00:02:53.620So one of the frustrating things about this, honestly, is that for our main protagonist, Brian Wansink, there's actually very little information available about his early life and sort of how he got into the field of food research.
00:03:06.520What we do know about Brian is that he starts as a marketing professor, which is that we're already in the foreshadowing section.
00:03:14.000I was going to say, this does not bode well.
00:03:16.300This is an excerpt from his book Mindless Eating, which comes out in 2007.
00:03:20.300I'm never sure what to say when someone asks how I first became interested in food,
00:04:07.440I mean, the only thing that I think that we can sort of pull out of these origin stories is really that he's fascinated by the idea that people, especially consumers, make choices without really knowing why they're doing it.
00:04:29.840He goes to the Wharton Graduate School of Business at the University of Pennsylvania.
00:04:33.540And eventually he sort of lands at the University of Cornell in 2005.
00:04:37.440Because there's kind of no biographical details in his books, I kind of had to piece together his career basically from his like Google Scholar citations.
00:04:46.580So I just like organized all of his research in chronological order and just started looking at the kinds of studies that he was publishing.
00:04:53.340Over the course of his career, he publishes over 480 academic studies.
00:05:07.440For the first 10, 15 years of his career, the research that he's producing is, like, very straightforward marketing research.
00:05:15.300So one thing that he's really obsessed with is this idea of unit size that, you know, if people buy a large bag of chips, they'll eat the whole bag.
00:05:23.580And if they buy a small bag of chips, they'll eat the whole bag.
00:05:25.880But he's doing all of this research to give advice to companies on, like, how big their unit sizes should be.
00:05:31.140Like, it's very clear that what he's doing is, like, he's helping companies sell more products.
00:05:35.740Like, that's the way that all of his work is framed throughout the 1990s.
00:05:39.820Yeah, this is the Halo Top approach, right?
00:08:04.540There actually is like a test restaurant.
00:08:08.000I don't know why they don't call it the test-a-rant at this university where like people like diners can come and they know that they're participating in studies.
00:08:17.060And it'll be like the menu will be like, you know, have French names one night and then English names the other night.
00:08:21.860And they'll test like does this affect your purchasing decisions?
00:08:24.320So like he's also doing these lab studies in this test-a-rant constantly.
00:08:28.300That's fascinating. And also, like, I feel as you're just talking about the experimental designs, I feel myself going like, oh, right? Like, it feels like an interesting, like, dinner party conversation sort of topic. So I'm like, there's a lot of curb appeal to these studies.
00:08:43.220I mean, this is like catnip for journalists.
00:08:46.080The other big study that comes out in 2005 is the, do you know this one, the popcorn study?
00:08:51.320I don't know the popcorn study, at least not by name.
00:08:53.680This is one where people are going to a movie and sort of at the door, he tells them like, you've been entered into a drawing something something.
00:09:48.440They ate because of all the cues around them.
00:09:50.740Not only the size of the popcorn bucket, but also the distracting movie, the sound of people eating popcorn around them, and the eating scripts we take to movie theaters with us.
00:09:59.160All of these were cues that signaled it was okay to keep on eating and eating.
00:10:02.980So, like, I understand that people are eating this sort of mindlessly and without really any connection to the quality of the food or how fresh it was or anything like that.
00:10:12.120But, like, how does he get from there to, it's all these other keys.
00:12:06.660It doesn't make me be a fish who takes a nap.
00:12:09.020I mean, the best example of that is one of his studies that gets, like, an amazing amount of play in the mainstream media is one that shows men eat 93% more pizza and 86% more salad in the presence of women.
00:12:28.560It's like, I think something else is going on.1.00
00:12:32.080There's also an infamous study where Brian goes through old editions of The Joy of Cooking.
00:12:37.920You know, the joy of cooking has been around since like 1936.
00:12:41.040He publishes a study where he says only, you know, there's only about 18 recipes that have like endured from 1936 through all the additions to I think the most recent at the time was the 2006 edition.
00:12:53.360And it turns out the calories in those recipes have increased significantly over time.
