The Peter Attia Drive - #284 ‒ Overcoming addictive behaviors, elevating wellbeing, thriving in an era of excess, and the scarcity loop ｜ Michael Easter, M.A.

00:00:00.000 Hey, everyone. Welcome to the Drive podcast. I'm your host, Peter Atiyah. This podcast,

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00:00:58.020 head over to peteratiyahmd.com forward slash subscribe. My returning guest this week is

00:01:05.980 Michael Easter, who was a previous guest in October of 2022 on episode 225. Michael is a professor in

00:01:14.760 the journalism department at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, and a co-founder and co-director

00:01:19.980 of a think tank at UNLV called the Public Communications Institute. He is also the author

00:01:25.540 of the bestseller and one of the few books that I am always giving away to people, The Comfort Crisis.

00:01:31.880 In this episode, we speak about Michael's latest book, Scarcity Brain, which I will just tell you

00:01:37.920 right now is also an exceptional book, and I put it right up there with The Comfort Crisis in terms of

00:01:44.300 its implications for how we can live better lives. Throughout this conversation, we discuss what the

00:01:50.080 scarcity loop is and how it affects our way of life in many ways. This includes looking at it through

00:01:56.400 the lens of food, gambling, drugs, our need to accumulate more and more possessions, and the

00:02:02.080 stimulation we receive from our phone, boredom, the influx of information we have in our lives, and

00:02:07.660 finally, we look at happiness. So without further delay, please enjoy my conversation with Michael Easter.

00:02:13.920 Michael, thanks for making the trip to Austin.

00:02:21.380 Yeah, thanks for having me again. It's good to be here.

00:02:23.600 Congrats on the book.

00:02:25.380 Thank you very much. Congrats on yours.

00:02:27.500 Thanks so much. So last time we were here, we were talking about The Comfort Crisis, which is a book

00:02:32.940 people have heard me talk about over and over and over again. It's on the short list of books I

00:02:37.300 recommend regularly, but I want to kind of understand how you went from the obvious success of The Comfort

00:02:43.520 Crisis and more importantly, the lessons you learned in The Comfort Crisis to thinking about the

00:02:48.720 particular problem that feeds into scarcity brain. Yeah. So I finished The Comfort Crisis basically

00:02:53.840 right as the pandemic was taking off. So March 2020. Now, when the pandemic takes off, what does

00:03:01.220 everyone do? They go to the grocery store and they hoard as much stuff as they can. We're going to get

00:03:06.880 all the canned food we can get. We're going to get all the toilet paper. We're going to get all the

00:03:10.460 hand sanitizer. It was a rational decision at that point, but it made me sort of realize when we think

00:03:15.320 that resources are scarce, our reaction is to hoard them and gather them. And I think what was

00:03:21.080 interesting about the pandemic is you had this initial spike in that sort of behavior, but then

00:03:26.180 sort of as it drew out, you saw everything from drinking and drug use increase. You saw purchasing

00:03:33.960 increase. You saw a lot of people gain weight, eating food and exercising less. And so you saw all

00:03:39.780 these behaviors that can be damaging, just sort of increase over time. And so that made me wonder

00:03:45.580 about questions of scarcity, how it affects us, how our environments have changed, because that's what

00:03:50.220 The Comfort Crisis is ultimately about. And one of the elements underlying that is that we do live in a

00:03:55.620 world where we have an abundance of all these things we're built to crave and managing that can be

00:04:00.700 difficult. You know, I was thinking about where to start. There are so many sections in this book,

00:04:05.400 each of which dive into seemingly disparate topics of scarcity, right? And we'll talk about them all,

00:04:10.740 right? We'll talk about scarcity of information, scarcity of food, but maybe we start with food

00:04:16.980 because I think it is the most obvious one, at least to me. Also, it's the one for which there is

00:04:23.020 the most obvious evolutionary link. Now, there are scholars out there who would argue that the greatest

00:04:29.640 superpower of the Homo sapiens are their ability to tell stories. I've heard this said, and that makes

00:04:37.080 sense. Maybe it's just my own bias in biology, but I've always felt that our superpower as Homo sapiens

00:04:44.280 was energy storage. And it's probably the case that there are many superpowers that we have that

00:04:49.280 coalesced around where we are today and how we kind of leapfrogged ahead of every other species about

00:04:55.700 250,000 years ago. Let's talk a little bit about what we know about scarcity with respect to

00:05:02.180 nutrition and how that evolved us as a species. Until very recently, food was scarce and it was

00:05:09.120 hard to find. I mean, especially prehistorically, there wasn't a lot of food. Not to mention, in order

00:05:14.060 to get it, you weren't going down to the 7-Eleven. You would have to hunt, you would have to gather,

00:05:18.460 you'd have to put in energy to get energy. We know it wasn't always easy to come by. It kind of

00:05:23.020 depended on where you lived, obviously. But recently, in the grand scheme of time and space,

00:05:27.680 within the last 100 years, we've been able to produce really an abundance of food.

00:05:33.960 And we've engineered our food to be as delicious as possible. And we have so much food now that the

00:05:40.520 average person in America, or America as a whole, we throw out about a third of the food that we

00:05:44.460 produce. So we've gone from being these creatures who evolved to, because food was scarce and hard to

00:05:50.180 find, if you had the opportunity to eat it,

00:05:53.020 maybe eat a little more than you needed at any given time, that would give you a survival

00:05:56.860 advantage. Because you could store that energy, and then the next time that you can't find food,

00:06:01.420 you're going to survive that. We still have that drive to eat a little more than we need,

00:06:06.140 but we live in a world where food is rarely scarce. So it's an evolutionary mismatch, basically.

00:06:12.640 I don't know if you've heard me talk about the default food environment. We were talking about it a

00:06:16.060 minute ago, effectively, in the pantry. We were both talking to each other about the challenges of our

00:06:21.960 pantries. And this is what I kind of talked to my patients about is the default food environment.

00:06:26.360 So when you're changing a habit that requires subtraction, to me, the strategy is changing the

00:06:33.000 environment. When you're changing a habit that requires addition, there's a whole different

00:06:36.660 strategy. But the default food environment is, as you said, it's incredibly palatable, incredibly

00:06:42.520 calorie dense, incredibly non-perishable, and therefore portable, and incredibly cheap.

00:06:48.960 So if you just think about dollar per kilojoule, you can't fathom how remarkable this is. And by the

00:06:55.480 way, I don't believe that any of that is particularly nefarious on the part of industry. I think it's

00:07:02.020 solving a problem, and the solution happened to produce those things that we now have that meet

00:07:08.240 those criteria. And it's just that one of the criteria that wasn't on the list, there's not a fifth

00:07:12.900 criteria that is healthy. Make it such that if you consumed it at any level, it would not harm you.

00:07:20.340 That is obviously not one of the criteria. So what do we know about the most contentious topic of them

00:07:27.520 all, which is what is at the root of the obesity crisis? Because while people can debate that, there's

00:07:34.400 really no debate at the state of our excess nutrition. So I'll let you give the stats, but we

00:07:41.940 are an overnourished species at this point, that even globally, the state of overnourishment exceeds

00:07:49.180 that of malnourishment.

00:07:51.080 Yeah. So 40 some odd percent of Americans are now obese. That number is expected to climb. And globally

00:07:58.580 too, I believe that diseases that stem from overnourishment outweigh those that stem from

00:08:05.320 overnourishment- By undernourishment.

00:08:07.220 Fourfold. Yeah, undernourishment. Yeah. To your point, this is a good problem to have. Because

00:08:13.020 literally for all of time, your job was getting food every day and preparing it. Great example is

00:08:20.880 before we created production lines to make tortillas, Mexican women used to spend five hours a day 1.00

00:08:27.820 hand grinding corn to make tortillas. When we get in food production lines and we sort of start to

00:08:34.520 process our food more, that frees up a lot of time for people. It makes food more abundant. It makes

00:08:39.340 it easier to come by. It makes it cheaper. So today, I think the average American spends about 8% of

00:08:43.680 their income on food. In the past, we used to spend more than 40%.

00:08:47.360 Eight versus 40.

00:08:49.260 Eight versus 40.

00:08:50.080 Wow.

00:08:50.500 So think about that. So this is a good problem to have, but we now have so much food that it does

00:08:55.420 become hard to manage. And as you've talked about plenty on this podcast, obesity is linked to so

00:09:02.060 many of the diseases now that end up cutting our lives short. And not only that, they cut into our

00:09:07.600 health span. They make us mobile. And I think that that leads to some downstream consequences like

00:09:13.060 depression, anxiety. And so it becomes pernicious over time. One of the issues is that food will always

00:09:19.360 be rewarding in the short term. And it's a hard battle to fight. So I have a lot of empathy for people who

00:09:25.420 are obese. I understand that it's very challenging because we do live in a food environment where

00:09:30.880 you can make that decision for that thing that's going to be delicious, feel good in the short term.

00:09:36.600 Too much of it can cause some long-term problems.

00:09:39.660 So when you wanted to look into this question, you did something that I think is very interesting.

00:09:44.700 And folks, when they read the book, I think will be particularly intrigued by this section,

00:09:49.940 where you decided to go and live with some hunter-gatherers. Now, there aren't that many

00:09:55.560 hunter-gatherers left. And usually when we talk about them, we think of the Hadza because so much 0.95

00:10:01.160 attention has been thrown their way. But you went to a different group in Bolivia, the Chumani,

00:10:07.980 correct? Yeah.

00:10:09.020 I hadn't even heard of this group of hunter-gatherers until I read the book. So how did you find them?

00:10:14.580 How did you select them over some of the ones that could have been a lot easier to reach,

00:10:18.400 again, such as the Hadza?

00:10:19.900 So I came across this paper and I believe it was 2018. And I basically found that this tribe does

00:10:25.840 not get heart disease. So when you look at what kills the average person, it's heart disease.

00:10:31.180 That's the number one killer of Americans. It's the number one killer worldwide. 0.95

00:10:34.600 So I go, okay, it's going down there. Let's see what's going on there. Because the other thing that

00:10:38.360 I think is important is when you look at what people actually worry about health-wise,

00:10:42.760 it's not heart disease.

00:10:44.060 Definitely not. It's cancer.

00:10:45.260 People worry about cancer. People worry about terrorism. They worry about violence.

00:10:50.440 So you'll have people who stock tons and tons of guns and bullets because they don't want to get

00:10:54.760 killed. And yet they've also got a pantry full of junk food. And it's like, well, maybe we should

00:10:59.200 think about that too. So I read this paper. I talked to the two researchers on it and I decide

00:11:05.700 I'm going to go down there. I want to see it for myself. My background is I'm a journalist and I'm an

00:11:10.780 investigative journalist. So I travel places to meet with people to see what's going on. I'd get my eyes

00:11:14.820 on the world. So I fly into La Paz. 0.74

00:11:16.820 Go to the source.

00:11:17.760 Go to the source.

00:11:18.800 As one of your editors might've said.

00:11:20.320 Yes. Yes. So I fly into La Paz. Then we take a 12-hour car ride down to a town called

00:11:25.380 Runa Baca in Bolivia. And from there we get in a canoe. It's called a Peke Peke boat. So these 1.00

00:11:31.680 long boats are like 30 feet, really thin, and they've got these motors on them. They're called

00:11:36.400 long tail motor. We take that about six hours up a feeder river of the Amazon. It was hilarious

00:11:44.180 because all you can see is jungle the entire time. Like it's all green. It all looks the

00:11:49.240 same. And then the boat driver just eventually pulls over and you're going, how did he know?

00:11:53.740 How did you know? And he's like, this is it. Get out.

00:11:57.620 Yeah. And there they were. And they're fascinating, I think, because they're not true hunter gatherers.

00:12:02.240 So they're hunter horticulturalists, I guess you would consider them. So what was interesting with

00:12:07.260 them is that some point in a given day, because you sort of brought up how we've had all these

00:12:11.700 fad diets over the last X amount of years. At some point in the day, they're going to offend some

00:12:17.520 fad diet, right? So they eat meat. They eat plain white rice. Their diet isn't necessarily low fat.

00:12:24.220 It's not necessarily low carb. They're eating things like corn. That's off limits in so many diet

00:12:30.400 books. But the commonality behind their food is that it all has one ingredient.

00:12:36.160 So they're basically not getting access to ultra processed food. And that seems to be one of the

00:12:42.780 key reasons they've been able to avoid disease. And tell me about the population. So how many

00:12:47.140 folks are there? Yeah. So I believe there are 20,000. That might be a high number.

00:12:53.400 Might be five, five to 20,000 spread throughout the Amazon, the Bolivian Amazon. But the group that I

00:12:58.580 went and saw, there's about 50 of them in a small village.

00:13:01.800 And what does the distribution of their lifespan look like? In other words, what is median survival?

00:13:08.120 Because I imagine there's a skew down on median based on no access to antibiotics and the things

00:13:16.080 that we take for granted here, where what I call Medicine 2.0 has done a remarkable job of extending

00:13:22.340 human lifespan.

00:13:23.020 I had a guide who was from another tribe take me up there. And I said, all right, great. They don't 0.98

00:13:29.720 die of heart disease. They don't die of Alzheimer's. What do they die of? And he just goes, oh, accidents.

00:13:35.400 It's accidents, snakes. Like literally there's snakes out there that if you get bit, you're screwed. 0.93

00:13:41.380 I think they live into their 70s on average if they're managed to sidestep a snake or some other

00:13:47.300 accident.

00:13:47.780 And then the claim that they don't have coronary artery disease, explain how that claim has been

00:13:53.720 validated.

00:13:55.200 Yeah. So they put them in a boat, this guy that I talked to, this researcher. They got a bunch of

00:14:00.840 the tribe members and they took them into the village to do CT scans of their heart. And so

00:14:05.500 they basically didn't have a lot of the markers that they look for in that scan.

00:14:08.660 Yeah. So they're doing these CT angiograms on folks in their seventies. And I believe as you

00:14:15.280 described it, they looked like healthy 50 year olds. Is that about the time phase?

00:14:20.180 Yeah. I believe it was about their hearts looks about 30 years younger.

00:14:22.520 30 years younger.

00:14:22.980 Yes.

00:14:23.580 Okay. So we've got these folks and they, at least on the basis of what I refer to as the four horsemen,

00:14:31.040 they don't seem to get the four horsemen. Eventually they're going to die because of these

00:14:35.120 other problems. There are a lot of things that are different for them. So one could say, well,

00:14:40.360 they're probably not under chronic stress. They're probably quite active. They probably

00:14:44.960 have a really good circadian rhythm and sleep well, and they don't have electronics. And obviously

00:14:49.800 they eat a very different diet. How much do you think this different diet, which I want you to go

00:14:54.380 into a little more detail on because you even attempted to follow it for some time. How much do you

00:14:58.540 think the diet played a role in this given that we can't answer that question prospectively?

