Amanda Ripley on Conflict
b'Amanda Ripley is a New York Times Bestselling Author, an investigative journalist, the host of The Slate Podcast \\u201cHow To!,\\u201d and the co-founder of Good Conflict, a company that creates workshops and original content to help people get smarter about how they fight and deal with conflict. Amanda has spent her career trying to make sense of complicated human mysteries, helping people get out of dysfunctional conflicts, and helping countries to educate virtually all of their kids to think for themselves. Her most recent book is High Conflict: Why We Get Trapped and How We Get Out. Her previous books include The Unthinkable: Who Survives When Disaster Strikes and Why and The Smartest Kids in the World. Throughout her work she follows people who have been through some type of transformation, including the survivors of hurricanes and plane crashes, American teenagers who have experienced high school in other countries, and politicians and gang members who were bewitched by toxic conflicts and managed to break free. Amanda also has written about how journalists can do a better job of covering controversy in an age of outrage.\\n\\xa0\\nAmanda had a number of amazing insights during our conversation. Some of them include:\\n\\u201c4 out of 10 Americans are sometimes or often actively avoiding contact with the news\\u201d (8:50).\\n\\u201cWe\\u2019re stuck in and old way of deciding what is the news and how to deliver it\\u201d (9:30).\\n\\u201cI do not ever watch TV news\\u2026 it doesn\\u2019t tend to leave you more informed\\u201d (10:50).\\n\\u201cPart of my identity is wanting to be informed\\u201d (13:40).\\n\\u201cI do want to be informed, but the news is not giving me what I want\\u201d (14:15).\\n\\u201cThere are three things we know humans need, almost biologically, that are missing from most reporting: hope, agency, and dignity\\u201d (15:00).\\n\\u201cHope is like water. We need to have something to believe in\\u201d (15:40).\\n\\u201cAny story I\\u2019ve ever done, whether it\\u2019s in India, Colombia, or Washington DC, no matter how grim, there are glimmers of hope, agency, and dignity. And they just didn\\u2019t make it into the story\\u201d (19:05).\\n\\u201cThere\\u2019s a healthy level of needing to matter that we all have. I think a lot of the struggles that people are having in the modern age have to do with not feeling like they matter, not feeling like they belong\\u201d (28:30).\\n\\u201cThe best journalism is low-ego, high-curiosity journalism that treats people like they matter\\u201d (29:40).\\n\\u201cMy main job at this point, if I\\u2019m doing journalism, is to try to revive curiosity\\u201d (48:40).\\n\\u201cConflict is not the problem. We need conflict\\u2026 to be heard, to get stronger, to push\\u201d (48:50).\\n\\u201cCorruption is a condition for high conflict\\u201d (51:10).\\n\\u201cAnyone who has taken a negotiation class in American business schools knows that what partisans are doing on social media and in congress is totally opposite of everything we know you should do if you want to get, over the long term, a sustainable deal\\u201d (55:40).\\n\\u201cRemove the audience [when you\\u2019re having an argument]\\u201d (1:02:35).\\n\\u201cHalf of what people want in conflict is to be heard\\u201d (1:03:40).\\n\\u201cAs difficult as it is, we always learn something we didn\\u2019t know [through conflict]\\u201d (1:13:20).\\n\\u201cOnce you experience people having honest, hard conversations across a big divide, but with some dignity and decency, you actually want more of it\\u201d (1:16:15).\\n\\u201c100 million Americans are actively avoiding contact with the news\\u201d (1:19:30).\\n\\xa0\\nAdditionally, you can check out Amanda\\u2019s website here, and I strongly encourage you to purchase Amanda\\u2019s new book, High Conflict, which you can buy anywhere books are sold. Also, Amanda has a great podcast through Slate called \\u201cHow To!\\u201d which I also recommend you give a listen to. Lastly, you can follow Amanda on Twitter as well!\\nThank you so much to Amanda for coming on the podcast!\\nI wrote a book called \\u201cShift Your Mind\\u201d that was released in October of 2020, and you can order it on Amazon and Barnes and Noble. Additionally, I have launched a company called Strong Skills, and I encourage you to check out our new website https://www.strongsk'