Michael Easter
Appearances
Habits and Hustle
Episode 397: Michael Easter on The Comfort Crisis: Is Optimizing Life Making Us Weaker?
Totally.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 397: Michael Easter on The Comfort Crisis: Is Optimizing Life Making Us Weaker?
Right. Like absolutely. Even I mean, literally even drug addiction. If you can slow down the delivery that leads people like addiction rates go down.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 397: Michael Easter on The Comfort Crisis: Is Optimizing Life Making Us Weaker?
Yeah, I'll send you a link. So I wrote about it on my newsletter. I'll send you a link to the post. It's called 2%. And so, yeah, I'll send you a link to that. That'll give you all the details.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 397: Michael Easter on The Comfort Crisis: Is Optimizing Life Making Us Weaker?
Yeah, a year tomorrow, actually.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 397: Michael Easter on The Comfort Crisis: Is Optimizing Life Making Us Weaker?
Yeah, well, I think a lot of it goes back to finding pauses. I gave you the one about food. I gave you the one about shopping. Gave you the one about cell phones.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 397: Michael Easter on The Comfort Crisis: Is Optimizing Life Making Us Weaker?
ClearSpace. Yep. It's great. It's great. We actually did, through my newsletter, we did a ClearSpace challenge. I think it was in April where we got... Everyone went on the app and there was like a competition of who could use the apps they had banned the least. And it was awesome. So many people are like, I downloaded this just because I wanted to win the prize.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 397: Michael Easter on The Comfort Crisis: Is Optimizing Life Making Us Weaker?
And it has totally changed my relationship with my phone. It's been awesome.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 397: Michael Easter on The Comfort Crisis: Is Optimizing Life Making Us Weaker?
Totally.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 397: Michael Easter on The Comfort Crisis: Is Optimizing Life Making Us Weaker?
The gambling pigeons. The gambling pigeons. The degenerate gambler pigeons. Yes. So for this book, I talked to this guy whose name is Thomas Zentahl, and he's one of... like the best, most legendary psychologists in the world. So this guy started doing his research like back in the 60s. And in one of his studies, what he did is he would set up this game for pigeons to play.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 397: Michael Easter on The Comfort Crisis: Is Optimizing Life Making Us Weaker?
And so now, I mean, at this point, three years later, we're selling... a lot more per week than we were like even in week three of the release. So it just kind of word of mouth took over.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 397: Michael Easter on The Comfort Crisis: Is Optimizing Life Making Us Weaker?
They could choose from two games. So he would take these pigeons out of their cages. He would put them in this big cage and they could play from two different games. So the first game, they would peck a light and every other peck, they would get a predictable amount of food. So they might get, say, 10 pallets of food or whatever, every other pack.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 397: Michael Easter on The Comfort Crisis: Is Optimizing Life Making Us Weaker?
Now, the second game, they would pack the light, but it was unpredictable about when they would get the food. So it was like a slot machine, right? It's totally random. They pack, they pack, they pack, no food, no food, no food. And then, bam, they would get food, but it would be 15 pallets of food. So it'd be about every fifth pack randomly that they would get this 15 pallets.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 397: Michael Easter on The Comfort Crisis: Is Optimizing Life Making Us Weaker?
Now, if you do the math on this, it makes way more sense to play the first game. Like, you end up with way more food in the long haul, and there's this theory called optimal foraging theory that basically says that all creatures will do whatever they can to get the most amount of resources. Like, you'll just choose the option that gets you the most food, the most whatever.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 397: Michael Easter on The Comfort Crisis: Is Optimizing Life Making Us Weaker?
But 98% of these pigeons chose the gambling game. even though it didn't make any sense. Literally, these pigeons would play the one game, play the second, and they'd be like, oh, this second game, that's what I want to play. And they would just play that even though it's getting them less food.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 397: Michael Easter on The Comfort Crisis: Is Optimizing Life Making Us Weaker?
predictability becomes boring. Yes. And unpredictability is not boring, right? It grabs our attention.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 397: Michael Easter on The Comfort Crisis: Is Optimizing Life Making Us Weaker?
And, uh, the guy, the Thomas and Tom, who I just mentioned his idea, and this is backed by a lot of other people is that the reason we're so interested in unpredictability or the reason that really grabs our attention is because when you think about how humans evolved to find food, it was kind of like that pigeon game, right? It's like, we would have to walk
Habits and Hustle
Episode 397: Michael Easter on The Comfort Crisis: Is Optimizing Life Making Us Weaker?
to one area looking for food, we wouldn't find it. So then we'd walk to another area. No food there either. Then we walk to another area. Oh, no food. Finally, we go to another area and it's like, bing, bing, bing, jackpot. You find all this food, right? But it's totally unpredictable. You never know when you're going to find it. And so it's almost like...
Habits and Hustle
Episode 397: Michael Easter on The Comfort Crisis: Is Optimizing Life Making Us Weaker?
The brain had to almost incentivize falling into this unpredictable scarcity loop reward schedule to grab our attention so we would continue looking for food. Because if you're the type of person who goes, well, we didn't find it in two places, I guess I'll quit. You're going to die. So you really have to keep looking.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 397: Michael Easter on The Comfort Crisis: Is Optimizing Life Making Us Weaker?
