0 and 100%

Two people. Same room. Same question. One said great. One said horrible. They were both right.

I did stand-up comedy in college.

I want to be clear about something before we go further. I was not good at this.

I was a guy in Kansas City who loved George Carlin, Bernie Mac, and Martin Lawrence so much that I had apparently convinced myself that loving funny people was, functionally, the same as being one.

(It is not.)

I went to open mic nights maybe a half dozen times. Each time I’d walk off stage buzzing — the lights, the microphone, the general vibe of having said things into a room full of strangers who possibly, maybe, reacted to them. It was a rush.

Then I made the mistake of bringing two friends.

I did my set. When I came off stage — probably a little too pleased with myself — I asked them the question you should never ask anyone if you’re not prepared for any answer.

“Well? What did you think?”

They answered at the same time.

“Great.”

“Horrible.”

I pressed. “Did people laugh?”

Again, simultaneously: “Yes.” “I didn’t notice any.”

I drove home that night genuinely stuck. I had heard laughs. I had seen what looked like smiling faces through the stage lights. One of my closest friends heard nothing. The other thought it was great.

Same room. Same five minutes. Same material. Two completely different realities.

Who was right?

What this newsletter is — and isn’t — about

This isn’t a comedy newsletter. (Clearly. See above.)

This is a Both/And newsletter — which means we take things that look like contradictions and sit with them instead of solving them. Two things can be true at once. That’s not a cop-out. It’s usually just accurate.

And that moment in Kansas City is the same moment Elon Musk described in a post on X a few weeks ago that I can’t stop thinking about.

He wrote that he once had dinner with a top physicist and a top computer scientist and asked them both the same question: what’s the probability we’re living in a simulation?

They answered simultaneously.

The physicist: 0%.

The computer scientist: 100%.

Musk wrote: “It was like a double-slit experiment, but with humans.”

Now — the double-slit experiment is real physics and I promise not to get weird with it. The very short version: when tiny particles are fired at a wall with two slits and nobody is watching, they behave like waves. The moment you observe them, they snap into particles. Same particles. Radically different behavior. Depending entirely on how you look.

Niels Bohr called this complementarity — the idea that some things have two valid, mutually exclusive descriptions that you need both of to understand the whole. Wave or particle. Justice or mercy. You can’t hold them simultaneously, but you need both to get the full picture.

Researchers at Indiana University and Ohio State have since confirmed — using actual quantum probability math, published in peer-reviewed journals — that human judgment works the same way. The frame you bring to a question shapes what you find. Across 70 national surveys over a decade, the pattern held. Classical probability can’t explain it.

The measurement isn’t just recording reality — it’s participating in creating it.

My two friends in Kansas City weren’t disagreeing about facts.

They were running different experiments on the same five minutes.

And they were both right.

The Yin side: two people can look at the same thing and both be telling the truth

There’s a study I keep coming back to that I think about more than I probably should.

In 1985, pro-Israeli and pro-Arab students were brought into a lab at Stanford and shown the exact same news footage of the same conflict. Same clips. Same duration. Same everything. Afterward, both groups concluded the coverage was biased — against their side.

Same footage. Opposite conclusions. Both completely sincere.

I find that both devastating and clarifying at the same time. Because it means the problem isn’t information. More facts, more footage, more evidence — none of that touches it. The framework you bring in is the framework you leave with. Researchers call this “naive realism” — the quiet, unshakeable conviction that you see the world as it actually is, and the people who disagree with you must be missing something. The research on this is as airtight as social science gets.

And then I look at the news.

I’ve been following the Israel-Iran situation — and the US’s role in it — for a while now, and what strikes me isn’t the conflict itself. It’s how internally coherent both sides are. A RAND analyst named Karen Sudkamp wrote something recently that I haven’t been able to shake: “Both Israel and Iran believe they are fighting against existential threats.”

Both. At the same time. About the same conflict.

When you sit with that — really sit with it — it stops feeling like a political problem and starts feeling like a physics problem. Israel’s framework begins from a history that makes existential threat feel permanent and recent. Iran’s begins from a different history entirely — one where outside interference isn’t paranoia, it’s just memory. Neither side is fabricating. Both sides are measuring.

And the US, caught between alliance obligations and a nonproliferation agenda that predates the current administration by decades, is running its own experiment on the same reality.

The International Crisis Group said each of the three parties claims to have won. But all three victory narratives have sizeable holes.

Hmmm.

What do you do with that? I genuinely don’t know. I’m not sure anyone does. But I think naming it — really naming it, without immediately reaching for a verdict — is the first honest move.

The Yang side: but holding two truths at once is hard, and forcing resolution can make things worse

Here’s where it gets uncomfortable.

The instinct — for all of us, in all conflicts — is to resolve. Pick a side. Declare a winner. Move on. It feels productive. It feels like something.

But when a conflict is genuinely about identity rather than interests — when it’s about who you are, not what you want — forcing resolution doesn’t just fail. It can harden the walls between people rather than lower them. Harvard’s own negotiation researchers acknowledge this. And history has examples that are hard to look at: the Arusha Accords were designed to end Rwanda’s civil war through power-sharing. They collapsed into 100 days and 800,000 lives lost.

Here’s the thing though. And this is the part I didn’t expect when I went looking.

