A Research-Based Motivation Claim

SPEAKER_00 0:12

Hello Scott. I have just emerged from the multiverse and I bring a solution. It's actually already a solution in our world. People just don't know it. So it's this is already a thing. It's not new. I didn't invent this. But it's it's very it's it's it's not known very wide in a widespread mainstream way. And I will now share it with you. So it has to do with motivation. A lot of times people feel like changing their lives is hard or like staying motivated is hard. Yes. And that's that's that's definitely true, right?

SPEAKER_01 0:50

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 0:50

Um, the problem is what the research says and what people do, there's a huge disconnect. And so that, like, for example, there was this book, Atomic Habits, that came out that was like super popular. I have this book, yes. Um, I've read this book. Yeah, and that's a good one. And there's other ones too, you know, Drive is a book that a lot of people like, kind of a classic at this point from like their late early 2000s about motivation. But what all these books miss is actually what the most strong data says, but is like hard to package into like a book that everyone wants to read, into like a popular book. But it's actually the best way to increase your motivation and then do things like change your life.

SPEAKER_01 1:36

Win the lottery. Win the lottery helps. Win the Wait, no, that would actually decrease my well, I guess motivation in what regard?

SPEAKER_00 1:45

That would increase your motivation to drive Lamborghinis, but it would lower your motivation to like work on yourself, probably. Work a nine to five. Yeah, yeah, or do anything for anyone ever. Um so the answer is though, so this is what the actual research points out is the answer is actually your environment. And this is what people don't don't understand. And and so some of these books, like atomic habits, starts to sort of touch on it, but it really doesn't. They act everyone always acts like it's a matter of like will or ideology. This is what this is what all these books say. Drive, it's like, you know, it's like your ideology is like what you believe. Do you believe that you're the locus of control, you know, self-determination theory? It's a belief, it's an ideology. Or did you, you know, do you have like a do you have a or is it like a character trait? Well, I have a strong willpower. It's my character trait, willpower, uh, you know, grit. This is like the Angela Duck work. Like, do you have grit? It's like a personal character trait, or it's like a muscle that you get by like doing hard things, you strengthen that muscle. All of this is like not actually really true. I mean, it's true a little bit on the edges, but the real fundamental, like what the actual research around motivation says, is the way to change people's behavior and increase their motivation is changing their environment. That's the answer. Like, that's the actual answer. It's just no one writes books about that because it's like boring. I wrote a book about it. It's called Motivate by Adam Browse, you can go read motivate. And I don't really say this up front, it's more just kind of woven through because it's all research, the whole book is research. But this is the real takeaway is that if you want to change your motivation or you want to change your life, the number one thing you can do with the most certainty, actually with almost a hundred percent certainty, is to change your environment for the better.

SPEAKER_01 3:35

So wait, let me let me check. You're not saying just like if you go into a room with yellow walls instead of green walls, you're gonna have more motivation.

SPEAKER_00 3:42

No, no, that's that no, it's gotta be more. Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 3:45

You're talking about like, yeah, are you saying like that if you don't have motivation, maybe there's a reason why, and it's based on how you're set up. It's based on your environment. Reacting to that. Yes, yes. So if you change the setup that you're in, it'll change how you react, including starting to get motivated and do stuff that you wouldn't have done before.

SPEAKER_00 4:05

Correct. And people don't like this. This is not an emotionally satisfying explanation, and that's why there's no books, there's not like a lot of popular books written about it, because people have a cognitive bias, which is also well studied, which is called the uh fundamental attribution error. Are you familiar with fundamental attribution error? I've heard it, yeah, but tell me tell me exactly what it is. Yeah, yeah, it's a cognitive bias

Why Environment Beats Willpower

SPEAKER_00 4:32

that all human beings, you know, human beings have, which is to uh to over-emphasize the importance of character on uh behavior when really environment is far, far more impactful. Like environment actually almost well, if you're like a hard determinist, then do you actually believe environment determines what people do? But it's it's hard, it's I'm not, I mean, you know, it's a little bit not it's not as extreme as that in the science. You know, there's some there's some, you know, if someone really decides to like do something like will really asserts their will, and there's a cases where people go against their environment and they go totally against it. So, but those are just rarities, those are like exceptions. The general rule is your environment pretty much it doesn't determine, but it sort of circumscribes and it deeply influences what you're going to be able to do and what you're going to end up doing.

SPEAKER_01 5:27

I find it strange that people don't like this because I feel like they don't like it. They don't like it. If you were told, hey, it's not your fault. If it you're it's not your fault, it's just something that you can totally change. I feel like that would be good the met with a good response instead of people being yeah, that's odd to me. That's interesting.

SPEAKER_00 5:45

Well, people I think it goes back to self-determination theory, which so people want to feel like they're in control of their lives, right? People want to feel like a sense of agency. And so if you tell them, well, the research really says you, you, you do have, I I like to think of it positively. You do have a sense of agency. You can change your environment.

SPEAKER_01 6:04

It's setting up your spot. But people want more agency. They want to be like, I can do whatever I want to do despite the effects of the environment.

