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

Episode Date: October 7, 2023

Michael Easter is a University of Nevada, Las Vegas professor, a journalist and an author who focuses on health and human performance. Even though we might often feel in control of our impulses, there are regular moments that remind us of our uncontrolled tendencies. From overspending to overeating, there is a secret loop happening inside of our minds that causes our actions and intentions to move further apart Expect to learn why moderation is so impossible to achieve, what humans actually want the most out of life, what the scarcity loop is and how it drives your behaviour, if it's possible to become dependent on certainty, whether humans are more likely to chase happiness or avoid discomfort, Michael’s contrarian opinion on first world problems and much more... Sponsors:  Get 15% discount on Mud/Wtr at https://mudwtr.com/mw (use code MODERNWISDOM) Get an exclusive discount from Surfshark VPN at https://surfshark.deals/MODERNWISDOM (use code MODERNWISDOM) Get 20% discount on House Of Macadamias’ nuts at https://houseofmacadamias.com/modernwisdom (use code MW20) Extra Stuff: Get my free Reading List of 100 books to read before you die → https://chriswillx.com/books/ To support me on Patreon (thank you): https://www.patreon.com/modernwisdom - Get in touch. Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/chriswillx Twitter: https://www.twitter.com/chriswillx YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/modernwisdompodcast Email: https://chriswillx.com/contact/ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Hello friends, welcome back to the show. My guest today is Michael Easter. He's a professor at the University of Nevada, a journalist and an author who focuses on health and human performance. Even though we might often feel in control of our impulses, there are regular moments that remind us of our uncontrolled tendencies. From overspending to overeating, there is a secret loop happening inside of our minds that causes our actions and intentions to move further apart. Expect to learn why moderation is so impossible to achieve, what humans actually want the most out of life, what the scarcity loop is and how it drives your behaviour, if it's possible to become dependent on certainty, whether humans are more likely to chase happiness

or avoid discomfort, Michael's contrarian opinion on first world problems, and much more. This episode is brought to you by Mudwater. Mudwater is a coffee alternative with adaptogenic mushrooms and Ayurvedic herbs, provides energy without the anxiety, jitters, or crash of coffee. The blend includes a lion's mane for alertness,

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and mW20. A checkout. But now ladies and gentlemen, please welcome Michael Easter. Why is moderation so hard to achieve? Why can't humans just ever get enough? It never made sense until maybe, I don't know, the 1970s to start moderating. We're species that came up in these environments where everything we needed to survive was scarce food, stuff, information, even number of people we could influence status, things like that. And so the people who lived on in spread their DNA were people who tended to not try and moderate on those things, right? But the difference is that today we have an

abundance of all these things that were sort of built a grave, if you will. And we still have our old genes that push us into more. So, because we existed for almost all of human history with less than we wanted, less than we needed, we have seen everything as being a fleeting, brief amount of abundance in an ocean of scarcity. We should take advantage of it right now, give me more and more and more of everything that's in front. Yeah. Exactly. Right in the, in the, take food.

Food's a great example. In the past, it was hard to find food. You would have to walk around all day, pick it out of the ground, pick it off a tree. You would have to hunt it, just to literally run it down until it was exhausted and then you'd spear it, and then you'd take it home. And so it required effort, and there was never a maximal amount of it. So when you had the opportunity to eat, you wanted to eat as much as possible. And you even still say this today, and some tribes where I talked to a researcher who was hanging out, I think with the Ache tribe in Paraguay and he's like, these guys came upon

this orange bush and they literally ate oranges until they threw up. And then they ate more oranges, right? Because that sort of behavior gave you a survival advantage in the past because you would put on those extra calories as fat. And in the times when you inevitably encounter the scarcity and you were starting to lose weight, you would have something to draw on. We still have that exact same drive. In a world where now that you live in the US, you can identify with this where there's a 7-11 on every corner, pumping out Coca-Cola and

Slurpees and bags of food. And we've got, you know, I live in Vegas, there's buffets where people will go up, you know, 10 times. And that often backfires. But it's not just, of course, it's not just food, right? It's all of these other things. It's like the average person today owns more than 10,000 items in the house, right? We see more information, some researchers think,

in one day than the average person 700 years ago would have seen in their entire life. And so it's all these different things that used to give us a survival advantage over doing them. We now have an abundance of them and continue to overdo them. Do you ever think about the fact that the selection pressures on our ancestors and the fulfilment pressures on us now have basically inverted. So we are the progeny of the people who would have sought out more information, who would have sought out more food, who would have sought out more status or identity or certainty or whatever it is. And we are inheriting the challenge that they benefited from in a world now that is terribly mismatched.

Yeah, exactly. That's exactly it. And, you know, I will say, like, let me be clear, these are good problems we have now. Like, I'll take having to try to not eat too much rather than being like, where is my next meal? Are we going to survive this upcoming bad winter? But there's still problems nonetheless. And so a lot of what the book does is it looks at, how did we get here? What in particular is pushing us into more

today? Because I think what's also interesting about the last, you know, since the 1980s is that I think that technology has really allowed insights into what really drives people and hooks people on behaviors that push them into more. So I was part of the book, for example. I, well, I'll just, I'll just build this up by saying, we have technology that really is pushing us into more. And one of the insights of this book is that I sort of discovered what I call the scarcity loop. Now, this is a three-part behavior loop that is unparalleled at pushing people out of moderation.

It is the serial killer of moderation. Now the way that I discovered this is that I live in Las Vegas and living in Las Vegas, you see a lot of weird stuff, right? I mean, it is a town built on excess and getting people to eat more, to spend more, to do more, to have more fun, to do all these things to excess. But by far, the best thing and the weirdest thing is the slot machines because these things are freaking everywhere and people play them around the clock. I mean, they're in grocery stores, they're in gas stations, they're in restaurants.

And I wonder, why do people sit here and play these things for hours and hours? Because this is an inherently irrational behavior. The house always wins. Everyone knows this. So why are you hooked on this behavior that doesn't make any damn sense? It doesn't. So this leads me to start asking questions. Long story short, I end up with this casino on the edge of town in Las Vegas. It's one of the newest casinos in town, super cutting edge. But the public isn't welcome. And that's because it's a casino laboratory. So the gambling industry as well as a bunch of big tech companies basically built a real casino but it is a human behavior laboratory. And so they're looking at all these different ways that what happens in a casino impacts human behavior.

Now as part of this visit I end up to bring it back to Islam machine. You probably wonder why the hell is it going to talk about Islam machines, you probably wonder why the hell is Scott talking about Slot Machines? I end up talking to a Slot Machines Engineer. And he walks me through why Slot Machines are so effective. And they run on this loop that I call the scarcity loop, and it's got three parts. So it's got opportunity, unpredictable rewards, and quick repeatability.

