How Small Changes Lead to Big Rewards with Michael Easter

In this episode, Michael Easter defines the scarcity loop and its impact on human behavior, particularly in relation to addictive tendencies. Michael shares several compelling insights on how small changes can lead to big rewards.

In this episode, you will be able to:

• Embrace the 2% mentality to unlock powerful daily habits and achieve long-term goals
• Discover the surprising benefits of choosing discomfort for sustainable personal growth and success
• Learn effective strategies for breaking free from the scarcity loop and cultivating abundance in life
• Uncover the remarkable impact of making small lifestyle changes on overall health and well-being

To learn more, click here!

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
You give a cave man of sleeve of oreos, they're
going to eat the whole thing. And that makes sense
because they're never going to see that again. Right. But
today we're just surrounded in food, and we still have
a brain that goes like, hey, if you have a
chance to overeat or eat food that is more calorie dense,
like junk food, like do that. And you see this
kind of manifests itself in people's waistlines today. You know,
people are obviously, on average, a lot heavier than they

(00:21):
were in the past.

Speaker 2 (00:30):
Welcome to the one you feed Throughout time, great thinkers
have recognized the importance of the thoughts we have, quotes
like garbage in, garbage out, or you are what you think,
ring true. And yet for many of us, our thoughts
don't strengthen.

Speaker 1 (00:45):
Or empower us.

Speaker 2 (00:47):
We tend toward negativity, self pity, jealousy, or fear. We
see what we don't have instead of what we do.
We think things that hold us back and dampen our spirit.
But it's not just about thinking. Our actions matter. It
takes conscious, consistent and creative effort to make a life
worth living. This podcast is about how other people keep

(01:08):
themselves moving in the right direction, how they feed their
good wolf. Thanks for joining us. Our guest on this

(01:28):
episode is Michael Easter, a writer and speaker who focuses
on how humans can leverage modern science and evolutionary wisdom
to perform better and live healthier lives. Michael's work has
been implemented by professional sports teams, elite military units, fortune
five hundred companies, and leading universities. Today, Michael and Eric

(01:49):
discuss his book, The Scarcity Brain.

Speaker 3 (01:52):
Hi, Michael, welcome to the show.

Speaker 1 (01:54):
Thanks for having me, glad to be here.

Speaker 3 (01:55):
I am really excited to have you on. We're going
to be discussing your book, Scared City Brain. But before
we get into that, let's start like we always do
with the parable. In the parable, there's a grandparent who's
talking with their grandchild and they say, in life, there
are two wolves inside of us that are always at battle.
One is a good wolf, which represents things like kindness
and bravery and love, and the other is a bad wolf,

(02:17):
which represents things like greed and hatred and fear. And
the grandchild stops and they think about it for a second.
They look up at their grandparents. They say, well, which
one wins? And the grandparent says the one you feed.
So I'd like to start off by asking you what
that parable means to you in your life and in
the work that you do.

Speaker 1 (02:35):
I mean, a lot of my work focuses on the
general theme that in order to improve your life, you
often have to do things that are challenging in the
short term to get a long term benefit and reward
in your life. And you know, I think the world
is increasingly set up that it's harder to feed the
good wolf if you will, It's so much easier to

(02:55):
feed the bad wolf, right, Like, that's an easy thing
to do. But I do think that, you know, we
all know that the reward of feeding the good wolf
is better for our long term health, well being, mindset,
all those things.

Speaker 3 (03:09):
So yeah, so I'm going to ask you a question.
I've asked a lot of people and gotten generally unsatisfactory answers,
but I believe you are going to give me a
satisfactory answer.

Speaker 1 (03:18):
No, no pressure.

Speaker 3 (03:21):
But it's this. You know, I've exercised for a long time.
I'm not a young man. You know, I've got thousands
of reps of exercise under my belt. Every single time
I've done it, when I'm done, I'm like, that was great,
I'm glad I did that, And yet with that much
positive reinforcement, I still find it hard to do sometimes.

(03:44):
Why is that.

Speaker 1 (03:46):
Humans evolved to avoid physical activity. We invented exercise basically
after the Industrial Revolution. So if you think about the
grant sweep of humanity, right, what we needed to survive
was always scarce and it was hard to find. So
energy was one of those things. Energy in the form
of food. So if you were the type of person

(04:07):
that wanted to burn energy for the sake of it,
that is to say, exercise, you would have died off
because there just wasn't enough food to do that. So
over time, humans basically evolved to be lazy and avoid
any extra activity that wasn't going to getting resources to
Like this larger point, right, A stat that I love
that highlights this, which I'm sure we'll talk about later

(04:29):
the podcast, is that two percent of people take the
stairs when there's also an escalator available. So what that
tells me and shows me is that we really are
wired to do the next easiest, most comfortable thing and
avoid extra movement. Right. We just do that unconsciously. So
long story short, It's like for two and a half
million years of time of generations, avoiding exercise or any

(04:50):
extra movement, it kept you alive. And we have all
these discomforts. Our body throws at us psychologically physically to
keep us away from moving any more than we have to,
and exercise is a form of that. So, like if
you went into every workout being like I absolutely want
to do this every single time, and you just kept
going and going like still today, that you'd probably incur

(05:10):
some downside's like you want some sort of resistance going
into that, or else the human species would not have
lived on.

Speaker 3 (05:16):
So is it safe to say that things that take
that much energy expenditure don't end up becoming what we
would truly consider a habit, meaning it happens automatically every time.
Is it really a sense of these things that you
really have to summon a lot of energy for there's
always going to be some degree of resistance there.

Speaker 1 (05:35):
Yeah, I think there probably will be some degree of resistance, Yeah,
if something is challenging. Exercise is a great example. Healthy
eating is harder than unhealthy eating because we're also wired
to value and crave foods that are more calorie dense
than those that are less calorie dense. Right, kind of
back like the exercise thing. For two and a half
million years of time, it always made sense to overread

(05:57):
if you had the opportunity, Right, you give a cave
man of sleeve of oreos, they're going to eat the
whole thing, And that makes sense because they're never going
to see that again. Right. But today we're just surrounded
in food, and we still have a brain that goes like, hey,
if you have a chance to overeat or eat food
that is more calorie dense, like junk food, like, do that.
And you see this kind of manifests itself in people's

(06:18):
waistlines today. You know, people are obviously, on average a
lot heavier than they were in the past.