00:12:59.780dun dun dun. So one of his sort of explanations for the obesity epidemic is this idea that like
00:13:05.740portions, unit sizes, the food environment has completely changed over time. And this is like
00:13:10.940a perfect little encapsulation of that, that like a sort of a normal dinnertime recipe
00:13:15.360is just like 30% larger now than it was in 1936. That feels observably true, right? Like in my
00:13:22.120lifetime alone, right? Like the largest drink size that you can get has like doubled, maybe triple,
00:13:28.280another thing that he mentions in the study is that muffin tins if you look at old muffin tins
00:13:34.000the muffins were like half as big as they are now yeah there you go another infamous one
00:13:38.500is he measures the eye angle of cartoon characters on cereal boxes what and he finds that brands aimed
00:13:48.460at children the cartoon characters are looking downward at an angle of 9.67 degrees so that it
00:13:56.300looks to children in the grocery store as if they are looking at them this is another of his like
00:14:01.780very famous studies that if you google it you can still find like 50 references to it man when you
00:14:06.020started talking about cartoon eye angles i was like are we gonna get into real racist territory
00:14:11.260no anyway back to this dr seuss book from the 40s like oh no for once that isn't where that
00:14:17.460was going thank god first time on the show so by 2007 he's basically translating all of these
00:14:25.580findings into weight loss advice so his book mindless eating comes out in 2007 becomes a
00:14:31.580massive bestseller it's you know reviewed in the new york times and the new republic it's like this
00:14:35.180huge deal what his research implies is that like there are all of these sort of small forces on
00:14:42.260our behavior and if you can change those small forces you can actually lose weight sort of
00:14:47.060without really knowing it right so the you know one of the main pieces of advice that goes around
00:14:51.720from his book is like you can just switch to smaller plates in your house because people tend
00:14:55.780to eat less from smaller plates this explains why so many co-workers around that time were like
00:15:02.020get a smaller plate right this is absolutely what people want to hear you can become thin
00:15:06.980without having to really think about it exactly and without anything else in society changing
00:15:11.640either so we are going to watch a clip oh this is a presentation of his work from a michael
00:15:17.820Pollan documentary in the early 2000s. Also, at some point, we're going to do some talking
00:15:23.560about Michael Pollan, man. I know, dude. That's, I know. So grab a plate up there. The pasta's
00:15:30.640right on the stove. Serve yourself up. Brian Wansink is an expert on eating behavior. He's
00:15:36.780discovered we're often not aware of why we eat as much as we do. Sometimes it's because of
00:15:42.340something we don't give the slightest thought to, like the size of our plate. We'll bring people in,
00:15:47.500and we'll give them a large plate to serve themselves.
00:15:49.840But what they don't realize is that the pasta is cold.
00:20:50.220I know. This is the thing. I don't want to get into it because we need to do a whole
00:20:53.160episode on like the unbelievable trash fire that is this field but i just wanted you to read like
00:21:00.120one very brief excerpt like this was the kind of advice that was going around to workplaces at the
00:21:06.480time this is an excerpt from his book slim by design and he's talking about how he's doing a
00:21:11.680consultation with google to prevent what's called the google 15 fuck off that when people start
00:21:18.120working at google because there's like these canteens everywhere and the food is really good0.89
00:21:21.340and it's free. Everybody gains weight when they start working at Google. This is one of the ideas
00:21:26.000that he comes up with. I'm going to send this to you because I cannot get through this without
00:21:29.460tittering. Okay. To tackle the I gained weight before I knew it problem, Bob Evans, one of their
00:21:35.920software engineers, had an idea. Have you ever seen those iPhone or Android apps that let you
00:21:41.000upload a photo of yourself and it shows you what you would look like if you were 20 or 40 pounds
00:21:45.860skinnier or fatter? Oh, Mike, I hate this already. I know. It only gets worse.
00:21:50.480John figured out there might be a way to have a quote unquote food scanner set up that could scan someone's tray and a camera screen in front of them would take their photo and instantly display what they would look like in a year if they ate this much food every day for lunch.
