>> amanda it's a pleasure to get a chance to talk to you about what is a fascinating book exploring what i think you call

the invisible hand of our time but when i was reading it, it almost seemed more like the background music of our daily lives and that is the challenge of what you label high conflict basically as you define it distinct from natural conflict but the type of conflict that resolves into a true us versus them. i want to spend a little bit of time talking with you today about that in diving a little bit into the markers and the investigative work that you did to bring this book and this concept forward. but i thought i would start by asking you to talk a little bit

about what got you interested in this particular topic. in some ways what i found so fascinating about reading it was that it is in so many ways what we are living through in so many stories in our daily life right now but thought about and away the most of this never stopped to actually think of the process and how these daily news stories unfold. >> thank you garrett and thank you for everyone joining us today. i'm so glad to be back with you all talking about this. watergate feels like an appropriate back story and we can get backac to that but four years ago i felt like as a journalist i had to do something differently. i felt it so easy as a journalist to make our

political -- work. some intend to and most don't and it just felt like there was something i really didn't understand about what was going on in the country and that is a problem. i spend a lot of time with people who have studied conflict of all kinds, personal political professional individual and study a conflict as the system particularly the intractable conflict that? everything else in thein place. that as an overlay made everything makes sense. then the question became all right what can we learn from people who have been through conflict and gotten to a better place so i followed a politician in california former gang leader in chicago and environmental activist in england regular

frustrated democrats in new york city a regular frustrated republican init rural michigan d the whole goal was to see how did they get beyond conflict which is in unpleasant conflict because the problem is the conflict it turns out can feel that way but the problem is the kind of conflict and all those people did make that journey which is incredibly encouraging and they were patterns and what happened first, second and third so it's about how they did that and how more of us could do the same if we wanted to. >> can you talk a little bit in the context of defining the realm this is most naturally come to mind which is very intractable divorces and i wonder justr to help viewers and

listeners understand the framework you talk about how it appears in divorce cases you talk about high conflict that incites people to lose their minds. i was so struck in the start of the book as you begin to talk about this context of divorce. >> that is where the phrase high conflictnf comes from. there are people who work in the world of psychology, lawyers and they referred to a height conflict divorce of one in which there are pervasive negative exchanges in a hostile environment where conflict is the definition and the conflict doesn't go anywhere and there's tno movement. about a quarter of american divorcesin each year are derived

is high conflict so that's about 200,000 divorces. 2 turns out they are high conflict politics and companies hike conflict people. i think it's a useful way to understand a special category of conflict in which there is not progress. we are just kind of stuck there's a distinct difference between good conflict in high conflict and for me it help to get out of the mindset of the narrowing confines of the idea that we have to have bipartisan unity or be at each other's throats. those are not the only two choices. just like in a marriage you don't have to get along allll te time and you also don't have to verbally emotionally or

physically abuse each other. there's a lot of space in between that. >> one of the things that you and there's a quote that i loved and helped to clarify for me a lot of what you are talking about the president of germany is saying there's a permanent it didn't --l indignation and a kid of social raids and that really does seem like part of the challenge that we are wrestling with in our politics where the names change but the outrage doesn't. and i'm curious as he traces back and if you look at the roots of it when did america lose its mind?

when did american politics maneuver from a natural penchant over policies and philosophies into something that is much more akin to day to a very bitter sports rivalry? >> the interesting thing is most of the research dates back to roughly around the 80s in the aftermath of watergate and vietnam and other things that brought down the trust level of a lot of our institutions and also i would say boosted the adversary of traditions of the media. many reporters still think they are breaking watergate everyday are trying to and there's this adversarial us versus them mindset that can build from things like that and you find there were media outlets like "fox news" who don't target the

whole country but air grievances and anger, not all the time but much of the time it's the audience coming back and back and it grows and grows. we design a lot of our institutions to incentivize high conflict. the important thing about that is we can redesign them. they are not from god so we can design them to his incentivize. we have all worked at places or been in a church or a synagogue or neighborhood where there were cultures that dealt with conflict differently. people avoid it and that's doesn't work great usually but all of that is very common.

