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

26:20So I live in Las Vegas, and I have this underlying question, and Las Vegas is a fascinating town. 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 real casino. There's hotel rooms, there's like restaurants, there's 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.

27:05And 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 it's three parts are one, opportunity to 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.

27:50It'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 Robin Hood. It's being leveraged by different gig work companies, right?

28:30It 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 would we get hooked on it in the first place? And I can explain that. Please. And then where it pops up in modern life, you don't know where it came from?

29:03Yeah, yeah. Okay, so I had the same question. So I talked to the slot guy and, now I'm like, okay, I get the gambling and slot machines are so compelling. I get that this thing isn't 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. 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.

29:40So 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, dang, dang, jackpot. You find this massive elk that you end up killing and it feeds you for weeks. 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. It's right there. Amazing. And you couldn't predict any of that. And you've got to repeat that behavior every day for life.

30:19So 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 who are the rest of the animal kingdom wide in such a way because one would assume they would be? Yeah. 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.

30:59And you see it in rats, you see it in other primates. So when the rewards are unpredictable for a pigeon, they engage in the behavior more. Which would, again, match us up with your theory that whenever there's unpredictable awards associated with an action, we are more engaged because it falls into that prehistoric hardware. Exactly. Think about starting a car. 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 to get it doesn't turn over.

31:32What 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, it's going to turn on and then it stops. And you do it again and then it doesn't do that. And so you're like, okay, well, what's going on? So you do it again. It starts to sound like it's going to come on. It's like, 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.

31:59And that will capture attention of any animal pretty much. And I mean, that's what when I was thinking about, I think it's called near miss theory or something that you took back in the 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 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.

32:32That's a better example. You got four cherries lined up. And if this fifth cherry hits, you're going to want a bunch of money. Now, what will 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 on the back, I'm going to win a bunch of money. And then it lands, but it's not the cherry. 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.

33:11Do they use near misses as a way to engage us with technology or anything else in our lives? Is there like any other examples within our modern lives where I 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 on Instagram and you can 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 someone that I think is super cool that's saying, oh, that's an amazing photo. You look wonderful on that photo. Or is it some troll online going, man, you look like a complete idiot in that.

33:48So there's always unpredictability embedded in social media. It wouldn't work if you knew what was coming. I guess that's why some of you will just keep tweeting and posting because it's kind of like every post comes with a bunch of likes and you're going, you might go viral. Yeah, totally. Yeah, think of the think of the experience of using will take Twitter now called acts apparently. So you let's say you have come up with a little tweet that you think is hilarious since of the moment, right? So you put it up and then you wait, right? The rails are spinning. And you open the app, app back up and you're like, did people like it?

34:24Did they retweet it? And you don't know what's 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?

34:55It could be, oh, here's some sort of crazy fight that happened outside of a bar after Philadelphia Eagles game because the fights are always in Philadelphia, in the US. Or it could be this video, this amazing heartwarming dog video. And that makes me smile. Or it could be some hilarious video that you're just laughing your butt off until you're kind of sucked into that waiting for the next win, right? You're scrolling scrolling scrolling and then that's the one that got me. How do we break out of this? Because 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.

35:40You 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, 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 have the scarcity loop that I mentioned.

36:19So 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 this guest, it's your brain in chapter four. 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 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.

36:50Like, 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, you have that drive, right? And that's taking you to a certain place. And now you have certain financial assets and you've sort of shifted, though, too, your career.

37:31So now I'm turning it back on you. How do you feel like that's manifested itself in your life? It's interesting because in chapter seven, you talk about the 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 a ways. And so I assumed that I liberated myself from the game of status, however. I read another book and it was made the case that the status games we all play just change.

38:08And 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 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 changed the game. And we like to we like to think that we're either not playing the game or the game hasn't changed. Everyone's like this. So what's it what's really interesting about status, which I love 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.

38:48And 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 asks, oh, no, I don't care. I don't care what others think about me. It's like, yeah, you do. Like let's all be 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 would have to you probably wouldn't have to do the crappy like the mean 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.

39:37And 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 health care. So everyone's health care 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 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.

