#2039 - Michael Easter

We're up.

It looks like they sawed these bones to get the marrow out. Now, a lot of these bones that they've dated are 10,000 plus years old. And the thing is, the saw was really supposedly invented somewhere around 7,000 years ago.

He's excavating somewhere in the neighborhood of like six and a half acres. And there's another place that's like somewhere similar in size. And they're finding massive amounts of bones in these areas. That's crazy. Wooly, mammoth tusks and all this crazy stuff.

But this is really interesting because that seems to be really clear evidence of tools that were used to saw bone. Another one they found. Like, look at this.

We get Homo sapiens. All of a sudden, they move into the Americas. We put freaking boats in the water and go to Australia. We take submarines down to the bottom of the ocean. We shoot off rockets into outer space.

We are a species that never stops exploring. We want to know, what is that? What's over there? I want to find out.

So if you think about how people explore today, we still explore in a sense. But it's mediated through the internet. So it's like we have this urge to find information that can enhance our life. In the past, you had to go there. You had to go talk to someone.

You had to go up around the river bend. You had to go, okay, where is this greener grass? I'm going to go find it on foot. There's going to be some amount of effort. Now, when we have this sort of information, itch, we scratch it through a screen.

Which on one hand, that's great because we can get information quickly. On the other hand, it's so easy to access and there's so little effort we have to do. I think sometimes we get overwhelmed by it. And it's a very different form of information we can get today.

I've got to use Dewey Decimal System. I've got to walk the stacks. I'm going to find it. I'm going to put in this time and effort and I'm going to learn something. If I want to learn something about a human, I'm going to go talk to them.

I'm going to go face-to-face like, hey, what do you think? And I think now everything has become so easy that that can backfire a little bit. It's very easy to just scratch the information itch all the time. And it's not necessarily leading to more understanding among humans. There's a difference between knowledge and understanding.

And I didn't even go into the article. And oftentimes you get in the article, you're like, oh, what is this based on? Oh, this is bullshit. And then you go further and then you find out, oh, no, no, no, it's not real at all.

His name is Mark Vande. Hei. We do this program where, if an astronaut wants to talk to someone, we'll put you two in touch. And you can FaceTime with him while he's in outer space. And I'm going, is this like the new Nigerian prince scheme?

And then all of a sudden, I'm waiting for this guy to show up. And then, bam, there he is. And I know it's not a long con, because the dude is floating in outer space. He's up in the ISS. So he had read The Comfort Crisis, my last book, and just wanted to chat.

So NASA will do this to sort of give astronauts a boost to talk to someone else, anyone they want to talk to. And what came out of that conversation was that he is up there for the sole purpose of getting information that can hopefully help us live on as a species. should we have to leave this planet and go find another. But sort of back to what we were talking about, for him to do that, he has to put in this mind-body effort to go get that information, right? He literally has to go up into outer space to figure these things out.

And he talked about how oftentimes, when he will come back home, and he'll go to schools, he'll go to universities, he goes, at some point in every talk, I had this run of like 30 talks, where the Q&A, someone would always ask me if the world is flat.

And he goes, I did not know how to take that. Because I would kind of just, you know, no. And then they would start to fire off facts, and he's like, yeah, but no. And so I think that with minimal barrier to entry, you can find information that confirms your worldview, and just follow that strange rabbit hole, even though it's not leading anywhere.

They think that they're going off of some passages in the Bible where they refer to the firmament. And they refer to, like, they believe somehow there's like this dome over the Earth, and that the stars are just lights. And the reason why the moon landing is fake is because the moon is not real. I read that one today. I was like, oh, boy.

And then, you know, some people think that stars are fake. They don't think space is real. They think it's all a con by Satan or someone, and then that all these space agencies are in cahoots with Satan, which is really wild. if you think about, like, did they deny satellite? Like, how much did they deny?

Did they deny satellites? Like, do you believe in direct TV? Is that a satellite? Okay. Do you believe that the satellites are taking photos?

Are they taking any? What about the weather patterns? What about their ability to determine weather patterns as they move across the globe? What about the flight patterns? What about the fact that you can actually track planes as they go around the globe?

Like, what do you think about that?

Like, why would they do that? I don't understand what they think the motivation is.

And so I think that a lot of conspiracies, even though they seem complicated, because, you know, there's the board with the strings going everywhere, at the end of the day, they give certainty to something that is uncertain and is complicated. And that can sort of be relieving. You go, okay, well, this world, being flat, doesn't jive with my worldview. I think X, Y, Z. This doesn't make any damn sense.

And then you can go, oh, well, what if it's flat? And then there's like sort of this trail you can follow online, where at the end it goes, bam, you got it. You're good to go.

And there's something very exciting about it. Also, a lot of the people that are really into it, for whatever reason, I mean, I don't want to, like, stereotype, but a lot of them are unsuccessful in other aspects of their life. They might be successful in one thing or something like that, but there's something about it that, like, leads them to want to be the one who uncovers this truth. And I think it's like it plays on the mind. Like, we have this desire to go and find things.

Like, that's part of the explorer gene or whatever it is, the explorer. Whatever it is, that makes us want to get in a boat and say, like, where's Hawaii? You know, I'm like, how about those guys, the Polynesians? I mean, what a crazy trip. They went all the way out to the middle of the ocean.

They found this volcano.

Like, how are they living like this? And there's probably this overwhelming desire to see, because you would live the way you lived, and you would say, well, this is how people live. And you'd be like, no, no, no, people live so differently. Like, some of these explorers that went to these uncharted islands and found these people that were living essentially, like, you know, Stone Age-like. No access to fire.

And they're living on this island. Like, what? Like, what is going on over here? How is this real?

So, if you think about humans, in the past, as we evolved, there was a handful of things you really needed to survive. Food, possessions, tools, information. We craved status as well, because if you could influence more people, you probably had a survival edge. And so I think, when you start to apply that to today's world, because in the past all those things were relatively scarce. They were hard to find.

