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funding for c-span2 comes on frm these television companies and more including charter communications. >> broadband is a force for empowerment. that's why charter has invested billions building infrastructure, upgrading technology, powering opportunity in communities big and small. charter is connecting us. >> charter communications along with these television companies supports c-span2 as a public service. >> amanda, it's a pleasure to get the chance to talk with you about what is a fascinating book, exploring what i think you call the invisible hand of our time, but when i i was readin, it almost seemed more like the background music of our daily lives, and that is this challenge of what you label high

conflict, basically you define it distinct from reflectors sort of natural conflict but the type of conflict that resolves into a true us versus them. and so i want to spend a little bit of time talking with you today about that, diving a little bit into some of the markers and investigative work that you did to bring this book and this concept forward. but thought i would just start by asking you to talk a little bit about what got you interested in this particular topic. in some ways what i found sort of 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 in a way that most of us never stopped to actually think of and process as these daily news stories unfold. >> thank you, garrett, and thank you to the aspen institute and everyone joining us today. i am so glad od to be back with you all talking about this. watergate feels like an appropriate back story, we can get back to that, that four years ago i felt like as a journalist i had to do something differently. i felt like it was so easy as journalists to make our political conflicts worse, even if you didn't intend to. some people intend to but most don't and yet here we were. it felt liked there was somethig relevant understanding what was going on in the country and that's a problem. i spent a lot of time with people who study conflict of all kinds, personal, political,

professional, at scale,h individual.so and the study of conflict as a system, particularly intractable conflict, for me really clicked everything else into place. there's a lot of forces that got us where we are but that as a sort of overlay suddenly made everything makes sense in a distorted kind of way. so then the question became all right, what can we learn from people who have been through really a good conflict and got into a better place? i followed a handful of people including a politician in california, a former gang leader in chicago and environmental activist in england, regular frustrated democrats in new york city and regular frustrated republicans in rural michigan, and the whole goal was to see how did they get from high conflict, which is this really unpleasant, toxic dystrophy, conflict, too good conflict? the problem is in conflict it turns out.

they can feel that way but the problem is the kind of conflict. all those people didpl make that journey which is incredibly encouraging and the werean patterns in what happened first, second and third. the book is really about how they did that and how more of us could do the same if we want to. >> you talk about in the context of defining this, the realm, this sort of most masterfully comes to mind which is very intractable divorces, and i wonder if just to help viewers and listeners understand this framework if you could talk about how this appears in divorce cases. you talk about high conflict as a mysterious force that have people lose their mind in

political views or gang vendettas. i was so struck in the start of the book as you begin to talk about this just in the context of divorce. >> that's actually where the phrase high conflict comes from. there are people who work in the divorce world,, psychologists, lawyers, and the refer to high conflict divorce as one in which there are pervasive negative exchanges any hostile environment where the conflict is at the destination, so to speak. like the conflict doesn't go anywhere. there's no movement. and about a quarter of american divorces each year can be categorized as high conflict, so that's like 200,000 forces. it turns out there are also high conflict politics, high conflict companies, high conflict people. so i think it's a useful way to understand this special category

of conflict in which there is not progress, , right, where you were kind of stuck. it is something you really, there's a distinct difference between good conflict and high conflict. i think it helps, for me it helped me get out of my set of narrowing confines of the idea that we either have to have bipartisan unity or be at each other's throats. like, those are not the only two choices. just like in a marriage, you don't have to get along all the time and you also don't have to verbally, emotionally or physically abuse each other. there's a lot of things in between that. >> one of the things, you have this quote i just loved and sort of help clarify for me a lot of what you're talking about where

you quote the president of germany as a we are experiencing permanent indignation, a kind of social rage. that really does seem like part of the challenge that we are wrestling with in our politics today where the names matter, or the names change but the outreach doesn't. and as you traced this back and look at the roots of this, when did america lose its mind, like where did the american politics move from the natural tension over policies and philosophies into something that is much more of him today to a better sports

rivalry? >> it dates back to roughly around the 80s in the aftermath of watergate and other things that brought down the trust level of a lot of our institutions. and also i would say that it boosted the adversarial positions of the news media. many reporters still think they are so there's a kind of adversarial and then of course you find that there were media outlets and things like fox news they could not target the whole country. much of the time to get a niche on the coming back would grow and grow and other media outlets have figured that out and have social media platforms, so we have designed a lot of our

institutions to incentivize the high conflict and the important thing about that is we can design the two incentivize good conflict and we see that. we've all worked at places where in a church or synagogue or neighborhood where there were cultures that dealt with conflict differently. maybe some places people avoided it and that's top-down how the leadership deals with it. but also it's very common and other places where conflict is combustible and destructive. it is possible to tap into and i

