Ep60 "Can we think better by wrestling with conflicting ideas?"

Why do we believe our own truths so strongly? What is steel-manning, and why is it so important? What does any of this have to do with F. Scott Fitzgerald, John Keats, or the future of our society? This week's episode deals with polarization and what we might do about it. Join Eagleman and his guest Isaac Saul, who works to represent different points of view in his newsletter Tangle -- all in the name of the intellectual humility that can blossom from grappling with conflicting ideas.

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:05):
Why do we all believe our own truths so strongly?
And is there any possibility that we can at least
see other points of view? What is steel manning and
why is it so important? What does any of this
have to do with f Scott Fitzgerald or John Keats
or the future of our society? Welcome to Inner Cosmos

(00:29):
with me David Eagleman. I'm a neuroscientist and an author
at Stanford, and in these episodes we come from the
perspective of the brain to understand why and how our
lives look the way they do. Today's episode is about

(00:53):
something that I've talked about on here before, which is
the extreme and seemingly growing rization that characterizes much of
our society at this moment, and I'm interested in it
from the point of view of neuroscience. I'm not banging
on about any particular political position here. What I'm interested
in is how we come to form our truths and

(01:16):
why we each believe in them so strongly. For all
of us, with whatever political issue, our intuition usually is
to say, well, I know that I'm correct about this,
but the important part to point out is that, depending
on the issue, roughly half of the society has a
different point of view than you do, and on almost

(01:37):
any hot button political issue, you'll find that the people
on the other side of the issue have exactly the
same dedication and passion that you do, the same absolute
belief that they are right and that you are misinformed. Generally,
it's hard to see this with politics, and I don't
want to ruffle any feathers here, but I just want
to point out that it's often easier to see this

(01:59):
with something like religion, whatever deity you were brought up with.
You tend to think, okay, well, I know that's right,
and I know that the other two thousand religions on
this planet are all diluted and incorrect. But of course
each of those people is looking at you and thinking
exactly the same thing. The way the atheist community sometimes

(02:19):
phrases this is we are all atheists. I just believe
in one fewer God than you do. And it's always
a worthwhile exercise to think about what your beliefs would
be if you happened to be born into a different religion,
Let's say, on a different spot on the globe, where
everyone that you cared about, your mentors, your hero is

(02:41):
your relatives all believed in that deity. So ask yourself,
what would be your worldview? Now, if there were a
single truth about which deity is correct, you might expect
that that would spread everywhere equally. So you'd look for
evidence of a grassroots takeover of Ottestanism in Mecca, or

(03:02):
maybe a blossoming of Islam in North Dakota. But that's
not what we see. We all take whatever our culture
pours into our nervous systems. Now, I use this as
an example only to illustrate that it's easy to recognize
that there are many points of view on things that
we feel our fundamental truths, and for better or worse,

(03:23):
people can hold these truths with absolute conviction and take
up arms over this stuff, and we might be able
to get ourselves to a point of realizing that if
you were brought up in a different place, you might
have a different point of view. Okay, now you've heard
me talk about on other episodes. Is that the brain
is locked in silence and darkness inside your skull and

(03:47):
its whole life. It's just trying to make a model
of the world out there. We slide into the world
half baked, and we each experience a very thin trajectory
in this world. We're born in a particular spot at
a particular moment in time, and we have a handful
of experiences that shape our view, and the massive flexibility

(04:10):
of the human brain, what's called brain plasticity, is what
allows us to absorb our local experiences and shape our model.
So we each end up with an idiosyncratic model about
what makes sense. But the interesting thing is that our
human brains are generally terrible at seeing outside of their

(04:31):
own walls. We generally believe that our view of the
world is the correct view, and we're typically likely to
think that anyone who votes differently than we do is
a real problem because they are misinformed or stubborn, or
at the extreme, they're simply evil. So we have limited
internal models combined with a sense that we know the truth.

(04:55):
This is just the way that brains work, and for
much more detailedness, please listen to some of my previous episodes,
which I've linked in the show notes on Eagleman dot
com slash podcast. Now, one of the things that's been
hard to miss is watching millions of humans on both
sides of society doubling down and saying that they need
to protect our democracy, which is being threatened by the

(05:18):
other side. And part of what makes me feel dismayed
is that I have intelligent friends on both sides of
the aisle, and many of the people that I know
and love are truly unable to see the viewpoint of
the other side. People on both sides claim to have
logic on their side, and morality and the statistics, and

(05:40):
they feel certain that they're right and the other side
is wrong. And for that matter, a lot of people
feel certain that there even are clearly definable sides, even
though so much of political life on Earth's complexities in
which issues go with which. And again, what this comes
down to is the limitations of the internal model. Without

(06:00):
real effort, we have a difficult time putting ourselves at
other people's shoes. And it would be one thing if
only a few people had this other point of view.
But in the case of current political upheaval, it's usually
the case that about half of the humans that you
spin with might be on the other side of some issues.
So it's not just a few people with a wacky opinion.

