#38 - Manu Meel - Healing Political Polarization

31:42That's right. Or a racist or there's some kind of bigot or something like that. That's right. Right. They're going to take my livelihood. Yes. And they want to. You know, it's like the classic sort of the example of like, let's say you're lying by a river and a crocodile jumps out and it bites your arm off. You lose your arm. You're very sad. or another case you're lying by the river and an axe murderer comes along and like grabs you and cuts your arm off and you lose your arm in which case are you in which case is most likely to have have long-term negative mental health consequences to you yeah it's going to be the the axe murder right because there's like an intention it's like an animal it's like it's just it is what it is it's a stupid animal just doing what it does but like an axe murderer all that someone doing an evil act just pure malice and intention so it's like when when there's the idea of intentional malice behind a thing that we disagree with that is so much more um and i'm sure there's a good evolutionary reason for it because in part we've always wanted to disincentivize you know like malicious bad behavior um but yeah it's it seems to be so much more visceral to us so if you can find a way to like turn down the temperature on that and show look okay maybe you don't agree with them maybe they are stupid but it's not because they're actually out to get you yep they're just misunderstanding it's a misunderstanding that's right um yeah that seems very powerful are there any aspects of because it sounds like you're trying to like eradicate any kind of like classic point scoring you know like making people not see each other as opposing teams and it's like getting rid of this idea of rivalry entirely have you incorporated are there any forms of like actual positive sum type competition that you can incorporate in where almost like are we going to have a little contest of who can get a deeper understanding of who can better represent the other person's views that they did you know or who has the biggest delta like in the beginning let's try and represent their view uh oh okay that's not and then they're like i only score you a two out of ten and actually accurately representing me and then at the end they do it again and maybe this time they they get an eight out of ten because they actually have a deeper understanding yeah that's actually fascinating i didn't think about that that you gamify the win-win positive conversation right there's a there's a scholar um and and now practitioner named Irshad Manji, who has come up with this actually method that I think is similar, where she basically sets up a dialogue game.

34:01And I think they go to campuses. And the entire idea is you basically have conversations and you try to turn that into a competition. What we found at our chapters is that the best way to get students really excited about this work is in threefold sort of compartments. The first is you actually build friendships with people that are different than you. There's evidence that recently came out. I think there's a poll in 2024 that showed that somewhat of 57 % of students wouldn't room with someone that's politically different than themselves. And to me, some of my best friendships are with people that are different than me because they can challenge me.

34:38They push me. So one is students actually come to our chapter and suddenly they're part of a community. And it's a community of misfits. It's a community of people that feel like they are finding more solace, more opportunity in playing a more hopeful game, essentially. The second group of people that get really engaged and excited at our discussions is they start to see these dialogues as ways for them to be more effective advocates for their viewpoint. Like, what are you going to do trying to, you know, just shout in your own echo chamber like what does that get anybody right um and then the third group is really interesting this is where i see an opportunity i think from like the economic very like pragmatic practical sense which is people have started seeing that oh my god being able to be a bridge builder and have conversations is actually a workforce skill like this is the other opportunity we're seeing for the people that are like the pre-med students of the world the stem students the world that aren't just going to jump out and want to come into a bridge dialogue is now you are actually being more effective for the workforce because companies are now seeing a literal economic loss because their workforces are fighting each other yeah and and that that's where i see a flip on how i think we can start to i hate the word commoditize but you're trying to Fight a carrot.

36:02Yeah. Like an actual economic carrot. That's right. That will reward those who do the best bridge building. That's right. That's right. Because it's, I think we all like intuitively, you know, I see like, to me, you're one of the most valuable humans alive right now. Like just with the work you're doing, like it's so clear. But at the same time, it's like, does the economy actually reward that? Right. Not always, you know, and that's part of the problem. Because it's not, at least it's not direct. It's hard to always quantify these like more like holistic skills and so on. um but it's also true that companies have been you know i know plenty of ceos who are just like tearing their hair out because they're like my yeah you know they're trying to enact policies of like no politics at work guy you know guys like this is too much but if there's you know if i was hiring someone who had like on their cv like some kind of like like a student who's like i created this organ you know this movement or i i facilitated these kind of dialogues almost like a yeah like a bridge building score yeah something like that yeah but of course with all these things it's like you you run the risk of god heart's law um you know when you create a metric for something it often ceases to be if people then start optimizing for that it ceases to be a good metric yes um you have to be careful of that additional layer of gamification um and as always if you like i know it's almost any movement even something as fantastic as like a bridge building win-win-y type movement there will be people who will come and like try and grift and co-opt it for their own things have you run into anything like that out of interest i mean i would be lying if i personally didn't have to fight against that like this is where like the reality of i mean when you and i uh had like i think five minutes into our conversation i we were talking about some of the challenges that i personally face doing this work and one of those challenges is that as you start to lead an organization as you start to build a movement around an idea that becomes popular or interesting, there's a lot of incentives to sell out in different ways.

38:00There's a lot of, there's a jump and a desire to say, oh my God, there's now economic value, but that can start to get into that atmosphere of you actually losing sight of why you started this work in the first place, the mission. And in some ways, that's frankly, I don't think influencers and the people that are peddling outrage are bad or evil in any ways. I think they're just caught up in their incentive structure. And so that absolutely exists. And I think it'll actually continue to increase. And here's why I think it'll really continue to increase. Whether people listening to the show like DEI or not, DEI is now being put on the back burner and it's being ripped out a lot of different institutions.

