The Basic Tribal Instincts that Drive Us with Michael Morris
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This is masters in business with barry results on bloomberg radio .

this week on the podcast, I have another extra special guest. Professor Michael Morris is a fascinating instructions or of social psychology and the way tribal ism affects us and the way we affect tribes, his book tribal have the cultural and things that divides can help bring us together, is really a fascinating discussion of various ways that tribes are not edin stone. They're not part of our DNA.

Tribes vary from culture to culture, from company, the company, and that using tribes can be a very effective way to turn the company around. That struggling to change a country that's facing all sorts of chAllenges and essentially to become um the best organization we can be. Full disclosure, the professor has consultations for B G P.

That's the parent company dio, where he let classes teaching proper culture and tribal ism. I thought the book was really interesting, and I found our conversation to be absolutely fascinating. And I think you will also, with no, to do my conversation with professional Michael Morris, author of tribal.

Thank you so much for having me here. Well.

thanks for coming. Let's start out with your background. Undergraduate codner of science and english literature at Brown and then A P.

H. D. In psychology at the university of michigan. Go blue. What was the original career plan?

Well, the original career plan was I wanted to stay in school for a little while. I went to do a PHD. I had actually gone to four different, three different universities in my four years as an undergraduate.

And so I, my feet had been moving, and I thought I could benefit from going to graduate school. And I chose something sort of in the middle of the two topics that I studied as an undergraduate. Cognitive science is computer science and sort of no chomsky style linguistics, part of a more math formal approach to the mind.

And then comparative literature is obviously all about tradition and the collective, the collective representations that shaped the discourse in in, in a community over, over the centuries. And so I think that was kind of natural for me to be interested in how the received culture shapes the the thought processes that a group people have. I had grown up know around people from different parts of the world and didn't seem to me like everybody thought the same way that everybody didn't seem have the same common sense.

So so I started working with people who were rebuilding a field called cultural psychology, which had had existed briefly in moscow, in the toys, but then kind of got shut down by stalin. And, you know, IT resurfaced in the mid nineties as people were trying to understand the rise of the four tigers and china and japan, and how was IT that you could have multiple modern ties, you know, not everyone was becoming western. And that that sort of the time in place in which my career started IT sounds .

like based on exactly how you're describing this, IT was almost inevitable that you would end up focusing on psychology, tribes and management. Um tell us a little bit about you know how you came to focus on on this area.

I started doing work that you can think of as sort of east west comparisons often IT was a comparing college students in china to college students in the us. Or bank employees in hong kong to bank employees in new york. When I was doing that, I was considered to be a sort of fringe, fringe research in psychology, because psychologists at the time like to think of themselves as natural scientists, part of the natural sciences.

They thought that most of the biases they observed were no rooted in in a brain structure in one way or another, and they were part of universal human nature. And so what I was doing was a little bit considered to be critical of that. But at the same time, the business schools of the world, at least the top business schools of the world, we're becoming very, very interested in cultural differences and in particular interested in research on cultural differences. That was somewhat objective, that used precise measurements rather than anthropological field work, which has a more subjective feeling, although IT is valuable in many ways.

To the to the economist you running the top business schools IT felt a little vae and impressionistic and so I was running experiments and precise surveys um comparing you know professionals and and students in these different parts of the world and observing regular differences in some of the cognitive biases and that LED three of the top business schools in the world to all make me job offers and so I had not foreseen that this research would Carry me into the world of business schools. Brown is not a place that has a business school. You you don't have much exposure to IT IT seemed like the universe was telling me that what I was doing was of great interest to people in business school.

So my career turned to the corner at that point. And then I started at stanford business school. Eight, twenty six know before i'd even finish my dissertation.

And IT was a learning experience. You know, I wasn't, I wasn't the greatest teacher in my first couple of years, but you learn, you learn from teaching. And then I did.

Well, they are, and got promoted early the air, and then had to come back to new york, where I I grew up in the new york area. And that brought me to columbia. I came back to columbia in two thousand and one.

My first of teaching at columbia, a university, was actually nine eleven. So that was that was an interesting introduction. But you i've enjoyed living and working in new york quite a lot. I never thought I would still be living here because I had been in a pattern of moving every five years. But it's an easy solution to life. I take a lot of sabbath ticals years in china, singapore, hong kong, so I sustained deep collaborations and laboratories there as well as in some other part of the world like india, uh, and sometimes in europe.

So you are not the first person, both academic and and people working in finance who have said my original research was thought of his fringe twenty years ago and then suddenly um not not friend so IT IT just goes to show you that if you're outside of the mainstream, outside of the consensus, that's where you know all of the undiscovered veins of gold dar yeah or so IT.

Seems you talk about the difference between how chinese students behaviors, american students, and even when chinese students are in the U. S. When they're speaking chinese, it's a different set of culture, a different set of behaviors, versus when the same group of people speaking english IT seems like the norms change and the various behavioral change. You publish two hundred articles on behavioral science. Tell us what your research finds about these various behavioral I don't want to call them text behavioral al um or just behaviors that the switch is when when a cultural factor is impacting people's think IT right?

Well, let me start by saying this. This touches on the core theme of the book, which is that cultural changes, there's this myth out there that culture is unchanging and unchangeable, that the cultures, the world are permanent fixtures, and that the americans of two centuries ago were the same as us. And that's that's an illusion that we kind of enjoy but it's it's an illusion.

Know what the founding fathers meant by the pursuit of happiness is not what you and I think of is the pursuit of happiness um and what we know today in the pop culture as code switching IT sort of came into the popular discourse when obama was presented. And we've seen IT again this year as commoner Harris campaign um is this notion that people who have grown up in more than one ethics up culture that have corresponding dialects will make switches depending on the audience that they're in front of. You have .

reference to korean pilots with south korean pilots, whether is a history and a culture of difference to seniority. And IT reminded me, and that leads to problems in airplane crashes. And IT reminds me, I want to say I was Matthew sired the book black box thinking, who talked about a similar cultural phenomenon with south american pilots.

And IT ultimately LED to them, changing their ways. Pilots interact, cause literally, planes were flying into mountains because the copilot didn't want to disrespect the senior pilot, say, hey, we're all about to die like its amazing. Cultural norms are so strong that rather than risk offending the pilot, you lose the plane IT IT IT seems bananas, but apparently that's how important culture is.

Well, a lot of this is unconscious automatic behavior, right? I mean, I i'm a copilot, socialized my whole life to speak in a definition al way to those of senior rank. And so i'm speaking that way. I'm not calculating that if I spoke more assertively, that might change that the pilot comprehension of the of the urgency of the situation yes. So I think that a lot of accidents are caused by automatic behavior and a lot of cultural behaviors.