Speaker 3 (06:23):
Yeah, that makes a lot of sense to me. Listener,
while you were listening to that, what resonated with you?
What one thing to feed your good wolf comes to mind?
If the thing that came to your mind was more
time for stillness, or you've tried meditation before and you
really haven't liked it, then I want to give you
a quick tip that might make it better for you.
And it's simply to stop expecting that you're not going

(06:46):
to have thoughts. Nearly everyone has this expectation that they're
going to sit down and meditate and they're going to
stop having thoughts. And when they stop having thoughts, that
means they're doing it well. But no one does that,
and so we end up feeling like we're failing all
of the time. Every three seconds, failed again, failed again.
We develop a relationship with meditation that is aversive. So

(07:09):
if you want to stop dreading meditation and actually find
it relaxing, check out my free meditation guide at Goodwolf
dot me slash calm. In it, I walk you through
my process to engage with meditation in a new way,
and a lot of people have found it really helpful.
That's Goodwolf dot me slash calm. So you mentioned the
two percent stat You're wearing a hat that says two

(07:30):
percent that orients towards a way of approaching the world
that you call being a two percenter, And you say
this in your substack about this, You say, you know,
we all tend to think of the big things that
we do as being important, but you say what we
do in all our other moments is the most powerful.
The littlest choices make the biggest impact. I mean my
favorite phrase is little by little, a little becomes a lot,

(07:53):
both positively and negatively. Right, And so talk about other
ways besides taking this versus the escalator. What are other
sort of small choices that we can make that over
time are going to be very beneficial for us.

Speaker 1 (08:10):
Yeah, that's a great question. So, yeah, the substack is
called two percent after that stat which totally changed my
thinking about humans and behavior. Ye. I actually have a
whole written piece that's called the two percent Manifesto up
on the site that'll dive into a ton of this,
and the site is twopct dot com. But to answer
your question, I think it manifests itself relationship wise. Right,

(08:30):
think of how many people text today instead of call
because a call is more intimate. Right, you have to
be more open. It might take a little bit more time.
You don't know what to expect. You can't control all
the variables. But there's plenty of research that says the
simple act of picking up the phone and calling someone
it creates better social bonds, more intimate connections. And when
you put that in the context of the fact that
we're facing a loneliness crisis, like pick up the phone

(08:52):
it'll be totally worth it, not to mention, you'll honestly
save time in the long run, especially if you're like
asking the person the question. So socially it affects us.
I would also say it affects us food wise. So
when you look at a lot of the research, most
eating decisions today are not actually driven by true physiological hunger.
So more than eighty percent of eating is not because

(09:12):
of real hunger. It's because it's a certain time at
a clock, and we always eat at that time. It's
because we're stressed out, like stress eating is a huge thing,
and it's because we're bored something like that. Right, So
I think that learning to be okay with hunger can
teach you something about physiological hunger and how much food
you actually need to feel well and perform well. I

(09:33):
think it extends to how we spend our time and attention.
So when you look at why people pick up their phone,
more than ninety percent of pickups things ninety six percent
are not because a person got a notification. They're because
they felt something internal, usually boredom. We've just become totally
boredom resistant today and we just have this easy, effortless

(09:55):
escape from it in our phone. But if you can
just sit with that boredom, if you can be like
the two percent mentality, right, I'm going to choose this
short term discomfort to get a long term benefit. There's
all this crazy research that shows that boredom is one
of the best ways to increase creativity. Some of the
best ideas come out of being bored. Not to mention
it gives your brain a break from all the screens
that we spend our time on. We spend more than

(10:16):
thirteen hours a day engage with digital media. This is
all new stuff in the grand scheme of time and space.
People spend ninety three percent of their time indoors, and
it's like, well, why the hell's that. It's like, well,
because the outdoors is cold or it's too hot, or
it might be raining or it's windy, and it's less
predictable than my you know, sanitary box that I live in.
And so even something as simple as going outside is

(10:37):
one of the best hacks for mental health and can
prove mental health. But we just don't do it all
that often. So it's like, how can I take this idea,
this two percent idea, like being the two percent of
people that's going to select that thing that's going to
be a little more uncomfortable in the short term, but
it's going to give me a long term reward. How
can I apply that just across the board, and you
can find tons of ways. I've written a lot about this,

(10:58):
so and then to answer your call up quest to that,
how do these things add up? And I'll give you
a really interesting stat So, when you look at how
people burn calories across the day, we think of exercises
like the big thing that's burning our calories. Right, if
you count out the calorie burn from just keeping your
body alive, which is called BMR, you find that actually
just the everyday movement you do in daily life actually

(11:18):
burns significantly more calories than workouts, like two to three times.
And so there's research from the Mail Clinic that basically
found that people who just move more throughout the day,
that's like taking the stairs, that's like parking the farthest
spot away every time it's like, oh, I need to
go down to get a coffee and the coffee shop
is a half mile away, Like I'm just gonna walk,
I'm not going to drive or whatever it is, Right,

(11:39):
they burn more than eight hundred extra calories across a day.
Let's equivalent to like an eight mile run. I mean,
how many people just go out for an eight mile run?
We don't, right, We go to the gym for like
thirty minutes, and we think that like that's going to
be enough. And it's like I'm not saying don't go
to the gym at all. I am saying go to
the gym, but I am also saying, how can you
weave in more incidental movement into your day because that's
going to have a larger effect on your health span

(12:02):
and lifespan and general fitness than just doing your whatever
amount of time in the gym and then sitting. It's
like we really just kind of have partioned off, like
we do this weird thing where we have like this
is the healthy part of my day and life and
then the rest of it is like sedentary or kind
of unhealthy, and or it's like January is my healthy month,
and then I fell off the wagon in February whatever

(12:23):
it is, right, And so I think we just need
to start thinking, like how can I find little wins
throughout the day rather than trying to take on these
heroics Because heroics don't seem to last.

Speaker 3 (12:32):
Right, Right, Heroics don't last, and heroics aren't available for
a lot of people, right. A lot of people don't
have ninety minutes a day to say, go exercise, but
they do have lots of little five minutes and lots
of little on the way to places. It's interesting how
much environment plays a role too, because I was in
New York City recently and it was cold out and

(12:55):
we were outside walking all day every day, and then
I get home to and it's cold, and all of
a sudden, I'm like, it's a little bit too cold
out there, and I suddenly don't want to go out.
It's so interesting to me how, like you said, we
get into these sort of ways of being that need interrupted.
The other thing that you were saying there also is
you know, we had an exercise scientist on years ago.

(13:18):
I mean it's been probably seven years ago, but I
remember it clear as day because she basically said the
rule is move as often as you can in any
way that you can. I mean, that was it. That
was the whole sum of her overall research and everything,
was that that's the best way to go. Just move
when you can. However you can and ideally in ways
you like to.

