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

Is comfort killing you? And why can we never get enough of anything? Is the real way to find happiness by going against our most basic instincts? In this new episode Steven sits down with New York Times Bestselling author, Michael Easter. Michael Easter is the bestselling author of books such as ‘The Comfort Crisis’ and ‘The Scarcity Brain’. He was a senior editor at Men’s Health magazine and is currently a professor of journalism at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. His writing has appeared in Men’s Health, Outside magazine, Men’s Journal, Cosmopolitan, Vice, Esquire, Scientific American, and Women’s Health. In this conversation Michael and Steven discuss topics, such as: How to get out of your comfort zone Why your comfortable life is killing you What is meant by healthy discomfort How 2% of people are willing to push beyond their comfort zones The difference between being lonely and alone The benefits of being alone But the negative impacts of being lonely Why loneliness is a killer How to make better long term decisions Why people with higher status live longer How noisy cities cause heart attacks and depression How to fix back pain The ways that taking the stairs will improve your health Why the world is becoming increasingly unhappy How activity in nature is better for your brain Why our ancestor were so much fitter than us How we’ve engineered meaning out of our lives Addiction being a spectrum we are all on Why moderation is not easy for humans What is the scarcity brain Why expectations often lead to unhappiness Fewer problems not necessarily leading to more happiness Embracing discomfort during crises You can purchase Michael’s most recent book, ‘Scarcity Brain: Fix Your Craving Mindset and Rewire Your Habits to Thrive with Enough’, here: https://amzn.to/3MG5hef If you enjoyed this video, I recommend you check out my conversation with Dr Peter Attia, which you can find here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eqPnptAtBJk Follow Michael: Instagram: https://bit.ly/3QGzEnd Twitter: https://bit.ly/40lW7JB Follow me: https://beacons.ai/diaryofaceo Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

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

• 0:11Speaker 01

  Best selling author.

• 0:12Speaker 00

  Journalist. Professor of psychiatry.

• 0:14Speaker 01

  He's on a mission. To save us from the comfort crisis.

• 0:17Steven Bartlett?

  Crisis. Crisis.

• 0:18Speaker 00

  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 job, 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.

• 1:02Speaker 00

  We simply start searching for the next problem.

• 1:04Steven Bartlett?

  Really?

• 1:05Speaker 00

  Yes, we've become unhappier.

• 1:06Steven Bartlett?

  Usage of the word love halved between 1965 and 2015.

• 1:11Speaker 00

  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.

• 1:17Steven Bartlett?

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

• 1:20Speaker 00

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

• 1:38Steven Bartlett?

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

• 1:55Speaker 00

  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, all those sorts of things. We lose something about being a human and lose the things that keep us healthy and happy. I would argue, I argue in the comfort crisis, that the things that most impact your day-to-day life today, how you live,

• 2:40Speaker 00

  everything from cars, climate control, to the food system, to on and 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. I mean, 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.

• 3:09Steven Bartlett?

  And the brain hasn't caught up?

• 3:12Speaker 00

  No, no. So we, you know, a lot of my work, it looks at, it takes 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, right? 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 were 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,

• 3:56Speaker 00

  it can backfire in these new environments. So that's called an evolutionary mismatch.

• 4:01Steven Bartlett?

  What is the, the modern symptoms of that evolutionary mismatch?

• 4:05Speaker 00

  Chronic diseases. So for example, you know, 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, you know, 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 they do, when scientists do studies

• 4:47Speaker 00

  on hunter-gatherers today, which are a way to get to 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. Now, today, the average American, and I would assume probably the average Brit as well, were probably about in the same place, walk anywhere from, you know, 4,000 to 5,000 steps a day. That was 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.

• 5:22Steven Bartlett?

  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. So fascinated 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 learnt about the differences in how they lived versus how we live now? You talk there about movement and activity. Is there any other sort of really central differences that are pertinent to health outcomes?

• 5:55Speaker 00

  Yeah, I mean, well, food is one of them, right? So as part of this new book, scarcity brain.