Um the uh the situation with uh korean pilots IT was something that was discovered first by boeing boeing researchers you know who made the seven forty seven class jet which requires equal collaboration among copilot and pilots which wasn't the case with smaller jets. They noticed that there was enormous variance across the world's flagship airlines um in safety rates and and the countries that we're having the most problems, we're not the ones that you might think they were taiwan and south korea. Those were the countries would do were safety record and those are not poor countries in particular or countries with particularly bad weather, but there are countries that are among the highest in the world.

When you look at hierarchical values, you know what researchers called power distance. And in those societies, if someone is i've seen, you're rank, you're not supposed to equally, you not supposed to interact with them equally. And IT was sufficiently wearing that boeing actually considered designing a different plane for for those parts of the world.

But then at the same time, this study of cockpit black boxes that are recovered after accidents and have recordings of the cockpit dialogue that came out around the same time and pointed to a very similar conclusion. And malon gladwell in his book outliers rote about the confluence of these, these two things, and I think brought up to a lot of people's attention at that time. But what I found even more interesting then, the paradox that know a country like south korea, which is high and technology, high and wealth, that was having problems, was that they managed to get rid of the problems.

They made some very simple changes in korean airlines, and they haven't crash since. So they went from the worlds were a safety record to an unblamable safety record. And the change they made was not firing a bunch of people.

IT was not changing all their procedures. IT was changing the official language of the country and the official language of the cock pit from korea to english. Now all pilots already spoke english because it's the language of air travel control around the world.

But when people were speaking. To the same colleagues in english, they weren't cued to be deferential because just like in japan, where you have to call your boss, you know, SATA song or something, you know you have to use certain specific is in korea. And there are these complex, horrific declensions that you have to use that are constant reminders of the state relative status level.

And of course, in english, we don't have those things. So it's a remarkable story about the you know, that cultural patterns are not essentialism. Or in parents, you sometimes, if you can just change the environment slightly so that they're not triggered the same people are totally unencouraged by them.

And that's fascinating, that they went from the worst safety record to one of the best simply by changing the language in the cock pit. That's just amazing.

IT is as is striking, and IT IT IT really goes against this notion of cultures as permanent fixtures. Or people know there are ways of talking about culture like this is in our cultural DNA, you know. And it's this equation of culture with a with genetics in a way that I think you is a bit of a fallacy because that leads us to think of culture as a set of traits, where as culture is a set of lens is that we look through, but the lenses are shifting and the lens is change over time.

I want to stay with this topics because it's so fascinating. You've been researching this area for in colombia almost twenty five years. What LED you to say? Hey, I can regulate all these different aspects and turn them into a comprehensive book on humanity and tribal ism. What you made you to that path?

Well, as a as a business school professor, I do a lot of teaching to executives. I also do a lot of consulting. As you mention, I consult to political campaigns every election season doesn't who he's work out the I wish you know, but I also consult the company is. So ten years ago, I ran a course for a couple of years at bloomberg about decision making, biases, culture and leadership to the top ecus here.

And through that process, i've developed a playbook or a tool kit for thinking about how to lead through culture, how to use what I know about the malleability of culture and the manage ability of culture, so that as a leader, you're not thinking of culture as an obstacle to what you want to get done. But as a force that you can harness, that you can dial up or dial down, and that you can mount slow campaigns to evolve the culture in a way that you think you will support the needed strategy in the future. So I started to write a book sharing that playbook. But then over the course of the last five years, and i've been writing the book for about five years, there have been a series of conflicts in the world that have evoked people to start using the word tribal and tribal ism much more than they ever did before.

And i'm talking about the the red blue left, the record racial protests in the streets and the religious strife, you both at at home and around the world, where you start to hear this new discourse about tribal ism as A A curse, you, an evolutionary curse that we are somehow genetically prety disposed to hate or to fear and loading of some other group, and that this will always hinder us and hold us back from the nice things that we would like to have like international CoOperation or a ethnic um a harmony harmony, a political uh functioning um so I think that this way of talking about tribal ism is part right but part wrong. IT is the case that our tribal psychology plays a role in this escalating conflicts. But where the pundits get IT wrong is that we don't have a tribal instinct to hate other groups.

That wouldn't have been a particularly adaptive instinct, right like A A warning instinct. There was an archaic human species called nanda sauls that kind of did have that sort of orientation towards neighboring tribes. They practice cannabis ism and warfare. And they went extinct in part because our kind of had a different foreign policy. We we made IT and traded with other groups and form these larger networks called tribes that proved to be a lot more adopt of proved to be a more winning strategy over time.

So there's this kind of fallacy that just because these conflicts involve hostility, that somehow they start from a drive for hostility, and that's just a false diagnosis that doesn't IT doesn't help us understand ways to immediate these conflicts. IT makes for riveting articles about how we doomed and and the end times are here. But IT doesn't make for good policies. And so I, as a secondary purpose of the book, i've tried to argue that, hey, we really need to, if we want to talk about tribal psychology and tribal ism, let's have a science informed view of what tribal instincts are and understand how they do figure in conflicts, but not in a way that curses us to eternal international line conflict. It's it's it's a manageable side of human nature that um wise leaders have always found their way around.

Then the end of the all approach verses the homo sap's approach, I believe. And correct me if i'm getting this wrong, r DNA is about one to two percent in the end of. So the idea of trade and CoOperation and and mating was obviously well A A little hints de bias, but where the survivors.

So that seems to have been the approach that worked. But before I read the book, I was under the assumption that humans were very similar from culture to culture, country to country, and that DNA was determinative. But what the book really shows you is we really vary from region to region, from country to country. Cultures are very different and very valuable, and they have a big impact on society. Fair statement.

Fair statement. Yeah, it's it's it's a position that kind of falls in between the traditional nature versus nurture framework that, you know, people of our age you got in school what the new consensus is. And there's a field of evolutionary anthropology that is had a lot of the key insights, uh, is that human nature is nor that we are the species that became wired by evolution to internalize the patterns of communities that nurture us.

And what that means is that we can Operate as a coordinated group that functions seamlessly and that measures together based on cultural patterns, because we all internalize them unconsciously and we are motivated to follow them. And hence, we can have large organizations and cities and things like that, that other primates would be completely incapable love. But it's not like where ants or bees who are wired by their DNA to behave socially in a, in a particular way.

If you go around the world and hills are always comical and behaves are always hex ogino. Because that's genetically programmed. We're not genetically programmed to build our shelters in any particular style. But we do learn culturally, you know, to build a youth if we're incursion, stan, or to build a tp, if we're planes. Native american.

Really, really fascinating.

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wings, nuggets, eggs, no matter the form, americans love their chicken. The chicken industry .

is one of the largest and most complex supply change that amErica has. These birds are big business, and we wanted to get to .

the bottom of welcome. The big capitalism brought you by output. In this special three part series from blimber's podcast, we are going to examine some of the theories issues facing the U.

