The Exercise Expert: This Popular Lifestyle Is Killing 1 Person Every 33 Seconds! (The Comfort Crisis): Michael Easter

When your cat is acting weirder, or your dog is being louder, your turtle moves slower. Hello, Ted? Your cat seems thirstier. Whoa, slow down, buddy. Or your puppy is acting clumsier. Day or night, if you don't know what's wrong, know where to go. Vegg ER for pets. This is Kate. Vegg, the better, kinder ER for pets.

2,000 heart disease deaths a year in Europe were due to the noise that people live in. In the world we live in now, that is not how humans are designed to live.

Michael Easter, bestselling author, journalist, professor of psychiatry. He's on a mission to save us from the comfort crisis. Is it really a crisis?

As a species, we evolved to do the easiest, most comfortable thing. But we eventually end up paying a price for it. People are burned out, stressed out, more mental health problems, and we’re looking for the next pleasure.

And the industry really leans into this addiction. For example, slot machines. Once they got rid of handles and just put a spin button, people went from playing 400 games in an hour to an average of 900. If you break that down by minute, that’s more than we blink.

And then we engineered movement out of our lives. With our new jobs, sitting in these chairs eight hours a day, now 2% of people take the stairs when there is also an escalator available. And now we have heart disease, the number one killer of humans globally. This drive that we have to do the most comfortable thing is a problem.

As people experience fewer and fewer problems, we don't become more satisfied. We simply start searching for the next problem. We’ve become unhappier. Usage of the word "love" halved between 1965 and 2015, and negative words like "hate" increased. We need to realize that it’s your ancient brain working against you. It’s not your fault, but it is your problem.

I want to take back control. How do we break out of this?

I call this concept being a 2-percenter. And if you apply this, I guarantee you will end up healthier and learn what you’re capable of. The first step is...

Michael, there’s a quite obvious through line throughout your work. So I wanted to ask you, if you had to encapsulate and summarize the mission that you're on with the work that you do, the books you write, how would you summarize that mission?

I think that in the context of today, and the world we live in now, you often have to embrace short-term discomfort to get a long-term benefit. So I think the world is set up in a way now where things are easy, things are more effortless. And while that is good overall, that’s a result of progress, I think by not having moments that press back against us—and this could be everything from taking the stairs to being willing to have hard conversations in your life—we lose something about being a human and lose the things that keep us healthy and happy.

I would argue in *The Comfort Crisis* that the things that most impact your day-to-day life today, how you live—everything from cars, climate control, to the food system, on and on—they're all relatively new in the grand scheme of time and space. They're all new within the last 100 years.

Here’s a great example: digital media. The average person today takes in 12 to 13 hours of digital media a day. The radio was invented maybe 100 years ago. That is an insane shift in how people spend their time and attention every day.

And the brain hasn't caught up?

No. So a lot of my work looks at an anthropological lens, really. It looks at how humans were shaped over time and how we have these adaptations that used to make sense in these environments where what we needed to survive was scarce, where the world was hard and uncomfortable and life took effort. And those things kept us alive.

But when you put us in a world where we’ve engineered the world to be kind of a lot easier in a lot of ways, where we have an abundance of all these things that we’re sort of built to crave—everything from food to stuff, to information, to even status and influence—we now have an abundance of all those things and these sort of ancient drives we have, this ancient hardware, it can backfire in these new environments. So that's called an evolutionary mismatch.

What are the modern symptoms of that evolutionary mismatch?

Chronic diseases. So for example, people didn't really get heart disease until we started engineering movement out of our lives with our new jobs and started eating more because we had a massive supply of food thanks to advances in agriculture.

I think there’s mental health issues too. People are burned out, stressed out. Our collective lack of fitness, I think too, has led to a lot of health issues. So for example, in the past, our ancestors probably were about 14 times more physically active than us. 14 times. It's a crazy number.

So when scientists do studies on hunter-gatherers today, which are a way to get at the ideas of how humans used to live in the past, groups will generally walk more than 20,000 steps a day. And that's just an average day. And today, the average American—and I would assume probably the average Brit is probably in the same place—walk anywhere from 4,000 to 5,000 steps a day. That is just so little in the grand scheme of time and space. We had to be active to live and survive, and this drive that we have to do the next easiest, most comfortable thing, it often backfires today.

I imagine in preparation for your books, you spend a significant amount of time studying hunter-gatherer communities and native tribes and things like that. I’m so fascinated by that because I think most of the answers we’re in search of in our modern lives exist behind us instead of in front of us, if that makes sense.

What have you learned about the differences in how they lived versus how we live now? You talked there about movement and activity. Are there any other sort of really central differences that are pertinent to health outcomes?

Yeah, food is one of them. So as part of this new book, *Scarcity Brain*, when you look at the diseases that kill modern humans, it's heart disease. Now, the crazy thing about heart disease is that people also don’t worry about it. So when you look at what people worry is going to kill them, it’s cancer, it’s terror attacks, it’s the crazy neighbor next door with the gun. Heart disease is way down the list. But what actually kills people is heart disease, full stop. That is the number one killer of humans globally, especially if you live in a developed country.

So I have that in the back of my mind and I come across this paper, this study, and it found a tribe in Bolivia with the healthiest hearts ever recorded by science. The reason they don’t seem to get heart disease, as well as a lot of other chronic diseases that we get and that kill us—for example, they don’t seem to get Alzheimer's—tracks back to what they eat.

And what they eat, at some point in the day, which is fascinating, is that it is going to give the middle finger to every single fad diet you’ve heard of over the last 40 years. So it’s not necessarily low-fat, it’s not low-carb, it’s not vegan, it’s not paleo, it’s not all these different diets you’ve heard of.

But the one commonality that all their food has is that it has just one ingredient. So they’re eating things like rice, they’re eating potatoes, they’re eating red meat from Amazonian deer, they’re eating a lot of fish, they’re eating nuts, they’re eating fruits, they even eat sugar. Like, how many diets do we have where they’re like, "If you eat a gram of sugar, your kidneys are going to explode and you’re going to die on the spot"?

And so for me, the takeaway was that when you look at what the average person in a developed country eats, it's a lot of ultra-processed foods. Ultra-processed foods are basically just a euphemism for junk food. That's what scientists use to describe junk food. And it's stuff packed with all sorts of ingredients and triggers that lead us to overeat, more or less.

So when you take a food through a ton of processing—like a Dorito. You guys have those in the UK?

Yeah, we have Doritos.

Oh, thank God. You concentrate the calories. So, one: the food tastes way better than anything you'd find in the jungle. Like when I was living with these people, I'm not going to lie, the food was not that delicious. It really wasn't. So you make the food taste a lot better, and you also concentrate the calories. The food becomes a lot easier to eat; you can eat more faster.

So there’s these interesting experiments at the NIH where they will lock people in a lab and they will give them an unprocessed diet and then for the next period of time they will give them an ultra-processed diet, a sort of junk food diet. Now everything about these diets is matched, like the calories, the carbs, the protein, the fat, and they say, "Eat as much as you want until you're full." And when people eat the foods that have fewer ingredients, the unprocessed foods, they end up eating 500 fewer calories a day and they end up losing weight.

So that's just one example of how things have changed. So in *Scarcity Brain* in particular, I'm looking at how everything we needed to survive in the past was scarce and hard to find. And so it made sense to, when you got the opportunity, to overdo those things. Whether it be food, whether it be gathering possessions—tools—whether it be trying to gain status over other people, trying to gain influence, whether it was information.

And now we have an abundance of all of those things. We've got grocery stores packed with thousands and thousands of foods on all sorts of corners. Information? Think about the internet. The average person in one day today sees more information than a person 700 years ago would have seen in their entire life. Entire life.

Think of status and influence. It used to be that we would be in these tribes of people that would have maybe 150 people max. And it was very clear what your rank was, because we’ve got a leader, we’ve got some whatever. But now you can blast out stuff about yourself to millions of people at one time.

You talk in your work about, I think that was in the first book, *The Comfort Crisis*, about how being in large groups actually has adverse consequences for our health and happiness. This number, 150 people, in an office space really made me consider a couple of decisions I've made. What is the basis for that and what is the key takeaway?

So the number is called Dunbar's number and it's by this researcher, Robin Dunbar. The theory is that groups of people, as we evolved, we probably didn't get over 150 people. Because of this, today when we have groups of more than 150 people, things get complicated. Once a group of people gets over 150, you've got to remember a lot more interconnected relationships, you've got to remember a lot more names, you've got to remember a lot more faces, you've got to remember all these things.

And oh, by the way, now that we have this big group of people, we need to establish laws, we need to establish all these different things. So it gets rather complex. And the takeaway is that this seems to be a lot of work and stress for most people. And so living in environments where you are sort of jammed in with fewer people seems to make most people happier most of the time.

So you can sort of gauge happiness levels where people who live in the most densely packed cities tend to be, on average, most unhappy compared to people who live out in rural areas. Of course, I'm not saying that everyone that lives in a densely packed city is unhappy, of course I'm not. I'm just saying on average, you compare those two groups, you're going to find that people who live in countrysides and they're less packed in with groups are going to be happier.

Does noise matter? Noise of the environment?

Yes, that was part of *The Comfort Crisis*. The overarching narrative of that book is I spent 33 days in the Arctic. And the thing that I really didn't expect to happen—so in that book I tell this story of my time in the Arctic, and as I experienced these different forms of discomfort that humans would have experienced in the past, I sort of peel off and explain the science behind them and other travels I did about them.

So in the Arctic, it was unbelievably silent. There's no one around for hundreds of miles. I mean, one day we're standing in there and I hear this *tsh, tsh, tsh, tsh*. And I'm going, "What the hell was that?" Turns out it was my wristwatch. It is so silent up there that you're just standing and you just pick up the *tsh* of the second hand, which normally you would have to hold up, right?

And so I got curious about that. And what was funny is that humans have increased the loudness of the world about fourfold—400% since before we became this species that overtook the planet, is the estimate. And people tend to get stressed out when they're in lots of noise all the time.

