The Psychology Behind Our Rage: Understanding Outrage Overload

My guest today on Earthbound is David Beckmeier.

David is the host of Outrage Overload, a podcast and civic media platform with one core lowering the temperature.

As part of the Connors Institute, Outrage Overload brings together scientists, researchers and authors to examine the psychology of outrage, political polarization, disinformation, and the media forces that keep us angry and divided.

Through his work and expertise, David has built a practical, research grounded case for why we get so worked up and what we can actually do to lower the temperature and maybe let cooler heads prevail in challenging times.

Left, right, up, down, right.

Wrong.

The grass is green.

No, it isn't.

Global warming is real.

You must be some deranged radical liberal.

How can you say that?

How can you not see what I see?

Rising seas?

More extreme weather?

The science parts per million.

You must be some unhinged wingnut.

Instead of you and me.

It's us versus them.

Weaker and slower than the ancient apex predators roaming the African veldt, our earliest ancestors had little to protect them but their wits and each other.

We survived as a species by organizing into cooperative tribes to run counter to the norms, beliefs, expectations and traditions of the tribe, therefore threatened an individual's survival.

To be banished from the tribe was tantamount to a death sentence.

Competition for resources evolved into suspicion, a contest of beliefs and culture.

Winners versus losers, us versus them.

To travel into the brain is to travel into deep time, layers of evolutionary circuits shaped for survival.

In a world of immediate dangers, tooth and claw must now grapple with headlines and hashtags.

Tasked with interpreting a world of symbols, signals and stories, the amygdala still ask the ancient question, is this a threat?

But in the age of algorithms and outrage overload, the answers arrive faster than reality can follow.

After all that the modern human mind has imagined, created and built, we are still quietly driven by an almond shaped cluster of tissue with the power to flutter bodies with fear, urgency and conviction.

We cannot escape our neurological wiring, but we can employ other layers of cognition not to fight our lizard brains, but to understand them.

Here's how all this plays out in my world.

I've been writing and studying and talking with people about climate change for nearly 20 years.

I've covered it from conference halls and field stations, from disappearing coastlines, melting permafrost and warming seas.

I was in Paris in 2015 for COP21, where the Paris Agreement was adopted.

At the time, Paris felt like a turning point.

The world had come together.

Literally.

Heads of state from nearly every country on the planet gathered in the same room.

Something had shifted.

It was, for me, a genuine high water mark.

But it didn't take long for that feeling to fade.

Now, more than a decade later, and with COP30 in the rearview mirror, I find myself in a different place.

Not without hope, but much more clear eyed about something I may have spent a long time not really wanting to see.

The science hasn't gotten murkier, the evidence hasn't weakened.

The case for urgent action is stronger than ever.

And yet the conversation feels harder, more brittle, more tribal, more stuck, even as it becomes more critical with each passing season.

For a long time, too, too long, I assumed this was a problem of information, that if we could just get the right facts to the right people clearly enough, often enough, the needle would move.

What I've come to understand, and what my conversation with Beckmeyer helped crystallize, is how I kept falling into a trap David calls naive realism.

The quiet assumption that because I looked at the evidence and reached a conclusion, everyone else should too.

And if they haven't, well, something must be wrong with them.

That's a hard habit to break.

People evaluate problems, unsurprisingly, through the lens of their tribe.

David talks of a phenomenon researchers call solution aversion, in which people quietly shift their positions on a problem, depending on whether the proposed solutions are ideologically threatening.

We don't necessarily do this consciously or cynically, though sometimes we do.

But the brain does it even before you know it's happening.

If your information doesn't fit my tribe's narrative, it's a threat.

It's the low growl of a crouching lion in the tall grass.

It's our friend, the amygdala doing its thing.

So someone who loves clean rivers, blue skies and fresh air may still resist the conversation about climate change, not because they don't care about the environment, but because climate change has become a tribal signal, a red flag fighting words.

And the amygdala, still asking its ancient question, treats that tribal signal as a potential peril.

Which raises the question, if the hardened skeptics are mostly unreachable and the true believers are already in the room, who's left?

And how do we talk to them without triggering their ancient wiring?

The answer, in part, is older than politics, older than science, older than the written word.

It is in the stories we tell and how we tell them.

We are a storytelling species.

Long before we had data, we had narrative.

Stories are how our ancestors made sense of the world, passed down knowledge, and bound communities together around shared meaning.

Facts inform, at least theoretically, but stories move.

And in A media environment engineered to trigger the amygdala.

A well told human story may be one of the few things that can still slip past our defenses and reach something deeper.

David calls the people we need most to reach the movable middle.

They're not loud, they're not rage posting on your feed, but they're out there and they're listening.

The question is whether we know how to speak to them.

We all love clear skies and clean water.

So how do we move past the triggers and come together to preserve what we all love?

I think this conversation is a good place to start.

Here's David Beckmeier of Outrage Overload.

