The Scarcity Brain: How To Rewire Your Habits to Thrive with Enough | Michael Easter X Rich Roll

We still have that DNA that pushes us to do the next easiest and most comfortable thing. Companies know which rewards program will really grab people's attention. Every app I spend too much time on is what makes it work. I sat down with Michael. Easter, a professor, an investigative journalist, a behavior change expert, and the author of The Comfort Crisis and the Scarcity Brain. Our

brain

is almost, quote-unquote, programmed to fall into this because it was so important to our survival all along. This conversation will leave I think with a new lens on the world that you can never unsee, if you are always in the media,

your

ideas come from others and if you don't have the technology you can't function well in society, so it's almost as if We'd become slaves to these things, which is probably the most depressing thing I've ever said in my life, but today's episode is brought to you by the incredible organizations that make this show possible.

I am very happy to have you here today. I've been waiting to meet you for a long time. I love the work you've been doing, it fits perfectly into so many topics that interest me and you know I've heard you on several other podcasts so it's a pleasure. to meet you, thanks for coming, yeah, same way, thanks for having me here, man, and you're a sober guy, I'm a sober guy, yeah, you got a pretty interesting backstory, uh, family history with that , right? Yes, I do, um. The family story is that my dad went to rehab and my mom got sober, so I'll give you some background on that.

My dad goes to rehab and my parents met, you know, when they were partying. phase and the rehab center gives my mom a book and they say: I want you to read this book because this is what

your

father or her husband is going to read while he is in rehab, so she is doing well, whatever it is the idea. It's just that if she reads this book, she'll know what he's going through, so one night she's home, sitting in the bathtub and drinking a Jin and Tonic and she feels fine. I'll read the rehab book here. and she starts reading it, turning page after page and finally she just says, "oh, wait a minute," so it all applies to me too, so she realizes that she needs to be sober too and, uh, my Dad managed to stay sober for, you know, two 3. weeks, which was

enough

time for me to get my mom pregnant and skip town, like actively addicted men tend to do, huh, but my mom has stayed sober ever since.

Wow, yes, yes, the message is for those who want it, not necessarily those who totally need it, yes. Yes, and you also have a relationship with your father. No no no. I think I maybe saw it twice in my life. I don't think I've heard from him since I was maybe eight, but you know. The fact that I am also sober is that I never felt much resentment towards him. I've come to see him as you know, maybe he was doing me a favor by realizing that he didn't have the ability to play that role in any way.

That was going to help, right? I would rather have someone not be in my life than someone who would be in my life and maybe be kind of a drag on my life, so I'll give him props for that, yeah, well, that's a charitable interpretation that we try, so, How did you find yourself in a problematic relationship with substances that required brety? You know, the first time I drank I was maybe 15 and just out the door. I thought, oh, this is it. Awesome like this, it's a great time, the alcohol allowed me to feel really wild and free, like I could explore the limits of life, so to speak.

I was always the type of person where my favorite drink was the next one and when you drink like that, that can lead to some long-term consequences. I would say you know when I drink I always drink to excess, but it was within the realm of acceptability probably until I was maybe 23, maybe 22, at which point it just started to lean. into something darker I would say, and it took me a while to get sober, I mean, I had fits and starts, sure, I came up with all sorts of weird solutions to try to drink less shocking, shocking, what would you do that, yeah, shocking. oh, maybe if you just know, here's a crazy thing just because, to give you an example of how the mind works of a person like me, I started the night and said, "Okay, I have these six coins and I'm going to put them all in in my left back pocket and every time I have a drink I'm going to transfer a coin to my right pocket and when I don't have any more coins in my left back pocket then I'm done and I can't drink any more so I go out to the bar and you know, I have my first I swallow, so I transfer the coin, I take another one, I transfer the coin and then someone says, hey, do you mind if I buy it from you and my

brain

works fine, that doesn't count, it's the back pocket one because I didn't buy it right and then it goes.

I come up with different ways to not transfer the coins and you think how does someone's mind work that way but that's how it is so you know the answer for me is that I had to be sober and I was 20, 7 or 28 when. I was sober and it was really for me to realize that I had a moment where I could see the field that if I were to continue with that behavior that I was probably going to die early. Now I realized that it would probably be easier in the short term because you know that for me nothing solves a problem like the first drink, but it was not going to be a good path and I kind of saw that I had this opportunity that something really changed in my head where I was like I wanted to be sober and I started working to make that happen and thank God it did. that through AA and kind of a traditional 12 step or did you have some alternative modality yeah, yeah, I haven't really talked about AA, but since I've been on this podcast, yeah, I called my mom, that was actually for me. when it was like Okay, you're RNG, do something about it, right?

Because my mom never had any idea that she had a drinking problem, so I wake up that morning, everything is a disaster. I told myself I could see the field and I called her and she just said hey, I need to talk to you, I have a drinking problem and she's like me, yeah, and I'm like, give her some details and she's like, oh, okay, this It's what I did when I was in the year position and that took me. I went to AA. I became active in the program. I found a really cool sponsor. Really cool guy.

Fascinating guy because he had a Terminal 4 canceller. Wow, and I had no idea until the three months I was working with him and that just ruined it. My mind is like you know the clock is ticking and you're dedicating some of those tics to liking this idiot here, like that blows my mind and I think events like that make you realize how serious it is, but also I make you feel very grateful, yes, that's beautiful, I mean, it's a perfect example of service in action, and you being someone who probably felt that way, it's very indulgent of me to bother this guy who has real problems, but Maybe you'll recognize it later as you recover.

Him talking to you and him not having to obsess over his own problems was also helpful for him, yeah that's how it works, yeah he's a really amazing, cool guy and I really owe him my life in a lot of ways so That's beautiful, well, I certainly identify with your inner experience, I try to discover all those things in the madness of the alcoholic brain, but you know, I think that in looking at your work and reading your books, it is clear that this type of message of recovery is. in between the lines, like in everything you do, it's pretty clear that anyone who is sober can identify that and I think you know that as a sober person, anyone who has achieved or maintained sobriety has experienced that journey from some sort of broken hole or from despair to mend and understand that discomfort is kind of the price for a better life and pain is a catalyst for growth and everything you want is on the other side of the heart and discipline is freedom and all these kinds of tropes that we hear from and that is certainly a big part of the comfort crisis, you know one aspect of the work that you have done, this idea that life gets better at the same time as your willingness to invite difficulties into your life, yes, I mean, I think the story of a lot of improvements and improving your life in the current context is that you often have to go through short-term discomfort for long-term benefit, so in the comfort crisis, you know, I talk about how as the world becomes more and more comfortable, we've lost a lot of the things that kept us healthy, that kept us happy, and that humans evolved, I think making the next thing easier and more comfortable, and that it's because it made sense forever, because we evolved in these environments that were uncomfortable, they were difficult, and so if you were the type of person that you know I'm not going to move any more than I have to when I have this food I'm going to eat a little more than I need I'm going to try to stay as warm as possible It's possible that with all these different things you would have a survival advantage and I think we still have that DNA that pushes us to do the next easiest and most comfortable thing in a world which has become comfortable in many ways, you know, so you think. about movement, we really have designed a lot of movement from our days, our food system is very different, the fact that not only do we not necessarily have to physically work to get our food, but also the type of food that we eat It's very hyperpable and calorie dense and there's a good reason for that, right, we evolved to C those things that we spent 93% of our time indoors, that humans evolved outdoors, we were outdoors in the sense of that we lived outside and I think taking us out of that has had some repercussions on mental health and yes, I think just look at the big picture of the environments that we live in today: they are very different from how we lived for 2 and a half million years when humans reached this moment we are in. in this time of excess and overindulgence where we have to seek out or create types of artificial constructs to invite

scarcity

into our lives and combat the incessant messages we are exposed to 247 that tell us that happiness is the purpose, the fulfillment.

What we seek is on the other side of comfort, luxury, materialism and relaxation and vacations and material goods and foods that do not serve our wealth and well-being. Yeah, and I really liked how you said that we have to build these things that sustain us. us healthy, I mean, that's absolutely true, I mean, looking at exercise as if exercise was something we invented after the Industrial Revolution basically and scaling it up as if it never made sense to move for the sake of moving all the time. time, but now it's okay. We design the movement of our days and we notice that these people who sit more seem to get sicker than people who still move a lot, so maybe we should invent something to get people who are inactive to be active.

We'll call it exercise. We're going to build a building where you go in and lift things that are heavy for the sake of being heavy and then you run around with this motorized belt and blah, like all this stuff, right? I mean, we just made it up, we have to make up these Constructs to stay healthy, that doesn't mean they're bad at all, but it's a really fascinating time and it's a great time too. I would rather choose to exercise than be forced to perform a large amount of movement each time. A single day like people were in the past, so we are in this time where we have so many opportunities to live a completely wonderful life, but the downside is that there is a lot of temptation floating around, whether in the form of food or inactivity . drugs and alcohol or whatever, you know, seeking status on social media is like there are a lot of things that can get us in trouble at the same time, almost everything can completely get us in trouble and it's a scenario where from the moment in that The Born were inundated with that type of programming and messages, so the amount of will you have to muster to combat inviting goodness into your life is almost superum.

I was listening to the podcast you did with Step Bartlett and him. he reflected on that notion as something that made him more compassionate about The Human Condition, and I think I agree that it's hard when every day we're being subliminally programmed to do all these things that make us feel lonelier and more disconnected. more addicts more divorced from the things that make us feel good in Body, Mind and Spirit, yes, I also have a lot of empathy because I think you also know that everyone has something, something that they exaggerate, you can visually see some things and those people are criticized, so for example, if someone is obese it's like people say oh man, look at that person who eats so much or whatever, but I'm sure that person who says that has something that they overdo and they just We are not aware.

