Hello, I'm Jesse Hirsch and welcome to Meta Views, recorded live in front of an automated audience.

And today we're gonna talk about something that I think quite frankly is needed, which is making sense of all the nonsense, or more accurately addressing the culture of outrage, the culture of toxicity, the lack of discourse, even the corruption of discourse or something.

We've talked a lot here on Meta Views is pollution in the information ecosystem.

And I'm joined today by David Beckmeyer, who.

David, we like to start each of our show with kind of set of icebreakers.

And in traditional media fashion, we always like to start with the news, partly because Metaview publishes a daily newsletter on substack.

But the breaking news that I just saw before we started recording was the Supreme Court has upheld the TikTok ban.

And even though it's still uncertain as to what that means, cuz of course the incoming administration says they wanna make a deal, they wanna come across as saviors.

But now TikTok saying they're gonna go dark as a protest move, that they're just gonna shut everything off, all services in the United States.

Cause they recognize that their users are pissed off and it could be a moment if there is some kind of negotiating for them to sort of have the advantage there.

Now, David, this is always where I turn to the guest and I say, is there any news you would like to share?

Could be personal news, could be world news.

Unfortunately, I have had some guests share some fake news, which I'm sure you understand the dynamics of the Internet and how that happens.

But I'm curious, within the spontaneity of this newscast, if there's anything you think our audience should know about in terms of the general landscape of either your personal life or what's happening right now in politics and media.

Yeah, okay, sure.

I don't know if I'd call it a news exactly news, but there was some commentary.

I don't know if you saw it from.

Paul Bloom talked about this theory of America, this humiliation theory of American politics.

No, I didn't.

That sounds hilarious.

Please.

Yeah, so, I mean, he was.

He's kind of coming from this perspective that, you know, it's obviously not the only driver for, for some of these.

These things, but one driver.

It was like, you know, there's sort of the famous thing about Donald Trump was humiliated at the roast by Obama at the.

Whatever it was, the.

What do they call that?

The.

The press dinner.

The Washington press dinner.

Yeah, yeah, the press corps dinner thing.

And he was in.

And a lot of people cite that as that's why he was determined to go become president.

Eddie.

Eddie also talks about how I think Tucker Carlson was sort of, quote unquote, humiliated.

I often, like, really, was he, though?

Because I know people on the right would see him as humiliated, but he's humiliated by Jon Stewart a while back on, like, a crossfire kind of thing.

And.

And I think even if the right wouldn't see it as humiliation, they see it as the left humiliate, humiliating them.

And they're found to be humiliated.

Humiliated within the.

I'm having a hard time with that word today.

And within the.

Within the sphere of kind of the left media and all that sort of stuff.

And now he's sort of saying Musk is kind of in that same thing.

He feels slighted by Biden that he wasn't invited to the electric vehicle event, which is probably dumb, because here's a guy that's like, got the largest, you know, electric vehicle market out there, and they've been in it the longest in some sense, and doesn't invite him.

I mean, that was dumb, probably, but.

And he's slighted by that, so he's citing that as a reason why this kind of public embarrassment.

And he sort of saying, stop doing that.

Right.

But.

But for me, I kind of take it to a next step, though, and it kind of ties back to my show a little bit that, you know, I hear this from my audience a lot.

You're just telling me to be nice to the other side and stop having my own perspective on things or whatever, or, you know, and I'm really not doing that.

I'm.

I'm sort of saying just be better at conflict.

Right?

Yeah.

Yeah.

It's fine to have different views, and some things you're probably not going to be able to resolve, like.

But, you know, you still have to sort of coexist with these people and find the places where you can have dialogue or whatever.

Right.

So.

So I.

I thought of that as, like, the.

Because the opposite of that would be what?

Not saying anything.

I mean, I still think you need to hold people accountable when they do stuff.

So I.

I get it.

Like, maybe don't do it.

Do it in a way that doesn't publicly humiliate them.

But I think we want to also be mindful that you can't just not do anything either, or you can't just let everything go, I guess, is what I want to say.

Absolutely.

And although I love this argument, and it kind of foreshadows the idea that if TikTok were to humiliate the US Government.

And they're certainly hum humiliating Congress right now in terms of the pushback.

But if they were to humiliate Trump and the executive, I mean, jokingly, does that lead then to a conflict over Taiwan, or quite the opposite, does it stay just in the language of media?

And it is funny, I think, how the right, as they ascend to power, have never been more insecure.

You'd think that they'd be sort of in this kind of hubris of, all right, yeah, we made it, we're getting there.

But never have they bit more insecure, I think.

And I think we're seeing that play out in the nomination hearings and just how easily some of the nominees for the cabinet are, quite frankly, being made fools of.

And that doesn't mean that they won't end up in their positions, I think, due to the nature of contemporary politics.

But it fuels the outrage machine, which I think we're going to end up talking about quite a bit.

Now, our second segment that we do on every episode of metafiews is wtf or what's the Future?

Because we are a future centric podcast.

We like to provoke our audience, our guests, to imagine futures, whether desired or undesired, because we operate under the principle that nothing's inevitable.

Provided you're willing to pay attention.

Right, Provided you're kind of scoping the horizon to see what's there.

So I'm curious, David, what is something that either you're looking at or that you think our audience needs to be looking at when anticipating the next year, the next few months, in what's looking to be a pretty turbulent and volatile period?

Oh, well, I was kind of framing it into longer world when I was thinking about, please go right ahead.

But you know, in terms of like, yeah, the next few months or the next year or so, I mean, I'd be looking at resiliency, right?

I mean, I think there's going to be a lot of stuff being thrown at the wall.

Overreacting is going to happen a lot.

People are going to, you know, think everything is a doomsday, you know, kind of, and we're going to have to sort through which ones are as big a deal as that, that probably deserve our attention.

I think that's.

That's going to be a challenge.

And so, you know, what are the, you know, how do you do that?

