Don't know man. It seems like JK Dobbins and the Ravens are in sort of this Weird place right now, and maybe it's just me. Maybe it's coincidental. I don't know But stuff seems like it's really strange right now. Now, of course Media day Media day that's when all the players they showed up and stuff They were taking the pictures. They were shooting the videos and whatnot. They were doing everything for media And JK Dobbins was then we talked about it that day that that was a nice little shock And I a nice news for the Ravens that JK Dobbins has showed up And I was like, all right Well, we're gonna be seeing JK Dobbins at minicamp and whatnot and he was making the cuts for media day and all that I'm doing his running back stuff and I was like, all right, let's go Then we see no signs of a man minicamp at all nothing And I was like, oh, well, okay Todd Monk and said that he was hoping to see JK Dobbins out there give him something to get excited about He said run a wheel around or something But no, there was no JK Dobbins there But that ain't really what had me tripping that much. It was really a John hardball today When he was asked about JK Dobbins, he said he had he had expected him to practice But it just wasn't in the cards and it was just the way that hardball said it to me It just seemed like there was just seemed like there was a disconnect between him and JK Dobbins And how about like how about the coach when and he's shown it to us before I mean, he only been coaching the Ravens for what since 2008. So today it's 14 15 years So it's been a little while so I think a lot of us kind of know hardball maybe but If he's like if he's in sync with you if he's in tune with you what not if he got your back or whatnot He gonna hold it down He gonna hold it down. But if y'all not on the same page, even if it's temporarily A lot of times it can be shown through his words the way that he speaks about you And that's what it seemed like today listen to the press again. Let me know if it's just me But that's what it seemed like today. It seemed like There's just a disconnect right now Because he sort of made it seem like well a I was thinking it was gonna be one thing But then it ended up being something completely different. So we'll see he said he'll probably be ready for training camp. So that's good That's nice But I don't know. It just seemed like they're in a real weird spot and again We got we got to go back to the very end of last season how last season ended With JK with his frustration talking about how he wanted to be the guy Like he said he was tired of holding it back He said he talked to some people on the sidelines and stuff. Are you tired of holding it back? I need to be the guy and that's of course when He didn't really get that much work uh in the playoffs and then like especially in the red zone and stuff With y'all y'all know how it went. We remember But I don't know it seemed like they in a weird spot, but then even the other day um In the press of the other day somebody asked uh John Harbaugh like how jk dobbins would fit Into the new offense and I forget exactly what John Harbaugh said But his answer to me again, let me know if it's just me or if y'all saw or heard it too But his answer to me made it seem like uh, like they would really have to find a spot for him It didn't feel like uh, jk dobbins would be the guy Now I was we've talked about it before and he I was just talking to my guy jason about it the other day too um, I feel like with with uh jk dobbins Um, oh no, it's talking to my guy uh david about it. My god david But I was telling him with with jk dobbins. It sucks because it seemed like he was getting ready to get the keys A couple years ago. It seemed like it was getting ready to be His offense. I was not his offense, but he was going to be the feature running back for the east baltimore ravens That's what it seemed like But then what was it 2020? I think it was 2020 No, 2021 2021 Yeah, yeah 2021 Let's seem like they were gonna be like, all right jk here. It's all you baby. It's all yours But then he got the injury on the the week three of the preseason against the commanders on that screen pass Where that ended his season because that that's where it was really like, all right It's getting ready to be jk's time But then that messed him up and then last year Uh, it just seemed from that point on like the ravens are like, all right, we Like almost like they couldn't trust him or something like that um To be the guy to hold it down all the way and because after ray rice like ravens have done They've done a lot of running back back to me I mean, they they did had a justin four set. He I guess he was the guy for them. They had the alice collins um, but besides those two It's been a lot of running back by a committee And just right when it seemed like they were gonna go away from that a bit Or they did have mark ingham too. I mean mark ingham did this thing But that was running back by committee, but mark ingham was the guy running back for them So I guess they have done had a main guy here and there But it seemed like jk dobbins was getting ready to be their next main guy but Then the injuries happening that seemed to be the end of that but I just really wonder what's going on right now and hopefully Hopefully this is just nothing. Hopefully this is me just overthinking something right now. Who knows? But um, again with the tweets The tweets I hate to go back to those tweets But we got to go back to those tweets with jk dobbins talking about his future with the ravens and stuff like Stuff like that. You don't just say out of nowhere Stuff like that. You don't just say for no reason stuff like that.  Randomly, I want to tweet about my future with the baltimore ravens. You know, okay. Let's have at it. No So again, I wonder if there was a uh, a conversation about that now, um my guy, uh My idea if he had uh, he had hit me up a couple days ago Just talking about running backs in general And how it just They they get treated like nothing nowadays All right, and let's look to to what he said he said The running back market is absolutely disgusting They really get treated like nothing Davencook put up monster numbers in four years and is getting cut for his contract being too big Which really isn't for a guy who's a top five running back. I feel really bad to know To how to run an nfl treats running backs basically after your rookie year You may never even see another contract go after your rookie contract. I think you meant I say lennon for net 27 years old and still free agent zeke davencook Only has interest. He hasn't even been brought in for contract negotiations with anyone James robinson just got cut who was on a two year four million dollar deal Who's 24 years old feel like something should change for these guys Maybe some more money on contracts or incentives after you've been out the league I don't know but with how running backs, uh are being treated How do you think the ravens will address jk dobbs and gust edwards with the expiring deals soon? That's a really good question That's a really good question and I told him like like with running backs That's unfortunately, uh, the market right now, man That's that's the market right now the the and not even just the just the nfl in general Because the way that they look at running backs is like, all right You're nice whether we drafted you undrafted you but you're nice. Okay.  Okay, cool. Oh, you're getting a look expensive now. Uh I think we can still get some good production Out of a running back, but for a lot cheaper So a lot of teams will go the undrafted free agent route. The lot of teams will go the late round pick route like even Isaiah oh from the chiefs. I know I'm messing up his name Pacheco I know I messed up his name y'all know who I'm talking about my apologies I think he was like a sixth or seventh round pick for the chiefs And he ended up starting over clad that was a layer clad that was a layer was a first round pick Um, but he was a sixth or seventh round pick Ended up helping them run their way to the Super Bowl I mean they did a lot more than running, but he was a big part of what they did so Teams are looking around and like hey, we we can get production Out of backs and we ain't got to pay for it like that. Oh, yeah sign us up all day Even mark any mark in was on a three year five million per Three million 15 million dollar deal three year 15 million dollar deal. So five mil per And Ravens cut them I said, oh, oh He ain't got to worry about finishing that one. Bye And because the other running backs are getting paid cheaper and they could get more production out of them They like oh mark anymore. Okay. See you. Love you. Thank you for everything big trust but see you That's nature to business man. That's the business with with running backs But as far as um, jk dobbins and gust Edwards I really don't know I really don't know and it's uh It's something to think about because again, both of them are at the end of the deals jk dobbins last year last year His contract gust Edwards. They reworked this year, but I believe he's still in the last year of his contract So Things could be changing big time. Remember gust Edwards undrafted free agent They signed him as an undrafted rookie free agent jk dobbins was probably the most investment that they spent at running back in a long time and him being a second round pick Other guys that they brought in justice hill. He was a fourth round pick um Alex Collins they signed him off of Seattle's practice squad. I believe um Terrence west was a free agent I know i'm like skipping like a generation of running backs for the Ravens because I'll be forgetting But um, just in force set He was uh, he was a free agent um I know i'm just i'm i'm like missing so many people like this There's this big gap in my mind right now that I just can't remember a lot of the running backs that the ravens had over the years but Oh, well mark angraham. He was a free agent Uh, but yeah, man, but as far as jk dobbins and gust Edwards. I don't even know what to think about what's gonna happen with them I I have no clue No clue at all It's funny. Uh, why are we talking about this? My guy, um I got Tariq send me a video from good morning football. I don't know if y'all caught it and Uh, Leonard four net was on there Leonard four net was on there and he was talking about Odell Beckham junior and stuff and he was on there with Peter Shraggs and uh and two other people I forget who the other two people were my apologies Um, but if they wanted talking about obj and stuff. He was like, yeah last time obj Um, last time he was playing and stuff. He looked good and he was making dudes look silly And he was only doing it with one leg But now he's healthy and whatnot.  