David Beckmeier, it's good to talk to you today, Tom.

It's great to talk to you.

This is going to be a different kind of talk for me, so I'm looking forward to it.

Good.

Yeah.

So it's really an interesting conversation for me because I have been writing about climate change for a couple of decades now.

And my challenge, my ongoing challenge is connecting with people and finding a narrative that works.

And it's getting harder and harder.

So let's start off.

Why don't you give my audience a brief outline of your work and your podcast, Outrage Overload.

Yeah.

So Outrage Overload is a podcast.

It's also kind of a media network because we've also got a few other shows and I write on Substack, and it's essentially a civic media platform where we're trying to build civic muscle, which you might describe as kind of the habits and skills for participating in our world.

And the overarching theme, you could pretty easily say is just kind of lowering the temperature.

And then that covers a lot of different topics.

So we talk about some of the science behind why all this outrage is out there and why we get caught up in it.

We talk about misinformation, we talk about tech.

Those are some of the big threes that we kind of mash together.

So you make outrage the center of your work.

So why do you believe outrage, rather than reason or critical thinking or empathy, has become the dominant mode in today's discourse, particularly since we're talking about climate change, particularly around global warming.

I sort of use the term outrage as a placeholder for kind of a set of emotions.

Particularly moral indignation is probably one of the big ones.

But anger and a bunch of other stuff.

Yeah.

And really you're getting at the core of, like, how the whole, what the whole show was inspired by and what we've learned along the way is all this Psychology and human nature that pulls us into this tribal way of looking at the world.

And that's one of the biggest drivers for all this.

And then that lets us take on particularly like this moral indignation aspect of it.

And then there's kind of a win, lose and we're right and they're wrong and it's really hard to, you know, not.

And it's really easy to fall into.

Right.

Because you get the validation for it.

Like basically this question is kind of my whole hundred and something episodes of my show.

Right.

But basically it's all that put together, you know, and a lot of it is just the root of a lot of it is our kind of tribal nature.

Human nature.

Yeah.

And it's interesting, the tribal nature.

When I started writing about climate change, there's always been the tribal aspect to it.

It seems to be getting worse for many reasons in the U.S. i would offer particularly around the narrative that our president is putting forth.

It's all a hoax.

But climate change, I've never thought of it.

Maybe you can correct me on this because I just listened to your podcast about scientific populism and I probably might be falling into a trap.

I always thought that I'm just clear headed about this.

This is simply an energy imbalance in the atmosphere.

And how can these people think this way?

What are the CYC psychological mechanisms that create this tribalism around climate change, would you suggest?

Yeah, I mean this one is always.

I have everything that I've learned along the way kind of, and I know it in the abstract.

Right.

I kind of get it.

Like oh yeah, there's this scientific phenomenon, there's that one, there's this cognitive bias, there's all these tendencies we have and so on.

And then I think about in the context of climate change and I go, you know, it's still hard to wrap my mind around kind of in practice.

Why does this still happen?

Why are we like this?

I mean, why do we fall into this?

But around climate change, because you get exactly those feelings.

One thing that you mentioned is like, I think I'm rational.

I'm the one with the right.

You know, I've looked at the data and I've got it.

And that's a naive, something that sometimes is called a kind of naive realism.

Like how could everyone else not come to the same conclusion?

I came to, you know, and we look at this facts and we.

Why wouldn't they come to the same conclusion?

And with climate change it's slightly complicated beyond that a little bit.

And actually in all these contexts it is, too.

But this is particularly a biggie in climate change because you have a lot of misinformation purveyors, right, that have financial incentives and other things to really take advantage of our innate sort of tribal nature to pit us against each other in this topic, not necessarily for our best interests.

So you have that factor in it, too.

But even if we all shared all the same facts and let's say we didn't have any of this misinformation, we'd still be in a similar boat.

We could still be in a similar boat in some ways anyway, because it somehow starts getting attached to these tribal identities and this tribal nature of us.

And so it's a big combination.

It's like there isn't really sort of one magic thing.

We can push this button in this one place and we'll fix it all.

But underlying a big piece of it is this.

It starts to be part of our identity, and it starts to be part of our moral fabric kind of thing.

And again, thinking about this from a practical, practical perspective, I know a lot of conservatives that are very much outdoorsy, they love the outdoors, they love blue skies, they want clean water, yet simultaneously be against regulations for this and not really putting it together that those regulations are why we have the clean air, you know, in some cases, right?

So it can create cognitive biases for me, or cognitive dissonance for me is like, how can those two things exist at the same time?

Despite, like I say, I kind of know in the abstract or in the intellectual side, I've studied all this.

I've heard about all this scientific stuff from all these experts.

And so I do get it.

I get why it happens.

But, yeah, that's the big driver for it really is somehow when it starts, once it starts becoming identified, are associated, I should say, with kind of our identity, with our tribal fears.

