Heidi Burgess:  Hi. This is Heidi Burgess, and I'm here today with Peter Coleman, who is, I have to admit, I didn't look up your title, at the Teacher's College in Columbia. Guy and I have known Peter for, I don't know, 30 years. He was involved in Beyond Intractability at the very beginning. And I think he, more than anyone else, maybe Lou Kriesberg also, has been kind of the guru of intractable conflicts, writing two books on the topic. The first one was called The Five Percent. And the title came from the assertion that pretty much five percent of all conflicts, be they interpersonal, international, or anything in between, would become intractable, and it looked at why and it looked at what to do about it. And then he wrote a follow-on called The Way Out which was really taking the same ideas and applying them to the US, political conflict, particularly toxic polarization—we call it hyperpolarization. And indeed, trying to find a way out. And what I'd like to get Peter to do, first off, really, is to quickly talk about the key ideas in both those books about what makes conflicts intractable, maybe particularly zooming in on political polarization in the United States. What's making this so difficult? And then I'd like to spend most of our conversation talking about the way out, both in terms of the book, but more particularly in terms of how is our society going to get out of this mess?

Peter Coleman: Yeah. Very good. All right. That sounds great. That's a big agenda, but let's try to tackle it.

Heidi: We can solve it. We've got an hour! 

Peter: Okay. That sounds good. Yeah. So I'm Peter Coleman. I'm a professor of psychology and education at Columbia. I'm on different faculties there. And I direct a center called the Morton Deutsch International Center for Cooperation and Conflict Resolution. And then I founded what we call a consortium, which is called the Advanced Consortium on Cooperation, Conflict, and Complexity. That's a university-wide consortium, which is situated at the Earth Institute at Columbia. So I work in different faculties and are affiliated with these two centers. In the Morton Deutsch Center, about 15 years ago, we launched this thing called the Difficult Conversations Lab, and that came out of my interest in intractability. So yeah, I got interested in intractable conflict, and that's when I met Heidi and Guy years ago. I think my first introduction to it was reading a chapter by Dean Pruitt and Paul Olczak, which was in a book about Morton Deutsch's influence. I think it was labeled "intractable conflict" or something like that, you know, extremely difficult conflicts. And they took a somewhat systems view. They were using a model out of clinical psychology that was thinking about treating humans clinically in a holistic way. And they used that model and applied it to conflict.

And I thought that was very innovative and interesting. And the idea of intractability as this understudied subset of conflicts that we knew little about and didn't really know how to address effectively. We had Getting to Yes, win-win negotiation and mediation processes and other kinds of conflict resolution processes for more resolvable conflicts, moderate kinds of conflicts, that we can navigate through. But these more long-term, stuck conflicts that sort of last longer than anybody wants them to was an outlier. We didn't know much about it. And so I got interested in that as a doctoral student.

I did some research on ripeness theory as a motive to when parties will actually consider, in an intractable conflict, coming together— coming together and negotiate as opposed to trying to kill each other. And so I did some preliminary kind of, I would say, micro studies. So trying to understand ripeness and motivation in terms of bringing people together, studying humiliation as a toxic emotion. It seems to be at the core of some intractable conflicts, studying identity formation around intractability.

So I was studying pieces of the problem, but I was really always taken by Pruitt and Olczak's paper and a more holistic understanding of it. And so I got interested in systems thinking and trying to understand systemically, how do we understand intractability? I found our field a bit wanting in that because there were some systemic thinkers like Louise Diamond and John Paul Lederach, and others —there was Maire Dugan— that were thinking more holistically about conflict and long-term protracted conflicts.

But they were mostly using systems as a metaphor, as a lens through which to think. And I was trained by Morton Deutsch, who was an empirical scientist, you know, theorist, but an empirical scientist. And I really needed or wanted to be able to do research with data to see if it could help us understand the usefulness or lack of usefulness of these kinds of systemic metaphors.

So I discovered some work by two social psychologists, Robin Vallinker and Andre Novak, who were introducing ideas and methods and models from physics and complexity science into psychology in different ways. And they were, I thought, doing some of the best conceptual work that led to empirical research to challenge or refine the conceptual work and then ultimately to develop some implications for practice. So I reached out to them and said, "Do you want to work on world peace?" And they said, "Let's do it!" And so we got funded for about five years to put this group together, which we called the Dynamical Systems Theory Group and focused principally on intractability. And so that was, I don't know, 15 years ago or so that that started.

And so, again, we're starting to borrow ideas and methods from things like physics and biology, the harder sciences that were more advanced in their use of interpretation or use of leveraging of complexity science to study phenomena. Because complexity science ideas are used in biology, in physics, in medicine, in a variety of different ways, but less so in the social sciences andin  less sophisticated ways in peace and conflict at the time.

