In this episode of the Joe Rogan Experience, we're talking about a new discovery at the Boneyard in Alaska, and why exploration is so important to us as a species. We also talk about how technology has changed the way we think about how advanced early humans were, and how we can use it to our advantage. And we talk about why we should all be out to find out what's out there in the world, and what we can do about it. Joe also talks about his new book, "Scarcity Brain," which is out now, Scarcity Brain: The New Science of Exploring the Past, Present, and Future of the Human Species, and the importance of travel as a means to explore the past and the past as a way to understand the present and future of our world. And, of course, we have a special guest on the show this week, my good friend Michael. Check it out! Check out The Joe Rogans Experience: The Podcast by Day, by Night, All Day, All Night, all Day! by night, by day, all day, by night. by day. By night, we are up. We're up. We are up! We are awake. We're awake! And we are here! Today's episode features: Michael's new book: "The Oldest Man in the Universe" by John Reeves, which you can read here. What's next? The New York Times bestselling author of The Oldest Thing I've Ever heard of? What are you waiting for? and more? I'll tell you what you need to know about it? And more! , and much more. , by Joe's new podcast, coming soon! Joe's latest book: How to Find It All? by Michael's book: Scary Talk Podcast, coming out soon, by , coming soon, and so much more is out in the next episode, and much, much more, so don't miss it! (listen to find it on Amazon Prime and all the rest of the good stuff you'll get a copy of the book, including the podcast, too! . I hope you'll check it out on Amazon and subscribe on Audible, Podchaser, and other places! and subscribe to it on your favorite streaming platform, too.
00:02:47.000I mean, maybe they could find out that the saw marks are actually only a thousand years old and someone had found these bones and tried to saw them a thousand years old.
00:03:42.000So my book, Scarcity Brain, which is coming out soon, it has a whole chapter on this and why exploration is so important to humans as a species, but also how it's changed.
00:03:55.000So if you think about how people explore today, we still explore in a sense, but it's mediated through the internet, right?
00:04:01.000So it's like we have this urge to find information that can enhance our life.
00:04:14.000And there's going to be some amount of effort.
00:04:18.000Now when we have this sort of information itch, we scratch it through a screen.
00:04:24.000Which, on one hand, that's great because we can get information quickly.
00:04:28.000On the other hand, it's so easy to access and there's so little effort we have to do.
00:04:35.000I think sometimes we get overwhelmed by it, and it's a very different form of information we can get today.
00:04:40.000Yeah, it's also leading us into this seemingly inevitable path of this conversion of humans and technology that seems to be happening, whether we like it or not, that really doesn't seem to jive well with our biology.
00:06:32.000We do this program where if an astronaut wants to talk to someone, we'll put you two in touch and you can FaceTime with him while he's in outer space.
00:06:40.000And I'm going, is this like the new Nigerian print scheme?
00:07:12.000And so they set up this video conference.
00:07:14.000I have to download this special software and I'm thinking this is where it comes in.
00:07:21.000And then all of a sudden I'm waiting for this guy to show up and then bam, there he is.
00:07:26.000And I know it's not a long con because the dude is floating in outer space.
00:07:30.000He's up in the ISS. So he had read The Comfort Crisis, my last book, and just wanted to chat.
00:07:37.000So NASA will do this to sort of give astronauts a boost to talk to someone else, anyone they want to talk to.
00:07:43.000And what came out of that conversation was that he is up there for the sole purpose of getting information that can hopefully help us live on as a species should we have to leave this planet and go find another.
00:07:56.000But sort of back to what we were talking about, for him to do that, he has to put in this mind-body effort to go get that information, right?
00:08:05.000He literally has to go up into outer space to figure these things out.
00:08:09.000And he talked about how oftentimes when he will come back home and he'll go to schools, he'll go to universities, he goes, at some point in every talk, I had this run of like 30 talks, where at the Q&A, someone would always ask me if the world is flat.
00:08:26.000And he goes, I did not know how to take that because I would kind of just, you know, no.
00:08:32.000And then they would start to fire off facts and he's like, yeah, yeah, yeah, but no.
00:08:36.000And so I think that that with minimal barrier to entry, you can find information that confirms your worldview and just follow that strange rabbit hole, even though it's Yeah, that rabbit hole is the wildest one.
00:08:51.000That there's been this long-standing conspiracy to deny the fact that the Earth is flat, to hide it and obscure it, and that all of these space agencies all over the world are all working in cahoots to try to perpetuate this hoax.
00:09:35.000They think that they're going off of some passages in the Bible where they refer to the firmament and they refer to, like, they believe somehow there's, like, this dome over the earth and that the stars are just lights.
00:09:53.000And the reason why the moon landing is fake is because the moon is not real.
00:10:05.000They think it's all a con by Satan or someone and then that all these space agencies Or in cahoots with Satan, which is really wild if you think about, like, did they deny satellites?
00:10:46.000I mean, Japan has a very sophisticated satellite system where they're taking high-resolution photos of the Earth, like, every few seconds, right?
00:11:25.000And I think that humans really like certainty.
00:11:28.000So we are a species who just crave certainty.
00:11:32.000There's actually some fun studies where people will choose to get shocked by an electric zap rather than wait to see if they're going to get zapped.
00:11:42.000Like, just get it over with because I want to be certain about this thing.
00:11:45.000And so I think that a lot of conspiracies, even though they seem complicated because, you know, there's the board with the strings going everywhere, at the end of the day, they give certainty to something that is uncertain and is complicated.
00:12:35.000And there's something very exciting about it.
00:12:38.000Also, a lot of the people that are really into it, for whatever reason...
00:12:43.000I mean, I don't want to stereotype, but a lot of them are unsuccessful in other aspects of their life.
00:12:49.000They might be successful in one thing or something like that, but there's something about it that leads them to want to be the one who uncovers this truth.
00:12:59.000And I think it's like it plays on the mind.
00:13:03.000Like we have this desire to go and find things.
00:13:08.000Like that's part of the explorer gene or whatever it is.
00:13:26.000There used to be people who would, I can't remember what tribe this is, but these tribes would get in a boat and go hundreds of miles, and it was all for the sake of meeting another tribe, and they would sort of exchange a couple goods that weren't really that meaningful, which suggests it really was for the journey,
00:13:44.000They were doing this just to explore, to take on an adventure, to learn from it, and bring back this thing that was...
00:13:53.000Sort of meaningless in the grand scheme of things, but it was symbolic, very symbolic that they had done this great journey.
00:13:59.000And I think this was in the Polynesian islands where this happened, like around the Philippines.
00:14:04.000Yeah, I mean, I guess there's also this longing to understand how people can live in different places.
00:14:10.000If you're used to living on a certain, like, tropical island, and then you find out about someone who lives in, like, the Taiga Forest in Siberia, like, how?
