Exploring the Implications of Our Tribal Instincts to Contemporary Governance Challenges (TRN4-V17)

Transcript: Exploring the Implications of Our Tribal Instincts to Contemporary Governance Challenges

CSPS Descriptive: Exploring the Implications of Our Tribal Instincts to Contemporary Governance Challenges

[00:00:00 Video opens with animated CSPS logo.]

[00:00:05 Text appears on screen: We would like to begin by acknowledging that this event is filmed on the traditional and unceded territory of the Algonquin Anishnaabeg people. We encourage you to take a moment to reflect on the traditional Indigenous territory you occupy.]

[00:00:21 Taki Sarantakis appears full screen. Text on screen: President, Canada School of Public Service / Président, École de la fonction publique du Canada.]

Taki Sarantakis: Good morning, good afternoon, good evening, depending on where you are joining us from today, my name is Taki Sarantakis. I'm the President of the Canada School of Public Service, and it is my great pleasure to welcome you to our latest event.

So, our latest event will involve two firsts, as far as we're aware at the Canada School of Public Service. The first of our two firsts is that we have an evolutionary biologist with us today.

[00:00:52 Text on screen: Opening Remarks/Exploring the Implications of Our Tribal Instincts to Contemporary Governance Challenges /Discours d'ouverture/Exploration de l'incidence de notre instinct grégaire sur les défis contemporains de la gouvernance.]

Taki Sarantakis: And you may ask yourself, what on earth does an evolutionary biologist have to do with public service and public policy? And we hope at the end of this session that you will have your answer to that question, because a lot of the things that we do in our modern society are actually things that come from our not so modern mind, our not so modern brain. And our organic brain is a lot older than our civilization, and it still continues to impact us in many ways, both conscious and subconscious.

The second first at the Canada school, at least during my time, we have a baby in the audience. So, the baby is the baby of Professor Samson, who you will meet in a moment. So, if you hear any gurgling or little cooing or anything like that, it is not me. It is not Professor Samson . It is the baby. So, without further ado.

[00:01:58 Professor David R. Samson walks through the audience to take centre stage.]

Professor Samson: Hello, everyone.

I want to begin today by evoking an image. Imagine growing up and dwelling in a place that had no crime. It had very little alcohol abuse, very little drug abuse, and the leading cause of death is old age. Well, to many in this room, that might sound like a kind of science fiction utopia, but in fact, I want to welcome you now to the Roseto mystery. This place existed. It existed for approximately 80 years in a very unsuspecting place, which is Roseto, [in] the Northampton County of Pennsylvania. It was scientifically and empirically discovered by a man by the name of Stewart Wolf, in the fifties.

[00:02:56 Split screen: Professor Samson; slide, as described.]

Professor Samson: He went there for an academic conference – it was a medical conference – and basically what was going on is that the doctors there had noticed a very interesting trend in this particular town, a town of 1600 people. These doctors were saying, we note that heart disease is nearly nonexistent here. It's 30% to 40% less than what we're seeing at other places with similar demographics throughout the country. And at first, Stewart thought, no, there's got to be something wrong with the data. When he went there, he checked the data and it was solid, it was clean. And what he wanted to do then is figure out what was the underlying factors. And as he did so, he actually discovered several other different outliers: Nobody was on welfare; they had no suicide recorded; no alcoholism, or serious drug addiction; and barely any crime.

[00:03:51 Split screen: Professor Samson; slide showing a colourful drawing of a busy town market square with people gathered together, eating and talking.]

Professor Samson: And so, this brought to bear a mystery, one that was popularized by Malcolm Gladwell and his book Outliers, because it was such a statistical mystery, and one that I've been obsessed with, because I think it talks to one of the main themes that we're going to discuss and explore today.

The Roseto mystery was something he was very interested in uncovering. And so, he spent the next ten years of his life in Roseto trying to figure out how and why this was. He was a great hypothesis tester. He came up with three different ideas. He thought, well, maybe it's the genetics? Maybe the Rosetans themselves have something in their genes that is protecting them. He looked at Rosetans who had gone to different counties or different states in the United States and found they were still suffering from all the things that everybody else was suffering from. So, it wasn't genetics. You could reject that hypothesis.

He thought, maybe they have a culture of exercise? Are there running clubs or bicycling clubs? And there was decidedly no such culture in Roseto at all.

He thought, maybe what if it's the diet? Now, the town itself, Roseto, was a namesake of the town that many had immigrated from, the town of Roseto in Italy. And so, they had what we would argue to be not the healthiest diet. It was high in complex carbohydrates and high in fat, and they ate a lot of it. So, they rejected the third hypothesis.

So, this is why I want to highlight this right now. And we're going to revisit the Roseto mystery at the end of this talk.

[00:05:20 Split screen: Professor Samson; slide, as described.]

Professor Samson: For us to understand, to unlock the key to what the Roseto mystery is, I believe, as an evolutionary biologist and an evolutionary anthropologist, that we have to go back 1.8 million years to uncover the secret. To do this, though, we have to use an analogy, because for many, even one human lifespan is hard to comprehend. We're talking about thousands of human lifespans that undergirded the evolutionary journey of our species since our mitochondrial grandmother 1.8 million years ago in East Africa.

So, imagine here, the "Human Movie" is broken down into 100 minutes. Okay, we've got it, it's on Netflix so we can see our time bar up there, and we can fast forward 1 minute. At this opening minute – it's actually pretty cool, something really exciting happens – our australopithecine ancestors, from which homo erectus, our genus, that everyone is descended from in this room, our homo erectus ancestors evolved and split from the australopithecines that were essentially chimpanzees from the waist up – they had the functional morphology of a chimp, they had the size of a brain of a chimp – but from the waist down, they could walk facultatively biped. So, they were a little bit different than chimps. There was a split. Some of them stayed in the trees, others went to the ground.

And in that first minute, some really radical social experiments began to allow homo erectus to not only survive, but to thrive. The camp came into existence here, a camp you can see in the few hunter gatherer foragers that still exist on this planet. A camp is a coalition of individuals, adults, typically between 20 and 35 adults. They work together in the shared project of survival and reproduction. That is what they do. And to do that, they do a thing called CCP, share their resources together. So, some go out and forage, some go out and hunt. When they come back, they distribute these equally amongst the camp.

So, already you see an incredible moral insight and an incredible moral evolution right there. And it was the first time it got embedded into our DNA. It was, if you're part of our camp, we will share resources together. Now, with every innovation, though, there's a flip side to the moral coin. And that meant that there's a kind of tyranny to the cousins. If you don't adhere to our social norms in this camp, you will be excommunicated. And what excommunication means if you're in that size of a camp is you're dead. So, there was a flip side to that coin.

Now, let's fast forward all the way to minute 84 in the movie. Now, you would have needed a David Attenborough to spice up the majority of this movie, because it would really look like a nature documentary. But by the time you get to minute 84, things start really ratcheting up in the movie. In fact, this is when tribes evolve.

And when tribes evolve – and you can see it in the archeological record – when tribes evolve, it means that there was a group of us going beyond the typical 30 km it takes for a human home range to coexist, and going beyond that, maybe 100, 200, 300 km, and sharing with a group of them. Meaning these goods had behavioural signatures on them: ochre, the way that they flint napped the point, that were non-local. And so, the first time that human mind was grasping with the complexities of working with a completely different group that had a completely different intersubjective belief network.

And now I'm going to identify and define what a tribe is. It's an empirical definition, a scientifically robust definition, and it's universal to all humans on the planet. A tribe is an intersubjective belief network, and its primary function is to bootstrap trust amongst strangers. So, this is fascinating, because when we think of tribalism today in the 21st century, immediately we think of something negative or pejorative.

But the irony here is that we first invented tribalism as a species to bootstrap trust amongst strangers. Meaning if you emit the right codex of information – perhaps it's the way you dress, perhaps it's your language, your dialect, sense of humour, any of these – if you emit these things and you confront a stranger that also emits these things, it's like gaining access into a secret society. And we do all these things universally and unconsciously. That happens at minute 84.

Now let's fast forward all the way. We're approaching the end of the movie. There's 30 seconds left in the film. And this is where it starts getting almost science fiction-y because every single slide, some crazy exponent is happening. Here's where sedentary society comes into play. So, for 99 minutes of the human story, camp life was most of what humans did, all our ancestors did. With 30 seconds left, we started becoming sedentary, meaning you start collecting resources together in one spot and you start defending it. And this is where, in terms of political organization, you start seeing tyranny at mass scale because what you need to do to defend sedentary resources is to defend it with an organized military.

