#2039 - Michael Easter

Hello Michael, good to see you buddy. Yeah likewise man. Last time I saw you we were in elk camp in Utah. We were indeed in elk camp, it was a good time. Yes so um I was just pointing out to you about these discoveries they found at the bone yard in Alaska and my friend John Reeves who's been on the podcast before Jamie I'm gonna send this to you. You got it Renny? So the most recent thing they found is evidence that looks like saw marks on these bones. It looks like they saw these bones to get the marrow out. Now a lot of these bones that they've dated are 10,000 plus years old and the thing is the saw was really supposedly invented somewhere around 7,000 years ago. I feel like we often we often think that early humans weren't as advanced as they actually were. Yeah. And every time we make a new discovery it just pushes it back, it pushes it back and you learn that people were way more interesting, had a lot more tools, had a lot more skills than I think we think. Yeah this is really interesting. I mean if they do date this you know some of the stuff they've dated is like 30,000 plus years old that they found out here. The bone yard is an amazing place. I think it's the bone yard Alaska is the Instagram page. Do you know where on the map it is? I do not know. Okay. Do you know Jamie? I sort of remember it's in the middle of Alaska. Okay. But this is amazing. I mean there's some he's also found some bones from some animals that supposedly didn't even live there. Some cats, ancient cats. The craziest thing is it's a very small area. He's excavating somewhere in the neighborhood of like six and a half acres and there's another place that's like somewhere similar in size. Yeah. And they're finding massive amounts of bones in these areas. That's crazy. Woolly mammoth tusks and all this crazy stuff but this is really interesting because that seems to be really clear evidence of tools that were used to saw bone. Another one they found. Like look at this. And the cut is clean. So clean. Yeah. So it really does look like a saw that they sawed to get to the marrow. Which is wild stuff. I don't know if anyone has ever found anything like this before but it's pretty extraordinary. Changes how we think about how advanced we were. I mean who knows. I mean maybe they could find out that the saw marks are actually only a thousand years old and someone found these bones and tried to saw them a thousand years. I mean I don't know. Humans are amazing because we're such great explorers. That's something that I think makes us so unique among animals. Yeah. Alright so Homo sapiens comes out and we take over the world in a very short amount of time. Yeah. Right. Neanderthals live 200,000 years. They basically made it into Europe. We get Homo sapiens all of a sudden they move into the Americas. We put freaking boats in the water and go to Australia. We take submarines down to the bottom of the ocean. We shoot off rockets into outer space. We are a species that never stops exploring. We want to know what is that. What's over there. I want to find out. Massive curiosity. Massive curiosity and it's it's shaped us so much. So my book Scarcity Brain which is coming out soon. It has a whole chapter on this and why exploration is so important to humans as a species but also how it's changed. So if you think about how people explore today we still explore in a sense but it's mediated through the internet. Right. So it's like we have this urge to find information that can enhance our life. Yeah. In the past you had to go there. You had to go talk to someone. You had to go up around the river bend. You had to go okay where is this greener grass. I'm gonna go find it on foot and it's gonna be there's gonna be some amount of effort. Now when we have this sort of information itch we scratch it through a screen which in on one hand that's great because we can get information quickly. On the other hand it's so easy to access and there's so little effort we have to do. I think sometimes we get overwhelmed by it and it's a very different form of information we can get today. Yeah it's also it's leading us into this seemingly inevitable path of this conversion of humans and technology that seems to be happening without whether we like it or not that really doesn't seem to jive well with our biology. Yeah it's it's hard to tell what is true and false today and I think there is less of a well now that we have screens you don't have to go talk to someone in person right if you want to learn something even just 20 years ago I was like okay I'm gonna go to the library I gotta go find out where this book is I gotta use Dewey Decimal System I gotta walk the stacks I'm gonna find it I'm gonna put in this time and effort and I'm gonna learn something if I want to learn something about a human I'm gonna go talk to them right I'm gonna go face-to-face like hey what do you think and I think now everything has become so easy that that can backfire a little bit it's very easy to just you know scratch the information itch all the time and it's not necessarily leading to more understanding yeah there's a difference between knowledge and understanding right yeah I think if you pursue it there's more information and there is more knowledge if you really get after it but how many people do that how many people just read head I do that all the time I just read a headline I go did you hear you know and I didn't even go into the article and oftentimes you get in the article you're like oh what is this based on oh this is bullshit and then you go further and then you find out oh no no no it's not real at all right there's a lot of layers and yeah what made me start thinking about this is I'm sitting at home and I get this email and it's from someone who claims that they're with NASA and they go hey we got this astronaut his name is Mark van de Hei we do this program where if an astronaut wants to talk to someone we'll put him in we'll put you two in touch and you can FaceTime with him while he's in outer space and I'm going is this like the new Nigerian Prince scheme what do you need from me just access to my bank account no big deal at what point do I hand over the credit card right so but I go okay because the it's a at NASA gov like okay that seems they could that though I'm sure they I've gotten emails from me for at NASA Joe at NASA Doug no back in the day I used I got an email that was from my website from an email that I don't have yeah and I was like what is this that's wacky yeah but I go along with it right and so they set up this video conference I have to download this special software and I'm thinking this is where it comes in yep and then all the sudden I'm waiting for this guy to show up and then bam there he is and I know it's not a long con because the dude is floating in outer space he's up in the ISS so he had read the comfort crisis my last book and just wanted to chat so NASA will do this to sort of give astronauts a boost to talk to someone else anyone they want to talk to and what came out of that conversation was that he is up there for the sole purpose of getting information that can hopefully help us live on as a species should we have to leave this planet and go find another mm-hmm but sort of back to what we were talking about for him to do that he has to put in this mind-body effort to go get that information right he literally has to go up into outer space to figure these things out and he talked about how oftentimes when he will come back home and he'll go to schools I'll go to universities goes at some point in every talk I had this run of like 30 talks where at the Q&A someone always asked me if the world is flat he goes I did not know how to take that because I would kind of just you know no and then they would start to fire off facts knees like yeah yeah yeah but no and so I think that that with minimal barrier to entry you can find information that confirms your worldview and just follow that strange rabbit hole even though it's not leading yeah that rabbit holes the wildest one that there's been this long-standing conspiracy to deny the fact that the earth is flat to hide it and obscure it and that all of these space agencies all over the world are all working in cahoots to try to perpetuate this whole hoax yeah well I can tell you when he won he took me you know around the ISS and showed me the place over zoom and then two at one point he flips the the screen and shows me the earth and at least in that instance I can tell you that it was round maybe it's just a disc could be that's a lot of the could be in deep people think they think it's a disc I think it's all a religious thing they they think that they're they're going off of some passages in the Bible where they refer to the firmament and they they refer to like that they believe somehow there's like this dome over the earth and that the the stars just lights and the the reason why the moon landing is fake is because the moon is not real I've read that one today I was like oh boy and then you know some people think that stars are fake they don't think space is real they think it's all a con by Satan or someone and then that all these space agencies are in cahoots with Satan which is really wild if you think about like did they deny satellite how much did they deny did they deny satellites like do you believe in direct TV is that a satellite okay do you believe that the satellites are taking photos are they taking any but what about the weather patterns what about their ability to discern weather patterns as they move across the globe what about the flight patterns what about the fact you could actually track planes as they go around the globe like what do you think about that yeah I mean there's Japan has a very sophisticated satellite system where they're taking high-resolution photos of the earth like every few seconds right isn't that what it is yeah private companies that do that and they think that's bullshit that's all lies but it's like what do you have to like what are you getting out of that like why would they do that that's I don't understand what they think the motivation is I think that some things are complicated in life and I think that humans really like certainty so we are species who just crave certainty there's actually some fun studies where people will choose to get shocked by an electric zap rather than wait to see if they're gonna get zapped like just get it over with I want to be certain about this thing and so I think that a lot of conspiracies even though they seem complicated because you know there's the board with the strings going everywhere at the end of the day they give certainty to something that is uncertain and is complicated and that can sort of be relieving you go okay well this world being flat doesn't jive with my worldview I think XYZ this doesn't make any damn sense and then you can go oh well what if it's flat and then there's like sort of this trail you can follow online where at the end it goes bam you got it you're good to go I think people are always looking to find things out that they've been lied about so I think they believe they don't trust the government they believe you know various conspiracies and like the Gulf of Tonkin ones that have turned out to be true mm-hmm and then they go okay what else what else and there's something very exciting about it also a lot of the people that are really into it for whatever reason I want I mean I don't want to like stereotype but a lot of them are unsuccessful in other aspects of their life they might be successful in one thing or something like that but there's something about it that like leads them to want to be the one who uncovers this truth and I think it's like it plays on the mind like we have this desire to go and find things like that's part of the Explorer gene or whatever it is the Explorer whatever whatever it is that makes us want to get in a boat and say like where's Hawaii you know I'm like how about those guys the Polynesians I mean what a crazy trip they they went all the way out to the middle of the ocean they found this volcano there used to be people who would I can't remember what tribe this is but these tribes would get in a boat and go hundreds of miles and it was all for the sake of meeting another tribe and they would sort of exchange a couple goods that weren't really that meaningful which suggests it really was for the journey right they were doing this just to explore to take on an adventure to learn from it and bring back this thing that was sort of meaningless in the grand scheme of things but it was symbolic very symbolic that they had done this great journey and I think this was in the Polynesian Islands where this happened like around the Philippines hmm yeah I mean I guess there's also this longing to understand how people can live in different places if you're used to living on a certain like tropical island and then you find out about someone who lives in like the taiga forest in Siberia you're like how what are they doing I mean imagine before there was video before there was the internet and really before there were books people would hear about these people that did these things and they're like where are these people like how are they living like this and this was probably this overwhelming desire to see because you would live the way you lived and you would say well this is how people live and you'd be like no no people live so differently like some of these explorers that went to these uncharted islands and found these people that were living essentially like you know Stone Age like no access to fire and they're living on this island like what like what is going on over here how is this real yeah totally and to with your question about that sometimes people who get really really deep down those rabbit holes aren't successful I think it provides an answer for why the person isn't successful right you can find a reason like oh it's it's them that's done this thing and why I have XYZ problem and I think that and it also pulls on like I said I think we have a drive to search for information so if you think about humans in the past as we evolved there was a handful of things you really needed to survive food possessions tools information we crave status as well because if you could influence more people you probably had a survival edge and so I think when you start to apply that to today's world because in the past all those things were relatively scarce they were hard to find so if you sort of crave them and always look for them try to grab them when you had the opportunity you would have that survival advantage but in today's world all these things that we evolved to crave are abundant in many ways and we don't necessarily have the governor telling us when we've had too much so take something like possessions even a couple hundred years ago the average person probably had like a hundred items maybe in their house now the average home has 10,000 items in it really yeah 10,000 items it's that the range is 10,000 that I've seen to 40,000 and then there's people that collect stuff like trading cards stamps yeah exactly coins and they get obsessed with collecting these things yeah exactly and I think it does fall back into the fact that we kind of evolved to add whether it's food whether it's stuff whether it's trying to influence more people whatever it might be and that can kind of create a cycle for people where the pursuit of the thing is like a thrill in of itself and then you get it you go oh that's fun I gotta I gotta go do that yeah and then they got to get another one yeah yeah that that's it's such a weird it sort of plays on these original survival instincts right you're in your search for food your search for shelter your search for fertile hunting grounds you know you have humans have this sort of inherent desire to go and find things and then something comes along that just monkeys with that like stamps like now there's you have to get this 1972 Abraham Lincoln you know fucking stamp and you know you're you're on this quest to get it yeah and people pay extraordinary amounts of money for these things too tons especially like cards like baseball cards and stuff like that yeah I mean that's bonkers how much people pay for those yeah it's crazy I was at my mom's house the other day and I was going through my old basketball cards I used to collect I'm like oh here's a kind of interesting card like that player was pretty good I look it up I'm like oh my it's worth that much money that's crazy because they don't make them anymore yeah exactly even though it's no big deal it's just a piece of paper yeah so as part of this book I got really interested in this idea of you know everyone knows that everything is fine in moderation but then the question is like okay well why the hell can't we moderate right right people keep eating when they're full you keep buying stuff when you got a house full of stuff even stuff like how much media we consume right it's like people will scroll and scroll and scroll even though they know this is not how they want to be spending their time I've spent so many nights where I went to bed at 3 o'clock in the morning feeling like a fucking idiot like what did I do I just wasted time watching dumb videos and reading dumb websites and just going down and I'm tired and I should just go to bed but I just whatever like maybe the next thing it's gonna really excite me maybe the next video is really gonna stimulate me nope nope it's always the same feeling I go to bed like fucking idiot you should have been in bed three hours ago and everyone has that experience right yep and so I live in Las Vegas which happens to be a good town to think about why the hell can't we moderate right now when you live there you see all kinds of wild stuff right but to me what's always been the strangest has been the slot machines so you've spent time in Vegas yeah it's like they're in the casinos obviously but they're in the gas stations the grocery stores the restaurants the bars and the airport and they're not sitting empty right people are playing them around the clock yeah so I'm like what the hell is up with that just plays in your dopamine well and it doesn't make sense because everyone knows the house always wins yeah it's not it's like a numbing thing they just sit there and press the buttons and press the buttons and press the buttons and hope they make money yeah so I I decide all right like I'm gonna find out how a slot machine works why do people get hooked on slot machines that's the question and so I go into journalist mode and I start making calls now the first group of people that I call turns out to be a dead end so who I call are people who are effectively anti-gambling researchers okay so these are researchers who have a very anti-gambling bent and they tell me all sorts of sort of strange things they're like oh it's because casinos don't have clocks they're like these myths we've all heard casinos don't have clocks slot machines only play in the key of C which relaxes people and relaxes their wallet casinos don't have any right angles and right angles activate their rational part of your brain and so I go okay and then I go to an actual casino and there's right angles everywhere right the screens are right angles no clocks but guess who else doesn't have clocks like most businesses right there's not clocks in Costco restaurants right yeah it's not normal to have clocks and then for the the audio the key of C I call up a slot machine audio composer now this is a real job you can have in Las Vegas right and this guy goes where the hell do you hear that he's like I use all keys so I realized that the problem that I'm encountering is that I have called people who want us to stop gambling I need to call people who want us to start gambling all right I got to follow the money on this so long story short I talked to a handful of people in town and this leads me to this casino on the outside outskirts of Las Vegas that's brand new it's cutting-edge but the catch is that it's not open to the public so this place is basically a