Young and Profiting with Hala Taha - Michael Easter: The Comfort Crisis, Embracing Discomfort to Reclaim Your Wild, Happy, Healthy Self | Human Behavior E290

Episode Date: May 13, 2024

Alcohol offered Michael Easter a cheap thrill. But when he got sober, he needed to fill the void with other stimulating experiences. So, he turned to travel, surrounding himself with brilliant thinkers and people living at the extremes. From hunting in the Arctic to living in the Bolivian jungle, his experiences have helped him uncover practical ideas for optimizing life. In this episode, Michael breaks down the power of discomfort, the scarcity loop, and how to avoid falling into the trap of excess and bad behaviors. Michael Easter is an expert on behavioral change and a New York Times bestselling author of The Comfort Crisis and Scarcity Brain. He is also a contributing editor at Men's Health magazine and a columnist for Outside magazine.  In this episode, Hala and Michael will discuss: - The side effects of too much comfort - How to infuse more discomfort in our daily lives  - How uncomfortable situations lead to better health and more happiness - Why we’re overly competent but underconfident - The upside of boredom - Why thinking of death leads to better decision-making  - The problems of excess - How the scarcity loop fuels bad habits - Why we're so obsessed with unpredictable results - How can we rewire our brains to change bad behaviors - Tips for avoiding scarcity cues - How to deal with information overload - And other topics… Michael Easter is an adventurer, an expert on behavioral change, and a New York Times bestselling author of The Comfort Crisis and Scarcity Brain. He is also a contributing editor at Men's Health magazine, a columnist for Outside magazine, and a professor at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. His research focuses on how embracing discomfort can enhance well-being. His work has been featured in publications such as Men’s Journal, New York, and Scientific American, reaching audiences in over sixty countries. He shares his latest insights through his popular newsletter, ‘2% with Michael Easter.’  Sponsored By: Shopify - Sign up for a one-dollar-per-month trial period at youngandprofiting.co/shopify Indeed - Get a $75 job credit at indeed.com/profiting Kajabi - Get a free 30-day trial to start your business at Kajabi.com/PROFITING LinkedIn Marketing Solutions - Get a $100 credit on your next campaign at LinkedIn.com/YAP Yahoo Finance - For comprehensive financial news and analysis, visit YahooFinance.com    Active Deals - youngandprofiting.com/deals Key YAP Links Reviews - ratethispodcast.com/yap Youtube - youtube.com/c/YoungandProfiting LinkedIn - linkedin.com/in/htaha/ Instagram - instagram.com/yapwithhala/ Social + Podcast Services: yapmedia.com Transcripts - youngandprofiting.com/episodes-new Entrepreneurship, entrepreneurship podcast, Business, Business podcast, Self Improvement, Self-Improvement, Personal development, Starting a business, Strategy, Investing, Sales, Selling, Psychology, Productivity, Entrepreneurs, AI, Artificial Intelligence, Technology, Marketing, Negotiation, Money, Finance, Side hustle, Startup, mental health, Career, Leadership, Mindset, Health, Growth mindset,Leadership, Productivity, Networking, Goal Setting, Time Management, Problem Solving, Decision Making, Leadership Skills, Strategic Planning, Mindset, Time Management, Team Building   Learn more about YAP Media's Services - yapmedia.io/

You are risking so much by not being willing to do this thing that seems like scary, that seems big, that feels like an abyss. But on the other side of that, that is where you ultimately grow, even if you fail. Michael Easter, the author of Comfort Crisis. Michael's work and ideas have appeared in over 60 countries. He believes that new discoveries and a deeper understanding don't happen from behind a screen. He has this line in there where he says, you risk so much hesitating to fling yourself into the abyss. That just changed me.

and I have never thought about that. It's really the thesis of the comfort crisis, but it's so true. It's like I've had to find something that scratches my itch for kind of adventure. And I liked going to extreme places, talking to people, asking questions. I like learning information. And I landed on a job that allows me to do that for a living. And I think if you're miserable in your job, it's like, well, who cares if you build an empire, if you hate it along the way?

Everything's so important in the world and whatever. And there's a lot of nonsense. And I think those experiences shape and color how you actually tell the story. And so the proposition is... Young improfitors, if you believe in science, then you believe that humans started to evolve 6 to 7 million years ago. And our species, Homo sapiens, what we are today, really started to turn up 200,000 to 300,000 years ago.

And the problem with all of this is that technology only turned up about 100 years ago. So the world has totally transformed. since the Industrial Revolution. We now have food in abundance. We now have cars. We now have computers, devices, and the whole world has changed. But yet we still operate with the same brain and bodies. And that can cause a lot of problems. We're living with too much comfort and too much excess. And that's why I'm talking today with Michael Easter. He's a New York Times best-selling author. He's also an investigative journalist. He wrote the best-selling books, the comfort crisis, as well as the scarcity brain.

And today we're going to talk to him about how we can live healthier, happier, more productive lives by using the power of discomfort and avoiding excess. Michael, welcome to Young and Profiting Podcast. Thanks so much for having me. I'm excited to be here. Yeah, likewise. So you are not the kind of journalist to just pick up a phone and have an interview. You like to travel, and a lot of your work is in exotic places.

