← Intelligence Squared
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- [00:00]
Narrator/Advertiser
This episode is sponsored by the Planet Visionaries Podcast Planet Visionaries is back with a new season hosted by Alex Honnold, who you might know from his incredible solo climb of the 3,000 foot El Capitan in Yosemite national park this season. You can hear him in conversation with people who are not just imagining a better future, but actually building it. Here at Intelligence Squared, we love conversations that explore real solutions and real progress. In this podcast, you'll hear from scientists, explorers, activists and storytellers from around the world who are reshaping the future in practical and inspiring ways. In an upcoming episode, Alex speaks to Chris Tompkins, a conservationist and former CEO of Patagonia who has dedicated her life to preserving millions of acres of land across South America. In 2017, this vision led to one of the largest private land donations ever when her foundation gifted an area that the size of Denmark to Chile to create a new national park. What makes this show so compelling is that it highlights the human side of climate work. It's not just policy or numbers, it's people taking meaningful action to create a better world. Listen in to be part of the movement to reimagine our planet's future. In partnership with the Rolex Perpetual Planet Initiative, this is Planet Visionaries. Listen or watch on Apple, watch Spotify, YouTube or wherever you're listening right now. This episode is sponsored by indeed. You just realized your business needed to hire someone yesterday. How can you find amazing candidates fast? Easy. Just use Indeed. When it comes to hiring, Indeed is all you need. Stop struggling to get your job post seen on other job sites. Indeed Sponsored Jobs helps you stand out and hire fast. With Sponsored Jobs, your post jumps to the top of the page for your relevant candidates so you can reach the people you want faster and it makes a huge difference. According to Indeed data, Sponsored Jobs posted directly on indeed have 45% more applications than non sponsored jobs. Sometimes the hardest part of hiring is just working out where to start. Indeed makes it clear, simple and quick to reach the right talent. Plus, with Indeed Sponsored Jobs, there are no monthly subscriptions, no long term contracts, and you only pay for results. How fast is Indeed in the minute I've been talking to you. 23 hires were made on Indeed according to Indeed Data worldwide. There's no need to wait any longer. Speed up your hiring right now with Indeed and listeners to this show will get a $75 sponsored job credit. To get your jobs more visibility@inn Indeed.com intelligencesquared just go to indeed.com intelligencesquared right now and support our show by saying you heard about Indeed on this podcast indeed.com intelligencesquared terms and conditions apply. Hiring Indeed is all you need.
- [03:12]
Producer Mia Sorrenti
Welcome to Intelligence Squared, where great minds meet. I'm producer Mia Sorrenti. Why do we find it so hard to resist the things we know are bad for us? From junk food to endless scrolling. On today's episode, author and scientist Nicholas Brenborg joins us to discuss his new book Super Stimulated, which explores how modern life is hijacking our evolutionary instincts. In conversation with Emma Weinel, he reveals how powerful companies exploit our biology through super stimuli, exaggerated versions of the things we evolved to crave and what we can do to reclaim control over our habits, our health and our happiness. Let's join our host, Emma Winel now with more.
- [04:00]
Host Dr. Emma Weinel
Welcome to Intelligence Squared. I'm Dr. Emma Weinel and today our guest is Niklas Brendborg, a Danish author and scientist. He holds an MA in biotechnology from the University of Copenhagen and while studying he wrote Jellyfish Age, Nature's Secrets to Longevity, which was published in 2021. It instantly entered the bestseller charts and it was also nominated for Science Book of the Year with the Royal Society in 2023 and the youngest ever, a shortlistee of that award, which is pretty awesome. Today we are going to be talking about his most recent book, so Super Stimulated, how our biology is being manipulated to create bad habits and what we can do about it. Welcome to Intelligence Squared, Nicholas, thank you very much. It's great to have you with us today. We are going to be talking of course about the new book Super Stimulated and Super Stimuli of course are a key component of your book. So could you give those listening a quick rundown of what these are and how you're adapting the idea of super stimuli in your book?
