In this episode of the Art of Manliness podcast, my guest says it's all thanks to a scarcity loop that we're hardwired to follow. Once you understand how this loop works, you can start taking action to resist the compulsive cravings that sabotage your life. Michael Easter is the author of Scarcity Brain: Fix Your Craving Mindset and Rewind Your Habits to Thrive With Enough.
00:25:29.640And I think that what becomes so hard for everyone is that phones are now your everything device.
00:25:36.920You know, it's very hard to, to sort of create silos around these behaviors because, you know,
00:25:45.160the 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.
00:25:54.520It's this device that gets used for so many things.
00:25:56.420And I think what tends to happen is that you go to check email and then you're like, oh, I'm on here.
00:25:59.600I'll, you know, I'll check this random social media platform.
00:26:02.460And you get, and then you look up and 15 minutes have gone by because these things are designed to be so hyper stimulating.
00:26:08.380Or you're like, you know what, I'll check the news.
00:26:10.780You 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.
00:26:19.340And, 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.
00:26:28.880And 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.
00:26:44.880It 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.
00:26:52.820I do think that that is very valuable because you are seeing, you know, rates of anxiety and really spike.
00:27:08.580Play sports, get physically active, that sort of thing.
00:27:11.100So 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.
00:27:21.960And 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.
00:27:32.760Yeah, 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.
00:27:48.680But 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.
00:28:02.440So 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.
00:28:17.040So 75%, that's a pretty significant number.
00:28:20.280And there was another survey that found over 10 years, 86% of people who struggle with addiction ended up getting clean.
00:28:26.800The 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.
00:28:34.600And as you mentioned before, I mean, I feel relatively qualified talking about this because I'm a person who is now sober.
00:28:41.940And 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.
00:28:58.300It's very unpredictable trying to get the drugs, trying to see what's going to happen after you have a bunch of drinks.
00:29:03.700And then you repeat the behavior, right?
00:29:05.560You get kind of sucked into a cycle of getting drugs again or waiting for the next drink.
00:29:10.000The U.S. has had different viewpoints on addiction throughout the years, but they tend to be two different viewpoints.
00:29:16.200The first is that addicts are bad people.
00:29:21.020Or now, which started in the 90s, is that addiction is a brain disease.
00:29:26.100And I traveled to Iraq to understand some of the new thinking around addiction.
00:29:33.020So a lot of new thinkers are coming out and basically saying, addiction, of course, is not a moral failing by any means.
00:29:40.440You're not a bad person if you're, you know, an addict.
00:29:43.420But it also doesn't seem to be a brain disease.
00:29:46.620And that's because if it's a brain disease, you can't really cure it, right?
00:29:50.460You can't respond to incentives if it's a brain disease.
00:29:53.080It's like Alzheimer's is a brain disease.
00:29:55.060And 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.
00:30:06.280But 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.
00:30:18.040So I think addiction is more of a symptom than anything else.
00:30:21.740Drugs effectively get used to deal with life's problems, right?
00:30:27.900It could be just general discomfort with life or people might have started using because they have some past trauma or whatever it might be.
00:30:34.440And Iraq is a good case study of this because you had basically no people using drugs in the country.
00:30:39.740And then the U.S. invaded and this caused obviously a lot of trauma in people's lives, right?
00:30:46.000And 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.
00:30:55.900So there's now billions of these Captagon pills floating around the Middle East and they're akin to methamphetamine, basically.
00:31:05.540You 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?
00:31:15.500It'll comfort you from the hardships of life.
00:31:18.680And so you start to see addiction really spike in Iraq.
00:31:23.180And I think that that has been the American story, too.
00:31:25.580I 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.
00:31:35.220And then they moved out of town and all hope was lost.
00:31:38.480It's like, okay, well, life is really hard.
00:31:40.420And then you have an influx of opioids.
00:31:42.540And it's like, well, this will fix my problems in the short term.
00:31:44.700And the problem could be that you don't have a job.
00:31:51.760And 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.
00:32:04.320So 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.
00:32:13.880Because there's this huge heroin epidemic among U.S. soldiers in Vietnam.
00:32:17.400And so Nixon came in and goes, I don't want all these addicts coming back to the U.S.
00:32:22.980If you are a soldier in Vietnam and you want to come back home, you have to pass a urine test.
00:32:28.640And so if the idea that an addict can never get clean is true, we would have left 25% of soldiers in Vietnam, right?
00:32:38.640Nearly every single soldier produced a clean urine test.
00:32:41.560And when they got home, 95% of them remained clean.
00:32:45.520And the 5% that didn't remain clean tended to be soldiers who had used drugs before the war.
