Michael Morris: Tribal Ties in Modern Times

0:00:15 “Hello friends of Remarkable People, this is Guy Kawasaki and you know we are on a mission
0:00:18 to make you remarkable.
0:00:22 Helping me in this episode is the remarkable Michael Morris.
0:00:28 Now Michael is a professor of leadership and psychology at Columbia University and he has
0:00:33 literally spent decades studying how culture shapes human behavior.
0:00:37 We’re going to be talking about tribes today.
0:00:43 A lot of us are Seth Godin fans and if you’re a Seth Godin fan, you think of tribe as something
0:00:47 really great that you build the tribe.
0:00:52 On the other hand, in the political environment, a tribe could be taken as a negative.
0:00:58 Michael has a book called Tribal, how the cultural instincts that divide us can help
0:01:00 bring us together.
0:01:07 And he argues that our tribal instinct, which is often blamed for social division, can actually
0:01:09 bring people together.
0:01:13 What a great topic he covered for us.
0:01:18 So Michael aims to show how understanding our cultural motivations can mobilize groups
0:01:20 and create political change.
0:01:22 I’m Guy Kawasaki.
0:01:34 This is remarkable people and now here is the remarkable Michael Morris.
0:01:37 Can you just define what a tribe is?
0:01:43 Because I think for a while because of Seth Godin that tribe became a positive thing and
0:01:47 now not clear to me that being part of a tribe is necessarily positive.
0:01:51 Let’s start with a definition of what a tribe is.
0:01:59 A tribe is a large group that is united by shared ideas, whether those are passions or
0:02:02 goals or framework assumptions.
0:02:05 A tribe is a group that is united by a culture.
0:02:09 And we are the only animals who have tribes.
0:02:14 Some other animals have the very rudiments of culture like pods of dolphins will develop
0:02:20 a particular way of fishing and chimpanzee troops will develop a way of cracking nuts,
0:02:23 but it never develops very far in other species.
0:02:33 But in our species, we had a couple of mutations in early humans that unlocked this potential
0:02:39 to live in groups that were not united by kinship or even by necessarily close friendship, but
0:02:42 they were just united by common understanding.
0:02:47 And so I think Seth Godin is really on track and especially with regard to understanding
0:02:54 why the tribe metaphor works really well for groups, especially say a startup company or
0:03:00 a mission-driven company where it’s more than the revenue, more than authority, it’s the
0:03:05 shared understanding that unites people and motivates people.
0:03:11 To your second point, part of the reason I wrote this book is that I’ve done research
0:03:17 for decades on how cultural frameworks shape people, how they shape literally what you
0:03:20 see and what you do.
0:03:24 And some of the work has been really influential in academia, but that doesn’t mean that the
0:03:27 rest of the world takes notice, right?
0:03:34 And over the last, say, five years, I’ve noticed that you can’t open a newspaper without seeing
0:03:40 a new conflict, whether it’s a partisan conflict in the states or a racial ethnic conflict in
0:03:47 the workplace or a sectarian civil war somewhere, some sort of religious strife.
0:03:49 And I don’t think any of that is really new.
0:03:52 I think we’ve always had conflicts.
0:03:57 But what I do think is new is that there’s a kind of despair or cynicism about it.
0:04:02 And it often takes the form of chalking it all up to tribalism.
0:04:06 And there’s not a lot of definitions given when the pundits talk about tribalism or
0:04:08 the politicians talk about tribalism.
0:04:11 It’s more an accusation than really an analysis.
0:04:16 It’s a way of saying that the other side is being irrational, tribalism.
0:04:22 And I think that we could benefit a lot from some more psychological clarity about what
0:04:23 tribal thinking is.
0:04:28 And what tribal thinking is really is thinking in terms of shared cultural frameworks and
0:04:32 acting on motivations based on shared ideals.
0:04:38 So I’m trying to demystify this genie called tribalism that the pundits talk about in
0:04:39 despairing tones.
0:04:45 And I think that tribalism consists of some psychological processes that we know quite
0:04:50 a bit about and that we know how to nudge and that we know how to shift.
0:04:51 And so that’s my goal.
0:04:55 That’s why I wrote this book for the broad audience.
0:05:01 So from a positive standpoint, what does a tribe enable a group of humans to do that
0:05:04 is advantageous and positive?
0:05:08 Well, a tribe enables, first of all, peace.
0:05:14 I know Jane Goodall is a friend of yours and I’ve been on the show and I love chimpanzees.
0:05:18 I think they’re wonderful animals, but you could never have a chimpanzee in Manhattan
0:05:25 because that many unrelated adult chimpanzees on a small island would just be a bloodbath.
0:05:30 And chimpanzees, even in small groups, even in their troops, they can’t coordinate on
0:05:31 tasks.
0:05:36 So they may hunt together side by side and one chimpanzee may accidentally help out another
0:05:41 chimpanzee by spooking some prey, but they can’t work from the same script together.
0:05:46 They can’t collaborate in the way that we can because we have these shared frameworks
0:05:47 that guide us.
0:05:49 We’re living in tribes.
0:05:53 It was a way to create cooperation and peace and coordination.
0:06:01 And then it also became a way to create continuity and to build on the wisdom of the past so
0:06:06 that the culture in a group accumulates across the generations and the group gets wiser and
0:06:09 wiser even if the individuals are no smarter.
0:06:16 So from a scientific standpoint, if you have two tribes, it’s not necessarily the case
0:06:19 that those two tribes will be in conflict.
0:06:22 They could just be different tribes.
0:06:27 Or is it assumed that your tribe and my tribe were going to go at loggerheads because we’re
0:06:29 in different tribes?
0:06:34 Most people assume that, but they should not assume that because evolution created these
0:06:38 tribal instincts for solidarity, for in-group solidarity.
0:06:42 Like, early humans didn’t have that much contact without groups.
0:06:45 The population wasn’t very dense then.
0:06:51 What really mattered was that they had instincts that guided solidarity within the group and
0:06:54 allowed for cooperation and allowed for peaceful relationships.
0:06:58 Now tribal instincts can contribute to conflicts.
0:07:00 They can in many ways.
0:07:03 But that’s not a necessary outcome.
0:07:06 Solidarity does not imply antagonism.
0:07:11 Sometimes an out-group can help you bond in the same way that the early MAC commercials
0:07:17 set up the PC guy as this out-group that helped define what a MAC guy is, right?
0:07:21 But it doesn’t have to be that way, and that’s not the core of it.
0:07:27 Would you define Republicans as a tribe and MAGA as a tribe and Democrats as a tribe and
0:07:28 liberals as a tribe?
0:07:29 Definitely.
0:07:35 I think that the red and blue tribes, there are organizations that are not really tribes
0:07:38 because they don’t really share that much.
0:07:46 So 50 years ago, both the Democrat Party and the Republican Party had a lot of policy diversity
0:07:47 within each party.
0:07:53 There was a Southern conservative wing and a more liberal Northern wing within each party,
0:07:57 and people often had more in common with parts of the opposite party than with the other
0:07:58 side of their own party.
0:08:04 But I think what’s happened to political parties in the United States over the last 20 years
0:08:12 is that the red and blue identities have become mega identities because we sorted residentially
0:08:17 where liberals moved to the coasts and to college towns and conservatives moved to the
0:08:21 heartland and to rural areas and exerbs.