So if you think about noise in the past, if you heard a loud noise it was probably danger. It's a storm rolling in. It's an animal that thinks you would be a delicious dinner and is letting out a roar, right? So we tend to become stressed when we hear loud noises. Now in the past those were likely infrequent, and today we kind of live in this low-grade loudness that seems to be associated with stress and even disease.

Yeah, there's a WHO study where they estimated that 2,000 heart disease deaths a year in Europe were due to how loud the noise is that people live in. And that's simply because loudness increases stress, and stress is a key factor for heart disease.

It makes me think about the way we've designed our professional and personal environments. You know, like open-plan offices and—I mean all my offices around the world have always been open-plan. In your first book, *Comfort Crisis*, I think it's Chapter 13 where you start to talk about how that is both bad for people's anxiety, depression, and productivity.

Yeah. And it's funny because what I found fascinating about the studies on that is most people don't realize that being in a lot of noise impacts their productivity. But when you look at what they actually produce, people tend to produce more better work when they're in more silent environments.

There was one study where one group worked in a quiet office and one worked in an open-plan office. The open-plan office was 50% louder. The workers in the open-plan office didn't feel any more stress, but stress monitors found that they were in fact more stressed and less productive. Chapter 13 of your book.

I'm sorry that I just...

I was like, "My team are going to hear this and we've just had—we've just approved the designs for our new HQ in the middle of London."

Well, let's call off the build.

Yeah, Jesus. We’ll take a look at the blueprints after this. And this was staggering: anti-anxiety medication use rises a relative 28% for every 10-decibel increase in sound in neighborhood experiences, and people who live nearer to loud roads are 24% more likely to be depressed.

Yeah, it's definitely surprising, right? Because we do live in a lot of noise. And another thing that was interesting while I was reporting that section on noise and sound and how that's changed is that most people today say that they feel at first uncomfortable in silence.

Totally me.

Yeah, I think everyone’s like that.

I can't even sleep without something playing.

Right. So this was a study in Australia and it was rather informal, but people would take some time to just be in complete silence and they all wrote, at first they felt really uncomfortable through that. But on the other side of that, they started to feel better.

And I think that's kind of a framework for a lot of things in life. It's uncomfortable at first, but when you go through that, you come out on the other side of it and you feel like you've improved. And you probably have improved.

Being alone and being lonely. You say it's being two very different things. Loneliness seems to be awful for our health and we're getting increasingly more lonely decade by decade. But being alone is—what's the distinction between the two? How do you define the difference?

So lonely to me is: I want to be with others but I don't have anyone to be with. I just don't have that resource in other people. Being alone is different. It's choosing to take time to be with yourself and see what you can learn from that. And I think too that there is some interesting research on people who just prefer to be alone. They just like solitude. And turns out they're just as happy as super social people.

There's a little bit of individual variation. Now, of course, these people will have some people in their life that they can count on. I think that that is absolutely important. But I do think that we've shifted in the last, say, 15, 20 years where the message is really, "You need a bunch of friends to be happy. You absolutely need to be as social as possible."

And while I'm not saying "don't be social"—that is not my message at all—I am saying that it's also worth taking time to be alone sometimes and seeing what you can learn from that, because I think it does help you better appreciate those social moments. Like for me, I never appreciate my friends more than when I've gone off on some reporting trip into a strange place completely alone for a month or whatever it might be and then come back and I'm like, "Oh man, I really appreciate being around these people," and I don't take that time for granted.

Being lonely increases your chance of dying in the next seven years by 26%. Being lonely can shorten your life by 15 years. Staggering stats. And when you think about the trajectory of travel that society is on with machines and artificial intelligence and all of these things, it's hard to find—it's understandable how it might be hard for someone to find hope that the stats are going to turn around and go the other way as it relates to loneliness.

Are you concerned at all that the invention of AI and the speed in which we're seeing it proliferate is going to lead to, you know, some people say sex robots and all of these kinds of things? I mean, I read an article the other day where a woman is a virtual boyfriend to hundreds of men, and they're paying because they're using generative AI to have seemingly intimate conversations with her. And the fact that there's demand for that is a signal of not great things.

Yeah, I think we need—I mean so then you ask like, "Okay, well why are these people doing that?" I think part of it is because having to go out and interact with another human that you don't know is a little bit awkward and challenging at first. And so to me, I mean a big message of my work is that you have to do challenging things in order to grow as a human, because I guarantee that your relationship with an actual person is going to be more rewarding in the long haul than the AI bot or whatever they call them. But it is hard to go out in public, and I think that we live in a world where you can go, "Okay, I'm going to avoid the hard thing because I can get this thing that's easier even though it's not going to be as good for me in the long haul."

Why you? I always think when people commit themselves to writing books—because books are painful processes. I mean, it’s nice when it's out, but it's not necessarily enjoyable when you're having to condense your thoughts and put them pen to paper. But there is correlation and there is a through line between these two subject matters, so it makes me beg the question, why did you, of all the things you could have taken an interest in or become curious about, why did Michael have a natural curiosity towards this subject matter?

Yeah, that's a great question. I think a lot of it for me is how I grew up. I grew up with an only child of a single parent who had to travel a lot. When I was in my 20s, I also got sober. That was not an easy thing, right? I was choosing this short-term relief of alcohol at the expense of long-term growth and meaning.

And what was the cost of that?

Oh, I mean, you’re just an internal mess. So I wasn't an interesting case, but I wasn't a case that most people would think of in the sense that my life was totally fine on paper. I had a job at a magazine, everyone knew, I had a house, I had a car, that sort of thing. But internally I was just a total mess and it’s kind of like the walls were caving in.

And I tried to quit drinking a lot of times. And finally it just occurred to me like, this isn't going to be easy. And if you don't do this, you're probably going to die early, by the way. And I realized I had to just rip off the Band-Aid and do the hard thing. And once I went through that process, my life improved across the board.

When you said that internally you were a mess, how do I gain color on what that means in reality so that people that are listening who might be internally a mess will have a bridge to be able to relate to what you're saying there?

Oh, well. So addiction is really consistently choosing a short-term reward at the expense of long-term growth. I knew that my drinking was causing problems in my life across the board. I mean like, I had less money, it was eating into my bank account, it was kind of—it was messing with some of my relationships. I would never feel good the three days after I would go out on a bender, right? I would just be like a mess.

And yet I couldn't stop. I mean that's the key, right? Is you go, "I know this is screwing me up. I know it." And then I tell myself, "You know what? Maybe it'll be different this time. Like I'm just going to have one or two drinks this time." And then you have one or two and you go, "Well, if one or two is this good, what would like 10 more be like?" right? And something shifts in your head.

So it's choosing that short-term relief at the expense of long-term growth and that is a tough cycle. I mean I write about it in *Scarcity Brain* about addiction and how we think about it, because I think that another thing that's interesting about today is that, you know, when people hear the word "addiction" they automatically think drugs, they automatically think alcohol. But really if addiction is choosing that short-term reward at the expense of long-term growth, it really falls on this big spectrum. There's plenty of things we all do every day that fall into that, but it's just how bad is it hurting you, to what extent?

And even the, you know, the DSM-5, which is sort of like the Bible of psychiatrists, the one that they use—it basically puts addiction on a spectrum. It's like a, "Here’s like 11 questions about addiction and if you say yes to, you know, four of them then you got a mild case, if you say yes to six of them you got a medium case and if you say yes to seven or more you got an extreme case." And like when you read that, you could plug in a bunch of different behaviors that people do all the time and go, "Oh, I guess I am kind of like mildly addicted to," insert whatever app you spend way too much time on.

And I think that getting out of that is ultimately hard. And ultimately, I also see addiction as kind of a symptom of some underlying thing. So for me, I think the reason that I drank is because I had an office job that I found a little bit boring. It was rather sanitary, rule-based. And as I mentioned before, I'm a person who I do well on extreme experiences, right? And when I would drink, alcohol would allow me to be sort of wild and free in this world that’s become increasingly sanitary, increasingly rule-based, whatever. But that's like not a good way to find that. There's a lot more productive ways to find that. And I can find that now by applying it to a job that allows me to go into extreme and interesting places.

And so I think that, you know, the message for the average person is that once you figure out why you have an issue in the first place, and if you can figure out, "Okay, well how do I apply it to something that enhances my life?" that can be a good life.

When your cat is acting weirder, or your dog is being louder, your turtle moves slower. Hello, Ted? Your cat seems thirstier. Whoa, slow down, buddy. Or your puppy is acting clumsier. Day or night, if you don't know what's wrong, know where to go. Vegg ER for pets. This is Kate. Vegg, the better, kinder ER for pets.

I want to zoom in on a particular moment there, which we can all relate to. It's the moment you described where you have an internal conversation about having those first two drinks. Now, we can all relate to that in our own ways. I have internal conversations with myself once in a while about having the carrot cake. And in my head, like logically I know that this is not a good long-term decision, right? It could be, you know, bingeing on a website or whatever when you know you've got other important responsibilities and priorities in your life. That moment where you have that internal conversation with yourself appears to be the opportunity you have of making a better long-term decision. How on earth—everyone listening to this will want to know—how do we win that battle, which is seemingly with ourselves?

It yeah, it is in a way with ourselves, but it's also, I think, in a way with this sort of ancient hardware that we have. So in the—I'll answer this this way and it might provide some insight and we can kind of go from there.

So in this book, *Scarcity Brain*, there's this underlying question I have that is, you know, everyone knows that everything’s fine in moderation, and yet we all suck at moderation in some way or another in our life, right? We all have a thing that we’re not great at moderating, let's say.

So I live in Las Vegas and I have this underlying question and Las Vegas is a fascinating town because—and so I want to know why slot machines work. Why are they so good at grabbing attention?

Now, long story short is this leads me to this place on the edge of town in Las Vegas and it’s a brand new, fully working, cutting-edge casino, but it’s used entirely for research on human behavior. So it’s a collaboration with the gambling industry and a bunch of different tech companies. So you go into this place and I went in there and it is just a—it's a real casino. There's hotel rooms, there's like restaurants, there's a coffee bar, there's all these different things that a casino would have: like the slot machines, like the poker tables, like the sports book, like insert whatever.

And while I’m there I end up talking to a researcher who designs slot machines. And slot machines work on what I call the Scarcity Loop. It is a three-part behavior loop, and its three parts are: one, opportunity; two, unpredictable rewards; and three, quick repeatability.

