The One You Feed - How Small Changes Lead to Big Rewards with Michael Easter

Episode Date: March 26, 2024

In this episode, Michael Easter defines the scarcity loop and its impact on human behavior, particularly in relation to addictive tendencies. Michael shares several compelling insights on how small changes can lead to big rewards. In this episode, you will be able to: Embrace the 2% mentality to unlock powerful daily habits and achieve long-term goals Discover the surprising benefits of choosing discomfort for sustainable personal growth and success Learn effective strategies for breaking free from the scarcity loop and cultivating abundance in life Uncover the remarkable impact of making small lifestyle changes on overall health and well-being To learn more, click here!See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

You give a caveman a sleeve of Oreos, they're going to eat the whole thing. And that makes sense because they're never going to see that again, right? But today we're just surrounded in food and we still have a brain that goes like, hey, if you have a chance to overeat or eat food that is more calorie dense, like junk food, like do that. And you see this kind of manifest itself in people's waistlines today. You know, people are obviously on average a lot heavier than they were in the past. You are what you think, ring true. And yet, for many of us, our thoughts don't strengthen or empower us. We tend toward negativity, self-pity, jealousy, or fear.

We see what we don't have instead of what we do. We think things that hold us back and dampen our spirit. But it's not just about thinking. Our actions matter. It takes conscious, consistent, and creative effort to make a life worth living. This podcast is about how other people keep themselves moving in the right direction, how they feed their good wolf. I'm Jason Alexander.

And I'm Peter Tilden. And together, our mission on the Really Know Really podcast is to get the true answers to life's baffling questions like why the bathroom door doesn't go all the way to the floor, what's in the museum of failure, and does your dog truly love you? We have the answer. Go to reallyknowreally.com and register to win $500, a guest spot on our podcast, or a limited edition signed Jason bobblehead. Thanks for joining us. Our guest on this episode is Michael Easter, a writer and speaker who focuses on how humans can leverage modern science and evolutionary wisdom

to perform better and live healthier lives. Michael's work has been implemented by professional sports teams, elite military units, Fortune 500 companies, and leading universities. Today, Michael and Eric discuss his book, The Scarcity Brain. Hi, Michael. Welcome to the show. Thanks for having me. Glad to be here. The Scarcity Brain. that are always at battle. One is a good wolf, which represents things like kindness and bravery and love. And the other is a bad wolf, which represents things like greed and hatred and fear. And the grandchild stops and they think about it for a second. They look up at their grandparent, they say, well, which one wins? And the grandparent says, the one you feed. So I'd like to start off

by asking you what that parable means to you in your life and in the work that you do. I mean, a lot of my work focuses on the general theme that means to you in your life and in the work that you do. I mean, a lot of my work focuses on the general theme that in order to improve your life, you often have to do things that are challenging in the short term to get a long-term benefit and reward in your life. And, you know, I think the world is increasingly set up that it's harder to feed the good wolf, if you will. It's so much easier to feed the bad wolf, right? Like, that's an easy thing to do. But I do think that, you know, we all know that the reward of feeding the good wolf is better for our long term health, well being mindset, all those things. So yeah. So I'm going to ask you a question I've asked a lot of people and gotten generally

unsatisfactory answers, but I believe you are going to give me a satisfactory answer. Oh, no, no pressure. But it's this, you know, I've exercised for a long time. I'm not a young man. You know, I've got thousands of reps of exercise under my belt. Every single time I've done it, when I'm done, I'm like, that was great. I'm glad I did that. And yet, with that much positive reinforcement, I still find it hard to do sometimes. Why is that? Humans evolved to avoid physical activity. We invented exercise basically after

the Industrial Revolution. So if you think about the grand sweep of humanity, right, what we needed to survive was always scarce, and it was hard to find. So energy was one of those things, energy in the form of food. So if you were the type of person that wanted to burn energy for the sake of it, that is to say, exercise, you would have died off because there just wasn't enough food to do that. So over time, humans basically evolved to be lazy and avoid any extra activity that wasn't going to getting resources to like this larger point, right? A stat that I love that highlights this, which I'm sure we'll talk about later in the podcast is that 2% of people take the stairs when there's also an escalator available. So what that tells me and shows me is that we really are wired to do the next easiest,

most comfortable thing and avoid extra movement, right? We just do that unconsciously. So long story short, it's like for two and a half million years of time of generations, avoiding exercise or any extra movement, it kept you alive. And we have all these discomforts our body throws at us psychologically, physically, to keep us away from moving any more than we have to. And exercise is a form of that. So like, if you went into every workout being like, I absolutely want to do this every single time, and you just kept going and going, like still today that you'd probably incur

some downsides, like you want some sort of resistance going into that or else the human species would not have lived on. So is it safe to say that things that take that much energy expenditure don't end up becoming what we would truly consider a habit, meaning it happens automatically every time? Is it really a sense of these things that you really have to summon a lot of energy for? There's always going to be some degree of resistance there. Yeah, I think there probably will be some degree of resistance. If something is challenging, exercise is a great example. Healthy eating is harder than unhealthy eating because we're also wired to value and crave foods that are more calorie dense than those that are less calorie dense, right? Kind of back like the exercise thing for two and a half million years of time, it always made sense to overeat if you had the opportunity, right? Like,

you give a caveman a sleeve of Oreos, they're going to eat the whole thing. And that makes sense, because they're never going to see that again, right? But today, we're just surrounded in food. And we still have a brain that goes like, hey, if you have a chance to overeat or eat food that is more calorie dense, like junk food, like do that. And you see this kind of manifest itself in people's waistlines today. You know, people are obviously on average a lot heavier than they were in the past. Yeah, that makes a lot of sense to me. Listener, while you were listening to that, what resonated with you? What one thing to feed your good wolf comes to mind? If the thing that came to your mind was more time for

stillness, or you've tried meditation before and you really haven't liked it, then I want to give you a quick tip that might make it better for you. And it's simply to stop expecting that you're not going to have thoughts. Nearly everyone has this expectation that they're going to sit down and meditate and they're going to stop having thoughts. And when they stop having thoughts, that means they're doing it well. But no one does that. And so we end up feeling like we're failing all of the time. Every three seconds, failed again, failed again. We develop a relationship with meditation that is aversive. So if you want to stop dreading meditation and actually find it relaxing, check out my free meditation guide at goodwolf.me slash calm. In it, I walk you through my process to engage with meditation in a new way.