And that is basically the story of the past 5000 years as this has been bootstrapping up. But it's also the story of when mismatch – and this is a very important term, I'm going to define it cleanly in a few slides – where evolutionary mismatch takes root because we start deviating from the previous ways we were living. And whenever that happens, bad things can happen.

To the point where, at its best, most clear expression, evolutionary mismatch, I think, occurred in turning our social pattern into the McDonald's of social patterns. This is the quote, unquote, nuclear family.

One thing I want you to leave from this talk today is the idea that there is no such thing as a nuclear family. The smallest unit, the smallest nuclear unit in homo sapiens for 99 minutes of the movie was the nuclear camp. It was never the nuclear family. But the Levitt brothers wanted to profit from a lot of vets coming back from WWII, and they invented the suburbs. We'll talk about that in a minute. And that's where I think evolutionary mismatch comes to bear socially today.

And then, in the last seconds of the movie, you have 5 billion people gaining access to X/Twitter online, and you wonder why we're in this midst of chaos between intersubjective belief networks.

[00:12:15 Split screen: Professor Samson; slide, as described.]

Professor Samson: So, I dropped this idea here of evolutionary mismatch. This is a super crucial and important idea. And if it wasn't for me wrestling with this idea as a postdoc, I don't think I would have thought about any of this nearly as deeply.

Here is the South African Jewel Beetle. They are in a current state of evolutionary mismatch, and that is because the males of this species are attracted to, they find very sexy in their mates, big pits on the shells of the females. What happens, though, when you have a signal that confuses them? The beer bottles in South Africa, when thrown on the ground, on the base of them, have these big pits, bigger than your average female pitted South African Jewel Beetle. And so, they're on the cusp of extinction because this is triggering the male to think, I've got to go get that signal. That's the signal, this beer bottle, even though it's a fake signal. They're differentially trying to reproduce with beer bottles. Now, I don't want to make any analogies to modern society and the Internet, that would be low hanging fruit. But, as you see here, this is a problem.

Now, here's the good news. An intervention can help the beetle. An intervention by petitioning these beer bottle companies to no longer pit their beer bottles. Actually, you see, when this intervention occurred in real time, the population starts thriving again.

[00:13:50 Split screen: Professor Samson; slide, as described.]

Professor Samson: This has led those who work in this particular field, Lloyd, Wilson, and Sober, to say, quote: A substantial portion of human misery is probably due to genetic and cultural mismatch with our current environments. End quote. And so, when you see in this slide here three different realms, three different levels by which human beings exist with our societies, our institutions, and as individuals.

The idea here is that if you can be in sync, if you can stay away from being in evolutionary mismatch, you're going to increase human wellness for everyone in that area. And so, for my idea of good governance is to try and stay out of mismatch and to find that sweet spot that enhances human wellness and well-being. But I'm just an evolutionary biologist.

[00:14:50 Split screen: Professor Samson; slide, as described.]

Professor Samson: So, I want to bring some examples here of how mismatch is working in the human world. I have done research in multiple primate species, chimpanzees, orangutans, lemurs and in humans, human foragers. I worked with Hadza hunter-gatherers; I'll talk about that soon. And a lot of that research has been on the topic of sleep. Here's a great example of mismatch in human beings. Raise your hand if you've ever had problems falling asleep.

[00:15:24 Professor Samson and the audience appear full screen.]

Professor Samson: Almost 100%. That's intense.

Now, one could argue that this is due to a state of mismatch, and it's a mismatch of timing your environment and your biological clocks. So, biological clocks control the daily cycles in physiology and behaviour, particularly with this. It's what's called the Suprachiasmatic Nucleus, the SCN. It's the master circadian clock.

[00:15:48 Split screen: Professor Samson; slide, as described.]

Professor Samson: But there are also another eight or nine independent clocks in different organs of your body. And when any one of those clocks is off, for example, your metabolism, if you eat right before bed, that will throw you out of mismatch as well, hormonally, and metabolically.

What are we in right now? We're in a place that has perfectly regulated temperature and perfectly regulated light. Right now, we're attenuating the cues that actually help this ancient 500-million-year-old evolved system, time things, so that you stay in sync. And the cost is insane. They've done estimates where chronic circadian diseases in Canada and in the US are almost $400 billion, so this has real world consequences.

[00:16:39 Split screen: Professor Samson; slide, as described.]

Professor Samson: What about suffering love? When I'm in the classroom, I often challenge my students to think about what their paleolithic ancestors would have done if they had access to a smartphone and Tinder, and then they have to go through the thought process.

So, someone pops open their phone, swipe left, swipe left, they swipe left. Your deck's done. That's it. That's everyone in your home range who was a viable mate. There's no other deck, guys.

So, we are not evolved necessarily for the kinds of ways we meet our significant others in the 21st century. You could see some of these stats since 1995 to 2017. Look at through friends and look at through family as a method of being introduced to your mate. Those two things were 50% back then if you coupled them. Now, well below 30%, and most people now are meeting online.

Here's the major thing, is that we didn't evolve to have no consequences when we were searching for a mate or a pair bond. We evolved in kin networks, by which if you treated X poorly, or ghosted X poorly, then your third cousin, thrice removed, is going to come over and maybe have some words with you, because there are complex social networks that are keeping everybody alive together, and there's a lot of reasons why people come together. So, there's no real reputational costs. And humans are very sensitive to this.

[00:18:14 Split screen: Professor Samson; slide, as described.]

Professor Samson: What about suffering communication? This was a recent paper just came out in 2024, and it showed all the things that active Twitter use increases. So, here's the thing: you'll note at the bottom, it increases a sense of belonging, but this is a red herring. It's a toxic form of belonging, because what drives it is polarization outrage, which leads to loneliness, anxiety, and boredom, and ultimately reduces well-being. What is the countermeasure to get back in sync? It's social interaction with other humans. It shouldn't be too much of a surprise for someone who evolved in a camp for 99 minutes of the "Human Movie".

[00:19:00 Split screen: Professor Samson; slide, as described.]

Professor Samson: What about institutional mismatch? Well, this is a tough one, because it's all about the challenge of scaling human groups. If the nuclear human group is 30, and then you have nested groups of 30 individuals in camps, equaling a band of about 150 people – these are like neighbourhoods, paleolithic neighbourhoods – and at most, getting to about 1500 people, which is actually when you start being able to define what a tribe is, it starts stretching beyond the capacity to start remembering what everybody's face is. It's really hard to stay cohesive when you burst beyond Dunbar's Number of 150. Dunbar's Number being specifically the number of people that the human brain can process computationally in deep relationships. It's a processing problem.

So, when organizations scale, they lose a lot of this stuff, and then they lose you even more if they have workspaces that emphasize division over unity, if the hierarchies are strict and dominance based, as opposed to the more paleolithic style, which are prestige and skill based. Paleolithic leadership. When I was working with the Hadza, the leaders, quote unquote leaders, were the ones who used their skill and their understanding to give the most to the group. And as a de facto, their opinion was valued more. It was never, listen to me, I'm the big person. Never. So, scaling without ensuring belonging leads to a fragile bond being broken.

[00:20:32 Split screen: Professor Samson; slide, as described.]

Professor Samson: Here's what I think is perhaps maybe the worst form of mismatch with the longest lasting consequences. I already hinted at our friend here, Levitt and Levittown, it was actually a team of sociologists teaming up with FDR. FDR was really scared of all these soldiers coming back after WWII and how they might potentially unionize, how they might potentially stir up trouble. And what they wanted to do was to create an intentionally antisocial community.

This was captured beautifully by Douglass Rushkoff. Quote: They were specifically concerned about men congregating. They wanted to prevent veterans returning from WWII from organizing labour or drinking together. And here's the bolded, italicized. They invented an intentionally de-social community. End quote. Suburbs. I'm not a big fan of suburbs. They definitely bring us to a state of mismatch.

[00:21:34 Split screen: Professor Samson; slide, as described.]

Professor Samson: And that started in the fifties, and I think it's been a half decade of building up to what we just recently saw at the end of 2023, the Surgeon General announcing to the United States public that there's an epidemic of loneliness and isolation. And the science is so clear on this particular point. The science is devastating on all ends, in terms of predicting broad based morbidity, mortality. Loneliness is deadly.

The fundamental theory here is something that Jim Coan, who came up with this theory, calls Social Baseline Theory. When you are isolated, when you perceive yourself as being isolated, you are burning hot. It's the equivalent of a car running at 8000 rpms all the time, nonstop.

