AMANDA RIPLEY: My name is Amanda Ripley, and I am a journalist and a co-founder of Good Conflict, and the author most recently of "High Conflict: Why We Get Trapped and How We Get Out."

- [Narrator] Chapter 1: "Breaking the Cycle of High conflict."

- High Conflict is the kind of conflict that escalates to a point where it's conflict for conflict's sake. We start to make a lot of mistakes in this state. We usually get into an us versus them, all or nothing mindset, and the worst part about high conflict is that eventually, we harm the thing we went into the fight to protect, whether it's our family or our country. High conflict is like a spell, and we are all vulnerable to it. It is so magnetic, it's very hard to resist. If you've seen people in your life seemingly lose their mind to a political or social conflict, do things that you never thought they'd do, think about the conflict night and day, have the same conversations over and over, it's like they're under spell. The paradox of high conflict is that we both want out of the conflict desperately, and we want in, so at the same time, when we are in a kind of intractable, malignant conflict, we feel this pull towards the conflict. We don't wanna leave it, not even for a second. We might have trouble sleeping. At the same time, we would love to be free of it, so it's a real paradox and you see it over and over again in high-conflict divorces, high-conflict politics, gang warfare, you name it. Humans are very susceptible to high conflict, especially in a low-trust environment, and at the same time that we want out, we want in. Right now, according to Graham Boyd at the University of Mississippi, we only feel heard about 5% of the time, which means are we all terrible listeners? Is anyone listening? As George Bernard Shaw is reported to have said, "The single biggest problem in communication is the illusion that it has taken place." When people feel heard, something incredible happens. I've seen it again and again, again. We've now trained over 1,000 people through good conflict workshops, and I see it every single time. It's an amazing thing. When people feel heard, they say more revealing, complicated, nuanced, and vulnerable things. You get closer and closer to what we're really fighting about, what they care most about underneath all the allegations and he said, she said, and the facts and the history, underneath it is something that I like to call the understory, which is what we're really fighting about. That is how you get to the understory, is by listening deeply. Because when people don't feel heard, which is about 95% of the time, sadly, what happens? The next thing they say is more extreme, more simplified, and louder in every way, right? So you get further and further from what we really should be fighting about, which is how we end up having a bunch of nonsense fights and don't have the fight we really need to have. You might be wondering, what is this high-conflict business? Well, let me tell you a story. There's a place in Los Angeles just off Wilshire Boulevard by an IHOP that looks like a lake, looks very tranquil. In fact, it is a natural asphalt spring that has been gurgling away since the last ice age. And in this spring, there are over three million bones. Scientists have found 2,000 saber tooth tiger skeletons in this pit right in the middle of downtown Los Angeles. How did this happen? Well, it turns out that over time, animals would be drawn to this pit thinking that it was a beautiful, peaceful lake. That's what it looked like, so naturally they're drawn to it, right? And then they get there, and you only have to walk through a couple of inches of this sludge before you're immobilized. Even a large mammal is stuck. So then what happens? Well, then along comes, say, a pack of wolves who sees a bison just standing there. Wonderful, so they too are naturally drawn to the pit, then they get stuck. Slowly, slowly, all of these animals get stuck. Their carcasses slowly sink to the bottom. And more and more predators and prey are drawn in over time. That is high conflict. You get drawn in for very natural, understandable, evolutionarily reasonable reasons, but once you get in, you find you can't get out. And in fact, the more you fight and the more you try to get out, the more stuck you become. Any intuitive thing you do to get out of the tar pit of high conflict will almost certainly make things worse. You have to do counterintuitive things, which is difficult. High conflict is a chronic stressor. It keeps you up at night, literally. You lose peripheral vision, literally and figuratively. You make a bunch of mistakes about your enemy, whoever that might be. You miss big opportunities. You actually experience repeated injections of cortisol and other stress hormones, which we know impairs memory and lowers your immunity to disease and can shorten your lifespan, so high conflict is literally deadly. High conflict is diabolical on many levels. What you find is the more entranced you get by high conflict, the more narrow and small and trapped the space becomes. It's impossible to feel curious while you're feeling outraged. You can't do both. The more threatened you feel, the worse decisions you're gonna make. So the idiot driver reflex is the way in which humans always understand their own behavior to be a product of their circumstances. I was driving quickly because I was late to something, and also, I'd just been stuck in traffic, et cetera, et cetera. But with other people, of course, we don't give them that same benefit of the doubt. When other people are driving quickly, I might think that they just think they're above the law, like they don't care. They're mean-spirited, they're reckless, right? And that is the technical term is the fundamental attribution error, but I feel like idiot driver reflex is easier to remember. So in my book, "High Conflict," I follow people and communities who were stuck in really ugly high conflict of all kinds, personal, political, you name it. And in every single case, there were certain trip wires that led them into this kind of dysfunctional conflict. And they're always the same trip wires, no matter if it was gang violence or an ugly divorce. The trip wires include binary thinking, where you believe there is an us and a them. It's very hard to resist this. The more uncertain and scary things get in the world, the more we as humans are drawn to simple dichotomies, right? Where it's black versus white, good versus evil, us versus them, that is a very evolutionarily appropriate response and a totally inappropriate and destructive response for the modern age. So it is an instinct we have that doesn't serve us very well today when we live in interdependent, diverse democracies. Everyone that I followed for "High Conflict" at some point reached what's known as a saturation point, which is kind of like hitting rock bottom, right? Where something happens where you suddenly start to question whether all of this conflict is actually worth the cost. It's a moment of dizzying disorientation where people have to decide whether they're gonna stay in high conflict or do something radically different. I followed Curtis Toler, who was a fairly high-ranking gang leader in Chicago for many years. He was in a longstanding vendetta with a rival gang for lots of reasons that were very understandable from a long history of violence, but there was this moment when he saw his son graduating from eighth grade, and for a variety of reasons, which I explained in the book, all of a sudden, he found himself just silently weeping, which is not something Curtis typically did in public or in private. But all of a sudden, he had this moment where he started to really question existentially whether this conflict was still worth it, and this moment's really important because a lot of people hit a saturation point, but they have nowhere to go. No one is welcoming them out of the conflict, because at this point, they've become so dangerous or so toxic that nobody wants anything to do with them outside of the conflict itself. In Curtis's case, thank God, he had somewhere to go. He literally was able to move across town so people in his organization couldn't find him so easily. He had a priest in his neighborhood who welcomed him back, who gave him a role to play in a new basketball league that was forming between rival gangs to try to reduce the violence in Chicago, and he had his faith, which was his Islam, which was something that he had over the years developed right alongside his conflict identity, and they were in constant conflict internally, right? Because