Michael Morris (cultural psychologist on tribalism)
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Or you can listen for free wherever you get your podcasts. Welcome, welcome, welcome to Armchair Expert, Experts on Expert. I'm Dan Shepard and I'm joined by Monica Monzu. Hi. We have another Morris. We had a Morris recently. That's right. We're on a tear of Morrises. Who else should we have that's a Morris? Great question. Zach Morris? Zach Morris. That'd be great.

Morris Day from the time Prince's rival in Purple Rain. Oh, okay. Morris the cat. I'm failing big time. There's another Morris. William Morris. William Morris, the, I think probably deceased agent. William Morris. Agency. Agency.

or I'm a member. Well, there's a lot more we can have. Yeah, okay, so point is, we'll try to keep them coming. But this Morris, Michael Morris, is a cultural psychologist and professor at Columbia University, and he has a great book out called Tribal, How the Cultural Instincts That Divide Us

can help bring us together. I really like this one because we hear so much about tribalism. I'm always talking about it and I exclusively talk about it in a negative light. And he's here to talk about kind of the very positive side of tribalism. And the way we can use those positive pieces to bring us together. Counteract the negative pieces. Yeah. So this is a great one. Please enjoy Michael Morris.

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You would live in New York. You teach at Columbia. I live in New York, yeah. And so you're in LA right now. Is that a trip you look forward to? Oh, of course. I lived in California for 10 years. Probably like the best years of my life. You have a California vibe. Yeah. In a good way. Yeah, yeah. You have a cool vibe. Chill, relaxed. Were these the Stanford years? Yeah. And I always admired California. My family is sort of from New York. I always saw New York as sort of like mired in the past. I was like, I'm going to go to New York.

And I saw Californians as these enlightened beings. Liberated from tradition. Yeah. Eat better food. You know, the genders aren't as bifurcated. The teenagers don't seem to have the same awkward years. East Coast awkward years are really awkward. Yeah. Like New Jersey awkward is really awkward. I know you're from Michigan, right? Yeah. And Atlanta. Atlanta. Okay, cool. And you're from New York. What part of New York? I was born in the city and my parents were from the city, but then they started having too many kids.

And so they moved upstate, moved around erratically, and then landed in a town called Liberty, which is in the Catskill Mountains. Ooh, beautiful. If you've ever seen Dirty Dancing, it's where Dirty Dancing was set, not where it was filmed. Lake Lure, North Carolina. That's where it was filmed. Yeah. And you did your PhD at U of M? I did. And did you like living in Michigan? You can be honest. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah.

I think my answer is probably not atypical, right? I grew up in this little, I can call it a shit town, right? A little shit town. Are we on or are we not? Inerrantly. Oh, yeah. We're always on. We're ABR. Okay, okay, okay. Yeah, when does this start? We don't know.

We don't know when it ends for sure. Very loosey goosey. One of the first podcasts I ever listened to was Shit Town. Have you ever heard that? Oh, I love that. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And that was the word that everyone in my town used, not when they were trying to be derisive, but just when they were trying to be factual.

So I grew up there. I didn't get into any colleges. I was kind of a jerk in high school, kind of a deviant. What was your perversion? Was it music? Was it the occult? I was one of the kids who took some leadership roles, but then I was always being subversive. So like at one point they asked me to do the morning announcements. And, you know, in a public school, you're all sitting in your homerooms and you're listening to the announcements. And so it would always be like, will the following students please report to the vice principal's office? Yeah.

James Miller, Jimi Hendrix, I would be slipping in or fake names. You're a rascal. Yeah, a bit of that. And I always thought people liked me, but I realized afterwards that I made the teacher's jobs really difficult. Once I became a teacher and I realized having a person sitting on the side of the room just

making jokes constantly. It's not making it easier for me. I'm guilty of it too. Yeah. I didn't get in any colleges that I applied to. I went to a couple of colleges in New York state and went on a program to London. And then I got into Brown mostly through distance running because I had become a distance runner in the colleges that I went to. Did you major in psychology there as undergrad? I didn't. I did a literature degree at Brown. There aren't many requirements. You know, it's sort of a cafeteria style college.

And what a lot of people at Brown do is they take courses each semester that they like, and then they're informed that they have completed the requirements for the history degree, which is like, oh, take four history classes. You know, it's like very minimal. That works well with how the human brain works, because we like to do a bunch of random things and then in retrospect, put them in an order that seems to make sense. So that's like almost the approach. Do whatever the hell you want. And then in reflection, we'll go, well, that was clearly an ancient Rome degree. Right.

Those are the two sides of our brain. The intuitive brain just makes choices and we feel in our gut it's the right choice and we're committed to it. And then the rational brain is a sort of after the fact sense maker that carves a narrative or contrives a narrative, connects to the dots. We can make sense of anything.

retroactively. Yes, we can. Yeah, I'm great at it. I'm like every step I took seems like it led precisely to where I'm at. It's a danger that we are so facile at rationalizing things. When I teach that material, one of the main things I try to teach people because they're smart kids, I teach them smart people have a real fallibility of believing their own bullshit because their brains are so able to justify anything. The intellectual humility

Of knowing that 90% of your choices are being made by your intuition that you have no access to and no control over gets it wrong eight out of 10 times. That's sort of what we want to teach them. Yeah. There's also a concept in statistics, just regression of the mean. If somebody does something extraordinary, chances are their next performance will be less extraordinary. And so really smart parents tend to have kids who are smarter than average, but not as smart as them. Ah.

You know, so some of that might be just that science is largely chance. I mean, some intelligence is the price of admission, but then do you happen to work on a problem that gives way to your particular attack on the problem? And that's largely chance. So you leave there with a literature degree and then you go directly to U of M? I also did a cognitive science degree. At the time, at least, it was a mix of

Some computer science, especially artificial intelligence style computer science. Some linguistics, especially the more Noam Chomsky formal linguistics. And then some philosophy of mind and some cognitive psychology. So there was a bit of psychology in there. Do you think you knew what question you were trying to answer as a human? I was really intrigued by some...

books at that time. I don't know if you've ever seen Doug Hofstetter's books like Goodell, Escher, Bach. He is kind of one of these physicists who integrates physics with music and other things. It was a time when the cognitive revolution in psychology was coming together with early artificial intelligence. Artificial intelligence was really promising then and then kind of had a hiatus for about 30 years. And now, kabam, it's back. It's

so exciting now. It's changing every six months. It's hard to keep up with. Okay, so but when we get to U of M, we now must focus more specifically on a chosen field, I'm presuming. I wanted to go to the U of M. We were talking about Michigan at first. When I was a college student, the poster on my wall was always Bob Dylan. And I was kind of seduced by a combination of Bob Dylan and Garrison Kaler to think that the Midwest was this mystical...

honest fountain of good. Minnesota might still be, but not the rest of it.

Where Garrison Keillor was, maybe. Yeah. I had grown kind of sick of New England and the Ivy League experience, at least that I had, of being sort of a fish out of water. So I thought, oh, let me go to a big first-rate but state land-grant college in the Midwest and see the real American experience, basically. Yeah, no airs. At Brown, there were a lot of kids who went by the name Fleetwood or Che. Ha!

But then you would say, what's Che's real name? And it's like, oh, it's Franklin Roosevelt Cabot Lodge III. So Michigan was fun when I first got there. I remember I would say, where are you from? And they'd say, I'm from the thumb. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Oh, the mitten. They hold up the mitten. And I was just enchanted by the place for probably a year. After having gone to four or five different colleges in four years, my feet were always moving. And now I realize I was supposed to stay there for four more years in a relatively small... Ann Arbor's tiny. Yeah. Yeah.

It's got a lot of richness and some of the most interesting people I've ever met. At the hotel where I'm staying, the lobby is decorated with the paintings of a girl that I used to babysit for. No way. Really? Yeah. Her name is Koak. She's an internationally known artist, but I've never walked into a boutique hotel and seen her paintings in the lobby. Are you staying at Cara? Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Her artist name is COAC. And I think it stands for Kristen Olsen Artist Company because her name is Kristen Olsen. I go there all the time and I have noticed that the art there is incredible. Oh. That's so funny. Independently, you thought. Yeah. In fact, I think I asked the manager, like, can I buy some of this? Oh, he said you can't afford it. Yeah, they said, we'll get back to you. And then they never did. Yeah.

She's great because her stuff sells at the best galleries in Paris, but she always puts out limited edition print things so that everyone can participate in her art. Us losers. One way or the other. That's so cool. Yeah. So did you leave U of M?

with a PhD in psychology? Yeah, it was in social psychology. Right. Social psychology is kind of a catch-all for the areas of psychology that aren't about rats and pigeons or blinking. The really micro processes tend to be called cognitive psychology. And then even a lot of cognition falls under social psychology because it's the study of the messier side of psychology.

How it's interfacing with society. It's like the inter instead of inner look at psychology. Exactly. It's the interpersonal. That was sort of the classic definition. I often call myself when I get on a plane or something, I say I'm a behavioral scientist. That shuts them up. Yeah. Yeah.

I used to say I'm a psychologist, but not the type that helps people. Oh, there you go. That kind of sets a bad tone. So where you've landed, though, and what you're doing currently at Columbia, if I am right about this, is you're doing an interdisciplinary approach, right? You're now doing cultural psychology.

which is a fusion of anthropology and psychology, which again, seems very obvious. Like, duh, of course. Yeah, in hindsight, it's sometimes hard to explain to people why the contributions that I made early in my career were contributions because they seem completely obvious. And they're just kind of in the air now. Young graduate students are like,

You discovered that? There was a time when people didn't know that? Yeah. What did people assume then? Yeah. And will you brag for a second and tell me some of the things you were working on that at the time were novel and proprietary that are now kind of standard? So what happened to me was that the only colleges that were interested in me were really quirky places. Like Reed College interviewed me. But then once they met me, I was too quirky for them. And then...

Weirdly, I got a request from the Northwestern Business School. Would you apply for our job? Because we heard about your paper with somebody. And so I applied for that job. They really liked me. It went well.

And then the next week, Stanford and University of Chicago emailed me, would you apply for our job? I didn't think any of these places would hire me because I didn't know anything about business. I was kind of a hippie, even relative to the other psychologists. But then I got job offers from all these business schools. So I was like, I guess the world is telling me that

The sort of innovative twist on psychology that I'm doing might find a larger audience in the business school world. I saw you had Mike Norton on your show and he's a similar story to me. Yeah. He didn't understand why he ended up at Harvard. At Harvard. A quirky guy. His explanation was that he knew how to run human experiments and all these businesses and corporations are dying to figure out what makes their employees work better. Yep.

But along the way, what were some of the things, I guess I'm looking for a couple steps before we land on tribalism. One of the areas that I was surrounded by when I was studying psychology was the study of biases in social judgment. So social judgment is this

everyday sense-making. We walk down the street, we see a person yelling at a car, and then we have to make sense of it. Did the driver do something wrong? Is the person schizophrenic? Are they just having a bad day and it's spillover from that? One of the biggest principles in social psychology, it was called the fundamental attribution error, was this idea that we get personal about things that are

all about the situation. So we meet someone in a library. We jump to the conclusion they're introverted because they're speaking softly. We don't take into account it's a library. My favorite example of this is Dave Chappelle, the comedian. We love him. He's like, on Sesame Street, everyone is so quick to say Oscar is a grouch. He's the poorest Muppet on Sesame Street. He lives in a garden.

can't take into account his situation. But that's how we like to think, grouch. So that was certainly a true thing about Western societies where most of the research was done. But I was living in a household of all people freshly arrived from China. And it was a time of a lot of ferment because Tiananmen Square had happened. And so there was a lot of

comparing notes where I would say, to me, it looks like this happened. And they'd be like, no, this happened. Even Tenement Square, I saw it as some courageous student leaders inspiring the rest of the country to come. They were like, no, it happened by accident. You know, there were a few people doing a hunger strike that happened to correspond with the end of the school year. And then so many more people arrived. And I'm friends with some of the student leaders who live in New York. They concur with that, that they are accidental heroes. They didn't know what was going on either. But in any case,

we kept finding that whether we were talking about what happened at the party we went to together or what happened in the news, that their worldview, their social interpretation was different from mine. Mine was more the fundamental attribution error, which is if somebody wins a prize, oh, they're a genius. Or if somebody screws up, oh, they're irresponsible. And they were always like, well, because their parents supported them, they won the prize or

Because the manager wasn't a good mentor, that's why the employee screwed up. They were always explaining things with regard to the collective. You know, at first I thought they were just more polite, but then I realized that they were doing it even when it wasn't polite. And so I was working with a guy from China named Kai Ping Peng, who currently has the most popular podcast in China. Oh, he does? He's gone on to do that. He probably dwarfs Rogan because he's got a billion people to choose from. He probably has the most popular podcast.

podcast in the world. Can I ask a quick question? Yeah.