00:15:03.160 I think it plays a pretty large factor. Of course, it's not everything. Now, one of the reasons I

00:15:07.780 think this is because there is another tribe called the Mosaten, who I spent a little bit

00:15:12.060 of time with. They're only an hour from the village. So they will go into town, they'll get

00:15:16.960 ultra processed food, they'll get things like oil, and they will fry their plantains. The

00:15:22.180 chimane are baking them in a fire. They're just not doing all these things that make the food

00:15:26.260 a lot more appealing and in turn lead them to overeat. The Mosaten seem to have elevated risk 1.00

00:15:31.820 of heart disease, according to scientists I talked to.

00:15:35.740 So let's go back to what these folks eat. Go through what the chimane eat because you 0.99

00:15:41.520 describe it as they're eating tons of meat, they're eating tons of carbs, they're eating

00:15:45.840 tons of plants. As you said, they're kind of violating every cult of diet out there. 0.58

00:15:52.760 Yeah, they absolutely are. So I would say in the average day, so for breakfast, it's probably

00:15:57.440 something like white rice, maybe some plantains with some protein, it could be fish, it could

00:16:02.520 be chicken, it could be they hunt a Amazonian deer called a taper. So it's a red meat. For

00:16:09.260 lunch, very similar, pile of white rice, maybe some fish, little bit of vegetables. So one

00:16:14.460 thing that was interesting too, is that they're not eating a ton of vegetables. If you and I

00:16:19.880 go to the sweet greens salad chain or whatever, like that single salad that we would get there

00:16:24.960 is probably the amount of vegetables are eating across the day. And the way we think of vegetables

00:16:28.900 like greens, cabbage, things like that. And then for dinner, it's the same deal. It's more

00:16:33.720 carbs, it's sweet potatoes, it's maybe some meat, fish, and it's just very simple foods

00:16:39.700 repeated over and over and over. And that's, I think what it was probably like for humans

00:16:44.160 for most of time. One of the fascinating things about today is that we have more options

00:16:48.640 for food to eat than ever before. I mean, think of your average grocery store. It's got

00:16:53.220 like 10,000 things that you can choose from. And that is very new in the grand scheme of

00:16:57.620 time and space. And I think that we haven't necessarily learned to navigate that well.

00:17:03.160 So we do know that the more options people have to eat, the more things they can eat, the more

00:17:10.560 that person will eat. So this is a term, the buffet effect.

00:17:14.680 As you've alluded to, there's a real raging debate within the obesity community where so many

00:17:20.520 interesting theories are put forth. And it might be that no one theory is wholly complete.

00:17:26.880 So obviously one theory is food availability. It's simply the quantity of food that is available.

00:17:32.900 And there are certainly examples of where that seems to work, but then there are other counter

00:17:36.540 examples where you can find in places of either high or low food availability, you get the opposite

00:17:41.140 to what you would expect based on the theory. You talk about palatability. Food today is hyper

00:17:46.740 palatable. And again, there are plenty of examples. This being one of them where hyper palatability

00:17:51.440 or lack thereof seems to play a role. Obviously you then get into it's carbs, it's fats, it's

00:17:57.240 this, it's that. It's the other thing. Where do you think pleasure from eating fits into this

00:18:04.180 landscape? In other words, anybody listening to this takes for granted, I think we all take

00:18:10.780 for granted the idea that eating is often very pleasurable because we have choice. I don't know,

00:18:17.260 I'm going to decide what I'm going to eat today. If I'm at a buffet or even if I'm at home or if I'm at

00:18:20.600 a restaurant ordering something, I'm going to presumably order something that I enjoy eating.

00:18:27.200 Do you get the sense that they enjoy eating? As someone coming from the US and Las Vegas,

00:18:34.200 by the way, which buffets everywhere, their food was not enjoyable. It's very, very, very plain.

00:18:42.680 They're not salting it. You're eating plantains that have been baked in a fire. The fish is just,

00:18:47.480 you know, they cook it up and it is what it is. I've never consumed fish without at least putting

00:18:52.200 salt on it. What does it taste like? It's just like flaky. It's just flaky, unsalted fish.

00:18:58.940 Yeah. Interesting. And the chicken as well. One thing that was fascinating is that their chickens are

00:19:03.180 also much different than ours because our chickens have been bred to be giant. They could never live

00:19:09.720 out in the wild. The chickens that we have in the big plants in the US, their chickens are wild

00:19:14.960 chickens. They weigh like three pounds and there's not much meat on them. And the meat that is on them.

00:19:20.160 It's got to be tough. It's very tough. It's very stringy. I took a bite of it. I'm like,

00:19:24.420 oh yeah, we're not in Las Vegas anymore. I mean, it's not that enjoyable comparatively.

00:19:32.280 So eating is the thing you do because you need to do it.

00:19:35.640 Yes. You do it because you need to do it. Now, at the same time, I know that they're not

00:19:39.440 having access to Las Vegas buffet. So for them, is it like, oh, this is pretty good.

00:19:44.180 That could very well be.

00:19:46.100 How long did it take, if at all, for your taste buds to downregulate and for you to be like,

00:19:55.040 you know, I can actually taste the sweetness in this plantain. And these sweet potatoes really are

00:20:01.140 kind of a step up in sweetness from the plain rice or whatever. Like, did you go through this

00:20:05.520 desensitization or rather a resensitization as you stayed with them?

00:20:09.800 Yeah, I think so. I think you start to enjoy it more. And it could just be that you're hungry now.

00:20:13.720 You've come from the city where you've had all this great food. And now you're shoveled into this

00:20:18.600 world and your first meals, you're going, okay, I'm just going to have a little bit of this because

00:20:21.980 it doesn't taste good. And then all of a sudden do that for a few days and go, okay, well,

00:20:25.740 I'm actually hungry now. I got to eat. I do feel like hunger is the best sauce.

00:20:29.320 If you're hungry, a lot can taste good. If you're deprived of something and then you get it,

00:20:33.500 it becomes more enjoyable.

00:20:35.680 What about, so here in the US, of course, or in the developed world, any one of us,

00:20:39.860 myself included, who's thinking about their weight is kind of playing this game of how much should I

00:20:45.300 eat? And, you know, there are all these great models like, well, always get up from the table

00:20:50.700 when you're still a little bit hungry, count your calories or limit your carbs or limit your fat.

00:20:57.100 We always have heuristics that we try to use to regulate caloric balance. Do they do any such

00:21:03.840 thing or do they literally eat as much as they want of these bland foods, but their off switch

00:21:09.120 just comes so much sooner because presumably nothing in their brain is being hijacked?

00:21:16.780 I'll answer that with this. There was an interesting study from Kevin Hall at the NIH and they basically

00:21:22.160 took a group of people and for two weeks, they fed them a diet that was ultra processed food.

00:21:25.920 I love this study, by the way.

00:21:27.380 Oh, it's fantastic.

00:21:27.860 It's so, so great.

00:21:28.620 Kevin Hall is here.

00:21:28.960 And Kevin was a real skeptic going into this study. I think it's worth maybe giving a little

00:21:33.120 bit of background.

00:21:34.140 That's a great point. So a group from Brazil had basically come out and said that one of the

00:21:40.140 reasons for the obesity crisis is the food is ultra processed. The nature of the ultra processing

00:21:45.660 itself is leading people to eat more. So he calls them up and he goes, you know, what evidence do you

00:21:50.200 have? Like, why do you think that?

00:21:51.600 And sorry to interrupt, but just to make sure the listener understands, because you and I know Kevin very well,

00:21:55.920 Kevin's an empiricist whose view is to the best of his knowledge based on his data. And Kevin

00:22:01.700 generally has access to the most controlled studies because he runs a metabolic ward. It's the energy

00:22:09.060 content of the food that is driving weight gain. Yes. And it is independent of the quality of the

00:22:17.360 food. Yes. So a thousand calories of broccoli is as fattening as a thousand calories of potato chips.

00:22:26.120 Yes. So he calls them up and he, you know, he says basically that, and he goes, so why do you

00:22:31.440 think that? And they go, well, ultra processed food has more sugar. It's got more salt. And he goes,

00:22:37.140 well, you just named all these macronutrients. You can't say that. And that doesn't make any sense.

00:22:41.980 So what he decides to do is he's going to study this, see if there's any there, there, because he's a

00:22:45.780 skeptic. So it takes this group of people for two weeks, they were kind of differentiated,

00:22:50.860 but for the first two weeks, they eat a ultra processed diet. For the next two weeks,

00:22:56.720 they eat a diet that is matched for everything, carbs, salt, all that for the other two weeks.

00:23:03.340 But this food is minimally processed. So it's a minimally processed version of the diet. So for

00:23:08.920 example, on one night of the ultra processed diet, you might be getting the Swanson meatloaf with the

00:23:15.780 mashed potatoes that have the butter and all that kind of stuff. On the unprocessed night,

00:23:22.120 that version might be cut a beef, some plain potatoes sort of thing.

00:23:27.460 And just to be clear, I believe it was an ad lib feed study.

00:23:30.740 Yes.

00:23:31.500 The participant eats as much of the food as they want.

00:23:34.960 Yes.

00:23:35.080 They're not being restricted.

00:23:36.080 Correct. So he's telling them, eat as much as you want until you feel full.

00:23:38.560 And what he finds is that when people are on the ultra processed diet, they end up eating about

00:23:45.900 500 more calories a day and they start to gain weight. When they're on the minimally processed

00:23:50.740 diet, they eat less and they start to spontaneously lose weight. And so I think one of the reasons for

00:23:56.860 this, obviously there's a lot of potential reasons, but I think one of the things that he thinks is

00:24:03.100 that speed becomes a factor. So when you process a food to the extent that it becomes, you know,

00:24:09.500 an ultra processed food, i.e. a junk food, it becomes a lot faster to eat and you simply end

00:24:15.960 up eating more of it. And there's more triggers to continue eating more of it because it is so

00:24:20.660 hyper palatable and enjoyable.

00:24:22.680 This leads to the three V's of snacking.

00:24:25.620 Yes. So I talked to a guy who's with the food industry and he says, if you want to get a snack food

00:24:32.800 to sell, it's got to have three V's. It's got to have value. So it's got to be relatively

00:24:37.840 affordable. It's got to have variety, meaning there's got to be a variety of flavors. The

00:24:42.700 flavors have to be intense. And oh, by the way, if you're making one, just one snack food, that's

00:24:47.100 not a good idea. Don't make just one original Pringles, make 20 Pringles, make barbecue Pringles,

00:24:52.600 make sour cream Pringles on and on and on. There's all this different varieties. And then three,

00:24:57.300 the third V is velocity. It has to be fast to eat. So snacking was not a sort of

00:25:02.780 cultural thing until about 1970. And once people start to really snack, I mean, this becomes,

00:25:08.800 this is a concerted movement by the food industry to go, okay, how do we sell more food? Let's invent

00:25:14.040 this category called snacking. And once you see snacking start to take off, I think you really

00:25:19.360 start to see the rise in obesity in our country and then have it trickle out across the world in 1970.

00:25:24.700 Yeah. It's kind of amazing to think that only 50 years ago, this concept, which seems

00:25:32.080 so ingrained in how we live. I mean, you can't really go anywhere. Like think about every time

00:25:37.080 you're on an airplane, there's like a snack basket. Everywhere you go, there are snacks.

00:25:42.720 There are snacks. Yeah. And so I think there's a lesson in that. When you think about, okay, well,

00:25:48.020 if I'm trying to eat less, how can I do that? Well, I think that the lessons from the Chimane 1.00

00:25:54.100 suggest, and there's other research that backs this up, is that foods that are minimally processed,

00:25:59.020 easy way to think about that is our ingredients rather than have ingredients, they cut the breaks

00:26:04.740 that sort of lead people to overeat, meaning it's a lot slower to eat foods that are unprocessed.

00:26:11.900 So let's go back to your example of the thousand calories of brownie versus a thousand calories

00:26:16.480 of broccoli. Yes. Those two things might make you equally fat, but I would love to watch a person

00:26:22.000 try and eat 1000 calories of broccoli. It's never going to happen. It just takes up so much volume

00:26:27.380 in your stomach. It's slow to eat. Whereas with a brownie, I mean, I've eaten a thousand calories of 0.99

00:26:32.320 brownie before. It's relatively easy to do. And I could do it right now. And it's enjoyable.

00:26:36.660 We can do it after this podcast. Yeah. No, no. You know, I get asked all the time about the

00:26:40.180 carnivore diet and people sort of say, what do you, what do you think of this? Does this really work?

00:26:43.500 And I said, look, as someone who's never done it, but who thinks about this problem a lot,

00:26:49.300 it doesn't really surprise me that if a person were limited to ribeyes and they couldn't eat a

00:26:55.820 single other thing, but ribeyes, despite how calorically dense a ribeye is, and it's right

00:27:00.460 at the top of calorically dense foods. Yeah. I can totally see how a person would lose weight.

00:27:05.720 Now, if you said, well, it's ribeyes plus baked potatoes, plus this, plus this, plus this,

00:27:11.520 and that's all I'm going to eat. Well, at some point it becomes a little bit comical. So yeah,

00:27:16.300 I think if you were stuck eating one food for the rest of your life, you would wither away

00:27:22.480 regardless of what that food is. And by the way, that might even apply to something as ridiculous 0.89

00:27:26.860 as ice cream. And conversely, if you want to make that even more extreme, if you want to 0.70

00:27:32.520 increase the number of food choices, you have to pull a different knob or dial a different lever

00:27:37.540 the other way, which is, okay, then you have to dial down the processing. Right. Yeah.

00:27:41.300 I just love this story. And then you go home and you decide you're going to give this a shot.

00:27:45.840 It's like the diet with no name. Yeah. So I hang out with this tribe for a while,

00:27:50.240 learn from them, observe what they're eating, fish with them, just hang out. Great people go

00:27:56.140 back to Las Vegas. And I decide, okay, I'm going to try this for a month. I'm going to see what

00:28:00.500 happens. So literally it's every food that I eat has to have just one ingredient. I got to mimic

00:28:06.220 as closely as I can what they're eating. Tell me this, when you go home, how many foods in your

00:28:11.320 pantry and refrigerator already fit that description? There's like eight foods in the pantry that

00:28:17.780 probably has 200 items that fit this, right? I've got like some apples in there.