it's combustible and out of control and it's not what the organization is supposed to be about. we need policies in place to make conflict healthier. just as we are hardwired for conflict we are hardwired for good conflict and most of human history is about sut good confl. >> one of the things you really talk about is the key to reducing high conflict is breaking out of the binary, the idea that you can't reduce a situation whether it's political or personal or professional to the idea that there are only two sides and one possible solution. when you say our institutions don't come from god you actually do talk about one state that you

saw and learned about in the context of naturally setting up political parties and clinical binaries and i wonder if you could just talk about what you saw is a new book to teach us about how to as the public do better. >> i didn't know anything before i start working on this. it casts aok wide net in seeing are there institutions that have deal with conflict better and enshrined in what they do. the concept of it is there is no us or them. the idea is that we are very interdependent so in some ways

it's particularly appropriate for this moment in history and as we are seeing with the pandemic. the idea is that jesus christ and the prophet mohammed leaving that allel major religions come from one spiritual source starting the mid-1800's and there are 150,000 here in the united states the largest community in india. significant. small but a global space and there are no ministers and no clerical leaders so what they do is end this is essentially one form of halifax each spring everyone in each of the 17,000 locations gathered together to elect leaders. we have a democracy operating in 233 country so here's the twist. everything aboutou

these elections are designed to reduce high conflict. the thing about high conflict is once you're int. it it's very tricky to get out. lots of psychological and social logic pro reasons for that but it's like don't let it start. no binary categories and people aren't allowed too give their position even if they want to. they can only discuss which qualities are needed and basicallyy the process. after prayer each person writes down the names of nine people who they think have good character. they are secret ballots and the nine winners are announced and it's considered an duty not a victory.

once they have the people in place and they make decisions for the community to deal with the conflict that arises in budgets and not that sort of thing they have other traditions in place to keep high conflict less likely one of which are consultations and they do things like propose an idea. once i propose it's it's no longer my idea. it's a little thing that seems smallly but it plays into how it works to help reduce the odds of that binary us versus them dynamic. so it's interesting. >> you also mentioned in your answer there the pandemic and that was a subject that i wanted to spend some time talking with you about. you are a writer for the

atlantic and i wrote a piece at the start of pandemic for the atlantic last year where i continued to chew over in my mind about whether i got it terribly wrong and i was thinking a l lot about it in the context of you are writing on high conflict and in the first year of this pandemic way back in the beginning what i saw in this unique period in america this national moment of unity and desire to work together with americans that i saw as a unique moment in american history. a lot of my own history writing is based on 9/11 and taking

about the unity that the country had after 9/11 and never forget, united we stand and i feel like we are in this same moment in the beginning and middle of march last year where you saw individual americans making these choices about the pandemic closing their businesses and the government told them to have school closings and at that moment it was celebrated, the spirit of 2020 that america is coming together admits the pandemic and every week since then it has felt less like a united nation in the face of a pandemic. i keep coming back to the frame of high conflict, this question

of how it seemed like americans got a response to the pandemic right and then politics messed it up and how do you think about in your own high conflict lane the america that you have lived through in his last year? >> i think there was an opportunity for that. we know all over the world not just america there was a real coming together and disasters and terrorist attacks there is a golden hour after a terrible catastrophe or during when there's a very strong human toll to come together toul help one another. you can really feel it and it's amazing and amazing experience.

i think one of our great powers in society but it has to be harnessed. we saw in late march of 2020 that 90% of americans believed were all in it together from 63% in the fall of 2018. the u.s. senate passed that massive federal stimulus bill by a vote of 96-0. it was quantitatively absolutely -- people are wired to us and them and we are wired to expand their definition of us. and big shock like a pandemic makes us encompass the whole world overnight. there's a huge opportunity in conflict to use those shocks. peter polmann writes about this a lot.

because high conflict in the system with interlocking diabolical parts whichlo are sef perpetuating it could be a whether a vendor could he adapt or could be violence or new common enemy. when you have a shot taken up and temporarily some of those interlocking systems but you have to seize that opportunity which is usually left to leadership at the national or local level and so on the one hand i would say that opportunity was particular at the national level. it was certainly seized in some places and also the duration of this particular kind of cataclysm is important. it's very hard for humans to sustain that feeling when he

goes on and on and there's no chance to recover. this is why looking forward to future pandemics it's so important to look at the psychological as well as associate logical and of why logical point of view to be united in clear tested on real humans in real time to try to front load the reaction so that you can make it shorter because it's fundamentally too much to ask for humans who need socializing and interaction especially children. it's too much to ask for it to go on this long. .. pretty sustained condition which was the extreme polarization and conflict so that doesn't go

away. i would say in h >> that in hugh-polarized societies, one of the things we start to see is that the news media becomes sort of relentlessly negative on all sides of the spectrum. there's a lot of reasons for that, but i also think that doesn't help us, right? because even when the caseload went down, when vaccines started to look like they were, you know, going v to work, you didnt see a huge change in the tone and emphasis of a lot of the headlines. there was a nice study done on this, by thehi way, about comparing the negativity of major u.s. news accounts during the pandemic to international news accounts of the pandemic, ccand the u.s. coverage was with much more negative. even more negative than science journal coverage of the pandemic, right inn so a lot of different things happening, but the bottom line is when you have this level of high conflict, it's very hard to seize those opportunities.

