Ten Percent Happier with Dan Harris - Good Conflict | Amanda Ripley | An Episode From “On Being”

Episode Date: November 17, 2023

Today we are dropping down our feed a conversation that I listened to recently that had a huge impact on me. It's from a great show that I'm sure many of you have heard of, On Being with Krista Tippett. It's been around for decades, and it explores the question of what it means to be human, how to do life better, how to live with each other in complex times.Krista Tippett is a recent friend of mine, somebody who I have long admired and really, like – she was on the show just recently. They've got a new season of their show going right now, over on the On Being feed, which I highly recommend you check out. They're doing episodes on the intelligence of the human body, what AI might be calling us to as human beings, and much more. They've also got a 20 year archive of conversations with people like Mary Oliver, John O'Donohue, and Desmond Tutu, which is pretty extraordinary. And this conversation, which, as I mentioned earlier, has had a big impact on me seems unfortunately quite relevant. It's about conflict and how to do it right: the difference between healthy conflict, which is an unavoidable part of life, and high conflict, which we see all around us these days, but which is avoidable.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Wondering Plus subscribers can listen to 10% happier early and add free right now. Join Wondering Plus in the Wondering app or on Apple podcasts. Hello everybody, happy Friday, time for a bonus. Today we are dropping down our feed, a conversation that I listened to recently that had a huge impact on me. It's from a great show that I'm sure many of you have heard of on being with Christa Tippett. It's been around for decades. It really just explores the question of what it means to be human, how to do life better, how to live with each other in complex times. Christa Tippett is a recent

friend of mine, somebody who I have long admired and really like. She is phenomenal. As you may have heard, she was on the show this week. They've got a new season of their show going right now over on the on being feed, which I highly recommend you check out. They're doing episodes on the intelligence of the human body. What AI might be calling us to as human beings and much more, the new episodes drop every Thursday. And like I said, I highly recommend them. They've also got a 20-year archive of conversations with people like Mary Oliver, John O'Donohue, Tick-Nott-Hon and Desmond Tutu, which is pretty extraordinary. And this conversation, which as I mentioned earlier, has had a big impact on me, seems quite relevant

in many ways, unfortunately. It's about conflict and how to do it right, and the difference between healthy conflict, which is an unavoidable part of life and high conflict, which we see all around us these days, but which is avoidable. So here we go now with my new friend, Christa Tippett. On Being With Christa Tippett is supported in part by the John Templeton Foundation, funding research and catalyzing conversations that inspire people with awe and wonder. Discover the latest findings on neuroscience, cosmology, and the origins of life at templeton.org. Amanda Ripley began her life as a journalist covering crime, disaster, and terrorism.

Then in 2018, and this is how I became aware of her, she published a brilliant essay called Complicating the Narratives, which she opened by confessing a professional existential crisis. by confessing a professional existential crisis. We journalists, she wrote, and I quote, can summon outrage in five words or less. We value the ancient power of storytelling, and we get that good stories require conflict, characters, and scene. But in the present era of tribalism,

it feels like we've reached our collective limitations. Again and again, we have escalated the conflict and snuffed the complexity out of the conversation. Yet what Amanda Ripley has gone on to investigate and so hopefully illuminate is not just about journalism or about politics. It touches almost every aspect of human life, in almost every society around the world right now. We think we're divided by issues, arguing about conflicting facts. But actually she says, we are trapped in a pattern of distress, known as high conflict, where the conflict itself has become the point and it sweeps everything into its vortex. So how to get out? What Amanda has been gathering by way of answers to that question is an extraordinary gift to

us all. What a pleasure to complicate this narrative with the wise Amanda Ripley. I'm Christa Tippett, and this is on being. I spoke with Amanda before a live audience at the Humphrey School of Public Affairs of the University of Minnesota. of the University of Minnesota. into the light. And I have been wanting to meet Amanda in the flesh for a long time, and I'm really grateful to Humphrey for conspiring with me to get her here.

Thank you so much, Krista. I've been like having this conversation in my head with you for like five years, so it's exciting that it's happening. I'm very grateful. I'm excited. Yeah. Okay. Well, let's go. So, you know, I always ask a question of origins. I don't know that I knew this when I started doing that, but that's a technique that's used often in conversations where we're trying to not have the predictable conversation. And you wrote something that was just so helpful to me in why that works.

I mean, I have all kinds of experiences of why it works, but you said something that was really interesting that stories of origins when we talk about our early life, our childhood, you said, these are by definition dimensional and messy, unlike the debate we think we're gonna have, because you said real life is not a bumper sticker. So I think the question I want to ask you about origins come to focus in on the topic

today is how you would trace the roots of your awareness of your attention to conflict in the earliest background of your life, in your childhood. Your attention to conflict and what you took away from that about what to do with it. You know, I don't think I really realize this until pretty recently, but if I look back, most of us, I think your first exposure to conflict is at home, right, with your family.

If you think back, what's the first time you experienced conflict? Maybe it was with kids in the playground or on the street, but probably it's with a parent or watching parents have conflict. So in my case, my parents had a lot of conflict. And it took different forms, but it usually involved a lot of yelling, particularly by my mother, but she, as my father, was quick to point out when I showed him a draft of the book.

She was not entirely to blame. And they both participated in this conflict in all kinds of ways. But as a kid, I would do this thing where I would monitor their conflict. So I would monitor those fights from the top of the stairs and I can vividly remember sort of drawing in the carpet, listening to them fighting. And I think it was a way to control it, right?