38:37and the work that I'm doing focused on bridge building and plurals and this idea that we have to get people of very different ideas to be able to understand and live with each other and to hear each other, see each other, that that is a framework that could actually replace DEI in a lot of ways. And a lot of institutions, a lot of companies, a lot of universities are looking to organizations to say, okay, we're removing our DEI focus in place. Can we replace it with with this bridge building concept, this dialogue concept. And now you can start to see where the economic and the capital sort of pulls start coming into the work.

39:13But I think one of the best ways to avoid that, for me personally, is to remind myself like why I started this work. Like, it's really funny, but after this, I'll be in Chicago, and I'll be giving the keynote at the American Medical Association, which is like a cosmic justice in some ways, because I started off as a pre-med student and it'll be like all these all these people that are helping the medical professionals and one of the things that i'm going to talk about in that conversation is um we are here to try and build an infrastructure a capacity a skill set because at the end of the day i don't think this experiment succeeds without it so i think we just have to remind ourselves why that's what matters the most and i know that kind of sounds kumbayai but like it you know like I think about someone like Lex Friedman, who's like doing this at scale, like at a much larger level, right?

40:01It's his whole mission. And you can just see him wrestling with it in such a public way. And I don't know him at all, but I can just imagine like people like that. Um, and so the way that I think about my work again is I'm just trying to send a good example for our students because they're doing the courageous thing. How do you handle the, the problem of bad faith actors? because one of the things that is frustrating sometimes in a dialogue is, I mean, again, it ties back to often the loudest voices are the ones that hijack something. And there are some people who just, for whatever reason, well, at least in my experience, maybe you'll counter this.

40:44I hope this is true.

40:48They come in with such a rivalrous mindset that they will only argue in bad faith. And the classic sort of rhetorical tricks of getting them to see the humanity in the other person just doesn't seem to work. Have you run into that? Or is that just not the case? Is everyone actually good faith if you dig deep enough? Of course not. There's bad faith actors in everything. I mean, there's bad faith actors in poker. There's bad faith actors in chess. I mean, like when we were playing, I was thinking about like Hans Niemann, right? Like anal beads, right? To be fair. I mean, I think that's been a lot disproved.

41:23I feel like there's been some, I don't know. I feel like that's spiraled a little out of control. I mean, he's not proven guilty, right? Sure. The point is, in anything that you do, there's always going to be someone that tries to exploit. Now, let me reverse this question, though. Because I've been thinking, this was the, when we started at Cal, right? And we started those dialogues. And one of the first questions that students would ask us is like, Um, but there are bad fact, bad faith actors that prevent us from having this conversation. Imagine you, you flip the question. You said, okay, there's a bad faith actor in poker.

42:03Does that mean that the entire game of poker is corrupt? Right? No, no. Right. In politics, when you talk to somebody and you say, Hey, let's have a civic dialogue or conversation. The first thing that comes to their mind is they're having a conversation, Tucker Carlson, or the first thing that comes to their mind is they're having a conversation, Cenk Weger, or like whoever you're pick your like partisan right or left person um the fact is that we cannot let the bad apple examples of discourse and dialogue ruin our capacity to see the complexity of our landscape that's like saying i have a bad uncle in my family so i'm going to leave it right this is you're going to work around it yeah right now yes when now let's say you are in a conversation and there is a bad faith actor in that conversation again the question becomes what does success mean for you?

42:49What does success mean? For me, if I'm in a conversation with a bad faith actor, I'm very curious to understand why are they acting that way? Like, who gives a shit whether or not I'm going to change their mind in that conversation? It's not going to happen. What's more productive use of my time is, hey, let's like sit down and I'm just going to ask you questions. Like, I want to know why. Like, do you actually believe that everyone on the left? or you actually believe everyone on the right thinks that way or you actually believe that like bill gates is microchipping you like i want to know why right or like you actually believe that elon musk has only committed evil acts tell me why you think that and i think like once you can get to the psychological roots of bad faith actors i think you suddenly start to realize and start to find a lot more hope in humanity because the reasons why they fall into those rabbit holes are oftentimes very understandable.

43:45Right. If you actually hear their whole life story, like they maybe have grew up in some heinous conditions, like they got robbed, et cetera, et cetera. And so they're just like living out, you know, they're living out their pain, they're living out their trauma. And so, yeah, if you can dig deep enough, you'll get an understanding. So I see. So you, it sounds like to me, your mindset in everything, and probably your secret of success is that you just view everything as a learning opportunity. Absolutely. Every single opportunity. And that's maybe the like vibe you're trying to instill into your students.

44:17It's always plus, plus, plus, you know, every, um, uh, we host this annual summit live where we basically bring together all of our two to three student leaders from every one of our chapters. It's an, it's a, it's, it's a summit that was born out of this idea again, that we're not just trying to create these chapters and have these skillsets on campus. We're trying to build an identity. We're trying to build a movement. We're trying to get people excited. So these students will show up and they disagree in lots of things, right? They hold some of the firmest views. You've got conservative students from Texas and Louisiana.

44:49You've got very liberal students from different parts of the coast. You've got different identity groups, demographics. People often think that these conversations can only happen between like straight white dudes, right? And no, you've got a huge diversity of people. They're all showing up. And you ask them, why are you here? Why do you actually care about this? Why are you trying to have this dialogue? And you'll get the mix of one sort of common theme or answer. And that is that by 2045, the United States is going to be the most diverse democracy in the history of democracies. This experiment has never happened before at the scale it is happening.

45:23Imagine I told you that there's 330 million people out there, all of different backgrounds and different beliefs, heavily armed, trying to make it work. If you studied like any bit of human history, you'd be like, if I'm a betting person, And I'm like out on Mars looking into America. I'm like, this is impossible. And so for me, I'm playing with house money, man. Like, like I love this place. And, and the bad faith actors of today are operating in a cynical mindset where they're trying to win for their own side. And I'm trying to win for this country. I'm trying to win for the human race. And that's what all of our students are doing.