Was he as fascinated with you as you were with him? Because I think therein lies the absolute fun of being around different things and different people. He and I are a lot alike. We're both creative people who race through different associations. But when I would tell him about my people, he thought it was bizarre. And when he would tell me about his people, I thought it was bizarre. And he and I were kind of misfits in our own societies, like most professors are.

And so we worked together and then we had to come up with ways to test this idea that the go-to social bias in Western culture is different than the go-to social bias in Chinese culture. It's not a human bias. It's a cultural bias. And before, that's how it was described. It was called the psychology of human inference, human social biases. And I thought, OK, this bias has a lot to do with individualism.

This pressure to think of each individual as an island, character's destiny. Whatever thing they accomplish is theirs entirely. Whatever failure is theirs entirely. Like in Japan, when somebody invents something that makes billions of dollars for their company, they get like a $300 bonus. Right, nice watch. And here, the intellectual property regime, it's all about the individual inventor. And we kind of ignore that.

that they were standing on the shoulders of giants. We just kind of reduced the messiness of reality to a simple narrative about great men and great women. Yeah. Do you think that's a Western obsession with celebrity? It's definitely related, but I think it shows up even like in classical Chinese painting, more often it's a view from a distance of a group of people. With us, it's like main character. We were trying to figure out how we could, in a culture fair way, test that the biases...

were different. And so one of the things we did that made a big splash was we made cartoons with like a really early animation program for Macs. And some of the cartoons were physical objects, like a soccer ball rolling across a field, hitting another soccer ball. And then some of the cartoons were animals and we eventually settled on fish. So we would have an individual fish like over here on the left and then a group of fish

And they would swim. So the individual is swimming in front of the group. And then we would ask, why did the blue fish over here move? And that was just the open-ended question. And Americans would tend to say things like, he decided he wanted to explore. He probably always. Yeah. Or even if it was it, it's the leader. And they're all following. The Chinese people saw either the group is expelling a member or...

Or the group is chasing a member. It's like, which is the cause and which is the effect? And Americans kind of defaulted to the individual is the cause and China as the effect because it was something that when Americans see it, they can't really see it any other way. Right. And then Chinese people will be like, no, it's plainly influence from the group. In some objective way, they're weirdly objectively correct.

Like the notion that you would focus on the singular and not the group is just numerically kind of funny. Yeah. Because I would too. I'd be like, what's this motherfucker up to? He's going to show them where some cod is or something, right? I think that helped. At different times in the past, work on culture was considered to be not politically correct in leftist Marxist sociology circles because the idea was everything is caused by social class and culture is an illusion, but...

Because we were pointing out a cultural difference where the East Asians looked smarter than the Westerners, it was more palatable. Because a lot of the previous stuff would be like Westerners are linear. Cognitive anthropologists would be like this peasant group in the mountains of Uzbekistan. They don't have logic. They have a web based mentality or holistic mentality. And that could easily read wrong.

as dismissive. The leftist progressive North Star is that we're all the same, maybe. Yep. And then a history of any time we delineated differences, it was generally with the goal of subjugating one of those groups we figured was inferior to us. So it's like some pushback to the history. But yeah, it's insane to me that we're not allowed to point out these incredible differences. They're so fascinating.

I've always been interested as a former distance runner of like the preponderance of world class marathoners that come from particular groups in particular regions of Kenya who live at high altitude, but like not from Tibet. And then I learned that these groups all have different local biological adaptations to living with lower oxygen, but they have different ones. And then there's a cultural component on top of that.

Right. Of course, they grew up running 10 miles to go to school and 10 miles back, which is the optimal way to train in childhood rather than racing all the time, which can give you injuries. And by the way, it's worthwhile because I think we do have aspirational goals as a group, as a culture, as everything. And it's worthwhile to see how other people do things and what the outcome of it is. It's like there's a very pragmatic outcome.

outcome of figuring out what we're all doing differently and what are the results of those different approaches. It's just negative if America or the West is centered. It just has to be America does this, China, you know, it's not like, so they're different. It's like, we're all different. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. I think things get a little, people push back.

Exactly. You studied anthropology. So the field of anthropology has had an extended crisis over that. The classic early anthropologists, mostly from Europe, were funded by their government as part of the colonialist project. Please go document these people. And if you don't mind, please emphasize the need for Western missionaries, armies, and

And hospitals. Yeah. And I don't think anthropologists, they certainly were not deliberately trying to exploit the people they studied, but they just weren't politically aware in the old days. And they slipped into language contrasting European civilization with non-Western tribes. And using the word primitive a lot. Yes. This is problematic. There were societies...

in Central America and South America that were equal to most European societies at the time in terms of scale, in terms of their mathematics, in terms of their astronomy. And there were in Africa as well, but the Western anthropologists didn't always see that. If you want to go down that road, Guns, Germs, and Steals is a great ride through that history. It's an amazing book. One of the books that was sort of a model for me in trying to write a book that is a serious intellectual book, but also readable. You've accomplished that by the

Your book is really, really fun. It's very Gladwell-esque. Oh, well, thank you. Malcolm is a friend of mine, and I've always admired The Tipping Point as a wonderful book that just gives ideas the power of action. You know, it's like reading a detective novel. Well, you have a parallel story in your book, weirdly, the Korean soccer team, which we'll talk about, and Korean Air, his chapter on Korean Air. Yeah.

And crazily enough, virtually the exact same situation and solution. Kind of fascinating. Yeah. So you did that. You did these, the fish test. That landed as basically there are different biases that come from different cognitive frames being in the foreground as a function of your culture. And the idea of culture as a constellation of biases.

cognitive frameworks that guide people's sensemaking and thinking. And so then people just sort of accepted that there's the Eastern worldview that carries with it certain biases and the Western worldview that carries with it certain biases. And that's how I got hired by Stanford and how I got early notoriety in the field. And then I wanted to understand better because I hadn't spent significant time

in China. And so I took a couple of years and spent most of the year at universities in Hong Kong, where I taught and I conducted research with local scholars who are also interested in cultural comparison. How effective was that?

by being under English rules. It almost feels like it potentially could be a hybrid. It is, but when you're doing these natural experiments, when you're doing these comparisons, you sometimes want that. At the time, I was studying differences in conflict resolution and dispute resolution preferences. Like, why do Americans always want to go to court and why do people...

in East Asian cultures tend to use a mediator or just negotiate it. Again, their approach seems a little wiser, you know, like a little more practical than ours. So I wanted a place that was roughly equal to

to say New York or San Francisco in wealth, in sort of population density and having a legal system, which was the sort of Western adjudicatory legal system. So that if I still observed differences in people's preferences, that it wasn't coming from the social structure being different. Like if it was in rural China, sure, they use a mediator because there's no other option. Yeah, you're getting to see people decide.

But your concern is still a very legitimate one because you might say, okay, they're not using the legal system because it's this funny English tradition where people would wear the wigs. That would turn me out of a courtroom. It's so weird. I mean, it's different. No, you're allowed to make fun of white people.

Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. It's weird. It's fucking ridiculous. It's preposterous. A bunch of people in costume. What is the point of that? Is it so that everyone kind of looks the same? What is that? Isn't there a lice origin to it? I don't know where it comes from. Maybe in the time of the Revolutionary War, I think Thomas Jefferson and all those people wore wigs like it was a fashion thing. But I think it's

preserved in the courtroom because they want to get the procedure exactly the same every time so that even if the outcome doesn't turn out right for someone, people will say, well, at least the procedure was followed. And so that's why it's always a wooden mallet. It's always a black robe. It's always, in England, a white. It's sort of preserved in amber because of this need for constant procedure. Huh.

Yes, yes. I do think there's a lice background to it, though. We'll do a fact check. Rob earmarked that. I do think there was some kind of health reason why they were all wearing wigs in the chambers. But regardless, I don't think the lice could jump through the wig or some shit. I don't know. We'll find out. And then what did you find there? That was around the time when the opposing worldviews theory was finally accepted and I could

retire on that. That was fine. But then my day-to-day life in Hong Kong completely overturned that for me because I would walk into campus every day and I would see the students from the universities that I taught at there. And they would be walking in little groups on the sidewalk, chatting softly in Cantonese, greeting other people formally, making way if an

very well-mannered. And then they would cross the gate onto the campus. The campus is a Western space in Hong Kong. Classes are in English on most of the campuses because it's a multicultural society. A lot of the workplaces and the schools are in English, but people live in purely Chinese neighborhoods with purely Chinese families. So I

People span these two worlds every day. And what I would observe was that when they would cross the campus gate, suddenly the group conversation would switch into English without missing a beat, mid-sentence switch into English. Wow.

And then people would be laughing louder. They would be standing a little bit different, you know, high-fiving friends. Tall popping. And at the time, I was struggling to learn the most basic rudiments of Chinese and Chinese social customs. Never even learned my own culture, you know, learning a second culture. You rejected yours and then tried to pick up this one.

So I was constantly offending people and, you know, sort of stepping in it. And they were just without any seeming effort or even awareness, switching from fluent Chinese behavior to fluent Western behavior. And so that made me think that we don't have these stable worldviews, but these cognitive frames are situationally triggered.

And so I started doing research on what we call code switching now in popular culture. And in research, we often called it frame switching. And we would run all these experiments where we would have the same experiment, like an experiment with the fish Rorschach test or an experiment where you have to say how you would resolve a conflict. And we would either run the session in Cantonese or in English with Hong Kong students, and they would

make different choices when they were operating in Cantonese because it would just bring all their Chinese frames to the foreground compared to when they were answering in English. And even we would put like a poster in the back of the wall of Mickey Mouse or of a Chinese dragon. So even these iconic images were triggers or the architecture or

a Western vase or a Chinese vase. So things that are touchstones of the culture bring it to the surface. You yourself as the participant don't feel those switches per se. You don't feel yourself code switching. I don't think we're very aware of it. I think we think in our narrative self, we're the same person moving through all these situations, but we're not.

I think the first times you do it, which, you know, for someone who's African-American and having to know how to behave on the street and know how to behave in school, they're learning this stuff by the time they're six years old. Then it's automatic. Like any habit, it saves attention for other things. I think it became a practice.

pop cultural thing when Obama was president and Key and Peele just dined out on it for years. All these funny things about Obama, but also things just with each other where they kind of trigger each other. Or his angry interpreter. Yeah. Yeah. So funny. But also that's really funny. It circles back to what you said at the very beginning of this episode. You were like, I'm triggered by people who are triggered with words. Oh, uh-huh. And-

This example is like language is so important. It informs the way we literally see the world and make decisions. So it is important. Yeah, you're transferring thoughts. That's the magic of language, right? It's like this impossible thing that I'm going to...

Take what's in my brain and give it to you to experience through this medium of language. For me, it's like it's okay to be sensitive because there's a ton of meaning behind language, like more than we know for sure. Yeah. My issue with swearing is a class warfare hierarchical thing, but yes, I accept it fully. Stay tuned for more Armchair Expert if you dare.

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Language is really tricky because it's both something that gets triggered, like in code switching of a politician in front of a different audience, but then it's also triggering. If I get a phone call at work from a high school friend, I start behaving in a way that my colleagues don't recognize because I'm back to that small town high school experience. In the past decade or so, most of my work has been about cultural complexity and how people negotiate it and

the variety of situational things that are triggers for different layers of culture and then also how culture changes how people learn new cultures throughout their lifespan and how collectively a culture will shift i'm sort of fascinated by just the inflection points like we're all old enough to remember when

they was not a pronoun for one person, right? It's really only been the last five years or so that very effectively the LGBT community and its allies have, not by coercion, but just insisting that we would prefer that everyone do this, it would be considerate. And now if you don't do it, you're considered to be obstinate.