- [05:15]
Guest Nicholas Brendborg
Yes. So the whole idea of the book is basically that in the first one I talk about a lot of these age related diseases, dementia, cancer, cardiovascular diseases. Then where this second book kind of follows up is that even if we disregard age related diseases, we're in the middle of a big crisis with a lot of health issues in most parts of the world that are kind of like growing in prevalence. So we are in the middle of the obesity epidemic every year in not just rich countries, but now also middle income countries and even poor countries. We have increasing obesity rates. Most adults at this point are soon overweight. We have increasing problems with mental health issues such as anxiety, depression, especially among young people. We're the loneliest generations that have ever been recorded. So people have fewer friends, they Spend more time alone at home and fewer people have a partner. And then we have all kinds of addictions that are kind of on the rise as well. All the way from really horrible stuff like drug addictions and problems with gambling to them all mild but still annoying stuff. For instance, being really addicted to your phone, just scrolling away. And then my claim in this book is that there's actually an underlying phenomenon that tie all of these distinct health crisis together. So that in reality it's not a lot of different health crisis, it's just the same thing repeated in different areas. And the underlying, like red thread or underlying theme here is what's called a super stimuli or a supernormal stimuli, if you want the whole. The whole word. And it's basically a phenomenon that was coined by a Dutch scientist. He won the Nobel Prize for, for it back in the 70s. And, and the best way to understand it is an example. He did experiments where he would take these little birds that would lay these small, kind of bluish greenish eggs. Then he would make a fake version of this egg out of plaster, and then he would paint it bright blue with some paint that he bought. And when he took this really big and brightly colored fake egg and put it into the cage of the bird, the bird would like look down at its small, not very interesting egg. And then one time over at this big and bright egg. And it would try to actually jump onto the fake egg instead of trying to hatch it, its own egg. And it would get so. It would get so drawn to this big egg that it completely refuses to pay attention to its own egg. And Nicholas Sinbaer and then showed that he would just keep exaggerating, you know, making the egg bigger and bigger and bigger, brighter and brighter, and the bird would just be ever more interested in it. So the reason the bird reacts like this is that from nature, its brain is programmed to know that the larger and the more brightly colored the egg that it has is, the healthier the female has been. And that means that there's a high chance the egg will turn into a live young that can then get its own young and so on. So it just never had a reason to have kind of like a ceiling for this instinct. It basically learned or has a brain that programmed to know, okay, the bigger and the brighter the egg, the better. So then when we come with our modern technology, we can easily fool this bird and make it. Yeah. Pick the wrong choice. Yeah. So that my. That might sound far away from obesity and loneliness, for instance, but it's actually this this very phenomenon then transferred to the human realm, that is, that's underlying these various health problems.
- [08:59]
Host Dr. Emma Weinel
Wow. There's a lot to cover then. There's a lot to cover in this book, isn't there? One of the things you talk about a lot is obviously stimulation, super stimulation, but also desensitization. So when the reward system in the brain is slowly kind of dialing down its response, when you're repeating a rewarding activity over and over again. Tell us a bit about how that works in relation to super stimuli.
- [09:22]
Guest Nicholas Brendborg
Yeah, so a really easy way to understand how super stimuli are then used on humans would be to look at our food system. So the, the big change we've had in the last 100 years, especially in the last 50, is that we've gone from growing our own food or hunting for it, or if we go even further back to mainly getting food from companies. So if you're a food company and you produce food, you have to follow or you follow the same economical rules that every other company follows, right? You want to, you want to sell as much of your product as possible, so you earn as much money as possible. That means if you're a food company, you want people to be drawn to your product and you want to them also not to get full when they eat, because the more they eat, the more money you make. So you, you'll hire someone with a profile like me, basically, who knows about human biology, and you will task them like, optimize this cookie, optimize this candy so that it is as rewarding as possible and so that people don't get full because then we earn more money. Now there's a lot of different stuff you can do, but one that's very simple to understand is that humans have a preference for stuff that's sweet. So if something tastes sweet, we like it once we eat more of it. It probably stems all the way back from when we were fruit eating monkeys in the rainforest. So even before this hunter gatherer period. And when you eat fruit in the rainforest, if something is sweet, that means the food is ripe and also that it's not poisonous. So we have this inherent trait where we like sweetness. But then imagine the difference between a strawberry and then strawberry flavored candy. When you make the strawberry flavored candy, basically what you've been doing is saying, okay, how could I make, how could I find out what is rewarding about the strawberry and how can I just exaggerate it as much as possible to make a super stimuli? And you can do that with added sugar. Today Right. Because we can make something that's way, way sweeter, sweeter than the strawberry could ever be. Then people pick the strawberry flavored candy instead of the actual strawberries. And sugar has just this effect on us that because we like it so much, it tends to make us overeat. And then when you overeat, you tend to gain weight. But the interesting thing then when you asked about desensitization is that we can then see if you take for instance a studies where they take normal Americans, they usually eat quite a lot of added sugar in their diet. But then if you for instance, remove half of them and just say now you have to completely cut out added sugar, then you make them taste various products that is prepared by the scientist. Could be like a pudding, for instance, where you know the level of sugar added, then the same level of sugar gets judged to be sweeter and sweeter. The further from the further you go into the study. So the longer you've had of not eating sugar, then you resensitize, so you kind of regain your ability to taste sweetness and you need less and less sugar to actually get this rewarding feeling. But unfortunately, in the, in the environment we live in today, we are on the opposite kind of roller coaster where companies keep coming up with new products that press even harder on the reward system. Then we lose our sensitivity to this because that's just how the human brain works. Then we need even more and then you just keep going up and up.
