The Joe Rogan Experience #2039 – Michael Easter
In episode #2039 of The Joe Rogan Experience, Michael Easter discusses the addictive nature of slot machines and their psychological grip on people. Living in Las Vegas, he explores why people can’t moderate their gambling habits, despite knowing that “The House Always Wins.” He uncovers how slot machines use a “scarcity loop” of opportunity, unpredictable rewards, and quick repeatability to hook users. This loop also extends beyond gambling to social media, gig economy jobs, and even personal finance apps. Easter delves into evolutionary psychology, explaining how behaviors once critical for survival, like unpredictably finding food, now manifest in modern-day addictions, from slot machines to Uber incentives. He also highlights how this system is exploited by tech companies to captivate users in various industries.
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MICHAEL: So, I live in Las Vegas, which happens to be a good town to think about: why the hell can’t we moderate? Right? Now, when you live there, you see all kinds of wild stuff, right? But to me, what’s always been the strangest has been the slot machines. You’ve spent time in Vegas?
JOE: Yeah.
MICHAEL: It’s like they’re in the casinos, obviously, but they’re in the gas stations, the grocery stores, the restaurants, the bars, and the airport. And they’re not sitting empty. People are playing them around the clock.
So, I’m like, what the hell is up with that?
JOE: It just plays on your dopamine.
MICHAEL: Well, and it doesn’t make sense because everyone knows The House Always Wins.
JOE: Yeah. It’s not, uh, it’s like a numbing thing. They just sit there and press the buttons and press the buttons and press the buttons and hope they make money.
MICHAEL: Yeah. So, I decide, all right, like, I’m going to find out how a slot machine works. Why do people get hooked on slot machines? That’s the question. And so I go into journalist anti-gambling researcher mode, and I start making calls.
Now, the first group of people that I call turns out to be a dead end. So, who I call are people who are effectively anti-gambling researchers. Okay, so these are researchers who have a very anti-gambling bent. And they tell me all sorts of strange things. They’re like, “Oh, it’s because casinos don’t have clocks.” They’re like these myths we’ve all heard: casinos don’t have clocks, slot machines only play in the key of C, which relaxes people and relaxes their wallet, casinos don’t have any right angles, and right angles activate the rational part of your brain.
And so I go, okay. And then I go to an actual casino, and there are right angles everywhere, right? The screens are right angles, uh, no clocks, but guess who else doesn’t have clocks? Like, most businesses, right? There’s not clocks in Costco.
JOE: Most restaurants…
MICHAEL: Right? It’s not normal to have clocks.
And then, for the audio, the key of C, I call up a slot machine audio composer. Now, this is a real job you can have in Las Vegas, right? And this guy goes, “Where the hell did you hear that? I use all keys.”
So, I realized that the problem that I’m encountering is that I have called people who want us to stop gambling. I need to call people who want us to start gambling, right? I got to follow the money on this.
So, long story short, I talk to a handful of people in town, and this leads me to this casino on the outskirts of Las Vegas. It’s brand new. It’s cutting-edge, but the catch is that it’s not open to the public. So, this place is basically a living, breathing casino, but it’s used entirely for research on human behavior.
Cutting-Edge Casino Research
JOE: What?
MICHAEL: Yeah.
JOE: Really? Who funds that?
MICHAEL: Seventy-three different companies. So, there’s gambling companies that are involved, but also a bunch of big tech companies who are on the Fortune 500.
So, I go there, and it’s, like I said, it’s a legit casino.
The Casino
JOE: How big is it?
MICHAEL: It’s, um, I would say, I mean, it’s not the size of a normal casino, like a sprawling strip one. It’s probably about the size of everything you have here, maybe a little bigger. But they have hotel rooms.
JOE: It’s like a Walmart, that big?
MICHAEL: Yeah, it’s in this big, um, office building, basically. And they’re basically looking at how everything that happens in a casino affects human behavior. So, how does room design and the technology we’re using in rooms affect behavior? How does betting with, say, an AI bot versus an actual human impact betting?
Now, when I’m there, I meet with, to bring it back to slot machines, I meet with a guy who designs slot machines. So, the reason that these things are so entrancing to people, it tracks back to this behavior loop that I call the Scarcity Loop. And this is basically a loop—looping behavior—that when people do it, they tend to get hooked on it very easily.
So, it’s got three parts: it’s got opportunity, unpredictable rewards, and quick repeatability.
The Scarcity Loop
- Opportunity: You have an opportunity to get something of value. So, in the case of a slot machine, it’s money, right?
