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

Episode Date: January 8, 2024

View the Show Notes Page for This Episode Become a Member to Receive Exclusive Content Sign Up to Receive Peter’s Weekly Newsletter Bestselling author Michael Easter returns to The Drive to discuss his new book, Scarcity Brain. In this episode, Michael explores the evolutionary backdrop that molded human beings, a setting characterized by scarce food, limited information, and few possessions. He contrasts that with the modern era, marked by abundance and comfort, and the ensuing repercussions on our physical and mental well-being. Michael introduces the concept of the “scarcity loop,” a three-part behavior cycle which helps explain modern challenges such as overeating, addiction, gambling, and materialism, and offers practical strategies to break free from its cycle. The episode culminates in a thought-provoking exploration of happiness, drawing on Michael's experiences with monks and underscoring the value of boredom, exploration, and discomfort as transformative elements that elevate awareness, presence, and the will to live. We discuss: Inspiration for Michael’s latest book, Scarcity Brain [2:15]; Evolutionary adaptations to the scarcity of food contrasted with the modern obesity crisis [4:00]; Lessons learned about diet and nutrition from living with hunter-gatherers [9:30]; The impact of ultra-processed foods on energy balance [20:30]; Michael’s experience with attempting the hunter-gatherer diet at home [27:30]; The roots of excess: factors that contribute to overeating and the varied vulnerabilities among individuals [34:00]; The scarcity loop: how components of the scarcity loop are illustrated in gambling and addiction [39:45]; Using knowledge of the scarcity loop to break the cycle [50:45]; The evolutionary drive to acquire material possessions [58:15]; The benefits of boredom and value of exploration [1:07:00]; The consequences of an attention economy driven by negativity bias [1:16:30]; Navigating the world of endless information and the value in “slow information” [1:23:00]; Defining happiness, and the downward trend in reports of happiness [1:33:00]; Purpose, austerity, self-reliance and other missing elements of happiness gleaned from the study of monks [1:38:30]; The value in uncomfortable activities that increase your awareness, presence, and will to live [1:48:45]; and More. Connect With Peter on Twitter, Instagram, Facebook and YouTube

Hey everyone, welcome to the Drive Podcast. I'm your host Peter Atia. This podcast, my website, and my weekly newsletter all focus on the goal of translating the science of longevity into something accessible for everyone. Our goal is to provide the best content in health and wellness, and we've established a great team of analysts to make this happen. It is extremely important to me to provide all of this content without relying on paid ads. To do this, our work is made entirely possible by our members, and in return, we offer exclusive member-only content and benefits above and beyond what is available for free.

If you want to take your knowledge of this space to the next level, it's our goal to ensure members get back much more than the price of the subscription. If you want to learn more about the benefits of our premium membership, head over to peteratia-md.com forward slash subscribe. My returning guest this week is Michael Easter, who is a previous guest in October of 2022 on episode 225. Michael is a professor in the journalism department at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, and a co-founder and co-director of a think tank at UNLV called the Public Communications Institute.

He is also the author of the best seller and one of the few books that I am always giving away to people, the comfort crisis. In this episode, we speak about Michael's latest book, Scarcity Brain, which I will just tell you right now is also an exceptional book, and I put it right up there with the comfort crisis in terms of its implications for how we can live better lives. Throughout this conversation, we discuss what the scarcity loop is and how it affects our way of life in many ways. This includes looking at it through the lens of food, gambling, drugs, our need to accumulate more and more possessions,

and the stimulation we receive from our phone. Boredom, the influx of information we have in our lives, and finally, we look at happiness. So without further delay, please enjoy my conversation with Michael Easter. Michael, thanks for making the trip to Austin. Yeah, thanks for having me again. It's good to be here. Congrats on the book. Thank you very much. Yeah, thanks for having me again. It's good to be here. Congrats on the book. Thank you very much. Congrats on yours. Thanks so much.

So last time we were here, we were talking about the comfort crisis, which is a book people have heard me talk about over and over and over again. It's on the short list of books I recommend regularly. But I want to kind of understand how you went from the obvious success of the comfort crisis and more importantly, the lessons you success of the comfort crisis and more importantly, the lessons you learned in the comfort crisis to thinking about the particular problem that

feeds into scarcity brain. Yeah, so I finished the comfort crisis basically right as the pandemic was taking off. So March 2020. Now when the pandemic takes off, what does everyone do? They go to the grocery store and they hoard as much stuff as they can. We're going to get all the canned food we can get. We're going to get all the toilet paper. We're going to get all the hand sanitizer. There's a rational decision at that point, but it made me sort of realize when we think that resources are scarce, our reaction is to

hoard them and gather them. And I think what was interesting about the pandemic is you have this initial spike in that sort of behavior. But then sort of as it drew out you saw everything from drinking a drug use increase you saw purchasing increase you saw a lot of people gain weight Meeting food and exercising less and so you saw all these behaviors that can be damaged You just sort of increase over time and so that made me wonder about questions of scarcity, how it affects us, how are environments have changed because that's what the comfort crisis is ultimately about. And one of the elements underlying that is that we do live in a world where we have an

abundance of all these things we're built to crave and managing that can be difficult. You know, I was thinking about where to start. There are so many sections in this book, each of which dive into seemingly disparate topics of scarcity, right? We'll talk about them all, right? We'll talk about scarcity of information, scarcity of food. But maybe we start with food because I think it is the most obvious one, at least to me. Also, it's the one for which there is the most obvious evolutionary link. Now, there are scholars out there who would argue that the greatest superpower of the Homo sapiens are their ability to tell stories. I've heard this said, and that makes sense. Maybe it's

just my own bias in biology, but I've always felt that our superpower as Homo sapiens was energy storage. And it's probably the case that there are many superpowers that we have that coalesce around where we are today and how we kind of leapfrog to head of every other species about 250,000 years ago. Let's talk a little bit about what we know about scarcity with respect to nutrition and how that evolved us as a species. Until very recently, food was scarce and it was hard to find.

I mean, especially prehistoricly, there wasn't a lot of food. Not to mention, in order to get it, you weren't going down to the 7-11. You would have to hunt, you would have to gather, you'd have to put in energy to get energy. We know it wasn't always easy to come by. It kind of depended on where you lived, obviously. But recently in the grand scheme of time and space within the last hundred years, we've been able to produce really an abundance of food. And we've engineered our food to be as delicious as possible. And we have so much food now that the average person in America or America as a whole, we throw out about a third of the food that we produce.

So we've gone from being these creatures who evolved to, because food was scarce and hard to find, if you had the opportunity to eat it, maybe eat a little more than you needed at any given time, that would give you a survival advantage because you could store that energy, and then the next time that you can't find food, you're going to survive that. We still have that drive to eat a little more than we need, but we live in a world where food is rarely scarce. So it's an evolutionary mismatch, basically. I don't even have heard me talk about the default food environment. We were talking about it a minute ago, effectively in the pantry. We were both talking to each other about

the challenges of our pantries. And this is what I kind of talked to my patients about as the default food environment. So when you're changing a habit that requires subtraction, to me, the strategy is changing the environment. When you're changing a habit that requires addition, there's a whole different strategy. But the default food environment is, as you said, it's incredibly palatable, incredibly calorie dense, incredibly non-perishable, and therefore

portable, and incredibly cheap. So if you just think about dollar per kilojoule, you can't fathom how remarkable this is. And by the way, I don't believe that any of that is particularly nefarious on the part of industry. I think it's solving a problem, and the solution happened to produce those things that we now have that meet those criteria. And it's just that one of the criteria that wasn't on the list, there's not a fifth criteria that is healthy. Right. Make it such that if you consumed it at any level, it would not harm you. That is obviously not one of the criteria.

So what do we know about the most contentious topic of them all, which is what is at the root of the obesity crisis? Because while people can debate that, there's really no debate at the state of our excess nutrition. So I'll let you give the stats, but we are an overnourished species at this point that even globally the state of overnourishment exceeds that of malnourishment. Yeah, so 40 some odd percent of Americans are now obese, that number is expected to climb. And globally too, I believe that diseases that stem from overnourishment outweigh those

that stem from overnourishment. Byigh those that stem from overnourishment by undernourishment for fault. Yeah undernourishment. Yeah To your point, this is a good problem to have because literally for all of time your job was Getting food every day and preparing it great example is before we created production lines to make tortillas example is before we created production lines to make tortillas, Mexican women used to spend five hours a day hand grinding corn to make tortillas. When we get in food production lines and we sort of start to process our food more, that frees up a lot of time for people. It makes food more abundant. It makes it easier to come by.

It makes it cheaper. So today I think the average American spends about 8% of their income on food. In the past, we suspend more than 40%. 8 versus 40. 8 versus 40. So think about that. So this is a good problem to have, but we now have so much food that it does become hard to manage. And as you've talked about, plenty on this podcast, obesity is linked to so many of the diseases now that end up cutting our life short. And not only that, they cut into our health span. They make us mobile, and I think that that leads to some downstream consequences like depression,

anxiety, and so it becomes pernicious over time. One of the issues is that food will always be rewarding in the short term, and it's a hard battle to fight. So I have a lot of empathy for people who are obese. I understand that it's very challenging because we do live in a food environment where you can make that decision for that thing that's going to be delicious, feel good in the short term. Too much of it can cause some long-term problems. So when you wanted to look into this question, you did something that I think is very interesting and folks when they read the book, I think will be particularly intrigued by this section

where you decided to go and live with some hunter-gatherers. Now, there aren't that many hunter-gatherers left. And usually when we talk about them, we think of the HODZA because so much attention has been thrown their way. But you went to a different group in Bolivia, the Chamani, correct? Yeah. I hadn't even heard of this group of hunter-gatherers

until I read the book. So how did you find them? How did you select them over some of the ones that could have been a lot easier to reach, again, such as the HODZA? So I came across this paper and I believe it was 2018. And I basically found that this tribe does not get heart disease. So when you look at what kills the average person, it's heart disease.

That's the number one killer of Americans, it's the number one killer worldwide. So I go, okay, it's going down there. Let's see what's going on there. Because the other thing that I think is important is when you look at what people actually worry about health-wise, it's not heart disease. Definitely not. It's cancer. People worry about cancer, people worry worry about, health wise? It's not hard to see. Definitely not. It's cancer. People worry about cancer, people worry about terrorism, they worry about violence. So you'll have people who stalk tons and tons of guns and bullets because they don't want to get killed

and yet they've also got a pantry full of junk food. And it's like, well, maybe we should think about that too. So I read this paper, I talked to the two researchers on it and I decided I'm going to go down there. I want to see it for myself. My background is I'm a journalist and I'm an investigative journalist, so I travel places to meet with people to see what's going on there. Get my eyes on the world. So I fly into La Paz. Go to the source. Go to the source. As one of your editors might have said. Yes, yes. So I fly into La Paz, then we take a 12-hour car ride down to a town called Rono Bake in Bolivia.

And from there, we get in a canoe. It's called a Peca Peca boat, so that these long boats are like 30 feet really thin, and they've got these motors on them. They're called long tail motor. We take that about six hours up a feeder river of the Amazon. It was hilarious because all you can see is jungle the entire time. Like it's all green, it all looks the same. And then the boat driver just eventually pulls over and you're going, how did he know? How did you know? Get out and he's up. This is it. Get out. Yeah, no, they were. And they're fascinating, I think, because they're not true hunter-gatherers. So they're hunter-horticulturless, I guess you would consider them. So what was interesting with them is that

some point into given day because you sort of brought up how we've had all these fad diets over the last X amount of years. At some point in the day, they're going to offend some fad diet. All right, so they eat meat, they eat plain white rice, their diet isn't necessarily low fad, it's not necessarily low carb. They're eating white rice, their diet isn't necessarily low fat, it's not necessarily low carb.

