Bingeing, Escapism & Modern Addictions - Michael Easter

why is moderation so hard to achieve why can't humans just ever get enough it never made sense until maybe I don't know the 1970s to start moderating right we're we're species that came up in these environments where everything we needed to survive was scarce food stuff information even number of people we could influence status things like that um and so the people who lived on and spread their DNA were people who tended to not try and moderate on those things right but the difference is that today we have an abundance of all these things that we're sort of built to Crave if you will and um we still have our old our old genes that push us into more so because we existed for almost all of human history with less than we wanted less than we needed we have seen everything as being a fleeting brief amount of abundance in an ocean of scarcity we should take it advantage of it right now give me more more more of everything that's in front yeah exactly right in the and take food food's a great example in the past it was hard to find food you would have to walk around all day pick it out of the ground pick it off a tree you would have to hunt it have to literally run it down until it was exhausted and then you'd spear it and then youd take it home and so it required effort and there was never a maximal amount of it so when you had the opportunity to eat you wanted to eat as much as possible and you even still see this today in some tribes where I talked to a a researcher who was hanging out I think with the a tribe in Paraguay and he's like these guys Came Upon This orange Bush and they literally ate oranges until they threw up and then they ate more oranges right because that sort of behavior gave you a survival advantage in the past because you would put on that those extra calories as as fat and in the times when you inevitably encountered a scarcity and you were starting to lose weight uh you would have something to draw on we still have that exact same Drive in a world where now that you live in the US you can identify with this where there's a 7-Eleven on every corner pumping out cocacola and Slurpees and bags of food and we've got you know I live in Vegas there's buffets where people will go up you know 10 times and uh that often backfires but it's not just of course it's not just food right it's all these other things it's like the average person today owns more than 10,000 items the house right we see more information some researchers think in one day than the average person 700 years ago would have seen in their entire life and so it's all these different things that used to give us a survival Advantage overdoing them we now have an abundance of them and continue to overdo them do you ever think about the fact that the selection press pressures on our ancestors and the uh fulfillment pressures on us now have basically inv converted so we are the progyny of the people who would have sought out more information who would have sought out more food who would have sought out more status or Identity or certainty or whatever it is and we are uh inheriting the challenge that they benefited from in a world now that is terribly mismatched yeah exactly that's exactly it and you know I will say like let me be clear these are good problems we have now like I'll take having to try to not eat too much rather than being like where's my next meal are we going to survive this upcoming bad winter right but there's still problems nonetheless and so a lot of what the book does is it looks at how did we get here um what in particular is pushing us into more today because I think what's also interesting about the last you know since the 1980s is that I think that technology has really allowed um insights into what really drives people and hooks people on behaviors that push them into more so as part of the book for example I uh well I'll just I'll just build this up by saying we have technology that really is pushing us into more and one of the insights of This Book Is that I sort of discovered what I call the scarcity Loop now this is a three-part Behavior Loop that is unparalleled at pushing people out of moderation it is the serial killer of moderation now the way that I discovered this is that I live in Las Vegas and living in Las Vegas you see a lot of weird stuff right I mean it is a town built on excess and getting people to eat more to spend more to do more to have more fun to do all these things to access but by far the best thing and the weirdest thing is the slot machines because these things are are freaking everywhere and people play them around the clock I mean they're in grocery stores they're in gas stations they're in restaurants and I wonder why do people sit here and play these things for hours and hours because this is an inherently irrational Behavior The House Always Wins everyone knows this so why are you hooked on this behavior that doesn't make any damn sense it doesn't so this leads me to start asking questions long story short I end up at this casino on the edge of town in Las Vegas it's one of the newest casinos in town super Cutting Edge uh but the public isn't welcome and that's because it's a casino laboratory so the gambling industry as well as a bunch of big tech companies uh basically built a real casino but it is a human behavior laboratory and so they're looking at all these different ways that what happens in a casino impacts human behavior now as part of this visit I end up to bring it back to slot machines you probably wonder why the hell is this guy talking about slot machines um I end up talking to a slot machine engineer and he walks me through through why slot machines are so effective and they run on this Loop that I call the scarcity Loop and it's got three parts so it's got opportunity unpredictable rewards and quick repeatability so opportunity you have an opportunity to get something of value in the case of a slot machine it's money uh two unpredictable rewards you know you'll get that thing of value eventually but you don't know when and you don't know how valuable it's going to be so with a slot machine you play a game you could lose your money you could win a dollar you could win a million dollars and there's a fantastic range of outcomes and they're all unpredictable and then three quick repeatability you can repeat the behavior immediately so with the case of slot machines the average slot machine player plays 16 games in a minute which is about as much as we blink now the important part and why uh I'm not telling you just about slot machines to tell you about slot machines is that this system is inherent in tons of the Technologies and even institutions that I think most influence our life today so what is what makes social media work it has been embedded in a lot of personal finance apps like Robin Hood it's part of the rise of sports betting obviously it is what makes dating apps so enthralling it's in our education it's in our food system and on and on and on you start you know when I started really looking at this thing you're like oh wow this is everywhere and it is such an important part of so many behaviors that people do over and over and over eventually to their detriment to some degree or another so I it's really great and I love using gambling as an analogy uh some of the cool stuff that you can learn about uh there's no right angles on the carpet if you walk into a uh a casino there's never windows to the outside world uh there's rumors that they increase the oxygen saturation in the air uh by pushing this stuff through um so all of that fascinating the same number of times that you blink is the same number of times that you play slot machines also fascinating what I don't get yet is why why have you called this the scarcity loop I don't this there doesn't seem to be any scarcity in in this what am I missing well it pushes us into more and I will say so when I started um trying to unpack why slot machines work the first thing I did is I called a bunch of researchers who uh basically research gambling but from a here's why gambling is bad perspective and they told me all these reasons why people supposedly to gamble to excess and it was what you said it's there's no right angles in casinos it's that slot machines play in the key of C which is supposed to be relaxing and so we're going to spend more they don't have clocks and the problem with that is that when you go into a casino you see right angles everywhere I mean the I mean this the slot machine screens are a right angle it's a box so that doesn't make any sense I call up a slot machine audio composer I go