Episode 152 – The Scarcity Mindset – Tom Wheelwright & Michael Easter

Speaker 1: 

This is the Wealth Ability Show with Tom Wheelwright. Way more money, way less taxes. 

Tom Wheelwright: 

So when is enough enough? How do we stop focusing on what we don't have and start focusing on what's possible? 

Hi, this is Tom Wheelwright, and today we have a very special guest, Michael Easter, who is an expert and done a lot of studying in this field on scarcity mindset and has written a new book, which I'm very excited about because it's a terrific book and really highly recommend for anybody who just likes to read, let alone whether you like the topic or not, it's just a really good read. So it's called Scarcity Brain: Fix Your Craving Mindset and Rewire Your Habits to Thrive with Enough. And Michael, it is great to have you on our podcast today. 

Michael Easter: 

Yeah, I'm so happy to be here, Tom. Thanks for having me. 

Tom Wheelwright: 

So if you would give us a little of your background, because an unusual background for what you're writing about and how'd you get into this? Because your first book's Comfort zone, right? 

Michael Easter: 

Yeah. Comfort Crisis. 

Tom Wheelwright: 

Comfort Crisis. And then now we're talking about scarcity. Those two clearly go together. So what's driven this for you? 

Michael Easter: 

Yeah, that's a great question. My background is that for a lot of years I was an editor at a magazine and I tended to cover health and wellness, mental health, physical health, all these things. And then I'm now a professor at a university where I continue to write, and yeah, the first book was The Comfort Crisis, which basically looks at how as the world has become more comfortable in a lot of ways, we've lost a lot of the things that keep us healthy. Now, this book is interesting because what I noticed is that when people deal with a lot of their problems by accumulating, by reaching for more, by doing something. I'm like, “What's up with that?” As someone who is in the wellness industry and wants to know how to improve people's lives, I tend to think about how can we fix bad habits more than how can we improve good habits? 

Because when you look at the landscape of numbers and figures and data, you see that it's usually bad habits hurt people more than good habits can help them. So if you're trying to develop all these good habits, but you haven't fixed your worst ones, you still have your foot on the brake. And to me, some of the worst habits are these habits we have where we repeat a behavior over and over, consume, accumulate, and that is what the book really gets into and why we do that and how it manifests itself in our lives. 

Tom Wheelwright: 

Well, let's start out with just a simple definition if we could. Define a scarcity mindset. What is this? What's causing this? 

Michael Easter: 

Yeah, I think it's the feeling that we don't have enough and it manifests itself in a lot of different ways. The book really looks at, everyone knows that everything is fine in moderation, but why can't people moderate? Why do we keep eating when we're full? Why do we keep buying stuff when we've got storage units full of possessions that we don't use? Why do we keep scrolling social media or checking and rechecking and rechecking email when we know it's not doing great things for our mental health and we don't need to be doing that? Humans are really accumulators and cravers, and I think that is really what the scarcity mindset is and how it manifests itself in our lives. 

Tom Wheelwright: 

So why do we do this? How did that evolve? 

Michael Easter: 

Sure. Well, when you think about the landscapes that humans evolved in, everything we needed to survive was scarce and hard to find. So everything from food to stuff to information to the number of people we could influence and much more, it's all hard to find. So it made sense for millions of years literally to when you had the opportunity to reach for enough, to eat more food than you needed, to accumulate more stuff than you needed, to try and one up another person because that would improve your survival laws, to accumulate information, to keep getting information, information, information. But we now live in a world where we have an abundance of all these things that were built to crave, and we don't have a governor on that. So we keep overdoing it and overdoing it. And this leads to long-term problems. 

Tom Wheelwright: 

You actually start in the book and you talk about basically the drug crisis being part of this. What is it that you think drives us to, it's almost like we need this constant hit of serotonin that we're constantly looking for because now that we have our basics, you look at Maslow's hierarchy and needs and all I think is, “Well, gee, we get the basics taken care of. Shouldn't we be able to reach for those higher levels?” And yet what it seems is we see a lot of, and we saw this during the pandemic when people were given a lot of handouts, is that what did they do with that? And they weren't creating new art and they weren't creating new products, they were using drugs and watching porn and whatever. I mean, that's what people were doing. Why? What's causing that? 