SPEAKER_00 6:13

Exactly. People want to feel like they're spontaneously free and their will can overcome things, you know, and it's true it can in exceptional cases, but um, but it's just not it's just not realistic in in everyday cases, you know. Like if you want to like the a really simple example, personal example for me is if I buy cookies like that I like to eat, like there's these

Cookies And The Limits Of Self-Control

SPEAKER_00 6:42

IKEA cookies that are like oatmeal, uh kind of like oatmeal with dark chocolate on one side. Okay. And they sell them in these in Ikea, they sell them in these huge square boxes. There's probably like 50 cookies in one box, which is a huge number of them. That's how they get you. And I want to buy them, but man, if I buy them, I will eat all 50 of those cookies in about, I don't know, a week. Yeah, you know, like 10 a day, eight, you know, five, seven a day. And it's not healthy. That's like adding a thousand calories a day more to my diet uh that I definitely don't need to eat. So that that's like a perfect example. Like, could I buy those 50 cookies and then like by sheer force of will, like meet out eating only two of them a day? Maybe if some if like my life depended on it, you know. But is it realistically going, am I realistically going to do that? No, I'm just going to eat so many cookies until I get a stomachache every day, and that's going to be the thing that stops me from eating the cookies. And that's basically just the way we are in our environment most of the time.

SPEAKER_01 7:46

Well, that makes sense because I would do the same, I would, I I can I have the willpower to keep it out of my kitchen. But you're right, if it was there, I'd probably buzz by and nibble from time to time and get into all sorts of trouble. But yeah, it's the get that that's the control I can exert, I've found, at least successfully, because everything is just a lie you tell yourself. So when you say environment, are you talking about your like the room you're in? Are you talking about like the house? Are you talking about the city you're in? Are you are you talking you need to change the the country you're in?

SPEAKER_00 8:20

Yeah, it depends. It depends. I mean, it depends on what you're well, it depends on what kind of goal you're trying to like. If you want to change your life, that could be very diverse. If you're just trying to increase your motivation, you probably don't need to change cities because most cities are basically the same, you know. Um but but if you want to change your life, then yeah, you might have to really look at how you know changing your whole environment, including maybe where you live or the people you interact with every day, or the you know, um there's there's a case of this well-studied research around drug addiction. I mean, we're not most people are just normal, they don't have drug addiction, but it's it's indicative of this whole phenomenon, which is environmental, environment kind of circumscribing uh motivation and change and your life. If people do drugs, like if every time you get into a into a car, you light up a cigarette just to to start driving. I I used to have I had a I had a a friend who did this. Every time she got in a car, she'd crack the window and light a cigarette and then drive the car. And it was like automatic for driving cars. Well, you know, honestly, if she started riding the bus, she could, it would help her quit smoking because she can't light up a cigarette on the bus. So that's an example of like changing your environment would would then support changing your behavior, for example. Um, I I have another friend, this is due with smoking as well. I had another friend who uh his name was Abel, mine is Adam, so we were Adam and Abel, like biblical hangouts. And we were we were in Spain. This is when I lived in Spain for a little bit when I was a teenager, and he would smoke cigarettes a lot, which in Spain was like possible. In America is a bit of a taboo already by then, but in Spain it was

Smoking Triggers And Changing Context

SPEAKER_00 9:58

like everyone was smoking like chimneys. So he would always have like a pack of cigarettes and and light up a lot. But he did that, he said this thing once, which even at the time seemed absurd to me, but didn't seem absurd to him. He he took out a cigarette, he was like, I want to quit smoking. He already had told me that because he knew it was unhealthy and you know, and it was making him sick, he was getting coughs and like a lot and like getting fever, you know, colds often because his immune system's bad. Sure.

SPEAKER_01 10:23

The c the classic cigarette reaction.

SPEAKER_00 10:27

Yeah, he wanted to quit. But but but to illustrate to me, he took out a cigarette and he put it down in front of him on like the tab, the table of the restaurant or cafe we were in. And he was like, if I set this here, I can't stop myself from picking it up and smoking it. Like if I try and we start talking and I get even the million, a tiny bit distracted, my hands will just put it in my mouth and I'll start smoking. And I won't realize until the cigarette's halfway gone. And so it to him, this was just this failing, this like personal failing, you know. Like, look, I have this personal failing. And and already to me at that time, before I knew the research that I know now, I thought that's kind of silly. You know, like obviously, if you have it right in front of you, you're going to, you know, do it. Yeah, it you shouldn't even buy a pack of cigarettes, right? Like you shouldn't live in Spain. I mean, you shouldn't live in a place where everyone's smoking all the time. You know, um, you should remove the environmental triggers and the environmental access. And if you do that, it actually probably won't be very hard at all to quit smoking.

SPEAKER_01 11:29

And just the cultural permission that doesn't exist everywhere, you know, like there's a there's an okay in Japan too. It's a there's a cultural okay with smoking that doesn't exist the same way in America, you know.

SPEAKER_00 11:43

Yeah. So that would be a case of like actually moving countries would be good. We don't always have the freedom to do that, so you have to kind of work inside the confines of of where you are. But to just to drive enough drive this example even further home for people who might be skeptical, there's this there's a very famous research of Vietnam veterans who are addicted to heroin in Vietnam.

SPEAKER_02 12:05

Okay.

SPEAKER_00 12:05

Have you heard of this?

SPEAKER_02 12:06

Uh-uh. Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 12:07

So in Vietnam, American soldiers, I think it was one fifth of American soldiers were addicted to heroin. Because it was easy to get heroin because they were in the Middle East where

Vietnam Heroin Study That Surprised Everyone

SPEAKER_00 12:19

they grow heroin. Not a lot of dopamine. They were, you know, right, right. You're just like laying in, you know, wet jungles all day long, and you have access to heroin. It makes you feel great. You know, you're your your bombs are blowing up, you're afraid you're gonna be killed. You can't sleep. Well, you take heroin, you fall right asleep.

SPEAKER_02 12:38

Some horrors.