So can you talk to us about how your adventures as a journalist first started? Yeah, well, it's a blessing and a curse. I'll tell you this. My background is I came from the magazine industry. And the reason I got into journalism in the first place is that I wanted to go have interesting experiences and learn new interesting things from interesting people. So once I got in the journalism office, every single story that I would pitch, it would get me out of the office. And I started to become the go-to guy for, okay,

we're going to send him into this weird experience. And my stories always did really well because the reality is, as if all of the reporting and research that you do is from behind the screen, well, everyone else has access to that too. You're never going to learn anything really new because it's already on the internet. And so you have to go places to get the best story. And you really have to go places as well because I would pitch stories thinking they were one thing. But once I got there, it would be a totally different thing.

And I think those experiences shape and color, how you actually tell the story. They give you a story. And that's ultimately how people digest information. Well, I want my listeners to understand just how many places you've been to and how cool these places have been. So what are some of the most interesting places you've been for your writing? Oh, so for the comfort crisis, I spent more than a month in the Arctic. I went to Bhutan for that book. That book took me to Thailand. I went to Japan. I went to Iceland. And then for scarcity brain. I spent some time in Iraq. I went into this remote jungle location in Bolivia. I lived at a monastery with some monks in New Mexico for a week. So a lot of it is really just

embedding myself with whatever interesting characters I find and go in there. I love it. And so I noticed that a pattern in your career is basically taking insights from the edge. And you mentioned that this is how you get the best stories. But what else? What makes you so passionate about that? I think that I'm just a person who has always been drawn to extreme experiences, to be quite honest. Now, that hasn't always served me. So a theme that resonates that weaves through my books is that I've been sober for about nine years. And I think what initially drew me before I got sober, what drew me to alcohol was that it was a very cheap, fast way to have an extreme experience. And once I got sober, I had to channel that into something else.

and it really became the travel, the entering into new experiences, kind of as a solo person, often experiences that have some element that might keep the average journalist away. And so, yeah, that's just kind of how things work. And it's just kind of a more productive way to scratch the strange itch I have to explore and do interesting things, I guess. Speaking of the Arctic, you mentioned that you went to the Arctic for one of your travels. That really inspired your work with the comfort crisis. Can you talk to us about how going away with this extreme explorer made you realize that you had a book on your hands? The big grand thesis of the comfort crisis is basically that as the world has become more and more comfortable in so many ways,

and this really started happening about 100 years ago. We now live in climate control. We no longer have to put in effort for our food, our relationship to boredom has really changed. We've kind of engineered boredom out of our life. We spend a lot less time in nature. I mean, I could just go on and on and on. That's really changed us and not always for the better. Because when you look at what improves people, whether it's their physical health, whether it's their mental health, whether it's their spiritual health. There's usually some element of discomfort that it takes to get the benefit. So, for example, exercise is going

to improve your health, but you have to exercise to do it. And exercise is uncomfortable. But you get this long-term benefit. Same goes with mental health and asking yourself hard questions and having hard conversations with others. It's uncomfortable in the short term, but beneficial in the long term. And humans are very much wired to do the next easiest, most comfortable thing because that kept us alive in the past when our environments were very uncomfortable and very hard, right? You didn't ever want to put in any extra effort. You wanted to avoid temperature swings. You wanted to basically do the next easiest thing because that kept you alive. But now we're not. live in a world where things are easy and things are comfortable, that doesn't serve us. And so the

idea of going to the Arctic was, okay, I've made this observation that you have to do challenging uncomfortable things in order to improve your life. Well, let's test that out in a really grand scale. Let's go up to the Arctic for more than a month and see what we can learn up there. And I definitely went up with an open mind and I learned a lot. And I can tell you, it absolutely changed my life. At the same time from that experience, my message is not, hey, you have to do these. really crazy extreme things that are going to take them on, not at all. A big message that I talk about and write about is this idea of what I call being a two percenter. So this comes from a study that found that only two percent of people take the stairs when there's also an escalator

available. So 100 percent of those people knew that if they just took the stairs, they would get a better long-term return on their health. But 98 percent of people take the escalator. It's because we're wired to do an easy thing even when it doesn't serve us. whole newsletter is based on this. It's at a TWOPCT.com and I just write about this theme in a lot of different ways and ways that apply to the average person, no matter who you are. I'll definitely stick that link to the newsletter in the show notes so everybody can check it out. But I did want to talk about, I had Wimhoff on the show. So this is actually not the first time that we're talking about comfort. So I had Wimhoff on the show about a year ago. And he talked about

comfort and how he uses cold and breathing to kind of awaken the body. right? And he talked to us about how we're so comfortable all the time that our body is just getting lazy. And so we're not really leveraging our full health and body and brain. We're just on autopilot being too comfortable. So I'm very excited to go over this topic with you because I've been thinking about it for a year now and haven't really gotten to go super deep. So let's go deep right now. What are all the different ways that humans have gotten too comfortable and what is the problem with that. Oh, God. Let me first say that all the comforts that we're talking about, they're good in the grand scheme of time and space. So we've made all this progress. It's amazing,

but now we've kind of have side effects and have become victims of our progress. So for example, I'll just start listing some out. In the past, humans used to take about 20,000 steps a day. Today, the average person takes about 4,000. So that is one of the root causes of the epidemic. of heart disease and diabetes that we have, for example. In the past, people didn't eat that much because food was hard to come by. Today, 80% of eating is driven by reasons other than true hunger. We eat just to eat, just because food's there. And we have this food system that is designed to lead us to eat more food than we really need. And it's all hyper caloric stuff. Bordom, we've engineered boredom out of our life. So the average person today spends 12 to 13 hours

engaged with digital media. Now, all that is new of in the last hundred years. Right in the past, you would get bored and you would have to go, I'm bored. What am I going to do? And you would come up with something productive. Well, now it's like, okay, TikTok, and that's not really moving your life forward. Silence. So people say that they are uncomfortable in silence.

