High Conflict

Joe:
Amanda, welcome to the podcast. How are you today?

Amanda:
I’m great, Joe. Thanks for having me. Good to be here.

Joe:
It is so great to have you on the show today. Congratulations on all the books, your latest High Conflict. We’re going to dive into a lot of it today. And then before I forget though, at the end of this I need to touch on a few things from the Smartest Kids in the World specifically because I’m a parent and just I’m always looking at ways to be a better parent and to help my children grow in every way possible. So there’s a couple of nuggets in there that I want to get through. There’s a lot, but I know we don’t have a ton of time. So the definition of conflict and the way I think about conflict in my everyday life is like this binary thing where I’m either in a conflict situation or I’m not. But the way you describe it is much different in that there are certain levels of conflict hence the book High Conflict. Can you explain, can we level set first on the definitions of conflict and the different levels of them?

Amanda:
Absolutely. So the kind of conflict you’re in really matters it turns out. And conflict itself is not the problem, right? Conflict is like stress. So you have to put your body under stress to get stronger, right? Conflict is how we get better as a community, as a family, as a person. That’s how we defend ourselves. We push other people. We evolve, hopefully, right? It can be stressful, and heated, and unpleasant, and uncomfortable, but conflict is not the problem. And I would call healthy conflict, good conflict, right? If you’ve ever heard of the late Congressman John Lewis, he used to talk about good trouble, right? Which is necessary trouble to get into. And the same is true with good conflict. That’s the kind where we get better. We push ourselves, we push each other. Then there’s something I came to know of as high conflict.

Amanda:
There’s different words for this in academia. Some people call it intractable conflict, but the way I have come to understand it is it’s the kind of conflict that can start small, but it gradually takes on a life of its own. It’s an us versus them feud usually. And in high conflict, we behave differently than we do in good conflict. We tend to feel more and more certain of our own superiority and more and more baffled and ultimately disgusted by and contemptuous of our opponents, whoever that may be. And the behavior’s the same which is wild, whether it’s in politics, or in our office disputes, or warfare, or divorce court, that human behavior in high conflict is very similar and it becomes conflict for conflict’s sake if that makes sense. And in that state, we make more mistakes, we miss opportunities, we fight less effectively. There’s a lot of research on this. And eventually, this is probably the most heartbreaking part of it. Eventually, we start to mimic the behavior of our opponent without realizing it. So, and we start doing the thing to some degree that we went into the fight to stop.

Joe:
Yeah. That makes a lot of sense. And I see that it’s very prevalent now in the news, which is my next question to piggyback off that. Doesn’t conflict creates curiosity and then curiosity drives ratings. So how do we get out of a place where we can reduce high conflict if we tune in constantly to news headlines and to high conflict situations because that’s what intrigues us?

Amanda:
Right? I mean, it is true. I’ve been a journalist for 20 years and from the beginning, it was always you were always taught, you need characters, you need conflict. There’s certain ingredients you need for a story to move to work, right? To compel people to pay attention. And conflict is part of that, for sure. I think in this state of hyperpolarization that we’re in as a country, the definition of conflict including for journalists gets really, really narrow. So there’s a lot of ways to have conflict, right? You can have a complication, you can have internal conflict, you can have a surprise, something that’s counterintuitive that conflicts with what we expect, right? Those are great stories. And in high conflict, this trap that we’re currently in, you start to have the same us versus them conflict over and over and over to the point where it’s no longer interesting.

Amanda:
I don’t know if you feel this way, but I can scroll through the headlines on my phone as I do. And I know what the story is going to say. I don’t actually have to read it about 85 to 90% of the time. That’s not getting my attention, right? And so it’s because it gets into this trap of viewing everything through an adversarial lens. So yes, it’s compelling, but it’s like one note, the same note, usually fear or outrage over and over and over. So I actually think to your really hard question of how do we get out of this from a news media point of view? I actually think conflict, this narrow form of conflict has become cliche. It’s just boring. So there’s a huge unmet demand for a more complicated, interesting version of conflict that’s true, right? And actually more true. I would argue because it’s less oversimplified.