00:28:22.180 So your pantry is as bad as mine.

00:28:23.420 Yeah. I've got some plain rice. I've got things that I think people would normally

00:28:27.320 maybe consider healthy, like whole wheat bread, flip that over. It's like, wow,

00:28:31.760 that's a long list of stuff. So I ended up going to Costco to try and solve for this problem. And I'm

00:28:37.540 walking the aisles and there's literally entire aisles that are just off limits. So you're left with a

00:28:42.980 very basic diet every single day. In the morning, I might eat something like oatmeal. I might eat

00:28:48.800 some eggs with that. At lunch, I might air fry some plantains and have some fish. At dinner, I would

00:28:55.000 have maybe a sweet potato with some green beans. And luckily we both hunt some elk. And I will tell

00:29:03.800 you, it was not as exciting as my normal diet. At the same time, I started dumping weight pretty fast

00:29:09.600 and I didn't necessarily want to lose weight. So I all of a sudden had to go, okay, if I want to

00:29:14.200 stay at, it was 180 pounds about, if I want to stay least at 175, I'm going to have to up my

00:29:20.320 caloric intake. Oh my gosh. It became so much food. You were force feeding yourself. I was force

00:29:26.740 feeding myself. Yes. So one day, for example, I'm like, okay, I'm trying to do some rough math in my

00:29:31.340 head of calories. I'm going, okay, we're going to need X amount of plantains, get them there. And it's

00:29:35.800 just, it's a mountain. It becomes tough to eat all that food.

00:29:39.600 By the way, did you restrict yourself in any other way? Did you not snack deliberately or

00:29:44.740 were you just never hungry between meals? If I wanted a snack, I would usually just have a

00:29:48.720 piece of fruit. The jungle out there is filled with fruit. I will say that was the one food they

00:29:51.980 had that was good. So they had pretty good fruit out there. Yeah, it was fantastic.

00:29:55.160 But I got to say, Michael, like that doesn't sound like an impossible to follow diet. If you have

00:29:59.960 control of your food environment, where I think a diet like that becomes challenging is the moment you

00:30:06.180 venture out of your own preparation bubble, i.e. the moment you go to someone's house for dinner

00:30:10.820 or the moment you go to a restaurant. So how did you navigate those situations?

00:30:15.140 That was absolutely challenging. The reality is, is I couldn't be perfect then, right? If my neighbor

00:30:19.260 invites me over and says, hey, we're making you dinner, I'm not going to walk in and be like,

00:30:22.480 okay, well, I got this food list from this tribe in the Amazon, please. Yeah. Just fry me up some

00:30:28.740 plantains. Air fry though. Only air fry. So I wasn't going to do that. So I would just kind of

00:30:33.600 do the best I could. If it's a cookout, they're going to have like some grilled chicken. They might

00:30:37.640 have some, I don't know, like potatoes or something. I would just do my best.

00:30:42.080 Do you have a sense of what your macros broke down into?

00:30:45.680 Heavier on the carbs.

00:30:46.760 What were you, roughly 50 carbs?

00:30:48.800 Yeah, more than 50% carbs. I would say 50 to 60 at least. Yeah. Could have been up into the 70s some

00:30:55.520 days.

00:30:55.700 What else did you have for protein besides fish?

00:30:58.720 Elk.

00:30:59.360 Oh, that's right. You mentioned elk. Would you season the elk?

00:31:02.340 I'm not going to lie. Sometimes I would put some salt on that, Peter.

00:31:05.700 And do you think that that's violating, I mean, again, there's no principle here we're trying

00:31:09.260 to adhere to, but do you think that that changed your appetitive behavior? Because that's effectively

00:31:14.220 what we're trying to get at here.

00:31:15.440 It makes it easier to eat. And if something's easier to eat, you're going to eat more of it.

00:31:19.960 How much protein were you able to eat per day? I mean, the eggs would be a good way to get

00:31:23.480 protein. But I mean, as much as I love meat, I really like to have salt and pepper on it.

00:31:30.060 Yeah. Well, I think that sometimes we discount how much protein comes from grains, depending

00:31:36.620 on what the grain is. And we often discount that. So if I'm having a giant bowl of oatmeal

00:31:40.540 in the morning, I mean, that might have 18, 20 grams right there.

00:31:44.500 But you can't mix it with anything. You wouldn't even put berries on the oatmeal?

00:31:48.320 I would sometimes put berries on the oatmeal.

00:31:49.680 Okay. So that doesn't violate the rule.

00:31:51.380 Yeah. No. We all got one ingredient here.

00:31:54.160 I see. So it's all single ingredients that can be mixed together.

00:31:56.980 Yeah. Yeah, exactly.

00:31:58.300 I kind of want to try this.

00:31:59.640 Oh, you should try it. One thing that was interesting is I followed up with a buddy

00:32:03.080 whose name is Trevor Cashy.

00:32:05.160 Oh yeah. You wrote about Trevor in the first book.

00:32:06.820 Yeah. He was in The Comfort Crisis. Brilliant guy. He's a biochemist and he ended up getting

00:32:11.440 into nutrition. I told him about what was happening and he said, basically, a lot of good

00:32:16.400 things can happen too. That even if you have a very low level allergy to a food that you're

00:32:20.680 not aware of, by cutting out a lot of the foods I did, it could be too that maybe I was

00:32:26.620 to some extent allergic to a food and I wasn't aware of it. And that helped me lose weight

00:32:31.420 or might've made me end up feeling better or something like that. So I think that there's

00:32:35.600 a lot of things, a lot of good things that can come out of a project like that. And the

00:32:39.520 reality is, is like, would I tell anyone to eat that exact way the rest of their life

00:32:43.640 and never violate that? No. Do I think that something like that is worth trying so you

00:32:49.500 can learn, okay, these are some foods that seem to work for me. I tend to feel more full

00:32:54.480 on fewer calories when I'm eating foods like this. And then from there you can go, okay,

00:33:00.000 like I have a general plan that's going to be like, I'm going to eat like this 80, 90%

00:33:04.880 of the time, whatever it might be. And then we do live in a world where it's amazing in the

00:33:10.400 sense that we can sit down and have that thousand calories of brownies. If I bring a thousand

00:33:15.080 calories of brownies to the Chimane, they're going to be like, oh my God, this is amazing.

00:33:19.260 They're going to eat it. And so I'm not saying that we should never eat ultra processed food.

00:33:23.580 I think the question is how do we manage that? Because we do live in a world where it's incredible

00:33:28.420 that we can have brownies, that we can have 15 different flavors of Doritos. It's all great.

00:33:32.880 But if we are eating those foods too often all the time, that becomes the brunt of our diet.

00:33:37.580 I mean, we know we're going to have issues. And I think that I believe a lot of the research

00:33:42.300 suggests that anywhere from 60 to 70% of American diet is ultra processed. So you start to look at

00:33:48.540 that and go, okay, we've got snacking, we've got people eating ultra processed food for most of the

00:33:54.380 foods they're eating. And I think it starts to make sense why you see scales start to get higher over

00:34:00.100 time. Do you have a sense of why some people are more or less immune to those effects?

00:34:06.480 There are some people who even when presented with ultra processed food, don't eat to excess.

00:34:13.480 And yet there are others, and I would put myself far on this scale where the only way I'm not going

00:34:19.300 to eat to excess in the setting of hyper palatable, hyper processed food is enormous self-discipline

00:34:26.100 when I can manage to exert it, which is not always and not most of the time. In other words,

00:34:30.780 I have to use hacks and tricks to get around it. Whereas I know people who can sit in front of a plate

00:34:35.900 of freshly made cookies and eat one while the entire plate sits there in front of them for the

00:34:41.720 next hour. That's a really good question. I don't think there's a perfect answer. I do think sometimes

00:34:47.860 food can be used for things other than nutrition. For example, stress relief, things like that,

00:34:54.900 emotions, dealing with emotions. I do think you tend to see, especially today, people eat for emotional

00:35:00.320 reasons. There was a study that I had in the comfort crisis that suggested that 80% of eating today is

00:35:06.440 driven by reasons other than true hunger. And so there's a lot of things it could be. It's a certain

00:35:11.200 time of day, but I think food is around, so you just eat it. But I do think that stress eating is a

00:35:15.800 thing that works. Eating food will solve your stress in the short term.

00:35:19.720 And where do you think that comes from in the sense that I want to talk about the scarcity loop? We

00:35:23.680 haven't defined it. I sort of jumped into it, but we're going to talk about what the scarcity loop is.

00:35:27.580 But there are some people, like I could walk into a casino, which we're going to talk about gambling.

00:35:32.980 It wouldn't even occur to me to play a slot machine. The thought wouldn't cross my mind.

00:35:38.740 I would just look at that and think, why would I ever want to waste a dollar? I say that not with

00:35:44.380 any judgment on those who have destroyed their lives at slot machines. If you said to me, you could

00:35:49.880 play the slot machine or watch the paint dry on the wall, I'd be like, well, at least I don't have to

00:35:53.980 pay to watch the paint dry. Yet there are some addictions, such as food, that I will struggle

00:35:59.880 with indefinitely. And we could go through the list. There are some people who drugs, whether it be

00:36:06.480 that first time they take a painkiller, it puts a hook into them that is very difficult for them to

00:36:11.900 escape. Alcohol, same thing. Never occurs to me to get drunk. And I know, obviously, you're sober. So

00:36:17.080 clearly, for you, alcohol scratched an itch, that it's never scratched for me. And I feel very

00:36:22.880 grateful for that. In other words, I don't think there's a moral difference between us. I think

00:36:28.400 there's like a biochemical difference. Do you have a sense of why each of us have different

00:36:35.100 vulnerabilities when it comes to the scarcity loop? I don't know if that, I mean, you might know,

00:36:39.540 but I don't think there's a very specific answer. Why do you like F1 and I like basketball? Who knows?

00:36:45.380 But I do think that probably exposure during vulnerable periods sets the table. So for example,

00:36:52.940 here's a good example from addiction research. If a person drinks at 15 or younger, they have a

00:37:00.500 coin flips chance of becoming an alcoholic. If they drink after 21, 21 or older, they have a 10% chance.

00:37:08.300 And so why is that? It's because your brain is developing such a way from puberty till you're

00:37:12.100 about 25 where you're trying to figure out, okay, how do I find comfort? How do I navigate the world?

00:37:16.280 How do I deal with stress? How do I deal with my problems? And so I think that that sort of gets

00:37:21.420 set in with alcohol, for example, that gets set in at that age and you go, oh, this is what works for

00:37:25.720 me. So it could be maybe the young age, like food works for you to help you deal with your problems.

00:37:31.660 For me, it was like, first time I drank when I was like 15, I'm like, wow, the world's way better

00:37:37.300 after this, right? It was like a very deep learning experience.

00:37:41.200 Yeah. That's so interesting. I remember reading that and thinking of my first time drinking,

00:37:45.380 which was 13, but I drank so much. It was funny. I worked at my dad's restaurant. It was New Year's

00:37:52.040 Eve. I was a bus boy. And at the end of the night, I went around and drank all of the remaining drinks

00:37:58.160 on the table of everything that was there, including this is back when you could even have a can of beer

00:38:04.520 and I'm pouring it out and like cigarette butts are coming out and I'm drinking the beer. Like

00:38:08.120 I got so drunk that not only did I vomit throughout the night, I was drunk the next day.

00:38:14.840 Is it just the case that that was such an unpleasant experience versus your experience? And by the way,

00:38:22.280 you know, recently Matthew Perry died. And I remember reading an article about him where he talked about

00:38:26.800 the first time he drank. I think he said, you know, he sort of drank a bottle of wine laid in a field

00:38:31.580 and was like, this is the greatest feeling in the world. So made me think that maybe it comes down to not

00:38:37.320 just age of exposure, but the reward that comes from that exposure. And maybe if there's no reward,

00:38:43.560 and in fact, there's a punishment physiologically, it could have the opposite effect.

00:38:48.560 Yeah, I think so. I mean, I think you learn that this thing is good. You do this thing. Oh, that was a good

00:38:53.560 outcome. I'm going to do that again because I want that good thing again. Whereas with you, your exposure to

00:38:58.280 alcohol was, okay, I did this thing. Wow. That was terrible. I'm not going to do that again. Right.

00:39:03.720 It's for you. It's like putting your hand on the stove. So, Oh, not doing that ever again. For me,

00:39:10.300 it was like, I flipped on the stove and this amazing five course best meal of my life appeared. And it

00:39:15.820 was like, wow, I'm going to be touching that stove button to get that to happen again. So I think it's,

00:39:20.460 it's very much just a learned behavior. I mean, that's how humans learn. That's why we do what we do

00:39:24.520 because we get rewarded for it. And so I think it just sort of gets set in particularly at a young

00:39:30.500 age. And it could be that by the time going back to that study, by the time you're 21, well, you

00:39:35.520 figured out these other ways to navigate the world, what you get rewards from. And so if you've waited

00:39:40.940 until 21, you're like, well, I have all these other things that give me rewards. Yeah. You figured

00:39:46.300 out other self-soothing tools. Yeah. So let's now talk about the scarcity loop. There are three

00:39:52.520 components to it. And these three components get exploited in our lives everywhere we go.

00:40:00.880 What are they and how do they feed off each other? So for context, the reason that I started

00:40:05.040 thinking about this is that I live in Las Vegas and in Vegas, I mean, you talked about your experience

00:40:11.760 with the slot machines. Well, not everyone in Vegas feels the way you do about slot machines.

00:40:16.100 And I don't say that with any judgment or moral superiority. I truly believe there's a biological

00:40:21.260 difference between me and that person in Vegas who could throw their life away.

00:40:26.060 Yeah, totally. I agree. So I basically make the observation that one, you have to realize

00:40:30.760 that slot machines are all over Las Vegas. They're in the grocery stores, they're in the gas stations,

00:40:34.840 they're in the restaurants, the bars, they're in the airport. And people play them all the time.

00:40:39.540 And so when I go down to the gas station to fill up my truck and get a Diet Coke, I'll see people

00:40:45.460 in there at 7 a.m. playing slot machine. And I see that and I go, why would anyone do that?

00:40:51.260 It doesn't make any sense because everyone knows the house always wins.

00:40:54.260 And by the way, when the house wins in blackjack and poker, it's only slightly. It's 51-49.