So, one: opportunity. You have an opportunity to get something of value that's going to enhance your life. In the case of a slot machine, it's money, right?

Two: unpredictable rewards. You know you'll get that thing of value at some point, but you don't know when and you don't know how valuable it's going to be. So with slot machines, it's like you play, you could lose your money, you could win a couple dollars, you could win hundreds of thousands of dollars. It's crazy.

And then three: quick repeatability. You can immediately repeat the behavior. Now the important part is that, and why I'm talking about this, is because that three-part behavior loop, it is the most powerful behavior loop at getting people to repeat behaviors and get sucked in. It's like the serial killer of moderation, okay?

And it's now in all sorts of other tech and institutions. So for example, it’s what makes social media work. It's what makes dating apps so compelling. It’s being put in financial apps like Robinhood. It's being leveraged by different gig work companies, right? It explains the rise of sports betting. It's embedded in a lot of these behaviors that we can't seem to moderate.

So when I look at the things that people aren't good at moderating, whether it's, you know, "I check email way too much" or "I check my stocks way too much and this drives me nuts," it usually falls—it’s usually behavior that falls into those—into that Scarcity Loop. And so the book unpacks, you know, what it is, where it came from, why we get hooked on it in the first place—and I can explain that—and then where it pops up in modern life.

You want to know where it came from?

Yeah. Okay. So I had the same question. So I talked to the slot guy and now I'm like, "Okay, I get that gambling and slot machines are so compelling. I get that this thing is in a lot of different places. But why? Why in the first place?" He just looks at me and goes, "I don't know. Like, he just makes money off it. He doesn't care."

So I end up calling a guy who's a psychologist at the University of Kentucky. And this guy is an old-school behavioral psychologist. Like, he got his PhD in 1968 and he's been doing research ever since. And he explained that it likely evolved to help us find food in the past.

So if you think of humans in the past, you basically had to find food every day or else you're going to die. 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 point A: no food. Point B: no food. Point C: ding ding ding, jackpot! You found this massive elk that you end up killing and it feeds you for weeks, right? So that is the exact same architecture as a slot machine. You play the game, you don't get anything. You play the game, you don't get anything. You play the game—oh, it's right there! Amazing! And you couldn't predict any of that, right? And you've got to repeat that behavior every day for life.

So we seem to be inherently attracted to behaviors that fall into that loop, because if we weren't in the past, we wouldn't have had as much incentive to continue searching for food and in turn survive. So we still have that sort of ancient hardware.

And are we the only ones, or is the rest of the animal kingdom wired in such a way? Because one would assume they would be.

Yeah, they are. So the guy that I spoke to at the University of Kentucky, he does research on pigeons. And pigeons will play a gambling game that gets them less overall resources compared to a predictable game that gets them more food. So he can basically turn pigeons into these sort of degenerate gamblers. And you see it in rats, you see it in other primates. Yeah.

So when the rewards are unpredictable for a pigeon, they engage in the behavior more. Which would, again, match up with your theory that whenever there's unpredictable rewards associated with an action, we are more engaged because it falls into that prehistoric hardware.

Exactly. Think about starting a car. Okay, you start your car—it turns on every time. That's not that exciting, right? Like, it's not going to capture your attention. Let's say you turn it on and it doesn't turn over. So you try it again, it doesn't turn over. You try it again, it doesn't turn over. What are you going to do? You're just going to be like, "Okay, well my car's not starting. I'm going to fix it." Now what happens if you go to start your car and it doesn't turn over but it kind of putters? It goes *dut-dut-dut-dut* like it’s going to turn on and then it stops. Then you do it again and then it doesn't do that. And so you're like, "Okay, what's going on?" So you do it again and it starts to sound like it’s going to come on, it's like *dut-dut-dut-dut* but then it doesn't. You're going to sit there messing with that so long as that car is giving you signs of life, right? There's this unpredictability embedded into it. And that will capture attention of, yeah, any animal, pretty much.

And I mean that's what when I was thinking about, I think it’s called like Near Miss Theory or something that you talk about in your book. That's kind of what that is when you see—you're on like a slot machine and you see like the cherry go *shoo*—nearly, you nearly got it. You didn't quite get it, but—is that called Near Miss Theory or something?

Yeah, Near Miss. So near misses are a term from the casino industry. And in slot machines, let's say you have five reels and you know, you need these bars to line up, these gold bars or whatever. We'll use cherries, that's a better example. You got four cherries lined up and if this fifth cherry hits, you're going to win a bunch of money. Now what'll usually happen in slot machines is that fifth wheel, they will be programmed to have that thing roll longer and longer and longer. So they extend that out because you are sucked in. You're like, "If this thing lands, I'm about to win a bunch of money!" And then it lands, but it's not the cherry.

What tends to—what ends up happening is that this leads people to repeat the behavior quicker, actually. And because near misses are mathematically more likely to happen than actual wins, it compels people to repeat the behavior.

Do they use near misses as a way to engage us with technology or anything else in our lives? Is there any other examples within our modern lives where, I don't know, brands or technology companies are using that as a way to engage us?

Yeah, well you could think if you—I mean say you get an update on your phone, let's say you go into Instagram and you get an update and it's a comment. I mean you could argue, well the comment, it could be good. It could be bad. Is this a comment from like someone that I think is super cool that's saying, "Oh, that's an amazing photo. You look wonderful in that photo"? Or is it some troll online going, "Man, you look like a complete idiot in that," right? So there's always unpredictability embedded in social media. It wouldn't work if you knew what was coming.

I guess that's what—why so many people just keep tweeting and posting, because it's kind of like every post comes with a bunch of likes and you're going, you know, "I might go viral."

Yeah, totally. Yeah, think of the experience of using—we’ll take Twitter, now called X, apparently. So you, let's say you have come up with a little tweet that you think is hilarious and it's of the moment, right? So you put it up and then you wait, right? The reels are spinning. Then you open the app back up and you're like, "Did people like it? Did they retweet it?" And you don't know what could have happened. It could be so clever that like, "Oh my God, so many people have retweeted this!" and this feels amazing if this happens. But it could have fallen flat. And then you're like, "Now I actually look like an idiot because I put out a joke and no one thinks it's funny." It's like telling a joke in front of a room and people just stare at you, right? So there's this range of unpredictable outcomes that could happen.

Same with scrolling though, in a way. I mean you just scroll and scroll and scroll and you're kind of searching for that video that's going to provide you with a hit of something, right? It could be, oh, here's some sort of crazy fight that happened outside of a bar after a Philadelphia Eagles game, because the fight throwies in Philadelphia in the US. Or it could be this video, this amazing heart-warming dog video, and that makes me smile! Or it could be some hilarious video that you're just laughing your butt off. And so you're kind of sucked into that waiting for the next win, right? You're scrolling, scrolling, scrolling and then *shoo*, that's the one that got me.

How do we break out of this? Because, I know, I want to take back control.

Yeah, well we all do. Well, first I will say that when people fall into this loop, I like to say that you're not a bad person because this is very much part of the human brain. You know, people will be hard on themselves because their screen time is so high and like, "Why do I keep doing this thing?" So you're not a bad person. It's your ancient brain working against you. It's not your fault, but it is your problem. You still have to figure out how am I going to get out of this.

The first step to me is just being aware of it in the first place. So once you become aware of behavior and observe a behavior, it tends to change. That's called the Hawthorne effect. And then the second part is that you can remove or change any of the three parts of that loop that I mentioned. So you can remove or change the opportunity, you can remove or change the unpredictable rewards, or you can remove or change the quick repeatability—you can slow things down.

In *Scarcity Brain* in Chapter 4 you talk about something I was also very, very compelled about, which is: you make the case that we have an ingrained sense of not being enough. My first book, the last chapter is about this idea of like not being enough. I've always hypothesized whether humans are built with a—I don't know—a message in our genetic code that tells us we are designed and we will struggle forward to get more? Like is that hardwired into us?

Well, I think that when you look at how humans behave, it seems to be, right? And I think it does go back to evolution because if you had more of these things that we need to survive, whether it's food, to stuff, to information, to status, you would have a survival advantage and that's still built into us. I think it still is advantageous today to a point.

Now I’m going to turn the question back on you. So it's like you probably have that drive, right? And that's taken you to a certain place. And now, you have certain financial assets and you've sort of shifted too, your career. So now I'm turning it back on you: how do you feel like that's manifested itself in your life?

I—it's interesting because in Chapter 7 you talk about this idea of status. And I, once upon a time, three, four years ago, would have told you that I'm no longer playing status games because three, four years ago I would have had flashy things. Like I had like a Rolex and like a sports car and designer stuff. Now I have none of that. The outfit you see me in now is pretty much the outfit everyone sees me in always. And so I assumed that I'd like liberated myself from the game of status.

However, I read another book and it made the case that the status games we all play just change. And in fact, it's an anti-signal now for someone in my position to have those things. So I'm just playing a different status game. Maybe the status game I'm playing is: how big can my podcast be? Or how good can I be on like TV? Or whatever it is. It's just a different game. So that's kind of where I think I am now. I think I’ve just changed the game.

No, I think you’re right. I think we all change the game. And we like to think that we're either not playing the game or that the game hasn't changed. Everyone’s like this.

So what's really interesting about status, which I loved learning when I was reporting about it in the book, is that psychological researchers, they didn't really research status all that much until the 90s. And this is because they didn't want to admit that status is important to humans. Because by researching it, you are saying this is probably important to me. So the worst thing you can do for your status is tell people that you care about your status. Absolutely. Yet everyone cares about it. And everyone acts, "Oh no, I don't care. I don't care what others think about me." It's like, "Yeah you do." Like let's be all honest, everyone cares to some extent what others think about them in some way.

And I think by talking about it and also understanding why in the first place is important. Now the reason why to me is that the more status and influence that you would have had in the past would have given you a survival advantage in the sense that you probably wouldn't have to do the crappy, like, menial labor that burns energy. You probably would have had more mates, you probably would have gotten more food, you probably would have gotten all these things.

