Today, we have a fascinating guest, Dimitris Xygalatas, a cultural anthropologist who delves into the intricate connection between our bodies and our behaviors. Dimitris conducted a groundbreaking study in Spain, aiming to explore intense rituals like fire walking.

Can you think of a ritual in your life? Maybe it's a birthday celebration, a wedding ceremony, or even how you prepare your morning cup of coffee. Rituals shape our identities and create bonds within groups. Can we use rituals to unite our team or organization and increase performance?

During the podcast, Dimitris shares his firsthand experiences, where he witnessed the power of rituals in bringing people together, creating community, and achieving greater performance.

So, get ready for an enlightening conversation as we dive into the world of rituals with Dimitris Xygalatas.

Purchase his book "Rituals" below:

https://www.amazon.com/Ritual-Seemingly-Senseless-Worth-Living/dp/0316462403

Connect with him on his website below:

https://www.xygalatas.com/

Mentioned in this episode:

1on1 App Information

https://www.thinkmovethrive.com/1on1-app/

Hey, everybody.

We're talking to Demetrius Zygalatas today.

What an amazing guy.

He's an anthropologist that studies rituals all over the world, has some

incredible stories of firewalkers and why seemingly irrational

behaviors drive our success.

He's a great new friend of mine.

You don't want to miss this incredible conversation.

Welcome, welcome, welcome.

I am Dallas Burnett, sitting in my 1905 Koch Brothers

barber chair in Thrive Studios.

But more importantly, we have an amazing guest, somebody I have been

so looking forward to getting on the show for like three months.

We've had him on the calendar for a long time.

He's a world traveler.

He's seen amazing cultural rituals.

He's got a PhD in anthropology.

Welcome to the show, Demetrius!

Hi, Dallas.

It's great to be with you.

Oh, man.

so I've got to share with the listeners how this came about because

it's a unique is a unique story on how you came to be on the last 10%.

We get recommendations, people reaching out to us to share guests

that they'd like to have on the show.

And we also get we also get former guests that, that, that give us ideas

and recommendations, but this show is special because I found your work on

this, this subject and the book Rituals.

I read it and I was so blown away at the insights that you have laid

out on this topic and this subject.

I was like, We got to get this guy on the show.

we have got to get this guy on the show.

So I actually reached out to you and was like, man, can you make the last 10%?

So we're so thankful that you are on the show today and made some time for us.

I'm so excited about this conversation.

Well, thanks for having me.

So some of the listeners may be wondering exactly what is an

anthropologist and what do they do?

Tell us a little bit about what anthropology is and what you do.

Yeah.

Broadly speaking, anthropologists, study human nature.

Of course, that is very broad and, and indeed there are many

shades of anthropologists.

most people, since the, the first Indiana Jones movie came out, most people think

of anthropologists as, uh, archaeologists.

And, and those are, some anthropologists do that.

Some anthropologists study human nature in the past through, the

artifacts that, that they left us or, through, whatever they can dig up.

But I'm the other kind of anthropologist.

I'm a cultural anthropologist.

So I studied human cultures in contemporary settings.

So I studied living people.

And in fact, I'm even in that respect, I'm a bit different than most cultural

anthropologists in the sense that I combine psychological perspectives and

I combine experimental perspectives with what we call participant observation.

So I still go to the field and I spend years in different field settings.

Just living with local people and trying to get a sense of

what they do, and why they do it.

But at the same time, I tried to bring experimental methods and measure things.

So as they do the things that they do, I try to do things like bring

wearable technologies to see what their emotional reactions are or to find

ways of quantifying their behavior and how they interact with one another.

That's one of the things about your work that I found

to be so interesting was that you were combining so many different aspects.

It was like you just said, the technology piece.

I thought you were so clever in how you were capturing data.

It was really cool.

We'll talk about that more in the show, but also it was not, it was,

there was, there's a theoretical piece of it, but there's so much.

There was so much data that you collected in the moment on the ground with people

and so much time that you spent inside the culture and just getting to know

people, it was just so enlightening.

It's very fascinating.

So tell us what inspired you to get into the field of anthropology.

I guess what my first inspiration was that just the people that

I admire, the people who are my heroes and growing up in, in Greece, this was

the time before the internet was widely available just a few years prior to that.

And we didn't have, we only had two or three television channels.

There was no cable television in Greece at the time.

So the kinds of programs that I enjoyed watching as a kid were,

things like, David Attenborough's.

programs.

And then I would say I would watch people like Jane Goodall and Jack Cousteau.

And these people are not necessarily anthropologists, but what they had in

common is that they were explorers.

They liked getting out there in the real world and they liked combining

different forms of knowledge.

So they would combine their own personal experience.

some of them would talk to other, other people.

They would observe things in the field in a real life setting, but they were

also bringing scientific measurements.

That's really great.

I think that's awesome and that I love how that informed what you're doing now

and it also not just anthropology, but informed how you do anthropology, like

what, what

And of course, another source of inspiration and

I'm sure that this has been the source of inspiration for so many

anthropologists was National Geographic,

Oh yeah.

just looking at those colorful, glossy pictures and

reading those stories about far away places and all those extraordinary

rituals that really got me excited.

I was at a, I was at this place one time and they had, it

was an old bookstore or something.

They had these.

National Geographics, magazines.

They were still, they were for sale and it, the, there was two boxes of 'em.

They were just trying to get rid of them and they were all from like the

1980s which is all the ones I remember.

So I looked at 'em and they were like, I was like, oh, how much are these?

They're like, I don't know if you wanna take 'em, we'll do like $2.

I was like, $2 a piece.

They're like, no, for the two box.

I was like, yes.

Put 'em in my car.

So

still, there's still a collection from the, I

guess the late eighties and early nineties in my parents house.

So good.

So good.

