Alan Levinovitz: How We Got Hooked on Junk Food Information

the Joe Rogan experience I think that's one of the weirdest things about today right is that we are faced with these unparalleled crisises where we really we don't have anything to go off of we don't have a similar situation that happened you know in 1985 we were we are today with the coronavirus and then with the subsequent lockdown of the economy where everyone's terrified and then you have the George Floyd murder and then you have the looting and the riots and the chaos and the protests and then you have the coronavirus kicks in again and our leaders look impotent and we we can't look to what I mean when you have a guy like Donald Trump in office already you have a situation like Jesus I hope the cabinet can keep this thing together I hope the Senate can hold this badnesses madness we got a reality show host who's the [ __ ] president but then all the mayors are [ __ ] up all the governor no one it's not even that they're [ __ ] up is that no one is equipped to handle this so you see unprecedented anger particularly online where you know you're dealing with people this is one of the things that drew me to you is one of the tweets that you made about processed information that online information is essentially processed information when you're dealing with like social media versus like actual communication like you and I are having right now which is what resonates with people I think it's one of the things that resonates with podcasts it's one of the reasons why I prefer to do them in person it's the closest thing to a real conversation with a real person whereas this viewing of text white on black you know white letters in my case I use the night mode on a black screen it's so weird like you you you have to interpret intent you have to try to get and then you're not getting any social cues from the person you you're not there's not a back-and-forth it's just you spit something out they spit something back and it's you're trying to approximate what it's like to actually talk to a person it's very processed I thought I thought that would you the way you described it was really the perfect definition of what ails us where so many people today are communicating in this way and it's very similar to people surviving off a processed food and becoming sick it's so if you think about if you think about how processed food was was created basically and and I mean modern ultra processed food because these terms are all really slippery right just like the term natural so this is on a spectrum right the history of cooking is a history of processing food right you like to cook I like to cook that's processing food dessert is a kind of food that's been made to be highly palatable you know so it's not about processing being intrinsically evil but with ultra processed foods which you've got is you got a bunch of companies that are like alright what can we exploit about human appetites to make foods as compulsively eatable as possible right it's terrifying you've got I think coca-cola I think it was said something like we have to conquer stomach share this is a term they use yeah so like there's a yes if you think right you have a hundred you think of the stomach right like okay so we got a hundred percent of the stomach like how can coca-cola fill the maximum amount of stomach share in in the humans of the world wow what a bizarre way of looking at people it's terrifying right and so then and they did it because if they got the smartest people you know they've got great chemists and biologists working you know day and night to figure out how to conquer stomach share and they did it right and one of the ways they did it also was make it cheap and accessible there's vending machines in every school I mean think for a second how crazy that is that there are vending machines with just coca-cola and candy bars and stuff in every single school we have you know it's that but but it happened right and so now we live in a world in which extremely cheap highly palatable and very accessible food is everywhere no wonder we have a problem with our diets and that's exactly what's happening with information right now so I as as I understand it the way in which Twitter was designed for example they consulted with people who wanted to figure out how to keep you compulsively coming back so like slot machines right they consulted with people who build slot machines to figure out okay what Pete what keeps people pulling the lever right so they could just have it refresh you just have your tweets at the top but instead there's a little alert button right you pull down there's a little noise like or whatever the noise is when you when you pull down on it you know and so they've made it compulsive they've made it highly palatable right you want to you want to keep coming back and the thing is the difference between ultra processed information and ultra processed food is that I think we're were were the companies now and that really freaks me out we're the consumers were also the manufacturers and we're also the distributors we make the meme someone is gonna take some cut of this show and turn it into a sound bite that's highly palatable in the way that information becomes highly palpable it's gonna be oversimplified Brian it's gonna have heroes and villains it's gonna have a this going to demonize someone and it's going to be something that gives you a sense of belonging those are the three things I think that make information highly processed and highly palatable we want a hit of information that's easy to understand that demonizes someone and that gives us a sense of belonging and that's