The Art of Manliness - Break Your Bad Habits by Escaping the Scarcity Loop

00:00:00.000 Brett McKay here, and welcome to another edition of the Art of Manliness podcast.

00:00:11.500 Everyone has some bad habits, and they nearly always involve doing something too much.

00:00:15.940 Eating too much, drinking too much, buying too much, looking at your phone too much.

00:00:20.920 Why do we have such a propensity for overdoing it?

00:00:23.580 My guest says it's all thanks to a scarcity loop that we're hardwired to follow.

00:00:27.140 Once you understand how this loop works, you can start taking action to resist the compulsive cravings that sabotage your life.

00:00:34.180 Michael Easter is the author of Scarcity Brain.

00:00:36.420 Fix your craving mindset and rewire your habits to thrive with enough.

00:00:40.300 Today on the show, Michael impacts the three parts of the scarcity loop, and how they've been amplified in the modern day.

00:00:45.460 We talk about the slot machine lab that corporations use to hack your brain,

00:00:48.920 why your main problem may be that you're understimulated rather than overstimulated,

00:00:52.920 why addiction may be better thought of as a symptom rather than a disease,

00:00:56.020 how the quantification and gamification of life can negatively impact your experience of it,

00:01:00.820 and how ultimately, the fix for resisting your bad habits is having something better to do

00:01:04.980 than chase the cheap, unsatisfying hits of pleasure our culture so readily offers.

00:01:09.420 After the show's over, check out our show notes at awim.is slash scarcity brain.

00:01:13.020 All right, Michael Easter, welcome back to the show.

00:01:26.980 Hey, thanks for having me back. I appreciate it.

00:01:29.160 So we had you on last time to talk about your book, The Comfort Crisis.

00:01:32.460 That's episode number 708 for those who haven't listened to it.

00:01:36.440 I highly recommend you go check it out.

00:01:38.000 You got a new book out called Scarcity Brain, Fix Your Craving Mindset and Rewrite Your Habits

00:01:43.700 to Thrive with Enough.

00:01:44.980 Now, I read a lot of books for what I do, my business.

00:01:48.000 It's one of the best books I've read this year, and I'm looking forward to digging into it.

00:01:52.720 So let's start off with this idea of scarcity brain.

00:01:54.860 What is the scarcity brain?

00:01:57.320 Well, first of all, thank you for having me back,

00:02:00.000 and thank you for the kind words about the book.

00:02:01.600 I'm glad you enjoyed it.

00:02:02.860 To answer your question, everyone knows that everything is fine in moderation, right?

00:02:08.000 But the question is, why are we so bad at moderating?

00:02:12.020 It's like, why can't people seem to get enough of everything from food to stuff to time on social

00:02:18.120 media, all these different behaviors that we do to excess and want to stop, but can't seem to.

00:02:23.740 So scarcity brain is really that feeling we don't have enough and this tendency we have

00:02:27.580 to sort of overdo things in our life.

00:02:30.220 And I think where that comes from, it sort of tracks back to evolution because for all

00:02:37.400 of time, trying to over-accumulate, overdo things, getting more food, more stuff, more

00:02:44.660 status over people, that gave you a leg up survival-wise.

00:02:48.720 But in today's world, we now have an abundance of all those things, and I think that you start

00:02:52.680 to see it backfire in a lot of ways.

00:02:54.900 Gotcha.

00:02:55.820 So I mean, what are some areas where you see the scarcity of your brain contribute to

00:02:59.800 problems in modern life?

00:03:02.020 Sure.

00:03:02.500 Well, I think food is a really easy to see one.

00:03:06.840 We throw out about a third of the food that we produce in America.

00:03:11.300 You know, 75% of the country is either overweight or obese, and we're not alone.

00:03:16.640 I think more than half of countries now have an obesity rate of at least 20%.

00:03:20.920 So for all of time, food was scarce, and now, I mean, it's literally on every corner and

00:03:25.720 hyper-processed and delicious possessions.

00:03:28.800 So the average American used to own something like a few outfits and some basic tools and

00:03:33.940 furniture that was passed down generation to generation.

00:03:36.720 Now the average home has 10,000 items, and that is linked to debt, to general life stress,

00:03:46.820 just being around all the clutter that we're in.

00:03:48.940 And it seems to be linked to life stress, and not to mention, it's a lot of wasted resources

00:03:53.140 and even information.

00:03:55.000 So the average person today, and this was a crazy stat that I came upon in researching

00:03:59.420 this book, the average person today takes in more information in one day than a person

00:04:04.340 700 years ago would have taken in in their entire life, which is wild to me.

00:04:10.820 And I think that in the sea of information we live in, it's not always improving our understanding

00:04:17.160 of the world, right?

00:04:17.940 I mean, you can Google any, any silly question that pops into your brain.

00:04:21.980 There's obviously a big problem with misinformation online, and also how we get information has

00:04:27.400 really changed.

00:04:28.140 We used to have to go there in person in the present moment, maybe often talk to another

00:04:32.840 human to know something.

00:04:34.600 And now this world of information that may be good or bad is at our fingertips instantly.

00:04:39.720 Also influence and status.

00:04:41.240 So that's a big thing that we evolved to crave as humans.

00:04:44.420 And in the past, we could only influence so many people.

00:04:47.300 You know, we seem to have evolved in these bands of people that were maybe 150 people

00:04:52.360 most.

00:04:53.300 But now we have this rise of hyperconnected societies and social media where you can literally

00:05:00.880 put a post on the internet that influences millions of people and promote your status.

00:05:06.140 And it all just goes out instantly.

00:05:08.300 And then that status can then get quantified, right?

00:05:10.740 It gets quantified and sort of gamified and likes and retweets and follows and all that

00:05:16.000 sort of stuff.

00:05:16.940 And even just sheer stimulation.

00:05:19.540 You know, the average person today is taking in 11 to 13 hours of digital media every single

00:05:24.360 day.

00:05:24.940 That's all new in the last hundred years.

00:05:26.940 Like we've never been this hyper stimulated by media ever.

00:05:30.940 And I think you see that leading to a lot of issues with mental health and burnout.

00:05:36.000 And yeah, I mean, this is just one of those things that's basically an evolutionary mismatch

00:05:41.820 where humans are in these environments where everything we needed to survive was scarce.

00:05:46.760 And now it's abundant.

00:05:47.840 Yet we still have these old brains going, you need more of that status.

00:05:51.760 Yeah.

00:05:52.060 Get that information.

00:05:53.200 Oh, you got to figure that out.

00:05:54.420 Food.

00:05:54.760 Yeah.

00:05:54.920 Have another bite.

00:05:55.700 Right.

00:05:56.940 Right.

00:05:57.200 So yes, the scarcity brain is making us fat, going into debt, buying stuff, just getting

00:06:03.000 sucked into social media feeds and all that stuff.

00:06:07.580 Those are some things that the scarcity brain that anyone can experience.

00:06:10.320 But you also talk about the extreme form of scarcity brain is addiction, addiction to

00:06:14.680 alcohol and drugs.

00:06:16.120 And you talk about this in your book and then in your previous book that you experience the

00:06:20.760 pitfalls of the scarcity brain when it comes to addiction.

00:06:24.640 Yeah, totally.

00:06:25.560 So I am a person who has been sober for about a decade now, and I can absolutely tell you

00:06:33.060 when you look at addiction, it very much is this constant craving, this wanting more

00:06:37.560 of this substance that is going to improve your life in the short term, but lead to long

00:06:42.940 term problems.

00:06:44.240 And I think that that same story holds for a lot of the bad habits that people have.

00:06:49.400 So I've, you know, I've been writing about health and wellness and psychology for most

00:06:55.640 of my career.

00:06:56.180 And I'm, uh, I started in magazine world and now I'm a professor at a university and I've

00:07:01.460 always been most interested in bad habits.

00:07:05.780 It's like everyone wants to, you know, give gas to good new habits, but if you still have

00:07:10.440 your worst habits, you still have your foot on the brake.

00:07:12.940 It's the things that we do that really drag us down that keep us from going anywhere.

00:07:17.560 Like for me, I could do all the exercise and eating right and all these great things I

00:07:22.400 needed to, but until I stopped drinking and got sober, I wasn't really going anywhere.

00:07:26.900 Right.

00:07:27.320 It was having to fix that really bad habit of repeat consumption of this thing that was

00:07:32.120 bringing me down that allowed me to really improve my life.

00:07:35.660 And I think that everyone has to a certain extent, probably something in their life, a

00:07:39.920 handful of bad habits that are really holding them back.

00:07:42.160 And so part of what I want to do with this book is help people identify those, understand

00:07:47.340 why you fall into those bad habits in the first place, and then start to think about,

00:07:51.740 okay, well, why do I have those?

00:07:53.600 And then how do I get out of that?

00:07:56.060 So something you write about in the book and you take this thread all throughout the book

00:08:00.400 is that one of the things that, or the thing that is driving our scarcity brain is what

00:08:05.120 you call the scarcity loop.

00:08:06.780 So what is the scarcity loop and what did you learn about the scarcity loop by visiting

00:08:11.020 a casino research and development facility in Las Vegas?

00:08:14.920 Yeah.

00:08:15.400 So I told you I'm interested in bad habits and I live in Las Vegas, which just happens

00:08:20.220 to be the best town of person who's interested in bad habits could ever live in, right?

00:08:25.640 This town is built on, it's built on excess and people coming into town to just go crazy

00:08:31.480 for a while and then leave.

00:08:33.440 So you see a lot of strange things when you live here, but the strangest thing about this

00:08:38.860 town to me has always been the slot machines because these things are everywhere.

