Guarded?

Guarded, yeah.

And, and I think this really clicked for me when I, I connected with an anthropol- anthropologist for the piece, uh, 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, this idea that, like, cost- costly signaling basically is this concept where you do something to sort of inflict, like, a, incur a cost, quote-unquote, like, u- upon yourself.

Um, do something r- 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 subli- 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 wanna, like, chat to you, get to know you.

Now that you're drinking, you're like, "Yeah, I can't, I can't look at that score."

... "I can't, I can't look at that score."

Dude, I mean Everyone who's ever worn a WHOOP and has had a beer in their life knows that, like, it, 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 know, you obviously also come across a lot of people who are doing... who are kind of taking things to the maximum, um, 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, the understanding that, like, we all do have a sort of limited time here, it's like, do I wanna be spending most of my time in the garage tuning the car and washing the car? Um, or do I actually wanna be out there, like, fucking driving it and, and, you know, enjoying it? And so I think I, I got to a point where, somewhere in those three months, when I just realized, like, you know, kind of cost-benefit here.

Was it, like, a collective everyone r- thought, "Oh, God, thanks- thank God someone said this 'cause I've been thinking it," or was it, like, you know, the Brian Johnson followers got their pitchforks from their labs and-