00:22:07.940Way cool is the end of that quote.0.99
00:22:11.620It's one of those demented fucking things I've ever heard.0.99
00:22:14.280i hate every so they have no concept of people with eating disorders or body dysmorphia they0.99
00:22:21.540have no concept of like fat people and increasing bias they have no concept of like a lot of the0.83
00:22:28.820things that i care the most about imagine being a fat person at google and somebody gets their0.98
00:22:34.740tray out and they hold it under this fucking miserable like minority report scanner and it0.98
00:22:40.280shows them a body that looks like you like what are we fucking doing here brian it really feels0.97
00:22:47.100like they're a hop skip and a jump away from just adding like an oinking sound effect or something0.98
00:22:52.500you know i mean this is like uh this is like school bully shit oh yeah he also at one point0.96
00:22:59.020in the same chapter suggests that employees should have to sign health declarations fuck off where0.97
00:23:05.300they promise their employers that they're gonna like exercise two days a week and that like if0.99
00:23:10.560they if their bmi goes above 30 they have to be like mandatory attendance at weight watchers fuck0.98
00:23:17.200off i know truly madly deeply fuck off so again we're gonna save like most of our fire emojis0.98
00:23:25.700for our eventual workplace wellness episode but like that is a main thread of his work0.97
00:23:30.120The other main thread of his work is this Smarter Lunch Rooms program.
00:23:36.460I remember this because, again, like I have a mom who's an early childhood ed person who never stops yelling about this study, which is that kids were offered, I think it was like fruit and candy.
00:24:42.780Researchers recruited 208 students at seven elementary schools.
00:24:46.580As part of their regular lunch menu, these students were already allowed to take an apple, a cookie, or both in addition to their main dish.
00:24:53.380Before the study period, about 20% of the children chose an apple and 80% chose the
00:40:07.540These are all statistically significant results, by the way.
00:40:10.000Like, these are all technically publishable.
00:40:11.660I also think, like, part of the backdrop of findings like these and interpreting findings like these and people just sort of running with them is this desire to believe that scientifically we have arrived.
00:40:23.120That we sort of, like, know everything that is knowable.
00:40:25.380we have reached the pinnacle and we are there now and now we're looking out onto all of the world
00:40:30.320as it is right rather than going wait a minute sometimes people are not as meticulous as we want0.97
00:40:36.660them to be or sometimes we put wishful thinking into our science or sometimes there's shit we
00:40:40.800don't know and techniques that are developing now that will help us in the future instead what we
00:40:45.360get is a conversation about science that is like the science says this therefore it's true therefore
00:40:50.520you gotta get smaller plates or something where you're like well that's not the whole picture
00:40:55.020I also think that one of the fundamental misunderstandings here, and this comes up so much, is that when you hear that something is a significant result, that makes you think that it's big.
00:41:04.380Like if I say watching Legally Blonde had a significant effect on my life, you'd be like, okay, it's a big effect.
00:41:16.800This is from a Nature article about this.
00:41:19.700Critics bemoan the way that p-values can encourage muddled thinking.
00:41:22.780Last year, for example, a study of more than 19,000 people showed that those who meet their spouses online are less likely to divorce than those who meet offline.
00:41:31.760That might have sounded impressive, but the effects were actually tiny.
00:41:35.360Meeting online nudged the divorce rate from 7.7% down to 6%.
00:41:40.060So those are statistically significant results.
00:41:43.160But people who met online have a 1.5% lower divorce rate is not that interesting.
00:41:49.900And also, if you're using a site like, say, eHarmony, where they're like, it's science, we're matching you based on science, that that also, like, increases your buy-in to the method of meeting and makes you feel like it's somehow more legit.
00:42:03.640Again, there are so many variables here that could account for these differences.
00:42:08.360And when you just say people who met online have, you know, are less likely to get divorced, people are like, oh, I should be looking online, right?
00:42:15.540Rather than going, well, wait, what does that mean?
00:42:17.920Yeah, I mean, this also comes up a lot in sort of anything involving mortality, that you always hear these things like eating nuts reduces your risk of prostate cancer by 40%.
00:42:29.560And then you look at the actual numbers, and it's like, you know, you have a three and 100,000 chance, and that goes down to like a two and 100,000 chance.
00:42:37.120It's not clear to me that I need to change my dietary habits to make this extremely rare thing like slightly rarer.
00:42:43.440Totally. And I think in our brains, right, because most of us are sort of accepting this
00:42:48.000news pretty passively and again, pretty uncritically. We hear that as eat nuts three
00:42:53.340times a week and you definitely won't get prostate cancer.
00:42:57.060Part of this sort of breakdown happens in the research itself. Part of it happens in how the
00:43:02.280research is presented in the paper. Part of it happens in how the research is interpreted and
00:43:07.640reported in media. And part of it happens sort of at the point of consumption, which is the point
00:43:12.360which we hear it and sort of translate it into what we're going to do in our daily lives.
00:43:16.280There are breakdowns at every step along the way in this process.
