Overcoming addictive behaviors, elevating wellbeing, thriving in an era of excess, and the scarcity loop | Michael Easter, M.A.

**Peter Attia** (0:11)
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My returning guest this week is Michael Easter, who was a previous guest in October of 2022 on episode 225 Michael is a professor in the journalism department at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, and a co-founder and co-director of a think tank at UNLV called the Public Communications Institute. He is also the author of the bestseller and one of the few books that I am always giving away to people, The Comfort Crisis. In this episode, we speak about Michael's latest book, Scarcity Brain, which I will just tell you right now is also an exceptional book. And I put it right up there with The Comfort Crisis in terms of its implications for how we can live better lives. Throughout this conversation, we discuss what the scarcity loop is and how it affects our way of life in many ways. This includes looking at it through the lens of food, gambling, drugs, our need to accumulate more and more possessions and the stimulation we receive from our phone.
Boredom, the influx of information we have in our lives and finally, we look at happiness. So without further delay, please enjoy my conversation with Michael Easter.

**Michael Easter** (2:14)
Hey!

**Peter Attia** (2:19)
Michael, thanks for making the trip to Austin.

**Michael Easter** (2:21)
Yeah, thanks for having me again. It's good to be here.

**Peter Attia** (2:23)
Congrats on the book.

**Michael Easter** (2:25)
Thank you very much. Congrats on yours.

**Peter Attia** (2:27)
Thanks so much.
So last time we were here, we were talking about The Comfort Crisis, which is a book people have heard me talk about over and over and over again. It's on the short list of books I recommend regularly. But I want to kind of understand how you went from the obvious success of The Comfort Crisis and more importantly, the lessons you learned in The Comfort Crisis to thinking about the particular problem that feeds into scarcity brain.

**Michael Easter** (2:51)
Yeah, so I finished The Comfort Crisis basically right as the pandemic was taking off. So March 2020 Now, when the pandemic takes off, what does everyone do?
They go to the grocery store and they hoard as much stuff as they can. We're going to get all the canned food we can get. We're going to get all the toilet paper. We're going to get all the hand sanitizer. It was a rational decision at that point, but it made me sort of realize when we think that resources are scarce, our reaction is to hoard them and gather them. And I think what was interesting about the pandemic is you had this initial spike in that sort of behavior.
But then sort of as it drew out, you saw everything from drinking and drug use increase, you saw purchasing increase, you saw a lot of people gain weight, eating food and exercising less. And so you saw all these behaviors that can be damaging, just sort of increase over time. And so that made me wonder about questions of scarcity, how it affects us, how our environments have changed, because that's what the comfort crisis is ultimately about. And one of the elements underlying that is that we do live in a world where we have an abundance of all these things we're built to crave, and managing that can be difficult.

**Peter Attia** (4:01)
You know, I was thinking about where to start. There are so many sections in this book, each of which dive into seemingly disparate topics of scarcity, right? We'll talk about them all, right? We'll talk about scarcity of information, scarcity of food. But maybe we start with food because I think it is the most obvious one, at least to me. Also, it's the one for which there is the most obvious evolutionary link.