• 6:02Speaker 00

  When you, uh, when you look at the diseases that kill humans, 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, you know, the crazy neighbor next door with the gun, it's all these whatever things. And heart disease is way down the list. But what actually kills people is heart disease, full stop. Like 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, uh, heart disease, as well as a lot of other chronic

• 6:47Speaker 00

  diseases that we get and that kill us, for example, they don't seem to get Alzheimer's, um, 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 X, all these different diets you've heard of, right? But the one commonality that all their food has is that it has just one ingredient. So they're eating things like, foods like rice, they're eating potatoes, they're eating red meat from, um, Amazonian deer, they're eating a lot of fish, they're eating nuts, they're eating fruits, they're eating, they even eat sugar. Right?

• 7:30Speaker 00

  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? Right? And so for me, the takeaway was that, um, when you look at what the average person in a developed, uh, country eats, it's a lot of very ultra-processed foods. So ultra-processed foods are basically, that's a euphemism for junk food. It's what scientists use to describe junk food, you know? And it's stuff packed with all sorts of, uh, ingredients and triggers that lead us to overeat, more or less. So when you take a food through a ton of processing, right? Like a Dorito, you guys have those in the UK? Yeah, we have Doritos. Oh, thank God.

• 8:14Speaker 00

  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 gonna 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 a 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, you know, eat as much as you want till you're full. And when people eat the foods

• 8:59Speaker 00

  that have, you know, 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, you know, 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, right, 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, right? We've got grocery stores packed with thousands and thousands of foods on all sorts of corners. Information, think about the internet. The

• 9:44Speaker 00

  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, right? 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 sort of rank was, right? Because we got a leader, we got some whatever. But now you can blast out stuff about yourself to millions of people at one time.

• 10:14Steven Bartlett?

  You talk in your work about, I think that was in the first book, The Comfort Crisis, about how kind of sort of adjacent to that, being in large groups 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.

• 10:34Speaker 00

  What is the, what is the basis for that? And what is the, the key takeaway? So the number is called Dunbar's number. And it's by this researcher, Robin Dunbar. I hope I got his first name right. The theory is that groups of people, as we evolved, we probably didn't get over 150 people. Now, because of this, today, when we have groups of more than 150 people, things get complicated. All right, because once a group of people gets over 150, you got to remember a lot more interconnected relationships, you got to remember a lot more names, you got to remember a lot more faces, you 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.

• 11:16Speaker 00

  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 jam packed 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 countryside and they're less packed in with groups are going to be happier. Does noise matter? Noise of the environment? Yes.

• 12:00Speaker 00

  As 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 the 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, you know, you're standing there and I hear this.

• 12:43Speaker 00

  And I'm going.

• 12:46Speaker 00

  The hell was that?

• 12:48Speaker 00

  Turns out it was my wristwatch. It is so silent up there that you're just standing and you just pick up that of the second hand, which normally you would have to hold up, right?

• 13:00Speaker 00

  And so I got curious about that. And what was funny is that humans have increased the loudness of the world about fourfold.

• 13:10Steven Bartlett?

  100%.

• 13:11Speaker 00

  Yep. Fourfold since before we, you know, 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.

• 13:56Speaker 00

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

• 14:17Steven Bartlett?

  It makes me think about the way we've kind of 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.

• 14:34Speaker 00

  Yeah, well, 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.

• 14:52Steven Bartlett?

  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, so they didn't feel any more stressed, but stress monitors found that they were in fact more stressed and less productive.

• 15:05Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 15:06Steven Bartlett?

  Chapter 13 of your book.

• 15:08Speaker 00

  I'm sorry that I just.

• 15:10Steven Bartlett?

  I was like, my team are gonna hear this. We've just had, we've just approved the designs for our new HQ in the middle of London.

• 15:16Speaker 00

  Well, let's uh, you know, call off the build.

• 15:19Steven Bartlett?

  Yeah, Jesus.

• 15:20Speaker 00

  We'll take a look at the blueprints after this.

• 15:22Steven Bartlett?

  And that's what's 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.

• 15:36Speaker 00

  Yeah, it's uh, 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.

• 15:52Steven Bartlett?

  Totally me.

• 15:53Speaker 00

  Yeah, I think everyone's like that.

• 15:54Steven Bartlett?

  I can't even sleep without something blowing.

• 15:56Speaker 00

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

• 16:26Steven Bartlett?

  Being alone and being lonely, you cite as 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?