Joe:
So when we are in a high conflict situation, we’re triggered by something that can cause us to react, which then can cause a downstream of conflict of high conflict. What are some things that you’ve seen or signals to be self-aware of when it comes to just knowing that you’re going down a path that isn’t ideal?

Amanda:
Yeah. So in this book, I actually included an appendix that has a quiz so you can tell if you’re in high conflict which I’ve never done, but I found that it’s actually pretty easy to tell if you’re approaching high conflict. It sounds like it would be a blurry line but it’s usually not. So some of the telltale, you need to have five or six of these not just one, but some of the telltale signs you might be in high conflict include when you keep having the same conversation, that’s imaginary with the other person or side in your head and it’s just going round and round, right? When you lose sleep over the conflict when you actually feel good when the other person or side suffers, even if that loss doesn’t help you in any way that’s not a good time when you discuss the conflict with someone who agrees with you and you leave the conversation feeling worse.

Amanda:
So even though you agree, it doesn’t make you feel better to talk about it because you’re stuck. You’re just going round and round, right? There’s no sense of movement. That’s one of the key distinctions I should say between good conflict and high conflict and you can see it in the data which is cool. In good conflict there, you do experience anger, and frustration, and sadness, but then you have flashes of understanding, and humor, and curiosity, and then you’re back to anger and frustration. So you have this galaxy of emotions as opposed to the same one or two emotions over and over and over. So that feeling of being stuck is more than a feeling. It’s actually what is happening in the conflict? It’s not going anywhere because high conflict is the destination, right? Whereas good conflict, you’re not sure how it’s going to end.

Amanda:
So more questions get asked in good conflict, curiosity survives, right? So those are some of the distinctions that to be careful of. And I notice it now in myself. So I went into this because I just felt like, I didn’t know how to be useful as a journalist in the level of conflict were in particularly when half the country didn’t believe the places I was writing for were even trying to tell the truth. So it just felt like curiosity was dead and that was like my whole currency such as it is, right? Was curiosity and facts, right? So I was just casting about trying to understand conflict better and hanging out with people who study intractable conflict all over the world. People who work in it differently than journalists like peace negotiators, gang violence interrupters, divorce lawyers, all these people understand conflict intimately, right?

Amanda:
And understand it as a system particularly at this level. So it’s like there are different rules of engagement than there are for normal or healthy conflict. So in doing that, I started to become a little more conscious of the times when I would start to slip into high conflict thinking, right? So anytime I start thinking about a complicated issue as having just two sides like us and them, that’s a red flag, right? Because there’s usually, especially if you take a big political issue, right? You cannot cleanly divide 300 million Americans into two categories. That’s a basic physics problem.

Joe:
Yeah, [crosstalk 00:09:53].

Amanda:
So always reminding myself of, okay, there’s this group of people, this group of people, this third group of people, this fourth group of people, right? There is that complexity in the problem, but there’s a real temptation to reduce it to something else.

Joe:
And I know you talk about that a lot. Humiliation, winners and losers, different groups, Republicans and Democrats. And when there are countries that don’t have the kind of two-party lines there’s less conflict and people can generally agree on things more. One of the things that I found super fascinating because you mentioned the politician is your Gary Friedman story. And I know you talk about this all the time on all your podcasts, but it’s so fascinating because many times we know how to coach others or we can clearly observe things, and give people pointers, but when we’re involved in the conflict it’s really hard to see it because we’re inside the bottle.