True, we have a world where everyone has something and everyone loves something, so I think realizing that cardsthey're very against us and the fact that you yourself probably have something that you might be exaggerating a little bit helps to generate empathy, yes. Of course, I've said this before, but I think the moment we're in, if there's a silver lining to all of this, has allowed people to have a broader understanding and an empathetic perspective on the nature of addiction, Like when I was sober. Things have changed, we're in Los Angeles, it's very permissive about recovery, but still, if you're an alcoholic or a drug addict, you're like this person here and that's what addicts are or this is what an alcoholic looks like. and now, because of social media, the iPhone, our digital interfaces, and the gamification of everything, almost every human being can relate to some level of compulsivity where they lack control over their best interests.

I think that has allowed people to say "wow," like maybe I'm not sticking a needle in my arm, but at the same time I have a greater connection to being powerless over certain things in my life that I think has created a little more compassion. around the notion of what addiction is and the understanding that addiction lives on a spectrum and everyone can probably identify where they fall on that spectrum, somewhere you know in the middle, if not as you know, on the severe side , which I would consider to be correct. I think one thing that's interesting about addiction is like, okay, who determines who is an addict and who isn't, someone with a clipboard, right, is it subjective or do they say it's up to you, you have to make that decision for yourself. same.

Even if you look at the dsm5, they don't even use the word Addiction, first they use substance use disorders and they have these 11 criteria right and you go down the list and you say, "Okay, if you meet it, you know one." to four, you have a mild case, if you meet five to, say, seven of these, you have a medium case and you know eight or more you have a severe case of substance use disorder, you know, I look at that and say, okay. . I start it with my drinking and I'm like, oh yeah, we've got a bad case here, yeah, that was really bad, but if I start having other

habits

that I have that I wanted to stop, I'm like, well, just the way I am. on the border of, you know, mild and moderate with what I do, I'm moderate with what I do, so I think that makes you realize that, as we've said, there are two things that are against us in many cases . ways, but also again that everyone has something, yes, with respect to the comfort crisis aspect of this, um, yes, we see the health and fitness in the wellness industry exploding as a result of people recognizing that they know that They need to fight all these social networks. strengths, now we see the explosion of not just marathons but ultramarathons and all these crazy, super long endurance races where people pay money and push themselves and train to do hard things because, on some level, the reward is greater connection to oneself, one's inner capacity and the benefits of, you know, enduring something difficult and what that does to self-esteem or sense of your own kind of personal potential and possibility.

Yeah, as part of the

scarcity

mark, I talked to this guy whose name is Thomas. Enal and he's a psychologist who's at the University of Kansas, Kentucky, sorry, it's a K place, yeah, it's one of those K schools. He got his PhD in 1968, so he came up in this line with BF Skinner and he has 80 years. He is still in the lab every day. He is truly one of our best minds and Psychology. I was talking to him about this exact phenomenon and he said, "You know, I think humans probably value things that we have to work harder to get to." there is more effort, so if you think about humans in the past, where food was scarce, you needed food to survive and there were times when you could find it, it was easy, but there were other times when you couldn't find it. one day for two days and you're looking for this landscape and it's hard and you're cold and you know if you don't find this food you're going to die when you find that food, it's a fucking party right, it's like the best food you've ever had in your life.

It could be the exact same food you found, say, a week earlier, but it was easy to find, but you value that food that was harder to find, we need it to encourage the future. Persistence, this is his right idea and you still see this translated today, so he's a teacher and we were talking about students and grades and he said, you know, I see this in myself, whereas students will value and they went into, let's say, physics a lot. more than the a they got in, say, English, because physics a was much harder to get, but they are worth exactly the same point value, so why is it because we value things that are harder for us to achieve and I think when you think? about something like an ultramarathon or whatever, having to go through those difficulties, that short-term discomfort, on the other hand, you get a much deeper and greater reward knowing that and understanding that anyone who has endured something like that has benefited from it.

So why are we still in a situation where all the messages, all the billboards, all the television commercials, all the commercial concerns inform us? Otherwise, you know, why don't we have billboards? I guess there are no finances. What corporate interest will benefit from telling us not to buy things and to do difficult things? I don't know, yeah, you know, yeah, I mean, honestly, I think that's the main driver, it's corporate interest, but you know. We humans come from these scarcity environments where everything we needed to survive was scarce and hard to find, so if you were the type of person who would exaggerate what you needed to survive, from food to things to information to the amount of status That You could get it, that would give you a survival advantage and I think that is prayed for in our modern world in a way where we have an abundance of all these things that we are made to crave but don't really realize. like we don't have a top governor for that kind of stuff, right, we throw away a third of our food, right, over 70% of people are overweight or obese, the average home has over 10,000 items, right, you can influence in millions of people. people in a single tweet or Instagram, well now whatever it is, it's a strange new world for us where we really have to deal with abundance and the other thing is I look at myself in the past like I'm saying that to get those things that help us survive, whether it's that possession, whether it's that bite of food, it took that physical purchase, you had to do something hard to do it right and now you don't do it, so I think that's changed to as we move forward. well, and we have an evolutionary mismatch there, all of our evolutionary instincts are now orthogonal to what is best for us, yeah, which is a very strange experiment to run at scale.

Oh, in the human race, it's a totally Western world, it's totally foreign and I. I think it's hard for us to realize this. There's a concept in the comfort crisis I write about called prevalence-induced concept shift and it basically finds that as humans experience fewer and fewer problems, we don't actually become more satisfied, we just lower our definition of what we consider a problem, so our problems become emptier over time as the world improves, so it's as if today's comfort is tomorrow's discomfort, we are constantly moving the golden point and we don't necessarily see everything this happens unconsciously, so I'll give you an example of this in my life: because of the comfort crisis, I go and spend a month in the Arctic MH and I've told this story before, but I think it's important.

One is that when I get on the plane to fly from Las Vegas to Alaska so I can go to the Arctic, it's terrible because flying on planes sucks. The correct chair is too small. The movies on the back suck. The sandwiches are terrible. The coffee. It's not good there's a screaming baby if you want to go to the bathroom you have to walk and you're in this little closet you're trying to go to the bathroom like it's not a fun experience so I'm going to spend a month in the Arctic and it's like I want to go to the bathroom, I had to walk through the tundra and bring the rifle because there are grizzly bears that we like, we don't have

enough

food, so I'm starving.

I'm very cold all the time. If I want to drink, I have to walk to the stream and walk to the camp. I'm so bored all the time, so when I get back on the plane to go from Alaska to Vegas it's like what do you think my experience is like with that? It sure is pure luxury oh my gosh this is the most amazing thing yes there are pretzels and I'm like oh my gosh these are the most amazing pretzels I've ever had. I haven't sat in a chair for over a month, so now all of a sudden you're thinking, "wow, this airplane chair is incredibly comfortable." You're watching these movies that blow your mind at how incredible they are because you've done, you literally haven't had any stimulation on screens for a month, so I guess that's a long way of saying that we live in an incredible time because, by the way , this is all happening in a steel tube that is flying through the air at about 500 miles per hour, but two, sometimes you need to do things that help you realize that because it's like I never thought about how amazing it is.

They were the planes. I thought, oh yeah, this is like a shitty experience that I have to go through but they're not, they're absolutely amazing but not necessarily because we're born into it I have a big big big I don't know how many big ones are behind this Auntie her name is Nelly sin think and she lived in Missouri and was a Mormon, so the Mormons were being driven out of Missouri. Well, what they do is they decide that we're going to go west, we're going to go to Utah, so you have all these Mormons who have handcarts that they have to pull by hand and move across the plains, to get to Utah. , now they come out in April and it's a four-month trip, so when October comes, she's right outside of Salt Lake City, she's almost there, like inside.

Well, 100 miles away, a blizzard hits and kills her parents, freezes her legs, but they rescue her, so they take her to Salt Lake City and she has to cut off her legs without any anesthesia and, by the way, This costs 1850 mhm in four months. your parents die in the process and you have to take your legs off and there are reports about her that she never complained in her entire life because that's how it was wow and then you know I'm getting on a plane from St. Louis to Salt Lake City and say, "Oh my God, he was 15 minutes late." Yes, the half-life of that experience also tends to be very short, so the luxury experience on the return trip from the Arctic is mind-blowing, but how long before you arrive? annoying the next time you have to go through TSA or something, like our brains, you know, are incapable of retaining that preferential lens about how wonderful our lives are in this modern world, the other kind of Trope with that.

It's how surprised everyone was the first time you could have Wi-Fi on a plane and then five minutes later, total irritation because it doesn't work right, you know, like you forgot, it's like we were programmed, you know, evolutionarily. In some ways, it's a total mismatch for the world we find ourselves in now, yes, in many ways. I mean, I think, to your point, it's almost like I don't know if you had this when you were sober, but sort of Pink Cloud where you come out of the worst and then it's like everything is the best it could be, but then it happens. time and that goes away, so I think it's like, what can you do?

I think it's like if you go to exercise, you don't just do it once and you do it well, it's how you can constantly find ways to put yourself in moments that make you realize these things and that kind of rejection of all of this, Well, that prevalence-induced concept shift you referred to is just an indication that we're not meant to live problem-free, even though in our minds we think wouldn't it be great if I could retire to a desert island and, well, You know, sitting on a couch for the rest of my life, that wouldn't be an ideal experience.

We are meant to have problems in our lives and face them and be challenged by them and as our world turns. It's more convenient, those problems tend to be more trivial and we look for them when we don't really have them, so there's a kind of evolutionary thing about looking for problems even when we don't actually have any real problems that we need. worry, yes, exactly, the IND prevalence, make a change of concept, you can think of it as the science of first world problems, that's how I like to say it, once you eliminate one problem, your brain automatically looks for the next one, but if things keep getting better over time, then your problems get sillier and sillier over time and then you feel guilty and ashamed for complaining about those problems, well, some people do.