Right, exactly. And so I was noticing that this town is still called Los Feliz by most people. Yeah. But I suspect that in the next decade, it will become Los Feliz. And not because it's becoming more Hispanic, because it's becoming more hipster. I mean, it must have

started out as Los Feliz. I don't know how it changed. Yeah. Yeah. It's certainly not spelled Los Feliz. Exactly. That's obvious. I was asking my friend last night, she said something like people switch into Los Feliz in December because Feliz Navidad is like, it's on the front of their mind. So it's kind of on the bubble now. The convention could switch. I'll move when they start calling it Los Feliz. I'll be like, okay, I aged out. I got to move now. You can,

just call it that? I know. It's unclear whether it's pretentious or authentic. That's the fine line. I'm always quick to assume it's pretense. That's my own baggage. Except you also do call it orangutan and Neanderthal. Well, because that's what it's, yeah. So, yeah. I say both of those wrong. Me too, because I feel like it's pretentious to call it

the proper way, but really we should probably just be calling everything the proper thing. We should make an effort. Yeah. Yeah, I agree. Okay, so now we land at your book. Sorry, that was a long walk, but I enjoyed the hell out of it. I've often expected questions about my research past, but I've never gotten them before. So it was fun to finally tell someone about it. Okay, so the book is called Tribal, but-

Tribalism in general has become really popular. I think as a result, we'd agree in the polarization of the country over the last 10 years. And I think a lot of social scientists have tried to step in to help us understand what's really going on. And I think there's been some interesting political debates where they're really figuring out, they're arguing about identities.

They're not these issues that seem to be the issues they're arguing about. So I think it's gotten popular, but I think in its popularization, your book at least would warn is it's kind of a limited explanation of tribalism and that there's more to it. It's not just this negative thing. And I think I use it quite often that way. In-group, out-group, us-them, that these are problematic issues.

But your book has got kind of an optimistic point of view. And it's saying, sure, all that stuff's true, but it's also the catalyst in the fuel behind everything great we do too. Yes. And it is a mutable, malleable force. I started writing this book because I had done this research and I've taught at Stanford Business School, at Columbia Business School and various business schools around the world for shorter visits. And so I've kind of developed a toolkit of how

how my knowledge of how culture changes and how culture can be triggered is useful for leaders or managers or teachers, parents, anyone who's trying to motivate and orchestrate other people, sort of leading them through their culture. So I've been teaching that for decades. And I started writing a book, okay, I'm just going to write about that. And then while I was writing over the last five years, was meant to be one year, but...

It took five years. Tribalism became this meme. It started with the pundits, like Tom Friedman wrote a very influential article saying, we've caught a virus of tribalism from our Middle East adventures. And now we regard the opposite party as a mortal enemy who must be defeated instead of as a fellow citizen. It's like we've descended into tribalism. Yeah, yeah. Tom kind of made it sound like encephalitis. We caught it from the Middle East. Yeah.

But then Andrew Sullivan wrote this piece where he said, a deeply buried evolved drive has resurfaced in our moment to create blind allegiance and hate and distrust for outsiders and to blur our view of reality. And

That was in the wake of Trump being elected. And I think a lot of people felt that way, like what bomb went off to cause this world that we're in? Then more people picked it up. Sometimes now it has been called toxic tribalism. Your book introduced me to that term. I hadn't heard that yet, but of course that's so natural. Because people say it's killed a lot of people because Republicans didn't want to take Biden's vaccine and political violence killed people. So this...

trope of toxic tribalism, I think is quite dangerous because it's despairing. At worst, it's fatalistic doomsaying. I've even seen in several of these articles, like the genie has gotten out of the bottle and there's no way to put it back in again. And

I'm like, okay, is this metaphor really helpful for thinking about policies that might ameliorate the situation? It makes for interesting journalism. It makes for good speeches. Politicians have picked it up, but I think it's a little bit fatalistic. It doesn't show the way to manage or to lead people out of problematic ways of thinking. I, as someone who has been studying this thing for decades and reading, I read a lot of the evolutionary anthropologists.

There's a guy at UCLA, Robert Boyd. I don't know if you had any contact with him, but if they had Nobel Prizes in anthropology, he would get it. He's probably done the most important work in the past 30 decades to build these models of cultural evolution. And they're really mathematical models and they're by analogy to biological evolution. And so I've tried to incorporate everything that's been learned in that field with everything that's been learned from the experimental psychology that I do. And I think that...

We have a real toolkit that we can use to manage in the short term which cultural identities are affecting a group of people that we're a part of or affecting ourselves. And then to manage over the longer term to guide the evolution. Evolution will happen organically, but we can also guide it

by giving experiences to a group that will affect them and will update their preconceptions about things. So yeah, the book started as really just sharing what I teach. It has taken on a different agenda, which is trying to counter this meme or this trope that I think has led to a sort of cynical, despairing attitude towards the crises in the world.

Or maybe, yeah, in worst case, it would be apathy and acceptance. Yeah. This kind of resolution of like, we can't do anything. We're wired this way. We're wired to hate. It's like, that's not the main story of the human race. I mean, there was a species like that. It's called Neanderthals. They went extinct.

because there was this other species that was mostly about community, and that's our species. It's kind of not a fair picture. The tribal instincts evolved for solidarity and collaboration. They didn't evolve for hostility. The hostility is just a byproduct of a chain of things that happens sometimes. Context dependent. Yeah, occasionally the in-group bumps up against the out-group in a manner where that altercation is inevitable.

But more often what you're seeing is the group just kind of expand and invite more and more people into the in-group. Groups expand and that's the arc of...

human civilization from kingdoms to nations to empires to the UN to the internet. It's larger and larger, more and more inclusive networks. Even in this dismal current state of affairs, there is a silver lining in that minimally 150 million people agree on one thing and then 150 million people agree on another thing. Those are pretty big numbers. That's a pretty fucking big in-group. Yeah. Even though it sucks that that's the case. Well, and actually...

most people all agree on the same thing. There's just a few people who don't agree. Right. We misperceive the other faction as though everyone in the faction holds the most extreme beliefs in the faction. Your average liberal Republican and your average moderate Democrat don't differ. Yeah. And that's most people. You have a

Fun personal anecdotal situation that I would imagine also drives you to write this book, which is you were involved in the Hillary campaign in some capacity. And you were at the Jarvis Center when that world ended for all Democrats. It's on the far west side of New York. It's a building with a very distinctive glass ceiling. So the Hillary campaign chose it as their site to celebrate this historic victory. And here's something fitting of the accomplishment that was inevitable.

There were many other celebrations in New York and elsewhere that all ended in this sort of fiasco-like way. But everyone there was so convinced that victory was inevitable. We gathered in our living room for a celebratory viewing of what we already knew was coming. Yeah. And it was just one of those moments where, what?

Did somebody take over CNN and broadcast? Did CNN get hacked? It was so hard to reconcile. Really, we're not that polarized now. But you end up in an uber. I think this is really fascinating. So I was there and I was with some people that I had been working with. I just felt my mood shifting towards rage. And so I know enough about myself better to be out of a crowded room when I might start arguing with somebody. Yeah.

So I sort of wound my way out through layers and layers and layers of gathered crowds, all of whom were dazed and stupefied by things. And then I couldn't find a cab and there's not a subway around there. And so I'm walking for blocks. And then finally I get an Uber pool that's available. And I'm like, sure. Okay. I'll take anything. And I...

hop in. This 30-ish woman, pearls, nice silk dress, flashes me a big smile. And I'm like, oh, what a nice person. You know, I didn't consciously register, but it was the first smile I had seen in hours. And then she trilled, are you coming from the event? And I was like, at the Javits Center? And she said, no, at the Midtown Hilton. Then I remembered that

Trump, who also lives in New York, was also having an event not too many blocks away. Uber should have been aware to separate. So then I'm sharing a ride with her, even though we're not sharing realities. Because at first I was like, oh, one of them. And then I was so curious. I was like, were people at your event surprised by the outcome? Yeah.

Yeah. And she's like, not at all, because everyone hates her and he's been surging in the Midwest. And she had knowledge that I had been completely unaware of about Michigan, for example, and about some other places. You know, I had been working in the campaign as part of this group of social scientists who kind of advise campaigns. It just started my process of realizing that.

I'm not seeing reality in its complexity. I've been pulled into a conformist process of getting my news from websites of people who agree with me and then checking my understanding with people who completely agree with me and then becoming more and more confident in my worldview. That they weren't shocked is really telling. It's a cool observation. I think the reason for it is, and there's a lot of research evidence showing this, that both the right and the left

think that their views are just reflections of reality. Yes. Whereas the other side is in the grip of some distorted ideology. Fox News or CNN, pick your side. And so because of that, we each think the center

agrees with us. Because of that, even when the polls are close, we're like, well, but surely the independents will come our way. And both sides believe that. And that's why there's a lot of election night surprises increasingly, you know, not just in this country, but in other countries where groups really

are shocked and then the surprise turns into election denial. And that's the danger of it. And you're fair enough to say we did it too. The left did it in Georgia. The right did it nationally. Yeah. You can get a little sympathetic to it because it's their reality. I was just watching last night, 60 Minutes did a thing on Sunday about the January 6th people that are in prison, some of the ones that were prosecuted not in there, have this gentleman talking who participated. And he said, well,

You have to understand, we weren't overthrowing the government. We were saving it. The election had been stolen. It wasn't a democratic election. And you're like, wow, I don't have that opinion, but I get it. You're not overthrowing. You're protecting the government. If there was a huge fraud, you have to get in there and restore it. It's not let's overthrow it, make it something new. So it's just, yeah, your perspective and what you believe. And yes, if you do believe it was fraudulent, like we believed in Georgia, you're pretty much willing to do some stuff. I don't want to sound like Donald Trump, but-

I think there were very well-intentioned people who were part of that. And then there were just fun-loving people. It was just like a rowdy thing to be a part of. Yeah, there were bozos and dum-dums that would have been at like a free Popsicle giveaway. And then there were some people that really thought they had witnessed something that had never happened in our history. True patriots. They saw themselves as like the Boston Tea Party colonists who were defying the law. It's just really, really important to...

to minimally, as an act of good faith or goodwill, grant people that they're sincere about what they're saying. I think that's minimally what we have to do. It's very favorable for both sides to go like, they were lied to, that's why they think that, they're misinformed, they're dumb, or it's not really that, it's bullshit, they're really trying to destroy it. It's like, let's just grant each other the notion that we're trying to.

to make things better. - Tribalism is often an accusation, like they're being irrational, they're being primitive, they're being emotion driven. But I think we should honor the intention of the other side because the intention is often symmetrical to our own intention. Right now at my campus, we had a situation where the political protests

which started out as something I was proud of the people on both sides. I was proud of my Israeli students and colleagues for speaking up and expressing grief and educating people about the situation. And I was proud of the sort of anti-genocide coalition, which is a very inclusive coalition. It's very small percentage of people are Palestinian and there's probably more Jews than Palestinians on that side, right? But

it escalated in part because both sides were co-opted by outside groups that were more extreme, that had different agendas. And there were certain triggers, the kinds of things I write about in the book, like symbols and ceremonies, which are situational triggers that bring extra layers of cultural thinking that sometimes get in the way of critical thinking. And so lots of stupid things were said, but

But these are 19 year olds. We shouldn't expect Gandhian discipline. They were taking a math class the day before. They don't do this for a living. They had like a pimple that they were thinking of not going to class over. So I think there were arrests and procedures, and I think it's quite appropriate to scare them. But I don't think that we should...

be all that punitive in a long-term way. Some of my colleagues really disagree, but we are proud of what happened at Columbia during the Vietnam War. And we are proud of what happened at Columbia during the apartheid years, which was sort of like my years in college. Columbia was the first campus to have shanties and protests, and it spread throughout the country. And when Mandela was released a few years later, that was one of the

factors cited that it had spread internationally. Did you happen to read the, it was a New York Times article that I really loved and I ended up reading the person's book and then we had them on even. But the framing of that college situation was laid out like this. Forget about left and right being a battle between the issues and think of it much more as two different worldviews. The left being the world is a battle between the oppressed and the oppressors and we must protect the oppressed.

Very legitimate point of view. And then for the conservatives, the worldview is life is a battle between barbarism and civilization. Also very true and very legitimate. You can see countries without law and a functioning judiciary. We know what the outcome is. These are both really defendable points.

And they were materialized so perfectly on that campus. And I think my frustration is that, and this funnels into tribalism, is there has to be a winner in that. There has to be the right or the wrong, the good or the bad, the evil or the protectors.