It's like, easier said than done.

But a lot of it is just trying to be mindful and trying to ask those questions, like, you know, am I?

Is this as big a deal as they're really portraying it as, because that kind of gets to what you're saying about the outreach industry world that wants to hype, you know, wants to get us so afraid all the time.

So.

But it's going to be tough.

I mean, I think we're going to see a lot, a lot of things thrown at the wall and it's going to be hard to sort through which ones are the places where we should probably spend energy.

Well, and part of what I've been following in terms of the climate volatility right now, we're seeing it in L.

A and we saw it with Hurricane Helene and in Carolina and Tennessee is the anxiety a lot of people feel because of the trauma, the disruption to their lives.

And to your point, how do we divert that from the outrage machine?

What are the mechanisms that we need to kind of help people go through these types of crises, help them face these types of challenges?

Fostering community, fostering solidarity, fostering discourse, dialogue around how to measure it.

And again, I suspect that we're really going to get into the weeds, hopefully, of how that works.

So to transition then to our feature which I construct these kind of frames and wrap these conversations partly because I want to get the most of your wisdom in the least amount of time, as selfishly as possible.

But I also try to push my guests to really think about, you know, the next level of their thinking, the implications of the ideas they're presenting.

And I wanted to start with media literacy because media literacy is something I've certainly benefited from my entire life.

I, at a very early age, recognized that media literacy was one of the most enabling aspects of living in the world that we are in, that if you were high up on the learning curve of not just media skills, but knowledge, because that fundamentally is what media literacy is about, that you could go far.

And yet it also seems that we're in a world now where media literacy is kind of a double edged sword, where I always saw it as a path to empowerment.

I'm kind of now seeing it become weaponized, that it's being used by nefarious actors to be vague, to pollute the information ecosphere, to target people who are vulnerable.

Is it still something empty that we just encourage people to do, or are we now coupling with it with larger social responsibilities or larger commitments around respect and civility?

I'm curious how that synthesizing as our understanding of media literacy is I think fundamentally maturing.

So you actually think media literacy is maturing?

I know where you're going with that and I'm in accordance.

When I say maturing, I mean our understanding of it, the distribution of it among society, unfortunately is not as widespread as we require it.

But I mean on a scholarly level, on an intellectual level, I think our understanding of how it's used and where has changed over the last 10 years.

Danah Boyd, for example, has written a couple of essays which are kind of critical of media literacy on its own.

So as someone who is on the front lines, right, who both as a practitioner and as an intellectual, I'm curious how this idea for you has evolved while acknowledging where you were headed there, which is it's still an elite resource and not something that is pervasive amongst the citizenry.

Yeah, well, I think the biggest way, you know, being sort of a STEM person and more, more kind of in that rational science side and you know, was always the person that thought, well if you just have a rational argument, you can win the day.

Right.

What I've learned in a couple of years, doing this show and talking to all the experts and all the research papers and other work that I've read, you know, that's obviously that's like, doesn't work.

And, and, and there's evidence for that, that that doesn't work too.

That's the kind of irony of it.

All right.

The people that say that I'm going to convince you with evidence, there's actually evidence that shows you that convincing you with evidence doesn't work.

That's a meta view right there.

Literally.

Right, right, exactly.

You know, and that's actually metaview is kind of interesting too because that's kind of what my show is.

It's kind of a, it's not a.

We don't talk about political issues very much, but we're sort of above that.

Like we're talking about how you talk about political issues, that kind of thing.

Right.

But, but yeah, with media.

Yeah, I guess that's true.

We understand a lot more about it and it has become a lot more weaponized.

So that's one things I've learned is that, you know, it's a lot more our psychology and it's an uphill battle because it's our, it's kind of our, our innate tendencies are to fall into being susceptible to, to misinformation, disinformation and it's not one sided.

Like it's not only Republicans that do this or whatever.

We all suffer from These same cognitive biases and we all suffer from these emotions and getting tied up in our tribal thinking when, when we don't think we are.

I mean, I think that's the other big piece is we're very blind to it when we're doing it or people on our side are doing it.

You know, I mean, I see these conversations about, you know, a bunch of like minded people talking about how the other side is so, you know, caught up in this.

And then, and then they'll go on and say things like, okay, you're doing it right now, you're doing the thing you were just accusing the other people of.

Right.

So I think that's probably what I've learned the most about that, you know, in this journey is that it's much more complicated and it's not, it's going to be a challenge because our innate psychology has not really kept up.

Our, our society is not really kept up with, with this.

And it also requires practice and skills that have to be learned.

You don't just, you can't just be smart and then be good at media literacy.

Right.

You have to also practice it and look for the signs and things like that.

Well, and you raise an interesting point.

And one of the things we do talk about often here on meta views is learning how we learn.

Right to your point about talking about how we talk.

And one of our key insights is that learning is very social.

It's inherently social.

Right.

That while it is possible to learn alone, learning in a group, learning with others is far more efficient, far faster.

And it matches what you're describing there in terms of both our cognitive biases, but also our tendency towards groupthink that by default we're gonna want to agree with our parents or disagree by default.

Right.

We're going to want to get along with our friends, we're going to want to get along with our co workers.

So to what extent have or should perhaps media literacy efforts acknowledge those group dynamics rather than sort of expect the individual media consumer to develop that critical lens?

When it seems like it's two part, it's both fostering that awareness, fostering that critical lens, but also fostering dialogic techniques, for lack of a better phrase, like ways to engage your social world.

Otherwise, if everyone around you is saying, yeah, the election was stolen, right.

That puts a lot of social pressure on you to agree and go, okay, I guess the election was stolen.

Even if visibly and critically, you know that that's nonsense.

Oh yeah, for sure.

I mean, there's a bunch of threads we could pull there.

But, you know, so one of the first thoughts I had while you were saying that is this idea of trust, right?