Like a way to feel like I could, I was surveilling the conflict, if that makes sense. And for me, I think that never ended in a way. You know, like as a journalist, you're always monitoring conflict. Yeah, so I see, right, a lot of these patterns we learn don't service when we get older, but I think you wrote somewhere else. You know, I think when you're watching as a child,

when you're surveilling, when you're listening, monitoring, as you said, you're, that's your way to try to feel safe, to try to keep yourself safe, to think that you can participate and keep everybody else safe. And it feels to me like that. Flow is very naturally into the reason

that you would become a journalist. Yeah. Right. And I used to just feel like that was a failing, in other words, because it's a delusion, it's a sort of grandiose one, right, that you can control conflict by writing about it or monitoring it. On the other hand, I think there is some helplessness

sometimes in trying to tell stories about the conflict that are enlightening, if they are, or illuminating. But it's complicated. So I've seen you writing, but tell me if this is right, was it around 2016 that you really started to come to this conclusion that this is not working? What do you remember? Like was there a day or was there an event or a story that brought that home? What would have happened in 2016?

Yeah, I know. But I mean, in terms of the journalism you were doing. Yeah, it just felt like, I mean, I had grown up where my dad was a Republican, my mom was a Democrat. We got the Trenton Times and the New York Times delivered every day in New Jersey. And the New York Times was like revered in my household, rightly or wrongly.

But my parents were the first in their families to go to college, education was revered. I think there was a certain status attached to the New York Times, you know what I mean? But I think after the 2016 election, I couldn't, I mean, how do you not ask yourself if this is working out the way we planned, right? I mean, in other words, if it didn't seem to matter

what the New York Times reported about Donald Trump because half the country didn't seem to matter what the New York Times reported about Donald Trump, because half the country didn't believe they were acting in good faith. So, but I mean, I just feel like you, and you wrote, you know, you wrote, I think, in complicating the narrative, which was 2018. There are all kinds of ways to analyze, right? And you can talk about the influence of social media. You can talk about the business model of journalism. And you said, all of this mattered.

This is where you came to. But none of these explanations felt quite adequate. Something else was happening to something that had not been named. Yeah. So in my kind of midlife crisis of wondering, what is journalism? Does it matter how can I be useful in this world,

in which every story I do either will have very limited impact or just make things worse potentially, right? Partly, I could go off on that midlife crisis because I was a freelancer, right? So I had some distance from these places at this point, and there's a lot of privilege in that to kind of sort of question fundamental things, which is much harder to do when you're in a newsroom every day, having to go to dangerous, difficult reporting. So I just want to name that. But also, so I kind of went off trying to figure out, like, what is going on here,

how do I make sense of this, how do I be useful? And again, went down a lot of different avenues, which all of which matter. But when I started spending time with people who study intractable conflict or who have been themselves an intractable conflict or malignant conflict, is it sometimes called? Then it was like everything clicked. That part of how you have to understand, at least for me, what's happening is to understand what high conflict is, which is a special kind of conflict, which doesn't behave according

to the rules of normal or healthy conflict. And it's very magnetic. It's a kind of conflict that becomes us versus them, where we feel increasingly morally superior and increasingly baffled and threatened by the other side or person. And we make a lot of mistakes. So there's a lot of research on this, and there is kind of a bright line between healthy conflict, good conflict, and high conflict. And just as a quick example, anger is okay.

In all the research on emotion and conflict. I'm a big fan of anger. I don't know if anyone else is a fan of anger. But it is initiatory, it is important as a signal, right? It's energizing. Contempt is really hard to work with, and the same with disgust. So that's a bright line to just give you an example I'm talking about. But that for me was a really helpful, bigger umbrella to understand how all these other forces were interacting.

And really what you did is you got interested in, of course I like this, because the human condition is my lens, right? That's, I mean, there's this line where you said, in complicating the narrative, after spending more than 50 hours in training for various forms of dispute resolution, I realized that I've overestimated my ability to quickly understand what drives people to do what they do. I have overvalued reasoning in myself

and others and undervalued pride, fear, and the need to belong. And I want you to flesh this out. I've been operating like an economist, in other words, an economist from the 1960s. Yeah, you know, this is the thing that I think is really helpful for me in trying to understand where we need to get to. So if you think about economics used to be based on, I'm sort of reducing it down, so forgive me for the economists in the audience, but used to be based on certain theories about how people would behave, right?

And then finally, Daniel Coniman and others convinced the field more or less that actually human behavior isn't quite as simple as you are. The idea also was that we were basically rational, that people were basically rational economic actors, and of course that wouldn't be true all the time, but somehow this overall rationality would balance it out. Exactly.

Yeah. And it turns out that's not right. And so you get this field of behavioral economics and For a long time we were thinking of calling that essay behavioral journalism But that felt too creepy and weird so but that would be the goal is you know What if you started over with journalism and you try to create a Field of storytelling that was designed based on what we actually know about what humans need to thrive and make decisions in a world that's in and dated with information

and that requires a lot of interdependence across different groups. So what would that actually look like? And I think your show is closer to that, where you're thinking about the audience as a human. Yeah. Okay, so I want to come back to something that you just touched on. Well, let me just say this, so really this conversation we're having and the investigation you're doing, the conversations you're leading, the entry point was journalism, but this is really a conversation, exploration, and truth telling about what it means to be human and alive now.