SPEAKER_00 12:39

No, not great, because you're yeah, you're coping, right? You're coping and you're diverting yourself, and you know, and there's nothing else to do. All you have to do is sit around and like clean your gun and packs, you know, stack stuff up. And yeah, yeah, you know, the military is just enforced idle, idle idleness. Like that's what the military until there's a battle, which is like for 10 minutes or a day, there's nothing to do really the rest of the time. Except like, you know, rub your gun down or whatever. It's a be ready. Yeah, be ready for the next time like bullets start firing. So all so people were terrified. This was a pub this this was a well-known public health scare. People were like, oh my god, there's gonna be drug addicts on every corner because these hundreds of thousands of, so I don't know how many hundreds of thousands of millions of soldiers are gonna come back from Vietnam, and one fifth of them are addicted to heroin.

SPEAKER_01 13:30

So many people are coming back. Uh this percentage of them.

SPEAKER_00 13:33

Yeah, it's gonna be like 25,000. I don't know the exact numbers, but it's gonna be some tens of thousands of these or hundreds of thousands of these uh heroin addicts. Well, you know, the the common idea is if you're addicted to heroin, it's a personal failing and it's an ideology, and it's a thing that you're not going to be able to kick because it's a personal failing and it's a willpower problem, and blah blah blah blah. Well, guess what happened? We didn't have every single street corner uh heroin addicts. They came back and 99% of them all stopped doing heroin.

SPEAKER_01 14:05

What why because heroin's not actually that bad or their environment changed. The environment changes.

SPEAKER_00 14:11

No, because their environment changed. No, heroin's the most addictive substance on the planet, second to nicotine. You know, but they're so soon that caused me.

SPEAKER_01 14:21

They couldn't access it.

SPEAKER_00 14:22

Yeah. And the access, the supply of things. So they couldn't access it. They had other things, yeah. They could do other things with their time, they could sleep in a nice warm bed, they could, you know, have go on dates and go get a beer with their friends, and they could, you know, and they could go to work and dedicate themselves to something interesting and you know, may meaningful to them and make money and go to movies. And you know, they weren't in a war anymore. And though they didn't need to go, they didn't need the other so so right. So, so so that's an indication not so if you say, like, oh man, I I you know, I I have some problem with my environment, or I have some problem that has a lack of motivation or lack of willpower, and then I say, Well, you should change your environment around it, and then you say, Well, that's not gonna work. It's like, well, it worked for heroin addicts, so I'm pretty sure it's gonna work for you, like trying to like watch less TV.

SPEAKER_01 15:11

That's a strong indicator that it works for most that it should work for anything under heroin addiction.

SPEAKER_00 15:18

Right. If it's less well, and nicotine is worse, so I will say it is hard to quit smoking. Although hit all the hypnosis cures smoking. Hypnosis is one of the best hypnosis is very addictive.

SPEAKER_01 15:33

Yeah, I heard all the people in Vietnam, the other 38% were on heroin, but the other 62% were all doing hypnosis. That was what they were spending their time with. They were like, we don't have time for heroin, we're turning each other into chickens.

SPEAKER_00 15:48

Playing our butts like bongo drum. Right? Yeah, that's right. You get addicted to heroin, uh, you get addicted to hypnosis. That's that's pretty serious.

SPEAKER_01 15:57

It w it was it was a weird time. The 70s, Vietnam was weird.

SPEAKER_00 16:01

Yeah, it was a strange time. Yeah, late 70s, early late 60s, early 70s was very strange. So change your environment, you can increase your motivation, you can change things about your life. We do see, I think we see some of this that oh yeah, go ahead.

SPEAKER_01 16:18

Well, I I assume this works in reverse. Uh I mean, it seems like it would work in reverse as well if you put yourself in a bad spot, you're gonna start being inclined to do bad stuff and and uh likewise, you know.

SPEAKER_00 16:34

Yeah, absolutely. And I think this goes also for um for social ills as well, you know, like people think, oh, this is fault, this is also part of this sort of fundamental attribution error cognitive bias, which is which is not which is not true. So for example, people say, oh, he's

Crime As A Social Environment Problem

SPEAKER_00 16:51

a thief, right? Or or or she's a murderer, right? Okay. They say they we we we we we we classify someone who has fallen into crime as a type. We typecast them. We say your role is you are a burglar because you've burgled five houses or whatever. You have a history of burgling houses.

SPEAKER_01 17:12

Okay, yeah.

SPEAKER_00 17:12

So you're a burglar. Or or you or they lie, they're a liar, right? Yes, and you might have compulsive lying, you might literally have like a psychological problem where you're a compulsive liar. But in crime, in something like a social ill like crime, it's actually a lot more like this hair, like heroin in Vietnam. It's usually embedded, it's almost always embedded into a social context. And if you disrupt that social context, you actually will disrupt the crime, you'll stop the crime.

SPEAKER_01 17:41

So, how do you mean it's embedded in a social context? What is that?

SPEAKER_00 17:45

Yeah, so like you know, you might say, well, he's a burglar, you know, he goes around and rattles doorknobs, and when he finds a little open doorknob, he goes in and he takes stuff and goes out. You know, burglar. Right. It's not a good thing. It's a crime. I've been burglar before when I was in my room in my house. Terrible. It's not good. But why what what's what's the context in which they're burgling, right? It it's probably a lot of things. Uh it's not just that they have a character flaw of being a burglar or they are somehow genetically born to burgle or something. It has to do with their catwoman, so well, catwoman is different. Let's not get into that, those leather, the leather leggings of catwoman. But you know, they're inside of a social. It sounds obvious when you talk about it. Yeah, catwoman accepted. They it's almost obvious, it's almost too obvious when you start to describe it, but obviously they're going to be low socioeconomic status, right? Stats. They're gonna not have very much money, right? Clearly.

SPEAKER_01 18:46

I I think a burglary is either I'm trying to get something of value so that I can exchange it for value, or I already have my eye on a specific thing and I'm like, I want that thing.

