Ep138 "Why do our political brains mistake opinion for truth?" with Kaizen Asiedu

What if your confidence in your political beliefs doesn't have that much to do with whether they're true? When you're watching a pundit, why does outrage often feel so convincing and nuance seem so unsatisfying? Our conspiracy theory is a predictable feature of human brains. And is there any way for us to stop ourselves from mistaking our feelings for conclusions? How can we become clearer thinkers? Today we're going to speak with political commentator and proponent of clear thinking, Kaizen Asiyadu, about how we arrive at our hot takes on the political world. Welcome to Intercosmos. This me David Eagleman, I'm a neuroscientist and author at Stanford, and in these episodes, we sailed deeply into our three-pound universe to understand how we see the world and how we all see different worlds inside different heads. I'm Lori Siegel, and on my new podcast, Mosley Human, I'll take you to some wild corners of the tech world. I'm about to go on a date with an AI companion, add a real-world cafe right here in New York City. There's no playbook for what to do when an AI model hallucinates a story about you. Mosley Human is your playbook for how tech can work for you. Anyone can now be an entrepreneur, anyone can build an app, and it's very empowering. Listen to Mosley Human on the iHart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows. This financial literacy month and the podcast Eating Wall Broke is bringing real conversations about money, growth, and building your future. This month, here from top streamer, Zo Spencer, and venture capitalist, LaKisha, Landrum Pierre, as they share their journeys from starting out to leveling up. There's an economic component to community striving. If there's not enough money and entrepreneurship happening in communities, they fail. Listen to Eating Wall Broke from the Black Effect Podcast Network on the iHart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. On the Sino Show podcast, each episode invites you into a raw, unfiltered conversations about recovery, resilience, and redemption. On a recent episode, I sit down with actor, cultural icon Danny Trail talk about addiction, transformation, and the power of second chances. The entire season two is now available to bench, featuring powerful conversations with the guest like Tiffany Addish, Johnny Knoxville, and more. I'm an alcohol, and without this group, I'm a die. Listen to Sino Show on the iHart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. On paper, the three hosts of the Nick Dick and Pohl show are geniuses. We can explain how AI works, data centers, but there are certain things that we don't necessarily understand. Better version of Play, Stupid Games, When, Stupid, Brises. Yes. Which, by the way, wasn't Taylor Swift who said that for the first time. I actually thought it was. I got that wrong. But hey, no one's perfect. We're pretty close, though. Listen to the Nick Dick and Pohl show on the iHart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. Every moment of your life, your brain is running. It's one main job. It's collecting up tons of scraps of sensory data, things like sounds and images and words and social cues. And it's using these to build a model of the world. This is what you'll often hear me refer to as the internal model. Your brain is locked in total darkness in the silence of your skull. And it's trying to figure out what is going on out there. As it gets better and better at building this internal model, then it can make better predictions. And it can do all sorts of other things like fill in gaps and smooth over uncertainty and make inferences about things even when they're quite ambiguous. Now, here's the really important part for today's conversation. Your brain does not build a perfect model of the world. First of all, it can't. You wouldn't have nearly the processing power that you would need to represent the actual world that's out there. But there's an even more immediate reason why your internal model is so impoverished, which is that you only have a very limited lens on the world. You have followed a thin trajectory from your time and place of birth to right now. And you've only seen a vanishingly small fraction of the things you could have seen. And for that matter, you've only even heard about a small fraction of the things you could have heard about. And you have grown up embedded in your particular family, in your neighborhood, in your culture, in your moment in time. And if any of those were different, you might have slightly different opinions about plenty of things. So in other words, what your brain constructs is not actually a perfect model of the world, but a very rough working model. It's generally good enough to help you predict what might happen next and make choices about how to act, but it is not a mirror of the world, not even close. I love this line by the Nobel laureate, Rabindranath Tagore, who said, "Most people believe the mind to be a mirror, more or less accurately reflecting the world outside them, not realizing on the contrary that the mind is itself the principal element of creation." So your internal model of the world is not perfect and it doesn't have to be, just stay alive into conserve energy and to get by. Now what all this means in today's context is that the brain didn't evolve to be an objective, true seeking machine. It evolved to be a subjective machine. And by the way, a very social one. All of us with human brains are exquisitely sensitive to approval and rejection and in-group signals of inclusion and out-group signals of threat. And as a result, a lot of our internal models of reality are shaped a lot by what keeps us aligned with the people around us. This creates a fundamental tension in how we understand ourselves because we like to think of ourselves as rational agents. In our flattering view of ourselves, we carefully weigh the evidence and we update our beliefs and we follow the facts where they lead. But on the other hand, we know from decades of cognitive science that our brains are vulnerable to all sorts of cognitive biases, things that we'll talk about today like framing effects or confirmation bias or motivated reasoning and on and on. And something that I've talked about a lot on other episodes is that brains are not data processing devices that just take in statements and decide true or false. Instead, there's so much more to the belief we hold, including social issues like defending whichever team we're on. Now throw modern media into that equation, you get the inputs to our internal models, arriving at high speed and they're optimized for engagement and they're often designed to provoke. And as a result, outrage travels fast and bold claims are cheaper to make than careful refutations. And it takes a lot more energy to debunk misinformation than it does to create it. So we find ourselves in a strange moment with lots of questions to chew on. Like how do social incentives bend us away from accuracy, even for well-intentioned? What does it mean to think clearly in an ecosystem that rewards outrage and tribal loyalty? And there's also a question about feelings. Feelings are signals about what matters to us, about perceived threats and values and injustices, but they shouldn't alone give us our conclusions. Our job is to interpret. And the danger comes when we stop at the feeling and we mistake that for the full story and never ask what else might be going on. So when we look at the big picture, I think the most important thing we need is what's known as epistemic humility. What is that? That epistemic just refers to our knowledge and humility, of course, is keeping a modest view of it. So epistemic humility is about recognizing the limits and fallibility of our own knowledge. It's about acknowledging that for all of us, our understanding is always incomplete and provisional. And as we'll talk about today, epistemic humility is about challenging your own assumptions and being willing to say, you know, I might be wrong. And this brings us to education. If our brains are so easily influenced by framing and emotion and social pressure, then what should education really be about? Is it about transmitting facts or about training minds to notice their own blind spots? And this issue, of course, reaches past the classroom into our daily lives and it underlies our debates about free speech and protests and conspiracy theories and the way we subscribe to political ideologies. So today we're going to talk with someone who has made these questions central to his work, someone who's not trying to tell us what to think, but instead to help us see how we're thinking and how easily that process can get steered or manipulated. Kaizen ASEADU is a philosopher by training and an Emmy award-winning producer and now he has a million followers on Instagram where he talks about politics and free speech and epistemic humility. What I love about his videos is that he works very carefully to get people on all sides to slow down and consider other points of view and to steal man those points of view and just generally try to understand the assumptions that live underneath their conclusions. Kaizen is the creator of Clear Thinker where he helps us all to understand how what we believe can get shaped by the way it's framed or our own cognitive biases or even our own social incentives. So in today's conversation we're going to explore why it's so difficult for people to agree on the truth and how