So if you sort of craved them and always looked for them, tried to grab them when you had the opportunity, you would have that survival advantage. But in today's world, all these things that we evolved to crave are abundant in many ways. And we don't necessarily have the governor telling us when we've had too much. So take something like possessions. Even a couple hundred years ago, the average person probably had like 100 items maybe in their house.

Now the average home has 10,000 items in it. Yeah, 10,000 items. The range is 10,000 that I've seen to 40,000..

I got to go do that. Yeah.

And then something comes along that just monkeys with that, like stamps. Like now you have to get this 1972 Abraham Lincoln, you know, fucking stamp. And, you know, you're on this quest to get it. And people pay extraordinary amounts of money for these things too. Tons.

Especially like cards, like baseball cards and stuff like that.

I'm like, oh my, it's worth that much money? That's crazy.

So, as part of this book, I got really interested in this idea of, you know, everyone knows that everything is fine in moderation. But then the question is like, okay, well, why the hell can't we moderate, right? Right. People keep eating when they're full. You keep buying stuff when you got a house full of stuff.

Even stuff like how much media we consume, right? It's like people will scroll and scroll and scroll. Even though they know this is not how they want to be spending their time.

But I just, whatever. Like, maybe the next thing is going to really excite me. Maybe the next video is really going to stimulate me. Nope.

Now, when you live there, you see all kinds of wild stuff, right? But to me, what's always been the strangest has been the slot machines. So you've spent time in Vegas. Yeah. It's like, they're in the casinos, obviously.

But they're in the gas stations, the grocery stores, the restaurants, the bars, and the airport. And they're not sitting empty.

So who I call are people who are effectively anti-gambling researchers. So these are researchers who have a very anti-gambling bent. And they tell me all sorts of sort of strange things. They're like, oh, it's because casinos don't have clocks. They're like these myths we've all heard.

Casinos don't have clocks. Slot machines only play in the key of C, which relaxes people and relaxes their wallet. Casinos don't have any right angles, and right angles activate the rational part of your brain. And so I go, okay. And then I go to an actual casino, and there's right angles everywhere, right?

The screens are right angles.

No clocks. But guess who else doesn't have clocks? Like most businesses, right? There's not clocks in Costco. Most restaurants.

Right. It's not normal to have clocks. So then, for the audio, the key of C, I call up a slot machine audio composer. Now, this is a real job you can have in Las Vegas, right? And this guy goes, where the hell do you hear that?

He's like, I use all keys. So I realize that the problem that I'm encountering is that I have called people who want us to stop gambling. I need to call people who want us to start gambling. I've got to follow the money on this. So long.

story short, I talked to a handful of people in town, and this leads me to this casino on the outskirts of Las Vegas. That's brand new. It's cutting edge. But the catch is that it's not open to the public. So this place is basically a living, breathing casino, but it's used entirely for research on human behavior.

What? Yeah.

It's probably about the size of your, everything you have here, maybe a little bigger. But they have hotel rooms.

And they're basically looking at how everything that happens in a casino affects human behavior. So how does room design and the technology we're using in rooms affect behavior? How does betting with, say, an AI bot versus an actual human impact betting? Now, when I'm there, I meet with, to bring it back to slot machines, I meet with a guy who designs slot machines. So the reason that these things are so entrancing to people, it tracks back to this behavior loop that I call the scarcity loop.

And this is basically a loop, looping behavior that when people do it, they tend to get hooked on it very easy. So it's got three parts. It's got opportunity, unpredictable rewards, and quick repeatability. So opportunity, you have an opportunity to get something of value. So in the case of a slot machine, it's money, right?

Two, unpredictable rewards. You know you're going to get the thing of value if you continue the behavior. But you don't know when. And you don't know how valuable it's going to be. So with a slot machine game, when those reels are spinning, you could win nothing.

You could basically lose your money. You could win a couple dollars, or you could win a life-changing amount of money. There's a fantastic range of things that could happen. And then three, quick repeatability. You can immediately repeat the behavior.

So with slot machines, the average player plays about 16 games a minute. And that's different from all other habits. Like most habits, you don't immediately repeat them. Now, the reason that people are so interested in this, companies, casinos, is because this sort of three-part system I just laid out, it can get people to repeat a lot of other behaviors too. So it's in social media.

It's in sports gambling. It's in dating apps. Even companies like gig work economy companies are using it to get people to work longer hours. It's being leveraged by the financial industry in a lot of personal finance apps, and on and on and on. It's been embedded in so many of the products, even institutions, that influence people's lives.

because it is so captivating to us. We tend to get hooked on this three-part system.

Or you might get hundreds of likes, which is like, oh, my God, that's amazing. It's the same exact architecture as a slot machine. And then you check and recheck. You're repeating the behavior all day.

And this loop, the reason that we're so attracted to it, it goes back to evolution. So I talked to this…. Once I learned how this kind of loop pulls people in, and it's really what slot machines lean on. to get people to repeat the behavior, I call up a psychologist. He's this old-school dude from the University of Kentucky who's been studying psychology since the late 60s.

His name's Thomas Sental.

And he described…. He basically explained. this likely goes back to evolution and finding food. So if you think about hunter-gatherers, the thing you have to do every day is find food. But it's a random….

It's random whether you're going to find the food or not. So you go to point A, you don't find any food. Go to point B, you don't find any food. You go to point C, no food. Point D, oh my God, it's a giant berry bush full of food.

And that saves your life, right? So that search, that repeat searching, really pushes us and grabs our attention, because it used to help us survive in the past. And there's even…. I mean, if you want to get down the rabbit hole, in it, there's even things like what are called near-misses in slot machines, which is when you kind of almost win, right?

