The Rich Roll Podcast - The Scarcity Brain: Michael Easter On How To Rewire Your Habits to Thrive with Enough

Episode Date: February 19, 2024

In a world saturated with comforts, overstimulation, and the perpetual allure of convenience, a crisis has quietly emerged. It is the pervasive influence of the “Scarcity Brain” that wires our minds to crave more. Michael Easter, an author, investigative journalist, and UNLV professor, offers insights to rectify the craving mindset in his books, The Comfort Crisis and the New York Times bestseller Scarcity Brain. Michael reveals the driving psychological aspect behind our technological compulsions—exploiting the scarcity loop—comprising components of opportunity, unpredictable rewards, and quick repeatability. Our evolutionary origins in scarcity clash with our present reality of abundance. The conversation extends to Michael’s journey with sobriety, exploring the scarcity loop’s impact on addictive behaviors. It delves into strategies for reducing addictive behaviors, achieving balance with technology, and addressing the comfort crisis. We also discuss social media’s impact on the brain, minimalism, and technological addictions. Understanding the psychological loop can transform our relationship with the digital world, and recognizing these behaviors is crucial for positive change. The hope is that this revelatory conversation equips you with tools to identify scarcity loops, understand your interactions, and reverse these behaviors.  Show notes + MORE Watch on YouTube Newsletter Sign-Up Today’s Sponsors: LMNT: Get a FREE sample pack here 👉 drinkLMNT.com/RICHROLL Eight Sleep: Get $200 OFF the Pod 3 Cover 👉 EightSleep.com/RICHROLL  AG1: Get a FREE 1-year supply of Vitamin D3+K2 & 5 FREE AG1 Travel Packs👉 drinkAG1.com/richroll Squarespace: Use code RichRoll to save 10%  👉Squarespace.com/RichRoll  On: Get 10% OFF 👉 on.com/RICHROLL

We still have that DNA that sort of pushes us to do the next easiest, most comfortable thing. Companies know what schedule of rewards is really going to capture people's attention. Every app that I spend too much time on, it's what makes it work. I sat down with Michael Easter, a professor, an investigative journalist, a behavior change expert, and the author of The Comfort Crisis and Scarcity Brain. Our brain is almost quote unquote programmed to sort of fall into this thing because it was so important for our survival for all of time. This conversation will leave you, I think, with a new lens on the world that you will never be able to unsee.

If you're always on media, your ideas are coming from others. And if you don't have the technology, you can't function well in society. So it's almost like we kind of become a slave to these things, which is probably the most depressing thing I've ever said in my life. Really happy to have you here today. I've been looking forward to meeting you for a long time. I love the work that you've been doing. It dovetails perfectly into so many subjects that I

care about. And, you know, I've heard you on a number of other podcasts, so it's delightful to meet you. Thank you for coming. Yeah, likewise. Thanks for having me here, man. And you're a sober guy. I am a sober guy. Yeah, you have a pretty interesting kind of backstory, family history with that, don't you? Yeah, I do. So, the family story is that my dad went to rehab and my mom got sober. So I'll give you some background on that is that my dad goes to rehab and my parents met, you know, when they're in their partying phase and the rehab facility gives my mom a book. They say, I want you to read this book because this is what she, what your father

or her husband is going to be reading while he's in rehab. And so she goes, okay, whatever. Because the idea is that if she reads this book, she'll kind of know what he's going through. So she's at home one night, she's sitting in the bathtub and she's drinking a gin and tonic and she goes, all right, I'll read the rehab book here. And she starts reading it, flipping page after page. And eventually she just goes, oh, wait a minute. This totally all applies to me as well. So she realizes she needs to get sober too. And my dad managed to stay sober for about, you know, two, three weeks, which was just enough time to impregnate my mom and skip town as actively addicted people tend to do. But my mom has stayed sober ever since.

Wow. Yeah. The message is for those who want it, not necessarily for those who need it. Totally. Yeah. And so do you have a relationship with your dad? I don't. You don't? No. I think I've maybe seen him twice in my life. I don't think I've heard from him since I was maybe eight. But part of me getting sober too is I never really felt many resentments toward him. I've sort of come to view it as, you know, maybe he was doing me a favor realizing that he didn't have the capability to be in that role in any way that was going to do any good. Right. I would rather have someone not be in my life than someone who's in my life who was maybe sort of a drag on my life. So I'll give him props for that.

Yeah. Well, that's a charitable interpretation. We try. So how did you find yourself in a problematic relationship with substances that required sobriety yourself? You know, the first time that I ever drank, I was maybe 15 and it was just right out of the gate. I was like, oh, this is awesome. Like, this is a great time. Alcohol just allowed me to really feel sort of wild and free, sort of like I could explore the edges of life, if you will.

I was always the type of person where my favorite drink was the next one. And when you drink like that, that can lead to some long-term consequences eventually. I would say that, you know, my drinking, I would always overdrink, but it was within the realm of acceptability, probably until I was maybe 23, maybe 22. At that point, it just started tipping into something darker, I would say. And it took me a while to get sober. I mean, I had fits and starts for sure. I came up with all kinds of sort of strange solutions to try and drink less. Shocking. Shocking that you would do that. Yeah. Shocking. Like, oh, maybe if I just, you know, here's a crazy one,

just because to give you an example of how a person like me's mind works. I started the night and I go, okay, I got these six coins and I'm going to put them all in my back left pocket. And every time I have a drink, I'm going to transfer a coin to my right pocket. And when I have no more coins in my back left pocket, then I'm done. Then I can't drink anymore. So I go out to the bar and, you know, I have my first drink. So I transfer the coin. I have another one. I transfer the coin. And then someone goes, hey, you care if I buy you a round? And my brain goes, well, that doesn't count. It's the back pocket one because I didn't buy it, right? And so then I'm coming up with all different ways

to not transfer the coins. And you're just like, how does someone's mind work like that, right? But it does. And so the answer for me is that I had to get sober. And I was 27 or 28 when I got sober. And it really was for me realizing that, you know, I kind of had a moment where I could see downfield that if I were to continue that behavior, that I was probably going to die early. Now I realized that that would probably be easier

in the short term because, you know, for me, nothing fixes a problem like the first drink, but it wasn't going to be a good path. And I kind of saw that I had this opportunity to really just like something switched in my head where I was just like, I was kind of in to get sober and I just started doing work to make that happen. And thank God it did. Did you do that through AA and kind of traditional 12 step or did you have some alternative modality? Yeah. Yeah. I haven't actually talked about AA, but since I'm on this podcast, yeah. So I called my mom actually.

That was for me when it was like, okay, you're gonna do something about this, right? Because my mom never had any clue that I had a drinking problem. So I wake up that morning, everything's a mess. I'm like, like I said, I could see downfield and I called her and I just said, hey, like I need to talk to you. I have a drinking problem. And she's just like,

what? I'm like, yeah. And I tell her, give her some details. And she's like, oh, okay. Well, here's what I did when I was in your position. And that led me to AA. I got active in the program. I found a really kick-ass sponsor, really great guy, fascinating guy because he had a Terminal 4 canceler. And I had no idea until three months in that I'd been working with him. And that just blew my mind. I'm like, you know the clock is ticking and you're devoting some of those ticks to this idiot right here, like that just blew my mind. And I think events like that kind of make you realize how serious that is, but also make you very grateful. Yeah, that's beautiful. I mean, that's a perfect example of service in

action and you being someone who probably felt like this is so indulgent of me to be bothering this guy who has real problems, right? But recognizing perhaps later as you become more recovered that him talking to you and him not having to obsess on his own problems was of service to him as well, which is kind of how it works. Yeah, really amazing, cool guy. And I really owe my life to him in a lot of ways. Yeah. That's beautiful. Well, I certainly relate to your interior experience, trying to figure all that stuff out in the insanity of the alcoholic brain. But, you know, I think that in looking at your work and reading your books, it's clear, like this sort of recovery message is interlineated, like, throughout everything that you do. Like, it's pretty clear. Anybody who's sober can identify

that. And I think, you know, as a sober person, anybody who has achieved or maintained sobriety has experienced that journey from kind of broken to whole or from despair to repair and understands that discomfort is sort of the price to a better life and pain is a catalyst to growth and everything you want is on the other side of hard and discipline is freedom and all these kinds of tropes that we hear about.

And that's certainly a huge part of the comfort crisis, you know, aspect of the work that you've done. This idea that life improves in lockstep with your willingness to invite hardship into your life. Yeah. I mean, I do think the story of a lot of improvement and improving your life in the context of today is that you often have to go through short-term discomfort to get a long-term benefit. So in the comfort crisis, you know, I talk about how as the world has become more and more comfortable,

we've lost a lot of the things that kept us healthy, that kept us happy. And humans evolved, I think, to do the next easiest, most comfortable thing. And that's because that made sense for all of time because we evolved in these environments that were uncomfortable, they were hard. And so if you were the type of person who,

you know, I'm not going to move any more than I have to. When I have this food, I'm going to eat a little more than I need. I'm going to try and stay as warm as possible, all these different things. You would have a survival advantage. And I think we still have that DNA that sort of pushes us to do the next easiest,

most comfortable thing in a world that has become comfortable in a lot of ways you know so you think about movement we've really engineered a ton of movement out of our days our food system is very different the fact that not only do we not necessarily have to physically work to get our food but also the type of food that we eat is very hyper palatable and calorie dense and there's a good reason for that, right? We evolved to crave those things. We spend 93% of our time indoors, which humans evolved outside.

We were outdoorsy in the sense that we lived outside. And I think that removing us from that has had some mental health repercussions. And yeah, I think you just look at our environments that we live in today, big picture, they are so much different than how we live for two and a half million years as humans. We're coming up toant messaging that we're exposed to 24-7 that's telling us that the happiness, the purpose, the fulfillment that we seek is on the other side of comfort, luxury, materialism, and relaxation, and vacations, and material goods, and foods that are not in service to our well-being. Yeah. And I really liked how you said we kind of have to construct these things that keep us healthy. I mean, that's absolutely true. I mean, consider exercise. Like exercise is something we

made up after the industrial revolution, basically, and put it at scale. Like it has never made sense to move for the sake of moving for all of time. But now it's like, okay, we engineer movement out of our days. We realize, hey, these people who sit most, they seem to get more sick than people who still move a lot. So maybe we should make something up that gets the people who are inactive to be active. We'll call it exercise. We'll build a building where you go in and you lift stuff that is heavy for the sake of being heavy. And then you run on this motorized belt and blah, blah, blah, all these things, right? I mean, we just invented it up. We have to invent these constructs to keep ourselves healthy. That doesn't mean they're bad at all, but it is a really fascinating time. And it's also a great time,

right? I would rather have to choose to exercise than to be forced into a serious, serious amount of movement every single day, like people were in the past. So we're in this time where we have so many opportunities to live a completely wonderful life. But the downside is that there's a lot of temptation hanging around, right? Whether it's in the form of food, of inactivity, of drugs and alcohol, of whatever it might be, of pursuing status over social media. There's a lot of things that can get us in trouble at the same time. Almost everything can get us in trouble. Totally. And it's a scenario in which from the moment you're born, we're inundated with that kind of programming and messaging. And so the amount of

like will that you have to summon to combat that, to invite goodness into your life is almost superhuman. I was listening to the podcast that you did with Stephen Bartlett, and he reflected on that notion as something that made him more compassionate for the human condition. And I think I agree with that. It's like, it's hard. It's hard when every day, subliminally, we're being programmed to do all these things that are making us more lonely, more disconnected, more addicted, more divorced from the things that make us feel good in body, mind, and spirit. Yeah.