And a lot of people have found it really helpful. That's goodwolf.me slash calm. So you mentioned the 2% stat, you're wearing a hat that says 2% that orients towards a way of approaching the world that you call being a 2%-er. And you say this in your sub stack about this, you say, you know, we all tend to think of the big things that we do as being important, but you say what we do in all our other moments is the most powerful. The littlest choices make the biggest impact. I mean, my favorite phrase is little by little, little becomes a lot, both positively and negatively, right? And so talk about other ways besides taking the stairs versus the escalator. What are other sort of small choices that we can make that over time are going to be very beneficial for us?

Yeah, that's a great question. So yeah, the sub stack is called 2% after that stat, which totally changed my thinking about humans and behavior. I actually have a whole written piece that's called the 2% manifesto up on the site that'll dive into a ton of this. And the site is TWOPCT.com. But to answer your question, I think it manifests itself relationship wise, right? Think of how many people text today instead of call. That's because a call is more intimate, right? You have to be more open. It might take a little bit more time. You don't know what to expect.

You can't control all the variables. But there's plenty of research that says the simple act of picking up the phone and calling someone, it creates better social bonds, more intimate connections. And when you put that in the context of the fact that we're facing a loneliness crisis, like pick up the phone. It'll be totally worth it. Not to mention, you'll honestly save time in the long run, especially if you're like asking the person the question. So socially, it affects us, I would also say, it affects us food wise. So when you look at a lot

of the research, most eating decisions today are not actually driven by true physiological hunger. So more than 80% of eating is not because of real hunger, it's because it's a certain time and a clock and we always eat at that time. It's because we're stressed out% of eating is not because of real hunger. It's because it's a certain time of the clock and we always eat at that time. It's because we're stressed out. Like stress eating is a huge thing. And it's because we're bored, something like that, right? So I think that learning to be okay with hunger can teach you something about physiological hunger and how much food you actually need to feel well and perform well.

I think it extends to how we spend our time and attention. So when you look at why people pick up their phone, more than 90% of pickups, I think it's 96%, are not because the person got a notification. They're because they felt something internal, usually boredom. We've just become totally boredom resistant today. And we just have this easy, effortless escape from it on our phone. But if you can just sit with that boredom, if you can be like

the 2% mentality, right, I'm going to choose this short term discomfort to get a long term benefit. There's all this crazy research that shows that boredom is one of the best ways to increase creativity. Some of the best ideas come out of being bored. Not to mention, it gives your brain a break from all the screens that we spend our time on. We spend more than 13 hours a day engaged with digital media. This is all new stuff in the grand scheme of time and space. People spend 93% of their time indoors. And it's like, well, why the hell is that? It's like, well, because the outdoors is cold, or it's too hot, or it might be raining, or it's windy, and it's less predictable than my, you know, sanitary box that I live in.

And so even something as simple as going outside is one of the best hacks for mental health and can prove mental health, but we just don't do it all that often. So it's like, how can I take this idea, this 2% idea, like being the 2% of people that's going to select that thing that's going to be a little more uncomfortable in the short term, but it's going to give me a long-term reward. How can I apply that just across the board? And you can find tons of ways I've written a lot about this. So and then to answer your follow up question to that, how do these things add up? And I'll give you a really interesting stat. So when you look at how people burn calories across the day, we think of exercise as like the big thing that's burning our calories, right? If you count out the calorie burn from just keeping your body alive, which is called BMR, you find that actually just the everyday movement you do in daily life actually burns significantly

more calories than workouts, like two to three times. And so there's research from the Mayo Clinic that basically found that people who just move more throughout the day, that's like taking the stairs, that's like parking the farthest spot away every time it's like, oh, I need to go down to get a coffee and the coffee shop is a half mile away. Like I'm just going to walk. I'm not going to drive or whatever it is. Right. They burn more than 800 extra calories across a day. That's equivalent to like an eight mile run. I mean, how many people just go out for an eight mile run? We don't, right. We go to the gym for like 30 minutes and we think that like, that's going to be enough.

And it's like, I'm not saying don't go to the gym at all. I am saying go to the gym, but I am also saying, how can you weave in more incidental movement into your day, because that's going to have a larger effect on your health span and lifespan and general fitness than just doing your whatever amount of time at the gym and then sitting, it's like we really just kind of have portioned off like, we do this weird thing where we have like, this is the healthy part of my day

and life. And then the rest of it is like sedentary or kind of unhealthy. And it's or it's like January is my healthy month. And then I fell off the wagon in February, whatever it is, right. And so I think we just need to start thinking, like, how can I find little wins throughout the day rather than trying to take on these heroics, because heroics don't seem to last. Right, right. Heroics don't last and heroics aren't available for a lot of people, right? A lot of people don't have 90 minutes a day to say go exercise, but they do have lots of little five minutes and lots of little on the way to places. It's interesting how much environment plays a role too, because I was in New York City recently and it was cold out and

we were outside walking all day, every day. And then I get home to Columbus and it's cold. And all of a sudden I'm like, it's a little bit too cold out there. And I suddenly don't want to go out. It's so interesting to me how, like you said, we get into these sort of ways of being that need interrupted. The other thing that you were saying there also is, you know, we had an exercise scientist on years ago. I mean, it's been probably seven years ago, but I remember it clear as day because she basically said the rule is move as often as you can in any way that you can. I mean, that was it. That was the whole sum of her overall research and everything was that that's the best way to go. Just move when you can,

however you can, and ideally in ways you like to. Yeah, totally. In the comfort crisis, I talk a lot about with environments changing, it's just our environments have changed so much so fast in the grand scheme of time and space. It's like we've really engineered movement out of our days, we've engineered more hypercaloric food into our days. We've engineered connection out of our days. Like we've engineered all the good stuff out of our days and engineered in stuff that isn't necessarily good for us. And I mean, if you just take a look at how much people moved in the past compared to today, since we're on the topic of exercise, people used to walk at least 20,000 steps

a day and about 10 miles a day. Now the average person is taking, you know, anywhere from 4000 to 7000 steps per day. And the average person in the past used to do what the government classifies as moderate exercise. And they gauge this using accelerometers and all these different things on hunter gatherers for about three hours and 20 minutes, three hours and 20 minutes of exercise a day, right? Now the average person is like 30 minutes, three times a week, right? I mean, it's just crazy how much less we move. And it's not like, you know, I think people sometimes think of these people in the past and be like, man, these are just like these heroic people. It's like, no, you would do the same damn thing. It's

just, you live in a built environment now. And so you don't do that. Right? Yeah, environment is so hugely important in the choices that we make. All right, let's change direction here and talk about your latest book, scarcity brain. Yeah. And you say that you've come across this concept of something called the scarcity loop. And you say it's the serial killer of moderation. Yes. I'm a big believer in moderation. I guess even though having been an addict, maybe I recognize the importance of moderation. But I just love that line, the serial killer of moderation. Tell me about the scarcity loop.

