#690 - Michael Easter - Why Can’t Humans Do Anything In Moderation?

27:30But the reality of what happened is that the vast majority of these soldiers all produced clean urine. They all made it back home. And once they were back home, very, very few of them relapsed. And the ones who did relapse, relapse tended to have been using drugs before they got to Vietnam. So I think that it shows that addiction is a lot more complex than just the person is a bad person. The person has this brain disease that has, you know, nothing to do with behavior and conditions and environment and all this other things. So that chapter of the book really looks into those questions. the sort of changing ideas around addiction.

28:13Yeah, it's a strange one, man. You know, to think about kind of soft addictions to not somebody who is an alcoholic, but every evening after they get home from a difficult job, maybe their relationship or family situation isn't fantastic, maybe they're stressed about one or a few things. It's just, you know, it's five pints and then I can go to sleep. But the person that always uses weeds to wind down on an evening time, the line that I between a compulsion, a dependency, an addiction, it all kind of becomes very blurred. I like the fact that you say it's somebody who has a problem and the solution that they reach for is this particular substance or stimulus.

28:59I think that's a nice way to look at it. I mean, I know people who if they're emotionally upset, they'll go on their phone. Like, their phone is the distraction from whatever emotions that they're feeling, right? Yeah. Yeah. These things all provide a sort of escape from problems is the underlying theme. And, you know, to me, people will look at a drug addict and go, that doesn't make any sense. Just like I was with the, with the slot machine players. But the reality is is that and I can speak about this because I'm a person who is nine years sober now going on 10. Nothing fixes a problem like using a substance at least in the short term.

29:48So this is this might seem like an arachylike if you're an alcoholic, it might seem totally irrational to take a drink. It's not at least in the short term. The problem is that you're fixing a problem in the short term, but you're creating long term problems for yourself. So addiction would be a problem if a person like me goes, you know what, I'm going to have like 10 beers, and I'm going to go volunteer, and I'm going to go donate my time and my money, and I'm going to do all these good things for society. Another problem is that what tends to happen is that when people sort of zone out like that, they tend to do behaviors that hurt not just them, but society in the long haul.

30:25Is it possible to come dependent on certainty, do you think? Yeah, I think so. I mean, look at this is this might be a strange example, but look what happens when people think they have you know you get a pain in your side and people are like what is that? And then you go on you know whatever it is, Web N D and people will obsess. And it's not it man, it's stage 4 cancer actually. You know and so people are just going down the rabbit hole, the rabbit hole of trying to to find answers to questions that are so much of life is uncertain and so much of the sort of data that we use I think also has an uncertainty baked into it because it's based on human judgments at the end of the day.

31:09It's like, what are you gonna do with this data? What does it mean? And... Oh, so I'm gonna, do you think that hyper -conreacts are dependent on certainty in some way? Yeah, well they don't, they hate unpredictability. it asks for sure. Yeah, they they they uphold an open loop right so what a hyperconjurect by this framing maybe here comes some broch signs by this framing a hyperconjurect would sooner have an assumption that's fatal then an open loop that allows them to survive. Yeah I could say that I mean And certainty feels good, right? There's a part in the book where I talk about, why do people love certainty so much?

32:00And it seemed to be, it's possible, this is a theorizing from philosopher I talked to is that the University of Utah as names teen win, it's THI, NGU, YEN. He talked about how probably as humans of all, we could trust certainty, this aha feeling we'd get that we'd solved this problem, right? Because if you're looking for food, you can be rather certain that you've found the food, that you've escaped the tiger or whatever. But I think today, the questions that we grapple with are much more complex, but we still love this aha feeling. Except we have a million different answers we could find for a question, right?

32:41If you ask, are carbs good or bad? You could type that into Google and it's like, oh, they're bad, aha, I got it. But there's a governmental conspiracy around sugar, or you could find another thing that's, oh, carbs are good. Yeah, there's this group that all they eat is carbs. And like, they live to 110, right? So I think that we live in a world now where you can very easily maybe reinforce a pre -existing belief, or at least find information that makes you feel certain about questions that are inherently always going to be uncertain. Because so many questions are individual and it's like, you know, pick an answer, what are you going to do?

