284 ‒ Overcoming addictive behaviors, elevating wellbeing, & thriving in an era of excess

1. 0:00 – 0:47

   Intro

   1. MEMichael Easter0:00

      When you think about the context to your point of how humans evolved, we lived like that all the time, 'cause we didn't know where our next meal might come from very often. We didn't know what the weather would bring. We didn't know what was happening next, and we were having to really work and, uh, struggle to survive. And there is probably something rewarding to that, and to be in the moment, and to have to work to get the things that you get, really on a deep level, and be just kind of in it. Like, you are in it, you know? And, um, yeah, so I think that the takeaway for the average person is how... is not to go to Baghdad, let me say that. [laughs] It is, how can you do things in your life that maybe reflect that a little bit?

   2. PAPeter Attia0:45

      [upbeat music]

2. 0:47 – 2:45

   Inspiration for Michael’s latest book, Scarcity Brain

   1. PAPeter Attia0:47

      Hey, everyone. Welcome to the Drive Podcast. I'm your host, Peter Attia. Michael, thanks for making the trip to Austin.

   2. MEMichael Easter0:57

      Yeah, thanks for having me again. It's good to be here.

   3. PAPeter Attia0:59

      Yeah. And congrats on the, uh, on the book.

   4. MEMichael Easter1:01

      Well, thank you very much, and c- congrats on yours.

   5. PAPeter Attia1:03

      Thanks so much. [lip smacks] So last time we were here, we were talking about, uh, The Comfort Crisis, which is a book people have heard me talk about over and over and over again. It's, it's on the short list of books, you know, I, I, I recommend, uh, regularly. Um, but I wanna kinda understand how you went from the obvious success of The Comfort Crisis, and more importantly the lessons you learned in The Comfort Crisis, to thinking about the particular problem that feeds into Scarcity Brain.

   6. MEMichael Easter1:30

      Yeah, so I finished The Comfort Crisis basically right as the pandemic was taking off, so March twenty twenty. Now, w- when the pandemic takes off, what does everyone do? They go to the grocery store and they hoard as much stuff as they can, right? We're gonna get all the canned food we have, we can get. We're gonna get all the toilet paper. We're gonna get all the hand sanitizer. It was a rational decision at that point, but it made me sort of realize, oh, when, when we think that resources are scarce, our reaction is to hoard them and gather them, right? And I think what was interesting about the pandemic is you had this initial spike in that sort of behavior. But then sort of as it, uh, drew out, you saw everything from drinking and drug use increase. You saw purchasing increase. You saw a lot of people gain weight, eating food and exercising less. And so you saw all these behaviors, um, [lip smacks] that can be damaging just sort of increase over time. And so that made me sort of wonder, uh, about questions of scarcity, how it affects us, um, how our environments have changed, because that's what The Comfort Crisis is ultimately about. And one of the elements underlying that is that we do live in a world where we have an abundance of all these things we're built to crave, and managing that can be difficult.

3. 2:45 – 9:22

   Evolutionary adaptations to the scarcity of food contrasted with the modern obesity crisis

   1. PAPeter Attia2:45

      You know, I was thinking about where to start 'cause th- there are so many sections in this book, each of which dive into seemingly disparate topics, uh, of scarcity, right? Well, and we'll talk about them all, right? We'll talk about scarcity of information, scarcity of food. Um, but maybe we start with food because I think it is the most obvious one, at least to me. Um, also, it's the one for which there is the most obvious evolutionary link. Um, now, there are scholars out there who would argue that the greatest superpower of the Homo sapiens, uh, are their ability to tell stories. And I've, I've, I've, I've, I've heard this said and, and I, uh, that makes sense. Um, maybe it's just my own bias in biology, but I've always felt that our superpower as Homo sapiens was energy storage. Um, and it's probably the case that there are many superpowers that we have that, that coalesced around, um, where we are today and how we kinda leapfrogged ahead of every other species about two hundred and fifty thousand years ago. Um, so let's talk a little bit about what we know about scarcity with respect to nutrition and how that evolved us as a species.

   2. MEMichael Easter4:00

      Yeah, well, I mean, in the past, re- r- until very recently, food was scarce and it was hard to find. I mean, especially prehistorically, like there wasn't a lot of food. Not to mention, in order to get it, you know, you weren't going down to the seven eleven. It was, uh, you would have to hunt, you would have to gather, you'd have to put in energy to get energy. And you know, we know it wasn't always easy to come by. It kinda depended on where you lived, obviously. Um, but recently in the grand scheme of time and space, within the last hundred years, we've been able to produce really an abundance of food. And we've engineered our food to be as delicious as possible. [chuckles] And we have so much food now that the average person in America, or America as a whole, we throw out about a third of the food that we produce. So we've gone from being these creatures who evolved to, because food was scarce and hard to find, if you had the opportunity to eat it, maybe eat a little more than you needed at any given time, that would give you a survival advantage because you could store that energy. And then the next time that you can't find food, you're gonna survive that. Um, we still have that drive to eat a little more than we need, but we live in a world where food is rarely scarce, right? So it's a evolutionary mismatch, basically.

   3. PAPeter Attia5:16

      You know, uh, you m- I don't know if you heard me talk about the default food environment. We were talking about it a minute ago effectively in the pantry exa-- you know, we were both k- you know, talking to each other about the challenges of our pantries. And this is what I kinda talk to my patients about is the default food environment, right? So when you're, um, when you're changing a habit that requires subtraction, to me the strategy is changing the environment. When you're changing a habit that requires addition, uh, there's a whole different strategy. But, um, the default food environment is as you said, it's incredibly palatable, incredibly calorie dense, uh, incredibly non-perishable and therefore portable, uh, and incredibly cheap. So if you just think about dollar per kilojoule, it's... You can't fathom how remarkable this is. And by the way, uh, you know, I don't believe that any of that is particularly nefarious on the part of industry. I think it's solving a problem.

   4. MEMichael Easter6:13

      Yes.

   5. PAPeter Attia6:14

      And the solution happened to produce, you know, those, those things that we now have that meet those criteria, and it's just that one of the criteria that wasn't on the list, there's not a fifth criteria that is, like, healthy, right? Like-

   6. MEMichael Easter6:29

      Right

   7. PAPeter Attia6:29

      ... make it such that if you consumed it at any level, it would not harm you.

   8. MEMichael Easter6:34

      Yeah.

   9. PAPeter Attia6:34

      That, that is obviously not one of the criteria. So, um, w- what do we know about the most contentious topic of them all, which is what is at the root of the obesity crisis? Because w- while people can debate that, there's really no debate at the state of our excess nutrition. Um-

   10. MEMichael Easter6:56

       Mm-hmm

   11. PAPeter Attia6:56

       ... so, I mean, I'll let you give the stats, but we are an over-nourished species at this point, um, that even globally the state of over-nourishment exceeds that of malnourishment.

   12. MEMichael Easter7:09

       Yeah, so 40 some odd percent of Americans are now obese. That number is expected to climb. Um, [clears throat] and globally too, I believe that diseases that stem from over-nourishment [chuckles] outweigh those that stem from over-nourishment by about four-

   13. PAPeter Attia7:27

       By undernourishment

   14. MEMichael Easter7:28

       ... by four-fold. Yeah.

   15. PAPeter Attia7:29

       Yeah, by-

   16. MEMichael Easter7:29

       Undernourishment, yeah. And so, you know, uh, to your point, this is a good problem to have, 'cause literally for all of time, um, your job was getting food every day and preparing it, right? So f- a great example is, um, before we created production lines to make tortillas, Mexican women used to spend five hours a day hand grinding corn to make tortillas, right? When we get in, um, food production lines and we sort of, um, start to process our food more, that frees up a lot of time for people. It makes food more abundant. It makes it easier to come by. It makes it cheaper. So today I think the average American spends about 8% of their income on food. In the past, we used to spend more than 40%, so that's a m-

   17. PAPeter Attia8:16

       8 versus 40?

   18. MEMichael Easter8:18

       8 versus 40.

   19. PAPeter Attia8:18

       Wow.

   20. MEMichael Easter8:19

       So think about that, right? Um, so this is a good problem to have, but w- we now have so much food that it be- it does become hard to manage, and, you know, as, as you've talked about plenty on this podcast, uh, uh, obesity is linked to so many of the diseases now that end up cutting our lives short, and not only that, um, they cut into our healthspan, right? They make us immobile. Um, and I think that that leads to some downstream consequences like depression, anxiety, and so, um, it really is, uh, it becomes pernicious over time. And the, one of the issues is that food will always be rewarding in the short term, right? It's a hard battle to fight. So I have a lot of empathy for people who, um, are obese. You know, um, I understand that it's, it's very challenging because we do live in a food environment where you can make that decision for that thing that's going to, um, be delicious, feel good in the short term, but it is, um, too much of it can cause some long-term problems.

4. 9:22 – 21:29

   Lessons learned about diet and nutrition from living with hunter-gatherers

   1. PAPeter Attia9:22

      So when you wanted to look into this question, you did something that I think is very interesting, and folks, when they read the book, I think will be particularly intrigued by this section where you decided to go and live with some hunter-gatherers. Now, there aren't that many hunter-gatherers left, and usually when we talk about them, we think of the Hadza because so much attention has been sort of thrown their way. But you went to a different group in Bolivia-

   2. MEMichael Easter9:49

      Mm-hmm

   3. PAPeter Attia9:50

      ... the Tsimane, correct?

   4. MEMichael Easter9:51

      Yeah.

   5. PAPeter Attia9:51

      I, I hadn't even heard of this group of hunter-gatherers until I read the book. So, um, how did you find them? How did you select them over some of the ones that could've been a lot easier to reach, uh, again, such as the Hadza?

   6. MEMichael Easter10:03

      Yeah. So I came across this, uh, paper in I believe it was 2018, and it basically found that this tribe does not get heart disease. So when you look at, you know, what kills the average person, it's heart disease. It's the number one killer of Americans. It's the number one killer worldwide. So I go, "Okay, what's going down there? What's, let's see what's going on there." Because the other thing that I think is important is when you look at what people actually worry about health-wise, it's not heart disease.

   7. PAPeter Attia10:28

      Definitely not.

   8. MEMichael Easter10:29

      [laughs]

   9. PAPeter Attia10:29

      It's cancer, yeah.

   10. MEMichael Easter10:30

       People worry about cancer. People worry about terrorism. They worry about violence, right? So you'll have people who stock, you know, tons and tons of guns and bullets because they don't wanna get killed, and yet they've also got a pantry full of junk food, and it's like, well, maybe we should think about that too.

   11. PAPeter Attia10:46

       [laughs]

   12. MEMichael Easter10:46

       Um, so I read this paper, I talked to the two researchers on it, and I decide I'm gonna go down there. You know, I wanna see it for myself 'cause, uh, my background is I'm a journalist and I'm an investigative journalist, so I travel places to meet with people, to see what's going on there, to get my eyes on, on the world. So I fly into La Paz.

   13. PAPeter Attia11:05

       Go to the source.

   14. MEMichael Easter11:06

       Go to the source.

   15. PAPeter Attia11:06

       As, as, as one of your editors might have said.

   16. MEMichael Easter11:08

       Yes, yes. Um, so I fly into La Paz. Um, then we take a 12-hour car ride down to a town called Rurrenabaque in Bolivia, and from there we get in a canoe. It's called a peke peke boat, so they're these long boats. They're like 30 feet, really thin, and they've got these motors on them. They're called long tail motor. And we take that about, uh, six hours up a feeder river of the Amazon, and it was hilarious because, you know, all you can see is jungle the entire time. Like, it's all green. It all looks the same, and then the, the boat driver just, you know, eventually pulls over, and you're going-

   17. PAPeter Attia11:45

       "How, how did he know?"

   18. MEMichael Easter11:46

       "How did you know?" You know? And he's like, "This is it. Get out." You know? Um, yeah, and there they were, and they're fascinating, I think, because they're not true hunter-gatherers. They do a lot of, um, so they're hunter horticulturalists I guess-

   19. PAPeter Attia12:00

       Sure

   20. MEMichael Easter12:00

       ... you would consider them. So [clears throat] What was interesting with them is that, you know, at some point in a given day, because you sort of brought up how we've had all these fad diets over the last X amount of years, at some point in the day, they're going to offend some fad diet, right? So they eat meat. Uh, they eat plain white rice. Their diet isn't necessarily low fat. It's not necessarily low carb. Um, they're eating things like corn, right? That's off limits in so many diet books. But the commonality behind their food is that it all has one ingredient. So they're basically not getting access to ultra-processed food, and, um, that seems to be one of the key reasons they've been able to avoid disease. I mean, they're not-

   21. PAPeter Attia12:46

       And, and tell me about the population. So how many folks are there?

