The Scarcity Brain: Michael Easter On How To Rewire Your Habits to Thrive with Enough

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to capture people's attention. Every app that I spend too much time on, it's what makes it work. I sat down with Michael Easter, a professor, an investigative journalist, a behavior change expert, and the author of The Comfort Crisis and Scarsody Brain. Our brain is almost a quote-unquote program to sort of fall into this thing because it was so important for our survival for all of time. This conversation will leave you, I think, with a new lens on the

world that you will never be able to unsee. If you're always on media, your ideas are coming from others. If you don't have the technology, you can't function well on society. It's almost like we've kind of become a slave to these things, which is probably the most depressing thing I've ever said in my life. Really happy to have you here today. I've been looking forward to meeting you for a long time. I love the work that you've been doing. It dovetails perfectly into so many subjects

that I care about. I've heard you on a number of other podcasts, so it's the life of me, and I love you. Thank you for coming. Likewise, thanks for having me here, man. You're a sober guy. I'm a sober guy. You have a pretty interesting backstory of family history with that, don't you? Yeah, I do. The family story is that my dad went to rehab and my mom got sober. I'll give you some background on that is that my dad goes to rehab and my parents met when

they're in their partying phase. The rehab facility gives my mom a book. They say, I want you to read this book because this is what your father or her husband is going to be reading while he's in rehab. If she reads this book, she'll kind of know what he's going through. She's at home one night. She's sitting in the bathtub and drinking a gin and tonic and she goes, I'll read the rehab book here. She starts reading it, flipping

page after page, and eventually she just goes, oh, wait a minute. This totally all applies to me as well. So she realizes she needs to get sober too. My dad managed to say sober for about two, three weeks, which was just enough time to impregnate my mom and skip town as actively addicted people tend to do. But my mom has stayed sober ever since. Wow. Yeah. The message is for those who want it not necessarily for those who need it

totally. Yeah. And so do you have a relationship with your dad? I don't. No. I think I may be seeing him twice in my life. I don't think I've heard from him since I was maybe eight. But you know, part of me getting sober too is I never really felt many resentments toward him. I've sort of come to view it as, you know, maybe he was doing me a favor realizing that he didn't have the capability to be in that role in any way that was going to do

any good. Right. I would rather have someone not be in my life than someone who's in my life who was maybe sort of a drag on my life. So I'll give him props for that. Yeah. Well, that's a charitable interpretation. We try. So how did you find yourself in a problematic relationship with substances that required sobriety yourself? You know, the first time that I ever drank, I was maybe 15. And it was just right out of the gate. I was like, oh,

this is awesome. Like this is a great time. Alcohol just allowed me to really feel sort of wild and free, sort of like I could explore the edges of life, if you will. I was always the type of person where my favorite drink was the next one. And when you drink like that, that can lead to some long term consequences. Eventually, I would say that, you know, my drinking, I would always over drink, but it was within the realm of acceptability,

probably until I was maybe 23, maybe 22. At that point, I just started tipping into something darker, I would say. And it took me a while to get sober. I mean, I had fits and starts for sure. I came up with all kinds of sort of strange solutions to try and drink less

shocking. Yeah. Shocking that you would do that. Yeah. Shocking. Like, oh, maybe if I just, you know, here's a crazy one, just because to give you an example of how a person like me's mind works, I started the night and I go, okay, I got these six coins and I'm going to put them all in my back left pocket. And every time I have a drink, I'm going to transfer a coin to my right pocket. And when I have no more coins in my back left pocket, then

I'm done. Then I can't drink anymore. So I go out to the bar and, you know, I have my first drink. So I transfer the coin. I have another one I transfer the coin. And then someone goes, Hey, you care if I buy you around? And my brain goes, well, that doesn't count as the back pocket one because I didn't buy it. Right. And so then I'm coming up with all of different ways to like not transfer the coins. And you're just like, how does someone

to mind work like that? Right. But it doesn't. So, you know, the answer for me is that I had to get sober. And I was 27 or 28 when I got sober. And it really was for me realizing that, you know, I kind of had a moment where I could see downfield that if I were to continue that behavior that I was probably going to die early. Now, I realized that that would probably be easier in the short term because, you know, for me, nothing fixes a problem

like the first drink. But it wasn't going to be a good path. And I kind of saw that I had this opportunity to really just like something switched to my head. I was just like, I was kind of in to get sober. And I just started doing work to make that happen. And thank God it did. Did you do that through AA and kind of traditional 12 step or did you have some alternative modality? Yeah. Yeah. I haven't actually talked about AA, but since

I'm on this podcast, yeah. So I called my mom actually. That was for me when it was like, okay, you're going to do something about this, right? Because my mom never had any clue that I had a drinking problem. So I wake up that morning, everything's a mess. I'm like, like I said, I could see downfield and I called her and I just said, hey, like, I need to talk to you. I have a drinking problem. And she's just like, what? I'm like,

yeah. And I tell give her some details. And she's like, oh, okay. Well, here's what I did when I was in your position. And that led me to AA. I got active in the program. I found a really kick ass sponsor, really great guy, fascinating guy because he had terminal four cancel. And I had no idea until three months in that I've been working with him. And that just blew my mind. I'm like, you know, the clock is ticking. And you're devoting

some of those ticks to like this idiot right here. Like that just blew my mind. And I think events like that kind of make you realize how serious that is, but also make you very grateful. Yeah. That's beautiful. I mean, that's a perfect example of service in action. And you being someone who probably felt like this is so indulgent of me to

be bothering this guy who has real problems, right? But recognizing perhaps later as you become more recovered that him talking to you and him not having to obsess on his own problems was of service to him as well. Yeah. Which is kind of how it works. Yeah, I really amazing. Cool. And I really owe my life to him a lot of ways. That's beautiful. Well, I certainly relate to your interior experience. Yeah. Big girl, that stuff out in the insanity

of the alcoholic brain. But you know, I think that in looking at your work and reading your books, it's clear like this sort of recovery message is interlineated like throughout everything that you do. Like it's pretty clear. Anybody who's sober can identify that.

And I think, you know, as a sober person, anybody who who has achieved or maintained sobriety has experienced that journey from kind of broken to whole or from despair to repair and understands that discomfort is sort of the price to a better life and pain as a catalyst to growth. And everything you want is on the other side of hard and discipline as freedom and all these kind of tropes that we hear about. And that's certainly a huge

part of the comfort crisis, you know, aspect of the work that you've done. This idea that life improves and in lockstep with your willingness to invite hardship into your life. Yeah. I mean, I do think the story of a lot of improvement in improving your life in the context of today is that you often have to go through short term discomfort to get

a long term benefit. So in the comfort crisis, you know, I talk about how as the world has become more and more comfortable, we've lost a lot of the things that kept us healthy, that kept us happy and humans evolved, I think, to do the next easiest, most comfortable thing. And that's because that made sense for all of time because we evolved in these environments that were uncomfortable, they were hard. And so if you were the type of person who, you

know, I'm not going to move any more than I have to. When I have this food, I'm going to eat a little more than I need. I'm going to try and stay as warm as possible, all these different things. You would have a survival advantage. And I think we still have that DNA that sort of pushes us to do the next easiest, most comfortable thing in a world that has become comfortable in a lot of ways. You know, so you think about movement. We've really

engineered a ton of movement out of our days. Our food system is very different. The fact that not only do we not necessarily have to physically work to get our food, but also the type of food that we eat is very hyper-palible and calorie-dense. And there's good reason for that, right? We evolved to crave those things. We spent 93% of our time indoors, which

humans evolved outside. We were outdoorsy in the sense that we lived outside. And I think that removing us from that has had some mental health repercussions. And yeah, I think you just look at our environments that we live in today. Big picture, they are so much different than how we live for two and a half million years as humans were coming up to this moment that we're in right now.

Right. This moment of overindulgence and overabundance where we have to seek out or create kind of artificial constructs to invite scarcity into our life and combat the incescent messaging that we're exposed to 24-7 that's telling us that the happiness, the purpose, the fulfillment that we seek is on the other side of comfort, luxury, materialism, and relaxation and vacations and material goods and foods that are not in service to our well-being.

Yeah. And I really liked how you said we kind of have to construct these things that keep us healthy. I mean, that's absolutely true. I mean, consider exercise. Exercise is something we made up after the industrial revolution, basically, and put it that scale. It has never made sense to move for the sake of moving for all of time. But now it's like, okay, we engineer movement out of our days. We realize, hey, these people who sit most, they seem to get more sick

than people who still move a lot. So maybe we should make something up that gets the people who are inactive to be active. We'll call it exercise. We'll build a building where you go in and you lift stuff that is heavy for the sake of being heavy and then you run on this motorized belt and blah, blah, like all these things, right? I mean, we just invented it up. We have to invent these constructs to keep ourselves healthy. That doesn't mean they're bad at all. But it is

a really fascinating time. And it's also a great time, right? I would rather have to choose to exercise than to be forced into a serious, serious amount of movement every single day, like people were in the past. So we're in this time where we have so many opportunities to live a completely

wonderful life. But the downside is that there's a lot of temptation hanging around, right? Whether it's in the form of food, of inactivity, of drugs, and alcohol, of whatever it might be, of, you know, pursuing status over social media, like there's a lot of things that can get us in trouble at the same time. Almost everything can get us in trouble. Totally. And it's a scenario in which from the moment

you're born, we're inundated with that kind of programming and messaging. And so the amount of, like, will that you have to summon to combat that to invite goodness into your life is almost superhuman. I was listening to the podcast that you did with Stephen Bartlett and he reflected on that notion as something that made him more compassionate for the human condition. And I think I

agree with that. It's like, it's hard. It's hard when every day, subliminally, we're being programmed to do all these things that are making us more lonely, more disconnected, more addicted, more divorced from the things that make us feel good in body, mind, and spirit. Yeah. I also have a ton of empathy because I think there's also, you know, everybody has something, something they overdue. You can visually see some things and those people get criticized. So for example,

if someone is obese, it's like people will be like, oh man, look at that person. They eat so much or whatever it might be. But I'm sure that that person saying that has something that they overdue that we just aren't aware of. We kind of have a world where everyone has something, everyone's worshiping something. And so I think that realizing that the car's hardware much stacked against us and you yourself probably have something that you're maybe overdueing a

little bit helps generate empathy. Yeah. Of course. I've said this before, but I think the time that we find ourselves in, if there's a silver lining in all of this, has sort of allowed people to have a more broad understanding and empathetic perspective on the nature of addiction. Like when I got sober, things have changed. We're in Los Angeles. It's very permissive around recovery. But still, like if you're an alcoholic or a drug addict, you were like this person over here.