You're really smiling about obj and the ravens and Peter Shraggs and Leonard four net was just he's like And Peter Shraggs was like he said, oh, that's that's because the ravens.  I was like, they really just slipped that in there like that He's like, hey, they did And say, I don't know. Are they really calling Leonard for that? I guess we'll see eventually But um, I just thought that was interesting and then later on in that same segment um Leonard four net they were talking still talking about the ravens and then uh Shraggs was like, oh, he's like Leonard four net He's gonna be probably he's probably gonna get signed by the end of this segment. He's like, oh, is that is that air the costume? Is that is that the cost on your line? He's like he's gonna end up playing with the ravens or something like that But anyway, they kind of transformed it into a joke But it's one of those things where it's like are they joking or I don't know I guess it's one of them things we'll just have to wait and see and find out But again back to my god day of his um his point about the running backs That's just where the NFL is right now, man They they put so much emphasis on it being a passing league which it is But running a ball is still important But it's in a different place than it was years ago. That's not what the NFL wants That's not what the NFL focuses on the NFL is different. The NFL is forever changer Um, you still should be able to run a ball and it's nice when you can run a ball, but the focus is on passing Um, so we're running backs again. They treat it like an afterthought even with full backs too. You think about full backs um And patrick ricotta think that they said he's gonna be starting training camp on the the pup Because he's having what did they say hip surgery? They said he's having some I forgot what what it was But so he's gonna start the training camp on the physically unable to perform this um But even full backs full backs is like a dying breed a lot of teams don't even carry full back anymore A lot of things that they don't even do it. Sometimes they they will use Teams just use no full backs sometimes they'll use a tight end as a full back in certain situations and whatnot But a lot of teams they don't even carry full backs So it's just we're running the ball again. It's NFL is they they they just change so much With the rule changes and whatnot. It's um It's just different than what it used to be even five six years ago Especially 10 11 years ago. It's much different than what it used to be So Yeah, man Just thought it was a very uh very interesting topic that my god dad brought up because it's something that we think about a lot Um, and we see it. We we see how the NFL operates. We see how the ravens operate at the position and whatnot Um, so it was just something that's important to uh to keep in mind. It's funny though, too Speaking about my god Tariq. Um, I had told him a couple years ago I told him that like look man. I just the way that the NFL been changing the way that the rules and stuff I could see them taking the kickoff out I could see them taking the kickoff out in the next two to three years and I told him this about maybe like three years ago Told him I got to see the NFL taking the kickoff out Just because they they talk about safety this and say even though a lot of stuff they do Is not safe, but I could see them taking that out And they haven't taken it out So it lasted past the two three years and whatnot, but I don't know it still does seem like it could be trending that way Especially with the new fair catch rule, which is It's like, uh everything But anyway, so we'll see But team keep it clean. I love y'all. I appreciate y'all as far as jk diving specifically I really hope that All this whatever it is gets cleared up and hopefully it's just a bunch of nothing Hopefully it's just me overthinking.  So You can hopefully whatever it is if it is something that can get worked out Um, and we'll see we'll just see how things go team keeping clean. I love y'all so much I appreciate y'all make sure you subscribe to the channel so you don't miss anything and hey, that's it the mini camp is over Next time you see these Baltimore Ravens, it will be for training camp. So that is towards the middle end of july so yeah Should be fun. Love y'all. We're still gonna keep y'all locked in throughout the entire summer Throughout their entire break even though they're gonna be getting the break We still got y'all backs man. I love y'all appreciate y'all and just like the Ravens are for about a month and a half We out


And so we wanted to see does ritual mute that signal, sort of turn it down, or does ritual heighten that signal? And why that's important is because that signal has been associated with chronic anxiety. So Nick, welcome to the show. Thank you. Thanks for having me. We're really excited to be here. I'm excited, man. We got introduced with a mutual friend of ours. As these things happen. Yes. Yeah, yeah. I'm not per se a researcher or a scientist. I'm more of a curious bee evangelist of psychology and behavioral economics. And for me, I'm always interested in like, why does a person do those things? And most people will kind of come to their own subjective justification. For me, I'm like, no, it's not about subjective. There's a fundamental underlining reason. And for me, I love to say the nature is the best teacher. If we look at our past through evolution, psychology, biology, and we look at the history of Homo sapiens, not just modern day Homo sapiens, like our lineage, Homo habilis, and all the way back. Ancestors, yeah. Ancestors like, we behave a certain way because of X, Y, and Z. And so you specialize in a lot of this stuff and you've written a bunch of research. And there's one paper though that actually have in front of me right now, which I've been fascinated by, and that is rituals. Okay. Like we're getting right into it. Yeah, yeah, yeah. But like extremely fascinated by rituals. Good. I'm a big student of mythology. Okay. Specifically like Joseph Campbell. Yeah, good, good. And going deep on Joseph Campbell, looking at stuff like Arthur Schopenhauer talks about. But even looking at like modern day military, where they have certain ritual practices, or even looking at religion, or they have ritual practices, and looking at like how one ritual can be a catalyst to completely transform someone's perception of reality. And so you wrote this paper, how rituals alter the brain to help us perform better. Okay. I was wondering which paper you read. That's it. Yeah, good, good. So I'd love to kind of do a deep dive on this. Yeah, totally. So I'll have to think back now because that's a few years in the middle of my PhD. That was work that I did with a shout out to a student, a former student of mine, Devon Bonk. Devon is now a PhD student in his own right at I think the physical education department, kinesiology department of University of Toronto. So he and I were just brainstorming one day, talking about rituals in the context of performance and in performance generally, but in particular with athletes and professional athletes. And so you have, and I'll talk about athletes in a second to sort of set up context. But I remember I was actually talking to one of the lead surgeons, I think it was St. Mike's.  It was like people who come, have a car accident, like burn their body. She will do the cosmetic surgery to help them and skin grafts, et cetera. And we sat down to her coffee and it was really interesting. She's like, we actually have these quirky pre-performance rituals before we go into the operating suite, the operating room where the head surgeon and the nurses will engage in these really weird superfluous quirky behaviors that we could construe as ritualistic. And she said, it's particularly odd for us because doctors and in particular surgeons are seen as like the most cold calculated robotic like human being. If there ever was one or should be one, it should be a surgeon who's not operating or doing their job based off of some sort of emotion, but instead of sort of sticking to a process and a protocol. And she said, despite that stereotype, despite that image of the surgeon, we were still engaging in these performative rituals because they helped to, and most people don't have an answer when you talk to them about why do you do these rituals? It's really, you have to probe them and unpack it. But she's like, yeah, it just makes us feel like where we can do our job. We feel better about it. So they even had like a shrine before. Really? You know where they do, you know where they scrub or whatever and they wash their hands and their arms. They would have this shrine that they would, dare I say, like pray to before going in and operating. So that psychology, which is, I'm going into some performance context. It's high stakes. I'm feeling particularly anxious. I'm feeling stressed. I need to do something to anticipate what's going to come. And that usually manifests itself in some form of ritual or ritualistic behavior. So we see it in there, insurgents. We see it in military and we see it in athletes. So athletes are the one that we sort of think about because it's sort of, you know, we see it in sports. We love to follow athletes. It's just sort of fun to see what they do. Raphael Nadal is highly ritualistic and bordering into compulsive how obsessive and extreme he is when he does his pre-performance and during performance rituals. So you could argue that most professional athletes, most people who have some sort of high stakes performance will have a ritual. And so this is where we were starting at with the study. So then the next question was, okay, from process, from sort of looking at it mechanistically because we're scientists, we wanna understand what's actually going on. Why are they doing these things? Because it's a bit of an opaque window. We're not really sure why they do them. So it's like, okay, let's look in the brain. And we have these great neuroscience methodologies and tools that we can use to sort of peer into the inner workings of a person's brain and see what is actually happening during a ritual when a person is doing that ritual and what is happening after they've done the ritual when they're mid-performance. And we had two hypotheses, two competing hypotheses. The first was that rituals help to alleviate anxiety and the part in the brain that's sort of responsible for generating that signal of anxiety, especially in particular in response to failure.  