#690 - Michael Easter - Why Can’t Humans Do Anything In Moderation?
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Hello, friends, welcome back to the show. My guess today is Michael easter. He's a professor at the university of nevada, a journalist and an author who focuses on health and human performance. Even though we might often feel in control of our impulses, there are regular moments that reminds us of our own control tendencies, from overspending to over eating, 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 scary lubis and how IT drives your behavior if it's possible to become dependent uncertainty, whether humans are more likely to chase happiness or avoid discomfort Michael's contrary opinion on first world problems and much more. But now, ladies and gentlemen, please welcome Michael eater.

Why is moderation so hard to achieve? Why can't humans just ever get enough IT never .

made sense and tell maybe, I don't know, the one thousand nine hundred and seventies to start moderating a species that came up in these environments where everything we needed to survive with scarce food, stuff, information, even number of people we could influence status, things like that um and so the people who lived on and spread their DNA, where people who tended to not try moderate on those things right. But the difference is that today we have an abundance of all these things that were sort of built to grave, if you will. And um we still have our old our old genes that pushes .

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

Yeah, exactly right in the and take food. Food is a great example. In the past, IT was hard to find food.

You would have to walk around all day, pick IT off the ground, pick IT off a tree. You would have to hunt IT if to literally run IT down until I was exhausted. And then you'd spirit IT, and then you take at home.

And so IT required effort, and there was never a maxim amount of IT. So when you had the opportunity to eat, you wanted to eat as much as possible. And you even still say this today.

And some tribes where attach a researcher who taking out, I think, with the oj tribe and paragraph is like, these guys came upon this orange bush, and they literally eight oranges until they drew up, and then they ate more oranges. Because that sort of behavior gave you vantage in past, because you would put on that those extra calories as as fat. And in the times when you inevitably encountered a scarcely and you were starting to lose weight, you would have something to draw.

We still have that exact same drive in a world word. Now that you live in the U. S.

You can identify with this where there is a seven eleven on every corner, pump in out coca cola and slopes and bags of food and wave god I have in vegas those buffs where people will go up, you know, ten times. And that often backfires. But it's not just, of course, it's not just food, right? It's all of these other things.

It's like the average person today owns more than ten thousand items in the house, right? We see more information some researchers next one day than the average person seven hundred years ago would have seen in their entire life. And so it's all these different things used to give us a survival advantage over doing them. We now have an abandoned government continue to overdoing.

Do you ever think about the fact that the selection pressures on our ancestors and the fulfilment pressures on us now have basically inverted? So we are the project 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, uh, inherited the chAllenge that they benefit from in a world now that is terribly mismatched.

Yeah exactly. That's exactly. 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 note too much rather than being like where's my next meal are we're going to survive this upcoming bad winter, right? But there are still problems on the less.

And so a lot of what the book does is that looks out how did we get here um what in particular is pushing us into more today because I think what's also interesting about the last since the one nine hundred eighties is that I think that technology has really allowed um insights into what really drives people and hooks people on behaviors to push them into more. So as part of the block, for example, I was all just build this up by saying we have technology that really is pushing us into more. And one of the insides of this book is that I sort of discovered what I call the scarcity loop.

Now this is a three part behavior loop that is unparalleled at pushing people out of moderation. This is the serial killer of moderation. Now, the way that I discovered this is that I live in lost vegas.

And living in lost vegas, you see a lot of weird stuff, right? I mean, that is a town built on access 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 weird thing, is the song machines, because these things are are freaking everywhere, and people play them around the clock.

I mean, they're in grocery stores, gas stations, restaurants. And I wonder, why do people sit here and play these things for hours and hours? Because this is an inherently irrational behavior.

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

IT doesn't. So this leads me to start asking questions. Long story. sure. I end up at this casino on the edge town lost bag since one of the news casino and town super cutting edge.

Uh, 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, a basically built a real casino. But IT is a human behavior laboratories. 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 am up to bring him back to some machine you probably want to want.

How was got talking about some machine? Um i'm not talking to a slot machine engineer and he walks me through why slot machines our self effective and they run on this loop that I call the scarcity lupines got three parts. So it's got opportunity, unpredictable rewards and quick repeatability.

So opportunity have an opportunity to get something of value. The case of a song machine is money, uh, to 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 is 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 slow machines, the average sw machine player plays sixteen games in a minute, which is about as much as we blink. Now the important part why i'm not telling you just about slam machine to talk 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 what is what make social media work? IT has been embedded in a lot of personal finance apps, like Robin hood, part of the rise of sports sledding.

Obviously, IT is what makes dating apps. So when throwing in our education, it's in our food system and on and on. And now you start, when I started really looking at this thing, you're like, oh, wow, this is everywhere. And IT is such an important part of so many behaviors that people do over and over and over, eventually, to their detriment, to some degree, another.

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 tangles on the carpet. If you walk into a caso, never windows.

To the outside world there's rumors that they increase the oxygen such ation in the air um by pushing this stuff through um to all of that fascinating the same number of times the e blink is the same number of times the e play slot machines. Also fascinating. What I don't get yet is why why we call this the scarcity loop. I don't doesn't seem to be any scarcity in in this. What am I missing?

Well IT pushes us in the mall and I will say so when I started um trying to impact why slot machines es work the first thing I did as I called a bunch of researchers who basically research gambling but from here's why gambling is bad perspective and they told me all these reasons why people supposedly to gamble to excess and that was what you said it's there's no right angles and casinos.

It's that slot machines play in the key of sea, which is supposed to be relaxing. And so we're going to expend 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 screen are our right angle. It's a box, so that doesn't make any sense. I call up a slap machine. Audio composer, go, hey, like what you what do you use when you write these old salt jangles?