00:43:20.060I also think, you know, the fundamental point about all of this research, too,
00:43:24.360especially these large, you know, surveys, is that they don't show causation, right?
00:43:29.680That they're very limited in what they can show.
00:43:31.280All they can show is associations, right?
00:43:33.680You know, there's ways that you can control for poverty, you can control for education.
00:43:37.200I'm a little skeptical of that sort of how much statistical controlling you really can do.
00:43:43.200But the fundamental fact is that all you can find is associations.
00:43:45.980And oftentimes those are measuring a third thing.
00:43:49.440There's probably something independent that is affecting how many bananas you eat and your score on the SAT verbal.
00:43:55.240Right. Bananas as a snack are also sort of like speaking to a really specific sort of like racial class and cultural background, right?
00:44:03.940That like, if you're in an immigrant family, your after school snacks might be a different
00:44:08.280thing that doesn't make you less likely to do well on your SAT verbals, right?
00:44:13.340Like, there are other sort of factors at play here.
00:44:22.580Because it's like a huge, weird, like, not intentionally, well, I don't even know, maybe
00:44:28.820intentionally, like it's a grift economy.
00:44:30.800I mean, this is what's so hard about this is because I think for people of good faith, if you're actually trying to find out sort of which nutritional habits are the best for promoting health, there's no perfect way to gather that information.
00:44:44.840There's no good way to answer that question.
00:44:46.700Most of the people in this field are trying to kind of triangulate, zigzag their way to real answers.
00:44:54.920But the problem is that these methodologies, the gaping holes in these methodologies, leave them vulnerable to grifters and also vulnerable to the incentives of science.
00:45:06.500So one of the things that is really important in Brian Wansink's story is this idea that you have to publish, right?
00:45:12.100If you want to get tenure, if you want to get noticed in your field, you have to publish as much as possible.0.96
00:45:17.940And for a lot of people, if you've gone to all of this work to gather this data, you've spent months watching what people are doing at a pizza buffet, it's like, well, fuck, I can't just get rid of this.0.97
00:45:30.520Yeah, I mean, I also feel like, because of the ways in which sort of capital S science, right, has been used as a political football in recent years, particularly around climate change, particularly around, I mean, COVID is a great example. Do you believe the science or do you not believe the science? So there has become this sort of reaction on the left to be like, we believe in science, which means that we sort of like accept a lot of this stuff uncritically, right?
00:45:57.280Right. That we sort of slip slide into this mode of just like whatever science says is the truth
00:46:02.560without really a recognition of, you know, what most researchers and most scientists will tell
00:46:08.100you, which is that science is like a series of very active participatory conversations.
00:52:35.400There's a bunch of stuff we thought we knew and we don't actually know.
00:52:38.480And it's gotten so far out into sort of the public, you know, imagination and into our
00:52:43.280sort of collective bloodstream that you kind of can't unring that bell, right?
00:52:47.240By the time people sort of just sort of start to intuitively believe and understand that men eat more pizza in front of women, you can't be like, well, actually, mathematically, those findings were both, you know what I mean?
00:52:59.460Like, that doesn't mean anything to anybody.
00:53:01.300And also, I would not be remotely surprised if it turned out that if a candy dish is near you, you end up eating more candy during the day.
00:53:07.360Like, I think that that's extremely plausible.
00:53:09.640I also think that, like, this is the whole point of science is to actually confirm things that seem plausible.
