The Way I Heard It with Mike Rowe - 367: Michael Easter—Scarcity Brain

Episode Date: January 23, 2024

367: Scarcity Brain with Michael Easter The journalist and NYT bestselling author shares his research into why our brains are hardwired for overconsumption, how this scarcity mindset can lead us to take unnecessary risks, and how Inveterate gambling pigeons prove that we can change. It's all from his newest book, Scarcity Brain: Fix Your Craving Mindset and Rewire Your Habits to Thrive with Enough.

You millions of loyal listeners, is it millions, Chuck? Or have we crossed over into billions at this point? It's tough to say. What comes after billions? Megabillions. I shall call it many billions. I shall call this scarcity brain, which also happens to be the title of a new book by our friend Michael Easter. And it strikes me that there could not be a better book for you to read here at the outset of a new year.

year. And when I say you, Chuck, part of me does mean you, but I was also talking in terms of the royal you. I am suspicious of advice in general, as most of you know, but this book is pretty, pretty solid in that area. In fact, the subtitle says it perfectly, fix your craving mindset, rewire your habits and thrive with enough. Is that a concept you can get behind? Yes, it is. And it's not so much that he's giving advice about it. He's basically telling us why our brains do the things we do, this thing called the scarcity loop that he introduces in it. And he talks about basically why we think the way we do and recognizing that is the best way to start. You know, I mean, ultimately it comes down to you've got to decide to do something. But it's good to know why you're doing the crazy stuff. The thing you're doing anyway. It's very humbling and very human. And spoiler alert, when the dust settles, the point is really that we are living in a time of such unparalleled abundance that our old brains haven't had a chance to reconfigure the way we think about the reality of that which is scarce. And so we are still functioning in just about every way

imaginable as if there isn't enough food out there, as though data. As though, danger lurks around every corner like it did 2,000, 3,000 years ago. In every way, we are infected, it seems, by this misapprehension, this misassumption that we don't have enough. Well, it's true. We don't have enough. We have too much in almost every imaginable way. So I think it's a good conversation to start off the new year. I love the book. You'll love it too. And if you haven't had a chance, to hear what makes Michael Easter tick. This is the guy who wrote the comfort crisis, Chuck, which I understand you also devoured. Yes, yes, yes I did. But I got to tell you, this new book, the one thing that really struck me, he said that historically human beings crave high caloric

food because it's high caloric. The reason that fatty things, sweet things taste better to us is evolutionary because we know that we get more calories from it. It's not inherent. It's not written in the stars that a Reese's peanut butter cup taste good. There is no good. There is no bad. Our taste buds are a reflection of thousands of years of evolution. And because the calories are high, we're hardwired to want it, right? We're hardwired to follow savory with sweet. But we just didn't get the memo. You don't need it, folks. You don't need the fourth trip to the buffet. You don't need to spend three hours in front of the slot machine. But as it turns out, the reasons we do the latter have everything to do with why we do the former. Check out your own scarcity loop in the conversation

that follows with Michael Easter. And it will commence right after this. Long before she was Peggy Roe, my mom was Peggy Noble, daughter of Carl and Thelma Noble. It was her father, Carl, who inspired me to pitch a show called Dirty Jobs to the Discovery Channel and later start a foundation that honored the kind of work Carl Noble did for a living, trade work, skilled labor. That foundation is called MicroWorks, and today I'm proud to tell you that we've helped thousands of people get the training they need to begin a career in the skilled trades. In fact, we'd love to help you. You can apply for a work ethic scholarship right now at microwerworks.org.

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It's my favorite way to support Microworks and my favorite whiskey to sip responsibly after a long day of interviewing people on this podcast. Pick up a bottle at Noble. Spirits.com. K-N-O-B-E-L-Spirits.com. Soon may the nobleman come to bring a bottle for everyone. One day when the waiting is done, we'll take a drink and go. Michael Easter, where in the world are you? I'm in Las Vegas, Nevada. Fabulous Las Vegas.

Is that what the sign says? Is it fabulous or fantastic? The one when you're leaving town? You've put me on the spot. I think it says welcome to fabulous Las Vegas. So every time I go there now, I usually stay at the four seasons when I can because it's one of the few hotels that doesn't have a casino attached to it directly anyway. Right. You know?

And when I'm there, you know, I don't have my ruck bag with me. You'll be pleased to know. I'm not to the point where I'm traveling with 40 pounds of dead weight so I can walk aimlessly around the McCarran Airport. Yeah. But that's where I walk when I'm there because it's a great. seven-mile loop. And every single time, I leave the hotel, I make a right, and I go toward the airport, and there's a line of people. I've seen this line 500 deep, like three-quarters of a mile. They're waiting to get their picture taken next to the sign that says, welcome to fabulous Las Vegas.

What the hell is going on with people? Well, some of them are in wedding dresses and tuxedos. You know, you got the normal tourists and their shorts and their t-shirt. You know, they're just kind of a little bit hungover and days looking. But then you got the people who've come to Vegas to get married and they want their wedding photo to be at the sign. And they, just like the tourists, they're in line with all the edits. Just, you know, fully dressed up, just waiting their turn to get the photo. It's great. Yes. Every time I walk by this thing, I wonder how many people are in line because they saw the line and said, to themselves, I'm not sure what's happening here, but it's Vegas and people are lined up. We better

get in this line. Like the old Soviet Union, right? Exactly. So, you know, because you have a big brain, can you explain the dynamic at play that would compel an otherwise rational person, either a tourist or a visitor or somebody on business or maybe somebody who just celebrated the aforementioned nuptials, what would compel a person to wait in line over an hour to get a picture next to a sign? Well, it depends on what they're using the picture for. And I think today, a lot of people use it for Instagram, right? It's the allure of the points, the social points of the social network. It taps into our ancient drive for status and belonging and to feel liked literally and sort of metaphorically through the little tap of the screen. Yeah, I think you've,

The line's definitely longer now that Instagram is the thing. And you're starting to see cultural spaces design themselves knowing that people will come for the Instagram photo. Right. A great example is there's a new casino that's actually in the downtown Fremont area and it's called the Circa. And you go in there and everything is designed to have these sort of big, crazy backdrops. And the whole point is that they know people will come for the photo to have the backdrop behind. them and it's driving people into the casino. Vegas doesn't care. They just want to get in the door somehow. It used to be like, hey, here's a, you know, a ticket for a dollar shrimp cocktail. And now it's,

come take your photo with this big half-maked lady on a horse. Actually, I might pause for that one, but I'm going to go through my phone later and I'm going to find this photo because as I was standing there, looking at the line, like, I mean, to be honest, my first thought was, that is a cool sign. I've seen it in a million movies. I should grab a pick. And then you walk a little further and you see the beginnings of the line. And then you see it snaking off into eternity and you say to yourself, decision time, right? I mean, what am I going to do? Am I not going to get the photo or am I going to get in line?

