Speaker 1
And the way to think about like what to buy and what to acquire is try to think of things as gear and not just stuff. So he makes the distinction that gear serves a specific purpose and ideally multiple purposes. It's not just a thing that you're adding to your collections. It's doing like a very use it's solving a very useful problem for you and doing a very useful job over and over again. And if you can't think of what specific job something is satisfying, or if you see something in your house that you haven't used in a while, and you can't say like, Oh, this is solving this problem in my life right now, you should probably not buy it or donate it or sell it and get rid of it, because it's become just stuff. And you don't want a life that's just like cluttered with stuff. It's interesting idea here about travel to using everything this woman's there. I was like a famous adventure explorer person. And she says, I just feel like money hasn't served me in the sense of having better experiences compared to not having as much money. Money brings more control, but also less adventure. When I start with fewer resources and materials, whatever I earn, whatever problem I solve myself, I enjoy every moment a little more than if I had unlimited resources. There's something so freeing and incredible about it. The word empowering has become kind of gross, but it's empowering in a sense to know that you were creating your own experience and that you're relying on yourself. I think a really fun idea of trying to travel or go on trips, but not be super programmed and not do a lot of like expensive, organized tours and things, right? Like, what if you just fly somewhere and don't get any help and then ask locals what to do, or just go out and walk around and find something interesting, right? There's this like scarcity because we feel like we have to find the highest rated restaurant and then we have to wear the best thing on the menu there. We have to go to the best sites in an area. We have to do all the best excursions. And that's not true, right? Like you might actually have more fun just exploring and seeing what comes up and seeing where the adventure takes you. And I don't know, I find that very attractive because I find the hyper optimized travel sort of exhausting. And so I'd like to try doing this sometime for myself. And then we come to a big one, which is information. How does information trigger scarcity? How do we seek it out and afford it? And I think, you know, we kind of instinctually know that this is becoming a bigger and bigger problem. The average person today might have access to and consume more information in a day than somebody a few hundred years ago received in their lifetime. Right? Just think about how few books people used to be able to read the average person, they might have their Bible and one or two, you know, maybe a dozen books in their library. But they certainly were having access to like this, right? Like all these books behind me. And you know, plus everything online, all the articles, and then you've got the tweets and the Instagram posts and whatnot. There's just an endless source of information and social media in particular really takes advantage of the scarcity of it's hyper engineered to keep you on the app so that you keep running the platform ad revenue by trying to give you that perfect stream of information that's going to satisfy the scarcity loop in your brain. So remember, something that might be useful or advantageous, some kind of opportunity, unexpected rewards, right? So it might be good, might be bad, we don't know. And then quick repeatability, well, every time you refresh the Twitter, Instagram, whatever, every time you like go to the YouTube homepage, you don't know what's going to be there. It's going to be something new. It's going to give you that unpredictable reward. And you might find something really magical that that satisfies that urge. So they're just hyper optimized around making you feel like you need to keep coming back to keep satisfying that need for information. And the news isn't much better, right? We've got this 24 seven very partisan news coverage now. So you can always find something to be scared about. And that can have really serious negative consequences. And this is a wild study. Okay, so immediately after the 2013 Boston Marathon bombings, researchers from the University of California Irvine investigated two groups. The first group was made up of people who watched six or more hours of televised bombing coverage. The second group was people who actually ran in the 2013 Boston Marathon, the fighting, the first group, the bombing news bingers were more likely to develop PTSD and other mental health issues. That is worth reciting. People who binge watched bombing news on TV from the comfort of home had more psychological trauma than people who were actually bombed. This is blows my mind, right? Because you think that you're being a really good informed educated citizen by consuming this information. And to some extent, yes, it is good to know what's going on. But there is a limit in the limit by y'all in which it stops being useful is a lot earlier than we think it is, right? Maybe just getting a little two or three minute recap of the day would be sufficient. There's really no reason that you need to watch hours and hours and hours of coverage of an event. Most often the