hey like what do you what do you use when you write these little slot Jingles that's a real job you can have in Las Vegas by the way it's a good town uh he goes no where the hell did you hear that he's like I use all different keys and then the clocks thing is like yeah casinos don't have clocks but neither does like Walmart or Target or Costco or your grocery store it's not normal to just hang clocks everywhere in a business right and really what makes people gamble is that this Loop that I told you about the scarcity Loop is that it's inh enthralling to humans it's the definition of what makes a interesting game and it can provide a fun escape right so even though there isn't a scarcity it pushes us Beyond moderation which is the situation that we would have done had there have been a scarcity okay that makes sense okay so why are we so hooked by this like what is it that it's doing to us that's causing us to stay on and on and on yeah so I called a guy whose name is Thomas zental now this guy is in his 80s he started studying psychology in I think 1968 is when he graduated got his PhD from UC Berkeley and he was following up on a lot of research behavioral research like he's a you know sort of direct descendant of of Skinner and um when psychologist started realizing that animals get really hooked on unpredictable Rewards Skinner had been um feeding rats treats at a predictable interval and he started running out of treats and so what he ends up doing long story short is he goes okay I don't want to make more treats it's going to take a lot of time I'm just going to give these Rats the treats unpredictably like I'll just give them every now and then and they're probably going to get bored they're going to get bumped out they're going to you know whatever and what he found is the opposite happened these rats got totally uh enthralled in hitting this lever if they didn't know when they were going to get a tree so zal he goes okay I'm going to follow up on this because this is weird and this guy has basically found that it's pretty easy to turn a pigeon into a degenerate Gambler he gives these studies where he has pigeons can play one game where it's a predictable reward game or they can play another game where it's an unpredictable reward game so it's very much like a slot machine setup now in the unpredictable reward game they will get less food overall for the behavior and what he found is that 97% of pigeons choose the unpredictable reward game they choose to gamble rather than play the game that gets them more food overall this like doesn't make any damn sense right and what he told me is he thinks that this Behavior the fact that we do tend to really hone in and focus on unpredictable rewards probably tracks back to finding food so if you think about humans you know hundreds of thousands of years ago we have to find food every day and we don't necessarily know where that food is so you go to one place no food you go to another place no food you go to another place no food you go to another place oh my God jackpot there's so much food right so our brain seems to incentivize this sort of repeat search for something and get excited when it happens the center of the bullseye according to both Sam Harris and Andrew huberman when it comes to pleasure is things being about to be slightly better than we done anticipated yeah like that just it's the very beginning of the moment when something good happens it's when you you turn on Instagram and there's a hundred new comments it's when you are just about to head out a really good study from uh my old industry of nightlife they got people to track uh they pinged them on their phone and got them to track the uh level of happiness that they had throughout the entire night right from like 3 in the afternoon till 3: in the morning and you'd think you're going to go on this night out and there's going to be a DJ and there's going to be music and you're going to be drunk and all of this stuff but it wasn't the time when people were the most happy was when they were getting ready with their friends before they went out so anticipation is the bullseye of happiness and it's one of the reasons for the fledgling marketers out there a really protracted launch sequence of anything that you're going to do drag it out make it [ __ ] excruciatingly painful because in my opinion people like to have things that they look forward to and you can be that thing right just add another thing to the calendar it's like oh and there's the the new Michael Easter substack post that he's been working on for six months like I'm excit he's been talking about this for weeks I'm really really excited about this like that is the bullseye of Happiness yeah totally and you know the huberman and the the Sam Harris they're absolutely spot on another good person to ask is someone who's made a shitload of money using that and that would be the gambling industry and and the slot slot designer I talked to said yeah gambling isn't when you know whether you won or loss it's when the dice are rolling across the table it's when the reels are still spinning it's when the cards are falling and you're figuring out is it going to be good is it going to be bad is it going to be really really good that's it it's the whole deal and to your point I mean that is that is why that's embedded in so many systems that um are effective at grabbing people's attention today take dating apps right you swipe you swipe you swipe and you go oh I got a match is it the person who I was like I don't know if I'll swipe on this one or was it the person I'm like oh my God that's the most amazing human being I've ever seen in my life right that's what's exciting about these things and it I mean I I really do feel like so much of the world has effectively started leaning into these sort of slot machine gambling mechanics and it's no damn wonder why you see people spending on average 12 to 13 hours a day engag with digital media of course not all of it is spent on Instagram but you look at people's screen time and like a lot of Instagram a lot of Tik Tok a lot of email too like even um Tristan Harris who's the very you know silicon like kind of anti-icon Valley guy I mean even he admits to getting fixed on email because it's totally random word you like Ping is it a uh is it an advertisement from Nike with new more shoes or is it like oh I just got in you know for him oh it's an interview request from 60 minutes or whatever it might be yeah where does the scarcity Loop live what was that where does the scarcity Loop live where yeah I mean so social media it's in email I also think it's part of the news cycle you start to see unpredictability to really rise after uh basically 2016 with Trump and now you're seeing it even more embedded into news with you know breaking news becoming a thing uh I mentioned dating apps I mentioned personal finance apps like Robin Hood so for example Robin Hood what really made that app take off is that they leveraged quick repeatability so before Robin Hood uh you would have to pay to make a trade so that slows down the rate of trading Robin Hood what they did is they leverage this uh concept called payment order flow where it makes it um the trading fees are basically baked in so you can make quick repeat trades throughout the day and you see that app just take off and they even had basically gambling mechanics to get people in where you'd spin a wheel uh Regulators actually made them take take that down because they're like no this is just way too Casino like um got a fly in the room that's how it goes uh it's in advertising so for example uh a lot of a lot of companies are using Casino like features for ads so you go on websites now you might have to spend a wheel to get a bargain and that increases uh conversion rates by Sevenfold According to some research Sevenfold so if you just get someone to spin a wheel and they're like oh my God I won 30% off holy [ __ ] they're more likely to buy uh it's in shopping online shopping I mean think of something like Lightning Deals that's quick repeatability that's lending on uh scarcity and urgency temu teu TAMU are you familiar with this site no what's that okay it is uh I would compare it to the crystal methamphetamine of shopping wow so it is um you go on and it's basically we have a limited amount there's a limited amount of time to get a bargain and right when you pop on there's a wheel you spin for a bargain it's a it basically sells stuff direct from factories in China and um they've just turned the whole site into a casino of Bargains so it's pretty crazy wow okay so talk to me about how humans like to escape and