00:53:15.860like it seems super plausible that the sun rotates around the earth but then you look into it you're
00:53:21.700like whoops it seems like this very common sense plausible thing turns out not to be true this is
00:53:26.060the episode when mike comes out as a flat earther i know listen there is a glass dome there are flat
00:53:32.520edges why is there a horizon i'm just asking questions did you not know that i was a ptolemy
00:53:38.160stan i like on little loop-de-loops and then it's like from this mathematical stuff it's just like
00:53:44.500a non-stop avalanche of like ethical weird stuff like there's a huge amount of self-plagiarism
00:53:51.580like entire articles that he's basically repurposing for book chapters and vice versa
00:53:55.820like tons of that stuff there's my favorite one is apparently he wrote some weird article
00:54:01.240about world war ii veterans and sort of like how trauma affects their eating habits something
00:54:07.740something and in his sample this is like right there in black and white in his sample 20 percent
00:54:13.660of the participants are women the whole thing is based on like combat veterans and like trauma
00:54:19.040among combat veterans and it's like well women women didn't fight in world war ii we're doing
00:54:24.920a study on the tuskegee airmen and in this sample we're going to talk through the 50 of them that
00:54:29.680were white women and you're like what no and so we also get in this like wave of downfall stuff0.93
00:54:38.540we also get the complete collapse of all of this school lunches shit what happens with the school0.99
00:54:44.640oh my fucking god is it still is it still in play like what i mean the school lunch stuff the the0.98
00:54:49.820program is now defunct i mean i mean i think that like whatever there's probably schools that have0.99
00:54:53.760like bowls of fruit next to the cash register like i think that some of the principles are
00:54:57.040probably still in play sure but as a sort of usda program it's it's gone like their website you can
00:55:02.420only look at it on archive.org like the thing is toast there's a researcher named eric robinson who
00:55:07.740starts looking into this stuff. And the first thing that he finds, it's actually like pretty
00:55:13.020bad and pretty bad that nobody noticed this before. But they started implementing this
00:55:17.520program in 2014. The first randomized control trials of these principles didn't start until
00:55:24.0402014. So basically when they implemented this program, they had no data. One of the things
00:55:30.560that Eric Robinson also notes in his paper is that, you know, there's these 15 strategies that
00:55:34.940schools were supposed to be implementing. It appears to this day, only six of them have ever
00:55:39.680actually been studied. Yeah, that just seems wild. And also, I will say, like, there is already so
00:55:45.780much that we expect out of schools, right? Like, we're expecting teachers and school administrators
00:55:52.380and school staffers to carry the weight of so many of our social anxieties. Oh, my God. And
00:55:57.660this also becomes another one that they're now holding and carrying, right? But like, all of our
00:56:02.960weird shit around health and weight and whatever that kids generally don't have in the same way.0.95
00:56:10.180This is like part of how we ensure that kids pick that stuff up, right? And that we sort of0.98
00:56:15.100project it onto them. And also, I mean, this was the thing that I was biting my tongue to keep
00:56:20.200from saying earlier when you were talking about the Elmo stuff. So the Elmo study, choose an
00:56:25.420apple with an Elmo sticker or a cookie, right? Yeah. It turns out the study wasn't on eight to
00:56:31.40011 year olds it was on three to five year olds well that makes more sense right you sniffed it
00:56:38.200out millions of researchers did not sniff this out aubrey you knew what i mean truly like anyone
00:56:45.760who has spent any amount of time around a nine or ten year old can tell you that even if they still0.91
00:56:52.900like elmo they sort of know that they aren't expected to so like this is a fucking wild error0.57
00:56:59.180to make like i thought it was among eight to eleven year olds it was actually three to five
00:57:03.000year olds in daycares so this has no application to elementary schools well and also like again
00:57:08.840children ages three to five are in a completely different state of brain development exactly
00:57:15.780and impulse control and like it's not quite like you should be studying another species but it is
00:57:21.600like so far off the mark well yeah i mean the whole concept of choosing food is like very different0.90
00:57:28.380for a four-year-old versus a 10-year-old yes there's also another fucked up thing this actually
00:57:33.260shows up in a lot of lunchroom studies i've been reading studies all week that in this sort of this0.79
00:57:37.820study where they made the chocolate milk harder for the kids to grab what happened is they took
00:57:42.700more milk so it's like yay they're taking milk it's not flavored it's not sugared
00:57:47.100but then they're not actually drinking it no getting kids to take vegetables is a totally
00:57:53.500different thing from getting them to eat vegetables. Like it is very easy to get my
00:57:57.780nephew to put vegetables on his plate. Yes. That's fine. He will do that without objection.