And we don't know this is happening, by the way.

It's not like we're sitting and writing down that, oh, my tribal fear is this, and therefore that this is the stuff that's happening before that part of our brain is even active, right?

Our brain is constantly scanning for these things, and then in hindsight, we rationalize it, right?

So we tell ourselves we're making these rational decisions, and, you know, this is kind of the human machine, you know, is really good at this, Right?

I mean, we do this all the time.

And so everybody thinks that making rational decisions in this, even the people that we might look at and say, wow, where'd you get those Facts or that doesn't make any sense or I don't know.

Especially when it's.

If you start thinking in the frame of if I don't take this position, my position in my tribe will be jeopardized.

Right.

That's our early brain.

It looks at that and sees that as basically a death sentence.

Right.

I mean you can't live on your own or a species that was very.

We're very groupy because that's why we survive.

That's our niche.

Right.

That's what let us survive is becoming really good at forming groups and working together and.

And now my group is my only reason for that I can survive.

I don't have big muscles, I gave up big muscles and all that kind of stuff.

Right through evolution and now those.

And so once that group connection is threatened, it's just like being attacked by a tiger or feeling like I could be attacked by a tiger because it triggers those same exact emotions.

And so, you know, this is how we get there.

But we don't know any that's going on.

Right?

Yeah.

So we're tracked by our amygdala pretty much.

Yeah.

We back into our rationalizations of like when we buy something you think oh I really need this kind of thing because you give yourself reasons, this is a pretty light hearted example perhaps.

But you end up buying something that you don't really need it.

So you rationalize emotional drivers into rationalization.

Yeah.

And I think with climate in particular, just another thing that's happening is, and it's this idea, you've seen some research around this calls it this idea of solution aversion or solution attraction.

So we change our position on the issue itself based on what solutions are attached and how those solutions align with our ideology.

Right.

So once a particular solution is proposed or connected with this issue and that solution is aligned in our tribe, seriously, one way or the other, then we then change our position somewhat or our maybe importance on that issue.

So you could say maybe people on the left do this with immigration.

Right.

They don't like the solution for solving immigration.

And you could argue maybe I'm wrong there.

But just taking that as an example, that maybe people on the left would say, well I'm going to deprioritize.

I don't think immigration is a big problem because I don't like the solutions people are proposing.

And for people in climate change you see the same thing.

I don't.

Yeah, I don't think climate change is a big problem because I don't like the solutions now again, you don't know you're doing that.

Like, we don't know we're doing that.

We make those kind of things.

But that's another aspect we see in the science, is that it can be somewhat about.

It's not so much the issue itself, it's like what solutions get attached to it.

And this is where I think communications about the topic can really help is coming up, finding ways to talk about solutions that aren't so polarizing.

Right, I agree.

I've always kind of thought that talking about climate change you might not agree with, say what I would say a solution is.

But let's talk about what are your ideas of a solution as opposed to saying, I don't like your solutions, so go away, I don't want to talk to you.

My struggle is I can preach to the choir all day long and that's okay.

You know, you're informing people, keeping them informed as to what's going on, but you're not really pushing the needle at all.

And then there's the people that anything I say is just going to hit a brick wall.

And then there's, I guess there's the people in the middle that, you know, they have their lives to live.

They're raising whatever climate change isn't front of mind.

And because of what I do, climate change is more or less front of mind.

How I can connect with those people where there is a chance of making inroads.

You know, you don't have to be as concerned about it as I am, but just understand that there, there's, this is an issue, these are possible solutions and that's the struggle I have found.

And in today's media, algorithm driven, AI driven media landscape, that really seems to be harder and harder because the algorithm of the choir is easy to reach.

And actually the algorithm of the people that don't want to hear from me at all is easy to reach.

They find me, they find me.

Go, you know, you're full of shit.

And then there's the ones in the middle that I just, I don't know how to get to them.

Can you walk us through somehow how, given the scenario I've just given you, how a person can approach a conversation, conversation about climate change in this environment that we're in?

Yeah, I mean, I can talk about what the experts talk about, and I think you're really hitting a key thing here, is that sometimes when we go about these things, we think of the person that's the farthest extreme from us.

Right.

The most polarized the most polar opposite from us on this topic.

And we start there, like we're going to take that person and we're going to fix them because they're wrong.

Generally.

That's probably not going to get, you know, it's not going to work.

Like you say, a lot of those people have art.

It's not probably the best place to start.

And so I think this idea, some people have called it, Some people hate this term, but some people call this idea of this movable middle, right?

And focusing your energy more in that area.

And other people have talked about kind of adjacencies, right?

Find people that are a little bit adjacent, like you say, may not be their top issue, but they're not necessarily real locked in one way or the other either.

And focusing your energy there is definitely, I think from all the research is basically a much better way to spend your energy.

It's less frustrating for you and more likely to maybe have some positive outcomes.