They're eating things corn, that's off limits in so many of diet books. But the commonality behind their food is that it all has one ingredient. So they're basically not getting access to ultra-process food. And that seems to be one of the key reasons they've been able to avoid disease. And tell me about the population, so how many folks are there? And that seems to be one of the key reasons they've been able to avoid disease. And tell me about the population, so how many folks are there? Yeah, so I believe there are 20,000, that might be a high number, maybe five to 20,000, spread throughout the Amazon, the Bolivian Amazon, but the group that I went and saw

there's about 50 of them in a small village. And what does the distribution of their lifespan look like? In other words, what is median survival? Because I imagine there's a skewed down on median based on no access to antibiotics and the things that we take for granted here where what I call medicine 2.0 has done a remarkable job of extending human lifespan. I had a guide who was from another tribe, take me up there, and I said, all right, great.

They don't die of heart disease, they don't die of Alzheimer's. What do they die of? I need to just go to the... Oh, accidents. It's accidents, snakes, like literally there's snakes out there that if you get bit, just screw it. I think they lived into their 70s on average, if they're managed to sidestep a snake or some other accident. And then the claim that they don't have coronary artery disease

explain how that claim has been validated. Yeah, so they put them in a boat, this guy that I talked to, this researcher. They got a bunch of the tribe members and they took them into the village to do CT scans of their heart. And so they basically didn't have a lot of the tribe members and they took them into the village to do CT scans of their heart. And so they basically didn't have a lot of the markers that they look for in that scan. Yeah, so they're doing these CT angiograms on folks in their 70s. And I believe as you described it, they looked like healthy 50 year olds. Is that about the time you live in? Yeah, believe us about their hearts looks about 30 years young.

30 years young. Yes. Okay. So we've got these folks, and they, at least on the basis of what I refer to as the Four Horsemen, they don't seem to get the Four Horsemen. Eventually, they're gonna die because of these other problems. There are a lot of things that are different for them. So one could say, well, they're probably not under chronic stress.

They're probably quite active. They probably have a really good circadian rhythm and sleep well, and they probably not under chronic stress, they're probably quite active, they probably have a really good circadian rhythm and sleep well and they don't have electronics. And obviously they eat a very different diet. How much do you think this different diet, which I want you to go into a little more detail on because you even attempt it to follow it for some time? How much do you think that diet played a role in this given that we can't answer that question prospectively?

I think it plays a pretty large factor. Of course, it's not everything. Now one of the reasons I think this is because there is another tribe called the Mosatang who I spent a little bit of time with. They're only an hour from the village. So they will go into town, they'll get ultra-process food, they'll get things like oil, and they will fry their plantains, the chamanne, or baking them in a fire. They're just not doing all these things that make the food a lot more appealing and in turn lead them to overeat.

The most attend seem to have elevated risk of heart disease according to scientists I talk to. So let's go back to what these folks eat. Go through what the Chimane eat because you describe it as they're eating tons of meat, they're eating tons of carbs, they're eating tons of plants. As you said, they're kind of violating every cult of diet out there. Yeah, they absolutely are. So I would say in the average day, so for breakfast, it's probably something like white rice, maybe some plantains, with some protein, it could be fish, it could be chicken, it could be they hunt a Amazonian deer called a taper. So that's a red meat for lunch, very similar,

pile of white rice, maybe some fish, little bit of vegetables. So one thing that was interesting too, is that they're not eating a ton of vegetables. If you and I go to sweet greens, salad chain, or whatever, like that single salad that we would get there is probably the amount of vegetables are eating across the day. In the way we think of vegetables,

like greens, cabbage, things like that. And then for dinner, it's the same deal. It's pork arms, it's sweet potatoes, it's maybe some meat, fish, and it's just very simple foods repeated over and over and over. And that's I think what it was probably like for humans for most of time.

One of the fascinating things about today is that we have more options for food to eat than ever before. I mean, think of your average grocery store. It's got like 10,000 things that you can choose from. And that is very new in the grand scheme of time and space. And I think that we haven't necessarily learned to navigate that well.

So we do know that the more options people have to eat, the more things they can eat, the more that person will eat. So this is a term the buffet effect. Is you alluded to, there's a real raging debate within the obesity community where so many interesting theories are put forth, and it might be that no one theory is wholly complete. So, obviously, one theory is food availability. It's simply the quantity of food that is available.

And there are certainly examples of where that seems to work, but then there are other counter-examples where you can find, in places of either higher low food availability, you get the opposite to what you would expect based on the theory. You talk about palatability. Food today is hyper-palatable. And again, there are plenty of examples of this being one of them where hyper-palatability or lack thereof seems to play a role. Obviously, you then get into its carbs, its fats, it's this, it's that, it's the other thing.

Where do you think pleasure from eating fits into this landscape. In other words, anybody listening to this takes for granted, I think we all take for granted the idea that eating is often very pleasurable. Because we have choice, I don't know, I'm going to decide what I'm going to eat today if I'm at a buffet or even if I'm at home or if I'm at a restaurant ordering something, I'm going to presumably order something that I enjoy eating. Do you get the sense that they enjoy eating? As someone coming from the U.S. and Las Vegas, by the way, which buffets everywhere,

their food was not enjoyable. It's very, very, very plain. They're not salting it, you're eating plantains that have been baked in a fire. The fish is just, you know, they cook it up, and it is what it is. I've never consumed fish without at least putting salt on it. What does it taste like? It's just like flaky, it's just flaky, unsalted fish.

Yeah, interesting. And the chicken as well, one thing that was fascinating is that their chickens are also much different than ours ours because our chickens have been bred to be giant. They could never live out in the wild. The chickens that we have in the big plants in the US, their chickens are wild chickens. They weigh like three pounds and there's not much meat on them and the meat that is on them. It's got to be tough. It's very tough. It's very stringy. I took a bite of it. I'm like, oh yeah. We're not in Las Vegas anymore. I mean, it's not that enjoyable, comparatively.

So eating is the thing you do because you need to do it. Yes. You do it because you need to do it. Now, at the same time, I know that they're not having access to Las Vegas buffet. So for them, is it like, oh, this is pretty good. That can very well be. How long did it take, if at all, for your taste buds to down-regulate and for you to be like, you know, I can actually taste the sweetness in this plantain. And these sweet potatoes really are kind of a step up in sweetness from the plain rice or whatever. Like, did you go through this desensitization or rather a resensitization as you stayed with them?

Yeah, I think so. I think you start to enjoy it more and it could just be that you're hungry now. You've come from the city where you've had all this great food and now you're shuddled into this world and your first meal is you're gone. Okay, I'm just gonna have a little bit of this because it doesn't taste good. And then all of a sudden do that for a few days. You go, okay, well, I'm just going to have a little bit of this because it doesn't taste good. And then all of a sudden, do that for a few days. You go, okay, well, I'm actually hungry now. I got to eat. I do feel like hunger is the best sauce. If you're hungry, a lot can taste good.

If you're deprived of something and then you get it, becomes more enjoyable. What about, so here in the US, of course, are in the developed world. Any one of us, myself included, who's thinking about their weight, is kind of playing this game of how much should I eat. And you know, there are all these great models like, well, always get up from the table when you're still a little bit hungry, count your calories, or limit your carbs, or limit your fat. We always have heuristics that we try to use to regulate caloric balance.

Do they do any such thing, or do they literally eat as much as they want of these bland foods, but their off switch just comes so much sooner because presumably nothing in their brain is being hijacked? I'll answer that with this. There was an interesting study from Kevin Hall at the NIH and they basically took a group of people and for two weeks they fed them a diet. It was ultra-process food. I love this study, by the way. Oh they basically took a group of people. And for two weeks, they fed them a diet that was ultra-processed food. I love this study, by the way. Oh, it's fantastic. And Kevin Hall's here.

And Kevin was a real skeptic going into this study. I think it's worth maybe giving a little bit of background. That's a great point. So a group from Brazil had basically come out and said that one of the reasons for the obesity crisis is food is ultra-processed. The nature of the ultra-processing itself is leading people to eat more. So he calls them up and he goes, you know, what evidence do you have? Like, why do you think that?

And sorry to interrupt, but just to make sure the listener understands, because you and I know Kevin very well. Kevin's an empiricist whose view is to the best of his knowledge based on his data and Kevin generally has access to the most controlled studies because he runs a metabolic ward. It's the energy content of the food that is driving weight gain. Yes. And it is independent of the quality of the food. Yes.

So a thousand calories of broccoli is as fattening as a thousand calories of potato chips. Yes. So he calls them up and he, you know, he says basically that and he goes, so why do you think that? And they go, well, ultra-processed food has more sugar, it's got more salt. And he goes, well, you just named all these macronutrients. You can't say that. And it doesn't make any sense. So what he decides to do is he's going to study this. See if there's any there there because he's a skeptic. So it takes this group of people. For two weeks, they were kind of differentiated, but for the first two weeks, they eat a ultra-process diet. For the next two weeks, they eat a diet that is matched for everything,

carbs, salt, all that for the other two weeks. But this food is minimally processed. So it's a minimally processed version of the diet. So for example, on one night of the ultra processed diet, you might be getting the swans and meatloaf with the mashed potatoes that have the butter and all that kind of stuff. On the unprocessed night, that version might be cut a beef, some plain potatoes, sort of thing.

And just to be clear, I believe it was an ad lib feed study. Yes. The participant eats as much of the food as they want. Yes. You're not being restricted. Correct. So he's telling them eat as much as you want and tell you to feel full. And what he finds is that when people are on the ultra-process

diet, they end up eating about 500 more calories a day, and they start to gain weight. When they are on the minimally processed diet, they eat less, and they start to spontaneously lose weight. And so I think one of the reasons for this, obviously there's a lot of potential reasons. But I think one of the things that he thinks is that speed becomes a factor. So when you process a food to the extent that it becomes an ultra-processed food, i.e. a junk food, it becomes a lot faster to eat. And you simply end up eating more of it, and there's more triggers to continue eating

more of it because it is so hyper-palatable and enjoyable. This leads to the three Vs of snacking. Yes. So I talk to you a guy who's with the food industry and he says, if you want to get a snack food to sell, it's got to have three Vs. It's got to have value, so it's got to be relatively affordable. It's got to have variety, meaning there's got to be

a variety of flavors. The flavors have to be intense and oh, by the way, if you're making one snack food, that's not a good idea. Don't make just one original pringles. Make 20 pringles. Make barbecue pringles. Make sour cream pringles. On and on and on.

There's all the different varieties. And then three, the third V is velocity. It has to be fast to eat. So snacking was not a sort of cultural thing until about 1970. And once people start to really snack, I mean, this becomes, this is a concerted movement by the food industry to go, okay, how do we sell more food?

Let's invent this category called snacking. And once you see snacking start to take off, I think you really start to see the rise and obesity in our country and then have it trickle out across the world in 1970. Yeah, it's kind of amazing to think that only 50 years ago this concept, which seems so ingrained in how we live, I mean, you can't really go anywhere, like think about every time you're on an airplane, there's like a snack basket. Everywhere you go, there are snacks.

There are snacks, yeah. And so I think there's a lesson in that. When you think about, okay, well, if I'm trying to eat less, how can I do that? Well, I think that the lessons from the chamanes suggest and there's other research that backs us up is that foods that are minimally processed easy way to think about that is our ingredients

rather than have ingredients. They cut the breaks that sort of lead people to overeating, meaning it's a lot slower to eat foods that are unprocessed. So let's go back to your example of the thousand calories of brownie versus a thousand calories of broccoli. Yes, those two things might make you equally fat, but I would love to watch a person try and eat 1000 calories of broccoli. It's never going to happen.