46:00That is ambitious. That speaks to human nature because now suddenly you're not just having this like conversation just for some like kumbaya watered down reason you're a pioneer like you're going to some unventured human territory right and you throw in like ai into that it's like yo like you're doing something cool yeah no i mean that's a very good point because like we've kind of oh my god am i a dialogue nerd i love it no like the u.s is a nation of frontiers that's like what it was founded on it was literally like what is this crazy continent we're expanding we're trying to learn wow there's this landscape and so on i so it's always had that energy but obviously it's it's it's basically covered its whole land mass so now it's like what is the new frontier obviously it's trying to go into space and there's other physical ones but that's an interesting way of putting it there are these like social and mental frontiers and that's actually where the new space is that's where the new potential is um and driving people into seeing like these new ways of like coexisting and and i mean it's almost again sounding kumbaya but it's like a new form of like consciousness that we're needing to unlock um which is kind of what i'm trying to do with this whole thing right like what is what is the win-win mindset how do we cultivate more of it when are we not win-winning one like how do we make that go viral and like how do we harness the power of like yeah memes and virality to spread this so what methods are you currently doing like what what um what has worked for you and what has not worked for you in terms of movement building getting your name out there yep um so there's there's three pillars to i think I see it as movement building.

47:34In other ways, the way I would describe it is I'm essentially trying to, along with our students, create a norm. We're trying to create a new norm, a set piece for how you engage. You can call it movement, you can call it a norm. I think it's similar. I think there's three things that you need to build a norm in society. In some ways, this is not unique or special to us. I think it's just reverse engineering the way we got to this point. I think part one is you have to equip people with that skill set. You've got to just be able to, at scale, be able to give people the training, the capacity, the examples, the role models to be able to have these conversations.

48:09Because most people, again, my insight on these college campuses is it's not that the dialogue's not possible. It's just that most people have given up on it. So if most people have given up, you've got to give them examples of success. Don't just tell, but show. Part two, and I think this goes to your memes point, is you got to make this work fun and interesting. You got to make it culturally relevant. um one of the great things that i think podcasting has done is it's made this notion of intellectual heterodoxy interesting and cool again right um now i think there's some ways in which this world can also fall into the bad faith actors but overall i think that's what it's doing make it culturally interesting and part three is make it a community so like the students out in mississippi have to feel like they're not on their campus doing this alone but they're they're in the same mission in this mindset with students out in our New York chapter, our Columbia chapter, our San Francisco chapter.

49:01And now you've got a real identity that's built around a solid set of principles. And then here's the scary part, because we said we got to build a tribe, is who is your they? What I mean by that is like, who's they? Who's the outgroup? Who's the outgroup? And people that are like experts in bridging work, I don't know, maybe I'm like committing some like heresy against John Haidt, but I've just looking at human history, I think you always do need an outgroup. I don't know how you can do it without it. Now, you say, well, Manu, okay, at the end of the day, if you've created your own, you've created this giant group, and you've got this outgroup, did you actually bridge a divide, right?

49:47Or did you just create a new one? And my is welcome in our in-group, it is your choice to not be a part of it. Anyone's welcome. The only thing you got to sign up for is the win-win mindset, right? It's the bridging mindset, but everyone's welcome. So the difference in our in-group and other in-groups is it is up to you. And in fact, you joining our in-group is actually your way of unplugging out of this outrage industrial complex and giving a giant middle finger to everybody out there that is exploiting you for that binary so really yeah that's what the difference is you're giving people agency you're giving people agency you're giving them choice and anyone is welcome you you're welcome to join our tribe or you're welcome to not but it's better if you join our tribe so it's yeah it's it's it's funny it reminds me of this like weird kind of psychedelic vision i had once where i was sitting there i was like musing on the idea of like zero sumness and positive sumness and win-win and moloch and and i saw this like i was like wait so we need to defeat zero sumness so that the world becomes win-win and positive sum but the moment we start trying to defeat zero sum we become zero sum yeah and so i'm seeing this like you're just like inspiring you know just like like how do you get past it and i and for ages i was like oh it's it's unsolvable but i think you're touching like what on what it is it's it's it doesn't need to be perfect you don't need to perfectly defeat something in order to level up the world you can actually have both coexist yes you can provided you always have agency in the loop you always have an you like the intelligence allowing people to choose if you start forcing them into tribes again now now you're actually playing the zero-sum game that's right no give people the choice and you can kind of you don't have to have this perfect kumbaya world where everyone is forever like perfectly collaborating because also that wouldn't be as you you want the ability to have sort of differentiation and competition and rivalry in healthy ways um so anyway yeah like it was it you sort of took me back into that as you were describing it the choice is yours to be a bridge builder yes and shall you take it or not right but the you know it feels like the world wants more bridge like there's just like there's this energy and like more comes to you when you start doing this kind of stuff i noticed the the world wants more bridge builders and people actually want more bridge builders yes like okay but look i want to go back to this infinite loop thing though um do you ever do you think it's it there there's test cases and use cases where it's actually okay and good to actually have zero sum yes right yes right like our chess game that we played exactly exactly that is by definition by definition it's a chess is a zero sum game one of us one one of us and that's what makes it fun right but it's only it's it's actually a hypothetical concept that's right it's it's it's it doesn't actually exist in reality because there's always externalities yes it's only because we both agree that we're doing this thing we're playing this game that we both agree as i've got a set rules that we have zero sumness but in in the downstream effects is we're now better friends we feel we like each other more we understand how each other think we have some smack talk dynamic etc or i mean the externalities could be negative of course right um but yeah like i think that's why we we need zero sum in order to find these like little moments of it's a way to like get to know one another it's a form of like artificial scarcity to find something out and and and i think the other thing that happened in that game this sounds like this sounds like i'm making a big meta claim but uh that zero sum competition the result of that was not an indictment on the other human, right?