how this plays a role yeah so when you think about Escape it's essentially a removal from the complexities and problems of everyday life and these sorts of systems with the scarcity Loop tend to be a great uh Escape because you can fall into the system and you can repeat this effectively what is a game uh and your problems tend to dissolve when you're in this and and what really happens when you think about a traditional game is that traditional games sort of give us some obstacles some unpredictability more or less uh in exchange for knowing that we did exactly the right thing so at the end of the game you know whether you won or lost right and that seems to be sort of calming and relaxing for humans but the problem with the scarcity Loop is that because it is such a Escape such a great system for a game if you do it too often it can be quite bad but at the same time if you're just doing it every now and then I mean it's it's totally fine so I don't want the message of people to walk away from reading this book going like oh I need to never do anything that falls into this loop it's like no that's not it uh because it is fun like I like to gamble gambling's fun the problem is is if I decide oh I want to gamble all the time now we start to really have a problem and people tend to get hooked on the system and such a way that allows them to escape in a way that hurts them in the long run is there a an element of Flow State here yeah there I mean there could be it sounds to me hearing you talk about it and saying you know there's there's sort of a there's an interaction that you kind of Lose Yourself I imagine the people that play Slots that time kind of does dissolve for them that they almost become one uh I don't think that there's a massive amount of skill associated with slots but for the people that find themselves in flow their um skill requirement and skill level are often only a little bit apart in any case so perhaps even though it's low uh skill requirement the skill level of the participants is uh matched appropriately so yeah I just I figured that um I've got ran Doris coming on soon from flow research Collective I'm going to ask him about um whether there is flow found in compulsive behaviors like Tik Tok and uh gambling and I'm I'm pretty sure that he's going to say you're going to drop into Thea or Delta when it comes to brain waves it's going to be kind of oddly agitating and relaxing at the same time to do this stuff think about the way that you feel while you're on social media it's it's very compulsive it it is kind of relaxing and passive and it's also kind of agitating and [ __ ] does your head in so it's like a right a balance between the two well it's the it's the sort of Randomness between is this post G to be agitating or is it g to make me laugh my ass off is it g to make me you know is it going to be some video where the soldier comes home and the dog runs at the soldier and I just start crying Hyster my favorite videos yeah so I do think that there is an element of where people do zone out and what's what's interesting is when um researchers talk to like seriously compulsive slot machine players they actually get annoyed when they win a lot of money because it interrupts the process because when you win a lot of money on a slot machine it goes ballistic and it um if you win more than $ thousand dollars you have to pay taxes on it so it shuts off the machine and they have to come give you a payment by hand and that down what they're actually there for which is just to Simply write out this sort of process of kind of you know maybe you're up maybe you're down sometimes what's the story of captagon oh yeah so uh captagon is this drug that was not super well known I would say even just a handful of years ago and it's now effectively sort of overtaken the Middle East where there are billions of pills circulating throughout the middle Middle East in particular it uh started in the 60s as a drug to treat uh ADHD and depression and in the 70s uh psychiatrists realized that it worked a little too well so they uh they ban it and there had developed sort of this uh a lot of fans of it let's say in Middle Eastern countries because um it's a it's effectively an amphetamine it's like a lowgrade uh meth you can think about it as and um so you had some gangs in I think Bulgaria gang up and start supplying the Middle East and then the [ __ ] fly is this is the best dude I would be annoyed if it weren't so damn funny right um if he comes back just hit yourself in the head really really hard yeah dude I'm just going to bang yeah um Hungarian Middle East yeah so there was these gangs in Bulgaria that start Sor to the hungarians Y and um but eventually what happened is that Syria started producing it so especially after the fall of Syria um it's now produced in government labs and the production of captagon is actually far greater in Syria uh or greater than legal exports in Syria and they're effectively supplying the Middle East with this drug Capon there was just a there was just a finding just like a week ago where they busted about a billion dollars worth of pills at uh a port coming into the Middle East so long story short is that I traveled to Iraq to sort of understand this problem and effectively about addiction because when you think about overusing this scarcity Loop it really can become an addiction now to me addiction is a behavior that you uh consistently repeat and provide you a benefit in the short ter term while giving long-term benefits effectively or long-term detriments right now Iraq is interesting because it's a country where addiction effectively didn't exist for a very long time and that's just because Saddam ruled with an Iron Fist and once Iraq Falls after uh the US invades it what happens is you have a lot of people who have a lot of problems and Trauma right from that war and then Syria Falls and you get this massive uh supply of Capon and it starts moving its way throughout the Middle East and into Iraq and you start to see a huge uptick in addiction to this drug and so I think it stands for sort of this greater question about addiction which the US government has typically seen it uh two ways for a long time it was seen as a moral failing right so an addict was a bad person or just a person who's making their bad choices like damn it let's throw them in jail in the mid 90s you start to see addiction positioned as a brain disease now the reason that this positioning occurred is because neuroscience and brain scans were becoming pretty popular at the time and when neuroscientists would do um scans on addict's brains they saw that their liking system of their brain which is basically the system that we think is actually the sort of pleasure Center it would not have any activity but their brain would still pump out high levels of dopamine Drive making them want a drug right so we see this strange mismatch and like wow this thing doesn't light up but this thing does light up so they start to argue that it's a brain disease it's just caused by this you know sort of mismatch and brain chemicals and on and on and on and I think to me after really looking into this I see addiction as more more of a symptom typically of something larger so to me addiction uh you need a few things you need a you need a population or a person who has uh problems you need a substance that can relieve the problems and the person has to have uh no other means of fixing the problems Beyond this substance and I think Iraq um sort of knows that and you also tend to see this idea in research where you know the naida which is the National Institute on drug abuse they argue that addiction is basically you can't get over it it's this compulsive recurring disease uh that is in the brain and so once you're addicted you're pretty much addicted and you're not going to have a high chance of recovery but you look at uh examples like in the 70s there was Operation golden flow which is is with uh soldiers in Vietnam where something like 25% of soldiers US soldiers who were fighting in Vietnam were addicted to heroin and Nixon was like yeah I don't want these heroin addicts coming back into the United States like if you want to come back in the United States you got to give us a clean urine test so if addiction is something that is near impossible to get over and it's this brain disease that you can't fix and you have zero at all agency in you would think we would have left 25% of soldiers in Vietnam but the reality of what happened is that the vast majority of these soldiers all produced clean urine they all made it back home and once they were back home very very few of them