- Unpredictable Rewards: You know you’re going to get the thing of value if you continue the behavior, but you don’t know when, and you don’t know how valuable it’s going to be. So, with a slot machine game, when those reels are spinning, you could win nothing, you could basically lose your money, you could win a couple of dollars, or you could win a life-changing amount of money. There’s a fantastic range of things that could happen.
- Quick Repeatability: You can immediately repeat the behavior. So, with slot machines, the average player plays about 16 games a minute. And that’s different from all other habits—like most habits, you don’t immediately repeat them.
Now, the reason that people are so interested in this, companies like casinos, is because this sort of three-part system I just laid out can get people to repeat a lot of other behaviors too. So, it’s in social media, it’s in sports gambling, uh, it’s in dating apps. Even companies, uh, like gig work economy companies, are using it to get people to work longer hours. It’s being leveraged by the financial industry and a lot of personal finance apps, and on and on and on.
It’s become—it’s embedded in so many of the products, even institutions, that influence people’s lives because it is so captivating to us. We tend to get hooked on this three-part system.
Unpredictable Rewards
JOE: And so, when you’re talking about, like, gig economy stuff, like, uh, you’re talking about, like, Uber and things along those lines?
MICHAEL: Yeah, driving for Uber…
JOE: And so, how do they use that?
MICHAEL: So, things like, um, unpredictable rewards get put up in front of a driver to get them to drive into an area of town that Uber might want them to be in.
There’s also…
JOE: Unpredictable rewards?
MICHAEL: Yeah, so, like, you might get, um, say, “Oh, if you drive here, you’ll make x amount more money,” right? It sort of pops up unpredictably.
JOE: Also, they’ll incentivize you. They offer you more money to go to a different part of town?
MICHAEL: Yeah. Or dropping in cues, saying like, “Hey, this is where we are. You’re going to make more money today,” type of thing.
JOE: Oh.
MICHAEL: Um, if you think about it in terms of something like social media, it’s like the opportunity is to get, say, status or likes or whatever it is, right? And then, say, a person posts, and then the rewards become totally unpredictable, right? You might get two likes, which is like, “Eh, that wasn’t great,” or you might get hundreds of likes, which is like, “Oh my God, that’s amazing.” It’s the same exact architecture as a slot machine. And then you check and recheck, you’re repeating the behavior all day.
And, um, this loop, the reason that we’re so attracted to it, it goes back to evolution.
Repeat Searching
So, I talked to this, uh, once I learned how this kind of loop pulls people in—it’s really what slot machines lean on to get people to repeat the behavior—I called up a psychologist. He’s this old-school dude from the University of Kentucky who’s been studying psychology since the late ’60s. His name is Thomas Zentall.
And, um, he basically explained this likely goes back to evolution and finding food. So, if you think about hunter-gatherers, the thing you have to do every day is find food. But it’s random whether you’re going to find the food or not. So, you go to point A, you don’t find any food, you go to point B, you don’t find any food, you go to point C, no food. Point D: “Oh my God, it’s a giant berry bush full of food,” and that saves your life, right?
So, that search, that repeat searching, really pushes us and grabs our attention because it used to help us survive in the past.
JOE: Oh.
MICHAEL: And there’s even—I mean, if you want to get down the rabbit hole in it—there’s even, um, things like what are called near misses in slot machines, which is when you kind of almost win, right? You might get…
JOE: Two lemons…
MICHAEL: Yeah. Two lemons…
JOE: Two lemons, and the other lemon just barely passes by.
MICHAEL: Yeah, barely passes by. Or losses disguised as wins. Do you know what those are?
JOE: No.
MICHAEL: So, that’s when, uh, let’s say you bet a dollar, and you “win” fifty cents. So, you don’t lose everything, but you win fifty cents. Now, we tend to react to that as if we’re winning when they study, uh, gamblers. And that’s also embedded in the search for food, right?
You might—let’s say you’re hunting, and you’re like, “Oh, we got a big kill on our hands,” and then you whiff, and the animal’s on its way. It’s like, damn, that is a near miss.
Um, or you come up on a berry bush, and let’s say it took you—you burned 500 calories looking for this thing, and it only contains 200 calories worth of food. And so all of these sort of evolutionary parts of this system that we used to fall into as we evolved are now in slot machines, and in turn, now being used by a lot of big tech companies and different industries.
JOE: So, they just trick the human reward system?
MICHAEL: Yeah, yeah. It mimics these sort of ancient pathways, more or less.