And still today when you look at how status affects health, people of lower status tend to have worse health outcomes than people of higher status. And so you might think, "Well this is just because the higher status people have more money and they can go to better hospitals and get better health care." But the thing is is that it holds in countries that have universal healthcare, so everyone's healthcare access is pretty much equal.

Could it not relate to the type of work they're doing? Because as you kind of said earlier, I think of if you're lower status, one might assume the type of work you're doing is constrained, low autonomy, maybe more isolated potentially, or monotonous or less fulfilling, and that might have physiological implications. It's interesting: people that are higher status live longer. Hmm. That's not a nice narrative, is it?

Yeah, no. And that's the thing. It's like, it's not super comfortable to talk about, right? And it definitely affects us. And here's a—here's a sort of fun crazy study that I came across while reporting *Scarcity Brain*: flights that have a first-class cabin, they have a fourfold higher rate of air rage compared to flights that don't have a first-class cabin. And if the passengers in second class—coach—have to walk through the first-class cabin, the rate increases to a ninefold increase in incidence of air rage.

What is air rage?

People going absolutely nuts on flights. It's like when there's a—there's a big incident with, you know, the flight attendant or someone just losing their mind and they have to ground the plane or whatever it might be.

And why do you think that is?

Well, the researchers think it's because of that massive status cue of having to walk through first class and, by the way, you're not first class. Because you're in coach.

We talked about food in your—how you covered it in your first book—but in your second book, *Scarcity Brain*, you talk about food again. Specifically, you talk a quite a lot about snacking. Oh yeah, snacking. What's the problem with snacking? Everybody snacks.

So this is in the 1970s, the food industry decided, you know, "We need to come up with this new category of eating." And it’s eating between meals—snacking. Now, if people are eating three square meals, they may not be super full. So they kind of need just these little meals they can have and they need to be easy to eat, they need to be quick to eat. So they come up with snack foods.

And what's really interesting is that, you know, I told you about the Scarcity Loop. There is an executive in the food industry who was talking about what makes a snack food successful. Like, how do you sell a snack food? And he said it has to have three V's: it’s got to have value, it’s got to have variety, and it’s got to have velocity. That’s just another way of talking about that loop.

Is that right? It's a good value. Variety: it's got to have a lot of different interesting intense flavors, and there's got to be a lot of different options. So when you think about chips or crisps as you guys—you guys call them crisps, right? There's a bunch of different flavors. There's like barbecue, there's sour cream, there's salsa, there's like all these different flavors. And then velocity: it has to be quick to eat. So when you ultra-process a food, as I mentioned before, people tend to eat it faster. And so the industry really leans into this; they create snacking as this totally new category. And this is in the 70s—is when you really start to see obesity climb. And it's because we just end up eating more across the day. Meantime, our activity levels are dropping.

There's a kind of a through line there with gambling when you talked about velocity, the—the speed in which you get the outcome being short.

The faster we can do a behavior, the more likely we are to repeat the behavior. Especially if it's unpredictable. So one of the big advances in casino technology, for example with slot machines, was removing the handles. Because, you know, if—if the machine has a handle you have to *pull*. Once they got rid of handles and just put a spin button, you can keep your hand on the button and just *doop, doop, doop, doop*. And it basically doubled the rate of gambling. So people went from playing, I think, 400 to 500 games in an hour up to an average of 900. So that's more, if you break that down by minute, it's more than we blink.

Interesting. Yeah. With a crazy range of outcomes too.

Why can't we—so if snacking is a new—sort of relatively new invention in modern society and it's—it's correlated to the rise in obesity. Can we not just measure the amount of calories that we have? Like can we not just do the, you know, the whole "calories in, calories out" approach to staying fit and healthy?

Oh, I think you absolutely could, but I just—the question is, are people going actually do that? I mean I think there's a certain sub—you know, there's a portion of the population that will do that. And, you know, I do believe that if you were to measure everything perfectly, you have—you know, you could probably lose weight eating McDonald's. And there's people who have shown this. At the same time, if you are eating only McDonald's, I can tell you something: you are going to be starving throughout the day. Because foods that are ultra-processed tend to be less filling per calorie than foods that have just a single ingredient.

So I want you to picture: you and I have a bag of potato chips and then we have a plate of boiled potatoes. What do you think we could have more calories of?

Only the same thing, they're both made of potato.

The fried potatoes, right?

Right. Really?

The chips. So if you have—like, you could probably eat an entire bag of chips if you really set your mind to it. Oh yeah. But you couldn't eat an equivalent amount of calories in boiled potatoes. I mean, it would—you would get full like a quarter of the way through. So for example, you know, like a boiled—an ounce of boiled potatoes might have 50 to 100 calories. An ounce of chips might have 200, whatever it is. And by the way, it's also not as filling because there's not as much water content. So when you process a food, you concentrate the calories and people tend to eat more of the food.

I don't eat them anymore, but they used to be one of my favorite foods. And in your first book, I think you—you came for them, which is croissants. But I—I don't have those anymore because they make you feel like shit and my gut hates them. But use a croissant as an example of a food that let—makes us less full.

Yeah, so there's this really interesting study out of Australia where they had people eat a certain amount of different types of food and then they had them go eat at a buffet a certain amount of time later and measured how much they ate after and asked them how—how full they were after eating the test foods.

They found that the most filling food per calorie was plain boiled potatoes. I think after that was just plain white fish that was a relatively low-fat fish. And then after that, I think it was oatmeal, just plain oatmeal. And the least filling foods were tended to be things like croissants, cookies, foods like that. Foods that have been—you know, where we're mixing flour, fat, all these sorts of things and baking it and it's like this nice crispy thing. So it's really a—it's a measurement of how processed a food is, basically.

A small croissant and white potato both have about 170 calories, but you'd have to eat seven croissants before you feel the same amount of fullness as one potato. How much of weight gain is about the feeling of fullness? Because it's not really a concept that I really thought much about—this idea of fullness. I thought the key thing was calories or not eating junk food.

Well, I think that you will be fuller, or you will be as full eating fewer—and end up eating fewer calories if the food is not as processed. So the foods just—they take up more room in your stomach, they're not packing in as much calories per bite. Let's say for you to be full you have to eat 10 ounces of food. And we have one food that has 50 calories per ounce and one food that has 100 calories per ounce. Right? So if you were to eat the 10 ounces of this food, you're going to eat 500 calories, but if you eat 10 ounces of this food, you're going to eat 1,000. And I think that you extrapolate that across a day and you start to see, "Oh, okay, I can see why choosing foods that help me be more full on fewer calories could be good if my goal was to lose weight or not gain weight compared to foods that are more calorie-dense."

What’s your position on fasting?

I think that it can be a good weight control tool for some people. I think it can constrain—like look, if you're the person who's eating around the clock and you go, "Okay, well I'm just going to eat from noon to, whatever, 6:00 p.m. or 7:00 p.m.," you've just cut out a lot of meals. I also think that if you were to go, "Well since I'm only eating from noon to 6:00 p.m., I better eat a ton every single meal," I don't know if you would lose weight.

I think there could be definitely some health benefits, possibly. But I also think that if you're doing these extended fasts, that could maybe not be great for muscle mass. So I think it kind of goes back to—like these things are complicated, right? And I think it kind of goes back to: what is your goal, how are you trying to use this tool, like what are you doing this for, and then is the way that you're doing it, does it align properly with your goal? But I do—I mean I've met plenty of people who have lost weight fasting simply because they ate crap for breakfast and they would stop at Starbucks on the way to work and get some sugary drink. And like just by cutting that out because now they don't eat till noon, like they ended up losing weight.

You talk about hungry days. Yeah, programming two hungry days per week. What's a hungry day?

That's one that has worked for some people where you could eat relatively normally, say five days a week, and then people will eat, say, 500 calories on their two hungry days. So basically you're just constraining your calories. You're basically just pulling the lever of time, right? If you can—at the end of the day, I think really calories is probably the best predictor of weight gain or loss. And so the question is, "Okay, if you need to reduce the calories, how are we going to do that?" And there's a lot of different ways to do it. I think that fasting is pretty damn simple, right? It seems a lot simpler than some of the other methods out there.

I was on a treadmill many years ago in Boston. And I always tell this story because I'd got into this routine of running like 5, 10 kilometers a day, every day on the treadmill, pretty much every day on the treadmill. And I—and when I got to that 5, 10 kilometer mark, I would typically feel like fatigued. And then there was this one day where I’d landed in Boston, got on this treadmill, the distance dial wasn't working. So I couldn't see how far I was running. So, I thought, "Well, I'll stop when I feel the usual feeling." And I start running, and I start running, and I start running, and I start running. And I only get off the treadmill because I'm going to be late for this appointment that I have. And when I hit the stop treadmill button, the distance pops up. And I've run two times further than I usually run on a treadmill, and I didn't feel the same. I felt fine. I felt fine. And I couldn't understand that until—and I've said this on stage quite—quite often—as evidence that there's clearly something going on in our psychology that is signaling to our body that we are at our limits, and that's clearly somewhat of an illusion. And then I read in your first book, *The Comfort Crisis*, this idea of where you talk about mental fatigue. Does that kind of marry up with what I'm—what I'm saying?

Muscular fatigue, sorry. Oh, 100%. Our psychology affects our—how we perform, basically. And there's a lot of fascinating studies similar to yours where they will take people and, you know, they'll give them some sort of cue like, "Run as far as you can. Most people are getting about an hour." So they'll give them this cue and then they will change the time, basically. They'll change the clock. So the people maybe have run 40 minutes in real—in reality, but they think they've done, you know, an hour and five minutes, which is five minutes longer than some of the better times, and they'll be like, "Okay, I'm totally wiped out."

They'll do the opposite where they slow down time. So these people will have run an hour and say 30 minutes—I'm making up the times—but they think they've run that hour and five minutes, just a little bit better than the next guy. And then they'll—then they'll be like, "Okay, I'm totally fatigued." And there's plenty of research that goes back years that basically says our psychological perception is a key determinant of how tired we feel during exercise.

Because at the heart of this comfort crisis is our psychological relationship with discomfort. Discomfort to me feels like a story I tell myself.

Oh, it's totally a story. Yeah, what story are you going to tell yourself? Right? So here's another great example: your legs, they’re—they’re spasming, they’re tired. If you're running up a hill, it sucks. You want to quit. If you're having sex, this is great! Right? Like context really matters about how we feel.