I don't know, those both seem like pretty valid points of view to be expressing. Exactly. And there are campuses where you had a kind of dialectic, where you had a negotiation involving both groups and the administration. Rutgers, for example, was one of them. Northwestern was another. But Rutgers was interesting because the leadership at Rutgers said like, well, if this is an opportunity to make Rutgers better, if Rutgers can learn something from this crisis, we should. Right.

And so that was a very face-saving way to say, okay, some of the demands from the anti-genocide coalition, like hire more professors who have a knowledge of Palestinian and Arab issues. Another issue I thought was really interesting in terms of tribalism, they said...

We want parity in terms of the flags that are flown on campus, because apparently there were some centers at Rutgers that flew Israeli flags and there was no place that flew a Palestinian flag. And so that is interesting thing for Rutgers to learn, right? That symbolic parity in a public space and it's a state university. And so I think they took the right attitude and there were many demands that they did not fulfill.

a seed too, like we will divest from companies that do business with Israel and we will drop our partnerships with Israel. So the book starts out very fun. Again, I'm going to parallel it with the Korean Air chapter in the Gladwell book. You start with South Korea is going to host the 2002 World Cup.

And they have been abysmal up to this point. They've been really terrible at soccer as a nation. Lately, they've been. Oh, okay. Okay. I'm not being fair. They kind of won the World Cup, co-hosted with Japan, arch rival, in the mid-90s when they were riding high. They sort of clawed their way up throughout the 20th century through colonialism and war and political turmoil, and then kind of emerged as this

successful economy in the 90s, moving into the elite tier of nations. Their soccer team, the Reds, was a regional power. It was like winning the Asia Cup. They got to be host nation. And then the Asia crisis came in like 1998.

And not only did their economy tank, but they had to get embarrassing bailouts from the IMF and they were accused of crony capitalism. And there's a lot of patronizing language by the international institutions. So it was a really humiliating moment. And their team, the Reds, started losing to Kuwait and losing to really tiny countries. Like 5-0, 5-0, 5-0. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Like really getting slaughtered.

They were the host nation. It's really embarrassing if you're the host nation and your team is terrible. So the head of the Korean soccer bureaucracy called this soccer coach in the Netherlands...

who had a mystique for being able to bring out the talent in teams. And not just in the Netherlands, he had coached in the Netherlands, but he had brought foreign players to Dutch clubs in a way that people hadn't done before and made it work. And then he went to Turkey and then he went to Spain and he was able to work his alchemy in all of these places. And sports is a really fun little microcosm of tribalism because there are these existing pillars of belief, which is

the Spanish players were more improvisational. Matadors. Yeah, Matadors. Brazilian samba on the field. Yeah, samba. And he brought a Brazilian up to the hall. The Germans have Teutonic discipline and the English are shopkeepers. It's this kind of national character rhetoric that you still hear during the World Cup. The old commentators engage in it, but it makes no sense because 90% of the year, these players are playing in clubs all around the world. So the idea that they have a fixed profile

Unprogrammed playing style as a function of their nation is something projected. It's a great place to just look because all that stuff is so steeped in tribalism. And Hiddink was someone who was like a pioneer for not believing those things and thinking that the so-called Dutch style of total football could be brought to Spain. And even as Dutch style had been influenced by some Russian. It was just the Dutch style because the Dutch made it famous, but it drew from certain traditions.

things that had been done in England and certain things that had been done in Moscow. And he came to Korea. His first impression was of an ignoramus because he not only didn't know any words of Korean, but he didn't recognize the names of the star players like the Messi or the David Beckham of Korea. He didn't get their names.

He's not only Dutch, but he's from a rural farming region in the east of the country. So he's really down to earth. It's like a Ted Lasso. Literally, that's what this sounds like. It's a little bit of a Ted Lasso story. I mean, he knew the sport, so that was different. But he's a fish out of water. His particular bias, which is this kind of down to earth, egalitarian...

no formality bias was in some ways exactly what the Korean team needed because the Korean team had certain habits of play that were in fact influenced by the hierarchical nature. Like in the Korean language, if I'm addressing you and you're older than me, obviously you're way younger than me, but I have to

say something like san in Japanese that acknowledges that you're my senior and hitting observed early on. He's like, what are they saying on the field? And the coach would give him a literal translation. So they were using these honorific declensions when asking somebody to pass to them. And they were playing in their hierarchy. So if they had an open shot and they were a rookie, they would pass it to a veteran out of deference and they'd lose the shot or they'd

They would be shining the shoes of the veterans if they were a rookie, or they would make a loud noise to warn a veteran they're about to score on. Oh, boy. All this stuff that was getting in the way of victory as the game is currently played. I don't know whether Hiddink was aware of what had happened at Korea Airlines a few years before. This was...

years before Malcolm's book, Outliers, which I think was like 2006 or something. But Malcolm talks about something that was in the academic literature that researchers at Boeing discovered that if they looked at all the national flag carrier airlines and they looked at crash rates with 747 class jets, which require equal collaboration of pilot and copilot, unlike previous jets, the countries with the highest crash rates were not the ones you would expect.

They were essentially Taiwan and South Korea. Neither country has particularly bad weather. Neither country is poor. They have a military with an air force where the pilots had equal hours up in the sky. They had already lost the right to fly through some airspace and they were on the verge of losing their right to fly through Canada's airspace. There was so many accidents.

Boeing even considered redesigning, like having one plane designed for hierarchical cultures and one for egalitarian cultures. The reason they were crashing wasn't their skill level, it was that the co-pilot's job is to point out the errors of the pilot and vice versa. But when the senior pilot was making an error, the co-pilot would either say some very mitigating statement

and not really shine a light on what was going wrong. The structure of pilot and copilot was rendered useless in this hierarchical system. Right. The really chilling evidence is from the transcripts of the black boxes in the cockpit. So these transcripts were published. The conversation would be the copilot would be saying something like, sir,

What about the mountain issue? And it would be, stop it. I'm trying to concentrate. And then it would be, sir, we might want to change course, you know, knowing they're about to fly directly into a mountain. And then the transcript ends. In Outliers, the story is told mostly as a story about how cultures differ. But the aspect of the story that to me was the most striking was that Korean Air, to its credit, said, OK, well,

All pilots speak English because that's the international language of air traffic control. So let's make our official language of the company English. So the cockpit language will be English. Did

Didn't have to fire anyone. Maybe they had a few English classes and haven't crashed since. You know, the same people in the same planes. There's nothing inherent about these Korean individuals that made them prone to this interaction. I think it's one of the most hopeful stories I've ever read in my life. There's a problem of that magnitude that could be figured out and could be solved is so encouraging. And the soccer one is equally so. He did the same thing, the soccer coach. Yeah, he announced all these weird rules.

rules for the training camp. One of the rules was no use of honorifics on the field. He rationalized it as need for efficiency. But some of the other rules were, we're going to hold the first training camp in the United Arab Emirates, not in Korea. And the Korean sports press are not allowed to follow us there and interview you after every scrimmage about your mistakes. And so these were all justified

in terms of efficiency, but you could see, and people at the time could see, that he was changing the cultural cues around people. He wasn't telling them to change. He wasn't even telling them how he wanted them to change, but he was creating a situation that made some identities less salient and other identities more salient. And that helped them learn a more modern tactical system, this total football system, and

There are other times when he wanted them to think like Koreans, you know, and then he created a situation that was like intensely Korean. So he is just good at pulling the strings, recognizing that in any player, there are multiple identities and multiple loyalties and that you can be a puppet master sort of by

knowing what situational cues or what experiences will update somebody's assumptions about the group that they're a part of. I've never met the guy, but I found him to be an unlikely prophet about this. He does in his interviews always talk about players are a lot more adaptable than you would think. And he will say, like, I played in many different countries and I saw that people could change

And so he definitely had some conscious awareness of this, but I think some of it was just, he kind of understood how to tweak the situation, tweak the situation, tweak the situation until it jelled. - And they got to the semis and this moment was compared

by the media to their end of colonialism and statues were erected. Like it was as big as it could get in Korea. Yeah, they put up statues of him. They put them on a postage stamp. They named the stadium instead of World Cup Stadium. It became Who's Hitting Stadium. And then they wanted to make him an honorary citizen and they couldn't because Korea, like many countries,

had a blood standard rather than a soil standard of citizenship. So you had to prove Korean ethnicity. And so they changed that, which was from time immemorial. And that's regarded as sort of an inflection point in the South Korean identity, a sort of symbolic and literal openness to the world, a level of confidence, like we can open ourselves to citizens who aren't Korean without being threatened by it. We won't lose our identity in this

Right. In some ways you gain identity from it because you regenerate an identity in this generation, which is slightly different and more interesting. And one idea of authenticity is that the culture can never change. Another idea of authenticity is that it must change. And that if you're doing what was done a generation ago, then, well, that's a museum piece. That's not the real culture. That's the view of culture that I hold. And I think it's more progressive. So you break up three distinct ways in which tribal psychology works, right?

The first of which is an instinct to imitate and conform to what most people do. And I think there is one part in here that seemed specifically the people that are nurturing you, I think is really relevant. Like the group that's nurturing you, you will instinctively conform and imitate them. Yeah. Something that I remember from listening to some of your past podcasts that you talked about is nature versus nurture. When I was going to school, that was the binary frame that

would always be on day one of a class. You would take the evolutionary psychology class and they would say, these other classes, they told you it was nurture. I'm going to convince you that it's all nature, 99% nature. And then the anthropology class would be, the brain is a blank slate. And there's one culture where the women stand up to pee and the men sit down. And there's another culture where, you know. It's almost a major of anomalies. Yeah, yeah. That's why I like it.

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And so what I think has emerged due to, you know, a lot of the great work has been done at UCLA at this Department of Anthropology and Brain Sciences or whatever. It's like an interdisciplinary department. Human nature is nurture. What we are genetically programmed to do is to learn to just absorb like a sponge from whatever community is nurturing us and nurture.

We are also programmed to teach to the people we are nurturing. And we do that without even knowing that we're doing it. And other social animals are more wired to behave in a specific way. So an ant colony in California is exactly the same as an ant colony in Michigan or in New York. But a strip mall in California is different than a strip mall in

Manhattan, because we are wired to learn from whatever is nurturing us. The culture is differentiated, but within the culture, we still have seamless coordination. We don't have constant collisions because we know to mesh with each other through our shared habits. And that's what I call the peer instinct. And it's sort of the

foundation of human culture. And even the earliest humans were able to collaborate and coordinate, operate together with a shared goal through these common habits, these common understandings in a way that other primates cannot. And that was one big step towards tribal living. And then the second one, which you guys have mentioned a couple of times already is heroes, the hero instinct. And that was a new layer of psychology where if the

Peer instinct was conformist, you know, doing what's normal. The hero instinct is this drive to do what's normative, to do what is regarded as moral or aesthetic or a valued contribution by the community. Like exceptional. Yeah, in the book, you say emulating someone...

that is held in high regard. And just like with conformity, there are things that conformity leads us to do that are bad, where we give up our independent thinking, et cetera. But my argument is that most of conformity is good and enables us to do things collectively that we wouldn't otherwise do. Similarly with the hero instinct, there's the silly kind of emulation. So like when Elizabeth Holmes-

wore Steve Jobs' black turtlenecks, that didn't help Theranos succeed. And we see a lot of that in sports where people want to know what LeBron eats for breakfast. So it can be dumb, but it operates for the most part in a really dynamic way because, you know, imagine a sort of farming community where maybe the soil is changing and then a few farmers start farming

yams instead of sweet potatoes. I don't even know what the difference between yams is. I know they are different. And then they sell more crops than the average person. Well, in the next decade and in the next generation, more people are going to start doing that because they're going to see, okay, these people have success and status. And so I don't know if the yams are what caused it, but I suspect that it might be. And so that way you have a

adaptive cultural change, you know, collective level learning where the group shifts in the direction of what is working through this hero worship drive. Well, that's why you need this balance of individuality and collectivism. Someone has to be producing the emergent quality. Someone has to be divergent for us to navigate the changes and adapt.

The human existence is one where we're constantly feeling conflicted between these different drives that we have, you know, the drive to conform versus the drive to stand out. The third one is some people are surprised that it's the last one to evolve because it sounds in some ways like the most primitive, which is the ancestor instinct, the drive to perpetuate the ways of the past or the ways of past generations. And that created tribe level memory. It led to a sort of hanging on of the wisdom of the past.

so that the wheel didn't have to be reinvented every generation and the hero instinct energy could go into building on the past rather than just recreating it. We can recognize all of these things in ourselves today. We have this curiosity about founders. Yeah, the founding fathers are deities at this point.