But we've recently increased the world's loudness by fourfold. And when researchers conduct studies where they have people work in a, louder sort of open concept office versus a really silent office. The people who are working in the silent office, they all say, you know, I found that very uncomfortable at first. But when they look at the amount and quality of work that the two different groups produced, the silent group always beats the group that was in the loud office. So inserting silence back in your life can be very important. I could go on and on and on. There's just so many examples of how this affects us in ways that I don't think we've thought of

and in ways that definitely reduce not only what we're physically capable of, but also capable of at work and in business. Yeah, and I would say humans, we were uncomfortable for a long time. This comfort really only happened since the industrial revolution primarily, right? Yeah, that was about 1850 is when things really started a tip, and you start to see different changes. Now people will think like, oh, 1850, that's a long time, not really in the grand scheme of time and space.

So humans as a genus have been around for about two and a half million years. So over those two and a half million years, we lived in an uncomfortable worlds. And we really developed these drives to do the next comfortable thing. And then our environment just totally switched. And now it doesn't necessarily serve us anymore. Can you talk to us about exercise and how we engineered exercise out of our lives? So I told you the 20,000 steps versus 4,000 steps stat. when you accumulate everything in terms of just physical activity a day,

our ancestors would have exercised about 14 times more than we do today. And by the way, I'm using the word exercise, but it's not actually the best word to use because exercise is made up. Exercise is just moving around for the sake of it. These people weren't like, I think I'm going to do some jazzercise. No, they were having to walk really long distances to find food. they were having to hunt, they were having to gather. Even, for example, when they were at rest,

they were often having to sit in the squatting position. So that works like a low level of muscle, and now we just sit in chairs and our muscles can go totally slack. So that's one of the reasons why people get back pain is because we don't really use our muscles when we're resting anymore. I mean, there's just so many ways that we're less physically active. And physical activity is the best, single best thing that you can do to prevent disease over the long run and live a better life.

And it's really a great booster of focus at work, of productivity at work. It's the magic pill, but it's a little bit uncomfortable. It's an uncomfortable pill to swallow. Yeah. It's funny to me to think about the fact that I think a lot of us tuning in are probably exercising three to five times a week. It's part of our routine to like go to the gym. And it's so funny to think that this is just something made up

because we don't do manual labor anymore. We're not hunting anymore. And it's just something that we've made up to be healthier. To me, that's just mind-blowing the fact that we just don't do the things that we used to do back in the day. And we've got to, like, engineer fake exercise. It's real exercise, but fake moving our bodies for no reason. And it's very new, too.

We really started figuring this out is that after the Industrial Revolution happened, and a lot of jobs started being not farming in a field, but rather you were sitting at a desk, scientists start to make observations, oh, well, those people who sit all the time, they seem to die earlier, and they seem to be sicker than these people who are still moving around.

And so they go, okay, it must have something to do with movement. So what do we do? Well, let's just invent this thing called exercise, and we'll have these people who sit all day, we'll go have them go to a building, and we'll put some things that weigh something in there, and they can pick them up and put them down, And then we'll create this machine that has a belt so they can just walk to nowhere for 30 minutes.

And that'll help. And it does help. At the same time, though, it's very odd, right? Yeah. And we've got to, like, build in this time to do that kind of stuff. It's clear why health is important when it comes to putting ourselves in uncomfortable situations. But why do you think happiness is a result of that as well? There's really good evolutionary reasons why things that are harder to get that take more effort, we find more rewarding. I won't get into deeply into the science of why that is, but it basically, if something took a lot of effort to get, you wanted to have people get really rewarded by that and be like, oh my God, this is amazing when you finally get it. So you would do that again and survive. And so still that gets translated today. As a listener, think about the things that you have found

most rewarding in your life. I guarantee no one is going to say, oh, it was that freebie I got, right? it tends to be raising my kid. Well, raising kids is a huge pain in the ass, right? Or building my business. Was that easy? Probably not. You probably had a bunch of times that you wanted to quit or you wanted to just throw in the towel. But by persisting when things worked out in your favor, it becomes like this amazing thing that you've accomplished. And we wait that more psychologically. And that leads to feelings of satisfaction and happiness. So let's talk about these metaphorical tigers, you say that we have to bring back into our lives. How can we infuse more discomfort in our daily lives? I think that there's a million different ways you can do it, right? And I do always start

with that 2% stat because it's really a metaphor for when you have a choice to do the very easy thing or the slightly harder thing that's going to give you a greater long-term return, your body's going to tell you and your brain is going to tell you do the easy thing. But if you can consistently choose that slightly harder thing, you're going to get such a better long-term return on whatever domain that's in. That idea applies to business. It applies to health. It applies to mental health. So I always start there. And I mean, it really can be as simple as just taking the metaphorical stairs. At the same time, I think there's also a case for doing one big epic thing every year. So there's this concept that I talk about in the book called Masogi. And it's based on this idea that, you know, if you think about how

humans lived in the past, we used to have to do really big epic challenges all the time as part of life. And we didn't know if we could complete them, but we would have to in order to survive. And each time that we would take one on, we'd really get stretched to our limits. You know, we'd think we had to quit. We'd think we're like, I'm not going to be able to finish this. But by going through that and finishing, we would realize that we're way more capable than we we realize. Humans are capable of so much more, but we really just undersell ourselves. And so trying to take on a big epic task every single year where you're not sure if you're going to make it. You're like, I might fail with this.