And I was on the far side of the street and I was able to get close enough to the sign. So I did the selfie, right? Kind of like this. So you can see the sign. You can see me in it. And then you can see the line. And I swear to God, I'm like, after I took the picture, I crossed and walked. over and the people early in the line who had been waiting forever, one of them kind of shook their

fist at me, right? And I could just see, like, nothing harsh was exchanged, but there was a look on their faces like, you cheated. You're not supposed to do that. You didn't cut the line, but you still wound up with a picture of the sign. And I thought to myself, because I'm smug and self-possessed, I thought, yeah, not only that, but I got a picture of you in the line. You pathetic sheep, you poor, poor creatures, right? And so I walked away feeling smug and self-satisfied, and now I have to ask you, what's wrong with me, right? Am I giving myself a victory lap unnecessarily for rising above the fray? Or am I simply trying to scratch something that itches below the service that even I can't articulate? That's a good question. Here's what I'll say is that

we can look at the line and go, okay, these people waiting in this five, deep line for this photo of this sign from 1950. It's irrational, right? It's like, this doesn't make any damn sense. But here's the thing. Las Vegas as an entire city is built on irrationality. This is just the norm. If people were rational, this whole damn city would not exist.

Gambling is an irrational behavior. Every person who comes to Vegas and plays a game, everyone knows the house always wins. Yet people gamble and gamble and gamble. and this town was not built on winners. I can tell you that. Before I ask you to really jump into that, because obviously that's a big thing I want to talk about. Chuck, as you may or may not know,

is an inveterate gambler, hopelessly. I beg your pardon? Inverid. I play poker. Oh, my mistake. Very different. Very different. My mistake.

You play poker in Vegas. You go to Vegas so you can sit down with people who also don't share your addiction to gamble with one another in a place where, right. But before we do, that. Before we understand why Chuck is suffering from this affliction, why are you one of the most rational people I've ever met, a guy who's written a number of books rooted in aggressive

rationality. Why do you live in the belly of the beast? That's a good question. Damn right, it's a good question. Honestly, so my background as a journalist is, what is my job? It's to observe the world and to ask questions. about it, especially when something doesn't make any sense, right? That's a story when you go, why is that that way? And then you go, well, I guess I have to find out because that's my job as a journalist. And you get a lot of that in Las Vegas. And I very much see Las Vegas as this grand human behavior laboratory. You know, 40 million people a year come into Vegas as tourists. And these are people all over the economic spectrum. You got billionaires flying in on their jets.

you got people with 20 bucks in a dream flying in on the $30 spirit flight. They don't even have a room book. They're going, I'm going to make this $20 into $200. I'm going to get a room and I'm going to have great time. It's just everyone. And, you know, the town is very much designed to give people what they want, to fulfill whatever a person's next need is.

And that can tell you a lot about a person for sure and humanity in general. It has certainly informed your. book. It's called Scarcity Brain. It's a terrific follow-up to comfort crisis, which, by the way, I've personally recommended, I don't know how many people. And I'm curious about what the response has been to both of these books, Mike, because in both books, and I'm paraphrasing here, but you seem to be saying, stop doing that. Stop doing things because you want to do them. Stop giving in to your ridiculous desire to always be comfortable, to always be satiated, to always be satisfied. Stop telling yourself that it's okay to do a thing simply because you feel like it and get a hold of yourself, ma'am.

It's like that scene in airplane where everybody's standing in line to slap the woman who's freaking out. You're right? And they're just so. And you're such a nice guy. you're such a sweetheart. But, you know, when I peel the layers back in your book, I find an element to that in almost every single chapter. And in this case, you're trying to close the scarcity loop. You're trying to challenge people to say, look, the reason you do so many incomprehensible and irrational things in Las Vegas and elsewhere is because you're trying to fill a void.

And the void is in your brain. And it's a giant lie that's been promulgated. since time memoriam. That's a big idea. Did I get any of it right? Yeah, I think you're there. I think you've made me seem more like a killer of fun than I think I am. But like, look, here's the deal. So, you know, in Scarcity Brain, I talk about, you know,

everyone knows that everything's fine in moderation. And yet we all suck at it, right? Why can't we moderate? Why can't we moderate? And the reason that's pretty simple. It's because all these things that were built to crave, whether it be from food to the next purchase to information, to status, to whatever it might be. All of those things used to give us a survival advantage in the past.

If you were the type of person who, when you had the opportunity to eat food, you overate it to the point where you're like, oh my God, I'm so full. You would pack on fat. And then when the next famine came, you were in good shape. You would spread your genes, right? So we still have that genetic wiring that's telling us more. More is always makes sense, right? give into that craving. But we live in a totally different world than we did back then when we got those jeans. And this basically backfires. And so I think that I am helping people understand.

One, yeah, if you give into the next craving all the time, you're going to find yourself in misery, unfortunately. Feels good in the short term, detrimental in the long run. I mean, that is the fundamental architecture, I think, of what gets people in trouble, simply taking the next easiest thing. It's today, in today's sort of strange world. You often have to do things that are uncomfortable in the short term that give you a longer term reward. For example, exercise. For example, not going for the fourth round at the buffet when you come visit my fine town of Las Vegas.

Oh, God, dude. I'm sorry, just a quick sidebar, but one of the first dirty jobs we did, and to this day, one of my favorite ones, was a story of a pig farm up in North Vegas. And what made it so interesting was the guy who ran it, Bob Combs, fed his pigs, the uneaten leftovers from the hotel casinos. And they were legion.