we might cultivate clearer thinking in our own brains which are spilling over with cognitive biases. So Kaizen, something that you and I both think a lot about is conspiracy theories and the question is why do people get so much certainty and some idea and how can we get ourselves eventually as a society to epistemic humility? Yeah, well I think with conspiracy theories they thrive in an environment of uncertainty and humans don't like uncertainty. Uncertainty feels very unsafe. So I think that when there's something that has a lot of uncertainty particularly something very emotionally relevant to them like for example the Charlie Kirk assassination that's very emotionally relevant to a lot of people because many people looked up to him as a leader or felt that he represented their values. So when he died a lot of people were struggling to reconcile with his death and for them there were things about the official narrative that didn't line up which created uncertainty. In order to sort of close off that uncertainty people seek a certainty and they'll look for certainty wherever they can find it they're not very particular about it. So the thing with conspiracy theories is often it's just a giant exercise in motivated reasoning and motivated reasoning is essentially when you form the conclusion and then look for evidence to justify the conclusion rather than the other way around which as a scientist you know is the way it's supposed to be done. So if you can find that certainty even if it's not evidence based you'll form an emotional attachment to it and once that emotional attachment takes hold especially in the area of social media and the internet you can keep on reinforcing that attachment with information because you'll always find someone on the internet who will tell you what you already believe. And to what degree do you think our beliefs have to do with our identities also as a name? My group believes this. Yeah. A ton. A ton because when people have a belief and they're getting social validation from it like you're getting likes online or your friend group is praising you or you're making money off of it. I know this right? Like I'm someone who was a thought leader. I make content for a living. I have an incentive to say things that fit my tribe's bias and everyone has a tribe. I try to go out of it but it's algorithmic echo chambers that were all existing in. So yeah a big part of this is just wanting to have a congruent identity both socially and psychologically because sitting on uncertainty can create a lot of cognitive dissonance and that's like it's like psychological suffering when you go through that and I know that because I'm always having to deal with them like they say the right thing like what about this angle that's not like a good argument too and I do that because for me it's really important I like to be responsible for the things that I say but most people especially if you're not thinking about these things deeply like politics and culture and conspiracy theories they're not going to want to do that and instead they're more interested in the social signaling and social approval that comes from having a certain identity. So it's a really nasty trap that's hard to get out of. You know one of the things that I really appreciate about your social media channels is that you put the effort into presenting different views entertaining different hypotheses at least having them on the table and then you point out where the weight of evidence seems to sit the most but it's very inclusive in that way and it draws people in. How do you find that sort of strategy working as opposed to the hey I'm going to pretend I have absolute certainty about this particular theory. Yeah it's interesting you know I've only been talking about politics for like a year and a half. I didn't really even pay attention to politics before that. Wait can I ask you a quick question. Your Instagram you have how many followers now in Instagram? Like around 900,000 and how many did you have a year and a half ago? About like 5,000. Okay yeah so okay so it's really tapped into something. Yeah tapped into something. Okay so keep going. Yeah and I think that meteoric rise is evidence of the fact that people actually are increasingly tired of the emotional sensational approach to discourse. I think in general but especially in politics and you know if I honestly don't know if I would have thought that that was possible that there was really a market for that if I didn't experience it because all we pretty much ever saw was talking heads getting heated, attacking each other at home and named calling constantly. But I think we've reached a point where the pendulum I don't know if it's fully spwing the other way but at least some people are swinging the other way and saying I'm just tired of this. I don't want to be baited into being angry. I don't want to be misled. I'm not actually that politically convicted about anything. I just I want people who feel calm and reasonable and are willing to actually be leaders. Not people who just have a lot of followers and there is a difference. There's plenty of people who have a lot of followers and don't actually act like leaders. They're just feeding their group what they actually want to hear. So yeah, I feel grateful that it was not very intentional me talking about politics and all this stuff happening. But it's actually been really inspiring for me personally because I was like, okay, cool. I'm not the only one who just wants clear thinking, calm discourse and sane conversations. Yeah. So what do you mean by clear thinking because that's really your brand is saying, look, we're going to think about this clearly and I'm so inspired to see that it's working well. So what do you mean by it? Yeah. So let's talk about maybe the what the conditions for clear thinking are. And before this, we were talking about the idea of epistemic humility. And I want to talk about that second word first, humility. Great. The more attached we are to any particular outcome, the harder it is to think clearly. Because what's happening is we're engaging in motivated reasoning. Otherwise, because we're looking for a conclusion that gives us emotional validation or social validation, whatever form of satisfaction we're looking for. So I think one of the preconditions for clear thinking is emotional detachment and actually trying to view even your own personal beliefs scientifically and not being so identified with your beliefs and recognizing, yeah, well, I don't know. Like I believe something. It doesn't mean it's the truth. I don't know. I just holding that as a fundamental axiom, I think, would get everyone so much further. But what's happened is especially in politics, we've conditioned people to believe that not knowing is cowardice or it's a sign of weakness. I mean, when a politician changes their opinion, what do people call them? Flip floppers. Exactly. Like the fact that that's even a term, like I get obviously to steal man that actual term, I think it's usually intended to refer to someone who just changes their opinion with the way audience blow. Yeah. But I think that also gets misapplied to people who are actually growth seeking and trying to be scientific about their thinking. And I'm not saying emotions aren't valid data, they're data, but they're not conclusions. So the more emotionally attached you are, the less clearly you're thinking. Yeah, agreed. And I just want to come back to one thing you said. So I understand it about being a leader because there are plenty of leaders who speak with conviction and say, I know the truth and they have some opinion. And they are leaders also, right? How are you thinking about a leader being somebody who's willing to be swayed by new data? Well, the distinction I have between a leader and someone who just has a lot of followers is someone who just has a lot of followers will always tell their followers what they want to hear. Leaders will break with their followers to bring their followers to a new place. They say, hey, I have a vision. You don't see where I'm going. I'm going to help you get there. I'm going to elevate. And your willingness to be rejected even by your own tribe, albeit temporarily, but even by your own tribe, I think is the prerequisite to actually being a leader. Otherwise, why do we even need you? You're just a mouthpiece for everyone. Something everyone already believes. That's really interesting. I just want to stick on this to think for a second because let's think someone like Candace Owens, the question is, is she a leader? It seems to me she is. But she's telling a particular kind of story. It happens to find resonance with her large audience. I think you and I both find aspects of her storytelling concerning, but the question is is she a leader under this definition? I think she is. I think she's had a long track record of willing to go against her audience. Right? I don't know her politically. to intimately, but as I understand it, she really started getting big as a conservative commentator and she stood out because she's black and a woman and that's unusual in the conservative space. You know, then she went to the daily wire and that was more kind of mainstream conservatism. Relatively recently, actually, she left them, started taking opinions that would not be sanctioned by the daily wire and therefore not be sanctioned by the audience as she built the daily wire. That takes a tremendous amount of courage. That requires actually going against your