So before we get into breaking down high conflict a little bit more, which feels so familiar even as you start to describe it, I really do want to kind of establish this foundation that you're on that, and that psychology is on too, that conflict in and of itself is not problematic, that it's often productive, that it's necessary, that it is and can be a good. Yeah, this is like the single biggest mistake that I think it's made in public discourse around this. I mean, we need conflict to get better, to be challenged, to challenge each other. In fact, I think the US needs a lot more good conflict, not less. There's

no better shortcut to transformation that I know of. And that's not what we've got, right? So we've built a bunch of institutions to cultivate high conflict, as opposed to good conflict, which means we could design them differently, right, to cultivate good conflict as opposed to good conflict, which means we could design them differently, right, to cultivate good conflict. But there's a place called the Difficult Conversations Lab at Columbia University where Peter Coleman studies and his colleague study conflict. And so they've hosted more than 500 strained and awkward arguments between people who disagree on profound important things like gun control, abortion, the Middle East.

And what they found is you can roughly sort those conversations into two buckets, which is there's one group that get really stuck in the same one or two negative emotions. And then there's another group where there's movement. So yes, they experience frustration and anger, but then there's like a flash of curiosity or even humor, God forbid. And then back to frustration and anger. So, when you see it in the data, it's like a galaxy of emotions as opposed to just one. And that, I think, is how it feels to be in good conflict, right? There's a sense of movement. Yeah.

Yeah, that something is possible here, and you can't predict exactly what it is. And in those conversations, people asked each other more questions, and they came out of the lab more satisfied than they come in. So I think I hold those graphs in my head as far as, you know, what we've got and what we could have and what I hope we have. I want to read two things, just put them side by side from high conflict.

You said we need turbulent city council meetings, strange date night dinners, protests and strikes, clashes in boardrooms and guidance council or offices. People who try to live without any conflict who never argue or mourn tend to implode sooner or later as any psychologist will tell you. Living without conflict is like living without love, cold and eventually unbearable. And when you introduce the notion of high conflict, you describe it as the mysterious force

that incites people to lose their minds in ideological disputes, political feuds, or gang vendettas. The force that causes us to lie awake at night obsessed by a conflict with a coworker or a sibling or a politician we've never met. Right. So that's the diabolical thing about high conflict, right? Every single one I've followed all over the world, you end up harming the things you care

most about. The thing you went into the conflict, usually to protect, without realizing it, right? So there's something diabolical about that system of high conflict where usually everyone suffers, but to very different degrees, which is maybe worth noting here that the phrase high conflict, which I liked better than intractable conflict. Yeah, which is Peter Coleman's phrase is intractable conflict.

Yeah. I just feel like intractable feels like impossible, even though I think that's not technically true. Yeah. High as in kind of alluring drama, I swear with. Right, and it could go, it could change, right? What goes up might come down. So the phrase high conflict comes from high conflict

divorces, which in the 80s, lawyers started noticing that about a quarter of American divorces were stuck in perpetual cycles of hostility and blame. And you know who suffered the most, which is kids. And that's true today in the United States, right? And that's true in every high conflict I've seen, whether it's gang violence or guerrilla warfare. That the children suffer. Yeah.

So there's a lot of similarity across really different conflicts, really different high conflicts, because humans are humans. And there's collective behavior that's important and there's different access to resources and weaponry and that's important. But the behavior is really similar which for me was exciting because then it means you can learn. You can learn from high conflict divorces and you can learn from high conflict politics and it's sometimes helpful to get out of the myopic focus on on one kind of conflict and look at its sideways from another context.

You know, something that this also sparks in me that I've thought about in these years is also how we have such a body of experience and intelligence in our personal lives, about navigating conflict, about how there's going to be lots of times when love is not a feeling, but just things you do, despite how you feel that day, that with the people we're intimate with, we don't say everything, we don't blurt out everything we're thinking all the time, because we know we're in relationship and there are times when what you do is you don't

talk about certain things because you know it won't be heard. So you know one of the things you talk about one thing high conflict does is it collapses complexity and thinking about how um you know how annoying it is when when you're getting relationship counseling and they say, you said you always. Yes. And you're like, well, but it's true. It's true, right? But then, but and collapse complexity is actually collapsing the fullness of reality.

So what do we know about our brains on simplicity and our brains on complexity? Right, so one of the things that Peter Coleman and his colleagues tried, once they realized there were these two kinds of good conflicts and high conflicts in the lab, they decided, what could we induce one or the other, right? So they experimented with different things. And one thing that they did was to show people a news story before they went into the lab

about some other hot button controversy, right? And they gave half the group a traditional news story with basically two sides, right? What you might see about most controversial issues, you know, where you have sort of activists or advocates are going back and forward like a tennis match. And then they gave the other half a story at the same length about the same controversy with more complexity,

tethered to reality. So it might say, in fact, it's hard to sort Americans into two camps when it comes to abortion rights. In fact, most Americans have very complicated feelings about abortion. And there might be four or six or eight different categories if you really try to reduce it. And if you ask the question differently, people will answer polling on this subject very differently. So those people went in and had good conflict conversations. And the ones who read the traditional stories went in and were much more likely to have the less good or high conflict conversations. So it's an example of how we can be primed for curiosity and complexity, which is awesome,