53:35So we could have the zero sum competition. And actually, the norm that we had was the idea was, we're going to have this game, because it's going to help us get to know each other better, right? You take this now to like geopolitics, like, sometimes zero sum is really important, you're in a war, country invades you, you're not going to have like the bridge builder out there, like, don't put me out there, you know, put the put the person that's going to fight the fight. But that I think gets to this core idea of like, are we, are we in a way creating a zero sum world by trying to pursue the work of bridge building?

54:06And my viewpoint on this is, I also don't actually think it's always right to be a bridge builder. Like, I just think it's the right thing for the moment. And that's where I think this complexity of democracy, this complexity of society needs to kick in. In some ways, that is the high rung thinking. Democracy is a puzzle. It's like, imagine, imagine I asked you live, like, tell me when you're eating food what's your favorite utensil is it the fork the knife or the spoon you'd probably be like well it depends on what i'm eating right right give me the context yeah or like maybe it's chopsticks when you're like you didn't even ask about chopsticks um the same way in democracy it's like imagine i asked you live tell me do you think it's best to protest do you think it's best to go to the town square and have a dialogue do you think it's best to completely disengage and i think the right answer is well it depends on the moment the circumstance and again that's where my view on all these protests and everything is it's not about protest good bad it's not about free speech good bad it's about what tool do you use to advance your work at that time given the circumstances one tension that i always wonder is because what you're trying to do here with with bridge building is to sort of open people's minds more because so much of the problem is that you know that people are closed-minded to the other side's view how do you and maybe again this is a false a false tension but it feels like there's some kind of tension that concerns me that when you open people's minds so much then they become vulnerable to like almost like falling over the other side and being more vulnerable to propaganda because again there are bad actors out there who are trying to propagandize people for their cause and especially in the era of like persuasion technology that we are now in.

55:47We'll soon probably have super persuaded AIs. And in some ways, propaganda is almost a form of that, right? How do you think we can like navigate as a society that tension? Yeah, I mean, I would say that one of my biggest weaknesses sometimes in like my darkest moments is I'm like, do I actually have real beliefs? Because I spent all my time being like curious. It's like, what do I actually believe? Right? And it means like when I'm in a in a conflict with somebody, I oftentimes my immediate reaction is to back down because I actually have a hard time standing up for my belief. Like if, if, you know, my family member and I in an argument, my instinct is I'm a bridge builder.

56:24I'm a curiosity person. So I think there's, there's two sort of ways that I think about this. The first is it goes back to my favorite question when you've got like a divergent path, which is what does success look like? if you're scrolling the internet in that moment what are you trying to achieve beyond like getting your dopamine you know hit for the day right and usually it's something around well i'm trying to you know learn something about a certain topic i'm trying to get more informed well in that case the mindset that you probably need to have in that moment is you want to be the rational skeptic right you want to be the the interesting and intellectually curious person you're going to dig into this headline deeper and you're gonna do that now let's say that you're at a rally and let's say it's your favorite president his name is president trump and you're getting all riled up and you're excited well what does success look like in that moment well in that moment you probably showed up because you want to feel like you're part of a movement and an identity that is powerful for you okay great you got that hit does that mean that that hit is needed all the time for the rest of your day?

57:28No, it's about modulating. And again, this gets to my point of complexity. It's like, I would hate to be a consistent, constant influencer on X, because it means that 24-7, the mindset that I'm living in is that zero-sum mindset. And so I just think it's about the right time and the right moment. And it's about what's needed. And I think on a college campus, what's most important is you're going there to equip yourselves with not necessarily, I think in even some ways, raw knowledge, but knowing the right questions to ask. Because if you know the right questions to ask, suddenly you can navigate the world in a lot more of a self-confident and assured way.

58:06And that's the point of a campus. So again, it's about the environment. It's about what you're trying to achieve. And it's about what the goal is for that moment. Hmm. How have things changed on college campuses, in your observation, since Trump got elected this time around? Over the last month and a half?

58:28I think there's a unique opportunity right now. And here's the opportunity. In 2016, after President Trump won the first time, the immediate reaction to President Trump's win was contempt. It was contempt and it was resistance. And again, I'm not here to question whether or not someone should feel right in the way they reacted. I'm not that person. My goal here is not to litigate, again, an outcome. It's to litigate a process, and that's the process of bridging curiosity. What happened this time around is rather than the immediate reaction being contempt, I've seen a lot of openness and possibility for curiosity.

59:06But it's not curiosity around like, do I suddenly think President Trump is a great president? Or do I think President Trump is a terrible president? I think it's a lot more about curiosity about how did we get here. Right. What made people vote for him twice? Yes. What made people vote for him twice? Why did Hispanic men shift his way so much? If we were so right, let's say I'm a typical progressive on a campus. If we were so right about this idea that resistance is the best way to fight back, how did the terrible bad monster get larger? And I think that's been the opportunity for Bridge in the last two to three months and what our students are seeing on their campuses.