And then when you finally find that food, even though you didn't know it was going to be there, it's got to be really exciting. It's like, oh my God, yes, we live. We live to see tomorrow. And then you have to go do the thing over and over again. That's why we will repeat these behaviors ad nauseum.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 397: Michael Easter on The Comfort Crisis: Is Optimizing Life Making Us Weaker?
Yeah, I think you nailed it. And I'll give you another, a follow-up example with the pigeons. Yes. So the pigeons, they live in these like small cages, right? It's like they got enough room, but not a ton. Their life is rather boring. So then when he puts them in this box where they can choose from two games, they all play the gambling game.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 397: Michael Easter on The Comfort Crisis: Is Optimizing Life Making Us Weaker?
Now, what happens though, is that they will take the pigeons and they'll put them in this like giant cage that is meant to mimic like the wild, like a real world that a pigeon would live in the wild where they have to like, they got to go out and forge for their food. They build roost. They interact with other pigeons. Like they're living like a wild life that a pigeon was evolved for. Right.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 397: Michael Easter on The Comfort Crisis: Is Optimizing Life Making Us Weaker?
So they'll let them hang out in there for a while. They'll live there for a while. And then they put them back in the box where they can choose between the two games. And all the pigeons choose the predictable game, the one that makes sense. And so why is that? It's quite the conundrum, right? It's because they have lived a life where they found plenty of stimulation elsewhere, right?
Habits and Hustle
Episode 397: Michael Easter on The Comfort Crisis: Is Optimizing Life Making Us Weaker?
They were living as a pigeon evolved to live. And so I think when you think of humans today, it's like our lifestyles are way different than how humans lived for two and a half million years. We don't have to physically go find food. We don't have to physically work to survive. We're not outside as much. Our social lives have changed.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 397: Michael Easter on The Comfort Crisis: Is Optimizing Life Making Us Weaker?
All these different things have changed that have taken away just tons of stimulation from us. And so without that, we go looking for it elsewhere. We play slot machines. We spend a million hours on Instagram. We go on to Rakuten. Is that what you called it?
Habits and Hustle
Episode 397: Michael Easter on The Comfort Crisis: Is Optimizing Life Making Us Weaker?
No, but we've, you know, we got there. We got where we needed to get. So I love it. Yeah.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 397: Michael Easter on The Comfort Crisis: Is Optimizing Life Making Us Weaker?
Yeah. So instead of like the stimulation that you would get normally hunting and gathering and living outside two million years ago, it's like Rakuten has become that like, oh, here's this new thing, you know?
Habits and Hustle
Episode 397: Michael Easter on The Comfort Crisis: Is Optimizing Life Making Us Weaker?
Yeah. So this is a, I wrote about this in the comfort crisis.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 397: Michael Easter on The Comfort Crisis: Is Optimizing Life Making Us Weaker?
So it's called, the researchers call it prevalence-induced concept change. And what you can really think about it as is problem creep. And it basically explains that as humans experience fewer and fewer problems, we don't actually become more satisfied. We just lower our threshold for what we consider a problem. So we end up with the exact same number of problems.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 397: Michael Easter on The Comfort Crisis: Is Optimizing Life Making Us Weaker?
But over time, as the world has improved, our problems get more hollow, more silly over time. And so it's kind of like the science of first world problems. And they demonstrated this and the researchers were from Harvard and they did a couple studies that were really clever and kind of hilarious to find this.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 397: Michael Easter on The Comfort Crisis: Is Optimizing Life Making Us Weaker?
But yeah, long story short is that people will find problems no matter how good they have it.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 397: Michael Easter on The Comfort Crisis: Is Optimizing Life Making Us Weaker?
Yeah, so the easiest way to think of the scarcity loop, it is, I argue in the book, the most powerful habit loop in the sense that it pushes people into repeat behaviors that they later regret. So the easiest way to understand how it works is to picture a slot machine and why people get hooked on slot machines. So the scarcity loop, it has three parts. It's got opportunity.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 397: Michael Easter on The Comfort Crisis: Is Optimizing Life Making Us Weaker?
Yeah, you know, I think that I have learned, you know, my background is a journalist and it's very easy to try and learn from a screen. You know, like I could read a bunch of studies and anecdotes and whatever, but I've always found that I get the most interesting stuff, the most true stuff, and also stuff that like you wouldn't expect.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 397: Michael Easter on The Comfort Crisis: Is Optimizing Life Making Us Weaker?
Like I've had things that I totally believe to be true, totally reversed because I went to the actual source looking for the information. And so that's ultimately why I travel. is because I just know that I'm going to find the best stuff if I actually go there and talk to people on the ground and also put myself in experiences where I can actually experience what I'm writing about.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 397: Michael Easter on The Comfort Crisis: Is Optimizing Life Making Us Weaker?
That just, I feel like, leads me to write something that's maybe a little more true, at least for me.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 397: Michael Easter on The Comfort Crisis: Is Optimizing Life Making Us Weaker?
I got sober almost 10 years ago.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 397: Michael Easter on The Comfort Crisis: Is Optimizing Life Making Us Weaker?