Yeah, I learned about it, interestingly enough, because I live in Las Vegas and watching people play slot machines for hours and hours and hours at a time and going, why would you keep doing that when everyone knows the house always wins? Like what the hell is going on? Right? So because I'm a journalist, when I ask a question like that, I don't just go, huh, you know, and then move on. Like I actually try and figure out the answer. And so I start talking to all these different gaming researchers and people in casino industry and blah, blah, blah. And long story short, this leads me to this, uh, place on the edge of town that is a fully working brand new cutting edge casino, but it's used entirely for human behavior research. So it is like a living working

casino laboratory. And it's funded by the casino industry and a lot of big tech companies. I think 72 different companies are on board providing all sorts of funding to this place. And so this is where I talked to a slot machine designer who explains to me basically how a slot machine works, why it's so good at hooking people. And by the way, they really are. Slot machines make more money than books, movies, and music combined. Those three industries combined every single year. That's amazing. Yeah, it's amazing. And it's horrifying. So a slot machine works by having these three parts, which is what I call a scarcity loop. It's got opportunity, unpredictable rewards, and quick repeatability. Think of it as a looping behavior. Okay, so opportunity, you have an opportunity to get something of value. With slot machines, it's money, right? unpredictable rewards, you know, you'll get that thing of value at some point if you keep doing the behavior, but you don't know when you're

going to get the thing of value and you don't know how valuable it's going to be. So with a slot machine, you play a game and you could lose, you could win some money, you could win a ton of money, right? Crazy range of outcomes. And then three, quick repeatability. You can just repeat the behavior immediately. There's like zero pause between repeating the behavior. So with slot machines, people play about 900 games an hour. Now, the reason that this is important and why the book starts in the casino lab and learning this is because once you understand this behavior loop,

you start to see why people get hooked on all sorts of stuff that seems counterproductive and dumb, all these bad habits we have, a lot of them have elements of the scarcity loop. So for example, this is what makes social media work, right? It's got those same three parts, you got an opportunity for I don't know, some social likes a boost to find something entertaining. You don't know how many likes you're going to get, you don't know when you're going to find the real that's going to make you crack up. And then you just keep scrolling and scrolling and scrolling because infinite scroll, right? That's in Instagram, it's in Twitter, it's in TikTok, it's in name any social

media app, the loop is being put in personal finance apps. So people will do more trading faster. It explains the rise of sports betting and how that's really just taken off. It was like this combination of legality and then putting it in cell phones and leveraging the loop to make it take off. It's what makes dating apps work, right? Opportunity to find a mate, swipe, swipe, swipe, swipe, swipe. Oh my God, I just matched with someone being jackpot. Swipe, swipe, swipe, swipe, swipe, right? And so when you start to look at how the world is constructed, like it's even in elements of our food system. I talked to a guy who's a executive for junk food companies and he talked about how, yeah, we totally use the quick repeatability thing in our food.

I mean, it just starts to show up everywhere and it is unparalleled, but pushing people into these quick repeat behaviors that are usually engaging in the short term or at least distracting in the short term, but at least distracting in the short term, but that can often lead to long term regrets or long term problems. Yeah, you quote one of the people in the snack food industry saying there's three V's in the snacking world value, variety and velocity, which is exactly the three things of the scarcity loop. So you're talking about all the modern applications of this scarcity loop, but this is something that is built into us right from evolutionary history. So explain the origins of why we get so lost in it. Yeah. So it's funny because after I talked to the slot machine designer, like he's showing me

how the slot machine works and blah, blah, blah. And then I asked him, I'm like, why do people find this so captivating? And he just looks at me and he goes dude. I don't know I just make machines that make a lot of money. Like I don't know why people play him, right? So I end up talking to this guy who's a behavioral psychologist at the university of kentucky. His name is thomas zenthal He's like 80 something years old. He's been doing research since the late 1960s and he like knows everything and he told me it's basically a piece of evolutionary hardware in our brain that helped us find food every day when we were hunter gatherers on the savannah. So I want you to picture us looking for food, right? Every single day,

you had to find food, you either had to find it in the form of gathering, you were like walking out looking for trees that have food, or you have to find it from hunting, right? You had to find it in the form of gathering. You were like walking out looking for trees that have food. Or you have to find it from hunting, right? You have to find an animal that's on the move. So you go to one place you think is going to have food, doesn't have food. So you go to another place you think is going to have food. No food there. You go to another place, jackpot.

Place has all kinds of food. So yay, everyone's fat and happy for only a moment though. Because then you got to repeat that behavior, maybe the same day for lunch, or dinner, definitely the next day for food again the next day, right? So like literally our life finding food, every single day, we fell into this scarcity loop of finding food. And so our sort of attraction to it and these random rewards embedded in it and this like quickly repeating the behavior, it kept us alive for all of time. And now that architecture simply gets applied to all these different places in our life and is really unparalleled at capturing our attention. And it works in every single animal.

All wild animals still have to find food scarcity loop style. And so like this guy, Thomas and Tal, I mean, he can get pigeons to fall into it with like these slot machine games he makes them. I mean, you see it in all animals. It's really fascinating. I think really the key is that it's always been a part of us, but Las Vegas really figured out how it works and how to work it and how to just really optimize it starting in about 1980.