(06:23):
We're talking about millions of people who genuinely feel differently
about some issue. Than you do. And the question is,
is there a way for us to expand our internal
models to at least see their point of view, not
even agree with it, just understand what their perspective is
and why. Now we're all familiar with the problem that's

(06:44):
currently worsening our political discourse, which is we all tend
to seek out the people who agree with us, and
it's a self reinforcing loop such that we tend to
believe that most or all sane and reasonable people agree
with us. But the question for today is is there
any meaningful way that we could combat this tendency to

(07:07):
retreat into our own echo chambers and at least here
with the other side of the political issue is saying
and how they're feeling, and to appreciate the complexities and
diversity of opinions on the other side. There's a great
quotation from the writer F. Scott Fitzgerald who says, quote,
the test of a first rate intelligence is the ability

(07:30):
to hold two opposed ideas in mind at the same
time and still retain the ability to function. And the
poet John Keats, who was a believer in this concept
as well, he called this ability negative capability, which he
just meant as a person being capable of being in
uncertainties and mysteries and doubts. So there's some nodding to

(07:55):
this in the intellectual community, but we're not seeing a
great deal of this in the political media. This holding
two opposed ideas in mind at the same time, well
why not. I suspect there are at least two issues here.
The first is that we all like to believe our
own truths in the second is that people often feel
that they will seem smarter and get more followers if

(08:16):
they take a hardline position and say I understand this
with crystal clarity, I have no doubts.

Speaker 2 (08:23):
Now.

Speaker 1 (08:23):
This is true for politicians and also for media outlets,
which are rewarded for speaking the language that their constituents
want to hear. And of course we see on all
sides of the spectrum the media that say, look, we
only care to tell the truth. Everyone else might be

(08:43):
a liar or misdirected, but we're finally going to get
this right. We see this on all sides, and what
this represents is our certainty that we know the truth
and if we could just shout it loudly enough and
start our own website, then everyone would see the wisdom
of what we're saying and come to agree with us.
And you may know that I made a triptich of

(09:04):
episodes on this issue of the meaning of truth and
truth on the Internet and truth in media. Those were
episodes forty to forty two. And if you heard my
argument there, you'll know that I think this notion of
telling the truth in media is a lost cause because,
with the exception of a very few factual issues, most

(09:25):
of telling a political story is interpretation, which is to say,
even putting aside the fog of war issues, the issue
of perspective determines which facts make it into your story
and which do not. So the question I want to
ask say is this, is there a different approach to
news telling? Is there a way to think about doing

(09:48):
this totally differently? And I think one of the cleverest approaches,
which is attempted every once in a while, is to
build something that instead of trying to pick aside and
fight and die for it, but instead works to say, look,
there are multiple points of view here. Let's genuinely dig
into the complexity of the issues and try to see

(10:10):
if we can build a more multi dimensional understanding. Instead
of the typical approach of saying I have my team
and the other team is simply misinformed or misanthropic. And
one such attempt at making a site like this is
from a journalist named Isaac Sahl, who runs a newsletter
called Tangle. The idea of Tangle is to present different

(10:34):
sides of the same argument to understand something about the
complexities therein. It's not about saying both sides are right
and we're going to land in the middle. Instead, it's
about saying, wherever you might land, can you do this
with curiosity and intellectual humility and a meaningful level of
self education on the position rather than tribalism and assumption.

(11:00):
Big fan of what sites like Tangle are working to do,
so I called up Tangles founder Isaac Sahl to talk
with him about this. Okay, Isaac, it's so great to
have you here. You run a newsletter called Tangle, which
I'm a giant fan of, and one of the things

(11:22):
that has struck me as amazing is that you tell
your readers if they disagree with you, not to throw
vitriol your way or or you know, unsubscribe, but to
tell you why they disagree and to make their argument
to you. So tell us about that, tell us about
Tangle and how you came to run a newsletter like that.

Speaker 2 (11:45):
Yeah, for sure. So first of all, thanks for having me.
You know, I'm Stan of the show, glad to be here.
It's been fun listening to you guys last few weeks.
You know, I have kind of two genesis stories. I'd
say the first one is just that I grew up
in a really politically divided place in Bucks County, Pennsylvania,
Bellweather County, Bellweather State. Obviously, Pennsylvania kind of goes where

(12:05):
the presidential election goes. So I just grew up around
a lot of people who had very different political views
than each other, and so I saw how those divides
manifested and also how people kind of talked through those
divides in real time. And have a lot of friends
and family people I love and care about who have
different political views, which I think just makes me a
little bit more open minded to them. And then the

(12:27):
second kind of genesis story was just being on the
inside of media organizations and kind of seeing how the
sausage was made. And it became very clear to me
early on that a lot of media organizations are catering
their content to their audience. You know, we have a
term for it now, audience capture. The idea that you know,
an audience likes something, they like a certain tone or

(12:50):
a certain editorial slam, and so news organizations give them
more and more of that because they recognize that's what
the audience wants. And we've created a lot of echo
chambers and bias and you know, confirming people's preconceived notions.
And when I decided to go out and start my
own media company, I was just looking at a blank

(13:10):
page and that was super exciting for me to think about,
how could I tear this whole thing down and start
from the beginning. And what are some of the ethos
that I would want a news organization to have. And
one of them is that I want us to be
really open minded and fair. Another is I want to
make sure we're representing people from across the political spectrum

(13:33):
and not just presenting people with arguments reviews that they
already believe. And the third is that I want my
audience to be involved in the conversation and the production
of the content and feel like their voice is heard
and feel like they can actually interact and learn from
the news and talk to me or our staff, or

(13:54):
have a space where they can kind of express themselves.
You know, I look at the comment section on Facebook
on an article, and a lot of people see, you know,
craziness and people spouting off and fighting, and it's always like,
don't look at the comments section. And when I go
and do that, I see something that I think is
a gold mine for people who care about issues, people

(14:17):
who want to express themselves, people want to be involved
in the conversation, And so I try and invite those
people in a bit. And frankly, I learn a lot
from my readers when they write in and tell me
about why they view the world a certain way. It's
almost always illuminating.

Speaker 1 (14:30):
Now a lot of folks, especially in this moment in time,
seem less interested in instigating dialogue than in terminating it.
So why do you think that is what's happening? And
do you feel that this time is different than previous eras?