So that's awesome.

all right.

So in your book, you make the statement that rituals are a true human universal.

Let's talk a little bit about rituals.

And when you say that rituals are a true human universal, what do you mean by that?

Yeah.

sometimes you hear the term universals.

And.

It's often hard to substantiate.

But I think when it comes to ritual, there's no doubt.

There's definitely no human society that we've ever documented, whether past or

present, that didn't have any rituals.

It is so pervasive that archaeologists sometimes turn to ritual when they

want to determine whether a particular society can truly be called human.

For example, did they bury their dead?

Did they perform any kind of ritual actions?

Because those actions also point to things like, our ability

to, to have symbolic thought.

And our empathy and our ability to connect.

So some of the things that make us human,

That's incredible.

So they would actually use rituals to define as an archeologist,

define what human is in the past.

That's awesome.

I've not thought about that.

So let's talk about exactly what rituals are like.

How do you separate the idea of what a ritual is?

then say, a routine or a reminder, what makes rituals specifically different?

yeah, that's a good point.

Because ritual is one of those terms that people use in all sorts of ways.

It's used so much that they can mean different things to different people.

And that's okay.

But when I study ritual, what I'm interested in, is pretty specific.

and that means that when I'm comparing to other things like habits and

routines, we can distinguish ritual because it has two key characteristics.

I think one is that there's no causal relationship.

between the action you undertake and the effect is it is meant to have if

there is an effect in the first place.

So that's what we call causal opaqueness.

Okay.

And that means that some people say, brushing my

teeth, is that my morning ritual?

And I would say no, because that has a clear purpose and there's a direct causal

relationship between what you do, how you use the brush and what you expect to do.

But if I were to wave my toothbrush in the air every morning, either

with the belief that it will clean my teeth or with no belief at all, just

because, then that's a ritual for you.

And, and I think the other aspect that characterizes ritual is that ritual

actions are perceived to be special.

They're perceived to be, a lot of the time they're perceived to be sacred.

Yes.

and that means that when our rituals

are interrupted, we feel upset.

Sometimes when we feel morally upset, even.

Really?

Just like to feel that something's missing or that something's been taken away or

it's like we've the world's not right.

Something's got to be put back in place.

I think that's a very interesting way to describe rituals because I think

when you talk about that toothbrush example, it's funny, but it's so true.

It's there, there are some things that you do, and it's I think about the

athlete who's walking out of the locker room, and they're touching all the

signs on the walls, play great today, or you're a champion, or whatever.

they're touching that with the expectation that's giving

them some kind of mental edge.

And yet, it's if you really look at that, it's like, What, you've been

practicing for like three months in the off season and you're going to

weight room and getting up at five in the morning and do all this stuff.

And then you're like, nope, if I don't touch this sign or where, different

colored socks on the way out the door, like things are not right.

Not that is true.

And since you mentioned sports is a great domain

to observe spontaneous rituals.

private, personal rituals.

And in fact, there are studies that show that, elite athletes

tend to have more rituals.

You might expect they would have fewer because they, there's more skills that

they would rely more on their skill.

In fact, they have more rituals.

And we believe that the reason is that they compete for higher stakes.

So it's those kinds of environments, high pressure, high uncertainty

environments that breed ritualization.

the more, the higher the stakes and the higher the.

Uncertainty the more so it's almost like you could say like a stressful, the

more stress, stressful, the environment, the more likely that would be a, an,

a breeding ground for more rituals.

Is

Exactly.

And this is why you also see a lot of personal rituals in the casino.

And this is actually something that we have tested experimentally.

So we have done experiments where we stress people up.

And then we quantify their behavior.

We use motion sensors to see how they move.

And we see that their behavior becomes more rigid, more patterned.

It becomes like a ritual.

It becomes redundant.

So I remember in your book, I think it mentioned

that, something like that.

There was a study on how in Israel, how the closer they were to like

an area that was, dangerous on the borders there was women in that area

that would have more rituals that, that was very interesting to me.

that's, it's not intuitive necessarily why you would think like you would,

that there would be a difference.

It would be like this.

Person or society or these things with certain rituals, but then to

say no ones that are going through high stress would actually have more.

that's very interesting.

What is it about rituals that draw us as humans to them

and make us want to do them?

Because we said this kind of a breeding ground when we're

in a stressful environment.

But what is it about rituals that draw us into that?

That make us want to do that?

So rituals are very successful, social technologies.

And the reason they're so successful is that they're able to trigger multiple

cognitive mechanisms at the same time.

So let's take one of them at a personal level.

And that's, I think we have to look at this because for, in order to get to

cultural rituals, in order to get to group rituals, as you mentioned, ritual has to

be attractive to us at a personal level.

Now, what draws us to, to ritual?

and the theory we're proposing, with my colleagues is that

rituals, help our brain.

Find the sense of order now, the way our brain works is that our brain is

a predictive machine It keeps making predictions about the state of the world

before I finish my sentence your brain Already has a prediction about what is

going to come out of my mouth next and if it doesn't then it gets confused and this

Kind of predictive coding happens all the time, whether it's about our perception,

what we see, let's say, if we, my window has bars, right now, and my brain makes

up the missing information, perceives a complete image and so on and so forth.

And that means that because of this architecture, which is a very adaptive,

very useful, cognitive architecture, if I have low predictive capacity,

so if I don't know what's going to happen next, then I get stressed, we

experience anxiety and what's the best.

One of the best ways to alleviate anxiety is to get a sense of structure and order,

Hmm.

To allow your brain to make predictions, to

anticipate what's going to happen, even if it's another domain.

And that was, that's what ritual offers, because if ritual is

anything, it is structure.

When you're performing a ritual, you know exactly what to do.

You know exactly how to do it.

You know exactly when it's supposed to happen.