I wish I wish everyone did, yeah, that's true, the evolutionary angle, though I mean, I think. He's the scientist I talked to and his name is David Lavari, he's at Harvard about this, he's the guy.who discovered it, basically said that, if you think about it from an evolutionary context, you're always looking for the next problem and trying to solve it gives you a survival advantage when the world is really hard and tough, right, you're like: Okay, do we have enough food? Let's solve this. It's okay, we have enough food. Great, oh, but what about our shelter?

It is safe? We're going to survive this, okay, we have to figure it out right, if you're constantly looking for problems in a world that's full of them, you're probably going to survive and we still have that adaptation, right? The antidote is the practice of gratitude. I think if you know and I like to be useful as a cure to break the cycle of the self-obsessed mind, yeah, you know, what they are as recovery tools. Mhm, no one's diet fits absolutely perfectly every day without fail, which is why I believe in smart. Solid science backs supplementation and my go-to source for all my supplement needs is important because everything they make comes from the highest quality ingredients and is rigorously third-party tested to ensure optimal effectiveness.

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The products in the line where you explore this idea of ​​the convenience crisis really overlap perfectly with this notion of the scarcity brain, like they're very closely intertwined with each other, so explain what the scarcity cycle is and how you became aware of this and you were interested enough. that you thought would provide the basis for a book, yeah, so the scarcity loop is basically a three-part behavioral loop that you can think of as the serial killer of moderation, because as everyone knows, everything is fine in moderation, but then it's okay, yes. we're terrible at it, I'm the worst, you know someone who has some kind of addiction problem, you know that's just not applicable at all so I'm interested in that question and you know I'm a journalist so I'm always watching the world and when I see something that doesn't make sense, I ask: how does it work?

So I live in Las Vegas. Las Vegas is a strange city. Let me first say that we talked about this before. I don't know how you do it man, it would drive me crazy, well if you're someone who likes to observe strange things, then hey, you found a city, yeah, you're never going to run away from me, yeah. to me it's like the darkest part of the human machine, yes, in a way, I mean, look, the city wasn't built on winners, let's put it nicely, but of all the strange things I see there, I always thought that the strangest one was the slot machines because people just play them like always, they will play them over and over again and they are all over the city, they are in gas stations, grocery stores, you name it, I will be filling up my car like a 7: a.m. and there's someone at the gas station playing the slot machine and that's why I want to know how it works because it doesn't make any sense, everyone knows that The House always wins as if the city wouldn't exist if that weren't true.

Long story short, I talked to one person in the gaming industry, he tells me to talk to another, you go through this loop of people and I end up at this casino on the outskirts of town in Las Vegas, it's brand new. Cutting Edge has all the coolest things, but the strange thing is that it is not a casino completely open to the public like a real casino, but it is used entirely for human behavior research. It's like a Skinner box that breathes life. Yes, that's great. way to put it, I wish I had used that line in the book, damn, you can, you can borrow it, yeah, give me credit, go ahead, I'll consult you before my next book, so while I'm there I talk to this guy who's a designer of slot machines and teaches courses on how to design games and slot machines, so he's something of an expert on how to pressure people into more correct behavior.

Behavior they repeat over and over again despite knowing they probably will. you lose in the long run and slot machines work on that three part system called the scarcity loop so you have these three parts you have opportunity you have unpredictable rewards and you have fast repeatability so with opportunity it's like you know that you're going to get something of value at some point, this gives you the opportunity to get something good, so with a slot machine it's money, unpredictable rewards, you know you're going to get something of value at some point, but you don't know when, you don't know as. valuable is going to be and then three quick repetitions, you can repeat the behavior immediately, so think about a slot machine, it's like you can win money.

I play this game like the real ro

roll

. I don't know if I'm going to lose. With the money, I could win a couple of dollars on my dollar bet or I could win like $2000 mhm. It's a crazy variety of results and then once the real ones drop, I can repeat that behavior immediately. Now this becomes really important and this casino is not only funded by gambling. It's funded by a lot of other big tech companies because what can be learned from this system and other systems built into gambling can help people do a lot of other irrational things over and over again, so it's really what makes Social media works, it's what makes dating apps work when included in sports betting.

Sports betting really increases. When they are included in financial apps, you start to see the usage and frequency of financial apps increase, but you know, in the book I also argue. It's been built into our food system, it's in a lot of different places today and I think that's one of the key reasons why people today struggle with moderation because we have these places figuring all this out and by the way, like this system. It doesn't just hook humans, it hooks all animals. If you give animals a gambling game versus a game that is predictable, they will choose the game that imitates a slot machine and play it over and over again, it's really depressing and insidious, but once you understand it.

This template, this three-pronged thing, you can overlay it on almost anything you see in the world, like it really changes the way you perceive your relationship with every app you open on your phone or every TV commercial you watch. the digital version or the practical analog version of the right combination of salt, sugar and fat in a certain food to light up your brain in a certain way that makes it impossible to have just one chip, oh yeah, totally, and for me it was, you know ? you go into this Skinner box and you put it on and you talk to this guy and you know I learn about it and when I leave he says, "You know, this is a really powerful one and two system, by the way, it's not just in the machines slot machine".

I mean it's in so many other places and once I see it then you start getting to your point oh holy hell this is what makes every app I spend too much time on it's what makes it work and it's in There so many different places now that I think again we have the deck stacked against us, but from what you say, I think awareness is really important, so simply being aware of a behavior often changes a behavior and therefore knowing how , oh this is why I'm spending so much time on this insert app or insert other behavior that falls into it, I think I can change it, yeah, it's less about willpower of your own or your own kind of sense of weakness and a lot more about how powerful these tools are that they override every Best for your brain, yeah, the guy I mentioned before, Thomas and all that, did some really interesting studies on animals and gave them the option to play games that give them more food but they are predictable or games that give you less food but they are casino games. basically slot machines and they'll choose the slot machine game like I mentioned, but I asked him, "Okay, obviously this works on humans or you know Facebook wouldn't be a company.

Las Vegas wouldn't be a successful place and you." I've shown that it also works in pigeons and all these other different animals, so why? And he says it probably goes back to foraging in the past and how we evolved to find food, so if you think about finding food when food was scarce, We've evolved, it's like you need food to survive, there's an opportunity to get food, but you don't know where the food is and you don't know how much you're going to find, so you go somewhere and you might not have food. You can go somewhere else and maybe you know a couple of berries, but fewer calories than it took you to burn to get them, you go somewhere else, nothing, you go somewhere else and then bam, jackpot, it's like you won, you found it. a ton of food and therefore you survive mhm and by the way you have to repeat that game every day, that's your life, so it's almost like our brain was quote unquote programmed to fall into this because it was so important. for our survival forever in the context of the slot machine, because it's like the perfect machine to understand this whole mechanism, there's a lot of interesting things to learn from that and understand that which then extends to everything else. like when the slot machine went from the handle you pulled to a digital interface where you just press a button, like when the stats skyrocketed in terms of repeat use, yeah, I mean, I can say that big picture, the faster you can repeat A behavior is more likely to repeat a behavior so industries know that and in the case of the slot machine if we remove the handle that takes a little bit of time to pull they also tended to break what ended up happening is uh . games more than doubled per hour so they went from 400 games per hour that a person would play on average to about 900 games per hour so that speed is just boom boom boom boom it's like why the hell do you think we changed to infinite displacement? infinite sc

roll

ing autoplay on Netflix, I mean, just whatever, every app has all these things built in, so all these Silicon Valley barons are paying attention to what's going on in this casino and pulling out, you know, those seeds and then incorporate them. these apps that become irresistible, yeah, speed totally kills, I mean, in a way, breaking down where you live into a couple of places, it's like when you think about social media, it's like if you post, you have a status opportunity , say, and then you publish and then the next time you launch that app, the rewards are unpredictable, right?

You could have said lost and no one liked your post or someone said you look like an idiot in the comments section or you could have W, you could have so many more likes and comments than you've ever gotten it's like, oh my god, I just won. the Mega Million jackpot from social media and then you check and recheck that phone all the time, right, it's in the rise of sports betting, I mean, all gambling depends on this system, it's like you. you have the opportunity to win money, you put it into a game, but the interesting thing about the rapid repeatability in sports betting is that sports betting companies allowed people to start betting on in-game events, so, for example, Is this team going to score on this drive? you have this short period of time to make the bet so well, so the faster we can get people to bet and have more opportunities to bet, the more money we can make in the example of something like Instagram or Twitter, let's say you have an audience of a certain size before the complexity of the algorithm started driving what people see and you just saw your timeline, you know in its natural development, you would think, think like, oh, when you post well, I have this many people. those who follow me like this is how many people will see it or whoever, you know a certain percentage that, as you would expect, is online every day, but as we all know, sometimes no one sees it and sometimes a completely humongous audience , you know, a contingent of people will see it.

See it. I'm curious to know how you publish something that is going to affect the algorithm and make it becomeviral and trip, but maybe it's even more complicated than that, to your point, the algorithm is making this decision around unpredictability to say this is perfect for the algorithm, but I'm not going to share it like I'm going to hold it back to purpose because in 10 days I'm going to let this person's post go crazy, yeah, and that's all on purpose. capturing that, like brain chemistry, to keep you engaged in that way, yeah, I mean, I can tell you that companies know what rewards program is going to really capture people's attention and their resources, whether it's attention or money, for example. with slot machines, until about 1980, no one really played them because they were boring, like people won maybe one in 20 times or one in 10 times, whatever, and then this guy came along in the '80s and basically digitized slot machines and this allowed you to do this method we're getting into gambling here, but I think it's important to call losses disguised as wins, so instead of just betting on a row of symbols where your odds are very high. win anything, it allowed people to bet on multiple rows, so if you think about a slot machine screen, there can be five, a 5 by five grid symbols, and you can bet on all kinds of lines with crazy shapes, so in a slot game. you could bet on 40 different lines, now this meant that the odds of, say, one or two lines winning something went up, but usually the win was less than what you bet, so you could bet a dollar, but in quotes , you will earn, let's say 50 cents on this now.