That's a real job I can have in last bag is by the way, it's good time uh he goes no where they held you hear that like I use all different keys and then the clock thing is like, yeah because he knows don't have clocks but neither is like walmart or target or costco or your grocery store. It's not Normal just hang clocks everyone to 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 interview. And to humans, it's the definition of what makes a interesting game and IT can provide .

a fun escape, right? So even though there isn't a scary IT pushes us beyond moderation, which is the situation that we would have done had there have been a gusty. Okay, that makes, yes, okay. So why we so hooked by this? Like what is that that is doing to us that causing us to stay on and on and on?

Yeah so I called the a, uh, guy whose name is tone's santal. Now this guy is in his eighties. He started studying psychology in one thousand nine hundred and sixty eight when he graduated, got A P H.

D from U. C. berkeley. And he was following up on a lot of research, behavior research, like he's, you know sort of direct descendent of skinner.

And um when psychologists started realizing that animals get really hooked on unpredictable rewards, skin had been feeding ratched treats at a predictable interval and he started running out of treats. And so what the ends of doing long story sure is he goes, okay, I don't want to make more treats. It's can take time.

I'm just going to give these rats the treats unpredictably. I got just give him every now and then and they're probably going to get bored. They're going to get bumped out.

They are going to know whatever. And what he found is the opposite. These rats got totally and thrawl and hitting this level. They didn't know when they're going to go to treat.

So as an tall, he goes OK, i'm going to follow up on this because this is we and this guy is basically found that it's pretty easy to turn a pigeon into A A generate gambler. He gives these studies where he has pigeons, can play one game where it's a predictable reward game, or they can play another game or it's an unpredictable reward game. So it's very much like a slot machine set up.

Now in the unpredictable reward game, they will get less food overall for the behavior. And what he found is that ninety seven percent of pigeons choose the unpredictable, rewarding. They choose to gamble rather than play the game that gets them more food overall.

Dislike 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 reward, probably tracks back to finding food. So if you think about humans, you know, hundreds of thousands years ago, we have to find food every day, and we don't necessarily know where that food is.

So you got to one place. Now food, you ve got another place. Now food, you got to another place. No food, go to another place. Oh my god, jack part. They're so much food, right? So our brain seems to, when sanitize this sort of repeat search for something and get excited when that happens .

the center of the bull eye, according to both sam Harris and uh, andres huberman, when IT comes to pleasure, is things being about to be slightly Better than we anticipated yeah 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 one hundred new comments. It's when you are just about to head out.

So a really good study from a my old industry of nightlife. They got people to track, they pink them on their phone and got them to track the uh level of happiness that they had throughout the entire night, right from like three in the afternoon until three in the morning. And you think you going to go on this night out and it's going to be A D, J, is going to be music, and you're going to be drunk and all of this stuff.

But IT wasn't the time when people were the most happy was when they were getting ready with their friends before they went out. So anticipation is the buli of happiness. And it's one of the reasons for the fledged marketers out there, a really protracted launch sequence of anything that you're going to do.

Drag IT out, make IT fucking excruciating. The 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.

So like oh, and there's the the new Michael easter subject post that he's been working on for six months. Like, yes, i'm excited. Been talking about this for weeks.

I'm really, really excited about this. Like that is the bulls eve happiness? Yeah totally.

And you know the human in the the same hair that absolutely spot on. Another good person to ask someone who's made a shipload of money using that and that would be the gambling industry and the slot slot designer I talk to you said, yeah, gambling isn't when you know whether you want to loss. It's when the dice are rolling across the table.

It's when the rails are still spinning, is when the cards are falling and you're figuring out, is that gonna good? Is that going to be bad? Is that gonna be really, really good? That's IT the whole deal and tear point. I mean, that is that is wise, that is Better than so many systems that um are effective of grabbing people's attention today. Take dating up.

So you swipe, swipe, swipe and you go how I got to match is that the person who I was like, I don't know, we'll swipe on this one? Or was that the person like, oh my god, that's the most amazing human being i've ever seen in my life. That's what's exciting about these things.

And I mean, I really do feel like so much of the world has effectively started leaning into the sort of slot machine gambling mechanics. And it's no damn wonder why you see people spending, on average, twelve the thirteen hours a day engage with digital media. Of course, not all of that is spent on instagram, but you look at people screen time.

And like a lot of instagram, lot of tiktok, lot of email too like even um trust and herri who's the very you know so icon I like kani silicon valley guy and even he admits to getting text on email because it's totally ran. Imm, would you like paying is that a um is an advertisement from nike with new more shoes or is that like? H I just got in, you know, for him? Oh, it's an interview request from sixty minutes or whatever I might be.

Yeah, why does the scary you believe?

What was that?

Why does the scarcity you believe where?

Yeah I mean, so social media is an email. I also think it's part of the new cycle. You start to see unpredictably to really rise after a basically twenty sixteen, what's ramp.

And now you're seeing even more embedded into news with you know breaking news becoming a thing. Uh, I mention dating apps. I mentioned personal finance apps like Robin hood.

So for example, Robin hood, what really made that at take off is that they leverage quick repeatability. So before Robin hood, you would have to pay to make a trade. So that slows down the rate of trading Robin hood. What they did is they leverage this, a concept called payment order flow where IT makes IT.

Um the trading feeds are basically baked in so you can make quick repeat trade throughout the day and you see that APP just take off and even had basically gambling mechanics to get people in read, spin a wheel ah regulators action at them take take that down because we're like now this is just way to the ino like um gotto fly in the room course uh in advertising. So for example, uh a lot of a lot of companies are using casino like features. So you go on website now, you might have to spend a whale to get a bargain.