So that gives your.

your brain has sense that you're on top of things.

You're in control of things.

You know exactly what to do.

There's no more uncertainty.

Ah,

does that solve your problem directly?

The stressor?

No, it does nothing for the stressor, but if it helps you relieve

anxiety, it can help you achieve your outcomes in an indirect way.

And in fact, that's what we see, for example, in other studies with

athletes where we see that athletes who perform pregame rituals,

they perform better in the game.

That doesn't happen through any kind of magical causation that happens because

they're better able to boost their confidence and they lower anxiety.

And if you prevent them from doing those rituals, then they begin, it throws

them off and then they perform worse.

that's incredible.

I love how you summarize that.

And it makes sense when you apply it to those stressful environments

because like you're saying, if we're predicting, if we're going in into an

environment of unpredictability and our brain is trying to predict things,

then that in that inherently is going to create anxiety because we can't

achieve what we're wanting to achieve, in the sense that we can see around

corners and understand that environment.

So it's almost like we almost, we perceive it as more in our control,

because we've done this thing that is very orderly and timely and all

that stuff in that same environment.

Yeah.

And this, and this too is something that we can actually measure.

So we've done studies in both in the lab where we measure people's cortisol levels,

and we'll see that there's a correlation between how many, rituals they, they

take part in and their stress levels.

So there are people who take part in more collective rituals.

They have.

Lower levels of stress.

And then we go out into the real world and we went into Hindu

temples in Mauritius and we measure people's physiological responses.

We see that after performing their usual rituals, their heart rate

variability increases, which shows that they're better able to cope

with stress in those environments.

You've seen rituals all over the world and you write

about a lot of those in your book.

What are some of the most impressionable rituals that you

have experienced with people or seen

Yeah.

So I've seen a lot of rituals around the world, but some of the most

impressive ones for me are definitely, some that include body mortification.

One of those rituals is the type of Samkavati, it's a Hindu ritual.

It's a Tamil Hindu ritual.

So it's performed in Southern India, Sri Lanka, but also anywhere where you

find members of the Tamil diaspora, which is pretty much around the world.

This ritual even happens in, neighborhoods of Toronto and New York.

But where I studied it, it's massive.

So there are about a hundred, temples, having processions on the same day.

And this is the Island of Mauritius in the Indian ocean.

And this ritual involves, it's essentially a long pilgrimage to

honor Lord Muruga, a Hindu deity.

Okay.

But on the way to the temple, and this pilgrimage

may last for three, four, six, eight hours, depending on the context.

And On the pilgrimage, people carry these large structures called kavadi

and that, that actually means burden in the Tamil language and they're

decorated with, with feathers and flowers and there's a lot of symbolism

going on there related to Lord Murugan.

So they're very heavy and we've done studies where we measured the

size and the weight of those kavadi.

Some of them can weigh well over a hundred pounds.

Oh

carry these for six hours under the midsummer tropical sun.

So this is January, February in the southern hemisphere.

without having any, food or anything to drink.

And then when they reach the temple, they have to climb 242 steps,

carrying them up to the temple.

But that's not even the beginning of their suffering.

Because before they, they embark in this procession, they begin

to have their body pierced.

And some of them, most of the women will have one piercing through

the tongue or through the, cheeks.

And this is a needle, a long needle made of silver.

This symbolizes a vow of silence, but some of the men, they

can have hundreds of needles.

Some of them can have their entire body pierced except for the genitals.

And it gets even worse than that because some of them have hooks through

the skin of their backs by which they drag these enormous chariots so

they can be the size of a small bus.

They're pulling them with the hooks in their

yes they are.

Oh.

then some of them have long skewers the size of

broomsticks pierced through their cheeks.

And they can be so long and heavy that they have to bite on them

and hold them with two hands.

Otherwise, they will rip their face off.

Ah.

So yeah, I can see your face now, your reactions.

it's something that is not easy to watch.

oh, man.

and they will do this for, they will experience this carrying the object and

then all these piercings for, you said up to six hours as they proceed on this

Yeah, this goes on for half a day or

and they're doing this with all the other people, like

everybody else is carrying these things and going through this at the same time,

Yes, there are several hundreds of people in every procession,

doing this actively, being pierced.

And then there's many more.

Walking alongside family members who are not peers, but they're, you can really see

the emotional contingent in that context because their loved ones are also crying,

they, they vicariously suffer with them.

Oh man, so they're not, it's not like a parade where you think

of it where there's like these bystanders on the street cheering everybody on.

It's more like

No, not at all.

It's a, it's not a carnivalesque type of ritual.

it's a very solemn procession and people take it very seriously.

every once in a while, people begin to fall into, to trance.

And when this happens, again, you can see the emotional contagion.

I think when the first person starts, then there's the person next to them

is more likely to start as well.

And they start swirling to the music and then they start, dancing with

all that weight on their shoulders.

And

they

start dancing with, while they're carrying this big, heavy burden and

they've carried it for all this time.

And they go into what you say is a trance

Yes.

And this, in this context, dancing is mostly circling around.

You can imagine if you're carrying a hundred pounds on your shoulders,

you're constrained in your movements.

goodness gracious.

And this is every year they do this every year.

Correct.

Oh my goodness.

So let's talk about that a little bit, because you collect data, not only

from the participants in the ritual, but also from the spectators or the

people that are on the peripheral of that, what are some of your findings

related to people's experience?

Like how, what's the experience of the person actually doing the ritual, whether

that's carrying this load, this burden in this procession or walking on fire.

And then the experience of the people that's actually watching it.

Tell us a little bit about that.

This was one of the most exciting things that we

have found out with those studies.

So in one context, and this is a small village in Spain

called San Pedro Manrique.

They have fire walking rituals every once every year on the summer solstice.

Again, the hottest part of the year in that part of the world.

they have this festival of San Juan and that culminates with a big firework.