So that's what we did. And we built this thing that we call the Difficult Conversations Lab because we needed to be able to collect data that would allow us to basically capture people's experiences of conflict in real time over time. Because what many psychology studies will do is measure somebody's attitude before a conversation and then have them have a conversation and then measure their attitude afterwards and see if the conversation was helpful or not.  But that didn't allow for the measurement of what happened during the conversation that is useful, or not useful, to understand. So we built a lab that was modeled after a lab that John and Julie Gottman have. They studied marital conflict in their love lab on the West Coast. And they had what they call a capture lab. And so we modeled our lab after that and used the Difficult Conversation Lab as one of the methodologies we used to try to track conflict dynamics over time in these sort of difficult conversations.

We also did case studies of Mozambique and other long-term difficult conflicts that changed. But the Difficult Conversation Lab was the first place that we really tried to empirically test some of our theoretical assumptions that we were borrowing from physics. And the primary metaphor that came out of physics that we applied was this idea of attractors, and attractor dynamics.

Attractors are simply patterns that you can see and that we fall into as human beings. I always talk about people's siblings or their nuclear family, their family of origin, because you may grow up and move away and have your own life. But when you go home, you pretty much fall back into the attractor of your childhood.  And the politics of your siblings is still the same and you have the same old arguments. Why is that? I'm so different than I was 50 years ago, but somehow, the pecking order is the same.

These are attractor patterns. And attractors, again, are just a concept. When you measure something over time, oftentimes you see strong inclinations in a system. So John Gottman would bring a married couple in, have them talk about a conflict for an hour, and then measure basically their positive to negative experiences over that period of time.

And what they would see in the data are strong patterns that if the couple comes in again and again and again, they kind of move into these strong emotional patterns that are very robust in terms of showing up again and again and again. Because two people in a room could feel 100,000 different things, but we don't. We move into these patterns. So we used the concept of attractors and then some of the methods for measuring attractors in conflict to better understand and to validate or refine our thinking and our theory. And so that's sort of what came out of the initial work with this team. and we wrote several papers and then we, as a team, wrote a book, a third book, which was called Attracted to Conflict. And it's an academic book. And it was really chapters that had some of the theory behind how we think about this, both intractability, but also ultimately of attractor dynamics and how we understand that.

And then there were mathematical models that Andre Novak and Larry Leibovich developed that were visualizing some of those dynamics and testing how to change those dynamics through simple changes in algorithms or simple models. But then we also had some case studies and some studies of escalation dynamics and things like that. So the science is more heavy in the book, Attracted to Conflict. That came out, I think, a year after the 5%. And the 5% we had planned to publish together, when I got a literary agent and they looked at it. They refused to have eight people, eight authors on a more popular-like book. So I became the author and I cite them in the first page as being critical contributors to everything that I'm saying. And I essentially wrote that book.

And that really was an attempt to show what, at the time, we felt were useful insights coming out of this research for practitioners, for people that are trying to address these things. And again, the basic model was this attractor dynamic model. And that argues that something like how you relate to your siblings over time is not determined only by your personality or their personality or your history or alcoholism in the family or part of the country you live in.  It's some constellation of all of those things that come to bear to create these patterns that are so hard to change. So it was our attempt to take complex systems and say, you know, each complex system is different because it has different pieces, but it's really how those pieces come together that determine these patterns. And so that's how we approach it. 

The one thing I want to emphasize is that one of the insights that we had generated from theory, but we really wanted to experimentally explore in the Difficult Conversation Lab, was the power of complexity. The idea that when conflicts persist, become escalated, intense, we've become identified with them. What tends to happen is what we call "a collapse of complexity," a simplification of how we feel, how we think, and how we respond to conflicts. And that collapse of complexity, we were able to actually see in the data. We would bring in people who were opposed on some morally divisive issue like abortion. The first study, we just brought them in and had a facilitator there to shut it down if it got bad. And we said, "Can you try to generate a consensus statement of your thinking on this issue?" And then we just let it run.

And we were really interested in the conversations that went really poorly, got stuck. People got frustrated and either needed to stop or they stopped themselves, or the conversations that actually ended up being what we would call constructive. People felt like the conversation was worthwhile. They'd do it again. They continue it with this person. They felt like they were able to generate statements that were sort of nuanced. And so then we compared those two. And the primary difference, I would say, that we identified in the data, was this collapse of complexity. Those conversations that went poorly and that people weren't willing to continue were very simple in terms of their emotional dynamics over time, in terms of how people thought about the issues in themselves, and in terms of their behaviors, how they treated one another.

And so we saw these patterns of simplification versus staying in a more nuanced way. It's not that the good conversations didn't feel negative things or that the participants didn't get frustrated or annoyed, but they moved in and out of positivity and negativity more dynamically over the time of the conversation, which allowed them to ultimately feel like it was mixed positive and worthwhile.

And that insight around complexity, again, is something that psychology has studied in terms of integrative complexity and behavioral complexity and emotional complexity and the values of that for things like leadership. We were really interested in how it operates in intractability or potentially intractable conflicts as a core phenomenon that captures how we think, feel, and act, but then ultimately how we organize our societies, right? Because we start to build these institutions that are also rigid and exclusive. And so basically, it's how that principle of the collapse of complexity or attractor dynamics scales at different levels.

