Alan Levinovitz

And to be fair, some of them are.

And they have that kind of charisma.

They have that sort of everyone will heal themselves if they follow me.

And that stuff's bad.

It's bad and it makes it difficult to see things clearly.

What a big question.

Sorry.

I guess, well, so one thing I would say about the brain retraining coaching world, whatever you want to call it, is that there are some kinds of interventions and people don't, I didn't get to get into this a lot in the Wired piece, but I think it's really important.

There's some kinds of interventions that are just harder to test in the way that our brain

institutions of scientific inquiry are set up than others.

They're just more difficult to test.

So for example, Biggest Loser, the television show, as a year-long weight loss intervention is terrific.

It works great.

Like everyone who goes on Biggest Loser loses a ton of weight.

But how do you do a randomized controlled trial of being on the Biggest Loser as a year-long weight loss intervention?

You can't.

What does the blinding look like?

I mean, it wouldn't even make any sense.

And so I think a part of what gets lost in these sorts of interventions, at the risk of bringing up something that I know you talk about, I wanna stay away from this, but addiction is similar to this.

So addiction is a physiological state.