   22. MEMichael Easter12:49

       Yeah, so I believe there are 20,000. That might be a high number. Um, might be five, 5,000 to 20,000 spread throughout the Amazon, um, the Bolivian Amazon, but the tribe, the group that I went and saw, there's about 50 of them in a small village.

   23. PAPeter Attia13:03

       And what does the distribution of their lifespan look like? Uh, in other words, um, what is median survival? Because I imagine there's a skew down on median based on no access to antibiotics and the things that we take for granted here, where what I call Medicine 2.0 has done a remarkable job of extending human lifespan.

   24. MEMichael Easter13:26

       Right. So when I asked, um, I had a guide who was from another tribe take me up there, and I said, "All right, great. They don't, you know, they don't die of heart disease. They don't die of Alzheimer's. What do they die of?" And he just goes, "Oh, accidents." It's accidents. It's, uh, snakes. Like, literally there's snakes out there that if you get bit, you're, you're screwed. Um, I think they live into their 70s on average if, if they're managed to sidestep a, you know, a snake or some other accident.

   25. PAPeter Attia13:57

       And then the claim that they don't have coronary artery disease, explain how that, how that claim has been, uh, validated.

   26. MEMichael Easter14:05

       Yeah, so they, um, put them in a boat, this guy that I talked to, this researcher. They got a bunch of the tribe members, and they took them into the village to do, uh, CT scans of their heart, and so they basically didn't have a lot of the markers that they look for in that scan.

   27. PAPeter Attia14:20

       Yeah, so they're doing these CT angiograms on folks in their 70s, and I believe, as you described it, they looked like healthy 50-year-olds. Is that about the-

   28. MEMichael Easter14:30

       Yeah

   29. PAPeter Attia14:30

       ... the time frame?

   30. MEMichael Easter14:31

       Yeah, I believe it was about-- They looked, uh, their hearts looked about 30 years younger.
5. 21:29 – 29:33

   The impact of ultra-processed foods on energy balance

   1. PAPeter Attia21:29

      What about, um, h- any of the... So, so here in the US, of course, or in the developed world, any one of us, myself included, who's thinking about their weight is kind of playing this game of how much should I eat? And, you know, there are all these great, you know, sort of models like, well, you know, always get up from the table when you're still a little bit hungry or really, you know, tr- you know, count your calories or limit your carbs or limit your fat or, you know, what- we always have like kind of heuristics that we try to use to regulate caloric balance. Do they do any such thing or do they literally eat as much as they want of these bland foods but their off switch just comes so much sooner because presumably nothing in their brain is being hijacked?

   2. MEMichael Easter22:18

      Yeah, so there, I'll answer that with this. There was an interesting study from Kevin Hall at the NIH, and they basically took a group of people and for two weeks, um, they fed them a diet that was ultra-processed food. Uh-

   3. PAPeter Attia22:29

      I love this study, by the way

   4. MEMichael Easter22:30

      Oh, it's fantastic.

   5. PAPeter Attia22:31

      It's so, so, so great.

   6. MEMichael Easter22:31

      And Kevin Hall is great.

   7. PAPeter Attia22:32

      And Kevin was a real skeptic going into this study. I think it's worth maybe giving a little bit of background.

   8. MEMichael Easter22:36

      That's, that's a great point.

   9. PAPeter Attia22:37

      Yeah.

   10. MEMichael Easter22:37

       So a group from Brazil had basically come out and said that, you know, one of the reasons, uh, for the obesity crisis is because of, uh, the food is ultra-processed. They're, the nature of the ultra-processing itself is leading people to eat more. So he calls them up and he goes, you know, "What evidence do you have?" Like, "Why do you think that?"

   11. PAPeter Attia22:56

       And sorry to interrupt, but just to make sure the listener understands, 'cause you and I know Kevin very well, um, Kevin's an empiricist whose view is to the best of his knowledge based on his data, and Kevin generally has access to the most controlled s- studies because he runs a metabolic ward.

   12. MEMichael Easter23:13

       Right.

   13. PAPeter Attia23:14

       It's the energy content of the food that is driving weight gain.

   14. MEMichael Easter23:19

       Yes.

   15. PAPeter Attia23:20

       And it is independent of the quality of the food.

   16. MEMichael Easter23:24

       Yes.

   17. PAPeter Attia23:24

       So 1,000 calories of broccoli is as fattening as 1,000 calories of potato chips.

   18. MEMichael Easter23:32

       Yes. So he calls them up and he, you know, he says basically that, and he goes, "So why do you think that?" And they go, "Well, ultra-processed food has more, it's got more sugar, it's got more salt." And he goes, "Well, you just named all these macronutrients. Like, you can't say that and that doesn't make any sense." So what he decides to do is he's gonna study this, see if there's any there there, 'cause he's a skeptic, right? So takes this group of people, uh, for two weeks they eat a, uh, they were kinda differentiated, but for the first two weeks they eat a ultra-processed diet. For the next two weeks they eat a diet that is matched for everything, carbs, salt All that, uh, for the other two weeks. But this food is minimally processed, so it's a minimally processed version of the diet. So for example, on one night of the ultra-processed diet, you might be getting, you know, like the Swanson meatloaf with the, with the, uh, mashed potatoes that have the butter and all that kind of stuff. Uh, on the unprocessed night, that version might be cut of beef, you know, some plain potatoes, that sort of thing. [smacks lips] And what he finds is that when-

   19. PAPeter Attia24:45

       And, and just to be clear, I believe you could... It was an ad lib feed study.

   20. MEMichael Easter24:49

       Yes.

   21. PAPeter Attia24:50

       You-- the, the participant eats as much of th- uh, the food as they want.

   22. MEMichael Easter24:54

       Yes.

   23. PAPeter Attia24:54

       They're not being restricted.

   24. MEMichael Easter24:55

       Correct. So he's telling them, "Eat as much as you want until you feel full." And what he finds is that when people are on the, uh, ultra-processed diet, they end up eating about 500 more calories a day, and they start to gain weight. When they are on the minimally processed diet, they eat less, and they start to spontaneously lose weight. And so I think one of the reasons for this, uh, obviously there's a lot of potential reasons, but I think one of the things that he thinks is that, uh, speed becomes a factor. So when you process a food to the extent that it becomes, you know, an ultra-processed food, i.e. a junk food, uh, it becomes a lot faster to eat, and you simply, uh, end up eating more of it, and there's more triggers to continue eating more of it because it is so hyper-palatable and enjoyable.

   25. PAPeter Attia25:45

       This leads to the three V's of snacking.

   26. MEMichael Easter25:48

       Yes.

   27. PAPeter Attia25:48

       Right?

   28. MEMichael Easter25:49

       So I talked to a, uh, a guy who's with the food industry, and he says, "If you wanna get a snack food to sell, it's gotta have three V's. It's gotta have value, so it's gotta be relatively affordable. It's gotta have variety, meaning there's gotta be a variety of flavors. The flavors have to be intense. And oh, by the way, if you're making one, just one snack food, that's not a good, that's not a good idea. Don't make just one original Pringles, make 20 Pringles. Make barbecue Pringles, make sour cream Pr- Pringles," on and on and on, right? There's all these different varieties. And then, uh, three, the third V is velocity. It has to be fast to eat. So snacking was not a sort of cultural thing until about 1970. And once people start to really snack, I mean, this becomes, this is a concerted movement by the food industry to go, "Okay, uh, how do we sell more food?" Right? "Well, let's invent this category called snacking." And once you see snacking start to take off, I think you really start to see the rise in obesity in our country, and then to have it trickle out across the world in 1970.

   29. PAPeter Attia26:52

       Yeah. It's kind of amazing to think that only 50 years ago, this concept which seems so ingrained in how we live... I mean, you can't really go anywhere. Like think about every time you're on an airplane, there's like a snack basket. Like everywhere [chuckles] you go, there are snacks.

   30. MEMichael Easter27:10

       There are snacks, yeah. And so, uh, and there's a, I think there's a lesson in that, right? And so it, when you think about, "Okay, well, if I'm trying to eat less, how can I do that?" Well, I think that the lessons from the Tsimane suggest, and there's other research that back this, backs this up, is that foods that are minimally processed, easy way to think about that is are ingredients rather than have ingredients, um, [smacks lips] they cut the breaks that sort of lead people to overeat, meaning it's a lot slower to eat, uh, foods that are unprocessed. So let's go back to your, uh, the example of the, you know, 1,000 calories of brownie versus 1,000 calories of broccoli. Yes, those two things might make you equally fat, but I would love to watch a person try and eat 1,000 calories of broccoli.
6. 29:33 – 36:22

   Michael’s experience with attempting the hunter-gatherer diet at home

   1. PAPeter Attia29:33

      name.

   2. MEMichael Easter29:33

      Yeah. So I hang out with, uh, this tribe for a while, learn from them, observe what they're eating, fish with them, just hang out. Great people. Go back to, uh, Las Vegas, and I decide, uh, "Okay, I'm gonna try this for a month. I'm gonna see what happens." So literally it's every food that I eat has to have just one ingredient. I gotta mimic as closely as I can what they're eating.

   3. PAPeter Attia29:55

      So what... Does... Tell me this. When you go home, how many foods in your pantry and refrigerator already fit that description?

   4. MEMichael Easter30:03

      Oh, there, there's like eight foods in the pantry that probably has 200 items that fit this, right?

   5. PAPeter Attia30:08

      Okay.

   6. MEMichael Easter30:08

      I've got like some apples in there.

   7. PAPeter Attia30:09

      So your pantry's as bad as mine.

   8. MEMichael Easter30:11

      Uh, yeah, I've got some plain rice. I've got, you know, but even things that I think people would normally maybe consider healthy, like whole wheat bread, flip that over, it's like, wow, that's a long list of stuff. Um- So I end up going to Costco to try and solve for this problem, and I'm walking the aisles and there's literally entire aisles that are just off limits, right? So you're left with a very basic diet every single day. In the morning, I might eat something like oatmeal. I might eat, uh, some eggs with that. At lunch, I might air fry some plantains and have, um, some fish. At dinner, uh, I would have maybe a sweet potato with some green beans and, um, you know, luckily we both hunt, uh, s- with some elk. And I will tell you, it was not as exciting as my normal diet. At the same time, I started dumping weight pretty fast. And I didn't necessarily want to lose weight, so I all of a sudden had to go, "Okay, if I want to stay at..." It was 180 pounds about. "If I want to stay, you know, at least at 175, I'm gonna have to up my caloric intake." Oh my gosh. It, it became so much food, right?

   9. PAPeter Attia31:18

      You, you were force feeding yourself.

   10. MEMichael Easter31:19

       I was force feeding myself, yes. So one day, for example, I'm like, "Okay," I'm trying to do some rough math in my head of, you know, calories. I'm going, "Okay, we're gonna need X amount of plantains," get them there and it's just, it's a mountain, you know? And, uh, it becomes tough to eat all that food s- so

   11. PAPeter Attia31:34

       By the way, did you restrict yourself in any other way? Did you not snack deliberately? Like if you... Or were you just never hungry between meals?

   12. MEMichael Easter31:41

       If I wanted a snack, I would usually just have a piece of fruit. So there, you know, the jungle out there is filled with fruit. I will say that was the one food they had that was good.

   13. PAPeter Attia31:48

       Oh, I bet.

   14. MEMichael Easter31:48

       So they had pretty good fruit out there. Yeah, it was fantastic. Um, so-

   15. PAPeter Attia31:51

       I wanna say, Michael, like that doesn't sound like an impossible to follow diet if you have control of your food environment. Where I think a diet like that becomes challenging is the moment you venture out of your own preparation bubble, i.e. the moment you go to someone's house for dinner or the moment you go to a restaurant. So how did you navigate those situations?