I mean, you talked about that we learn things through, through our social networks.

And I think technically it's.

They talk about it as sort of social epistemology, right?

And you know, that there was.

We couldn't be human, we couldn't survive without it.

So it's not saying, you know, we can't do it.

But you have to also realize that there's this trust factor, that you trust the people in your network and you don't trust people on the other side.

And, and, you know, there's a, there's a social psychologist and I'm forgetting the name now, I can get it to you for the show notes.

But she said, she said something so profound when she said that the fear of social death is greater than the fear of physical death.

So, like the thing you're talking about, like, I, I have.

I can't lose my tribe.

And we don't even know this is going on because it's that deep, ancient part of our brain, you know, that survive.

Humans traded brain power for muscle.

They traded muscle for this social cohesion and, and work operating as groups.

And so groupiness is like, literally critical to our survival.

And our brain is very afraid of getting ousted out of a group.

Right.

And we don't even know that's going on.

But, but it's happening all the time.

And so, you know, it's a balance because you have to have.

You can't know everything.

I can't know everything about how an iPhone works, but I'm still going to use an iPhone, right?

So there's a whole bunch of people and there's a whole bunch of history there that just comes collapsed with that.

And I have to kind of accept it.

And there's a bunch of.

And that same thing is true in a bunch of other realms.

We can't know it all ourselves, right?

We're going to have to draw some lines about where we're going to accept the information that we trust from somewhere.

And this is the challenge that we have going forward.

Well, and it's funny, you sort of describe or you evoke the kind of black box society, right?

The consequence of algorithms is we don't always know why they make the decisions they make.

Although we are starting to understand now the kind of outrage machine that the bias of fostering engagement is.

Extremists end up being rewarded because they're more engaging.

Whether you're telling them that they're wrong or whether you're saying, wow, I didn't know that.

That type of secret knowledge.

And we've looked previously at this concept of algorithmic folklore, which is basically people reverse engineering how the algorithm works by talking to each other.

Do you see that as either facilitating or enabling a kind of media literacy?

Quite the opposite.

Is it facilitating further weaponization in the sense that the average person is probably not thinking, okay, now that I know algorithmic optimization, I'm going to make sure my puppy photos are more popular versus it's those who are politically motivated who are perhaps more likely to use that information, use that media literacy to, you know, further destabilize the public discourse.

Right.

I mean, some of it's grift, right.

I mean, some people have figured out how to use these tools just.

And sometimes that there's a political aspect of that grift.

Right.

They've figured out that that's a hot button I could use and I can then go sell my.

Whatever crazy products they have.

I mean, you know, you could go, I guess, to.

Alex Jones is sort of an example of that in some largest way.

Right.

He has all this nonsense he says.

Who knows how much he believes, but.

And then he goes and sells, you know, vitamins and I don't know, all kinds of crazy stuff that he sells.

And he's even said in court that he doesn't really believe in him and he's just trying to sell pills.

Right.

So it doesn't matter.

People still listen.

I mean, that gets back to our.

How this tribalness that we have and we want this information, we want to be lied to, basically, Right?

Yeah.

Because hearing what we want.

But yeah.

So can it.

Could it be used for good?

Potentially.

But I think this gets back to our innate.

The challenge.

I mean, every time a technology has come out, you know, with this idea that somehow it'll solve our problems and make.

Make the world better, it's often just created more division and loud misinformation to spread better, going all the way back to the printing press and 150 years of wars over the church.

Right.

So this is not new.

Like, every time these technologies come out, rna, human tendencies come out and you get sort of the good and the bad with it and finding how to sort of tease out the good and.

And somehow make the good win and win the day.

It has historically been a challenge.

And I don't know what that answer is.

I do, you know, kind of believe there's some possibility that maybe AI could be applied In a good way on this.

But again, you're back to that.

It also can be applied in really horrible ways.

Well, and, And.

And hopefully we'll sort of come back and end around that in terms of, I suspect, use of incentivizing.

Right.

And rewarding people in terms of their desire for attention and their des.

Dopamine could be engineered to get the outcomes we desire.

And I do want to come back to that, but I'm curious to kind of open up outrage overload as both a concept, a phrase, and then fundamentally a journey or a path that you've been on.

Because for me, outrage overload kind of evokes a system breakdown.

Like, on the one hand, I sort of imagine the overload of the individual, right, where this is a kind of sensory overload.

But then there's the democratic implication, right, that this is overloading.

I think it already has overloaded our democratic capacity to handle disputes, to handle disagreements, to handle conflict.

Give me a sense of, you know, the narrative, the.

The kind of.

What's the word I'm looking for here, the direction, the momentum of outrage overload.

And as I describe this, I almost imagine thinking of Dune, that you're riding Shai Hulud, right?

You're riding this big worm that is outrage overload, and you're holding onto it, trying to say, hey, here's what's going on.

Please enlighten me.

Yeah, no, the way you characterize it in the beginning is really perfect because there is this sort of individual side of it, because outrage is itself using outrage.

You know, it's kind of a placeholder for this whole set of emotions, often anger, moral indignation, stuff like that.

And it has a place in society.

It has a place in human history and society.

There's evolutionary biology.

We believe that outrage was sort of invented as a way to enforce social norms so that those groups could stay together.

This goes back, you know, tens of thousands of years.

And so it's very innate in our brain.

But.

But if you're just swimming in it, obviously it doesn't serve that purpose anymore.

Right.

And that's where the overload side comes in.

Right.

So should we be outraged at some things?

Probably, yes.

I mean, I'm not saying you shouldn't be outraged.

There's probably things that deserve are being outraged about it.

Maybe when you go learn about them, you'll find I should be more outraged about that thing.

But there are a lot of things we're outraged about just for no reason.

Like, it's a small enough thing that there's better ways to spend our time and it's causing us to lose the ability to do the thing we talked before, which is be critical of media and be a critical thinker because it turns off that part of our brain, our emotions kick in, all these other flight and fight and all this kind of stuff kicks in and we're not very good at being a logical being anymore.