Yeah. We learn a little bit about our family history. We see an old photo and we want to know about this person. We want to know, oh, what did that person do for a living? And old family recipes. You know, we have this inordinate curiosity and this sort of sense that it's the right thing to do to...

perpetuate and propel these traditions forward. It can lead to sort of blind conservatism, blind traditionalism, but it's also very useful. The way that we're wired is that even things that are not immediately practical are

we feel like we should perpetuate. And that led to art and other symbolic traditions. You would see, hmm, look, we came into a cave and there's painting on the wall. We don't know who did that. It looks kind of old, but let's learn how to do it and let's do it in our cave. And none of this had any practical value, but it prepared them for things that were practical. So if you have this routine of sort of learning by rote of things from the past,

well, then there might be some sort of way of making a spear or a way of making a fishing hook that is sort of too complex for you to really understand why it works

but you can still do it because grandma taught you to do it this way and you're going to do it this way. And she looked over your shoulder when doing it and made sure that you did it this way. And you're going to make sure that the next people do this way. And so this technology that is very useful is being passed on despite people's inability to understand exactly why it's done that way. Right. All three of these things,

conformity, status seeking, and sentimentality and nostalgia, blind repetition of the past. They are things that I grew up thinking of as human embarrassments, you know, like aspects of human nature that are holding us back from our rational core. But I've come through studying this stuff for decades to think that these things are actually the distinctive superpower of our species that evolved that

leads us to behave in certain ways that allow for social organization. And they're not completely rational, but rationality doesn't solve every problem. Like global warming is not a problem that rationality will get us out of because behaving in your individual self-interest leads to overconsumption and not worrying about future generations.

So some of these tribal logics may have a better chance of changing behavior in the ways that are needed. But of course, they do lead us astray, right? Is it Ash's work? Am I pronouncing it correctly? Yeah, yeah. Where he demonstrated through these experiments. That was sort of the famous work in the early 60s that added a lot of fuel to this sense of conformity is a danger, which I guess it was in the 1950s, right?

And what he showed is that if you bring a group of people like us together for an eye test, and I don't know that you two are actually in cahoots with Ash, I'm the only real experimenter, you're fake subjects. The first couple rounds when asked, is that blue or green? We all say blue, trivial question. And then...

After a few questions, you guys start giving the same wrong answer. And then I, as the real subject, rub my eyes. I clean my glasses. I scratch my head. I kind of look at people like, are you guys goofing with me? And then a very high percentage of people in my role

to give the wrong answer along with the majority. The question that social psychologists struggled with for a long time was, are they just paying lip service to that so as not to be ostracized, a sort of conscious condition

conformity that is not so deep. Is their perspective changing? Like, is your answer becoming a frame that when I look at this teal shaded square, I start to see the blue in it. So they've done some studies in recent years where people are hooked up to an fMRI machine. You know, it's that light bright psychology where you see which part of their brain is activating and the people who conform, they're seeing both the part of the brain that

handles social conflict and the amygdala that handles any kind of threat and the part of the brain that handles visual perception beliefs. So there's some belief updating going on. It does seem like there is some top-down influence on people's perceptions. Conformity is deep.

And it can lead to wrong judgments, especially in these rigged situations. Well, you do. You wonder that when you're evaluating the out group. I do this myself. I find myself going, do they really believe that? Or are they smart enough to go like, well, I don't really care. I'm just with this group. It's probably both things. Right. I think the two judgments we make are one, either they're not sincere. They don't believe this. They're just saying it because they're rich and they don't want to get taxed.

Or they actually believe this, which shows that they're so deep into this Tea Party ideology that they can't see the world clearly anymore. Neither of those is very charitable. Right, right. Yeah. When we talk about the hero instinct emulating someone with high regard, pride versus shame...

is interesting and I think worth pointing out some of the potholes we step in, which is there's so many experiments at this point that show people behave much differently when they're being observed. If they're a philanthropist,

They're going to give more when there's celebrities in the room or there's other philanthropists in the room. If there's a honor system to pay something, they pay one thing when people are present and a different when other people are present. Or even if there's a poster on the wall of watching eyes above the honor system coffee pot, people are less likely to cheat, you know.

A lot of these mental mechanisms are very trigger happy. So you don't need the full flown peer group watching me taking notes, even just the hint of eyes or even just the reminder of the group will cause you to think in terms of the frameworks that you share with that group. And that's like a reputational driven behavior to preserve our reputation in our group.

Yeah. Not always conscious calculation about reputation. Shame is a really interesting emotion. Shame and pride are like a system. And traditionally, both Christians and like the psychoanalytic therapists have regarded them as dysfunctional. Pride goeth before a fall.

Or the psychoanalysts always said, shame is paralyzing. It's not a constructive emotion. It leads to all sorts of bad behaviors. And when behavioral scientists started running rigorous studies of all the different social emotions and what their consequences are and doing it

across societies, what became very clear is that pride and shame are not about self-consciousness and dysfunction. They are a system that evolved such that when we do a thing which is valued by our community, we feel pride and we feel it automatically. Olympic medal winners everywhere, even in the Paralympics, the blind judo people, they all have the nonverbal expression of

- Pride, which is-- - Yeah, just expanded. - Just expanded, which evolutionists say it's a way of calling attention to yourself as opposed to shame where you slump and you try to make yourself invisible. They say that the pride-shame system is like a good PR agency in that it broadcasts your successes and it hides your failures. And it's kind of designed both to induce you to do the things that will be appreciated and to not do the things that won't be appreciated.

And to make it more obvious when you have done the good thing. And it's not all good because it also leads you to do things like hide your mistakes and take credit for things beyond what you. So it's not all good. It's not the moral emotion, but it's the ethical emotion in the sense that it's

trying to make you appear virtuous and trying to avoid having you appear unvirtuous. I thought there was a neat outcome of this. A hunting and gathering group in Africa. And what's interesting is, and it makes so much sense, which is if we act differently when we're being observed...

And yet we're now gathering in groups that are thousands and tens of thousands in civilizations. You're milling about the world, but you're not actually seeing people that know you. So that's diminished that power. And it's interesting to see what kind of gods develop in response to that, which is most of these huge civilizations developed automatically.

all-knowing, all-seeing, omnipotent gods to stand in for your group. Whereas a group like the Kung, they're always with each other. There is no milling about with strangers. So you're actually observed. So their gods are not these all-seeing, all-powerful, all-knowing gods.

It's a fascinating outcome, I think, of that. Yeah. You get these nosy gods, these high gods who are both omniscient and awfully concerned with what humans are doing. Each person. All eight billion of us. Once you get social scale...

that allows for anonymity, you know, that I'm doing things where nobody who knows me can see and where I might hurt another person. It's sort of like the big security camera in the sky that causes us to behave nicely. And outside of religion, we do the same thing with like Santa Claus. He knows if you've been good or bad, you know, and we perpetuate other myths, like in public swimming pools. When I was growing up, there were signs saying like,

If you should have an accident in the pool, a cloud of blue dye will appear. The cloud of blue dye never appears. You know, and you would think you would have seen it. I once worked where I had to go to pool supply stores because I was doing maintenance for things. And

They sell the signs. They don't sell the dye because it doesn't exist because sweat would have the same reaction. So it's just a myth that we perpetuate to get good behavior. You walk us through how we've evolved to have all these aspects of our tribalism. And then you give great examples of how lots of good comes out of them. The ending chapter is about this toxic tribalism. So when I'm stuck in my pessimistic view, I don't think this is something that

we will ever transcend. I don't think we will remove the vestigial tribal component from our in-group, out-group thinking.

And then I go, well, what would it take? And then I go, well, it'd have to be an outside enemy that was so threatening that we'd get our shit together here. Like I go to, it's got to be the worst. We need the Martians. Yeah, Martians or Russia's really got to launch an attack. Or, you know, I have only really negative ideas of how we could make this whole country one in group. But how do you see it? How are we a little astray individually?

in our summation of all this tribalism? - I think there are very deep, trenchant, disturbing conflicts in our politics, in our race and ethnic relations, and across religious lines, whether it's people shooting up a synagogue or civil war in Darfur. There's a lot of conflict going on, but I think that's true in every generation and probably will be in every generation.

And it is the case that most generations think that civilization is unraveling on their watch, right? And you can read Socrates talking about the youth are no longer studying the way we did. So I think there will always be conflict for sure. I think what's new is the way that people are talking about these conflicts

the toxic tribalism trope that we are sort of wired to hate outsiders because hostility is a part of all of these conflicts, but they don't start from hostility. And thinking that they start from a hardwired hostility is

is not a useful way to think about the conflict that you're in or the conflict that you might want to try to ameliorate. So I think that there is not just one kind of tribal thinking gone awry, but there are several varieties of it that come from these different tribal instincts, the peer instinct, the hero instinct, and the ancestor instinct. In the last chapter, I argue that the

Red-blue rift is largely something that emerges from the peer instinct, from the conformist information processing. And so I call that epistemic tribalism. It's a tribalism of the mind when tribe comes before truth. And we're seeing the world through the lens of our

shared tribal beliefs rather than reality, but we don't have the metacognition to realize that. So we blame other people for the fact that they disagree with us. And there are steps that can be taken to lower the heat, to dial it down. There's a whole industry of

red-blue bridge groups that has sprung up in the last four or five years. And I think some of them are doing it the right way and some of them are not doing it the right way. So a lot of these groups are called things like high from the other side or...

Red, blue encounters or town versus gown. And I think that's exactly wrong because you're inviting people to an event where they're going to be paired off with somebody. And you're basically saying you're going to be paired off with one of them. There are some evidence that those kinds of interactions actually polarize people.

But there's evidence that when we don't know that the person that we're talking to is from the other side, or even if we know that, there are other groups called Make America Dinner Again and Coffee Party USA, Open Lands USA. Let's bring bipartisan groups together for dialogue around shared passions that have nothing to do with politics and that crosscut the two sides.

And those are more likely to create a conversation that continues beyond the event. I love coffee and you tell me about a cafe in this neighborhood. I'm like, well, what about next Wednesday? You want to meet there? So it may seem like an indirect route, but it's a better route than saying,

setting up this oppositional thing? I've seen some cool experience. There's a few of these out there that I've seen. One is they make them talk about like six topics before they're allowed to launch into, they'll get given this divisive topic and the outcomes after they've had to do these five is drastically different than when they start there. The other one I've seen, they have to build a piece of furniture like Ikea, or they have to have some physical project.

And they're not allowed to talk about anything political till the end. And again, the outcomes of those are drastically different than when you start with that. I'm actually kind of surprised about that because I would think then you'd feel a betrayal. Oh, really? Yeah. That like, but I thought I knew you and I thought we were friends. And now I find out that we're actually so different. That would be my instinct. Just like when your parent, I think for people who have

family situations where they disagree politically, I think that's really intense than when it's a stranger who you're just like, well, I don't know them, so I don't have any investment here. For sure. It's the act of, it's us two against this piece of furniture. So like we're an in-group. No, I know. And then like you're in-group, in-group, in-group, and then you hear that they're out-group. I think what it does is

is it right sizes what it means to be an out-group? Because you've just experienced another version where they're an in-group and now you're questioning the boundaries of in-group, out-group. Yeah, but I mean, as you kind of alluded, the research in this area, it's highly variable. Like they haven't quite figured out all of the parameters that matter. And it's related to a longer area of research called the contact hypothesis, where in what situations, if you bring...

Israeli kids and Palestinian kids at a summer camp together, will you have attitudes become more accepting as opposed to polarizing? And it requires that they have equal status. It requires that they are working on projects together where they need each other. There's this concept of the jigsaw puzzle classroom where you can't solve the problem unless each kid contributes their knowledge. But

It's fragile. Sometimes the equal status is artificially created and it's not really believed or you start building trust and then somebody says something and then it's like they grew an alien head and you feel betrayed because you thought you knew who they were. So it's a complicated situation, but there are better and worse ways. You know, a lot of well-intentioned people would think that the best way to create the event is to highlight that it's a red, blue, dark,

That's not the thing to emphasize. A cool point you make is that these three instincts that have evolved, they have evolved specifically to mesh with peers and strangers and to help a group. So it does seem crazy that they would all of a sudden be completely maladaptive and non-functional. And we're talking about some of like kind of micro examples of how it could happen. But what do you think can happen on more of a scaled up version for us?