And I think, Heidi, that gets a little bit to the notion of scaling the implications of The Five Percent and The Way Out. The way I've always approached this is that we do this research, not to just identify like an individual difference of somebody's personality, but to identify principles, scientific principles, that have the potential of scaling. So attractor dynamics can be seen in just how I think today, right? My behavioral ritual every morning, right, is pretty common. In fact, somebody just did some big data science research about humans across the world. And they basically said, "you know, we're very predictable. We all get up, stick a toothbrush in our mouth, use the bathroom, get breakfast, tend to the kids, go to work, and come home." That's pretty much what everybody around the world does. 98% of us every day.

And so again, those are attractor patterns. And how did that happen? And what makes that? Given all the vast differences in wealth and education, basically, most people are doing the same thing. That's an extraordinary thing. And those are evidence of attractors. We were able to see evidence of attractors in these two-person conversations over moral differences in terms of how they felt and acted and thought about the issues and the other.

But we also see those kinds of patterns, strong patterns— they're called attractors because they are patterns that draw us in, right, even if we don't want to. Like addiction is an attractor, right? You don't want to pick it up, but you just keep doing it, despite the fact that it's ruining your life. And in American society, political tribalism and political polarization and political contempt for the other side is a very robust attractor, right?

It's a pattern — a scalable pattern — in society. If you look at Pew Research data, and other sources of data, what you see is since the late 1970s, Americans have become colder towards the other side. They have more of a sense of contempt and frustration with the other side. And you see the same kinds of dynamics in the federal government, in Congress, in the Senate, in their lack of bipartisanship and their obstructionism. So this is something like 50-year pattern that we're trapped in. And the evidence of that is pretty clear at the local level and at the state level and at the federal level. And again, there's no one thing that causes it. It's a constellation of things and how they come together.

But if you look at, for example, red and blue voting patterns across elections over the past 25 years, there's not a lot of movement. People vote the same way in the same places over decades and decades —despite 9/11, despite Afghanistan, despite COVID, despite whatever. It's like we can throw everything at us and people still do the same thing, right? And so those are attractor patterns. And so understanding the nature of these patterns, how they form, and importantly, for intractability, the conditions under which they change, is important. 

What are the levers that we should consider for changing up these patterns? And so in The Five Percent, I write about some of those but, to some degree, we felt like when that book was written, these were very preliminary. There was some sense of validity to them. And in The Way Out, what I do is I build off of what I wrote about in The Five Percent, but take it further and bring in other areas of science and other research. And I do offer in The Way Out some new ideas.  I see political polarization in this country as an intractable phenomenon, right? It's a complex long-term phenomenon that doesn't seem to be changing soon.

But there are certain conditions under which those kinds of patterns can get destabilized and change course. And we've seen this in societies like Costa Rica and the Scandinavian countries and Botswana and Mauritius, where there were long periods of division and even war. And then at some point, those societies break free of that and choose a different course. And so there are certain conditions that are hopeful for destabilizing societies enough that they choose a different path intentionally.

And so that's one of the arguments I make in The Way Out, is that we are amidst those conditions right now because of our increased awareness of racial injustice in this country, because of our COVID destabilization, that was sort of rocked our world because of Trump's approach to governing, Trumpism and how destabilizing that was and the insurgency on January 6th. All of these things were major political shocks which destabilized all of us, our lives, our feelings, our attitudes. And sometimes they encourage people to question the status quo, question their day, their assumptions, their relationships that they have and don't have, where they do and don't travel. So I argue in the book that despite how difficult and sometimes depressing and demanding our current era is, it's also so destabilizing that it offers an opportunity for change.

But as Bill Zartman would tell us, there are two things that you need in intractable situations. One is being destabilized and miserable enough on all sides of the equation or most sides — and having a sense of a way out. What does that look like? And so that's why I wrote The Way Out because I wanted to offer some sense of what the science tells us are useful levers for an alternative way forward, right? Not the same old patterns. But if you want to choose a different pattern, what does that look like?

And so in that book, there are five principles that I offer. Some of them are informed by our earlier work in the Difficult Conversation Lab and with complexity. One of the principles is complicate your life, right? Because we're creatures of habit, we'll watch the same news, right? We get comfortable with the news we trust. And so we go to that, whenever the news breaks, we go to PBS or CNN or whatever it is that is our go-to. What I've had to do over the past few years is train myself when the news breaks, when something interesting is happening, I find four or five people on the other side of the political aisle who I, importantly, think are smart, well-intentioned, but politically different from me, are decent people, but in my view, but are politically opposed to me.  And what I intentionally do when there's a story-breaking, I seek them out for information as well. Because otherwise, I just get my comfort food, my comfort news that reinforces my assumptions and doesn't really challenge my thinking. And these days, because we have very separate news information, networks, kind of parallel worlds, it's important for all of us to force ourselves to complicate our understanding, complicate our feelings, complicate what we do.