Speaker 1 (13:37):
Yeah, totally. In the comfort crisis, I talk a lot
about with environments changing. It's just our environments have changed
so much, so fast in the grand scheme of time
and space. It's like we've really engineered movement out of
our days. We've engineered more hyperchloric food into our days.
We've engineered connection out of our days. Like we've engineered
all the good stuff out of our days and engineered

(14:00):
in stuff that isn't necessarily good for us. And I mean,
if you just take a look at how much people
moved in the past compared to today. Since we're on the
topic of exercise, people used to walk at least twenty
thousand steps a day and about ten miles a day.
Now the average person is taken, you know, anywhere from
four thousand to seven thousand steps per day. And the

(14:21):
average person in the past used to do what the
government classifies as moderate exercise, and they gauge this using
accelerometers and all these different things. On Hunter gathers for
about three hours and twenty minutes three hours and twenty
minutes of exercise a day. Right now, the average person
is like thirty minutes three times a week, right, right.
I mean, it's just crazy how much less we move.

(14:43):
And it's not like you know, I think people sometimes
think of these people in the past and be like, man,
these are just like these heroic people. It's like, no,
you would do the same damn thing. It's just you
live in a built environment now, and so you don't do.

Speaker 3 (14:54):
That, right. Yeah, environment is so hugely important in the
choices that we make. All right, let's change direction here
and talk about your latest book, Scarcity Brain. Yeah, and
you say that you've come across this concept of something
called the scarcity loop, and you say it's the serial
killer of moderation. Yes, I'm a big believer in moderation,

(15:17):
I guess, even though having been an addict, maybe I
recognize the importance of moderation. But I just loved that line,
the serial killer of moderation. Tell me about the scarcity loop.

Speaker 1 (15:26):
Yeah. I learned about it interestingly enough, because I live
in Las Vegas and watching people play slot machines for
hours and hours and hours at a time and going
why would you keep doing that when everyone knows the
house always wins, Like, what the hell is going on? Right? So,
because I'm a journalist. When I ask a question like that,
I don't just go you know, and then move on,
like I actually try and figure out the answer. And

(15:48):
so I start talking all these different gaming researchers and
people in casino industry and blah blah blah. Long story short,
this leads me to this place on the edge of
town that is a fully working, brand new cutting edge
because you know, but it's used entirely for human behavior research.
So it is like a living, working casino laboratory, and
it's funded by the casino industry and a lot of

(16:09):
big tech companies. I think seventy two different companies are
on board providing all sorts of funding to this place.
And so this is where I talk to a slot
machine designer who explains to me basically how a slot
machine works, why it's so good at hooking people, and
by the way, they really are. Slot machines make more
money than books, movies, and music combined, those three industries

(16:30):
combined every single year.

Speaker 3 (16:32):
That's amazing.

Speaker 1 (16:33):
Yeah, it's amazing, and it's horrifying. So a slot machine
works by having these three parts, which is what I
call a scarcity loop. It's got opportunity unpredictable rewards and
quick repeatability. Think of it as a looping behavior. Okay, so opportunity,
you have an opportunity to get something of value. With
slot machines it's money, right, unpredictable rewards. You know you'll

(16:54):
get that thing of value at some point if you
keep doing the behavior, but you don't know when you're
going to get the thing of value, and you don't
know how valuable it's going to be. So with a
slot machine, you play a game and you could lose,
you could win some money, you could win a ton
of money, right, crazy range of outcomes, and then three
quick repeatability. You can just repeat the behavior immediately. There's
like zero pause in between repeating the behavior. So with

(17:17):
slot machines, people play about nine hundred games an hour. Now,
the reason that this is important and why the book
starts in the casino lab and learning this is because
once you understand this behavior loop, you start to see
why people get hooked on all sorts of stuff that
seems counterproductive and dumb. All these bad habits we have

(17:37):
a lot of them have elements of the scarcity loop. So,
for example, this is what makes social media work. Right,
It's got those same three parts. You got an opportunity
for some social likes, a boost to find something entertaining.
You don't know how many likes you're gonna get. You
don't know when you're gonna find the real that's gonna
make you crack up. And then you just keep scrolling
and scrolling and scrolling because of infinite scroll. Right. That's
in Instagram, It's in Twitter, it's in TikTok, and name

(18:00):
any social media app. The loop is being put in
personal finance apps so people will do more trading faster.
It explains the rise of sports betting and how that's
really just taken off. It was like this combination of
legality and then putting it in cell phones and leveraging
the loop, the mided tick off. It's what makes dating
apps work, right, opportunity to find a mate, swipe, swipe, swipe, swipe, swipe,

(18:25):
Oh my god, I just matched with someone being jack
pot swipe swipe, swipe, swipespe Right. And so when you
start to look at how the world is constructed, like
it's even in elements of our food system. I talk
to a guy who's a executive for junk food companies,
and he talked about how Yeah, we totally use the
quick repeatability thing in our food. I mean it just
starts to show up everywhere and it is unparallel but

(18:47):
pushing people into these quick repeat behaviors that are usually
engaging in the short term or at least distracting in
the short term, but that can often lead to long
term regrets or long term problems. Yeah.

Speaker 3 (18:59):
You quote one of the people in the snack food
industry saying there's three v's in the snacking world, value, variety,
in velocity, which is exactly the three things of the
scarcity loop. So you're talking about all the modern applications
of this scarcity loop, but this is something that is
built into us right from evolutionary history. So explain the

(19:20):
origins of why we get so lost in it.

Speaker 1 (19:23):
Yeah. So it's funny because after I talk to the
slot machine designer, like he's showing me how the slot
machine works and blah blah blah, and then I asked him,
I'm like, why do people find this so captivating? And
he just looks at me and he goes, Dude, I
don't know. I just make machines that make a lot
of money, Like, I don't know why people play him right.
So I end up talking to this guy who's a
behavioral psychologist at the University of Kentucky. His name is

(19:45):
Thomas Entl. He's like eighty something years old. He's been
doing research since the late nineteen sixties, and he like
knows everything. And he told me it's basically a piece
of evolutionary hardware in our brain that helped us find
food every day when we were hunter gatherers on the savannah.
So I want you to picture us looking for food, right,

(20:08):
every single day you had to find food. You either
had to find it in the form of gathering you
were like walking out looking for trees that have food,
or you have to find it from hunting. Right, you
have to find an animal that it's on the move.
So you go to one place you think is going
to have food, doesn't have food. So you go to
another place you think it's going to have food. No
food there. You go to another place, jackpot place has

(20:30):
all kinds of food. So yay, everyone's fat and happy
for only a moment, though, because then you got to
repeat that behavior, maybe the same day for lunch or dinner,
definitely the next day for food again. The next day, right,
so like literally our life finding food every single day,
we fell into this scarcity loop of finding food and
so our sort of attraction to it and these random

(20:54):
rewards embedded in it, and this like quickly repeating the behavior.
It kept us alive for all of time. And now
that architecture simply gets applied to all these different places
in our life and is really unparallel at capturing our attention,
and it works in every single animal. All wild animals
still have to find food scarcely loop style, and so

(21:16):
like this guy Thomas and Tal, I mean he can
get pigeons to fall into it with like these slot
machine games he makes them. I mean, you see it
in all animals. It's really fascinating. I think really the
key is that it's always been a part of us,
but Las Vegas really figured out how it works and
how to work it and how to just really optimize
it starting in about nineteen eighty, and other industries took

(21:37):
notice and they went, why are people playing those slot
machines so often all the time now, and why are
they making so much money? What the hell is going
on there? And they just pulled elements of it.