relapsed and the ones who did Relapse relapse tended to have been using drugs before they got to Vietnam so I think that it shows that uh addiction is a lot more complex than just the person is a bad person the person has this brain disease that has you know nothing to do with behavior and conditions and environment and all this other things so that chapter of the book uh really looks into those questions this sort of changing ideas around addiction yeah it's a strange one man um you know to think about kind of soft addictions too uh not somebody who is an alcoholic but every evening after they get home from a difficult job maybe their relationship or family situation isn't fantastic maybe they're stressed about one or a few things it's just you know it's it's five points and then I can go to sleep or the person that always uses weeds to wind down on an evening time the line between you know a compulsion a dependency an addiction it all kind of becomes very blurred I like the fact that you say um it's somebody who has a problem and the solution that they reach for is this particular substance or or or or stimulus um I think that's a nice way to look at it I mean you I know people who if they're emotionally upset they'll go on their phone like their phone is the distraction from whatever emotions that they're feeling right yeah uh yeah these things all provide a sort of escape from problems is the is the underlying theme and you know to me me people will look at a drug addict and go that doesn't make any sense just like I was with the uh with the slot machine players but the reality is is that and I can speak about this because I'm a person who is nine years sober now going on 10 nothing fixes a problem like using a substance at least in the short term so this is this might seem like an IR like if you're an alcoholic it might seem totally irrational to take a drink it's not at least in the short term the problem is that your fixing a problem in the short term but you're creating long-term problems for yourself so addiction wouldn't be a problem if a person like me goes you know what I'm GNA have like 10 beers and I'm G to go volunteer and I'm going to go donate my time and my money and I'm going to do all these good things for society now the problem is that what tends to happen is that when people sort of zone out like that they tend to do behaviors uh that hurt not just them but Society in the Long Haul is it possible to come dependent on certainty do you think yeah I think so I mean look at uh this is this might be a strange example but look what happens when people think they have um you know you get a pain in your side and people are like what is that and then you go on you know whatever it is web andd and people will obsess ptis that's it pendy no it's not that's not it man it's stage four cancer actually you know and so people are just going down the rabbit hole the rabbit hole of trying to find answers to questions that are inherent so much of life is uncertain and so much of the uh the sort of data that we use I think also has uncertainty baked into it because it's based on human judgments at the end of the day it's like what are you going to do with this data what does it mean and um oh soang hang on do you think that hypochondriacs are dependent on certainty in some way yeah well they don't they hate unpredictability that's for sure yeah they could they they abhor an open loop right so what a hypochondriac by this framing maybe here comes some bro signs uh by this framing a hypochondriac hypochondria act would sooner have an assumption that's fatal than an open loop that allows them to survive yeah I could see that I mean certainty feels good right there's a part in the book where I talk about you know why why do people love certainty so much and it seemed to be you know it's possible this is a theorizing from a philosopher I talked to is at the U University of Utah his name's uh twin it's t h i n ye n he talked about how probably as humans evolved we could trust certainty this aha feeling we'd get that we'd solved this problem right because if you're looking for food you can be rather certain that like you've you found the food you know that you escaped the tiger or whatever um but I think today the questions that we grapple with are much more complex but we still love this aha feeling except we we have a million different answers we could find for for a question right if you ask are carbs good or bad you could type that into Google and it's like oh they're bad aha I got it yeah there's a governmental conspiracy around sugar or you could find another thing that's oh carbs are good yeah there's this uh there's this group that all they eat is carbs and like they live to 110 right so I think that we live in a world now where you can very easily maybe reinforce a pre-existing belief or at least find information that makes you feel certain about questions that are inherently always going to be uncertain because so much so many questions are are individual and it's like you know pick an answer what are you going to do we're never going to know yeah I've had the theory for a little while about how the modern information landscape isn't trying to convince the populace of any one narrative but to try and make them unconvinced about all narratives you know if you were to create an information landscape at the moment to just cause Mass distrust of yourself of the world around you of even your neighbor uh that that's what you would do I'm like the least conspiratorial person on the planet but whether it's by coordination or [Music] um like coincidence the end result is people not being sure what to believe am I supposed to eat meat is meat killing me or is it not should I go vegan Rich R says that I should go vegan but Stan eing says that I should go what about Mela Peterson she seems to be she's lost loads of weight she looks good like there is a myriad of solutions to exactly the same problem coming in opposite directions and is Ukraine are Ukraine the good guys or Russia the good guys is Russell Brand guilty of doing something heinous or is this a coordinated attack because big farmer are scared about him getting too close like for every cultural movement there is a countercultural movement here's like this there's a prediction that you can make with almost certainty that if you want to work out what's going to happen within the next six months look at a cultural movement that's been born out that as yet hasn't had its inverse uh made popular so if you have mgtown men going their own way in the dating Market I'm exiting the dating market for every mgtow you're going to find a red pill right so for the guys that are exiting that are the guys that are leaning in for the Trad wives the girls that are going to kind of regress back to this sort of 60s aesthetic for partners there's going to be the boss [ __ ] right for every incel there's going to be a pickup artist for every Sigma grind set Bro leaning in there's going to be the spiritual bro that's kind of leaning out right aism and Hedonism you know whatever's going on [ __ ] uh Megan the stallion 2021 summer 2021 hot girls summer 2022 feral girl summer right right every cultural movement has the inverse about to happen because what it creates is essentially a vacuum that you can position yourself against somebody else and this is how the information landscape at large works I think yeah I think so and I I mean this is largely product of the internet I had I had this strange we're doing bro philosophy again here um last night I'm for whatever reason I was thinking about what the world of Fitness used to be like and what people would get interested in and do you remember when there was those videos I think the videos were called like P90x and the whole thing the whole thing was you know what the benefit is it's muscle confusion that was their whole thing and people were like this is before the internet so people go oh muscle confusion yeah that that makes sense I've never heard that that makes sense your muscles are confused so they just like they go crazy and they grow now everyone has an internet connection you I mean you could literally just type in muscle confusion and you would get a thousand hits for like oh here's P90X as it works here this here's this person saying like here's why it could theoretically work here's this other smart person going no that doesn't make any damn sense at all right so people can fact check more easily today you don't just take what's sort of given to you but at the same time the factchecking process if you don't know where to find good facts then you're not really factchecking