Dhru Purohit Show - The Scarcity Brain Loop and How Our Brains Are Being Hijacked By the Environment with Michael Easter

Episode Date: November 2, 2023

This episode is brought to you by Rupa Health, Cozy Earth, and Beekeepers.  Our modern lifestyles and technology have led us to crave and consume with addictive tendencies and a hope of immediate gratification. Whether it's food, social media, news, gambling, or even alcohol, we know that people are struggling with moderation, balance and feeling fulfilled.   Today on The Dhru Purohit Podcast, Dhru sits down with professor and journalist Michael Easter to discuss how our ancient brains lead us to the “scarcity brain.” Michael shares what he has learned through his research and travels about stopping cravings, learning and processing information in our daily lives, and reframing our thoughts on addiction. Michael Easter is an author, journalist, and professor known for his work on a wide range of topics, including fitness, nutrition, mental health, and environmental conservation. He is the author of a book titled The Comfort Crisis, where he explores the concept of embracing discomfort as a method to improve physical and mental resilience. His newest book is called Scarcity Brain, where he focuses on our ancient mindset and how it can lead us to have a scarcity mindset, crave more, and have addictive behaviors.  In this episode, Dhru and Michael dive into (audio version / Apple Subscriber version): -Living in a world that is designed to take advantage of our brains (2:30 / 2:30) -Why is focusing on bad habits a key to unlocking longevity (4:00 / 4:00) -Michael’s time with the Tsimane tribe in Bolivia and what he learned about scarcity mindset (5:44 / 5:44)  -What is the scarcity loop (13:02 / 10:36) -How a routine and eating the same thing each day can lead people to make better food choices (20:18 / 17:54) -The history of ultra-processed foods and how the industry uses them to cause addiction (23:47 / 21:14) -Where does the scarcity loop live in the brain, and what it causes us to feel (26:40 / 24:19) -Michael’s thoughts on addiction, what he has learned, and how it applies to various forms of addictions (32:00 / 28:14) -Certainty and what role it plays in your overall journey and goals (42:44 / 38:49) -Michael’s time with Benedictine monks and what he learned (48:44 / 44:46)  -How to prevent behaviors that operate within the scarcity loop (51:33 / 47:36) -Information overload and how to put in the effort to truly understand the information you are being (54:07 / 50:10) -How drinking alcohol at a later age can prevent addiction and how it is used to cope (1:04:00 / 1:00:06)  Also mentioned in this episode: -2% Newsletter Access more than 3,000 specialty lab tests with Rupa Health. You can check out a free, live demo with a Q&A or create an account at RupaHealth.com today. Right now, get 40% off your Cozy Earth sheets. Just head over to cozyearth.com and use code DHRUP. Go to beekeepersnaturals.com/DHRU and enter code “DHRU” to get Beekeeper’s Naturals' exclusive offer of 20% off sitewide. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Moderation has never made sense for humans for pretty much all of time, except until today. So when you look at how humans evolved, we evolved in these environments where everything we needed to survive was scarce. It was hard to find. So everything from food to stuff, to information, to even the amount of status we could get. And if you're the type of person who always craved that, tended to overdo, say, food when you had the opportunity, that would give you a survival advantage. So we evolved to not be great in moderation. If you're curious about how to rewire your brain from scarcity and addiction to one that's driven by contentment and joy, today's episode is for you. Welcome to the Drew Proet podcast.

Each week we explore the inner workings of the brain and the body with one of the brightest minds in wellness, medicine, and mindset. This week's guest is Michael Easter, and he's here to talk to us about the scarcity brain and the scarcity mindset. this leftover part of our brain that we have from our ancestors that largely was used for good, but today in our modern world is being hijacked by our overstimulation from technology and information and, of course, our ultra-processed diet, which is leading to an abundance of overeating and chronic disease. Now, a little bit more about Michael. Michael Easter is an American author, journalist, and professor known for his work on a wide range of topics, including fitness, nutrition, mental health, and environmental conservation.

Michael Easter's career, as a writer and a journalist, has been marked by his passion for exploring the intersection of human well-being and the natural world. He's contributed to numerous prestigious publications, including Men's Health, Esquire, Outside, and National Geographic, amongst others. One of Michael's notable works includes his book, The Comfort Crisis, Embracing Discomfort to Reclaim You're Wild, which was published in 2021. In this book, he explores the concept of embracing discomfort as a means to improve physical and mental

resilience. His latest book, which is out now and also the topic of today's conversation, Scarcity Brain, reveals the biological and evolutionary foundations behind our brain's fixations and how we can improve our life by understanding how to use our brain better. Stay tuned for a fantastic episode with Michael Easter. Michael, welcome to the podcast. We'd love to jump right in.

You say that most people don't realize this, but we're living in a world that's designed to take advantage of our brain. Can you expand on this a little bit more and tell us what you mean by it? So the book, The Scarcity Brain, it looks at why humans can't get enough. You know, we everyone knows that everything's fine in moderation, but why are we so bad at moderating? And there's a lot of evolutionary reasons for that. but what I think is new in the grand scheme of time and space is that we have a lot of technology now that sort of knows what is going to get us to behave a certain way.

So algorithms that push things in front of us that were more likely to buy, food engineered that we are more likely to eat. We have social media tools that really prey on our need to be liked and have some. status and all these different things that, you know, we're sort of built to crave. Technology is sort of dialed in. What's going to get us to act, more or less? I'd love to zoom in on that from an angle of health. You know, a big takeaway that I got from the book was if we care about longevity, which

of course is our health span and our lifespan, it's so important for us to focus on addressing and overcoming our bad habits. that might be counterintuitive to people because they often think about, well, what am I missing out on? What is the new thing that I need to add? So why is focusing on our bad habits one of the keys to unlocking our longevity? Yeah. So I say in the book that everyone sort of wants to give gas to good new habits. But if you still have your worst habits, you still have your foot on the break.

Like they're still holding you back. So I think when you look at the data on what most, affects people, it tends to be our worst habits, right? Those hold us back and affect our life more than adding some good new habit is going to. So, you know, a good example would be if you're consistently overspending, for example, that's going to add a ton of stress into your life that it doesn't matter how many freaking ice baths you take or vegetables you eat or whatever it is you're trying to do to relieve stress. If you haven't conquered that, you're still working at a deficit. It same could be with, you know, some issue with your diet where you're eating, you're just eating too much or whatever it might be.

