The Skinny Confidential Him & Her Podcast - Michael Easter On How To Form Good Habits, Rewire Cravings, & Benefit From Discomfort In Your LIfe

Episode Date: January 3, 2024

#642: Today, we're sitting down with Michael Easter, author of The Comfort Crisis & Scarcity Brain, and a professor at UNLV. He writes and speaks on how humans can leverage modern science and evolutionary wisdom to perform better and live healthier lives. Michael joins us for a discussion on getting uncomfortable and why it's important for long-term success. He dives into his experience with addiction and finding sobriety, and how this impacted his viewpoint on the comfort crisis that the world is currently living in. We discuss everything from how to be aware that you're too comfortable, the benefits of doing hard tasks, and tips to escape the toxic habits that are holding you back. To connect with Michael Easter click HERE To connect with Lauryn Evarts Bosstick click HERE To connect with Michael Bosstick click HERE Read More on The Skinny Confidential HERE To subscribe to our YouTube Page click HERE For Detailed Show Notes visit TSCPODCAST.COM To Call the Him & Her Hotline call: 1-833-SKINNYS (754-6697) This episode is brought to you by The Skinny Confidential. This episode is brought to you by Armra ARMRA Colostrum strengthens immunity, ignites metabolism, fortifies gut health, activates hair growth and skin radiance, and powers fitness performance and recovery. Visit www.tryamra.com and use code SKINNY at checkout for 15% off your first purchase. This episode is brought to you by Caraway Caraway Home’s non-toxic kitchen wares are all designed for the modern home and feature a chemical-free ceramic coating, so food can be prepared with peace of mind that no hard-to-pronounce compound will leach into your healthy ingredients. Visit Carawayhome.com/SKINNY or use code SKINNY at checkout to receive up to 10% off your next order. This episode is brought to you by HVMN Ketone-IQ™ is brain fuel. It’s a clean energy boost without sugar or caffeine. Visit HVMN.com/SKINNY to receive 30% off your first subscription order of Ketone-IQ. This episode is brought to you by Arrae Arrae's product line is comprised of three products, Bloat, Calm, & Sleep alchemy capsules to help solve everyday problems that women constantly deal with. Use code SKINNY at arrae.com to get 15% off your first purchase. This episode is brought to you by The Farmer's Dog It's never been easier to invest in your dog's health with fresh food. Get 50% off your first box & free shipping by going to thefarmersdog.com/skinny This episode is brought to you by Heineken Heineken 0.0: 100% taste, zero point zero percent alcohol, only 69 calories. Click HERE to buy now. Must be 21 years or older to purchase. Produced by Dear Media  

The following podcast is a Dear Media production. She's a lifestyle blogger extraordinaire. Fantastic. And he's a serial entrepreneur. A very smart cookie. And now Lauren Everts and Michael Bostic are bringing you along for the ride. Get ready for some major realness. Welcome to The Skinny Confidential, him and her.

For a lot of people with a bad habit, it might be something like stress. They might get an email from their boss and that makes them go into the pantry and eat a handful of M&Ms. Figuring out what the trigger is and why you're doing it in the first place. And then trying to find a better substitute. For example, one of the reasons I think that I drank 2XS is because I like extreme experiences. So once I stopped drinking, I still have a need for that, but I can't get it from alcohol. So now I've got to figure out another way. So I started exercising a lot more. I started spending a lot more time outdoors, taking trips to Alaska for a month.

And I think that that's a lot more productive thing than drinking for me. Welcome back, everybody. Welcome back to the Him and Her Show, kicking off the New Year's in a strong way with Michael Easter. Many of you may know Michael Easter from his books. His first book, The Comfort Crisis, is absolutely phenomenal. And his newest book, Scarcity Brain, is also a phenomenon that I've enjoyed. A little while back, my friend Doug sent me a copy of The Comfort Crisis, and I absolutely fell in love. Just to give you an idea of what The Comfort Crisis is about, here's the subtitle. Embrace discomfort to reclaim your wild, happy, healthy self. A lot of people may read the title and think, oh, I don't want to be uncomfortable. It's not about that. It's about understanding the

pitfalls of becoming too comfortable and realizing that this may be the source of our unhappiness and so many other things. So we dive into that on this episode. We also dive into Michael's new book, Scarcity Brain. The subtitle there is fix your craving mindset and rewire your habits to thrive with enough. Again, we live in a society where we feel like we never have enough. We're constantly doom scrolling. It's not good for our mind and our wellbeing. This book helps us understand why we do these things and how to solve them. So if you're somebody who's sitting on social media all the time and feeling endlessly uninspired or counterproductive, this episode is definitely for you. This episode is really for anybody that wants to level up, feel better about themselves and start the new year in the most

productive way possible. It's going to give you an understanding of why we do some of the things that humans do and why we fall into the pitfalls of comfort and scarcity. So with that, Michael Easter, welcome to the Skinny Confidential Him and Her Show. This is the Skinny Confidential Him and Her. Michael Easter in the studio. I've been wanting to interview you now for a while. Love your work. Love what you're doing. The Comfort Crisis. We're going to get into that. And then your new book, Scarcity Brain, which by the way, I've promoted like eight times,

but I kept saying it wrong. I'm like, yeah, it's this book. It's Scarcity Minds, but it's Scarcity Brain. And so for the audience that's been hearing me say that we have the author in the studio now, Michael Easter, new book, Scarcity Brain. To get a little context on you, let's go back a little bit. Let's talk about your childhood and how you grew up. I grew up in Northern Utah, outside of Salt Lake City. A only child, single mom. She worked her butt off, built us a pretty good life. I mean, I'm not saying we were rich or anything, but here's a crazy statistic. So in the United States, I'm going to make you guess. What percent of single moms do you think live at a level that's considered extreme poverty, which is $200 a week or below?

I'm going to let Michael answer and then just go off. What percentage in the entire United States? Yeah, of single mothers live in extreme poverty, which is $200 a week or below. 20%. Higher. 40. 50. Wow.

So if you are a single mom or a child of a single mom, you have basically a coin flip chance of living in extreme poverty. Now my mom is a very good coin flipper, right? So she started her own business and built that up, worked really hard and yeah, provided a pretty good life for us. We didn't have a ton of extra money, but the extra money that we did have, she would funnel into travel. So every summer, like we always had the shittiest cars. I don't know if I can swear on this podcast.

It's been done before. Okay. We always had terrible cars, but we would go on a international vacation for at least two weeks every summer. Like that's what she would save up for. And so that was really eyeopening for, I think the both of us just like learning what else was out there. Yeah. And then I went to college on the East coast. So most of the town that I grew up in, I think there was my graduating class in high school was maybe four to 500. And I think there were four of us who went out of state for college. So it was a pretty insular community.

And I went to school on the East Coast. And then I ended up getting into journalism, working for magazines for a while. And now I'm here doing books. Well, I think as I was reading your book in the beginning, you start off talking about addiction and your struggle with that. And then there's some stats later in the book where you say the earlier you start, the greater chance you have to actually develop addiction. But at what age did you start experimenting with alcohol? I think I was 15 the first time I had a drink. And so I'm 15 years old. And so as you probably know that Utah is very heavily Mormon. So I

wasn't raised Mormon. I have a lot of family members who are, but my mom was sort of, you know, she turned 18 and she moved to Hawaii to go be a hippie in the sixties. And so she's never been active in Mormonism. Yeah. I drank when I was 15 and I remember the first time I'd had alcohol, it was like, why would you not just do this all the time? Like this, this is it.

This is it, man it man and yeah it worked for a while so part of what i talk about in scarcity brain with addiction is that when we think of addiction we often we often go why would a person do that because it's clearly bad for them they're doing this thing that is hurtful for them now that is true in the long run but if you're an addicted person alcohol still works for you in the short term, or doing drugs still works for you in the short term. So the first time, you know, I drank without consequences for a really long time

and it enhanced my life. What's a really long time? I would say it probably tipped into, started to get maybe a little darker around 22. Okay. So, you know, you got a good seven year run there. What was like, I'm in college, didn't ever really have any negative consequences.

And then once I got, I would say, into grad school and out of grad school, I could still have times where I would drink and things would be fine. But you start to have times where you wake up and you're like, oh, God, what have I done? Like what? Give us an example. Oh, here's a good one. One time I'm in New York and I'm drinking. I black out.

I come back to back in Manhattan around where I started drinking and I'm walking back to the subway and I start going through my pockets. I pull out receipts from like four different boroughs that I don't even remember being in. Like at all. Like imagine that.

Like getting on the subway, you're going here, you're going there. I'm like, I don't even remember being in those'm like and that was the first time i was like you might have a problem if you if you don't remember being in four different freaking boroughs in new york right but at the same time alcohol still makes you feel better it solves your problems in the short term even though you start to rack up long term consequences i think i i just kind of got off the rails on the conversation, but- No, no, no, no. What was the epiphany of when you were like, okay, I'm actually going to admit I have a

problem to other people and do something about it? So I had admitted that I had a problem to people who were, who I would say weren't of much consequence in my life. Like I remember one time and I don't mean that to mean they were insignificant. I just mean that they were people that I was more comfortable admitting that to. I remember one time I was drinking with one of my best friends. We would always just like get after it. We were college friends. He would come down and visit me. I was living in Pennsylvania at the time and we're drinking. We're like pre-gaming. We're

going to go out every time we would get together. It was just like, we're like pre-gaming, we're going to go out. Every time we would get together, it was just like, you know, let's go. He looks at me and he goes, you ever wonder if you have a drinking problem? And I go, wonder? No, I definitely have a drinking problem. And the way that I said that, it was even a surprise to me. I'm like, oh yeah, that's right. Like I, you know, I knew, but I would say that when I got sober, what really sort of set it off for me that I was like, okay, I'm committed is that I called my first person I called when I was like, I got to do something about this. And I'm serious. And I called my mom because she's also sober and she's been sober for 39 years. Wow. So I called her up and I just said, I think I have a drinking problem. And once I did that, it was like, I've now said this to someone that I really care about,

who I know will be willing to really help me. So I would say that was sort of like the big moment. And then what happened after that? Did you end up going to a rehab? I didn't go to rehab. So I had tried to stop drinking a bunch of times before. You know, it's one of those things where I think one of my inherent issues is I was always trying to come up with some harebrained scheme to drink less.