So opportunity, you have an opportunity to get something of value. In the case of a Slot slot machine, it's money. Two, unpredictable rewards. You know you'll get that thing of value eventually, but you don't know when, and you don't know how valuable it's going to be. So with a slot machine, you play a game,

you could lose your money, you could win a dollar, you could win a million dollars, and there's a fantastic range of outcomes. And they're all unpredictable. And then three, quicker beatability, you can repeat behavior immediately. So with the case of slot machines, the average slot machine player plays 16 games in a minute, which is about as much as we blink. Now the important part and why I'm not

telling you just about slot machines to tell you about slot machines is that this system is inherent in tons of the technologies and even institutions that I think most influence our life today. So it is what makes social media work. It has been embedded in a lot of personal finance apps like Robinhood. It's part of the rise of sports betting. Obviously, it is what makes dating apps so enthralling.

It's in our education, it's in our food system and on and on and on. You start, you know, when I started really looking at this thing, you're like, oh, wow, this is everywhere. And it is such an important part of so many behaviors that people do over and over and over eventually to their detriment, to some degree or another. So it's really great. And I love using gambling as an analogy to some of the cool stuff that you can learn about There's no right angles on the carpet if you walk into a

Cassino there's never windows to the outside world There's rumors that they increase the oxygen saturation in the air by pushing this stuff through So all of that fascinating the same number of times that you blink is the same number of times that you play slot machines also fascinating. What I don't get yet is why is why have you called this the scarcity loop? I don't this that doesn started trying to unpack why slot machines work the first thing I did is I called a bunch of researchers who basically Research gambling but from here's why gambling is bad perspective and They told me all these reasons why people supposedly to gamble to excess and it was what you said It's there's no right angles and casinos. It's that slot machines play in the key of C,

which is supposed to be relaxing until we're gonna spend more. They don't have clocks. And the problem with that is that when you go into a casino, you see right angles everywhere. I mean, the slot machine screens are our right angle. It's a box. So that doesn't make any sense.

I call up a slot machine audio composer. I go, hey, like, what do you, what do you use when you write these little slot jingles? That's a real job. You can have them Las Vegas, by the way. That's a good town. It goes, no, where the hell do you hear that? He's like, I use all different keys. And then the clock thing is like, yeah, Casinos don't have clocks, but neither does Walmart or Target or Costco or your grocery store. It's not normal, just hang clocks everywhere in a business, right? And really, what makes people gamble is that this loop that I told you about, the scarcity of the loop, is that it's inherently, and throw into humans, it's the definition of what makes a interesting game, and it can provide a fun escape.

Right. So, even though there isn't a scarcity, it pushes us beyond moderation, which is the situation that we would have done had there have been a scarcity. Okay, that makes sense. Yes. Okay, so why are we so hooked by this? Like what is it that it's doing to us that's causing us to stay on and on and on? Yeah, so I called a guy whose name is Thomas Zenthal.

Now this guy is in his 80s. He started studying psychology in 1968. He's when he graduated, got his PhD from UC Berkeley. And he was following up on a lot of research, behavioral research, like he's a, you know, sort of direct descendent of Skinner. And when psychologists started realizing that animals get really hooked on unpredictable rewards, Skinner had been feeding Ratch treats at a predictable interval. And he started running out of treats. And so what he ends up doing long story short is he goes, okay, I don't want to make more treats.

It's going to take a lot of time. I'm just going to give these rats the treats unpredictably. Like I'll just give them every now and then. And they're probably going to get bored. They're going to get bumped out. They're going to, you know, whatever. And what he found is the opposite happened. These rats got totally enthralled in hitting this lever.

If they didn't know when they're going to get a treat. So as then tall, he goes, okay, I'm going to follow up on this because this is weird. And this guy is basically found that it's pretty easy to turn a pigeon into a degenerate gambler. He gives these studies where he has pigeons can play one game, where it's a predictable reward game, or they can play another game, where it's an unpredictable reward game. So it's very much like a slot machine setup. Now, in the unpredictable reward game, they will get less food overall for the behavior. And what he found is that 97% of pigeons choose the unpredictable reward game. They choose to gamble rather than play the game that gets them more

food overall. This like doesn't make any damn sense. Right. And what he told me is he thinks that this behavior, the fact that we do tend to really hone in and focus on unpredictable rewards, probably tracks back to finding food. So if you think about humans, you know, hundreds of thousands of years ago, we have to find food every day. And we don't necessarily know where that food is. So you go to one place, no food. You go to another place, no food. You go to another place, no food.

You go to another place. Oh my God, jackpot. There's so much food. All right, so our brain seems to incentivize this sort of repeat search for something and get excited when it happens. The center of the bullseye, according to both Sam Harris and Andrew Huberman, when it comes to pleasure is things being about to be slightly better than we'd anticipated. Yeah. Like that, just, it's the very beginning of the moment when something good happens. It's when you turn on Instagram and there's a hundred new

comments, which when you are just about to head out, so really good study from my old industry of night life, they got people to track, they pinged them on their phone and got them to track the level of happiness that they had throughout the entire night, right, from like three in the afternoon until three in the morning. And you'd think you're going to go on this night out and there's going to be a DJ and there's going to be music and you're going to be drunk and all of this stuff, but it wasn't.

The time when people were the most happy was when they were getting ready with their friends before they went out. So anticipation is the bullseye of happiness. And it's one of the reasons for the fledgling marketers out there, a really protracted launch sequence of anything that you're going to do. Drag it out, make it fucking excruciatingly painful, because in my opinion, people like to have things that they look forward to, and you can be that thing, right? Just add another thing to the calendar. It's like, oh, and there's the new Michael Easter sub stack post that he's been working on for six months. Like, yeah, I'm excited.

He's been talking about this for weeks. I'm really, really excited about this. Like, that is the bullseye of happiness. Yeah, totally. And, you know, the Hubertman and the Sam Harris that they're absolutely spot on. Another good person to ask is someone who's made a shitload of money using that, and that would be the gambling industry. And the slot designer I talked to said,

yeah, gambling isn't when you know whether you want to loss. It's when the dice are rolling across the table. It's when the rails are still spinning. It's when the cards are falling, and you're figuring out, is it going to be good? Is it going to be bad? Is it going to be bad? Is it going to be really, really good? That's it. It's the whole deal. And to your point, I mean, that is that is why that's embedded in so many systems that are effective at grabbing people's attention today.

Take dating apps, right? You swipe, you swipe, you swipe, and you go, oh, I got a match. Is it the person who I was like, I don't know, if I'll swipe on this one? Or was it the person I'm like, oh my God, that's the most amazing human being I've ever seen in my life? That's what's exciting about these things. And I mean, I really do feel like so much of the world has effectively started leaning into these sort of slot machine gambling mechanics.