It could be, I mean, just name any real big bad habit. That is what ultimately holds people back, I think. And so working from, okay, well, how do I resolve my worst habits is going to do more for a person in the long run than simply adding a bunch of good stuff? You know, whatever that bad habit might be. Could be drinking too much. Could be buying too much. could be eating too much, could be spending way too much time in media, and that's totally making you depressed and anxious. I mean, on and on and on. Like, we have all these different,

we live in a world that has a ton of bad habits we can get into. This stuff tends to be sort of fun and rewarding in the short term, but it often causes us long-term benefits or long-term problems. I'm going to jump around a little bit, but I'd love to start off with the story. In writing this book, Scarcity Brain, you went down to Bolivia and spent time with this indigenous tribe. And this indigenous tribe can teach us, as you've written about, not only incredible things about longevity and the implications of heart disease, but more importantly, they can help us understand and unpack how the scarcity mindset that we're all dealing with, including

them, can be kept at bay so we can maximize our true health potential. So tell us about that story of spending time with this tribe. So background on me is that I'm a health and I'm health and science journalist. I have been my entire career. And what's always been interesting to me is heart disease. Now, heart disease is fascinating to me because it is the number one killer of Americans. Like full stop. It kills more people around the globe than all our other diseases, right?

but when you look at what people actually worry about, it's not heart disease. People worry about cancer. They worry about, you know, someone breaking into their house and shooting them in the night and so like all these different things. And heart disease is way low on the list of what we worry about. Yet it's the thing most likely to kill you. So a handful of years ago, I come across a study that discovered this tribe in Bolivia called the Chimani tribe.

They don't seem to get heart disease. and I'm like, well, that seems like an important finding. So I decide to travel down there and they live in the Bolivian Amazon. So I fly until La Paz, which is the capital, and then, you know, drive 12 hours down to this river, which is the jumping off point. And then we take this canoe like six hours into the jungle. And eventually we meet with them. And the reason they don't get heart disease, it seems to mostly track back to what they eat. and what they eat is interesting because at some point in a day, it is going to go against

every fad diet we've been sort of sold over the last, you know, 20, 30 years. It's not low fat, it's not low carb, it's not, you know, keto, it's not paleo, it's not vegan, it's not on and on and on, right? But the one commonality that all of their food seems to have is that it has just one ingredient. So, for example, they're eating red meat that they're eating red meat that they're hunt, they're eating fish, they're eating white rice that they grow, they're eating a lot of fruits, they're eating potatoes, they're eating all these foods that just have a single ingredient. And why this seems to work, I think, and a lot of the research also shows, is that when you're eating foods that have just one ingredient, you tend to eat less food overall.

So there's this great study from Kevin Hall at the NIH, and he basically locked people in a laboratory. and gave them two different diets that were all matched for, you know, for carbs, fats, proteins, all that stuff. And one of the diets was ultra-processed food and the other was minimally processed food. And what happened when people ate minimally processed food is that they ate 500 fewer calories a day and they spontaneously lost weight. And that is probably simply because ultra-processed food, that is to say, food, you can eat it much faster and it's much less filling. Now, when you look at what the average

American eats, it's like 70% ultra-processed foods. Like, we don't even realize how much, how much of our food is super processed. Not to mention, when we start adopting fad diets, what happens is we go, oh, okay, I'm adopting this, let's say, low-carb diet. Great. So in theory, in a perfect world, that steers you into sort of lean meats and nuts and like leafy greens. But what happens is that then, you know, Slim Fast comes along and goes, please enjoy this low-carb candy bar. It's like, that's not going to do like you're still going to end up overeating that and gaining weight.

And so I think that, you know, food that has fewer ingredients, especially if it's just a single ingredient food, tends to have a lot fewer triggers that lead us to eat more of it faster, Like you simply, you have, it takes longer to chew. It's more filling per calorie. You're just not going to sit down and like smash a bunch of plain boiled potatoes or broccoli or plain chicken breast. Like that just never happens. But the person can sit down with a bag of Doritos on the couch and easily eat like 1,500 calories and be like, oh, what just happened?

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and specifically how our brains are being hijacked by the environment. we're getting stuck in this scarcity loop. First, I'll unpack the scarcity loop. So this is a, this is this behavior loop that I sort of discovered in Las Vegas in a casino laboratory. And it's what makes slot machines so addictive and attractive. It's got three parts. It's got opportunity, unpredictable rewards, and quick repeatability.

So opportunity, you have an opportunity to get something of value that enhances your life. Okay. in the case of a slot machine, it's money. Two, unpredictable rewards. You know you'll get that thing of value at some point, but you don't know when and you don't know how valuable it's going to be. So with a slot machine, you play a game, you could lose your dollar, you could win $2,

or you could win a life-changing amount of money. There's this crazy range of possibilities, right? And then three, quick repeatability, you can immediately repeat the behavior. So with most everyday habits, we don't repeat them, right? If I got an itch and I scratch the it, I'm not going to scratch the it, scratch the it, scratch the edge. Behaviors that fall into the scarcity loop, you can immediately repeat.

So with slot machine players, they play about 16 games per minute, which is more than we blink. Now, the reason that there's labs out in the world studying this scarcity loop and figuring out how do we optimize this thing is because you can put this in a lot of other technologies, systems, and institutions as well to get people to repeat. behavior over and over and over and over, capturing their time, capturing their attention, leaving them to make decisions maybe they otherwise may not. So it's in social media, it's in things like dating apps, it's what makes sports gambling work, it's being put in personal finance apps, it's being put in the gig economy. But it's also in our food system. So the way it shows up in our food system, and I have this great quote from a guy who's a junk food company executive, and he basically said, if you want to make a junk food company,

food successful. It needs to have three Vs. So it's got to have value. It's got to have variety. It's got to be a lot of different options. The flavors have to have a lot of variety packed in. It's like sugar, salt, fat, sweet, all these things. And then it's got to have velocity. That is to say, you have to be able to eat it quickly. You have to be able to eat it, even if you're actually, you know, I might be full, but you know what? I'm going to have a few more bites. Now, that is just another way of talking about the scarcity loop. Right. So this. This thing gets put into junk food, especially rising in the 1970s. And this is when you start to see obesity begin to take off in the United States.