right? And I think has obvious implications for journalism, particularly in a time like this, because I feel like my whole job now is to get people to be curious about things that they're not curious to help, but maybe should be. And so I think all of our normal cognitive biases get much more extreme in high conflict, and the research supports that. So you literally lose your peripheral vision and figuratively, and you miss big opportunities that, I mean, everyone I followed for high conflict who was stuck in really, really difficult

conflict and then shifted to good conflict. Every single one of them made huge mistakes that they regret. Because the narrative was so powerful. So, you know, just as a quick example, Curtis Toler, who was a pretty high ranking gang leader in Chicago for many years, was really trapped in a series of vendettas with a rival organization based on a story that he had had in his head since

he was a kid about a homicide that was tragic and heartbreaking for him and many other Chicagoans. Eventually he runs into the guy who had done that shooting and is at a point in his life where he can hear him and he had that feeling, I don't know if anyone's ever had this feeling, where you're listening, and suddenly something comes undone in your head and in your heart. And you realize that you've been really wrong about something you'd assumed, about your enemy or the opponent. And it's a very destabilizing moment, a very disorienting moment. But it was really important to him to staying out of high conflict, to be able to realize the mistakes that he had made, all for understandable human reasons. But

you know, it just doesn't serve us well in the world we live in, to stay too long in that world in which we are morally superior than other groups. That's hard right now, I think, because in our fractured country, I think people feel very justified, and they like that it's very just very true, that they are morally superior. That's our high conflict, right? Right, no, it's just to circle back to Curtis. One of the things he told me is, I think whenever there's a better than and a less than, there's always room for war.

So Curtis now works for Chicago Cred, which interrupts getting violence in Chicago and is doing really difficult work, trying to treat people who are at most at risk of shooting or being shot as complicated humans, right? And interrupt this cycle. So they make fewer mistakes just the way he wished he could have done sooner for himself. Yeah. Something I've heard you talk about too is that we all have many identities, right? What is that line of I contain multitudes? And that's just true of all of us.

And you said something that can happen in the high conflict, I guess people are really locked into and defined by, and they're defining the other person by, and identity. And you've talked about how it can happen that another identity that somebody has, you describe this moment, kind of breaks loose and enters the room. Right, that's a well put.

I mean, I think with Curtis, it was his identity as a father. It's often that, but not always. But that is a very effective way to try to help people out of high conflict, is to light up their identities outside of the conflict, especially their identity as a parent or a child. So, you know, if you think about it all the time, our identities are shuffling and reshuffling. So one of the problems right now is that we are locked into this binary winner-take-all political system, right, where people don't have anywhere to go. So the more partisan leaders and influencers and pundits you can get to question, to sort of step out of the conflict, step out of the zombie dance of high conflict,

then the more space you create for other people to still hold on to their identity as a Republican or Democrat. And deeply refuse political violence as an option, right? So you have to create that space. And just very quickly, one of the things that, I love this because I think it's so hopeful, Colombia has been through a lot of violence

for half a century. And they've also tried a lot of things to invite people out of conflict, out literally out of the jungle, out of the guerrilla groups, to disarm and reintegrate. Lots of complexity there. Yeah, but putting all that aside.

One of the things that has worked best, according to pretty new research by Juan Pablo Aparedizio, is they did these very simple public service ads during Colombian national soccer games, national team soccer games. They did these very simple public service ads during Columbia National Soccer Games, National Team Soccer Games. And because they knew from listening to former guerrilla members, that all of them listened to these games

on the radio in the jungle, whenever they could. And they, in those ads, would just say very simply, next time come home, we're saving you a seat, watch the next game with us. And it was like the mothers and fathers of guerrilla members. And what they saw is the very next day, twice as many demobilizations, voluntary departures on the conflict, which over nine years of running these ads,

added up to more people leaving the Civil War voluntarily, then left when the peace treaty was signed. So that's incredibly powerful. And there had to be other things happening, right? Like it wasn't just the ad, but they lit up this other identity on purpose in a way that really resonated. Support for On Being with Christa Tippett comes from the Fetzer Institute. Fetzer supports a movement of organizations that are applying spiritual solutions to

society's toughest problems. Learn more at Fetzer.org. You have said that there should be in journalism a fear and loneliness beat. Yeah. Talk about that. That would be interesting. What if somebody gave you that job? Yeah, well, I mean, that's kind of what you're, what that's a little bit of an illustration of how that could be very sophisticated.

Right. Right. It's not about feeling sorry for people. It's about acknowledging the reality. Right. Because there's a few things that pretty reliably trigger high conflict, and one of them that I think is most underappreciated is humiliation. So until we start talking about that and reporting it and understanding it, we're really not

telling the whole story. So, to me, that's where I think journalism needs to go, right? Is there needs to be more psychologically informed reporting that we're not afraid to do? And I think still it makes people nervous, it makes editors nervous. Yeah, and that just saying, just making sure you attend to both sides or pay lip service to both sides, you've said it's just another form of simplicity. That's actually not complexity. Right. I mean, it's a trap in a way.

And you can spend a lot of time arguing about it. Like right now, there's a lot of people arguing about which side is worse when it comes to rhetoric. Yeah. And I'm happy to weigh in on that. And that's how this always goes. In every high conflict, it's asymmetrical, all over the world. And everybody rightfully focuses, understandably focuses on the same questions. Who is worse? Who is more to blame? And that is not how you step out of the stance.