00:14:20.000I mean, imagine before there was video, before there was the internet, and really before there were books, people would hear about these people that did these things.
00:14:29.000And they're like, where are these people?
00:14:43.000Like, some of these explorers that went to these uncharted islands and found these people that were living essentially, like, you know, Stone Age-like.
00:14:59.000And with your question about that sometimes people who get really, really deep down those rabbit holes aren't successful, I think it provides an answer for why the person isn't successful, right?
00:15:13.000You can find a reason, like, oh, it's them that's done this thing, and this is why I have XYZ problem.
00:16:25.000The range is 10,000 that I've seen to 40,000.
00:16:29.000And then there's people that collect stuff like trading cards, stamps, coins, old coins, and they get obsessed with collecting these things.
00:16:42.000And I think it does fall back into the fact that we kind of evolved to add, whether it's food, whether it's stuff, whether it's trying to influence more people, whatever it might be.
00:16:55.000And that can kind of create a cycle for people where the pursuit of the thing is like a thrill in of itself and then you get it.
00:18:13.000So as part of this book, I got really interested in this idea of Everyone knows that everything is fine in moderation, but then the question is like, okay, well, why the hell can't we moderate, right?
00:18:25.000People keep eating when they're full, you keep buying stuff when you've got a house full of stuff, even stuff like how much media we consume, right?
00:18:33.000It's like people will scroll and scroll and scroll, even though they know this is not how they want to be spending their time.
00:18:39.000Oh, I've spent so many nights where I went to bed at 3 o'clock in the morning feeling like a fucking idiot.
00:19:29.000It's like they're in the casinos, obviously, but they're in the gas stations, the grocery stores, the restaurants, the bars, and the airport.
00:21:54.000So there's gambling companies that are involved, but also a bunch of big tech companies who are on the Fortune 500. So I go there, and it's, like I said, it's a legit casino.
00:24:05.000People are so interested in this, companies, casinos, is because this sort of three-part system I just laid out, it can get people to repeat a lot of other behaviors too.
00:24:15.000So it's in social media, it's in sports gambling, it's in dating apps, even companies like gig work economy companies are using it to get people to work longer hours.
00:24:28.000It's being leveraged by the financial industry in a lot of personal finance apps and on and on and on.
00:24:35.000It's been embedded in so many of the products, even institutions that influence people's lives because it is so captivating to us.
00:24:45.000We tend to get hooked on this three-part system.
00:24:49.000And so when you're talking about like gig economy stuff, like you're talking about like Uber and things along those lines?
00:24:59.000So things like unpredictable rewards get put up in front of a driver to get them to drive into an area of town that Uber might want them to be in.
00:25:23.000They offer you more money to go to a different part of town?
00:25:26.000Yeah, or dropping in cues that's saying like, hey, this is where we are – you're going to make more money today type of thing.
00:25:33.000If you think about it in terms of – Something like social media, it's like the opportunity is to get, say, status or likes or whatever it is, right?
00:25:42.000And then, say, a person posts, and then the rewards become totally unpredictable, right?
00:25:48.000You might get two likes, which is like, oh, that wasn't great.
00:25:51.000Or you might get hundreds of likes, which is like, oh, my God, that's amazing.
00:25:55.000It's the same exact architecture as a slot machine.
00:26:04.000This loop, the reason that we're so attracted to it, it goes back to evolution.
00:26:11.000So I talked to this, once I learned how this kind of loop pulls people in, it's really what slot machines lean on to get people to repeat the behavior.
00:27:29.000So that's when, let's say you bet $1 and you quote-unquote win 50 cents.
00:27:36.000So you don't lose everything, but you win 50 cents.
00:27:39.000Now we tend to react to that as if we're winning when they study gamblers.
00:27:44.000And that's also embedded in the search for food, right?
00:27:47.000Let's say you're hunting, you're like, oh, we got a big kill on our hands.
00:27:50.000And then you whiff and the animal's on its way.
00:27:52.000It's like, damn, that's the near miss.
00:27:57.000Or you come up on a berry bush And let's say you burned 500 calories looking for this thing, and it only contains 200 calories worth of food.
00:28:06.000And so all of these sort of evolutionary parts of this system that we used to fall into as we evolved are now in slot machines and in turn now being used by a lot of big tech companies and different industries.
00:28:20.000So they just trick the human reward system.
00:28:22.000Yeah, it mimics these sort of ancient pathways, more or less.
00:28:26.000And gambling, to me, is one of the most peculiar ones because it's so overwhelming for people that are hooked on gambling.
00:28:39.000And when you see people that are just, like, chasing it and they just can't stop, it's like, I always wonder, like, what pathway is being hijacked?
00:28:51.000Human beings that want to risk, like, literally all of their money on a roll of the dice or on a spin of the roulette wheel or on a hand of cards.
00:29:27.000So he'll get pigeons who, you know, they live in these cages, and he'll give them the option to play a game where every other peck they get, say, 15 units of food.
00:31:53.000He would argue, and a lot of biologists would, they would say, you know, there's this theory called the optimal foraging theory.
00:31:59.000It says that animals will expend the least amount of energy to get the most amount of food.
00:32:03.000So over time, they're expending a lot less energy to get more food.
00:32:08.000And so here's where it gets interesting, though, is that to sort of bring it back to why do people fall into this, why would someone bet their entire fortune on a roulette wheel or whatever, is that when he will put pigeons in a sort of wild environment,
00:32:26.000so where he keeps them is in these pigeon cages where they kind of live alone.
00:33:02.000Yeah, for people who don't know that study, what they call it, Rat Park.
00:33:06.000So they did a study where they put rats in this very sterile environment.
00:33:13.000Laboratory environment, bright lights, no toys, no nothing, and they gave them the option of water or water with cocaine.
00:33:20.000And they always took the water with cocaine.
00:33:22.000They just kept taking the water with cocaine.
00:33:24.000But then when they put them in Rat Park, which is a much larger thing with a lot of toys and things to do and a lot of places to run around, they didn't do that.
00:33:56.000You know, if they have access to something like heroin or cocaine, I wonder if they would just ignore it because they get this sort of very natural environment that is sort of programmed into our lives,
00:34:12.000programmed into our DNA. Like, people that live a subsistence lifestyle are unusually healthy.
00:34:18.000I'm sure you've seen, have you seen Werner Herzog's documentary, Happy People?
00:35:08.000He said there's another theory, I think it's called the optimal stimulation theory.
00:35:14.000It basically says that humans and animals need a certain level of stimulation in their life, or else they start seeking it from other things.
00:35:25.000So if you think about the context of how humans came up, I mean, it was very, sort of like the people you talk about on the Taiga, right?