SPEAKER_00 18:56

Right. And a serial burglar is definitely just gonna be going into houses virtually at random, right? Or they might case a place first, they might hear about that there's a drug, a drug a drug dealer they want to get yeah. Or they're they're gonna steal their neighbors.

SPEAKER_01 19:12

I'm just looking for silverware, jewelry, whatever generic value, yeah, valuable stuff or whatever.

SPEAKER_00 19:17

So anyways, all that's embedded inside of a social context. This is this is why welfare systems reduce crime, but for some reason, left-wing people never say this. Partly because they have a soft spot for criminals. They don't want to malign criminals and say, Oh, I want to be tough on crime. But the reality is that if you provide everyone, for example, like health insurance, they stop doing crimes because they don't need to anymore, because they're your their economic status is never so precarious that they need to go steal from other people or or deal drugs.

SPEAKER_01 19:50

I think you're I think Yeah, I think you're right. You're onto some there because it is it does seem like a more of a right-wing uh ideal to be saying, like, no, we don't think that's a a mutable, a transmutable thing. It's like you're either a criminal or you're not a criminal. They're a criminal, right? Right. They're a drug addict. And we like that because I can classify and write these people off as criminals. I also like that because me, who is in a position not to be a criminal, I don't want to believe that if I were in their shoes, I would do the same thing. I want to think that I have a different moral standard.

SPEAKER_00 20:23

I have a different moral standard. Right, which is not true, which is not true, right? If you're in their exact situation, the chances are you probably do roughly the same thing. Also, what people don't realize about crime is that rich people do as much or more crime than poor people. It's just usually not violent crime. Actually, they even do violent crime as much. It's just not reported nearly as much. Like rich people beat their wives, you know.

SPEAKER_01 20:49

They do things, they do things. And there are ways to sidestep consequences.

SPEAKER_00 20:54

Right, exactly. It doesn't get reported, sidestep consequences. Rich people are drug addicts just as much as poor people. Rich people they're just addicted to different drugs, more expensive drugs, more than a lot of drugs. We're not Elon Musk. Right, he's definitely addicted to drugs. But you know, they they abuse drugs, they do they do crimes, they do, but they but it all gets this kind of veneer of like, you know, uh, you know, whatever, social acceptability because they're rich. And because yeah. So so I mean, the but the main thing is if you want to change people's behavior, you change their environment. So if you want to change your behavior, you can change your environment. Or if you want to increase your motivation, you can increase, you can change your environment to increase your motivation. We see some of this in like very simple like advice from like the manosphere, the kind of advice that people don't disagree with from the manosphere. Like Jordan Peterson said, like, make your bed when you wake up in the morning. No one thinks Jordan Peterson is a monster for thinking people should make their bed in the morning. People think he's a monster because he he's a monster and other he does other things that are morally absurd and and and and and objectionable. You know, some of his perspectives on.

Small Environment Tweaks That Stick

SPEAKER_00 22:00

You know, whatever trans people and stuff.

SPEAKER_01 22:01

It's not people aren't harping on him on the make the bed thing. No.

SPEAKER_00 22:05

Yeah, make the bed's good. And he's exactly right because when you make your bed, you change your environment. Now, all day long, if you're in your room or you're leaving your room or coming into your room, there is a well-made bed in the room. That just that is enough for you to have an entire cast of mind the rest of the day that things are in your life well ordered and proper and set up the way you wish them to be in a presentable, acceptable, good way. That that has an effect on your environment on your mind because you have changed your environment. You've made your bed. It's a simple example.

SPEAKER_03 22:45

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 22:46

Well, I mean, it's an undeniable effect being in a dirty house versus a clean house, or even just your dirty room versus a clean, ordered, root, organized room, is completely different in the way you feel, like your mental state. Right, right. It reflects.

SPEAKER_00 23:00

And so people, for some reason, I mean, again, Jordan Pearson or these Manosphere, all these Jordan, you know, Dan Pink and Drive, Angelo Duckworth, blah, blah, blah, blah. They're always going to act like the way you change your life or change or increase your motivation in positive ways is always willpower. You have to have the willpower to make your bed. They almost make it seem like if you have the willpower to make your bed, then that's the reason why. Right. Or you have to have some ideology. Well, I'm a stoic, so I have this ideology, so that's going to make me change my life or improve my motivation, blah, blah, blah. Turns out that's all just not really true. I mean, it's on the edges. It's on the edges. It's like kind of an 80-20. It's like 80% environment, 20% willpower ideology stuff. But but if you change your environment, like it doesn't matter what your willpower environment of what your willpower and ideology is, you're going to be destroyed by the environment. The environment's the dominant variable.

SPEAKER_01 23:52

Yeah, it sounds like if you're having if you're like running at the end of your willpower internally, you're like, oh, maybe I can give myself some willpower steroids by changing my in changing my environment instead of just trying to be like, come on, man, just work harder. Right. Why can't I figure that out? Which I I'll blame myself and beat myself up in instead too, and not and not think, oh, well, I'm doing natural human things. Why don't I give it myself a better better, an easier road here?

SPEAKER_00 24:25

Yeah, sort of smooth out the pavement a bit before you try to go down the road.

SPEAKER_03 24:29

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 24:31

Yeah, so it's a so it's a classic uh so it's a classic thing. I think this is why a lot of people benefit from uh uh fat you and you do this, you do the the fasting during the what is it called? Intermittent fasting. Intermittent fasting. Yeah. So that's an environmental change. Because if you sit down to a meal, you have to execute some kind of willpower to do portion control. But if you never sit, if you never prepare and sit down to a meal, then you've changed your environment. You don't there is no meal there for you to like have willpower about. Now you have to have a willpower not to go prepare or buy and consume food, but that's actually in a way easier than you've prepared food and now you use your willpower to not eat too much of it. That's actually much, much, much harder from a willpower perspective.