[00:22:20 Professor Samson and the audience appear full screen.]

Professor Samson: Never gets to brake, never gets to turn off. The metabolic activity is churning and churning and churning and evolutionarily this makes perfect sense, because you're the only eyes you've got. What if there's a predator in the environment? What if there is an attack on the way? What if I miss something, some crucial resource? I don't have a second pair of eyes. So, the theory is strong.

And so, people who are in a strong social network, they burn less calories per time alive, and it has a host of downstream consequences. We see that socially isolated people, they're more antisocial, they're more prone to depression, they have double the rates of suicide. They're more likely to get cancer, hypertension. The list goes on and on and on. And there are biological sex consequences as well. For women who have birth and postpartum depression is nearly doubled or tripled if you have a poor social network. For men, acute loss in old age of friends – because it's hard for males to make friends, typically they do so early in their life, shoulder to shoulder – it has an incredible impact on their cognition and their immune system. So, this is very serious.

[00:23:34 Split screen: Professor Samson; slide, as described.]

Professor Samson: What about politics? So, something really remarkable is going on. I want to call your attention here to the right side of your screens. This is the House of Representatives in the United States from 1949 to 2011. When I see this, from the vantage point of an evolutionary biologist that studies population dynamics, I think of a speciation event. I think of a population that did trade genes, and that is no longer trading genes. There's no cross fertilization anymore. So, much so that in 2024, we've made a lot of progress. There's the Overton window has shifted drastically on different cultures marrying different cultures in the United States, but it's flipped with political inbred marrying. Only 4% intermarriage between Democrats and Republicans, 4%.

And this is, anthropologically, the term is called endogamy. This literally means when the tribe has a very strong social norm of not marrying outside the tribe. And that's what's going on here. And what happens is things like moral equivalency, where you think the moral goodness or righteousness, or evilness of the other side is a full order of magnitude worse than what it actually is.

[00:24:54 Split screen: Professor Samson; slide, as described.]

Professor Samson: So, this slide actually is worth spending just a bit of time on just to figure out. So, these dark bars are the perceived impression of what the out group thinks of that group. The light bars are the actual beliefs or infractions by the group in question.

So, say, for example, tax fraud. And in fact, amongst political tribes, you do see subtle differences ranging between 1% and 3%. Tax fraud. This is what Democrats believe goes on in Republicans, and this is actually what goes on. You could see here, there is a little bit more compared to, say, Democrats. There's more of a norm to smudge some taxes.

On the other hand, you could also say the same for Democrats: Cheating on a spouse, more socially acceptable amongst Democrats. But here, the other side believes that it's a full, instead of 3%, it's 30%. So, the perception of moral violation from one group of the other is outstanding. It's way more.

[00:26:13 Professor Samson and the audience appear full screen.]

Professor Samson: So, we're going to do a little exercise. How many people, raise your hands if you've ever meditated before? Raise your hands if you've meditated before. Okay, we have a very present, meditative audience. This is going to be great.

[00:26:35 Split screen: Professor Samson; slide, as described.]

Professor Samson: All right, take a good look at the screen. This is a cockroach, a rendition of a cockroach. Take a look at its back. It's dirty. Imagine the vectors associated with it. Look at the spiny legs, proboscis, the moving tentacles.

Now, I want you to go to a meditative state, please close your eyes. All right, go to that little spot. I'll give you just a second to ground yourself. Go to that little spot that allows you to feel your body as an object in consciousness and the things that happens in your body as an object in consciousness.

Now, imagine that cockroach on your hand. Quickly, it juts up to your elbow. It pauses. Its antennae are investigating your elbow. It goes up to your shoulder very quickly. Then it slowly starts moving up your neck, around your neck. Your mouth opens. You see the feelers around your mouth. Oh, this is great. You're doing this, guys. I can see it in the audience. This is wonderful. All right, open your eyes. Open your eyes. I knew you guys were doing this because I could see some physiological responses.

[00:27:48 Professor Samson and the audience appear full screen.]

Professor Samson: Can anybody tell me, as a matter of how that felt as an object in consciousness, what did that feel like?

Audience member: <inaudible>

Professor Samson: How? How did the uncomfortability manifest?

Audience member: My eyes were closed, so I wasn't able to see where it was going until after <inaudible>

Professor Samson: Okay, anybody else? Yes.

Audience member: <inaudible>

Professor Samson: Heart rate tensing up. Ooh, I heard the d word. I heard disgust. It turns out humans aren't the only animal on the planet that experience disgust. It's a universal response amongst primates, and it's highly adapted. It's highly adapted because it's very important for a species survival to be able to expel potential threats to its life. If something is toxic or bad or pathogenic, then you want to expel it. And that means that even monkeys and humans share a particular gesture when they're disgusted. Think about it. You're expelling something from your digestive system. And we're not the only species that does this.

[00:29:05 Split screen: Professor Samson; slide, as described.]

Professor Samson: Here's the bad news, guys. You see this brain? This brain is an fMRI. This is your brain on disgust. It is a particular part of the brain. It's the insular cortex and this pathway touches the amygdala, the fear spot of your brain. And unfortunately, evolution is thrifty. It's economical. So, once we got socially complicated, it didn't just say, well, let's make a fresh, new social part of our brain. It leveraged and bootstrapped and scaffolded the old parts of our brain. So, when you sense, and we sense as a species, moral violation, this disgust response is what pops.

Which means, think about the last time you were on Twitter/X or social media, and somebody said something that you didn't like. Have you ever had the response where you go, well, that disgusts me. Think of that word. Think of that response, that contempt response, as a matter of consciousness, you are being controlled by ancient parts of your brain. And that's when we need to become acutely aware of what's going on.

[00:30:21 Split screen: Professor Samson; slide, as described.]

Professor Samson: So, realignment – that's all the bad news, that was all the things in which it can go wrong – how do we get back into alignment? Well, if it's about improving your sleep, which I think everybody in this room sounds like you could all use some tips on your sleep. What I would recommend is start with the basics. Don't worry about sleep. We focus about sleep too much. Worry about your circadian rhythm. Worry about spending time outside in the sun. Tether your wake-up time with the time the sun gets up and rises, and then spend time outside. Eat outside, even if it's crummy weather, because you're getting cued in data about the temperature that it is outside.

And then, when it's dark, instead of sitting in front of a screen for two or 3 hours, that's emitting blue wave light that's literally inhibiting your capacity to produce melatonin. Melatonin being the hormone that facilitates good sleep. Turn that off and walk around in candlelight. Maybe not candlelight, but low light, low red light that won't have this activation. That's how I would say, realign your circadian rhythm.

[00:31:26 Split screen: Professor Samson; slide, as described.]

Professor Samson: I remember this acutely. When I was a postdoc at Duke University. I had, for the first time in my life, a good paying job. I could actually pay my bills, my student loans. I had very engaging work. I was working in the lab of Dr. Charles Nunn in evolutionary anthropology at Duke University. It was incredible. The work was so interesting and engaging, and other parts of my life felt good because I had achieved what society told me I needed to achieve to be happy. Turns out, though, I was as depressed as I had ever been in my life. And it hit me like a tonne of bricks when I was home alone, watching Netflix on a Friday night, and this movie from Roko Belic called Happy pops up on the screen. And I watched it, and it's all about the positive psychology and what a good life is composed of. And one of the things that hit me very, very hard was how crucial your family, your kith and your kin, and feeling connected, feeling the sense of belonging is.

[00:32:37 Professor Samson appears full screen.]

Professor Samson: And I hadn't felt that. I had sacrificed that, chasing the dream of getting my PhD. I had sacrificed it for ten years. I hadn't been in touch with that for ten years.

[00:32:51 Split screen: Professor Samson; slide, as described.]

Professor Samson: Not only that, but I had also just gotten out of a full field season working with the Hadza hunter-gatherers. Probably one of the most amazing scientific experiences and personal experiences I've ever had in my life. So, I got to live with one of the last foragers who hunt and gather for a vast majority of their calories. And to see how they do it: see their alloparenting strategy; see how low stress they have when kids are running around; see how connected they are; how they rely on each other for their problems; see the rituals they perform together. I got to see this stuff.

[00:33:21 Split screen: Professor Samson; slide, as described.]

