there's something deeper and much bigger and systemic going on there. Yeah. I mean, I think the pace of change economically, socially, technologically, all of that, the inundation of news, I think that has definitely created a deep malaise, like anxiety. And John Powell, who runs the Othering and Belonging Institute, speaks about this very beautifully. And he has explained to me that, you know, when people feel that kind of just low level anxiety and fear, they will tend to other another group. They will tend to find a scapegoat, find someone to blame. And there are plenty of conflict entrepreneurs out there who will happily give them one right now, right? And we've sort of created a lot of institutions to reward conflict entrepreneurs right now. But the flip side of that is they're wanting to belong. They're wanting to know that

their children will belong. And so the more we can continually expand the definition of us, the less violent and destructive conflict we will have. That is easier said than done, but there is a relationship between that anxiety, alienation, and the pace of change, as you say, the look of time and conflict. That's really important. And I think explains a lot, even more so than like Facebook or whatever, about why we are where we are today. Yeah, I think technology has definitely evolved in it, but there's something deeper and sort

of like more baked into our DNA. The Apple Watch Series 10 is here. It has the biggest display ever. It's also the thinnest Apple Watch ever, making it even more comfortable on your wrist, whether you're running, swimming, or sleeping. And it's the fastest charging Apple Watch, getting you eight hours of charge in just 15 minutes.

The Apple Watch Series 10, available for the first time in glossy jet black aluminum. Compared to previous generations, iPhone XS or later required, charge time and actual results will vary. Mayday, mayday, we've been compromised. The pilot's a hitman. I knew you were going to be fun. On January 24th. Tell me how to fly this thing. Mark Wahlberg.

You know what the difference between me and you is? You're going to die. Don't shoot him, we need him. Y'all need a pilot? You just used this phrase, conflict entrepreneur. I want to go deeper into that. It's one of these sort of like three horsemen that you talk about. Conflict entrepreneurs, humiliation, and corruption as being like these three really big contributors to high conflict. Tell me about each one of those three, because I think it's a fascinating framework. Yeah. So conflict entrepreneurs are people or platforms who exploit conflict for their own ends. And sometimes that's for power or profit, right?

But I find even more often it's for a sense of mattering in the world. It's for attention, right? It's for status seeking, right? We've currently designed a bunch of our institutions, not just social media, but definitely including social media, but also politics and news to raise up and reward conflict entrepreneurship. We celebrate it in some ways. And you can see this with pundits, right? And you can see it with politicians. It is often a kind of pathological narcissism, right? That is leading people, especially if they're like a lifelong conflict entrepreneur who've made a career out of it, right? There's a deep void that they're trying to fill, right? That they will never fill, right? And it's been helpful to me to

try to understand that. So I'm not just demonizing conflict entrepreneurs, right? And creating a new us versus them, which is so tempting, right? But I know as a journalist, it is very easy to play into this, right? To be a conflict entrepreneur. I've done it myself, and I try every day to wake up and just not be a conflict entrepreneur, right? Because right now, there aren't a lot of norms for being the opposite, for being a conflict interrupter. So there aren't a lot of rewards for that. But we could change that. I think people in certain spaces have changed that, including online in certain spaces. So I think that is also fluid and part of the world actually financially rewards high conflict in the media, whether it's mainstream media, whether it's social media. It's almost like the more

conflict you generate, the more adversarial you are, whether it's with a basis or not, the more eyeballs you get, the more eyeballs you get, the more money you get, whether it's as an individual or as a business. So we've got these massive economic structures which are built around fostering high conflict without really an eye towards, is this also fostering our shared humanity? Is this good for culture? Is this good for society? And interestingly, I feel like we start to silo ourselves. I'm so curious because this is sort of like your world also, where we opt out of conflict with those who have an opposing point of view. And we opt into getting it vicariously by only allowing ourselves to have sort of like

information brought to us through a particular channel. So we're still like, we're observing all of it and it juices our need to feel like righteous and to feel like we are the people who are right and who can see clearly. But it also opts us out of ever having to actually consider other points of view on a human to human level with other people standing in front of us who believe and see the world differently. And part of, I think how we get out of that silo is, is first noticing who are the conflict entrepreneurs in your feed, in your news diet, in your life, right? Everyone I've ever known who's shifted out of high conflict into good conflict has started by distancing themselves from the conflict entrepreneurs in their life, right? If you want to give up sugar, you don't buy six cakes