00:35:32.000They have, you got to work all day, you're outside a lot, you're doing tasks that involve your mind and your body.
00:35:39.000Like it's this full on effort to survive.
00:35:42.000You're also in sort of closer knit communities, all these different things.
00:35:46.000And today we don't have that quite as much.
00:35:49.000And so his theory is that when you don't have enough stimulation in your life or meaning from other places, humans tend to start to look for it in other ways.
00:37:57.000It's kept us, led us to live longer, allowed me to Fly from Vegas to Austin in two hours instead of, you know, getting the old wagon train out and be like, yeah, I'll see you in like a six-month show.
00:38:15.000But I don't think we've necessarily kept up with it.
00:38:19.000I mean, our hardware doesn't change that fast in our software, you know?
00:38:22.000And so I think a lot of the problems that we see today are often a result of us living as almost sort of ancient creatures in a very new modern changing world and trying to navigate that.
00:38:34.000That's what scares me about this seemingly inevitable connection with humans and technology is that I think What we're going to do is integrate with technology to avoid all the problems that we have existing in this modern world with this ancient hardware.
00:38:52.000And that we're going to adjust our hardware.
00:38:55.000And that it seems to me that this is inevitable.
00:38:58.000It seems to me that this is just where we're going and that humans are going to be some sort of cyborg type thing.
00:39:04.000And also, with the invention of AI, and I'm sure you're paying attention to all this chat GPT stuff and deepfakes.
00:39:39.000Like someone can just buy the software and put it together.
00:39:42.000You know, and now AI can make literal films.
00:39:46.000So, I mean, at one point in time, right now there's kind of like the uncanny valley in some ways where you can kind of see the difference between what's real and what's not real and kind of like, eh, it looks fake.
00:39:56.000How long before, like, UFO footage is a great example.
00:40:00.000Jeremy Cornbell, who's like the premier UFO researcher with George Knapp, you know, every now and then I'll find something online and I'll send it to him.
00:42:07.000So, like, how many people are just in front of an office where they're not checking in a cubicle, just bullshitting, probably listening to this podcast right now?
00:44:03.000They had complaints about her missing stuff and doing work, and then she was saying this is all bullshit, and they had evidence of her doing misconduct in their words.
00:47:07.000There's all these things that can come out of a discussion, all these possible goals.
00:47:11.000But when you start to put numbers behind that in the form of likes, of retweets, of whatever it is, People start to tweet in a way that scores likes and retweets.
00:47:24.000And that is a different goal than is discussion.
00:47:43.000And this guy noticed it in himself because he's a philosopher, so his job is basically to think all day.
00:47:51.000He goes, you know, the first time I had a tweet go viral, it was like, oh my god, that was awesome.
00:47:57.000And then he found himself, when he would have these sort of philosophical thoughts, instead of going into this really deep zone that he'd usually have to go into to understand it, He started finding himself going, how can I put this into like a 140 character tweet that'll really do well,
00:48:47.000One of the things that people want when they hunt is they want to get a mature animal for a bunch of reasons.
00:48:55.000One reason is that the mature animal, say if you get like a seven-year-old mule deer, that is a deer that has spread its genes and It's done its job in the reproductive system.
00:49:09.000It's passed on its DNA. And this is an old, mature deer.
00:49:14.000Also, it's more of a challenge because this is a wiser deer.
00:49:18.000This is a deer that has probably experienced hunters before.
00:49:23.000Most certainly has experienced mountain lions and bears and other predators.
00:49:28.000And so the goal is, ethically and morally, that's the animal that you should choose to try to hunt.
00:49:35.000Now, there's numbers that are involved now.
00:49:37.000So with deer, it's the size of the antler.
00:49:41.000And the magic number is 200. If you can get a 200-inch mule deer, that is a very, very rare deer.
00:50:05.000So this guy had shot a mule deer, this beautiful, mature mule deer, but it scored 194. It didn't score 200. And he was like, well, it's just a deer, just another buck.
00:50:35.000It's also an important thing to manage the population numbers of these animals so that they don't get overpopulated, which leads to the spread of diseases like CWZ and chronic wasting and all these different things that people attribute to overpopulation and car accidents,
00:50:53.000And but the number thing got in people's heads and this guy was very happy with his deer until he found out it was 194 and not 200 because it's like it's impossible to tell when you're looking through binoculars right you're looking through binoculars you go that is a giant mule deer that's what i want to get but he was unsatisfied because it came up in the though so the overall score the way they do it is kind of complicated They measure the width of the base,
00:51:18.000they measure the length of the tines of the antlers, the width of how far they're apart, and all that stuff gets factored together and it comes up with a score.
00:51:26.000And his score was six inches short and he was bummed out.
00:52:08.000He likes wine, but he thinks, oh, all this snobby language around wine, like it's keeping people who would otherwise enjoy it from drinking it.
00:52:55.000But his scoring system, if a wine scores really well, those bottles fly off the shelf.
00:53:00.000Whereas the ones who don't get quite as good of a score, they collect dust.
00:53:06.000So what the wine industry does is they go, okay, well, if we want to sell a lot of wine, we got to produce bottles that get a good score from Robert Parker.
00:53:16.000So they change how they make wines to suit his palate.
00:53:20.000Now, if you don't have Robert Parker's palate, if you don't like what he likes, this is meaningless to you.
00:53:39.000If you put a number on it, it's kind of this arbitrary thing that someone has to make up, and it's often done in a vacuum, and it's very, very subjective.
00:53:47.000But we pretend like it's objective, and then we behave like it means something, right?
00:58:10.000And this guy had apparently, according to my friend, such a palate that he could experiment by taking these various, much more inexpensive wines, combining them in very specific ratios, and recreate something that was very similar.
00:58:28.000And as long as you got it in this bottle, And as long as you looked at it, it's like, oh, it's a Bourjois Bourbon from 74. And you thought you were getting the real shit.
00:58:38.000And so then there's the placebo effect, right?
00:58:41.000You're tasting it and you're imagining it.
00:58:44.000This is rich, robust wine that very few people can appreciate.
00:58:48.000And then you're all appreciating this wine.
00:58:49.000Meanwhile, this guy's laughing his ass off because he made it in his fucking Century City house.
01:01:28.000No, man, I'm just pulling some labels off, some old wine bottles.
01:01:31.000So at the end of this documentary, they wind up destroying thousands of bottles of this wine, and it's really bonkers because, like...
01:01:39.000It's he could have sold that wine for who knows how much money and so see see there He's got all those labels that he had sitting there That was the guy that got duped and this is the guy that duped him that guy with the glasses on He was the one who's like this one's a real one and the other wine extras like bitch This is fake as fuck interest and I don't even know how they know or if they really do know I mean,
01:01:58.000I'm such a I'm such I don't know anything about wine I just say, what's a good wine?