S. Economy through the medium of this humble bird. Examine, get IT. So there's .

going to be chicken on .

there are definitely going to be chicken pons. We're going to be asking why the chicken industry has evolved the way that IT has. And what does that say about the american economy that so many consumers are flocking to poultry?

There's another one for you. Listen to beat capitalism from out now on apple podcasts, spotify, or ever you get your podcasts.

So let's get a little basic and and delvin to um some fundamentals of your research. And I want to start with what is a .

try from the broad evolutionary anthropology perspective is the distinctively human form of social organization are nearest neighbors chimpanzees can form troops of up to about fifty sixty individuals. If he gets any larger, IT breaks apart into clashing factions and bloodshed. We obviously conform much larger groups and collaborate and much more sophisticated than adopting ways.

And the the way that we can do that is that we can form groups that trans and cafe and can. We can form groups where we are connected to total strangers who there are the same cultural heritage, us. So culture is a glue that holds together large human groups and enables us to trust each other in a way that no other animal can.

And that was the rubicon that we crossed as a species that after that, we left the rest of the primate pack in our, in our dust. Because once we were forming these rich cultures that were shared by large groups, IT was like a collective brain. IT was this pool of knowledge that started accumulating across the generations and that individuals could tap into to become more capable than the individuals from prior generations because the cultures became richer and richer.

One of the things that I was kind of fascinated by in the book and you mention um chance, is that if you take a uh human toddle and an adult chip and an adult range time and you use a tool or show them a technique to get something, the five year old figures IT out pretty quickly can imitate but the champs in the rank tanks, you know, not so much. Why is that the the exposition, the book, about just being able to follow each other's gaze because our eyes are our White and our coin and hyrule or dark, which primate, other primates don't have? Tell us a little bit about just some of these evolutionary differences.

Yeah, well, you know, evolution works in funny ways. Evolution is kind of a tinkler. And one of the things that evolution came up with or a mutation came up with, then became hardest by our social intelligence, is the Whites of our eyes.

Other prime mates don't have White clara, and so they can track each other other's gaze as easily, and that means they can't read each other other's minds as easily. This is old idea, the eyes of the window to the soul. And the research on this has found A A new scientific understanding of what that means.

And so our ability to mind ad enables us to imitate each other's behavior at a much richer level than other primates can do, is more like mimicry when one h chimps are very inventive, but not very collaborate. So if one of them develops a new way to use a stick to get term IDE or to use a stick to get fruit from a tree, others may see IT, and they may, they may do something that's cruelly similar to IT. But they don't catch what the method is and what the intention, whether humans, you know if somebody invents something new, the people around them immediately um can replicate IT and start doing IT and innovations spread very you know we all know about fs right know innovation spread really rapidly.

And it's funny because we we say monkey see monkey, do we have this ocean from going to the zoo that that that they are this they are such copycats, such such, uh, imitative. But we are far more imitative than they are. And there's this psychologist name, Michael Thomas o is on this wonderful work because he's he's one of the world's experts at child cognition, but he's also one of the world's experts at primate cognition, so he can come to do these comparative experiments between children and and and around a tan's chimpanzees.

What he's found is that if you teach a child how to solve a puzzle to get a treat know through one method, say, pushing the yellow button and you get some m and ms. Ah, but then you show that child, four other children who all work with the same puzzle and hit the red button and get amines, then you let the first child go again. They'll push the red button.

They'll conform to what they see the peers are doing. When you put a trip through that same procedure, they stick to what works for them. You know they can see that other chimps are doing the red button.

They stick to what works for them. So we are more imitative. We are quicker to join the consensus.

Then the other primates, and we tend to deride that side of us, I call IT the peer instinct. H is this is this impulse to mess with what the others around us are doing. And we tend to deride IT as a heard instinct or as conformity.

And of course, IT does limit our independent thinking sometimes and sometimes tragically. But we forget that that is the corner stone of human culture and human collaboration, because IT allows us to mild minds and mesh actions. And when we are with people who are part of the same in group, are part of the same, sure, we can finish each other sentences.

We can, uh, you know, help each other without even a request, a way that no other species can. Because we're we have this just strong impulse to match and almost everything important that humans have accomplished. It's not the work of one loan genius you know even um newton said, know if i've seen farther than others it's because I stood on the shoulders of giants, right? So it's it's our ability to work within, build on the ideas of others that really responsible for everything that we've accomplished. And is this, per instance, this confirmative instinct, conformists and instinct, that is largely responsible for that.

So I want to stay with the idea of CoOperation and collaboration and the White collar a of the eyes you use in the book an example going back two million years ago of horen ce um one of our producer species um and the sum of the most recent a fossil locations in some of the more recent findings suggest that this was a CoOperative species far and uh both with hunting and and uh cooking game much earlier than we had previously believed even though there wasn't a spoken language. Tell us a little bit about how homo reactive was able to hunt two million years ago CoOperatively and why that was such a evolutionary advantage.

somewhat jokingly in the book, suggests that the field of archeology, oh, a very sincere apology to homo erectus, because for the longest time, archaeology was pretty much the science of stones and bones. You know, it's it's what has survived, but it's not necessarily the only tools that these ark humans had.

Its kind of a selective survivor bias, right? So we tend to think of them as the flint stones, but of course, they had lots of wooden tools and other tools that are just aren't around for us to see. But archaeologists have become much, much more clever.

They they use these csi worthy techniques to learn a lot more from often microscopic traces of uh things of soil in these sites that they identify as living sites. And um one thing that has become clear is that home erectile only invented one tool, the hand acts, which is A A sort of tear drop shaped piece of a link that they used they used to shop, they used to grind, they used to this. And so they are always kind of portrait as the single tools.

Simple thing you know that was around for a million years and only invented this one tool portrayed as more intellectually, more APP than human. But what has become evident from footprints that have been discovered in kenya are in the footprints that assists ed in the mud, is that groups of erectile, you know, a million and a half years ago, engaged in coordinated hunting of antilopes. And it's long been known that there were antilope bones in directive sites.

But I was thought that, oh, they must have been scavenger, you know, because how could, you know, antil hopes can run fifty miles an hour, not even you say boat could come near them so how could home erectile with just a hand acts stand a chance of getting an answer up? Well uh today uh there are some african people who engage in what's called persist in hunting which is um say you and I are our hunters in in a group that doesn't really have many weapons so we watch an antelope heard and then we see maybe one antelope on the margin of the heard and then you go chase IT and you kind of separate IT from the heart and then you're tired and it's tired. But then I start chasing IT, coordinating with you on the same antelope.

IT does no good to different antilopes around all the note, but if we can chase the same antilopes, you know, evolution design antilopes to be sprinters not marathoners right alliance zoey charge once and so um if you and I and someone else can take turns chasing this antil open a coordinated way and keeping IT separated from the heart eventually IT just kills over from exhaustion and dehydration and um we have an anthology and so it's become evident from fossilized footprints that even a million and half years ago, uh, homo actis was capable of that sort of thing. And it's also become evident from other kinds of uh, microscopic particles of bernstine that they were a cooking. And so they were coordinating both with regard to hunting and with regard to gathering.