And those are what addicts are like. Or that's what an alcoholic looks like. And now because of social media and the iPhone and our digital interfaces and the gamification of everything, almost every single human being can relate to some level of compulsivity where they lack control over their best interests. Right. And I think that that's allowed people to say, wow, like maybe I'm not

sticking a needle in my arm, but it's the same time. Like I have a greater connection to powerlessness over certain things in my life that I think has bred a little bit more compassion around the notion of what addiction is. And understanding that addiction lives on a spectrum. And everybody can probably identify where they fall on that spectrum somewhere in the middle,

if not to the severe side, which I would count myself as. Right. I think that one thing that's interesting about addiction is like, okay, who determines who's an addict and who isn't? Well, someone with a clipboard, right? It's subjective or an A, they say it's up to you. You have to make that decision for yourself. I mean, even if you look at the DSM-5, they have the, they don't even use the word addiction first off. They use substance use disorders. And they have these

11 criteria, right? And you go down the list and you're like, okay, if you meet, you know, one through four, you have a mild case, if you meet five through, say seven of these, you got a medium case, and you know, eight or more, you've got a severe case of substance use disorder. You know, I see that and I'm like, okay, I started with my drinking and I'm like, oh, yeah, we got a

severe case here. That was a severe. But if I start to run other habits I have that I want to quit through that, I'm like, well, hell, like I'm on the border of, you know, mild and moderate with this thing I do, I'm moderate with this thing I do. And so I think that that makes you realize, I mean, like we've said, two things, cards are stacked against us in a lot of ways. But also,

again, that everyone has kind of something. Yeah. With respect to the comfort crisis aspect of this, yes, we see the health and fitness and the wellness industry exploding as a result of people recognizing that, you know, they need to combat all of these social forces. We see the explosion of not just marathons, but ultra marathons now and all these like crazy super long endurance races where people are paying money and going out of their way and training to do hard things

because on some level the reward there is a greater connection with oneself, one's internal capacity and the benefits of, you know, enduring something difficult and what that does to one's self esteem or sense of their own kind of personal potential and possibility. Yeah. So it's part of the scarcity brand. I talked to this guy who's named Thomas Lental and he's this psychologist who's at the University of Kansas, Kentucky. Sorry. That's a K place. It's a K place.

Yeah. It's one of those K schools. He got his PhD in 1968. So he kind of came up through this line with a BF Skinner and he's in his 80s. He still was in the lab every single day. He's really one of our top minds in psychology. And I was talking to him about this exact phenomenon. And he said, you know, I think that probably humans value things that we have to work harder to get where there's more effort. So if you think about humans in the past where food was scarce, right? You needed

food to survive and you had these times where like, yeah, you could find it. It was easy, but you had other times where you couldn't find it for a day for two days and you're out across this landscape looking for it and it's harsh and you're cold. And you know that if you don't find this food, you're going to die. When you find that food, it's a freaking party, right? It's like the

greatest food you've ever had in your life. It could be the exact same food that you found say a week before, but it was easy to find, but you value that food that was harder to find. We need that to encourage future persistence. This is his idea, right? And you still see this

translated today. So he's a professor and we were talking about students and grades. And he said, you know, I see this in myself, whereas students will value an A they got in say physics far more than the A that they got in say English because the physics A was that much harder to get yet they're worth the exact same point value. So why is that? Because we value things that are

harder for us to achieve. And so I think that when you think about something like an ultra-marth on or whatever it might be having to go through that hardship, that short term discomfort of that, on the other side of that, you get a much deeper and greater reward.

Knowing that and understanding that anybody who's endured something like that has benefited from it, why are we still in a situation where all of the messaging, all of the billboards, all of the television commercials, all of the commercial concerns are informing us otherwise. You know, like why don't we have billboards up that I guess there's no financial, like what is the corporate interest that's going to benefit from telling us to like not buy stuff and like do hard

stuff? I don't know. Yeah. Yeah, I mean, I honestly think that is the main driver is like the corporate interest. But you know, humans came from these environments of scarcity where everything we needed to survive was scarce and it was hard to find. And so if you were the type of person who would overdue what you needed to survive from food to stuff to information to the amount of status

that you could get, that would give you a survival advantage. And I think that that gets preyed upon in our modern world in a way where we have an abundance of all these things that were built to crave. You know, we don't really realize like we don't have an upper governor for those types of things, right? We throw out a third of our food. More than 70% of people are overweight or at least. The average home has more than 10,000 items in it. You can influence millions of people in a single

tweet or Instagram, but well, X now, whatever it might be. And so it's kind of a strange new world for us where we're really having to grapple with abundance. And the other thing is that like, look, in the past, like I was just saying, to get those things that help us survive, whether it's that possession, whether it's that morsel of food, it took that physical buy-in. You had to do a hard thing to get it, right? And now you don't. And so I think that that has changed as well. And we

have an evolutionary mismatch there. Right. All of our evolutionary instincts are now orthogonal to what's in our best interest, which is a very strange experiment to be running at scale on the human race. It's totally Western developed world. It's totally weird. And I think that we have a hard time realizing this. There's this concept in the comfort crisis I write about called prevalence induced concept change. And it basically finds that as humans experience fewer and fewer

problems, we don't actually become more satisfied. We just lower our definition of what we consider a problem. So our problems sort of become more hollowed out over time as the world improves. So it's kind of like today's comfort is going to be tomorrow's discomfort. We're constantly moving the goalposts. And we don't necessarily see this. It all happens unconsciously. So I'll give you an example of this in my life is that for the comfort crisis, I go and I spend a month in the Arctic.

And I've told the story before, but I think it's an important one is that when I get on the plane to fly from Las Vegas up to Alaska so I can go in the Arctic, it's terrible because flying in plain sucks, right? Cher is too small. The movies in the seat back, they suck. The snacks are terrible. The coffee's not good. There's a screaming baby. If you want to go to the bathroom, you got to walk in this tiny little closet, you're trying to go to the bathroom. It's not a fun experience.

Then I go spend a month in the Arctic. And it's like if I want to go to the bathroom, I got to hike out on the tundra and bring the rifle because they're squizzle bears. We just like don't have enough food. So I'm starving. I'm freezing cold the entire time. If I want to drink, I got to hike down to the stream and hike it all the way back up to camp. I'm bored out of my mind the whole time. And so then when I get back on the plane to go from Alaska back to Vegas,

it's like what do you think my experience of that is like? Sure. It's just pure luxury. Oh God, it's the most amazing thing. There's pretzels. I'm just like, oh my God, these are the most amazing pretzels I've ever had. I hadn't sat in a chair for more than a month. So now all of a sudden, you're like, wow, this airplane chair is unbelievably comfortable. Wow. You're watching these movies that are just blowing your mind with how amazing they are because you've done,

you've had literally no stimulation in the form of screens for a month. And so I think it's kind of a long way of saying that one, we live in an amazing time because like, by the way, this is all happening in a tube of steel that's hurtling through the air at like 500 miles an hour. But two, sometimes you need to do things to help you yourself realize that. Because it's like, I had never thought about how amazing planes work, right? I was just like,

yeah, this is like a shitty experience that I have to go through. But they're not. They're absolutely incredible. But we don't necessarily see that because we get born into it. I have a great, great, great, I don't know how many grades are behind it. Aunt, her name is Nelly Unthank. And she was living in Missouri and she was Mormon. So the Mormons were getting driven out of Missouri. Okay. So what they do is they decide we're going to go west.