SPEAKER_01 25:19

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 25:20

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 25:21

Well, I've been I've shared with the for me, the thing is like I'm terrible at moderation. So if I'm eating three regular meals, but I'm just like eat normal, moderated, like very reasonable food, I fail at that more often than if I'm like, all right, just eat at this more narrow time, but I have to be less reasonable with my food choice, that that seems to be an easier thing for me to maintain to hit.

SPEAKER_00 25:48

Yeah, and I would say that's because it's an environmental change rather than a willpower demand, right? So if every day there was like a buffet of food just like in your kitchen, just offered to you on your dining table. If only. You would be I would be so fat. I would be so I know I would be so fat because I I just sit down and just I would just eat until my I would like have a distended stomach, you know. And it would be hard for me to stop. Some people can do this. I I feel like the most people can't, and the GLP1 drugs prove it, right? Because that's all the GLP one drugs do, like with Gobi and Bosempic, is they chemically make you stop eating after like 80% full. But it's so hard to do that normally. That's why people are so fat. So if you change your environment, you'll change your motivation, you'll change your life. Anyways, yeah, this is this is kind of the trick. If people want to make changes and increase their motivation, it's all about environment.

SPEAKER_01 26:41

And and sort of a a way to ease off some of the burden if you're if you're putting too much on yourself to be like, man, I can't do this. And I've been trying over and over again. Maybe it's not a personal failing, like you're saying. It's definitely not. And just go go up a level, construct the right space for the success you want, and then put yourself in that and focus on doing that instead of trying to push that ball up the hill over and over again and going, ah, it keeps rolling back down. Right. My willpower isn't good enough. You know, it's going to while you're in that same spot. Yeah. If Sisyphus, oh shoot, if Sisyphus moved to a place where he just pushed it downhill, he got off so much more free time.

SPEAKER_00 27:22

If he just like dug some like if he dug some like little holding spots for the ball up the hill. Uh-huh.

SPEAKER_01 27:30

Spend his time chopping the ball into a cube, okay? So go over here and now you can roll it chunk by chunk. It's gonna be hard to roll it, but you're not gonna get your downward pro it's uh it's sysyphist. Listen to me.

SPEAKER_00 27:47

I gotta roll this ball, bro. Stop talking. And the same thing can be said of the same thing can be said of tantalus. We don't talk about tantalus enough. We talk about Sisyphus a lot, but not tantalus. Who is tantalus? You know, tantalus. Tantalus, tantalus was in uh he was in hell too, like Sisyphus. But his torture was uh he he's standing

Sisyphus Tantalus And Better Systems

SPEAKER_00 28:10

in an orchard, and above him are fruit like fruit on trees, and below him is water at his feet. If he but if he if he reaches up towards the trees, the branches extend away from him just out of reach. So the fruit's just out of reach. And as he reaches up, the water comes up to his up to like his armpits. But as he bends down to drink the water, the water recedes down into the earth. So then when he puts his mouth all the way on the ground, it's like dust, it's like totally dry. So he can't get the water and he can't get the fruit. But when he's down on the ground, the fruit is right over his head, it's like right there. This is where we get our word tantalizing. It's tantalizing. I was just gonna say tantalizing just always just out of reach. Right. So if he just like puts some buckets on his feet and maybe like some uh, I don't know, some like uh sort of canopy over his head to like hold the fruit down, right? What the hell? What are these guys doing in in hell?

SPEAKER_01 29:05

They need they need help. Specifically designed torture problem. John Kramer said they're like, all right, lift the lift the fruit now. He's the fruit saw, right?

SPEAKER_00 29:21

Get a Deloitte oh saw, yeah. I was gonna say get like a Deloitte consultant in there. Well, what you're gonna need to do here is we need to optimize the uh synergy between the water and the fruit uh resources. Oh my god.

SPEAKER_01 29:35

His hope isn't being dashed hard enough. We need to get just a little close. But if he could try to fingertip somehow.

SPEAKER_00 29:43

Oh god.

SPEAKER_01 29:47

Squeeze all the juice out of this man.

SPEAKER_00 29:48

We gotta squeeze it juice out.

SPEAKER_01 29:50

I mean, he presumably he's done something uh uh uh unmoral in the life to wind up.

SPEAKER_00 29:58

He was probably just like a sodomite or something. You know, they don't it was like Middle Ages. It's not they probably didn't do anything that bad.

SPEAKER_01 30:06

You know what? It was the pride, it was the pride that got him there. He used to walk around the earth stamping in all the water, going, look at all this water I could touch. He'd reach up and just touch all the fruit, and he'd be like, This is so easy. I'm so tall. This is so easy for me. And they're like, Oh, okay, buddy, you think it's so easy to touch fruit and step on water here? Let's let's see how you like it.

SPEAKER_00 30:25

Okay, I thought I looked up, I looked up what Tantalus did. So King Tantalus committed two ultimate taboos. He stole the god's divine food, ambrosia and nectar, to share with mortals. Okay, and he murdered his own son, cook cooking his flesh and serving it to the Olympics and Olympians at a dinner party to test their omniscience. Holy crap.

SPEAKER_01 30:47

Okay, these those two seem very different. They're severity. Also, what if we went out to steal your finger? Why don't you just put your hand behind your back and say, How many fingers am I holding? What do you hey hey? What do you think? Two things. All right, what's one? One was I mean, like I said to proof. All right, I probably don't even need to hear the other one. I'm sure it's the same sort of I mean, why would you lead with what's the other one? I you know, I took my kid.