Joe:
Can you expand on that story a bit? And by the way, there’s tons of amazing stories in Amanda’s book Curtis [Toller 00:10:59] is another great one. But Gary Friedman is one that I think is pretty, pretty, I don’t want to say the word funny, but it’s ironic in the sense that he’s this brilliant lawyer who in many cases like married couples go to, to use only him instead of having multiple attorneys. So I just found it fascinating in the sense that he was this guy who you think really would nail down and have self-awareness regarding conflict, but he didn’t. Can you unpack that story a bit?

Amanda:
Yeah. I love this story. I learned so much from Gary and I mean it’s to his credit that he was willing to go on the record and tell this story for the first time because Gary is someone who is literally one of the world’s leading experts on conflict. He’s written books about it. He’s taught negotiation at Harvard and Stanford. And like you mentioned, he’s helped thousands of people mediate really hard conflicts like labor disputes, ugly custody battles, all kinds of human misery, and he’s great. He’s like this rock, he’s able to be curious and to ask different questions and just really get deep into conflict with extraordinary grace, right? So then a few years ago, a few of his neighbors encouraged him to run for office in his little town in Northern California, which made so much sense because who better, right?

Amanda:
To go into politics than someone like this, like a conflict guru who helped invent the field of conflict mediation in the United States. So in this little town, the political scene had gotten a little toxic, pretty unpleasant adversarial, much like the national scene. So people thought this would be a great idea and Gary thought this too. He figured it was a good way to give back. He’d never run for office, but couldn’t he apply the same ideas from mediation to politics, right? That’s what he’d done in the legal system and it worked. He took an extremely dysfunctional adversarial system and operated very differently. So it took him as he puts it about an eighth of a second before he fell into high conflict with his neighbors in his little town, he’s not proud of it, but he lost two years of his peace of mind to this conflict.

Amanda:
He was not the person he wanted to be. The conflict was over water rates and things that seem really, really small to an outsider, but this is how conflict works. It can be about anything because it stops being about the thing once it’s high conflict and it starts being about conflict, winning, and losing. So one of the lessons from this is that anyone is susceptible to high conflict, all of us. And there are certain things that forces that tend to create high conflict that put us at risk for high conflict. And those forces were present for Gary, including humiliation, which you mentioned. So humiliation, Evelin Lindner who studies conflict and war, she calls humiliation the nuclear bomb of the emotions. And I think that’s about right. It’s one of the most underappreciated drivers of all kinds of really awful conflict from gang violence, to domestic violence, to international political standoffs, often humiliation is lurking in there for, but people don’t always call it that or even intend for it to be that.

Amanda:
In Gary’s case he came in as the savior, he was in his seventies, he was this incredibly accomplished conflict expert. He expected even subconsciously to experience success and gratitude, right? And instead, he got a lot of pushback and he did certain things, but also other people did certain things that made the situation pretty toxic. And so people would make fun of some of the things he tried to do. He got called the [Polianich 00:15:11] and told that he didn’t listen. Things that really cut to the core of his identity as a person, as somebody who did conflict well, and anytime that happens, right? We typically respond the same way. There’s a lot of really interesting research on this that we experience social pain the same way we experienced physical pain.

Amanda:
It lights up the same parts of our brain. And interestingly, we experienced it even when we are not the ones who are the victim of it, but someone in our group. So it’s the same thing. It’s collective pain. So anytime you experienced exclusion or ostracism, or worse, humiliation, we tend to react often with aggression. If we can’t immediately re-integration ourselves, we become aggressive. And that’s because it’s we’re hard-wired to need a group. So when we are suddenly ostracized or excluded, it’s very painful. It is the same as physical pain. It’s not different. In fact, in some ways, in some research, it’s worse because you can in your mind revive the feeling of humiliation really easily. Whereas with physical pain, if you ever tried to… Yeah, think of a time you were hurt five years ago, right? If you try to revive the feeling it’s kind of abstract, right? It’s not real vivid, but humiliation humans can revive really easily. Yeah.

Joe:
Absolutely. If Gary had one thing to do over again, what would he have done?