just like exploiting what humans want right you're saying you know we're creatures that want to love each other we want to belong right it's this just the same way we want to taste salt sugar and fat we want to feel these things and the information that we have around us now it's the it's the same thing as a Snickers bar except the differences were Snickers we're making it and we're behaving like junkies like rabid junkies if you look at I don't know what percentage of Twitter discourse ends in people being angry with each other but it seems like it's half at least I mean it's just there's so much rabid discourse there's just people pissed at each other and insulting each other and it's so unlike anywhere else in the world in turn less you're in a [ __ ] war zone like the way people talk to each other people talked to each other in real life the way they talked in on Twitter the emergency ward would be filled with people with broken faces and shattered eye sockets it'd be chaos it's like road it's road rage it's how you treat people it's how you treat the person in the other car that's cut you off because they're not they've been dehumanized they're isolated right it's like Twitter just allows you to and social media in certain ways facilitates being angry in the way that you get angry their car you like honk you like [ __ ] you man I hate you it's like it's like you know it also cost is that the reason why people do that in road rage that's because your sensors are heightened because you're moving so fast because you're you're aware that split-second decision-making is it's important to survival so when you're going 65 miles an hour and you're looking around at everybody in this guy kids a freaky [ __ ] like you're already at 7 or 8 and I think this is also a part of the problem today online because the the coronavirus and because of the the lockdown and economic instability and we were at unprecedented joblessness right now I mean people are really hopeless there's a lot of people that they we got one 1200 dollar check from the government and then that's it and then you know you hear that Kanye West got this giant loan and Judd Apatow got this giant law these really wealthy people are getting all this money but meanwhile salon owners small business owners didn't a lot of people are just [ __ ] furious at everything because it's like driving a car you're you're already heightened so this information that comes at you maybe it wouldn't have pissed you off under normal circumstances but now you're [ __ ] furious right it's like stress eating something so we have this I hadn't really thought about that with with road rage but it does make sense right so one year when you're already at that when you're already at that level then you're gonna be even more likely to need that kind of information want to participate in that kind of dialogue you're it's not dialogue but no it's not it's yeah yeah it's a and there's ways we can we can stop it I really think we can stop it by focusing on problems with the system and problems with ourselves right it's both of us because we're the ones manufacturing it and we're the ones consuming it so we can do things about it and it ranges from you know I mean I don't like I don't have I don't still don't have a smartphone you don't know a flip phone Wow yeah purpose yeah I mean in part not because you tweet a lot I do so I'm not good well it's compulsive I think the reason I don't have it is if I had a smartphone man it'd be all over I mean on it all the time I mean when I'm at home cuz i know cuz i work from home sometimes my wife has my wife has a smartphone and so i'll always be like using her photo doing like if you don't have fun you can't just go use my phone right then i'm installing things on my computer like freedom which is this app that blocks you from i mean it's literally like you know with food right people have those lines that only open so i have an app that like locks me out of these sites i have a folder on my desktop or on my i guess yeah my desktop of my phone that says junky and thats all of my instagram and twitter and all that stuff it's important that's that kind of things so we need i think we all need to collectively take steps in that way but also we need to realize and and this is really important right it's not just about natural unnatural it's not just about technology we've had this kind of junk food information around forever and this is where i think for me is a as a scholar of religious studies right if you look at myths and folk tales and fairy tales and if you look at the structure of religions there are ways to tell stories to get people heightened there are ways to tell stories to make people feel belonging there are ways to tell stories to demonize people right these tropes have been a lot you know they've been around forever right what do you do you create a villain you tell a story about Redemption you tell a story about a fall you tell a story in which the people who are hearing the story just by hearing it become heroes right these are these are things that have been around for a long time in the same way that if you go back 2,000 years if you were super rich and had access to lots of delicious salty sugary fatty food you could get fat it was just a lot harder back then and in the same way now we facilitated the manufacture of this kind of these junk narratives that in small doses I think are fine but if it's all we're consuming it's a it's a disaster and we're gonna end up I think with some kind of with some problems that are analogous to the health problems that we're seeing because of what we eat they're gonna be problems in our soul right