0:08:27 And then once you had cable media, cable news shows where you’re sorting into where you
0:08:33 get your news based on partisan identities, and then social media just made it far worse
0:08:39 because you have these echo chambers where my own behavior elicits confirmation from
0:08:43 the news feed that I trust to be a barometer of the world.
0:08:50 So we’ve come into a world now where we, you know, I’m a liberal and I have to confess
0:08:52 I get my news from places.
0:08:56 They’re not necessarily kind to the conservative viewpoint.
0:08:57 They caricature it.
0:09:01 They leave out details that conservatives like to focus on.
0:09:08 And so I think they’ve become very rich tribes and primary identities for people in a way
0:09:09 that they weren’t.
0:09:14 I think 50 years ago, your religious identity as a Catholic or a Protestant or a Jew, it
0:09:15 was way more important.
0:09:20 Your ethnic identity was way more important, and people tended to live in neighborhoods
0:09:22 that were more ethnically sorted.
0:09:30 And so I think that we do see a change in how much these partisan identities are fundamental
0:09:35 tribes that shape people’s identities and their sense of who they are.
0:09:43 So if you were given the goal of reducing the negative aspects of these tribes so that
0:09:51 there’s more peace and cooperation and mutually acceptable goals and methods, what would you
0:09:52 do today?
0:09:53 It’s interesting.
0:09:54 Lots of people are trying it.
0:10:00 This depolarization, bridging the divide has become, it’s like a collection of movements.
0:10:03 There’s all sorts of foundations doing it.
0:10:09 And there are researchers studying the effectiveness of different programs and different approaches.
0:10:15 And the core of most of these ideas is that if we can get people to talk to each other
0:10:21 in an equal status situation, they will start to listen to each other, and their views will
0:10:24 become more moderate, and then they will become more respectful towards each other.
0:10:30 It’s a theory called the contact hypothesis that was used with regard to race relations
0:10:31 in the past.
0:10:37 The problem is that a lot of these bridge organizations are called things like high from
0:10:45 the other side or the red-blue rift or the urban-rural dialogue.
0:10:50 And it accentuates that you’re talking to somebody from the other side.
0:10:57 And then there are some other ones that are called things like Coffee Party America, or
0:10:59 they’re all about land preservation or something.
0:11:04 They focus on an issue that kind of cuts across the red-blue divide.
0:11:10 And the study is fine that when a liberal talks to a conservative about a completely
0:11:17 non-political issue, that depolarizes them more than if they talk about a political issue.
0:11:24 And if it’s not made super salient that the other person is a Republican, then you learn
0:11:28 and you become more moderate as a function of the bipartisan contact.
0:11:32 But if it’s made very salient that you’re a liberal and you’re a Democrat and you’re
0:11:35 talking to a conservative, then people don’t learn from the conversation.
0:11:37 Their guard is up, essentially.
0:11:44 Okay, so what does that mean that we should have these movements led by people who love
0:11:49 football, people who love stock car racing, people who love the Olympics, people who love
0:11:50 sushi?
0:11:56 I mean, what do we use as this kind of neutral, unifying force?
0:11:57 Those are all great ideas.
0:12:03 This research showing that during the Olympics, the affective polarization like the mutual
0:12:07 loathing between the red and the blue, it declines during the Olympics because during
0:12:13 the Olympics, we all feel like Americans and we’re not focused on our internal division.
0:12:18 I think it’s finding things that people are passionate about that aren’t politicized
0:12:20 issues.
0:12:25 Those are more likely to start a conversation that will sustain beyond the one-hour program
0:12:29 because you talk to somebody, you love coffee, they love coffee, you say, “Oh, let’s meet
0:12:32 at this new coffee place or let’s meet at this new sushi place.”
0:12:33 Surfing.
0:12:34 Surfing.
0:12:35 Yes.
0:12:37 I surfed with Republicans.
0:12:42 When I lived out in the Bay Area, I used to surf in Santa Cruz and I wasn’t very good.
0:12:47 In fact, I was terrible, but I did it as part of my larping as a Californian.
0:12:52 I wanted to feel like a Californian, so I had to learn how to surf.
0:12:59 In your book, you talk about the three instincts, peer, hero, and instinct.
0:13:03 Can you just explain how that fits into tribes?
0:13:04 Sure.
0:13:10 That’s basically where I’m trying to break tribalism, tribal motivations, tribal thinking,
0:13:12 break it down into pieces.
0:13:18 With most academic things, I could probably break it down into 50 pieces if I was writing
0:13:26 an academic paper, but there are three major waves that correspond to different group psychology
0:13:31 systems in our heads that I think are useful to distinguish and they offer different levers
0:13:34 for managing culture, for changing culture.
0:13:39 You could think of them as the urge to fit in and match with other people around you,
0:13:45 the drive to contribute to your community, and the ache to maintain traditions and continuity.
0:13:50 These are three fundamental sides of us, almost like three characters that live within
0:13:51 each person.
0:13:57 There’s the conformist, there’s the aspirational person who wants to do good, and then there’s
0:14:01 the nostalgic sentimental backward-looking person.
0:14:05 The peer instinct is what I call the conformist instinct.
0:14:10 It’s our sideways glances at classmates, coworkers, neighbors, keeping up with the Joneses.
0:14:15 When you put a student in a math classroom that is operating at a higher level, the student
0:14:18 tends to rise to the level of the classroom.
0:14:25 We are wired to kind of be the same, to mesh with, to match the people around us.
0:14:31 That evolved really early for early humans, for Homo erectus like two million years ago,
0:14:38 and it allowed for coordinated activity in a way that other primates can’t do.
0:14:42 Antelope hunting, chasing an antelope in a group, taking turns chasing it until the antelopes
0:14:49 exhausted or gathering in ways that require more than one person.
0:14:54 Collective foraging is way more efficient than each individual doing it themselves.
0:14:56 That was one major breakthrough.
0:15:02 Then, a second major breakthrough in human social life happened about half a million
0:15:08 years ago, and this was Homo neanderthalis.
0:15:15 This is what we can recognize in ourselves as our upward attention to CEOs and MVPs and
0:15:22 noblists and our quest to contribute, our yearning for status and tribute.
0:15:27 It’s status-seeking we often think of as a shallow thing, but status-seeking drives
0:15:29 most of the contributions to the world.
0:15:32 Why do people like you and I work so hard?
0:15:35 Because we want to be respected by other people.
0:15:37 This was something new under the sun.
0:15:42 You started having valiant hunters who would sacrifice themselves so that the tribe could
0:15:46 bring down a woolly mammoth, or you started to have people learning how to make spears
0:15:52 that were better spears even though it took years of work to figure it out, or building
0:15:55 shelters to protect the elderly for the first time.
0:16:00 All of these things where you were doing something that had a personal cost, but it was for the
0:16:05 greater good, but you eventually got paid back by the respect that people gave you.
0:16:13 And then only in the last 100,000 years, there’s another new side of human social interest.
0:16:19 And that’s the sort of backward-looking interest in past generations, an interest in our ancestors,
0:16:21 the ancestor instinct.
0:16:28 And we see examples of this with cave art, where you have caves that were painted in
0:16:35 maybe 200,000 years ago and then sealed off by a landslide and then opened up again by
0:16:37 another landslide.
0:16:40 And what did the the Cro-Magnon people 60,000 years ago do?
0:16:44 Well, they would venture into this cave and they would see this cave art that they had
0:16:46 no idea where it came from.
0:16:51 And unlike the cavemen in Hollywood movies, they didn’t run away, they didn’t seal off
0:16:54 the cave, they didn’t act primitive and superstitious.