No, not super long ago. Yeah, I was 28, 37 now. So yeah, I got sober when I was 28. And I think this actually kind of goes into the whole back to the pigeons in the cages thing. It's like, at the time I had this job that was kind of like, yeah, whatever. It wasn't that fulfilling to me. And I've always been someone, you kind of alluded to this, but I've always kind of been someone who likes to,
Habits and Hustle
Episode 397: Michael Easter on The Comfort Crisis: Is Optimizing Life Making Us Weaker?
Oh, thank you.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 397: Michael Easter on The Comfort Crisis: Is Optimizing Life Making Us Weaker?
Go out, learn things, kind of explore the edges. I'm drawn to like intense experiences. And because I just wasn't getting those in my life, I could get them pretty easily through drinking, right? Like on Friday night, I can guarantee that if I were to start drinking, it would be a more unpredictable experience.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 397: Michael Easter on The Comfort Crisis: Is Optimizing Life Making Us Weaker?
Probably crazier night than if I had decided just to sit home and watch Netflix, right? Right. So I was able to get that through drinking. Unfortunately, though, that eventually backfires, right? That works until it doesn't. And when it stops working, it's like really bad. So part of me getting sober was one having to unpack, okay, well, why did you drink like that in the first place?
Habits and Hustle
Episode 397: Michael Easter on The Comfort Crisis: Is Optimizing Life Making Us Weaker?
And then two, once you have that answer, you can start to say, okay, well, where else can you get what you were looking for? Like that underlying thing you were looking for? How can you get that in a way that enhances your life and other people's lives rather than messing up your life and other people's lives?
Habits and Hustle
Episode 397: Michael Easter on The Comfort Crisis: Is Optimizing Life Making Us Weaker?
I mean, so today I do, I spent a lot of time on my newsletter because I've found that it kind of a lot, you know, books are interesting because you basically sit alone in a room for A year or a year and a half and don't talk to anyone and you're alone with your thoughts and you get no feedback and then you kind of just release it and go, here you go.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 397: Michael Easter on The Comfort Crisis: Is Optimizing Life Making Us Weaker?
Whereas the newsletter, I can talk to people in real time, work on things that maybe don't perfectly fit into the narrative of a book. So it gives me a lot more bandwidth and real time stuff. But I will, I probably will do a third book. And I think I want to really dive into mindset in the third book.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 397: Michael Easter on The Comfort Crisis: Is Optimizing Life Making Us Weaker?
So comfort crisis had a lot to do with, you know, physical health, but I kind of want to look at how this idea of the comfort crisis is impacting mindset and resilience and stress tolerance and things like that. So that'll probably be the third book.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 397: Michael Easter on The Comfort Crisis: Is Optimizing Life Making Us Weaker?
Part two is unpredictable rewards. And then part three is quick repeatability. So when you play a slot machine, you have an opportunity to win money, right? But two unpredictable rewards, you don't know when you're going to win money or if you're going to win money, right?
Habits and Hustle
Episode 397: Michael Easter on The Comfort Crisis: Is Optimizing Life Making Us Weaker?
Yeah.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 397: Michael Easter on The Comfort Crisis: Is Optimizing Life Making Us Weaker?
Yeah. I'm going to tell you the whole story because I think it's an amazing story. Yeah. So it starts with this researcher, his name's Lighty Klotz, and he's like this top of the world engineering researcher, basically one of the best in the field. And he's playing Legos with his son and his son is three years old. The kid's name is Ezra. And they're building this Lego bridge.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 397: Michael Easter on The Comfort Crisis: Is Optimizing Life Making Us Weaker?
So they build these two pillars and then they build the span and they connect the two pillars to the span and they realize they have screwed this thing up. So that one pillar is taller than the other. So the span is like Skawampus. It's at an angle, right? So our Mr. PhD smarty pants engineer, he's like, oh, I got the fix for this.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 397: Michael Easter on The Comfort Crisis: Is Optimizing Life Making Us Weaker?
So he turns around, he rifles through the bin of Legos and then he turns back around with the Legos and he realizes his son has solved the problem. So his three-year-old son simply removed Legos from the taller pillar. So he fixed the problem, but he did it in a better way because it was more efficient. It used fewer resources.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 397: Michael Easter on The Comfort Crisis: Is Optimizing Life Making Us Weaker?
And so now they have more Legos that they can build this entire Lego city around the bridge, right? And he realizes, oh my God, like removing these Legos, it didn't even cross my mind to fix the problem. So what he does is... He makes the bridge kind of skwampus again. He starts taking it around the university campus.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 397: Michael Easter on The Comfort Crisis: Is Optimizing Life Making Us Weaker?
Anytime he meets with other professors, he pulls out the two pillars and the span, throws some extra Legos on the table, and he goes, hey, fix this bridge. Every single professor adds Legos to fix the problem. So this makes him realize, okay, maybe there's something here.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 397: Michael Easter on The Comfort Crisis: Is Optimizing Life Making Us Weaker?
