Bingeing, Escapism & Modern Addictions - Michael Easter

Michael Easter is a University of Nevada, Las Vegas professor, a journalist and an author who focuses on health and human performance. Even though we might often feel in control of our impulses, there are regular moments that remind us of our uncontrolled tendencies. From overspending to overeating, there is a secret loop happening inside of our minds that causes our actions and intentions to move further apart. Expect to learn why moderation is so impossible to achieve, what humans actually want the most out of life, what the scarcity loop is and how it drives your behaviour, if it's possible to become dependent on certainty, whether humans are more likely to chase happiness or avoid discomfort, Michael’s contrarian opinion on first world problems and much more... Sponsors: Get 15% discount on Mud/Wtr at https://mudwtr.com/mw (use code MODERNWISDOM) Get an exclusive discount from Surfshark VPN at https://surfshark.deals/MODERNWISDOM (use code MODERNWISDOM) Get 20% discount on House Of Macadamias’ nuts at https://houseofmacadamias.com/modernwisdom (use code MW20) Extra Stuff: Get my free Reading List of 100 books to read before you die → https://chriswillx.com/books/ #psychology #discipline #selfcontrol - 00:00 Why Can’t Humans Ever Get Enough? 03:50 Explaining the Scarcity Loop 09:51 Why Are We So Hooked? 17:47 Humanity’s Love for Escapism 21:39 The Wild Story of Captagon 30:25 Are We Becoming More Dependent on Certainty? 39:54 The Evolutionary Pursuit of Status & Influence 52:31 Becoming Addicted to Observable Metrics 57:25 The Scarcity Loop of Food 1:04:26 How to Break Through the Loop 1:10:40 Where to Find Michael - Get access to every episode 10 hours before YouTube by subscribing for free on Spotify - https://spoti.fi/2LSimPn or Apple Podcasts - https://apple.co/2MNqIgw Get my free Reading List of 100 life-changing books here - https://chriswillx.com/books/ - Get in touch in the comments below or head to... Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/chriswillx Twitter: https://www.twitter.com/chriswillx Email: https://chriswillx.com/contact/

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Chris Williamson?

  Why is moderation so hard to achieve? Why can't humans just ever get enough?

• 0:06Speaker 01

  It never made sense until maybe, I don't know, the 1970s to start moderating. We're a species that came up in these environments where everything we needed to survive was scarce. Food, stuff, information, even number of people we could influence, status, things like that. And so the people who lived on and spread their DNA were people who tended to not try and moderate on those things. Right. But the difference is that today we have an abundance of all these things that we're sort of built to crave, if you will. And we still have our old, our old genes that push us into more.

• 0:41Chris Williamson?

  So because we existed for almost all of human history with less than we wanted, less than we needed. We have seen everything as being a fleeting, brief amount of abundance in an ocean of scarcity. We should take advantage of it right now. Give me more, more, more of everything that's in front.

• 1:03Speaker 01

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

• 1:48Speaker 01

  Because that sort of behavior gave you a survival advantage in the past because you would put on that, those extra calories as fat. And in the times when you inevitably encountered a scarcity and you were starting to lose weight, you would have something to draw on. We still have that exact same drive in a world where now that you live in the US, you can identify with this, where there's a 7-Eleven on every corner pumping out Coca-Cola and Slurpees and bags of food. And we've got, you know, I live in Vegas, there's buffets where people will go up, you know, 10 times and that often backfires. But it's not just, of course, it's not just food, right? It's all these other things. It's like the average

• 2:26Speaker 01

  person today owns more than 10,000 items in a house, right? We see more information, some researchers think in one day than the average person 700 years ago would have seen in their entire life. And so it's all these different things that used to give us a survival advantage overdoing them. We now have an abundance of them and continue to overdo them.

• 2:50Chris Williamson?

  Do you ever think about the fact that the selection pressures on our ancestors and the fulfillment pressures on us now have basically inverted? So we are the progeny of the people who would have sought out more information, who would have sought out more food, who would have sought out more status or identity or certainty or whatever it is. And we are inheriting the challenge that they benefited from in a world now that is terribly mismatched.

• 3:23Speaker 01

  Yeah, exactly. That's exactly it. And, you know, I will say, like, let me be clear, these are good problems we have now. Like, I'll take having to try to not eat too much rather than being like, where is my next meal? Are we going to survive this upcoming bad winter? Right? But there's still problems nonetheless. And so a lot of what the book does is it looks at how did we get here? What in particular is pushing us into more today? Because I think what's also interesting about the last, you know, since the 1980s is that I think that technology has really allowed insights into what really drives people and hooks people on behaviors that push them into more. So as part of the book,

• 4:04Speaker 01

  for example, I, I'll just, I'll just build this up by saying we have technology that really is pushing us into more. And one of the insights of this book is that I sort of discovered what I call the scarcity loop. Now, this is a three-part behavior loop that is...

• 4:25Speaker 01

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

• 5:07Speaker 01

  behavior. The house always wins. Everyone knows this. So why are you hooked on this behavior? That doesn't make any damn sense. It doesn't.

• 5:18Speaker 01

  So this leads me to start asking questions. Long story short, I end up at this casino on the edge of town in Las Vegas. And it's one of the newest casinos in town, super cutting edge. But the public isn't welcome. And that's because it's a casino laboratory. So the gambling industry, as well as a bunch of big tech companies, basically built a real casino, but it is a human behavior laboratory. And so they're looking at all these different ways that what happens in a casino impacts human behavior. Now, as part of this visit, I end up to bring it back to slot machines. You probably wonder, why the hell is this guy talking about slot machines? I end up talking to a slot machine engineer, and he walks me through why slot machines are so effective. And they run on this loop that I call the

• 6:03Speaker 01

  scarcity loop. And it's got three parts. So it's got opportunity, unpredictable rewards, and quick repeatability. So opportunity, you have an opportunity to get something of value. The case of a slot machine, it's money. Two, unpredictable rewards. You know you'll get that thing of value eventually, but you don't know when, and you don't know how valuable it's going to be. So with a slot machine, you play a game, you could lose your money, you could win a dollar, you could win a million dollars. And there's a fantastic range of outcomes. And they're all unpredictable. And then three, quick repeatability, you can repeat behavior immediately. So in the case of slot machines, the average slot machine player plays 16 games in a minute, which is about as much as we blink.

• 6:44Speaker 01

  Now, the important part, and why I'm not telling you just about slot machines, to tell you about slot machines, is that this system is inherent in tons of the technologies and even institutions that I think most influence our life today. So it is what makes social media work. It has been embedded in a lot of personal finance apps like Robinhood. It's part of the rise of sports betting. Obviously, it is what makes dating apps so enthralling. It's in our education. It's in our food system, and on and on and on. You start, you know, when I started really looking at this thing, you're like, oh, wow, this is everywhere. And it is such an important part of so many behaviors that people do

• 7:25Speaker 01

  over and over and over, eventually to their detriment to some degree or another.

• 7:31Chris Williamson?