• 16:42Speaker 00

  Yeah. So lonely to me is, I want to be with others, but I don't have anyone to be with. Right? 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's real, there is some interesting research on people who just prefer to be alone. They're just like solitude. And turns out that they're just as happy as super social people. There's a little bit of individual variation. Now, of course, these people will have, you know, some people in their life that they can count on. I think that that is absolutely important. But I do think we've shifted in the last, say, fifteen, twenty years where the message is really, you need a bunch of

• 17:27Speaker 00

  friends to be happy. You absolutely need to be as social as possible. And while I'm not saying that, 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 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.

• 18:03Steven Bartlett?

  Being lonely increases your chance of dying in the next seven years by twenty-six percent. Being lonely can shorten your life by fifteen years. Staggering stats. 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

• 18:46Steven Bartlett?

  paying because they're using generative AI to have like seemingly intimate conversations with her. And the fact that there's demand for that is a signal of not great things.

• 18:56Speaker 00

  Yeah, I think we need, I think we need.

• 19:01Speaker 00

  I mean, so then you ask like, okay, well, why, why are these people doing that? I think part of it is because having to go out and interact with another human is that you don't know is a little bit awkward and challenging at first. And so to me, I mean, a big message in my work is that you have to do challenging things in order to grow as a human. Cause I guarantee that your relationship with an actual person is going to be more rewarding in the long haul than the, you know, the AI bot or whatever, 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, 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.

• 19:43Steven Bartlett?

  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 a 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?

• 20:11Speaker 00

  Yeah, that's a great question.

• 20:14Speaker 00

  I think a lot of it for me is how I grew up. I grew up with a, an only child, a single parent who had to travel a lot. When I was in my twenties, 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.

• 20:36Steven Bartlett?

  What was the cost of that?

• 20:38Speaker 00

  Oh, I mean, you're just an internal mess, you know, so my, I was, I wasn't an interesting case, but I wasn't the 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, you know, 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 had 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.

• 21:23Steven Bartlett?

  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?

• 21:37Speaker 00

  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, you know, 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 gonna 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,

• 22:20Speaker 00

  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 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,

• 23:06Speaker 00

  it basically puts addiction on a spectrum. It's like, 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 a 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.

• 23:50Speaker 00

  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. Right? And so I think that, you know, the message for the average person is that

• 24:21Speaker 00

  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, that can be a good life hack.

• 24:34Steven Bartlett?

  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, binging 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, it appears to be the opportunity you have of making a better long-term decision. How on earth, everyone listening to this will want to make better long-term decisions? How do we win that battle, which is seemingly with ourselves?

• 25:18Speaker 00

  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, 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.

• 25:43Speaker 00

  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. 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.

• 26:28Speaker 00

  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.

• 27:12Speaker 00

  So with slot machines, it's like you play, you could lose your money, you could win a couple of 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.

• 27:55Speaker 00

  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 fall, it's usually behavior that falls into those, into that scarcity loop. And so the book unpacks, you know, what it is, uh, where it came from, why 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 all know where it came from? Yeah. Okay. So I had the same question.

• 28:36Speaker 00

  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, uh, 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.

• 29:22Speaker 00

  So you go to point A, no food. Point B, no food. Point C, ding ding ding jackpot. You find this massive elk that you end up killing and it feeds you for weeks. All 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 no, 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, um, 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.

• 30:04Steven Bartlett?

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

• 30:09Speaker 00

  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.

• 30:33Steven Bartlett?

  So when the rewards unpredictable for a pigeon, they engage in the behavior more.

• 30:37Speaker 00

  Yep.

• 30:38Steven Bartlett?

  Which would, again, matches up with your theory that whenever there's unpredictable awards associated with an action, we are more engaged because it falls into that prehistoric hardwell.

• 30:46Speaker 00

  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 gonna do? You're just gonna be like, okay, well, my car's not starting, I'm gonna 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, like, it's gonna 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 gonna come on, it's like, but then it doesn't. You're gonna sit there messing with that so long as that car is giving you signs of life, right?

• 31:26Speaker 00

  There's this unpredictability embedded into it. And that'll capture attention of, yeah, any animal, pretty much.

• 31:32Steven Bartlett?

  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, nearly, you nearly got it. You didn't quite get it, but is that called, is it near miss theory or something?

• 31:47Speaker 00

  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 gonna 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.

• 32:23Speaker 00

  And then it lands, but it's not the cherry. What tends up, 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.

• 32:41Steven Bartlett?

  Do 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?