0:16:59 Instead, they studied the art like you or I would at a gallery, and they learned the
0:17:03 technique, and then they extended some of the murals that a completely different group
0:17:10 of people 100,000 years before had, not 100,000, but maybe 10,000 years before had started.
0:17:16 So it’s this kind of fascination and reverence with the ways of the past, even the ways that
0:17:20 are not immediately practical.
0:17:26 And this curiosity about ways of the past, eagerness to learn it, drive to maintain these
0:17:32 ways of the past, this is something that created cultural memory, because suppose we were in
0:17:37 a tribe that figured out boat making, and then you have a mini ice age, and for many
0:17:42 generations nobody needs a boat, the boat making was kept alive because we would know
0:17:46 the ancestors made boats and we would want to make them even if we couldn’t use them.
0:17:49 And so it was a way to create memory.
0:17:53 Before that, people are were innovative, but they had to reinvent the wheel every generation
0:17:56 because a lot of things got lost.
0:18:01 But once people were curious to listen to elders and curious to pick up an old arrowhead
0:18:06 that they find on the ground, and then model after that technique, it created this cultural
0:18:09 memory and then you had this continuity.
0:18:13 And then once you had all three of these things together, then the real magic happened, which
0:18:19 is cultural accumulation that human groups started building on the expertise of past
0:18:23 generations with each generation, and sort of tuning their knowledge to their particular
0:18:28 ecology, whether it was the desert or the rainforest.
0:18:31 And so cultures differentiated and they became much richer.
0:18:37 This is often what’s called the creative explosion in the human journey, where suddenly you
0:18:43 had homo sapiens multiplying in numbers, migrating all across the planet, and essentially moving
0:18:46 to the top of the food chain, becoming the dominant species.
0:18:47 And there was no looking back.
0:18:51 That we just left the rest of the primate pack in our dust.
0:18:54 And we just became a completely different kind of animal.
0:18:58 And it wasn’t that our brains were getting any bigger, it was that our sort of cultural
0:19:01 brains were getting bigger, our cultural brains were getting bigger.
0:19:06 And that’s really the secret of our success, that we only like 1% of what I know or you
0:19:11 know, did we learn ourselves, the rest is just inherited from the past.
0:19:19 And so that was the sort of killer app of the humankind, culture and cumulative culture.
0:19:21 And it made us who we are today.
0:19:25 And so things like conformity and status seeking and nostalgia.
0:19:30 When I was growing up, I thought of those as weaknesses, as like human follies and should
0:19:35 derive those things and we should leave them behind and we should try to focus on being
0:19:37 rational and being ethical and all these things.
0:19:41 But I’ve come to think that’s very incomplete and that we have to understand that our strongest
0:19:48 motivations come from these tribal instincts, both as people trying to sustain our personal
0:19:54 motivation and as leaders trying to implant motivation or salespeople trying to hook into
0:19:55 some of these motivations.
0:20:03 We need to be aware of these tribal instincts and how we can manage them and redirect them.
0:20:24 And what is the difference between a tribe and a cult?
0:20:25 Great question.
0:20:29 I often read that a cult is just a strong culture.
0:20:31 I often see that asserted.
0:20:36 And I think that we often call things cults that are not really cults.
0:20:41 Where I work with some of the computer science professors, they think all these AI companies
0:20:45 have become cults because they all have secretive knowledge and they don’t really know how their
0:20:46 programs work.
0:20:49 But I think there’s a really clear difference.
0:20:59 A cult is a community that engages in a particular set of activities to create a monopoly of
0:21:03 status with one leader or one group of leaders.
0:21:10 And what defines a cult to cult researchers is what they call network closure or network
0:21:11 capture.
0:21:16 So a typical cult, like in the old days, say the Unification Church of Reverend Sun Young
0:21:22 Moon, they would find a lonely college student on campus, maybe someone who had recently arrived.
0:21:28 They would invite them to a dinner and love bomb them with incredibly warm behavior.
0:21:33 And then this recruit would be invited to a workshop usually held in a rural area where
0:21:37 phones don’t work and there’s no TV for about a week.
0:21:44 And it would be long days without much sleep of the ways that you indoctrinate people.
0:21:48 And then they would encourage them to move into a church residence, collective living
0:21:49 kind of thing.
0:21:53 And then eventually probably be better if you cut off ties with your family and your
0:21:57 old friends, because we know most of these outsiders are hostile to the good mission
0:21:59 of the church.
0:22:01 And the Moonies had a special word for that too.
0:22:07 I think they called it heavenly deception, that it was like a lie, but for a good cause.
0:22:09 And then parents were typically quite angry.
0:22:14 And then that kind of corroborated the cult’s story about the mainstream being hostile.
0:22:20 And so what happens there is the recruit gradually gets into a world where they’re enveloped
0:22:26 by fellow cult members and where the only, I guess, what I would call prestige signals,
0:22:30 the only deference, the only admiration is towards the cult leader.
0:22:32 It’s a monolithic system.
0:22:39 And in our everyday life, we may respect the CEO, but we may also respect the Pope or we
0:22:42 may also respect Mick Jagger.
0:22:45 We have a sort of balance of heroes.
0:22:49 And so no one of those heroes can completely dominate us.
0:22:54 But in a cult, the cult leaders have a monopoly on status.
0:23:01 And so it’s really hard for people to question them and the approval of the cult leaders
0:23:02 becomes like a drug.
0:23:07 One of the only effective ways to get people out of a cult is a sort of setterfuge where
0:23:14 you put a spy into the cult, who’s like a very capable person, and they rise to a certain
0:23:20 level of status within the cult, and then they leave in a very ostentatious way.
0:23:23 People often leave cults because there can only be one leader.
0:23:30 When an insider leaves, that creates an opportunity for others to leave because they can say,
0:23:37 “Ah, this person always has been high status, and they’re leaving, and so I can leave.”
0:23:44 So it’s a way of using the status deference in a cult against the cult by creating a high
0:23:46 status person who leaves.
0:23:51 You can’t exactly make the case that Liz Cheney pulled that off, right?
0:23:58 I mean, seriously, isn’t the Republican Party today a cult by what you just described?
0:24:03 They all worship Donald Trump, and it’s all about Trump at this point.
0:24:04 Almost all about Trump.
0:24:05 Yeah.
0:24:06 It’s getting there.
0:24:10 There are parts of it that are, there are still never Trumpers, but they’re diminishing.
0:24:14 So I think, yeah, it’s verging on that.
0:24:18 Certainly the MAGA contingent is verging on that, and they have their hats.
0:24:24 They have the sorts of things that are really strong culture, the hats that make them as
0:24:29 a symbol, and they’ve got their particular words that they use to mean things.
0:24:30 So it’s verging on a cult.
0:24:31 Okay.
0:24:32 I don’t want to go into that.
0:24:33 That’s cool.
0:24:38 Now, let’s take the positive aspects of a tribe.
0:24:39 I don’t know.
0:24:44 Maybe you’re the CEO or CMO of a company, and you intentionally want to create a tribe
0:24:51 like the Macintosh Tribe or the GPT tribe or the Mead tribe or something.
0:24:54 So how do you create a tribe?
0:24:58 And I mean this in the positive sense, not the MAGA sense.
0:25:00 I think the Macintosh Tribe is a good example.
0:25:02 You’re the expert.
0:25:08 But I think I remember from the history of maybe from your book, but maybe from elsewhere,
0:25:13 at one point Apple put all the Macintosh people in their own building, and they flew like
0:25:15 a pirate flag or something.
0:25:20 So they created this sense of we’re subversive, we’re not the mainstream, we’re not corporate
0:25:22 America, we’re the Macintosh people.
0:25:27 And I think that Apple was also very good at creating a tribe among Mac users by the
0:25:32 Think Different ad campaign that I know you’re one of the stewards of it.
0:25:36 It’s interesting because it really plays into this idea that I’m not one of them.
0:25:42 I’m part of this group where I have these cultural heroes like Albert Einstein and Steve Jobs
0:25:48 that are people who did it their own way and shifted the paradigm, that sort of thing.
0:25:55 Creating heroes, creating conformity similarity within the group by a common workplace, and
0:26:00 then eventually celebrating traditions and building ceremonies and rituals.
0:26:06 So I don’t know whether there were cultural traditions within the Mac Division of Apple
0:26:10 that were part of what made people feel like, okay, this is who we are.
0:26:12 This is the Macintosh Tribe.
0:26:18 I think the closest thing we had to a ritual was getting the free orange juice in the refrigerator,
0:26:20 which at the time was a big deal.
0:26:23 I mean, listen, the Macintosh Division was so long ago.
0:26:28 If you gave people free Odwalla juice, that was a huge thing.
0:26:33 It’s not like Google where they have vegan sushi and I don’t know, non-GMO, barbecue
0:26:36 sauce and everything and ping pong and volleyball.
0:26:38 We just had free juice.
0:26:40 That was good enough.
0:26:48 But I will tell you that I think the Macintosh Tribe, although we also call that the cult,
0:26:54 but I don’t think that we ever worship Steve Jobs to the extent that we thought he was
0:26:58 derivative from God and everything he said was perfectly true.
0:27:03 There was a lot of arguing with him, but when you argued with Steve Jobs, you sure as hell
0:27:08 better have your act together because if you were wrong, you were going to get drilled.
0:27:11 Yeah, I believe it.
0:27:12 I believe it.
0:27:17 I never met him, but I would sometimes see him in Palo Alto when I lived there, like at
0:27:20 a restaurant and even the waiters were terrified.
0:27:24 Now, so let’s say that you create a tribe, the Macintosh Tribe.
0:27:29 What are the danger signals that you should say, “Uh-oh, we’re going too far.
0:27:31 We should pull back here.
0:27:34 This is going to turn destructive and evil.”
0:27:35 That’s a good question.
0:27:40 I think that one thing you see a lot is that when you create an intense culture within
0:27:46 a division or a company, then one way that managers will do that is by setting up the
0:27:50 competition or some other company as a rival, as the outgroup that we’re different from
0:27:58 them, and then there becomes a tendency to denigrate and caricature that other side.
0:28:03 That’s really bad for business because if you’re underestimating the competition or
0:28:10 if you’re dismissing their technology or their strategy just because they’re doing it, then
0:28:15 that gets in the way of clear thinking and people get anchored by the ways of the past.
0:28:22 So I think when the ancestor instinct is healthy, when it’s about maintaining and defending
0:28:28 our traditions, where it becomes unhealthy is when it’s denigrating other people’s traditions.
0:28:32 But it can slip into that, especially when people are threatened.
0:28:38 So it’s a dangerous thing because say when a company starts to lose out to the competition,
0:28:42 that’s when the temptation to denigrate the competition will be strongest, but that’s
0:28:47 when it’s also most problematic because it’s a moment when you should be learning from
0:28:48 the competition.
0:28:54 I’ll tell you, the McIntosh division guilty as charged because we definitely denigrated
0:28:57 the IBM PC and IBM in general.
0:28:58 What can I say?
0:29:01 Now, I’ll give you a hypothetical, Michael.
0:29:06 Let’s suppose that you are now Speaker of the House.
0:29:08 How would you govern differently?
0:29:09 In the House.
0:29:11 That’s a tough one.
0:29:16 What’s going on right now almost defies description, which is that the Speaker of the House is
0:29:21 getting things done through the Democrats, not through the Republicans.
0:29:25 That’s where he’s gotten his votes from, the Democrats, because Hakeem Jeffries can get
0:29:26 people to line up and vote.
0:29:33 Now, if I was in the House, I think in an organization like that, you count votes and
0:29:37 you have to find a requisite consensus.
0:29:39 You’re not going to get 100%.
0:29:42 You may need 51%.
0:29:47 And so you have to engage in what’s called legislative negotiation, which means I understand
0:29:55 exactly what the more liberal Republicans would need in order to sign on.
0:30:00 And so I can reach across the aisle and I can say, “Hey, we’re going to build in a rider
0:30:05 to this bill that takes care of something.”
0:30:10 So it’s an abortion bill, but there’s an exception in the case, something like that.
0:30:14 Because I really see them accurately and I know their preferences.
0:30:19 So as a negotiator, I can give them exactly the concession that works for them and gets
0:30:22 them above threshold to say yes.
0:30:26 I know you’ve had negotiation people like Bill Urie on your show in the past.
0:30:28 So it’s the getting to yes idea.
0:30:33 I think the problem is that we don’t see much reaching across the aisle anymore.
0:30:35 It’s become very rare.
0:30:40 And I think it’s because politicians have what we call partisan blindness, which is
0:30:43 that they don’t see the other side accurately.
0:30:47 They stereotype the other side and they tend to see the other side as like the opposite
0:30:50 of them and as very extreme.
0:30:56 So when you ask Republicans what percentage of Democrats are LGBTQ identified, they’ll
0:31:00 say something like 30%, whereas in reality, it’s 9%.
0:31:02 It’s about the same as it is in every other group.
0:31:05 And they really think it’s 30%.
0:31:11 And when you ask Democrats about Republicans, they also have these mistaken perceptions
0:31:12 of the other side.
0:31:19 I think what I would try to do is both myself personally and with the sort of core group
0:31:24 of people who would be my arm twisters and back room negotiators, try to make sure people
0:31:29 are understanding the other side accurately and understanding that the other side is a
0:31:30 spectrum.
0:31:35 And it’s not a monolith and that there are issues like, say environmental issues, there
0:31:43 are ways that liberals can reach out to conservatives speaking in terms of conservative values.
0:31:49 So recently, it was part of Biden’s Inflation Act had a lot of environmental provisions.
0:31:54 And one way they got relatively conservative people, whether it’s Manchin, who’s a conservative
0:32:02 Democrat, or some of the more liberal Republicans, the way they got them on board was by having
0:32:10 clerics talk about the sanctity of the earth and the Christian obligation to preserve the
0:32:15 world for future generations or the Jewish tradition to heal the world.
0:32:20 The words of clerics and the sort of obligation of tradition, that rings true to a lot of
0:32:22 conservative ears.
0:32:29 And liberals usually make the case for environmentalism in terms of liberal values like unfairness
0:32:33 or we should try to make sure that society is equal and fair and it’s not fair that some
0:32:36 groups suffer from these environmental problems more than others.
0:32:40 That’s a good way to convince another liberal, but it’s not necessarily the way to convince
0:32:45 a conservative, but this religious discourse is better for convincing a conservative.
0:32:51 So you’re saying we talk about climate change as we should protect this God-given earth.
0:32:52 Exactly.
0:32:56 Yeah, you’re good at this.
0:32:58 You obviously managed a lot of salespeople.