And that increases conversion rates by seven fall, according to some research, seven four. So if you just get someone to spend a while and there like, oh my god, I won thirty percent off shit, they're more likely to buy a it's in shopping, online shopping. I mean, think of something like lighting deals that's quicker repeatability that's lending on, uh, scarcity and urgency. Tmo tmo tamu, are you findings with the site?

No, what's up.

guy? That is A I would compare to the Crystal that Anthony of shopping. So IT is you go on and it's basically we have a limited amount there's a limited amount of time to get a bargain.

And right, when you pop on, there's a wheel you spend for a bargain. It's IT basically cell stuff direct from factories in china, and they've just turned the whole side into a casino of bargains. So it's prety crazy.

wow. Okay, so talk to me about how humans like to escape and how this plays a role.

L 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, uh, and your problems tend to dissolve when you're in this and and what really happens when you think about the traditional game is that traditional games sort of give us some obstacle, some unpredictably, more or less, uh, in exchange for knowing that we did exactly the right thing. So the end of the game, you would know whether you wanna lost, right? And that seems to be sort of calming and relaxing for humans.

But the problem with the scarcity loop is that because this 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 ever now, and I mean, it's it's totally fine. So I don't want the message of people to walk away from reading this work, going like I needed.

Never do anything that falls into a this loop like no that's not IT ah because this fun like I liked the gamble, gamble is fun. The problem is if I decide, oh, I want to gamble all the time. Now we started to really have a problem, and people tend to get hooked on this system in such a way that allows them to escape in a way that hurts them in the long run.

Is the a an element of flow state here? yes. I mean.

there could be it's time to me hearing .

you talk about IT and saying, you know sa 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 is a massive amount of skill associated with their slots.

But for the people that find themselves in flow, their um skill requirement and skill level are often only a little bit apart in any case. So perhaps even though it's low at skill requirement, the skill level of the participants are matched appropriately. So I just i've figured that um i've got read Doris coming on soon from flow research collective.

I'm going to ask him about um whether there is flow found in compulsive behaviors like tiktok and gambling. And I am pretty sure that he's going to say you're gna drop into a theater or delta when he comes to brain waves. It's going to be kind of oddly agitating and relaxing at the same time to do this stuff.

If you think about the way that you feel while you're on social media, it's it's very compulsive. IT is kind of relaxing, impassive and it's also kind of agitating and fucking in. Does he head in? So take a baLance between the two.

Well, it's the, it's the sort of randomness between is this post gonna be agitating is IT onna make me laugh my ass off is is going to make me yes, I was going to be some video where the soldier comes home and the dog runs at the soldier and I just .

started cry yeah so .

I do think that there is an element of where people do zone out. And what's what's interesting is when um researchers talked to like seriously compulsive slaw machine players, they actually get annoyed when they win a lot of money because IT interprets the process because when you win a lot of money on the song machine, IT goes ballistic and IT. Um if you win more than one thousand dollars, you have to pay taxes on IT. So IT shots off the machine and they have to come give you a payment by hand and that slows down what they're actually therefore, which is just to simply write out this sort of process of out of, you know, maybe maybe you're down sometimes.

What's the story of captain gone?

yeah. So um capital is this drug that was not super well known, I would say, even just a handful years ago and it's now effectively sort of overtaken the middle east where there are billions of pill circulating throughout the middle ast in particular and uh started in the sixties as a drug to treat uh A D H D depression and in the seventies, uh psychist realized that I worked a little too well so they they ban IT and there had developed sort of this um a lot of fans of IT, let's say in middle eastern countries because it's effectively ampt ataman.

It's like a low grade math 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. This is the vast deed. I would be annoyed if I went so down. Funny.

if he comes back, just take yourself. And I had really.

really hard.

Hungarian middle ast.

yes, so there is these gangs in balcarres .

that's Carry.

sorry to the hungarians. And but eventually what happened is that syria started producing IT so especially after the fall of syria um it's now produced in government labs and the production of captains on is actually far greater in syria uh or greater than legal experts in syria.

They're effectively supplying the middle st with this drug captains on there was just a, there was just a finding just like a week ago where they boasted about a billion dollars were the pills at A A port coming into the midst east. So, long story short, is that I travel to iraq to sort of understand this problem and effectively about addiction. Because when you think about overusing this scarcity loop, but really can become an addiction, now to me, addiction is a behavior that you a consistently repeat and provide you a benefit in the short time term, while giving long term benefits, effectively a 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 sedan rolled with a ion fist. And once iraq falls after, uh, the U. S.

Invade IT, what happens if you have a lot of people who have a lot of problems and trauma right from that war and then syria falls and you get this massive uh, supply of captains on and that starts moving its way throughout the middle stand into iraq and you start to see a huge uptake in addition to this drug. And so I think IT stands for sort of this greater question about addiction, which the U. S.

Government has typically seen. IT. Uh, two ways. For a long time I was seen as a moral fAiling, right? So an attack was a bad person.

There's just a person is making those bad choices, like danny. With thermo in jail in the midst nineties, you start to see addiction positioned as a brain disease. Now the reason that this positioning occurred is because neuroscience and brain scans were becoming pretty popular at the time.

And when neuroscientists would do um scans on at experience, they saw that they are liking system of the 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 pumped out high levels of dopamine drive, making them want a drug, right? So we see this strange mismatch and like this thing doesn't light up, but this thing doesn't light up, so they start argue that it's brain disease. It's just caused by this, a sort of mismatch and brain chemicals and on and on and on.

And I think to me, after really looking into this, I see addition is more of a symptom, typically of something larger. So to me, addiction, uh, you need a few things. You need a new population or a person who has a problems.