he was doing things that were not okay according to his faith. So he had somewhere to go, which is critical. So in this climate today, it feels like whatever conflict you're in, there's just three options. You can either avoid it, like run, don't walk the other direction and hope it'll go away, or you can go to war, you can fight force with force, you can try to humiliate the other side, try to beat them in the next election, whatever it is, right? Or the third way seems to be you have to surrender. You have to stay silent, not speak up for what you believe in and just go along with whatever your group is doing. But actually, there's another way, and it's the only good way, particularly in this moment, which is cultivate good, healthy conflict on purpose. Not to avoid, not to go to war, not to say silent or surrender, but to do something else entirely. Looping is a deep listening technique that I learned from Gary Friedman at the Center for Understanding and Conflict, and it is a way to prove to the other person that you are really trying to understand them, even as you profoundly disagree. And this has totally transformed how I operate in the world as a journalist, but also just as a human, as a parent, as a spouse, more than anything else I've learned in 20 years. It sounds so simple, but actually, we almost never do it. Most of us never get training in it, but we can get much, much better at it. The four steps of looping are to, first, listen to what the other person is saying, but really listen to what seems most important to them, not to you. Really, what are they most upset about? What do they wanna tell you underneath what they're saying? Listening for metaphors, for strong words, really trying to figure out what's most important to them. The next step is to use your own language, the most elegant language you can come up with, and play it back to them to see if you're understanding them. Summarize what you're hearing in your own language. And then the next step, and this is really easy to forget when you're first learning, but really important, is to check if you got it right. To literally say, "Is that right? Am I missing anything?" And be genuinely curious. Don't just say it, right? But really wanna know the answer. One of two things happens, and I've now done this in different languages, different countries, all kinds of people, thousands of people. What you find is, usually, people will add on to what they've said or they'll correct you in some way, but they're slowly peeling away and revealing more and more of the understory, like what the conflict's really about, what they care most about. This is everything, right? Because not only are you now starting to understand them better, but they're starting to trust that you want to understand them, which is like the skeleton key to conflict. You can't get anywhere unless people feel heard. They just will not listen until they feel heard. And then if you get to a point where you check if you got it right and the person says, "Yes, exactly," then and only then can you go to your next question or ask them to tell you more. The impulse very often, and I know I did this for years as a journalist, is to ask plot questions or to offer a similar story that you went through and try to connect with them, or to maybe even try to offer advice, right? This is the natural inclination we all have. But what we found from the research is that before you do any of that, you have to prove to the person that you are trying to get them, and that makes everything else possible. Literally, people physically change when you do this, like their shoulders drop, they open up. Even if you didn't get it right, they're so grateful to be heard, that someone is trying to understand them, and almost always, they realize things about themselves that they hadn't articulated before. So it's an iterative process, which is why it's called a loop, and it is really surprisingly intellectually and emotionally challenging and incredibly powerful. The power of looping is that it builds trust, but it also reveals the understory of the conflict, like what is really underneath this fight? Because you can easily get lost in the back and forth, in the blame and attacks and defensiveness, but underneath that, there's usually just one of a few things going on, and if you can identify what that is, then you can figure out what to do next. So for example, most of the common understories are about power and control, respect and recognition, care and concern, and stress and overwhelm. So we might be fighting about textbooks or prayer or a politician we've never met or who did the dishes last night. We can have that fight for a 1,000 years, over and over and over. We'll always come up with new material, or we can try to figure out what we're really fighting about, and if it's about who did the dishes last night, it might really be about respect and recognition or care and concern or power and control, right? If we can at least figure that out, then we have a shot, not at necessarily solving all the conflict, 'cause we need conflict in this world, we need some friction, right? But we could have a shot at figuring out what we both need and noticing when there's opportunities to make that happen. So as an example, recently at Good Conflict, we got an email from a mayor of a small town in Colorado, and she was saying how there city council meetings were just becoming just kind of classic dumpster fires of attacks and criticism and toxicity, and so she tried looping, she tried looping her critics, not agreeing with them, but really trying to understand what they were saying and proving to them with her words that she was trying to understand them. Not just nodding and looking like she was trying to understand, but proving it. What she found was that even when people didn't get what they wanted, which is often the case, right? They felt respected, they felt like she cared what they thought, they felt like they had some dignity in the situation, which makes all the difference. We all, as humans, can put up with a lot if we feel like we matter and like we belong, and what I've learned is that's something I can give people, even as I continue to disagree. And the more I practice it in low-stake settings, the more easily I can do it under stress. So let me give you an example. I was trained on this years ago by Gary Friedman, who became a character in my book "High Conflict," because he is a conflict expert who ran for office and then himself got trapped in conflict, which is very interesting, but what I've learned is that you have to practice looping in a low-stake setting. So he taught me how to loop, I started practicing it all the time. It's a great thing to practice if you have kids at home, for example, or a roommate or someone at work who's complaining, any emotion at all in the conversation, try looping them. And what happens is you get better and better and better at it, and it starts to be kind of fun and like a cool challenge honestly. And then what happens is when you really need it, when you're in a hot conflict, then you can do it on automatic, which is the only way to actually operate well under stress is when something is like muscle memory. So I was at an event talking about a story I had done for the Atlantic a couple years ago, and it was a really positive story about this town, so I didn't expect this, but at some point in this large theater during the Q&A, somebody raised their hand and just started laying into me, saying I was a terrible journalist, I'd missed the most important things about the town, really angry, and in the past, I might have gotten defensive or tried to defend myself or tried to explain why I did what I did. None of that is gonna work. This person needs to feel heard before he will listen because he's a human, right? So luckily, I could, just outta my back pocket, use looping 'cause I'd done it so many times. So I listened to what he was saying and I said, "It sounds like you feel like you read the story and didn't even recognize your own hometown. That must have been enraging. Is that right?" And you could just see it just felt so good for him to be heard, right? And he said, "Exactly." And that's all I had to do, because you know what? I needed to hear that criticism. And if I had gotten into a big argument back and forth with him, where does that get me? I got my chance to be heard in the story. This was his turn. And so I heard him and he felt heard, and we moved to the next question. That's not always gonna work that way, but if you don't practice it, it's never gonna work. You have to practice