group. So I don't think she's someone who is one of these people who just has a lot of followers, even though I disagree with some of her methodology. Okay, fair enough. So coming back to conspiracy theories. So what do you suppose this satisfies in people when they hear a particular idea that says, "Look, mass media is telling you X, but I know the truth. It's actually Y." What is that feeding in them? Well, I think it satisfies your desire to be part of an in-group. Because if I know something that other people don't, they're the out-group, I'm the in-group with special knowledge. And we talked before about the social approval and validation that you get from that. You're getting the social approval from other people inside that in-group and every group has a status hierarchy. So the more conspiratorial you can be and the more dogmatic you can be, the more you get celebrated by other people as, "Yeah, you're just a true seeker and the other people, they don't know the truth, they're just sheep, they're people who believe the mainstream media, believe the narrative." And look, mainstream media, there's tons of criticisms we can love against them. I think since 2020, they've broken trust with a lot of people and we've seen a lot of these outlets. We see the clear evidence of ideological capture in these institutions. But the solution is not to go from one extreme to the other where we're just replacing mainstream media bias with podcasted bias. No, the solution is to think for ourselves rigorously and don't dismiss something just because of where it came from and also don't accept something just because of where it came from. We want to look for what can be true, like objectively verified, as close we can get to there, or at least what everyone seems to agree on. Like, can we even get to a shared sense of reality even if we don't know if things are true? And you proceed from there. But yeah, with conspiratorial thinking, you get to feel like you're better than other people. And it's intellectual hubris, actually. It's the opposite of epistemic humility. And it's very dangerous because now it's not actually about pursuing the truth. It's about reinforcing your position in the dominant hierarchy or reinforcing your sense of an identity as someone who knows more or better than other people. And the problem with conspiracy thinking is often it's unfalsofiable, too. So you're not actually making a claim. You're demanding that someone else prove the negative. So for example, right, if I sat here and excuse me, this is going to trigger into your audience. And I said, oh, so why do you beat your wife? And you're like, wait a second. Like, you have any, I haven't even proven that you beat your wife. But I'm already telling you, you need to explain. You need to prove that something didn't happen. How do you prove that something didn't happen? That's much more difficult than proving a positive claim. And it touches on Brandolini's law, which I've heard you bring up in your videos about when a conspiracy theorist is putting out lots and lots of stuff. If you try to address each aspect of it, it would take too long. So tell us about Brandolini's law. Yeah. So Brandolini's law basically states that it takes significantly more energy to debunk a claim than it does to make the claim. And it basically creates a game of whack-mole, especially when we're talking about conspiracies. Because the more claims that the conspiracy theorist puts out, it's actually not a proportional relationship between the conspiracy theorist and the person making the counterclaim. It's like a logarithmic relationship. So if someone puts out 30 hours of content, I might need to spend 300 hours of content actually refuting that. And even once I've refuted that, it's not actually a refutation because all I've done is created skepticism around the skeptic. I haven't actually proven a thing. Unless where I had a point where there is certainty about something. But even when there is certainty about something, because people have not been trained to think about things from first principles, what they'll instead do is default to do I trust the person. So if they say, "Well, I trust Candice Owens, but I don't trust the FBI." It's like, "Okay, well, how can I falsify that then?" It doesn't really matter what I say. That you're just going to accuse me of being a fad or bought off or whatever. And it's like, you're the tribe of the true seekers. So yeah, that's how Branda Lini's law operates. And it creates an incentive where if you're making a conspiratorial claim, as long as you just make as many different claims as possible, it comes overwhelming to even engage with. So this brings us back to this issue of how we all assess truth. I saw a political cartoon some years ago. It showed a bunch of people walking along the road, and then there's a fork in the road. One direction said, "Complex but correct," and the other said, "Simple but incorrect." And most of the people were going in the direction of simple but incorrect and falling off a cliff. And there were a few people following this more complicated road up. Now here's the interesting part about the cartoon. I got curious, who had made the cartoon? Was it somebody on the left or the right politically? So I started, I just started examining who was liking the cartoon online. And it turns out that everybody liked the cartoon, no matter what your political position, everyone thinks they are the complex but correct thinker. And so I've been very interested in this issue of why we all think that we have the truth, and it's obvious to us, and we can't understand why all those idiots and trolls can't see it. They're misinformed, they're disinformed, something like that. What's your thoughts on that? Well, it's so scary to think that you don't have the truth. Right, like imagine you realize you don't have the truth and then you start to reflect, "Oh my god, who have I told this falsehood to? What decisions have I made based on this bad information on these bad beliefs?" It's very ego-threatening. Oh, that's a really good point. And the fact is, each of us has a very thin trajectory through space and time, and we collect up little facts and data through our lives. But the world is big and complicated, right? And so each of us ends up with an internal model of the world where we think, "Okay, I pretty much got this. I know what the truth is." And you're totally right. It's ego-threatening to think that might be wrong. So your mission is to teach people how to think better. So, okay, so how do we go from this thing of having this small internal model to questioning the fence lines? Well, first, let me talk about what quality thinking even looks like. Why shouldn't anyone believe me when I say this clear thinking? I'm a clear thinker, right? How arrogant. I remember when I was in school. I took a philosophy class, I was a philosophy major. I took an intro-philosophy class for intro to logic. And I don't even remember if I actually even finished the class to tell you the truth. But I still remember very clearly having a moment where I was sitting in class and I just had this light bulb moment. I was like, "Wait a second, logic is a thing." It's not just a description, like B-logical or B-rational. No, it's a formal discipline that's been developed for thousands of years, dating back to Aristotle. And Aristotle develops it because he was looking at what Plato and Socrates were doing. And he's like, "Okay, we need to formalize this, basically the truth-seeking process." And when I realize that, I think it just raised my standards for thinking. Because it's not, now the arbiter of good thinking is not, "Oh, how passionately I feel something." It's, "No, does it abide by the formal principles and rules of logic?" There's actual rules of logic. Like, this contribution is, and converse, and the contradictory statements can't be both true. And if you actually look at formal logical notation, it's like math. It actually looks like math. And I don't think most people are even acquainted with logic at that level. Like, you don't need to take a whole logic class, but even realizing, "Wait a second, this is a formal discipline." It's not something that people are just hand-waving about. It's not some sort of swear word that people use when you're like, "You're a logical." It's like, "No, no, no, it literally does not conform to the rules of logic." We need to be introducing kids, actually, like very early to logic. I mean, just like, along with math, I think logic is kind of like verbal math when you think about it. Yeah. I think that's very good to get that into schools at a young age. I also think the whole issue about in groups and out groups, and what drives these sorts of things, and issues of moral pollution, and issues of, "Are they on my side?" or not, all these things would be worth getting into schools at a very young age, so that we find, what are the pot holes that we fall into? So we don't see coming. First of all, do you have confidence that this would be useful, could be useful in an education level? Absolutely. I mean, I actually made a course. It's called Clay thinker course. What age is that aimed for? Yeah, so it is more aimed for probably like young adults, and my audience that gravitates toward tends to be more conservative, because I just have a more conservative audience that's older. But I designed it in a way that I'm speaking pretty simply, and I think even someone in probably high school could get it, the only concern I'd have is the