I also have a ton of empathy because I think there's also, you know, everybody has something, something they overdo. You can visually see some things and those people get criticized. So for example, if someone is obese, it's like, people will be like, oh man, look at that person. They eat so much or whatever it might be. But I'm sure that that person saying that has something that they overdo that we just aren't aware of, right? We kind of have a world where everyone has something, everyone's worshiping something. And so I think that realizing that the cards are very much stacked against us and you yourself probably have something that you're maybe overdoing a little bit, helps generate empathy.

Yeah, of course. I've said this before, but I think the time that we find ourselves in, if there's a silver lining in all of this, has sort of allowed people to have a more broad understanding and empathetic perspective on the nature of addiction. Like when I got sober, things have changed. We're in Los Angeles. It's very permissive around recovery. But still, like if you're an alcoholic or a drug addict, you were like this person over here

and those are what addicts are like or that's what an alcoholic looks like. And now because of social media and the iPhone and our digital interfaces and the gamification of everything, almost every single human being can relate to some level of compulsivity where they lack control over their best interests, right? And I think that

that's allowed people to say, wow, like maybe I'm not sticking a needle in my arm, but at the same time, like I have a greater connection to powerlessness over certain things in my life that I think has bred a little bit more compassion around the notion of what addiction is and understanding that addiction lives on a spectrum and everybody can probably identify bred a little bit more compassion around the notion of what addiction is and understanding that addiction lives on a spectrum and everybody can probably identify where they fall on that spectrum somewhere, you know, in the middle, if not like, you know, to the severe side, which I would count myself as. Right.

I think that one thing that's interesting about addiction is like, okay, who determines who's an addict and who isn't? Well, someone with a clipboard, right? It's a subjective. Or an AA, they say it's up to you. You have to make that decision for yourself. I mean, even if you look at the DSM-5, they have the, they don't even use the word addiction. First off, they use substance use disorders and they have these 11 criteria, right? And you go down the list and you're like, okay, if you meet, you know, one through four, you have a mild case. If you meet five through say seven of these, you got a medium case and you know, eight or more, you've got a severe case of substance use disorder. You know, I see that and I'm like, okay, I started with my drinking and I'm like, oh yeah,

we got a severe case here. Yep. That was a severe. But if I start to run other habits, I have that I want to run other habits I have that I want to quit through that, I'm like, well, hell, like I'm on the border of, you know, mild and moderate with this thing I do. I'm moderate with this thing I do. And so I think that that makes you realize, I mean, like we've said, two things.

Cards are stacked against us in a lot of ways, but also again, that everyone has kind of something. Yeah. With respect to the comfort crisis aspect of ways, but also again, that everyone has kind of something. Yeah. With respect to the comfort crisis aspect of this, yes, we see the health and fitness and the wellness industry exploding as a result of people recognizing that, you know, they need to combat all of these social forces. We see the explosion of not just marathons, but ultra marathons now, and all these like crazy, super long endurance races where people are paying money and going out of their way and

training to do hard things because on some level, the reward there is a greater connection with oneself, one's internal capacity, and the benefits of, you know, enduring something difficult and what that does to one's self-esteem or sense of their own kind of personal potential and possibility. Yeah, so as part of the scarcity brain, I talked to this guy whose name is Thomas Lentol, and he's this psychologist who's at the University of Kansas, Kentucky. Sorry, I messed that up. It's a K place.

It's a K place, yeah. It's one of those K schools. He got his PhD in 1968. So he kind of came up through this line with BF Skinner and he's in his eighties. He still is in the lab every single day. He's really one of our top minds in psychology. And I was talking to him about this exact phenomenon. And he said, you know, I think that probably humans value things that we have to work harder to get, where there's more effort. So if you think about humans in the past where food was scarce, right? You needed food to survive. And you had these times where like, yeah, you could find it. It

was easy. But you had other times where you couldn't find it for a day, for two days. And you're out across this landscape looking for it and it's harsh and you're cold and you know that if you don't find this food, you're gonna die. When you find that food, it's a freaking party, right? It's like the greatest food you've ever had in your life. It could be the exact same food that you found say a week before, but it was easy to find,

but you value that food that was harder to find. We need that to encourage future persistence. This is his idea, right? And you still see this translated today. So he's a professor and we were talking about students and grades. And he said, you know, I see this in myself, whereas students will value an A they got in, say, physics far more than the A that they got in, say, English, because the physics A was that much harder to get, yet they're worth the exact same point value. So why is that? Because we value things that are harder for us to achieve. And so

I think that when you think about something like an ultra marathon or whatever it might be, having to go through that hardship, that short-term discomfort of that, on the other side of that, you get a much deeper and greater reward. Knowing that and understanding that anybody who's endured something like that has benefited from it, why are we still in a situation where all of the messaging, all of the billboards, all of the television commercials, all of the commercial concerns are informing us otherwise? You know, like, why don't we have billboards up that I guess there's no financial, like, what is the corporate interest that's going to benefit from telling us to like, not buy stuff and like, do hard stuff? I don't know. Yeah. You know? Yeah. I mean, I honestly

think that is the main driver is like the corporate interest. But, you know, humans came from these environments of scarcity where everything we needed to survive was scarce and it was hard to find. And so if you were the type of person who would overdo what you needed to survive from food to stuff to information to the amount of status that you could get, that would give you a survival advantage. And I think that that gets preyed upon in our modern world in a way where we have an abundance of all these things that we're built to crave. Yet we don't really realize, like we don't have an upper governor for those types of things, right? We throw out a third of our food, right? More than 70% of people are overweight or obese. The average home has more

than 10,000 items in it, right? You can influence millions of people in a single tweet or Instagram post, well, X now, whatever it might be. And so it's kind of a strange new world for us where we're really having to grapple with abundance. And the other thing is that, like, look, in the past, like I was just saying, to get those things that help us survive, whether it's that possession, whether it's that morsel of food, it took that physical buy-in. You had to do a hard thing to get it, right? And now you don't. And so I think that that has changed as well.

And we have an evolutionary mismatch there. Right. All of our evolutionary instincts are now orthogonal to what's in our best interest. Yeah. Which is a very strange experiment to be running at scale on the human race. It's totally- In the Western developed world. It's totally weird. And I think that we have a hard time realizing this.

There's this concept in the comfort crisis I write about called prevalence-induced concept change. And it basically finds that as humans experience fewer and fewer problems, we don't actually become more satisfied. We just lower our definition of what we consider a problem. So our problems sort of become more hollowed out over time as the world improves. So it's kind of like today's comfort is going to be tomorrow's discomfort. We're constantly moving the goalpost and we don't necessarily see this. It all happens unconsciously. So I'll give you an example of this in my life is that for the comfort crisis, I go and I spend a month in the Arctic. And I've told this story before, but I think it's an important one is that when I get

on the plane to fly from Las Vegas up to Alaska, so I can go in the Arctic, it's terrible because flying in planes sucks, right? Chair is too small. The movies in the seat back, they suck. The snacks are terrible. The coffee's not good. back. They suck. The snacks are terrible. The coffee's not good. There's a screaming baby. If you want to go to the bathroom, you got to walk and you're in this tiny little closet. You're trying to go to the bathroom. It's not a fun experience. Then I go spend a month in the Arctic. And it's like, if I want to go to the bathroom, I got to hike out on the tundra and bring the rifle because there's grizzly bears. We just like don't have enough food. So I'm starving. I'm freezing cold the entire time. If I want a drink, I got to hike down to the stream and hike it all the way back up to camp. I'm bored out of my mind the whole time.

And so then when I get back on the plane to go from Alaska back to Vegas, it's like, what do you think my experience of that is like? Sure. It's just pure luxury. Oh God. It's the most amazing thing. Yeah. There's pretzels. And I's just pure luxury. Oh God, it's the most amazing thing. Yeah. There's pretzels. And I'm just like, oh my God, these are the most amazing pretzels I've ever had. I hadn't sat in a chair for more than a month.

So now all of a sudden you're like, wow, this airplane chair is unbelievably comfortable. Wow. You're watching these movies that are just blowing your mind with how amazing they are because you've done, you've had literally no stimulation

in the form of screens for a month. And so I think it's kind of a long way of saying that, one, we live in an amazing time. Because like, by the way, this is all happening in a tube of steel that's hurtling through the air at like 500 miles an hour. But two, sometimes you need to do things to help you yourself realize that.

Because it's like, I had never thought about how amazing planes were, right? I was just like, oh yeah, this is like a shitty experience that I have to go through. But they're not. They're absolutely incredible, but we don't necessarily see that because we get born into it. I have a great, great, great, I don't know how many greats are behind it, aunt. Her name is Nellie Unthank. and she was living in Missouri and she was Mormon. So the Mormons were getting driven out of Missouri. Okay. So what they do is they decide we're going to go West. We're going to go to Utah. So you have all these Mormons who get hand carts, which they have to pull by hand and move across the plains to get to Utah. Now they leave in like April and it's a

four month journey. So by the time it's October, she's right outside of Salt Lake City. She's almost there, like within 100 miles. Well, a blizzard hits and kills both of her parents. It freezes her legs, but she gets rescued.

So they bring her to Salt Lake City and she has to get her legs sawed off without any anesthetic. And this is 1850. Four months. By the way, your parents die in the process and you have to get your legs sawed off. And there's these reports about her that she never complained like her entire life because that was just how it was. And then, you know, I'll get on a plane from St. Louis to Salt Lake City and be like,

oh my God, it was 15 minutes late. Yeah, the half-life on that experience tends to be very short too, right? So the luxurious experience on the return trip from the Arctic is mind-blowing, but how long before you're annoyed the next time you have to go through TSA or something like that, right? Like our brains are unable to kind of retain

that preferential lens on just how amazing our lives are in this modern world. The other kind of like trope with that is how amazed everyone was the first time you could get Wi-Fi on a plane. And then five minutes later, just total irritation because it doesn't work right. You know, like you just forget. It's just, you know, it's like we are hardwired, you know, evolutionarily in a way that is a total mismatch for the world that we now find ourselves in. Yeah. In so many ways. I mean, I think to your point, it's almost kind of like, I don't know if you had this when you got sober, but sort of the pink cloud where you kind of get out of the worst of it.