living breathing casino but it's used entirely for research on human behavior what yeah so really who funds that 73 different companies so there's gambling companies that are involved but also a bunch of big tech companies who are on the fortune 500 so I go there and it's it's like I said it's a legit casino how big is it it's I would say I mean it's not the size of a normal casino like a sprawling strip one it's probably about the size of your everything you have here maybe a little bigger but they have hotel rooms like a Walmart yeah big it's in this big office building basically and they're basically looking at how everything that happens in a casino affects human behavior so how does room design and the technology we're using in rooms affect behavior how does bedding with say an AI bot versus an actual human impact betting now when I'm there I meet with to bring it back to slot machines I meet with a guy who designs slot machines so the reason that these things are so entrancing to people it tracks back to this behavior loop that I call the scarcity loop and this is a basically a loop looping behavior that when people do it they tend to get hooked on it very easy so it's got three parts it's got opportunity unpredictable rewards and quick repeatability so opportunity you have an opportunity to get something of value in the case of a slot machine it's money right two unpredictable rewards you know you're gonna get the thing of value if you continue the behavior but you don't know when and you don't know how valuable it's going to be so with a slot machine game when those reels are spinning you could win nothing you can basically lose your money you could win a couple dollars or you could win a life-changing amount of money there's a fantastic range of things it could happen and then three quick repeatability you can immediately repeat the behavior so with slot machines the average player plays about 16 games a minute and that's different from all other habits like most habits you don't immediately repeat them now the reason that people are so interested in this companies casinos is because that this sort of three-part system I just laid out it can get people to repeat a lot of other behaviors too so it's in social media it's in sports gambling it's in dating apps even companies like gig work economy companies are using it to get people to work longer hours it's being leveraged by the financial industry in a lot of personal finance apps and on and on and on it's become it's been embedded in so many of the products even institutions that influence people's lives because it is so captivating to us we tend to get hooked on this three-part system hmm and so when you're talking about like gig economy stuff like you're talking about like uber yeah like things along those lines driving for uber and so how how did they use that so things like unpredictable rewards get put up in front of a driver to get them to drive into an area of town that uber might want them to be in there's also unpredictable rewards we yeah so like you might get say oh if you drive here like your whatever will you you'll make X amount more money and it sort of pops up unpredictably also they'll they'll incentivize you that they offer you more money to go to a different part of town yeah or dropping in cues at saying like hey this is where we are you're gonna make more money today type of thing if you think about it in terms of something like social media it's like the opportunity is to get say status or likes or whatever it is right and then say a person posts and then the rewards become totally unpredictable right you might get two likes which is like that wasn't great or you might get hundreds of likes which is like oh my god that's amazing it's the same exact architecture as a slot machine and then you check and recheck you're repeating the behavior all day and this loop the reason that we're so attracted to it it goes back to evolution so I talked to this once I learned how this kind of loop pulls people in it's really what slot machines lean on to get people to repeat the behavior I call up a psychologist he's this old-school dude from the University of Kentucky who's been studying psychology since the late 60s his name's Thomas Sintall and he described he basically explained this likely goes back to evolution and finding food so if you think about hunter-gatherers the thing you have to do every day is find food but it's a random it's random whether you're gonna find the food or not so you go to point A you don't find any food go to point B you don't find any food you go to point C no food point D oh my god it's a giant berry bush full of food and that saves your life right so that search that repeat searching really pushes us and grabs our attention because it used to help us survive in the past and there's even I mean if you want to get down the rabbit hole in it there's even things like what are called near misses in slot machines which is when you kind of almost win right you might be lemons yeah two lemons lemon just barely passes by barely passes by or losses disguised as wins you know those are no so that's when let's say you bet one dollar and you quote unquote win 50 cents so ho right so you don't lose everything but you win 50 cents now we tend to react react to that as if we're winning when they when they study gamblers and that's also embedded in the search for food right you might let's say you're hunting you're like oh we got a big kill on our hands and then you whiff and the animals on its way it's like damn that is it that's a right that's the near miss or you come up on a berry bush and let's say it took you you burned 500 calories looking for this thing and it only contains 200 calories worth of food and so all of these sort of evolutionary parts of this system that we used to fall into as we evolved are now in slot machines and in turn now being used by a lot of big tech companies and different industries so they just trick the human reward system yeah yeah it mimics these sort of ancient pathways more or less and gambling is what to me is one of the most peculiar ones because it's so overwhelming for people that are hooked on gambling it's such a mental health issue it's such a an addiction and when you see people that are just like chasing it and they just can't stop it's like I always wonder like what pathway is being hijacked like what what is about human beings that want to risk like literally all of their money on a roll the dice or on a spin of the roulette wheel or on a hand of cards like what is that yeah this is a good question now this this Zental guy that I told you about he does a lot of research on pigeons so he can basically turn a pigeon into a degenerate gambler in like two minutes okay pigeon pigeon dude he'll give them I said that's cool I said the same thing when I was talking to life hard enough as a pigeon yeah he so he'll get pigeons who you know they live in these cages and he'll give them the option to play a game where they every other peck they get say 15 units of food so peck no food peck 15 units of food then they have an option to play a second game and this second game is very much a gambling game in that they get food about every fifth peck but it's random right so you could go peck peck food peck peck next one could be food peck peck peck peck right so it's just kind of like a slot machine and they get more food playing the gambling game they get 20 units if you do the math it makes a lot more sense to play the game where you get every other right every other peck is getting you food it adds up to a lot more food but what he finds is that the pigeons consistently play the slot machine game 97% of pigeons will choose that game but they're not risking anything they're not risking anything right but it's still that gambling they're still putting in the effort to have to play the game yeah but that seems obvious that like the the rewards are greater so they know that if they just keep pecking it doesn't hurt to peck they're gonna get a bigger supply of food they don't get a bigger supply though because they'll get 15 every other peck right versus 20 every fifth peck so if you put in a hundred pecks you're gonna get more food playing the one where it's you get food every other time right but it's still not gambling because the pigeon just sees a larger pile of food with the more pecks so just wants the larger pile of food so just keeps going it's not like they're risking all their food right right so I don't think it's a gambling thing well the larger the larger pile of food comes from the predictable rewards yes right if you do every other right yeah every other is how you get the biggest pile of food but you don't get the biggest pile in one jump one dump right the one where it's every five that's a larger quantity of food yeah so you get 20 yeah see that's not gambling why is it not gambling because it's just more effort it's more effort to get a bigger pile so he would argue that they're just dumb they just can't say oh it's every other one well all they see is that they're getting you know what are 15 units versus 20 is that what it was yeah yeah all they know is 20 units like oh this one gives 20 units just keep pecking that I don't think they're smart enough to figure that out I think they just like keep going keep higher 20 keep going keep going 20 but there's not a risk so here's what I'll tell you he would argue and a lot of biologists would they would say you know there's this theory called the optimal foraging theory says the animals will expend the least amount of energy to get the most amount of food alright so over time they're expending a lot less energy to get more food and so here's where it gets interesting though is that to sort of bring it back to why do people fall into this why would someone bet their entire fortune on a roulette wheel or whatever is that when he will put pigeons in a sort of wild environment so where he keeps them is in these pigeon cages where they kind of live alone it's you know it's a basic cage when he puts them in a cage that mimics the wild so it's this giant cage that has like roosts it's got cliffs it's got other pigeons it's very much like they would have to live in the wild and then he throws them back to choose a game they start choosing the optimal game yeah interesting yeah and so and you see that in many animals where they do these sorts of studies like rats right that's the cocaine and rat thing right yeah yeah just like that yeah the people don't know that study what they call it rat Park so they did a study where they put rats in this very sterile environment laboratory environment bright lights no toys no nothing and they gave them the option of water or water with cocaine and they always took the water with cocaine they just kept taking the water with cocaine but then when they put them in rat Park which is a much larger thing with a lot of toys and things to do and a lot of places to run around they didn't do that they just drank the water right and that but that makes sense it's like they're fucking living in hell and the the cocaine water is the only thing that gives them any good feeling and so they just keep going back to that good feeling but when you give them a normal natural environment where they can just exist I wonder if that's the case with people that live like say a subsistence lifestyle you know if they have access to something like heroin or cocaine I wonder if they would just ignore it because they get this sort of very natural environment that is programmed into our lives programming to our DNA like people that live a subsistence lifestyle are unusually healthy I'm sure you've seen have you seen Werner Herzog's documentary happy people I don't think I've seen that it's great it's happy people life in the taiga and it's about these trappers who live in Siberia and there's very low instances of mental health issues very low instances of you know all sorts of problems and that society just has the ubiquitous in their world these people are very happy and they get by they just get by I mean they have snowmobiles and dogs and they hunt and they trap and they fish and they just get by and they work every day yeah and you have to work the only way to live is to eat and the only way to eat is to work and so everybody does everything that they can and they're all happy it's very weird so that was this guy's theory as he said there's a nut there's another theory I think it's called the optimal stimulation theory basically says that humans and animals need a certain level of stimulation in their life or else they start seeking it from other things yes so if you think about the context of how humans came up I mean it was very stimulus sort of like the people you talk about on the taiga right they have you got to work all day you're outside a lot you're doing tasks that involve your mind and your body like it's a full-on effort to survive you're also in sort of closer-knit communities all these different things and today we don't have that quite as much and so his theory is that when you don't have enough stimulation in your life or meaning from other places humans tend to start to look for it in other ways we gamble we spend a lot of time on the internet we buy a lot of stuff all right so we start searching for it somewhere else and those ways can often be counterproductive in the long run when you overdo them yeah yeah totally makes sense and also you know I was having a conversation with a friend of mine about this yesterday we were talking about how complex the human mind is and how complex life and society is but yet there's no real management book like there's no real there's no document that shows you this is the optimal way to exist and these are the pitfalls of existing other ways that you know you have these human reward systems built in and they can be hijacked by these various things and this is the way the human body and the human mind exist optimally and for whatever reason there's no real structure that people can follow that's universally agreed upon you know like if you like save your mechanic right and you're working on an engine like it's it's there's very clear documents that show you like these are the Pistons this is the spark plug this is the carburetor if it's not clean it'll do this this is the problem with the gas line and you have to fit it this way and that way and so you do it all right and then boom it starts up and it works and you can fix things that way and you can build things that way we don't really have that for the most complex thing that we're aware of which is human existence yeah totally that's cuz it is so complex it's so complex it's and technology also changes very fast so technology is probably it's great in many ways it's a result of progress right it's kept us let us to live longer allowed me to fly from Vegas to Austin and two hours instead of you know getting the old wagon train out and be like yeah I'll see you in like six months yo yeah right how long would that be by wagon train and it's pretty crazy but I don't think we've necessarily kept up with it I mean our hardware doesn't change that right software you know and so I think a lot of the problems that we see today are often a result of us living as almost sort of ancient creatures in a very new modern changing world and trying to navigate that that's what scares me about this seemingly inevitable connection with humans and technology is that I think what we're going to do is integrate with technology to avoid all the problems that we have existing in this modern world with this ancient hardware mm-hmm and that we're gonna adjust our hardware and that the scene it seems to me that this is inevitable it seems to me this is just where we're going and that all humans are going to be some sort of cyborg type thing that we're and also with the invention of AI and you know I'm sure you're paying attention all this chat GPT stuff and that and in deepfakes there's got so many deepfakes people keep sending me commercials that I've never done for you know penis enhancements and you know all these different things well wild commercials and it's my voice yeah and it's my lips moving and it shows me talking about how great these products are and then I never even heard of them yeah and this is just the tip of the iceberg we're just starting to be able to fake things like that we're on a consumer model like someone can just buy the software and put it together and you know and now AI can make literal films so I mean at one point in time right now there's kind of like the uncanny valley in some ways where you can kind of see the difference between what's real what's not really and kind of like yeah it looks fake how long before it like UFO footage is a great example Jeremy Cornwell who's like the premier UFO researcher with George Knapp you know every now and then I'll find something online I'll send it to him it's like oh that's bullshit dude like this this is what they did and you can see it this is how and this is why and like oh okay but there's a lot of that there's a lot of fake stuff and it's hard to it's hard to know it's hard to know what's real what's fake and we kind of can tell now but will we in 20 years I bet no no and I could be five years yeah it might not I'm being very generous yeah sure I'm sure it's five months I mean it's weird yeah and I think we naturally gravitate to the technology right everyone adopts it and then it just is it's just a part of life yeah it's a part of life you just sort of fall into it yeah and oftentimes you get punished if you're not using the technology even though it might be bad for you in the long run yeah so think about something like trying to keep say a teenager off of social media we know it's probably not a great place for them to hang out a ton right and yet if they're not on it their life suffers yeah right because they get they're not as dialed in socially and for teenagers being social is very important due to how the brain is changing at the time right but even think about work especially with how work the nature of work has changed after covid with more people working from home if you don't want to be stuck on email all day it's like I totally get that but now if you decide well I'm not gonna check my email during these times because it drives me insane now you're a negligent employee so you effectively have to adopt the technology to live in the system and then the system starts to sort of govern your actions I read an article about a woman who was fired and she met all of her productivity goals she was working remotely but the company detected that she hadn't clicked enough on her computer she hadn't hit enough keystrokes she hadn't moved her mouse enough and I think there was also an issue with the amount of time she spent in front of the computer that it wasn't enough meanwhile she met all of her goals so like how many people are just in front of an office where they're not checking in a cubicle just bullshitting probably listening in this podcast right now enjoy enjoy and and you know they're okay they're okay because they are in front of that computer and as long as they move their cursor around and do things and and I mean they could be listening to this podcast on under AirPods while they're also fucking around and doing all these other things as long as they spend of and they might not be as productive but they are doing the thing that the algorithm wants them to do this lady got fired it's good she like maybe she doesn't need to work as much to meet the productivity goals you said for her but she's a good employee if you set a productivity goal for an employee say hey we need to get you know X amount of units of work done by Friday and she does it didn't she do her job like if she can do her job in 31 hours and the average person needs 44 isn't she a better employee yes she's more productive yeah she's better right does she have to be clicking on things constantly and it's kind of crazy this lady got fired like that's why it makes me wonder I mean maybe there's some other factors but