Speaker 2 (14:47):
Look, I mean, anybody who takes a dive into the
history of free speech will learn pretty quickly that what
we're living through right now is not a particularly unique thing.
I think beach goes through expansions and contractions, and it
always has throughout you know, civil society. There were times
when the idea of a printing press was exactly the

(15:10):
same way we talk about you know, the internet today,
that this would be too big and too easy to
disseminate information, and we needed to limit this thing because
it was so scary that someone could write down their ideas,
you know, print a thousand copies of them, and cover
a city in them, you know, in a matter of hours.
And we went through the same thing with the radio.

(15:31):
We went through the same thing with the Internet, and
it's something that's going to happen over and over again
throughout society. And I'm sure there's communication methods we haven't
even considered yet that are coming down the pike that
are going to make it a lot easier to you know,
transmit thoughts or ideas and create all sorts of different issues.
And I don't want to downplay the idea that you know,
misinformation or bad information is a you know, a threat

(15:57):
to democracy or a threat to an informed populace. It is.
There are certain things about it that are really problematic.
The Internet has a lot of really dark corners, and
it's really easy for people to sort of sit in
their own echo chambers and be radicalized. I mean, there's
a plethora of evidence for that. But the way to

(16:17):
sort of address these issues is almost never to eliminate them,
and oftentimes it's not even good to quarantine them, because
what you basically do is you just put people off
into their own silos. You put them into their own
little corners of the Internet where they're only interacting with
the people who agree with them, and it just pushes

(16:39):
them further into the fringe. And you know, there are
a lot of examples of this. I think the number
of people who have been quote unquote canceled or silenced
and the people who have done the cancelation or silencing
have gotten what they want is quite limited. You know,
I could think of maybe two or three people who
have I'm like, oh, I forgot that person existed because

(17:00):
they got canceled or they got kicked off a platform
or whatever. Most of the time, what happens is like
what happened to somebody like Alex Jones, where you know,
he becomes a martyr by being silenced, and then he
builds his audience in his own space where nothing he
says or does gets challenged. And then you know, you
look at something like January sixth, and who's there standing

(17:20):
on the White House lawn on a table giving instructions
on a megaphone. It's Alex Jones with a bunch of
his supporters. And yeah, maybe we haven't seen him on
Twitter for five years, but guess what, he's still building
a massive audience, speaking to millions of people, and he's
just doing it in a space where his perspectives are
never getting challenged. So I think that's the kind of
illustration of why silencing these you know, quote unquote dangerous

(17:43):
people is a really dangerous thing to do, and why
I prefer to have the engagement and have it out
and let the audience sort of make up their minds.

Speaker 1 (17:51):
So I love your point of view and your approach
to this. Why do you think it's so rare? As in,
why are you one of the few people who's running
a site like this?

Speaker 2 (18:02):
You know, it's a question I asked myself a lot,
because when I started, I recognized that there was a
desire for this from people. But I also remember when
I first launched Tangle that I was not confident that
it was going to work. The idea that I was

(18:22):
going to bring a bunch of people from across the
political spectrum under one roof and convince them all to
trust me and to trust my news, and to trust
us as a place to provide them balanced perspectives. It
was really daunting. It seemed kind of unrealistic, and in
a lot of ways, I thought, this probably isn't going

(18:43):
to work, but it's worth trying. And I think most
people who are looking at the media as a business
understand that the best way to make money and the
best way to grow is to give people the red
meat that they want. You know, I mean the vast
majority of trash and viewers on a station like Fox
News or a website like the New York Times dot

(19:05):
com or whatever it is, they're political junkies. They are
people who are going back to that every single day.
You know, they represent maybe five or ten percent of
the population. And if you can capture that group and
keep them coming back day to day and keep giving
them what they want, keep giving them ammunition for their
arguments and their worldviews, that's a really good way to

(19:25):
build a subscription, you know, a subscriber base. It's a
really good way to build an audience for primetime television.
It's a really good way to build an advertising business
that has consistent traffic and metricks. And so I think
there's a lot of business stuff happening in the media
space that's sort of influencing these things. I had a
vision for a subscriber supported news outlet where people were

(19:48):
coming to us because they trusted us, because they wanted
to understand the news better, because they wanted to get
out of their bubbles. And I thought we could sell
it to them if the content, you know, followed through
on the promise, and we've been able to do that.
But you know, I have one hundred thousand plus subscribers
on my newsletter, which is a huge number, and I'm
super proud of it. And five years ago, if you

(20:09):
told me that, I would have been really happy that
we hit this milestone. But two million people watch Fox
News every night, you know, The New York Times has
two million subscribers. That Huffing and Post still gets hundreds
of thousand of hits a day. So there's a lot
of people who are competing with that make us look
like a small fish still. But I think that, you know,

(20:30):
we're a growing movement of people who are interested in
stepping into this kind of media ecosystem, and I hope
it keeps growling.

Speaker 1 (20:53):
So I just want to touch on this issue about
the extremes about you said maybe five percent of the
people are going for the extreme things. That leaves a
lot of people somewhere in the middle. And so what
opportunities do they have, for example, from the point of
view of candidates. You know, we have a system that
tends to privilege people who take extreme positions, and so

(21:15):
what does this mean for our political system?