  So it's really great, and I love using gambling as an analogy, some of the cool stuff that you can learn about. There's no right angles on the carpet. If you walk into a casino, there's never windows to the outside world. There's rumors that they increase the oxygen saturation in the air by pushing this stuff through. So all of that fascinating. The same number of times that you blink is the same number of times that you play slot machines. Also fascinating. What I don't get yet is why, why have you called this the scarcity loop? I don't, there doesn't seem to be any scarcity in, in this. What am I missing?

• 8:11Speaker 01

  Well, it pushes us into more. And I will say, so when I started trying to unpack why slot machines work, the first thing I did is I called a bunch of researchers who basically researched gambling, but from a here's why gambling is bad perspective. And they told me all these reasons why people supposedly gamble to excess. And it was what you said, it's there's no right angles in casinos. It's that slot machines play in the key of C, which is supposed to be relaxing. And so we're going to spend more. They don't have clocks. And the problem with that is that when you go into a casino, you see right angles everywhere. I mean, I mean, the slot machine screens are a right angle.

• 8:50Speaker 01

  It's a box. So it doesn't make any sense. I call up a slot machine audio composer. I go, hey, like, What do you, what do you use when you write these little slot jingles? That's a real job you can have in Las Vegas, by the way. It's a good town. Uh, he goes, no, where the hell did you hear that? He's like, I use all different keys. And then the clocks thing is like, yeah, casinos don't have clocks. But neither does like Walmart or Target or Costco or your grocery store. It's not normal to just hang clocks everywhere in a business, right? And really what makes people gamble is that this loop that I told you about, the scarcity loop, is that it's inherently enthrall into humans.

• 9:31Speaker 01

  It's the definition of what makes a interesting game and it can provide a fun escape.

• 9:39Chris Williamson?

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

• 9:58Speaker 01

  Yeah, so I called a guy whose name is Thomas Zentall. Now, this guy is in his eighties. He started studying psychology in, I think, nineteen sixty-eight is when he graduated, got his PhD from UC Berkeley. And he was following up on a lot of research, behavioral research. Like, he's a, you know, sort of direct descendant of Skinner. And, um,

• 10:21Speaker 01

  when psychologists started realizing that animals get really hooked on unpredictable rewards, Skinner had been, um, feeding rats treats at a predictable interval. And he started running out of treats. And so what he ends up doing, long story short, is he goes, okay, I don't want to make more treats. It's gonna take a lot of time. I'm just gonna give these rats the treats unpredictably. Like, I'll just give them every now and then. And they're probably gonna get bored, they're gonna get bumped out, they're gonna, you know, whatever. And what he found is the opposite happened. These rats got totally, uh, enthralled in hitting this lever if they didn't know when they were gonna get a treat. So Zentall, he goes, okay, I'm gonna follow up on this, because this is weird. And this guy has basically found that it's pretty easy to turn a pigeon into a degenerate gambler.

• 11:04Speaker 01

  He gives these studies where he has pigeons can play one game where it's a predictable reward game. Or they can play another game where it's an unpredictable reward game. So it's very much like a slot machine setup. Now, in the unpredictable reward game, they will get less food overall for the behavior. And what he found is that 97% of pigeons choose the unpredictable reward game. They choose to gamble rather than play the game that gets them more food overall. This like, doesn't make any damn sense, right? And what he told me is he thinks that this behavior, the fact that we do tend to really hone in and focus on unpredictable rewards,

• 11:42Speaker 01

  probably tracks back to finding food. So if you think about humans, you know, hundreds of thousands of years ago, we have to find food every day. And we don't necessarily know where that food is. So you go to one place, no food. You go to another place, no food. You go to another place, no food. You go to another place, oh my God jackpot, there's so much food. Alright, so our brain seems to incentivize this sort of repeat search for something and get excited when it happens.

• 12:17Chris Williamson?

  The center of the bullseye, according to both Sam Harris and Andrew Huberman, when it comes to pleasure is things being about to be slightly better than we'd anticipated.

• 12:30Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 12:30Chris Williamson?

  Like that, just, it's the very beginning of the moment when something good happens. It's when you, you turn on Instagram and there's a hundred new comments. It's when you are just about to head out. So a really good study from my old industry of nightlife. They got people to track, they pinged them on their phone and got them to track the level of happiness that they had throughout the entire night. Right from like three in the afternoon until three in the morning. And you'd think you're gonna go on this night out and there's gonna be a DJ and there's gonna be music and you're gonna be drunk and all of this stuff. But it wasn't. The time when people were the most happy was when they were getting ready with their friends before they went out.

• 13:11Chris Williamson?

  So anticipation is the bullseye of happiness. And it's one of the reasons for the fledgling marketers out there. A really protracted launch sequence of anything that you're going to do. Drag it out, make it fucking excruciatingly painful because in my opinion, people like to have things that they look forward to and you can be that thing, right? Just add another thing to the calendar. It's like, oh, and there's the the new Michael Easter Substack post that he's been working on for six months. Like, yes, I'm excited. He's been talking about this for weeks. I'm really, really excited about this. Like, that is the bullseye of happiness.

• 13:48Speaker 01

  Yeah, totally. And, you know, the Huberman and the Sam Harris, they're absolutely spot on. Another good person to ask is someone who's made a shitload of money using that, and that would be the gambling industry. And the slot designer I talked to said, yeah, gambling isn't when you know whether you won or lost. It's when the dice are rolling across the table. It's when the reels are still spinning. It's when the cards are falling. And you're figuring out, is it going to be good? Is it going to be bad? Is it going to be really, really good? That's it. It's the whole deal. And to your point, I mean, that is, that is why that's embedded in so many systems that are effective at grabbing people's attention today. Take dating apps, right? You swipe, you swipe, you swipe, and you go, oh, I got a match.

• 14:34Speaker 01

  Is it the person who I was like, yeah, I don't know if I'll swipe on this one? Or was it the person I'm like, oh, my God, that's the most amazing human being I've ever seen in my life? Right? That's what's exciting about these things. And I mean, I really do feel like so much of the world has effectively started leaning into these sort of slot machine gambling mechanics. And it's no damn wonder why you see people spending on average 12 to 13 hours a day engaged with digital media. Of course, not all of it is spent on Instagram, but you look at people's screen time and like a lot of Instagram, a lot of TikTok, a lot of email, too. Like even Tristan Harris, who's the very, you know, Silicon, like kind of anti Silicon Valley guy.

• 15:14Speaker 01

  I mean, even he admits to getting fixed on email because it's totally random words you like ping. Is it a, is it an advertisement from Nike with new more shoes? Or is it like, oh, I just got in, you know, for him, oh, it's an interview request from 60 Minutes or whatever it might be.

• 15:31Chris Williamson?

  Yeah. Where does the scarcity loop live?

• 15:34Speaker 01

  What was that?

• 15:35Chris Williamson?

  Where does the scarcity loop live?

• 15:36Speaker 01

  Where?