We're going to go to Utah. So you have all these Mormons who get hand carts, which I have to pull by hand and move across the planes to get to Utah. Now they leave in like April. And it's a four month journey. So by the time it's October, she's right outside of Salt Lake City. She's almost there, like within a hundred miles, well, a blizzard hits and kills both of her parents. It freezes her legs, but she gets rescued. So they bring her to Salt Lake City and she has to get her legs sought off

without any anesthetic. And this is 1850. Four months, by the way, your parents die in the process. And you have to get your legs sought off. And there's these reports about her that she never complained like her entire life. Because that was just how it was. And then I'll get on a plane from St. Louis to Salt Lake City and be like, oh my god, it was 15 minutes late. Yeah. The half life on that experience tends to be very short, too. So the luxurious experience on the return trip

from the Arctic is mind blowing. But how long before you're annoyed the next time you have to go through TSA or something like that, right? Our brains are unable to retain that preferential lens on just how amazing our lives are in this modern world. The other trope with that is how amazed everyone was the first time you could get Wi-Fi on a plane. And then five minutes later, just totally irritation because it doesn't work, right? It's like we are hardwired evolutionarily

in a way that is a total mismatch for the world that we now find ourselves in. Yeah. And I mean, many ways. I mean, I think to your point, it's almost kind of like, I don't know if you had this when you got sober, but sort of the pink cloud where you kind of get out of the worst of it. And then it's like just everything is the best that it could ever be. But then time happens. And that kind

of goes away. So I think it's like, what can you, what can we do to kind of maintain that? You know, I think it's like, if you're going to exercise, you don't just exercise once and like, you got it, right? It's like, how can you consistently find ways to put yourself into moments that make you realize these things and that kind of push back against against all of this? Well, that prevalence induced concept change that you referred to is just an indication that we're not meant to live

problem free. Even though in our minds, we think it wouldn't be great if I could retire to a deserted island and, you know, sit on a lounge chair for the rest of my life, that would not be an ideal experience. We're meant to have problems in our life and confront them and be challenged by them. And as our world becomes more convenient, those problems tend to be more trivial. And we

search them out when we don't actually have them. So there is some kind of evolutionary thing about like seeking out problems, even when we don't really have any real problems that we need to concern ourselves with. Yeah, exactly. The prevalence induced concept change and kind of think about as the science of first world problems is how I like to put it. Once you take a problem away, your brain automatically just looks for the next one. But if things keep getting better over time,

then your problems become sillier and sillier over time. And then you feel guilty and ashamed that you're complaining about those problems. Well, some people do. I wish everyone did. Yeah, that's true. The evolutionary angle though, I mean, I think the scientist who I talked to and his name is David

LaBarrie, he's at Harvard about this. He's the guy who discovered it. He basically said that, you know, if you think about it from an evolutionary context, if you're always looking for the next problem and trying to solve it, that gives you a survival advantage when the world is actually like tough and harsh, right? You're like, okay, do we have enough food? Let's figure this out. Okay, we got enough food. Great. Oh, but what about our shelter? Is it safe? Are we going to survive this?

Okay, we got to fix that, right? If you're constantly looking for problems and the world that is full of them, you're probably going to survive and we still kind of have that adaptation. Right. The antidote being gratitude practice, I think. Yeah. Yeah. And like being of service as a cure to breaking the loop of the self-obsessed mind. Yeah. Yeah. Which is those are just like recovery tools. Mm-hmm. We're brought to you today by Eight Sleep. I take my sleep hygiene. Let's just say a little more

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scarcity brain notion like they're very closely kind of intertwined with each other. So explain what the scarcity loop is and kind of how you became aware of this and interested enough that you thought it would provide the basis for a book. Yeah so the scarcity loop is basically a three part behavior loop that you can think of as like the serial killer of moderation. Because like everyone knows everything is fine and moderation. But then all right yeah like we're

terrible with that. I'm the worst. You know anybody who has any kind of addiction issues, you know that just that is just not applicable. Totally. So I get interested in that question and you know I'm a journalist so I'm just always observing the world and when I see something that doesn't make sense I go well how does that work right. So I live in Las Vegas Las Vegas is a strange town let me first say that. Yeah I don't know how you do it man. Like I would just go out

of my mind. Well if you're someone who likes to observe strange things then hey you found a town for yeah you're never going to run out of me. To me it's like the dark underbelly of the human machine. Yeah in a way I mean look the town wasn't built on winners let's just say that right. But so of all the strange things I see there I've always thought the strangest was the slot machines because people just play them like forever. People play them over and over and over and they're

all across town. They're in like the gas stations the grocery stores whatever you know I'll be filling up my car at like 7 a.m. and there's someone in the gas station playing slot machine. And so I want to know how it works because it doesn't make any damn sense. Everyone knows the house always wins. Like the town wouldn't exist if that weren't true.

So a long story short is that I talked to one person in the gaming industry. Tells me to talk to another you kind of go through this loop of people and I end up at this casino on the other town in Vegas. It's brand new. It's cutting edge. It's got all the coolest stuff. But the wacky part is that it is not a fully open casino to the public. Like it's a real casino but it's used entirely for human behavior research. It's like a living breathing

Skinner box. Yes that's a good that's a great way to put it. I wish I would have used that line in the book. Damn I'm you can you can borrow it. Yeah. It's credit me. I'm consulting you before my next book. So while I'm there I talk to this guy who is a slot machine designer and he teaches courses on how to design games and slot machines. And so he's kind of the savant about like how do you push people into more right this behavior they do over and over and over

despite knowing that they're probably going to lose in the long term. And slot machines work on that three part system called the scarcity loop. So it's got these three parts. It's got opportunity. It's got unpredictable rewards and it's got quick repeatability. So with opportunity it's like you know you're going to get something of value at some time right this offers you an opportunity to get something good. So with the slot machine it's money.

Unpredictable rewards you know you'll get that valuable thing at some point but you don't know when you don't know how valuable it's going to be. And then three quicker repeatability you can just repeat the behavior immediately right. So think of a slot machine it's like I can win money. I play this game as the reals roll. I don't know if I'm going to lose the money. I might win a couple bucks off my dollar bet or I might win like $2,000. It's crazy range of outcomes. And then once

the reals fall I can immediately repeat that behavior. Now this becomes really important. And this casino it's not just funded by gambling companies it's funded by a lot of other big tech companies because what you can learn from this system and other systems that are embedded in gambling can help you get people doing a lot of other rational things over and over and over. So it's really it's what makes social media work. It's what makes dating apps work when it gets put into sports betting,

sports betting really climbs. When it gets put into financial apps you start to see the use and frequency of financial apps go up. But you know in the book I also argue that embedded in our food system it's it's in so many different places today. And I think it's one of the key reasons you find that people today struggle with moderation because we have these places figuring this whole

thing out. And by the way like this system doesn't just hook humans it hooks all animals. If you give animals a gambling game versus a game that's predictable they will choose the game that mimics a slot machine and play it over and over and over. It's really depressing and insidious this. But once you kind of understand this template this three-pronged thing you can layer it on top of

almost anything that you see out in the world. Like it really changes how you perceive your relationship with every app that you open on your phone or every TV commercial that you see. It is the digital version or the analog practical version of the right combination of salt sugar and fat in a certain food to light up your brain in a certain way that makes it impossible

to just have one chip. Oh yeah totally. And for me it was you know I go into this Skinner box you put it and talk to this guy and you know I kind of learn about it and as I'm leaving he goes you know there's a really powerful system one and two by the way it's not just in slot machines. I mean it's in a lot of other places. And once I sort of see it then you just start to go like to your point oh holy hell. Like this is what makes every app that I spend too

much time on. It's what makes it work. And it's in so many different places now that I think again we have the deck stacked against us. But to your point I think awareness is really important. So just being aware of a behavior often changes a behavior. And so knowing like oh this is this is why I'm spending so much time on this insert app or insert other behavior that falls into

it I think can change it. Yeah it's less about self will will power or your own kind of sense of weakness and much more about just how powerful these tools are that override every best interest in your brain. Yeah the guy I mentioned before Thomas and tall so he's done some really interesting studies on animals and given them the option of playing games that get them more food but are predictable or games that get them less food but our casino games basically slot machines and they

will pick the slot machine game like I mentioned. But I asked him like okay well obviously this works on humans or else you know Facebook wouldn't be a company. Las Vegas wouldn't be a successful place. And you've proven that it also works on pigeons and all these different other animals. So why is that? And he says it probably tracks back to finding food in the past and how we evolved to find food. So if you think of finding food when food was scarce as we evolved it's like you need food to

survive right there's the opportunity to get food. But you don't know where the food is and you don't know how much you're going to find. So you go to one place and may not have food you can go to another place it might have you know a couple berries but fewer calories than it took you to burn to get them. You go to another place nothing you go to another place then bam jackpot right that is like you have won you have found a ton of food and therefore you survive. And by the way you have

to repeat that game every single day that's what your life is. So it's almost like our brain is almost quote unquote program to sort of fall into this thing because it was so important for our survival for all of time. In the context of the slot machine though because that's sort of like the perfect

machine to kind of understand this whole mechanism. There's so much interesting stuff to learn from that and understand about that that then spills out into everything else like when the slot machine went from the handle that you pulled to a digital interface where you just push a button like the stats went through the roof in terms of repeat use right. Yeah I mean I can say that big picture the faster that you can repeat a behavior the more likely you are to repeat a

behavior. So industries know this and in the case of the slot machine. If we take off the handle that takes a little bit of time to pull they also tend to break. What ended up happening is games more than double games per hour. So they went from 400 games an hour a person would play on average to about 900 games an hour. So just that speed it's just boom boom boom boom. It's like why the how do you think we switch to infinite scroll right infinite scrolling auto play on Netflix.