Any random game you play on a slot machine, you could lose, you could win like a dollar, or you could win thousands of dollars. There's this insane range of possibilities that can happen from this one behavior. And then three, quick repeatability. Once you finish a game, you can play over, right? And so people play over and over and over.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 397: Michael Easter on The Comfort Crisis: Is Optimizing Life Making Us Weaker?
And long story short, he ends up setting up 12 different experiments where people have to either make an improvement or solve a problem. And in every single experiment, the best, most efficient way to make the improvement or solve the problem is to subtract resources. So you can solve it or make the improvement by adding. You can, but it's always more efficient to subtract.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 397: Michael Easter on The Comfort Crisis: Is Optimizing Life Making Us Weaker?
And what he finds is that every single and every single experiment, people add to fix the problem, to make the improvement. So this basically tells us that humans are wired to add even when it doesn't make sense. We just preferentially overlook subtraction. So it's not that like one is any better than the other, but it just tells us that we don't even think of subtraction.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 397: Michael Easter on The Comfort Crisis: Is Optimizing Life Making Us Weaker?
And by not thinking about that, we're leaving like half the options off the table. And those options are often more efficient. They're often a better use of time, of energy, of resources. And so kind of the takeaway is if you're trying to improve something, if you are trying to solve a problem, you should probably write down, okay, how would I solve this or improve this if I were to subtract?
Habits and Hustle
Episode 397: Michael Easter on The Comfort Crisis: Is Optimizing Life Making Us Weaker?
Because your brain is automatically going to go add, add, add. Can I throw money at this? Can I do X, Y, Z? Can I buy this thing? But often the answer is just to subtract.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 397: Michael Easter on The Comfort Crisis: Is Optimizing Life Making Us Weaker?
Totally. Yeah. And a lot of times, I mean, and unfortunately, a lot of times they're totally wrong. Like, I did this whole series on the newsletter about accuracy of wearables and... You look at the numbers and you're just like, wow, these things are not good at their job.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 397: Michael Easter on The Comfort Crisis: Is Optimizing Life Making Us Weaker?
Yeah, so you can do, if you look at step counts, step counts are anywhere from 200% off to some are like within 10%, but the vast majority are within 20 to 30% off. And they're always, they always overestimate. So if you took, you know, it'll tell you you took 10,000 steps when you only took eight.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 397: Michael Easter on The Comfort Crisis: Is Optimizing Life Making Us Weaker?
But I think where it starts to get really wacky is when you get wearables that score something like sleep or give you like a strain count or something like that for your workouts. Those are I mean, they're basically just making stuff up like it's not it's not good data.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 397: Michael Easter on The Comfort Crisis: Is Optimizing Life Making Us Weaker?
So I live in Las Vegas, which was really kind of the impetus for me to start thinking about this loop, just watching people play slot machines all day long. Because when you look at that behavior, you're like, that doesn't make any damn sense. It's like everyone knows the house always wins in the long run, yet people keep repeating and repeating the behavior.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 397: Michael Easter on The Comfort Crisis: Is Optimizing Life Making Us Weaker?
Well, if you basically look at how they track heart rate through the wrist, they're making generalizations based on your size, based on wrist-based heart rate tracking for a lot of the workout stuff. And that's been proven to be incorrect a lot of the time because there's just so much noise coming through the wrist.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 397: Michael Easter on The Comfort Crisis: Is Optimizing Life Making Us Weaker?
The sleep ones, the algorithms make a ton of assumptions that aren't necessarily true. And the other thing is like, how do you score sleep?
Habits and Hustle
Episode 397: Michael Easter on The Comfort Crisis: Is Optimizing Life Making Us Weaker?
Exactly. So, like, you can't, you know, and if your wearable tells you, oh, you actually, you know what, you only got a 39 out of 100. Like, what are you going to do? Like, oh, I guess you're right, wearable, even though I feel great. Like, I'm going to feel like shit now. Like, come on. You know, it's like...
Habits and Hustle
Episode 397: Michael Easter on The Comfort Crisis: Is Optimizing Life Making Us Weaker?
the technology just really isn't there and frankly i don't know if it'll ever be there because there's so many individual variations i mean like some people can sleep totally fine if they just get six hours a night some people they need consistent eight hours some people sleep better in absolute darkness while other people's act people actually need a little bit of light a little bit of noise in the background like it's just so individual and so by trying to like
Habits and Hustle
Episode 397: Michael Easter on The Comfort Crisis: Is Optimizing Life Making Us Weaker?
put this all in a single number for everyone it just it doesn't make any damn sense like it's better just to do some self-examination be a little bit self-reliant figure out what works for you experiment come to you know find your own buddha out in the sleep universe and then you know do that thing i agree i mean i find there's way too many variables to really be accurate so does that mean you don't wear any of these things now you're not where are you not tracking anything
Habits and Hustle
Episode 397: Michael Easter on The Comfort Crisis: Is Optimizing Life Making Us Weaker?
I'll track steps. Actually, the most accurate step counter you can buy is like a $20 pedometer off of Amazon. Yeah. You wear on your hip like your grandma probably wears when she mall walks. That's about the most accurate you can get. I'm at the point now where I kind of know, did I get enough steps for the day? And that's good.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 397: Michael Easter on The Comfort Crisis: Is Optimizing Life Making Us Weaker?