They were manifold. There was just an endless variety of people food that he would haul back from Harris and Caesars and all of it and put it in this giant cooker in his backyard and reduce it to this ultra-high-protein boulea base and feed it to his pigs that grew exponentially faster. literally off the appetites, the insatiable appetites of the very people we've been talking about who would stand in line for an hour and a half to get a picture next to anion sign.

What a weird rumination on abundance. There is everything and more that you need in Vegas so much so that a pig farm can exist on the uneaten buffet food that people take on their fourth run. And even then come to the conclusion, you know what? even I can't clear this plate. And so it gets thrown away for the pigs. So in the abundance model, you're saying in a really short period of time, we went from scarcity to plenty faster than our genetic makeup could decipher the memo and alter our cravings. Precisely. Exactly. That is an amazing story about the pig farm. I mean, here's an interesting fact. Okay, so we have these pigs who are

eating, you know, this boiled down shrimp cocktail and Chinese food and prime rib and whatever it might be. Other pigs. Other pigs. Got a little dark there. Got a little dark there. For all of time, a human being's job was mostly to walk around hunting and gathering for food. That was your job. That's what you did all day. I'm going to walk around today and I'm going to look for food. I'm going to hunt some food. You repeated that 365 days a year. You rarely had a enough food. There were rarely times where you got fourths, much less seconds. And just the act of getting food, even as we started growing food, was this backbreaking labor-intensive endeavor. So, for example, this stat I came across, it said that Mexican women, before the invention of the

tortilla maker and the grand scale of industrialization of our food, they used to spend five hours a day kneading corn to make tortillas. That is hard work. That is a daily, daily labor. And now they just come off a line and, you know, the tourists, yeah, I think I've had enough of that. And they end up with the pigs. And so our environments have just changed so, so much. And we haven't caught up to them. And it's not just food. It's the number of possessions that a person can have. I mean, even 150 years ago, the average person owned a handful of items, right? They'd have a couple outfits. They'd have some tools they used. They had the family Bible. They had maybe an heirloom they passed down. The average home today has anywhere from 10,000 to 50,000 items. Wow. There are more storage units

than there are Starbucks, Walmarts, Burger Kings, McDonald's, and Dunkin' Donuts combined. Wow. We have no upper limit. And so then you're like, okay, why the hell would a person own that much? And it's, it goes back to what I said about our genetic sort of wiring, not catching up with our modern environment. In the past, if you had tools, that would help you survive, right? Having more tools rather than less tools, always made sense. You could accomplish things. You could live on another day. But now we live in a world of Amazon Prime purchases where you can get the thing for, you know, $10 in less than two days. Another great stat that I loved. Brought to you, Mike, brought to you. You don't even have to go get the backscratcher.

You can see it. You can want it. You can click. on it. And then a van is commissioned. A driver is implemented. The device is delivered. The transaction occurs out of sight, out of mind. And now suddenly you've got 50,0001 items in your house. Yeah, exactly. I mean, so another great one, just how great we are at production now is that it used to take a nail maker about a minute to make one nail. Now modern nail machines can make 356 nails in one minute. And so nails were so precious in the past that you had arsonists who would go around burning down buildings and then returning to the site just to take the nails. It's amazing what we're able to accomplish with manufacturing today. This is a good thing in the grand scheme of time

space. At the same time, it's also led us into impulsive purchases to have homes filled with stuff that we don't need. And that hurts our finances. It leads to debt. It also just leads people to, I mean, people get anxiety when they have too much stuff in their space, right? There's a lot of great studies that suggest that people who have desks like mine are highly anxious because I got stuff all over it. And this explains a lot of my problems right now. I got crap all over my desk, right? And this was never an issue in the past. And things have just changed so much. What would our ancestors make? I mean, assuming they could even get their heads around the invention of television, what would they make of a show like hoarders? It's got, I mean,

that's the obvious extreme to what you're talking about. Do do do do do do do. Dumb. Well, people are still raving, raving, I tell you, about my mother's performance in the latest Pure Talk commercial. And if you haven't seen it, I encourage you to give it a look on my Facebook page and read the comments. They're hysterical.

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Microwworks Foundation, and allows me to exploit my own mother in a national advertising campaign. Do what my mom did. Get yourself unlimited high-speed data for just 3499 a month. At puretalk.com slash row. You can switch in as little as 10 minutes at PureTalk. dot com slash row yeah it's an interesting question so here's how i'll answer that so as part of this book what really set this book off is that you know i live in las vegas and obviously you see all sorts of weird stuff in this town right but it's the slot machines to me that are the weirdest because they're everywhere i mean they're in the bars they're in the restaurants they're in the gas stations they're in the grocery stores the airport dude the airport they're in the airport they're in the airport

You're standing there in another line, waiting to do another thing, which is get the hell out of Dodge, but wait, there's still time to jam whatever money you didn't manage to lose into the one-armed bandit before you go. Shame to waste the opportunity. Exactly. And that's the deal right, is that people actually do that. And so I'll go get groceries at 7 a.m. And there's people sitting in the little casino at the local grocery store, just playing 7 a.m. letting their perishable spoil. and you know, I see that. Like I said, it's like, I'm a journalist.

I see something weird. Man, that's weird. Oh, right. That means I probably got to figure out why. So I start looking into why do people place a lot machines? Because it doesn't make sense. Everyone knows the house always wins. Now, long story short, is this takes me to this sort of strange twilight zone of casinos that

is on the edge of town in Las Vegas. And it's this brand new, fully working casino. but this place gets used entirely for human behavior research. Okay, so it is a sort of living, breathing, working casino laboratory. A lab within a lab. I mean, if the whole of casino is a lab, this then is the like the lab on steroids where actual researchers are conducting actual science.

Yes, exactly. So this place is funded by gambling companies, but also a bunch of big tech companies. And while I'm there, I talked to a guy who, makes slot machines. He's a slot machine game designer. And he sort of walked me through why slot machines work, why they capture attention. And it works off this three-part system that I call the scarcity loop. So it's got these three parts. It's got opportunity. It's got unpredictable rewards and it's got quick repeatability. So you have an opportunity to win something of value, right?