Michael Easter: 

Well, I think it does go back to this idea that… I'll give you an example of a study. Here's a great study I learned about, and I talked to the researcher. I was reporting this book. There's this guy whose name is Leidy Klotz, K-L-O-T-Z, and he is an engineering professor at the University of Virginia. And this guy is probably one of the top engineering minds in the country. One day this guy is playing Legos with his son. The kid is three years old and they're building a Lego bridge, and they got this bridge and they got the two pillars and they're about to put the span and they put the span on and they realize that the bridge is off-kilter. So one of the pillars has fewer blocks than another one, so it's off center. So the engineering professor, what's his fix? He goes and he starts rummaging through the box of Legos to fix this thing, finds the Legos he needs. 

He turns around and he realizes that his three-year-old son has done something pretty interesting. And that's that he fixed the problem by removing blocks, and that is the better thing to do because they now have more resources that they can use. The bridge is now flat. And so you have this PhD engineer who's done work for the World Bank, for all these massive corporations who just gets out engineered by a three-year-old. And so what he does is he goes, “Wow, that's interesting.” And he starts taking this bridge around the University of Virginia in the engineering department. And when he meets with his colleagues and when he meets with students, he'll pull this thing out, he'll throw some Legos on the table and he'll be like, “Hey, fix this.” Every single person adds to the pillars. Every single person's fix is to add resources. So he goes, “All right, this is weird enough that we need to study this.” 

And he does a series of six studies and they all are problems. Now, a person can either fix the problem by adding resources or taking resources away. In every single study, the right answer is to subtract resources. That's the more efficient use, that's the better option. But in every single study, the majority of people add to try and fix a problem. Now, the reason for this goes back to what I said about how we evolved in environments of scarcity. It has always made sense for humans to add, to accumulate. If you had the opportunity to add more, to accumulate more, to do more, you always took that. We still have that brain in a world where it doesn't always make sense. 

Tom Wheelwright: 

So interesting. So the big term now is FOMO, right? We all have this fear of missing out. How does that play into this? Because as you talk about in your book, I mean, that's how a lot of companies are successful in marketing, is they market on FOMO and rule number one when I do selling from stage and rule number one, selling from stage is there's got to be scarcity. There's got to be scarcity and urgency. And if you get those two, you're going to win every single time. So how do we deal with that on a daily basis since I think it's natural that we have it, and I think social media compounds it. 

Michael Easter: 

Yeah, it absolutely does. So I'll back up. And first, you're absolutely correct. That scarcity and urgency, that's the secret sauce. If you want to sell something, tell them there's only one and tell them they have to make a decision now. So back to that idea of our worst habits hurting us the most. What really got me thinking about this is that I live in Las Vegas, and when you live in Las Vegas, you end up saying a lot of strange things. This is a town built on access. It's built on accumulation. But the strangest part to me has always been the slot machines, because they're everywhere. They're 90% on casino floors, but they're also in our gas stations, our restaurants, our bars- 

Tom Wheelwright: 

Everywhere. 

Michael Easter: 

Everywhere. And people play them around the clock. I mean, I'll be getting groceries at 7:00 AM and there's someone there letting their perishables spoil because they got sucked into some cat themed slot machine. And you're going, “What's up with that? It doesn't make any sense. Everyone knows the house always wins.” So I decide I'm going to get to the bottom of this because that's what I do. I'm an investigative journalist, and long story short, through talking to various people, sources, I end up at this casino on the edge of town and it's brand new, super cutting edge, one of the nicest casinos I've been into. But the catch is that it's not open to the public. So this is a casino laboratory. It's a living, breathing casino, but it's used exclusively for human behavior research. And it's not just funded by the gambling industry. 

There's 73 different companies that are on board in this thing, and they are some of the biggest tech companies in the world, a lot of Fortune 500s have money invested in this place, and they're trying to figure out how basically everything that happens in the casino later affects human behavior and decision making, trying to get people to spend more. Now while I'm there to bring it back to slot machines, I end up talking with a slot machine designer and he explains why slot machine works and slot machines depend on a system that I call the scarcity loop. So it is this three-part behavior loop that evolved in the human brain, and you can think about it as the serial killer of moderation. 

So it has three parts. It's got opportunity, unpredictable rewards, and quick repeatability. So opportunity, we have an opportunity to get something of value. In the case of a slot machine, it's money. Unpredictable rewards. We know we'll get that thing of value eventually, but we don't know when and we don't know how valuable it'll be. So with slot machines, you play a game and you're like, “I could lose money. I could win 75 cents. I could win $75 million. I don't know.” And then quick repeatability, you can repeat the behavior right away. So with slot machines, you see people just play and play and play. 