And that suggests that they were sophisticated with regard to social intelligence in ways that that goes way beyond the picture of them, that archaic logy presented, you know, in prior generations, the first evidence for a stone tip spears is about a half a million years ago, I think, because the technology for building spears is that you have to first straight, and if it's a throne speare, you have to straight in the shaft of IT. And then you have to sharp in the point of IT into a needle le sharp point, and then you have to somehow have the the spear tip onto the thing. So is there is a pretty elaborate process of making a spear.

But that is one of the hallmark innovations of the next big wave of human social evolution, uh, which happened about a half a million years ago. And that involves what I call the hero instinct, which is if the peer instinct was an instinct to be Normal, to do what most people are doing, the hero instinct was this new impulse to be Normative, to be examples, to go beyond what other people are doing, to be a key contributor and gain the state is, and the tribute that the community accords to those who are the key contributors. And IT was an interesting thing to evolve, because IT IT was rewarding for the individuals who had the ambition to be a contributor.

They got socially rewarded. But IT also was very adapted for the group because it's incentivized individuals to build tools that require toiling alone for a long period of time. It's also around the time when archaeologists start to see the skeleton of people with uh congenital uh deformities.

That survived to the age of adult hood and that suggests that someone was taking care of a person in their group who probably couldn't reciprocate. Uh and so you know, i'm doing something pro social. I'm not going to get paid back by the person that i'm helping, but i'm going to get paid back by the group because i'm doing something nobody is is something good or something examples, i'm a hero.

So let's put this into historical context here. Instinct, hero instinct and ancestor instinct, pear instinct, two million years ago, that begins to develop. And that IT is useful because conforming in ordination allows smooth social interaction and collaboration, and that leads to a more successful group yeah working .

as a united t and if there's all these economic analysis of forrid ing you both by biologists and by and for rigid collectively, is more efficient and risk reducing that each individual for themselves, right? If for working as a group, there's less likelihood of any of us starving.

And you mention the heroes thinking that was about half a million years ago. Tell us about the ancestor instinct, the ancestor .

instinct to a lot of people when I describe IT, IT sounds like the most primitive of all of these instincts, but it's actually the crowning touch that enabled us to live in. Tribes can accuse all the advantages of IT and the ancestor instinct, just like the other two. We can still recognize IT in ourselves today.

The peer instant corresponds to the sideways gLances at our neighbors and our co workers and the impulse to do what they're doing. The hero instinct corresponds to our our upward curiosity about MVP and cees and celebrities and the and the weird impulse we have to to emulate their corks to kind of eat what a lebron James eats for breakfast, or to you use the same hand gestures that barack obama uses. The ancestor sting corresponds to the curiosity that we feel about past generations.

You, when we hear about the founder, when I used to teach a bloomberg, I would tell them when mike bloomberg started the company on the the first terminal day least, he put IT in the trunk of his car and he drove down the wall street and people just hang on every word when you're talking about those formative legends. You know what the founder did at the beginning of the organization? People are very curious to hear about prior generations of their family.

Their curious about the original family recipe, and they take a deep satisfaction. And following those recipes on on a holiday, we fetishize antiques in these artifacts from the past. And so all of this is the psychology of nostalgia for the past, or sentimentality for the past. And IT IT comes with IT a capacity for rote learning, you know? So when we're learning religious things from our our grandparents, we're not supposed to ask questions.

You we're supposed to repeat the sater dinner exactly the way the sater dinner was done you by prior generations and um that is what I call the ancestor instinct, is this impulse to learn by rote about things that the past generations did, and then replicate, almost compulsively, those things in exactly the way that we've learned them. And I can lead to superstitious learning and hanging on to ways of the past that are no longer adaptive. But IT was very adaptive for our evolutionary forebearance, because IT contributed to memory both.

As an individual, I could, I could learn some technique, like a spear making technique that might go beyond my understanding. You know, I don't understand why this way of straight ing wood by soaking and water works, but IT works. So if I, if I just trust and, you know, take IT on faith and learn, learn by road, then I can continue that expertise and pass IT onto the next generations.

And for the group, IT created a kind of tribal memory before that, in the archaeological record, what you'd see is that A A group in a particular area would develop the throwing spear and have IT for ten generations, and then lose IT for thirty generations. And then someone would invented to get. So they were, they were reinventing the wheel a lot.

And and after, after the ancestor instinct was also in place. Then you had these three instinct. You had the ancestor instinct, which allowed you to hang onto the lessons of the past.

You had the hero instinct, which made people want to go beyond what's already in place. So IT turned into building on the, on the expertise of the past. And then appear instinct was this mechanism, this engine, for kind of spreading and distributing the knowledge we want to confirm what the others around us are doing.

And the end result of this was cumulative cultural evolution, that the the shared knowledge in a group became richer and more tuned to what works in the environment with each generation. And that collective level learning more than anything about our brains as individuals is what enabled our species to become the dominant species of of the planet. And IT um it's still a very powerful resource force today quanto computers .

aren't like ordinary machines. They are built from the ground up on the physics of the very small and by harney, the power of the quantum scale. We can now see and understand the world down at the level of individual items and molecules. I wanted to find out about the hope that this new tool could help cure cancer or be a game changer for climate change. Join me, hana fry, on the expense tie era, a bloomberg dot com forwards national nokia.

Which nuggets eggs, no matter the form, americans love their chicken.

The chicken industry is one of largest and most complex supply change that amErica has. These birds are big business, and we wanted to get to the bottom of IT.

welcome. The big pital ism brought you by in this special three part series from climbing podcast. We are going to examine some of the thorn issues facing the U.

S. Economy through the medium of this humble bird. Examine, get IT. So there going .

to be chicken ponds.

There are definitely going to be chicken ponds. We're going to be asking why the chicken industry has evolved the way that IT has. And what does that say about the american economy that so many consumers are flocking to poultry?

There's another one for you. Listen to beat capitalism from out now on apple podcasts, spotify, or ever you get your podcasts.