And that's also embedded in the search for food, right? Let's say you're hunting. You're like, oh, we've got a big kill on our hands. And then you whiff, and the animal's on its way. It's like, damn, that's the near-miss.

Or you come upon a berry bush, and let's say it took you…. You burned 500 calories looking for this thing, and it only contains 200 calories worth of food. And so all of these sort of evolutionary parts of this system that we used to fall into as we evolved are now in slot machines and, in turn, now being used by a lot of big tech companies and different industries.

Like, what is it about human beings that want to risk, like, literally all of their money on a roll of the dice or on a spin of the roulette wheel or on a hand of cards? Like, what is that?

The next one could be food, peck, peck, peck, peck, right? So it's just kind of like a slot machine. And they get more food. playing the gambling game. They get 20 units.

If you do the math, it makes a lot more sense to play the game where you get every other, right? Every other peck is getting you food. It adds up to a lot more food. But what he finds is that the pigeons consistently play the slot machine game. Ninety-seven percent of pigeons will choose that game.

Keep going, keep going, 20.. But there's not a risk.

interesting, though, is that to sort of bring it back to. why do people fall into this, why would someone bet their entire fortune on a roulette wheel or whatever, is that when he will put pigeons in a sort of wild environment, so where he keeps them is in these pigeon cages, where they kind of live alone. It's a basic cage. When he puts them in, a cage that mimics the wild, so it's this giant cage that has, like, roosts, it's got cliffs, it's got other pigeons, it's very much like they would have to live in the wild. And then he throws them back to choose a game.

They start choosing the optimal game.

But then when they put them in rat park, which is a much larger thing, with a lot of toys and things to do and a lot of places to run around, they didn't do that. They just drank the water. Right. But that makes sense. It's like they're fucking living in hell.

And the cocaine water is the only thing that gives them any good feeling. And so they just keep going back to that good feeling. But when you give them a normal natural environment where they can just exist, I wonder if that's the case with people that live, like, say, a subsistence lifestyle. If they have access to something like heroin or cocaine, I wonder if they would just ignore it, because they get this sort of very natural environment that is sort of programmed into our lives, programmed into our DNA. People that live a subsistence lifestyle are unusually healthy.

I'm sure you've seen—have you seen Werner Herzog's documentary, Happy People?

And they get by. They just get by. I mean, they have snowmobiles and dogs, and they hunt and they trap and they fish. And they just get by. And they work every day.

And you have to work. The only way to live is to eat, and the only way to eat is to work. And so everybody does everything that they can, and they're all happy. It's very weird.

You're also in sort of closer-knit communities, all these different things. And today, we don't have that quite as much. And so his theory is that when you don't have enough stimulation in your life or meaning from other places, humans tend to start to look for it in other ways. We gamble. We spend a lot of time on the Internet.

We buy a lot of stuff. So we start searching for it somewhere else. And those ways can often be counterproductive in the long run when you overdo them. Yeah. Yeah.

That, you know, you have these human reward systems built in and they can be hijacked by these various things. and this is the way the human body and the human mind exist optimally. And, for whatever reason, there's no real structure that people can follow that's universally agreed upon. You know, like, if you, like, say, if you're a mechanic, right, and you're working on an engine. Like, there's very clear documents that show you, like.

these are the pistons, this is the spark plug, this is the carburetor. If it's not clean, it'll do this. This is the problem with the gas line and you have to fit it this way and that way. And so you do it all right and then, boom, it starts up and it works. And you can fix things that way and you can build things that way.

We don't really have that for the most complex thing that we're aware of, which is human existence.

There's so many deep fakes. People keep sending me commercials that I've never done, for, you know, penis enhancements and, you know, all these different things. Wild commercials.

So, I mean, at one point in time. Right now there's kind of like the uncanny valley in some ways, where you can kind of see the difference between what's real and what's not real. You can kind of like, oh, it looks fake. How long before, like UFO footage. Great example.

Jeremy Cornbell, who's like the premier UFO researcher with George Knapp, you know, every now and then I'll find something online and I'll send it to him. He's like, oh, that's bullshit, dude. Like. this is what they did and you can see it. This is how, and this is why.

Like, oh, okay. But there's a lot of that. There's a lot of fake stuff. And it's hard to know. It's hard to know what's real and what's fake.

And we kind of can tell now. But will we in 20 years? I bet no. No.

We know it's probably not a great place for them to hang out a ton. Right. And yet, if they're not on it, their life suffers. Yeah. Right?

Because they're not as dialed in socially. And for teenagers, being social is very important due to how their brain is changing at the time. Right. But even think about work, especially with how the nature of work has changed after COVID, with more people working from home. If you don't want to be stuck on email all day, it's like, I totally get that.

But now, if you decide, well, I'm not going to check my email during these times because it drives me insane. Now you're a negligent employee. So you effectively have to adopt the technology to live in the system. And then the system starts to sort of govern your actions.

She hadn't moved her mouse enough. And I think there was also an issue with the amount of time she spent in front of the computer, that it wasn't enough. Meanwhile, she met all of her goals. So, like, how many people are just in front of an office where they're not checking in a cubicle, just bullshitting? Probably listening to this podcast right now.

As long as they spend enough. And they might not be as productive. But they are doing the thing that the algorithm wants them to do. This lady got fired. Like, maybe she doesn't need to work as much to meet the productivity goals you set for her.

But she's a good employee. If you set a productivity goal for an employee, say, hey, we need to get, you know, X amount of units of work done by Friday. And she does it. Didn't she do her job? Like, if she can do her job in 31 hours and the average person needs 44, isn't she a better employee?

It makes me wonder. I mean, maybe there's some other factors. But maybe not. I mean, maybe it's just as simple as, like, they're just following numbers. And that's how they hire and fire people.

They can discriminate between 1, 2, and 3.. You go above that, and it's either small, medium, or large. And that's probably how humans thought of quantities for most of time.