SPEAKER_00 31:18

All right, you're gonna uh inflate him, cooked him, and I killed my son, I butchered him, put him in a soup, sold him to the gods because I was trying to prove that the gods they don't really know that much, they don't really know everything. Oh my god.

SPEAKER_01 31:34

What a horrible thing. The guy's like, the other one is you took fruit.

SPEAKER_00 31:40

Wow. And then so then he was, yeah, eternal torment, reach up for fruit, read down for water. Isn't good enough. You know, I'm anti-panicalist now. I'm gonna go hot take. That punishment really is more on the stole the food thing. You don't feel like it's really covering the killing the food. Don't steal food cannibalism more than don't don't don't freaking start people. Yeah, don't don't serve the gods. Well, maybe the gods are kind of like yeah, we ate mortals, who cares? You know, like whatever, we kill mortals, we eat mortals. Although gods rarely eat eat people, they they have sex with a more tantalists. Oh, tantalizing, there you go. Gross. I didn't realize the second one. That's awful. I thought it was more like in the first one.

SPEAKER_01 32:24

History of tantalists.

SPEAKER_00 32:25

Yeah, Jesus. Ooh. Those Greeks really knew how to yikes. Saw five seven, saw lambda, saw gamma there. That's the Greek.

SPEAKER_01 32:36

Yeah, right. Jigsaw could never be such a diabolical.

SPEAKER_00 32:40

So, anyways, that's the solution for today. All the solutioners, all you solutioners out there are gonna be hyper motivated, hyper, you're gonna be able to change your lives on a dime.

SPEAKER_01 32:51

No, I love this because a lot of times we sometimes not sometimes we have stuff that is higher level or like we need change at a structural

Build A Life That Makes Good Easy

SPEAKER_01 33:00

level or at a state level or at like an institutional level. And this is really something that that does work, you know, this works all the way up the chain, but this is also immediately actionable by anyone listening who can think about and go identify, oh, there's that thing that I've been trying to do. Let me attack it a different way. Let me let me just get humor at them just for a second and it and go a different way.

SPEAKER_00 33:22

Yeah, what's the environmental tactic I could take? Um, like for example, I when I was getting better at writing, I would go to a coffee shop and write because in a coffee shop there's nothing else you can do. The internet's slow, there's no one, there's nothing to do there except for write, you know. And then I would order a sandwich and you know, so I wouldn't get up because I could eat lunch there and I could just keep writing. So I got to do like two or three hours of writing every time I went. It was great. And so that's an example. If I were my house, I could there's all these things I could do. I could play video games, I could read a book, I could take a nap, I could do right. Or people building a workstation. I think a lot of people do this without realizing it, but they build like a gaming setup, right? They have like a gaming chair with a gaming PC with a game with a great monitor with great mouse. Well, guess what they're doing? They're creating an environment conducive to them playing a ton of video games. If you want to play fewer video games, throw away your video game chair, get a crappy mouse, don't have a very good monitor for video game playing. Guess what? You won't play as many video games, you know. It's like, you know, or or the say, or the I oh, I should share one more thing about the the the heroin thing, which uh people might know this, people might know this study, but there was a study done with mice, with rats, I think, where they had the rats have they were in a plain cage where they had two buttons. One button was for food pellets and one button was for cocaine pellets, like they've got cocaine. Okay. And in a plain cage with like a wheel and a water bottle and these two buttons, all they would do is just they would try the food, then they would try the cocaine, and as soon as they tasted the cocaine, they would just hit the cocaine button again and again and again, and they would just like die because they're gonna be able to do that. As they spec. Right. Yeah, yeah. Yeah. So what the researchers then did is they took rats and they put them in retopia. So they built this like fantastic cage with like multiple cages with like colored plastic tubes going between them with like multiple like games and wheels and things they could play and other rats that they could socialize with and like have babies with and like be. And then they have the same two buttons, food, cocaine, right next to each other. And people, the mice just hit the food pellet button all the time. They didn't hit the cocaine button. And and so that that's kind of the that's kind of the model people should have all the time. Yeah, yeah. So this is the model. Same as the soldiers, yeah. Yeah, yeah. And and and even for today, we have the the opioid crisis. That's exactly that. This this is called a disease of despair. It's because people's lives, their environment of their lives, are so is so awful and stressful and traumatic that they go back and hit the cocaine button every time. They go hit the oxycotton button every time. If their lives were better, if they had Medicare for all, free education, accessible health care, accessible, good jobs that were meaningful and interesting to do, and could have good relationships that were, you know, meaningful and positive relationships, they would not hit the button anymore. They would just hit the food pellet.

SPEAKER_01 36:27

You'd see more balanced behavior, yeah.

SPEAKER_00 36:30

Right. So you can take this action on yourself, like, oh, I want to lose weight, or I want to be stronger, or I want to do, you know, I want to read more. And you can say, okay, what environmentally would make it so I read more. Well, I like to read this way. I like to have the book, so I'll buy the book, and then I like a reading nook, and maybe I read best in bed, so I'll get a really nice light from my bed so I can like read exactly right or whatever. And you know, read more. Well, that's true, but also at a systematic level. Well, what do we want different in society? Do we want less violent crime? Well, violent crime is embedded in a series of social environments that we can disrupt with policies that that have been proven to disrupt crime. So we don't need like more policing, right? We need to change the environment around criminals. I'll give you a perfect example of this, which is called Advanced Peace. And I I've asked a guy, and I I've almost got him to come on the episode the solution on the podcast because I I've connected to the founder of this. But I'll just tell you a little bit about it. Maybe we'll still have him on the podcast.

SPEAKER_01 37:29

Advanced Peace sounds like a minority report situation. It's called Advanced Peace. It is.

