YouSaid · the spoken record

Michael Easter

lines on the record: 131
first: 2023-11-02
most recent: 2023-11-02
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“Yeah, well, that's the search, right? That's the ultimate human search, I think, that a lot of religions, they're set up to counter that.”
2023-11-02 · The Diary of a CEO · The Exercise Expert: This Popular Lifestyle Is Killing 1 Person Every 33 Seconds! (The Comfort Crisis): Michael Easter · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So people got 50% richer on average. Yet happiness didn't change. In fact, it might have actually decreased a little bit. So this suggests that once our needs are met to a certain point, like it's not necessarily going to make us happier, yet we keep thinking that happiness is going to be in the next purchase, that it's in the next, that it's in the next viral tweet or whatever it might be.”
2023-11-02 · The Diary of a CEO · The Exercise Expert: This Popular Lifestyle Is Killing 1 Person Every 33 Seconds! (The Comfort Crisis): Michael Easter · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“On depression, more mental health problems. Yep. And there's probably a variety of reasons for that. But I do think that one thing that's interesting. We seem to live in a world where a lot of people have enough of what they need to survive. And if they don't, it's probably a governmental problem. It's probably a distribution problem. And this I'm mainly talking about developed countries here. But as we've got more and more and more, we haven't necessarily become more happy. So, for example, I think the year was from 1970 to about 2000. The real income of Americans grew by 50%. So this factors in price adjustments, inflation.”
2023-11-02 · The Diary of a CEO · The Exercise Expert: This Popular Lifestyle Is Killing 1 Person Every 33 Seconds! (The Comfort Crisis): Michael Easter · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Let's take the last 500 years. Of course, the world is better. You live longer, you're more likely to be literate, you're less likely to be starving, you're less likely to Yeah, exactly, on and on and on. But we often don't realize that in the moment, and that affects us”
2023-11-02 · The Diary of a CEO · The Exercise Expert: This Popular Lifestyle Is Killing 1 Person Every 33 Seconds! (The Comfort Crisis): Michael Easter · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Explained that probably in the past it gave you a survival advantage to always be looking for the next problem, right? Because if you're a type of person who's vigilant going, okay, we might run out of food. That is problematic. We got to fix it. This is a problem. Let's fix that. If you're vigilant like that, that would help you survive, right? But applied to today's world where you've seen the world get better and better over time. It often causes us to miss how amazing it is and pile up first world problems, right? So there's also amazing research where researchers will ask the average American, do you think the world is improving? And only 6% of people think the world is improving. Because we look for the next problem. But if you think about that”
2023-11-02 · The Diary of a CEO · The Exercise Expert: This Popular Lifestyle Is Killing 1 Person Every 33 Seconds! (The Comfort Crisis): Michael Easter · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Because they've been given less. But that didn't happen. They did is they said threatening the exact same amount of times. They took faces that were kind of on the border that they would have passed up and not said we're threatening before. They started deeming those threatening. Same with the research proposals. They started getting more nitpicky. Now, the scientists who I spoke with, whose name is David Lavari, yep, getting his name right, remembered it.”
2023-11-02 · The Diary of a CEO · The Exercise Expert: This Popular Lifestyle Is Killing 1 Person Every 33 Seconds! (The Comfort Crisis): Michael Easter · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Now, if these two things are black or white, the groups would have said threatening fewer times as time went on. They would have found fewer and fewer unethical research proposals”
2023-11-02 · The Diary of a CEO · The Exercise Expert: This Popular Lifestyle Is Killing 1 Person Every 33 Seconds! (The Comfort Crisis): Michael Easter · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Problem creep. Right. So, you know, what used to be a problem yesterday, or we're always going to look for problems. It's basically what I'm trying to say. And they discovered this in this study where they would have people look at a bunch of different faces and determine, you know, is this face threatening or non-threatening? They'd go one face after another. And by the 200 face, though, the scientists started feeding the participants or the study participants fewer and fewer threatening faces. Other study that did two of these, they had them look at research papers and determine whether the research papers were ethical or unethical. Same deal. About midway through they start feeding them fewer and fewer unethical research proposals.”
2023-11-02 · The Diary of a CEO · The Exercise Expert: This Popular Lifestyle Is Killing 1 Person Every 33 Seconds! (The Comfort Crisis): Michael Easter · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yes, it's called, it's a theory. It was discovered by Harvard researchers in the psychology department, and the technical term, they call it, is prevalence induced concept change. And you can just think about it as problem creep.”
2023-11-02 · The Diary of a CEO · The Exercise Expert: This Popular Lifestyle Is Killing 1 Person Every 33 Seconds! (The Comfort Crisis): Michael Easter · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We adapt to what we have. So it's like today's pleasure is tomorrow is just any given thing and we're looking for the next pleasure. And there's some interesting studies about this as well. One of my favorites from the comfort crisis is this study that found that as people experience fewer and fewer problems, we don't become more satisfied. We simply start searching for the next problem.”
2023-11-02 · The Diary of a CEO · The Exercise Expert: This Popular Lifestyle Is Killing 1 Person Every 33 Seconds! (The Comfort Crisis): Michael Easter · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Be washing my hands. The water's nice and hot, and I'll think back to that and be like, oh, remember when the hot running water hit your hands and you got emotional at how amazing it is? I mean, it's good to have these reminders that life is pretty amazing right now. We've come pretty far.”