it in a low-stake setting and then you can use it when you need it. When I was working on this book, I ended up spending some time talking to astronauts and future astronauts at NASA, because NASA has dealt with a lot of conflict. Turns out on every space mission, there is conflict between the crew up in space and ground control down on Earth, and it can really derail the mission. So they've done a lot of really interesting research about how to keep conflict healthy. You don't want no conflict, right? That's not good. You can end up in real danger in outer space if people can't disagree. You need some conflict, but you don't want it to become toxic. So what they learn is that you wanna seize every opportunity to have positive, fleeting, good interactions, and then it's like money in the bank, so you can then have conflict that's healthier. John and Julie Gottman, who study marriage at the Love Lab in Seattle, have found that there's something known as a magic ratio where couples who have good, healthy conflict and stay together, they have about a five-to-one ratio of positive interactions for every conflict interaction, which seems like a lot depending on your marriage, but five-to-one is about the same ratio you need with strangers or people in your office. You need to have some buffer of goodwill, rapport, connection. Even people who when I did crisis deescalation training, if you're in a conflict with someone at a hospital or on the street that you don't even know, you wanna try to build rapport very, very quickly. You don't have time for a relationship, but you might have time for rapport. So you're trying to have five positive, fleeting connections for every one negative connection. Yeah, I mean, high conflict can be really useful, right? Because it generates energy and motivation and passion and people will stick with you for a very long time, even if you're a leader who makes a ton of mistakes and messes up a lot of things. In high conflict, people will stick with you because there's so threatened by the other side, like you've so thoroughly demonized their opponents that they will stick with you out of loyalty and fear of the other side. So high conflict can be very useful in the short term, but in the long term, all of the evidence shows that you cannot get lasting change through high conflict. Eventually, eventually it'll turn on you, right? So you can't solve an us versus them problem with a new us versus them. Making an enemy is helpful in the short term. A common shared enemy can be very inspiring and motivational and energizing, but in the longer term, we have to live with each other. As the negotiator William Ury once said, "There's no winning a marriage." You can't find a way to trounce the other side if you have kids together, right? At the end of the day, you're gonna see each other. So for the kinds of problems we are facing as a planet, whether it's climate change or pandemics, we need some level of cooperation. We don't have to like each other, we don't have to agree, nor should we, but as soon as we fall into high conflict, we will end up harming the things we care most about. I've now followed people all over the planet who've been stuck in really toxic conflict. And what I've learned over and over and over again is whatever fight you're in, whatever your mission is, you're gonna be much more effective if you can stay in good conflict, even in your own head. You're gonna sleep better at night and make fewer mistakes.

- [Narrator] Chapter 2: "The Psychology of Surviving a Crisis."

- When I worked at Time Magazine, I ended up covering disasters, all kinds of disasters, sort of by accident, but also because of 9/11, I ended up covering terrorism attacks, hurricanes, wildfires, and after a while, I felt like I was just doing the same story over and over. Those were important stories, like stories of grief and blame and stories of loss, but there were also other things that I was hearing from the survivors of these disasters that weren't making it into the stories, really interesting, surprising, useful things that also weren't making it into official conversations about how to prepare for disasters. People found that when they were in a life-or-death situation, it was not anything like they'd expected. In some ways, it was better, and in other ways, it was worse, but their brain behaved differently than what they expected based on movies and news coverage. And these survivors had things that they wanted the rest of us to know, things that they wish they had known that would really help us to meet our disaster personalities before we need them. We all have ideas about how we're gonna behave in a crisis or emergency. It's almost never how things actually go. What you learn in a real disaster is that you have another personality, a disaster personality, and it's helpful to understand it better before you need it. So if you look at human behavior across all different kinds of disasters across all of history, you see a huge spectrum of responses. Some of which are understandable, right? Sometimes people start hysterically screaming. Other times, most often, people shut down, they freeze, they stop moving altogether. Sometimes people fight, sometimes people flee, sometimes, believe it or not, people laugh in the face of a life-or-death situation. Sometimes, maybe most often, people carry on doing whatever they were doing before. Our brains can become incredibly creative in helping us pretend that whatever's happening is not really happening. And sometimes people rise to the occasion and do incredible things. There're heroes who lead hundreds of people out of mayhem, who save lives at great personal risk. So there's a huge range of behaviors, and it's really hard to predict just looking at the person how they're gonna behave. For my book, "The Unthinkable," I followed people who had survived really hellacious disasters of all kinds, and what you find is there's a pattern, even across very different contexts, from plane crashes to earthquakes. Almost always, people go through a period of denial, profound disbelief, and delay, then people go through a period of deliberation. People get really social. They do something that researchers call milling, where they discuss with each other what's happening and what they should do next. And finally is the decisive moment where people either take action and flee or cooperate in some way, or most often, shut down and do nothing at all. So there's something called a normalcy bias, which you see in all kinds of disaster situations where people tend to think that whatever is happening, it's gonna be fine. Our brains take whatever input we get and compare it to what we've experienced before. So every firefighter has a story like this, where they come into a bar or restaurant and there's smoke filling the ceiling and the fire alarms are going off and nobody's moving. Everybody's still drinking their drinks and acting like it's not happening. This is very, very typical, especially for people who either have no training for emergencies, which is most of us, or who have never been in a life-or-death situation like that. It is the most common response by far. In fact, just the other day, I was walking through DuPont Circle in Washington, DC and I heard a gun go off around four o'clock in the afternoon on a random Tuesday, and it was very close. I could tell it was like a block away, and I looked around and nobody reacted. Everybody in that neighborhood, where there aren't a lot of shootings, kept walking as if it didn't happen. People were on their phones, they're talking to their friends, they're drinking their coffee, and I was like, "What?" And then I remembered that, of course, people don't expect this to happen here. So they're acting like it didn't happen. In fact, there was a shooting right there at that intersection, and most people just kept on going like it didn't happen. Now, if the same thing had happened in another neighborhood, you might see a different reaction, right? But there's a million examples like this, where often, our reaction is to normalize whatever's happening around us. One of the tricky things about fear is that it's super helpful to you in small doses, but when you have too big of an injection of stress hormones like cortisol, you start to deteriorate. You lose eye hand control, you lose your peripheral vision, that's very common. It feels like time slows down. Sometimes you lose your hearing altogether. It's wild. There's a lot of really interesting research that's been done on police officers in shootings, and they will often report really intense