SPEAKER_00 37:33

They they pre-crime. Yep,

Advanced Peace And Policy As Environment

SPEAKER_00 37:35

they have precogs, and they discover and they go after them. No, Advanced Peace. You got a red ball. You got that's right. Oh, yeah, dang, that was a good movie. I gotta rewatch that. Um, Advanced Peace is a thing that started in Stockton, California, and now has spread across 50 cities in the United States, and it's proven to work. And what they do is it's a way to reduce gun violence. And the way it works is you know, there are neighborhoods that are, you know, gang neighborhoods in America, you know, in these cities, and the police officers actually know, they know, this is kind of pre-crime, they know who the active shooters are. Like they know. They're like, yep, you know, Tony, you know, whatever, Josh or whatever, who's down the street, he lives there. He's in a gang and he's got a gun, and eventually he's gonna shoot it. He shoots it in the air, he shoots it at things, eventually he's gonna shoot it at people, and we're gonna arrest him because it's gonna be a gun crime. They know, they know, they know, like these are the 20 active shooter guys in our gang neighborhood. So they know who they are, they know where they live, they know everything about them, but they can't arrest them pre-crime, you can't arrest someone until they do a crime, right? So, you know, and you have evidence of it, right? So these gun violence, you know, they know who it is, but they can't go pre-arrest them for just owning a gun or just being someone who shoots a gun in the air or whatever. So, what they do is with Active Peace, is they go and they offer them thousands of dollars a month to turn in their guns and leave the gangs. So they go and say, hey, you'll get like a basic income. And we're gonna help your whole family with social work. We're gonna get your mom like the surgery she needs, we're gonna get your kid like in the right grade school, we're gonna like help you with this, we're gonna get you, we're gonna so we're gonna fix your life. And in exchange, you're gonna turn in your guns, you're gonna leave the gangs. Well, guess what? They think that's a great deal. They turn in their guns, they leave the gangs, and they do this to all the active shooters. So it massively reduces gun crime. And now, for those of you who say, Well, how are you gonna pay for it? Which, of course, awful people we've been trained by our awful right-wing media to to think you have to ask that question.

SPEAKER_01 39:53

The reality is that if this costs money, you can't do it because free hands to so that's yeah, exactly. I'm paying my taxes for them to I'm giving them money? No. But tell me why that's wrong, because I'm assuming that's where you're heading.

SPEAKER_00 40:07

Exactly. They don't deserve it. It's wrong because every single gun crime, so a single gun crime, someone shooting a gun illegally, maybe hitting someone through windows, blah, blah, blah. The average cost of a single gun crime to the city is $500,000. And that's because ambulances, ER visits, ongoing medical care for the victims, insurance payouts to the buildings, the people, the health, the health, the buildings, the every kind of insurance that gets paid out. The police show up, many police, police cars, they all have to be paid to live to do that. You have to pay for all the bulletproof vests and da-da-da-da-da. All of that, plus the lawyers, you gotta charge people, you gotta arraign them, you have to pay judges and lawyers and court time to do all this for a single gun crime costs $500,000. So if you, for like a couple thousand bucks a month and a little bit of social work, which you already have the social workers there doing, anyways, you can like prevent the 10 or 20 active shooters from doing any more, like you can reduce the number of gun crimes even by one or two a month, or one or two a year. You're making a million bucks. Two gun crimes prevented is a million dollars saved by the city. Uh so it's so it's actually incredibly easy out. Yeah, so it's actually a huge saving for the public cost to do this, not a huge, not some kind of expense. Anyway, so this is an example. This is one example, but we could do this on a much larger scale. For example, Medicare for All. If everyone had health care, that would just be like the amount of crime in the United States would go down precipitously because people would be less desperate for money because they would be better taken care of.

SPEAKER_01 41:56

That fewer can't, yeah.

SPEAKER_00 41:57

Not to mention Medicare for All covers mental health care. Like everyone talks about how we have a mental health crisis. Well, guess what Medicare for All would do? Make free mental health care for everyone. Right?

SPEAKER_02 42:08

So provide services that were thrown in the garbage recently.

SPEAKER_00 42:14

Or even not recently.

SPEAKER_02 42:15

Yeah, all the services that were been ripped out.

SPEAKER_00 42:18

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Anyways, so so we can act on it individually, but it actually expands much bigger than that. We can change the environment of society and get then the consequences that we want. Maybe we want lower crime, maybe we want more entrepreneurship. Well, guess what? If you want more entrepreneurship, you have to create the environment for entrepreneurs. Yeah, Medicare for All is a huge part of that. What do what's the biggest thing that stops people from quitting their jobs and starting a new business? Usually is healthcare. That's what's stopping people from being entrepreneurs. So, you know, Medicare for All could also stimulate. I don't want to make it just all about Medicare for All. You might want to also stimulate uh in entrepreneurship by making like co-working spaces all throughout your whole city. Maybe you say, hey, we're going to subsidize co-working spaces in every neighborhood. So that with and every co-working space will have like a entrepreneurship clinic that you can access, you know, resources or whatever. Whatever. But if you create the environment, then you'll get the behavior. Uh and right now we create an environment. They will come. If you build, they will come. There it is. So there it is. Now all the solutioners will will will be hyper, hyper high performing people because they'll know to just change their environment to get whatever.

SPEAKER_01 43:30

I was gonna say it may be way late in the conversation. Is this is Feng Shui at all related to what we're doing? Oh, that's a good question. Yeah. Exactly related to where there's like if you change, if you re the problem is if you rearrange this, it will have an effect on you, like

Feng Shui And The Psychology Of Space

SPEAKER_01 43:47

you in the space. That's kind of the whole I don't know very much about it, so I'm not being specific.