I'm not sure if I can do it. 50, 50 shot. I think you get put in one of those positions where you really do have internal doubt and you struggle, but you come out the other side of that with newfound knowledge about yourself. And that changes how you view yourself moving forward. And that allows you to accomplish more. And are you talking about something physical or can this be digital, like, terms of taking on something that's really hard to do?

I honestly think it can be anything. What is one big thing you think would move the dial for you? And what is that goal? And then once you set that goal, be like, what did the odds that I think that I could accomplish it? And I will tell you, your first answer is going to be wrong because people are always going to do things that will be challenging, but they're pretty sure they can accomplish. So think about how people run marathons.

No one goes, I don't know if I'm going to be able to run this marathon. They go, I don't know if I'm going to be able to run it in whatever, three hours, three hours, 30 minutes. You really want something where you're stretching yourself and going, oh, I really have no idea if I'm going to be able to accomplish this. But I'm going to find out. And I know that's going to change me. Even if you fail, you'll learn something about yourself. For example, you'll learn that today failure is not that big of a deal. In the past, it was if you failed when you're trying to gather and hunt for food, if you failed at that, you die.

So humans are very afraid of failure for this reason. We're biologically wired to hate failure. But today, failure is, well, I took a swing in business and I lost some money, but guess what, I still got a roof over my head. And the upsides of trying are so huge and yet we often undersell ourselves and don't take the big swings we're going to need to reach the next level. I think this is a really important point that you're bringing up. You're basically saying a lot of our fears actually don't have much weight because we're not actually going to do. if something happens. So we have a lot of stress and anxiety that we carry around all the time because of how we've evolved over time. Can you talk to us more about that?

I have this theory and I say that humans evolve to be overly competent, but underconfident. Basically, I want you to think of these scenarios. It's a million years ago and there's some tiger chasing us, right? And we get to a point where we're going to have to cross a river. you want the person who's like, I don't know if I can cross that river, right? There's this danger. Like, I don't think I can do that. But if they get put in the position where they have to do it,

they can accomplish it because you don't want people to take on unnecessary risk. But if they get put in that risky position, you want them to be able to get through it, right? You don't want the person who is the opposite where they're like, oh, I could definitely cross that river. I got this shit. And then they get in the river and they drown, right? Because they're not that competent.

So I think that the big message is that people are always going to undersell themselves. And we're going to be afraid. But once we actually get in the thick of it, we figure our stuff out. We're way more capable than we believe. And that expresses itself. And by going through that, you realize that you can do a lot more. Let's hold that thought and take a quick break with our sponsors. At Yap, we have a super unique company culture.

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What are some common things that we can switch up to just bring more discomfort in our lives? The stairs are an easy one and people will always be like, oh, the stairs won't really impact your health that much. And I would refer people to a study that found that people who climbed stairs for just three minutes, they were 30% less likely to die across a year span. So three minutes a day. That is not a lot of time, right? One thing that I will do, for example, is that if I have a work call, instead of just sitting on the couch and taking it or sitting in my office chair and taking it, I will take it while out on a walk. And sometimes I'll even throw on a backpack that has some weight in it in order to make that a little bit harder.

And so I might cover like three miles in the course of a one hour call. It's slightly harder, slightly more uncomfortable. But I've done all this work at a time when I would originally be sitting. normally. I think that finding ways to insert boredom back into your life can be really wise and be great for ideas and creativity. The people with the best ideas win. Of course, you got to execute it, but if you don't have a good idea to start, you're never going anywhere. And when you look at what time on devices does to creativity, I mean, it really just saps our creativity because we're looking at other ideas and processing those rather than coming up with our own. So people generally

find boredom very uncomfortable, but by going through that, their brain has to start thinking of, okay, what's something else I could do? You start to get some thoughts going. And sort of the longer you sit with it, you see in studies that people who have gone through boredom compared to groups who are on their phone or on a computer, they afterwards score much higher in creativity tests. They come up with more answers, and the answers are also more creative on creativity tests. So I think that can be a good one. Something to get bored is even just go for a walk outside with a microphone for like 20 minutes. And it kind of just means like being silence.

Yeah. Right? Yeah. Silence is huge. Work in silence. I mean, I know so many people that can't do anything without music on in the background. I don't understand that. I'm like, please.

Because my whole job is talking, hearing, and I just want quiet a lot of the time. so I'm with you on that. Yeah, totally. So one of the sections that I get in in the book, which is mildly heavy, but I think it's pretty important, is that we very much remove death from our lives as a culture.