59:48I'll give you a very tangible example. Um, last week we had, uh, a great dialogue happen. Actually, no, no, it's happening. That was another conversation. In three weeks, we're going to have this event called Bridge the Bay. And it's an event with four of our different chapters in the Bay Area, San Francisco, San Francisco State, San Jose, UC Berkeley, Stanford. All these chapters are going to get together. Liv, we would have never had an event that big in the pre-Trump era because right now, again, there's this curiosity. and and here's the other way i describe president trump's win is if you're someone that really dislikes him the way i think about president trump is he's a he's a forest fire that just burned down the entire forest and what happens when a forest fire rips their forest it's possibility for new things to be created and if you're someone that loves president trump well you now have a responsibility and opportunity to build new things it's not just enough to tear down so again i think no matter what side you're on the possibility for the bridging and win-win mindset i think prevails and i think that's the opportunity that's really cool very encouraging yeah because i mean i do worry but again there's so much of my information i get from x where everything is overly dramatized it's low nuance by definition everything's squeezed down all these complex concepts into 280 characters but i i can't help but feel there's it feels like we're stacking up over corrections on one another you know so the sort of the more like left woke movement whatever you want to call it that happened over the last sort of 15 years was a a correction to um you know a lot of social injustices and from the from the right before and then now like the sort of the trump swinging and every the pendulum is swinging over to the right now as a sort of overcorrection to the woke stuff.

1:01:37And in response, people, you know, one of the first messages I tweeted when Trump won, I was like, okay, I know a lot of people who voted for Trump. Please, now your duty and responsibility is to show people that you are not the thing that they fear. I think I actually saw that tweet. Treat that, treat this with grace and an opportunity to show that you are not the scary thing. And unfortunately, a lot of powerful people have not done that and in fact they've gone almost the opposite they've leaned the it's almost like the power's going to their head yeah and so i really worry that we're going to have you know this is an overcorrection to the woke stuff and the blowback to that is going to be even bigger so like the pendulum is getting more and more and more extreme yes that's what it feels like and i want you to tell me that i'm wrong and why you're not wrong uh certainly not wrong i i i only speak my perspective is only driven by the campuses and the people that i meet and speak about.

1:02:27But what your perspective does make me think about is this thing that I call the 10 % problem. And here's the 10 % problem. Remember how when we were talking about those protests at Berkeley, one of the things that came about was, it's these loud voices that are dominating the conversation, everyone else is quiet. Just in the morning today, I was actually doing this research to make sure my numbers still accurate. There are about 150 active users, 150 million active users on twitter or on x all those 150 million the percentage that actually post content regularly is 10 uh that means that there are approximately 15 million people controlling the discourse and the way in which the united states's politics is headed and the other remaining 135 million people feel like those 15 million people describe their reality well while they're sitting there on their couches they're like this is crazy this is freaking insane and i think this is 10 also i don't know if this is like cosmically true or not but 10 also happens to be the same amount of uh the elector that usually shows up in a primary to actually elect their elected officials that's it's approximately 10 and that 10 who do you think shows up are the are the loudest most vocal most ideologically rigid people all of that to say that it whether it's um in politics or it's in our social media organizing landscapes or it's on a campus, the 10 % dictate what the 90 % think.

1:03:58And this is the power of agency. What we have to do is we have to tell people, you are the 90%. You are actually the majority. Do you want to be played by the 10 %? And importantly, here's what's on our side is we know that most of them are ready for an alternative. They're craving it, man. I'm sure you talk to people. I'm like one of those annoying people that'll just be like sitting at a cafe and we'll be like overhearing a conversation and then i'll like start talking to the person and they'll eventually ask me what i do and almost every time the reaction is oh my god that's amazing and god bless you but also it's probably impossible everybody thinks that so it's it's time to shatter the perception and the control the 10 and and it and do you know what gives those 10 the power next is it's us engaging so in some ways you're the master of your own fate right but again it's a coordination problem yes right we can all individually well we can all individually say okay i'm not going to engage with these these noisy 10 outrage peddlers but when you then everyone else does then ultimately they're still getting you know it's so hard to get everyone to simultaneously like wake up from this haze and start being either start speaking out in pro calm measured nuance or just to stop giving these people the air that they they crave and um that keeps on boosting them so it it needs to be yes you need this kind of like education program to as a sort of bottom-up way of teaching people but you also need like a top-down systems redesign yes that's that i you i don't see a way through this without also having just like you know like control or deleting social media and just starting again from like okay we've learned some lessons how can we rebuild these so that actually nuance rises to the top that like the most nuanced the most um high-rung thinkers and and and content is what gets amplified because everything is like you know people are like oh well it's just organic it's like no no none of this is organic like it just happens to be the design like this the algorithms are optimizing for whatever gets the most revenue you know uh advertiser revenue which happens to be usually whatever's you know things that go viral because they're either you know angry making or fit into tribal tribal lines so that's not organic either so it feels like there needs to be some kind of like i mean ideally like someone with a lot of money to start a brand new social media platform or like redesign the algorithm you know with like have like fundamentally human bridge building algorithms at its core.

1:06:35Yeah. I don't know, like, you know, I'd love to like just spitball on that with you. Do you have ideas? Do you know anyone who's working on this? Have you seen any like promising potential? Like what kind of algorithms would you like to see? Like how would you start building that if you were given$5 billion? Yeah. So, so I'll actually give you the example. It'll probably take more than 5 billion, but I'll give you the example of what actually is working on college campuses right now. So imagine you replaced the word X with a college campus, and you replaced algorithms with top-down administration policy, and you replaced organic engagement with students, because that's the bottom up.