maybe not I mean maybe it's just as simple as like they're just following numbers and that's how they hire and fire people well the numbers are really interesting because they're not really that old you know numbers are maybe ten thousand years old there's still tribes in the Amazon there's a tribe called the Paraha who they still don't have numbers they can discriminate between one two and three you go above that and it's either small medium or large and that's probably how humans thought of quantities for most of time so if they catch a bunch of fish they can't say how many fish they go they have a 30 people in their village this is the story I just read through the article there's a little bit of both both sides on this story oh she's Australian they have wild rules over there they had complaints about her missing stuff and doing work and then she was saying this is all bullshit and they had evidence of her doing misconduct in their words oh it's a both side story oh okay okay well there you go that makes more sense so plus she's very pretty in that picture maybe she's like trying to be an influencer maybe they factor that in I don't know maybe you know it seems like she's using a filter that's another weird thing right filters people like how many people are just using filters where I see pictures of like a friend of mine with his wife and the wife is using a filter and I know my friend doesn't look like that right you know but he's with her and she's got the filter on like hey bro did you go back in time yeah what the fuck happened you look like you're 15 years younger just get back from Hawaii or exceedingly tan in that photo you look fantastic what are you doing tell me about your diet yeah so you can kind of bend reality and to to get back to numbers is that once we invent numbers it starts to really change how humans behave right especially with measurement because that provides an element of sort of certainty so in the case of that employee it's like someone somewhere with a clipboard goes well a good employee has 20 clicks per hour and then they just go down the thing and go oh well this person had 19 we got a can her so we're measuring by a random number instead of saying did this person do the job we want the way that we want them to what is the outcome of the task we're trying to do and focusing on the actual goal which is to make money for a company but it seems like in this story that's kind of more more to it but that's always the case right if someone makes an accusation have been against a company firing them either always like I was the best employee ever and I didn't do anything nobody ever says I kind of fucked off a little but I think I was good enough to keep the job right nobody ever says that everybody's always like I was perfect and my boss is a tyrant in the work environment is toxic and yeah yeah no one takes personal responsibility yeah that kind of shit now Twitter is a good example of how putting numbers on things can change our behavior and why we do what we do so here's the example is that and I learned about this from a guy whose name is T Nuyen so it's T-H-I-N-G-U-Y-E-N he's a philosopher at the University of Utah when you start to measure Twitter via likes and retweets and that sorts of things that changes what how you use Twitter so Twitter is now the the the platform formerly known as Twitter is supposed to be billed as a place for discussion right and so then you ask yourself okay well what are the goals of a discussion and the answer is like well there's like a fucking lot of goals right behind us the discussion it could be to empathize it could be to understand someone it could be to push back on them like there's all these things that can come out of a discussion all these possible goals but when you start to put numbers behind that in the form of likes of retweets of whatever it is people start to tweet in a way that scores likes and retweets and that is a different goal yeah then is discussion it's often at odds with that so like what does well on Twitter it's calling someone a dickhead it's trying to dunk on someone it's trying to say something outlandish or maybe then something in a way that insights outrage right and that totally changes the point of a discussion right and this guy noticed it in in himself because he so he's a philosopher so his job is basically to think all day he goes you know the first time I had a tweet go viral it was like oh my god that was awesome and then he found himself when he would have these sort of philosophical thoughts instead of going into this really deep zone that he'd usually have to go into to understand it he started finding himself going how could I put this into like a 140 character tweet that'll really do well right and that changes that changes how he thinks and what he does and you see this I mean this isn't just in social media this is in so many different systems where we put numbers behind something it starts to change people's goal in a way that changes their behavior but the goal of scoring numbers is often different from the original goal yes of the behavior you know this discussion actually came up in the hunting world recently because I was having a conversation with a friend of mine there's two goals in what one of the things that people want when they hunt is they want to get a mature animal for a bunch of reasons one reason is that the mature animal say if you get if you get like a seven-year-old mule deer that is a deer that has spread its genes it it's done its job in the reproductive system it's passed on its DNA and this is an old mature deer also it's more of a challenge because this is a wiser deer this is a deer that has probably experienced hunters before most certainly has experienced mountain lions and bears and other predators and so the goal is ethically and morally that's the animal that you should choose to try to hunt now there's numbers that are involved now so with deer it's the size of the antler and the magic number is 200 if you can get a 200 inch mule deer that is a very very rare deer that is a deer that has lived for a long time it has superior genetics it has this very big why have you ever seen a 200 inch mule deer on the hoof yeah they're giant they're giant and it's so impressive so this guy had shot a mule deer this beautiful mature mule deer but it scored 194 didn't score 200 and he was like well it's just a deer just another buck and my friend was furious he's like this is a bastardization of everything that hunting is supposed to stand for like hunting is supposed to stand for this is an ethical way to acquire your food this is the best wild protein that you can get it's the healthiest for you it's also an important thing to manage the population numbers of these animals so that they don't get overpopulated which leads to the spread of diseases like CWZ and chronic wasting and all these different things that people attribute to overpopulation of the car accidents all these different things and but the number thing got in people's heads and this guy was very happy with his deer until he found out it was 194 and not 200 because it's like it's impossible to tell when you're looking through binoculars you're looking through binoculars you go that is a giant mule deer that's what I want to get but he was unsatisfied because it came up and the overall score the way they do it it's kind of complicated they measure the width of the base they measure the length of the tines of the antlers the width of how farther apart and all that stuff gets factored together and it comes up with a score and his score was six inches short and he was bummed out which is just nuts it's crazy it's weird right so his his goal because we put the number on that is simply just to get 200 or over right to your point where you just talked about you know why do we hunt there's all these really complex but far more valuable and meaningful reasons that we go out into hunt but if you get captured by this number that changes your experience in a way that is probably not a good thing yeah I mean you saw this in the wine world when Robert Parker started the wine advocate I think this was in the early 80s or 70s so this guy is Robert Parker's this guy from Maryland kind of grew up in the backwoods he's just a normal dude he likes wine but he thinks all this snobby language around wine like it's keeping people who would otherwise enjoy it from from drinking it so it's a good intent and so what he decides is I'm gonna start I'm gonna start a magazine I'm gonna start giving wines a score from 50 to 100 so when he starts this the magazine takes off because now the average consumer can know well this is an 80 this is a 90 the 90 is better I'm buying that now here's the thing though is that it is Parker who's testing the wines and he's also having to test them alone not with food now one of the main reasons you drink wine is to drink with food because it changes as you drink it right but his scoring system if a wine scores really well those bottles fly off the shelf whereas the ones who don't get quite as good of a store a score they collect dust so what the wine industry does is they go okay well if we want to sell a lot of wine we got to produce bottles that get a good score from Robert Parker so they change how they make wines to suit his palate now if you don't have Robert Parker's palate you don't like what he likes like this is meaningless to you right and so there's one person one person and then you started to see I mean his industry and Empire grew you start to see a lot of other wine rating places pop up that mimic it but it's the same with it's the same with any review right if you put a number on it it's kind of this arbitrary thing that someone has to make up and it's often done in a vacuum and it's very very subjective but we pretend like it's objective and then we behave like it means something right yeah I have a very good friend who's a wine connoisseur like a real wine connoisseur like he has this big wine cellar in his home you go in it's filled with all this crazy wine and he knows everything about wine he can tell you what the good years were and where the vineyards were and where the things come out of and he had a birthday and so he invites me to this uh wine pairing dinner on his birthday and it was great the food was great the wine was great but the it was so bizarre because they bring these flights of wine and then everyone tests the wine and people are recording themselves doing this they have little tape recorders and they're talking about the tannins and the oaky this and the that and and then someone opens up I think this one's corked this one's corked and they're testing yes I believe this one's corked I'm like this one's my favorite I don't even understand what's going on here and there was this one guy that was there that was being heralded as this big wine expert and they would refer to him well cut two years later that guy gets arrested and he winds up doing 10 years in jail for making fake wine and there's a documentary on it the documentary is called sour grapes and it's amazing documentary I haven't seen I've seen it pop up now I'm gonna watch it it's very very interesting because it plays on this very strange thing that people have to want the rarest most unique and what this guy did was he started well he started buying wine that's the first thing he did he would go to these auctions and you know I don't know if you've ever seen any of those wine auctions but they're super bizarre like people are spending ungodly amounts of wine of money on wine like ancient bottles and very rare bottles and so this guy's buying all this wine so he is established as this connoisseur and then what he's doing is he's going to his home and he's aging these labels and he's creating labels and he starts auctioning off and I think is it Sotheby's or Christie's someone's involved in this auction that kind of should know that this is bullshit like they haven't checked and so one man from one vineyard who's this very famous family vineyard sees bottles of his company's wine for sale and he says we never made a magnum that year we never made that bottle of wine like that is not real and that you know is going for insane amounts of money and so then then they start doing an investigation and they find out that this guy has made and sold thousands of bottles of fake old wine including to the Koch brothers and this is where he got fucked this is where he he sold the Koch brothers like millions of dollars worth of wine and these guys are just super ballers with an unlimited amount of money and they were buying like Lincoln's bottle of wine like Thomas Jefferson's bottle like that kind of crazy shit and people are saying nope that's not even it's handwriting that's not this is not real so these guys were they got duped and so then they open the investigation and they find this guy's house and they find the bottles of wine he was buying old bottles and recorking them and like making the labels dirty and doing all this different shit and but it's so interesting because one of the guys in the film is like uh this was a bottle that he sold me was the legit because the guy was selling legit wine too he's like this one's legit and they're drinking oh you can tell and this other guy comes on can let me try that he's like this is garbage this wine's garbage this is fake it doesn't have the complexity it doesn't have the the robustness it doesn't have the and and these other guys who are like also supposedly experts they're like i'm like what what are you guys tasting what is going on here like what is this weird thing that you're chasing that the difference is so subtle it's not even the difference between coke and pepsi you know it's so subtle but yet it's the difference between a bottle of wine that's worth 50 bucks 100 bucks and 40 000 and no one knows no one can tell and this guy had apparently according to my friend such a palette that he could experiment by taking these various much more inexpensive wines combining them in very specific ratios and recreate something that was very similar and as long as you got it in this bottle and as long as you looked at it and it's like oh is it bullshoe ball from 74 and you you thought you were getting the real shit and so then there's the placebo effect right you're you're tasting it and you're imagining it this is rich robust wine that very few people can appreciate and then you're all appreciating this wine meanwhile this guy's laughing his ass off because he made it in his fucking century city house i mean he's like it's fucking nuts he got it in the bathtub yeah i mean literally see if you can get some clips out of that and there was actually a study and it was conducted i think at a university in france that has a good wine department the researchers they got a bottle that you know was scored really high and a bottle that was scored low and they got this group of students and without them knowing they switched the labels right so they so the bad bottle has the nice label on it and vice versa yeah and they you know served it out and they had them talk about it and rate it and do all these things and you know where i'm going with this the students who think that the uh the terrible bottle is good they give it all this like oh it's got a deep bubble but you know they're using all the tannins and all the word salad you know and then with the the bottle that was actually expensive and highly rated that they thought was bad they you know yeah this is cat piss and so and so expectations often to your point about the placebo effect they shape how you experience something yeah as well it's that world is so strange because the difference between a very good glass of wine and a good glass of wine is so big i was with my friend mark once we were in florida and we were eating at this italian restaurant and uh it was a great restaurant and i said let's get a crazy bottle of wine let's get a fucking really nice bottle of wine and i've never had like a thousand dollar bottle of wine so we bought this bottle of wine from you know 1980 or whatever the fuck it was and it wasn't that good it was okay it was okay yeah yeah it was like it was okay and then we were i said okay let's flip it up because there's quite a few people at the table i said let's flip it up and let's get our next bottle let's get like a 90 bottle of wine and we're both like this is better this one's better this is i i don't know what i'm drinking i don't know what i just know what this tastes like nice wine like so here so here's how this guy did this so he would take these bottles and sit them in water and you know he had all these labels and all these different things and he would get bottles from you know like used bottles like bottles of legitimate wine that he had already you know drank you're not shitting that he's literally doing this in some random apartment oh yeah he was doing it in his house yeah i mean look he's got the windows taped up so no one can see him doing it he's got fucking he's got aluminum foil in the windows like he's doing a heroin in there it's like you cooking meth in there yeah man i'm just pulling some labels off some old wine bottles so at the end of this documentary they wind up destroying thousands of bottles of this wine and it's it's really bonkers because like it's he could have sold that wine for who knows how much money and so see see there he's got all those labels that he had sitting there that was the guy that got duped and this is the guy that duped him that guy with the glasses on he was the one who's like this one's a real one and the other wine extras like bitch this is fake as fuck interesting and i don't even know how they know or if they really do know i mean i'm such i'm such i don't know anything about wine i just like i just say uh what's a good wine yeah when i go to a restaurant pick one out for me that's good yeah i don't understand or i call my friend who is a legit expert and i'll say tell me a good and he's usually right i mean oh he's always right but what does that mean what does it mean i mean am i going to notice the difference especially two glasses in when you're eating a steak no as long as it doesn't taste terrible it's a great it's a nice wine i don't yeah i'm not i'm not super into that world either i just gotten so interested in this idea of numbers and having the sort of certainty of quantification changing our behavior in strange ways that i ended up down that rabbit hole another good example would be if i'm a professor why do you go to college a lot of reasons right right you want to acquire information you also want to make friends you want to learn how to get your shit together to turn things in on time to get on a schedule that you're going to need when you go out into the world to get a job all these different things right but what are my students most obsessed about their gpa and that's totally that's very different and i found in my experience as a professor that it's often not the students who are straight a's who are the best because those students tend to be a little more robotic the students that are best tend to be in the b plus a minus so this is because they might have they might be working 40 hours a week along with that so this suggests they're pretty gritty they're a hustler or they might be too free thinking right the type of students where i say hey do the assignment this way and they do it a different and they're just going oh well i thought i could do it this way and blah blah blah blah blah you know and they also don't tend to ask about their grades now the reason that we use grades is simply because it makes the lives of administrators much easier right if you need to compare students quickly if you're sending people through the system you can put a number on it and you can kind of rank people but it doesn't necessarily reflect whether this person has accomplished all these different things why you would want to go to college yeah and what are you going to college for are you going to college to get a good job and if you have a high gpa wouldn't that