• 15:37Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 15:37Speaker 01

  Oh, I mean, so social media, it's an email. I also think it's part of the news cycle. You start to see unpredictability really rise after, uh, basically 2016 with Trump. And now you're seeing it even more embedded into news with, you know, breaking news becoming a thing. Uh, I mentioned dating apps. I mentioned personal finance apps like Robinhood. So for example, Robinhood, what really made that app take off is that they leverage quick repeatability. So before Robinhood, uh, you would have to pay to make a trade. So that slows down the rate of trading. Robinhood, what they did is they leveraged this, uh, concept called payment order flow, where it makes it, um, the trading fees are basically baked in. So you can make

• 16:22Speaker 01

  quick repeat trades throughout the day and you see that app just take off. And they even had basically gambling mechanics to get people in where you'd spin a wheel. Uh, regulators actually made them take, take that down because they're like, no, this is just way too casino like, um,

• 16:38Speaker 01

  got to fly in the room. That's how it goes. Uh, it's in advertising. So for example, uh, a lot of, a lot of companies are using casino-like features for ads. So you go on websites. Now you might have to spin a wheel to get a bargain. And that increases, uh, conversion rates by sevenfold, according to some research, sevenfold. So if you just get someone to spin a wheel and they're like, oh my God, I won 30% off. Holy shit. They're more likely to buy. Uh, it's in shopping, online shopping. I mean, think of something like lightning deals. That's quick repeatability. That's lending on, uh, scarcity and urgency. Temu, Temu, Temu, are you familiar with this site?

• 17:17Chris Williamson?

  No, what's up?

• 17:18Speaker 01

  Okay, it is, uh, I would compare it to the crystal methamphetamine of shopping. So it is, um, you go on and it's basically, we have a limited amount and there's a limited amount of time to get a bargain. And right when you pop on, there's a wheel you spin for a bargain. It's a, it basically sells stuff direct from factories in China. And, um, they've just turned the whole site into a casino of bargains. So it's pretty crazy.

• 17:45Chris Williamson?

  Wow. Okay. So talk to me about how humans like to escape and how this plays a role.

• 17:52Speaker 01

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

• 18:37Speaker 01

  But the problem with the scarcity loop is that because it is such a escape, such a great system for a game, if you do it too often, it can be quite bad. But at the same time, if you're just doing it every now and then, I mean, it's totally fine. So I don't want the message of people to walk away from reading this book going like, oh, I need to never do anything that falls into this loop. It's like, no, that's not it. Because this fun, like, I like to gamble. Gambling's fun. The problem is, is if I decide, oh, I want to gamble all the time, now we start to really have a problem. And people tend to get hooked on the system in such a way that allows them to escape in a way that hurts them in the long run.

• 19:18Chris Williamson?

  Is there an element of flow state here?

• 19:24Speaker 01

  Yeah, there, I mean, there could be.

• 19:27Chris Williamson?

  It sounds to me, hearing you talk about it and saying, you know, there's, there's sort of a, there's an interaction that you kind of lose yourself. I imagine the people that play slots, that time kind of does dissolve for them, that they almost become one. I don't think that there's a massive amount of skill associated with slots, but for the people that find themselves in flow, their skill requirement and skill level are often only a little bit apart in any case. So perhaps even though it's low skill requirement, the skill level of the participants is matched appropriately. So yeah, I just, I've figured that I've got Rian Doris coming on soon from Flow Research Collective.

• 20:09Chris Williamson?

  I'm going to ask him about whether there is flow found in compulsive behaviors like TikTok and gambling. And I'm, I'm pretty sure that he's going to say, you're going to drop into theta or delta when it comes to brainwaves. It's going to be kind of oddly agitating and relaxing at the same time to do this stuff. If you think about the way that you feel while you're on social media, it's, it's very compulsive. It is kind of relaxing and passive, and it's also kind of agitating and fucking does your head in. So it's like a, a balance between the two.

• 20:41Speaker 01

  Well, it's the, it's the sort of randomness between, is this post going to be agitating? Or is it going to make me laugh my ass off? Is it going to make me, you know, is it going to be some video where the soldier comes home and the dog runs at the soldier? And I just start crying hysterically.

• 20:58Chris Williamson?

  My favorite videos.

• 20:59Speaker 01

  Yeah. So I do think that there is an element of where people do zone out. And what's, what's interesting is when researchers talk to like seriously compulsive slot machine players, they actually get annoyed when they win a lot of money because it interrupts the process. Because when you win a lot of money on a slot machine, it goes ballistic. And it, if you win more than a thousand dollars, you have to pay taxes on it. So it shuts off the machine and they have to come give you a payment by hand. And that slows down what they're actually there for, which is just to simply write out this sort of process of kind of, you know, maybe you're up, maybe you're down sometimes.

• 21:37Chris Williamson?

  What's the story of Captagon?

• 21:39Speaker 01

  Oh yeah. So Captagon is this drug that was not super well known. I would say even just a handful of years ago. And it's now effectively sort of overtaken the Middle East where there are billions of pills circulating throughout the Middle East in particular. It started in the 60s as a drug to treat ADHD and depression. And in the 70s psychiatrists realized that it worked a little too well. So they they ban it. And there had developed sort of this, a lot of fans of it, let's say, in Middle Eastern countries, because it's a it's effectively an amphetamine. It's

• 22:23Speaker 01

  like a low grade meth, you can think about it as. And so you had some gangs in, I think Bulgaria, gang up and start supplying the Middle East. And then the fucking flies.

• 22:43Speaker 01

  This is the best, dude. I would be annoyed if it weren't so damn funny.

• 22:48Chris Williamson?

  Right. If he comes back, just hit yourself in the head really, really hard.

• 22:52Speaker 01

  Yeah, dude, I'm just gonna bang.

• 22:54Chris Williamson?

  Yeah. Hungarian, Middle East?

• 22:58Speaker 01

  Yeah, so there was these gangs in Bulgaria that started producing it.

• 23:02Chris Williamson?

  Sorry to the Hungarians.

• 23:03Speaker 01

  Yep. And but eventually what happened is that Syria started producing it. So especially after the fall of Syria, it's now produced in government labs and the production of Captagon is actually far greater in Syria, or greater than legal exports in Syria. And they're effectively supplying the Middle East with this drug Captagon. There was just a, there was just a finding just like a week ago, where they busted about a billion dollars worth of pills at a port coming into the Middle East. So, long story short, is that I traveled to Iraq to sort of understand this

• 23:43Speaker 01

  problem and effectively about addiction. Because when you think about overusing this scarcity loop, it really can become an addiction. Now, to me, addiction is a behavior that you consistently repeat and provide you a benefit in the short term while giving long term benefits effectively, or long term detriments, right? Now Iraq is interesting because it's a country where addiction effectively didn't exist for a very long time and that's just because Saddam ruled with an iron fist. And once Iraq falls after the US invades it, what happens is you have a lot of people

• 24:26Speaker 01

  who have a lot of problems and trauma, right, from that war. And then Syria falls and you get this massive supply of Captagon and it starts moving its way throughout the Middle East and into Iraq and you start to see a huge uptick in addiction to this drug. And so I think it stands for sort of this greater question about addiction, which the US government has typically seen it two ways. For a long time, it was seen as a moral failing. Alright, so an addict was a bad person, or just a person who's making the bad choices, like damn it, let's throw him in jail. In the mid 90s, you start to see addiction positioned as a brain disease.

