Why We Do What We Do

Humans have been engineering strategies to reduce the risks of life for as long as humans have been engineering everything. As it relates to addiction, harm reduction is a stragegy that emerged to help prevent the spread of disease and has been successfully applied to supporting people with chemical dependency. We explore the criticisms, concerns, and science behind harm reduction.

Welcome to our new episode format, the mini! Although this is our second one, we are still excited to be exploring this new way of doing episodes. This discusion explores how lotteries came to be and why we pursue them with such vigor.Become a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/why-we-do-what-we-do--3419521/support.

The saga continues as we explore the historical policy blunder that was the "War on Drugs." What lead to the development of this idea? We review the distinction between what was stated and what actually happened, and, of course, who won the war? spoiler it was drugs. RecommendationsAbraham: Speechify App (https://speechify.com/?source=fb-for-mobile&via=nguyen-linh-nam&gad_s

Welcome to our first ever new episode format that we are trying out. These miniature episodes will be supplemental, additional episodes that we release every week alongside our normal full-length episodes. This first installment is exploring the weird tradition of people slapping peices of our flesh together to show appreciation. We started recording these quite a while ago, so, ap

The disease model of addiction is a popular philosophical approach to dependency. The idea is to remove fault and blame from the addicted individual. Further, there are a lot of parallels between addiction and illness. However, there are some drawbacks to conceptualizing addiction as a disease. We talk through the benefits and our reservations about using the disease framework for

Alcohol dependency is a complicated condition that has killed a staggering number of people. Fortinuately, many people have banded together to support one another through behavior changes to reinvent their life without this dependency. One such program truly dominates the known landscape of addiction interventions: Alcoholics Anonymous. Yet, the effectiveness of the AA program and

Most people are only one or two nodes away from someone who has struggled with some sort of addiction, or may struggle themselves. But what is this phenomenon? The definition has been tricky to pin down because addiction can span chemicals to behaviors, can go undetected or be overt, and can have seemingly creep up out of nowhere. But what all addiction has in common is harm to the

Have you thought about what you'll do if a significant disaster destroys most of humankind? Perhaps you've prepared for the zombie apocalypse or a nuclear winter. What will humans do if we are faced with end times? We look through the history of extinction-level natural disasters that nearly killed off all humans and how we somehow pulled through... and what this tells us about wha

This re-run updates a previous episode on our musings about what aphantasia is, and the purpose of diagnoses. This condition describes people who can't see with their mind's eye. But, what does that mean? How would you know? Do we have aphantasia? Do you? We'll never know.RecommendationsAbraham? Project Ironside (https://ironsidegametable.com/)Shane: Electric Shark Tattoo (https://

Psychologists and philosophers speculated for centuries trying to understand how the conscious experience of the mind relates to the physical substrate of the body. Is the mind just the process of our gooey brains, or something more? It's our brains. But we'll unpack it all. RecommendationsAbraham: The Fox Experiment (https://pandasaurusgames.com/products/the-fox-experiment) Shane: