Joe Rogan Experience #2039 — Michael Easter Transcript

Transcript

0:00 Joe Rogan Podcast, check it out! Yes. So, I was just pointing out to you about these discoveries they've found at the It pushes it back. Okay. But this is amazing. in the neighborhood of like six that were used to saw bone. old and someone found these bones and tried to saw them a thousand years. I mean, I don't know. We shoot off rockets into outer space.

3:42 So my book, Scarcity Brain, which is coming out soon, it's shaped us so much. So, um, my book scarcity brain, which is coming You had to go up around the river bend. form of information we can get today. Yeah. It's also, it's leading us into this seemingly inevitable path of this conversion of humans and technology that seems to be happening, whether we like it or not, that really doesn't seem to jive well with our biology.

5:23 I'm going to find it. knowledge if you really get after it. But how many people do that? How many people just read And what made me start thinking about this is I'm sitting at home and I get this email. Just access to my bank account. I've gotten emails from me. But I go along with it, right? He's up in the ISS. come back home and he'll go to schools, he'll go to universities, he goes, at some point in every

8:57 to hide it and obscure it. And that all of these space agencies all over the world some passages in the bible where they refer to the firmament and they refer to like they believe somehow there's Okay. I mean, Japan has a very sophisticated satellite system But it's like, what do you have to, like, what are you getting out of that? even though they seem complicated because, you know, there's the board

12:05 I think X, Y, Z, this doesn't make any damn sense. the government. They believe, you know, various conspiracies and like the Gulf of Tonkin, get in a boat and say like where's hawaii you know and like how about those guys the polynesians i like around the Philippines. Yeah. I mean, I guess there's also this longing to understand how people can live in different

14:37 Because you would live the way you lived. holes aren't successful, I think it provides an answer for why the person isn't successful, look for them, try to grab them when you had the opportunity, you would have that survival The range is 10,000 that I've seen to 40,000. whatever it might be. And that can kind of create a cycle for people where the pursuit of the thing

17:45 extraordinary amounts of money for these things too tons especially like cards like baseball cards we moderate right right I'm like, maybe the next thing is going to really excite me. so I live in Las Vegas, which happens to be a good town to think about why the hell can't we like I'm gonna find out how a slot machine works. who are effectively anti-gambling researchers.

20:38 Casinos don't have any right angles. Most restaurants. I need to call people who want us to start gambling. Yeah. hotel rooms like a walmart yeah big. Yeah. That big? Yeah. when people do it, they tend to get hooked on it very easy. So it's got three parts. It's got You can immediately repeat the behavior. It's being leveraged by the financial industry in a lot of personal finance apps and on and on and on.

25:04 to get them to drive into an area of town that Uber might want them to be in. Yeah. Or you might get hundreds of likes, psychologist, he's this old school dude from the University of Kentucky who's been And that saves your life, right? say you bet one dollar and you quote unquote win 50 cents so oh right so you don't lose everything that we used to fall into as we evolved are now in slot machines

28:39 And when you see people that are just like chasing it and they just can't stop it's like i always wonder like A pigeon? and he'll give them the option to play a game where every other peck they get, say, 15 units of food. And they get more food playing the gambling game. get a bigger supply though because they'll get 15 every other peck versus 20 every fifth peck.

31:05 comes from the predictable rewards. Yes, right. If you do every other, right? Yeah, every other They just can't say, oh, it's every other one. Just keep pecking. So over time, they're expending a lot less energy to get the most amount of food. All right. So over time, It's got cliffs. Right, that's the cocaine rat thing, right? just kept taking the water with cocaine. But then when put them in rat park which is a much larger thing with a lot of toys

34:24 It's great. And you have to work. You're outside a lot. So we start searching for it somewhere else. And those ways can often be counterproductive in the long run when you overdo You know, like if you like say if you're a mechanic, right, and you're working on an engine, like it's there's very clear documents that show you like these are the pistons. This is the spark plug.

37:46 And technology also changes very fast. So technology is probably great in many ways. as almost sort of ancient creatures And that we're going to adjust our hardware. And that it seems to me that this is inevitable. Insane stuff. We're on a consumer model. This is how and this is why. I bet no. Yeah, it's just a part of life. You just sort of fall into it. Yeah. And oftentimes you get

41:20 people working from home. If you don't want to be stuck on email all day, it's like, I totally get that. I read an article about a woman who was fired Enjoy. employee. If you set a productivity goal for an employee, say, hey, we need to get X amount of I mean maybe there's some other factors. You go above that and it's either small, medium, or large.