40:20And that might have physiological implications. It's interesting. People that are higher status live longer. 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 sort of fun, crazy study that I came across while reporting scarcity brain is that 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.

41:07What is air rage? People going absolutely nuts on flights. It's like when 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 what do you think that is? Well, the researchers think it's because of that massive status queue 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 and your, how you covered it in your first but but in your second book scarcity brain, you talk about food again. Specifically, you talk a quite a lot about snacking.

41:39Oh, 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 a executive in the food industry who's talking about what makes a snack food successful.

42:19Like, how do you sell 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. So 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, says 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.

42:49So when you ultra -process the 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 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.

43:24So one of the big advances in casino technology, for example, with slot machines was removing the handles. Because if the machine has a handle, you have to do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do So it's really a measurement of how processed a food is basically a small cross -on and white potato both have about 170 calories but you'd have to eat seven cross -on before you feel the same amount of fullness is one potato.

47:11How 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 but fullness. Well, I think that you will be fuller or you will be as full eating fewer any 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 ten ounces of food. And we have one food that has 50 calories per ounce and one food that has a hundred calories per ounce.

47:55So if you were to eat the ten ounces of this food you're going to eat 500 calories but if you eat ten ounces of this food you're going to eat a thousand. And I think that you extrapolate that across the 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 a person who's eating around the clock and you go okay well I'm just going to eat from noon to whatever 6 p .m.

48:33or 7 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 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 fast 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.

49:11But 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 tell noon like they ended up losing weight. It took about hungry days. Yeah. Programming to hungry days per week. Yeah that's one that has worked for some people where you could eat relatively normally say five days a week and then people we say 500 calories on their two hungry days. So basically you're just constraining your calories basically just pulling the lever of time right.

49:49If you can at the end of the day at 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 the story because I'd gotten to this routine of running like five 10 kilometers a day every day on the treadmill pretty much every day on the treadmill. And I and when I got to that five 10 kilometer mark I would typically feel like fatigued.

50:24And then there was this one day where I landed in Boston got on this treadmill that the distance style 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 only get off the treadmill because I'm going to be late for this appointment that I have. And when I hit the stock 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 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.

51:03And that's clearly somewhat of an illusion. And then I read in your first book the comfort crisis this idea of what you talk about mental fatigue. Does that kind of marry up to what I'm saying? Oh 100 % must muscular fatigue. Our psychology effects are 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 we're going to 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 reality.

51:43But 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 opposite where they slow down time. So these people will have run an hour and say 30 minutes. I'm making up the time. 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 perceptions is a key determinant of how tired we feel during exercise.

52:15Because at the heart of this comfort crisis is a 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? Alright so here's another great example. Your legs, 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.

52:56Right? 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. 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 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.

53:30Can allow you to perform a little better. I wonder which 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. Yeah. Because there's clearly a big group of people that are able to you know 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 give you a good example is that. 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.

54:05My first flight is from Las Vegas to Seattle. And I hate flying right the plane is always too hot. The seat is cramped the movie suck on the plane if you want to go to the bathroom. It's this cramped little closet babies crying. It's just terrible. Then I go spend a month in the Arctic where I'm hungry the entire time. If I want water I got 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.

54:49Amazing. This is the most amazing reason it's ever happened to me. So the chair I had inside of the chair from one of the month it's like oh my god this chair is so incredibly comfortable. I'd been freezing the entire time so that warm plane. It's 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 on 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 the airplane snack food sucked. I'm like oh my god these pretzel is amazing.

55:22And 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.

56:10Like 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 is nice and hot. And I'll think back to that and be like, remember when like the hot running water hit your hands and you got emotional how amazing it is.

56:48I 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 my impoptence in my brain what I used to learn about the stoic people and how they do that sort of what's a hedonistic adaptation. And they would remove the pleasantries from their lives 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.

57:23One 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 it's the technical term they call it as prevalence induced concept change. And you can just think about it as problem creep. Now problem creep. Problem creep. Right. So, you know, what used to be a problem yesterday or we're always going to live for problems. It's basically what I'm trying to say.