Some people will collapse under that pressure, under that weight, other people will sort of push it back and move on. So we thought that ritual is sort of helping them move on past that performance setback. And then the other function we hypothesized was that rituals are helping us to align our motivation, getting us in the right sort of frame of mind so that we can go into that performance with a degree of confidence, that we're sort of self signaling to ourselves, I'm ready for this, whatever it might be. So why that's important is because there's a particular brain signal, a particular signal in the brain that arises from the anterior cingulate cortex or the ACC, which is just behind our prefrontal cortex. It's sort of seen as the, in sort, our ancestral past, our evolutionary past is seen as the first prefrontal cortex before the humans had the massive prefrontal cortex that we have. So the ACC, and the ACC generates the error related negativity signal or the ERN, often called the oh shit signal, which is like you're doing a task, you screw up and your ACC will fire off this sharp inflection that basically is there to tell you something happened in your environment that's not good, I don't like it, I being the brain, let's pay attention to that thing so that you can avoid making that mistake again down the line. Very adaptive, very functional signal that we have. And so we wanted to see, does ritual mute that signal, sort of turn it down, or does ritual heighten that signal? And why that's important is because that signal has been associated with chronic anxiety. So people with clinical generalized anxiety disorder and OCD tend to have a very high amplitude, a very high signal of the ERN, because they're hypervigilant. What's going on? What's going on? Are you feeling a certain way? Why am I feeling that way? So they have this massive ERN signal. So a big signal can mean that you're overly anxious and overly hypervigilant, which is not good for performance. So ritual might actually help to just turn it down a little bit, not so much so that you're sort of not seeing any of the failure. You don't want to mute it completely, but you want to see it in such a way so that you don't react defensively. So that you accept the failure, you integrate it and you move forward in an adaptive way. So we call this like priming. Yeah, I guess it's, yeah, the ritual you mean? Yeah.  And so the opposite of just to go back a second, I'm going all over the place here, I hope you know mine. It's good. Going back to, so the people with generalized anxiety to sort of have a really high signal, people who are super religious, zealots, extreme, even extreme, like in their religiosity and religious behavior have a very low signal. Meaning sort of like back to, I can't remember who said it, maybe Marx, religion is the opiate of the masses. So religion is this analgesic. It's this distraction so that we don't have to face some of the most harsh realities of our existence, which is like we're mortal. What Nietzsche is saying, like the toughest thing a man can do is to sit by himself. That's it, exactly. Exactly, and there's a study that gets at that, which is hilarious, talk about it in a second. And so the ritual for an athlete or for anyone who's going into performance is sort of somewhere in between those two states. You're not the extreme religious person who's refusing to acknowledge that life is tough, but you're also not the hyper-vigilant chronic worrier and worry-wartened person with anxiety, who's just picking up type two errors everywhere they go. So you're sort of right in the middle. And that's what we find with the study. And one other thing I'll say about that is, why that's a particularly cool study, aside from the fact that we did it, is that we designed an ad hoc ritual. So something that we created. Right, cool. Because we couldn't, because as a scientific experiment, we couldn't go to a person and say, do your ritual before, because there's all sorts of confounds with that. Yeah, skew the results too. Exactly, so anytime you're doing a true experiment, you have an experimental condition and a control condition, you need all of the participants in both conditions to have the same starting point.  And so that's what we did. I created up, I designed this set of behaviors that involves repetition, redundancy, a lot of movements and vocalizations. And then we said to them, we didn't even use the term ritual whatsoever because that comes with its own hidden meanings. Of course, yeah. So we said to them, do these actions once or twice a day for a week, memorize them and then come into the lab and you're gonna do this performance thing and we gave them the opportunity to do the ritual one last time. But essentially what they were doing was they were taking these arbitrary ad hoc behaviors and ritualizing them as a function of doing them every day at home so that by the time that they came into the lab on the eighth day or whatever it was, those behaviors are no longer just mere behaviors. Those are in a sense ritualized behaviors. So that was another important point, sort of a value out of that particular study. You mentioned a second ago you were talking about, I was talking about Nietzsche about being an alone. You said you wanna... Distraction. Distraction, yeah. Yeah, so there's a cool study where they gave people the option to be alone in a room and they could either take their smartphone or their device with them in the room or they could go into the room just with nothing. With nothing. No computer, nothing, just their thoughts. And the majority of people, men in particular, were willing to take their phone into the room even when the upshot was, they had to receive mild electric shocks. Really? So it's like, I would rather have my phone and receive electric shocks, something like 40% of men, than sit in that room alone with my own thoughts. That's how averse of it is for us to think our own thoughts and to be alone. So you think religion is a distraction then too? It's like old school social media. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, yeah, yeah. A real analog version. Yeah. Yeah, so that is what distraction is. Distraction isn't, we think of distraction and I can't take credit for this view. It's even Neri Al with his new book, Indistractable and others have talked about it before that distraction isn't sort of like, oh, I'm not being able to pay attention. I'm not able to focus. Distraction is actually the things in our environment, be they technological, be they people, social, physical environment, the things in our environment that are pulling us away from the things that we want to do or that are good for us to do, that we intend to do. So when you construe and when you frame distraction in that way, smartphones are a distraction, of course, and all the different things on them are apps, but religion could be framed as a distraction because it's sort of forced, and there's gonna be a lot of people who obviously disagree with me, I'm an atheist or probably an agnostic because I have to be, according to my scientific principle thinking, to be an agnostic that is. And so it is forcing a person to not think about some of the harsher realities, like the fact that we don't know what happens after we die. We have no idea. It's not a falsifiable hypothesis, we can't test it yet. Maybe one day, but not yet.  We have no ideas. And that's why debates about does God exist? Is there an afterlife are in my mind?  Yeah, that's where they bring up that. What's the saying, the Pascal's wager? Yeah, exactly. It's like, well, just live life or as if God exists. And you'll appease him at the end of the day. But it's like, and you know, Pascal was onto something.  Like you're like, ah, I got you, God. I'm gonna just have this wager. And when my time comes, I'm gonna get into the kingdom of heaven because I was hedging my bets. God's gonna know if there is a God, he's very powerful, he knows your thoughts. I have a theory of God. Let's hear it. And it's not what people think it is. So if a God does exist, it's not how we think it is. So I view, and I'm same camp as you, I'm agnostic. So I'm far, I'm the opposite of religious. Like I have a deep hatred for organized religion, not individual religion or spiritual choice, but the organization of a religious. You're the SBNR, spiritual but not religious. Correct. Okay, yeah, good. So I always view, I'm more into Nick Bostrom's like simulation theory. Like for me, more and more, I'm like, rationally that kind of makes sense to me. You know, I'm like, yeah, computer code science. Yeah, it makes sense. So I'm like, okay, if I was this like omnipotent, omnipresent, super computer, right? Everywhere in the ether out there, I would know everything and be everywhere. But the only thing I wouldn't know is where I come from. Right. It's like who created me if I'm this like super powerful thing. So then what I would do is like, I would be like, I would get bored for a while. I would become a joker, like in mythology, a lot of the like the most important gods or joker gods cause they may, it shows you that no matter what your belief system is, that's not the truth, right? There is no such thing as the absolute truth. And so basically if I was this like AI super God, I'd be like, well, I got to figure out where I come from. Let me run these experiments everywhere. And that's us. Yeah, I like it. Yeah, because I was like, maybe one of these things evolves into me like 10 trillion years from now. Then you get insight into it. Yeah. I believe it. I mean, it's plausible. Yeah. So is like Elon Musk says it's, we have to accept, analytically we have to accept that it is plausible, that it is the sort of logical sequence that this is a simulation. And that that's actually a much more plausible narrative than the big God, big moralistic God in the sky, which majority of people believe. So I think it's a matter of time. I think it's a generational thing, a cohort thing. I don't think religion is going away. It is dying. Yes. Nietzsche said it, God is dead.  