So.

Yeah, and then like you say, then that extends into society, right?

So people have figured out this works, whether accidental, like just kind of randomly running algorithms until they get the engagement they want or whether actively, you know, in media and a whole industry of folks that know that this is the way they're going to have to keep viewership.

And it's back to that word you use in earlier, the incentive thing, right?

So how do we flip those incentives in some way that you know, and then some.

That starts with us, right?

We have to stop wanting to stop, we have to stop clicking on it.

We have to stop, you know, viewing it when, or calling them out when they use these kind of techniques.

And that's hard, right?

I mean, because you get caught up in it and require, it's going to require us to do it.

But I do believe bottom up movements can happen and I think that's probably the way, the way out of this.

But yeah, that's exactly what you're saying.

It's like it's, it's, it's outrage is a good thing, but not when you're just swimming in it and you can't tell the difference between what's hurting you and what's not.

Well, and it also strikes me, as you've alluded to earlier, the group dynamics here are crucial because on the one hand there's a kind of snowball effect combined with the fear of missing out.

Where you want to be part of the pylon, right?

You want to be part of the powerful side of the mobile.

The same way that if that's coming at you, it's very terrifying.

And that is another kind of overload.

And there are unfortunately a lot of people on the Internet who have had to experience that.

How do we build a culture of solidarity, a culture of community defense, so that it's not just that we discourage each other from engaging in that behavior.

And I'm seeing this on airplanes more often that when someone has an episode on an airplane, more of the other passengers are standing up to the defense of maybe they're harassing the staff, maybe they're harassing a person.

It seems like there's a greater community responsibility coming on.

But on the Internet, that's harder.

On the Internet, it's easy to just go away or close the window.

Is there a need for that kind of.

You're describing the incentives to create the alternative.

Is there a need to create a similar group dynamic that is a positive force rather than fueling this outrage and fueling the kind of emotions that go with it?

Well, yeah, I mean, there's definitely some of this going on.

I mean, this is one thing to keep in mind that there are lots of groups out there kind of recognizing that this is a problem and, and that there's working on ways out.

Do people have all the answers or we got it figured out and do they have enough traction yet?

You know, probably not.

Right.

But.

And maybe that's a problem.

It's too.

There's too many organizations, and we somehow need to consolidate a little bit in some way.

But, but there is.

There are some movements.

Movements on this, I think.

Yeah.

And I think this, this idea of, of, you know, the airplane example that you use, you know, that can go too far too.

Right.

Because now you can, you can find.

Find that now suddenly all kinds of things are.

Are not acceptable in certain situations.

And, and you are starting to make it, you know.

Well, I say social media is a perfect example of this where you talked about you.

It's easier to just walk away.

Well, and that's part of the problem because now it creates this perception because the loud voices are who stick around.

It creates this misperception that they represent a larger group than they really do because a lot of the people that, like, are more, like, more soft on this or have a more rational view of it are like, I'm out.

I can't deal with this.

I got better things to do.

So all you get are those loud voices.

So you get a misperception of the world as being more sort of polarized emotionally than it really is.

Well, and allow me then, to bring that right to the core of politics, because I think what you just described is what we're seeing in the electoral space, that, that smart people, rational people, sane people are staying the hell away from politics.

Right.

There's zero incentives for them to be mocked, attacked.

There's a certain level of vicious partisanness that I think alienates a lot of smart and sensible people who go, I just like the Internet.

I just don't want to be part of that.

And we as a society suffer, right, because we don't get the best and brightest in office and in our body.

Instead, we get the loudest and those who covet power the most.

And so I'm curious, in terms of this outrage loop, how do we, to your point, how do we switch that culture, acknowledging that this culture is strong and being constantly reinforced?

Because while you acknowledge.

And maybe.

Actually, I have two questions now forming, so I'll stick to the political one.

You acknowledge that there are organizations trying to stop this.

And it strikes me, fundamentally what we have is an outside of government problem, right?

This is not the state.

This is not the Department of Justice.

This is.

Social media is not actually a public square because the public state, the government does not have power to enforce there.

And Meta, for example, has just said, hey, we're backing off moderation, forget about it.

You guys say whatever you want.

Is there a danger then, and I'm being hyperbolic here deliberately, is there a danger here then, in vigilantism, that rather than focusing on social norms, rather than focusing on social institutions, we're instead just escalating the information war by, you know, unfortunately saying the other side is winning.

We need different tactics.

We can't use the methods that the other side is using, because then we're just the other side.

But we're also not creating the type of governance and responsibility and trust that we would think we would need in a democratic society.

Am I off base here?

Again, this is the political scientist in me going, where is legitimate power within this larger context?

Yeah, well, certainly, first of all, on the, on the sort of politician side, even if they are, you know, sort of more moderate in their views or more moderate in their.

They would prefer to be more moderate in the way they interact with the opposing party.

They can't even do that anymore.

Like, that now has become something that will get them canceled or whatever you might want to call it, that their own people will go after them if they're too nice or, you know, they're willing to compromise.

Just.

We've made compromise a bad word, right?

And it's like the only way to get anything done is compromise.

People like you can't always get your way.

And, you know, and there's certainly.

I'm not saying you can't have issues you won't compromise on, but the reality is you have to build coalitions to make things happen.

And so you can't just always get your way.

But.

But.

And we've made that a bad word.

So, yeah, within.

Even within politicians, if they are not so much just this crazy, they almost have to pretend to be this, you know, this kind of wild Extreme, because their own people, they'll get black from their own people for not doing that.

And I think to the, to the platforms and what could happen, obviously, we've kind of seen it, right.

I mean, look at the changes in Twitter slash X over the last couple of years.

Right.

I mean, it's become a cesspool of misinformation.