• 32:53Speaker 00

  Yeah, well, you could think if you, I mean, say you get an update on your phone. Let's say you go onto 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 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.

• 33:22Steven Bartlett?

  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, you might go viral.

• 33:30Speaker 00

  Yeah, totally. Yeah. Think of the, 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 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, 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

• 34:14Speaker 00

  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 fights are always in Philadelphia in the US.

• 34:37Speaker 00

  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.

• 34:51Steven Bartlett?

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

• 34:56Speaker 00

  Yeah, well, we all do.

• 35:00Speaker 00

  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

• 35:45Speaker 00

  any of the three parts of that loop that I of the scarcity 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.

• 35:58Steven Bartlett?

  In scarcity 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 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?

• 36:23Speaker 00

  Well, I think that when you, 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 taken you to a certain place. And now you have certain financial assets and you've sort of shifted though to your career. So now I'm turning it back on you. How do you feel like that's manifested itself in your life?

• 37:04Steven Bartlett?

  I, it's interesting because in chapter seven, 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 or 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 like liberated myself from the game of status. However, I read another book and it was, 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

• 37:48Steven Bartlett?

  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.

• 37:55Speaker 00

  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 that the game hasn't changed. Everyone's like this. So what's, what's really interesting about status, which I, 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 nineties. 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 asks, oh no, I don't care. I don't care what others think about me. It's like, yeah, you do.

• 38:39Speaker 00

  Like, let's, I'll 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, uh, 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 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 healthcare.

• 39:24Speaker 00

  But the thing is, is that it holds in countries that have universal healthcare. So everyone's healthcare access is pretty much equal.

• 39:32Steven Bartlett?

  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.

• 39:54Steven Bartlett?

  It's interesting, people that are higher status live longer. That's not a nice narrative, is it?

• 39:59Speaker 00

  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, 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.

• 40:37Steven Bartlett?

  What is air rage?

• 40:39Speaker 00

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

• 40:50Steven Bartlett?

  And why do you think that is?

• 40:52Speaker 00

  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.

• 41:00Steven Bartlett?

  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 quite a lot about snacking.

• 41:09Speaker 00

  Oh, yeah.

• 41:10Steven Bartlett?

  Snacking, what's the problem with snacking? Everybody snacks.

• 41:13Speaker 00

  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. Like, how do you sell snack food? And he said it has to have three Vs. It's got to have value, it's got to have variety, and it's got to have velocity.

• 41:57Speaker 00

  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, 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, um, in the seventies 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, are dropping.

• 42:41Steven Bartlett?

  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.

• 42:48Speaker 00

  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 you've, um, if the machine has a handle, you have to do, do, do, do, do.

• 43:08Speaker 00

  Do, do, do, do, do. Once they got rid of handles and just put a spin button, you can keep your hand on the button and just do, do, do, do. And it basically doubled the rate of gambling. So people went from playing, I think, four hundred to five hundred games in an hour, up to an average of nine hundred. So that's more, if you break that down by minute, um, it's more than we blink.

• 43:30Steven Bartlett?

  Interesting.

• 43:30Speaker 00

  Yeah. With a crazy range of outcomes, too.

• 43:34Steven Bartlett?

  Why can't it, so if snacking is a 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?

• 43:51Speaker 00

  Oh, I, I think you absolutely could, but I just, the question is, are people gonna 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, um, 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 gonna 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, um, 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?

• 44:36Steven Bartlett?

  Aren't they the same thing? They're both made of potato.

• 44:39Speaker 00

  The, the fried potatoes, right?

• 44:41Steven Bartlett?

  Right, really?

• 44:42Speaker 00

  The chips. So if you, like, you could probably eat an entire bag of chips if you really set your mind to it.

• 44:48Steven Bartlett?

  Oh, yeah.

• 44:49Speaker 00

  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 boil, 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.

• 45:17Steven Bartlett?

  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 don't, I don't have those anymore because they make you feel like shit and my gut hates them. But you use a croissant as an example of a food that, that makes us less full.

• 45:35Speaker 00

  Mm-hmm. Yeah, so there's this really interesting study out of Australia where they, um, 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 food, so. They found that the most filling food per calorie was plain boiled potatoes.

• 46:01Speaker 00

  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, 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.

• 46:31Steven Bartlett?

  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? Cause 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.