But I think it's gonna be a slow death. And maybe I'll recant what I said. I think we're just gonna have a different version of God, like so what you were saying. And whatever that is, it's sort of technological. If it's more us, if it's nature, then that's gonna be the case. And in fact, I actually think that our society would benefit greatly from a transferring from the God, you know, the big God, the monotheistic God to the nature God, sort of the more pantheistic nature is sacred. Back to bone religions. And indigenous religions are actually more in line. So even indigenous populations in Canada, like our different nations within Canada, those spirituality, because they don't call themselves religions, those systems of spirituality and worldviews and philosophies are actually more consistent with scientific thinking and thought and quantum physics than the existing monotheistic religions and God religions, where nature is this thing that you revere and worship and you think is holy. Imagine we had the indigenous ways of thinking and worshiping for the past 2000 years instead of the Judeo-Christian religions. We wouldn't have climate change, I guarantee that. We wouldn't have like these problems of, because we would be considerate of our physical surroundings and of nature. So I actually wouldn't be upset if we began to put God back into nature. I think there's some good things to be tapped into there. Yeah, it's interesting right now. I think religion is an appeal for a lot of people. It would be irresponsible for me or it wouldn't be truthful for me to say here and say there's religion is all negative. There's many beneficial aspects of it, right? From the community, the tribal building, camaraderie. Some people actually do follow some of the commandments are okay, not all of them, you know what I mean? So there are beneficial aspects to it. At the exact same time the organized religion is just for me that's all negative aspects. And so I think if you look at the history and monotheistic religion is pretty much yesterday's news. It's very early in the whole grand scheme of things. We have, I think it goes back to the reason why we created narratives as, oh, what's the author's name of Homo sapiens? Oh, Yvonne. Yvonne, Herrera, yeah, Herrera, yeah. So the number one invention of human beings is storytelling, is narratives. Our narratives create the perception of a reality. This is computer code software in my brain. Okay, so back in the day it goes back to logical fallacies. So certain things happened. And so our brains had to justify what these things, why these things are happening. It's like, well, the sun did this. It's like, well, we got to worship the sun because the sun will keep on doing this and therefore these plants will grow, whatever, or the wind, so it's logical fallacies. We see certain things, but we can't make the connection between X, Y, and Z. So we have to create a story in our mind to justify these events. Cool, right? So that kind of evolves. We have this narrative, the storytelling model within our psyche. It evolves, evolves, evolves, evolves, evolves. The problem though is with modern day religion or any form of belief system, it's not that it's bad. Like, I'm not here saying religion is bad. The problem with any narrative or like any code is like, unless I update my code. Yeah, you need to update the code, especially when it comes to religion. Yeah, so it doesn't matter if you follow any of the top three monothistic religion, whether that is Judaism, Christianity, or Islam. The problem with these monothistic religions is they're not updating the narrative to fit 2020. That's the fundamental problem. Yeah, because when they were invented, like you said, what you call storytelling is to the human brain sometimes referred to as effect and some motivation, which is like, I can piece together various causes and effects in my environment. And the brain evolved a very happy, subjective, nice feeling when we're able to do that. That's why children, toddlers, I have a 20 month at home. When she learned something about her physical or social worlds environment, she responds with such happiness and joy because her brain is saying, yes, receive those inputs because that's how you learn about your world. That is you piece together the causal sequence of various events. Now we have a finite brain, a finite computer between our skull and the external surroundings are by definition infinite. So now you have this mismatch. You have this mismatch between a finite processor and an infinite number of stimuli that are coming in. And so the brain evolved these different fallacies and heuristics, which even the word fallacy and bias hints at that they're bad when in fact, they're actually quite good. They allowed us to take the infinite sources of information and stimuli and to sort of package them and pattern match them so that we can make sense of what William James called the buzzing, booming confusion of our world. And so we could actually like go around and mate and find food and survive and have the species thrive. So if we weren't able to do that, then we would have like our ancestors would have another ancestor would have eaten us who had that ability to do that. So anyways, that whole storytelling, as you said that cause and effect, because of the finite because of the infinite, there's a lot of things that we're just not gonna be able to get even despite those heuristics that we've evolved. So some things are just gonna be uncertain. And we will never know what they are. 2000 years ago, we had a lot of those things that we would call uncertain or unknown. 10,000 years ago, we had even more of those. And now, as we progress through different technological revolutions, industrial revolution and to now with the digital age into AI and cognitive computing, we still have a lot of unknowns and uncertainties we always will, maybe, but the number of those unknowns is exponentially far fewer. And so we need to, as you said to your point we need to revise and change the software, change the narrative, change the story because we filled in a lot of those causes and effects. But we didn't do that 2000 years ago and we needed the religion at the time. Absolutely, believing in religion, having a religion 2000 years ago was the right strategy. I don't think it's the right strategy right now. And that's probably gonna get me shot by saying that on, you don't have to edit that out. We see issues right now. We were talking before the podcast. So we have a rise in populism around the world. We have more and more political wedges occurring and this is a repeated behavior we see in human civilization, right? It's scapegoating, like pointing fingers. And so you'll have a group of people here. No one's really thinking for themselves as I heard mentality, right? The medics is like, oh, I'm just regurgitating what everyone else is saying but on that opposite spectrum, they're doing the exact same thing, pointing fingers at each other. I'm always sitting back and I'm like, where's a pup massage? What are they?   We're the same. Now we just have more tools that can piggyback off our psyche, exponentially make it worse. Expediates our behavior as opposed for us being responsive, collective, reflective. We are reactive, instant anger, et cetera. It's like the balance between parasympathetic versus sympathetic, right? Now we're like 24-7 in fighting. Fight or flight? Yeah, but we're fighting. Yeah, we're not fleeing? Yeah, that's because we're sitting behind a keyboard and we feel the courage to fight. Yeah, keyboard warriors, Twitter. But it's one thing for us to say here and look at it from a subjective perspective. Like we see an issue, like this is a cognitive issue. This is a social issue. I'm always curious of, okay, we've identified problems. We see that populism is rising. We see that there's a divide in certain political ideologies building up. Even here in Canada, populism's on the rise. People talking about anti-immigration policies, yada, yada, yada. For me as like an historian buff, I'm like fuck, cycle's repeating again, here we go. It's nothing new, right? When do we learn?  But the only difference is we have different tools now. Now the tool, like a gun, is who's wielding the gun. You can have a sociopath wielding the gun, that's no good. Or you can have somebody who's trained, psychologically trained, forget how to use it. But psychologically trained, using it for defense and proper purposes. And so for me, my always question, and I don't have a personal answer for this, is like fuck, what do we do? Cause I've already seen the writing in the wall. It's happened many, many times. Times before. Yes. But it seems like an even more intractable problem, difficult to solve problem because of these new inventions we have. Like guns and I think the worst is social media. Yes. And just the ability to jump on bandwagon so quickly and to be so reactive and like knee jerk, in a sense. Whereas before we, because the spread of information was so much slower, we just were forced to actually sit with that information more, or at least sit back and hear our official position from our tribe leader, or like our priest or whatever. And that authority figure, and that wasn't the right way either. But I think the spread of information on social media is so fast now. Listen, we all have confirmation biases. Yeah, exactly. All of us. Yeah, we all have certain biases. And like you mentioned, not good or bad. I always have people hate when I say this, but from a purely psychological aspect and behavioral aspect, I personally, and I'll just say myself, I personally believe there's no such thing as good or evil. There's just actions. I agree. And so you can, and I always tell people, there's no one that wakes up, like let's say a certain leader doing very negative things in countries, killing millions of people. That person doesn't wake up, is like, I'm gonna do evil things today. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. No, like, yeah, yeah, like, you know, ooh, one trill, one trill, there's no doctor evil. There's no doctor evil. That individual in his or her mind is doing the right thing.  Exactly. You can think you're doing the greatest thing of all time, but that individual over there is like, evil. And it hearkens back at a perennial debate within the social sciences and philosophies that, you know, relativism versus absolutism, especially with morality, and psychologists have sort of joined in on that debate in the last 10 years, would work by John Hite and others. And this is where I enjoy Sam Harris, especially more as of late. I did it at first, but I do now with his podcast, probably because he's got great guests on it. Great podcast. Yeah, yeah. It's one of my favorite. And I think he's refined his thinking a little bit since the early days of his first writings, but one of those first, like it's the second or third book is like the moral landscape where he makes the argument that science can be the thing that argues that our morality can be absolute, that you can have peaks and troughs in moral virtue and moral value, so that you can sort of rank behaviors and actions along a gradient of the least moral or evil to the most moral or virtuous and good and noble. I don't think we're capable of that because cultures are so important. Our cultural upbringing is such an important predictor and input into our system of acquiring a sense of morality, moral belief and moral emotions. So I'll give a good example. This is work by John Hite. This is a favorite. So here, this is what I always give to my students and family members. And when I've had a few too many beers, I haven't had any beers yet, by the way, but I'm still gonna ask you. Not yet. So there's this man or woman, but no, no, no, it has to be a man, it's a man. It's a man and he enjoys every Sunday sort of his personal own tradition, doesn't have a family, just himself, picking up a roaster chicken from the grocery store. Not cooked, it's raw. Not cooked, raw, yeah. And he brings it home and before he roasts and has a beautiful dinner to himself, he has sex with the chicken. Got you. With the chicken carcass. Yes. The chicken is dead. And so the question is, is that immoral? And I'll put that to you. Is that immoral? That action. No. Why? He bought the chicken, it's his property, he can do what he wants. I don't know. Okay, let me break it down. Yeah, no, no, no. Let me do something. Yeah, think about it. So the chicken has died already. Dead. So the original purpose, if anyone's looking at this from like a storytelling perspective, he went to buy the chicken to cook the chicken. So no matter what, the chicken's gonna be gone. Exactly, dead anyway. Eventually turned into electrons and protons in his body and into feces. Yes. All right? So it's not like he's killing the chicken.  So for me, is that immoral? I would say no. The only question I would ask then is this a chronic behavior that perpetuates into not just chickens. Yeah, yeah, yeah. You know what I mean? That could lead to some other. Correct, but if I'm just looking at this one case example of just the dead chicken. Exactly. He's not harming a chicken because the chicken's already dead. It's already dead. So what you've evoked there in your argument and your logic, which is the same as mine in most psychologists and most highly intelligent people, educated people is you've evoked an argument or a logic of harm or harm reduction. So there was no harm done to himself. You can assume he didn't get, he doesn't get some weird penis disease. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Exactly. He cleans up. Bacterial infection afterwards. He cleans up, exactly, which is probably possible. Not that I know. And then he did no harm to the chicken. So there's no harm being done. So there's no violation of what is construed by many people, many human beings as the most important moral virtue, which is harm or the lack of causing harm, which we see in all our religions by the way as well, with important caveats. So it's not a moral then that's some, there's two camps. There's the people who say there's no harm done, therefore it's not a moral. And then there's the camp two, which is like even less in numbers, which is I don't believe in morality.  It's a fetish. So I don't think it's a moral that there's no such thing as morality or morality, like you said. But if you ask that question to the majority of human beings, majority would say, yes, absolutely, that's immoral. And then you go, why? Just as I prompted you, but you said no. And most people would be like, cause what do you think they would say? Imagine they're like, ah, imagine you said, yes, that's a moral. And I said, why do you, why is that a moral in here? I don't think so. They can articulate the, because this is my thinking when it comes to anger. I want to say anger, but Yeah, what is emotion? What emotion is going on there? I would say it's a hodgepodge of different emotions. The problem is, and this is why therapy is good. And I'm a fan of psychedelics and kind of makes you peel the onion layers to do, understand what you're feeling. Cause one thing to feel something, it's then the second thing to understand what you're feeling, to articulate what you're feeling. So for me, I think people get round up with this emotion, but they don't have the necessary tools or systems or heuristics to articulate what they're feeling. So they just, it's reactive. Blurred it out. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, it's not good. I'm like, why? Yeah. Like a little child. I mean, why, why, why, why, why, why? It's exactly, yeah. But, and then that's what's weird thing is like children evolve to learn from adults and teachers and older kids that they model to always ask, why, why, why, why? And then it seems like at a certain age, and I think education is probably part of the problem of why this is the case. Yes. We stop asking why. We stop hypothesis testing our external surroundings. And I think that's such a tragedy. I think we should always be asking why. And this is a perfect example of, you know, this doesn't come up, but it brings up other real world examples where we should be asking why constantly and to push it to its nth degree. Is there another example you can bring up? There's a few, yeah. All right, let's do it. So before I get to the next one, which is even more problematic. This one, that one's the funny one.  That's what my students called me when I brought this up. So the initial, the findings from that first study by John Hyde was it's discussed. People go, it's disgusting, right? So there's five or six, depending on who you ask, moral pillars that they claim are universal across all cultures that they claim every human being has. But those pillars will sort of, we're not at the same level. You're gonna see in Western society, the strongest pillar or the one that we uphold the most is harm or committing no harm, not killing. Which is what we talked about earlier. But in other cultures, and even within the culture, if you're conservative versus liberal, what's another one that's very strong is what's called divinity. Yeah. Or the natural way of things. And so when the divinity ethic is violated in our moral code, the response to that is discussed. And so when somebody's disgusted, their automatic assumption in their brain sort of reactive is it's immoral. And of course, if you push and push and push and you say to the person, the chicken's dead, he's not harming the chicken, he's not harming himself, he cleans up, oh, and I forgot to mention he eats the chicken after he cooks it, which is an important part because that actually just really grosses out people. So it's violating this divinity ethic that, and so they would cite, if I push them and if I push them more, that it's just not how things should be. It just goes against this code. Yeah, this magical code. Exactly, exactly. But we can't write that off because our upbringing, our culture, we have sort of that divinity ethic turned down. No, I understand where it comes from. Totally, yeah. And a lot of people that sort of dialed way up, especially in non-western cultures. So back to the point that morality is relativistic depending on your cultural upbringing and environment, familial upbringing. So the second one is John and Stacey, our brother and sister, probably know where I'm going with this one, folks.  And they both wanted it, they're both consenting, welling adults, no pregnancy, no bad outcomes. They do it once, no emotional hangups, no awkwardness. It's just a one beautiful experience and they move on. Is it immoral? I personally care. Right. The only time I would care based on science and chromosomes would be if they have a baby. Exactly. And you get some weird mongolite babies, right? Yeah, yeah, some disease or some kind of genetically, which we know in studies occur when you have similar genes coming together. Exactly. So that one's a little bit more, has more of an actual biological explanation if... If something happens. If they had a baby. But they didn't. And yet our evolution has sort of tricked us, our evolved brain has tricked us into thinking, okay, when that situation happens incest, anything related to that is immoral. At least for maybe, we'll call them serfs. Yeah. Because they'll relate this to like kings and queens. Yeah, that's...  Exactly, yeah. Exactly. To keep the money and power within the family, the blue blood is like cousin, cousin, cousin, cousin, cousin. Yeah, how many, what level of cousin is appropriate? Exactly, yeah. So that's a weird, actually anomalous case there with royalty.  