And then.

So what works with those people, right?

What we've found, and it can be really hard, is storytelling, right?

If you can relate to something like.

Like I was even talking about people like streams and they want clean water and they want the fish to be there and they want this blue skies and stuff.

So the storytelling can help in many ways, in a few ways, depending on, again, what this adjacency is, but.

And understanding their concerns.

So that's one of the first steps is understanding a concern.

So maybe their concern is, you know, these environmentalists just want to go in and I can.

They're not going to let me do this, they're not going to let me do that.

They're going to enforce these rules and I won't be able to do these things.

And so if you can start identifying some of those things and say, well, that's kind of a misperception.

So here's an example.

I know so and so who had this problem and that problem.

And when these laws changed, it actually was better for them because this happened and that happened.

Those kind of things can have much more impact than here's a fact and here's a study.

And if you look at this.

So try to identify what their concerns are and then speak to those concerns with storytelling, if you can.

And that's much more effective.

That makes perfect sense.

Meeting people where they are and a.

Human's personal story is the best.

Yeah, yeah.

We are a storytelling species.

That's how we create our realities, right, through stories.

One issue in communicating climate is, well, there's outrage fatigue and then there's apathy or paralysis.

How do we avoid pushing people?

You might have just addressed this a little bit through storytelling, but pushing them either to denial or despair, I mean, those are two extremes.

And I know that there's a lot of people that in my camp, and sometimes I feel this way myself.

It's like it's just too late, you know?

And then there's the denial, which is pretty common, but those are the two extremes.

How do we.

Is it just what you just said, finding good stories to avoid either of these extremes?

You know, it's a fine balance when you're communicating something like climate, because it's a lot of.

It's a lot of hard news.

I was at cop 15 and cop 21.

Cop 21 was the Paris Agreement.

That was my high point of feeling, all right, we're making some Progress.

And now 10 years on, I feel this sense of despair coming back in.

And I don't want to communicate that to people.

I want to be frank.

You know, hope is when we stop fooling ourselves.

It's not like you buy an electric car and everything's going to be okay.

It's not that at all.

There's going to be some, some significant changes.

And so I find it difficult to express the fact that, hey, we're in for some big changes.

It's going to be hard, but it's going to be better than the alternative.

I don't know if there's a question there, but do you have any thoughts about it?

A lot of the work that I'm doing is we're talking about political polarization.

Right.

So I've talked to a lot of experts on that that have been in it for decades.

And we often talk about how this is not a feel good story in a lot of ways.

Right.

It's hard to stay upbeat because, yeah, it's sort of ongoing as it's gotten worse and climate change is that and probably then some.

Right.

It has those same kind of issues.

So, yeah, it definitely can be a challenge.

I mean, this is where, and I won't say necessarily just the singing to the choir side, but just at least having those connections with other folks that are concerned about it and also even commiserating sometimes about how hard it is to communicate in some of those things can help, you know, help you realize, oh, I'm not alone in this.

So, you know, there are some good aspects of that.

Obviously you can kind of be a downward spiral and you can drive yourself mad, but having that connections and having being involved in not doing this on your own is one aspect that can help the despair side and the apathy side and then sort of identifying like those small wins when you can find them.

Right.

Because sometimes the news is.

Sometimes most of the time the news is going to tell us mostly about all the bad stuff.

Right.

That's.

It's a bleed, it leads kind of thing.

Right.

So you have to dig out those.

Those uplifting or at least, you know, maybe not as negative stories.

Oh, maybe that thing isn't.

When you go into the details, you, oh, that thing wasn't as bad as they made it sound.

Right.

It was kind of this and that.

And that's a truth that you'll find a lot when you dig a little bit deeper into some of these news stories.

So maybe keep a file of like the uplifting things and have it there.

You can refer to it once in a while.

Oh, yeah, this thing happened.

I remember that.

And this.

Maybe I talked to this person and they changed their mind a little bit or maybe I learned something from them about something else, you know, so those kind of things can help.

But yeah, it's definitely a tough space when you kind of want to solve all the world.

I mean, this is the environment we've been trained to be, that somehow we'll do a thing and it'll be this grand thing and all the problems will be solved in real life.

You know, these things change through collective movements and just remembering that small thing you did somewhere and maybe it is.

Maybe you did just get an ev.

Okay.

Maybe that's all you did this year or whatever.

Right.

It's something.

You can take some credit for that and feel like you've took some step.

And so that's a piece of it too.

What are these small steps that we can take and realize that we have agency in this.

And because that's what you lose sight of sometimes, you just think nothing I do will matter.

Yeah, that's an excellent point.

It's easy to fall into that.

Like I put this thing in the recycling bin.

Who cares?

It's not going to make.

And as an individual act, it might not make that much of a difference.

But it's the collective everybody following their values.

You know, I know that just me putting this thing or buying an EV or putting this thing in recycling bin isn't going to make that much of a difference.