And other industries took notice. And they went, why are people playing those slot machines so often all the time now? And why are they making so much money? What the hell is going on there? And they just pulled elements of it. I'm Jason Alexander. And I'm Peter Tilden. And together on the Really No Really podcast, our mission is to get the true answers to life's baffling questions like why they refuse to make the bathroom door go all the way to the floor. We got the answer.

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So we've got this scarcity loop that's sort of embedded in us, but has some certain limits on it evolutionarily, right? As in like, there isn't like crazy amounts of food. Yes, there is repeatability, but you don't repeat it two seconds later, right? Whereas these modern scarcity loops, we know, for example, that our food is designed to be super satiating and stimulating. We know that we can repeat these things really, really fast. And so this scarcity loop, if I understand you, is built into us evolutionarily, but our modern world has figured out how to essentially soup it up. Yeah, that's a great word to describe it. Our modern world has really figured out the optimal schedule of unpredictable rewards. So about 45, 55% of the time getting something is optimal in slot machines, for example, but they've also found ways to tweak it. So for example, slot machines really started taking off when they started being embedded with this thing called a win and you play a slot machine game. And when you play a slot machine game, it's no longer just a single line of symbols that you're trying to line up. Like it's all these

different combinations of symbols you can get. There could be like, I don't even understand them. I see one and I'm like, I don't know what's happening here at all. Yeah. They're crazy now. But the long story short is that by doing this, they can do what are called losses disguises wins. And that basically just means you quote unquote, win less money than you bet. So you might bet say a dollar, but you quote unquote, win 50 cents. But here's the thing, it sounds ridiculous. But when you actually play the game, the machine cues you to show you that something good has happened. You still get the lights, you still see the money go up. And scientists will study this, they'll do fMRI neuroscience stuff, and find that people's brain reacts the exact same to a loss disguises a win, as they do a real win. And it compels people to play the game for longer and

makes it more entertaining. And you see this, for example, in social media. So when you go onto social media, usually there's like this delay, right? You wait to see if you got an update, like they could tell you immediately, the delay is programmed in to tell you how many say notifications you got on Twitter, or whatever it is, right? And then when you open that up, you're like, well, how many is it going to actually be? Is that one? Is it 1 million? Did I get two likes? Did I get 2 million likes, right?

There's this kind of like, there's losses disguised of wins. There's real wins. I mean, it's really just like a taking of the casino tactics, yeah. And then also the speed. Good example from slot machines is that when they removed the handles on them,

people could game faster. And they went from playing 400 games an hour to 900 games an hour. Similar thing happened when social media started using infinite scroll. Screen time just went through the roof and people's sessions lengthened. All these different things happen. So generally, the faster you can get a person to repeat a behavior, the faster they will repeat a behavior. So engineers now know this. And so they go, okay, how can we get someone to do this quicker? Even a lot of online shopping places, for example,

are trying to really push people into one click buying. Because what happens when you go cart? Yes, I'd like to check out. Here's my address information. Here's how I'd like it shipped. By the time you hit the shipping thing, you're like, do I really want a new pair of running shoes? Do I really need this? But if you have one click buying, it's just you have like no time to think about whether this is a good decision or not. Yeah, it's funny, as you're saying that I was thinking back to when Amazon really sort of got going. And this is early 2000s. And I remember how just the fact that I could buy books that easily. And again, there was no one click buying then, right? But I didn't have to go to a bookstore, it nearly ruined me. The fact that in three minutes, I could have another book on its way to me, right? But it shows how we sort of keep upping the game, because now they think

that's too slow, right? and the same way with delivery times like you know before i'd be like oh we're gonna get this thing in like three days that's amazing now it's like it's not here in an hour right like what's the problem totally and there's even a lot of sites that are using unpredictable rewards within shopping so putting like the slot machine features or a spinning wheel for bargains and though likeimou is a great example of the casino vacation of shopping. It's all these type of random rewards and bargains and discounts. And I mean, those spinning wheels, some people are like, oh, this is stupid. Those increase conversion rates by sevenfold. That's crazy.

If you give someone a spinning wheel and they think they've won like the whatever jackpot bargain, they're seven times more likely to make a purchase. Crazy. Yeah, that's a huge number. Yeah. All right, now let's pause for a quick good wolf reminder. And this one is on meditation. If while you're meditating, your mind wanders, you probably, like most people, treat that as a moment of failure, like, oh, my mind wandered again. But let's flip that and instead treat that as a moment of celebration, because in that moment, your mind actually woke up and you were mindful of the fact that your mind wandered. So it's a win. So if we can flip that right on its head and say, oh, good job, brain, we actually make it more likely that A, our brain is going to do it more

often because we're training it, and B, that we're going to enjoy it more likely that A, our brain is going to do it more often because we're training it, and B, that we're going to enjoy it more. And specifically, it's about how to make you not dread meditation so much and actually find it relaxing. Check out my free meditation guide at goodwolf.me.com. So I want to get to how we can work against this scarcity loop here shortly. But before we do, I'd like to explore it from a couple of different angles like you do in your book. And the first place I'd like to spend a little bit of time is you say at the extreme end of scarcity brain lies addiction. And listeners of the show know that I have an addiction and alcoholism history.

I was a homeless heroin addict at 24. But you have a similar background, at least struggles with alcohol. So talk to me about scarcity brain in the context of addiction. Yeah. Yeah. I've been sober for nine years and my thing was alcohol. And when you think about how most of what we needed to survive in the past was scarce and hard to find.

And we now have an abundance of all these things we're built to crave. I think that addictive substances absolutely fall into kind of what we were just talking about, how everything has been strengthened and distilled. So when you think about the past and addictive substances, we would usually use the substances that we now consider addictive and drugs as tools. So I'll give you an example of alcohol. So humans evolved to have sort of a taste for alcohol because it helped us find food. So fruit would fall from trees and it would begin to ferment, right? And it would give us the scent and be like, oh yeah, we can smell it better because it's fermenting. And then we would go eat

it and it would have these low levels of alcohol, right? But we would find food. And we would get a ton of sugar from that. By the way, the alcohol even killed some of the germs that would be on the food. And at the same time, though, it's not like this fruit that was rotting was like Jack Daniels, right? It's like a very, very low level of alcohol in the fruit. Same thing goes for say, coca leaves, which is what cocaine is made for, right? So coca leaves have this very, very low level of the compound cocaine. And still in countries in the Andes, people will chew it because it helps with focus, it helps ward off altitude sickness, for example. But it's like, you don't really feel anything from it, right? But

we've managed to and this is a story with all substances we've managed to sort of take the psychoactive compound whatever it might be and really distill it down into its strongest form and so we can get just the like high from that right it's just this super concentrated high so it's like this thing that we used to use as a tool for all the time we now have an ability to have it like this thing that we used to use as a tool for all the time, we now have an ability to have it be this thing that allows us to escape. And, you know, I think there's plenty of people, obviously, that can use alcohol, and even drugs, to some extent, illegal drugs without repercussion, right? They don't have a problem with it. But I think that you find some people I can speak for myself, who use it as a way to just totally escape and deal with their problems. And obviously that, you know, comes with some downsides. Like it came with some downsides to me personally. And I can tell you that I've found that addiction definitely falls into the loop as well. So for me, when I would drink, it was like I had an opportunity to improve my life in the short term.