So plus, she's very pretty in that picture. Maybe she's, like, trying to be an influencer.

I see pictures of, like, a friend of mine with his wife, and the wife is using a filter. And I know my friend doesn't look like that. Right. You know? But he's with her, and she's got the filter on.

Like, hey, bro, did you go back in time? Yeah. What the fuck happened? You look like you're 15 years younger.

And then they just go down the thing and go, oh, well, this person had 19.. We got to can her. So we're measuring by a random number instead of saying, did this person do the job the way that we want them to? What is the outcome of the task we're trying to do and focusing on the actual goal, which is to make money for a company? I don't know.

Everybody's always like, I was perfect, and my boss is a tyrant, and the work environment is toxic.

When you start to measure Twitter via likes and retweets and that sorts of things, that changes how you use Twitter. So Twitter is now, the platform formerly known as Twitter, is supposed to be billed as a place for discussion. And so then you ask yourself, okay, well, what are the goals of the discussion? And the answer is like, well, there's like a fucking lot of goals behind this discussion. It could be to empathize.

It could be to understand someone. It could be to push back on them. There's all these things that can come out of a discussion, all these possible goals. But when you start to put numbers behind that, in the form of likes, of retweets, of whatever it is, people start to tweet in a way that scores likes and retweets, and that is a different goal than is discussion. It's often at odds with that.

So, like, what does well on Twitter? It's calling someone a dickhead. It's trying to dunk on someone. It's trying to say something outlandish, or maybe bend something in a way that incites outrage. And that totally changes the point of a discussion.

And this guy noticed it in himself because he's a philosopher, so his job is basically to think all day. He goes, you know, the first time I had a tweet go viral, it was like, oh my god, that was awesome. And then he found himself when he would have these sort of philosophical thoughts, instead of going into this really deep zone that he'd usually have to go into to understand it, he started finding himself going, how can I put this into like a 140-character tweet that will really do well? And that changes how he thinks and what he does. And you see this.

I mean, this isn't just in social media. This is in so many different systems. where we put numbers behind something. It starts to change people's goal in a way that changes their behavior. But the goal of scoring numbers is often different from the original goal of the behavior.

One of the things that people want when they hunt is they want to get a mature animal for a bunch of reasons. One reason is that the mature animal, say if you get like a seven-year-old mule deer, that is a deer that has spread its genes. It has done its job in the reproductive system. It's passed on its DNA, and this is an old, mature deer. Also, it's more of a challenge because this is a wiser deer.

This is a deer that has probably experienced hunters before, most certainly has experienced mountain lions and bears and other predators. And so the goal is, ethically and morally, that's the animal that you should choose to try to hunt. Now, there's numbers that are involved now. So with deer, it's the size of the antler, and the magic number is 200.. If you can get a 200-inch mule deer, that is a very, very rare deer.

That is a deer that has lived for a long time. It has superior genetics. It has this very big—have you ever seen a 200-inch mule deer on the hoof?

And my friend was furious. He's like, this is a bastardization of everything that hunting is supposed to stand for. Like hunting is supposed to stand for. this is an ethical way to acquire your food. This is the best wild protein that you can get.

It's the healthiest for you. It's also an important thing to manage the population numbers of these animals so that they don't get overpopulated, which leads to the spread of diseases like CWD and chronic wasting and all these different things that people attribute to overpopulation and car accidents, all these different things. But the number thing got in people's heads. And this guy was very happy with his deer until he found out it was 194 and not 200.. Because it's impossible to tell when you're looking through binoculars.

You're looking through binoculars, you go, that is a giant mule deer. That's what I want to get. But he was unsatisfied because it came up. So the overall score, the way they do it, is kind of complicated. They measure the width of the base.

They measure the length of the tines of the antlers. The width of how far they're apart and all that stuff gets factored together, and it comes up with a score. And his score was six inches short and he was bummed out, which is just nuts.

But if you get captured by this number, that changes your experience in a way. that is probably not a good thing. Yeah. I mean you saw this in the wine world when Robert Parker started the Wine Advocate. I think this was in the early 80s or 70s.

So this guy is, Robert Parker. is this guy from Maryland. Kind of grew up in the backwoods. He's just a normal dude. He likes wine, but he thinks, oh, all this snobby language around wine.

It's keeping people who would otherwise enjoy it from drinking it. So it's a good intent. And so what he decides is, I'm going to start a magazine. I'm going to start giving wines a score from 50 to 100.. So when he starts this, the magazine takes off.

Because now the average consumer can know, well, this is an 80.. This is a 90.. The 90 is better. I'm buying that. Now, here's.

the thing, though, is that it is Parker who's testing the wines. And he's also having to test them alone, not with food. Now, one of the main reasons you drink wine is to drink it with food, because it changes as you drink it. Right?

But his scoring system, if a wine scores really well, those bottles fly off the shelf. Whereas the ones who don't get quite as good of a score, they collect dust. So what the wine industry does is they go, okay, well, if we want to sell a lot of wine, we've got to produce bottles that get a good score from Robert Parker. So they change how they make wines to suit his palate. Now, if you don't have Robert Parker's palate, if you don't like what he likes, this is meaningless to you.

If you put a number on it, it's kind of this arbitrary thing that someone has to make up. And it's often done in a vacuum. And it's very, very subjective. But we pretend like it's objective. And then we behave like it means something.

Yeah.

And he had a birthday. And so he invites me to this wine pairing dinner on his birthday. And it was great. The food was great. The wine was great.

But it was so bizarre because they bring these flights of wine. And then everyone tests the wine. And people are recording themselves doing this. They have little tape recorders. And they're talking about the tannins and the oaky, this and the that.

And then someone opens it up. I think this one's corked. This one's corked. And they're testing. Yes, I believe this one's corked.

I'm like, this, one's my favorite. I don't even understand what's going on here. And there was this one guy that was there that was being heralded as this big wine expert. And they would refer to him. Well, cut to years later.