I mean just you name it every app has all of these things built into it. So all of these silicon valley barons are paying attention to what's happening in this casino and extracting you know those nuggets and then building them into these apps that become irresistible. Yeah speed totally kills. I mean to kind of break down where it lives in a couple places like when you think of social media like if you post you have an opportunity for status say and then you post and then

the next time you fire up that app the rewards are unpredictable. All right you could have say lost and no one liked your post or someone said you look like an idiot in the comments section or you could want you could have way more likes and comments than you've ever gotten it's like oh my god

I just won the mega millions jackpot of social media and then you check and recheck that phone all the time right it's in the rise of sports betting I mean all gambling relies on the system it's like you got an opportunity to win money you place it on a game but what's interesting about the quick

repeatability in sports betting is that sports betting companies allowed people to start betting on in-game occurrences so for example is this team going to score on this drive so you have this short period of time to make the bet so right so it's like the faster we can get people to bet and

have more opportunities to bet the more money that we can make. In the example of something like Instagram or Twitter let's say you have an audience of a certain size before the complexity of the algorithm started to kind of drive what people see and you just saw your timeline you know

in its natural you know unfoldment you would think like oh when you post while I have this number of people who follow me like that's how many people are going to see it or whoever you know a certain percentage is predictably online every day but as we all know sometimes nobody sees it and sometimes

a completely outsized larger than your audience you know contingent of people will see it I'm curious how do you post something that's going to hit the algorithm and get it to go viral and travel but perhaps it's even more complicated than that to your point the algorithm is making this decision

around unpredictability to say this is perfect for the algorithm but I'm not going to share that one like I'm going to hold it back on purpose because 10 days from now I'm going to let this person's post go crazy yeah and that's all on purpose to to really you know capture that like brain chemistry

to keep you engaged in that way yeah I mean I can tell you that companies know what schedule of rewards is really going to capture people's attention and their resources whether that is attention or whether that is money so for example with slot machines up until about 1980 no one really

played them because they were boring like people would win maybe once out of every 20 times or once out of every say 10 times whatever might be and then this guy came in in the 80s and he basically digitized slot machines and this allowed him to do this method which we're kind of getting in

the gambling weeds here but I think it's important called losses disguised as wins so instead of just betting on one row of symbols where your odds are very low of winning anything he allowed people to bet on multiple rows so if you think of a slot machine screen there might be

five a grid of five by five symbols right and you can bet on all sorts of crazy shaped lines so when one game of slots you could bet on 40 different lines now this meant that the odds of say one or two lines winning something they spiked but usually the win was less than what you bet so you might

bet a dollar but you quote unquote win say 50 cents on this now the human brain though it doesn't see that as losing it's still exciting and the machine still cues that as a win right the bells still go off you still see the money go up and that's exciting even though you've lost and so what

this did is this allowed for the schedule of wins to losses to really improve so they became a lot less boring so now say 45% of any given slot machine game something good is going to happen now you might win less than you bet but you might win more but it's all exciting and so just that dialing in

of what grabs people I think is really what tech has allowed companies to do on top of that anybody who is a true gambling addict will tell you that the thrill isn't around the prospect of winning it's around the prospect of losing yeah the gambling guy talked to me said you know gambling isn't

isn't when you learn when the rails have fallen or when the dice have fallen in the cards it's when they're rolling right it's when the dice are running across the table the dopamine of anticipation yeah yeah what's really fascinating is in people who are legitimate problematic gamblers they could

addicted to gambling they actually don't get that excited by big wins because they're not there to necessarily win they're there just to kind of run through the process what happens when you have a big win is your machine shuts down and they have to come pay you out by hand and that stops the

process of gambling they got to sit there for a half hour fill up tax forms do all these things that interrupt the real reason why they're there not there to make money they're there to just sit in this zone of gambling and just watch the money kind of go slow and just escape wow

yeah that's intense the other ripple to this is the near miss idea which is kind of related to what you just shared like winning 50 cents winning quote unquote when you when you've put a dollar in isn't really winning even though our brain interprets it differently but there's also

the slot machine thing where it just almost lines up but it doesn't yeah and that is an additional kind of nuance to this whole thing like building that in to where people think they're very close to winning but it's really just a predictable kind of equation that spits that out from time to

time to keep you engaged yeah and it does when that happens when you're just say one symbol off of the wind people speed up their next bat they do it a lot faster and this might seem weird but you know I give a handful of examples in the book where you say this all the time like if I walk up to a elevator and I push you know number seven to go to the 7th floor and the button doesn't light up what do I do I go do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do

right you immediately repeat that because you expected something to happen it didn't happen and you will repeat that fast and hard hmm did you talk to BJ fog in writing this but I did not he feels like patient zero and all of this on some level and he's a super nice guy and he very brilliant

and but the class that he teaches at Stanford kind of brought a lot of what we're seeing now and what you're talking about yeah I mentioned his work in that class in particular in the comfort crisis I think it's in the chapter about some of the benefits of boredom and how we've kind of

programmed boredom out of daily life yeah another antidote to boredom is putting yourself in adventurous scenarios which you do in the course of writing these books you call yourself a journalist but you really are like an immersive adventure journalist like you really embed yourself

and the book opens up with you embedding yourself in Iraq with this investigation of the drug trade there and this drug that I'd never heard of called Capagon yeah so explain that like that's fascinating stuff like how did you decide to go out there and put yourself in harm's way in such

an intense way yeah so I got I mean I got interested in addiction for this book because for me the real extreme end of I can't moderate I can't get enough is addiction and to sort of understand the roots of addiction because there's all these different ideas about like what causes addiction you

know and there used to be this idea that you know an addict is a bad person they're just making these destructive personal choices and then at the other end more recently has been that it's a brain disease right and I think after investigating this chapter I think it's I absolutely don't think

it addict is a bad person I also don't think that brain disease is quite the right words to put on it so to get to this idea I traveled to Iraq because there's this drug as you mentioned called Capagon that's rising in the Middle East and what this drug is you can think about it as analogous

to methamphetamine but Iraq is an interesting case study that sort of gets into the heart of my argument because there wasn't really any addiction there and drug use for a long time and that's largely for governmental reasons because Saddam Hussein rolled over the N iron fist then what happens

is you have the US invade the country and they throw out Saddam Hussein and so you effectively have a war right and when a war happens you end up having a lot of people that have to live through that and they have a lot of trauma and after Syria fell it became a narco state so once the Syrian

government fell they the leaders that be now they took over the pharmaceutical plants and they started cranking out this drug called Capagon and it's now their biggest export even though it's illegal and they started flooding the Middle East with it so they sent a ton of it down to all

these different countries in the Middle East but Iraq effectively got a surge of this drug you have basically these three things that I think you need for addiction to basically bloom is that you have a population that is in pain psychic pain whatever it might be they have problems you have

few other ways to manage that pain those problems right in Iraq it's not like there's a lot of places where a person go can go talk about their traumas and then three you have a substance in big supply that can solve that problem at least in the short term right it relieves that psychic

pain and so I think when you have those three things you start to see addiction really blossom and that's what's happening in Iraq it's not that different from the opioid crisis that penetrates a certain you know sector of the United States yeah there's a lot of examples throughout history I mean

one of the ones that I thought was most interesting as I was reporting the book is that after the civil war in the south so during the civil war opioids were used to help combat wound pain battlefield wound pain and you saw that opioid use in the south after the civil war it rose among southern

whites because they just lost right but it dropped significantly among blacks in the south because now they were free and they saw opportunity from this like we're able to escape this life that we are living at slaves right and I think there's a lot of different case studies throughout

history where you see addiction rise and fall based on what a person's psychic state is and if they're able to deal with problems in different ways how does this notion of the scarcity loop inform your perspective on addiction specifically like a substance addiction oh that part was

really interesting for me too so this chapter I mean I have to say this was my favorite to write because obviously it's personal to me right and I kind of went into it thinking one thing and I walked out of it thinking that thing kind of but also a lot of other things and so when it

comes to the scarcity loop I think that you see that drugs alcohol use they fall into that loop in the sense that you have an opportunity to improve your life at least in the short term like for me no matter what my problem was if I just had a drink things are good and that comes

with unpredictable rewards as well right so if you think or unpredictability rather if you think about drug use a lot of the thrill that people report about drug use it comes from getting the drug are we going to be able to get it who are we getting it from where are we getting it how strong

is it going to be are we going to get in trouble along the way right there's so much unpredictability embedded into that and then also after you drink or use like the world opens up it's going to be different you don't know what's going to happen and then there's the repeatability where especially

if someone is an addict once you've used it's like okay restart the process we've got to find drugs again and it just kind of goes in that cycle of opportunity unpredictable rewards quicker repeatability over and over and over with alcohol there's less unpredictability around the use and

access of the substance you can just go to the store and buy it in fact it's quite predictable you know exactly what you're going to get this is like a little like ripple in this I think because like just thinking of my own experience like on one level I know exactly what's going to happen if

I drink this I know how it's going to make me feel and that's part of the allure because I'm so uncomfortable and how I feel right now the unpredictability comes with the consequences of what's going to happen and this idea that anything might happen is part of that addictive loop like

if I drink a whole bunch like something crazy is going to happen and that's exciting and that might be chaos and terrible but it also might be some wild adventure that you get to tell stories about for the rest of your life but it is a roulette wheel because you could end up in a car accident

or something terrible could happen or you could end up at this fabulous party meeting somebody you never thought you would meet yeah that one I mean that was my experience I think well one of the things that makes addiction so pernicious is that to substances especially is that you know people

use it for good reason in the first place it usually solves problems especially at first term yeah I mean when I started drinking I didn't really face that many repercussions in fact it benefited my life in a lot of ways right I could have more interesting adventures when I was drinking I

was a more interesting person I had I was more at ease around other people but by continuing that behavior especially the way I was drinking eventually I start to see long term problems but the thing is that the problem is the solution is the problem is the solution is the problem

is the solution I have all this evidence from my past that says oh no this has worked for you before so you keep doing it and you're like well why isn't this working anymore well maybe I just need to try it again maybe I need to drink more maybe I need to do all this things right so it's

like the thing flips and it no longer becomes this thing that seem to do a lot of good things for you but you can't quite you just can't quite trust that that's right evidence right like no there was just you know I mixed it with the wrong soda I know the obsession of every alcoholic to drink like

a gentleman you know is boundless right yes yes we will you know explain that to the ends of the earth before we're willing to just do the obvious thing which is whether a little bit of discomfort you know to kind of let go of that habit that we know is killing us yeah and you're drinking did