And then it's like, just everything is the best that it could ever be. But then time happens and that kind of goes away. So I think it's like, what can you, what can we do to kind of maintain that? You know, I think it's like, if you're going to exercise, you don't just exercise once and like, you got it, right? It's like, how can you consistently find ways to put yourself into moments that make you realize these things and that kind of push back against all of this. Well, that prevalence-induced concept change that you referred to is just an indication that we're not meant to live problem-free, even though in our minds we think, wouldn't it be great if I could retire to a deserted island and, you know, sit on a lounge chair for the rest of my life,

that would not be an ideal experience. We're meant to have problems in our life and confront them and be challenged by them. And as our world becomes more convenient, those problems tend to be more trivial and we search them out when we don't actually have them so there is some kind of evolutionary thing about like seeking out problems even when we don't really have any real problems that we need to concern ourselves with yeah exactly the prevalence induced concept change you can kind of think about it as the science of first world problems is how i like to put it once you take a problem away your brain automatically just looks for the next one. But if things keep getting better over time, then your problems become sillier and sillier over time.

And then you feel guilty and ashamed that you're complaining about those problems. Well, some people do. I wish everyone did. Yeah, that's true. The evolutionary angle though, I mean, I think the scientist who I talked to and his name is David Levari.

He's at Harvard about this. He's the guy who discovered it. He basically said that, you know, if you think about it from an evolutionary context, if you're always looking for the next problem and trying to solve it, that gives you a survival advantage when the world is actually like tough and harsh, right? You're like, okay, do we have enough food? Let's figure this out. Okay, we got enough food. Great. Oh, but what about our shelter?

Is it safe? Are we going to survive this? Okay. We got to fix that. Right. If you're constantly looking for problems in a world that is full of them, you're probably going to survive. And we still kind of have that adaptation. Right. The antidote being gratitude practice, I think. Yeah. You know, and, and like being of service as a cure to breaking the loop of the self-obsessed mind. Yeah. You know, which is, those are just like recovery tools. Mm-hmm. You exploring this comfort crisis idea

really overlaps perfectly with this scarcity brain notion. Like they're very closely kind of intertwined with each other. So explain what the scarcity loop is and kind of how you became aware of this and interested enough that you thought it would provide the basis for a book. Yeah. So the scarcity loop is basically a three-part behavior loop

that you can think of as like the serial killer of moderation. Because like everyone knows everything is fine in moderation. But then, all right. a three-part behavior loop that you can think of as like the serial killer of moderation, right? Because like everyone knows everything is fine in moderation, but then, all right. Yeah, like we're terrible at that. We're terrible at it. I'm the worst. You know, anybody who has any kind of addiction issues, you know, that is just not applicable.

Totally, so I get interested in that question. And, you know, I'm a journalist, so I'm just always observing the world. And when I see something that doesn't make sense, I go, how does that work? So I live in Las Vegas. Las Vegas is a strange town. Let me first say that. Yeah, we were chatting about that earlier.

I don't know how you do it, man. I would just go out of my mind. Well, if you're someone who likes to observe strange things then hey you found a town for yeah you're never gonna run out of me yeah to me it's like the dark underbelly of the human machine yeah in a way i mean look the town wasn't built on winners let's just say that right but so of all the strange things i see there i've always thought the strangest was the slot machines because people just play them like forever they will play them over and over and over. And they're all across town. They're in like the gas stations,

the grocery stores, whatever. You know, I'll be filling up my car at like 7 a.m. and there's someone in the gas station playing slot machine. And so I want to know how it works because it doesn't make any damn sense. Right, everyone knows the house always wins. Like the town wouldn't exist if that weren't true.

So long story short is that I talked to one person in the gaming industry who tells me to talk to another. You kind of go through this loop of people. And I ended up at this casino on the edge of town in Vegas. It's brand new. It's cutting edge. It's got all the coolest stuff.

But the wacky part is that it is not a fully open casino to the public. Like it's a real casino, but it's used entirely for human behavior research. It's like a living, breathing Skinner box. Yes. That's a good, that's a great way to put it. I wish I would've used that line in the book. Damn. Well, you can, you can borrow it. Yeah. Just credit me. Go ahead. I'm consulting you before my next book. So while I'm there, I talked to this guy who is a slot machine designer. And he teaches courses on how to design games and slot machines.

And so he's kind of the savant about how do you push people into more, right? This behavior they do over and over and over, despite knowing that they're probably going to lose in the long term. And slot machines work on that three-part system called the scarcity loop. So it's got these three parts. It's got opportunity, it's got unpredictable rewards, and it's got quick repeatability. So with opportunity, it's like, you know you're going to get something of value at some point, right? This offers you an opportunity to get something good. So with a slot machine, it's money. Unpredictable rewards, you know you'll get that valuable thing at some point,

but you don't know when, you don't know how valuable it's going to be. And then three, quick repeatability, you can just repeat the behavior immediately, right? So think of a slot machine, it's like I can win money, I play this game as the reels roll, I don't know if I'm going to lose the money, I might win a couple bucks off my dollar bet, or I might win like $2,000. It's a crazy range of outcomes. And then once the reels fall, I can immediately repeat that behavior. Now, this becomes really important. And this casino, it's not just funded by gambling companies. It's funded by a lot of other big tech companies, because what you can learn from this system and other systems that are embedded in gambling can help you get people doing a lot of other irrational things

over and over and over. So it's really, it's what makes social media work. It's what makes dating apps work. When it gets put into sports betting, sports betting really climbs. When it gets put into financial apps, you start to see the use and frequency of financial apps go up. But in the book, I also argue, been embedded in our food system.

It's in so many different places today. And I think it's one of the key reasons you find that people today struggle with moderation because we have these places figuring this whole thing out. And by the way, this system doesn't just hook humans, it hooks all animals. If you give animals a gambling game versus a game that's predictable, they will choose the game that mimics a slot machine

and play it over and over and over. It's really depressing and insidious, this. But once you kind of understand this template, this three-pronged thing, you can layer it on top of almost anything that you see out in the world. Like it really changes how you perceive your relationship with every app

that you open on your phone or every TV commercial that you see. It is the digital version or the analog practical version of the right combination of salt, sugar, and fat in a certain food to light up your brain in a certain way that makes it impossible to just have one chip. Oh, yeah, totally. And for me, it was, you know, I go into this Skinner box, as you put it, and talk to this guy. And, you know, I kind of learned about it. And as I'm leaving, he goes, you know, this is a really powerful system, one. And two, by the way,

it's not just in slot machines. I mean, it's in a lot of other places. And once I sort of see it, then you just start to go like, to your point, oh, holy hell. Like this is what makes every app that I spend too much time on, it's what makes it work. And it's in so many different places now that I think, again, we have the deck stacked against us. But to your point, I think awareness is really important. So just being aware of a behavior often changes a behavior. And so knowing like, oh, this is why I'm spending so much time on this insert app or insert other behavior that falls into it, I think can change it. Yeah. It's less about self-will, willpower, or your own kind of sense

of weakness and much more about just how powerful these tools are that override every best interest in your brain. Yeah. The guy I mentioned before, Thomas Zental, so he's done some really interesting studies on animals and given them the option of playing games that get them more food but are predictable or games that get them less food but are casino games, basically slot machines, and they will pick the slot machine game, like I mentioned. But I asked him, like, okay, well, obviously this works on humans or else, you know, Facebook wouldn't be a company. Las Vegas wouldn't be a successful place. And you've proven that it also works on pigeons and all these different other animals. So why is

that? And he says, it probably tracks back to finding food in the past and how we evolved to find food. So if you think of finding food when food was scarce as we evolved, it's like you need food to survive, right? There's the opportunity to get food. But you don't know where the food is and you don't know how much you're gonna find. So you go to one place, you may not have food. You can go to another place, it might have a couple of berries,

but fewer calories than it took you to burn to get them. You go to another place, nothing. You go to another place and then bam, jackpot, right? That is like you have won, you have found a ton of food and therefore you survive. And by the way, you have to repeat that game every single day. That's what your life is.

So it's almost like our brain is almost quote unquote programmed to sort of fall into this thing because it was so important for our survival for all of time. In the context of the slot machine though, because that's sort of like the perfect machine to kind of understand this whole mechanism, there's so much interesting stuff to learn from that and understand about that, that then spills out into everything else. Like when the slot machine went from the handle that you pulled

to a digital interface where you just push a button, like the stats went through the roof in terms of repeat use, right? Yeah. I mean, I can say that big picture, the faster that you can repeat a behavior, the more likely you are to repeat a behavior. So industries know this. And in the case of the slot machine, if we take off the handle that takes a little bit of time to pull, they also tended to break. What ended up happening is games more than doubled games per hour. So they went from 400 games an hour, a person would play on average to about 900 games an hour. So just that speed, it's just boom, boom, boom, boom. It's like, why the hell do you think we switched to infinite scroll? Right. Infinite scrolling, autoplay on Netflix.

scroll. Right. Infinite scrolling, autoplay on Netflix. I mean, just you name it. Every app has all of these things built into it. So all of these Silicon Valley barons are paying attention to what's happening in this casino and extracting, you know, those nuggets and then building them into these apps that become irresistible. Yeah. Speed totally kills. I mean, to kind of break down where it lives in a couple of places, it's like when you think of social media, it's like if you post, you have an opportunity for status, say,

and then you post, and then the next time you fire up that app, the rewards are unpredictable, right? You could have, say, lost and no one liked your post, or someone said you look like an idiot in the comment section, or you could have won. You could have way more likes and comments than you've ever gotten.

It's like, oh my God, I just won the mega millions jackpot of social media. And then you check and recheck that phone all the time, right? It's in the rise of sports betting. I mean, all gambling relies on this system. It's like you got an opportunity to win money, you place it on a game. But what's interesting about the quick repeatability in sports betting is that sports betting companies allowed people to start betting on in-game occurrences. So for example, is this team going to score on this drive? So you have this short

period of time to make the bet, right? So it's like the faster we can get people to bet and have more opportunities to bet, the more money that we can make. In the example of something like Instagram or Twitter, let's say you have an audience of a certain size. Before the complexity of the algorithm started to kind of drive what people see and you just saw your timeline, you know, in its natural, you know, unfoldment, you would think like, oh, when you post, well, I have this number of people who follow me, like that's how many people are going to see it or whoever, you know, a certain percentage that's predictably online every day. But as we all know, sometimes nobody sees it. And sometimes a completely outsized, larger than your audience, you know, contingent of people will see it. I'm curious, how do you

post something that's going to hit the algorithm and get it to go viral and travel. But perhaps it's even more complicated than that. To your point, the algorithm is making this decision around unpredictability to say, this is perfect for the algorithm, but I'm not going to share that one. Like, I'm going to hold it back on purpose because 10 days from now, I'm going to let this person's post go crazy. And that's all on purpose to really capture that brain chemistry to keep you engaged in that way. Yeah. I mean, I can tell you that companies know what schedule of rewards is really going to capture people's attention and their resources, whether that is attention or whether that is money. and their resources, whether that is attention or whether that is money. So, for example, with slot machines, up until about 1980,

no one really played them because they were boring. Like people would win maybe once out of every 20 times or once out of every, say, 10 times, whatever it might be. And then this guy came in in the 80s, and he basically digitized slot machines. And this allowed him to do this method, which we're kind of getting in the gambling weeds here, but I think it's important, called losses disguised as wins. So instead of just betting on one row of symbols where your odds are very low of winning anything, he allowed people to bet on multiple rows. So if you think of a slot machine screen, there might be five, a grid of five by five symbols, right? And you can bet on all sorts of crazy shaped lines.