And so I think also realizing, you know, there's some really fascinating studies that show we don't recruit all of our capacity, more or less, because it's a defense mechanism, right? You want to keep some capacity on board so your brain is trying to slow you down and shut you down before you've reached your limit. So framing how you want to view how a workout is going is important, right? And I think it can allow you to squeeze a little more performance out of it.

Now let's say your brain only allows you to recruit 50% of your muscle. I don't think you can go, "I've only gotten 50%," and you're going to get like up to 100. Like, it doesn't work like that. But I do think running it through like context and thought and realizing like, "This actually isn't as bad and by the way I've chosen to do this and it's kind of awesome that I can choose to do this," can allow you to perform a little better.

I wonder—I wish there was like a magic pill we could take which allowed us to change the frame and the story we tell ourselves about the discomfort we experience. You know, because there's clearly a big group of people that are able to—ultra runners and ultra athletes and all this stuff.

But you—but this can also be—I mean this isn't just exercise we're talking about, right? It's like: what story am I going to tell myself in any given situation? So I'll—I'll give you a good example: so I spend 33 days in the Arctic, right? Now to get up to where the drop-off point is you have to take a bunch of different flights. My first flight is from Las Vegas to Seattle. And I hate flying, right? The plane is always too hot, the seat is cramped, the movies suck on the plane. If you want to go to the bathroom it’s this cramped little closet. Babies crying. It’s just—it’s terrible.

Then I go spend a month in the Arctic, where I'm hungry the entire time. If I want water I have to hike down to the stream and hike it back up. I'm freezing cold the entire time. I'm sitting in the dirt the entire time. If I want to go to the bathroom I have to hike out onto the tundra and I got to bring a rifle because there's grizzly bears.

So when I leave that world and I get back on that flight to Las Vegas, what do you think the flight was like?

Amazing.

It was the most amazing thing that's ever happened to me, right? So the chair—I hadn't sat in a chair for more than a month. It's like, "Oh my God, this chair is so incredibly comfortable." I'd been freezing the entire time, so that warm plane—I was like, "Oh this plane is so comfortable, so nice and warm." I'd been bored out of my mind up there the whole time because I don't have any screens or anything, so those movies in the seat back—"Oh my God, this is the most stimulating thing I've ever watched. This is incredible." Snack food—I used to think that airplane snack food sucked. I’m like, "Oh my God, these pretzels! Amazing!"

And then when I go to the bathroom, right, it's you hit this little red tab and you get hot running water that hits your hands at 35,000 feet and you're moving 600 miles an hour through a tube of steel. It's like, when that hot water hit my hands, it was incredible.

So context matters. Because once I went and did that, that totally reframed how I think about these situations that I used to bitch about in the past. And now I can appreciate them. So the reality is that the world that we live in today is amazing in so many ways. Like, full stop, incredible. The fact that we have hot running water on demand, the fact that we have all these different forms of entertainment, the fact that we don't have to hunt and gather for our food—like we're not forced to do these things. But we often miss how amazing that is because we're like the fish thrown in the water that don't know they're in the water.

And I do think that doing things that push back against that—having experiences that you throw yourself into, they can be big and small, that throw you out of your comfort zone and give you perspective—I do think that that is important in order to live well and get perspective and have gratitude. I mean I still have times today where I'll be washing my hands, the water's nice and hot, and I'll think back to that and be like, "Oh, remember when hot running water hit your hands and you got emotional at how amazing it is?" I mean, it's good to have these reminders that life is pretty amazing right now. We’ve come pretty far.

It made me think that discomfort is an antidote for happiness in that regard because—you know, and also then it popped into my brain what I used to learn about the Stoic people and how they'd do that sort of, what is it, hedonic adaptation, and they would remove the pleasantries from their life so that they could appreciate them more.

Yeah, we adapt to what we have. So it's like today's pleasure is tomorrow's just any given thing and we're looking for the next pleasure. And there's some interesting studies about this as well. One of my favorites from *The Comfort Crisis* is this study that found that as people experience fewer and fewer problems, we don't become more satisfied. We simply start searching for the next problem.

Really?

Yes. It's called—it's a theory, it was discovered by Harvard researchers in the psychology department and the technical term they call it is prevalence-induced concept change. And you can just think about it as "problem creep."

Problem creep.

Problem creep, right. So, you know, what used to be a problem yesterday or—we're always going to look for problems, is basically what I'm trying to say. And they discovered this in this study where they would have people look at a bunch of different faces and determine, you know, "Is this face threatening or non-threatening?" They'd go one face after another.

And by the 200th face though, the scientists started feeding the participants—yeah, the study participants—fewer and fewer threatening faces. The other study they did—two of these—they had them look at research papers and determine whether the research papers were ethical or unethical. Same deal, about midway through they start feeding them fewer and fewer unethical research proposals.

Now, if these two things are black or white, the groups would have said "threatening" fewer times as time went on, they would have found fewer and fewer unethical research proposals. Because they're being given less. Right? Because they're being given less. But that didn't happen.

What they did is they said "threatening" the exact same amount of times. They took faces that were kind on the border that they would have passed up and not said were threatening before, they started deeming those threatening. Same with the research proposals: they started getting more nitpicky.

Now, the scientist who I spoke with whose name is David Levari—yep, getting his name right, I remembered it—he explained that probably in the past it gave you a survival advantage to always be looking for the next problem. Right? Because if you're the type of person who's vigilant going, "Okay, we might run out of food, that is problematic, we got to fix it. This is a problem, let's fix that." If you're vigilant like that, that would help you survive, right?

But applied to today's world where you've seen the world get better and better over time, it often causes us to miss how amazing it is and pile up first-world problems. Right? So there's also amazing research where researchers will ask the average American, "Do you think the world is improving?" And only 6% of people think the world is improving. It's because we look for the next problem. But if you think about that from, like let's take the last 500 years—of course the world is better. You live longer, you're more likely to be literate, you're less likely to be starving, you're less likely to lose a child. Yeah, exactly. On and on and on. But we often don't realize that in the moment and that affects us.

Are we getting—you know, you talked about the abundance we have in the world, but are we getting happier? Do you know any stats around our collective happiness or how we report on that?

Yeah, I think a lot of the research on happiness suggests that we are less happy than we were.

More mental health problems as well, we all know those stats around depression and suicide.

Yeah, more mental health problems, yep. And there's probably a variety of reasons for that. But I do think that one—one thing that's interesting: we seem to live in a world where a lot of people have enough of what they need to survive. And if they don't, it's probably a governmental problem, it's probably a distribution problem, and this I'm mainly talking about developed countries here.

But as we've got more and more and more, we haven't necessarily become more happy. So for example, I think the year was from 1970 to about 2000, the real income of Americans grew by 50%. So this factors in, you know, price adjustments, inflation. So people got 50% richer on average. Yet happiness didn't change. In fact, it might have actually decreased a little bit. So this suggests that once our needs are met to a certain point, like it's not necessarily going to make us happier. Yet we keep thinking that happiness is going to be in the next purchase, that it’s in the next blowout, that it's in the next viral tweet or whatever it might be.

Did they discover an antidote for this sort of incessant search for problems? Because I'd like to be content.

Yeah, well that's the search, right? That's the ultimate human search. I think that a lot of religions, they're set up to counter that. Right? Don't steal because you're taking away from someone else and society falls apart. Don't be gluttonous because that's going to give you problems. Don't—you know, they're all telling us: don't overdo all these worldly things that we tend to overdo. And instead, the focus is to, you know, take the focus off yourself and put it on something that will help you kind of do the next right thing. Now those get interpreted in ways that can be controversial, of course, but I do think that the overall architecture is the same. And that is the ultimate question for all people, right?

My whole team here have got more and more into running. We speak about running all the time. And obviously you know Daniel Lieberman who's been on the show before. He—I think he wrote a book on running, didn't he? That's his last book, the one that we had a conversation with on the show. What’s your perspective on exercise, running, and what did you learn when you studied nomadic tribes about the importance of exercise?

Yeah, I mean I do think that it's probably the best thing that you can do for your health is exercising. And I think that, you know, a lot of people will say "exercise is medicine." I think more that inactivity is poison. So we evolved to have a certain amount of activity in our daily life. Like we need that in order to get a certain—to be healthy and happy. And we often don't get that today the way we design our lives.

Something I write about in *The Comfort Crisis* is: the human body is good at two things. Humans evolved to be good at two things. One of them is running long distances relatively slowly, which I'm sure Daniel Lieberman talked about because he's the dude who discovered that. He's great.

But the other thing that we are good at is carrying things for distance. So you ask, "Okay, well why are we good at this long-distance running in the heat?" and it’s because we would chase down animals who are not good at cooling themselves for miles and miles and miles until they overheated and then we would kill them and we would have our meal. But then what happens after you kill an animal away from camp?

Call an Uber.

Call an ancient Uber. You got to carry it back. And we're the only—we're the only animal that can carry things for distance well. And that absolutely shaped us just as much as running did. So we've got these hands that can grip things strongly, we're built in such a way that we can carry stuff for distance.

And I argue in *The Comfort Crisis*, a lot of people still run, like jogging is popular, but carrying things as a workout is something that a lot of people don't do. And so I advocate for rucking, which is loading up a backpack with weight and walking. And when you compare rucking to running, rucking tends to be less injurious, so people—the injury rate is much lower. It also preserves more muscle than running does. So when you run, you're burning fat but you're also burning muscle. When you ruck, because you have weight on your body, it's signaling your body like "don't burn quite as much muscle." And studies bear that out.

So you're kind of getting cardio and weight training in one. And I think it's a good thing that people should be doing. I'm not saying don't ever run, but I am saying we've engineered this really important form of human physical activity, which is carrying things for long distances, out of our lives. And by adding it back in, I think we do get a lot of different benefits.

How does the modern body look different to the body of our ancestors in that regard, or these nomadic tribes? Do they have sort of—because I imagine if they're carrying things in a world where we can put it in the boot of a car or find some other means using wheels to roll it, they must be physiologically adapted in certain ways?