Speaker 3 (22:19):
So we've got this scarcity loop that's sort of embedded
in US, but has some certain limits on it evolutionarily,
right as in like there isn't like crazy amounts of food. Yes,
there is repeatability, but you don't repeat it two seconds later,
right right. Whereas these modern scarcity loops, we know, for example,
that our food is designed to be super satiating and stimulating.

(22:44):
We know that we can repeat these things really really fast.
And so this scarcity loop, if I understand you, is
built into us evolutionarily. But our modern world has figured
out how to essentially soup it up.

Speaker 1 (22:56):
Yeah, that's a great word to describe it. A modern
world has really figuredigured out the optimal schedule of unpredictable rewards.
So about forty five to fifty five percent of the
time getting something is optimal in slot machines, for example,
But they've also found ways to tweak it. So, for example,
slot machines really started taking off when they started being

(23:20):
embedded with this thing called a win disguised as a loss.
So this is when you say you bet a dollar
and you play a slot machine game, And when you
play a slot machine game, it's no longer just a
single line of symbols that you're trying to line up,
Like it's all these different combinations of symbols you can get.

Speaker 3 (23:36):
It could be like I don't even understand them. I
see one and I'm like, I don't know what's happening
here at all.

Speaker 1 (23:42):
Yeah, they're crazy now. But the long story short is
that by doing this, they can do what are called
losses disguised as wins, and that basically just means you
quote unquote, win less money than you bet. So you
might bet, say a dollar, but you quote unquote win
fifty cents. But here's the thing. It sounds ridiculous, but
when you actually play the game, the machine cues you

(24:03):
to show you that something good has happened. You still
get the lights, you still see the money go up.
And scientists will study this. They'll do fMRI neuroscience stuff
and find that people's brain reacts the exact same to
a loss, discusses a win as they do a real win,
and it compels people to play the game for longer
and makes it more entertaining. And you see this, for

(24:27):
example in social media. So when you go on to
social media, usually there's like this delay, right, you wait
to see if you've got an update, like they could
tell you immediately. The delay is programmed in to tell
you how many, say notifications you got on Twitter or
whatever it is, right, and then when you open that up,

(24:48):
you're like, well, how many is it going to actually be?
Is it one? Is it one million? Did I get
two likes? Did I get two million likes? Right, there's
this kind of like there's losses disguise of wins. There's
real wins. I mean, it's really just like a taking
of the casino tactics. Yeah. And then also the speed.
A good example from slot machines is that when they

(25:08):
removed the handles on them, people could gain faster, and
they went from playing four hundred games an hour to
nine hundred games an hour. Similar thing happened when social
media started using infinite scroll. Screen time just went through
the roof and people's sessions lengthened. All these different things happen.
So generally, the faster you can get a person to

(25:29):
repeat a behavior, the faster they will repeat a behavior.
So engineers now know this, and so they go, Okay,
how can we get someone to do this quicker? Even
a lot of online shopping places, for example, are trying
to really push people into one click buying, because what
happens when you go kart. Yes, i'd like to check out,
here's my address information, here's how i'd like it shipped.

(25:51):
By the time you hit the shipping thing, you're like,
do I really want a new pair of running shoes?
Do I really need this? But if you have one
click buying, it's just you have like no time to
think about whether this is a good decision or not.

Speaker 3 (26:02):
Yeah, it's funny as you're saying that, I was thinking
back to when Amazon really sort of got going, and
this is early two thousands, and I remember how just
the fact that I could buy books that easily, and
again there was no one click buying then, right, but
I didn't have to go to a bookstore. It nearly
ruined me the fact that in three minutes I could
have another book on its way to me. Right. But

(26:23):
it shows how we sort of keep up in the
game because now they think that's too slow. Right In
the same way with delivery times, like you know, before
i'd be like, oh, we're going to get this thing
in like three days. That's amazing. Now it's like it's
not here in an hour, right, Like what's the problem totally.

Speaker 1 (26:38):
And there's even a lot of sites that are using
unpredictable rewards within shopping, so putting like the slot machine
features or a spinning wheel for bargains and m hm though,
like Tamu is a great example of the casino vacation
of shopping. It's all these type of random rewards and
bargains and discounts, and I mean those spinning wheels. Some

(26:59):
people are like, oh, this stupid. Those increase conversion rates
by sevenfold.

Speaker 3 (27:03):
That's crazy.

Speaker 1 (27:04):
If you give someone a spinning wheel and they think
they've won like the whatever jackpot bargain, they're seven times
more likely to make a purchase. Crazy.

Speaker 3 (27:12):
Yeah, that's a huge number.

Speaker 1 (27:14):
Yeah, all right.

Speaker 3 (27:15):
Now let's pause for a quick good Wolf reminder, and
this one is on meditation. If while you're meditating your
mind wanders, you probably, like most people, treat that as
a moment of failure, like, ugh, my mind wandered again.
But let's flip that and instead treat that as a
moment of celebration because in that moment, your mind actually

(27:36):
woke up and you were mindful of the fact that
your mind wandered. So it's a win. So if we
can flip that right on its head and say, oh,
good job, brain. We actually make it more likely that
a our brain is going to do it more often
because we're training it, and b that we're going to
enjoy it more. And specifically, it's about how to make
you not dread meditation so much and actually find it relaxing.

(28:00):
Check out my free meditation guide at goodwolf dot me
slash calm. So I want to get to how we
can work against this scarcity loop here shortly, but before
we do, I'd like to explore it from a couple
different angles, like you do in your book. And the
first place I'd like to spend a little bit of
time is you say, at the extreme end of scarcity

(28:22):
brain lies addiction, and listeners of the show know that
I have an addiction in alcoholism history, I was a
homeless heroin addict at twenty four. But you have a
similar background at least struggles with alcohol. So talk to
me about scarcity brain in the context of addiction.