And so to bring it back to the Chimane tribe and your question, the foods, they don't have this scarcity loop, right? They're not only that. So they're not going to eat as much of them. They're not going to eat it as fast. Not only that is they actually have to work for their food. Right. So if these people want a bowl of rice, it's like, okay, we got to go out to where we grow the rice and we got to pick it. And then we have to peel it, which that's a physical act.

They get the rice and they put it in this big like mortar thing. And then they smash it with this like 10 pound pestle for a while. And that peels the rice. And then we have to cook it, which, oh, by the way, to get the water, we got to walk down to the river and we got to like carry the water. And then we got to build the fire. We got to boil it. and we put it on there. And then eventually, after all of that, we've got our bowl of rice, right?

Whereas meantime, we're like, I got this bag of pre-cooked rice and I just ripped the top off and I put it in the microwave for 30 seconds and I can eat the rice. And so there's just so many different things happening that I think you tend to see when you add them all up, they get a lot fewer diseases than we do. So heart disease is just one. Now, I focused on heart disease because. I think that it is the biggest killer of Americans, but they also seem to not get Alzheimer's. They don't get diabetes.

They don't get certain cancers. They don't get all these things that kill us today. And, you know, some people have asked me, well, is it just because they're a lot more physically active than us? And my answer to that is, I wondered the same thing. But there is a tribe that is just downriver from that. about four hours, who was a lot closer to the village. So they end up buying and eating a lot more of these ultra-processed foods. They bread and they fry their food.

They end up getting more junk foods from the village. And you're starting to see heart disease climb in those populations, even though they move at about the same rate. You know, for people who are listening, they're looking at the world that we live in today. And they're wondering, why is it that I feel like I struggle with moderation? Why do I struggle with moderation? And there's this tribe over here.

They don't have the access to technology. They don't have access to the knowledge. They don't have access to the podcast over there. You know, why do so many people today feel that there is almost a moral failing that they have when it comes to willpower, especially exercised in the area of health? Moderation is quite difficult for them. Well, I mean, moderation has never made sense for humans for pretty much all of time, except until today. So when you look at how humans evolved, we evolved in these environments where everything we needed to survive was scarce. It was hard to find.

So everything from food to stuff, to information, to even the amount of status we could get, right? Scarce and hard to find. And if you're the type of person who always craved that, tended to overdo, say, food when you had to, the opportunity, that would give you a survival advantage. So we evolved to not be great in moderation. Now, the difference was that we lived in our environment put constraints on us, right? We could only eat so much. We could only buy so much. We could only get so much information, right? So, for example, the average person today takes in more information in a single day than a person 700 years ago would have taken in in their entire life. But the difference is that we now live in a world where,

we have an abundance of all these things that we are sort of built to crave. And our genes haven't caught up. We still have this wiring that says, yeah, when you get the opportunity to, say, overeat, yeah, have a little more food. Does that make sense for all of time? But it doesn't today. And so I like to say that, you know, if you find yourself falling into some of these behaviors, you're definitely not a bad person.

And it's not your fault. But it is your problem to solve. We have to do some things that are kind of strange in the grand scheme of time and space, like watching what we eat, like not hoarding as much stuff, like all these different behaviors that haven't made sense until today now that our environments have changed so drastically, so fast. Tell us why eating largely the same things every day and having a routine could be one of the things that could help us navigate this complicated world that we live in today.

One of the things that leads people to eat more food is simply having more different options of food. So this is called the buffet effect, basically. You put people at a buffet and they're going to eat more because I want to try a bunch of different stuff. Right. So food becomes kind of this little unpredictable reward game, like the scarcity loop, right? Part two, unpredictable rewards. if you if you tend to eat all the same things every day um that takes the unpredictable unpredictability away from it and all animals are attracted by unpredictability like it hones it in our focus it drives our behavior and so by just finding a handful of foods that you um you know are healthy for you that um you seem to do well on just repeating that behavior over and over um tends to be good for people we tend

to eat less over time. And that is a, that's probably a good thing to do in today's age where we're surrounded by, you know, racist puffs cereal and ice cream and all that kind of stuff. For people who say, well, I mean, that sounds very straightforward, but that feels boring, you know, what are your, what are your thoughts on that? And it is boring necessarily a bad thing. Well, yeah, I mean, like, we've basically trained ourselves to think that every meal needs to be this like explosion of sugar, salt, fat flavor every single time. And that is very, very new. Like, people for all of time used to eat the same thing every single day. And it would be like, bread. You know, what are we having today? Bread. What do we have them tomorrow? Bread. What about

three days from now? More bread. You'd have meat like once or twice a year. You were lucky to get some vegetables. I mean, so I think we're very spoiled. And, uh, We have to realize that, you know, part of eating healthy is being able to eat healthy over the long run is realizing that not every meal has to be huge. Not every meal has to be super delicious. But I would also argue that by, you know, having a little bit more boring diet, when you do have the occasional treat where the meal is, you know, big and delicious, you go out for some special dinner, that makes it even more rewarding because you haven't been, you know, you've been eating. things that are not as great for a while. And then when you get that special meal, it actually does feel special.

So when I went and stayed with the chimane, I'm not going to lie. Food was terrible. Food was very boring. There's not much salt on it. The chicken was definitely not like our chicken. I mean, this is like a chicken that people would have eaten before we started all this crazy genetic engineering on our animals.

Yeah. So I do think that there is a case to be made for eating a little bit more boring diet most of the time. But at the same time, I'm not saying that every meal has to be that way. But I do think that over time, it'll help. Can you talk a little bit about sort of the history? You mentioned in your book, but the history of sort of the processed food industry and how they have come to understand. Do you mention the scientist that you spend time with? You broke down the three Vs, but just a little bit more of the history around how do we end up in this mess where we have so many hyper-palatable foods that are around us right now and companies who are using it to their advantage, not necessarily always nefariously, but not necessarily with our best health interest in mind.

So you start to see ultra-processed food take off, especially around the 70s, but when it started to sort of ramp up was after World War II. So what ended up happening is we get into World War II, and this means we're going to have a bunch of soldiers all around the world who are needing food that is not going to basically spoil. You're eating MREs and things like that. And so what happens is that companies like craft, like Coca-Cola, like all these giant companies that have become giant, came in and helped the war effort and created all these ultra-processed foods that are not going to spoil. And after the war, it's like, well, we have these great production facilities and production lines, but like no more soldiers to feed. So what are we going to do? It's like, oh, well, we should just start selling our stuff to the average American. So this is when you start to see the processed food industry really take off.

