I

want to just signal to the listener that we're going to go deep on both sides of the coin here, high conflict and healthy conflict and how to get out of one and into the other. I'm big on operationalizable advice, so we're going to get into that. But let's just stay in the uncomfortable part of the discussion here with high conflict for a second. So you've described it as both a trap and also as something that's magnetic. So it's not just like a trap that you can randomly fall into. It pulls you in, too. Can you say a little bit more about this?

Yeah, there's a lot of paradoxes, right, in high conflict. And one of them is that we want in and we want out. There's a way in which it pulls you in. There's something very appealing about high conflict, particularly in times of anxiety or uncertainty or threat. about knowing for sure who the enemy is, who is good, that's your side, you or your side, knowing that you are better than, right? And having a sort of clean line between us and them. That is what psychologists call splitting. And people do it when they are afraid or uneasy. And then sometimes leaders feed into that, right? Offer them splitting as a explanation for all of their problems or ills, right? So it is something that is appealing and it feels good. There's an energy to high conflict, right? To that righteous superiority, to the sense that you are fighting on the side of all that is good in the universe. Curtis Toler, who was a fairly high-ranking gang leader and now does incredible work interrupting gang violence in Chicago for Chicago cred, he says that he estimates that about 80% of people who are in high conflict, and now we're talking about violent conflict, want to get out quite desperately. If only they knew how. They don't feel like there is a way. And I would say that has been my experience working with people stuck in other kinds of high conflict, like members of Congress and their staff, like nonprofits who have gone to war with themselves over unionizing or other things. There is this kind of misery for most people in high conflict. It's not really why they got into politics or into journalism or whatever it is. And it is a little bit of a slow death by a thousand cuts for your soul, right? Physically, mentally, spiritually, it is very hard to live in high conflict. It's easy to visit, but to live there is very taxing.

Yeah. Like I can feel it in my body as you're describing it. Not only because-

Isn't this fun? Isn't it fun to have me at parties?

Yeah, exactly. Yes. By the time this comes out, what I'm about to say will be public. Although as we're recording it, it's not public. But I've been in a nearly three-year separation process from the meditation app that I co-founded. I'm definitely not going to characterize the mindset of my counterparties, my now former co-founders. But I know in my own mind, I lapsed in many ways into high conflict. It's just been unbelievably difficult to deal with. So when you're talking about all the downsides of high conflict, I'm just putting it through that lens just to say. I

appreciate your sharing that. It's not easy to talk about and also sharing it with your own experience as opposed to assuming. That's hard to do, I think. Do you get that sense of being pulled in and also wanting to get out? Yes.

Tension? Yeah. Yes. And again, I don't know if it ever became high conflict on their side. I just know that as I look at and we'll get into it, you've got some questions you can ask yourself to diagnose whether you're engaged in high conflict in any aspect of your own life right now. And so as I look at those questions, many of them are no, like I it didn't for me get that far, but it got pretty far in my own mind. And, you know, sleeplessness, for example, or carrying on an argument in my own head, because one of the things you usually do in your book is talk about how there's the external aspect of high conflict. And then there's the internal aspect of high conflict. When I'm referring to high conflict in my own experience, it's really the internal side of it that I see myself in when you describe high conflict. Yeah.

And I'm glad you said that because I think that is where we need to start always. Right. And I resisted this for a while because I'm later to understanding meditation and mindfulness than you are. And I'm in some ways allergic to things that feel too kind of woo-woo. And this might be my old school journalism persona getting in my own way, which I think you can probably relate to. But I think I have come to realize that the only starting place with conflict is internal. If you can at least get into, try to stay in good conflict in your own head, because there's a lot we can't control outside of our heads, right? But if you can at least do that, and this is what I tell people who are really stuck in conflict that's way out of their control, right? Even, you know, civil war level conflict. If you can work every day, a lot of the practices that you talk about on the show, to stay in good conflict in your own head, you will be less miserable and make fewer mistakes, sleep better at night. And you'll be able to see when there are openings in the conflict where you could actually do something useful. That won't fix everything, right? But it'll destabilize the conflict system that you're in. You'll be able to see those. And you really can't see them when you're trapped and you're sort of bewitched by high conflict. Bewitched.

Yes. I keep thinking about Al Pacino and the Godfather three saying, I tried to get out and they sucked me back in. And it just speaks to the bewitching, or as you say, magnetic nature of high conflict, even if it's just internal. And I want to be clear, there's so many things that we talk about on this show that really helped me pull myself out of nosedives. Not always, but maybe sometimes several weeks too late. And we'll get into that for sure, because we're going to talk about some very practical things that we can do. But let me just stay at a higher level just for this beginning part of the conversation. Let me go to the question that I was describing earlier, which is this kind of diagnostic that we can run. How does somebody listening to this show, especially since this is coming out in the middle of the 2024 presidential election, know whether they have crossed that line between good or healthy conflict and high conflict.