The human brain even though it doesn't see it as losing, it is still exciting and the Machine still indicates that as a victory, the bell still rings, you still see the money increase and that is exciting even though you have lost, so what this did is that it is allowed. so the win and loss schedule actually got better, so they became a lot less boring, so now let's say that in 45% of any slot machine game something good is going to happen, you might win less than what you bet , but you may win more, but it's all exciting.

I think that's really what technology has allowed companies to do. Furthermore, anyone who is a true gambling addict will tell you that the thrill is not in the prospect of winning, but in the perspective. of losing yeah the player I talked to told me you know betting isn't uh it's not when you learn when the reels have fallen or when the dice have fallen on the cards it's when they're rolling right it's when the dice are running through the table the dopamine of anticipation, yeah, yeah, what's really fascinating is that people who are legitimate problem gamblers, like gambling addicts, don't actually get that excited about big wins because they're not necessarily there to win. there just to run the process.

What happens when you have a big win is that your machine turns off and they have to come pay you in hand and that stops the playing process. They have to sit there for half an hour to complete. Tax forms do all these things that interrupt the real reason they are there. They are not there to make money. They are there just to sit in this gambling zone and just watch the money go slow and just run away. Wow, yes. that's intense, the other ripple effect of this is the idea of ​​almost losing, which is related to what you just shared, like winning 507 sense, winning in quotes when you put a dollar down is not really winning even though our brain thinks so. interprets differently, but There's also the thing about slot machines where they almost line up, but they don't, and that's kind of an added nuance to all of this, like building that thing where people think they're very close to each other. win, but really it's just a kind of predictable equation that spits that out from time to time to keep you involved, yeah, and it does when that happens, when you just say a symbol out of the win, people rush their next beta, it they make much faster and this.

It may seem strange, but you know, I give a handful of examples in the book where you see this all the time, like if I walk to an elevator and I press the number seven to go to the seventh floor and the button doesn't turn on, what do I do, I go well you immediately repeat that because you expected something to happen, it didn't and you will repeat it fast and loud, did you talk to BJ Fog on the correct writing in this book? No, he didn't feel it. like zero patience in all of this on some level and he's a super nice guy and very bright, but the class that he teaches at Stanford kind of shaped a lot of what we're seeing now and what you're talking about, yeah.

I mentioned his work in that particular class on the comfort crisis. I think it's in the chapter about some of the benefits of boredom and how we've programmed borderdom out of daily life. Now, another antidote to boredom is to go on adventures. In the scenarios that you do while writing these books, you call yourself a journalist, but you're really like an immersive adventure journalist, like you really embed yourself and the book starts with you embedding yourself in Iraq with this investigation of the drug trade there and This Drug of the who I had never heard of is called Capon, yes, so explain to him that it is something fascinating, like how you decided to go out and put yourself in danger and in such an intense way, yes, so I got interested. um addiction for this book because for me the real end of I can't moderate I can't get enough is addiction and understanding the roots of addiction because there are all these different ideas about the causes of addiction, you know and there.

There used to be this idea that you know an addict is a bad person, they're just making destructive personal decisions, and then at the other extreme, more recently, it's been that it's a brain disease, right? And I think after researching this chapter, I think it's me. I absolutely do not believe that an addict is a bad person. I also don't think brain disease is the right word to describe it, so to come up with this idea I traveled to Iraq because there is a drug, as you mentioned, called Capon, that is increasing. in the Middle East and what this drug is, you might think of it as analogous to methamphetamine, but Iraq is an interesting case study that kind of gets to the heart of my argument because there really wasn't any addiction there or drug use. drugs for a long time. time and that is largely due to government reasons because Saddam Hussein ruled with an iron fist, so what happens is that the United States invades the country and they expel Saddam Hussein, so effectively you have the right to war and when a war occurs war you end up having.

Many people have to live through that and have many traumas and after the fall of Syria it became a narco-state, so once the Syrian government fell, the leaders who are now took over the pharmaceutical plants and started to produce this drug. called Captagon and now it's their biggest export even though it's illegal and they started flooding the Middle East with it, so they shipped a ton to all these different Middle Eastern countries, but Iraq effectively received a flood of this drug. These three things that I think you need for Bloom addiction basically is that you have a population that suffers from psychic pain, whatever it is, they have problems, you have few other ways to manage that pain, those problems in Iraq, not that there are many places where a person can go to talk about their traumas and then three, you have a substance in Big Supply that can solve that problem at least in the short term, relieve that psychic pain, so I think when you have those three things you start to see that addiction really flourishes and that is what is happening in Iraq, it is not that different from the opioid crisis that penetrates a certain sector of the United States, yes, there are many examples throughout history, I mean one of which I The most interesting thing I thought about while reporting on the book is that, after the Civil War in the South, opioids were used during the Civil War to help combat the pain of wounds.

Pain from battlefield wounds and saw opioid use in the South after the Civil War. It increased among southern whites because they just lost the right, but it decreased significantly among southern blacks because they were now free and they saw the opportunity for this, like we were able to escape this life that we lived as slaves, right? And I think there's a lot of different case studies throughout history where you see addiction wax and wane depending on a person's mental state and whether they're able to deal with problems in different ways. How does this notion of scarcity inform your perspective on addiction specifically? substance addiction oh, that part was also very interesting to me, so this chapter, I mean, I have to say it was my favorite to write because it's obviously personal to me, right, and I went in thinking one thing and I came out thinking that kinds of things, but also a lot of other things, so when it comes to the cycle of scarcity, I think you see drug use, alcohol, fall into that cycle in the sense that you have the opportunity to improve your life by less in the short term, for me, no matter what my problem was, if I just had a drink, things are fine and that also comes with unpredictable rewards, so if you think about the unpredictability, rather, if you think about the drug use, people feel a lot of emotion. report on drug use comes from getting the drug are we going to be able to get it who do we get it where do we get it from how strong is it going to be are we going to get in trouble along the way right there there's so much There's a lot of unpredictability built into that and then also after drinking or using, the world opens up, it's going to be different, you don't know what's going to happen and then there's the repeatability, especially if someone is addicted once you've used. it's like okay, restart the process, we have to find drugs again and it just goes into that cycle of opportunities, unpredictable rewards, rapid repeatability over and over again, with alcohol there is less unpredictability around substance use and access, you can just go to the store and buy it, in fact it's quite predictable, you know exactly what you're going to get, this is a bit like Ripple in this, I think because I only think about my own experience, on one level I know exactly what's going What if I drink this, I know how it will make me feel and that is part of the charm because I feel very uncomfortable with how I feel right now, the unpredictability comes with the consequences of what is going to happen and this idea that anything can passing is part. of that addictive Loop like I drink a lot like something crazy is going to happen and that's exciting and it could be chaos and terrible, but it could also be a wild adventure that you can tell stories about for the rest of your life, but it's a roulette wheel because you could end up in a car accident or something terrible could happen or you could end up at this fabulous party meeting someone you never thought you'd meet, yeah, I mean, that was my experience, I think which of the What makes the addiction is so pernicious is that, in the case of substances, especially, you know that people use them for a good reason, first of all, it usually solves the problems, especially in the beginning, in the short term.

Yeah, I mean, when I started drinking, I didn't really deal with that many things. In fact, the repercussions benefited my life in many ways. I could have more interesting adventures when I was drinking. He was a more interesting person. I felt more comfortable around other people, but by continuing that behavior, especially while drinking. eventually I start to see long term problems, but the thing is the problem is the solution is the problem is the solution is the problem is a solution I have all this evidence from my past that says oh no, this has worked for you before So you move on doing it and you think: why doesn't it work anymore?

Well, maybe I just need to try again, maybe I need to drink more, maybe I need to do all these things right, then it's like the thing flips and it no longer becomes something that seems to do a lot of good things for you, but You can't, you just can't trust it to be the right evidence, like I just, you know, I mixed it with the wrong soda, I know. Every alcoholic's obsession with drinking like a gentleman, you know, is limitless, right, yes, and we will know how to exploit that to the ends of the Earth before we are willing to do the obvious, which is WEA, a little discomfort. knowing how to let go of that habit that we know is killing us, yeah while drinking you had a lot of fits and starts or yeah I mean I relapsed a lot before I finally got sober and ended up in a treatment center where I thought I was going to go for a couple of weeks and dry out and I ended up living there for 100 days and changed my life, yeah, um, but my sobriety hasn't been linear, it's nobody's, you know, it has its peaks and valleys and challenges and you know relapse is part of that story, yeah, and I think you know the shame and guilt that comes with that, like you know there's still a lot of emotional stuff around it that you know I'll spend my life.My whole life I've tried to unravel it and make sense of it, but I have tools on how to live today and my life is incredibly good as a result of being sober and making sobriety a priority in my life, the priority really, yes, yes, I agree. okay, I mean, I've definitely had hogs and valleys and sobriety and like I said, I tried to stop using all kinds of weird stuff and I also tried using White Knuckle as you know, maybe I'd go two months without drinking, but it's really just in the back of my head.