It just takes up so much volume in your stomach. It's slow to eat, whereas with a brownie, I mean, I've eaten 1000 calories of brownie before. It's relatively easy to do. And there's just, I can do it right now. It's enjoyable. We can do it after this podcast. Yeah. No, no, I get asked all the time about the carnivore diet and people sort of say,

what do you think of this? Does this really, we're going to say, look, it as someone who's never done it, but who thinks about this problem a lot, it doesn't really surprise me that if a person were limited to rib eyes, and they couldn't eat a single other thing, but rib eyes, despite how calorically dense a rib eye is. And it's right at the top of calorically dense foods. Yeah, I can totally see how a person would lose weight. Now, if you said, well, it's ribeyes plus big potatoes, plus this, plus this, plus this, and that's all I'm gonna eat. Well, at some point, it becomes a little bit comical.

So, yeah, I think if you were stuck eating one food for the rest of your life, you would wither away, regardless of what that food is. And by the way, that might even apply to something as ridiculous as ice cream. And conversely, if you wanna make that even more extreme, if you want to increase the number of food choices, you have to pull a different knob or dial a different lever.

The other way, which is okay, then you have to dial down the processing. Right. Yeah. I just love this story. And then you go home and you decide, you're gonna give this a shot. It's like the diet with no name. Yeah, so I hang out with this tribe for a while,

learn from them, observe what they're eating, fish with them, just hang out. Great people. Go back to Las Vegas and I decide, okay, I'm going to try this for a month. I'm going to see what happens. So literally it's every food that I eat has to have just one ingredient. I got a mimic as closely as I can with their eating. Tell me this, when you go home, how many foods in your pantry and refrigerator already fit that description? There's like eight foods in the pantry

that probably has 200 items that fit this, okay? I've got like some apples in there. So your pantry's as bad as mine. Yeah, I've got some plain rice. I've got things that I think people would normally maybe consider healthy like whole wheat bread. Flip that over. It's like, wow, that's a long list of stuff. So I end up going to Costco to try and solve for this problem.

And I'm walking the aisles and there's literally entire aisles that are just off limits. So you're left with a very basic diet every single day. In the morning, I might eat something like oatmeal. I might eat some eggs with that. At lunch, I might air fry some plantains and have some fish at dinner. I would have maybe a sweet potato with some green beans. And luckily, we both hunt some elk. And I will tell you, it was not as exciting as my normal diet. At the same time, I started dumping weight pretty fast, and I didn't necessarily want to lose weight, so I all of a sudden had to go, okay, if I want to stay at 180 pounds

about, if I want to stay at least at 175, I'm going to have to up my clerk intake. Oh my gosh, it became so much food. You were force feeding yourself. I was force feeding myself. Yes. So one day, for example, I'm like, okay, I'm trying to do some rough math in my head of calories. I'm going, okay, we're going to need X amount of plantains.

Get them there and it's just, it's a mountain. It becomes tough to eat all that food. By the way, did you restrict yourself in any other way? Did you not snack deliberately? Or were you just never hungry between meals? If I wanted a snack, I would usually just have a piece of fruit. The jungle out there is filled with fruit. I will say that was the one food they had that was good.

So they had pretty good fruit out there. It was fantastic. But I got to say, Michael, that doesn't sound like an impossible to follow diet. If you have control of your food environment, where I think a diet like that becomes challenging, is the moment you venture out of your food environment, where I think a diet like that becomes challenging is the moment you venture out of your own preparation bubble.

I.e. the moment you go to someone's house for dinner or the moment you go to a restaurant. So how did you navigate those situations? That was absolutely challenging. The reality is, is I couldn't be perfect then, right? If my neighbor invites me over and says, Hey, we're making you dinner. I'm not going to walk in and be like, okay, I got this food list from this. You're not going to be that guy. Let's try in the Amazon. So say we're making you turn on, I'm not gonna walk in and be like, okay, I got this food list from this. You're not gonna be that guy.

Let's try it in the Amazon, please. Yeah, just, you know, prime up some plantains, air fry though, only air fry. So I wasn't gonna do that. So I would just kinda do the best I could. If it's a cookout, they're gonna have like some grilled chicken, they might have some, I don't know,

like potatoes or something. I would just do my best. Do you have a sense of what your macros broke down into? Heavy or on the carbs. What were you roughly 50 carbs? Yeah, more than 50% carbs. I would say 52. 50 to 60 at least.

Yeah, it could have been up into the 70s some days. What else did you have for protein besides fish? Elk. Oh, that's right, you mentioned elk. Would you season the elk? I'm not gonna lie, sometimes I would put some salt on that Peter. And do you think that that's violating a, I mean, again, there's no principle here we're trying to adhere to, but do you think that that changed your repetitive behavior?

Because that's effectively what we're trying to get out here. It makes it easier to eat. And if something's easier to eat, you're going to eat more of it. How much protein were you able to eat per day? I mean, the eggs would be a good way to get protein, but I mean, as much as I love meat, I really like to have salt and pepper on it. Yeah, well, I think that sometimes we discount how much protein comes from grains,

depending on what the grain is. That's true. And we often discount that. So if I'm having a giant bowl of oatmeal in the morning, I mean, that might have 18, 20 grams right there. But you can't mix it with anything. You wouldn't even put berries on the oatmeal. I would sometimes put berries on the oatmeal. Okay, so that doesn't violate the rule. Yeah, no. We all got one ingredient here.

I see. So it's all single ingredients that can be mixed together. All single ingredients. Yeah, exactly. I kind of want to try this. Oh, you should try. One thing that was interesting is I followed up with a buddy whose name is Trevor Cashy. Oh yeah, you wrote about Trevor in the first book. Yeah, he was in the comfort crisis. Brilliant guy, he's a biochemist and he ended up getting into nutrition. I told him about what was happening and he said, basically a lot of good things can happen, too, that even if you have a very low level allergy to a food that you're not aware of, by cutting out a lot of the foods I did, it could be too that,

maybe I was, to some extent, allergic to a food and I wasn't aware of it, and that helped me lose weight or might have made me end up feeling better or something like that. So, I think that there's a lot of things, a lot of good things that can come out of a project like that. And the reality is, is like, would I tell anyone to eat that exact way the rest of their life and never violate that? No. Do I think that something like that exact way, the rest of their life, and never violate that? No. Do I think that something like that is worth trying? So you can learn, okay, these are some foods that seem to work for me. I tend to feel more full on fewer calories when I'm eating foods like this. And then from there, you can go, okay, like I have a general plan that's going to be like, I'm going

to eat like this 80, 90% of the time, whatever it might be. And then we do live in a world where it's amazing in the sense that we can sit down and have that thousand calories of brownies. If I bring a thousand calories of brownies to the Chumane, they're gonna be like, oh my God, this is amazing, they're gonna eat it.

And so I'm not saying that we should never eat ultra-process food, I think the question is, how do we manage that? Because we do live in a world where it's incredible that we should never eat ultra-processed food. I think the question is, how do we manage that? Because we do live in a world where it's incredible that we can have brownies, that we can have 15 different flavors of Doritos. It's all great. But if we are eating those foods too often all the time, that becomes the brunt of our diet.

I mean, we know we're going to have issues. And I think that a believe a lot of the research suggests that anywhere from 60 to 70% of American diet is ultra processed. So you start to look at that and go, okay, we've got snacking, we've got people eating ultra processed food for most of the foods they're eating. And I think it starts to make sense. Why you see scales start to get higher over time.

Do you have a sense of why some people are more or less immune to those effects? There are some people who even when presented with ultra processed food don't eat to excess. And yet there are others and I would put myself far on this scale where the only way I'm not going to eat to excess in the setting of hyper palatable, hyper processed food is enormous self discipline when I can manage to exert it, which is not always, and not in most of the time. In other words, I have to use hacks and tricks to get around it, whereas I know people who can sit in front of a plate

of freshly made cookies and eat one. While the entire plate sits there in front of them for the next hour. That's a really good question. I don't think there's a perfect answer. I do think sometimes food can be used for things other than nutrition, for example stress relief, things like that, emotions, dealing with emotions. I do think you tend to see, especially today, people eat for emotional reasons.

There was a study that I had in the comfort crisis that suggested that 80% of eating today is driven by reasons other than true hunger. And so there's a lot of things that could be it's a certain time of day, but I think food is around so you just eat it, but I do think that stress eating is a thing that works. Eating food will solve your stress in the short term. And where do you think that comes from in the sense that I want to talk about the scarcity loop, we haven't defined it, I sort of jumped into it, but we're going to talk about what the scarcity loop is. But there are some people like I could walk into a casino, which we're going to talk about gambling.

It wouldn't even occur to me to play a slot machine. The thought wouldn't cross my mind. I would just look at that and think, why would I ever want to waste a dollar? I say that not with any judgment on those who have destroyed their lives at slot machines. If you said to me, you could play this lot machine or watch the paint dry on the wall. I'd be like, well, at least I don't have to pay to watch the paint dry. Yet there are some addictions such as food that I will struggle with indefinitely. And we could go through the list, there are some people who drugs,

whether it be that first time they take a pain killer, it puts a hook into them that is very difficult for them to escape alcohol. Same thing. Never occurs to me to get drunk. And I know obviously you're sober. So clearly for you, alcohol scratched in itch, that it's never scratched for me

and I feel very grateful for that. In other words, I don't think there's a moral difference between us. I think there's like a biochemical difference. Do you have a sense of why each of us have different vulnerabilities when it comes to the scarcity loop? I don't know if that, I mean, you might know, but I don't think there's this very specific answer.

Why do you like F1? And I like basketball. Who knows? But I do think that probably exposure during vulnerable periods sets the table. So for example, here's a good example from addiction research. If a person drinks at 15 or younger,

they have a coin flips chance of becoming an alcoholic. If they drink after 21, 21 or older, they have a 10% chance. And so why is that? It's because your brain is developing such a way from puberty to your about 25 where you're trying to figure out, okay, how do I find comfort?

How do I navigate the world? How do I deal with stress? How do I deal with my problems? And so I think that that sort of gets set in with alcohol, for example, that gets set in at that age and you go, oh, this is what works for me. So it could be maybe the young age, like, food works for you to help you deal with your problems. For me, it was like, first time I drank when I was like 15, I'm like, wow, the world's way better after this, right? It was like a very deep learning experience.

Yeah, that's so interesting. I remember reading that and thinking of my first time drinking, which was 13, but I drank so much. It was funny. I worked at my dad's restaurant. It was New Year's Eve. I was a bus boy. And at the end of the night, I went around and drank all of the remaining drinks on the table of everything that was there, including this is back when you can even have a can of beer. And I'm pouring it out and even have a can of beer and I'm pouring it out and like cigarette butts are coming out and I'm drinking the beer like I got so drunk that not only did I vomit throughout the night, I was drunk the next day. Is it just the case that that was such an unpleasant experience versus your experience? And by the way, you know,

recently Matthew Perry died and I remember reading an article about him where he talked about the first time he drank. I think he said, you know, he sort of drank a bottle of wine laid in a field and was like, this is the greatest feeling in the world. So made me think that maybe it comes down to not just age of exposure, but the reward that comes from that exposure.