Like you could manage it. Yeah. That sounds great. I think there's a lot of people. Well, it sounds great until you have the first one. And if your favorite drink has always been the next one, that doesn't work so well. Right? So I just did all kinds of stupid stuff to try and drink less. It never worked.

I think it just became very clear to me there wasn't going to be an easy way out of this. And I could very clearly see that if I continued drinking the way I was, that I was going to die early. Now, I didn't know if I was going to die when I was 35 or 55 or 75. I just knew it was going to be earlier than it would be. And I also knew that my life would probably be not as good as it could be if I were to stop. So when I got sober, it was sort of a realization like, oh, we're going into the fire, dude. And this is going to suck. And I don't even know if you can do it, but we got to like, just bear down. So at what point, I mean, you seem to me reading your book, like a, a very curious person, your thought, you're, you know, obviously in your line of work,

you've studied all of these different people and gotten in all these different adventures and had all these different experience when you were drinking was, were you focused on your professional career at all? Or was this not until later? Like how did, how did you start kind of falling into the space that you're in now yeah so i was at the time i was working at a magazine you know big magazine so i was doing the work i was doing now i was definitely losing some some gas that could have gone in the work tank to the fact that you know monday after a weekend bender i would be basically useless most Most of Tuesday, I'd be useless. Then, okay, we started to get some gas back Wednesday and Thursday. And then by Friday, I'm going, man, can't wait to go out tonight. So like, really, I'm not investing that many

resources to work. Like, don't get me wrong. I'm working well enough that I'm not getting fired, but I'm definitely not employee of the month. You. You know, you back up. Part of, I think, getting sober is figuring out why you drink in the first place or why you use drugs in the first place. And that takes a while. It's not like you get sober and then you go, oh, that's why. Like, it's a long process.

It's a process that I'm still figuring out. For me, though, I think that it was probably that I've always been drawn to like intense experiences. I just like to explore the edges of life. And so when I'm working at the magazine, like I'm in an office every day, I've got this like nine to five, that's like rather sterile.

I'm doing work that, I'm doing the type of work that I don't necessarily love. It's kind of like, oh, this pays the bills. It's just a little bit boring, right? And so when I drink drink all of a sudden i kind of turn into this new person that is more willing to explore the edges right because if you have a lot of drinks all of a sudden any experience can turn into a sort of an extreme intense experience whether it's with other people or whether it's even if i'm trying to write something like i'm going to write it differently and it might be really interesting.

Sure. And so it sort of allowed me to scratch that itch for extreme experiences, but it was doing that in a way that ultimately caused long-term harm. A lot of creatives say that, like Hunter S. Thompson, he would drink all day long as he was... Among other things. S. Thompson, he always, he would drink all day long as he was like, I feel like it's very common that a lot of creatives want that intensity that they think that the drug or alcohol brings to their work. Yeah. And you know, the other thing is that me having a background wanting to be a writer, I didn't really realize I wanted to be a writer until I was maybe 20, 21 in college. Um, even though I had loved reading different works as I grew up,

I was a magazine junkie. I was a book junkie and I was a huge Hunter S Thompson fan. Part of me, as I'm the drinking person, I'm going like, well, all writers, like they drink, they drink to excess. Now, never once did I go, well yeah hunter s thompson put a gun in his mouth at 62 or however old he was oh so did hemingway like come on dude um that's not a good long-term plan it's like people that glamorize certain rock stars and they don't they don't like go a little forward say like oh look how that ended yeah and so and i think really what it is, it is, it is not that the alcohol or drug of choice makes them a good, good, anyone, a good musician, anyone, a good writer, anyone, a good artist, anyone good at anything.

It's just a person who is maybe can make a living off those things are good, um, is drawn to those sorts of things. Because for every person who's done that, who's like a crazy drug person like Hunter S. Thompson, you can line up other people who aren't. Where and when did you realize that there was a comfort crisis? Like, was there a moment that you were just sitting somewhere and you saw something or you read something or you heard something?

Or was it just like a bunch of little events that added up that you saw that there was something happening? I think it was a lot of little events. I think it was, you know, going through getting sober. I realized that, you know, after I did that, like hardest thing I've ever done, full stop, totally uncomfortable in every single way. I mean, the physical stuff is like not even most of the battle. It's like, you got to figure out why your head is the way it is and you got to relearn life and how to live it. Like everything. Yeah, that sucks. But by going through that, my life improved full stop, like across the board, things you could measure, things you could not measure. So I kind

of make this observation that, yeah, in order to improve your life, you sometimes have to do things that are challenging in the short term. It's a big topic on this show. And like I said, a friend of mine, Doug, hi Doug, he gave me your book and it sat on my bookshelf. And then one day I looked at it and we've been talking on the show about, you know, in life for the longest time, I think many of us have this utopia vision of like one day I'm going to be all set. I'm going to be comfortable. Everything's be taken care of. I'm going to have money. I'm going to have all these resources and all my problems are going to go away. And what I try to point out is in my personal life, as things have

gotten more comfortable, a lot of the times things get more stressful, but my relationship to that stress is maybe a little bit tinged or a little bit warped. Meaning like if you were to look at it outside, like, oh, like everything's fine, but I think we are trained. And we talk, you talk about this in your book to kind of look for new discomforts, the more comfortable you get. And I have a, I have a quote that I want to talk about with you and dive into from your book. It says most people today rarely step outside their comfort zones. We are living progressively sheltered, sterile, temperature controlled, overfed, under challenged, safety netted lives, and it's limiting the degree to which we experience our one wild and precious life.

And when I read that, I was like, aha, this is why we wanted to have you on the show to talk about this. Yeah. So I would say I make that sort of observation about sobriety and I've always been into like anthropology, why are humans the way we are, you know, and it goes back to the past, the environments we evolved in. I was still writing for this magazine that I used to work at. And I got sent on this story to profile a guy whose name is Donnie Vincent. He's this backcountry bow hunter and filmmaker. So I go hunting with him for like a week off the grid in Nevada. It was uncomfortable. So we like hike into these mountains that were at like 11,000 feet. And if we want water, we've got to hike, you know, miles down to a stream, carry it back up, freezing cold the

entire time. I'm super hungry the entire time. Cause you're only going to pack in so much food cause you're like climbing around all day. Um, I'm bored the whole time. And when I get back to my house in Las Vegas, one, I felt great. Like I felt like I'd accomplished something. I'd done something of consequence. I was calmer. I was more collected. But I think what I could notice is like, oh my God, like the environment that I'm living in now is so different than what I was in up there hunting. But the environment up there is literally how humans lived for millions of years of evolution. The comforts that most impact your daily life, everything from climate control to how you get from point A to point B to where your food comes

from to how you spend your time and attention to literally everything in your life. It's all new. It's all made in the last hundred years. And it's all designed to make your life easier and more comfortable. And so basically being a journalist, I just wondered how that had changed us as human beings. And that's what set off the book. What's interesting is like, this is, and this is why we wanted to have you on to talk about this because we talk about, I think it's easy to say like, hey, you have to go get uncomfortable.

And a lot of people say that. But what I like about your book is you kind of take some data points and you point out what some of these comforts are maybe quote unquote doing to us. Some of them you have here is those physical and psychological problems like obesity, heart disease, cancers, diabetes, depression, anxiety, and feelings of lack of meaning and purpose. And like a lot of these issues we just didn't have, at least in as much abundance years ago. And so I think the question is, from your perspective and from things you've studied, how are these quote unquote comforts harming us?

Well, yeah. I mean, basically every chronic disease that we have now, the stuff that kills us now is a result of how we now live. So for example, in the past, the average human was taking more than 20,000 steps a day. And by the way, they're not just stepping, right? If you want to sit down, you're sitting in the dirt, you're having to carry stuff. You have like every part of your life is physical. And now today, the average person takes about 4,000 steps a day. And even as we're sitting, we're sitting in like plush couch, like we just don't work our bodies as much. And that is the number one driver of diseases like heart disease, which is the number one killer of

human beings. So I don't want, I also don't want people to like think that the takeaway from my books is like, yeah, try and live like a hunter gather. It's like, hell no, I don't want to, I'm not suggesting anyone run around for their food and do all this stuff. We have these amazing advances, but we've kind of become a victim of our own success. So the answer to me is really like, how can I take some of the wisdom of the past, like things that we used to have to do as humans that kept us healthy, everything from being more physical to even how we spend our attention. Like people used to get bored a lot. Now we've got a million easy, effortless escapes from boredom. Yeah. Like being sent to your room when you were a kid was a huge punishment.

