I'm Jane Messineo Lindquist. And I'm Mark Lindquist. And this is. Madcap Radio. Hi, Jane. How are you? Good. How are you? So this is our inaugural podcast, baby. Talking to my husband, not my baby. I would like to talk about being wrong. Well, that's about time. No, not wrong with you honey, I'm never wrong with you. This is in life about being wrong. Okay. Mm hmm. In that case, I stand corrected. I want to start the conversation with talking about what does it take to be a great dog breeder?
Because that's what we always aspire to do, is help people be great dog breeders. So, honey, what do you think it takes to be a great dog breeder? Oh, geez, is that. I wasn't ready for that. I .... wasn’t ready for that one Oh, man. A lot of a lot of patience. Fortunately, I have a handy answer. Ready? I happen to have the answer. Actually, what makes a good dog breeder to me is no different than what makes you great at anything. Which is three things. First is knowledge, right?
You have to know how to do it. You got to know how to fly the plane. Right, honey? My husband is a retired airline pilot, so we use a lot of airline pilot comparisons. That's because it's the only thing I understand. Mm hmm. Well, thank God you just stood it. Well, it would have been bad if you didn't. So, you know, you need knowledge. You need to know how to do it. But then you need experience to transform the knowledge into competency.
Because just knowing, you know, book smarts doesn't do you any good. You have to do it. True. But just doing something again and again does not make you good at it unless, and this is the big third one that we're going to be talking about, you have the intellectual humility to learn from your experience, and especially when that new experience conflicts with what you think you already know, i.e. you find out that you were wrong about something. So without any doubt, I mean, we can agree, right?
The third one is the hardest one. Oh, absolutely. Right. Without a doubt. Without a doubt. Because nobody likes to be wrong. Why do you think we don't really like to be wrong? It's humiliating. It's humiliating, right? Well, wrong doesn't win. Mm hmm. I mean, on the outward view, wrong doesn't win. Right. Wrong. It's failure. There's a lot of things that go along with being wrong that aren't pleasant. Mm hmm. And it's interesting, because there's actually an evolutionary basis to this.
Our sort of evolutionary brain job is to make order out of chaos. So we create these stories, and we will fight very hard any information that conflicts with the story and people form tribes around stories. I mean, not just tribes like people that didn't live in suburbia tribes, but even on the Internet, you'll hear people say, well, that's not my tribe or my tribe is this or that. And people, you know, they they have these stories.
And and when information conflicts with that, it's really almost physically violent to to the people to have to admit that they were wrong. I'm all ears. You're all ears. I mean, it's deep in our DNA. In fact, they're they actually did studies on people who were proven wrong, like cults that were proven wrong. Like there was this one cult that believed that spaceships were going to come and take them away, and everybody else on the earth was going to perish. And the the date happened.
And this did not happen, obviously, because we're making this podcast from the US, not from Mars. So but then when it didn't happen, you think, what, that everybody's going to be like, well, that was a crock. I'm going home by that. Well, that was wrong. We were wrong about that. No way. That is not what happened. That is not what happened. They rewrote the facts to coincide with our story and they said, Oh, well, the reason it didn't happen is because we prayed hard.
And that's that's why the spaceships didn't come. But they've studied this phenomenon. And the question is why is it so persistent for humans to believe things that just aren't true?
And the answer is that there is an evolutionary advantage to irrational belief when it when it connects you to a tribe, because they found in societies where, you know, people are still fighting like tooth and nail or were fighting tooth and nail just for survival against each other, that the societies that held irrational beliefs, even in the face of facts, were better able to defend because they would defend something completely irrational right to the death.
And it would it would defend their tribe. So their tribe had an evolutionary advantage. So that's great if you're living, you know, in the jungle and literally fighting tooth and nail with the neighboring tribe for food. But in modern society, where we're technology and information driven, that is kind of the kiss of death to be that way. I mean, kiss of death, if you want to be good at anything.
This is why I'm starting with this for our podcast, because we are doing that breeder course From Newborn to New Home, which is following what we do with the litter from birth to placement. And there's a couple things in there that are different from what we did in Puppy Culture. I mean, we've evolved some, some things. And I think, you know, we have to tell a little bit of the back story about why we changed things.
And also to put it out there that changing the way you do things is not a sign of weakness. It's a sign of strength. It's a sign that you're able to learn from your experience and improve. And we are always improving. That is definitely our mantra. Well then why call it wrong? Well, I mean, I put out wrong because again, I want people to feel that in their soul, like, ooh, no, I don't like to be wrong.
No, I'm wrong because that that's like you have to have a different conditioned emotional response to being wrong. Like right now your natural genetic conditioned emotional. It's not even conditioned. It's your emotional response. It's not conditioned to being wrong is going to be very negative because if it's threatening your place in the tribe when you're wrong, when you're wrong, when your tribe is wrong, that that is cataclysmic on a very cellular level for people.
But the evolved person has a conditioned emotional response to being wrong, of excitement, of saying, Oh, this could be my opportunity for growth. In fact, that's my only opportunity for growth is when I'm doing something and somebody comes up with another way to do it and I see, Oh, I might be wrong about the way I'm doing something. The evolved person is excited. Well, that's that is I would assume, a learned behavior over time.
Exactly. Which is why I'm saying at Puppy Culture, I feel like our focus has switched from specifically like this is the way you do things to this is how you think about things and this is how you're able to assimilate the information that's in front of you because that is what makes you a great breeder or a great anything. Yeah. Goes throughout life. Throughout life. All right. I'm excited. What's on the list? What are the three things? I think we should call this being wrong in three acts.
Okay, okay. Continue. Act one, low birth weight puppies. Okay. I don't know what being wrong and low birth weight puppies has to do with anything, but. Well, it all shall be revealed shortly. All right. Act Two Food Wars. Okay. Act three early off premises. socialization. Well, well, yeah, I know that one. Well, that's exciting. I'm looking forward to this. Okay. Maybe. Maybe not. I don't know. I might be wrong. A play on words. Oh, good. one, honey. Just went right over my head. Oh.
Okay. Ready for act one? Sure. Okay.