0:32:59 You’ve been very involved in that.
0:33:03 And good salespeople, they don’t try to change the values of the customer they’re talking
0:33:04 to.
0:33:10 They try to find the identity within that customer that implies that they should buy an apple,
0:33:15 whether it’s that they were a liberal arts person, or that they’re a political radical,
0:33:20 or that they ride a motorcycle, whatever it is, you find that thing that is already part
0:33:21 of somebody’s identity.
0:33:25 And then you say, well, you know, as a motorcycle rider, don’t tell me you’re going to buy
0:33:26 an IBM.
0:33:29 You work with the momentum of what’s already in them.
0:33:32 When I go surfing today, I’m going to go out there and say, as a surfer, don’t tell
0:33:38 me you’re going to vote for Donald Trump because he’s going to ruin the ocean, right?
0:33:47 So are you basically seeing marketing advices you build from commonality as opposed to conversion?
0:33:51 I think a great example is Martin Luther, Jr. King, when he gave his “I Have a Dream”
0:33:52 speech.
0:33:59 He didn’t spend the time in that speech talking about all of the inequity that African Americans
0:34:03 and his movement had suffered, even though he had been attacked with police dogs just
0:34:04 shortly before.
0:34:10 Instead, he talked about the American dream and the Declaration of Independence that all
0:34:16 men are created equal and he recited the lyrics to America, the beautiful, sweet land of liberty.
0:34:22 And what he was doing is he was calling on the egalitarian values that are inside of
0:34:26 all Americans because he wasn’t just talking to the activists in Washington.
0:34:31 He was talking to every American in their living room who was watching on television.
0:34:37 And instead of converting them, he sort of evoked the ideals within them.
0:34:41 And he did it through symbols, through iconic symbols.
0:34:46 And I think that’s also what the Think Different campaign did, is you didn’t explain what it
0:34:48 means to think different.
0:34:52 You show them a picture of Gandhi, you show them a picture of Albert Einstein, especially
0:34:55 one where Albert Einstein’s hair is particularly messy.
0:35:00 And then that communicates, it’s like a magnet of meaning, it communicates a whole set of
0:35:06 ideals and values that would be consistent with thinking, okay, I’m a creative type who
0:35:11 should be using a Mac rather than a conformist type who should be using a PC, even though
0:35:17 the Mac culture is just as much of a tribe as the PC culture.
0:35:22 Let me ask you the most theoretical question in the history of this podcast.
0:35:25 Okay, we’re about to make history here.
0:35:26 Okay, it’s an honor.
0:35:33 Let’s just say that by some miracle, Donald Trump calls you up and says, listen, my campaign
0:35:34 is in trouble.
0:35:40 Can you give me some advice how I can appeal to a broader selection of people?
0:35:46 I mean, I’m sort of on record for having helped the other side every election, so I don’t
0:35:47 think he would do that.
0:35:55 But if he did, and if I was inclined to help him, if there was someone even worse on the
0:35:57 other side, what would I say?
0:36:02 I would say Donald Trump has some strengths, which is why he got elected once.
0:36:06 He’s the billionaire, but he’s the billionaire from Queens who likes to eat at McDonald’s.
0:36:09 So he has this common touch.
0:36:14 And even though he doesn’t have that much in common with blue collar audiences, they
0:36:19 feel like he gets them and they feel like he can represent them and represent their voices.
0:36:23 And there’s a lot to learn from Donald Trump.
0:36:27 Now I don’t think he’s doing that as much in this election.
0:36:30 So I think it’s gotten more ugly.
0:36:37 It’s more he’s attacking, first attacking Biden obsessively and then now attacking Kamala
0:36:41 Harris in a way that seems to be overboard, not effective.
0:36:45 I would say that he should highlight that he’s a family man.
0:36:49 He should highlight that he talks to all of his kids every day.
0:36:51 His wife loves him.
0:36:57 Not one may be a stretch, but maybe he can somehow negotiate with her to make an appearance
0:36:58 of it.
0:37:01 But there are things that people liked about Trump and there are things that people liked
0:37:03 about his policies.
0:37:07 People thought of him as someone who, you know, who wasn’t a globalist and who cared about
0:37:09 America first.
0:37:13 And you know, a lot of the people in the Midwest who live in these hollowed out regions, they
0:37:15 don’t think globalism has treated them very well.
0:37:20 And their manufacturing jobs have gone away and they liked his protectionist rhetoric and
0:37:26 they liked that he wasn’t eager to get involved in foreign wars and spend a lot of our budget
0:37:28 on foreign wars.
0:37:33 So there are some legitimate policies that he had when he was running that people liked.
0:37:37 And I think if he wanted to win this election, he might spend a little more time talking
0:37:40 about those things instead of what he’s been talking about.
0:37:41 Okay.
0:37:46 So since I asked you the most hypothetical question, I got to ask you the second most
0:37:52 hypothetical question, which is Kamala Harris calls you up and says, help me win this election.
0:37:54 You’re an expert in tribes and cultures.
0:37:55 What do I do?
0:37:58 I think Kamala Harris has a tremendous amount of strengths.
0:38:05 She has what I would call a lot of cultural capital because she’s a person who has a legitimate
0:38:08 involvement in many different tribes.
0:38:11 And so let me say what I mean, think of her life in chapters.
0:38:17 She grew up as the daughter of an African American, but also Caribbean immigrant and
0:38:19 South Asian Indian immigrant.
0:38:24 So she knows what it’s like to be with a Asian mother at a supermarket who speaks in an accent
0:38:27 and the cashier can’t understand what she’s saying.
0:38:33 She knows some of the things that African Americans experience on a daily basis.
0:38:35 She’s a self-made professional.
0:38:36 She didn’t go into the family business.
0:38:41 She made her career moving up the legal world and becoming the top cop of California.
0:38:45 And I think top cop is a good way to represent her record.
0:38:46 She was tough on crime.
0:38:50 And I think most Americans want someone tough on crime.
0:38:53 And then she has been a very successful senator.
0:38:55 She’s been a vice president.
0:39:00 So she has a lot of different experiences that can connect her to different swaths of
0:39:02 the American public.
0:39:08 And I think that you can show an audience the side of yourself that is similar to that
0:39:11 audience and gain their trust.
0:39:16 Because if they know that you’ve walked in their shoes, they’ll think that you can probably
0:39:19 understand their concerns and represent those concerns.
0:39:24 There’s one idea these days that goes under the heading of intersectionality.
0:39:29 And it’s the idea that we should all focus on our most specific combination of identities.
0:39:32 So I’m a straight white middle-aged male.
0:39:36 And so I should be representing straight white.
0:39:37 And I don’t think we need to do that.
0:39:39 I think we can code switch.
0:39:44 I think we can be, I’m sure you meet your surfer friends and your vocabulary is gnarly
0:39:47 and things the surfer say.
0:39:50 And when you meet your technology friends, you’re talking technology jargon.
0:39:55 And when you are at home with your family, you’re speaking in terms of the family’s
0:39:56 running jokes.
0:40:00 They don’t have to be completely consistent in front of every audience.
0:40:04 And one of the things that I’ve studied for years and that I talk about a lot in the book
0:40:11 is what I call triggering, which is that some of these, the peer instinct in particular,
0:40:12 it’s triggered by our tribe mates.
0:40:19 So when we see the faces of people who are from a group that we have lived in and we
0:40:23 know well and that has nurtured us, we automatically become that.