33:24We're never going to know. Yeah, I've had this theory for a little while about how the modern information landscape isn't trying to convince the populace of any one narrative, but to try and make them unconvinced about all narratives. You know, if you were to create an information landscape at the moment to just cause mass distrust of yourself, of the world around you, of even your neighbor, that's what you would do. I'm like the least conspiratorial person on the planet, but whether it's by coordination or coincidence, the end result is people not being sure what to believe. Am I supposed to eat meat?

34:07Is meat killing me? Or is it not? Should I go vegan? Rich about Michaela Peterson, she seems to be, she's lost a lot of weight, she looks good. Like, there is a myriad of solutions to exactly the same problem coming in opposite directions. And, is Ukraine, are you Ukraine the good guys or Russia the good guys? Is Russell Brand guilty of doing something heinous or is this a coordinated attack because big farmer who scared about him getting too close? Like, for every cultural movement, there is a counter cultural movement. Here's like this, there's a prediction that you can make with almost certainty that if you want to work out what's going to happen within the next six months, look at a cultural movement that's been born out that as yet hasn't had its inverse made popular.

34:58So if you have migtow, men going their own way in the dating market, I'm exiting the dating market. For every migtow, you're going to find a red pill, right? So for the guys that are exiting, those are the guys that are leaning in. For the tradwives, the goals that are going to kind of regress back to this sort of 60s aesthetic for partners, there's gonna be the boss pitches, right? For every in -sell, there's gonna be a picker artist. For every sigma grind set bro leaning in, there's gonna be the spiritual bro that's kind of leaning out, right? It's a seticism and hedonism. You know, whatever's going on, fucking Megan D.

35:33Stallion, 2021, Summer 2021, Hot Girls Summer, 2022, Ferrell Girl Summer, right? Right, right. So every cultural movement has the inverse about to happen because what it creates is essentially a vacuum that you can position yourself against somebody else. And this is how the information landscape at large works, I think. Yeah, I think so. And I mean, this is largely a product of the internet. I had this strange, we're doing rough loss of you again here. Last night, for whatever reason, I was thinking about what the world of fitness used to be like, and what people would get interested in. And do you remember when there was those videos, I think the videos were called like P90X, and the whole thing.

36:18The whole thing was, you know, what the benefit is? It's muscle confusion. That was their whole thing, and people were like, this is before the internet. So people go, oh, muscle confusion. Yeah, that makes sense. I've your muscles are confused. So they just like they go crazy and they grow. Now everyone has an internet connection. I mean, you could literally just type in muscle confusion and you would get a thousand hits for like, oh, here's P90X says it works. Here's this here's this person saying like, here's why I can theoretically work. Here's this other smart person going, no, that doesn't make any damn sense at all, right?

36:50So people can fact check more easily today. You don't just take what sort of given to you, but at the same time, the fact -checking process, if you don't know where to find good facts, then you're not really fact -checking, right? And you could argue, like, who the hell knows what is actually true? It's like, no one really knows, right? We have to make this kind of strange decision where we go back to what you were talking about with nutrition. It's like, who am I going to trust? And then the question is, okay, well, why are you trusting that person? And you can like provide some rationale, but really I don't think you could truly unpack like well why do I trust this person?

37:28Right? Like how did you end up trusting this person? I don't know. Right? And so it's it's definitely a strange landscape. I mean, you know, I have certain people that I'm like, yeah, I'm pretty sure this person is right, but at the same time, I think we live in a world where it makes sense to to be open to the possibilities and know that science is always is always changing. science as a process. People will sound very smart and great because they're pulling from science, but at the end of the day that science might change and we also need to be okay with that. That doesn't make the person wrong.

38:00That just means that they might be following the science of a process. And so it is a time where I don't think you can be certain about a lot of things. And yet we really want that certainty. And I think that that can lead to to frustrations, or at least it's like, why do people go down in foxholes when the fox holes are constantly changing? Right? So, yeah, well, you'll be familiar with the zygonic effect. I'm guessing. Now tell me about it. Okay, so this psychologist, Mr. zygonic, was doing a study on service in restaurants, and if you've ever had a server come up to you and stand there and ask for your order and not get a note pad out, there's a part of you that thinks to yourself, this guy, fucking crazy, he's gonna get this wrong, I'm gonna try, I'm gonna make it.