would say most of human history is about good conflict or we wouldn't have gotten to this point. >> one of the things being key to high conflict is breaking out of the binary. the idea that you can't sort of reduce a situation whether it is personal, political or to the idea that there's only two sides and two possible solutions. when you say the institutions don't come from god you talk about the states you talked about in the context of naturally setting up a system that doesn't reduce things to the political parties or political binaries and i wonder if you can just talk about the

behind the scenes what you saw it being able to teach us about how to do politics better. >> it's funny because i didn't know anything about it before i started working on this, but the book was about casting a wide net saying are there examples that do conflict better institutionally in sort of enshrined in what they do and the behind the scenes is interesting. the concept is we are all connected. there is no us or them foundation only. the idea is we are very interdependent so in some ways it is appropriate for this moment in history when we are so interdependent as we are seeing in the pandemic and many other things. so the idea is with the prophet mohammed and believing all major religions come from one's spiritual force starting in the

1800s and ears on has spread 150,000 with the largest community. anyway, what's interesting is it's pretty significant, small but global and there are no ministers or clerical leaders to run things. essentially it is one the form of politics. each spring everyone in the 17,000 locations gather together to elect leaders. it's close to a democracy operating in 230 countries. but here's the twist. everything is designed to reduce the odds of high conflict. the thing about the conflict is once you are in it it is tricky to get out. there's a lot of psychological and sociological reasons for that but the idea is to stay out of it like don't let it start.

so they are no parties allowed. people are not allowed to campaign for a position even if they wanted. you can only discuss which qualities are most needed and then it's a pretty sober process after prayer each person writes down the name of people they think have the experience and character to lead to the the communityat that moment ande winners are announced. there is no celebrating. it's considered a duty, not a victory. and then once that they have the people in place and have to make the decisions for the community to deal with the conflicts that arise and all that they have other traditions in place to keep the ego in checked and conflict less likely one of which the meetings are called consultations and they do things

like if i bring to the table and idea, once i propose that it is no longer my idea so these little things sound small but actually play into how humans work and how to reduce the binary dynamic that we know tends to lead to the conflict so it's interesting. >> you also mentioned in the pandemic i wrote a piece at the start for the atlantic last year that i've continued to chew over in my mind about whether i got it inherently wrong and i was thinking a lot about it in the

context of your book and writing on the conflict in the pandemic way back at the beginning, what i saw as this unique spirit in america was a sort of national moment of unity and desire to work together as a unique moment in american history. a lot of my own history writing was focused on 9/11 and thinking about the unity that the country had after 9/11. never forget united we stand. we thought the individuals

making these choices about the pandemic and closing their businesses that had a win and the government told them to close. at that moment i was sort of celebrating the spirit of 2020 that america is coming together. i keep coming back to the high conflict this question it seems like americans got the response to the pandemic right and then the politics misted up. how do you think about this

conflict frame of the america that you've lived through in this last year? >> there was an opportunity for that period to last longer than it did. i know all over the world not just in america there was a real coming together. like you i cover lots of disasters and terrorist attacks and this is always true that there is a sort of golden hour after a catastrophe or during when there is a very strong pull to come together to help one another and it is an amazing experience and i think one of our great powers but it has to be harnessed and sustained. we saw in late march of 2020 that 90% of americans that they believed were in it together,

63% in the fall. it's hard to remember but the senate passed the stimulus bill by a vote of 96-0. so quantitatively. and we are wired to expand under certain conditions and big shocks like a pandemic can make us encompass the whole world overnight. there is a huge opportunity in conflict to use those shocks. in the interlocking diabolical parts of the machine when you have a big shock to the system it could be weather events, it could be a new common enemy. when you have a shock it can upend temporarily some of those

interlocking systems but you have to seize that opportunity for both levels. that opportunity wasn't ceased. it's also true that the duration of this particular kind of cataclysm is important and hard for humans to distain that feeling. this is why looking forward for future pandemics it's important probably.

you can make it shorter. it is fundamentally too much to ask for humans that are social creatures who need socializing interaction especially the way they need food and water is too much to ask. i think both are true it was a huge opportunity. there was a moment that we had a pretty sustained condition which was the extreme polarization and conflict so that doesn't go away. i would say in hyper polarized societies one of the things you start to see is the news media become 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 because even when the caseload went down when the vaccines started to look like they were not going to work, you didn't see a change in the tone and emphasis. there was a study done on this by the way about comparing the negativity of major u.s. news accounts during the pandemic to international news accounts of the pandemics and it was covered even more negative than the science journal. a lot of different things happening but the bottom line is when you have this level of conflict, it is very hard to cease 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 but particularly to our partners at politics and prose here in washington, and use the code special ten at checkout for an extrat discount. i want to thank the aspen institute. i want to thank ambassador and mrs. gildenhorn for sponsoring this book series and most of all, amanda, thank you for putting such an interesting