Speaker 1 (28:38):
Yeah. Yeah, I've been sober for nine years and my
thing was alcohol. And when you think about how most
of what we needed to survive in the past was
scarce and hard to find, and we now, how have
an abundance of all these things were built to crave.
I think that addictive substances absolutely fall into kind of
what we were just talking about, how everything has been

(28:59):
strained and then distilled. So when you think about the
past and addictive substances, we would usually use the substances
that we now consider addictive and drugs as tools. So
I'll give you an example of alcohol. So humans evolved
to have sort of a taste for alcohol because it
helped us find food. So fruit would fall from trees

(29:20):
and it would begin to ferment, right, and it would
give us this scent and be like, oh, yeah, we
can smell it better because it's fermenting, and then we
would go eat it and it would have these low
levels of alcohol, right, But we would find food and
we would get a ton of sugar from that. By
the way, the alcohol even killed some of the germs
that would be on the food. And at the same time, though,
it's not like this fruit that was rotting was like

(29:42):
Jack Daniels, right, It's like a very very low level
of alcohol in the fruit. Same thing goes for say,
coca leaves, which is what cocaine is made for. Right,
So coca leaves have this very very low level of
the compound cocaine, and still in countries in the Andes
will chew it because it helps with focus, it helps

(30:02):
ward off altitude sickness, for example. But it's like you
don't really feel anything from it, right, But we've managed
to and this is a story with all substances, We've
managed to sort of take the psychoactive compound whatever it
might be, and really distill it down into its strongest form,
and so we can get just the like high from that. Right,
it's just this super concentrated high. So it's like this

(30:26):
thing that we used to use as a tool for
all the time, we now have an ability to have
it be this thing that allows us to escape. And
you know, I think there's plenty of people obviously that
can use alcohol and even drugs to some extent, illegal
drugs without repercussion, right, they don't have a problem with it.
But I think that you find some people I can

(30:46):
I can speak for myself, who use it as a
way to just totally escape and deal with their problems.
And obviously that you know, comes with some downsides, Like
it came with some downsides to me personally, and I
can tell you that I've found that addiction definitely falls
into the loop as well. So for me, when I
would drink, it was like I had an opportunity to
improve my life in the short term because nothing would

(31:08):
fix my problem, Like the first drink right, doesn't matter
what kind of problem I have. If I just have
a drink, I'm good to go. Obviously, I could never
have one drink right. My favorite drink was always the
next one right, right, And then there's unpredictable rewards. I
didn't know what the hell was gonna happen. I just
know that if I start drinking, I'm gonna have a
more interesting night, could be in a good way, could
be in a bad way than I would if I

(31:30):
was sober, right, and then repeatability. It's like after that,
I'm just waiting until I can have the next drink again.
And I think you also see it in illegal drugs too,
with like even getting the drugs, it's like you don't
know where you're gonna get it. You don't know who
you're gonna get it from, you don't know how strong
it's gonna be, you don't know how much it's gonna cost.
You know if you're gonna get in trouble along the way. Like,
there's all these unpredictable things about drug use, and you

(31:53):
do tend to find that when certain drugs are legalized
or at least controlled and put in doses that are predictable,
addiction rates do seem to fall.

Speaker 3 (32:02):
Yeah, there's a ton of ways I would love to
follow that particular question, because we're seeing interesting things, you know,
with marijuana being legalized and Oregon decriminalizing and headed back
towards criminalization, and black markets in California for marijuana. There's
a lot of interesting things happening in that space. But
that's not really where I want to go. What I
would love to talk a little bit about is you

(32:24):
talk about you know, over the last century, we've sort
of ended up with two dominant schools of thought of addiction. Right.
The one is sort of the very classic one, meaning
you're an alcoholic or an addict because you're a bad person,
you're weak, you're of lower moral character, the classics, right,
And then the more recent is this idea of it

(32:45):
being a disease, and they call it lots of different things, right,
but it's there's something in your brain that gets broken
as a result of this, and I think the disease
model was actually a really good step away from the
more failing model, Like it moved us a certain direction,
and then there's a direction that I think has been
hugely beneficial. And like any model, it has its own

(33:09):
limitations to it. Right, you go on to say something
that I think is really important about the broken brain idea. Right,
Because the broken brain idea, the disease model says you
don't have a choice, right in alcoholics, anonymous right, twelve
step programs. You know I'm powerless over alcohol, Right, I
have no ability. But you say something about the broken

(33:29):
brain model. You say that, in essence, the broken brain
model is right. Addiction is not a choice. Instead, it's
a summation of repeated choices that make a different choice
harder to make for environmental, biological, and historical reasons. It's
deep learning. And I just loved that idea. I've talked
to some of the same people on the show that

(33:50):
you've had in your book. But say a little bit
more about that.

Speaker 1 (33:54):
Yeah, I mean, I think the first things versus that
I agree with you about the disease model and the
intent behind it. Right, it came up in a time
where we're throwing all these people in jail because they're
bad people, because they are addicted to drugs, and we
think that that's going to like solve their problems. It's
like no, right, And so I think it's well intentioned.

(34:14):
I think that it's downside, though, is that there's plenty
of examples where people are able to make choices. So
a classic example is the soldiers in Vietnam. There's this
huge spike in addiction rates to heroin in Vietnam in
the Vietnam War, and so President Nixon he launches this
program called Operation Golden Flow. And the deal is pretty simple.

(34:35):
It's that if people who are addicted, our soldiers who
are addicted to heroin want to come back to the
United States and leave war, they have to pass a
urine test. So something like fifteen to twenty percent of
our soldiers in Vietnam we're addicted to heroin. So you
would think, okay, like if people can't make a choice here,
and it's one hundred percent of choice, we would have

(34:56):
left fifteen to twenty percent of our soldiers in Vietnam, right. Well,
what ended up happening was complete opposite. Every single soldier
passed the dr in test and when they got home,
the relapse rates among the people who were addicted were
exceedingly low. They were like five percent, and the five
percent who relapse tended to be drug users before the

(35:16):
Vietnam War. So what this suggests is that one people
have a choice, and that two elements of addiction may
also be driven by our environment. Back to the environment, right,
And so then it's like, Okay, what was Vietnam like
during the war, Well, that sounds like hell. It's like, yeah,
if I was in that hell, I might be wanted
to do some drugs too to escape. And so I
think that you see, addiction rates tend to rise and

(35:38):
fall based on people's external and internal conditions. So I
really see addiction as a solution for people who are
experiencing problems. Unfortunately, using a substance provides a solution in
the short term, like I said, with my drinking, right,
that'll solve a problem faster than anything. But the problem

(35:58):
is that it creates long term issues. Right. So unfortunately,
when I drank, it's not like I would go, you know,
donate my time to charities and also donate my money
and read great books like I did stupid shit that
ended up half ruin in my life, right, not tends
to be the story for most people. But I do
think that knowing that there is an element of choice

(36:22):
is helpful for people. It's not like people will say, oh,
it's a choice. It's like, well, that really really simplifies it,
you know. Yes, it's like in a way, yes, but
like that is ninety nine percent right, one hundred percent wrong.
It's like feels a choice. No one would make the choice.
It's like, why is the person doing the behavior in

(36:42):
the first place, And it's usually because it's solving a
short term problem. That is this massive problem that's going
to have to take all these different means of solving
and by the way, it's really going to suck as
you solve it in the long term, right, And so
it's super complicated. But I do think that that also
gives people a little bit of hope. So when you
look at this really interesting study out if I think
the University of New Mexico, and it basically found that

(37:04):
the top reason people relapsed it was a study of
alcoholics for about a year, it was because they believed
wholeheartedly in the disease model, and they went, well, wait
a minute, if I have a disease, and I asked
my doctor, how do I cure this thing? And my
doctor goes, well, there's no cure for it. Why would
I even try? Like it's a foregone conclusion that I'm
going to relax, right, And so I do think the
message that you know, there is a little bit of hope.