You need a substance that can relieve the problems and the person has to have uh no other means of fixing the problems beyond this substance. And I think iraq um sort of shows that. And you also tend to see this idea in research where you know the night to, which is national institute on drug views.

They argue that addiction is basically you can get over IT. It's this compulsive recurring ing disease um that is in the brain. And so once you addicted, you're pretty much dick and you're not going to to have a high chance of recovery.

But you look at examples, like in the seventies there was a Operation, golden flew, which is with the soldiers in feta m, where something like twenty five percent of soldiers, U. S. Soldiers who were fighting in vietnam, were addicted to heroin.

And nickson was like, yeah, I don't want these harvin add s coming back in to the united states. Like, if you want to come back to the united, say, you've got to give us a clean your test. So addiction is something that is near impossible to get over.

It's this brain disease that you can't fix, and you have zero at all. agency. And you would think we would left twenty five percent of soldiers in vietnam.

But the reality of what happened is that the vast majority of these soldiers all produced cleaner, and they all made IT back home. And once they were back home, very, very few of them relaxed. And the ones who did relaxed, relaxed, tended to have been using drugs before they got to be at now. So I think that IT shows that, uh, 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 the other things. So that chapter the book really looks into those questions, this sort of changing ideas around addiction yet to .

string um um you know to think about kind of soft addictions to, uh, not somebody who is an alcoholic, but every evening after they get home from a distance ult job maybe their relationship or family situation isn't fantastic. Maybe they 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.

But the person that always uses weed to wind down on the evening time, the line between, you know, a compulsion, a dependency and addiction IT all kind of becomes very blood. I'd like the fact that you say, um is somebody who has a problem and the solution that they reach for is this particular substance or or or or or stimulus. Um I think that's a nice way to luckily I I I I know people who if the emotionally upset they'll go on the phone like the phone is the distraction from whatever emotions that they are feeling.

right 嗯 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 that I can go that doesn't make any a sense just like I was with the ah with the slot machine players but the reality is is that and I can speak about this because i'm a person who was nine years sober. Now go on ten nothing fixes a problem like using a substance, at least in the short term.

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

is IT possible to come independent on certainty.

Do you think? Yeah I think so. I mean, look at this is this might be a strange example, but what 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 is web N D. And people .

will have set that that penis said.

no, it's not that's not IT men IT stage for cancer, actually, you know and so people are just going on the rabbit hole, the rabbit le of trying to find answers to questions that R N so much of life is uncertain and so much of the a the sort of data that we use, I think, also has uncertainty baked into IT because is based on human judgment at the end of the day. Like what are you going to do with this data? What does that mean?

And so I do you think that hyper country acts are dependent on certainty in some way?

Yeah, well, they don't. They hate and predictability. As for sure yeah.

they they take up horn a open loop, right? So what a hyper country act by this framing. Maybe he comes from Brown signs by this framing a hypo country act, hyper contact would sooner have an assumption that fatal, then an open loop that allows them to survive.

Yeah, I can say that. I mean, certainty feels good, right? There's a part of the book where I talk about you, why do people have certain to so much? And IT seems to be, you know, it's possible this is a theorizing from philosopher doctors at the university as m uh t win T H I N G U Y E N.

He talks about how probably is humans of all we could trust certainty, this all hot feeling we'd get that we'd solve this problem, right? Because if you're looking for food, you can be rather certain that, like you, you found the food, you know that you've escaped the tiger, whatever. But I think today, the questions that we grapple with are much more complex. But we still love this aha feeling except we have a million different answers we could find for for a question, right? If you ask our cards good or bad, you could type that into google and it's like, oh, they're bad oh, I got IT there's a governmental conspiracy around sugar or you could find another thing that's, oh, cards are good yeah, there's this, there's this group that all they ate is carbs.

And like, they live to one hundred and ten, right? So I think that we live in a world now where you can very easily maybe reinforce the preexisting 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 pick an answer, what are you going to do? We're never going to know.

Yeah, i've had this theory for a little while about how the modern information landscape isn't trying to convince the populist 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, even your neighbor ah that's what you would do unlike the least conspiratorial person on the planet.

But whether it's by coordination or um it's like coincidence, the end result is people not being sure what to believe. I'm supposed to eat meat. Is me killing me or is IT not? Should I go vegan ritual says that I should go vegan, but stan effect says that I should go.

What about meca Peterson? SHE seems to be. She's also, which looks good, like there is a myriad of solutions to exactly the same problem coming in opposite directions. and.

Yeah, is ukraine ukraine the good guys, or russia the good guys? Is russia brand guilty of doing something? Is or is this a coordinated attack? Because big farmer too scared about him getting too close. Like for every cultural movement, there is a countercultural movement. He is like this. There's a prediction that you can make with almost certainty that if you want to work out what's going to happen within the next six months, look at a cultural movement that's being born out that as yet hasn't had its invocation pula. So if you have midtown men going their own way in the dating market and editing the dating market for every mig, tell you are going to find a red pill, right?

Of the guys that are exiting, the guys that are leaning in for the trade wives, the goals that are going to kind of regress back to this sort of sixty synthetic for partner is gonna the boss pitches right for every insult is gna be a picker parties for every sigma grind set bro, leaning in this gonna be the spiritual bro. That's kind of leaning out right. It's a criticism and hedonism, you know, whatever is going on fucking, uh, Megan, this story, twenty twenty one summer twenty twenty one hot girl, summer, twenty twenty two feral goal, summer .

right?

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 of large works.

I think, yeah, I think so. And I I mean, this is largely a product of the internet and I had this strange we're doing brave ilo sophy again here um 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 were those videos? I think the videos were called like p ninety x ah.