mental diabetes yeah yeah all right it's I I feel like it's a I mean I'm not I'm not like a sort of organized religious religion person myself but I would say it's not just mental it's like our souls there's something deeply corrupting of our humanity and I and I catch myself doing it so like so that tweet that you were talking about I had I had written a piece a week before that about Trump visiting you know visiting the church and holding up the Bible it was this really angry piece and I was like I'm gonna write about how terrible this is and and and put this out there right was something the way he set it up to my tear gas the protestors to clear the area it was like what a horrible thing right I'm gonna tell everybody how horrible this is I'm gonna get my anger out and then I and then when the article came out I just realized that I was just sending it into the [ __ ] machine right and it was gonna get ground up and the people who already agreed with it we're gonna read it and be like yeah it's terrible and the people that disagreed with it are either never gonna read it or they're gonna see it and they're gonna be like see people keep attacking Trump like they're all crazy and it it was sort of like a Chrysler is just like I want it I don't want to be doing I don't want to be putting anything into this machine if it's just gonna get processed into junk information so that we can feed our habit and this is a habit that we really don't know how to navigate we've only been dealing with this habit for when to Twitter get invented 2007 it's very recent yeah that's not enough time for us to figure out how to do it right I mean you remember like during the I'm 52 so when I was a kid watching television for kids all day was fairly new right it had only been like a generation or two that that was even possible to just watch TV all the time right and it was constantly thought of as the corrupting thing like get out get away from the TV you're all you do is watch TV get up get outside and that was sort of the first indication that there's there's a potential for an unhealthy relationship with technology and with distributed content right but I think Twitter's far more toxic than that because you're actually putting the content out yourself and you're waiting to see how people respond and you shift the way you interact with people based on how they respond to your tweets right it's the belonging yes or your Facebook post or what it would have you it created I mean it's interesting you say that like thinking again about food because I'm assessment like the first book I wrote was about food um and like how we came to fear certain foods like fat or salt or sugar and and thinking about it in this way right you need a technology to be able to process something to get it cheap enough so that it can be widely consumed right so information that allows you to belong right for a long time only certain people I mean it for a while or it's only people who could read and write right so that's that's all you've got those are the only people could prove sent and then now every it's so cheap to produce information that makes you a part of a community it's free right right do it we do it all the time and like you said we haven't figured out how to navigate it and that's another confusion I think that people have with natural versus unnatural which is that we also just have problems with novelty as human beings right something new comes that we still don't know how to navigate our food system we still don't know how to stop people from eating too much we don't we don't know how to do it collectively as a society we clearly have not solved this problem and yet it's important to remember that for most of the world the problem is still not having enough right so there was a time when the problem was people had no information you just didn't know anything you knew nothing that sucked - right so it's great that we have the internet that was far worse yeah that was far worse um or at least not like it was Deb it was it was really bad and it was bad in a profoundly different way I mean this goes back to like the with the hunter-gatherer thing right whether it was better in a state of nature I often hear people there's a great book called against the grain written by a by a guy who he's a land he thinks that we need to be easier on the past and harder on the president in this book and one of the things he points out it's like oh people these days like humans modern humans you and I we go out and we don't know what a plant is or we don't know what an animal is and he's right right we don't most people don't have a have the knowledge of the natural world that hunter-gatherers do but at the same time they don't know about the germ theory of disease don't know about you no planetary cycles and so it's always important for me at least as soon as I start to get sucked into one of these binaries right it was so bad it's so bad now today to remember that it was also bad bad in different ways in the past and we can't make the mistake of thinking that the problem with information and our and our consuming of it today we can't make the mistake of thinking that that the evil is in the form it we can make it good we can make it better we can learn how to deal with this I think I hope as long as we're conscious of the problem [Applause]

Channel: JRE Clips

Views: 915,161

Keywords: Joe Rogan, JRE, Joe Rogan Experience, JRE Clips, PowerfulJRE, Joe Rogan Fan Page, Joe Rogan Podcast, podcast, MMA, Joe Rogan MMA Show, UFC, comedy, comedian, stand up, funny, clip, favorite, best of

Id: QsZTGvMnqnc

Length: 16min 22sec (982 seconds)

Published: Wed Jul 08 2020