Professor Samson: So, it was all baking in there. And I also – and I only recently became aware of this book, and I highly recommend it and I think we'll talk about it a little bit in the Q and A – this is Colin Woodard's American Nations. And I think of it as North American nations. Canada's totally looped in here. I no longer see Canada and the United States as the super tribes that they are. I see them as being building blocks of actual intersubjective belief networks, which these are the tribes of North America. These are the movers and shakers. You want to know why one particular person wins an election? It's not red versus blue. It's these coalitions of intersubjective belief networks.

I was born in New France. My father's side is Quebecois. I remember. And I grew up there in New Brunswick until I was twelve. My mother is in Indiana, Hoosier. We moved there when I was twelve. And her lineage descended from Scottish/Irish settlers, Greater Appalachia. So, I'm actually a child of two different tribes. And culturally, I grew up in Greater Appalachia.

So, I've been tribalist for some time. And I had no idea how that was impacting me. Not being around people who saw the world the way I do. It's fascinating.

[00:34:41 Split screen: Professor Samson; slide, as described.]

Professor Samson: So, to understand all this, to get us back into realignment, we have to understand human scaling. That's where we talk about Dunbar's Number. This is 150 people. This is a channel capacity. And what do I mean by that? It even gets even more sensitive.

So, there's something called a sympathy group. A sympathy group is the number of people who, if you were to imagine their death, it would be absolutely emotionally devastating. For the average person, when asked to create this list, it's twelve people long. And so, that means that we are incredibly sensitive to loss for some people.

So, when we talk about human groups, it's not a question of morality, it's actually a question of energy, because it's incredibly expensive to cast empathy on somebody. It's beyond the average human's capacity to actually do functionally.

So, in this one study, they found 21 small scale societies with the average size of 148 people – right on Dunbar's Number. And they all share things like all the tribal friendship primers: language; dialect; geography; educational experiences; hobbies; interests; spiritual viewpoints; sense of humour; and music.

And so here we have the scales that I think you guys really need to think about when you're organizing your teams. Five is kind of like a military fire team. It's like your closest trust circle. At 15, you can expand it out because you can have multiple of these circles to coordinate on tasks that require a larger number of people. 50 might be something like a department. You don't want to get much bigger than 50. In fact, churches thrive at this number of 50. When they scale beyond 50, they start collapsing, dividing, and start having too many differences of opinion. And 150 is the number of deep relationships you can have.

[00:36:41 Split screen: Professor Samson; slide, as described.]

Professor Samson: So, think about this from a workplace perspective. Really, the camp was the first corporate entity, where reproductive fitness was the goal, and calories were the currency. So, there's got to be a way to leverage our evolutionary history to improve workplaces. Gore is a company that's done really well at this. It's a Fortune magazine's 100 Best Companies to Work; 5 billion annual revenues, and it's particularly associated with their creativity, trust, and innovation. They never break Dunbar's Number of 150 when they are working on these particular tasks. And they have specific task forces that are five people only, and it's outside the normal hierarchical structure of the group. So, they're using leveraging human group sizes very effectively.

[00:37:28 Split screen: Professor Samson; slide, as described.]

Professor Samson: This was a fascinating study by Google. It took two years; they analyzed 180 teams and 37,000 employees. And their primary research question: what makes the perfect team? What makes the perfect team? They came up with this concept, psychological safety. And let me define what psychological safety meant in this study. It meant that you could voice a countervailing opinion without fear of reprisal. You could voice a minority opinion without fear that that group is going to adopt a tyranny of the cousins' approach and say,

[00:38:12 Professor Samson and the audience appear full screen.]

Professor Samson: you can't be part of our group because you don't think exactly like us. It was actually psychological safety [that] was one of the primary drivers.

Think about this from the perspective of realigning our communities.

[00:38:23 Split screen: Professor Samson; slide, as described.]

Professor Samson: I have to give a shout out to Charles Montgomery. He has done fantastic work out at BC and Vancouver in an urban environment, trying to use the kinds of principles that I've been talking about with camp life. And we've had many conversations since, to how to create housing that also increases cohesiveness amongst neighbours and the people that they're living next to.

So, he's found six principles to happy community homes. The first is integration: linking buildings with neighbourhoods to foster community interaction. The second is transition: being able to blend private spaces for social and personal balance. The third is co-location: clustering common areas for routine enhanced social interactions. Then you have heart: create a central space as the community's social nucleus. And then evolution: design flexible living spaces for the needs of the residents.

[00:39:26 Split screen: Professor Samson; slide, as described.]

Professor Samson: I want to give two really, really cool examples of this from the real world. Where people, fed up with living in their suburb or living in an isolated environment, wanting to make it on their own. Besties Row is very classy. Some of you might have read about this in the top. Besties Row is a group of best friends. They bought a plot of land on the Llano River in Castell, Texas. The four best friends created eco-friendly homes for about $40,000 a pop and then threw in $80,000 to build a communal cooking area and hanging out area. And this is their retirement exit strategy, that they can't wait, that they're spending more and more time there together. And it reminds me the most of kind of a modern, 21st century hunter gatherer approach to dwelling.

The one on the bottom was featured on The World's Most Extraordinary Homes. It's called the Three Sisters. So, three sisters had always wanted to live together with their families. They inherited a plot of land from their grandfather in Spain. And you can see it's like three stars, a three-pointed star, where every home juts out. It has privacy because it's looking out on the Spanish countryside. But inside is this nucleus where all the cooking occurs, all the social activity occurs, playing with kids. And it's intentional community from the ground up design.

[00:40:48 Split screen: Professor Samson; slide, as described.]

Professor Samson: There are some really exciting things happening in Vancouver. Here's the title of this particular topic: Vancouver's new mega development is big, ambitious, and undeniably Indigenous. Some of the Indigenous communities here have land and they've been having to fight what I think is one of the more annoying things in the world, Nimbyism – not in my backyard – but because of their new reclaimed power, they're building these subdivisions here. And I just want to highlight on the right there that some of these are intentionally communal buildings that link all the other structures, where ritual and ceremony are the heart of these urban sprawling places to live, which is kind of really cool to think about.

[00:41:35 Split screen: Professor Samson; slide, as described.]

Professor Samson: So, what about realigning politics? For us to broach this topic, we have to ask the question, how does one change their mind? And in fact, for such a complicated topic, it's actually an easy response in so much that you have to identify as someone whose mind can change. Now, that sounds simple, but it's actually quite difficult.

[00:42:00 Split screen: Professor Samson; slide, as described.]

Professor Samson: Let me give you an example. In 2014, so this is ten years ago, there was a debate between Bill Nye, the Science Guy, and Ken Ham, a 6000-year-old Earth Creationist. And they were at the Creation Museum where there was an ark and everything. I've driven by it many times, driving to my family's house. And the moderator asked one of the most important questions you can ask anybody in an intractable debate: Okay, you both have stated your positions. What would it take for you to change your mind? It was Bill's response. He goes through a laundry list:

[00:42:42 Professor Samson and the audience appear full screen.]

Professor Samson: I would need to see different things in the geological record; I would need to see molecular evidence and timing of changes in different primate phylogenies. He just went down and down and down. Ken Ham's response was crucial and to me very, very insightful.

His response was, I'm a Christian.

[00:43:03 Professor Samson appears full screen.]

Professor Samson: And the audience applauded. I'm a Christian, was his response. So, I won't ever change my mind. Do you see there? The answer wasn't a formula, it wasn't data, it was identity. Identity. And guys, this is the thing that was really hard for me to wrestle with while I was writing this book. Identity is the mind killer. When you firmly have a strong identity, your capacity to see veridical reality is shattered. And the science is pretty strong on this.

[00:43:40 Split screen: Professor Samson; slide, as described.]

Professor Samson: So, I have some even worse news. Okay, and I'll join in with you. Who here identifies as educated?

[00:43:55 Professor Samson and the audience appear full screen.]

Professor Samson: I have a PhD, so I think I have to do this. All right. Who here identifies as intelligent? I know we've got to say we're intelligent but it's Canadian modesty if you guys aren't lifting your hand. And who here thinks that their worldview can help improve the world? Okay, all right. I'm three for three. This is why this was particularly devastating for me.

[00:44:27 Split screen: Professor Samson; slide, as described.]

Professor Samson: And it seems like we might share a couple of these overlapping themes of identity. This is from Keith E. Stanovich's recent book, on Myside Bias in Individuals and Institutions. Quote: However, one bias, my side bias, sets a trap for the cognitively sophisticated. There is, in fact, a group of people who tick all these boxes, people who are highly intelligent, highly educated, and strongly committed to ideological viewpoints. That group happens to be the group of social scientists who study politicized topics.