00:32:49.520So 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.
00:32:57.260Like it allowed them to sort of forget that problem while they were using.
00:33:01.780But once they were out of that hell, the problem was solved and they didn't need to use drugs anymore.
00:33:06.240And so I think that that's kind of a larger metaphor for the underlying reasons why people tend to use 2XS.
00:33:11.660Because people have problems and drugs are a pretty quick and easy way to solve your problems, at least in the short term.
00:33:18.480But the issue is that they cause long-term problems.
00:33:21.620We're going to take a quick break for your word from our sponsors.
00:33:29.800So 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.
00:33:41.280Like 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?
00:33:48.140Or like even like what happened with you, right?
00:33:49.880There's something happened that you're able to get out of that scarcity loop.
00:34:55.700But if someone starts drinking when they're 21 or after, their risk is, I think, 6%, which is very minimal, right?
00:35:04.260And that's because these changes in the brain, things are happening then.
00:35:08.460So if you introduce a substance then, it makes you more likely to want to use that substance to excess later on in your life.
00:35:15.220And so over time, what happens is that people can effectively grow out of it.
00:35:19.540It's like they might use when they're in their 20s and they're going, you know, this helps me solve my problems.
00:35:25.000But 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.
00:35:36.680I'm not saying that it's easy at any point.
00:35:38.800It is hard, but that's what you tend to see.
00:35:41.200For 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.
00:36:38.380I was living in a town I didn't really want to live in.
00:36:41.020I didn't see my friends all that much.
00:36:42.720I just wasn't doing that interesting of things.
00:36:45.460And what was interesting is if I would drink, all of a sudden things became unpredictable, right?
00:36:51.960It 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.
00:37:02.420You know, if I go to a bar and I start drinking, it's like, who the hell knows what's going to happen?
00:37:07.080I might close this place down and be belting out Garth Brooks at 3 a.m. with some people that I just met.
00:37:12.940Or I might, you know, connect with some person I otherwise wouldn't have.
00:37:17.640Or I could sit down at my desk and write something that I otherwise wouldn't have sober.
00:37:21.440So 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.
00:37:32.340So 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.
00:37:39.580But 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.
00:37:50.260Because I've always been drawn to extreme experiences.
00:37:53.160But if your extreme experiences come from drinking, you're going to find yourself with some problems.
00:37:58.880So I had to find new ways to sort of deal with that.
00:38:01.620Started spending a lot more time doing things like, you know, backcountry hunting or traveling.
00:38:07.940I got more into working out, started picking up more sort of extreme exercise.
00:38:12.840I 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.
00:38:29.000Okay, 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?
00:38:40.500And then solve it in another way with something else.
00:39:13.180Some people go to those sorts of programs and it doesn't work for them.
00:39:17.600But they might find a group that they rock climb with and they get really into rock climbing.
00:39:21.320And all of a sudden they're like, oh, I have this thing in my life that's providing me with something bigger.
00:39:25.680Or they get married or they have kids or they get a new job or they decide they're going to go get educated.
00:39:30.100It's the guy that I talked to the head psychiatrist in Iraq.
00:39:33.780And 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.
00:39:43.200And we need to find a way for you to improve your life.
00:39:48.000I want you to try all these different things and we're going to see what takes.
00:39:51.820But it ultimately is going to take a little bit of effort.
00:39:54.920But on the other side of that is growth.
00:39:57.580So 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.
00:40:13.400So what's going on there with quantification, creating new scarcity loops for us?
00:40:19.660His name is T Nguyen, which is spelled T-H-I space N-G-U-Y-E-N.
00:40:26.080And he's up at the University of Utah.
00:40:28.100And 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.
00:40:41.560Now, to understand this, I will give you something of a damning admission.
00:40:47.900And that's that I got this Instagram habit, right?
00:40:51.500So I download Instagram initially years ago because it's like you download it and like, oh, okay, great.
00:40:58.300I can share photos of my life with my friends and my family.
00:42:26.820So, you know, he joined Twitter just to sort of communicate with people like we all do at first.
00:42:32.000And then he had a few tweets go viral.
00:42:34.420And what ended up happening after that is that, so this guy's a philosopher.
00:42:38.100His job is to think really deep thoughts, like to go down the rabbit hole of thoughts and ideas.
00:42:44.440And he found that after he had this tweet go viral, what ends up happening is he starts, he'll have a thought.
00:42:49.940And instead of following it down that rabbit hole that it needs to go down for him to be a good philosopher,
00:42:54.880he starts thinking, how could I turn this into a short tweet that would maybe go viral?