So at midnight, everybody gathers at this big venue.

that have built specifically for this purpose, and there are thousands of

spectators that have come from nearby villages and a group of men and women

will walk through burning embers.

And those are when I say burning embers, we measure the temperature at 1200 degrees

Fahrenheit, which is actually enough to melt aluminum and they will walk there

barefooted and while carrying somebody on their back, they carry another person.

Oh,

see, I've always wondered that I've not experienced the fire walk

before, but I've seen people do it and they spread these coals out on

the sand and you just run through it.

And I'm like, I don't know if that's, but this is real deal.

Like they 1200 degrees.

I have seen many fire walking rituals in my life, but

that one is quite something else.

The intensity of that fire and the intent, they intentionally use oak wood,

which burns at a very high temperature.

so that surface is, and it's very, the surface is deep as well.

So it produces this very high temperature and just standing near

it feels like you're opening an oven and your face gets roasted.

Oh, my goodness.

it just seems like everybody that's going to do this is going

to have is massive injuries.

do they know that kind of going into it?

and they're just like, I'm okay with that.

I'm going to have some,

So in, in fact, most people don't get burned while firewalk.

And there's a physical explanation for this.

coal is a very poor conductor,

okay.

analogy that I've come across is, baking bread in the oven.

So if you open your oven and stick your hand inside it and touch the bread

as it's baking for one second, you're probably not going to get a burn.

You will feel the heat, it'll be very hot.

But if you touch the metal plate for the same duration, you will get a serious

You'll get a burn.

Oh,

that matter, the air inside the oven is at the same temperature

the moment just before you open it.

Oh man.

and that means that you can have a short period of

contact with it without getting burned.

Obviously, if you were to stand on the coals.

But having said that, just because it's possible to do it and not get burned

doesn't mean that it's guaranteed.

In fact, there are many ways to get burned.

And,

to just the psychological perspective of looking and

feeling the heat, like you said,

I mean, you, you, you feel it on your face, your whole body is hot

and you're looking at these burning coals and you've got to walk across,

psychologically that has got to be.

A real, I don't know, that's intense, man.

That's gotta be, especially with thousands of people and you got

somebody on your back that is, you're setting up a pretty intense

It is very intense.

And that's the kinds of things we're measuring.

So when we look at these people's heart rates right before going into the fire

and as they're walking through the fire, their heart rates reach levels that we,

I didn't personally think were possible.

Things like 240 beats per minute.

What?

we looked at the maximal medically accepted level of

arousal, most of these people were above it, which means that they were

in risk of having a heart attack.

oh my goodness.

Oh, that's incredible.

And that's not, that's not necessarily because they've done this massive

amount of physical activity before.

That's just anxiety, like intensity producing heart rate.

Like you're

Absolutely.

Because especially in that context, they are actually seated and

they're waiting for their turn.

They're not engaged in any kind of physical activity

right before the firework.

So we're going to know that this is just stress

The highest heart rates are happening and they're

not even walking over the fire yet.

There, this is like right before

they go

at the moment, right before entering the fire.

That's the highest.

a, Oh my goodness.

so you're in this environment, you've got all these spectators,

you've got 1200 degree.

firewalking going on.

what are you seeing you?

So their heart rates are ridiculous right before they start walking.

What happens when they hit what, what happens when they hit the firewalk?

So what we were interested in seeing was whether we could

see emotional alignment in this ritual.

And this relates to anthropological theories that talk about

how these rituals, create a sense of social cohesion.

It's very common and the people that I studied with, that I work with, they

kept telling me that the way it feels when you go through the fire, it feels

like you become one with the crowd.

There, there are so many people there, but you feel like one.

And this really echoed some anthropological theories about the way

these rituals create social cohesion.

It's by the alignment of people's emotions.

If we all feel like one, feel the same way, then we also feel like

we're more bonded and more similar.

Yes.

what we were testing.

And that's why we collected measurements both from the fire walkers, but

also from people who are watching.

And we made sure to have, people of different who had different

kinds of relationships there.

So we had their friends and family, but we also had.

Outsiders who just arrived there.

There's so many curious tourists who come to witness this.

And what we found was that first of all, we saw an extraordinary degree

of synchrony during that ritual.

So not only those who walked on fire, but also those who are waiting for their turn.

Those who are just sitting there and watching their heart

rates began to synchronize.

But this Only extended to the members of the community.

So the outsiders, the tourists, we didn't see any kind of synchrony with them.

And in fact, we're able to predict the level of synchrony based on

their degree of connectedness.

So your closest friends, your close family would be more synchronous

through their vicariously.

through their vicarious suffering, alongside you compared to more

distant friends and relatives.

and when you say synchrony, like you mean your heart

rate or your, how do you, how do you

In this case, we're looking at heart rate.

So we're looking at how their heart rates go up and down at the same time.

So they're tracking, their heart rates are tracking together.

So the

more connected you are in an experience like this, the more you experience it

essentially the same way as the person that's actually doing the ritual.

you would feel that same.

and that results into, more bonding.

And we have seen this in other studies where we looked at, sports fans, we looked

at spectators in basketball games, and through an entire season, we measured

their physiological reactions to the game.

And we see that it is during those games that people's reactions to the game.

Heart rates are more closely synced than people have.

They have a better experience with the game and more meaningful experience.

And they also feel more bonded with each other.

When their heart rates, when their physiological reaction,

when their emotional reactions are more synchronous, more

and more synchronized.

So when you actually feel that it's almost like you can, I could see

that because there's been games that you go to and you're like,

you can, it's almost palpable.

Like you can feel this energy in the, in everybody's it's, I don't

know if I don't explain that.

I know exactly what you mean because

Yeah.

and it's very hard to explain.

And this is the, this is exactly the point, why we did all these measurements.