• 46:55Speaker 00

  Well, I think that you will be fuller

• 47:00Speaker 00

  or you will be as full, eating fewer, uh, 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 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 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 and fewer calories could be good.

• 47:40Speaker 00

  If my goal was to lose weight or not gain weight compared to foods that are more calorie dense.

• 47:46Steven Bartlett?

  What's your position on fasting?

• 47:47Speaker 00

  I think that it can be a good weight control tool for some people. I think, um, It can constrain, like, look, if you're a person who's eating around the clock and you go, "Okay, well, I'm just gonna eat from noon to whatever, 6:00 PM or 7:00 PM." You've just cut out a lot of meals. Um, I also think that if you were to go, "Well, since I'm only eating from noon to 6:00 PM, um, I better eat a ton every single meal." I don't know if you would lose weight. I think there could be definitely some, um, health benefits, possibly. Um, but I also think that if you're doing these extended fasts, that could maybe not be great for, 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, uh, what is your goal?

• 48:32Speaker 00

  Uh, 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, um, 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.

• 48:59Steven Bartlett?

  You talk about hu- hu- hungry days.

• 49:02Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 49:02Steven Bartlett?

  Programming two hungry days per week.

• 49:05Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 49:05Steven Bartlett?

  Hungry day.

• 49:05Speaker 00

  That's one that, um, 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. Basically, just pulling the lever of time, right? Um, if you can, at the end of the day, it, um,

• 49:24Speaker 00

  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 gonna 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.

• 49:40Steven Bartlett?

  I was on a treadmill many years ago in Boston. And I always tell the story because I'd got into 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. And then there was this one day where I landed in Boston, got on this treadmill, the, 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 gonna 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.

• 50:22Speaker 00

  Felt fine.

• 50:23Steven Bartlett?

  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 to what I'm, what I'm saying?

• 50:43Speaker 00

  Oh, a hundred percent.

• 50:44Steven Bartlett?

  Muscular fatigue, sorry.

• 50:46Speaker 00

  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 gonna run as, 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 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

• 51:29Speaker 00

  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.

• 51:45Steven Bartlett?

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

• 51:53Speaker 00

  Oh, it's totally a story. Yeah. What story are you gonna tell yourself? All 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. Framing how you want to view how a workout is going is important, right?

• 52:37Speaker 00

  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. Can allow you to perform a little better.

• 53:03Steven Bartlett?

  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, you know, ultra runners and ultra athletes and all this stuff.

• 53:18Speaker 00

  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 get, I'll give you a good example is that, um, so I spent 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.

• 53:53Speaker 00

  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?

• 54:19Steven Bartlett?

  Amazing.

• 54:20Speaker 00

  This is 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 on the seat back, oh, my God, this is the most stimulating thing I've ever watched. This is incredible.

• 54:47Speaker 00

  Snack food, I used to think the 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.

• 55:12Speaker 00

  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, is that

• 55:25Speaker 00

  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

• 56:03Speaker 00

  in order to live well and get perspective and have gratitude. I mean, I still have times today where

• 56:11Speaker 00

  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 like the hot running water hit your hands and you got emotional? 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.

• 56:24Steven Bartlett?

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

• 56:40Speaker 00

  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.

• 57:05Steven Bartlett?

  Really?

• 57:05Speaker 00

  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.

• 57:16Steven Bartlett?

  Now. Problem creep?

• 57:17Speaker 00

  Problem creep, right. So, you know, what used to be a problem yesterday, or we're always going to look for problems. It's 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 participant, or the, yeah, the study participants, fewer and fewer threatening faces.

• 57:48Speaker 00

  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.

• 58:11Steven Bartlett?

  Because they've been given less.

• 58:12Speaker 00

  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 scientist who I spoke with, his name is David LaVary. Yep, getting his name right, 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 a type of person who's vigilant going, okay, we might run out of food, that is problematic, we gotta fix it, this is a problem, let's fix that. If you're vigilant like that, that would, that would help you survive.

• 58:57Speaker 00

  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...

• 59:37Steven Bartlett?

  Lose a child.

• 59:38Speaker 00

  Yeah, exactly. On and on and on. But we often don't realize that in the moment, and that affects us.

• 59:44Steven Bartlett?

  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, around our collective happiness, or how we report on that?

• 59:55Speaker 00

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

• 1:00:01Steven Bartlett?