distortions, like they don't see who's firing their gun. Turns out it's them, right? They don't hear the gun, their ears aren't ringing afterwards. They can describe in great detail the other person's weapon, but they can't describe their face, right? So you tend to do a lot of things. Your brain is trying to help you under extreme stress, but unless you've had some kind of really good realistic training, it tends to become counterproductive, like it's too much stress. So your eyes, your brain will fixate on the perceived threat, which may or may not be the full threat, and then you miss things. So it's a really tricky, slippery slope. Any kind of disaster you're in, fear is useful, but not too much. One of the disasters I spent a long time studying was the evacuation of the World Trade Center on 9/11, partly because we have incredible research and survey data on the thousands of people who evacuated that day, and what you find is that, on average, people took about six minutes before they even began evacuating. People took the time to gather books they were reading and other things. They would shut down their computers before they left. But most of all, the first thing people did was to talk to each other. And we've all experienced this, right? I mean, you've probably been in a situation where a smoke detector goes off. The first thing you do is you look around to see what everybody else is doing, right? That's a very natural reaction and it's a good survival response if the people around you know anything about how to get out of the building or what might be the actual threat. So this was a huge factor in the evacuation of the Trade Center. Unfortunately, on 9/11, many, many people heard an official order over the PA from the Port Authority to stay in place, right? There were lots of reasons for that, some of them good, some of them not so good, but the end result is that many people took much longer to leave than you would want or expect, given that they had experienced a pretty intense explosion, even in the second tower. So there was a long delay for a lot of people in leaving for this reason. But deliberation's really helpful in a lot of cases, because it is kind of like the wisdom of the crowd. If you have people around you who know things that you don't know, then you can make better decisions, right? We know that, for example, on average, people check with five sources before deciding to evacuate before a hurricane, right? So that might mean they check with their neighbor and with their mother-in-law and with their local weather person, right? But also, the mayor's orders or whatever else, and they're of course gonna weight their own past experience in all of that. So one of the things that people are often surprised by is how social disasters can be. Typically, people become much more polite and nicer than they are normally, which is the opposite of what we might expect. But going back to the World Trade Center evacuation, one of the reasons the evacuation took so long is that people who were evacuating from the upper floors would let the coming in below them go first, right? Which means the people who had the farthest to go took the longest to get out. On average, the World Trade Center evacuation took about a minute per floor, which was twice as long as safety engineers had predicted, even though the buildings were only half full at the time. And part of that was because of delay and denial, but also because of deliberation. The third and final phase of the disaster arc is the decisive moment, where you either take action or not. This is where everything that's happened before and the denial and delay and deliberation phases comes home to roost. It can make all of the difference. So as an example, most serious plane crashes are actually survivable, which is surprising, but it turns out that most planes, if they crash, they end up on the ground and on fire, and the whole trick is to get out really fast. But that delay and deliberation phases can really slow you down, right? There was a famous plane crash in Tenerife, the Canary Islands years ago, and what they found is that even though people could have gotten off the plane, they actually died there from smoke inhalation from the fire, and they were found just many of them sitting in their seats with their hands crossed across their laps. So there was a lot of research done about why had this happened. And what you find is that humans, like most mammals, tend to shut down in really frightening situations for which they have no training or prior experience. But there was one gentleman on that plane who before the plane even took off, he looked around and noticed where the exits were, which is what people who study plane crashes always do, and he knew exactly how many rows away that the exits were, and he kind of had some kind of mental model for how to get out of that plane. So when the crash occurred, he grabbed his wife's hand, who was at that point kind of frozen, paralyzed, he grabbed her hand and he said, "We're getting out of here," and they got off and they survived, but the people sitting around them did not. So that's the decisive moment where your past experience, who you're with, how long you're stuck in denial, all of those things really shape what you do or don't do. The biggest problem in most plane crashes is what researchers call negative panic. People do nothing, they shut down, which is actually a good survival response in certain situations, but not on a plane crash. So that decisive moment is the culmination of everything that's come before. What I noticed in writing "The Unthinkable" is that a lot of our survival instincts don't serve us very well in the modern world, where we've built huge vertical buildings that take very long time to evacuate, for example, or where we have to evacuate a city days and days before the storm even arrives. The good news is you can actually evolve on purpose through realistic training. So the better you understand your environment and the risks that you face, and the more prepared you are for some of the problems you might encounter, especially denial and delay, the better you can push through those phases and make an intelligent decision under stress. So while it can be kind of scary how many threats we face for all kinds of reasons, from pandemics to climate change, we also have an incredible ability to do better and to train and educate ourselves for whatever environment we're in. As an example, people who study disasters, they're kind of weird, right? But they do things that I have learned to do as well. They're just more aware, just like people in the military, they're more aware of their environment, so they know where the exits are. When I go to a hotel, I always check where the stairs are. I might go down the stairs, see where I come out. There's a lot of little tricks like that that are small and maybe symbolic, but the idea is you have more awareness of where you are, and even metaphorically, that's important, right? Knowing where you live, what the threats are, who you can trust, building those relationships and that wisdom before you need it. People who tend to do better in disasters are people who have had some training or some rehearsal beforehand. So in the case of the gentleman on the Tenerife flight who got off with his wife, who evacuated the plane with his wife, he had actually been in a house fire as a kid. So he knew how quickly smoke can fill a space, and that the real threat in most fires is smoke. He understood how quickly smoke can fill a space, so that experience helped him push through the denial phase more quickly. In other cases, it's knowing how to get out of a building. In the case of 9/11, I write about in the book, there was a gentleman named Rick Rescorla who was head of security for Morgan Stanley, and he would run the company through regular fire drills in which they had to actually walk into the stairwells, which was unheard of, and to this day, is unusual in most skyscrapers. And he insisted that they evacuate for every fire drill, which people did not like, but he was serious about it, and so people did it, and that saved lives on 9/11 because people had some muscle memory for where the stairs were and how long it might take to get out of them. The fundamental thing that Rick Rescorla and other heroes in the book understood is that we are capable of incredible things, but we have to trust each other in advance. We have to respect regular people enough to help them be agents of their own destiny. We have to trust them to do the right thing, but give them the information in advance. The