subject matter can be very emotionally charged, because we're talking about politics, but it's not just a logic course. It's about logic, it's about psychology, like modern psychology, cognitive biases, apply to the political and informational realm, just because if you just talk about this stuff in the abstract, It's bloodless, so it's hard for people to feel excited to engage with it. But if I'm talking about group attribution error, for example, like projecting the opinions or beliefs of a minority group on the entire group, and I talk about that in the context of Gaza or Israel, Palestine, all of a sudden, like, wait a second. Okay, now people have an emotional connection. I'm like, okay, now this is actually relevant to me. Give us an example of that. Yeah, so one straw man that people do of each other, so this is my part is in straw manning, is the left will call the right evil or fascist or lacking empathy for wanting to deport people who are in the country legally. And they'll say, your anti-immigrant, you actually just hate immigrants. And of course, you can always find some subset of a group that actually fits the straw man. But a lot of people on the right is like, no, it's not they hate immigrants. They just want people to come into the country legally. And they think it's a fundamental matter of fairness to have people only be here if they came here legally. And to even address the hard case, like the argument for deportations is, hey, this is about trust in the rule of law and order. And if you don't deport these people, and you just like naturalize them, for example, you actually fundamentally broken trust in the system. I mean, if we're not going to follow the principles for that someone has to follow upon entry into the country, why should I even pay my taxes? So that's a straw man that people on the left do the right. The straw man that people on the right do the left is, oh, you're just open borders, communists, you don't care about America, you want anyone here, you want them to vote and take over the country, which is again, of course, is a subset of the left that, yes, genuinely does believe in open borders, but a lot of the left is this moderates who want to have a immigration policy where people can enter the country legally, relatively easily, because as I understand, it's actually pretty difficult. And for people who are here illegally, we want them to be treated humanely with compassion, with, you know, as little ice raids and forced deportations as possible. So they look at some of the what the right is doing and they say, well, okay, we get that we need to close the border. And there's disagreements on how we should deal with the people already here, but can we not be making like trailers set to Pokemon theme music of doing deportations, which is the thing that's actually happening right now under the Trump administration? So that's an example of straw manning, right? This is a, I think it's a logical fallacy, where you misrepresent the argument of the other side and then you attack that caricature rather than addressing the strongest regime of the argument from the other side. And it's very easy to straw man because as I said, you can always find straw men in real life. I'm Lori Siegel and I'm mostly human. I go beyond the headlines with the people building our future. This week, an interview with one of the most influential figures in Silicon Valley, open AI CEO Sam Alman. I think society is going to decide that creators of AI products, bear a tremendous amount of responsibility to products we put out in the world. From power to parenthood. 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This month, here from top streamer Zoe Spencer and venture capital's Laquisha Landrum Pierre as they share their journeys from starting out to leveling up. If I'm outside with my parents and they see all these people come up to me for a picture, it's like, what? Today now, obviously, it's like 100% they believe everything, but at first, it was just like, you got to go get a real job. And what I mean by falls, they don't have money to pay for food. They cannot be their kids. They do not have homes. Communities don't work unless there's money flowing through them. Listen to Eating While Broke from the Black Effect Podcast Network on the I Heart Radio app Apple Podcast or wherever you get your podcast. When you listen to podcasts about AI and tech and the future of humanity, the hosts always act like they know what they're talking about and they are experts at everything. Here, the Nick Dick and Paul show, we're not afraid to make mistakes. What Kugler did that I think was so unique. Who's he? He's the writer's director. Who do you think he is? I don't know. You mean the like the president? You think it's the president? The candidate has the president. You think China has the president? Those law crews that. God, I love that thing. I use it all the time. I wrap it in a blanket and sing to it like. It's like the old Polish saying, not my monkey's not my circus. Yep. There's a good one. I like that song. It's an actual Polish saying. It is an actual Polish saying. Yeah. Better version of Play, Stupid Games, When Stupid Prizes. Yes. Which by the way, wasn't Taylor Swift who said that for the first time. I got that wrong. Listen to the Nick Dick and Paul show on the I Heart Radio app Apple Podcast or wherever you get your podcasts. Hi, I'm Bob Pittman, Chairman and CEO of I Heart Media. And I'm kicking off a brand new season of my podcast, Math and Magic, Stories from the Frontiers of Marketing. Math and Magic takes you behind the scenes of the biggest businesses and industries while sharing insights from the smartest minds in marketing. I'm talking to leaders from the entertainment industry to finance and everywhere in between. This season of Math and Magic, I'm talking to CEO of Liquid Death, Mike Siserio, financier and public health advocate Mike Milken. Take two interactive CEO Strauss Selnik. If you're unable to take meaningful creative risk and therefore run the risk of making horrible creative mistakes, then you can't play in this business. Sesame Street CEO Sherry Weston and her own chief business officer, Lisa Koffee. Making consumers see the value of the human voice and to have that guaranteed human promise behind it really makes it rise to the top. Listen to Math and Magic, Stories from the Frontiers of Marketing on the I Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts are wherever you get your podcast. You know, it strikes me on social media. I happen to be a defender of social media in general, just on the grounds that when people talk about polarization, there is nothing new about polarization. And in fact, if you just look at the 20th century with communist revolution in China and Russia, Nazism in Germany and fascism in Italy and what happened in Rwanda and Cambodia, the last century was so bloody pre-social media. So that's why I feel like social media doesn't necessarily have that much to do with what's going on. But one thing that I do see is what I'm calling the fringe amplification effect, which is people will make a video and they'll stitch in somebody's video from the most extreme on the other side. So somebody on the other side who is all the way to the left or the right will make some stupid video and that video will get lots of attention on the other side because it gets so amplified. So those are the faces we see often of the other side. I love that you said that social media is a bit of a red herring. I think we have a really bad relationship with social media, but I think the issue is more the relationship than the tool itself. Because as you pointed out, we've had polarization all throughout the human history, I mean in the 20th century, we saw how bad it can actually get. Ultimately, we can't outsource our responsibility technology. We have to take personal responsibility for the information that we take in for the biases that we all form for the echo chambers that we're all in. On two biases. So the negativity bias, our tendency to focus on information that's the most negative and availability bias. So our tendency to focus on information that's just present to us. And what will happen is because of social media, this is something that's unique to social media, someone that you would never would have heard because they represented like 1% of the population, now can get pushed out to 30% of the population. And then that 30% of the population is like, whoa, that's what those people believe. And because of the social media echo chamber effect, you might not get exposed to a counter example from the other side. So for example, going back to the whole left versus right immigration thing, let's say you're on the right and you live in Texas, like rural Texas, you don't live around liberals, you've never interacted with one in maybe in your life, in real in real conversation. You might see a video from like a Black Lives Matter, Blue Hair, you know, Trans-Indoor Singh, Open Borders, Genuine Communist, and say, what is going on in California? (laughs) That's all you've ever seen. And of course, you're just getting conservative media on your side. You're not seeing this version of a different reality that's a normal version. You're just getting the abnormal version pumped to you. Exactly. And of course, same for the left versus the right. So that's part of the problem. We're using these social media algorithms and we're using them very unconsciously. And we're not being, when I really scrutinizing