you have a lot of fits and starts or yeah I mean I relapsed a ton before I finally got sober and I ended up in a treatment center where I thought I was going to go for a couple weeks and spender I and ended up living there for a hundred days and that changed my life yeah but my sobriety is not

been linear not that anybody's is you know it has its peaks and valleys and challenges and you know relapses part of that story yeah and I think you know the shame and the guilt that comes with that like you know there's there's still a lot of you know emotional baggage around it that you know spend my lifetime trying to untangle and make sense of but I have tools for how to live today and my life is incredibly good as a result of getting sober and making sobriety of priority in my life

the priority really yeah yeah I agree I mean I've had definitely peaks and valleys and sobriety and like I said I tried to quit using all kinds of strange things and tried to white knuckle it too like you know I'd maybe get two months without drinking but it really just in the back of my head I'm going the clock is counting down and it's just hell as the clock counts down and then you know for whatever

reason I had to really just I had to take action to make phone calls and tell people that like I can't figure this shit out could you help me and I think that's what started it really do you get accused of transferring some of your addict energy onto this adventure chunky you know embedded

journalist kind of lifestyle that you have like how does that work yeah the accusations come from me yeah I mean I'm aware of that right I think that I mean I'm still figuring this thing out but certainly to go to Iraq and put yourself in harm's way with some pretty gnarly people is

exciting you know yeah yeah I mean I think one of the reasons I drink in the first place is because I just like to explore the edges and have intense experiences and alcohol gave me that gave me problems in the long term and so when I get sober it's like I still have that thing as part of me

and I found ways to manage it that you know don't lead me to park my car in someone's yard you know and so yes I'm aware that probably a lot of that some of the traveling I do into extreme places is scratching that itch yeah but I do a lot of things to make sure that it's safe as it can possibly be.

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these forces are out in the world that are trying to get us off kilter and kind of leverage our lizard brains how does that inform your perspective about like living a balanced life like well it just you know deal with all of these things in moderation like I'm not asking you to be a lot

I but just go in with an awareness that's tricky for me like I just you know abstinence really is the only solution to prevent me from going down you know the rabbit hole that engages the worst part of my proclivities mm-hmm I mean in a way and I would be interested to see if you think this

I'm glad that my addiction is alcohol because I can just not drink you know I think of what if it was food like where you can't just not eat right it's very black and white line and so I I mean I definitely have a ton of empathy for people who find themselves addicted to behaviors

that are almost necessary for living and some of them are absolutely necessary for living when I think about this loop I mean I think that number one becoming aware of it is really important and how it's embedded like oh okay once you know how the machine works you can maybe start to use the

machine a little differently to is that I think that when you just look at behavioral psychology if you can change any one of the three parts of the loop that tends to reduce the behavior so if you can you know with the opportunity it's like okay what am I getting from this and can I find that

from something else with unpredictable rewards can I change the rewards can I change how the rewards are and then three can I slow this down so let's take eating for example something like food if you can slow down your rate of eating that usually reduces the eating behavior so even

something like if you're eating foods that are unprocessed people tend to eat less of them because just the speed is a lot slower right with opportunity it's like can I can I remove a food from the house that's my sugar food like that tends to help people with phones for example with rewards a

lot of the things that make phones rewarding or one of the main things is that all the colors and lights and stimulation something as simple as changing your phone to grayscale it tends to reduce the behavior there's a study that found that it reduced screen time by about 40 minutes a day

because all of a sudden your phone is freaking boring which we learn from slot machines people don't use boring things as much as they do hyper stimulating things so I think unpacking those three things and going okay how can I change or remove any one of these things tends to work and

then scarcity brand I give examples for everything I look at from over buying from too much time on your phone from addiction and how I how that ended up affecting me to even the information that we live in right we live in this world where the average person now sees more information a single day

than a person 700 years ago used to see in their entire life and you see people just get hooked on whatever app it is it could be the New York Times app it could be Twitter Twitter's a big one especially when there's something going on it's people are just like oh my god oh my god waiting for

the next hit of information but also status and influence right I mean thinking about that from like a social perspective I think people do get hooked on that as well and trying to unpack that greater why and remove parts is can be useful yeah yesterday I had Jud Brewer and you know him

psychiatrist loving neuroscientist who has a new book coming out called the hunger habit and it's sort of like the scarcity brain but just for food yeah and a lot of what he shares overlaps really perfectly with your message and his kind of solution to the idea that diets don't work and

on some level most people have an unhealthy relationship with what they put in their mouths that instead of approaching that from a traditional perspective of going on a temporal diet to instead bring awareness and presence and mindfulness practices into your eating like what you just

share like can you just be can you slow it down can you just be aware of what you're doing seems highly applicable to all these other aspects of life in which the scarcity loop show up from devices to online shopping to our Netflix consumption etc if we can just be really present

you read your book and you're like okay I get I can see like the matrix is now evident to me I can see the mechanics behind all of this and even if I'm still scrolling at least I'm starting to develop an understanding of why I'm doing it and perhaps I can be a little bit more compassionate

on myself and realize it's not my weakness it's just that this is really powerful and let's slow it down a little bit and do an inventory around it a compassionate inventory we're not judging yourself or gilting yourself but just being aware of your behavior and starting to map kind of

what those loops look like and ultimately when you play them out where they lead you in terms of your emotional well-being or your mental well-being or your physical well-being yeah totally and I think that people realize that a lot of the stuff is an issue and so there are tools out there

that I think can be useful for people right it's like a is a tool you know there's this also this app that person reached out to me because I saw that I wrote something on my newsletter about the gray scale thing and phones he goes ahead did this app helps you reduce your screen time

blah blah blah and I rolled my eyes because I'm like you want me to download an app so I can not use another app is that what I'm hearing you go yeah just trust me so I ignore them and then I go you know what I'm going to try it and what this app does is it you pick the apps that you have

trouble moderating on and you pick how many times you want to open them a day and when you go to open them it'll have a pause and you have to breathe for you know three seconds and then it goes how much time would you like to spend on this app so you've been forced to pause you got a three

second pause and it goes how much time do you really want to spend on this app and you go okay 10 minutes and then you get your 10 minutes and then after 10 minutes you're done and it works I mean I was laughing and I watch you out there's no override no like panic button no it has to go

back through the process I mean it really leans on the the fundamentals of behavioral psychology of just slowing things down putting pause predetermining how much time you actually want to do this behavior that is addictive and I do think that looking into tools can be useful for people yeah

it's just a bummer that we have to have more and more tools it's like the solution to all the apps is another app and like we have to create all this artifice in our life just to get back to some kind of baseline around what it means to be a human yeah I mean one of the things that really got me

thinking as I was writing this book is so I mentioned the psychologist with the pigeons so what these experiments show is that he will take pigeons they live in these you know kind of little cages their lab pigeons and he will put them in a cage that has a choice to play two

different games the first game it's predictable so they pack a light and every other pack they get a predictable amount of food every single time and then they have a choice to play another game which is more like a slot machine so in this game about every fifth pack they get food right so

it could be the first sequence it could be like the second pack they got the food the next one it could be the fourth pack they got some food so it's very much like a slot machine the catch is that with the first game they end up with more food overall so there's this theory called the

optimal forging theory and it basically says the animals will do whatever they can to put in the least amount of effort to get as much food as possible so that theory basically says the pigeons should play the first game they shouldn't play the gambling game but what happens is that 97%

of these pigeons choose the gambling game now where gets really interesting is that he will put these pigeons in a very big cage that mimics how they live in the wild because normally they're in these like sterile kind of small pigeon cages where they're not being able to hang out with other

pigeons they're not living how they normally would in the wild he'll put them in this giant cage that mimics the wild so they've got other pigeons around they have to work for their food they can build little nest they go up on cliffs they just live how pigeons evolve to live basically

and when he puts them back in the game every single pigeon chooses the smart game the one that's predictable and gets them more food this goes back to the theory called the optimal stimulation theory and it basically says that all animals whether humans pigeons dogs cats we need a certain

amount of stimulation in our life in order to thrive and if we don't get it we go looking for it elsewhere and so the sky says to me goes you know and when you think of humans today he immediately goes from pigeons to humans because when you think of humans today I think that's going on with a

lot of us right we our lives are so much different than humans evolve to live in so many ways we don't have to work for our food we're not outside as much we don't put in as much physical effort we're not as connected to others and so we're a lot like my pigeons that are in their small sterile cages

and because of that we go looking for stimulation elsewhere we find it in phones we find it in drug use and alcohol use we find it in shopping too much we find it and we have all these different ways to find that stimulation but if you can find ways to insert stimulation in your life that are

positive you know whether it's ultra running whether it's for me the the traveling whatever it might be that's giving you a long term benefit I think that that can be the pretty solid life hack mm-hmm it seems so self-evident you know but left your own devices we won't do it

because the lures of these things trap us we really have to exert conscious effort to carve out those kinds of experiences to combat like the force of these things that want to stuck in this loop that is you know making us lonely and unhappy and providing all these mental health disorders

that we're dealing with and addiction and the like yeah and it feels like it's a losing battle because when the responsibility is on the individual to go to war with these technological forces you know you're bringing a knife to a gunfight literally right like do you feel like knowing

everything that you know now doing this deep dive into you know the Skinner box that is our existence these days like do you think that technology should be regulated in a certain way to put guard rails up against engagement that's a really good question here's how long to that I think that

for teens it probably should I think that we should probably be regulating certain applications for teens because the teen brain is changing in such a way that it prioritizes being social like over values these things and teens just you know they say things to each other on these apps that

