Everyone always likes to say that Toronto is the New York City of Canada. Toronto is just like New York, but without all this stuff. Well, we just got back from a five-day trip in Toronto, so we're going to give you our breakdown on whether I think that this is true or not true. Hopefully this video helps anybody who is thinking about visiting Toronto who wants to move there. Yeah, or it's just interesting to explore cultural differences, the pros and cons of every single place, right?  So make sure you like, subscribe, turn on your notifications. First off, we got to give a huge shout out to the CCYA Celeb Classic. Andrew, we got some of the basketball highlights down below. But yeah, let's just get into it, man. Andrew, what is the big difference in attitude? Everybody always talks about there's a New York attitude. It's hyper-direct. It can be very rude. People just say things to each other. In Toronto, there's obviously a very Canadian attitude, right? Of saying sorry or depending on where you're from, Andrew. Sorry. Yeah. I mean, even before, I think every major sports game or sports event, they have to acknowledge that they are on First Nations land. In America, that would be like, before we sing the national anthem, we want to also thank all the Native American tribes, like the Cherokee, the Chiragawa, the Sioux Indians, because it is their original land that we are on. Yeah. I mean, they have a very different approach to ethnicity and making sure that people from diverse backgrounds get along. Andrew, Canadians do not refer to ethnic food as ethnic food. They just call it like, oh, you're eating Korean food or Chinese food or Middle Eastern food.  Yeah, you know. Like, you know, you minorities. Right. It's other. And I think obviously America has a different relationship with race wars in America. One time, Andrew, at a bar in Canada, Andrew, I heard sorry said five times in 90 seconds. That's crazy. And people meant it too. They weren't just saying it like, sorry. Like, you know, sometimes they do, sorry. It wasn't like that. I mean, let's be honest. I think Toronto is the biggest city in Canada, but it's not, it's not really, it's not, it doesn't got that crazy big city vibe where it's hyper, hyper competitive like New York City. Like New York City is just like everybody's trying to get somewhere. And I think Toronto is just a more chilled out version. So although, you know, it does kind of feel like New York at times. I would say it almost feels like San Diego, Seattle, a little bit of almost like Queens. Chicago, Charlotte. Yeah.  Like if you include Long Island City in the Queens. And we were staying on Bloor Street, which is just like a mile up from the actual city center.  So there was like no houses in Manhattan. Yeah. A lot of row houses. I would say also it's way cleaner, way less cockroaches in way, maybe a hundred million less rats. I don't think I saw a single rat in a week. I didn't see any rats on the street, man. We were out on the street, but the streets are way more wide open. It's way cleaner, way less dense, man. It's almost like a suburban, urban vibe. It's really difficult to describe. Moving on, Andrew, just to the stores and businesses and food, these are like very obvious things that anybody, you know, it's like tier one obvious, right?  I was like, man, Canadians eating that much Popeyes. And they have one chain that you have zero of in New York City and just zero of almost left in America. They have a ton of A and W's. Yeah, that's old school. And root beer floats. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And you know what I would say is different is first of all, Tim Hortons, I know a lot of Canadians hate on Tim Hortons, but I had some of their sandwiches, their beef and cheddar. And that bread, I think is better than the equivalent bread that you would get in America. Would you say it is from a little bit of the French influence, maybe from Quebec? Yeah, you might have to give them credit for the Quebec and Montreal, man, because the bread is a little bit better there. Also, I would just say, like, overall, I saw more businesses that I think had more, like, whimsical names. I think Canada is, like, a little bit more lighthearted or goofy, or maybe because it's not quite a hyper-hyper-competitive market. Like, it's not so bent on being, like, cool all the time. But they'll, like, come up with funny names for things. It is the land of Martin Short, Andrew, Mike Myers. Jim Carrey. Drake is very funny and, like, almost, like, self-effacing, right? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Also, I noticed, as far as the food scene goes, David, that we'll get into the Asian food in a little bit, but when it comes to even other food, it was, like, not so much about, like, making you feel like you were in France or making you feel like you were in Italy.  You know, it's like, everything is supposed to be hyper-hyper-authentic straight from there and give you an elevated experience. I think there's obviously some of that in Toronto, but they seem to be having more fun with food. Yeah, for sure, for sure. I mean, it reminds me of an attitude that you find not in New York. You can find that attitude in America, like, in the Midwest, in Texas. People have fun with things. Charlotte, North Carolina. Even California a little bit more. Even Chicago even more. That was a big difference between, like, at least the biggest city that is the financial, cultural hub. Interestingly enough, Andrew, some chefs told me that they believe that development of Western food, specifically whether that's, whether they're considered New Canadian versus New American, is they said it's like 10 to 15 years behind, but they believe Asian food is on par or at least when it comes to Cantonese food in Canada, 10 years to 15 years ahead of America, specifically of maybe even just Cantonese food. Yeah, I mean, we, shout out, this one spot, we filmed that couple last year with Linda Dee called Zo, I think, and it was like this. This is all, yeah. It's all, it's this big Vietnamese restaurant that I had never even seen in America. And I'm not saying that there's a bunch of Vietnamese in Toronto, but I'm just saying this restaurant with all the LED lights, very nice build-out, huge spot, like, I'd never seen a Vietnamese restaurant in America built like that. Now, there's a number of reasons why it possibly cost, but or, but I'm just like, I don't know, like there's certain things you see in Canada that if you're really into food, you're like, this is a little different. There's a spot. Remind me more of like Houston, almost. Yeah, there was this spot called So Famous that we walked into. It's just this little Chinese spot where you can buy like fresh stir-fried, but it's like newly redone and it's clearly done by like a second generation guy, but then like, it's just one chef on a walk and they were so nice because I was just joking and said, hey, hey, I could, I could chef something on the walk too. And then literally the old canto chef was like, hey, come over here and show me. Yeah, he was like this guy talking a big game. You know, I got to test out his skills. And then I went in the back of the kitchen and he almost let me cook on the hot walk.  