One of the things I've done in the past year and a half now is rekindle a relationship with a neighbor of mine who I'd become completely estranged from because he's in the other camp. He was intentionally provocative and saying ridiculous things to me that I thought were pretty insane. And so for about a year, I became aware of his support for Donald Trump in 2016 and I still stayed in conversation with him for a while. And then at some point, I just thought, "I'm out. I don't want to I don't want this anymore. This is just bad energy, bad news, and I'm never going to convince this guy of anything else." And so I did pull out of the relationship for about a year. And then I wrote this darn book, The Way Out, and about a year after I wrote it, I thought, "All right. I've got to try." So I did.  I emailed my neighbor and I said, "Hey, would you go for a walk with me?" And we lived near Riverside Park on the west side of Manhattan.  I said, "Would you go for a walk with me in the park?"

And he wrote back and said, "Happy to have a conversation with you. Why walk? Are you CIA? Are you afraid that there's going to be surveillance?" And I said, "you know, I'll explain it to you. I think it could be useful. Would you be willing?" He agreed. And then, I literally tried to walk my talk.

I basically took the five principles that I've outlined in the book that I think have implications at different levels for individuals, for families, for organizations, for societies. But I said, "Okay, how am I going to do this today in my life?" And so I reached out, asked him to go for a walk, which was intentional because one of the principles is the power of physical movement, either alone to kind of trigger our neuroplasticity and our flexibility and think in different ways, feel different feelings, also movement together, moving with others side by side, ideally outside. And the value of that, that we're learning from neuroscience, is people feeling a stronger sense of compassion and connection or openness to each other that can come when you move together physically, ideally outside, side-by-side. So asking him to go for a walk was very intentional, because I believed that that could help us, right?

But what I also had to do as the first principle is to reset. We're on such an automatic pilot that we need to really think about "how do we start this over?" And what does that mean? And so I had to ask myself when I reached out to him, "What's the point?" Because I know how the conversation can go, right? The automatic stuff would just put us in nonsense land. And one of us would walk away. So I knew that that would be easy to fall into. So I had to say to myself, "Well, what am I doing here? What do I really want to do here, because I'm not going to change his mind?" And what I thought was, "you know, I don't know anybody that's all in on Trump and Putin."  And this is an opportunity to try to understand that, at a deeper level. And so I really thought I want to understand. I want to take this opportunity to learn because that is, I think, really important.

And so then I thought, "Well, if I'm going to do that, how do I do that?" And so one of the ways, of course, is moving together. Another of the ways is, again, kind of allowing his story to complicate my understanding of him and the issues in Trumpism, right?

And so instead of jumping into politics and jumping into an issue and having that happen, what we did on the walk was begin by me saying, "Can you tell me who you are? Where'd you come from? What's your history? What's your family's history? What's important to you?" And it was a really interesting story, right? Not what I expected. Very interesting.

He was born in France. His grandfather was a very influential rabbi in France, he moved to the UK, he is here now, and he does business around the world. His story is just really interesting, right? And part of what I started to understand is that he's a member I think, a founding member. of a temple across the street that's more conservative, Orthodox. And the values of that community are very aligned with what Trump espouses, right? And so suddenly, the context of his decisions made much more sense to me. It wasn't just that he was crazy and listened to Breitbart, although he was doing that too. But it was also that there's an alignment here with his community's values, right? So hearing that helped.

And then he said to me, "Who are you?" And I shared who I am.  And I think that made a difference, too, because I told him my story, and I'm not who you think I am unless you hear my story. And one of the things he discovered in the story was that you know I'm born Irish Catholic, but my wife is Jewish. And he said, "So your children are Jewish." And I said, "Yeah, that's right." And that, of course, mattered to him, surprised him, right, but also opened up some space and possibility.

So we started with what I would call dialogue, not debate, right? We started with sharing of stories of who we are, where we come from, not interrogation, not challenging, but just hearing each other's context to rekindle some of the rapport that we used to have. And then he said, "you know Why are you here?" He said, "I assume you want to talk to me because you don't know any Republicans you can talk to." I said, "That's not true." He said, "Well, you don't know any Trump-loving Republicans." I said, "That's absolutely true." And then I used another principle which was —and this is a way to complicate things— I intentionally said, "Can you explain to me your passion and for support for Trump?" And that simple question of asking people to explain sometimes allows them to talk long enough to get to the things that they're not really certain about.

And that's kind of what happened as we kept walking. He started to talk about Trump. He was hitting all the main talking points from Breitbart. You know George Soros is the source of all evil, and Obama was a loser, and you know —all of that stuff. And of course, if I countered any of it, we would have been off to the races. I saw no value in that. So I just listened. I would once in a while ask clarifying questions: "so you think this, but not that." Okay. And as we talked, he got more passionate. He walked faster. He got kind of riled up. He was really ready for this debate, which didn't happen because I didn't play that game. I just listened and questioned. And then a kind of fascinating thing happened, which is that we walked for a while.