And maybe if there's no reward, and in fact there's a punishment physiologically, it could have the opposite effect. Yeah, I think so. I mean, I think you learned that this thing is good. You do this thing. Oh, that was a good outcome. I'm going to do that again, because I want that good thing again. Whereas with you, your exposure to alcohol was, okay, I did this thing. Wow, that was terrible. I'm not going to do that again, right? It's for you, it's like putting your hand on the stove. So, oh, not doing that ever again. For me, it was like I flipped on the stove and this amazing five-course best meal in my life appeared. And

it was like, wow, I'm going to be touching that stove button to get that to happen again. So I think it's very much just a learned behavior. I mean, that's how humans learn. That's why we do what we do, because we get rewarded for it. And so I think it's very much just a learned behavior. I mean, that's how humans learn. That's why we do what we do, because we get rewarded for it. And so I think it just sort of gets set in, particularly at a young age. And it could be that by the time going back to that study, by the time you're 21, well, you figured out these other ways

to navigate the world, what you get rewards from. And so if you've waited until 21, you're like, well, I have all these other things that give me rewards. Yeah, you've figured out other self-soothing tools. Yeah. So let's now talk about the scarcity loop. There are three components to it.

And these three components get exploited in our lives everywhere we go. What are they? And how do they feed off each other? So for context, the reason that I started thinking about this is that I live in Las Vegas. And in Vegas, I mean, you talked about your experience with slot machines. Well, not everyone in Vegas feels the way you do about slot machines. And I don't say that with any judgment or moral superiority, I truly believe there's

a biological difference between me and that person in Vegas who could throw their life away. Yeah, totally. I agree. So I basically make the observation that one, you have to realize that slot machines are all over Las Vegas. They're in the grocery stores, they're in the gas stations, they're in the restaurants, the bars are in the airport, and people play them all the time. And so when I go down to the gas station to fill up my truck and get a diet coke, I'll see people in there at 7 a.m. playing slot machine. And I see that and I go, why would anyone do that? It doesn't make any sense because everyone knows the house always wins. And by the way, when the house wins in Blackjack and Poker, it's only slightly. It's 51.49.

How much does the house win in slot machines? So it's actually not super, super far off of those odds. So in the past, slot machines used to be, they called them one arm bandits because the case was that they were one arm bandits. Now I believe that slot machines are about, return about $0.85 for every dollar you spend on average. Which is smart for reasons you're going to explain.

Yeah, we'll get into why that works. And why once they shifted from not giving people frequent wins and rewards to more frequent wins and rewards, why slot machines took off. So I make this observation about slot machines and I start wondering, okay, how does a slot machine work? How can this thing get people to be down at the 7-11 and sit for hours and hours and play the thing where you know you're going to lose. Play it long enough, you're going to lose. It's just how it works. So I go into Journalist Mode and what was fascinating is the first people that I call are people who are, I would guess I would term them, they're gambling researchers but they have a very

anti-gambling bent. Okay, so they're looking at, okay, here's all the reasons why gambling hurts us, here's why people get hooked on slot machines. And I call them up and I talk to these people. And they tell me all sorts of things that kind of like the myths you hear about casinos. So one person said slot machines only play in the key of C. And the key of C is very pleasing to people and it relaxes their wallet, relaxes them and then turn their wallets. Another person tells me, oh, casinos don't use right angles because right angles activate the decision making part of your brain and that'll slow down your rate of gambling.

All these different things. Another one was casinos don't have clocks so you lose track of time. Did you hear the one about how casinos inject oxygen into the air? I don't know why that would make you want to gamble more, but I remember hearing that they're pumping oxygen into the room. Also knows the biggest fire hazard ever known to man. Yeah, exactly. Yeah.

So I go, okay, sounds good. But the problem is, is I live in Las Vegas and I got a casino like two exits for me. So I go into the casino. No, they don't have clocks. Neither does Costco. Neither does Walmart. Neither does any normal business.

We don't just hang clocks everywhere. I don't have one in here by the way. I don't know if you noticed. Right, well, you're trying to manipulate me. I'm trying to get you to play a slot machine. The right angles thing, slot machines screens are a square. Those are the right angles. And then I call up a slot machine audio composer who lives in Vegas.

It's a real job you can have in that town. He goes, where'd you hear that? I use all keys. You know, I'm just trying to make the best little jingle that I can. I'm just trying to have fun. So I realized that my inherent problem is that I am talking to people who want us all to stop gambling. And I need to talk to the people who want us to start gambling, right? I got to follow the money on this thing. So long story short is through some different

contacts. I end up at this place on the edge of town in Vegas and it's this new cutting edge casino, but it is not fully open to the public like a normal casino would be. It's a casino laboratory, so it's used entirely for research on human behavior. And the people invested in this are gambling companies. So big gambling companies, void, seizures, whatever, all the big names,

but also a lot of tech companies. So there's 73 different companies that are invested in this place. And it is very much like a twilight zone of casinos. You walk into this place and you're like, I'm in a casino. But there's a lot of people with PhDs, they're doing studies.

And I end up talking to a guy who designed slot machines. And he basically explains, oh, yeah, here's how a slot machine works. And he lays out this system. And I talked to other people who talk about it in different ways. So I call it the Scarris of D-Loop. And so the reason a slot machine works is it works on this three-part system system and I talk to other people who talk about it in different ways. So I call it the scarcity loop.

And so the reason a slot machine works is it works on this three-part system that I call the scarcity loop. So part one, or the first condition, is opportunity. You have an opportunity to get something of value. So in the case of a slot machine, it's money, right? Part two is unpredictable rewards. You know you're going to get the thing of value at some point, but you don't know when, and you don't know how valuable it's going to be.

So with the slot machine, once you play a game and those reels are rolling, they could all land and you get nothing. They could land and you win, say, $2 on your dollar bet, or you could win $20,000 on your dollar bet. There's a crazy range of outcomes every single game. And then three, and this is important, is quick repeatability. So once those reels land, you can immediately repeat the behavior. You can play again.

So the average slot machine player plays 16 games a minute, which is more than we blink. Now, the reason that this is important to talk about, that we're not just talking about slot machines here, right? This is an gambling podcast is that this system can get people to do a lot of other behaviors that are seemingly irrational too. So it's what makes a lot of different systems like social media work. You post something.

You got an opportunity to get some likes, some status. So you check and recheck because you don't know when those likes are coming in. You don't know if your post is going to go viral. You might get canceled. You might get a message from someone that you think is great. On and on and on. It's in dating apps. It's in different financial apps.

So one of the reasons that Robin Hood really took off is because they increased the quick repeatability by removing fees for trades. It's in online shopping. A lot of advertisers are using casino-like features in their ads to drive profits and that's led to a seven-fold increase in conversion rates when they put like a spinning wheel for a discount. And so I think when you start to look at the behaviors that people have a hard time moderating, I think a lot of them rely on this system. So let's talk a little bit more about how one can use that information to break the cycle. Let's talk about drug use.

You chose a very interesting place to go to investigate drug use. I was very surprised by that given the problems we have here in the US, you could have literally gone to any city in the US. I'm not sure why you had to go into Baghdad. The reason that I went into Baghdad is because you had nothing and now you have something. And it really stands for what I think the conditions that you need for a addiction epidemic to rise. So to give some context, for most of the time, I racked and have a drug problem. And a lot of that was for political reasons. The DOM ruled with kind of an iron fist around that. And then the US invades. And it destabilizes the country. So you have a big population that has lived through a war. And then soon after Syria falls, Syria becomes a narco state effectively and they start producing

a drug that is called Capdagon. And it's analogous to methamphetamine. And so they start sending this drug all throughout the Middle East. So you've got three things. You've got one, you have a population who is in a lot of pain. You have few ways to deal with that pain that are more productive, not a lot of options. And then three, you have a substance that solves that pain, not problem, in the short term, immediately. And so I think that leads to that rise in addiction.

And you see it here in the US as well. It's like, why did the opioid epidemic start in states where the factories had moved out? Well, it's because factories move out. Our lives change. We don't have a lot of resources. Things have gotten really dark. And now we have this flood of pills that can take away those problems in the short term.

That can allow us to escape from that life we live. But I think the reason for going to Iraq instead of placing the US is simply that this is happening now on the ground, and it is just booming, and it is a new substance. So there are two models for drug addiction. What are those two models? So we've thought about it two different ways that it's a moral failing, i.e., a drug user, an addict,

is a bad person. They're making this very specific choice to just mess over other people and putting themselves ahead of everyone else. Even in the extension of that, is they simply don't have the self-management, self-discipline. So even if they're not deliberately doing this

to sabotage their life, they're so lacking in moral character that they can't manage themselves. Yeah, and then the second is the brain disease model. That addiction is the result of brain disease. Effectively, drugs change your brain in such a way that removes your capacity to make any decision to round the behavior. And that drug addiction is a chronic and relapsing disease.

Now, let's talk about a counter-example to both of those. What do we know about Vietnam vets use of heroin when they were in Vietnam versus when they returned? And what does that tell us? The Vietnam war, you had about 20 to 25% of soldiers, US soldiers who were in Vietnam were addicted to heroin, regular frequent users of heroin. And President Nixon, he decides I don't want to let all these heroin addicts back into the United States. It was a significant number of people. So he decides to start a program that is called Operation Golden Flow. And the deal is this, if you want to come back into the United States, as a soldier who's been in Vietnam, you have to produce a clean urine test. If you do not produce a clean urine test, you will be left in Vietnam.

So if addiction basically obliterates the capacity to make any choices and any decisions, you would expect that 25% of soldiers in Vietnam would be left in Vietnam. Now what actually happened is that nearly every single one provided clean urine, and when they got back into the United States, the vast majority of them, about 95%, managed to stay clean. The 5% that relapsed, they tended to be people who had used drugs before the war. So this suggests that people aren't necessarily a slave to chemicals, right? That maybe it's a little bit more nuanced than it being purely a brain disease where choice

is completely obliterated. And so how can we extrapolate from that to where we are today? In other words, we're sitting in the midst of an unbelievable epidemic. I've even done a podcast on this and it's a little outside of my area of expertise and you could argue, and I have argued that it does impact longevity because mortality rates for the US population are actually in a small state of decline being driven almost exclusively by the death of people aged roughly 25 to 55, where we've seen the deaths of despair increase at a rate we've never seen before. So deaths of despair and the biggest of the three deaths

of despair, so we count accidental overdose, that includes poisoning, right? So fentanyl in a drug that you don't think has fentanyl, alcohol-related deaths and suicides. So those three are collectively expanding, but the greatest of the three by far is the overdose, the non-suicide overdose. So what do you think explains that

how much of each of the relative contributions do you think are contributing to that? Because it's no longer just in the old steel mill town, which I think probably explain the thin edge of the wedge in the late 90s and early 2000s. But here we are 25 years later, and this is an epidemic in any and every city, including my city of Austin.

Yeah, I think if you're looking at it purely from a death statistics, that goes back to fentanyl. And that fentanyl is being put in drugs that are all over the country now, and people aren't necessarily aware that they're getting a drug. So I think we also have to back up and go, okay, well, why do people use drugs? Would people use a drug knowing that there's a risk that there's fentanyl in something that they weren't expecting fentanyl to be in. Right. I think when you look at drugs from a historical perspective,

humans have always used psychroaptic substances as tools to accomplish something. So if you think about chewing coca leaf in South America, the coca leaf was used to enhance focus on long hunts to kill hunger on long hunts when you couldn't find food, same with tobacco. And so you tend to see that substances have always been used as a tool to accomplish something because they benefited the person's life somehow.

Now, what has changed between today and 100,000 years ago is that we've taken our substances and we have distilled them into something where the psychoactive component is so strong and pure that it really can become almost in a blitterant in a way, right? And over time, the availability has risen as well. So I think when you think about something like fentanyl being placed into things is I think there's a lot of people that can use drugs and be okay. Would I recommend that? No. But can people use drugs recreationally?