00:08:44.040 They're obviously all over the casinos, but they're in our gas stations, they're in our

00:08:49.080 grocery stores, they're in airports, they're in restaurants, they're in bars, you name it.

00:08:53.500 And these things are not sitting empty.

00:08:55.720 People will play slot machines around the clock.

00:08:58.660 Like I'll be getting groceries at 7am on a Tuesday and someone will be letting their

00:09:03.060 frozen food spoil because they got sucked into this slot machine, right?

00:09:06.660 And this is insane to me because everyone knows the house always wins, right?

00:09:13.280 Yet people play and play and play.

00:09:15.460 And I would later find out that we spend more on slot machines than we do on music, movies,

00:09:22.180 and books combined.

00:09:23.280 And it's like, well, why the heck is that?

00:09:26.720 Yeah.

00:09:27.340 And another interesting point you made in the book when you're talking to these guys in

00:09:31.660 the gambling industry, 30 years ago, 40 years ago, slot machines weren't the main event

00:09:37.540 at casinos.

00:09:38.500 Most of the revenue came from the table games.

00:09:41.540 It was all table game revenue.

00:09:43.180 And then what ended up happening is that this guy whose name is Cy Red comes along and he's

00:09:49.180 like this old school.

00:09:50.160 I mean, just picture like your stereotypical old school Vegas guy in like a maroon polyester

00:09:54.460 suit, big cowboy hat, you know, the bolo tie, just a really fascinating cat.

00:09:59.740 And he is effectively able to apply this idea called the scarcity that I call the scarcity

00:10:06.320 loop to slot machines.

00:10:08.120 And the way that I learned about this, it wasn't necessarily from him.

00:10:12.060 It's that I traveled to the slot machine lab that you kind of mentioned before.

00:10:17.880 And this came from, you know, noticing that people play slot machines around the clock.

00:10:22.060 And it's like, okay, why are people doing that?

00:10:24.360 I'm an investigative journalist.

00:10:25.720 Let's figure it out.

00:10:26.620 And this takes me to this lab.

00:10:29.060 And this lab is this casino that's on the edge of town.

00:10:32.440 Like this is a fully working casino, newest, most cutting edge place in town, but it's used

00:10:37.720 entirely for research on human behavior.

00:10:40.460 So the public isn't welcome.

00:10:42.680 And the gambling industry has collaborated with a bunch of big businesses in 73 different,

00:10:48.720 there's 73 different companies on board.

00:10:50.840 And they're all trying to figure out, okay, how do we get people to gamble more?

00:10:53.840 And it all tracks back to getting people into this scarcity loop.

00:10:58.520 Now, this is like the ultimate serial killer of moderation.

00:11:02.280 It's this behavior loop that pushes people into repeat behaviors.

00:11:05.300 And it has three parts.

00:11:06.400 It's got opportunity, unpredictable rewards, and quick repeatability.

00:11:10.700 So with opportunity, it's you have an opportunity to get something of value.

00:11:14.440 In the case of a slot machine, it's money.

00:11:16.620 Then you have unpredictable rewards.

00:11:18.500 You know, you're going to get that thing of value, but you don't know when, and you

00:11:21.920 don't know how valuable it's going to be.

00:11:23.480 So when you pull a slot machine handle, you could lose, you could win a few quarters, or

00:11:27.360 you could win a life-changing amount of money, right?

00:11:28.840 That's this crazy range of outcomes.

00:11:30.660 And then quick repeatability, you can immediately replay, you can repeat the behavior, you can

00:11:35.540 repeat the game.

00:11:36.480 So the average slot machine player plays something like 16 games in a minute, which is more than

00:11:41.940 we blink.

00:11:43.020 And there really is nothing better than this random reward loop, the scarcity loop at pushing

00:11:47.820 people into these repeat behaviors that can be fun in the short term, but ultimately hurt

00:11:52.400 them in the long run.

00:11:53.880 Okay.

00:11:54.380 So let's dig into this unpredictable rewards.

00:11:56.580 What is it about unpredictable rewards in this scarcity loop that drives, that's a bigger

00:12:04.620 reinforcer of behavior than predictable rewards?

00:12:07.160 Because that seems counterintuitive, right?

00:12:09.280 Because if you know you're going to get something all the time, then you'd be like, well, I'm going

00:12:12.540 to do it because I know I'm going to get it.

00:12:14.060 But we see unpredictable rewards influence not only humans, but also animals.

00:12:19.320 So what's going on there?

00:12:21.140 Yeah.

00:12:21.400 And to your point about it being counterintuitive, that's what behavioral psychologists thought.

00:12:25.940 So sort of one of the fathers of behavioral psychology is BF Skinner.

00:12:29.560 In the fifties, he's teaching rats to basically hit a lever for a treat.

00:12:35.480 And what ends up happening is this guy runs out of treats.

00:12:39.480 He's running low on them.

00:12:40.480 So instead of making new treats, he goes, I'm just going to give them treats randomly when

00:12:44.000 they hit the lever.

00:12:45.060 And he figures, okay, now that they're not getting as many treats and they don't know

00:12:49.380 when they're just going to stop hitting the lever.

00:12:51.640 The opposite happened.

00:12:53.040 They got super obsessed with hitting that lever.

00:12:55.660 They just sit there and hit it, re-hit it, re-hit it, trying to figure out when they

00:12:58.740 were going to win that treat.

00:12:59.900 So I ended up talking to a guy whose name is Thomas Zental and he's like 80 something

00:13:05.320 years old.

00:13:06.140 He started researching behavioral psychology in the sixties and he's done similar experiments.

00:13:12.500 Well, he will take pigeons and he will give them two different games.

00:13:16.220 So in the first game, the pigeons hit a lever and every other time they hit the lever, they

00:13:20.500 get say 15 pellets of food.

00:13:21.800 In game two, they hit the lever and they get food every fifth pack, but it's random.

00:13:28.160 So it could be like pack food, pack, pack, pack, right?

00:13:31.520 So it's a total random rewards game, just like a slot machine.

00:13:34.360 And what ends up happening is when you offer pigeons, these two games, the pigeons all

00:13:38.460 choose the gambling game.

00:13:39.440 Like 97% of pigeons choose the gambling game, even though that game ends up getting them far

00:13:44.600 less food, like half as much food.

00:13:46.380 And you see this in all different animal species.

00:13:50.700 Now, the reason for this likely tracks back to how we used to have to find food, how all

00:13:57.600 animals find food.

00:13:58.660 So if you think of us as hunter gatherers and it's a million years ago and we need food

00:14:03.660 or else we're going to starve.

00:14:04.940 But the thing is, is we don't know where the food is, right?

00:14:07.680 So we're going to go to point a to look for it.

00:14:10.040 Oh, it's not there.

00:14:11.420 Okay.

00:14:11.840 We'll go to point B.

00:14:12.640 We'll go to point B to look for it.

00:14:13.980 It's not there.

00:14:14.460 Now we're going to go to point C, not there.

00:14:16.980 Oh man.

00:14:17.700 We're going to go to point D jackpot, ton of food.

00:14:21.520 So this is effectively a random rewards game that kept us alive in the past.

00:14:26.180 So this Thomas Zental's theory is that we effectively evolved to fall into this game.

00:14:32.140 Our brain has this sort of natural attraction because if it didn't, we would have been not

00:14:37.400 quite as good at persisting in these long, crazy, hard hunts and sessions of gathering

00:14:43.760 that kept us alive.

00:14:45.800 Okay.

00:14:46.240 So the scarcity loop, you have opportunity, unpredictable rewards, quick repeatability.

00:14:50.880 And this explains why slot machines are so addictive, but then you see this scarcity loop

00:14:56.280 pop up in other parts of our life.

00:14:57.780 It's why social media or the internet just going online taps into a scarcity loop.

00:15:02.820 Cause like you have the opportunity it's in your pocket, in your phone, the unpredictable

00:15:07.300 rewards.

00:15:07.840 You don't know what you're going to find.

00:15:08.780 Maybe you're going to find something really cool or funny, maybe not, or maybe you post

00:15:13.380 something that's going to get a lot of likes, maybe not.

00:15:15.780 So it's that unpredictable reward is driving you to constantly check your phone and then

00:15:20.540 it's quickly repeatable.

00:15:21.940 You can just do it anytime you want.

00:15:23.520 So the scarcity loop explains why our wanting to check our phone is such a problem.

00:15:27.020 But then you also see this with food.

00:15:28.560 If you have the opportunity of like snacks in your house, you eat one, it may be good.

00:15:34.380 It may not be kind of great, but then you can quickly repeat that.

00:15:38.060 So this is, you see it everywhere in modern life.

00:15:40.820 Yeah, you really do.

00:15:41.580 I mean, so when I, I mean, you have to track back and ask, okay, there's this casino lab

00:15:46.960 and there's gambling companies are invested, but the majority of the companies that are

00:15:50.280 invested in this thing or not have nothing to do with gambling.

00:15:52.860 They're like these big tech companies and you go, okay, well, why do they care?

00:15:55.920 It's because this loop, which is fundamental in slot machines, I think we really figured

00:16:01.600 it out with slot machines in the eighties, other industries take notice and they go,

00:16:05.900 what's happening over there.

00:16:07.880 And so now you start to see it pop up in all these different technologies.

00:16:11.440 I mean, to your point, you named a few, but social media, it's like, you know, you have

00:16:14.960 an opportunity to get some status, you post, you don't know if you're going to get one 0.91

00:16:18.420 like, and that sucks. 0.62

00:16:19.680 Or if you're going to get a million likes, you're going to go viral.