And I think that by realizing that this ride that we're on called Life is going to end, that is very uncomfortable. But I think it changes how you ride the ride, meaning that you start to make better decisions that are going to impact you in the long run. you come down to the center of what actually matters to you. And there's really great research that has people sit with the thought of death. And in every single study, they all say,

yeah, that was super uncomfortable in the short term. But it led me to start making different decisions in my life. And those decisions increase my happiness over time. This is all really great stuff. So again, it's called the comfort crisis. And so let's move on to your latest book called The Scarcity Brain, and to warm everybody up, you say we're all operating today with a scarcity and survival mindset left over from our ancient ancestors. Can you walk us through what it was like thousands of years ago to be human and how the people who survived and passed on their genes were really the people who embraced excess? When you think about what humans need to survive, it's food, it's possessions like tools,

shelter. It is information. You want to know what's coming up next. What do I need to do to keep surviving? It is status. That is to say, you want to be higher status in your tribe because that'll help you survive. So in the past, all those things were very scarce and they were hard to find. So humans evolved to basically obsess about getting more and more of those. Because if they're hard to find, that's all you want to be focused on, right, is find this stuff so I don't doubt. food, stuff, status, information, possessions. And now all of that stuff that we need to survive, we have a crazy excess of it.

To give you some comparisons, life in the past used to be a game of just finding food, and there's never enough of it. Well, now in the United States, 70% of the population is overweight or obese, and we throw out a third of our food. So we've just got food everywhere. And food is designed to be,

as tasty as possible, so we'll eat more of it. So the food industry can make more money. When you think of stuff, even just, I think it's like 200 years ago, actually I think it was less. I think it was about 150 years ago. The average person owned about two outfits. Today, the average person owns 100 outfits. 100.

The average house has more than 10,000 items in it, anywhere from 10,000 to 40,000 items. When you think about information, a person today in just one, single day, they see more information than a person in the 1400s would have seen in their entire life, their entire life. And then status, we evolved to want to get status and kind of be high in the hierarchy. But we only lived in small groups of 100 people, say. Well, now it's like you can just go on to Instagram and quantify your status and your followers and blast out stuff about yourself to billions of people around the world. And so that really co-ops this drive we have for status in ways that I think can be beneficial sometimes. I'm not saying any of this stuff is bad. It's all a

result of progress. But I do think that when you start to look at a lot of the problems we have, it's because we just have this brain telling us more and more, more, more, more, and a world where we can get more, more, more, and that backfires. And like we were talking about earlier, it's kind of like our brain is not evolving as fastest technology, right? So technology, it's been like 100 years since we've really had it. And it's like life is completely changed. And our brain took a million years to evolve. Do you think AI is going to make everything significantly worse now?

I think basically with every technology, some things become better. Some things become worse. I'll give food as an example. For all of time, the problem is that we didn't have enough food. And you had people dying of starvation and malnutrition in mass. Then we got hyper-processed food. as a whole, that benefited humanity by far. Now our problem is that we have so much food that what is killing us is no longer malnutrition and starvation, it is overnutrition and eating too much.

So all of these progresses, I like to say that I will take the problems that we have today, problems from excess, over the ones from scarcity, but that also doesn't mean they're not problems that we need to be thinking about how to solve. What excites me about AI is advances in, in medicine. I think it could be really good for pushing medicine downfield, helping people detect diseases like cancer earlier, helping with treatments and cures. Informationally, I think it's going to be a little bit of a swamp for a while. I think it's going to be a lot of confusion. I think probably people end up losing jobs, depending on what their jobs are. And I think that's going to be pretty chaotic. I think we'll probably spend less time together as humans, the more AI we get. And that

worries me because I think time with others is really important. So yeah, it's like technology at the end of the day is just a tool. How you use it really determines its effect on you. At the same time, the more technology we get, the more that you are required to use it to live in society. So I'll give you an example. My uncle, old school, old school guy, railroad worker gruff goes up into the mountains for like months at a time because you just can't stand society. So he's always had a flip phone. So now he tried to travel somewhere and the only way he could get a boarding pass was with a smartphone.

So it's like, now the dude has to adopt this smartphone, which he doesn't want, by the way, because he can't get on a plane anymore. If you're a person who's like, well, I spend too much time on Instagram, I spend too much time on Twitter, I buy too much crap on Amazon, I don't want to be carrying a smartphone around. It's like, well, now you can't do all these things

that are normal in society because you don't have this technology. And you see that in tons and tons of different ways. Yeah, so interesting. So I want to talk about something that you mentioned in your book that's a really important concept, the fact that really bad behaviors are resulting of having a scarcity brain. Can you talk to us about some of the worst things that happen because everything is backfiring from having this scarcity mindset? I talk about this thing in scarcity brain that I call the scarcity loop. And so my opinion on habits is that everyone wants to add good new habits to reach a goal. But if you still are doing your worst habits, you still have your foot on the break. You're not going anywhere because it's typically our worst habits. They pull us down more than good habits are going to push us forward. And when you look at what bad habits people have, they tend to fall in.

to this thing I call the scarcity loop. And I learned about it. I live in Las Vegas, by the way. And I learned about it by basically studying people who play slot machines in Las Vegas. People will play slot machines for hours and hours and hours. And everyone know the house always wins. They'll sit there just game after game after game. And to me, it was one of those things where I see that. And I just go, that doesn't make any sense. So because I'm a journalist when I make an office, observation like that, though, I don't just kind of move on. I got to go, okay, we've got to figure out why someone would do that. Long story short, I end up in this brand new cutting edge working casino, but this place is used entirely for human behavior research. So this is like the Twilight Zone

Casino. It's just wild. And I talked to a guy who designed slot machines, and he tells me, okay, here's how a slot machine works. It's got three parts. So it's got opportunity, unpredictable rewards and quick repeatability. So opportunity is you have an opportunity to win money, the slot machine, right? There's your reason for playing. But then it has unpredictable rewards. So you know that you'll win at some point,

but you don't know when that's going to happen. You also don't know how much money you are going to win, right? In a game you could lose, you could win like $2 or you could win like $200,000. And then finally, it's got quick repeatability. So once you finish the one game, you can immediately repeat the behavior. and start the process again.