right and you could argue like who the hell knows what is actually true it's like no one really knows right we have to make this kind of strange decision where we go back to what you were talking about with nutrition it's like who am I going to trust and then the question is okay well why are you trusting that person and you can like provide some rationale but really I don't think you could truly unpack like well why do I trust this person right like how did you end up trusting this person I don't know right and so it's it's it's definitely a strange landscape I mean you know I have certain people that I'm like yeah I'm pretty sure this person is right but at the same time I think we live in a world where it makes sense to to be open to the possibilities and know that science is always is always changing science is a process um people will sound very smart and great because they're pulling from science but at the end of the day that science might change and we also need to be okay with that that doesn't make the person wrong that just means that they're they might be following the scientific process and so it it is a time where I I don't think you can be certain about a lot of things and yet we really want that certainty and I think that that can lead to um frustrations or at least it's like why why do people go down in foxholes when the fox holes are constantly changing right so yeah well you'll be familiar with the zygon effect I'm guessing no tell me about okay so um this psychologist Mr zonic was doing a study on servers in restaurants and if you've ever had a server come up to you and stand there and ask for your order and not get a notepad out there's a part of you thinks to yourself This guy's [ __ ] crazy he's going to get this wrong I'm going to try I'm going to make him yeah I want the ribs please but I actually want them to be done with that particular glaze and I want the tomatoes switched out for Roma and blah blah blah um and what he found was that while table still had their orders open the servers were unbelievably effective at being able to recall what was being ordered as soon as the tables had been closed they had zero memory of what they'd done so this um open loop closed loop Dynamic that zonic found is very fundamental to the way that our brains work and our brains abhor an open loop it's the same reason why think about you know like a a missing child what is it the parents say like we just want to know you know they would genuinely probably rather find out that their child was dead than have their child still missing after a long enough time you know these parents that have had kids that have been missing for 10 years or whatever like they just it's it's it's awful it's the same reason why uh Cliffhangers work at the end of books or on Netflix shows you know like you want to know what happens next it's the sensation of wanting to know what happens next yeah totally the same thing goes for the the servers as well so you talk to me about um influence like how does wanting influence and the requirement of more of it play a role here yeah so when you think about influence and status if you had more of it in the past for most of time still today uh you would have a survival Advantage right it could get you more food it could get you out of crappy menial labor that's just going to burn calories it got you more mates possibly and so I think that humans humans crave status and influence now in the past I don't think could influence as many people as we could influence today obviously right so influence has sort of been put at scale via social media and now what sort of one person does can literally influence millions of people right you can send out one tweet and if it goes viral it could can totally change people um and so a lot of what that chapter in the book looks at it's like how does how does this really affect us and have you ever had Jessica Tracy on I feel like that would be someone you would have on uh no what's what's who she she runs this uh Lab at I think University of Washington I'm going to kick myself after if it's somewhere else uh that looks at how many of our emotions uh evolved basically just to interact with other people uh they're totally social emotions things like Pride shame empathy right and a big point that she talked about I think she has actually a book out called pride and it just the whole book is about Pride she looked at how pride is this thing that basically tells you um makes you feel good about yourself you need to accomplish something there's two types of Pride there's authentic pride and hubristic pride She lays out so authentic Pride you feel this good feeling after you've done something and it's great you feel it no matter if someone sees what you've done or not now if someone sees what you've done great that's even better hubis pride is different it's essentially promoting yourself as a way to sort of boost up your status but but the problem is that you haven't actually done anything so I would argue that probably in the past it was much easier to call out that hubristic Pride because everyone kind of knew each other you knew what people were doing but now you can sort of display that on this massive scale on social media and that can confuse people and it can also make you look like a jerk when people realize that oh this person isn't actually as great as they say yeah the weird thing about status is that as soon as you acknowledge that you're the game you lose the game yeah exactly so it took it took a long time for psychologist to even study status for that reason because there was it like no one wanted I talked to this guy Cameron Anderson who's at UC Berkeley and he he was like yeah it took a long time for us to really acknowledge this thing because by acknowledging it as a psychologist you're going oh I might you know actually care about my status and so it took until at least the 90s I think the research that did it was looking at class issues so it kind of made it more acceptable to start studying it now you've got this uh influx of it ah so you're acting as this benevolent Bourgeois sort of Ivory Tower person speaking down from on high don't worry M peasants the plebians I will I will bring you up from the muck and the m and the blood and the feces yeah that's interesting yeah the influence things funny man you know previously people wanted Fame because it was a marker of having done something worthy of being famous now people just want to be famous for its own sake because what Fame is is the promise of obligation free Status at least mod the modern conception of frame you know you don't have to be a heroic General you don't have to actually invent something you can just be in the right place at the right time and you know reality TV is the absolute sort of zenith of this where you get normal people plucked out of obscurity and placed on some television show to be like purposefully normal like you're you're providing average representations of avatars within the populace and then six weeks later they come off and they've got 2 million followers and a pretty little thing contract and free charcoal toothpaste and a blue tick and they're now completely changed so what what is the lesson that it teaches the modern world about how you achieve fame and status and influence you're in the right place at the right time you don't do a thing for an incredibly long amount of time and grind hard on it what was it Thomas Edison said I have not failed I simply found 10,000 ways that didn't work right right I mean even up to the Advent of the internet if you wanted uh Fame and attention you probably did have to do decent things or could be opposite you get famous for doing really bad things but the point is that you did something y right and so there was this filter of of a of a large media Corporation choosing whether or not they're going to cover you and now you can cover yourself if you would like and just blast it out there and it can work right you see a lot of people rise uh to public like being known by many people in the public although they haven't necessarily really done anything that interesting in a vacuum yeah the move from people being judged by their deeds to people being judged by their opinions has meant that words carry more weight than actions and that's a very dangerous position to be in because you can say things that you don't mean and you can Proclaim things that you haven't done yeah and and ultimately you know performative empathy is this it's patient zero for this and you know how many times have we seen it's almost to me it's almost like the person that is the most vehement about their