And the whole thing, the whole thing was, you know what the benefit is, is a muscle confusion. That was the whole thing. And people were like, this is before the internet.

So people go, oh, muscle confusion. Yeah, that makes sense. I've never heard that.

That makes sense. Your muscles are confused. So they just like they go crazy and they grow. Now everyone has an internet connection. I mean, you could literally just type in muscle confusion and you would get a thousand hits for, like, oh, here's pin N Y X as that works here. Here's this person saying, like, here's why I A theodicy 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 sort of given to you, but at the same time, the fact checking process, if you don't know where to find good facts, then you're not really fatch 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 are gonna trust? And then the question is, okay, well, why are you trusting that person? And you can, like, provide some russia.

But really, I don't think you could truly unpack, like, why do I trust this person, right? Like, how did you end up posting? Ling, this person I don't know, right? And so it's it's suffer a strange landscape.

I mean, you know, I have certain people that I like. 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 um people will sound very smart and great because they're pulling from science. But of the day that science might change and we also need to be OK with that, that doesn't make the person wrong. That just means that there they might be following the scientific process.

And so IT 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 um frustrations or at least it's like why why do people go down in fox holds when the fox holds are constantly changing, right? So you we'll .

be familiar the iconic effect i'm guessing. Now tell me about IT. okay. So um this psychologists mister egana was doing a study on service in restaurants.

And if you've ever had a service come up to you and stand there and ask for your order and not get a no pod out, there's a part of these things yourself. This guy fucking crazy. He's gonna 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 delays. I want the tomato oes switched out for romain and blah ba um and what he found was that while table still had the road is open, the service was unbelievably effective at being able to recall what was being ordered.

As soon as the tables have been closed, they had zero memory of what they have done. So this open loop, closed loop dynamic, the agony found, is very fundamental to the way that our brains work in our brains up hall and open loop. It's the same reason why think about you like A A missing child.

What is IT the parents say, like we just want to know you. They would genuinely probably rather find out that the child was dead, then have their child still missing after a long enough time. You know these parents have had kids have been missing for ten years or whatever, like IT just it's it's it's awful. It's the same reason why uh Cliff is work at the end of books or on netflix shows you like you want to know what happens next to the sensation of wanting to know what happens next yeah so the same thing goes for the the service as well. So he talked to me about um influence like how does wanting influence in the requirement of more of a player role here?

Yeah so when you think about influence status, if you had more of IT in the past for most of time and still today, uh, you would have a survival advantage, right? IT could get you more food IT could get you out of crappy media labor that just to burn calories, IT got you more mates, possibly. And so I think that humans, humans current status and influence, now in the past, I don't think we could influence as many people as we can influence today, obviously, right? So influence the sort of and put at scale via social media.

And now what sort of one person does can literally influence to millions of people, right? You can set up one tweet if because viral can can totally change people um 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 seon? I feel like that would be .

someone you would have on maybe what he runs this a lab that .

I think university of washington i'm going to kick myself after if it's somewhere else. Uh, that looks at how many of our emotions uh, evolve basically just to interact with other people. Um there are totally social emotions, things like pride, shame, empathy, right?

I don't know a big point that he talked about. I think he has actually a book out called pride, just the whole book is about pride. SHE looked at how pride is a thing that basically tells you um makes you feel good about yourself.

You need to accomplish something. There's two types of prisons, 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 that no matter if someone sees what you've done or not, now someone sees what you've done, great, that's even Better. You risk cried 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, there was much easier to call out that hubristic crime because everyone can not know each other. You knew what people were. But now you can sort of display that on this massive scale on social media, and that can confuse people. And I can also make you look like a jerk when people realized that this person isn't actually, there is great as they say.

yeah, the weed thing about state is that as soon as you, I acknowledge that you're playing the game.

you lose the game. Yeah, exactly. So I took, I took a long time for a psychologist to even study status for that reason, because there was IT like, no one wanted that.

I talk to this guy, Cameron Anderson, who's that uc berkely. And he, he was like, took a long time for us to really acknowledge this thing, because by acknowledging that is a psychologist, you're going, I know, actually care about my status. And so I took and tell least the nineties, I think the research that did IT was looking at class issues. So what kind of made IT more acceptable to start studying? And now you've got this, uh.

info of IT, uh, so you are acting as this benevolence bojo, a sort of ivory tower person speaking down from one. I don't worry me a the plebians I I will bring you up from the up in the mayor and the blood in the faces yeah, that's interesting. Ah 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 moon conception of frame. You know, you don't have to be the heroic general.

You don't have to actually invent something. You can just be in the right place at the right time and in a reality, TV is the absolute sort of zen that this you will get Normal people pluck out of obscurity and placed on some television show to be like purposely ly Normal like you. You're providing average representations of avataras within the popular.

And then six weeks later, they come off and they ve got two million followers in a pretty little thin contract in free child tooth pace, in the blue take. And then now a completely change. So what? What is the lesson that he teaches them on the 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 incredibly long amount of time and grind hard on IT. What was Thomas Edison said? I have not failed that. I simply found ten thousand .

ways that didn't work. I mean, even up to the add of the internet, if you wanted a fame and attention, you probably did have to do decent things. Or could be opposite.

You get famous for doing really bad things. yeah. But the point is that you did something. Yes, right.

And so there was this filter of of a of a large media corporation choosing whether or not they're going to cover you. And now you can cover yourself if you would like, and just blasted IT out there. And they can work, right? You see a lot of people rise uh to public like being known by many people in the public, although they haven't necessarily really done anything that interesting in a vacuum.

Yeah, they 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 and ultimately, you know performative empathy is this it's patient zero o for this.