He talked, and I listened, and I didn't do what he expected. And so towards the end of the conversation, as we were moving back towards our building, he started to express his own ambivalences about his candidate and some of their choices and some of the decisions. And was that the right thing to do? Probably not. And should he run again? Probably not.  And so he was beginning to come to some of his own doubts and ambivalences, but not by me telling him. And that's a very powerful thing when in a conversation, someone else isn't shaking their finger at you and saying, "You're wrong. I've got different facts." But people are able to come to their own doubts because we all have them, right? We all have them, no matter how extreme we are. And the more extreme we are, the less we pay attention to them, but we still have them, right?

So we went through this walk, which had a kind of reset, which had movement, which had a complicating factor, which is as I learned about him, as he learned about me, as I heard him come to his own uncertainties. It did complicate my feelings for him, my experience for him, my understanding of Trumpism. Things got more complicated. And so we were able to complicate things.

And then very importantly, I think part of what happened towards the end is when I first met him, first of all, I was anxious. I was sick to my stomach beforehand because these are hard, right? And if they go bad, you know it's going to be even harder. So I was nervous. And when I met him, he was sitting in front of our building on a bench. And he said, "I just want you to know my wife's not feeling well, so I may have to come back early. So you know I just want you to know I may not have time to do this whole thing." And I was like, "I get it. Okay. No worries." So he, too, was agitated and nervous and afraid the CIA was tracking us. And then as we started to come back, we were walking towards the building, and I said, "Look, I know your wife isn't feeling well. Maybe we should head home." And he was like, "Eh, we can walk a few more blocks." So we did. Eventually, we came home, and I had happened to have a copy. I put a copy of my book, The Way Out, at the front door, and just said, "Here, I want you to have this. You don't have to read it. You don't have to endorse it. But I wanted you to know why I'm doing this. I'm trying to open a conversation and keep the conversation going."

And, as we got into the elevator together, he looked at the back of the book, and he said, "Yeah. Political polarization." He said, "I don't know what to do about that." He said, "you know I feel all day long, I'm just triggered and outraged and angry, and I'm lost in the forest, and I have no way how to get out of this." And I said, "Well, I think all we can do is what we just did, which is try to keep the conversation going." And he thanked me and left.

And the postscript to this is that two weeks after this walk, my son, who's about 27, got on the elevator with him, and they had never spoken before. He had never acknowledged my son, and there had never been a conversation. And he saw my son, and he said, "You're Peter's son, aren't you?" And Adelaide said, "Yeah." And he said, "Tell your father, I'm reading his book, and it ain't bad." And I thought, "That's the best endorsement I could ask for, right? "It ain't bad." And I will say, just to finish this up, you know this was one thing, right? It was an hour walk and conversation, but it made a difference in me and it made a difference in him. And since then, we've met again. And we've reached out to each other when the Israel-Palestinian tensions at Colombia really burst open. He called me right away and said, "What are you going to do about it? What can be done?" And we've met a couple of other times just to sort of catch up. He sends me articles. I send him articles. So we're keeping the conversation going.

And the reason I want to say that is because there are not quick fixes to this. And what I just described may sound like one. It was an opening. It was a beginning. But it was an ability for us to reset our relationship enough, that there was enough trust that he now comes to me when he has concerns about what the other side is doing. And so we're continuing the walk and continuing the conversation, now, a year and a half later. So I think that's part of it is the importance of realizing because the last principle in the book, which is a hard one, is that you're going to fail.

This is not going to be a quick fix. You're going to do things that don't work or that backfire. And you need to sort of have your eye in the long term because if you're going to adapt and move through this effectively, you have to recognize that it's not just getting together with Braver Angels for dinner and thinking, "I'm done," because that's not going to move the needle. You have to really understand that this is a longer-term game, a longer-term commitment. And if you can accept that, then you're less frustrated by the setbacks.

Heidi: So that's a really powerful story. I love that story. And my question is, how do we get enough people in this country doing that kind of thing to move the needle for the country?  That made a significant change for you and for him. But that's one drop of water in a vast ocean. And I think there's lots of interesting stuff going on now, Braver Angels, Livingroom Conversations. Listen First. Tons of stuff like that. Starts with Us. I've signed up for the challenge. I want you to talk about that a little bit. I can't say as I've done it very routinely. But this attractor we're in is so deep and so strong. One of the things that got me most depressed reading The Way Out is I'm looking through these five things that we have to have to get out. And one of them was a shock to the system. And I agree with you. We've had so many shocks to the system. I thought, sure, when COVID hit, it would change things because we've all learned in conflict class and sociology class that what you need is an external enemy, and that brings people together. And what better external enemy than a virus?  I mean, how could you have created an us-versus-them situation over a virus? My Gosh, we did. I mean, it's phenomenal to me that the virus deepened our animosity, instead of pulling us together.

Peter: It speaks to the power of the attractor, of the polarization because everything is weaponized. Wildfires are weaponized. Israel-Palestine is being weaponized.