38:45Yeah, I want the ribs please, but I actually want them to be done with that particular glaze, and I want the tomatoes switched out for romaine and blah, blah, blah. And what he found was that while table still had their orders opened, the servers were unbelievably effective at being able to recall what was being ordered. As soon as the tables had been closed, they had zero memory of what they'd done. So this open loop closed loop dynamic that Zygonic found is very fundamental to the way that our brains work and our brains abhor an open loop. It's the same reason why, think about a missing child.

39:21What does it the parents say? We just want to know. There were genuinely probably rather find out that their child was dead than have their child still missing after a long enough time. These parents that have had kids have been missing for 10 years or whatever. It's just awful. It's the same reason why Cliffhangers work at the end of books or on Netflix shows, you want to know what happens next. It's the sensation of wanting to know what happens next. The same thing goes for the service as well. It talked to me about influence. How does wanting influence and the requirement of more of it play a role here?

40:01Yeah, so when you think about influence and status, if you had more of it in the past for most of time, and still today, you would have a survival advantage, right? It could get you more food, it could get you out of crappy, medial labor that's just going to burn calories, it got you more mates, possibly. And so I think that humans, humans crave status and influence. Now in the past, I don't think we could influence as many people as we could influence today, obviously, right? So, influence has sort of been put at scale via social media, and now what sort of one person and does can literally influence millions of people.

40:40Right? You can send out one tweet and if it goes viral, it can totally change people. And so a lot of what that chapter in the book looks at, it's like, how does this really affect us? And have you ever had Jessica Tracy on? I feel like that would be someone you would have on. Oh, no, what's she? She runs this lab at I think University of Washington. and I'm going to kick myself after if it's somewhere else, that looks at how many of our emotions evolved basically just to interact with other people. They're totally social emotions, things like pride, shame, empathy, a big point that she talked about.

41:22I think she has actually a book out called Pride, and it's just the whole book is about pride. She looked at how Pride is this thing that basically tells you, makes you feel good about yourself. You need to accomplish something. There's two types of pride. there's authentic pride and hubris stick pride. She lays out so authentic pride you feel this good feeling after you've done something and it's great you feel it no matter if someone sees what you've done or not now someone sees what you've done great that's even better. Hebristic pride is different. It's essentially promoting yourself as a way to sort of boost up your status, but the problem is that you haven't actually done anything.

41:59So I would argue that probably in the past it was much easier to call out that hubris stick pride because everyone kind of knew each other. You knew what people were doing. But now you can sort of display that on this massive scale on social media. And that can confuse people. And it can also make you look like a jerk when people realize that, oh, this person is actually, those great, as they say. Yeah, the weird thing about status is that as soon as you acknowledge that you're playing the game, you lose the game. Yeah, exactly. So it took a long time for a psychologist just even study status for that reason.

42:35Because there was, no one wanted to, I talked to this guy Cameron Anderson, who's at UC Berkeley and he used to, yeah, it took a long time for us to really acknowledge this thing because by acknowledging it as a psychologist, you're going, oh, I might actually care about my status. And so it took until at least the 90s. I think the research that did it was looking at class issues. So it kind of made it more acceptable to start studying it. Now you've got this influx of it. So you're acting as this benevolence bourgeois sort of ivory tower person speaking down from on high. Don't worry me a peasant.

43:09The plebians I will I will bring you up from the muck in the myron the blood and the feces. Yeah, that's interesting. Yeah, the influence things funny man. You know, previously people wanted fame because it was a marker of having done something worthy of being famous. Now people just want to be famous for its own sake because what fame is is the promise of obligation -free status, at least the modern conception of frame. You know, you don't have to be the heroic general, you don't have to actually invent something. You can just be in the right place at the right time. And, you know, reality TV is the absolute sort of zenith of this, where you get normal people plucked out of obscurity and placed on some television show to be like purposefully normal, like you're providing average representations of avatars within the populace.

43:58And then six weeks later they come off and they've got two million followers in a pretty little thing contract in free charcoal toothpaste and a blue tick. And they're now completely changed. So what is the lesson that it teaches the modern world about how you achieve fame and status and influence? You're in the right place at the right time. You don't do a thing for an incredibly long amount of time and grind hard on it. What was it? Thomas Edison said, I have not failed. I simply found 10 ,000 ways that didn't work. Right, right. I mean even up to the advent of the internet if you wanted fame and attention You probably did have to do decent things or Could be opposite you get famous for doing really bad things.