I go, the clock is counting down and it's hell as the clock counts down and then you know, for some reason I had to do it, I just had to act and make phone calls and tell people I can't fix this. Could you help me? I think that's what started it. Are they really accusing you of transferring some of your addicted energy to this adventure junkie? You know, the kind of lifestyle you have as an embedded journalist. How does this work? The accusations come from me, yes, I mean. I'm aware of that, I think that, uh, I mean, I'm still figuring this out, but certainly going to Iraq and putting yourself in danger with some pretty twisted people is exciting, you know, yeah, yeah, I mean, I think one of the reasons The reason I drink in the first place is because I just like to explore boundaries and have intense experiences and alcohol gave me long term problems and when I'm sober it's like I still have that as a part of me. and I found ways to deal with it that, you know, don't lead to me parking my car in someone's yard, you know, and yes, I'm aware that probably a lot of the trips I take to extreme places are for scratching. that pike, yes, but I do a lot of things to make sure it's as safe as possible by learning everything you've learned about cycles of scarcity and how powerful all these forces are in the world that are trying. to unbalance us and take advantage of our lizard brain.

How does that influence your perspective on living a balanced life? Life is good, you know, treat all these things in moderation, as if it's not asking you to be light, but to just come in with an awareness that's complicated for you. me, as if you knew that abstinence really is the only solution to prevention. I go down you know the rabbit hole that involves the worst part of my inclinations mhm, I mean in a way and I would be interested to see if you think this. I'm GL, my addiction is alcohol because I simply can't drink you.

I know, I think about what if it was food, well you can't just not eat well, it's a very black and white line, so I mean I definitely have a lot of empathy for people who find themselves addicted to behaviors that are almost necessary to live. and some of them are absolutely necessary to live, when I think about this cycle, I mean, I think number one is becoming aware of it and how it's built in, you say, oh, okay, when once you know how the machine works , maybe you can start using the machine a little differently.

The second is that I think when you look at the psychology of behavior, if you can change any of the three parts of the cycle that tends to reduce the behavior, if you can, you will know given the opportunity that it is. Well, what am I getting out of this? Can I find that in something else with unpredictable rewards? Can I change the rewards? Can I change what the rewards are like and then three? Can I slow this down? So, um, let's take eating, for example, something like food if you can slow down your pace of eating, which generally slows down the eating behavior, so even if you eat unprocessed foods, people tend to eat less because the speed is a lot. slower, with the opportunity, it's like I could.

I take out a food from the house that is my trigger food, that tends to help people with phones, for example, with rewards, a lot of the things that make phones rewarding or one of the main things is that all the colors , lights and stimulation are something like that. As simple as switching your phone to grayscale, it tends to reduce the behavior. There's a study that found that it reduced screen time by about 40 minutes a day because all of a sudden your phone becomes incredibly boring, which we learned from slot machines, people don't do that. They use boring stuff as much as they use hyper stimulating stuff, so I guess unpack those three things and everything is fine, how can I change or eliminate any of these things? tends to run and then the scarcity mark.

I give examples of everything I look at about excessive purchasing. from spending too much time on your phone since addiction and how that ended up affecting me to even the information we live in, we live in this world where the average person now sees more information in a single day than a person did 700 years ago. used to see in your whole life and you see people just get hooked on whatever app it is, it could be the New York Times app, it could be Twitter Twitter is big, especially when something happens, people are like, oh my gosh, oh .

My God, I'm waiting for the next hit of information, but also of status and influence, of course. I mean think about it from a social perspective. I think people get hooked on that too and trying to unpack that major Y and remove parts can be helpful, yes. I had Jud Brewer yesterday and you know him?, a psychiatrist neuroscientist who's about to publish a new book called The Hunger Habit and he's kind of like the scarcity brain, but only for food. Yes, and much of what he shares overlaps perfectly with his message. their kind of solution to the idea that diets don't work and that, on some level, most people have an unhealthy relationship with what they put in their mouths, that instead of approaching that from a traditional perspective of following a temporary diet to bring awareness and practices of presence and mindfulness in your eating, like what you just shared, can you just be, can you slow down? can you just be aware of what you are doing?

It seems very applicable to all these other aspects of life where these scarcity loops appear. from devices to online shopping to our Netflix consumption etc., if we could be really present, you read your book and say, okay, I understand, I can see that the Matrix is ​​now evident to me, I can see the mechanics behind all of this um. and even if I'm still surfing at least I'm starting to develop an understanding of why I'm doing it and maybe I can be a little more compassionate with myself and realize that it's not my weakness, it's just that this is really powerful and come on to slow it down a little and take an inventory around it, a compassionate inventory where you don't judge yourself or feel guilty, but rather simply be aware of your behavior and begin to map what those loops look like and, ultimately, when.

Play them wherever they take you. In terms of your emotional well-being, your mental well-being or your physical well-being, yes, totally, and I think people realize that a lot of things are a problem, so there are tools out there. There I think it can be useful for people, it's like AA is a tool, you know, there is also this application. That person reached out to me because they saw that I wrote something in my newsletter about grayscale and phones. this app helps you reduce your screen time blah blah blah and I rolled my eyes because it was like you want me to download an app so I can't use another app.

What I'm hearing is him saying yes, just trust me, so I ignore him. him and then I go, you know what I'm going to try and what this app does is choose the apps that you're having trouble moderating and choose how many times you want to open them a day and when you go. to open them there will be a pause and you will have to breathe for 3 seconds and then it says how much time you would like to spend on this app, so you have been forced to pause, you have a 3 second pause and it says how much time you really want to spend on this app and you go fine, 10 minutes and then you get your 10 minutes and then after 10 minutes you are done and it works.

I mean I was laughing because it blocks you, there's no override it's not like the panic button, you have to go back in the process. I mean, it really leans into the behavioral psychology fundamentals of just slowing things down, putting a pause, predetermining how long you really want to do this behavior that's addictive and, um, I. I think looking for tools can be useful for people, yes it is a shame that we have to have more and more tools, it is as if the solution to all applications is another application and we have to create all this artifice in our life just to come back to some kind of baseline about what it means to be human, yeah, I mean, one of the things that really made me think while I was writing this book is that I mentioned the pigeon psychologist MH, so what these experiments show is that he will take pigeons, they live in these, you know, kind of small cages, they are laboratory pigeons and he will put them in a cage that has the option of playing two different games, the first game is predictable, so they peck at a light and each In another pack they get a predictable amount of food each time and then they have the option to play another game that is more like a slot machine, so in this game about every five packs they get the correct food, so It could be the first sequence. be like the second package, they got the food, the next one could be the fourth package, they got some food, so it's a lot like a slot machine, the problem is that with the first game they end up with more food overall, so that there is this theory called the optimal foraging theory and it basically says that animals will do everything they can to put in the least amount of effort possible to get the most food possible, so the theory basically says that pigeons should play the first game, they shouldn't play the game. game, but what happens is that 97% of these pigeons choose the betting game.

Now what gets really interesting is he's going to put these pigeons in a very large cage that mimics how they live in the wild because they're usually in these sterile types. from small pigeon cages where they can't hang out with other pigeons, they don't live like they normally would in the wild, he will put them in this giant cage that imitates nature so that they have other pigeons around they have to work to earn their food, they can build little nests, they go up on cliffs, they just live how pigeons evolve to live basically and when he puts them back in the game, each pigeon chooses the smart game, the one that is predictable and gets them more.

MH food this goes back to this theory called optimal stimulation theory and it basically says that all animals, whether it's humans, pigeons, dogs, cats, we need a certain amount of stimulation in our life to be able to

thrive

and if we don't get it, let's go search so somewhere else and this guy tells me, you know, and when you think about humans today, it immediately goes from pigeons to humans because when you think about humans today, I think that's happening to a lot of us. Right? Our lives are like that. It's very different from humans who evolved to live in so many ways that we don't have to work for food, we're not outside as much, we don't do as much physical effort, we're not as connected to others, so we're very much like my pigeons. that are in their little sterilized cages and so we look for stimulation elsewhere we find it in phones we find it in drug and alcohol use we find it in excessive shopping we find it in we have All these different ways to find that stimulation, but yes you can find ways to insert simulation into your life that are positive, you'll know if it's ultra running, if it's for me or traveling, whatever, I think that will give you a long-term benefit.

That can be a pretty solid life hack, it seems very obvious, you know, but if left to our own devices, we won't do it because the attractions of these things completely ensnare us, we really have to make a conscious effort to create those guys. of experiences to combat as the force of these things that want us trapped in this loop that makes us feel alone and unhappy and gives us all these mental health disorders that we're dealing with and addictions and things like that, yeah, and it feels like if it were a losing battle because when the responsibility of going to war with these technological forces falls on the individual, you know you're bringing a knife to a gunfight, literally, do you feel like knowing everything you know now by diving deep into what what do you know? the Skinner box that is our existence these days do you think technology should be regulated in a certain way to put up barriers against engagement?

It's a very good question, here's how I'll answer. I think for teenagers I probably should. I think we should probably regulate certain apps for teenagers because the teenage brain is changing in such a way that it prioritizes being social,it overrates these things and teenagers, you know, say things to each other on these apps that are not good. I think that seems pretty reasonable now for the average person, it gets a little more complicated, you know, if you're an adult, I don't know, so for example, when you look at addiction rates, the vast majority of people You can have a drink. and they enjoy it and they do it with friends and it's great, the vast majority of people can sit at the slot machine and they put in their $20 and they say, oh, that was fun, you know, maybe they walk away with some money, maybe Maybe we don't and then the question is: when do we start regulating things that most people can handle without repercussions? and then how do we determine when the repercussions for most people most of the time have become too much and it starts to get really murky and I think it probably has to be on a case by case basis, but my inclination is that probably less regulation be better, for example, as with alcohol.