44:03 They had complaints about her missing stuff and doing work, So, plus, she's very pretty in that picture. Like how many people are just using filters? Right. Well, it seems like in this story, there's kind of more to it. is toxic. this from a guy whose name is T. Nguyen. So it's T-H-I-N-G-U-Y-E-N. He's a philosopher at the Like there's all these things that can come out of a discussion,

47:32 dickhead. It's trying to dunk on someone. It's trying to say something outlandish or maybe tweet that'll really do well, right? And that changes, that changes how he thinks and what he One of the things that people want when they hunt is they want to get a mature animal for a bunch of reasons. And so the goal is, ethically and morally, that's the animal that you should choose to try to hunt.

50:00 Yeah, they're giant. It's the healthiest for you. antlers they the width of how far they're apart and all that stuff gets factored together and it comes up with a score. There's all these really complex, but far more valuable and meaningful reasons that we go out into hunt. But So when he starts this, the magazine takes off because now the average consumer can know,

53:06 So what the wine industry does is they go, okay, well, if we want to sell a lot of wine, You start to see a lot of other wine rating places behave like it means something, right? Yeah. I have a very good friend who's a wine connoisseur, The wine was great. arrested and he winds up doing ten years in jail for making fake wine and there's And what this guy did was he started buying wine.

55:51 And then what he's doing is he's going to his home and he's aging these labels and he's creating and they find out that this guy has made and sold thousands of bottles of fake old wine, That's not, this is not real. and they're drinking oh you can tell and this other guy comes along can let me try that he's the placebo effect, right? You're tasting it and you're imagining it. This is rich, robust wine that

59:25 And they served it out, and they had them talk about it and rate it and do all these things. We were in Florida, and we were eating at this Italian restaurant. Like, eh. better this one's better like this is i i don't know what i'm drinking i don't know what i just in some random apartment. And it's really bonkers because he could have sold that wine for who knows how much money.

1:02:02 I just say, what's a good wine? When I go to a restaurant, pick one out for me. That's good. I don't know anything about wine. I just say, what's a good wine? I mean am I going to notice a difference, especially two glasses in when you're eating a steak? Why do you go to college? professor that it's often not the students who are straight A's who are the best because those

1:03:49 you can put a number on it and you can kind of rank people. Because it's also very hard to quantify whether or not a person is going to be productive. I think it goes back to what we were talking about earlier with certainty. Yeah. And a lot of people don't know why they do. They just want to be successful, right? overdose you know like no one wants to be that guy. So it's like, what do I have to do? And you

1:06:45 But we can't quantify that. And it's all about like selling the next knife. You're just kind of chasing that next whatever it is, the purchase. So I think it was in, I'm trying to remember the exact cutoff of the years. okay, why are humans not good at moderation? What are the things that we are bad They have to go into the chapel to pray seven times a day.

1:10:23 this how do you feel about this and then they come up with a metric that they is basically what they think of as happiness hmm that's a weird one because that you're you're getting a person who's So maybe their self-reported happiness is incorrect. Yeah, it could be. Or they could Like you can tell if someone's overweight. And then here's where we eat breakfast.

1:12:55 But I make it down for breakfast. that they're interacting with physically, which I think is a real issue with human beings. and I don't want to look at a person on a screen and all these different things. I'm doing. I think a podcast is pretty easy for the most part because for the most part, I criticize things that need to be criticized, but I try to be fair and I try to be as overall

1:16:25 Create less people that are upset listening to it. And it's probably better overall, I didn't expect to be educated. 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.

1:17:56 I mean, we affect each other. Like my feelings don't get hurt. You know, it's like you're getting something out of that. So I have to learn how to not do that amongst regular people. Like, I don't think people do things for bad reasons. I think that people usually get something And so they feel like they always need to be on the defensive. Right. when I was younger, I would look at that person and go,

1:22:15 That was someone's little boy. And it was interesting because I saw something today about Gavin Newsom. And he is trying to, I give that guy a lot of shit and I probably shouldn't, you know, But he did do something I really like recently, he vetoed this bill that would have forced a parent to affirm a child's So he's bullshitting us. And so kudos to him for trying to figure out a way to get rid of that law.

1:25:44 Well, especially, look, no one cared about him at all until COVID. Like everyone must get vaccinated. It doesn't stop infection and there's some very weird data that shows that the more often you are in a blue state, in a blue city like Los Angeles, you kind of have to do that because that's And that's terrible politically. right, we need to correct and be vocal. And I think that generally being more open about why

1:29:21 stand up and say, hey, folks, I don't think we should do that. Like? That's pretty easy to do if you're in Texas, like what Governor Abbott did. It was a lot of guessing, man. the extreme end of an ability to not get enough. Also incentives, you know, places like San I think personally, after looking into this, that addiction is more of a symptom of an

1:31:52 no known cure for it, what's the point of even putting up an effort? And those people tended a solution, right, for a problem. And that's how really drugs have always been. So when you look at You're going to eat more of it because it has a low level of alcohol. Every restaurant has drugs. Yep. I'd like a glass of whiskey with my meal. Exactly. You're on drugs.

1:34:08 They've lived through a war. They put a lot of stimulants in it. Now, Syria And it was a wacky trip too. I had, um, Picks me up the next day. How long ago was this? This was last summer. Oh, boy. And I'm in Baghdad. I'm like, oh, my God, this is going to be a long week. How long ago was this? I'm like, okay, whatever, dude. I'm like, what did you say to those people?

1:37:07 and different terrorists. So I talked to the police there. We talked to some of the 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. controls it all and also like hezbollah which is a been named a terror organization that's involved

1:39:28 just text me, but he'll take the meeting. He will talk. Because that's sort of what the government of the U.S. sort of claims. or having a drink solves your issues you face, Yeah, it was escape. the opposite of addiction is connection, I'm going to be on my game all the time, but the moment I start drinking, it's a game. Like, Yeah. getting sober it was one i had to realize that it wasn't going to be easy. It's not going to be easy no matter who you are.

1:44:06 That's how he gets places. But he doesn't realize that as he's stuck by flapping his wings, Yeah, I think that that I think there definitely is a genetic component to a point. Um, and so I think that's part of it, but then also you go, okay, well there's the genetic Right. This is the thing. It's wild that I've never even heard of that before. I look for that.

1:47:16 People were getting hooked on it and it was, um, yeah. And then, uh, what had happened is that It helps them write. They use Adderall to function. Yeah. I know a lot of people that take that stuff. A whopping 41. So you see the overdose death rate go up significantly as fentanyl starts to That's a super great question. I don't know. So it's like, it's really,

1:50:30 You don't know if you're going to get in trouble. And so there's all these up in the airs that make good either. No, because we can't control And you, so much harder to get to. Just the fucking fear involved in that. The thing that's illegal, the naughty thing. And you see that in behavior for sure. Totally. Open up. Really? and they're banging on the door.

1:53:19 like, who the hell do we call? We're both like, boy, I don't know. some Valium or something like that? And it actually turned out to be fentanyl. not some of the more, you know, average cases. And in those more average cases, things that provide whatever the drug was providing for them and are able to get off it. Well, also, hopefully with age comes wisdom and with a bunch

1:57:05 the great benefits to people like yourself is that someone who has gone through that can now talk so if addiction is, together this narrative. It is oftentimes frustrating as hell. There's a lot of negative short-term consequences, but you could almost argue, and I've thought about in their pursuit of excellence to the point where it overwhelms all the other aspects of their life.

1:59:37 to pills and so now he was addicted to pills and he just couldn't stop taking And before he died, like my friend told me that one time they were all at a diner and he fell asleep in his food. players in the world and uh ultimately the drugs got him i mean, he hurt his back really badly. The thrill that knowing that there's going to be this one event that you're preparing for.

2:01:37 And if you can get there, if you can get back to excellence again, My fucking knees are going, you know, my back hurts now. olympic trials broke his neck rehabbed it somewhat and got a bunch of fucking novocaine shots in his above and beyond in amateur athletics are some of the toughest human So you're talking about an insanely powerful person and he got caught in it.

2:04:48 sometimes people need a pat on the back and sometimes they need a little bit of a kick in the ass. It got filled with whatever the, you know, the drug of choice is. that, you know, something like 12 step programs, they really help a lot of people. They're not for How have I replaced it? Let's go in the woods for like a week, right? You want an extreme experience.

2:07:19 have an aversion to that idea of hunting and that they think it's cruel. And I get how they in insects because of pesticides, in fawns, Yeah, rabbits, all sorts of things get killed in that. And, you know, you could say that that's also the cycle of life and that most certainly doesn't go to waste because something will eat those birds. Well, believe me, something's going to find that thing.

