new from kaleidoscope: two percent with michael easter

0:10Speaker 1:Yo, what's up. It's dexter. I wanted to share a new show on the Kaleidoscope Network. It's called two Percent and it's hosted by journalist Michael Easter. The show explores how we can live better by examining pop medicine hype with healthy skepticism and putting real science first. The clip we're sharing today is from an episode about alcohol and how the recent trend of not drinking at all might not necessarily lead to a healthier life. Here's Michael.

0:36Speaker 2:The way that I figured out that I had a drinking problem was that literally every problem in my life was caused by my drinking. So if that is you probably don't drink. Yes, if you're more like Dean, where you are doing one hundred healthy behaviors, you go out, you have a couple of drinks in the context of friends, you have great conversations, you meet new people. You maybe don't have to get super caught up in this idea that like removing alcohol is going to vastly improve my health.

1:08Speaker 2:There have been a lot of conflicting reports about drinking and health over the past few years. So for most of time, scientific bodies said, you know, if you have one or two drinks a day that could actually help your heart health. But in the last halful of years that has totally been flipped and now a lot of people are saying no alcohol at all that is going to vastly improve your health. Now, I do think there is a bit of nuance in this topic. For example, take me, I do not drink at all. I've been sober for eleven years, and the reason for that is because my favorite drink it was always the next one.

1:44Speaker 2:And if you drink like that, you can rack up some life problems. But on the other hand, most people are having one to two drinks every now and then, and I think a big question is is that enough to really hurt health? So I'm going to read a couple of stats here. Gallup recently found that drinking is at an all time low. So when the seventies up through about twenty twenty, between sixty to seventy percent of the population drank. Now the figure is fifty four percent.

2:14Speaker 2:We also have wineries that are closing in Napa Valley because not enough people are buying wine. And I recently spoke to a friend who owns a restaurant in la and she said that a lot of LA restaurants are struggling because no one is drinking anymore, and restaurants make a lot of money from alcohol sales. So big question here is drinking bad or can it be even good? I have a friend, his name is Dean Statman. I used to work with him at Men's Health magazine, Very fitness minded, healthy guy, and he saw all this stuff out there about how not drinking is the answer to health.

2:48Speaker 2:So we decided to jump on the wagon. He lasted about three months because he found that although his health scores on his fitness tracker did improve, a lot of really interesting things happened to his mental health and his social life. He wrote a piece about it in GQ. It is called why my twenty twenty six resolution is to start drinking again. All right, Dan, thanks for coming on the show.

3:14Speaker 3:Pleasure to be here.

3:16Speaker 2:So let's back up a little bit. It's summer of last year and you decide you're gonna stop drinking. Now. I think the context it's important for this is this wasn't like, oh I got a duy, I got arrested, I'm going through a divorce. What prompted all this?

3:35Speaker 3:No, none of those things. Thank God.

3:38Speaker 4:I've been a journalist, a magazine editor for literally my entire career.

3:43Speaker 2:That's how we met because we both were we both worked at mental health and Overlapdorek. Yeah, and as you know, you know, you can work in wellness, but it's not like I guess, I don't know, like maybe accounting or something where you really do have this this constant it's every day is different. Like as these sort of wellness trends come and go, you're covering them, you're learning about them. A lot of the time, you're actually sort of trying things out yourself. And I think I had just seen the space evolved so much as it continues to do.

4:14Speaker 2:There's so many ways you can optimize your wellness. And you also have I will point out because of your work. You work out all the time.

4:23Speaker 4:Yeah, a lot of hit classes, a lot of running, and then there's the stuff that I just sort of personally love, you know, playing soccer every week. I got again just by virtue of covering this stuff, got like really into meditation for a while, got really into like saw on a cold plunge, red light therapy. I've been doing a bunch of higer archs, races recently, and this is all throughout you know, also just just drinking like an ordinary person. So I think at a certain point, I just you know.

4:51Speaker 3:I did. I kind of got swept up.

4:54Speaker 4:In this like aura around the NA movement where you've got you know, Tom Hollands, Biro and Lewis Hamilton has like a tequila or a gave or whatever, and then plus the other a dozen plus celebrities that have like non alcoholic beers and spirits and things. Now you know, it's back in the day, it was like everyone had their like vodka.