00:16:21.800 And oh my gosh, that, you know, that made my day.

00:16:24.620 So it's this random rewards game.

00:16:26.380 You also see it in online shopping with things like lightning deals, or even just scanning the

00:16:31.500 internet, like, I need to find this purchase.

00:16:33.100 I need to find this purchase.

00:16:34.060 Oh, this is the one, this is the one, right?

00:16:37.120 And now you've even seen it in advertisements online where you can say, spin a wheel, like

00:16:41.500 a roulette wheel for a discount.

00:16:43.180 And those tend to increase conversion rates by seven fold, which is, which is a crazy number.

00:16:49.300 It's in dating apps, right?

00:16:50.480 It's like swipe, swipe, swipe.

00:16:52.340 Oh my gosh, I matched.

00:16:53.560 But who is it?

00:16:54.440 Is it that person that I was like on the fence about?

00:16:56.680 Or is that person that was like, oh my God, that's the most amazing person I've ever seen

00:16:59.600 in my life, right?

00:17:00.160 Like it's random sports betting.

00:17:02.480 It's obviously in sports betting.

00:17:04.080 And I think too, that you have to realize that the scarcity loop is, you know, inherently

00:17:09.560 part of nature.

00:17:10.560 It's part of life, but really the important part about it that makes the difference of

00:17:15.160 why it's so popular today is the quick repeatability element.

00:17:19.680 So the quicker you can repeat a behavior, especially if it has random rewards, the more likely you

00:17:25.920 are to repeat it again and again and again.

00:17:28.860 So when you think of sports betting, this is why sports betting goes, okay, we can get

00:17:35.400 people to bet.

00:17:36.360 But the thing is, is that games are kind of long.

00:17:38.520 So how can we fix that?

00:17:39.960 Oh, what if people could bet on like a free throw?

00:17:42.340 What if they could bet on whether the team will score a touchdown?

00:17:44.680 So you start to see the rise of in-game betting as well.

00:17:47.200 And then it's, you know, it's in personal stock trading apps like Robinhood, their real secret

00:17:52.900 to success was increasing the quick repeatability.

00:17:55.820 And they did that by taking down trading fees because that slows you down.

00:18:00.740 You're going to have a moment of pause if you have to pay a fee to make a trade, right?

00:18:03.680 So by taking that down, people started to increase the frequency of their trades.

00:18:08.440 It's in the gig economy too.

00:18:09.940 Companies like Uber are using it to nudge workers into driving different areas and driving longer

00:18:15.360 than they would want.

00:18:17.020 And yeah, to your point, it is in the food industry.

00:18:18.980 One of the more fascinating quotes that I came across was from an executive at a big

00:18:24.400 junk food company.

00:18:25.460 He basically said, the way that you make a snack food successful is that it has to have

00:18:31.000 three Vs.

00:18:31.920 It has to have value.

00:18:33.760 It has to have variety.

00:18:35.300 And it has to have velocity.

00:18:37.320 That is just different language to explain the scarcity loop, right?

00:18:40.620 It's got to give you something of value.

00:18:42.740 You've got to have a lot of different flavors because then it becomes much more exciting

00:18:47.080 and you have to be able to eat it quickly.

00:18:49.920 And when you see how people eat, if a food is ultra processed like junk food is, they will

00:18:55.340 eat far more of it faster than if the food was less processed.

00:18:59.580 So some interesting research you highlight is the role of understimulation in our environment

00:19:04.980 and its contribution to the scarcity loop.

00:19:08.740 What does that research say about understimulation?

00:19:10.740 Yeah, so this was one of those counterintuitive things as well that goes back to animals.

00:19:16.520 I mentioned that researcher Thomas Zental earlier.

00:19:20.440 And so he turns these pigeons into degenerate gamblers in like two minutes, right?

00:19:24.580 He takes them out of their little cages and he gives them the option of, do you want to

00:19:28.040 play the predictable game or do you want to play the slot machine like game?

00:19:32.080 They all choose a slot machine like game.

00:19:33.340 But what happens is that at some point he takes these pigeons out of their small cages where

00:19:39.140 they kind of live alone and he puts them into this really massive cage that is designed to

00:19:43.880 be just like their wild environment.

00:19:45.940 So it's got, you know, plants, it's got trees, it's got places they can roost and it's got

00:19:50.860 other pigeons that they can hang out with.

00:19:52.440 And then he gives them the choice to play the games again.

00:19:55.620 And what he finds is that pretty much all the pigeons stop playing the gambling game.

00:20:00.320 They start making better decisions.

00:20:02.220 And so from there, he basically told me, you know, I don't think that we as humans are all

00:20:09.500 that different from animals.

00:20:10.720 Like his whole research is that the same fundamental architecture of the brain still sort of holds.

00:20:16.860 And there's this model in psychology called the optimal stimulation model.

00:20:22.260 And it basically says that animals and humans, they have a certain level of stimulation that

00:20:27.920 they prefer that helps them do well.

00:20:29.800 And when we get below that, we go searching for stimulation.

00:20:33.240 And so what he found is that when you put an animal in its more wild environment, it gets

00:20:37.380 enough stimulation and doesn't have to go find stimulation from a slot machine. 0.92

00:20:41.100 And his point was that, you know, we humans today, we are living very different than we did

00:20:46.780 in the past.

00:20:48.460 You know, we don't have to struggle for resources.

00:20:52.280 We don't have to go, you know, hunt and forage food.

00:20:55.700 We spend a lot less time outside.

00:20:57.500 Our social worlds have changed where we are less reliant on other people for survival.

00:21:02.860 And we don't have to be in the moment anymore, right?

00:21:05.400 Like life used to be very consequential and dangerous.

00:21:07.440 And that's a lot of stimulation all the time.

00:21:09.120 And now that we're in kind of a very safe world, it's great.

00:21:12.260 Don't get me wrong.

00:21:12.960 This is part of progress.

00:21:13.880 But we get a lot less stimulation from our environments.

00:21:17.220 And so we become more likely to go search for it in the form of, say, gambling or say

00:21:23.400 overpurchasing or even doing drugs or eating more than we need.

00:21:27.040 Just something that makes us feel something, really, is his theory.

00:21:32.880 Yeah.

00:21:33.040 Well, there's that one famous study where they put people in a room and they connect them

00:21:37.700 to like a zapper and they say, well, look, you can just sit here, you know, quietly for

00:21:43.360 half an hour or you can zap yourself with an electric current.

00:21:47.860 And most people zap themselves with the electric current because they're just looking for some

00:21:51.400 sort of stimulation.

00:21:52.220 And particularly men were the ones more likely to zap themselves than be bored out of their

00:21:57.540 minds.

00:21:58.620 Yeah, exactly.

00:21:59.440 So as part of this book, I traveled to Iraq and I talked to a lot of people that had been

00:22:05.340 in war zones.

00:22:07.120 And it's so fascinating to talk to them because they all go, you know, when I was there, it

00:22:12.320 was very intense.

00:22:13.260 It was dangerous.

00:22:14.180 But I also look back on that time in my life very fondly because I had to be 100% in the

00:22:20.620 moment.

00:22:21.500 I had to have my head on a swivel.

00:22:23.460 I had this group of people that I was working with that all had the same common mission.

00:22:30.340 And, you know, everything I did was consequential.

00:22:32.820 And then I came back home and I didn't get that anymore.

00:22:36.500 And I absolutely, I missed that.

00:22:38.420 And so I do think that that is one of the key reasons we see PTSD in vets.

00:22:44.560 It's quite counterintuitive, but I think that the research bears that out.

00:22:49.080 Well, so it seems like we're really, we have a problem of overstimulation in our modern lives.

00:22:52.720 We have the internet, we've got all this stuff trying to grab our attention.

00:22:55.860 So how are we understimulated?

00:22:58.780 Well, it's a different type of stimulation, right?

00:23:00.340 I think we're understimulated in the way that humans for two and a half million years evolved

00:23:05.120 to be stimulated.

00:23:05.920 We never had digital media in our life until about 100 years ago.

00:23:10.700 And then you see radio creep in and people start listening to it for three hours a day.

00:23:14.080 And then TV really rises in the fifties.

00:23:16.900 And TV went from people watching zero hours in 1950 to the average person, I think, watching

00:23:22.120 four hours by 1960 a day.

00:23:24.460 So you kind of have this creep of media that is stimulating.

00:23:29.460 But at the same time, we've lost this other form of stimulation, which requires hard work

00:23:35.680 and effort in a sort of natural environment like humans had to do for all of time.

00:23:40.460 And so I think we've just traded it.

00:23:42.160 And again, that goes back to progress, right?

00:23:45.400 It's probably, I would say for the vast majority of people, like we don't want to be out hunting

00:23:49.860 and gathering.

00:23:50.360 We don't want to be braving the elements every single day.

00:23:53.760 But I do think that a result of that is that we've had to look for other forms of stimulation

00:23:59.840 and those other forms of stimulation haven't always necessarily netted a positive in our life

00:24:05.720 when you think about a lot of the behaviors that you see people do today.

00:24:09.680 Yeah.

00:24:09.760 I think a lot of the stimulation we have, it's underwhelming, right?

00:24:13.120 It doesn't really scratch the itch.

00:24:15.100 And so you, as a result, you have to get more of it to even feel like you're doing something.

00:24:20.740 I think that's what I, that's what I've noticed in my own life.

00:24:23.260 Yeah.