Now I'm like, put me in my room for as long as you want. Yeah, because I've got like 79 different screens in there. Even the way people poo was different. Like even the way we go to the bathroom now, like they had to like squat down, which is, by the way, really good for your intestines to be on that squatty potty. But it's like, it's a totally different thing. There's even the memes that exist. It's like, what do you do if you forget your phone in the bathroom? Yeah. No, you're absolutely right. And so for example, here's

a, that's a great example. So I would say most people in the, in Western countries, because we, we just don't squat anymore. Most of us can't squat with our heels on the ground, ass to grass. And because of this, we have a lot higher incidence of knee issues. We have a lot higher incidence of hip issues. When you look at East Asian countries where people rest in the squat or go to the bathroom in the squat, their rates of knee diseases and hip problems are way lower than ours, simply because they're taking their bodies through a range of motion that humans were designed to do every single day, multiple times single day. We have a squatty potty. Is that the same? Is that the same or is that not the same? Is that still comfortable? I feel like that's still comfortable. I feel like I need to get a toilet in the floor like we saw in China

where you're like, I would do that. That's cute. Let's not change our whole, let's not rip the toilets out of our mouth. If I'm designing a house, so I will put a toilet in the floor. And if you think I'm joking, you can pull this podcast clip in 10 years when I have my whole remodel. You're going to message me and be like, why did you come on this show and talk about this and send me a photo of your hole in the ground?

Yeah, we just have holes in our house. Yeah, we're going to strip everything out of our house. No, but doing a show like this and having a media platform that reaches a lot of people, I feel like some of these issues you want to talk about, people get touchy about. But the fact is, there's a stat in your book that I found crazy and I highlighted. It says like 32% of Americans are overweight, 38% are obese, 8% extremely obese, 70% of us are too heavy, one third of diabetes or prediabetes, 40 million Americans have mobility

problems, heart disease kills 25 of us all medical issues essentially non-existent until the 20th century that's just those are scary staggering numbers like outside of any kind of like body positivity or whatever like these are just like we are not healthy as a population yeah Yeah. And it's, it's a problem. Yeah. What I like to say about, you know, if you're in the overweight or obese category, I don't want,

it's not a guarantee you're going to get ill, but what it does is it increases your risk of diseases. Sure. Right. So it's like you're playing with a set of dice that are loaded towards the direction of disease. Does that mean you are going to get heart disease? No, it's not a guarantee. Is it a guarantee you will get diabetes? No,

just means your likelihood is much higher. But do you think a lot of these issues are because people seek so much comfort in their life, which leads to poor habits that make us more sedentary or make us less prone to movement or more prone to bad eating habits is that's like kind of like the essential point of the problem with seeking constant comfort right yeah exactly yeah and i mean it's a direct one-to-one if you're not moving enough that leads to issues your weight creeps up you're also not getting metabolic effects that are good for your for your heart and if you're eating a lot, you're going to gain weight. And that's associated with all sorts of bad outcomes.

And it really is. It's just the fact that, you know, when you look at how humans evolved, we evolved in these environments where we would have to go hunt and gather for food all day. That took a lot of physical work. And by the way, the food was scarce and hard to find. So we didn't have access to a ton of food. So the people who would have survived and spread their genes, the food was scarce and hard to find, so we didn't have access to a ton of food. So the people who would have survived and spread their genes, when they had access to food,

they tended to overeat it. They also didn't move more than they had to because you're just wasting energy, right? And energy is at a premium. So we still today have those same genes that basically tell us like, yeah, don't move too much. If you have the opportunity to sit instead of stand, you should probably sit. Don't just go out and move for the sake of it. Oh, if you have

calorie dense food and have access to it, yeah, probably eat a little more than you really need to. That would have provided an advantage for all of time until now in a world where we don't have to run around hunting and gathering for our food, where we do have gas stations filled with 79 different kinds of Doritos, right? So we're pre-programmed to want these comforts, but the problem is now we have so much abundance and so much ease of access that this pre-programming is essentially harming us because we don't do all the things that we used to do to get these things. Exactly. If someone is listening and they are like, oh, I have this problem, I'm constantly seeking

comfort, which I mean, most of us are, what are some things that you would sort of prescribe them when it comes to discomfort? Like give us some easy ones that you could do tomorrow. Yeah. Well, I mean, I think it depends on what we're talking about, but even something like, okay, we'll start with food. 80% of eating is now driven by reasons other than true hunger. So we eat because it's a certain time we eat because we're stressed out. We eat because like, well, I always eat it when I watch this show. All right. And so I think what happens is people today, we tend to think that hunger is an emergency. Like it's going to build and build and build. And at a certain point, your stomach is just going to implode on itself and you're just going to like die. It's like, that's not how it works, right? It comes and goes in waves. It's really not that

bad. And so I think even doing something like, you know, try fasting for a single day, not so much that it's going to do you any magic in the moment, but it's going to teach you that like hunger is not actually an emergency and it might actually teach you, okay, this is what hunger actually feels like. And so if I'm not feeling this, like, might actually teach you, okay, this is what hunger actually feels like. And so if I'm not feeling this, like, do I really need to be eating this thing? With exercise, something I talk about in the book is rucking. So if you look at what humans are designed to be good at physically, we're good at two things.

We're good at covering long distances, slowly running. We would use this to run down animals that we would hunt and kill. And then we would have to, two, the second thing we're good at covering long distances, slowly running. We would use this to run down animals that we would hunt and kill. And then we would have to, too, the second thing we're good at is carry those animals back to camp. So we're the only animal that can carry weight for distance. And this totally shaped how we are built. It allowed us to become apex predators. It allowed us to literally take over the world because we could take tools into the unknown, right? We could carry stuff.

And I see you, Lauren. This guy goes to the airports with a big rucksack on. Every time he's traveling, he's got a big weighted backpack on. I'm going to be doing that at the lovely Austin airport. I might have to pick up that habit because I see it. I'm like, we travel all the time. I just, I literally flew to LA yesterday, did a meeting and flew back. You rucking while traveling is truly my worst nightmare of hell.

You are already such a fucking nightmare when we travel. If you start fucking rucking while we're traveling, I will literally... I'm going to act... I will divorce you. I'm not joking. I'm going to get the exact setup

and then I'm going to start. No, no, no. We have to give and take here. You get your hole in the ground. He gets his airport rucks. We'll call it a day. Our whole house is going to be torn up and there's going to be rucksacks everywhere.

Rucksacks and holes to pee in and poop in so what but so i think here's the other issue i think a lot of people will will receive this information or they'll hear it and it's like yeah i agree and i get it but then there's no like flip of a switch to say okay i gotta actually implement and make some changes i think as humans we're so resistant we know these are know these are all bad things. Of course you shouldn't overeat. You shouldn't overdrink. You shouldn't be sedentary all the time. You should work out. We know all these things inherently in your life. What was the switch where it was like, okay, I'm just doing these things now. And I'm going to put myself in a position where I'm constantly seeking discomfort. I think that's the thing that people have trouble unlocking. Yeah. I think it, I mean, part of it is realizing it's not going to be easy.

You know, like I think that we live in a world now where, you know, there's a lot of, oh, this diet's, try this diet because it, you know, you're not going to be hungry at all or try this workout. It's only 20 minutes and it does everything you could get taken 60 minutes or whatever. I think the realization that one, it's not going to be easy.

Two, it's not actually, once you do something a handful of times, it becomes much easier. So I think the story of improvement in today's world in a lot of different domains, everything from losing weight to improving your fitness, to improving your mental health, to improving your creativity,

to improving your productivity across the board is basically this. You have to embrace short-term discomfort to get a long-term benefit. That is just part of the bargain. So I think realizing that once you actually start doing something, it will start to give you these returns in the long run. It's going to take a minute, right? This is why most people quit their diet after five weeks because they're like, oh, I'm still hungry. This sucks. They haven't gotten to the real benefit yet, right? But if you can just learn to sort of push through that

and really ask yourself, you know, how bad is this? The reality is it's probably not that bad, but it's just we sort of default to like, I got to find the easy thing. I got to get out of this like slight feeling of discomfort I have. And so, you know, I wish I could tell you like, oh, do X, Y, Z thing. It's going to be super easy,

but it wouldn't work if it was easy, right? Can I tell you two ways that I think that I get uncomfortable on a daily basis and you give me a real assessment if you agree? Okay. Okay. The first thing that I do every single day is I meditate for 24 minutes. Now, I don't know if that's comfortable because I like being in silence, but I also think, and we can like being in silence, but I also think because we can get into scarcity brain, but I feel like it's uncomfortable to sit quiet. Do you agree with that or no? Yes.

Okay. Totally. Okay. The other thing I do, I think you're 100% going to agree with this one is cold plunging. That's uncomfortable, right? Uncomfortable. Yes. Cold.

So I get your check. Yes. Okay. Now, get your check. Yes. Okay. Now, I guess my question is, what else would you add to those two things if it was you? I know you said rucking, but if you could add more little things throughout the day that are uncomfortable, what would you add? Because I would love to add some more things that make me uncomfortable. First, I would say that the meditation is great

because I will tell you, I know people who could, you know, go run a hundred miles right now if you asked them to and they'd just be able to do it. And they're really good at managing that discomfort, but you ask them to sit alone with their thoughts for 24 minutes and they would be like, I can't do that. Like they would fall apart. Yeah. So rocking, I think is something that everyone should do. I think that it is, I do think it's actually particularly beneficial for women. And the reason for that is because of increased bone density. Women tend to lose bone density as they age. Now, this increases your risk of if you were to fall, which people fall all the time of a broken hip.

And if you break your hip after, you know after age, I think it's 65, you have basically a 33% chance of dying in the next six months. Rucking is uniquely good at improving bone density and therefore staving off makes you be able to take a hit basically. So this is something like I definitely worry about with my mom. She rucks a little bit now. And you like the ruck better than the vest. My answer to that is it's more important that you carry weight rather than how you carry it. But I do think that there are unique advantages to the rock over the weight. We need to rock after we fuck. Let's rock. Let's just make sure we do the other thing.

But speaking of being low through thoughts, and I'm going to jump ahead. There was a, and I don't remember if this was in this book or the Scarcity book, where you were talking about there was this study where two-thirds of men or a fourth of women would rather be shocked than be alone with their thoughts. People just don't like being alone inherently. And I found that to be really interesting. And I think to Lauren's meditation point, a lot of people just have a really tough time sitting with themselves. I used to have these roommates in college and one of them was just like, he could not even like, you know, every day you have to be in the living room with them or somebody is attached to him.