Unpredictable rewards, you know that if you keep repeating that thing, that you'll win something eventually. But you don't know how big it's going to be and you don't know when. And then finally, quick repeatability, you can just repeat that behavior over and over and over and over. At infinim, right? You can play slot machines as long as you have money. What's fascinating is that same three-part loop. It explains why a lot of things are semi-addictive and why we overdo a lot of things. So, for example, it's what makes social media work. It's what makes dating apps work. It's being put into finance apps. It's in all the rise of sports betting. It's in all these different things, right? So I want know why. Why do people get, like, we have this three-part system. This is what makes slot machines

alluring great, but why at a fundamental level would humans be attracted to this in the first place? So this leads me to this guy who's a psychologist and he's, he's like 85 years old, still comes into the lab every single day. He's done research on pigeons for years. And he tells me that basically this same system would be found in finding food. So if you think about humans finding, food in the past, it's very much like a gamble. It's like you go to the one place you think the food is. No, it's not there. So you go to the other place you think the food is. Oh, it's not there. You go to the other place. Ding, ding, ding, jackpot. You won. Amazing. Fantastic. And then we've got to repeat that behavior every day. So he said that basically that system is almost sort of embedded in our brains as

something that we get fixated on, right? But now it's just being put in all these different systems that we see in life. Now, to sort of, this is a long way of answering your original question, he's done all these studies on pigeons. And he can get pigeons to gamble, like 97% of these pigeons that he does studies on will choose a game that is like a gambling game that gets them less food than another game that is a more predictable game, but that gets them more food. Okay, so take them from the cage, you put them in the little room and you say, pick a game, do you want to play this one where every other peck, you know you're going to get X amount of food, or do you want to play this one?

This one's more like slot machine. You don't know when the food's going to come. You pack, you pack, you pack. You don't know when you're going to get the food, but it'll come sometime. But you are going to get less food this game. 97% of these pigeons choose the gambling game. When it pays off, does it come in the same quantity

as the more predictable shoot? They get slightly more food when the gambling game. So, right. Long run, you end up with way more food if you choose the predictable game. But a win in the gambling game is bigger. So the most interesting thing, though, to me, and I think that this kind of goes back to saying, okay, why are we doing all this distractive nonsense in the first place, is he will take his pigeons out of their normal sort of small, sterile cages where they hang out alone and it's a rather

boring life. And he'll put them in this big cage and it's got other pigeons and it's designed to mimic the wild. So they build their nest, they go up on ledges, they build roost, they hang out with their pigeon friends, they do all these things that pigeons are supposed to do in the wild. They live pigeon lives. Then he throws them back in the game, and they all choose the smart game, the optimal game, every single one. So there's this theory called the optimal stimulation theory, and it basically says that all species, whether pigeons, dogs, lions, tigers, bears, humans, you name it, we need a certain level of stimulation in our life. And if we don't get it, we go searching for it elsewhere. Now, if you think about how humans used to live, not even that long ago, our lives

are pretty stimulating. You were physically working every day. You were mentally working every day. You were outside. You were doing, I mean, if we go back to our hunter-gatherer ancestors, you're walking the land, looking for food, you're encountering wild animals, you're encountering the elements. You're having to do all these really intense things to survive, right? You're in that loop. in other words. Yes, exactly. You're in the loop. And when you think about how we live today, it's like, we don't really have that anymore, a lot of us. And when you don't get that level of stimulation, you go searching for it elsewhere. You gamble. You spend too much time on social media. You maybe drink to excess. You do all these things that are sort of counterproductive behaviors

because you're just trying to fall into the loop some other way looking for that stimulation. So where do you draw the line and how do you draw the line between potentially dangerous behavior, addictive behavior, and behavior that's truly pleasurable? Chuck, for instance, I don't think he's really a gambling addict. I just think he gets great joy from doing it. I don't think I'm an alcoholic, but I drink every day, and I like it. And I don't know if I'm compensating for some hidden problem in my brain or trying to cure for some thing in my childhood. I consciously, I certainly don't think I am. But I know lots of people who might drink less than I drink who talk about their behavior in terms of a problem.

And I know some other people who think of it in terms of a disease. And I know this is controversial, but you get into it in your book. it's not a straight line. It's this weird, curvy thing. And as much as I'd like to think we have a playbook that draws those lines between dangerous behavior, addictive behavior, you know, your experience may vary.

So how can you paint with a broad brush that's still accurate with respect to this kind of human behavior? I know B.F. Skinner tried, and he's in your book too, which is fascinating. Yeah. I mean, I don't think there's a clear answer. think long story short is that if the behavior is causing you more long-term problems than you want to deal with, then that's a problem. So to your example, you know, someone could have, say,

four drinks a day. And if it's not causing long-term problems in their life, it's like, who cares? That's great. You're having a good time. But if a person has four drinks and then they go and they get in an argument with their wife and, oh, they ignore their kids after they have four drinks, And then that starts to lead to problems in the long term. Okay, well, now let's talk about that. That's really, to me, what addiction is. It is choosing a short-term benefit at the expense of sort of long-term problems, really. But if you're not getting long-term problems, like, it's not a problem, right?

So I don't drink because I'm a person who shouldn't drink. Because when I would drink, I would do dumb stuff. If I would have drank and gone and, you know, donated to widows and given my time down at the VA and volunteer, here, like, not a big deal. But no, I would do idiotic stuff that would create long-term problems in my life. And so, therefore, that seems like a problematic behavior to me that I should probably stop. But, you know, content is king, right? And Chuck and I just had this conversation this morning, because we knew you were coming on. I woke up and reached for my phone like an idiot, because that's what we do, right? You're just sitting there and I'm like, immediately, the first thing in the morning,

I'm seeing what emails came in over the night, what texts, might I have missed what articles has Google decided I might like because they're my curator, you see, and they know me better than I do. And so I check in with these things and now I'm sucked into reels or something and I see something that makes me laugh out loud and I immediately send it to Chuck. And then two hours later, I'm out for my walk and Chuck says, hey man, that thing you sent, that was pretty freaking funny. I said, right?