I know if I worked out, like, you know, there's a lot simpler ways to track this sort of thing that all come down to pen and paper like we were doing before we got all these crazy tech devices.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 397: Michael Easter on The Comfort Crisis: Is Optimizing Life Making Us Weaker?
Yeah. We've, I mean, we've engineered exercise out of our life, really. And I mean, that's, that's progress, right? But progress also has a price.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 397: Michael Easter on The Comfort Crisis: Is Optimizing Life Making Us Weaker?
And it's simply because that three-part system is incredibly powerful at grabbing people's attention and incentivizing this repeat behavior that is fun in the short term, but it's detrimental in the long run. Now, the reason that it's important is, you know, people are probably listening to this going like, I don't play slot machines. Why do I care?
Habits and Hustle
Episode 397: Michael Easter on The Comfort Crisis: Is Optimizing Life Making Us Weaker?
Yep. That's a good way to track your steps. I mean, I've found kind of going back to that subtraction idea that less is probably more when it comes to what you're trying to accomplish. So, I mean, for me personally, it's like I have to get honest with myself and be like, you know, what is your goal? And my goal is to write words that help people live better. And that comes through writing.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 397: Michael Easter on The Comfort Crisis: Is Optimizing Life Making Us Weaker?
So first thing in the morning, I usually wake up pretty early. I don't use an alarm or anything, but I'm usually up really early and I just start writing. I write for, you know, maybe three or four hours a day. Then I usually take my dogs for a walk. I will.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 397: Michael Easter on The Comfort Crisis: Is Optimizing Life Making Us Weaker?
Yeah, it's either for the newsletter or it's books or some other project I'm working on. So I always write every day. I mean, that's my job, right? People are like, oh, you write four hours a day. It's like, yeah, but if I was like, you know, at an auto factory, I'd be making auto parts for eight hours a day. So it's, you know. True.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 397: Michael Easter on The Comfort Crisis: Is Optimizing Life Making Us Weaker?
Yeah, it's ideas come through a lot of different ways. A lot of it is just kind of noticing what's happening in the field and writing about current things happening. A lot of times it's readers will have questions, you know, or I'll write one piece and people will be like, hey, well, what about this thing? It's like, all right, well, that sounds like a topic for the next one. Right.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 397: Michael Easter on The Comfort Crisis: Is Optimizing Life Making Us Weaker?
And luckily, I mean, and anytime I have an idea, I always write it down because ideas are like one of those things that they last for five seconds. And if you don't write them down, they're gone. Totally true. So I always have an idea log. So yeah, I write and I usually walk my dogs. I'll toss on a ruck when I walk the dogs and then...
Habits and Hustle
Episode 397: Michael Easter on The Comfort Crisis: Is Optimizing Life Making Us Weaker?
Once I'm done writing, I kind of reserve the rest of the afternoon for the stuff that's less intellectual lift, you know, responding to emails, doing that sort of stuff. I'll usually work out at some point before dinner and then usually at night I'll like read.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 397: Michael Easter on The Comfort Crisis: Is Optimizing Life Making Us Weaker?
watch some series with my wife whatever we have this um we have this i don't like to talk about this publicly but i'm going to we love the uh we love the real housewives series i don't blame you for not wanting to talk about it i'm just joking which one do you watch Real Housewives of Salt Lake City. That is my jam. So I grew up, I grew up north of Salt Lake City.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 397: Michael Easter on The Comfort Crisis: Is Optimizing Life Making Us Weaker?
And so I've never watched this crap. And then they did a Salt Lake City one. I'm like, I'll watch the first episode. And I got, I just got straight up hooked on that.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 397: Michael Easter on The Comfort Crisis: Is Optimizing Life Making Us Weaker?
Yeah.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 397: Michael Easter on The Comfort Crisis: Is Optimizing Life Making Us Weaker?
Yeah, I didn't think I was the type either, but here I am.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 397: Michael Easter on The Comfort Crisis: Is Optimizing Life Making Us Weaker?
Yeah, that's my mental sludge. I do think it's I do think it's probably good for people if you do a lot of intellectual heady work.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 397: Michael Easter on The Comfort Crisis: Is Optimizing Life Making Us Weaker?
To offset that with something where you just don't have to think. So a lot of people will do like intellectual work all day and then they'll be like, you know what, I'm going to relax with like a really, really dense book. It's like that can sometimes backfire, you know, at least for me, I would try to read this like heavy stuff at night.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 397: Michael Easter on The Comfort Crisis: Is Optimizing Life Making Us Weaker?
The reason this is important is that this three-part system really got sort of revived and put at scale in slot machines in Las Vegas in the 1980s. And then a lot of other industries saw that people would play these machines and lose money. And they were making, the casino industry is making billions of dollars off this thing. And they go, okay, well, how do we do that? What is that?
Habits and Hustle
Episode 397: Michael Easter on The Comfort Crisis: Is Optimizing Life Making Us Weaker?
And I realized, oh, I should probably put that in like the afternoon.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 397: Michael Easter on The Comfort Crisis: Is Optimizing Life Making Us Weaker?