Even failed peace agreements reduce suffering. The Human Security Report looked at 11 collapsed agreements and found that in 10 of them, the annual death toll was lower after war resumed than before the agreement was reached. Average reduction: more than 80%.

Failed attempts at resolution still matter.

That’s not a reason for blind optimism. But it is a reason to stop treating “it didn’t fully work” as the same thing as “it made no difference.”

And it scales down. To your marriage. Your team at work. Your family group chat that nobody has opened since 2022. John Gottman has studied couples for over 40 years and found that partners in a negative emotional state stop noticing roughly half of the positive things their partner does. Same relationship. Two people. Two completely different experiential realities running in parallel, neither one aware the other exists.

Two people. Running different experiments. Both convinced theirs is the accurate one.

Context: who is this actually for?

Three groups of people are going to read this and feel it differently.

The person who is in an active disagreement right now — whether with a coworker, a family member, a friend, or the general direction of the world: this is for you most. The instinct to prove you’re right is understandable. But the research says your opponent isn’t running a bad experiment. They’re running a different one. Understanding that won’t necessarily resolve anything. But it changes how you carry it.

The person who thinks they’re above this — the “I’m pretty reasonable, I see both sides” person: Dan Kahan at Yale found that the most cognitively sophisticated people are the most polarized, not the least. Intelligence doesn’t dissolve this problem. It makes you better at defending your existing framework. Same girl, same. (Hi.)

The person who wants someone to just tell them who’s right: There isn’t one. And the research on what happens when you force that answer is sobering. But there are things that help — and they don’t require anyone to abandon their framework to work.

MAYA: So what do we actually do with this?

Marsha Linehan built Dialectical Behavior Therapy on one insight: two opposing truths can coexist. “You can be weak and you can be strong.” Backed by more than 15 randomized controlled trials, DBT’s core finding is that focusing only on change caused patients to feel unseen and drop out. The synthesis of acceptance and change is what works.

You cannot force someone to abandon their axiom. You can only expand the frame until there’s room for both.

Wendy Smith and Marianne Lewis — whose foundational research on organizational paradox won the Academy of Management Review’s highest honor — found the same thing playing out in business. Organizations that hold contradictory demands in tension, rather than resolving them in favor of one side, outperform those that pick sides. They literally wrote the book on this. It’s called Both/And Thinking. (I did not pay them to name it that.)

You don’t solve breathing by choosing between inhaling and exhaling.

James Fishkin at Stanford put 526 representative voters in a room for four days of moderated discussion — not debate, discussion. On 22 of 26 highly polarized policy questions, they moved toward each other. 95% said they learned a lot about people very different from themselves. The intervention wasn’t persuasion. It was structured exposure — being forced to be in the same room as the other measurement.

Peter Coleman at Columbia offers maybe the most counterintuitive prescription in this whole field: to solve an impossible conflict, make it more complicated, not simpler. When a disagreement collapses into a single us-versus-them frame it becomes self-reinforcing. Present the same information through multiple perspectives simultaneously? People open up.

The instinct to simplify is exactly wrong.

Okay but actually — what do you do with this starting today?

The research points to a few things that are small, specific, and don’t require the other person to do anything differently. Which is convenient, because they probably won’t.

• Before your next hard conversation, name the experiment. Ask yourself: what framework am I bringing into this? What would the other person say their framework is? You don’t have to agree with theirs. You just have to know it exists.
• Replace “why won’t they listen” with “what are they measuring.” This is a tiny language shift with a surprisingly big effect. It moves you from moral judgment (they’re being unreasonable) to curiosity (they’re getting a different result). Curiosity keeps the door open. Judgment closes it.
• Ask, don’t imagine. Nicholas Epley at the University of Chicago found that married couples who tried to imagine what their partner was thinking had a 35% error rate. Couples who simply asked had a 15% error rate. Perspective-getting beats perspective-taking every time. When in doubt — just ask what they actually think, and then actually listen to the answer.
• Try the one-point rule. Before your next disagreement goes sideways, find one legitimate thing about the other side’s position. Just one. Not as a debate tactic — as a genuine exercise. Lee Ross found this single move, done sincerely, consistently unlocked more productive conversations than any amount of additional evidence or argument.
• Stop trying to resolve it in one conversation.The research on depolarization is clear: effects fade without reinforcement. The goal isn’t one breakthrough moment. It’s a series of smaller ones. James Fishkin’s voters moved toward each other after four days, not four minutes. Give it time.

None of this is easy. None of it is fast. But all of it is doable — today, without anyone’s permission, in the next conversation you have.

Final result: it’s pretty gray. And that’s okay.

I went back to the open mic at 36 years old.

New material. My style. My jokes. No Carlin impressions. I walked off stage and thought: I think they laughed. Pretty sure. Someone did. Maybe.

I still don’t know.

That used to bother me. Now I think it might be the most honest possible outcome.

The question was never really “were you funny?” The question was: whose experiment counts?

My two friends weren’t wrong. They were both right — in the same way the physicist and the computer scientist were both right. Running different experiments on the same five minutes. Both getting genuine results. Neither one the whole picture alone.

The question isn’t which one was telling the truth.

The question is whether you can hold both answers at the same time — without collapsing them into one.

That’s harder than it sounds. It might also be the whole thing.

My story of this is gray. I’m still not sure if I’m funny or not. (My kids have opinions. They don’t agree either.)