empathy and standing up for the little person and talking about the Deeds that they've done whilst the kind of this suspicious lack of having seen the Deeds that they've done that's almost a red flag for me in fact it probably is Ellen degenerous uh lizo right uh it's Jimmy Fallon appears to have been popped recently for this stuff as well all of the people that are you know championing the little person it turns out that lizo was body shaming her dancers uh Jimmy Fallon the guy that's supposed to be this bubbly super welcoming Lefty person turns out who's a total Tyrant Ellen degenerous as well he someone who's supposed to be you know a champion for different sexual orientations and this kind of like motherly figure late night show host and stuff total [ __ ] apparently allegedly allegedly a little [ __ ] and um yeah it's to me the move from Deeds to opinions has allowed people that are prepared to lie very effectively or obfuscate the truth or manipulate or do self-delusion uh they've benefited more from this than anybody else yeah yeah I agree and I I did really find it fascinating how status affects us so much so one of the one of the studies that's totally bizarre but also very telling is that flights that have a first class cabin have four times greater rates of air rage now if the passengers have to walk through the first class cabin on their way to the you know the where the cattle are stored on the plane those flights have a nine times greater rate of air rage like that's crazy like these status reminders they they irk people and there's constantly status reminders we face every day and they do seem to affect us so the uh people who are higher status generally have better health outcomes in the long run and this isn't you know you might think oh well they can afford medical care it's like well no because this holds even in countries that have Universal medical care so you would think that you know that wouldn't hold in those countries but it but it seems to yeah it's such a huge determinant did you read uh will star's book the status game I haven't read that one now you'd love it you would fall in love with it it's it's absolutely fascinating so yeah this addiction I suppose to influence that we have and the fact that you can be bestowed obligation free Status uh it it's been objectified and U turned into a metric game by social media right I know exactly how many followers I know exactly how many plays I know exactly how many likes so yeah that that feedback loop or this the previous scarcity that would have been uh I want to get more status Downstream from status are increased access to mates increased access to food protection you know all that better child mortality all this stuff uh has been weaponized and commercialized by Quantified Quantified to your point as you can see exactly what it is and you can watch that number go up on social media that's one thing that I um talk about in the book too is how numbers influence us and how this rise of gamification has in a lot of ways shifted the goal of why we do what we do so anytime that you put a a number on thing and you gamify a system what tends to happen is people start to chase whatever the gamified number is so this is fine in in an actual game if you're playing football American football Chris uh the point is to run the ball over the into the touchdown zone right to score these points and then you just leave the game there and it's like okay that was great it doesn't affect the rest of your life but when you start to gamify um different Tech Systems people change their behavior so Twitter is a great example so Twitter is theoretically supposed to be this platform for discussion right and then you ask okay well what are the goals of a discussion and the answer is like well there's a lot of goals to discussions right it's like to empathize um to commiserate to share information to sort of meet on a Level Playing Field like oh there's all this [ __ ] that comes from a normal discussion but when you go on Twitter what tends to happen is that you see people chasing likes retweets and follower counts the things you need to do to raise those metrics are usually at odds with discussion right so people are dicks on Twitter because you know what happens when you're a dick on Twitter is you get more followers and you get more likes and I mean they've studied this it's like when scientists have looked at this and you start to see when people start to get um likes and retweets and follower counts and it usually tends to be from sort of negative negative things um they start to chase that so this happened with uh politicians there was a group that surveyed a bunch of I think it was a decade's worth of tweets from politicians in the United States and they found that over that decade politicians tweets got much more toxic they use this AI algorithm to sort of give it a tweets a toxicity score what tended to happen in all these cases is that you know the politician would go on and they do normal you know what you might think hey we're having a you know a breakfast so and so to raise money for the firefighters and then the minute they would start to be more toxic that would get more of a reaction from people and they go oh that's it like that's how you use this thing that's what boosts the number so then you start chasing the numbers the likes the retweets and that totally changes the goal and this isn't just in of course it's not just in Twitter this is also Instagram you go on to show some photos of your your friends you know when you're out with your friends and then people go oh wait a minute this type of thing gets more followers so you start to do that it's also in uh the wine scoring world right it's like when this Robert B Parker guy started wine Advocate and put a number a scoring number on bottles it totally changed the wine making industry which had had this same practice for 2,000 years but this guy starts this magazine goes okay I want to make you know wine accessible to the people I'm going to taste all these wines and I'm going to give them a score from 50 to 100 and what happened is that the bottles that had this very clear score that had a high score they started to sell way more and so wine makers went we make more money if we make wines that suit this guy's taste so they started cranking out more bottles that this Robert B Parker guy liked it totally shifts the industry now if you're a person who doesn't share taste with Robert Parker you're like well this is meaningless to me right and so once we start to fixate on numbers long story short is that this changes our behaviors and why we do what we do I've been playing with this idea of hidden and observable metrics over the last few weeks so uh it's my belief that people will often trade a hidden metric for an observable metric and the gamification makes this plain so a really good hidden metric would be something like peace of mind or sanity and a good observable metric would be something like salary or the amount of money that you earn so you could quite happily sacrifice uh how calm you feel by taking a job where your Frontline defense customer complaints person but they know that this is a difficult job so they're going to compensate you more highly so you've gained $10,000 per year but how much has your much more important metric of sanity and peace of mind degraded you know and if someone was actually to somehow be able to give you a sanity score you would realize that you had netted a negative by doing this another one might be something like um the quality of your relationships right uh so the quality of your relationships with your partner uh you take a job that's a little bit further away uh again you're going to make a little bit more money but it means that you spend less time with your wife or your children and in future the memories that you have are not going to be so good but you know it's it's ephemeral it's like it's out there do you know what I mean like [ __ ] I can't tell how this is working how much how many more steps closer to to a divorce am I today how much has my relationship degraded and um yeah I I think that making the hidden observable is a really good strategy that we should be trying to do things like journaling uh you know things like um doing a weekly check-in of some kind having some sort of process to just check in okay the things that I've said that genuinely matter that I can't see another one from your world um how many people have optimized the observable metric of weight on a scale but sacrificed the hidden metric of Health right right I've dialed back my body fat or I have um changed my composition so