I mean, that almost killed me, but I also realize that for most people they're fine. and it improves your life in a way, at the same time, we do not allow people under 21 to drink and there are good reasons, for example, people who drink before the age of 15 have a high chance of becoming alcoholics if you wait until Being 21 years old, the chances drop below 10% and that is simply due to how the brain is changing and how people find comfort at that time in their life. Obviously, the regulation is problematic from a personal freedom perspective and I'm not convinced that the government is even equipped to handle this.

Not that I see it as a solution, but it seems to me that we should have more options instead of excluding ourselves. Choices when it comes to how we interact with technology. For example, instead of having to opt out of some algorithm, we should choose to opt in, since the default should be the timeline without all the algorithmic acceleration, bells and whistles that you already know, and if we want to have that experience, I can turn up the anti and check the box or whatever and do that, but it has to be an option to enter that instead of the other way around.

I mean, I can totally see that argument. I can definitely see that you know, I mean using you as a A case study like you got into Ultra Running and it totally changed your life so you managed to do this thing that gives you bigger rewards and I think that's a story that I want to say that It's accessible to anyone you know. You can do that and I think a lot of bad

habits

go away by accident, not necessarily on purpose, once you get into a good habit, you really get into it and you become captivated by it, and I don't think you necessarily know what.

It's going to be okay, it's like my neighbors are all trying to die on the hill, let's make Michael play pickle ball, he's going to love this and I don't have a chance in hell, um, but you know what I'm getting. I mean, it's like you have to try things that you have to try, if you're on the right side, you have to try a lot of things and something might happen and then all of a sudden you say, "Oh, this is amazing," and you find yourself. going down that and then all of a sudden. Suddenly you are no longer doing what you no longer wanted to do.

Bad habits disappear. They are displaced by the estimable acts you are doing in your own name. There is some truth to my wife being someone. Who is an example of that? She will simply like the bad habits to disappear when she focuses on the good habits. The addict in me is a little more complicated. You know, it's like he needs a little more than that. You know, those bad habits have stuck. power, for some reason they are a little more annoying and persistent, but I see your point and I think there is some truth in that, but I would also say that I am an example of someone who has created a career and has benefited from technological tools available. which creates a problematic relationship for me in terms of how I interact with them because my career on some level is driven by these things, so I can't be light and choose not to consume them as food on some level, as my career requires professional.

You know, use them and enjoy them on some level, but that gets really complicated because there's a difference between using platforms to create and using them to consume. Yeah, I mean, I think that's the big problem with technology, is you know. it accelerates and it becomes more and then it becomes a necessity and you can't necessarily escape it, it's like you have to start using it to live a normal modern life and I mean people have been dealing with that for a long time and it's absolutely complicated, but you know it's a fight worth trying to figure out what your personal approach will be.

There are two types of semi-existential threats that these things pose that you talk about and the first one, which is really more of a crisis of comfort. One thing, but I think it's applicable here is the death of boredom, like we've eliminated boredom from our lives, so talk a little bit about that and the kind of larger implications that you know of humanity no longer having any capacity. to reflect, yes, so I. I started thinking about boredom when I was in the Arctic for over a month, uh, because of the comfort crisis, because I didn't bring, you know, the cell phone didn't work.

I didn't bring books, magazines and that kind of stuff. We were there hunting caribou and it's a lot of sitting and waiting on a hill, you're waiting for the animals to pass by, they weren't passing by, so I met up with Bor again, because he didn't have all this stuff. Normally I would use my time if I was bored, you know, to solve our Bard and we did all this kind of crazy stuff, it's like we read our nutrition labels on our energy bars, like I could tell you all the details about a cliff bar in this In That time in my life we ​​read the labels on our jackets and stuff like that I came up with story ideas for the magazines I wrote for and I mean it really was a different use of how I would use my time than if I was bored then you have to ask Well, what is boredom in the first place and boredom is this evolutionary discomfort that basically tells us whatever you're doing with your time right now, the return on your time invested has been exhausted and that's why you need to go do something else now in the past, I think something else would be much more productive than it is today, so if you think about people who hunted in the past and you need food to survive if the animals don't get bored If you feel uncomfortable, you go , okay, we have to go do something else, let's pick potatoes, let's pick raspberries, let's do something so that we can have food and survive, uh, but now, when we feel that discomfort of boredom, we have that easy and painless escape. effort. from it in the form of a telephone in the form of a computer in the form of our television in the form of our radio whatever, so the average person today spends, I think, 13 hours and 20 minutes interacting with digital media, which is a crazy 13 hours and 20 minutes 13 hours and like two years ago it was like 12 right or 11 or something like that the curve shoots up into the sky yeah here it shoots up into the sky and um I mean think about that on the grand scale of humanity is like none of these things were in our lifetime, we had zero minutes like 100 years ago, zero minutes and now we have 13 hours and 20 minutes, which is a crazy change in how we spend our lives and our attention and our interactions with others and it's absolutely changed us and you hear a lot about less use of phones and all that and obviously I think that's very important, but I think the important thing is to think about how I can reinsert boredom into my life because boredom in reality comes with quite a few.

The good thing is that when you are bored you are forced to reflect, you turn inward for a while and that seems to be associated with less stress. You also tend to have good ideas, so there's some interesting research suggesting that boredom helps people emerge. with good ideas and it's also like you know there's a quote from William James that basically said that at the end of your life your life is the culmination of what you were aware of and if you think about that, it's like 13 hours, 13 hours a day. day. I don't think people look back on their life and say, man, I really should have increased those numbers by 13 hours, what was I doing?

It should have been 15, right or when someone passes away, no one will praise them by talking about what it is. They have an incredible diet, yes, exactly, I mean, totally, yes, I mean, boredom is the source of creativity and if we no longer allow ourselves space for that kind of reflection, what does that portend in terms of the future of humanity, specifically, of course, with what humans do? create, you know art and culture, but I think it's deeper than that, where good ideas come from and if you never allow yourself to develop that ability, everything becomes derivative and we live in some kind of strange Hall of Mirrors.

Yeah, I mean, if you're always in the media, your ideas come from others, so you're basically modifying something that someone else came up with, so I think having that time without that to just let things flow is really important, I mean, for anyone, it's not just when people think about creativity, they automatically think about the artist, they think about the writer, they think about whatever, but it's important for business, right? I mean, this is something that Steve Jobs has talked about, he talked about what boredom was. One of the real tools that he leveraged in creating the products that he created and thinking about the design and how these things would work was this extended uninterrupted time where he could lean into boredom and let his mind go wherever it wanted.

It had to go and I think we are losing it to some extent. I think that's existential in many ways. Yes, the other kind of semi-existential threat revolves around this idea of ​​human insatiability and our propensity for addition. as a way to solve problems instead of subtracting, so let's talk a little about that. I think it's super interesting. Yeah, I'll tell you the story of the GU guy who discovered this. There is a researcher. I think it's a UVA name. Lighty Clots. and he's one of the best engineers in the country right now, he's received money from all these different amazing organizations, like this list of research that he's done on engineering is just incredible, so one day he's sitting with his son, whose name en Ezra and Ezra en They are 3 years old and they are playing with Legos and what they are doing is building a bridge, so they got these two pillars for the bridge and now they need to put a span that connects the two pillars and when are they going to do that, What they find is that one pillar is taller than the other, so you have this span of bridge that is at this crooked angle, so Mr.

PhD, an engineering professor, has a solution, and he turns around and starts to rummage. through the Lego box to find Lego so he can raise the span and solve the problem and when he turns around he realizes that his son has solved the problem, he simply removed the Legos from the highest pillar, so this child solves the problem with one, but he solves two. do it in a more efficient way because now you're using less Legos overall, they have more resources and it's a simpler solution, so you realize I didn't even think about subtracting and here I am, this crazy engineer, so what he does is to take this. exact bridge and starts taking it to all his UVA colleagues and all his UVA students, all with engineering backgrounds, and he puts it on the desk and says, hey, fix this bridge, you know it's out of place every time. one of them adds Legos to it, so his tendency is to add to solve the problem and once he has so many examples of that, everything goes well, there is something here that we have to study, so he sets up all these different studies where he basically does tasks. participants with solving a series of problems in each of the problems, the best most efficient answer is to eliminate to subtract from the problem, so, for example, this one is a little peculiar.

It had a mini golf hole and it had too many. cheats and things like that, there are too many obstacles and you asked them to improve it, obviously the answer is that we have to remove some things because there is too much going on, each person added things and there are a lot of different examples. What he has shown with that is that, in a nutshell, we have evolved to do advertising correctly. When we see a problem, our default is to add to solve it and immediately add more resources to do more things to solve it.

I don't even think about subtraction and that's a big problem, right, it's like the answer could be addition but it could also be subtract something, but if we're not thinking about this whole other range of subtraction options, that becomes a problem and so on once. I talk to this guy and you're like, oh yeah, I mean, I feel like I see that in myself, but then I start looking at just you, just a little list of stats and there's so many ways.different ones in which we have added, added and added. to society in our lives since the Industrial Revolution, I mean, think about all the things that we own, when you look at the regulations, they're like an incredible number of times longer than they used to be.

There's a big study that found that incoming college presidents were like 10 times more likely to add new programs than to eliminate programs that weren't working, and that goes on and on and on, and I think just being aware of that is Well, my tendency will be to try. and add things to buy something to solve this problem, um, do more work to do XYZ. I think questioning that can be a way to be more efficient in solving personal and business problems and all these different areas of life, it's so counterintuitive, even though it's all right. in our society it is more oriented towards everything you want is on the other side of buying more looking more moving more consuming more every problem can be solved through more Innovation like just look you know, I don't know like our energy consumption our food Consumption, like all of our macrosystems, is operating in an unsustainable way, the solution really is to slow down and consume less correctly, but we intend to solve this through some further innovation, whether it be going to the moon or some new technology. that we can.