I don't know how to use it. I would say a lot of things to me, the easiest way to describe it, and you know, you guys can tell me if I'm right or wrong. I think I'm right. Are orientated for the middle, middle to upper middle class. I think a lot of things in New York are actually orientated for maybe either almost like lower class or like ultra wealthy. Yeah. Especially in New York City, there's not a huge amount of things that cater to the middle. Maybe more in Queens you do see things that cater in the middle, but as far as Manhattan goes, very, very high low. I like what you're saying because New York's food scene, I would say is generally known for its cheap eats, right? As we know, the bodega, everything in a cheap Chinatown eats, very famous for that. And then also famous for its like top and like world, famous world we're now like super hyper high and Michelin star one Madison Park restaurant. Like that's what also New York is known for. But that middle part, people don't talk about it as much. Right, right, right.  You know what it is in New York? It's like all the high end stuff is for the middle class people to experience once in a while. But other than that, they're like eating everything else. Yeah, for sure. I mean, what do you think of the architecture? I noticed that they take a lot less risks with architecture in Toronto. A lot of the businesses, they look like glass, essentially just glass boxes with balconies. Yeah, I don't think that the architecture is something that I would say Toronto has better of. I think New York has way more diverse architecture. I think that the architects, when they think about building a building, they want to build it super crazy and like, you know. Oh, and by the way, Andrew, one time when we went to Toronto last year, we Airbnb'd unexpected, like not intentionally in the infamous ice building. Yeah, don't Airbnb. Yeah, do not Airbnb. I'm just gonna go ahead and say, just don't do that one. Well, all right, David, get into the Asian food scene because obviously that's one that a lot of our fans are thinking about because we were in it. Right, right, right. I mean, obviously when we are going to Toronto or even when we're here in New York, that's more of the scene that we are 10 out of 10 experts in. I can't tell you that I'm a 10 out of 10 expert in the Middle Eastern world of either city. We eat a lot of Asian food. So in downtown Toronto, because I didn't spend as much time in Markham this trip, but Markham's food is always good, right? In Chinatown, I felt like that there was a lot more... First of all, Chinatown is actually pretty big in downtown Toronto, I felt like. Oh, and it opened actually much later. There's a lot of spots open until like 4 or 5 a.m. Yeah, yeah, yeah, because I also think it's safer. That's why things are open later. And then there's like a lot more like Hakka, Indo, Chinese food and Chiljiao food restaurants. Are you talking about the mixture between the Daisy world and the Sino world? Yeah, which is like Toronto because Toronto has a lot of Chinese and a lot of brown Asians. Isn't Toronto like 20% Daisy and 15% Chinese? So South Asian, I think make up a slightly higher percentage in Toronto and then it's about 14 or 16% Chinese. Listen guys, I'll just say this. If you're not used to seeing Indian and Chinese people and Indian and Chinese people also hang out together, go to Toronto because that makes up like 40% of every single person you see anywhere. Yeah. I do think there's not a lot of Korean food in the Chinatown. Most of the good Korean food you'll find is on Yonge Street over in North York, which is not that far. Obviously Markham for the Chinese community, all types of Chinese and Indians. That would be equivalent to more like flushing, but it doesn't look like flushing. It looks almost more like 626, almost more like a walnut, diamond bar, rolling heights, Temple City thing. Yeah, and obviously Cantonese being the single largest noticeable kind of singular group out there, David. So the Cantonese food is very good. Obviously Canada in general has a lot of Cantonese people since a lot of them came over from Hong Kong. And I think that that means that there's a lot of bars that kind of or even the nightlife is different. Yeah, yeah, I would say it's a little different. Like nightlife, for example, let's just shout out to the spots. Midnight Market, Midnight Arcade, Big Trouble, all ran by Andrew. That's like, those are pretty cool spots. And I would say they mostly play hip hop. So I guess if you're into that, those are definitely spots you'd have to check out. Yeah, a lot of old school jams and boom bap and everything. Just a good vibe. But they have a lot of other Asian spots that are kind of Asian mixed. AMPM, Easy on Fifth, especially on Fridays. Obviously the big EDM club is Rebel. Yeah, I'm not a fan of Rebel personally. Anytime anybody wants to go to Rebel, I'm like, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Okay, me out. So what is it?  Andrew, is Toronto like New York City? If you made me say yes or no, I'm going to say no, it's not. It's not that much like New York City, but it doesn't have to be. I think Toronto is an amazing city. It's very nice. I always have a good time there. I meet a lot of good people. I connect well with the community out there. But I like would not. It's probably the closest thing to New York and Canada, but coming straight from New York, I'm like, I don't know if it's like New York. Yeah, like not fully. I would say it's below 50%. So I'm just going to say no. Yeah. Yeah, share some similarities. I mean, isn't it the truth that everything is relative to your like own spectrum as an individual and what you've seen in your life? I'm thinking if you come from Calgary, Canada, Andrew, like more like the countryside and you moved to Toronto, that's like going to like Tokyo, London. But then if you're from like New York City, moving to Toronto, it might feel like you're moving to almost like the suburbs. Right. So it's all relative to like what you said as your like baseline default for like what is normal.  