And it's no damn wonder why you see people spending on average 12 to 13 hours a day and gaze with digital media. Of course, not all of it is spent on Instagram, but you look at people screen time and like a lot of Instagram, a lot of TikTok, a lot of email too. Like even Tristan Harris, who's the very, you know, Silicon, I like kind of anti-Selicon Valley guy. I mean, even he admits to getting fixed on email because it's totally random word. You like, ping. Is it an advertisement from Nike with new more shoes? Or is it like, oh, I just got in, you know, for him.

Oh, it's an interview request from 60 minutes or whatever it might be. Yeah. Where does the scarcity loop live? What was that? Where does the scarcity loop live? Where? that? Where does the scarcity loop live? Where? Yeah. I mean, so social media, it's an email.

I also think it's part of the news cycle. You start to see unpredictability really rise after basically 2016, with Trump, and now you're seeing it even more embedded into news with, you know, breaking news becoming a thing. I mentioned dating apps. I mentioned personal finance apps like Robinhood. So for example, Robinhood, what really made that at take off is that they leverage quick repeatability. So before Robinhood, you would have to pay to make a trade.

So that slows down the rate of trading. Robinhood what they did is they leveraged this concept called payment order flow, where it makes it the trading fees are basically baked in. So you can make quick repeat trades throughout the day and you see that app just take off and they even had basically gambling mechanics to get people in where you'd spin a wheel. Regulators actually made them take that down because they're like, no, this is just way too casino like you got to fly in the room. That's how it goes. It's in advertising. So for example, a lot of a lot of companies are using casino-like features for ads. So you go on websites, now you might have to spend a wheel to get a bargain. And that increases conversion rates by sevenfold according to some research, sevenfold.

So if you just get someone to spend a wheel and they're like, oh my God, I'm 130% off, holy shit. They're more likely to buy. It's in shopping, online shopping. I mean, think of something like lightning deals, that's quick repeatability, that's lending on scarcity and urgency. Tamu, tamu, tamu? Are you familiar with this site?

No, what's up? Okay, it is, I would compare it to the crystal methamphetamine of shopping. So it is, you go on and it's basically, we have a limited amount and there's a limited amount of time to get a bargain. And right when you pop on, there's a wheel you spin for a bargain. It's basically sells stuff direct from factories in China. And they've just turned the whole side into a casino of bargains. So it's pretty crazy. Wow. Okay. So talk to me about how humans like to escape and how this plays a role. Yeah. So when you think about escape, it's essentially a removal from the complexities

and problems of everyday life. And these sorts of systems with the scarcity loop tend to be a great escape, because you can fall into the system and you can repeat this effectively, what is a game, and your problems tend to dissolve when you're repeat this effectively what is a game and your problems tend to dissolve when you're in this. And what really happens when you think about a traditional game is that traditional games sort of give us some obstacles, some unpredictability more or less in exchange for knowing that we did exactly the right thing. So at the end of the game, you know whether you won or lost, right?

And that seems to be sort of calming and relaxing for humans. But the problem with the scarcity loop is that because it is such a escape, such a great system for a game, if you do it too often, it can be quite bad. But at the same time, if you're just doing it every now and then, I mean, it's totally fine. So I don't want the message of people to walk away from reading this book going like, oh, I need to never do anything that falls into this loop. It's like, no, that's not it. Because it's this fun.

I like to gamble. Gambling's fun. The problem is, if I decide, oh, I want to gamble all the time, now we start to really have a problem. And people tend to get hooked on this system in such a way that allows them to escape in a way that hurts them in the long run. Is there an element of flow state here?

Yeah, there could be. It sounds to me. Hearing you talk about it and saying, you know, there's sort of, there's an interaction, that you kind of lose yourself. I imagine the people that play slots that time kind of does dissolve for them that they almost become one. I don't think that there's a massive amount of skill associated with slots, but for the people that find themselves in flow, their skill requirement and skill level are often only a little bit apart in any case. So perhaps even though it's low skill requirement, the skill level of the participants is matched appropriately.

So yeah, I just I've figured that I've got reandoris coming on soon from Flow Research Collective. I'm going to ask him about whether there is flow found in compulsive behaviors like TikTok and gambling. And I'm pretty sure that he's going to say, you're going to drop into theater or delta when it comes to brain waves. It's going to be kind of oddly agitating and relaxing at the same time to do this stuff. If you think about the way that you feel while you're on social media, it's very compulsive. It is kind of relaxing and passive, and it's also kind of agitating and fucking does you head in. So it's like a balance between the two. Well, it's the sort of randomness between, is this post going to be agitating?

Or is it going to make me laugh my ass off? Is it going to make me, you know, is it going to be some video where the soldier comes home and the dog runs at the soldier? And I just start crying hysterically. My favorite videos. Yeah. So I do think that there is an element of where people do zone out. And what's what's interesting is when researchers talk to like seriously compulsive slot machine players, they actually get annoyed when they win a lot of money. Because it interrupts the process. Because when you win a lot of money on a slot machine, it goes ballistic. And if you win more than $1,000, you have to pay taxes on it.

So it shuts off the machine and they have to come give you a payment by hand. And that slows down what they're actually there for, which is just to simply write out this sort of process of, kind of, you know, maybe you're up, maybe you're down sometimes. What's the story of Captegon? Oh, yeah. So Captegon is this drug that was not super well known, I would say, even just a handful years ago. And it's now effectively sort of overtaken the Middle East, where there are billions of pills circulating

throughout the Middle East in particular. It started in the 60s as a drug to treat ADHD and depression and in the 70s, psychiatrists realized that it worked a little too well. So they ban it and they had developed sort of this a lot of sort of this, a lot of fans of it, let's say, in Middle Eastern countries, because it's effectively an amphetamine.

It's like a low grade meth you can think about it as. And so you had some gangs in, I think Bulgaria, gang up and start supplying the Middle East. And then the fucking fly. This is the best dude. I would be annoyed if it weren't so damn funny. If he comes back just take yourself in the head, read you, read you hard. Yeah, dude, I'm just gonna hang. take yourself in the head, read you, read you hard. Yeah, dude, I'm just gonna bang. Yeah.