44:38Yeah, but the point is that you did something Yeah, right and so there was this filter of of a of a large media corporation choosing whether or not They're going to cover you and now you can cover yourself if you would like and just blast it out there and And it can work, right? You see a lot of people rise to public, like being known by many people in the public, although they haven't necessarily really done anything, that interesting in a vacuum. Yeah, the move from people being judged by their deeds, to people being judged by their opinions, has meant that words carry more weight than actions.

45:16And that's a very dangerous position to be in because you can say things that you don't mean. and you can proclaim things that you haven't done. And ultimately, you know, performative empathy is this, it's patient zero for this. And how many times have we seen, it's almost to me, it's almost like the person that is the most vehement about their empathy and standing up for the little person and talking about the deeds that they've done was the kind of this suspicious lack of having seen the deeds that they've done. That's almost a red flag for me. In fact, it probably is Ellen DeGeneres. Lizzo, right?

45:56Jimmy Fallon appears to have been popped recently for this stuff as well. All of the people that are, you know, championing the little person, it turns out that Lizzo was body -shaming her dancers. Jimmy Fallon, the guy that's supposed to be this bubbly, super welcoming, lefty person turns out who's a total tyrant. Ellen DeGeneres as well. He's someone who's supposed to be, you know, a champion for different sexual orientations and this kind of like motherly figure, late night show host and stuff. Total bitch, apparently, allegedly, allegedly a total bitch. And yeah, to me, the move from deeds to opinions has allowed people that are prepared to lie very effectively or obfuscate the truth or manipulate or do self delusion, they've benefited more from this than anybody else.

46:46Yeah, yeah, I agree. And I did really find it fascinating how status affects us so much. So one of the one of the studies that's totally bizarre, but also very telling is that flights that have a first class cabin have four times greater rates of air rage. Now, if the passengers have to walk through the first class cabin on their way to the, you know, the, where the cattle are stored on the plane. Those flights have a nine times greater rate of air rage. Like, that's crazy. Like, these status reminders, they, they hurt people. And there's constantly status reminders we face every day. And they do seem to affect us.

47:26So the people who are higher status generally have better health outcomes in the long run. And this isn't, you know, you might think, oh, well, they can afford medical care. It's like, well, no, because this holds even in countries that have universal medical care. So you would think that, you know, that wouldn't hold in those countries, but it seems to. Yeah, it's such a huge determinant. You read a Will Stors book, the status game. I haven't read that one now. You'd love it. You would fall in love with it. It's absolutely fascinating. So yeah, this addiction, I suppose, to influence that we have and the fact that you be bestowed obligation free status.

48:03It's been objectified and turned into a metric game by social media. I know exactly how many follows. I know exactly how many plays. I know exactly how many likes. So yeah, that feedback loop or the previous scarcity that would have been, I want to get more status downstream from status, increased access to mates, increased stacks us to food, protection, you know, all that better child mortality, all this stuff, has been weaponized and commercialized. But I'm quite qualified to your point is you can see exactly what it is and you can watch that number go up on social media. That's one thing that I talk about in the book too is how numbers influence us and how this rise of gamification has in a lot of ways shifted the goal of why we do what we do.

48:59So any time that you put a number on thing and you gamify a system, what tends to happen is people start to chase whatever the gamified number is. So this is fine in an actual game. If you're playing football, American football Chris, the point is to run the ball over the into the touchdown zone, right, to score these points and then you just leave the game there and it's like, okay, that was great. It doesn't affect the rest of your life. But when you start to gamify different tech systems, people change to the behavior. So Twitter is a great example. So Twitter is theoretically supposed to be this platform for discussion.

49:37And then you ask, okay, well, what are the goals of a discussion? And the answer is like, well, there's a lot of goals to discussions, right? It's like to empathize, to commiserate, to share information, to sort of meet on a level plane, felt like, oh, there's all this shit that comes from a normal discussion. But when you go on Twitter, what tends to happen is that you see people chasing likes, retweets, and follower accounts. The things you need to do to raise those metrics are usually at odds with discussion. So people are dicks on Twitter because you know what happens when you're a dick on Twitter, is you get more followers and you get more likes.