And, you know, and it's.

And it's.

You know, there's probably.

It says.

It's this challenge of there's lots of good information on these platforms.

It's just hard to weed it out.

Like, where is the good information?

How do you tell the difference?

And that.

That's a heavy lift for the average person to.

To work with.

And so you're overwhelmed.

I mean, it's.

What is Bannon's thing?

Right.

Just throw BS at the wall and.

And that will, you know, that just was it.

Flood the zone, I think he said.

Right.

And.

And that works.

I mean, that basically you have to say the guy's winning.

Right?

The guy's.

He wants to destroy the.

The administrative state.

He's.

He's achieving it with essentially what the word that you use, this information warfare idea.

So, yeah, I don't.

It's.

It's.

I'm trying not to be the negative nanny here or whatever, because I try to bring positive messages, but it's a challenging landscape, for sure.

I mean, we have diseases like polio coming back and things like that.

And so it's a dismiss information world.

It's a challenging landscape.

Well, and I think to your point about the public health dynamics, I think there's a side to this larger battle, and I think framing it as a battle is problematic, but it is right now, until we get a ceasefire, it is a battle is that the scientists, the institutional authorities, they've kind of sat it out, right?

Because they recognize that the other side isn't playing by the rules, that they're using tactics that are unfair and vicious, especially in terms of some of the death threats targeted or now the threat of prosecution against Dr.

Fauci.

Right.

But at the same time, there really isn't.

To bring it back to podcasting.

I'm both pleased and disappointed at this talk of, oh, the left needs a Joe Rogan or the Democrats need a podcasting kind of ecosystem, the way that the right has a podcasting ecosystem, which that happened with talk radio, that happened with cable news.

It's a recurring phenomena.

But at the same time, it doesn't feel as if the people who have power, the people who have the expertise, have the scientific know how as if they are willing to wade into these public battles.

And part of me gets it because they're probably going to get clobbered before they have a chance of getting their point across.

I'm curious what you think.

Is this something in which we need to be asking those leaders, we need to be asking those experts, academics, community leaders to kind of, you know, engage more, or is the deck stacked against them?

Right.

Is it a situation in which the casino's always going to win and they're smart by not really wading into the morass that has become our public discourse?

Yeah, I think there's a lot of things going on there.

I mean, one is the trust thing we talked about.

But one challenge is a very legitimate.

I had David Helfand, who is a longtime astrophysicist and tries to go out and talk about various science things and communicate.

Know, he just talked about how he, you know, basically science communications are not very good at telling stories and convincing people.

Right.

They.

It's.

So that's a challenge.

Right.

So you.

And, you know, we need those storytellers.

So we had, you know, people like Carl Sagan and we had people like Burke, the, the English science communicator, forgetting his name now.

But I'm sure you know who I'm talking about.

You did like, connections.

James Burke.

James Burke, yeah.

Folks like that.

Right.

We need more folks like that that can communicate some of this science and bring it down to a level and get that message through with storytelling.

And, you know, I'm, I'm sort of thinking about how can I.

I help do that, you know, and as I need to do more of that on my show because I still often, I mean, we do storytelling through interviews a little bit, but I have to do more storytelling to get some of these messages across because I've, you know, I've had listeners come back and say, you know, this thing, this thing, this thing.

And I said, dude, we talked about that on episode, you know, 32.

And we talked about that on, you know, but clearly it's my problem.

I didn't get the message across.

Right.

And so I think we have to take.

I think the scientists typical community has to take the responsibility for being poor at communication, basically.

Right.

And I think Democrats as at large do as well.

I mean, I think they've really struggled to communicate with that segment of the sort of mass.

The masses.

Well.

And in their defense, you know, lying is easier.

Right.

Like, if you're just going to make stuff up versus scientists tend to feel a commitment to not misrepresenting the science or even exaggerating the science versus going with people who are literally just making the nonsense up as they go along.

Well, yeah, you're absolutely right about that.

And I failed to kind of talk about that a little bit too, because, yeah, it is an unfair playing field a little bit.

Right.

Because we sort of sometimes position disinformation on one side and quality news reporting or something on the other, but they're very different.

Quality news reporting is simply trying to give you the.

The information you need to make a decision if it's really quality journalism.

Right.

Whereas disinformation is trying to take you someplace and have an outcome.

And so those two things are not opposites.

Like, they're not.

One doesn't.

You don't defeat one with the other.

You kind of need a disinformation campaign, or you need a propaganda campaign and anti propaganda propaganda a little bit to actually fight disinformation.

And that's where, you know, unfortunately, the journalism crisis is obviously complicating this, because in an ideal democratic society, you'd have a strong culture of journalism, which was the counter to disinformation.

You'd have science saying, you know, here's what we're Lear, here's what we're researching, here's how we respond to a pandemic or the climate threat.

And then you have journalists who are saying, yeah, that Alex Jones guy.

No, those supplements are snake oil.

The conspiracies he's peddling are designed to make you afraid.

But the journalism has kind of fallen apart for a bunch of different reasons, partly economic, partly technological.

But I think where the journalism crisis and the science communication inadequacies, where they're a little united, is the clutching onto objectivity.

And where I think objectivity as a concept has a role and should evolve.

Science is teaching us that we are subjective beings and that as you were saying, within our ancestral brain and our social and collective kind of connections, Right.

We're far easily trusting the people around us and the people we love, even if they're spouting nonsense sense compared to a legitimate, verified, credible expert who spent their entire life around a little bit of research.

And I think the issue there comes down to we want to see people's humanity.

We want to see their authenticity.

And this is where Neil DeGrasse Tyson, he's not perfect, but he is a credible science communicator because he's himself and you get a sense that he's himself.

And I think the Journalists, the science communicators, the people who are leaning away from objectivity and more to their honest, humble perspective.

I'm seeing that as a much more viable way of how people communicate.