Hungarian Middle East. Yeah, so there was these gangs in Bulgaria that started producing. Bulgaria, sorry, to the Hungarians. Yeah, and, but eventually what happened is that Syria started producing it. So especially after the fall of Syria, it's now produced in government labs

and the production of Cap, it's now produced in government labs and the production of Capdagon is actually far greater in Syria or greater than legal exports in Syria. And they're effectively supplying the Middle East with this drug Capdagon. There was just a finding just like a week ago where they busted about a billion dollars worth of pills at a port coming into the Middle East. So, long story short is that I travel to Iraq to sort of understand this problem and effectively about addiction. Because when you think about overusing this scarcity loop, it really can become an addiction. Now to me addiction is a behavior that you

consistently repeat and provide your benefit in the short term while giving long-term benefits effectively or long-term detriment, right? Now Iraq is interesting because it's a country where addiction effectively didn't exist for a very long time and that's just because Saddam ruled with an iron fist. And once Iraq falls after the U.S. invades it, what happens is you have a lot of people who have a lot of problems in trauma right from that war. And then Syria falls and you get this massive supply of Cap-Dagon and it starts moving its way

throughout the Middle East and into Iraq and you start to see a huge uptick in addiction to this drug. And so I think it stands for sort of this greater question about addiction, which the US government has typically seen it two ways. For a long time, it was seen as a moral failing. So an addict was a bad person. There's just a person who's making the bad choices, like dammit with Sermon jail. In the mid-90s, you start to see addiction positioned as a brain disease.

Now the reason that this positioning occurred is because neuroscience and brain scans were becoming pretty popular at the time and when neuroscientists would do scans on addicts brains they saw that They're liking system of their brain, which is basically the system that we think is actually the sort of pleasure center It would not have any activity, but their brain would still pump out high levels of dopamine, drive making them want a drug. Right, so we see the strains mismatch and like, wow, this thing doesn't light up,

but this thing does light up. So they start to argue that it's brain disease. It's just caused by this, you know, sort of mismatch and brain chemicals and on and on and on. And I think to me, after really looking into this, I see addiction is more of a symptom, typically of something larger. So to me addiction, you need a few things.

You need a population or a person who has problems. You need a substance that can relieve the problems and the person has to have no other means of fixing the problems beyond this substance. And I think Iraq sort of shows that. And you also tend to see this idea in research where you know the NIDA, which is a national institute on drug abuse, they argued that addiction is basically, you can't get over it. It's this compulsive recurring disease that is in the brain. And so once you're addicted, you're pretty much addicted and you're not going to have a high chance of recovery.

But you look at examples like in the 70s, there was an Operation Golden Flow, which is with soldiers in Vietnam, where something like 25% of soldiers, US soldiers, who were fighting in Vietnam were addicted to heroin. And Nixon was like, yeah, I don't want these heroin addicts coming back into the United States. If you want to come back in the United States, you've got to give us a clean urine test.

So if addiction is something that is near impossible to get over, and it's this brain disease that you can't fix, and you have zero at all agency in, you would think we would have left 25% of soldiers in Vietnam. But the reality of what happened is that the vast majority of these soldiers all produce clean urine, they all made it back home. And once they were back home, very, very few of them

relapsed. And the ones who did relapsed, relaps tended to have been using drugs before they got to Vietnam. So I think that it shows that addiction is a lot more complex than just the person is a bad person. The person has this brain disease that has nothing to do with behavior and conditions and environment and all this other things. So that chapter of the book really looks into those questions, the sort of changing ideas around addiction. Yeah, it's a strange one, man. To think about soft addictions to not somebody who is an alcoholic, but every evening after

they get home from a difficult job, maybe their relationship or family situation isn't fantastic, maybe they're stressed about one or a few things. It's just, you know, it's five pints and then I can go to sleep. Or the person that always uses weeds to wind down on an evening time, the line between, you know, a compulsion, a dependency, an addiction, it all kind of becomes very blurred. I like the fact that you say it's somebody who has a problem and the solution that they reach for is this particular substance or stimulus. I think that's a nice way to look at it. I know people who, if they're emotionally upset, they'll go on their phone. Their phone is the distraction from whatever emotions that they're feeling, right?

Mm-hmm. Yeah. Yeah, these things all provide a sort of escape from problems is the underlying theme. And, you know, to me, people will look at a drug addict and go, that doesn't make any sense. Just like I was with the slot machine players. But the reality is, is that, and I can speak about this because I'm a person who was nine years sober now going on 10.

Nothing fixes a problem like using a substance at least in the short term. So this might seem like an arach, like if you're an alcoholic, it might seem totally irrational to take a drink. It's not at least in the short term. The problem is that you're fixing a problem in the short term, but you're creating long-term problems for yourself. So addiction wouldn't be a problem if a person like me goes, you know what? I'm gonna have like 10 beers,

and I'm gonna go volunteer, and I'm gonna go donate my time and my money, and I'm gonna do all these good things for society. Now the problem is that what tends to happen is that when people sort of zone out like that, they tend to do behaviors that hurt not just them, but society in the long haul. Is it possible to come dependent on certainty, do you think? Yeah, I think so. I mean, look at this might be a strange example, but what happens when people think they

have, you know, you get a pain in your side and people are like, what is that? So I mean, look at this is this might be a strange example, but look what happens when people think they have You know you get a pain in your side and people are like what is that and then you go on you know Whatever it is Web N.D. And people will upset Pendicit that's it. No, it's not that's not it man. It's stage 4 cancer actually You know and so people are just going on the rabbit hole the rabbit hole of trying to find answers to questions that are so much of life is uncertain. And so much of the sort of data that we use, I think also has an uncertainty baked into it

because it's based on human judgments at the end of the day. It's like, what are you gonna do with this data? What does it mean? And... Ooh, so I mean, do you think that hyper-conreax are dependent on certainty in some way? Yeah, well, they don't, they hate unpredictability. That's for sure.

Yeah, they, they, they, they have a hole in an open loop, right? So what a hyperconjurect, by this framing, maybe here comes some brochines, uh, by this framing, a hyperconjurect, science by this framing, a hypercontri-act, a hypercontri-act would sooner have an assumption that's fatal than an open loop that allows them to survive. Yeah, I could say that. I mean, certainty feels good, right? There's a part in the book where I talk about, why do people love certainty so much? And it seemed to be, it's possible,

this is a theorizing from philosopher I talked to is that the University of Utah as names teen win, it's T-H-I-N-G-U-Y-E-N. He talked about how probably as humans of all we could trust certainty, this aha feeling we'd get that we'd solved this problem, right? Because if you're looking for food, you can be rather certain that like you've found the food, you know, that you've escaped the tiger or whatever. But I think today the questions that we grapple with are much more complex, but we still love this aha feeling,

except we have a million different answers we could find for a question, right? If you ask, are carbs good or bad? You could type that into Google and it's like, oh, they're bad, aha, I got it. Now there's a governmental conspiracy around sugar, or you could find another thing that's, oh, carbs are good. Yeah,

there's this group that all they eat is carbs. And like, they live to 110, right? So I think that we live in a world now where you can very easily maybe reinforce a preexisting belief or at least find information that makes you feel certain about questions that are inherently always going to be uncertain. Because so many questions are individual and it's like, you know, pick an answer, what are you going to do? We're never going to know. Yeah, I've had this theory for a little while about how the modern information landscape isn't trying to convince the populace of any one narrative, but to try and make them unconvinced about all narratives. You know, if you were to create an information landscape

at the moment to just cause mass distrust of yourself, of the world around you, of even your neighbor, that's what you would do. I'm like the least conspiratorial person on the planet, but whether it's by coordination or coincidence, the end result is people not being sure what to believe. Am I supposed to eat meat? Is meat killing me?