Why do you want to compare it to New York? I don't think you would want to, to be honest. Like I really enjoyed sort of the French Scandinavian. You know what I mean? Because I'm assuming that there's more French and Scandinavian influence just due to the history of Canada structurally, culturally. Like you said to your point, the breads taste better. Scandal Franco, yeah. Yeah. So you're like, keep Toronto, Toronto. It doesn't have to be New York City. I don't think so. No, I don't know. New York is New York. I know people from Toronto right now are like, yo, I got to go to New York. It's a big city is New York. I'll tell you this, man, New York is crazy. You got to come prepared here. Okay. Yeah. I mean, I would tell anybody to go check it out. I think Toronto is like, is really, really cool.  We probably didn't even get to like one fit to what we could have talked about, you know, but immediately that's just like what comes off the top of mind. You know, I didn't, I didn't have any bag milk while I was there. Did you bag milk? No, I didn't even see it. But I don't know if that's going out of style more if that's just a certain group of people that more eat it. But I don't think that's really enough. I noticed that like maple syrup things were not as big as I remember. I don't know if that was just like in my youth. I remember I think Canada is changing, bro, because they even have like this new version of Tim Hortons like Tim Hortons 2.0 where you can get matcha and matcha donuts. Matcha, use of donuts. Like they look different though. It's almost like a Starbucks reserve. I mean, if you think about it, America is kind of like the NBA. Okay, it is the top league for almost anything. Or the NFL versus the CFL, right? It's also a crazy country, but it has some really innovative stuff here. So if that's what you're striving for is to make it in the most competitive possible market. Yeah, New York is it. But I'll say this, man, I got a breather in Toronto. We enjoyed ourselves. The community is nice out there. The food's pretty good out there. It's just a nice break. And so I could see, I mean, would you potentially live in Toronto in the future, David? This is a good test because you love New York, but would you ever live in Toronto? I would live in Toronto for a full year. Wow, just one. And if you stay there a year, you might stay there another. It's possible.  I mean, I'm sure that varies on everybody's lens. Oh, that's a good point. Everybody is like a different camera body juxtaposed with a different lens. If you guys know anything about cameras, the lens matters, the camera body matters, even the add-on, the ND filters, the polarizers. I mean, but just for me, the way I'm viewing it right now, I like where TDOT's at. You like the energy in TDOT. I like it a lot, man. You like there. You think there's some momentum there. I think it's really cool what they got going on. Again, shout out to CCYAA. Shout out to everybody, man. No, shout out to the Google Pixel 7 Pro. Bring up the ball. Bring up the ball. Give me the ball. Shout out to, yeah, like you said, the Google Pixel 7 Pro. Shout out to Simu. Shout out to Jeremy. Yeah, cool. Shout out to everybody, man. You know what? I think the fact that the CCYAA celeb classic game is held there and it's such a big event, I think it says something about the Asian community up there. I'm just saying. Yeah. It's nice. Check it out. Let us know what you think about Toronto. And if you don't have any thoughts about Toronto in the comments section below, let us know what you think about Canada in general. I'm sure there's pros and cons. Somebody told me Amazon is kind of slow and more expensive there, like Amazon Prime. You know, maybe you don't need... But maybe it's also less consumeristic. So if you don't like being sold something or buying something every five seconds, you know, like I said, every pro has a con. Everything's like always, you know, and it depends on how you interface or how you prioritize pros and cons. Maybe you don't need same-day delivery. Maybe. Maybe you don't. All right, everybody. Thanks for watching the Hot Pop Boys. And until next time, we out. Peace.


What's up everybody, Jason here for JasperCaseBrace.com. Happy to release today, guys. A little fun release here of 2022, 23, Bowman University Chrome Basketball. This is a four box break, random first letter, first name, number one. And again, guys, this is where you can chase the Bowman's first of Victor, Webb and Yama, and Caitlin Clark, amongst other big prospects as well, some other, but these are mainly the big ones people really want, pretty much want. And again, guys, it is an all card ship, 17 spots. Remember, everybody's running a little from the list below. As an example, if you get a randomized letter V and we hit a Victor Webb and Yama, then you get that card. And a couple of letters here have combos of two as well. So, yeah, let's start doing this break, guys. Let's click dice roll. And we got ourselves a two and a four, six times. Good luck, six times. One, two, three, four, five, six. So, two, four, six, six, Michael down to John. Six, two, four, six, six. One, two, three, four, five, six. Six, six, six, B, down to A. And here we go. So, Michael, you have letter B, James K with letter K. Brian Crawford with W, Z combo. Michael L with M, Danny with F. Brian Crawford with T, Kev, you have R. Brian Crawford with L, H, James, or J, M, S, sorry. P, Michael with S, Tristan with N, O. Justin Martin with C, Brian Crawford with D. Tristan with V, J-Mass with, oh sorry, Michael P with E, G. J-Mass with J, and then John with A. Now, a lot of people don't really trade for letters, although I have seen it for like a letter V or letter C, whatever, but for the most part, I feel like some people kind of just stick to what they got, but let me know, of course, if anybody is interested in trading. If not, we'll start the break. Well, I'm assuming no trades then. All right, well, this is 12 boxes it looks like, so what we're gonna do is these four here, we're gonna group them into a four box break. These ones, we're gonna group them into a four box break, and these last four bottoms, we'll group them into a four box break. There you go, you got three different possibilities. If I roll a die, and it's one, two, we're gonna go to the left, three, four, middle, five, six, right