- [12:48]
Host Dr. Emma Weinel
And I think some listeners might be thinking, gosh, that's a little bit scary. Perhaps, you know, the ultra processed food world that we live in can be sometimes a bit scary because these foods are often designed to, you know, tap into some of those neural mechanisms. But if we're going to take a more of a, perhaps a positive approach, do you think the same could be applied to healthier foods? Do you think they could be optimized in the same ways?
- [13:16]
Guest Nicholas Brendborg
Well, it's hard to say yes and no. There's been a lot of discussion about ultra processed foods, right? Some of it goes into the little more like who ish territory. It's not like, I mean, it's not like a food becomes unhealthy because it's touched a machine in some way. The reason these foods are unhealthy mainly is really this problem that they are optimized to make you eat more of them or at least not to get full. So then when you overeat, you gain weight and it's like the excess weight that's a problem in most cases, then you also have the issue, like the stuff we talked about with sugar here. You can do the exact same thing with saltiness. And if you eat too much salt, it has a tendency to then increase your blood pressure. And that is an independent risk factor for a lot of diseases. But, but a lot of it is really this, this over consumption more than it's anything that is, that is inherently wrong with the food. But that also makes it hard, you know, to, to make a healthy food where it's optimized in, in this way you can do it. I talk about in my book with some artificial sweeteners. I discuss for instance, the, the big question of our time when it comes to health. At least one I get all the time. Should you drink the, the soda that has sugar or the one that is, has artificial sweeteners? And there you can see when you use artificial sweeteners, most of them have either very, very few or no calories. So at least you remove this problem of gaining weight from the direct consumption of them. So, so that would be a way to still get like artificial sweeteners are way, way sweeter than sugar, right? So it would be a way to get the super stimuli without getting the bad effects from them. You'd still lose sensitivity to sweetness and there would be all this other stuff. But it is at least a way healthier option than the sugar sweetened version.
- [15:13]
Host Dr. Emma Weinel
And I'm interested at what happens at the kind of extreme ends of those super stimulations. So you're talking about sugar there. And the first part of the book focuses specifically on food. So when somebody is eating sugar and they're becoming kind of more and more super stimulated on that, is there a kind of maximum amount or can people just keep consuming more and more and more and more?
- [15:35]
Guest Nicholas Brendborg
Well, it's a good question. There'll be a lot of natural experiments where people have sort of not on purpose try this on themselves. But we do see that, you know, if you look into for instance the genetics of obesity, so we know that there's a genetic component not in the way that you're like if you have these genes, you are bound to become overweight. Because we can see, you know, two generations ago, practically everyone was slim. But we can see in the modern environment some genetic variants predispose you to gain weight or at least to weigh more. And then when you zoom into these genes, you see that they mainly have to do with the brain. So they have to do with the development of the brain, the reward system, impulse control, stuff like that. So while we all have an inherent liking for stuff that is like sweet stuff, that's salty stuff, that's fatty, there will be differences between us. And if you're just unlucky that either you react really strongly to these stimuli or maybe you just have a tendency to desensitize really quickly, then you will have a higher likelihood of getting into this pattern of overconsumption and then gaining weight because of, because of that. So there's a difference between us that, that's important.