Unfortunately, those folks are on TikTok and they may be SOL real fast.

But I'm curious again, through your own experiences, especially vis a vis your audience relations, because I thought that was a really powerful example.

How do you see your own relationship with objectivity?

Because you're dealing with emotion, you're talking to people about often the irrational side of their thinking and their psychology.

Where do you, as a guide, as an educator, as a host, where do you fall within that spectrum and how do you manage it yourself in terms of the tone that you take on your show and the way that you relate to your constituency or community?

Yeah, again, there's a little bit of a meta aspect of this as well, because again, I'm sort of talking about how storytelling is the way to do things and I'm often presenting it with facts.

So I fall into the same problem.

But, but, but, yeah, I mean, it's a message that I really try to work on, is that this, we have this assumption sometimes you could call it like naive realism, where we assume the way we see the world is how everybody else will see.

If we had the same facts, we'd come to the same conclusion.

And you know, that's clearly not, not how things work, you know, and, and, and facts are, play a role in it.

And so, but a lot of people see, and this has been true in science communication for a long time, that there was this idea of information deficit, I think was the theory and this idea that if we just give more information, we'll, we'll, we'll close that gap and everyone will come to the same thinking on this.

And it's clearly shown that that doesn't work, that that's not how things work.

So, you know, a lot of people talk about there's a fact gap, and that's true.

There are.

We learn our bubbles and there's some fat gap.

But even when the facts, when we have shared facts, if you don't talk about objectivity, even if we have shared facts, it doesn't mean we're going to come to the same conclusions from those facts.

And that's where people have a hard time.

Like, how could you not come to this conclusion?

Like, you late.

You literally see people saying they must be literally insane that they did not come to the same conclusion as me.

And that's where we have to get better at appreciating that and get better that empathy side to.

To try to understand how people view things.

And I think this is one reason why on my show, sometimes I'll say the same thing in different episodes with different guests in different ways, because people take away what they take away day and.

And it's almost like if you're going to talk to your kid, I don't know if you have kids, but if you're going to talk to your kid about.

About reproduction, like, you know, the story you tell them at five years old is going to be a lot different than the story you tell them at 7.

And, and you have.

You can't just give that story once at 5 and say, I'm done.

Right.

You know, you're gonna.

They're gonna get a different thing out of it every time you.

You talk about that story.

And, and at, you know, at some point, hopefully they'll understand it all right?

But.

But it's the same.

Same sort of thing here.

People take away what they take away, and you have to almost present the same issue, maybe in different ways to get it across.

And I think that's a lesson that people don't appreciate in their own lives.

Like, they really still think, I can charge into the room, lay out my facts, and win the day.

And I think the biggest thing we lose about that is we don't understand that even if you win, you lose when you do that.

And I think that's sort of the power of podcasting, that it's much more about emergence and dialogue rather than persuasion.

Right.

It's not some PowerPoint where someone's like, here's why you need to do this.

It's people talking and exploring a concept and an idea.

And that's where only because I feel I would be just as guilty of the hypocrisy as you've acknowledged.

I also promote storytelling and narrative, and yet at the same time, often just end up doing exactly what we're doing.

Right.

We're just not so much crafting a clear narrative, but getting into arguments and sharing ideas.

And I do think that that is a form of storytel.

And I think to your point about not so much repetition, but iteration, where you're telling kind of the same concept or making the same argument and using different language.

I think that's tremendously important from an accessibility perspective because everyone has a different frame of reference for where they came from.

Right.

What they're thinking about now, who they've read, what they've listened to.

And I think that Speaks to, as we sort of segue to the common ground part, why we've heard all sorts about echo chambers and filter bubbles and I think you and I have been talking about their predecessor, which is the community, right, the family.

How our ideas, our conceptions are very social and our peers, for example, often have way more influence on us than our parents in terms of the kids.

And how as parents we want our kids to be one way, but their friends almost certainly shift them in another.

But I really liked how you touched upon empathy.

And I definitely believe that empathy is the key to effective communication, period, full stop.

But also to countering this culture, the culture of outrage, the culture of toxicity we have.

How do we, and in particular in the online remote sense, how do we infuse more empathy into how we not just discuss, but discuss contentious issues?

Right, Because I think that's where it can be most difficult for people and that's when they tend to withdraw from empathic attitudes and get more into combative ones.

Yeah.

Well, leaving the social media part and the digital world set aside for just a moment, I think I want to say a couple things on the idea of common ground.

Right?

So sometimes people, if you talk about common ground, they turn off, they're like, oh, you're just trying to get me to be a milk toast, you know, not have any position on anything.

And I'll, and I'll let these people that I think have really terrible ideas have their way.

And, and you know, that's really not what we're saying.

I mean, often we're talking about, sometimes we are talking common ground.

There are applications of common ground for like, if you're going to work together as a community on some project, you're probably gonna need some common ground to be able to sit down and do that.

But we're not always only talking about that.

Sometimes we're just talking about, about shared humanity, common humanity, seeing humanity with the others and, and being less extreme, be more realistic.

Actually it's better to say more realistic because the reality is those extreme positions you have in your head aren't a reflection of reality.

Right.

Nobody fits this very, I mean, somebody, maybe one person somewhere fits the stereotype you have for your political rivals, right?

Nobody really is like that.

Like, when you go meet real people, you find they're not really like that stereotype that you have.

And so you know, that, that, and you know, clearly all the, you know, the folks working in this space doing these kind of things, having these kind of cross dialogue conversations and, and so like that, you know, show this to be true, right?

That, that when you, you get an opportunity.

Because we often don't have an opportunity for these kind of conversations that aren't so heated that they go off the rails.

When you have those exposure to that, you do, you know, gain some of that humanity and you start to have more empathy for their positions and all that kind of stuff.

Now that is really hard to scale, right?

To just do it with conversations plus just doing the conversation doesn't ne necessarily like that's work.

Like why would I do that?