So in one game of slots, you could bet on 40 different lines. Now, this meant that the odds of, say, one or two lines winning something, they spiked. But usually the win was less than what you bet. So you might bet a dollar, but you quote unquote win, say 50 cents on this. Now the human brain though, it doesn't see that as losing. It's still exciting. And the machine still cues that as a win, right? The bells still go off. You still see the money go up and that's exciting even though you've lost. And so what this did is this allowed for the schedule of wins to losses to really improve. So they became a lot

less boring. So now say 45% of any given slot machine game, something good is going to happen. Now you might win less than you bet, but you might win more, but it's all exciting. And so just that dialing in of what grabs people, I think is really what tech has allowed companies to do. On top of that, anybody who is a true gambling addict will tell you that the thrill isn't around the prospect of winning, it's around the prospect of losing. Yeah, the gambling guy I talked to, he said, you know, gambling isn't when you learn

when the reels have fallen or when the dice have fallen in the cards, it's when they're rolling, right? It's when the dice are running across the table. The dopamine of anticipation. Yeah. What's really fascinating is in people who are legitimate problematic gamblers, like addicted to gambling, they actually don't get that excited by big wins because they're not there to necessarily win. They're there just to kind of run through the process. What happens when you have a big win is your machine shuts down

and they have to come pay you out by hand. And that stops the process of gambling. They got to sit there for a half hour, fill up tax forms, do all these things that interrupt the real reason why they're there. They're not there to make money. They're there to just sit in this zone of gambling and just watch the money kind of go slow and just escape. Wow. Yeah. That's intense. The other ripple to this is the near miss idea, which is kind of related to what you just shared. Like winning 50 cents, winning quote unquote, when you've put a dollar in isn't really winning, even though our brain interprets it differently. But there's also the slot machine thing where it just almost lines up, but it doesn't. And that is an additional kind of nuance to this whole thing, like building that in to where people think they're very close to winning, but it's really just a predictable kind of equation

that spits that out from time to time to keep you engaged. Yeah. And it does, when that happens, when you're just say one symbol off of the win, people speed up their next bet. They do it a lot faster. And this might seem weird, but I give a handful of examples in the book where you see this all the time. Like if I walk up to a elevator and I push number seven to go to the seventh floor and the button doesn't light up, what do I do? I go, right? You immediately repeat that

because you expected something to happen. It didn't happen. And you will repeat that fast and hard. Did you talk to BJ Fogg in writing this book? No, I did not. He feels like patient zero in all of this on some level. And he's a super nice guy and he's very brilliant. But the class that he teaches at Stanford kind of wrought a lot of what we're

seeing now and what you're talking about. Yeah. I mentioned his work in that class in particular in the comfort crisis. I think it's in the chapter about some of the benefits of boredom and how we've kind of programmed boredom out of daily life. Yeah. Another antidote to boredom is putting yourself in adventurous scenarios, which you do in the course of writing these books. You call yourself a journalist, but you really are like an immersive adventure journalist. Like you really embed yourself. And the book opens up with you embedding yourself in Iraq with this investigation of the drug trade there and this drug that I'd never heard of called Captagon. So explain that, like that's fascinating stuff. Like how did you decide to go out there and put yourself in harm's

way in such an intense way? Yeah. So I got, I mean, I got interested in addiction for this book because for me, the real extreme end of I can't moderate, I can't get enough is addiction. And to sort of understand the roots of addiction, because there's all these different ideas about like what causes addiction, you know, and there used to be this idea that, you know, an addict is a bad person. They're just making these destructive personal choices. And then at the other end, more recently has been that it's a brain disease, right? And I think after investigating this chapter, I think it's, I absolutely don't think an addict is a bad person. I also don't think that brain disease is quite the right words to put on it. So to get to this idea,

I traveled to Iraq because there's this drug, as you mentioned, called Captagon that's rising in the Middle East. And what this drug is, you can think about it as analogous to methamphetamine. But Iraq is an interesting case study that sort of gets into the heart of my argument because there wasn't really any addiction there and drug use for a long time. And that's largely for governmental reasons because Saddam Hussein ruled with an iron fist. Then what happens is you have the U.S. invade the country and they throw out Saddam Hussein ruled with an iron fist. Then what happens is you have the U.S. invade the country and they throw out Saddam Hussein. And so you effectively have a war, right? And when a war happens, you end up having a lot of people that have to live through that

and they have a lot of trauma. And after Syria fell, it became a narco state. So once the Syrian government fell, the leaders that be now, they took over the pharmaceutical plants, and they started cranking out this drug called Captagon, and it's now their biggest export, even though it's illegal. And they started flooding the Middle East with it, so they sent a ton of it down to all these different countries in the Middle East, but Iraq effectively got a surge of this drug.

You have basically these three things that I think you need for addiction to basically bloom is that you have a population that is in pain, psychic pain, whatever it might be. They have problems. You have few other ways to manage that pain, those problems, right? In Iraq, it's not like there's a lot of places where a person can go talk about their traumas. And then three, you have a substance in big supply that can solve that problem, at least in the short term, right? It relieves that psychic pain. And so I think when you have those three things, you start to see addiction really blossom. And that's what's happening in Iraq. It's not that different from the opioid crisis that penetrates a certain, you know, sector of the United States. Yeah. There's a lot of examples throughout history. I

mean, one of the ones that I thought was most interesting as I was reporting the book is that after the Civil War in the South, so during the Civil War, opioids were used to help combat wound pain, battlefield wound pain. And you saw that opioid use in the South after the Civil War,

it rose among Southern whites because they just lost, right? But it dropped significantly among Blacks in the South because now they were free and they saw opportunity from this, like we're able to escape this life that we are living as slaves, right? And I think there's a lot of different case studies

throughout history where you see addiction rise and fall based on what a person's psychic state is and if they're able to deal with problems in different ways. How does this notion of the scarcity loop inform your perspective on addiction specifically, like substance addiction? Oh, that part was really interesting for me too. So this chapter, I mean, I have to say this was my favorite to write because obviously it's personal to me, right? because obviously it's personal to me, right? And I kind of went into it thinking one thing,

and I walked out of it thinking that thing kind of, but also a lot of other things. And so when it comes to the scarcity loop, I think that you see that drugs, alcohol use, they fall into that loop in the sense that you have an opportunity to improve your life, at least in the short term. Like for me, no matter what my problem was, if I just had a drink, things are good. And that comes with unpredictable rewards as well, right? So if you think, or unpredictability rather, if you think about drug use, a lot of the thrill that people report about drug use,

it comes from getting the drug. Are we going to be able to get it? Who are we getting it from? Where are we getting it? How strong is it going to be? Are we going to get in trouble along the way? There's so much unpredictability embedded into that. And then also after you drink or use, the world opens up. It's going to be different. You don't know what's going to happen. And then there's the repeatability where, especially if someone is an addict, once you've used it's like okay restart the process we got to find drugs again and it just kind of goes in that cycle of opportunity unpredictable rewards quick repeatability over and over and over with alcohol there's less unpredictability around the use and access of

the substance you can just go to the store and buy it. In fact, it's quite predictable. You know exactly what you're gonna get. This is like a little like ripple in this, I think, because like just thinking of my own experience, like on one level, I know exactly what's gonna happen if I drink this. I know how it's gonna make me feel.

And that's part of the allure because I'm so uncomfortable in how I feel right now. The unpredictability comes with the consequences of what's going to happen. And this idea that anything might happen is part of that addictive loop. Like if I drink a whole bunch, like something crazy is going to happen and that's exciting. And that might be chaos and terrible, but it also might be some wild adventure that you get to tell stories about for the rest of your life. But it is a roulette wheel because you could end up in a car accident or something terrible could happen, or you could end up at this fabulous party meeting somebody you never thought you would meet. Yeah. I mean, that was my experience.

I mean, that was my experience. I think one of the things that makes addiction so pernicious is that, to substances especially, is that, you know, people use it for a good reason in the first place. It usually solves problems, especially at first. In the short term. Yeah. I mean, when I started drinking, I didn't really face that many repercussions. In fact, it benefited my life in a lot of ways, right?

I could have more interesting adventures when I was drinking. I was a more interesting person. I was more at ease around other people. But by continuing that behavior, especially the way I was drinking, eventually I start to see long-term problems. But the thing is, is that the problem is the solution is the problem is the solution is the problem is the solution. I have all this evidence from my past that says, oh no, this has worked for you before. So you keep doing it and you're like, well, why isn't this working anymore? Well, maybe I just need to try it again. Maybe I need to drink more. Maybe I need to do all these things. Right. So it's like the thing flips and it no longer becomes this thing that seemed to do a lot of good things for

you, but you can't quite, you just can't quite trust that that's right evidence, right? Like, no, there was just, you know, I mixed it with the wrong soda. I know. The obsession of every alcoholic to drink like a gentleman, you know, is boundless, right? And we will, you know, exploit that to the ends of the earth before we're willing to just do the obvious thing, which is weather a little bit of discomfort, you know, to kind of let go of that habit that we know is killing us. Yeah. And you're drinking, did you have a lot of fits and starts or? Yeah. I mean, I relapsed a ton before I finally got sober and I ended up in a treatment center

where I thought I was going to go for a couple of weeks and spin dry and ended up living there for a hundred days and that changed my life. Yeah. But my sobriety has not been linear, not that anybody's is, it has its peaks and valleys and challenges and relapse is part of that story. Yeah.

