Thank you. It's actually practically the only thing that works. Yeah, you're not just, yeah. Could you just go everywhere I go and say that? I would love to. Because I feel like one of the worst parts about talking about this book is that I am kind of by nature a fighter. I'm not like a kumbaya person. Do you know what I mean? And so I hate that people assume sometimes that that's what I'm saying. I said, why can't we just have bipartisan unity? That is not what I'm saying. I'm just saying like, I want this to actually work. Let's not just keep having nonsense fights forever. And by the way, I don't, you know, I don't always succeed. We just had an argument with my husband last night in the car about whether we should get a handyman because he's been really busy and so have I and things aren't getting fixed. And it got really heated because we weren't talking about the understory, which was, for me, it was about care and concern. So this is the good news. I have good news and then we'll get to Lupin. The good news is there's only like four understories out there. So you don't have to spend all day on it. Like you kind of can figure out pretty quickly what combination you're dealing with and it's care and concern, respect and recognition, power and control, and stress and overwhelm. Yeah,

that sounds right. Which

is like, you know, when you just get enraged and it's actually because you're just like really tired or hungry. So anyway, in the handyman argument, for me, it was about care and concern. Because really what I was saying is you're working too much. And I feel like you're not here and you don't love us. Do you know what I mean? In so many words, which too bad, I couldn't just say that. Wouldn't that have been nice?

It's impossible.

Still, after all the training, still wrote a book, still can't always get there, especially with people who are very close to me. You know, with a stranger, I can go off. I mean, I've gotten a lot better with strangers. Like I handle like sudden public conflict much, much better than I used to. But with a loved one, I think, Glennon, to your point about trauma, it's like, because it feels threatening to me. My husband, thank God, is a little more like Abby, where he actually does not want to burn down the house that we live in. So like, he's trying most of the time. But for him, there's an understory too, right? Like, I think for him, it's more about respect and recognition. He felt like it's kind of his job. Usually, he's fixing these things. We're not that gendered in everything, but in this one case, it was things that he normally is, and he feels bad that he hasn't done it, right? He knows he's been kind of negligent and he doesn't like being called out on it. He doesn't want me to hire someone, but I'm also like, I'm not going to sit here forever with no dryer or working bathtub. That's not. So you know what I mean? Yes, I do. But like too bad we couldn't have just gone there right away.

And it's interesting. One of the things that I've noticed with Glennon is that it's too vulnerable to say the actual understory, to admit to it for her. And that's one thing that I try to cut into conflict, to try to shorten it quickly is I get as vulnerable as I possibly can. I don't know. One day I'll say, my feelings are really hurt. Period. What do you do with that? I'm like, fuck. She's giving you nothing

to fight. It's hard to fight. Yeah.

I feel abandoned or I'm feeling or a part of me, whatever it is. And it's like that really cuts through and it takes Glennon a little bit longer. Sometimes a day, usually it's only a day for you to circle back and say, I think my feeling or whatever it is, but it's a vulnerability, especially for folks who actually accept more conflict into their life or seek it. I think it's harder, at least in the case with Glennon. You're definitely more conflict positive, I would say. Yeah,

I like conflict. Prone. I feel like it settles things. Prone. Yeah. It makes progress and it helps you know each other and it's like, what's the point if you're not... But what I do wonder about because of my own suspicion of myself is when you say, Amanda, like it works. What that suggests is that both people are trying to work toward the same fit. So I am entering a political conversation with somebody who has, for me, the biggest conflict would be somebody who has like, you know, conservative quote values or, you know.

But

sometimes you can enter a conflict where your intention is, let's find middle ground. Let's work together to like find a way forward, you know. But the other person is actually not trying to do that. Right. They're trying to like sow discord. They're trying to get their ego met. So it's a completely two people playing different games. If we were both entering a room where we were trying to find common ground on how to save the planet, we were really trying to save the planet together. Right. But that's not often

what the other person is doing. No, agreed, right. And you don't wanna be vulnerable. Like Abby, you know what her intentions are, but like with someone else, you don't want to make yourself vulnerable for someone who actually is a bad faith actor, right, who has ill intentions. It's funny, you know, where I hear this a lot is from members of Congress, because there are conflict entrepreneurs who keep getting now elected. And like, they literally want to sow discord.

Tell us what a conflict entrepreneur is. And Pod Squad, just

think about everyone you know. Yeah, so conflict entrepreneurs are people or companies or platforms that exploit and inflame conflict for their own ends, right? Who do it over and over again, who seem to delight in conflict. Sometimes it's for profit, but I actually think more it's for attention, for a sense of power and belonging, right? A belief that you matter. So you hear this a lot among members of Congress and their staff, that look, I'm here to make a deal to make things better for the country, but these yahoos over there, I mean, that's not what they're about. And you also hear it from gang members, right? It's like, I would love to make peace and have this block be less violent. But these guys are not about that. And that's true. Like, I'm not saying it's not true. I think part of it is shifting what the goal is. So the goal, this, I was taught by Gary Friedman. So for my book, I followed people who were stuck in high conflict and shifted into good conflict or healthy conflict. And one of them is Gary Friedman, who is a really renowned conflict expert who ran for office in California. And it was, as he said, took about an eighth of a second for him to fall into high conflict, because we are all susceptible, right? And what he taught me about his mediations, he's mediated like 2000 different cases and trained of judges and lawyers and journalists like me. And he said, the goal is not to agree or to even solve the problem. Like you'll never hear him say the word compromise or middle ground. goal is it's a successful mediation if people leave the room and one of three things has happened. They either understand the other person themselves or the problem better. That's good. Right. So if you go into an encounter with someone who is a conflict entrepreneur, just understanding that about them will be helpful to you.