00:58:02.820When you're like, hey, you got to have a couple more bites of vegetables. He'll be like,
00:58:06.280how big of a bite? Let's negotiate. There's also, this is one of the fucking pettiest
00:58:11.180things I've ever seen in an academic paper. You know, there are like randomized control0.97
00:58:15.360trials that show that, you know, smarter lunchrooms do actually improve, you know,
00:58:18.900the number of fruits and vegetables that kids are eating. And, you know, this is sort of
00:58:22.120evidence that brian wansink was using for years and he would talk about it in his ted talks and
00:58:25.840like we're doing this and it really improves things for kids and then when eric robinson goes
00:58:30.880back to the data the studies show that you know after all of these interventions in schools like
00:58:35.700the biggest sort of study that has been done on this shows that kids are eating 0.1 unit of fruit
00:58:41.920more than kids who aren't getting this intervention and so he has a whole page of his paper dedicated
00:58:49.160to photos of this so he goes figure one a small apple figure two 10 of an apple and it shows like
00:58:57.080this lonely little slice of an apple on a plate and he like clearly took the photos at his office0.98
00:59:02.100like they're in the shitty break room i love everything about this that's fucking brutal dude0.97
00:59:06.840you could have just said it there is a real special place in my heart for like the extreme0.97
00:59:12.620pettiness that is reserved for very high-minded fields love it so basically it appears that like
00:59:19.380all of these interventions increased the amount of fruit that kids ate by one-tenth of an apple
00:59:25.400we're not talking about like a revolution in children's consumption here we're talking about
00:59:30.000extremely modest effects yeah and that was never how he was describing them publicly it's so hard
00:59:35.440because this feels like a real like emperor's new clothes kind of an episode yeah i mean this is
00:59:41.580honestly like my biggest revelation from this is that you know there's the statistical stuff
00:59:46.140there's the p hacking stuff but the worst thing that he did was like out in public yeah like one
00:59:52.080of the things eric robinson mentions is that you know he would have these studies where you know
00:59:56.700we find kids are eating 0.1 unit of apple more and then in the conclusion of the article he'd be0.99
01:00:03.720like this is an effective intervention for childhood obesity god fucking damn it and you're0.97
01:00:08.040like, well, it's very evidently not. You have to line up so many dominoes before you can sort of0.99
01:00:13.240flick one and have them all fall the way that you think they should, right? And this guy essentially
01:00:17.720set up two dominoes and they didn't make it past sort of the finish line, right? And he was like,
01:00:21.980we did it. There's another example in here is that there's articles where in the abstract,
01:00:27.260he says that, you know, giving kids pre-sliced fruit increased fruit consumption by 71%.
01:00:32.560And then you read through the paper and it actually increased it by 4%.
01:00:36.680if you and i as people who are not uh we don't have math degrees like if this stuff jumps up
01:00:45.460out to you and i just at face value right like that that feels like oh it's not good it's not
01:00:51.740great it's not great so this is actually sort of like the next stage of the downfall there's sort
01:00:57.060of like this year-long period where like the pizzagate stuff is happening and there's statistical
01:01:02.040analyses and there's a lot of the sort of behind the scenes are like intra-academic debates about
01:01:06.980this brian wansink guy but it hasn't really bubbled up to the surface like sort of normies
01:01:13.100were not really noticing this and the next stage this is so weird the next stage of this downfall
01:01:20.400basically happens with a tweet thread by the joy of cooking twitter account
01:01:26.400oh god i really love the idea of a nutrition researcher getting owned by the joy of cooking
01:01:37.340fucking owned by my grandma's cookbook so do you remember the joy of cooking like study that he did
01:01:45.700sure they had of course seen his study they'd seen it like it's been cited more than 30 times0.97
01:01:50.360it shows up in media reports it's something that like everyone just sort of mentions in
01:01:53.640like cute little parentheses whenever joy of cooking comes up they're like lol the portion
01:01:57.640sizes are so much bigger there's this great new yorker article by friend of the show helen rosner
01:02:02.840who interviewed people at joy of cooking about like what it felt like to be the target of this
01:02:09.020study and sort of trying to debunk it for years and like the world wasn't ready finally after sort
01:02:15.200of things start to domino out of place for brian wansink they put out this thread saying that like
01:02:21.580First of all, the entire idea of his original study was that, you know, there were all these
01:02:26.400different recipes throughout time. He could only find 18 that appeared in every single Joy of
01:02:31.280Cooking to compare to each other. The Joy of Cooking is like, uh, we found 275 recipes that
01:02:38.180were in every single edition. And then they do this, like this whole thing about, it's kind of
01:02:44.480absurd to say that portion sizes have increased when most recipes in the book aren't meant to be
01:02:51.240eaten all at once like one of the recipes that he sort of says like has gotten bigger over the years