• 25:09Speaker 01

  Now, the reason that this positioning occurred is because neuroscience and brain scans were becoming pretty popular at the time. And when neuroscientists would do scans on addicts' brains, they saw that their liking system of their brain, which is basically the system that we think is actually the sort of pleasure center, it would not have any activity, but their brain would still pump out high levels of dopamine, driving, making them want a drug. Alright, so we see this strange mismatch and like, wow, this thing doesn't light up, but this thing does light up. So they start to argue that it's a brain disease, it's just caused by this, you know, sort of mismatch in brain chemicals and on and on and on.

• 25:52Speaker 01

  And I think to me, after really looking into this, I see addiction as more of a symptom typically of something larger.

• 26:03Speaker 01

  So to me, addiction, you need a few things. You need a, you need a population or a person who has problems. You need a substance that can relieve the problems and the person has to have

• 26:20Speaker 01

  no other means of fixing the problems beyond this substance. And I think Iraq

• 26:27Speaker 01

  sort of shows that. And you also tend to see this idea in research where, you know, the NIDA, which is National Institute on Drug Abuse, they argued that addiction is basically, you can't get over it. It's this compulsive recurring disease

• 26:45Speaker 01

  that is in the brain. And so, once you're addicted, you're pretty much addicted and you're not going to have a high chance of recovery. But you look at examples like in the seventies, there was a Operation Golden Flow, which is with soldiers in Vietnam, where something like 25% of soldiers, US soldiers who were fighting in Vietnam were addicted to heroin. And Nixon was like, yeah, I don't want these heroin addicts coming back into the United States. Like, if you want to come back in the United States, you got to give us a clean urine test. So if addiction is something that is near impossible to get over, and it's this brain disease that you can't fix and you have zero at all agency in, you would think we would have left 25% of soldiers in Vietnam.

• 27:31Speaker 01

  But the reality of what happened is that the vast majority of these soldiers all produced clean urine. They all made it back home. And once they were back home,

• 27:41Speaker 01

  very, very few of them relapsed. And the ones who did relapse, relapse tended to have been using drugs before they got to Vietnam. So I think that it shows that addiction is a lot more complex than just the person is a bad person. The person has this brain disease that has, you know, nothing to do with behavior and conditions and environment and all this other thing. So that chapter of the book really looks into those questions, this sort of changing ideas around addiction.

• 28:13Chris Williamson?

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

• 28:53Chris Williamson?

  that they reach for is this particular substance or stimulus. I think that's a nice way to look at it. I mean, I know people who, if they're emotionally upset, they'll go on their phone. Like, their phone is the distraction from whatever emotions that they're feeling, right?

• 29:17Speaker 01

  Mm hmm. Yeah. Yeah, these things all provide a sort of escape from problems is the is the underlying theme. And, you know, to me, people will look at a drug addict and go, that doesn't make any sense. Just like I was with the with the slot machine players. But the reality is, is that, and I can speak about this because I'm a person who is nine years sober now, going on 10. Nothing fixes a problem like using a substance, at least in the short term. So this is, this might seem like an irrational, like if you're an alcoholic, it might seem totally irrational to take a drink. It's not, at least in the short term. The problem is that you're fixing a problem in the short term, but you're creating

• 29:59Speaker 01

  long term problems for yourself. So addiction wouldn't be a problem if a person like me goes, you know what, I'm gonna have like 10 beers, and I'm gonna go volunteer, and I'm gonna go donate my time and my money, and I'm gonna do all these good things for society. Now, the problem is that what tends to happen is that when people sort of zone out like that, they tend to do behaviors that hurt not just them, but society in the long haul.

• 30:25Chris Williamson?

  Is it possible to become dependent on certainty, do you think?

• 30:29Speaker 01

  Yeah, I think so. I mean, look at a, this is, this might be a strange example, but look what happens when people think they have, um, you know, you get a pain in your side and people are like, what is that? And then you go on, you know, whatever it is, WebMD, and people will obsess.

• 30:45Chris Williamson?

  Pendicitis, that's it.

• 30:46Speaker 01

  Pendicitis, no, it's not, that's not it, man. It's stage four cancer, actually, you know? And so people are just going down the rabbit hole, the rabbit hole of trying to find answers to questions that are inherent, so much of life is uncertain. And so much of the, uh, the sort of data that we use, I think, also has uncertainty baked into it because it's based on human judgments at the end of the day. It's like, what are you going to do with this data? What does it mean? And, um,

• 31:12Chris Williamson?

  Oh, so I, I'm gonna, do you think that hypochondriacs are dependent on certainty in some way?

• 31:20Speaker 01

  Yeah, well, they don't, they hate unpredictability, that's for sure.

• 31:24Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, they, they, they abhor an open loop, right? So what a hypochondriac, by this framing, maybe here comes some bro science, uh, by this framing, a hypochondriac,

• 31:36Chris Williamson?

  a hypochondriac would sooner have an assumption that's fatal than an open loop that allows them to survive.

• 31:48Speaker 01

  Yeah, I can see that. I mean, certainty feels good. Right? There's a part in the book where I talk about, you know, why do people love certainty so much? And it seemed to be, you know, it's possible, this is a theorizing from a philosopher I talked to is at the U, University of Utah, his name's, uh, Ti Nguyen, T H I N G U Y E N. He talked about how probably as humans evolve, we could trust certainty, this aha feeling we'd get that we'd solved this problem, right? Because if you're looking for food, you can be rather certain that like you've, you've found the food, you know, that you've escaped the tiger or whatever.

• 32:29Speaker 01

  Uh, but I think today, the questions that we grapple with are much more complex. But we still love this aha feeling, except we have a million different answers we could find for a question, right? If you ask, are carbs good or bad? You can type that into Google and it's like, oh, they're bad. Aha, I got it. Yeah, there's a governmental conspiracy around sugar. Or you could find another thing that's, oh, carbs are good. Yeah, there's this, uh, there's this group that all they eat is carbs and like, they live to 110, right? So I think that we live in a world now where you can very easily maybe reinforce a pre-existing

• 33:09Speaker 01

  belief, or at least find information that makes you feel certain about questions that are inherently always going to be uncertain. Because so much, so many questions are, are individual and it's like, you know, pick an answer. What are you going to do? We're never going to know.

• 33:26Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, I've had this theory for a little while about how the modern information landscape isn't trying to convince the populace of any one narrative, but to try and make them unconvinced about all narratives. You know, if you were to create an information landscape at the moment to just cause mass distrust of yourself, of the world around you, of even your neighbor, uh, that, that's what you would do. I'm like the least conspiratorial person on the planet, but whether it's by coordination or, um, like coincidence, the end result is people not being sure what to believe. Am I supposed to eat meat? Is meat killing me? Or is it not? Should I go vegan?

• 34:10Chris Williamson?