The thing with sleep too, it's like people say, oh, you need to sleep in absolute darkness. It needs to be absolutely silent. I can tell you that our species would have died off if that's what we required to sleep. Like people used to just sleep around the fire, which by the way is bright. There would be people snoring all the time. There's like the wilderness noises the whole time.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 397: Michael Easter on The Comfort Crisis: Is Optimizing Life Making Us Weaker?
Like if we couldn't sleep when it was kind of bright and kind of loud, like we just wouldn't be here. Like people are fine. You'll figure it out.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 397: Michael Easter on The Comfort Crisis: Is Optimizing Life Making Us Weaker?
Yeah, totally. I like the word fragile you used. I mean, in general, I think the more you need in order to do something, the more fragile you are. You know, it's like you should be able to just do a thing without many resources like that's exactly what you're after. And a lot of this stuff borders on superstition. Like to me, you know, you see all these crazy morning routines people have.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 397: Michael Easter on The Comfort Crisis: Is Optimizing Life Making Us Weaker?
They're like, I got to go through 11 steps before I can sit down and work. It's like that to me is no different than a baseball player who stands on the mound and has to like tug their cap three times and then do some weird thing before they'll throw a pitch like is no different.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 397: Michael Easter on The Comfort Crisis: Is Optimizing Life Making Us Weaker?
Totally. Yeah. I think it's like, I think people need to, I think it's worth analyzing what actually is helping being kind of ruthless in that examination.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 397: Michael Easter on The Comfort Crisis: Is Optimizing Life Making Us Weaker?
So, you know, the person with the 11 step routine, if they got ruthless, they might find, you know, maybe like two or three of these things are good, but there's a lot of, there's a lot of stuff that's actually just adding to this burden of like things I have to do. And if I don't, if I don't do them, I feel guilty. I feel like I've lost the magic potion that's going to allow me to do X, Y, Z. So.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 397: Michael Easter on The Comfort Crisis: Is Optimizing Life Making Us Weaker?
How do we do that? And so now you see this three-part scarcity loop being put in a lot of mobile technology. So I would argue that if the average listener wants to pull out their phone and look at their most used apps, I guarantee most of them are going to be using this loop. So think of social media.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 397: Michael Easter on The Comfort Crisis: Is Optimizing Life Making Us Weaker?
That'd be awesome.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 397: Michael Easter on The Comfort Crisis: Is Optimizing Life Making Us Weaker?
Yeah, well, I'll be fine. This is like a tax that my job takes with all the travel. So it is what it is. My gosh.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 397: Michael Easter on The Comfort Crisis: Is Optimizing Life Making Us Weaker?
Well, I'll send you that grayscale one.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 397: Michael Easter on The Comfort Crisis: Is Optimizing Life Making Us Weaker?
Yeah, thanks so much. It's great to be here. Yeah, thank you. Bye. Bye.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 397: Michael Easter on The Comfort Crisis: Is Optimizing Life Making Us Weaker?
It's like you have an opportunity to get a like, a comment, to see something entertaining, but you don't know how many likes you're going to get if you post, right? It could be one or two and you're like, oh, that sucks. That's a loss. Or you could go viral. It's like, oh my God, my life changed. And then you check and recheck, right? It's in dating apps. It's the sort of swipe, swipe, swipe.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 397: Michael Easter on The Comfort Crisis: Is Optimizing Life Making Us Weaker?
Totally. Am I going to get a hit? But it's also in the rise of sports betting on cell phones. It's in, I mean, it's just been placed in so many different areas in our life that we often lose our time, resources and attention to. It's even put in shopping. So like online shopping is really leveraging the loop to get people to buy more stuff they don't need.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 397: Michael Easter on The Comfort Crisis: Is Optimizing Life Making Us Weaker?
Yeah, it went. So the average slot player went from playing 400 games an hour on the handled machines because it's slower, right? You got to pull this clunky handle to playing about 900 games an hour when you could just hit this button repeatedly. So basically doubled. So, yeah, the three things that it needs is the person has to get something that's of value to them.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 397: Michael Easter on The Comfort Crisis: Is Optimizing Life Making Us Weaker?
First of all, it has to be unpredictable, right? If something is predictable, like I'll give you an example of a slot machine. That's kind of a ridiculous example, but it'll help you understand it is if you were to put a dollar in a slot machine and every time you hit the button, you got two dollars. It's like, OK, that would be nice, but it wouldn't be that fun.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 397: Michael Easter on The Comfort Crisis: Is Optimizing Life Making Us Weaker?
I mean, that's basically what a job is, right? It's like a basic labor job. Like I pull this hand, it's like working in a factory. I pull this handle and I get a predictable amount of money for the act. That is a job. So you need to have that unpredictability. And then third, to your point, the faster you can deliver and repeat the behavior, the more likely someone is to get hooked on it.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 397: Michael Easter on The Comfort Crisis: Is Optimizing Life Making Us Weaker?
So for example, like buying a house, that has a certain amount of unpredictability too, right? If you're looking at it as an investment. But no one gets hooked on buying houses because, you know, you're going to own the house for like 10 years. So you need the speed, the faster.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 397: Michael Easter on The Comfort Crisis: Is Optimizing Life Making Us Weaker?