01:02:05.000When I go to a restaurant, pick one out for me.
01:02:26.000I'd just gotten so interested in this idea of numbers and having the sort of certainty of quantification changing our behavior in strange ways that I ended up down that rabbit hole.
01:02:37.000Another good example would be, if I'm a professor, why do you go to college?
01:02:47.000You want to learn how to get your shit together, to turn things in on time, to get on a schedule that you're going to need when you go out into the world, to get a job, all these different things, right?
01:02:57.000But what are my students most obsessed about?
01:03:00.000They're GPA. And that's totally, that's very different.
01:03:05.000And I found in my experience as a professor that it's often not the students who are straight A's who are the best because those students tend to be a little more robotic.
01:03:14.000The students that are best tend to be in the B plus, A minus.
01:03:18.000So this is because they might be working 40 hours a week along with that.
01:03:22.000So this suggests they're pretty gritty.
01:03:25.000Or they might be too free-thinking, right?
01:03:26.000The type of students where I say, hey, do the assignment this way, and they're just going, oh, well, I thought I could do it this way, and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
01:03:35.000And they also don't tend to ask about their grades.
01:03:39.000Now, the reason that we use grades is simply because it makes the lives of administrators much easier.
01:03:44.000If you need to compare students quickly, if you're sending people through the system, you can put a number on it and you can kind of rank people.
01:03:52.000But it doesn't necessarily reflect whether this person has accomplished all these different things, why you would want to go to college.
01:03:59.000Yeah, and what are you going to college for?
01:04:02.000Are you going to college to get a good job?
01:04:04.000And if you have a high GPA, wouldn't that...
01:04:32.000Do they seem like a good person that would be, you know, a nice person to have around the office because, you know, they would make a pleasant work environment and that would also help things more productive, become more productive?
01:04:44.000It's like, I get why there would be numbers, but it is a strange thing that humans are obsessed with numbers.
01:05:10.000But I also think we need to be skeptical that they tell the absolute truth.
01:05:14.000And I think we need to be aware of the fact that they can change our behaviors in such a way that we miss these greater purposes of why we're doing the things that we do.
01:06:28.000Like, maybe a person who makes 100 grand a year is, you know, they get their bills paid, they live comfortably, they're happier, they're better off.
01:06:38.000They do what they actually enjoy doing for a living, and it's just not as profitable.
01:06:43.000Maybe that's a better goal, but we can't quantify that.
01:06:51.000If you're a person, say you make knives, you make chef's knives, and you're just making these beautiful, gorgeous knives, and you get deep satisfaction out of this, but you're just fucking barely getting by.
01:07:04.000You're paying your bills, but you're living kind of check to check.
01:07:07.000And it's all about like selling the next knife and okay, now we've got the mortgage paid and I got to keep making knives.
01:07:13.000That guy might be happier than some crazy person who's buying $100,000 bottles of wine because that person doesn't even know what's making them happy anymore.
01:07:31.000You're just kind of chasing that next whatever it is, the purchase, you know, the person that you've hooked up with, whatever it might be.
01:07:40.000And I do think that what people tend to chase and think is going to make them happy does tend to fall back into the evolutionary argument of like, what did we need to survive?
01:07:53.000It was food, it was stuff, it was status, influence over others, it was, you know, information, even people really lean on the smartest person or whatever.
01:08:03.000But I don't think, you know, obviously having a certain amount of income correlates to happiness.
01:08:10.000But once you get above a certain level, it kind of disappears.
01:09:40.000They basically don't talk to each other.
01:09:43.000There's only a handful of hours they can talk.
01:09:46.000And they also have to work every day, four hours, manual labor.
01:09:52.000They have to go into the chapel to pray seven times a day.
01:09:56.000And so despite having this really austere kind of hard life that demands a lot of them, when researchers look at their happiness levels and compare them to the general public, they're much higher.
01:10:10.000And what are they looking for when they say happiness levels?
01:10:14.000They're looking at self-reported life satisfaction scores.
01:10:18.000So they basically ask them, how do you feel about this?
01:10:20.000And then they come up with a metric that is basically what they think of as happiness.
01:10:25.000Hmm, that's a weird one because that you're You're getting a person who's completely isolated from the rest of the world, right?
01:10:34.000So you're not compare they're not comparing themselves to other people And so like what they consider happiness I wonder if they have people that are living different walks of life that they can compare to and Maybe they would not have the same score.
01:11:37.000And a lot of times, I think what makes people happy is not necessarily chasing the next item, that sort of chase of like, I'm going to buy this thing, I'm going to hit this amount of money, I'm going to do this.
01:11:48.000It is finding some sort of higher purpose, trying to do the next right thing, however you interpret that, and eventually people wind up finding themselves happy.
01:12:57.000And it was really fascinating living that way for a week.
01:13:02.000I mean, I definitely got a lot out of it and had some interesting conversations when we could talk.
01:13:08.000And just watching the people live and interact, I think it just opens up a lot of you go, oh, there's like different ways of viewing things and there's probably something I can learn from that.
01:13:18.000Am I going to be living in the monastery anytime soon?
01:13:45.000But somewhere along the line, I realized that The energy that I'm putting out, if I'm being negative, that affects me whether I realize it or not.
01:13:55.000If I'm being mean and shitty to someone and trying to ruin their day, that affects me whether I realize it or not.
01:14:45.000As fucking corny and as cliche as this sounds, and I've especially thought of this after psychedelic experiences, which have been some of the most profound, life-changing, and perspective-altering experiences I've ever had,
01:15:02.000that That I have to think about overall good, the overall good of what I'm doing.
01:15:09.000I think a podcast is pretty easy for the most part because for the most part what we're doing is having a conversation and I think this one is very interesting to me and so I think it's probably going to be very interesting to other people.
01:15:23.000And these subjects are very interesting and they stimulate your mind.
01:16:33.000So it's like if you're doing something or you're creating things, like we were talking about knives, like chef's knives, that's an overall positive thing.
01:16:41.000You are creating a thing that someone will use and they'll appreciate and enjoy.
01:17:16.000And I was like, well, I'll do my own fucking thing.
01:17:19.000And it would be kind of like doing morning radio.
01:17:21.000But then along the line, when I started having guests on and I started considering other people's perspectives and I started considering how I interact with those people and getting better at interacting with them and having some negative experiences and negative experiences.
01:17:33.000Negative shows and negative interactions.
01:17:35.000I realize, like, those don't make me feel good.
01:19:33.000They want to enjoy their experience with other people.
01:19:36.000And I think that even when you look at our bad behaviors, they usually provide some sort of short-term benefit that often gets overlooked.
01:19:48.000Like, I don't think people do things for bad reasons.