50:21And I mean, they've studied this. It's like when scientists have looked at this and you start to see when people start to get likes and retweets and follower accounts and it usually tends to be from sort of negative things, they start to chase that. So this happened with politicians. There was a group that surveyed a bunch of you, I think it was decades worth of tweets from politicians in the United States. And they found that over that decade, politicians tweets got much more toxic. They used this AI algorithm to sort of give it a tweet to toxicity score. What tended to happen in all these cases is that the politician would go on and they do normal, you know, what you might say, okay, we're having a breakfast, so -and -so to raise money for the firefighters.

51:02And then the minute they would start to be more toxic, that would get more of a reaction from people and they go, oh, that's it. That's how you use this thing. That's what boosts the number. So then you start chasing the numbers, the likes to reach waste. And that totally changes the goal. And this isn't just in, of course, it's not just in Twitter. This is also Instagram. You go on to show some photos of your friends, you know, when you're out with your friends and then people go, oh, wait a minute, this type of thing gets more followers. So you start to do that. It's also in the wine scoring world.

51:32It's like when this Robert B. Parker guy started wine advocate and put a number, a scoring number on bottles, it totally changed the wine making industry, which had had the same practice for 2 ,000 years. But this guy starts this magazine, goes, okay, I want to make wine accessible to the people. I'm going to taste all these wines, and I'm going to give them a score from 50 to 100. And what happened is that the bottles that had this very clear score, that had a high score, they started to sell way more. And so wine makers went, we make more money if we make wines that suit this guy's taste. So they started cranking out more bottles than this Robert B.

52:11Parker guy like that totally shifts the industry. Now, if you're a person who doesn't share tastes with Robert Parker, you're like, well, this is meaningless to me, right? And so once we start to fixate on numbers, long story short is that this changes our behaviors and why we do what we do. I've been playing with this idea of hidden and observable metrics over the last few weeks. So it's my belief that people will often trade a hidden metric for an observable metric and the gamification makes this plane. So a really good hidden metric would be something like peace of mind or sanity and a good observable metric would be something like salary or the amount of money that you want.

52:53So you could quite happily sacrifice how calm you feel by taking a job where your frontline defense customer complaints person, but they know that this is a difficult job, so they're going to compensate you more highly. So you've gained $10 ,000 per year, but how much has your much more important metric of sanity and peace of mind degraded? You know, and if someone was actually to somehow be able to give you a sanity score, you would realize that you would netted a negative by doing this. Another The other one might be something like the quality of your relationships. The quality of your relationships with your partner, you take a job that's a little bit further away.

53:37Again, you're going to make a little bit more money, but it means that you spend last time with your wife or your children and in future the memories that you have are not going to be so good. But it's femoral, it's like it's out there. You know what I mean? Like, fucking, I can't tell how this is working. How many more steps closer to a divorce? Am I today? How much has my relationship degraded? And yeah, I think that making the hidden observable is a really good strategy that we should be trying to do things like journaling, you know, things like doing a weekly check -in of some kind, having some sort of process to just check in.

54:16Okay, the things that I've said that genuinely matter, that I can't see. Another one from your world, how many people have optimized the observable metric of weight on a scale but sacrificed the hidden metric of health? Right? I've dialed back my body fat or I have changed my composition so that I'm carrying way more muscle, but the actual internal state of where I'm at is fucked. Or even, I mean, think of activity trackers. people get it because they want to be more active and then they get obsessed with these arbitrary metrics that whether it's a step count whether it's you know if you use one of these devices that gives you some sort of daily strength count People get hooked on that and it changes how they do What they do and oftentimes why they do what they do because you do you start it for health But people oftentimes don't go okay.

55:11Well, what does health mean to me? So then you get this thing and you're like well health is making sure I get a nine on my whatever, you know this thing that I wear that tells me a strength count. And the problem too is that all of these trackers use these sort of mysterious algorithms. And they're working on very flawed systems. You're making assumptions that this device is taking perfect metrics all the time, perfect measurements. You're assuming that the people who created this algorithm, which most companies won't share how they figure out these numbers because it's proprietary, you're assuming that those people are making the right decisions based on data that is correct.