That was hysterical. And we had a conversation about it. So, like, all of these behaviors are still manifesting themselves hours after they happen. We're actually talking about it. And then Chuck made the point, you know, it's a hell of a thing. You know, you go to the bathroom, you sit down and 20 minutes later, you're still scrolling through TikTok. You're still just scrolling and scrolling. And I said, yeah, it is a problem because it's a vast wasteland of fast food and garbage.

And it's not going to nourish you. It might make you chuckle. It might titillate you. But like the guy sitting there in front of the slot machine, you just keep going and going and going. But my question, Mike, is, what if TikTok was filled with interesting tidbits from history or useful hacks to live a better life or positive affirmations to make you a more lovable, interesting, engaging person? would we still consume it at the same level because of the loop you've described, or would we seek out content that is more inherently pure, juvenile, and otherwise empty? That's a great question.

Here's what I'll say. That great question was better than my earlier great question, I thought, if you're keeping track. You're two for two, bro. I got two great questions for you. Great. Chuck, please rank them. So here's what I think. If TikTok were to start giving people educational material, which let me be clear that that is what they do for children in China.

Kids in China get more educational material on TikTok while our kids get videos of people dancing and falling on their face. They get wago. We get candy corn. Yes, exactly. If they were to do that, I think that you would see engagement probably drop off simply because it eventually gets boring. at a certain point. So we learn from slot machines in the 1980s that if you're not getting the reward, right, you need the reward to come in at a certain time. If you don't get the reward

at a relatively good enough time or ratio of times that you've swiped through the app or played the game on the slot machine, people's attention fades away. So slot machines, for example, before 1980, you would win out of, you'd win maybe one out of every 20 times. That's really boring.

Imagine that. Lose, lose, lose, lose, lose, lose, lose, lose, win. Like, that sucks. That's no fun. What made slot machines tip into being so powerful, they now make up 85% of casino floors. People spend more money on slot machines than they do books, movies, and music combined, is that they had to increase the win schedule. So slot machines got changed, so you would start to get what are called losses disguised

as wins. This is when you say bet $1, and you quote unquote win 50 cents. It's like, okay, you lost 50 cents. but when that actually happens, it's still exciting. Because the machine lights up, it goes ballistic, the number goes up and you're like, oh, I still kind of won. And when neuroscientists do studies with people playing casino games, they find that losses disguises wins.

They register them in their brain the same as a normal win. And so this increases the frequency that something exciting is happening. And that's really what social media is looking for, is trying to give you the right amount of exciting things to just keep your attention. So I think if they were to switch over to all the educational videos all the time, unless the person found those very exciting, I think you'd start to see attention fade away. So the nature of the reward does matter.

A slot machine is using the loop to facilitate the promise of money. Hunting and gathering is using the loop to facilitate the process of finding nutrition, which is also a biggie, but maybe not as, you know, immediately enticing, especially in the age of abundance. We have enough food. Everybody has enough food, more or less. Not everybody has enough money. But knowledge to satisfy curiosity, to enhance your brain. That's interesting, but only to a point, right? Which begs the question. Which gives you greater pause? You're in Vegas, you're walking through the casino, And there's Marge from Boise.

She's about 60 pounds overweight. She's been sitting at the same slot machine for four hours. She has two big gulp cups. One filled with quarters and silver dollars and tokens. And the other filled with, well, just Coca-Cola, your regular old big gulp. And there she sits, smoking cigarettes, just feeding the machine. Does she worry you more or the 15-year-old student? who's doing great in a good school, but spends six to seven hours a day just scrolling and swiping and checking her status and checking in with her friends and sending the text and the photos and standing in the line at Vegas to get her picture for her Instagram moment at the aforementioned sign.

What scares you more? It's a good question. Here's how I'll answer that. Damn good question. I thought three for three. Three for three. Put it on the board. When Marge leaves the casino, she's no longer gambling.

Okay. So great. Marge, go back to Boise. When you're in Boise, there's not slot machines there, as far as I know. So she uses this as a vacation to, you know, come and get some release in her life. It's like it's entertainment, you know. Whereas our 15-year-old kid example, the casino is in their pocket all the time. Right.

mean, this scarcity loop is what makes social media work. It's the random trickle of the reward and not knowing, right? So take posting. You have an opportunity to get likes, which is really to feel valued socially. So you post. And then you wait in suspense. And that's just like when the reels are rolling on a slump machine. And then you open back up the app and you figure out, have I won? Did I get enough likes that I'm going to feel good about this? Or did I lose? Did I not get enough likes? So now I'm going to feel bad. Or did I really lose? Like some other girl commented on my post and said, oh my God, you're so ugly. And now I feel terrible. And by the way, we're going to quickly repeat this. I'm checking this thing all day. And so when I think about the sort of insidious 24-7 nature

of what comes through phones, especially as applied to teenagers, who, by the way, they are changing in such a way. So the human brain really changes from about puberty to 20, where they really value social connections more than any other time in their life. They become paramount. And they're also figuring out their way in the world and how they deal with their problems and how they find comfort and how they just navigate the future. When I think about all those things, I think that the cell phone with the 15-year-old is scarier to me than Marge, despite her Virginia splims, despite her big gulps.

and despite the fact that she just lost $500 on a slot machine that's titled Kitty Glitter. They were Marlboro Reds, by the way. I'd play the Kitty Glitter. That sounds fun. Yeah, for five hours. It's a good one. It's a good one. Good Lord. It just seems like we're all just trying to fill in the blanks in our lives as best we can. Playing the cards we get, as it were.