[00:45:01 Split screen: Professor Samson; slide, as described.]

Professor Samson: I know, guys. It hits home. I'm going to describe [this], because as somebody who identifies as these things, a lot of writing this book was a kind of excavation on my own mind and soul. It was very difficult, but also very rewarding. I want to show you the science here of how this works.

[00:45:23 Professor Samson and the audience appear full screen.]

Professor Samson: So, here's Dan Kahan's work. If you're interested in this topic, this particular blind spot, I highly recommend his work. Here is where a condition by which someone who has high numeracy,

[00:45:32 Split screen: Professor Samson; slide, as described.]

Professor Samson: numeracy defined as your capacity to look at objective data and interpret it correctly. Smart people are better at this. Educated intelligent people are better at this. So, this is when it's just over a skin rash condition, you're looking to see whether or not remedial action, putting cream on a skin rash will help it, and you're looking at raw data.

It turns out if you're high numeracy, you're way better at figuring out the answer than people who have low numeracy. Check. That makes sense.

Move to a politicized topic where maybe identity might be wrapped up into it, and you can put any hot button issue on here. This is gun conditions, it could be abortion, it could be whatever you want. And probability of correct answer for the low numeracy group, because it's identity affirming, you're going to see a little bit of a bump. A little bit of a bump. They're better at it. They see it a little clearer. The high numeracy, you can see, gets a little bit better, too. Everyone gets a little bit better at analyzing the data when it affirms their identity.

Here's where things get really interesting. When it threatens your identity, all of a sudden, everybody's dumb. Everybody. And here's the kicker. Look at these yellow lines. This means that those who amplify the BS the most are typically rhetorically gifted and cognitively sophisticated. So, that means the onus is on those who identify as cognitively sophisticated to be especially aware of this bias because we're more prone to it. And then when we're wrong, we're really good at getting out of it because we can explicate why we're right. It's just something I wanted to talk about today and I hope it lands.

[00:47:27 Split screen: Professor Samson; slide, as described.]

Professor Samson: So, the truth won't make you free, it will make you extinct. This is Donald Hoffman's brilliant book, The Case Against Reality. Here's the value proposition. It's not truth when we're talking about truth and its value, when we're talking about groups saying something is true, it's not about being right. It's about signalling your group level loyalty. And, in fact, the more outlandish the idea is, if you say it's true, the stronger coalitionary signal it is. Religions love to play with this one. Think of the Trinity. How can one person be three things?

[00:48:11 Professor Samson appears full screen.]

Professor Samson: It's a paradox. But if you believe in the Trinity, if I believe in the Trinity, that is a strong signal of coalitionary alliance. Because it's a paradox. You're signalling I'm part of the team. Very powerful.

And my point here is that this is going on unconsciously. This is my new favourite example of how instincts can manifest. Shaking someone's hand. If you shake someone's hand, which many of you do in your businesses, [you] probably shake many people's hands every day, when you shake someone's hand, there is a 100% increase in you smelling your hand within the next 30 seconds. It'll look something along the lines of, oh, hello, blah, blah, blah, blah, so nice to meet you.

[00:49:00 Professor Samson folds his arms in front of himself and raises one hand to his chin.]

Professor Samson: Mm hmm, mm hmm, mm hmm, mm hmm, mm hmm. And note, once I became aware of this instinct, I actually was like, holy crap, I cannot believe I'm smelling my hand. This is impossible!

[00:49:11 Professor Samson and the audience appear full screen.]

Professor Samson: That is the power of instinct, and everyone does it. And instinct wouldn't work if you were aware of it. And the only way to gain control of it is to actually let your executive function handle it.

So, what data are you getting from it? When you shake someone's hand, you're getting their health status, their current stress. You're getting, potentially, if it's a mate, you're getting major histocompatibility complex as a pheromone. You're assessing all this data instantaneously.

[00:49:46 Split screen: Professor Samson; slide, a Canadian flag.]

Professor Samson: So, let's talk about another instinct. What is this? A flag. What do you associate with it?

Taki Sarantakis: My tribe.

Professor Samson: Ah, flesh that out for me, Taki. What do you mean?

[00:50:03 Professor Samson, Taki Sarantakis, and the audience appear full screen.]

Taki Sarantakis: It's my tribe. It's the people I vote for, the people I work for, the people I protect, where my children are born and where I hope they're raised.

Professor Samson: Beautiful. Beautiful. That was an incredibly, incredibly beautiful response and also quite abstract when you think of it. Because objectively, you're right on one level.

[00:50:32 Professor Samson appears full screen.]

Professor Samson: On another level, all this is, in veridical reality, is a non-equally distributed 2D dimension of red and white. That's objectively what it is. But because we're symbolically instinctual, you instantaneously associated an incredibly complex idea to a very simple symbol. Flags are incredibly powerful. They harbour, they embed so much symbolic information. And to the extent that someone is proud of a flag, or perhaps doesn't like a flag, or feels offended by the flag, that power is hypostasized. It comes out of nothing. And all humans do it because we are a social, symbolic, instinctual animal.

[00:51:21 Split screen: Professor Samson; slide, as described.]

Professor Samson: So, here I have to give major credit to Nav Bhatia, the Toronto superfan who has been to every home game since 1995. He's been acknowledged by – he's shaken hands with Barack Obama. He's been acknowledged by many different civic organizations for what he's done entrepreneurially and to what he's given back to his community.

Here we have a very effective intersubjective belief network signaller. He identifies as a Sikh. You have the Dastar turban. This symbolizes that you are part of the Sikh community. You're a full-fledged member of the Sikh community. We have the Kesh beard here playing a little bit to both parties because if you were a strict Sikh, you would never, ever touch the beard. His beard is holy. It's given by God. Here we have a very prominent beard, but perhaps to the standards of the society with which he lives, acceptable. Here we have the Kara bracelet. This is a symbol of unity in the infinity of God. Also, in the medieval ages, [it] could double as something to protect your hands if you're going to throw a punch, like brass knuckles.

And then we have symbols like, We the North, a decidedly super tribal symbol towards Canada. Adorning Nike. This is an icon of capitalism, an icon of western identity, one of the most popular on the planet. And then a basketball jersey which are only played in certain parts in the world. All this together you picked up unconsciously, and you now have an incredible amount of data by which to make Bayesian predictions of Mr. Nav Bhatia's behaviour. That's what we all do every time we take in the data of a new human being.

[00:53:07 Split screen: Professor Samson; slide, as described.]

Professor Samson: We're getting down to closing here. And I want to start thinking about identity and the power of primary identity. If you want a successful camp, if you want a successful institution, if you want a successful school and you want a successful nation, you need to harness primary identity.

Here [is] Jim, you can see clearly from his Twitter/X profile: Steeler fan; Pennsylvania resident; father; husband; Christian; and Patriot. He ranks them, he shows them. That means that if somebody says something disrespectful about the Steelers, there might be consequences.

[00:53:46 Split screen: Professor Samson; slide, as described.]

Professor Samson: I, through writing this book, had to actually physically write down my own identity stack and rank weighted them. And I realized through this exercise, I'd become very politically tribal. And it was time for me to re-weight my identities. Because they're so precious, they take up so much of our instinctual bandwidth. The blue here are the face-to-face actual real-life groups that I identified with. Only two.

And now re-weight it much more heavily focused on face-to-face. So, this is the difference between, say, identifying as a Roman Catholic writ large, or a Catholic that attends the church down the street with my local community and identifying as that, as opposed to something more tribal, more beyond the scope of human comprehension.

[00:54:40 Split screen: Professor Samson; slide, as described.]

Professor Samson: So, testing the mismatch hypothesis, is it even possible to test this? And I think it is. In 2024, this is extremely recent, there was a beautiful study in PNAS that came out, that over 3000 individuals it measured life satisfaction as a function of the local social support, trust and cultural engagement, and local freedom and autonomy to make choices in absence of corruption. And what they found was something pretty stark. You can't buy happiness as a society. On the right there, so looking right here, we have many of the western nations.

[00:55:23 Professor Samson and the audience appear full screen.]

Professor Samson: And yes, nice wealth per capita. But here we are on the life evaluation. These were small scale societies, meaning small scale horticulturalists, hunter gatherers, and some nomadic people as well.

[00:55:38 Split screen: Professor Samson; slide, as described.]

Professor Samson: This is their life satisfaction, without all the trappings and even the social safety net that many of these nations provide, which is fascinating. It tells us something.