57:57And 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 go one face after another. And by the 200 face, though, the scientists started feeding the participants or the study participants fewer and fewer threatening faces. The other study that did two of these, they had them look at research papers and determine whether the research papers were ethical or unethical. Same deal. That 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.

58:37It's time went on. They would have found fewer and fewer unethical research proposals. Because they've been given less. Right. Because they've been 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 of 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 scientists who I spoke with, his name is David LaVari. Yep, getting his name right. Remember it. He explained that probably in the past, it gave you a survival advantage to always be looking for the next problem.

59:15Because if you're a 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. 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.

59:55But 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... You're entwined. 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.

1:00:32Moments, health problems as well, we only have those stats. Yeah, and depression and mental health problems. And there's probably a variety of reasons for that. But I do think that 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 is 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%.

1:01:13So this is, this factor is in 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, you know, happiness is going to be in the next purchase, that it's in the next layout, 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?

1:01:51That's the ultimate human search. I think that a lot of religions, they're set up to counter that.

1:02:02Don'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. They're all telling us, don't overdo all these worldly things that we tend to overdo. And instead the focus is to 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 of people. My whole team here have got more and more into running.

1:02:40We speak about running all the time. And obviously, you know Daniel Lieberman who's been on the show before. He wrote a book on running, didn't he? This is last book, the one 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, well, I do think that it's probably the best thing that you can do for your health is exercising. And I think that a lot of people will say exercises medicine. I think more that inactivity is poison. So we evolved to have a certain amount of activity in our daily life.

1:03:14Like we need that in order to be 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.

1:03:57And then we would kill them and we would have our meal. But then what happens after you kill an animal away from camp? Oolenebo. All in ancient Uber. You got to carry it back. Yeah. And 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 grit 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.

1:04:51And 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're 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.

1:05:35And 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? Well, I think that in my experience, and you would have to talk to Dan as well to see if he agrees with us, but I do think that most hunter -gatherers are much smaller than the average westerner is.

1:06:14They'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 guns more calories? Well, if you did it per pound of body weight, they do. Like by far. But when you... they might wait... 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.

1:06:53And that's an important distinction that needs to be made when we talk about do hunter -gatherers, burn as many calories as westerner, because there are some people who are like, well, they burn the same. It's like, yeah, there are 100 pounds on average. We're on average 200 pounds. That's a big difference. The arms of the average prehistoric woman, for example, with 16 % stronger than those of today's women's Olympic rowers. Yeah, Jesus Christ. Yeah, 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.

1:07:24And she talked about how even the older people in the tribe were talking about 70, 80 -year -old women, they can just hike all day. They can hurtle over rocks, 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 covering ground. They're covering ground that is rough, right? It's all outdoors.

1:08:04It's going to require more energy than a sidewalk. They're caring stuff. They're squatting. They're digging. 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. So there's this, all this, besides just the stuff that we would look at and say, yeah, that's active. 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?

1:08:39Because as a species, we evolved to do the next easiest, most comfortable thing. So we have applied that with technology to our environments. 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 build these buildings where you just go and maybe you run on a belt and maybe you pick up some weights that are perfectly balanced and you do that. How about three sets of 10? That's what we'll call it.

1:09:20So when we basically invented exercise, 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'm just 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 weights. 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 persons. I mean, think of mountain climbers. They don't bulk up for a climb, right? They don't get huge in jacks. It's like, no, you need to be strong for your weight.

1:09:51You 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 have always 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 strange thing. Like there is some research that says that muscle mass is good for longevity and protective.

1:10:19A 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 tonne just to have it. I think probably the sweet spot is just B in a as much as BMI as a controversial measurement. I think probably B 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 what did humans do for all of time. That's probably a pretty good road map to try and mimic. And you tend to find that those people aren't that giant.

1:10:53Daniel 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 did for exercise. Because the concept of exercise is not something they think about because they're exercising all day. So I think he remarked that one of those communities turned around to him and was like, why would you run for fun? Yeah, they probably was like, what do you do for exercise? And they probably said, what the hell's exercise? Literally, like he said something like training.

1:11:26What do you do to train? And they were like training. It's part of our life is exercise. Well, that's how it was for all of us. For ever. No one moved just to move because our lifestyles in the past were we had to just 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, second to go about exercises, a psychological act. I 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 line coming at us.