are not good things I think that that seems pretty reasonable now for the average person it gets a little trickier you know if you're an adult I don't know so for example you know when you look at addiction rates the vast majority of people can have a drink and enjoy it

and they do it with friends and it's great the vast majority of people can sit down in the slot machine and they put their $20 in they go oh it's kind of fun you know maybe they walk away with some money maybe they don't and so then the question becomes like when do we start to regulate

things that most people can handle without repercussion and then like how do we determine when the repercussions for most people most of the time have become too much and so it starts to get really really murky and I think it needs to probably be on a case by case basis but my inclination

is that probably less regulation is better for example like with alcohol I mean that almost killed me but I also realized that for most people they're fine and it enhances their life in a way at the same time we don't let people who are under 21 drink and there's for good reasons so for example people who drink before they are 15 they have a coinflips chance of becoming an alcoholic if you wait till you're 21 the chances dip below 10% and that's simply because of how

the brains changing and how people find comfort at that time in their life. Obviously regulation is problematic from a personal liberty perspective and I'm not convinced that the government is even equipped to you know handle this so it's not like I see that as a solution but it does feel to me like

we should have more kind of opt-in rather than opt-out choice when it comes to how we're interfacing with technology so for example rather than us having to opt-out of some algorithm we should have to make the choice to opt into it like the default should be the timeline without all the you know algorithmic acceleration and bells and whistles and if we want to have that experience we can up the ante and check the box or whatever and do that but it has to be a choice

to enter that rather than the other way around. I mean I can totally see that argument I can definitely see that you know I mean like use use a case study like you got into ultra running and that totally changed your life right and so you've managed to do this thing that gives you

greater rewards and I think that that is a story that I mean that's accessible to to anyone you know anyone can do that and I think that a lot of bad habits fall away on accident not necessarily on purpose once you pick up a good habit and get really into it and get really

captivated by it and I don't think you necessarily know what it's going to be right it's like my my neighbors are all trying to die on the hill of let's get Michael to play pickleball he's going to love this and I'm like not a chance in hell but you know what I mean it's like you got

to try stuff you got to try like you find yourself in the right you got to try a lot of stuff and something might take and then all of a sudden you're going this is awesome and you just find yourself going down that and then all of a sudden you're just not doing that shit you didn't want

to do anymore. Quite as much. Yeah the bad habits fall away get they get crowded out by the steamable acts that you're doing on behalf of yourself there's certain truth to that my wife is somebody who who is an example of that like she'll just like bad habits fall away when she focuses

on good habits the addict in me it's a little trickier you know it's like I need a little bit more than that you know those bad habits have staying power for some reason there's a little more pesky and persistent but I get your point and I think there's truth in that but I would also say that

I'm an example of somebody who's created a career and benefited from the available technology tools which creates a problematic relationship for me in terms of how I interface with them because my career on some level is driven by these things so I can't be a luddite and opt out of them like food on some level like my professional career requires that I you know use them and indulge them on some level but that becomes really tricky because there's a difference between

using the platforms to create and using them to consume. Yeah I mean I think that that's the that's the big problem with technology is that you know it accelerates and it becomes more and then it becomes a necessity and you can't necessarily escape it it's like you have to start using it in order to live a normal modern life and I mean people have been grappling with that for a long time and it's absolutely tricky but you know to fight with fighting trying to figure out

what your personal approach you are just going to be. There's two sort of semi-existential threats that these things pose that you talk about and the first which is really more of a comfort crisis thing but I think it's applicable here is the death of boredom like we have engineered boredom out of our life so talk a little bit about that and the kind of you know larger implications

of of humanity that no longer has any ability to ruminate. Yeah so I started thinking about boredom when I was in the Arctic for more than a month for the comfort crisis because I didn't bring you know the self-unident work I didn't bring books and magazines and that sort of thing and we

were up there hunting caribou and it's a lot of just sitting and waiting on a hill you're waiting for animals to come through they were not coming through and so I found myself bored again right because I didn't have all these things I would normally use my time with if I felt bored you know

to solve our boredom we did all these sort of wacky things it's like we read our nutrition labels on our energy bars like I can tell you every detail about a cliff bar at this point in my life I read the tags on our jacket things like that I came up with story ideas for the magazines I wrote

for and so I mean it really was a different use of how I would use my time then if I were bored at home and so then you have to ask okay well what is boredom in the first place and boredom is this evolutionary discomfort that basically tells us whatever you're doing with your time right now

the return on your time invested has worn thin and so you need to go do something else now in the past that something else I think would be a lot more productive than it is today so if you think about people hunting in the past and you need food to survive if the animals aren't coming through

boredom kicks on you feel uncomfortable you go okay we gotta go do something else let's go pick potatoes let's go pick raspberry let's do something so we can have food and survive but now when we feel that discomfort of boredom we've got that easy effortless escape from it in the form of a

phone in the form of a computer in the form of our TV in the form of our radio whatever it might be so the average person today is spending I think it's 13 hours 20 minutes engaged with digital media which is insane 13 hours and 20 minutes 13 hours and like two years ago it was like 12th right or 11

or something like that the curve is shooting skyward yeah it's shooting skyward and I mean think of that in the grand scale of humanity it's like none of this stuff was in our life at all we had zero minutes like a hundred years ago zero minutes and now we have 13 hours 20 minutes that is a crazy

shift in how we spend our lives and spend our attention and our interactions with others and it's absolutely changed us and you hear a lot about using phones less and everything and I obviously I think that's very important but I think what's important spend to put on it is thinking how can I

reinsert boredom into my life because boredom actually comes with quite a few upside so when you are bored you're essentially forced to ruminate you go inward for a little while and that seems to be associated with less stress you also tend to come up with good ideas so there's some interesting

research that suggests boredom helps people come up with good ideas and it's also like you know there's this William James quote he basically said that at the end of your life your life is a culmination of what you were aware of and so if you think about that it's like 13 hours 13 hours

a day I don't think people are going to look back on their life and go and really should have got those numbers up 13 hours what was I doing should have been 15 right or when somebody passes away nobody's going to eulogize them by talking about what an amazing feed they are.

Totally yeah I mean boredom is the fountain of creativity and if we are no longer allowing ourselves space for that type of reflection what is that bowed in terms of the future of humanity specifically of course with what humans create you know art and culture but I think it's more profound than that where do good ideas come from and if you're never allowing yourself to kind of you know develop that capacity everything becomes derivative and we live in service weird hall of

mirrors. Yeah I mean you're if you're always on media your ideas are coming from others right so you're just basically tweaking something that someone else has come up with and so I think having that time without that to just let things flow is really important I mean for anyone it's not

just you know when people think creativity they automatically think the artist they think the writer they think whatever but it's important for business right I mean this is something that Steve Jobs has talked about he talked about how boredom was one of the real tools that he leveraged in order

to come up with the products he did and think about design and how these things would function it was this extended time without interruption where he could just kind of lean into boredom and let his mind go or it needed to go and I do think we're losing that to a certain extent for sure yeah

and I do think that that's existential in many ways yeah the other kind of semi existential threat is around this idea of human insatiability and our our proclivity towards addition as a way of solving problems rather than subtraction so talk a little bit about that

I think that's super interesting yeah I'll tell you the story of the guy who discovered this that there's a researcher I think so UVA so he was lighting cloths and he's he's one of the greatest engineers in the country right now right he's gotten money from all these amazing different

organizations like this list of research he's done on engineering is just unbelievable so one day he's sitting with his son whose name is Ezra and Ezra is three years old and they're playing with Legos and so what they're doing is they're building a bridge so they got these two pillars for the bridge and now they need to put the span that connects to the two pillars and when they go to do that what they find is that one pillar is taller than the other so you got this span of a bridge

that's at this wonky angle right and so mr. PhD professor of engineering he's got a solution he turns around and he starts rifling through the Lego box to find Lego so he can elevate the span and fix the problem and when he turns around he realizes that his son has fixed the problem he's

simply removed Legos from the taller pillar so this kid won fixes the problem but two he fixes in it in a more efficient way because now he's using less Legos overall right they have more resources and it's a simpler fix so he realizes like I didn't even think to subtract and here I am this crazy

engineer so what he does is he takes this exact bridge and he starts taking it around to all his colleagues at UVA and all his students at UVA who are all engineering backgrounds and he's like puts it on the desk and be like hey fix this bridge you know it's off-kilter every single one of them

adds Legos to it so their perclivity is to add to fix the problem and once he has so many examples of that he goes all right there's something here we've got to study it so he sets up all these different studies where he basically tasks participants with solving a series of problems

in every single problem the best most efficient answer is to remove to subtract from the problem so for example this is kind of a quirky one he had a mini golf hole and it had just way too many traps and things like that on it right too many obstacles and he asked them to make it better

obviously the answer is like we got to remove some stuff because there's just too much shit going on every single person added stuff right and there's a bunch of different examples that he's he's proven with that so long story short is that we are sort of evolved to add right when we see

a problem our default is to add to solve it to immediately sort of add more resources to do more things to fix it we don't even think of subtraction and that's a big problem right it's like the answer could be to add but it could also be to subtract something but if we aren't thinking of this whole

other range of options of subtraction that becomes a problem and so once I talk to this guy you kind of go oh yeah I mean I feel like I see that in myself but then I start looking at just it's just a laundry list of statistics and there's just so many different ways that we have added

and added and added to society into our lives ever since the industrial revolution I mean think of all the stuff we own when you look at regulations they're like an insane amount of times longer than they used to be there's this great study that found that incoming university presidents were

