Escaping "Scarcity Brain" with Michael Easter

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That is noblegoldinvestments.com right now. Hey everybody, it's Andrew Charlie Kirk Show. One of my favorite authors, Michael Easter. We talk Scarcity Brain, his new book, also author of Comfort Crisis. Can't recommend that book enough.

Fix your craving mindset and rewire your habits to thrive with enough. Michael Easter, Scarcity Brain. Check it out today. Email us freedom at charliekirk.com and get involved with Turning Point USA today at tpusa.com.

That is tpusa.com. Get involved with Turning Point USA and start a high school or college chapter. Become a member charliekirk.com and click on the members tab and email me as always freedom at charliekirk.com. Buckle up everybody. Here we go. Charlie, what you've done is incredible here. Maybe Charlie Kirk is on the college campus. I want you to know we are lucky to have Charlie Kirk. Charlie Kirk's running the White House folks. I want to thank Charlie. He's an incredible guy. His spirit, his love of this country. He's done an amazing job building one of the most powerful youth organizations ever created, Turning Point USA. We will not embrace the ideas that have destroyed countries, destroyed lives and we are going to fight for freedom on campuses across the country.

That's why we are here. Brought to you by the loan experts I trust, Andrew and Todd at Sierra Pacific Mortgage at andrewandtodd.com. Joining us now is one of my favorite authors. In fact, I read something like 28, 30 books last year and his book won my book of the year award, Comfort Crisis, but we're here to talk about his new book that I'm super excited about, Michael Easter. Michael, thank you so much for taking the time. Welcome back. Hey, thanks for having me back, Charlie. It's good to see you, man. Thank you.

Love your approach to try to find the truth and try to help people's lives. Again, I cannot recommend Comfort Crisis enough. It's super powerful. But you have a new book called Scarcity Brain. In fact, we purchased like 40 or 50 copies for our entire directors at Turning Point USA. We're actually reading through it right now. Introduce the book Scarcity Brain to our audience. Yeah, so everyone knows that everything is fine in moderation.

Well, why are humans not so great at moderating, right? We're people who can't seem to get enough of everything from food to stuff to status online and to all these different things. And so the book really looks at why do we crave so much? Why do we tend to be over consumers? And how is that hurting us in a lot of different ways, everything from our health to our mental health?

And I think one of the revelations of the book is that we live in a world now where technology knows so much about us, the apps we're on and how we spend our time online, that we're really being pushed into more than we ever have been before of purchases, of food, of all these different things. So let's just define our terms scarcity. Scarcity is actually usually considered to be a negative term, but we live in overabundance. Most of our problems are because of a surplus.

Too much screen time, too much sugar, too much carbohydrates, too much entertainment, too much idle time. When in past hundreds and hundreds of years ago, as you build out in this book and also in Comfort Crisis, that these are new problems, that actually the problems that are facing our species have never been problems before. And so we have this hard wiring that is supposed to allow, you know, try to try to deal with scarcity when we really have problems with abundance. So talk about the scarcity loop.

I found that to be fascinating. Yeah, so to your point, you know, humans came up for all of time. We lived in these environments where everything we needed to survive was scarce and it was hard to find. So if you were the type of person who defaulted to a little bit more every time you got the opportunity, that would help you survive. Today, our problem is abundance. We still have those sort of old genes pushing us into more when it doesn't always make sense.

We're in these worlds of plenty. The scarcity loop is something that I discovered when I traveled into a casino laboratory in Las Vegas. I live in Las Vegas and there is a casino on the edge of town that is brand new, it's cutting edge, it's got the nicest everything, but the public isn't welcome in the traditional sense of a casino. This place is used entirely for research on human behavior and figuring out how can we get people to sort of do what we want in the casino. And it's not just funded by the gambling industry.

It's also funded by a lot of big tech companies. And while I was there, I talked to a slot machine designer who unpacked this idea of the scarcity loop. And it explains why people spend so much time on, for example, slot machines. People will play for hours and hours and hours doing this behavior that doesn't seem to make sense.

Everyone knows the house always wins in the long term. So this loop, it's got three parts. It's got opportunity, it's got unpredictable rewards, and it's got quick repeatability. You've got an opportunity to get something of value that will enhance your life, but you don't know when you're going to get it and you don't know how valuable it's going to be.

And then three, you can quickly repeat the behavior. So if you think of a slot machine, you've got an opportunity to win money. On any given game, you could lose, you could win a couple bucks, or you can win thousands of dollars.