5:15Speaker 2:Now it's no alcohol vodka.

5:17Speaker 3:Yeah.

5:17Speaker 4:I think at one point, actually the situation from Jersey Shore had like a protein infused vodka which was which is quite funny if you pay attention to nutrition science.

5:27Speaker 2:Did you drink it?

5:27Speaker 3:Oh?

5:28Speaker 4:Hen no, no, no, no, I mean no shade to him. I think he actually is sober now.

5:34Speaker 2:Yeah, he's sober now too much of the protein vodka.

5:37Speaker 4:So I guess I just thought, like, why not give this a try, Like I'm already doing so many other things for my health, for my wellness, why not just sort of add this. The science I think has moved past the point now where it's like, you know, it's healthy for you to drink a glass of red wine a day or whatever, Like we know now that that's really not.

5:57Speaker 2:True from a physical health perspective.

5:59Speaker 4:Yes, physiologically it's it's not a plus, it's it's likely a minus if you're sort of guess going past a certain point or probably in any any quantity really, which is also really interesting, just by the way, about the new nutritional guidelines that the FDA just came out with, because they actually removed specifying the number or the amount of alcohol that is considered healthy, opting rather to just say drink less, which is quite interesting because if you're aready drinking an.

6:29Speaker 3:Absolute shit load, like what is less?

6:30Speaker 2:Yeah, if you're having fifteen drinks a day, you're like, you know, yeah, fourteen, all right, you're following the guidelines of fourteen.

6:36Speaker 3:Yeah, yeah, you're just following the FDA's guidelines. Yeah.

6:39Speaker 4:So I decided to just give it a try and see. I lasted about three months, which is not very long. And the reason really at its core was that I didn't realize going in how alcohol is not just about alcohol. You might be pulling one lever, but it affects so many there are things it's not just like my night's going to be exactly the same, except my beer didn't have any alcohol in it. It's got sort of roots that just go so much further than I had imagined.

7:11Speaker 4:I was noticing how not drinking was affecting my friendships, my marriage even and kind of just my general like mood Outlook, you could maybe even go so far as and say mental health. Maybe had I done this for longer.

7:28Speaker 2:Yeah, I thought that was most interesting. Is you said like you weren't as happy?

7:33Speaker 3:Yeah, hundred percent. I think. You know, I'm someone who I work from home.

7:39Speaker 4:I'm writing most of the time, which is, as you know, it's a very you know, solo activity, and so I used to really look forward to those times when I would, you know, go play pick up soccer with the guys that I had in New York and we'd go grab beers afterwards, or or just going out on a weekend, whether it's a Friday night going out to dinner with friends and then going to a bar afterwards, or just going to bars and bar hopping. It's someone's birthday, or you go out and then you decide like, hey, let's go somewhere else after this instead of just going home that just got kind of decimated.

8:15Speaker 2:Yeah, I feel like the big point here is that I think there's a massive difference between drinking alone at home, you know, watching Netflix or whatever, and the context in which you were doing it in, which is I have a group of friends, We're going to this dive bar, or we've just finished this game of soccer. And in the piece, I liked how you got into the fact that in the context of a bar when you're drinking, the conversations almost changed, where you had a great example where you're like, you know, on after the first beer, I'd be like, hey, guys, we should all go to this music festival in Virginia. Let's roll. I got this right, and that those moments didn't happen as much when you stop drinking. You did say that you would still occasionally go to bars, but you were like the non alcoholic beer and it just kind of it just changed things.

9:06Speaker 2:So what was that like, and like, how did that manifest itself in those actual situations.

9:10Speaker 4:Yeah, I mean, I'll give a great example just from a couple of days ago, even because now obviously that I'm you know, not doing that experiment anymore. So, my wife and I were out in the sort of like area of Zurich that we hadn't been to before, so sort of like industrial part. It's very much like like Short Ditch in London, kind of like a little Brooklyn sort of, and we were out looking for furniture. It was sort of a long day, and then we were about to go home and we saw this like just interesting, sort of mysterious almost looking bar. From the outside, it looked like a almost like a little sort of warehouse, but it was like clearly marked like as a bar and had some cool like neon in the windows. And we were just passing by and on the way to the train, and I was like, do you want to just grab a beer before we go?