Yeah. So these are like 10 ways to know. There's a few cues that, at least for me, have been really helpful because I can now catch myself sometimes two weeks too late, as you said, but sooner than I ever did before. There's some kind of high level cues like language to listen for. Like do the people in this conflict, including you, use sweeping or grandiose or violent language to describe the conflict, even if it's not violent? Are rumors or myths or conspiracy theories present? Do some people withdraw from the conflict altogether, leading to the appearance of just two extremes, right? Does the conflict seem to have its own life, its own momentum? Those are all signs because there's, you know, high conflicts can be violent or not. They can last for decades and decades or much less. There's not just one form it can take, but one thing to pay attention to is the language you use and also the language you use in your own head, right? So I write in the book about Gary Friedman, who's an incredible conflict mediator and expert who introduced me to meditation, but he ran for office really late in his career, late in his life, thinking he could, as a conflict expert, do some good. So he ran for a local office in California. And as he put it, it took about an eighth of a second before he fell into high conflict. And one of the things that I noticed in talking to him about this was that he described his election victory, because first he won, as an unprecedented landslide, which was an odd way to describe the results of an unpaid volunteer community election, right? But you see, you can hear the grandiosity in the language, right? He and his advisor started talking about good people and bad people, right? This is another sign that you're using splitting language. Another sign is that he felt like there were rumors being spread about him all the time, and maybe there were, right? But that's another sign, right? Also, the kind of flexible people in the community stopped coming to the town meetings because it had gotten so ugly. You're left with two binary extremes, or it certainly feels that way, just like you see on Twitter or in politics. Anytime humans get into this false binary sense that the whole world can be split in two, we make a lot of mistakes. The conflict also seemed to have its own momentum. Everything he did to get out of the conflict made it worse. This is probably the lesson I've had to relearn over and over again myself, is that in high conflict, anything you do, any intuitive thing you do to get out of the conflict will probably make it worse. So you have to do counterintuitive things, which takes some preparation and practice. You can't just do it under stress. That's not going to happen. So these days, most of my time is spent doing trainings and workshops for people who are stuck or trying to not get stuck in high conflict. And most of what we do is practice the counterintuitive moves. And those are really powerful, especially today. We're just living in an age of conflict. And so a lot of our institutions are designed to cultivate high conflict. So that means you have to be countercultural. And that takes a little bit of practice.

Just a note to the listener, we're going to get into the practices. But again, just staying at a higher altitude for a few more minutes. A couple more questions. You referenced that we're living in an age of conflict or high conflict. What's going on in our culture that's making high conflict more of a salient feature of our lives?

I think a lot of things you and your listeners already know about when it comes to the ways our news diet has become very fragmented when it comes to the ways social media really incentivizes dysfunctional conflict, right? Anonymous conflict, contempt, politics, our winner-take binary system with two parties is a recipe for high conflict in many ways. And we know that countries that have proportional representation or multiple parties tend to be less polarized on average. So there's a bunch of things that are happening once, but I think that's all kind of granular. level, none of us know exactly what's causing this, but my best guess is that the ambient level of anxiety and fear is such that people are splitting in a way they didn't in the past. And they're very vulnerable to people, leaders, pundits, politicians who exploit that fear and anxiety. And part of that fear and anxiety is manufactured. And part of it is the pace of change is wild. Like it's just easy for us to forget. But when the typewriter was invented, it took a century and a half for it to become like every day. So now things are changing at a speed socially, economically, physically, all kinds of ways, spiritually. They're changing at a speed that as Krista Tippett says, mammals weren't really designed to live in that level of change. So I think that's part of it. But I'm curious if you have things you would add to that.

I co-sign on everything you just said, and I would add at least one more thing, which is a lack of social interaction. I like to use the deliberately provocative and somewhat annoying term of love, a lack of love. Everything in our culture militates against social interaction. It's individualistic, which, of course predates the cell phone. Individualism does. But then cell phone and social media, which we should put social in scare quotes, drive us further and further into our own little worlds. even worse. We know this. It's not complex. We just know that the nervous system is girded by healthy interactions with other people and live a longer, happier, more successful life if you've got positive relationships. And you take that away, especially with a global pandemic, and the results are pretty clear. Yeah,

that's right on. And it reminds me of when you put social media, social in air quotes, it reminds me of Esther Perel talks about AI, artificial intimacy, right? So like the way we feel like we're in constant touch, we feel, but it's a kind of veneer, right? Of connection. And it's very thin, but it's enough to keep us coming back. Speaking of the paradox of something being magnetic and repulsive, I think that's how most of us feel about our phones, right? It pulls you in, you want in and you want out. So it's a very ambivalent relationship, much like with conflict. The

other high level question I wanted to ask you about was, and you referenced this earlier, but what does high conflict do to the brain? Yeah.