And now how many times have we ve seen it's almost meet IT, almost like the person that is the most vegan about their empathy and standing up for the little person and talking about the deeds that they've done was the kind of this suspicious lack of having seen the deeds that they have done, that almost a red flag for mean, in fact, is probably is Allen to generous ah liza right? Um it's a Jimmy fallon pears to have been popped recently for this stuff as well. All of the people that you know championing the little person IT turns out that body shaming her dancers.

Uh, Jimmy fan, the guy that supposed to be this bubble super welcoming lefty person, turns out who's a total tyran. Allen, the generous as well. If someone who's supposed to be, you know, a champion for different sexual orientations in this kind of like mother ly figure, late night show, a host and stuff, total bitch, apparently, allegedly, allegedly, a total bitch. And yeah, is is to me, the move from deeds to opinions has allowed people that are prepared to lie very effectively, or obvious cape truth, or manipulate, or do self illusion they benefit more from this than anybody else.

Yeah yeah, agree. And I did really find IT fascinating how status affects us so much. So one of the one of the studies that totally bizarre, but also very telling is that flights that have a first class cabin have uh four times greater rate 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 urge people and there's constantly status reminders we face every every day and they do seem to affect us. So the uh people who are higher status generally have Better health outcomes in the long run.

And this isn't you know you might think of what they can afford medical careers like, no, because this hold event countries that have universal medical care. So you would think that you know that wouldn't ld in those countries, but IT. But that seems to yeah.

it's such a huge determinant. If you read the whilst res book the state this game.

I haven't D.

D, love you fall in love. It's abit fascinating. So yeah, addiction, I supposed to influence that we have in the fact that you can be bestow obligation free status.

Ah IT. It's been objectified and turned into a metric game by social media, right? I know exactly how many follows. I know exactly how many plays. I know exactly how many likes.

So yeah, that that feedback loop or this, the previous scarcity y that would have been, I want to get more status downstream from status. Are increase access to mates, increase access to food protection, a Better child mortality. All this stuff has been wep ized and commercialized by qualified quantified .

to your point, as you can see exactly what IT is and you can watch that number go up on social media. That's one thing that I um talk about in the book. Two is how number of influence us and how this rise of game fiction has in a lot of ways shifted the goal of why we do what we do.

So any time that you put up a number on things and you game of a system, what tends to happen as people start to chase whatever the game of five number is? So this is fine in an actual game if you're playing football, american football, Chris, uh, 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. Now it's like OK, I was great and doesn't fact the rest your life.

But when you started a game, if I um different tax systems, people change in the behavior. So twitter is a great example. So twitter is theoretically supposed to be this platform for discussion.

I don't know you ask you what what are the goals of a discussion and the answer is like, well, there's a lot of goals to discussions. It's like to empathy um took a miserable to share information to sort of meat on a level playing fact like others, all the shit that comes from a Normal discussion. But when you go on twitter, what tends to happen is that you see people chasing wakes rates and follow account.

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 are dick on twitter. If you get more followers and you get more lives.

And I they've studied this, it's like when scientists have looked at this and you start to see when people start to get um likes and retweet and follower accounts. And IT usually tends to be from sort of negative native things, they started to check that. So this happened with the politicians.

There is a group that surveyed a bunch of you. I think I was a decades worth of tweet from politicians in the united states, and they found that over that decade, politician sweets got much more toxic. They use this A I algorithm, sort of give a tweet to toxic to the score.

What tended to happen in all these cases is that know, the politian would go on and they do Normal. You know what, you might think that having a breakfast, so, 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, they go all that's IT like, that's how you use this thing. That's what boost the number ers.

So then you start chasing the numbers, the likes, the rich. And that totally changes the goal. And this isn't just in, of course, it's not just in twitter. This is also instagram.

You go on to show some photos of your your friends, you know, when you're out with your friends and then people go on, wait a minute, this type of thing gets more for. So you start to do that also in the wine scoring world. And it's like when this Robert b.

Parker guys started wine advocate and put a number of scoring number on bottles, IT totally changed the wine making industry, which had had the same practice for two thousand 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 ones, and i'm going to give them a score from fifty to one hundred.

And what happened is that the bottles that had this very clear score, that had a high score, they started to sell way more. And so winemakers went, we make more money if we make wines that suit, disguise, taste. So they started at cracking out more bottles that this Robert b.

Parker guy like that told me, just industry. Now, if you're a person who doesn't share a taste with Robert Parker, you're like, what? This is meaningless to me, right? And so once we start to fix that, our numbers long, stories short, is that this changes our behaviors and why we do what we do.

I've been playing with this idea of hidden and observable metrics over the last few weeks. So it's my belief that people will often trade a hidden metric for an observable metric, and the game fiction makes this plain. So a really good hidden metric would be something like piece of mind of 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, uh, how come you feel by taking a job where your front line defense customer complaints person, but they know that this is the difficulties? Bs, so they've going to compensate you more highly. So you've gained ten thousand dollars per year, but how much has your much more important metric of sanity and piece of mine degraded? You know and if someone was actually to somehow you be able to give you a sate score, you would realize that you would net a negative by doing this.

Uh another one might be something like um the quality of your relationships, right uh so the quality of your relationships with your partner, uh, you take a job that a little bit further away a again, you going to make a little bit more money but that means that you spend last time with your wife or your children and in future the memories that you have not going to be so good but it's femoral it's like it's out there you know I mean, like, fuck, I can't tell how this is working. How much how many more steps closer to a divorce am I today? How much is 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 uh you know things like um um 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 optimize the observable metric of weight on a scale, but sacrifice the hidden metric of health, right? I've dialed back my body fat or I have um changed my composition so that i'm Carrying way more muscle. But the actual internal state of where I is fucked a right or .

even I mean, think of activity tracking ers like people get IT because I want to be more active and then they get obsessed with these arbitrary metrics that whether it's a step count, whether it's know if you use one of these devices that give you some sort of daily strange um people get hooked on that and that changes how they do what they do and often times why they do what they do, because you do, you start IT for health.