Amanda:
Well, that’s a good question. So humiliation is one of the drivers. He probably would have been more conscious of that, right? But that’s maybe third on the list. First on the list, another driver of high conflict in every case that I followed from politicians to activists, to regular voters, to gang members, one of the drivers of high conflict in addition to humiliation is the presence of conflict entrepreneurs. So these are people who exploit conflict for their own ends, sometimes for profit but more often for power, or purpose, or comradery, right? And our system rewards conflict entrepreneurs right now, like social media, news media, politics. So it’s not really their fault entirely, right?

Joe:
And these are people that are just trying to stir things up. You might watch them on the news and they have polarizing opinions, those kinds of folks is what you’re referring to?

Amanda:
Yeah. They’re playing the game. They’re playing the game the way it is currently set up. So yeah, there are people or platforms that really delight in every twist and turn the conflict takes. You know what I’m saying? There’s often when you talk to divorce lawyers, they’ll talk about in high conflict divorces, which about one in four divorces in the US would be considered high conflict. There’s often people on the sidelines who are fanning the flames who are fermenting conflict. Maybe it’s a sister or a lawyer often, right? But people who even if they don’t realize the harm it’s doing, they are really inflaming the conflict.

Amanda:
So the presence of conflict entrepreneurs is a common pattern. And one of the common patterns for people who shift out of high conflict into good conflict is that they distance themselves from the conflict entrepreneurs in their midst if they can, right? So in Gary’s case, he was relying on a seasoned political operative type person who again, was playing the game the way it is designed to be played, particularly at the national level. And applying those same strategies, talking about this little election as a war, and you’re going to kill the other side. It sounds absurd but-

Joe:
It is small. Yeah, this small town.

Amanda:
In this tiny town. Yeah. It was like a volunteer position, but he eventually figured this out and he still has a lot of respect and gratitude for this person who was trying to help him. But he started relying on his wife instead for political advice. His wife, who was beloved in the community and saw even his adversaries as three-dimensional humans, right? Which is a very valuable way to stay out of high conflict. So she became his go-to advisor. And that’s probably, I think what he would have done from the beginning in retrospect.

Joe:
Got it. And I know the story of Curtis who is a former gang member, Curtis Toller. What I liked about that in the book is you unpack and or you unpack if you are in this state of conflict and need to get out of it. And a gang member, gang leader is such a good example because that just seems really hard to get out of that situation. What are some tips that apply that you learned from Curtis that can apply to anyone really that’s in a tough situation like that?

Amanda:
Yeah. I mean, Curtis tells his story so powerfully, and actually one of the things I’m most excited about with the book, just as a side note with the audiobook, we were able to include some excerpts of the actual people talking for themselves instead of my voice. So Curtis is in there, he’s got a great voice and he tells his story really well. But yeah, Curtis joined his first gang at the age of nine on the South Side of Chicago. He got into high conflict for the same reason a lot of us do. Trying to belong, trying to make sense of the world, trying to get a sense of control where you have none. And he rose through the ranks of his particular organization becoming a leader at a very young age. And along the way, one of his childhood heroes, a basketball star in Chicago was murdered in high school.

Amanda:
And the person who did the shooting was a member of a rival gang, the Gangster Disciples. And in Curtis’s mind, this really sealed the high conflict, right? It became a vendetta with this rival organization that lasted for years. It was a very painful experience for all of Chicago to lose this young man in such a violent way. He was a basketball star and had a huge future ahead of him, but the way Curtis made sense of that, which was impossible to make sense of because it doesn’t make sense is to look at it through this us versus them lens, right?

Amanda:
Anyway, many things happened and eventually, he ends up meeting the person who killed his childhood hero and they now work together. But if you talk to Curtis now about what drove him, how he got out of high conflict, and how he helps other people out of high conflict today because he works with an organization called Chicago CRED, helping young men and women get out of high conflict more quickly than he did is he talks a lot about conflict entrepreneurs actually, because he was one. I mean he was a conflict entrepreneur and he talks really powerfully about what motivated him.