55:50And it's, I mean, it's definitely not in some degree. But the question is like, okay, to what degree is this, this wrong, right? And yet we get really hooked on these type of things. You see a lot of people do. Another great example of this would be I'm a professor. And so I see it with my students at a point of going to a university is, is what? There's a ton. It's like, yeah, you want the degree, but like you're there to meet people, you're there to learn to be a damn adult. You're there to show up on time, learn to turn in assignments on time, learn to interact with your peers and have discussions and disagree with people in a nice way.

56:26But what tends to happen with my students is they get obsessed with grades. It's the GPA, right? So that is not the same as everything I've just listed, why you go to the university. Yeah, that's a good heart's law and measure in practice, right? You know, good heart's law. Yeah, I think so. When a measure becomes an outcome, it ceases to be a good measure. So it's, you know, if you gave your customer service team the measure that you would say what we're looking for you to do is reduce down the fraud rate and what the outcome is that occurs is every customer is treated like a fraudster. So yeah, we've managed to drive the fraud rate down, but the actual felt experience that you wanted, the outcome you wanted was we want to have a successful company with customers that care about us that doesn't have too much fraud.

57:16What you ended up doing was creating this tyrannical fucking customer service representative team. You were talking about food earlier on. Have you ever seen those videos of tribal people eating cheese cake for the first time? No, but I'm going to need to see that because I bet it, Does it, do they love it or do they just absolutely hate it? It blows their minds. Right, it absolutely blows their minds because it's this really interesting blend of sugar and fat. It's got orification, which is the texture design of food. So very rarely, ancestral wood we have ever had something that was both crunchy and fluffy.

57:54So if you think about Oreos or French fries or cheesecake, you have a very interesting blend of textures. It's not just one texture. Even in fucking yoghurt, people throw granola on the top. Like why is that good? Why it's good because it's a blend of the different textures. If you go for liver king mode and just start eating raw liver, it's not a particularly exciting texture, right? As you just, it's slimy and it's kind of all one thing. So yeah, I mean, food, when you're looking at scarcity loops, food has to be probably the prime culprit, I would guess. Yeah, definitely. I mean, just as I told you about how there's this casino lab trying to figure out how to, you know, tweak the perfect slot machine and games and make sure every experience that happens in a casino leads us to the behavior that they sort of want.

58:43This is obviously happening in the food in the food industry, right? So especially around the 1970s, you start to see the rise of ultra -process food. So after, especially after World War II, companies start to put a lot of money into developing foods that are going to just check all the boxes you need to make a human love them. And they realize we need to increase snacking as well, because if you're eating three square like we used to, it's like, well, they're leaving a lot of money on the table. We got to create snacking as a thing. And what we tend to snack on is these ultra -process foods.

59:20And there's a food industry exec who explained if you want to get a snack food to sell, it's got to have three views, it's got to have value, it's got to have variety, it's got to have velocity. That is basically the scarcity loop. Velocity in the foods, I mean, you'd throw it at someone aggressively. That means you eat it fast. Ah, nice. So, so value, it's relatively cheap. Variety, there's a wide variety of flavors, right? There's unpredictability embedded in the food. Like you go to the grocery store and there's like 75 different kinds of chips, right? And when people have more options of what to eat they tend to eat more and then velocity is simply when you hyperprocess a food we tend to eat it faster and There's been some interesting research at the NIH where the will give people a diet that is matched for you know macros and salt and all that One of the diets is ultra processed and the other is minimally processed.

1:00:24What tends to happen, and they let them eat as much as they want over a course of a day. This is a study where they lock people in the lab. It's like a two week study. You can't keep them in the lab for too long, but that allows them to measure exactly every gram of everything they ate. People tend to eat about 500 fewer calories a day when they're eating minimally processed food. One of the main reasons for that is when a food is ultra processed, we can simply eat it faster. That's interesting. So it's not even necessarily to do with the palatability, although that will contribute a little bit, but you can just get it down.