that I'm carrying way more muscle but the actual internal state of where I'm at is [ __ ] uh right or even uh I mean think of activity trackers right people get it because they want to be more active and then they get obsessed with these arbitrary metrics that whether it's a step count whether it's you know if you use one of these devices that gives you some sort of daily strin count um people get hooked on that and it changes how they do what they do and oftentimes why they do what they do because you do you start it for health but people often times don't go okay well what does Health mean to me so then you get this thing and you're like well health is making sure I get a nine on my whatever you know this this thing that I wear that tells me a strength count and the problem too is that all of these trackers use these sort of mysterious algorithms and they're working on very flawed systems you're making assumptions that this device is taking perfect metrics all the time perfect measurements you're assuming that the people who created this algorithm which most companies won't share how they figure out these numbers because it's you know proprietary you're assuming that those people are making the right decisions based on data that is correct and it's I mean it's definitely not in some degree the question is like okay to what degree is this this wrong right and yet we get really hooked on these type of things you see a lot of people do another great example of this would be I'm a I'm a professor and so I see it with my students right the point of going to a university is is what there's a ton it's like yeah you want the degree but like you're there to meet people you're there to learn to be a damn adult you're there to show up learn to show up on time learn to turn in assignments on time learn to interact with your peers and have discussions and disagree with people in a nice way but what tends to happen with my students is they get obsessed with grades it's the GPA right so that is not the same as everything I've just listed why you go to the university yeah that's uh good heart's law in measure in uh in practice right you know good heart's law yeah I think so when a measure becomes an outcome it ceases to be a good measure so it's you know if you gave your customer service um Team the measure that you would say what what we're looking for you to do is reduce down the fraud rate and what the outcome is that occurs is every customer is treated like a fraudster so yeah you've managed to drive the fraud rate down but the actual felt experience that you wanted the outcome you wanted was we want to have a successful company with customers that care about us that doesn't have too much fraud what you ended up doing was creating this tyrannical [ __ ] customer service representative team uh you were talking about food earlier on have you ever seen those videos of uh tribal people eating cheesecake for the first time no but I'm going to need to see that cuz I bet it does do they love it or do they just absolutely hate it it blows their minds right it absolutely blows their minds because it's this really interesting blend of sugar and fat it's got um orifices design of food uh so very rarely ancestrally would we have ever had something that was both crunchy and fluffy so if you think about Oreos or french fries or cheesecake you have a very interesting blend of textures you know it's not just one texture even in [ __ ] yogurts people throw granola on the top like why is that good well it's good because it's this it's a a blend of the different textures if you go full liver King mode and just start eating raw liver like it's not a particularly exciting texture right is you just it's slimy and it's kind of all one thing so yeah I mean food when you're looking at scarcity Loop food has to be it's got probably the prime culprit I would guess yeah definitely I mean just as I told you about how there's this casino lab trying to figure out how to you know tweak the perfect slot machine in games and make sure every experience that happens in a casino leads us to the behavior that they sort of want this is obviously happening in the food in the food industry right so especially around the 1970s you start to see the rise of ultra processor food so after especially after World War II companies start to put a lot of money into developing foods that are going to just check all the boxes you need to make a human love them and they realize we need to uh increase snacking as well because if you're eating three square like we used to it's like well they're leaving a lot of money on the table we got to create snacking as a thing and what we tend to snack on is these Ultra processed foods and there's a uh food industry exact who explained if you want to get a snack food to sell uh it's got to have three V's it's got to have value it's got to have variety it's G to have velocity that is basically the scarcity Loop right velocity in the food does that mean that you throw it at someone aggressively that means you eat it fast ah you eat it fast so so value It's relatively cheap uh variety there's a wide variety of flavors right there's unpredictability embedded in the food like you go to the grocery store and there's like 75 different kinds of chips right um and when people have more options of what to eat they tend to eat more and then velocity is simply when you hyper process a food we tend to eat it faster and there's been some interesting research at the NIH where they will give people a diet that is matched for you know macros and salt and all that one of the diets is ultra processed and the other is minimally processed and what tends to happen and they let them eat as much as they want over the course of a day and this is a this is a study where they lock people in the lab so it's like a twoe study you can't keep them in the lab for too long but that allows them to measure exactly every gram of everything they ate and people tend to eat about 500 fewer calories a day when they're eating minimally processed food and one of the main reasons for that is when a food is ultra processed we can simply eat it faster that's interesting so it's not even necessarily to do with the palatability although that'll contribute a little bit but you can just get it down you presumably density as well is a good chunk of this that yeah if you ever looked at how many carbs are in a a Haribo and then you compared that to how much potato you would get to eat compared with the Haribo it's insane yeah so that's exactly it you're concentrating the calories really so as part of the book I uh I traveled into the Bolivian Amazon there's a tribe called the chimane who have the healthiest Hearts ever recorded by scientists so I fly into laaz I take this 12-hour crazy car ride down to this town that's a jumping off point into the Amazon and then we take a uh it's called a pek pek boat which is this really long canoe that has this really annoying motor on the back of it for six hours and then you know it's it's just a wall of jungle for six hours and eventually the dude pulls the pek peky over I'm like it's all look the same you know he's like no this is it trust me it's like okay so we get out of this damn boat and like walk up and sure enough you know there's the tribe and I stayed with them um for a little while and so not only do they have uh super healthy Hearts they don't really have any markers of Health disease of heart disease and the reason that's important is because heart disease is the number one killer of people in the developed world like by far everyone worries about cancer no heart disease is probably what's going to kill you you have about a coin flip chance of dying from heart disease uh they also don't get they don't seem to get diseases like Alzheimer they don't get certain cancers so they're this super healthy group of people in a lot of ways now the ways they're not healthy are problems that we cured in the past right they get things like pneumonia they get random infections that we've figured out long ago and that's what ends up killing or they get bit by snakes things like that but um a lot of what's kept them healthy is it goes back to what they eat and what they eat is kind of interesting because at some point in a in a day in a given day of eating food it's going to give the middle finger to some popular diet that we've been sold over the last 40 years so it's not paleo it's not vegan it's not low carb it's not necessarily low fat it's you know it's not any of this stuff they eat the real commonality of all the foods they eat is that they have just one ingredient so it's red meat from animals