00:41:00.480 How much does the house win in slot machines? 0.99

00:41:02.740 So it's actually not super, super far off of those odds. So in the past, slot machines used to be,

00:41:09.280 they call them one-arm bandits because the case was that they were one-arm bandits. Now I believe that

00:41:13.760 slot machines return about 85 cents for every dollar you spend on average.

00:41:17.920 Which is smart for reasons you're going to explain.

00:41:20.540 Yeah. We'll get into why that works and why once they shifted from not giving people frequent

00:41:25.820 wins and rewards to more frequent wins and rewards, why slot machines took off.

00:41:30.640 So I make this observation about slot machines and I start wondering, okay, how does a slot machine work?

00:41:36.800 How can this thing get people to be down at the 7-Eleven and sit for hours and hours and play this

00:41:41.980 thing where you know you're going to lose? Play it long enough, you're going to lose. It's just how it

00:41:46.060 works. So I go into journalist mode and what was fascinating is the first people that I call

00:41:52.640 are people who are, I would guess I would term them, they're gambling researchers, but they have

00:41:57.440 a very anti-gambling bent. Okay. So they're looking at, okay, here's all the reasons why gambling hurts

00:42:01.700 us. Here's why people get hooked on slot machines. And I call them up and I talk to these people

00:42:05.640 and they tell me all sorts of things that are kind of like the myths you hear about casinos.

00:42:10.240 So one person said slot machines only play in the key of C and the key of C is very pleasing to people

00:42:16.860 and it relaxes their wallet, relaxes them and in turn their wallets. Another person tells me,

00:42:21.860 oh, casinos don't use right angles because right angles activate the decision-making part of your

00:42:25.600 brain and that'll slow down your rate of gambling, all these different things. Another one was casinos

00:42:31.060 don't have clocks, so you lose track of time. Did you hear the one about how casinos inject oxygen

00:42:36.440 into the air? I don't know why that would make you want to gamble more, but I remember hearing

00:42:40.700 that they're pumping oxygen into the room. Also known as the biggest fire hazard ever known to

00:42:44.820 man. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. So I go, okay, sounds good. But the problem is, is I live in Las Vegas and

00:42:50.900 I got a casino, like two exits for me. So I go into the casino. No, they don't have clocks. Neither

00:42:55.780 does Costco. Neither does Walmart. Neither does any normal business. We don't just hang clocks

00:42:59.900 everywhere. I don't have one in here, by the way. I don't know if you noticed. Right. Well,

00:43:02.400 you're trying to manipulate me somehow. I am trying to get you to play a slot machine.

00:43:05.240 The right angles thing, slot machine screens are a square. Those are right angles. And then I call

00:43:10.740 up a slot machine audio composer who lives in Vegas. It's a real job you can have in that town.

00:43:16.000 He goes, where'd you hear that? I use all keys. I'm just trying to make the best little jingle

00:43:20.720 that I can. I'm just trying to have fun. So I realized that my inherent problem is that I am

00:43:26.020 talking to people who want us all to stop gambling. And I need to talk to the people who

00:43:31.180 want us to start gambling, right? I got to follow the money on this thing.

00:43:34.180 So long story short is through some different contacts. I ended up at this place on the edge

00:43:39.260 of town in Vegas, and it's this new cutting edge casino, but it is not fully open to the public

00:43:44.900 like a normal casino would be. It's a casino laboratory. So it's used entirely for research

00:43:50.180 on human behavior. And the people invested in this are gambling companies. So big gambling

00:43:55.540 companies, Void, Caesars, whatever, all the big names, but also a lot of tech companies.

00:43:59.760 So there's 73 different companies that are invested in this place. And it is very much

00:44:04.760 like a twilight zone of casinos. You're walking into this place and you're like, I'm in a casino,

00:44:08.040 but there's a lot of people with PhDs. They're doing studies. And I ended up talking to a guy

00:44:13.620 who designed slot machines. And he basically explains, oh yeah, here's how a slot machine

00:44:18.380 works. And he lays out this system. And I talked to other people who talk about it in different

00:44:23.040 ways. So I call it the scarcity loop. And so the reason a slot machine works is it works

00:44:27.960 on this three-part system that I call the scarcity loop. So part one, the first condition is

00:44:34.320 opportunity. You have an opportunity to get something of value. So in the case of a slot

00:44:38.620 machine, it's money, right? Part two is unpredictable rewards. You know, you're going to get the thing

00:44:44.920 of value at some point, but you don't know when, and you don't know how valuable it's going

00:44:48.420 to be. So with the slot machine, once you play a game and those reels are rolling, they could

00:44:52.420 all land and you get nothing. They could land and you win say $2 on your dollar bet, or you could

00:44:57.880 win $20,000 on your dollar bet. There's a crazy range of outcomes every single game.

00:45:03.180 And then three, and this is important, is quick repeatability. So once those reels land,

00:45:08.340 you can immediately repeat the behavior. You can play again. So the average slot machine

00:45:12.660 player plays 16 games a minute, which is more than we blink. Now, the reason that this is

00:45:19.140 important to talk about, that we're not just talking about slot machines here, right? This

00:45:23.400 isn't a gambling podcast, is that this system can get people to do a lot of other behaviors

00:45:28.860 that are seemingly irrational too. So it's what makes a lot of different systems like social media

00:45:34.800 work. You post something, you got an opportunity to get some likes, some status. So you check and

00:45:41.340 recheck because you don't know when those likes are coming in. You don't know if your post is going

00:45:45.120 to go viral. You might get canceled. You might get a message from someone that you think is great,

00:45:50.580 on and on and on. It's in dating apps. It's in different financial apps. So one of the reasons

00:45:55.120 that Robinhood really took off is because they increased the quick repeatability by removing 0.99

00:46:00.040 fees for trades. It's in online shopping. A lot of advertisers are using casino-like features in their

00:46:06.200 ads to drive profits. And that's led to a seven-fold increase in conversion rates when they put like a

00:46:11.500 spinning wheel for a discount. And so I think when you start to look at the behaviors that people have

00:46:17.600 a hard time moderating, I think a lot of them rely on this system. So let's talk a little bit more about

00:46:25.540 how one can use that information to break the cycle. Let's talk about drug use. You chose a very

00:46:32.920 interesting place to go to investigate drug use. I was very surprised by that given the problems we have

00:46:40.940 here in the U.S. You could have literally gone to any city in the U.S. I'm not sure why you had to

00:46:46.840 go into Baghdad. The reason that I went into Baghdad is because you had nothing and now you have

00:46:52.800 something. And it really stands for what I think the conditions that you need for a addiction epidemic

00:46:59.760 to rise. So to give some context, for most of time, Iraq didn't have a drug problem. And a lot of

00:47:08.120 that was for political reasons. Saddam ruled with kind of an iron fist around that. And then the U.S.

00:47:13.100 invades and it destabilizes the country. So you have a big population that has lived through a war.

00:47:20.020 And then soon after Syria falls, Syria becomes a narco state effectively. And they start producing 0.98

00:47:27.100 a drug that is called captagon and it's analogous to methamphetamine. And so they start sending this

00:47:32.820 drug all throughout the Middle East. So you've got three things. You got one, you have a population who 1.00

00:47:37.640 is in a lot of pain. You have few ways to deal with that pain that are more productive, not a lot

00:47:43.320 of options. And then three, you have a substance that solves that pain, that problem in the short

00:47:49.940 term immediately. And so I think that leads to that rise in addiction. And you see it here in the U.S.

00:47:56.600 as well. It's like, why did the opioid epidemic start in states where the factories had moved out?

00:48:03.480 Well, it's because factories move out. Our lives change. We don't have a lot of resources.

00:48:06.980 Things have gotten really dark. And now we have this flood of pills that can take away those

00:48:14.240 problems in the short term, that can allow us to escape from that life we live. But I think the

00:48:19.240 reason for going to Iraq instead of a place in the U.S. is simply that this is happening now on the

00:48:25.840 ground and it is just booming and it is a new substance. So there are two models for drug

00:48:32.780 addiction. What are those two models? So we've thought about it two different ways.

00:48:37.280 That it's a moral failing, i.e. a drug user, an addict is a bad person. They're making this

00:48:44.140 very specific choice to just mess over other people and putting themselves ahead of everyone else.

00:48:50.400 Even an extension of that is they simply don't have the self-management, self-discipline.

00:48:54.300 So even if they're not deliberately doing this to sabotage their life, they're so lacking in moral

00:49:00.480 character that they can't manage themselves. Yeah. And then the second is the brain disease model.

00:49:06.060 That addiction is the result of a brain disease. Effectively, drugs change your brain in such a way

00:49:11.560 that removes your capacity to make any decisions around the behavior. And that drug addiction is a

00:49:17.160 chronic and relapsing disease. Now let's talk about a counter example to both of those. What do we know

00:49:26.220 about Vietnam vets' use of heroin when they were in Vietnam versus when they returned? And what does

00:49:33.180 that tell us? In the Vietnam War, you had about 20 to 25 percent of soldiers, U.S. soldiers who were in

00:49:40.580 Vietnam were addicted to heroin, regular, frequent users of heroin. And President Nixon, he decides,

00:49:48.840 I don't want to let all these heroin addicts back into the United States. It was a significant number

00:49:53.940 of people. So he decides to start a program that is called Operation Golden Flow. And the deal is this.

00:50:02.240 If you want to come back into the United States as a soldier who's been in Vietnam, you have to

00:50:07.440 produce a clean urine test. If you do not produce a clean urine test, you will be left in Vietnam. 1.00

00:50:13.500 So if addiction basically obliterates the capacity to make any choices, any decisions, you would expect

00:50:20.320 that 25 percent of soldiers in Vietnam would be left in Vietnam. Now what actually happened is that

00:50:26.900 nearly every single one provided clean urine. And when they got back into the United States,

00:50:32.400 the vast majority of them, about 95 percent, managed to stay clean. The 5 percent that relapsed,

00:50:38.360 they tended to be people who had used drugs before the war. So this suggests that people aren't

00:50:44.140 necessarily a slave to chemicals, right? That maybe it's a little bit more nuanced than it being

00:50:52.360 purely a brain disease where choice is completely obliterated.

00:50:55.440 And so how can we extrapolate from that to where we are today? In other words, we're sitting in the

00:51:02.260 midst of an unbelievable epidemic. I've even done a podcast on this, and it's a little outside of

00:51:08.980 my area of expertise. And you could argue, and I have argued, that it does impact longevity because

00:51:15.240 mortality rates for the U.S. population are actually in a small state of decline, being driven almost

00:51:23.540 exclusively by the death of people aged roughly 25 to 55, where we've seen the deaths of despair

00:51:32.320 increase at a rate we've never seen before. So deaths of despair, and the biggest of the three

00:51:38.280 deaths of despair, so we count accidental overdose, that includes poisoning, right? So fentanyl in a drug

00:51:44.240 that you don't think has fentanyl, alcohol-related deaths and suicides. So those three are collectively

00:51:49.260 expanding, but the greatest of the three by far is the overdose, the non-suicide overdose. So what do

00:51:56.600 you think explains that? How much of each of the relative contributions do you think are contributing

00:52:01.080 to that? Because it's no longer just in the old steel mill town, which I think probably explained the

00:52:08.460 thin edge of the wedge in the late 90s and early 2000s. But here we are 25 years later, and this is an

00:52:16.380 epidemic in any and every city, including my city of Austin. Yeah. I think if you're looking at it

00:52:22.300 purely from a death statistics, that goes back to fentanyl, and that fentanyl is being put in drugs that

00:52:29.120 are all over the country now, and people aren't necessarily aware that they're getting a drug.

00:52:33.520 So I think we also have to back up and go, okay, well, why do people use drugs?

00:52:38.200 Why would people use a drug knowing that there's a risk that there's fentanyl in something that they

00:52:43.240 weren't expecting fentanyl to be in? Right. I think when you look at drugs from a historical

00:52:47.860 perspective, humans have always used psychoaptic substances as tools to accomplish something. So

00:52:54.640 if you think about chewing coca leaf in South America, right, the coca leaf was used to enhance

00:53:00.320 focus on long hunts, to kill hunger on long hunts when you couldn't find food. Same with tobacco. And so

00:53:07.360 you tend to see that substances have always been used as a tool to accomplish something because

00:53:12.460 they benefited the person's life somehow. Now, what has changed between today and 100,000 years ago

00:53:21.260 is that we've taken our substances and we have distilled them into something where the psychoactive

00:53:27.680 component is so strong and pure that it really can become almost an obliterant in a way, right? And

00:53:35.680 over time, the availability has risen as well. So I think when you think about something like

00:53:42.380 fentanyl being placed into things is I think there's a lot of people that can use drugs and be okay.

00:53:48.560 Would I recommend that? No. But can people use drugs recreationally? I think there are plenty of people

00:53:55.040 who can and do. The work of Carl Hart, for example, gets into this a lot. And so what happens when you

00:54:02.860 start getting fentanyl in drugs that people who are using it recreationally get, you start to see

00:54:08.600 people who die. So there's recently in New York City, there was a bad batch of cocaine that had

00:54:14.460 fentanyl in it. And you had five people die in Manhattan in a single night. And these are not

00:54:18.560 people living on the street. These are like people who have an apartment. These are white collar people

00:54:23.140 who use cocaine recreationally. Yeah, exactly. And so I think that that really accounts for the rise in

00:54:28.780 overdose deaths. You're not necessarily thinking that we're seeing an increase in the epidemic of,

00:54:35.940 I don't know how to describe it, but catastrophic drug use or drug use that is commensurate with

00:54:41.320 no function in life outside of drug use. I think we very well might be because the substances,

00:54:47.340 when I'm talking about deaths being spread around the country, I think that accounts for that. But I do

00:54:51.260 think that our substances today are strong enough that they can have more extreme consequences.

00:54:56.420 In other words, the deaths of despair might be over counting because some of those people dying

00:55:01.500 might not be the same. Yeah. That said, a pushback to that would be, look, should anybody really be

00:55:07.800 using cocaine? What does it say about us if we need to be using cocaine? Let's go back to the example

00:55:12.760 you gave. We clearly evolved to enjoy the rush of norepinephrine, but the cocoa leaf never produced

00:55:22.060 the concentrated high. In many ways, the drugs of today are the equivalent of a bag of peanut M&Ms.