Amanda:
Because part of what we have to understand, right? Is what is motivating conflict entrepreneurs. And one of the things that motivated him, he now realizes was his own internal conflict. He had witnessed so much violence, especially against his mother from abusive partners, that he had never been able to deal with. With that internal conflict tends to spill out, right? It becomes an external conflict. And so it wasn’t until he was able and willing to access trauma counseling, that he could deal with some of, like recognize what was happening internally and therefore extract himself from some of the other conflicts that he didn’t want to be in anymore. And what he tells young men today is, “Look until you deal with that internal conflict, this external conflict is going to keep happening.” So the inner fight and the outer fight are really connected in ways that we don’t often talk about.

Joe:
Is some of that too just hope, meaning you can want to change but maybe you don’t see a clear path to change?

Amanda:
Totally. I mean, I often think about, I wonder how many people there are, who would like to get out of high conflict, whether it’s gang conflict or other things. And I think it’s millions of people. I mean, if you talk to people who are in gang conflict in Chicago today, it is miserable. They want out. And interestingly, I had a chance to talk with a group of bipartisan group of members of Congress a couple of weeks ago. And it’s they sound the same. They’re miserable. They want out, they hate it and they’re stuck, right? They’re stuck in high conflict. So yeah, often there’s a sense that you have no options or that there’s only two options and they’re both terrible. So that’s another red flag to look for whenever you feel in life like there’s only two options and they’re both terrible, you’re probably missing something, and that’s the way that high conflict narrows our vision, right? And it’s important to find ways to get that peripheral vision back.

Joe:
When you were speaking to Congress, did you make any inroads with that or was there a positive outcome at the end of it? Do you think there’s going to be change because of it, and what did you learn from that?

Amanda:
On the one hand, it feels impossible. It’s like someone calling you from a crack house and asking you how they could live a healthier lifestyle. You’re like, “Well, first you have to move out.” So they are trapped by a system that is much bigger than any of us, right? That is adversarial. That is us versus them. That is fueling high conflict. It’s a conflict industrial system, right? Millions and millions of dollars get made off the system politically, and in journalism, and other things. So on the one hand feels impossible and that’s how they feel, right?

Amanda:
On the other hand, there’s basic stuff that they could be doing that you would do in any middle school to prevent violent conflict. That doesn’t happen in Congress, right? So I’m really torn like on the one hand, oh my gosh, this feels insurmountable. On the other hand, it’s like maybe you guys could have lunch together once in seven years. Do you know what I’m saying? Basic things that we know help interrupt conflict. And again, they want to do this. I mean, so there’s this committee called the Select Committee on Modernization, which is bi-partisan and to their credit, these members of Congress are trying to change the way that place works. And it’s not easy to do.

Joe:
And speaking of having lunch together, I know you mentioned and you talk about ratios and especially now because we’re in Zoom land and Slack world, and everything is virtual, and we’re missing these opportunities as you say eloquently of even being able to have positive interactions with someone saying hi and smiling. And I completely feel that. my company has been virtual since the beginning of the pandemic. I don’t see us going back really ever to what it was, which is sad in a way it is sad. How do you balance that now? How do you create this in a virtual world where you can’t have those, “Hey, let’s go out to lunch.” If you’re talking now we’re hiring remote employees across the country and doing a lot of things like that.

Amanda:
Yeah. This is, I mean, I feel your pain. This is a recipe for disaster. We have got to see each other in person, and you can’t rush it and you got to do it safely, and you can’t force it, right? So it’s tricky. And it doesn’t have to be every day, right? But we know from decades and decades of research, that those fleeting encounters, or even better intense encounters that are outside of the conflict that are positive, are literally insurance for your sanity and productivity. If you want to succeed as an organization, as a family, as a country, as a neighborhood, you have to have those encounters and you have to have far more positive than negative so that when conflict arises, which it will, you can keep it productive. You can use it to get better, right? Which is what we all need.