They just know that assuming that's coming will solve this problem so we can continue to be additive. Yes, before reading this study a few years ago, this is embarrassing and damning. I realize that I have too many things in my house. It has that moment at some point and then what do I do? I buy a book on how to minimize and the book tells me to buy very specific bags to keep my things in order because everything has to look so I have to go. buy, I have to go buy all this stuff so I can have less and I think I have this moment and I'm like, yeah, this looks amazing on Instagram, but I don't think we're achieving this idea of ​​minimalism like We think we have less because I just buy a bunch of stuff so I can eliminate some but then put my other stuff away.

You know, it's just the sensitivity is right, but you tell the story of this nomadic woman, right, oh. Yeah, you have some interesting thoughts on minimalism in general, yeah, Laura Zera, the toughest human being who ever lived, the coolest human being who ever lived, she's 30 years old, and when she was in college, she went to a really good school on the east coast. but he dropped out when he was a senior because he had always wanted to spend time outdoors, like he lived off the grid, and he had basically done it all through college like he didn't even live in the college dorm at the time. who attended. and she lived in the woods and basically built a yurt and she has this moment during school when she realizes that the reason I'm here at university is so I can follow this story that I need to understand. a good job so I can have a lot of money so I can do whatever she wants on my two weeks off or whatever and she realizes, she waits a minute if I just want to go out in the woods. and she survives like I don't think she needs that much money, so she quits school and just starts traveling the world.

He has a backpack like a sleeping bag, a tarp like a saucepan, like the very basic rudimentary things and he just travels the world for years and goes out in the desert for 30, 60, 90 days at a time, so I end up going out in the desert with she.in Montana we weren't even there that long, but it was really fascinating because she has really combined what she needs to live a life that she loves, she has almost nothing, everything fits in this backpack and she is the most interesting. She's a happy, fascinating person I've met and she talks a lot about how she's had experiences where having less has actually led to much more interesting experiences in life, so a couple of examples she gave me is that she used to hitchhike. a ton and she's like I had money and I would have taken the flight I would have gotten on the flight I would have put on headphones like everyone else but instead I like hitchhiking and I get in the car with people I don't know and how we became best friends for this eight hour trip or whatever and as always I'm going to remember those conversations that I had, that she also talked about, so for a while she was um, hung out with some people who were very, very

rich

, just say that and um, they would take her on these hunting trips that were very expensive and these, you know, other different trips, and she said it was fascinating because she explains it like what do you call it.

I'm trying to remember the real language. Happy Meal expensive, so she said it's like all

rich

people get the same thing, the goal is to eliminate any uncertainty and unpredictability, so you get this list of experiences that you go through and she's like, don't get me wrong, it was very nice and I understand why people do that when they are short on time. I totally get it, but I've had much more interesting experiences when I didn't have a lot of money, when I had to make things up as I went along, when everything was really an adventure.

I had no idea what was coming next and that's really the reward of the restrictions. of mhm are a kind of lever for creative experiences, yes, you know, not being able to do what you want, those limitations drive creative solutions and adventures. Yeah, and one thing that's really interesting about her is that this idea of ​​the scarcity cycle I think you can use it for things that are really beneficial to you, so what she does with her time when she's in the wild is she lets to hunt So for people who aren't familiar with it, it's basically just walking through nature looking for detached antlers, you know, animal skulls that have fallen off and she's totally turned it into a game and that's 100% of scarcity.

Loop, yes, like us. I had a chance to find this thing that I think is really cool, but I don't know where it will be. I don't know how big it will be. I don't know what I'm going to find and I just repeat that all day and she gets so obsessed with this search and it just allows her to explore the mountains, go to interesting places and, you know, I'm not suggesting that everyone go shed hunting, but Yes, I think there are many things. ways you can use this Loop to push yourself to do good things, for example, most activities in nature have it, for example bird watching, right, you don't know what you're going to see, you might see something really weird , you might see something you see. every day you repeated, I think it's in things like foraging, like a lot of people have gotten into mushroom foraging recently, it's in that, but I also think that even you know about outdoor sports where your times are changing the landscape. the one you're running for.

You're going to change like you're chasing trying to get better. I mean, ultimately, it's like a game. I think finding ways to get looped in a way that improves your life is important. The interesting thing is how humans will create a scarcity. Loop when there is one like her around without even being aware of the scarcity. Loop is she totally makes one, which is just proof positive that this kind of operating system is built into our kind of innate operating system, yeah, so are you going to create a fun, adventurous, outdoor, you know , expansive scarcity, loop for yourself or are you going to default to the scarcity loops that are being imposed on you, yes, that's really the question you're asking mhm and its relationship to what you own is also interesting so I'm writing to you. of coming out with the rule of thinking in a team, not in things, so if you think in a team, it is an element that you are using for the purpose of achieving some kind of higher purpose, right, it is a tool that you are using in some way in your life that is not something for the sake of it and I think it's a good idea to avoid buying things that are just for the sake of it or for some other reason, because there are many reasons why humans buy.

For example, the state of belonging also bores them, people buy things when they are bored and it is much easier to buy things now when you are bored than it was 15 years ago because now you get ads through your iPhone. I don't have to go to the store, so I think using it can be useful for pairing purchases. Yeah, I think two insights from what you just shared are: the first is our inclination to devalue what is probably our most precious asset, which is Our time is right, so this person who made this conscious decision to live this minimalist nomadic lifestyle has a gigantic wealth in how you spend your time and that kind of ability is something that you know a billionaire could have motivated the billionaire to start his business.

I want to have generosity to begin with so I can live the life I want to live, but each step along that ladder simply creates a more gilded prison where free time becomes even harder to access, it's like that parable of the fisherman. Well, go fishing, you should hire some people and then you can catch more fish, and why would I do that? And blah, blah, blah, until you know well that if you had all this wealth, then you could know how to do whatever you want. I want the whole afternoon, which is what the fisherman already has before even starting and for some reason we fight with that right, like I hear this woman's story and as incredible as it may seem or my friend Light Watkins, who came to the program and showed me everything is in his backpack and that's all he owns and he's one of the coolest, happiest people I know, I'm like yeah, but I'm really going to do that, you know what I mean, academically, yeah , I get it, yes, you do.

Your point proven, I get it and then I reflect on the extent to which I am modifying my own behavior every day and I realize the disconnect between those two things. Yes, I think the question is what lessons can we learn from these people. and I think from Laura I learned to think in terms of the angle of the gear nuts, like what is this item actually like and what am I using it for, what is the usefulness, what is the usefulness and can I find something else in my house that can serve. the same purpose because one of the things she talked about is that it was always more fun for her when she could MacGyver and solve a problem with what she already had and she got a lot of rewards from that and actually there are some interesting things. research showing that when resource constraints are placed on teams, they actually manage to accomplish more and find more creative ways to solve the resource because, going back to our propensity to add, if we have a ton of money, we just say, oh yes, how to hire.

Someone to do that or do it with this right, but if you don't have it, you have to be really agile. Then you mentioned that I spoke to Steven Bartlett and he talked about it with his team when they least had it. amount of money they came up with their best ideas because they say we have 10 dollars and we have to figure this out for sure or movie directors will talk about this all the time, they don't have enough money or they don't have enough Days to get the shots they They want and are forced to figure things out in the moment and those limitations end up driving greater creative choices that actually make the final product better in a different way than they had anticipated or could have imagined. if they had all the resources available to do it the way they wanted in their brain, yes, yes, totally, if anyone is listening to this and is starting to think about how scarcity loops operate in their own life, like what is the process like, how do you advise people to develop a little more awareness?

You know, if they want to do an inventory. Let's see how they are kidnapping me. What is the parasite in my ant brain? commandeering me and making me do things that I'm not aware of and that, you know, I even made the decision to do. Yes, one thing I talk about in the book is that I think when it comes to improving your life, a lot of times we want to add new good habits, like we just accumulate new good habits, when a lot of times what will move your life further it's solving a bad one, like if you can solve your worst problems, the world can open up and I mean I don't know if you relate to this, but I definitely relate to it, like when I suddenly stopped drinking, oh, now, like that's what that was really holding me back and I had tried doing all these other things and it just never got me anywhere because I was still on the rocks with my drinking, so I think if you can list the habits that you are aware are bad and you want to change and then you go through a list of well, how does this fall into the scarcity cycle?

And I think most of them do, and then you identify, what parts of the cycle can I change?, which we talked about before. I think that's the awareness of it. Realize that you know that falling into the loop kept humans alive for millions of years, so if you are doing these behaviors it is not necessarily your fault, but it is your problem to solve. I think it can be powerful justrealize how the machinery works and then Checking and taking a good look, can I change any of these three parts and then ask the most important question?

Why am I doing this in the first place? Why am I doing this in the first place? Getting to the heart of the matter, which is difficult and takes time, but ultimately I think it leads to better results in the long run mhm, yeah, why am I doing this to begin with? It makes that arrow point straight in, you know you're going to You have to do a little digging to get to the depths, you know, answer a question like that, but when you think about our propensity for insatiability and additive solutions and you adopt a macro view of what's happening with humanity and the world and I mean, are you optimistic about our future?

Are we going to solve this? You know, getting to a healthier place with the way we live together. This is a good question. What does the world look like in 50? years 100 years this is a good question. I can tell you that as we get more and more technology, technology will become more and more precise in making money and how you make money today is generally by grabbing attention, so I think that Arrow will continue to become sharper now. I think it's possible that maybe people will reject all of this. I mean, I don't know. If you look at the vast scope of time with technology, it's like the more technology you add, the more limitations you have.