I think that—well I think that in my experience, and you would have to talk to Dan as well to see if he agrees with this, but I do think that most hunter-gatherers are much smaller than the average Westerner is. They're just much smaller. Because they don't have as much food, they're also far more active. And so they're not giant people. When you look at people in the West today, we're giant people in the grand scheme of time and space.

Who burns more calories?

Well, if you did it per pound of body weight, they do. Like by far. But when you—they might weigh—so you have to do it by how big the person is, right? If you have two people that are burning 3,000 calories, great. But if one person weighs 250 pounds and the other weighs 120 pounds, well the person who's 120 pounds is burning far more for their body weight and that's an important distinction that needs to be made when we talk about, "Do hunter-gatherers burn as many calories as Westerners?" because there's some people who are like, "Well, they burn the same." It's like, "Yeah, they're 100 pounds on average. We're on average 200 pounds." Like that's a big difference.

The arms of the average prehistoric woman, for example, were 16% stronger than those of today's women Olympic rowers. Jesus Christ.

Yeah, they’re—they’re very fit people. I mean they can go—there's this one anthropologist I talked to who spent some time with hunter-gatherers in Tanzania and she talked about how even the older people in the tribe—we’re talking about, you know, 70, 80-year-old women—they can just hike all day, they can hurdle over rocks, like they're just like—they're monsters. And I'm like—you know, she's a 30-year-old woman, she's like, "I'm kind of trailing behind these women that are like two, almost three times my age."

And that's because they've stayed active and kept muscle mass, right?

Yeah, they've stayed active. And so when you think about daily life, a lot of it is effortful. So they're not just—they're not just covering ground. They're covering ground that is rough, right? It's all outdoors. That's going to require more energy than a sidewalk. They're carrying stuff, they're squatting, they're digging, they're—some of them will climb trees. Even when they're resting, they might rest in the squat position where we are going to rest in a Lazy Boy and just melt into it, right? So there's this all this—besides just the stuff that we would look at and say like, "Yeah, that's active." I mean even just resting is more active than where they’re always undergoing some low level of physical activity.

And now we've engineered so much of that out of our lives, and that's undoubtedly changed us. But we don't even know. It's like we're born into it, right? Because as a species, we evolved to do the next easiest, most comfortable thing. So we have applied that with technology to our environment and it's good overall, but it's changed us. It's changed our fitness, it's changed our physicality. And once we did that and realized, "Oh, we've taken out all this physical activity out of our lives and now we're getting sick for it," we go, "Well, I guess let's just like build these buildings where you just go and, you know, maybe you run on a belt and maybe you pick up some weights that are perfectly balanced and you do that, you know, 'Oh how about three sets of 10? That's what we'll call it.'"

So when we—we basically invented exercise. Right? And it's not the same as we used to necessarily do in the past. I'm not saying that there's anything wrong with that, but I am saying that the way that we are physically active today, even that has changed greatly. Like no one in the past would have tried to get giant and lift a bunch of weight. That—it doesn't make sense to have all this extra muscle. You didn't have enough food to grow it, you didn't want to be carrying that around on your person. I mean think of mountain climbers: they don't like bulk up for a climb, right? They don't get huge and jacked. It's like, "No, you need to be strong for your weight." You need to be as strong as possible for your weight, but you don't want to have any excess weight. And today you have people who are like, "I just want to be like 250 pounds of pure muscle. It's going to be awesome."

People always—people have been saying to me that calisthenics is one of the more important exercises, probably for that very reason that lifting your body weight is probably the central—being able to move your body is the most important thing, not having massive guns.

Yeah, and I think it is a strength thing. Like there is some research that says that muscle mass is good for longevity and protective. A lot of those studies are often conducted looking at people who are sarcopenic. And there's a difference between people who have a dangerously low level of muscle mass and those who just have a ton just to have it. I think probably the sweet spot is just be in a—as much as BMI is a controversial measurement, I think probably be in a BMI that is normal and try and be strong for your weight and do a bunch of cardiovascular exercise. I mean just look at, like, what did humans do for all of time? That's probably a pretty good roadmap to try and mimic. And you tend to find that those people aren't that giant.

Daniel Lieberman said something to me which is clearly so obvious but really did shock me. He said when he spoke to these sort of hunter-gatherer tribe communities, they almost laughed at him when he asked them what they do for exercise. Because the concept of exercise is not something they think about because they're exercising all day. So he—I think he remarked that one of those communities turned around to him and was like, "Why would you run for fun?"

Totally. Yeah, they probably, he asked, "What do you do for exercise?" and they probably said, "What the hell is exercise?" Literally, like he said something like "training," "What do you do to train?" and they were like, "Training? Like we—it's part of our life is exercise."

Well that's how it was for all of us forever. Like no one moved just to move because our lifestyles in the past were—we had to move for work and you wouldn't want to do any extra because you were moving all day for labor. I mean this was farm labor is really taxing, most people worked in agriculture until the industrial revolution. Exercise is something that we invented once we engineered movement out of our lives.

You talk about exercise as a psychological act. I.e. once upon a time when we were out in nature exercising, we would be psychologically stimulated because there might be a bear or I don't know a lion coming at us. So we’re moving our bodies but our mind is so attuned to everything happening around us. Now, as you said, we’re on in these gyms with these rubber belts and we’re watching like—I don't know—we’re just like looking at the screen or watching Netflix or just—

Real Housewives.

Yeah, whatever on the—on the treadmill. Does that—having exercise be a psychological act where it's psychologically stimulating through the when you’re doing it, does that matter?

Yeah.

Why?

I just wrote a deep dive on about this on my newsletter, which I call "2%", we can—I can explain why I call it 2%. But when you think about the context of exercise that we used to do in the past, there are so many more things happening than just the physical work of moving your body across the land.

So as you're moving, take something like trail running. You're having to figure out, "Okay, well where am I going to place each foot?" because the trail might be rocky, you might even not even be on a trail. So you're having to figure out what is my foot placement. You're also having to factor in, "Okay, how am I going to pace myself knowing I have this distance to go, knowing that it is this hot outside, knowing that I have this much water with me?" You're also having to factor in things in the periphery like, are there wild animals out there? And if you are running because you are say hunting in the past, you're having to track the animal.

That is an exceedingly psychologically taxing act. You're looking, you're going, "Okay, well we got a broken branch there. Oh looks like there's a blood spatter from that, you know, arrow we put in it." It is—if running on a treadmill is like addition, running outside in the context that we would have run outside is like multivariate calculus.

And there's a researcher at USC named David Raichlen, and he's thought about this a lot. And he basically thinks that, you know, when you compare running indoors staring at a screen, your brain just kind of shuts off. You don't really have to do much cognitive work as you do this exercise. Yes, it is good for your cardiovascular health, he will say. But when you exercise outdoors, especially if it's in sort of wilder nature—like on a trail—think running on a trail. You're having to do a lot of cognitive work as you do that, and that might be better for brain health as well in the long run for people. Not to mention, outdoor exercise is also harder. You're probably going to burn more calories per step, you're going to have more ups and downs, you're going to have—like it's just—it's better overall.

Daniel also opened my eyes to something. I had, just before I spoke to Daniel, I had an issue with my feet. I had what they call plantar fasciitis. I woke up one day and I basically couldn't walk because something in my foot had like swelled up. And then I googled it and they said it’s plantar fasciitis. And the hypothesis—so I was then given these insoles to kind of try and correct it. The hypothesis that I then later discovered was that because my feet are so weak because I walk around every day in these like one-inch cushion shoes that we all do and there's this whole industry about like heel size and how that makes running and exercise and comfort better and it's—how it's better for you or better for your knees. When I suddenly started exerting a lot of effort onto my feet because I was training for a big football match, my feet just gave way. And that made me start to believe that maybe I'm not supposed to have these massive like one-inch, one-centimeter, whatever, heels, soles that we all have on our shoes. Imagine if from the second a child was born we put a glove on both of their hands that was one centimeter either side. Imagine how like weak and pathetic their hands would be. That's essentially what we're doing to our feet. And so now, I don't wear shoes that have a—like a—like a sole. I have barefoot shoes.

Yeah. We're supposed to have a certain amount of inputs strength-wise and I think that we don't get those in a lot of ways. I mean it's not just—it's not just the shoes, right? It's also, "Okay, well why does everyone's back hurt?" because 80% of people will experience back pain at some point in their life. And you go, "Okay, well, you know, we all sit eight hours a day and we're not sitting like in the squatting position like we used to." Right?

We're sitting in these chairs that are comfortable that take the physical work we used to have to do just to keep our torso up off our back. And so then when we go to say lift something, our back muscles are exceedingly weak and something happens and we get a problem, right? And you can extend that to many different—like average pains that people have. It's usually because our environment is set up to take the physical stress off our bodies but we eventually end up paying a price for that when we try and do something out of that very small comfort zone that we've built ourselves.

So in the case of you, it's, you know, you had weakened your feet over time and then you add load onto them and they're not ready for that and that manifests itself as pain. For another person it could be they sit at a desk all day and they decide, "You know what? I'm going to go back into the gym," and they do one deadlift and their back just goes, "What are you doing?" and sends a bunch of pain there. And it's a lot of different things—shoulder—shoulder pain—a lot of—a lot of different pains are just manifestations of our modern environment.

And to avoid those, you said 80% of people will experience back pain at some time.

Yeah, it's the most common pain that people will experience. And it’s also—it has a huge economic toll. It’s—yeah, it’s pretty crazy.

As soon as you said that my back started to feel painful.

Yeah. So a very—a very simple fix is spending more time sitting on the floor. Having your back—having to prop it up like I am now. I’m not using the backrest, you know? If I do this, your back has to do more work. And even just that low level of work across time can help prevent some problems.

You said sitting on the floor?

Yep, sitting on the floor. That helps with mobility. When you're sitting on the floor you don't have this giant backrest that you can just melt into. Your—your body has to do work to keep yourself upright, right? And you're probably going to get uncomfortable at some point, so you're going to shift around, you're going to put your hips into different positions, you're going to put your legs into different positions. It seems to help with mobility and with pain over time.