I mean, the other thing about the fear, what was it fear and belonging? not how you step out of the stance. I mean, the other thing about the fear, what was it fear and belonging? It's just to acknowledge that as a dynamic is to cover in journalistically the full humanity of whoever's being covered and also the consumers of the journalism. I mean we have this fascinating and terrifying phenomenon right now that that this high conflict and polarization is happening everywhere globally, right? And I I

personally think that fear, and there's a lot of good, people are being reasonable in their fearful now, right? But there are a lot of things reasonably to be fearful about. Yes. That like another way to describe what's happening in the world is the amygdala on the loose.

Yeah, you know, John Powell, who runs the Othering and Blonging Institute, he explains it really well, I think. He said, you know, the pace of change, social, economic, technological, which way predates the 2016 election to your point, right? As well as I would add, the pace of news, like the influx of information, has so outstripped our capacity to process it, that it creates this profound anxiety and a sense of unease, right?

And one thing we know about humans is that we're good at noticing when we're unhappy and we're afraid, especially, and we're really bad at assigning a reason why. So into that void, we'll step a long list of conflict entrepreneurs and politicians and pundits who are happy to give you a simple story about why you feel the way you do that blames somebody else. So I think, for me, it's been helpful to think about that bigger picture of where did that malaise come from.

And sometimes it's being tweaked and embellished and incited on purpose now, right? I've been really struck, just, you know, I came here from DC and I was in the hotel room last night watching friends, I think, which appears to be on the 24 hours on network TV. But anyway, the commercials were so fear-based because you all are in the middle of a election and I was like, based because you all are in the middle of a election and I was like, wow, right. And then here's also the terrible result of that which you also are right about in such a compelling way. Fear doesn't, when people feel vulnerable or humiliated or all the things one feels, it doesn't,

nobody says very rarely. I feel scared. I'm afraid. No, we get mad because that feels like a strong thing and that gets rewarded. And I really, you often, you know, you're doing such complicated research. And then you also do, you're always applying this.

And I think this is a lesson for all of us, like, again, to what's happening close to home. Like you notice, as I was already telling a story about your son, like you notice, you understand in a way that I don't think I did with my children at home, that when they're afraid, it shows up looking like anchor, being mad. At least with my son, it does. I don't know if that's true for everyone. No, it makes so much sense. But it's interesting that this is something that we all do routinely and are so lacking in self-awareness about it. And now, I mean, it's such a crisis for our life together.

Yeah, and I do this too, to be honest. Like, maybe that's where he learned it. But when I'm frightened, I just, without thinking, I get angry, you know. I'm trying to undo that programming, but because it's super unhelpful. Like, it's an interesting thing, right? How are all of our visceral assumptions about what will work when we feel threatened, when we want to persuade, all of those are wrong.

And this is the lesson that I relearn every day. In high conflict, any intuitive thing you do to get out of the conflict will almost certainly make things worse. So now I try, I don't always succeed, to take my first intuition and just ask myself, just ask, could I do the opposite? What would that look like? Because that's how you step out of that dance. But it's very unintuitive. How much of a time does that work? It takes a lot of practice. It takes a lot of practice in low-stakes settings. That's worth practicing. Totally. So for me, you know, I talk in the book about looping as a listening technique, and there's other ones out there.

Yeah. But talk about looping. Okay, so looping is something I learned from Gary Friedman, who's a conflict expert, who's in the book, who also gets sucked into high conflict as soon as he runs for office in California. But then extracts himself out of it to his credit. Anyway, he teaches this to mediators. And I've now taught it to a lot of journalists because it's totally transformed how I interview people

and how I talk to friends and family. But it's basically, you're listening for the most, the thing that seems most important to the other person who's talking, what's most important to them? Not to me, which was hard. I'm embarrassed to admit, took me a while to make that, and then I try to play it back to them, not robotically repeating the words, but distilling it into the most elegant language I can muster.

And then also easy to forget, then I check to see, is that right? Because when you do this, I literally ask them. Is that right? Because they can tell even if you're wrong, which is like way more than I'd like to admit, they can tell you're really trying. So it's in sort of injecting a little humility. Because there's that old saying, the only mistake in

communication is thinking it happened. We think we understand each other and we think we're saying the thing. And actually, it's think we understand each other and we think we're saying the thing and actually it's much more iterative than that. Like it's very hard to, you know, to get to the real thing on the first go round without some back and forth. This is also about how there's so much going on in a conversation that's happening that's not in the words. Yes. Right. And also that you can ask a curious sounding question. I mean, this happens in journalism all the time.

But the other person at an animal level knows whether you're actually curious or not. And they're going to respond to their animal level. Yeah. Experience of you. Yeah. There was some really good research on this where they tried to see if people could tell if other people were listening based on the obvious cues. So I used to think it was listening if I was nodding and smiling at the right moments and came prepared with my questions and furrowed my brow and all those things. It turns out that's not listening. People can tell when you're really listening and it's usually not always based on what you say next. No.

Like, are you actually hearing what I'm saying? I mean, you've been interviewed by reporters. Like, you know, this feeling of, yeah. You say something that feels really revealing. And to you, important, and you actually want to say more about it. And they immediately go to something else, you know, and you're just like, oh, yeah, it's about them.

Yeah. Kind of following on this wonderful place we got, which is things we can do, things we can practice. I kept a couple of pages of notes, of places in your writing. Were you sure? The power of a better question. A question is such a powerful thing, right? And so, if a question, the way I think about it is that answers rise or fall to the questions

they meet, right? So, if a question is combative, it's just very hard not to be combative back. And if it's simplistic, it's really, like as you say, even if you really have something you want to say, let me ask you simplistic questions, it's really hard to transcend that and say something complex. And you've talked about specific questions that have been found to be useful in different settings. And these were suggestions for reporters.

