#2039 - Michael Easter

27:16Or you might get hundreds of likes, which is like, oh, my God. That's amazing. It's the same exact architecture as a slot machine. And then you check and recheck. You're repeating the behavior all day. And this loop, the reason that we're so attracted to it, it goes back to evolution. So I talked to this once I learned how this kind of loop pulls people in. It's really what slot machines lean on to get people to repeat the behavior. I call up a psychologist. He's this old school dude from the University of Kentucky, who's been studying psychology since the late 60s. His name's Thomas Cental. And he described, he basically explained, this likely goes back to evolution and finding food.

28:02So if you think about 100 gathers, the thing you have to do every day is find food. But it's a random, it's random whether you're going to find the food or not. So you go to point A, you don't find any food. You go to point B, you don't find any food. You go to point C, no food. Point D, oh my god, it's a giant berry bush full of food. And that saves your life, right? So that search, that repeat searching really pushes us. And grabs our attention because it used to help us survive in the past. And there's even, I mean, if you want to get down the rabbit hole in it, there's even things like what are called near misses in slot machines, which is when you kind of almost win, right?

28:45You might get two lemons. Yeah, two lemons. And then the lemon just barely passes by. Barely passes by or losses disguised as wins. Do you know what those are? No. So that's when, let's say you bet $1 and you quote unquote win 50 cents. So, oh, right. So you don't lose everything, but you win 50 cents. Now we tend to react to that as if we're winning when they study gamblers. And that's also embedded in the search for food. Right? You might, let's say you're hunting, you're like, oh, we got a big kill on our hands. And then you whiff and the animals on twits like, damn, that is it. That's a, right?

29:20That's the near miss. Or you come up on a berry bush and let's say it took you, you burned 500 calories looking for this thing. And it only contains 200 calories worth of food. And so all of these sort of evolutionary parts of this system that we used to fall into as we evolved are now in slot machines and in turn now being used by a lot of big tech companies and different industries. So they just trick the human reward system. Yeah. Yeah. And then next these sort of ancient pathways, more or less. And gambling is, to me, is one of the most peculiar ones because it's so overwhelming for people that are hooked on gambling.

30:00It's such a mental health issue. It's such an addiction. And when you see people that are just like chasing it and they just can't stop, it's like, I always wonder, like, what pathway is being hijacked? Like, what is about human beings that want to risk, like literally all of their money on a roll of the dice or on a spin of the roulette wheel or on a hand of cards? Like, this episode is brought to you by Life Lock. Tax season is already stressful. You shouldn't have to worry about identity theft on top of everything else. And trust me, it's a big worry. Especially since during tax season, your sensitive info does a lot of traveling to places you can't control.

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33:06Franklin County, Kentucky, Buffalo Trace, American, family owned, independent and perfectly untamed. What is that? Yeah. This is a good question. Now this, this Zen tall guy that I told you about, he does a lot of research on pigeons. So he can basically turn a pigeon into a generate gambler in like two minutes. A pigeon? A pigeon, dude. He'll give them, yeah. I said the same thing when I was talking. Isn't life hard enough as a pigeon? Yeah. So he'll get pigeons who, you know, they live in these cages and he'll give them the option to play a game where they, every other pack, they get, say, 15 units of food.

33:53So pack now food, pack 15 units of food. But then they have an option to play a second game. And this second game is very much a gambling game in that they get food about every fifth pack, but it's random. So you could go pack, pack, food, pack, pack. The next one could be food, pack, pack, pack, pack, so it's just kind of like a slot machine. And they get more food playing the gambling game. They get 20 units. If you do the math, it makes a lot more sense to play the game where you get every other, right? Every other pack is getting you food. It adds up to a lot more food. But what he finds is that the pigeons consistently play the slot machine game.

34:3297 % of pigeons will choose that game. But they're not risking anything. They're not risking anything, right? But it's still that gambling. They're still putting in the effort to have to play the game. Yeah, but that seems obvious. Like the rewards are greater. So they know that if they just keep packing, it doesn't hurt the pack. They're going to get a bigger supply of food. They don't get a bigger supply though. Because they'll get 15 every other pack versus 20 every fifth pack. So if you put in 100 packs, you're going to get more food playing the one where it's you get food every other time.

35:03Right, but it's still not gambling because the pigeon just sees a larger pile of food with the more packs. So just wants the larger pile of food so it just keeps going. It's not like they're risking all their food. Right, right. So I don't think it's a gambling thing. Well, the larger pile of food comes from the predictable rewards. Yes, right. If you do every other, right? Yeah, every other. It's how you get the biggest pile of food. But you don't get the biggest pile in one jump. One dump, right? The one where it's every five that's a larger quantity of food. Yeah, so you get 20. Yeah, see that's not gambling.

35:37Why isn't that gambling? Because it's just more effort. It's more effort to get a bigger pile. So he would argue that they're just dumb. They just can't say, oh, it's every other one. Well, all they see is that they're getting, you know, what are 15 units versus 20s? That what it was? Yeah. Yeah. All they know is 20 units. Like, oh, this one gives 20 units. Just keep packing. I don't think they're smart enough to figure that out. I think they just like keep going key. I hear there's 20. Keep going, keep going, 20. But there's not a risk. So here's what I'll tell you. He would argue and a lot of biologists would they would say, you know, there's this theory called the optimal foraging theory.

36:12So as the animals will expend the least amount of energy to get the most amount of food. All right. So over time, they're expending a lot less energy to get more food. And so here's where it gets interesting, though. Is that to sort of bring it back to why do people fall into this? Why would someone bet their entire fortune on a roulette wheel or whatever? Is that when he will put pigeons in a sort of wild environment. So where he keeps them is in these pigeon cages where they kind of live alone. It's a basic cage. When he puts them in a cage that mimics the wild. So it's this giant cage that has like roofs.

36:51It's got cliffs. It's got other pigeons. It's very much like they would have to live in the wild. And then he throws them back to choose a game. They start choosing the optimal game. Yeah. Interesting. Yeah. And so, and you see that in many animals where they do these sorts of studies. Like rats. Right. That's the cocaine and rat thing, right? Yeah. Yeah. Just like that. Yeah. For people who don't know that study, what do they call it rat park? So they do study where they put rats in this very sterile environment, laboratory environment, bright lights, no toys, no nothing. And they gave them the option of water or water with cocaine.

37:34And they always took the water with cocaine. They just kept taking the water with cocaine. But then when they put them in rat park, which is a much larger thing with a lot of toys and things to do and a lot of places to run around, they didn't do that. They just drank the water. Right. And that, but that makes sense. It's like they're fucking living in hell. And the cocaine water is the only thing that gives them any good feeling. And so they just keep going back to that good feeling. But when you give them a normal natural environment where they can just exist, I wonder if that's the case with people that live like say a subsistence lifestyle.

38:10You know, if they have access to something like heroin or cocaine, I wonder if they would just ignore it because they get this sort of very natural environment that is sort of programmed into our lives, program into our DNA. Like people that live a subsistence lifestyle are unusually healthy. I'm sure you've seen, have you seen Werner Herzog's documentary Happy People? I don't think I've seen them. No. It's great. It's Happy People Life in the Tiger. And it's about these trappers who live in Siberia. And there's very low instances of mental health issues, very low instances of, you know, all sorts of problems that society just has ubiquitous.

38:57In their world, these people are very happy and they get by. They just get by. I mean, they have snowmobiles and dogs and they hunt and they trap and they fish. And they just get by and they work every day. And you have to work. The only way to live is to eat. The only way to eat is to work. And so everybody does everything that they can and they're all happy. It's very weird. So that was this guy's theory is he said there's another, there's another theory. I think it's called the optimal stimulation theory. Basically says that humans and animals need a certain level of stimulation in their life or else they start seeking it from other things.

39:37Yes. So if you think about the context of how humans came up, I mean, it was very stimulus sort of like the people you talk about on the Tiger, right? You got to work all day. You're outside a lot. You're doing tasks that involve your mind and your body. Like it's just full on effort to survive. You're also in sort of closer -knit communities, all these different things. And today we don't have that quite as much. And so his theory is that when you don't have enough stimulation in your life or meaning from other places, humans tend to start to look for it in other ways. We gamble. We spend a lot of time on the internet.

40:16We buy a lot of stuff. So we start searching for it somewhere else. And those ways can often be counterproductive in the long run when you overdo them. Yeah. Yeah. Totally makes sense. And also, you know, I was having a conversation with a friend of mine about this yesterday. We were talking about how complex the human mind is and how complex life and society is. But yet there's no real management book. Like there's no real, there's no document that shows you this is the optimal way to exist. And these are the pitfalls of existing other ways. That, you know, you have these human reward systems built in and they can be hijacked by these various things.

41:04And this is the way the human body and the human mind exist optimally. And for whatever reason, there's no real structure that people can follow that's universally agreed upon. You know, like if you, like, save your mechanic, right, and you're working on an engine. Like it's, there's very clear documents that show you. Like these are the pistons. This is the spark plug. This is the carburetor. If it's not clean, it'll do this. This is the problem with the gas line and you have to fit it this way and that way. And so you do it all right and then plumb, it starts up and it works. And you can fix things that way and you can build things that way.

41:48We don't really have that for the most complex thing that we're aware of, which is human existence. Yeah. Totally. That's because it is so complex. It's so complex. And technology also changes very fast. So technology is probably, it's great in many ways. It's a result of progress, right? It's kept us, let us to live longer, allowed me to fly from Vegas to Austin and two hours instead of, you know, getting the old wagon train out and be like, yeah, I'll see you in like six months. Yeah, right. How long would that be by wagon train? Oh, man. It's pretty crazy. But I don't think we've necessarily kept up with it.

42:32I mean, our hardware doesn't change that fast in our software. Right. And so I think a lot of the problems that we see today are often a result of us living as almost sort of ancient creatures in a very new, modern, changing world and trying to navigate that. That's what scares me about this seemingly inevitable connection with humans and technology. Is that I think what we're going to do is integrate with technology to avoid all the problems that we have existing in this modern world with this ancient hardware. And that we're going to adjust our hardware. And that the scene, it seems to me that this is inevitable.

43:11It seems to me that this is just where we're going and that all humans are going to be some sort of cyborg type thing. And also with the invention of AI, and I'm sure you're paying attention to all this chat, GPT stuff. And deepfakes, there's so many deepfakes. People keep sending me commercials that I've never done for penis enhancements and all these different things. Well, wild commercials. And it's my voice. Yeah. And it's my lips moving and it shows me talking about how great these products are. And I've never even heard of them. Yeah. And this is just the tip of the iceberg. We're just starting to be able to fake things like that.

43:51We're on a consumer model. Like someone can just buy this software and put it together. And, you know, and now AI can make literal films. So, I mean, at one point in time, right now there's kind of like the uncanny valley in some ways, where you can kind of see the difference between what's real and what's not really and kind of like, how long before it, like UFO footage, it's a great example. Jeremy Corbell, who's like the premier UFO researcher with George Napp, you know, every now and then I'll find something online and I'll send it to him. It's like, oh, that's bullshit, dude. Like, this is what they did and you can see this is how and this is why.

44:28Like, oh, okay. But there's a lot of that. There's a lot of fake stuff. And it's hard to know. It's hard to know what's real and what's fake. And we kind of can tell now, but will we in 20 years? I bet no. No, and it could be five years. Yeah, I might not. I'm being very generous. Sure. I'm sure it's five months. I mean, it's weird. Yeah. And I think we naturally gravitate to the technology, right? Everyone adopts it and then it's just a part of life. Yeah. Just a part of life. You just sort of fall into it. Yeah. And oftentimes you get punished if you're not using the technology, even though it might be bad for you in the long run.

45:07So think about something like trying to keep say a teenager off of social media. We know it's probably not a great place for them to hang out a ton. Right. And yet, if they're not on it, their life suffers. Yeah. Right? Because they get, they're not as dialed in socially. And for teenagers being social is very important, due to how the brain is changing at the time. Right. But even think about work, especially with how work the nature of work has changed after COVID with more people working from home. If you don't want to be stuck on email all day, it's like, I totally get that. But now if you decide, well, I'm not going to check my email during these times, because it drives me insane.

45:45Now you're a negligent employee. So you effectively have to adopt the technology to live in the system and then the system starts to sort of govern your actions. I read an article about a woman who was fired. And she met all of her productivity goals. She was working remotely. But the company detected that she hadn't clicked enough on her computer. She hadn't hit enough keystrokes. She hadn't moved her mouse enough. And I think there was also an issue with the amount of time she spent in front of the computer that it wasn't enough. Meanwhile, she met all of her goals. So like, how many people are just in front of an office where they're not checking in a cubicle, just bullshitting, probably listening to this podcast right now.

46:29Enjoy. Enjoy. And you know, they're okay. They're okay because they are in front of that computer. And as long as they move their cursor around and do the things and I mean, they could be listening to this podcast under AirPods while they're also fucking around and doing all these other things. As long as they spend, and they might not be as productive. But they are doing the thing that the algorithm wants them to do. Just letting her fired. Like, maybe she doesn't need to work as much to meet the productivity goals you set for her, but she's a good employee. If you set a productivity goal for an employee, say, hey, we need to get, you know, X amount of units of work done by Friday.

47:12And she does it. Didn't she do her job? Like, if she can do her job in 31 hours and the average person needs 44, isn't she a better employee? Yeah, she's more productive. Yeah, she's better, right? Does she have to be clicking on things constantly? And it's kind of crazy. This lady got fired. Like, that's what, it makes me wonder. I mean, maybe there's some other factors, but maybe not. I mean, maybe it's just as simple as like, they're just following numbers. And that's how they hire and fire people. Well, the numbers are really interesting because they're not really that old. You know, numbers are maybe 10 ,000 years old.

47:49There's still tribes in the Amazon. There's a tribe called the Paraha, who they still don't have numbers. They can discriminate between one, two, and three. You go above that, and it's either small, medium, or large. And that's probably how humans thought of quantities for most of time. So if they catch a bunch of fish, they can't say how many fish they could. They have 30 people in their village. This is the story. I just read to the article. There's a little bit of both. Both sides on this story. Oh, she's Australian. They have wild rules over there. They had complaints about her missing stuff and doing work.