0:40:26 It brings those frames to the fore of our mind.
0:40:29 And that’s very useful for coordinating with those people.
0:40:34 And we’re starting to hear a little bit about this code switching with Kamala because when
0:40:39 she speaks to an audience of African-American women in Atlanta, she may speak in a slightly
0:40:43 different register than when she speaks to a legal audience in Palo Alto.
0:40:50 And when Obama was campaigning, people also drew attention to this and Key and Peele had
0:40:51 a lot of fun with it.
0:40:57 Some of their funniest routines were caricatures of the code switching that Obama had to engage
0:41:00 in to earn the trust of all the different parts of the American public.
0:41:06 So I think that she has tremendous strengths and I would say the same for her running mate.
0:41:12 It’s funny, I heard him describe recently as an REI candidate instead of a DEI candidate
0:41:15 because he looks like a guy who’s genuinely gone camping in his life, which you can’t
0:41:18 say for Trump or you can’t say for JD Vance.
0:41:22 And he can wear a John Deere hat to a rally and it looks like it’s a hat that he actually
0:41:26 owns not just something he’s wearing for political purposes.
0:41:30 So I think that you should put him in front of farmers, you should put him in front of
0:41:35 high school teachers, you should put him in front of veterans because he’s got that cultural
0:41:36 capital.
0:41:41 And so that’s what I would, I guess, say to both of them, don’t be afraid to use your
0:41:46 cultural capital, you can connect with a lot of the coalition that you need.
0:41:51 Up next on remarkable people, traditionally soldiers followed flags in the battle.
0:41:58 The flag is like an icon of the country and armies have lost men and women trying to rescue
0:42:05 the flag, not even trying to capture the territory because the icon becomes so representative
0:42:11 of the thing itself.
0:42:13 Thank you to all our regular podcast listeners.
0:42:17 It’s our pleasure and honor to make the show for you.
0:42:22 If you find our show valuable, please do us a favor and subscribe, rate and review it.
0:42:28 Even better, forward it to a friend, a big mahalo to you for doing this.
0:42:34 Welcome back to remarkable people with Guy Kawasaki.
0:42:39 There is no doubt in my mind that Tim Walls could back up a truck that’s hooked up to
0:42:40 a trailer.
0:42:43 And I know I cannot do that.
0:42:48 I’ll also tell you from time to time, I go back to Hawaii and I give speeches in Hawaii
0:42:54 and I have to code switch and my speeches in Hawaii are very different from my speeches
0:42:56 anywhere else in the world.
0:43:01 You say mahalo or I can drop into pigeon that you a howling could not understand what the
0:43:04 hell I’m saying is like a foreign language.
0:43:06 I speak two languages, English and pigeon.
0:43:12 Okay, but I mean, I imagine that connects you to the audience in a way that no, no facts
0:43:14 would ever do, right?
0:43:19 Because you’re showing them, you can’t speak a language or a pigeon without an accent unless
0:43:20 you were raised in it.
0:43:24 It’s like a shibboleth like in the Bible where they wanted to see you whether someone was
0:43:29 a Cadenite or an Israelite, they had to pronounce a certain word, the word shibboleth and the
0:43:33 Cadenites said Sibboleth and they executed them.
0:43:36 So yeah, it’s a gift that you have, so you should use it.
0:43:40 Well, I think if Donald Trump came and spoke here, JD Evans came up and spoke in the Bay
0:43:45 area, he would call San Francisco Frisco, right?
0:43:52 Instead of the city, right, trying to bond, thinking, thinking he’s bonding, frisco, I
0:43:55 love San Fran.
0:44:01 All right, so I’m going to give you as much time as you want, but I want you to pitch
0:44:02 your book.
0:44:04 I loved your book.
0:44:05 So just pitch your book right now.
0:44:10 This is an unpaid advertisement that you approve of.
0:44:12 One of the things that we haven’t talked about too much about the book that I really want
0:44:19 to make sure I get across is that there’s this myth, this illusion that cultural patterns
0:44:24 are permanent fixtures that say like, the culture of Hawaii has been that way since
0:44:28 time immemorial and always will be, right?
0:44:29 And it’s just not true.
0:44:32 Cultures fluctuate.
0:44:36 You may act Hawaiian in one setting and not act Hawaiian in another setting.
0:44:42 And even Hawaii, the culture of Hawaii, there’s been a cultural renaissance in Hawaii after
0:44:48 the pineapple plantations in part helped by tourism because people wanted to see Hula
0:44:52 and they wanted to hear the traditional music and that created a market for it.
0:44:57 And the same is true in say Bali, that there’s been a renaissance of these traditional Balinese
0:45:01 arts that, you know, almost died out at a certain point.
0:45:07 So it’s not a straight line with culture, culture ebbs and flows and evolves.
0:45:09 And that’s a good thing.
0:45:11 And in the book, I talk about it at two levels.
0:45:16 And one level is what I call triggers, which is as a manager, whether you’re managing a
0:45:21 football team or you’re managing a sales team or you’re managing a large organization or
0:45:25 managing a classroom like I do, you can’t change who the people are, but you can change
0:45:26 the context.
0:45:29 You can set the context in a particular way.
0:45:34 And these tribal instincts are very context driven.
0:45:39 So when you see Hawaiian faces and you hear other people speaking pigeon, you just launch
0:45:40 into it.
0:45:45 And so you can create a setting that induces the behaviors you want.
0:45:48 And it’s a lot of why schools use uniforms.
0:45:52 If you have an urban school district and people are allowed to just come in wearing whatever,
0:45:56 it ends up being divisive because I’m coming in wearing my Crips colors and someone else
0:45:59 is coming in wearing their preppy clothes.
0:46:04 And so I feel poor and they feel rich and then someone else is offended by my gang colors
0:46:07 and nobody can pay attention to the math that the teacher is trying to teach.
0:46:12 So when you have a school uniform and it’s like a classical image of a student, it brings
0:46:19 people’s student identity to the fore and then they’re more available to learn.
0:46:22 So that’s how you can think about triggering peer codes.
0:46:27 And then triggering hero codes is more what I talked about, you do it with symbols.
0:46:31 So traditionally, soldiers followed flags in the battle.
0:46:33 The flag is like an icon of the country.
0:46:40 And armies have lost men and women trying to rescue the flag, not even trying to capture
0:46:47 the territory because the icon becomes so representative of the thing itself.
0:46:51 Similarly in religions, a lot of religions have icons that are meant to aid worship,
0:46:56 but people start worshiping the icon itself and then icon of class come and get rid of
0:46:58 the icons and that sort of thing.
0:47:04 So symbols and icons are the triggers for the hero instinct and for the ancestor instinct,
0:47:10 this kind of traditionalism instinct, one of the core triggers is ceremonies.
0:47:15 There’s something about ceremonies, public events where you’re talking in unison, singing
0:47:21 in unison, maybe moving in unison and where people are talking about the collective past
0:47:27 and the group’s traditions, that it puts people in a traditionalist mindset and it makes
0:47:31 people capable of doing things that they wouldn’t otherwise do.
0:47:35 One example in the book, I talk about Joan of Arc, how did this teenage girl turn around
0:47:40 the Hundred Years War, convincing these dispirited French soldiers that they could fight back
0:47:42 against the British invaders?