9:54Speaker 3:And she was like, yeah, let's do it. So we go.

9:56Speaker 4:Inside and it turns out it's actually this huge like badminton hall and there were like like eight games of badminton, like full court badminton going on in this like giant hangar, and in the front there was this bar, and it was so weird. It was almost like a kind of like like Nashville like honky Tonk kind of theme, but it also had this like Japan sort of inspur It was very and visually it was very like, it was very cool. It was sort of like Wes Anderson meets like kill Bill kind of aesthetic is the best way I can put it. And I was just like, I'm so glad we found this spot. And then we started talking to the bartender about the badminton and turns out it's this like badminton club and we ended up booking a court for the next weekend and that was last weekend that just passed, and so my wife and I went and played badminton and we've never done that with each other before. We've never really done anything like that with each other before, because I I run a lot, I left a lot, I like to race this ovary solo.

10:54Speaker 4:I play soccer. She doesn't play soccer, you know, she has other things that she does. But we never had that kind of like intersection, and so had we not gone in for a beer, we wouldn't have found this cool badminton place, and we wouldn't have done this like great activity together as a couple. And then afterwards we were like, that was so fucking rad, we have to go back. And so now we're going to go back totally. So I think that's just one example of like alcohol kind of leading you down the rabbit hole to unexpected things.

11:23Speaker 4:And if I wasn't drinking, I mean, this is another great example, Like I would have never said, you want to stop for a beer before we go home, because like in my mind at least, I'm sure other people will disagree.

11:32Speaker 3:Like what's the.

11:34Speaker 2:Point I think for me? So I don't drink. I went sober eleven something years And the important point is that this was not prompted by like I listened to a four hour podcast that told me alcohol is associated with all these risks. I was like the guy who you know would wake up and go where did I park my car? And when you drink like that, that can come with some reapers, obviously for your health, but obviously for your life, for your social for your social relationships and things like that. I rarely miss alcohol. When I first got sober, I thought I missed alcohol. What I eventually realized is I didn't actually miss alcohol because I knew that if I have one drink, it's going to lead to X number more and that's not going to be good. What I missed was the setting of bars in the sense that you walk into a bar and everyone's relaxed, and it like levels this playing field.

12:36Speaker 2:There's not like people have a warmness and it's not awkward if someone's sitting next to you to just start talking to the dude next to you, Whereas if you're like, you know, I don't know a counter of a Wendy's or like sitting there, like you start talking to the dude at the Wendy's. Next year, he's gona be like, what the hell are you talking to me, dude? But it's in that bar setting, it's like people there's like a certain sort of social comfort there. There's a warmth, there's a sense of like with my work obligations, I could just be like, Okay, now I can just finally relax.

13:06Speaker 2:And I do think that bars are unique in giving us those situations where it like I would just feel like I let off. And so for me, like after getting sober, I've been like, Okay, where can I find that that isn't a bar? That's not always easy. Which I'm trying to say is like bars have this like unique sociality to them that doesn't necessarily come from a place that isn't serving alcohol, And it sounds like you realized eventually through this experiment, oh, I was getting something akin to that as well. And then when that got removed, you go, well, why the hell is my mental health weird?

13:40Speaker 2:Like why am I not why am I not having these wacky conversations with my friends? Why are we not like connecting as much? And it all went back to the fact that you had a beer in your hand, and you were the type of person that would just have one or two, right, I.

13:53Speaker 4:Mean you described like the bar kind of environment perfectly. And then in a very stark contrast to that, like, during that three months stint, I ended up in a couple of situations where I was standing in you know, typical literal social circle of you know, five six people talking, no one's drinking. And this wasn't just like people happened not to be drinking in that moment, but like people who aren't.

14:16Speaker 3:Drinking for health reasons or whatever reasons.