And I think the shame and the guilt that comes with that, there's still a lot of, you know, emotional baggage around it that, you know, I'll spend my lifetime trying to untangle and make sense of. But I have tools for how to live today and my life is incredibly good as a result of getting sober and making sobriety a priority in my life. The priority, really. Yeah. Yeah, I agree. I mean, I've had definitely peaks and valleys and sobriety. And like I said, I tried to quit using all kinds of strange things and tried to white knuckle it too. Like, you know, I'd maybe get two months without drinking, but it really just in the back of my head, I'm going, the clock is counting down and it's just hell as

the clock counts down. And then, you know, for whatever reason, I had to really just, I had to take action and make phone calls and tell people that, like, I can't figure this shit out. Could you help me? And I think that's what started it, really. Do you get accused of transferring some of your addict energy onto this adventure, chunky, you know, embedded journalist kind of lifestyle that you have? Like, how does that work? The accusations come from me. Yeah. I mean, I'm aware of that, right? I think that, I mean, I'm still figuring this thing out. But certainly to go to Iraq and put yourself in harm's way with some pretty gnarly people is exciting, you know? Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I think one of the reasons that I drank in the

first place is because I just like to explore the edges and have intense experiences. And alcohol gave me that, gave me problems in the long term. And so when I get sober, it's like, I still have that thing as part of me. And, um, I found ways to manage it that, you know, don't lead me to park my car in someone's yard, you know? And so, yes, I'm aware that probably a lot of that, some of the traveling I do into extreme places is scratching that itch. Yeah. But I do a lot of things to make sure that it's as safe as it can possibly be. In learning everything that you've learned about the scarcity loops and how powerful all of these forces are out in the world that are trying to get us off kilter and kind of leverage our lizard brains,

how does that inform your perspective about living a balanced life? Like, well, it just, you know, deal with all of these things in moderation. Like I'm not asking you to be a Luddite, but just go in with an awareness. That's tricky for me. Like I just, you know, abstinence really is the only solution to prevent me from going down, you know, the rabbit hole that engages the worst part of my proclivities. I mean, in a way, and I would be interested to see if you think this, I'm glad that my addiction is alcohol because I can just not drink. I think of what if it was food? Like, well, you can't just not eat, right? It's very black and white line. And so, I mean, I definitely have a ton of empathy for people who find themselves addicted to behaviors that are almost necessary for living. And some of them are absolutely necessary for living. When I think about this loop, I mean,

I think that number one, becoming aware of it is really important and how it's embedded. You're like, oh, okay. Once you know how the machine works, you can maybe start to use the machine a little differently. Two is that I think that when you just look the machine works, you can maybe start to use the machine a little differently. Two is that I think that when you just look at behavioral psychology, if you can change any one of the three parts of the loop, that tends to reduce the behavior. So if you can, you know, with the opportunity, it's like, okay, what am I getting from this? And can I find that from something else?

With unpredictable rewards, can I change the rewards? Can I change how the rewards are? And then three, can I change the rewards? Can I change how the rewards are? And then three, can I slow this down? So let's take eating for example, something like food. If you can slow down your rate of eating, that usually reduces the eating behavior. So even something like if you're eating foods that are unprocessed, people tend to eat less of them because just the speed is a lot slower, right? With opportunity, it's like, can I remove a food from the house? That's my sugar food. Like that tends to help people. With phones, for example, with rewards, a lot of the things that make phones rewarding

are one of the main things is that all the colors and lights and stimulation. Something as simple as changing your phone to grayscale, it tends to reduce the behavior. There's a study that found that it reduced screen time by about 40 minutes a day because all of a sudden your phone is freaking boring, which we learned from slot machines. People don't use boring things as much as they do hyper stimulating things. So I think unpacking those three things and going, okay, how can I change or remove any one of these things tends to work. And in scarcity brand, I give examples for everything I look at from overbuying, from too much time on your phone, from addiction and how that ended up affecting me to even the information that we live in.

We live in this world where the average person now sees more information in a single day than a person 700 years ago used to see in their entire life. And you see people just get hooked on whatever app it is. It could be the New York Times app. It could be Twitter. Twitter's a big one, especially when there's something going on. It's people are just like, oh my God, oh my God, waiting for the next hit of information, but also status and influence, right? I mean, thinking about that from like a social perspective, I think people do get hooked on that as well and trying to unpack that greater why and remove parts can be useful. Yeah.

Yesterday I had Jud Brewer in, do you know him? Psychiatrist, neuroscientist, who has a new book coming out called The Hunger Habit. And it's sort of like the scarcity brain, but just for food. Yeah. And a lot of what he shares overlaps really perfectly with your message and his kind of solution to the idea that diets don't work.

And on some level, most people have an unhealthy relationship with what they put in their mouths that instead of approaching that from a traditional perspective of going on a temporal diet to instead bring awareness and presence and mindfulness practices into your eating, like what you just shared, like, can you just be, can you slow it down? Can you just be aware of what you're doing? Seems highly applicable to all these other aspects of life in which these scarcity loops show up

from devices to online shopping to our Netflix consumption, et cetera. If we can just be really present, you read your book and you're like, okay, I can see like the matrix is now evident to me. I can see the mechanics behind all of this. And even if I'm still scrolling, at least I'm starting to develop an understanding of why

I'm doing it. And perhaps I can be a little bit more compassionate on myself and realize it's not my weakness. It's just that this is really powerful. And let's slow it down a little bit and do an inventory around it. A compassionate inventory where you're not judging yourself or guilting yourself, but just being aware of your behavior and starting to map kind of what those loops look like. And ultimately when you play them out, where they lead you in terms of your emotional wellbeing or your mental wellbeing or your physical wellbeing. Yeah, totally. And I think that people realize that a lot of this stuff is an issue. And so there are tools out there that I think can be useful for people, right? It's like, AA is a tool, you know, there's this, also this app that person reached

out to me because I saw that I wrote something on my newsletter about the grayscale thing and phones. He goes, Hey, I did this app helps you reduce your screen time, blah, blah, blah. And I rolled my eyes because I'm like, you want me to download an app so I can not use another app? Is that what I'm hearing? He goes, yeah, just trust me. So I ignore him and then I go, you know what, I'm going to try it. And what this app does is that you pick the apps that you have trouble moderating on and you pick how many times you want to open them a day. And when you go to open them, it'll have a pause and you have to breathe for three seconds. And then it goes, how much time would you like to spend on this app? So

you've been forced to pause. You got a three second pause and it goes, how much time do you really want to spend on this app? And you go, okay, 10 minutes. And then you get your 10 minutes. And then after 10 minutes, you're done. And it works. I mean, I was laughing. It locks you out. There's no override, no like panic button. You would have to go back through the process. I mean, it really leans on the fundamentals of behavioral psychology of just slowing things down, putting pause, predetermining how much time you actually want to do this behavior that is addictive.

And I do think that looking into tools can be useful for people. Yeah. It's just a bummer that we have to have more and more tools. It's like the solution to all the apps is another app. And like, we have to create all this artifice in our life just to get back to some kind of baseline around what it means to be a human. Yeah. I mean, one of the things that really got me thinking as I was writing this book is, um, so I mentioned the psychologist with the pigeons. So what these experiments show is that he will take pigeons,

they live in these kind of little cages, they're lab pigeons, and he will put them in a cage that has a choice to play two different games. The first game, it's predictable. So they peck a light, and every other peck, they get a predictable amount of food every single time. And then they have a choice to play another game, which is more like a slot machine. So in this game, about every fifth pack, they get food, right?

So it could be the first sequence. It could be like the second pack, they got the food. The next one, it could be the fourth pack, they got some food. So it's very much like a slot machine. The catch is that with the first game, they end up with more food overall. So there's this theory called the optimal foraging theory. And it basically says that animals will do whatever they can to put in the least amount of effort to get as much food as possible. So that theory basically says the pigeons should

play the first game. They shouldn't play the gambling game. But what happens is that 97% of these pigeons choose the gambling game. Now, where it gets really interesting is that he will put these pigeons in a very big cage that mimics how they live in the wild. Because normally they're in these like sterile, kind of small pigeon cages where they're not being able to hang out with other pigeons. They're not living how they normally would in the wild. He'll put them in this giant cage that mimics the wild. So they've got other pigeons around. They have to work for their food. They can build little nests. They go up on cliffs.

They just live how pigeons evolved to live, basically. And when he puts them back in the game, every single pigeon chooses the smart game, the one that's predictable and gets them more food. This goes back to this theory called the optimal stimulation theory. And it basically says that all animals, whether humans, pigeons, dogs, cats, we need a certain amount of stimulation in our life in order to thrive. And if we don't get it, we go looking for it elsewhere.

And so this guy says to me, he goes, you know, and when you think of humans today, he immediately goes from pigeons to humans. Because when you think of humans today, I think that's going on with a lot of us, right? Our lives are so much different than humans evolved to live in so many ways. We don't have to work for our food. We're not outside as much. We don't put in as much physical effort. We're not as connected to others. And so we're a lot like my pigeons that are in their small sterile cages. And because of that, we go looking for stimulation elsewhere. We find it in phones, we find it in drug use and alcohol use, we find it in shopping too much, we find it and we have all these different ways to find that stimulation. But if you can find ways to insert stimulation in

your life that are positive, whether it's ultra running, whether it's for me, the traveling, whether it's ultra running, whether it's for me, the traveling, whatever it might be, that's giving you a long-term benefit, I think that that can be a pretty solid life hack. Mm-hmm. It seems so self-evident, you know, but left to our own devices, we won't do it

because the lures of these things trap us. Totally. We really have to exert conscious effort to carve out those kinds of experiences to combat like the force of these things that want us stuck in this loop that is making us lonely and unhappy and providing all these mental health disorders

that we're dealing with and addiction and the like. Yeah. And it feels like it's a losing battle because when the responsibility is on the individual to go to war with these technological forces, you know, you're bringing a knife to a gunfight. Literally. Right? Like, do you feel like knowing everything that you know now, doing this deep dive into, you know, the Skinner box that is our existence these days, like, do you think that technology should be regulated in a certain way to put guardrails up against engagement?

That's a really good question. Here's how I'll answer that. I think that for teens, it probably should. I think that we should probably be regulating certain applications for teens because the teen brain is changing in such a way that it prioritizes being social. It like overvalues these things and teens just, you know, they say things to each other on these apps that are not good things. I think that that seems pretty reasonable. Now for the average person, it gets a little trickier. You know, if you're an adult, I don't know. So for example, when you look at addiction rates, the vast majority of people can have a drink and enjoy it

and they do it with friends and it's great. The vast majority of people can sit down in the slot machine and they put their $20 in, they go, oh, that's kind of fun. Maybe they walk away with some money, maybe they don't. And so then the question becomes like, when do we start to regulate things that most people can handle without repercussion? And then like, when do we start to regulate things that most people can handle without repercussion?