   16. MEMichael Easter32:11

       Yeah, that was, that was absolutely challenging. Um, the reality is, is I couldn't be perfect then, right? If my neighbor invites me over and says, "Hey, we're making you dinner," I'm not gonna walk in and be like, "Okay, well I got this food list from this-"

   17. PAPeter Attia32:21

       [laughs] You're not gonna be that guy

   18. MEMichael Easter32:22

       ... to this tribe in the Amazon. Please, yeah, just, uh, you know, fry me up some plantains. Air fry, though. Only air fry. Um, so I wasn't gonna do that. So I would just kinda do the best I could. You know, if it's a cookout, they're gonna have like some grilled chicken. They might have some, I don't know, like potatoes or something. I would just do my best. And-

   19. PAPeter Attia32:40

       Do you have a sense of what your macros broke down into?

   20. MEMichael Easter32:44

       Heavier on the carbs. So these people s-

   21. PAPeter Attia32:45

       Like what, what were you, roughly 50 carbs?

   22. MEMichael Easter32:48

       I would... Yeah, more than 50% carbs.

   23. PAPeter Attia32:49

       Okay.

   24. MEMichael Easter32:49

       I would say 50 to...

   25. PAPeter Attia32:51

       50 to-

   26. MEMichael Easter32:52

       60 at least. Yeah. Could've been up into the 70s some days.

   27. PAPeter Attia32:55

       And what else did you have for protein besides fish?

   28. MEMichael Easter32:58

       Elk.

   29. PAPeter Attia32:59

       Oh, that's right.

   30. MEMichael Easter32:59

       Eggs.
7. 36:22 – 42:53

   The roots of excess: factors that contribute to overeating and the varied vulnerabilities among individuals

   1. PAPeter Attia36:22

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

   2. MEMichael Easter37:04

      Yeah.

   3. PAPeter Attia37:04

      While the entire plate sits there in front of them for the next hour.

   4. MEMichael Easter37:08

      Yeah, that's a, that's a really good question. Um, I don't think there's a perfect answer. I do think sometimes food can be used for things other than nutrition. For example, stress relief, things like that. Um, emotions, dealing with emotions. I, I do think you tend to see, um, [lip smack] especially today, um, people eat for emotional reasons, right? There was a study that I had in The Comfort Crisis that, uh, suggested that 80% of eating today is driven by reasons other than true hunger. And so there's a lot of, a lot of things it could be. It's a certain time of day, but I think, uh... Or, you know, food is around, so you just eat it. But I do think that stress eating is a thing that works. Like, eating food will solve your stress in the short term if it works for you.

   5. PAPeter Attia37:52

      And, and where do you think that comes from in the sense that... 'Cause let's go, I wanna talk about the scarcity loop. We haven't defined it.

   6. MEMichael Easter37:57

      Mm-hmm.

   7. PAPeter Attia37:57

      I, I sort of jumped into it. But we're gonna talk about what the scarcity loop is, but there are some people, like, I could walk into a casino, which we're gonna talk about gambling. It wouldn't even occur to me to play a slot machine. Like, it wouldn't, the thought wouldn't cross my mind. I would just look at that and think, "Why would I ever want to waste a dollar?" Like, it, I, and I, I say that not with any judgment on those who have destroyed their lives at slot machines, but that doesn't... I mean, I don't, like, I would... If you said to me, "You could play the slot machine or watch the paint dry on the wall," I'd be like, "Well, at least I don't have to pay to watch the paint dry."

   8. MEMichael Easter38:33

      [laughs]

   9. PAPeter Attia38:33

      Um, so, so there are, but yet there are some addictions, such as food, that I will struggle with indefinitely. Um, and we could go through the list. There are some people who, you know, drugs, you know, whether it be that first time they take a painkiller, it puts a hook into them that is very difficult for them to escape. Alcohol, same thing. Like, never occurs to me to get drunk, and I know obviously you're sober.

   10. MEMichael Easter38:58

       Right.

   11. PAPeter Attia38:59

       So clearly for you, alcohol scratched an itch that it's never scratched for me, and I feel very grateful for that. In other words, I don't think there's a moral difference between us. I think there's, like, a biochemical difference.

   12. MEMichael Easter39:12

       Mm-hmm.

   13. PAPeter Attia39:13

       Do you have a sense of why each of us have different vulnerabilities when it comes to the scarcity loop?

   14. MEMichael Easter39:20

       That's a great question. I think, um, I don't know if that... I mean, you might know, but I don't think there's a s- very specific answer. Like, why do people, why do you like F1 and I like basketball, right? It's, who knows? But I do think that probably exposure, um, during vulnerable periods sort of sets the table. So for example, um, here's a, here's a good example from addiction research. If a, uh, person drinks at 15 or younger, they have a coin flip's chance of becoming an alcoholic. If they drink, uh, after 21, 21 or older, they have a 10% chance. And so why is that? It's because your brain is developing such a way from the, from puberty till you're about 25, where you're trying to figure out, "Okay, how do I find comfort? How do I navigate the world? How do I deal with stress? How do I deal with my problems?" And so I think that that sort of gets set in with alcohol, for example. That gets set in at that age, and you go, "Oh, this thing, this is what works for me." Right? So it could be maybe at a young age, like, food worked for you to help you deal your, deal with your problems. For me, it was like, you know, I, first time I drank when I was, like, 15, I'm like, "Wow, the world's way better after this," right? It was like a very deep learning experience.

   15. PAPeter Attia40:34

       That's so interesting. I remember reading that and thinking of my first time drinking, which was 13. But I drank so much. It was funny. I worked at my dad's restaurant. It was New Year's Eve. I was a busboy. And at the end of the night, I went around and drank all of the remaining drinks on the table-

   16. MEMichael Easter40:53

       Oh, no

   17. PAPeter Attia40:53

       ... of everything that was there, including, this was back when you could even have a can of beer, and I'm pouring it out, and, like, cigarette butts are coming out, and I'm drinking the beer. Like, and I got so drunk that not only did I vomit throughout the night, I was drunk the next day.

   18. MEMichael Easter41:09

       Oh, wow.

   19. PAPeter Attia41:10

       Is it just the case that that was such an unpleasant experience versus, you know, your experience? And by the way, you know, recently Matthew Perry died, and I remember reading an article about him where he talked about the first time he drank. And I think he said, you know, he sort of drank a bottle of wine laid in a field and was like, "This is the greatest feeling in the world." So, uh, that made me think that maybe it comes down to not just age of exposure, but the reward that comes from that exposure.

   20. MEMichael Easter41:38

       Yeah.

   21. PAPeter Attia41:38

       And maybe, you know, if there, if there's no reward, and in fact there's a punishment physiologically, it could have the opposite effect.

   22. MEMichael Easter41:45

       Yeah, I think so. I mean, I think y- y- you learn that this thing is good, right? You do this thing. "Oh, that was a good outcome. I'm gonna do that again 'cause I want that good thing again."

   23. PAPeter Attia41:54

       Yeah.

   24. MEMichael Easter41:54

       Whereas with you, your exposure to alcohol was, "Okay, I did this thing. Wow, that was terrible." [laughs] "I'm not gonna do that again," right? It's, for you it's like putting your hand on the stove.

   25. PAPeter Attia42:04

       Yeah.

   26. MEMichael Easter42:04

       It's like, "Oof. Not doing that ever again." For me, it was like I flipped on the stove, and this amazing five-course best meal of my life appeared, and it was like, "Wow, I'm gonna be touching that stove button to get that to happen again." So I think it's, it's very much just a learned behavior that we... I mean, that's how humans, humans learn. That's why we do what we do, 'cause we get rewarded for it, right? And so I think it, um, just sort of gets set in particularly at a, at a young age. And, um, you know, and it could be that by the time, going back to that study, by the time you're 21, well, you've figured out these other ways to navigate the world, what you get rewards from. And so if you've waited until 21, you're like, "Well, I have all these other things that Give me rewards and

   27. PAPeter Attia42:46

       Yeah. You, you've, you've figured out other self-soothing tools-

   28. MEMichael Easter42:49

       Yeah

   29. PAPeter Attia42:49

       ... that, yeah. So let's now talk about the scarcity loop.

8. 42:53 – 55:05

   The scarcity loop: how components of the scarcity loop are illustrated in gambling and addiction

   1. PAPeter Attia42:53

      There are three components to it, and these three components get exploited in our lives everywhere we go.

   2. MEMichael Easter43:02

      Yeah.

   3. PAPeter Attia43:02

      What, what are they and how do they feed off each other?

   4. MEMichael Easter43:04

      Yeah, I mean, so for context, the reason that I started thinking about this is that I live in Las Vegas. And in Vegas, I mean, you talked about your experience with slot machines. Well, not everyone in Vegas feels the way you do about slot machines. [laughs]

   5. PAPeter Attia43:17

      No. And I, and I, and I d- again, I don't say that with any judgment or moral superiority. I truly believe there's a biological difference-

   6. MEMichael Easter43:24

      Yeah

   7. PAPeter Attia43:24

      ... between me and that person in Vegas who could throw their life away.

   8. MEMichael Easter43:28

      Yeah, totally. I agree. So I basically make the observation that, one, you have to realize that slot machines are all over Las Vegas. They're in the grocery stores, they're in the gas stations, they're in, uh, the restaurants, the bars. They're in the airport. And people play them all the time. And so when I go down to the gas station to, you know, fill up my truck and, and get a Diet Coke, I'll see people in there at, you know, 7:00 AM playing the slot machine. And I see that and I go, "Why would anyone do that?" Like, it doesn't make any sense 'cause everyone knows the house always wins.

   9. PAPeter Attia43:58

      And by the way, when the house wins in blackjack and poker, it's only slightly, right? It's like, you know, it's 51/49, right? What is the ex- how, how much does the house win in slot machines?

   10. MEMichael Easter44:10

       So it's actually not super, super far off of those odds.

   11. PAPeter Attia44:14

       Oh, okay.

   12. MEMichael Easter44:14

       So in the past, slot machines used to be, they called them one-armed bandits because the case was that they were one-armed bandits. Now I believe that, uh, slot machines are about, return about 85 cents for every dollar you spend-

   13. PAPeter Attia44:24

       Got it

   14. MEMichael Easter44:24

       ... on average. So, um, so I see this and-

   15. PAPeter Attia44:27

       Which is smart for reasons you're gonna explain.

   16. MEMichael Easter44:29

       Yeah. We'll, we'll get in-

   17. PAPeter Attia44:30

       Yeah

   18. MEMichael Easter44:30

       ... we'll get into why that works and why once they shifted from not giving people frequent wins and rewards to more frequent wins and rewards, why slot machines took off. So I make this observation about slot machines and I start wondering, "Okay, how does a slot machine work? How can this thing get people to be down at the 7-Eleven and sit for hours and hours and play this thing where you know you're gonna lose?" Play it long enough, you're gonna lose. It's just how it works. So I go into journalist mode, and what was fascinating is, is the first people that I call are people who are, I would guess I would term them, um, they're gambling researchers, but they have a very anti-gambling bent. Okay? So they're looking at, "Okay, here's all the reasons why gambling hurts us. Here's why people get hooked on slot machines." And I call them up and I talk to these people, and they tell me all sorts of things that, um, are kind of like the myths you hear about casinos, right? So, uh, one person said, uh, "Slot machines only play in the key of C, and the key of C is very pleasing to people, and it, uh, relaxes their wallet. You know, it relaxes them and in turn their wallets." Another person tells me, "Oh, casinos don't use right angles because right angles activate the decision-making part of your brain, and that'll slow down your rate of gambling." All these different things. Another one was casinos don't have clocks, so you lose track of time.

   19. PAPeter Attia45:48

       Did you hear the one about how casinos inject oxygen into the air to... I, I don't know why that would make you wanna gamble more, but I remember hearing that they're pumping oxygen into the room.

   20. MEMichael Easter45:59

       Also known as the biggest fire hazard ever known to man.

   21. PAPeter Attia46:01

       Yeah. [laughs] Exactly.

   22. MEMichael Easter46:02

       Yeah. [laughs] So I go, "Okay, like, sounds good," but the problem is, is I live in Las Vegas and I got a casino like two exits from me. So I go into the casino. Uh, no, they don't have clocks, but, like, neither does Costco, neither does Walmart. Neither does any normal business. They, we, we don't just hang clocks everywhere.

   23. PAPeter Attia46:19

       I don't have one in here, by the way. I don't know if you noticed.

   24. MEMichael Easter46:21

       Right. Well, you're trying to mani- manipulate me somehow. [laughs]

   25. PAPeter Attia46:23

       I, I am trying to get you to play a slot machine.