Put human beings, that's the story, I mean, and once you get into the system, it's hard to escape from it because you start to trust it to do something, so just think about something as simple as us. invent a car, that's a really cool thing, right, this is cool, but now we have too many cars, so now we need to build roads. Well, the city has to be designed this way. Well now we have to have a lot of rules about cars you must have airbags you must have seat belts you must have this you can only turn right when there is a green light all these things are fine well now we have built our cities of So if you don't have a car, well, you're screwed, you can't get from point A to point B and that's a very common example, but it applies to so many things where it's like once you adopt technology, suddenly we need there are rules around it and then the rules start limiting us and then suddenly if you don't have the technology you can't function well in society so it's almost like we become slaves to these things, which which is probably the most depressing thing I have ever said in my life, but I want to say that we are more than slaves to them to refer to that analogy that you talk about about the fungal parasite in the brain of the ant that we are now consciously or not.

Through our micro behaviors and macro behaviors every day, every day, inform and give rise to a new technological way of life, like all data and the way we interact with technology, is contributing to this massive set of data that quickly becomes known faster than I think we realize that it takes us into this world of artificial intelligence and a lot of questions about what that means and what that looks like when we talk about regulations or security barriers and the advances that those perhaps create in terms of personal freedom, like our personal freedom. It's actually contributing to our own enslavement, yeah, you know, the more we redouble our freedom to do whatever we want with these devices, the faster we'll be giving birth to something that has more and more control over our lives, MH, which It is an increase. like we're backed into this weird corner with all this, yeah, there's a guy who really started public relations and advertising, one of the key players in that industry, since I think the late 19th century, his name is Claude Hopkins , so it builds upIn this industry, he basically built Bissell vacuum cleaners into what they are today and he's a fascinating guy because he was going into the clergy and at that time advertising was seen as a very dirty thing that didn't advertise well, it was like If socially outside he is not good, he starts going through the clergy and decides that it is not for him, but he dedicates himself to advertising, which is a really interesting way because you go from selling religion to selling products correctly, so he uses many techniques you learned. there to take on clients and build all these big brands that are still today from the clergy who learned at wow yeah at Divinity School or something so he built Bissell vacuum cleaners he's the guy that started the free sample model that was your idea, genius, um.

Advertiser and at the end of his life he saw this machine that had arrived just during his life of advertising and we are talking from the end of the 19th century to the 20s or 30s, whatever, that is why he writes this memoir about his life and just says: You know, I think people who are happier generally live closer to nature and are more disconnected from this kind of machine that we've created and more connected to other people, so I think that's probably a lesson there. and you think about where we are now. I mean, if this guy saw it today, it would be interesting to see his opinion.

Yeah, I mean, it seems like the answer always points in that direction, whether it's the nomadic woman. you know, living minimally or this tribe you're talking about, the Sani, that's how you say it, yeah, chman or you look at the blue zones like pockets of the world that are becoming rarer and rarer where humanity lives more in conjunction with just the natural rhythms of the planet you know these people tend to live longer they're happier they don't suffer from all these chronic lifestyle ailments they don't have mental health disorders they're not, you know, they're being captured by technology and yet, I know we just go our way and make those pockets smaller and weirder and weirder and harder and harder for you to, you know, kind of access for ourselves, yeah, I mean, I think we probably There's a pretty strong correlation between the number of hours someone spends. online and the likelihood that they are not as happy as they would like to be we are in an epidemic of loneliness.

I had the Surgeon General here. This is like everything, do you know how we got into this hyper-connected world where we are more alone than to the point of you know, higher rates of depression and suicide, etc., this is catastrophic and that's why I'm optimistic because I believe in humanity and I believe in the goodness of human beings, but when you kind of look outward at the way that you have, you know, through all these things that are happening, it's hard, it's hard to stay connected to the hope, yeah, well, it's interesting, it's almost like there's a sweet spot of progress, so I mean, when you think about people who are alone.

I mean, part of the reason we have more people alone is because we just have more money, like grandma doesn't have to live with the family anymore. Grandma has enough money to be able to have her own little house a few miles away, but that also means Grandma spends a lot of time alone and the chances of her being lonely probably increase, so as we get more resources, we start to Disconnect more, we start not having to move as much as if there was probably something sweet. middle ground I have everything I need covered, but I don't have as much that I've designed, like I spend more time being forced to spend time with my family and the people I love, but the community I don't love.

I have a million different hyper-processed food options that I might have to know about, walk around some places at some point and there's probably a sweet spot, who the hell knows where, that's not me, so yeah, what changes have you made? done? I mean, the ones you talked about. Grayscale and the type of apps you know may restrict your access to these loops of technological scarcity, but of all the work and all the people you've talked to, what have been the material impacts on your type of life? daily? Yes, good. I mean, I will say that reporting on the Comfort crisis definitely made me feel very grateful for the world we live in.

I mean, as much as we spend some time talking about how things are terrible in many ways. I think a lot of the problems that we face today are good problems in the grand scheme of time and space, you know, I mean taking the question of our relationship with food, it's like I'd rather have to deal with not eating at all. excess instead of saying I don't know where. my next meal comes from what it was all along and that's just one example so I'm definitely a lot more grateful in terms of practices. I mean, it's kind of like what I just said, where you spend more time outdoors. more time with the people we love, using the Internet as a tool to achieve a goal and realizing that it can easily absorb us through other means and that is difficult because most people have to be online because of their work, but I think that the more time you spend online um for most people most of the time is probably not a good thing MH, I mean something I write about in comfort crisis 2 is uh rucking.

I do it a lot for my physical practice, that's really the foundation of supporting weight over distance. I think humans are uniquely adapted to carrying weight over a distance, it's really good for our bone density, it helps preserve muscle, it works our strength, but it's also an incredible form of cardio and we're the only animal that can do it, which it's nice. Co we're the best at that yeah we sure are the best at that persistent hunting yeah yeah you run over the animal and then you have to carry it back to camp mhm and then just the act of collecting too I mean that's that. carry and it also gets me outside, so I just put some weight on my back and worry and um, I don't know, have empathy too like you mentioned before, like reporting, especially the chapter on addiction, when I really realized that a addict is someone who is doing something that has always benefited their life up until now and that they just can't see and I've been there too, it's like, oh, that gives you a lot more empathy because if you have all these examples of how this something makes you feel better. has helped in the past, why the hell wouldn't you?

It's a very rational example and by the way, using a substance if you have a substance abuse problem will solve your problem in the short term and therefore that's the way it is. It is a rational thing to use at least in the short term, it is important to recognize that the reason addicts become addicted is because it works, yes, until it stops working properly, but to deny that there is any benefit that this person is getting from it . I think it's not productive in the conversation about understanding grief, yes, and asking the same question for many bad habits can be helpful, it's like why, what's the benefit here, sure because everyone is solving some need or serving someone doing something. for you or you wouldn't be doing it exactly so I understand okay what is that doing for me or why did I start doing that okay to start with what happens right before mhm what happened right before let me do that you know I like solutions?

What you shared, I mean, I think you can feel a sense of helplessness if you look at all of this and there are things that we have agency in and there are things that we can do that improve our lives and It's not that hard, it's like getting outside, watching your friends bring challenges into your life like you know not going to the Arctic Circle is cool but you don't have to do it right, that's an extreme example that kind of reset your functioning. system, but I think that's all you know, everyone has some way of bringing a little type of adventure into their lives that will be healing for many of us.

I mean, I think it's possible for anyone. I received this amazing email a couple ago. Years ago, in the comfort crisis, I talked about this Mogi idea, which is this idea that was created by this guy whose name is Dr. Marcus Elliott, but anyway the idea is to go out and do something really difficult once a year. year and learn that you learn something about your advantages and your potential, so I received this email, the subject is misogi and it's from uh Janet. I forgot her last name and I'm just saying hi Michael, my name is Janet, I'm 79 years old, I'm going to do Mogi.

It'll make it hard and I won't die Signed Janet, so I say, damn Janet, if you can do it. Did you hear from her? Did she inform me? I didn't hear from her. Oh, she's fine, Janet, yes you. I'm listening, yes, Janet, I want to follow Michel, waiting for a follow-up check. I think we are people much more capable of change than we might think. Will it be easy in the short term? No, but once you start progressing, the progress is compiled. and you look back and say oh wow, that's a big difference and anything is possible.

I believe in that and I think you know anyone who has spent time in recovery has witnessed many lives transformed in positive ways so I believe in the human ability to change. and adapt and I think your work is really important in this, soThank you for coming and sharing with me today. Well, in the same way, what are you working on now? Can you talk about that? I'll probably do a third book. I mean a lot of what I do now is I have a sub stack that's uh 2%, it's on tww pct.com and I write about the things I write about my book in real time.

You know, I realized that by just doing books I had this kind of three years. there's a delay and I couldn't talk about things in real time as they came in and even go a little off topic from time to time, so the newsletter allows me to do that and eventually I'll write a third book, but yeah, we're doing it. to postpone because it's a preview, okay, man. Come back and talk to me again when you have something else to share. I appreciate it man, this was great, thanks, yeah. I would love to appreciate it very much, thank you Michael, peace.

Yes, that's all for today, thanks for listening. I really hope you enjoyed the conversation to learn more about today's guest, including links and resources related to everything discussed today. Visit the episode page on Rich roll.com, where you can also find the full podcast archive. As podcast merchandising, my Finding Ultra books express the change in the form of plant energy, as well as the plant energy meal planner in meals. ritual.com, if you want to support the podcast, the easiest and most impactful thing you can do is subscribe to the show on Apple Podcasts on Spotify and YouTube and leave a review or comment supporting the sponsors who support the show.

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