(37:25):
There's a lot of hope actually, and there's also some
personal agency, but also realizing like it's going to be hard,
and it's going to take work, and it's going to
take asking for help. You're going to have to be like, hey,
I need help from people. You know, it's not always
going to be easy. But I do think you see
a much brighter outlook too. For addiction.

Speaker 3 (38:05):
I agree with you. I mean, the great mystery to
me is why some people recover and others don't. Right.
We can point to things, we can look at people's environments, right,
we can look at the social capital that they have.
There's lots of explanations, right, But at the end of
the day, there does seem to me to be something
mysterious about it. Because you'll see some people who have

(38:26):
all the trauma in the world, none of the social capital,
none of the support, and they get sober. And then
you'll see other people who have all the support in
the world, all the social capital, their trauma load isn't
that high, and they don't. Right, And so there is
an element of choice in it. But the question is
always how much choice right? And I know in my
own life the amount of choice I feel about picking

(38:49):
up a drink or doing drugs is completely different than
it was fifteen years ago. Right, fifteen years ago, it
felt like I had this sliver of choice. It was there,
was always there, but it didn't feel like it feels today.
And that's why I loved your line about addiction is
not a choice. Instead, it's a summation of repeated choices

(39:10):
that make a different choice harder to make. For all
the reasons we've talked about, environmental, biological, and historical, right,
I think that really speaks to it. I mean, that's
my understanding to bring a spiritual word into this of karma. Right.
Karma to me is simply that a behavior that I
do makes it easier to repeat again and again, hence
the scarcity loop aspect of this. Right. The more repeatable

(39:32):
behavior is, the more I repeat it, the more likely
it is I'm going to do the same thing in
the future. It starts to cut a groove in the record,
so to speak.

Speaker 1 (39:40):
Yeah, and I think that too, in the sense that
it's kind of a mystery. I mean, I don't think
that's unlike any behavior though too. You know, It's like,
why are some people really good with money and some
people really bad with money, whether or not they're rich
or poor?

Speaker 3 (39:51):
Right?

Speaker 1 (39:51):
Why are some people into ex food and not into
why food? It's like it's kind of these great mysteries
of being the human And when you apply addiction onto it,
I think it a murky because it is something we study,
but there's all these things about life that we just
don't study that are equally vexing, you know, totally. And
I do think too, like I want to kind of

(40:12):
put a pin in the fact that it's important to
have empathy because people think that like, if an addict
is using a drug or drinking, it's an irrational decision.
It's like, no, it's not, because if you're an addict
or an alcoholic using your substance of choice, it always
improves your life in the short term every single time, right, Right,
so you're going to get an immediate benefit. That is

(40:34):
not an irrational decision in the short term, right, and
the long term it is. Yeah, but you can't see that, right,
And not to mention, I think most people who have
an addiction, they don't start using a substance and their
life immediately goes to shit. It never happens that way.
No things are good for years and you get all
these positive experiences from this thing, or else you wouldn't
do it. People don't do things that don't benefit them somehow, right,

(40:56):
Like I had years of drinking where drinking enhance my life.
Maybe we have more interesting experiences. I was more open
with people and fun at parties. I would think funnier things.
I'm a writer. If I sat down on the keyboard,
I'd probably write something different. A lot of times it
was something more interesting than I normally write. And so
I have all this evidence that alcohol does good things

(41:16):
for me, right years of it. But then that starts
to tip and I start to have repercussion some nights,
and then over time I have a greater ratio of
bad nights to good nights. But still in the back
of my mind, I'm going I got like a decade
of evidence that this is a good thing, and if
I can just get back there, things are gonna be fine.
But you can't get back there.

Speaker 3 (41:37):
Or you only get back there temporarily, Like if it
didn't work at all, it's back to unpredictable rewards to
some degree, right, Like if I drank and I didn't
feel better, Ever, it would be easy to be like, well,
that doesn't make any sense, right, right, But the fact
is that it still does a little bit sometimes right now, again,
if the same person would see like, okay, it's not

(41:58):
worth the trade off, and that's why I love I
think it may have been Miasavolets who proposes the idea
of you know, it being in essence of learning disorder,
right that a brain that's working fully correctly would be like, Okay,
that used to be good, but now it's really bad,
and the downside is out weigh the pros, and I'm
going to update my mental models around this thing, and

(42:19):
I'm gonna learn and I'm gonna stop doing it. But
that doesn't seem to happen, at least not quickly and
without great downside in the average addict or alcoholic.

Speaker 1 (42:29):
Mm hmm, exactly she's great one. Let me say that.
The second part is that I think that happens with
all sorts of things every day that you do, I do,
everyone does. When you eat really unhealthy food, it's like, well,
that was really enjoyable in the short term, yeah, even
though you know it's not gonna be good for you
in the long run. When people play slot machines in town,

(42:49):
anytime you gamble, you're like, you know you're probably gonna lose,
but it's like, well, that was still fun, right, right.
It only becomes a problem when all of a sudden
you're like, oh my god, I don't have any money
to cover my bills because I've I've gambled so much, right, right,
And so there's all these kind of behaviors that just like,
at a certain point they tip for people, and that's
when it becomes problematic. But that doesn't mean the behavior

(43:12):
is problematic in general for most people most of the time.

Speaker 3 (43:15):
Right. Well, if we go back to the two percent idea, right,
we all know that taking the stairs is a good idea, yeah,
and two percent of us are doing it, right, So
you know, that's why I think thinking of addiction along
the spectrum is a very helpful concept, right, because we
all have, depending on the activity of the behavior, you know,
varying degrees of making good choices.