0:47:47 She came and she first made them go to confession and then go to mass and take all the Catholic
0:47:53 sacraments and then she told them that she was the prophesized young maiden from French
0:48:00 tradition who would liberate France from these heathen invaders and people, they were in
0:48:05 the mindset of just having come from all these ceremonies and they’re like, okay, well let’s
0:48:09 give her a chance and they gave her a chance and turns out the English lost and then they
0:48:12 tried again, the English lost again and they pushed the English all the way back up to the
0:48:13 top of France.
0:48:19 So ceremonies are super powerful, they can unlock this ability to make a leap of faith
0:48:22 which is what we do when we act out of tradition.
0:48:27 But I think that ceremonies are also dangerous and earlier you asked me about some political
0:48:32 things and it’s hard to comment about the Middle East, it’s hard to comment about the
0:48:36 national things but one thing I can comment about is the campus politics.
0:48:42 The campus I’m on, Columbia University is notorious now because we had these really
0:48:51 polarized pro-Israel and anti-Israel or anti-genocide depending on who you’re listening to campaigns
0:48:57 and it turned into opposing factions chanting at each other through megaphones and calling
0:49:03 each other Nazis and it ended up being something that people weren’t learning much from and
0:49:07 a lot of college presidents lost their jobs because of this because they didn’t quite
0:49:08 know how to come down on it.
0:49:12 You can’t really restrict the content of speech on a college campus at least in the
0:49:18 classroom or at least in some settings, you don’t want to restrict what books can be in
0:49:19 the bookstore, right?
0:49:24 You want a free marketplace of ideas because even wrong ideas help people discover the
0:49:25 good ideas.
0:49:30 At least that’s the philosophy from John Stuart Mill that we’ve always believed in.
0:49:36 But I think what gets ignored in all of this is that you can restrict based on the manner
0:49:38 of speech, right?
0:49:43 So we know that you can’t yell fire in a crowded theater but you can whisper fire but you can’t
0:49:45 yell fire in a crowded theater, right?
0:49:46 Why?
0:49:51 Because it creates a storm for the exit and a stampede and people get trampled and similarly
0:49:58 I think that Columbia and other campuses, they made a mistake which is that the one
0:50:04 lever that the administration have is what public events do we give a permit to?
0:50:11 And the way all of this started was that there was just a series of vigils and marches and
0:50:19 other ceremonial events that were on both sides, either ceremonial marches about what
0:50:24 we dread will happen to the citizens of Gaza or vigils mourning the terrible losses on
0:50:26 October 7th.
0:50:30 All of these things totally understandable why people want to have these events.
0:50:35 But should we sponsor them on a mass scale on the campus?
0:50:41 And I would say not as much as we’ve been doing because ceremonies put people in a traditionalist
0:50:46 mindset where they’re sentimental, they’re nostalgic, they’re thinking in terms of these
0:50:50 absolutist frames of what did the previous generation do?
0:50:52 Okay, we should do the same thing.
0:50:59 And so instead what the university presidents should be permitting is debates, panel discussions,
0:51:01 podcasts, teachings.
0:51:08 These are also events that can be held about this conflict but they’re not ceremonies that
0:51:14 lull people into this traditionalist mindset and their events, their types of assembly
0:51:18 that stimulate critical thinking rather than blunting critical thinking.
0:51:24 So I think that’s one card that people forgot to play that would have made things a little
0:51:29 better this year had we come down really hard about the manner of speech, the manner of
0:51:32 events that we allow on campus.
0:51:38 Now since you brought this up, I have to ask you, but what if you’re the college president
0:51:43 and some asshole billionaire is now telling you that he’s going to stop giving money because
0:51:45 he doesn’t agree with your perspective?
0:51:48 This has nothing to do with ceremony or anything.
0:51:54 This is like some private equity hedge fund manager believing that because he gave money
0:51:55 he can tell you what to do.
0:51:58 Now what do you do?
0:51:59 It’s not hypothetical.
0:52:03 I had a conversation just a few hours ago with my dean about this very matter.
0:52:06 I understand these people who contribute a lot.
0:52:12 They want to have a voice and they often are seeing things from a distance and I can tell
0:52:18 you that what happened on the ground on campus and then the way it was represented on Fox
0:52:21 News had almost nothing to do with each other.
0:52:29 You had these largely peaceful demonstrations where a lot of the students on the anti-genocide
0:52:37 side were also Jewish groups, explicitly Jewish groups and then it got represented as anti-Semitism
0:52:42 and yeah there were incidents of harassment surely and it’s really distressing.
0:52:44 But that wasn’t the core of things.
0:52:46 That wasn’t what was going on day to day.
0:52:50 Okay, so what do I do about the billionaire?
0:52:51 I think that we hold an event.
0:52:54 Wait, before you answer that, are you tenured?
0:52:55 Yes, I am.
0:52:56 I’m a chair professor.
0:52:57 Yeah, yeah.
0:52:58 I got ten year long ago at Stanford.
0:52:59 It came to Columbia.
0:53:01 That’s a different story.
0:53:03 But I came to Columbia in part for Carol Dweck.
0:53:06 I wanted to mention that because I know that you’re a friend of Carol Dweck.
0:53:07 I love Carol Dweck.
0:53:08 Yeah, yeah, yeah.
0:53:12 But I’m a chair professor so I’m in the group, the cabal of people that helps to make the
0:53:15 decisions for the university.
0:53:20 And I think we should be holding events, bringing not just one billionaire in, but twelve of
0:53:25 them and having a brainstorming session and I think what they’ll discover is they don’t
0:53:31 agree and it’ll be obvious to them that there’s not any easy answer and that the university
0:53:35 president faces trade-offs and that there are reasons.
0:53:41 There’s a coherent philosophy that the university should host debates.
0:53:45 The university should not be a participant in the debates.
0:53:50 Therefore, the university president should not be weighing in on a lot of political issues
0:53:53 even if they have opinions on those issues.
0:53:57 Because that can undermine the ability of the university to host all ideas.
0:54:02 So I think that these ideas, once people hear them and it’s not out of negligence that the
0:54:04 university president isn’t commenting more.
0:54:08 It’s out of this sacred obligation of maintaining the Calvin principle.
0:54:12 I think when people hear that, they understand it and so we should involve them.
0:54:14 We should take care of their need for involvement.
0:54:19 We should honor the intention behind their desire to make a difference.
0:54:22 That means that we have to engage with them a little bit more.
0:54:23 Okay.
0:54:26 Probably kiss their ass a lot in the process.
0:54:29 That’s definitely a big part of fundraising in the academic world.
0:54:33 I don’t know about in the startup world, but in the academic world it’s a big part of
0:54:34 fundraising.
0:54:39 There’s a lot of people kissing ass of venture capital, so I understand what you’re saying.
0:54:40 Okay.
0:54:41 Yeah.
0:54:46 There’s one other myth about tribal leadership I wanted to touch on and that is that some
0:54:50 people will tell me like tribal leadership is great if I’m Donald Trump and I’m trying
0:54:55 to build like a chauvinistic crusade of rural white males or something.
0:54:57 But what if I’m trying to build a rainbow coalition?
0:55:02 And I think the secret of tribes is that tribes are nested groups.
0:55:07 And our forebears, they lived in bands that were part of clans and then the clan was part
0:55:10 of a tribe, which was a broader network in a region.
0:55:14 And then once we had nations and empires, it’s like tribes of tribes, right?
0:55:20 But we have simultaneous, more local identities and more inclusive, broader identities.
0:55:28 And leaders, they can trigger and they can also change those broad inclusive identities.
0:55:30 Two examples that I think are interesting.