[00:55:54 Professor Samson and the audience appear full screen.]

Professor Samson: And it gives us a hint and a clue at perhaps solving the Roseto mystery. When Stewart Wolf excavated what was going on in the town of Roseto, he discovered a very interesting thing. It hadn't changed in size. It had been 1600 people, plus or minus 100 people, for 80 years. Interestingly, this is exactly the average size of a hunter gatherer tribe. It had a population where 70% of the people lived and died in Roseto. 80% lived intergenerationally,

[00:56:35 Professor Samson appears full screen.]

Professor Samson: meaning you had grandparents in the home and children in the home. 75% were married. And about as many said, if they had a problem, would they go to the government or would they go to their family? And almost all of them said their family to help solve and overcome the problem. They did this by way of having a shared intersubjective belief network. They had a very strong, prominent shaman. This was a Catholic priest, and this Catholic priest was beloved by many of them. They had all attended the same church, they went through the same rituals, and they ritualized once a week together as a community.

[00:57:21 Split screen: Professor Samson; slide, as described.]

Professor Samson: And so, here we have evidence that the resolution to the Roseto mystery is actually the social alignment of the group itself. And it was affecting things as distantly downstream as heart disease.

[00:57:30 Split screen: Professor Samson; slide, as described.]

Professor Samson: And so, if I have one call to action for the brilliant minds in this room, it's to consider how we can overcome the challenges of the 21st century by perhaps trying to create the Roseto tribes of the future so that we can enhance our wellness, our meaning, and our purpose.

[00:57:46 Professor Samson and the audience appear full screen.]

Professor Samson: Thank you very much for your attention, guys.

[00:57:58 Professor Samson and Taki Sarantakis are seated together on stage.]

Taki Sarantakis: Wow, that was pretty cool. So, I want to pick up on a few of the themes that we talked about. There's a lot to unpack there. I invite people to catch my eye if you have a question, and we'll get a microphone over to you. And also, we're going to have some questions that we'll pull up. We're already getting our online questions, but I want to start with coming back to the tribe and trust. Tell us a little bit about those two again, because I think what I heard you say was that without tribes, we can't exist as human beings, and that tribes were absolutely central to the human story, or in this case, the "Human Movie". So, talk to us a little bit about what tribes did for us.

[00:58:56 Professor Samson appears full screen. Text on screen: Author and Associate Professor, University of Toronto. / Auteur et professeur adjoint à l'Université de Toronto.]

Professor Samson: Yes. So, tribes are truly the magic ingredient by which you can take a group of strangers and allow them to cooperate at scale. It's literally like a heuristic cheat sheet. It means that our very limited brains, that can only process a very small amount of social relationships, all of a sudden got a super quick "if then" update. And it's like the "if then" is, this person is wearing the headdress that symbolizes ranked social status and membership in the group that I identify with and that I invest my energy into. And so, it gives you that perfect cheat sheet to be able to know who to invest my energy into. And then, though, here's the bad part, because I like to call it the cursed blessing. And I do so in the book because this was an incredible moral innovation.

But the flip side of that moral coin meant that if you do not signal those secret signals that indicate we're part of the same coalition, you do not get any of those benefits. And in actuality, it might be easier to do counter signalling. And this is the beginning of the end, because if you start actively counter signalling, oh, they're not one of us. And in fact, you start engaging the kinds of neural mechanisms, like the insular cortex, for example, and the amygdala, and saying that this is the classic routine before genocide is, what is it? They're like cockroaches. They're a disease. They need to be exterminated.

[01:00:38 Professor Samson and Taki Sarantakis are seated together on stage.]

Taki Sarantakis: The dehumanization.

Professor Samson: The dehumanization. So, it's a blessing and a curse all at the same time. And we are just now figuring this out as a species. And unless we learn to cope and understand it, I think our probabilistic outlook in the 21st century is going to be pretty rough.

Taki Sarantakis: Now, as human beings, we're data machines, so we have a gazillion cells. Each of those cells takes in information. I think one of the things in modern society that confuses us, or at least tricks us, is we think that language is not only the primary way through which we communicate, but in some ways, even the exclusive way. It's like, but I told you, I told you. I said this. Yes, but I think we communicate in literally dozens and dozens of ways. What are some of those ways?

Professor Samson: Absolutely. So, just the low hanging fruit is talking about body language. 60% of communication is nonverbal. I love teaching in my introduction to physical anthropology, I love having an entire 30-minute bit on body language because it's so empowering, because body language is totally linked to our limbic system. So, for example, if I were to do this, this is a vital vein right here, and I'm showing I'm completely comfortable exposing that to you. And it's as basic as that. So, a classic body language sign of internal anxiety, you'll see people do a clavicle notch touch and

Taki Sarantakis: Adjusting the tie.

Professor Samson: Adjusting the tie. Well, what is a tie? I'm protecting all the crucial veins by which someone could attack me. That's literally like I'm dressed for war. This is what this is. It's a suit. It's a suit of armour. It's protecting all these things. So, in terms of linking that back to tribal signalling, it's the matrix. Once you see it, you can unsee it. I'll give a quick example of metal tee shirts. I love metal tee shirts.

[01:02:51 Professor Samson appears full screen.]

Taki Sarantakis: Metal tee shirts?

Professor Samson: Yes. Yes. So, if you've ever been to a show, one thing that happens is that you never wear the shirt of the band you're going to see. You wear the really cool shirts in the same genre, almost as though you're begging to find tribal coalitionary alliances within the group, because then someone goes, you like that obscure band, too? And it's like we're constantly seeking moments to make engagement, to make connection, and to build solid relationships that, from an evolutionary standpoint, are there to ensure survival and reproduction. There are so many, though.

[01:03:30 Professor Samson and Taki Sarantakis are seated together on stage.]

Taki Sarantakis: Now, I'm glad you mentioned survival because, again, in our civilized world, we're told, you're here for happiness, you're here for self-fulfillment. But actually, our evolutionary self is here for one thing. That thing is survival. Tell us how important that is to everything that hits us every day. Whether it's walking down the street, whether it's talking to a friend, whether it's talking to a stranger, whether it's giving a presentation. What does survival mean for us in our everyday life?

Professor Samson: Well, let's broach that with a topic that's probably quite fond in this room. Let's talk about politics for a second.

[01:04:22 Professor Samson appears full screen.]

Professor Samson: One thing that I think is refreshing in the sense that oftentimes we wonder the question, why? Why does my political opponent say that? How could they say that? Why? There's a lack of understanding. And so, here are the survival functions, and here are the moral evolutionary consequences of evolving as we have as a species.

So, everyone's familiar with the left and the right, a very basic dynamic. Now we're going to cut a quadrant in it, and going down in this quadrant, we're going to see more autonomy. We'll say libertarian might be an easy political term. When we go up, we see authoritarian. And so, now we've gone beyond just this very simple dimension and we put it into a quadrant. All these poles are the products of evolution, survival, and reproduction.

Let me walk through them. So, on the left, you have commitment to socialism, a redistribution of resources. What is a redistribution of resources? If you're a hunter gatherer Hadza, it is you hunt and come back, and you literally cut the animal up and distribute it to people who didn't hunt.

Now, let's go to the other side of the axis. The conservative economic impulse is, well, what about freeloaders? I'm not going to share my hunt with people who didn't commit to hunting. Well, turns out that's an evolved impulse, too. And there are massive consequences for being in a camp and being perceived as a freeloader. You're excommunicated if people perceive that you are not adding to the benefit of a camp. I'm talking 25 to 30 people within a hunter gatherer band. If you don't cross that threshold, you're out. So, here we've already explained in a very simple evolutionary theory, we've explained two poles of this.

Here's the other two poles. So, on the bottom you'll find the libertarian impulse. The libertarian impulse is fascinating because for 99 and a half minutes of the "Human Movie", there was no overlord, there was no boss. In fact, Richard Wrangham, who just recently retired, he was at Harvard, he was a paleoanthropologist. Richard Wrangham wrote the Goodness Paradox, and he has a very convincing argument that we actually have an impulse to kill people who are despotic. It's actually an ingrained impulse, to remove them from our group.

And so, you have a very strong impulse on the base to have autonomy and freedom. And when I was with the Hadza, it was so apparent. I couldn't tell you to go get water. You might give a ten-minute storytelling time about how, if you were the person to the target, it might be, you know, your father was so good at fetching water for the group. I remember this time I was super thirsty, and he went 3 miles and then he came back. And that's how you get stuff done. There's this sense of freedom. This, don't tell me what to do, is very strong.

