Ep48 -- Blame the Burrito

 So last week I had the pleasure of enjoying a burrito from one of the many street taco places that now pop up every evening across Los Angeles.  I understand that these establishments can cause problems for nearby brick-and-mortar restaurants that have to pay exorbitant LA rent, but nevertheless, I believe a thriving street food scene is essential to any world-class city. 

My favorite place makes an Al Pastora burrito with crispy grilled cheese that easily weighs in at two pounds or so.  Now, in my experience, there are very few foods that can put you in a food coma, quite like a massive burrito.  And after my latest experience eating one, I think I figured out why. 

It's not just the contents of the burrito. Meat, cheese, rice, beans, onions, cilantro, salsa wrapped up in a flour tortilla the size of a trash can lid.  But it's also the pacing.  Nothing brings on a food coma, quite like inhaling massive amounts of food way too quickly, and the street burrito mandates that you eat it quickly if you want it to maintain its structural integrity. 

When you take one big bite, it's like removing an essential log in a teetering Jenga tower. You have to get back in there quickly with another bite to prevent an avalanche of filling from cascading out. On top of that, if you do manage to create an approximately level exposed surface on the top of your burrito, if you have the courage to put it down with each passing second, you raise the risk of your burrito tower collapsing altogether. 

As you can tell, I've thought about this burrito for way too long than is probably healthy. But nevertheless, I felt like I'd stumbled upon something or more appropriately gluttoned upon something foundational to our human experience. I just needed to figure out what it was.  And believe it or not, I think I've actually come up with something. 

The key thing about a burrito-induced food coma is that it's not your fault. It's the burrito's fault.

The burrito demands nay requires that you eat it at such a pace that you very quickly regret ordering it in the first place.  I had a similar experience when I cut back on carbs a few years ago. I figured there was no way I'd be able to do it. Since I loved my starchy snacks and rice and bread, I'd never be able to conjure up the willpower to resist those treats. 

But after a couple days of detox, I found that my cravings for high-carb foods actually decreased so dramatically that I haven't really craved them much since. So it wasn't my lack of willpower that was the problem. It was the nature of the carbs themselves, spiking my blood sugar, then crashing it, leaving me starving, and desperately craving more and more carbs. 

It's like, did you ever notice how after you have a massive Italian dinner with tons of pasta and bread and tiramisu leaving you stuffed, promising never to eat again?  Then the following morning, you wake up starving? How is that possible? Well, it's possible because that's how carbs work. So the thing about carbs, just like with burritos, is that the problem isn't us, it's them. 

 So on this episode, I wanna talk a little bit about ways that we misdirect blame and how that can lead us to pursue the exact wrong remedy. Stay tuned. 

I am Craig Boreth, and this is The Great Ungaslighting, a podcast about how we all get conned into accepting a manmade culture that's out of sync with our human nature and how we can fight back and put the kind back into humankind.  

But first, a word about a non-sponsored.  

This episode of The Great Ungaslighting is not brought to you, and after this will never be brought to you by FUBU and Disney, and while I'm burning bridges, I'll throw in Fox and Warner Brothers Discovery as well.  For those of you who aren't sports fans, you may be surprised to know that sports coverage is basically the lifeblood of the pay-TV industry.  Last year, 97 out of the top 100 events on TV were sporting events.

And the three major legacy companies that own the rights to sporting events are Disney, Fox, and Warner Brothers Discovery.  And early last year, they decided to do a sports-specific merger among them and create one massive sports TV rights behemoth.  This joint venture would control 80% of pro baseball, basketball, football, and hockey rights, and 98% of the rights to playoff games in those sports.  With that much power, practically speaking, there would be no way for any small sports streaming company to survive.  And almost immediately one such small streamer, FUBU sued to block the merger.  And you can understand why FUBU would be pissed. Since they've constantly been smacked down by the big guys as they've grown to threaten their sports dominance.

For example, Disney charged FUBU more for content than it does for more general subject streamers, and told FUBU if they wanted sports content, then they'd have to pay for a bunch of other stuff they didn't want. 

Now, in August, a judge ruled decisively against the merger saying it would quote exercise near monopolistic control over the ability for a different live sports-only streaming service to exist and compete.  And, shortly thereafter, the Justice Department filed an amicus brief in support of FUBU's lawsuit.

So it's looking pretty likely that this merger ain't gonna happen because it's clearly illegal.  But as I recall, there was a little local event here in the good old US of A around mid-January that shook things up a bit. And with our new corporate government overlords settling into their new hegemony, we're getting the distinct impression that laws are more just suggestions than requirements.

And so with FUBU seeing the writing on the wall, you might think that they would lose faith that the clear legitimacy of their suit might result in a just outcome. So if they were to drop their suit, Disney. Well, forget it, Jake. It's Chinatown. That's just the way business works. But that's not what FUBU did.

What they did was offer themselves up for sale to Disney, which promptly bought FUBU for a few hundred million dollars, and lo and behold,   FUBU stock jumped 250%. 

 So, let me see if I'm reading reality correctly here. We had a blatantly illegal monopolistic merger, but if the merging companies buy up the plaintiff that sued over the merger, suddenly there's no longer an issue with the original illegal monopoly.  

 Now, of course, there's a slight chance that the current administration could still scuttle the merger,  which is certainly no more legal now than it was before they bought off the plaintiff in their case, or what's slightly more likely is that Disney CEO Bob Iger could just compliment dear leader's short game and watch the case disappear entirely. 

And we're back.  

Obviously, human beings are capable of unspeakable cruelty, and that is by no means mitigated by financial security, Ivy League education, or lifelong professed fealty to the Prince of Peace.