SPEAKER_00 43:51

But I don't, I know it's funny you bring that up because actually I watch a lot of feng shui YouTube videos, and I've learned a lot about feng shui because that. That's been a little hobby of mine. Feng shui is definitely awesome. And people should definitely like set up their rooms with Feng Shui principles because it it is quite nice. But um, but and it'll have a small effect, I think, because it'll be like making your bed. Like every day you'll get up and things will just be all change. It's yeah, rearranging will just be set up. Like one thing you're not supposed to do is so the worst thing you could do is if you were in a room where the windows were across from the door, and then you put your bed head up against the windows and face the feet of the bed towards the door, that would be like F-grade feng shui. That would be like the worst feng shui you could do. Because the energy of the door would open right onto well your feet. Yeah, the energy of the door would open right onto the bed, like out towards the bed, towards the feet of the bed, towards your head. And then the with your if your back, if the the if the bed frame is towards the window, then you have the the energy of the windows come in over onto your onto you as well. So you have basically these two high kind of sources of chaotic energy pointing right at your bed and at your head. That's bad. Right. So like it's better to have the bed you know perpendicular to the windows, the door, and make sure you know the door opens.

SPEAKER_01 45:23

You don't want the door to like I'm so happy to hear this. This is how I didn't even think about that. That's how my room is set up.

SPEAKER_00 45:28

So yeah, and you can even if you if you want to even be even better, if the door opens a particular direction, put it so that the head of the bed is in the opposite direction. So the door energy when it opens doesn't hit the bed very much. It goes right. Like if the door opens towards you won't you don't want the door to open towards the head of the bed, you want it to open towards the foot of the bed. Because the door opens from one end. Powerful feet energy. Yeah, so the energy of the door, you want it to come be able to come in and kind of dissipate without hitting the the your head, basically. So there's these little things that if you do it, you're basically making it so that um it's like it's like how when you take you take off your shoes when you go into like a Hindu temple or something, like, or when or you know, you take off your shoes when you come into someone's house who is their shoes off. It's not because the bottoms of your shoes are so dirty that you can't come into their house with them. It's because it turns when you take off your shoes and enter, you the energy level comes down, you know, and the the personalness comes up. And it's kind of a it's kind of a shift. It's the same thing with feng shui. You can use that and it creates this sort of calmness because the energies of people coming in out of the door don't hit you in the head while you're sleeping, they they hit kind of they go off and disperse into the room, and you're in this sort of safer spot. Sometimes it might hit your feet, but your feet are less sensitive to like door energy, you know, to energy coming in and out. But there's also really fancy stuff you can do. Like we were just in a hotel in Korea, and the bed, the the layout of the room was insane. And my wife was like, What the hell are they doing? There's like three couches near the door, and then there was like the bed with like diagonal facing the window, and there was like totally crazy. And I was like, No, this is like very, very high-level feng shui. I bet they hired an expert feng shui person because they were breaking a bunch of rules, but they were breaking them in certain ways where you could break them. Like if you know the rules, you can break them, right?

SPEAKER_01 47:32

Like if you're an expert, like an impressive way. So a feng shui person is gonna be like, oh, ooh lala, what is it? Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_00 47:39

Like, ooh, oolala. Like you're not.

SPEAKER_01 47:44

Like the hotel is trying to mess with you, give you a bad night, so that the next morning they'll be like, No, no, no. No, they made it great. Do you need a boost? Do you need some coffee here? Buy us a little extra upcharge? Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 47:55

Like for what they did was like the head of the bed was face, like the bed was facing the window at the end of the room. And if you did that, that would be really bad feng shui because when the door opens, you couldn't see the door. So it's kind of like almost scary, like someone could sneak up on you. And in feng shui, you don't want to be able to be snuck up on you. Like, that's bad. But because they put so many couches zigzagging through the room before the bed, it's like they disperse that energy into the couches. And so they're and so by the time you got to the bed, it's almost like its own little bubble of energy. And so it could actually, it was like from the function.

SPEAKER_01 48:34

Yeah, it was really interesting. It's like uh it's like a series of levees, like in New Orleans. Yes, yes. That's exactly the tidal wave.

SPEAKER_00 48:42

That's right. It's like the tidal wave of the door energy was soaked up by like all these weird zigzag couches. And then when you got to the bedroom, it was peaceful water. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_01 48:55

Crazy geniuses have done it. God damn it, they've done it.

SPEAKER_00 49:00

Yeah, that was some crazy. I was like, whoa, this is great. This is really advanced feng shui. I just do basic feng shui, you know, energy from the window, energy from the door, you know, try not to have things open the wrong way, you know.

SPEAKER_01 49:13

That's more advanced than me, so that's impressive. I I I'm just gonna do it. You gotta be careful where to put my bed is in the right spot.

SPEAKER_00 49:18

I just found out your bed's in the right spot. When I come to your house next, I can do a full. I can do a full feng shui breakdown.

SPEAKER_01 49:25

Give me an audit. Yep. Let's do it. Investigation.

SPEAKER_00 49:28

I can't promise to like high. Yeah, pizza and feng shui, feng feng za. It'll be good. Okay, we did it. I like it. Absolutely. Thanks for another one, Adam. Thank you everyone for listening. Yep. Yeah, and we'll talk more. Uh, we'll have another one in a couple weeks. And uh I think we might be starting an email list. So keep your eyes peeled for an email list.

SPEAKER_01 49:56

Over email, it'll be an easy way to reach out to us

Wrap Up And What’s Next

SPEAKER_01 50:00

and get you know thoughts back and forth. That's what we're trying to do too.

SPEAKER_00 50:03

Yeah, let's do it. Okay, Scott, thanks so much. Thanks, everyone. Tune next time.