So let's talk a little bit about um some of the examples you use uh of corporate amErica adapting some of the strategies and and full disclosure. You consult for a lot of these companies you've consulted for a bloomberg and and other entities. Um so there's all sorts of fascinating examples of of how companies either user or don't use um the lessons of tribal ism but I have to start again in south korea talking about their terrible soccer team. Tell us a little bit about the hidden syndrome um who was coach hiding and why did the south koreans um bring him to fix this core team .

well uh south korea is a country that had a very difficult twenty eth century of of a civil war and colonization and a political turmoil and everything was finally coming together in the nineties when they reached the elite tier of nations and they successfully bid on hosting the world cup with their arrival, japan and IT really looked like they were ascendant. And then the asia crisis in I think ninety eight ah you know brought down their politicians, brought down some of their banks are brought embarrassing bailouts from the west and accusations of crony capitalism and at the same time their national soccer team, the reds, was starting to flounder. They are usually a regional power, but in the two thousand asia cup they they couldn't even beat kuwait, which is a fairly small country not known for its soccer process. And so this was a moment of panic for the soccer overlords of south korea, because they were about to cohoes the world cup and the soccer od makers were betting that they would be the first ever host nation to not advance from group play to tournament rounds not a distinction that they were hoping would be associated with their a country, uh, being the first host not to advance so they made A A gamble which is that they called um made a long distance call to the netherlands and called a fellow name whose hidden who was a um football or soccer coach in the netherlands um who had found a lot of success turning teams around um and doing so despite you know what might be considered an obstacle which is cultural differences so he and .

let me jump in right here because in the book you describe a very similar set of defero like copy at a pilot where you would have rockies Young team mates who would have open shots and defer to the more senior experience players and pass on taking a good shot instead forward the ball to to the senior player. How did he resolve this? How did he deal with this?

Well, he was a very downed earth egalitarian, an dutchman, and also not terribly knowledgeable about the legends of south korean soccer. He didn't know who their beacon and who messy were, and he had watched the game tapes and noticed that their style of play was a little bit slower and more predictable.

Then what was needed to play with the world's best at this time? And so he, he thought, okay, i'm gonna have to just change the way things are done there so he held open tryouts, which was the first way of roughly feathers because you know the customer there had been that the legends of korean soccer would automatically be given their standard positions on the team. And he um then um started noticing that when they would scream ge that uh that are the players were not uh taking every shot or passing as fluently as he would like.

And so he announced a set of a set of change policies that were a bit mysterious to the players. He said, OK the next phase of our training camp is not gonna here in south korea is going to be in united arab, emerge at an international socket facility and um the horrific declensions of korean which he had heard from his assistance coaches were being used on the field our hands forth band。 He justified IT as the need for speed but IT was obvious that some of these things were also changing the cultural cues around the players. He also didn't allow the south korean sports press to follow them to the emirates so that players wouldn't be interviewed by their campaign rates after every scrim ge about what they did wrong and what they did right. And what he was trying to do was sort of remove the daily reminders of these korean cultural habits that he, that he suspected were getting in the way of learning. What he was trying to teach was which was this uh dutch style of football where players swap positions on the field to throw off defenders um but IT means that A A twenty year old rookie who is playing next to the legendary ID fielder would take that person's position and then that person takes the the winger position and whatever the other position is and that just felt wrong to players when they were thinking through the lens of their korean social habits um but when they were in the emirates, surrounded by professional football players from various countries, their identity as professional football players came to the four of their minds rather than their identity as koreans and they became more open both the rockies and the veterans to learning this new tactical system which was necessary to raise their game to the level where they could compete against .

worse and spoiler alert, how did the south koreans do as the host country in the world cup?

Well, amazingly, they made IT out of the uh group rounds to tournament play and an international play. They were Petered with uh the teams like uh italy and spain who were sort of defending americans here and they made IT all the way to the semi finals. And IT was one of the few times that I A team that was not either south amErica or europe made IT to the semi finals.

IT was the first asian team to ever make IT to the semifinals and um IT was not just an unlikely run for a soccer team but IT it's set off uh jubilation that was nationwide A A celebration of what the south korea was capable of if they open themselves up to you to outside influences and outside ideas. And I think it's partly responsible for the south korea that we know today, which is cultural exporter and a much more open society than what was the case. Then they even changed their citizenship law so that they could make who's hitting and on every citizen IT was and had been for a time in memorial, a blood standard of citizenship where you had to prove that you were korean to be a citizen.

And instead they changed IT to one where if you had lived there in work there, you could become, uh, korean citizen. So literally and figuratively, they open themselves up to the world. And the south korea we know today with k pop bands topping the charts, and you movies that are winning Oscars, and you know, soap Operas that are played all around the world. That's the south korea that has come from the openness that are this event helped to create.

So so I want to temporarily leave asia and talk a little bit about microsoft and a little bit about bank america, amErica lynch. Let's start with sadi n adela and microsoft, so long thought of as a monopoly uh for good reason. Um they come out of a decade where their stock went nowhere when all their peers, yes, apple, amazon, go on listen video all did really well. Microsoft kind of andel in the desert for a decade under their prior sey. The deal comes in does a listening tour you describe in the book and essentially completely changed the culture of microsoft from a take you to leave IT ideology tomorrow we're listening tell tell us a little bit about what made nadella special and what changes .

did yes well the first two CEO um bill gates and Steve bomber were strong personalities and sort of intellectually dominant sort of figures and sort of the smartest guy in the room type of people and LED that way. And then that worked really well when your microsoft had a virtual monopoly and could just load more and more technical features on each generation of its software.

And people didn't really have a choice because the switching costs were high. But then we enter the cloud computing era where switching costs are much lower. And there's this new norm of just paying for the features that you use.

And that created a premium on knowing your customer, knowing what your customer needed, which was not microsoft wasn't an extroverted organization IT IT was introverted. IT was IT was a cult of technical expertise. And such an adella had been succeeding in the cloud division.

But that was a relatively small division within microsoft. And he was tapped to be CEO. And he realized that what he had to do was to use the hero instinct, the tendency to follow role models, as a way of reshaping the culture.

But IT was tRicky because he couldn't use his bully puppet, a CEO, to know shoulder people to become Better listeners. You know, that would be an oxy moron, right? He had to instead lead by example and show people what were the set of behaviors that the organization needed, and that would Carry prestige in the new era.

And so he embarked on a listening tour, words that had never been undered by the prior CEO, and went all through the microsoft ecosystem, you know, to their, to their developers, to their sales people, to their customers and you know, listened, listened and made a few changes based on what they said. So one of the things that microsoft was famous for was a stack rank performance evaluation system, where everybody, you know, you have a fixed curve and the lower ten or twenty percent are are fired each year. And that was considered to be something that was a inhibiting the collaboration that was needed in the new era.

And the employees, we're quite vocal about that. And he made that change. So listening works Better if you are also taking some action that shows that you've heard what was said. And then one particularly event, I think, very notable, he went to a conference on a women in technology. It's called the Grace hoper conference you know after one of the founders of computer scientists who was woman who was unrecognized you until recently and um in IT he was asked during A Q N A about gender differences in tech salaries.

You and we know that these gender differences are in part caused by the fact that companies don't regard that as a credible threat when women getting outside off because they don't think the woman's husband and family will move to another city in the way that they do when a man gets an outside so women don't get the same raises, you know when you have a star system, IT happens in academia, IT happens in tech companies. And um but nadella, you know was tired and he had answered a lot of questions and he got the question and he said, well, he said a lot of these inequalities, they even out over time. And so maybe it's just a good idea to let the trust, the process and let the process make its corrections.