01:19:51.000I think that people usually get something from any behavior they do.
01:19:55.000That doesn't mean the behavior isn't maladaptive, but usually in the short term, there is a benefit and a reason why they're doing the thing they're doing, and it usually goes back to some sort of deeper reason, right?
01:20:27.000And realizing that people are usually acting the way they're acting for a good reason, I think gives you space, it gives you empathy, and allows you to interact with others better in the world.
01:20:41.000Because if I look at the asshole and be like, hey, fuck that guy, and that changes the rest of my day, like, that's not good for me either.
01:21:32.000There was this lady I saw recently, and she had the most insanely bad posture.
01:21:38.000Maybe she had suffered an injury, like a broken neck.
01:21:43.000Because her head was like – she was like very frail and very obviously addicted to drugs and dirty and her head was like hanging down like this so deeply that she couldn't barely look up to like ask for money.
01:22:01.000And, you know, all I could think of was that that was someone's little baby.
01:22:08.000You know, you see some guy who's, like, sleeping on the corner of a street, just covered in filth.
01:22:17.000That was a little—a woman gave birth to this little boy.
01:22:21.000And they had, you know, all the potential in the world if they were in a different environment, if they were in a different— If they had different genes, if they were in a different neighborhood, if they had different parents, if they had different experiences.
01:22:33.000But now here I find them in worst case scenario on the ground, you know, being ignored.
01:22:43.000You know, it's a testament to the health of a society when you see how many people are in that state.
01:22:53.000Like that's one of the things that I find very troubling about a lot of these big cities, like particularly like Los Angeles.
01:23:02.000That are just overrun by these homeless encampments.
01:23:06.000And it was interesting because I saw something today about Gavin Newsom.
01:23:12.000And he is trying to – apparently there's some sort of law that he's trying to get rid of that does not allow you to move homeless people.
01:23:33.000It's like you're not saying that you're not caring about these homeless people, but to just be forced by law to not be able to move these encampments seems insane.
01:23:46.000Not just counterproductive, but a barrier to productivity, a barrier to progress.
01:23:52.000And, you know, kudos to him for trying to do that.
01:23:55.000I give that guy a lot of shit and I probably shouldn't.
01:23:57.000You know, because, like, I think that job is insane.
01:23:59.000He said something crazy about me recently.
01:24:01.000So, like, his son is involved in these micro-cults where he's listening to people like Jordan Peterson and me and...
01:24:10.000I think he's upset because I called him a con man, which I probably shouldn't because that's not productive either.
01:25:32.000What mayor of a big city doesn't suck?
01:25:36.000There's always going to be someone who thinks the person is totally awful and people who are like, oh, they're okay, and people who love them, you know.
01:25:44.000Well, especially, look, no one cared about him at all until COVID. Nobody was upset at him.
01:25:50.000And then you're confronted with this problem that no one has faced in 100 years.
01:26:12.000I mean, you're literally having people like Sean Penn on TV saying that if you're not vaccinated, you're literally holding a loaded gun to people's heads.
01:26:19.000In their defense, at that time, they really believed that this vaccine was going to stop transmission and it was going to stop infection.
01:26:29.000And if you didn't do that, you were fucking it up for everybody else.
01:26:34.000The problem with that, logically, of course, is that If it did stop transmission and it did stop infection, wouldn't people just realize that and only the people who got the vaccine would be okay?
01:26:51.000And then everybody else would be fucked.
01:26:53.000Of course, over time, we've realized that's not really the case.
01:27:00.000And there's some very weird data that shows that the more often you're hit with these mRNA vaccines, there seems to be some correlating factors.
01:28:19.000I think most people are trying to make the best guess they could, given the information that we had.
01:28:24.000But I think you're also right in the sense that once we learn that the information that we were working off of isn't right, we need to correct and be vocal.
01:28:35.000Being more open about why we're making the decisions we are and accounting for the uncertainty is probably the answer rather than trying to pretend we know everything in the moment when the reality is that we don't.
01:28:49.000It's just super difficult to do that and be a politician because you're dealing with polls.
01:28:54.000You're dealing with people that they pick on every single thing that you say and try to find fault in it and try to find their own counterpoint that's more effective and more accurate.
01:30:17.000You know, places like San Francisco in particular and Portland where they actually give people, I think it's San Francisco, they actually give people money.
01:30:47.000And now it's sort of shifted around 1995 to thinking that an addict has a brain disease.
01:30:57.000And I'm not sure that that's quite right either.
01:31:02.000I think personally, after looking into this, that addiction is more of a symptom of an underlying problem and that using the substance solves the problem in the short term but creates long-term problems.
01:32:11.000And I have a ton of empathy too because I think that if you are addicted, and I can tell you this, nothing solves a problem like using your substance of choice in the short term.
01:35:33.000My man picks me up in a 10 year old beat to hell, Hyundai base model, drops me off at my hotel, which is this sort of hole in the wall, just bombed out hotel.
01:36:20.000So the first few days, we're just madly driving around Baghdad in this dude's, you know, neither secure nor top of the line Hyundai the whole time.
01:36:52.000But just as this guy's sort of grift, you know, worked on me, it starts to work on other people.
01:36:58.000So he somehow talks us into this police compound on the outskirts of town where they hold the big drug smugglers in the country and different terrorists.
01:37:10.000We talked to some of the people in the prison.
01:37:13.000Then he ends up getting this sort of off-the-books meeting with two Iraqi intelligence officers who work on the border of Syria.
01:37:22.000Fighting Captagon as it comes through.
01:37:24.000And they told me just crazy ways that people get the drug over.
01:37:28.000So a lot of times the government, because it's all controlled by the government, by the way, will hire farmers, like shepherds, We're good to go.
01:38:00.000And they just put it in some sort of a bag that doesn't get broken down by the stomach acids?
01:38:42.000Most of it is controlled by what's called the Fourth Division, which is sort of akin to our sort of Navy SEALs, like this really elite military unit controls it all.
01:38:52.000And also like Hezbollah, which has been named a terror organization, is involved in the trade too.
01:39:00.000Eventually we get this meeting with the guy who's the head of psychiatry for all of Iraq.
01:39:05.000And basically what happens is I'm able to, I'm in the country going, okay, like nothing is really, this guy's just piecing together these kind of meetings as we go.
01:39:13.000And I track down a guy who's a journalist in the country and I kind of tell him my situation and he goes, you know, call this guy.
01:39:21.000So, my fixer calls the head of psychiatry, and the guy tells him immediately, you know, just text me, whatever.
01:39:50.000So we go to this damn meeting and, you know, we come in and the guy's kind of looking at us like, you're not who I expected.
01:39:59.000But we sit down with him and I get him to, at first he's kind of trying to shoo us out, you know, but I get him to start talking to us and he echoed sort of the same that we've been talking about.