But I am expressing my values.

And it's an example.

Other people express their values and.

And that's how change happens, is my estimation on that.

What would your take Be if just generally speaking, we can pull back from climate change a little bit, just the general information environment that we're in right now, how do you see it serving the public good?

The algorithms, the social media, how dangerous is all this?

We're sort of simultaneously in a world where there's more good information out there and available than there's ever been.

At the same time, there's lots of bad information and it's really hard to find.

You know, it's really hard to sort through and manage all that in an effective way.

And there's no silver bullet, like everybody kind of, well, isn't there this one source?

I can just go there and all my problems will be solved.

It doesn't really exist.

It does.

It's a heavy lift, unfortunately, for us these days, to really find, like I said, I can't point you to one journal and say, that's great, all information there is going to solve all your problems.

It's a bit of a heavy lift.

And it is a little bit, frankly, I'm very concerned about this and it is a little dangerous.

And we already have the media environment we have now, which is very big.

Problem with it is it's so fragmented, so you can get any detail you want on any subject, but the quality of that is quite variable.

Right.

So that's a big challenge.

So that's what we're starting with.

And now you start throwing AI into this.

And I think what a lot of people aren't paying attention to is that there's a huge amount of power there, right?

These algorithms, you're already seeing this language.

I'm seeing it in my circles.

I'm sure you've seen it too, where you'll say, I don't even use Google anymore.

I don't look at the Google results.

I just ask AI, ask ChatGPT or whatever, and that gives me what I want to know.

And that kind of sounds good on the surface, but if you think about the power that that means that that now is our collective intelligence, right?

They can be whatever they decide to put in that training.

And you literally have seen people say, I need to change the grok.

People are always talking about my.

It's too woke.

Trump has now made it illegal for the government to use what he's calling woke AI.

So what does that mean?

Like, what does that even mean?

So there's already clearly a bias built into these things, and so it can kind of be whatever somebody wants, somebody that's not you and me, because we're not dictating.

How that thing gets trained, whatever they want to put out.

And I hate to sort of use words like they like, it's a big conspiracy.

One of the media people that I had on my show I think had a great line.

It's like, you know, it doesn't have to be a conspiracy.

Like the biggest conspiracy is all, is no one knows what the heck they're doing.

Right, Exactly.

So sometimes you can think of it that way too.

It's just like even if you think about the social media world and be able to with the algorithms and how terrible they are, it's not like nobody really thinks there's like a Mr. Burns at the top that decided for that to happen.

It was kind of just a water flows downhill natural outcome of deciding that engagement was what we're going to create.

And then it was us, it's our brain that did it.

And this has been proven with research that basically even if you take social media without an algorithm where it just has follows likes and I think one other factor, doesn't take much and you throw humans into it, boom.

Toxic polarization happens, toxic environment happens anyway without any algorithm at all.

Now the algorithms make it worse and all that.

I'm not saying that, but I'm just saying our brain is the algorithm that's destroying it.

You know, it's because of what we, we want.

So when you throw that in, yes, I'm very concerned.

And how do you go from there and where we're going from here, I mean we're headed to some new world about information.

Because if you, you know, how are people getting information now?

It's a lot of TikTok reels and things like that.

Right.

And it's like I say, when you let our brain run on its own, you don't end up in a great place.

So the way to stay out of it personally is to be very intentional, that kind of stuff.

But where it is in the big picture is I am very concerned.

Yeah.

How does somebody that wants to be seriously informed and they have their views.

How do people cultivate the self awareness to be able to recognize that they're being manipulated, you know, by outrage and especially let's focus back in on climate change, I guess.

You know, as an example, as a personal example, you know, I follow, I have my algorithms and it's probably no surprise to anybody.

I'm a liberal, so I have the things I'm seeing and it makes me mad.

And you know, this isn't helping.

How do people combat this barrage of media technology?

I Think there was a term that came up when I was researching this.

Metacognition.

Yeah.

Can you speak to that?

Yeah.

So at the end of the day, that's the way that you could potentially deal with a lot of this.

But so metacognition is this idea of activating that part two, the phase two, the level two of our brain, right.

Instead of letting everything be controlled by the elephant, that is all those.

All those base level emotions.

So metacognition is cognating over the thing.

So it's like looking at the thing of the thing, or it's a second order looking at things.

And if we think of that in practical terms, one thing you mentioned is what are some things you can do about knowing about the way that people are feeding us this outrage all the time?

Well, the first is something you said, which is knowing they're doing it.

Right?

And in particular, the people on your side, right?

They're the ones who have in some sense more influence on you, right?

And so these people that you consider on your side, you know, they're trying to get clicks and likes and doing the thing.

So they're trying to make you as mad as anybody else is, right.

In fact, that's where we get most of our anger stuff from, right?

People on our side.