the data as it comes in, it's just you ought to read. You get outraged or you think it's funny or whatever. Ha ha, you share it. You move on to the next one, next one, next one, next one. And in a single sitting session, you might go through 10 videos and not actually think deeply about any of them. That's right. Do you see that though as a cognitive problem with us or an algorithmic problem with what gets served up? I look, I think if it's tough, it's a little bit of chicken or egg, but I think the algorithms are designed to exploit cognitive biases. So I think it's chicken. We're the chicken. Social media is the egg. And ultimately, the algorithms are just meeting our need for engagement. Like they're just giving us what we're gonna engage with. If we all said, look, I'm gonna instantly unfollow anyone who's rage-baiting me. I'm going to instantly unfollow anyone who is willfully lying to me. The algorithms will change pretty quickly. Yeah. Or rather, what the algorithms serve will change pretty quickly. But again, because of negativity bias, we had that prior to social media. So of course, in a social media environment, negative content is gonna get more engagement. So we have to individually take more responsibility. That's right. You know, I just recently patented a new social media algorithm that I'm trying to get implemented right now. Which is a very simple idea. It's just, okay, so the algorithm of course knows lots about you and me and so on. So the idea is people get connected. They see each other's videos. If they have things in common that they like. You know, we both like surfing and this kind of dog and we like traveling to this place and so on. There's all these things we haven't come. All that stuff gets surfaced and people can become pals that way. They feel in-groupy on these other things. Only later, as a matter of temporal sequencing, only later does anything political or hot button get surfaced. Such that, if you and I already feel like, God, we've got all these things in common, we dig each other's pals and then we find out, oh, wait, I didn't know you felt that way about abortion or gun control or something. Then we're more apt to lean in and talk about it. - I like that. - If the outrooping is the first thing you hear about somebody, then that's the first reaction. But if the conservative in Texas met the blue-haired trans-liberal in California, but first knew all this other stuff about them and only later discovered that. - Yeah, I love it. I mean, I think the insight here is to humanize people to one another first and establish common ground, build rapport, show where you're similar before you expose where you're different. - Yeah, exactly. That's the whole thing. 'Cause it turns out we've got these networks in our brains specifically in the medial prefrontal lobe, which have to do with humanizing somebody else. And it turns out when we're dealing with outgroups, these networks are dialed down. We essentially don't see them as humans. We see them more like objects. So by the way, this is of course one of the big tricks about propaganda is that you dehumanize literally. You say, look, they're a virus, they're an animal, they're an insect, whatever. Yeah, so the idea is to make sure you crank up these medial prefrontal lobe in terms of the way you're seeing somebody else. - Yeah, I like that. I'm very passionate about we got a fixer education system. So it's equipping people for the social media landscape. - Yes, okay, so let's come back to this because, right, I was really curious how we can get education into junior high high school those sorts of levels. And I know one of the things that you and I have both thought about is ideological capture at the college level. Maybe the high school level as well. I'm not sure. Tell us your take on that. - Yeah, well, I was actually reading today, I think it was in Australia, they banned social media access for kids 16 and under. - Exactly. - Really interesting move. I'm still not honestly sure what I think of it. But thinking about this in real time, it's like, cool, I get the idea, right? And increasingly research is coming out, coming out about the corrosive effect of social media on the brain. But what happens when they're 17? Do they just throw them off the deep end? They got us got to figure it out. So we got to figure out how do we train people so that they are not ideologically captured from the jump. Or they understand the difference between the online world and the physical world. And I think part of it is, you actually, one of the things I really love doing in high school was debate. - Yeah. - I love debate. It was such a formative experience doing the debate in high school. And one of the reasons why it wasn't even because it just made me good at debating, it just forced me to consider the other side. - Yeah. - Because the way debate competitions would work is let's say you get an issue like healthcare. You have to go in on that hour, not knowing what side of the debate you're gonna take. So you have to be equally prepared for the pro and the con. As opposed to, I'm gonna go in and prove why I'm right. It's like, no, it's actually not about you at all. So I think it's one of those exercises that I thought was fun. I think it builds a lot of confidence. I think it demands critical thinking. I think it demands that you steal man the other side. And I would love to see that, I mean, even earlier than junior high. Like I think pretty much for the moment, kids are having disputes. It's like, cool, let's set up debates. - Yeah, you know, I'm super enthusiastic about the possibility for AI to improve our education system in this very specific way because teachers don't have time to do one-on-one debates with each kid. You can obviously set them up in pairs and so on. But the real opportunity here is for a student to sit in front of an AI and have a debate on whatever hot button issue. The student presents the side, argues, argues, argues. The AI ends up grading them, predicated on how well they argue their side. And then you switch sides and I argue the other side. And the AI of course can present calm, empathic arguments in the other direction at all times to really, so kids can hone their skills against this digital grinding stone. And I just think if we get every kid into that so that they see both sides, so they see the switchability, the nuances, the subtleties, that would be a really important move for education. - I totally agree. And they haven't sponsored me yet. But I'm talking to this app company, they're called Gappel. So I'll shout them out just 'cause I like what they're trying to do. - Great. - This is not endorsement. I don't know if the app is good. I haven't tried it, but I liked them so far. Whether it's actually trying to create a matchmaking app where you log on and let's say you get thrown into a lobby to debate immigration, for example. You got maybe three minutes to say your piece and then the other person does a piece. And then there's an AI doing voice transcription so that it has a transcript of the conversation and it'll rate it. - Super cool. - Based on what, on how rational the arguments were? - I don't know too much about what their rubric is, but I assume something like the quality of your logic, the persuasiveness of your rhetoric, and it's video based, right? So you actually hop on and you guys have talked to someone. I think it's an amazing idea, personally. - Got it. - And let me just get one thing straight. When you said a matchmaking app, I assumed you meant romantic dating, but you don't mean that like an intellectual matchmaking. - Yeah, intellectual debate. - Okay. - I don't know what the business model is or who they're trying to attract, but the idea is you hop on to debate. - Cool. - And I think it's a certain type of person who likes to debate. I'm one of people who actually enjoys it. I know not everyone's like that, but the point is not even debate so much as let's get into the conversation where there's tension that needs to be resolved and we get comfortable sitting in that tension because people become so hyper sensitized to disagreement. Like every disagreement is a death match and that is certainly a byproduct of social media. I do not remember disagreements being so scary for people growing up. - Oh, interesting. I wonder about how much that is retrospective romanticization, though. - Really? - Because, right, it's always been the case that our identities are tied to our political beliefs and when certain things are threatened with argument, people feel defensive about that. I interpret that as something quite ancient. Interestingly, there's a subreddit where people come to debate and they debate points and if you successfully change the other person's mind, then they will tell you and you get karma points for that. And so people sort of compete to see when they can change other people's mind. Now, the really interesting thing that happened this past year is that a Swedish research team released some AI bots surreptitiously onto this channel. And it turns out the AI bots did about six times better than the average human in terms of convincing the other person. And there was a huge uproar about this and people got really angry about it. But I thought there was something interesting there, which is the AI bots did not win by spreading misinformation or fear or overwhelming with noise. Instead, they convinced the other person by presenting good arguments that were rational and calm and empathic. And I thought, boy, how