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that we have all been affirmatively deceived by policies that allow imported meat to be marketed as domestic. That's the reason I switch to good ranchers. If I'm being honest, though, I doubt that I would have stayed this long had the quality not been so acceptable. Every single cut I've devoured from Good Ranchers has been straight up delicious, and every morsel was raised on a small American farm or ranch. Give them a try. Subscriptions are affordable and flexible. In fact, if you start your plan today, you'll get free meat for life and $40 off your first order. Just use code mic at good ranchers.com. Free meat for life, $40 off your first order. Good Ranchers.com. meat delivered. If you could eat a steer, if you could eat a cow, don't take a chance on a foreign ranch, get good ranchers now. Yeah, I think so. And then so the, then the question is, what cards do you want to

play? How do you want to spend your time, right? What table do you want to sit at and play cards at? And so I think that you're right, though, that people want to do something. Right, we're always going to do something. We have to feel like we're doing something. Because again, and I always take it back to evolution and what would have helped us survive because I think it's very informative to human behavior today is that if you were the type of caveman who sat on his ass thinking, oh, everything's great out, right? These flowers smell good. My life is perfect. I've just solved the whole problem of living. You would die. You wouldn't have enough food. You would have this crappy shelter when the storm came in. You would miss the fact that there's another caveman coming to smack you

over the head because you're lazy. So we didn't really, you know, evolve to be people who have much chill and can just really sit and rest and relax and feel like we've arrived, like we've made it. Right when we think we've arrived, we go, what's that other place over there, though? You see that place? Oh, God, that's so true. And that's how we are, because it kept us alive. And the fundamental difference, though, is that today you're going to stay alive, whether you have this neurotic drive or not. And so I think the big question of living today in this amazing world we live in is finding a balance of appreciation for just how amazing things are today and really using your time in a way that enhances your life. But also you still need that drive. You can't just sit around, right? So it's like

this very complicated dance that we have to do now. And at the same time, That's the dance of life. That's the dance of living. And this is questions that people have been grappling with, you know, since we started writing down questions and marking them up on Mike's good question board. Thank you. I'm up to three. Here's number four. You're fundamentally trying to help people with these books. And you just glossed over something that I think is really interesting, at least in terms of cognitive dissonance and hard for people to square. But truly, in spite of the headlines. And in spite of all of the distractions. and pitfalls and minefields, has there ever been a better time to be alive? I mean, we're up to our neck in abundance. We're up to our neck in medical science breakthroughs. We just have so bloody much of everything. Why don't people want to hear that?

Why do they feel like they're being attacked if you remind them that there's an endless list of things to be grateful for. In the comfort crisis, I talk about this concept called prevalence-induced concept change. That is a nerdy way of saying problem creep. And it's these two scientists at Harvard, they basically found that as humans experience fewer and fewer problems, we don't actually become more satisfied.

We simply lower our threshold for what we consider a problem. So we have the same amount of problems. But as the world gets better over time, people's problems become more hollowed out, right? So this is the science of first world problems. There's actually a scientific basis for first world problems. Oh my God, I love this so much. What did I say to you yesterday, Chuck? Why does everything have to be a meal? Why do we need an act of Congress to do small, easy things? Why? Why? We are suspicious of anything that might happen too easily. Yes, 100%. Because we just sort of look, we just sort of look.

to the next problem that's in our immediate vicinity that's in this small time horizon, we're terrible at looking and comparing to something that happened, say, 50 years ago, 100 years ago, 1,000 years ago. So when you poll the average American, 6% of people say that the world is improving. Only 6%. Now, I'm not saying the world is perfect. But let's compare it to 150 years ago. You're less likely to be starving to death.

You're less likely to die at work. You're less likely to die before you hit age 50. Your children are far less likely to die before reaching age five. You're more likely to have an education. You're more likely to be literate. I mean, I could just go on and on and on and on. But we don't think about that. When someone goes, excuse me, sir, I'm a pollster.

Do you think the world is improving? I go, well, oh, that one politician, though, hell no, it's not improving. you just look for a problem, even though it's not a big problem in the grand scheme of time and space, and you say, no, it's not improving. But ultimately, that colors your worldview. That's the problem. 150 years ago, guess what your job was? You're out in the field, buddy, because like most of the world works in agriculture.

So you could be born, and your mom goes, okay, great, we need to get you to the point where you can walk so you can start to help us out in the house. So then you can go out in the field. And then that's the whole story. That's your deal. That's what you're doing for life. And now you can be anything you want. You can be a carpenter.

You can be a computer programmer. You can be a Broadway actor. You can be a pilot. You can be all these cursions. You could tour with the Grateful Dead if you want to. Like, how amazing is that? Like these ultimate infinite range of possibilities of being a human, and we just miss that. And that's too bad.

And yet, people are killing themselves, literally, because they were bullied virtually. because something went so awry in their need for acceptance. So they're so fragile that somehow a thing has been said on a site that might as well be a slot machine. And that thing somehow has been given the power to hobble us, to bring us to our knees. it seems to me, and I don't know if you make this point in the book, but it seems to me that the power of the slot machine can only be bestowed upon it by the person pulling the handle.

I get the psychology and I get the smarts that went into creating the environment that facilitates and encourages the behavior. But in the end, that thing doesn't have any power that we don't willingly give to it. The question is, why would we do that? Are we bored? Are we so desperate for stimulation? Yeah, I mean, so I think that with most things, it's like we sort of fall into these behaviors and it's like, oh, yeah, I guess I'll just download Instagram.

What's the worst that could happen? I'll play the slot machine once. Yeah, that's the worst that could happen. And for whatever reason, you know, I don't think that we know the underlying reason why, say, a gambling addict chooses the slot machine. where a social media addict gets hooked on Instagram. But for whatever reason, I think that people kind of do this behavior that gives them this short-term reward.

They repeat it and they get a reward and they get a reward and they give a reward and it does something good for them. But at a certain point, it starts to tip. It starts to tip and it starts to become negative. But they have all this backstory and history of this thing working for them, doing a good thing for them and they're like, it'll be different this time. No, I've won before at the gambling table. No, I've been able to drink and be in control.

whatever it might be. So that's ultimately like the cycle of addiction, right? It's like for a person who is in a sort of addictive spiral, they are fully convinced they're acting rationally because doing a drug of choice, playing a slot machine, going onto social media will solve their problem in the short term. It'll make them feel better immediately. But it'll give them long-term problems and that is what the fundamental issue is.

But they don't realize that because they're like, well, I can just feel better right now if I just have a drink, if I just play a slot machine, if I just go on social media. Do people think that or do they just do it without thinking because it's worked in the past? You know, you have no, like Mike said before, you know, people willingly pull the slot. Is there a point where they're not doing it willingly anymore? They're doing it because they can't control themselves?