make you more likely to be hired so there's that yeah there's that little tricky thing also with numbers because it's also very hard to quantify whether or not a person's going to be productive i mean i guess you meet with them and then you want to find out you know how they are socially you know you know like when you talk to them are they easy to communicate with are they gregarious or they they seem like a good person that would be you know a nice person to have around the office because you know they would make a pleasant work environment and that would also help things more productive become more productive it's like i get why there would be numbers but it is a strange thing that humans are obsessed with numbers yeah i think it goes back to what we were talking about earlier with certainty yeah put a number on something you can be certain what it is that you've done the right thing but the reality is is that all these metrics there's so much gray that goes into them but when we see them we think they're black and white yeah and that can um you know obviously we need numbers our world runs on them but i also think we need to be um skeptical that they tell the absolute truth and i think we need to be aware of the fact that they can change our behaviors in such a way that we miss sort of these greater purposes of why we're doing the things yeah that we do yeah and a lot of people don't know why they do they just they just want to be successful right yeah like they don't it's very hard if you the thing about uncertainty right and this is the thing that you have when you're in college or this is a thing you have when you're embarking upon a risky career like there's so much uncertainty is this going to work for me am i going to make it is it going to happen or i'm gonna or am i going to be left out like everybody am i going to be one of the people that doesn't make it am i going to be one of those sad stories like this person they just failed in life and they want to die in a heroin overdose you know like no one wants to be that guy right so it's like what do i have to do and you know what what are the metrics that i have to achieve like what are the numbers what's the thing that i have to do to show oh i make a million dollars a year i'm a winner you know that's a thing totally like if you are a millionaire you could say listen i'm a millionaire like whoa you did it you made it right but that person might be fucking miserable right so isn't the goal to be happy like maybe a person who makes a hundred grand a year is you know they get their bills paid they live comfortably they're happier yeah they're better off they do what they actually enjoy doing for a living and it's just not as profitable yeah like maybe that's a better goal but we can't quantify that like how can i i can't put happiness on a scale right i can't put like if you're a person like say you make knives you make um chef's knives and you know you're just making these beautiful gorgeous knives like and you get deep satisfaction out of this but you're just like fucking barely getting by you're paying your bills like but you're living kind of check to check and it's all about like selling the next knife and okay now we've got the mortgage paid and i got to keep making knives that guy might be happier than some crazy person who's buying hundred thousand dollar bottles of wine because that person doesn't even know what's making them happy anymore like they don't enjoy their job they're just getting money so that they can acquire these things right exactly you're just kind of chasing that next whatever it is the purchase yeah um you know the person that you've hooked up with though whatever it might be yeah and i do think to i do think that what people tend to chase and think is going to make them happy does tend to go tend to fall back into the evolutionary argument of like what did we need to survive right it was food it was stuff it was status influence over others it was um you know information even people really lean on oh i'm the smartest person or whatever um but i don't think you know obviously having a certain amount of income correlates to happiness but once you get above a certain level kind of disappears yeah so i think it was in i'm trying to remember the exact cut off of the years it's somewhat irrelevant but income rose in real dollars 50 from say 1979 to like 2005 or whatever the years are um but happiness didn't actually increase in the united states so even though we got richer dollar for dollar with adjusted for inflation happiness levels didn't seem to increase and this suggests that at a certain point once you have your needs taken care of you're probably going to be good to go and in fact probably chasing more of sort of these ephemeral things you know is not going to make you happy it creates anxiety creates anxiety part of so part of the book i have a section on because the book overall looks at okay why are humans not good at moderation what are the things that we are bad at moderating at and how do we think about getting out of that cycle and so because i'm an investigative journalist i go places for stories right i'm going to go talk to experts i'm going to go live with different groups who are interesting so to get into this idea of happiness i spent a week living with these benedicting monks in the mountains of new mexico so these guys benedicting monk it's an order of Catholicism so these guys they live in an abbey they all live together they basically don't talk to each other they there's only a handful of hours they can talk and they also have to work every day four hours manual labor they have to go into the chapel to pray seven times a day and so despite having this really austere kind of hard life that demands a lot of them when researchers look at their happiness levels and compare them to the general public they're much higher and what are they looking for when they say happiness levels they're looking at um self-reported status life satisfaction scores so they basically ask them how do you feel about this how do you feel about this and then they come up with a metric that they is basically what they think of as happiness that's a weird one because that you're you're getting a person who's completely isolated from the rest of the world right so you're not comparing they're not comparing themselves to other people and so like what they consider happiness i wonder if they have people that are living different walks of life that they can compare to if maybe they would not have the same score that's a great question you know like they think they're happy but maybe they would be happier if they could sleep till 10 a.m you know maybe they would be happier if uh you know they could go on a trip every now and then and just go see paris maybe they would be happier if they had a car and they could just drive out to the mountains and just like sit on the top of a ridge and just look at the beautiful scenery they don't do that because they don't have a car so that maybe their self-reported happiness is incorrect yeah could be or they could could be that you're to your point they could be happier yeah what i do think it suggests that you don't necessarily need all these things that we've been talking about to be happy right and a lot of times i think what makes people happy is not necessarily chasing the next item that sort of chase of like i'm gonna buy this thing i'm gonna hit this amount of money i'm gonna do this it is finding some sort of higher purpose trying to do the next right thing however you interpret that and eventually people wind up finding themselves happy yeah what is yeah it's like it's weird right because you can't put it on a scale like you can tell if someone's overweight you can't tell if someone's happy right and i'll tell you man it was pretty funny because you know when i get there i arrived during what's called the grand silence so this is a time when all speaking is forbidden except in you know grave instances and apparently my arrival classified as a grave instance so the grave the guy uh you know this this monk uh meets me and he kind of you know walks he's like this is a chapel being there at 350 for 350 in the morning for you know this service and then here's where we eat breakfast and by the way don't for breakfast we don't sit we don't talk so blah blah blah and then he takes me up to like the guest quarters and you know what do i do one of the one of the rules is to not be lazy and to not be tiresome and of course i sleep through the 350 am meeting in the chapel right but i make it down for breakfast and it was really fascinating living that way for a week i mean i definitely i got a lot out of it and had some interesting conversations when we could talk and just watching the people live and interact i think it just opens up a lot of you go oh there's like different ways of viewing things and there's probably something i can learn from that am i going to be living in the monastery anytime soon like hell no but there's things we can learn from interacting with other people in the present who are different than us yeah also they're only interacting with the people that they're interacting with physically which i think is a real issue with human beings i mean we're talking about dunking on people on twitter and that kind of stuff i don't do that i've done it in the past um but somewhere along the line i realized that the energy that i'm putting out if i'm being negative that affects me whether i realize it or not if i'm being mean and shitty to someone and trying to ruin their day that affects me whether i realize it or not it's not good for you it's not healthy i don't want to do that in person i don't want to look at a person in the eye and say mean thanks to them and i don't want to look at a person on a screen and say mean thanks to them i understand that there's a great pull to that because of the numbers because if you do dunk on someone you know and say well what are you fucking do and then ah and all these people put memes and all these different things and you get a hundred thousand likes or whatever i don't i don't think that's good for you and i don't think you really get anything out of that other than the the the score it's not enhancing your life in any real way you know you you're just you're contributing to the negativity of the world and i think as fucking corny and as cliche as this sounds and i've thought of it i've especially thought of this after psychedelic experiences which have been some of the most profound life changing and um perspective altering experiences i've ever had that that i have to think about overall good the overall good of what i'm doing like what is over i think a podcast is pretty easy for the most part because for the most part what we're doing is having a conversation and i think this one is very interesting to me and so i think it's probably going to be very interesting to other people and these subjects are very interesting and they they stimulate your mind and i feel good about my work i feel good about it i feel like when people come up to me i love your podcast i'm like thank you i'm glad you enjoy it i really like it i like that i think i'm doing a good thing i think i'm putting a good thing out there and i think it's so i feel good about it if i was using my podcast to tear people apart and tear things down and i mean i do with i criticize things that need to be criticized but i try to be fair and i try to be as overall net positive as possible and i think i'm going to try to do that more and more as time goes on i think i'm going to avoid even i mean even this open criticism of people that deserve it i mean i wonder how productive that really is i i often think about it like should i just spend more time instead of doing that on things that i'm just fascinated with and i think that would probably be better for me probably create less people that are upset at me create less people that are upset listening to it and it's probably better overall like the overall good of things so it's like if you're doing something or you're creating thing like we're talking about knives like chef's knives that's an overall positive thing you are creating a thing that someone will use and they'll appreciate and enjoy it's an overall positive exchange and so i think the more overall positive exchanges you can create in your life the better and it took me a long fucking time to figure that out took it really took me until i started doing this podcast i mean this podcast has been this insanely educational experience to me that i didn't expect to have i didn't expect to be educated i expected to just do it because it was a fun thing to do i used to like doing morning radio and i was like well do my own fucking thing and this would be kind of like doing morning radio but then along the line when i started having guests on and i started considering other people's perspectives and i started considering how i interact with those people and getting better at interacting with them and having some negative experiences and negative negative shows and negative interactions i realized like those don't make me feel good those feel like shit like what do i have to do to not do that and and create more positive experiences and as i've done that the more i've done that the better i've gotten at that the happier i've been with what i do so what's the big takeaway if you had to sum it up from that experience i mean we affect each other and if you're affecting each other in a negative way you're not doing overall good but if you can affect people in a positive way you are doing overall good and so i try to do that i try to do like when we do podcasts that are fun i try to make them like if i have comics on just let's just have a good time like i don't want anybody to feel bad i want everybody to have fun let's have a great time let's laugh i love comics in particular because we can shit on each other and it's funny like like if a comic makes fun of me it's funny to me too like it's i don't my feelings don't get hurt it's part of what we do to each other like when we're alone like comics in a green room are hilarious with each other we're just always shit because we're looking for things to make fun of and you can appreciate it's like if you're sparring and someone hits you with a jab like oh that was a good shot you're like you got ah drop my hand yep thank you you know it's like you're getting something out of that you're getting something out of the kind of verbal sparring but it's all good natured and it's all fun and unfortunately some people don't feel that well you can't take like comedian thinking and apply it to other people some people get like super upset if you dunk on them but you're not trying to be so i have you know you have to learn how to not do that amongst regular people and i've made those mistakes too yeah one i mean one guy who's really helped me in my own life um he's helped a lot of people he said you know i think at the end of the day if all the people i've talked to most people they just want to be loved yes and they don't want to be alone yes yes they want to be loved they don't want to be alone they want to enjoy their experience with other people and i think that even when you look at the our bad behaviors they usually provide some sort of short-term benefit that often gets overlooked like i don't think people do things for bad reasons i think that people usually get something from any behavior they do that doesn't mean the behavior isn't maladaptive but usually in the short term there is a benefit and a reason why they're doing the thing they're doing and it usually goes back to some sort of deeper reason right so the case would be a person who's an asshole it might be a defense mechanism because maybe they're raised by a parent who was terrible to them right and so they feel like they always need to be on the defensive and so yeah when we walk in you know 20 years later we go that guy's a dickhead but really it's like no he still just hasn't recovered from being a kid whose parent was a jerk to them yes and realizing that people are usually acting the way they're acting for a good reason i think gives you space it gives you empathy and allows you to interact with others better in the world and that changes your own experience because if i look at the asshole and be like hey fuck that guy and that changes the rest of my day like that's not a that's not good for me either right right i can just be like yeah well yeah some people are that way and probably probably a reason for it and you have children i don't have children no one of the things that happened to me when i um started realize when you see someone go from being a baby to an adult you you think about human beings in a very different way i think about everyone i meet i think of them as a baby like oh this is a like if i meet some poor homeless person in front of a gas station when i was younger i would look at that person and go oh fucking idiot get your shit together and now i look at that person like what hand did life give you right you were a baby this was there was this lady i saw recently and she had the most insanely bad posture like maybe some like she had suffered an injury like a broken neck because her her head was like she was like very frail and very obviously addicted to drugs and dirty and her head was like hanging down like this so deeply that she couldn't barely look up to like ask for money and you know i just all i could think of was that that was someone's someone's little baby you know you see some guy who's like sleeping on a the corner of a street just covered in filth that was someone's little boy that was a little a woman gave birth to this little boy and they had you know all the potential in the world if they were in a different environment if they were in a different if they had different genes if they were in a different neighborhood if they had different parents if they had different experiences but now here i find them in worst case scenario on the ground you know being ignored people are passing them by no one cares about them you know it's uh a testament to the health of a society when you see how many people are in that state like that's one of the things that i i find very troubling about a lot of these big cities like particularly like los angeles that are just overrun by these homeless encampments and uh it was interesting because i saw something today about gavin newson and um he is trying to uh there apparently there's some sort of law that he's trying to get rid of that does not allow you to move homeless people and he's trying to get rid of that he's and and he's making sense it's like this is not good for them it's not it's like it's you're not saying that you're not caring about these homeless people but to just be forced by law to not be able to move these encampments seems insane not just counterproductive but a barrier to productivity a barrier to progress and you know kudos to him for trying to do that i give that guy a lot of shit i probably shouldn't you know because like i think that job is insane he said he said something crazy about me recently so like his son is involved in these micro cults where he's listening to people like jordan peterson and me and i think he's upset because i called him a con man which i probably shouldn't because that's not product product productive either just call someone a con man he's a politician he's doing what he's trying to do but he did do something i really like recently he vetoed this bill that would have uh forced a parent to affirm a child's gender uh in in order to keep custody of the child it was like some crazy sort of Orwellian thing that they're trying to do where you have to affirm a child's gender if the child is trying to change gender if you do not do that you could lose custody of your child and he vetoed that so kudos to him for doing that it's like it's got to be a fucking insane job you know and for us to stand on the outside and just shit on these people especially someone like him who's handsome and tall