they hunt it's a lot of fish it's white rice that they grow it's a lot of fruit that they grow it's it's white potatoes it's you know just this basic stuff and you just can't eat that much of those foods and they also don't have a billion triggers that push you into eating more it's like if you ever sit down and try to your back let's bring it back to potatoes because that's a damn good food so if you have a boiled potato it's probably going to be like 150 calories if you just sit and just eat that with like no salt or anything holy hell that is a task like it is really hard if you give me like 10 times the calories in chips I could probably get through it I mean I could probably crush a thousand calories in chips without and it would be a great time right i' just be like oh man this is a great experiment let's do this [ __ ] again soon and so I think that that's really what it comes down to because when you look at the average American diet especially in the OR many developed countries we're at like 60% foods that are ultr processed and so over time you just eat more I think than you plan to you end up heavier and that impacts your disas risk Okay so we've got a lot of different ways that we get hijacked whether it be status whether it be influence whether it be information certainty food how does somebody step in and break the scarcity Loop yeah so there's basically three ways uh the first is just uh becoming aware of it by becoming by observing it by observing a behavior you tend to change it it's a Hawthorne effect uh second is that you can change or take out any three of the parts so you can change the opportunity you can change the unpredictable Rewards or remove them and you can or you can slow the behavior down so let's take food as an example so with unpredictable rewards in food a lot of the reasons why we eat is because we have so many different hyper palatable flavors and options so people who eat the same thing day in and day out they tend to weigh less overall because it's basically predictable you're not going to be eating a ton when you've got 50 different options and then with uh the speed or the quick repeatability eating foods that are far less process lead you just it slows down the process of eating and you end up eating less with something like social media you can change the opportunity because I think what happens as we talked about is when people go on social media it goes from I just want to share some photos of my dog to oh I need to score these points and you post and you go oh yeah I'm waiting for these these likes to come in um you can change why you're using it you can be like okay look here's how I'm using social media I'm literally using it to keep up with my friends I'm using it to share information about some cause I'm only following people who are in this Lane that I want to know more about right uh you can slow it down and this sounds kind of crazy because I've always I've been skeptical when the answer to using an app is to use another app but there are great apps that simply put a sort of brief period of hold before you can open another app so you might go to open the app this other app will go okay you can open it in countdown and just having that it slows down people's use of it because you have to be intentional you your best what's the best app of that that you found um I think it's called clear space I'd have to look at the name um yeah the guys and I used the what converted me is the guys who founded it had seen me write about the benefits of switching to grayscale on your phone which changes effectively the unpredictable rewards uh your phone just becomes less stimulating less rewarding and so they reached out to me they're like yeah try our app and I was yeah okay I'll try I didn't try it because I'm like yeah I'm not going to download your [ __ ] app so I can use another apps right but I did it my damn screen time went way down because I had to get intentional with when I was going to use it and why wow um with something like shopping if I'm going to buy a which I'm going to do after this buy a fce waterer um with something like I can't believe this thing is still alive dude like how long do these things live I thought they liveed like 30 minutes God been talking for an hour and 10 minutes [ __ ] should be dead by now this is so good with shopping with shopping you can um ask yourself why am I am I buying this in the first place what is the opportunity that I'm trying to get from this item because a lot of times I think we buy because we're bored we're on Instagram because we're bored and then we see this perfectly targeted ad and we're like oh yeah maybe I could use those shoes that seem to be perfectly made in a lab for my style right but you really you know need them it's the question it's like what are you trying to get out of this a lot of times it goes back to I'm bored I think it's going to raise my status to have this item I think it's going to help me belong to a group I think it's going to do all the different things and so even just inserting the question helps um you can slow that down as well if you just say anytime I see something online I'm GNA wait x amount of days to buy it now when I've done that I'll put something in my cart or I'll just you know go oh yeah it's that item within three to four or five days I'm like what was that thing I wanted to buy oh yeah why do I want to buy that I don't really need that right yeah so I think just learning that we're in this world now where we have just an abundance of all these things that we're built to Crave and we have all these systems that can really push us into these decisions very quickly and that's really changed our behavior and so trying to unpack the mechanics of that system that Loop and then find ways to break it down I think can be beneficial for people in changing Behavior [ __ ] yeah man it's it's so strange to think about how mismatched we are and it does feel like a a imbalanced battlefield that we're on as at the moment uh you know there was there was especially when it comes to information and and sort of stimulus there was one day in probably early 2011 when there was the right balance between how much information we wanted and how much information we were getting and then very very quickly it went from being below to just and it completely blasted through and you know in the past especially when it comes to information you're the best skill set that you needed was that of a a scout whereas the best skill set that you could have now is that of a discerner right it's somebody that is able to kind of cut through and weave and know when that's enough and so on and so forth and the same thing the moderation for everything if that you have grown up and evolved with a predisposition to get more and now there is more than you need like what do you think's going to happen like you're going to end up you're going to end up overloading on absolutely everything and yeah is it Aristotle he talks about the golden mean it's not a viice of excess nor aice of uh scarcity or something like that um yeah man it's tough I'm glad that you are putting your hand to a problem that everybody is super familiar with and I'm a big fan of your substack as well I'm glad that you've joined us here on the uh independent Creator muuk and Maya cesp too yeah man it's been a fun uh project for people who are interested it's uh 2% but the website is tww pct.com it's been a fun project man I mean I didn't know how it would go the the reception has been better than I expected which is awesome um and I get a lot of I have a lot of fun doing it which I think is really key I can explore things that I otherwise wouldn't have were I writing for a lot of the magazines that I used to write for right things get edited down to the bone there's stuff where you're like this is the most fascinating part of this and it gets taken out so I really dive into I think the stuff that is most uh useful and there's not as many uh constraints sometimes I might need some constraints on word counts because I'll send out an email every now and then where I'm like how the hell is this 2500 words what are you doing man um but all the information I like and people seem to like it so hell yeah Michael Easter ladies and gentlemen what's the book Michael where should people go the book is called scarcity brain it's uh available anywhere that anywhere anywhere will be where people get it dude I appreciate you I'm looking forward to seeing what you do next if you enjoyed that episode then press here for a selection of the best clips from the podcast over the last few weeks and don't forget to [Music] subscribe