Or is it not? Should I go vegan? Rich Roll says that I should go vegan, but Stan Effeting says that I should go, what about Michaela Peterson? She seems to be, she's lost a lot of weight, she looks good. Like, there is a myriad of solutions to exactly the same problem coming in opposite directions. And, is Ukraine, are you creating the good guys or Russia the good guys?

Is Russell Brand guilty of doing something heinous or is this a coordinated attack because Big Farmer is scared about him getting too close? Like for every cultural movement there is a counter-cultural movement. Here's like this, there's a prediction that you can make with almost certainty that if you want to work out what's going to happen within the next six months, look at a cultural movement that's been born out that as yet hasn't had its inverse made popular. So if you have migtow, men going their own way in the dating market, I'm exiting the dating market. For every migtow, you're going to find a red pill, right?

So for the guys that are exiting, those are the guys that are leaning in. For the tradwives, the goals that are going to kind of regress back to this sort of 60s aesthetic for partners There's going to be the boss bitches, right? For every in-sell, there's going to be a picker partist. For every sigma grind set bro leaning in, there's going to be the spiritual bro that's kind of leaning out, right? It's a seticism and hedonism. You know, whatever's going on. Fucking Megan D. Stallion 2021, summer 2021, hot Girls Summer, 2022, Ferrell Girls Summer, right?

Right, right, right. So every cultural movement has the inverse about to happen because what it creates is essentially a vacuum that you can position yourself against somebody else. And this is how the information landscape at large works, I think. Yeah, I think so. And I mean, this is largely a product of the internet. I had, I had this

strange, we're doing breath philosophy again here. Last night, I'm for whatever reason, I was thinking about what the world of fitness used to be like and what people would get interested in. And do you remember when there was those videos, I think the videos were called like P90X and the whole thing. The whole thing was, you know what the benefit is? It's muscle confusion. That was their whole thing. And people were like, this is before the internet.

So people go, oh, muscle confusion. Yeah, that makes sense. I've never heard that. That makes sense. Your muscles are confused. So they just like, they go crazy and they grow. Now everyone has an internet connection. I mean, you could literally just type in muscle confusion

and you would get 1,000 hits for like, oh, here's P90X as it works. Here's this person saying like, here's why I could theoretically work. Here's this other smart person going, no, that doesn't make any damn sense at all, right? So people can fact check more easily today. You don't just take what's sort of given to you, but at the

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

Like, how did you end up trusting this person? I don't know. Right? And so it's, it's definitely a strange landscape. I mean, you know, I have certain people that I'm like, yeah, I'm pretty sure this person is right, but at the same time, I think we live in a world where it makes sense to be open to the possibilities

and know that science is always changing. Science is a process. People will sound very smart and great because they're pulling from science, but at the end of the day, that science might might change and we also need to be okay with that. That doesn't make the person wrong. That just means that they might be following the scientific process. And so it is a time where I don't think you can be certain about a lot of things.

And yet we really want that certainty. And I think that that can lead to frustrations or at least it's like, why do people go down in foxholes when the foxholes are constantly changing? Right? So. Well, you'll be familiar with the zygonic effect. I'm guessing. Now, tell me about it.

Okay. So this psychologist, Mr. zygonic, was doing a study on service in restaurants. And if you've ever had a server come up to you and stand there and ask for your order and not get a note pad out, there's a part of you that thinks yourself this guy's fucking crazy, he's gonna get this wrong, I'm gonna try, I'm gonna make him. Yeah, I want the ribs please, but I actually want them to be done with that particular glaze and I want the tomatoes switched out for romaine and blah blah blah. And what he found was that while table still had their orders opened, the servers were unbelievably effective at being able to recall what was

being ordered. As soon as the tables had been closed, they had zero memory of what they'd done. So this open loop closed loop dynamic that Zygonic found is very fundamental to the way that our brains work and our brains abhor an open loop. It's the same reason why, think about a missing child. What does the parents say? Like, we just want to know. You know, they would genuinely probably rather find out that their child was dead than have their child still missing

after a long enough time. You know, these parents that have had kids have been missing for 10 years or whatever. It's just, it's awful. It's the same reason why cliffhangers work at the end of books or on Netflix shows. You want to know what happens next. It's the sensation of wanting to know

what happens next. Yeah, totally. The same thing goes for the service as well. So it talked to me about influence. Like, how does wanting influence and the requirement of more of it play a role here? Yeah, so when you think about influence and status, if you had more of it in the past for most of time, still today, you would have a survival advantage, right?

It could get you more food. It could get you out of crappy, medial labor that's just going to burn calories, it got you more mates, possibly. And so I think that humans, humans crave status and influence. Now in the past, I don't think we could influence as many people as we could influence today, obviously, right? So influence has sort of been put at scale via social media, and now what sort of one person does can literally influence millions of people. You can send out one tweet, and if it goes viral, it can totally change people.

And so, a lot of what that chapter in the book looks at, it's like, how does this really affect us? And have you ever had Jessica Tracy on? I feel like that would be someone you would have on Maybe what's what's she she runs this lab that I think University of Washington. I'm gonna kick myself after if it's somewhere else That looks at how many of our emotions Evolved basically just to interact with other people of our emotions evolved basically just to interact with other people. They're totally social emotions, things like pride, shame, empathy, right? And I know a big point that she talked about, I think she has actually a book out called

Pride and it's just the whole book is about pride. She looked at how Pride is this thing that basically tells you, makes you feel good about yourself. You need to accomplish something, there's two types of pride. There's authentic pride and heubristic pride. She lays out, so authentic pride, you feel this good feeling after you've done something, and it's great. You feel it no matter if someone sees what you've done or not.

Now, if someone sees what you've done, great. That's even better. Heubristic pride is different. It's essentially promoting yourself as a way to sort of boost up your status, but the problem is that you haven't actually done anything. So I would argue that probably in the past, it was much easier to call out that hubris stick pride because everyone kind of knew each other. You knew what people were doing. But now you can sort of display that on this massive scale on social media. And that can confuse people, and

it can also make you look like a jerk when people realize that, oh, this person is actually as great as they say. Yeah, the weird thing about status is that as soon as you acknowledge that you're playing the game, you lose the game. Yeah, exactly. So it took a long time for a psychologist to even study status for that reason. Because there was, no one wanted to, I talked to this guy Cameron Anderson, who's at UC Berkeley, and he used to take a long time for us to really acknowledge this thing,

because by acknowledging it as a psychologist, you're going, oh, I might actually care about my status. And so it took until at least the 90s. I think the research that did it was looking at class issues, So it kind of made it more acceptable to start studying it. Now you've got this influx of it. So you're acting as this benevolence, bourgeois, sort of ivory tower person speaking down from one high. Don't worry, me a peasant.