00:24:23.740 What's more exciting, climbing up a dangerous mountain or watching someone climb up a dangerous

00:24:28.340 mountain on TikTok.

00:24:29.700 Like, obviously it's the climbing up a dangerous mountain, right?

00:24:32.620 That's the thing that you go home and you go, oh my God, that trip changed my life.

00:24:36.140 You remember that forever and it changes your behavior from then on.

00:24:39.520 It changes your sense of self.

00:24:40.540 It changes your confidence, your competence.

00:24:43.820 Not so on TikTok.

00:24:45.100 You forget about it in about two seconds when you flip to the next video, which is,

00:24:49.280 you know, a cat that learned how to play the drums or whatever, whatever it is.

00:24:53.300 Well, you see this idea of what healthy environmental stimulation looks like.

00:24:57.680 I've read reports about kids going to summer camp and the camp bans digital devices,

00:25:04.280 smartphones, iPads, whatever.

00:25:06.100 And what they find is that, you know, after the first few days, like the kids are kind of grumpy.

00:25:10.140 It's like, I want my, I want my smartphone.

00:25:12.460 But after a while, they just, they're happy.

00:25:14.420 Like they don't even think about their smartphone and they report, like the reason why is because

00:25:18.400 I've got these other kids that are around me.

00:25:20.700 We're out doing hard things with our bodies.

00:25:23.320 And so they don't even have the desire to look at their phone by the end of camp.

00:25:28.300 Yeah.

00:25:29.040 Yeah, exactly.

00:25:29.640 And I think that what becomes so hard for everyone is that phones are now your everything device.

00:25:36.920 You know, it's very hard to, to sort of create silos around these behaviors because, you know,

00:25:45.160 the work device, which is your phone is also your entertainment device is also the device that you use to keep in touch with your kids or, or family.

00:25:54.520 It's this device that gets used for so many things.

00:25:56.420 And I think what tends to happen is that you go to check email and then you're like, oh, I'm on here.

00:25:59.600 I'll, you know, I'll check this random social media platform.

00:26:02.460 And you get, and then you look up and 15 minutes have gone by because these things are designed to be so hyper stimulating.

00:26:08.380 Or you're like, you know what, I'll check the news.

00:26:10.780 You start looking at the news and then you find yourself, you know, in a, in a fit of anger and anxiety because of some crazy political thing coming out of Washington.

00:26:19.340 And, and I think that that makes it hard to really get away from it when everything is coming through one device or everything is available on a computer at all times.

00:26:28.880 And yeah, so I do think that, you know, the lesson, especially for kids is that if you have kids, it's, uh, having kids take time away from their phones or from media stimulation and go out into the real world with other kids.

00:26:43.520 It doesn't have to be a summer camp.

00:26:44.880 It could even be, Hey, you got to go volunteer at the homeless shelter, or we're putting you in this, you know, program for X, Y, Z with other kids.

00:26:52.820 I do think that that is very valuable because you are seeing, you know, rates of anxiety and really spike.

00:26:59.580 You're seeing focus go down.

00:27:01.120 You're seeing critical thinking go down.

00:27:02.720 And I think it does track back to how much time people spend on digital media today.

00:27:08.380 Yeah.

00:27:08.580 Play sports, get physically active, that sort of thing.

00:27:11.100 So we talk about addiction is the extreme form of the scarcity loop, scarcity brain, but you highlight some really interesting research that goes against how we typically think of addiction.

00:27:21.960 And I think when we typically think of addiction, we think, well, once you get addicted to something, you're addicted for life, but you have that research that actually, that's not the case.

00:27:31.980 What's going on there?

00:27:32.760 Yeah, the reason that we think that is because most of the research that leads to that conclusion is conducted by neuroscientists in labs where they're looking at a lot of the most addicted people, like the absolute extreme cases.

00:27:48.680 But when you look at the data on sort of, I guess I would say everyday people, most people are able to quit a problematic drug or alcohol use or even smoking on their own.

00:28:02.440 So for example, there was this one big survey, looked at 20,000 people, and it found that 75% of them who reported struggling with drugs before they had turned 24, they no longer used any substances by age 37.

00:28:17.040 So 75%, that's a pretty significant number.

00:28:20.280 And there was another survey that found over 10 years, 86% of people who struggle with addiction ended up getting clean.

00:28:26.800 The point I want to make in the book with this is on this topic is that I do think that addiction definitely falls into a scarcity loop.

00:28:34.600 And as you mentioned before, I mean, I feel relatively qualified talking about this because I'm a person who is now sober.

00:28:41.940 And I can tell you that, you know, a substance, whatever it be, alcohol, drugs, it gives you an opportunity to improve your life or just escape from your problems, at least in the short term, only in the short term, whether you're getting drugs or whether you're drinking and don't know what's going to happen.

00:28:58.300 It's very unpredictable trying to get the drugs, trying to see what's going to happen after you have a bunch of drinks.

00:29:03.700 And then you repeat the behavior, right?

00:29:05.560 You get kind of sucked into a cycle of getting drugs again or waiting for the next drink.

00:29:10.000 The U.S. has had different viewpoints on addiction throughout the years, but they tend to be two different viewpoints.

00:29:16.200 The first is that addicts are bad people.

00:29:19.700 It's a moral failing.

00:29:21.020 Or now, which started in the 90s, is that addiction is a brain disease.

00:29:26.100 And I traveled to Iraq to understand some of the new thinking around addiction.

00:29:33.020 So a lot of new thinkers are coming out and basically saying, addiction, of course, is not a moral failing by any means.

00:29:40.440 You're not a bad person if you're, you know, an addict.

00:29:43.420 But it also doesn't seem to be a brain disease.

00:29:46.620 And that's because if it's a brain disease, you can't really cure it, right?

00:29:50.460 You can't respond to incentives if it's a brain disease.

00:29:53.080 It's like Alzheimer's is a brain disease.

00:29:55.060 And if I tell a person with Alzheimer's, like, hey, if I put you in this, you know, this church basement with a bunch of other people with Alzheimer's and you talk about Alzheimer's, you'll probably be okay.

00:30:05.440 Like that would never happen.

00:30:06.280 But that does seem to work with addiction, where if you put people in a group of other people who are trying to get over addiction and they talk about it and they get a new network, they make bigger changes in their life.

00:30:16.200 They can come out of it.

00:30:18.040 So I think addiction is more of a symptom than anything else.

00:30:21.740 Drugs effectively get used to deal with life's problems, right?

00:30:27.900 It could be just general discomfort with life or people might have started using because they have some past trauma or whatever it might be.

00:30:34.440 And Iraq is a good case study of this because you had basically no people using drugs in the country.

00:30:39.740 And then the U.S. invaded and this caused obviously a lot of trauma in people's lives, right?

00:30:44.940 They had to live through a war.

00:30:46.000 And then what ended up happening is that Syria fell and effectively became a narco state and they started flooding the Middle East with this pill called Captagon. 0.95

00:30:55.900 So there's now billions of these Captagon pills floating around the Middle East and they're akin to methamphetamine, basically.

00:31:03.300 And so you have these two things.

00:31:05.540 You have this population who has a lot of problems, a lot of traumas, and then you have this sudden influx of a substance that will immediately solve your problems if you take it, right?

00:31:15.500 It'll comfort you from the hardships of life.

00:31:18.680 And so you start to see addiction really spike in Iraq.

00:31:23.180 And I think that that has been the American story, too.

00:31:25.580 I mean, there's a reason that you saw the opioid epidemic hit the Midwest hardest in these towns that used to, say, have steel mills or used to have factories.

00:31:35.220 And then they moved out of town and all hope was lost.

00:31:38.480 It's like, okay, well, life is really hard.

00:31:40.420 And then you have an influx of opioids.

00:31:42.540 And it's like, well, this will fix my problems in the short term.

00:31:44.700 And the problem could be that you don't have a job.

00:31:46.500 You could be really bored.

00:31:47.400 You could have some past trauma.

00:31:49.200 And you see it all spike.

00:31:51.760 And there's also great examples from the past of people who were addicted changing their environment in such a way that it removes their problems.

00:32:03.100 And they tend to get clean.

00:32:04.320 So soldiers in Vietnam are a great example where during the peak of the Vietnam War, you had something like 25% of U.S. soldiers the government thought were addicted to heroin.

00:32:13.880 Because there's this huge heroin epidemic among U.S. soldiers in Vietnam.

00:32:17.400 And so Nixon came in and goes, I don't want all these addicts coming back to the U.S. 0.99

00:32:22.980 If you are a soldier in Vietnam and you want to come back home, you have to pass a urine test.

00:32:28.640 And so if the idea that an addict can never get clean is true, we would have left 25% of soldiers in Vietnam, right?

00:32:37.180 That didn't actually happen.

00:32:38.640 Nearly every single soldier produced a clean urine test.

00:32:41.560 And when they got home, 95% of them remained clean.

00:32:45.520 And the 5% that didn't remain clean tended to be soldiers who had used drugs before the war.

00:32:49.520 So really what the difference was is that they were in this environment where there was this hell of war and drugs allowed them to cope with that.

00:32:57.260 Like it allowed them to sort of forget that problem while they were using.

00:33:01.780 But once they were out of that hell, the problem was solved and they didn't need to use drugs anymore.

00:33:06.240 And so I think that that's kind of a larger metaphor for the underlying reasons why people tend to use 2XS.

00:33:11.660 Because people have problems and drugs are a pretty quick and easy way to solve your problems, at least in the short term.

00:33:18.480 But the issue is that they cause long-term problems.

00:33:21.620 We're going to take a quick break for your word from our sponsors.