Something's bad here and call it and have the visceral state of emotions that we feel. And call that thing immorality. But then I flip it to like religious people like don't we all come from Adam and Eve? Yeah, yeah, yeah, it's bad. The O.G. Yeah, yeah, yeah. The O.G. incest. We're all incest in if we come from Adam and Eve then.  And there's a lot of incest in the old testament for that matter. Okay, one more and then we'll move on. Cool. This is for all the patriotic folks. And this is important for going back to populism and sort of the cultural wars we're in versus left is that this person has an American flag. I'm gonna use the American flag because I think Canadians wouldn't care as much about this. Has an American flag and they're cleaning their bathroom and they can't find any regs. They take the American flag that's rolled up that was part of sort of like a family military tradition or maybe they received from a grandfather or whatever. And they tear it up into shreds and use it to clean their toilet. Is it immoral? Is it their property? Yeah, they own it. It's theirs. Fuck, it's just a piece of paper. There you go, exactly. So you are and I am, I would probably put us at the 2% of the type of response when asked that question. As long as he or she owns that piece of property, like they're not- It's theirs to do what they want.  Exactly. So you ask most Americans, especially in the red Bible Belt, forget it. You'd be booed out of the room if you even brought that up. So that is a highly immoral act. Because it violates another moral ethic, another foundation, which is loyalty, group loyalty, right? So you have these five pillars, you have these five foundations and they're gonna be turned up or down depending on your culture. And they can actually vary as a function of not just ethnic culture, but political ideology. Liberals care most about harm and so do conservatives, right-leaning folks, but they care a great deal about the divinity one and in particular, loyalty to groups. Liberals, not as much. And that's within a country. So there's, I think proof, and I don't like to use the word proof as a scientist, but there's pretty strong evidence to show that morality is psychologically subjective. And that it will be probably forever. Yes. Like there is, I always give this example of, I don't know if it's First Nation tribes in North America, but it is some Aboriginal group where the elder, and I'll put this in the show notes afterwards, I'll find the writings for this word, the elder would commit suicide very similar to in Japan, they had- Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. That's a call, I forget what it's called. Yeah, I know what you mean. Yeah, and it was an honor. Yeah. But in our society today, we're like, Yeah.  No, no, no, it was an honor for the elders. Like I'm slowing you down, I'm not good for the tribe, I've served my time, this is the highest order of my life. Like I want this. Yeah, yeah, and it's revered, it's held holy. Whereas, and again, that's just another good example, another testament to the fact that so much of this is relative. Yeah, I give example to my wife because we go back and forth on this, she's a naturopath doctor, she also has a lot of logical, but she's more in the like, I guess the feminine energy morale. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And I'm like, okay, here's like a hypothetical situation, we're in a parallel universe, same earth, a parallel universe. So we'll call this universe A, that's universe B.  Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Like we'll purge, I'm like, okay, we'll use that as a case example. I'm like in universe B, purge is normal. Like we've had purge since the beginning of so-called Homo sapiens. Like it's actually part of our DNA. It's sort of, yeah, like it's our strategy that we... Yeah, so it's accepted. It's like... Yeah, yeah. It's like, no, no, no, it can't be. I'm like, why not? Why not? Why not? You know, to play devil's advocate here and to my earlier points, of all of those moral foundations, the one that is the strongest and that you do see is typically the strongest across all groups is harm. Totally. So if we can somehow manage to turn down all the other ones and maintain the harm reduction one or not to not commit harm or to not kill. The problem with the harm reduction is one has to be aware that the act, the second order of thinking, one has to be aware that they are causing harm. A lot of times in the moment and with their ideological belief system, they don't look, I'll give you a real example that happened to me recently. I wanna say I was arguing, I was having a conversation with a pretty, I wanna say hardcore environmentalist, like this person's passionate, like I get it, I understand. And he was talking about Alberta.   I'm agreement with you, we have to figure out better methods.  If it was up to you, you would literally be like 1.2, whatever, how many people employed out of work. Think about that for a moment. It's collateral for him, it's collateral damage. It's like, for me, that's insane. Yeah, yeah, no, and I agree and I voted green.   It's already kind of happening. And yeah, like that's a good point actually, is that, and that goes back to the, what was the example we started off with where a person- The chicken? Before the chicken, where the person gets up and they don't think they're doing evil. Yeah. The pro environmental. Yeah, Dr. Evil.  And that's a worthy cause, I'm not saying that, but there's so much nuance. There's so much gray area, including, and so I think you push back correctly then that I was saying, maybe we just need to like boost up this one fat moral foundation, which is cause no harm. And you're saying correctly, I think, that that itself is so complex and so nuanced that what could be perceived as doing harm to one person is not going to be perceived as doing harm by another person. Yes. Yeah, so I think it's super complicated. I want to say I have solutions. I have ideas that might- Hypothesis. I have systems that could potentially work better to piggyback off of human behavior. I had Dr. Christopher DeCarlo on the show couple of episodes ago. He's going to be on again. We're going to be diving in deeper. I know you and I were talking about Elon Musk. I truly believe for our political systems to get better to help everybody out, we need some type of AGI, some general AI to eliminate the biases that we have to give us real answers, regardless of our belief system. That doesn't say we accept the answer, but here is more kind of an anchor point to work off of. Like we need this. No matter what, if you look at our parties today, for me, liberal and conservatives are the same. All the parties are the same. Just little spectrums of differences and they all have this ideological belief systems. It's hard to communicate and you're not going to please everybody. So we need that. Number two is the idea of nation states. I think it's a quick experiment that will fail in the longterm. I'm not saying that nation states will disappear. I think how nation states are constructed today need to evolve. A good example of a nation state that has a decent model would be Switzerland. So I'm a firm believer in game theoretical models. So a great example would be Alberta today. Alberta has Alberta problems. It's not Ontario problem.  I'm here saying like, I want to sympathize with people there. I understand your position. I'm like, I think from a Maslow hierarchy needs, I'm like, you want to save your industry. You want to put food on the table. Like that's how I view it, right? So it's very difficult for a nation to create rules. And I'm not talking about constitutions. I think the whole idea of a government granting you rights is the most stupidest thing I've ever heard. You are born these rights. It's a sovereign, as a sovereign human being, you have the right to protect yourself. You have a right of choice of practice of religion. You have the right for no government can grant you this. This is your sovereign human right. However, when we create certain rules, let's say within Canada, it's very hard for these rules to benefit and be applied to all different provinces and cultures and territories. It's very difficult, almost impossible. So what I'm saying is like, we look at examples of Switzerland with Canton cities. They're like, let's call them miniature city-states or Singapore is a city-state. And these are, I would say, I want to say great, I want to say good examples, but examples, something to build our thesis for you. Where if we look at nature, everything is game theoretical. Everything is competition. Nature's about preserving energy and creating this energy for a long sustainable future. And so if we look at Canada, I think Canada is a good, I think we're in a good position where we should start creating city-states. You're still, it's a nation-state, it's Canada. The province, Alberta pays taxes towards the federal. Like, I believe we need an army to protect us. We need proper police for property, like without property rights, we don't have a nation. Period, like that's most important. Property rights must be here. Without property rights, a society goes roof. And if we, great example in the animal kingdom, if people don't believe in borders, like two chimp tribes meet up, shit's about to go down. It's resource protection at the end of the day. Number one, resource of women, which is very important for them and resource of food. Yeah, yeah, I will, I'll hold you there. Just, and we were talking about this before, I think it was before we were recording with them. There's this idea of you're either a Durkheimian or a John Lennon. So just to repeat it for your listeners, if you're a Durkheimian, you believe that humans have certain fallible traits which require us to have borders. Not just physical borders, but also psychological borders and constraints and limits, in order for us to flourish and to get along.  