and slick back hair and he talks really well it says he's bullshitting us look at all the problems he's created look at all the things but also try managing those problems try try figuring it out what do you do with a hundred thousand homeless people particularly if you can't even move them yeah right and so kudos to him for trying to figure out a way trying to get rid of that law you know it's so easy to criticize on the outside it's so easy to just look at this stuff on the outside and go you know you need to get it together you fucking suck but yeah who doesn't suck what mayor of a big city doesn't suck there's always going to be someone who thinks the person is totally awful and people who are like oh they're okay and people who love them you know um well especially um look no one cared about him at all until covid nobody was upset at him right and then you're confronted with this problem that no one has faced in a hundred years we're going to shut society down there's a pandemic there's a giant pandemic and there's these solutions on the table and um politically particularly in california these are universally accepted solutions like everyone must get vaccinated i mean you're literally having people like shawn pann on tv saying that if you're not vaccinated you're literally holding a loaded gun to people's heads now in their defense at that time they really believed that this vaccine was going to stop transmission and it was going to stop infection and if you didn't do that you you were fucking it up for everybody else um the problem with that logically of course is that if it didn't if it did stop transmission and it did stop infection wouldn't people just realize that and you would you would like only the people who got the vaccine would be okay and then everybody else would be fucked of course over time we've realized that's not really the case it doesn't stop transmission it doesn't stop infection and there's some very weird data that shows that the more often you are hit with these mrna vaccines there seems to be some correlating um effects where like the cleveland clinic study which showed that the more often people were vaccinated those people got covid more than the people who weren't vaccinated as much or weren't vaccinated at all but how the fuck do you know that in 2020 you don't you know when you're dealing with this thing in 2020 and universally politically in especially in a blue state in a blue city like los angeles you kind of have to do that because that's your job you have to tell people to go get vaccinated you have to tell people to do this and you should put you know if it really if you really did think it would work you'd put incentives in place to make sure that it does work but then also when you know that it doesn't anymore then you have to adjust that's what i think it is and the problem with that is then you have to admit you're wrong and that's terrible politically yeah because then you give your enemies fuel and then they get to come after you you were wrong about this and you were wrong about that but i was right and i should be the leader right right yeah i think you know when that when that thing went down we didn't know what was right or wrong nobody knew what was right or wrong i think most people are trying to make the best uh guess they could give them the information that we had but i think you're also right in the sense that once we learn that the information that we we're working off of isn't right we need to correct and be vocal and i think that generally being more open about why we're making the decisions we are and accounting for the uncertainty is probably the answer rather than trying to pretend we know everything in the moment when the reality is that that we don't it's just super difficult to do that and be a politician because you're dealing with polls you're dealing with people that they pick on every single thing that you say and try to find fault in it and try to find uh you know their own counterpoint that's more effective and more accurate and then you also have money right you have the influence of the pharmaceutical drug companies that want everybody to get vaccinated they want everybody to do it and they want the politicians to do it and then when your people want it too what do you do do you stand up and say hey folks i don't think we should do that like that's pretty easy to do if you're in texas like what governor abbott did he was like you know like no i'm not going to force people to do anything and no we're going to open the state back up and i remember so many people were like oh my god you're going to kill people right you're you're opening up way too soon this is dangerous turn out that wasn't the case but if it was right then you know those people would be right it was a lot of guessing man tons of guessing tons of guessing and monday morning quarterbacking is so fucking easy to do and i do a lot of that yeah i do a lot of monday morning quarterbacking yeah um yeah the the questions of homelessness too is a big one especially addiction um that's one that i covered in this book addiction is the big one right addiction is the big one it's the extreme and of an ability to not get enough also incentives you know places like san francisco in particular in portland where um they actually give people i think in san francisco they actually give people money to stay there so these people are there and they they give them you know x amount of dollars a month for food and for whatever they need and they sort of incentivize these people to not improve their lives yeah i think you know addiction is really interesting because for the longest time we thought about it as a moral failing so an addict is a bad person and now this shift uh it sort of shifted around 1995 to thinking that uh an addict has a brain disease and i'm not sure that that's quite right either i think personally after looking into this that addiction is more of a symptom of an underlying problem and that using the substance solves the problem in the short term but creates a long-term long-term problems with everything over time with gambling with gambling with eating with i mean that is the story of what addiction is right choosing the short-term reward that creates long-term problems and consistently doing that over time yeah i think the problem with the model we currently see it as is being a brain disease is that it can deflate hope for people so when you look at reasons why people relapse there was a big study in new mexico of alcoholics i found that the number one reason for relapse was believing that addiction was a brain disease and therefore if i have this disease and there's no known cure for it what's the point of even putting up an effort and those people tended to relapse at much higher rates so i think for me and and i'll i'll tell you i've been sober nine years and for a long time i thought it was a brain disease and i went into this book thinking that and i've changed my mind and i have a ton of empathy too because i think that if you are addicted and i can tell you this uh nothing solves a problem like using your substance of choice in the short term like it is ultimately a solution right for a problem and that's how really drugs have always been so when you look at when humans first started using psychoactive substances they're often used as a tool as a solution so for example you chew coca leaves you get more energy you get more focus that helps you on a long hunt right alcohol used to you know waft off of fermenting fruit you smell alcohol in the air you go eat that fruit it's going to help you find the fruit one you're going to eat more of it because it has a low level of alcohol and it also kills a lot of germs on the fruit so this is the story of like every psychoactive substances right right in the past the actual psychoactive component itself was relatively scarce but it helped us live on the difference is that now we've sort of concentrated the psychoactive effect and put it at scale and i think that is really what starts to create a lot of these long-term problems because it is such a such a stronger substance and it's available everywhere everywhere it's available at every restaurant every restaurant has drugs yep i'd like a glass of whiskey with my meal exactly you're on drugs exactly whether you realize it or not so i went to to study this topic and understand it i ended up traveling to iraq now iraq is an interesting case study of this because they used to not have addiction really and a lot of that is because saddam ruled with an iron fist there's no drugs getting in the country the u.s ends up invading and you know throwing him out and because of that war you have a lot of people who are in trauma they have problems the economy is in ruin they've lived through a war and then what happens is that syria falls and becomes a narco state and they start pumping out a drug called captigon have you heard of this no so it is analogous to methamphetamine it's a pill they put a lot of um stimulants in it now syria produces no shit billions and billions of pills that are moving around the middle east right now like they just busted um a big shipment i can't remember where it was coming through in the middle east but it was like a billion some odd dollars worth of captigon so this drug is sweeping across the middle east and so what happens in iraq is that you have a population who is has a lot of pain a lot of problems in their life there's not many outlets for those problems and then you have a substance come in that solves problems in the short term and you tend to see addiction spike in that country so i um and it was a wacky trip too i had um you know i need to get a fixer or whatever and i i land on this guy and he sends me this email he goes okay i know you're here to study captigon here all the groups we're meeting with the precise times we're going to meet them here's the hotel you're going to be staying in it's the nicest most secure hotel in bagdad i'm going to pick you up in this you know secure top of the line suv blah blah blah you're good to go it's like okay so i land there my man picks me up in a 10 year old b to hell hondai base model drops me off at my hotel which is this sort of hole in the wall just bombed out hotel picks me up the next day i'm like okay let's get our meetings going you know and he goes oh no no this was just proposals the itinerary was proposed this guy totally bullshitted me i'm like every fact of this oh no and i'm in bagdad i'm like oh my god this is going to be a long week this was last summer oh boy yeah so i'm going all right well let's figure this out he goes no don't worry about it just you know worry about other things like what we're gonna have for lunch i'll figure this out for you i'm like okay whatever dude so the first few days we're just madly driving around bagdad in this dude's you know neither secure nor top of the line hondai the whole time and he's texting and calling people he's got two phones he's texting as he's driving and he ends up getting in like two car accidents doesn't even stop the fucking car duty just like banks off a car and just rolls down my window and yells some shit in arabic i'm like what'd you say to those people he goes i said why you in my way oh boy like okay um but just as this guy's sort of grift you know worked on me it starts to work on other people so he somehow talks us into this uh police compound on the outskirts of town where they hold uh the big drug smugglers in the country and different terrorists so i talked to the police there we talked to some of the the people in the prison then he ends up getting this sort of off the books meeting with uh two iraqi intelligence officers who work on the border of syria fighting captagon as it comes through and they told me just crazy ways that people get the drug over so uh a lot of times the government because it's all controlled by the government by the way will hire farmers like shepherds and have them store the pills in the stomachs of sheep so they'll open the stomach of the sheep put the drugs in in a bag sew the sheep's stomach and then have them just move across the border in the night so if you're looking at them as a intelligence officer or the army you're going oh it's just a shepherd now it turns out that actually they're drug smugglers and so these sheep are still alive yeah they're still alive and they just put in some sort of a bag that doesn't get broken down by the stomach acids yeah exactly wow that's crazy so they do surgery on the sheep yeah stuff the pills in there yeah and just walk up there wow i mean we're talking billions of these pills circulating in the middle east wow and but if it's the government that's moving them in the syrian government yeah so syria is effectively a narco state now so most of their uh they make some crazy amount more money producing captagon than they do all their legal exports combined so what happens is that after the country fell they took over the pharmaceutical plants and the pills are all pumped out there now and it's all controlled most of it is controlled by uh what's called the fourth division which is sort of akin to our sort of navy seals like this really elite military unit controls it all and also like Hezbollah which is a been named a terror organization that's involved in the trade too eventually we get this meeting with the guy who's the head of psychiatry for all of iraq and basically what happens is i'm able to i'm in the country going okay like nothing is really this guy's just piecing together these kind of meetings as we go and i track down a guy who's a journalist in the country and i kind of tell my situation he goes you know call this guy so my fixer calls the head of psychiatry and the guy tells him immediately you know just text me whatever so okay he starts texting with him and my fixer starts smiling and goes he'll take a meeting but he thinks i'm another person with the with the same name but he'll take the meeting i'm like wait so he thinks we're someone else and we're going to this meeting and then my fixer's like yeah i'm like i don't know man he goes listen he'll talk he will talk so we go to this damn meeting and you know we come in and the guy's kind of looking at us like you're not who i expected but we sit down with him and i get him to set first he's kind of trying to shoo us out you know but i get him to start talking to us and he echoed sort of the same that we've been talking about he goes look like the the brain disease model and this complex neuroscience around drug addiction is interesting obviously the brain changes due to drugs but the question is whether those changes obliterate all ability to make choice and to change because that's sort of what the government of the u.s sort of claims when you look at nida's website it's all on the brain disease model it says that drug addiction is this recurring disease basically if you have it you're going to relapse etc etc and he really talked about how it is a confluence of a population who's in pain no way to get out of the pain and a substance that solves the problem in the short term so people are who are addicted to drugs they're making a very rational decision to use those drugs because it is solving a problem right there's if you are a addicted person and heroin solves your problem or having a drink solves your issues you face well you're making a rational decision but the problem is that the problems are piling up in the long term yeah interesting so what was your uh addiction alcohol yep so i haven't drank for nine years and you just found yourself like wanting a drink to solve problems to escape yeah it was escape i've had to think about that a lot especially as i wrote the chapter and i think you know there's a lot of you see a lot of different stuff for why do people have an addiction and i think the reality is is that there's not just one reason there's a lot of reasons out there different people use four different reasons to access for me so for example um you know one i can't remember there's one thinker out there who basically says the opposite of addiction is connection that people who are addicted don't have social connections and i can tell you for me that wasn't true at all i had plenty of friends i felt connected i found that for me i had at the time i was working in this job that was rather boring um i had a lot of sort of bound-up energy and i like new uh sort of extreme experiences and i could find that through alcohol so if i drank i could be wild and free in a world that is increasingly orderly and sanitary right it's like i'm gonna be i'm gonna be on my game all the time but the moment i start drinking it's a game like you know the world opens up yeah and i can be i can be who i want to be and sort of really let loose and who the hell knows what's gonna happen tonight that's the comedian lifestyle that's it that's interesting yeah a lot of comedians get addicted to alcohol yeah you know because obviously you're in a bar almost every night and a lot of guys like a drink or two before they go on stage then afterwards hey let's meet down at the bar and then people are handing out shots and then you know you're at some fucking dingy hole in the wall at two o'clock in the morning laughing and having a good time and then you know it's this constant cycle and you think you need that to enjoy yourself exactly yeah and so for me i think getting sober it was one i had to realize that it wasn't going to be easy it's not going to be easy no matter who you are um but it is necessary i mean i really do think that i would have died early had i not gotten sober i mean it was you know pretty bad at times and so i have a lot of empathy for people who are addicted because i understand that you know there's this great um in Dante's Inferno the book he describes satan as living in a world of cold and ice so hell as he pictures it is cold and ice and now satan is in hell which is cold and he's stuck up to ice to his waist and in order to do anything in his life he's always had to flap his wings that's how we get that's how he gets places but he doesn't realize that as he's stuck by flapping his wings the ice is just getting colder and colder and colder and getting him more stuck and that's what addiction is like so you've done this thing it worked for you for a very long time improve your life and then it started causing your problems but it is still this behavior you've learned that has the potential to solve all your problems and you still think that it's going to do do the thing that's going to improve your life but the problem is is you can't see that because it's like that's just what you've always done but what about the genetic component because there are people that seem to be more genetically predisposed to alcoholism yeah i think that that i think there definitely is a genetic component to a point it's kind of like it's kind of like with food right right genetics slows the gun and then your environment pulls the trigger um so i think they're i mean both of my parents for example are um my mom has been in recovery for a long time my dad i don't know i've met him maybe one time and i've you know why i can only assume it's because you think it's over um and so i think that's part of it but then also you go okay well there's the genetic component but also you know growing up in a single parent household and my mom had to travel for work a lot so there's a lot of there's a lot of things underlying the surface and you go you know why why is it that and i don't think this is just for people who um have a drinking or drug problem i think there's a lot of things it's like why is the thing that makes you feel like that's it that like solves my problems i feel better right now like why is it the thing that it is for some people it's food yeah for some people it's gambling yeah for some people it's literally getting super hooked on working really hard just being a workaholic for others it could even be a behavior that side society doesn't reject like exercise right it becomes an escape from problems and a way to deal