like 10 times more likely to add new programs than they were to remove programs that weren't working and it just goes on and on and on and I do think that just the awareness of that that like okay my tendency is gonna be to try and add stuff to buy something to fix this problem to do more work to

do xyz I think questioning that can be a way to maybe get more efficient solving problems personally and business and all these different areas of life it's so counterintuitive though right everything in our society is oriented around more like everything you want is on the other

side of buying more watching more scrolling more consuming more every problem can be solved through more innovation like just look at you know I don't know like our energy consumption our food consumption like all of our macro systems are operating in an unsustainable way the solution really

is to slow down and like consume less right but we're intent upon solving it through some additional innovation whether that's going to the moon or some new technology that we're just you know sort of assuming will arrive that's gonna solve this problem so that we can continue to be additive

yeah before I read this study a few years ago this is embarrassing and damning I realize I have too much shit in my house right everyone has that moment at some point and so what do I do I buy a book on how to how to minimize and the book instructs me that I must buy very specific

totes to keep my things in right because everything has to look so I gotta go buy I gotta go buy all this stuff so I can have less and I'm like I have this moment and I'm like yeah this looks awesome on Instagram but I don't think we're actually achieving this idea of minimalism like we think

having less because I've just bought a bunch of stuff so I can weed out some stuff but then keep my other stuff in you know just the sensibility of it is correct but you tell the story of this nomadic woman no right oh yeah you have some interesting ideas around minimalism in general

yes Laura's era toughest human being who ever lived coolest human being whoever lived she's she's in her 30s and when she was in college she went to a really good school on the East Coast but she dropped out when she was a senior because she'd always wanted to just spend time outside

like living off the grid and she'd basically done that all through college like she didn't even live in the dorm in college she went and lived out in the woods and basically a year she built and she kind of has this moment during school when she realizes like the reason that I'm here in college is so that I can you know follow this storyline that I need to get a good job so I can have a bunch of money so that I can go do what I want to do on my two weeks time off or whatever it might be

and she realizes well wait a minute if I just want to go out and woods and survive like I don't think I need that much money so she bailes on school and she just starts traveling the world she has a backpack with like a sleeping bag a tarp like a saucepan just like the very very basic rudimentary

stuff and she just travels the world for years and we'll go out into the wilderness for like 30, 60, 90 days at a time and so I end up going out into the wilderness with her in Montana we weren't even out there that long but it was really fascinating because she really has paired down

what she needs to really live a life that she loves she hardly owns anything it all fits in this one backpack and she's the most interesting happy fascinating person I've ever met and she talks a lot about how she's had experiences where having less have actually put her in much more

interesting experiences in life so a couple examples that she's given is that you know she used to hitchhike a ton and she's like if I would have had money and taken the flight I would have got on the flight I would have put on my headphones like everyone else but instead I like hitchhike and I

get in the car with people I don't know and like we become best friends over this you know eight-hour journey or whatever it is and like I'm always going to remember those conversations I had she also talked about so for a while she was she rolled around with some people who were very very wealthy

let's just say that and they would take her on these hunting trips that were really expensive and these you know other different trips and she said it was fascinating because she explained to like she said what you call it turn her remember the language a really expensive happy meal

so she said it's like every rich person gets the same thing the whole point is to remove any uncertainty any unpredictability so you get this list of experiences you run through and she's like don't get me wrong it was very nice and I understand why people do that when they're pressed

for time I totally get it but I've had so much more interesting experiences when I didn't have a lot of money when I had to invent things on the run when everything was really an adventure I had no idea what was going to come going to come next and that's really what the rewards are from. Constraints being kind of a lever for creative experiences. Yeah you know not being able to do whatever you want those constraints drive creative solutions

and adventures. Yeah and one thing that's really interesting about her is so this idea of the scarcity loop I think you can use it for things that are really beneficial to you so what she does with her time when she's out in the wild is that she shed hunts so for people who aren't

familiar with that it's basically just walking around in the wilderness looking for shed antlers you know skulls of animals that have fallen off and she's just turned it totally into a game and that's 100% the scarcity loop yeah it's like we got an opportunity to find this thing that I

think is really cool but I don't know where it's going to be I don't know how big it's going to be I don't know what I'm going to find and I just repeat that all day and she gets so obsessed with this search and it just allows her to explore the mountains going to interesting places and you

know I'm not suggesting that everyone go pick up shed hunting but I do think that there's a lot of ways that you can use this loop to push yourself into good things for example most activities and nature have it for example bird watching right you don't know what you're going to see you could

see something really rare you could see something say every day you're repeated I think it's in things like foraging like a lot of people have gotten into mushroom foraging recently it's in that but I also think that even you know outdoor sports where times are changing the landscape that you're

running across is going to change like you're kind of chasing trying to get better I mean it's ultimately like a game I think finding ways to get the loop in a way that improves your life is important what's interesting is how the human being will create a scarcity loop when there isn't one around right like she without consciously being aware of even what a scarcity loop is she manufacturers want totally which is just positive that like this is embedded and are like kind of a net operating

system yeah so are you going to create a fun adventure some outdoorsy you know expansive scarcity loop for yourself or you're going to default to the scarcity loops that are being foisted upon you yeah really is the question that you're asking and her relationship to what she owns is

interesting to so I kind of walked away with it with a rule of thinking gear not stuff so if you think of gear it's an item that you're using for purpose to achieve some sort of higher purpose right it's a tool that you're using somehow in your life that isn't just a thing for the sake of it

and I think that that's a good heuristic to keep yourself out of just buying things that are just things for the sake of it for some other reason because there's a lot of reasons that humans buy for example status belonging also boredom people buy stuff when they're bored and it's far easier

to buy stuff now in your board than it was even 15 years ago because now you're getting ads fed at you through your iPhone you don't have to go down to the store and so using that I think can be useful to pair down purchases yeah I think two insights in what you just share the first is

our inclination to devalue what is probably our most precious asset which is our time right so this person who made this conscious choice to live this nomadic minimalist lifestyle has gigantic wealth in how she spends her time and that kind of capacity is something that you know

a billionaire might have motivated the billionaire to begin his or her business to begin with like I want to have largest so that I can live the life that I want to live but every step along that ladder just creates a more gilded prison where freedom of time becomes even more difficult to access

it's like that parable of the fishermen you know go catch a fish well you should hire some people and then you can catch more fish and why would I do that and blah blah blah all the way up to you know wealth you had all this wealth and you could you know do whatever you want all afternoon which is

what the fisherman already has before he even begins and for some reason we struggle with that right like I hear the story of this woman and as amazing as that sounds or my friend light walkins who who came on the show and showed me everything that's in his backpack and that's all that he owns

and he's one of the happiest coolest people that I know I'm like yeah but am I gonna really do that you know what I mean like academically yes I get it yeah you have proven your point I understand it and then I reflect on the extent to which I'm actually modifying my own behavior every single day

and realize the disconnect between those two things yeah I think the question is like what lessons can we learn from these people and I think from Laura I learned thinking in terms of the gear not stuff angle like how is this item actually and like what am I using this for the utility

what is the utility and can I find another thing in my house that can serve the same purpose because one of the things she talked about is that there's always most fun for her when she could sort of go McGiver and solve a problem with what she already had and she got a lot of rewards from

that and there's actually some interesting research that shows what when you put constraints on resources on teams they actually manage to accomplish more and come up with more creative ways to solving the resource because back to our precliventy to add if we have a bunch of money we just go

oh yeah just like hire someone to do that or do it with this right but if you don't have that you have to get really nimble so you mentioned how I talked to Steven Bartlett and he talked about that with his team when they had the least amount of money they came up with their best ideas

because they're like we got ten bucks and we got to we got to figure this thing out sure or film directors we'll talk about this all the time they don't have enough money or enough days to you know get the shots that they want and they're forced to figure things out on the spot and those

constraints end up driving greater creative choices that actually make the finished product better in a different way than they had anticipated or could have imagined had they had all the resources available to do it the way they wanted to in their brain yeah yeah totally if somebody is

listening to this and they're starting to think about how scarcity loops operate in their own in their own life like what is the process like how do you counsel people to develop a little bit of a greater awareness you know if they want to do an inventory like let's just look at like

how I'm being hijacked like what is the the parasite in my aunt brain you know that's commandeering me and making me do things that I'm not consciously aware that you know I even made the decision to do yeah one thing I talk about in the book is that I think that when it comes to improving

your life a lot of time we want to add good new habits like we just pack on good new habits when a lot of times what will move your life forward the most is solving a bad one like if you can fix your worst problems the world can open up and I mean I don't know if you identify this but I

definitely identify with that is like when I stopped drinking all of a sudden oh like now like that was the thing really holding me back right and I had tried to do all this other stuff and it just like didn't ever get me anywhere because I still had my foot on the break with my drinking

and so I think that if you can sort of list out the habits that you're aware of that are bad that you want to change and then it's going through a list of okay how does this fall into the scarcity of the loop and I think most of them do and then kind of identifying okay what parts of the loop

can I change which we talked about before I think that one the awareness of it to realize you know falling into the loop kept humans alive for millions of years so if you're doing this behaviors it's not necessarily your fault but it is your problem to solve I think that can be

powerful just realizing that how the machinery works and then going through and looking okay can I change any one of these three parts of it and then asking the bigger question which is why am I doing the single first place why am I doing the single first place having to get sort of to the to the

nitty gritty which is hard and takes time but ultimately I think it leads to better results in the long term yeah why am I doing this to begin with makes that arrow kind of point directly inward you know you're going to have to do a little excavation there so you know get to get to the deep