side. Get a new dice roll, and here we go. It's a six, so we're gonna go one, two, three, four, five, six. So again, these ones here will be for a future break, which I'm sure we'll do more today. These four here, we're gonna do right now. All right, here we go, guys. So good, good luck. So again, this design should be very similar to Balmain Chrome Baseball. You know, with the first and everything, I don't think the design is a lot different. But you do get two Chrome autographs per box. Now, of course, some of these guys are eligible for the draft this year. Some of these guys are probably still in college, you know, but for the most part, have an opportunity to go star. And then at some point next year, we'll be seeing Brani in some of these products. So we got Ernest, and it was just refractor, so they're not gonna be numbered. We got Skyscraping, Mark Mitchell, they'll go back there. Then we got Anthony Black, Balmain's first at our console looks like. Number, it's a $2.99, so letter A going to John. Hand to Emanuel, and I remember this kid. This kid is awesome, man. This kid's still a baller. That's a cool one, that was a refractor first. And that's gonna go to letter H, and then to letter Browncroft. Brandon Miller, two at a $1.99, letter B, Michael P. And I believe Victor Webanyama and I think Katelyn Clark, but I think for sure Victor's like a short print. So you're not really gonna see too much of him in base. He is like a short print variation, so if we do pull one, it's gonna be pretty awesome. And I think Katelyn Clark actually might be a regular, but I think Victor's like a short print extended. JJ Starling is our first auto out of $4.99. So JJ, letter J's, JMS, Drew Timmy, and Jaylin Cook, autograph there, another one for letter J going to JMS. Then we have a Tyrese Proctor out of Duke, not numbered. All right, next one. We got Jackson Kohler, Michigan Spartans, Michigan State, I just say the $2.99. Another one for letter J, JMS. So again, I think some of the popular letters of course is like J, stuff like that. And whoa, what do we got here? Prime signatures of Mark Mitchell from Duke. And that looks like an orange, eight out of 25. So Mark Mitchell, letter M is Michael, Green Shimmer, Brandon Murray, letter B, one of Michael P. And we got a G.G. Jackson, gold. Bowman Chrome first. And that's 16 out of 50. Letter G, going to Michael P. Lycorra with the EG combo. And we got Hunter Dickinson. I believe these shimmers are not numbered, correct? Maybe they're just normal vase, yeah. That one had some nice colors, an orange and a gold. All right, here we go, next box. Another Jaden Shucks, $4.99, letter J with that one. JMS. And we got the big Kahuna, that looks orange. It looks like numbered, right? Aliyah Boston, out of 25. Letter A, going to John McGee. And a big Kahuna, Brandon Miller, autograph. Alabama, number to 150. Letter B, Michael P. Manny. Jalen Bridges, Bazoulas. Right, what's his name, Brandon Miller? That might've been, right? The Alabama kid. But I think nothing happened though, Chad, right? Yeah, that's true, I mean. He has a pretty high kick, yeah, probably, potentially. But yeah, I mean, I don't know. You ready for this weekend, Chad? For a split second, I forgot you were coming this weekend. We need to actually plan out, Chad. So I don't know if I'll be able to go to the Dodger game. I'm gonna see if I can still. I'm gonna have to try to convince my wife to go with me. So I'm not trying to go by myself. But if we can't do that, I know the games I got for. Is there anything you guys have planned after? Because remember how you said you wanted to come to the store, per se? I actually have to go to a brunch. I forgot I scheduled my friend with his girlfriend. In the morning, and since technically that game's at four, it's kind of tricky, because I don't know what time I'll be able to get back for that. Here we go, next one. Skyscraping, Kejani Wright, out of $2.99. What I was trying to say was that since I probably won't be available in the morning, and the games I got for, I'm assuming obviously, you're gonna want to get there a little earlier. Maybe after the game, if you're interested in coming over to the shop, I can meet you here. And then Joe will be here too. It wouldn't be the worst time. But yeah, just let me know. I definitely want to try to say hi to you since I won't really see you. Yeah, yeah, well, that's what I'm saying. I mean, it's nothing too crazy.  No matter how long it is for me, you know? I actually have a little gift for you too, Jack, so I wanted to give it to you, personally. But if you can't make it happen, you have to let me know if you're trying to come to the store on Saturday. Because if you're trying to come to the store on Saturday, then I'll leave the gift here just in case. But yeah, I think I'll be able to come over here later in the night, afternoon. Armando Vaca, like, you know, after the game's over and stuff like that kind of deal. Let me know. We can try to plan that out. What up, Rex? Did I miss an auto? It was a base one I didn't even notice it. Okay, maybe this one only gave us. Maybe this one only gave us one auto. Am I chipping? I guess we're missing an auto. Oh, there it is. Trippin' balls. We got Malik, or no. Letter M, might go all. The base ones are kind of tricky, man. Brad and Slater. All right, so there you go, guys. Found the second auto, and again, one auto's there, two auto's there, two more autos here, and then a couple of nice colors there, so yeah. Very nice stuff in general, guys. Like I said, no Caitlyn Clark auto for Victor Webinyama, but we did get a Caitlyn Clark base. Victor, I believe,'s base is a short print variation, so like I said, if definitely want to get more going, let's definitely do that. Jaspy's casebricks.com, guys, thanks.