Speaker 1 (43:34):
Right, right. DSM five they don't use the word addiction.
The DSM five, if people don't know, is like the
Bible that psychiatrists use for diagnoses, but doesn't use the
word addiction. It does use substance use disorder, and in
order to figure out if a person has a substance
use disorder, it basically outlines eleven criteria eleven questions more

(43:55):
or less and if you have, say, you know, one
to four, you've got a mild case. If you've got
five to whatever, seven you got a medium case, and
eight or more you got an extreme case or whatever
they language they use. But what's fascinating about that is
you can look at that and you can plug in
all sorts of things that you do that you're like,

(44:15):
I wish I did this a little less, and we'll
probably fall on some spectrum of that what they consider
use disorder, like pop in your cell phone, habit, your
relationship to your favorite drunk food, whatever it might be. Right,
And so I really do think that reinforces the idea
that there's all these things we do, we're on the
sort of spectrum of giving us benefits in the short
term and harming us in the long run.

Speaker 3 (44:35):
Yep. So I would love to explore this scarcity loop
from different angles. I think there's some really fun things
about games, in the ways that we can use games
for positive and negative. We've touched on food. You have
some great things about stuff and information. But what I'd
like to get to now. We may get to some
of those things in the post show conversation. What I'd

(44:55):
like to talk about now is given, now that we
know this scarcity, what are ways that we start to
bring ourselves out of it.

Speaker 1 (45:04):
Yeah. So, if it's a bad behavior that falls into
the scarcity loop, there's three big ways that I see,
starting from easiest to hardest. So the first way is
just becoming aware of it. So once you become aware
of a behavior and that it sort of falls into
this ancient loop, I think that oftentimes will reduce the
frequency of it. So this is called the observer effect

(45:26):
in science. Just by observing something, it tends to change.
This is bad for scientists conducting studies. This is good
for us when we want to change our own behaviors.
So if you can identify something you're doing, you're going like, oh,
this is falling into the scarcity loop. And by the way,
it's not your fault because it's just your ancient brain
like falling into this system that it's naturally attracted to.

(45:47):
But it is your problem to solve, right, So I
think observing can be super helpful for people. It usually
will reduce some frequency. And then number two is that
you can change any three of the parts and that'll
usually reduce the frequency of the behavior. So you can
alter the opportunity, you can alter the unpredictable rewards, or
you can slow down the frequency of the behavior, slow

(46:08):
down how fast you can do the behavior basically, So,
for example, with opportunity, something as simple as like if
you've got a problem with, say, eating oreos at night,
taking away the opportunity to eat oreos, i e. Getting
them out of your house, Like you're gonna do that
less Like it's so simple, but like it works.

Speaker 3 (46:29):
Door Dash has ruined that though, and these meal delivery services,
like it used to be so much simpler, like you
had to leave the house and now it's like, let
me just bring up this thing on my phone and
click click, click, and three ice cream sundays arise.

Speaker 1 (46:44):
Yeah, I mean even something like Okay, so let's take
an example of inserting pause. How can we make that
more of a pain in the butt. Delete the app? Yeah, right,
just deleting not having the app right there, and you go,
oh my god, I gotta reinstall it, and I have
to remember my password. I don't remember my password. I'm
gonna have to create a new password. Like you're putting

(47:04):
all these layers that that just reduces I'm not saying
that that's a guarantee you're not going to get those
ice creams, but I am saying it'll reduce the probability
that you will get those ice creams.

Speaker 3 (47:14):
Right, That basic rule of you know, if you want
to do more of something, decrease all the steps in
between doing it, And if you want to do less
of something, make it harder and harder in whatever creative
ways you can come up with to make it difficult.

Speaker 1 (47:27):
To do exactly exactly. Changing unpredictable rewards helps too. So
for example, one of the reasons that our phones are
so rewarding as all the colors are really stimulating, Like
colors stimulate behavior, right, green means go red means slow down.
So putting your phone in gray scale, for example, one
study showed reduces screen time by about forty minutes just

(47:49):
making that boring right, you don't get as much unpredictable
rewards basically from the phone and then slowing behaviors down.
I think this is probably the most powerful and that
comes in you know, with shopping. It could be I'm
only buying stuff in person, or if I'm going to
buy something online, I got a seventy two hour holding
period where I'm like, it's got to sit in the
car for seventy two hours, and I guarantee by the

(48:11):
time you go back, you'll be like, wait, what did
I put in the cart the other day? You won't
need the item. Right. When it comes to food, I
think eating food that is less processed reduces how many
calories you'll eat simply because the food is much slower
to eat than junk food. So, as we talked about
with that executive, the third V and what makes a

(48:32):
junk food successful is velocity. The faster a food is
to eat, the more a person will eat of the food.
That's good for the wallets of the junk food industry.
It's not good for our wastelines. So eating less junk
food and switching over to a whole in sort of
less processed foods. People eat fewer calories with cell phones
and pause. There's an app I love called clear Space.

(48:54):
What it does is like you choose the apps that
you have a problem opening, the ones where you're in
like the grocery store line and you just find yourself
on and you're like, wait, how did that happen? Right?
The ones you reflexively take out. What it does is
you choose the apps you want kind of restricted. When
you go to open them, it basically makes you pause.
It goes, hey, did you actually want to open this app?

(49:16):
And you go yes, and then it goes okay, let's
like wait for a minute, makes you breathe for like
says like breathe, it's fifteen seconds. Then it shows you
this nice quote about how like you know your life
is going by as you're on your phone or something,
and then you have to select how much time you
actually want to spend in the app so you can't
just fall down the rabbit hole of it. And that

(49:38):
has been a great one for people.

Speaker 3 (49:41):
Yeah, I downloaded that app after reading the book and
it's great my remaining phone vice. Such it is. I'm
pretty much completely off social media. You know, I don't
play games very much. I mean a little bit is
just compulsively, for no reason at all, checking my email
every time i'm bored, just again and again and again.
It's the scarcity loop one hundred percent, right, because every

(50:04):
once in a while when I open my email, I'm like, oh, wow,
there's this really great thing in here. You know, somebody
said something really nice, or I found out that I've
been asked to do this thing or whatever.

Speaker 1 (50:16):
Right awards, Yeah, man.

Speaker 3 (50:18):
Unpredictable reward, and I can do it again and again
and again and again. It seems to be the one
sort of digital thing that I tame it back. You know.
I get to the point where I'm like, okay, I've
gotten to the point now where I've like, I take
time off. I can be without it for a week,
two weeks, but the minute I have it back, it
creeps its way back up to this sort of almost

(50:38):
like a tick, you know. So I found that app
to be really really helpful in a causing me to pause,
be being able to say how many times a day
I want to open it? So then I'm like, oh, well,
I said, I'm only going to do it two more
times today and it's ten am. I'm probably going to
want to check email again, you know. And then like

(51:01):
you said that it limits the time that I'm in it,
so which is not for email that important because I'm
usually in it for like thirty seconds because i checked it,
you know, eight minutes ago.