JOE: And gambling, to me, is one of the most peculiar ones because, um, it’s so overwhelming for people that are hooked on gambling. It’s such a mental health issue, it’s such an addiction. And when you see people that are just, like, chasing it and they just can’t stop, it’s like… I always wonder, like, what pathway is being hijacked? Like, what is it about human beings that makes them want to risk, like, literally all of their money on a roll of the dice or on a spin of the roulette wheel or on a hand of cards? Like, what is that?
Pigeons and Gambling
MICHAEL: Yeah, this is a good question. Now, this Zentall guy that I told you about, he does a lot of research on pigeons. So, he can basically turn a pigeon into a degenerate gambler in like two minutes.
JOE: A pigeon?
MICHAEL: A pigeon dude…
JOE: That sounds cruel…
MICHAEL: Yeah, I said the same thing when I was talking to him.
JOE: Like, “Isn’t life hard enough as a pigeon?”
MICHAEL: Yeah… he, uh, so he’ll get pigeons who, you know, they live in these cages, and he’ll give them the option to play a game where every other peck they give, say, 15 units of food. So, peck—no food. Peck—15 units of food. But then they have an option to play a second game, and this second game is very much a gambling game, in that they get food about every fifth peck, but it’s random, right? So, you could go “peck-peck, food,” “peck-peck, no food,” “peck-peck-peck, food,” right? So, it’s just kind of like a slot machine.
And they get more food playing the gambling game. They get 20 units. If you do the math, it makes a lot more sense to play the game where you get food every other peck—it adds up to a lot more food. But what he finds is that the pigeons consistently play the slot machine game. 97% of pigeons will choose that game.
JOE: But they’re not risking anything, right?
MICHAEL: They’re not risking anything, right. But it’s still—
JOE: How’s that gambling?
MICHAEL: They’re still putting in the effort to play the game.
JOE: Yeah, but that seems obvious. Like, the rewards are greater, so they know that if they just keep pecking—it doesn’t hurt to peck—they’re going to get a bigger supply of food.
MICHAEL: They don’t get a bigger supply, though. Because they’ll get 15 every other peck versus 20 every fifth peck. So, if you put in 100 pecks, you’re going to get more food playing the one where you get food every other time.
JOE: Right. But it’s still not gambling, because the pigeon just sees a larger pile of food with more pecks, so it just wants the larger pile of food. So, it just keeps going. It’s not like they’re risking all their food.
MICHAEL: Right, right.
JOE: So I don’t think it’s a gambling thing.
MICHAEL: Well, the larger pile of food comes from the predictable reward.
Every other peck?
JOE: Yes, right. If you do every other peck, right?
MICHAEL: Yeah, every other peck is how you would get the biggest pile of food.
JOE: But you don’t get the biggest pile in one jump, one dump. Right, the one where it’s every five, that’s a larger quantity of food.
MICHAEL: Yeah, so, you’d get 20.
JOE: Yeah, see, that’s not gambling.
MICHAEL: Why is it not gambling?
JOE: Because it’s just more effort. It’s more effort to get a bigger pile.
MICHAEL: So, he would argue that…
JOE: They’re just dumb. They just can’t say, “Oh, it’s every other one.” All they see is that they’re getting, you know, whatever, 15 units versus 20. Is that what it was?
MICHAEL: Yeah. Yeah, 15 versus 20.
JOE: All they know is 20 units. Like, “Oh, this one gives 20 units, just keep pecking.” I don’t think they’re smart enough to figure that out. I think they’re just like, “Keep going, keep going… oh, 20!” Keep going, keep going, 20! But there’s not a risk.
MICHAEL: So, here’s what I’ll tell you. He would argue, and a lot of biologists would, they would say, you know, there’s this theory called Optimal Foraging Theory. It says that animals will expend the least amount of energy to get the most amount of food, right? So, over time, they’re expending a lot less energy to get more food.
Why?
And so, here’s where it gets interesting, though, is that, to sort of bring it back to why do people fall into this—why would someone bet their entire fortune on a roulette wheel or whatever?—is that when he puts pigeons in a sort of wild environment—so, where he keeps them is in these pigeon cages, where they kind of live alone, it’s, you know, a basic cage. When he puts them in a cage that mimics the wild—so, it’s this giant cage that has, like, roofs, it’s got cliffs, it’s got other pigeons, it’s very much like they would have to live in the wild—and then he throws them back to choose a game, they start choosing the optimal game.
JOE: Oh, interesting…
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Michael Easter is a health and fitness writer, professor, and author of several books. His latest is Scarcity Brain: Fix Your Craving Mindset & Rewire your Mindset to Thrive with Enough. https://eastermichael.com