Which you know might be the right answer if a junior employee is asking whether he should negotiate hard or you know ah but IT wasn't considered to be the best answer about this issue, sort of a structural issue related to gender. And so there was some some chatter in the blogger sphere about this. And instead of ignoring IT, which he could have easily done, he actively publicized the fact that he made this error and then actively went to meet with women in technology groups and labor economists and people who are experts on this issue, and actively showed that he was taking steps to avoid this structural problem at microsoft.

And by sort of enthusiastic cally owning his mistake and apologizing for IT, he was role modeling this set of behaviors, which is, you know, okay, you're a customer and microsoft hasn't been listening to you very well and is trying to sell you software with a lot of features that you don't need. So let's instead apologize for not knowing Better in and let's take corrective steps of a let's send a sales person to, you know, shadow your people, you know for a few weeks and really get to know the day to day at your company and then we'll come up with, you know a cloud product that really dub tails with your needs instead of, you know, the way that we've been doing IT. And it's considered debate, you know, the the the instrumental, the critical behaviors that change microsoft culture from a no at all culture to a learn at all culture.

You such adela is also very taken by the research in psychology by Carol dow and others about learning orientations and growth orientations as there are some orientations of you thinking, uh, i'm smart, you know and I have high intelligence as a fixed entity and then other people have this mindset that um I have the ability to get smarter and such an nadella is a big advocate of trying to create this growth mindset rather than you fixed mindset about ability. And um microsoft has really resumed its position on the top of the technology hierarchy. It's made really uh adaptive moves in the A I space.

And it's it's become a very happening in quantum computing as well. So it's it's not just in the cloud computing area. The got its mojo back. And I think I got its mojo back by leaving behind an organizational culture that worked in the early air of the industry but didn't work once. You your competing with lots of very adaptive organizations and you need a partner Better and you need to know your customers Better.

Really interesting. So nadel was able to change the culture of a single organization. How difficult is IT to merge the culture of of two different organizations? And i'm thinking about the financial crisis shot on wedding of bank of amErica and amErica lunch. Tell us a little bit about how that merger worked out well.

That's a fascinating case is a case that we we teach at columbia to our students in their very first weeks. Ah you have as a background Peter Lewis know who had built bank of amErica starting from a very small regional north CarOlina, a bank, and swallowing up banks even larger than itself to become this bank that had one in five americans as a customer IT was that you know the the largest consumer bank. But he wanted one more Victory at the end of his career, which was to to acquire a wall street banker, an investment bank, and move into the fascinating in a finance. And the financial crisis presented an opportunity because these investment banks had really troubled baLance sheets, and a consumer bank was considered to be something that could baLances .

that fdc regulated planning a reserve capital and not in the same risk category that all the wall street banks were during the financial crisis.

And he he actually came up to new york and started talking to other other banks. I think, uh, maybe banks that were too far gone and partially through government intervention, uh he became a in conversation with mary linch and mary lynch was this century old, you know esten a brand um IT was in the in the collective imagination synonymous with wall street.

IT had the most famous logo in banking, the charging bull, and slogans like you, mary inches, bullish on america. So very strong culture, very strong brand. And IT needed a rescuer. So a IT looked like a master's stroke of strategy where mary was saving itself, and bank of amErica had gotten a prize at discount.

But then the full depth of the troubles related to the financial crisis became apparent with each quarter where uh there were lots of bad loans on the books at marrow and um then bank of america's acquisition of countywide in L A H brought IT into the um problematic um mortgage uh crisis and as a result there a lot there a lot of strain. There were some resentment of the bank of america, the more plebian consumer bankers who weren't getting a bonus because of the expensive investment bank that had been purchased um and uh what Lewis and others at bank of amErica tried to do was to a simulate marrow into its bank of amErica culture. They regarded as some of the moral culture as uh the problem that created the crisis, the excessive risk taking and um and so um they would hold workshops to try to bank of american ize the moral bankers but you you probably know a lot of former moral bankers as I do.

They they were people who didn't think they had that much in common with the the person at the bank branch on the corner. They thought they were in a very different industry and that the bank of amErica culture had very few lessons relevant to them. Even the so called thunder ing heard of a moral investment advisors know at offices around the country and abroad, uh, didn't think that serve their business to suddenly have a sign in front saying bank of amErica that looked the same as as the the standard bank branch or or to call themselves bank of america.

You can imagine A A career moral person in paris or tokyo suddenly having to call themselves bank of america. It's not the brand that worked particularly well in those environments. And so um IT was fAiling and you had a emerging of talent where brokers can often take their whole portfolio of clients and go across the street to another to the competition. And so um and just .

to put a little flash on on how bad this merger was, one banking analyst called IT the merger from hell. So were they able to rely the cultures in any positive way?

Well, what Lewis did that was a saving a saving Grace was that he hired a person named Sally crojack, who was already A A sort of legend of wall street at a Young age, because he SHE called out some conflicts of interest at bernstein when he was freshly out of her columbia MBA and got fired in the process, but became a bit of a hero. The journal called her the last honest analyst on wall street and then he was hired at city bank when they had some problems in their private wealth division and SHE stood up for the rights of investors who had been solved certain products that um he thought, you know, I had some hidden problems and got fired again but was lauded once again as being a person with integrity and so SHE was brought in a restore trust as somebody that you know had wall street credentials IT didn't seem like he was just this consumer bank person who didn't get what what A A marrow broker, a marrow investment banker needed um and fortunately he was also from north Caroline so he could be A A translator, a natural by cultural person who could go down to share. Let and talk to the bank of amErica executives and I explained to them what the wall street people need did, and they ultimately, after a lot of negotiation, allowed her to do the largest ever rebranding, which was called the bull, is back.

And they they brought back the mary linch name, and they brought back the bull logo for the private wealth division so that IT was once again mary linch and almost immediately uh IT restored uh confidence and IT restored uh collaboration and and citizenship within an organization that had always been was called mother mary IT had always been a very communitarian organization but when when its name was taken away and people were told you're just a bank of amErica employee and nobody identified with bank america, IT all just kind of fell apart and then you see the the most successful people leaving for the the competition IT was very demoralizing but when SHE gave them their group boundary back and he gave them their symbol, the ball back and he gave them their name and their tradition, mary linch back. Suddenly you had this just renaissance collaboration and people working over time to help each other succeed and to convince investors that um you know the post crash era was a buying opportunity and and suddenly mary linch was the bright spot on bank of america's book um and now that went on for a few years now ultimately Sally got removed in a political shift. I think that he is widely regard as having saved the private wealth division through cultural leadership, through understanding how important this sense of group identity. And you know these logos and these slogans, these are these are very important uh, conduits for collaboration. And when you take them away, people are alienated and anoma and they don't know how to collaborate.