Speaker 2 (21:19):
I had nothing great. It's not I would say the
news is not super optimistic in that sense. You know.
I got the chance to interview a guy named Hiram
Lewis who co authored a book called The Myth of
the Lefts and the Right. Really fascinating guy who talks about,
you know, basically, we're not operating around a left and

(21:40):
right political orientation that is fixed and we're all moving.
Those political orientations are actually moving, and it's really just
tribal motivations and kind of tribal dynamics that are driving
what constitutes being a conservative or what constant's being in liberal.
And one of the things that he said to me.
That has always stuck with me, which I really like

(22:01):
is most voters go to the voting booth, and what
they are doing effectively is like being a shop or
going to a grocery store where you're looking for a
bunch of things. You want to go pick out all
the things you want, and you get to the grocery
store and there's one card A that's just full of
half stuff you really want and half stuff you really don't,

(22:21):
and one car card B full of half stuff you
really want and half stuff you really don't. And you
just have to pick one of the carts, and you
pick the one with more stuff that you really like
and less stuff that you really don't. And that's what
most American voters you're doing. And I think it's true
of Democrats, and it's true of Republicans. And what's really
interesting about it is the dynamic we have in our

(22:42):
country right now is a lot of people who go
to the grocery store and pick cart A. Look at
people who go to the grocery store and pick cart
B and think you're totally insane. I can't believe you
would do that, like you're a nut. Even though there's
a bunch of stuff in card b they want to
and a bunch of stuff in there cart that they
don't really want, but they have a hard time seeing

(23:03):
that about the other person. And there's tons of dynamics
I think that drive that, you know, whether it's the
media polarization, which is an issue that I'm trying to solve,
Whether it's the fact that, you know, we only talk
about the people who are on the fringe when we
talk about the other side, or the fact that in
American society today, people are becoming a lot more siloed.
So it's not just that we consume news that you know,

(23:27):
affirms a lot of our priority. It's that we also
spend time with people in our social lives who mostly
agree with us politically. So, you know, if you're a
conservative living somewhere in rural West Texas, you might not
know very many in Muslims. And so the things that
you see about Muslims on the news are the things
that we all see about Muslims on the news, and

(23:47):
you don't get to learn or meet somebody who maybe
is not what you see characterized on the news, And
that goes every direction in our country and it creates,
you know, a really dangerous sort of boiling pot, which
I think is part of what we have right now.

Speaker 1 (24:03):
So I want to return to this issue about what
makes you care about taking this middle position, about standing
in between the two carts and saying, look, I get it,
there's some good stuff in here. There's some good stuff
in here. You said that you grew up in a
place where there were different opinions and so on, but
still a lot of people grew up in that. What
is it that allowed you to feel like, all right,

(24:23):
I want to tackle this. I want to represent everyone's
point of view here so that we can understand each other.

Speaker 2 (24:29):
Yeah. Well, first of all, I just want to address
something you just said, because it's something I try and
talk a little bit about in my writing, which is
I'm not trying to be a middle my own personal
perspectives and my own views. I'm not just trying to
find some middle ground. I actually think doing that is
an ideology of its own. If you're always looking for
what's between the left and the right, you're just going

(24:51):
to land on a bunch of half baked solutions. Sometimes
the people on the left are right, sometimes the people
on the right are right. I try and just take
it issue by issue, and I don't know. I consider
my self a moderate and open minded, but I don't
consider myself, you know, middle on a lot of the
really contentious issues. Sometimes I'd land there, but I try
and you know, come to it organically and not seek
it out. In terms of like the the motivation for

(25:13):
starting Tangle, I mean, part of it was the classic
entrepreneurial thing, which was I wanted a product and I
went looking for it and I couldn't find it, and
so I thought, oh, it wouldn't be that hard to
make that. I mean, I would go read the news
and there'd be a story about Donald Trump's border wall,
and in order for me to feel like I had

(25:35):
a full understanding of all the arguments about whether a
border wall was a good or bad thing, I'd have
to read the Wall Street Journal opinion page. I'd have
to watch Fox News. I'd have to read the New
York Times opinion page. I'd read an article on the
Huffington Post. I'd read a piece from some immigration lawyers
who are on the left or at the ACLU. I
would listen to some conservative podcasts like Ben Shapiro or something.

(25:57):
I would go to twenty different sources and I'd six
hours doing it, and then at the end of all that,
I'd feel like, Okay, now I kind of have some clarity,
and I've seen a bunch of the arguments on this issue,
and God, I really wish there was a place that
I could just go get that and not spend half
my day doing it, and it would just take ten
or fifteen minutes. And I went looking for that product

(26:19):
and I didn't see it anywhere, and so I started
a product that I felt fulfilled that need and figured
I wasn't building the person who wanted that. I think,
you know, some of our growth has definitely confirmed that
there's a lot of people out there, and over time
the newsletter, in the podcast and the YouTube channel and
all the stuff we have, it's just become a lot
more personal because people want to know who's providing the

(26:41):
news to them. So early on readers would say, hey,
it's like, thanks for explaining this story. Cool to see
what the left and the right are saying, but I'm
really curious, like what do you think? And that was
like the genesis of my take, which is a section
in the newsletter where I share my own personal opinion
on stories and that's one of the engage parts of
the newsletter because people are really interested in the kind

(27:04):
of personal element and the person that is providing them
this information why they view things certain ways. And I
try not to just make that section a little mini
opinion piece. I try and address the arguments that we
just laid out in the newsletter and talk about why
so I'm resident with me and why they don't. And
I go to it with, you know, just humility, with
the acknowledgement that my position is not the right one

(27:25):
and I'm trying to learn and figure out what i believe,
just like a lot of Americans are.

Speaker 1 (27:30):
Yeah, I think that's the key, is intellectual humility. One
of the things that I find so remarkable about your
newsletter is first of all, you present the what the
left is saying, what the right is thing. Even within
those there are different voices representing different points of view.
Then you tell your opinion. But the important part is
then you say, look, I'm really aware, I'm trying to

(27:51):
see my own blind spots, and so next week I'm
going to write from the opposite point of view. I'm
going to stealman the other point of view and represent
that and try to see my own blind spots, and
that is so rare, and I'm still I'm trying to
figure out what makes you do that? And why isn't

(28:12):
everybody trying to do that?