48:19And then she was saying, this is all bullshit. And they had evidence of her doing misconduct in their words. So it's a both sides story. Oh, okay. Okay. Well, there you go. That makes more sense. So, plus, she's very pretty in that picture. Maybe she's like trying to be an influencer. Maybe they factor that in. I don't know. Maybe. It seems like she's using a filter. That's another weird thing, right? Filters. How many people are just using filters? Where I see pictures of a friend of mine with his wife. And the wife is using a filter. And I know my friend doesn't look like that. Right. You know?

48:58But he's with her. And she's got the filter on. Hey, bro, did you go back in time? What the fuck happened? You look like you're 15 years younger. Just get back from Hawaii. You're exceedingly tan in that photo. You look fantastic. What are you doing? Tell me about your diet. Yeah, so it can kind of bend reality. And to get back to numbers is that once we invent numbers, it starts to really change how humans behave. Right. Especially with measurement, because that provides an element of sort of certainty. So in the case of that employee, it's like someone somewhere with a clipboard goes, well, a good employee has 20 clicks per hour.

49:40And then they just go down the thing and go, oh, well, this person had 19. We got a can her. So we're measuring by a random number, instead of saying, did this person do the job we want, the way that we want them to? What is the outcome of the task we're trying to do? And focusing on the actual goal, which is to make money for a company. I don't know. Well, it seems like in this story, it's just kind of more, more to it. But that's always the case, right? If someone makes an accusation against a company firing them, you know, it's like, I was the best employee ever, and I didn't do anything. Nobody ever says, I kind of fucked off a little, but I think I was good enough to keep the job.

50:16Right. Nobody ever says that. Everybody's always like, I was perfect, and my boss is a tyrant in the work environment is toxic. Yeah. Yeah. No one takes personal responsibility for that kind of shit. No. Twitter is a good example of how putting numbers on things can change our behavior and why we do what we do. So here's the example is that, and I learned about this from a guy whose name is T -Newian. So it's T -H -I -N -G -U -Y -E -N. He's a philosopher at the University of Utah. When you start to measure Twitter via likes and retweets and that sorts of things, that changes how you use Twitter.

50:58So Twitter is now, the platform formerly known as Twitter, is supposed to be built as a place for discussion. And so then you ask yourself, okay, well, what are the goals of a discussion? And the answer is like, wow, there's like a fucking lot of goals, right? Right. Behind us a discussion. It could be to empathize. It could be to understand someone. It could be to push back on them. Like, there's all these things that can come out of a discussion. All these possible goals. But when you start to put numbers behind that in the form of likes, of retweets, of whatever it is, people start to tweet in a way that scores likes and retweets.

51:38And that is a different goal than his discussion. It's often at odds with that. So like, what does well on Twitter? It's calling someone a dickhead. It's trying to dunk on someone. It's trying to say something outlandish or maybe, then something in a way that incites outrage. Right. And that totally changes the point of a discussion. Right. And this guy noticed it in himself because he, so he's a philosopher, so his job is basically to think all day. And he goes, you know, the first time I had a tweet, he go viral. It was like, oh my God, that was awesome. And then he found himself when he would have these sort of philosophical thoughts instead of going into this really deep zone that he'd usually have to go into to understand it.

52:20He started finding himself going, how can I put this into like a 140 -character tweet that'll really do well. Right. And that changes. That changes how he thinks. And what he does. And you see this, I mean, this isn't just in social media. This is in so many different systems where we put numbers behind something. It starts to change people's goal in a way that changes their behavior. But the goal of scoring numbers is often different from the original goal. Yes. Of the behavior. You know, this discussion actually came up in the hunting world recently. Because I was having a conversation with a friend of mine.

52:55There's two goals in what, one of the things that people want when they hunt is they want to get a mature animal for a bunch of reasons. One reason is that the mature animal say if you get like a seven -year -old mule deer, that is a deer that has spread its genes. It's done its job in the reproductive system. It's passed on its DNA. And this is an old mature deer. Also, it's more of a challenge because this is a wiser deer. This is a deer that has probably experienced hunters before, most certainly has experienced mountain lions and bears and other predators. And so the goal is ethically and morally that's the animal that you should choose to try to hunt.

53:48Now, there's numbers that are involved now. So with deer, it's the size of the antler. And the magic number is 200. If you can get a 200 -inch mule deer, that is a very, very rare deer. That is a deer that has lived for a long time. It has superior genetics. It has this very big, have you ever seen a 200 -inch mule deer on the hoof? Yeah, they're giant. They're giant. And it's so impressive. So this guy had shot a mule deer. This beautiful mature mule deer, but it scored 194. It didn't score 200. And he was like, well, it's just a deer. It's just another buck. And my friend was furious. He's like, this is a bastardization of everything that hunting is supposed to stand for.

54:38Like hunting is supposed to stand for. This is an ethical way to acquire your food. This is the best wild protein that you can get. It's the healthiest for you. It's also an important thing to manage the population numbers of these animals so that they don't get overpopulated, which leads to the spread of diseases like CWZ and chronic wasting and all these different things that people attribute to overpopulation and car accidents, all these different things. But the number thing gotten people's heads. And this guy was very happy with his deer until he found that it was 194 and not 200. Because it's impossible to tell when you're looking through binoculars.

55:18You're looking through binoculars. That is a giant mule deer. That's what I want to get. But he was unsatisfied because it came up. So the overall score, the way they do it, it's kind of complicated. They measure the width of the base. They measure the length of the tines of the antlers. The width of how farther apart and all that stuff gets factored together and it comes up with the score. And his score was six inches short and he was bummed out. Which is just nuts. It's crazy. It's weird. So his goal, because we put the number on that, is simply just to get 200 or over. And to your point where you just talked about, you know, why do we hunt?

55:52There's all these really complex. But far more valuable and meaningful reasons that we go out into hunt. But if you get captured by this number that changes your experience in a way that is probably not a good thing. Yeah. I mean, you saw this in the wine world when Robert Parker started the wine advocate. I think this was in the early 80s or 70s. So this guy is Robert Parker's this guy from Maryland. And kind of grew up in the backwards. He's just a normal dude. He likes wine, but he thinks all this snobby language around wine. Like it's keeping people who would otherwise enjoy it from, from drinking.

56:30So it's a good intent. And so what he decides is, I'm going to start, I'm going to start a magazine. I'm going to start giving wines a score from 50 to 100. So when he starts this, the magazine takes off. Because now the average consumer can know, well, this is an 80, this is a 90. The 90s better. I'm buying that. Now, here's the thing though, is that it is Parker who's testing the wines. And he's also having to test them alone, not with food. Now, one of the main reasons you drink wine is to drink it with food because it changes as you drink it, right? But his scoring system, if a wine scores really well, those bottles fly off the shelf.

57:14Whereas the ones who don't get quite as good of a score, they collect dust. So what the wine industry does is they go, okay, well, if we want to sell a lot of wine, we got to produce bottles that get a good score from Robert Parker. So they change how they make wines to suit his palate. Now, if you don't have Robert Parker's palate, you don't like what he likes. Like this is meaningless to you, right? And so it's one person. And then you started to see, I mean, his industry and empire grew. You start to see a lot of other wine rating places pop up that mimic it. But it's the same with any review, right?

57:53If you put a number on it, it's kind of this arbitrary thing that someone has to make up. And it's often done in a vacuum and it's very, very subjective. But we pretend like it's objective. And then we behave like it means something, right? Yeah. I have a very good friend who's a wine connoisseur, like a real wine connoisseur. Like he has this big wine cellar in his home. You go in and it's filled with all his crazy wine. And he knows everything about wine. He can tell you what the good years were and where the vineyards were and where the things come out of. And he had a birthday. And so he invites me to this wine pairing dinner on his birthday.

58:32And it was great. The food was great. The wine was great. But it was so bizarre. Because they bring these flights of wine. And then everyone tests the wine. And people are recording themselves doing this. They have little table quarters. And they're talking about the tannins and the oaky this and the that. And then someone opens up that thing. I think this one's corked. This one's corked. And they're testing. Yes, I believe this one's corked. And I'm like, this one's my favorite. I don't even understand what's going on here. And there was this one guy that was there that was being heralded as this big wine expert.

59:06And they would refer to him. Well, cut to years later. That guy gets arrested. And he winds up doing 10 years in jail for making fake wine. And there's a documentary on it. Wow. The documentary is called Sour Grapes. And it's amazing documentary. I haven't seen it. I've seen it pop up. Now I've got to watch it. It's very, very interesting. Because it plays on this very strange thing that people have to want the rarest, most unique. And what this guy did was he started, well, he started buying wine. That was the first thing he did. He would go to these auctions. And, you know, I don't know if you've ever seen any of those wine auctions, but they're super bizarre.

59:51Like people are spending ungodly amounts of wine, money on wine. Like ancient bottles and very rare bottles. And so this guy's buying all this wine. So he is established as this connoisseur. And then what he's doing is he's going to his home. And he's aging these labels. And he's creating labels. And he starts auctioning off. And I think is it Sotheby's or Christie's? Someone's involved in this auction that kind of should know that this is bullshit. Like they haven't checked. And so one man from one vineyard, who's this very famous family vineyard, sees bottles of his company's wine for sale. And he says, we never made a magnum that year.

1:00:40We never made that bottle of wine. Like that is not real. And that, you know, is going for insane amounts of money. And so then they start doing an investigation. And they find out that this guy has made and sold thousands of bottles of fake old wine, including to the Koch brothers. And this is where he got fucked. This is where he sold the Koch brothers like millions of dollars worth of wine. And these guys are just super ballers with an unlimited amount of money. And they were buying like Lincoln's bottle of wine, like Thomas Jefferson's bottle. Like that kind of crazy shit. And people are saying, no, that's not even his handwriting.

1:01:19That's not, this is not real. So these guys were, they got duped. And so then they opened the investigation. And they find this guy's house and they find the bottles of wine. He was buying old bottles and recorking them and like making the labels dirty and doing all this different shit. But it's so interesting because one of the guys in the film is like, this was a bottle that he sold me was legit. Because the guy was selling legit wine too. He's like, this one's legit. And they're drinking it like you can tell. And this other guy comes along. Let me try that. He's like, this is garbage. This wine's garbage.

1:01:52This is fake. It doesn't have the complexity. It doesn't have the robustness. It doesn't have the, and these other guys who are like also supposedly experts still like, what are you guys tasting? What is going on here? Like what is this weird thing that you're chasing? That the difference is so subtle. It's not even the difference between Koch and Pepsi. You know, it's so subtle. But yet it's the difference between a bottle of wine that's worth 50 bucks, 100 bucks, and 40 ,000. And no one knows. No one can tell. And this guy had apparently, according to my friend, such a pallet that he could experiment by taking these various much more inexpensive wines, combining them in very specific ratios, and re -create something that was very similar.

1:02:42And as long as you got it in this bottle, and as long as you looked at it, and he's like, oh is it bulgeable bone from 74? And you thought you were getting the real shit. And so then there's the placebo effect, right? You're tasting it, and you're imagining it. This is rich, robust wine that very few people can appreciate. And then you're all appreciating this wine. And meanwhile, this guy's laughing his ass off because he made it. And his fucking century city house. I mean, he's like, it's fucking nuts. He's got it in the bathtub. Yeah, I mean, literally. See if he can get some clips out of that.

1:03:15There was actually a study, and it was conducted, I think, at a university in France that has a good wine department. The researchers, they got a bottle that was scored really high, and a bottle that was scored low. And they got this group of students, and without them knowing, they switched the labels. So the bad bottle has the nice label on it, and vice versa. And they served it out, and they had them talk about it, and raided, and do all this things. And where I'm going with this, the students who think that the terrible bottle is good, they give it all this, like, oh, it's got a deep bottle of blood.

1:03:53Like, you know, they're using all the tannins and all the word salad, you know. And then with the bottle that was actually expensive and highly raided, that they thought was bad. Yeah, this is cat piss. And so expectations, often, to your point about the placebo effect, they shape how you experience something as well. That world is so strange, because the difference between a very good glass of wine and a good glass of wine is so big. Okay, I was with my friend Mark once, we were in Florida, and we were eating at this Italian restaurant, and it was a great restaurant. And I said, let's get a crazy bottle of wine.

1:04:31Let's get a fucking really nice bottle of wine. And I'd never had like a thousand dollar bottle of wine. So we bought this bottle of wine from, you know, 1980 or whatever the fuck it was. And it wasn't that good. It was okay. It was okay. Yeah. Yeah. It was like, it was okay. And then we were, I said, okay, let's flip it up, because there's quite a few people at the table. I said, let's flip it up, and let's get our next bottle. Let's get like a 90 dollar bottle of wine. And we were both like, this is better. This one's better. Like this is, I don't know what I'm drinking. I don't know what I just know what this tastes like nice wine.

1:05:07So here's how this guy did this. So he would take these bottles and sit them in water. And, you know, he had all these labels and all these different things. And he would get bottles from, you know, like used bottles, like bottles of legitimate wine that he had already, you know, drank. You're not shitting that he's literally doing this in some random apartment. Oh, yeah, he was doing it in his house. Yeah, I mean, look, he's got the windows taped up, so I know I could see him doing it. He's got fucking, he's got aluminum foil in the windows, like he's doing heroin in there. It's like, you cooking meth in there?

1:05:42Yeah. Oh, man, I'm just pulling some labels off some wine bottles. So at the end of this documentary, they wind up destroying thousands of bottles of this wine. And it's really bonkers because like, he could have sold that wine for who knows how much money. And so see, see there, he's got all those labels that he had sitting there. That was the guy that got duped. And this is the guy that duped him. That guy with the glasses on, he was the one who was like, this one's a real one. And the other wine extras like, pitch, this is fake as fuck. Interesting. And I don't even know how they know or if they really do know.

1:06:11I mean, I'm such a, I'm such, I don't know anything about wine. I just like, I just say, what's a good wine? You know, when I go to a restaurant, pick one out for me, that's good. Yeah. I don't understand. Or I call my friend. Who is a legit expert? And I'll say, tell me a good, and he's usually right. I mean, oh, he's always right. But what does that mean? What does it mean? I mean, am I going to notice a difference? Especially two glasses in when you're eating a steak? No. As long as it doesn't taste terrible, it's a nice wine. I don't. Yeah. I'm not super into that world either. I just gotten so interested in this idea of numbers and having the sort of certainty of quantification, changing our behavior in strange ways that I ended up down that rabbit hole.