   26. MEMichael Easter46:25

       Uh, the right angles thing, slot machine screens are a square. That is right angles, right? And then I call up a, uh, slot machine audio composer who lives in Vegas. It's a real job you can have in that town. And, uh, he goes, "Where'd you hear that? I use all keys. You know, I'm just trying to make the best little jingle that I can. I'm just trying to have fun." Um, so I realized that my inherent problem is that I am talking to people who want us all to stop gambling, and I need to talk to the people who want us to start gambling, right? I gotta follow the money on this thing. So long story short is through, um, some different contacts, I end up at this place on the edge of town in Vegas, and it's this new cutting-edge casino. Um, but it is not fully open to the public like a normal casino would be. It is used, uh, it's a casino laboratory, so it's used entirely for research on human behavior.

   27. PAPeter Attia47:18

       [laughs]

   28. MEMichael Easter47:19

       And the people invested in this are gambling companies, so big gambling companies, um, like Boyd, Caesars, whatever, all the big names, um, but also a lot of tech companies. So there's 73 different companies that are invested in this place. And it is, it, it is very much like a twilight zone of casinos. You walk into this place and you're like, "I'm in, I'm in a casino." But there's a lot of people with PhDs and there's, you know, they're doing studies. And, uh, I end up talking to a guy who designs slot machines, and he basically explains like, "Oh, yeah, here's how a slot machine works," and he lays out this system. And I talk to other people who talk about it in different ways, so I call it the scarcity loop. And so the reason a slot machine works is it works on this three-part system that I call the scarcity loop. So part one, or the first condition, is opportunity. You have an opportunity to get something of value. So in the case of a slot machine, it's, it's money, right? Uh, part two is unpredictable rewards. You know you're gonna get the thing of value at some point, but you don't know when, and you don't know how valuable it's gonna be. So with a slot machine, once you play a game and those reels are rolling, they could all land and you get nothing. They could land and you win, say, $2 on your dollar bet, or you could win $20,000 on your dollar bet. There's a crazy range of outcomes every single game. And then three, and this is important, is quick repeatability. So once those reels land, you can immediately repeat the behavior. You can play again. So the average slot machine player plays 16 games a minute, which is more than we blink. Now, the reason that this is, uh, important to talk about, that we're not just talking about slot machines here, right? This isn't a gambling podcast, is that, uh, this system can get people to do a lot of other behaviors that are seemingly irrational, too. So it's, uh, it's what makes a lot of different systems like social media work, right? You post something, you got an opportunity to get some likes, some status, so you check and recheck 'cause you don't know when those likes are coming in. You don't know if your post is gonna go viral. You might get canceled.

   29. PAPeter Attia49:25

       [chuckles]

   30. MEMichael Easter49:26

       You might get a message from someone that you think is great. On and on and on, right? Um, it's in dating apps. It's in different financial apps. So one of the reasons that, uh, Robinhood really took off is because they increased the quick repeatability by removing fees for trades. Uh, it's in online shopping. A lot of, uh, advertisers are using casino-like features in their ads to sort of drive profits, and that's, uh, led to a sevenfold increase in conversion rates when they put, like, a spinning wheel for a discount. And so I think when you start to look at the behaviors that people have a hard time moderating, I think a lot of them rely on this system.
9. 55:05 – 1:03:09

   Using knowledge of the scarcity loop to break the cycle

   1. PAPeter Attia55:05

      extrapolate from that to where we are today? In other words, we're sitting in the midst of an unbelievable epidemic. I've even done a podcast on this, and it's a little outside of, you know, my area of expertise, and you could argue, and I have argued, that it does impact longevity because, uh, mortality rates, uh, for the US population are actually in a small state of decline, being driven almost exclusively by the death of people aged roughly 25 to 55, where we've seen the deaths of despair, uh, increase at a rate we've never seen before. So deaths of despair are now, um... And, and the biggest of the three deaths of despair, so we count accidental overdose or, you know, that, that includes poisoning, right? So fentanyl in a drug that you don't think has fentanyl. Um, alcohol related deaths and suicides. So those three are collectively expanding, but the greatest of the three by far is the overdose, the non-suicide overdose. So what do you, what do you think explains that, uh, how, how much of each of the relative contributions do you think are contributing to that? Because it's no longer just in the old steel mill town, y- you know, which I think probably explained the thin edge of the wedge in the late '90s and early 2000s. But here we are 25 years later, and this is an epidemic in any and every city, including my city of Austin.

   2. MEMichael Easter56:35

      Yeah. I think if you're looking at it, um, purely from a death s- statistics, um, that goes back to fentanyl, and that fentanyl is being put in, um, drugs that are all over the country now, and people aren't necessarily aware that they're getting-

   3. PAPeter Attia56:49

      Right

   4. MEMichael Easter56:49

      ... the drug, right? So I, I, I think we also have to back up and go, "Okay, well, why do people, why do people use drugs?"

   5. PAPeter Attia56:56

      Why would people use a drug knowing that there's a risk that, that there's fentanyl in something that they weren't expecting fentanyl to be in?

   6. MEMichael Easter57:03

      Right. I think when you look at drugs from a historical perspective, um, humans have always used psychoactive substances as tools to accomplish something. So if you think about, uh, chewing coca leaf in South America, right? The coca leaf was used to enhance focus on long hunts, to, uh, kill hunger on long hunts when you couldn't find food. Same with tobacco. Um, and so you tend to see that substances have always been used as a tool to accomplish something, right? Because they benefited the person's life somehow. Now, what has changed between today and, you know, 100,000 years ago is that we have made, uh, we've taken our substances and we have distilled them into something where the psychoactive component is so strong and pure that it really can become almost an obliterant in a way, right? And, um, over time, the availability has risen as well. So I think when you think about something like fentanyl being placed into things is, I think there's a lot of people that can use drugs and be okay. Would I recommend that? No. But can people use drugs, um, recreationally? I think there are plenty of people who can and do. Um, the work of Carl Hart, for example, gets into this a lot. Um, and so what happens when you start getting fentanyl in drugs that people who are using it recreationally get, um, you start to see people who die. So there's recently in New York City, there was a, uh, bad batch of, uh, cocaine that had fentanyl in it, and you had five people die in Manhattan in a single night, and these are not people living on the street-

   7. PAPeter Attia58:47

      Right

   8. MEMichael Easter58:47

      ... right? These are like people who have an apartment in Midtown.

   9. PAPeter Attia58:50

      These are white collar people who-

   10. MEMichael Easter58:52

       Yeah

   11. PAPeter Attia58:52

       ... use cocaine recreationally.

   12. MEMichael Easter58:53

       Yeah.

   13. PAPeter Attia58:53

       Yep.

   14. MEMichael Easter58:53

       Exactly. And so I think that that really accounts for the rise in, uh, overdose deaths.

   15. PAPeter Attia58:58

       So in other words, y- you, you're, you're not necessarily thinking that we're seeing an increase in the epidemic of, I, I don't know how to describe it, but like catastrophic drug use or drug use that is commensurate with no function in life outside of drug use.

   16. MEMichael Easter59:15

       I think we very well might be because, uh, the substances, when I'm talking about, uh, you know, deaths being spread around the country-

   17. PAPeter Attia59:22

       Yeah

   18. MEMichael Easter59:22

       ... I think that accounts for that. But I do think that our substances today are strong enough that they can have more extreme consequences.

   19. PAPeter Attia59:29

       Yeah.

   20. MEMichael Easter59:29

       You know?

   21. PAPeter Attia59:29

       Yeah. In other words, the deaths of despair might be over counting because some of those people dying might not be in-

   22. MEMichael Easter59:36

       Addicted to drugs

   23. PAPeter Attia59:36

       ... the same... Yeah. That said, a, a pushback to that would be, look, should anybody really be using cocaine? Like-

   24. MEMichael Easter59:43

       Right

   25. PAPeter Attia59:43

       ... what does it say about us if we need to be using cocaine?

   26. MEMichael Easter59:46

       Yeah.

   27. PAPeter Attia59:46

       Is there some, is there a pr- you know, like let's go back to the example you gave. Um, we clearly evolved to enjoy the rush of norepinephrine, right? But the, the coca leaf never produced the concentrated high. In many ways, the drugs of today are the equivalent of a bag of peanut M&Ms.

   28. MEMichael Easter1:00:09

       Right.

   29. PAPeter Attia1:00:10

       Like they're simply so concentrated in bliss-

   30. MEMichael Easter1:00:14

       Mm-hmm
10. 1:03:09 – 1:12:56

    The evolutionary drive to acquire material possessions

    1. PAPeter Attia1:03:09

       talk about material possessions. You've alluded to it already because you mentioned how during the pandemic, many of us increased our e-shopping. And, um, I suppose, like all good addictions, there's an adaptive component to that, right? Like, at the beginning of the pandemic, when it was March and April of twenty twenty, I think there was a pretty good reason not to go out. We had no idea what we were dealing with. And the fact that Amazon could deliver things to my door that I used to go out for made complete and total sense. And yet, why is it that I probably still buy as much on Amazon now as I did then, if not more?

    2. MEMichael Easter1:03:50

       Yeah, I think it, uh, I think there are evolutionary reasons for having more items. Right? If, uh, you could get more tools as a person, that probably gave you a survival advantage. Having more items was probably a better idea than having less, especially when you're trying to survive, right? So I think we still have this, uh, drive to accumulate stuff, but the difference, of course, is that now we live in a world where we manufacture so much stuff, and it's cheaper than ever before. So even just a couple hundred years ago, the average person, for example, owned about three outfits. Now the average person owns a hundred and four outfits, and they also only wear ten percent of the clothes that they own. So we [laughs] ... There's like, I think the stats are twenty percent of the stuff in our closets we don't wear at all. I think there's another, uh, I'm gonna get the math here wrong, forty percent or something that we're like, "Eh, it's okay. I don't really love it." And then there's a few items where we're, "I wear 'em sometimes," and then we're left with ten percent, where we actually repeatedly wear those items all the time, and that, that tracks with my own experience. And so I think really, um, the difference today is that, you know, we've, we've always had this itch to own things, to possess things, um, but we could never scratch it that often because not only, um, uh, things took time to make. Because of that, they were more expensive. It was harder to get the resources to make 'em. And then once the Industrial Revolution happens, we, you know, start cranking out stuff at an amazing rate. Now, again, this kind of goes back to the food thing, where it's like, well, this is a good problem to have. But I think you s- tend to see people collect and collect and collect items. And now the average house, uh, according to one estimate, has anywhere from ten thousand to forty thousand items in it.

    3. PAPeter Attia1:05:37

       So we clearly can see a direct and negative consequence to our well-being due to the scarcity loop's impact on food, which is, for seventy percent of us, it results in overweight or obesity, and for that subset of the population, there's a nearly doubling of risk in c- other chronic diseases. So that's, like, you might not feel the pain immediately, but there is a real and clear threat to your longevity. What are the downsides of stuff accumulation outside of the extremes? So clearly there are people who have, like, hoarding diseases, and then clearly there are people who could buy so much stuff that it would financially ruin them in the same way a gambler could be ruined. But I suspect that most people listening to this are more like me, where they have too much stuff, but it's, doesn't seem to pose a direct risk to them. Yet I suspect that there's something, uh, harmful about it. What, what is that?

    4. MEMichael Easter1:06:45

       Well, I do think there's some interesting research that suggests, um, being around too much clutter, I do think it impacts, uh, your ability to focus. Seems to be related to, um, anxiety, different things. Um, now, is it a direct threat like, you know, heart disease is? No But, um, I, I think what tends to happen is when you look at why people buy, I think there's basically four reasons. I think the first is, um, items are tools. We use them to accomplish a greater goal. This is probably how people would've used things for most of time. Uh, two, we can use them to get status. So you're buying something, uh, in order to display something about yourself to others, right? It- it's kind of a status play. It's like no one buys a Rolex 'cause they wanna know what time it is. [laughs]

    5. PAPeter Attia1:07:39

       [laughs] You're talking to a watch guy here.

    6. MEMichael Easter1:07:40

       Well, same here. I'm, I'm, I'm aware of it. I'm talking, I'm talking crap on myself. [laughs] Um, and then number three is that we can use goods to belong. So think of, um, you know, you wear your F1 shirt when you go to the F1 race.