00:33:27.780 And now back to the show.

00:33:29.800 So what goes on with the scarcity loop with these people who, you know, you talked about 75% of people who report struggling with drugs before age 24 are no longer used.

00:33:38.580 So they really put it behind.

00:33:39.580 So what happened?

00:33:41.280 Like what do you think is going on with the scarcity loop in those individuals that allowed them to put the drug or the addiction behind them?

00:33:48.140 Or like even like what happened with you, right?

00:33:49.880 There's something happened that you're able to get out of that scarcity loop.

00:33:54.860 Yeah.

00:33:55.040 So I'll answer this two ways.

00:33:56.380 I'll kind of talk generalities and then I'll talk about what happened with me.

00:34:01.160 So you do tend to see that addiction rates peak when people are younger.

00:34:05.000 And this is because from about puberty to age 25, the human brain undergoes like an insane renovation.

00:34:13.400 And all these different things become important to people.

00:34:16.680 One of them is that teens really like to take risks.

00:34:20.260 They're more drawn to risky behavior.

00:34:22.240 Another one is that this is when we learn how to cope with life.

00:34:28.340 Basically, we're figuring out how do we deal with our problems?

00:34:31.480 How do we cope?

00:34:32.100 And if people use drugs when they are younger or alcohol or whatever it might be, their risk of becoming addicted greatly increases.

00:34:42.560 And that's because they've learned that this substance can help them solve a problem in the short term.

00:34:47.940 So, for example, if you started drinking at under age 15, your risk of becoming an alcoholic is about a coin flip.

00:34:55.020 It's 50%.

00:34:55.700 But if someone starts drinking when they're 21 or after, their risk is, I think, 6%, which is very minimal, right?

00:35:04.260 And that's because these changes in the brain, things are happening then.

00:35:08.460 So if you introduce a substance then, it makes you more likely to want to use that substance to excess later on in your life.

00:35:15.220 And so over time, what happens is that people can effectively grow out of it.

00:35:19.540 It's like they might use when they're in their 20s and they're going, you know, this helps me solve my problems.

00:35:25.000 But then as they age and they start to realize like, oh, this is actually creating more problems in the long haul than it's solving, they begin to try to work to get out of that cycle.

00:35:35.500 And it is hard.

00:35:36.680 I'm not saying that it's easy at any point.

00:35:38.800 It is hard, but that's what you tend to see.

00:35:41.200 For example, people might go, well, I want to get married to this person and they're not going to marry someone who's, you know, drinking this much.

00:35:47.600 Or I want to have kids.

00:35:48.720 I can't be drinking as much as I drink when I have kids.

00:35:51.260 So the behavior changes because they have something more important to care for than their alcohol or drug use.

00:35:58.940 Now with me, you know, I've thought about this a lot doing this book.

00:36:02.540 And I will say that when my editor assigned me this book and was like, yeah, you need a chapter on addiction.

00:36:07.680 I went in thinking that addiction was a disease.

00:36:10.820 So, okay, we're going to like learn about this was a brain disease basically.

00:36:15.060 And I don't know if I think that anymore.

00:36:16.700 If people think that I'm totally fine with that.

00:36:18.700 Really?

00:36:19.160 I just want people to, if they have a problem to have resources to change.

00:36:23.940 But I do think for me, it was very much that I had this job that was relatively unsatisfying.

00:36:30.080 I was in the office from, you know, 8 a.m. to 6 p.m. five days a week.

00:36:36.240 And I didn't have a lot of money.

00:36:38.380 I was living in a town I didn't really want to live in.

00:36:41.020 I didn't see my friends all that much.

00:36:42.720 I just wasn't doing that interesting of things.

00:36:45.460 And what was interesting is if I would drink, all of a sudden things became unpredictable, right?

00:36:51.960 It became this sort of, every night could offer a new opportunity that I knew was going to be far more exciting and interesting than if I had sat home and watched, you know, Netflix or whatever it is.

00:37:02.420 You know, if I go to a bar and I start drinking, it's like, who the hell knows what's going to happen?

00:37:07.080 I might close this place down and be belting out Garth Brooks at 3 a.m. with some people that I just met.

00:37:12.100 And that would be a blast.

00:37:12.940 Or I might, you know, connect with some person I otherwise wouldn't have.

00:37:17.640 Or I could sit down at my desk and write something that I otherwise wouldn't have sober.

00:37:21.440 So it really, for me, was allowed me to sort of live out on the edge and have more intense experiences than I otherwise wouldn't have had I been sober.

00:37:32.340 So when I realized that I needed to get sober, it was very, I mean, it's the hardest thing I've ever done by far.

00:37:39.580 But a big part of me becoming sober was that I had to find where to get stimulation and excitement in my life from other places.

00:37:50.260 Because I've always been drawn to extreme experiences.

00:37:53.160 But if your extreme experiences come from drinking, you're going to find yourself with some problems.

00:37:58.080 And I did.

00:37:58.880 So I had to find new ways to sort of deal with that.

00:38:01.620 Started spending a lot more time doing things like, you know, backcountry hunting or traveling.

00:38:07.940 I got more into working out, started picking up more sort of extreme exercise.

00:38:12.840 I just found other ways to deal with that and to sort of scratch that itch to go peek over the edges in a way that didn't lead to these insane long-term problems that made me not like myself and made other people not really like me that much anymore.

00:38:29.000 Okay, so it sounds like if you have an addiction to a substance, the key is to find, like, try to figure out, like, what's the problem in my life that this addiction is trying to solve?

00:38:40.500 And then solve it in another way with something else.

00:38:43.340 Yeah, exactly.

00:38:43.900 And I think you've got to try a lot of different things.

00:38:45.940 I mean, what works for one person isn't going to work for another.

00:38:48.700 You know, there's this researcher.

00:38:50.100 I talked to two researchers around this who are really smart.

00:38:52.800 One's name is Sally Sattel and the other is Maya Salovitz.

00:38:55.000 And Maya said, you know, you really see that people do find all different ways to cope.

00:39:02.700 Some people go to sort of programs, you know, like a 12-step program.

00:39:07.100 And that really works for them because it gets in this new group of people and it gives them a sort of higher purpose.

00:39:11.840 They're doing service.

00:39:13.180 Some people go to those sorts of programs and it doesn't work for them.

00:39:17.600 But they might find a group that they rock climb with and they get really into rock climbing.

00:39:21.320 And all of a sudden they're like, oh, I have this thing in my life that's providing me with something bigger.

00:39:25.680 Or they get married or they have kids or they get a new job or they decide they're going to go get educated.

00:39:30.100 It's the guy that I talked to the head psychiatrist in Iraq.

00:39:33.780 And that was his big message is that, you know, when people come in here and talk to me, I very much tell them, like, we need to figure out a way to deal with your past traumas if that's it.

00:39:43.200 And we need to find a way for you to improve your life.

00:39:45.760 I want you to go to school.

00:39:46.960 I want you to learn how to read.

00:39:48.000 I want you to try all these different things and we're going to see what takes.

00:39:51.820 But it ultimately is going to take a little bit of effort.

00:39:54.920 But on the other side of that is growth.

00:39:57.580 So one of my favorite chapters is where you talk to a philosopher out of the University of Utah about how our tendency in the modern world to quantify all aspects of our lives might be contributing to our scarcity brain and scarcity loop.

00:40:13.400 So what's going on there with quantification, creating new scarcity loops for us?

00:40:18.000 Yeah, I love this guy.

00:40:19.660 His name is T Nguyen, which is spelled T-H-I space N-G-U-Y-E-N.

00:40:26.080 And he's up at the University of Utah.

00:40:28.100 And he studies games and gamification and how quantification, when we put game-like features into everyday activities, how that ultimately changes our behaviors in ways that may not be good.

00:40:41.560 Now, to understand this, I will give you something of a damning admission.

00:40:47.900 And that's that I got this Instagram habit, right?

00:40:51.500 So I download Instagram initially years ago because it's like you download it and like, oh, okay, great.

00:40:58.300 I can share photos of my life with my friends and my family.

00:41:02.760 And that's it.

00:41:03.400 So it's like, here's a photo of me at a concert with my wife.

00:41:05.980 Here's a bunch of photos of my dog, that sort of stuff.

00:41:09.560 But then I began to realize that, oh, I'm getting these followers who aren't my friends and family.

00:41:14.820 And certain types of photos are getting a higher number of likes and comments and shares and that sort of stuff.

00:41:22.280 So an example of this is that when I would post photos of my runs in the desert, I live on the edge of Las Vegas.

00:41:27.700 And I've got, I mean, I'm very blessed to have a backyard that looks like something from an old Western movie.

00:41:33.820 It's amazing.

00:41:34.920 And I would run out there and, you know, post photos.

00:41:37.640 And those would start to get the most likes and comments and shares and stuff.

00:41:41.380 So once that happens, all of a sudden my behavior changes.

00:41:44.880 I start posting more photos of that to accumulate more of those metrics.

00:41:49.000 And then the worst part is that the whole reason that I was running out in the desert is that it was my time to escape.

00:41:55.420 It was my time to zone out.

00:41:56.600 It was my time to, it was like a moving meditation, right?

00:42:00.220 But then once that sort of gamified Instagram system gets in my head, now when I'm out there running,

00:42:06.380 I'm looking for freaking what would look good in an Instagram photo.

00:42:09.420 And this totally changes what my run is like.

00:42:13.260 It makes it something totally different.

00:42:15.020 And I don't like it.

00:42:16.080 Right now, this philosopher, I came across one of his papers and it turns out that he had had the exact same thing happen to him,

00:42:25.080 but it happened to him with Twitter.