1:06:50Another good example would be some of a professor. Why do you go to college? A lot of reasons, right? Right. You want to acquire information. You also want to make friends. You want to learn how to get your shit together to turn things in on time, to get on a schedule that you're going to need when you go out into the world. To get a job, all these different things, right? But what are my students most obsessed about? They're GPA. Right. And that's totally, that's very different. And I found in my experience as a professor that it's often not the students who are straight a's, who are the best, because those students tend to be a little more robotic.

1:07:28The students that are best tend to be in the B plus, A minus. So this is because they might be working 40 hours a week along with that. So this suggests they're pretty gritty. They're a hustler. Or they might be too free -thinking, right? The type of students where I say, hey, do the assignment this way? And they do it a different, and they're just going, oh, what? I thought I could do it this way and blah, blah, blah, blah. You know? And they also don't tend to ask about their grades. Now, the reason that we use grades is simply because it makes the lives of administrators much easier. Right.

1:07:58If you need to compare students quickly, if you're sending people through the system, you can put a number on it, and you can kind of rank people. But it doesn't necessarily reflect whether this person has accomplished all these different things why you would want to go to college. Yeah. And what are you going to college for? Are you going to college to get a good job? And if you have a high GPA, wouldn't that make you more likely to be hired? So there's that. But there's that little tricky thing also with numbers. Because it's also very hard to quantify whether or not a person's going to be productive.

1:08:32I mean, I guess you meet with them and then you want to find out how they are socially. You know, when you talk to them, are they easy to communicate with? Are they gregarious? Are they seem like a good person that would be a nice person to have around the office? Because they would make a pleasant work environment, and that would also help things more productive become more productive. It's like, I get why there would be numbers. But it is a strange thing that humans are obsessed with numbers. Yeah. I think it goes back to what we were talking about earlier with certainty. Yeah. If you put a number on something, you can be certain what it is that you've done the right thing.

1:09:13But the reality is is that all these metrics, there's so much gray that goes into them. But when we see them, we think they're black and white. Yeah. And that can, you know, obviously we need numbers. Our world runs on them. But I also think we need to be skeptical that they tell the absolute truth. And I think we need to be aware of the fact that they can change our behaviors in such a way that we miss sort of these greater purposes of why we're doing the things that we do. Yeah. And a lot of people don't know why they do. They just want to be successful, right? Yeah. It's very hard. The thing about uncertainty, right?

1:09:49And this is a thing that you have when you're in college or this is a thing you have when you're embarking upon a risky career, like there's so much uncertainty. Is this going to work for me? Am I going to make it? Is it going to happen? Or am I going to be left out? Like everybody, am I going to be one of the people that doesn't make it? Am I going to be one of those sad stories? Like this person, they just failed in life and they want to die in a heroin overdose. You know, like no one wants to be that guy. Right. So it's like, what do I have to do? And you know, what are the metrics that I have to achieve?

1:10:22Like what are the numbers? What's the thing that I have to do to show? Oh, I make a million dollars a year. I'm a winner. You know, that's a thing. Totally. Like if you are a millionaire, you can say, listen, I'm a millionaire. Like, whoa, you did it. You made it, right? But that person might be fucking miserable. Right. So isn't the goal to be happy? Like maybe a person who makes 100 grand a year is, you know, they get their bills paid. They live comfortably. They're happier. Yeah. They're better off. They do what they actually enjoy doing for a living. And it's just not as profitable. Yeah. Like maybe that's a better goal.

1:10:58But we can't quantify that. Like how can I, I can't put happiness on a scale. Right. I can't put, like if you're a person, like say you make knives, you make chef's knives. And you know, you're just making these beautiful, gorgeous knives. Like, and you get deep satisfaction out of this. But you're just like fucking barely getting by. You're paying your bills, like, but you're living kind of check to check. And it's all about like selling the next knife. And okay, now we've got the mortgage paid. And I got to keep making knives. That guy might be happier than some crazy person who's buying $100 ,000 bottles of wine.

1:11:33Because that person doesn't even know what's making him happy anymore. Like they don't enjoy their job. They're just getting money so that they can acquire these things. Right. Exactly. You're just kind of chasing that next, whatever it is, the purchase. Yeah. You know, the person that you've hooked up with, the whatever it might be. Yeah. And I do think to, I do think that what people tend to chase and think is going to make them happy, does tend to go, tend to fall back into the evolutionary argument of like, what did we need to survive? Right. It was food. It was stuff. It was status. Status.

1:12:10Influence over others. It was, you know, information even people really lean on on the smartest person or whatever. But I don't think, you know, obviously having a certain amount of income correlates to happiness. But once you get above a certain level, kind of disappears. Yeah. So I think it was in, I'm trying to remember the exact cutoff of the years. It's somewhat irrelevant. But income rose in real dollars 50 % from say 1979 to like 2005, whatever the years are. But happiness didn't actually increase in the United States. So even though we got richer, dollar for dollar with adjusted for inflation, happiness levels didn't seem to increase.

1:12:54And to suggest that at a certain point, once you have your needs taken care of, you're probably going to be good to go. And in fact, probably chasing more of sort of these ephemeral things, you know, is not going to make you happy. It creates anxiety. It creates anxiety. So part of the book, I have a section on, because the book overall looks at, okay, why are humans not good at moderation? What are the things that we are bad at moderating at? And how do we think about getting out of that cycle? And so because I'm an investigative journalist, I go places first stories, right? I'm going to go talk to experts.

1:13:32I'm going to go live with different groups or interesting. So to get into this idea of happiness, I spent a week living with these Benedictine monks in the mountains of New Mexico. So these guys, it's an order of Catholicism. So these guys, they live in an abbey, they all live together. They basically don't talk to each other. There's only a handful of hours they can talk. And they also have to work every day, four hours, manual labor. They have to go into the chapel to pray seven times a day. And so despite having this really austere, kind of hard life that demands a lot of them, when researchers look at their happiness levels and compare them to the general public, they're much higher.

1:14:23And what are they looking for when they say happiness levels? They're looking at self -reported, saddest life satisfaction scores. So they basically ask them, how do you feel about this? How do you feel about this? And then they come up with a metric that they is basically what they think of as happiness. That's a weird one, because you're getting a person who's completely isolated from the rest of the world, right? So they're not comparing themselves to other people. So what they consider happiness, I wonder if they have people that are living different walks of life that they can compare to, maybe they would not have the same score.

1:15:09That's a great question. They think they're happy, but maybe they would be happier if they could sleep till 10 a .m. Maybe they would be happier if they could go on a trip every now and then just go see Paris. Maybe they would be happier if they had a car. They could just drive out to the mountains and just sit on the top of a ridge and just look at the beautiful scenery. They don't do that because they don't have a car. So maybe their self -reported happiness is incorrect. Or they could be that, to your point, they could be happier. What I do think it suggests that you don't necessarily need all these things that we've been talking about to be happy.

1:15:50And a lot of times I think what makes people happy is not necessarily chasing the next item, that sort of chase of like, I'm going to buy this thing, I'm going to hit this amount of money, I'm going to do this. It is finding some sort of higher purpose, trying to do the next right thing, however you interpret that. And eventually people wind up finding themselves happy. Yeah. What is, yeah, it's weird, right? Because you can't put it on a scale. Like you can tell if someone's overweight, you can't tell if someone's happy. Right. And I'll tell you, man, it was pretty funny because when I get there, I arrived during what's called the Grand Silence.

1:16:29So this is the time when all speaking is forbidden except in grave instances. And apparently my arrival classified as a grave instance. So the grave, the guy, you know, this, this monk meets me and he kind of walks, he's like, this is a chapel being there at 350 for 350 in the morning for, you know, this service. And then here's where we eat breakfast. And by the way, don't for breakfast. We don't sit. We don't talk. He walks up all along and he takes me up to like the guest quarters. And you know, what do I do? One of the rules is to not be lazy and to not be tiresome. And of course, I sleep through the 350 AM meeting in the chapel, right?

1:17:09But I make it down for breakfast. And it was really fascinating living that way for a week. I mean, I definitely, I got a lot out of it and had some interesting conversations when we could talk. And just watching the people live and interact, I think it just opens up a lot of you go, oh, there's like different ways of viewing things. And there's probably something I can learn from that. Am I going to be living in the monastery any time soon? Like tell me. But there's things we can learn from interacting with other people in the present who are different than us. Yeah. Also, they're only interacting with the people that they're interacting with physically, which I think is a real issue with human beings.

1:17:50I mean, we're talking about dunking on people on Twitter and that kind of stuff. I don't do that. I've done it in the past. But somewhere along the line, I realize that the energy that I'm putting out, if I'm being negative, that affects me. Whether I realize it or not. If I'm being mean and shitty to someone and trying to ruin their day, that affects me, whether I realize it or not. It's not good for you. It's not healthy. I don't want to do that in person. I don't want to look at a person in the eye and say mean things to them. And I don't want to look at a person on a screen and say mean things to them.

1:18:26I understand that there's a great pull to that because of the numbers. Because if you do dunk on someone, you know, and say, whoa, what are you fucking do? And then, ah, ah, ah. And all these people put memes and all these different things. And you get 100 ,000 likes or whatever. I don't think that's good for you. And I don't think you really get anything out of that other than the score. It's not enhancing your life in any real way. You know, you're just, you're contributing to the negativity of the world. And I think as fucking corny and as cliche as this sounds. And I've thought of it, I've especially thought of this after psychedelic experiences.

1:19:06Which have been some of the most profound life changing and perspective altering experiences of life. I've ever had that, that I have to think about overall good, the overall good of what I'm doing. Like what is overall, I think a podcast is pretty easy for the most part. Because for the most part, what we're doing is having a conversation. And I think this one is very interesting to me. And so I think it's probably going to be very interesting to other people. And these subjects are very interesting. And they stimulate your mind. And I feel good about my work. I feel good about it. I feel like when people come up to me, I love your podcast.

1:19:45I'm like, thank you. I'm going to enjoy it. I really like it. I like that. I think I'm doing a good thing. I think I'm putting a good thing out there. And I think it's, so I feel good about it. If I was using my podcast to tear people apart and tear things down. And I mean, I do with, I criticize things that need to be criticized. But I try to be fair. And I try to be as overall net positive as possible. And I think I'm going to try to do that more and more. As time goes on. I think I'm going to avoid even, I mean, even this open criticism of people that deserve it. I mean, I wonder how productive that really is.

1:20:24I often think about it. Like, should I just spend more time instead of doing that on things that I'm just fascinated with? And I think that would probably be better for me. Probably create less people that are upset at me. Create less people that are upset listening to it. And it's probably better overall. Like the overall good of things. So it's like, if you're doing something where you're creating things like we're talking about knives, like chefs knives, that's an overall positive thing. You are creating a thing that someone will use and they'll appreciate and enjoy. It's an overall positive exchange.

1:21:02And so I think the more overall positive exchanges you can create in your life. The better. And it took me a long fucking time to figure that out. It really took me until I started doing this podcast. I mean, this podcast has been this insanely educational experience to me that I didn't expect to have. I didn't expect to be educated. I expected to just do it because it was a fun thing to do. I used to like doing morning radio. And I was like, well, I don't do my own fucking thing. And this would be kind of like doing morning radio. But then along the line, when I started having guests on. And I started considering other people's perspectives.

1:21:39And I started considering how I interact with those people and getting better at interacting with them. And having some negative experiences and negative shows and negative interactions. I realized like, those only make me feel good. Those feel like shit. Like, what do I have to do to not do that and create more positive experiences? And as I've done that, the more I've done that, the better I've gotten at that. But the happier I've been with what I do. So what's the big takeaway if you had to sum it up from that experience? I mean, we affect each other. And if you're affecting each other in a negative way, you're not doing overall good.

1:22:18But if you can affect people in a positive way, you are doing overall good. And so I try to do that. I try to do like when we do podcasts that are fun. I try to make them, like if I have comics on, just let's just have a good time. Like, I don't want anybody to feel bad. I want everybody to have fun. Let's have a great time. Let's laugh. I love comics in particular because we can shit on each other and it's funny. Like if a comic makes fun of me, it's funny to me too. I don't, my feelings don't get hurt. It's part of what we do to each other. Like when we're alone, like comics in a green room are hilarious with each other.

1:22:53We're just always shit because we're looking for things to make fun of. And you can appreciate it. It's like if you're sparring and someone hits you with a jab, like, oh, that was a good shot. You got, oh, I dropped my hand. Yeah, thank you. You're getting something out of that. You're getting something out of the kind of verbal sparring, but it's all good nature. And it's all fun. And unfortunately, some people don't feel that way. You can't take like comedian thinking and apply it to other people. Some people get like super upset if you dunk on them. Yeah. But you're not trying to be, so I have, you know, you have to learn how to not do that amongst regular people, and I've made those mistakes too.

1:23:29Yeah. I mean, one guy who's really helped me in my own life, he's helped a lot of people. He said, you know, I think at the end of the day, if all the people I've talked to, most people, they just want to be loved. Yes. And they don't want to be alone. Yes. Yes. They want to be loved. They don't want to be alone. They want to enjoy their experience with other people. And I think that even when you look at the, our bad behaviors, they usually provide some sort of short term benefit that often gets overlooked. Like, I don't think people do things for bad reasons. I think that people usually get something from any behavior they do.

1:24:09That doesn't mean the behavior isn't maladaptive, but usually in the short term, there is a benefit and a reason why they're doing the thing they're doing. And it usually goes back to some sort of deeper reason, right? So the case would be a person who's an asshole, it might be a defense mechanism because maybe they're erased by a parent who was terrible to them. Right. And so they feel like they always need to be on the defensive. And so when we walk in, you know, 20 years later, we go, that guy's a dickhead, but really it's like, no, he still just hasn't recovered from being a kid whose parent was a jerk to them.