  Rich Roll says that I should go vegan, but Stan Efforting says I should go. What about Michaela Peterson? She seems to be, she's lost a lot of weight. She looks good. Like, there is a myriad of solutions to exactly the same problem coming in opposite directions. And is Ukraine, are Ukraine the good guys or Russia the good guys? Is Russell Brand guilty of doing something heinous? Or is this a coordinated attack because Big Pharma are scared about him getting too close? Like, for every cultural movement, there is a countercultural movement. Here's like this, there's a prediction that you can make. With almost certainty that if you want to work out what's going to happen within the next

• 34:49Chris Williamson?

  six months, look at a cultural movement that's been born out that as yet hasn't had its inverse made popular. So if you have Mig Tow, men going their own way in the dating market, I'm exiting the dating market. For every Mig Tow, you're going to find a red pill, right? So for the guys that are exiting, there are the guys that are leaning in. For the trad wives, the girls that are going to kind of regress back to this sort of 60s aesthetic for partners, there's going to be the boss bitches, right? For every incel, there's going to be a picker partis. For every sigma grindset bro leaning in, there's going to be the spiritual bro that's kind of leaning out, right? It's asceticism and hedonism, you know, whatever's going on. Fucking Megan Thee Stallion 2021,

• 35:34Chris Williamson?

  summer 2021, hot girl summer. 2022, feral girl summer, right?

• 35:39Speaker 01

  Right, right.

• 35:40Chris Williamson?

  Like every cultural movement has the inverse about to happen because what it creates is essentially a vacuum that you can position yourself against somebody else. And this is how the information landscape at large works, I think.

• 35:54Speaker 01

  Yeah, I think so. And I mean, this is largely a product of the internet. I had, I had this strange, we're doing bro philosophy again here. Last night, for whatever reason, I was thinking about what the world of fitness used to be like and what people would get interested in. And do you remember when there was those videos? I think the videos were called like P90X?

• 36:17Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 36:17Speaker 01

  And the whole thing, the whole thing was, you know what the benefit is? It's muscle confusion. That was their whole thing. And people were like, this is before the internet. So people go, oh, muscle confusion. Yeah, that makes sense. I've never heard that. That makes sense. Your muscles are confused. So they're just like, they go crazy and they grow. Now everyone has an internet connection. I mean, you could literally just type in muscle confusion and you would get 1000 hits for like, oh, here's P90X says it works. Here this, here's this person saying like, here's why it could theoretically work. Here's this other smart person going, no, that doesn't make any damn sense at all, right? So people can fact check more easily today. You don't just take what's sort of given to you. But at the same time, the fact checking process, if you don't know where to

• 37:01Speaker 01

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

• 37:37Speaker 01

  you know, I have certain people that I'm like, yeah, I'm pretty sure this person is right. But at the same time, I think we live in a world where it makes sense to, to be open to the possibilities and know that science is always, is always changing. Science is a process.

• 37:51Speaker 01

  People will sound very smart and great because they're pulling from science. But at the end of the day, that science might change. And we also need to be okay with that. That doesn't make the person wrong. That just means that they're, they might be following the scientific process. And so it is a time where I, I don't think you can be certain about a lot of things. And yet we really want that certainty. And I think that that can lead to frustrations, or at least it's like, why, why do people go down in foxholes when the foxholes are constantly changing? Right? So.

• 38:22Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, well, you'll be familiar with the Zygonic effect, I'm guessing.

• 38:25Speaker 01

  No, tell me about it.

• 38:26Chris Williamson?

  Okay, so this psychologist, Mr. Zygonic was doing a study on servers in restaurants. And if you've ever had a server come up to you and stand there and ask for your order, and not get a notepad out, there's a part of you that thinks to yourself, this guy's fucking crazy. He's going to get this wrong. I'm going to try, I'm going to make it. Yeah, I want the ribs, please, but I actually want them to be done with that particular glaze. And I want the tomatoes switched out for romaine and blah, blah, blah. And what he found was that while tables still had their orders opened, the servers were unbelievably effective at being able to recall what was being ordered. As soon as the tables had been closed. They had zero memory of what they'd done. So this open loop, closed loop dynamic that

• 39:12Chris Williamson?

  Zygonic found is very fundamental to the way that our brains work and our brains abhor an open loop. It's the same reason why, think about, you know, like a missing child. What is it the parents say? Like, we just want to know. You know, they would genuinely probably rather find out that their child was dead than have their child still missing after a long enough time. You know, these parents that have had kids that have been missing for 10 years or whatever, like, they just, it's, it's, it's awful. It's the same reason why cliffhangers work at the end of books or on Netflix shows, you know, like, you want to know what happens next. It's the sensation of wanting to know what happens next.

• 39:50Speaker 01

  Yeah, totally.

• 39:50Chris Williamson?

  The same thing goes for the, the servers as well. So you talk to me about influence, like, how does wanting influence and the requirement of more of it play a role here?

• 40:01Speaker 01

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

• 40:46Speaker 01

  And so a lot of what that chapter in the book looks at, it's like, how does, how does this really affect us? And have you ever had Jessica Tracy on? I feel like that would be someone you would have on.

• 40:58Chris Williamson?

  Uh, no. What's, what's who she?

• 41:02Speaker 01

  She runs this lab at, I think, University of Washington, I'm gonna kick myself after if it's somewhere else, that looks at how many of our emotions evolved, basically, just to interact with other people. They're totally social emotions, things like pride, shame, empathy, right? And a big point that she talked about, I think she has actually a book out called Pride, and it's just, the whole book is about pride. She looked at how pride is this thing that basically tells you, um, makes you feel good about yourself. You need to accomplish something. There's two types of pride. There's authentic pride and hubristic pride, she lays out. So authentic pride, you feel this good feeling after you've done something and it's great. You feel it no matter if

• 41:44Speaker 01

  someone sees what you've done or not. Now, if someone sees what you've done, great, that's even better. Hubristic pride is different. It's essentially promoting yourself as a way to sort of boost up your status, but the problem is that you haven't actually done anything. So I would argue that probably in the past, it was much easier to call out that hubristic pride because everyone kind of knew each other. You knew what people were doing. But now you can sort of display that on this massive scale on social media and that can confuse people and it can also make you look like a jerk when people realize that, oh, this person isn't actually as great as they say.

• 42:21Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, the weird thing about status is that as soon as you acknowledge that you're playing the game, you lose the game.

• 42:28Speaker 01

  Yeah, exactly. So it took, it took a long time for psychologists to even study status for that reason. Because there was, it's like, no one wanted, I talked to this guy Cameron Anderson, who's at UC Berkeley and he was like, yeah, it took a long time for us to really acknowledge this thing because by acknowledging it as a psychologist, you're going, oh, I might, you know, actually care about my status. And so it took until at least the nineties. I think the research that did it was looking at class issues. So it kind of made it more acceptable to start studying it. Now you've got this influx of it.

• 43:01Chris Williamson?

  Uh, so you're acting as this benevolent bourgeois sort of ivory tower person speaking down from on high. Don't worry, me a peasants, the plebeians, I will, I will bring you up from the muck and the mire and the blood and the feces. Yeah, that's interesting. Yeah, the, the influence things, funny man, you know. Previously, people wanted fame because it was a marker of having done something worthy of being famous. Now, people just want to be famous for its own sake, because what fame is, is the promise of obligation-free status, at least the modern conception of fame. You know, you don't have to be the heroic general, you don't have to actually invent something, you can just be in the right place at the right time. And, you know, reality TV is the

• 43:42Chris Williamson?

  absolute sort of zenith of this, where you get normal people plucked out of obscurity and placed on some television show to be like purposefully normal, like you're providing average representations of avatars within the populace. And then, six weeks later, they come off and they've got 2 million followers and a pretty little thing contract and free charcoal toothpaste and a blue tick. And they're now completely changed. So what is the lesson that it teaches the modern world about how you achieve fame and status and influence? You're in the right place at the right time. You don't do a thing for an incredibly long amount of time and grind hard on it. What was it Thomas Edison said? I have not failed, I simply found 10,000 ways that didn't work.