By the 70s, they've kind of created snacking as a whole category. And I will say that, you know, I think it's, we have to be careful in saying like they did this. Because the reality is they're just reacting to what we're purchasing, right? It's not like they were going, how do we give people junk food? They basically said, how do we give people food that they'll buy? and the food that we buy is food that is ultra-processed because our brains are tuned to sugar, salt, fat, it's what we like to eat. Like that is what makes it food enjoyable.

At the same time, we've gotten so much of it and they've continued to dial up just how delicious it could be through insane levels of testing, like unbelievable amounts of research on what people will enjoy and react to that over time we found ourselves in a little bit of a pickle with things like obesity and all the related diseases that obesity increase the risk of. When you talk about the scarcity mindset, you say that it's this leftover part of our brain from our ancestors. It was important for their survival. And now today, because of our environment, largely, it's being hijacked, not necessarily by other people, although there are big food and casinos and big tech that are looking at how to take advantage of it. But it's the environment that

we've created to give us that over abundance and overstimulation. Where in the body and where in the brain does this scarcity loop actually live? Like could we call it the lizard brain? Is it in the migdala? Like where exactly is this? Well, I don't get super deep into the neuroscience in the book. But I do know, for example, you know, look at gambling. What makes gambling exciting is not when you know you've won. It's when the dice are falling across the table. It's when the reels are spinning. So it's really anticipation.

And anticipation and desire and wanting tend to be driven by dopamine, mostly. So I think that there is a, when you look at how this system works, dopamine peaks with unpredictability, right? If we don't know we're going to get something and it could be yes, could be no, like 50, 50 shot, that's when our anticipation is the most. So I think that when you think of things, behaviors that fall into the scarcity loop, there's always that unpredictability. There's always that unpredictable element, right?

It's like if I post on, say, Twitter and I think I've said something super clever, and then I'm going to close the app and then it's like when I open, in the app, it's like, oh, did I get a bunch of likes? Did I get retweets? Did I get followers? Right. That's when it gets exciting, when you're like waiting for that news. Same with dating apps, right? You're swiping, swiping, swiping. You get a match and you're going, oh, amazing. I got this match. But who is it? Is it the great looking person? Is it the okay looking person that I swiped on? Same with, I mean, even stock trading apps that when you start to see stock trading apps like Robin Hood really take off is when they increase the quick repeat of.

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Visit beekeepers naturals.com slash Drew and use the code Drew, D-H-R-U at checkout for 20% off any of their products. That's beekeepers, B-E-E-K-E-E-P-E-E-P-E-R-S-N-A-R-S-N-A-L-S dot com slash D-H-R-U with the code Drew, D-H-R-U at checkout for 20% off any of their products. One of the mind-blowing things that I learned from your book was that when it came to slot machines and you live in Las Vegas and you went to that research lab, the casino that's not available to the public, It's for testing and how to make slot machines more addictive. So the first mind-blowing thing that I learned about is that you said that we spend more money on slots than we do books and movies.

And the second mind-blowing thing that relates to what you just shared is that people who play slots actually get a little bit upset when they win money. Why is that? Yeah. And I'll also add to that. It's not just movies and books. It's music as well. Wow. So movies, books, music combined.

And then the second point, that applies to problem gamblers. So the average person, when they win, it's exciting. But when people have lapsed into like serious problem gambling, they're doing it just to totally escape and to kind of get into the zone of like just playing and playing and playing because it allows them to sort of forget about their problems for a while. And what happens when people win a significant amount of money on a slot machine, the machine shuts down because you need to pay taxes on that.

So the machine shuts down, a thing comes up on the screen, and a casino attendant comes and they pay you out by hand and they give you a tax form. You have to fill out for that. And that ruins the experience for that because they're not necessarily there to like, they're just there to escape. And now someone has interrupted this moment they had where they were just kind of zoning out. They're there to escape, which also do you feel plays into that anticipation aspect, that their high sort of dopamine spikes are spent in that, that they're getting from that

anticipation. And now the anticipation is sort of temporarily paused. Is that a fair connection? Yeah, I think that's probably a reasonable connection to make. Let's talk a little bit about addiction. You were in the Middle East and you were studying how there became this epidemic, I guess, is a fair word to say. of addiction with a particular drug.

Can you chat a little bit about that? I was interested in addiction because it's really the extreme end of this topic that I'm talking about, which is why can't humans get enough, right? It's the extreme end of scarcity brain. It's this behavior that people do over and over and over and just can't stop, even though problems are piling up for them in the long run. Now, when you look at addiction in the U.S., we've typically thought about it in two ways. We've thought about it as a moral failing.

so the person is a bad person, or we've thought about it as the person is a sick person. So it's a brain disease. And I definitely don't think that people who are addicted are bad people at all. I don't think it's a moral failing. But I don't think that the brain disease model quite captures it perfectly. And to sort of understand this, I traveled to Iraq. And, you know, Iraq didn't really have addiction for a very long time. And part of the reason was political with, you know, leaders like Saddam ruling with an iron fist around drugs. And then the U.S. invaded and destabilized the country. And you have an entire population who has lived through a war. So that has left a lot of psychological trauma. And in Iraq, there's not a lot of outlets to deal with that. It's not like there's a lot of

psychiatrists. There's not a lot of people working in mental health. There's also not a lot of jobs, so there's a lot of trauma and a lot of problems in the country and not a lot of ways to deal with them. And then in 2017, Syria fell and effectively turned into a narco state and they make this drug called Caphtagon, which is, it's analogous to methamphetamine. And it is their biggest export, it's these little pills and they're circulating like billions and billions of pills around the Middle East. And so you have three things that lead addiction to spike dramatically interact. You have that population who has a lot of problems. You have not a lot of ways they can deal with their problems. And then you have the rise of a substance that very easily solves problems,

right? If you have a lot of problems, like you have trauma, you can take a drug and that will allow you to escape for a certain amount of time, right? It gets you out of your problems. And I think that this point is what the sort of addiction establishment in a way that we think about addiction has totally missed the mark, right? We've always thought of drugs as bad. Well, the reality is that people use drugs and alcohol for a good reason, right? It enhances their life in some way. It allows them to escape from their problems. If you have trauma and you can take a drug that allows you to just feel okay for a while, you're effectively self-medicating. And so I think that in order to begin to get over addiction, you need to figure out, okay,

well, why am I taking this drug in the first place? What am I trying to escape from? And only once you've done that sort of underlying work, do I think that you'll see success rates in terms of recovery really increase. And when people do do that work, you do see that people absolutely recover because it's another thing that I don't think we've communicated well in this country. So the National Institute on Drug Abuse, for example, says that addiction is a chronic and relapsing disease, meaning once you got it, you got it, buddy.