And so when you look at slot machines, people play about 900 games an hour, simply because it's this random rewards game that you just cycle through. Might win money, might win money, right? The reason I told you that, and you're probably going like, well, I don't play slot machines.

I don't care. The reason I told you that and why this is important to sort of understand where we're at as a society and where we get stuck is that this system that really came out of slot machines in 1980s, it then got adopted by a lot of big tech companies and put in all the technologies that people today tend to get hooked on. So it's what makes social media work. It's what makes dating apps

so addictive. It's what makes sports betting so addictive. It is in personal finance apps now. It's really the random rewards that keep people going over and over and over eventually to our detriment, right? Because over time, the house always wins. Can I dig on that a little bit? What does the research say about why we're so obsessed with unpredictable results? Now you're speaking my language. This is where I like to dig in. So, okay, I wonder the same question.

So I talked to this slot machine designer and he walks me through this. I'm like, totally. Makes sense. Yeah, but why? What's the deeper reason? He's just like, dude, I don't know. I just make slot machines. So I eventually talked to this guy who was a psychologist.

And he's about 80-something years old. He's one of the greatest behavioral psychologists in the world. Still works like 60 hours a week. Guys crazy. And he told me what explains it is evolution, like everything. He said, when you think about humans in the past, we had to find food every single day. So our opportunity is to find food so we don't starve. But we didn't know where the food was, right?

And we didn't know how much of it we would find. So you go to one place, no food. Then you got to go to another place. no food. You go to another place. No food. One more place. And then finally jackpot, right? You find the food. And it's like, oh my God, that's amazing. Right. And then the next day, you got to repeat that again, over and over again. That is your entire life. It's playing that same random rewards game. Opportunity to find food. Unpredictable rewards. Don't know where the food is, how much we'll find. Quick repeatability. Got to repeat this all day, every day for your entire life or else you die. So with the quick repeatability, that was really eye-opening for me.

because most things, you can't just do it again, right? But the really bad things, like eating a chip and then finishing the whole bag of chips, that's something that humans often do. So talk to us about quick repeatability and how it works in some situations and doesn't work in other situations. The quick repeatability, I think, is one of the things that has really been changed recently. Basically, in short, the faster you can do a behavior that is rewarding and somehow or has unpredictable rewards, the more likely you are to do that behavior.

So an example from the slot machine world is that once slot machines took away the arms they used to have, maybe you'd have to pull the big arm, and switched out buttons that were much faster to play, people started basically gambling doubled overnight. People went from playing 400 games an hour to 900 games an hour. Now you start to apply that to, say, social media. How much social media do you think you would use if you could see, say, 10 posts, and then you had to hit a next button, and then that page would load,

and then you'd do it again. A lot less. A lot less than infinite scroll. And to your point, I love that you brought up food because this is one of my favorite examples. I talked to a guy from the food industry. He's an executive at a junk food company.

And he basically told me that if you want to get a food, a junk food to sell, it's got to have three Vs. It's got to have value. It's got to have variety and it's got to have velocity. That's the scarcity loop, just using different language. So velocity becomes,

really important. When you look at when obesity really took off in the 70s, it's because the food industry started producing a lot more foods that were faster to eat. So to your point about the chips, imagine if you have one person sitting on the couch and they're eating a boiled potato versus another person sitting on the couch with a bag of chips, who do you think is going to eat more calories? The chip person, because they're engineered with all these triggers that make people eat them, eat more and eat faster. And this is also in sports, I mean, the quick repeatability thing is incredibly important. We'll be right back after a quick break from our sponsors.

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So for all of time, it never made sense to moderate. If you had the ability to overeat, you would want to do that because soon you're going to face a shortage of food. And you want to have a little bit extra weight on your body so you can survive that. Right? If you have an opportunity to get more information, you want as much information as you can because it'll help you survive. But now that gets put on infinite scroll on Twitter and you just see people going down rabbit holes all day. We're not designed to moderate. Moderation never made sense ever until today and our brains haven't caught up. So how can we get over this? How can we rewire our brains so that we aren't following this scarcity loop anymore? Great question. So I see basically three ways. Now the first is simply observing the behavior. So this leverages something that is called the observer effect. Once you become aware of a behavior and you start to track it, it changes how often you do the behavior. So when scientists, for example, do studies on workers and worker productivity, when they go, hey, we're going to observe your workers and see how well they work, what do you think the workers do? do better work. They work harder.

They do more, right? So just simply observing a behavior changes the behavior. I'll give you an example, like with food, simply becoming aware of how much you actually eat and like tracking that can be really informative for people. Same with social media. Every time you pull out your phone and go to use social media, write down. Write down when time, why you opened it, what the situation was.

