Podcast: Why Your Brain Always Wants More, and How to Fix It

Top researcher Leidy Klotz on overcoming our deepest cognitive bias and redesigning our spaces for peak well-being.

While writing my book Scarcity Brain, I came across the work of a researcher named Leidy Klotz. He’s a professor at UVA and one of the foremost engineers in the world—his work has been published in the top scientific journal Nature, and he has contracts with the World Bank, U.N., and Fortune-500 companies.

Yet one day, his three-year-old son beat him in an engineering problem while the two were playing with Legos. That moment kicked off a decade of research that exposed one of the strongest, most underrated biases in the human brain:

When we want to solve a problem or make an improvement, we almost never subtract. We default to adding—more, more, more—even when addition is not the best answer.

Leidy has thought a lot about the subtle quirks in our thinking and environments that impact us far more than we realize. He’s used that information to help people live longer, and companies make more money more efficiently (all while decreasing burnout).

And he has a new book out—In a Good Place: How the Spaces Where we Live, Work, and Play Can Help Us Thrive.

The book explores how the spaces where we live and work impact our health, lifespan, productivity, and focus.

This episode is for you if you live somewhere, work somewhere, or make decisions. Leidy and I talked about how to design our homes and offices to live better. And, of course, his work on the value of subtraction despite our brains screaming at us to add.

I loved this conversation because it covers two fundamental yet radically transformative things we totally overlook.

Watch the episode here

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Show notes

• Leidy’s new book: In a Good Place: How the Spaces Where we Live, Work, and Play Can Help Us Thrive

• Leidy’s first book: Subtract: The Untapped Science of Less

• Leidy’s Nature paper: People systematically overlook subtractive changes.

• Leidy’s Substack: Less, by Leidy.

• The “Langer-Rodin” Effect: Nursing home residents given the autonomy to make choices about their surroundings—such as caring for their own plants or arranging furniture—were significantly happier and healthier, with some studies showing higher survival rates.

• Read Chapter 4 of my book, Scarcity Brain, to learn more about Leidy’s work and why humans crave more (when, today, more often hurts us).

Have fun, don’t die, live in a good place,

-Michael

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