That's really useful. Because that's a small thing that I can do to reduce my chances of being part of the 80% that will experience back pain. Sitting on the floor more often—I can do that. What are the other small day-to-day decisions that we could all make to give ourselves a little bit of healthy discomfort in our lives?

Yeah, so I call this concept being a "2-percenter." And it comes from a study that found that 2% of people take the stairs when there is also an escalator available. 2%. Now, 100% of those people knew that taking the stairs would give them a long-term benefit on their health, right? But only 2% take them. And that's because we're a species who's wired to do the next comfortable thing, even when it doesn't make sense in our comfortable environment.

So when I talk about being a 2-percenter, I'm talking about taking the actual and the metaphorical stairs when you can. What are the small things that you can do in daily life in order to add more activity, more discomfort into your life, in a way that is totally manageable, that adds up to a giant return over time?

A giant return over time? Taking the stairs?

A giant return over time. If you take the stairs every single time, I guarantee that you will have better health than if you were to take that escalator. And if you apply that across the board—I mean something as simple as, "Okay, I have a work phone call. I can sit in my office and take it in this sort of, you know, dim office, or I can go take it while walking." And I've snuck in a mile and a half of walking. "Oh, and by the way, you know, maybe next time I'm going to throw on a 10-pound ruck or a 20-pound ruck and I'm going to be rucking while I take that phone call."

"I'm going to park in the parking lot that is like Siberia away from the grocery store," right? And it sounds like people say—people will shrug their shoulders and go, "Yeah, everyone knows that." It’s like, "Okay, well why the hell doesn't anyone do it?"

Because they don't believe it matters.

Because you don't believe it matters! And the problem is is that we look at that act as just one individual act and go, "Okay, well that might only burn five more calories." Okay, well what if you did that 10 times a day and extrapolated it over a lifetime? I guarantee you will end up healthier and better off than if you consistently were doing the easier thing. So where can I find those little 2% wins, flow them into my life? Because once you start doing it, you realize like, "Oh, not only is this very easy to do, but I actually feel better when I do this stuff," right?

You could carry your groceries. Like a lot of back pain would go away if people started carrying their groceries more often. I can guarantee that! But we don't do that. And so a lot of my work and thinking is: how do we find those little wins across the day and pile them up? I'm not saying that people should stop going to the gym and doing their normal routine, but I am saying if you're looking at 24 hours in a day and you are doing the next easiest, most comfortable, most lazy thing for 23 and a half hours and you think that your 30 minutes in the gym is going to recoup that—you’re missing—you’re missing the big picture. That is not how humans are designed to live.

I was thinking as you were talking about how it compounds for or against you as well. So in the example you gave about the taking the stairs versus the escalator might burn five calories and then you times that by 10—you know, then that's 50 calories you're burning a day—I was thinking is there a compounding element to this? And my brain decided there was because if you take the stairs and you burn calories and build up a little bit of muscle, you then have more muscle to do more activities like that. And I think it was Daniel Lieberman that told me about this concept of senescence, which is almost this downward spiral of muscle decay where you like lose muscle so you do less activity so you lose muscle so you do less activity and that's the spiral downward for a lot of people that causes aging and ultimately death. What we think of aging and ultimately death.

And that's what I thought of in those small things. I thought like, "It is going to compound for me." If I do it more, I'll be able to do it more, so I'll probably do it more.

Exactly. No, and you're absolutely right. And you know, the concept isn't even just physical, it's psychological. It's being willing to have the hard conversation you need to have with your spouse. Being, you know, if you're working on a hard project, our tendency is when the hard project gets hard, what do we do? We check our cell phone, we go, "Oh, I'm going to get up and get coffee." Being willing to go—put in that extra little work to kind of push through that thing that's just going to be a little bit harder, I think ultimately leads to the biggest transformation and breakthroughs.

I used to think you could change your beliefs. You know, and then I really got quite obsessed with figuring out if you could choose a different belief. And I concluded that you couldn't, because there's no belief in my life that I genuinely believe that I now, if my family were held at gunpoint, could genuinely change. I could lie, but I couldn't actually change the belief. So I thought, "What are beliefs?" and concluded that they are essentially a stack of evidence that we've accepted as subjectively true.

And that is governing our lives. It's telling us who we are and how we show up, especially in situations of discomfort. I remember I had Chris Eubank Jr. on the podcast and he's like a world champion boxer, and he said to me, "If I'm home alone and I get to mile nine on the treadmill and I told myself I was going to do 10, I will limp and I get cramp in my leg—I have to limp the last mile, even if no one's watching, because," quote, "I can't let the demons in." What he's saying there is, "I can't let a new self-story emerge that I'm the type of person that quits when it's hard," because in round 12 of a championship boxing fight, that story will emerge when I'm on the stool and I want to quit.

This idea, and it kind of goes back to what you're saying about the stairs, that all of these small things are compounding psychologically to tell us a story about who we are and our relationship with discomfort. And that, like, you know, the greatest way to influence our self-story is to start keeping uncomfortable commitments with ourselves. And that'll compound for us over time.

Yeah. And then once you take those stairs you be like, "Okay, maybe I could do that run, that three-mile run. Oh now I'm doing five." I think that, you know, you're right about the stories we tell ourselves and where they come from. But you can change the experiences that you have. Right? So your experiences will change that set of beliefs. It's like this story I told about me spending the month in the Arctic. I didn't think I could ever do that. And I hadn't ever had any reason to be that deeply appreciative of the world today. I had to go have this experience that changed my perception.

Evidence.

Right. I could tell myself all day, "Yeah, hot running water's great," but did I ever feel that emotionally? Like a legitimate emotional connection and this like, "Oh my God, like you peel the veil back"? No, I had to go do—I had to have an experience outside of my comfort zone. Right? An experience that was tough and challenging.

And that is ultimately the hero's journey that you see in, you know, the work of Joseph Campbell. Analyzes all these myths throughout time. Finds that all cultures basically have the exact same structure behind their myths. And that is that the hero gets called to adventure, but by the way it's going to be hard, it's going to be challenging. And the person doesn't want to go. Right? There is always this phase where they go, "I don't want to deal with this." But if they choose to accept that, they're always going to enter this middle ground that's really trying, that's really challenging. They’re going to struggle down there. But in the struggle is where you learn what you're capable of. The reality is that humans are capable of way more than we think, but we don't get thrust into positions to realize this anymore. And that is the teacher. You have to throw yourself into the abyss and you get down there and you swim through the fog and you figure out your shit and then you come out the other side and go, "Oh, I got more on board than I realized." And that changes you permanently. Changes what you're capable of forever.

And then if you're lucky you'll get another call to adventure and have more problems in your life and get another opportunity to iterate again. And you just keep peeling off layers, peeling off layers. That's the human story of improvement to me.

But most of us are waiting for evidence to go on the adventure. We don't realize that the evidence will come from the adventure.

Right. Well, I think that's one way that things have changed. In the past, humans used to have to do hard things all the time. This could be from these big hunts we used to have to go on, it could be that a storm rolls in and you're like, "We need to get—we need to get over this mountain range in the next 24 hours or else we're going to die." And by the way, this mountain range is huge, I don't know if we can do it. So we get thrust out of our comfort zone all the time and we have these moments where we realize what we're capable of. Because we go in there, we go, "I'm pretty sure we're going to die crossing this mountain range," but we don't die. We go, "Oh wow, I had way more on board than I realized. Well that's something." And that changes you. It shapes you. It makes you realize what you're capable of. And life no longer thrusts these things on us anymore. Right? You can just kind of live in the comfort zone now. And it's nice, it's comfortable, it's safe. But you don't get to go out on those edges and learn what you're capable of and that ultimately I think limits you over time.

So you're telling everyone to quit their jobs.

Like you did! I'm telling everyone to take two weeks off and go do something totally kickass that will change you forever because we can all do that.

Our relationship with uncertainty though is at the very heart of this, I think. Because when people are thinking about venturing off on that adventure, leaving their job, doing and do something new, uncertainty seems to be this headwind that holds us in place. And I remember studying the work that Uber Labs had done—so that's Uber, the app, the food and taxi app. Yeah, they do everything. In their lab they had figured out that one of the worst parts of any customer experience was the feeling of uncertainty. So once upon a time you’d call a taxi then you’d stand on the side of the road and just be in total uncertainty. So they factored that into the app by showing you where the driver is.

And also we can all intuitively agree but also can recount times where a plane was delayed and it said "delayed" and the feeling of the uncertainty versus just saying "delayed two hours," which I'd much rather prefer. At the heart of going on the adventures of our lifetimes and throwing ourselves into discomfort is our need for certainty. That holds—like when I speak to people on the streets or they DM me—that is the conundrum that they face, is "I don't know what the future holds if I go off on that adventure, so I'd rather just stay in certain misery than endure the uncertainty that that journey might bring my way."

Yeah, I mean we don't like uncertainty. But there's—as I was reporting *Scarcity Brain*, I ended up reading a lot of strange old texts. And I read this—the writings of this monk who lived in silence in a cave in the 1800s in France. He wrote—he published his journals, he didn't use his name because he didn't want any fame, he didn't want anyone to know. And there's this quote in the book that goes, "You risk so much hesitating to fling yourself into the abyss."

And that is the damn truth. Especially in the context of today, what's the worst that could happen? You're not going to die. Even if you lose everything you own, we've got a lot of safety nets today. And do you think you're a relatively intelligent person? Have you figured it out in the past? Well you can probably figure it out again. And if you're not willing to embrace that uncertainty, that is actually a feature, not a bug, because that uncertainty gives you opportunities. If you're certain what you're going to get, well that's not any damn exciting, right? I mean you—it's not exciting.

That’s what you talk about in *Scarcity Brain*.

Yeah, unpredictability is exciting. It's captivating. And so yeah, the outcome could be bad. But it could also be really, really good. Way better than you thought. And by not taking that gamble, you're kind of sitting on the sidelines.