Some people are just extremely terrified of just being alone. I would caveat that with though, the more you sit alone with your thoughts, and this has been my experience, the more you get addicted to sitting alone with your thoughts. So I think that at first it seems really uncomfortable, but then as you do it, and after reading the surrender experiment, I even more was like, oh my God, I just want to sit alone and quiet. It's a weird thing. And I'm sure that happens with rucking and cold plunging too. It's like you start it, it's uncomfortable, but like you were saying, you have to sort of get to the other side for the discomfort to almost become soothing, if that makes sense. Yeah, the human body adapts.

And one way that I like to look at it is we often look at these habits as if they're these things that we do to sort of get healthier. My position is more that being sedentary, for example, is more of a toxin than exercise is additive and like a vitamin. So basically humans evolved to go through temperature swings. We evolved to get a certain amount of movement every single day.

We evolved in conditions of hunger. And so that is our normal state. We have taken ourselves out of this normal state and simply by doing this stuff, we are restoring ourselves to where we need to be. I think it's an important flip. There are some bad things that have come out of the last few years, but there's also some incredible things. I think it is one of the biggest moments in time where people are actually starting to

pay more and more attention to their health. This is so needed, which is why I love this partner, Armoura Colostrum, so much. You guys know I'm always on the lookout the ways to strengthen my immune system, the gut health, improve my fitness and metabolism, enhance skin, hair radiance, all of the above, which is why we love Armoura Colostrum so much. We've had the founder of Armoura on this show going in-depth about the benefits of Armoura Colostrum. And there are so many different things that Lauren and I have noticed since taking it. Armour is a propriety concentrate of bovine colostrum that harnesses over 400 living bioactive nutrients that rebuild the barriers, all of the barriers of your body and fuel cellular

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carawayhome.com slash skinny or use code skinny at checkout. Caraway, non-toxic cookware made modern. This company is blowing up all over social media because it's known as a brain fuel. What I noticed though is a clean energy boost and also it curbs my appetite, which is really nice if I'm fasting in the morning before the gym. And the product is called Ketone IQ. Basically, it's like this little shot. I like to take two before I work out and it just gives you like really clean energy. It's not like a sugar or caffeine kind of energy. It's just a pure energy. What I like about it, though, is it's also awesome for an appetite suppressant. So I usually don't eat a big meal before the gym. I'll do like two hard boiled eggs and my coffee with raw milk, and then I'll take a shot of

this and I'm not starving during my workout at all. So I have my protein, my caffeine, and then I have my little hit of my ketone IQ. It's the perfect situation. Michael is the one who told me about this brand. It's HVMN, which stands for health via modern nutrition. And he was like, everyone is obsessed with this. It's not a keto diet product. It's just like this little shot that gives you brain fuel. So he kept telling me all his friends were taking this before workouts. I tried it. I noticed it was a clean energy. I'm always testing products. I test so many products. And this was one that really stood out to me because it really helped

me get through a workout. And also it just gave me a nice clean energy. Like I said, you should also know that 60% of the Tour de France uses this product. You can try it too. You can save 30% off your first subscription order of Keton IQ at hvmn.com slash skinny. That's hvmn.com slash skinny. When you decided to go remote to Alaska, which is wild, by the way, did you have any, like, was this an experiment to see kind of how far you could push these discomforts and how far you could adapt? Or like, was this just an adventure? Like, why decide to do that? Because that seems like the most extreme version of talking about finding discomfort.

Yeah. I think that after I'd made this observation about the benefits of discomfort, I had my friend Donnie calls me up and he's like, do you want to go to the Arctic for more than a month? And my initial thought was not only no, but hell no. But he's a good salesman and he starts talking me into it. And it just, it occurs to me, well, this could be a great way to test this theory and quite epically. Right. So I signed on. That was the whole deal is that I'm a journalist. And I think that as a journalist, you benefit from going out in the world, trying things, going places, meeting people in person, working every angle you can. And I think that one of those angles is going through things yourself because I don't know if you can really fully understand something unless you actually do it as well. What I found, I was trying to even just fathom that. And to your point,

I don't think you can fathom it until you've done what you've done. But when you talked about the moment where you were just kind of there alone and there's no cell service and there's no human and you could send a smoke signal and it wouldn't matter. Like, I don't think people realize because we've been so connected for so long, what it's actually like to be that alone. I wonder if you just like describe that feeling. Yeah. So we, to, to get where we needed to go, we had to take this plane. That's about the size of a Snickers bar out into the middle of the Arcticctic and then we took an even smaller plane um where what a pilot would take us one by one so there are three of us out there total uh one by one to this next spot so because we're being ferried and i was last i just got left standing in the middle of the

tundra like hundreds of miles from civilization from anyone you know i think in modern life we go if i want to be alone what do i I do? I go in my bedroom. There's people in the other room. And oh, by the way, I'm going to text with someone. I'm going to go on Instagram. I'm going to watch TV. So I'm with other people through media. So in this part, in this position I found myself in, I am truly utterly alone. Even if you're alone, you can also, if you need to get to someone, you can get to them rather quickly where in your situation you can't. Right. So there's no one around me for hundreds of miles. I have no form of communication.

I can't even like listen to another person over the radio or something, right? You're just standing there totally alone. And I had never been that alone in my entire life. And that is a strange feeling. It's a very strange feeling. At the same time, it occurred to me, I could do anything right now. I could be anyone right now, right? So much of how we behave in day-to-day life is a reaction to all those other people around us. And like, once you remove society from the story, things get pretty open. And I think that the takeaway for that for me was, okay, well, how can this inform my life when I go back into society? The fact that this realization that all these decisions we make every single day are a reaction to others, and maybe we're not making them truly based on our own merit or what we want to do, right? Because society determines

so much of what we do. And so I think that that was very useful for me. And I think it's useful for the average person. It's like, how much of your decisions are driven by what you think X person thinks? Sorry, the majority. What you think Y person thinks? A lot of them. A lot of them. So I think one of the underlying sort of current through a lot of my books, I think is being more reliant on yourself, not only through skills, but also just really kind of listening to yourself. Like, what do I want to do with this time that I have on earth, which by the way, is very short. And am I making

decisions for other people or what I think other people are going to want me to do? And what skills can I learn to make better decisions, to become more self-reliant, to basically build the tools so I can take names and kick ass with no one at my side. Great, I'm going to bring people with me. I'm not saying like shun society, but like I want people to be able to like affect things on their own

and carry themselves through hard times. When someone comes to you and they want advice, friends, family, about something that they're doing that's making them comfortable, what do you normally say? Besides read my book. What would be an example? What if they come to you and they say, I've been doing this thing. Maybe they're drinking too much alcohol. They're taking too much drugs. They're taking painkillers. What can I do? What are habits that thing that triggers it? I think can be very informative for a lot of people with a bad habit. It might be something like stress. They might get an email from their boss and that makes them go into the pantry and eat a handful of M&Ms, figuring out what the trigger is and why you're doing it in the first place, and then trying to find a better

substitute. So I mentioned how, for example, one of the reasons I think that I drank 2XS is because I like extreme experiences. So once I stopped drinking, I still have a need for that, but I can't get it from alcohol anymore. Right. So now I got to figure out another way to get it. So I started exercising a lot more and the exercise ramps up in intensity. That's a good way for way to get it. So I start exercising a lot more. And the exercise ramps up in intensity. That's a good way for me to burn off steam, I learned, and get that extreme experience.

I start spending a lot more time outdoors. Start, yeah, to your point, taking trips to Alaska for a month. And I think that that's a lot more productive thing than drinking for me, right? This gives me long-term benefits rather than long-term consequences. What I've observed that I think is really interesting about like right now is that when people are uncomfortable in any situation, they reach for their phone. So like when they're in line in the bathroom, they'll reach for the phone. When they're sitting alone in a restaurant, they'll reach for the phone. I even noticed like people in the morning, right when they wake up and maybe they have an uncomfortable thought, they'll reach for their phone. When they go to bed, it's like a bookend

for their day. They'll like literally lay down and go to bed with the phone. What do you think about that? Go off. So you asked, what are these discomforts that people should weave back into their life? One of them is boredom. So I'll tell you when I'm up in Alaska, so we're hunting caribou up there and, um, the caribou migrate from North to South. And so we're trying to catch them on this migration. Now they weren't migrating. So we'd sit on this Hill for hours and hours and hours at a time. I didn't have my phone. I didn't have a book. I didn hours at a time i didn't have my phone i didn't

have a book i didn't have magazine didn't have a tv didn't have ipad didn't have video games right insert a million other things i didn't have so i find myself bored again it's like okay this is a strange feeling so what do we do with our boredom start reading labels on our food the nutrition labels right because of this i can tell you that a Clif Bar has 250 calories. It's got 10 grams of protein. It's got six grams of fat, 49 carbohydrates. Memorized it. Learned a lot of interesting things.

We read the tags on our gear. I come up with a Christmas list for gifts for my friends and family for like seven years, right? But you can't write it down. No, I have a notepad. You have a notepad. Because I'm a journalist. So I write that down. Got it.