00:42:26.820 So, you know, he joined Twitter just to sort of communicate with people like we all do at first.

00:42:32.000 And then he had a few tweets go viral.

00:42:34.420 And what ended up happening after that is that, so this guy's a philosopher.

00:42:38.100 His job is to think really deep thoughts, like to go down the rabbit hole of thoughts and ideas.

00:42:44.440 And he found that after he had this tweet go viral, what ends up happening is he starts, he'll have a thought.

00:42:49.940 And instead of following it down that rabbit hole that it needs to go down for him to be a good philosopher,

00:42:54.880 he starts thinking, how could I turn this into a short tweet that would maybe go viral?

00:43:00.340 Well, it changes his entire experience of thought, right?

00:43:04.820 And so the long story short of this is that when you gamify a system with numbers and points and shares and retweets or whatever it might be,

00:43:16.160 could be great.

00:43:16.720 The goal shifts to scoring points.

00:43:20.160 Now, if you are playing a real actual game, like baseball, like basketball, like Monopoly, that's totally fine.

00:43:29.540 Because games, as they are normally constructed, are supposed to be an escape from normal life.

00:43:35.800 They're not part of normal life.

00:43:36.960 They're this fun diversion we do to sort of, you know, have some entertainment.

00:43:40.760 But when you start to put a gamified system on really complicated behaviors that are part of everyday life,

00:43:47.780 it changes the goals in ways that can take us away from the original meaning.

00:43:52.980 So take Twitter, right?

00:43:53.960 It's supposed to be this platform for people to have discussions.

00:43:58.320 And it's like, well, what's the goal of a discussion?

00:44:01.040 There's a lot of them, right?

00:44:02.480 It could be to commiserate, to share information, to show empathy, to fact check things, to do.

00:44:08.680 I mean, there's so many different goals of a conversation.

00:44:11.380 But once you put that scoring on Twitter, people just start to tweet to score points.

00:44:16.720 They're like, oh, I got to get retweets.

00:44:18.700 I got to get likes.

00:44:20.200 And that changes how you use the machine.

00:44:22.260 So this is why you tend to see Twitter is like the ultimate place for people to be outraged and say crazy things

00:44:28.540 because that is what the system of scoring incentivizes.

00:44:32.520 It's no longer a platform for discussion.

00:44:34.240 It's a place for people to score likes by trying to, you know, dunk on people publicly.

00:44:39.040 And you can apply that same logic to really any gamified system.

00:44:43.740 Another example is great.

00:44:45.960 So the point of going to college, I'm a professor.

00:44:47.820 The point of going to college, what is it?

00:44:49.900 There's like a lot of them, right?

00:44:51.200 It's you want to learn.

00:44:52.360 You want to think critically.

00:44:53.300 You want to be able to unpack other people's arguments, unpack your own arguments.

00:44:56.900 You want to be able to question yourself.

00:44:58.060 You also want to learn how to be social.

00:44:59.560 You need to learn how to get your stuff together so you can turn things in on time.

00:45:03.300 You have to balance work and other stuff. 0.99

00:45:05.920 You have to learn how to not be a jerk at parties. 0.98

00:45:08.040 There's a million different things that you learn at college. 0.94

00:45:10.500 But once you start to slap grades onto things, which is the simplified gamified thing with like the 4.0 scale, all my students really obsess about is their grade.

00:45:22.380 Not whether they learn the material, not whether they've been able to think critically and prepare for this future out in the employment world.

00:45:29.760 They all obsess about their grades.

00:45:31.540 And I have personally found as a professor that the best students, they don't get the A's.

00:45:36.800 The best students are free thinking.

00:45:38.540 They might be working other jobs.

00:45:41.100 They're questioning things.

00:45:42.320 They're going to do things a little differently to sort of test the edges and really think.

00:45:46.200 They tend to get, you know, a B plus or A minus.

00:45:48.420 But it's the A students that get recruited by companies.

00:45:51.520 And the A students tend to just simply be more robotic.

00:45:53.780 It's like, okay, just, you know, fill out the sheet, make it perfect, get the A, move on with your life, whether or not I really know the material or not.

00:45:59.860 Well, what you highlight in the book is that with all these things that we want to quantify or gamify, you know, whether it's Instagram, grades, you all see this with fitness apps and trackers like the Whoop and your sleep score.

00:46:14.700 What you're trying to do with these things, you're trying to put a number on something that's otherwise ambiguous.

00:46:20.400 Like you don't know for sure what your social status is, you know, where you are in the pecking order or how smart you are or how healthy you are.

00:46:27.800 But what these numbers do is that they give you, it gives you something concrete, but they may not, they might not be accurate, right?

00:46:34.840 Like it doesn't actually reflect reality, but you still let the numbers affect, you know, everything like your mood, your self-perception, your motivations and your actions.

00:46:45.080 Yeah.

00:46:45.240 It goes back to the humans love certainty.

00:46:48.220 This is why real games work.

00:46:51.220 They give us this escape.

00:46:52.740 You know, life is very complicated and complex.

00:46:55.040 It's everything's ambiguous, but in a real game, what makes it fun is that you take on these obstacles and at the end of it, you know, exactly whether or not you did the right or wrong thing.

00:47:06.200 If you are playing basketball with some friends, you know, whether you won, you know, whether you lost with most of life's big decisions like education or what to do at work or who to marry or what kind of food you should eat to, you know, avoid this.

00:47:18.880 I mean, all these big decisions, they're ambiguous.

00:47:20.840 You never get a clear yes or no answer, but with gamified systems, they allege to give you a clear answer on whether you did the right or wrong thing.

00:47:28.940 The problem is, of course, they don't.

00:47:32.280 It's like, you know, with whoop, it's it all goes into this black box algorithm.

00:47:36.880 There's a ton of assumptions.

00:47:38.020 It's also based on data about ideas like HRV and what respiratory rate means and what heart rate really means.

00:47:44.480 And these are all things that, you know, the science isn't settled on these things by any means.

00:47:48.260 And it's all based on these very potentially flawed human judgments.

00:47:53.160 And so, like, what does it really mean?

00:47:55.000 Right.

00:47:55.220 It doesn't.

00:47:55.700 But if you can just see, like, oh, my God, my whoop this morning said I got a 94.

00:48:00.360 Like, I got to work out today.

00:48:01.920 Right.

00:48:02.240 Or conversely, if it's, you know, in the red and you're not going to work out because of that, that seems like a questionable judgment.

00:48:10.340 Right.

00:48:10.420 So, yeah, what the quantification does, it creates scarcity loops that probably don't need to be created.

00:48:15.780 Yeah, exactly.

00:48:16.260 It's basically preying on our need for certainty, putting us into this loop where we're going to get these random, unpredictable rewards in the form of points.

00:48:25.020 Like, you know, if you have a sleep tracker, when you wake up in the morning, you're probably checking that thing first thing.

00:48:29.120 How'd I do?

00:48:30.280 Right.

00:48:31.060 But it's probably highly flawed.

00:48:32.980 And whether or not you slept well, it's like, well, you're still going to do the same things you're going to do.

00:48:37.960 Right.

00:48:38.180 So, I think that what tends to happen is that we just gravitate to scoring points rather than experiencing or doing the activity for many of its original goals.

00:48:47.880 You know, the point of whoop is to help you, I guess, increase your fitness.

00:48:51.560 But it's like, well, why do you want to increase your fitness?

00:48:53.640 It's not to score points on your whoop.

00:48:55.120 It's probably to have these experiences in life that are inherently important about being a human that you're going to need to be fit for.

00:49:02.400 It could be being around for when your grandkids are around so you can crawl on the ground.

00:49:05.600 It could be like, you know what, I get a ton of rewards from going out on these seven-day backpacking excursions and I want to be fit from that.

00:49:12.380 And I think that sometimes we forget that.

00:49:14.740 We don't define, what are all these reasons I'm doing this everyday behavior in the first place?

00:49:19.160 And we tend to just default to obsessing about whether we got the right or wrong number of points.

00:49:23.660 Right.

00:49:23.760 And what that point system can do, it can end up, it's a nocebo.

00:49:27.680 So, it's the opposite of a placebo.

00:49:29.380 You know, a placebo is like, if you think something's going to work, it's going to work.

00:49:32.320 A nocebo is the opposite of that.

00:49:34.220 Like, well, if you get negative feedback, it makes you think that you can't do the thing, right?

00:49:39.220 So, it demotivates you.

00:49:40.320 So, like with the whoop, you know, if you get the low score and it's like, well, yeah, you're not ready to work out.

00:49:45.020 Well, you think, well, yeah, I can't work out.

00:49:46.660 And so, you don't.

00:49:47.320 I mean, it's like, actually, you probably could have worked out and had a great workout if you just ignored your whoop score.

00:49:51.280 Or, you know, you as a writer, I'm sure you struggle with it.

00:49:53.760 You mentioned this with Instagram.

00:49:55.040 Like, you put something out there on Instagram post or maybe a newsletter and it doesn't get that many opens or engagement. 0.99

00:50:02.320 And you think, oh, man, I suck. 0.82

00:50:05.440 Why am I doing what I'm doing? 1.00

00:50:06.800 You start questioning your career.

00:50:08.700 Because you experience that status defeat that the numbers gives you.

00:50:13.060 When, if you just had ignored that or just didn't even have those numbers, like, you wouldn't have been affected.

00:50:17.700 So, like, how do you avoid those scarcity loops, especially when it comes to social status in your own life?