- [16:58]
Host Dr. Emma Weinel
And I'm going to move us on to kind of part two of the book, which focuses on sex and drugs and how stimulation, super stimulation is relevant in those areas. So for listeners, can you give us some examples of people might be overstimulated when it comes to things like sex? This is a huge industry now. We're seeing things like OnlyFans cropping up. Certainly people are much more exposed perhaps to things than they used to be. So do you think there are kind of more healthier alternatives there that people might be able to use?
- [17:33]
Guest Nicholas Brendborg
I mean, there's a natural alternative that I think most people would prefer. But yeah, at this point in the book. So basically I talk a lot about all this food stuff, right? And it's quite universal. You can, if you want to do obesity studies on rodents, you can basically just feed rodents ultra processed food. It's called the cafeteria diet. And it's one of the easiest ways to make them gain weight. So it's like a universal drive, this drive to eat. And a lot of the ways that you can then hack it is, is quite universal, at least when you're talking about omnivores such as us and then rodents. But then of course, like our instincts to eat is not the only instincts we have. We also have instincts such as sex drive, which is, you know, again, something universal. But what the readers should take from this is basically just that it's not like this is isolated. You know, when we talk about ultra processed food, the whole like company structure of optimizing your profits by, by using the weaknesses of the human brain is not isolated to food. There's basically an industry for every single instinct we have. And then, you know, sex drive is a, an obvious one where I think maybe it's a little more abstract to understand, but I think a lot of people can think that the same way that, you know, strawberry flavored candy relates to strawberries, that's basically the way pornography relates to real sex. Like, you try to zoom in on this and then say, okay, what is it about it that we like, what is it about it that maybe we don't like? And can you get the, the non stimulating part away and can you then up concentrate the stuff that we actually, that we actually interested in? So you can kind of, you know, imagine for instance in pornography, first of all you have the whole, you have the whole part of using plastic surgery. The models are already picked beforehand to have certain attributes that like appeal instinctually to us. Then you can use editing, you can use all these things that you actually also use in, in normal movies to then make it attractive. And then you can see that it's, you know, a huge industry because these companies earn money mostly from showing ads. So the more time they can make you sit there and watch it, the more money they earn. Then in, in this kind of the same area we also, we don't only have the sex drive, we also have the, you know, partnering up drive, the drive to find, to find love. They're overlapping but not always the same. And we have a super stimuli mechanism in that area as well. In dating apps especially, where you also play on our inherent liking of having a lot of options and you can show a lot of people at the same time and you can create a solution of just having a lot of options for partners.
- [20:30]
Host Dr. Emma Weinel
And do you think society's increasing use of pornography, things like dating apps, all of those kind of more technologies that are playing on those inherent drives that we have are maybe even desensitizing us to those real relationships, not physical intimacy that we can experience in real life.
- [20:51]
Guest Nicholas Brendborg
I mean at least you can see if you look into, if you look into the amount of singles, it's been increasing in every country basically for quite a long time. So then you can also look into the fertility rate, like the number of kids that people actually have. It used to be a thing like where we would talk about a country like the UK or Denmark where I'm from, I would say, okay, it's like in the rich countries people don't get as many kids anymore. But now we see it in like middle income countries. And we also see falling fertility rates even in low income countries. So it's not only in rich countries, it will be countries like China, Chile or other Latin American countries. It will be even like India, Indonesia, a lot of the Asian countries too, where we see either like just about the replacement level or even below that. So, so we definitely see effects that would point to this direction. And then of course you can discuss what is the most important part in causing these issues. But I mean pornography is a huge industry. Dating apps have kind of taken over. We can see that that is the main way now that we have great studies from the US where you can see that's like by far the most common way to meet your partner today is on a dating app. So it used to be through friends. It used to be like going to a bar and then you can just see online is just like skyrocketing.
- [22:13]
Host Dr. Emma Weinel
And something we've seen in the UK recently is the introduction of age checks and verifications to go onto websites that have pornography on them. So some of those estimates even suggest that there's been a visitor decrease of around 77% because of those additional checks. So in that instance, do you think people could become desensitized because they may be not accessing pornography in the way that they used to?