That guy gets arrested. And he winds up doing 10 years in jail for making fake wine. And there's a documentary on it. The documentary is called Sour Grapes. And it's an amazing documentary.

And I don't know if you've ever seen any of those wine auctions. But they're super bizarre. Like people are spending ungodly amounts of money on wine. Like ancient bottles and very rare bottles. And so this guy is buying all this wine.

So he is established as this connoisseur. And then what he's doing is he's going to his home. And he's aging these labels. And he's creating labels. And he starts auctioning off.

And I think, is it Sotheby's or Christie's? Someone's involved in this auction? that kind of should know that this is bullshit. Like they haven't checked. And so one man from one vineyard, who's this very famous family vineyard, sees bottles of his company's wine for sale.

And he says, we never made a Magnum that year. We never made that bottle of wine. Like that is not real. And that, you know, is going for insane amounts of money. And so then they start doing an investigation.

And they find out that this guy has made and sold thousands of bottles of fake old wine, including to the Koch brothers. And this is where he got fucked. This is where he sold the Koch brothers like millions of dollars worth of wine. And these guys are just super ballers with an unlimited amount of money. And they were buying like Lincoln's bottle of wine, like Thomas Jefferson's bottle, like that kind of crazy shit.

And people are saying, no, that's not even his handwriting. That's not – this is not real. So these guys were – they got duped. And so then they opened the investigation. And they find this guy's house and they find the bottles of wine.

He was buying old bottles and recorking them and like making the labels dirty and doing all this different shit. But it's so interesting, because one of the guys in the film is like this was a bottle that he sold me was legit. Because the guy was selling legit wine too. He's like, this. one is legit.

And they're drinking it. You can tell. And this other guy comes along. Let me try that. He's like, this is garbage.

This wine is garbage. This is fake. It doesn't have the complexity. It doesn't have the robustness. It doesn't have the – and these other guys are like, also supposedly experts.

So I'm like, what are you guys tasting? What is going on here? Like what is this weird thing that you're chasing? that the difference is so subtle? It's not even the difference between Coke and Pepsi.

It's so subtle. But yet it's the difference between a bottle of wine that's worth $50, $100, and $40,000.. And no one knows. No one can tell. And this guy had apparently, according to my friend, such a palate that he could experiment by taking these various, much more inexpensive wines, combining them in very specific ratios, and recreate something that was very similar.

And as long as you got it in this bottle and as long as you looked at it, it was like, oh, it's a bourgeois bourbon from 74.. And you thought you were getting the real shit. And so then there's the placebo effect, right? You're tasting it and you're imagining it. This is rich, robust wine that very few people can appreciate.

And then you're all appreciating this wine. Meanwhile, this guy is laughing his ass off because he made it in his fucking Century City house. I mean he's like nuts.

And you know where I'm going with this. The students who think that the terrible bottle is good, they give it all this like, oh, it's got a deep blah, blah, blah. They're using all the tannins and all the word salad. And then, with the bottle that was actually expensive and highly rated that they thought was bad, they, yeah, this is cat piss. And so expectations often, to your point, about the placebo effect, they shape how you experience something as well.

Let's get a fucking, really nice bottle of wine. And I'd never had like a thousand dollar bottle of wine. So we bought this bottle of wine from, you know, 1980 or whatever the fuck it was. And it was not good. It was okay.

It was okay. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It was like, it was okay.

And then we were, I said, okay, let's flip it up, because there's quite a few people at the table. I said, let's flip it up and let's get our next bottle. Let's get like a $90 bottle of wine. And we were both like, this is better. This one's better.

This is, I don't know what I'm drinking. I don't know what, I just know what, this tastes like nice wine.

So here's how this guy did this. So he would take these bottles and sit them in water. And, you know, he had all these labels and all these different things. And he would get bottles from, you know, like used bottles, like bottles of legitimate wine that he had already, you know, drank.

That guy with the glasses on, he was the one who was like, this one's a real one. And the other wine experts were like, bitch, this is fake as fuck. And I don't even know how they know, or if they really do know. I mean, I'm such a, I'm such, I don't know anything about wine. I just, like, I just say, what's a good wine?

You know, when I go to a restaurant, pick one out for me. That's good.

What does it mean? I mean, am I going to notice a difference, especially two glasses in, when you're eating a steak? No. As long as it doesn't taste terrible, it's a great, it's a nice wine. I don't.

Yeah.

You want to acquire information. You also want to make friends. You want to learn how to get your shit together, to turn things in on time, to get on a schedule that you're going to need when you go out into the world, to get a job, all these different things, right? But what are my students most obsessed about? Their GPA.

And that's totally, that's very different. And I found in my experience as a professor that it's often not the students who are straight A's who are the best, because those students tend to be a little more robotic. The students that are best tend to be in the B plus, A minus. So this is because they might have, they might be working 40 hours a week along with that. So this suggests they're pretty gritty.

They're a hustler. Or they might be too free thinking, right? The type of students where I say, hey, do the assignment this way. And they do it a different, and they're just going, oh, well, I thought I could do it this way and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, you know? And they also don't tend to ask about their grades.

Now, the reason that we use grades is simply because it makes the lives of administrators much easier, right? If you need to compare students quickly, if you're sending people through the system, you can put a number on it and you can kind of rank people. But it doesn't necessarily reflect whether this person has accomplished all these different things why you would want to go to college.

I mean, I guess you meet with them and then you want to find out how they are socially. You know, like when you talk to them, are they easy to communicate with? Are they gregarious? Do they seem like a good person? that would be a nice person to have around the office, because they would make a pleasant work environment?

And that would also help things more productive, become more productive. It's like I get why there would be numbers, but it is a strange thing that humans are obsessed with numbers.