Amanda:
So in the research, the psychologists Julie and John Gottman who study marital conflict have found that couples who are resilient in conflict have about a five to one ratio. They call this the magic ratio between positive and negative encounters, right? And so that’s a lot. And Peter Coleman’s research at Columbia University looking at political conflict between strangers. It was more like three to one. So somewhere between three and five, I think is what we should shoot for. And you can have some of that on Zoom, but I think it’s a very thin experience. So I think whether you’re doing it once a week, or once a month, there have to be ways for humans to come together in person. And there are certain conditions to make that more positive and useful than it might otherwise be, as opposed to randomly waiting for organic conversations by the coffee maker. But it’s super important.

Joe:
Yeah. I totally see that, I feel it. And it’s we do things like give each other tacos, but everything is virtual unless there’s virtual reality. And you could feel like you’re actually walking next to someone. Zoom came out with this immersive view now where you feel like you’re in this conference room. And I’m like, “Well, that was a year too late,” But still, it’s just like, okay, now it looks like we’re cartoons. So I mean, it’s a tough situation, but you’re right. And just when you do because things are opening back up a bit, but unfortunately you now the gates are open, right? Everyone is used to working a certain way and it’s going to be hard to get them back to what it was. I don’t see a clear path to that even then the next year or so.

Amanda:
Yeah, and maybe what it was isn’t the right goal, right? I mean, we know there’s certain conditions that lead to those encounters being more vivid and productive. So maybe if it’s a hybrid situation, you’re just more thoughtful about those encounters. So we know for example, that you want people to, first of all, there should be food, speaking of tacos. And I mean, the real kind, there should be food. That’s a basic, it’s nice if there’s music. There’s are certain things that are just ancient for humans, right? These are primal things. And then also it’s good to be working on a common problem together and maybe outside of the normal work problems, right? Whether you’re trying to build a house for habitat for humanity or something that’s outside, but you have a common identity in that experience.

Amanda:
We know I was just talking to Adam Grant, the organizational psychologist who was saying that it’s especially important for onboarding new employees. Don’t skip this in person and the intensity of those bonding experiences really matters, right? So that’s going to be different depending on the organization for some, a cornhole match could be super intense for others it might be going deep sea fishing or going bowling. I don’t know. But this stuff which I used to make fun of. I came up as a alternative journalist and I thought that birthday cakes in the office kitchen were just super contrived affairs. And now I’ll tell you what, I’m going. I actually really see the value and I see it not just in conflict or for any kind of crisis or productivity to happen.

Joe:
Have you done any research on mergers and acquisitions in terms of groups? And what I mean by that is so my company is were acquired and we wanted to just be independent and we wanted to have our own culture. And then the parent company was this other group and it was never a negative thing. It was just more of like, “Let’s just keep our identity.” But after reading your book, I now look back at that, the period right after the acquisition and wonder if it would have been better if we were just like, “Let’s just merge everyone together as one as one team,” Because what happens is that after an overtime, you view each other as not competitors in a way, but it is definitely different than just one big happy family, right?

Amanda:
Yes, totally. And it’s so tricky, right?

Joe:
I’m just wondering if you’ve done anything with that, yeah.

Amanda:
Well, it’s tricky because you don’t want to lose if you have a high-functioning team culture, you don’t want to lose that. I mean, that’s the whole reason they bought you, right? And at the same time, yes, anytime you divide humans into binary groups, especially if there’s just two and they’re not fluid, bad things will eventually happen or at least good things will not happen. So we used to work on this problem at time magazine. So we would every time there was a big disaster like a hurricane, we’d send people down and CNN owned by the same company would send people down from the same city, right? It’s very expensive to do this. And yet there TV and we’re print and we would always try to come up with ways to work together. So because they had the vehicles that could go into high water and we didn’t.