  More mental health problems as well, we all know those stats.

• 1:00:04Speaker 00

  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...

• 1:00:15Speaker 00

  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 is, this factors in, you know, price adjustments, inflation. So people got 50% richer on average. Yet happiness didn't change. In fact, it might've actually decreased a little bit.

• 1:00:56Speaker 00

  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 mail out, that it's in the next viral tweet or whatever it might be.

• 1:01:12Steven Bartlett?

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

• 1:01:18Speaker 00

  Yeah, well, that's the, that's the search, right? That's the, that's the ultimate human search. I think that a lot of religions, they're set up to counter that.

• 1:01:30Speaker 00

  Don't, don't, uh, 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, that is the ultimate question for all people, right?

• 1:02:06Steven Bartlett?

  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, well, he wrote a book on running, didn't he? It's his 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?

• 1:02:29Speaker 00

  Yeah, well, 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 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

• 1:02:57Speaker 00

  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.

• 1:03:32Speaker 00

  But then what happens after you kill an animal away from camp?

• 1:03:36Steven Bartlett?

  On a nebo.

• 1:03:38Speaker 00

  On engine Uber.

• 1:03:41Speaker 00

  You gotta carry it back.

• 1:03:42Steven Bartlett?

  Yeah.

• 1:03:43Speaker 00

  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.

• 1:04:12Speaker 00

  It's 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.

• 1:04:52Speaker 00

  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.

• 1:05:08Steven Bartlett?

  How does the modern body look different to the body of our ancestors in that regard? All these nomadic tribes, tribes? Do they have sort of, because I imagine if they're, 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?

• 1:05:30Speaker 00

  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, when you look at people in the West today, we're giant people in the grand scheme of time and space.

• 1:05:59Steven Bartlett?

  Who burns more calories?

• 1:06:01Speaker 00

  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?

• 1:06:11Steven Bartlett?

  Right, of course.

• 1:06:11Speaker 00

  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 Westerner? Cause there are 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.

• 1:06:37Steven Bartlett?

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

• 1:06:44Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:06:44Steven Bartlett?

  Jesus Christ.

• 1:06:45Speaker 00

  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, these women that are like two, almost three times my age.

• 1:07:15Steven Bartlett?

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

• 1:07:18Speaker 00

  Yeah, they've stayed active. And so when you think about daily life,

• 1:07:24Speaker 00

  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, 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, I mean, 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 we're, 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?

• 1:08:09Speaker 00

  Because 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 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. How about three sets of 10? That's what we'll call it, right? So when we, we basically invented exercise, right?

• 1:08:53Speaker 00

  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 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 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 gonna be awesome.

• 1:09:29Steven Bartlett?

  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.

• 1:09:42Speaker 00

  Yeah, and I think it is a strange thing. Like there's 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.

• 1:10:23Steven Bartlett?

  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 I think he remarked that one of those communities turned around to him and was like, why would you run for fun?

• 1:10:50Speaker 00

  Totally. Yeah, they probably, he was going, what do you do for exercise? And they probably said, what the hell's exercise?

• 1:10:54Steven Bartlett?

  Literally, like, oh, he said like something like training. What do you do to train?

• 1:10:57Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:10:57Steven Bartlett?

  And they were like, training, like, we, it's part of our life is exercise.

• 1:11:00Speaker 00

  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 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's 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.

• 1:11:24Steven Bartlett?

  You talk about, a second ago, 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, 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.

• 1:11:49Speaker 00

  Real Housewives.

• 1:11:50Steven Bartlett?

  Yeah, whatever.

• 1:11:50Speaker 00

  Watching Real Housewives.

• 1:11:51Steven Bartlett?

  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?

• 1:12:01Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:12:01Steven Bartlett?

  Why?

• 1:12:02Speaker 00

  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. So as you're moving, take, take something like trail running.

• 1:12:26Speaker 00

  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. That 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, arrow we put in it. It is, if running on a treadmill is like addition.

• 1:13:09Speaker 00

  Running outside in the context that we would have run outside is like multivariate 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. Yes, 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, outdoor exercise is also harder.

• 1:13:54Speaker 00

  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.

• 1:14:00Steven 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, is it plantar fasciitis? I woke up one day and I basically couldn't walk because something in my foot had like swollen up. And then I Googled it and they said it's plantar fasciitis. And the hypothesis, so I was then given these insults 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 cushioned 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, 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.