and keep them on your counter, right? That's just a basic thing. So that's one thing is sort of notice who seems to delight in every twist and turn the conflict makes, right? a store behind them and wants to gossip with you about how badly you were treated and what do you think and what will you do and isn't it terrible? And there's a kind of dysfunctional intimacy that people can bring to conflict, right? But just noticing it is huge, I can tell you from personal experience. And then you can kind of deal a little differently or create some space, sometimes, not always, with the conflict entrepreneur. And even in extreme cases, so Curtis Toler, who's the gang leader in Chicago, who I profiled in the book, former gang leader in Chicago, when he decided to leave that conflict, partly because his parent identity got lit up. One of the first things he did, which was lucky, was he moved across town. And that literally created a distance between himself

and the conflict and the conflict entrepreneurs, which makes it not easy, by the way, but possible to shift out of high conflict. And sort of for most people who are not gang leaders, I used to not long ago be very uncomfortable having conversations with people I disagree with profoundly about politics, including strangers. And the more I saw it happen as a reporter, and the more I did it as a human, it just got dramatically easier. So for whatever that's worth, while it is easier to be siloed and kind of feeling righteous and outraged and just surround yourself with people who agree with you, I actually like myself a lot better when I'm having occasional, in certain contexts, encounters with people that I really disagree with, right?

If there are garrules in that conversation, because it always teaches me something I didn't know, right? Like I just, to wrap this up, I went a couple months ago, there's a nonprofit called Starts With Us that tries to work on the political divide in the United States. And they asked me if I would go to a abortion rights march that was happening in front of the Supreme Court because the Roe v. Wade decision had been leaked. I was like, well, I don't know. And they were like, we'll have a camera crew. And so I ended up asking them to have two camera crews. And my colleague, Helene B. Andudi-Hofer, she went to the group that was protesting the decision. So this is the pro

abortion rights. And I went to the pro-life or anti-abortion rights side, depending on what you want to call it. And this is a group I profoundly disagree with, but it was the first time in my life I'd gone to a protest truly wanting to ask questions and try to understand people better. And I have to tell you, I have never felt more informed than leaving that protest. Did I feel like there was an obvious solution? I did not, right? Like this is a hard, difficult problem. Did I change my mind about my own opinions on abortion? I did not. But I could start to see, first of all, how many different kinds of people and different thinking and reasoning there was within this one group, right? So you let go of the kind of binary thinking that can really trap you in conflict.

And I could see how they were thinking about it, which you can't change anyone's mind until you understand their mind. So it's like learning a language that you may not want to move there, but you learn a lot from trying to get some proficiency. And it was strangely fulfilling. Yeah. I mean, what's fascinating about that also is that your purpose in going there was not to try and advocate for a position, but it was purely to talk to people who you knew saw the world differently and understand how and why they came to this position. It's like a very different way of stepping into conflict, but maybe that's actually like really instructive just about how we could all do it. It goes back to what you were talking

about earlier of like first seek to see and understand and find empathy. And here is part of my curiosity around this too. And I wonder if it's whether people often find it so challenging is that not infrequently the person or the group that you find yourself in conflict with, you may also feel is doing a very real and current harm to you or to people that you care about. And it raises this issue of what has often been called emotional labor these days. Like, why should I have to do the work of sitting down, of seeing somebody, of inquiring into them, of holding space to them, of creating safety for them, of actually investigating and inquiring and holding myself open for empathy and compassion when their point

of view or their actions or decisions are causing real and present danger or harm. And I understand both sides of that. I really get it and it's complicated. Yeah, I do too. And I think there are times when you shouldn't have to do that work, right? And it's not a good idea. And it's not physically or emotionally wise to do that depending on the situation. I will also say that, look, we are stuck with each other. We basically have kids together in this country and we have got to find a way to get things done. And we are failing our kids right now. This thing we've got

going on where we believe we are morally superior to each other, that's very dangerous. You know, Curtis Toller, who I mentioned earlier, the former gang leader who now does gang violence interruption, is a very wise person on conflict. What he said to me once is, you know, I think anytime there's a better than and a less than there's always room for war. So let's make sure that the reason we're not having these conversations isn't because we are certain we are superior. That kind of hierarchy is very dangerous. And it's not sustainable in a community in which we've reached the upper limits of what an adversarial us versus them mindset can achieve. And now we've got big problems to solve, right? Whether it's a pandemic or climate change or education reform, you name it. We cannot do things,