great that maybe that's just going just set the bar higher for us. It's just gonna teach us, hey, that's the way and an analogy to chess and go, we're all good players now trained with AI, and they're playing a much better game than anyone did 30 years ago. Maybe that's what's gonna happen with debate as well. - I love that. I mean, I'm not surprised to hear that people were outraged to get to see people, I think, you know, the relationship with AI and everything. It's like, doomers and people are afraid of it. But that's what I do. - Yeah. - I'm constantly, I mean, dude, I gotta be one of the top AI subscribers in the world. I got pro on claw, I got pro grog, I got pro geminiens, like I'm constantly talking to AI to refine my ideas and clarify my thinking. I mean, for me, it's like, the videos that you see me put out, it takes me a long time to make just the three minutes because I want to nail every argument in there and make sure I've anticipated any counterarguments or blind spots, and I changed my mind as I think through these things. And AI has absolutely revolutionized my thinking. - Yes. - And think about it, you got, you got essentially an omniscient, rational, unemotional debate partner in your pocket. Like there's no shortage of tools, it's just the willingness to use them. (soft music) - I'm Lori Siegel, and I'm mostly human, I go beyond the headlines with the people building our future. This week, an interview with one of the most influential figures in Silicon Valley, open AI's CEO, Sam Altman. - I think society is gonna decide that creators of AI products, baritrum, and this amount of responsibility to products we put out in the world. - From power to parenthood. - Kids, teenagers, I think they will need a lot of guardrails around AI, this is such a powerful and such a new thing. - From addiction to acceleration. - The world we live in is a competitive world, and I don't think that's gonna stop. Even if you did a lot of redistribution, we have a deep desire to excel and be competitive and gain status and be useful to others. - What's is the man who has extraordinary influence over our lives have to say about the weight of that responsibility? - My highest order bit is to not destroy the world with AI. - Listen to mostly human on the I Heart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows. - I feel like it was a little bit unbelievable. Until I really start making money. - It's financial literacy month, and the podcast Eating While Broke is bringing real conversations about money, growth, and building your future. - If I'm outside with my parents, and they're seeing all these people come up to me for pictures, it's like, what? - Today now, obviously, it's like 100% they believe everything, but at first it was just like, you gotta go get a real job. - There's an economic component to community striving. They cannot feed their kids. - Listen to Eating While Broke from the Black Effect Podcast Network on the I Heart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcast. - Hi, I'm Bob Pittman, Chairman and CEO of I Heart Media, and I'm kicking off a brand new season of my podcast, Math and Magic, Stories from the Frontiers of Marketing. This season on Math and Magic, I'm talking to CEO of Liquid Death, Mike Sissario, financier and public health advocate Mike Milken, take two interactive CEO Strauss Selnik. - If you're unable to take meaningful creative risk and therefore run the risk of making horrible creative mistakes, then you can't play in this business. - Sesame Street CEO Sherry Weston and her own chief business officer, Lisa Koffing. - Making consumers see the value of human voice and to have that guaranteed human promise behind it really makes it rise to the top. Listen to Math and Magic, Stories from the Frontiers of Marketing on the IHR radio app Apple Podcasts are wherever you get your podcast. - When you listen to podcasts about AI and tech and the future of humanity, the hosts always act like they know what they're talking about and they are experts at everything. - What Kugler did that I think was so unique. - Who's he? - He's the writer director. - Who do you think he is? - I don't know. - Do you mean the president? - You think it was the president? The candidate has a president. You think China has a president? - Let's walk through that. (laughing) - God, I love that thing. - What color? - I wrap it in a blanket and sing to it. - It's like the old Polish saying, not my monkey's not my circus. - Yep. - There's a good one. I like that saying. - It's an actual Polish saying. - It is an actual Polish saying. - Better version of Play, Stupid Games, Wednesday, The Prizes. - Yes. - Which by the way, wasn't Taylor Swift who said that for the first time. - I actually thought it was. I got that wrong. - Listen to the Nick Dick and Polcho on the iHeart radio app Apple Podcast or wherever you get your podcasts. (soft music) - I'll tell you something that scares me. I talked about this on a previous podcast, but I'm afraid that we might be in a golden era of AI right now. And what's going to happen eventually is that it's going to bolcanize, where people will say, where liberals will say, well, I don't want that conservative garbage in the training set and conservative. I don't want that liberal trash in the training set. And so we'll start getting AI's that agree with us more. Now, I think people like us and lots of other people don't want that. They want what you just described, where it refines your thing and it presents counter arguments to you that you hadn't thought of. But you know, a lot of people will want something that just says, hey, that's a great argument. I agree with you. - Yeah. So it may be that this thing that AI does, where it says, look, there are two sides of this argument, some people think this, and here's why some people think that, a lot of people complained about that. I think it's one of the greatest features of what AI can tell you. - Absolutely. And I don't know how to solve the problem that you identified, because they will just be market incentives to give people sick, a fan, take AI and not to punch down on them. I think that's what Chatch EPC has been doing. - Although it should be noted that some months ago, a version came out that was more psychophantic and people didn't like that. It actually-- - They pushed back a bit. - Exactly. - So there was some correction there, but I remember that those specific updates, I was like, there's became a lot more people pleasing. - Yeah. - And at first I kind of liked it. I was like, oh yeah, I am right. That is really it. And then I was like, wait a second, you're like always telling me this. (laughing) So for me, my solution has actually been to use multiple different AI. So I'm constantly shifting between, right now it's Claude, Grock and Gemini. It's, you know, I'll sometimes have a though Chatch EPC in the mix or two. But of course, I mean, I think that's part of the education solution. - Yeah. - Because we need to teach people about their own bias. We need to teach people epistemic humility and to be skeptical of themselves first and foremost. So that no matter what tool they're using or information environment they're in, there's always a piece of them that recognizes, hey, I am a human. I am susceptible to manipulation. The blanket solution to that is just to be more humble. - Yeah, exactly. It's to understand, first of all, the limitations of our own models. And I am, this is actually the topic of my next book called Empire of the Invisible. It'll be out in about two years. But it's about the limitations of our internal model. And the fact that we think we're seeing everything on the map, even though we're so limited in what we can actually see. And that's why we interpret everyone else as being misinformed and disinformed and so on. So the first thing is understanding the limits of our own model. The second thing is doing what it takes to try to understand someone else's model better. And that's so rare that people, and it's not the same thing you have to agree with someone else. But really trying to understand is, you talk a lot about steel mannings, the one who's argument. In just a case the listener doesn't know that's instead of straw manning and trying to come up with the weakest version of their argument and take it down. It's saying, how can I best defend their, how can I represent their argument in its strongest form that's a very lovely habit to get into? I would love to see this built into junior high in high schools where they're learning that kind of stuff. They're learning about their own biases. This is what you spend a lot of attention on in your videos about what are the biases that we have, the identified psychological biases that we have. How can you come to just have a list of those at hand all the time so you say, oh, okay, yeah, I get what I'm doing, not what the other person is doing, but I get what my problem is. - Yeah. Yeah. I love that you pointed out steel manning 'cause it's my favorite practice for just sharpening one's thinking. 