01:40:10.000He goes, look, like the brain disease model is And this complex neuroscience around drug addiction is interesting.
01:40:17.000Obviously, the brain changes due to drugs.
01:40:20.000But the question is whether those changes obliterate all ability to make choice and to change.
01:40:27.000Because that's sort of what the government of the U.S. sort of claims.
01:40:32.000When you look at NIDA's website, it's all on the brain disease model.
01:40:35.000It says that drug addiction is this We're good to go.
01:40:58.000They're making a very rational decision to use those drugs because it is solving a problem, right?
01:41:04.000If you are a addicted person and heroin solves your problem or having a drink solves your issues you face, well, you're making a rational decision.
01:41:15.000But the problem is that the problems are piling up in the long term.
01:41:33.000I've had to think about that a lot, especially as I wrote the chapter.
01:41:36.000And I think, you know, there's a lot of, you see a lot of different stuff for why do people have an addiction.
01:41:42.000And I think the reality is that there's not just one reason.
01:41:45.000There's a lot of reasons out there different people use for different reasons to access.
01:41:51.000For me, so for example, you know, one, I can't remember, there's one thinker out there who basically says the opposite of addiction is connection, that people who are addicted don't have social connections.
01:42:01.000And I can tell you for me that wasn't true at all.
01:42:05.000I found that for me, I had, at the time, I was working in this job that was Rather boring.
01:42:14.000I had a lot of sort of bound up energy and I like new sort of extreme experiences and I could find that through alcohol.
01:42:23.000So if I drank, I could be wild and free in a world that is increasingly orderly and sanitary, right?
01:42:29.000It's like, I'm going to be on my game all the time, but the moment I start drinking, it's a game.
01:42:36.000Like, you know, the world opens up, and I can be who I want to be and sort of really let loose, and who the hell knows what's going to happen tonight.
01:43:27.000I mean, I really do think that I would have died early had I not gotten sober.
01:43:32.000I mean, it was, you know, pretty bad at times.
01:43:35.000And so I have a lot of empathy for people who are addicted, because I understand that, you know, there's this great, in Dante's Inferno, the book, he describes Satan as Living in a world of cold and ice.
01:43:52.000So hell as he pictures it is cold and ice.
01:43:54.000And now Satan is in hell, which is cold, and he's stuck up to ice to his waist.
01:44:01.000And in order to do anything in his life, he's always had to flap his wings.
01:47:02.000They all tend to have that on them, and it's just a mix of...
01:47:04.000So it started in the 60s as a legal pharmaceutical drug, and I think they banned it in the 70s, or it might have been the mid-70s, because it worked too well.
01:47:16.000People were getting hooked on it, and it was...
01:47:19.000And then what had happened is that enough people, especially in the Middle East, were using it as a pharmaceutical that some drug gangs came in and started making it themselves.
01:47:32.000And now it's just slowly transitioned where Syria runs it all.
01:47:36.000The wild one in America that's legal is Adderall.
01:47:41.000Yeah, so we have billions of pills circulating as well.
01:47:44.000I know so many people that use Adderall.
01:50:08.000I think part of it goes back to sort of that loop idea that I was telling you about in the sense that unpredictable rewards tend to hook people more than predictable rewards.
01:50:21.000So when you think of illegal drugs, you don't know if you're gonna get them.
01:50:27.000You don't know how strong they're gonna be.
01:50:28.000You don't know who you're gonna get them from.
01:50:30.000You don't know if you're gonna get in trouble.
01:50:32.000So there's all these up in the airs that make that search for drugs, I think, more compelling than if a drug is legal.
01:51:53.000And you see that in behavior, for sure.
01:51:55.000I mean, so drinking rose during Prohibition and partly because of the forbidden fruit effect.
01:52:02.000And we still even celebrate that today with NASCAR. I mean, that sport evolved naturally out of people souping up their cars to drive whiskey places, right?
01:52:54.000Those DEA agents are fucking wild, whether it's Coast Guard or DEA, whoever those federal agents are that jump on top of fucking submarines.
01:53:04.000It's crazy, because this fucking submarine is shooting across the water, and these guys jump on top of this goddamn thing, and they're banging on the door.
01:54:13.000But then again, what if your child dies of an overdose because they thought they were just getting, you know, some Valium or something like that.
01:54:20.000And it actually turned out to be fentanyl.
01:54:31.000And then there's also the reality that certain cartels will poison certain—they will literally do that to put other cartels out of business.
01:54:40.000So if one cartel has a grip on one area, they'll release— Poison, you know, like literally on purpose tainted cocaine so that this cartel goes out of business or they get attacked.
01:54:57.000I do think that there is more hope for people than we often might think.
01:55:07.000An interesting stat that I read is that 1 in 10 Americans have reported having gotten over a substance abuse issue in their lifetime.
01:55:18.000So what tends to happen in a lot of the big government studies where the numbers are very dire once you're hooked on a substance, it's very, very hard to quit.
01:55:28.000They tend to look at some of the worst cases.
01:55:31.000Not some of the more, you know, average cases.
01:55:35.000And in those more average cases, the odds of recovery are a lot higher.
01:55:41.000And I think a lot of it has to do with, a lot of times we age out.
01:55:46.000As simple and strange as that sounds, you tend to see addiction spike in people who are about 15 to 25. And that's because of the way the brain is changing during that time.
01:55:58.000So risk is something that we naturally get drawn to.
01:56:01.000We're looking for social connection, and we're also looking for how we find comfort and meaning in the world.
01:56:07.000And so if you introduce a substance that does those things for people at that age, we're more likely to sort of learn using that substance as something that enhances our lives.
01:56:17.000But once you start to Age out over time.
01:56:21.000People generally find other things that provide whatever the drug was providing for them and are able to get off it.
01:56:28.000Well, also, hopefully, with age comes wisdom.
01:56:31.000And with a bunch of negative experiences, there's the term reaching rock bottom.
01:56:37.000With a lot of addicts, they have to hit the bottom where they go, I have to fucking do something.
01:56:55.000It's like, for whatever reason, they haven't hit rock bottom or they haven't decided that their life is so fucked up with this stuff that they'd be better off without it.
01:57:04.000I think one of the great benefits to people like yourself Is it someone who has gone through that can now talk about it?
01:57:34.000And I'll tell you that once you get out of it, so if you think of addiction as persistence against negative consequences, well, applied to drugs and alcohol, that's a bad thing.
01:57:46.000Applied to a lot of other things, that is the ultimate life hack.
01:57:54.000Writing a book is a lot of sitting in an office in the dark very early and having to wade through studies, having to figure out how do I put together this narrative.