So just going in with that lens, like, oh, yeah, don't forget they're trying to do that, to me, is already a little bit of an inoculation, right?

Just having that lens.

And then the second piece of it is you said something about self aware.

And the challenge with self aware is it's really hard.

You have to be very intentional, right?

You have to say, I am going to do a steel man argument.

If your listeners are familiar with that.

The idea of a straw man argument is like a really bad defense.

A steel man argument is the opposite.

Like, I believe that this thing.

But my argument now is, what if I had to defend the other side of that?

What if I had to defend the other side of that?

Can I do that?

How would I do that?

What would it take to go find information that would be the opposite?

And then can I do that in good faith?

Because often we'll do that a little bit and go, yeah, see, those arguments are terrible.

I'm still right?

So do that with good faith.

Can be kind of challenging.

But another practical tool is also to go deep instead of wide sometimes, right?

It's easy to get overwhelmed with all these little headlines.

Maybe this week, maybe pick a headline or something that's bothered you and go deep.

On that one thing and set the other stuff aside for this week or for three days or something like that.

Some of those tactics can help and frankly, just sometimes opting out for a while, like I've had too much outrage today.

So just limiting it can also be a factor.

So all of those are practical tools that in the end activate our metacognition.

That's good.

The idea of, well, first off, just backing off every now and then and then going deep instead of wide.

I fall into these traps.

I fall into traps of.

I've gone into climate.

Raise your hand if you fall into these traps.

Well, yeah, it's the amygdala again, right?

Yes.

Yeah, I've gone into some climate skeptic, I guess we could say websites and looked at their arguments and I'm going, ah, yeah, that's just BS as opposed to actually trying to take their point of view in an authentic sort of way.

And it's difficult because I have the beliefs that I have and it's hard for me to authentically kind of look at it.

Well, you know, maybe there is, maybe.

They have a point there.

Maybe it's not as bad as they.

As we.

As I say it is.

It's a challenge, It's a real challenge and it's not made any easier by the world we live in.

How would you distinguish the polarization versus disinformation they're used often.

And how do you distinguish between healthy debate and outrage based manipulation in climate conversations?

Now, can you address that question?

Yeah, I think I first want to say that I don't think there's any such thing as healthy debate because debate is typically framed as a win, lose.

You know, there's a winner, there's a loser.

The word I would throw there is deliberation.

And this I think is a good example of what you were just talking about, of trying to go look up some of the counter arguments about some of these things.

If you do true deliberation, right, where you have good information sources.

We know from research, even involving climate, that if we're able to facilitate quality deliberation, we are able to do it.

And at the end of the day, what that's talking about is taking good information and then learning about the complexities of it.

And I would say, like an example of where this all fell down on social media would be something like maybe the Dakota Access pipeline might be an example.

If folks remember that at the end of the day that turned into a very black and white binary kind of, you're with me or you're against me.

And all the kind of nuance of the reality of the benefits or the reason to do it and the negative consequences kind of just got washed out because now it just became you're with it or you're against it.

All parties involved let that happen.

But media obviously drove a lot of that.

And an example where this has worked and I don't know if you know anything about this, but James Fishkin has been doing this idea of, he calls it deliberative polling, but what it really is is a big deliberative, I don't know, process.

It's very intense.

It's like a full weekend.

People get together, they go through a bunch of cycles of being presented information where these are like, they're not really partisans in the information, but there's people trying to show the information about both sides and highlight sort of nuance and trade offs involved.

And then people discuss it and do the deliberation about that.

And then they go back again and they say, well, these new questions came up and they go back to the experts and they ask the experts about those questions.

And what we've learned in those, and he's been doing this for decades, is that we can do it, we can do this.

Right?

And at the end of the day, what this means is that we're exposing this nuance and this.

And once, once that happens, the sort of extreme edges fall off a little bit.

And you can now debate the real questions here, which are these trade offs.

Like what trade?

Because nothing is black and white, right?

These are all going to, there's going to be trade offs.

So now we can actually, that's the area where the difficult conversations happen in what trade offs are we willing to live with and how can we come to a consensus about the trade offs we're willing to live with?

And if you get to that point now you're somewhere.

Now you can actually have the debate we need to have.

And that's kind of what's not happening in the climate world typically.

Right.

But one example where that did happen to show that this method can work.

I don't know if you know about this, but the Texas wind power deliberations are.

You know anything about that?

Not too much.

I've heard of it, but I'm not that familiar with it.

No.

Yeah.

And what you saw there is even in something charged like the climate debate, once the real information about it gets out there and people are able to deliberate beyond these Fox News and MSNBC talking points, which I guess is not msnbc now it's MSNBC now, I think.

And once you get beyond the talking points and actually can look at the true trade offs of these things and see that there's more to it, you can have value debates in the end.

And that was an example where that happened even in a climate space.

So it's possible to happen even in pretty charged areas where you get a solid debate and in the end of the day the people came up with a solution.