00:50:22.500 Yeah, so the three parts of the loop are opportunity, unpredictable rewards, and quick repeatability.

00:50:29.220 So, to me, what gamification does is it really changes the opportunity.

00:50:33.560 It's changing the opportunity of any behavior from all these kind of deeper, more meaningful things down to scoring these random points that, like, some coder in Palo Alto came up with.

00:50:45.680 You know, so I think for me, it's like I have to remind myself, what is the opportunity of this thing that I'm doing?

00:50:52.220 What am I really doing this for?

00:50:54.440 The answer is never to score points.

00:50:56.300 The answer is usually to improve the life of others if we're talking about content that I put out as a journalist and a writer.

00:51:03.200 And that could be on social, too.

00:51:05.020 So, I've started to shift my Instagram to being, like, the goal of this is to inform people, give them information that can hopefully help their lives, and help others.

00:51:15.500 So, if I'm using it in a way that is divorced from that, then I'm not using it for the goal that I want it to.

00:51:22.020 And the metrics, they can be useful.

00:51:24.100 They cannot be useful, too.

00:51:25.140 I could have a post bomb, but then I get a message from someone who's like, hey, I saw that post.

00:51:30.240 I started practicing that.

00:51:31.940 Dude, that changed my life.

00:51:32.780 I lost 15 pounds.

00:51:34.120 I went to the doctor, and he was like, hey, your triglyceride levels are looking great.

00:51:37.880 It's like, that is what we're after.

00:51:39.600 And that is what points can ever capture.

00:51:42.880 Right.

00:51:43.580 So, the rest of the book, you talk about different ways you can engage in scarcity loops in non-scarcity loop ways.

00:51:51.360 So, like for diet, for example, you highlight, if you want a non-scarcity loop diet, it's going to look pretty boring.

00:51:58.300 Like, you're just going to eat kind of the same sort of foods.

00:52:01.400 They don't taste terrible.

00:52:02.920 They're palatable, but they're not like hyper palatable like the food you get at a convenience store.

00:52:08.620 And if you just eat the same thing every day, that's food that tastes okay, you're going to be okay, probably.

00:52:15.040 That'll help you avoid that scarcity loop diet.

00:52:19.480 Yeah, I agree.

00:52:20.340 So, what I found to be really interesting is, you know, just like there's these casino laboratories researching the scarcity loop to get you to gamble more.

00:52:27.560 Turns out this is also happening in the food industry.

00:52:30.000 There's labs across the country figuring out how do we get people to eat more faster.

00:52:33.840 I mentioned before that junk food executive who basically said the three V's of being able to have a junk food takeoff is value, variety, and velocity.

00:52:45.360 So, with any scarcity loop behavior, if you can take away any one of the three parts, you can start to reduce the behavior around it.

00:52:54.460 And so, in the case of junk food, it really sells well because there is such a wide variety, right?

00:53:01.680 It's like if you go to the grocery store right now, there's like 75 different kinds of Doritos.

00:53:05.820 And that makes us more likely to overeat when we have all these different amazing tasting foods.

00:53:10.640 So, if you can eat mostly the same stuff every day that isn't super hyperpalatable but is still, you know, it's good but it's like not every meal you have has to be this explosion of flavor, that can be a good thing.

00:53:26.080 And also, changing the velocity, the quick repeatability.

00:53:29.680 So, people tend to eat ultra-processed foods significantly faster than they do foods that are less processed like lean meats and vegetables and whole grains.

00:53:40.540 Like you just can't eat those foods that fast and this seems to allow you to better figure out when you are full and in turn not overeat.

00:53:49.100 And that's shown in studies where they'll give people a, you know, everything about the food is the same in terms of macronutrients and salt and all those things.

00:53:57.100 But in one group, the food will be hyper-processed, ultra-processed.

00:54:01.460 On the other, it'll be very minimally processed.

00:54:03.460 And the people who are eating the ultra-processed food eat about 500 extra calories a day.

00:54:07.940 They end up gaining weight and that it's opposite in the group that eats the less processed stuff.

00:54:13.760 And to really get to the bottom of this, what was a really interesting trip is I traveled into the Bolivian Amazon because there is a tribe there called the Chimane who have the healthiest hearts ever recorded by science.

00:54:26.060 So this is important because, you know, the average American, they worry, if you look at the data, they really worry about cancer.

00:54:33.380 They really worry about things like mass shootings.

00:54:37.140 It's not that those things aren't dangerous, but compared to heart disease, heart disease is what kills people.

00:54:42.780 Kills like half of people.

00:54:44.120 It's the number one cause of death by far for all Americans.

00:54:47.900 And yet we totally ignore it.

00:54:49.220 And so I traveled down there and what really stuck out to me is that they're basically eating, they have a wide variety of foods they're eating, but it all comes down to that they mostly just have one ingredient and they're not super delicious.

00:55:03.180 So there's not as much incentive to just eat and eat meat like we do when things are really delicious.

00:55:09.140 And not to mention that foods that have just one ingredient like fruits, vegetables, lean meats, you know, rice, potatoes, plantains, things like that.

00:55:18.920 Those are so much more filling and you just can't eat that much of them where like I could sit down right now and probably smash an entire thing of Doritos.

00:55:26.680 If I really put my mind to it, if I sat down with an equivalent bag of like carrots and broccoli, dude, I'd get like an eighth of the way through it and be like, oh my God, this is so much.

00:55:35.860 There's no way I can do this.

00:55:37.600 And you also talk about you explored your shopping binge you went on during the COVID lockdowns.

00:55:43.500 And I think it's a perfect example of the scarcity loop when it comes to stuff.

00:55:46.580 You were under stimulated.

00:55:47.860 You couldn't go out anywhere.

00:55:49.300 And then you had this scarcity loop.

00:55:51.340 You had the opportunity.

00:55:52.320 You're on Amazon.

00:55:53.540 You had unpredictable rewards.

00:55:54.820 You never knew what you're going to find on some website saying, hey, here's this product you need to buy to help you navigate the pandemic.

00:56:01.400 And then you're able to do it fast.

00:56:02.880 And you said the counter that that scarcity loop when it comes to our stuff, you had this neat heuristic.

00:56:08.700 You need to start thinking of your stuff as gear.

00:56:11.180 How can thinking of your stuff as gear help you overcome the scarcity loop when it comes to buying crap? 0.57

00:56:17.900 Yeah.

00:56:18.420 Well, I think that there's a handful of reasons why people buy.

00:56:21.240 One is because the item is a piece of gear, meaning that it is helping us accomplish something, right?

00:56:28.400 It serves this higher purpose of allowing us to do something greater.

00:56:33.640 There's also buying for status.

00:56:36.300 So this is like when you buy, say, the really nice, the car that's nicer than your neighbors because you kind of want to one up another person.

00:56:42.540 And we see this all all the time with I mean, it's it's what luxury brands really thrive on.

00:56:47.700 You can also buy something to belong.

00:56:49.540 So this could be something like a football jersey.

00:56:52.260 So you can, you know, be with your friends and like you're all in your Cleveland Browns jerseys or whatever it is.

00:56:58.020 And then there's also for boredom.

00:56:59.480 Like, let's be honest.

00:57:00.320 I think that during the pandemic, you saw such a spike in purchasing because to how you put it is that people were understimulated.

00:57:08.000 It was like, well, you got to do something.

00:57:10.020 And, you know, we're creatures who evolved to add, who evolved to acquire items when we could.

00:57:16.200 And so in that setting, we're like, OK, yeah, I'll just kind of do what I've always done and just buy some stuff.

00:57:20.720 But I think so much of what we buy now is we don't need it.

00:57:24.020 You know, the average home now has 10,000 items and the vast I think the world as a whole spends a trillion or more dollars on stuff they don't need anymore.

00:57:32.900 It's like this insane amount of stuff that people have.

00:57:35.480 And I found myself going down this rabbit hole.

00:57:38.380 Yeah.

00:57:38.760 During the pandemic, like I'm on first name.

00:57:40.500 I was on a first name basis with my UPS guy.

00:57:43.560 It was like, what the hell is happening here?

00:57:45.780 And I learned about the scarcity loop.

00:57:47.660 And that, of course, was it.

00:57:48.840 Right.

00:57:48.980 I was using stuff.

00:57:50.340 I was getting caught in this like search for random items.

00:57:53.480 And when I'd find it, it was like, oh, exciting.

00:57:55.640 Jackpot.

00:57:56.280 And then it would arrive.

00:57:57.020 And then I'd repeat the cycle again.

00:57:59.380 So seeing your items and purchases through the lens of gear rather than stuff, I think is a useful heuristic for saying, OK, what is this allowing me to accomplish?

00:58:09.560 Because a piece of gear is ultimately a tool to accomplish something bigger.

00:58:12.580 So framing, reframing my purchases through that has been pretty useful for me to not just buy as much stuff that I don't need, which has saved a lot of money.

00:58:21.940 Yeah.

00:58:22.040 And you also talk about minimalism can turn into a scarcity loop where you're just constantly purging stuff.

00:58:26.800 So you buy the stuff, which feels good.

00:58:29.060 But then also it feels really good to purge.

00:58:30.900 I'm guilty of this.

00:58:32.200 I love purging stuff.

00:58:34.020 And I just throw away stuff that probably shouldn't be thrown away.

00:58:37.700 Like I get carried away.

00:58:39.660 And I end up, you know, my kids are like, Dad, what happened to my homework?

00:58:43.960 And I'm like, oh, well, it was on the floor.

00:58:46.760 So I guess it wasn't important.

00:58:47.980 I threw it away.

00:58:48.600 Sorry.