And then you can play and play and play. Now, the reason this is important and why it's not just gambling companies who are invested in this casino laboratory is you can put this system in a lot of other things to get people to repeat behaviors that are fun in the short term, but can hurt them in the long run. So for example, it's really what makes social media work. It's being put in dating apps. It's being put in a lot of new financial apps. It is being put in gig work economy apps like Uber and driving for Lyft. It's in the rise of sports gambling. And as this thing sort of ripples out, especially as we start to spend a lot more time on our phones, but it's not just in our phones, but I think the best case studies are in our phones.

You just see that people start to make some decisions that they maybe otherwise wouldn't. So, Michael, let me ask you about addictions. People think of alcohol and heroin.

You mentioned kind of the video games, emails, newsfeed, social media. Just how much of talk about how these things can be, yes, similarly chemically addictive, but also the people that are designing them. Is their intent also to addict us? Well, I think the intent of people who are designing, say apps or even foods. I mean, just as there's a casino laboratory, there are hundreds of labs across the country trying to figure out how do we give people the perfect mixture of sugar and salt and fat so they end up eating more.

You know, I think that the intention is to get us to use the product more, to buy more of the product. And unfortunately, the more incentives there are to use a product, probably the more likely it is going to be addictive. So most of the most addictive behaviors and substances, they all tend to fall into this scarcity loop. So for example, with drugs, it's not just the chemical impact of the drugs that people get addicted to, they often get addicted to the search for drugs, right?

They don't know when they're going to get drugs. And that's really alluring to people. And then they finally get them and it's like, great. And then they use them and then they got to reuse them again. That's the same architecture that you see in a slot machine, the same architecture that you see in social media use.

Pretty much all animals get really attracted to unpredictable rewards, and we can't seem to look away. Yeah. And identifying those kind of patterns is super important.

And so I want to read, I want to read part of this from the book, which I think is really important. And first, it's, you know, detecting the hidden scarcity cues to stop cravings is really important. Something you talk about here, but also just the slot machine is one of them. But it's kind of funny, Michael, when I'm going through my email, I feel as if I'm going through a slot machine, right? It's kind of like you go down, you never know what's going to come up, right? And you don't know if there's something hidden in the junk folder.

Is that actually a good comparison? You know, kind of talking about how email and slot machines kind of developed a similar psychology? Yeah, 100 percent. It's an unpredictable reward game, right? So when you get a ping on your phone, you go, OK, you got an opportunity to get information that could enhance your life. But you don't know what it is, right? It could be an email saying, hey, we got this great guest to come on the show that you've been trying to get for a long time. Or it could be a piece of spam, right? It's nothing.

And not knowing what it's going to be, that's really captures people's attention, right? You have to open that email and then you have to see what it is. And then, oh, by the way, you're getting another email in about three, four minutes.

So you just play that game all day. And I think people get hooked into all different behaviors that fall into this loop. Email is one that I think people struggle with checking over and over and over and over again, even when they're off of work hours. Social media shopping online uses a lot of elements of the scarcity loop to get people to buy more. So great example is advertisements online that are embedded with casino like features. They increase conversion rate by sevenfold.

Sevenfold. I mean, that's a huge determinant of how people are buying. Yeah. So I want to dive in throughout the hour of practical ways people can understand how they are preyed upon by some of these products and some of these. But it's also just kind of educating yourself on the latest neuroscience breakthroughs of exactly how our brain is wired. And I mean, we are a largely addicted country to a lot of different things. Right.

And, you know, being able to get to the fundamental parts of the part of the brain that is being taken advantage of by the rigging of the apps, the games, the products and the feedback loops to create these types of applications. States decide about abortion. And so many liberal states are taking extreme stands, even allowing abortion up to literally the second before a baby is born.

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That is CharlieKirk.com and click on the preborn banner. So, Michael, on page 81 of your book, Scarcity Brain, you say something that could be considered a thought crime where you, I think, very kindly challenge this idea of addiction as an incurable disease. Right. And you go through a series of studies here. So this is important because some people will say there is nothing I can do with my alcoholism problem or whatever addiction problem. I have an addictive personality and it cannot be cured. You're careful in the way that you challenge it, but you do it very factually where you say, quote, Satel, who is a researcher here, says, the implication of blaming addiction on brain chemicals like dopamine is that addicts should just be taking dopamine blockers, medication that blocks the release of dopamine.