Simply by tracking that, you'll start to be like, oh, I seem to open my phone when I get frustrated at work. Well, maybe I just need to sit through that frustration and that starts to change things. So number one, observation. Number two is that if the thing you're doing too much of falls into that loop we talked about, you can remove or change any of those three parts that we talked about. I'll give you an example with cell phones. So we just talked about how quick repeatability is sort of what really pushes us to do more. There are apps that you can use that insert pause before you can get into an app. When I first heard of this, I rolled my eyes and said,

you want me to download an app so I can use another app less, right? Sounds kind of crazy. But I download this app that's called ClearSpace, and I've done a lot of work with them. I love the two guys who started it. And what this app does is you pick the apps that you want to restrict, say Instagram. and then when you click Instagram, up pops a thing and it says, are you sure you want to use Instagram?

And then you can choose yes or no. And you go, yes, I want to use it. And it goes, okay, take a breath. Take a breath for like 10 seconds. Then it shows you a nice uplifting quote. And then it asks you, how long you want to spend on Instagram? And you go, I think I want to spend, say, five minutes. Simply just having that pause in there, it forces intentionality.

It slows down the quick repeatability. And you go, yeah, I didn't want to open Instagram. We just reflexively open these apps that are engineered to be addictive. And most of the time, you'll probably say, yeah, I actually don't want to go in there. But when you do, you have to get intentional about it. And then it also puts a limit because I think everyone's experienced, whatever the app is, is like you go in the app to do one thing. And then you start doing 50,000 other things that are not the one thing you went in there for, right?

And then an hour your time is gone. So that's one of the ways you can modify. That's what cell phones, but you can also slow down quick repeatability simply by eating less junk food because it is engineered to make you eat faster. So foods that have just one ingredient, just plain foods. People just eat less because they eat them much slower. They're not as tasty. They're not as addictive to your point.

Yeah, exactly. Oh, a good one for shopping too, because people buy a ton of stuff online because it's so much easier to buy stuff now, is to put something in your cart and then put a 72-day holding period, at least. And then you go, okay, I want this thing. I'm going to put it in my cart. then we're going to return to it in 72 hours, and I'm going to have this time. And in that time, you might decide, hey, I actually really do need this thing. But a lot of the time, you're going to be like,

yeah, I don't even remember why I wanted to buy that thing. I don't even like those shoes. That shirt, I don't know. And you don't buy it. I love all those tips. How about cues, right? So there's certain things that might trigger us to even start a loop to begin with. So can you talk to us about cues and how we can avoid scarcity cues? Yeah, usually I would say that most of the time that we do habits that fall into the scarcity loop, it's because we're looking for some sort of short-term escape. Take the example of pulling out your phone to go on Instagram. It's usually because you're slightly bored.

You have this discomfort of boredom you're trying to relieve. Or you're stressed, and that gives you some relief. Or think of food. Stress eating is a thing, right? And what is the best food for stress eating? It's like candy. Yeah, the worst food. Yeah, the worst foods.

So usually it's some sort of internal discomfort that we're looking for an escape from. And the behaviors that fall into that scarcity loop tend to be the best for relieving that discomfort. So becoming aware of that and finding a better path out, I think is really important. So a lot of my listeners, we're spending all day on the computer. And like you just gave a crazy stat that somebody in the 1700s, what we see in one day is what they saw in their lifetime in terms of information. So how do we deal with this information overload? that we have today. I mean, I worked in media and journalism for a lot of years,

and I can tell you that the role of media companies is to get as much attention as possible to monetize it. And the way you do that is often by running things that have some controversy or you watch the news that's like violence, destruction, chaos. But that oftentimes, it's not actually a reflection of the real world. because the news is going to run five murders a night, whether or not the murder rate is rising or falling. And so that can distort your picture of reality.

So I do think that keeping that in mind and just less news in general can be good for people or even slower news. Like, for example, I get a lot of my world national news from magazines because it's like they've had to be more intentional with what they're going to print. There's more cues around what is actually important. That's a big thing. that I've built this newsletter on is it comes out three times a week, and I'm going to tell you, you know, it's hard to figure out what's important when you're on Twitter. It's like everything's

so important in the world of health and whatever, and there's a lot of nonsense. And so the proposition is we're going to actually get intentional with our information here so you can do stuff that's actually going to move your life forward rather than a lot of noise. I think some newsletters can be good if you're not into the print thing. And yeah, I think, I honestly think when you look at how much time people spend on their phone. I think we all kind of know less. Phone is important. But what I'll point out,

and I read about this in the comfort crisis, is when people use their phone less, they often get bored. And that boredom kicks on and they go, well, I can't deal with this, but I can't use my phone. I'll just watch Netflix instead. And there's really no difference to your brain

between your phone and Netflix or your computer. So I think people would probably be better off psychologically if they had less just digital technology in their life generally, or at least tried to take periods of time every day to totally disconnect and probably go outside. We know that going outside can be really good for people's mental health and productivity and ideas and all these things. So we know that the scarcity loop works and we're so addicted to things like slot machines and junk food. How can we take this and actually use it to our benefit to be more productive,

to gain skills and things like that. There's a couple of good apps that are actually leaning on the scarcity loop, the unpredictable rewards, the quick repeatability, in order to get people to do things that are good for them. I think Duo lingo is a good one. I think that, and this is a funny one, is I'm friends with the guy who created Pokemon Go. And the whole idea is like he had this kid who would just play video games alone at home.