Because all of these anthropological theories were talking about this.

Ineffable feeling.

There's something that is very hard to describe, but people experience

they some people, describe it as a jolt of electricity or a goose

bumps at the back of your neck.

And that's how I feel when I go to my home, team's stadium and, to watch a game

of football, what you call soccer here.

And I chant with 30, 000 people.

I do get goose bumps.

it's incredible, but it.

But you know, when you ask that, and I try to describe it.

It's not easy to describe.

It's just like what you said, like I could describe it.

It feels like a, almost like a dance or energy or, lightning

bolt, like you said, or goosebumps, I've had all that when you're, you

just feel like you said in sync.

So it's fascinating that, and you, and the more connected you are,

the more in sync that you are.

So you can almost see.

who's in the community because they're in it with everybody else.

I would think that's like reinforcing, because the more you experienced that,

it would seem like the more connected and aligned you are and the more bonded.

And so it's I don't know, that's fascinating.

All right.

So you also found some interesting relationships that are not.

Uh, it's just surprising to me, like you, you described that ritual

earlier that people were getting piercings and suffering a great

deal, but you found some surprising relationships about pain and rituals.

Tell us a little bit about that.

Like what, what have you found in that category?

this was so after we did this study in Spain, I wanted

to find that context, an appropriate natural context where I was, that

would allow me to study what we find in the body extends to behavior.

Because it's one thing to say if we think that these rituals make people

more bonded It's one thing to look at their heart rates But it's another thing

to see whether their behavior actually suggests that they're more pro social

within that community And that was what brought me to mauritius that was what

led me to study those rituals that I described that are even more painful

than fire walking so in the context of that ritual that involves body piercing

and all kinds of forms of suffering.

We set up a charity, that was administrated by

local research assistance.

So people didn't know that it was us who are behind this,

and we looked at how much money people donated after performing

a painful ritual or less painful ritual or no ritual at all.

And this was members of the same community going to the same temple

between those two rituals in the context of the same festival.

But some of these rituals are high intensity.

Some of them are low intensity.

So we're interested in seeing how the same people would react

after each one of those events.

And we see that compared to the control.

So So, charity, donations collected outside of any kind of temple of ritual

context compared to that people who took part in a collective prayer,

they gave almost twice as much.

taking part in a collective ritual, increased pro social

giving, increased generosity.

But then looking at the very painful ritual, those people

gave even, way more than that.

they gave three times more than baseline.

so, so you're saying you guys were at this ritual in this kind

of community that's going through these rituals, this, at this time, you set up

a charity with locals and the charity is asking for donations after they finish

these rituals, and if you go through this kind of prayer time and it's fine and

it's good, but it's not very intense.

You're then asked for it and you give a certain amount and then if you go

through, maybe a more communal type, walk or whatever, then you give twice as

much as somebody that just had prayer.

But then if you actually are the one that's going through excruciating

pain and suffering, You give three times as much more to the charity.

See, that is not intuitive at all.

I just, that is, that's incredible.

Like,

It is, it might not be, I think.

it's not intuitive if you try to rationalize it, but it, but at

some level we already know this.

And the reason one, fact that suggests that, is that when people are trying

to organize, donations and charity events, what they do is that they,

they do things like marathons.

they don't do things like, a warm cup of cocoa.

Yeah.

Right?

Remember the ice bucket challenge?

It invited people to suffer

Oh I've not even thought about

lot of money.

That's so true.

I didn't even think about that.

Oh, so you increase the suffering and it increases the participation.

It's Because you're almost, it makes sense because it's going back to what you said.

You're almost, you're engaging in becoming part of a community through

that suffering, and then you feel more connected and that particular community

has a cause or something like that.

And that's what's going on.

So

And another interesting thing we see there is

that in the context of that ritual on that day, it was not just the ones

who suffered that gave more money.

It was.

Also, their family and friends who were walking alongside the procession.

So again, those who suffer vicariously, they also became more processual.

So on those days, the entire community becomes more processual.

Oh my goodness.

So it wasn't just the one that it was everyone.

Like you said, vicariously, that is so interesting.

I think that was one of my favorite parts of the book, by the way, just

how you describe that in so much detail and the results I just, that was really

something that caught my attention.

I think that's really interesting too, because so many times I think we see.

Painful things as a negative.

And I think what your research has shown though, is that is the other side of that

coin is that there's very interesting social and internal benefits for us to

go through these painful things, even whether they're rituals or even not.

It just, it's almost like an awareness increase.

And once you start thinking about it, then you will see

that, so there's this, psychologist, Paul Bloom, who, who talks about,

how suffering can create meaning.

And if you think about it, some of the most meaningful things in our lives.

The kinds of things that create meaning for us.

They're the ones that involve suffering.

They're the ones that involve a lot of effort and sometimes a lot of pain.

So you climbed Mount Everest.

That's, that's something that you will cherish for the rest of your life.

you raised four children.

Quite painful it can be.

You won a championship.

How much effort does that require?

How much...

Pain is there involved in this all of the things that we come to consider

as the most meaningful in our lives They involve a lot of effort a lot

of suffering and it's it is perhaps because of that we come to connect Pain

and effort with meaning so we perceive things as more meaningful sometimes

just because they're more effortful

Make more effort.

That is awesome.

I love that.

That's so good.

So we have a lot of listeners that are leading organizations, they're

leading teams, and that's their thing.

That's their grind.

That's their responsibility.

and on the last 10%, we love providing them information

that will help them be better.

Cause the last 10 percent it's all about finishing well, finishing

strong, living in that last time, doing the extra efforts and the extra

things to live in that last 10%.

And so I think rituals are so important.

We're actually, we've been talking about this book that we've got coming out.

And one of the reasons that your book was so intriguing to me is

because it's part of lift this new business fable coming out.