00:55:29.220 Right. They're simply so concentrated in bliss that there's nothing that compared to, it's not that you

00:55:36.240 couldn't eat a peanut before or even have some cacao, but nobody imagined the crunchy shell with the

00:55:43.980 sugar and the chocolate and the this and that and the other thing. That's sort of what the cocaine and

00:55:48.320 the heroin are to their predecessor, right? Yeah, exactly. That same logic, though,

00:55:54.680 too, also applies for alcohol, which we culturally accept. So in the past, our sort of proclivity as

00:56:00.120 humans for alcohol is probably because alcohol used to help us find food. So when you think about

00:56:05.020 we're searching the land for fruit, fruit would fall from trees, it would ripen on the ground,

00:56:10.060 it would begin to ferment, and it would put off this funky smell from the alcohol. That would help us

00:56:14.740 find the food. When we actually got the fruit, that low level of alcohol in the fruit would help us

00:56:20.760 eat more of it. It's the aperture effect. So now, though, we have last night at my hotel in Austin,

00:56:27.600 they've got this big, super long bar, and you can see all the bottles. And how many of them have the

00:56:33.380 same amount of alcohol that fermented fruit would have? Yeah, pretty much zero.

00:56:36.580 We're talking like bourbons that are, you know, 120 proof or whatever. So I think that the more that

00:56:44.060 you scale up and concentrate the psychoactive substances, I think probably the more problems

00:56:49.380 you can get into. Then there's like this debate. It's like, okay, well, if alcohol is okay, should

00:56:54.400 the government regulate cocaine? And that way, we don't have to worry about fentanyl being in it. I

00:56:57.940 mean, that's just like an entire can of worms that probably best left for policymakers.

00:57:02.820 What does the use of methadone tell us about how to at least address one of the issues in the

00:57:11.200 scarcity loop if you're trying to help a person who's opioid addicted?

00:57:15.600 Yeah. So one of the things that I think makes drugs so compelling and attractive to people

00:57:20.180 is the element of the scarcity loop of unpredictability. So when you think about

00:57:25.200 getting and using any street drug, there's a lot of unpredictable elements in that.

00:57:30.020 Are you going to be able to find the drug? Are you going to get in trouble?

00:57:33.260 As you try and find the drug. Once you get the drug, how strong is it going to be? Is it going

00:57:37.140 to be really good? Is it going to be really bad? And then you use it and a lot could happen from

00:57:41.040 there. And so with methadone, you find that once you make the drug predictable in the sense that

00:57:47.280 the environment becomes predictable, the timing of when you get it becomes predictable, the dose

00:57:52.940 becomes predictable. You start to see people be able to wane off of drugs. And in fact, people who use

00:57:57.980 methadone often won't get high from the drug. And I think you see this in a lot of pharmaceuticals

00:58:03.200 as well. The addiction rate for prescribed drugs that are controlled where the dose and

00:58:08.300 the timing is controlled, the addiction rates for those are way lower simply because there's

00:58:12.320 no unpredictability. There's no game behind it.

00:58:14.600 All right. Let's pivot a little bit and talk about material possessions. You've alluded to

00:58:19.260 it already because you mentioned how during the pandemic, many of us increased our e-shopping.

00:58:27.440 And I suppose like all good addictions, there's an adaptive component to that.

00:58:34.620 Like at the beginning of the pandemic, when it was March and April of 2020, I think there's a pretty

00:58:39.120 good reason not to go out. We had no idea what we were dealing with. And the fact that Amazon could

00:58:43.560 deliver things to my door that I used to go out for made complete and total sense. And yet, why is it

00:58:50.720 that I probably still buy as much on Amazon now as I did then, if not more?

00:58:56.980 I think there are evolutionary reasons for having more items. If you could get more tools as a person,

00:59:06.180 that probably gave you a survival advantage. Having more items was probably a better idea than having

00:59:10.540 less, especially when you're trying to survive. So I think we still have this drive to accumulate

00:59:17.400 stuff. But the difference of course, is that now we live in a world where we manufacture so much stuff

00:59:24.260 and it's cheaper than ever before. So even just a couple hundred years ago, the average person,

00:59:29.200 for example, owned about three outfits. Now the average person owns 104 outfits and they also only wear

00:59:35.940 10% of the clothes that they own. I think the stats are 20% of the stuff in our closets. We don't wear it

00:59:42.820 all. I think there's another, I'm going to get the math here wrong, 40% or something that we're like,

00:59:49.060 eh, it's okay. I don't really love it. And then there's a few items where I wear them sometimes.

00:59:53.840 And then we're left with 10% where we actually repeatedly wear those items all the time. And

00:59:57.840 that tracks with my own experience. And so I think really the difference today is that we've always

01:00:02.940 had this itch to own things, to possess things, but we can never scratch it that often. Things took

01:00:08.460 time to make. Because of that, they were more expensive. It was harder to get the resources

01:00:13.620 to make them. And then once the industrial revolution happens, we start cranking out stuff

01:00:18.280 at an amazing rate. Now, again, this kind of goes back to the food thing where it's like, well,

01:00:22.460 this is a good problem to have. But I think you tend to see people collect and collect and collect items.

01:00:28.860 And now the average house, according to one estimate, has anywhere from 10,000 to 40,000 items in it.

01:00:34.540 So we clearly can see a direct and negative consequence to our well-being due to the scarcity

01:00:43.560 loops impact on food, which is for 70% of us, it results in overweight or obesity. For that subset

01:00:52.460 of the population, there's a nearly doubling of risk in other chronic diseases. You might not feel

01:00:59.540 the pain immediately, but there is a real and clear threat to your longevity. What are the downsides

01:01:08.140 of stuff accumulation outside of the extremes? So clearly there are people who have like hoarding

01:01:13.280 diseases. And then clearly there are people who could buy so much stuff that it would financially

01:01:18.880 ruin them in the same way a gambler could be ruined. But I suspect that most people listening to

01:01:24.480 this are more like me, where they have too much stuff, but it doesn't seem to pose a direct risk

01:01:32.280 to them. Yet I suspect that there's something harmful about it. What is that?

01:01:37.620 Well, I do think there's some interesting research that suggests being around too much clutter. I do think

01:01:43.920 it impacts your ability to focus. It seems to be related to anxiety, different things. Now,

01:01:50.540 is it a direct threat like heart disease is? No. But I think what tends to happen is when you look at

01:01:57.880 why people buy, I think there's basically four reasons. I think the first is items are tools.

01:02:04.860 We use them to accomplish a greater goal. This is probably how people would have used things for most

01:02:10.840 of time. Two, we can use them to get status. So you're buying something in order to display something

01:02:20.480 about yourself to others. It's kind of a status play. It's like no one buys a Rolex because they

01:02:25.360 want to know what time it is. You're talking to a watch guy here.

01:02:28.900 Well, same here. I'm aware of it. I'm talking crap on myself. And then number three is that we can

01:02:36.100 use goods to belong. You wear your F1 shirt when you go to the F1 race. It's like you're part of

01:02:41.020 this community and it pulls you into the community. And I think you see that practically beyond sports.

01:02:46.940 I mean, certain types of people wear Patagonia. Certain types of people wear the Black Rifle Coffee

01:02:52.220 Company shirt. We kind of get these tribes that we can identify with via a thing to buy.

01:02:57.980 And then the fourth reason I think, and I think this was a powerful one during the pandemic,

01:03:02.140 is simply that people are bored. We today have much faster, easier opportunity to purchase stuff

01:03:09.940 than we ever have before. Even 20 years ago, if a person wanted to buy something, if they're bored.

01:03:15.640 They had to actually go out and do it. You had to go out and do it. You had to get in your car.

01:03:19.500 You had to go to the store. You had to walk the aisles. Is this the thing I want? Is this thing

01:03:23.680 there? It's a time-consuming process. Now we can just do it online. We can search Amazon. Not to

01:03:28.540 mention. I think that when you look at how algorithms have evolved, I mean, anyone who's

01:03:33.680 ever spent 10 seconds on Instagram, they know that that machine knows what they want to purchase

01:03:39.620 more than they do themselves. That's what amazes me. Usually when Instagram suggests something to me,

01:03:46.940 it's good. It's good. Whereas interestingly, Google isn't nearly as good for some reason. I don't

01:03:53.960 know why. Google seems to really suggest dumb things to me. I have no interest in, but not 0.97

01:03:59.060 Instagram. Yeah. Instagram is very good. Very good. I think it's probably taps in better to

01:04:03.780 It's probably that you interact with it in a different way, even though I barely spend time

01:04:08.160 on social media. It must know when I watch an exercise video, or maybe it knows I'm posting

01:04:14.020 exercise video. It's always suggesting the coolest exercise equipment. And I'm always like,

01:04:19.660 even though I don't have any room for that, I could really use that device.

01:04:25.140 You and I are the same. I get exercise contraptions, and I'm sorry to bring up the

01:04:28.820 Grateful Dead again on your podcast. But once I start following all these random Grateful Dead

01:04:34.060 accounts, what am I getting? I'm getting like, oh, you need this shirt from the 1994 tour. It's

01:04:39.620 awesome. Dang it. That's the other thing I get. I get a lot of t-shirt ads for things that I'm

01:04:45.820 clearly doing. Yeah. If you are bored, you might first get bored and you feel that discomfort.

01:04:51.760 And so the boredom, I talked about this on the last podcast, talked about it in the comfort crisis,

01:04:56.000 but boredom is this evolutionary discomfort that basically just tells us whatever you're doing

01:04:59.940 with your time right now, the return on your time is worn thin. So go do something else. Now in the

01:05:04.520 past, that something else was often productive. If you think about hunter-gatherers, if no animals are

01:05:08.780 coming through when they're hunting, what they're going to do is go, okay, well, maybe we could fish.

01:05:12.740 Maybe we could pick potatoes. Maybe we could pick berries. Today, when we feel that discomfort,

01:05:17.200 we have a lot of very easy, effortless, hyper-stimulating escapes from it in the form of

01:05:21.940 cell phones, in the form of TVs. And so now when you feel it, it's like, okay, pull out your cell

01:05:26.600 phone. Well, I guess I'll open Instagram. I'm scrolling. I'm still bored. Oh, there's that t-shirt

01:05:31.680 I love or that exercise contraption. And then it's like, yeah, I guess I'll buy it. And so I think you

01:05:36.760 start to see purchases really up when we can repeat the behavior faster. So as a general rule,

01:05:41.480 the faster a human, any animal can repeat the behavior, the more likely they are to repeat

01:05:46.600 the behavior. And this is something that came up in slot machines in the 80s, as we kind of alluded

01:05:50.760 to. Yeah. I've thought a lot about what you just said with respect to boredom from our first

01:05:55.720 discussion. And I've tried to be more cognizant of it. And in particular, like how uncomfortable I

01:06:01.980 am when I'm bored. And there aren't that many times I get to be bored. But this idea that just going

01:06:08.440 places without your phone, which I think is a good practice. Like I'm going to go somewhere

01:06:12.600 today and I'm not going to take my phone because I can actually live without it. I used to do this.

01:06:18.520 There was a day when I did this before. And then you find yourself in the line at the store without

01:06:23.900 a phone. And it's odd at first. It's really weird. It's like it's five minutes where there's nothing

01:06:29.920 to do. I also think that you can train yourself to realize that it's an opportunity.

01:06:34.880 Oh, yeah. It's a beautiful opportunity to just observe your thoughts, to observe some element of

01:06:41.920 the surrounding. It's actually why you and I've talked about this. It's why I love rucking. It's a

01:06:46.300 no phone zone that is great. But I think there's something different about rucking in that it's so

01:06:51.240 physically challenging or you can make it so physically challenging that the lack of music or

01:06:55.800 stimulation is okay. There's something about stillness and otherwise boredom that I think can be

01:07:01.680 challenging. And to think that if we didn't have that drive, our species might not have survived.

01:07:09.020 That's a very cool thought to me. Oh, yeah, absolutely. You asked me,

01:07:13.160 did you sort of adapt to the chimane food? I do think you can adapt to boredom. So for example,

01:07:21.140 you know, in the comfort crisis, I spent all this time in the Arctic. And I will say that the boredom

01:07:25.500 was most intense early on in the trip, after you've sort of removed yourself from the incoming

01:07:31.720 emails, the screens, the million things that you're normally doing, things start to slow down and you

01:07:37.000 start to calm down and you start to become more observant. I mean, I will tell you probably the

01:07:41.980 most mentally well I've ever been in my life was after a couple of weeks up in the Arctic. You're just

01:07:48.840 dialed in. You just feel so much calmer. And I do think that we live in a world now of hyperspeed.

01:07:55.880 Anytime we want to be stimulated, we can do that. And by the way, it's going to be TikTok coming at

01:08:01.660 you fast. So I do think that there's a case for finding time in your life for removal from all that

01:08:07.340 to sort of lean back into boredom. One of the things, I guess, issues I've had with a lot of the

01:08:12.960 messaging around how people need to use their cell phone less is that like, yes, that is important.

01:08:17.880 But what tends to happen is when people take an hour off their phone screen time,

01:08:21.480 they go, okay, well, I'm bored. What do I do now? And they turn on Netflix and there's no difference.

01:08:27.480 So I advocate for trying to think, how can I infuse boredom back into my life? And really for me,

01:08:33.820 that's go out, take a walk for 20 minutes, see what happens to your thoughts, be willing to sort of sit

01:08:39.440 with that and see where it leads you beyond the screen. Because on the screen is what everyone else is

01:08:44.360 getting. And so I think this is particularly great for ideation. I think this is one of the reasons

01:08:49.420 why people have their best ideas in the shower, because you're not focused on anything. You're

01:08:54.180 just kind of letting your mind wander, do its thing. And then bam, that's the angle, whatever it is,

01:08:59.180 that's the idea.

01:09:00.640 Finishing out this discussion on stuff, my kids have many more toys than I had. My wife and I talk

01:09:07.580 about this a lot because I kind of live vicariously through them when it comes to Lego. So I just can't

01:09:14.240 stop buying Lego because I love building it with them, watching them build it, creating a huge Lego

01:09:19.700 city. But I wonder, like, is there a downside of this? Because my kids are good kids. Like,

01:09:25.700 I don't feel like they're spoiled brats or anything like that. But I only had one Lego and I had to take

01:09:31.620 it apart and put it together and take it apart and put it together, take it apart and together. And the

01:09:34.660 truth of it is, I see them getting bored of Legos. They're so conditioned that anytime a new one comes

01:09:41.400 out, dad goes and gets it because he can't wait to see it kind of thing. And I do wonder, like,

01:09:46.300 am I doing them a disservice in the long run? Am I depriving them of a scarcity that I had?