But that doesn't work. And it says they're not alone in their ideas, that there's a growing community of people that believe that you actually can change the brain of someone who's addicted. So give our audience some background here and let's dive into this. So we've traditionally thought of addiction in two ways in the U.S. We thought of it that an addict is a bad person and so they are deserving of punishment. They're making this negative choice day in, day out. And then we thought of it as a brain disease. That is to say they have zero agency in this thing and it is just a result of chemical phenomena in the brain that is causing them to make these choices. It turns out that both ways, in my opinion, are not a great way of looking at addiction. So I tend to see addiction as more of a symptom of something else underlying and that people who are addicted to a substance often use the substance to solve a problem in the short term. So you tend to see that people who become addicted to alcohol or drugs, that substance solves their problems in the short term.

They might have a bad childhood, they might have lost their job and they're trying to solve for that. But the problem is that repeating that behavior leads to long term problems. Now the upside is that because you're using this thing to solve a problem, if you can find a more productive way to solve whatever the underlying problem is that's leading you to use substances in a way that is harming you in the long term, you can often get out of it. And you see this in, there's a fantastic case study from the Vietnam War. So during the Vietnam War, about 20 to 25% of our soldiers in Vietnam were using heroin. So at the time it was thought, you know, if you use heroin one time, you're going to become an addict. And President Nixon didn't want a bunch of addicts coming back into the United States of America. So we set up this program that was called Operation Golden Club.

And it was pretty simple. If you as a soldier wanted to come back from your time in Vietnam back to the United States, you had to pass a drug test. Now, if addiction is a brain disease and people have zero agency over this, they're just sort of slaves to these neurochemicals, then you would assume that, well, 20, 25% of those soldiers got left in Vietnam, they couldn't come home. And the reality is, is that every single soldier passed a drug test by and large. And when they were back in the United States, what else happened is that very, very few relapsed. I think maybe 5% relapsed. And the 5% that relapsed of all those people, they tended to be people who used drugs before the war. Now, okay, so why was that able to happen?

Well, very simple. These soldiers were in Vietnam, and they're in a literal war zone where they're seeing all kinds of terrible things from war every single day. And using a drug allowed them to escape that terrible, terrible reality that they were in. And it allowed them to feel better for a little bit of time.

But once they were out of Vietnam, they no longer needed that escape from drugs and were able to quit drugs. So I think that the metaphor there is that in the United States, you tend to see drug problems rise and fall in areas that tend to have more problems. Maybe the jobs all got wiped out. Maybe the economy has really cratered. And there's a lot of different complicated reasons, but I think that's a larger theme you tend to see. Some of the most exciting discoveries in neuroscience show how much your brain can actually change at almost any age. And this is, again, it's underreported.

We get almost nothing but negative news. One of the most famous examples is when they did brain scans of the cabbies in London, where they found that the hippocampus was actually significantly larger because the grids of streets in London are indecipherable to any human being. There is no grid.

There is no rationale. It is a series of randomness. In fact, you cannot become a certified London cabbie without passing a test called the knowledge.

It's a big deal. And they found when they scanned the brains, spatial awareness, which goes to the hippocampus and understanding maps and turns, that London cabbies had like a 10 to 20 percent bigger or more active hippocampus than just a random person in London. And most of the people didn't get the job until their late 20s or early 30s, which then goes to show that you can actually change your brain far more than people realize. And that goes against all the garbage of the early 20th century, not garbage, but, you know, the psychologists said, oh, no, you are who you are from like two years old.

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That is patriotmobile.com slash Charlie or call 878-PATRIOT. Do you have any reaction to this idea that brains can change? New neuroscience breakthroughs are showing us just how, quote unquote, plastic the brain is, the London cabbie example being one of the most famous.

Oh, yeah. I mean, everything changes the brain, right? Everything we do, this conversation we're having right now is changing our brain. But I think the problem is, is that especially the NIH and NIDA with the, you know, overseas drugs and research around drugs, they tend to imply that changes that happen in the brain because of drugs make you unable to make a decision. Now, that's not it.

That's not. And we see that in plenty of anecdotes. And I think that the real problem with that message is that it tends to leave people hopeless. So there's a great piece of research out of the University of New Mexico and it basically looked at alcoholics. It tracked them over the course of a year and it found that the number one reason for relapse among alcoholics was believing that they had an incurable disease because that's the problem, right? It's like the NIDA is saying, hey, this is a disease, but oh, by the way, we don't have a cure for it. And that leaves people hopeless.

