Michael Morris

You know, you get it, you know.

And so it's a way of building up my confidence

credit in the community by saying things even more extreme than the last person said.

And then there's also at times the ancestor instinct itch, which is this desire to feel part of some sort of enduring estimable tradition.

And so the different political parties, they look back to their

respective heroes, you know, the Democrats talk about JFK, you know, the Republicans talk about the great Republican presidents of the past, like Reagan, and they feel connected to those times.

So

Being in like-minded political groups, it satisfies these tribal motivations in a very, very effective way.

And the problem is that this has created a feedback loop where people are getting almost all of their political information from like-minded groups, whether it's their residential community or their online community.

And the country didn't used to be that way.

But I think with radio, there's a special reason to be sad, which is that there's an idea in cultural and political theory called imagined communities.

So when you listen to the president, FDR in the old days, giving his fireside chat over the radio,

you could imagine that almost all your American compatriots were listening at the same time in their living rooms, gathered around their radios.

And that created a feeling of national unity that is really important.

And so I feel like when we have this splintering of the media landscape,

there's a danger of losing the common reference points that help us understand each other as a nation.

tribalism is what, uh, got us out of the stone age. It's what, uh, led to our human specific form of social life, which is different from the social life of other social species, including our cousins, the chimpanzees. Um, they live in minimally collaborative troops that can ever get larger than about 50 individuals or they turn into a blood bath. And we evolved, uh,

tribalism is what, uh, got us out of the stone age. It's what, uh, led to our human specific form of social life, which is different from the social life of other social species, including our cousins, the chimpanzees. Um, they live in minimally collaborative troops that can ever get larger than about 50 individuals or they turn into a blood bath. And we evolved, uh,

tribalism is what, uh, got us out of the stone age. It's what, uh, led to our human specific form of social life, which is different from the social life of other social species, including our cousins, the chimpanzees. Um, they live in minimally collaborative troops that can ever get larger than about 50 individuals or they turn into a blood bath. And we evolved, uh,

some social quirks that enable us to live in culture sharing groups and these culture sharing groups allow for a level of collaboration and common fate and common concern that that is not present in other in any other social species and so