Like, you know, so there's, you sort of got to have some reason to do that.

And that reason to do that might be as an advocate for something and you know, that, you know, what is the line.

I forget who said this one too.

But like if you're going to, you know, solve a problem or you're going to, you know, stop being in a war, you don't talk to your friends, you talk to your enemy, right?

And, and, and so that's what we have to get.

So us getting in a room with a bunch of like minded people and arguing about the other side isn't going to change anything, right?

You're going to have to start figuring out the other side and empathy is how you start to have some.

I think that we've been coached that every idea they have is terrible.

They're terrible people, right?

And we believe it, that we've been, we bought into that, that we really think these other side is evil.

And now you can't negotiate with evil, right?

So when you, but when you actually go, you know, interact with real people and you're ready to be real about listening and, and, and hearing their position, you may find that there is some, you can see a rational argument for how they are think about the world.

You may not agree with it.

And this is the other thing that really frustrates me.

And I'm going to get, you're going to get me going here in a minute.

But one of the things that really frustrates me, a lot of people think letting the other side tell, express their views is somehow agreeing with them.

Like you don't have to change your mind to let them express their views like you, you aren't obliged to change your mind.

Like we're not, I'm not always telling you to change your mind, but if you are an advocate for your position, you're going to be a much better advocate for your position.

If you understand those opposing views and even have some, maybe some empathy for how they arrive at Those views.

And this is what often people like, a bridge people can't seem to cross, Right.

That they can't seem to understand that if you want to be an advocate, you're going to be a much better one by having.

By appreciating those opposing views.

Well, and I would argue even a better human being, right.

A better partner, a better parent, a better person in the world.

Because you said a couple things I want to tease out.

One, that every human being fundamentally is unique and I would argue contradictory.

Right.

So however you imagine your ideological opponent, not only are they not that, but they probably have their own contradictions that you also do.

And we need to afford that level of humanity and humility, I think, in our politics.

But the other side to this too is, I think.

And this is problematic because the other point I think you argued was for nuance, because you acknowledge that there are a lot of people who are like, no, you can't give the other side an inch, or why would you be civil when the other side is so disrespectful?

And that to me is just a race to the block, bottom right.

It's a race to conflict without any chance of resolution.

And this is paradoxical.

I do feel we need a base level of respect that even amongst people who hate each other, there needs to be for a society to exist.

There needs to be a base level of respect, a base level of social norm.

And I do fear that in the online world, we've lost that.

I think in Face to Face, that's still kind of there, right?

There is still.

You know, to your point, this is all easier face to face.

It's easier to connect to someone's humanity.

It's easier to connect to someone's empathy.

And I say this more for our audience because, you know, I love to share these kind of personal anecdotes.

I paradoxically identify as a Jewish Communist.

And while that's both a historically accurate but contemporarily oxymoronic identity, I was a member of a very conservative golf club for about 10 years.

And not only did nobody at that golf club know that I was a communist because this was a very right wing, you know, whatever, but we were all friends, right?

These are people who are ideologically on the other end of the spectrum of me, right, who I have very little in common with, but the golf club created an environment of respect.

It created an environment of civility.

We weren't there to debate taxation.

We were there to enjoy the outdoors.

We were there to enjoy each other's time.

And it was transformative for me because on the one hand, I was this huge outlier.

There were certainly no other Jewish radicals at the golf club, maybe only one other Jew at the golf club.

But to be able to connect with these conservatives, right, with these people who was so rewarding for me because it humanized my opponents.

It humanized all the people who politically, I would never agree with.

But socially, I live in the same world as I wish that there was a way for other people to have similar experiences to that, where on the one hand, I'm confident enough in my identity that I know who I am and I don't have to go to a golf club and feel I need to conform, But I'm also able to open myself to other people's views and other people's perspectives.

Ironically, my experience at the golf club probably made me more of a radical than I was going in because I got a greater sense of sort of what these people's attitudes were and more.

But I have been privileged enough to be in situations with people right across the political spectrum, and they're all human beings, right?

They all breathe, they all fart, they all eat, they all do those things.

And I have struggled since then to think about how we recreate that, how we create environments in which your humanity is all that matters.

Not your views, your faith, your attitude on particular policies.

Has that come up in your many conversations in terms of how do we get back to that point where people who are ideological enemies, people who are disagree, can still drink beer, smoke a dube, shake hands and hang out with each other?

Oh, yeah, for sure.

Both in terms of scientific research where people have studied this, and also with the practitioners.

Right?

So one.

One group has an idea of this, uses the word dignity.

Like they prefer dignity over respect.

So you're affording your.

These opponents, your political rivals, or whoever you're having.

Having a conflict with, you know, dignity.

And they have this scale called the Dignity Dignity Index.

And you can look it up, and they have a lot of information on that.

This is like this 1 to 8 scale from contempt P to dignity.

And I think that's a.

I use that scale often when I'm in my.

And I think, you know, I think they.

They created this and they admit this.

They kind of created this as a tool to measure or rate the people on the other side.

I think it's a much more useful tool.

And they have found the same thing too, to sort of rate your own speech and rate.

Rate folks on your own side, like, am I Affording my, My rival dignity.

So that's, that's one example of that.

And there's lots of other, that kind of work out there in terms of the, A lot of the research and some of the groups working on this, on that example you talked about, about, of, you know, getting to spending time with somebody in an environment where politics is not the central identity factor of that sort of the premise of the interaction is, you know, always a great thing because that way if politics does come up later, you'll at least have some amount of benefit of the doubt because you do see them as human.

Right.

And so you can, you know, go play video games together, something like that, that, and get to know them as a regular person.

That, That's a huge factor in this.

And.

But these are heavy lifts, right?

So to go do that, especially if someone, you know, is sort of a political opposite, it's.

It's a heavy lift.

I mean, and I, and I of course always say, you got to do what you can do.