Then I wrote some of the book. Why am I telling you this? I basically told you that to tell you this, is that we are rarely bored anymore, right? And when we are bored, we have a very easy, effortless escape from it, right? We have this cell phone we can grab at any given moment. So when I'm up in the Arctic, it's like, what the hell do I do? Oh my God, this is so terrible. Oh, let's read our

energy labels, right? Now, when you look at boredom and why humans get bored in the first place, boredom is basically this evolutionary discomfort that tells you whatever you're doing with your time right now, the return on your time invested is wearing thin. So if we're sitting and hunting, say it's a million years ago, and we need food or else we're going to die, right? We need food to survive. If the animals aren't coming through, we're going to get bored and it's going to basically tell us, go do something else. So in the past, that something else was often productive. We would go pick berries. We would go find potatoes we go do whatever now when we feel that boredom we have a really easy effortless escape from it in the form of cell phones and so i think that which

is a lot of time unproductive which is often unproductive right very few people pull out their cell phone and read war and peace very few people pull out their cell phone and go on to oxfam and donate money every time right right? We're going into like, we're going down crazy internet rabbit holes. We're going on Twitter and getting worked up about, now X, getting worked up about something. And so I think that the way we spend our boredom has changed. It's no longer used for things that could potentially be productive. So really in a vacuum, boredom is neither good nor bad. It's what does it tell you to do?

It just tells you to go do something, right? And in the past, that something used to be productive and now it's not often productive. Which I think is a good segue into your book, Scarcity Brain. But before you do that, there's one thing I want to talk to you about,

which I forgot to mention. And I was trying to explain this concept to Lauren the other day, which is, I think you call it, not comfort creep, but you call it basically- Problem creep. Problem creep. But I call this, just so you know, the saber-toothed tiger that he looks for whenever everything's

good, he's looking for the saber-toothed. I think this will resonate with many listeners. And tell me if I have the concept wrong. In life, the more comfortable you get and the more you take yourself out of discomfort, our brains are still wired to look for problems or issues. And so you could be in a objectively comfortable situation that many people in other parts of the country would look at and say like, that would be ideal. Maybe you're sitting in your house, you're in AC, maybe you're alone, but you could get on a dating app if you wanted to, you could order food delivery service, but now it's a problem because it's not a nicer place. Or maybe you get used to

flying business class and you get downgraded to coach and now it's the worst experience of your life. Is that essentially what it is? Basically it's, you're in a good situation, but your brain is wired to tell you that it's a bad situation even when it's not. Is that like kind of it? Yeah. Yeah. So this is from a study conducted in 2018 by researchers at Harvard. And they basically found that as humans experience fewer and fewer problems, we don't realize this and appreciate it. We simply look for the next problem. So in the past, this used to... You're getting seen. Yeah. Well, I think everyone does this. No, no, no, no, no. Keep going, Michael. I'll keep going not you michael

this one what happens if your meditation in the morning gets derailed that's a different story so so in the past this used to keep us alive because we lived in environments that were harsh where we rarely had enough like the world was really hard and so if you were the type of person who was looking for the next problem that would would keep you vigilant. Okay. We got enough food, but do we got enough firewood? Okay. We got enough firewood, but how's our shelter, right? Like there's all these dangers. And so that keeps you alive. Now applied to today's world where things have gotten a lot better over the last, say 500 years, like we're definitely living better. I think people sometimes get mad when, when we say that on the show, but objectively, if you read history or you look at what, like we objectively are

living better as humans. Yeah. It's, yeah it's you know how are you going to measure so like i think about it in terms of okay well how are things going with lifespan well we live to like nearly 80 now we used to live to an average of 35 like do kids live do our kids more likely to survive before age five yeah like thousands of percents more likely to survive before age five? Yeah. Like thousands of percents more likely to survive past age, like all these different things. Hunger is down. Literacy is up. People are more free. But when you pull the average American, only 6% of people think the world is improving. That's because we simply look for the next problem. The last problem we encounter, we go, oh no, things aren't improving. But I think more importantly is this colors how we live our day

to day life, right? So we live our day-to-day life. So we live in this really amazing environment, all things considered, but we rarely stop and appreciate it. We kind of go, oh, there's a problem there. There's a problem there. But as the world continues to get better, these tend to morph into first world problems. I think sometimes people will look at people who have quote unquote made it and they're like miserable people or they're constantly stressed and they don't understand how that could be. But when I read this, I'm like, oh, it's because they have this issue where no matter how good it

gets, they're constantly looking for the problem. Yeah. And I think we all do. And I think the way to fight back against it is to sometimes try going without. So I'll give you an example. It's like when I flew up to the Arctic, I hate flying. And because you're in this small cramped seat, the plane is too hot. There's like a baby screaming, the movies suck, the snacks suck, the coffee sucks, the bathroom's cramped. Like, yeah, flying sucks, right? Then I go spend a month in the Arctic. I'm freezing cold the entire time. If I want water, I've got to hike down to a stream, bring it back up. There's no coffee. I'm starving the entire time because we only packed in so much food.

I'm bored out of my mind the entire time. If I want to go to the bathroom, I got to hike out on the tundra and I got to bring a rifle because there's grizzlies. And so when I get back on the 747 back to vegas like what do you think my experience of the flight was like this is the best coffee i ever had oh my god it's the best best experience of my life yeah all right ample coffee i'd like 20 bags of pretzels that i hadn't sat in a chair for more than a month like oh my god this chair is so amazing the movies all right i'm watching like fast and the Furious 99 going, oh my God, this movie is unbelievable. It's so good. And then when I go to the bathroom, it's like you walk down there,

you go in the bathroom, hit a little red tab on the sink and hot running water hits my hands. And by the way, I'm standing in a tube of steel that is hurtling through the air at 600 miles an hour, 30,000 feet above sea level. And I i at one point in my life was bitching about that like it is amazing the world we live in all right here's what i'm gonna do for your birthday i'm gonna send you to antarctica and i'm gonna drop you off in a little plane with nothing no food no water no cell phone and then i want you to come back and i want you to find no saber to to be honest though i might want to go shit on the tundra with a rifle as opposed to going in those airplane bathrooms those things can get pretty that's the only one okay let's talk about no and i think these like i just think these are things

for people to think about like yesterday i had to fly to LA for a meeting. I did the meeting and I literally got back on a plane right after and came back to Austin. And I, and I was thinking as I was reading, cause I was reading your books on the plane and I was thinking people just get like, if you would have rewound 60 years, 80 years, like there's no way that travel is possible. Like to go that far, come back in the same day, like literally go over multiple states, do a meeting, come back same day and then go back to bed. Like it's just like, it's just lost on people.

And I, and I think it's just like, sometimes it's worth it to sit back and contemplate how good we actually have it. You know what else he said to me that really goes with your book? He said, God, traveling is so easy without kids.

Cause normally we're traveling with our kids under three two and so he like had a really great experience traveling with no kids but five years ago you would have been like oh that was so much to have to go on the plane and come right back but without kids it's like a fucking vacation changes yeah changes it okay here okay so here's like a crazy family story that'll deals with what we're talking about now. So I have this aunt. It's great, great, great, whatever aunt, right? So this is like 1840s. So she's this Mormon lady and Mormons got driven out of Missouri to Utah.

That's why they came to Utah. So she's part of these trains that came to Utah. So what they do is they have these hand carts and they have to physically pull these hand carts and walk from basically Missouri all the way to Utah. So it takes her months. They do this in the summer. They're in Utah. They're about getting into Utah in October, November, and snowstorm hits. Blizzard. Parents get killed. She has her legs frozen up to the knee so this rescue party comes and gets her they take her to salt lake city her legs are frozen they have to cut off her legs at the knee yikes with no i mean we're not talking like they have painkillers or anything right so she lives the rest of her life with basically stumps that aren't, I mean, the sawing process is really gnarly.

So they're always like bad. Apparently she didn't complain her entire life. In fact, she opened up a small business and like produced stuff for the community. She was always in, they wrote down, she was always in good spirits, blah, blah, blah. There's a whole statue to her at University of Southern Utah. Never complained. And like now I'm going to complain because the plane is too hot?

And it took her three months. And by the way, she lost her legs in the process of going a distance that would take three hours on a plane. This is only 150 years ago. Yep.

That is like a blink of an eye. It's crazy. No, and you know, one thing, Lorne, I actually didn't even mention this to you and I wanted to give you a compliment. It's kind of a compliment. Lorne, and objectively we talked about on the show has been through more adversity in her personal life than I have. She's had things happen that just, like what you're talking about, or like some of the things Lauren has been through losing a family member, a parent or whatever. Like they're almost, you say they're reported to be happier later in life. And let me, I have it written down,

have better psychological wellbeing, higher life satisfaction, fewer psychological and physical symptoms, less likely to use painkillers, use healthcare less, less likely to report as disabled. And what resonates is Lauren and I do this ice bath together. And I am not going to lie, she is way tougher than me in the ice bath. Sometimes I will go and I'll hit that three-minute mark. We go cold. It's like 39 degrees and it's one of those ones that move. So it's not easy. She'll go in there for like five or six minutes. And I'm like, how the hell does she do it? And then I read your book. Well, Peter Atiyah does 16 minutes or so.

Well, he's a freak, Peter. Hi, freak. Hi, Peter. Hi, freak. Hi, freak Peter. Peter. But I was reading your book and I'm like, oh, I think her relationship to pain and in your book, you were talking about peoples that have experienced tragedy in life or adversity, their relationship to pain is different than maybe somebody who hasn't experienced those same things. Maybe we could talk about that a little bit. Well, one, I will say that women have a way higher pain tolerance than men. Men are like, yeah, you guys are fucking pussy. We're fucking pussies full on. And there's, I mean, this isn't just me like having observations.

This is like actual science behind this. And also observations. My friend said it's because you guys don't get a period once a month. So you guys are like, oh, I have a sniffle. And it's like, okay. We also don't give birth. Which again is controversial to say these days. You guys really don't do much. We don't do much.