even the things we agree on, until we start to show some intellectual humility and start to show some grace and deep curiosity about each other. So that's a bit of a rant and I apologize, but I've seen it happen so many times now that, you know, I actually ended my book with a quote from Martha who, so at the end of the book, I follow a group of very progressive left Jewish New Yorkers who go and spend three days and three nights in the homes of very conservative Christian corrections officers in Michigan for a variety of strange reasons. This happens and we have a bunch of hard conversations. They disagree on many, many things, but there's like this almost joyfulness in some of the conversations. And when Martha,

who's a professor of women's studies, out gay woman involved in a long-term relationship, lives in Manhattan. When she came back from that, she said to me, I wish I could show up more often as the person I was on those three days, open, curious, able to be surprised. And that's how I feel. When I'm able to do it, I'm not always able to do it. It's kind of more who I want to be. That totally resonates with me. The question I often ask of others and of myself is really simple. How's that working out for you? That's great. It's like whatever it is we're dug in about, if we have commensurate levels of misery,

the more dug in we get, at some point we have to be like, huh. Okay. So if just doubling down on whatever it is I'm saying or believing is actually causing me more harm and probably causing other people more harm too, at some point you've got to question that and potentially swap on the lens of curiosity you described there. That sort of experiment that you described though also, I mean, it has a long tail sort of like moral at the end of it too, which is that yes, a three-day intervention can really change people's point of view, but it can't stop at three days. When people return to their environments, everything just reverts. There's got to be something bigger and more sustained.

Yeah. Yeah. You need to have a relationship. I mean, it all comes down so often, right, to relationship. And it's hard right now because we are politically very segregated, more so than ever. So it's hard to have meaningful relationships across big divides. But it doesn't have to be this way. There's a lot of ways, including a national service year or many other things we could talk about that would create relationships. And there are institutions that do this already, right? There are domestic exchange programs between high school students.

There are the military does this. There are lots of ways in which we can build relationships across big divides, but you're absolutely right. They have to continue. It can't be a one-off kind of deal. Yeah. And I think, again, that's where this feeling of breathlessness in all of our lives and acceleration sometimes makes that harder because we're like, I'm going to carve out the time to do this one thing. But to actually turn that into an ongoing thing that's sustainable, maybe even a relationship, I think it's harder for people. We've talked about a bunch of different ideas and the notion of being more open, being more curious, stepping into conversations with really wanting, just asking questions and with the intention to see and understand before you try

and persuade if you even go there. You also talk about something called contact theory, which I guess kind of brings in a lot of these different things, but if we sort of step into more of the, like, where, where do we go from here? Tell me how this, how these ideas come into the conversation. So there's, you know, been a lot, decades and decades of research on how do you reduce prejudice? Whether it's, you know, racial prejudice or prejudice against different religions or ethnicities, there's only one thing that consistently works, and it's contact. And what does that mean? Well, under certain conditions, and those are important, having relationships with people who are different than you are seem to be very effective, the most and maybe only effective way to chip away at our worst natures, which are to demonize one another and believe we

are superior. Now, the conditions matter, right? It is important that contact across big divides be done thoughtfully. It helps if people are on equal footing from a power point of view, if not in the world, which is very hard to do, then in the room, right? It helps if you're trying to solve a shared problem together. It helps if there is food and humor, right? Like there's some basic things. But again and again, there's been like 500 experiments on contact theory and some of them really good experiments and they do show progress. Now, the good thing here, and now often I'll tell people this and they're like, oh, great. Well, that's great. Thanks a lot. And like, what are we going to do? But the thing is, you can experience vicarious contact. And that's where I think

my colleagues in the journalism world have to do a better job of helping people understand each other. And not just in journalism, but actually some of the most powerful content that helps people experience contact with the other, whoever that is, across a big divide is fictional shows like series, right? Where you have people on apartment building from five different groups that are in conflict, right? And that is one way for people to learn about each other without having to literally, you know, go to Michigan for three days or engage in hard conversations that might be crossing a boundary for them, right? So that's something I think, look, we have the most creative, best resourced storytellers in the world, in the United States still.