1:24:40Yes. And realizing that people are usually acting the way they're acting for a good reason, I think gives you space, it gives you empathy, and allows you to interact with others better in the world, and that changes your own experience. Because if I look at the asshole and be like, hey, fuck that guy, and that changes the rest of my day, like that's not good for me either. Right. Right, I can just be like, yeah, well, yeah. Some people are that way, and probably a reason for it. Do you have children? I don't have children. No. One of the things that happened to me when I started real, when you see someone go from being a baby to an adult, you think about human beings in a very different way.

1:25:25I think about everyone I meet, I think of them as a baby. Like, oh, this is a, like if I meet some poor, homeless person in front of a gas station, when I was younger, I would look at that person and go, fuck an idiot. Get your shit together. And now I look at that person like, what hand did life give you? Right. You were a baby. This was, there was this lady I saw recently, and she had the most insanely bad posture. Like maybe some, like she had suffered an injury, like a broken neck, because her, her head was like, she was like very frail, and very obviously addicted to drugs and dirty, and her head was like hanging down like this so deeply, that she couldn't barely look up to like ask for money.

1:26:15And, you know, I just, oh, I could think of, was that that was someone's, someone's a little baby. You know, you see some guy who's like sleeping on a, the corner of a street, just covered and filled. That was someone's little boy. Yeah. That was a little, a woman gave birth to this little boy, and they had, you know, all the potential in the world, if they were in a different environment, if they were in a different, if they had different genes, if they were in a different neighborhood, if they had different parents, if they had different experiences. But now here I find them, in worst -case scenario, on the ground, you know, being ignored, people are passing them by, no one cares about them.

1:26:57You know, it's a testament to the health of a society when you see how many people are in that state. Like, that's one of the things that I find very troubling about a lot of these big cities, like particularly like Los Angeles, that are just overrun by these homeless encampments. And it was interesting because I saw something today about Gavin Newsom. And he is trying to, apparently there's some sort of law that he's trying to get rid of that does not allow you to move homeless people. And he's trying to get rid of that. And he's making sense. It's like, this is not good for them. It's like, you're not saying that you're not caring about these homeless people.

1:27:50But to just be forced by law to not be able to move these encampments seems insane, not just counterproductive, but a barrier to productivity, a barrier to progress. And, you know, kudos to him for trying to do that. I give that guy a lot of shit, I probably shouldn't. You know, because like, I think that job is insane. He said something crazy about me recently. So like his son is involved in these micro -cults where he's listening to people like Jordan Peterson and me and I think he's upset because I called him a con man, which I probably shouldn't. Because that's not a product productive either.

1:28:28Just call someone a con man. He's a politician. He's doing what he's trying to do. But he did do something I really like recently. He vetoed this bill that would have forced a parent to affirm a child's gender in order to keep custody of the child, it was like some crazy sort of or well -earned thing that they're trying to do where you have to affirm a child's gender, if the child is trying to change gender, if you do not do that, you could lose custody of your child and he vetoed that. So kudos to him for doing that. It's gotta be a fucking insane job. You know, and for us to stand on the outside and just shit on these people, especially someone like him who's handsome and tall and slick back hair and he talks really well, it says that he's bullshitting us.

1:29:20Look at all the problems he's created. Look at all the things, but also try managing those problems. Try figuring, you know, what do you do with 100 ,000 homeless people, particularly if you can't even move them, right? And so kudos to him for trying to figure out a way to get rid of that law. You know, it's so easy to criticize on the outside. It's so easy to just look at this stuff on the outside and go, you know, you need to get it together. You fucking suck. But who doesn't suck? What mayor of a big city doesn't suck? There's always going to be someone who thinks the person is totally awful and people who are like, they're okay and people who love them, you know?

1:29:58Well, especially, no one cared about him at all until COVID. Nobody was upset at him. Right. And then you're confronted with this problem that no one has faced in a hundred years. We're going to shut society down. There's a pandemic. There's a giant pandemic. And there's these solutions on the table and politically, particularly in California, these are universally accepted solutions. Like everyone must get vaccinated. I mean, you're literally having people like Sean Pan on TV saying that if you're not vaccinated, you're literally holding a loaded gun to people's heads. Now, in their defense, at that time, they really believed that this vaccine was going to stop transmission and it was going to stop infection.

1:30:43And if you didn't do that, you were fucking it up for everybody else. The problem with that logically, of course, is that if it didn't, if it did stop transmission and it did stop infection, wouldn't people just realize that? And you would, you would, like, the only people who got the vaccine would be okay. And then everybody else would be fucked. Of course, over time, we've realized that's not really the case. It doesn't stop transmission. It doesn't stop infection. And there's some very weird data that shows that the more often you are hit with these mRNA vaccines, there seems to be some correlating effects where, like, the Cleveland Clinic study, which showed that the more often people were vaccinated, those people got COVID more than the people who weren't vaccinated as much, or weren't vaccinated at all.

1:31:39But how the fuck do you know that in 2020? You don't. You know, when you're dealing with this thing in 2020, and universally, politically, especially in a blue state, in a blue city, like Los Angeles, you kind of have to do that because that's your job. You have to tell people to go get vaccinated. You have to tell people to do this. And you should put, you know, if it really, if you really did think it would work, you'd put incentives in place to make sure that it does work. But then also, when you know that it doesn't anymore, then you have to adjust. That's what I think it is. And the problem with that is, then you have to admit you're wrong.

1:32:14Right. And that's terrible politically. Yeah. Because then you give your enemies fuel, and then they get to come after you. You were wrong about this, and you were wrong about that, but I was right, and I should be the leader. Right. Right. Yeah, I think, you know, when that thing went down, we didn't know what was right or wrong. Yeah. I think most people are trying to make the best guess they could, given the information that we had. But I think you're also right, in the sense that once we learn that the information that we, we're working off of, isn't right? We need to correct and be vocal.

1:32:46And I think that generally, being more open about why we're making the decisions we are, and accounting for the uncertainty, is probably the answer, rather than trying to pretend we know everything in the moment when the reality is that we don't. It's just super difficult to do that, and be a politician, because you're dealing with polls, you're dealing with people that they pick on every single thing that you say, and try to find fault in it, and try to find, you know, their own counterpoint that's more effective and more accurate. And then you also have money, right? You have the influence of the pharmaceutical drug companies that want everybody to get vaccinated.

1:33:27They want everybody to do it, and they want the politicians to do it, and then when your people want it to, what do you do? Do you stand up and say, hey, folks, I don't think we should do that. That's pretty easy to do if you're in Texas, like what Governor Abbott did. He was like, you know, like, no, I'm not going to force people to do anything, and no, we're going to open the state back up, and I remember so many people were like, oh my God, you're going to kill people. You're opening up way too soon. This is dangerous. Turn out that wasn't the case. But if it was, then, you know, those people, it was a lot of guessing, man.

1:34:02Tons of guessing. Tons of guessing. And Monday morning quarterbacking is so fucking easy to do. And I do a lot of that. I do a lot of Monday morning quarterbacking. Yeah, the questions of homelessness too is a big one, especially addiction. That's one that I covered in this book. Addictions, the big one, right? Addictions, the big one. It's the extreme end of an ability to knock it enough. Also incentives, you know, places like San Francisco in particular in Portland, where they actually give people, I think it's San Francisco, where they actually give people money to stay there. So these people are there, and they give them, you know, X amount of dollars a month for food and for whatever they need.

1:34:48And they sort of incentivize these people to not improve their lives. Yeah. I think, you know, addiction is really interesting, because for the longest time we thought about it as a moral failing, so an addict is a bad person. And now the shift, it sort of shifted around 1995 to thinking that an addict has a brain disease. And I'm not sure that that's quite right either. I think personally, after looking into this, that addiction is more of a symptom of an underlying problem, and that using the substance solves the problem in the short term, but creates a long term, long term problems. With everything.

1:35:30Overdambling, with gambling, with eating. I mean, that is the story of what addiction is, right? Choosing the short term reward that creates long term problems and consistently doing that over time. Yeah. I think the problem with the model we currently see it as is being a brain disease is that it can deflate hope for people. So when you look at reasons why people relapse, there was a big study in New Mexico of alcoholics. I found that the number one reason for relapse was believing that addiction was a brain disease, and therefore if I have this disease, and there's no known cure for it, what's the point of even putting up an effort?

1:36:10And those people tended to relapse at much higher rates. So I think for me, and I'll tell you, I've been sober nine years. And for a long time, I thought it was a brain disease, and I went into this book thinking that. And I've changed my mind, and I have a ton of empathy too, because I think that if you are addicted, and I can tell you this, nothing solves a problem like using your substance of choice in the short term. Like it is ultimately a solution, right, for a problem. And that's how really drugs have always been. So when you look at when humans first started using psychoactive substances, they're often used as a tool, as a solution.

1:36:53So for example, you chew coca leaves, you get more energy, you get more focus, that helps you on a long hunt. Alcohol used to, you know, waft off of fermenting fruit. You smell alcohol in the air, you go eat that fruit, it's going to help you find the fruit one, you're going to eat more of it, because it has a low level of alcohol, and it also kills a lot of germs on the fruit. So this is a story of like every psychoactive substances, right? Right. In the past, the actual psychoactive component itself was relatively scarce, but it helped us live on. The difference is that now, we've sort of concentrated the psychoactive effect, and put it at scale.

1:37:32And I think that is really what starts to create a lot of these long -term problems, because it is such a stronger substance. And it's available everywhere. Everywhere. It's available at every restaurant. Every restaurant has drugs. Yep. I'd like a glass of whiskey, with my meal. Exactly. You're on drugs. Exactly. Whether you realize it or not. So I went to study this topic, and understand it, I ended up traveling to Iraq. Now, Iraq is an interesting case study of this, because they used to not have addiction, really, and a lot of that is because Saddam ruled with an iron fist, there's no drugs getting in the country.

1:38:11The U .S. ends up invading, and throwing him out. And because of that war, you have a lot of people who are in trauma. They have problems. The economy is in ruin. They've lived through a war. And then what happens is that, Syria falls, and becomes a narco state, and they start pumping out a drug called CAPTAGON. Have you heard of this? No. So it is analogous to methamphetamine. It's a pill. They put a lot of stimulants in it. Now, Syria produces no shit, billions and billions of pills that are moving around the Middle East right now. Like, they just busted a big shipment. I can't remember where it was coming through in the Middle East, but it was like a billion some odd dollars worth of CAPTAGON.

1:38:55So this drug is sweeping across the Middle East. And so what happens in Iraq is that, you have a population who has a lot of pain, a lot of problems in their life. There's not many outlets for those problems. And then you have a substance come in that solves problems in the short term, and you tend to see addiction spike in that country. And it was a wacky trip, too. I need to get a fixer or whatever, and I land on this guy, and he sends me this email and he goes, okay, I know you're here to study CAPTAGON. Here are all the groups we're meeting with. The precise times we're going to meet them.

1:39:35Here's the hotel you're going to be staying in. It's the nicest, most secure hotel in Baghdad. I'm going to pick you up in this, you know, secure top of the line SUV, blah, blah, blah. You're good to go. It's like, okay. So I land there. My man picks me up in a 10 -year -old beat -to -hell, Hyundai base model. Drops me off at my hotel, which is this sort of hole in the wall, just bombed out hotel. Picks me up the next day. I'm like, okay. Let's get our meetings going, you know, and he goes, oh, no, no. Those were just proposals. The itinerary was proposed. This guy totally bullshaded me. I'm like, every fact of this.

1:40:13Oh, no. And I'm in Baghdad, and I'm like, oh, my God, this is going to be a long way. How long goes this? This was last summer. Oh, boy. Yeah. So. All right. Well, let's figure this out. He goes, no, don't worry about it. Just, you know, worry about other things. Like, what we're going to have for lunch? I'll figure this out for you. I'm like, okay, whatever, dude. So the first few days, we're just madly driving around Baghdad in this dude's, you know, neither secure nor top of the line, Hyundai the whole time. And he's texting and calling people. He's got two phones. He's texting. He's driving.

1:40:48And he ends up getting in like two car accidents. Doesn't even stop the fucking car duty. Just like a bank's off a car and just rolls down my window and yells some shit in Arabic. And I'm like, what do you say to those people? He goes, I said, why are you in my way? Oh, boy. Like, okay. But just as this guy's sort of grift, you know, worked on me, it starts to work on other people. So we somehow talk this into this police compound on the outskirts of town where they hold the big drug smugglers in the country and different terrorists. So I talked to the police there. We talked to some of the people in the prison.

1:41:26Then he ends up getting this sort of off the books meeting with two Iraqi intelligence officers who work on the border of Syria, fighting Captagon as it comes through. And they told me just crazy ways that people get the drug over. So a lot of times the government, because it's all controlled by the government, by the way, will hire farmers like shepherds and have them store the pills in the stomachs of sheep. So they'll open the stomach of the sheep, put the drugs in in a bag, sew the sheep's stomach, and then have them just move across the border in the night. So if you're looking at them as an intelligence officer or the army you're going, oh, it's just a shepherd.

1:42:08Now it turns out that actually they're drug smugglers. And so these sheep are still alive? Yeah, they're still alive. And they just put in some sort of a bag that doesn't get broken down by the stomach acids? Yeah, exactly. Wow. That's crazy. So they do surgery on the sheep. Yeah. Stuff the pills in there. Yeah. And just walk up the... Wow. I mean, we're talking billions of these pills circulating in the Middle East. Wow. And... But if it's the government that's moving them in? The Syrian government. Yeah. So Syria is effectively a narco state now. So most of their... They make some crazy amount more money producing Captagon than they do all their legal exports combined.

1:42:45So what happens is that after the country fell, they took over the pharmaceutical plants. And the pills are all pumped out there now. And it's all controlled. Most of it is controlled by what's called the fourth division, which is sort of akin to our sort of baby seals, like this really elite military unit controls it all. And also like Hezbollah, which has been named a tear organization, is involved in the trade too. Eventually we get this meeting with the guy who's the head of psychiatry for all of Iraq. And basically what happens is I'm able to... I'm in the country going, okay, like nothing is really...

1:43:23This guy's just piecing together these kind of meetings as we go. And I track down a guy who's a journalist in the country and I kind of tell him my situation. And he goes, you know, call this guy. So my fixer calls the head of psychiatry and the guy tells him immediately, you know, just text me, whatever. So, okay. He starts texting with them. And my fixer starts smiling and goes, he'll take a meeting. But he thinks I'm another person with the same name. But he'll take the meeting. I'm like, wait. So he thinks we're someone else, and we're going to this meeting. And then my fixer's like, yeah.