Now, anytime a behavior can fit into these three conditions, humans are vastly, vastly, vastly more likely to get hooked on it. And the reason that there's so many companies involved in this project, not just gambling companies, is because you can insert this scarcity loop into all sorts of other behaviors and products to drive behavior. So for example, it's how social media works, it's how dating apps work. It's been, going in line with this podcast, it's one of the reasons that Robinhood did so well is the quick repeatability of trades and the taking away of fees. So people could do that quicker. It's in everything from our food system to our education system. Companies like Uber and Lyft are using it to get workers to drive longer hours. And so I think that part of getting out of bad habits is realizing that we are very prone to falling into behaviors that fit into this system. 

Tom Wheelwright: 

All right, so that begs the question, how do we get out of the bad habits? So how do you break that cycle? If you've got that scarcity loop, how do you break that scarcity loop? 

Michael Easter: 

Yeah, there's basically three ways. The first way is that just by becoming aware of it, you can start to change your behavior. Now, this is a long-established psychological idea that basically once people start to become aware of what they're doing and observe themself, they start to change their behavior. So just awareness is key that when you fall into this repeat behavior, whether it's checking and rechecking email because it's a random reward game, unpredictable rewards or scrolling social media, realizing that it's not necessarily your fault because this is an ancient part of the human brain, and I can tell you why in a minute, but it is your problem to have to fix. So awareness helps. And then the second part is that you can take away or change any one of the three parts of the loop so you can change the opportunity why you're using the thing. 

So for example, social media, people tend to just fall into the likes and retweets and gamification of it, but a person could use it as a communication tool to keep in touch with friends and family. You don't have to fall into the gamified system of random rewards. You can change the unpredictable rewards or take them away. So that's by making things more predictable. A good example is one of the reasons why obesity started to take off in the United States is that food makers consciously decided we need more random rewards in our food. We need to put all sorts of different options out there because they know if you have a lot of different options for food, you'll tend to eat more of it. So things like eating the same food every day can help people. And then you can also slow down the repetition. 

So for example, that would be something like there's certain limiters you can put on your phone to limit app use. You could keep the phone in another room. If you've got a problem with buying too much stuff on Amazon, you could put in say, “All right, when I see something I want, I'm going to wait three days to buy it.” Because the reality now is that we used to have the pause before we could buy stuff of needing to go to the store to buy it. Now we can buy something, just a thought pops into our head, or we're just mindlessly scrolling for something else and we see an ad and we can just complete the purchase immediately. 

Tom Wheelwright: 

Interesting. A friend of mine I was talking to the other day, and he said that he likes to read books on Kindle when he travels because if he's got his iPad, he'll be distracted by all the social media. So that's an example of what you're saying, right? 

Michael Easter: 

Yeah, it absolutely is because, and there's actually really great research backing up his observation that I think is probably an observation we've all made that people tend to switch tasks on phones and iPads. I can't remember the exact stat. It was something crazy where you go, “Oh, no wonder people can't pay attention”, because you read a page and then you go, “I wonder if I got an email.” Then you're checking your email and you read another page. “I wonder if I got an update on my LinkedIn profile”, and then you're checking your LinkedIn. And so I think even having systems where fewer unpredictable rewards like that are coming at us, in the case of your friend, it's the Kindle doesn't have LinkedIn updates and email, I think can reduce some of that behavior that tends to scatter us and lead us to end up doing less in the long run. 

Tom Wheelwright: 

Well, it sounds like this has a serious impact on our ability to focus, and that's certainly been something we've seen, you call it the TikTok generation, that you have people they want 15 second, 30 second videos, and they're constantly going from one to another to another. That's a loop. So you've talked about some things we can do individually. How do you deal with that in society when it's constant in social media and society and politics? 

Michael Easter: 

So this is a larger question of should corporations have to change a system that works? So for me, I tend to think about it more in terms of the reason that this scarcity loop works is because it's engaging. It's really attention getting. We tend to fall into it. It tends to entertain us. It tends to be fun in the short term, but if you fall into it too much, it can hurt you in the long run. So for me, I tend to think, look, if you wanted to really reduce this, you would have to take away the unpredictable rewards. You would have to make videos less. You'd have to make everything less engaging. And then the question is, do we really want that? Do I want YouTube to be like, “Hey, this video way too entertaining. This slot machine game, way too fun. Nope, this is too much fun.” 