Our world runs on them. But I also think we need to be skeptical, that they tell the absolute truth. And I think we need to be aware of the fact that they can change our behaviors in such a way that we miss sort of these greater purposes, of why we're doing the things that we do.

Like there's so much uncertainty. Is this going to work for me? Am I going to make it? Is it going to happen? Or am I going to be left out?

Am I going to be one of the people that doesn't make it? Am I going to be one of those sad stories? Like this person, they just failed in life and they want to die of a heroin overdose. You know, like no one wants to be that guy. So it's like, what do I have to do?

And, you know, what are the metrics that I have to achieve? Like, what are the numbers? What's the thing that I have to do to show? Oh, I make a million dollars a year. I'm a winner.

You know, that's a thing. Totally. Like. if you are a millionaire, you could say, listen, I'm a millionaire. Like, whoa, you did it.

You made it. Right. But that person might be fucking miserable. So isn't the goal to be happy? Like maybe a person who makes a hundred grand a year is, you know, they get their bills paid.

They live comfortably. They're happier. Yeah. They're better off. They do what they actually enjoy doing for a living.

And it's just not as profitable. Yeah. Like, maybe that's a better goal. But we can't quantify that. Like, how can I, I can't put happiness on a scale.

Right. I can't put, like. if you're a person, like, say, you make knives, you make chef's knives and, you know, you're just making these beautiful, gorgeous knives. Like, and you get deep satisfaction out of this, but you're like fucking barely getting by. You're paying your bills, like, but you're living kind of check to check.

And it's all about like selling the next knife. And okay, now we've got the mortgage paid and I got to keep making knives. That guy might be happier than some crazy person who's buying $100,000 bottles of wine. Because that person doesn't even know what's making them happy anymore. Like they don't enjoy their job.

They're just getting money so that they can acquire these things.

And this suggests that at a certain point, once you have your needs taken care of, you're probably going to be good to go. And in fact, probably chasing more of sort of these ephemeral things, you know, is not going to make you happy.

I'm going to go talk to experts. I'm going to go live with different groups who are interesting. So to get into this idea of happiness, I spent a week living with these benedictine monks in the mountains of New Mexico. So these guys...

And they also have to work every day, four hours manual labor. They have to go into the chapel to pray seven times a day. And so, despite having this really austere kind of hard life that demands a lot of them, when researchers look at their happiness levels and compare them to the general public, they're much higher.

We don't talk. Blah, blah, blah. And then he takes me up to like the guest quarters. And, you know, what do I do? One of the rules is to not be lazy and to not be tiresome.

And, of course, I sleep through the 3.50 a.m. meeting in the chapel, right? But I make it down for breakfast. And it was really fascinating living that way for a week. I mean I definitely got a lot out of it and had some interesting conversations.

when we could talk. And just watching the people live and interact, I think it just opens up a lot of ego. Oh, there's like different ways of viewing things and there's probably something I can learn from that. Am I going to be living in the monastery anytime soon? Hell, no.

But there's things we can learn from interacting with other people in the present who are different than us.

But somewhere along the line I realized that the energy that I'm putting out, if I'm being negative, that affects me, whether I realize it or not. If I'm being mean and shitty to someone and trying to ruin their day, that affects me, whether I realize it or not. It's not good for you. It's not healthy. I don't want to do that in person.

I don't want to look at a person in the eye and say mean things to them. And I don't want to look at a person on a screen and say mean things to them. I understand that there's a great pull to that because of the numbers. Because if you do dunk on someone and say, well, what did you fucking do? And then, ah-ha-ha.

And all these people put memes and all these different things, and you get 100,000 likes or whatever. I don't think that's good for you. And I don't think you really get anything out of that other than the score. It's not enhancing your life in any real way. You're contributing to the negativity of the world.

And I think as fucking corny and as cliché as this sounds, and I've especially thought of this after psychedelic experiences, which have been some of the most profound, life-changing and perspective-altering experiences I've ever had, that I have to think about overall good. The overall good of what I'm doing. I think a podcast is pretty easy for the most part. Because for the most part, what we're doing is having a conversation. And I think this one is very interesting to me.

And so I think it's probably going to be very interesting to other people. And these subjects are very interesting. And they stimulate your mind. And I feel good about my work. I feel good about it.

I feel like when people come up to me, I love your podcast. I'm like, thank you. I'm glad you enjoy it. I really like it. I like that.

I think I'm doing a good thing. I think I'm putting a good thing out there. And I think it's – so I feel good about it. If I was using my podcast to tear people apart and tear things down, I mean I do. I criticize things that need to be criticized.

But I try to be fair and I try to be as overall net positive as possible. And I think I'm going to try to do that more and more as time goes on. I think I'm going to avoid even – I mean even this open criticism of people that deserve it. I mean I wonder how productive that really is. I often think about it.

Like, should I just spend more time instead of doing that on things that I'm just fascinated with? And I think that would probably be better for me. Probably create less people that are upset at me. Create less people that are upset listening to it. And it's probably better overall, like the overall good of things.

So it's like if you're doing something or you're creating things, like we're talking about knives, like chef's knives. That's an overall positive thing. You are creating a thing that someone will use and they'll appreciate and enjoy. It's an overall positive exchange. And so I think the more overall positive exchanges you can create in your life, the better.

And it took me a long fucking time to figure that out. It really took me until I started doing this podcast. I mean this podcast has been this insanely educational experience to me that I didn't expect to have. I didn't expect to be educated. I expected to just do it because it was a fun thing to do.

I used to like doing morning radio. And I was like, well, I'll do my own fucking thing. And it would be kind of like doing morning radio. But then, along the line, when I started having guests on and I started considering other people's perspectives. And I started considering how I interact with those people and getting better at interacting with them and having some negative experiences and negative shows and negative interactions.

I realized like those don't make me feel good. Those feel like shit. Like what do I have to do to not do that and create more positive experiences? And as I've done that, the more I've done that, the better I've gotten at that, the happier I've been with what I do.