0:55:32 One is Abraham Lincoln.
0:55:36 If you think about who invented Thanksgiving, you’ll probably say the Pilgrims, right?
0:55:38 Because that’s what every American school child is like.
0:55:45 Well, the Pilgrims in 1721 invited the local Native Americans over for a meal of turkey,
0:55:47 cranberry sauce and pumpkin pie.
0:55:51 And they lost football.
0:55:53 And they did hold a feast.
0:55:55 There definitely was no pumpkin pie.
0:55:58 They didn’t call it a Thanksgiving because a Thanksgiving actually had a meaning to
0:56:03 Quakers or to Puritans that was different than a party because it was more of a party.
0:56:10 But then around the 1860s, people started to look back on that and think we should have
0:56:13 a national holiday of togetherness and thanks.
0:56:16 And it would be just like what the Pilgrims did, even though that’s not quite what the
0:56:18 Pilgrims did.
0:56:24 And Abraham Lincoln was the president who, in his inauguration, said something like the
0:56:29 healing cords of memory will once again unite this nation.
0:56:31 I didn’t get it quite right, but he was a poet president.
0:56:33 He was the narrator in chief.
0:56:39 And he listened to these literary types who were saying we need a national holiday of
0:56:41 Thanksgiving and togetherness.
0:56:48 And so he proposed in 1863 that we have a national Thanksgiving day on the last Thursday
0:56:50 of November.
0:56:55 And he framed it as continuous with the Pilgrims and as similar to something that George Washington
0:56:58 did as a one-off thing after the Revolutionary War.
0:57:02 So he made it look like this was already an established tradition.
0:57:03 And it became an instant tradition.
0:57:10 And the Southerners and the Northerners, even though the Harvest came at different times
0:57:13 for them, they were all sitting down and having this meal at the same time.
0:57:17 And it helped to rebuild the American identity.
0:57:23 And that was what we call an invented tradition, where he retrospectively created a tradition
0:57:28 from the Pilgrims that gave the tradition gravitas, because it seemed like it was already
0:57:30 hundreds of years old.
0:57:32 But it worked to help bring people together.
0:57:36 Another example, I don’t know if you want another example, but Mandela, Mandela got out
0:57:43 of jail and he had to kind of forge a national identity and lead people to democracy, even
0:57:48 though there had been the horrors of apartheid for decades.
0:57:51 And a lot of people would have said, well, let’s forget about the past and focus on the
0:57:52 future.
0:57:57 But he realized that they needed to do something to reconcile with the past, because there
0:58:02 were just too much people wanted to know what happened to their relatives and people wanted
0:58:04 to work through the trauma.
0:58:09 So he saw that this truth commissions had been used in South America.
0:58:14 He was a legal scholar and he knew about it, but he couldn’t just take the thing that worked
0:58:17 in South America and make it work in South Africa.
0:58:23 So in South America, it was a judge because people trusted the independent judges there,
0:58:27 but he put Archbishop Tutu in charge of it and he called it the Truth and Reconciliation
0:58:28 Commission.
0:58:33 And then when he went around to the different communities in South Africa, he pitched it
0:58:37 to people in terms of their own tribal traditions.
0:58:42 So when he went to the Zulu community, he said, this is consistent with Ubuntu, which
0:58:49 is a Zulu concept about that we’re all interconnected in that even the African community and the
0:58:52 Zulu community, we’ve been at loggerheads, but we’re connected and we need to work through
0:58:53 it together.
0:58:58 And when he went to his own tribe, the Joso tribe, they had these restorative justice
0:59:03 traditions where people would engage in truth telling to somebody they had wrong.
0:59:09 And so he explained the continuity between this rather new and innovative process that
0:59:14 nobody had engaged in before and the cultural traditions they were familiar with.
0:59:16 And he kind of leveraged the ancestor instincts.
0:59:19 The Zulus were like, if this is Ubuntu, we’re in favor of it.
0:59:24 And the Zosho were like, if this is a truth telling ritual, we’re in favor of it.
0:59:27 And Ubuntu had also been adopted by the white liberals as part of their movement.
0:59:29 So they also bought the tradition.
0:59:35 So he got the nation to engage in this seven year process of revisiting all of the horrors.
0:59:40 And it was like therapy on a national level that allowed the country to move forward.
0:59:45 So these are both examples of using tribal instincts in both cases, the ancestor instinct
0:59:51 to forge a new tradition that brings people together under a different tribal banner.
0:59:58 You may find this off the wall, but I think that Tim Walls could make the case that let
1:00:05 us celebrate making America great again and take that away from one tribe and put it in
1:00:07 place for the whole country.
1:00:12 You can’t argue against making America great again conceptually.
1:00:14 It’s just the execution, right?
1:00:19 So we could have a MAGA day and then everybody would have something in common.
1:00:24 I think the liberals and the Democrats and the Republicans and the conservatives, we
1:00:26 all want to make America great again.
1:00:27 Yeah.
1:00:30 They did something like that already, which is the camo cap.
1:00:31 I don’t know if you’ve seen it.
1:00:32 Yeah.
1:00:33 I saw it.
1:00:34 I ordered two.
1:00:35 Yeah.
1:00:39 It’s great because it’s even more down to earth than the red MAGA hat.
1:00:41 And it’s even more legitimate.
1:00:43 It’s consistent with how people actually dress.
1:00:44 I have two on order.
1:00:48 You would think for the amount of money I gave to the DNC, I would get free hats.
1:00:52 But no, I have to buy them, but okay.
1:00:55 Oh, this has been wonderful, Michael.
1:00:56 Thank you very much.
1:01:01 I learned more about tribes and I’m going to, I’m going to tell Seth Godin, you got
1:01:04 to listen to this episode, Seth.
1:01:05 I would have, that’d be great.
1:01:07 I hope that he likes the book.
1:01:12 I don’t hope he doesn’t think I’m stealing his title, but it’s tribal, not his was tribes.
1:01:17 But I found myself having a better understanding of the book just through talking to you because
1:01:20 your questions are, you’re not softball questions.
1:01:24 I had a bunch of notes about things I thought you were going to ask, but you really pushed
1:01:27 me right ahead of all those issues towards the real heart.
1:01:28 That’s good.
1:01:32 I mean, maybe your next book, you and Seth could do it together and you can call it the
1:01:40 purple tribe instead of the cow purple tribe.
1:01:45 All right, Michael, thank you very much.
1:01:53 As I am recording this outro for the Michael Morris episode, it is October.
1:01:54 Let me check.
1:01:58 It is October 9th, 2024.
1:02:02 And I still don’t have the two hats that I ordered.
1:02:08 The Tim Walls baseball camo hat, which is astounding to me.
1:02:11 So this has been Michael Morris from Columbia University.
1:02:16 I hope you learned about tribes and how tribes can be a positive thing and bring America
1:02:20 back together again and make America great again.
1:02:22 So I’m Guy Kawasaki.
1:02:28 This is Remarkable People, and I just want to thank the rest of the Remarkable People
1:02:29 team.
1:02:35 Our tribe is composed of Madison Neismar, who is the producer of this podcast and co-author
1:02:37 of Think Remarkable.
1:02:40 There’s Tessa Neismar, who is our researcher.
1:02:44 And finally, there’s Jeff C. and Shannon Hernandez.
1:02:47 Every one of these people is remarkable.
1:02:50 So that’s the Remarkable People team slash tribe.
1:03:02 And until next week, mahalo and aloha!