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There's a great experiment where rats were given a lever to press for cocaine
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and after learning that it releases a lot of dopamine, the rats will [music] press that lever till exhaustion or
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death, which is essentially the model of addiction that we see in humans. But if
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the cocaine is then removed, eventually they won't press the [music] lever anymore. Now, if that same rat after a
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period of time is then exposed to a very painful foot shock, the first thing the
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rat will do is run over and start pressing that lever again. And that's really powerful because it shows that
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when individuals are under extreme stress, [music] they are more vulnerable to going back to compulsive
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overconumption of our drug of choice because their brain has already encoded using these high dopamine rewards as a
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way to get out of that pain. >> Okay. So, what do I need to do to make sure that I can knock the bad habits and
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add some new ones? >> So, first of all, on average, it takes 4 weeks for people to get out of constant
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state [music] of craving. But here's the problem. Our survival depends on figuring out how to live in a world of
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abundance. For example, we're now seeing the drugification of human connection
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through social media, dating apps, and now artificial intelligence designed to flatter, to validate. There's no
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friction there. And [music] so, it's pulling us away from the hard things that we need to be doing in real life to
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cultivate real life relationships. Just we cannot go in that direction because in a world of abundance, we are
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entertaining ourselves to death. Sounds like a good way to go. >> It's really not because the relentless
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pursuit of pleasure leads to anhidonia, [music] the inability to take joy in anything at
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all.