We're about to head into thanksgiving. What should family members keep in mind about their tribe and tribal ism in order to have a peaceful thanksgiving dinner?

Well, there's a, there's an economist at U. C, L. A. And Keith chen who works with cell phone location data. So he has his massive data sets that basically attracting the location of everyone in phone.

And what he has been able to discover through very complex statistics is that in the last election sees in two thousand and twenty two thousand and sixteen families that that are politically divided have cut short their thanksgiving dinner during these election years because of the conversations that start to happen out of the second glass of wine so I wish americans not just uh, peaceful but lengthy thanksgiving celebrations. And one of the things I would suggest is a to not believe the hype that americans are more divided now than they ever have been. In eight hundred and sixty, Abraham lincoln became president with less than forty percent of the popular vote.

Seven states succeed from the union before his inauguration. The silver war broke out in a week or so afterwards. Um that's what I would call a real rift.

That's what I would call a chAllenge, a little chAllenge, right? And so what's interesting is what did link think was the solution to that? In his first inaugural, al, he said .

the .

mystic ds of memory will yet swell the course of the union. That's a bit poetic encysted. But what he was suggesting is that collective memory, you know, thinking of our common ancestors, and the gratitude and the obligation that we that we feel and the reference that we feel when we think of ancestors.

Can get us beyond our current differences. Our current differences seem large, but when we think in terms of the hundreds of years of the american experiment since the first settles on these shores, we can think of this disagreement between the north and the south is one that we can possibly get beyond. And um right around the same time as his more famous getty's burger dress, when he talked about our fathers came to this land, you know, he made reference to ancestors.

He did something that he's not often given credit for, which was the proclaim tion of the thanksgiving holiday we learned. I learned in school that americans have celebrated thanksgiving holidays since sixteen and twenty one unbroken tradition. That's not true.

But a lot of the national folklore of every country is fake ler. It's created retrospectively and and projected onto the past. So the pilgrims did not have a thanksgiving in sixteen and twenty one.

They had A A feast that they called a rejoicing where they shot guns in the air and drank whisky. And thanksgiving for them was a religious ceremony. So IT was something very different. Uh, but there were there was a concept of thanksgiving among the puritan s this kind of religious. George washington held one of those religious ceremonies after the revolution war.

And lincoln was influenced by some of the thought leaders of the era who thought a national holiday, a sort of autumn harvest feast that we all do at the same time, would be a unifying thing at a time when the country is sort of divided and linked in. Thought that that makes sense. But how can I get people to accept a new holiday? Well, I can portrait IT as something that's already a time on our american tradition.

So he he described IT with reference to the purity, themes and customs, and he made reference to George washington s. Thanksgiving, a one off event that wasn't meant to be a holiday. And within a few years, americans have embraced IT as a sacred national tradition.

So thanksgiving itself is an example of how culture is beautiful. It's not know the the differences that we have now are not set in stone. They're not necessarily gonna forever. And we can use our cultural capacity for ritual to move beyond differences. And so by celebrating thanksgiving, we should remember that we can get beyond much worse political crisis than the one we have today.

Really fascinating quanta.

Computers aren't like ordinary machines. They're built from the ground up on the physics of the very small, and by harney, the power of the quantum scale. We can now see and understand the world down at the level of individual items and molecules. I wanted to find out about the hope that this new tool could help cure cancer or be a game changer for climate change. Join me, hana fry, on the exponential era, a bloomberg dot com forwards national nokia.

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The chicken industry is one of the largest and most complex supply change. These birds are big business, and we wanted to get to the bottom of IT.

Welcome the big alisa brought to by outbox in this special three part series from glib er podcast. We are going to examine some of the thornie issues facing the U. S.

Economy through the medium of this humble bird. Examine get IT. So there's .

going to be chicken and .

there are definitely going to be chicken ponds. We're going to be asking why the chicken industry has evolved the way that IT has. And what does that say about the american economy that so many consumers are flocking to poultry? There's another one for you.

Listen to beat capitalism from all out now on apple podcasts, spotify, or ever you get your podcasts.

Alright, so let's go back to asia. You you describe singapore at one point in time as A A poor, backwards, very corrupt, impoverished islands. How do they manage to turn that around? Singapore is now thought of is one of the most successful countries .

in the world. Yes, singapore is healthier, wealthy and less corrupt then the the united states by a substantial margin. That's not to say everything about IT is great. I lived there a couple of years ago for a year and it's got many virtues. But you very strict right in new york it's virtues as well.

right? No no, the famous ly spitting gum on the caning and and that sort of stuff but by a large a very successful society yeah.

And IT was a IT was a british colony. And then during world war two the the japanese occupied and shut down the port which the the british had a tradition there of a free port.

So IT was A A free port for a trading open trading zone and the japanese kind of shut that down and that LED to a sort of darker period in singapore where um you had act markets and you had a lot of corruption um instead of an open port that was no treating everyone the same and and prospering due to the high traffic of business. Singapore after getting a after getting free of the japanese joined the federation of malaysia ah with his northern neighbors. IT continued to be less of a free port than IT had been under under british rule.

Um and some of the local uh traditions of sort of relationship based business where you do business with my family so I give you preferential access to somebody else that's kind of how business works in that area. There are lots of words for IT gon SHE sort of network based business. And that was the dominant mode of how the port Operated.

Uh but then a leader named leak on you who was uh singapore and but who studied law in the U K, returned to singapore to kind of try to help its government during um the malaysian period but then in the mid sixties singapore gained its independence by being ejected from the malaysian federation in part because of the ethnic strife between the primarily chinese napoli's and the malaysians. At the time, IT had no source of drinking water, IT had a very high employment rate, IT had a huge malaria problem and its port had been completely dis functional for decades since the japanese occupation during world war two. A Young leader name leak on you who had grown up in singapore but then studied law and practice law in the U.

K. For a while before returning, became elected as the first prime minister and knew that he needed to do something special in order to help singapore survive as an independent country. And what he did was largely opposite to what most independence leaders do.

Independence leaders tend to eliminate any trace of the prior colonial influence. They pull down statues and they change the names of things back to the local language. And they eliminate western dress and put on the the ethnic guard league.

You did largely the opposite of that. He um his political party, a adopted White uniforms reminiscent of the british navy that had you ensured the Operation of the port for many decades in singapore. He made english the official language rather than male or chinese or many of the other dialogue spoken in the area.