01:02:56.980is gumbo it's like a big ass pot of gumbo yeah i mean it feels a little bit like look my reference
01:03:03.840point for this whole section is just gonna be the new york times cooking section and the comments
01:03:10.740on those recipes have you ever looked at the comments in the new york times cooking section
01:03:14.260oh aren't they like i replaced the chicken with beef and the rice with styrofoam chips like it's
01:03:20.140I modified it. And it was not very good. One star. You're like, well, come on, dude. And that feels
01:03:27.180like the part of the challenge here, right? It's like, you can't and don't know. Like also,
01:03:32.840hey, Brian Wonsink, you love your plate sizes so much. How big are the plates that people are
01:03:37.100eating the gumbo off of? Yeah. Good Lord. That study was basically trash. Like this is sort of
01:03:42.540the overall frustration. There were dozens of articles written about this. But like joy of
01:03:46.920cooking portions are getting bigger. Like what? It's just not a story that means anything. And
01:03:51.460it never was. So the final chapter of this downfall, and I think probably the most important
01:03:57.320one, is a reporter named Stephanie Lee at BuzzFeed does a public records request. You know, a lot of
01:04:05.040the people that Brian Wansink has been corresponding with are employees of universities. And universities
01:04:10.420are public institutions and you can FOIA them. And so she gets this huge trove of emails from New
01:04:15.900mexico state university where one of his collaborators works and she basically finds
01:04:20.800that all of this was totally deliberate what he was basically running this lab as like a
01:04:25.900publication factory in a very explicit way there's all these emails about sort of the same way that
01:04:31.900it was with the pizza study where it's like they they've gathered all this data and then whatever
01:04:35.920grad student gathered it has moved on and then he'll assign like another graduate student to
01:04:41.680sort of mess with the data until they can get something publishable out of it and so he says
01:04:45.660in one of the emails, a lot of these papers are laying around on our desktops and they're like
01:04:50.000inventory that isn't working for us. We've got so much huge momentum going, this could make our
01:04:55.160productivity legendary. In one case, there's this data that's like how people shop in grocery
01:05:02.220stores where they don't speak the language. And it's just like, isn't all that interesting.
01:05:06.120And they didn't really find like nothing jumped out of the data. And he's like, oh, we'll keep
01:05:09.480looking at lower and lower tier journals until you can get it published. This is such a weird
01:05:15.100capitalism forward approach to like scientific findings it's real it's really odd that feels
01:05:21.220really odd to me and also media forward yeah because in a lot of these emails he's also
01:05:25.340you know people will come to him with ideas and be like oh that'll definitely go viral
01:05:28.520like this is a very explicit goal of his he's even at one point training his grad students
01:05:33.720how to pitch their findings to the media like they'll have little sessions where they'll
01:05:37.760practice their like elevator speeches to media sources which isn't in and of itself nefarious
01:05:43.320right like you practice elevator speeches for all kinds of stuff but if again if that is the focus
01:05:48.320you're not going to have findings that are as useful or as solid as you would want them to be
01:05:52.700and eventually the cornell sun the newspaper of the university interviews his former grad students
01:05:58.020and they say that like they felt really uncomfortable with the way that they were
01:06:01.260pressured to manipulate data to frame things for the media to try to get these things to go viral
01:06:07.060it seems like this was like a very well-known problem among people who worked with him yeah
01:06:11.600Yeah. And there's like this intense power dynamic there, right?
01:15:13.140And it's like, no, Brian, we should take the chocolate milk away.
01:15:16.740Like, I feel fine about there not being chocolate milk in schools, dude.
01:15:20.840Also, we live in a world of forced choices, right? It's happening all around us all the time. That is part of the central conceit of his work. It seems really weird to say we're going to stop short of forcing choices, even though all of his research is forcing choices.
01:15:34.580Exactly. The implication, the obvious implication of his work is that we should force choices,
01:15:40.300right? That these are designed environments. There's no such thing as a non-socially engineered
01:15:45.420food environment. Like we are surrounded by social engineering at all times. So we might as well
01:15:50.620engineer good environments, especially for kids. But it's like, as soon as it came to any actual
01:15:56.020mandatory thing of like forcing kids to not have those choices, he would like completely freak out
01:16:02.560and be like no no the corporations have to be our partners like it's very clear what his actual
01:16:06.360project was the entire time ultimately these are incredibly complex issues and to focus just on
01:16:14.660these sort of like individual choice slash life hack stuff feels like very short-sighted to me
01:16:21.280so uh in conclusion don't life hack write to your senator and uh make something from the 1936 joy of
01:16:30.340cooking tonight. Also, if there are any