Now we go to the top. So, all three of those, that's ancient. That's ancient code. Now we go to the top. It's the newest layer. It's the newest, most troubling layer, especially since half the world lives in authoritarian regimes. And this gets us to why multiculturalism has functioned. Why do we even appreciate multiculturalism? What's the value? Why don't we all just hang out with our own tribes? It seems easier. Once you get to the top, you go all the way top to the authoritarian, then we get to the physics of summing collective energy to increase cost of attack. What do I mean by this?

So, this is raw physics. And every organism on the planet has to figure out these physics. So, if you're a cell and you have a thin outer wall, you are cell A. If you're cell B, you have a little bit of a thicker outer wall. And then there's a predator in the environment that wants to eat cells. Picks up this one a little bit, it's like, oh, man, I'm spending, like, three calories now trying to pick at this cell. Oh, what about this one? Boom. Spent one calorie, and I ate that cell. This cell, cell B had an increased cost of attack. It increases cost of attack.

You scale that up all the way to human social complexity, and then you see the function value of a military. Militaries exist such that they increase the cost of attack of another group coming in and eating your cell. So, this top tier here had to emerge as an emergent property so that we could sum collective energies of people who believed in the same imaginary stuff. And the better you are at distributing the imaginary stuff, such that people also identify as your team, the more raw watts of energy, the more joules per second you can collectively use to increase cost of attack. All survival functions.

[01:10:02 Professor Samson and Taki Sarantakis are seated together on stage.]

Taki Sarantakis: Yes. First question from the audience, and then I go for one online.

Audience member: Hi, Erwin Best, Canada School. Thank you very much for your presentation. Your talk was fascinating. I'm curious. You mentioned multiculturalism, and you were going where I was going in my head, around the concept of immigration. It said that an immigrant to Canada arrives every minute.

[01:10:23 Audience member appears full screen.]

Audience member: So, I was wondering if you can comment on the alignment between social alignment, time, and immigration. At what point does that happen based on the research?

[01:10:32 Professor Samson and Taki Sarantakis are seated together on stage.]

Taki Sarantakis: Just before you answer that, how many people in here are immigrants? And how many people in here are the children of immigrants?

[01:10:41 Taki Sarantakis and the audience are seen raising their hands.]

Taki Sarantakis: So, almost the majority of the room between those two groups.

[01:10:48 Professor Samson and Taki Sarantakis are seated together on stage.]

Professor Samson: Yes. So, there's this term I've been thinking about recently because we have sort of a negative pejorative connotation to the word nationalism. I think, at least in my education, I was told that, no, we want to be a citizen of the world. We want it to be one large community, and that's the moral way. And nationalism somehow prejudices us against that virtuous end. I wonder, though, instead of – when I think of that, I think of tribalist nationalism when it's a zero-sum game. This term, though, civic nationalism, it's actually different than thinking other groups are bad. And this is actually a good thing. So, the neurophysiology of this is clear. And I'll try and really rope this back into immigration here.

[01:11:41 Professor Samson appears full screen.]

Professor Samson: Identifying with somebody is a matter of sympathy. This is the singular cortex. And say, I identify with you, Taki, and we're in the kitchen and we're cooking some dinner together, as we would since we're friends, and you cut yourself in the act of cutting some produce, and you bleed and you go, ow. My singular cortex actually lights up. If it was a stranger, if we had never cooked before, it does not light up.

The reason why it lit up, though, is because we have done things shoulder to shoulder. We've engaged with each other face to face. And in fact, this whole project, I actually feel we've only known each other for two passes together.

[01:12:27 Professor Samson and Taki Sarantakis are seated together on stage.]

Professor Samson: But I actually feel quite close to Taki because we've done some really cool things like this together. That's like a shared project. Shoulder to shoulder, my singular cortex would actually legitimately light up. So, the trick is,

Taki Sarantakis: How do we get connection?

Professor Samson: How do we get connection? How do we get belonging? Belonging is the biggest predictor at all those levels I talked about.

[01:12:53 Professor Samson appears full screen.]

Professor Samson: Be it institutional mismatch or wherever, the sense of belonging predicts your satisfaction working for the group, your performance, all these things. So, you want to maximize belonging.

So, in my mind, I'm just an evolutionary theorist, I don't know how the policy would work out at all. But in my mind, the challenge for anybody who's working in that world would be, how do we maximize sense of Canadian-ness belonging to the people who are making that move here? How do we do that? So, we've got some hints from psychology, developmental psychology, and group psychology. You put them together and you have them do stuff together, literally.

So, there's this beautiful example. Maybe some of you have seen the Heineken commercial where they have – this is actually brilliant; it's won lots of awards. It's a Heineken commercial where they have people identifying all across the political spectrum. All across. Almost designed to create tension in the scene. And what they did was they had these people interact and build a bar together. Straight up, they just built a physical bar. And then, at the end of the act of building the bar together, they were shown the videos of their entry level interviews where they said certain things about their beliefs and worldviews that are polar opposites. They were clearly two different tribes.

And then they watched the magic unfold, because they had done the thing together, they were willing to listen to each other. And because of that, you have these beautiful instances of human beings that never would deign to hang out together, exchanging numbers and having long lasting friendships, because they were shoulder to shoulder on something. And that's really the key.

The first scientific study that ever showed this was from Muzafer Sherif, and this is a very, very famous study. Muzafer Sherif, after WWII, wanted to figure out what drives conflict. And so, he took a bunch of Protestant boys from Kansas who were middle class. It was a super homogenous group of students. They were middle class, about ten to twelve years old, and they all had unbroken families. So, mother/father pair, and they all went to summer camp.

And when they were at summer camp, they were split into two teams. They had to come up with their own identities. They were the Rattlers and the Eagles; you guys might have heard this story. And then they made them compete.

And during this course of several competitions, baseball games, having to do tug of rope, the escalation of violence was so fast. It was like, at first there was this sort of default aggressive attitude by the Rattlers. And then the flag got stolen and burned by the Eagles, and then the cabin got ransacked the next day. So, there was this counter reprisal. These kids hated each other in this context. So, they were like, we're going to put a pause on this.

And mind you, I have to say as a sidebar, what this tells us is this is completely independent of the melanin content on our skin. This was as homogenized a group as you could possibly imagine. Every kid was a little white kid from Kansas, okay? Which shows us racism is more downstream to the fundamental group-ism we're talking about, the tribalism that is undergirding it all.

So, how did they get them to cooperate? Well, they said, okay guys, we've got to go get some ice cream but it's in town. Our bus broke down. Can everybody help fix it? They start working on the bus, and then they're assigned another group project they worked together on. Before you know it, they start calling each other nicknames. That means you're of one of us. If you get a nickname, you're one of us. Then they start having their own group identity. And by the time the camp was done, they were singing camp songs together on the bus getting out. All because they had to do something together.

[01:17:24 Professor Samson and Taki Sarantakis are seated together on stage.]

Professor Samson: So, I don't know how that translates to policy, but it takes action because every time neural linkage occurs, when you're physically doing something with each other, you can get – if all of us started doing 100 push-ups and started going, one, two, three, our neuroendocrine systems and our hormones would start locking in sync. It's basic biomechanics here. It's basic physics.

Taki Sarantakis: Now, a lot of us think that this started with the Internet,

[01:17:57 Taki Sarantakis appears full screen.]

Taki Sarantakis: but now that you mention it – and I think back to kind of pre-Internet, because I'm older than the Internet, which is kind of shocking, my children still don't believe that – there was a book. Sociologists started talking about this, like bowling alone, and people kind of declining in participation in the civic institutions. So, how do we start getting some of that back at scale?

 [01:18:20 Professor Samson and Taki Sarantakis are seated together on stage.]

Professor Samson: Yes, I've been thinking about civic institutions a lot. I really think that is a piece of the puzzle. Roseto had very strong civic institutions. 1500-1600 hundred people and they had 22 civic organizations. They had a Masonic Hall, they had Daughters of the Nile, they had the shoot-offs of organizations from the Catholic church.

[01:18:44 Professor Samson appears full screen. Text on screen: Author and Associate Professor, University of Toronto. / Auteur et professeur adjoint à l'Université de Toronto.]

Professor Samson: They were doing stuff with and for each other constantly under different sub-identities of the Rosetan identity.