- [22:41]
Guest Nicholas Brendborg
Yeah, I mean it's, it's an interesting kind of societal experiment to follow. I, I talk about later in the book how when you had Prohibition in the U.S. for instance, where you banned alcohol, then you could actually see that and there was a decrease in the amount of alcohol related injuries in hospitals and a lot of proximations. You basically see that people drink less. That doesn't mean they don't drink. And there's all these illegal industries that come around and then people say, okay, even if it has this effect, we don't want it. Because of course health is not the only aspect to think about here. There's also freedom, which I also personally think is very important. But what we basically see is that if you introduce friction or anything that just makes any kind of super stimuli product harder to access, then you decrease consumption. So you doesn't, you don't make it go away, but you make it, you make consumption lower. And yeah, then when you see, we basically see that, that we have this dynamic adjustment of both getting desensitized and then resensitized in various instances. And so you'd expect that. Yeah, especially if you're someone who is prone to desensitization. If you, then you lower your consumption, then yeah, we would expect that to also increase your preference for stuff that's less stimulating. I think the way to think about this is that your brain is basically a machine, biological machine that goes around always trying to predict, okay, how can I get a reward? And there's various forms of reward you can seek out and you know, depending on your physiological state, you will naturally gravitate towards some of them. For instance, if you're very hungry, food will be the reward that your brain seeks out the most. But this whole process also means that it constantly has to kind of compare different rewards so it know, knows there, there are different rewards out there for food. If you know there is the presence of junk food, there is a presence of candy or whatever, then that will, that will tend to win out over the other rewards. Like there's a carrot or there's an apple or something like that. But then if you suddenly remove all that other stuff, then this, you know, and you're still hungry. There's this, this other reward will win, win out. And you can imagine then the same thing happening with stuff like sex. Or it could be with social media, it could be with all this, all these other things. Things.
- [25:12]
Host Dr. Emma Weinel
And you mentioned there some of us might be more prone to desensitization. How might somebody know if they're more prone to desensitization in comparison to, you know, their friends or their family, for example?
- [25:24]
Guest Nicholas Brendborg
Yeah, I think that that's something that, that's something that pretty much everyone listening as soon as I said that, they will just instantly know which areas it is for them and which areas it's not. I mean, you will, you will notice if you, for instance, with food, there will be some that have a preference for sweetness or saltiness or maybe both. And you will also just know if you tend to be more prone to reach to get another handful of candy than people around you. And maybe you've historically been ascribing that to willpower, whatever, but it could be simply also just be that they don't like their impulse to do that is not as, as big as it is with you. And the same for all these other things. Like you'll pretty much know from the people around you. And you know, the good thing around here, like don't want to scare people is most people will have some areas where they know that they're just more prone to, to falling, falling in. And then they also have areas where maybe you just. I don't understand how people can think that it's fun to gamble at a casino or why they think alcohol is so rewarding. And like you don't really get the buzz. That will then be an area where you don't have this issue, but you'll definitely know the ones that you do.
- [26:43]
Host Dr. Emma Weinel
Okay, something to reflect on then. I think.
- [26:52]
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- [28:57]
Host Dr. Emma Weinel
Screens the final part of the book talks a lot about screens, and screen time, I think is something that most of us can probably relate to. We're on a screen recording this right now and whilst it's lovely to see you, we use screens a lot, don't we, in all of our everyday lives and they seem to be particularly powerful super stimuli.