The plebians, I will bring you up from the muck and the mire and the blood and the feces. Yeah, that's interesting. Yeah, the influence things, funny man, you know, previously people wanted fame because it was a marker of having done something worthy of being famous. Now people just want to be famous for its own sake because what fame is is the promise of obligation free status, at least modern, the modern conception of frame. You know, you don't have to be the heroic general,

you don't have to actually invent something, you can just be in the right place at the right time, and you know, reality TV is the absolute sort of zenith of this, where you get normal people plucked out of obscurity and placed on some television show to be like purposefully normal, like you're providing average representations of avatars within the populace. And then six weeks later, they come off and they've got two million followers in a pretty little thing contract and free charcoal toothpaste and a blue take. And they're now completely changed. So what is the lesson that it teaches the modern world about how you achieve fame and status and influence.

You're in the right place at the right time. You don't do a thing for an incredibly long amount of time and grind hard on it. What was it, Thomas Edison said, I have not failed. I simply found 10,000 ways that didn't work. Right. I mean, even up to the advent of the internet, if you wanted fame and attention, you probably did have to do decent things or could be opposite. You get famous for doing really bad things. a lot of people rise to public being known by many people in the public, a lot of people are going to cover you.

And so, you know, you know, you're going to be able to, you know, to be able to, you know, to be able to, you know, to be able to, you know, to be able to, you know, to be able to, you know, to be able to, you know, to be able to, you know, to be able to, you know, to be able to, you know, to be able to, you know, to be able to, you know, to be able to, you know, blasted out there. And it can work, right? You see a lot of people rise to public, like being known by many people in the public, although they haven't necessarily really done anything. That interesting in a vacuum. Yeah, the move from people being judged by their deeds to people being judged by their

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

It's Jimmy Fallon appears to have been popped recently for this stuff as well. All of the people that are, you know, championing the little person, it turns out that Lizzo was body-shaming her dancers. Jimmy Fallon, the guy that's supposed to be this bubbly, super welcoming, lefty person, turns out who's a total tyrant. Ellen DeGeneres as well, who's supposed to be, you know,

a champion for different sexual orientations and this kind of like motherly figure, late-night show host and stuff. Total bitch apparently, allegedly, allegedly a total bitch. And yeah, to me, the move from deeds to opinions has allowed people that are prepared to lie very effectively or obfuscate the truth or manipulate or do self-delusion. They've benefited more from this than anybody else. Yeah, I agree.

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

And they do seem to affect us. So the people who are higher status generally have better health outcomes in the long run. And this isn't, you know, you might think, oh, well, they can afford medical care. It's like, well, no, because this holds even in countries that have universal medical care. So you would think that, you know, that wouldn't hold in those countries, but it, but it seems to.

Yeah, it's such a huge determinant. You read a Will's store's book, The Status Game. I haven't read that one now. You'd love it. You would fall in love with it. It's absolutely fascinating. So yeah, this addiction, I suppose, to influence that we have and the fact that you can be bestowed obligation-free status, it's been objectified and turned into a metric game by social media, right? I know exactly how many follows. I know exactly how many plays.

I know exactly how many followers I know exactly how many plays I know exactly how many likes. So yeah, that feedback loop or the previous scarcity that would have been, I want to get more status downstream from status, increased access to mates, increased access to food, protection, all that better child mortality, all this stuff has been weaponized and commercialized. But I'm quite a fan of qualified to your point is you can see exactly what it is and you can watch that number go up on social media. That's one thing that I talk about in the book too is how numbers influence us and how this rise of gamification has in a lot of ways shifted the goal of why we do what we do. So anytime that you put a number on thing and you gamify a system, what tends to happen is people start to chase whatever the gamified number is. So this is fine in an actual game. If you're playing

football, American football Chris, the point is to run the ball over the into the touchdown zone, right, to score these points and then you just leave the game there and it's like, okay, that was great. It doesn't affect the rest of your life. But when you start to gamify different tech systems, people change to the behavior. So Twitter is a great example. So Twitter is theoretically supposed to be this platform for discussion. And then you ask, okay, well, what are the goals of a discussion? And the answer is like, well,

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

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

money for the firefighters. And then the minute they would start to be more toxic, that would get more of a reaction from people and they'd go, oh, that's it. Like, that's how you use this thing. That's what boosts the number. So then you start chasing the numbers, the likes, the reach-ways. And that totally changes the goal. And this isn't just in, of course, it's not

just in Twitter. This is also Instagram. You go on to show some photos of your, your friends, you know, when you're out with your friends, and then people go, Oh, wait a minute, this type of thing gets more followers. So you start to do that. It's also in the wine scoring world. It's like when this Robert B. Parker guy started wine advocate and put a number, a scoring number on bottles, it totally changed the wine making industry, which would have this same practice for 2,000 years. But this guy starts this magazine, goes, okay, I want to make wine accessible to the people. I'm going to taste all these wines and I'm going to give them a score from 50 to 100. And what happened is that the bottles that had this very clear score, that had a high

score, they started to sell way more. And so, whinemakers went, we make more money if we make wines that suit this guy's taste. So they started cranking out more bottles that this Robert B. Parker guy liked. That totally shifts the industry. Now, if you're a person who doesn't share tastes with Robert Parker, you're like, well, this is meaningless to me, right? And so once we start to fixate on numbers, long story short, is that this changes our behaviors and why we do what we do.

I've been playing with this idea of hidden and observable metrics over the last few weeks. So it's my belief that people will often trade a hidden metric for an observable metric, and the gamification makes this plane. So a really good hidden metric would be something like peace of mind or sanity, and a good observable metric would be something like salary or the amount of money that you want. So you could quite happily sacrifice how calm you feel by taking a job where your frontline defense customer complaints person, but they know that this is a difficult job, so they're going to compensate you more highly. So you've gained $10,000 per year, but how much has your much more important metric

of sanity and peace of mind degraded? You know, and if someone was actually to somehow be able to give you a sanity score, you would realize that you would netted a negative by doing this. Another one might be something like the quality of your relationships, right? So the quality of your relationships with your partner, you take a job that's a little bit further away. Again, you're going to make a little bit more money, but it means that you spend last time with your wife or your children and in future, the memories that you have are not going to be so good, but you know, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's like it's out there. You know what I mean? Like, fucking, I can't tell how this is working. How much,

how many more steps closer to a divorce? Am I today? How much has my relationship degraded? And yeah, I think that making the hidden observable is a really good strategy that we should be trying to do. Things like journaling, you know, things like doing a weekly check-in of some kind, having some sort of process to just check in. Okay, the things that I've said that genuinely matter, that I can't see.