You've done a fair bit of work in the past looking at a particular case that we're interested in for this course, and that is facilitated communication. Can you tell us a bit about what it is and what people have done in the past to look at it? Sure. The basic argument is that largely people with autism, not necessarily autism because it's spread to other disorders, but typically autistic kids who are non-communicative. The problem is not that they don't have something to say. The problem is that they have difficulty getting it out, and the facilitated communication is an idea to facilitate their communication to help them get their communication out. And the problem, according to this view, is that the biggest problem these kids have is they can't initiate a conversation, they can't initiate communication. And so the argument for facilitated communication is what you do is with a little bit of help, help them type on a keyboard, just move their arm a little bit to get them started. The idea is if you can get them started, then they can type out messages that are sensible, that are full sentences, paragraphs, and so on from these kids that you thought really had nothing to say, or in the past people have thought they had very little to say. They weren't capable of communicating. The general logic of facilitated communication is if you can get the kids started, if you can get the movement started, and if you can stop them from just continuously hitting the same button once they've started, so they have this perseverative problem where if you hit a C, then you hit a C again and again and again, you can't get out of that loop.  And so this initial starting motion and stopping them from keeping repeating the same thing, start them on the next letter, and so on, and then these kids can now communicate in ways that they weren't able to communicate before, because you're just facilitating the beginning and the ending of the communication. Sounds like facilitated communication then would be quite useful. So previously, the autistic individuals weren't able to communicate, kind of locked in, in a sense, and unable to communicate with their parents or their loved ones. It sounds like it could be really, really the holy grail for parents of autistic kids. Is it? Well, it looks like it's really life changing, right? Because you've got these kids who aren't able to communicate. They can't say even a single word to you, and with the help of the facilitator, now they're able to tell you what they did on the weekend, they're able to write poetry, they're able to go to school, finish high school, and so on, right? So the impression that you get if you see this stuff in action is, wow, this is huge, right? We're freeing these kids. As you say, these kids who have been locked in, we've got the key man, we unlock that door, they're out, they're communicating, and it sounds wonderful. Absolutely. Yeah. Interesting. Obviously, we're introducing this topic as, for a reason, it's not all it's cracked up to be. Can you tell us what the problem is exactly with this technique? Sure. There's one really critical question that has to be answered here, and it turns out to be a very simple question once you calculate what that question is, but you have two people involved here. You have a facilitator who's guiding the movements of the client, and then you have the client. And so when, say, the pair of them write a poem, right? Because the client is not able to write the poem without the help of the facilitator. So when the pair of them write the poem, who's the author? You have two people involved in that situation, and the fundamental question you have to answer, you have to figure out the answer to is, who's the communication coming from, right? Is it coming from the facilitator, or is it coming from the client? So if you've got this pair going to high school, right, going to the math courses and writing essays in English and all that sort of stuff, come graduation day, who do you give the diploma to? Do you give the diploma to the facilitator or to the client? So how do you find out where the communication is coming from? Well you have to, you can't, in that naturally occurring situation, right? You have to find some situation, you have to get control over the situation. So the two people involved have different pieces of information. And then if you interrogate that pair, so you ask them to type out something with the help of the facilitator, right? If they each have different information in their heads, you can tell by which information you get out of the pair who it came from. And that's what a lot of the research, well basically all of the research that's been done, all the scientific research that's been done on facilitated communication uses that technique. Make sure people have different pieces of information. The client has one piece of information, the facilitator has another piece of information, and you interrogate the pair of them, you ask them a question, and see which one of those things comes out. So what you would do is set up a scenario for example where the facilitator who's guiding the arm of the autistic individual sees, for example, a photograph of a pair of socks, and the autistic individual sees something else, say a pair of keys. And so you have these two differences, they're seeing two different things, and then you see what comes out in terms of the communication. If it's the socks, then it's the facilitator. If it's the keys, then it's the autistic individual. And that's the sort of experiment that's been done in the past? Exactly, multiple times. So in the early 1990s, there's a whole raft of these experiments. This is when facilitated communication was getting popular, and there's a whole raft of these kinds of experiments that tested this idea by making sure you have different pieces of information in the two individuals, look to see what comes out. And across all the experiments, there were different denominators in terms of the results that came out. That is, there were different numbers of trials on which you could get information, or evidence of information from the client, right? So one study by Wheeler and his colleagues at the Hex Center that was using this technique, if I remember correctly, I think it was about 140. I can't remember, it might have been 160. But there's 140, say, of these trials on which you could have gotten information coming from the client, and they got information clearly coming from the client on zero of those trials, none at all. And throughout all these studies that have been done, the numerator never changes, the denominator may change. Maybe it's 60 trials, maybe it's 30 trials, maybe it's 45 trials. But the number of trials where you actually get solid evidence of information coming from the client in all those cases is zero, none. Wow, so the denominator you're referring to, just the number of opportunities that the autistic individual has to demonstrate that they're the ones that are communicating, and under all of those circumstances, none of those opportunities have come to fruit. Precisely, yeah. What happened? I mean, what's the fallout of this? Did they just stop doing facilitated communication, or what happened after these sort of experiments came to light? I think some of the steamroller effect of this procedure dissipated. But it's still the case that people are using facilitated communication these days, and this is what, 20 years after the bulk of that really unequivocal evidence has come in to say that the technique is not working. And so yeah, it's still being used, not to the extent that it would have been without this evidence, I think. And I think there's a lot of competent therapists who are not using it that have sort of learned the lesson in some sense. There's an interesting study by, one of the major studies that was done in the early 90s, done by Doug Wheeler and his colleagues at the OD Hex Center in, I think it was Schenectady, New York. And they were using this technique, and they were having wonderful results, or at least they thought they were having wonderful results with it. And you can imagine being one of these therapists, working with these kids, right?  