(upbeat music) - All right, Jesse, let's do some calls. Who do we have on the old call docket today? - Okay, our first call is from Mark. He's like you, he's a professor in DC, and he has a question about finding the opposing views when you're dealing with certain topics.

- Hi, Kel, my name is Mark, and I'm also a professor at an R1 university in the DC area. My question for you is the following. Often on your show, you'll discuss this idea of building up the Socratic dialectic, as you call it, or finding the best thinkers or writers or speakers from opposing viewpoints on a given topic.

My question is the following. If you want to explore a given topic, but perhaps you're not as familiar with the topic enough to kind of know who the key thinkers are on that topic, how would you go about the specific mechanics of identifying who the best speakers were for that specific topic?

For example, let's say I wanted to understand the causes of the Baltic War. It's not a topic I'm typically familiar with. How would I go about finding the two or three best thinkers or speakers on that, given that I have no knowledge of that area? So this is sort of the curse of knowledge situation, where if I know who the best thinkers are, I'm probably already knowledgeable enough about the field to understand what the key points are.

But if I'm just entering something for the first time, it's actually quite difficult to do what you're describing. Thank you for your time. - It's a good question, Mark. Let me start by just underlining the bigger picture method that Mark was talking about here. So it's one of the big points I've been making on this show since the beginning, is when it comes to having an interesting, thriving, resilient, but also authentic and value-producing intellectual life, you have to be very worried about or wary of intellectual groupism.

And this is where you say, I just want to be told what I'm supposed to think about something, who the good guys are and who the bad guys are. Your mind knows that you are being subservient when you do that, and it's not happy with yourself. It's not a approach to intellectual life that is sustainable.

It makes you feel bad about yourself. And it brings you into weird tribal places. It's also, by the way, the dominant mode of intellectual discourse on social media. So beware if you are wandering through the waters of Twitter, you're wandering through the waters of, I don't know what people use these days, Instagram.

So my alternative, and by my, I mean this goes back to the very early days of systematic thinking about thinking, is the Socratic dialectic method. If you want to understand something better, listen to really good thinkers on multiple sides of it. In that collision, you see what resonates, you get more insight, you get a more nuanced rooted understanding of that topic.

One that you can actually base real action on and feel good about it. If by contrast, you just do intellectual groupism, your mind often is not going to really trust your stance because you know you're just following a crowd. So it's not a good foundation for action. You don't feel confident taking action.

You don't feel confident taking real action based off it. So then you end up just doing very little about a cause, maybe like tweeting about it or yelling at people, or like getting mad at your cousin or something like this. And nothing really happened. So there's this irony of intellectual groupism is that often people think this is the key to changing the world.

If we could just get people to just be on our side and don't question it and attack the other side, then we'll change this issue. But actually what you do is you defang people's actual activist impulses and very little action is taken because they don't trust the intellectual foundation of what they believe.

They just vaguely think you're on their team and don't want to get yelled at. So encounter real argument, real argument on both sides. You will not be tricked. Your deep moral intuitions will not be tricked because you read a particularly clever National Review or Mother Jones article. It's not going to trick you.

It's going to make your beliefs stronger and more nuanced. It's actually going to make you a better advocate for what you believe in. So how do you find these things? Well, for really specific issues like the Baltic War, you know, something that's kind of niche, you don't have to find from scratch the best thinker.

You just have to find someone who knows about it and ask them who the best thinker is. That's almost always the right way to do it. Like, oh, here's a professor who wrote an article about the Baltic War. That's why I'm thinking about it. I read this article. Let me talk to this person.

Like, hey, what are like the definitive books on this? Who are the definitive thinkers on it? What are the different sides of this? You can do that for almost any topic. Find someone who knows about the topic and then ask them who they think the best thinkers are. Now, if there's already a clear tribal divide on the topic, just find a reasonable person who seems to be roughly speaking on one side.

Find a reasonable person who, roughly speaking, seems to be on the other side. And say, what are the best articles or books about this topic? Then you're going to get those two opposing viewpoints. You read them both. Let them collide. You are going to have the more nuanced understanding.

All right. So Mark, I appreciate the question because it gives me a chance to go back to that general thinking. There's actually a name I heard for that approach to intellectual life, especially culturally relevant intellectual life. It was a name that was coined by a former doctor who is now a full-time podcaster YouTuber who talks about medical issues.

And he goes by-- and this name is not going to make you feel better about what I'm about to tell you here-- but he goes by the name ZDogg with two Gs, MD. That's how you can find him on YouTube, ZDoggMD. I don't know what his actual real name is.

Really funny guy, really smart guy, really funny broadcaster. But he coined this term alt-middle. And I kind of like this terminology. So alt-middle is basically an approach where instead of partaking in intellectual groupism, where you say, where's my tribe? What do we believe? Send me the memo. Great. Who can I tweet at?

You approach topics one by one and say, let me get into this if it's interesting or relevant to me and I have the time. Let me look at people on both sides of it and come up with my own take on it. And then-- and this is critical-- be willing to change that take if I get better information down the line.

That hold that position with some empathy and with some contingency. I might not quite be right here. This is a complicated topic. And so I'm going to hold that with some contingency. And I'm going to be relatively empathetic to people on other sides. Other people aren't evil. And that is what he calls the alt-middle approach.

It really emerged because he's a doctor. He does a lot of sort of COVID-centrist type communication. He's sort of a COVID-centrist, so one of these people that's very plugged in and mainstream on COVID and understands the science, but also is alarmed by both sides. Alarmed, for example, by really extreme anti-vaccination type of discussion.

Also alarmed by really extreme, we need to lock down the kids and put them in underwater cages because there's a guy who lives six states over who was once immunocompromised type thinking. And so through COVID-centrism, he has evolved this idea. But I think it could apply to all of intellectual life.

Alt-middle. So ZDogg, I appreciate that terminology. Mark, I appreciate you bringing this up. Find people who seem reasonable. Ask them who the best is. Read on both sides of the topic. Think for yourself. Hold ideas with some contingencies. Be empathetic to the other side. And trust your moral intuitions.

You're not going to be tricked into believing something bad. Your views are going to get more nuanced. Your beliefs are going to get stronger. Your ability and motivation to actually make change in the world, which is what actually matters, is actually going to be improved when you encounter the very best thinkers on all sides of an issue.

All right, thanks, Mark. Jesse, I showed you ZDogg's-- I showed you one of his videos. I guess his studio looks very nice. I'm jealous. So what is it that makes it look nice? It's like a lighting, but-- I don't know, it's like a big studio, and it's in soft focus or something.

Yeah, it kind of looks like a really nice yoga studio. Yeah. Now, I don't know if he has a nice camera. We have pretty nice cameras. Maybe he has an even nicer camera. But they're good-looking videos. He's also a funny guy. I like him. ZDoggMD. That's such a-- the first name I came up with when I-- I bet if we asked him, he's like, I signed up for YouTube on a whim 20 years ago.

And it was the first name that came to mind, and then you're stuck with it. It's like when you end up with your email address is like nsyncfan24@aol.com. And you're kind of stuck with it because all your family, that's the one they know to use. I wonder if that's where ZDogg came from.

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