I try to make them like if I have comics on, just let's just have a good time. I don't want anybody to feel bad. I want everybody to have fun. Let's have a great time. Let's laugh.

I love comics in particular because we can shit on each other, and it's funny. Like if a comic makes fun of me, it's funny to me too. My feelings don't get hurt. It's part of what we do to each other. When we're alone, like comics in a green room are hilarious with each other.

We're just always shit because we're looking for things to make fun of. And you can appreciate it. It's like if you're sparring and someone hits you with a jab, like, oh, that was a good shot. You're like, oh, I dropped my hand. Yep, thank you.

It's like you're getting something out of that. You're getting something out of the kind of verbal sparring, but it's all good natured and it's all fun. And unfortunately, some people don't feel that way. You can't take, like, comedian thinking and apply it to other people. Some people get, like, super upset if you dunk on them.

But you're not trying to be. So. I have to learn how to not do that amongst regular people, and I've made those mistakes too.

Right? So a case would be a person who's an asshole. It might be a defense mechanism, because maybe they were raised by a parent who was terrible to them. Right. And so they feel like they always need to be on the defensive.

And so when we walk in, you know, 20 years later, we go, that guy's a dickhead. But really, it's like, no, he still just hasn't recovered from being a kid whose parent was a jerk to them.

I can just be like, yeah, well, you know, some people are that way and probably a reason for it.

Get your shit together. And now I look at that person like, what hand did life give you? Right. Like you were a baby. There was this lady I saw recently.

And she had the most insanely bad posture, like maybe some, like she had suffered an injury, like a broken neck. Because her head was like, she was like very frail and very obviously addicted to drugs and dirty. And her head was like hanging down like this so deeply that she couldn't barely look up to, like ask for money. And, you know, I just, all I could think of was, that was someone's, someone's little baby. You know, you see some guy who's like sleeping on the corner of a street just covered in filth.

That was someone's little boy. That was a little, a woman gave birth to this little boy. And they had, you know, all the potential in the world if they were in a different environment. If they were in a different, if they had different genes, if they were in a different neighborhood, if they had different parents, if they had different experiences. But now here I find them in worst case scenario, on the ground, you know, being ignored.

People are passing them by. No one cares about them. You know, it's a testament to the health of a society when you see how many people are in that state. Like. that's one of the things that I find very troubling about a lot of these big cities like, particularly like Los Angeles, that are just overrun by these homeless encampments.

And it was interesting because I saw something today about Gavin Newsom. And he is trying to, apparently there's some sort of law that he's trying to get rid of that does not allow you to move homeless people. And he's trying to get rid of that. And he's making sense. It's like this is not good for them.

You're not saying that you're not caring about these homeless people, but to just be forced by law to not be able to move these encampments seems insane. Not just counterproductive, but a barrier to productivity, a barrier to progress. And, you know, kudos to him for trying to do that. I give that guy a lot of shit. I probably shouldn't.

You know, because I think that job is insane. He said something crazy about me recently. So, like his son is involved in these micro cults where he's listening to people like Jordan Peterson and me. And I think he's upset because I called him a con man, which I probably should, because that's not productive either. Just call someone a con man.

He's a politician. He's doing what he's trying to do. But he did do something I really like. recently. He vetoed this bill that would have forced a parent to affirm a child's gender in order to keep custody of the child.

It was like some crazy sort of Orwellian thing that they're trying to do where you have to affirm a child's gender if the child is trying to change gender. If you do not do that, you could lose custody of your child. He vetoed that. So kudos to him for doing that. It's got to be a fucking insane job.

And for us to stand on the outside and just shit on these people, especially someone like him, who's handsome and tall and slick back hair and he talks really well. He's bullshitting us. Look at all the problems he's created. Look at all the things. But also try managing those problems.

Try figuring it out. What do you do with 100,000 homeless people, particularly if you can't even move them? Yeah. Right? And so kudos to him for trying to figure out a way to get rid of that law.

You know, it's so easy to criticize on the outside. It's so easy to just look at this stuff on the outside and go, you know, you need to get it together. You fucking suck. But who doesn't suck? What mayor of a big city doesn't suck?

There's a giant pandemic, and there's these solutions on the table. And politically, particularly in California, these are universally accepted solutions. Like everyone must get vaccinated. I mean, you're literally having people like Sean Penn on TV saying that if you're not vaccinated, you're literally holding a loaded gun to people's heads. Now, in their defense, at that time, they really believed that this vaccine was going to stop transmission and it was going to stop infection.

And if you didn't do that, you were fucking it up for everybody else. The problem with that, logically, of course, is that if it didn't, if it did stop transmission and it did stop infection, wouldn't people just realize that? And you would like only the people who got the vaccine would be okay. And then everybody else would be fucked. Of course, over time, we've realized that's not really the case.

It doesn't stop transmission. It doesn't stop infection. And there's some very weird data that shows that the more often you're hit with these mRNA vaccines, there seems to be some correlating effects where, like the Cleveland Clinic study, which showed that the more often people were vaccinated, those people got COVID more than the people who weren't vaccinated as much or weren't vaccinated at all. But how the fuck do you know that in 2020? You don't.

When you're dealing with this thing in 2020 and universally, politically, especially in a blue state, in a blue city like Los Angeles, you kind of have to do that, because that's your job. You have to tell people to go get vaccinated. You have to tell people to do this. And if you really did think it would work, you'd put incentives in place to make sure that it does work. But then also, when you know that it doesn't anymore, then you have to adjust.

But I was right and I should be the leader. Right.

You have the influence of the pharmaceutical drug companies that want everybody to get vaccinated. They want everybody to do it. They want the politicians to do it. And then, when your people want it, too, what do you do? Do you stand up and say, hey, folks, I don't think we should do that.