• 44:26Speaker 01

  Right, right. I mean, even up to the advent of the internet, if you wanted fame and attention, you probably did have to do decent things. Or could be opposite, you get famous for doing really bad things. But the point is that you did something, right? And so there was this filter of a large media corporation choosing whether or not they're going to cover you. And now you can cover yourself, if you would like, and just blast it out there. And it can work, right? You see a lot of people rise to public, like, being known by many people in the public, although they haven't necessarily really done anything that interesting in a vacuum.

• 45:05Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, the move from people being judged by their deeds to people being judged by their opinions has meant that words carry more weight than actions. And that's a very dangerous position to be in, because you can say things that you don't mean, and you can proclaim things that you haven't done. And ultimately, you know, performative empathy is this, it's patient zero for this. And, you know, how many times have we seen?

• 45:34Chris Williamson?

  It's almost to me, it's almost like the person that is the most vehement about their empathy and standing up for the little person and talking about the deeds that they've done, whilst the kind of this suspicious lack of having seen the deeds that they've done, that's almost a red flag for me. In fact, it probably is. Ellen DeGeneres, Lizzo, right? Jimmy Fallon appears to have been popped recently for this stuff as well. All of the people that are, you know, championing the little person. It turns out that Lizzo was body shaming her dancers. Jimmy Fallon, the guy that's supposed to be this bubbly, super welcoming, lefty person, turns out who's a total tyrant. Ellen DeGeneres as well. Someone who's supposed to be, you know, a champion for different sexual orientations and this kind of like

• 46:18Chris Williamson?

  motherly figure, late night show host and stuff. Total bitch, apparently. Allegedly, allegedly a total bitch. And yeah, it's, to me, the move from deeds to opinions has allowed people that are prepared to lie very effectively, or obfuscate the truth, or manipulate, or do self-delusion. They've benefited more from this than anybody else.

• 46:46Speaker 01

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

• 47:31Speaker 01

  And this isn't, you know, you might think, oh, well, they can afford medical care. It's like, well, no, because this holds even in countries that have universal medical care. So you would think that, you know, that wouldn't hold in those countries, but it, but it seems to.

• 47:44Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, it's such a huge determinant. Do you read Will Stor's book, The Status Game?

• 47:49Speaker 01

  I haven't read that one now.

• 47:50Chris Williamson?

  You'd love it. You would fall in love with it. It's absolutely fascinating. So yeah, this-

• 47:56Chris Williamson?

  Addiction, I suppose, to influence that we have and the fact that you can be bestowed obligation-free status, it's been

• 48:06Chris Williamson?

  objectified and turned into a metric game by social media, right? I know exactly how many followers, I know exactly how many plays, I know exactly how many likes. So, yeah, that that feedback loop or the previous scarcity that would have been, I want to get more status downstream from status are increased access to mates, increased access to food, protection, you know, all that, better child mortality, all this stuff has been weaponized and commercialized.

• 48:38Speaker 01

  They're quantified, quantified to your point is you can see exactly what it is and you can watch that number go up on social media. That's one thing that I talk about in the book too, is how numbers influence us. And how this rise of gamification has in a lot of ways shifted the goal of why we do what we do. So anytime that you put a number on things and you gamify a system, what tends to happen is people start to chase whatever the gamified number is. So this is fine in an actual game. If you're playing football, American football, Chris, the point is to run the ball over the, into the touchdown zone, right? To score these points and then you just leave the game there and it's like, okay, that was great.

• 49:22Speaker 01

  It doesn't affect the rest of your life. But when you start to gamify different tech systems, people change their behavior. So Twitter is a great example. So Twitter is theoretically supposed to be this platform for discussion. Right? And then you ask, okay, well, what are the goals of a discussion? And the answer is like, well, there's a lot of goals to discussions, right? It's like to empathize, to commiserate, to share information, to sort of meet on a level playing field. Like, oh, there's all this shit that comes from a normal discussion. But when you go on Twitter, what tends to happen is that you see people chasing likes, retweets and follower accounts.

• 50:06Speaker 01

  The things you need to do to raise those metrics are usually at odds with discussion. Right? So people are dicks on Twitter because you know what happens when you're a dick on Twitter is you get more followers and you get more likes. And I mean, they've studied this. It's like when scientists have looked at this and you start to see when people start to get

• 50:30Speaker 01

  likes and retweets and follower counts, and it usually tends to be from sort of negative, negative things. They start to chase that. So this happened with politicians. There was a group that surveyed a bunch of, I think it was a decade's worth of tweets from politicians in the United States, and they found that over that decade, politicians tweets got much more toxic. They use this AI algorithm to sort of give it tweets a toxicity score. What tended to happen in all these cases is that, you know, the politician would go on and they'd do normal, you know, what you might think, okay, we're having a, you know, a breakfast so and so to raise money for the firefighters. And then the minute they would start to be more toxic, that would get more of a reaction from people and they go, oh, that's it. Like, that's how you use this thing. That's what boosts the number. So then you start chasing the numbers, the likes, the retweets, and that totally changes the goal.

• 51:15Speaker 01

  And this isn't just in, of course, it's not just in Twitter. This is also Instagram. You go on to show some photos of your, your friends, you know, when you're out with your friends and then people go, oh, wait a minute, this type of thing gets more followers. So you start to do that. It's also in the wine scoring world. Right? It's like when this Robert B. Parker guy started Wine Advocate and put a number, a scoring number on bottles, it totally changed the wine making industry, which had had this same practice for 2,000 years, but this guy starts this magazine. Goes, okay, I want to make, you know, wine accessible to the people. I'm going to taste all these wines and I'm going to give them a score from 50 to 100. And what happened is that the bottles that had this very clear score

• 51:59Speaker 01

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

• 52:29Chris Williamson?

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

• 53:11Chris Williamson?

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

• 53:53Chris Williamson?

  How much, how many more steps closer to a divorce am I today? How much has my relationship degraded? And yeah, I think that making the hidden observable is a really good strategy that we should be trying to do. Things like journaling, you know, things like doing a weekly check in of some kind, having some sort of process to just check in. Okay. The things that I've said that genuinely matter that I can't see. Another one from your world. How many people have optimized the observable metric of weight on a scale, but sacrificed the hidden metric of health? Right? I've dialed back my body fat or I have changed my composition so that I'm carrying way more muscle.

• 54:38Chris Williamson?

  But the actual internal state of where I'm at is fucked.