>> you talked a lot about it and i will sort of talk about this rogue problem that we are in some ways sort of all in conflict scenarios beholden to the most combustible people in the group or loyalty circle. can you talk about the competing groups and identities, and i wonder if you can talk about the way you end up calling it virus starters. what are the things that cause people to be the source of high conflict? >> it comes from the story of the hatfield and mccoy feud which many people may have heard of but very quickly, you know,

in 1878 along with the big sandy river with farming the land and randolph mccoy thought that he recognized one of the pigs on hatfield's farm and stole it from his. no one could convince him to drop it so they complained to the authorities, organized the trial, he lost the trial and that wasn't a great experience for him, but he let it roll off and everyone moved on. it was a group conflict because they had many relatives all over the area and in the first year and a half after the trial, they got in a fight with a witness who testified and they beat the man to death so this is when the

feud became sort of combusted and morphed over the course of the next decade it was a vigilante shooting. women were beaten, people were drawn in across the region. i explained this to say one of the conditions that leads to high conflict in every case i look at our powerful group identities. when we experience collective emotion, geometrically it compounds the conflict. if someone is attacked or humiliated the way humans process this literally in the same parts of the brain that process pain it feels like it's happening to you and the reverse

is true if somebody does something amazing and powerful you feel pride just like sports fans after their team wins. they feel like they are more likely to do amazing things which is clearly not true. but it is our perceptions of this powerful group identity particularly when there's something about this binary this is where our particular political system of a when is designed for high conflict based on what we know about human behavior and conflict. those powerful oppositional groups it doesn't bring out the best i think it is fair to say. >> one of the things i was

fascinated were curious to talk about was what does america do with the lessons that you have laid out in this book? we are locked into this conflict in our politics and most of us don't want to be there and i think that is sort of another part of your book is talking about how the conflict hollows out the middle. that's something that's consisted in politics and war zones. what advice do you have to the country as we wrestle with where we are right now? >> with the collective level one thing that goes to what we were talking about is to make

significant reform to the systems and make third parties possible. there's no reason we have to speak to this formula. we know from the research others have done about polarization that countries that have multiple parties and things like representation tend to be less polarized and have less trust. it feels more fair and it is more fair which changes everything and lowers the volume. some states have already moved in this direction and others are trying actively.

it's operating at an individual level and. it's operating at an individual level and. they need to change what they are doing and it's also been captured they are people, companies, platforms who intentionally exploit conflict for their own end. it could be for profit but often i find it's for attention for a sense of meaning and come artery in the social media or news it

puts distance between you and them if you want to stay out of high conflict. that's something we know is very effective and the people i follow for the book including this politician who found themselves caught in this cortex one of the things he did is to start relying on different people, he moved away from the sort of black-and-white, good and evil and move to somebody else the saw a lot more nuanced humanity among the people he disagreed with and we have to take a more current example. he moved across town to help him get out of the conflict. when things went bad as they

always do, and his cousin he was very close to who was brutally murdered, he didn't know how he had done it. he couldn't react the way that he normally would because of the distance that he had created so everything you can do to slow down conflict is very important. at the individual level and also the collective level. >> last question before i open up to the audience you started by saying that this book grew out of basically where you saw your self in journalism and the stories you were covering and wondering where they came from and why. i wonder how this book changed the way that you do your journalism. i know it changed the way that you talk to your family because you talk about the way that you try to listen differently around

the dinner table. but when you are out doing your job, how do you write differently and explain differently now that you understand this background? >> the rules of engagement for journalism and anything don't apply the same way. they just will not work and often backfire. for me i had to develop a new set of rules and engagements. it's hard. i'm still figuring it out and working with the solutions journalism network that the trainsthe newsroom to help themo this.