That's pretty easy to do. if you're in Texas, like what Governor Abbott did. He was like, no, I'm not going to force people to do anything. No, we're going to open the state back up. And I remember so many people were like, oh, my God, you're going to kill people.

You're opening up way too soon. This is dangerous. Turned out. that wasn't the case. But if it was, then those people would be right.

It was a lot of guessing, man.

Yeah. I think the problem with the model we currently see it as is being a brain disease is that it can deflate hope for people. So when you look at reasons why people relapse, there was a big study in New Mexico of alcoholics. They found that the number one reason for relapse was believing that addiction was a brain disease. and therefore, if I have this disease and there's no known cure for it, what's the point of even putting up an effort?

And those people tended to relapse at much higher rates. So I think for me, and I'll tell you, I've been sober nine years. And for a long time I thought it was a brain disease, and I went into this book thinking that. And I've changed my mind. And I have a ton of empathy too, because I think that if you are addicted, and I can tell you this, nothing solves a problem like using your substance of choice in the short term.

Like it is ultimately a solution, right, for a problem. And that's how really drugs have always been. So when you look at when humans first started using psychoactive substances, they're often used as a tool, as a solution. So, for example, you chew coca leaves, you get more energy, you get more focus, that helps you on a long hunt. Alcohol used to, you know, waft off of fermenting fruit.

You smell alcohol in the air, you go eat that fruit, it's going to help you find the fruit, one. You're going to eat more of it because it has a low level of alcohol and it also kills a lot of germs on the fruit. So this is the story of like every psychoactive substance, right? In the past, the actual psychoactive component itself was relatively scarce, but it helped us live on. The difference is that now we've sort of concentrated the psychoactive effect and put it at scale.

And I think that is really what starts to create a lot of these long-term problems, because it is such a stronger substance.

The U.S. ends up invading and, you know, throwing him out. And because of that war, you have a lot of people who are in trauma. They have problems. The economy is in ruin.

They've lived through a war. And then what happens is that Syria falls and becomes a narco state and they start pumping out a drug called Captagon. Have you heard of this?

I can't remember where it was coming through in the Middle East, but it was like a billion, some odd dollars worth of Captagon. So this drug is sweeping across the Middle East. And so what happens in Iraq is that you have a population who has a lot of pain, a lot of problems in their life. There's not many outlets for those problems. And then you have a substance come in that solves problems in the short term.

And you tend to see addiction spike in that country.

And it was a wacky trip, too. I had, you know, I need to get a fixer or whatever. And I land on this guy, and he sends me this email. He goes, OK, I know you're here to study Captagon. Here are all the groups we're meeting with, the precise times we're going to meet them.

Here's the hotel you're going to be staying in. It's the nicest, most secure hotel in Baghdad. I'm going to pick you up in this, you know, secure, top-of-the-line SUV, blah, blah, blah. You're good to go. I go, OK.

So I land there. My man picks me up in a 10-year-old, beat-to-hell, Hyundai base model. Drops me off at my hotel, which is this sort of hole-in-the-wall, just bombed-out hotel. Picks me up the next day. I'm like, OK, let's get our meetings going.

You know, and he goes, oh, no, no. Those are just proposals. The itinerary was proposed. This guy totally bullshitted me on, like, every fact of this.

So the first few days, we're just madly driving around Baghdad in this dude's, you know, neither secure nor top-of-the-line Hyundai the whole time. And he's texting and calling people. He's got two phones. He's texting as he's driving. And he ends up getting in, like, two car accidents.

Doesn't even stop the fucking car, dude. He just, like, banks off a car and just rolls down my window and yells some shit in Arabic. I'm like, what did you say to those people? He goes, I said, why are you in my way?

But just as this guy's sort of grift, you know, worked on me, it starts to work on other people. So he somehow talks us into this police compound on the outskirts of town where they hold the big drug smugglers in the country and different terrorists. So I talked to the police there. We talked to some of the people in the prison. Then he ends up getting this sort of off-the-books meeting with two Iraqi intelligence officers who work on the border of Syria fighting Captagon as it comes through.

And they told me just crazy ways that people get the drug over. So a lot of times the government, because it's all controlled by the government, by the way, will hire farmers like shepherds and have them store the pills in the stomachs of sheep. So they'll open the stomach of the sheep, put the drugs in a bag, sew the sheep's stomach, and then have them just move across the border in the night. So if you're looking at them as an intelligence officer or the army, you're going, oh, it's just a shepherd. Oh, it turns out that actually they're drug smugglers.

So what happens is that after the country fell, they took over the pharmaceutical plants, and the pills are all pumped out there now. And it's all controlled. Most of it is controlled by what's called the Fourth Division, which is sort of akin to our sort of Navy SEALs. Like this really elite military unit controls it all. And also, like Hezbollah, which has been named a terror organization, is involved in the trade too.

Eventually we get this meeting with the guy who's the head of psychiatry for all of Iraq. And basically, what happens is I'm able to—I'm in the country, going, okay, like nothing is really— this guy's just piecing together these kind of meetings. as we go. And I track down a guy who's a journalist in the country, and I kind of tell him my situation. And he goes, you know, call this guy.

So my fixer calls the head of psychiatry, and the guy tells him immediately, you know, just text me, whatever. So okay. He starts texting with him, and my fixer starts smiling and goes, he'll take a meeting. But he thinks I'm another person with the same name. But he'll take the meeting.

I'm like, wait, so he thinks we're someone else, and we're going to this meeting? And my fixer's like, yeah. I'm like, I don't know, man. He goes, listen, he'll talk. He will talk.

So we go to this damn meeting. And, you know, we come in, and the guy's kind of looking at us like, you're not who I expected. But we sit down with him, and I get him to—at first he's kind of trying to shoo us out, you know. But I get him to start talking to us, and he echoed sort of the same that we've been talking about. He goes, look, like the brain disease model and this complex neuroscience around drug addiction is interesting.