Did everybody think it was great?

Probably not, but they were able to do the hard work of deliberating about it and, and talking about the trade offs, which is like I say, it's just what's not happening in climate very, very often.

And actually I believe that Texas is.

One of the leaders in wind energy.

So that debate bore fruit.

Exactly.

Yeah.

So you mentioned storytelling and I, I want to reiterate that I think storytelling is very important.

We seem to be in a media atmosphere that promotes outrage.

So how can we counteract that with hope based messaging?

Well, I think it gets back to something we talked about before, which is this collective action, right?

Like if we all post, if we.

Well, a couple things you can do.

If you can start tweaking the algorithms a little bit by liking the stuff that you don't usually like.

Right?

So maybe you start liking the, maybe not the full on climate skeptic kind of stuff, but if there's a rational argument, maybe you can promote that within your tribe and say there's some good points made in this rational argument or whatever.

Right.

So we could do more of that.

We can start telling these algorithms we want something different and then also just highlighting more of these uplifting things when we do see them.

Right?

Because that's the stuff that's not necessarily getting out there because it's the negative stuff that's always, you know, there's a negative, we have a negative bias as humans.

Right.

You can see this like if you think of a job performance review or something, there's 10 Excels in these 10 areas and you get one mark like, oh, this needs improvement.

What's the one you're going to lose sleep over?

Right, Right.

So that's the same thing.

What's happening in these algorithms?

We promote and share that one negative thing when there might have been 10 other ones that were good and also even highlighting other work people are doing.

Right.

That's been successful or even just had any results at all.

So all of those things can help start training these algorithms that we don't want this negativity.

We don't want the outrage.

And also just remind us, because social media, one of the worst aspects of social media is it's giving us this misperception of the world.

We think everybody's a climate skeptic because that 8% or whatever the number is, is just.

Just dominating the landscape.

Right.

Whether when there's a whole bunch of other people that either don't know or it's not their top issue, that kind of thing is kind of that movable middle we talked about.

That's what's the majority out there.

But they're not in social media.

Right.

They're not getting the attention.

So social media gives us this really negative.

And that can bring us to this point of apathy and.

And all that kind of stuff.

Right, right, right.

So it feels like that we're against this algorithm and we have no agency over it, though obviously, we're feeding it all the time.

But I think what you've just described is we do have agency over the algorithms that feed us the information.

We can, we can shape it.

Right, you can shape your algorithm and your feed.

Yeah, yeah.

Which is an important point, I think.

I think people feel overwhelmed.

Well, let's wrap it up with, you know, people are feeling exhausted and overwhelmed, not just by climate news, but we can focus on climate news for this.

But, you know, it's news in general and the social division, you might have addressed this a little bit before, but let's wrap it up with some practical steps for people to reengage productively without falling into the outrage and the apathy.

Yeah.

I mean, one of the areas that can get frustrating in this space, and I'm sure you go there sometimes too, is that.

That, you know, you sort of.

Some of it almost sounds like platitudes, right?

Like, because some of it seems like, oh, that.

But like, it's kind of the classic meme kind of idea, you know, I have this problem, well, here's the fix.

And they're like, oh, no, not that.

Right, right.

And you see that a lot because some of it is even really, really dumb stuff like getting good sleep and eating well and that kind of thing.

Right.

So some of it is real simple.

Simple things like that make a much bigger difference than people think sometimes.

But.

And so some of that means please don't be scrolling right before you go to bed.

That kind of stuff.

Right.

Find a better go to bed habit that doesn't involve social media and doom scrolling.

Right.

So some of it's that.

And that brings us back to the thing we Talked about before about being intentional about your social media consumption and even regular traditional media too.

Being intentional about it.

Like, what hours of the day do I do it, how much time do I spend on it?

That kind of thing.

That's a real big factor in this because once we fall into that scrolling for scrolling, like, oh, I have five minutes, I'll just scroll.

Like, I don't have anything else to do.

That's like the worst now, right?

Because now it's just all algorithmic fed and the whole thing.

Right.

There's no intentionality to it, you know, And I think we talked about a lot of this stuff before, but you were talking about like, you know, in our world, we all do this.

We.

It's our, you know, the rage bait stuff is flowing at us all the time.

So just be intentional about not liking that stuff.

Right?

It's like, you know, spend less time clicking on.

Even though I really want to like it.

Because my first reaction is, I love it.

Right.

Just do give it less attention.

And that's really hard.

Like, all this stuff sounds easy, but that's really hard.

So those are a couple of biggies.

A lot of it's about recognizing your agency in this and just remembering you have more agency than you think.

Some of it's the connection thing we talked in the beginning, like, connect with others that are struggling with some of this as well.

I mean, don't just commiserate all the time, but at least know there's these other people out there working and struggling with some of these things.

And.

And once in a while you can even bounce things.