And by the way, if you try and get off it, you're probably going to relapse. It's like that is not a good message, nor is it one that is backed by a human experience. There is plenty and plenty of data that suggests that people can and do recover from addiction all the time. They just need to make some hard changes that are probably going to be uncomfortable in the short term. They're going to have to learn why they were using in the first place. But there is a path out. Dr. Gabor Mata, who's been on this podcast before, has this great quote. He says, don't ask why the addiction.

Ask why the pain. And that goes back to your core message that's here. If you extrapolate that, you know, some individuals are dealing with drug addiction, alcohol addiction. You have your own journey that you've been very open with. We'll get to that in a second. But then there's these other more socially acceptable sort of addictions that are there, working too much, food addiction, social media addiction, you know, porn addiction, which is being talked about more. but obviously a lot of people are dealing with that as well. So in those same classifications that may not seem, quote unquote, as extreme as a drug addiction, would you say that the same principle applies

that those things are also being used to cover up some sort of pain or uncomfortable feeling? Yeah, 100%. I mean, so addiction to me is really choosing a short-term reward at the expense of long-term growth. And so anytime you're using a behavior that allows you to escape in the short term, but it's causing you long-term problems, I think it qualifies. So a lot of people will get really obsessive about work because it makes them feel like they're doing the right thing in their life. And that brings them comfort. But then it's at the expense of family time and that's leading to problems. It could be exercise. Like there was a there's a great story, well, not a great story, a sad story in the Wall Street Journal years ago about the rise in, it was mostly men.

who were getting really into Ironman triathlons and training like, you know, three, four hours a day. But these are also people who work eight hours a day and have families. So they, you know, they go to work and then they get home and they're like, see you later, family. I got to go ride my bike for three hours. It's like that becomes problematic, right? It can really happen with, I think, anything. But I do think that you tend to see that behaviors that fall into that scarcity loop that I I mentioned, they tend to have higher rates of addiction compared to behaviors that don't fall into the

loop. Would you mind talking a little about your own journey? You know, you've been pretty open about it and how that relates to your own overcoming of addiction. Yeah. So I've been sober for nine years and my drug of choice was alcohol. And for me, what I found as I've sort of unpacked, why I was drinking in the first place is that, you know, at the time, especially at the height of my alcohol abuse, is that I was working in a job that was not super fulfilling. It was a little bit boring. And I am a type of person who needs, I like extremes, right? I like sort of being out in the world. I like meeting people. I like doing sort of having new intense experiences. And alcohol could give me that because when I would drink, it was always like, who knows what's going to

happen tonight, right? I'm not having two or three drinks. I'm having like all the drinks. And when you drink that way, the night opens up. Anything could happen. Right. And that sort of fulfill, that need that or that propensity I have for extreme experiences. But repeating that over time, of course, leads to issues, right? You can't. have a bunch of drinks and expect that your life is just going to go swimmingly all the time. And I think that what's important is that really worked to give me stimulation of my life. Like it worked for a long time. But if you keep doing that over time, eventually you start to pile up problems and pile up problems. But the issue is, is that you've learned as an addicted person

that this behavior works and it solves this underlying problem I have. Even though I know it's causing these other problems. And so you're thinking, well, I could still do that behavior right now, and it would solve my problems in the short term, right? So doing the behavior did solve my problems in the short term, but eventually led to these longer term issues. And so for me, having, getting sober was, was challenging because you're having to basically relearn how you find stimulation in the world, how you find comfort, how you live your life around other people. But on the other side of that was a lot of growth. And I mean, my life got better across the board, like every single way.

And I've learned that I can get that sort of whatever the whatever I was chasing with alcohol. I can get that through other experiences that are much better for me in the long term. For example, intense exercise outdoors, trips into the back country hunting, trips to other countries, that I, you know, I'm not, I haven't been to before. Like there's all these other things I can do to get that in my life that aren't going to, you know, lead me to wake up and go, hey, dude, where's my car? You know, so, yeah. Well, thank you for sharing about that.

You know, I think that that aspect of your personal story is really beneficial for a lot of people to hear because you study this area. You know, you have an entire newsletter, 2%, right? believe it's called. Yeah, 2%. We'll link to it in the show notes where you write about this. You know, you talk about these things. And so even somebody like yourself who's gone through this is, again, a reminder that we have certain parts of our brain that are largely based on the sort of environment that we live in this modern day and age can essentially be hijacked. You know, we have a sense of whether it's escapism or whether we are trying to avoid a certain

amount of pain and it doesn't mean that you're broken. It doesn't mean that there's something wrong with you. Sure, you may want to get your life in order so that you don't have to deal with the downside consequences of it. But people don't talk enough, even still in this day and age that we live in, we don't talk enough about the fact of how many people are struggling with their own version of any addiction on the spectrum. Can you chat a little bit more about certainty and how that plays into this conversation? Yeah, I mean, so humans, We love certainty. We love to know whether we did the right thing or the wrong thing. And the way that I look at it in the book is around the rise of especially gamification and numbers that are being inserted into everyday behavior. So since this is a health show, we can talk about the rise of activity tracking. So activity trackers, they give us, sort of. of certainty about how much we moved in a day, right? We know, oh, it says I walked 11,612 steps,

or I burned 602 calories in my workout, or I did XYZ. And people love numbers because they allow you to feel like you've done the right thing, right? But I think that there's a lot more ambiguity about so many topics, even fitness trackers. So they tend to be off by a certain range anywhere from on average, I think 20%. A lot of times the algorithms are, you know, people ask a lot of questions about the algorithms and they tend to be off in a lot of ways. But they can also capture us in the sense that like, you know, why do you buy a fitness tracker in the first place? It's probably because you want to get healthier, right? And so like, all right, what is health to you?