14:19Speaker 4:Really yeah, but it felt like there was just this sort of in the In the piece, I called it like a LinkedIn coded coldness, because it almost felt like we were like waiting in a room before going into like a job interview, Like I felt like everyone had their kind of pr face on, and it just it just felt weird, and maybe it made me sort of in the moment, feel like, well, I don't like this whole life about drinking thing. It seemed to me that like if you were someone who just drank like and did not sort of do it to a problematic extent, that it was just something that you did. It wasn't like a part of your personality, like, oh this is d he does xx and drink like it's not something you mentioned, It's just something that's whatever.

15:02Speaker 3:You drink water.

15:04Speaker 4:But I found that people a lot of the time, the people I was encountering who who were specifically sober in the wellness scene were like people who it felt like that was like an important part of their personality. Like it seemed like very few conversations went by without people sort of like announcing in some form or fashion that like or like making it known that they don't drink. And I just think that it it kind of made things conversations just feel a little more like edited, maybe is a good word. Guarded guarded, Yeah, And I think this really clicked for me when I connected with an anthropologist for the piece, Ben Tannenbaum, who you know, like looks into this stuff for a living, and he kind of told me about this concept of costly signaling, which is essentially this idea that like one of the reasons that alcohol sort of serves as like a social lubricant, as we say, is nothing to do with actually like you know, getting drunk and sort of letting your guard down because of that, but more this idea that like cost costly signaling basically is this concept where you do something to sort of inflict like a incur a cost

16:14Speaker 4:quote unquote like upon yourself, do something like negative to yourself as almost as like a social buy in, so that people sort of trust and see that like, oh, this person's let their guard down. So in this case, it's alcohol, because alcohol is something that's like you know, not necessarily good for you like health help wise, but it's one of the ways we sort of subconsciously or subliminally like let people know like, Hey, I'm just I'm just here to hang out, you know what I mean, Like I just want to like chat to you, get to know you, like there's no ulterior motives here. And I think that's one of the reasons why alcohol does sort of serve as this like social lubricant, and then in the absence of that, you really feel it when you're kind of paying attention to that.

16:58Speaker 2:Yeah, there's a book that I love. It's called Chapel on the River and it's about it's written by this lady whose name is Wendy Bounds. She's a friend and after nine to eleven she moved up the Hudson River to a town called Garrison, and she was a reporter for the Wall Street Journal, and she took a job at this bar called Guidance. It's like this old pub in this town, and the book really focuses on the relationships that were built in this bar in this little town and how it was really the focal point of the town. So you would have people come in, there were regulars. The place didn't serve any hard alcohol. It was beer only. And she wrote about how people would come in who had totally different viewpoints politically, totally different backgrounds, but in that setting any disagreements were really dropped. Like people would give each other shit, they'd rip each other about whatever, but it was like people would just connect who otherwise would have never connected. And that could really only happen in that bar setting. And I think that that to your point about the anthropologies you spoke to.

18:02Speaker 2:It goes back to that idea you pointed out of costly signaling, and I think when you look at for most of time, bars were these places where people would go to connect. I do feel like since twenty twenty the rise of sort of the health wellness podcast sphere, which grounded I'm part of, I think that's tapered off and we're realizing that in the sort of quest for optimal health. Then you pointed out, like the perfect Whip score, which tracks a million different data points, we have lost these things that are so much harder to measure, which is the interactions we're having with the people around us, the people that we maybe don't know but could have an opportunity to know. And something gets lost in that.

18:47Speaker 4:Yeah, one hundred percent. And look, I still wear the golden handcuff over here. I maybe don't check it as often as as you're supposed to because it could be depressing.

18:57Speaker 2:Now that you're drinking, You're like, I can I can't look at the dude.

19:00Speaker 4:I mean, everyone who's ever worn a whoop and has had a beer in their life. Notice that, like the effect is it's incredible, like it it'll drop your recovery score faster than you know anything. I think part of this too was again being in this in this space, you obviously also come across a lot of people who are doing who are kind of taking things to the maximum and spending most of their time doing things that are like optimizing their body. And at a certain point I was like, we're all, you know, not to get like grim or anything, but like we're all gonna die, Like we haven't gotten to the point yet where like immortality is something we've discovered. And so with the assumption or the understanding that like we all do have the sort of limited time here, it's like do I want to be spending most of my time in the garage tuning the car and washing the car or do I actually want to be out there like fucking driving it and you know, enjoying it. And so I think I got to a point where somewhere in those three months when I just realized, like, you know, kind of cost benefit here, like what am I gaining by not drinking?