And so the guy goes, well, I know he's into these. random rewards that are embedded in video games. He's not spending time outside. He's not exercising and he's not spending time with other people. So with Pokemon Go, his whole goal is, you know what? You're going to play a video game, but it's going to be put out onto the real world. You're going to end up walking miles and miles to find these Pokemon. You were going to be exposed to the outdoors.

And by the way, if you do it with people, you're able to catch more and bigger Pokemon. So now you've hung out with your friends. And so he's come up with this really elegant way to get to sort of of sneak in all these things that are inherently good for humans into a game environment. But I also think there's a lot of ways to figure this out with business. I talk about some of them in Scarcity Loop. I think that the loop in a positive way is in a lot of activities in nature. So for example, like a lot of people get really into bird watching because you don't know what birds you're going to see when it's going to appear. And you've walked a lot. You've been

outdoors, you've been with other people. So it's really finding ways like, how can I flip this thing into a positive in a way that's going to enhance my life and give me all these things that we know are good for people. Well, Michael, thank you so much for your time today on Young and Profiting Podcast. I feel like we learn so much about the power of discomfort, the scarcity brain, the scarcity loop, and how we can avoid falling into the trap of excess and bad behaviors. So thank you so much for your time today. I always end all of my interviews with two questions. And you can answer it however you want, doesn't have to be about the topic of today. So the first question is, what is one actionable thing our young improfitors can do today

to become more profitable tomorrow? Here's how I will answer this. So when I'm reporting scarcity brain, I go, I mentioned this in the beginning. I went and lived with these monks in the mountains of New Mexico at a monastery. No talking aloud, no cell phones, no electricity. It was pretty raw. But they have this bookstore attached to the monastery. So I go in and there's like all these books.

Catholic bookstore, right? And there's this one that I just randomly pull out and is written by a guy in the 1800s. He's a monk. He lives in a cave alone for like 30 years. And he writes about his experience. And he wrote about how hard it was at first and how it just felt like this abyss. But on the other side of that, he improved so much spiritually as a person and his thinking. And he has this line in there that he says, you risk so much hesitating to fling yourself into the abyss. And I have never thought about that that just changed me. It's really the thesis of the comfort crisis, but the way he put that just, it changed me forever because it's so true. It's like you are risking so much by not being willing to do this thing that seems like scary, that seems big, that feels like an abyss. But on the other

side of that, that is where you ultimately grow, even if you fail. I love that. And what is your secret to profiting in life? And this can go beyond business and finance. I've personally, I've had to find something that scratches my itch for kind of adventure and that sort of weird thing I have inside of me and figure out a way to monetize it. So for me, it's like, I liked going to extreme places, talking to people, asking questions, I like learning information, and I landed on a job that allows me to do that for a living. And I think, you know, if you're miserable in your job, it's like, well, who cares if you build an empire, if you hate it along the way? Well, thank you. you so much, Michael. Where can everybody learn from you and everything that you do? You can check out my

newsletter. It's at TWOPCT.com. And then I'm on all the socials. I think if you just search my name, I'll pop up. Amazing. Awesome. Well, thank you so much for joining us. Thank you. Young improfitors, are we becoming too comfortable as a society? Not all of us may want to inject the kind of adventure into our lives that Michael Easter enjoys, but we could all probably benefit from a little bit more discomfort. And I loved some of the ideas that Michael had for how to infuse more discomfort into our daily lives. This starts with training yourself to take the metaphorical stairs, to do the slightly harder thing, whether with regard to your health, your business, or your relationships. So think about taking that next work phone call while on a walk,

or maybe just put away your devices and force yourself to be bored. Boredom can be extremely uncomfortable to many of us, but it could also lead to some of our biggest insights. I also found it fascinating what Michael had to say about the gap between our current environment and the one that humans evolved within, and just how much our lives have changed in the past few centuries. Same person who might have owned two outfits back in the 1800s now owns more than 100 outfits, or 1,000 or 2,000 if you're me. And today, the average person consumes more information in a day than a person in the 1400s might have consumed in their entire lifetime. That is shocking.

But some things don't change, like our need for social status or our cravings for knowledge or rewards. And whether we are in Las Vegas, at a grocery store, or on social media, our brains are constantly being bombarded with enticements that are designed to play on our innate desires. So how can we overcome these unhealthy temptations? First, by becoming more aware of your own behavior. Just observing a behavior can help you change that behavior. Also, you can interfere with what Michael calls the scarcity loop. This could mean restricting the use of certain apps on your phone, or even forcing yourself to consume the news in print rather than online. But don't put away that phone just yet. If you listen, learned, improfited from this episode of Young Improfiting,

please share this episode with your friends, family, and colleagues and anyone you think who could benefit from hearing what somebody like Michael Easter has to share. And if you did enjoy the show and you learned something new, then please take a couple minutes, take a break, don't fast forward to the next episode, just pause and write us a five-star review on Apple, CastBox, Spotify, Player FM, wherever you're listening, please drop this review, it will make my day. You can also find me on Instagram at Yap with Hala or LinkedIn by searching my name.

It's Hala Taha. And before we go, I got to say thank you to my Yap production team. You guys are awesome. Thanks for all that you do. This is your host, Hala Taha, aka the podcast princess, signing off.