Dean Statman

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, where you do something to sort of

inflict like a incur a cost quote-unquote like upon yourself um 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 health-wise um but it's one of the ways we sort of

subconsciously or subliminally let people know, hey, I'm just here to hang out.

You know what I mean?

I just want to chat to you, get to know you.

There's no ulterior motives here.

And I think that's one of the reasons why alcohol does sort of serve as this social lubricant.

And then in the absence of that, you really feel it when you're kind of paying attention to that.

Yeah, 100%.

And look, I still wear the golden handcuff over here.

I maybe don't check it as often as you're supposed to.

Dude, I mean, everyone who's ever worn a whoop and has had a beer in their life knows that the effect is incredible.

It'll drop your recovery score faster than anything.

I think part of this too was, again, being in this space, you obviously also come across a lot of people who are taking things to the maximum and spending most of their time doing things that are 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 a 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 um

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.