1:43:58I'm like, I don't know, man. He goes, listen. He'll talk. He'll talk. So we go to this damn meeting. And, you know, we come in and the guy's kind of looking at us like, you're not who I expected. But we sit down with him and I get him to say, at first he's kind of trying to shoot us out, you know. But I get him to start talking to us. And he echoed sort of the same that we've been talking about. He goes, look, like the brain disease model and this complex neuroscience around drug addiction is interesting. Obviously the brain changes due to drugs. But the question is, whether those changes obliterate all ability to make choice and to change.

1:44:41Because that's sort of what the government of the US sort of claims. When you look at NIDA's website, it's all on the brain disease model. It says that drug addiction is this recurring disease. Basically, if you have it, you're going to relapse, et cetera, et cetera. And he really talked about how it is a confluence of a population who's in pain, no way to get out of the pain, and a substance that solves the problem in the short term. So people who are addicted to drugs, they're making a very rational decision to use those drugs. Because it is solving a problem, right? If you are an addicted person and heroin solves your problem, or having a drink solves your issues you face, well, you're making a rational decision.

1:45:28But the problem is that the problems are piling up in the long term. Yeah, interesting. So what was your addiction? Alcohol. Yeah. So I haven't drank for nine years, and I mean, you just found yourself wanting a drink to solve problems to escape. Yeah, it was escape. I've had to think about that a lot, especially as I wrote the chapter, and I think there's a lot of different stuff for why do people have an addiction? And I think the reality is that there's not just one reason. There's a lot of reasons out there. Different people use for different reasons to access. For me, so for example, you know, one, I can't remember, there's one thinker out there who basically says the opposite of addiction is connection.

1:46:12The people who are addicted don't have social connections. And I can tell you, for me, that wasn't true at all. I had plenty of friends. I felt connected. I found that for me, I had, at the time I was working in this job that was rather boring. I had a lot of sort of bound up energy, and I like new sort of extreme experiences. And I could find that through alcohol. So if I drink, I could be wild and free in a world that is increasingly orderly and sanitary. It's like, I'm going to be on my game all the time, but the moment I start drinking, it's a game. Like, you know, the world opens up. And I can be, I can be who I want to be, and sort of really let loose and who the hell knows what's going to happen tonight.

1:46:58That's the comedian lifestyle. That's it. That's interesting. Yeah, a lot of comedians get addicted to alcohol. Yeah. Yeah. You know, because obviously you're in a bar almost every night. And a lot of guys like a drink or two before they go on stage. And then afterwards, hey, let's meet down the bar and then people are handing out shots. And then, you know, you're at some fucking dingy hole in the wall at two o 'clock in the morning laughing and having a good time. And then, you know, it's this constant cycle. And you think you need that to enjoy yourself. Exactly. Yeah. And so for me, I think getting sober, it was one I had to realize that it wasn't going to be easy.

1:47:36It's not going to be easy, no matter who you are. But it is necessary. I mean, I really do think that I would have died early, had I not gotten sober. I mean, it was, you know, pretty bad at times. And so I have a lot of empathy for people who are addicted. Because I understand that, you know, there's this great in Dante's Inferno, the book. He describes Satan as living in a world of cold and ice. So hell, as he pictures it, is cold and ice. And now, Satan is in hell, which is cold. And he stuck up to ice to his waist. And in order to do anything in his life, he's always had to flop his wings.

1:48:19That's how we get, that's how he gets places. But he doesn't realize that as he stuck by flopping his wings, the ice is just getting colder and colder and colder, and getting a more stuck. And that's what addiction is like. So you've done this thing. It worked for you for a very long time. Improve your life. And then it started causing your problems. But it is still this behavior you've learned that has the potential to solve all your problems. And you still think that it's going to do the thing that's going to improve your life. But the problem is, you can't see that, because it's like, that's just what you've always done.

1:48:53But what about the genetic component? Because there are people that seem to be more genetically predisposed to alcoholism. Yeah. I think that that, I think there definitely is a genetic component. To a point, it's kind of like, it's kind of like with food, right? Right. Genetics loads the gun and then your environment pulls the trigger. So I think they're, I mean, both of my parents, for example, are, my mom has been in recovery for a long time. My dad, I don't know. I've met him maybe one time. And I've, you know, why? I can only assume it's because he didn't get sober. And so I think that's part of it.

1:49:31But then also you go, OK, well, there's the genetic component, but also, you know, growing up in a single parent household. And my mom had to travel for work a lot. So there's a lot of things underlying the surface. And you go, you know, why is it that? And I don't think this is just for people who have a drinking or drug problem. I think there's a lot of things. It's like, why is the thing that makes you feel like, that's it? That likes all of my problems. I feel better right now. Like, why is it the thing that it is? For some people, it's food. Yeah. For some people, it's gambling. Yeah. For some people, it's literally getting super hooked on working really hard, just being home workaholic.

1:50:15For others, it could even be a behavior that society doesn't reject. Like exercise. Right. It becomes an escape from problems and a way to deal with life. Hold that thought. I got to pee. Yeah. And we're back. Oh, much better. Yeah. This is the thing. You can't concentrate when you have to pee. You're sitting there going, I can't get the words out. Hey, man, I don't even know what I just said the last 30 minutes. We were talking about alcoholism and drug addiction and whether or not it's mental disease and this crazy drug in Iraq. Yeah. Yeah, I think it's. It's wild that I've never even heard of that before.

1:50:56The amount of Capticans that we just kept on. Captagon. The amount of pills circulating in the Middle East. Is that what it looks like? Do they have any of the images of it coming out of sheep guts? I look for that. I mean, I want to see that. I see a lot of different ways of learning. Yeah, it's got this. Okay, so you see the photo that we're on there. It's got those two crescent moons. They all tend to have that on them and it's just a mix of. So what it started in the 60s as a legal pharmaceutical drug. And I think they banned it in the 70s or it might have been that, you know, I think mid 70s because it worked too well.

1:51:29People were getting hooked on it and it was. Yeah. And then what had happened is that enough people, especially in the Middle East, were using it as a pharmaceutical that some drug gangs came in and started making it themselves. And now it's just slowly transitioned where Syria runs it all. The wild one in America that's legal is Adderall. Yeah, so we have billions of pills circulating as well. I know so many people that use Adderall. They use Adderall for productivity. They use Adderall as a journalist to help some right. These Adderall to function. Yeah. I know a lot of people that take that stuff.

1:52:12And we Google it once. What's the number, Jamie? What was it like, 39 million prescriptions a year? I've heard one in eight people are on some sort of attention -enhancing stimulant. Woo! Well, we are. We're on coffee. Yeah, exactly. We can't be hypocrites. We're on coffee and I've got to zen in my mouth. It's... That goes back as like people... Yeah, I'm a liar. People use... I'm a fucking fraud. I'm over here enhanced. Yeah. And plus I smoke pot. Well, that's not. But it is a little bit. Wapping 41. 41 .4 million Adderall prescriptions were dispensed in the US in 2021. Up more than 10 % from 2020.

1:52:51And what is 2023? Is it keep going? Yeah, so I think one of the real big issue that we're facing is I don't know necessarily if addiction is climbing or not. What I do know is that our drugs are stronger and cheaper than ever. And many of them have stuff added to them. That makes them much more dangerous. So you see the overdose death rate go up significantly as fentanyl starts to get added to different drugs. Right. But, you know, I've had this conversation recently with Al experience and we were discussing whether or not drugs should be legal. Because if drugs were legal, then you could get pure cocaine and pure heroin.

1:53:37You wouldn't have to worry about it being, you know, laced with fentanyl. Maybe less people would die. But then we both agreed that that would at least for a while create a new problem where many more people would use it because it's legal. And how many more of those people would get addicted that wouldn't have gone addicted because they wouldn't have bought it illegally. Right. That's super great question. I don't know. So it's like, it's really, it's very similar to the alcohol prohibition dilemma that they've faced in the 1920s, right? During the prohibition time, the only way to get alcohol was you got to get alcohol from bootleggers.

1:54:17Right. And so that's, you start drinking rise too. I think part of it goes back to sort of that loop idea that I was telling you about in the sense that unpredictable rewards tend to hook people more than predictable rewards. So when you think of illegal drugs, it, you don't know if you're going to get them. You don't know how strong they're going to be. You don't know who you're going to get them from. You don't know if you're going to get in trouble. And so there's all these up in the airs that make that search for drugs, I think, more compelling than if a drug is legal. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, if you look at the places where they have the least amount of drugs, they probably have really high crimes, like very high punishments for people like Singapore.

1:55:07Right. Right. I don't think that's good either. No, because we can't control, I mean, Singapore is an island. Right. They'll kill you. They get you with marijuana, which isn't saying, which is wild. Yeah. Terrifying. But it definitely will keep you from doing marijuana if you don't want to fucking die. You don't want to get locked in a jail and get beheaded or whatever they do to you. Yeah. And you so much harder to get to because the penalty for smuggling you in is death too. Yeah. Yeah. And it's all coming, you know, there's only somebody entry points into the country and they all are either by vote or by plane.

1:55:40So it's either coming through the ports or the airports. Imagine trying to score in Singapore. Just the fucking fear involved in that. Yeah. Oh my god. Well, for some people, that's the extra rush. Oh, it is. Yeah. Right. The thing that's illegal. The naughty thing. Right. I'm going to go get me some forbidden fruit. Exactly. You know, for Bidden marijuana. For Bidden fruit tastes better than normal fruit. That's for sure. And you see that in behavior, for sure. I mean, so drinking rose during prohibition. And partly because of the forbidden fruit effect. And we still even celebrate that today with NASCAR.

1:56:19I mean, that sport evolved naturally out of people suping up their cars to drive them to drive whiskey places. Yeah. Yeah, we've talked about that before. It's amazing. It's kind of crazy, right? That it's like one of our national pastimes. And it came out of drug running. Totally. Yeah. So it's, I mean, it's a fascinating and it's a complicated topic. I wonder if that'll be the case in the future of drugs become legal. If they'll have like submarine races from like Columbia to America. Because that's the wildest one. When the DE agents, DEA agents jump on top of these fucking submarines and they're banging on the roof.

1:56:58Like stop it. Open up. We're here. Have you seen those videos? I haven't seen the videos actually. Oh my god. Those guys are wild. Really? Those DEA agents are fucking wild. Whether it's Coast Guard or DEA, whoever those federal agents are, they jump on top of fucking submarines. See if you can find it, Jamie. It's crazy. Because this fucking submarine is shooting across the water. And these guys jump on top of this goddamn thing and they're banging on the door. Holy hell. Where did they get the submarine? Russia? Good question. Probably. Like, where do you buy a submarine? Like, if you and I go, okay, we're going to get a submarine.

1:57:33Like, who the hell do we call? Uh, here it is. Look at this. This fucking dude is like this banging on top of the door. Open up, bitch. On a submarine. Jumping on top of a fucking submarine. Drug submarine busts 12 ,000 pounds of cocaine seized. Geez. Woo. How big of an industry that is. Yeah. It's a giant industry. Now, here's the question. I mean, is the solution legalizing it? Like, you know, and this is the conversation, again, that I had with Baronson. We're both like, boy, I don't know. I mean, I am all for freedom. I'm all for people being free to choose to do whatever they want to do. And then we deal with the consequences.

1:58:14But is that, you know, what if your child dies of a fucking heroin overdose? Because heroin's legal. Totally. You know, what are you going to say to that person? Hey, man, freedom. You know, what are you going to say? Like, no, you're not going to say, but then again, what if your child dies of an overdose? Because they thought they were just getting, you know, some volume or something like that. And it actually turned out to be fentanyl. Yeah, that's the, that's so tricky. And I do think that you start to see the deaths go up when you don't know what you're getting. Yes. Yeah. And then there's also the reality that certain cartels will poison certain, they would literally do that to put other cartels out of business.

1:58:53Right. So they'll, if one cartel has like a grip on one area, they'll release poison, you know, like literally on purpose tainted cocaine so that this cartel goes out of business or they get attacked. And it's like, yeah, I do think that there is more hope for people than we often might think. A interesting stat that I read is that one in 10 Americans have report having gotten over a substance abuse issue in their lifetime. 50 % of them got over it on their own. So it tends to happen in a lot of the big government studies where like, you know, the numbers are very dire once you're hooked on a substance.

1:59:39It's very, very hard to quit. They tend to look at some of the worst cases, not some of the more, you know, average cases. And in those more average cases, the odds of recovery are a lot higher. And I think a lot of it has to do with a lot of times we age out as simple and strange as that sounds. You tend to see addiction spike in people who are about 15 to 25. That's because of the way the brain is changing during that time. So risk is something that we naturally get drawn to. We're looking for social connection and we're also looking for how we find comfort and meaning in the world. And so if you introduce a substance that does those things for people at that age, we're more likely to sort of learn using that substance as something that enhances our lives.

2:00:31But once you start to age out over time, people generally find other things that provide whatever the drug was providing for them and are able to get off it. Well, also hopefully with age comes wisdom. And with a bunch of negative experiences, you know, there's the term reaching rock bottom. And that's with a lot of addicts, they have to hit the bottom. When they go, I have to fucking do something. I mean, we've all known people that, you know, you go, hey man, you gotta stop drinking. And they don't want to do it. And they don't, if you drag them to a rehab, they'll start drinking when they get out.

2:01:07They just can't stop themselves. It's like, for whatever reason, they haven't hit rock bottom or they haven't decided that their life is so fucked up with this stuff that they'd be better off without it. I think one of the great benefits to people like yourself is that someone who has gone through that can now talk about it. And they go, oh, well, look at this. Michael Easter is a very smart guy. Like, how did he get? Okay, he's, he's just like me. And he did it. I can do it too. He's smart. He's not some fool. He's a guy who recognizes why he got trapped in this terrible cycle of behavior and thinking.

2:01:45And he got out of it. I can get out of it too. And I'll tell you that once you get out of it, so if addiction is, if you think of addiction as persistence against negative consequences, well, applied to drugs and alcohol, that's a bad thing. Applied to a lot of other things. That is the ultimate life hack. Right. Right. The ability to focus like, I write books. Writing a book is a lot of sitting in an office in the dark very early and having to wade through studies, having to figure out how do I put together this narrative. It is oftentimes frustrating as hell. There is a lot of negative short term consequences.