- [29:20]
Guest Nicholas Brendborg
Why is that they're involved in many of these stimuli? Super stimuli because a lot of what's rewarding to us is basically some kind of experience. So then if you want to provide people with that experience, you know, a lot of it goes through the eyes, then you will have to, you know, put it on a screen somehow. Right now fortunately we, we like record stuff but eventually it will be generated probably by artificial intelligence or something. But yeah, screens are involved. You know, we already talked about dating apps and pornography. Screens are obviously involved there. Then I talk a lot about in my book Social Media where, you know, humans are hugely social animals. We don't just tolerate each other. Like a lot of animals will attack each other even if they, if they see one of their, another member of the species. But it's not just that we tolerate each other. We really need each other. Like we need recognition from other people. We build our identity about like the groups that we are involved in. So it feels nice if you know, you're at work, someone comes by and say wow, it was really interesting what you said there at the meeting. Or maybe you meet someone and say wow, you look good today or something like that. And you know, people recognizing us and giving us a compliment like that feels good. Then in social media we just found a way to make a super stream live that for instance, you can think the first time this worked was when Facebook introduced the like button. So that when people make a post then maybe you get 20 or 50 or 100 people just at the same time recognizing you, acknowledging you, giving you, giving you praise. It's like I think people understand how that's like kind of the same. When we concentrate sugar and give a lot of it to at the same time then it's just like a lot of social natural acknowledgment that goes your way. And then later on a lot of these video based formats, it's like TikTok you use, you show people how many, how many people have looked at your video so that you can also use that as a reward and you can feel like oh, you want to get more and more because then again of course we get desensitized and keep, keep wanting, keep wanting extra. Then you can also make kind of experience super stimuli. That's what you do when you make like a movie, a TV series, a computer. A little more abstract phenomenon, but it's, it's practically the same where you try to just identify what's, what's stimulating and just up concentrate that so that for instance, one of the examples I use in the book is we obviously like to hang out with our friends and family. A lot of TV series is basically just that a friend group or a family that has some fun experiences together. But of course you cut out all the boring and trivial stuff like there's never awkward silence or nights where nothing happens or where it rains and stuff like that. Except you just, you just have all good experience with a lot of people that are really, really funny and attractive and all the, all that jazz. And then, then people end up spending a lot of time following along in, in this fake family or friend group instead of, you know, their own One because you just can't compete with, with the super stimuli vision.
- [32:35]
Host Dr. Emma Weinel
And that's really interesting. Social media in particular, and often social media can be really biased towards the highlights, the celebrations, you know, only posting the really complimentary great things. Do you think it would make a fundamental difference if we were collectively just more honest on social media and reflected the variety, the ups and downs of our lives?
- [33:03]
Guest Nicholas Brendborg
It definitely would. And you know, there's, I think it's called bereal, the social media that kind of tries to do that. But you know, it's also kind of inherent in us to want to present the best parts of ourselves. I mean again now we're talking about rewards. We kind of even teach each other that because, you know, it feels good to be acknowledged by someone and then we realize that that happens when we do something that other people find, you know, fascinating, good, impressive or so on. So yeah, it would definitely help. But you also have to think that I haven't really talked about like the underlying algorithm so much. But you know, when you're on social media, of course there's a giant experiment running all the time. So when you make food super stimuli, you make experiments before you actually launch the product, like on mice and humans for instance. But once it's out there, it's just out there. When you make social media, the experiment is ongoing forever. So you like, you never open your phone without it recording how like your screen time on the app and then trying all sorts of things like of course automated to make you, to make you stick around. So even if everyone just posted like totally normal mundane stuff, the algorithm, by looking at what gets the most attention, will just pick, you know, all the stuff that is impressive, people that are really, really attractive or funny or successful and will push that anyway. So you wouldn't see it because of course the way the, the algorithm optimizes is, is that they earn money from showing you ads. So the more screen time you have, the more ads you see and then the more money they make. So that's also why I talk about, in the book we have this, we have this phenomenon where people that dominate the algorithm are not. Your everyday person is like the top 0.0001% in attractiveness and talent and success and then them only posting their best.
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Host Dr. Emma Weinel
Their best moments, the stimulation. And that constant stimulation I think is a really interesting point because I think we live in a world that's so constant, so always on, so stimulating. So do you think we should be consciously taking it upon ourselves to switch off, to tolerate almost Boredom to not be stimulated.
- [35:32]
Guest Nicholas Brendborg
Yeah, it's probably a good idea for a lot of people. And I think there's also experiments. They call it a dopamine fast. And as I talk about in the book, that's not really how dopamine works, but the concept is legit enough. Like do resensitize by having a period of a period away. Like one of the phenomenon that I've been noticing lately paradoxically on social media. But people like young people today posting like basically saying I don't understand how people used to be able to like watch movies because they're like sitting so long and just watching one thing. It's just like they can't fathom that because when you get used like desensitized by the TikTok style feed, your attention span just decreases. And now even people have gone even further so that some TikTok videos are basically two videos at once because even one is not enough. So you know, it just keeps on going. But yeah, if you hear about what people used to spend their life on, you would think like everything is just in a slower tempo. And there were a lot, they needed a lot less for it to be, to be interest. Interesting. So I also talk about how if you look back and like a lot of the things that people try to like kind of force themselves to do now, like learning an instrument, painting, writing could be another thing. Reading that used to be what people did when they didn't work. Like that used to be the relaxing. And now I get to have my treat and do this think that's fun. But then because as I talked about, there's this, this way the brain works of always comparing the reward rewards that are available. Then once you introduce stuff that is more and more kind of rewarding, then you know, that other stuff suddenly becomes something that requires willpower. And apparently now for some people, we made the point where stuff like watching a movie, that's something that requires willpower to do. And of course just because I wrote this book is not doesn't mean that we reached the end of this. There's probably still or there are a lot of people out there working like their whole careers trying to optimize these things still. So then I don't know what the next thing will be. Probably something generated by artificial intelligence, but there's surely more to more ways to desensitize us.