1:07:13So over the last two to three years, there's been a massive shift on college campuses, where the norm now that universities and administrations are actually focused on implementing now is bridging and dialogue. Our work has seen tremendous demand, and it's not us there's amazing organizations across the country that are experiencing that so let me just reverse engineer this why is it succeeding on a campus like why is the norm becoming nuanced to outrage and it is actually um over 100 college presidents have signed um uh and signed onto a program led by this organization called citizens and scholars and that entire program is focused on free expression intellectual curiosity dialogue these are some of the most elite institutions um i think it's because of two things that have happened one is that for the longest time campus administrators have assumed that the students want actually resistance to be the dominant mindset but actually it's the 10 it's the loud voices so what we started doing was we said no let's give you an accurate picture of what the actual consumer wants here's what students actually believe in so students are not advocating for it they're pushing it so they've they've created this cultural buy-in that are like administrators we actually want dialogue what happens then is the administrators they have that material power to your point they have that they control the algorithms they control the policies they control the the things that you incentivize on a campus and so suddenly you create a feedback loop where the administrators are now championing the bridge builders on their campus they're championing and giving social credit to the people that are saying let's have these conversations and what you have is this feedback loop or the bottom up and the top down are aligned.

1:08:48And I think what you do on a social media platform is, I don't know if it's necessarily building a new one, but what I think is, it's one is it's recognizing there's actually a lot more complexity in the demand that consumers have, that it's not just all clickbait, outrage content, but the rise of podcasting demonstrates that people are interested in nuanced thinking. And then it's up to the, it's also important for the content creators and the owners of the platforms to realize that if they can start to reward that thinking, can you actually create a feedback loop? So an idea I had like a long time ago was you've got the blue check mark.

1:09:23Everyone loved the blue check mark, right? Cause it's like social credit. It's like, yo, I've got the blue check mark. Now I'm cool. I'm relevant. I'm credible. Imagine one day, like you just woke up on social media and people started getting this like green check mark. And you're like, wait, why is it? Why, why does some people have this green check mark? And the green check mark is like maybe determined by how you post, how long your posts are, the articles you share. maybe it's a like a nuance score it's a nuance score but you don't say it's a nuance score initially so people just started seeing this green check mark and they see oh my god Liv Burry's got the green check mark it's a Joe Rogan now is the green check mark um uh Ezra Klein on the on the liberal side has a green check mark it's like why are these people getting this green check mark and I think it's it's that simple it's about creating and socially engineering and building incentives that just prey on our basic human impulses which is like we want credit we want to be known i mean i love the idea like my ego was like oh that sounds great how to because again yeah with all of these things they'll become co-opted over time yeah right like the blue check was meant initially as a as a way to identify people yeah verifying famous people or institutions so that you know that it's real and then over time that became abused i mean i remember i got mine early on long before i was really a very famous poker player because i happened to know a guy who knew someone at Twitter who you could just like say yes or no and you would get verified and I mean how first of all would you protect against that because I think that's essential if you want people to like trust this thing for a while and be what what would be the actual metric to decide who is deserving of a green you know green check well like what is the metric we want to optimize for it sounds like it's something like nuance and complexity and possibly also though, because I think those themselves, I mean, by definition, I guess they're going to be evolving.

1:11:13They can't ever be steady. And, you know, they can't be an end state. It's like, I am now officially nuanced. No, the whole point is that like, you know, maybe, maybe it disappears if you, you know, if you don't evolve with the times or how to make it robust against gamification. And again, there's like God heart's law thing where it ceases to actually, you know, when it becomes, when the, when the measure becomes the objective, it ceases to be a good measure. I think the short answer is, it might have been Tim Urban, maybe not, but someone had this interesting notion that the best way to determine nuance is, like, what's, like, the simple, like, statement or metric to determine nuance is whether or not someone is willing to be introspective, like, whether or not they're willing to have their own views questioned.

1:11:52And so you can start to like look for signals around like it's not just are you curious and you're asking questions, you're posting things the right way. But it's like, are you actually willing to go out of your way and say the phrase? I don't know. Are you willing to go out of your way and engage with content and maybe post a critical question on a comment? Right. I think I think you can start to look for and start to set indicators for what helps you determine if someone is willing to be introspective, because I think introspection implies a desire for curiosity. so that's like that's like something i've been wrestling with but the longer answer to the question though is yeah the challenge is that if you have like the central committee at x that like says like this is what nuance is there will always be people that don't trust that um and that's where maybe the community notes model might be interesting because what's that done is it's created a bottom up um way for people to be able to provide fact checking without it being fact checking but the short answer is i think you try to put metrics around what it means for someone to be introspective like honestly if you the three i just was thought about this while talking about this like you're pushing me to think on this really in an interesting way which is what if what if the idea was like how many times has someone said i don't know publicly i feel like that's honestly i would definitely if i yeah like i'm sure there's a high correlation between someone saying i don't know and someone being more nuanced and more yeah and especially because we now have like retroactive data of like accounts you know because again someone will start gamifying it by being like build like an army of i don't know bots i don't know bots yeah um or you know just like yeah automate their account to do that but like yeah who's over the last 10 years doing has said yeah like actually if you just so you didn't create the green check mark based on ongoing data where they could gamify right it's retroactive retroactive yes you know um yeah and i mean that would that really would truly reward the people especially those who've like kept up old posts you know they haven't deleted stuff um they're like essentially putting their heart on their sleeve so it's authentic it's honest um yeah i quite like that a lot of students will come up to us live and they'll say like oftentimes when you ask them like who's your like favorite political leader like tell me like someone that you like look up to they oftentimes say that someone that demonstrates like vulnerable authenticity about what they know and they don't know is someone that signals high trust right which again speaks for that you know hope is not lost the fact that you know that the the sort of characterized image i have of like a gen z student who's just like running around and they're like you know this coddled they my way or the highway type closed fist approach to everything no the fact that they're actually most people have that intuition yep that when they imagine a wise sage there's someone who sits there and they think a long time before they speak they don't get emotional and they often say i don't know like that's like the archetype we want to sort of because i think remind people of i think it's part of human nature again i think it's like i think it's like you're trying to modulate for what part of human nature you're speaking to and i think that is within our nature everyone has it somewhere it's just like it's easier to access for some than others and like it's all dependent on the situation yes yeah like i fancy myself as a higher-minded person but like just this morning i was raving on twitter because someone said something annoying at me and i'm like oh okay no the enlightenment is very temporary and fickle yeah um but there's a phrase there's a word that you said that which is like emotional and and if i could just make one point on this, which is like oftentimes people will come up to us and say like, but do I have to give up my passion or my emotion to have a curious conversation?