2:02:20But you could almost argue and I've thought about this a lot that my persistence against negative consequences with drinking has carried over into this other part of my life where it is actually creating long term benefits. So that's a message that I like to tell people too. It's like, if you can get over this, you can apply your crazy brain, your crazy behaviors to something that will enhance your life and that makes you pretty damn unstoppable. Unfortunately, the opposite exists as well, particularly with athletes. I see that in a lot of fighters and even in other athletes, they are addicted to success.

2:03:00They are like single -minded in their pursuit of excellence. To the point where it overwhelms all the other aspects of their life, all they care about is winning. They want to win, win, win, win, win, and then they can't do it anymore. And that's gone. And they need something else. And some of them get addicted to... I knew a guy who was a top flight pool player, like a real world championship caliber pool player. And I knew him really well. And he was cleaning sober, didn't smoke cigarettes, didn't do anything. And then he was in a car accident. And when he was in a car accident, he heard his back.

2:03:40And when he heard his back, he couldn't play pool. And they started giving him pills. And the same thing that made him addicted to excellence in pool now transferred over to pills. And so now he was addicted to pills. And he just couldn't stop taking him. He had this wiring in his brain that was now filled with pills. Like he had a hole. And that pills were like, we'll take that spot. And the pills took that spot. And he wound up dying when overdose. And before he died, my friend told me that one time they were all at a diner and he fell asleep in his food. He literally like, tip forward and his face went into his food, into his plate just fell asleep.

2:04:22And this guy was Mr. Clean and sober. What pool halls are filled with degenerates and all these people that are drinking and gambling and doing drugs. And they're these wild outcasts of society. And this guy was the opposite. This guy was like, I'm not going to fall into that trap. I'm going to be the best. And he would eat clean and drink water. And he was like super fucking, he would dress clean and play really well. And he was one of the best players in the world. And ultimately, the drugs got him. I mean, he heard his back really badly. He had to get surgery in his back. And they gave him these fucking oxys.

2:05:02And he just went down that road and then died. I mean, that's, you know, it's terrible. It happens to a lot of athletes, man. A lot of fighters. It's that they lose this thing that sort of gave them meaning. And then they got to find a different thing. They gave them an identity. And it gave them the thrills. The thrill of a fight is the craziest thrill. The thrill that knowing that this is going to be this one event that you're preparing for. So you're preparing for weeks and weeks and weeks for this one thing. And either it's the greatest experience of your life when you win or it's the worst feeling in the world if you lose.

2:05:42And if it's the worst feeling in the world, then you go back to the drawing board and you want to figure out how to get that great feeling again. You want to figure out how to achieve excellence. And if you can get there, if you can get back to excellence again, then you want to get it even further and further. Then you want to be the best. You want to be the champion. You want to be the number one. And then when you're number one, it's like, how long can I hold on to this? I'm 34. You know, my body started to give out. My fucking knees are going, you know, on my back hurts now. I got a pinched nerve in my neck.

2:06:08I got to get a fucking epidural so I can compete. And then they want to break in their body down. And then we had Kurt Angle on the podcast. Kurt Angle, who was an Olympic gold medalist in the heavyweight division. Okay, the cut off to the heavyweight division is 198. He weighed 199. And he's like, I'm so good. I don't need to cut weight. I'm so disciplined. It's so good. And he beat guys that were like 260, 270 pounds. Whoa. He won the Olympics with a broken neck. He broke his neck and the Olympic trials. He broke his neck, rehabbed it somewhat, and got a bunch of fucking novocaine shots in his neck so that he could compete.

2:06:50We're not going to win the fucking Olympics with a broken neck. So think about the amount of mental strength that this guy has. Yeah. And then broke his neck five more times doing pro wrestling. Cheers. And and and performed with a broken neck. Mm -hmm. And then the pills. Right. The pills got him. And then he eventually got free of him. And you know, he talked about it and talked about the journey. He was just on. It was an amazing conversation. Because you're talking about a guy who is literally as mentally strong as the smallest number of people that have ever lived. Right. You know, like the fucking 0 .001 of human beings, the discipline, the drive, the will, the focus, the strength, the grit.

2:07:34You know, wrestlers above and beyond in amateur athletics are some of the toughest human beings ever. Because it's all for glory. There's literally no money in it. There's no money in wrestling. There's no like if you win the gold medal, you can go on and play for the professional wrestling league. Like if you win a gold medal in basketball, well, hey, you can go and play in the NBA. Yeah. If you win a gold medal in many sports, there's a professional outlet. There's literally no professional outlet other than the entertainment outlet, which is what he went into or professional mixed martial arts, which is a different skill set.

2:08:13You have to learn other things. So you're talking about an insanely powerful person and he got caught in it. Yeah. I mean, it hits anybody and everyone. Anybody and everybody. We have this idea that a person who's addicted is, you know, the person you see on the street, like that woman that you mentioned. Yeah. It's not. It can hit anyone for all different sorts of reasons. But I think the upsides is that it isn't a guarantee that you're not going to get cleaned or anything like that. Like there are paths out of it. Yeah. And they look different for every single person. All right. So I had a guy who helped me get sober and I was asking.

2:08:53What do people need, you know, and he goes, well, sometimes people need a pad on the back. And sometimes they need a little bit of a kick in the ass. Right. It's like everyone needs something, right? And what's going to work for one person isn't necessarily going to work for another person. Isn't necessarily going to work for another person. But I do think that the commonality you find is that it takes action. It's not going to be easy. And you have to find something that gives you that replaces the whole. So in the case of your friend, it's like there was the, you know, the wrestling was that was the life.

2:09:26That went away. I got filled with whatever the, you know, the drug of choices. Okay. Now we got to drain that. And we got to put something else in there. Yeah. Because if nothing changes, nothing changes. Right. Yeah. That's what they say. Like get addicted to something good. Like learn how to play golf or something. Get addicted to something that's productive. Yeah. Could be exercise running. Yeah. It could be some of, you know, there, there's all sorts of ways people recover. There really are. And I think that, you know, something like 12 -step programs, they really help a lot of people. They're not for everyone, though.

2:09:58And so if, you know, if you're a person who's suffering and that just didn't seem to work for you, I would suggest, you know, try something else. How'd you do it? I went through a program of people who were like -minded and helped me deal with my underlying issues and sort of gave me counseling. And I think that helped me start to peel the layers. It's not something I'm super active in now. But a lot of it did come down to figuring out, okay, well, why am I doing this thing in the first place? How have I replaced it? Whatever I was chasing, can I get that in a different kind of chase? You know?

2:10:36Yeah. So for - because I like sort of extreme experiences, sort of exploring the edges, intense living, I mean, okay, backcountry hunting. Let's go - let's call in the woods for like a week, right? That's like pretty extreme. Extreme, or even exercise, I think gives me a lot of that. A lot of the travels I do. You know, there's a reason that I could have gone and investigated drugs in, say, Ohio. Why the hell they go to Iraq? Because I kind of need that. You want an extreme experience. Yeah. And it's, you know - The hunting one is very valuable for veterans. Yes. A lot of veterans, they leave that world and they're very lost and they need something that helps them.

2:11:26And for many of them, hunting fills that void because it's so difficult. And I'm sure a lot of people listening to this that have an aversion to that idea of hunting and that they think it's cruel and I get how they would understand that. Unfortunately, a lot of those people also eat meat. And, you know, if you eat meat or if you even eat vegetables, unfortunately, that's the real sucky reality is that unless you grow all of your own food organically and you know exactly what you're doing and you eat vegetables that you grow yourself. If you're getting food from monocrop agriculture, you're 100 % contributing to the loss of life and not just one life.

2:12:06But do you think that a frog is as important as an elk? Do you think that a ground nesting bird is as important as an elk? Because if I shoot an elk, I eat that elk for months. Yeah. If you buy a bushel of corn, there are a lot of deaths attached to that in insects because of pesticides and fawns and these things that get ground up in combines when they're rolling over the fields. Like, there's a crazy video that I saw of these grain combines that are rolling across this field and they hit this patch. And you see all these deer just scatter out of there barely, barely making it out alive. How's this thing is running them over?

2:12:51That's crazy. Yeah, rabbits, all sorts of things get killed in that. And, you know, you could say that that's also the cycle of life and that most certainly doesn't go to waste because something will eat those birds or birds will eat those dead rabbits, you know, the vultures and coyotes. And all these animals that do get killed in the cultivation of grain, they will feed wildlife. Nothing goes to waste in the wild. You know, that's the thing. Like, even if you, like, save your hunting and you shoot an animal and it runs into the forest and you can't find it. And you go, oh my god, I've killed something for no reason.

2:13:30Well, believe me, something's going to find that thing. Right. It's going to get eaten. It's like, there's nothing that goes to waste in the wild. Zero things go to waste. They will find it. They will smell it. They will get to it. They will eat it. They will consume it down to the bones. You see it over and over and over. Yeah. Yeah, I was mentioning that that scarcity loop system that tends to draw people in and sort of people tend to get hooked on. Well, I mentioned how it evolved from hunting and gathering. So you can also find activities that fall into that that enhance your life in the process.

2:14:02Hunting, great example. Because as you're falling into that random care, it's you have an opportunity to find an animal. You don't know where it's going to be. You don't know how big. You don't know anything about what that experience is going to like. How it's all going to unfold. And then when it does unfold, it's like, oh my god, that was amazing. Right. And then you can do that again the next year. It's also people think it's easy and you've experienced it. It's not easy. It's not easy at all. No. It's so hard, especially with the bone arrow. It's insanely hard. It requires incredible amounts of discipline and practice.

2:14:36But even with a rifle, I mean, if you're, especially if you're on public land, it is so difficult to get an animal. It's so difficult. And depending upon what you're doing, unless you're like pig hunting in Texas, you could get a pig in Texas. They want you to do that, obviously, because they're invasive species. But it's, people have this idea that you're going out there with this high -powered scope and a rifle and just easily taking out some animal. And then, you know, you'll see it online when someone will post a picture of an animal. Like, what if that animal's armed? Did this isn't fair?

2:15:11You know, you should use a spear or, you know, you should go run up to it and stab it. You think you're a real killer. Go do it with your teeth. You know, like, it's, you see a lot of like ridiculous perspectives. And I kind of, I know where they're coming from. I see where they're coming from. They think of it as a cruelty thing. But it's because they haven't experienced it. I think if they went and they saw how hard it is, just like you're trekking through the mountains, eight, ten miles a day, it's exhausting. You're burning thousands of calories. You're going up and down an elevation. You have to be in great shape.

2:15:41And you could easily go 10, 11 days and come home empty handed and eat tag soup. It happens more than it doesn't. Yeah. Yeah, exactly. And people get greater rewards from things that are harder to get. Yes. That's what we ultimately find. If I, if I say give someone a check for a million dollars, it's great. But they would value that so much more if they had to build a business or something that earned it. Yes. Oh, yeah. And I think that goes back to a lot of, I mean, I think a lot of why we are the way we are and what we value goes back to evolution. And so that psychologist I was telling you about earlier, Thomas and Tall, you said the reason that we get more value from things that are harder to get is probably because if you had to work harder to get something in the past that saved your life, you want to incentivize that repeat searching, right?

2:16:39So the harder you work for something, if you get this giant like, oh my god, that was amazing. Right. We did it. That's going to incentivize future persistence. Like winning a fight. Like winning a fight. Yeah. All the work that goes into that. Right. You know? Yeah. And so I think finding, realizing that improvement and finding things that you truly value and mean something to you are ultimately going to be a challenge. And this even, this applies to marriage, this applies to, I'm sure, raising kids. I can imagine that's easy. It applies to all these different things that are important part of being a human today, knowing that, you know, a lot of times the process is the reward.

2:17:16And the harder the process, probably the bigger reward for you internally. Yeah. I mean, that's that cliche. It's all about the journey. And it is. It's like you, these little moments where you have success, these moments, they're just a testament to the fact that the grind is worth it. What do you, how do you, what are you feeling internally when you hunt? There's a lot going on. Don't fuck it up, but you can't think that because you'll fuck it up, right? But you want to make sure that you've done everything you need to do before a hunt. I lose weight. I get in really good shape. Like when it comes July, I start really ramping up my cardio.

2:17:57I start rucking. I carry kettlebells. I do like farmer's carries. I do all these different things. I pull sleds just so I can more easily manage my way through the mountains. And I put a lot of emphasis on that this year. A lot more than I did last year. And I got in much better shape. I really kept my diet clean. And I practiced every day. I was outside in the Texas heat. It was 104 degrees out. I had a giant 64 ounce or 62 ounce, whatever it is, 64 ounce hydroflask, filled with liquid IV and water. So I'm just out there hydrating in 104 degree heat, just practicing my shot over and over and over and over.

2:18:41And over and over and over and over for hours. So the point where my shoulders hurt, my arms not steady. To the point where I should have probably quit four or five groups earlier. Because my groups are getting a little scattered. Because my arms not steady anymore. But when I get to the mountains, I know that I've dotted all my eyes. I've crossed on my teeth. I'm in great shape. I have great accuracy. I'm very good. I know what to do. And I can do it. So it's knowing that that you've done the preparation. That's very important. It's a terrible feeling to not feel confident. To be doing this and not feel confident.

2:19:17I saw a few guys that were like that in camp. Yeah. That maybe it was their first time bow hunting elk. And they weren't really prepared. And you can tell that they weren't prepared. And you can tell that they could tell that they weren't prepared. And they weren't successful. There was, I don't know how many hunters in camp with us. I think there was 30. Two guys got elk with a bow. Really? Yeah. Two of them. That's right. That's right. Yeah. Why is that? Tough year. It's because of the snow. The snow. Yeah. They lost a lot of deer. I think they lost elk too. But they lost a lot of deer. Like in some places, some parts of the ranch, they said they lost some like 50 % of their deer.