But people often times don't go, okay, well, what does health mean to me? So then you get this thing and like what health is, making sure I get a nine and I whatever, you know this this thing that I wear that tells me a strange count. And the problem, too, is that all of these trickeries use these sort of mysterious algorithms, and they are working on very flawed systems.

You're making assumptions that this device is taking perfect meta ics all the time, perfect measurements. You're assuming that the people who created this algorithm, most companies won't share how they figure out these numbers because of you proprietary. You are 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 type things. You see a lot of people that another great example of this would be on a professor.

And so I see IT with my students at the point of going to a university is is what there's a ton. It's like, yeah you want a degree but like you're there to meet people. You're there to learn to be a dam, a doll.

You're there to show up, learn to show up on time, learn to turn in assignments on time, learn to interact with your appears and have discussions and disagree with people in a nice way. But what tends to happen with my students is they get obsessed with grades. It's the GPA, right? So that is not the same as everything i've just listed. Why you go to the university yeah that's .

a good hearts law and measure in uh in practice right you know good hearts law yeah I think .

when the .

measure becomes an outcoming c is to be a good measure. So you know if you gave your customer service um team the measure that you would say what what we're looking for you to do is reduced down the fraud rate. And what the outcome is that ocs is every customer is treated like a fraudster.

So yeah, you ve managed to drive the fraud right, right down. But the actual felt experience that you want, the outcome you wanted, was we want to have a successful company with customers to 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, uh, tribal people eating cheese cake for the first time?

No, but i'm going to need to say that because I bet IT. Because do they love IT, or do they just absolutely hate IT?

IT blows their minds try IT absolutely blows their minds because it's this really interesting blend of sugar and fat. It's got um unification, which is the a texture design of food. So very rarely ancestor ily would we have ever had something that was both crunchy and fluffy.

So if you think about IOS, uh, french fries or cheese cake, you have a very interesting blend of textures. You know it's not just one texture, even in fucking yogurts. People through a genoa on the top like why is that good? Why it's good? Because it's this.

It's A A blend of the different if you go full live king mode and just start eating raw liver like it's not a particularly exciting texture, right as you just slime and it's kind of all one thing. So yeah, I mean food when you're looking at scarcity loops, food has to be, but it's good. Probably the prime culprit, I would guess.

Yeah, definitely. I mean, I just as I told you about how there's this casino lab trying to figure out how to, you know, tweet 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 obvious ly happening in the fit in the food industry, right? So especially around the one thousand and seventies, you start to see the rise of alter process food.

So after after world war to company, start to put a lot of money into developing fruits that are gonna. Check all the boxes you need to make a human love them. And they realized we need to, uh, increase snacking as well.

Because if you're eating three square like we used to, it's like, well, if they've been a lot of money on the table, we got to create snacking as a thing. And what we tend to snack on is these older process ss foods. And there's a food industry exact who explained if you wants to get a snacks food to sell ah, it's got to have three views.

It's got to have value. It's got to have variety, it's got to have velocity. That is basically the scarcity loop.

The in the foods, I mean, throw that someone .

aggressively.

I means you at fast.

So so value is relatively cheap, uh, variety. There's a wide variety of flavors, right? There's unpredictably and bedded in the food like you go to the girls y store and there's like seventy five different kinds of chips, right? Um and when people have more options of what to eat, they tend to eat more. And then velocity is simply when you hyper process is of food, we tend to eat IT faster.

And there's spends some interesting research at the N I H where they will give people a diet that is matched for, you know, macros and salt to know that one of the diet is older process, and the other is minimally process and what tends to happen. And they let them eat as much as they want over course of the day. And this is, this is a study where they want people in the lab.

So it's like a two week study. You can keep him in the lab for too long, but that allow to measure exactly every gram of everything. They and people tend to eat about five hundred fewer calories a day when they're eating minimum processed food. And one of the main reasons for that is one of fruit sult process. We can simply eat IT faster.

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

yes. So that's exactly you're concentrating the calories really. So as part of the book, I uh I traveled into the belive amazon there's a tribe called the chemi who have the healthiest hearts ever recorded by scientists. So I flying into a pause, I take us twelve hour crazy car ride down to this town, this a jumping off point into the amazon.

And we take a, uh, it's called a packet packet y 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 peak like it's all look the same. You know, he's like, notice, is IT just me? Okay, so we get out this damp o and like walk up.

And sure enough, now there is the tribe and I stayed with him um for a little while. And so not only do they have uh 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 develop world.

Like by far everyone works about cancer. Now heart disease is probably what's going to kill you. You have about a coin fit chance of dying from heart disease.

They also don't get they don't seem to get diseases like alzheimer mera. They don't get certain cancers. So they're this super healthy group of people in a lot of ways.

Now, the ways they are not healthy, our problems that we Carried in the past, right, they get things like the monia. They get random infections that we figured out long ago and that's what ends up killing or they get bit by snakes, things like that. But um a lot of what's kept them healthy is he goes back to what they eat.

And what they eat is kind of interesting because at some point in a in a day in a given day of eating food, it's gonna give the middle finger to some popular diet that we've been sold over the last forty years. So it's not polio, it's not vegan, it's not low car, but it's not necessarily low fat. It's you know it's not any stuff.

They are the real commonalty of all the foods. E is that they have just one ingredient. So it's red meat from animals. They hunt a lot of fish. It's White rice that they grow, a lot of fruit that they grow, it's White potatoes.