    7. PAPeter Attia1:07:57

       Mm-hmm.

    8. MEMichael Easter1:07:57

       It's like you're part of this community, and it pulls you into the community, and I think you see that practically, um, beyond sports. I mean, certain types of people wear Patagonia.

    9. PAPeter Attia1:08:06

       Mm-hmm.

    10. MEMichael Easter1:08:07

        Certain types of people wear the Black Rifle Coffee Company shirt, right? We kind of get these tribes that we can, uh, identify with via a thing to buy. And then the fourth reason, I think, uh, and I think this was a powerful one during the pandemic, is simply that people are bored. And we today have much faster, easier opportunity to purchase stuff than we ever have before. I mean, even, even 20 years ago, if a person wanted to buy something, if they're bored, um, shopping would-

    11. PAPeter Attia1:08:36

        You'd actually go out and do it

    12. MEMichael Easter1:08:37

        ... you had to go out and do it. You had to get in your car. You had to go to the store. You had to walk the aisles. Go, "Uh, is this the thing I want? Is this thing there?" Like, it's a time-consuming process. Um, now we can just do it online. We can search Amazon. Not to mention, I think that when you look at how algorithms have invol- have evolved, I mean, anyone who's ever spent 10 seconds on Instagram-

    13. PAPeter Attia1:08:58

        [laughs]

    14. MEMichael Easter1:08:58

        ... they know that that machine knows what they wanna purchase more than they do themself.

    15. PAPeter Attia1:09:04

        That's what amazes me. Um, usually when Instagram suggests something to me, it's, it's good.

    16. MEMichael Easter1:09:12

        It's good. It's good.

    17. PAPeter Attia1:09:13

        Whereas interestingly, Google isn't nearly as good for some reason. I don't know why. Google seems to really suggest dumb things to me I have no interest in, but not Instagram.

    18. MEMichael Easter1:09:24

        Yeah, Instagram is very good. Very good. I think it's probably, it probably taps in better to culture.

    19. PAPeter Attia1:09:29

        It's probably that you interact with it in a different way, even though-

    20. MEMichael Easter1:09:31

        Mm

    21. PAPeter Attia1:09:32

        ... I don't sp- I barely spend time on social media.

    22. MEMichael Easter1:09:34

        Yeah.

    23. PAPeter Attia1:09:34

        But it, it must know when I watch an exercise video, or maybe it knows I'm posting exercise video. It's always suggesting the coolest exercise equipment, and I'm always like, "Even though I don't have any room for that, I could really use that device."

    24. MEMichael Easter1:09:50

        You and I are the same. I get, I get exercise contraptions, and I'm sorry to bring up the Grateful Dead again on your podcast, but once I start following all these random Grateful Dead accounts, what am I getting?

    25. PAPeter Attia1:10:01

        Oh, yeah.

    26. MEMichael Easter1:10:02

        Getting like, "Oh, you need this shirt from the 1994 tour. It's awesome." Like, oh, dang it. Over the pandemic, I bought about-

    27. PAPeter Attia1:10:08

        That's the other thing I get. I get a lot of T-shirt ads-

    28. MEMichael Easter1:10:10

        Yeah. [laughs]

    29. PAPeter Attia1:10:11

        ... for things that I'm clearly doing.

    30. MEMichael Easter1:10:14

        Yeah, and so I think that you, you, if you are bored, you can, you know... Y- you might s- first get bored, and you feel that discomfort, and so boredom, I talked about this on the last podcast, talked about it in The Comfort Crisis, but boredom is this evolutionary discomfort that basically just tells us-
11. 1:12:56 – 1:23:27

    The benefits of boredom and value of exploration

    1. MEMichael Easter1:12:56

       And I do think, too, t- you know, you asked me, did you sort of adapt to the Chiamane food? I do think you can adapt to boredom. So for example You know, in The Comfort Crisis, I spent all this time in the Arctic, and I will say that the boredom was most intense early on in the trip. After you've sort of removed yourself from the incoming emails, the screens, the million things that you're normally doing, um, things start to slow down, and you start to calm down, and you start to become more observant. And, I mean, I will tell you, probably the most, uh, mentally well I've ever been in my life was after a couple weeks up in the Arctic because you just, um, you're just dialed in. You just feel so much calmer. And I do think that we, um, live in a world now of hyperspeed. Um, anytime we want to be stimulated, we can do that, and by the way, it's, it's gonna be TikTok, right? It's, like, coming at you fast. Um, so I do think that there's a case for finding time in your life for removal from all that, to sort of lean back into boredom. And one of the, one of the things, uh, I guess, issues I've had with a lot of the messaging around how people need to use their cell phone less is that, like, yes, that is important. Um, but what tends to happen is when people take an hour off their phone screen time, they go, "Okay, well, I'm bored. What do I do now?" And they turn on Netflix. [laughs] And there's no difference, right? Um, so I advocate for trying to think, "How can I infuse boredom back into my life?" And really for me, that's, you know, go out, take a walk for 20 minutes, see what happens to your thoughts. Be willing to sort of sit with that and see where it leads you beyond the screen. Because on the screen is what everyone else is getting, and so I think this is particularly great for ideation. You know, I think this is one of the reasons why people have their best ideas in the shower [laughs] is 'cause you're not focused on anything. You're just kind of letting your mind wander, do its thing, and then bam, that's the angle. Whatever it is, that's the idea.

    2. PAPeter Attia1:14:57

       Finishing out this discussion on stuff, um, my kids have many more toys than I had, and my wife and I talk about this a lot because I kind of live vicariously through them when it comes to Lego. So I just can't stop buying Lego because I love building it with them, watching them build it, creating a huge Lego city. But [clears throat] I wonder, like, is there a downside of this? Because my kids are good kids. Like, I don't feel like they're spoiled brats or anything like that, but, like, I only had one Lego, and I had to take it apart and put it together, and take it apart and put it together, and take it apart and together. And the truth of it is I see them getting bored of Lego. Like, they're so conditioned that anytime a new one comes out, Dad goes and gets it 'cause he can't wait to see it kind of thing. And I do wonder, like, am I doing them a disservice in the long run? Am I depriving them of a scarcity that, that I had?

    3. MEMichael Easter1:15:55

       There w- there's an interesting study I came across when writing this book, and it basically, um, it had groups of people, and, uh, it had them solve a problem. And one group, uh, was told they had abundant resources to solve it. They could do all these different things to solve a problem. The other group had scarce resources, and so they had to come up with, um, different uses for tools. And what ended up happening is that the group that was faced with more scarce resources, they not only solved the problem, um, but they got more rewards from solving the problem by MacGyvering it. [laughs] Right? So when I think about it as applied, uh, to Legos, I don't... Uh, so in the book I lay out, um, you know, well, how should we think about, like, what's a good way to think about making a purchase? And one of the things that I argue for is framing purchases through the lens of gear, not stuff. So gear is an item that is allowing me to accomplish something that is life-giving, right? It's adding to this experience, um, that adds meaning into my life. Whereas stuff is often just kind of a purchase to fulfill an impulse. Um, I'm buying something 'cause I think it's gonna make me this other person.

    4. PAPeter Attia1:16:59

       Mm-hmm.

    5. MEMichael Easter1:16:59

       Right? It's gonna... If I buy this shirt, I'm gonna look like this. It's gonna be awesome. My life's gonna... Whatever. You get the point. And so I think w- when I think about your experience with Legos, that does seem to be adding a real enhancement to your life. Like, you're getting this time with your kids where you're building Legos. Um, at the same time, it might be interesting, now that you got this pile of Legos from all these killer kits, what could we make with this, guys? Right? We're not following the, the, the plan here anymore. We're going, "Could we build a castle? What would a castle look like with the resources we have?" And I think that that would probably lead them to exercise, um-

    6. PAPeter Attia1:17:34

       Well, it's funny you say that

    7. MEMichael Easter1:17:35

       ... their creativity.

    8. PAPeter Attia1:17:36

       We, we've already learned that. So when you buy the kit, they love to build the thing, but then they like to keep it and play with it as is.

    9. MEMichael Easter1:17:43

       Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

    10. PAPeter Attia1:17:44

        But where they get far more enjoyment is the loose Lego pile. So you go to the Lego store, you can buy loose Lego, and then there's a store called Bricks & Minifigs where they just... It's just a free-for-all. And the, the mo- They spend 80% of their time building a city that is huge. I'll show you after the podcast.

    11. MEMichael Easter1:18:04

        It's awesome.

    12. PAPeter Attia1:18:04

        You will find it hilarious. It's taken up our basement, and it's just made from the loose Lego, and it's their own stuff. So, like, every month we go get more pieces. They add another floor to the condo. You know, they've built, like, the grocery store, where I print out, like, H-E-B is the grocery store in Texas, so, like, I've p- I've made and laminated H-E-B signs that then stick on their grocery stores and all this other stuff. So I think you're right. I think they're... [clears throat] They must be getting more enjoyment out of that because it's where they're putting more time.

    13. MEMichael Easter1:18:36

        Yeah. Um, as part of the book, I talk about the value of exploration. So, um, you know, this feeds into information in that I think humans have a desire for information, right? If you, in the past, if you were the person who had more information, if you could crave information and try and get it, try to cure these uncertainties, that would give you a survival advantage. Now, we're still wired to crave information, and I think that anyone has experienced this practically. You know, anytime you get a itch in your side and you're going, "Oh, my gosh, am I dying?" Uh, you know, you're going down WebMD. Like, we know we want information. Twitter wouldn't work if people weren't information hoarders. But I think the difference between how we acquired information in the past and how we acquire it, acquire it today is that in the past, you had to go there in the present moment to learn something. It was a mind-body effort to get a piece of information, right? Is there g- greener grass over there? Well, you have to go to the other side to see if there is greener grass, and it's very up in the air. Um, there's a lot of uncertainties. But by going through that mind-body process outdoors, um, that real roll of the dice, you get more value from that when you realize, oh, we found this greener grass. This is great. And I think today, because we can Google so much, we still have this information itch, but we scratch it, um, online. So now I think that people's experiences of their day-to-day life oftentimes get mediated by, uh, information from other people. So what do I mean by that? Okay, when is the last time that you went to a restaurant just cold? Right? You just picked a random restaurant, you didn't read the Yelps from five different people, you didn't read all the reviews, you didn't look at the menu, you didn't kind of go, "Oh, that looks like a good table. Hopefully, we can get that one." Now, by doing that, when you get to that restaurant, your experience in there has totally changed. Totally changed, right? Because you now have expectations. You have expectations from, you know, Jim Smith, ninety-nine on Yelp because he told you to get the trout, but hold the almond sauce or whatever it is.

    14. PAPeter Attia1:20:40

        [laughs]

    15. MEMichael Easter1:20:41

        Um, and I think that that changes us, and I think that there is a case now for trying to re-explore the world like we used to, right? It's g- can you go into situations totally cold? And what will that be like? What sort of value will you get from that internally by doing this thing that no one told you about? You don't have any expectations going in, and you are just having this totally, uh, unadulterated moment that is in the present moment. And it's of course not just restaurants. It's like watching a movie, right? Reading a book, uh, listening to an album, going to a different part of town, right? There's all these different ways that you can have these sort of, uh, more momentous occasions in your life, um, without necessarily needing to follow the metaphorical Lego plan to the point of your kids-

    16. PAPeter Attia1:21:27

        Yeah

    17. MEMichael Easter1:21:27

        ... is why I'm talking about this. [laughs]

    18. PAPeter Attia1:21:30

        On that topic of information and exploration, um, [clears throat] y- you write about how homo sapiens were really the break-off point to true exploration, uh, in terms of distance traveled, uh, risk-taken, et cetera. I was thinking about it after I read that, and I, I don't know if you have a point of view or a thought as to why, for example, Neanderthals didn't do the same. They were bigger than us, stronger than us, had bigger brains than us, and could walk upright. In other words, they had all the tools that would've provided for the same, if not greater, exploration capacity as homo sapiens. Do we have a sense of what changed?

    19. MEMichael Easter1:22:10

        Yeah. We-- I mean, we are fascinating in that in basically fifty thousand years, we took over the world, right? [laughs] Homo-- Uh, Neanderthals were around a long time, and they just kinda were in the same place-

    20. PAPeter Attia1:22:21

        Yeah

    21. MEMichael Easter1:22:21

        ... most of the time. Not to mention that, but once we take over the world, we go, "All right. Well, let's put some highways on this thing, and maybe we should build a, uh, launch pad for a spaceship and go up into outer space, and, oh, what's, what's in that water?" Right? "Let's build a submarine." Um, so we are, uh, fascinating that way.