So some people say that like, you know, drug addiction or obesity or social media use or gambling is not a choice. I believe it is a choice. I believe choice gets constrained over time. if you do the same thing over and over and over and over, it becomes harder not to do that thing over and over. But it doesn't mean that you haven't made a choice. Right. And I think sometimes we confuse that with things like, is, you know,

X behavior a disease? Say, like, is drug addiction to disease? It's like, well, it's not a disease like, say, you know, cancer or Alzheimer's. It's like, there's nothing you could do for someone with Alzheimer's to, like, get them to not have Alzheimer's, right? I can't say, hey, person with Alzheimer's, go into a room and talk to other people who have Alzheimer's. You know, it's in a church basement and you guys will talk about it.

And this will help you. It's like, that would be cool. That would never work. So at a certain level, I think we need to be honest with ourselves and realize that a lot of these behavior issues are ultimately behavior issues that come down to choice. That's not saying the other choice is going to be easy to make. It's really not going to. And it's very, very complicated.

Right. It's super complicated. And it's going to piss a lot of people off to say this out loud. but do you think there's an unintended consequence in promulgating the idea that alcoholism, for instance, is a disease vis-a-vis the idea that once you know you have been diagnosed with a condition, any condition, then the prophecy begins to self-fulfill. And you begin to accept the fact that, okay, I'm sick. and the only way I can get over the sickness is to follow this plan.

And I think AA has a program that's actually worked for a lot of people. But have you read much about R-R? No. It's called rational recovery. Again, very controversial, but it starts with the idea of, no, you're not sick. You don't have a disease. You have a compulsion, a compunction. And we believe that you can rewire your brain.

And we believe that doing so might be profoundly unpleasant. But we're not going to treat you as if you have no power, as opposed to, I forget what the 12 steps are, but somewhere near the top of the list is, I have no power. My only hope is to put my fate in the hands of a third party, a higher power. So what are your thoughts, you know? Are we painting with too broad a brush? Do you like the idea that, well, if this works for you and that works for you, great? Or is there some other insight the scarcity loop can offer? I like the idea of do what works for you and try different things.

So here's what I'll say is that there was a study of a bunch of alcoholics in New Mexico. And they tracked these guys for about a year. And they were all trying to get sober. So they all get sober, say January 1st and we're going to track them and see how it goes. And they found that the number one reason that people relapsed in this study was believing that alcoholism was a disease. And they said, well, okay, why did that make you relapse? And they said, well, you know, it's a disease. And then I go, okay, well, what should I do to treat it?

And the doctor goes, well, there's no cure. And it's like, well, okay, well, why the hell would I do anything then? I got this disease. I can't do anything to cure. Why do anything? Now, at the same time, I'm fully aware that the disease model has helped a lot of people. What I'm trying to suggest is that there are a lot of ranges of possibilities to help people get out of cycles like that. And I do think that the narrative as of the last, say since like 1995 really is when the disease model really started getting popular has been you're just a sick person.

You didn't have anything to do with this. You know, didn't have anything to do with you. And I think that probably that's not the right message for everyone. And so I think that people should have options for messaging, realizing that, oh, I might have to actually, like do something about this. Like maybe I'm the asshole, you know. Maybe. Maybe. And acting on that is important. Well, what are your thoughts on leverage and the power of leverage to break through whatever construct it is that you embrace to explain whatever behavior is tormenting you? Is there something to leverage? I think people need a good reason to quit a bad habit. And so,

You know, I interviewed a lot of experts on this, and there's one whose name is Sally Sattel, and she's a psychologist at Yale who's thought a lot about this. And she said, you know, a lot of the messaging around addiction is that it's sort of, once you're in it, you're in it. Like, you're never getting out of it. But the problem is that the stats that come from, they've been taken from the most extreme cases who wind up in, you know, the most extreme rehab facilities and all that. So when you look at everyday people, people quit.

if they have a problem for all sorts of different reasons. She's like, I've had people I've worked with who quit because they miss their kids soccer game. And that was enough for them. Or they got fired from a job. Or they just woke up one morning and didn't like how they were living and just had this click, you know, and they really changed. So I think that you do need a reason. I mean, that's for sure. As part of the book, I traveled to Iraq to look at addiction.

And I talked to a guy who was there who really believes when he works with people who are addicted, he says, look, you need to find a big way to change your life right now. You need to get a new job. You need to learn how to read. You need to go back and get an education. You've got to get a totally new group of friends. Like you really need to have these more fundamental changes that fill whatever void the person was trying to fill with drugs, with alcohol, with whatever bad behavior it was. So yeah, I think that you do need big changes. And that's ultimately kind of what leverage is. Why did you have to go to Iraq, Mike? I mean, why can't you just walk down Vegas? Boulevard. I mean, is this just the journalist in you? You did the same thing with your other book.

You go to the back of beyond. Do you think it gives you more credibility to go halfway around the world to learn these things? I think in this case, Iraq was fascinating to me because there was nothing and then there was something. And in the United States, we've always had something. And you see these ebbs and flows and, you know, stories that have been covered in different ways. and I think that going elsewhere and helping the reader see, hey, this thing happened here. And they go, oh, yeah, that's kind of just like it happened in, with opioids in Appalachia or whatever it might be, right?

It's the same story. It's that I think for addiction to really boom, you need a populace who is in some sort of pain, psychic pain, whatever it might be. They don't have good outlets to deal with that pain. And then a substance comes in and it fixes their problem. problems in the short term. And that's what you had for addiction in Iraq to spike. That's what you had in the Midwest when the opioid crisis really boomed. I mean, that's kind of been the story of

addiction everywhere. You talked earlier about the power of uncertainty and the weird allure that always seems to involve not quite knowing how the story ends or where the story ends, you know, but there's no chapter in your book called uncertainty. You do have one though called certainty. So if you could sort of do the yin and the yang and make those rhyme, I'd appreciate it. Yeah. So I mean, I think that one of the things that humans absolutely want is certainty. Knowing we did the right or wrong thing, like having the loop closed,