Heidi: That one's more obvious to me. Wildfires should pull people together. And in fact, I think in that case, there's quite a few stories where it has. Y

Peter:  Yea, yeah. In communities, not with politicians.

Heidi: True. Very true. My question is how do we scale this?  How do we break through at a societal level, rather than interpersonal because, frankly, not that many people are going to walk that walk.

Peter: I agree with you. And not many people are going to read the book. I've come to that realization. So one of the things I'm doing is a lot of media — to try to tell stories like this so that it can get out there in different ways.

There are a couple of other things that I've been doing, one of which is consulting to about 30 different organizations that work in different spaces. Some of them work in politics, some of them work in the media, like One Small Step, which is StoryCorps people who are using media. But there are other groups too. Because I realize that this is a wicked problem or a cloud problem, it's a complex set of things that are feeding each other, there's no one way to do it. It's not going to happen just one individual at a time. But these principles, I believe, are useful for different groups. So one of the best examples that I have of this is the Select Committee for the Modernization of Congress, which is Derek Kilmer's committee. Now he is chairing the bipartisan working group, although he told me this fall, he's leaving politics. So that's depressing.

But what I wanted to say is when they set up the select committee, which was a two-year well, initially a one-year, then it became a two-year initiative to try to repair the divisions in Congress, they looked at the structure of Congress, right? Looked at incentive systems and video cameras and all the things that are affecting the culture there and to change it. And they brought in Amanda Ripley and Adam Grant and they interviewed me and others to get some sense of what to do. And then he brought me into the Select Committee to talk to the Committee about what do they do, right? What are some of the principles that could affect how they think about how Congress is organized, run, incentivized? And you know I went back to them last summer saw them again. And what they said was that committee, the Select Committee for Modernization Congress, was so successful.

They made, I don't know, 200 some recommendations to the leadership. About two-thirds of them have been implemented. And it did change a bunch of relationships. Now, not the extreme conflict entrepreneur, not the nuts, but a lot of them. And so when I went to this bipartisan working group last summer, they were clear that that was the North Star, that that committee did it right, and that they needed to emulate that in some of the other committees. And they started to cite committees that they were on where they sort of took up that approach as a way to try to mitigate some of these pressures. So that's just one example of one area, Congress, which is the epicenter of the problem, right, to some degree, or an epicenter, I guess, there's multiple ones. But where they're really trying to use insights from social science to transform their culture and think about it long-term, how do you grow a new culture, right?

So I think that's promising. There's some of that in media too. The Solutions Journalism Group, which is Amanda Ripley's project, was an attempt for journalists and editors and publishers of news to take a hard look at how they do their job, what their business model is, and how it contributes to polarization, and what an alternative might be to do reporting in a different way that is more transformative. And that, I think, is critical, right, because the media and how news is presented, misrepresented, and weaponized is so much part of the problem. So having that as an industry take that seriously, I think, is critical.

Same has to happen with major internet platforms, social media platforms, right?  So I guess my point here is that these principles have implications at any level. And so if you can get access to the Select Committee and inform them, and they can implement these ideas in ways that can meaningfully affect the culture of Congress over time, then we're on the right track. But it's not just going to be Congress.  I'm working with the Governor's Association under Spencer Cox, the Utah governor. I've been working and consulting with his folks. So, I've been basically putting in a lot of free time, free labor, to offer ideas to groups that are trying to reform their sector in different ways. And I think that is one way to work is try to kind of focus one sector at a time and find influential groups.

The other thing I'm trying to do, which you alluded to is this Starts with Us stuff.  A year after the book was published, I was talking to my daughter who read the book and she said, "you know, people aren't going to do this. People aren't going to read this. It's too hard." And so we said, "All right. Well, if I were to really live this, like you know, take a month and really live this, what would that look like?" And so I and she and a group of, I don't know, 20 of my former students and colleagues did a pilot group where we generated a bunch of ideas. If we were to actually live this every day, what would we do? And how would we proceed with that? And so the design that ultimately emerged was based on the five principles. And then the first week, we said, "Well, spend the first week with yourself and thinking about your tendencies and inclinations and habits and how you might start to reset and complicate and move and do those things for you.

The second week, importantly, is your in-group, the people that you're comfortable talking politics with that you're probably not very honest with anymore because we're not comfortable enough to be candid about, "Yeah, I don't agree with that," right? And so how do you begin to use these principles with your own group to start to open that up and break that up?

Third week is how do you reach out?  How do you prepare to reach out with others across the divide? That's when I took this walk. That was my effort during our pilot time. It was like, "Okay. I'm going to try this." And  so there are various iterations of that. And then the fourth week is trying to move into the structures and trying to identify —you know there are these great groups now, more and more, that are trying to bring red and blue or black and white or people of difference together and do so intentionally in ways that, ideally, are about action.