We only have so much emotional energy.

But some of the things we talked about before, if you do, you know, start to look at some of these things with a more rational lens and a more critical lens, you know, not only will, you know, you're helping society better, helping yourself, I mean, you're going to, your mental health is going to be so much better if you're not just constantly in fear of everything around you.

Yeah.

And I think that kind of mental health is contagious in a positive sense.

Right.

That you start helping other people sort of feel good.

And that's why I sort of titled this episode Making Sense of the Nonsense and that I think the consequence of outrage, overload is mental health crisis.

Right.

Is people not really understanding how to navigate their world, how to participate in their democracy.

So I kind of want to end on that notion of incentives.

Right.

As part of your journey, as part of your research, as part of your discussions, have you started to see incentives, whether psychological, whether technological, whether economic, whether social, that help us foster dignity, regard other people with dignity and respect ourselves in so much as we think about how we treat others and the benefits of doing things?

So, yeah.

And from my, for my, for the experience, from my little show, the best way to that I, the most obvious way I see that is, is it from.

At the individual level where that incentive related to that mental health, like people are just, they're overloaded, you know, they're overwhelmed, they're.

They feel like they're drowning.

There's all these metaphors, you can use and, and that's like the trigger to say I want to understand this better and for my, you know, starting and I always talk about that too.

Like do this for yourself first.

First then you can worry about society and the world and the planet and everything else.

But you know, you can't be a very good advocate if you're losing.

If you're losing it.

Yeah.

And so that, that's probably the biggest incentive I see in individuals is that they just need to re like, you know, they just, they're just beginning to see that they're falling apart and, and this is not good for their health and physical too.

I mean this stuff, the stress carries over into physical, your physical health as well.

So that's probably the first incentive there in terms of incentives like in the larger system frankly it's a, that's, you know I talked to Peter Coleman, he's with an organization called.

Well he's a lot of organizations but works with, starts with us among others and he's a professor and other things.

But he's one of the big leaders in this space for many decades.

You know, he says, well I have to say I've been in this space for a long time and it's not a feel good space.

You don't always get, you know, you don't always feel like you're seeing progress, you know, so it is challenging and when you look at the bigger picture, it is challenging.

Right.

You have all these disincentives, right.

The opposite incentives that are going to be hard to overcome.

But, but so you know, you know, in the research side of it, you know, you see things like to the most, for the most part many people know how you could make social media a better force.

But there's no like, like they're not going to do it.

Like the company aren't going to do it because it's going to affect their bottom line until we can somehow make it flip that.

So that also works for their bottom line.

And I'm not smart enough to have come up with how that is yet, but maybe somebody will figure that out.

Right on.

Well, and I think you know, the bottom up, you sort of described there a bottom up process that I see aligned with mental health, which is as individuals we could use this as a way of helping foster greater defenses of our sanity, a greater process of dealing with it.

Then we can empower our family, our friends, our colleagues, our workplace and that creates this bottom up kind of again virus of sanity that helps people again make sense of the non sand that we find ourselves swimming in.

That brings us to our last segment, which is the Shoutouts segment.

This is really designed kind of like a.

Imagine it like a bibliography.

This could be a shout out again to someone personal, could be a shout out to someone you've had on your show.

Could be a shout out to someone you've read recently.

It's again, designed to let our audience know of people you're thinking about that you think they should pay more attention to.

Yeah, well, I got.

I think I thought about this and I thought, well, I can't not say this person.

There's so many people I could thank and shout out to.

I mean, I've had fantastic acceptance into this world, being sort of a nobody in it, and now making all these connections.

But I'm gonna.

I'm gonna shout out my sister because, you know, of all my family, you know, she.

And also Prep.

I don't know, I guess I shouldn't say I didn't expect it, but it was maybe still a little bit of a surprise.

But other than my wife, she's been the most engaged, you know, and supportive of this journey that I've.

I've embarked on.

And.

And I also want to shout her a little bit because I also think she represents a lot of folks right now.

She's also struggling right now with the results of this election.

So I hope that my show has helped to give her some resilience to this.

But she's struggling, so that's who I was going to shout out.

Right on.

And to your point, I think a lot of us are struggling.

That's what's motivating me as well, is that there's a lot of people I know who are depressed straight out and are really looking for guidance for hope.

So I thank you, David, because I think you're doing that very much with your show and you've helped me here in terms of what we're doing.

I want to give a shout out to the association for Media Literacy.

Neil Anderson and Carol Arkes were two big influences of mine when I was younger and not so young, and they're possibly listening today as well.

So what's up, Carol?

How you doing, Neil?

They've also done great work.

And so, finally, before we go, how can our audience learn more about what you're doing, connect with your show?

I brought up your sub stack here only because it's hard to bring up a podcast visually on a podcast, but, you know, tell everyone where they can find you and how they can tune in.

Well, all my all my stuff, all the stuff you wanted to know about the show is that is at a website called outrage overload.net.

that's where we have.

You can find episodes there.

You can find other work, and then you can also find the link over to the substack where I do some writing on substack as well.

Well, and so that's the best place to start if you.

All my contact is more Orlander, too.

All my socials.

But the socials are all Outrage Overload.

So you should find me pretty much on Blue sky or Instagram or all the places.

And if you want to email me directly, again, that's on the website too, but it's outrageoverloadmail.com so always, always love to hear feedback from real people.

Right on.

Well, thank you very much, David.

That's been, I think, a fantastic episode.

We've been really, I think, honored to have a lot of folks on our show who are on the front lines of the public education work that we need to be doing to really flip the script in terms of the direction our society's heading politically.

Thanks, everyone, for tuning in.

Metaviews.

We tend to publish as often as possible for the same reason that we are trying to counter the disinformation and nonsense that's out there.

You can reach us on metaviews on pretty much all the platforms that there are.

I'm Jesse Hirsch.

We'll see you soon.

All right, take care.