20:08Speaker 4:And absolutely I was gaining things. I mean, whoop could tell you that, like I was waking up feeling great, no more hangovers. I save so much money. I just was more yeah, clear headed in the mornings. I could have an earlier start to the day. But on the other hand, everything that I was trading off. And it's not like I stopped getting invited to things. It was more like I started actually removing myself from things. You know, I don't want to go bar hopping with friends if I'm not drinking alcohol, Like it's so boring and like you're just watching your friends get absolutely slashed. The conversation becomes increasingly like annoying for you. And yeah, it's like there's just so many better uses of my time in that situation. And I think ultimately I kind of waited out and I was like, you know, I'm not going to stop doing other things. I'm literally just going to reintroduce drinking. And you know, not like claiming or having the illusion that this is like a good thing for my health, but I just felt that ultimately, net net, it actually was positive when I factored everything in, and I think that's, you know, maybe just something good to

21:17Speaker 4:considering wellness generally, that you don't have to do everything and it's important to you know, manage your priorities as well and still have fun because otherwise what's the point.

21:26Speaker 2:Yeah, I mean when you just look at the data on the importance of being social and having strong social connections, if that thing is enhancing that, like, that's a really important part of overall health and lifespan. And I think your analogy to a car is perfect because now that you're back drinking again, it's not like you're just redlining all the time. You're not just like ripping that thing around twenty four to seven redline, never changing the tires, never changing the oil. You're living in a way that you're doing all these things to maintain the car. It goes in the garage every day, you top off the oil, you make sure the tires are looking good, it's aligned.

22:04Speaker 2:But you also are willing to like go out and drive it. That's why you have the damn car. So it's really like I think the takeaway for the average person is like finding a balance between those things where people can get so caught up in health practices optimizing that you forget to actually ask yourself, well, why am I doing all this stuff in the first place? And a lot of times it's like, well, so I can live better, And then you look at all those things you go, is this actually making me live better? Or is this just making me a slave to all these routines for this possible tomorrows and my whip score and you just like forget to live in the process.

22:38Speaker 4:Yeah, Yeah, I couldn't agree more. And something that I also find myself keeping in mind is like, wellness is a big business right now. You know, like you see categories just being like absolutely blown up by like one product takes off and now you've got like seven competitors. You're seeing brands that did one thing really well now coming out with their line extensions and like the version two O and the pro and like the whatever. And so I think part of it is also just remembering that, like this is a business and people are trying to sell you things. And also the human body has not like changed very much at all, you know over the past couple hundred plus years, where to the point where like you need especially like a new thing every like year or two years or three years. Like I think for this is probably something that you'd agree with based on on your writing, is like if you just do the basics, like if you just focus on the foundations of health, like moving your body, eating like relatively well, and doing something to take care of your your mental health.

23:40Speaker 4:I mean, you can really get a lot of this done by just sort of living your life and not really like buying anything that requires like a discount.

23:49Speaker 3:Code off of Instagram.

23:50Speaker 2:Yeah, common sense stuff.

23:52Speaker 3:Yes.

23:53Speaker 2:I think what's interesting too is when you when you really look at the data on alcohol and health. Obviously, some people say any amount is toxic, never do it, but a lot of those studies are not actually that great. There's a guy, vin I Prisad, and he was an MD. You might have heard of him. He's the he was the former director of the Center for Biologics and Evaluation of Research, and he did this deep He's like kind of one of those guys that really peels back studies and goes, Okay, what's really going on here. He asked a lot of questions and when he looked at the research, he was like, yeah, drinking a lot isn't good for us.