So one of the best groups, one of the more promising groups that I spend a little time with is the Rockefeller Brothers Foundation. They organized all of the major volunteer organizations in the country, such as Habitat for Humanity, the YMCA, YWCAs, Mercy Corps, there were a bunch of them, and brought them together for two days in a retreat where we talked about contact theory and the limits of contact theory, right, when it works, when it doesn't work, and basically started to talk to them about science and how they might think about how they do what they do.

Because Habitat for Humanity to me is a perfect example. Fantastic organization. The MO is people coming together to help build homes for the poor, right? Everybody that does it is into that, right? Don't mess with that because those actions are really important. However, if you can be a bit more intentional about who you put together, how you set it up, the kinds of support you offer, then that existing initiative can maybe have another level of effect without it messing it up. And so that was the message to all these groups is, "Don't mess up what you're doing well, but realize that there may be hidden potential in how you select people and put them together, where you do this in the country," all of those things. And if you're more intentional about that, it can have an effect. It's dealing with an existing ecosystem of volunteerism, which is huge in this country, that people do have energy for.

And most importantly, it's action. It's not just talking to somebody. It's not just listening to somebody. It's working together with somebody else to do something that you believe in. And that's so critical. And that's the fourth week. The fourth week of the challenge is start to identify whether there a group that's working on something that you think is really interesting where there are different kinds of people involved. Then get involved, right?

So our hope with the challenge is that it will introduce enough people to their own tendencies, their own group, how to reach out to the other, and how to find some of these places where you can do something that is meaningful to you with people that are different from you, because that's something that we're missing sorely in this country as we physically move away from each other.

So we started this challenge probably a year and a half ago, I think, initially, and then revised it because initially, it was 100 different activities. And every day, people had a dozen options, and people were like, "A dozen options. That's going to take me an hour to read."  Which is my tendency. My tendency is to go complicated and then simplify. So then we edited it, and we basically now offer three options a day, easy, medium, and harder, and say to people, "Do whatever you can. Do whatever makes sense to you to try to make it easier to do."

And I've been talking a lot too. There are people that do social impact campaigns. And there's a brilliant guy named Stephen K. Friedman who was MTV's first social impact guru. And he did a lot of things through MTV programming that were attempts to sort of influence the society in a pro-social way without hitting them over the head. So, for example, one of the things they did is they started to do programming on a show called Teen Pregnancy and then Teen Mom, two shows. And they were thinking about it at a time when teen pregnancy was just skyrocketing. And so he said, "Okay, yeah, we can do a show about this. It's a reality show, so it has to be true. It has to show what happens, the love, the wonders, and the nightmares of being 16 and having a child, right? And it's the most popular show MTV ever had. And some group, an economics forum, did an analysis because what happened is teen pregnancy was going up, and then it plateaued, and then it started to come down. And they did an analysis of the factors they think that contributed to that change. And they attributed something like 30% of the change to this show.

Heidi: Wow.

Peter: Right? 30%!  So those are the kinds of things that Steven thinks about. So I've taken several walks with Steven. We meet in Central Park and walk. And he's helped me think through how do we do this in a way that is sticky, is viral, and yet isn't  preaching to the choir, right? Because that's one of the challenges with Braver Angels and reading The Way Out or even doing the challenge is that you get the usual suspects. That's not enough. He said you need to have the broadest possible audience. So you know we continue to innovate and try to adapt to make it more effective.

Our current thinking, which came out of a conversation with Steven, is he said to me, "you know, what really matters to so many people right now is that they're losing relationships. Brothers, friends, coworkers that they used to hang with and enjoy, they just don't talk to anymore." And that's a pain point for the country. And he told a story of his where that happened. And he said, you know, you should just start there and just say to people, "Are you estranged from somebody that you don't want to be estranged from?" And if so, you may try this five-day thing or seven-day thing, simple thing, you know simple exercises, and even invite them to do it.  But start by giving them a call and saying, "Any chance next week, you and I can take a walk." And then do these things to kind of prepare yourself for that. Because he said, "That is emotional. It's about your relationships that you're losing. And it's a pervasive problem right now in the country." And so he said, "That might fill the funnel at the top.

And then some people will do the whole thing, which is what you want them to do, but you got to get them to taste it." So that's my current thinking is let's do something that's moving, simple, not four weeks because four weeks scares a lot of people off. Stephen is a consultant for Paramount, you know the empire, and they have a big social impact group. And so he had them go through the challenge, and they were like, "Four weeks is too much. People aren't going to do it," right? They didn't. Yeah. So he said, "Give people a teaser, a taster that resonates for them right now, that has value not for political toxicity because whatever is that, just about the fact that I don't talk to my brother anymore. And I'm not okay with that, right?

And so that's where we're starting, because it is important that something like this be viral enough that it mobilizes enough people so that then more people will do the full thing. That's our current MO.

Heidi: So how do you get people through that first door? How do you get to the people to notice that there's somebody who has an idea about what to do about their estrangement with their brother? 