Could be a lot of things, right? People have all sorts of different reasons and definitions of what they consider healthy. For one person, it might be the ability to run a marathon. For another, it might be, oh, I can keep up with my grandkids. For another, it might be some number on the scale that makes them feel like they did in high school or something, right? but I think what happens is that when we start to quantify health in a lot of different ways, we get captured by those metrics because we do love the certainty that the metrics provide, but then we start to exercise so we can get X steps a day.

And that is not what health is, right? It's like we almost get obsessive about the numbers and that can drive behavior in a way that isn't always positive. So the way that I think about something like health trackers is that I think they can give you some awareness in the first place, you know, and so you're like, oh, okay, this is kind of what it feels like to know that I've gotten enough steps or that I've reached a certain intensity in my workout. But once you've kind of learned that underlying thing, I don't necessarily find them necessary because people just tend to get too captured by the data over time. Yeah, so you're not writing them off. There could be reasons why people use them. Yes. But you're saying that we don't want the

number to be the decider of what our ultimate outcome is. You know, if our ultimate outcome is to wake up and feel like we have energy, you know, there's a lot of people that might look at their aura ring score in the morning and they decide based off of that how they, how they're just, how they're going to feel in the day, right? So instead of deciding like, you know, hey, my sleep score is a little less than yesterday and I'm deciding that I'm mentally sort of not going to have as much energy because I didn't hit the score that I wanted, it could be a good reason to take a little bit of a break and just sort of feel into your body. Did you sleep well or not? Is that partly what you're saying? Yeah, exactly. And a good

example that's outside of the health realm is grades. So I'm a professor at UNLV. And, you know, grades put a number on the experience of going to a university. It's like, why do you go to college? And there's a million different reasons, right? You want to learn, but you also want to prepare yourself for a career. You want to make some friends. You want to learn how to do things in a timely manner, like turn in assignments. There's all these reasons, right? But what tends to happen is that students get obsessed over grades because they want that score that gives them certainty around like, oh, I got a 4.0. I did a good job. But by obsessing just over grades, you often miss all these other reasons that you go to college, right? A lot of times people who get obsessed with grades,

they'll just kind of get the information and then regurgitate it back without picking up all these very necessary skills to thrive in the workplace or to work well with others or X, Y, Z, all these different reasons. And this really happens with, I think, anything that we try and quantify. Sorry. But yet as a professor, you wouldn't say get rid of grades. It's more that we really have to, you know, as a society or an institution or even the companies that are hiring these graduates, start prioritizing the values that show that somebody is an independent thinker or, you know, entrepreneurial or entrepreneurial. It's the highlighting of these other values that are being left out when grades themselves are the, only focus. So, so I'm understanding you to say, you're not saying get rid of grades. It's just we have to highlight these other things, outcomes, values that are more important than grades. Is that accurate? Yeah, well, I mean, I would get rid of grades, but the system wouldn't work. So the reason we have grades in the first place is because it allows students to easily move between different

institutions, right? It's like a quick, rough metric for administrators, for employees. But when we overly focus on that, we miss a lot of the picture. So just because someone gets a 4.0 doesn't mean they're going to be a better employee than the person who gets a 3.5. It's like, what are we employing them for? What skills does this person have? So you just need to dig a little bit deeper, I think. What did you learn from spending time with the group of monks in writing this book? Yeah. Well, the reason I got interested in them is because they, you know, we live in a world where there's all these things we need to do to be happy. And there's like this list of stuff we got to do that's all backed by research.

And these monks, they don't do any of that stuff, right? Like they're not super social. They don't talk for like 16 hours a day. They do a lot of hard work, hard labor outside. They don't own all these different possessions. They don't meditate in a traditional sense. not doing like gratitude journaling. I mean, their life is hard and austere.

But when researchers look at their happiness scores, they tend to be happier than the general public on average. And then if you just look at their life on paper, you're like, dang, that looks pretty hard. Like these people don't even own anything, you know. So I wanted to learn more about that. And I think what I learned from them is that when we try and sort of just chase happiness for the sake of it,

we often miss the mark because happiness is kind of a moving target. And it's always moving throughout our lifestyle. And it's not necessarily something that we're going to get through, you know, following the next thing that sort of scarcity brain wants us to do. It's not in the next meal. It's not in the next possession. It's not in getting some salary. It's not in getting some grade.

It's not getting all these things. I think what they taught me is that people tend to be happiest when we are doing work that is for some higher, higher purpose. So for them, you know, they've dedicated their lives to God. But for the average person, I think, you know, finding something bigger than yourself through your work and behavior, I think is a pretty great path to the basket to find yourself happy. So this could be trying to figure out how can I do the next right thing and help others?

How can I, through my work, improve the world? How can I do all these different, just anything to, to, help others. And I think by doing that, people look back and find themselves happy. Just like at the beginning of the interview, we highlighted one of the lessons that you took away from spending time with this Bolivian tribe, the indigenous tribe. And that was this idea of, you know, especially when it comes to health, there's power in largely, you know, eating and having a simplistic sort of, you know, diet. Not that we're trying to just eat potatoes for lunch or that we're just eating red meat without salt. It's the nature of the idea of taking foods

that are simple, minimally processed, and sticking to kind of a routine. Are there other behaviors and recommendations that you have to individuals for them to get a hold of this scarcity loop and not feel that they're being dragged in one direction or another by this part of our ancient bring. Yeah, I think that, so this thing, like I mentioned, this thing is in online shopping. It's in our information. I mean, it's so many different places. And I think just being aware of how it works is one of the first steps to reducing behaviors that fall into the loop. So just being aware that like, oh, this is why I get hooked on social media because it's this unpredictable rewards game or, oh, this is why I'm getting sucked into this breaking news about some event, because I'm just,

like waiting for the next crazy piece of information to come out. I think that becoming aware of it is the first step to changing a behavior. Because once you start to observe a behavior, it tends to change. The second part is that you can change or remove any of the three parts of the loop. So you can take away or change the opportunity. You can take away or change the unpredictable awards. Or you can take away or change the quick repeatability. So I'll give you an example with quick repeatability. one of the reasons people do do things is because things have become much easier to do today. So take shopping, right? If you, even 15 years ago, 20 years ago, if you wanted to buy an item, you had to get up off the couch, you had to get in your car, you had to go down to the Kmart,

and you had to walk the aisles for it. You had to find it. And then you had to buy it, and then you had to drive home. Now, if you want something, you can just pull it up on your phone, and Amazon will have it there in 12 hours. So, once you see the rise of online shopping, you tend to see people start to buy a lot more stuff. And so simply putting in a rule that reduces that quick repeatability, something as simple as like, hey, I'm going to buy stuff only in person from now on. Or if there's an item that I'm going to buy online, I'm going to put in a week holding pattern. So I have to think about it.