24:33Speaker 2:We know that. At the same time, if you're having one or two drinks every now and then, there's really nothing we can say that's gonna tell you that is going to take time off your life or really affect your health in a way that's gonna change your lifespan. So we had this really great quote in a substec post which I will link to. He said, advising people who don't drink to start drinking daily is silly and unproven, and advising people who are drinking a little bit each day to stop is silly and unproven. The point being if you're having like one or two every now and then, there's no real, hard, reliable data that says that's going to help you in the long run.

25:16Speaker 3:Yeah. Yeah, absolutely.

25:18Speaker 4:And there's actually another piece that I wrote recently also for GQ, which kind of touches on something very similar, which is I don't have the name of the study in front of me now, but basically it was weighing the looking at the data and this was very good data. This is from where is it in Norway? I want to say, I'd have to check, but like a decade's long study that's been going on, and they were sort of looking at like what is a more effective leverte pool when it comes to longevity. Is it starting to work out or is it stopping drinking, And overwhelmingly it's it's fitness. You know, if you're going to change one thing, like if you're a relatively if you're a sedentary person, that's that's drinking. And again drinking like within sort of the bounds of common sense, you're going to do a lot more for your longevity and your health span by upping your activity, then you will by reducing or stopping alcohol consumption totally.

26:23Speaker 2:So when you fall off the wagon, was the change immediate?

26:28Speaker 4:I mean not really, because I think I like to have a beer if I go to or whatever, if I go to like a concert or something, or if we're at a restaurant and the table's not ready, like that's sit at the bar and have a cocktail. Like these are things that I'm not like consciously thinking about. They just sort of feel like right in the moment. And yeah, like a lot of the time they just lead the cool shit happening. Like you talk to a stranger, you know, you go out and you find a cool badminton all because you want to have a beer. Like there's just all these all these random the serendipity that I just I feel wasn't there when I was like very consciously abstaining.

27:10Speaker 2:Yeah, I feel like my big takeaway from this piece, given what you've written your experience, my own experience not drinking is the way that I figured out that I had a drinking problem was that literally every problem in my life was caused by my drinking. So, if that is you probably don't drink. Yes, if you're more like Dean, where you are doing one hundred healthy behaviors, you go out, you have a couple of drinks in the context of friends, you have great conversations, you meet new people, you find badminton courts embedded in like old railway stations of Zurich.

27:50Speaker 2:That seems like it's probably adding to your life. And so I think it takes a little bit of introspection to figure out where am I on that spectrum. But I think if you're more in the Dean spectrum, you maybe don't have to get super caught up in this idea that like, removing alcohol is going to vastly improve my health. I think it might actually do the It'll either be neutral or it'll do the opposite.

28:12Speaker 4:Yeah, And I think another takeaway for people to should be that, like, you don't have to like if you're not drinking not drinking, you don't have to just kind of start drinking in order to like get the benefits of a more fluid social life, you know, Like I find that it's something that helped me kind of explore life more fully and open more opportunities, more doors that I otherwise wouldn't have seen. But every personality is different. I'm also like quite an introverted person. I think if you are not drinking and you find that you are just like thriving anyway, it's not like, oh, well, let's see what this could unlocked for me, Like that guy said that it worked, Like, you don't need to do that. Like, I don't think any sort of KPI from like a fitness tracker is going to be what ultimately is what makes you make a certain decision here, because when my WROUP scores were at their best, I was probably at my like least happy. It's more just doing like a holistic inventory of your life, a very honest taking a very honest look at yourself and saying, like am I happy?

29:16Speaker 4:What are the sort of roadblocks that I feel are sort of standing in my way from being happy? And then just sort of like chisel away at those based on what's causing them.

29:27Speaker 2:Yeah, thanks a lot for coming on. Man, I'm glad you were at the pace. I thought it was really smart. I think it was a good read in the context of all the information about this today, and I think you approached it really fairly and with a good i'll call it sober head on.

29:43Speaker 4:Thanks, so I appreciate that and great to be on here. This is definitely a lot of fun.

29:49Speaker 1:If you want to hear the rest of the episode or check out the whole show, you can find two percent with Michael Easter anywhere you get your podcasts and on YouTube. Thanks for tuning in, and we'll be back with a new episode of kill Switch on Wednesday.