biggest mistake I've seen in every disaster I've ever covered is that the people in charge do not trust the public. They think that the public is going to panic, to misbehave, to do stupid things, and so they don't them the full truth, which leads the public to do sometimes unwise things. So it's this circle of distrust, and that problem is bigger than most of the threats we face. The fear of panic has killed more people than most disasters themselves. So for "The Unthinkable," I got to do some really cool things. I got to go do trainings with firefighters where they would fill a building with non-toxic smoke, and then we had to get out and repel down the side of the building, and I did flight attendant trainings where you would be in a pool and you'd have to get into a raft and that kind of thing. And that was fun, and it was kind of scary, but mostly fun. But the things that really stayed with me, honestly, were the interviews with survivors, people who had been through hell and back. They had things that they wanted you to know, things that they wish they had known. So those are the things that have changed my own behavior. So for example, whenever I go into a hotel, I always automatically check where the stairs are. It just makes me feel good to know that I have another way out, right? Maybe that's crazy, maybe not, but I do the same thing on planes. Anyone who studies plane crashes, they always count how many rows between them and the exit. It's a way to give yourself a sense of agency, even when you might not have a lot, right? And you then can, God forbid, in the unlikely event you need to evacuate, you can find it really quickly, even when you can't see your hand in front of your face. But more globally, and maybe more importantly, the thing that I've learned is to build relationships before you need them, right? So in every disaster, the first people on the scene are regular people. It's your coworkers, your neighbors, it's the people you live and work with, strangers on the subway, they will save your life. So it's really important to look at this as a collective endeavor, that we are all in this together, that emergency personnel will not get there for quite a while, and so we have to rely on and trust each other. And the only way to do that is to build those relationships in advance, build those relationships with your neighbors. So now, I maybe didn't in the past go to the block parties in my neighborhood in Washington DC where I live, now I go, right? Not just because there might be a disaster, but also because I realize now how those relationships enrich my life before and after a disaster. But the biggest lesson by far is that the health of a community after a disaster strikes is directly related to the health of that community before the disaster. It's actually more important than the disaster itself when it comes to the recovery. So building trust, building relationships is gonna save your life and make your life better in a million ways. That's the biggest lesson I've taken into my own life.

- [Narrator] Chapter 3, "The News is Broken and How to Fix It."

- News, I think, is supposed to help us make sense of the world and understand what has happened in the past and what might happen in the future, and how to navigate the world. In the past, I think, news was something that made us feel, ideally, more connected, and it helped us understand the world. Today, I feel like, increasingly, the news makes us feel hopeless, powerless, depressed, and afraid, most of all. In the past, the news was different because there was trust in the news, more trust maybe than there should have been, but also, importantly, the news was contained. You decided when you were going to consume the news. Today, it is aerosolized, it's everywhere. You can't escape it. So in the past, we would find the news, and today, the news finds us, whether we want to or not. The news can ambush you, right? Because you're carrying it in your pocket. You'll get a text message from a friend with a headline, you'll open Instagram, there it is, you'll get an email newsletter. Even if you don't intend to consume the news, it will come find you, whereas in the past, you could decide that you're gonna engage with the news over your morning coffee or watching the nightly news on TV before dinner. Now, you can't avoid the news. It's everywhere all the time. A lot of the challenges that we're dealing with are because journalists like me are used to doing things a certain way, and conventions die hard. So it used to be that if you could break the news first, you were special, that gave you a certain ego boost, and sometimes gave your employer profit. Today, because of the way news travels, we don't actually need that as much. We get information from people who are not even journalists with their phones, and still, there is this ego drive and this competitive pressure to break the news first. So in an attention economy like we're in, that means that you are just hammered all the time with fear and threat and outrage. Well, if you're in a mad scramble all the time to be first, then you're going to lose quality, you're going to lose fact checking, you're going to lose the ability to put things in perspective for your audience, right? And that's not just because of the time pressure, but also because of the competitive pressure and the lack of resources that a lot of newsrooms are dealing with today, especially in the print news world. So there's a lot of reasons for this, many of which you already know, but the bottom line is that the news has become a real bummer for a lot of people in a way that it wasn't before, and we can see a real dip in interest and engagement and delight with the news. I mean, it's hard to imagine, but there used to be more delight and more trust in the news. One of the reasons so many of us became journalists is because we thought we could help people, but also influence people, and it's gotten harder and harder to do that because half the country doesn't trust many of the places that I write for. Why would you be persuaded by a news outlet that you think is lying, that you think is out to destroy you? I mean, these are things that I have heard, so it is harder, I think, to persuade for lots of reasons, but especially because of the distrust. I've been a journalist for about 20 years. I spent 10 years as a senior writer at Time Magazine, and I loved the news. I remember going on vacation and working incredibly hard to find a newspaper wherever I was, and when I was at home, I would read the Washington Post, the New York Times, and the Wall Street Journal in print. Most days, I had CNN on mute in my office in Rockefeller Center, and I would listen to NPR in the shower. I mean, it's crazy looking back on it, but I actually enjoyed it, and I felt more curious, not less curious when I was reading the news, I felt a sense of surprise, of intrigue, sometimes anger and frustration, for sure, but that wasn't the only emotion. There was a range of emotions as opposed to just repeatedly feeling despair and anger and sadness. So that's maybe just me, but that's been my experience. I mean, always keeping up with the news is any good journalist's responsibility, and so that's part of why I did that, right? That's part of why I consume so much news, especially when I was covering a beat, so you really have to know what's going on, right? And that's very reasonable. I think today, however, we have a lot of research that the more news you consume, the more distorted your view gets and the more mistakes you make and the more depressed and anxious you are, especially if you're consuming video news, TV news, so this is a problem, right? Because journalists, at the same time, have to stay up to date, but also, it does warp your perception on the world, and we have a lot of research on that at this point. So it's a little bit like smoking your own supply. Like when do you decide that this is not serving you or your audiences, and how do you find that balance? It's very difficult. I hate to be so cliched, but I think it was during Donald Trump's first election in 2016 where I started to feel like, man, the news was just not functioning the way it was supposed to function. It didn't seem to be convincing anyone of anything that they didn't already believe, and it felt like if we just kept doing the same thing, we'd always done, just more loudly and more righteously, that wasn't gonna work. And it felt like any story I might do was either going to make our political and social divisions worse, or more likely, have no effect at all, which was really disorienting. I