I think there are plenty of people who can and do the work of Karl Hart, for example, gets into this a lot. And so what happens when you start getting fentanyl in drugs that people who are using it recreationally Get you start to see people who die. So there's recently in New York City There was a bad batch of cocaine that had fentanyl in it and you had five people dying Manhattan in a single night And these are not people living on the street These are like people who have an apartment or a white down. These are white-collar people who use cocaine recreationally. Yeah, exactly. And so I think that that really accounts for the rise in overdose deaths.

You're not necessarily thinking that we're seeing an increase in the epidemic of, I don't know how to describe it, but catastrophic drug use or drug use that is commensurate with no function in life outside of drug use. I think we very well might be because the substance is what I'm talking about, deaths being spread around the country. I think that accounts for that. But I do think that our substances today are strong enough that they can have more extreme consequences.

Yeah. In other words, the deaths of despair might be over counting because some of those people dying might not be the same drugs. Yeah. That said, push back to that would be, look, should anybody really be using cocaine? What does it say about us if we need to be using cocaine? Let's go back to the example you gave.

We clearly evolved to enjoy the rush of noripinephrine, but the cocoa leaf never produced the concentrated high. In many ways, the drugs of today are the equivalent of a bag of peanut M&Ms. They're simply so concentrated in bliss that there's nothing that compared to it. It's not that you couldn't eat a peanut before or even have some cacao, but nobody imagined the crunchy shell with the sugar and the chocolate and then this and then the other thing. That's sort of what the cocaine and the heroin are to their predecessor, right? Yeah, exactly.

That same logic that too also applies for alcohol, which we culturally accept. So in the past, our sort of perclivity as humans for alcohol is probably because alcohol used to help us find food. So when you think about, we're searching the land for fruit. Fruit would fall from trees. It would ripen on the ground. It would begin to ferment and it would put off this funky smell from the alcohol. That would help us find the food. When we actually got the fruit, that low level of alcohol in the fruit would help us eat

more of it, the apetrieth effect. So now though, we have, last night at my hotel in Austin, they've got this big super long bar and you can see all the bottles and how many of them have the same amount of alcohol that fermented fruit would have. Pretty much zero. We're talking like bourbons that are 120 proof or whatever.

So I think that the more that you scale up and concentrate the psychoactive substances, I think probably the more problems you can get into. Then there's like this debate, it's like, okay, well, if alcohol is okay, should the government regulate cocaine? And that way, we don't have to worry about fentanyl being in. I mean, that's just like an entire can of worms that probably best left for policymakers. What is the use of methadone tell us about how to at least address one of the issues in the scarcely loop if you're trying to help a person who's opioid addicted? Yeah, so one of the things that I think makes drugs so compelling and attractive to people is the element of the scarcely loop of unpredictability. So when you think about getting and using any street drug,

there's a lot of unpredictable elements in that. Are you going to be able to find the drug? Are you going to get in trouble? That you try and find the drug. Once you get the drug, how strong is it going to be? Is it going to be really good? Is it going to be really bad? And then you use it and a lot could happen from there.

And so with methadone, you find that once you make the drug predictable in the sense that the environment becomes predictable, the timing of when you get it becomes predictable, the dose becomes predictable. You start to see people be able to wane off of drugs, and in fact, people who use methadone often won't get high from the drug. And I think you see this in a lot of pharmaceuticals as well. The addiction rate for prescribed drugs that are controlled or the dose and the timing is controlled, the addiction rates for those are way lower simply because there's no unpredictability.

There's no game behind it. All right, let's pivot a little bit and talk about material possessions. You've alluded to it already because you mentioned how during the pandemic, many of us increased our e-shopping. And I suppose like all good addictions, there's an adaptive component to that. Like at the beginning of the pandemic, when it was March and April of 2020, I think there's a pretty good reason not to go out.

We had no idea what we were dealing with. And the fact that Amazon could deliver things to my door that I used to go out for made complete and total sense. And yet, why is it that I probably still buy as much on Amazon now as I did then, if not more? I think there are evolutionary reasons for having more items. If you could get more tools as a person, that probably gave you a survival advantage. Having more items was probably a better idea than having less, especially when you're trying to survive. So I think we still have this drive to accumulate stuff. But the difference

of course is that now we live in a world where we manufacture so much stuff. And it's cheaper than ever before. So even just a couple hundred years ago, the average person, for example, owned about three outfits. Now the average person owns 104 outfits, and they also only wear 10% of the clothes that they own. I think the stats are 20% of the stuff in our closets.

We don't wear it all. I think there's another, I'm gonna get the math here around 40% or something that we're like, eh, it's okay, I don't really love it. And then there's a few items where we wear them sometimes and then we're left with 10% where we actually repeatedly wear those items all the time and that tracks with my own experience.

And so I think really the difference today is that, we've always had this itch to own things, to possess things, but we can never scratch it that often. Things took time to make because of that, they were more expensive. It was harder to get the resources to make them. And then once the Industrial Revolution happens, we start cranking out stuff at an amazing rate. Now again, this kind of goes back to the food thing where it's like, well, this is a good problem to have. But I think you tend to see people collecting, collecting collect items. And now the average house, according to one estimate, has anywhere from 10,000 to 40,000 items in it. So we clearly can see a direct and negative consequence to our well-being due to the scarcity loops impact on food, which is for 70% of us, it results in overweight or obesity.

For that subset of the population, there's a nearly doubling of risk in other chronic diseases. You might not feel the pain immediately, but there is a real and clear threat to your longevity. What are the downsides of stuff accumulation outside of the extremes? So clearly there are people who have like hoarding diseases, and then clearly there are people who could buy so much stuff that it would financially ruin them in the same way a gambler could be ruined.

But I suspect that most people listening to this are more like me, where they have too much stuff, but it doesn't seem to pose a direct risk to them. Yet I suspect that there's something harmful about it. What is that? Well, I do think there's some interesting research that suggests being around too much in clutter. I do think it impacts your ability to focus. Seems to be related to anxiety, different things. Now, is it a direct threat like heart diseases? No. But I think what tends to happen is

when you look at why people buy, I think there's basically four reasons. I think the first is items are tools. We use them to accomplish a greater goal. This is probably how people would have used things for most of time. Two, we can use them to get status. So you're buying something in order to display something

about yourself to others. It's kind of a status play. It's like, no one buys a Rolex because I want to know what time it is. And you're talking to a watch guy here. Well, same here. I'm aware of it. I'm talking crap on myself.

And then number three is that we can use goods to belong. You wear your F1 shirt when you go to the F1 race. It's like you're part of this community and it pulls you into the community. And I think you see that practically beyond sports. I mean, certain types of people wear Patagonia, certain types of people wear the Black Rifle Coffee Company shirt. We kind of get these tribes that we can identify with via a thing to buy.

And then the fourth reason, I think, and I think this was a powerful one during the pandemic is simply that people are bored. We today have much faster, easier opportunity to purchase stuff than we ever have before. Even 20 years ago, if a person wanted to buy something, if they're bored. It'd actually go out and do it. You had to go out and do it. You had to get in your car.

You had to go to the store. You had to walk the aisles. No, it's just the thing I want. It's just thing, like It's a time consuming process. Now we can just do it online. We can search Amazon. Not to mention, I think that when you look at how algorithms have evolved, I mean, anyone who's ever spent

10 seconds on Instagram, they know that that machine knows what they want to purchase. More than they do themselves. That's what amazes me. Usually when Instagram suggests something to me, it's good, it's good. Whereas interestingly, Google isn't nearly as good for some reason.

I don't know why. Google seems to really suggest dumb things. To me, I have no interest in, but not Instagram. Yeah, Instagram is very good, very good. I think it's probably taps in better too. And it's probably the key to act with it in a different way. Even though I barely spend time on social media, it must know when I watch an exercise video,

or maybe it knows I'm posting exercise video, it's always suggesting the coolest exercise equipment. And I'm always like, even though I don't have any room for that, I could really use that device. You and I are the same. I get exercise contraptions, and I'm sorry to bring up the Grateful Dead again on your podcast. But once I start following all these random Grateful Dead accounts, what am I getting? I'm getting like, oh, you need this shirt from the 1994 tour.

It's awesome. Dang it. That's the other thing I get. I get a lot of t-shirt ads for things that I'm clearly doing. Yeah, if you are bored, you might first get bored and you feel that discomfort. And so the boredom, I talked about this on the last podcast,

talked about it in the comfort crisis, but boredom is this evolutionary discomfort that basically just tells us whatever you're doing with your time right now, the return on your time is one thing. So go do something else. Now in the past, that's something else was often productive. If you think about 100 gathers, if no animals are coming through

when they're hunting, what they're going to do is go, okay, well, maybe we could fish. Maybe we could pick potatoes. Maybe we could pick berries. Today, when we feel that discomfort, we have a lot of very easy, effortless, hyper stimulating escapes from it in the form of cell phones and the form of TVs.

And so now when you feel it's like, K, pull out your cell phone, I guess I'll open Instagram, I'm scrolling, I'm still bored. Oh, there's that t-shirt I love for that exercise contraption. And then it's like, yeah, I guess I'll buy it. And so I think you start to see purchases really up when we can repeat the behavior faster. So as a general rule, the faster a human,

any animal can repeat the behavior, the more likely they are to repeat the behavior. And this is something that came up in slot machines in the 80s, is what kind of alluded to. Yeah, I've thought a lot about what you just said with respect to boredom from our first discussion. And I've tried to be more cognizant of it. And in particular, like how uncomfortable I am when I'm bored. And there aren't that many times I get to be bored, but this idea that just going places without your phone, which I think is a grid practice,

like, I'm gonna go somewhere today, and I'm not gonna take my phone, because I can actually live without it. I used to do this. There was a day when I did this before, and then you find yourself in the line at the store without a phone. And it's odd at first. It's really weird. It's like it's five minutes where there's nothing to do.

I also think that you can train yourself to realize that it's an opportunity. Oh yeah. It's a beautiful opportunity to just observe your thoughts, to observe some element of the surrounding. It's actually why you and I have talked about it. It's love rucking. It's a no-phone zone that is great, but I think there's something different about rucking in that it's so physically challenging or you can make it so physically challenging that the lack of music or stimulation is okay. There's something about stillness and otherwise boredom that I think can be challenging and to think that if we didn't have that drive, our species might not have survived.

That's a very cool thought to me. Oh yeah, absolutely. You asked me, did you sort of adapt to the Chimane food? I do think you can adapt to boredom. So for example, the comfort crisis, I spent all this time in the Arctic. And I will say that the boredom was most intense early on in the trip

after you've sort of removed yourself from the incoming emails, the screens, the million things that you're normally doing. Things start to slow down and you start to calm down and you start to become more observant. I mean, I will tell you probably the most mentally well I've ever been in my life was after a couple of weeks up in the Arctic.

You're just dialed in, you just feel so much calmer. And I do think that we live in a world now of hyper speed. Anytime we want to be stimulated, we can do that. And by the way, it's going to be tick-tock coming at you fast. So I do think that there's a case for finding time in your life for removal from all that to sort of lean back into boredom. One of the things, I guess, issues I've had

with a lot of the messaging around how people need to use their cell phone less is that, like, yes, that is important. But what tends to happen is when people take an hour off their phone screen time, they go, okay, well, I'm bored. What do I do now? And they turn on Netflix. And there's no difference.