We have a section in there that is speaking to rituals as it relates

to work and business and how it's so important to include those in as.

As something that will help build and move and strengthen culture

of an organization or team.

If you're thinking about that, as it relates to your research, what would

you, what ideas or how would you speak to that as a way people could do

that at their work or in their teams.

Yeah, this is something I see that the business

world is increasingly aware of up until a few decades ago.

So the society I grew up in as a, as a kid and then as a teenager,

it was fundamentally different.

View of work than what is what we have now and that was that you work.

You're not supposed to enjoy work You're not supposed to derive meaning from

your work You just go in you put in your hours and then you punch out and

you leave and that's It's okay to hate your work and whether and if you're

a business owner, this is just a bad idea This is whether you see it from

a Marxist perspective, the alienation of workers or a capitalist perspective

how do I increase productivity?

you want your, your employees to, to enjoy their work and you want

them to derive a sense of meaning from it and a sense of community.

Otherwise you can't retain them, otherwise they won't be happy, they won't

be productive and so on and so forth.

and ritual is a par excellence, way of creating meaning.

This was something that I realized when I moved from Greece to Denmark.

Ah.

I went there as a student initially and later as faculty

and it immediately struck me this difference between the workplace in

Greece and the workplace in Denmark.

Now, Denmark happens to be one of the most productive countries on the planet.

But to me, it just seemed that they weren't working all that much.

They were just, they had all these kinds of rituals at the workplace.

So every morning we had, we would take a break at, at 10, a coffee break.

And then at lunch, we'd all do lunch together.

And the reason I'm referring to those things as rituals is that

sometimes they were not even...

There was not even a functional purpose.

That means that even if you already had lunch, even if you had brought

your own lunch, you just, you didn't stay in the office and have lunch.

You just joined everybody else.

Even if you weren't having lunch, so this wasn't about the lunch per se, right?

And then every Friday, there was a Friday bar.

And then on Christmas, there was a big party and each unit of the organization.

So my department had a Christmas party and my unit had a Christmas party.

And of course they were not on Christmas.

There were days earlier because you had to attend multiple ones.

And this was, I could see that for the Danes, this was something sacred.

Like nobody missed the Christmas party at work.

Really?

And then there was, there was singing and there was, playing

games and drinking and all kinds of things, all kinds of pageantry at the same

level that you would have at a family, at your biggest family, holiday gathering.

And that's exactly the reason, because those kinds of celebrations

create a sense of family.

And in a successful community, in a well bonded community, you need

both of those types of rituals.

You need the regular kinds of rituals, your morning ritual or

your lunch ritual that provide this sense of collective identity.

And the, the reminders of the, the group's goals and values and insignia, but then

you also need this high arousal rituals.

Every once in a while you want the big party where everybody.

Comes to, increase their heart rates, whether that's playing a game of

paintball as a group of whatever this ritual becomes for your team.

You also need this intense level of bonding, which produces a sense

of, family at the end of the day, because if you think about it, who

is, who are the people in your family?

These are the people you experience strong emotions with the people you laugh with

the people you cry with, the people you participate in those important flamboyant.

Right.

social theorists have even gone as far as to say that any kind

of social group is only truly a group when they perform a collective ritual.

And if you think about this, when are the members of an extended

family, ever together as a group?

At a wedding, at a funeral, at Thanksgiving.

When are the members of a college body together at a graduation ceremony?

When are the fans of a team ever together in the stadium performing

these collective chanting rituals?

Ritual creates, actively, it doesn't only symbolize.

Group membership.

It actively creates it.

I think that.

It's absolutely incredible and so awesome.

I've never thought about the defining a group by the rituals

and really how the actual groups are assembled around the rituals.

And it's so true.

Like extended family.

You just said it.

I, that's that is so true.

Even like fans on sports, we're getting together and we're

seeing as those fans when we get together for , that sporting event.

I think that's amazing.

If you're leading a team, I think the challenge today that I'm hearing

is if you're leading a team, if you're leading an organization or a

company, and you haven't taken the time to be intentional about ritual.

In your team organization, then what you're doing is you're leaving the

connectedness and the bonding and the alignment of your organization up to

something that's not very intentional.

And it may be good.

It may not be good, but I can assure you that intentionality and

focus is going to make it better.

So with that, Dimitris, do you feel like there's a recipe for a good ritual?

Cause you said two different kinds of rituals there.

You said there's one kind that's more of the.

the daily ritual, I'll say that's the waving the toothbrush in the air ritual,

and then there's the one that is the more of the firewalking ritual, which

is to get your heart rate up and it's a spectacle, is if someone was wanting to

be more intentional about that and they said, I want to be more intentional,

create a ritual or have a ritual.

Yeah.

What's the recipe look like?

how does one go about doing

I think it's not easy.

So I think the best way to go about it is to rely on accumulated cultural wisdom.

So the turn to other traditions.

And to do that, you have to be open to the idea that, that ritual, both

predates and extends far beyond religion.

So it's not about religion.

What I mean by that is that in my family, for example, we're not religious

and we never had a Christmas tree.

But

hmm.

Mm.

when my son was born a few years ago, we decided we're

going to have a Christmas tree and we're going to have these rituals.

It's not about, Christianity.

It's about family.

and, so in that sense, the best types of rituals to, to develop are

the ones based on established ones.

Every single day, there will be a million different rituals that are

born, and most of them will not be around next week or next month.

The ones that have survived this process of cultural selection are the

ones that clicked with individuals, the ones that were most successful

in, in, in doing things like creating meaning and alleviating anxiety.

So those that have been around for ages.

I would start with those.

And then, of course, you have to tweak those.

You have to fit your own company culture or your family or whatever group it

is you're trying to, to use them in.

that's, I love it.

