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In the past, until very recently, food was scarce, and it was hard to find, especially prehistorically, there wasn't a lot of food, not to mention in order to get it you weren't going down to the 7-Eleven, you would have to hunt, you would have to gather, you'd have to put in energy to get energy

Because food was scarce and hard to find, if you had the opportunity to eat, you would eat a little more than you needed at any given time and 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 going to survive. We still have that drive to eat a little more than we need, but we live in a world where food is rarely scarce so it's an evolutionary mismatch

All the time your job was getting food every day and preparing it. A great example is – before we created production lines to make tortillas, Mexican women used to spend five hours a day hand grinding corn to make tortillas, when we get in food production lines and we 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. Today I think the average American spends about 8% of their income on food, in the past we used to spend more than 40%

Food will always be rewarding in the short term, it's a hard battle to fight

When you look at what kills the average person it's heart disease, that's the number one killer of Americans, it's the number one killer worldwide. When you look at what people actually worry about health-wise, it's not heart disease, it's cancer. People worry about cancer, people worry about terrorism, they worry about violence. So you'll have people who stock tons and tons of guns and bullets because they don't want to get killed and yet they've also got a pantry full of junk food

The commonality behind the indigenous tribe’s food is that it all has one ingredient – they're basically not getting access to ultra processed food

For breakfast it's probably something like white rice, maybe some plantains with some protein, it could be fish, it could be chicken, they hunt an Amazonian deer called a taper so that's red meat. For lunch a very similar pile of white rice, maybe some fish, little bit of vegetables. One thing that was interesting too is that they're not eating a ton of vegetables

One of the fascinating things about today is that we have more options for food to eat than ever before

We do know that the more options people have to eat, the more things they can eat, the more that person will eat

Food today is hyper palatable

We all take for granted the idea that eating is often very pleasurable because we have a choice. I'm going to decide what I'm going to eat today, if I'm at a buffet, or even if I'm at home, or if I'm at a restaurant ordering something, I'm going to presumably order something that I enjoy eating

Hunger is the best sauce. If you're hungry, a lot can taste good if you're deprived of something and then you get it, it becomes more enjoyable

It's the energy content of the food that is driving weight gain and it is independent of the quality of the food, so 1000 calories of broccoli is as fattening as a 1000 calories of potato chips

What he finds is that when people are on the ultra-processed diet, they end up eating about 500 more calories a day and they start to gain weight. When they're on the minimally processed diet, they eat less and they start to spontaneously lose weight

If you want to get snack food to sell, it's got to have three Vs. It's got to have value – so it's got to be relatively affordable. It's got to have variety – meaning there's got to be a variety of flavors, the flavors have to be intense and by the way if you're making just one snack food that's not a good idea, don't make just one original Pringles, make 20 Pringles, make barbecue Pringles, make sour cream Pringles, on and on and on, there's all this different varieties. And then the third V is velocity – it has to be fast to eat. Snacking was not a sort of cultural thing until about 1970 and once people start to really snack this becomes a concerted movement by the food industry. Okay, how do we sell more food, 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

Let's go back to your example of the 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. It's never going to happen, it just takes up so much volume in your stomach, it's slow to eat, whereas with a brownie… I’ve eaten a thousand calories of brownie before, it's relatively easy to do

Every food that I eat has to have just one ingredient. It's all single ingredients that can be mix together. I tend to feel more full on fewer calories when I'm eating foods like this

If I wanted a snack, I would usually just have a piece of fruit

If something's easier to eat, you're going to eat more of it

I think that sometimes we discount how much protein comes from grains

I'm not saying that we should never eat ultra-processed food. I think the question is how we manage that, because we do live in a world where it's incredible that we can have brownies, that we can have 15 different flavors of Doritos, it's all great but if we are eating those foods too often that becomes the brunt of our diet, we're going to have issues and I believe a lot of the research suggests that anywhere from 60 to 70% of American diet is ultra-processed so you start to look at that and go “okay, we've got snacking, we've got people eating ultra-processed food for most of the foods they're eating and I think it start to make sense why you see scales start to get higher over time

I do think sometimes food can be used for things other than nutrition, for example stress relief or dealing with emotions. You tend to see that especially today people eat for emotional reasons. 80% of eating today is driven by reasons other than true hunger

There are some addictions such as food that I will struggle with indefinitely

I do think that probably exposure during vulnerable periods sort of sets the table for addictive behavior. Here's a good example from addiction research – if a person drinks at 15 or younger, they have a coin flips chance of becoming an alcoholic, if they drink after 21 or older, they have a 10% chance. Why is that it's because your brain is developing such a way from puberty till you're about 25, where you're trying to figure out, 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 sort of gets set in with alcohol. You go “oh, this thing, this is what works for me.” So it could be that at the young age food worked for you to help you deal with your problems. For me, the first time I drank when I was like 15, I'm like “wow, the world's way better after this, it was a very deep learning experience”