And now they're telling you about what they did on the weekend, they're joking with you, you're having conversations with them. You imagine, as a therapist, how rewarding that is. I mean, that's why you got into the business in the first place, was to be able to do this kind of thing. And they felt wonderful, right? And they decided, when people started criticizing this technique, they decided, OK, we're going to show them how this works, right? So they ran this study, they set up the situation where they make sure that the client has different information than the facilitator, they look to see who the information is coming from, and the data are very clear. It's coming from the facilitator. Any information that's coming over the paratheum at all is coming from the facilitator, not from the client. And they're absolutely devastated. But to their credit, they stopped using facilitated communication. They said, we can't, in good conscience, use this technique. No matter how good it makes us feel, no matter how good it makes the parents feel, it's wrong. These kids are not communicating. We're kind of acting like they are, but they're not really. And they were absolutely devastated. But I mean, I think it's a real testament to their integrity of the therapist at this place that they said, we're going to have to go back to square one. I don't like it, but we have to. We have no choice in this matter. And the parents and everybody else who's involved had to take that route. So are the facilitators then being malicious? Is that what's happening? I don't think so. I mean, in most cases, probably not. I mean, maybe that's happening in some cases as well. But there's no need to assume that. We have a long history in psychology of people influencing the behavior of others without being aware of it. There's a study by Rosenthal and Jacobson back in 1968 called the Pygmalion Effect. Pygmalion in the classroom was the name of the study. And it's named after the George Bernard Shaw play, right? And what they did was they brought an experimenter into a classroom, an elementary school classroom.   So the idea was these kids were about to blossom. They're about to have this big, like a physical growth spurt, only intellectual. And then they came back at the end of the year and they tested all the kids again. And lo and behold, these kids that they said were due for an intellectual growth spurt, in fact, had advanced significantly more than the rest of the kids in the class. The hitch is, they just pulled those names out of a hat. They had no way of predicting intellectual growth spurs or anything like that, they just made it all up. So what happened? Well, the argument was that the teachers, although they claimed not to be, were treating these kids differently. So if you know little Jimmy's ready for an intellectual growth spurt, right, and he's not quite getting something, well, you spend a little bit of extra time because you have these higher expectations of them. And we know if you have higher expectations of kids, they're gonna live up to them, right? Or at least they're gonna attempt to live up to them, right? And so a little bit higher expectations get a little bit higher results, right? A little bit higher performance. And that's what happened, right? And so that's an experimental expectancy effect. The experimenters were kind of expecting this outcome. In this case, the experimenters are the teachers in the classroom. It's their expectations that the kids are living up to. Sounds very similar to the clever Hans effect. Is that, I can't remember the details exactly, but something about a horse being able to read the signals provided by the trainer. Do you know that example? Yeah, back in the late 1800s, so the turn of the previous century, a guy named Wilhelm von Austin. He was a retired school teacher. He thought the so-called dumb animals, as they were called at the time, were getting short-tripped. They were a lot smarter than people thought they were. And so he trained this horse to do all kinds of amazing things. So the horse could tell you what time it was, he could do arithmetic, he could convert fractions to decimals and decimals to fractions. You could ask him questions like, well, if it's 25 to eight, where's the little hand on the clock? What numbers is it between? And so on. And they had these big commissions of inquiry who came to check out Hans and make sure that there wasn't some fraud going on and so on. And he passed all the tests. How does the horse respond in this case? Well, actually, a psychologist named Oscar Funks came along and figured out what was going on and what was going on in this case. I mean, Hans was very clever, but he couldn't talk, right? Wasn't Mr. Ed. So what he would do is he would just tap his foot to answer a question. What Oscar Funks established was that Hans could answer the questions if anybody in the audience knew what the answer was. Von Oster didn't need to be there, right? But someone had to know the answer to the question. And the way he tested this is he would ask one person to whisper a number in Hans's ear, another person to whisper a number in the other ear, say three and two, right? And they would ask Hans, add those two numbers. What's the sum of those two numbers? And Hans would go, just keep going. Because no one was telling him when to stop. Someone always told him when to stop. And the way they did that, Hans was very clever, not in the way that people thought, but he was very tuned to very subtle movements of people. So as Hans started to approach the right answer, people would just lean forward a little bit in anticipation of that answer. And so if he's going to five, you