And I guarantee that most of the time, when you go back in a week, you'll be like, why did I think I needed that? Right? So reducing the quickness with which you can repeat a behavior will reduce the frequency that you do the behavior. Are there any other boundaries that you've set up in your own life? And I'll go through a few categories. Let's talk about information. You mentioned we are dealing with a lot of information overload.

In fact, I believe that one of the things you talk about in the book is that, well, I'll let you share it. The average person today and the amount of information they go through in a day compared to our ancestors of the past. Yeah, it was so even an average person today takes in more information than a single day than a person, even 700 years ago, would have taken in their entire life. Wow. That has absolutely changed us. So, you know, we evolved to crave information because information would have given us a survival benefit in the past. If you knew where the food was, if you knew the intentions of that, you know, tribe a few miles away, if you knew where the, the, the

tigers tended to hang out, right? That would give you a survival advantage. And so we still have these brains that just crave information, but we now live in a world with breaking news 24-7, with Twitter, with Reddit, with Wikipedia, with insert anything. So I tend to think about it as, you know, if I really want to know and understand something, I do think that there's a case for leaning into slow information. That is putting in a little bit more work to find the information. going directly to the source. So this is something I learned and I read about it in the book

when I was an intern at Esquire magazine. It was like one of the key things that got my reporting better is if you had a question about something or a person, like call the person and ask them. Right? Don't just Google it. If you want to know the results of a study, like read the actual study.

If you want to have some other type of information, like read it in a book. putting in more effort to get information tends to lead people to, one, better understand it and to be better able to recall it later on. So that, I think, is one way. And also, especially with, you know, so, like, I think probably really pruning your feed if you're going to be on social media to the information that you actually want is actually going to improve your life is important.

Like if a certain, you know, follower or person you're following is stressing you out, like you should probably hit that on follow button. I guess extrapolating out that advice that you have, you know, people moving from even news on the television and sort of like traditional sort of fast-paced news to just even slower forms of news. Like some of my favorite sources of understanding. complex and nuanced things that are going on in the world would be substack newsletters that I subscribe to long format podcast where you don't have a time limit and you can truly listen to people talking about multiple sides of the angle, the sort of slow news phenomenon that a lot more people are paying attention to today. And I have all news notifications turned off on my phone.

It's tricky on social media because a lot of times now we're getting content that's not even people that we follow, right? You have the for you algorithm. So you're seeing all sorts of random stuff. So my approach on social media tends to be post and ghost. I'll post when I have something to post and then I'll sort of ghost and not try to get too sucked in because I like anybody else can get deeply sucked in. And before I know it, I'm doom scrolling for like the last, you know, 25 minutes on something. that has nothing to do with anything and is not making me any better in my day to day, day life. Yeah, totally. And I definitely agree about substack. That's why I started the substack,

is that, you know, even as someone who was a journalist in magazines for a long time, the way that stories even get edited turns them into something you probably wouldn't have wanted to write in the first place. The headlines get changed. Some of the contents get, you know, edited in such a way that kind of make it this faster information that's going to play well on social media. But that is often at odds with putting out good information. So for me, going to substack was so I can give stories longer treatment, get into some of the nuance, try and make them as practical as possible, and just leave people with information that isn't confusing, isn't aligned with the science and more.

And I think that you're seeing that is why substack has grown so much because there's so many different great substacks that leave you with more understanding than you would have otherwise gotten. We have your link to the substack and the show notes. People can subscribe to it.

And I believe that there's the website, 2%.com, right? Is that? Yeah, it's TWO-P-C-T.com. Can you just take one of the newsletters that you've written about. You know, you're talking about the top things in sort of performance, getting better, all aspects of that area. Break down one of the articles that you wrote about. You know, it doesn't have to be necessarily

related to this, to this, the book that you've written right now. If it is great, but just share one of the findings or the topics that you wrote about recently. Yeah, I did one on sleep that was popular. So I think that sleep is one of those areas where there's, There's such hyper-specific advice. But the main finding in that is that everyone sleeps kind of differently. And I mean, even the idea that we should get eight hours of sleep, it doesn't track with how most people sleep and how much sleep most people say they feel best on. Turns out it's more like seven hours.

Also, the idea that, like, you absolutely can't sleep unless your room is totally blacked out and totally silent. Well, if that were the case, like, no one would have been able to sleep for all of time. we're sleeping outside with like all these other people and all these animals around. And by the way, like the moon was up. And so I think you tend to, it basically looks at, kind of breaks down some of the research, looks at things through an anthropological lens, common sense lens. And you find that people all sleep differently. And so really the key is not to try and abide by a set of hyper-specific rules. It's to look at the rules and go, okay, well, I'm going to try this and see if it applies.

to me and it realized that it may or may not. Like some people, some people actually sleep best when they have, oddly enough, a TV on in their room at low volume because that sort of drowns out other noise and it allows them to sleep. Since we're on the topic, what have been a few things for you to dial in your own sleep? Again, knowing that this is personal, what works for you, may not be the things that work for other people, but there are there any sort of core habits that you've incorporated into your life that have been a game changer? when it comes to sleep? Honestly, probably the best one for me is, well, I'll give you two. Best one for me is temperature. I do best in a colder room. So being willing to have a giant

air conditioning bill in Las Vegas in the summer, but it's worth it. And then number two, I also realize that not eating at least three hours before I go to bed seem to improve my sleep. Because if I ate, say, you know, an hour before bed or two hours before bed, I would tend to get heartburn overnight and that would wake me up. So if I've got like a three hour good window, I tend to sleep better. And so those have really been the two things that have moved the die almost for me. And then also I think, you know, I've always been active. But I also noticed on the days that I'm active, especially if I do cardio, I tend to sleep better. Did you notice improvement in your sleep when you went sober? Well, I mean, I'll tell you what, nothing will

knock you out like a bunch of drinks. But yeah, I would say that, I would say that, yeah, once you, would you start going to bed at, you know, 10 p.m. instead of 5 a.m. that tends to help your sleep patterns, yeah. Yeah. I mean, we've had many people in this podcast talk about this, but alcohol for some people can help them fall asleep quicker, but it massively disrupts the deep sleep that's there, not to mention its impact on metabolic health, et cetera, other things. But just was curious if you had noticed anything. But I'm sure just by-

I think most of the research suggests that, you know, having a couple drinks before bed is probably going to disrupt your sleep. I was never the type of drinker that would have a couple drinks. So I was kind of, I'm kind of an outlier there. So I can't really speak to that sort of controlled drinking. But yeah, for most people I've talked to. And this is another example where a, a tracker could be useful.