• 54:43Speaker 01

  Right. Or even, I mean, think of activity trackers. Right. People get it because they want to be more active and then they get obsessed with these arbitrary metrics that whether it's a step count, whether it's, you know, if you use one of these devices that gives you some sort of daily strain count. Um, people get hooked on that and it changes how they do, what they do, and oftentimes why they do what they do. Cause you do, you start it for health. But people oftentimes don't go, okay, well, what does health mean to me? So then you get this thing and you're like, well, health is making sure I get a nine on my whatever, you know, this, this thing that I wear that tells me a strain count. And the problem too, is that all of these trackers use these sort of mysterious algorithms.

• 55:27Speaker 01

  And they're working on very flawed systems. You're making assumptions that this device is taking perfect metrics all the time, perfect measurements. You're assuming that the people who created this algorithm, which most companies won't share how they figure out these numbers. Because it's, you know, proprietary. You're assuming that those people are making the right decisions based on data that is correct. And it's, I mean, it's definitely not in some degree, but the question is like, okay, to what degree is this, this wrong, right? And yet we get really hooked on these types of things. You see a lot of people do. Another great example of this would be I'm a, I'm a professor and so I see it with my students. But the point of going to a university is, is what?

• 56:08Speaker 01

  There's a ton. It's like, yeah, you want the degree, but like you're there to meet people. You're there to learn to be a damn adult. You're there to show up, learn to show up on time, learn to turn in assignments on time. Learn to interact with your peers and have discussions and disagree with people in a nice way. But what tends to happen with my students is they get obsessed with grades. It's the GPA, right? So that is not the same as everything I've just listed, why you go to the university.

• 56:40Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, that's a good heart's law and measure in, uh, in practice, right? You know, good heart's law?

• 56:46Speaker 01

  Yeah, I think so.

• 56:47Chris Williamson?

  When a measure becomes an outcome, it ceases to be a good measure. So it's, you know, if you gave your customer service team, the measure that you would say, what, what we're looking for you to do is reduce down the fraud rate. And what the outcome is that occurs is every customer is treated like a fraudster. So yeah, you've managed to drive the fraud rate down, but the actual felt experience that you wanted, the outcome you wanted was, we want to have a successful company with customers that care about us that doesn't have too much fraud. What you ended up doing was creating this tyrannical fucking customer service representative team. You were talking about food earlier on. Have you ever seen those videos of tribal people eating cheesecake for the first time?

• 57:31Speaker 01

  No, but I'm gonna need to see that because I bet it, does it, do they love it? Or do they just absolutely hate it?

• 57:36Chris Williamson?

  It blows their minds, right? It absolutely blows their minds because it's this really interesting blend of sugar and fat. It's got orification, which is the texture design of food. So very rarely ancestrally would we have ever had something that was both crunchy and fluffy. So if you think about Oreos or French fries or cheesecake, you have a very interesting blend of textures. You know, it's not just one texture. Even in fucking yogurts, people throw granola on the top. Like, why is that good? Well, it's good because it's this, it's a blend of the different textures. If you go full Liver King mode and just start eating raw liver, like it's not a particularly exciting texture, right? As you just, it's slimy and it's kind of all

• 58:21Chris Williamson?

  one thing. So yeah, I mean, food, when you're looking at scarcity loops, food has to be, it's got probably the prime culprit, I would guess.

• 58:29Speaker 01

  Yeah, definitely. I mean, just as I told you about how there's this casino lab trying to figure out how to, you know, tweak the perfect slot machine and games and make sure every experience that happens in a casino leads us to the behavior that they sort of want. This is obviously happening in the foods, in the food industry, right? So especially around the 1970s, you start to see the rise of ultra-processed food. So after, especially after World War II, companies start to put a lot of money into developing foods that are going to just check all the boxes you need to make a human love them. And they realize we need to increase snacking as well. Because if you're eating three square like we used to, it's like, well, they're leaving a lot of money on the table.

• 59:13Speaker 01

  We got to create snacking as a thing. And what we tend to snack on is these ultra-processed foods. And there's a food industry exec who explained, if you want to get a snack food to sell, it's got to have three Vs. It's got to have value, it's got to have variety, it's got to have velocity. That is basically the scarcity loop, right?

• 59:37Chris Williamson?

  Velocity in the food, does that mean that you throw it at someone aggressively?

• 59:41Speaker 01

  That means you eat it fast.

• 59:42Chris Williamson?

  Ah.

• 59:43Speaker 01

  Eat it fast.

• 59:43Chris Williamson?

  See, okay.

• 59:45Speaker 01

  So value, it's relatively cheap. Variety, there's a wide variety of flavors, right? There's unpredictability embedded in the food. Like you go to the grocery store and there's like 75 different kinds of chips, right? And when people have more options of what to eat, they tend to eat more. And then velocity is simply when you hyper-process a food, we tend to eat it faster. And there's been some interesting research at the NIH where they will give people a diet that is matched for, you know, macros and salt and all that. One of the diets is ultra-processed and the other is minimally processed. And what tends to happen, and they let them eat as much as they want over a course of a day. And this is a, this is a study where they lock people in the lab.

• 1:00:30Speaker 01

  So it's like a two-week study. You can't keep them in the lab for too long, but that allows them to measure exactly every gram of everything they ate. And people tend to eat about 500 fewer calories a day when they're eating minimally processed food. And one of the main reasons for that is when a food is ultra-processed, we can simply eat it faster.

• 1:00:49Chris Williamson?

  That's interesting. So it's not even necessarily to do with the palatability, although that will contribute a little bit. But you can just get it down. You presumably density as well is a good chunk of this that if you've ever looked at how many carbs are in a Haribo, and then you compared that to how much potato you would get to eat compared with the Haribo, it's insane.

• 1:01:10Speaker 01

  Yeah, so that's exactly it. You're concentrating the calories, really. So as part of the book, I traveled into the Bolivian Amazon. There's a tribe called the Chimane, who have the healthiest hearts ever recorded by scientists. So I fly into La Paz, I take this 12-hour crazy car ride down to this town, that's a jumping off point into the Amazon. And then we take a, it's called a peke peke boat, which is this really long canoe that has this really annoying motor on the back of it for six hours. And then, you know, it's, it's just a wall of jungle for six hours. And eventually the dude pulls the peke peke over. I'm like, it's all looked the same, you know, he's like, no, this is it. Trust me. It's like, okay. So we get out of this damn boat and like walk up and sure enough,

• 1:01:56Speaker 01

  you know, there's the tribe and I stayed with them for a little while. And so not only do they have super healthy hearts, they don't really have any markers of health disease, of heart disease. And the reason that's important is because heart disease is the number one killer of people in the developed world, like by far. Everyone worries about cancer. No, heart disease is probably what's going to kill you. You have about a coin flip chance of dying from heart disease. They also don't get, they don't seem to get diseases like Alzheimer's. They don't get certain cancers. So they're this super healthy group of people in a lot of ways. Now, the ways they're not healthy are problems that we cured in the past, right? They get things like pneumonia, they get random infections that we figured out long ago. And that's what ends up killing, or they get bit by

• 1:02:39Speaker 01

  snakes, things like that. But a lot of what's kept them healthy is, it goes back to what they eat.