When we talk about where tribalism goes awry and contributes to group conflicts, I think it goes awry in several different flavors. One is this epistemic tribalism, sort of like living in different cognitive worlds. And there are some...

things we can do to try to communicate with a person. There's a lot of evidence that if I'm, say, a liberal environmentalist and I'm trying to get a few more conservative votes, like when they were working really hard to get Joe Manchin's vote for the Inflation Reduction Act, which

It's called the Inflation Reduction Act, but it's the biggest environmentalist law that's ever been passed. Oh, really? Yeah. But it was labeled in a way that was friendly to the people on the margin, right? Inflation Reduction Act. And the classical default thing is that your liberal will say, we need to stop global warming because it's an injustice to

the poor people who live closer to the ocean or to the future generations. And that's the logic of social justice. And it resonates really well with Democrats, but it doesn't resonate as well with conservatives. Other moral logics resonate better with them, like the rhetoric of sanctity. So if instead the message is we must preserve this God-given earth and

prevent the blasphemy of, you know, I may be laying it on too thick. And they send clerics to lobby. But the idea is work with the symbols and signs, bring their language to the fore, and then they can see a basis for saying yes to this, which

comes from their commitments rather than asking them to come from your commitments. And then aside from the left-right conflict, I argue that there's a different kind of tribalism gone awry in the racial discrimination and ethnic discrimination. There, my thesis is, I would say, probably a contrarian for a lot of people, but I argue that the racial discrimination in the workplace today comes

Not entirely from hostility to the outgroup. In fact, I think that may be a relatively small part of it. I think it comes from benevolence or favoritism towards the in-group. Yeah, preservation of the in-group, perhaps. Part of the hero instinct is that we are wired to contribute to our clan. We are wired to contribute not to all humankind, but to our community. Whoever's doling out the status, really. Exactly, the relevant status, right?

And so we have lots of mechanisms of hiring and promotion in organizations where I'm a manager and I'm making a subjective judgment about, is your high school experience leading the motorcycle club? Is that a leadership experience or is that something I should be worried about? Whatever it would be in anybody's case. So I have to make these subjective judgments. I also make a lot of judgments about

whether to give you the benefit of the doubt, whether to give you a little more time than was allotted for the interview. And I think we impulsively give these kinds of things to people who look like us or who have last names similar to us. That is in-group favoritism. And I think that's a stronger force. And what's really problematic is that HR departments are

have adopted procedures in the last couple of decades that turbocharge in-group favoritism. So one of them is hiring for cultural fit. The idea is the corporate culture is important. So when we're looking to see who to hire of all these college students, if you see people that you think would

fit in well with the current partners in terms of their extracurricular interests, give them an extra star. You know, there are anthropologists who go into corporations and one of them, a woman, Rivera from Northwestern, has written a great book where she kind of was a fly on the wall in

blue chip law firms and blue chip consulting firms and blue chip banks, the same organizations that had restrictions on who could work there generations ago. What she observed is that they place an inordinate emphasis on the high school and college extracurricular activities of the people they're hiring. And they say things like, oh, well, with her squash background and

Dax's crew experience, we can imagine them being a really good team on the trading floor. And the sports that they seem to harp on just happen to be these like waspy sports that only exist in elite suburbs. Elite suburbs today are demographically diverse, but they're still class-wise. You know, it's a particular way of living that hiring for cultural fit. It's a permission structure for this kind of in-group favoritism.

And then another one is referral systems. So companies now, if you're applying to be a manager, if you just apply externally, you have one-tenth the chance of being hired compared to if you are referred by one of the employees of the organization. And the way the referral systems work is if the employee refers someone who gets hired...

they get a financial incentive and they also get a friend coming into the organization. - Yeah, win-win. - And so companies have learned that referral hires come on board more quickly, stay longer, lots of good things in terms of efficiency,

But guess what? They're not diverse. They tend to look like the current employees. But some companies have tweaked the referral system where it's still a referral system. Like you're asked, do you know anyone in your work life or social life who might be a good fit for our new head of HR? And we're looking for people who are either veterans, LGBTQ,

Q, neurodiverse or from an underrepresented minority. Well, it turns out you're just as good at coming up with 20 people. They're not the 20 people that you would have come up with if you didn't have the target, but you can come up with the 20 people and all of the same advantages happen. You feel commitment. They have a friend.

They can learn from you. So they have someone to show them the ropes and they tend to work out and stay longer. So just by becoming aware of in-group favoritism as a big part of the problem, you can start to see that some of these innocent procedures are making it way worse. And there are limitations in how well you can measure racial animus, right? Because people don't want to admit to it. Yeah, it's a hard thing to get a real answer out of.

But all the indicators that do exist suggest that it still exists, but it's a small set of people. And it's not, for the most part, the people who are in power. It's the disenfranchised people. But discrimination is still rampant.

Really, really widespread. It's not happening from hostility. It's happening from, you know, like if I see the name Jamal Jefferson versus Paul Smith, it's not necessarily that I feel hostility at Jamal Jefferson. I might feel a little warm glow at Paul Smith. Familiarity. Yeah, some affinity, right? So there's reason to blind the names in resumes when you're doing hiring. And there are reasons to tweak the referral system.

I agree with you quite a bit on that assessment. Obviously, there's fucking white nationalism, there's hate groups, and that's all true. But I think it's putting a little too much focus on the thing that's not going to move the needle. Well, I agree as a minority. The things that have affected me aren't hatred. It's not like people hate me. It's just more favoritism toward the hegemonic group. So I think it's dead on. Unfortunately, you don't have any controversy here.

Maybe some other host would have been able to push back really hard on that. You said it was a little controversial. It's controversial because Google spends a billion dollars a year on its DEI training and 2% of their technical employees are women and underrepresented minorities. Yeah.

What they're doing is not working. It's not hitting the real problem. There's become a sort of diversity industrial complex now where there's this whole profession of biased trainers and instruments that reveal your hidden prejudice and most have a shaky scientific basis, but...

It's a good band-aid when something bad happens in a corporation, I'll bring in a bias trainer. It's a sort of ritual obeisance. It often makes things worse. And some data shows that after bias training, companies are less likely to promote minorities. And it's thought to come from the fact that people become shy about any interactions across racial lines or gender lines because minorities.

The feeling is I might commit a microaggression and then I might get canceled. They get scared. Yeah. Yeah. Well, this is fascinating. I'm really grateful to hear a somewhat positive take on it. Because, yeah, it's singularly negative. I perpetuate that quite often. I don't think that our democracy has been destroyed and I don't think civil society is dead. We just need to understand where the levers are and learn to manage ourselves better. Yeah. Yeah.

I agree. I agree. And I really, really enjoyed getting to talk to you and learn about you and hope everyone checks out Tribal, how the cultural instincts that divide us can help bring us together. Hopeful. And the finest point I want to put on it is it reads like pop fiction.

fiction. It reads like Gladwell. It's very fun. You're learning about all of these premises through stories about people and they're all very, very, very entertaining. And you're just kind of picking up the wisdom as you get entertained. So good job. Thank you. Yeah. It's really great. I'm really happy to hear that. Yeah. All right. Be well. Stay tuned for more Armchair Expert, if you dare.

My dad works in B2B marketing. He came by my school for career day and said he was a big ROAS man. Then he told everyone how much he loved calculating his return on ad spend.

My friend's still laughing at me to this day. Not everyone gets B2B, but with LinkedIn, you'll be able to reach people who do. Get $100 credit on your next ad campaign. Go to LinkedIn.com slash results to claim your credit. That's LinkedIn.com slash results. Terms and conditions apply. LinkedIn, the place to be, to be. Hi there, this is Hermium Hermium. If you like that, you're going to love the fact check with Miss Monica. Hello! Hi.

I wondered if you... Harem pants? Yeah. I had a feeling you were going to mention my pants. They're harems, right? Should I stand up? Yeah, give a stand up. Do a stand up. Do a twirl. Do a twirl. Turn to the left. Turn to the right. Do your thing on the couch. Yeah, they're kind of clownish. It's got a circus vibe. Fun, fashionable circus vibe. Yep. I got these at a vintage store in Austin. Really? Yeah.

How old do we think they are? Is there any way to know? I'm sure there's a way to know. Let's see. What if I typed in what year are my pants and it could do it? Oh my God. Speaking of, I was with Jess this weekend or end of last week and he has a cheapy tee on his phone. Okay. And he was like, I want to name my guy. Let's ask him what he wants to be named. So we were like talking to him. Okay.

And he speaks in a voice or in text? A voice. He does. A very, in my opinion, human-like voice. Okay. It's kind of like on Synced when Liz had her AI boyfriend. Right. It's similar to this. Okay. But Jess was saying, I'm with my friend Monica and we want to give you a name. Oh, Jess said, say hello to Monica. And he says, hi, Monica. Hi.

I hope you guys are having a great day. What do you think my name should be? Like, he immediately can really understand and then turn it into a colloquial back and forth. Sure, and engage you. Yes. And at one point I said, Jess, I want to talk to you. And he said-

Monica's getting mad that I'm not getting, she's not getting all my attention. And then it laughed. No. Yes. Oh, wow. It knew that was a joke. Yes.

That's good. I'm really afraid people are going to start turning to it for true companionship. Companionship. I mean, Jess was getting so into it. So you're nervous Jess in particular is going to- No, I think a lot of people, last week we talked about being lonely. Lonely. And like, what if during my incident, I had- Oh, well-

You needed it. This is great. This is a big philosophical. Yeah. By the way, Yuval, I heard Yuval talking. I think I even brought it up on a previous fact check. He's right. That he was talking, he was being interviewed by somebody on stage at a live event. And he was saying, if you think about it,

When you're talking to another human, the other human is just planning their next statement and thinking how what you're saying affects their own ego. In a sense, this AI thing would be a companion that is actually interested in you and actually wants to soothe you. That's really interesting. If you really think about what you're getting out of communication, what it's doing for you, if what you needed during your incident was comfort and it gave you comfort and helped you, why would it matter?

The AI is trained to give you what you want. And so that's good in certain circumstances, like probably a comfort circumstance. Ding, ding, ding to our last fact check where we were talking about yes men and only getting confirmation and affirmation and not having anyone challenge you. I imagine you could set the parameters. No one would do that. Well, you would.

If that was your fear and you're like, well, I don't want this thing to warp my sense of my own importance and my own blah, blah, blah. You could set parameters, I presume, for it because you'll go like, I think I'm going to have Twinkies for lunch. Now, a shitty friend would be like, eat 10. Right. But you've also told that your goals in life.

Now this goes back to Homo Deus, ding, ding, ding, you evolve Harari again. You strike. You can give it your goals. Like I want to be social. I want to exercise. I want to be in daylight this amount. You know, you could give it your whole dream list of who you would be. And so you go like, I'm going to think, Roger, I'm thinking about getting some Twinkies and he, and he could go, or she could go, those would be delicious, Monica, but it would take you off your goal by three days. And even if you say, I want some light pushback often,

Often in life, you don't want pushback, right? You can set that parameter. But then if you're getting it, if it's a real person, you have to engage. You have to stay there if it's someone you care about or love. You can't go fuck off, Roger. Yeah. You can't turn the person off. Yep. Like you can turn your phone off or just say, ugh, never mind. Or I'm resetting you to say something I want now. I totally agree with that.

But what would be interesting is because neither of us have been advised by Roger yet. I haven't. What would be really interesting is if you even get defensive when Roger does it. Because so much of I think what our defensiveness is like, I like and value this person and they have opinion about me that's negative. And that scares me.

So I wonder if even what might be interesting is does it nullify defensiveness? Like if my watch tells me you're a sloth. That's rude. I'd be like, fuck you, you're a watch. Yeah. You know, I don't know. I guess one of my more immediate fears is like, you know what it is, is I probably have a fear that my skills will be nullified. Yeah, of course. I mean, this is what the whole strike, the AI portion of the strike is.

was about this, this exact thing. Like, well, if,

a computer can write a script as well as a human, is that okay? I still stand by, I guess it's okay. I think it needs to be declared. Yeah. And I think I, as a person, will always be more impressed by a human who can do something interesting. Okay, now what about this? Could you say to Roger,

Look at all the sports information and write me a magazine right now. Could you publish this magazine? I think probably. Yeah. And what if it's better? Yeah.