you have to complicate the narrative that the audience has going into a polarizing issue and that requires knowing what that narrative is and it will be different for different audiences. figuring out if it is true and using history or different locations or a broad lens to see what is happening to help your audience have a full more useful view of either of the conflict, the other side or themselves so that is how i now try to measure success. is the story going to help illuminate anything about this conflict and if not, i am not going to do it. it's easier said than done but i think many newsrooms and editors particularly at the national level have fundamentally underestimated the desire and ability to handle complexity and i think most americans want something different than what they are getting. there is an opportunity to do

journalism differently particularly in the conflict and to be useful when we are not being as useful as we think. >> did you change your mind as the book unfolded and the research unfolded? what surprised you about your research? >> many things. i think one thing i had different conflicts in different categories. i thought polarization was a thing. i don't think that's very helpful. everything i've seen human behavior in different kinds of conflict whether it is the war

or political at a fundamental level is not that different so i am trying to be less sideload and how i look at the research and storytelling. i've become much more suspicious of my own righteousness when it flares up. i want to be careful because sometimes people say it sounds like i'm saying you can't be passionate or have radical ideas and i think that we need to get more nuanced and how we think about these things because you can have really radical visions and movements for social change without being in high conflict. so, some of the differences between good conflict and high conflict are telltale signs and you can see them all around you. one is there's still curiosity.

there might be moments of surprise. you experience a range of emotions. in high conflict everything feels clear more than it probably is and you begin to generalize. that lack of humility and complex that he is quite dangerous. but the most chilling part in every story that i followed is everyone involved in high conflict eventually begins to mimic the behavior of their adversary. eventually you run into the fight to stop. the politician that goes into politics to make it less inclusive made it less toxic and inclusive and there's a million

examples like this. this is the warning about high conflict. if you want to change the world, this is important. are there any national political leaders or state-level political leaders that you see as the embodiment of the good type of conflict that we want to be encouraging? who does this on this level that you seem? >> it's funny that you should say that because i'm trying to work on right now a project of actually ranking or quantifying members of congress and other high-profile leaders not just in politics, but the news media and other places to figure out who

are the conflict entrepreneurs and may be most interesting who is not anymore. the system incentivizes especially at the national level it incentivizes just like twitter so we have set up every incentive and again it's all fixable and changeable but we are asking people to be something different. i have some theories but i want to use some data. the example i would cite in our modern society the flip side of it would be a question here from

lawrence. what is the role of technology and encouraging high conflict and sort of how much of this is basically the tool that we are using to live in the digital age versus something that is new to our society? >> any attention economy is going to plague to the high conflict. so, whether it's news media or social media. anything that makes money off of seizing your attention. the cheapest way to do that is to fear and indignation. so, that is sort of the way to the bottom that we have seen in many different industries.

so i think that is definitely accelerated. that said, we focus a lot on the social media which is important to focus on and reform, but this started way before social media and some of the most, some of the people that are most captured by high conflict in their rhetoric and the sort of estranged family members in the research are not on facebook and twitter. so, if you look back where do you see a lot of this starting from the technology point of view it's from cable news. so to cast a broad net when we talk about the way technology has incentivized the conflict i

think that is true and it is not just social media. >> another question here from elizabeth but i will play with a little bit. her question is how do we help kids develop the muscle to avoid conflict and i will personalize it a little bit also by saying how do you parent differently now that you understand high conflict? >> it's tricky because i have a teenage son and he's living in the world and reading the news and very easy for him to slip into sort of sweeping generalizations about good people and bad people, and i get that and i don't want to just be the person like let's look at the full picture but i've also found that if i try to connect

to his own life or family that can be helpful how do you and think about how would we overlay that. it sounds complicit but i think that it's quite complex to try to make that connection. i do this and all my interviews now, this is what has changed most for me personally and professionally i do this technique and there's other forms of it out there but when someone is telling me something that they are bringing any level of emotion to the first thing people want is to be heard and they almost never get it.

it sounds like what you're saying you can't go back to school in person even though your teacher is vaccinated, i'm making this up, but you first acknowledge that you heard them and then you have to ask if you got it right, like it's a genuine curiosity. you have to be genuine. when you do this, it is amazing what it unlocks in people, even people that are different from me with political venues and life experiences once they feel heard and they don't mistake for the agreement by the way, they don't think i agree, once they feel like you are really trying to get them, they open up and the research shows they acknowledge more ambivalence and

complexity but it gets stifled in the high conflict and they are more open to information they may be don't want to hear. often with parenting once you've done it, the issue is over. if you don't have to do anything else, you don't have to fix it, argue it or make the case. you just make sure and everybody can move on. it is an incredible skill that we should absolutely be teaching kids to finally answer the question. >> thank you for such a relevant and timely book. if you are listening and watching, you can pick up a man does book anywhere that you buy books but particularly through our partners at politics and prose here in washington and use