know the answer is five, you go one, two, three, four, oh man, he's gonna make it there, five, now, not nearly as big, but there were very subtle movements, but that's what Hans was picking up on. And once Funks figured this out, he could ask to give whatever answer he wanted, simply by making these movements deliberately. So Hans was picking up on these subtle cues from the people around him, none of whom knew they were doing this, right? There's no reason to believe that Vaughan Austin, who was the guy that was, who had trained Hans, knew that he was queuing Hans the answers, right? He was, he had a point to make, sure, but he wasn't a fraud, he wasn't making money off this. He just thought Hans was as clever as he was and didn't realize that he was doing the actual queuing himself, or other people in the audience were doing the queuing when Vaughan Austin wasn't there because they'd often test without Vaughan Austin being there. As you would think, well, maybe he's up to something fishy, take him out of the room, test Hans, Hans works just fine, right? As long as somebody knows the answer because they give those subtle little cues as to where he should be going. And if you think about facilitated communication, you've got someone holding onto your sleeve or holding onto your arm, helping you reach out and point and touch a keyboard, very easy for that person without meaning to, to be guiding your hand in a particular direction. And so the client is simply sort of passing on the movements that have been started by the facilitator. So that's how you get the information from the facilitator out through the client. So someone might argue then that, you know, what's the harm in that kind of, in that kind of case? I mean, particularly with facilitated communication.  I've seen reports of this, the child can report, for example, I love you, mom.  I mean, what's the harm in doing that sort of thing? Well, there's a few of them, actually, I think. The first is we lost, I don't know, how many person years of research time into the causes and, well, the procedures, what goes on in autism? Because remember, at the time, people were saying, look, if this facilitated communication is working, then we have to fundamentally rethink what autism is. It's not at all what we thought it was. It's something completely different. It's not this maybe withdrawal from the world and those sorts of things. It's a communication problem. And that's all it is, and we just need to allow people to communicate. Well, people went off and started studying this stuff, and it was a wild goose chase. We spent, I don't know, how many millions of dollars, how many, like I say, person years of research time off chasing this wild goose chase. Right, so the societal cost. Because those people could have been actually investigating worthwhile avenues rather than these goofy ones. There are costs to the individuals involved because if you focus on this bogus communication, you may miss communication they actually are able to do. And there's a lovely description of that in the report on that study by Wheeler and his colleagues from the HEC Center, where they said at one point, there's one kid who was shown an item, let's say it was a car. And the child pointed at the car, made a manual sign for the car, this kid knew sign language, so made manual sign for a car, whatever that is. And uttered the first consonant of the sign, he was going kuh, kuh, kuh, kuh. And the facilitator who was watching the kid's hand on the keyboard completely ignored that information and he typed out balloon or something instead. So you have these legitimate attempts to communicate that are missed because people are focused on the bogus stuff. So that's a cost to those individuals because they're not able to communicate, you're blocking the real communication with the bogus stuff, with the stuff that's not real. And I think there's another piece and I have a hard time describing it, but I think there's a sense in which this bogus belief that there's some more intact individual inside the person that you're able to access denies the validity of the person who actually is in there, who may not be able to communicate, who may not have in some sense anything to say in the sense of being able to write poetry and so on, but so what, they're still human beings, they're still valuable, real people who deserve respect and proper treatment and so on for who they are, not for who you'd like to believe they are, right? So those are the kinds of costs that I think have been born largely by these poor autistic kids, right? But by society in general as well. Who should be doing these sort of experiments? Is it Syracuse University who developed facilitated communication or should it be to us, should the experiments be up to us to conduct to demonstrate that there's nothing to this technique? So should we be the police here or should the people who are developing these techniques actually come up with some evidence that they, in fact, work, good scientific evidence that they work? I think it's the people who are developing the techniques really should be doing this, but of course, this is one of a whole series of these kinds of treatments where people have come up with these ideas, everybody jumps on the bandwagon, it looks at first blush like something wonderful is happening and no one really stops to take a skeptical view. I mean, you mentioned sort of being cynical about it, but that's not what I'm suggesting. I don't suggest that you be cynical and don't believe anything. What I'm suggesting is you need to take a skeptical view. You say, okay, let me see some evidence, right? How can we make sure that this technique really is working? And when you're doing drug studies, you got to come up with some evidence that your drug is an effective drug before you're allowed to market and so on. I think that's less true of people coming up with therapeutic techniques as opposed to therapeutic drugs, but there has been a number of other cases where the same sort of thing's gone on, right? So I have movement desensitization retraining was developed as a way of treating post-traumatic stress disorder and phobias and so on, which basically says you set the person down, you get them in this nice, relaxed state teaching some relaxation exercises and you have them start to think about the things that are traumatic to them. You keep them relaxed as you're doing this, but at the same time, you give them a fixation point, something to look out like my finger, you move it back and forth really