event can be summarized again in a page or less after it's been a year or two, right? If you know, obviously if you're living in an area being perfected by some news, that's one thing. But constantly following, you know, other crises going on around the world and thinking you need to know everything that's going on is clearly really hurting people. It's given the PTSD, right? It's making them sick. It's not healthy. But news, media and social media know that we kind of have this scarcity loop and they can leverage that to make that money off of us. And so they do. And so you just have to be really, really aware of that when you're consuming information. So then he has a really wonderful chapter where he lives with some monks to kind of like study their lifestyle and get a better idea around happiness. I think he's just read it. It's my favorite chapter of the book. It's fantastic. And it really speaks to the desire a lot of us feel like we are searching for or something to solve these problems. And it's like, why are these loops getting set off in our brain so much? But then we get to the end. It's the question of, okay, what do we do? Right? We know that these scarcity loops exist. We know these cues are out there that are triggering us into being worried and afraid of things. So, what do we do about it? The one thing he suggests is shift the scarcity loops into abundance loops, find hobbies that have the three parts of the scarcity loop, but help us do things that are good for us. So this is a very simple example, taking up running or weightlifting kind of taps into that scarcity loop, because it's going to give you something where you're going to feel good afterwards, you're going to be stronger or whatnot. But really, I think it's the feeling good, because the getting stronger takes a long time. The rewards are unpredictable because you might beat your record from last time you might not. You don't totally know how well you're going to perform. And then you get the repeatability. You can do it again really quickly, maybe the next day or the day or two. So you get all three parts of it. He also talks about like fishing, right? You know, if you go fishing, you're getting something useful, right? You're having fun. You're getting food. unpredictable rewards might get nothing. You might catch a ton and quicker beatability. You can go out and do it again next weekend or whenever, like you want to try to find positive ways to leverage this part of our brain to drive you into better and better behaviors. And honestly, that's kind of what a lot of these books are for me. Like, I know that each book might have an incredible story or an incredible idea, something I can refer back to some great snippet I can share in these podcasts and videos. And sometimes they don't. So I've got a little bit of that scarcity loop going on there. And you can also use this in helping to guide the behavior of others. And I think that idea of how you would not take a $100 a week salary to play slot machines is really powerful, right? Because it shows that once you make something, once you make a reward, very expected, people stop wanting to do it. So he even mentions that if you want your child to like behave in some positive way, you kind of don't always want to praise her. You don't always want to give the same reward. Because then it'll just feel like work. And they say this for dog training too. You don't want to always give a treat or always praise or always give the same reward. You kind of want it to be unpredictable because that's always much more motivating. And for like an employer, you don't want to have a weekly happy hour on a certain day or a monthly happy hour on a certain day of the month, you kind of want to surprise people with it. Because even if you're surprised them with it once a month, it's still kind of unpredictable. They don't know when it's coming. And you kind of like tap into some of that energy. And then finally, whatever you're stuck in a bad behavior that you want to get out of, try to figure out how the scarcity loop is driving that unwanted behavior. What is the opportunity, the reward, the feeling that it's satisfying? What is unpredictable about it? And you know, what can you do with the unpredictability? And then how quickly can it be repeated? And what can you do about the quickness of the repeatability? Because attacking any part of that might help you change that behavior that you want to get out of. So like I said, I really enjoyed it. Definitely recommend picking up scarcity rain by Michael Easter and his first book comfort crisis as well. I think both are really fantastic. If you're enjoying the show, please send it to a friend that is the best way for me to be able to keep doing this. Like and subscribe on YouTube, subscribe to the podcast where you listen to podcasts, prefer to do that, leave a review. All those good things are super, super helpful to make sure I can keep doing this. You can also drop any book recommendations as comments anywhere. I'll find them because obviously I'm always looking for great new ideas. Next week's episode is actually a book that a listener recommended and I've been loving it. So I'm really excited to talk about that. It's hard to find like good new book recommendations that aren't just like the thing that everybody is reading right now. Thank you again for watching as always and I will see you next time.