1:15:44Like I, people oftentimes don't want to feel like they're giving up their convictions for the sake of a conversation. And, and again, that's where I actually think this is not us telling the world, don't be emotional. Like don't have passion, don't have beliefs. Um, again, as I said, like to our summit at our summit like you have like students with very strong beliefs a lot of our students that have graduated they've gone to work at the trump white house we've had students that go work on the kamala harris campaign we've got students that are journalists that are writers that are now working in ai labs it's about building another part of your identity so i just want to i just want to make sure that people don't leave feeling like man like they're telling me what what really what i need to do to operate in this world is i have to give up my conviction because i don't think that's what we're saying what are your thoughts on um um there was there was this amazing image in fact i can show it to you here i pulled it up uh i tweeted it saying mitosis of congress right i don't know if you've seen it so it starts in like 19 that's that's 1949 right because it's literally like two cells slowly splitting and becoming two separate bodies it's like the lack of inter uh you know cross partisanship This is, you know, this problem is not just limited to universities or social media.

1:17:03It's clearly an endemic, this polarization is like this, almost like this force coming through in all aspects of our society in many ways. And this has been happening slowly. It looks like it started in roughly sometime in the 70s, really got going in like 19, yeah, like mid 80s. And I mean, and that's 2011. Yep. It's worse than that now, right? Do you have any thoughts on ways to incorporate some of the bridge techniques you've found that work with students that could be injected into Congress, for example, or into politicians? Yeah. So there's actually, do you know the guy Ezra Klein? Have you heard of?

1:17:48Yeah. So Ezra wrote a book called Why We're Polarized, and it actually provides a really objective, not a left-leaning, but a genuinely objective analysis, I think, of why the party started segmenting. My view on this is that it's not necessarily about giving them the skills to have those conversations. Whenever I meet, like, and again, this goes to, like, these, like, random things that I've picked up doing this work that sort of informs of our fundamental insights, is, like, I'll meet a political leader. and they are actually like most of them are pretty complex thinkers behind the scenes like the amount of times you'll hear somebody say oh but that person actually in person is a really kind person or like they they're actually not that big of an asshole or like they actually do they did actually read that bill like what they said on twitter is not what they believe i think it's because politicians are like weather weather veins like they just they just go the direction of the norm.

1:18:43And the fact is that they're caught up in the same incentive structures that universities are caught up in, that our social media systems are caught up in. And that's why I think the solution is actually the same in every institution. It's the same algorithmic fix, which is when you talk to a political leader, they're saying, well, Manu, only 10 % of people show up in my electorate to vote in a primary. You know who those 10 % are? They're the craziest people. They want me to run to the extreme. So in some ways, we think politicians are leaders. They're not necessarily leading. They're sort of picking up on an insight and following it.

1:19:16So the question to me becomes, well, how do you elevate the other 90 %? It's all a game of incentives. And I think when we start to realize that the divide that we have is not so much a divide because I think people and their own fundamental one-on-one interactions are divided. it's not that each of those cells in that diagram that you showed are each actually that far apart it's that they're driven that far apart artificially by how they get elected and when you can start to unlock those solutions whether you know it's folks like andrew yang that have proposed party fixes or there's a whole host of people that have talked about things like rank choice voting there's right yeah like alternative voting methods seem like a really neglected area like with a lot of potential it is it's like usually it's first past the post right and it's it's a very low fidelity way of voting it's like it's very binary whereas like ranked choice it's like oh we get to we give people more of a like who we can it's actually just putting more information into the system that's right that's right it's putting more information into the system but here's the catchphrase in that ranches voting is the pushback will oftentimes be that it's too complex for someone to like navigate which i think is kind of condescending i don't know so condescending yeah like i don't i don't know if that's true but again most people can count like they can write down one two three four five they can see that there's five people that they vote for yeah but like part of the problem is that we're like often with these voting systems or thinking about new systems it's we feel like we need to accommodate absolutely everybody right so that like oh if there's even two percent of people who can't partake in it because it's a little bit too tricky or complex yep then we can't do it and it's like no let's not throw the baby out the bathwater there might have to be some sacrifices made here but if it's again i don't know what the right cutoff is whether it's like you want it to be 95 of the population 70 99.9 but it always optimizing for 100 is is not practical and it's not going to work but here's here's what's interesting is that you have in this like let's say like pro-democracy space, right?

1:21:21You've got a great amount of people. There's an organization called Unite America that's focused on like ranked choice voting, open primaries. There's like Andrew Yang's work. There's a whole cadre of people that are focused on fixing the institution. So like ranked choice voting, open primaries, there's like a whole slew of this stuff, right? And then there's a lot of people like myself that are focused on like the civic culture, which is like fixing the one-on-one interactions, getting people to engage in different ways. And I think you have to have a combination of both where you've got effective civic culture, effective institutions.

1:21:53And then I think, frankly, people just need to realize that democracy, like anything else, requires innovation. And the thing, maybe this is like, I don't want to be condescending, but maybe it's like the American in the room. Like one of the things that I found that Americans oftentimes have an attachment to is the greatness of the founding this country, which is absolutely true. I mean, I started off this episode saying like, I love this place. That's why I wanted to succeed. But I think one of the things that our founders understood was that if you can't innovate for the time, again, the founding of this country was a fundamental innovation for their time, then I think they would actually be incredibly disappointed.