Like I've had a, I've had a few friends who, you know, they, they'd heard, yeah, if you have a couple drinks before bed, your sleep might suffer. But once they finally got a tracker on and notice like, oh, yeah, the nights that I have had drinks before, like at night, my sleep does seem to be screwed up. It allows them to make a more conscious and better decision. Yeah, I would say for my wife, getting her an aura ring and seeing that just by moving up her sleep window by about an hour where she typically would want to go to sleep at 11, 1130, and her seeing that when she fell asleep at 10 and still got the same amount of sleep,

you know, woke up an hour earlier, she felt, not only felt better, but saw that her deep sleep score went up. And again, that's just her. You know, everybody has a different window, some people at night owls, this, that. But I think that that's the best situation where data can make you a little bit more aware of something that you weren't previously aware of. Totally. On the topic of alcohol, while I have you here, as we're winding down, I heard you mentioned in another interview, something really interesting. You mentioned that, you know, people and societies that would be delaying drinking, where

an individual might not, you know, start drinking until, let's say, 21, which is the legal limit in the United States. they tend to, if I understood correctly, have less issues with addiction. And part of that being that, you know, our young brain in our teens, there's a lot of changes that are going on, there's a lot of pain that we're going through. And, you know, we're more likely to find ourselves addicted to things. Is that accurate in the way that I sort of recap that back to you? Yeah.

The stat is crazy. It's if you start drinking, I think it's before at 15 or. earlier, you have a 50-50 shot of becoming an alcoholic once you're into your 20s. If you start drinking at 21, you have a 10% chance of having a drinking problem at some point in your life. So that's crazy, right? And to what you mentioned, it does go back to how the brain developed. So from about the time that we hit puberty to the time we're about 25, One of the things that's happening is that you're finding out, like, how do you manage discomfort? How do you deal with your problems?

How do you find comfort in the world? And so if you introduce alcohol at that point in a person's life, they tend to, it tends to increase the probability that a person will find it through alcohol. Do you know, you know, anecdotally, like I know that in a lot of European countries, people, they don't have the same sort of of 21 years old, you know, age limit. And it seems to be that sort of drinking is not seen as something as taboo for younger people. Do you have any idea about alcoholism and alcohol disorders in the U.S. versus Europe? Is that idea it was always sort of presented as to me from my friends in Europe that said, we don't make it this forbidden fruit.

So people don't wake up one day when they're 20 years old and go to college and feel like, oh my gosh, I can finally drink, so I'm going to binge out. Is there any truth to that or is there, is there not? Oh, I think there, I think the context absolutely matters. For example, my wife, her parents would let her have like a drink with dinner every now and then when she was younger, like in her teens, you know, like starting at 15. And she has zero issue with it because the context wasn't, yeah, this thing is off limits. But, you know, then you end up at a party.

and like everyone's drinking a ton. Like I learned to drink in a way that was like, oh, you use alcohol to get drunk, right? Whereas other people learn, oh, it's just this thing you have with dinner that, you know, maybe relaxes you a little bit. So I do think the context absolutely matters. And I think probably the context in the United States tends to be more. When you think of young people and drinking in the U.S., it is, to your point, it's the frat parties. It's whatever.

It's like, we're going to get waste. And so given that, if you put a 15-year-old in that situation, the odds that they'll drink that way in a way that ends up harming them later on is pretty high. If a person's already, you know, in their 20s by the time they start doing that, they might do that for a while, but it's not going to be this, it's less likely to be this habitual thing. Does that answer your question? Yeah, it totally does. Okay. And I think that makes complete sense. In this sort of party environment that we have, kids who are exposed to that.

earlier and I'm guessing other drugs as well too right it's the brain is at a very vulnerable stage and this is why we know we have a lot of data that tends to be that especially with even mental disorders like schizophrenia or psychotic episodes you know tends to be individuals there might be a portion of the population that's more predisposed to it but there is that concentration in you know especially young men and young women, more so in young men, in that sort of 18 to 25 demographic that's there. When the brain is going through a lot and we have a tendency to whether it's abuse certain things that might, you know, it's controversial, but abuse certain things that could be tipping people over the edge,

like high dose THC in some young men and young women. So yeah, no, that definitely helps connect a lot of the dots. Michael, this has been fantastic. Thank you for your book. Thank you for your work. Any final message that you want to leave with our audience here around this idea, the scarcity brain, and what's possible for them when they start to understand how to retake control of their life in this environment we live in today. The environment is what it is. We're not going back in time to us going to being hunter-gatherers or whatever it might be. So what is the hopeful message you want to leave people with? Yeah, well, I think that the message is just like it kind of was with ideas of addiction,

that change is absolutely possible. You know, we kind of get thrown into this environment and we just do the thing that humans have done for millions of years, except we're in a totally new playing field. And sometimes this leads to behaviors that we wish we would do. But the upside is that you can stop the behaviors that. that are holding you back is absolutely possible. And by doing that, that can really move your life forward. And so I think, you know, I think the book has a lot of different lenses through which to view that

and through which to view behavior change. And yeah, so my parting message, I just wanted to be, you know, I'm hopeful. I'm hopeful for people. I'm hopeful as well, too, especially when you come across a book like yourself. The book is out. Scarcity Brain, fix your craving mindset and rewire. to thrive with enough. Michael, thank you so much for coming on the podcast and doing the work that you're doing. Hey, thanks so much for having me. I really enjoyed talking to. It's fun.

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