00:58:49.060 So we have to go dig through the trash.

00:58:50.400 But that's a scarcity loop.

00:58:51.760 Like the whole minimalism thing can turn into a scarcity loop, too.

00:58:55.060 Yeah.

00:58:55.240 I talked to a psychologist who studies how humans relate to their possessions.

00:59:01.380 And, you know, her first point that was like, look, in the grand scheme of things, we're all hoarders today in the grand scheme of time and space.

00:59:07.660 Like we all have way more things than anyone has ever had in the past.

00:59:11.220 And that applies to all socioeconomic groups.

00:59:14.420 For the first time ever, even people who are in sort of lower socioeconomic status can compulsively buy.

00:59:21.180 You know, that's never been possible.

00:59:23.120 But as it relates to minimalism, she had this amazing point that was, you know, when I study how people relate to possessions, there's essentially kind of two groups.

00:59:31.500 There's people who are accumulators.

00:59:33.440 So these are people who kind of buy and buy and buy.

00:59:35.940 They don't like to get rid of stuff.

00:59:37.520 They tend to have a lot of stuff.

00:59:39.240 But then there's this other group which are more minimalist people.

00:59:43.120 And what happens with them is they get really into organizing things, purging things, making sure things are just so.

00:59:51.100 Now, the driving force between both of these, she thinks, is that it gives people a sense of control.

00:59:56.460 So if you're buying a lot of stuff, you're like, okay, I can solve any problem that comes my way.

00:59:59.940 I'm using this to sort of deal with stress.

01:00:02.240 But with minimalism, it's often the same thing.

01:00:04.740 It's like people are stressed and having too much makes them even more stressed.

01:00:08.240 And so they purge it.

01:00:09.980 But what happens with everyone is that people kind of slowly acquire over time.

01:00:14.580 And then we go, oh, my God, I have too much.

01:00:16.720 And so then we're like, you know, we go on the minimalist blog and we're like, I need to be a minimalist.

01:00:20.760 Then we purge all our stuff.

01:00:22.360 And then we kind of slowly start to reaccumulate it.

01:00:24.720 So her point was that you need to get into the underlying why you either want to accumulate more or purge more stuff in the first place.

01:00:33.540 Because that's how you can eventually end that cycle of buying, purging, buying, purging, buying, purging, buying, purging.

01:00:42.480 Yeah.

01:00:42.900 So one thing you did for this book is you went to a monastery in New Mexico to learn about taming the scarcity brain.

01:00:49.800 What did you learn at this monastery?

01:00:51.920 Yeah.

01:00:52.140 These guys at the monastery were so interesting because, you know, there's so much information out about how to be more happy.

01:00:59.380 And a lot of it is backed by some research or another.

01:01:02.620 There's always new research coming out.

01:01:04.880 And we've got this giant wellness industry in the United States.

01:01:08.840 But what you tend to see is that people are generally less happy than they ever have been in the United States.

01:01:16.280 And it's not just the U.S.

01:01:17.420 I mean, I think we're maybe especially worse off compared to comparable countries.

01:01:21.620 But overall, I think the world is generally becoming unhappier when you look at the data.

01:01:27.060 And these monks in this monastery that I went to are so interesting because they're not doing all these things that I think people think classically will make them happy.

01:01:38.240 They don't own anything.

01:01:39.260 They have a really hard lifestyle and the fact that they get up at 3 a.m. to pray and they pray seven times a day.

01:01:45.740 They do four hours of hard labor every single day.

01:01:49.960 Their meals, they don't eat that much.

01:01:51.800 They're asked to, like, you know, don't overdo it with food.

01:01:54.820 They're also silent for most of the day.

01:01:57.300 So they're not exceedingly social.

01:01:59.440 Like, they're around people, but it's not like they're, you know, yucking it up all day.

01:02:03.380 And yet, despite all that, despite the hardship and the sort of austerity of their life, when researchers do studies on them and ask them about their subjective well-being, which is kind of the science-y way of saying happiness, they always score far higher than the general public.

01:02:20.140 And so that shouldn't make sense, right?

01:02:22.280 It's like you look at that life on paper, you're like, oh, man, that sounds like a prison sentence.

01:02:25.440 But I think the takeaway with them is that they're not worried about being happy.

01:02:30.520 They realize that a lot of the things that we traditionally think are going to make us happy, like the next possession, like getting the bigger house, like having the nice meal out, like all these different sort of accumulations.

01:02:41.900 They call them, they call it worldliness.

01:02:44.460 It ultimately doesn't lead to lasting happiness.

01:02:47.260 And really, they're not even focused on happiness at all.

01:02:50.360 They really are dedicated to giving themselves over to something larger than themselves, to helping others, to working towards a sort of common goal of getting close to, again, something bigger than themselves, and just chasing that.

01:03:07.980 And as they've done that, sort of doing the next right thing, they've found themselves happy.

01:03:13.840 And I think that that's a good lesson for all of us.

01:03:16.320 The lesson, I think, for the average person is that sort of chasing things you think are going to make you happy that maybe you read is like, oh, this is the key to happiness.

01:03:25.660 That's probably going to backfire in the long run.

01:03:27.340 And instead, it's like, kind of do the next right thing that helps another person, that gets you out of yourself.

01:03:33.420 It may not always be easy, but ultimately, that seems to be what is most rewarding for humans.

01:03:39.840 Right.

01:03:40.320 I think the monks would say, you know, like St. Augustine talked about this.

01:03:43.980 He said that famous prayer, like, our hearts are restless, Lord, until they rest in you.

01:03:48.780 So, like, I think, like, these monks would say, well, you know, all these desires for, I don't know, social status, for food, for sex, for stuff.

01:03:58.660 He says, basically, those are like, I think they would say, like, we all desire the good, like, capital G, good.

01:04:05.120 Yeah.

01:04:05.380 Getting Instagram likes, nicotine, alcohol.

01:04:08.280 Those are our attempts at trying to get the good, but, like, it's not going to give you the good.

01:04:12.440 And you see this in other faith traditions, like Buddhism.

01:04:14.640 That's all Buddhism is about, is that desire is what leads to unhappiness.

01:04:18.780 And you got to somehow figure out how to, you get to see beyond the illusion that worldly fulfillment of desires will bring you happiness and realize that's not going to be the case.

01:04:28.480 So, you got to look for something bigger.

01:04:30.560 And, yeah, I mean, that's, like, this stuff of overcoming the scarcity brain, humans have been trying to figure this out for millennia.

01:04:37.620 Oh, totally.

01:04:38.140 And I think that what's different today is that we have such an abundance of these things that we're naturally drawn to, you know, sort of those worldly things.

01:04:48.100 As the monks would put it.

01:04:49.160 And we also have, live in a world where we've got laboratories figuring out how to push us into more of those things.

01:04:55.620 Whether it's a food laboratory, whether it's the casino laboratory, whether it's a laboratory in Palo Alto, watching every swipe you do and how long you look at every photo so they can give you more of what you want.

01:05:06.040 I think that's the real challenge of today.

01:05:08.540 It's a much harder world to navigate.

01:05:11.340 Now, the upside of it is that it's a really promising world in the sense that, like, you know, people don't die of infections anymore.

01:05:19.020 You're not going to starve.

01:05:20.620 There's all these things that, you know, used to be really hard about everyday life that we don't have to deal with anymore.

01:05:25.640 But within that promise, there is a lot of peril.

01:05:29.400 And figuring out how to navigate that, I think, is challenging.

01:05:32.460 But that is ultimately what it means to live a good life, is trying to improve yourself as a human and realizing that it's not always going to be easy.

01:05:41.060 And that the journey is what's important, not arriving at this ultimate destination.

01:05:46.700 Well, Michael, this has been a great conversation.

01:05:48.280 Where can people go to learn more about the book and your work?

01:05:50.180 Yeah, the book is called Scarcity Brain, and my website is Easter Michael.

01:05:55.780 And then I also send out a three-times-weekly newsletter called 2%, and that's at TWOPCT.com.

01:06:03.100 Fantastic.

01:06:03.580 Well, Michael Easter, thanks for your time.

01:06:04.600 It's been a pleasure.

01:06:05.880 Yeah, thank you.

01:06:07.980 My guest name is Michael Easter.

01:06:09.380 He's the author of the book Scarcity Brain.

01:06:11.160 It's available on Amazon.com and bookstores everywhere.

01:06:13.580 You can find more information about his work at his website, eastermichael.com.

01:06:17.020 Also, check out our show notes at aom.is slash scarcity brain.

01:06:20.180 Where you find links to resources, where you delve deeper into this topic.

01:06:30.280 Well, that wraps up another edition of the AOM Podcast.

01:06:33.200 Make sure to check out our website at artofmanly.com.

01:06:35.340 Where you find our podcast archives, as well as thousands of articles that we've written over the years about pretty much anything you think of.

01:06:41.120 And if you haven't done so already, I'd appreciate it if you take one minute to give us a review on Apple Podcasts or Spotify.

01:06:45.260 It helps out a lot.

01:06:46.020 And if you've done that already, thank you.

01:06:47.360 Please consider sharing the show with a friend or family member who would think we get something out of it.

01:06:51.420 As always, thank you for the continued support.

01:06:53.480 And until next time, this is Brett McKay.

01:06:55.160 Remind you to listen to the AOM Podcast, but put what you've heard into action.

01:06:58.800 Thank you.

01:07:02.540 Thank you.

01:07:21.420 Thank you.

The Art of Manliness - September 27, 2023

Break Your Bad Habits by Escaping the Scarcity Loop

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