1:22:31And imagine I told you, imagine you told George Washington, right? Like he like rose from his grave, right? And he was like, how is America doing? And your response is, well, sir, you know, America is struggling. And why is America struggling? Well, you know, there's about 15 million people in this country that are just, they just can't stop angrily tweeting. And, you know, it's like gender bathrooms and like, you know, guns. And he's like, so you're telling me, son, that the greatest experiment in the history of humanity is falling apart because we've got 15 million angry people on Twitter. And it's like, we've got to be able to recognize that the scale and gravity of our problems is only a result of the perception that we've built and and it's it's just as simple as like getting out of your house like having touching grass and having a conversation with your neighbor and being like yo like this is a pretty cool place and there's some cool people that live in this country and and my job is to equip people with the capacity to humanize each other do you use any um i'm curious to understand how you developed such a healthy mindset at such a young age um have you always been this way was there like notable moments in your life that like showed you like for example you mentioned you do these like daily gratitude photos um these like essentially like mental health mindfulness techniques that i suspect are a large part of your life um were there any notable moments in your life that sort of informed you to start this kind of mindfulness or were you just born this way no i i don't think anyone is born like a certain way and i also i'll be honest like i there's a lot of flaws that like i told you i'm like a very like anxious person i suffer a lot from uh just like being anxious about dumb things and then them just driving me or someone saying something and it hurting my capacity to have thoughts beliefs one of my biggest flaws is that i feel like oftentimes i struggle with what i believe which will probably get me in trouble like 10 years down the line because if i do say something they're going like he didn't believe anything back in the day but I'm in a journey to learn I just think it's a happier way of existence and and here's like when I think back honestly I think it started with my grandfather so I was born in New Jersey in 1998 it was central Jersey in a town called New Brunswick and my parents had immigrated to the United States in early 98 my dad was already here he married my mom they came here I was born and then they actually sent me to live with my grandparents for the first five years of my life while my mom and my dad were finishing up their exams and things like that in the U.S.

1:24:59So I lived in like a village in a state called Haryana for like the first five years of my life on and off and I stayed with my grandparents. I then moved back and every two years I moved for the rest of my life until high school where I stayed in one place for four years. For me, my entire life was about not necessarily what I believed but it was to make friends, to exist in new environment to be able to adapt, I have to create space for others. In some ways, it was a survival tactic. And that tactic of always trying to create space for others to accommodate is both, again, in any human trait is a strength and it's a flaw.

1:25:37But I think the way that I was raised alongside my lived experience, and then most importantly, and I can't say this more strongly, is that this journey of bridge has been one in which I made my best friends doing this work. I don't think I would be here sitting here doing this work given how stressful it is giving out challenging it is given the fact that um you're actually not really liked by anybody because you're not part of any single tribe uh you're kind of in this like lonely island until I think we build a big enough tribe where the people that I've met along this journey have given me the capacity and the strength to just keep going and so I think it's a combination um the last thing I'll just say is that I think curiosity is fundamentally courageous.

1:26:20I think we've, again, we've grown up at this time where the closed fist is the sign of courage. The shouting down somebody on Twitter and putting them down, right? Because someone has zero fucks to give. And I'm here for the long game. Like the United States next year, Liv, is going to be 250 years old. To a lot of people, especially someone like me, that sounds like a long time. In the span of human history, the Roman Empire lasts for 1800 years the Chinese dynasty lasts for 1500 years the Athenian democracy lasts for approximately 400 years we're not at the end of the American story we're just at the start and I'm going to do everything I can to to push that forward and that I think is a fundamentally hopeful thing to do so in some ways it gets me in trouble but in most ways I think it helps what advice or call to action would you give to the win-win listeners who I think very very tightly overlap with the philosophies of bridge um you know is there a place they can go to learn more um is there a particular action you would like want to throw out to them everything we've talked about is in your capacity to execute um and what i mean by that is people that oftentimes listen to these conversations assume well lex friedman is doing that right or like live is doing that or manu is doing that on their campus or john height is talking about this but i can't do this it's too hard for me.

1:27:41The way in which we reclaim and build a world in which the win-win mindset works is by you, the listener, recognizing that it is within your capacity to be able to do everything that we just said. So I would offer three simple things. One is the next time you're on social media, remember that the way in which you engage determines the incentive structure you create. your content creators are responding to your action um so the way in which you engage will affect the way that they produce content just think about that for a second the second thing you can do is the next time you leave your house or your apartment you're on your commute you're walking past a grocery store and there's that like one person that you've always walked past that's always there maybe it's the doorman maybe it's like the person that gets you your coffee every morning like just have a simple conversation with them like just ask them like how's your day going what are you up to and that might sound like a very kumbaya thing to do but what it does is it grounds you and it starts your day off on the side of humanity as opposed to like this like weird digital world that we operate in and the last thing you can do is like if you're a student like start a bridge usa chapter if you're um an adult like you're out in the community there's great organizations like braver angels and lots of people doing great stuff um but the most important thing and i say is it is in your capacity to pursue this mindset don't just sit there and think they're doing it that's great it's gonna take all of us absolutely amazing thank you so much yeah thank you for having me so good to have you on here and i haven't told folks but like i'm like a poker nerd now and like uh again as i told you like i'm not trying to like fanboy over you or anything like that but uh now that it's done um you know it's just been a it's been an absolute privilege to have this conversation with you.

1:29:31I knew we became in touch in a specific way, but yeah, it means a lot that you invited me out here to have this conversation.