It's you know just this basic stuff and you just can't eat that much of those foods and they also don't have a billion trigger that push you into eating more. So like if you ever sit down and try to hear back gluts, break back to potato s because that's a damn good food. So if you have a boiled potato, probably going to be like a honor, fifty calories.

If you just sit and just eat that with like no soul or anything, hold the hell. That is a task like IT is really hard. If you give me like ten times calories and chips, I could probably get through IT. I mean, I could probably crush a thousand calories and chips without you, and that would be a great time. I just like a man.

This is a great experiment let's do this year again to and so I think that that's really what IT comes down to because when you look at the average american die, especially in the or many developed countries, we're like sixty percent foods that are alter processed. And so over time, you just eat more, I think, than you plan to. You end up heavier and that impacts your disease risk. okay.

So we've got a lot of different ways that we get high jack, whether would be status, whether would be influence, whether would be information, certainty, food, how does somebody step in and break the scary loop?

Yeah so there's basically three ways. Uh, the first is just a becoming aware of IT. By becoming, by observing IT, by serving a behavior you tend to change IT is a hot, warm 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 to 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 palladour flavors and options.

So people who eat the same thing day in and day out, they tend to way less overall because it's basically predictable. You're not going to be eating a time when you ve got fifty different options. And then with uh, the speed or the quick repeatability eating foods that are far less process leader just IT slows down the process of eating and you end up eating less with something like social media.

You can change the opportunity because I think what happens as we talked about us, when people go on social media IT goes from I just want to share some photos of my dog to our. To score these points and you post and you go, oh yeah, waiting for these these lights to come in um you can change why you're using IT. You can be like OK look, here's how i'm using social media.

I'm literally using IT to keep up with my friends. I'm using IT to share information about some cause i'm only following people who are in this lane that I want to know more about, right? Uh, you can slow IT down.

And this sounds kind of crazy because i've always have been sceptical when the answer to using an apple classes to using other 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 apple 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.

You have to what's the best step of that? The u fund.

Um I think it's called clear space. I'd have to look at the name um yeah the guys and I used what converted me is the guys who found in IT had seen me right about the benefits of switching to gray scale on your phone, which changes effectively unpredictable rewards. Uh, your phone just becomes less stimulating, less rewarding. And so they reached out to me though, like I try her up and I was, yeah okay, i'll try I didn't try IT because I like, i'm i'm going to do what you fuck an APP so I can use another APP light, right? But I did in my damn screen time went wait down because I had to get intentional .

with when I was .

going to use IT and why wow um with something like shopping. I'm i'm going to buy a what i'm going to do after this buy a fly water um with something like I can't believe the thing is still like like how long do these things live? I thought they live like thirty minutes. It's god dog for you now in ten minutes, should should be dead by now. This is so good shopping .

with .

shopping. You can um ask yourself, why might buy this in the first place? What is the opportunity that I am trying to get from this item? So a lot of the sounds I think we buy because we're bored, we're on instagram because we're bored and then we see this perfectly targeted at like, yeah, maybe I could use those shoes that seemed to be perfectly made a lab for my style, right? But do you really, you know, need them?

The question like, what are you trying to get out of this lot of times that goes back to i'm bored. I think it's going to raise my status to have the item. I think it's going to help me belong to a group.

I think it's going to do all these different things. And so even just inserting the question helps. You can slow that down as well. If you just say any time I see something online, i'm onna wait x amount days to buy IT. Now when i've done that, i'll put something in my car or i'll just, you know go oh yeah, 再来 的 within three to four， five days, unlike what was that thing I wanted to buy oh yeah, why do I want to buy that I really need, right? So I think just learning that we're in this world now where we have just an abundance of all these things that we're built to create, and we have all these systems that can really push us into these decisions very quickly, and that's really change 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 for Cameron.

It's it's so strange to think about how miss matched well. And I just feel like A A embanked ed battlefield that were on at the moment. You know that there was, especially when he comes to information.

And so the stimulus there was one day in probably early twenty eleven 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, and you completely be blasted through. And in the past, especially when IT comes to information, your the best skills that that you needed was that of A A scout.

T, where's the best skill said that you could have now is that of a disa, right? It's somebody that is able to kind of cut through. And we've and no one that's enough. And so and self for and the same thing, the moderation for everything.

If you have grown up and evolved with a previous position to get more and now there is more than you need, like what do you thinking to happen? Like you're going to a end up you going to end up overloading and absolutely everything. Yes aristodicus talk about the golden mean.

It's not advice of excess nor revise of uh, scarcity or something like that. Um yemen, 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 subject as well. I'm glad that you've joined us here on the, uh, independent. Create a mucking and mayer cesspool too there, man.

It's been a one uh, project for people who are interested. It's h two percent with the website is T W O P C T outcoached. It's been a fun project that I mean, I didn't know how would go. The reception has been Better than I expected, which is awesome.

Um and I got a lot of I have a lot of fun doing IT, which I think is really I can explore things that I otherwise wouldn't have where I writing for a lot of the magazines that I used to write for right things get added IT down to the bone. There's stuff for you like this is the most fascinating part of this and that gets taken out so I can really dive into, I think, the stuff that is most uh, useful and there is not as many uh, constraint. Sometimes I might need some constraints on word counts because i'll send out an email every now then where i'm like holds us twenty five hundred words. What do you doing that? But all the information I like, and people seem to like IT.

So ah Michael. Ea, ladies and gentleman, what's the book? Michael, why should people go?

The book is called scarcity brain. It's available anywhere that anyway anyway will .

be where people get IT. Did I appreciate you? I'm looking forward to see what you do next.