new from kaleidoscope: two percent with michael easter
kill switch
Kaleidoscope
4.7 • 635 Ratings
🗓️ 27 April 2026
⏱️ 30 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
This week, we’re sharing a clip from another podcast we’re excited about. Two Percent with Michael Easter is a deep dive into the science of living better, balancing rigorous evidence with a healthy dose of skepticism to cut through the noise of the modern wellness industry.
In this episode, Michael takes a nuanced look at vices and whether some of them might actually enhance your life when you use them the right way. We don't have to live like monks to live a good life.
We’re sharing the first segment of the episode featuring Dean Stattmann, a GQ reporter who spent three months sober and wrote a now-viral piece titled "Why My 2026 Resolution Is to Start Drinking Again." His Whoop scores got better, but his friendships, his marriage, and his mood got worse. Dean explains what alcohol actually does for human connection, what anthropologists call "costly signaling," and why moderate drinking might not be the villain the internet has made it out to be.
Check out the rest of the episode and the show, Two Percent with Michael Easter, wherever you get your podcasts and on YouTube.
Hit us up: killswitch@kaleidoscope.nyc, or @killswitchpod and @dexdigi on IG or Bluesky.
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | This is an I-Heart podcast. |
| 0:02.5 | Guaranteed human. |
| 0:14.0 | Yo, what's up? It's Dexter. |
| 0:15.7 | I wanted to share a new show on the kaleidoscope network. |
| 0:18.6 | It's called 2%. |
| 0:19.7 | And it's hosted by journalist Michael Easter. |
| 0:22.5 | The show explores how we can live better by examining pop medicine hype with healthy skepticism |
| 0:27.6 | and putting real science first. The clip we're sharing today is from an episode about alcohol |
| 0:32.9 | and how the recent trend of not drinking at all might not necessarily lead to a healthier life. |
| 0:39.3 | Here's Michael. |
| 0:40.7 | The way that I figured out that I had a drinking problem was that literally every problem in my life was caused by my drinking. |
| 0:47.2 | So if that is you, probably don't drink. |
| 0:50.3 | Yes. |
| 0:51.0 | If you're more like Dean, where you are doing 100 healthy behaviors, you go out, you have a couple drinks in the context of friends, you have great conversations, you meet new people, you maybe don't have to get super caught up in this idea that like removing alcohol is going to vastly improve my health. |
| 1:12.6 | There have been a lot of conflicting reports about drinking and health over the past few years. |
| 1:18.5 | So for most of time, scientific bodies said, you know, if you have one or two drinks a day, |
| 1:23.0 | that could actually help your heart health. |
| 1:25.1 | But in the last handful of years, that has totally been flipped. |
| 1:28.3 | And now a lot of people are saying no alcohol at all, that is going to vastly improve your health. |
| 1:35.0 | Now, I do think there is a bit of nuance in this topic. For example, take me, I do not drink at |
| 1:41.8 | all. I've been sober for 11 years, and the reason for that is because |
| 1:45.3 | my favorite drink, it was always the next one. And if you drink like that, you can rock up some |
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