So that's something I think we could do a lot more of, and it could be very powerful. Yeah, that makes a lot of sense to me. And especially because it creates access to those who can't actually have these engaged, live, ongoing experiences. I feel like a lot of times, contact with people over time, you go into it and you're trying to find the points of what are the beliefs and the values and the histories where we share it, where we can see each other's humanity within those, I sometimes wonder if actually the stronger point of connection that opens up the humanity in others is actually what do we both suffer?

What have we both endured? It's interesting. I'm sure you've seen this. I've seen this. It's certainly done in a number of different settings, this step to the line exercise where people in two totally different groups who feel like they couldn't relate to each other are like on the opposite side of a room. There's a line in the middle. And somebody says, like, step to the line. If you have a relative in prison, if you have this,

if you have that, and all of a sudden these people like wealthy people, privileged people, and people who are all stepping to the line. And many of those questions are presented in the, what have you endured? What have you suffered? What's the pain in your life or has been the pain in your life? And it's just like the tears flow when you're like, oh, there's something powerful about that side of the spectrum that I feel like I hear talked about less. Yeah. And I wonder, what do you think that is? Because it's not common ground exactly, right? I mean, I guess it's vulnerability, right? You're putting yourself out there by walking to that line. And then one thing we know about vulnerability, again,

totally contrary to our intuition, is that showing a little bit of vulnerability in the right context is an immediate way to help other people show a little bit of vulnerability. So it does feel like somehow that exposure, which is not huge, right, but not nothing, creates a shared sense of humanity between people. Yeah. I mean, maybe I've often wondered that same thing too. And I feel like some of it also is commiseration is powerful. You kind of don't want it to be, but I think it is. And I think history has proved that over and over. And I think that's part of what happens when we share our suffering is that that connects us in what happens when we share our suffering, is that that connects us in a way that we don't often acknowledge is deep.

Right. Suffering is part of the human condition. And if you haven't suffered, you probably just haven't been alive long enough yet, but you will, right? And some people suffer more and earlier than they should. But yeah, that is definitely part of the human experience. And so seeing that in a visual way must kind of remind us how similar, not as similar we are, but how we're all on. We fear the same things, even if we think that the answers are different on how to like abate those fears and those worries. And maybe that is powerful too. Right. Cause it's redefining the sense of us, right? It's expanding it. And it's easy to forget that. I think people who study this often hope for an alien invasion from outer space because it will remind us very quickly we're not as different as we think yeah indeed as um as your zen buddhist friend said at the end we're all dead right feels like a good place for us to come full circle as well weirdly hopeful and a totally pessimistic right exactly um in this container a life project, if I offer up the phrase to live a good life,

what comes up? To live a good life is to feel connected to each other in suffering and in joy. Thank you. Thank you. Hey, before you leave, if you love this episode, safe bet you will also love the conversation that we had with Susan Piver about the Buddhist Enneagram and how that can help you understand yourselves and others in a way that eases conversation. You'll find a link to Susan's episode in the show notes. Good Life Project is a part of the ACAST Creator Network. And of course, if you haven't already done so,

please go ahead and follow Good Life Project in your favorite listening app. And if you found this conversation interesting or inspiring or valuable, and chances are you did since you're still listening here, would you do me a personal favor, a seven second favor and share it? Maybe on social or by text or by email,

even just with one person. Just copy the link from the app you're using and tell those you know, those you love, those you want to help navigate this thing called life a little better so we can all do it better together with more ease and more joy. Tell them to listen. Then even invite them to talk about what you've both discovered because when podcasts become conversations and conversations become action, that's how we all come alive together. Until next time, I'm Jonathan Fields, signing off for Good Life Project. Mayday, mayday. We've been compromised. The pilot's a hitman. I knew you were going to be fun. On January 24th.

Tell me how to fly this thing. Mark Wahlberg. You know what the difference between me and you is? You're going to die. Don't shoot him, we need him. Y'all need a pilot? Flight risk. The Apple Watch Series 10 is here.

It has the biggest display ever. It's also the thinnest Apple Watch ever, making it even more comfortable on your wrist whether you're running, swimming, or sleeping. And it's the fastest charging Apple Watch, getting you 8 hours of charge in just 15 minutes. The Apple Watch Series X.

Available for the first time in glossy jet black aluminum. Compared to previous generations, iPhone Xs are later required. Charge time and actual results will vary.