And why fight against something if it's not something you can change when the reality is, is that the vast majority of the data suggests that most people who have who have or have had a substance addiction, they get over it over time. And a lot of that occurs due to how the brain changes over from ages 15 to 25. And people, I mean, as simple as it sounds, a lot of people tend to age out of it.

Yeah. And there is a belief that you are captive to your patterns. And yes, you you could just build new neural pathways. Now, old ones, you know, in the book Dopamine Nation by Anna Lempke, she highlights that it's very easy to go back to old addictions if you're not careful. Right.

Once those pathways are built, they're still there and it doesn't take a lot to dust them off. But you could build new exciting ones with and the best example of this is you could walk into any room and five people say, hey, what is one food that when you smell it, you do not want it because you threw up when you're and all of a sudden you have an association. Right. So for me, it was like breakfast sausages.

Right. Just so happened, I used to love them, ate too many when I was 10 years old, didn't have a great experience afterwards. And for literally the next decade, if I smelled breakfast sausages, I had to leave the room. Now, that's irrational to someone that didn't have that experience, but it took a while to build a new neuro pathway. Michael, apply that to what you've learned in the book and you talk about in the book Scarcity Brain.

Well, I think I think the number one driver of behavior is our environment. So let's go back to that example I gave about soldiers in Vietnam. Like, why did they stop using drugs? Well, because their environment radically changed.

Right there. The reason that they were using drugs in the first place was removed. And so as part of this book, I traveled to Iraq, which didn't have a drug problem. And then because of the country was destabilized and Syria fell and started shuttling in this drug called Captagon, which is analogous to methamphetamine, you start to see addiction rise. And most of the thinkers in that country say, you know, the reason we're having this problem is because you have a lot of people who have gone through psychological trauma due to war. Number two is that they don't have a lot of ways to deal with that that are productive. And then three, we have this sudden abundance of a substance that can allow them to escape from their problems, at least in the short term. And so I think the message for the average person is that if you have a addiction, you need to ask, OK, well, why am I doing this thing in the first place?

What is the real underlying reason? And then you need to start to work on solving that. And I don't think that's going to be easy.

Right. Everyone wants to hit the easy button. And it would be wonderful if we had an easy button out of addiction. But the reality is that we don't. You have to make some hard choices. You're going to have to go through some hard situations. But on the other side of that is growth. And that is kind of the universal message in my work is that oftentimes you have to go through short term discomfort in order to get a sort of greater long term benefit. That applies to everything that applies to raising children, that applies to marriage, that applies to going through a career path and coming out the top of your company. And for some reason, we think that that just doesn't apply to certain things in life, like substance use.

Yet. So let's talk through some of the practical kind of things that you recommend people do and you get into this in the later on in the book here. And you talk it's broken into different categories, happiness, information, stuff. And so for someone that I mean, obviously read the book and they'll get the information. But what was one of the you know, when you start to write a book, I'm sure you have some idea in your head of what you're going to discover or how you're going to go. What was one of the big surprises that really opened your eyes in researching this book? Because you do such thorough, in-depth research where you were so shocked or something you previously believed was challenged and you have one hundred eighty different perspective when it comes to addiction and what you call the scarcity brain. I think addiction was a big one.

I mean, we've talked about that. I think that honestly, it was this scarcity loop because the reason I started on this path in the first place is noticing that. People play slot machine. I live in Las Vegas and there's slot machines everywhere and people play them around the clock. And it's just so irrational.

And you go, why are people doing that? And when this leads me to the casino laboratory, it makes you realize, oh, my gosh, there are places where people who are very, very bright sit around thinking about how can I get people to do this behavior that I know is going to drain them of their money in the long run. And so the realization that in many ways we have the chips stacked against us.

Now, that doesn't mean we're helpless. But we do live in a world where technology has advanced at such a rate that it is harder than ever to, I think, avoid some of these bad behaviors and the behaviors are worse. So, for example, with addictive substances, now that you see fentanyl being put in everything, that's when you really see the death rate over addictions spike. And so we kind of live in a world where everything is faster, everything is stronger, everything is more easily available. Yeah.