What is oversimplified about this issue? How has this conflict affected your life? What do you think the other side wants? What's the question nobody is asking? What do you and your supporters need to learn about the other side in order to understand them better? Here's another one working with a newsroom. What do you want the other community to know about you?

What do you want to know about the other community? A couple that in my life, like one that was really important to me early on was with an evangelical philosopher, Richard Mao, who said he was talking actually about the issue of gay marriage, which is interesting to remember. And he said, I just wish we could stop the suspicion and we could just start the conversations about saying, what are the hopes and fears you bring to this? And Frances Kisling, who I actually talked to in this space

and we had a conversation about abortion and vowed with two people on the two sides and vowed not to use the words pro-life or pro-choice, which you can actually do. And she talked about this question, she's used asking, and this is something you have to get to, because it's a vulnerable question. But if people can get to a place to say, what in my own position or group, causes me discomfort. And what do I admire in the position of the other?

I'm so glad you shared these because I was dying to ask you what questions you like to ask to get to this because I'm constantly adding to that list. So this is great. One of the questions that we got from Jay Rosen was along those lines. He said kind of journalistic sage.

Yeah, yeah. Thinker. And his question was, where do you feel torn? Along those lines. And then the other one I'm really into right now, which comes from actually family therapy, which is, if you woke up tomorrow and this problem was solved, the way you wanted to be solved, how would you know?

Like walk me through that day because people very rarely get to talk about or even think about what a better future would be like. And it's just a way to get out of our old grooves on this, on whatever the subject is, and try to be filled with wonder and curiosity again, you know. And you've talked about how youth experience people who get to that other side and how life giving that is. Yeah, I think this is the thing that's hardest to talk about, because people don't believe you typically, but

when you actually are in the presence of good conflict with people you really profoundly disagree with, when there are enough guardrails and connective tissue, there's something euphoric about it. You want more of it. So I actually ended the book with a woman named Martha Ackelsberg, who lives in New York City and went on this very unusual, like three-day homestay exchange to visit

conservatives in Michigan. And she said to me, you know, I wanna be the way I showed up there all the time in my life. Open, curious, able to be surprised. And this is someone who's very partisan. And she was visiting someone who was very partisan on the other side.

So it was not an easy experience. And I think somehow it's easy to sort of gloss over that. It was upsetting at times, frightening at times, angering at times, and also exquisite. And something that very few of us get to do anymore. That, it's just a manifestation of what you said the the quality is a good conflict that it is movement, right? It's growth right and you feel it in yourself At this point in the conversation, political scientist Larry Jacobs came up to curate a few questions from the audience at the Humphrey School in Minneapolis.

First question. Is the current moment new or repeat of the past with social media serving as a megafaunt this time? Well, I think there's a lot of similarities in the current moment to other high conflicts all over the world and throughout history. I do think that what's new is we've really reached the upper limits of the ability to solve these problems with us versus them adversarial thinking. You know, we just can't solve big problems that way anymore because we're too

interdependent and do aware of each other and to globalize. So we can't keep using the same old us versus them model to try to solve problems. And that's particularly obvious in politics, right? And one of the reasons the US is so much more polarized than other countries is that we have a binary winner-take-all system with just two choices. So if you win, I lose. And most democracies have proportional representation where it's not winner-take-all.

And there's, you know, ranked choice voting, which more states are experiencing, experimenting with is an example of something that would be better, right? winner take all and there's you know ranked choice voting which more states are experiencing Experimenting with is an example of something that would be better right where you get to choose your top four candidates or five candidates as opposed to one so I think we've a lot of this is the same and Yes, social media matters although maybe a little less than we've assumed I Think human behavior matters a lot.

And if you look at just the way the world has changed and the flow of information has changed, trying to solve this high conflict with more high conflict is going to make things worse. Next question. How do Jewish trans people, black indigenous and people of color work to reconcile with those who do not see them as human and see them as some part of an evil conspiracy to indoctrinate kids or take over the world? Yeah, I mean, I think there are some situations and some people that you're not going to reach,

right? And there's often in high conflict that group feels much bigger than it is until things get worse, right? So there's a very difficult line there of who is still willing to engage in good faith? Who is open to questioning their assumptions? Can I question my assumptions about them? I think power matters and not everything everything is complicated and people are complicated. So, you know, it's funny because when I'm not sure of this myself and I struggle with it internally, I often find it really clarifying to reach out to people who have been in much worse conflict. Because the things, for example, Curtis Toller asks young men to do in Chicago right now

are much, much harder than anything we have asked of members of Congress. And yet they have far more trauma and far fewer resources. So it can feel, and it's a little bit of a trick of the mind, it can feel like millions of people are beyond talking to. But in fact, if you talk to someone like Curtis or people who work in civil war and other countries or even genocide, you cannot give up on anyone. It may not be that you personally have to engage, right?

