Now, are all the traitors present? Let's get started, shall we? From rags to riches. I'm so sick of this. Working like a dog and being treated worse. Yorkshire to New York. Poor climbers, you and me. A life dedicated to revenge. Let's make this an occasion to remember. A woman of substance on Channel 4. Stream now. Do you want to know what it's like to hang out with MS-13, El Salvador? how the Russian mafia fought

the Russian mafia fought battles all over Brooklyn in the 1990s? What about that time I got lost in the Burmese jungle hunting the world's biggest meth lab? I'm Sean Williams. And I'm Danny Gold, and we're the host of the Underworld podcast. We're journalists that have traveled all over, reporting on dangerous people and places.

And every week will be bringing you a new story about organized crime from all over the world.

Available wherever you get your podcasts.

Have you ever noticed how the wellness industry repeats marketing strategies that have been used

by the fashion and diet book industries seemingly forever?

They didn't need to reinvent the wheel considering how embedded the drive to seek novelty

is in human psychology and behavior, so they just mimic it.

The habit of continually seeking new things is tied into our brain's dopamine system, which acts as a prediction and reward circuit.

Interestingly, this circuit responds more to the anticipation of reward than the reward itself. New things like a new diet or a new clothing

line trigger dopamine spikes because they represent potential. Sometimes called the wanting versus liking

distinction. We can sum it up like this. We want new things far more intensely

than we end up liking them. That's because humans rapidly habituate to stimuli. Familiar things

lose their psychological signal strength. Last year's diet feels stale, even if it worked.

And those clothes in the closet are still in great shape, but they don't give us that rush anymore.

There's a technical term for this.

I love it.

It's called hedonic adaptation.

Basically, we return to a baseline satisfaction level surprisingly quick after we gain something new.

Something novel resets the baseline by offering a fresh frame until it rapidly peters out,

and then we go and we seek more novelty.

Behavioral researchers call this the fresh start effect. People

...