• 1:02:49Speaker 01

  And what they eat is kind of interesting because at some point in a, in a day, in a given day of eating food, it's going to give the middle finger to some popular diet that we've been sold over the last 40 years. So it's not paleo, it's not vegan, it's not low carb, it's not necessarily low fat. It's, you know, it's not any of this stuff. They eat, the real commonality of all the foods they eat is that they have just one ingredient. So it's red meat from animals they hunt, it's a lot of fish, it's white rice that they grow, it's a lot of fruit that they grow, it's white potatoes, it's, you know, just this basic stuff. And you just can't eat that much of those foods.

• 1:03:30Speaker 01

  And they also don't have a billion triggers that push you into eating more. It's like, if you ever sit down and try it to your back, let's bring it back to potatoes, because that's a damn good food. So if you have a boiled potato, it's probably going to be like 150 calories. If you just sit and just eat that with like no salt or anything, holy hell, that is a task. Like, it is really hard. If you give me like 10 times the calories in chips, I could probably get through it. I mean, I could probably crush 1,000 calories in chips without, and it would be a great time, right? I'd just be like, oh man, this is a great experiment. Let's do this shit again soon. And so I think that that's really what it comes down to. Because when you look at the average American diet, especially in the, or in many developed countries, we're at like 60% foods that are

• 1:04:15Speaker 01

  ultra-processed. And so over time, you just eat more, I think, than you plan to, you end up heavier, and that impacts your disease risk.

• 1:04:25Chris Williamson?

  Okay, so we've got a lot of different ways that we get hijacked, whether it be status, whether it be influence, whether it be information, certainty, food. How does somebody step in and break the scarcity loop?

• 1:04:38Speaker 01

  Yeah, so there's basically three ways. The first is just becoming aware of it. By becoming, by observing it, by observing a behavior, you tend to change it. It's the Hawthorne effect. Uh. Second is that you can change or take out any three of the parts. So you can change the opportunity, you can change the unpredictable rewards or remove them. And you can, or you can slow the behavior down. So let's take food as an example. So with unpredictable rewards and food, a lot of the reasons why we eat is because we have so many different hyper palatable flavors and options. So people who eat the same thing day in and day out, they tend to weigh less overall.

• 1:05:21Speaker 01

  Because it's basically predictable, you're not going to be eating a ton when you've got 50 different options. And then with uh the speed or the quick repeatability, eating foods that are far less processed leads you just, it slows down the process of eating and you end up eating less. With something like social media, you can change the opportunity. Cause I think what happens is we talked about is when people go on social media, it goes from, I just want to share some photos of my dog to, oh, I need to score these points and you post and you go, oh yeah, waiting for these, these likes to come in. You can change why you're using it. You can be like, okay, look, here's how I'm using social media. I'm literally using it to keep up with my friends. I'm using it to share information about some cause.

• 1:06:06Speaker 01

  I'm only following people who are in this lane that I want to know more about, right? Uh, you can slow it down and this sounds kind of crazy because I've always, I've been skeptical when the answer to using an app less is to use another app, but there are great apps that simply put a sort of brief period of hold before you can open another app. So you might go to open the app, this other app will go, okay, you can open it in countdown. And just having that, it slows down people's use of it because you have to be intentional.

• 1:06:41Chris Williamson?

  You have to really. What's the best app of that that you found?

• 1:06:44Speaker 01

  Um, I think it's called Clear Space. I'd have to look at the name. Yeah, the guys and I used to, what converted me is the guys who founded it had seen me write about the benefits of switching to grayscale on your phone, which changes effectively the unpredictable rewards. Uh, your phone just becomes less stimulating, less rewarding. And so they reached out to me. They're like, yeah, try our app. And I was, yeah, okay, I'll try it. I didn't try it because I'm like, yeah, I'm not going to download your fucking app so I can use another app less, right? But I did it. My damn screen time went way down because I had to get intentional with when I was going to use it and why.

• 1:07:19Chris Williamson?

  Wow.

• 1:07:20Speaker 01

  Um, with something like shopping.

• 1:07:27Speaker 01

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

• 1:07:44Speaker 01

  This is so good.

• 1:07:46Chris Williamson?

  With shopping?

• 1:07:47Speaker 01

  With shopping. You can, um. Ask yourself, why am I buying this in the first place? What is the opportunity that I'm trying to get from this item? Because a lot of times I think we buy because we're bored. We're on Instagram because we're bored and then we see this perfectly targeted ad and we're like, oh yeah, maybe I could use those shoes that seem to be perfectly made in a lab for my style, right? But do you really, you know, need them? It's the question. It's like, what are you trying to get out of this? A lot of times it goes back to, I'm bored. I think it's going to raise my status to have this item. I think it's going to help me belong to a group. I think it's going to do all these different things. And so even just inserting the question helps. Um, you can slow that down as well. If you just say.

• 1:08:30Speaker 01

  Anytime I see something online, I'm going to wait X amount of days to buy it. Now, when I've done that, I'll put something in my cart or I'll just, you know, go, oh yeah, it's that item. Within three to four or five days, I'm like, what was that thing I wanted to buy? Oh yeah. Why'd I want to buy that? I don't really need that, right?

• 1:08:48Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 1:08:48Speaker 01

  So I think just learning that we're in this world now where we have just an abundance of all these things that we're built to crave. And we have all these systems that can really push us into these decisions very quickly. And that's really changed our behavior. And so trying to unpack the mechanics of that system, that loop. And then find ways to break it down, I think can be beneficial for people and change your behavior.

• 1:09:12Chris Williamson?

  Fuck yeah, man. It's, it's so strange to think about how mismatched we are. And it does feel like a, a imbalanced battlefield that we're on at the moment. Uh. You know, there was, there was, especially when it comes to information and sort of stimulus. There was one day in probably early 2011 when there was the right balance between how much information we wanted and how much information we were getting. And then very, very quickly it went from being below to just completely blasted through. And, you know, in the past, especially when it comes to information, your,

• 1:09:53Chris Williamson?

  the best skill set that you needed was that of a scout. Whereas the best skill set that you could have now is that of a discerner, right? It's somebody that is able to kind of cut through and weave and know when that's enough and so on and so forth. And the same thing, the moderation for everything. If you have grown up and evolved with a predisposition to get more and now there is more than you need, like, what do you think's gonna happen? Like, you're gonna end up, you're gonna end up overloading on absolutely everything. And yeah, Aristotle talks about the golden mean. It's not a vice of excess nor a vice of scarcity or something like that.

• 1:10:33Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, man, it's tough. I'm glad that you are putting your hands to a problem that everybody is super familiar with. And I'm a big fan of your Substack as well. I'm glad that you've joined us here on the independent creator, Muck and Maya cesspool too.

• 1:10:50Speaker 01

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

• 1:11:35Speaker 01

  every now and then where I'm like, how the hell is this 2,500 words? What are you doing, man? But all the information I like and people seem to like it, so.

• 1:11:43Chris Williamson?

  Hell yeah. Michael Easter, ladies and gentlemen. What's the book, Michael? Why should people go?

• 1:11:47Speaker 01

  The book is called Scarcity Brain. It's available anywhere.

• 1:11:52Chris Williamson?

  That anywhere, anywhere will be where people get it dude. I appreciate you, I'm looking forward to seeing what you do next.