Are We Really More Divided Than Ever? | Joe Rogan and David Pakman

I think this is the most polarized time I can remember as a 51-year-old man looking back at my history of paying attention to social issues and the way we communicate with each other and just the partisan attitudes that people seem to have. I think it's probably because of Trump. It's a giant part of it. But it's also just a sign of the times of social media. I think it's in part engineered by the algorithms that Facebook and Twitter and all these other social media companies utilize. And it's also been engineered by bad faith participants and people that are actually manipulating it. I don't know if you've paid any attention to... Sam Harris had a fantastic podcast with, and we had one with her as well, Renee DiResta. Renee DiResta analyzed all of the various accounts that the IRA had created with the Internet Research Agency that was responsible for all of these fake accounts that people thought were Black Lives Matter accounts or pro-Southern secession accounts or all these different accounts that were very polarizing and arguing with other people, that these were just Russians that were working for this organization that was specifically trying to start chaos. They were specifically trying to start arguments. And when you see that, and then, I mean, that's a factor. That's a giant factor. That kind of shit is a factor and that is sort of become part of the sport of social media has been arguing. I don't do it. I don't engage. But I do go on Facebook sometimes and someone makes an abortion post and I just watch the chaos like, oh my God. Or anything having anything to do with Trump or anything having anything to do with the Second Amendment or anything that has anything to do with the wall or immigration. So I don't know that people are actually in larger disagreements than they were previously. I think that, yes, Trump has coarsened the language and the way in which it's now acceptable to talk about a lot of these things. That's number one. I think the social media algorithms, like you're pointing out, reward the most extreme and polarizing comments and reactions in a never ending feedback loop where the most polarizing initial tweet generates a more response, more responses than less polarizing tweets and then the sub responses that are most polarizing and an aggressive do the exact same thing. And it's never ending feedback loop. I think it's all those things, but I don't know that people are having bigger disagreements than in times past. I just think that they're public in a different way. Well, there's more disagreements because people have more opportunity to disagree. So they have more opportunity to engage, particularly when you're talking about people that are addicted to their phones and this is coming from a guy who uses his fucking phone four hours a day. Right. I'd like to think that one hour of that is productive, but I know that three hours of it is me staring at butts on Instagram, looking at muscle cars and watching crazy videos. And then how much are you on like a computer? I don't know. I didn't, I don't have that, that data, but it's not as much. And the good thing about it is most of my bullshit I'm doing on the phone, most of my computer work, unless I'm laying in bed, I just watch embarrassingly enough. I watch YouTube videos on pool. That's what I watch before I go to bed. Oh, that's interesting. When I play pool. Yeah. So I watch like professional pool matches before I go to bed because it's calming. Yeah. It's relaxing and I analyze positions. That's interesting. I do the same thing with chess. Oh, there's. There's like chess streamers that I watch and it's similar. Yeah. You could kick back and sort of, it's you're engaged, but it's nothing crazy. And it's also kind of stimulating in an intellectual way. Right. Yeah. And it's different than politics. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. Like on weekends when people, you know, like my mom will, you know, want to talk to me about politics. Ooh. I'm on Saturday. I'm right in the middle of my break period. Are they left wing? Oh yeah. Thank God. I mean, can you imagine? Could you imagine some mean dad calling you out? What the fuck is wrong with you, David? I might've had to defo. Ah, defo. Yeah. Yeah. Anyway. Anyway, indeed. I think that there's more opportunity as we're saying to disagree with people, more opportunity to argue, and in those more opportunities, you're seeing more conflict and I think more polarization. And I think, again, the social media algorithms and all the other nonsense that gets, I think there's, I really do believe that the feeling that I get, but it also might be because a big part of my job is being on the internet. So maybe I'm more engaged with it. Our view skews it a little bit. Yeah. But I think, so in practice, let's imagine that the disagreements are equal to what they've always been, but there's more opportunities to disagree and the algorithm favors more escalated disagreement than rational conversation. The effect is that you might meet someone with whom you have 80% in common in terms of your political views, but the circumstances in which you engage with that person are going to be on the 20% that you don't. So it makes it seem as though you just have very little common ground with anybody because the 80% agreement becomes background and the social media platforms, the debates happening on YouTube elsewhere are focused only on like the most divisive fraction of one's entire political views. And that's, I think what the problem is. But it makes sense because most people agree that, I don't know, gas stations, I mean, just to pick something innocuous, most people agree that it's good to have a regulatory system that makes sure that when you think you've pumped five gallons of gas, you've gotten five gallons of gas. Yes. It's so uncontroversial that nobody's going to talk about it. Like it makes sense that the focus is going to be on the disagreements where it's damaging is then when you meet people in real life and it's hard to relate or even be in the same room because only those differences are sort of like played up or running. Yes, yes, yes. Yeah. Yeah. That conflict gets highlighted. You have conflict bias. Yeah. I don't know where I see this going. That's one of the more interesting things about, particularly with social media and like things when you come to this Crowder situation. I don't know where this is going because I didn't know this was ever going to be a thing. I had never really considered that there was going to be some digital town square that we're all going to be enjoying, whether it's Twitter or YouTube or whatever it is. That might even need regulation. Yeah. That might even need regulation.