It's almost like they've passed the test of time.

And so if they've passed it by sticking around, by being more sticky through,

through different generations, then you can know that those are more powerful

and more meaningful because it's been more meaningful throughout time.

But, I love that.

That's a, that's great advice.

This is, we're going to get into some more personal stuff here.

So you studied rituals for a long time.

And you've looked at a lot of different places, but you've heard

the saying that if you get too close to the fire, you might get burned.

So tell us about a time, because I love the story in the book.

Tell us about a time where you went to study a ritual, but then the

professor turns into the participant.

Tell us a little bit about what happened there.

Yes.

I like how you phrase that.

That was in a very literal sense what happened.

for many years, I, so I did my doctoral dissertation

studying fire walking rituals.

I went to Greece at a small village called a year Lenny.

And, I spent several months there just talking to the locals and getting their

stories and doing ethnographic work.

and I finished my PhD and then I went to study another

fire walking ritual in Spain.

And that's when I started introducing.

other types of, methods.

So the measurements there, and eventually I went to Mauritius.

So by that time I had seen many fire walking rituals, but I had

never taken part in any of them.

the reason was, one reason was that in the other contexts in which I had studied

those rituals, I would not be allowed.

So in Spain, it was only strictly for the locals in Greece.

it was a bit broader, but it was only for people who were, True believers

and that there was a process of, getting accepted into the group and I

didn't want to pretend to be somebody.

I wasn't so I never attempted to do any of those rituals.

sure.

But in Mauritius, the local community was

very welcoming from the beginning.

And at some point.

As I was watching the preparations for what was going to be the first fire

walking ritual I was going to see in Mauritius, some of the locals, there

was a, there was an evening where I was looking at the preparations and then I

noticed that people were staring at me.

And...

And at some point, then they waved at me to come closer.

I said, hi, what?

And they said, you know what?

We've been thinking Dimitris.

and I could tell this was not going to lead to anything

good the way they said it.

They said, we've been thinking, you've been.

with us for all these months, you're now part of the community.

And to which I tried to say, I don't want to pretend to be an insider.

I'm just here, to watch and learn from you.

It's also important for me to maintain some sort of distance in

order to be able to take notes and, pictures and so on and so forth.

But they said, since you're now part of this community.

You should try the firework as well.

So I politely tried to decline the invitation.

then, somebody said something like, if God wants you to do it, then you will do it.

And I said, trust me, Prakash, God does not want me to walk on

fire, but apparently I was wrong.

apparently God did want me to walk on fire.

So on the day of the ritual, and this was all forgotten, I went back, home

and, I told my wife, at the time, my, my girlfriend, who was with me in the field,

about it, and we all, laughed about it, we said, ah, it was a joke, and we forgot

it, but then on the day of the ritual, they allowed me to be inside the enclosure

and to take pictures and notes, and I was really, Fascinated by what, by everything

that was happening around me and the sounds and the colors and the emotions.

And I was trying to take good pictures and to this day, some of the best

pictures that I got from, of this, event were, was from that particular year.

And at some point, somebody taps on my shoulder and they say,

that's a better spot for you.

I say, oh, really?

Can I go that close?

And I say, yeah, go ahead.

So I went there and I kept taking my pictures.

And a while later, there's another top of my shoulder and, I look up and it's

Prakaast again and he says stand up.

So I stand up and he Say what and he goes turn around And I turn around and the

entire village is looking at me and I'm sitting and I'm realizing only that moment

that I'm standing in front of the fire

Oh,

And he just whispered something in my ear.

I think he said Now you will know what the fire Really is like

Oh,

something something along those lines at that point it was

either total humiliation and disruption to the ritual or just Going ahead with it.

So I the only Thing I could say was please hold my camera and I went through with it.

Oh, now you've had technology, you've taken pictures,

everything's at arm's distance, you've described, the synergy and how in sync

everyone is through it, but at this point you literally are walking the walk

through the fire.

How would you describe that as, how would you describe that differently than you

have in experiencing it in other ways?

Was it what you expected or was there something else?

It was both so in the sense that the first thing to say here

is that's exactly why anthropologists talk about participant reservation

because you can witness something You can record something a hundred times But

then once you do it yourself, you just get a taste of the other thing Just you

come to see what people meant they were describing that so hundreds of people

had described that moment to me But going through that moment One thing I realized

it was that, okay, yes, they're right.

A lot of the things they said resonated with me.

Hmm.

As you go through the fire, you go into this slow motion mode.

Like it feels it's only it only lasts a few seconds, but it feels like several

minutes and your peripheral vision gets completely blurred out There's

nothing around you, you know, there are hundreds of people around you, but it's

just You and the moment and the fire

Oh

then as soon as you step out of It's like waking up

from a dream and then you suddenly you see people around you and they're

rushing to congratulate you or hug you or talk to you And it's only then that

you realize what had just happened.

And of course your body reacts in all those funny ways.

And I always had one of my monitors on myself because I'm pretty sure that

my heart rates were well above 200.

Uh, And you feel the adrenaline rush and you feel your hormones rushing

through your body and all that, although it's a few seconds, you

have time to actually feel that.

You feel it all.

You do feel that you experienced that in slow motion as you go over the fire.

Oh man.

Oh man.

That is, That's incredible.

I'm so glad that you did that.

I'm so glad that they, that they did it because that was

such a cool part in the book.

and it was a very, it was very surprising because you the way that you wove that

in, it was like, you've talked about all this stuff and then it's oh, and

then there was this that happened.

And I thought that was just, that was well done.

And, so at the end of the book, you talk about harnessing or how to harness

the power of rituals in your own life.

How would you, for our listeners today, maybe they're leading a team, but they

want to harness that in their own life.

Do you have any other parting wisdom for people that are just wanting to do this?