Speaker 2 (28:14):
Yeah, it's a good question. I mean I, first of all,
from a personal perspective, I find that exercise exhilarating. I mean,
I genuinely find it really interesting and fun, and it
excites me to challenge myself that way, and it excites
me to see people write in and make an argument
I haven't thought of. I think I have a curious disposition,
and I'm open minded, and I'm speaking publicly about issues

(28:37):
that I really care about, and so I want to
get them right. So the idea that I can go
back and read an article I wrote a few weeks
ago and then write an entire opinion piece criticizing the
thing I just wrote that exercise for me is actually
really fun and rewarding. But I'll say candidly that I

(28:58):
wasn't always like that, and it wasn't always easy for
me to do that. And one of the things that
made it easy was the actual exercise of doing the
newsletter every day, and that is created in me, you know,
like a muscle that I think I've trained the same
way I trained muscles going to the gym, where I
have taught myself that it's okay, it's okay to just

(29:19):
like step out of my own belief step out of
my own viewpoint, and try and put myself in another
person's perspective or put myself in another person's you know,
ideological framework, and explore that a bit and think along
those lines and play with it and going there. It's
you know, I think a lot of people feel like
they can't go do that because if they do, they'll

(29:41):
never return to their core self or their values. And
it's not true. You can sit down at your computer
and write a five hundred word piece making an argument
for a position you don't believe, just to see what
it feels like and what comes out of you and
what positions come up and what ideas come up. And
then you can delete it and never publish it or
do anything with it, or you can show it to

(30:01):
people and try and get feedback on it. And that
exercise doesn't change who you are fundamentally. It just makes
you a little more open minded. I think teaches you
to empathize with people who maybe you disagree, and I
was fortunate enough that I did that publicly through Tangle
with a community of readers who are interested in that,
and they gave me a lot of positive reinforcement for it.
You know, Like we published a piece today where I

(30:24):
took the position that Israel should not have it like,
not engage in a ceasefire in Gaza, which is not
a position I believe. I've been writing a lot about
how I want Israel to make a ceasefire deal, and
I said today I'm going to step out of that
view and try and articulate the best arguments against my position.
And you know, I've read fifty emails that have come

(30:47):
in in the last hour and a half since we
published that piece, and forty eight of them have been positive.
You know. They are people saying, thank you so much
for doing this. I know you don't totally believe all
these things, but it's so fascinating to watch you go
through this process, and it's helping me better understand the conflict,
and getting that positive reinforcement makes me want to do
it more. So I'm very lucky in that sense, you know.

(31:08):
I mean, I'm getting some of that feedback that it's
clear people are interested in this kind of.

Speaker 1 (31:12):
Thing, and when you do this, I know you try
to be really careful to make sure that you're bringing
readers in and you're not stopping anybody at the door
from wanting to come in, and so you're careful about
language and the language choices you make.

Speaker 2 (31:27):
So tell us about that. Yeah, sure, you know. This
is something that I care a lot about because what
I've learned over time from doing this is it's often
not the content of the argument that sends people scurrying
away from you know, your perspective or your writing. It's
the language that you're using to sort of communicate it.

(31:47):
And so one of the classic examples that I give
that I think is really relevant in the media space
is the ways in which we talk about illegal immigration
in the United States. Anybody can go do this right now.
If you go to funews dot com and look up
a story about, you know, President Biden's border policies, you'll
see Fox News referring to legal aliens or illegal immigrants.

(32:10):
And if you go to the New York Times and
look up stories about Biden's border policies, you'll see them
referring to undocumented immigrants and that language choice might seem
not that important to somebody who is really a political junkie,
but to people who really care about that issue, that
those language choices matter a lot. And we found early

(32:31):
on that people would write in and say, you know,
I saw you refer to undocumented immigrants, and it's clear
that you're on the left, so I've unsubscribed, And it's
like they didn't even get to the arguments. They just
saw that language choice, and to them, that's a tip
that we are taking some ideological stance. And so, you know,
sometimes we would do articles where we mixed it, where

(32:52):
we do some undocumented and some illegal immigrants, and then
you know, people on the left would write in and say, like,
no person is a lead goal, you're dehumanizing immigrants. I
thought I was getting something better than this. I've unsubscribed
from the newsletter. And so we looked at our whole
you know, vocabulary across the website and started thinking about

(33:13):
ways in which we could find a little bit more
neutral language that still articulated the thing we were trying
to get across to our readers or listeners, so you know,
on the question of immigration. Our solution to that was
we refer to illegal immigrants or undocumented immigrants as unauthorized migrants,
which is actually the legal term that something like the
Department of Homeland Security will use to describe somebody who's

(33:36):
coming to the country illegally. And we find that that
doesn't offend the sensibilities at either side. It articulates exactly
what we're trying to say, and it keeps people focus
on the arguments we're presenting and not just the language
choices we're making. And you know this is relevant for abortion,
drug policy, every issue you can think of under the sun.
There there are language choices like this that readers are

(33:58):
really keen on, and it's a good way to kind
of get people's barriers down and make it so you
can communicate with them a little bit more openly.

Speaker 1 (34:06):
Yeah, I'm so glad you're really thinking about these trip
wires and removing those so you can get everyone in
to talk about these issues. So, as a neuroscientist, what
I'm really interested in is how we each have our
internal model of the world and we believe our truths.
We believe our models are complete, and we have those
From your point of view, why do you think it's

(34:26):
so difficult for people to see both sides of an issue,
or usually more than two sides, all sides of an issue.
Why is that such a challenge for people generally?