Ah, okay. Does that

make sense? That's so important. That reminds me so much of the time that I spent playing on the national team, that we spent so much time sitting around dining room tables, just talking about everything. And we didn't agree on everything. And we never came to an agreement on stuff. There wasn't like, oh, well, let's meet in the middle somewhere, right? Whether it was politically or religiously or whatever. We would stand up from the table and we would leave and then we would still somehow figure out how to find our way on the field, playing hard as hell for each other, even though we might have disagreed on, you know, four or five of these really important things to me, right? Like my right to marry whoever I wanted to, or who I was voting for at the polls, we would talk about it. And I do think that what you're saying is really important. There was nothing wrapped up in a little bow that made us go, kumbaya, we're albestis here. It was like, actually just saying the thing out loud because so much of the discontent in these relationships is like the unsaid, oh, I know they're conservative or I know that they're this or, and I don't believe or agree with that, but you don't say it. So it makes you dislike them. But as soon as you say this stuff and you're like, oh, well, yeah, that's not something I'm going to change about them, but I can still play with them. So this is a side.

That's so interesting, Abby. And do you think that that was that true on every team you're on or was there something about that team? Every single team I was on, you had people who thought

differently about the way that the world works, thought differently about it's not just politics and religion. It's just like how you deal with a friend or how you are in a space full of type A people. Like there were so many different relational things always ever happening. That it was very fruitful to talk about everything that was going on in our lives. And I would handle a certain situation differently. But I think one of the things that I have found the most value in all of the teams that I played on being in close proximity to so many different kinds of people that we were able to agree on one thing and it was playing soccer, whether it was for our nation or our club team. And that was one thing we could agree And so it gave us the ability to go out and even though that there was these other things, we were able to actually go and do the thing. It was like, here we go.

Okay. And I have a question for you, Amanda, because, and this is something Abby and I talked about lot and it's sensitive. That was a different time. I believe that Abby's ability to work side by side with people who may or may not have believed that she had the same rights as them out in the world had something to do with the time she was in where she was conditioned just to be grateful to be there, just to accept her own marginalization in a way that the same queer players in this day and age might feel more agency to not feel comfortable alongside people who don't believe in their whole humanity. What do you think about that, Abby? I

think two things. One, I knew, because this was happening in like the early 2000s, you know, middle 2000s, 2010s, where the world hadn't really gotten on board with gay rights yet, our country, you know, the world was still kind of new around this. And you had to be very progressive minded to be in the position that I was in, especially even for some straight folks, right? It was kind of like a real big bridge that some people crossed to become allies with the queer community. So for me, it was really important to be a voice for the folks that possibly one day could straddle and walk across the bridge to become an ally of the queer community, that they needed to see, talk, and hear my story, that they needed to be in communion with me in some ways, that they needed to see that I wasn't growing weird things off of my head. I know that sounds ridiculous, but that is the kind of position I knew that I was in, that I was going to create allies just by opening up myself and being vulnerable to like, hey, this is really hard for me that I legally can't marry or, and at the time, we'll never be able to marry somebody and have the same legal protections and rights as you all do. And that conversation starts to change the mind. So yes, I do know we were in a different time. And that is just what my experience was.

I want to get to Amanda's like things on conflict, but it also is mirrors our individual conflict. You actually had a very honorable, universal intention. Whereas I would be more fighting for my life. Yeah, it's a situation.

It feels more like a long termterm play versus a short-term play. Yeah, the difference there So there's

something called intergroup contact theory, which is this Idea that the only way we can reduce prejudice between groups is through interactions like that through relationships under certain conditions where you're roughly on equal footing in the room if not in the world Ideally where you're you have a transcendent common identity like you did with the national team, right? Something else you care about. And some kind of container for those conversations to happen. And this has been tested, contact theory, in like 500 experiments all around the world. It is the only known thing to reduce prejudice. We don't have another answer. So it's at once true that this is the only way and also not fair and not always your job. It shouldn't be everybody's job if you're the only black person in the room or the only gay person in the room. I guess I see what both of you are saying, that those conversations would be harder today because there would be less tolerance for intolerance, right, depending on who's in the room. But the stronger those relationships are, the more they can hold, right? But you have to set up the container. But the bad news is there's not another cure for prejudice that is actually proven. It's those encounters. It's those seeing someone and knowing them as a complicated human who you like and then they also are gay. That's what deep canvassing and all these things that we know were helpful with gay marriage. But it is very difficult and the more inflamed things are and the more threatened people feel and the more frightened they are, it gets almost impossible, right? But not impossible, but almost impossible.