And then like, how do we determine when the repercussions for most people most of the time have become too much? And so it starts to get really, really murky. And I think it needs to probably be on a case-by-case basis. But my inclination is that probably less regulation is better. For example, like with alcohol, I mean, that almost killed me, but I also realized that for most people, they're fine and it enhances their life in a way. At the same time,

we don't let people who are under 21 drink and there's for good reasons. So for example, people who drink before they are 15, they have a coin flips chance of becoming an alcoholic. If you wait till you're 21, the chances dip below 10%. And that's simply because of how the brain's changing and how people find comfort at that time in their life. Obviously, regulation is problematic from a personal liberty perspective. And I'm not convinced that the government is even equipped to handle this. It's not like I see that as a solution, but it does feel to me

like we should have more kind of opt-in rather than opt-out choice when it comes to how we're interfacing with technology. So, for example, rather than us having to opt out of some algorithm, we should have to make the choice to opt into it. Like the default should be the timeline without all the, you know, algorithmic acceleration and bells and whistles. And if we want to have that experience, we can up the ante and check the box or whatever and do that. But it has to be a choice to enter that rather than the other way around. I mean, I can totally see that argument. I can definitely see that. You know, I mean, I can totally see that argument. I can definitely see that. You know, I mean, like use you as a case study. Like you got into ultra running and that totally changed your life, right? And so you've managed to do this thing that gives you greater rewards.

And I think that that is a story that, I mean, that's accessible to anyone. You know, anyone can do that. And I think that a lot of bad habits fall away on accident not necessarily on purpose once you pick up a good habit and get really into it and get really captivated by it and I don't think you necessarily know what it's going to be right it's like my my neighbors are all trying to die on the hill of let's get Michael to play pickleball he's going to love this and I'm, not a chance in hell. But you know what I mean? It's like, you got to try stuff. You got to try it. Like you find yourself in the right, you got to try a lot of stuff and something might take. And then all of a sudden you're going, oh, this is awesome. And you just find yourself going down that. And then

all of a sudden you're just not doing that shit you didn't want to do anymore quite as much. The bad habits fall away. They get crowded out by the esteemable acts that you're doing on behalf of yourself. There's certain truth to that. My wife is somebody who is an example of that. Like she'll just, like bad habits fall away when she focuses on good habits. The addict in me is a little trickier. You know, it's like, I need a little bit more than that.

You know, those bad habits have staying power for some reason. They're a little more pesky and persistent. But I get your point. And I think there bit more than that. You know, those bad habits have staying power for some reason. They're a little more pesky and persistent. But I get your point, and I think there's truth in that. But I would also say that I'm an example of somebody who's created a career and benefited from the available technology tools, which creates a problematic relationship for me in terms of how I interface with them. Because my career on some level is driven by these things. So I can't be a Luddite and opt out of them like food on some level, like my professional career

requires that I, you know, use them and indulge them on some level. But that becomes really tricky because there's a difference between using the platforms to create and using them to consume. Yeah. I mean, I think that that's the, that's the big problem with technology is that, you know, it accelerates and it becomes more and then it becomes a necessity and you can't necessarily escape it. It's like you have to start using it in order to live a normal modern life. And I mean, people have been grappling with that for a long time and it's absolutely tricky, but you know, it's a fight worth fighting, trying to figure out what your personal approach to it is going to be. There's two sort of semi-existential threats that these things pose

that you talk about. And the first, which is really more of a comfort crisis thing, but I think it's applicable here, is the death of boredom. Like we have engineered boredom out of our life. So talk a little bit about that and the kind of larger implications of humanity that no longer has any ability to ruminate. Yeah. So I started thinking about boredom when I was in the Arctic for more than a month for the comfort crisis, because I didn't bring, you know, the cell phone didn't work. I didn't bring books and magazines and that sort

of thing. And we were up there hunting caribou and it's a lot of just sitting and waiting on a hill. You're waiting for animals to come through. They were not coming through. And it's a lot of just sitting and waiting on a hill. You're waiting for animals to come through. They were not coming through. And so I found myself bored again, right? Because I didn't have all these things I would normally use my time with if I felt bored. You know, to solve our boredom, we did all these sort of wacky things. It's like we read our nutrition labels on our energy bars. Like I can tell you every detail about a cliff bar at this point in my life. We read the tags on our jackets, things like that. I came up with story ideas for the magazines I wrote for. And so, I mean, it really was a different use of how I would use

my time than if I were bored at home. And so then you have to ask, okay, well, what is boredom in the first place? And boredom is this evolutionary discomfort that basically tells us whatever you're doing with your time right now, the return on your time invested has worn thin. And so you need to go do something else. Now, in the past, that something else I think would be a lot more productive than it is today. So if you think about people hunting in the past and you need food to survive, if the animals aren't coming through, boredom kicks on, you feel uncomfortable. You go, okay, we got to go do something else. Let's go pick potatoes. Let's go pick raspberry. Let's do something so we can have food and survive. But now when we feel that

discomfort of boredom, we've got that easy, effortless escape from it in the form of a phone, in the form of a computer, in the form of our TV, in the form of our radio, whatever it might be. So the average person today is spending, I think it's our TV, in the form of our radio, whatever it might be. So the average person today is spending, I think it's 13 hours, 20 minutes engaged with digital media, which is insane. 13 hours and 20 minutes. 13 hours. And like two years ago, it was like 12, right? Or 11 or something like that. The curve is shooting skyward here. Yeah, it's shooting skyward. And I mean, think of that in the grand scale of humanity. It's like none of this stuff was in our life at all.

We had zero minutes like 100 years ago, zero minutes. And now we have 13 hours, 20 minutes. That is a crazy shift in how we spend our lives and spend our attention and our interactions with others. And it's absolutely changed us. And you hear a lot about using phones less and everything. And obviously, I think that's very important. how can I reinsert boredom into my life? Because boredom actually comes with quite a few upsides. So when you are bored, you're essentially forced to ruminate. You go inward for a little while, and that seems to be associated with less stress. You also tend to come up with good ideas. So there's some interesting research that suggests boredom helps people come up with good ideas. And it's also like, you know, there's this William James quote. He basically

said that at the end of your life, your life is a culmination of what you were aware of. And so if you think about that, it's like 13 hours, 13 hours a day. I don't think people are going to look back on their life and go, man, really should have got those numbers up. 13 hours, what was I doing? Could have been 15. Right, or when somebody passes away, nobody's gonna eulogize them by talking about what an amazing feed they had. Yeah, exactly.

You know what I mean? Totally. Yeah, I mean, boredom is the fountain of creativity. And if we are no longer allowing ourselves space for that type of reflection, what does that bode in terms of the future of humanity? Specifically, of course, with what humans create, you know, art and culture. But I think it's more profound than that. Where do good ideas come from? And if you're never allowing yourself to kind of, you know, develop that capacity,

everything becomes derivative and we live in sort of this weird hall of mirrors. Yeah, I mean, if you're always on media, your ideas are coming from others, right? So you're just basically tweaking something that someone else has come up with. And so I think having that time without that to just let things flow is really

important. I mean, for anyone, it's not just, you know, when people think creativity, they automatically think the artist, they think their writer, they think whatever, but it's important for business, right? I mean, this is something that Steve Jobs has talked about. He talked about how boredom was one of the real tools that he leveraged in order to come up with the products he did and think about design and how these things would function. It was this extended time without interruption where he could just kind of lean into boredom and let his mind go where it needed to go. And I do think we're losing that to a certain extent, for sure. Yeah. And I do think that that's existential in many ways. Yeah. The other kind of semi-existential threat is around this idea of human insatiability

and our proclivity towards addition as a way of solving problems rather than subtraction. So, talk a little bit about that. I think that's super interesting. Yeah. I'll tell you the story of the guy who discovered this. So there's a researcher, I think it's a UVA. His name is Lighty Klotz. And he's one of the greatest engineers in the country right now, right? He's gotten money from all these amazing different organizations. Like this list of research he's done on engineering is just unbelievable.

So one day he's sitting with his son, whose name is Ezra, and Ezra is three years old and they're playing with Legos. And so what they're doing is they're building a bridge. So they got these two pillars for the bridge, and now they need to put a span that connects to the two pillars. And when they go to do that, what they find is that one pillar is taller than the other. So you got this span of a bridge that's at this wonky angle, right? And so Mr. PhD, professor of engineering, he's got a solution. He turns around and he starts rifling

through the Lego box to find Lego so he can elevate the span and fix the problem. And when he turns around, he realizes that his son has fixed the problem. He simply removed Legos from the taller pillar. So this kid, one, fixes the problem, but two, he fixes it in a more efficient way. Because now he's using less Legos overall, right? They have more resources and it's a simpler fix.

So he realizes, like, I didn't even think to subtract and here I am, this crazy engineer. I didn't even think to subtract. And here I am, this crazy engineer. So what he does is he takes this exact bridge and he starts taking it around to all his colleagues at UVA and all his students at UVA who are all engineering backgrounds. And he's like, puts it on the desk and be like, hey, fix this bridge. You know, it's off kilter. Every single one of them adds Legos to it. So their proclivity is to add to fix the problem.

And once he has so many examples of that, he goes, all right, there's something here. We've got to to it. So their proclivity is to add to fix the problem. And once he has so many examples of that, he goes, all right, there's something here. We've got to study it. So he sets up all these different studies where he basically tasks participants with solving a series of problems. In every single problem, the best, most efficient answer is to remove, to subtract from the problem. So for example, this is kind of a quirky one. He had a mini golf hole and it had just way too many traps and things like that on it, right? Too many obstacles. And he asked them to make it better. Obviously the answer is like, we got to remove some stuff because there's just too much shit going on. Every single person added stuff.