01:09:53.620 There's an interesting study I came across when writing this book. It had groups of people and

01:09:58.280 it had them solve a problem. And one group was told they had abundant resources to solve it. They

01:10:03.840 could do all these different things to solve a problem. The other group had scarce resources.

01:10:07.340 And so they had to come up with different uses for tools. And what ended up happening is that

01:10:11.500 the group that was faced with more scarce resources, they not only solved the problem,

01:10:16.600 but they got more rewards from solving the problem by MacGyvering it. So when I think about it as applied

01:10:22.480 to Legos, so in the book, I lay out what's a good way to think about making a purchase. And one of the

01:10:28.920 things that I argue for is framing purchases through the lens of gear, not stuff. So gear is

01:10:34.360 an item that is allowing me to accomplish something that is life-giving, right? It's adding to this

01:10:39.640 experience that adds meaning into my life, whereas stuff is often just kind of a purchase to fulfill

01:10:44.720 an impulse. I'm buying something because I think it's going to make me this other person. If I buy this

01:10:50.120 shirt, I'm going to look like this. It's going to be awesome. My life's going to, whatever. You get the

01:10:54.040 point. When I think about your experience with Legos, that does seem to be adding a real enhancement

01:10:59.280 to your life. Like you're getting this time with your kids where you're building Legos. At the same time,

01:11:03.980 it might be interesting. Now that you've got this pile of Legos from all these killer kits, what could

01:11:08.700 we make with this, guys? We're not following the plan here anymore. We're going, could we build a castle?

01:11:14.720 What would a castle look like with the resources we have? And I think that that would probably lead them

01:11:19.180 to exercise creativity. We've already learned that. When you buy the kit, they love to build the thing,

01:11:25.440 but then they like to keep it and play with it as is. But where they get far more enjoyment

01:11:31.400 is the loose Lego pile. So you go to Lego store, you can buy loose Lego. And then there's a store

01:11:36.520 called Bricks and Minifigs. It's just a free for all. And they spend 80% of their time building

01:11:43.600 a city that is huge. I'll show you after the podcast. You will find it hilarious. It's taken

01:11:49.500 up our basement and it's just made from the loose Lego and it's their own stuff. Every month we go

01:11:55.300 get more pieces. They add another floor to the condo. They've built the grocery store where I print

01:12:01.400 out HEB is the grocery store in Texas. So like I've made and laminated HEB signs that then stick on

01:12:09.300 their grocery stores and all this other stuff. So I think you're right. I think they must be getting

01:12:12.940 more enjoyment out of that because it's where they're putting more time.

01:12:16.060 Yeah. As part of the book, I talk about the value of exploration. So this feeds into information

01:12:22.840 in that I think humans have a desire for information. In the past, if you were the person who had more

01:12:30.020 information, if you could crave information and try and get it, try to cure these uncertainties,

01:12:33.980 I would give you a survival advantage. Now we're still wired to crave information. And I think that

01:12:39.060 anyone has experienced this practically anytime you get a itch in your side and you're going,

01:12:44.440 oh my gosh, am I dying? You're going down WebMD. We know we want information. Twitter wouldn't work

01:12:48.820 if people weren't information hoarders. But I think the difference between how we acquired information

01:12:54.520 in the past and how we acquire it today is that in the past, you had to go there in the present moment

01:13:00.140 to learn something. It was a mind-body effort to get a piece of information. Is there greener grass over

01:13:06.120 there? Well, you have to go to the other side to see if there is greener grass and it's very up in

01:13:10.860 the air. There's a lot of uncertainties, but by going through that mind-body process outdoors,

01:13:16.980 that real roll of the dice, you get more value from that when you realize, oh, we found this greener

01:13:22.480 grass. This is great. And I think today, because we can Google so much, we still have this information

01:13:29.560 itch, but we scratch it online. So now I think that people's experiences of their day-to-day life

01:13:36.020 oftentimes get mediated by information from other people. So what do I mean by that? Okay. When

01:13:41.540 is the last time that you went to a restaurant just cold, right? You just picked a random restaurant.

01:13:45.700 You didn't read the Yelps from five different people. You didn't read all the reviews. You

01:13:49.560 didn't look at the menu. You didn't kind of go, oh, that looks like a good table. Hopefully we can get

01:13:53.900 that one. Now by doing that, when you get to that restaurant, your experience in there has totally

01:13:57.940 changed. Totally changed because you now have expectations. You have expectations from Jim

01:14:03.980 Smith 99 on Yelp because he told you to get the trout, but hold the almond sauce or whatever it

01:14:09.320 is. And I think that that changes us. And I think that there is a case now for trying to re-explore

01:14:16.840 the world like we used to. It's, can you go into situations totally cold? And what will that be

01:14:22.480 like? What sort of value will you get from that internally by doing this thing that no one told you

01:14:27.860 about? You don't have any expectations going in and you are just having this totally unadulterated

01:14:32.560 moment that is in the present moment. And it's of course, not just restaurants. It's watching a

01:14:36.480 movie, reading a book, listening to an album, going to a different part of town. There's all these

01:14:42.280 different ways that you can have these more momentous occasions in your life without necessarily

01:14:47.700 needing to follow the metaphorical Lego plan to the point of your kids is why I'm talking about this.

01:14:54.380 On that topic of information and exploration, you write about how homo sapiens were really

01:15:00.340 the break-off point to true exploration in terms of distance traveled, risk taken, etc.

01:15:07.840 I was thinking about it after I read that. I don't know if you have a point of view or a thought as

01:15:11.920 to why, for example, Neanderthals didn't do the same. They were bigger than us, stronger than us,

01:15:18.380 had bigger brains than us, and could walk upright. In other words, they had all the tools that would

01:15:22.920 have provided for the same, if not greater, exploration capacity as homo sapiens. Do we have a sense of

01:15:29.200 what changed? I mean, we are fascinating in that in basically 50,000 years, we took over the world.

01:15:35.580 Neanderthals were around a long time, and they just kind of were in the same place most of the time. 0.62

01:15:39.500 Not to mention that, but once we take over the world, we go, all right, well, let's put some

01:15:43.880 highways on this thing, and maybe we should build a launch pad for a spaceship and go up into outer

01:15:49.000 space, and oh, what's in that water? Let's build a submarine. So we are fascinating that way.

01:15:54.440 Was that just something that randomly got selected for in the change to homo sapien,

01:15:59.700 and then it just got rewarded and rewarded and rewarded? Is there no other structural reason

01:16:03.780 for it other than just Darwin? As part of the book, there's a little bit of evidence of this

01:16:08.060 gene that is nicknamed the exploration gene. It seems to be around in populations that move

01:16:14.580 a lot more. So it's far more prevalent in nomads. It's far more prevalent in societies that would

01:16:19.920 have traveled farther from our origins in East Africa. There's probably some reason there, 0.62

01:16:25.120 but I think ultimately, we're a species that, and most animals are like this, you do the good thing.

01:16:30.880 So there's some inherent reason why we would have kept moving, and maybe it's just that we get

01:16:34.960 internal rewards from that.

01:16:37.020 So what do we owe a gratitude or despair to Benjamin Day for?

01:16:41.900 Oh, man. Okay. So before 1830, newspapers cost six cents. They tend to cover business and politics.

01:16:52.460 They're weekly. So Benjamin Day comes in, and he goes, I want to create a paper that gets like a lot

01:16:59.440 of readers, because six cents is a lot of money back then. So he goes, all right, what I'm going to do

01:17:03.460 is I'm going to create a newspaper, and I'm going to sell it for one cent. Now, I'm selling it at a loss.

01:17:10.000 So I have to make up my loss somehow. So what do I do? What if I went to some companies and said,

01:17:17.300 hey, I will publish stuff about your brand in my newspaper, and people will see it, and they'll

01:17:22.180 buy your stuff. That is to say, this guy really started advertising, the advertising model. So

01:17:27.980 once he does that, though, you can charge more money for your advertisements the more readers you

01:17:33.940 have. Okay. So how do we do that? Because we're at a loss right now. The more readers we have,

01:17:38.420 the more money we can make off of each ad, that's how we're making our money. Well,

01:17:43.720 business and politics is kind of boring. Business is a little bit boring. So what this guy does is

01:17:49.340 by dropping the price to one cent, he's selling at a loss, but more people will be able to buy it

01:17:55.000 so he can get a bigger audience. And then second, what he does is he starts covering murder, mayhem,

01:18:01.480 affairs, fights, all these different things that attract attention. So this is when you start to

01:18:08.540 see the real shift from us, from newspapers covering this sort of nice, boring things to

01:18:13.120 this guy going, literally, he ran a headline that was bathed in blood. And it was about this murder

01:18:19.040 suicide in New York City. So he starts to publish every single day for one penny. And the headlines are

01:18:25.740 always crazy gore. And I think this is when you start to see the attention economy in which we now

01:18:31.300 live, really start to take off. And it's the same deal. In order to make money off an ad model,

01:18:37.680 you have to get as many eyes as possible. And they have to be certain eyes. And the way you do that

01:18:42.520 is often by running information that is negative, that is lurid, that is going to capture information

01:18:48.620 that's going to capture as much attention as possible. For example, still today, 90% of news tends to be

01:18:53.840 negative. Now this holds whether or not the world is improving or not. Things could be much better

01:18:58.620 than they were 100 years ago, but our papers are still 90% negative news. Yeah. And again,

01:19:04.360 there's an evolutionary basis for negativity bias. You could make the case for how we are far better

01:19:10.100 off evolutionarily to pay attention to negative signals rather than positive signals. The negative

01:19:15.580 thing is what could kill you. That demands your attention. The positive thing is great, but it

01:19:20.200 doesn't need as much attention in the moment. Right. Exactly. If you're the person

01:19:23.660 who's looking at how beautiful the flowers are, as the saber-toothed tiger walks up this way,

01:19:28.000 you're not going to live that long. It is so incredible to think that natural selection

01:19:33.800 being such an amazing tool could have no appreciation for what would come with modernity

01:19:41.000 and how it would render so many things maladaptive. The best example of this is with a lot of social

01:19:48.860 media companies and how algorithms work. If you let those things run their course,

01:19:53.280 things that get the most traction tend to be the most lurid, crazy things. That is one of the main

01:20:00.140 reasons we're so polarized as a country today is that moral outrage is particularly great at capturing

01:20:06.760 attention. And those things get upvoted because they're going to get more eyes. And while that is

01:20:13.360 good for bringing in eyes and making money for a social media company, it's not necessarily good for

01:20:18.280 society always. So you wrote in the information chapter about a study that was done on the social

01:20:25.420 media use of politicians. What did you learn? So this kind of goes back to quantification and

01:20:31.620 how there are some downsides to quantifying everything and gamifying everything. But the

01:20:35.780 long story short of that study is basically that when politicians first get onto Twitter and scientists

01:20:41.540 analyzed, use an AI algorithm to analyze all the tweets of about 10 years of politician tweets,

01:20:47.740 and what they found is that when politicians would first get onto Twitter, it was like,

01:20:52.860 hey, we're having a fundraiser, blah, blah, blah, you know, nice things, relatively benign.

01:20:57.720 But once they would tweet something negative that was attacking another person, they would start to

01:21:02.340 get more likes and retweets. That in turn feel good. So it would tell them, oh, this works on this

01:21:08.660 platform. This is what you need to do on this platform to get these points, because this is how we are

01:21:13.840 scoring our behavior on this platform. And then from there, you started to see the number of negative

01:21:19.180 tweets from them increase over time, because that's what gets rewarded on social media. And so

01:21:25.860 this probably isn't an accurate reflection of maybe who these people really are, or what we really

01:21:33.140 want in society. Do we want our politicians being terrible human beings on Twitter? I don't think so.

01:21:39.520 It's interesting. Imagine a thought experiment where Twitter and social media ran exactly the same as

01:21:46.500 now, except the person who was commenting was blinded to the feedback from others. So likes and

01:21:56.920 retweets, for example. So if you put out something, you could put it out and everybody could still see

01:22:03.340 it just as they do. But if they liked it or retweeted it, you wouldn't see that.

01:22:08.280 How do you think that would change things?

01:22:10.800 To back up, it's human training. The algorithm trains us how to use it, how to behave and use

01:22:16.420 the social media platform. So I don't see a huge difference between when I go stand by the treat

01:22:21.620 jar and I say, Stockton sit, and my dog puts his butt on the floor and I give him a treat.

01:22:26.980 He knows to do that. Well, when I go on social media and I tweet some crazy thing, say, I don't actually

01:22:33.120 do that. But I treat some crazy thing and all you other humans go like, like, like. That tells me,

01:22:39.720 oh, if I want the good thing, whether it's my dog with the treat or the likes on social media,

01:22:44.220 I got to do that thing. Whether it's sitting or writing, Donald Trump is an idiot, Hillary Clinton's 1.00

01:22:49.440 an idiot, so-and-so's an idiot. I don't see much difference between that. Really, you get trained 1.00

01:22:53.740 on these based on how the system is set up with likes and retweets and followers. So that's a long way

01:22:58.800 of saying, I think you'd probably see less of that training occur. So how do we reconcile this?

01:23:04.660 We have evolved to want information. Have we evolved to want the truth?

01:23:10.280 That's a good question. So there's this guy I talked to whose name is T. Wynn, and he is a

01:23:15.560 philosopher at the University of Utah. And he talked a lot about how, you know, we sort of evolved to

01:23:22.180 trust when we feel like we'd gotten the right information. It gives us this sort of aha moment.

01:23:28.460 So we have a question, we find what we believe is the answer, and we go, aha, that feels good.

01:23:34.100 This makes sense. Things were probably pretty clear in the past, right? You either got the food that

01:23:39.560 was going to lead you to survive, or you didn't. You either found shelter, or you didn't. So you

01:23:43.120 could trust that, aha, here's the food. But I think in today's age, whenever we have a question,

01:23:48.680 we can go seeking out information from a lot of different sources, and we can get that aha moment,

01:23:54.540 whether or not the information is factually correct or not. Here's a good example, is that

01:23:59.900 why are conspiracy theories compelling? Because I give you an aha moment. Conspiracy theories,

01:24:05.640 they might seem complicated, and they often are. You got the big board, and you got all the strings,

01:24:10.860 and it's like this person, this person. But at the end of the day, you have a very specific answer

01:24:15.960 for why this thing is the way it is. It clears up any ambiguity. When in reality, most things in life

01:24:23.720 are very uncertain. They're very ambiguous. We don't fully understand why a certain thing has ever

01:24:28.620 happened. But if you can sort of provide someone with an aha, that is going to give them a feeling

01:24:34.280 of clarity, a feeling of certainty, and they can rely on that to make decisions whether or not the

01:24:38.640 information is actually accurate. Yeah, I think people also find conspiracy theories appealing

01:24:45.540 when they provide a grand narrative to something to which the truth is insignificant. To me,

01:24:54.460 the best example of this, because it happens to be one of the conspiracy theories I've gone down the

01:24:58.120 rabbit hole on, is the assassination of JFK. And I can say this, I'm sure I will enrage a subset of the

01:25:04.780 listeners. Every available shred of reasonably good evidence, if you actually understand ballistics,

01:25:11.180 and unfortunately, my training in surgical residency taught me a lot about what bullets do

01:25:17.920 when they hit people. Everything points to a single shooter. Everything points to three shots being fired

01:25:23.160 by Lee Harvey Oswald. By the way, it wasn't hard shooting. That's the other thing that's like,

01:25:27.500 there's no way he could have got... No, no, no. These were the easiest three shots in the world.