Speaker 2 (34:37):
Yeah, I mean, look, I don't this is probably closer
to your expertise than mine, to be frank, and I
don't want to, you know, step out of my lane here.
But from what I understand from reading a lot of
you know, people like Jonathan Haate who write a lot
about the way our brains work, and you know, the
competing things that happened and reasoning, what we know is that,

(34:59):
you know, use is the analogy of the elephant and
the rider, that our emotional response is like this ninety
percent part of our brain, this kind of instinctive response
we have to certain ideas to certain politicians or whatever
it is. That's the elephant, and then there's the rider,
that's the ten percent logic reason that's trying to control
this emotional thing. But sometimes we've lost the battle before

(35:21):
we even you begin. There's tons of super interesting political,
you know, poly sized studies about this stuff. Like, for instance,
one of the things that I've read about is a
study where people are shown the image of a politician
for about three seconds, and then the image is removed.

(35:42):
Then there's some the image of another politician for about
three seconds. The image is removed, and then they're asked
to vote on which politician they like more. And then
they do the same experiment again with people where they
show them these politicians and then they spend twenty minutes
explaining the views and they do the same thing and
the results are almost identical. And so what the researchers

(36:03):
take away is that a lot of times people are
making their minds up in a split second, just like
literally based on how somebody looks, all the things they
can assume about them, just based on their appearance and
what they look like, and that by the time they
get to know their actual views and policies, you're only
moving like ten percent of the population. Kind of a
scary thought, right, I mean, really like whoa. But it's

(36:25):
reflective of the fact that we are a tribal species,
you know, like there are people that we've interacted with,
there are people that we've spent our lives growing up with,
people that feel foreign, are different from us, and when
push comes to shove, those kind of like instinctual based
lizard brain type responses do a lot of the driving.
And you know, to the point I was making earlier,

(36:48):
I think it's a muscle you have to flex. It's
something you have to be very intentional about to do.
Everybody's capable of it. But I don't think it's something
that comes totally organically to people to just you know,
be open minded about the views or ideas or politicians
or whoever they're considering. That's right.

Speaker 1 (37:06):
We all have a drive for certainty where we feel like, hey,
look I know the truth, I know it's right and
what's wrong here. Do people ever look at what you
are doing and accuse you of being wishy washy?

Speaker 2 (37:19):
Yeah, yeah, they do. That's something I get a lot.
I mean, the common accusation is, you know, both SiZ
ism or what about ism or you know whatever else.
And look, I get it if you're somebody who has
a strong political view about an issue and you sign
up for our newsletter or start listening to our podcast

(37:40):
and you hear me talk about an issue and take
a squishy stance on something where you know, sometimes I'll
just say I actually don't know. I mean, I'll literally which,
by the way, everybody should do a lot more. But
I'll just say I don't you know, I don't know
like I feel conflicted about this. I don't feel confident
saying strongly that what my view is one way or
the other. Here's why I feel conflicted, and I'm just

(38:01):
not sure where I land on. You know, whether Congress
should pass this bill or not. And people feel strongly
about that issue, will you know, write in accusing me
of being wishy washy or whatever else, and my response
to them, like the standard response is I understand why
you feel strongly about this issue, and I can see
very clearly you know why this matters to you, what's

(38:23):
important to you about it. If you were looking for
somebody who's just going to give you something in black
and white terms all the time, I'll tell you right
now you're not going to get that here. And this
isn't the news outlet for you. I think there's a
lot of people doing that, and I hope you keep
reading them and you keep engaging them and supporting them
if you like their work. But to me, it seems
like we are actually the place you should be spending

(38:45):
some time with to get a little bit more of
the gray. And that response oftentimes goes over well, sometimes
it lands a little condescending or off putting or whatever,
but oftentimes people are receptive to that and they're appreciative
I took the time to write back or answer them somehow,
and so I just try and you know, be authentic
about what we're trying to do and who I am

(39:06):
as a person. And people typically, you know, they reply
positively when you just transparent and authentic and put a
little effort in.

Speaker 1 (39:27):
One of the things that I've been writing about and
talking about in this podcast is the way that I
possibly the only way that I see of trying to
bring sides a little bit closer together is the complexification
of allegiances, by which I mean understanding. Okay, well, look,
you know I feel strongly about this issue and you

(39:47):
feel the opposite about this. But you know, we actually
have this in common, and we both like to surf,
and we both like this kind of dog, and we
both have children at the same elementary school, and we
love the you know, activities there. And so when things
get tangled like that, then people find it a little
harder to completely dismiss the person and say you're my enemy.

(40:10):
So I'm just curious, you know, your newsletter I think
goes a long way to doing that. What would you
see in terms of the ways that we can entangle
the allegiances that people have in our society.

Speaker 2 (40:24):
Yeah, I mean I get a lot of emails that
I think ask a really similar question in a different way,
which is, you know, my niece is like a radical
socialist and I don't know how to talk to her
about politics. Or my neighbor is a diehard Trump supporter
and he flies the Trump flag and it freaks me out,
but you know, I want to learn more about him,

(40:45):
and you know, do you have any advice about how
to approach this the conversation or whatever? And you know,
depending on the context, I think one of my common
go to answers is just like, have you ever tried
grabbing a six packup ear and ocking on their door
and asking if they want to spend a little time together?
I mean, genuinely, like, people are social creatures. We're typically curious,

(41:09):
you know, we're typically peaceful if people approach them in
a peaceful manner. And I don't think it's particularly dangerous
to just try and go open a conversation with somebody
who you recognize might feel really differently about your worldview.
One rule that I have, I like a rule of

(41:30):
engagement I have about doing that is just try your
best to ask two or three questions before you make
any statements. And so like, when I'm speaking to somebody
who's somebody new and what will happen to me because
of my work, and you know, someone might know me,
or somebody a friend tells them that I write this

(41:51):
politics podcast, they'll come over and just like start drilling
me with political stuff immediately, you know, like spraying me
with their opinions whatever it is, are peppering me with questions,
and I my rule is just like, don't like get
on your stool and start pontificating out of the gate.