with life hold that thought i gotta pee yeah we're right and we're back huh much better yeah this is the thing you can't concentrate when you have to pee you're sitting there going i can't get the words out amen i don't even know what i just said the last 30 minutes we were talking about alcoholism and drug addiction and whether or not it's a mental disease and this uh crazy drug in iraq yeah yeah i think it's um it's wild that i've never even heard of that before the amount of capycan is that what you're saying capygon capygon the amount pills circulating the middle east is that what it looks like do they have any of the images of it coming out of sheep guts i mean i want to see it lots of different ways apparently yeah it's got this okay so you see the photo that we're on there it's got those two crescent moons they all tend to have that on them and it's just a mix of so it started in the 60s as a legal um pharmaceutical drug and i think they banned it in the 70s or it might have been that yeah i think mid 70s because it worked too well people were getting hooked on it and it was yeah and then uh what had happened is that enough people especially in the middle east were using it as a pharmaceutical that some drug gangs came in and started making it themselves and now it's just slowly transitioned where syria runs it all the wild one in america that's legal is adderall yeah so we have we have billions of pills circulating as well i know so many people that use adderall they use adderall for productivity these adderall as a journalist it helps them write these adderall to function yeah i know a lot of people that take that stuff and we we googled it once what's the number jamie what was it like 39 million prescriptions a year i've heard one in eight people are on um some sort of attention enhancing stimulant well we are we're on coffee yeah exactly we can't be hypocrites we're on coffee and i've got a zen in my mouth it's that goes back is like people yeah i'm a liar people you come fucking broad i'm over here enhanced and plus i smoke pot well that's not but it is a little bit whopping 41 41.4 million adderall prescriptions were dispensed in the us in 2021 up more than 10 from 2020 and what is 2023 is it keep going yeah so i think one of the the real big issue that we're facing is i don't know necessarily if addiction is climbing or not what i do know is that our drugs are stronger and cheaper than ever and many of them have uh stuff added to them that makes them much more dangerous so you see the overdose death rate go up significantly as fentanyl start starts to get added to different drugs right but that you know i've had this conversation i had this conversation recently with alex baronson and we were discussing whether or not drugs should be legal right because if drugs were legal then you could get pure cocaine and pure heroin you wouldn't have to worry about it being you know laced with fentanyl maybe less people would die but then we both agreed that that would at least for a while create a new problem where many more people would use it because it's legal and how many more of those people would get addicted that wouldn't have gotten addicted because they wouldn't have bought it illegally right yeah that's super great question i don't know so it's like it's really answer it's very similar to the alcohol prohibition dilemma that they faced in the 1920s right um during the the prohibition time the only way to get alcohol was you got to get alcohol from bootleggers right and so that's uh you saw drinking rise too i think part of it um goes back to sort of that loop idea that i was telling you about in the sense that unpredictable rewards tend to hook people more than predictable rewards so when you think of illegal drugs it um you don't know if you're going to get them you don't know how strong they're going to be you don't know who you're going to get them from you don't know if you're going to get in trouble and so there's all these up in the air that make that search for drugs i think uh more compelling than if a drug is legal right yeah yeah i mean if you look at the places where they have the least amount of drugs they probably have really high crimes like very high uh punishments yeah like singapore right right i don't think that's good either no because we can't control i mean singapore is an island right they'll kill you if they catch you with marijuana which is insane which is wild yeah terrifying but it definitely will keep you from doing marijuana if you don't want to fucking die you don't want to get locked in a jail and get beheaded or whatever they do to you yeah and you so much harder to get yeah too because right because the penalty for smuggling in is death too yeah yeah and it's all coming you know there's only so many entry points into the country and they all are either by boat or by plane so it's either coming through the ports or the airports imagine trying to score in singapore just the fucking beer involved in that yeah oh my god well for some people that's the extra rush oh it is it is yeah right the doing the the thing that's illegal the naughty thing right i'm gonna go get me some forbidden fruit exactly give me some forbidden marijuana forbidden fruit tastes better than normal fruit that's for sure and you see that in behavior for sure i mean so drinking rose during prohibition and partly because of the forbidden fruit effect and we still even celebrate that today with nascar i mean that sport evolved naturally out of people supping up their cars to drive them to drive whiskey places yeah yeah we've talked about that before it's amazing it's kind of crazy right that it's like one of our national pastimes and it came out of drug running totally yeah man um so it's i mean it's a fascinating it's a complicated topic um i wonder if that'll be the case in the future if drugs become legal if they'll have like submarine races from like columbia to america because that's the wildest one when the de agents dea agents jump on top of these fucking submarines and they're banging on the roof like stop it open up we're here have you seen those uh have you seen those videos like i haven't seen the videos actually i've heard of god those guys are wild really those dea agents are fucking wild whether it's coast guard or dea whoever those federal agents are that jump on top of fucking submarines see if you can find it jamie god it's crazy because this fucking submarine is shooting across the water and these guys jump on top of this goddamn thing and they're banging on the door holy hell where did they get the submarines russia good question probably like where do you buy a submarine like if you and i go okay we're going to get a submarine like who the hell do we call uh here it is look look at this this fucking dude like this banging on top of the door open up bitch on a submarine jumping on top of a fucking submarine drug submarine bust 12 000 pounds of cocaine seized jeez how big of an industry that is yeah it's a giant industry now here's the question i mean is that is the solution legalizing it you know and this is the conversation again that i had with barrington we're both like boy i don't know i mean i am all for freedom i'm all for people being free to choose to do whatever they want to do and then we deal with the consequences but is that you know what if your child dies of a fucking heroin overdose because heroin's legal totally you know what are you gonna say to that person hey man freedom you know what are you gonna say like no you're not gonna say but then again what if your child dies of an overdose because they thought they were just getting you know some valium or something like that and it actually turned out to be fentanyl yeah that's the that's it's so tricky and i i do think that you start to see the deaths go up when you don't know what you're getting yes yeah and then there's also the reality that certain cartels will poison um certain they would they would literally do that to put other cartels out of business right so they'll if one cartel has like a grip on one area they'll they'll release poison you know like literally on purpose tainted cocaine so that this cartel goes out of business or they get attacked and it's like yeah i do think that there is more hope for people than we often might think a interesting stat that i read is that one in ten americans have a report having gotten over a substance abuse issue in their lifetime 50 of them got over it on their own so what tends to happen in a lot of the big government studies where like you know the numbers are very dire once you're hooked on a substance it's very very hard to quit they tend to look at some of the worst cases not some of the more um you know average cases and in those more average cases the the odds of recovery are a lot higher and i think a lot of it has to do with a lot of times we age out as as simple and strange as that sounds you tend to see addiction spike in people who are about 15 to 25 and that's because of the way the brain is changing during that time so risk is something that we naturally get drawn to we're looking for social connection and we're also looking for how we find comfort and meaning in the world and so if you introduce a substance that does those things for people at that age we're more likely to sort of learn using that substance as something that enhances our lives but once you start to age out over time people generally find other things that provide whatever the drug was providing for them and are able to get off it well also hopefully with age comes wisdom and with a bunch of negative experiences you you know there's the term reaching rock bottom that's with a lot of addicts they have to hit the bottom when they go i have to fucking do something yeah i mean we've all known people that you know you go hey man you gotta stop drinking and they don't want to do it and they don't you know if you drag them to a rehab they'll start drinking when they get out right they just can't stop themselves it's like for whatever reason they haven't hit rock bottom or they haven't decided that their life is so fucked up with with this stuff that they'd be better off without it i think one of the great benefits to people like yourself is that someone who has gone through that can now talk about it and they go oh well look at this michael easter is a very smart guy like how did he get okay he's he's just like me and he did it i can do it too he's smart he's not some fool he's he's a guy who recognizes why he got trapped in this terrible cycle of behavior and thinking yeah and he got out of it i can get out of it too and i'll tell you that once you get out of it so if uh if addiction is if you think of addiction as persistence against negative consequences well applied to drugs and alcohol that's a bad thing applied to a lot of other things that is the ultimate life hack right right the ability to focus like i write books writing a book is a lot of sitting in an office in the dark very early and having to wade through studies having to figure out how do i put together this narrative it is oftentimes frustrating as hell there's a lot of negative short-term consequences but you could almost argue and i've thought about this a lot that my persistence against negative consequences with drinking has carried over into this other part of my life where it is actually creating long-term benefits so that's a message that i like to tell people too it's like if you can get over this you can apply your your crazy brain your crazy behaviors to something that will enhance your life and that makes you pretty damn unstoppable unfortunately the opposite exists as well particularly with athletes i see that in a lot of fighters and even in other athletes they are addicted to success they're there they are like single-minded in their pursuit of excellence to the point where it overwhelms all the other aspects of their life all they care about is winning they want to win win win win win and then they can't do it anymore and that's gone and they need something else and some of them get addicted to i knew a guy who was a top flight pool player like a real world championship caliber pool player and um i knew him really well and he was clean and sober didn't smoke cigarettes didn't do anything and then he was in a car accident and when he was a car accident he hurt his back and when he hurt his back he couldn't play pool and they started giving him pills and the same thing that made him addicted to excellence in pool now transferred over to pills and so now he was addicted to pills and he just couldn't stop taking him he he had this wiring in his brain that was now filled with pills like he had a hole and that pills like we'll take that spot yeah and the pills took that spot and he wound up dying of an overdose and before he died like my friend told me that one time they were all uh at a diner and he fell asleep in his food he literally like tipped forward and his face went into his food into his plate just fell asleep and this guy was mr clean and sober what pool halls are filled with degenerates and all these people that are drinking and gambling and doing drugs and they're these wild outcasts of society like and this guy was the opposite this guy was the guy i'm not going to fall into that trap i'm going to be the best and he would you know eat clean and drink water and you know and and he was like super fucking he would dress clean and and play really well and and he was one of the best players in the world and uh ultimately the drugs got him i mean he he hurt his back really badly he had to get surgery in his back and they gave him these fucking oxies and he just went down that road and then died i mean that's you know yeah it's terrible it happens to a lot of athletes man a lot of fighters it's that they they lose this thing that sort of gave them meaning and then they got to find a different thing it gave them an identity and it gave them thrills the thrill of a fight is the craziest thrill the thrill that knowing that this is going to be this one event that you're preparing for so you're preparing for weeks and weeks and weeks for this one thing and either it's the greatest experience of your life when you win or it's the worst feeling in the world if you lose if it's the worst feeling in the world then you go back to the drawing board and you want to figure out how to get that great feeling again you want to figure out how to achieve excellence and if you can get there if you can get back to excellence again then you want to get it even further and further then you want to be the best you want to be the champion you want to be the number one and then when you're number one it's like how long can i hold on to this i'm 34 you know my body's starting to give out my fucking knees are going you know my back hurts now i got a pinched nerve in my neck i got to get a fucking epidural so i can compete and you know and then they want to break in their body down and then we had kurt angle on the podcast uh kurt angle who was an olympic gold medalist in uh in the heavyweight division okay the cutoff to the heavyweight division is 198 he weighed 199 and he's like i'm so good i don't need to cut weight i'm so disciplined and so good and he beat guys that were like 260 270 pounds whoa he won the olympics with a broken neck he broke his neck in the olympic trials broke his neck rehabbed it somewhat and got a bunch of fucking novocaine shots in his neck so that he could compete went on to win the fucking olympics with a broken neck so think about the amount of mental strength that this guy has and then broke his neck five more times doing pro wrestling she's and and and performed with a broken neck and then the pills right the pills got him and then um he eventually got free of him and you know he talked about it and talked about the journey he was just on it was an amazing conversation because you're talking about a guy who's literally as mentally strong as the the smallest number of people that have ever lived right you know like the fuck and 0.0001 of human beings the discipline the drive the will the focus the strength the grit you know wrestlers above and beyond in amateur athletics are some of the toughest human beings ever because it's all for glory there's literally no money in it there's no money in wrestling there's no like if you win the gold medal you can go on and play for the professional you know wrestling league like if you win a gold medal in you know like basketball well hey you can go and play in the nba yeah if you win a gold medal in many sports there's a professional outlet there's literally no professional outlet all other than the entertainment outlet which is what he went into or professional mixed martial arts which is a different skill set you have to learn other things so you're talking about an insanely powerful person and he got caught in it yeah i mean it can it hits anybody and everyone anybody and ever we have this idea that a person who's addicted is you know the person you see on the street like that woman that you mentioned yeah it's not it's it's it can hit anyone um for all different sorts of reasons but i think the upside is that it isn't a guarantee that you're not going to get clean or anything like that like there are there are paths out of it yeah and they look different for every single person all right so i had a guy who helped me get sober and um i was asking i'm like you know what do what do people need you know and he goes well sometimes people need a pat on the back and sometimes they need a little bit of a kick in the ass right it's like everyone needs something right and what's going to work for one person isn't necessarily going to work for another person isn't necessarily going to work for another person but i do think that the commonality you find is that um it takes action it's not going to be easy and you have to find something that gives you uh that replaces the whole so in the case of your friend it's like there was the you know the wrestling was that was the life that went away it got filled with whatever the you know the drug of choices okay now we got to drain that and we got to put something else in there yeah because if nothing changes nothing changes right yeah that's what they say like get addicted to something good like learn how to play golf or something get addicted to something that's productive yeah exercise running yeah it could be some of you know there there's all sorts of ways people recover there really are and i think that you know something like 12-step programs they really help a lot of people um they're not for everyone though and so if you know if you're a person who's suffering and that just didn't seem to work for you i would suggest you know try something else how'd you do it um i went through a program of people who were like-minded and helped me deal with my underlying issues and sort of gave me counseling and i think that helped me start to peel the layers it's not something i'm super active in now um but it a lot of it did come down to figuring out okay well why am i doing this thing in the first place how have i replaced it um whatever i was chasing can i get that in a different kind of chase you know yeah so for because i like uh sort of extreme experiences sort of exploring the edges intense living i mean okay backcountry hunting let's go let's go in the woods for like a week right that's like pretty extreme yeah extreme uh or even exercise i think gives me a lot of that a lot of the travels i do you know there's a reason that i could have gone and investigated drugs in say ohio why the hell did i go to iraq right because i kind of need that you want an extreme experience yeah and it's you know the hunting one is very valuable for veterans yes a lot of veterans they they leave that world and they're very lost and they they need something that helps them and for many of them hunting fills that void because it's so difficult yeah and i'm sure a lot of people listening to this that have an aversion to that idea of hunting and that they think it's cruel and