you know answer to a question like that but when you think about our proclivity towards insatiability and towards additive solutions and you take a macro view of kind of what's happening with humanity in the world and I mean are you optimistic about our future like are we gonna

are we gonna figure this out and you know arrive at some healthier place with how we cohabitate this is a good one is what does the world look like in 50 years 100 years this is a good question I can tell you this that as we get more and more technology the technology will get sharper

and sharper and sharper at making money and how do you make money today it's usually by capturing attention so I think that that arrow will continue getting sharper now I do think that it's possible that maybe people reject all this I mean I don't know if you look at the grand scope of time with

technology it's like the more technology you add on the more constraints that you put on human beings that's just kind of the story of it I mean and once you get in the system it's like it's hard to escape it because you start to rely on it to do something so I mean just think of something as simple

as like we invent a car that's a really cool thing right this is great oh but now we got too many cars so now we need we need to build roads okay well the city has to be laid out this way okay well now we have to have a bunch of rules around cars you got to have your airbags you got to have your

seat belts you got to have this you can only turn right when there's a green light all these things okay well now we've built our cities in ways that if you don't have a car well you're screwed right you can't get from point A to point B and that's just like a very common example but it

applies to so many things where it's like once you adopt the technology all the so we need rules around it and then the rules begin to constrain us and then all of a sudden if you don't have the technology you can't function well in society so it's almost like we kind of become a slave to

these things which is probably the most depressing thing I've ever said in my life but I mean we're more than a slave to them to refer back to that analogy that you talk about of the fungal parasite in the brain of the ant we are now consciously or otherwise through our micro behaviors and macro

behaviors every single day every day informing and giving birth to a new technological form of life like all of the data and how we interface with technology is contributing to this massive data set that is quickly you know more quickly than I think we realize leading us towards this

artificial intelligence world and a lot of questions around what that means and what that looks like so when we talk about regulations or guardrails and the inroads that those perhaps create in terms of personal liberty like our personal liberty is actually contributing to our own

enslavement you know the more we double down on our freedom to do what we want with these devices the more quickly we're giving birth to something that has greater and greater control over our lives which is a fucked up like we're back into this weird corner with this whole thing

yeah there's a guy who really started PR and advertising kind of one of the key players in that industry from the I think the late 1800s his name is Claude Hopkins so he builds up this industry he basically built Bissle vacuums into what they are today and he's fascinated in guy

because he was going to go into the clergy and at the time advertising was seen as this very dirty thing he didn't advertise right it was like societally it was just not a good thing he starts to go through the clergy he decides it's not for him but he goes into advertising which is a really

interesting way because you go from selling religion to selling products right and so he uses a lot of techniques that he learned there to take on clients and builds all these big brands that's still today from the clergy that he learned in wow yeah in divinity school or something yeah so he

built Bissle vacuums he's the guy who started the free sample model that was his idea genius advertiser and at the end of his life he saw like this machine that had come just during his lifetime of advertising and we're talking like from the late 1800s like up to the 2030s whatever and so he

writes this memoir about his life and he just says you know I think that people who are happiest usually live closest to nature and are more disconnected from this kind of machine we've created and more connected to other people and so I think that that is probably there's probably a lesson

there and you think about where we are now I mean if this guy looked at it today it would be it would be interesting to see his take yeah I mean it seems like that the answer always points back in that direction whether it's the nomadic woman who's you know living minimally or this

tribe that you talk about the samani is that how you say it yeah samani or you look at the blue zones like pockets of the world that are becoming increasingly rare and rare where humanity is living more in conjunction with just the natural rhythms of the planet you know these people tend to live

longer they're happier they don't suffer from all these chronic lifestyle ailments they don't have the mental health disorders they're not you know being captured by technology and yet you know we're just going along our way and making those pockets smaller and smaller and rare and rare and

harder and harder to you know kind of access for ourselves yeah I mean I think there's probably a pretty strong correlation between the number of hours someone spends online and the likelihood that they're not as happy as they would like to be no we're in a loneliness epidemic I had the

surgeon general here this is like his whole thing you know how did we arrive in this hyperconnected world of being lonelier than ever to the point of you know increased rates of depression and suicide etc this is kind of close make and so I'm optimistic because I believe in humanity and I believe in

the goodness of human beings but when you kind of cast your gaze out in the way that you have you know across all these things that are that are happening it's it's hard it's hard to stay connected with hopefulness yeah well it's interesting it's almost like there's kind of a sweet spot of progress

right so I mean we think about people being alone I mean part of the reason we have more people alone is because we simply have more money like grandma doesn't have to live with the family anymore grandma's got enough money that she can have her own little place a few miles away but

that also means grandma spends a lot time alone and the odds of her being lonely probably increase so as we get more resources we do start to I think become more disconnected we start to not have to you know move around as much like there's probably some sweet spot between I've got everything I

need covered but I don't have so much that I've engineered sort of spending more time being forced to spend time with my family and people who I love right the community that I don't have a million different options for hyper processed food that I maybe have to you know walk some places

sometime and there probably is a sweet spot who the hell knows where that is not me so yeah so so what changes have you made I mean you talked about great scaling and sort of apps that you know can kind of restrict your access to these technological scarcity loops but of all the work

and all the people that you've talked to like what have been the material impacts on your kind of daily life yeah well I mean I will say that reporting the comfort crisis definitely made me very grateful for the world we live in I mean as much as we just spent you know some time talking

about how things are dire in many ways I think a lot of the problems that we face today are good problems in the grand scheme of time and space you know I mean take question of our relationship with food it's like I'd rather have to you know grapple with not overeating rather than be like I

don't know where my next meal is coming from which was how it was for all of time and that's just one example so I'm definitely a lot more grateful in terms of practices I mean it's kind of like what I just said where spending more time outdoors spending more time with people who we love

using the internet as a tool to accomplish a goal and realizing that it can easily suck us in for other means and that's hard because most people have to be online because of their job but I do think the more time you spend online for most people most of the time probably not a good thing

that I mean something I write about in the comfort crisis too is rucking I do that a lot for my physical practice that's really the foundation carrying weight over distance I think that humans are uniquely adapted to carry weight over distance it's really good for our bone density it helps

preserve muscle works our strength but it's also an awesome form of cardio and we're the only animal that can do it yeah we're the best at it yeah we're the best at it persistent something yeah yeah it's you run the animal down and then you got to carry it back to camp and then just

the active gathering too I mean that's that's carrying and it also gets me outside so just throw on some weight on my back and carrying and I don't know having having empathy as well like you talked about before like reporting especially the addiction chapter when it really clicked with me that

an addict is someone who is doing something that has always benefited their life up till now and they they just can't really see and I've been there too it's like oh that gives you so much more empathy because if you have all these examples of how this thing has helped you in the past why

how wouldn't you do that it's a very rational example and by the way using a substance if you have a substance abuse issue it will solve your problem in the short term and so therefore that is kind of rational to use it at least in the short term it's important to acknowledge that the

reason that addicts become addicts is because it does work yes until it stops working right but to deny that there is some benefit that this person is getting out of that I think is not productive in the conversation around understanding this affliction yeah and asking that same question for a lot

of bad habits can be useful it's like why I'm what what is the benefit sure because they're all solving some need or serving some doing something for you or you wouldn't be doing it exactly so understanding okay what is that doing for me or why did I start doing that right to begin with

what happens right before what happened right before let me do that you know I like the solutions that that you shared I mean I think that you can get the sense of powerlessness if you're looking into all of this and there are things we do have agency and there are things that we can do that

make our lives better and they're not that difficult it's like go outdoors see your friends bring challenge into your life like you know you don't eat going to the Arctic circles great but you don't have to do that right that's an extreme example that kind of rebooted your operating system but I

think there's all you know everybody has some way of you know bringing a little kind of adventure into their life that will be curative to a lot of what else I mean I do think it's possible for anyone I got this amazing email a couple years ago so in the comfort crisis I talk about this

idea of Mussogee which is this idea is that was created by the guy's name Dr. Marcus Elliott but anyways the idea is like go out and do something really hard once a year and learn from that learn something about your edges and your potential so I get this email the subject is Mussogee and it's

from Janet I forget her last name and just says hello Michael my name is Janet I am 79 years old I'm going to do Mussogee I will make it hard and I won't die signed Janet so I'm like damn Janet if you can do it did you hear back from her did she report back I didn't hear back from her

oh all right well Janet if you're listening yeah Janet I want to follow up yeah I think uh we are people are far more capable of change than we might think is it going to be easy in the short term no but once you start to make progress progress compiles and you look back and go oh

whoa that's a big difference and anything is possible I believe in that and I think you know anybody who's spend time in recovery has born witness to many lives transformed in positive way so I believe in the human capacity to change and adapt and I think your work is really important on this

so thank you for coming and sharing with me today well likewise what are you working on now can you talk about that I'll probably do a third book I mean a lot of what I do now is I have a a sub stack which is a 2% at twpct.com and I read about the things I read about my book in real time

you know I realized that by doing only books I had this kind of three-year lag and I couldn't talk about things in real time as they were coming in and even just kind of go a little bit off topic every now and then so the newsletter allows me to do that and I'll probably do a third book

eventually but yeah we're putting that off because it's a lift all right man well come back and talk to me again when you have something more to share I appreciate it man this was great thank you yeah I'd love to really appreciate it thanks Michael peace yeah

this episode was brought to you by element get a free sample pack with any purchase that's eight single serving packets free with any element order only available through my link at dr-ionk-lm-n-t.com slash ritual that's it for today thank you for listening I truly hope you enjoyed the conversation

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