1:12:06So we're moving our bodies, but our mind is so attuned to everything happening around us. Now, as you said, we're 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 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 about this on my newsletter, which I call 2%, and 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.

1:12:51So 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, 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.

1:13:24That is an exceedingly psychologically taxing act. You're looking at, you're going, okay, well, we got a broken branch there. Oh, looks like there's a blood splatter from that, you know, era 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 multi -various calculus. And there's a researcher at USC named David Reichlin 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.

1:14:02Yes, it is good for your cardiovascular health, you 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, after our exercises 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 just better overall. Q1 is often when businesses start implementing new systems and processes in hopes of creating efficiencies for the year ahead.

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1:15:11Over 41 ,000 businesses have chosen to future proof their business with NetSuite. So if you'd like to learn how it can help your business, head to netsuite .com slash Bartlett and free download the CFO's guide to AI and machine learning. That's netsuite .com slash Bartlett. 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 it's a planter for shiders. I woke up one day and I basically couldn't walk because something in my foot had swollen up and then I googled it and they said it's planter for shiders. And the hypothesis, so I was then given these insoles to kind of try and correct it.

1:15:47The hypothesis that I then later discovered was that because my feet are so weak, because I walk around every day and 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 centenitle whatever heels, souls that we all have on our shoes.

1:16:21Imagine if from the second a child was born, we put a glove on both of their hands that was one centenitry to 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 soul. I have a beth fit 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 payment some point in their life.

1:17:00And 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. 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 when we get a problem. Right. And you can extend that to many different problems like average pains that people have. It's usually because our environments are 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.

1:17:42So 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, 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 different pains are just manifestations of our modern environment. And to avoid those, you said 80 % of people experience back pain at some time.

1:18:14Yeah, 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. I don't know. Yeah. So a very simple, 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.

1:18:51And 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 %er.

1:19:25And 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. 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 %er, 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.

1:20:12A 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 rock or a 20 pound rock. And I'm going to be rocking while I take that phone call.

1:20:47I'm going to park in the parking lot that is like Siberia away from the grocery store, right? And it sounds like people will say, sugar shoulders. 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 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.

1:21:19So 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 in 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?

1:22:06You'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 against you as well. So in the example you gave about the taking the stairs versus the escalator, might burn five calories, and then times that by 10, you do it type, you know, then that's 50 calories you're burning a day. I was thinking, is there a compounding element to this? 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 synessence, which is almost this downward spiral of muscle decay where you lose muscle, so you do less activity, so you lose muscle, so you do less activity.

1:22:51And that's the spiral downward for a lot of people that causes aging and 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?

1:23:24We check our cell phone, we go, I'm going to get up and get coffee. Being willing to go through, 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 was held at gunpoint, could genuinely change, I could lie.

1:23:54But I couldn't actually change the belief. So I thought what a beliefs and concluded that they are essentially a stack of evidence that we've accepted is 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. It's the, I remember I had Chris, you banked Junior on the podcast and he's like a world championship 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.

1:24:27What he's 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's saying about the stairs that all of these small things are compounding psychologically to tell us a story about who we are in our relationship with this comfort. And that like, you know, the greatest way to influence our self -story is to start keeping uncomfortable commitments with ourselves. And that will compound for us over time.

1:25:02Yeah. And then once you take the stairs, you'd 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 the 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.

1:25:43Right. I could tell myself all day, yeah, hot running water is great. But did I ever feel that emotionally like a legit 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 your comfort zone 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's that the hero gets called to adventure.

1:26:16But 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's always the space 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 struggles where you learn what you're capable of. The reality is, 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.

1:26:52And 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 peel off layers. Peel 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 that's one way that things have changed. In the past, humans used to have to do hard things all the time.

1:27:27This 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 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.

1:27:57It shapes you. It makes you realize what you're capable of and life no longer thrust these things on to 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 telling everyone to quit their jobs. Like you just telling everyone to take two weeks off and go do something totally kick ass 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 going and do something new, uncertainty seems to be this headwind that holds us in place.