That's okay, but someone sure does. And it's a little bit of a bummer because I feel like I'd like to give up on some people and I'm sure people would like to give up on me and that's not the way this is gonna go down. We are stuck with each other in this country. One of the things that I was talking to someone who worked on peace in South Africa,

one of the things that has to happen is we have to convince each group that the other group is not leaving. They're not gonna be annihilated, they're not gonna die out.ilated. They're not going to die out. We are stuck with each other, and we've got kids together, just like in a high conflict divorce. So it's really hard to come up with an example

of someone you would give up on completely. John Lewis said that. OK, I feel better at giving up. I feel better at knowing that. He, I feel better than that. I feel better, you know, I'm not. He agreed. But you're right, it's not necessarily that everybody needs to be with them. You know, one thing John Powell says also is, we're in relationship, right? Like, you can look at those fractured maps, red stays, blue stays, he said, you can be in a good relationship,

it can be a bad relationship, you're right. We're in like a high conflict divorce situation, but we're in relationship. Yeah, and we've got kids together. And we can get divorced, but you're still going to have to deal with the custody arrangement. I mean, that's just the way it is. William Yurrie, who works on peace negotiations all over the world, he says, there's no winning this marriage.

And I think that's a good way, a good thing to keep in mind. And I think one thing that people get paralyzed about understandably and start to feel hopeless, like there's nothing they can do, there's no group they could convene, there's no relationship, they could build close to home that would matter because they'll look at the worst case most violent, I really am great,

this language of conflict entrepreneur is helpful. I can't change that person's mind. But I think I've heard you say, you don't have to start with the worst case exemplar. Who you can get in the room or build a natural relationship with matters. Right, because your mind will naturally go to the extremists, the worst case, the deviant outliers,

and that's understandable because they are threatening. And I'm always trying to remind myself to widen the lens, to look at a fuller picture. So when Curtis came out to talk to some Senate chiefs of staff about how he helps interrupt violence in Chicago and how we might try to do that on Capitol Hill, and their reaction, understandably, was, you know, you're talking to the wrong chiefs.

Like, we're not the problem. And you hear this again and again. I hear this with members of Congress. I mean, it's amazing. And you hear it with gang members, you know, like, it's not us. It's those guys. And they're not wrong, often. And so, but the nice thing is to be able to turn to Curtis and say, what do you think?

Since we don't have the right people in the room, is all hope lost? And then he says, well, Amanda, we never have the right people in the room at first. That's, you just, that's not how these things start, you know. You start with who will come into the room and then he slowly expand the circle. And you're not going to get every single person. Another question, this one is from online. I don't we have civil conversations when we cannot agree what the facts are and what is real.

Yeah, this is where my head often gets stuck, right? You go round and round, well, what if this happened and then this happened? Well, but we can't do anything because, or let me phrase this another way, I am afraid because we cannot agree on basic facts to go back to your point. Let's say the thing, right? So if we can't even do that, isn't all hope lost. Often, I will try to ask that question, how do you decide whom to trust when I'm interviewing someone who breaks out some like, you know, information that I know to be false? I was

like, how do you, because I've heard this other thing, so how do you know? And that gets actually into some interesting spaces. So that's the question you'll ask when somebody's giving you a fact that you doubt. Right, rather than I used to get into a, you know, I'll be like, well, I'm truly suggestively. Let me just give you this controlled study that, you know, and that's just not the way people work. I wish it were, you know. And so, so first I try to acknowledge what they've said. Like, oh, wow.

So you feel like XYZ. Huh. So now they know I heard them, right? Because that's half of what people want is to be heard. Happens about 5% of the time, according to their research, so at least I could give them that. And then, it's funny because I heard the exact opposite. How do you decide who to trust today, you know? And that doesn't fix it. Like we still got a big problem. But why we're not talking about trust and how to build it every single hour of every single day in this country? I do not know. You know? I don't know how we get out of this without working on that.

Because again, is the question we'd be asking if it were in a real world relationship. Right, right. If it was a couple in the room, we'd be focusing on, right? And we focus on that all the time in our lives. Right. Right. It's not a new problem. Yeah. But it is a harder problem and a more and more.

Yes. Right. I mean, it is, but I once interviewed a trust researcher and he said to me, I don't know why I found this reassuring, but maybe you all will too. He said, you know, it's impossible to survive without trust. So everybody trusts something or someone. So then it's about, well, why? Why that thing and not the other thing? And, you know, how does that shift? Because there are countries that are dramatically, including Germany, dramatically increased trust in recent history in public institutions. So why aren't we studying how they did that?

You know, and there are, I mean, to be fair, there are people focused on this. Like the Trusting News Project is a great example. But I feel like more creative, talented, dedicated people need to be focused on this. I also think that I love hearing you talk about stories that do something different that work because the truth is, for all the reasons we've been talking about, the complexity of human

beings and our psychology and how what a powerful motivator fear is and our bodies are, it was designed to protect us, right? It's not the enemy, but we got to grow up. It's not the enemy, but we got to grow up. There's a reason that the terrible inflammatory story, the conflict entrepreneur, even the story about the most catastrophic terrible heartbreaking thing that happened today, it mobilizes us and it is a challenge for journalism to know how to make goodness as riveting as evil. Right, but you know it's possible. I mean, there's some wiring here that is hard to resist.

And there's a lot of wiring that we've managed to get better at. You know, yeah, I've got to. The other day I was talking to a Editor at a national news outlet that I won't name and that and he said you know the problem is we've just gotten too good Like we know people too well So we know how to push out headlines. They will click on yeah, you literally said we are too good at knowing what's in people's hearts and minds And I I wish I had said I didn't think of I always think of it like an hour later. I was like I was just flummocks at the time because I'm not on staff at a place and so I'm not like in this all the time. And I was

like wow what I should have said is well you know what really gets a lot of clicks is porn. So why does your prestigious news outlet just do that? If you know people so well, what's the difference? You know, I mean, so this idea that this is different and acceptable needs to shift. And I think more and more journalists are getting really just exhausted from this. Just like readers, you know.