We just fucking sit around and go, you know, I'm going to go up to Alaska for a month because, oh God. You don't do much. No, I mean, definitely women have way higher pain tolerance. And this is even like in workout classes. They've done really interesting studies where they'll measure how hard men go versus women. And women consistently go way harder than men and report like it wasn't as hard for them. I can't even remember what we were talking about. No, but I think we were talking about how I think sometimes people…

You're saying I have more capacity. No, I think there's a silver lining to look at for people that have experienced tragedy in their life or adversity or hardships. Some of the data from your book points out that those people go on to actually live healthier, more fulfilled, happier lives than people who maybe experienced less adversity. Yeah. So it's a you. So basically, they've done these studies where people who sort of trauma after trauma after trauma, they don't have great mental health as you might expect. Sure. On the equal side, people who have no problems in their life and sort of get everything done for them and haven't ever faced adversity and hardship, they have equally poor rates of mental health. So there's a sweet spot where you want some number of challenges in your life,

because that teaches you how to navigate the future. You learn something from that. It actually sort of gives you skills. So I like to say, you know, when you think about problems, problems are actually opportunities to grow and learn from because humans, we don't, we don't improve when times are really great. You ultimately learn through trying to solve a problem, whatever problem that is, right? That's like very much like the hero or heroine's journey was like laid out by Joseph Campbell. It's like problem pops up. First thing you always do is you're like, I don't want to deal with this. I'm going to ignore it. But then if you accept it and you sort of try and solve it, the nature of solving a problem is you don't know how it's going to go, right? It's uncertain and

it's hard. And you have to do a lot of challenging things and struggle through that. But as you're doing that, you're learning so much about not only yourself, but also about how do I navigate the future when something comes up? And then you come out on the other side of that, literally a new person. Because you have changed. Your behavior has forever changed because of that. And then things are good for a while.

And then you have another problem. And then you go through that cycle again. That's like the growth cycle. But the problem is, is that some people, I think, and I think we all have something like this in our lives that like, I know I do where you might have a problem, but you're kind of sitting in that zone of refusal. You just camp out there like, I'm going to, I don't want to deal with this. I'm going to ignore it. But by doing that, you risk a lot because you're not ultimately growing, right? And I think we all have something like that. Oh, sure.

I will also say though, yes, you can say that I have capacity for pain, but also I'm like you where I like things intense. I just like intense things. Someone's like, I'm like, how should I start meditating? Someone's like, start for five minutes. I'm like how should i start meditating someone's like start for five minutes i'm like no i want to start for 30 about 24 let me try 45 minutes let me just sit in meditation all day like i like ease into the ice bath or she's gonna be in there for 10 no i i don't like like limp dick experiences i like intense like i just like I'm an intense person so I I don't know if that has something

to do with the ice bath or if you're just I think some people are wired no I mean and listen I feel like I you know when I'm with men like I can hold it with the best of them in an ice bath right like I'm consistently in cold water but when I do it with her it's just like it's a different it's a different thing she hands you your ass yeah okay Let's talk about scarcity brain, your new book. I think this really goes kind of like hand in hand with your first book. Why are we wired to think that we have less and crave more? Why like from your perspective of all the research you've done, why does this, because I, I think this is a common theme of discomfort and maybe unhappiness and unease in people's life where they just feel they need more and they don't have enough. Especially with social media, because you can

feel like the best mom on the planet. And then you go on and you see like business stuff, or you can feel like the best business person on the planet. And then you go on and you see family stuff and you're like, I'm not like, it's like, it's almost like it's never enough with social media. Yeah. Well, so the reason is very simple, is that humans came up in environments where everything we needed to survive and thrive, everything from food to possessions, to information, to status and influence,

what you say on social media, was scarce and hard to find. So if you were the person who defaulted to more of those things, who never felt like you had enough of those things and therefore acted on that, always tried to acquire and were worried about getting more, that would have led you to survive and you would have spread your DNA. And now we still have those genes that tell us you never have enough. You need to keep getting more. And unfortunately, it's applied to a world where we can't have enough.

We live in a world where we have an abundance of all the things we're built to crave. Everything from food, in the US, we throw out a third of our food, for example, from stuff. The average home has 10,000 to 40,000 items now. In the past, home might've had 100 items. Information, the average person today

sees more information in one day than a person about 700 years ago would have seen in their entire life to status and influence. So in the past, we probably lives in groups of at max, maybe 150 people. And now you can go on Instagram and write a post that influences millions of people. And you can also have millions of people comment on something you've said or a decision you've made. And in some ways, like all these things are good, right? Like it's good to have more food rather than less.

I'd rather, you know, have too much than be starving. I'd rather have the tools I need, but we still, we don't have a governor on those things. So we find ourself in a world where we're always wanting more, more, more, or the answer is we already have enough. We just, we just don't realize it. So what led you to start thinking about this topic, which obviously we're going to dive more into, but like along your journey when you, as a journalist, and as you've gone, as you went through the comfort crisis, why did you start focusing on this topic?

Yeah. So I finished the comfort crisis in May of 2020, which as you might know is when the world changed. So I finished the comfort crisis, pandemic hits. When the pandemic hits, what do we all do? We go to the grocery store and we hoard as much as we can, right? The grocery store, like fighting for toilet paper, all this stuff. And so I make this observation, like when people think that resources are scarce, like we really hoard. I think it was one of the most pitiful moments in human history. Oh yeah. Just like if you were an alien watching us and you, and you look down and say like, these people are charging and taking the toilet paper to, to your point, which many people didn't

evolve with and didn't need for thousands of years. And that's like the thing we all were fighting over the thing. So then after that initial shock, you start to see people lean into other behaviors where we want more. So for example, a significant amount of people gained weight. People spent a lot more time on screens, on phone screens, computer screens, TV screens. You saw impulse purchases spike

like the highest they've ever been. We adopted all these sort of bad habits. And so to me, it really became this moment where you realize like everyone knows that everything is fine in moderation. And yet we all suck at moderation. No one can moderate. And so why is that? And then that set off the journey of finding, okay, why are we bad at

moderation and like, how can we learn to find enough? I don't know about you, but I had some meals during the Christmas holiday season and I am ready to take everything up a notch. My workouts, my weightlifting, my walking, my cardio, and I am doing it with a little help from Array. I like Array because it's all about de-bloating and everything is formulated by a naturopathic doctor and everything is laxative-free, vegan, non-GMO, gluten-free, filler-free, nut-free, cruelty-free, non-habit forming. They have this bloat pill that I've been obsessed with forever. It's like a bloat capsule. It has bromelain, which is amazing. It's found in pineapple, and it really helps speeding food breakdown and swelling. It also

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I'll take two bloat capsules. You can go to Array.com and use code SKINNY at checkout. You receive 15% off your first purchase or auto-ship order. That's Array.com, code skinny. As many of our fine listeners and viewers know, Lauren and I have recently cut back pretty drastically on alcohol, which is why I'm so excited to announce our partnership with Heineken 00. Get the fine Heineken taste with 0% of the alcohol. Heineken 00 is an alcohol-free option to the original Heineken that you love. So it has 100% taste,

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sure that I do not have a bunch of selfish listeners out there only worrying about themselves, only getting the best health and wellness products for themselves. You know who you are, if that's you. I need to talk to the people that are neglecting their furry friends, their pets, and tell them that if you're just only focused on yourself, taking care of yourself, and not focused on making sure that your pets have the healthiest food, well, I am here to help you, which is why I love our partner, the farmer's dog so much. If you want to extend your dog's life, which who doesn't, and you want to get them feeling younger, healthier, happier, the result of switching your dog's food from kibble to a fresh can can seem like magic. When senior dogs start acting like a puppy again,

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better breath. So check it out. It doesn't matter if your dog is young or old, it's always the right time to begin investing in their health. We have a special offer just for our listeners. Get 50% off your first box of fresh, healthy food at thefarmersdog.com slash skinny. Plus you get free shipping. Just go to thefarmersdog.com slash skinny to get 50% off. That's thefarmersdog.com slash skinny. So when I first saw the book and I judged it by the cover, I was like, oh, this is going to be an expose mostly on like the news cycle and social media, which you touch on. But what I found fascinating was the origin of a lot of this stuff, which was Vegas slot machines, which Lauren, I don't know if I mentioned this to you, but when you were describing it, I grew up playing all sorts of video games. I remember the first

Nintendo and Super Nintendo. I was always in these games. And my dad gave me all this shit saying, if you keep playing these games, you'll be a total disaster. Now I'm learning kids are making millions playing games. I'm pissed off. I should have never done this podcast. I should have just stayed playing video games. But maybe you can just describe that a little bit. Because when I was reading it and when it transitioned from these mechanical machines to screens, that's really kind of what set off, I would argue, a lot of the stuff that we consume now. Yeah, that was the pivotal moment. So this is in the 80s in Vegas. And to understand this, you have to understand that up until about 1980s, slot machines,

no one played them. And the reason for this is because there are these like analog machines where you would play, there'd be three reels. You had to get all the symbols lining up on, you know, in one row and then you would win. And this didn't happen very regularly. Like you'd play, you'd play, you'd play, you'd play, you'd lose, lose, lose, lose, lose. And then maybe you'd get a win for a few bucks. There's no reason to play.

You're not getting feedback, right? So no one plays them. Then you have this guy come in and his name is Cyred. And he's like this straight up Vegas old school character, right? He's got the maroon suits. He's got the giant sunglasses he wears around town, the, like, bolo ties with the turquoise. And he makes this observation that his grandkids will play Atari for hours and hours on end. And he looks at this.

He goes, well, that's really interesting. But also, these kids are idiots because you don't actually win anything when you play a video game. But it makes him have this realization. He goes, could I take this technology and put it into slot machines? And so that's what he does. He takes slot machines from being analog, which literally we're talking physical spinning reels and mechanical parts into a screen-based game. So now the reels, when they spin, they appear to be spinning on a screen. But what this allows him to do is he doesn't have any more physical constraints. So he makes it so you can bet on, say, all five lines. He'll show five different lines. You can bet on them all. Or you can bet all these different ways of lines. So you can make 40 bets in one game.

