Hosts discuss sports rivalries and emotional ties to celebrities (Part 3)

I thought of an example that's very different from this, but it's intriguing to me, which is about the difference in the dynamic. We were doing a live show in Chicago once, and I want to say that this guy was an economist at university in Indiana. Forgive all the details I'm getting wrong here, but his research was about what I guess you would call asymmetric sports rivalries. And he'd actually measured very intensely how. How these asymmetries played out. So, for instance, Notre Dame is a big and famous and historically successful sports program, especially with football. And then they have all these other teams that they've played for years and years and years and years and years, and those schools, let's say Boston College, for instance. Boston College considers Notre Dame its number one rival. Notre Dame considers Boston College its number, I don't know, 37 rivals. That's what I got to thinking about when you were telling me about parasocial relationships generally. But that's a little bit easier to understand because it sounds as though with the parasocial relationships, especially if they're coming from media, let's say it's fiction, like Friends or nonfiction, like a podcast, that you really do feel you form a relationship with these people. Are you saying, however, that the listener or the viewer will really cross the line and really think that the relationship is beyond virtual? I don't know that people think, oh, my gosh, I thought we were best friends. I think it's just that there is something of a reflexive like, well, if I know a lot about you, then you must know a lot about me. That doesn't necessarily mean that people are delusional. Well, doesn't it sound borderline delusional? Like, why would I think that you would know a lot about me? Yeah, it's on a continuum. I guess you could argue. Maybe we're just using a heuristic generally, when I know a lot about you, a lot about me. But I remember when Princess Diana died and there was such an outpouring of grief around the world. Do you remember when that happened? And there was just like, piles of flowers and people who actually felt genuinely sad for days or more? I'll be honest with you. I mean, this may make me sound more like a robot than a human. I just didn't get it. I didn't understand why people cared so much. Same. I was like, holy shmoly, what is going on with these people who are grieving like it were a brother or a sister?