Because nothing would fix my problem like the first drink, right? It doesn't matter what kind of problem I have. If I just have a drink, I'm good to go. Obviously I could never have one drink, right? My favorite drink was always the next one. Right, right. And then there's unpredictable rewards. I didn't know what the hell was going to happen. I just know that if I start drinking, I'm going to have a more interesting night. Could be in a good way, could be in a bad way than I would if I was sober. Right. And then repeatability, it's like, after that, I'm just waiting until I can have the next drink again. And I think you also see it in illegal drugs too, with like, even getting the drugs, it's like, you don't know

where you're going to get it. You don't know who you're going to get it from. You don't know how strong it's going to be. You don't know how much it's going to cost, you know, if you're going to get in trouble along the way, like there's all these unpredictable things about drug use. And you do tend to find that when certain drugs are legalized or at least controlled and put in doses that are predictable, addiction rates do seem to fall. Yeah. There's a ton of ways I would love to follow that particular question because we're seeing interesting things, you know, with marijuana

being legalized and Oregon decriminalizing and headed back towards criminalization and black markets in California for marijuana. There's a lot of interesting things happening in that space, but it's not really where I want to go. What I would love to talk a little bit about is you talk about, you know, over the last century, we've sort of ended up with two dominant schools of thought of addiction, right? The one is sort of the very classic one, meaning you're an alcoholic or an addict because you're a bad person, you're weak, you're of lower moral character, the classics, right? And then the more recent is this idea of it being a disease and they call it lots of different things, right? But it's, there's something in your brain that gets broken as a result of this. And I think the disease model was actually a really good step away from the moral failing model. Like it moved us a certain direction,

and then there's a direction that I think has been hugely beneficial. And like any model, it has its own limitations to it, right? You go on to say something that I think is really important about the broken brain idea, right? Because the broken brain idea, the disease model says you don't have a choice, right? In Alcoholics Anonymous, right, 12-step programs, you know, I'm powerless over alcohol, right? I have no ability. But you say something about the broken brain model. You say that in essence, the broken brain model is right. Addiction is not a choice. Instead, it's a summation of repeated choices that make a different choice harder to make for environmental,

biological, and historical reasons. It's deep learning. And I just loved that idea. I've talked to some of the same people on the show that you've had in your book, but say a little bit more about that. Yeah. I mean, I think that first things first is that I agree with you about the disease model and the intentions behind it, right? It came up in a time where we're throwing all these people in jail because they're bad people, because they are addicted to drugs. And we think that that's going to like solve their problems. It's like, they are addicted to drugs. And we think that that's going to like solve their problems. It's like, no, right. And so I think it's well intentioned. I think that it's downside though, is that there's plenty of examples where people are able to make choices. So a classic example

is the soldiers in Vietnam. There was this huge spike in addiction rates to heroin in Vietnam, in the Vietnam war. And so president Nixon, he launches this program called operation golden flow. And the deal is pretty simple. It's that, uh, if people who are addicted, our soldiers who are addicted to heroin, want to come back to the United States and leave war, they have to pass a urine test. So something like 15 to 20% of our soldiers in Vietnam were addicted to heroin. So you would think, okay, like if people can't make a choice here and it's a hundred percent of choice, we would have left 15 to 20% of our soldiers in Vietnam, right? Well, what ended up happening was

complete opposite. Every single soldier passed the urine test. And when they got home, the relapse rates among the people who were addicted were exceedingly low. They were like 5%. And the 5% who relapsed tended to be drug users before the Vietnam War. So what this suggests is that one, people have a choice and that two, elements of addiction may also be driven by our environment, back to the environment. And so then it's like, okay, what was Vietnam like during the war? Well, that sounds like hell. It's like, yeah, if I was in that hell, I might be wanted to do some drugs too, to escape. And so I think that you see addiction rates tend to rise and fall based on people's external and internal conditions. So I really see addiction

as a solution for people who are experiencing problems. Unfortunately, using a substance provides a solution in the short term. Like I said, with my drinking, right, that'll solve a problem faster than anything. But the problem is that it creates long term issues. Right? So unfortunately, when I drank, it's not like I would go, you know, donate my time to charities and also donate my money and read great books. Like I did stupid shit that ended up half ruined in my life, right? And that tends to be the story for most people. But I do think that knowing that there is an element of choice is helpful for people. It's not like people will say, oh, it's a choice.

It's like, well, that really, really simplifies it, you know? Yes. oh, it's a choice. It's like, well, that really, really simplifies it. You know? Yes. It's like, in a way, yes. But like, that is 99%, right? 100% wrong. It's like, if it was a choice, no one would make the choice. It's like, why is the person doing the behavior in the first place? And it's usually because it's solving a short-term problem. That is this massive problem that's going to have to take all these different means of solving. And by the way, it's really going to suck as you solve it in the long term, right? And so it's super complicated. But I do think that that also gives people a little bit of hope. So when you look at this really interesting study out of I think the University of New Mexico, and it basically found that the top reason people relapsed, it was a study of alcoholics for about a year. people relapsed. It was a study of alcoholics for about a year. It was because they believed wholeheartedly in the disease model. And they went, well, wait a minute, if I have a disease,

and I asked my doctor, how do I cure this thing? And my doctor goes, well, there's no cure for it. Why would I even try? Like, it's a foregone conclusion that I'm going to relapse, right? And so I do think the message that, you know, there is a little bit of hope, there's a lot of hope, actually. And there's also some personal agency, but also realizing like it's going to be hard, and it's going to take work, and it's going to take asking for help. You're going to have to be like, hey, I need help from people. You know, it's not always going to be easy. But I do think you see a much brighter outlook to for addiction. I'm Jason Alexander. And I'm Peter Tilden.