So I tend to think more in terms of we as individuals need to become more aware of it and figure out what amount of it works for us. Because you also tend to see, if you just take addiction, for example, some people can drink alcohol without repercussion, some can't. So should those that can drink it without repercussion have to never drink alcohol because some people have a problem with it. At the same time, those people who are fine with alcohol might have a gambling problem, but the drinkers might be like, “Oh yeah, I'm fine with gambling.” So I think when you start to overly regulate these behaviors that most of the population can handle, you start to get in a little bit of trouble because then you end up taking away freedoms from some people. So really it is up to the individual, and that also is the promise and the peril of a free living society. 

Tom Wheelwright: 

Hey, if you like financial education the way I do, you're going to love Buck Joffrey's podcast. Buck's a friend of mine, he's a client of mine, he's a former Board Certified Surgeon, and he's turned into a real estate professional. So he has this podcast that is geared towards high paid professionals. That's who he's geared towards. So if you're a high paid professional, you're going, “Look, I'd like to do something different with my money than what I'm doing. I'd like to get financially educated. I'd like to take control of my money and my life and my taxes.” I would love to recommend Buck Joffrey's podcast, which is called Wealth Formula Podcast with Buck Joffrey. I hope you joined Buck on this adventure of a lifetime. 

So going back to the individual, which we love on this show, because this is a show for entrepreneurs and the most individualistic people in the world are entrepreneurs, you talk about scarcity cues. What are some of those scarcity cues? 

Michael Easter: 

Oh, simply telling people that there's a limited amount, that stock is running low. Any cue that's going to make people reach for more. 

Tom Wheelwright: 

Going out of business sale. 

Michael Easter: 

Yeah, going out of business sale. But even things like, here's a really interesting study that deals with scarcity cues is even information that implies drama or danger can act as a scarcity cue. So there's this study I came across and I spoke with a researcher where they had two bowls of M&M's, and the first bowl said low calorie, the second bowl said high calorie. People would come and they'd be like, “Hey, do you want M&M's?” This is on a college campus. They had a television there, and if the television was playing shows where everything's great with the world, like it's a sitcom, people would tend to take fewer M&M's and they tend to take the ones from the low calorie pile. 

Now, if they had things like news that was negative news, like nothing is right in the world, the world is crumbling, people would tend to take from the high calorie and also eat more of them. So what tends to happen, and I followed up with a biologist like, “Well, this doesn't make any sense. Why is this?” He goes, “No. If you think about it in the past, anytime that there was an implied danger, probably the safest thing you could do is eat more, buy more, accumulate more, get as much as you can, hoard information.” And so still today, that affects us even though we live in a much safer world. 

Tom Wheelwright: 

So this is why toilet paper, there was a run on toilet paper during Covid, even though covid had nothing to do with going to the bathroom. 

Michael Easter: 

Yes, exactly. I have a fun story about that too. I spoke to a researcher who studies hoarding, and she studies hoarding in both animals and humans. And she goes, “Okay, I want you to picture squirrels. So squirrels have to gather nuts in the fall before they go into their little nest.” She's like, “If it's been a good summer for nuts, everything is relaxed. Everyone's going, Hey, how are you, as they gather nuts.” She goes, “But if it's been a bad summer and there's a shortage of nuts, it turns apocalyptic. What the squirrels do is they fight over nuts. They're screaming at each other, yelling, and then once they feel like they have enough nuts, they put them in their little cave, their burrow, where they're going to stay, and then they stand guard at the door ready to fight.” 

And then she immediately transitions into, “So when the pandemic happened, it became very apocalyptic. Everyone ran down to the store. It was just like squirrels gathering the nuts. People are fighting for toilet paper. People are doing all this crazy stuff. They're hoarding. And then once they get home in the borough, what do people do? Everyone went and bought guns. More gun sales occurred at the onset of the pandemic than ever because it was to defend resources.” So her point was that we often have behaviors that are very similar to animals and predictable because in the end of the day we're from a long line of animals. So it's rather fascinating. 

Tom Wheelwright: 

So you mentioned as perhaps the solution to this is this concept of enough, and I was thinking about this as I was reading Scarcity Mindset, and one of my mentors is Dan Sullivan, a strategic coach, and he talks about the gap in the gain. That's his term is that if you focus on the gap what you don't have and you never focus on what you do have, which is the gain, how far you've come, then you end up just completely, you're never satisfied, you're never happy. So how do you get to that point where I want to have an abundance mindset, in other words, there's amazing possibilities in the world. At the same time, I want to make sure, I want to be like, “I'm good. I'm good better, but I'm good now.” 