Another one from your world, how many people have optimized the observable metric of weight on a scale but sacrificed the hidden metric of health? I've dialed back my body fat or I have changed my composition so that I'm carrying way more muscle, but the actual internal state of where I'm at is fucked. Right. Or even, I mean, think of activity trackers. People get it because they want to be more active and then they get obsessed with these arbitrary metrics that, whether it's a step count, whether it's, you know, if you use one of these devices

that gives you some sort of daily strength count, people get hooked on that and it changes how they do, what they do and oftentimes why they do what they do. Because you do, you start it for health, but people oftentimes don't go, okay, well, what does health mean to me? So then you get this thing and you're like, well, health is making sure I get a nine on my, whatever you know, this, this thing that I wear that tells me a

strength count. And the problem too is that all of these trackers use these sort of mysterious algorithms. And they're working on very flawed systems. You're making assumptions that this device is taking perfect metrics all the time, perfect measurements. You're assuming that the people who created this algorithm which most companies won't share how they figure out these numbers because it's proprietary. You're assuming that those people are making

the right decisions based on data that is correct. And it's definitely not in some degree. The question is like, okay, to what degree is this wrong, right? And yet we get really hooked on these type of things. You see a lot of people do. Another great example of this would be, I'm a professor and so I see it with my students. At the point of going to a university is, is what?

There's a ton. It's like, yeah, you want the degree, but like you're there to meet people. You're there to learn to be a dam adult. You're there to show up on time, learn to turn in assignments on time, learn to interact with your peers and have discussions and disagree with people in a nice way.

But what tends to happen with my students is they get obsessed with grades. It's the GPA, right? So that is not the same as everything I've just listed why you go to the university. Yeah, that's a good heart's law and measure in practice, right? You know, good heart's law. Yeah, I think so.

When a measure becomes an outcome, it ceases to be a good measure. So it's, you know, if you gave your customer service team the measure that you would say what we're looking for you to do is reduce down the fraud rate and what the outcome is that occurs is every customer is treated like a fraudster. So yeah, we've managed to drive the fraud rate down, but the actual felt experience that you wanted, the outcome you wanted was we want to have a successful company with customers that care about us that doesn't have too much fraud. What you ended up doing was creating this tyrannical fucking customer service representative team.

You were talking about food earlier on. Have you ever seen those videos of tribal people eating cheesecake for the first time? No, but I'm going to need to see that because I bet it does it. Do they love it or do they just absolutely hate it? It blows their minds. It absolutely blows their minds because it's this really interesting blend of sugar and fat. It's got orrification, which is the texture design of food. So very rarely, ancestral wood we have ever had something that was both crunchy and fluffy. So if you think about Oreos or French fries or cheesecake,

you have a very interesting blend of textures. You know, it's not just one texture. Even in fucking yoghurt, people throw granola on the top. Like, why is that good? Why it's good because it's this, it's a blend of the different textures. If you go for liver king mode and just start eating raw liver, like it's not a particularly exciting texture, right? It's just slimy and it's kind of all one thing.

So yeah, I mean, food, when you're looking at scarcity loops, food has to be, it's got probably the prime culprit, I would guess. Yeah, definitely. I mean, just as I told you about how there's this casino lab trying to figure out how to tweak the perfect slot machine and games and make sure every experience that happens in a casino leads us to the behavior that they sort of want. This is obviously happening in the food industry, right? So especially around the 1970s, you start to see the rise of ultra-process food. So after World War II, companies start to put a lot of money into developing foods

that are gonna just check all the boxes you need to make a human love them. And they realize we need to increase snacking as well, because if you're eating three square like we used to, it's like, well, they're leaving a lot of money on the table. We gotta create snacking as a thing. And what we tend to snack on is these ultra-process foods. And there's a food industry exec who explained,

if you want to get a snack food to sell, it's got to have three views. It's got to have value, it's got to have variety, it's got to have velocity. That is basically the scarcity loop. Velocity in the foods, I mean, you'd throw it at someone aggressively. That means you eat it fast.

Ah, you eat it fast. So, so value, it's relatively cheap. Variety, there's a wide variety of flavors, right? There's unpredictability embedded in the food. Like you go to the grocery store and there's like 75 different kinds of chips, right? And when people have more options of what to eat, they tend to eat more. And then velocity is simply when you hyperprocess a food, we tend to eat it faster.

And there's been some interesting research at the NIH where the will give people a diet that is matched for, you know, macros and salt and all that. One of the diets is ultra-processed and the other is minimally processed. And what tends to happen, and they let them eat as much as they want over a course of a day. And this is a study where they lock people in the lab. So it's like a two week study. You can't keep them in the lab for too long.

But that allows them to measure exactly every gram of everything they ate. And people tend to eat about 500 fewer calories a day when they're eating minimally processed food. And one of the main reasons for that is when a food is also processed, we can simply eat it faster. That's interesting. So it's not even necessarily to do with the palatability, although that will contribute a little bit, but you can just get it down. You presumably density as well is a good chunk of this. That if you ever looked at how many carbs are in a haribo, and then you compared that to how much potato

you would get to eat, compared with the haribo, it's insane. Yeah, so that's exactly it. You're concentrating the calories, really. So it's part of the book. I traveled into the Bolivian Amazon. There's a tribe called the Chamane, who have the healthiest hearts ever recorded by scientists. So I fly into La Paz. I take this 12 hour crazy car ride down to this town that's the jumping off point into

the Amazon. Then we take a, it's called a Peke Peke boat, which is this really long canoe that has this really annoying motor on the back of it for six hours. And then, you know, it's just a wall of jungle for six hours. And eventually the dude pulls the Peke Peke over and like, it's all looked the same, you know, and he's like, no, this is it, trust me.

It's like, okay. So we get out of this damn boat and like walk up and sure enough. You know, there's the tribe and I stayed with them for a little while. And so not only do they have super healthy hearts, they don't really have any markers of health disease, of heart disease. And the reason that's important is because heart disease is the number one killer of people in the developed world.