Amanda:
And we had anyway, it never worked. It never worked because there was no fluidity normally between these groups, right? So, yeah, I mean, I don’t think you have to give up any identity, but if you look at the research, there has to be movement. So if you trade places for a week or two weeks, or you’re not always in the same… So then you have a lot more respect and empathy for the other group because you’ve been there. And it doesn’t feel as that this is a hard problem. Yeah. It’s a hard one.

Joe:
I mean, if you think about any company getting acquired, that’s the first thing. And I see this amongst my peers too. It’s like we’re going to keep our independence and now I’m just rethinking it. I’m like, “You know what? Just pull off the bandaid, we’re all one let’s get together. Let’s solve these problems. Let’s create synergies and just have this joint task force to make sure that we’re not losing momentum.” [crosstalk 00:34:29]

Amanda:
Yeah. Because if we think about it I often find it’s helpful to think of the marriage analogy, especially with political conflict, but any kind of conflict. If you think about, if you’re going to marry someone and you’re going into it like, “Well, I’m just going to keep my independence just so you know.” I mean, understandable, right? You do want some boundaries. You don’t want to lose yourself. On the other hand, you’re trying to create something new, right? Something different than the two independent entities, so.

Joe:
Yeah. That’s a great analogy. If you are trying to give constructive criticism that could be viewed as a conflict to someone, what are tips that you’ve seen work in terms of being able to create conflict, but it’s really productive conflict. Is there something that’s obvious?

Amanda:
Yeah, yeah. Yeah. So it always comes back to really advanced listening, I wish it were not such a like woo, woo word. But when I say listening, I mean, something more than what most of us do. So it’s like, you have to start with asking different questions of the other person or side, and really listening to their answers. And then proving with your words, not with your gestures, but with your words that you heard them, and you’re trying to understand them, right? It’s like there’s research on motivational interviewing. That’s really powerful. And in the research by Gaia [Jacob 00:36:01] on listening. When people feel heard amazing things happen. they work harder, they will follow their doctor’s orders. They will, even as they disagree, right? So even if there is conflict and not everybody’s on the same page, as long as people also feel heard, it can be productive.

Amanda:
So it sounds counterintuitive because I think you’re asking me, “What if you have to bring something that could create conflict to someone, how do you keep it good?” And I’m saying, “Listen to them.” So it sounds a little bit like a order of operations like how do you… So but it’s like bringing up the subject and asking them what they think and really listening, right? And then saying what you think and then asking them what they heard. It’s this iterative process that isn’t as painful or slow as it sounds. But the tactic that I talk about in the book is called looping for understanding, which actually Gary Friedman trained me on and has trained thousands of people on, but it’s basically you listen for what seems most important to that person. So you’re trying to get at where’s their internal conflict?

Amanda:
What are they torn about? What are they worried about? And then you paraphrase it in the most elegant language you can muster, play it back to them. And then this is the part I used to always forget is you have to check to see if you got it right. With genuine curiosity, right? So you have to be like, is that right? And you get this real momentum going where they’re like, “Yeah, yeah, yeah. That’s exactly right.” And then they will listen to you, right? So it’s like a game of chicken, who’s going to listen first. So I would recommend listening first.

Joe:
Yeah. You had a great story about bus driver Dan as well to deescalate the situation where people are trying to vandalize the bus. And he’s just asking questions and saying, “Why are you doing this?” I think that’s-

Amanda:
Yeah. He has a formula for public conflict that suddenly erupts. Honest question, honest question, honest question, choice. And that’s his form. I love that. I think about it a lot.

Joe:
I know we have to wrap in the second here. I wanted to get to the Smartest Kids in the World, but I know that’s a little bit off-topic, so maybe I could have you on again. But my last question would be, now having published this book, if there was another chapter in it of things that you’ve learned, what would you add to it?