So I advocate for trying to think, how can I infuse boredom back into my life? And really for me, that's go out, take a walk for 20 minutes, see what happens to your thoughts, be willing to sort of sit with that and see where it leads you beyond the screen. Because on the screen is what everyone else is getting. And so I think this is particularly great for ideation.

You know, I think this is one of the reasons why people have their best ideas in the shower. It's because you're not focused on anything. You're just kind of letting your mind wander, do its thing, and then bam, that's the angle, whatever it is, that's the idea. Finishing out this discussion on stuff, my kids have many more toys than I had.

My wife and I talk about this a lot because I kind of live vicariously through them when it comes to Lego. So I just can't stop buying Lego because I love building it with them, watching them build it, creating a huge Lego city. But I wonder, like, is there a downside of this? Because my kids are good kids. I don't feel like there's spoiled brats or anything like that.

But I only had one Lego, and I had to take it apart and put it together and take it apart and put it together, take it apart and together, and the truth of it is, I see them getting bored of Lego. They're so conditioned that any time a new one comes out, dad goes and gets it, because he can't wait to see it kind of thing.

And I do wonder, like, am I doing them a disservice in the long run? Am I depriving them of a scarcity that I had? There's an interesting study I came across when writing this book. It had groups of people and it had them solve a problem. And one group was told they had abundant resources to solve it. They could do all these different things to solve a problem. The other group had scarce resources. And so they had to come up with different uses for tools.

And what ended up happening is that the group that was faced with more scarce resources, they not only solved the problem, but they got more rewards from solving the problem by miggaivering it. So when I think about it as applied to Legos, so in the book I lay out out what's a good way to think about making a purchase. And one of the things that I argue for is framing purchases through the lens of gear, not stuff. So gear is an item that is allowing me to accomplish something that is life giving, right? It's adding to this experience that adds meaning into my life where a stuff is often just kind of a purchase to fulfill an impulse.

I'm buying something because I think it's gonna make me this other person. If I buy this shirt, I'm gonna look like this. It's gonna be awesome. My life's gonna whatever. You get the point. When I think about your experience with Legos, that does seem to be adding a real enhancement to your life. Like you're getting this time with your kids where you're building Legos. At the same time, it might be interesting now now that you've got this pile of Legos from all these killer kits, what could we make with this guys? We're not following the plan here anymore. We're going, could we build a castle?

What would a castle look like with the resources we have? And I think that that would probably lead them to exercise creativity. We've already learned that. When you buy the kit, they love to build the thing, but then they like to keep it and play with it as is. But where they get far more enjoyment is the loose Lego pile.

So you go to Lego store, you can buy loose Lego, and then there's a store called Bricks and Mini Figs. It's just a free for all. And they spend 80% of their time building a city that is huge. I'll show you after the podcast. You will find it hilarious. It's taken up our basement. And it's just made from the loose Lego and it's their own stuff.

Every month we go get more pieces. They add another floor to the condo. They've built the grocery store where I print out HB is the grocery store in Texas. So like, I've made and laminated HEB signs that then stick on their grocery stores and all this other stuff. So I think you're right.

I think they must be getting more enjoyment out of that because it's where they're putting more time. Yeah. It's part of the book I talk about, the value of exploration. So this feeds into information in that I think humans have a desire for information. In the past, if you were the person who had more information, if you could crave information

and try and get it, try to cure these uncertainties, I would give you a survival advantage. Now we're still wired to crave information and I think that anyone has experienced this practically any time you get a itch in your side and you're going, oh my gosh, am I dying? You're going down web MD, like we know we want information. Twitter wouldn't work if people weren't information hoarders. But I think the difference between how we acquired information in the past and how we acquire it today

is that in the past you had to go there in the present moment to learn something. It was a mind, body, effort to get a piece of information. Is there greener grass over there? Well, you have to go to the other side to see if there is greener grass, and it's very up in the air. There's a lot of uncertainties.

But by going through that mind, body, process, outdoors, that real role of the dice, you get more value from that. When you realize, oh, we found this greener grass, this is great. And I think today, because we can Google so much, we still have this information itch, but we scratch it online. So now I think that people's experiences of their day to day life oftentimes get mediated

by information from other people. So what do I mean by that? Okay, one is the last time that you went to a restaurant, just cold, right? You just picked a random restaurant. You didn't read the Yelps from five different people, you didn't read all the reviews, you didn't look at the menu, you didn't kind of go, oh, that looks like a good table, hopefully we can get that one. Now, by doing that, when you get to that restaurant, your experience in there has totally changed, totally changed, because you now have expectations. You have expectations from Jim Smith 99 on Yelp

because he told you to get the trout but hold the almond sauce or whatever it is. And I think that that changes us and I think that there is a case now for trying to re-explore the world like we used to. It's, can you go into situations totally cold? And what will that be like? What sort of value will you get from that internally

by doing this thing that no one told you about? You don't have any expectations going in and you are just having this totally unadulterated moment that is in the present moment. And it's, of course, not just restaurants. It's watching a movie, reading a book, listening to an album, going to a different part of town. There's all these different ways that you can have these more momentous occasions in your life without necessarily needing to follow the metaphorical Lego plan to the point of your kids. That's why I'm talking about this.

On that topic of information and exploration, you read about how homo sapiens were really the break off point to true exploration in terms of distance traveled, risk taken, et cetera. I was thinking about it after I read that, I don't know if you have a point of view or a thought as to why, for example, in the end of the L's, didn't do the same.

They were bigger than us, stronger than us, had bigger brains than us and could walk upright. In other words, they had all the tools that would have provided for the same if not greater exploration capacity as Homo sapiens. Do we have a sense of what changed? I mean, we are fascinating in that. And basically 50,000 years we took over the world. The end of those were around a long time and they just kind of were in the same place most of the time. Not to mention that, but once we

take over the world, we go, all right, well, let's put some highways on this thing. And maybe we should build a launch pad for a spaceship and go up in outer space. And, uh, what's in that water? Let's build a submarine. So we are fascinating that way. Was it just something that randomly got selected for in the change to Homo sapien and then it just got rewarded and rewarded and rewarded? Like is there no other structural reason for it other than just Darwin?

It's part of the book. There's a little bit of evidence of this gene that does nickname the exploration gene that seems to be around in populations that move a lot more. So it's far more prevalent in nomads. It's far more prevalent in societies that would have traveled farther

from our origins in East Africa. There's probably some reason there, but I think ultimately, we're a species that, and most animals are like this, you do the good thing. So there's some inherent reason why we would have kept moving, and maybe it's just that we get internal rewards from that. So what do we owe a gratitude or despair to Benjamin Day for? Oh, man.

Okay, so before 1830, newspapers cost six cents. They tend to cover business and politics. They're weekly. So Benjamin Day comes in and he goes, I want to create a paper that gets like a lot of readers because six cents is a lot of money back then. So he goes, all right, what I'm going to do

is I'm going to create a newspaper and I'm going to sell it for one cent. Now, I'm selling it at a loss. So I have to make up my loss somehow. So what do I do? What if I went to some companies and said, hey, I will publish stuff about your brand in my newspaper and people will see it and they'll buy your stuff?

That is to say, this guy really started advertising, the advertising model. So once he does that though, you can charge more money for your advertisements the more readers you have, okay? So how do we do that? Because we're out of loss right now, the more readers we have,

the more money we can make off of each ad. That's how we're making our money. Well, business and politics is kind of boring. Business is a little bit boring. So what this guy does is by dropping the price to one cent, he's selling it a loss, but more people will be able to buy it so he can get a bigger audience. And then second, what he does is he starts covering,

murder, mayhem, affairs, fights, all these different things that attract attention. So this is when you start to see the real shift from us, from newspaper covering this sort of nice boring things to this guy going, literally he ran a headline that was bathed in blood and it was about this murder suicide in New York City. So he starts to publish every single day for one penny and the headlines are always crazy. And I think this is when you start to see the attention economy in which we now live, really start to take off. And it's the same deal. You know, in order to make money off an ad

model, you have to get as many eyes as possible. And they have to be certain eyes. And the way you do that is often by running information that is negative, that is lured, that is going to capture information that's going to capture as much attention as possible. For example, still today, 90% of news tends to be negative. Now, this holds whether or not the world is improving or not. Things could be much better than they were 100 years ago,

but our papers are still 90% negative news. Yeah, and again, there's an evolutionary basis for negativity bias. You could make the case for how we are far better off evolutionarily to pay attention to negative signals rather than positive signals. The negative thing is what could kill you, that demands your attention.

The positive thing is great, but it doesn't need as much attention in the moment. Right, exactly. If you're the person who's looking at how beautiful the flowers are, as the saber-to-tiger walks up this way, you're not going to live that long. It is so incredible to think that natural selection, being such an amazing tool, could have no appreciation for what would come with modernity,

and how it would render so many things maladaptive. The best example of this is with a lot of social media companies and how algorithms work. If you let those things run their course, things that get the most traction tend to be the most lured, crazy things. That is one of the main reasons we're so polarized as a country today is that moral outrage is particularly great at

capturing attention and those things get upvoted because they're going to get more eyes and while that is good for bringing in eyes and making money for a social media company, it's not necessarily good for society always. So you wrote in the information chapter about a study that was done on the social media use of politicians. What did you learn? So this kind of goes back to quantification and how there are some downsides to quantifying everything and gameifying everything. But the long story short of that study is basically that when politicians first get onto Twitter and the scientists analyzed, use the AI algorithm to analyze all the tweets of about 10 years of politician tweets.

And what they found is that when politicians would first get onto Twitter, it was like, hey, we're having a fundraiser, blah, blah, blah, you know, nice things, relatively benign. But once they would tweet something negative, it was attacking another person, they would start to get more likes and retweets. That in turn, feel good.

So they would tell them, oh, this works on this platform. This is what you need to do on this platform to get these points, because this is how we are scoring our behavior on this platform. And then from there, you started to see the number of negative tweets from them increase over time, because that's what gets rewarded on social media. And so this probably is an accurate reflection of maybe who these people really are or what

we really want in society. Do we want our politicians being terrible human beings on Twitter? I don't think so. It's interesting. Imagine a thought experiment where Twitter and social media ran exactly the same as now, except the person who was commenting was blinded to the feedback from others. So likes and retweets, for example.

So if you put out something, you could put it out and everybody could still see it just as they do. But if they liked it or retweeted it, you wouldn't see that. How do you think that would change things? To back up, it's human training. The algorithm trains us how to use it, how to behave and use the social media platform. So I don't see a huge difference between when I go stand by the treat jar and I say, stocked and sit and my dog puts his butt on the floor

and I give him a treat, he knows to do that. Well, when I go on social media and I tweet some crazy things, I don't actually do that, but I treat some crazy thing and all you other humans go like, like, like, that tells me, oh, if I want the good thing, whether it's my dog with the treat, with the likes on social media, I gotta do that thing, whether it's sitting or writing Donald Trump as an idiot, Hillary Clinton's

an idiot, so-and-so as an idiot, I don't see much different between that. Really, you get trained on these based on how the system is set up with likes and retweets and followers. So that's a long way of saying, I think you'd probably see less of that training occur. So, how do we reconcile this? We have evolved to one information. Have we evolved to want the truth? That's a good question. So there's this guy I talked to whose name is T. Win and he is a philosopher at the University of Utah. And he talked a lot about how, you know, we sort of evolved to trust when we feel like we'd gotten the right information. It gives us this sort of aha moment.