Peter: Well, again, I think most of us know this, right, that if we stop and think, we think, "Yeah, I won't talk to my brother-in-law anymore, because it's just like a mess." But if you started to think, "maybe there's a way I could do that that could be okay. Maybe I'll try that." So I think we know it. I just think it has to be recognized. So just yesterday we've kind of sketched out what a week would be of a plan to address that. It's just one thing a day, simple, based on this relationship estrangement idea, where you reach out to somebody and say, "Would you do this with me?" Or at least, would you take a walk with me? And I sent it to Starts with Us. I don't know if they'll have the resources or the will to do this, because they've invested a lot in what we already have.

But also, Steven Friedman said, "If you can do something simple like that, then we can think about how to use it in media as a way to draw attention to it." How things get attention and go viral today is magic. We don't know. Suddenly, it's like cats, really? Cats in the bathroom? So it's really hard to predict that.

But Steven, over the decades, developed some principles about what you don't do, which is hit people over the head with, "This is what you got to do," right? So I'm trying to work with sophisticated social impact people to think about how do you make this enough, particularly in the environment we're in, right, where there's so much rage, so much anger, we're moving into political camps further and further. That's going to continue for at least a year, if not longer.

So what matters to people — and that's probably one thing that matters is the loss of someone that they want to be with, right? So that's what we're starting. Exactly how we implement that, [I don't know yet.] We're in conversations. We're trying to figure out who are the partners that could help us scale this. It might be influencers. It's got to be influencers, not me who are like old white people, but how do we get — say Travis Kelsey. I don't know. Although he's politicized already. He's a football player.

Heidi: I was going to say, who's he.  But now I realize, he's the one who's hooked up with Taylor Swift." Taylor Swift's boyfriend.

Peter: Yeah, he's associated on one side of the equation. 

But the other thing I've been trying to actively do is stay as connected to more conservative colleagues than possible. I went and did the Mitch McConnell Center in Kentucky and worked with those fellows. I worked with Pierce Godwin, who is an evangelical Christian, who runs Listen First. And we did a series of articles together, and we've done some presentations together. So I'm trying to stay sensitive to the right and what will or will not resonate with them.

So that's one of the litmus tests I do with things like this, is it's easy to get the left to pay attention. It's harder for the right. I do think being estranged from people you love is very common. But how that message gets out to the right is a big challenge. But it's definitely something that's on the radar.

Heidi: The one group that you haven't mentioned through this whole thing that keeps on jumping out at me is faith groups, which is probably a way to get more at the right, although there's plenty of progressives who are involved in religious organizations. I was working with one of my students for a while who was a higher up in the Episcopal Church and learned from him that they're very divided, that they're pretty much 50/50 progressive and conservative, which I wouldn't have expected. So they've been dealing with these things in their church yeah for a long time. And it strikes me that that's another like the volunteer organizations—faith organizations are a place that are worth getting involved in all of this.

Peter: Yeah. Some of that I'm doing. Just because out of serendipity, someone who's a high up in the Bahai Faith community contacted me because they kind of committed to 25 years of trying to depolarize societies around the world. And so they've taken the challenge and are adapting it and integrating it with their scriptures so that they could use it within their communities in ways that resonate with their community.

Dave Isay, the StoryCorps founder in One Small Step, they've recently connected deeply into the evangelical community. And so they're inviting evangelicals, people within the faith across these divisions to have these conversations and to share the content within them. So that's one of the ways that we're trying to do that. But yeah, I mean, the truth is, I only have so much bandwidth, and this is my hobby, not my job. You know I have five jobs and a hobby. So you know we've not been terribly well-funded. So we do what we can with volunteers and with what we have and with the kind of kindness that Starts with Us has. But they, too, are financially strapped.

So we're doing as much as we can with what we have, but you're right. That would be an ideal group to work with or get into. And that's, I guess, the hope. The hope is that — what I've said from the beginning — is this sort of challenge thing is just a bunch of ideas that come from these scientific principles. The principals themselves should stand. People can develop whatever they want. They can take the challenge and adapt it and make it work for them. It might be that Nike is very interested in movement as a piece of this. And so great. Do that. Focus on that. It has that kind of potential. But you know again, as I said, this is my hobby. Heidi,

I'm going to have to go because I have to go walk my dog before I have a 12 o'clock thing, and it's raining.

Heidi: All right. Well, thank you so much. I've learned and remembered a bunch, and I'm hoping that we get this out there and we'll get a lot more people interested and engaged.

Peter: And I just really appreciate what you've been doing these many years. Well, you all inspired me as a graduate student. I think I was a graduate student when we came together.  I was definitely just starting out in the field. And those meetings were so fantastic and so rich. So you know you definitely inspired me to move forward.

Heidi: Well, very good. Thanks!

01:06:41.000 Yeah So let's move forward together and find a way out. That sounds great. And if there's any way I can help promote this or share it or anything like that, let me know. I'll get in touch offline and we'll talk about next steps. All right. Sounds great. All right. All right. Take care of yourself. Tell guy. I said, "I'm sorry. I missed him. I hope he recovers soon." Thank you much. Talk to you soon. Bye-bye.