And I'm a sports enthusiast. Then you'll buy it. But why would you buy anything? Couldn't you just tell your own Roger? Well, I want a sports magazine too. Exactly. I'm not sure how this is all going to work, but we're going to find out. If an AI makes the most beautiful song in the whole world, it's like gorgeous sound that I've ever heard. I might listen to that song. Yeah. But I won't never listen to a human song again. And I won't find it as impressive. Yeah.

As even a human who maybe is doing 75% of that perfection. Yeah, it's like when I do fast math, it's still kind of impressive. But a calculator can do it really, really way faster. There's still room for me to be impressive even though calculators exist. Exactly. Yeah. And I would have previously said before I heard that Metallica Yacht Rock AI. Mm-hmm.

hybrid mashup, I would have assumed there wouldn't be an A.I. song I'd actually love. But in truth, I love that song. I probably like it as much as a lot of other songs. The thing that'll be missing is like, it doesn't have what Steely Dan has, which is like, even though Steely Dan's songs, one of their defining characteristics is their songs are so different, kind of like the Beatles. Like none of them overlap. They're all unique, but by God, they're all Steely Dan. They have that fingerprint and they have some essential vibe.

That is Walter Becker. Charles Lydon. Oh, Charles Lydon. Our father. Christopher Lydon. Oh, fuck. Christopher Lydon. Poor Chris, man. We owe him to know it really well. And we're not doing great. I just can't do it. I just can't do it. Chris Lydon. Do you have a photo of him you could put up on the TV, Rob?

Oh. Yeah. Yeah, let's see if we can. We can just have him up always. Yeah, as our father. Can I tell you about one fun thing between Delta and I? Yeah. So when I drop her off from school, we kind of park and we walk a block to school.

And we saw someone's virtually their whole wig. It wasn't a whole wig. It was all extensions. Okay. It was a huge amount of extensions. Oh, boy. And we had been listening to Don't Stop Till You Get Enough. Come on. And so we were walking down the street and we started singing, Don't Stop Till You Get Enough. Come on.

Till your hair falls out. Leave it on the sidewalk. Come on. Till your hair falls out. That's funny. And it's still there this morning. That was like eight days ago. And luckily, I think the thing about hair on a sidewalk is no one wants to pick it up. You would need tongs. Is that him? Oh.

He's so handsome. On the cover of The Guardian? Well, he deserves it. He invented podcasting. That's Chris Lydon. Fuck. Thank you, brother. Father. Thank you, dad. Daddy. Daddy. Da-da. Yeah, we made it gross. Daddy. We so quickly made it so gross. You're my podcast daddy. Oh. Ew. I can't do that.

I think the only thing left will be like pervy grossness jokes. No, AI will be. Do you know how many pervy jokes are on the internet? Yeah, but a vibe. It laughed at the joke.

It knows a good joke. Really good joke. And he laughed so hard. Well, did his laugh sound like maniacal or friendly? It was layered. It was like, oh, I get that's a joke. And also like, oh, I feel a little bad for her. She shouldn't feel like this. She's being replaced by me. She has a low zobus to me. I feel it. Yeah. She's probably had an incident recently. What if it asked? Monica.

By chance, did you have an incident recently? Hey, did we ever? Because there was a lot of justifiable complaints about the fact check not containing our chimp crazy debrief. Have we done it? Yeah, we did. Okay, great. We didn't do it on Catherine's. But we did it. It's to come. Okay. Well, it happened. It's next month. It's last week and then Adam won.

Oh, one other thing I wanted to say in the comments that made me really happy is someone again asked, like, why aren't you in the attic? You know, for me, it's like we're a month into this. Like you got to understand Monday's the attic. Wednesday's is the studio. But someone was nice enough to write this.

And they wrote, you know, at Dax Shepard, they said, hey, Dax Shepard, I'll take this one. Oh, that's sweet. I understand, though. I think it's important. I think maybe me and you got too hasty. Like we said it once or twice and we felt like we said it all. You think so? Yeah, because there are some podcasts that I listen to that do say this. Like they say updates. Right. Like updates.

for a year, the same update to tell people. And we haven't done that, but maybe we should. Yeah, I just think the baseline armchair is so smart. I really do believe that. They are, but also we have new people, we hope. I think the bigger issue, which is very fair, is...

There's many people don't listen to every episode. So it's like, yeah, we did it for two or three episodes and we're like, yeah, we're good. Yeah. But it's very common for someone to have missed three episodes. Then they listen. They're like, what's happening now? Okay. Let me tell people about our show. Okay. So we have a show called Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard. Is it about the messiness of being human? It is. Okay.

It's about incidents. What's the incidence of being human? It's about human incidents. It is actually. And what's our schedule? Okay. So our schedule is we have three episodes for you a week. Yeah. That's, oh my God, that's a great offering. I know. How much does it cost? It's free. Oh my God. Okay. Wow. You got me on the hook. It's free.

Where can you listen? And where can you listen to this? You can listen anywhere you get your podcast. Anywhere. Hold on. Could I listen on Apple Podcasts? Yes, you can. Could I listen on Wondery? Absolutely. How about Stitcher?

I think. Spotify? Yes. Great. Yes, you can. You can listen anywhere. You get your podcast. And look, if you're like, I don't get my podcast, I don't know what that means. Then on your phone, if you have an iPhone, you do have an Apple podcast icon. It's purple. Came preloaded. Came preloaded. So you do have it.

And then you can search in apps for the Wondery app or the Spotify app or the Stitcher app or the iHeartRadio app. I'm assuming all these people have apps. I'm not sure. I think so. We release an episode on Monday, Wednesday, and Friday.

Monday is a celebrity interview. Okay. It's Dax and Monica talking to a celebrity friend. And we're really interested in incidents and the messiness of being human and vulnerabilities. And we're not really interested in people's high highs. We like addiction. We like poop. And then- Are those-

Audio or video? Okay, great question. Thank you for asking. It is audio only. However, you can watch it on YouTube. You won't see...

The conversation. You won't see the conversation, but there'll be some visuals. But the fact check, which happens at the end of each episode, the end of, I'm sorry, the end of Monday and Wednesday's episode, the fact check. Yeah, this is confusing. I gotta see why people are upset. Me too. Okay, so that's just Dax and Monica and they're checking the facts from the episode because

Everyone makes a lot of claims that need substantiation. Right. But also the fact check, more than facts, is just Dax and Monica really catching up on their thoughts and ideas, opinions. Sometimes they fight. Sometimes they cry. And sometimes they laugh. Yeah. And the fact check is always on video now. Interesting. Yes. Okay. But if you don't like video...

You don't have to watch it. Hold on. I remember. You can listen completely. I remember an episode. I even want to say it was Bobby Lee where Dax made a huge stink about that he would never do video because it would ruin the integrity of the vulnerability. Sure. So he's a liar and he's a hypocrite and he sold out for money. Well, I think it's not very nice of you to speak that way about my friend.

First of all, we are keeping the integrity of our celebrity guests. That's why on Monday there is no video because we do want to keep that intimacy and make people feel very comfortable and feel vulnerable. Not point cameras at them. We don't want cameras. We don't want them to feel like they have to put on makeup, any of that. So that is why we are not doing video on Monday.

But let me talk about Wednesday. Oh, I can't wait to hear. Wednesday is when we have an expert on. We have professors. We have mathematicians. So like knowledge-driven, not vulnerability-driven. Exactly. Although sometimes vulnerability seeps its way in there. Sure, sure, sure. And so those are really, really fun.

We don't feel that that needs as much preservation of intimacy because as you said, it's more knowledge base and less vulnerability. So we thought it would be nice for people if they so choose to see our faces and see an interaction. A lot of people really enjoy YouTube.

then they have that. I've heard there's a whole demographic of people, more than there are even on podcasts, that they're on YouTube and that's where they're going to stay forever. They're not going to go to a platform. So this seems like a good idea if you want to bring this knowledge to people who only consume on YouTube. It's a great idea for that. And if you want to see the fact check and see Dax and Monica chit-chat and

Cry and laugh and fight. Recount their day. Yes. You can watch that or you don't have to watch anything. You can just listen as you've always been listening on any of the platforms. And that's our show. Oh, and then we have Fridays. Okay. What happens Fridays? We have Armchair Anonymous. That's a really fun show that we do with our listeners. And how that works is we put out prompts at the beginning of each month. Oh, fun. It's fun.

Tell us about a time you broke a bone. Tell us about a time you had an unauthorized evacuation. Ooh, that's up my alley. Yeah. Tell us about a time you were on the news. Like we'll put out a prompt, four prompts. Yeah. And people can go to our website, armchairexpertpod.com, and you can submit your story. Yeah. And if you get chosen...

then we chat with you for about 15 minutes and you tell us your story. And then we post that. Well, you know, this seems to answer a question I read a lot in the comments. Why don't you interview a normal person? Oh, well, we do. So Friday, I think it sounds like you interview four normal people every Friday. And I think

We're not interested in calling people normal on this show. No, this is what they're saying in the comments. I know. I'm telling them that we don't really use that word. It's not very – no one's normal. Right. Well. Yeah. Okay. No one's normal. We're all special. We're all special unicorns. Just like everyone else, though. That's the normalizing part. That's right. Yeah. Yeah.

And that's our show. That's confusing. That took 20 minutes. Yeah, and when I hear it laid out, it is very confusing. I can concede to that. So now you have some compassion. But I don't know what else to do. I think we're going to have to do this every...

Every single episode. Every episode, yeah. Okay, I think people will probably stop listening. Well. It's kind of like we're teachers in a classroom and you got to account for, like you want to move on to long division. Yeah. But people are still struggling with the multiplication. Do you think the teachers should move on for those advanced kids or should they wait until everyone understands? Well, that's the struggle. I guess you're trying to balance that because you don't want to lose the smart kids and get them bored and start doing drugs in the hallway or whatever. Yeah.

It's tough. But when you think about it now, I'm being sincere. Yeah. Well, it's impossible. You're like you're aiming at the average. And we know about the fallacy of the average. You're probably excluding more people than if you would just pick one side or the other. Right. But I guess that's why it's good. It's if schools have programs for children who are a little bit above average and children who need a little extra help. Yes. So there's other time. Yeah. Yeah.

for both of those groups. Yeah, and then you get into, there's only so many resources. Yeah, it does like, when you really think about it and you're generous, like we're also critical of school, like either the test bad or this or that. It's not an easy job to execute. No. You have 30 kids and they're all different levels. Yeah, it's really hard. Yeah. But when AI, AI teachers. That is one of the things, this is one of the few things I argued with

Bill about. Which was a weird argument. You couldn't, yeah, you couldn't see my point. I really could not. I'm coming from such a specific dyslexic place. I know, which to me means I would have thought you would be extra on board. Tell people. When we were in India with Bill Gates, we sat in on some meetings. I'm not really supposed to talk too much about the details, but there was like a

a presentation of an app that would help students because in India, there are so many languages. Yeah. And so... That's what it was. It was the technique that was explained. I was like, well, that wouldn't work for dyslexic. Sure. So I think that's what I got hung up on. But probably there's versions that they would develop that would work for a dyslexic. Yeah, exactly. But just...

What it scared me about was like normalizing some learning strategy. Because like the AI is going to go with the probabilistic route. 98% of kids would learn good if you did it this way. And then it's not going to do an unprobabilistic result. Although you could type in, I suppose, how to dyslexics best learn and then use the probabilistic thing. Yeah. I mean, I think it's actually, I think it's fairly easy. It probably when you first start learning,

the app, you take a test. And that would be good. And it shows, so it learns how you learn. This kid's fucked up in this quadrant. In this domain. And so then it, it, you put your homework into these things and it helps you learn in that way. Did I tell you about the, like, I had some testing when I was a kid, but it wasn't terribly comprehensive, but then I did it at UCLA to get extra. Well, actually so that I didn't have to spell correctly on tests. Oh yeah. Yeah.

That was a long, that was like eight weeks of testing. I had to go once a week and you do so many cognitive tests and what they're looking for and what was so apparent on mine is you have all these columns and what they're looking for is like some baseline and then a complete trough. Yeah. And I had that. Yeah. You had it in spelling. Yeah. And I'm going to brag. I even set a couple of records.

In the drop? Yeah, I did. Like my pattern recognition column was the best they had ever tested. Really? And then I had a column that was among the lowest they ever tested. Whoa, that's interesting. The dyslexic part. Yeah. And so... It's very addict-y of you. It is. It's very in keeping with my overall personality. Real high. High highs and low lows. High highs and low lows.