And when I think of even my own personal life, I have a best friend group that, when I moved to Indiana, I have friends that I've had since then. And only in the past five years have I realized we've created our own civic institution. It's a group, it's a club where we ritualize, no matter where we are in the world, we ritualize coming together once a year in southern Indiana at a certain spot. And we hang out with each other, no cell phones, no distractions. And it's incredible. It's like you don't even miss a beat. But the ritual's there, and it's absolutely crucial.

This brings to mind, actually, the one example we talked about when we were at the awards ceremony, and I think it's worth repeating here, because it's such a powerful example of how shared identity and shared ritual can shape cooperation in even the most – I mean, I can't even imagine a more violent environment where it could shape cooperation.

The battle of Gettysburg killed 51,000 people. And at the heat of the battle, the peak of the battle, there was a cavalry charge by one of the Confederate officers. His name was Lewis Armistead, and he got hit by a bullet, and he got thrown off his horse. And he realized he's bleeding out on the field of battle. He lifts up a sign into the heavens. I don't know what that sign is, because it's a secret sign that only a certain group of people know. And the person who saw it was Hiram Bingham. He was an officer for the Union. And he went in, in the middle of the fray, picked up this man who was dying and dragged him to his Union fieldhouse. There he was given the man's spurs. He was given his diary, and he was given his Masonic necklace, and he promised him to take it back. The man who was dying said, can you please take this to my family after the war, a promise that was kept by Hiram Bingham 18 months later. And the reason why that happened is because whatever that sign was, which I don't know because I'm not a Mason, is a secret symbol that Masons know after they've undergone their ritual initiation. And it means that if a Mason is ever in mortal danger, another Mason will protect them.

Think about this. In the heat of the bloodiest war, civil war that America has ever known, two men reversed identity from Confederate, to Union, to Masons, like that. That is power. If we can figure out in a just and socially responsible way to channel that power, we've got a shot. Not only just for Canada, but for our species. That's magic.

[01:21:56 Professor Samson and Taki Sarantakis are seated together on stage.]

Taki Sarantakis: But it's almost like we don't have a shot, because if you think of – as you were speaking, I'm trying to think of where do we come together in big groups?

Professor Samson: Yes.

Taki Sarantakis: Maybe at sporting events? So, that's what, 20, 30, 40,000, in some cases in the NFL, 80,000 people. Concerts. You go to a, I don't know, a Taylor Swift concert or a Bruce Springsteen concert,

[01:22:20 Taki Sarantakis appears full screen.]

Taki Sarantakis: depending on your age, you're having shared experiences with people. But we're 40 million people. The United States, there are 300 and something. So, how do we have connection at scale, or belonging at scale?

Professor Samson: Yes.

Taki Sarantakis: Or is it impossible?

[01:22:37 Professor Samson appears full screen.]

Professor Samson: I don't think it's impossible. I think as a proof of concept, it's certainly possible. When you look at the diversity of the United States, this is not a new problem. And those from the Yankee tribe – in fact, could we put up the map of the American Nations? Yes. And I'll keep going.

Those from the Yankee tribe were very conscious of this. The Yankee tribe is basically the descendants of Calvinists, and they were communalists. They believed in educating everyone, but in a very specific way because they had a lot of religious zeal. So much so, again, these communities were fantastic. Everybody had access to education, everybody was well taken care of. The cost? An occasional witch burning.

So, there are costs to all these things. And a lot of the first of the founding fathers from the Yankee side wanted – their whole thing was a mission to make the United States Yankee. They wanted everybody to have their shared community. They thought it was a Utopic vision. And so, they invested a lot of their goods that they willfully donated through local taxes to building the best schools in the world. We're familiar with some of them, places like Harvard, Yale, et cetera.

And there were basically, when you look back at what Colin Woodard's second and third books discuss, is the education that was going on was much less important than the continual and ritualized mythology of the origin of the United States. And how many times do we spend a day saying a pledge of allegiance to the flag? How many times do we worship on the altar of George Washington? How many times do we do X, Y and Z? So, they solved this problem. This was their solution to that problem.

[01:24:57Professor Samson and Taki Sarantakis are seated together on stage.]

Taki Sarantakis: It used to be education.

Professor Samson: It used to be education.

Taki Sarantakis: There was the saying that if two people read the same twelve books together, they're bound deeper than blood, in some ways. But we seem to have lost a lot of those commonalities.

So, we've got time for one more question. I'm going to make it from the audience. Does anybody? No. So, since we don't have, what I'm going to do is, this may look like a pen, but it's actually not a pen, it's a magic wand. So, I'm going to give you the magic wand, and with the magic wand I want you to give us one wish or one piece of guidance that we, as public servants, can take away to kind of practice an action to strengthen those positive bonds of belonging and communities.

Professor Samson: Okay, I'm going to have to stand up for this.

Taki Sarantakis: Absolutely.

[01:25:54 Professor Samson stands and takes centre stage.]

Professor Samson: Okay, so you all have dedicated your careers to public service. This is very commendable. And one of the things that really, really helped me come to understand not only the United States and Canada better, but everybody. And what I mean understand, I mean in sort of the Spinozian way of, do not weep, do not wax indignant, but understand someone. Understand where they're coming from.

I couldn't recommend this book anymore, obviously read Our Troubled Future, please. But this is the book, again, I wish I would have read before finishing that book, because I would have had an entire chapter on it because it made all the actions that we're making today so much clearly predictive.

[01:26:38 Split screen: Professor Samson; slide, as described.]

Professor Samson: So, I'll just give one example, and then I'll give the call to action. So, I don't see Canada and the US. That's fine. You guys can, I just don't anymore. I see the initial migrational patterns that came over and then interacting with the Indigenous communities that were living here for thousands of years.

And the way it spilled out actually had an emergent property where the Midlands wrap around here. So, you see northern Indiana, northern Ohio, Yankee spread this way, and they really got the left coast with academic institutions, so did greater Appalachia.

But the Midlands wrap around the Great Lakes, and we are in the Midlands right now. Here's the interesting historical trajectory of the Midlands: William Penn, he was the son of a very rich English aristocrat, and the king owed him tonnes of money. And he goes to the king, and he says, if you give me everything west of Pennsylvania up to a certain point that the English had claimed, I'll just wipe that debt off. And the king's like, sounds good, let's do that.

So, William Penn came over, and who was William Penn? William Penn was a lock stock, fundamentalist Quaker. What do Quakers believe? Quakers believe in respect amongst all peoples. Quakers believe in pacifism. Quakers believe in being very open and tolerant. Probably some sacred values that many in this room hold. And that's interesting because it wrapped all the way around to Midlands, which includes Ottawa, Toronto, all that. So, culturally, many of the people in these areas actually have much more in common than, say, El Nort, the far west, the deep south.

So, my challenge to you, the call to action, is to read this book, because what you can do with that knowledge is instead of thinking, well, let's be very deeply respectful to other cultures, especially when they're coming in through the process of immigration, or when we go out of North America and we visit other people, let's treat their cultures with deep, profound respect. The challenge I have for you all today is to think like an ambassador in North America.

Given I hail from greater Appalachia and New France, I actually feel as though I'm an ambassador of those places, those intersubjective belief networks, those tribes, if you will, whenever I go to different places, and try and understand the people in those places. And that's the magic, because once you understand their sacred values – that they have them, first of all – and then you recognize them as human, all of a sudden, conversations that you never would have imagined could have occurred can happen. And that's how true cultural unity can occur. So, I'll close with that. Take the magic wand away. It's too much power.

[01:30:05 Professor Samson re-takes his seat and joins Taki Sarantakis on stage.]

Taki Sarantakis: Professor David Samson, thank you so much for coming and spending your time with us. These are important topics that I think more and more as we come to understand, not only the human mind, which I'm not sure we understand enough in public policy, but more and more the scale of the "Human Movie" that you walked us through. There are things that we do and don't do for reasons that we don't understand.

[01:30:31 Taki Sarantakis appears full screen. Text on screen: President, Canada School of Public Service / Président, École de la fonction publique du Canada.]

Taki Sarantakis: And I think one of the things that you've brought forward to us is that a lot of these things are deeper and more primal than just writing laws or policies. We have to figure out how to channel some of the things that are inside of us into those laws and policy.

So, thank you so much for taking the time to come and talk to us.

[01:30:51 Professor Samson, Taki Sarantakis, and the audience appear full screen.]

Professor Samson: Thank you. Thank you, everyone.

[01:31:02 The CSPS animated logo appears onscreen.]

[01:31:12 The Government of Canada wordmark appears, and fades to black.]