Michael Easter: 

Yeah, yeah. Well, I do think probably if a person is listening to this podcast, I would imagine they're probably relatively decent off in the grand scheme of time and space. So for example, I'll give you an example. My last book, I spent more than a month in the Arctic. We had to pack in our food. We had nothing the whole time. So when I got back to my normal life, it was very much just a smack in the face going, “Oh my God, modern life is amazing. It's totally amazing.” And I think we sometimes forget that. But in terms of bringing that down to a practical level, I think you do have to have an honest conversation about what is the point of this work in the first place? What's the long play here? And most people, what tends to happen is that people will often fixate on numbers because they give a certainty, the salary, the sale, the percentage, the whatever it is. 

But really the reason you work in the first place is so you can provide a livelihood for yourself, for your family, so you can live a happy life. So you can maybe pursue these higher things of being a human, these higher experiences, and those often don't have much to do with the actual number. You can often get those without needing the pile of money. And at a certain point, chasing the pile of money can backfire in the sense that it is removing you from time that you want to have to live a good life. And so unfortunately, I don't think that there's an easy, here's the three step formula to perfectly find enough. 

I think its self-exploration for everyone, but I do think hard conversations need to be had with yourself and families about, “Okay, if we want this amount of money, here's what it could get us. Here's probably the amount of time and effort it's going to take. Do we want to give and take here? How do we want to do this?” Everyone could make more money if they just put their nose to the grindstone, put in better systems, did all this stuff. But at the same time, if you do that for 40 years and you look back and go, “Well, I was miserable that 40 years. Is that worth it?” It's really a balance. At the same time, you can't just hardly do anything 'cause then you're going to be miserable from the lack of what you have. So it's very much a hard conversation. 

Tom Wheelwright: 

And we do see a big difference in people, and sometimes those of us who are always focusing on what can we do better, what can we do more, we have a tendency to look at people who are saying, “I'm good”, and we're going, “Oh, they're not motivated. They're just sit on their keister and they're not really doing what they could contribute.” And yet, I look at my wife. So my wife is she's CPA like I am. She has a small practice and she is the most comfortable, happy enough person I've ever met, way better than I am, way better than I am. And she's good. I said, “So what are your plans?” Says, “Well, I'm going to live today. Today's good. I'm focused on today.” 

There's a children's book called The Candy Dish, which is about really about focusing on today, one of my favorite books to read my grandkids. And have you looked at how do people do that introspection and look at, okay, because we all know people who have tens of millions of dollars and it's not enough. They're constantly wanting more. And if you ask them, they go, “No, you don't know what's going to happen tomorrow. That's not enough.” So have you looked at how do you do that? How do you actually evaluate that in yourself and take the time and go, “Okay, what do I need to do to change that mindset so that it's not always scarcity.” 

Michael Easter: 

Yeah, that's a great question. And I do think when that mindset becomes destructive enough that it's legitimately causing problems, that I'm always trying to acquire more, do more, I think that in most cases, it's simply a symptom of some underlying dissatisfaction. So when humans are dissatisfied with something in their life when they have some sort of internal conflict, discomfort, maybe it's like the marriage isn't great, maybe it's just there's some unhealed thing from the past, whatever it is, I do think we tend to lean into doing these things that get us more, that accumulate, and we're always going to be doing that and figuring out why the hell do I keep doing this unless I can fix that underlying thing? And what really shaped my thinking on this is that in the book, I ended up traveling to Iraq to study addiction. And we've, typically in the US, the government has either treated it as a moral failing or as a brain disease, and probably neither are quite right, it turns out. 

So there's a lot of new thinkers that are seeing addiction as a symptom of something else. It is a solution in the short term because it provides this idea that it's going to, if it's, say drugs, this is going to make me feel better in the short term. It's going to fix my problems, but it's going to create long-term problems. And I don't see much difference from chasing just money for the sake of it and being obsessed with getting more and more and more if it's creating long-term problems than I do with using drugs. It's the exact same overlying architecture, choosing this short-term reward that's creating long-term problems. And usually addiction, when it comes to drugs, is that, again, it's treating a problem, an underlying problem, allowing for escape. And so having to unpeel that layer and go, “Okay, well why am I doing this in the first place?” That's a hard thing to ask, right? 

Tom Wheelwright: 

It is. What am I escaping from? 

Michael Easter: 

Right. What are you escaping from? 