01:58:04.000There's a lot of negative short-term consequences, but you could almost argue, and I've thought about this a lot, that My persistence against negative consequences with drinking has carried over into this other part of my life where it is actually creating long term benefits.
01:58:19.000So that's a message that I like to tell people too.
01:58:23.000It's like, if you can get over this, you can apply your crazy brain.
01:58:26.000Crazy behaviors to something that will enhance your life and that makes you pretty damn unstoppable.
01:58:32.000Unfortunately, the opposite exists as well, particularly with athletes.
01:58:37.000I see that in a lot of fighters and even in other athletes.
02:00:11.000Pool halls are filled with degenerates and all these people that are drinking and gambling and doing drugs and they're these wild outcasts of society.
02:00:27.000And he would, you know, eat clean and drink water and, you know, and he was like super fucking, he would dress clean and play really well and he was one of the best players in the world.
02:01:00.000It's that they lose this thing that sort of gave them meaning and then they got to find a different thing.
02:01:08.000It gave them an identity and it gave them thrills.
02:01:11.000The thrill of a fight is the craziest thrill.
02:01:14.000The thrill that knowing that there's going to be this one event that you're preparing for.
02:01:19.000So you're preparing for weeks and weeks and weeks for this one thing.
02:01:22.000And either it's the greatest experience of your life when you win or it's the worst feeling in the world if you lose.
02:01:29.000And if it's the worst feeling in the world, then you go back to the drawing board and you want to figure out how to get that great feeling again.
02:01:35.000You want to figure out how to achieve excellence.
02:01:37.000And if you can get there, if you can get back to excellence again, then you want to get it even further and further.
02:03:04.000Because you're talking about a guy who's literally as mentally strong as the smallest number of people that have ever lived.
02:03:10.000You know like the fucking point zero zero zero one of human beings the discipline the drive the will the focus the strength the grit You know wrestlers above and beyond in amateur athletics are some of the toughest human beings ever because It's all for glory.
02:03:33.000If you win the gold medal, you can go on and play for the professional wrestling league.
02:03:41.000If you win a gold medal in basketball, Well, hey, you can go and play in the NBA. If you win a gold medal in many sports, there's a professional outlet.
02:03:51.000There's literally no professional outlet other than the entertainment outlet, which is what he went into, or professional mixed martial arts, which is a different skill set.
02:04:49.000It's like everyone needs something, right?
02:04:51.000And what's going to work for one person isn't necessarily going to work for another person isn't necessarily going to work for another person.
02:04:56.000But I do think that the commonality you find is that it takes action.
02:05:45.000And so if, you know, if you're a person who's suffering and that just didn't seem to work for you, I would suggest, you know, try something else.
02:07:17.000And I'm sure a lot of people listening to this that have an aversion to that idea of hunting and that they think it's cruel.
02:07:23.000And I get how they would understand that.
02:07:26.000Unfortunately, a lot of those people also eat meat.
02:07:29.000And, you know, if you eat meat or if you even eat vegetables, unfortunately, that's the real sucky reality is...
02:07:37.000That unless you grow all of your own food organically and you know exactly what you're doing and you eat vegetables that you grow yourself, if you're getting food from monocrop agriculture, you're 100% contributing to the loss of life and not just one life.
02:07:52.000But do you think that a frog is as important as an elk?
02:07:57.000Do you think that a ground-nesting bird is as important as an elk?
02:08:00.000Because if I shoot an elk, I eat that elk for months.
02:08:05.000If you buy a bushel of corn, there are a lot of deaths attached to that.
02:08:10.000In insects, because of pesticides, in...
02:08:13.000fawns and these things that get ground up in combines when they're rolling over the fields.
02:08:20.000There's a crazy video that I saw of these grain combines that are rolling across this field and they hit this patch and you see all these deer just scatter out of there barely making it out alive as this thing is running them over.
02:08:38.000Yeah, rabbits, all sorts of things get killed in that.
02:08:42.000And, you know, you could say that that's also the cycle of life and that most certainly doesn't go to waste because something will eat those birds.
02:08:51.000Birds will eat those dead rabbits, you know, vultures.
02:08:56.000And coyotes and all these animals that do get killed in the cultivation of grain, they will feed wildlife.
02:09:07.000Like, even if you, like, say if you're hunting and you shoot an animal and it runs into the forest and you can't find it, and you go, oh my god, I've killed something for no reason.
02:09:17.000Believe me, something's going to find that thing.
02:11:44.000If I, say, give someone a check for a million dollars, it's great, but they would value that so much more if they had to build a business or something that earned it.
02:12:13.000He said, the reason that we get more value from things that are harder to get is probably because if you had to work harder to get something in the past that saved your life, you want to incentivize that repeat searching, right?
02:12:25.000So the harder you work for something, if you get this giant like, oh my god, that was amazing!
02:12:54.000It applies to all these different things that are an important part of being a human today, knowing that a lot of times the process is the reward.
02:13:03.000And the harder the process, probably the bigger reward for you internally.
02:14:19.000So I'm just out there hydrating in 104 degree heat just practicing my shot over and [...
02:14:31.000To the point where my shoulders hurt, my arms not steady, you know, to the point where I should have probably quit four or five groups earlier because my groups are getting a little scattered because my arms not steady anymore.
02:14:42.000But when I get to the mountains, I know that I've dotted all my I's.
02:17:04.000But when it's over, when you're successful...
02:17:08.000It's a great feeling of relief, a great feeling of satisfaction, and the food that you get from it is the finest animal protein that you can get.
02:17:18.000It's the best stuff in the world for you.
02:18:35.000So I grew up in just north of Salt Lake City and the home I grew up in, my mom has a mountain lion that hangs out in her backyard quite a bit because there's some woods behind her house.
02:18:48.000It's a pretty developed area too, but there just happens to be this wooded area where there's a park and she'll hear the mountain lion at night having just killed some deer because there's some deer that live in there and they get pretty damn big around there.
02:21:56.000He had had encounters with bears in the past, but he told a story, and he was also with my friend Remy Warren, who told a story on the podcast.
02:23:04.000And then because it took them like hours to get to this place.
02:23:06.000And then they're going to pack out the elk.
02:23:09.000And while they're sitting there eating lunch, this fucking 11-foot bear runs at them.
02:23:16.000Through the trees, through the camp, but there was so many people there that the bear doesn't know who to attack and just kind of runs through them.
02:23:27.000And one of his camera guys, this guy, his nickname is Dirtmouth.
02:23:32.000Dirtmouth winds up on the bear's back.
02:23:36.000The bear like literally plows through these people and he's on this thing's back for like 10 yards as it's running and then he falls off.
02:23:46.000My other friend Giannis hits it with a trekking stick in the face as it passes him and he said it was literally a foot from his face.