2:19:55One place they lost 80%. I think they lost 80 % to the winter die off. Yeah. Man, it's a fucking hard world out there for those animals. Yeah. They're freezing to death. I pulled a tag last year for the cash area, which is right bot, which is basically within where we were at Deseret. And that went well. And I had gone with a buddy whose name is Chase Lamborn. He's at Utah State. He's a Ph .D. wildlife researcher. Kid, I went to high school with. So old buddy. And then he turns out he, you know, goes and gets his super smarty pants Ph .D. And a cool subject. So I went with him. And, you know, I asked him, I'm like, should I put in this year?

2:20:32And he's like, I don't know, man. Like Utah is kind of a mess with Mule there this year. Like you're not going to go anything. Yeah, they all got killed off. So. Yeah. It could be a while, many years, until they bounced back to the numbers they were a few years ago. But that's the reality that these animals live in. You know, so it was tough in that respect. The numbers were a little lower than normal. You know, it's also tough when they have a lot of feed. You know, because there was so much rain and so much rainfall. There was feed everywhere and water everywhere. So it was more difficult predicting where they're going to be and finding them.

2:21:06And then, you know, it's just, it's fucking hard. It's hard to do. A lot of tracking. It's a lot of tracking. And you got to be in shape and you got to be ready. You know, it's, it's hard. But when it's over, when you're successful, whoo. It's a great feeling of relief, a great feeling of satisfaction. And the food that you get from it is the finest animal protein that you can get. Yeah. The best stuff in the world for you. Totally. What do you feel like your most rewarding hunts has been?

2:21:41It's always the hard ones, you know. It's always the difficult ones. It's like the desert is a hard one because not because of density. There's a lot of animals there. But it's just hard terrain. It's, you know, and the wind swirling like there, you have to have so many. There's so many factors. I mean, there's so many times you're getting close and then you feel the wind at the back of your neck. And you're like, fuck. And then you see the elk just like picked their head up and just start running. Yeah. They hundreds of yards away. They smell predator and they're like, fuck this. And, you know, that's why they're, you know, eight, nine years old.

2:22:15The guy, the elk eye shot was 11 years old. That's crazy. That's wild. It was a perfect elk to shoot because his teeth were worn out. They were really worn down and he might have not made it through the winter. You know, he was, they don't really live older than 11, you know. Right. And the wild, like, and there's mountain lines all over the place up there. Is there a lot more now? They have a lot. They have a lot to the point where Utah changed their laws. And they made mountain line hunting. All you have to do is just get a tag. Oh, the counter. Yeah, like, and you could shoot them like coyotes.

2:22:47Wow. My mom, so I grew up in, um, just north of Salt Lake City. And the home I grew up in, my mom has a mountain line that hangs out in her backyard quite a bit because there's some woods behind her house. It's a pretty developed area too, but there just happens to be this wooded area where there's a park and she'll hear the mountain lion at night having just killed some deer because there's some deer that lived in there. And they're, they get pretty damn big around there. Yeah. I've seen three mountain lines in my life. And the two that I saw before the one I saw two years ago, the two that I saw previously were very small.

2:23:26I saw one in Colorado. It was probably like the size of a dog. And then I saw one in Montecito. We were driving on the road and I thought what I saw was a coyote run across the road until I saw the tail. I was like, oh my god, it's a mountain line. Wow. This is a brief glimpse. And again, this is probably a 60 pound animal. Two years ago, we saw one that was easily 180 pounds. Easily. He was fucking huge. I think that was the hunt that I was on too. Was it? Yeah, because I remember you coming back and being like, oh my god. Dude, we just saw like in your eyes or just saucer. I was so scared. And I was in a truck.

2:24:07It was a crazy thing. We were driving down this road and it was at dusk. And as we were driving down this road, my friend Colton saw these eyes under this tree. And he hits the brace, goes, look at the size of that fucking cat. And we looked, this thing had a pumpkin head, like this big old muscular head. You know, like a wrought while it has where they have these big muscles on the side of their head. And these massive forearms, man. His forearms were fucking huge and it was just like crouched underneath this tree staring at us. Thirty yards away. And I'm in the truck, so I pulled out my binoculars.

2:24:46So I'm looking at them through ten power binoculars and I'm seeing his whole face. I'm looking in his eyes. I'm seeing his body and like, what do you do if you zig when you should have zagged and you run into that thing? Like, holy shit was it big. Yeah, you just say, well, there are worse ways to die. I guess I'll take this one. Yeah, unless you have a pistol on you. But it was, it was eye opening because... Even the pit started to change the topics. But even the pistol thing is, I mean, that inserts its own form of danger. Like, I heard, it was a guy last year in Wyoming who got mulled by a grizzly.

2:25:24And he pulled out, you know, the Glock 10 millimeter just opened up the clip and he ended up shooting himself in the ankle. Oh, yeah, yeah. The friend of a friend. It's a panic. Yeah, ends up at the bear ended up dying, you know, walked off dies. But he shoots himself in the ankle. It just blows his ankle. And then they had to do 10 miles on horses to get the guy to a place where they could lifelight them. To get a reception. And they lifelight him, so this is in Wyoming, they lifelight him to University of Utah Hospital and they end up saving the foot. Oh, but in the process, it's paid for that one.

2:26:01Yeah, well, that's a panic moment, right? And you don't even know what panic is until you see a fucking grizzly bear. Yeah. You know, Steve Rinella. Mm -hmm. He had had encounters with bears in the past. But he told a story. And he was also with my friend, Remi Warren, who told a story in the podcast about they were in a Fogneck Island. So a Fogneck is like Alaska. And so there's the coastal brown bears. So you're dealing with like 11, 12 foot bear. Giant. Giant. Because they just eat salmon all there. It's exactly. And they eat elk because they're on this island hunting elk. Oh. So he shot an elk and they're in this insanely dense area where it's very, very difficult to pack out.

2:26:48So they hang the elk in a tree. They leave some of the meat. They take some of it back. They go back the next morning to get to the elk. And they see some bear shit. And they don't, you know, they don't think anything of it. They're there. The elk is still there. They think they've got it. Well, some bear had claimed this elk. And they didn't know that the bear claimed the elk. And they're all sitting around eating lunch. They're going to have lunch. And then they could have took them like hours to get to this place. And then they're going to pack out the elk. And while they're sitting there eating lunch, this fucking 11 foot bear runs at them.

2:27:29Through the trees, through the camp. But there was so many people there that the bear doesn't know who to attack and just kind of runs through them. And one of his camera guys, this guy is nicknamed dirt myth. Dirt myth winds up on the bear's back. The bear like literally plows through these people. And he's on this things back for like 10 yards as it's running. And then he falls off. My other friend, Yannis, hits it with a trekking stick in the face as it passes him. And he said it was literally a foot from his face. This fucking gnashing, enormous mouth. This maw that would be instant death.

2:28:16And he said, all your ideas of what you would do in that circumstances, they're all out the window. Your reptilian brain completely takes over. And this is a guy, and Steve Renella, that is as experienced a woodsman as you will ever find. He's also a brilliant guy. He's very smart. And he can articulate the experience in a way that not that many people can. And the way he described it was absolutely horrific. Just horrific. Like you just don't have any idea what that would be like until you encounter it. And then when you encounter it, you don't ever want to see that again. Yeah, that's crazy.

2:28:53Those things are so giant. So giant. You don't even understand what it means until you're around them and they're running. Because they can run like a fucking quarterback or a quarterback, I should say. They run fucking bass, is what I'm trying to say. Did they hear it before? They just, they're just coming through the, I think they heard some noise in the woods and they turned. And it was just running straight towards them. Literally like a bus. Just a bus. Like a Volkswagen bus with teeth. Just running at you. Fuck, man. And so that's something that's literally 10 times the size of that cat that I saw.

2:29:34Oh, yeah. I'm shit in my pants looking at this cat through a window, 30 yards away in a truck where I'm kind of protected. And they, you know, encountered this thing that ran through their camp. Yeah, well, they're going to remember that forever. Don't remember that forever. Absolutely. Yeah, it's, you know, there's just the reality of nature and the wild. People that don't experience it. Like someone was telling me this today, I need to know if this is true, that in British Columbia, you can't even shoot a bear and self -defense. Really? Yeah, well, they outlawed Grizzly Bear hunting. And which is crazy because the problem with the place like British Columbia is that the voting population all exists in urban areas.

2:30:22So you have all your people from Vancouver. It's beautiful city. And, you know, it's the kind of people that live there, urban people, right? They're not, they don't have any experience with wildlife for the most part unless they regularly go out there. So they don't even know what they're voting on. And this bill comes across like, should we outlaw Grizzly Bear hunting? Like, well, no one's hunting a Grizzly Bear to feed their family. That's ridiculous. Like, we should outlaw that. So they outlawed. Well, my friend Mike, who runs a guide service in northern BC, he experiences, he had a shoot of fucking Grizzly Bear from like three beat away from a cabin door.

2:31:02So this thing was trying to break into a cabin and he had to shoot it like as it was coming to the cabin door. Like, these are terrifying animals. Yeah, so breaking the house is easy at the time. Yeah, terrifying. And there's also wolves up there like packs of wolves that will take out a horse every now and then. So you'll like, you hear some crazy noise. You look out the window and there's a pack of wolves mauling one of your horses. The wild that those people exist in, it is so alien to anyone that lives in an urban environment that they pass these laws and they don't even know what they're voting on.

2:31:33They don't understand. Right. They should literally be forced to go out there and camp in the wilderness and encounter Grizzlies. And understand the population. There's a lot of them. It's not a small number. They're not endangered by any stretch of the imagination. Grizzly bears are thriving up there. Yeah. And when you're not hunting them, now they're not afraid of people anymore. So at least when they were hunted, they'd smell people and they go, oh, I equate the smell of people to someone hunting me. I'm going to get out of here. Now they don't avoid people at all. In fact, they say they come to gunfire because they hear gunfire and they think it's a down deer and they go to steal that deer from the hunter.

2:32:10Yeah. So they hear a gun and they run towards where the gun is going. To the gunfire. Well, and so the whole point of the vote is that people perceive that they're limiting suffering. Yes. But once you get populations big enough, then you start to have problems with how much food they can access. There's going to be infighting between them. So you're going to get suffering on the back end. And then they go into ranchers and they start attacking cattle. And they start, it becomes a giant. As soon as they're not threatened by people at all, they become very fucking dangerous. Yeah. See if that's true.

2:32:46You can't shoot them even in self -defense. I can't find anything that says that. I found it a case where a guy claimed self -defense, but the judge said that didn't sound like self -defense because he went back inside to grab his arrows. Oh. That's the only thing I could find out was even close to it. I'm looking harder, but I can't find anything. That could still be self -defense. Because you go back inside the grab, if you have to get out and it's there, and now you have arrows on you. It's kind of like what's happened on Maui with the access deer, right? There's just so damn many. Yeah, except they're not dangerous.

2:33:19Yeah, exactly. And you can eat them. And, you know, they've got Maui Newy Venison, which is a company that's really done an amazing thing where they hunt them. They have a USDA processing facility on the ranch, and you can buy wild game from Maui. So you're helping control this invasive population. You're getting this incredible, delicious protein that's actually necessary to shoot them because they don't have any predators. Yeah, they don't have predators. And the way that they're shooting them, too, is about as ethical as you can get. Yeah. I mean, they're shooting them as I understand it in the middle of the night, just like right in the head, like bam, they're done.

2:33:56Yep, yep. It's a great operation. Yeah, they're using, yeah. And they process it, like I said, with the USDA facility. So you know that you're getting, you know, it's all clean and safe. And it's all done correctly and sanitaryly. And, you know, you can get the best protein that you can get. And it helps them because, like, Lenai is crazy. When we were in Lenai, Lenai has 3 ,000 people, this gorgeous island. And it has 30 ,000 deer. And you can't imagine the numbers. When you're, we drove at nighttime and we hit the high beams and you just see eyeballs. Yeah. As far as the eye can see. I mean, you're looking at thousands and thousands and thousands of deer just in one field.

2:34:46Crazy. And just eating everything that they can and they hunt those at night, too. They hunt those with snipers. They do everything they can. It's great for the population because everybody there eats well. They all have great food. They all have great vines. But it's just so unnatural. Yeah. And I guess they were a gift. They were a gift to King Kamehameh. Right. Yeah. And then they just overpopulated the island. Yeah. How do you feel like when you try this year, how did you feel rocking helped you? Well, anything where you're carrying weight and you're going like one of the things that I did quite a bit is 30 % incline on a, I have a really good treadmill.

2:35:2930 % incline and put a weight vest on. That's awesome. Yeah. And just watch a movie and fucking grind. That's the pack meal workout, dude. I do that a lot. My feet, my feet, my calves were killing me. It's hard. Man, it's hard. Another thing I did a lot of is the echo bike. You know, it's like an assault bike with a broke bike. That one helped me a lot. Intervals? Yeah, Tabatas. Okay. Yeah. So I do these 22nd sprints, 10 second rest, 22nd sprints. And you do it a cycle of eight. And I would do that at the end of my workout. So I do all, I start off every workout with a cold plunge. I do a cold plunge for three minutes.

2:36:06Then I do my series of body weight exercises to warm myself up. Every day, I do 100 pushups and 100 body weight squats on a slant board. So I do those. And then by that time, I'm warmed up. And then generally, I do most days. I do Nordic curls. So I have a Nordic bench. So I hook my heels into this thing. And then I lift myself up with my hamstrings. That's a hard exercise. It's hard. Yeah. So I do reps with that. And I'll do three sets of six or seven. Now I'm up to seven. Seven reps. I want to make sure they don't blow something out. Because it is hard to do. It's like you're going, yeah. It's not like a body weight squat.

2:36:54Like I can do 20 body weight squats easy. So I do sets of five. Five sets of 20 rather. So that's how I get my 100 in. But the Nordics, I take a good amount of time in between. Yeah. Like I'll do it. And then I'll do like a good five minute rest before I attempt a second set. Maybe even 10 minutes sometimes. Yeah. So I do those. And then I generally do kettlebell routines. Or I do, I have a body weight series that I do. Or I do 10 chin ups, 20 dips and 10 L chin ups. Or N pull L pull ups. So it's a close grip where my feet are extended out in front of me. Yeah. And I'm doing these. And I do sets of 10 of those.