(42:12):
Do your best to ask like two or three questions,
earnest questions, like real genuine questions, and hear the person,
listen to them, pay attention to what they're saying, and
just try to understand them a little bit better before
you start trying to explain anything to them, or you know,
convince them that your position's right. And that exercise to
me has always you know, entangled me in some sort

(42:33):
of societal fabric way where they'll say something or I'll
hear something that they that they offer that makes me
think of a friend or a relative, or you know,
I recognize a little bit of who this person is
or where they're from, and I can connect them to
some other part of my life, and that makes me
a little bit more empathetic to whatever else is coming
out of their mouth, or maybe some positions they have

(42:54):
that I find a boor or whatever it is. And so,
you know, I think earnestly asking questions is genuinely you know,
spending time with somebody trying to talk to them is
a good strategy. And I know it sounds so cheesy
and corny, and people can pretend it's not true, but
it is really genuinely true that the vast majority of people,

(43:16):
not just in the United States but all across the world,
you know, they they care about their family, They care
about safety and security and eating having food on their
table and taking care of their kids, and you know,
growing up in an environment that's kind of safe and
boiling off some steam and having some fun and you know,
everybody smiles and everybody laughs. Everybody can do that. Everybody

(43:38):
has that capacity, and you can reach people who feel
unreachable if you're you know, asking the right questions or
coming into I think with a truly open minded posture.
So that's kind of what I preach and I think
it's effective in my personal life.

Speaker 1 (43:52):
Have you thought about how to get this into the
education system with high schoolers and college students? Plus what
you mentioned before about the value of steel manning the
other side's argument, if we could work this into our
educational system and even this, you know, the simple thing
of okay, ask two or three questions before you say
your thing. How would you think about getting that in there?

Speaker 2 (44:15):
Yeah, So one of my big goals for Tangle actually
is to get more engagement at the high school and
college level. I have a partnership with a poly side
professor at Georgia State University who actually sells a digital
poly side textbook, and Tangle is part of the textbook,
so included in the textbook yard daily editions of Tangle

(44:36):
every day, which is really cool. And we have teachers
from all over the country who are high school teachers
who are subscribers to the newsletter of the podcast and
have written in and told me, you know, they're using
editions that we've written about controversial issues as sort of
jumping off points for their classes. You know, it's a
really big problem. I think the education side of it

(44:57):
and bringing kids up, you know, in an environ that
teaches them to be a lot more open minded, and
we need to do it at that age. I mean,
the question you're asking, in my opinion is really the
right question, is how do we get the next generation
to a place where they're a lot more open minded
and inquisitive and you know, tolerant of the other side

(45:17):
or people who have different political views in them, because
I think we're seeing a hardening right now. And you know,
I think the really the really cynical part of me
feels in some ways like, you know, the people who
are in their fifties and sixties and seventies, they are
not lost, but it's you know, it's like a euphemism

(45:38):
that it's so hard to you know, teach an old
dog nutrix. For a reason, it's it is, And we
need to focus on, like the young people and our
generation who are coming up next and are entering a
society that is really black and white and really hard
and really ideological right now and break them out of
that because it's getting worse in a lot of ways.

(46:00):
And I think we have a small window to kind
of course correct that. So I'm doing my best to
you know, spread tangle to the masses, and I hope
model some of this, you know, model the way that
I want to see people go about this. But the
more participants the better, and kind of spreading the word
is really one of the only good ways to fight

(46:23):
back against some of the stuff we're saying.

Speaker 1 (46:26):
Let me trill into that for one second, because I
know that some people are of the opinion that the
young people are the ones that it's hard to teach
new tricks to and that as people mature and they gray,
they think, well, you know, maybe this we've had I've
seen more things now, I've known people with different opinions.
I'm just curious that you mentioned fifty sixty seven year

(46:49):
olds are the ones that are less plastic in their
views and the young people are more plastic.

Speaker 2 (46:54):
Yeah, that's an interesting point. I mean, I guess I've
heard that framing too, and haven't thought super deeply about
the kind of counter to that. I would say. My
perspective is folks who are older and have been around longer,
I think have a better understanding of the complexity and

(47:14):
the gray that exists between the black and white, but
they're less willing to move out of whatever their positions are.
And I think that's kind of what I'm more articulating,
is that, you know, if you're a sixty five year
old and you're a lifelong Democratic voter and you know

(47:34):
you think Trump is the worst thing you've ever seen
in the history of US politics, I am way more
skeptical that in the next fifteen years you're going to
change your mind about that position than I am if
you're a twenty year old college student who feels that way,
and I know you're about to go through this next
phase of your life and your world's going to change
and your world's going to evolve, and you know, I

(47:58):
think it's true. I think you make a great point
that a lot of the longer you are around, I
think the more you realize that the world is not
black and white. But I think people also become more
fixed in their positions and less willing to kind of
have their mind changed by other people. And part of that,
I think, part of what scares me I think about

(48:18):
this moment right now in particular, is that we're in
this weird kind of societal moment where a lot of
younger Americans are entering a space where, you know, silence
is complicity. There is a perception that if you are
not tapped into or have a strong opinion about certain
issues that our country is facing, that you are somehow,