mean, it was kind of like a mid-career crisis where I had to step back and say, "What are we actually doing here?" And at the same time, I was seeing the data showing that Americans were tuning out of the news, that they found it so dispiriting and repetitive, that they were actively avoiding it like it was a virus. And so that makes me wonder, maybe there's a better way to do this. So for a long time, I tried to just power through, do what I'd always done, consume a whole bunch of news, and just tell myself to toughen up. I had covered a lot of difficult things in my life. I covered 9/11, I covered other terrorist attacks, I covered hurricanes, tsunami, all kinds of trouble, crime, abortion, you name it, politics, so I felt like what was wrong with me? How did I get so soft and fragile? So I kept trying to push through, and then I would find that I just lacked the energy to do anything after I'd gotten through all of my news consumption for the day. So then I tried dosing it, like you might with a drug, like I would move my news consumption to the end of the day when I'd kind of given up all hope anyway, and then that was a little bit more helpful. But eventually, I found that the only way to kind of stay at least a little bit hopeful and curious about the world was to really limit my news consumption. So not just time it right, but try to contain it, which is hard to do because it's around every corner. I mean, it's hard to contain it. A lot of different things happened. I tried a lot of different things, many of which did not work, including blaming myself. And then I eventually went to a therapist and asked her about it, and she said, "Well, I have the solution: stop consuming news. Just tune out. If it's really leaving you afraid and distressed, it's probably not serving you." But that just didn't feel like an option, not only professionally, but also just personally. I wanna feel like I am engaged in the world, like I'm informed, like I know what's going on and like I'm a good citizen of the planet, right? And so it went against a lot of my identity and values, but the thing that really kind of finally forced me to reckon with this was, one by one, I had a series of journalist friends tell me that they were experiencing the same crisis, that they had found that they just really could not consume the news the way they used to. Often, it was female journalists, but not always, and we would sort of discuss this in whispered tones, which felt wrong too, because this is the thing we're supposed to be creating, that we've put a lot of years and sweat and tears into, how come it's making us so sad and despondent, and also, in a weird way, powerless, like we are not even doing the things we could do because it's so draining. So at that point, I decided, okay, this is probably partly a me problem, but it's also a news problem. There has to be a better way to help people understand the world today, given technology, given all of the things, there has to be a better way. The other change, of course, is that now people can find the news that confirms their worldview really easily, right? So if you are left frightened and despondent by the news, then of course you're gonna try to find news sources that make you feel better, or at least make you feel morally superior, right? And so there's a lot of choices now in a way that there wasn't, and we know that people are, naturally, going to the news sources that feel right to them, that seem to recognize them and their values, and whether or not they're doing rigorous journalism, those news sources look similar to every other news source, and so that's another challenge, is it's hard to know whom to trust, and the less trust there is, the less trustworthy a lot of news sources become, ironically. So the more I looked into this, the more obvious it was that I was definitely not alone in my inclination to start avoiding the news. We now know that four in 10 Americans, according to the Reuters Institute, are actively avoiding contact with the news some or all of the time. One in 10 Americans are totally disconnected from the news on purpose all the time. And this is a trend all around the world, where more and more people are finding the news so repetitive and dispiriting and untrustworthy that they are actively avoiding it, which makes you think maybe there's something wrong with the way we are covering the news. These days, no national news outlet is trusted by more than half of American adults, and that's a problem, which we can see. If we don't have a common sense of reality, then it's very hard to solve problems, even the problems that we could solve. It makes us very, very vulnerable to conflict entrepreneurs and politicians who wanna exploit our division, as well as journalists who are exploiting our divisions. So people have lost their trust in the news over time, before Donald Trump ran for president, but of course, the political polarization has accelerated that decline in trust. There is something diabolical about intractable conflict, which is what we are in in the United States and many other countries. What happens is news outlets tend to pull to extremes, just like highly partisan voters, and so the more outraged and disgusted journalists become on one side, the more they lose the trust and interest of people and readers and audiences on the other side, right? So there is this kind of diabolical doom loop that we have gotten into, which is where media organizations become more and more partisan, sometimes on purpose, but sometimes because journalists themselves are consuming a lot of news, and we know that this is bad for your health. It creates chronic stress, it makes you make mistakes about the other side and people you disagree with, and that leads to more and more distortions, which leads to less and less trust. So it's a bit of a negative feedback loop. In the current political climate, there is a clear partisan divide on trust in the news media. So highly engaged folks on the left trust the mainstream news media much more, whereas highly engaged folks on the right are extremely distrustful of most mainstream news outlets. There are exceptions to that, but in general, that is the disparity that we're seeing. And the more polarized we get, the worse that disparity gets, but even on the left, trust is not that high. As of 2022, according to the Reuters Institute, only 39% of Democrats say that they really trust the news some or all of the time, whereas on the right, it's more like 14%. There's a really interesting divide on how much opinion journalists should reveal. Younger Americans, for example, seem to want journalists to reveal who they are, to be more honest about their own biases and preferences, and they are more tolerant and actually interested in opinion on average, not always, whereas older Americans really distrust the opinions that they are seeing, particularly because of social media and because so many journalists have become sort of brands onto themselves. Many of them are opinion journalists, right? They're not really technically news journalists, but I don't think most audience members really make that distinction or see it as quite as clear as journalists themselves see it. As more and more journalists have become brands unto themselves and as social media has become part of their jobs, you see more and more journalists revealing strong opinions on social media, which of course, they are incentivized to do by the algorithms of most social media platforms. That's how you get attention, that's how you get followers, and then you see a real divide in the American population about this, where younger viewers seem to think it's good and fine and important maybe for journalists to reveal their opinions on social media, whereas older audiences feel the opposite, that that's inappropriate, they're not interested in your opinion, just give us the news. So I think, in general, there's a real crisis within the journalism profession about whether it's even possible or desirable to try to be neutral, whether it's possible to be objective, whether opinion is just more honest, or are you actually trolling people? Are you actually just exploiting and inflaming conflict for your own ends? All of those things I could make an argument for, depending on the context and the news outlet and the person, so it's a very difficult time to figure out what is the right tone for journalism. Personally for me, I want journalists to try to stay sane. I want them to try to see and know and understand many different kinds of people, and to help me see and know and understand many different