• 1:14:44Steven Bartlett?

  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 in 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 soul. I have Beffet shoes.

• 1:15:15Speaker 00

  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 were 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. And 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

• 1:15:57Speaker 00

  and 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. 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, 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

• 1:16:39Speaker 00

  different things, shoulder, shoulder pain, a lot of different pains are just manifestations of our modern environment.

• 1:16:44Steven Bartlett?

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

• 1:16:47Speaker 00

  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.

• 1:16:53Steven Bartlett?

  Soon as you said that, my back started to feel painful.

• 1:16:55Speaker 00

  Yeah, so a very, 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.

• 1:17:12Steven Bartlett?

  You said sitting on the floor?

• 1:17:13Speaker 00

  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 in different positions. It seems to help with mobility and with pain over time.

• 1:17:36Steven Bartlett?

  What are, that's really useful because that's a small thing that I can do to to reduce my chances of being part of that 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?

• 1:17:55Speaker 00

  Yeah. So I, I call this concept being a two percenter and it comes from a study that found that 2% of people take the stairs when there is also an escalator available. 2%.

• 1:18:11Speaker 00

  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 two 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.

• 1:18:45Steven Bartlett?

  A giant return over time, taking the stairs?

• 1:18:47Speaker 00

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

• 1:19:33Steven Bartlett?

  Because they don't believe it matters.

• 1:19:34Speaker 00

  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, um, so a lot of my work and thinking is how do we find those little wins across the day and pile them up?

• 1:20:19Speaker 00

  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.

• 1:20:44Steven Bartlett?

  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 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, 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, 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 death, what

• 1:21:29Steven Bartlett?

  we think of aging and ultimately death. Um, and that's what I thought of in those small things. I thought like, it is, 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. You know?

• 1:21:40Speaker 00

  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 cellphone, we go, I'm gonna 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 gonna be a little bit harder, I think ultimately leads to the biggest transformation and breakthroughs.

• 1:22:10Steven Bartlett?

  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. 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 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 Eubank Jr. 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 gonna do 10, I will limp and I get cramping my leg, I have to limp the

• 1:22:55Steven Bartlett?

  last mile, even if no one's watching, because quote, "I can't let the demons in." What 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 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 will compound for us over time.

• 1:23:36Speaker 00

  Yeah. 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.

• 1:24:15Steven Bartlett?

  Evidence.

• 1:24:16Speaker 00

  Right. 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.

• 1:24:28Steven Bartlett?

  Outside of your comfort zone.

• 1:24:29Speaker 00

  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. 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's 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, is that humans are capable of way more than we think.

• 1:25:13Speaker 00

  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.

• 1:25:45Steven Bartlett?

  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.

• 1:25:52Speaker 00

  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. 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 gonna 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. Cause we go in there, we go, I'm pretty sure we're gonna 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 onto us anymore.

• 1:26:36Speaker 00

  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.

• 1:26:47Steven Bartlett?

  So you're telling everyone to quit their jobs?

• 1:26:52Speaker 00

  Like you just. I'm 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.

• 1:26:59Steven Bartlett?

  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. 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'd figured out that one of the worst parts of 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, factored that into the app by showing you where the driver is.

• 1:27:38Steven Bartlett?

  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. I 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 they have to endure the uncertainty that that journey might, you know, bring my way.

• 1:28:18Speaker 00

  Yeah, I mean, we don't like uncertainty, but there's a, as I was reporting the scarcity brain. I, I ended up reading a lot of strange old texts, 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?

• 1:29:03Speaker 00

  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?

• 1:29:28Steven Bartlett?

  I mean,

• 1:29:29Speaker 00

  It's not exciting.

• 1:29:30Steven Bartlett?

  That's what you talk about in the scarcity brain.

• 1:29:32Speaker 00

  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, and by not taking that gamble, you're kind of sitting on the sidelines.

• 1:29:45Steven Bartlett?

  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. And I say this because my first company was called Walpark. And it was only when we ran out of money.

• 1:30:15Steven Bartlett?

  That we did our best work because we had no choice. So we, I don't know, I had like six thousand pounds as a marketing budget or something. And then I remember being sat there with, with my two buddies who were building the business with me, Ash and Don, 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 John Hopkins. That's kind of what I, I thought, ah, it's true.