So, we have a question. We find what we believe is the answer and we go, aha, that feels good. This makes sense. Things were probably pretty clear in the past, right? You either got the food that was going to lead you to survive or you didn't. You either found shelter or you didn't. So, you could trust that, ah, here's the food. But I think in today's age, whenever we have a question, we can go seeking out information from a lot of different sources and we can get that aha moment,

whether or not the information is factually correct or not. Here's a good example is that why are conspiracy theories compelling? Because I give you an aha moment. Conspiracy theories, they might seem complicated, and they often are. You got the big board, and you got all the strings, and it's like this person, this person. But at the end of the day, you have a very specific answer for why this thing is the way it is. It clears up any ambiguity. When in reality, most things in life are very uncertain. They're very ambiguous.

We don't fully understand why a certain thing has ever happened. But if you can sort of provide someone with an aha, that is going to give them a feeling of clarity, a feeling of certainty, and they can rely on that to make decisions whether or not the information is actually accurate. Yeah, I think people also find conspiracy theories appealing when they provide a grand narrative to something to which the truth is insignificant. To me, the best example of this, because it happens to be one of the conspiracy theories I've gone down the rabbit hole on, is the assassination of JFK. And I can say this, I'm sure I will enrage a subset of the listeners. Every available

shred of reasonably good evidence, if you actually understand ballistics. And unfortunately, my training and surgical residency taught me a lot about what bullets do when they hit people. Everything points to a single shooter. Everything points to three shots being fired by Lee Harvey Oswald. By the way, it wasn't hard shooting. That's the other thing that's like, there's no way he could have got none of them. These were the easiest three shots in the world. He killed JFK. Why do we have to have so many conspiracies? Because how can we accept that such an insignificant, irrelevant human being like Lee Harvey Oswald could alter the course of history. That's impossible for most of us to wrap our minds around. It's much easier to think

that the CIA had to do this because of pick your favorite Oliver Stone idiotic reason. And so I wonder how that factors into us as storytellers and the need to have sort of information. Again, I don't know if there's an evolutionary basis for that, but I think that that also plays a role in people. I think some conspiracy theories turn out to be true. So it's not always that the first answer is right where the first answer is wrong. This kind of gets to another issue. And I think Nguyen brings this up, which is the idea that we should think of food and information as analogous, where too much fast food is bad for you. Too much loose information without nuance is bad for you.

Yeah, he compared it to food where if you give up on a food's nutritional quality, it's very easy to make very delicious tasting food. So ductively good food and the same as with information. If something just feels really good, really tasty, you should probably use that as a sign to maybe investigate the issue further to look at what the other side is saying. Right. If you're willing to sacrifice truth and nuance, you can have the most seductive information possible. Yeah, if you're willing to sacrifice nutrition, nutritional quality, you can have the most delicious food possible. I think it's a beautiful analogy. Yeah, exactly. And it is so easy to find anything online today. You know, on the book, I talk about Heather's answers to the most

sort of mundane questions that we could have in daily life, like product reviews. What is the best pillowcase? It's like, this is the epitome of a first world problem, but here I'm going to spend 800 words of my time reading this story about what is the best pillowcase. Just all over the board, we have so many experts, we have so much information that I think we have more, maybe, college in the world, but we don't necessarily have more understanding and more of an understanding of like, how should I actually spend my time?

Do I wanna go down the hour long review sites on pillowcases or whatever the item might be? And you can apply this to so many different things. I mean, your background, I mean, does WebND ever really help a person? Like, figure out what's going on or does it just lead them to go, oh, definitely stage four cancer?

Yeah, yeah, I think that's a very fair comparison. What would be a tool you could recommend to somebody who's listening to us talk about this and acknowledging it and saying, you know what, come to think of it, I'm a bit of an information addict. I'm at a point where my innate desire for information is becoming maladaptive because it's being applied in a manner that just as my natural

and adaptive behavior to seek food has become maladaptive. I'm in the same place information wise. How would you suggest a person cope with that? Yeah, I do think that information falls into that scarcity loop that I talked about. You're looking for this piece of information that you think is going to improve your life, but you don't know where it is, and so you search and search the web, and then when you find it,

it's like, bingo. Great. I found it. And then you can quickly repeat. So I think one way that you can slow down any behavior you do in excess, or reduce the frequency, is to slow it down. So there's this interesting study that I talk about in the book where they had a group of students here, two groups, they had them both figure out the answer to a question. Now the first group could use the internet. So they go online, they search it, they find it really fast, great. The second group could not use the internet. So they had to use books, so they got to go to the library, they got to walk the stacks, they got to find the book. And then they got to open the figure out where the information is in the book. They go, okay, I got it.

They return back. Not only do they have slightly better information, but more importantly, they were better able to recall it later on when they were tested on it, they did better. So I think that there is an argument for a shift to slow information when you really want to understand something, because these people were better able to put it into context.

Now, most people are gonna listen to that and say, it makes sense, but I'm never gonna get up off my desk and go to the public library and look at the stacks. So is there a way that you can toggle between fast and slow information, still using the internet, for example? So I think kind of the metaphor there is like, if you do really want to understand something,

realize you're probably going to have to put in a little bit more work. It can't be a quick Google search. That's how I justify the existence of this podcast, by the way. If you really want to understand a topic, I try not to make too many apologies for the fact that we have three hour episodes. Yeah. I think that a useful heuristic is to, if you've got just our random everyday questions, it's not of much consequence in your life,

try to make the decision in 60 seconds. You search for the information you wanna know, okay, founded in 60 seconds, yeah, that's probably right. Well, how do I get to our beast, bam, there you go. What pillowcase should I buy? Pick in 60 seconds. Pick something, just pick something, because eventually you're wasting time. I have a story in the book about how when I was an interned at Esquire way back in 60 seconds, pick something, just pick something, because eventually you're wasting time.

I have a story in the book about how when I was an intern at Esquire way back in the day, I got this assignment, and it was okay. Find out how much money the Pope makes, and I go, okay, that's my job. I'm gonna find out how much money the Pope makes. So I end up searching around online. I even called up some Catholic academic,

and he was kinda like, I think it's this much, whatever. So I send in some Catholic academic and you know, he was kind of like, I think it's this much, whatever. So I send in the research file to my editor and I get an email back and just says, meet me in the conference room in five minutes. So I get up and I go into the conference room and this was at the Hearst Building in New York, which is where Esquire is. And so we're looking down the barrel of eighth avenue and he's sitting at this long table and very Esquire guy. He says the button down, the tie is loose. He goes sit down.

And he say, okay, I go sit by him and he just looks at me, starts shaking his head, leans back and he goes, no, no, no, no. If you wanna know how much money the Pope makes, you call the fucking Vatican. Call the fucking Vatican. So the point is, I had totally missed the most obvious answer to that. If you want to know something, about a person, ask the person.

But instead, we'd have now all these sort of kooky ways to go around it. So I think the metaphor is like, if you can really just go to the source in a way, do that, right? Read the study if you hear someone online saying that, I don't know, oatmeal is totally toxic and blah, blah, blah. And like, oh, by the way, you're probably gonna have to learn to read a study. Luckily, you provide information like that that is useful. If you wanna know what a person thinks, maybe ask them.

Look at what they've written on a thing. Watch the full interview in context. You see someone say something that seems crazy in a 30 second Instagram clip. It's like, okay, well, maybe we should get the first like five minutes and the last five minutes after that. So we kind of know what the context is. And you'll probably find that it's taken out of context. And like it's been used against the person, right? So I think it is so easy to get such quick seductive information. You want to do a little more work for the things that you really want to understand and not jump to conclusions.

Like we've seen so many, I mean, for example, media outlets get in trouble because they publish all these op-eds about 30-second Instagram clip like with the Covington Catholic. And now they owe the kid $250 million because we jumped to conclusions on a 30-second video clip. So the last section of the book is on Happiness, which I actually found probably the chapter that I was thinking the most about, right? It was the one where I would pause the most

and reflect and think and stuff like that. So I'll start with arguably the most difficult question, which is how do you define Happiness? Well, I can tell you that I have the same question and I still do have the same question. I'll tell you what the dictionary says. I think it says, joy, a feeling of joy, and there's one other word,

maybe like felicity or something like that. So you go, okay, well, what does joy mean? You go to joy, you go, it's a feeling of happiness. So it's circular. And I think that you see people define happiness in all different ways. So I think it was Sennaka who said, it's not having anxiety about the future, feeling okay in the moment,

not having anxiety about the future. John Lennon, the famous song, Happiness is a warm gun. I think it's hard to define. And it's also one of those things where maybe we don't even know it when we are happy, but we can look back and be like, oh, that was a happy moment in my life. Like, it's this very, very murky thing. And yet, we all want to be happy. That is sort of the capital G goal of most of the things we do. We take a drink, cares, we think it's going to make us happy. We make buy this purchase because we think it's going to make us happy.

We seek out that information on WebMD because we think that if we know what this thing is, that'll give us some relief. But it is a very confusing topic. And I think maybe we know a little bit less about it than we think. Where does happiness fit on Maslow's hierarchy of need? I know self-actualization is about the fourth rung, but does happiness actually fit into it? I don't think so, does it? I don't think so, but I haven't looked at it in a very long time.

Yeah, I dove into that a bit in the book, but I can't recall. I don't think it was on there. So that seems a little odd, isn't it? Because depending on how you define happiness, it does seem like a very high-order goal. Yeah, it is a very high order goal. Yeah, it is a high order goal. But of course, I guess he's not defining it as a need, and maybe that's why it doesn't belong there. Yeah, so for this chapter,

what made me write this chapter is realizing that we all want more happiness. Sort of the book looks at, what are these things that we all want more of? How have they changed over time? And I think that while most of the chapters say, we had a scarcity of this thing, now we have a massive abundance of it. I don't know if that's necessarily held

for happiness in a lot of ways. So one great example is that from 1979 to 1999, you saw real income grow by about 43% among Americans. We didn't actually become any happier. So if we think that progress and money is always going to make us happier, I don't think that that is the case. When do you think peak happiness occurred? Because like, I often think that on my worst day, I'm so happy to be alive today and

to have not have been alive 200 years ago or 2000 years ago or 20,000 years ago. Now, that's a bit of a dumb thing to say I know because I have no idea what it was like to be alive 20,000 years ago when you don't know what today feels like. So in other words, getting eaten alive by mosquitoes and ants every day while you scavenge for food, if you don't know what this is, is just what it is. So I get that one can't make that statement, but do the people who attempt to study this have a sense of when peak happiness occurred for our species? Not that I've come across. I mean, I do know that

we are seeing decreases in happiness. And the data, a lot of the data suggest that people are becoming less happy. Honestly, I would imagine that probably as we've gotten more technology in a way, it's like technology improves your life and happiness to a certain point. And then a certain point it begins to constrain you. And that could potentially make you more unhappy. Yeah, it's super interesting. So Arthur Brooks has written a lot about happiness, and I have found the way Arthur writes about it to be the best way for me to think about it, because A, he doesn't write about happiness as a feeling, and that's I think the problem with the dictionary definition and why it's circular, because happiness points to a feeling of joy and joy points to a feeling of happiness.

But instead, he really writes about components, what he describes the macronutrients of happiness. And so enjoyment being one of them, and enjoyment being a much deeper thing than pleasure. Pleasure being purely sensory enjoyment, being more cerebral, and really having this essential component of being shared with others. And then he talks about satisfaction, which of course is the most fleeting of them, but is highest when there is a struggle. So this goes back to many of the examples you've already given, which is if you get something easily, it's not very satisfying. If you have to work very hard to achieve something, it's more satisfying. But probably for very important evolutionary reasons, we can't keep satisfaction. And that's what keeps us striving. And then the final, what he calls macro nutrient is sense of purpose. And again, without that, we can't have true happiness.