And together on the Really No Really podcast, our mission is to get the true answers to life's baffling questions like why they refuse to make the bathroom door go all the way to the floor. We got the answer. Will space junk block your cell signal? The astronaut who almost drowned during a spacewalk gives us the answer.

We talk with the scientist who figured out if your dog truly loves you and the one bringing back the woolly mammoth. Plus, does Tom Cruise really do his own stunts? His stuntman reveals the answer. And you never know who's going to drop by. Mr. Brian Cranston is with us today. How are you, too?

Hello, my friend. Wayne Knight about Jurassic Park. Wayne Knight, welcome to Really, No Really, sir. Bless you all. Hello, Newman. And you never know when Howie Mandel might just stop by to talk about judging. Really? That's the opening?

Really, no, really. Yeah, really. No, really. Go to reallynoreally.com. And register to win $500, a guest spot on our podcast, or a limited edition signed Jason bobblehead. It's called Really, No, Really, and you can find it on the iHeartRadio app, on Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. I agree with you. I mean, the great mystery to me is why some people recover and others don't, right? We can point to things.

We can look at people's environments, right? We can look at the social capital that they have. There's lots of explanations, right? But at the end of the day, there does seem to me to be something mysterious about it because you'll see some people who have all the trauma in the world, none of the social capital, none of the support, and they get sober. And then you'll see other people who have all the support in the world, all the social

capital, their trauma load isn't that high, and they don't, right? And so there is an element of choice in it, but the question is always how much choice, right? And I know in my own life, the amount of choice I Instead, it's a summation of repeated choices that make a different choice harder to make for all the reasons we've talked about, environmental, biological, and historical, right? I think that really speaks to it. I mean, that's my understanding to bring a spiritual word into this of karma, right? Karma to me is simply that a behavior that I do makes it easier to repeat again and again, hence the scarcity loop aspect of this, right? The more repeatable a behavior is, the more I repeat it, the more likely it is I'm going to do the same

thing in the future. It starts to cut a groove in the record, so to speak. Yeah. And I think that too, in the sense that it's kind of a mystery, I mean, I don't think that's unlike any behavior though, too. You know, it's like, why are some people really good with money and some people really bad with money, whether or not they're rich or poor? Right. Why are some people into X food and not into Y food? It's like, it's kind of these great mysteries of being the human. And when you apply addiction on to it, I think it makes it murky because it is something we study, but there's all these things about life that we just don't study that are equally vexing, you know? Totally. And I do think too, like, I want to kind of put a pin in the fact that it's important to have empathy because people think that like, if an addict is using a drug or drinking, it's an irrational decision. It's like,

no, it's not. Because if you're an addict or an alcoholic, using your substance of choice, it always improves your life in the short term, every single time. Right. Right? So you're going to get an immediate benefit. That is not an irrational decision in the short term. Right. In the long term it is. Yeah.

But you can't see that, right? And not to mention, I think most people who have an addiction, they don't start using a substance and their life immediately goes to shit. It never happens that way. No. Things are good for years and you get all these positive experiences from this thing or else you wouldn't do it. People don't do things that don't benefit them somehow. Right. Right.

Like I had years of drinking where drinking enhanced my life. Maybe have more interesting experiences. I was more open with people and fun at parties. I would think funnier things. I'm a writer. If I sat down on the keyboard, I'd probably write something different. A lot of times it was something more interesting than I normally write. And so I have all this evidence that alcohol does good things for me, right? Years of it. But then that starts to tip and I start to have repercussions some nights. And then over time, I have a greater ratio of bad nights to good nights.

But still in the back of my mind, I'm going, I got like a decade of evidence that this is a good thing. And if I can just get back there, things are going to be fine. But you can't get back there. Or you only get back there temporarily. Like if it didn't work at all, it's back to unpredictable rewards to some degree, right? Like if I drank and I didn't feel better ever, it would be easy to be like, well, that doesn't make any sense. Right. Right. But the fact is that it still does a little bit sometimes, right? Now, again,

if a sane person would see like, okay, it's not worth the trade off. And that's why I love, I think it may have been Mia Savalitz who proposes the idea of, you know, it being in essence a learning disorder, right? That a brain that's working fully correctly would be like, okay, that used to be good, but now it's really bad. And the downsides outweigh the pros. And I'm going to update my mental models around this thing and I'm going to learn. I'm going to stop doing it. But that doesn't seem to happen, at least not quickly and without great downside in the average addict or alcoholic. Exactly. She's great. One, let me say that. The

second part is that I think that happens with all sorts of things every day that you do, I do, everyone does. When you eat really unhealthy food, it's like, well, that was really enjoyable in the short term. Even though you know it's not going to be good for you in the long run. When people play slot machines in town, anytime you gamble, you're like, you know, you're probably going to lose, but it's like, well, that was still fun. Right. Right. It only becomes a problem when all of a sudden you're like, oh my God, I don't have enough money to cover my bills because I've, I've gambled so much. Right. Right. And so there's all these kinds of behaviors that just like at a certain point they tip for people and that's when it

becomes problematic. But that doesn't mean that behavior is problematic in general for most people most of the time. Right. Well, if we go back to the 2% idea, right, we all know that taking the stairs is a good idea. Yeah. And 2% of us are doing it. Right. So, you know, that's why I think thinking of addiction along a spectrum is a very helpful concept, right? Because we all have, depending on the activity of the behavior, you know, varying degrees of making good choices. Right. Right. DSM five, they don't use the word addiction. The DSM five, if people don't know, is like the Bible that psychiatrists use for diagnoses, but doesn't use the word addiction. It does use substance use disorder. And in order to figure out if a person has a substance use disorder,

it basically outlines 11 criteria, 11 questions, more or less. And if you have say, you know, one to four, you've got a mild case. If you've got five to whatever, seven, you got a medium case and eight or more, you got a medium case and eight or more, you got an extreme case or whatever they language they use. But what's fascinating about that is you can look at that and you can plug in all sorts of things that you do that you're like, ah, I wish I did this a little less. And it'll probably fall on some spectrum of that, what they consider use disorder, like pop in your cell phone habit, your relationship to your favorite drunk food, whatever it might be. Right. And so I really do think that reinforces the idea that there's all these things we do are on the ways that we can use games for positive and negative.