i i get how they wouldn't understand that unfortunately a lot of those people also eat meat and you know if you eat meat or if you even eat vegetables unfortunately that's the the real sucky reality is that unless you grow all of your own food organically and you know exactly what you're doing and you eat vegetables that you grow yourself if you're getting food from monocrop agriculture you're 100 contributing to the loss of life and not just one life but do you think that a frog is as important as an elk do you think that a ground nesting bird is as important as an elk because if i shoot an elk i eat that elk for months yeah if if you buy a bushel of corn there are a lot of deaths attached to that in insects because of pesticides in fawns and these things that get ground up and and combines when they're they're rolling over the fields like there's a crazy video that i saw of these uh these uh grain combines that are rolling across this field and they hit this patch and you see all these deer just scatter out of there barely barely making it out alive jeez how's this thing is running them over that's crazy yeah rabbits all sorts of things get killed in that and you know you could say that that's also the cycle of life and that that most certainly doesn't go to waste because something will eat those birds or the birds will eat those those dead rabbits you know the vultures and and coyotes and all these animals that do get killed in the cultivation of grain they will feed wildlife nothing goes to waste in the wild you know that's the thing like even if you like say if you're hunting and you shoot an animal and it runs into the forest and you can't find it and you go oh my god i've killed something for no reason well believe me something's gonna find that thing right it's it's gonna get eaten it's like there's nothing that goes to waste in the wild zero things go to waste they will find it they will smell it they will get to it they will eat it they'll consume it down to the bones you see it over and over and over yeah yeah i was mentioning that that scarcity loop system that tends to draw people in and sort of people tend to get hooked on well i mentioned how it evolved from hunting and gathering so you can also find activities that fall into that that enhance your life in the process hunting great example because as you're falling into that random carrots you have an opportunity to find an animal you don't know where it's going to be you don't know how big you don't know anything about what that experience is going to like how it's all going to unfold and then when it does unfold it's like oh my god that was amazing right and then you can do that again the next year it's also people think it's easy and you've experienced it it's not easy it's not easy at all no it's so hard especially with the bow and arrow or the bow and arrow it's insanely hard it requires incredible amounts of discipline and practice even but even with a rifle i mean if you're especially if you're on public land it is so difficult to to get an animal it's so difficult and depending upon what you're doing unless you're like pig hunting in texas you could you get a pig in texas and they they want you to do that obviously because they're an invasive species but it's people have this idea that you're going out there with this high powered scope and a rifle and just easily taking out some animal and then you know you'll see it online when someone will post a picture of an animal like what if that animal is armed this isn't fair you know you should use a spear or you know you should go run up to it and stab it you think you you're a real killer go do it with your teeth you know like it's you see a lot of like ridiculous perspectives and i kind of i know where they're coming from i see where they're coming from they think of it as a cruelty thing but it's because they haven't experienced it i think if they went and they saw how hard it is just like you're trekking through the mountains eight ten out ten miles a day it's exhausting you're burning thousands of calories you're going up and down in elevation you have to be in great shape and you could easily go 10 11 days and come home empty-handed and eat tag soup it happens more than it doesn't yeah yeah exactly and people people get greater rewards from things that are harder to get yes that's what we ultimately find if i if i say give someone a check for a million dollars it's great but they would value that so much more if they had to build a business or something that earned it yes right oh yeah and i think that goes back to a lot of i mean i think a lot of why we are the way we are and what we value goes back to uh evolution and so that psychologist i was telling you about earlier uh thomas dental he said the reason that we get more value from things that are harder to get is probably because if you had to work harder to get something in the past that saved your life you want to incentivize that repeat searching right so the harder you work for something if you get this giant like oh my god that was amazing right we did it that's going to incentivize future persistence like winning a fight like winning a fight yeah all the work that goes into that right you know yeah and so i think finding realizing that um improvement and finding things that you truly value and mean something to you are ultimately going to be a challenge and this even this applies to marriage this applies to i'm sure raising kids i can't imagine that's easy it applies to all these different things that are important part of being a human today knowing that you know a lot of times the process is the reward and the heart of the process probably the bigger reward for you internally yeah i mean that's that cliche it's all about the journey and it is it's like you these little moments where you have success these these moments they're they're just a testament to the fact that the grind is worth it what do you how do you what are you feeling internally when you hunt there's a lot going on um don't fuck it up but you can't think that because you'll fuck it up right but you want to make sure that you've done everything you need to do before a hunt i lose weight i get in really good shape like when it comes july i start really ramping up my cardio i start rucking i carry kettlebells i do like farmer's carries i do all these different things i pull sleds just so i can more easily manage my way through the mountains and i put a lot of emphasis on that this year a lot more than i did last year and i got in much better shape i really kept my diet clean and i practiced every day i was outside in the texas heat it was 104 degrees out i had a giant 64 ounce or 62 ounce whatever it is 64 ounce hydro flask filled with uh like liquid ivy and water so i'm just out there hydrating in 104 degree heat just practicing my shot over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over for hours to the point where my shoulders hurt my arms not steady you know to the point where i should have probably quit four or five groups earlier because my groups are getting a little scattered because my arms not steady anymore but when i get to the mountains i know that i've dotted all my i's i've crossed all my t's i'm in great shape i have great accuracy i'm very good i know what to do and i can do it so it's knowing that that you've done the preparation that's very important this it's a terrible feeling to not feel confident to be doing this and not feel confident i saw a few guys that were like that in camp yeah that maybe it was their first time bow hunting elk and they weren't really prepared and you can tell that they weren't prepared and you can tell that they could tell that they weren't prepared and they weren't successful there was uh i don't know how many hunters in camp with us i think there was 30 two guys got elk with a bow really yeah two does that does it does right yeah why is that tough year tough year is it because of the snow snow yeah yeah they lost a lot of deer um i think they lost elk too but they lost a lot of deer like in some places some parts of the ranch they said they lost some like 50 of their deer one place they lost 80 they think they lost 80 to the winter die off yeah man it's a fucking hard world out there for those animals yeah they're freezing to death i pulled a tag last year for the um cash area which is right bot which is basically within where we were at uh deseret and that went well and i had gone with a buddy whose name is chase lamborn he's at uh utah state he's a phd wildlife researcher kid i went to high school with so old buddy and then he turns out he you know goes and gets his super smarty pants phd and a cool subject so i went with him and you know i asked him i'm like should i put in this year and he's like i don't know man like utah is kind of a mess with mule deer this year like you're not going to go anything yeah they all got killed off so yeah it could be a while many years until they bounce back to the numbers they were a few years ago but that's the reality that these animals live in you know so it was tough in that respect the numbers were a little lower than normal um you know it's also tough when uh they have a lot of feed you know because there was so much rain so much rainfall there there's feed everywhere and water everywhere so it's more difficult predicting where they're going to be and finding them and then you know it's just it's fucking hard it's hard to do a lot of trekking it's a lot of trekking you got to be in shape and you got to be ready you know it's um it's hard but when it's over when you're successful who has a great feeling of relief a great feeling of satisfaction and um the food that you get from it is the finest animal protein that you can get yeah the best stuff in the world for you totally what do you feel like your your most rewarding hunts has been it's always the hard ones you know it's always the difficult ones it's like the deseret is a hard one because not because of density there's a lot of animals there but it's just hard terrain it's you know and the wind swirling like dude you have to have so many there's so many factors i mean there's so many times you're getting close and then you feel the wind at the back of your neck and you're like fuck and then you see the elk just like pick their head up and just start running yeah hundreds of yards away they they smell predator they're like fuck this and you know that's why they're you know eight nine years old the guy the elk i shot was 11 years old that's crazy he was that's wild it was a perfect elk to shoot because his teeth were worn out they were really worn down and he he might have not made it through the winter you know he was at they don't really live older than 11 you know right in the wild like and there's mountain lions all over the place up there is there a lot more now they have a lot they have a lot to the point where utah changed their laws and they made mountain lion hunting all you have to do is just get a tag it's not a draw anymore yeah like and you could shoot them like coyotes wow my mom so i grew up in um just north of salt lake city and the home i grew up in my mom has a mountain lion that hangs out in her backyard quite a bit because there's some woods behind her house it's a pretty developed area too but there just happens to be this wooded area where there's a park and she'll hear the mountain lion at night having just killed some deer because there's some deer that live in there and they're they get pretty damn big around there yeah i've seen three mountain lions in my life and the two that i saw before the one i saw two years ago the two that i saw previously were very small i saw one in colorado it was probably the size of a dog and then i saw one in monocito we were driving down the road and i thought what i saw was a coyote run across the road until i saw the tail i was like oh my god it's a mountain lion wow this is a brief glimpse and again this is probably a 60 pound animal two years ago we saw one that was easily 180 pounds easily he was fucking huge i think that i think that was the hunt that i was on too was it was yeah because i remember you coming back and being like oh my god dude we just saw like and your eyes are just saucer eyed i was so scared and i was in a truck that was a crazy thing we were we were driving down this road and it was at dusk and as we were driving down this road my friend colton saw these eyes under this tree and he hits the brace goes look at the size of that fucking cat and we looked this thing had a pumpkin head like this big old muscular head you know like a like a rottweiler has where they have these big muscles on the side of their head bumps all over it and these massive forearms man his forearms were huge and it was just like crouched underneath this tree staring at us 30 yards away and i'm in the truck so i pulled out my binoculars so i'm looking at him through 10 power binoculars and i'm seeing his whole face i'm looking in his eyes i'm seeing his body and like what do you do if you zig when you should have zagged and you run into that thing like holy shit was it big yeah you just say well there are worse ways to die i guess i'll take this one yeah unless you have a pistol on you but it was it was uh it was eye-opening because even the pit sorry to change the topics but even the pistol thing is i mean that inserts its own form of danger like i heard um there was a guy last year in wyoming who got mauled by a grizzly and he pulled out you know the glock 10 millimeter just opened up the clip and he ended up shooting himself in the ankle a friend of a friend panic and yeah ends up at the bear ended up dying you know walked off dies oh but he shoots himself in the ankle it just blows his big round and then they had to do 10 miles on horses to get the guy to a place where they could life flight them to get reception and they life flight him so this is in wyoming they life flight him to university of utah hospital and they end up saving the foot oh but in the process it's paid for that one yeah well that's a panic moment right and you don't even know what panic is until you see a fucking grizzly bear yeah you know steve ronella um he had had encounters with bears in the past but he told a story and he was also with my friend remi warren who told the story in the podcast about um they were in a fog knack island so a fog knack is like um alaska and so there's the coastal brown bears so you're dealing with like an 11 12 foot bear giant giant right because they just eat salmon all day exactly and they eat elk because they're on this island hunting elk so um he shot an elk and um they're in this insanely dense area where it's very very difficult to pack out so they hang the elk in a tree they leave some of the meat they take some of it back they go back the next morning to get to the elk and they see some bear shit and they don't you know they don't think anything of it they're there the elk is still there they think they've got it well some bear had claimed this elk and they didn't know that the bear claimed the elk and they're all sitting around eating lunch they're they're gonna have lunch and then because it took them like hours to get to this place and then they're gonna pack out the elk and while they're sitting there eating lunch this fucking 11 foot bear runs at them through the trees through the camp but there was so many people there that the bear doesn't know who to attack and just kind of runs through them and uh one of his camera guys this guy his next name is dirt myth dirt myth winds up on the bear's back the bear like literally plows through these people and he's on this thing's back for like 10 yards as it's running and then he falls off my other friend jonas hits it with a trekking stick in the face as it passes him and he said it was literally a foot from his face this fucking gnashing enormous mouth this maw that would be instant death and he said all your ideas of what you would do in that circumstances they're all out the window your your reptilian brain completely takes over and this is a guy in steve ronella that is as experienced a woodsman as you will ever find yeah he's also a brilliant guy he's very smart and he can articulate the experience in a way that not not that many people can and the way he described it was absolutely horrific just horrific like you just don't you don't have any idea what what that would be like until you encounter it and then when you encounter it you don't ever want to see that yeah that's crazy those things are so giant so giant you don't even understand what it means until you're around them and they're running because they can run like a fucking quarterback or a line back or like a like a corner back i should say they run fucking fast is what i'm trying to say did they hear it before they did they just hear this coming through the i think they heard some noise in the woods and they turned and it was just running straight towards them literally like a bus just a bus like a volkswagen bus with teeth just running at you fuck man so that's something that's literally 10 times the size of that cat that i saw oh i'm shitting my pants looking at this cat through a window 30 yards away in a truck where i'm kind of protected and they you know encountered this thing that ran through their camp yeah well they're gonna remember that forever they'll remember that forever absolutely yeah it's you know there's just the reality of nature in the wild people that don't experience it like someone was telling me this today i need to know if this is true that in british columbia you can't even shoot a bear in self-defense really yeah well they outlawed grizzly bear hunting and which is crazy because the problem with a place like british columbia is that the voting population all exists in urban areas right so you have all your people from vancouver it's a beautiful city and you know it's the the kind of people that live there are urban people right they're not they don't have any experience with wildlife for the most part unless they regularly go out there so they don't even know what they're voting on and and this bill comes across like should we outlaw a grizzly bear hunting like well no one's hunting a grizzly bear to feed their family that's ridiculous like we should outlaw that so they outlawed well my friend mike who runs a guide service in northern b.c he experiences his he had to shoot a fucking grizzly bear from like three feet away from a cabin door so this thing was trying to break into a cabin and shoot it like as it was coming to the cabin door like these are terrifying animals breaking the house is easy yeah terrifying and there's also wolves up there like packs of wolves that'll take out a horse every now and then so you'll like you hear some crazy noise you look out the window and there's a pack of wolves mauling one of your horses the the wild that those people exist in it is so alien to anyone that lives in an urban environment that they they pass these laws and they don't even know what they're voting on they don't understand right they should literally be forced to go out there and camp in the wilderness and encounter grizzlies and understand the population there's a lot of them it's not a small number they're not endangered by any stretch of the imagination grizzly bears are thriving up there yeah and when you're not hunting them now they're not afraid of people anymore so at least when they were hunted they'd smell people and they go oh i equate the smell of people to someone hunting me i'm gonna get out of here now they don't avoid people at all in fact they say they come to gunfire because they hear gunfire and they think it's a downed deer and they go to steal that deer from the hunter yeah so they hear a gun and they run towards where the gun is going to the gunfire well and once you i mean so the whole point of the vote is that people perceive that they're limiting suffering yes right um but once you get populations big enough then you start to have problems with how much food they can access there's going to be