kinds of people. So if you don't have people in your life that you talk to, and on some level, are curious about who are different than you, it's really hard to do that. And you will, in this kind of conflict, eventually start to caricature and miss important details about people you don't understand. When the Reuters Institute ask people why they avoid the news all around the world, 43% cited politics or COVID, 36% cited the negative effect that the news had on their mood, 29% said they were worn out by the amount of news, 29% said news is untrustworthy or biased, 17% said the news leads to arguments that they'd rather avoid, and 16% said that there's nothing that they can do with the info. I think we can all feel this in our bones, and I think the research supports it. We are not equipped to be constantly bombarded with the most terrifying, disturbing news from all around the globe all the time. We don't know what to do with that information. It doesn't serve us, and it actually does leave us so depleted, that sometimes, we won't do the things we could do to be helpful. So in a way, it feels like, evolutionarily, we're not cut out for the news environment that we've built. So I feel like the news has to evolve, right? The news has to change in order to be more helpful to people, given everything we know, not just about technology today, but also about psychology, about what humans need to thrive in a complicated, interdependent, globalized world. Let me give you an example. The other day I happened across a list of the cognitive biases that lead to depression and anxiety, things like all-or-nothing thinking, overgeneralization, catastrophizing, minimizing the positive. Every single thing on this list is something that journalism does as a convention all the time. Just as a habit, that is what we do. We catastrophize, we engage in all-or-nothing thinking, we minimize the positive, and it really shook me up 'cause I was thinking, "Wow, it's like we're creating content in order to leave people depressed and anxious." In fact, that's not the intention, right? But that is the effect. And since we now know that consuming a lot of news does lead to depression and anxiety, it does beg the question, isn't there a better way? I do think that you can cover what is happening in the world in a rigorous, serious, clear-eyed way without catastrophizing and minimizing the positive and overgeneralizing, that is possible, I've done it, I've seen other people do it to great effect, but it requires very different mindset about what is the news and how we should deliver it. Headline stress disorder is when people report to therapists and psychologists that they are feeling terrified of the world around them, even in ways that are not rational, but the more news they are consuming, the more frightened and paralyzed and despondent they become. So when I looked hard at what the news is doing and what humans actually need to thrive in the modern world, it seemed like it boils down to three things that are missing from the news. First, hope, second, agency, and third, dignity. Hope, agency, and dignity. These are things that sound fluffy, nice to have, but we actually know now from neuroscience and psychology that humans need these things in order to get up in the morning, in order to have a democracy, in order to raise children. We need them like we need water, and here's an example of what I mean. So there was a study that came out in 2021 that showed of all of the stories about climate change on the nightly news or the Sunday morning shows, only a third even mentioned any possible solutions to mitigate against climate change. Only a third. So two-thirds did not even address possible solutions, right? That is a traditional convention of journalism. It feels safer to hide behind constantly criticizing and proclaiming and forecasting doom than it does to say, "Well, here's what this one community or this one scientist is doing to try to prevent disaster," because you could be wrong, it might not work out, right? But we know now that humans actually really need to know what can be done, even if they personally can't do it. There is a vicarious hope. We now know from three decades of research into the science of hope that hope is actually a muscle. It's a skill that you develop. It's not a thing that either exists in a given situation or not. It is something that you do. There is actually a recipe, so to speak, for hope, which is a combination of a roadmap, what needs to be done, which is really important and where journalism could help us, but also the belief that you can impact the world, and lastly, the willpower to do so. And we know from the research on hope, which is totally fascinating, that the more people develop this skill, and it is a skill, the better they're able to manage illness, pain, and even real trauma, like child sexual abuse or domestic violence. So it is not something that is delusional hope. It is something that helps us make better decisions and make the world a better place. So as an example, if you are doing a story about climate change and all you do is address how terrible things are and will be in the future, you leave people so paralyzed that they won't take the action that we need in order to prevent that disaster and it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. People need to know that even if they personally can't fix a big, wicked social problem, it is possible collectively to make a difference. So let me give you an example. The New York Times did a story a while back about how 25,000 unhoused people were moved into homes in the city of Houston, Texas. That begs a question, which is how did they do that? And also, why isn't my city doing that, right? So it opens up a whole possibility of what we might call vicarious agency, where even though you personally cannot fix homelessness, you can see from rigorous reporting how other places have effectively reduced homelessness. And then you might, who knows, ask your city council member why they aren't doing what happened in Houston, right? So there's a way in which you can hold officials accountable, not by just exposing how terrible they are, which is the old way of doing journalism over and over and over until we don't trust anyone, but also, by showing us places that are outliers. What David Bornstein from the Solutions Journalism Network calls positive deviance, places and people who are doing something differently and it is having an effect, even if the problem doesn't totally go away, there is a kind of opening that happens. You can physically feel it when you read a story like that and it has to be serious. It can't be insult your intelligence with stories about dogs and butterflies, but actually looking seriously with data and with investigative journalism at ways to tackle a problem that actually seem to be working and then ask ourselves why that's not happening in other places. It's funny to me, as a journalist, we never really talked about dignity or hope or agency, but dignity, in particular. And I'll never forget, I heard Shamil Idriss from an organization called Search for Common Ground that works in conflict zones, war zones, all around the world, and he said everywhere he goes, one thing is the same, that humans need a sense of dignity, which is a sense that you matter. No matter what else happens, no matter how unfair the world is, each person matters. What does that look like in journalism, right? I think it looks like going to neighborhoods not just when there's been a shooting. I think it looks like following up on stories of mayhem and disaster and not just parachuting in on the worst day. I think it looks like honestly asking people what they wanna know, how we can help them as journalists. WBEZ's "Curious City: program in Chicago asks people and has for years this beautiful question, which is what do you wanna know about your city that we could help you find out? That gives people respect and it says we are here to serve and to link arms with you as the public. We are not here to tell you what to think and to convince you that you're wrong or right. We are here to be helpful to you and to listen to you deeply, which is something that very rarely happens, not just in journalism, but in public health and education and politics. So should you be avoiding the news? Is the news bad for your health? What if the news were designed according to the ways humans actually think? What if the news were designed according to everything we know about what humans need to thrive in the modern world?

- [Narrator] Chapter four, "The Illusion of Polarization."