02:25:36.000Yeah, it's, you know, there's just the reality of nature and the wild.
02:25:42.000People that don't experience it, like someone was telling me this today, I need to know if this is true, that in British Columbia, you can't even shoot a bear in self-defense.
02:25:56.000Well, they outlawed grizzly bear hunting, which is crazy because the problem with a place like British Columbia is that the voting population all exists in urban areas, right?
02:26:09.000So you have all your people from Vancouver.
02:26:12.000It's a beautiful city, and the kind of people that live there are urban people, right?
02:26:18.000They don't have any experience with wildlife for the most part unless they regularly go out there.
02:26:22.000So they don't even know what they're voting on.
02:26:24.000And this bill comes across, like, should we outlaw grizzly bear hunting?
02:26:30.000Like, well, no one's hunting a grizzly bear to feed their family.
02:26:37.000Well, my friend Mike, who runs a guide service in northern B.C., he had to shoot a fucking grizzly bear from, like, three feet away from a cabin door.
02:26:48.000So this thing was trying to break into a cabin and shoot it, like, as it was coming to the cabin door.
02:26:55.000Yeah, they'll break into houses easy all the time.
02:26:57.000And there's also wolves up there, like packs of wolves that'll take out a horse every now and then.
02:27:02.000So you hear some crazy noise, you look out the window, and there's a pack of wolves mauling one of your horses.
02:27:09.000The wild that those people exist in, it is so alien to anyone that lives in an urban environment that they pass these laws and they don't even know what they're voting on.
02:28:39.000I found a case where a guy claimed self-defense, but the judge said that didn't sound like self-defense because he went back inside to grab his arrows.
02:29:46.000And they process it, like I said, with the USDA facility, so...
02:29:51.000You know that you're getting, you know, it's all clean and safe and it's all done correctly and sanitarily and, you know, you can get the best protein that you can get.
02:30:02.000And it helps them because, like, Lanai is crazy.
02:30:05.000When we were in Lanai, Lanai has 3,000 people, this gorgeous island, and it has 30,000 deer.
02:30:58.000How do you feel like when you trained this year, how did you feel rocking helped you?
02:31:03.000Well, anything where you're carrying weight and you're going, like one of the things that I did quite a bit is 30% incline on a, I have a really good treadmill, but it's a 30% incline and put a weight vest on.
02:34:40.000I get my heart rate down to about 100 and then I get back on it again and I do another one and I get it back down to 100. 100. Do it again.
02:34:48.000And depending upon the workout, like if I'm just doing that, I'll do 10. I'll do 10 reps.
02:34:59.000But if I'm doing all that other stuff first, I'm so beat up by the time I get to that that I'll do 4 or maybe I'll push myself to do 5. And then I immediately go into the sauna.
02:35:53.000I feel like the slow grind of rucking is awesome for cardio and then you just pair that with – To what you're talking about, which is that high intensity.
02:36:03.000You hit both those systems, and that's kind of the secret sauce to me.
02:36:07.000A lot of what I think about, too, with hunting is, how can I resist injury?
02:36:12.000If you roll an ankle or something out there, or whatever it might be, that can blow the whole thing for you.
02:36:18.000So I also do a ton of durability work, like just getting my ankles real tight and resistant to falls, getting my knees nice and locked down.
02:36:26.000Then the question just becomes, okay, can I cover ground while bearing load for an entire day?
02:36:32.000And if the answer is yes, like, all right, I feel pretty solid.
02:36:35.000And can I handle a pack out if I have a heavy pack out?
02:36:37.000So I have one of those treadmills, too, that goes at a pretty good incline.
02:36:40.000And I'll throw, you know, maybe 100 pounds in a ruck or something and just slow grind for a while.
02:38:52.000So I go down and visit them in Bolivia.
02:38:55.000So I got to fly into La Paz, which is like 13,000 feet.
02:38:59.000And I was supposed to take a small plane down, which is a half an hour, but the airline goes belly up the day before I'm supposed to get there, right?
02:39:07.000So we've got to take this 12-hour car ride down to the jungle, and you take a six-hour canoe ride up into the jungle, and it's all just a wall of green, right?
02:39:15.000You're going, it all looks the same, and it has for the last six hours.
02:39:19.000And then eventually the canoe guy just goes up a bank, and you're like, How the hell do you know this is the place?
02:39:31.000And the real difference maker, their diet generally is At some point across the day, it's gonna break, like, every popular diet that we've been given in the last, you know, 40 years.
02:39:45.000Like, they eat some sugar, they eat some chocolate, they eat red meat, they eat fish, they eat white rice, they eat white potatoes.
02:39:53.000It's not low-fat, it's not low-carb, it's not, right?
02:39:56.000It's, at some point, it's gonna offend someone.
02:40:49.000Variety, you've got to have a lot of different flavors.
02:40:51.000Not only within the food itself, so this mix of sugar, salt, fat, whatever it might be, but also a lot of different varieties of junk foods.
02:40:59.000Like you go to the supermarket and there's like 45 different Doritos.
02:41:08.000And so when scientists will put people in a lab and have them eat one diet that is basically unprocessed, very minimally processed, versus an ultra-processed diet where everything else is matched, this is an NIH study, the people who eat the ultra-processed diet end up eating 500 more calories a day Yeah.
02:43:52.000Someone made a breakdown, I think on Instagram or something like that, of one of those Baskin Robbins coffee things, those flurries or whatever the fuck it is.
02:44:24.000It seems like you'd go into a fucking sugar coma.
02:44:26.000So when I was in the jungle with that tribe, we did have sugar.
02:44:30.000We had a sugar cane, but the difference is that we had to walk into the jungle, we had to physically chop it, we had to move it to this expeller thing they have that is human powered.
02:44:41.000So you put the cane in between these two wood pole things, and then you have to push this thing around and it shoves the cane through that and it juices it.
02:44:50.000And so by the time you've done all that work, Like, you've burned quite a few calories, and by the way, you're not getting 129 grams from a thing of sugar, right?
02:44:59.000And so I think it just goes back for the average person that we don't move enough, so we can't buffer the sugar, right?
02:45:07.000Diabetes could just be that you are—it's too much couch rather than too much of anything else.
02:45:14.000And it's also just so easy to eat food today and take in a lot of calories in one bite because— Just as I mentioned in the beginning, we've got this casino lab figuring out what leads people to gamble more.
02:45:27.000We've got tons of labs across the country going, how do we make super delicious, hyper-palatable food that people will eat more of?
02:46:38.000Like even though I'm full, I'll still eat it because it's like you're getting this reward from those carbs and the flavors and because that's one of the things they say about those competitive eaters.
02:46:51.000You know when they're in those hot dog eating contests and shit like that?
02:46:54.000They eat fries with it so that they can eat more food.