Tom Wheelwright: 

Right, right. What am I escaping from? 

Michael Easter: 

Yeah, and to your point about how sometimes if you're an entrepreneur, you can look at people who aren't working as hard and be like, “Man, why are they like that? Why are they so lazy?” But really it's that you're playing one game and they're playing a different game. So your game is, I want to see that number in the bank account increase. And that's how you measure your score. And for them, it's a completely different game. They're going, “No, the number's there, but that's not what I'm worried about. I'm worried about my relationships, I'm worried about these other things.” 

Tom Wheelwright: 

[inaudible 00:31:04]. 

Michael Easter: 

So they at the same time are looking at you going, “Man, why is this [inaudible 00:31:10].” 

Tom Wheelwright: 

No, no question. I mean, this is what's makes, I think this is a really interesting part of the world. So when we typically think about, let's end with this, we typically think about scarcity mindset, and then we immediately think about, okay, the opposite would be the abundant mindset. So can you talk a little bit about the abundant mindset and how that differs in what has to be done to get there? 

Michael Easter: 

Yeah, I think the abundance mindset is realizing that you have enough, and to me, that comes from fixing those underlying bad habits I talked about. And when I talked about the scarcity loop, how that tends to push people into these repeat behaviors that can hurt them in the long run. The reason that humans get so attracted to that loop is because it evolved to help us find food when we were hunter-gatherers in the past. So if you think of searching for food, it's a random rewards game. You go to one place, there's no food, so you go to the next place, there's no food. So you go to the next place, no food, you go to the next place. Oh, there's so much food jackpot, and then you have to repeat it. I think that you can use that same system to push yourself into habits that are, they're good for you. 

So in that case, it flips to an abundance loop. For example, people get really into something like, I don't know, birdwatching, because you're going out and playing this random rewards game, but in the process, you're usually outdoors in the sun, you're exercising, you're oftentimes doing that with people, and you tend to find that people find activities that fall into this that lead to these long-term rewards, to be the most life enhancing things in their life. This is why a lot of people will get really into hunting because it's this thing that's giving them all these health, mental health benefits that the brain just naturally wants to fall into and keep them there and finds really fascinating. And so there's a lot of different ways to apply that across your life to develop these hobbies and habits that help you build relationships, help you move more, help you do all these things that we fundamentally know are good for humans and enhance your life in the longterm. 

Tom Wheelwright: 

This is great. This has been terrific. Thanks Michael. So if there were three steps you would recommend that somebody take to get started into going from the scarcity to abundance type of a mindset, what would those three steps be? 

Michael Easter: 

I would say to look for, if you feel like you have a habit that you overdue, that could be anything from spending too much time on your phone to, I don't know, for you guys checking your portfolios way too often to see where the numbers went in the last five minutes to overeating, to maybe you drink too much occasionally or something, I would look to see if they fall into the scarcity of the loop that I told you about. And chances are that they absolutely do. And then from there, you need to work to figure out how you can take elements of the loop away in order to start to overhaul those behaviors. 

And then from there, I think it's asking a lot of the bigger questions about what is a meaningful life to me. Money will make us happy and give us meaning up to a certain point. And I think people say, oh, it's $75,000. And I think that really, it's very different for everyone. 

Tom Wheelwright: 

For sure. 

Michael Easter: 

But there is a point. And so I think trying to figure out where the diminishing returns lie, you basically want, when the effort it takes to get more money greatly outweighs your happiness, then it becomes a self-defeating prophecy. It's like, “Okay, you've got enough now, so let's go use it.” That's the whole point of it. That's the whole point of making a good amount of money. So you can go have really great experiences and yeah. 

Tom Wheelwright: 

I love it. I love it. So the book is Scarcity Brain, and outside of buying and reading your book, where else can we get more information about you, Michael? 

Michael Easter: 

My website is eastermichael.com, and I send out a newsletter three times a week. That's at twopct, so that's T-W-O-pct.com is the website. And yeah, that goes out three times a week. And it's on different wellness topics, different psychological topics that oftentimes touch on the topics that you talk about. So people might enjoy that. 

Tom Wheelwright: 

That's awesome. So thank you. And this is important. My experience when it comes to money, wealth, happiness, is that we do have to focus on the personal side and the personal development side before we can have the success on the financial side. So I think as we do focus on our scarcity loops, on our scarcity habits, and we move towards those abundance habits, I do think what we're always going to end up with is way more money and way lower taxes. We'll see everybody next time.