00:43:00.340Well, it changes his entire experience of thought, right?
00:43:04.820And 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,
00:44:53.300You want to be able to unpack other people's arguments, unpack your own arguments.
00:44:56.900You want to be able to question yourself.
00:44:58.060You also want to learn how to be social.
00:44:59.560You need to learn how to get your stuff together so you can turn things in on time.
00:45:03.300You have to balance work and other stuff.
00:45:05.920You have to learn how to not be a jerk at parties.
00:45:08.040There's a million different things that you learn at college.
00:45:10.500But 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.
00:45:22.380Not whether they learn the material, not whether they've been able to think critically and prepare for this future out in the employment world.
00:45:42.320They're going to do things a little differently to sort of test the edges and really think.
00:45:46.200They tend to get, you know, a B plus or A minus.
00:45:48.420But it's the A students that get recruited by companies.
00:45:51.520And the A students tend to just simply be more robotic.
00:45:53.780It'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.
00:45:59.860Well, 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.
00:46:14.700What you're trying to do with these things, you're trying to put a number on something that's otherwise ambiguous.
00:46:20.400Like 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.
00:46:27.800But what these numbers do is that they give you, it gives you something concrete, but they may not, they might not be accurate, right?
00:46:34.840Like 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.
00:46:52.740You know, life is very complicated and complex.
00:46:55.040It'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.
00:47:06.200If 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.
00:47:18.880I mean, all these big decisions, they're ambiguous.
00:47:20.840You 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.
00:47:28.940The problem is, of course, they don't.
00:47:32.280It's like, you know, with whoop, it's it all goes into this black box algorithm.
00:48:16.260It'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.
00:48:25.020Like, you know, if you have a sleep tracker, when you wake up in the morning, you're probably checking that thing first thing.
00:48:38.180So, 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.
00:48:47.880You know, the point of whoop is to help you, I guess, increase your fitness.
00:48:51.560But it's like, well, why do you want to increase your fitness?
00:48:53.640It's not to score points on your whoop.
00:48:55.120It'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.
00:49:02.400It could be being around for when your grandkids are around so you can crawl on the ground.
00:49:05.600It 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.
00:49:12.380And I think that sometimes we forget that.
00:49:14.740We don't define, what are all these reasons I'm doing this everyday behavior in the first place?
00:49:19.160And we tend to just default to obsessing about whether we got the right or wrong number of points.
00:50:08.700Because you experience that status defeat that the numbers gives you.
00:50:13.060When, if you just had ignored that or just didn't even have those numbers, like, you wouldn't have been affected.
00:50:17.700So, like, how do you avoid those scarcity loops, especially when it comes to social status in your own life?
00:50:22.500Yeah, so the three parts of the loop are opportunity, unpredictable rewards, and quick repeatability.
00:50:29.220So, to me, what gamification does is it really changes the opportunity.
00:50:33.560It'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.
00:50:45.680You 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?
00:51:05.020So, 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.
00:51:15.500So, 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.
00:52:20.340So, 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.
00:52:27.560Turns out this is also happening in the food industry.
00:52:30.000There's labs across the country figuring out how do we get people to eat more faster.
00:52:33.840I 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.
00:52:45.360So, 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.
00:52:54.460And so, in the case of junk food, it really sells well because there is such a wide variety, right?
00:53:01.680It's like if you go to the grocery store right now, there's like 75 different kinds of Doritos.
00:53:05.820And that makes us more likely to overeat when we have all these different amazing tasting foods.
00:53:10.640So, 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.
00:53:26.080And also, changing the velocity, the quick repeatability.
00:53:29.680So, 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.
00:53:40.540Like 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.
00:53:49.100And 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.
00:53:57.100But in one group, the food will be hyper-processed, ultra-processed.
00:54:01.460On the other, it'll be very minimally processed.
00:54:03.460And the people who are eating the ultra-processed food eat about 500 extra calories a day.
00:54:07.940They end up gaining weight and that it's opposite in the group that eats the less processed stuff.
00:54:13.760And 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.
00:54:26.060So this is important because, you know, the average American, they worry, if you look at the data, they really worry about cancer.
00:54:33.380They really worry about things like mass shootings.
00:54:37.140It's not that those things aren't dangerous, but compared to heart disease, heart disease is what kills people.
00:54:49.220And 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.
00:55:03.180So there's not as much incentive to just eat and eat meat like we do when things are really delicious.
00:55:09.140And not to mention that foods that have just one ingredient like fruits, vegetables, lean meats, you know, rice, potatoes, plantains, things like that.
00:55:18.920Those 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.
00:55:26.680If 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.