We've touched on food. You have some great things about stuff and information. But what I'd like to get to now, we may get to some of those things in the post-show conversation. What I'd like to talk about now is given now that we know this scarcity loop, what are ways that we start to bring ourselves out of it? Yeah. So if it's a bad behavior that falls into the scarcity loop, there's three big ways that we start to bring ourselves out of it? Yeah. So if it's a bad

behavior that falls into the scarcity loop, there's three big ways that I see starting from easiest to hardest. So the first way is just becoming aware of it. And so once you become aware of a behavior and that it sort of falls into this ancient loop, I think that oftentimes will reduce the frequency of it. So this is called the observer effect in science. Just by observing something, it tends to change. This is bad for scientists conducting studies. This is good for us when we want to change our own behaviors. So if you can identify something you're doing, you're going like, oh, this is falling into the scarcity loop. And by the way, it's not your fault because it's just your ancient brain like falling into this system that it's naturally attracted to, but it is your problem to solve,

right? So I think observing can be super helpful for people, it usually will reduce some frequency. And then number two is that you can change any three of the parts. And that'll usually reduce the frequency of the behavior. So you can alter the opportunity, you can alter the unpredictable rewards, or you can slow down the frequency of the behavior, slow down how fast you can alter the unpredictable rewards, or you can slow down the frequency of the behavior, slow down how fast you can do the behavior, basically. So for example, with opportunity, something as simple as like, if you've got a problem with, say, eating Oreos at night, taking away the opportunity to eat Oreos, i.e. getting them out of your house, like, you're going to do that less. Like it's

so simple, but like it works. DoorDash has ruined that though. And these meal delivery services, like it used to be so much simpler. Like you had to leave the house and now it's like, let me just bring up this thing on my phone and click, click, click. Totally true. And three ice cream sundaes arrive. Yeah. I mean, even something like, okay, so let's take an example of inserting pause. How can we make that more of a pain in the butt? Delete the app. Yeah. Right. Just deleting, not having the app right there. And you go, Oh my God, I got to reinstall it. And I have to remember my password. I don't remember my password. I'm going to have to create a new password. Like you're putting all these layers that that just reduces. I'm not saying that that's a guarantee. You're not going to get those ice creams, but I am saying it'll reduce the probability

that you will get those ice creams. Right. That basic rule of, you know, if you want to do more of something, decrease all the steps in between doing it. And if you want to do less of something, make it harder and harder in whatever creative ways you can come up with to make it difficult to do. Exactly. Exactly. Changing unpredictable rewards helps too. So for example, one of the reasons that our phones are so rewarding is all the colors are really stimulating. Like colors stimulate behavior, right? Green means go. Red means slow down. So putting your phone in grayscale, for example, one study showed reduces screen time by about 40 minutes, just making that boring, right? You don't get as much unpredictable rewards basically from the phone. And then slowing behaviors down, I think

this is probably the most powerful and that comes in, you know, with shopping, it could be, I'm only buying stuff in person. Or if I'm going to buy something online, I got a 72 hour holding period, right? Where I'm like, it's got to sit in the car for 72 hours. And I guarantee by the time you go back, you'll be like, wait, what did I put in the cart the other day? You won't need the item, right? When it comes to food, I think eating food that is less processed reduces how many calories you'll eat simply because the food is much slower to eat than junk food. So as we talked about with that executive, the third V and what makes a junk food successful

is velocity. The faster a food is to eat, the more a person will eat of the food. That's good for the wallets of the junk food industry. It's not good for our waistlines. So eating less junk food and switching over to whole and sort of less processed foods, people eat fewer calories. With cell phones and pause, there's an app I love called clear space. What it does is like you choose the apps that you have a problem opening the ones where you're in like the grocery store line, and you just find yourself on and you're like, wait, how did that happen? Right? The ones you reflexively take out, what it does is you choose the apps you want kind

of restricted when you go to open them, it basically makes you pause. It goes, Hey, did you actually want to open this app? And you go, yes. And then it goes, Okay, let's like, wait for a minute makes you breathe for like says like breathe, it's 15 seconds, then it shows you this nice quote about how like, you know, your life is going by as you're on your phone or something. And then you have to select how much time you actually want to spend in the app. So you can't just fall down the rabbit hole of it. And that has been a great one for people. Yeah, I downloaded that app after reading the book and it's great. My remaining phone vice such it is, I'm pretty much completely off social media. You know, I don't play games

very much. I mean, a little bit is just compulsively for no reason at all, checking my email every time I'm bored just again and again and again, it's the scarcity loop 100%, right? Because every once in a while, when I open my email, I'm like, oh, wow, there's this really great thing in here. You know, somebody said something really nice, or I found out that I've been asked to do this thing or whatever, right? Unpredictable rewards. Yeah, man. Unpredictable reward. And I can do it again and again and again and again. It seems to be the one sort of digital thing that I tame it back. You know, I get to the point where I'm like, okay, I've gotten to the point now where

I've like, I take time off. I can be without it for a week, two weeks, but the minute I have it back, it creeps its way back up to this sort of almost like a tick, you know? So I found that app to be really, really helpful in A, causing me to me to pause be being able to say how many times a day I want to open it. So then I'm like, oh, well, I said I'm only going to do it two more times today and it's 10 a.m. I'm probably going to want to check email again, you know, and then like you said that it limits the time that I'm in it. So which is not for email that important because I'm usually in it for like 30 seconds because I checked it, you know, and then like you said, that it limits the time that I'm in it. So, which is not for email that important. Cause I'm usually in it for like 30 seconds. Cause I checked it, you know, eight minutes ago. Yeah. For people it's called clear space and that's awesome. Here's a great example. You telling me about how you'd kind of reduced all these