1:00:56You presumably density as well is a good chunk of this. If you've ever looked at how many carbs are in a haribo and then you compared that to how much potato you would get to eat compared with the haribo, it's insane. Yeah, so that's exactly at your concentrating the calories really. So it's part of the book I traveled into the Bolivian Amazon. There's a tribe called the Chamane who have the healthiest hearts ever recorded by scientists. So I fly into La Paz, I take this 12 hour crazy car ride down to this town that's the jumping off point into the Amazon and then we take a it's called a Peke Peke boat which is this really long canoe that has this really annoying motor on the back of it for six hours.

1:01:40and then you know it's just a wall of jungle for six hours and eventually the dude pulls the pecky pecky over him like It's all looked the same, you know, he's like no, this is it trust me Okay, so we get out of this damn boat and like walk up and sure enough You know there's the tribe and I stayed with them for a little while and so not only do they have super healthy hearts they don't really have any markers of health disease of heart disease and And the reason that's important is because heart disease is the number one killer of people in the developed world like by far Everyone worries about cancer now heart disease is probably what's gonna kill you you have about a coin flip chance of dying from heart disease They also don't get they don't seem to get diseases like Alzheimer's.

1:02:24They don't get certain cancers So they're this super healthy group of people in a lot of ways now the ways they're not healthy are Our problems that we cured in the past, right? They get things like pneumonia, they get random infections that we figured out long ago And that's what ends up killing or they get bit by snakes things like that, but a lot of What's kept them healthy is it goes back to what they eat? And what they eat is kind of interesting because at some point in a day in a given day of eating food It's gonna give the middle finger to some popular diet that we've been sold over the last 40 years So it's not paleo, it's not vegan, it's not low carb, it's not necessarily low fat, it's, you know, it's not any of this stuff.

1:03:08They eat the real commonality of all the foods they eat is that they have just one ingredient. So it's red meat from animals they hunt, it's a lot of fish, it's white rice that they grow, it's a lot of fruit that they grow, it's white potatoes, it's, you know, just this basic stuff. And you just can't eat that much of those foods. And they also don't have a billion triggers that push you into eating more. It's like if you ever sit down and try it to your back, let's bring it back to potatoes, because that's a damn good food. So if you have a boiled potato, it's probably gonna be like 150 calories.

1:03:45If you just sit and just eat that with like no salt or anything, holy hell, that is a task. Like it is really hard. If you give me like 10 times calories and chips, I could probably get through it. I mean, I could probably crush a thousand calories in chips without it. And it would be a great time, right? I'd just be like, oh man, this is a great experiment. Let's do this shit again soon. And so I think that that's really what it comes down to because when you look at the average American diet, especially in the, or in many developed countries, or at like 60 % foods that are ultra processed. And so over time, you just eat more, I think, than you plan to.

1:04:20You end up heavier and that impacts your disease risk. Okay, so we've got a lot of different ways that we get hijacked, whether it be status, whether it be influence, whether it be information, certainty, food, how does somebody step in and break the scarcity loop? Yeah, so there's basically three ways. The first is just becoming aware of it. By becoming, by observing it, by observing a behavior, you tend to change it. It's a hot -the -orn effect. Second is that you can change or take out any three of the parts. So you can change the opportunity, you can change the unpredictable rewards or remove them, or you can slow the behavior down.

1:05:05So let's take food as an example. So with unpredictable rewards and food, a lot of the reasons why we eat is because we have so many different hyper -palatable flavors and options. So people who eat the same thing day in and day out, they tend to weigh less overall because it's basically predictable. You're not going to be eating a ton when you've got 50 different options. And then with the speed or the quick repeatability, eating foods that are far less process leads you just, it slows down the process of eating and you end up eating less. With something like social media, you can change the opportunity.

1:05:42because I think what happens is we talked about is when people go on social media, it goes from, I just want to share some photos of my dog to, oh, I need to score these points, and you post, and you go, oh, yeah, wait for these lights to come in. You can change why you're using it. You can be like, okay, look, here's how I'm using social media. I'm literally using it to keep up with my friends. I'm using it to share information about some cause. I'm only following people who are in this lane that I want to know more about, right? You can slow it down and this sounds kind of crazy because I've always been skeptical when the answer to using an app less is to use another app.