    22. PAPeter Attia1:22:37

        Was it just something that randomly got selected for in the, m-in the change to homo sapien, and then it just got rewarded and rewarded and rewarded? Like, is there no other structural reason for it other than-

    23. MEMichael Easter1:22:48

        I think so

    24. PAPeter Attia1:22:48

        ... just Darwin?

    25. MEMichael Easter1:22:49

        I mean, uh, uh, as part of the book, I looked at, um... There's a little bit of evidence of this gene that [laughs] is nicknamed the exploration, uh, gene, and, um, it seems to be around in populations that move a lot more. So it's, uh, far more prevalent in nomads. It's far more prevalent, uh, in societies that would've traveled farther, um, from our origins in East Africa. And so that, there's probably some reason there. But I think ultimately, um, you know, we're a species that-- and most animals are like this. You do the, the good thing, right? So there's some inherent reason why we would've kept moving, and maybe it's just that we get internal rewards from that.

    26. PAPeter Attia1:23:26

        So what do we

12. 1:23:27 – 1:30:38

    The consequences of an attention economy driven by negativity bias

    1. PAPeter Attia1:23:27

       owe a gratitude or despair to Benjamin Day for?

    2. MEMichael Easter1:23:33

       Oh, man. Okay, so before 1830, newspapers cost six cents. Uh, they tend to cover business and politics, and, uh, they're weekly. So Benjamin Day comes in, and he goes, "All right. I wanna, I wanna create a paper that gets, like, a lot of readers," because six cents is a lot of money back then. So he goes, "All right. What I'm gonna do is I'm gonna create a newspaper, and I'm going to sell it for one cent. Now, I'm selling it at a loss, so I have to make up, uh, my loss somehow. So what do I do? What if I went to some companies and said, 'Hey, I will publish stuff about your brand in my newspaper, and people will see it, and they'll buy your stuff?'" That is to say, this guy really started advertising, the advertising model. So once he does that, though, you can charge more money for your advertisements the more readers you have. Okay, so how do we do that? 'Cause we're at a loss right now. The more readers we have, the more money we can make off of each ad. That's how we're making our money. Well, business and politics is kind of boring, right? Business is a little bit boring. So what this guy does is, uh, by dropping the price to one cent, he's selling at a loss, but more people will be able to buy it, so he can get a bigger audience. And then second, what he does is he starts covering sort of murder, mayhem, [laughs] affairs, fights, all these different things that attract attention. So this is when you start to see the real shift from us, from newspapers covering these sort of nice, boring things to this guy going, um... Literally, he ran a headline that was bathed in blood, and it was about this, you know, murder-suicide in New York City. So he starts to publish, uh, every single day for one penny. And the headlines are always crazy gore. And I think this is when you start to see the attention economy in which we now live really start to take off, and it's the same deal. You know, in order to make a, in order to make money off an ad model, you have to get as many eyes as possible, and they have to be certain eyes, and the way you do that is often by running information that is, uh, negative, that is lurid, that is going to capture, information that's going to capture as much attention as possible. And, uh, you know, for example, still today 90% of news tends to be negative. Now, this holds whether or not the world is improving or not. Right? So we could, things could be much better than they were 100 years ago, but we're still having, our papers are still 90% negative news.

    3. PAPeter Attia1:26:08

       Yeah. And, and again, there's an evolutionary basis for negativity bias, right? You could make the case for how we were far, we are far better off evolutionarily to pay attention to negative signals rather than positive signals.

    4. MEMichael Easter1:26:21

       Yeah.

    5. PAPeter Attia1:26:21

       The negative thing is what could kill you. That demands your attention. The positive thing is great, but it doesn't need as much attention in the moment.

    6. MEMichael Easter1:26:28

       Right. Exactly. If you're the person who's, uh, looking at how beautiful the flowers are as the saber-tooth tiger walks up this way, you're not gonna [laughs] you're not gonna live that long.

    7. PAPeter Attia1:26:37

       God, it is, it is so incredible to think that natural selection, being such an amazing tool, could have no appreciation for what would come with modernity-

    8. MEMichael Easter1:26:50

       [laughs] Right

    9. PAPeter Attia1:26:50

       ... and how it would render so many things maladaptive.

    10. MEMichael Easter1:26:55

        Yeah, and I think this is, you know, the best example of this is with a lot of social media companies and how algorithms work, you know. If you let those things run their course, things that get the most traction tend to be the most, uh, lurid, crazy things, you know, and I think that that is one of the main reasons, um, we're so polarized as a country today, is that moral outrage is particularly, uh, great at capturing attention, and those things get upvoted because they're gonna get more eyes. And while that is, uh, good for bringing in eyes and making money for a social media company, it's not necessarily good for society always.

    11. PAPeter Attia1:27:33

        So you wrote in the information chapter about a study that was done on the social media use of politicians.

    12. MEMichael Easter1:27:41

        Yeah. [laughs]

    13. PAPeter Attia1:27:41

        What did you learn?

    14. MEMichael Easter1:27:44

        So this kind of goes back, this, this, uh, goes back to quantification and, um, how there are some downsides to quantifying everything and gamifying everything, but the long story short of that study is basically that when politicians first get onto Twitter, and they, uh, the scientists analyzed, used a AI algorithm to analyze all the tweets of about 10 years, uh, of politician tweets, and what they found is that when politicians would first get onto Twitter, it was like they would use a, "Hey, we're having a fundraiser," blah, blah, blah, you know. Um, nice things, relatively benign. But once they would tweet something negative that was attacking another person, they would start to get more likes and retweets, and that, in turn, would feel good, right? So it would tell them, "Oh, this works on this platform. This is what you need to do on this platform to get these points, because this is how we are scoring our behavior on this platform." And then from there, you started to see the number of negative tweets from them increase over time, because that's what gets rewarded on social media. And so, uh, you know, this probably isn't an accurate reflection of maybe who these people really are or what we really want in society. Do we want our politicians being terrible human beings on Twitter? I don't think so.

    15. PAPeter Attia1:29:04

        It's interesting. Imagine, um, a thought experiment where Twitter and social media ran exactly the same as now, except the person who was commenting was blinded to the, uh, feedback from others, so likes and retweets, for example. So if you put out something, y- you could put it out, and everybody could still see it just as they do, but if they liked it or retweeted it, you wouldn't see that. How do you think that would change things?

    16. MEMichael Easter1:29:37

        Well, it wouldn't train... I mean, so is there, to back up, is it l- it's human training, right? The algorithm trains us how to use it, how to behave and use the social media, uh, platform. So I don't see a huge difference between when I go stand by the treat jar and I say, "Stockton, sit," and my dog puts his butt on the floor, and I give him a treat. He knows to do that, right? Well, when I go on social media and I tweet, um, some crazy thing, say, I don't actually do that, but I tweet some crazy thing, and all you other humans go, like, like, like, that tells me, oh, if I want the good thing, whether it's my dog with the treat or the likes on social media, I gotta do that thing, whether it's sitting or writing, "Donald Trump is an idiot. Hillary Clinton's an idiot. So-and-so's an idiot," right? Um, I don't see much difference between that. Really, you get trained on these based on, um, how the system is set up with likes and retweets and followers. So that's a long way of saying I think you'd probably see less of that training occur.

    17. PAPeter Attia1:30:37

        Yeah.

13. 1:30:38 – 1:41:57

    Navigating the world of endless information and the value in “slow information”

    1. PAPeter Attia1:30:38

       So we want-- how do we reconcile this, right? We have evolved to want information. Have we evolved to want the truth?

    2. MEMichael Easter1:30:49

       That's a good question. Um, I think that, so there's this guy I talked to whose name is, um, Thi Nguyen, and he is a philosopher at the University of Utah. And he talked a lot about how, you know, we sort of evolve to trust, um, when we feel like we've gotten the right information. It gives us this sort of aha moment. So we have a question, we find what we believe is the answer, and we go, "Aha, that feels good. This makes sense." Um, things were probably pretty clear in the past, right? You either got the food that was gonna lead you to survive, or you didn't. You either found shelter, or you didn't. So you could trust that, aha, here's the food. But I think in today's age, whenever we have a question We can go seeking out information from a lot of different sources, and we can get that aha moment whether or not the information is factually correct or not. So here's a, here's a good example is that, you know, why do, uh, why are conspiracy theories compelling? Because they give you an aha moment. Conspiracy theories, they might seem complicated, and they often are, right? You got the big board, and you got all the strings, and it's like this person, this person, right? But at the end of the day, you have a very specific answer for why this thing is the way it is, right? It clears up any ambiguity when in reality, most things in life are very uncertain. They're very am- ambiguous. We don't fully understand why a certain thing has ever happened. But if you can sort of provide someone with an aha, that is going to give them a feeling of clarity, a feeling of certainty, and they can rely on that to make decisions whether or not the information is acc- actually accurate.

    3. PAPeter Attia1:32:31

       Yeah. I think people also find conspiracy theories, um, appealing when they provide a grand narrative to something to which the truth is insignificant. Uh, to me, the, the best example of this, 'cause it happens to be one of the conspiracy theories I've gone down the rabbit hole on, is the assassination of JFK. And, um, I, I can say this, I'm sure I will enrage a subset of the listeners, like every available shred of reasonably good evidence if you actually understand ballistics, and unfortunately, my training and surgical, uh, residency taught me a lot about what bullets do when they hit people, everything points to a single shooter. Everything points to three shots being fired by Lee Harvey Oswald. By the way, it wasn't hard shooting. That's the other thing that's like, there's no way he could have g-... No, no, no. Like, these were the easiest three shots in the world. He killed JFK. Um, why do we have to have so many conspiracies? Because how can we accept that such an insignificant, irrelevant human being like Lee Harvey Oswald could alter the course of history? That's impossible for most of us to wrap our minds around. It's much easier to think that the CIA had to do this because of pick your favorite Oliver Stone idiotic reason. Um, and so, I, yeah, I think that also-- Like, I wonder how that factors into us as storytellers and, and the need to, you know, have sort of information. Again, I don't know if there's an evolutionary basis for that, but, but I think that that also plays a role in, in people always-- And again, I, I think some conspiracy theories turn out to be true, right? So it's not always that the, that the, that the first answer is, is right or the first answer is wrong. This kinda gets to another issue, right? Which is, and I think Nguyen brings this up, which is the idea that we should think of food and information as analogous, where too much fast food is bad for you. Too much loose information without nuance is bad for you.

    4. MEMichael Easter1:34:48

       Yeah. So he, yeah, he compared it, compared it to food, where if you give up on a food's nutritional quality, it's very easy to make very delicious tasting food, seductively good food. Um, and the same as with information. If something just feels really good, really tasty, you should probably use that as a sign to maybe investigate the issue further, to look, to look at the, what the other side is saying.

    5. PAPeter Attia1:35:11

       Right. If you're willing to sacrifice truth and nuance, you can have the most seductive information possible. Yeah. If you're willing to sacrifice nutrition, nutritional quality, you can have the most delicious food possible. I think it's a beautiful analogy.

    6. MEMichael Easter1:35:26

       Yeah, exactly. And it is so easy to find anything online today. And there's, there's, you know, in the book, I talk about how there's, uh, answers to the most sort of mundane questions that we could have in daily life, like, you know, product reviews. You know, what is the best pillowcase? It's like, this is, you know, this is the epitome of a first world problem, but here I'm gonna spend eight hundred words of my time reading this story about what is the best pillowcase, you know? And it, they're just all over the board. We have so many experts. We have so much information, um, that I think we have more, you know, maybe knowledge in the world, but we don't necessarily have more understanding and more of an understanding of like, how should I actually spend my time? Do I wanna go down the, you know, the hour-long review, uh, review sites on pillowcases or whatever the item might be? And you can apply this to so many different things. I mean, you know, your background, I mean, does, does WebMD ever really help a person, like, figure out [chuckles] what's going on, or does it just lead them to go, "Oh, definitely stage four cancer"?