infighting between them so you're going to get suffering on on the back end and then they go into ranchers and they start attacking cattle and they start it becomes a giant as soon as they're not threatened by people at all they become very fucking dangerous yeah see if that's true you can't you can't shoot them even in self-defense i can't find anything that says that i found it a case where a guy claimed self-defense but the judge said that didn't sound like self-defense because he went back inside to grab his arrows oh that's the only thing i could find that was even close to it i'm looking harder but i can't find it that could still be self-defense because you go back inside the grab if you have to get out and it's there and now you have arrows on you it's kind of like what's happened on maui with the axis deer right there's just so damn many yeah except they're not dangerous yeah yeah exactly and you can eat them and you know they've got maui nui venison which is a company that's uh really done an amazing thing where they they hunt them they have a usda processing facility on the ranch and you can buy wild game from maui so you're helping control this invasive population you're getting this incredible delicious protein that's uh that's actually necessary to shoot them because they don't have any predators yeah they don't have predators and the way that they're shooting them too is about as ethical as you can get i mean they're shooting them as i understand it in the middle of the night just like right in the head like bam they're done yep yep it's it's very yeah they're using yeah and they process it like i said with the usda facility so you know that you're getting you know it's it's all clean and safe and it's all done correctly and sanitarily and you know you can get the best protein that you can get and it helps them because like lanai is crazy when we were in lanai lanai has 3 000 people this gorgeous island and it has 30 000 deer and you can't imagine the numbers when you're drunk we drove at nighttime and um we hit the high beams and you just see eyeballs yeah as far as the eye can see i mean you're looking at thousands and thousands and thousands of deer just in one field crazy just eating everything that they can and they hunt those at night too they hunt those with snipers they do everything they can it's great for the population because everybody there eats well they all they all have great food they all have great venison but it's just so unnatural yeah and i guess they were a gift they were a gift to king kamehameha yeah and then they just overpopulated the island yeah how do you feel like when you train this year how did you feel rocking helped you well um anything where you're carrying weight and you're going like one of the things that i did quite a bit is um uh 30 incline on a um i have a real good treadmill there's 30 incline and put a weight vest on that's awesome yeah and just watch a movie and fucking grind oh yeah that's the pack mule workout dude i do that a lot my feet my feet my calves were killing me um it's hard man it's hard another thing i did a lot of is the echo bike you know it's like in a small bike the rogue bike that one helped me a lot intervals yeah tabatas okay yeah so i do these 20 second sprints 10 second rest 20 second sprints and you do it a cycle of eight and i would do that at the end of my workout so do all i start off every workout with a cold plunge i do a cold plunge for three minutes then i do my series of body weight exercises to warm myself up every day i do 100 push-ups and 100 body weight squats on a slant board so i do those and then by that time i'm warmed up and then um generally i do most days i do um nordic curls so i have a nordic bench so i hook my heels into this thing and then i lift myself up with my hamstrings it's a hard exercise it's hard yeah so i do reps with that and i'll do three sets of uh six or seven um now i'm up to seven um seven reps i want to make sure that i don't blow something out you know because it is hard to do it's like you're going yeah it's not a it's not like a body weight squat like i can do 20 body weight squats easy so i do sets of five five five sets of 20 rather you know so i that's how i get my hundred in but the the nordics i take a good amount of time in between yeah like i'll do it and then i'll do like a good five minute rest before i attempt the second set maybe even 10 minutes sometimes yeah so i do those and then i generally do kettlebell routines or i do i have a series of body weight series that i do where i do 10 chin ups 20 20 dips and 10 l chin ups or n pull l pull ups so it's close grip where my feet are extended out in front of me yeah and i'm doing these and i do sets of 10 of those and i'll do a circuit of five so five of those so i do you know um so it's 50 chin ups 100 dips and 50 pull ups so it all winds up to be 100 and 100 yeah and so i do that and then um generally either i'll do um neck exercises or core exercises like i'll do the iron neck and i'll do um you know with those hip glute ham machines where you you can do a sit-up where you're like way low oh yeah i do sets of 20 of those and then i do back extensions the opposite i flip it around and then i have a sore neck one that actually doubles as a reverse hyper and so then i do my reverse hypers and then uh i stretch out and then you know stretch my back out because it's a lot of back you know it's a lot of compression there it feels like everything's tight so i you know relax and stretch that out and then generally i'll do my sprints on the in the air dye machine and depending upon how hard the workout is i usually do four or five rounds of uh tabbatas so you know you're doing eight eight sprints each round eight sprints with uh eight rests then i'll recover i get my i wear a heart rate monitor i get my heart rate down to about 100 and then i get back on it again and i do another one and i get it back down to 100 do it again and depending upon the workout like if i'm just doing that i'll do 10 i'll do 10 reps so 10 10 series of eight yeah and but if i'm doing all that other stuff first i'm so beat up by the time i get to that that i'll do four or maybe i'll push myself to do five and then i immediately go into the sauna so my cardio still bang it because it's like i'm i'm going into the sauna my i'm already 130 beats per minute i'm stepping right off the assault bike yeah and it's 185 degrees in the sauna and i sit in there for 20 minutes yeah right on that'll do it yeah it fucks you up but but it gets you in tremendous shape it really does and if if i'm and i was consistent with that it made a big difference in the mountains i really know because you know obviously this is sea level it's like almost altitude here it's like fucking 191 feet it's nothing and in utah we were at 8 000 so you have to be in shape there's no other way to either you live up there and you fucking hike those hills all the time or you prepare yourself yeah so that's what i did i feel like the the slow grind of rucking is awesome for cardio and then you just pair that with to what you're talking about which is that high intensity you hit both those systems and that's kind of a secret sauce to me a lot of what i think about too with hunting is how can i resist injury you roll an ankle or something out there or whatever it might be i mean that can blow the whole thing for you so i also do a ton of durability work like just getting my ankles like real tight and resistant to falls getting my knees nice and locked down and then the question just becomes okay can i cover ground while bearing load for an entire day and if the answer is yes like all right i feel pretty solid right and can i handle a pack out if i have a heavy pack out so i have one of those treadmills too that goes at a pretty good incline and i'll throw you know maybe a hundred pounds in a ruck or something and just slow grind for a while and it's just the worst but you get it done and you're like all right one of the most satisfying things about the hunt was that i had to pack out i had to carry these quarters on my shoulder and make it up this wet slope so it's like very steep and it's pouring rain out and everything's wet you're stepping over wet logs and i'm carrying this quarter which probably weighs 80 pounds on my shoulder and i'm climbing over stuff and but you know i like i slipped but caught myself so i have the balance to catch myself it was all just confirmation that i had done the work yeah it was very nice yeah it felt great that i didn't have to feel like like i was underprepared yeah totally yeah right on man good times up but again it makes you want to get right back to it like as soon as it's over you're like okay don't slack off don't get fucking fat now stupid you know like don't get out of shape because now i have a good base so i have to keep it going well that's a great i mean it's a good pursuit because once a year you are going to have to get in shape too which i mean you probably keep yourself in shape generally but a lot of people that's the thing that pushes them they need you need an activity right a lot of people aren't just going to get in shape just to get in shape there needs to be some greater reason greater why behind it yeah and finding that i think can be transformative for people yeah you have a goal instead of just saying i'm going to be in great shape like why right like what you know i'm going to use it but if you have a thing that you know you're going to do in september that's fucking really hard to do and i've really worked hard this year like i i came into like july in great shape already so i was able to do it i really never slacked off the whole year so it made it it makes a difference also diet yeah i cut out all the bullshit i cut out all the bullshit i lost 10 pounds i i basically am on the carnivore diet that's basically what i'm eating and uh pretty strict and made a giant difference i think the cutting out of the bullshit is the most important thing for people so part of the book i found this tribe that has the healthiest hearts ever recorded by science they're called the chamone tribe and uh they're in the bolivian amazon so i go down and uh visit them in bolivia so i got to fly into lapaz which is like 13 000 feet and i was supposed to take a small plane down which is a half an hour but the airline goes belly up like the day before i'm supposed to get there right so we got to take this 12 hour car ride down to the jungle and you take a six hour canoe ride up into the jungle and it's all just a wall of green right you're going all looks the same and it has for the last six hours and then eventually the you know the guy the canoe guy just goes up a bank and you're like how the hell do you know this is the place it's like now trust me so we get out and you know there's the tribe and um the real difference maker their diet generally at some point across the day it's gonna break like every popular diet that we've been given in the last you know 40 years like they eat some sugar they eat some chocolate they eat red meat they eat fish they eat white rice they eat white potatoes it's not low fat it's not low carb it's not right it's at some point it's gonna offend someone they eat corn but the real difference maker is to your point about bullshit it's all one ingredient right it's all just having one ingredient and they're not eating super processed food it's just real food it's just real food it's real food and meanwhile in the us um i think something like 60 percent of the food the average american eats is ultra processed and so back to the the scarcity loop idea i told you about um there's this quote from a guy who's with the food industry he said if you want to make a food so people overeat it over consume it it's got to have three v's it's got to have value it's got to have variety and it's got to have velocity now that is just a different way of explaining what i just laid out right it's like the value it's got to be relatively cheap it's got to give you something um variety you got to have a lot of different flavors not only within the food itself so this mix of sugar salt fat whatever it might be but also a lot of different varieties of junk foods like you go to the supermarket and there's like 45 different doritos right and then velocity you have to eat it fast and so when um scientists will put people in a lab and have them eat one diet that is basically unprocessed very minimally processed versus an ultra processed diet where everything else is matched this is an nih study the people who eat the ultra processed diet end up eating 500 more calories a day just by the fact that they eat it much faster and you don't get those natural breaks with that you would with natural food that are telling you oh okay you're full because it's taking up more room in your stomach i mean think of a boiled potato versus potato chips one ounce of a boiled potato might be 50 calories vitamins minerals whatever one ounce of potato chips might be 250 calories and by the way like how many boiled potatoes are you going to fucking eat right i'll tell you how many potato chips i could eat and the answer is quite alarming right yeah bags yeah i can keep going i'll have a second bag of pringles yeah the box of pringles or um like ripples yeah oh love those good yeah so i think vinegar ones yeah exactly yeah those are the ones that get you yeah it's uh our food there's so many people that eat far more calories than they burn and it's easy to do you know if you're eating pizza how easy is it to overeat on pizza yeah fucking and that's not even processed even good pizza dude yeah i mean the amount of calories like a pizza from a place like a dominos or a pizza i mean it just literally like hits your mouth and just kind of melts and somehow you've just eaten one slice in like you know seconds one bite yeah it's probably who knows how many hundreds of calories in a slice yeah it's gotta be five six slices yeah so i'm literally burning off i mean it would take me hours in the gym to burn off a pizza oh totally like if i eat a whole large dominos pizza which i have more than once oh i have two yeah how many hours is that in the gym so many probably like three hours of hard cardio just and you're not gonna do that and i don't there's i don't think people realize just how many calories things have like okay this morning you know before the show i go get a coffee or whatever and i get a black coffee but you know people's orders are coming out and you know it's like all right i got a um pumpkin chino uh cinnamon bond frozen frappe extra whip for so and so large and you're looking at that going like that's probably 900 calories yeah maybe you know and that's like in the start of their day in addition and that's not breakfast right that's like the coffee that's a nice coffee i'm just gonna get a starbucks yeah just gonna get that's what they say i'll get a starbucks i mean it's a fucking milkshake they uh someone made a breakdown i think on uh instagram or something like that of uh one of those uh baskin robin's coffee things those flurries or whatever the fuck it is that's a that's a mcdonald's thing right whatever it was 129 grams of sugar whoa so they showed the actual amount of sugar you would get he had a clear like container that showed the amount of sugar that you'd be eating just drinking one of these things crazy how do you stay awake after that it seems like you'd go into a fucking sugar coma so when i when i was in the jungle with that tribe we did have sugar we had a sugar cane but the difference is that we had to walk into the jungle we had to physically chop it we had to move it to this expeller thing they have that is human-powered so you put the cane in this in between these two wood pole things and then you have to push this thing around and it shoves the cane through that and it juices it and so by the time you've done all that work like you've burned quite a few calories and by the way you're not getting 129 grams from it right thing of sugar right and so i think it just goes back for the average person that we don't move enough so we can't buffer the sugar right diabetes could just be that you are uh it's too much couch rather than too much of anything else and it's also just so easy to eat food today and take in a lot of calories in one bite because just as you know i mentioned the beginning we got this casino lab figuring out what leads people to gamble more we've got tons of labs across the country going how do we make super delicious hyper palatable food that people will eat more of yeah now i don't fault this yeah this is the guy so it's dunkin donuts that's what it is not baskin robins has 185 grams of sugar oh 185 so it's this much it's four look at that damn six teaspoons of sugar to give you another perspective the amount of sugar in there is equal to 14 glazed donuts dude it's like and how many people throw those things down every day that's the ultimate calorie delivery dunkin donuts i didn't know it was a dunkin donuts thing dang yeah yeah we eat too much sugar we eat too much processed bullshit and um if you don't do that the interesting thing about the carnivore diet is you can't overeat i mean you could i guess i can't i get satisfied pretty quickly yeah one you know 16 ounce steak or an 18 ounce steak and i'm done but if that 16 ounce steak was sitting next to a bowl of pasta i would eat the pasta too smashed in pasta yeah you just like try it a little oh so good like even though i'm full i'll still eat it because it's like you're getting this reward from those carbs and the flavors and because that's one of the things they say about those competitive eaters you know when they're in those hot dog eating contests and shit like that they eat fries with it so that they could eat more food so they can keep going yeah yeah which is wild if you offer a human more different food they will eat more different food yeah so even if you like they do studies in buffets and people always eat way more food than normal at a buffet simply because they're trying so many different things right and there's incentives to to do that so i think when you when you start to cut out food groups you inevitably eat less food because it also becomes less rewarding as well you know yeah i think that's what happens with this tribe as well as i mean when we sit down for lunch we have chicken white rice some baked plantains and some onions it was all terrible it was all fucking terrible dude just bland subsistence food bland as hell the chicken i mean so the chicken was probably i don't know like a three pound chicken or something i mean now today in the u.s our chickens are giant giant and so this meat is just really like stringy and chewy i'm going thank you thank you yeah it's a wild chicken probably yeah wild chicken and so we just don't we've enhanced the flavor of our food to such a degree that we're never going to eat more of it which don't get me wrong this is a good problem to have in the grand scheme of time and space it's better than starvation it's better than starvation so people will be like you know the modern food system is the worst thing ever and it's like well compared to what right compared to 200 years ago very few people are starving to death in america exactly if they are and at all i don't know what the numbers are but yeah i mean usually that's abuse someone's starving yeah it's usually a distribution problem and it often unfortunately happens with children because they've got shitty parents yeah it's not a food thing we throw out about a third of our food which is crazy yeah well listen michael it's always great to talk to you my friend it's always great to sit down talk to you about anything and everything and uh your book your newest book scarcity brain is it out now it is out yep uh do you do audiobook i did do the audio book you did i did the other yes i read the whole damn thing yes yeah i'm so happy when people tell me that i hate when an author who especially you was voice i know you know i want to hear you say it you know it it bums me out when so i'm glad you did it yeah