Speaker 1 (51:10):
Yeah. For people, it's called ClearSpace, and it's awesome. Here's
a great example, you telling me about how you'd kind
of reduced all these other apps and like, but you
still had the one. I have a great story. And
I'm going to use his name because we have competitions
in giving each other shit. Is my friend Jason McCarthy
who runs go Rock. He founded the company go Rock.
It was like, so I deleted Instagram from my phone

(51:32):
because I was using it too much, and he's like
it was good for you know a handful of days.
Like and then I freaking found myself like compulsively checking LinkedIn.
It's like, I haven't been on LinkedIn for years, and
I'm like going into LinkedIn cause it's given me that
unpredictable like what if someone said, what is someone can

(51:54):
I find on LinkedIn, I gotta scroll something for those
unpredictable rewards, And so I think it's like being conscious
that once you trade one you probably are going to
go looking for another, and then you gotta kind of
find a way to put rails on that. That's where
I think clear space is nice, because you just have
to be more intentional with the ones you do want.

Speaker 3 (52:11):
You know, that's great. So listener and thinking about all
of that and the other great wisdom from today's episode.
If you are going to isolate just one top insight
or thing to do that you're taking away, what would
it be. Remember that, little by little, a little becomes
a lot, and a habit for me that has accrude
and benefit over time is meditation. However, one of the

(52:32):
things that gets in our way of building a steady
meditation practice is that very striving.

Speaker 1 (52:38):
Right.

Speaker 3 (52:38):
Of course, we're doing it because we want certain benefits,
but in the moment of actually meditating, we need to
let striving go and focus on just being there and
experiencing it. No matter what's happening. It becomes not enjoyable
because I'm trying to make something happen some special moment
we want to let go of that. So if you
want to stop dreading meditation and action find it enjoyable.

(53:01):
Check out my free meditation guide at goodwolf dot me
slash calm. You know, I've found for me that that pause,
and I've used other apps that do it right, you know,
some of them completely shut the thing off. But for me, generally,
if I have to stop and go do I really
want to do this? And I usually am able to
be like no, I don't and set it aside. You know,

(53:23):
But I like clear spaces because it's not binary, right,
It's not like completely locked out. It's just be more
intentional about when you choose to use it and why
and for how long?

Speaker 1 (53:33):
Yeah, exactly. So the third to land the plane here
on the question. The third and top level thing with
kind of getting out of the scarcity loop is so
I told you about the Thomas Senthal guy. Now, he
does this research on pigeons and he can basically get
these pigeons to play this slot machine pigeon gambling game.
What he does is he gives them a choice between

(53:54):
two games. Okay, and the first game it's predictable, so
it gives them food every other time they peck a
life gives them like fifteen units of food. The second
game is like a slot machine, so about every fifth
pack they get twenty units of food. So they get
a little bit more food, but not by much. And
it's also random, like they don't know. It's about every
fifth one. Totally unpredictable. And you would think that because

(54:16):
animals they want to find the most resources they can,
right for the least amount of effort. This is called
optimal foraging theory, you'd think they would all play this
predictable game because if you play that, you're gonna get
more food over time, like a lot more over time, right,
But what he finds is that ninety seven percent of
these pigeons they end up playing the slot machine game.
Sit there and they play the game. So he keeps

(54:38):
these pigeons generally in standard lab cages. They're relatively small,
they're alone in there, and he decides that they're going
to put the pigeons together in this giant cage that's
more like the wild, right, Like they can kind of
live a wild pigeon life in there. They're with some
other pigeons. They can build nests, they can go on cliffs.
They got like trees, they got like all this stuff,

(55:00):
you know, So they're living like a pigeon is evolved
to live more or less. Then he puts them back
in the game and lets them choose between the smart
game or the gambling game. Every single pigeon chooses the
smart game after that, and I'm like, okay, well, why
the hell is that? And he tells me there's this
theory called the optimal stimulation theory, and it basically says

(55:23):
that no matter the species, from humans to pigeons, to
rats to whatever, we need a certain amount of stimulation
in our life. And if we don't get that stimulation
from somewhere, we go searching for it. And so when
you think about a creature, whether it's a human or
a pigeon, living the life they evolved to live, which

(55:45):
for humans we were for all the time we were mostly outside.
We were in these bands together where we had to
like really be social and work together. We had to
put in physical effort every day. Like we talked about
an early part of the podcast, things weren't always easy, right.
We were always kind of doing something, We were looking
for food, doing all this stuff. We live much differently now,
and so his argument was like, when you think of

(56:06):
humans today, we're a little bit like the pigeons and
the small cages, you know, and we go searching for
stimulation from bad behaviors, from things that fall into the
scarcity loop. Be it drugs and alcohol, be it gambling,
be it spending way too much time on our phones
and other digital media, insert all these different other bad behaviors.
So his point was like, if you can find ways

(56:27):
to insert stimulation into your life and find like kind
of greater meaning beyond the behaviors that we tend to
fall into, that can usually reduce a lot of the
bad stuff. So mine was alcohol, and it's like, when
I quit alcohol, it's like if nothing changes, nothing changes.
I had to make massive life changes, right, right, And
so I started exercising more, spent more time with friends,

(56:48):
I started spending way more time outside. I also, you know,
one of the reasons I drank is that I've just
been always drawn to extreme experiences, and so it's like, well,
I got to find that from somewhere now. So I
like to do stuff outdoors for extended periods of time.
I like to travel to kind of interesting places in
order to scratch that edge in a way that is
enhancing my life and not hurting my life.

Speaker 3 (57:08):
I think that is a great place to wrap up, right,
because it speaks to all the way back to the
wolf parable, Right. It speaks to the choices that we make,
and my experience is the more good choices I make,
it just naturally becomes easier not to make bad choices.
It's just a natural sort of law. When I'm doing
things that, like you said, enhance my life in general,

(57:29):
all the sort of difficult things tend to sort of
fade to the background, and it's far easier to be
the person I want to be.

Speaker 1 (57:37):
Yeah, totally.

Speaker 3 (57:38):
You and I are going to continue in the post
show conversation. I think we're going to talk a little
bit about how to have a sane relationship with stuff
and the pros and cons of sort of gamifying life.
We've all heard you should be gamifying your life. It
makes things better. Well maybe not. And listeners, if you'd
like access to that post show conversation, you'd like to

(57:58):
get some ad free episode special community meetings we do
and the chance to support something that's valuable to you,
go to one you feed dot net slash Join Michael,
Thanks so much, I've really enjoyed this conversation. I really
enjoyed your book.

Speaker 1 (58:12):
Yeah, it was a lot of fun. Thanks for having me.

Speaker 2 (58:30):
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(58:51):
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