• 1:30:54Speaker 00

  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 is, I think we get forced into innovation and creativity.

• 1:31:30Steven Bartlett?

  So are we lazy? Are abundant humans lazy?

• 1:31:33Speaker 00

  Um, I don't love the L word.

• 1:31:37Steven Bartlett?

  Don't worry, I said it.

• 1:31:39Speaker 00

  You didn't say it. Then I'll go, then I will 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.

• 1:31:54Steven Bartlett?

  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.

• 1:32:10Speaker 00

  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 get like, 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.

• 1:32:30Steven Bartlett?

  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.

• 1:32:39Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:32:39Steven Bartlett?

  In what way?

• 1:32:40Speaker 00

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

• 1:32:48Steven Bartlett?

  Interesting.

• 1:32:49Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:32:49Steven Bartlett?

  So when they had less resources, they actually used less resources.

• 1:32:52Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:32:53Steven Bartlett?

  And their ideas were better.

• 1:32:54Speaker 00

  Yep.

• 1:32:56Steven Bartlett?

  Interesting. It also kind of explains why being an underdog and holding on to 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 like.

• 1:33:10Speaker 00

  Thinking you've made it?

• 1:33:11Steven Bartlett?

  Yeah.

• 1:33:12Speaker 00

  Because you can let off the gas when you've made it.

• 1:33:14Steven Bartlett?

  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.

• 1:33:23Speaker 00

  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 their minds, people are going, yeah, but we got plenty of money.

• 1:33:57Speaker 00

  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.

• 1:34:03Steven Bartlett?

  The saddest line in your book was the line that we are experiencing a rising tide of global sadness. Chapter 12, 11.

• 1:34:13Steven Bartlett?

  How do you quantify that rise in global sadness?

• 1:34:16Speaker 00

  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 saying this in a lot of other developed nations too. And yeah, it is, those are a little bit sad.

• 1:34:31Steven Bartlett?

  Usage of the word love halved between 1965 and 2015.

• 1:34:37Speaker 00

  In 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 the year?

• 1:34:45Steven Bartlett?

  1965 to 2015.

• 1:34:48Speaker 00

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

• 1:34:58Steven Bartlett?

  Jesus.

• 1:34:58Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:34:59Steven Bartlett?

  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 antidote then? Bringing it right back down to, you know, the individual level. The two, become a 2% person.

• 1:35:18Speaker 00

  Right.

• 1:35:18Steven Bartlett?

  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?

• 1:35:30Speaker 00

  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 gotta do this, you gotta 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.

• 1:36:14Speaker 00

  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. Could be, okay, if I feel like I'm lonely.

• 1:36:33Speaker 00

  Well, I can sit here and be lonely, or I can join, I don't know, a softball team, or a cricket team.

• 1:36:42Speaker 00

  And yeah, it's gonna be awkward when I meet these new people. Do I think it's gonna 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.

• 1:37:11Steven Bartlett?

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

• 1:37:29Speaker 00

  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 gonna 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,

• 1:38:13Speaker 00

  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,

• 1:38:30Speaker 00

  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 gonna 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.

• 1:38:59Steven Bartlett?

  And I was gonna say, the one ethical casino would just go bankrupt.

• 1:39:02Speaker 00

  Right.

• 1:39:02Steven Bartlett?

  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, it 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.

• 1:39:27Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:39:27Steven Bartlett?

  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 had it 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.

• 1:39:59Speaker 00

  Yeah, they've increased over time. We're selling more every week now, two and a half, three years later than we were. Yeah.

• 1:40:08Steven Bartlett?

  Because people

• 1:40:08Speaker 00

  Right when it came out.

• 1:40:09Steven Bartlett?

  People can relate to the symptoms, I guess.

• 1:40:10Speaker 00

  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.

• 1:40:27Steven Bartlett?

  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 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. 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

• 1:41:09Steven Bartlett?

  for you is what makes you happiest?

• 1:41:13Speaker 00

  What makes me happiest is

• 1:41:17Speaker 00

  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 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.

• 1:41:54Steven Bartlett?

  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 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 of 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.

• 1:42:30Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:42:30Steven Bartlett?

  And more comfortable. Thank you.

• 1:42:32Speaker 00

  I appreciate you having me on, man. It was really fun. 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.

• 1:42:42Steven Bartlett?

  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.