'Cause basically, you don't need to know every list of logical fallacies and cognitive biases. If you can literally just try to make a good argument for the other side and incorporate so much of that, it really gets you, as you said, really aptly out of your own model and into someone else's model. - Yeah. - And the nice thing about that is it actually refines your model, okay? Because now you can see the vulnerabilities in your argument. You don't have to abandon your argument. You might still be right, but you'll be better at being correct as opposed to being dogmatically correct. And if we just got the students doing that, And also having this another thing I think we need to incorporate into the education system, more emotional intelligence. And not even, I mean obviously direct it on other people, but around oneself. I think a lot of people, they don't even realize when they're bothered by something. They don't even realize when they're angry, they don't realize when they're triggered. And emotion is not compatible with logic, like emotion is important too, as I said. But it often gets in the way or is used as a substitute for logic. So people don't recognize when they're mostly compromised. Or they'll even use that emotional capture that they're in as justification for why they're right. Well, it's like, oh, it's my truth. It's like, no, it's your feelings. There's no my truth. It's just the truth. And your perception of the truth might be different than other people. Your belief might be different, but there's that truth and then there's your relationship with it. That's interesting. I'm not sure I believe in a truth at all. Let's get into that. That's fine. I'm interested in this notion about truth because there are certain facts in the world. We can call those true or not true. Did this person say this thing? Did this person stab that other person with the knife? That's that's the truth. But the larger things about the interpretation of the context and the societal view of it and the legislation around that and so on. It's hard to say that there is a correct position on any of this. What's your take on this? Well, I would even point out what you said, the interpretation of it. So there's still something being interpreted. Yes. And that's the truth. Agreed. So this guy stabbed that guy. Was he justified? Was it not justified? Yeah. That's the part where it's a little harder to say, "Oh, there's a truth to that. There's a correct view on it." Yeah. And I think that's when we get into the realm of the subjective. But even then, it depends on what level of analysis we're trying to do this. Like if we're saying, is that justified? Well, what's justice? Justice is, it relies on your view of what even is reality? What's human's place in reality? What's the role of civilization? What's the role of the individual? But there's not a question of whether the guy got stabbed in physical reality. There's a question of how should we respond to achieve the goal that we have? I think the reason I'm talking about the whole my truth, your truth stuff that is very popular in California where we are is because I think often what happens is people are using those terms as a way to avoid conflict to find the truth. And it's like an epistemic cowardice, actually. When people say, "I have my truth, you have your truth." Yeah. Yeah. No, you have your beliefs. I have my beliefs. The truth. I don't own the truth. You don't own the truth. We're both trying to seek it and we need to get there together. Yeah. But if you have your truth and I have my truth, how can we get to the truth together? Yeah. It actually gets in the way of coordination and I think a durable harmony. Yeah. And I think the way we know if something is true or the way we get at least close to it, I'm not convinced we can ever get to the absolute truth. But truth has a predictive power. So you're a neuroscientist. If you run an experiment and you predictably get certain results, you're like, "Okay, cool. This is like more true than the thing that was correct five out of a hundred times because we got there 70 out of 100 times or even 99 out of 100. We didn't get there 100 out of 100, right? But we're still a lot closer to the truth." You know, just as a side note, scientists never actually used the word truth at all. Interesting. If I have a theory that makes perfect predictions about what's next, I still don't call it true. What I say is the weight of the evidence really supports this. It's got great predictive strength. But I'm always willing, as soon as someone presents a new theory tomorrow to say, "Oh, maybe that, maybe the weight of the evidence shifts over to that one." Yeah. And I love that. And I think that's actually the correct disposition to have toward the truth because the way I like to think of truth is, look, we're subjects. We don't have direct access to truth where everything is mediated by our senses and our experience. So you can think of getting the truth as the destination on the other side of the bridge. We can get closer and closer on the bridge whenever going to fully arrive. So we should always have this level of humility where we say, "Well, this is where the weight of the evidence points, but there might be new evidence that completely changes the model." And I think that's a healthy way to regard it. And I mean, this, more of, I guess, a philosophical question, I still believe that there is a there there. There's still a truth that there I just might not be able to get all the way. And that's okay. Like Moses not being able to arrive to the Holy Land together to the border. Yeah. So what are the top cognitive biases that you think are affecting political discourse right now? Confirmation bias. It's probably the biggest one. Because we talked about motivated reasoning. Yeah. So confirmation bias is our tendency to notice information that confirms our existing beliefs and ignore information that goes against our existing beliefs. So it's like, if, just make a little tripe example, if I say, um, the room is green. Everything in the room is green. Everything is a room is green. I just tell myself that over and over. I'm going to start going into the rooms and only look at the things that are green. It's not that there's not other things here. But it's like, while his shirt's green and the last plant's green and those are the things I saw. So it was green. Yeah. And, um, the Alagrova was really feed that too. Like it, they're designed to feed confirmation bias, become confirmation bias. When we've had something confirmed, we feel really good about it. And we become very emotionally invested in it. And that's what then produces more motivated reasoning. And then when we have motivated reasoning, we start to straw man other perspectives. So I think confirmation bias is probably the single biggest one. And how can people fight that in their own way? How do you fight that? I actively look for arguments or information or evidence to the contrary. So I literally, we talked about AI. I will literally ask my AI, what am I missing? Or give me the best arguments for and against here. Or if let's say I have a view, I've become suspicious of myself. Like, okay, this sounds too convincing. What's, just be a devil's advocate or what's the best argument against what I'm saying? Because if you prompt any AI explicitly to give you what you're looking for, it'll give it to you. It's just if you're not precise with your prompting, then you got into issues with the bias of the AI and how it was trained to. But confirmation bias is, um, really quick is that what's the proper way to prompt it to give you a counter-review it? Let's ask what are the best arguments for and against X? Excellent. Okay. Yeah. Or if you're looking for a specific counter-argumistic something, what's the best argument against this? Okay. Yeah. Good. Okay. So confirmation, but any others that really strike you as being a big problem? Um. I think this kind of speaks to the dehumanization you pointed out, which I agree is a huge issue. Um, group attribution error. Yeah. Is a huge one because it would be one thing if, you know, before social media and the internet more generally, you would not really get exposed to extreme people. So when someone would form a caricature of someone, it would really seem so ridiculous that it would be hard to believe. It would beg your belief that someone actually exists like you're describing. But now there's nine billion people on the planet. You can always find someone who fits this extreme, um, straw man model that you've presented, but they exist. And what will happen is people will project the attributes of that one member or few members of the group on the entire group. And that contributes to dehumanization. Um, so yeah, I think group attribution is a really big one too. Um, and then there's actually, I wouldn't say this is among the biggest, but we talked a bit about conspiracy theories earlier. I think that, I mean, conspiracy theories incorporate all the biases. One of the tools that people don't even know to apply or fail to apply were two of them actually are Occam's razor and Hanlon's razor. So Occam's razor essentially posits that the most simple solution or rather the solution that requires the fewest assumptions is most likely to be true. Doesn't mean it's always true, but most likely to be true. And Hanlon's razor states that incompetence is more common than malevolence. So don't assume evil when you could assume stupidity. Yeah. And one of the things with social media is that it's constantly exposing us to really negative scenarios. So what people will do is they'll say, wow, I saw this example of someone who being actually evil. And therefore everyone who's doing this thing must also be evil. As opposed to, hey, we're all humans. We're all a bit absurd. We all make mistakes constantly. I make mistakes every day. I don't know anyone who doesn't. A lot of the things that we see are just catastrophic breakdowns in human coordination. So