Michael Morris: Tribal Ties in Modern Times

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