And I honestly think of that as to date, the best model I have encountered. Now, you to study this continued your incredible journey of going and doing really hard things. So what did you seek out in the pursuit of happiness? Long story short, as I spent a week at a Benedictine monastery in the mountains of New Mexico. And so then you have to ask, well, okay, why the hell would you go there? And the answer is because we do kind of live in a world where there's a lot of these

different things we're supposed to be doing for our happiness. And they're often backed by research. You got to meditate, you got a gratitude journal, you got to have as many friends as possible, blah, blah, blah. And that all seems great. But when you look at these Benedictine monks, what I find so fascinating about them is that, they go against a lot of the happiness research that's in pop culture right now. They live a pretty hard life. They get up at 3 a.m. It's start to pray.

They don't eat a lot of food, so they're not getting you know the pleasure from meals They're also in silence most of the time. They do hard labor four hours every single day They're not entirely social because it's silence and they often work alone They're celibate. There's no relationships. No relationship. Yeah, no romantic relationships No real access to the outside world in terms of, you know, they're not on Facebook and keeping up with the news that way. Their motto is aura at LaBora, which is pre-and-work.

And so what's interesting though is that there's a researcher whose name is Alex Bishop who's done a lot of research on them and their happiness levels and they seem to be happier than the average American. Despite all these hardships that they face in their life, despite all these sort of crazy and necessary things, they seem to be doing, they wind up significantly happier than us. When we have access to all these things, it should make us feel great in the moment. So I go and I live with them for a week. My main takeaway for them really goes back

to what Arthur was saying is that if something is challenging to get, I think we get more rewards from that. And that also makes sense from an evolutionary perspective. I talked to a guy whose name is Thomas and Tall, and he explained that the reason for this is probably, you know, if you had to search and search and search for food and like you weren't finding it, if you had to search and search and search for food and like you

weren't finding it, but you persisted and persisted and persisted and then you find the food, that has to be inherently more rewarding than the food that was very easy to come by in order to incentivize future searches when you get in that situation. So it's that doing hard work and not necessarily having everything given to you, I think, becomes rewarding for humans. The other thing that I think is important about them is they're not necessarily in it for themselves. They've given their lives over to this higher ideal, even though it does require a lot of sacrifice. So for them, that higher ideas got, they're trying to get out of themselves, they're trying to help others and help this greater idea.

And it doesn't ultimately all come back to them. And I think that there's a lesson in there for the average person that is what sort of thing can you do to get out of yourself and find some greater meaning and purpose beyond just your next desire. It's funny, like I, and I know that that chapter isn't written to suggest that that's the answer, that hey, if you're reading this, but you don't feel really happy, there's a monastery for you. And you're going to go and wake up at 3.30 every morning, do your first prayers, go in work, go into your second prayers, go and eat, go into your next prayers, go and work. I mean, it, reading it made me uncomfortable. I was like, I would kill myself. The work part I would get, the prayer part would kill me. I was like, I just think I would lose my mind.

So clearly that's not what you're proposing, but it's an interesting contrast and example. But yet, I still wonder what it is, which element is missing for most of us. I've met some people who have an amazing sense of purpose. They're very mission driven to their work, to their technology, to their company, whatever it is they're doing. They struggle and strive and succeed, and that's short lived, and then they do it again and

again and again. And they also seem to enjoy themselves. They do do lavish things and they share the company of others. And yet ostensibly they don't seem that happy. So these guys conversely, you could argue their sense of purpose is, I don't know, they're not really serving the world. Like if every one of these monasteries went away, the world would continue to turn on its axis.

You can't say that for many professions. Like if every janitor went away tomorrow, the world would grind to a halt. Think about it. If we had one week of every sanitation person stop working, we couldn't function in society. Even if your job is cleaning, you have a really significant purpose. Not to disparage the monks, but it's like they're in their own bubble where they're self-sufficient, they do everything for themselves, but is that the purpose? Is it they help each other? I'm still struggling to understand how they're happy. Yeah, I think they help each other. I know they do a lot of work in

the community, so they help the community. I mean, I even wonder things like about the pace of their life. It's definitely slower than we live now. To me, what it really suggests is that there is no perfect plan for happiness. And in fact, by trying to be happy, that's not a great way to be happy, right? If you're trying to figure out what is the next thing I can do to be happy?

And so you Google how to be happy and it says, oh, well, this study said this. You need to start a gratitude journal. It's like, okay, that might help a few people, but the reality is is that it's so much more complicated than something that can just be sort of distilled down into like, here are these quick actionable. But I do think the commonality you see is that people who tend to be happy, they tend to be do something that they believe is of service and is going to a greater good. So even though if they all disappeared, the world would go on. But maybe they believe they have what they're doing has consequence in some afterlife. I see. Yeah, good point. And so I think that the takeaway is that it's probably useful for happiness to find something that is greater than yourself. If you're doing the next sort of

fulfilling your next impulse, that's probably not going to be good for you over the long run. Osterity sometimes is a key to being happy. You know these times where what it was like with the gratitude journals is like, okay, that's great, but the best way to feel grateful for something is to be deprived of it for a while. And these monks really practice that, for example, with food. So they do not eat a lot, and then every now and then, on like a saint's birthday, they get these festivals where it's, okay, we got a lot of food. This is going to be great. We're eating things we don't. And like, this becomes this moment where they're like, oh, I really appreciate this food that I worked hard

to bring to us, you know, and I think that without having to put in effort or never being deprived of anything, you just normalize to whatever you have, it doesn't matter if you have base model 2001 Honda Civic or the brand new Ferrari. That's your thing, that's what you're gonna normalize to. Yeah, absolutely. How much do you think that the following cycle That's your thing, that's what you're going to normalize to. Yeah, absolutely.

How much do you think that the following cycle is on an inevitable loop in society? This could be across multiple timescale. So, hard times make hard men, hard men make soft times, soft times make soft men, soft men make hard times. Is that the cycle of our species? I definitely think it's reasonable. I think you see it historically. What I think is so interesting about now

is that I think things change faster than ever. People are changing how we spend our time is changing faster than ever. I do wonder how that's affecting us. I mean, so I'm a professor at UNLV, and I've seen changes in my students over the past seven years. You would normally think that a change in behavior,

a big change in behavior, noticeably, would probably take generations to pop up. But I've definitely seen changes, and I think it is simply because of how we spend our time and attention, more online. You are the product of your attention. Right. Fewer in-person interactions, all the sorts of things.

What do you make of the difference between solitude and loneliness as you gathered it from this experience? Probably for good reason, there's a lot of information out about how it's good to have friends, to be social. I also think that there's a lot of people, or maybe we don't need as many as we've been told. I think that you need what is called anticipatory support, which is basically someone

or some bigger idea that you can count on. But in terms of having this big, bevy of friends, I don't think that that is necessary for happiness. I think that having certain people that you can count on, basically, and having maybe one good relationship is better than a bunch of mediocre ones. So when it comes to being alone and being in solitude, I think the difference between loneliness or aloneness is that you didn't necessarily choose that. You want to be with

people, but you're not able to, whatever reason. Whereas solitude is using this time, like you're consciously taking this time to be alone with yourself and use it, maybe to get to know yourself better. So when you look at some of the happiest, people who we consider the happiest and most enlightened in history, a lot of them spend a lot of time alone. Jesus walked out into the desert for 40 days,

the Buddha walked the earth for six years or whatever it was. And when you look at a lot of those writings, I don't think that they say, oh, this whole 40 days or six years was entirely blissed out. You know, it's hard to be alone, but I think by going through that and being like, okay, well, why is it hard? You can get to know yourself and get to sort of deeper revelations about yourself. And I think that's a narrative that you see across different faiths and history that sometimes people need to go through solitude as a way to gain insight into themselves. And once they do that, you can then come back into society and you're better able to function in it

because you're now more self-reliant. And really, I think what makes a good human is someone who can be reliant on themselves and can in turn help others. You write in the chapter and it might even be in the epilogue that for most of us, our will to live is no longer really a vital part of our existence. In fact, this was in the epilogue, if I recall, because I believe you wrote about it in the context of learning survival skills prior to going into Baghdad. I was really struck by that because it really resonates.

I can certainly think of times when I've exerted my will, but I don't really think about it in terms of will to live. And yet, for all of human history, that was a thing. Again, you think about that snake jumping out of the jungle, or you think about the complete lack of food, or the dysentery you just got.

There's so many areas where the will to live must have been one of the strongest selective features of our existence, and yet today it's never put to the test. What is the implication of that? Well, I think it's easy to just sort of exist, not live. So I'll tell you my experience of this is, before I go to Baghdad, I realize, okay, I should probably learn some skills, should things go south, which there's a much higher likelihood of something going south

than Baghdad than there is if I were to to your point report on drugs and Ohio or something. So I go meet my friend, his name is Mike Moreno, he's a VC guy, but before that he spent a bunch of years in the CIA in Baghdad running operations. So he takes me out to the desert outside San Diego. And we go through all these different skills I'm gonna need to know in order to survive should something go wrong while I'm there. So we spend eight hours. Here's all these ways you could die, Michael.

The end of the day we're sitting on the tailgate of his SUV and he looks over at me and he goes, man, I'm really jealous that you're going there. And when he says that to me, I look at him, I'm like, we just talked about how this is not a good idea in many ways. And yet you're wanting to go about what's up with that. And he says, what I miss most about my time there

is because it was austere, it was dangerous. You did have to be present and focused on what was around you. I found that extremely life-giving. You were thrust into the moment and you really had to exercise this will to live. I said, okay, and once I got back from Baghdad, I totally understood that. I will remember every moment of being there. You can't just zone out. On the way here in the Uber, I pop in my headphones, I can't do that. I'm looking around at everything. I'm aware every interaction becomes important. I'm having to make judgment

calls in the moment. There is some underlying level of danger and that in turn, that uncertainty forces me into presence and awareness and makes my time consequential. And I think that is life-giving. And I think we do not have that in the way, which is a good problem to have. Don't get me wrong here. That is a good problem to have. But I think when you think about the context, your point of how humans evolved, we live like that all the time because we didn't know where our next meal might come from very often. We didn't know what the weather would bring. We didn't know what was happening next and we were having to really work and struggle to survive.

And there is probably something rewarding to that and to be in the moment and to have to work to get the things that you get really on a deep level and be just kind of in it, like you are in it. Yeah, so I think the takeaway for the average person is not to go to Baghdad, let me say that. It is how can you do things in your life that maybe reflect that a little bit? I mean, I think maybe we both like hunting.

I definitely get that from hunting. You have to be present. You have to be focused. You have to be aware. It's not exactly comfortable. I think people can get that from all sorts of things that they can do outdoors. It could be from volunteering. I'm going to go to this place. I'm going to help others. I'm going to go down to this place. I'm going to serve others. Something that sort of puts you in the moment and makes you aware, I think, is important for happiness.

Well, Michael, congratulations again on the book. It's great. I'm not going to ask you what you have percolating in your mind, but I'm pretty sure you already have an idea for what the next book is. Gladn for punishment. Yeah, exactly. But I suspect that whatever you work on next will be an evolution of this type of thinking because it's clear you've really found a sweet spot around exploring these important topics, which I think both scratch the investigative journalist itch, which is you're basically learning a whole bunch of things in the field. But on top of that, there's a really practical takeaway for anyone of us

who reads it. So I suspect a lot of people listening to this are going to feel like we scratched a little bit of the itch, but they're going to go and need to read scary city brain. Well, thank you very much. Thanks for having me. I'll work on you so you can do your second book. We'll see how it goes. Thank you. Thank you for listening to this week's episode of The Drive.

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