01:25:32.000 He killed JFK. Why do we have to have so many conspiracies? Because how can we accept that

01:25:39.620 such an insignificant, irrelevant human being like Lee Harvey Oswald could alter the course of history?

01:25:46.460 That's impossible for most of us to wrap our minds around. It's much easier to think that the CIA had

01:25:51.780 to do this because of pick your favorite Oliver Stone idiotic reason. And so I wonder how that factors 0.99

01:25:58.520 into us as storytellers and the need to have sort of information. Again, I don't know if there's an

01:26:05.860 evolutionary basis for that, but I think that that also plays a role in people. I think some conspiracy

01:26:11.560 theories turn out to be true. So it's not always that the first answer is right or the first answer

01:26:17.400 is wrong. This kind of gets to another issue. And I think Nguyen brings this up, which is the idea

01:26:24.300 that we should think of food and information as analogous, where too much fast food is bad for you.

01:26:33.780 Too much loose information without nuance is bad for you.

01:26:40.000 Yeah. He compared it to food where if you give up on a food's nutritional quality, it's very easy to

01:26:45.760 make very delicious tasting food, seductively good food. And the same as with information. If something

01:26:51.180 just feels really good, really tasty, you should probably use that as a sign to maybe investigate

01:26:56.320 the issue further, to look at what the other side is saying.

01:26:59.560 Right. If you're willing to sacrifice truth and nuance, you can have the most seductive

01:27:04.980 information possible. Yeah. If you're willing to sacrifice nutrition, nutritional quality,

01:27:10.560 you can have the most delicious food possible. I think it's a beautiful analogy.

01:27:14.480 Yeah, exactly. And it is so easy to find anything online today. You know, in the book,

01:27:18.780 I talk about how there's answers to the most sort of mundane questions that we could have in daily

01:27:23.260 life, like product reviews. What is the best pillowcase? It's like, this is the epitome of a

01:27:29.220 first world problem, but here I'm going to spend 800 words of my time reading this story about what

01:27:34.160 is the best pillowcase. Just all over the board. We have so many experts. We have so much information

01:27:39.940 that I think we have more maybe knowledge in the world, but we don't necessarily have more

01:27:44.400 understanding and more of an understanding of like, how should I actually spend my time?

01:27:47.380 Do I want to go down the hour long review sites on pillowcases or whatever the item might be?

01:27:52.900 And you can apply this to so many different things. I mean, your background, I mean,

01:27:56.900 does WebND ever really help a person like figure out what's going on or does it just lead them to

01:28:03.340 go, oh, definitely stage four cancer? Yeah. Yeah. I think that's a very fair comparison.

01:28:09.160 What would be a tool you could recommend to somebody who's listening to us talk about this

01:28:13.680 and acknowledging it and saying, you know what, come to think of it, I'm a bit of an information

01:28:18.480 addict. I'm at a point where my innate desire for information is becoming maladaptive because it's

01:28:27.260 being applied in a manner that just as my natural and adaptive behavior to seek food has become

01:28:35.500 maladaptive. I'm in the same place information wise. How would you suggest a person cope with that?

01:28:40.420 Yeah. I do think that information falls into that scarcity loop that I talked about.

01:28:44.420 You're looking for this piece of information that you think is going to improve your life,

01:28:48.600 but you don't know where it is. And so you search and search the web. And then when you find it,

01:28:52.000 it's like, bingo, great. I found it. And then you can quickly repeat. So I think one way that you can

01:28:57.360 slow down any behavior you do in excess or reduce the frequency is to slow it down. So there's this

01:29:03.160 interesting study that I talk about in the book where they had a group of students, they had two groups,

01:29:07.640 they had them both figure out the answer to a question. Now the first group could use the

01:29:11.560 internet, right? So they go online, they search it, they find it really fast. Great. The second

01:29:16.600 group could not use the internet. So they had to use books. So they got to go to the library. They

01:29:20.540 got to walk the stacks. They got to find the book. And then they got to open the figure out where the

01:29:25.000 information is in the book. Like, okay, I got it. They return back. Not only do they have slightly

01:29:30.780 better information, but more importantly, they were better able to recall it later on when they were

01:29:35.340 tested on it, they did better. So I think that there is an argument for a shift to slow information

01:29:40.960 when you really want to understand something, because these people were better able to put it

01:29:45.260 into context. Now, most people are going to listen to that and say, it makes sense, but I'm never going

01:29:50.500 to get up off my desk and go to the public library and look at the stacks. So is there a way that you

01:29:56.080 can toggle between fast and slow information still using the internet, for example?

01:30:01.340 So I think kind of the metaphor there is like, if you do really want to understand something,

01:30:05.360 realize you're probably going to have to put in a little bit more work. It can't be a quick Google

01:30:08.920 search. That's how I justified the existence of this podcast, by the way, is if you really want

01:30:13.400 to understand a topic, I try not to make too many apologies for the fact that we have three hour

01:30:18.120 episodes. Yeah. I think that a useful heuristic is to, if you've got just a random everyday question,

01:30:25.580 it's not of much consequence in your life. Try to make the decision in 60 seconds. You search for the

01:30:30.560 information you want to know, okay, found it in 60 seconds. Yeah, that's probably right.

01:30:34.320 How do I get to Arby's? Bam. There you go. What pillowcase should I buy? Pick in 60 seconds.

01:30:41.680 Pick something. Just pick something because eventually you're wasting time. I have a story

01:30:45.520 in the book about how when I was an intern at Esquire way back in the day, I got this assignment

01:30:50.340 and it was, okay, find out how much money the Pope makes. And I go, okay, that's my job. I'm going to

01:30:56.400 find out how much money the Pope makes. So I ended up searching around online. I even called up some

01:31:01.800 Catholic academic and he was kind of like, I think it's this much, whatever. So I send in the research

01:31:08.060 file to my editor and I get an email back and it just says, meet me in the conference room in five

01:31:13.800 minutes. So I get up and I go into the conference room and this was at the Hearst building in New York,

01:31:18.620 which is where Esquire is. And so we're looking down the barrel of eighth Avenue and he's sitting

01:31:23.280 at this long table and very Esquire guy. He's has the button down. The tie is loose. He goes, sit down.

01:31:30.140 I say, okay, I go sit by him. And he, he just looks at me, starts shaking his head, leans back and he

01:31:35.140 goes, no, no, no, no. If you want to know how much money the Pope makes, you call the fucking Vatican. 1.00

01:31:42.800 Call the fucking Vatican. So the point is I had totally missed the most obvious answer to that. 1.00

01:31:48.620 If you want to know something about a person, ask the person, but instead we'd have now all these

01:31:55.220 sort of kooky ways to go around it. So I think the metaphor is like, if you can really just go to the

01:32:02.020 source in a way, do that, right? Read the study. If you hear someone online saying that, I don't know,

01:32:07.720 oatmeal is totally toxic and blah, blah, blah. And like, oh, by the way, you're probably gonna have

01:32:11.680 to learn to read a study. Luckily you provide information like that, that is useful. If you want to

01:32:16.760 know what a person thinks, maybe ask them, look at what they've written on a thing, watch the full

01:32:21.780 interview in context. You see someone say something that seems crazy in a 30 second Instagram clip.

01:32:27.260 It's like, okay, well maybe we should get the first like five minutes and the last five minutes

01:32:31.740 after that. So we kind of know what the context is. And you'll probably find that it's taken out of

01:32:36.100 context and like it's being used against the person. Right? So I think it is so easy to get such

01:32:40.920 quick, seductive information. You want to do a little more work for the things that you really want to

01:32:45.760 understand and not jump to conclusions. Like we've seen so many, I mean, for example, media outlets

01:32:50.300 get in trouble because they publish all these op-eds about 30 second Instagram clip, like with the

01:32:55.240 Covington Catholic. And now they owe the kid $250 million because we jumped to conclusions on a 30

01:33:00.800 second video clip. So the last section of the book is on happiness, which I actually found probably

01:33:07.240 the chapter that I was thinking the most about, right? It was the one where I would pause the most and

01:33:12.700 reflect and think and stuff like that. So I'll start with arguably the most difficult question,

01:33:17.740 which is how do you define happiness? Well, I can tell you that I had the same question

01:33:23.420 and I still do have the same question. I'll tell you what the dictionary says. I think it says joy,

01:33:30.280 a feeling of joy. And there's one other word, maybe like felicity or something like that. So you go,

01:33:35.060 oh, okay. Well, what does joy mean? You go to joy, it goes a feeling of happiness. So it's circular.

01:33:40.400 And I think that you see people define happiness in all different ways. So I think it was Seneca who

01:33:48.060 said, it's not having anxiety about the future, feeling okay in the moment, not having anxiety

01:33:53.180 about the future. John Lennon, the famous song, happiness is a warm gun. I think it's hard to

01:33:59.300 define. And it's also one of those things where maybe we don't even know it when we are happy,

01:34:04.320 but we can look back and be like, oh, that was a happy moment in my life. Like it's this very,

01:34:08.100 very murky thing. And yet we all want to be happy. That is sort of the capital G goal of

01:34:14.900 most of the things we do. We take a drink because we think it's going to make us happy. We make buy

01:34:20.960 this purchase because we think it's going to make us happy. We seek out that information on WebMD

01:34:25.840 because we think that if we know what this thing is, that'll give us some relief, but it is a very

01:34:31.000 confusing topic. And I think maybe we know a little bit less about it than we think.

01:34:36.280 Where does happiness fit on Maslow's hierarchy of need? I know self-actualization is about the

01:34:42.540 fourth rung, but does happiness actually fit into it? I don't think so. Does it?

01:34:47.720 I don't think so, but I haven't looked at it in a very long time.

01:34:50.700 Yeah. I dove into that a bit in the book, but I can't recall. I don't think it was on there.

01:34:54.340 So that seems a little odd, isn't it? Because depending on how you define happiness,

01:35:00.120 it does seem like a very high order goal.

01:35:05.220 Yeah, it is a high order goal.

01:35:07.100 But of course, I guess he's not defining it as a need and maybe that's why it doesn't belong there.

01:35:13.540 Yeah. So for this chapter, what made me write this chapter is realizing that we all want more

01:35:21.140 happiness. Sort of the book looks at what are these things that we all want more of? How have

01:35:25.640 they changed over time? And I think that while most of the chapters say we had a scarcity of this

01:35:31.400 thing, now we have a massive abundance of it. I don't know if that's necessarily held for happiness

01:35:35.880 in a lot of ways. So one great example is that from 1979 to 1999, you saw real income grow by about

01:35:45.520 43% among Americans. We didn't actually become any happier. So if we think that progress

01:35:50.980 and money is always going to make us happier, I don't think that that is the case.

01:35:55.240 When do you think peak happiness occurred? Because I often think that on my worst day,

01:36:01.160 I'm so happy to be alive today and to have not have been alive 200 years ago or 2,000 years ago or

01:36:07.100 20,000 years ago. Now, that's a bit of a dumb thing to say, I know, because I have no idea what

01:36:12.460 it was like to be alive 20,000 years ago when you don't know what today feels like. So in other words,

01:36:17.140 getting eaten alive by mosquitoes and ants every day while you scavenge for food, if you don't know

01:36:22.460 what this is, is just what it is. So I get that one can't make that statement, but do the people who

01:36:31.360 attempt to study this have a sense of when peak happiness occurred for our species?

01:36:35.720 Not that I've come across. I mean, I do know that we are seeing decreases in happiness in the data.

01:36:43.080 A lot of the data suggests that people are becoming less happy. Honestly, I would imagine that probably

01:36:48.720 as we've gotten more technology in a way, it's like technology improves your life and happiness

01:36:53.560 to a certain point. And then at a certain point, it begins to constrain you and that could potentially

01:36:58.300 make you more unhappy. Yeah. It's super interesting. So Arthur Brooks has written a lot about happiness

01:37:04.400 and I have found the way Arthur writes about it to be the best way for me to think about it because

01:37:11.940 a, he doesn't write about happiness as a feeling. And that's, I think the problem with the dictionary

01:37:16.920 definition and why it's circular because happiness points to a feeling of joy and joy points to a

01:37:22.660 feeling of happiness. But instead he really writes about components, what he describes the macronutrients

01:37:28.560 of happiness. And so enjoyment being one of them and enjoyment being a much deeper thing than

01:37:35.560 pleasure, pleasure being purely sensory enjoyment, being more cerebral and really having this essential

01:37:43.700 component of being shared with others. And then he talks about satisfaction, which of course is the

01:37:50.580 most fleeting of them, but is highest when there is a struggle. So this goes back to many of the

01:37:57.240 examples you've already given, which is if you get something easily, it's not very satisfying.

01:38:02.720 If you have to work very hard to achieve something, it's more satisfying, but probably for very important

01:38:09.560 evolutionary reasons, we can't keep satisfaction. And that's what keeps us striving. And then the final,

01:38:16.700 what he calls macronutrient is sense of purpose. And again, without that, we can't have true happiness.

01:38:22.940 And I honestly think of that as to date, the best model I have encountered. Now you, to study this,

01:38:31.320 continued your incredible journey of going and doing really hard things. So what did you seek out

01:38:39.480 in the pursuit of happiness?

01:38:42.080 Long story short is I spent a week at a Benedictine monastery in the mountains of New Mexico. And so then

01:38:48.000 you have to ask, well, okay, well, why the hell would you go there? And the answer is because we do

01:38:53.360 kind of live in a world where there's a lot of these different things we're supposed to be doing for

01:38:57.220 our happiness. And they're often backed by research. You got to meditate, you got a gratitude journal, you

01:39:02.040 got to have as many friends as possible, blah, blah, blah. And that all seems great. But when you look at

01:39:08.540 these Benedictine monks, what I find so fascinating about them is that they go against a lot of the

01:39:15.220 happiness research that's in pop culture right now. They live a pretty hard life. They get up

01:39:20.860 at 3 a.m., start to pray. They don't eat a lot of food, so they're not getting pleasure from meals.

