37: Why We Are Increasingly Divided Into Ideological Bubbles

Tracy Alloway (0:07)

Welcome to Odd Lots, I'm Tracy Alloway, executive editor of Bloomberg Markets.

Joe Weisenthal (0:12)

And I'm Joe Weisenthal, managing editor at Bloomberg Markets.

Tracy Alloway (0:16)

All right, so Joe, this week we have something a little bit different for our listeners. It's not entirely markets related, but I think it has a lot to do with what is going on in markets right now, if that makes any sense.

Joe Weisenthal (0:30)

Go, keep going.

Tracy Alloway (0:31)

Okay, all right, so this week's episode is actually inspired by a conversation I had when I was in London earlier this month. It was shortly after the Brexit referendum, which shocked a lot of people. The decision by the UK populace to leave the EU came as a shock to a lot of people, including myself, if I'm 100% honest.

So what happened is I was in London, I was talking to someone that you actually know, but who shall remain unnamed, someone I respect a lot. And this person said they had actually voted to leave the EU. And it was the last person I ever would have thought would vote to leave. But then as we started talking, this person listed all the reasons they thought leaving was a good decision, including a long drawn out argument about the death of neoliberalism.

And I realized, you know, my instinctive reaction to hearing someone saying that they want to vote to leave is, you know, incredulity, I guess. And maybe it shouldn't be. Everyone has valid reasons, right?

Joe Weisenthal (1:37)

Absolutely, and before we go any further, I'm just hoping that as soon as the recording stops on this podcast, you tell me who this person is. But I think this is an incredibly important topic because I think that when it comes to the Brexit referendum, when it comes to politics in the US, it's pretty clear that and elsewhere in the world, it's pretty clear that people separate themselves into these ideological bubbles, and not only do they not know or can imagine how someone sees something opposite, they don't even experience the, they seem to make almost no attempt to understand the other side's point of view. And I think this is pretty long term ramifications for the media, for democracy, for the economy, and probably also for markets, given how many people in the Brexit referendum were completely stunned by the result.

Tracy Alloway (2:35)

Exactly. That's the perfect segue. All right. So here with us today to talk about why the other side of the argument is not necessarily dumb is Sean Blanda. He is editor-in-chief of 99U, which is a publication that's dedicated to providing the missing curriculum for creative careers.

But he is also the author of a really good medium post on this topic that kind of enunciates a lot of the ideas that we are discussing right now. Thank you for.

Sean Blanda (3:17)

Very psyched to be here, thank you for having me.

Joe Weisenthal (3:19)

Well, Sean, you wrote a post on Medium about the other side not always being wrong, and of course, that other side can mean a lot of different things, but for many people working in finance and the major cities or technology, the other side either means the Brexit referendum, or it means voting for Trump or something else. So what did you mean in this post, and why did you write it?

Sean Blanda (3:43)

I'm a very active Twitter user, and a news event would happen, I would see a coalescing of viewpoints, and then the opposition viewpoints starts to filter into that bubble, and then I would see it immediately mocked, like it was an antibody. And I thought things cannot be this simple. And this is right before Brexit when this happened, and the notion that the other side had something to say was not even crossing people's minds. So one thing I did is I followed people that I disagreed with on Twitter, and I found that things would come up and it would change my mind.

As an example, the recent debate around gun control, as has been well documented, there were four gun control bills put on the floor of the house. People were arguing about it. And initially I was on one side of that, which is yes, let's heavily regulate guns through this no-fly list. And then someone posited, how is that no-fly list mandated?

Judicial oversight. And I was like, oh, I would not have thought of that if I was not following the other side.

This thing is more complex than I thought. The other side is not just a bunch of buffoons that don't agree with me. They have nuanced political views as well. And I've seen that borne out again and again. And Brexit is the latest example of that.