1:28:40And 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'd figured out that one of the worst parts of cost any customer experience was the feeling of uncertainty. So once upon a time, you'd pull a taxi, then you'd stand on the side of the road and just be in total uncertainty. So they factored in fact, 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 lifetime, and throwing ourselves into discomfort is our, I need for certainty.

1:29:27That holds, like when I speak to people in the streets where 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, then they have to endure the uncertainty that that journey might, you know, bring my way. Yeah, I mean, we don't like uncertainty, but there's as I was reporting the scarcity brain, I ended up reading a lot of strange old texts, text. 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.

1:30:14And 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 need damn exciting, right?

1:30:55I mean, it's not exciting. That's what you took about in the 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. Very better than you thought. And by not taking that gamble, you're kind of sitting on the sidelines. Also, chapter nine of scarcity brain, you talk about something that I joked about for many years as a marketer. I went around 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.

1:31:32And I say this because my first company was called Wallpark. And it was only when we ran out of money. That's what we did at the best work, because we had no choice. So we, 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 were 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.

1:32:10And 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 John Hopkins. That's kind of what I thought, it's true. Yeah, people, people become more creative. We try to innovate when resources are scarce. When we have a bunch of resources, what we do is we kind of do whatever 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's, I think we get forced into innovation and creativity.

1:32:57So we lazy, our abundant humans lazy. I don't love the L word, but I said it. You didn't say that I got the novel agree with you. I think that look, I think that we are 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 of version thing, but they tend to probably default to convention and obvious.

1:33:36I think you want to be light, you want to be fast, you want to be able to, you have, it sounds counter -intuitive, but it's almost like you have more options when you're smaller, right? When you have less, because you get like the world is open, we got to figure this out. 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 John 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.

1:34:11They used less resources. Interesting. Yeah. So when they had less resources, they actually used less resources. Yeah. And their ideas were better. Yep. Interesting. It also kind of explains why being an underdog and holding on to that mentality, regardless of your successes, probably a good thing. It's like a psychological state of, we're not there yet. I say this to my team all the time about, our biggest risk now is like, thinking you've made it? Yeah. 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.

1:34:45Less 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 the reminds people are going, yeah, but we got plenty of money.

1:35:23But 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 quantify that rising global sadness? Let'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 saying this in a lot of other developed nations too. And yeah, it is. Those are a little bit sad. You said you have the word love halved between 1965 and 2015.

1:36:03In songs. Yeah. So yeah, there are some researchers that analyzed a bunch of lyrics in songs that had come out from the 60s to what was here? 1965 to 2015. Yep. And they found that the word love, nice positive words halved and negative words like hate increased. Jesus. Yeah. And global and happiness hit a record high. This is the style is looking for global and happiness 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? The two become a two percent person, right? But when I have this ancient hardware that's given me this scarcity brain, what can I do?

1:36:52How can I take back control of my life and live up 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.

1:37:21I 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.

1:38:01Or 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, that monk wrote, to throw yourself into the abyss and have a human experience. Because life is 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.

1:38:40And especially living in Vegas and seeing those gas stations and 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.

1:39:23Do 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 oftentimes 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.

1:40:02But 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.

1:40:37It wouldn't have users. So it just would, it would become extinct. 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. Yeah. So it's all about being clunchess, intentional. And that starts with exactly what you've done in your book, really, which has 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.

1:41:11But then also this time, the comfort crisis, I've had 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. It'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. 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.

1:41:50You 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 did this podcast, I make notes beforehand. And I didn't think I've ever made more notes than I did reading these two books because it's all subject matter than I'm absolutely obsessed with. So the 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.

1:42:25We 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? What makes me happiest is probably when I am in my office and it is five 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 piece is suddenly merged 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.

1:43:15She'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 spoke to you. I will quote you for many, many conversations I know going forward, because as I said, this is the subject's 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 that's the TLDR for what I think about this. And all the indicators say that if there was ever a time where we needed to understand how upbrain is working and being taken advantage of so we can take back control.

1:43:52But also the importance of just comfort. It is now because things are only going to get easier and more comfortable. Thank you. I appreciate you having me on. It was really fun. I enjoyed the conversation. I appreciate you talking about the books, 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.

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