there's some really great stories around or studies that have been done on certainty. And, you know, people will do crazy things like, choose to be shocked rather than sit in uncertainty waiting to know whether they will be shocked. So if a researcher goes, okay, you might get shocked in the next minute. The person just goes, just shock me right now. Just get it over with. And that's powerful. And I think that one thing that I talk about in the book is this rise of quantification and all these different parts of our lives, right? We now have like numbers and measurements for everything from our sort of social score on social media to even something like grading that boils down this really big, rich educational experience into like

a 3.0 or a 4.0 because it makes things simple and certain, right? If you get the A, you know you did a good job. If you get the B, you know you did an okay job. If you get the C, you're like, I'm kind of on the fence, right? But you see this in all sorts of different parts of life. And those simplified scores can give us certainty, but at the expense of realizing that we do all these different things that were quantifying for a whole range of reasons, right? It's like the goal of going to school, for example, is to learn the material, to interact with other human beings, to learn how to be a good human, to learn how to argue respectfully, to learn how to get, you know, push back on when you say something dumb. But when you put things in a GPA scale, you know, I was a professor at University of

Nevada, Las Vegas for a long time, all my students care about is their GPA. I'm like, this is what they absolutely obsess on. I'm like, you're missing it. This is not what you're here for. You're not here for this number, but that's what they obsess on because then it tells them for certain, because all those other things I just named, those are really hard to measure. It's like, how do you know you've done the right thing, right? Yes. I don't know if there's a more important point to be made than that. I wonder what happened to us to make us so uniformly desperate for feedback. Everybody I know in my stupid industry, even before we were all waking up and reflexively reaching for our phones.

Everybody in my industry was waking up, desperate to figure out what did Nielsen say? What are the Q scores? What's the rating? You tell me, man, are you doing this right now with your book? When's the last time you talk to your publisher to check on sales? Are you doing it because you need to know for financial reasons and practical reasons? Or is it the like and the share and the click and And how important is it to you to know that the scarcity brain is on which list and how high? And what the reviewers say, do you care?

Or, like me, are you someone who will still get in the line to get your photo taken next to the fancy neon sign? With all the rest of the great unwashed. Next time we're in Las Vegas, you and I are standing in that line. I don't care how haunted is outside. At three in the morning. It'll just be you and me. And some married couple. Yeah, and a married couple.

Yeah, I mean, I'm human, right? I want to know too. But I will say that what really pierces that for me and gives me sanity is messages from people who read my books. Yeah. So you go, okay, well, why do I write books in the first place? And the answer is that I want to help people live better, right? I need to make a living and I can do it in this way that allows people to live better. That's great.

Now, how do I measure if people are. are actually living better after reading my books. The reality is I can't. It's very murky. I have no idea unless people reach out to me and tell me that. So I will log on to the author portal every Monday morning when the weekly book sales go up and I'll look at that number and I'll go, oh, it's this number.

Great. Or, oh, it's that number. Shit. That's no good. And you get high on your horse or you get whatever low on the ground just because of the stupid number. And then I'll get a message from someone who's like, hey, I read your book and it led me to lose 75 pounds.

And by the way, I quit my job and now I do this and my relationship with my wife is better. And you're like, oh, I don't give a shit what that number was this morning. I really don't care. Like that is that is why you do it. And so I think that we need those reminders. And I think sometimes in some fields it's easier to get them than others. And I definitely worry about, you know, for example, like the grading thing with students. There's so many students in the education system that grades and GPA just doesn't capture their talents.

They just don't jive with it because they're free thinkers. They're out of the box. They're not just fitting the mold that GPA casts them in. And I worry about that because that can take wind out of the sales of people who could really do some interesting things. This is probably the right place to land the plane. If you want to sum up with something, I hate to ask for advice because I know your as I am of painting with too broad a brush and cookie cutter advice. But if you can distill all of this, what do we do next? What do we do with this information in your book?

Well, I mean, I think the overarching narrative between my two books and the overarching big picture advice is that what most improves people's lives today, it's not the super easy thing. It's not the thing that like, you know, feels fun and great doing in the short term. It's usually going to be uncomfortable in the short term, but it gives you long-term rewards. Now, that could be taking up an exercise routine, you know, not having the next cookie when it comes to you. Resisting the pull of the slot machine, resisting the pull of your Instagram and trying to find something else like reading a physical book or writing your own book, right? That's hard in the short term, but ultimately rewarding in the long run. When I was reporting this scarcity brain book, I spent this week.

at a Benedictine monastery in New Mexico. And while I'm there, they have this little store where they sell coffee that they roast on site. And they have a bunch of books. It's like this very obscure range of books from small Catholic presses. And for whatever reason, I'm going through and I just, whatever, a book calls to me. I pull it out. And it's this book. It's written by this monk who lived in a cave in the 1850s.

And the person didn't even want to use his name. name because he didn't want any credit for the writings. And it's his journals from living in this cave alone for like years and years of the time. And one line that really stuck out for me is that he wrote, you risk so much hesitating to fling yourself into the abyss. And I think that that is the truth. The more we hesitate to do that thing that we know is going to be challenging, but we know we need to do, it's going to be uncomfortable. We're just risking so much waiting to do that because that's ultimately where the treasure is. Wow. Yeah, man. It's a great book. I hope you sell a bunch. Well, thank you. Yeah, sure. Where should people buy it?

Eastermichael.com is where you can find all things. Me. And you know what else you should do, folks? If you like this guy, and you should like him. Sign up for his newsletter. I get something every week from you now asking me a question. They're really well done. And they all offer little tidbits and little hacks that are useful. Chuck, any fun? Final thoughts from you, being a hopeless inveterate gambler. Any advice you'd like to pick his brain for before we say goodbye? Uh, no, I think I'm good. I just, I think I just got a belly up and just say no. You know, you can be at the tables as Mike and I are taking our shots at the sign. At the sign. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, let me check. I like what Richard Pryor said about addiction. You know, he said, I've been snorting cocaine for 15 years. I'm not hooked. Was the other one? Drinking problem.

I don't have a drinking problem. I drink. I get drunk. I fall down. No problem. Scarcity Brain is the book. Michael Easter is the author. Pick up a copy.

Thanks, brother. Yeah, thank you. If you're done, please subscribe. Leave some stars ideally five. Five lousy. little star