And it's I mean, the social media companies also have groups of very, very smart people that sit around and say, how do I get a seven year old addicted to a screen? Right. Which is really scary and sick when you think about it. So let me ask you, Michael, you also have an entire chapter that you dedicate here talking about trying to actually have a note here.

It's like not a Benedictine monk, something of that. Right. If I'm remembering correctly. Yeah. Yeah. Can you can you walk our audience through that?

Yeah. So I I got interested in the topic of happiness. And the reason I got interested in this is that I'm a science journalist. And so I keep tabs on all the science and the science on happiness is always changing. What makes people happy, what you have to do to be happy. And as a result, you know, we have all these messages from different scientists saying, oh, you must meditate. You must keep a gratitude journal.

You must have X amount of friends and spend Y amount of times with them. But I come across this research on Benedictine monks who they live a life that is totally opposite that. Right. They're up at 3 a.m. to pray in the chapel and they go in seven times for prayer a day. They do hard labor for four hours a day. They don't eat too much. They don't own anything. They don't talk to each other all that much. They're not that social. And yet the research on them suggests that they are significantly happier than the average person.

And so I wanted to know why. And so I went I spent a week at a Benedictine monastery in New Mexico outside of Silver City and lived with these guys, worked with them, prayed with them, ate with them, did everything they did. And I think my takeaway from that is that, you know, we live in a world where we're always trying to chase the next thing that's going to make us happy. And we often think that it's going to be the purchase or the raise or, you know, the promotion at work or once we get married, now everything's going to be perfect. And I think that these Benedictine monks taught me that really what makes people happy is finding something higher than yourself and letting that guide you, which often leads you to help others to realize that you're not the center of the universe and to take actions that ultimately help the world around you to do the next right thing. So are you alluding to kind of just at the very least, I mean, I'm very religious, but just a transcendent, that something is above you, that it's not as introspective and it's more duty bound and that you're trying to aim for something higher? Yeah, I think that when you look at what gives humans meaning and gives humans a deeper reward, it does tend to be things that are hard, that take work, that take effort. So for these monks, you know, they're subverting everything in their life to worshiping God and trying to get closer to God. And I don't know if that's the path for everyone, but I do think that you have to subvert yourself in some way and help others, because that's another thing that these monks are doing a lot of. And so I think that really living a good life really does come down to, am I helping others? Am I realizing that I'm not the center of the universe?

And am I not thinking that happiness is going to be found in the next drink or the next meal or the next time I purchase a new car? Those sort of acts and instead focusing on others. I want to read this from the book, page 261. My first day was followed by more of the same, wake early, go to the chapel, eat a meal, break, go to chapel, eat a meal, break, do work, break, go to chapel, eat a meal, go to chapel, sleep. I found something like serenity in the repetition. I felt calmer and more connected, not socially, but to myself. Living that schedule also gave me more respect for the monks here. So Michael, what I'm going to do is I'm going to ask you actually to compare and contrast the feeling you had with the monks to the feeling you had in the Alaskan wilderness when you wrote Comfort Crisis. What similarities, differences, and lessons do you think you could pick from both? Because those are two very unusual experiences that actually might have a lot in common. That's a really great question.

I think the feelings were honestly very similar and the reality is that it all came down to the fact that it wasn't exactly easy. The place I'm staying, it's cold. I'm not eating a lot while I'm there. I'm having to do physical labor and I'm spending time with people.

Now the monks, I only had a handful of hours that I could talk to them, but I'm at least with other people and talking to other people. I think that's a great lesson. I talked to someone the other day who told me they had taken this four week vacation to Spain. Two of the weeks they did the Camino in Santiago, they walked the Camino hard, they're carrying all their stuff. Two weeks they went to Ibiza at this really nice resort and she looked back and said, those two weeks on the Camino where I was actually having to do something that was challenging, that I was in nature, that I was present, that I wasn't focused on my cell phone the entire time, that I actually had to work to get the things that I enjoyed. Those were far better than when I went to the resort and could just hit a button and a cocktail appears or I can check my email 50 times a day. And so I think that that is kind of the thread between those two experiences. It's against how every marketing campaign in America works, but it's 100%. It's paradoxical when you think about it, which is you actually have to work harder, you actually might be happy.

The book is Scarcity Brain by Michael Easter and also check out Comfort Crisis. Plus we're going to be inviting members to Zoom calls with me starting very soon, so do not miss out. Help keep us uncensored by providing you with new content daily by becoming a member.