Imagine where it's just one big human, and everyone's getting along. And you can sort of camp people. And that broadly maps onto globalists versus nationalists. Yes. And what was your point before that? I don't forget. Why did I even interject there? My point is there's better systems to create that everyone can compete. So if you have city-states, Alberta must compete with BC, must compete with Ontario. Yes, I know my point. Thank you. Was a lot of going back to Indigenous cultures, and the reason I talked about it is my wife's, she's an educator for Aboriginal and Indigenous youth. So it's something that we talk about a lot, and I think about a lot. Presettler in Indigenous population, nations within Canada, they had their different nations, but they didn't have borders. Like they had treaties, they had trade deals, they had cooperative deal makings, but it was much less border-based. It was much more sort of free and loose. And I'm no expert in Indigenous anthropology, but my sense is that that's very similar to how these early presettler nations of Indigenous populations coexisted with one another. And one of the things that's like the Wampum Belt, the Wampum Belt is this idea that you can sort of coexist and get along, even though you're from a different nation. So maybe this is sort of the modern analog of that. Yeah, it's a... People who believe the borders don't exist as foolish, and I'm not here to promote nation-states. I think nation-states have caused, if not, hundreds of millions of deaths, but it is very naive for you to think that other people won't be bad actors, right? It goes to game theoretical model. I'm gonna say, oh, open borders of the world.  Dawkins and other evolutionary biologists have painted this quite clearly in the last few decades with his initial book in Selfish Gene, from a group selection perspective, like we evolved in all species, all organisms, not just Homo sapiens, we evolved so that the maximum game theoretic sort of rational equilibrium point is to have a certain percentage of pro-social good altruistic people like you and I. And then you're gonna have the dickheads and the assholes and the defectors and the people who choose to be selfish, but they're gonna be very covert and do it under the radar of course. But you actually need those people in your group, from a group selection vantage perspective, to create the most optimal society possible. Why? Because we're going to be vigilant, not overly vigilant, but we're gonna make sure we have certain things and certain checks and balances in place to make sure that those selfish defectors and free riders don't take over. Like I think in Dawkins book, Hawks versus something else, and he sort of lays out the calculus and the math of it, of like you need a certain proportion of each in order to get like sort of the best possible outcome. So back to your point, I think to just assume that everyone is the pro-social and the altruistic and the good and that there's not gonna be people out there who take advantage, I think is foolhardy and I think is completely naive of human behavior and completely idealistic. No, I agree and that's why I think if we can create more systems to compete against each other, it creates a more dynamic opportunity for because I'll give you an example in the United States happening right now, California has been raising taxes, New York state has been raising taxes, taxes and we're seeing a massive increase of people for primary residents migrating to Texas right now. Why?   Yeah, I've heard that too. So why wouldn't you? It's a no brainer. And so real example we'll give right now where hypothetical real example is Mississauga comes around and Mississauga creates a rule of no income tax. I'm moving to Mississauga. Yeah, of course. In a heartbeat, no question. But then Toronto's like, fuck, what do we do? Gotta follow. And this is how Switzerland works. You have cantons, cantons have certain veto rights against the central government. And each canton has tax policies, employment policies in general that you create game theoretical models competing because I think Switzerland's a neutral bank of everybody, right? So it creates models of like, okay, competition. How many of these cantons are there? I don't know, 14, 12, 14. Okay, so it's tiny. It's right, it's like tons. Switzerland's tiny, listen, it's at least a good anchor point to kind of work off of. Like a best practice, like a pilot. Yeah, and so I view nature like there's a science called biomimicry. Like how do we mimic science? I'm sorry, how do we mimic nature to human civilization or in general? And for me, it's about game theory and creating competition. This creates proper incentive structures for people to behave better. Yeah, yeah, yeah. That's interesting. The, when you say it's, you know, game theory and I could be wrong in pushing back against this is that all of human behavior, not all, most and a lot of human behavior and human cognition is, goes against game theoretical outcomes and analyses. So that's why we have behavioral economics now was because the economists in the 20th century and for decades assumed that we were rational actors according to these game theory models and we're not. We consistently and frequently violate these rational model, rational actor models. And in fact, it's sort of, you have to assume a certain degree of irrationality in our actions, i.e. ritual. Rituals are to bring it back because it's sort of my wheelhouse. Rituals are like the paragon of human irrationality. They are the most irrational behaviors we have. They completely inconsistent. They completely go against any sort of rational actor model. And yet they are the one behavior that is perhaps ubiquitous and pervasive across all human species, all human beings and all cultures. I agree we're irrational. I think it takes a certain tipping point, let's say a social tipping point before something is accepted or acknowledged. But I think if you and I were hunter and gatherers, we would have optionality. We can choose where we wanna go. We can choose where we wanna sleep. We can go to different territory. Like if we're living back in the day, we actually follow the migration paths of animals and that's why we're nomadic in places. I just view as if we can create civilizations where we have optionality, through us most, and this isn't humans being rational. In fact, this piggybacks off of different biases is it creates a more higher level. You mentioned earlier, you need certain type of people within your group, altruistic people, maybe a little bit sociopaths. And there's a reason why these types of archetypical people exist. And so if we create more opportunities to compete, I just think that creates a better system as a whole. Classic example, like my parents fled Yugoslavia, communist country back in the 86, 87, they left before the collapsed. You look at China today with the communist system, top down type of system, that system will not last. You cannot have one policy for all, one rule for all. Eventually, if we follow Dumbars number, their splinter groups, regardless of like, it'd be a splinter group of the communist splinter group, and that will splinter with other splinter groups and so far and so forth until you have a collapse. And in nature, nature is ground up. It's not top down governance. It's emergent, yeah. So you think the solution is creating, what you're saying is competition within, I guess it could be within a marketplace, within a country, within a city-state. You think more strategies to compete with one another to elevate the quality of life. Well, I'll give you an example.   You know what I mean? Like that's for me is like crony capitalism. Yeah, it totally is.   You just gotta become the next jump. You know? Isn't that, to mitigate that, then don't you have to legislate against that and build policy? Or is there other other ways? And this is outside my expertise in wheelhouse. Yeah, there's other ways we can do it. There's people who, I think New York state has done this before. I don't know if they still do it. There's like a simple method. You can do it Ontario that would help a lot of small businesses. Mind you, Ontario has a lot of interesting grants for small businesses, like I'll give them credit. There's like a lot of cool grants you can get from Ontario. But what I would do is I would create economic zones in Ontario. So Toronto doesn't need an economic zone. Let's look at areas that want to kind of propagate and put up. It might be like, I don't know. Maybe North, I don't know. I don't know the areas. Milton. Milton, let's say Milton. Georgetown, Milton, right? Sure. We create an economic zone there where it's like, okay, if you have your business there, you have tax free for five years, under the stipulation that you hire local, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, sure. So you guys have business, you're like tax-free five years. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I'm fucking. We'll go there. Interesting.  Who guides the process? If it was a city-state would be the, so in the Canadian example, the city-state would be the province. Gotcha. So they would legislate it against- Without the federal government saying, you can't do that. Right. I'll give you a real example to happen on Terra. And I have no idea if this is good or bad. So I'm just giving an example. The Toronto board voted for toll boots on the DVP years ago. I have no idea. Maybe it's bad, I haven't done my research, but they voted yes. So democratic vote, yes. To have them. Yeah, I don't know where, but yes, some toll boots will be around the DVP. Sure. Maybe we're at the 404. I have no idea. Yeah, yeah. The Ontario government came in and said, no. Ah, okay. Why? Why did they have the power to tell us no? It's our highway. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Our, but what's our municipal Toronto? Our taxes, man. But I think that's a fundamental problem in how we live our lives as individuals and as a collective. It gets, this gets at, I think a bigger issue. And you could, it's relevant for climate change. It's relevant for, in my work with culture change and organizations, it's relevant for religion, like anywhere. And Thomas Hobbes is a philosopher in like the 17th century who said it, and we've still haven't figured it. And we've had thousands, tens of thousands of very, very bright social scientists sort of scratching their head at this. And that is, how do you take the individual behaviors of a person, of you, of me? And how do you then extrapolate that out to the characteristics of a group? Because it's at the level of an organization or a group where decisions are made, policy, workplace, commercial, right?  