1:06:22But there are great apps that simply put a sort of brief period of hold before you can open another app. So you might go to open the app, this other app will go, okay, you can open it and count down. And just having that, It slows down people's use of it because you have to be intentional. You have to be really what's the best app of that that you've found. I think it's called ClearSpace. I'd have to look at the name. Yeah, the guys, and I used to what converted me is the guys who founded it had seen me write about the benefits of switching to grayscale on your phone, which changes effectively, unpredictable rewards.

1:07:01Your phone just becomes less stimulating, less rewarding. And so they reached out to me, they're like, yeah, try a wrap. And I was, yeah, okay, I'll try it. I didn't try it because I'm like, yeah, I'm not gonna download your fucking app so I can use another app last, right? But I did it. My damn screen time went way down because I had to get intentional with when I was gonna use it. And why?

1:07:22With something like shopping, if I'm gonna buy a, which I'm gonna do after this by a fly swatter, with something like, I can't believe the thing is still a lot. Like how long do these things live? I thought they live like 30 minutes. God, I've been talking for an hour and 10 minutes. It should be dead by now. This is so good. With shopping. With shopping, you can ask yourself, why am I buying this in the first place? What is the opportunity that I am trying to get from this item? Because a lot of times I think we buy because we're bored. We're on Instagram because we're bored and then we see this perfectly targeted ad and we're like, oh yeah, maybe I could use those shoes that seem to be perfectly made in a lab for my style, right?

1:08:11But you really, you know, need them. It's the question. It's like, what are you trying to get out of this? A lot of times it goes back to, I'm bored. I think it's going to raise my status to have this item. I think it's going to help me belong to a group. I think it's going to do all these different things. And so even just inserting the question helps. You can slow that down as well if you just say, anytime I see something online, I'm going to wait X amount of days to buy it. Now, when I've done that, I'll put something in my cart or I'll just go, oh yeah, it's that item. Within three to four or five days, I'm like, what was that thing I wanted to buy?

1:08:46Oh yeah, why don't I want to buy that? I don't really need that, right? So I think just learning that we're in this world now where we have just an abundance of all these things that we're built to crave and we have all these systems that can really push us into these decisions very quickly and that's really changed our behavior and so trying to unpack the mechanics of that system, that loop and then find ways to break it down I think can be beneficial for people and changing behavior. Fuck yeah man, it's so strange to think about how mismatched we are. And it does feel like an imbalanced battlefield that we're on at the moment.

1:09:26Especially when it comes to information and stimulus, there was one day in probably early 2011, when there was the right balance between how much information we wanted and how much information we were getting. And then very, very quickly it went from being below to just completely blasted through. And, you know, in the past, especially when it comes to information, the best skill set that you needed was that of a scout, whereas the best skill set that you could have now is that of a discerner, right? It's somebody that is able to kind of cut through and weave and know when that's enough and so on and so forth.

1:10:08and the same thing, the moderation for everything, if you have grown up and evolved with a predisposition to get more, and now there is more than you need, like what do you think is going to happen? Like you're going to end up overloading your absolutely everything. And yeah, Aristotle he talks about the golden mean, it's not a vice of excess nor a vice of scarcity or something like that. Yeah, man, it's tough. I'm glad that you are putting your hands to a problem that everybody is super familiar with. And I'm a big fan of your sub stack as well. I'm glad that you've joined us here on the independent creator, Muk and Maya, Cesspool too.

1:10:50Yeah, man. It's been a fun project. For people who are interested, it's 2%, but the website is TWoPCT .com. It's been a fun project, man. I mean, I didn't know how it would go. The reception has been better than I expected, which is awesome. And I get a lot of fun doing it, which I think is really key. I can explore things that I otherwise wouldn't have where I writing for a lot of the magazines that I used to write for, right? Things get edited down to the bone. There's stuff where you're like, this is the most fascinating part of this and it gets taken out. So I can really dive into, I think, the stuff that is most useful and there's not as many constraints.

1:11:31Sometimes I might need some constraints on word counts because I'll send out an email every now and then where I'm like, how the hell is this 2500 words? What are you doing man? But all the information I like and people seem to like it. Alia, Michael Easter, ladies and gentlemen, what's the book Michael, where should people go? The book is called, Scare City Brain. It's available anywhere. That anywhere, anywhere will be where people get it, dude. I appreciate you. I'm looking forward to seeing what you do next.