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That is members.charliekirk.com. Last part of the book is what we do now. Michael riff on that for a little bit. What do we do now? Well, we live in a world where this scarcity loop that I talked about I think has really captured us in a lot of ways. The upside is that you can get out of it. So really, the first step is becoming aware of it. Realizing that, oh, this is why I fall into these behaviors because I'm falling into this loop that is a sort of ancient part of the human brain. It's sort of wired into us.

It used to help our ancestors find food. And then two is that you can either change or remove any of the three parts of the loop. So you can change or remove the opportunity. You can change or remove the unpredictable rewards. You can change or remove the quick repeatability.

So I'll give you a couple of examples. Quick repeatability, simply slowing down your ability to do a behavior that you don't want to do. It tends to reduce the amount that you do the behavior. So a great one is shopping. So the average person today owns 10,000 items at least in their home. And one of the reasons for this is that if you want to buy something now, you can do it immediately. Whereas even 20 years ago, you had to get in a car, you had to go down to the store, you had to walk the aisles, you had to do all these things. So I think even if you're having problems with buying too much online, simply setting a boundary that says, Okay, I'm only going to purchase things in person. And just having that pause and the effort of having to go to the store will reduce your buying frequency. And I lay out all different ways that you can use that you can alter this loop to whether it's eat less, spend less time on social media, get a hold of your finances, buy less stuff, all these different ways that you can flip it to do something good.

It's the opposite of every one of these like self help people. So you need more, you need extra, you have the opposite. Talk about gear versus stuff.

I found this interesting. There's so there's basically four reasons that people buy stuff. The first is because we're using it as a tool. The second is because it gets a status.

So for example, no one buys a Rolex watch to know what time it is right. The third is because it makes us feel like we belong. Because you buy a certain item that allows you to fit in with a group and then four is that we're bored. So you see a lot of modern purchases simply being I'm on the couch, I'm bored, I don't know what to do.

I open Instagram, I get an ad for this perfect product that fits me and I think I need to buy it. But by taking the lens of purchases, and this really helped me reframe what I buy, thinking in terms of gear, which is items of purpose to complete a task, right? Gear is something that you buy so you can do something with it. There's an end game, there's an outcome. Rather than stuff, which stuff is just stuff you buy, you know, you don't know why you buy it, you buy it to fit in, you buy it because it makes you cool, you buy it because you're bored. So framing your purchases through gear rather than stuff I think can be a good way to align whether you're spending your money in a way that is going to actually improve your life rather than just lead you with more stuff and less money in your bank account. So in closing here, you know, we talk on this show a lot about legislation.

Is there anything in all your research that you've done? Is there anything that legislatively you think you could be done? You know, mental health crisis, you know, social media restriction time?

I know you probably don't get too much into that. But is there anything that just is glaring and obvious in your opinion, where like, if America could come together, both sides together and do X, the country would be better to help solve some of these problems? I think we need a lot more clarity on how, whether applications or industries that use this scarcity loop, how they are using it.

I think that having that clarity would be good to know. So I'll give you an example. You know, everyone likes to criticize the casino and the gaming industry. But the reality is, is that the gaming industry is highly, highly regulated.

Yes, it is. There's all these things that you could do to a slot machine to make it more addictive, but they can't do it because the government goes, okay, like, let's keep some reins on this. But that doesn't happen with social media. And if you look at the rise, especially in teens and youth with mental health problems, I think you see a very, very strong correlation to social media. And that just goes back to how teen brains are changing. And so I think trying to get some rails on how, why, when, where teens can use social media, I think that's probably a smart thing to do if we want the mental health of our country to improve over time. I totally agree. I mean, if a liquor company was targeting kids deliberately, we'd care.

But we basically don't care if Facebook is doing it. It's strange. Scarcity brain, Michael Easter. Great. Thank you so much, Michael.

Our whole team is reading it. We'll have you back on. And I hope there's a third book that we can highlight at some point.

And I'll also replug Comfort Crisis. That is a great, great book. I got to tell you, Michael, thanks so much. Hey, thanks for having me on again, man.

It's great to see you. Thank you. Thanks so much for listening. Everybody email us as always. Freedom at Charlie Kirk dot com. Thanks so much for listening.

And God bless for more on many of these stories and news you can trust. Go to Charlie Kirk dot com. When I grow up, I want to be offended by my co-workers and walk around the office on eggshells and have my words policed by H.R. words like grandfather peanut gallery. Long time no see.

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