Like by far, everyone worries about cancer. Now heart disease is probably what's going to kill you. You have about a coin flip chance of dying from heart disease. They also don't get, they don't seem to get diseases like Alzheimer's. They don't get certain cancers. So they're this super healthy group of people in a lot of ways. Now, the ways they're not healthy are problems that we cured in the past, right? They get things like pneumonia, they get random infections that we figured out long ago And that's what ends up killing or they get bit by snakes things like that. But um A lot of

What's kept them healthy is it goes back to what they eat? And what they eat is kind of interesting because at some point in a in a day in a given day of eating food It's gonna give the middle finger to some popular diet that we've been sold over the last 40 years. So it's not paleo, it's not vegan, it's not low carb, it's not necessarily low fat, it's, you know, it's not any of this stuff. They eat the real commonality of all the foods they eat

is that they have just one ingredient. So it's red meat from animals they hunt, it's a lot of fish, it's white rice that they grow, it's a lot of fruit that they grow, it's white potatoes, it's just this basic stuff. And you just can't eat that much of those foods. And they also don't have a billion triggers that push you into eating more. It's like if you ever sit down and try it to your back,

let's bring it back to potatoes, because that's a damn good food. So if you have a boiled potato, it's probably gonna be like 150 calories. If you just sit and just eat that with like no salt or anything, holy hell, that is a task. Like it is really hard. If you give me like 10 times calories and chips, I could probably get

through it. I mean, I could probably crush a thousand calories and chips without it and it would be a great time, right? I just be like, oh man, this is a great experiment. Let's do this shit again soon. And so I think that that's really what it comes down to because when you look at the average American diet, especially in the, or in many developed countries, we're at like 60% foods that are ultra processed. And so over time, you just eat more, I think, than you plan to, you end up heavier, and that impacts your disease risk. Okay, so we've got a lot of different ways

that we get hijacked, whether it be status, whether it be influence, whether it be information, certainty, food, how does somebody step in and break the scarcity loop? Yeah, so there's basically three ways. The first is just becoming aware of it. By becoming, by observing it, by observing a behavior, you tend to change it. It's a hot-dorn effect.

Second is that you can change or take out any three of the parts. So you can change or take out any three of the parts. So you can change the opportunity, you can change the unpredictable rewards or remove them and you can, or you can slow the behavior down. So let's take food as an example. So with unpredictable rewards and food, a lot of the reasons why we eat

is because we have so many different hyper-palatable flavors and options. So people who eat the same thing day in and day out, they tend to weigh less overall, because it's basically predictable. You're not going to be eating a ton when you've got 50 different options. And then with the speed or the quicker beatability, eating foods that are far less process leads you just, it slows down the process of eating and you end up eating less. With something like social media you can change the opportunity. I think what happens is we talked about is when people go on social media it goes from I just want to share some photos of my dog to. I need to score these points and you post and you go oh yeah wait for these these likes to come in.

You can change why you're using it. You can be like, okay, look, here's how I'm using social media. I'm literally using it to keep up with my friends. I'm using it to share information about some cause. I'm only following people who are in this lane that I want to know more about, right? You can slow it down and this sounds kind of crazy because I've always been skeptical

when the answer to using an app less is to use another app, but there are great apps that simply put a sort of brief period of hold before you can open another app. So you might go to open the app, this other app will go, okay, you can open it and count down. And just having that, it slows down people's use of it because you have to be intentional. You have to be a best. What's the best app of that that you've found? I think it's called ClearSpace.

I'd have to look at the name. Yeah, the guys, and I used to, what converted me is the guys who founded it had seen me write about the benefits of switching to gray scale on your phone, which changes effectively, unpredictable rewards. Your phone just becomes less stimulating, less rewarding.

And so they reached out to me, they're like, yeah, try or op, and I was, yeah, okay, I'll try. I didn't try it because I'm like, yeah, I'm not going to download your fucking app so I can use another op less, right? But I did it, my damn screen time went way down because I had to get intentional with when I was gonna use it and why. Wow.

With something like shopping, if I'm gonna buy a, which I'm gonna do after this by a fly swatter, with something like, I can't believe the thing is still alive. Like how long do these things live? I thought they live like 30 minutes. God, I've been believe the thing is still a lot. Like how long do these things live? I thought they lived like 30 minutes. God, I've been talking for an hour and 10 minutes. It should be dead by now.

This is so good. With shopping. With shopping, you can ask yourself, why am I buying this in the first place? What is the opportunity that I'm trying to get from this item? Because a lot of times I think we buy because we're bored. We're on Instagram because we're bored

and then we see this perfectly targeted ad and we're like, oh yeah, maybe I could use those shoes that seem to be perfectly made in a lab for my style, right? But you really need them, it's the question. It's like, what are you trying to get out of this? A lot of times it goes back to, I'm bored. I think it's going to raise my status to have this item. I think it's going to help me belong to a group. I think it's going to do all these different things. And so even just inserting the question helps. You can slow that down as well if you just say,

anytime I see something online, I'm going to wait X amount of days to buy it. Now, when I've done that, I'll put something in X amount of days to buy it. Now, when I've done that, I'll put something in my cart, or I'll just, you know, go, oh, yeah, it's that item. Within three to four or five days, I'm like, what was that thing I wanted to buy? Oh, yeah, why don't I want to buy that? I don't really need that, right? So I think just learning that we're in this world now, where we have just an abundance of all these things that we're built to crave and we have all these systems that can really push us into these decisions very quickly. And

that's really changed our behavior. And so trying to unpack the mechanics of that system, that loop, and then find ways to break it down, I think, can be beneficial for people and changing behavior. Fuck yeah, man. It's so strange to think about how mismatched we are and it does feel like a imbalanced battlefield that we're on at the moment. You know, there was, especially when it comes to information and sort of stimulus, there was one day in probably early 2011 when there was the right balance between how much information we wanted and how much information we were getting. And then very, very quickly it went from being

below to just completely blasted through. And, you know, in the past, especially when it comes to information, your... The best skill set that you needed was that of a scout, whereas the best skill set that you could have now is that of a dissoner. It's somebody that is able to kind of cut through and weave and know when that's enough and so on and so forth. And the same thing, the moderation for everything, if that you have grown up and evolved with a predisposition to get more. And now there is more than you need. Like, what do you think's going to happen? Like, you're going to end up, you're

going to end up overloading on absolutely everything. And yeah, Aristotle, he talks about the golden mean. It's not a vice of excess nor a vice of scarcity or something like that. Yeah, man, it's tough. I'm glad that you are putting your hands to a problem that everybody is super familiar with. And I'm a big fan of your sub stack as well. I'm glad that you've joined us here on the independent creator, Muck and Maya, Cesspool too. Yeah, man, it's been a fun project.

For people who are interested, it's 2%, but the website is TWoPCut.com. It's been a fun project for people who are interested. It's 2% but the website is twopct.com. It's been a fun project man. I mean, I didn't know how it would go. The reception has been better than I expected, which is awesome. And I get a lot of, I have a lot of fun doing it, which I think is really key.

I can explore things that I otherwise wouldn't have where I writing for a lot of the magazines that I used to write for, right right things get edited down to the bone There's stuff where you're like this is the most fascinating part of this and it gets taken out So I can really dive into I think the stuff that is most useful and There's not as many constraints

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

I appreciate you. I'm looking forward to seeing what you do next.