- [38:09]
Host Dr. Emma Weinel
And you mentioned artificial intelligence there, you've picked up on it already. But we can't not talk about artificial intelligence in this context, can we? It seems we can't not talk about artificial intelligence in many contexts, but how do you think our increasing dependence or use of artificial intelligence is going to exacerbate or potentially complicate the relationship here?
- [38:33]
Guest Nicholas Brendborg
Well, I think it's going to go a little like on the Internet when it was first introduced, all the talk was about the fact that you'll have all the knowledge in the world at the tip of your fingers and all that, how that is going to revolutionize everything. And it has, and that has been great for a lot of people. But what we saw like the majority of Internet traffic is not that part. It's you know, some kind of entertainment in some way. So that it's social media, it's Netflix especially that dominates. And the same thing with like the first sales pitch for artificial intelligence is all the stuff that you can use it for, like work wise and you can learn a lot of stuff and it makes it even more like all knowledge, even more accessible. At least if you disregard that. You know, sometimes, sometimes there's hallucinations and that stuff. But we already see now like OpenAI introduced what's called Sora 2 where it's like artificial intelligence that generate these small video clips for like a TikTok style format. And it's, it's pretty obvious, I would say that that's the next part, so the next way it's going to go. They also introduce that you can have I think sex chest or something like that with, with the AI, there's already been stories of people kind of falling in love and having like an AI girlfriend or boyfriend where you could make first of all a kind of like companion that is optimized to be more rewarding than a real human could ever be in these things. Like it's always positive and you know, it wants to listen to you all the time. It never requires anything from you. And then in the video generation format, you see now when you have the TikTok a app, there's all this optimization that I talk about. But at least like the videos have to be delivered by actual humans. So it gets like videos and then, then has to pick between them. In the algorithm. Once AI generated videos become good enough, it could even adjust inside the video so it could like find out, okay, when, when we show this video is like a point where people scroll to the next one, then we will tweak that point in a billion different ways, test it on all these users and then we can basically make each individual video also more, more attractive. So there's actually something like this going on already. So I cite a New York Times article in the book about the company Cocomelon that makes content for kids. And one of the ways they make it, I think it's actually a British company, one of the ways they describe it here is doing experiments where you will take, take small kids, put this video in front of them and then behind there's a screen that shows distractions. It could be like people walking in a coffee shop or whatever. And then play this animation you have made. And then every time, like register every time the child looks at the distraction or looks away. That's obviously like a weak point in this story. Then you can make, you know, changes, make a new one and then you can optimize so that there's as few of these look aways as possible. And that's basically what will be possible just in an automated fashion once AI generated videos are good enough. That's probably going to be a goodness.
- [41:53]
Host Dr. Emma Weinel
That sounds a bit scary.
- [41:55]
Guest Nicholas Brendborg
It is scary.
- [41:56]
Host Dr. Emma Weinel
It is a bit scary. But what I want to do is to end on a bit of optimism. And I think it's fair to say you end the book in quite an optimistic way. Maybe a bit of cautious optimism, but I think that's a nice way to kind of draw our conversation to a close. Is there any part of this space that you think there is a part of cautious optimism that we could take forward or that's hopeful?