quickly and they're supposed to track this with their eyes and this balances out something in their hemispheres and so on and makes the treatment much work much better and so on, except it's all nonsense, right? When you actually do the studies, that makes no difference. It's a technique that we've known about for, I don't know, 50, 60 years called systematic desensitization. You train a person up to be relaxed, you can't be relaxed and anxious at the same time, so then you sort of introduce the idea of the thing that makes you anxious in a gradual way and it doesn't cause so much anxiety anymore after you've done this training. You get equally good results with or without the eye movement stuff, right? But again, that was another technique that came in, it was in vogue for a while, people were paying big bucks to be trained in this, the therapists themselves are like, $2,500 to get trained at the first level of this, right? And they're flocking to do this, right? But that gets ahead of the actual evidence so then when the evidence comes in, it's like, well, no, but turned out to have been a waste of time. And there was a case more recently kind of related to this, the case of facilitated communication about locked-in syndrome. So there was an individual, I think, who was in a coma and people thought that he could communicate when in fact he couldn't. Do you know the details on that one? A little bit, I got a guy named Rob Hubin in, I think it was Belgium who had been in a coma for something like 23 years and he was given a number of tests and there were a neurologist there to decide that he wasn't really in a coma that something about his brain activity suggested that he wasn't actually a comatose, he was just unable to communicate and sort of along came a facilitator who would help him out and had him tapping away on this keyboard about what it was like to be locked in and all these sorts of things, right?  But he's typing away, his eyes are closed, he's not really paying any attention and the facilitator is so often in these cases is focused on the keyboard and looking at the keyboard and helping him type things and so on. One of the things this research has done, I think, is to make people a little bit quicker to ask those questions about is this really communication coming from this guy, right? So we know enough and there's enough people around now who can kind of say, wait a minute, wait a minute, this guy may have been locked in, he may not have been locked in but that information that's coming from this facilitator doesn't count as evidence that he can communicate, right? It just has no evidential value, it's anecdotal evidence and the situation is not controlled in such a way that you can tell who the communication's coming from and that's a big distinction. I'm very sympathetic on the part of the autistic individuals and of the parents that if there's anything to this technique whatsoever, if they can communicate, then we should give them the benefit of the doubt but I think some of the allegations that came out of the facilitator communication were fairly serious. Can you tell us a bit about those? Yeah, there is one case where a young woman through facilitated communication accused basically her whole family of sexually abusing her. Now, that's a case where legally as well as scientifically and morally, you really wanna know where those allegations are coming from, you really wanna know whose thoughts those are because there's a big difference. If someone says, I've been sexually abused, well, you gotta do something about that, right? That's first-hand sort of evidence. If you say, I think maybe so-and-so is being sexually abused, well, that's a whole different, it has a whole different evidential value, right? Sort of legally as well as scientifically. And what was happening is we were getting these sort of allegations of sexual abuse from this pair of people, the client and the facilitator and Betsy was pulled away from her family, made a ward of the court and so on while all this was kinda sorted out. What happened in that case was exactly the same kinds of evidence was gathered, as was gathered in the scientific studies. Communication expert came in to establish whether in Betsy's case, this is the young woman's name, Betsy, the information was coming from her or it was coming from the facilitator. So he did a number of the same kind of ideas, make sure that the two of them see different pictures and see which pictures come out. He did another version of the test where he took Betsy out of the room and gave her something, a key, for example, and then brought her back into the room and then asked her, what did I show you out there? And he wasn't able to get an answer. When he just pulled out a key and said, what's this? He was able to get an answer because the facilitator was present that second time when he pulled the key out. So it became clear fairly quickly if you controlled the situation properly so you could answer that fundamental question. Remember, the fundamental question is who's the communication coming from? That's the legal question as well. And it turned out that in that case, all the information was coming from the facilitator. There was nothing that was coming from Betsy in that case. So in that case, the charges were dropped and it became, because there was no evidence, there was no evidential value to these sort of sideways-going claims that Betsy had been abused. So the name of the course is the science of everyday thinking. Do you have any advice for the people who are taking the course on how to improve their everyday thinking? I think at least part of the answer is a healthy skepticism.  That I just don't believe anything. That's not what I'm suggesting. What I'm suggesting is being skeptical. Let's see some proof. I wanna see some evidence. So particularly when you see these kinds of claims, where's the evidence? How can we know this for sure? I think part of being skeptical is keeping an open mind, right? But demanding evidence and not jumping to conclusions, not making up your mind too early that either this is a wonderful thing or it's completely bogus, right? Let's get some evidence before we make those decisions. So that's maybe a bit unsatisfying. Then you're not gonna get a quick answer. There's no quick way of coming to the correct answer but I think part of the way of being in your everyday thinking is look for evidence.  Don't jump to conclusions. Try and find some evidence first and then make up your mind. My name is Scott. I think about evidence.