(48:42):
you know, part of the problem rather than somebody who's
just ripe to become educated or learn more about an
issue or whatever else it is. And so people feel
really really compelled to take sides and sort of this
blue versus red culture war that we have right now
that I don't think has always existed the past. And
so a lot of young people that I know and

(49:04):
I'm seeing, you know, on college campuses across the country
are jumping into issues, you know, headfirst in a way
that I'm like, yes, you should care about this, you
should be thinking about this, Like I love seeing this
civic participation and whatever else it is. But they're doing
it because it's it's almost like a social phenomenon. It's

(49:25):
a community thing. It's not it's not necessarily like an
educational thing that pushed them there or an interest in
you know, going really deep on this topic and learning
about all the complexities. It's like, oh, all my friends
are doing this thing, or you know, all my friends
have picked this side, and I feel like I need
to go pick this side. And there's a really really strong,
you know, social pressure, I think in part because of

(49:45):
social media and just also how divided the rest of
the country is. And I really want to get to
those kids and try and just like teach them that,
you know, it's okay to change your mind. It's okay
to not have a position yet, it's okay to say
you're still learning, and it's okay to feel really radically
passionate about a certain issue if like you spent the
requisite time to learn about it, and that that's kind

(50:08):
of like what I'm hoping to get out there a
little bit. And I think sort of the distinction I
see between the older and younger generations.

Speaker 1 (50:16):
One more question. So you and I both think a
lot about how to maintain curiosity and hopefully humility about
our political opinions. But it's tough, right and you recently
posted on x that things seem so fraud right now
that sometimes you feel tempted just to run back to
your side to people who agree with you and just

(50:39):
quit talking about it and quit being out there in
public advocating for curiosity and humility.

Speaker 2 (50:44):
So how do you stay strong on that?

Speaker 1 (50:47):
How do you stay somebody who says, you know what,
I'm going to keep trying to understand the different sides
of this.

Speaker 2 (50:54):
Yeah, I mean, first of all, I pace myself, you know.
I think one thing that's really important for someone who's
in my line of work is that, you know, you
can't spend ten hours with your head down just reading
the news and watching you know, videos of what's happening
in war zones across the world, or you know, congressional

(51:16):
hearings or whatever else it is. You actually have to
separate yourself from that and go live your day to
day life and experience the world as it is right
in front of you, to stay really grounded and to
understand that, you know, not everything is what's happening on
the kind of political fringes and whether it's in congress
or in war zones or whatever else it is. So

(51:36):
I try really hard to just like get some space
from that and take breaks and live and experience, you know,
the things that I'm talking about myself. And I also
just think we are sort of programmed in a way
to remember and focus on and emphasize the negative feedback

(51:57):
we get and not necessarily the positive feedback we get.
And I know in my work, when somebody writes in
really critically or says something that's really sharp or biting
about something I've said or my writing, that's the thing
that I spend all day thinking about. It's not the
email from somebody telling me your news source is like

(52:18):
the best thing that's ever happened to me. I'm so
glad to be a subscriber. And I could get ten
of those emails and one of the kind of biting ones,
and I'll think about the biting one the rest of
the day, and I just dismissed the other ten. And
so I've tried to be a lot more intentional about like,
you know, focusing on the people who are standing up
and clapping and saying we want more of this, like

(52:39):
this is what I've been looking for, and remembering that
like those people are relying on folks like me to
kind of step into the fray. And you know, as
I like to say, like I'm going to war with
partisan news, like that's the battle that I have is
that there's a lot of people out there who are
intentionally turning the temperature up when they don't need to.

(53:01):
That's going to happen organically. We don't need to manufacture that.
But they're doing it on purpose, and I'm trying to
fight against those people. That's sort of my quote unquote
enemy is the people who are trying to turn the
temperature up. And I just want people to be more
informed and have a more holistic view of things. And
when I feel that exhaustion, I just like step away,

(53:23):
give myself a little bit of a break, and then
try and focus on and remember the people who are
I know are like rooting for us and rooting for
me and rooting for my company, and want what we're
doing to kind of prevail, and hope that they just
stick around and keep supporting us.

Speaker 1 (53:37):
Well, keep up the strong work, Isaac. There are many
of us who are rooting for you, and we thank
you a lot.

Speaker 2 (53:44):
Thank you, I appreciate that man.

Speaker 1 (53:50):
That was my interview with Isaac Soahl from Tangle. I
highly recommend his newsletter, which is one of the few outlets,
along with some others that I list in my show notes,
that operates at a different level of curious intelligence. It
doesn't simply plug into our limbic systems to get us
angry and verify that we're right and those others are wrong.

(54:12):
But instead this pushes us into the prefrontal cortex, forcing
us to think about multiple points of view. One does
not have to agree with the other points of view,
and one may still feel dismissive towards them, but at
least one sees that reasonable people can hold different points
of view, can wrestle internally with deeply uncomfortable issues, can

(54:36):
even feel lost and confused about issues. Rather than pretending
that everything is black and white, this sort of approach
values a wide embrace of society rather than dismissing half
the population. If we have any hopes of retrieving a
more communicative and less polarized world, it's only going to

(54:58):
be having a willingness to expand our viewpoint just a
little bit, to not assume that everything is our way
or the highway, and to force ourselves at all moments
to see and celebrate our common humanity.

Speaker 2 (55:21):
Go to Eagleman dot.

Speaker 1 (55:21):
Com slash podcast for more information and to find further reading.
Send me an email at podcast at eagleman dot com
with any questions or discussion, and check out and subscribe
to Inner Cosmos on YouTube for videos of each episode
and to leave comments until next time. I'm David Eagleman
and this is Inner Cosmos.