- In times of anxiety and uncertainty, humans tend to split the world into good and evil. It's a very natural tendency, a way to feel more comfortable, and psychologists call this splitting. You often see it with people who have a personality disorder or other issues, but today, you see it among many, many millions of people because there's a lot of anxiety about the future and fear about the present. This tendency, which is very understandable, to split the world into good and evil, us and them, can give us short-term comfort. It feels good, it really does. But we make a lot of mistakes in the long term because most people don't neatly fit. You can't really divide a country into two camps. For example, there's a research group called More In Common in the United States and around the world, and they've done some really cool research on the American voter, and what they found is, really, there aren't two groups. There's about at least seven groups of American voters, which makes sense 'cause you're talking about 150 million people. So there's all different motivations and reasons and fears and hopes in there. So if you don't recognize that, if you really decide that there's us and there's them, you're gonna miss huge opportunities, right? Because most people don't neatly fit into two camps. In a time of high conflict, splitting is everywhere. People will insist that you pick a side, it will feel cowardly not to. The problem is we make a huge number of mistakes when we do this and we miss big opportunities, but it's very magnetic to do this. It feels right, it feels moral, and it feels good. As Ted Cruz said, "The differences between the two sides are as stark as darkness and light." It sounds like a character in Star Wars, right? That is how it feels, right? Like there's a good side and evil side, and of course, everyone thinks they're on the good side. CNN contributor and Sirius XM radio host Dean Obeidallah wrote in a tweet, "At this point, I literally view people who still support Donald Trump no different than the despicable, vile people who supported Bin Laden after 9/11." So you see here an attempt to lump together roughly 70 million Americans with people who supported Bin Laden after 9/11, right? And the language is important. He describes them as vile and despicable. That is a signature characteristic of high conflict. What we know from the research on emotion in conflict is that anger is okay, anger is generative, anger is a signal that I want you to be better, but contempt and disgust and hatred, those are really hard to work with because they signal that I have given up on you, and that is where violence becomes really, really likely to happen. So that kind of splitting, that kind of splicing the world into good and evil and lumping together millions and millions of people that you don't know and will never meet, that is very dangerous in conflict. One of the most pernicious things about high conflict is that we make a ton of mistakes. We assume that the other side is more extreme than it is partly because we hear so much from them. 95% of political tweets are written by something like 10% of users. So we, of course, extrapolate and assume everyone on the other side thinks a certain way, which means we're gonna be much more frightened than we even need to be, and we're gonna miss opportunities. So for example, 9 out of 10 Democrats say all students should learn how the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution advanced freedom and equality, and that George Washington and Abraham Lincoln should be admired for their roles in US history. That's twice as many as Republicans typically imagine. Nine out of 10 Republicans, meanwhile, say Americans have a responsibility to learn from our past and fix our mistakes, and that the Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. and Rosa Parks should be taught as examples of Americans who fought for equality. That is nearly three times more than Democrats believe. 8 out of 10 Americans think that political correctness is a problem. The same number say that hate speech is a concern too. They don't fit neatly into one camp or the other. One of the four trip wires that leads to high conflict is something called conflict entrepreneurs. These are people or companies that exploit and inflame conflict for their own ends. Sometimes, they do it for profit, often, they do it for attention or power. Right now, we have designed a bunch of our institutions and our social media platforms to glorify and reward conflict entrepreneurs. Every day, I wake up and just try not to be one, right? Because it's very tempting. You get literally rewarded for it today. So as the conflict entrepreneurs get louder and louder, and as they get elected into office and as they are handed huge megaphones on social media, then it becomes very hard to know what is representative of a group or what is one loud mouth who happens to have the biggest microphone, right? So this is one of the ways that we make big mistakes about our enemies or our opponents. And what we find is, and this is actually really good news, is that when you tell people that this is a mistake and what the real facts are, people actually reduce the amount that they hate the other side. So it is a treatment, so to speak, for high conflict, to just inform people, which is what ideally journalism would be doing, to help people understand each other better as they really are, not as they are performed on social media. This distortion effect causes us to misidentify and misunderstand both our enemies and our leaders and our heroes. We make a lot of mistakes, and eventually, we start to destroy the thing we went into the fight to protect, and we begin to mimic the behavior of our opponents without even realizing it, which is a sure sign of high conflict. There's something that researchers call integrative complexity, and that's the ability to hold multiple, sometimes contradictory truths in your head at once. And we know that this is an incredibly valuable skill in the modern world, like things are not all one way or all the other, and we know that when you can hold that tension, then you make fewer mistakes. So the pull to see everything in black and white, us versus, them is very strong in the current climate, in a sort of age of conflict, right? But you miss really important things. If you look at the polling data over decades of how Americans feel about abortion, what you see is incredible complexity. People will answer differently on different days if the question is phrased slightly differently. People do not fit neatly into a pro or anti-abortion camp. People have really complicated feelings about abortion, and many people don't know what the right answer is. We've trained over 500 journalists through Good Conflict, and one of the things we train journalists to do is to intentionally and routinely interview people who have changed their mind or who aren't sure what to think about a complicated social problem. Because most of us aren't sure what to think about everything, but we don't really see that modeled anywhere, right? You're supposed to know for sure, and there's very little intellectual humility on social media or on TV, but in a time of high conflict, it's actually really interesting. It's interesting to see when we're wrestling with something internally, and it's more true. The number one antidote to splitting is to have relationships with people who aren't like you, who look differently than you or vote differently than you or pray differently than you. This is getting harder and harder to do. So I don't wanna suggest that it's easy for lots of reasons, but if you can invest in those relationships and create some kind of rules of engagement that you both agree on so that you can understand each other better, then you will be much less likely to make this mistake of splitting the world into a false dichotomy or an us versus them. There are organizations that can help us do this when it comes to politics, like Braver Angels is one where they have chapters all over the country, and they help people come together and really listen to each other, even as they continue to profoundly disagree. And I will say, having gone to some of these workshops as a reporter, it does change you. I remember vividly the first one I went to years ago in Virginia, and I was just observing, I thought, as a reporter, but there were these two gentlemen who I probably disagree with on many, many things, but as they were talking in this format that Braver Angels has set up, I also noticed that they were really funny. They just had a good sense of humor, and all of a sudden, it complicated my view, right? Because I could see that they were more than one thing and we all are more than one thing. That doesn't mean I agree, that doesn't mean they agree with me, nor should they, right? But it does mean that I couldn't just dismiss them out of hand, right? I couldn't just assume they were just entirely ignorant and useless and vice versa. So the more you can engage in those conversations and really cultivate healthy conflict on purpose, which is getting harder to do, but is possible, the more immune you're going to be to conflict entrepreneurs, to splitting, to humiliation, to all the things that tend to spark really destructive, malignant conflict.