    7. PAPeter Attia1:36:26

       Yeah. Yeah. I, I think that's a very fair, uh, comparison. What, what is the, I don't wanna say solution, but what, what would be a tool you could recommend to somebody who's listening to us talk about this and acknowledging it and saying, "You know what? Come to think of it, I'm a bit of an information addict, and I'm, I'm at a point where my innate desire for information is becoming maladaptive because it's being applied in a manner that, you know, just as my natural and adaptive behavior to seek food has become maladaptive, I'm in the same place information-wise." How, how would you suggest a person cope with that?

    8. MEMichael Easter1:37:08

       Yeah. I do think that information falls into that scarcity loop that I talked about, right? You've, you're looking for this piece of information that you think is going to improve your life, but you don't know where it is, and so you search and search the web, and then when you find it, it's like, bingo. Great, I found it. And then you can sort of quickly repeat. So I think one way that you can slow down, um, any behavior you do in excess or reduce the frequency is to sort of slow it down. So there's this interesting study that I talk about in the book where they had a group of, um, students. They had two groups. They had them both figure out the answer to a question. Now, the first group could use the internet And so they go online, they search it, they find it really fast, great. The second group could not use the internet, so they had to use books. So they gotta go to the library, they gotta walk the stacks, they gotta find the book.

    9. PAPeter Attia1:37:54

       Mm-hmm.

    10. MEMichael Easter1:37:54

        [laughs] And then they gotta open to figure out where the information is in the book. They go, "Okay, I got it." They return back. Um, not only do they have slightly better information, but more importantly, they were better able to recall it later on. Um, when they were tested on it, they did, uh, better. So I think that there is an argument for a shift to slow information when you really want to understand something, right? 'Cause these people were better able to put it into context.

    11. PAPeter Attia1:38:20

        Now, most people are gonna listen to that and say, "It makes sense, but I'm never gonna get up off my desk and go to the public library and look at the stacks." So is there a way that you can toggle between fast and slow information still using the internet, for example?

    12. MEMichael Easter1:38:35

        Yeah, I think, um, [tsks] so I think kind of the metaphor there is, like, if you do really wanna understand something, realize you're probably gonna have to put in a little bit more work. It can't be a quick Google search. Now, at the same time, the, the-

    13. PAPeter Attia1:38:45

        That, that's how I justify the existence of this podcast, by the way.

    14. MEMichael Easter1:38:48

        [laughs]

    15. PAPeter Attia1:38:48

        Is if you really wanna understand a topic-

    16. MEMichael Easter1:38:51

        Yeah

    17. PAPeter Attia1:38:51

        ... that's why I, I try not to make too many apologies for the fact that we have three-hour episodes.

    18. MEMichael Easter1:38:56

        Yeah. I think that a useful heuristic is to, if you've got just a random everyday question that's not of much consequence in your life, um, try to make the decision in 60 seconds, right? You search for the information you wanna know. Okay, found it in 60 seconds. Yeah, that's probably right, you know? How do I get to Arby's? Bam, there you go. Um, what pillowcase should I buy? Pick in 60 seconds, right? Pick something. You just pick something, 'cause e- eventually you're wasting time. Uh, I had a, I have a story in the book about how when I was an intern at Esquire way back in the day-

    19. PAPeter Attia1:39:28

        [laughs]

    20. MEMichael Easter1:39:28

        ... um, I had, I got this assignment, and it was, "Okay, find out how much money the pope makes." And I go, "Okay, that's my job. I'm gonna find out how much money the pope makes." So I end up searching around online. Um, I even called up some Catholic academic, and you know, he was kinda like, "Uh, yeah, I think it's this much." Whatever. So I send in the research file to my editor, and I get an email back and it just says, "Meet me in the conference room in five minutes." So I get up, I go into the conference room, and this was at the Hearst building in New York-

    21. PAPeter Attia1:40:01

        Mm-hmm

    22. MEMichael Easter1:40:01

        ... which is where Esquire is. And so, you know, w- we're looking down the barrel of 8th Avenue, and he's sitting at this long table, and very Esquire guy, you know? He's, has the button-down, the tie is loose. Um, [inhales] he goes, "Sit down." And I say, "Okay." I go sit by him, and he, he just looks at me, starts shaking his head, leans back, and he goes, "No. No, no, no. If you wanna know how much money the pope makes, you call the fucking Vatican. Call the fucking Vatican." So the point is, I had totally missed the most obvious answer to that, right? If you wanna know something about a person, ask the person. [laughs] But instead we have now all these sort of kooky ways to go around it. So I think it's, uh, I think the metaphor is, like, if you can really just go to the source in a way, uh, do that, right? Read the study if you hear someone online saying that, you know, I don't know, oatmeal is totally toxic, and blah, blah, blah. And like, oh, by the way, you're probably gonna have to learn to read a study. Luckily, you provide information like that that is useful. Uh, if you wanna know what a person thinks, maybe ask them. Look about, look at what they've written on a thing. Watch the full interview in context, right? You see someone say something that seems crazy in a 30-second Instagram clip. It's like, okay, well maybe we should get the first, like, five minutes and the last five minutes after that so we kind of know what the context is. And you'll probably find that it's taken out of context and, like, it's being used against the person, right? So I think it is so easy to get such quick, seductive information. You wanna do a little more work for the things that you really wanna understand and not jump to conclusions. Like, we've seen so many, I mean, for example, media outlets get in trouble because they publish all these op-eds about, you know, a 30-second Instagram clip, like with the Covington Catholic, and now they owe the kid $250 million because we jumped to conclusions on a 30-second video clip.

14. 1:41:57 – 1:48:06

    Defining happiness, and the downward trend in reports of happiness

    1. PAPeter Attia1:41:57

       So the last section of the book is on happiness, um, which I actually found probably the, the, the chapter that I was thinking the most about, right? It was the one where I would pause the most and reflect and think and, and stuff like that. So I, I'll start with arguably the most difficult question, which is how do you define happiness?

    2. MEMichael Easter1:42:19

       Well, I can tell you that I had the same question [laughs] and I still do have the same question. I'll tell you what the, the dictionary says. I think it says, um, [tsks] joy, a feeling of joy, and there's one other word, maybe like felicity or something like that. So you go, "Oh, okay. Well, what does joy mean?" You go to joy, it goes, "A feeling of happiness."

    3. PAPeter Attia1:42:39

       [laughs]

    4. MEMichael Easter1:42:39

       So it's circular, right? Uh, and I think that you see people define happiness in all different ways. So I think it was, uh, Seneca who said it's, uh, not having anxiety about the future. Feeling okay in the moment, not having anxiety about the future. Uh, you know, John Lennon, the famous, uh, song, Happiness Is a Warm Gun, right? Um, I think it's hard to define, and it's also one of those things where, um, maybe we don't even know it when we are happy, but we can look back and be like, "Oh, that was a happy moment in my life." Like, it's this very, very murky thing, and yet we all wanna be happy, right? That is sort of the, uh, the capital G goal of most of the things we do. We take a drink 'cause we think it's gonna make us happy. We make, buy this purchase 'cause we think it's gonna make us happy. Um, we seek out that information on WebMD because we think that if we know what this thing is, that'll give us some relief, right? Um, but it is a very confusing topic, and I think maybe we know a little bit less about it than we think.

    5. PAPeter Attia1:43:47

       Where does happiness fit on Maslow's hierarchy of need? Is, I mean, is it, I know self-actualization is about the fourth rung, but where, does happiness actually fit into it?

    6. MEMichael Easter1:43:58

       I don't think it does. I mean, it's got the... I don't think so. Does it?

    7. PAPeter Attia1:44:03

       I, I don't think so. I don't, but I, but I haven't looked at it in a very long time. Um-

    8. MEMichael Easter1:44:06

       Yeah, I dove into that, um, a bit in the book, but I can't recall. I don't think it was at the, I don't think it was on there.

    9. PAPeter Attia1:44:13

       So that seems a little odd, isn't it? Because depending on how you define happiness, it does seem like a very high order goal.

    10. MEMichael Easter1:44:25

        Yeah. It is a high order goal.

    11. PAPeter Attia1:44:28

        But of course, I guess he's not defining it as a need, and maybe that's why it doesn't belong there.

    12. MEMichael Easter1:44:35

        So for this chapter, I, what made me write this chapter is sort of realizing that, um, you know, we all want more happiness. Sort of the book looks at what are these things that we all want more of? Um, how have they changed over time? And I think that, um, while most of the chapters say, you know, we had a scarcity of this thing, now we have a massive abundance of it, I don't know if that's necessarily held for happiness in a lot of ways, right? So one great example is that, uh, from 1979 to 1999, you saw, uh, real income im- uh, grow by about 43% among Americans. You know, we didn't actually become any happier, right? So [laughs] if we think that, you know, progress and money is always gonna make us happier, I don't think that that is the case.

    13. PAPeter Attia1:45:25

        When do you think peak happiness occurred? Because, like, I often think that on my worst day, I'm so happy to be alive today and to have not have been alive 200 years ago or 2,000 years ago or 20,000 years ago. Now, you know, that's a bit of a dumb thing to say, I know, because I have no idea what it was like to be alive 20,000 years ago when you don't know what today feels like. So in other words, you know, getting eaten alive by mosquitoes and ants every day while you scavenge for food, if you don't know what this is, is just what it is. So I get that one can't make that statement, but do the people who attempt to study this have a sense of when peak happiness occurred for our species?

    14. MEMichael Easter1:46:08

        Uh, not that I've come across. I mean, I do know that we are seeing decreases in happiness in the data. A lot of the data suggests that people are becoming less happy. Um, honestly, I would imagine that probably as we've gotten more technology, in a way, it's like technology improves your life and happiness to a certain point, and then at a certain point it begins to constrain you, and that could potentially make you more unhappy.

    15. PAPeter Attia1:46:34

        So Arthur Brooks has, has written a lot about happiness, and I, I have found the way Arthur writes about it to be the, the best way for me to think about it because, A, he doesn't write about happiness as a feeling, and that's, I think, the problem with the dictionary definition and why it's circular, 'cause happiness points to a feeling of joy and joy points to a feeling of happiness. But instead, he really writes about components or h- what he describes the macronutrients of happiness. Um, and so, uh, enjoyment being one of them, and enjoyment being a much deeper thing than pleasure, right? Pleasure being purely sensory, enjoyment being more cerebral, and really having this essential component of being shared with others. Um, and then he talks about satisfaction, which of course is the most fleeting of them, but is highest when there is a struggle, right? So this goes back to many of the examples you've already given, which is if you get something easily, it's not very satisfying. If you have to work very hard to achieve something, it's more satisfying. But probably for very important evolutionary reasons, we can't keep satisfaction, and that's what keeps us striving. Um, and then the final, what he again he calls macronutrient, is sense of purpose. Um, and again, without that, we can't have true happiness. And I, I honestly think of that as, to date, the best model I have

15. 1:48:06 – 2:00:12

    Purpose, austerity, self-reliance and other missing elements of happiness gleaned from the study of monks

    1. PAPeter Attia1:48:06

       encountered. Now you, to study this, continued your incredible journey-

    2. MEMichael Easter1:48:12

       Yeah

    3. PAPeter Attia1:48:12

       ... of going and doing really hard things. So what did you seek out in the pursuit of happiness?

    4. MEMichael Easter1:48:21

       So I go to, long story short, is I spent a week at a Benedictine monastery in the mountains of New Mexico. And so then you have to ask, "Well, okay, why, why the hell would you go there?" [laughs] And the answer is because, you know, I, we do kinda live in a world where there's a lot of these, uh, different things we're supposed to be doing for our happiness, and they're often backed by research, right? It's, uh, you gotta meditate, you got a gratitude journal, you gotta have as many friends as possible, blah, blah, blah. And, um, you know, that all seems great, but when you look at these Benedictine monks, what I find so fascinating about them is that they go against a lot of the happiness sort of research that's in pop culture right now. Um, they live a pretty hard life. [laughs] They get up at 3:00 AM, start to pray. They don't eat a lot of food, so they're not getting, [laughs] you know, pleasure from, uh, meals. They're also in silence most of the time. They do hard labor four hours every single day. They're not entirely social, right? Because it's the silence, and they often work alone. But when researchers have done these-

    5. PAPeter Attia1:49:28

       And, and no, no s- they're celibate. There's no relationships.