And there's a bunch of different examples that he's proven with that. So long story short is that we are sort of evolved to add, right? When we see a problem, our default is to add to solve it, to immediately sort of add more resources, to do more things to fix it. We don't even think of subtraction. And that's a big problem, right? It's like the answer could be to add, but it could also be to subtraction. And that's a big problem, right? It's like the answer could be to add, but it could also be to subtract something. But if we aren't thinking of this whole other range of options of subtraction, that becomes a problem. And so once I talked to this guy, you kind of go, oh yeah, I mean, I feel like I see that in myself, but then I start looking at just,

you know, just a laundry list of statistics. And there's just so many different ways that we have added and added and added to society and to our lives ever since the industrial revolution. I mean, think of all the stuff we own. When you look at regulations, they're like an insane amount of times longer than they used to be. There's this great study that found that incoming university presidents were like 10 times more likely to add new programs than they were to remove programs that weren't working. And it just goes on and on and on. And I do think that just the awareness of that,

that like, okay, my tendency is gonna be to try and add stuff, to buy something to fix this problem, to do more work, to do X, Y, Z. I think questioning that can be a way to maybe get more efficient at solving problems personally and business and all these different areas of life. It's so counterintuitive though, right? Everything in our society is oriented around more. Like everything you want is on the other side of buying more, watching more, scrolling more, consuming more. Every problem

can be solved through more innovation. Like just look at, you know, I don't know, like our energy consumption, our food consumption, like all of our macro systems are operating in an unsustainable way. The solution really is to slow down and like consume less, right? But we're intent upon solving it through some additional innovation,

whether that's going to the moon or some new technology that we're just, you know, sort of assuming will arrive that's gonna solve this problem so that we can continue to be additive. Yeah, before I read this study a few years ago, this is embarrassing and damning. I realized I have too much shit in my house, right? Everyone has that moment at some point. And so what do I do? I buy a book on how to,

how to minimize. And the book instructs me that I must buy very specific totes to keep my things in, right? Cause everything has to look. So I got to go buy, I got to go buy all this stuff so I can have less. And I'm like, I have this moment and I'm like, yeah, this looks awesome on Instagram, but I don't think we're actually achieving this idea of minimalism like we think, having less. Cause I've just bought a bunch of stuff so I can weed out some stuff, but then keep my other stuff in, you know? Yeah. The sensibility of it is correct, but you tell the story of this nomadic woman though, right? Oh yeah. You have some interesting ideas around minimalism in general. Yeah. Laura Zara, toughest human being who ever lived, coolest human being who ever lived. She's in her thirties. And when she was in college, she went to a really good school on the East coast,

but she dropped out when she was a senior because she'd always wanted to just spend time outside, like living off the grid. And she'd basically done that all through college. Like she didn't even live in the dorm in college. She went and lived out in the woods and basically a yurt she built. And she kind of has this moment during school when she realizes like the reason that I'm here in college is so that I can follow this storyline

that I need to get a good job so I can have a bunch of money so that I can go do what I wanna do on my two weeks time off or whatever it might be. And she realizes, well, wait a minute, if I just want to go out in the woods and survive, like, I don't think I need that much money. So she bails on school and she just starts traveling the world. She has a backpack with like a sleeping bag, a tarp, like a saucepan, just like the very, very basic rudimentary stuff. And she just travels the world for years and will go out into the wilderness

for like 30, 60, 90 days at a time. And so I end up going out into the wilderness with her in Montana. We weren't even out there that long, but it was really fascinating because she really has pared down what she needs to really live a life that she loves. She hardly owns anything. It all fits in this one backpack. And she's the most interesting, happy, fascinating person I've ever met. And she talks a lot about how she's had experiences where having less have actually put

her in much more interesting experiences in life. So a couple of examples that she's given is that, you know, she used to hitchhike a ton and she's like, if I would have had money and taken the flight, I would have gotten on the flight. I would have put on my headphones like everyone else, but instead I like hitchhike and I get in the car with people I don't know. And like, we become best friends over this, you know, eight hour journey or whatever it is. And like, I'm always going to remember those conversations I had. She also talked about, so for a while she was, she rolled around with some people who were very, very wealthy. Let's just say that. And they would take her on these hunting trips that were really expensive and these, you know, other different trips. And she said, it was fascinating because she

explains it, like she said, what'd she call it? I'm trying to remember the language, a really expensive Happy Meal. So she said, it's like every rich person gets the same thing. The whole point is to remove any uncertainty, any unpredictability. So you get this list of experiences you run through. And she's like, don't get me wrong. It was very nice. And I understand why people do that when they're pressed for time. I totally get it. But I've had so much more interesting experiences when I didn't have a lot of money, when I had to invent things on the run, when everything was really an adventure. I had no idea what was going to come next. And that's really what the rewards are from. Constraints being kind of a lever for creative experiences. Yeah.

You know, not being able to do whatever you want. Those constraints drive creative solutions and adventures. Yeah. And one thing that's really interesting about her is, so this idea of the scarcity loop, I think you can use it for things that are really beneficial to you. So what she does with her time when she's out in the wild is that she shed hunts. So for people who aren't familiar with that, it's basically just walking around in the wilderness, looking for shed antlers, you know, skulls of animals that have

fallen off and she's just turned it totally into a game. And that's a hundred percent in the scarcity loop. And it's like, we got an opportunity to find this thing that I think is really cool, but I don't know where it's going to be. I don't know how big it's going to be. I don't know what I'm going to find. And I just repeat that all day. And she gets so obsessed with this search and it just allows her to explore the mountains, go into interesting places. And, um, you know, I'm not suggesting that everyone go pick up shed hunting, but I do think that there's a lot of ways that you can use this loop to push yourself into good things. For example, most activities in nature have it. For example, birdwatching, right?

You don't know what you're going to see. You could see something really rare. You could see something you see every day. You repeat it. I think it's in things like foraging. Like a lot of people have gotten into mushroom foraging recently. It's in that. But I also think that even, you know, outdoor sports where times are changing, the landscape that you're running across is going to change. Like you're kind of chasing, trying to get better. I mean,

it's ultimately like a game, right? I think finding ways to get the loop in a way that improves your life is important. What's interesting is how the human being will create a scarcity loop when there isn't one around, right? Like she, without consciously being aware of even what a scarcity loop is, she manufactures one. Totally. Which is just proof positive that like this is embedded in our like kind of innate operating system. Yeah. So are you going to create a fun, adventuresome, outdoorsy, you know, expansive scarcity loop for yourself? Or are you going to default to the scarcity loops

that are being foisted upon you? Yeah. Really is the question that you're asking. Mm-hmm. And her relationship to what she owns is interesting too. So I kind of walked away with it with a rule of thinking gear, not stuff. So if you think of gear, it's an item that you're using for purpose to achieve some sort of higher

purpose, right? It's a tool that you're using somehow in your life that isn't just a thing for the sake of it. And I think that that's a good heuristic to keep yourself out of just buying things that are just things for the sake of it for some other reason. Because there's a lot of reasons that humans buy. For example, status, belonging, also boredom. People buy stuff when they're bored and it's far easier to buy stuff now when you're bored than it was even 15 years ago. Because now you're getting ads fed at you through your iPhone. You don't have to go down to the store. And so using that I think can be useful to pare down purchases. conscious choice to live this nomadic minimalist lifestyle has gigantic wealth in how she spends her time. And that kind of capacity is something that, you know, a billionaire might've motivated the billionaire to begin his or her business to begin with. Like I want to have largesse

so that I can live the life that I want to live. But every step along that ladder just creates a more gilded prison where freedom of time becomes even more difficult to access. It's like that parable of the fisherman, you know, go catch a fish. Well, you should hire some people and then you can catch more fish. And why would I do that? And blah, blah, blah, all the way up to, you know, well, if you had all this wealth, then you could, you know, do whatever you want all afternoon, which is what the fisherman already has before he even begins. And for some reason, we struggle with that, right? Like I hear the story of this woman

and as amazing as that sounds, or my friend, Light Watkins, who came on the show and showed me everything that's in his backpack and that's all that he owns. And he's one of the happiest, coolest people that I know. I'm like, yeah, but am I going to really do that? You know what I mean? Like academically, yes, I get it. You have proven your point. I understand it. And then I reflect on the extent to which I'm actually modifying my own behavior every single day and realize the disconnect between those two things.

Yeah, I think the question is like, what lessons can we learn from these people? And I think from Laura, I learned thinking in terms of the gear, not stuff angle. Like, how is this item actually? Like, what am I using this for? What is the utility? What is the utility? And can I find another thing in my house that can serve the same purpose? Because one of the things she talked about

is that it was always most fun for her when she could sort of go MacGyver and solve a problem with what she already had. And she got a lot of rewards from that. And there's actually some interesting research that shows when you put constraints on resources, on teams, they actually managed to accomplish more and come up with more creative

ways to solving the resource. Because back to our proclivity to add, if we have a bunch of money, we just go, oh yeah, just like hire someone to do that or do it with this, right? But if you don't have that, you have to get really nimble. So you mentioned how I talked to Stephen Bartlett and he talked about that with his team. When they had the least amount of money, they came up with their best ideas because they're like, we got 10 bucks and he talked about that with his team. When they had the least amount of money, they came up with their best ideas because they're like, we got $10, and we got to figure this thing out. Sure, or film directors will talk about this all the time. They don't have enough money or enough days to get the shots that they want,

and they're forced to figure things out on the spot. And those constraints end up driving greater creative choices that actually make the finished product better in a different way than they had anticipated or could have imagined had they had all the resources available to do it the way they wanted to in their brain. Yeah, yeah, totally. If somebody is listening to this and they're starting to think about how scarcity loops operate in their own life, like what is the process, like how do you counsel people to develop a little bit of a greater awareness? You know, if they want to do an inventory, like let's just look at like how I'm being hijacked.

Like what is the parasite in my ant brain, you know, that's commandeering me and making me do things that I'm not consciously aware that, you know, that's commandeering me and making me do things that I'm not consciously aware that, you know, I even made the decision to do. Yeah. One thing I talk about in the book is that I think that when it comes to improving your life, a lot of time we want to add good new habits. Like we just pack on good new habits when a lot of times what will move your life forward the most is solving a bad one. Like if you can fix your worst problems, the world can open up. And I mean, I don't know if you identify this, but I definitely identify with that as like when I stopped drinking all of a sudden, oh, like now

like that was the thing really holding me back. Right. And I had tried to do all this other stuff and it just like didn't ever get me anywhere because I still had my foot on the brake with my drinking. And so I think that if you can sort of list out the habits that you're aware of that are bad that you want to change, and then it's going through a list of, okay, how does this fall into the scarcity loop? And I think most of them do. And then kind of identifying, okay, what parts of the loop can I change, which we talked about before? I think that one, the awareness of it to realize, you know, falling into the loop kept humans alive for millions of years. So if you're doing this behaviors, it's not necessarily your fault, but it is your problem to solve. I think that can be powerful. Just realizing that how the

machinery works and then going through and looking, okay, can I change any one of these three parts of it? And then asking the bigger question, which is why am I doing this thing in the first place? Why am I doing this thing in the first place? Having to get sort of to the nitty gritty, which is hard and takes time, but ultimately I think it leads to better results

in the longterm. Mm-hmm. Yeah, why am I doing this to begin with makes that arrow kind of point directly inward. You're gonna have to do a little excavation there. It's the sharpest arrow. Get to the deep, you know, answer to a question like that. But when you think about our proclivity towards insatiability

and towards additive solutions, and you take a macro view of kind of what's happening with humanity and the world, and I mean, are you optimistic about our future? Like, are we gonna figure this out and arrive at some healthier place with how we cohabitate? This is a good question. What does the world look like in 50 years, 100 years?

This is a good question. I can tell you this, that as we get more and more technology, the technology will get sharper and sharper and sharper at making money. And how do you make money today? It's usually by capturing attention. So I think that that arrow will continue getting sharper. Now, I do think that it's possible that maybe people reject all this. I mean, I don't know. I mean, if you look at the grand scope of time with technology,

it's like the more technology you add on, the more constraints that you put on human beings. That's just kind of the story of it. I mean, and once you get in the system, it's like it's hard to escape it because you start to rely on it to do something. So, I mean, just think of something as simple as like we invent a car. That's a really cool thing, right? This is great.