Amanda:
Yeah, that’s always the way, right? It’s like you spend four years scouring the planet for the best stories you can tell. And then you publish the book and the stories come to you, and so that’s happened a lot. I’ve got a lot of people who’ve reached out to me with just incredible stories of not just conflict they’re in, but ways that they have extracted themselves out of high conflict into good conflict. So I think probably, and I’m definitely going to add things as I always do for the paperback version. But I think one of the things that maybe I didn’t I could explain better and especially tell stories around is the way that good conflict is actually addictive. So this is surprising to people, but all over the world once people experience good conflict, they want more. It is this transcendent feeling of being able to speak your truth and be curious and surprised.

Amanda:
To show up as the person you want to be in the heat of conflict. And once you experience it, it’s like there’s a euphoria. It’s hard to explain. It sounds crazy, right? But I have now experienced it and seen it enough that I feel like it’s an important point to drive home because otherwise, it feels impossible. But I said this to the members of Congress. I’m like, “Look, if you can get just 5 minutes of good conflict, you’ll find people want 10 more.”

Joe:
Right? Yeah. Is some of that radical transparency like what Ray Dalio practices? Is that along the same lines or is it different?

Amanda:
That’s interesting. I hadn’t thought of that. I mean, I guess part of it is because it’s so refreshing, right? And there’s now you have to set up the conditions. You can’t walk into on the floor of the Senate and suddenly try to have good conflict because that’s not what it’s set up for, right? So you have to get everyone involved or most of them to agree to some ground rules and come up with them together. So you can’t just do it overnight. But once the conditions are in place where people can be themselves and even reveal internal dissonance that they feel which everyone does, then that opens up other people. So yeah, there is a sense of transparency. That’s a vulnerability, right? So you need to take it in baby steps. But once you can get a little bit of vulnerability, you’ll find the other side or person usually more open to being vulnerable in the right conditions. And then there’s something amazing about being surprised about a conflict that had just felt so heavy and hopeless, right? Even as you continue to disagree about a lot of important things.

Joe:
Yeah. No, it makes sense. Amanda, thank you so much for your time today. Again, highly recommend High Conflict, the Smartest Kids in the World, and the Unthinkable. How else can people get ahold of you, your website I’m assuming?

Amanda:
Yeah, You can email me. I’m at, my website is amandaripley.com and I’m on Twitter at @amandaripley, on Instagram, the whole racket and the lots of ways I’d love to hear from people with their own thoughts about what works to make conflict good.

Joe:
Are you already working on another book?

Amanda:
No, I’m working on some magazine projects which is just sort of my normal routine is I do a bunch of magazine projects and then eventually another book once I run into a wall that I can’t see it.

Joe:
Do you just move to various topics that are similar and linked together or are you going to further explore the conflict?

Amanda:
I actually used to think of myself as a generalist and I still do. It seemed like the things I wrote about had nothing in common, but now I’ve finally realized that I usually what I get obsessed with or really wicked problems that I can’t figure out personally or professionally. And then I find people who have been to the other side in some way, and I write about them. Whether it’s for the first book, when people who have survived disasters, things they want you to know. Or for the second book, kids who have lived in countries with much higher-performing education system. What’s that like compared to their high school back in Oklahoma or California. And then in this book with High Conflict, it was people who have been through the darkness of high conflict and gotten into good conflict. What do they know that they want the rest of us to know? So that’s kind of my jam. It’s like just trying to follow regular people who have been to the other side and back.

Joe:
Yeah, definitely from the Smartest Kids in the World just opened my eyes more to even not only just reading to my kids, but asking them questions about what I write and having them think through some problems. So I thought that was good. Again, a little bit off-topic for this conversation. Maybe we could explore it again.

Amanda:
Yeah, I’d love that.

Joe:
I know you got to go through. Yeah. Well, thank you again so much, Amanda. Have a great day and we’ll talk soon.

Amanda:
Thanks, Joe. Good to see you. Take care.

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