01:39:27.600 They're also in silence most of the time. They do hard labor four hours every single day.

01:39:33.340 They're not entirely social because it's the silence and they often work alone.

01:39:38.300 They're celibate. There's no relationships.

01:39:39.980 No relationship. Yeah, no romantic relationships. No real access to the outside world in terms of,

01:39:46.420 you know, they're not on Facebook and keeping up with the news that way. Their motto is aura et

01:39:51.120 labora, which is pray and work. And so what's interesting, though, is that there's a researcher

01:39:57.240 whose name is Alex Bishop who's done a lot of research on them and their happiness levels,

01:40:01.160 and they seem to be happier than the average American. Despite all these hardships that they face

01:40:07.920 in their life, despite all these sort of crazy and necessary things they seem to be doing,

01:40:13.380 they wind up significantly happier than us when we have access to all these things that should make

01:40:18.020 us feel great in the moment. So I go and I live with them for a week. My main takeaway for them really

01:40:24.660 goes back to what Arthur was saying is that if something is challenging to get, I think we get more

01:40:32.260 rewards from that. And that also makes sense from an evolutionary perspective. I talked to a guy whose

01:40:37.340 name is Thomas Zental, and he explained that the reason for this is probably, you know, if you had

01:40:42.480 to search and search and search for food and like you weren't finding it, but you persisted and persisted

01:40:48.140 and persisted, and then you find the food, that has to be inherently more rewarding than the food that

01:40:53.080 was very easy to come by in order to incentivize future searches when you get in that situation.

01:40:59.000 So it's that doing hard work and not necessarily having everything given to you, I think becomes

01:41:06.280 rewarding for humans. The other thing that I think is important about them is they're not necessarily

01:41:11.460 in it for themselves. They've given their lives over to this higher ideal, even though it does

01:41:17.780 require a lot of sacrifice. So for them, that higher idea is God. They're trying to get out of themselves.

01:41:24.020 They're trying to help others and help this greater idea. And it doesn't ultimately all come back to

01:41:29.360 them. And I think that there's a lesson in there for the average person. That is what sort of thing

01:41:34.200 can you do to get out of yourself and find some greater meaning and purpose beyond just your next

01:41:40.800 desire? It's funny. Like I, and I know that that chapter isn't written to suggest that that's the

01:41:48.020 answer that, Hey, if you're reading this, but you don't feel really happy, there's a monastery for you.

01:41:54.020 And you're going to go and wake up at three 30 every morning, do your first prayers, go and work,

01:41:59.200 go and do your second prayers, go and eat, go into your next prayers, go and work. I mean,

01:42:04.020 reading it made me uncomfortable. I was like, I would kill myself. The work part I would get,

01:42:09.420 the prayer part would kill me. I was like, I just think I would lose my mind. So clearly that's not

01:42:15.880 what you're proposing, but it's an interesting contrast and example. But yet I still wonder what it is

01:42:23.960 which element is missing for most of us. I've met some people who have an amazing sense of purpose.

01:42:31.440 They're very mission driven to their work, to their technology, to their company, whatever it is

01:42:36.900 they're doing. They struggle and strive and succeed and that's short lived. And then they do it again

01:42:43.140 and again and again. And they also seem to enjoy themselves. They do do lavish things and they share

01:42:49.140 the company of others. And yet ostensibly they don't seem that happy. So these guys, conversely,

01:42:55.900 you could argue their sense of purpose is, I don't know, they're not really serving the world. Like

01:43:00.060 if every one of these monasteries went away, the world would continue to turn on its axis.

01:43:05.300 You can't say that for many professions, right? Like if every janitor went away tomorrow,

01:43:11.060 the world would grind to a halt. Think about it. If we had one week of every sanitation person

01:43:18.160 stopped working, we couldn't function in society. Even if your job is cleaning, you have a really

01:43:24.160 significant purpose. Not to disparage the monks, but it's like they're in their own bubble where

01:43:29.540 they're self-sufficient. They do everything for themselves. But is that the purpose? Is it they

01:43:35.520 help each other? I'm still struggling to understand how they're happy.

01:43:39.320 Yeah, I think they help each other. I know they do a lot of work in the community. So they help the

01:43:42.580 community. I mean, I even wonder things like about the pace of their life. It's definitely slower.

01:43:47.980 than we live now. To me, what it really suggests is that there is no perfect plan for happiness.

01:43:55.000 And in fact, by trying to be happy, that's not a great way to be happy, right? If you're trying to

01:44:02.720 figure out what is the next thing I can do to be happy. And so you Google how to be happy and it

01:44:07.140 says, oh, well, this study said this, you need to start a gratitude journal. It's like, okay, that might

01:44:11.800 help a few people. But the reality is, is that it's so much more complicated than something that can just

01:44:17.320 be sort of distilled down into like, here are these quick actionables. But I do think the commonality

01:44:22.120 you see is that people who tend to be happy, they tend to be do something that they believe is of

01:44:28.300 service and is going to a greater good. So even though if they all disappeared, yeah, the world

01:44:34.140 would go on. But maybe they believe they have what they're doing has consequence in some afterlife.

01:44:40.180 I see. Yeah, good point.

01:44:42.200 And so I think that the takeaway is that it's probably useful for happiness to find something

01:44:47.680 that is greater than yourself. If you're doing the next sort of fulfilling your next impulse,

01:44:52.560 that's probably not going to be good for you over the long run. Austerity sometimes is a key to

01:44:58.260 being happy. You know, these times where what it was like with the gratitude journals is like,

01:45:04.160 okay, that's great. But the best way to feel grateful for something is to be deprived of it

01:45:09.760 for a while. And these monks really practice that, for example, with food. So they do not eat a lot.

01:45:15.080 And then every now and then, on like a saint's birthday, they get these festivals where it's,

01:45:20.620 okay, we got a lot of food, this is gonna be great, we're eating things we don't. And like,

01:45:23.900 this becomes this moment where they're like, oh, I really appreciate this food that I worked hard

01:45:27.760 to bring to us, you know. And I think that without having to put in effort or never being deprived of

01:45:32.680 anything, you just normalize to whatever you have. It doesn't matter if you have

01:45:36.380 base model 2001 Honda Civic or the brand new Ferrari. That's your thing. That's what you're

01:45:41.840 going to normalize to. Yeah, absolutely. How much do you think that the following cycle

01:45:47.060 is on an inevitable loop in society? This could be across multiple timescales. So hard times make hard

01:45:55.340 men. Hard men make soft times. Soft times make soft men. Soft men make hard times. Is that the cycle of

01:46:06.620 our species? I definitely think it's reasonable. I think you see it historically. What I think is so

01:46:13.300 interesting about now is that I think things change faster than ever. People are changing how we spend

01:46:19.560 our time is changing faster than ever. I do wonder how that's affecting us. I mean, so I'm a professor

01:46:25.320 at UNLV and I've seen changes in my students over the past seven years. You would normally think that

01:46:30.600 a change in behavior, a big change in behavior noticeably would probably take generations to pop

01:46:36.220 up. But I've definitely seen changes and I think it is simply because of how we spend our time and

01:46:40.920 attention. More online. You are the product of your attention. Right. Fewer in-person interactions,

01:46:46.820 all those sorts of things. What do you make of the difference between solitude and loneliness

01:46:51.900 as you gathered it from this experience? Probably for good reason. There's a lot of

01:46:58.320 information out about how it's good to have friends, to be social. I also think that there's a lot of

01:47:06.020 people, or maybe we don't need as many as we've been told. I think that you need what is called

01:47:11.940 anticipatory support, which is basically someone or some bigger idea that you can count on. But in

01:47:18.580 terms of having this big bevy of friends, I don't think that that is necessary for happiness. I think

01:47:23.100 that having certain people that you can count on basically and having maybe one good relationship

01:47:28.220 is better than a bunch of mediocre ones. So when it comes to being alone and being in solitude,

01:47:34.760 I think the difference between loneliness or aloneness is that you didn't necessarily choose

01:47:38.520 that. You want to be with people, but you're not able to, whatever reason. Whereas solitude is

01:47:45.000 using this time, like you're consciously taking this time to be alone with yourself and use it

01:47:50.340 maybe to get to know yourself better. So when you look at some of the happiest people who we consider

01:47:55.480 the happiest and most enlightened in history, a lot of them spent a lot of time alone. Jesus walked

01:48:01.020 out into the desert for 40 days. The Buddha walked the earth for six years or whatever it was.

01:48:05.840 And when you look at a lot of those writings, I don't think that they say, oh, this whole 40 days

01:48:12.240 or six years was entirely blissed out. It's hard to be alone. But I think by going through that and

01:48:17.640 being like, okay, well, why is it hard? You can get to know yourself and get to deeper revelations

01:48:25.920 about yourself. And I think that's a narrative that you see across different faiths and history

01:48:30.940 that sometimes people need to go through solitude as a way to gain insight into themselves. And once

01:48:36.720 they do that, you can then come back into society and you're better able to function in it because

01:48:41.000 you're now more self-reliant. And really, I think what makes a good human is someone who

01:48:45.140 can be reliant on themselves and can in turn help others.

01:48:50.880 You write in the chapter, and it might even be in the epilogue, that for most of us,

01:48:56.220 our will to live is no longer really a vital part of our existence. In fact, this was in the epilogue,

01:49:02.940 if I recall, because I believe you wrote about it in the context of learning survival skills

01:49:07.360 prior to going into Baghdad. I was really struck by that because it really resonates.

01:49:12.940 I can certainly think of times when I've exerted my will, but I don't really think about it in terms

01:49:17.260 of will to live. And yet for all of human history, that was a thing. Again, you think about that snake

01:49:26.520 jumping out of the jungle, or you think about the complete lack of food or the dysentery you just

01:49:34.480 got. There's so many areas where the will to live must have been one of the strongest selective

01:49:42.680 features of our existence. And yet today, it's never put to the test. What is the implication of

01:49:48.120 that? Well, I think it's easy to just sort of exist, not live. So I'll tell you my experience of

01:49:54.740 this is before I go to Baghdad, I realized, okay, I should probably learn some skills should things

01:50:01.480 go south, which there's a much higher likelihood of something going south in Baghdad than there is

01:50:07.880 if I were to take your point report on drugs in Ohio or something. So I go meet my friend whose

01:50:13.560 name is Mike Moreno. He's a VC guy. But before that, he spent a bunch of years in the CIA in

01:50:19.940 Baghdad running operations. So he takes me out to the desert outside of San Diego. And we go through

01:50:25.220 all these different skills I'm going to need to know in order to survive, should something go wrong

01:50:30.840 while I'm there. So we spent eight hours. Here's all these ways you could die, Michael.

01:50:35.880 The end of the day, we're sitting on the tailgate of his SUV. And he looks over at me. He goes,

01:50:41.800 man, I'm really jealous that you're going there. And when he says that to me, I look at him. I'm

01:50:45.920 like, we just talked about how this is not a good idea in many ways. And yet you're wanting to go

01:50:52.080 about what's up with that. And he says, what I miss most about my time there is because it was

01:50:57.720 austere. It was dangerous. You did have to be present and focused on what was around you. I found

01:51:04.260 that extremely life-giving. You were thrust into the moment and you really had to exercise this

01:51:09.800 will to live. I said, okay. And once I got back from Baghdad, I totally understood that.

01:51:15.980 I will remember every moment of being there. You can't just zone out. On the way here in the Uber,

01:51:22.340 I pop in my headphones. I can't do that there. I'm looking around at everything. I'm aware every

01:51:27.740 interaction becomes important. I'm having to make judgment calls in the moment. There is some

01:51:32.640 underlying level of danger. And that in turn, that uncertainty forces me into presence and

01:51:37.880 awareness and makes my time consequential. And I think that is life-giving. And I think we do not

01:51:44.500 have that in a way, which is a good problem to have. Don't get me wrong here. That is a good

01:51:49.720 problem to have. But I think when you think about the context to your point of how humans evolved,

01:51:53.900 we live like that all the time because we didn't know where our next meal might come from very often.

01:51:58.900 We didn't know what the weather would bring. We didn't know what was happening next. And we were

01:52:03.500 having to really work and struggle to survive. And there is probably something rewarding to that

01:52:10.460 and to be in the moment and to have to work to get the things that you get really on a deep level and

01:52:16.760 be just kind of in it like you are in it. Yeah. So I think that the takeaway for the average person is

01:52:22.600 not to go to Baghdad. Let me say that. It is, how can you do things in your life that

01:52:29.700 maybe reflect that a little bit? I mean, I think maybe we both like hunting. I definitely get that

01:52:35.900 from hunting. You have to be present. You have to be focused. You have to be aware. It's not exactly

01:52:40.280 comfortable. I think people can get that from all sorts of things that they can do outdoors.

01:52:45.600 Could be from volunteering. I'm going to go to this place. I'm going to help others. I'm going to go

01:52:50.200 down to this place. I'm going to serve others. Something that sort of puts you in the moment

01:52:55.760 and makes you aware, I think is important for happiness. Well, Michael, congratulations again

01:53:02.420 on the book. It's great. I'm not going to ask you what you have percolating in your mind, but I'm

01:53:07.040 pretty sure you already have an idea for what the next book is. Glutton for punishment. Yeah, exactly.

01:53:12.980 But I suspect that whatever you work on next will be an evolution of this type of thinking because

01:53:18.620 it's clear you've really found a sweet spot around exploring these important topics, which I think

01:53:26.080 both scratch the investigative journalist itch, which is you're basically learning a whole bunch

01:53:32.340 of things in the field. But on top of that, there's a really practical takeaway for any one of us who

01:53:39.420 reads it. So I suspect a lot of people listening to this are going to feel like we scratched a little

01:53:44.560 bit of the itch, but they're going to go and need to read Scarcity Brain.

01:53:46.900 Well, thank you very much. Thanks for having me. I'll work on you so you can do your second book.

01:53:52.260 We'll see how it goes.

01:53:53.640 Thank you.

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The Peter Attia Drive - January 08, 2024

#284 ‒ Overcoming addictive behaviors, elevating wellbeing, thriving in an era of excess, and the scarcity loop ｜ Michael Easter, M.A.

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