And you'll often hear that such atrocities are proof that humans in general are inherently cruel.  But I would argue, and there's plenty of evidence to support this, that the opposite is the case. Humanity's true nature is gregarious and altruistic. But of course, our qualities exist on a continuum, and there's a long tail out there in the douchebag end that has a massively disproportionate impact on the species as a whole. 

What happens is those in the douchebag contingent take advantage of our general good nature, our desire to belong, our desire to fulfill demands made of us, and through inventing an evil other that threatens all we have, they can convince people to commit atrocities against those others.  

There was a cartoon in the New Yorker by Paul Noth a couple weeks ago that in a timely relevant way, illustrates my point. It shows one caveman working on chiseling a wheel. And another caveman comes up and says, we'll have to stop research now that the Neanderthals are in charge.

 It's important to remember that one of the primary reasons we are here and Neanderthals aren't is because of our social nature. Neanderthals were bigger, stronger, and had larger brains related to their body size. So how come they didn't just destroy homo sapiens when they met around 40,000 years ago? It's quite likely because they couldn't work together, they couldn't get along. They thought their own tribe was better than all other tribes, who were just moochers. So why join up, work together and try to survive as a larger group? Sound familiar?  

So that's an example of blaming humanity as a whole when the fault really lies with just a few select assholes. 

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There's another phenomenon that's blamed for much of the decline in American society over the past several decades, and it's manifested by plummeting church attendance.  And one could easily suggest that decreased church attendance leads to greater mental illness, less civic engagement, drug use, divorce, and any number of other individual and societal maladies.

So for many people, especially politicians who might rely on religious voters for their government jobs, it's clear that all those problems are caused by the removal of religion from people's lives. So the solution is of course, more religion. And for many, many people that works out fine. I genuinely have no qualms whatsoever with anyone who finds important personal meaning in their religious practice. 

But there are also a lot of people for whom it's more about just getting together with other people. It doesn't really matter what you're doing. The power isn't just being with others.  And for that which relates back to the strength of our species that I mentioned before, there is tremendous empirical support showing that just being with other people improves mood, reduces stress, boosts your immune system, even makes you live longer.  

So could it be that it's the lack of religion that's causing all those problems? For some people, sure, definitely. But everyone benefits from just being together. 

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The last scenario I wanna talk about in which we misplace blame has to do with technology. Lemme just say upfront, and I was told this a long time ago and I still find it useful almost daily.  When something is going wrong as you interact with technology, you can't complete an online form, some app is getting hung up, you mistakenly order something or you just can't figure out what to do next, the odds are almost all the time that the fault lies not with you, but with the tech. And over the years, with increasing monopolization in the tech industry, it's become more and more true as companies just don't give a crap if you have a lousy experience. There's no competitor for you to switch to. So just deal with it.  And ironically, bad user experience can lead to more revenue for these companies. As software engineer Tim Boudreaux recently wrote, when pleading with DOGE to not mess with the Social Security Code,  he said quote, we are used to broken software.  The public has been trained to expect low quality as a fact of life, and the industry is a rife with agile methodologies designed to churn out crappy software because crappy guarantees a permanent ongoing revenue stream. It's an article of faith that everything is buggy. And if it isn't, we've got a process or two to sell you that will make it that way.  

Now I know what you're thinking. Sure, my tech interactions have just gotten more and more infuriating, but what can I do about it? Well, I have one suggestion that might be helpful, and that is find technologies that do only one thing and do it well. It is such a pleasure to use these sites or apps. They're not trying to upsell you. There's usually no ads and there's no tracking. It's just a simple technological solution and it's such a refreshing reprieve from the norm that I recommend that you find such things and hold onto them for dear life, 

I've got three that I wanna recommend. One is very specialized, one is more commonly useful and one is just funny as hell. 

The first one is specialized and it's for you woodworkers out there who build using plywood. It's called Cut List Optimizer, and it's at cutlistoptimizer.com. You put in the size of your plywood sheets and the size of the pieces you want to cut, and it calculates the best way to divide up that plywood sheet. You can specify which way you want the grain to go, and even the thickness of the saw blade you're using. It's a great program. Not despite, but because of the fact that it really only does one thing. 

The next one is a shopping list app called ShopShop, and it's intended as a way of making your food shopping lists, but you can use it for any number of lists you wanna keep track of. For example, if you're going on a trip and there's a whole list of things you need to do before you leave, just create a list for all that stuff and put things in there as you think about 'em.  That's it. That's all it does. It doesn't connect to your smart appliances. It doesn't link to shopping services. It's just simple lists and I love using it.  

The last one is totally for fun, and it's a website called the Brooklyn Bar Menu Generator at brooklynbarmenus.com,  and all it does is create fake Brooklyn bar menus, and they're hilarious.  First of all, it generates names for the bars such as the Winthrop or Buffalo and Hudson, and then it lists each bar's bespoke offerings such as "clam bruschetta with quickened monkfish, croquettes and stubborn watermelon jam", $18 or "lamb and free range salt", $15 or "market fennel with frightened vinegar", $21. And that's it. Just silly, hilarious bar menus.  

It is a reminder that this technology that we're immersed in can still be useful, practical, and entertaining without any draconian, immiserating trade-offs. And remember that every technology that promised the stars but infuriates you or makes you feel incompetent is the result of countless decisions intended to extract maximum value from you with minimum concern for something as irrelevant as your feelings.  

Well, that's it for this episode of The Great Ungaslighting. If you liked it, please share it with anyone you know who might also enjoy it. And until next time, be kind to yourself, cut each other some slack, and use your damn turn signal.