He thought a lingua franca that was not connected to any of the local ethnicities and that was associated with this prior period in history when the port was functioning a in an an adaptive way would be uh the right kind of cultural q he even put up a statue of sir raffles um who was the a british founder of the singapore portion colony, Thomas raffles, in case, uh, somebody didn't get the point. So he didn't try to eliminate all of the traces of the sort of british um paradigm for running the port. He tried to uh restore that by creating an environment that reminded people of that time and brought those habits to the surface. And IT was in combination with a few other procedures like very strong anti graphed laws and sort of role modeling the um the austerity and the um uncorrupted ly that he wanted through role modeling and through these legal changes and through this cultural queue, he set in motion a new culture of singapore that proved to be very successful in attracting trade to singapore rather than to other local ports and a snowball to become the culture not just of the port in singapore, but of all of its industries, and created the singapore that we know today.

So using cultural cues and the right approach to tribal norms, you can affect change in countries, in companies, in sports teams. Am I missing anything there? Because the book really covers a wide range of ways that tribal ism influences organizations.

Yes, all of those are tribes in the sense that they are community is with an enduring identity across generations. What what a generation means is different in a sports team than in a society. But there is transmission of culture across generations.

And the culture is a kind of glue that enables people to coordinate, CoOperate and have a sense of continuity. But we also have levers for activating cultures, and we have levels for uh, altering cultures. And leaders likely on you are adapt to this. He didn't regard cultural sacred.

He was a bit of a cultural engineer at a time when that was regarded as um you know um an impossible thing to do, that you can change the culture of a nation, you can create a new culture, you can ask a newly liberated people to appropriate aspects of the culture from the former colonial era. But he is somebody who felt like people are a little bit more flexible than they've been given credit for. And he knew that he himself, personally, was by cultural.

He was very much chinese, but also very much english. And he thought that a lot of the opposition of his generation were also by cultural. And that was A A resource that he could draw upon to shape the new culture of independent singapore.

H so fascinating. Ly, the former president of singapore was had both a chinese and an english um identity. How do babies cogen develop? Uh, and identity, what is their focus? Do they see family members? Do they see race? What what affects babies? Cultural identities?

Well, race is very silent in this country because race happens to map on to cultural communities that are that are different from each other. But that's not the case in most of the world. In russia and the ukraine, you can't tell from somebody's face which side there on in in gaza.

You can't tell who's israeli and whose whose palestinian based on faces necessarily. And our evolutionary ancestors rarely encountered anybody who was physical, nominally different from themselves. So we're not wired to use race as the basis of categorization is something that even in this culture, children only learn later at, like aged six, to pay attention to race.

But there are certain cues that we seem to be wired to pay attention to in order to recognize whose in what group and in order to recognize when we're around tribe mates, and thus should engage in our tribal norms as a way of coordinating with them. And the number one thing is language. Babies learn not only their mother's language, but even their mother's dialect when they're in the woom.

So when they're born, they will already. If you play tape recordings to newborn's of their mother's language or another language, they will turn to look at their mother's language. They don't speak yet.

They can understand anything, but they know the patterns of the language, even dialect is that way. They will turn to a dialect. And the same kinds of experiments are done where you, you have two adult strangers in front of a baby, and both of them are offering a toy to the baby.

Which which toy does the baby take? Well, they will preferentially interact in and take a toy from a stranger who speaks with their mother's language, or even their mother's dialect, as opposed to a stranger who speaks with a different language or a different dialect. So their, their brains have recognized languages and dialects as markers of in group.

And they preferentially interact with those people and learn from those people. What's fascinating is that babies also seem to be wired to expect that food choices are, cuisine will also be a aligned with languages. So if you put babies in an experiment where there is one adult stranger who is speaking one language, say english, and another one who is speaking another language, say hindy, and then they see the person is speaking english eating one kind of food, and they see the person who speaking hindi eating a different kind of food.

And then a third person comes in, say, speaking english, and IT starts eating the the food that the uh hindy speaking person has been eating. The baby will be started in look like, oh my god, what's going on here? You're eating the wrong food, you know? So what this tells us is that babies are not wired to be racist, but they are already judging us based on how we speak and what we eat.

Who who knew babies were fool would never that alright. So our speed around tell us what you're a keeping you entertain, what are you either listening or or watching well.

ironically enough, what i'm watching is kenby's civil war series, which I never saw the first time uh and um I be great.

I'd written about .

the civil war in the book and then I wanted to watch IT uh.

let's talk about mentors who helped shape your career .

yeah as an undergraduate I had a mentoring and Michael harper, who was an african american poet, Brown and he sort of, I wasn't african american, obviously, but I liked poetry and and contact came from a background similar to his. And unlike most of the people, Brown, and you know, he was a great mentor, warm figure, and someone who paid attention to me when I needed IT.

And then when I want to graduate school, a guy name, Richard nis bit, who is a leading social psychologist. And then when I started at stanford, I had a colleague name, hazel Marcus, who was A A wonderful guide to understanding a profession that I had not much introduction to and help me avoid making lots of mistakes. Let's talk about books.

What are some of your favorites? What are you reading right now?

I just got yesterday a book called co intelligence by eth and molik. Um it's a book about A I but not not a this topic book about A I taking over but it's about how to use A I as your copilot, how to recognize what A I is good at and what you're good at and how to use IT, which I think I need to start teaching my students because .

I think is the new reality and our final question, what sort of advice would you give to a college grad interested in a career in either academic, social psychology or anything related?

Well, I say this to my nephews who are at that age. um. Learn what A I is good at and also learn ai's limitations because I think that the facility in using A I well and not using IT poorly is really going to be a distinguish factor in the knowledge economy career is going forward.

Thank you, professor, for being so generous with your time. This has really been absolutely intriguing. We have been speaking with professor Michael mars of columbia graduate school of business and author of the book tribal.

Have the cultural things that divide us can help bring us together if you enjoy this conversation. Well, check in any the previous five hundred and fifty we've done over the past ten plus years. You can find those at itunes, spotify, youtube wherever you find your favorite podcast.

And check out my new podcast at the money short, ten minute conversations with experts about issues that affect your money, earning IT, spending IT and most importantly, investing IT at the money wherever you find your favorite podcast. And in the masters in business feed, I would be remiss if I did not think the crack team that helps put these conversations together each week. My audio engineer is Steve canalis.

My producer is analog sage. Bwin is the head of podcast at bloomberg. John russo is my researcher. I'm barry reports. You've been listening to masters and business on bloomberg radio.

Wings, nuggets, eggs, no matter the form, americans love their chicken. The chicken .

industry is one of the largest and most complex supply chains. These birds are big business, and we wanted to get to the bottom of IT.

welcome. The big capitalism brought you by in this special three part series from climbing podcast, we are going to examine some of the theories issues facing the U. S.

Economy through the medium of this humble bird. Examine, get IT. So there going .

to be chicken pants.

There are definitely going to be chicken ponds. We're going to be asking why the chicken industry has evolved the way that IT has. And what does that say about the american economy that so many consumers are flocking to? Poll try. There's another one for you .

to beat capitalism from odd lot out now on apple podcasts, spotify, or ever you get your podcasts.