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 that he drank a bottle of wine, laid in a field, and was like “this is the greatest feeling in the world”. So that made me think that maybe it comes down to not just age of exposure but the reward that comes from that exposure. And maybe if there's no reward, and in fact there's a punishment, physiologically it could have the opposite effect

That's why we do what we do, because we get rewarded for it

A slot machine works on this three-part system that I call the scarcity loop. The first condition is opportunity – you have an opportunity to get something of value, so in the case of a slot machine it's money. Part two is unpredictable rewards – you're going to get the thing of value at some point, but you don't know when and you don't know how valuable it's going to be. With the slot machine, once you play a game and those reels are rolling, they could land and you get nothing, they could land and you win $2 or you could win $20,000, there's a crazy range of outcomes every single game. And then the third condition is quick repeatability – 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. This system can get people to do a lot of other behaviors that are seemingly irrational too. It's what makes a lot of different systems like social media work, you post something, you got an opportunity to get some likes some status, so you check and recheck, because you don't know when those likes are coming in

Why did the opioid epidemic start in states where the factories had moved out? Well it's because factories move out, our lives change, we don't have a lot of resources, things have gotten really dark, and now we have this flood of pills that can take away those problems in the short term, that can allow us to escape from that life we live

20 to 25% of US soldiers who were in Vietnam were addicted to heroin. They were regular frequent users of heroin and President Nixon he decided “I don't want to let all these heroin addicts back into the United States.” Nearly every single soldier provided a clean drug test before returning, and when they got back into the United States, the vast majority of them [about 95%] managed to stay clean. The 5% that relapsed they tended to be people who had used drugs before the war. This suggests that people aren't necessarily a slave to chemical, maybe it's a little bit more nuanced than it being purely a brain disease

Substances today are strong enough that they can have more extreme consequences

The addiction rate for prescribed drugs that are controlled, where the dose and the timing is controlled, the addiction rates for those are way lower simply because there's no unpredictability, there's no game behind it

If 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. So I think we still have this 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. Even just a couple hundred years ago the average person for example owned about three outfits, now the average person owns 104 outfits and they also only wear 10% of the clothes that they own

When you look at why people buy there's basically four reasons. The first is items are tools – we use them to accomplish a greater goal, this is probably how people would have used things for most of time. Two, we can use them to get status – you're buying something in order to display something about yourself to others, it's kind of a status play, no one buys a Rolex because they want to know what time it is. And then number three is that we can use goods to belong – you wear your F1 shirt when you go to the F1 race, you're a part of this community and it pulls you into the community, we kind of get these tribes that we can identify with. And then the fourth reason and I think this was a powerful one during the pandemic is simply that people are bored

Boredom is this evolutionary discomfort that basically just tells us that whatever you're doing with your time right now, the return on your time is worn thin, so go do something else. In the past that something else was often productive.

The faster a human or an animal can repeat the behavior, the more likely they are to repeat the behavior

I advocate for trying to think how can I Infuse boredom back into my life and really for me that's go out, take a walk for 20 minutes, see what happens to your thoughts, be willing to sit with that, and see where it leads you beyond the screen

I think this is one of the reasons why people have their best ideas in the shower, because you're not focused on anything

There's an interesting study I came across when writing this book and it had groups of people and it had them solve a problem and one group 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 they had to come up with 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 but they got more rewards from solving the problem by MacGyvering it

I think the difference between how we acquired information in the past and how we 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

There's an evolutionary basis for negativity bias, we are far better off evolutionarily to pay attention to negative signals rather than positive signals. Negative thing is what could kill you, that demands your attention, the positive thing is great, but it doesn't need as much attention

We have evolved to want information, but have we evolved to want the truth?

Too much fast food is bad for you, too much loose information without nuance is bad for you

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

If you want to know what a person thinks, maybe ask them

If you get something easily, it's not very satisfying. If you have to work very hard to achieve something, it’s more satisfying. Probably for very important evolutionary reasons we can't keep satisfaction and that's what keeps us striving

People who tend to be happy, they tend to do something that they believe is of service and is going to a greater good

You are the product of your attention

There's a lot of information out about how it's good to have friends, to be social. I think that you need anticipatory support which is basically someone or some bigger idea that you can count on, but in terms of having this big number of friends, I don't think that it is necessary for happiness. I think that having certain people that you can count on, basically having one good relationship is better than a bunch of mediocre ones

For most of us, our will to live is no longer really a vital part of our existence

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 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

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