And when that happens, chances are, 50% of the time, at least you're going to win on at least one of those lines. So you might put in some money and you win on one, but the catch is what he does, which is the brilliant part is you might bet a dollar, but when you win on say a couple of the 40 lines, you might end up only winning say 50 cents. So your brain registers that I won, but really you've lost, you still lost. Really you've lost, right? So our brain, and he cues that too by having the machines go ding, ding, ding, ding, ding. So you get all these cues that you've won.

You see the number go up, lights up. It's exciting. Yeah. Really you've lost 50 cents, but you feel like you've won. And so this leads people to play again, play again. So I want you to picture this, like let's say after this,

we all go, go okay we're going to dinner we get in your car you turn the key the engine goes click what would you do you turn it again right click now if we had gotten in your car and it was just nothing nothing nothing you would immediately call a tow truck but as long as you're getting signs of life from that engine you keep every now and then it starts to turn even if it doesn't go all the way over, you're going to keep turning the damn key. This is like what the slot machine does by giving out these little losses disguised as wins. So what ends up happening is that people start playing over and over and over because they just become a lot more exciting or a lot less boring. So slot machines go basically increase across casino

floors tenfold. They used to take up a very small fraction of casino floors. Now they're 85% of casino floors. And we now spend more on slot machines than we do on movies, books, and music combined. The reason I found this so fascinating as I was going through this, and a lot of people are like, why are you guys talking about slot machines right now? It was because I was relating this to how we consume social media. And it's the same thing. You call it a scarcity loop, which is basically like an opportunity and unpredictable reward, and then a quick repeatability. And it's like, you could sit on social all day and scroll and refresh over

and over and over and over and get something different. And eventually something's going to click that you really like or dislike, and it's going to trigger something in your brain. And so what you were talking about is like, I feel this technology led into so many other things that we now consume that are now basically hijacking people's minds, putting them in these loops and consistently that they don't realize are going on or that they can't get out of. Yeah, exactly. So what this guy really uncovers is, like you mentioned, this idea of a scarcity loop. So it's got like these three parts. It's got opportunity, unpredictable rewards, quick repeatability. So you've got an opportunity to get something of value, unpredictable rewards.

You don't know when you'll get that thing of value. You know you get it at some point, but you're not sure when. You're not sure how valuable it'll be. And then quick repeatability, you can repeat the behavior over and over and over to try and get the thing of value. So with the slot machine, it's money, right? I could win. I play a game. I don't know if I'll win a buck. I don't know if I'll win a hundred thousand bucks. I don't know if I'll lose. And I can play that over and over and over. So once slot machines really start to boom in the eighties and have this crazy upward curve, you start to see technology out of Silicon Valley growing in the nineties and in the two thousands. And they look at that and they go, what the hell is going on in Vegas? Because they saw how much money it was bringing.

They see how you can get people to spend time on device. That is literally the language they use. Time on device. You want to get people to sit on the slot machine for as long as possible, because the longer they're sitting and playing, the more money you're going to win. The math just determines that. Well, this is basically the exact same language that social media apps use. Or shopping apps, yeah. Yeah, shopping apps.

Get people to spend as much time on the device as possible. So you see this scarcity loop. It really gets exploited in slot machines and then it starts to get picked up by a lot of big tech companies, by online retailers, by all these different industries and wherever you put it it manages to do a really good job of pushing us out of moderation because think about slot machines it's like everyone knows that the house always wins in the long run you know we still play these

things over and over and over and you put it in social media it's the same thing it's like how many people are like i want to spend three hours a day on social media like no one but many people do that it is slot machine vibes isn't it it is the exact same architecture as a slot machine it's the exact same they were even he even pointed out like thinking about email which i've been guilty of for sure refreshing your email over and over. But what, so can you explain like what's going on in people's minds when they feel like when you, when they talk about going on in my husband's mind, when he refreshes his email, because what I think, I think the takeaway that I want for people here. And I think from your book is to

one realize when this is happening and two, figure out how to not... Nobody's going to get off social media. Nobody's going to get off... Give us a code word, Michael. Not Michael Bostic. Michael, give us a code word that we can use that I'm like, you're being sucked in by the slot machine system. No, but it doesn't... To the point, it's not just social media and email. I'm not perfect either though. I want to say that. I mean, I'm not saying I'm perfect. I'm just saying you do get a little sucked into well i think i think everybody does right if they especially if they don't recognize and what i wanted to get out of this episode outside of making maybe having people think about being

uncomfortable a little more is also recognizing when they're incessantly scrolling or checking email or or maybe it's like a finance app or maybe they're incessantly shopping like how do you how do you break these habits that kind of derail our lives? I have an Amazon problem. Yeah. Yeah. Everyone's got something. Yeah.

So these two things, they're all the same. So with email, with social media, with Amazon, you have an opportunity to get something that improves your life, right? For you, it might be that email saying, oh, this deal just came through. It's going to be awesome, right? It's this great news. Or it could be like, I don't know,

you get, one of your posts goes viral. For you, it's like, I'm searching Amazon, I'm looking for this thing. And then when I find the right one, that's gonna do it for me, right? And you search and search and search, whether it's social media, whether it's refreshing your email,

whether it's going through all the Amazon stuff, looking for that one item you think is gonna improve your life. And it all really hinges on this idea of unpredictable rewards, right? When you know you'll find or get that good thing at some point, but you don't know when,

that grabs our attention more than anything else. So this has been demonstrated in all animals. Unpredictable rewards, they grab our focus, they grab our attention, we gravitate to them. And so once you can embed unpredictable rewards, they grab our focus, they grab our attention, we gravitate to them. And so once you can embed unpredictable rewards in all these different systems, people will obsess over them. Based on your two books, if you could wave a wand and give our audience three tangible takeaways that they can implement tomorrow.

You've obviously done a lot of research. You've learned all these different things. What are three things that they can do tomorrow for free? Okay. So I just laid out the scarcity loop. So become aware of that because once you become aware of what the system is, it makes you a little more conscious about your use and why you're using it. So I like to say that it's not your fault because the human brain is wired to focus on unpredictability and really anticipate unpredictability. Like we want to know if we got the likes brain is wired to focus on unpredictability and really anticipate unpredictability. Like we wanna know if we got the likes, we wanna know if the email came in.

That's not always to our advantage anymore, right? So it's not your fault, but it is your problem. You gotta solve it. And just by being aware of it, you can tend to reduce the behavior more. So there's something called the Hawthorne effect. Two, when it comes to these scarcity loop behaviors, and it could be online shopping,

could be an obsession with social media, checking your email too much. It could be getting hooked on stock apps. It could be getting hooked on sports gambling apps. It's in so many systems now. If you can change or remove any three of the parts, that'll tend to reduce your behavior. So you could change what the opportunity is. You could figure out a way to take away the rewards, or you could find a way to slow down the behavior. Give an example, like as it relates to say you're somebody that's scrolling Instagram or TikTok. Like you're saying, put a time limit on,

delete the Instagram app on the weekends. Don't go on, like for me, my thing is I don't go on my phone after like 7.30. I put the phone in the other room. Yeah. Like create boundaries around it. Yeah. So for example, with shopping, so you could go, okay, the opportunity, it's like, why are you buying these things in the first place? What opportunity are you getting from that? Even just being like, what is this thing for me? Because people buy stuff for a lot of different reasons. A big one is just boredom. It's like, I just want something to do. And this is like fulfill some impulse, even though I don't need this. So like figuring out a heuristic for like, how am I going to make my decisions? I think changes the opportunity. You could also slow down the behavior. So in the, even 10 years ago, if you wanted to go buy some stuff and go

shopping, you had to leave your house, right? You couldn't just be like, oh, it's like 9 PM. I'm kind of bored. Like, I guess I'll just go on Amazon. Like you would have had to go down to the store and walk the aisles. And like, you're not going to do that so that inherently just reduces the frequency of the activity so in today's day and age you could be like okay i am going to try and buy when i want something i'm going to try and buy things in person that's just a boundary i can set or i'm going to let something sit in the cart for at least seven days because this reduces the speed like so if you can slow down the behavior the less likely you are to do it and repeat it. With social media, a good example would be

even something, so you can alter the rewards you get from your phone by using, and this is a crazy trick and I'll make you crazy, is using grayscale. So humans get rewarded by colors. Colors are stimulating. They tell us to do behaviors. The slot machine should be

reduced to grayscale. It would never. People, yeah, they would never do it, but it would work. And I'll tell you, there's been studies where people are asked to keep their phone in grayscale and their screen time tends to go down by about an hour simply because the phone is not as fun to use anymore. Interesting. Yeah. And so then number three, I would say there's an idea I talk about in the comfort crisis called Masogi. And the idea is that I'm going to go out and I'm going to do one very hard thing every single year that I think is that I have a 50, 50 chance at accomplishing. And the reason that this is important is because even today, when we take on hard tasks, we often know we're going to finish them. And having a moment where you're truly going, am I going to finish this?

And you have moments where you think, I'm going to quit. I can't finish this thing that I've taken on. But if you can just kind of keep putting one foot in front of the other, you get this other moment where you go, wait a minute, I thought my limit was back there. But I'm clearly past it. So I've sold myself short here. And then the important question becomes, where else in my life am I selling myself short? All right. So that is the ultimate teacher. People do not learn from when times are perfect.

We learn from adversity. And often in today's day and age, like I'm not saying the world is perfect by any means, but sometimes it helps to have to manufacture adversity. Because if you think about humans in the past, we used to have to do challenging things all the time to survive. This could be from hunting, this could be from having to move to summer and wintering grounds.