Basically, as a general rule, the faster you can repeat behavior that you get something good from, the more likely you are to repeat it.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 397: Michael Easter on The Comfort Crisis: Is Optimizing Life Making Us Weaker?
Yeah, it's like so dopamine sort of drives is the wanting element of it makes you want to do the behavior. And then there's a different system that delivers the reward. That's called the liking system.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 397: Michael Easter on The Comfort Crisis: Is Optimizing Life Making Us Weaker?
I have heard of them, but I don't know a ton about them. Tell me.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 397: Michael Easter on The Comfort Crisis: Is Optimizing Life Making Us Weaker?
Totally.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 397: Michael Easter on The Comfort Crisis: Is Optimizing Life Making Us Weaker?
Exactly. It's still exciting. I'll say two things about that. One is there's another website and app called Taimu. It's this like direct buy from China website. That site is like the crystal meth of shopping. It's like you go on the site and you get literally this wheel like you would see in a casino where you spin it and that determines your discount.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 397: Michael Easter on The Comfort Crisis: Is Optimizing Life Making Us Weaker?
Sometimes they'll even pop up with a slot machine where you play it and then it tells you, oh, you're going to get this discount. And it's also on a timer. So that incentivizes speed. They're like, you're going to get this free gift, but you got to buy something within five minutes. So now it's like the speed is on. It is just like, it's out of control. It's completely ridiculous, but it works.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 397: Michael Easter on The Comfort Crisis: Is Optimizing Life Making Us Weaker?
Like this company went from nothing to like being this giant online retailer.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 397: Michael Easter on The Comfort Crisis: Is Optimizing Life Making Us Weaker?
Oh yeah. Costco's good with this.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 397: Michael Easter on The Comfort Crisis: Is Optimizing Life Making Us Weaker?
Yeah. Okay. So I don't think people do anything that is completely irrational. There's always some benefit we get from these behaviors. So take buying stuff. That's fun as hell in the short term. You're like, oh, this is great. I got my, I just scratched off 20%. I'm going around the store. I'm throwing stuff in my shopping cart. I'm like, I'm going to look amazing in this.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 397: Michael Easter on The Comfort Crisis: Is Optimizing Life Making Us Weaker?
Everyone's going to love me. You buy it. You're like, oh God, that was so much fun. And then you get home though, and you're like, why did I do that? So the point I'm trying to make is that we often, when we get ourselves in trouble, is that we choose these sort of short-term rewards at the expense of long-term growth, long-term good decision-making.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 397: Michael Easter on The Comfort Crisis: Is Optimizing Life Making Us Weaker?
Like we're very much wired to look to the short-term for satisfaction. And, you know, part of what I argue, a lot of my work looks into sort of the bigger why we do that. And I think a lot of these sort of quirks that we have today, I think they go back to evolution and how in the past, you know, to survive, you just had to do the next thing that was going to get you a benefit. Right.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 397: Michael Easter on The Comfort Crisis: Is Optimizing Life Making Us Weaker?
We like didn't make sense to think long term in the past. Like you were just trying to survive. You're trying to get food. You're trying to keep your kids alive. Right. You're trying to procreate like you just needed to do the next thing that was going to give you a reward.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 397: Michael Easter on The Comfort Crisis: Is Optimizing Life Making Us Weaker?
And in today's age, with all the opportunities we have to have fun in the short term, I think that's not always the thing that leads us into long term places we want to be.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 397: Michael Easter on The Comfort Crisis: Is Optimizing Life Making Us Weaker?
Yeah, well, I can tell you ways to stop that sort of short-term bad decision-making, and then I'll give you kind of a larger, more existential answer. So in the short term, I think because we know that speed is such a driver of these decisions we later regret, I think if you can figure out a way to slow down a behavior, that can be a really great way to basically stop it.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 397: Michael Easter on The Comfort Crisis: Is Optimizing Life Making Us Weaker?
Yeah. Well, we'll have to talk about that.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 397: Michael Easter on The Comfort Crisis: Is Optimizing Life Making Us Weaker?
So if you think about online shopping, even something as simple as like, okay... I got a rule for myself. I'm going to put this thing in my cart and then I got to wait 48 hours, 72 hours. And then I'm going to come back to it in 48 hours or 72 hours and say, okay, do I really want this thing? Now I found personally, literally probably 80, 90% of the time, I'm like,
Habits and Hustle
Episode 397: Michael Easter on The Comfort Crisis: Is Optimizing Life Making Us Weaker?
I don't actually need those shoes. I don't actually need that new workout gizmo. Like you just, you don't actually need it. Right. And so I think that can cut it down, but you can apply this to all sorts of things. I mean, even like even food and eating junk food, like getting junk food in a place where there's a long barrier to entry to getting it, that'll slow down how much junk food you eat.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 397: Michael Easter on The Comfort Crisis: Is Optimizing Life Making Us Weaker?
All right. We're starting.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 397: Michael Easter on The Comfort Crisis: Is Optimizing Life Making Us Weaker?