Oh, but now we've got too many cars. So now we need to build roads. Okay. Well, the city has to be laid out this way. Okay. Well, now we have to have a bunch of rules around cars. You got to have your airbags. You got to have your seatbelts. You got to have this. You can only turn right when there's a green light, all these things. Okay. Well, now we've built our cities in ways that if you don't have a car, well, you're screwed, right? You can't get from point A to point B. And that's just like a very common example, but it applies to so many things where it's like, once you adopt the technology, all of a sudden we need rules around it. And then the rules begin to constrain us. And then all of a sudden, if you don't have the technology, you can't function well in society. So it's almost like we kind of become a slave to these things, which is probably the most

depressing thing I've ever said in my life. I mean, we're more than a slave to them, to refer back to that analogy that you talk about of the fungal parasite in the brain of the ant. We are now, consciously or otherwise, through our micro behaviors and macro behaviors, our micro behaviors and macro behaviors every single day, every day, informing and giving birth to a new technological form of life. Like all of the data and how we interface with technology is contributing to this massive data set that is quickly, you know, more quickly than I think we realize, leading us towards this artificial intelligence world and a lot of questions around what that means and what that looks like.

So when we talk about regulations or guardrails and the inroads that those perhaps create in terms of personal liberty, like our personal liberty is actually contributing to our own enslavement. Yeah. You know, the more we double down on our freedom to do what we want with these devices, the more quickly we're giving birth to something that has greater and greater control over our lives, which is a fucked up, like we're backed into this weird corner with this whole thing.

backed into this weird corner with this whole thing. Yeah. There's a guy who really started PR and advertising, kind of one of the key players in that industry from the, I think the late 1800s. His name is Claude Hopkins. So he builds up this industry. He basically built Bissell vacuums into what they are today. And he's a fascinating guy because he was going to go into the clergy. And at the time, advertising was seen as this very dirty thing. You didn't advertise, right? It was like societally, it was just not a good thing. He starts to go through the clergy. He decides it's not for him.

But he goes into advertising, which is a really interesting way because you go from selling religion to selling products, right? And so he uses a lot of techniques that he learned there to take on clients and builds all these big brands that still today are- From the clergy that he learned in, wow, in divinity school or something? Yeah. So he built Bissell Vacuums. He's the guy who started the free sample model. That was his idea, genius advertiser. And at the end of his life, he saw like this machine that had come just during his lifetime of advertising. And we're talking like from the late 1800s, like up to the twenties, thirties, whatever. And so he writes this memoir about his life and he just says, you know, I think that people who are happiest usually live closest to nature and are more disconnected from this kind of machine we've created and more connected to other people. And so I think that that is probably,

there's probably a lesson there. And if you think about where we are now, I mean, if this guy looked at it today, it would be interesting to see his take. Yeah. I mean, it seems like that the answer always points back in that direction, whether it's the nomadic woman who's living minimally or this tribe that you talk about, the Samani, is that how you say it? Yeah, Samani. Or you look at the blue zones, like pockets of the world that are becoming increasingly rarer and rarer, where humanity is living more in conjunction with just the natural rhythms of the planet. You know, these people tend to live longer.

They're happier. They don't suffer from all these chronic lifestyle ailments. They don't have the mental health disorders. They're not, you know, being captured by technology. And yet, you know, we're just going along our way and making those pockets smaller and smaller and rarer and rarer and harder and harder to, you know, kind of access for ourselves.

Yeah, I mean, I think there's probably a pretty strong correlation between the number of hours someone spends online and the likelihood that they're not as happy as they would like to be. No, we're in a loneliness epidemic. I had the Surgeon General here. This is like his whole thing, you know. How did we arrive in this hyper-connected world of being lonelier than ever to the point of, you know, increased rates of depression and suicide, et cetera? This is cataclysmic. And so, I'm optimistic because I believe in humanity and

I believe in the goodness of human beings. But when you kind of cast your gaze out in the way that you have, you know, across all these things that are happening, it's hard. It's hard to stay connected with hopefulness. Yeah. Well, it's interesting. It's almost like there's kind of a sweet spot of progress, right? So, I mean, when you think about people being alone, I mean, part of the reason we have more people alone is because we simply have more money. Like grandma doesn't have to live with the family anymore. Grandma's got enough money that she can have her own little place a few miles away. But that also means grandma spends a lot of time alone and the odds of her being lonely probably increase. So as we get more resources, we do start to, I think,

become more disconnected. We start to not have to, you know, move around as much. Like there's probably some sweet spot between I've got everything I need covered, but I don't have so much that I've engineered sort of spending more time, being forced to spend time with my family and people who I love, right? The community that I don't have a million different options for hyper-processed food that I maybe have to, you know, walk some places sometime. And there probably is a sweet spot. Who the hell knows where that is? Not me. So, yeah. So, what changes have you made? I mean, you talked about grayscaling and sort of apps that, you know, can kind of restrict your access to these technological scarcity loops. But of all the work and all the people that you've

talked to, like, what have been the material impacts on your kind of daily life? Yeah, well, I mean, I will say that reporting the comfort crisis definitely made me very grateful for the world we live in. I mean, as much as we just spent, you know, some time talking about how things are dire in many ways, I think a lot of the problems that we face today are good problems in the grand scheme of time and space. You know, I mean, take the question of our relationship with food. It's like, I'd rather have to, you know, grapple with not overeating rather than be like, I don't know where my next meal is coming from, which was how it was for all of time. And that's just one example. So I'm definitely a lot more grateful. In terms of practices, I mean, it's kind of like what I just said, where spending more time

outdoors, spending more time with people who we love, using the internet as a tool to accomplish a goal and realizing that it can easily suck us in for other means. And that's hard because most people have to be online because of their job. But I do think the more time you spend online for most people most of the time, probably not a good thing. That, I mean, something I write about in The Comfort Crisis too is rucking. I do that a lot for my physical practice. That's really the foundation, carrying weight over distance. I think that humans are uniquely adapted to carry weight over distance. It's really good for our bone density.

It helps preserve muscle, works our strength, but it's also an awesome form of cardio. And we're the only animal that can do it, which is pretty cool. We're the best at it. Yeah, for sure. We're the best at it. Persistence hunting. Yeah. Yeah. You run the animal down and then you got to carry it back to camp. And then just the act of gathering too. I mean, that's caring. And it also gets me outside. So just throwing some weight on my back and caring. And I don't know, having empathy as well, like you talked about before,

like reporting, especially the addiction chapter. When it really clicked with me that an addict is someone who is doing something that has always benefited their life up till now. And they just can't really see, and I've been there too, it's like, oh, that gives you so much more empathy. Because if you have all these examples of how this thing has helped you in the past, why the hell wouldn't you do that? It's a very rational example. And by the way, using a substance, if you have a substance abuse issue, it will solve your problem in the short term. And so therefore, that is kind of rational to use it, at least in the short term.

It's important to acknowledge that. The reason that addicts become addicts is because it does work until it stops working. But to deny that there is some benefit that this person is getting out of that, I think is not productive in the conversation around understanding this affliction. Yeah. And asking that same question for a lot of bad habits can be useful. It's like, what is the benefit here?

Sure, because they're all solving some need or serving some, doing something for you or you wouldn't be doing it. Exactly. So understanding, okay, what is that doing for me? Or why did I start doing that to begin with? What happens right before? What happened right before?

Let me do that. You know, I like the solutions that you shared. I mean, I think that you can get the sense of powerlessness if you're looking into all of this. And there are things, we do have agency and there are things that we can do that make our lives better. And they're not that difficult.

It's like, go outdoors, see your friends, bring challenge into your life. Like, you know, going to the Arctic Circle is great,

but you don't have to do that, right? That's an extreme example that kind of rebooted your operating system. But I think there's all, you know, everybody has some way

of, you know, bringing a little kind of adventure into their life that will be curative to a lot of what ails us. I mean, I do think it's possible for anyone. I got this amazing email a couple of years ago. So in the comfort crisis, I talk about this idea of Masogi, which is this idea that was created by this guy who's named Dr. Marcus Elliott. But anyways, the idea is like, go out and do something really hard once a year and learn from that.

Learn something about your edges and your potential. So I get this email. The subject is Misogi and it's from Janet. I forget her last name. And just says, hello, Michael. My name is Janet. I am 79 years old. I'm going to do Misogi.

I will make it hard and I won't die. Signed is Janet. I am 79 years old. I'm going to do Masogi. I will make it hard and I won't die. Signed, Janet. So I'm like, damn, Janet, if you can do it. Did you hear back from her? Did she report back? I didn't hear back from her. Oh, all right. Well, Janet, if you're listening.

Yeah, Janet, I want to follow up. Michael's waiting for a follow-up check-in. I think people are far more capable of change than we might think. Is it going to be easy in the short term? No. But once you start to make progress, progress compiles and you look back and go, oh, whoa, that's a big difference. And anything is possible. I believe in that. And I think, you know, anybody who spent time in recovery has borne witness to many lives transformed in positive ways. So I believe in the human capacity to change and adapt.

And I think your work is really important on this. So thank you for coming and sharing with me today. Well, likewise. What are you working on now? Can you talk about that? I'll probably do a third book. I mean, a lot of what I do now is I have a sub stack, which is a 2% at TWO PCT.com. And I write about the things I write about my book in real time.

You know, I realized that by doing only books, I had this kind of three-year lag and I couldn't talk about things in real time as they were coming in and even just kind of go a little bit off topic every now and then. So the newsletter allows me to do that. And I'll probably do a third book eventually, but yeah, we're putting that off because it's a lift. All right, man. Well, come back and talk to me again

when you have something more to share. I appreciate it, man. This was great. Thank you. Yeah, I'd love to. I really appreciate it. Thanks, Michael. Peace.

Yes. That's it for today. Thank you for listening. I truly hope you enjoyed the conversation. To learn more about today's guest, including links and resources related to everything discussed today, visit the episode page at richroll.com

where you can find the entire podcast archive, as well as podcast merch, my books, Finding Ultra, Voicing Change, and The Plant Power Way, as well as the Plant Power Meal Planner at meals.richroll.com. the easiest and most impactful thing you can do is to subscribe to the show on Apple Podcasts, on Spotify, and on YouTube, and leave a review and or comment. Supporting the sponsors who support the show is also important and appreciated. And sharing the show or your favorite episode with friends or on social media is, of course, awesome and very helpful. And finally, for podcast updates, special offers on books, the meal planner, and other subjects, please subscribe to our newsletter, which you can find on the footer of any page at richroll.com. Today's show was produced and engineered by Jason Camiolo with additional audio engineering by Cale Curtis. The video edition of the podcast Thank you. Thank you, Georgia Whaley, for copywriting and website management.

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