2:37:36And I'll do a circuit of five. So five of those. So I do, you know, so it's 50 chin ups, 100 dips and 50 pull ups. So it all winds up to be 100 and 100. Yeah. And so I do that. And then generally, either I'll do neck exercises or core exercises. Like I'll do the iron neck. And I'll do, you know, with those hip glute ham machines where you, you can do a sit up where you're like way low. Yeah. I do sets of 20 of those. And then I do back extensions. The opposite of flip it around. And then I have a sore next one that actually doubles as a reverse hyper. And so then I do my reverse hypers. And then I stretch out.

2:38:25And then, you know, I stretch my back out because it's a lot of back. You know, it's a lot of compression there. It feels like everything's tight. So I, you know, relax and stretch that out. And then generally, I'll do my sprints on the air die machine. And depending upon how hard the workout is, I usually do four or five rounds of tabatas. So, you know, you're doing eight, eight sprints each round. Eight sprints with eight rests. And then I'll recover. I get my heart rate monitor. I get my heart rate down to about 100. And then I get back on it again. And I do another one. And I get it back down to 100.

2:39:00Do it again. And depending upon the workout, like if I'm just doing that, I'll do ten. I'll do ten reps. So ten, ten series of eight. Yeah. But if I'm doing all that other stuff first, I'm so beat up by the time I get to that, that I'll do four or maybe I'll push myself to do five. And then I immediately go into the sauna. So my cardio's still banging. And because it's like, I'm going into the sauna. I'm already at 130 beats for me. I'm stepping right off the salt bike. Yeah, and it's 185 degrees in the sauna. And I sit there for 20 minutes. Right on. That'll do it. Yeah. It fucks you up. But it gets you in tremendous shape.

2:39:41It really does. And if I'm, and I was consistent with that, and it made a big difference in the mountains, I really know. You know, obviously this is sea level. It's like most altitude here. It's like fucking 191 feet. Right. And in Utah, we were at 8 ,000. 8 ,000. So you have to be in shape. There's no other way to either you live up there and you fucking hike those hills all the time or you prepare yourself. Yeah. Totally. So that's what I did. I feel like the slow grind of rucking is awesome for cardio. And then you just pair that with to what you're talking about, which is that high intensity.

2:40:16You hit both those systems, and that's kind of the secret sauce to me. And a lot of what I think about too with hunting is, how can I resist injury? Yeah. If you roll an ankle or something out there or whatever it might be, I mean, that can blow the whole thing for you. So I also do a ton of durability work, like just getting my ankles real tight and resistant to falls, getting my knees nice and locked down. And then the question just becomes, okay, can I cover ground while bearing load for an entire day? And if the answer is yes, I feel pretty solid. Right. And can I handle a pack out? If I have a heavy pack out?

2:40:51So I have one of those treadmills too that goes at a pretty good incline. And I'll throw maybe a hundred pounds in a rock or something, and just slow grind for a while. And it's just the worst. But you get it done, and you're like, all right. One of the most satisfying things about the hunt was that I had to pack out. I had to carry these quarters on my shoulder and make it up this wet slope. So it's like very steep, and it's pouring rain out, and everything's wet. You're stepping over wet logs, and I'm carrying this quarter, which probably weighs 80 pounds on my shoulder. And I'm climbing over stuff.

2:41:28But, you know, like I slipped, but caught myself, so I have the balance to catch myself. It was all just confirmation that I had done the work. Yeah. It was very nice. Yeah. It felt great that I didn't have to feel like, like I was under -prepared. Yeah. Totally. Yeah. Right on, man. Good times out. But again, it makes you want to get right back to it. Like, as soon as it's over, you're like, okay, don't slack off. Don't get fucking fat now, stupid. Like, don't get out of shape, because now I have a good base, so I have to keep it going. Well, that's a great, I mean, it's a good pursuit, because once a year, you are going to have to get in shape, too, which, I mean, you probably keep yourself in shape, generally.

2:42:04But a lot of people, that's the thing that pushes them, they need, you need an activity, right? A lot of people aren't just going to get in shape, just to get in shape. There needs to be some greater reason, greater why behind it. And finding that, I think, can be transformative for people. Yeah, you have a goal, instead of just saying, I'm going to be in great shape. Like, why? Like, what, you know I'm going to use it. But if you have a thing that you know you're going to do in September, that's fucking really hard to do. And I really worked hard this year. Like, I came into, like, July in great shape already.

2:42:32So I was able to do it. I really never slacked off the whole year. So it made it, it just, it makes a difference. Also, diet. Yeah. I cut out all the bullshit. I cut out all the bullshit. I lost 10 pounds. I basically, I'm on the carnivore diet. That's basically what I'm eating. And pretty strict. And made a giant difference. I think the cutting out of the bullshit is the most important thing for people. So part of the book, I found this tribe that has the healthiest hearts ever recorded by science. They're called the Chimane tribe. And they're in the Bolivian Amazon. So I go down and visit them in Bolivia.

2:43:09So I got a fly into La Paz, which is like 13 ,000 feet. And I was supposed to take a small plane down, which is a half an hour. But the airline goes belly up like the day before. I'm supposed to get there, right? So we got to take this 12 -hour car ride down to the jungle. And you take a six -hour canoe ride up into the jungle. And it's all just a wall of green, right? You're going, it all looks the same. And it has for the last six hours. And then eventually the, you know, the guy, the canoe guy just goes up a bank. And you're like, how the hell do you know this is the place? It's like, now trust me.

2:43:41So we get out and, you know, there's the tribe. And the real difference maker, their diet generally. At some point across the day, it's going to break like every popular diet that we've been given in the last, you know, 40 years. Like they eat some sugar, they eat some chocolate, they eat red meat, they eat fish, they eat white rice, they eat white potatoes. It's not low fat, it's not low carb, it's not right. It's, at some point, it's going to offend someone, they eat corn. But the real difference maker is, to your point about bullshit, it's all one ingredient. Right? It's all just having one ingredient and they're not eating super processed food.

2:44:23It's just real food. It's just real food. It's real food. And meanwhile in the US, I think something like 60 % of the food, the average American eat, is ultra processed. And so back to the, the scarcity loop idea I told you about, there's this quote from a guy who's with the food industry. He said, if you want to make a food, so people over eat it, over consume it, it's got to have three V's. It's got to have value. It's got to have variety, and it's got to have velocity. Now that is just a different way of explaining what I just laid out. Right? It's like the value, it's got to be relatively cheap.

2:45:01It's got to give you something, variety. You got to have a lot of different flavors. Not only within the food itself, so this mix of sugar, salt, fat, whatever it might be, but also a lot of different varieties of junk foods. Like you go to the supermarket, and there's like 45 different Doritos. Right. And then velocity. You have to eat it fast. And so when scientists will put people in a lab, and have them eat one diet that is basically unprocessed, very minimally processed, versus an ultra processed diet, where everything else is matched. This is an NIH study. The people who eat the ultra processed diet end up eating 500 more calories a day, just by the fact that they eat it much faster.

2:45:45And you don't get those natural breaks with that you would with natural food that are telling you, oh, okay, you're full, because it's taking up more room in your stomach. I mean, think of a boiled potato, versus potato chips. One ounce of a boiled potato might be 50 calories, vitamins, minerals, whatever. One ounce of potato chips might be 250 calories. And by the way, like, how many boiled potatoes are you going to fucking eat? Right. I'll tell you how many potato chips I could eat, and the answer is quite alarming. You could eat a ton of them. Yeah. I can keep going. I'll open up a second bag of pringles.

2:46:18Yeah, dude. The box of pringles. Or like ruffles. Yeah. Oh, that's so good. Yeah. So I think vinegar ones. Yeah. Exactly. Yeah, those are ones that get you. Yeah, it's our food. There's so many people that eat far more calories than they burn, and it's easy to do. You know, if you're eating pizza, how easy is it to overeat on pizza? Yeah. So fucking, and that's not even processed. Even good pizza. Dude, look. Yeah, I mean, it's the amount of calories. Like a pizza from a place like a dominoes or a pizza hut. I mean, it just literally like hits your mouth, and just kind of melts. And somehow you've just eaten one slice in like, you know.

2:46:56Seconds. One bite. Yeah. It's probably who knows how many hundreds of calories on a slice. Yeah, it's gotta be. I'll have five, six slices. Yeah. So I'm literally burning off, I mean, it would take me hours in the gym to burn off a pizza. Oh, totally. Like if I eat a whole large dominoes pizza, which I have more than once. Oh, I have two. Yeah. How many hours is that in the gym? So many. Probably like three hours of hard cardio just, and you're not gonna do that. And I don't, there's, I don't think people realize just how many calories things have. Like, okay, this morning, you know, before the show, I go get a coffee or whatever.

2:47:33And I get a black coffee. But, you know, people's orders are coming out. And, you know, it's like, all right. I got a pumpkin chino, a cinnamon bun, frozen frappe, extra whip for so -and -so. Large. And we're looking at that going like, that's probably 900 calories. Yeah. Maybe, you know. And that's like, in a - Start of their day. In addition, and that's not breakfast, right? No. That's a nice coffee. I'm just gonna get a Starbucks. Yeah, I'm just gonna get a Starbucks. That's what they say. I'll get a Starbucks. I mean, it's a fucking milkshake. They, uh, someone made a breakdown, I think on Instagram or something like that, of, uh, one of those, uh, Baskin Robbins coffee things, those flurries or whatever the fuck it is.

2:48:17That's, that's a McDonald's thing, right? Whatever. It was 129 grams of sugar. Whoa. So they showed the actual amount of sugar you would get. He had a clear, like, container that showed the amount of sugar that you'd be eating, just drinking one of these things. Crazy. How do you stay awake after that? It seems like you'd go into a fucking sugar coma. So when I was in the jungle with that tribe, we did have sugar. We had, uh, sugar cane. But the difference is that we had to walk into the jungle. We had to physically chop it. We had to move it to this expelor thing they have that is human powered.

2:48:54So you put the cane in this, in between these two wood pole things. And then you have to push this thing around and it shoves the cane through that, and it juices it. And so by the time you've done all that work, like, you've burned quite a few calories, and by the way, you're not getting 129 grams from it. Right. Thing is sugar, right? And so I think it just goes back for the average person that we don't move enough so we can't buffer the sugar, right? Diabetes could just be that you are, uh, it's too much couch rather than too much of anything else. And it's also just so easy to eat food today and take in a whole lot of calories in one bite because just as, you know, I mentioned at the beginning, we got this casino lab figuring out what leads people to gamble more.

2:49:40We've got tons of labs across the country going, how do we make super delicious, hyper -palatable food that people will eat more of? Yeah. Now I don't fault this. Yeah, this is the guy. So it's Dunkin' Donuts. That's what it is. Not Baskin' Robbins. It has 185 grams of sugar. Oh, 185. Sorry. It's this much. It's four. Look at that. Damn. Six teaspoons of sugar to give you another perspective. The amount of sugar in there is equal to 14 glazed donuts. Third. It's like that. And how many people throw those things down every day? That's the ultimate calorie delivery. Dunkin' Donuts. I didn't know it was a Dunkin' Donuts thing.

2:50:22Dang. Whew. Yeah. Yeah, we eat too much sugar. We eat too much processed bullshit. And if you don't do that, the interesting thing about the carnivore diet is you can't overeat. I mean, you could, I guess. I can't. I get satisfied. Pretty quickly. Yeah. One, you know, 16 ounce steak or an 18 ounce steak, and I'm done. But if that 16 ounce steak was sitting next to a bowl of pasta, I would eat the pasta, too. Smash the pasta. Yeah. You just like try it a little, also good. Like, even though I'm full, I'll still eat it because it's like, you're getting this reward from those carbs and the flavors.

2:51:00Because that's one of the things they say about those competitive eaters. Anyone there in those hot dog eating contestants like that? They eat fries with it so that they could eat more food. So they can keep going. Yeah. Yeah. Which is wild. If you offer a human more different food, they will eat more different food. Yeah. So even if they do studies in buffet, some people always eat way more food than normal at a buffet, simply because they're trying so many different things. Right. And there's incentives to do that. So I think when you start to cut out food groups, you inevitably eat less food because it also becomes less rewarding as well.

2:51:38Yeah. Yeah. And I think that's what happens with this tribe as well. I mean, when we sit down for a lunch, we have chicken, white rice, some baked plantains, and some onions. It was all terrible. It was all fucking terrible, dude. Just bland, subsistence food. Blend is hell. The chicken, I mean, so the chicken was probably, I don't know, like a three pound chicken or something. I mean, now today in the US, our chickens are giant. Giant. And so this meat is just really like stringy and chewy. And I'm going, thank you. Yeah. It's a wild chicken, probably. Yeah. There's a wild chicken. And so we just don't, we've enhanced the flavor of our food to such a degree that we're inevitably going to eat more of it, which don't get me wrong.

2:52:26This is a good problem to have in the grand scheme of time and space. It's better than starvation. It's better than starvation. So people will be like, you know, the modern food system is the worst thing ever. And it's like, well, compared to what? Right. Compared to 200 years ago? No. Very few people are starving to death in America. Exactly. If they are and at all, I don't know what the numbers are. Yeah. I mean, usually that's abuse if someone's starving. Yeah. It's usually a distribution problem. And it often, unfortunately, happens with children because they've got shitty parents. Yeah. It's not a food thing.

2:52:54We throw out about a third of our food. Which is crazy. Yeah. Well, this is Michael. It's always great talk to you, my friend. It's always great to sit down and talk to you about anything and everything. And your book, your newest book. Scares the Debrain? Is it out now? It is out. Yeah. Do you do audiobook? I did do the audiobook myself. You did. Yes. I had the whole damn thing. Yes. Yeah. I'm so happy when people tell me that. I hate when an author who, especially you, was voice I know, you know, I want to hear you say it. You know. It bums me out. So I'm glad you did it. Yeah. It's a lot of tedious work, but it is totally worth it, I think, in the end.

2:53:32Well, thank you very much, my friend. I appreciate you. Thanks for being here. Thank you very much. Tell everybody to your Instagram, all that good stuff. Instagram is Michael underscore Easter. I got a sub stack where I write about all the kind of stuff we just talked about today. It's called 2%. And then the book is called Scares the Debrain. All right. Thank you very much. Right on. Thank you. Bye everybody.