Like if you just like don't have it in the house, that's a lot easier to not eat it. Right. financial decisions too. I mean, there's, you can apply this to a lot of different ways and even like cell phones. So there's this there's this app I love called clear space. And what it does is you, you choose the apps that you want to put a limit on. Okay.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 397: Michael Easter on The Comfort Crisis: Is Optimizing Life Making Us Weaker?
So let's say I like select, all right, I want to put a limit on Instagram. Once I click Instagram, it's going to pop up and it's going to say, do you actually want to use Instagram? Because most of the time it's just like this reflexive thing, right? We just pull out and pick the app that we use too much. Yeah.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 397: Michael Easter on The Comfort Crisis: Is Optimizing Life Making Us Weaker?
I like it. Awesome. Well, I'm glad to be here. Thank you for having me.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 397: Michael Easter on The Comfort Crisis: Is Optimizing Life Making Us Weaker?
And then if you say yes, it puts you through like a 10, 15 second, like pause where you breathe in, you breathe out. It shows you this nice, inspiring quote. And then you go, okay. And then you pick how long you actually want to spend on Instagram. It might be five minutes, you know, to say five, 10, 15 minutes, whatever you pick that. And only then can you go into the app.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 397: Michael Easter on The Comfort Crisis: Is Optimizing Life Making Us Weaker?
So simply by having that, that friction to get in there, it will reduce your use of the apps that you don't want to be in significantly, like significantly. Yeah.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 397: Michael Easter on The Comfort Crisis: Is Optimizing Life Making Us Weaker?
Or anybody, right? Totally. So the way I heard about this is I had written a thing about how there's a lot of research that says if you just change your phone screen to grayscale, that reduces how much you use your phone because your phone suddenly becomes a lot less rewarding. Like, it's just not as interesting.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 397: Michael Easter on The Comfort Crisis: Is Optimizing Life Making Us Weaker?
There's this setting that you can use in your phone. I think if you just type in grayscale on the search, and it basically means... Where? I'm going to do it right now. Yeah, type in... Let me see. Is it gray? Let's see. Grayscale. There's something in the settings. I haven't done it in a while. But long story short, what it does is it makes your screen black and white, basically.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 397: Michael Easter on The Comfort Crisis: Is Optimizing Life Making Us Weaker?
And when your screen is black and white, all of a sudden your phone is like... The life gets taken out of it. It's so boring. And it's so like, it just sucks to use it. So because it sucks to use, you stop using it so much. So long story short, and there's a study out there that found it reduced phone use by about 40%.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 397: Michael Easter on The Comfort Crisis: Is Optimizing Life Making Us Weaker?
So I write about this study and the founder of that ClearSpace app, he sent me a DM and was like, hey, I really liked this. We have this app. It reduces screen time. And I wrote him back and I'm like, so you're telling me you want me to use an app so I can use another app less? He goes, yeah, I know. Just try it though. So I'm like, all right, I'll try it. I tried it. It worked.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 397: Michael Easter on The Comfort Crisis: Is Optimizing Life Making Us Weaker?
Yeah. So Scarcity Brain was New York Times bestseller. Comfort Crisis wasn't because Comfort Crisis had this like... What? So Comfort Crisis was interesting because it was one of those books that it came out, you know, had a decent opening week and then it kind of sat and it just needed to like, it was kind of like the virus where, you know, two people to four to eight to 16, word of mouth.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 397: Michael Easter on The Comfort Crisis: Is Optimizing Life Making Us Weaker?
Yeah, you can go into the app and you can say, I don't want any limits today. Like if you're just like, you know what, today's a day that I just want to go off the rails on Instagram. I want to binge. I want to go crazy. It allows you to do that.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 397: Michael Easter on The Comfort Crisis: Is Optimizing Life Making Us Weaker?
Yeah, but you still got to go through the whole breathing exercise and everything. And so I found that I'll occasionally do that, like if I have a work reason to be on Instagram more in a day. But it's really reduced my use of Instagram. Twitter is a bad one because Twitter just seems to be where mental health goes to die. So...
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1114: Dr. Alok Kanojia | Breaking the Cycle of Digital Dependence
I'm an investigative journalist, but I firmly believe that to understand a story, to understand all the mechanics of it, to get the information that you need to really tell a story, you have to go in person. Sometimes I get to go to the nice, shiny, comfortable labs where they bring me coffee and it's, you know, at Harvard or whatever.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1114: Dr. Alok Kanojia | Breaking the Cycle of Digital Dependence
But some days you find yourself in Iraq in a prison looking at cells of drug dealers and terrorists. But ultimately, I think that going there makes you get a better story, makes the story more interesting and gets you better information to really understand it. Everyone knows that everything is fine in moderation. So then the question is, well, why do we all suck so bad at it?
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1114: Dr. Alok Kanojia | Breaking the Cycle of Digital Dependence
People keep eating when they're full. We often find ourselves shopping when we already own a ton of stuff. We scroll through social media or keep binging news when we know it's not necessarily improving our mental health. When you think about how humans evolved, everything we needed to survive in the past, it was all scarce and it was all hard to find, right?
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1114: Dr. Alok Kanojia | Breaking the Cycle of Digital Dependence
So everything from food to possessions to information, even influence and status, the number of people we could influence. Thank you. Thank you.