other apps and like, but you still had the one. I have a great story and I'm going to use his name because we have competitions and giving each other shit is my friend Jason McCarthy, who runs go rock. He founded the company go rock. He was like, so I deleted Instagram from my phone because I was using it too much. And he's like, it was good for, you know, a handful of days. He's like, and then I freaking found myself like compulsively checking LinkedIn. It's like, I haven't been on LinkedIn for years. And I'm like going into LinkedIn because it's given me that unpredictable, like what has someone said? What is someone, what can I find on LinkedIn? I got to scroll something for those unpredictable rewards. And so I think it's like being conscious that once you trade one, you probably are going

to go looking for another. And then you got to kind of find a way to put rails on that. That's where I think clear space is nice because you just have to be more intentional with the ones you do want, you know. That's great. So listener, in thinking about all of that and the other great wisdom from today's episode, if you were going to isolate just one top insight or thing to do that you're taking away, what would it be? Remember that little by little, a little becomes a lot. And a habit for me that has accrued in benefit over time is meditation. However, one of the things that gets in our way of building a steady meditation practice is that very striving, right? Of course, we're doing it because we want certain benefits.

But in the moment of actually meditating, we need to let striving go and focus on just being there and experiencing it no matter what's happening. It becomes not enjoyable because I'm trying to make something happen, some special moment. We want to let go of that. So if you want to stop dreading meditation and actually find it enjoyable, check out my free meditation guide at goodwolf.me slash calm. You know, I found for me that that pause and I've used other apps that do it right, you know, some of them completely shut the thing off. But for me, generally, if I have to stop and go, Do I really want to do this? I usually am able to be like, No, I don't and set it aside, you know, but I like clear spaces,

because it's not binary, right? It's not like completely locked out. It's just be more intentional about when you choose to use it and why and for how long. Yeah, exactly. So the third to land the plane here on the question, the third and top level thing with kind of getting out of the scarcity loop is, so I told you about the Thomas Sintal guy. Now he does this research on pigeons and he can basically get these pigeons to play this slot machine pigeon gambling game. What he does is he gives them a choice

between two games, okay? And the first game, it's predictable. So it gives them food every other time they peck a light, gives them like 15 units of food. The second game is like a slot machine. So about every fifth peck, they get 20 units of food. So they get is like a slot machine. So about every fifth pack, they get 20 units of food. So they get a little bit more food, but not by much. And it's also random. Like they don't know it's about every fifth one, totally unpredictable. And you would

think that because animals, they want to find the most resources they can, right? For the least amount of effort. This is called optimal foraging theory. You would think they would all play this predictable game. Cause if you play that, you're going to get more food over time, like a lot more over time. Right. But what he finds is that 97% of these pigeons, they end up playing the slot machine game, sit there and they play the game. So he keeps these pigeons generally in standard lab cages. They're relatively small. They're alone in there. And he decides that they're going to put the pigeons together in this giant cage. That's more like the wild, right? Like they can kind of live a wild pigeon life in there. They're with some other pigeons.

They can build nests. They can go on cliffs. They got like trees. They got like all this stuff, you know? So they're living like a pigeon is evolved to live more or less, then he puts them back in the game and lets them choose between the smart game or the gambling game. Every single pigeon chooses the smart game after that. And I'm like, Okay, well, why the hell is that? And he tells me there's this theory called the optimal stimulation theory. And it basically says that no matter the species from humans to pigeons to rats to whatever, we need a certain amount of stimulation in our life. And if we don't get that stimulation from somewhere, we go searching for it. And so when you think about a creature, whether it's a human or a pigeon living the life they evolved to live, which for humans, we were for all the time,

we were mostly outside, we were in these bands together where we had to like really be social and work together. We had to put in physical effort every day, like we talked about in early part of the podcast. Things weren't always easy, right? We were always kind of doing something. We were looking for food, doing all this stuff.

We live much differently now. And so his argument was like, when you think of humans today, we're a little bit like the pigeons in the small cages, you know, and we go searching for stimulation from bad behaviors, from things that fall into the scarcity loop, be it drugs and alcohol, be it gambling, be it spending way too much time on our phones and other digital media, insert all these different other bad behaviors. So his point was like, if you can find ways to insert stimulation into your life and find like

kind of greater meaning beyond the behaviors that we tend to fall into, that can usually reduce a lot of the bad stuff. So mine was alcohol. And it's like, when I quit alcohol, it's like, if nothing changes, nothing changes. I had to make massive life changes. Right. Right. And so I started exercising more, spent more time with friends. I had to make massive life changes. Right. Right. And so I started exercising more, spent more time with friends. I started spending way more time outside. I also, you know, one of the reasons I drank is that I've just been always drawn to extreme experiences. And so it's like, well, I got to find that from somewhere now. So I like to do stuff outdoors for extended periods of time. I like to travel to kind of interesting places

in order to scratch that itch in a way that is enhancing my life and not hurting my life. I think that is a great place to wrap up, right? Because it speaks to all the way back to the wolf parable, right? It speaks to the choices that we make. And my experience is the more good choices I make, it just naturally becomes easier not to make bad choices. It's just a natural sort of law when I'm doing things that, like you said, enhance my life in general. All the sort of difficult things tend to sort of fade to the background, and it's far easier to be the person I want to be. Yeah, totally. You and I are going to continue in the post-show conversation.

I think we're going to talk a little bit about how to have a sane relationship with stuff and the pros and cons of sort of gamifying life. We've all heard you should be gamifying your life. It makes things better. Well, maybe not. And listeners, if you'd like access to that post-show conversation, you'd like to get some ad-free episodes, special community meetings we do, and the chance to support something that's valuable to you go to one you feed.net slash join michael thanks so much i've really enjoyed this conversation i really enjoyed your book yeah it was a lot of fun thanks for having me If what you just heard was helpful to you, please consider making a monthly donation to support the One You Feed podcast. When you join our membership community with this monthly pledge, you get lots of exclusive members-only benefits.

It's our way of saying thank you for your support. Now, we are so grateful for the members of our community. We wouldn't be able to do what we do without their support, and we don't take a single dollar for granted. To learn more, make a donation at any level, and become a member of the One You Feed community, go to oneyoufeed.net slash join. The One You Feed podcast would like to sincerely thank our sponsors for supporting the show. I'm Jason Alexander. And I'm Peter Tilden. And together, our mission on the Really Know Really podcast is to get the true answers to life's baffling questions like

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