2:09:28 They will eat it. that experience is going to like, how it's all going to unfold. And then when it does unfold, it's like, oh, my God, that was amazing. No. there with this high powered scope and a rifle and just easily taking out some animal and then in elevation. You have to be in great shape. And you could easily go 10, 11 days and come home the way we are and what we value goes back to a lot of, I mean, I think a lot of why we are the way we are and what we value goes back to evolution. And so that psychologist I was telling you about earlier, Thomas Zental,

2:12:49 And this even, this applies to marriage. Mm-hmm. I start rucking. it is, 64 ounce hydro flask filled with like liquid IV and water. So I'm just out there hydrating I have great accuracy. that they weren't prepared and they weren't successful there was uh i don't know how many I pulled a tag last year for the cash area, kind of a mess with mule deer this year. Like you're not going to pull anything. Yeah, they all

2:16:56 It's hard to do. It's always the hard ones, you know, it's always the difficult ones. It's like the Deseret is a hard one because not because of density, there's a lot of animals there, They smell predator. And they made mountain lion hunting. there's some woods behind her house. It's a pretty developed area too, but there just happens to be And then I saw one in Montecito.

2:19:39 Easily. And I was in a truck. And these massive forearms, man. And I'm like, what do you do if you zig when you should have zagged and you run into that thing like holy A friend of a friend. So this was in Wyoming. about um they were in a fog knack island so a fog knack is like um alaska and so there's the they're all sitting around eating lunch they're they're gonna have lunch and

2:23:21 that the bear doesn't know who to attack and just kind of runs through them. Your reptilian brain completely takes over. Those things are so giant. Did they just hear this coming through? where I'm kind of protected. And they, you know, encountered this thing that ran through their place like British Columbia is that the voting population all exists in urban areas.

2:26:37 Well, my friend Mike, who runs a guide service in northern BC, And there's also wolves up there, that they pass these laws and they don't even know what they're voting on. And when you're not hunting them, now they're not afraid of people anymore. And then they go into ranchers, and they start attacking cattle and they start, to it. I'm looking harder, but I

2:29:06 Yeah, exactly. Yeah, they don't have predators. USDA facility. So you know that you're getting, you know, it's, it's all clean and safe and it's I mean, you're looking at thousands and thousands and thousands of deer just in one field. They all have great venison. how did you feel rocking helped you? It's hard, man. So I do these 20-second sprints, 10-second rest, 20-second sprints.

2:32:02 And then by that time I'm warmed up. And then, um, generally I do Like I can do 20 bodyweight squats easy, so I do sets of five, So I do those and then I generally do kettlebell routines. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. sprints on the air dime machine depending upon how hard the workout is, I usually do four or five rounds of Tabatas. stuff first i'm so beat up by the time i get to that that I'll do four or maybe I'll push myself to do five.

2:35:22 That'll do it. It's like, what's the altitude here? prepare yourself. So that's what I did. I feel like the slow grind of rucking is awesome for And if the answer is yes, like, all right, I feel pretty solid. which probably weighs 80 pounds on my shoulder and I'm climbing over stuff. I have a good base I have to keep it going well Well, that's a great, I mean, it's a good pursuit because once a year you are going to have to get in shape too, which I mean, you probably keep yourself in shape generally.

2:38:04 You have a goal. And I really worked hard this year. I lost 10 pounds. So I go down and visit them in Bolivia. And, um, the real difference maker, their diet generally at some point across the day, It's just real food. Now, that is just a different way of explaining what I just laid out, right? unprocessed, very minimally processed versus an ultra processed diet where everything else is

2:42:01 eat a ton of them yeah i can keep going i'll open up a second bag of Pringles. Yeah, dude. people that eat far more calories I'll have five, six slices. How many hours is that in the gym? Maybe. drinking one of these things crazy how do you stay after that? It seems like you'd go into a fucking average person that we don't move enough, so we can't buffer the

2:45:48 Look at that. Damn. carnivore diet is you can't overeat i mean you could i guess I can't I get satisfied pretty quickly yeah one So they can keep going. So I think when you start to cut out food groups, you inevitably eat less food because it also becomes less rewarding as well, you know? And so this meat is just really like stringy and chewy. So people will be like, you know, the modern food system is the worst thing ever.

2:48:29 I don't know what the numbers are. It's not a food thing. Is it out now? I read the whole damn thing. out. So I'm glad you did it. It's called 2%.