Dr. David Eagleman

I think this political statement does matter because when the society reaches a point where some group of people is referred to essentially as non-human, that's when things get really dangerous really fast.

The Tutsis, cockroaches, the Jews as pestilence in Germany and whatever, you know.

All these things make a difference.

And by the way, you know, in Germany, in the Reichstag in 1934, all the people elected to the Reichstag were either far right Nazi party or far left communist party.

It was like a really polarized time.

And the part that's so scary about polarization of that extreme is that it just takes a moment for one party to eat the other.

It just it goes really fast.

And.

Suddenly, you know, when Hitler took power, when President von Hindenburg died, Hitler declared himself the Fuhrer and rounded up all the communists and put him in jail in concentration camps right away.

And so that's why polarization, if there are things we can do as a society to work on that, to try to get better models of the other person, to have meaningful debates and listen to the other side.

It doesn't mean coming to agree with them or whatever, but it means saying, OK, you

So I'm going to assume the other person is speaking genuinely.

What is their reason for holding this political position?

Also, by the way, having a better notion of our own internal models, which is that we are extraordinarily limited.

This is actually what my next next book is about.

It's called Empire of the Invisible.

And it's about why we all believe our own internal models.

We've all taken very thin trajectories through space and time.

And we've collected up our little scraps of data and we think, oh, I know the truth.

I know how to think about the world and these political issues.