yeah, people don't apply Hanlon's razor often or they don't apply Occam's razor. They look for needlessly complex explanations for things that actually have a very boring explanation a lot of the time. And you ask about biases, go back to one more bias, negativity bias. So I think it was Stephen Pinker wrote a book years ago. Basically making a evidentiary case for how dope the world actually is. Yeah, the better angels of our nation. Yeah, it's like because of the internet or the way we engage with the internet, it can seem like things are a lot worse than they are. And no matter how bad things are, you can always make them look worse. And negativity is a mind-firus. It spreads so quickly it causes people to act in a really negative way and it's a self-fulfilling prophecy. So negativity biases another huge one. You know, I'm just, I want to follow upon one thing which is making things needlessly complex, which obviously with, let's say with conspiracy theories and instead of saying, hey, it's likely to be this, it's the drawing strings between all the things. And yet, people often interpret that as being more simple in a way. - Yeah. - The audience really likes that. I'm just trying to figure this out. I've actually been a little heartbroken because I just saw a former student of mine who's very smart, lovely kid, just announced on Instagram that he's starting a new news organization to finally tell the truth because we deserve the truth. And it's incredibly biased. And the thing he's saying, he's just pouring out his very biased opinion on stuff. And his story, though, to the listener is, I'm finally giving you the truth, which they won't give you. - Yeah. - Yeah. You must see this all the time. - All the time, dude. It's funny, 'cause this will seem like a contradiction, but it's really not. I believe that there's the truth. I don't believe that I have it. - Yeah. - There's a difference between the two. There's a big problem when we become attached to our identity as the truth's heir, the truth teller. Because now there's a whole identity wrapped up in me knowing something that other people don't. That's super dangerous. It gets in the way of being humble and actually curious. So I don't even like to say, personally, that I'm like a truth teller or a bit. - Yeah. - And also a little clear thinker. That's good enough for me. - Right. - And even that's like a bit of a stretch, I think. It's like a aspirational still. Because the truth is something arrived at collectively, ideally, because you have a subjective experience. I have a subjective experience. We all have pieces of the puzzle, actually. We're all interacting with reality from different perspectives. We need to bring the perspectives together. But what happens a lot of time is people believe they know the truth and they're delivering it on a way that's actually weaponizing. And it's not that they don't have some things correct, but often they're missing a lot of other things that are also true because it doesn't fit their narrative of the truth. So yeah, I see it all the time. Frankly, I see a lot of the conservative space. I mean, I'm sure it happens a little bit left as well, but that's where my algorithms are. It's conservative media. And it's like, yeah, well, the mainstream media is not telling you the truth I am. - Yes. - It's like a great way to grandize yourself and it's a great business model, frankly. And it blinds you. It blinds you. So I like what you said, like, hey in science, we never talk about truth. We talk about the weight of evidence. - Yeah. - And I think that scientific mindset would be great if it was applied to media. And honestly, I think it would be great as someone, maybe I'll do it one day, just created a media organization where it's like, we're not gonna tell you the truth. We're gonna tell you the spectrum. - Yeah. - And then we're gonna have the spectrum, like have healthy conflict right in front of you. And you decide. You decide what resonates. And let's see if we can even arrive at a shared sense of reality. - You know, on this podcast I had, again, I named Isaac Saul, who's a journalist who started this media organization called Tangle, which represents the right and the left and all the positions. And you really get to wrestle with the idea. Every day I love it. And I can't wait to see even more projects that are like that. - Yeah, I love that. - So if you could give listeners one North Star for political discourse, what would it be? - Just understand the other side. Just really try. It's not fun, but it is really expansive and it will grow you in ways that you value. So it's not just about being a responsible citizen, although I think that's important too. I think it'll just help everyone improve the quality of thinking and your decisions are downstream of your thinking. So if you have better thinking, you have better decisions, you have a better life. So just try to understand the other side. You don't need to agree with them. (upbeat music) That was my interview with Kaizen Acaidu. So one useful way to think about the brain is this. It never has direct access to the territory. It only ever works with maps. The important part is that neurons don't touch reality. All they ever receive are electrochemical signals representing patterns of light or vibrations and air or chemicals or pressure. And from those signals, the brain draws a simplified representation of the world that helps us navigate. Most of the time that map is good enough to keep us alive, but it's never the territory. And if you're a regular listener to the podcast, you've heard many examples of this. For example, the way that memory is reconstructed or perception is an active inference. And as we revisited today, beliefs are compressed summaries shaped by experience and emotion and social context. So one of the greatest illusions we have, and we see this in politics every day, is mistaking the map for the territory. In other words, we mistake a clean, emotionally satisfying story for a complete one. That illusion is especially tempting in all social domains where maps guide us and they bond us together, such that shared maps become shared identities. And once a map is tied to belonging, then questioning becomes something that we generally stop doing. This is where epistemic humility matters as a navigational skill. Humility is the recognition that your map is incomplete, that it highlights certain features and leaves others out. And that other people, even those that you disagree with, may be operating from different maps, not necessarily from bad faith. Epistemic humility calls us to remain open to learning from other viewpoints rather than being overconfident in our own current beliefs. You're never gonna throw away your map. You wouldn't be able to navigate without one. But humility means holding on to it lightly enough to revise it when new information comes in. I think one of the most important takeaways from today's conversation has to do with education. Our schools have to be much more than the memorization of a single authoritative map, but instead the development of cartographic skills. We need to teach people how our mental maps are made, how framing works, how incentives distort scale, how emotions highlight some landmarks and obscure others. In other words, we don't need to be telling students what to think, but giving them the tools so that they get good at redrawing their maps as they go through life. And that's the thread running through today's conversation with Kaizen. Let's take this as an invitation to examine the processes by which beliefs form and to notice when feelings are being promoted to conclusions. Our job is to slow down, zoom out, and ask better questions about the maps we're carrying. Because none of us is ever going to reach the territory itself we're all navigating with approximations. The best that we can do is to make our maps a little more accurate, a little more flexible, and a little more honest about their limits. Go to eaglement.com/podcast for more information and to find further reading. Join the weekly discussions on my substack 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 Eaglement, and this is Inner Cosmos. [MUSIC PLAYING] I'm Lori Siegel, and on my new podcast, "Mosley Human," I'll take you to some wild corners of the tech world. "Mosley Human" is your playbook for how tech can work for you. Listen to "Mosley Human" on the iHart Radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows. It's financial literacy month, and the podcast eating while broke is bringing real conversations about money, broke, and building your future. Listen to "Eating While Broke" from the Black Effect Podcast Network on the iHart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. On the Steen or Show podcast, each episode invites you into a raw, unfiltered conversations about recovery, resilience, and redemption. The entire season two is now available to bench, featuring powerful conversations with the guests like Tiffany Addish, Johnny Knoxville, and more. I'm an alcohol, and without this group, I'm a diet. Listen to "Eating While Broke" on the iHart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. - Better version of Play, Stupid Games, When, Stupid, Brises. - Yes. - Yeah. - Which, by the way, wasn't Taylor Swift who said that for the first time. I got that wrong. - But hey, no one's perfect. Listen to the Nick, Dick, and Paul show on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. - This is an iHeart podcast. Guaranteed Human.