Morgan Housel

And social media makes it a hundred times worse than it's ever been.

Mm-hmm.

For example, you and I are recording this a day after Charlie Kirk was assassinated yesterday.

And there were who knows what number percentage it was, but I think it was not hard on social media to find people who were celebrating it yesterday.

Now, when Martin Luther King was assassinated, did those people exist too who celebrated assassination?

Of course.

But because of social media, by and large, you did not hear from them unless you were part of that group.

Whereas today, virtually everybody yesterday saw people celebrating Charlie Kirk's assassination.

And so even if those feelings existed in the past, they're much more apparent today.

You see them today in a way that you did not before.

So because of that, it's easy to say we're more divided today.

We're more extreme today.

We're more pessimistic than they are today.

I think the nuance is that's not actually true.

You're just more aware of it.

that those feelings always existed.

They existed in the 1990s, they existed in the 1950s.

It was just much easier to contain those.

And for the average citizen who got their information from one newspaper, one evening news program, to feel like things were much more stable and in control and that people were much more uniform in their opinions than they actually were.

Right, because in that situation too, we talked about this earlier, I don't know that individual's name, doesn't matter, but no one refers to him by his name.