    6. MEMichael Easter1:49:31

       Yeah. [laughs] No relationship. Yeah, no romantic relationships. Um, no real access to the outside world in terms of, you know, they're not on Facebook and keeping up with the news that way. It's a lot of, um, their motto is Ora et Labora, which is pray and work. [laughs] Right? And so- What's interesting, though, is that there's a researcher whose name is Alex Bishop, who's done a lot of, uh, research on them and their happiness levels, and they seem to be happier than the average American. Despite all these hardships that they face in their life, despite all these sort of crazy, unnecessary things they seem to be doing, they wind up significantly happier than us when we have access to all these things that should make us, you know, feel great in the moment. So I go and I live with them for a week. And I think the-- my main takeaway for them really goes back to, uh, what Arthur was saying, is that if something is, uh, challenging to get, I think we get more rewards from that. And that also makes sense from an evolutionary perspective. I talked to a guy, his name is Thomas Zentall, and he explained that there's probably-- the reason for this is probably, you know, if you had to search and search and search for food and, like, you weren't finding it, um, but you persisted and persisted and persisted, and then you find the food, that has to be inherently more rewarding than the food that was very easy to come by in order to incentivize future searches when you get in that situation. Um, so it's that doing hard, uh, work and not necessarily having everything given to you, I think becomes rewarding for humans. Um, the other thing that I think is important about them is they're not necessarily in it for themselves, right? They've given their lives over to this higher ideal, even though it does, uh, require a lot of sacrifice. So for them, that higher idea is God, right? They're trying to get out of themselves. Um, they're trying to help others and help this greater idea. Um, and it doesn't ultimately all come back to them. And I think that, um, there's a lesson in there for the average person that is, you know, what sort of thing can you do to get out of yourself and find some greater meaning and purpose beyond just your next desire?

    7. PAPeter Attia1:51:48

       Yeah. It's funny, like I-- [chuckles] and I know that that chapter isn't written to suggest that that's the answer, that, hey, if you're reading this but you don't feel really happy, there's a, there's a, there's a monastery for you, and you're gonna go and wake up at three thirty every morning, do your first prayers, go and work, go and do your second prayers, go and eat, go and do your next prayers, go and work. I mean, it, it was the most unpleasant... Reading it made me uncomfortable. I was like, "I would kill myself." The work part I would get. The prayer part would kill me. I was like, I, I just think I would lose my mind. So, um, clearly that's not what you're proposing, but it's an interesting contrast and example. But yet I still wonder what it is that-- which element is missing for most of us, right? Because I've met some people who, you know, have a g- have an amazing sense of purpose. They're very mission driven to, to their work, to their technology, to their company, whatever it is they're doing. Um, they struggle and strive and succeed, and that's short lived, and then they do it again and again and again. Um, and they also seem to enjoy themselves, right? They, they, they do do lavish things, and they, and they, and they share the company of others. And yet ostensibly they don't seem that happy. Um, so these guys conversely, like, you could argue their sense of purpose is, I don't know, they're not really serving the world. Like, if every one of these monasteries went away, the world would continue to turn on its axis. You can't say that for many professions, right? Like, if every janitor went away tomorrow, the world would grind to a halt, right? Like, think about it, right? If we had one week of every sanitation person stop working, we couldn't function in society. So, so, like, even if your job is cleaning, you have a really significant purpose. Um, again, not to disparage the monks, but it's like they're in their own bubble where they're self-sufficient, right? They do everything for themselves, but is that the purpose? Is it that they help each other? I, I- I'm still struggling to understand how they're happy.

    8. MEMichael Easter1:54:05

       Yeah, I think they help each other. I know they do a lot of work in the community as well.

    9. PAPeter Attia1:54:08

       Mm.

    10. MEMichael Easter1:54:08

        So they help the community. Um, I also wonder... I mean, I even wonder things like about the pace of their life. You know? It's, um, it's definitely slower than we live now. Um, it's, it's, to me, what it really suggests is that there is no perfect plan for happiness. And in fact, by trying to be happy, [chuckles] that's not a great way to be happy. [chuckles]

    11. PAPeter Attia1:54:35

        Mm.

    12. MEMichael Easter1:54:36

        Right? If you're trying to figure out, what is the next thing I can do to get to be happy?

    13. PAPeter Attia1:54:39

        [chuckles]

    14. MEMichael Easter1:54:40

        And so you Google how to be happy, and it says, "Oh, well, this study said this. You need to start a gratitude journal." It's like, okay, that might help a few people, but the reality is, is that it's so much more complicated than something that can just be sort of distilled down into, like, here are these quick actionables. Um, but I do think the commonality you see is that, um, people who tend to be happy, they tend to be-- do something that they believe is of service and is going to a greater good. So even though if they all disappeared, yeah, the world would turn, go on. But maybe they believe they have what they're doing has consequence in some-

    15. PAPeter Attia1:55:16

        Yeah

    16. MEMichael Easter1:55:16

        ... afterlife. And to your point-

    17. PAPeter Attia1:55:18

        I see. Yeah, good, good point.

    18. MEMichael Easter1:55:19

        And-

    19. PAPeter Attia1:55:19

        They must obviously if they're-

    20. MEMichael Easter1:55:21

        Right

    21. PAPeter Attia1:55:21

        ... obviously-

    22. MEMichael Easter1:55:21

        If they're there.

    23. PAPeter Attia1:55:21

        Yeah, yeah.

    24. MEMichael Easter1:55:23

        And so I think that, um, you know, the takeaway is that you do need to-- it's probably useful for happiness to find something that is greater than yourself. If you're doing the next sort of fulfilling your next impulse, that's probably not, not gonna be good for you over the long run. Um, austerity sometimes is a key to, uh, being happy 'cause you knew, you know, [chuckles] these times where, what it was like, right? It's like with the, with the gratitude journals, it's like, okay, that's great, but- The best way to feel grateful for something is to be deprived of it for a while, and these monks really practice that, for example, with food. So they, you know, they do not eat a lot, and then every now and then on, like, a saint's birthday, they get these festivals where it's, "Okay, we got a lot of food. This is gonna be great. We're eating things we don't..." And, like, this becomes this moment where they're like, "Oh, I really appreciate this food that I worked hard to, to bring to us," you know?

    25. PAPeter Attia1:56:18

        Mm-hmm.

    26. MEMichael Easter1:56:18

        And I think that, um, without having to put in effort or never being deprived of anything, you just normalize to whatever you have. It doesn't matter if you have the base model 2001 Honda Civic or the brand-new Ferrari, right? If that's, [chuckles] that's your thing, that's what you're gonna normalize to.

    27. PAPeter Attia1:56:35

        Yeah, absolutely. Um, how much do you think that the following cycle is on an inevitable loop in society? And th- and this could be across multiple timescales. So, so hard times make hard men, hard men make soft times, soft times make soft men, soft men make hard times. Is that the, is that the cycle of our species?

    28. MEMichael Easter1:57:03

        I think it-- I mean, I, I definitely think it's, it's reasonable. I think you see it, uh, historically. I do-- What I think is so interesting about now is that, um, I think things change faster than ever. Uh, people are changing. How we spend our time is changing faster than ever. And, um, I do wonder how that's affecting us. I mean, so I'm a professor at UNLV, and I've seen changes in my students over the past seven years, right? You would normally think that a change in behavior, a big change in behavior noticeably would probably take generations to pop up, but I've definitely seen changes, and I think it is, um, simply because of how we spend our time and attention. More online.

    29. PAPeter Attia1:57:46

        You are the product of your attention.

    30. MEMichael Easter1:57:47

        Right. Fewer in-person interactions. Um, all those sorts of things.
16. 2:00:12 – 2:06:10

    The value in uncomfortable activities that increase your awareness, presence, and will to live

    1. PAPeter Attia2:00:12

       Y- you write in the, the chapter, and it might even be in the epilogue, that, um, for most of us, our will to live is no longer really a vital part of our existence. In fact, this was in the epilogue, if I recall, because I believe you wrote about it in the context of learning survival skills prior to going into Baghdad. And so I, I, I was, I was really struck by that because it, it really resonates, right? Like, I don't know-- I can certainly think of times when I've exerted my will, but I don't really think about it in terms of will to live. And yet for all of human history, that was a thing. Like, again, you think about that snake jumping out of the jungle, or you think about, you know, the complete lack of food or the dysentery you just got that [chuckles] like, there's so many areas where the will to live must have been one of the strongest selective features of our existence, and yet today it's never put to the test. What is the implication of that?

    2. MEMichael Easter2:01:22

       Well, I think it's easy to just sort of exist [chuckles] and not, and not live. So I'll tell you my experience of this is, uh, before I go to Baghdad, I realize, okay, I should probably learn some skills should things go south, which, you know, there's a much higher likelihood of something going south in Baghdad than there is if I were to, to your point, report on, you know, drugs in Ohio or something. So I go meet, uh, my friend, whose name is Mike Moreno. Um, he's a VC guy, but before that he spent a bunch of years in the CIA in Baghdad running operations. So he takes me out into the desert in, uh, outside of San Diego, and we go through all these different skills I'm gonna need to know, uh, in order to survive should something go wrong while I'm there. And at the end of the day, so we spent eight hours, like, "Here's all these ways you could die, Michael." [laughs] At the end of the day, we're sitting on the tailgate of his SUV, and he looks over at me and he goes, "Man, I'm really jealous that you're going there." And when he says that to me, I look at him, I'm like, "We just talked about, like, how this is not a good idea in many ways, and yet you're wanting to go about it. What's up with that?" And he says, "You know, I really... What I miss most about my time there is because it was, uh, austere, it was dangerous, you did have to be present and focused on what was around you. I found that extremely life-giving. Right? You were thrust into the moment, and you really had to exercise this sort of will to live." And I said, "Okay." And once I got back from Baghdad, I totally understood that. Like, I will remember every moment of being there because it is, you can't just zone out, right? I can't... On the way here in the Uber, I pop in my headphones, I just sort of, you know, whatever. Um, I can't do that there. I'm looking around at everything. I'm aware every interaction becomes, um, important. I'm having to make judgment calls in the moment. There is some underlying level of danger, and that in turn, that uncertainty forces me into presence and awareness, and makes my time consequential. And I think that is life-giving, and I think we do not have that in the way, which is a good problem to have. [laughs] Don't get me wrong here. That is a good problem to have, but I think when you think about the context to your point of how humans evolved, we lived like that all the time 'cause we didn't know where our next meal might come from very often. We didn't know what the weather would bring. We didn't know what was happening next, and we were having to really work and, uh, struggle to survive. And there is probably something rewarding to that, and to be in the moment, and to have to work to get the things that you get, really on a deep level, and be just kind of in it. Like, you are in it, you know? And, um, yeah, so I think that the takeaway for the average person is how... is not to go to Baghdad, let me say that. [laughs] It is how can you do things in your life that maybe reflect that a little bit? I mean, I think maybe, uh, you know, we both like hunting. I definitely get that from hunting. You have to be present, you have to be focused, you have to be aware. It's not exactly comfortable. Um, I think people can get that from all sorts of things that they can do outdoors. Could be from volunteering. Like, "I'm gonna go to this place and I'm gonna help others. I'm gonna go down to this place and I'm gonna serve others," right? Something that sort of puts you in the moment and makes you aware, I think is important for happiness.

    3. PAPeter Attia2:05:01

       Well, Michael, congratulations again on the book. Uh, it's great. I- I'm not gonna ask you what, what you have percolating in your mind, but I'm pretty sure you already have an idea for what the next book is, so, uh, I-

    4. MEMichael Easter2:05:12

       Glutton, glutton for punishment. [laughs]

    5. PAPeter Attia2:05:14

       Yeah, exactly. Um, but I suspect that whatever you work on next will be an evolution of this type of thinking 'cause it's clear you've really found, um, a sweet spot around exploring these important topics, which I think both scratch kind of the investigative journalist itch, which is you're basically learning a whole bunch of things in the field, but on top of that, there's a really practical takeaway for any one of us who reads it. So, um, I suspect, uh, a lot of people listening to this are gonna feel like we scratched a little bit of the itch, but they're gonna go and need to read Scarcity Brain.

    6. MEMichael Easter2:05:52

       Well, thank you very much. Thanks for having me, and then, um, I'll work on you so you can do your second book.

    7. PAPeter Attia2:05:57

       [laughs]

    8. MEMichael Easter2:05:58

       We'll see how it goes.

    9. PAPeter Attia2:05:59

       Thank you. [outro music]

Episode duration: 2:06:10