- [42:23]
Guest Nicholas Brendborg
Yes, there's definitely several areas. So for instance, we talked about the obesity epidemic. There's some preliminary data now actually suggesting that maybe the numbers are decreasing slightly in the US mainly due to these weight loss drugs that have come around. So, you know, I'm, I'm Danish. As every single, pretty much Danish scientist, I have had funding at some point from Novo Nordisk that make the Vincent Oic. So not to sound like I'm, I'm paid to advertise anything like that, but these, these drugs is actually something that makes me kind of optimistic because what you've seen is that basically what they've done is saying now we have this environment where we have food that is more appetite stimulating than ever. Then we increase the like fullness to unnatural levels too. And then the two, two things align again and we can actually see it helps people eat less. But not only that, it seems to actually work in some area where there's beginning to be evidence that people that have alcohol use disorder, they drink less, people report that they feel less like urge to do impulse shopping, for instance. And it's not like I'm Saying the present version of these drugs will fix all of that. It just shows that it's at least possible to, to kind of affect these parts of the brain that has to like affect the reward system basically and that you can have a, that you can have then have that help people. So now every single pharmacological company in the world has their own sort of version of these GLP1 based drugs targeted for different things. So fortunately, most likely we will end up with way, way better versions down the line. Maybe some that are even engineered to affect different areas. Of course we would prefer that we wouldn't have to take drugs just to, you know, function in our society anymore. And there's also been quite a lot of interest in how can we decrease our screen time. It's not impossible. I advise something like for instance, you put your phone into black and white. Humans are very attracted to colors and that's again from being a devilled version of a fruit eating monkey in the rainforest. A ripe fruit is also colorful. So we have great color vision I think maybe, I don't know, could you call it black or white or you call it grayscale maybe. But you can put your phone on that. There's all these apps. I use one that's called Freedom that helps you decrease your screen screen time, even talks about. You can have two phones like a dumb phone and then an entertainment phone. You can leave the entertainment phone at home with all the social media and then once you go out into the world you only have access to like the tools you need. So there's, there's quite a lot of stuff. And it's also important to, to remember like it is possible to resensitize yourself so that you don't really need this strong of a stimuli. But my main conclusion in the book probably is that we're going to see some kind of social bifurcation. Like people will go in different directions. We already see now that all these technological advances, people that use them as tools will have a whole lot of advantages. You can now can do way more than we used to be able to do. But also there'll be a part of population that just gets dragged into this super stimuli wheel. You can even think now there will be a lot of people in like probably lower socio economic circumstances where their life could be something like you know, eating a lot of ultra processed foods, sky high screen time on social media, maybe watching Netflix or of other kinds of those entertainments, playing computer games and then you know, watching pornography at night maybe and then your whole Life is basically just trapped in this, you know, super stimuli machine. So I do think that there's a reason for optimism, but it's also likely that that's, you know, or it is already a case that some people get hit really, really hard by this stuff and it's probably also going to get worse for some.
- [46:42]
Host Dr. Emma Weinel
Yes. And although that is sad, I think one of the key takeaways for me was actually understanding the super stimuli can help us to kind of counteract them, if you like.
- [46:51]
Guest Nicholas Brendborg
Yeah, it's if we draw a parallel to one industry where we've not won, but we have at least gotten the upper hand. You know, the tobacco industry. Nicotine is what in the book I would refer to as like a chemical super stimuli. But at least there we've done a lot of stuff. We also have success by putting in rules and regulations, taxing them a lot and just, you know, just fighting. But one of the biggest wins was basically just going out to people and just presenting the evidence, just saying, like, nicotine is addictive. Here's all the bad health effects of smoking and see how badly you're being manipulated for profit by these companies. That will be enough so that at least some people, maybe the people that have the most, you know, social economic capacity will be able to, to fight this habit. Maybe it will take a few times, maybe they will need to have like tips and tricks that they can use. But just the, the fact that you know what is happening, you can probably after, after listening to this, see periods of yourself being desensitized or maybe resensitized, then just being aware of this fact makes it so much easier to control. And you know, the more people that are aware of this fact and wants to change it, that also increase what you would call kind of like the market for helping these people. So then maybe you could actually succeed as a company that makes food that is not hyper optimized for making people overeat or social media that are not hyper optimized for grabbing as much hits in the scene as possible.
- [48:27]
Host Dr. Emma Weinel
Nicholas, we've covered so much. I just want to thank you again for joining us today. That was Nicholas Brandeborg, author of Super Stimulated. How Our Biology Is Being Manipulated to Create Bad Habits and what We Can Do about it, which is available now online or at a bookshop near you. I've been Dr. Emma Winel. You've been listening to Intelligence Squared. Thank you for joining us.
- [48:54]
Producer Mia Sorrenti
Thanks for listening to Intelligence Squared. This episode was produced by Margarita Volpatto and it was edited by Mark Roberts.