Show Notes
In our divided world we face or avoid conflicts on a frequent basis. I turned to Bob Bordone and Joel Salinas to find out the best strategies to deal with these, including having them take on a mock conflict between each other on the merits of Covid research. Audio file You can also find this on Spotify and Apple podcasts with Ground Truths. The video is also posted on YouTube Transcript with Audio Links Eric Topol (00:06): Well, hello. It's Eric Topol with Ground Truths, and we're going to get into a new book called Conflict Resilience: Negotiating Disagreement Without Giving Up or Giving In, and we're lucky to have its two authors, Bob Bordone, who is a Senior Fellow at Harvard Law School, and Joel Salinas, who is a physician, neurologist, a clinician scientist at NYU. So welcome both Bob and Joel. Bob Bordone and Joel Salinas (00:34): Thank you for having us. Yeah, looking forward to the conversation. Eric Topol (00:37): Yeah. So first, how did you guys get together? This is a pretty diverse, you got law and medicine, usually they don't talk to each other very much. Bob Bordone (00:46): Well, we were very fortunate. I mean, we basically were friends, but part of that friendship, I think emerged from work that I do around conflict issues in the Mass General system and then just the larger, bigger Mass General, Harvard community. Yeah, so this began really as a friendship where we were each swimming in very different waters, but then as we would start to talk, we realized there was a lot of connection and maybe the possibility to bring two different disciplines together in a way that might be practically useful and make an impact. And even when we started writing this, which was during Covid, what seemed to be some pretty polarizing times that were unlikely to resolve by the time the book would come out. Eric Topol (01:44): Yeah, well you sure hit it with the divisiveness and the polarized world that we live in is perhaps worse than ever, certainly in all my years, and probably long before then as well. So this topic of resilience, it's a very interesting concept because some people might think of resilience as just being tough. So go into a conflict and just go heavy tough. That obviously is not what you're writing about. And I guess maybe we can start off, what was the goal here? Obviously, there's other books that have addressed this topic, I'm sure, but yours is somewhat unique in many respects because it brings in the science of it and many strategies perhaps that have never been developed. But when you got together, what was the mission that you set out to do? Joel Salinas (02:38): Yeah, well maybe I can start out and then you can add on. So my research has been all around understanding how social relationships influenced brain health, and one of the things that I was seeing was social isolation and loneliness had been steadily increasing. Want to figure out what kind of interventions or what are the factors that are involved here? And I think one of the things that has stood out is just the difficulty with being able to navigate conflict in different contexts. And so, the idea around conflict resilience is really, even though there's been lots of books on what to say and what specific tactics to use, I think that there was this skillset around just being able to sit with the discomfort of that disagreement, which will ultimately help make it much more useful to take on those tactics. One way to think about it, if it's like all these tactics are like learning how to cook with a set of recipes in the kitchen, what we're really proposing here is that you also need to be able to stand the heat of the kitchen to even be able to cook. Eric Topol (03:47): Okay. Go ahead, Bob. Bob Bordone (03:49): Yeah, and I would say I was starting to write about my first kind of piece on this topic where I use the word conflict resilience was in 2018, and it really came from an observed dynamic that I was seeing in my teaching of Harvard La
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