Yeah, it's no, we all share this problem, this challenge. And just in terms of kind of bringing this down to this question that we all want to ask, like, what can I do? How can I make a difference? This person, Dan Christensen, would you just tell the story of Dan Christensen? Yeah. So the best thing that's ever happened to me on Twitter is I met bus driver Dan, who is a public bus driver in Portland, Oregon, who's also very fascinated by conflict and

communication and has read a lot of books on it and tried out a lot of things on his bus because, you know, who's taken a bus recently? Okay, so there's a good amount of conflict that happens on public buses. So he has this lab, and as he puts it, I just assume every day that I'm the only one who's unarmed and I'm strapped in. So he has to interrupt conflict, and he has a bunch of techniques that he uses, and we had him on the How-To podcast for how to deal with a fight in public, you know,

when you're not the one directly in conflict. And he does a bunch of things that I've learned from. And one of them is, as soon as someone comes on the bus, he welcomes them with like a genuine smile. Hi, how are you, Even when they don't respond? That's brilliant, right? That's creativity. That's hospitality.

Yeah. And that's a tool, a technology that humans use to elevate. Yeah. Help people walk into the room. Right, because he feels like something might go down. But somewhere in your subconscious, you might think of me as a friendly. You know what I mean?

I've greeted you as a person. I've seen you. And he said, when he was wearing masks during the pandemic, he could tell that people could tell if he was smiling or not, even under the mask. Because you know how your voice changes when you smile, you know? So he would always smile with or without a mask.

And then when conflict erupted, he has a methodology, which I love, which is basically two questions and a choice. So first, he pulls the bus over and opens all the doors, because it's important not to corner people who are in conflict, metaphorically or literally. And you just say, again, it is important not to corner people who are in conflict. Something to keep in mind.

They have to have a way out. And so then he gets on the intercom, which is helpful. I wish I had an intercom. And he says, what happened? Right? He doesn't say, I mean, there's a million things he could say, like, what are you doing? What is your problem?

And he says, what are you doing? What is your problem?" And he says, what happened? In a voice of genuinely wanting to know. So this takes practice. And then what usually happens is because people, when they're in that Amygdala hijacked mode, they don't really see a question coming. So it forces them to think for a second. And so they'll say, well, he closes the window and I,

and Dan will say, I can tell you're really mad. So he's looping them quickly. And then he says, what do you want to do next? So it's not him telling them. And then he gives them a choice, because usually that flammax is them, like, well, and then he says, that's my angry conflict voice. And then he says, I could call someone right now, which I'm going to have to do, or you could come up here and talk with me, and we get everyone safely to where they're going. So he's offering them a way out. Come with me. There's a lot more to it but he's just a very wise

experienced practitioner. It's such an important story. We have to bring this to close. We could obviously keep talking forever. I hope to say I was really intrigued that you quote, roomy, that poet is Muslim mystic at the beginning, at the very beginning in the very end of high conflict. Isn't that the great thing about writing a book? You just do whatever the half you want. Yeah, but it ends like when the soul lies down in the grass, the world is too full to talk about. So this is actually also spiritual work we're talking about, isn't it?

Absolutely. I think that's what's missing from a lot of these conversations is joy, wonder, hope, dignity, and faith. So thank you for bringing those things. Into my ears, especially during the pandemic, you really helped keep me sane, and I think many other people.

I vividly remember going on those endless walks. I just kept walking the same routes. And you know how people would cross the street when they saw you coming, which I get, but it's not a great feeling just intrinsically. And I remember listening to you talk about how you two had cut down on your news consumption. And I felt like, oh, it's OK.

Like you gave me permission to do that. And also to question, is there a better way to do the news? Maybe it's not just that I've gone soft. If Christa's doing it, so thank you for that. Well, if I was a source of nourishment to you and I'm very pleased because we need to, thank you for what you're doing and for this beautiful investigation you're on on behalf of the rest of us and for being here today. Thank you.

Amanda Ripley is the author of several books including High Conflict, Why We Get Trapped and How We Get Out. You can find her fantastic essay, Complicating the Narratives on the Solutions Journalism Blog of the Solutions Journalism Network. She is co-founder of the company GoodConflict and she hosts the Slate podcast How To. Special thanks this week to Larry Jacobs, Lee Chittenden, and the entire staff at the Humphrey School of Public Affairs at the University of Minnesota for hosting this event. The On Being Project is Chris Hegel, Laurenne Drama House-In, Eddie Gonzalez, Lilian Vowe, Lucas Johnson, Susette Burley, Zach Rose, Colleen Check, Julie Cyple, Gretchen

Honald, Podrigotuma, Goutham Shriekishan, April Addamson, Ashley Hurr, Amy Chattelene, Romine Meme, Cameron Musaar, Kayla Edwards, Juliana Lewis, Antifini Champion. On-Being is an independent, nonprofit production of the On-Being project. We are located on Dakota Land. Our lovely theme music is provided and composed by Zoe Keating. Our closing music was composed by Galtham Shrekeshyn. And the last voice you hear singing at the end of our show is Cameron Kinghorn. Our funding partners include the Harthland Foundation, helping to build a more just, equitable and connected America

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