And whether they're maybe not even for work, just for themselves, what

would you offer to those people, to how to harness that power of rituals?

So one thing to say and to repeat here is that

ritual extends far beyond religion.

So a lot of the time when I talk to, when I talk to my students, for example,

when I ask them, do you have any regular rituals, any rituals that you perform

on a regular basis, many of them say no.

And then we get into, okay, what is a ritual?

Do you attend birthday parties, weddings and funerals?

Do you raise your glasses to make a toast?

Do you have any superstitions?

if you're practicing sports and so on and so forth, and of course all

of them have an abundance of rituals.

to that, I would say, just embrace this, but also try to think about

what types of rituals work best, in, in different situations.

So is that, is that a stressful time for you?

a lot of people already perform rituals.

They don't even think of them as rituals.

So they do things like meditation and yoga, and they might do them.

intentionally for stress relief or unintentionally, but they

have the same kinds of outcomes.

another advice in the era of the digitalization of everything

and remote connections.

Keep in mind that we know this from personal experience, all of us know

this, but we also know it from our experiments that the, the physical

co presence in a collective ritual.

That embodied sort of embedded experience.

There's nothing like it.

This, COVID was the best demonstration of this.

People started coming up with all kinds of online rituals.

On the one hand, that showed how essential ritual is to our lives.

Some people risk their, their lives or the risk fines, or there is

a lot of things just to attend a funeral or a wedding, but others

substituted those with, online rituals.

And of course that, that is better than nothing.

But we know from our studies that, attending a ritual in person

is fundamentally different than attending a ritual, online, virtually.

Oh.

Interesting.

So seek that, that, physical co presence.

Seek that collective participation.

that's part of what makes those rituals effective team building devices.

I think that is fantastic advice.

You have to be in the room.

You got to be in the room.

you got to be in the room to, to really, truly experience the power and

the connectedness and the alignment and, and the community that it brings.

I love that.

I love that man.

This has been.

Fantastic.

This has just been awesome.

I am, I just cannot tell you how much I appreciate your time and all

the wisdom that you've shared around rituals and their importance in,

in, in our experience and our lives and how they can bring us together.

And I think.

What a great message post COVID, I think that we've had so many people

that, we've seen studies on, how anxiety has gone up and how depression

rates have gone up through the COVID time because of this separation.

And I just think that your message about rituals and their importance

and how they build community is it's so needed and it's a

COVID was actually the best natural demonstration of the

need for ritual because you had this paradox where it was, this conundrum

where it was precisely at the time that an entire generation, that was the

most stressful moment of their lives,

Mm

and that was the time where that they

were deprived of those rituals.

And at the same time, there was this need for connection

again for the entire generation.

There was never a moment where people needed more human connection, and that was

precisely the moment where they couldn't have it because of the restrictions.

So that was the best natural demonstration of the need for ritual.

And the fact that people went out of their way to take part in those rituals or to

create new rituals or to find innovative ways of celebrating their rituals.

They were Italian towns where people were, creating bamboo.

poles with wine glasses attached to their ends so they would reach out

across their balconies across the street And make a toast with one another

because that's a very simple thing that make them feel like human again

Yeah, it's just, it brings people back together.

Hey, this was, we would normally toast.

We're not going to let this stand.

Even if we have to stay in our own place, we're going to toast across the cross.

I love that.

I didn't know that.

you can understand that your balcony you can say hi to

your neighbor, but the very simple physical acts Of being connected

through, through, through true glasses that touch each other.

So even this symbolic act of touching was fundamentally important to those people.

It made them feel truly connected.

Man, that is so good.

again, I think your message resonates with a lot of people and I hope that

a lot of people will share and listen to this episode because of that, and

I think that if you're leading a team.

If you're leading an organization, you really need to be intentional

about creating that connectedness and rituals and meaning in people's work.

I think purposelessness in work it's very detrimental . No matter what

perspective you are, if you lose purpose in your work and meaning in

your work, it's not going to be good, for your team, your organization.

So use, use rituals to be intentional about that.

And I know if you've listened to this show, you've gotten a lot

of great tips on how to do that.

All right.

So we're getting to the end now.

So we always ask the guests at the last 10%, we always say.

Who is someone that you would like to see or hear on the last 10%?

So is there anybody that comes to mind, for you that you would like

to hear be a guest on the show?

I actually think you would, you would really enjoy

discussing with my friend, Paul Bloom.

I mentioned him earlier and I can see you're, you're, you're

very excited about those topics.

among many other things, he talks about how people create meaning and sometimes

they create meaning through suffering.

Ah, okay.

All right.

So we're going to have to get connected with Paul.

We'll have to get him on, see if we can get him on the last 10%.

So yeah, that, that sounds awesome.

That sounds like another great discussion.

I'm going to, I'm going to tell him that, Demetrius talked us into

it after telling us about, pulling carts with hooks in our back.

So we, at that moment, it was like, all right, we got to have you on.

all right.

So let's, if people want to get in touch with you, they want to

interact with you about rituals, about maybe buying your book.

how do you want people to reach out and, or buy your book?

Where can they find that?

Well, you can find my book, pretty much anywhere

at Barnes and Nobles, Amazon.

if you speak another language, it's been translated into 10 languages.

Wow.

if you want to reach out personally, I have

the great benefit of having one of the rarest last names in America.

So,

ha ha ha ha ha ha

so if you type my last name, you will find me.

Perfect.

All right.

We'll put some of those links to his books and Amazon Barnes Noble on the

show notes and we'll make sure that you can find where you can find Demetrius.

If you want to reach out to him or follow him on social media, we'll make

sure that you have that opportunity to do that in the show notes because

his work is so impressive and very interesting and very needed.

So Demetrius, thanks again for being on the last 10 percent today.

This has been a pleasure.

I had a lot of fun.

Thank you.