So when you are in a state of high conflict, you literally lose your peripheral vision. Interesting that this was also true in states of extreme duress. My first book was about human behavior and disasters. And you literally get this tunnel vision. If you're in a gunfight or a terrorism attack, you cannot see. And some people literally lose 100% of their vision or their sense of hearing, which is wild. The same phenomenon happens in high conflict, less dramatic, right? But you do lose peripheral vision, and you start missing things. So you start missing opportunities, because you're making a bunch of assumptions about the threat to the other person, the other side. The same thing happens with couples who are fighting, right? So we know that couples experience spikes in cortisol when they fight a stress hormone, right? But so do political partisans after their candidate loses an election. Cortisol injections become recurring, which we know that cortisol impairs the immune system, degrades memory and concentration, weakens muscle tissue and bones, and accelerates the onset of disease. So it is a kind of poison, like a low-key poison that you're sipping off of when you're in this mindset. Is

it ever right to engage? We're running down high conflict here. We're demonizing high conflict, but is it ever right high conflict? Sure.

I think there are times where getting in that mindset of kill or be killed can be incredibly energizing and motivating. It can bond people together. That kind of mindset of us versus them thinking can be incredibly galvanizing. Many social movements are built on this, but you know what? Many social movements have died on this too, is the problem. Because you start to demand purity. You start to demand a kind of orthodoxy in the movement. You start to imbue everything with sort of moral meaning, and then you turn on each other eventually. It's very hard to build a social movement on an us versus them mindset and not eventually use it on yourself. So I think the times in which it's a good idea are very rare and you wouldn't want to do it for very long, right? For all the reasons we've discussed. That

lands for me. One of the things you say in the book is that you sometimes hate being the person in the conversation, counseling others against high conflict because you feel the pull too. And your point, I believe is the point that you make to your interlocutors in these cases is like, it's not about morality. It's not about idea cause is just, I agree with you. It's really just about what actually works and good conflict or healthy conflict is more likely to get us to the goal. Yeah,

I am very pragmatic at this point, but it is counter to my nature sometimes because I'm kind of like one of those people who was a born fighter. I can get passionate about things. I used to really like to argue. I like to make my case. And, you know, I think we all learn these habits as a kid, right, how to respond to conflict. And my way was always to kind of lean into it, not to avoid it. And I guess what really is difficult to communicate sometimes right now is that I am not suggesting for a second that any of us avoid conflict. Those are not the options. Like the options are not just avoid conflict, pretend it's not there, hope it'll go away, put my head in the sand, or do what we've been doing, like go to war, counterattack, assume we understand the other side, particularly in politics, right? I'm talking about now. Those are not the only two options. So that is itself a false binary, right? And trying to communicate and find new creative ways to name this is a big challenge. But what I'm trying to say is, yes, we need conflict. We need more conflict. But it needs to be the kind of conflict that makes us stronger. Just like when you go to the gym and lift weights, you need resistance and friction and it's unpleasant and you don't always want to do it, right? It doesn't feel great, but you emerge from the gym stronger. And that's what good conflict does is you walk out of there feeling like you understand yourself, the other person or the world a little bit better. And I think for me, that's become a much more exciting goal than resolution or compromise or bipartisan unity. None of that is actually that interesting or useful. But understanding is very powerful. It lets a little light in, right? And we can see opportunities when they arise. You've

done a great job of helping us understand the number of pros and massive number of cons to high conflict. So let's get a little bit practical here. You talk about five steps for either avoiding or getting out of, which is harder, high conflict. And the first of the five steps is, and this is your term here, investigate the understory. What does that mean?

Yeah. So every conflict has the thing that it seems to be about and then the thing it's really about, right? So think about any recurring fight that you had with a significant other or that you see in the news, immigration, guns, abortion, right? There's a surface level conflict, which is about to build a wall or not build a wall or how many people are coming in under which. But underneath that, the fuel, the engine of that conflict is the understory, the thing it's really about. And it's usually about one of just four things. So that's the good news. It's not an infinite list. And if you can identify, I'll share what those are, but if you can start to identify what the understory is, starting with yourself in any conflict, but also with others, then it gets interesting. Because then you can actually stop having the wrong fights about the wrong thing with the wrong people and have the right fight, like the fight you most need to have because now you know what you're fighting about. Those four understories that are most common are respect and recognition, care and concern, stress and overwhelm, and power and control. Underneath all of those is often fear, like a very primal fear. And that's the case with many debates about immigration, crime, other things. And this is how I got started on this path is I felt like traditional journalism was not touching the understory of the controversies that we were covering, right? It was just, we were stuck covering the same old tired scripts back and forth to change slightly from week to week, but not fundamentally because we were never talking about respect, power, fear, right? Those things that are really underneath it.

Yes.