Try to build a network of people that are maybe a different view.

It's hard.

But if you have a network and some trusted people that have some different views, run some stuff by them.

Like, am I, am I falling off the cliff here?

Am I going too far with this?

Or is this a rational way of looking at it?

And a lot of times other people will see it like, dude, you're going, this is ridiculous.

You know, and you just can't see it, right?

So if you can have that network of people that can check you a little bit, that's also real powerful in this.

Yeah, those are all good points.

You know, the intentionality of it.

Like you say, it's so easy to see something that just.

You want to click on it.

And it's so easy to click on it.

It takes more effort to not click.

On it than to click on it.

Yeah, and this is part of this problem too, is act locally.

I think we Talked about this a little bit, but it's so much easier to think like five a five mile radius, this kind of thing than it is to.

Because we're often sitting on the couch.

I'm trying to solve the world's problems with what I click and like on, you know, and like, and share and stuff.

And you're not really doing anything with those clicks and shares.

No.

Right.

But you can act locally, like that's where you have more agency.

Maybe it starts with your neighbors just like having chats about some of this stuff.

Right.

You bring that up and it reminds me in many of the conversations I've had on this podcast, it comes down to that in different approaches, you know, different conversations I've had over climate change and things.

And one of the biggest solutions is being involved in your local community.

So this great conversation, I appreciate it.

Any closing thoughts?

How optimistic are you for the world finding a better way to disseminate information?

Well, I have some of my optimism comes from talking with younger people and you know, and there's a real desire for it.

And I think you're seeing some of these tendencies.

Like, are these new developments, like some gen zers are turning off their devices or they're maybe even getting what you might call a dumber device.

Right.

They're not using smartphones, things like that.

So some of these trends, I think maybe, you know, these younger generations get it better than we do.

Right.

Yeah, Maybe they'll pull us in a new place.

But you know something, I would love to.

This is maybe another episode someday for us to do, but.

Okay, I mean, I would love to, to like that thing I was saying in the beginning about how I have a lot of conservative friends that they want clean air, they want, they want fish in the rivers, they want clean water.

Like, how can we tap into that better?

And why.

I mean, like I say, I know why, because I have a whole bunch of episodes with other experts about the why.

But it seems like there's an opening there.

Like, we want this thing together.

This is a shared value that we both care about.

Yeah.

If you're into it, I'd love to talk a bit more about that and maybe the subsequent podcast episode, because I have a care of that too.

People that have been skeptic and they don't want to talk about climate change, but they're concerned about the environment.

They say that to me.

So there is an opening there, definitely, and we should explore that.

But for now, I appreciate your time.

It's been a great conversation and your work is very interesting and I look forward to listening to more of your podcast, which is Outrage Overload.

David Beckmeier, thank you very much.

Thank you, Tom.

I really enjoyed it.

I would love to spend some more time with you.

This is a topic that, like I say, I'm sort of fascinated.

Fascinated how we've gotten so far apart on it.

Yeah, me too.

And we're at a point in time where we need to come together on it.

So anything we can do to help foster this more intentional communication about climate change, I'm all for.

Great.

Again, great talking, speaking with you.

Thank you so much for having me on.

David reminds us the people, even those with whom it seems we have little in common, aren't caricatures and that most want the same things.

You and I want a living world where we can all thrive.

And he wonders, as I do, why we can't seem to find each other across the noise.

And maybe that's the real work.

Not winning the argument, not converting the skeptic, because that often doesn't work, but finding the person who loves the same patch of sky you do and starting there.

The algorithmic media landscape we live in is not designed for that kind of finding.

It is designed to sort us, provoke us, and keep us scrolling.

It profits from our outrage and our division.

It does not care about the movable metal.

It does not care about shared sky or clean water or the kind of slow, honest conversation that actually changes minds.

But we can care.

And one of the small, genuine acts of agency available to any of us is choosing where to put our attention, seeking out voices that bring to life the simple story sitting with a conversation long enough to let it do something that's not nothing.

In a media environment built to trigger your amygdala, choosing to listen differently is its own kind of resistance.

That's what I'm trying to do here with Earthbound, episode by episode.

You can find David Beckmeier and outrage overload@outrageoverload.net and I'll put the link in the show notes.

And speaking of finding each other, I'd love to know more about you, who's listening, what brought you here, and what you'd like to hear more of.

I've put together a short listener survey, and it would mean a great deal to me if you could take a few minutes to fill that out.

The link for that is also in the show notes.

I'm Tom Schuenemann.

This is Earthbound Stories from the Anthropocene.

Life on a Warming Planet.

If this episode moved, you made you think or helped you feel a little less alone in all of this.

Please take a moment to leave a rating and review wherever you listen.

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And if you haven't already, please hit subscribe so you'll never miss another episode.

Thank you, dear listener.

I'll see you back here in a couple of weeks.

And in the meantime, stay safe.