And we often didn't think we were gonna make it out, but we did, and we would learn something about ourself. We'd have to dig deep and just be like, I gotta figure my shit out. And we'd come out on the other side and be like, wow, you have a whole different gear than you realized. And that changes you forever. And so I think today you have to do things

that show you you have that gear, that show you you have potential. Like I can sit here and be like, oh, you've like a whole hell of a lot more potential than you think, but you're never going to really get that unless you force yourself into a situation where you go, oh, I do. And then that changes you. This is so new to the human experience, even though we may not feel it's new. I remember you were talking about putting groceries and having them delivered.

I remember also at one point, if you wanted to go out, you're like, who's the designated driver? How are we going to get there? Do we got to call a taxi? Now people have Uber at their fingertips. It's so easy. But one thing I also wanted to mention is I think people are so charged up now. They get so upset about some of the things they see.

And what I found interesting reading your book is you have this part where you talk about politicians figuring out that the most unpredictable and contentious politicians on both sides ended up getting the most engagement and the most airtime on news sites. For example, Trump got what you said, four or five times more of the airtime than Obama. And I think people, when I heard that, just being aware so that sometimes when you see these contentious or kind of like viral characters like, oh, that's a tactic that maybe they're unbeknownst, they're doing it, but they're using to get more visibility and that these systems are serving more to you to kind of like either make you more divisive or charged up or get a reaction to your point to have more time on device. Yeah. And I think just like being aware of that,

because you see people like I've never seen people get so upset by so many external things. And I don't think they're, you know, in some ways, even though the feelings are true, some of this to a degree is somewhat manufactured. Does that make sense? Oh yeah. It's definitely manufactured. So I think the way to look at it is what really plays well on social and what plays the best on social in terms of engagement tends to be moral outrage. That's been demonstrated in many studies. So tweets that express moral outrage, they get liked more. And it's not just tweets, it's Instagram posts, it's Facebook posts, it's TikTok, it's whatever. If something has moral outrage, it's more likely to get a lot of traction. And so the algorithms are designed in such a way to get people to spend

as much time on the device as possible to engage with the content. What people engage with is moral outrage. So that's why that stuff tends to rise in your feed and get a rise out of you and others. And I think the inherent issue is that you're going to see the same amount of angry people about something in the world, moral outrage, whether or not the world is improving or not. So it just gives you this totally skewed sense of what the world is like, right? If I go on Twitter and I start scrolling, I'm going to learn a hundred reasons why the world is shit, why this side is the worst, why that side's the worst, why so-and-so's a bigot, why nope, the other side's actually the bigot, and well, on and on

and on. And it's just like, Jesus. And if I just walk out my front door, it's a nice fucking day outside. So let's take in the sunshine and breathe in the cool air and talk to the guy there and be like, hey, how do you think the world is today? And he's going to be like, yeah, it's pretty good. It's a nice day out here. And I'm going to talk to the old lady there and be like hey how like how's your day oh it's a good day it's really nice day outside right like the world on the screen is like not reflective of what you can actually find in your own life and in yourself and in interactions with other humans that aren't on that aren't on the algorithm but it goes back to even looking for the saber tooth or what what you called the what did you call it the problem um problem creep problem people are

maybe comfortable in their actual life and they're going on social just looking for that saber-tooth tiger they're looking for a fight they want it well it just like goes back to what we're talking about addiction to chaos you're sitting at home in your bedroom in your underpants, eating food in your bed, and then you're online screaming and fighting with people because you're bored and you don't have anything else going on at the moment. I think a lot of people fall victim to this stuff where they're on here and they're like, okay, well, I'm sitting here and now I'm angry. But if you were just out in the world trying to accomplish something, you might not have the time to look at something like that.

Does that make sense? Oh, totally. And I think that that's what these platforms and this technology, when I was reading this, I'm like, oh, this is what this stuff has done is it's sucked us into the point where this is all consuming. It's just become our every waking minute.

I'm going to give you a good metaphor that was one of my favorite when I was reporting the scarcity brain. So there's this guy who I spoke to whose name is Thomas Zental. And he's one of the world's greatest behavioral psychologists. The guy's like in his 80s now. And he started doing research when he was in 1968. And he has demonstrated that pigeons will gamble if you give them the opportunity. So what he does is he has these pigeons that, you know, live in these little cages in his lab and he will put them in a bigger cage that has the two games. So in the first game, they can peck a light and every other

peck, they get 15 units of food. Okay. So it's predictable game. The second game they play, it's more like a slot machine so about every fifth pack they will get 20 units of food but it's unpredictable so the first five sequences it could fall on the second pack the next five it could fall on the fourth pack same exact architecture as a slot machine now what he's found is that 97.5 percent of the pigeons will choose game two even though it gets them less food over the long haul, right? Because if you play this game a hundred times, you're going to get way more food than if you play the second game, the gambling game a hundred times. And that doesn't make any damn

sense, right? It's very strange behavior. It's fun. It's fun, right? They're looking for stimulation. The pigeon wants fun. The pigeon wants fun. So then here's what happens though. Once he takes those pigeons and he puts them in this really big cage that is designed to be just like the life they would live in the wild, where they have to build their nests. They're going to go hang out on cliffs. They're going to interact with other pigeons. They're going to do things that are inherently stimulating to a pigeon. Then he puts them back and lets them choose a game. All the pigeons choose the game that makes sense,

the game where they end up getting more food. And so I'm like, well, what the hell's up with that? And he says, there's a theory called the optimal stimulation theory. And it suggests that all species need a certain level of stimulation in our lives. And if we don't get that stimulation, we go searching for it from some other thing, right? So with these pigeons, it's like they're living in these shitty cages. Like might as well play this gambling game for fun, right? Because they have nothing else going on.

Because they got nothing else going on. And then his jump was, and I think when you think of humans today, we live lives that are very different than how we evolved to live, right? In the past, humans were walking, we were outside a lot. We had to put in effort for food. We had to put in effort for everything. We had to like really flex this will to live, right? In the past, humans were walking, we were outside a lot. We had to

put in effort for food. We had to put in effort for everything. We had to like really flex this will to live, to survive every single day. That is a very highly stimulating environment. You are forced into the present in that. And now we live in worlds that are very different where we don't do any of that. So when you think of modern humans today, he tells me, when we don't get a level of stimulation that we need, we go looking for it. We go looking for it in drugs. We go looking for it in gambling. We go looking for it in outrage on social media.

We go buy a bunch of crap. We do all these behaviors that, much like the gambling game, aren't really getting us to this larger goal. Well, this explains why our producer is addicted to porn and watches it 15 times a day i'm not talking about carson i'm talking about taylor this really wraps it in a bow for me i hope taylor's listening right now and he can take some notes no but you know maybe he can put down porn hub for a second i think everyone should check out your books to be i think it's important to just be aware of all these things i I think that's the first, like, honestly, my biggest takeaway is the first step is like just being aware because

again, I think you kind of just get like mindlessly sucked into these things and it's natural and it's, you know, and we've evolved to exhibit a lot of these behaviors. And so I think for me, it's like, as I've caught myself now, I'm like, okay, why am I scrolling and wasting time? Why do I keep checking that email? Or, you know, why am I buying this thing that I absolutely don't need that I'm really not that interested in? It's like all of these things that you can just catch yourself and be aware. And I think I want to end this on, you know, even stuff like food. You know, I think people like, why are you eating so much? Why do you feel you need that many courses? Why do you feel you need to eat that consistently? I think like, I don't know what I was reading. It's like food is one

of the biggest things that people have these issues with is, is just like you're mindlessly doing these things because maybe you were told to, or maybe it's set up or there's times maybe you could speak on that just a little bit. Yeah. I think that you need to, um, find a substitution really. So for example, like going back to, you know, when I get sober, it's like, why was I drinking? It's because I had this need to go find this sort of wildness in myself and explore these edges. And I found it through a way that was very counterproductive in the long run. It fulfilled this short-term need I had, but it created all these long-term problems. That's very similar to most bad habits that people have, right?

They solve the problem in the short term, but they end up creating long-term problems. So you're choosing this sort of short-term comfort at the expense of long-term growth. And so when I got sober, one, I had to go through absolute hell to do that. The other side of that was growth. And I had to figure out, okay, what things can I do that sort of scratch this itch, but aren't going to lead me to wake up in the morning and go, dude, where's my car? What are ways I can do that will actually enhance my life? It's like, okay, well, exercise, hard exercise was one. I'm going to go spend more time outside. That became inherently rewarding and improved my life. It allowed me to scratch that itch. Travel, right? All these different things. And so I think you kind of have to get down to the root of why and what sort of substitute can i find that will enhance my life rather than

hurt it and i do think that you know it really is trusting yourself like people can do this shit we as a species wouldn't be here if we couldn't affect the world and change ourselves and like do shit, right? And everyone still has that in themselves. You just kind of need to find the spark. Scarcity brain and the comfort crisis. Where can everyone find your books? Pimp yourself out. Give us your Instagram.

Where can they write to you? All the things. Where can they write to me? I should start taking mail. That'd be cool. Give them your Alaska address. Yeah. Website is Easter Michael. I also write a newsletter. It's called 2%. It's at twopct.com. It's free. Got a lot of good stuff in there. And then I'm on Instagram at Michael underscore Easter.

And you can send me any emails. I got a bunch of different forums on my website. Michael, thank you for coming on. I am inspired and love this episode. Check out the books, guys. I'm assuming anywhere, Amazon. Oh, yeah, the books. You can get them. Yeah, my editor's gone. Dude, did you really not mention the books? The Comfort Crisis, Scarcity Brain.

Yeah. Thank you for doing this, man. Appreciate you. Thank you.