00:55:54.820You 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.
00:56:36.300So 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.
00:56:42.540And we see this all all the time with I mean, it's it's what luxury brands really thrive on.
00:57:00.320I think that during the pandemic, you saw such a spike in purchasing because to how you put it is that people were understimulated.
00:57:08.000It was like, well, you got to do something.
00:57:10.020And, you know, we're creatures who evolved to add, who evolved to acquire items when we could.
00:57:16.200And 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.
00:57:20.720But I think so much of what we buy now is we don't need it.
00:57:24.020You 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.
00:57:32.900It's like this insane amount of stuff that people have.
00:57:35.480And I found myself going down this rabbit hole.
00:57:59.380So 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?
00:58:09.560Because a piece of gear is ultimately a tool to accomplish something bigger.
00:58:12.580So 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.
00:58:55.240I talked to a psychologist who studies how humans relate to their possessions.
00:59:01.380And, 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.
00:59:07.660Like we all have way more things than anyone has ever had in the past.
00:59:11.220And that applies to all socioeconomic groups.
00:59:14.420For the first time ever, even people who are in sort of lower socioeconomic status can compulsively buy.
00:59:23.120But 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.
01:01:17.420I mean, I think we're maybe especially worse off compared to comparable countries.
01:01:21.620But overall, I think the world is generally becoming unhappier when you look at the data.
01:01:27.060And 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.
01:01:59.440Like, they're around people, but it's not like they're, you know, yucking it up all day.
01:02:03.380And 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.
01:02:20.140And so that shouldn't make sense, right?
01:02:22.280It's like you look at that life on paper, you're like, oh, man, that sounds like a prison sentence.
01:02:25.440But I think the takeaway with them is that they're not worried about being happy.
01:02:30.520They 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.
01:02:41.900They call them, they call it worldliness.
01:02:44.460It ultimately doesn't lead to lasting happiness.
01:02:47.260And really, they're not even focused on happiness at all.
01:02:50.360They 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.
01:03:07.980And as they've done that, sort of doing the next right thing, they've found themselves happy.
01:03:13.840And I think that that's a good lesson for all of us.
01:03:16.320The 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.
01:03:25.660That's probably going to backfire in the long run.
01:03:27.340And instead, it's like, kind of do the next right thing that helps another person, that gets you out of yourself.
01:03:33.420It may not always be easy, but ultimately, that seems to be what is most rewarding for humans.
01:03:40.320I think the monks would say, you know, like St. Augustine talked about this.
01:03:43.980He said that famous prayer, like, our hearts are restless, Lord, until they rest in you.
01:03:48.780So, 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.
01:03:58.660He says, basically, those are like, I think they would say, like, we all desire the good, like, capital G, good.
01:04:08.280Those are our attempts at trying to get the good, but, like, it's not going to give you the good.
01:04:12.440And you see this in other faith traditions, like Buddhism.
01:04:14.640That's all Buddhism is about, is that desire is what leads to unhappiness.
01:04:18.780And 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.
01:04:28.480So, you got to look for something bigger.
01:04:30.560And, yeah, I mean, that's, like, this stuff of overcoming the scarcity brain, humans have been trying to figure this out for millennia.
01:04:38.140And 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.
01:04:49.160And we also have, live in a world where we've got laboratories figuring out how to push us into more of those things.
01:04:55.620Whether 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.
01:05:06.040I think that's the real challenge of today.
01:05:20.620There's all these things that, you know, used to be really hard about everyday life that we don't have to deal with anymore.
01:05:25.640But within that promise, there is a lot of peril.
01:05:29.400And figuring out how to navigate that, I think, is challenging.
01:05:32.460But 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.
01:05:41.060And that the journey is what's important, not arriving at this ultimate destination.
01:05:46.700Well, Michael, this has been a great conversation.
01:05:48.280Where can people go to learn more about the book and your work?
01:05:50.180Yeah, the book is called Scarcity Brain, and my website is Easter Michael.
01:05:55.780And then I also send out a three-times-weekly newsletter called 2%, and that's at TWOPCT.com.
01:06:09.380He's the author of the book Scarcity Brain.
01:06:11.160It's available on Amazon.com and bookstores everywhere.
01:06:13.580You can find more information about his work at his website, eastermichael.com.
01:06:17.020Also, check out our show notes at aom.is slash scarcity brain.
01:06:20.180Where you find links to resources, where you delve deeper into this topic.
01:06:30.280Well, that wraps up another edition of the AOM Podcast.
01:06:33.200Make sure to check out our website at artofmanly.com.
01:06:35.340Where 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.
01:06:41.120And 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.