You're making a decisions based off of your, maybe you've done some customer, consumer segmentation working, you have three customer types. This is why you'll never have like a real identity of nation-state or you can't please everybody because you go to Dunbar's number of 150, people can only have a certain connection with people. This is why I promote more independent cities within a nation-state. That are less in, or not so beyond Dunbar's number? Well, no, no, no, they can be beyond it, but they may have better policies. Mississauga might have better policies in Toronto for the stuff that I care about. Right, right, right, right. Some people might be more on the socialist side of things. We'll give example where like Mississauga becomes libertarian, like pure libertarian ideologies. So like in my sense, I'm going there. But I have my friend of mine who's very socialist and he'll pay 70% tax, like Switzerland tax, but he gets all these services. But Toronto offers that.  Go to Toronto. I don't care. Yeah, you can't please everybody bottom line. You just can't. No, no, no, no, okay. Well, I buy it. Yeah. Let's implement it tomorrow. All right, you hear that government? Yeah, yeah, yeah. True though, holler. You see the Prime Minister now, right? You know. Yeah. No, that makes sense. And I think, for me as a behavioral scientist now in an applied setting and applied context, what that speaks to is we need people at the level of government policy and for profit in organizations who understand human behavior.  Maybe I'm preaching to the choir on that one. Oh my God. And it seems so obvious to us. Yeah. And yet that's my world. And you'd be surprised at how little, how infrequent you hear that sort of talk, that narrative.  Like what we just talked about, right? Which just like, to me it's like so obvious. But that's a curse of knowledge, right? I go in and I give these talks to government. I go in and give them to organizations and they're like, if I've done a good job, they're like, mind blown, let's implement this in our organization or in our team and government or whatever. And I think we need more of that. But I think the problem is that people like you and I who have some understanding or formal or informal education of human behavior, we think it's classic curse of knowledge, which ironically itself is his own bias, its own heuristic. We think that how we think is how others think and that is definitely not the case. It's not that it's a very difficult thing to understand like this whole notion of biases and heuristics and evolutionary psychology and a mismatch between our evolved history and where we are now. Like it would give me a day and I could pretty much like convince any person of these certain truths of human behaviors. So it's not rocket science. It's not theoretical astrophysics, right?  It's now incumbent on the scientists and the people, the science thinkers like yourself who understand it to communicate and convince that to the scientists. We just need to start a new party like a science party or something. Yeah, how cool does that sound? I still can't believe it was only left and right or like a liberal concern and like. Right. Two parties? And like why a spectrum? They should have just had like a circle or a wheel or something, right? Because there's a lot of characteristics of extreme left that are oddly similar to an extreme right. Oh, they're the same. That's what they don't understand.  But they're on the extreme end. How does that, you know, the person's going, that doesn't make sense of my heuristic of the line. You can do like a prank where like you invite both people and they don't know what they're going towards but they don't know where they're going and they don't even know each other.  Like how do you feel like talking to this person? He's like, who's he again? Exactly. Yeah, so I think we stand, I think we're at a time now given the changes, given everything that's happening so quickly, technological revolutions, like all the things that are disrupting our entire societies. I think we're at a time now where we need what they're calling the behavioral revolution. It's not the technological revolution, some argue and I'm biased as a behavioral scientist, but I think the next big thing is human behavior. I agree. It pervades all domains and it's like, yeah, no shit, we're humans. No matter where a human is, government in your family, in your private life, in your business, in an organization, in military, in sports, there is some human decision being made based off of an emotion, based off of a sense of motivation, based off of some sort of underlying implicit assumption or heuristic that has these environmental inputs of how they're raised in their family, in their circle, it's a human decision that's being made.  It is, of course it is, but nobody's thinking that. And so my mission, as I've now left academia, I've entered into the world of consulting and practice is to convince people of that. It's to just show them that, because it seems so obvious to me. Good, we need it. Well, Nick, I want to thank you so much for coming on the show. Thanks for having me. I know for a fact, people are gonna have a lot of questions. What's the best resource for them to reach you out? Yeah, great. They can go to thebehaviorist.com, or sorry, not .com, I didn't get the .com, .biz. .biz. That's it. And that's an American spelling, sorry to your Canadian on. So that's a, there's no you in there, behaviorist.biz. And I just launched a podcast as well, which is, it's all just a bunch of BS. The BS stands for behavioral science, which obviously you can find a lot of these things in there as well. So that can be found on the website as well. Cool, I'll make sure I leave that in the channel, it's guys, and like always, if you found value in this podcast, leave a review on whatever podcast platform you're using. And if you're watching this on YouTube, subscribe, leave a comment below. Pretty sure you guys have questions about the chicken. You want my personal email? You want my phone number? I'll be waiting for the questions for the chicken. I got 10 chickens in my bag. Yeah, exactly. We'll get five chickens away for free. That's right, that's right. Chicken giveaways. Anyways, thanks again for coming on. All right, man, thank you. Cheers.


You want to come in the play? What's going on? Yeah. Yeah. Box? Do you want me to? I'll give you a better box, I swear. Nothing better than a crispy tune box. That's George's thing, though. Do you take a bite of the actual donut? I don't think you got to do that. Yeah, well, they're all going to be over with soon. You're going to have to finish them off now because... No. No, no, no, no. Hey, Vinnie, daddy wants his donuts. George. George. What? No. I got to stop with you getting my donuts. What's the matter, Vinnie? You weren't in the video? But I wanted you to go. You're mad that you didn't get a chance to fly with Bondi? Okay, Vinnie. Vinnie, do you want to fly with Bondi? Look. Watch him, Michael, little. Ready? One, two, three. That's a good picture. Who else is ready?  I love getting cloud-based. Perfect 10 by Unknown Brain, featuring Heather Summer, starting now. Take some in it to get her into it. I don't want to have to go to the gym. We're all... She came to you for love. Stole my partner in crime. Love. Look at her. She doesn't even pay attention to the fact that she's a subject to the video. Subject to the video. She's vlogging on Jersey. Jersey's like, how rude. Shall we clap for Jersey now, Aura? Because she did good dancing today. I love you so much. You want some cereal? Oh, she wants cereal. Eat up, she dances. Ready? Now clap for her. Vinny, this is Brandon. And he is here to beatbox for you. And he knows about beats. Not like mommy, where mommy can't beatbox. Well, let's give mom a little credit, because you got a little 1-2 in there. I tried. You saw? Okay. I know, I know. That's what I'm saying. She deserves a little credit. She deserves a little credit. Is that easier? Uh oh. Oh shoot. I'm very surprised he's not biting you right now. Okay. Vinny, Vinny, Vinny, Vinny. Vinny, Vinny. Vinny, the bird. Vinny, the bird, Vinny the bird, Vinny the bird. Vinny the bird, Vinny the bird. Vinny the bird, Vinny the bird. Take it away, Vinny. Take it away Vinny.  By the way, don't forget if you guys are looking for an amazing bird food brand for your bird that is healthy, organic and not full of food colorings and sugar and peanut smash, check out Marlene's signature blend. I did this along with Top's parent food. We just launched and the UK Northern Parrots now sells our food. You guys have been asking for it. You've got it. Also, things for wings in Canada sells our bird food right now. I'm proud to announce and they will ship it to you. I encourage you guys to check out my Feathered Fun Box. It's a passion project. It's a subscription box that comes with parrot toys for your bird and also special merch. Kind of like my dream box. Honestly, I put so much into it. I love that there's something like this for birds out in the world. That's why I created it. www.featheredfunbox.com. I love you guys so, so much. Thank you for listening.


Well, through some small donations collected during the Fourth of July parade, the Bemidji Fire Department has raised $4,000 to give Muscular Dystrophy the boot. The Muscular Dystrophy Association has teamed up with fire departments nationwide through the International Association of Firefighters to promote the cause. Last year, departments across the U.S. were able to raise more than $24 million. Well, this is the only time the local departments collect donations that are excited to see so many chip in. This kind of shows that every little bit helps. You know, when you put it all together across the country, it ends up being quite a bit of money. A final total for the fundraiser will be completed in the near future after all the remaining coins are counted. If you've enjoyed this segment of Lakeland News, please consider making a tax-deductible contribution to Lakeland Public Television.