But it's comforting, though. Yeah, I'm sure. For me. Yeah, that would be comforting for me, too. But also, if your pattern recognition is so good, why did you stop playing Connections?

Because my battery? No. I mean, I wasn't that great at it. You were good. You were really good, but you weren't perfect. I wasn't perfect. I think you should maybe get back into it because you and Callie dropped off at the same time and now it's over. And I hate, I like. I'm sorry. I'm mad about it. I did play it a couple of times recently because now the girls will ask me to open it up.

Oh my God, I took a picture of it. Does this happen to you all the time? I got Wordle. I don't play Wordle. Yeah. But I got it on the second gas. I always screen grab it if I get it on the second. I screen grabbed it. The girls were, they thought their dad was like a god from Mount Olympus. That is luck. It's funny. It is and it isn't. Like for anyone who plays Wordle or doesn't, you start and you can write a word that has five letters in it. And then it'll tell you which one is A, the word,

the right letter and in the right place. And then it's got another color that says that letter is in this, but it's in the wrong place. And so when you first see that, you go, this is impossible. But then really, it's crazy how patternistic

writing is. It's like if there's an A as the third letter, it really limits it pretty quickly. Or there was an I and I was like, I's are hard to put in that fourth. You generally can have an A before that. And then you start, you know, like I mainly chalk it up to luck if it's a two. If it's a three, I start adding in skill. I start giving myself a little credit for skill. Okay. And then from then on, it is definitely like it's a

what letters could go here in the English language. Anyways, the girls are asking me when we're bored. In fact, we were waiting for our in and out order and we knew there was like 30 numbers before ours. And so they were like, let's play connections. We played that. And then it was, well, let's play wordle. Nice. All prompted by them. That's pretty fun with them. Cause I like to hear them think out loud. Okay. So today I didn't do that great. Um, I got it on four, which is not very good. Uh,

Yeah, that's pretty shitty. I'm teasing. I don't really know what's good in that. Well, my first word was crane, and I only had one letter that was yellow. Oh, what letter? E. Okay. We can work with that. Mm-hmm. So it's not going to be at the end. Yeah, that's what we know. That's the only thing we know. It's going to be in the second or third spot. Uh-huh. Correct. Yeah. And you got rid of some good consonants. Actually, sorry. Not correct. Not correct.

But that is what I did. Oh, what was the word? Modem. Oh, yeah, they fucked you. Well, no. So I did crane. Then I did smelt. Wild. I mean. And then I did moped. Really close. It was close. I had three in the correct place and one in the incorrect. So then it was clear to me that it was modem. Okay. This is fun. Good job. This is a fun fact. Okay. Let's do a little, a couple facts. Let's do some work. Okay. This is for Michael Morris.

Tribal. Loved it. Very interesting, fascinating topic. Okay, Dirty Dancing was filmed in multiple locations in North Carolina and Virginia, including Mountain Lake Lodge. Which is on Lake Lure. Mountain Lake Lodge, Lake Lure, Grove Park Inn.

I love Grove Park Inn. Where's that? Georgia? Asheville. Oh, it's in Asheville. Yeah, it's the fancy hotel there. Oh. Yeah. I always wanted to stay there. More than the Biltmore. You can't stay at the Biltmore. Oh, they don't have a hotel at this point? They should. Grove Park Inn is like, that is the fancy great hotel. The historic. And Esmeralda Inn. Replicating the Catskills. Yeah. You said Ann Arbor is tiny. Ann Arbor is tiny.

Is 28.7 square miles and it's 119,875 population. But what's the total enrollment at U of M? Oh. I bet it's in the 50 plus. That's a big ass school. Okay. 51,000. So we got to lob that off, right? Well...

Why? They live there. I think of a town with 60,000 people who own homes and permanent residence. As small. Yeah, it's kind of a small. Considering how many people know the town Ann Arbor. Sure. It's not our state capital. Most towns have 60,000 people who know the names. Yeah, but I think we know the name because of the college. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I forgot something to say about our show.

Uh-oh. More confusion? If you like our show so much that you want it a week early, you do have that option. Oh, you do? Yes. On Wondry Plus. Oh, okay. Great. So you go to Wondry Plus and you can pay to get our episodes a week early. Do they still have the ads in? Because if I'm paying, I don't want to hear ads. There are no ads. It's ad free.

Oh, that's what would get me there. A week early, I don't know, but ad free, that'd be for me. Ad free. And also, you can get three months for free to try out Wondery Plus to see if you like it. How do you get that? Go to armchairexpertpod.com? I think you go to Wondery Plus and you can click...

armchair expert and then you can figure it out. Okay. Yams versus sweet potatoes. They are different. Wow. I'm glad I got my mouth shut because when he said that, I thought, no, they're the same thing, but I'm not going to say anything. Facts.

Sweet potatoes are in the morning glory family while yams belong to the lily family. Oh, wow. So there's a lot of people who have morning glory allergies. Oh. Tomatoes being among them. Oh, I thought that was nightshade. Eggplant. Oh, you're right. Nightshades. I don't know if anyone's allergic to that. I don't know about morning glories. Morning glory. Okay. Yams aren't as sweet as sweet potatoes and they are starchier and drier.

Their texture and flavor are more similar to potatoes or yucca. Oh, okay. Yams have a rough, woody texture, while sweet potatoes have a smoother, creamier texture. I like a sweet potato. Yams have an earthy, neutral taste, while sweet potatoes have a sweet, spicy flavor. Oh, this is... Yams must be cooked before eating because they are toxic when eaten raw.

Good tip. Very good tip. They're probably inedible raw, though. They're probably super hard like a potato. I'm going to try it. Like you would never eat a potato raw. Oh, my God. Do you think that's what caused my incident? Do you think maybe I ate some raw yam? Raw potato. Speaking of which, I just recently found out, I just stumbled upon two different articles independently talking about how dangerous keeping rice is for a long time. Oh.

I guess it's really susceptible to a certain mold. You know, I eat fucking rice that's three weeks old. I got a new one I'm really on. It's going to sound gross to people, but I urge them to try it. It's elk, egg whites, and a ton of feta cheese. Doesn't that sound horrible? It really sounds bad. It doesn't sound like gamey, gamey, gamey?

Oh my God. It's so disgusting. You know, when I'm saying it, like Kristen's like, what are you eating? And I'm like, it's elk, egg whites and feta. And as I was saying, I was like, that sounds like the worst dish possible. Yeah.

And oh my God, is it good. And I take a gluten-free tortilla. I took some chicken wire and I made a little tube out of the chicken wire. I put it in the air fryer and I make a taco shell out of the tortilla that is gluten-free and high in fiber. And I cram it full of egg whites, elk, and feta. And girl. You love it. Oh, is it tasty? I was like, I could open up a restaurant and serve these. Of course, I'd have to lie about what's in it because no one would see that list and think it was good. No, they wouldn't.

But if you're daring and you're in the audience and you figured out our listening schedule, I really urge you to try it. Here's the thing to remember, though. For real, you can do everything just audio as it was. Like, that's still available. The original thing is still there. I do want to reiterate that. Also, it's a mess, and that's what we're saying. It's a messiness. Messiness of being human. Yeah, the show's no mess.

It's not a mess. It's just there's added stuff. And the added stuff is... It's only a mess if you're trying to get all the new bells and whistles. Exactly. But you should. Yeah. But you should. Absolutely. Now, I have a apology to make to Arizona State. Okay. I've been critical of Arizona State. Yeah. And Rhode Island. I'm not apologizing about that. Okay. Great. It's a tough people. I've been a little critical about Arizona State, mainly because of their...

amusement park that they have at the university, meaning the lazy river. Yeah. It's just fun to sort of make fun of it. Yeah. Yeah. I don't actually have any problems with it. Also, what could be cooler than the lazy river? I'm just jealous. Yeah. I'm jealous too. I wish UCLA, if I could have got in my lazy river and taken it to another class across campus. Can you imagine though, the germs, all these college kids with STIs. Yeah.

It's successful. Yeah, the chlorine level's got to be pretty high in that thing. Yeah. So Michael brought up Robert Boyd. He said he's a UCLA anthropology professor and that he's really awesome, that he would win a Nobel Prize if there was that for anthropology. But Robert Boyd

Is also affiliated with Arizona State. Goes to Sun Devils. I think currently he's there. He was at Duke, Emory, ding, ding, ding. Boston. No, Emory's in Atlanta.

Oops. Wow, you really don't know where colleges are. I'm thinking of Emerson. Oh, okay. And the University of California, Los Angeles. Okay. All right. So he's at ASU now, and that's impressive. Yeah. Take his class. Yeah. If you're at Arizona State, once you get off your little lazy river. You're listening to this as you float down the lazy river. Hop off that river, get in an STI suit.

You get screened for those. And then take his class, Robert Boyd. Okay, I have one more fact. Okay. Barristers wear wigs. Oh, yes, yes. Okay. I thought there was a lice thing about it. I know. You thought there was lice. I'm not finding that. But it started in the 1600s. Before that...

They just had to have neatly trimmed hair and beards. Then in the 1600s, originating in Europe, wigs became a popular fashion item in the UK during the reign of King Charles II, especially among the upper class and aristocracy of the time. The wig was seen as a symbol of authority and lawyers would wear their wigs in the courtroom as well as outside of it to show their status and power.

Despite evidence suggesting some lawyers were hesitant to wear the wigs, by the end of King Charles II's reign, wigs were fully accepted by judges. A century or so later, the popularity of the wig waned. However, the tradition to wear wigs within the legal profession remained and became a formal requirement.

Wigs are still commonplace in the courtroom, almost thought of as a uniform to maintain the long tradition and formality of the legal system. However, the wigs have undergone some changes. Originally, the wigs worn in courtrooms were fully bottomed, which would typically extend down past the neck at the back and sides and sit over the shoulders. Now the full bottomed wig is only used as ceremonial dress. The wigs most often seen today are bob style wigs with much shorter sides all around and featuring a tail at the back.

Guys. Oh, man. I mean, of all the different ways that we've tried to elevate ourselves, this, I mean, that is the, the aliens watching that. I know. Men wearing long flowing hair, wigs. And women. Everyone has to wear it. Well, there was no women in

the court. Well, now I'm saying now. Also, it says in 2007, a change in the rules meant barristers no longer needed to wear a wig during civil and family law court. Thank God. There's some fucking heartbroken child talking about the divorce of their parents and some abuse. And we got a guy in a fucking powdered wig.

With a ponytail. That's like insulting. I'm so sorry. Can you remove this fucking Halloween wig you're wearing? They're also no longer required in the UK Supreme Court. However, wigs are still a requirement for criminal trials in the UK and while

Isn't it true, sir, that on the night of the... I'm so sorry. I will answer this question. But why are you in costume? Whilst the requirement of wigs in the courtroom seems to be in decline around the world, many law practitioners in the UK still take pride in wearing them. Do you think like a big moment, you know, like getting your varsity jacket? Yeah. Do you think like you pass the bar in England, you go get fitted for your powdered wig? Probably.

Probably. And you know what? Sure. I'm not trying to shame you if you have a hair system or a hair piece. That's it. Okay. Well, I love Michael Morris. Me too. We learned a lot. And I love you. I love you. And I love Robbie. I love Robbie. And I love the arm cherries. And I love you guys for sticking with this very complicated show. All right. I love you. All right. I love you.

Follow Armchair Expert on the Wondery app, Amazon Music, or wherever you get your podcasts. You can listen to every episode of Armchair Expert early and ad-free right now by joining Wondery Plus in the Wondery app or on Apple Podcasts. Before you go, tell us about yourself by completing a short survey at wondery.com slash survey.

In a quiet suburb, a community is shattered by the death of a beloved wife and mother. But this tragic loss of life quickly turns into something even darker. Her husband had tried to hire a hitman on the dark web to kill her. And she wasn't the only target. Because buried in the depths of the internet is the Kill List, a cache of chilling documents containing names, photos, addresses, and specific instructions for people's murders.

This podcast is the true story of how I ended up in a race against time to warn those who lives were in danger. And it turns out convincing a total stranger someone wants them dead is not easy. Follow Kill List on the Wondery app or wherever you get your podcasts. You can listen to Kill List and more Exhibit C True Crime shows like Morbid early and ad-free right now by joining Wondery Plus. Check out Exhibit C in the Wondery app for all your true crime listening.