Also, Chapter 9 of *Scarcity Brain*, you talk about something that I joked about for many years as a marketer. I went round telling CMOs around the world and CEOs that if you want your people, your team members, to do the very best work of their lives—and the most specifically the most innovative and creative work of their lives—withhold budgets. And I say this because my first company was called "Wallpark" and it was only when we ran out of money that we did our best work because we had no choice. So we had, I don't know, I had like 6,000 pounds as a marketing budget or something and then I remember being sat there with my two buddies who are building the business with me, Ash and Dom, and we ran out of money. And from that came an idea that would help me to build a company that was worth several hundreds of millions of dollars. It was in having less resources that we were forced to do the most creative best work of our lives and it drove us to first principles. And that's what I read when you were talking about this study at the University of Illinois and Johns Hopkins. That kind of—I thought, "Ah, it's true."

Yeah, people become more creative, we try and innovate when resources are scarce. When we have a bunch of resources, what we do is we kind of do what everyone else is doing. And so I think that when you look at humans, we're sort of designed to add. Our default is to add more, to do more, to whatever. And we often look for the sort of easy way out. When you remove resources, so we're not able to do that in the same way that kind of everyone else is, I think we get forced into innovation and creativity.

So we lazy? Are abundant humans lazy?

I don't love the L-word, but...

Don't worry, I said it.

You didn't say it, then I will—I will agree with you. I think that, look, I think that we're designed to kind of do the easy thing. I think that having to come up with a crazy idea, it takes work. And maybe we don't do that if we have the resources to just throw money at the problem.

And this kind of explains why companies as they get bigger, although they have more intellectual capital, they have more brains in their offices, they seem to become less innovative. Also it speaks to the whole loss aversion thing, but they tend to probably default to convention and obvious.

I think you want to be light, you want to be fast, you want to be able to—you have—it sounds counterintuitive, but it's almost like you have more options when you're smaller, right? When you have less. Because you—the world is open, we got to figure this out and there's all these things that no one else is saying because we're just forced to make a decision given this small budget that we have.

And that study at the University of Illinois and Johns Hopkins, you talk about these six studies where participants who faced scarce resources performed better.

Yeah.

In what way?

They came up with ideas that were more innovative. They used less resources.

Interesting. So when they had less resources they actually used less resources and their ideas were better.

Yep.

Interesting. It also kind of explains why being an underdog and holding onto that mentality regardless of your success is probably a good thing. It's like a psychological state of "we're not there yet." I say this to my teams all the time about our biggest risk now is thinking you’ve made it. Because you can let off the gas when you've made it and you can just be complacent, you have more resources you can do the obvious stuff, you can do what got you here. Less incentive to innovate and try new things, why would we? We're doing well.

Yeah, so for—I mean for you guys it might be, "Okay, we know this stuff has worked in the past. At a certain point we have to realize that it's not always going to work. So how are we devoting time to figuring out these things that people are overlooking that might benefit from fewer resources, right?" Maybe it's like exercises where one day every month you're going, "If we had X budget, what would we do?" Now it's kind of different because in the back of your minds people are going, "Yeah, but we got plenty of money." But I think trying to figure out, "Okay, what would we do if we had this budget?" could be a good exercise to kind of keep lean and be able to try stuff.

The saddest line in your book was the line that we are experiencing a rising tide of global sadness. Chapter 11. How do you—how do you quantify that rising global sadness?

That's just based on some research that's out there. The United States is definitely—has become unhappier over the years and I think you're seeing this in a lot of other developed nations too. And yeah, it is a little bit sad.

Usage of the word "love" halved between 1965 and 2015 in—in songs.

Yeah. So in—yeah there's some researchers that analyzed a bunch of lyrics in songs that had come out from the 60s to—what was the year?

19—1965 to 2015.

Yep. And they found that the word "love," nice positive words, halved. And negative words like "hate" increased.

Jesus. And global unhappiness hit a record high. This is the stat I was looking for: global unhappiness hit a record high in 2021, according to a source. So interesting.

What is the—what is the antidote then? Bringing it right back down to, you know, the individual level. "Become a 2-percenter." Right? But when I have this ancient hardware that’s given me this scarcity brain, what can I do? How can I take back control of my life and live my life more aligned with my long-term goals and dreams?

We live in a world where, you know, there's a million things we're told we need to do to be happy. It's like you got to do this, you got to do that, and there's all this research about it. But I think that really when you look at what makes people happy, it's when they accomplish things that weren't always easy. Now that could be from, like I mentioned before, like you spend this time alone and get to know yourself better—like that's not—that's not always easy, but you come out on the other side of that better.

I think it's being willing to do things that are ultimately going to be uncomfortable, they're going to be hard, and being okay with that. In fact, embracing that journey is the human story to me. And I think that as the world has gotten easier, more comfortable, safer in a lot of ways and we have this default to just kind of sit there in that zone, I don't think that's necessarily become good for us.

And that could be—you can apply that to all different things. I mean it's that literal and metaphorical taking of the stairs. It could be, "Okay, if I feel like I'm lonely, well, I can sit here and be lonely or I can join, I don't know, a softball team or a cricket team." And yeah, it's going to be awkward when I meet these new people. Do I think it's going to be easy? No. But that could enhance my life. And you can apply that to everything.

I think it's being willing, like that monk wrote, to throw yourself into the abyss and have a human experience. Because life was not supposed to be easy all the time, and in fact, if it is, people tend to go a little bit nuts and get unhappy. And so pushing against that, I think, is a good thing overall for people.

You must now look at the world, having studied all of these things and especially living in Vegas and seeing those gas stations that have the roulette machines in them. Do you think that corporations and these businesses are like a little bit evil? A little bit morally bankrupt?

Well, this gets into this larger question. So what we have to realize is that a lot of these behaviors are fun and rewarding in the short term. So take, I don't know, TikTok feeding you the exact algorithm that’s going to capture your attention. That is fun and rewarding. Okay? And so if you were to say, "Well you need to stop doing that," then the response from TikTok would be, "Okay, so you're telling us to basically give people boring content that they don't want as much. Do we want to live in that world?" I don't think so. Should slot machines be less fun? Should it be less fun to watch YouTube? Should Netflix design itself to be boring?

What my message really is is that I'm not saying don't ever do these things. But I think we need to realize that we often times fall into these behaviors for reasons we're not entirely aware of. So if you're the—if you want to spend 15 hours a day on TikTok, hell yeah, go for it. But I want you to make that decision consciously. And I think today a lot of corporations know the decision is not being made consciously. That's the reality.

But at the same time, I don't know if the antidote is going to be—leave us any better. Because then we start regulating everything and I don't think we want that. So really what I want to do is empower people to realize: you have the capacity to make choice, I want you to be more aware of why you're doing what you're doing, because ultimately that is where freedom lies. Like if we start punishing corporations, it's like you're treating the public like children.

And I was going to say, the one ethical casino would just go bankrupt. Right? And it wouldn't exist. But I think about that throughout society—the one social platform that didn't play to our scarcity brain would not exist, it wouldn't have users. So it just would become extinct.

So and then also if you think about it on like a geographical—on a global scale, if we just banned it in the United States or the UK, a lot of the innovation and opportunity just moves off to China or to some other place where they capitalize on the scarcity brain. So it's all about being conscious, intentional, and that starts with exactly what you've done in your book, really, which is starts with awareness.

And that's why your book is so brilliant. Both of the books are fantastic. *The Comfort Crisis* is superb, and as I said to you before we started recording, I had so many people come on the podcast and quote things from the book. But then also this term, "the comfort crisis," I've heard over and over and over again, and that comes back to you. You said something to me before we started recording that the sales of this book have increased since publication. That's not typical.

Yeah, they've increased over time. We’re selling more every week now two and a half, three years later than we were, yeah, right when it came out.

Because people can relate to the symptoms, I guess.

Yeah, I think it's just a word-of-mouth thing. I think that people read it and they relate to it and if they pick up some of the, you know, suggestions from the book, I think it changes them for the better. You know, I’ve had a lot of people that have really changed their life from the book.

And I told you before we started recording that when I do this podcast, I make notes beforehand, and I don't think I've ever made more notes than I did reading these two books because it's all subject matter that I'm absolutely obsessed with. So *Scarcity Brain*, which is the newer book, says: "Fix your craving mindset and rewire your habits to thrive with enough." Superb. Superb. I’ll link both of them in the description below so if anybody wants to get the books and understand why I was so passionate about having this conversation today, but why I love these books so much, you'll find them in the description below.

We have a closing tradition on this podcast where the last guest leaves a question for the next guest, not knowing who they're going to be leaving it for. And the question that’s been left for you is: "What makes you happiest?"

Oh, what makes me happiest is probably when I am in my office and it is 5:00 in the morning and my dog is there sleeping and I am writing and it is absolute hell, and then bam! The line comes in and I go, "That is how it all fits together." The puzzle pieces suddenly merge and I'm just like totally present, aware, and the words come. And also knowing that once I get through with that writing, I’m going to be able to hang out with my wife, who is my favorite person. She's the one for me. And it’s that. It's very simple.

Thank you so much, Michael. Really appreciate the conversation and I feel smarter having spoken to you. I will quote you for many, many conversations I know going forward, because as I said, this is the subject matter that I'm obsessed with at the moment. So thank you for—thank you for giving this message to the world. I think it’s a message that can save us in a lot of ways that we need to be saved. That’s the TL;DR for what I think about this. And all the indicators say that if there was ever a time where we needed to understand how our brain is working and being taken advantage of so we can take back control, but also the importance of discomfort—it is now. Because things are only going to get easier and more comfortable. Thank you.

I appreciate you having me on, man. It was really fun. I enjoyed the conversation, I appreciate you talking about the books, yeah, getting them out in the world, and having your stamp of approval is awesome. So thanks.

Do you need a podcast to listen to next? We've discovered that people who liked this episode also tend to absolutely love another recent episode we've done, so I've linked that episode in the description below. I know you'll enjoy it.

When your cat is acting weirder, or your dog is being louder, your turtle moves slower. Hello, Ted? Your cat seems thirstier. Whoa, slow down, buddy. Or your puppy is acting clumsier. Day or night, if you don't know what's wrong, know where to go. Vegg ER for pets. This is Kate. Vegg, the better, kinder ER for pets.

Take an Amex card with you on your morning coffee run and earn cashback. On a weekend trip, earn miles. See if you pre-qualify for an American Express card with no impact on your credit score. Learn more at americanexpress.com/check-for-offers. Your credit score may be impacted if you accept a card. Terms apply.