the code special ten and check out for an extra discount. i want to thank the aspen institute for sponsoring the book series and most of all amanda thank you for putting such an interesting book together about backdrop and >> recently, the museum in houston hosted a virtual event with a columbia university professor who explained why he believes future pandemics can be prevented by expanding vaccine literacy. >> i started, actually, writing this book about a year before covid-19 began, and i think one of the points of the book is that what's happened, what's happening with covid-19 is not the extraordinary event that many claim it is, but rather, a culminating event of a lot of

unare ralphing that's been happening -- unraveling that's been happening over the last few years. and it kind of chronicles the collapse, partial unraveling of global health infrastructure and all the things that we've put in place which includes a lot of vaccine diplomacy. i define it broadly as cooperation between nations around global health but particularly vaccines, because vaccines are such powerful tools in global health. and i, the beginning of it, actually, goes with the beginning of vaccines. so when edward jenner developed the first smallpox vaccine back in the late 1700s, some say 1798, he was immediately called upon to immediate kuwait prisoner exchanges between the british and the french during the napoleonic wars. and thomas jefferson used his vaccine as a goodwill gesture to

send with vaccine with the lewis and clark expedition and their exploration of the wilderness with native american groups. and the more modern version began with albert say ban who, when he developed the polio vaccine, he did it jointly with the soviets. he sent the strains to the ussr, got permission from the state department and his soviet counterpart whose son actually works at fda and is a friend and colleague, got permission to work together. that's where the vaccine was developed, tested on 10 million soviet school children, shown to be safe and effective and, ultimately, led to the licensure of the polio vaccine. and it happened again for smallpox i rad case. the soviets found a way the scale up production of the smallpox vaccine which allowed you to take that version into tropical areas and so it wouldn't be destroyed by heat,

and that's what allowed t.a. henderson -- d.a. henderson to lead the smallpox i rad case -- eradication. always relied on international cooperation and cooperation between countries which generally did not agree ideologically. they're willing to put a aside their ideologies to work together, and this is something that i was, have been so impressed with as a vaccine scientist over the years, i said, hmm, how can we dust this off and maybe give it a fresh coat of paint and reinvigorate it. and i had that role as u.s. science envoy for the state department in the white house between 24014-2016 -- 2014-2016 in the obamas white house at a very difficult time in the middle east. that's when the isis occupation was starting, it's when we were at the height of the syrian conflict and civil war, it's when the proxy wars between iran and saudi arabia were beginning

in yemen, and so at a very awful time looking at how we can cooperate between muslim majority nations for vaccine development. and i made some progress, but the point is i think this is a time when we need it more than ever. and we can talk about what we're seeing now unraveling with what russia's doing, with what china's doing to some extent. and now, as if life isn't complicated enough, this very aggressive anti-science disinformation campaign which is both home grown in the united states and being launched by russia, so how do we bring, how do we walk all of this back and kind of restore vaccine diplomacy to its rightful place because of its incredible track record of success. >> you can find the rest of this program on our web site, booktv.org. search for peter hotez or preventing the next pandemic using the search box at the top

of the page. >> booktv on c-span2. every weekend with the latest nonfiction books and authors. funding for booktv comes from these television companies and more including mediacom. >> the world changed in an instant, and mediacom was ready. internet traffic soared, and we never slowed down. schools and businesses went virtual, and we powered a new reality. at mediacom, we're built to keep you ahead. >> mediacom, along with these television companies, supports booktv on c-span2 as a public service. ♪ ♪ >> booktv in prime time starts now. first, one of the central park five exonerated for a wrongful conviction, and ian manuel sentenced to live in prison at age 14, talk about their experiences in the u.s. judicial

system. then dr. marty makary on how american health care needs change as well as the impact of the pandemic on the health care system. then bob wild reflect on the publisher's 10th anniversary, critical race theory is a threat to american culture and the van jobbing church, and ann -- andy slav visit talks it is about the u.s. response to the coronavirus pandemic. find more information at booktv.org or consult your program guide. now here's a discussion on the u.s. judicial system. >> hello. i'm tracy webster, executive director of the center for fiction. thank you for joining us. the center for fiction is the only literary organization in the country solely dedicated to celebrating fiction and storytelling in the all its