2023-11-02 · The Diary of a CEO · The Exercise Expert: This Popular Lifestyle Is Killing 1 Person Every 33 Seconds! (The Comfort Crisis): Michael Easter · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The world that we live in today is amazing in so many ways, like full stop, incredible. The fact that we have hot running water on demand, the fact that we have all these different forms of entertainment, the fact that we don't have to hunt and gather for our food, like we're not forced to do these things, but we often miss how amazing that is because we're like the fish thrown in the water that don't know they're in the water. And I do think that doing things that push back against that, having experiences that you throw yourself into, they can be big and small, that throw you out of your comfort zone and give you perspective. I do think that that is important in order to live well and get perspective and have gratitude. I mean, I still have times today where”
2023-11-02 · The Diary of a CEO · The Exercise Expert: This Popular Lifestyle Is Killing 1 Person Every 33 Seconds! (The Comfort Crisis): Michael Easter · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I'd been bored out of my mind up there the whole time because I don't have any screens or anything. So those movies in the seat back, oh my God, this is the most stimulating thing I've ever watched. This is incredible. Snack food. I used to think the airplane snack food sucked. I'm like, oh my God, these pretzels amazing. And then when I go to the bathroom, right, it's you hit this little red tab and you get hot running water that hits your hands at thirty five thousand feet and you're moving 600 miles an hour through a tube of steel. It's like when that hot water hit my hands, it was incredible. So context matters because once I went and did that, that totally reframed how I think about these situations that I used to bitch about in the past. And now I can appreciate them. So the reality is that”
2023-11-02 · The Diary of a CEO · The Exercise Expert: This Popular Lifestyle Is Killing 1 Person Every 33 Seconds! (The Comfort Crisis): Michael Easter · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I go spend a month in the Arctic where I'm hungry the entire time if I want water I have to hike down to the stream and hike it back up and freezing cold the entire time I'm sitting in the dirt the entire time if I want to go to the bathroom I have to hike out onto the tundra and I got to bring a rifle because there's grizzly bears So when I leave that world and I get back on that flight to Las Vegas, what do you think the flight was like? Is the most amazing thing that's ever happened to me, right? So the chair I hadn't sat in a chair for more than a month. It's like, oh my God, this chair is so incredibly comfortable. I'd been freezing the entire time. So that warm plane, I was like, oh, this plane is so comfortable, so nice and warm.”
2023-11-02 · The Diary of a CEO · The Exercise Expert: This Popular Lifestyle Is Killing 1 Person Every 33 Seconds! (The Comfort Crisis): Michael Easter · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“But this can also be, I mean, this isn't just exercise we're talking about, right? It's like, what story am I going to tell myself in any given situation? So I'll give you a good example is that. So I spend 33 days in the Arctic, right? Now, to get up to where the drop off point is, you have to take a bunch of different flights. My first flight is from Las Vegas to Seattle. And I hate flying, right? The plane is always too hot. The sea is cramped. The movies suck on the plane. If you want to go to the bathroom, it's this cramped little closet. Baby's crying. It's just terrible.”
2023-11-02 · The Diary of a CEO · The Exercise Expert: This Popular Lifestyle Is Killing 1 Person Every 33 Seconds! (The Comfort Crisis): Michael Easter · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Context really matters about how we feel. And so I think also realizing, you know, there's some really fascinating studies that show we don't recruit all of our capacity, more or less, because it's a defense mechanism, right? You want to keep some capacity on board so your brain is trying to slow you down and shut you down before you've reached your limit. Framing how you want to view how a workout is going is important, right? And I think it can allow you to squeeze a little more performance out of it. Now, let's say your brain only allows you to recruit 50% of your muscle. I don't think you can go, I've only gotten 50% and you're going to get like up to 100, like doesn't work like that. But I do think running it through context and thought and realizing like this actually isn't as bad. And by the way, I've chosen to do this. And it's kind of awesome that I can choose to do this.”
2023-11-02 · The Diary of a CEO · The Exercise Expert: This Popular Lifestyle Is Killing 1 Person Every 33 Seconds! (The Comfort Crisis): Michael Easter · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Oh, it's totally a story. Yeah, what story are you going to tell yourself? So here's another great example. Leg They're spasming. They're tired. If you're running up a hill, it sucks. You want to quit. If you're having sex, this is great”
2023-11-02 · The Diary of a CEO · The Exercise Expert: This Popular Lifestyle Is Killing 1 Person Every 33 Seconds! (The Comfort Crisis): Michael Easter · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Our psychology effects are how we perform basically. And there's a lot of fascinating studies similar to yours where they will take people. And they'll give them some sort of cue like we're going to run as far as you can. Most people are getting about an hour. So they'll give them this cue and then they will change the time, basically. They'll change the clock. So the people maybe have run 40 minutes in reality, but they think they've done, you know, an hour and five minutes, which is five minutes longer than some of the better times. And they'll be like, okay, I'm totally wiped out. They'll do opposite where they slow down time. So these people will have run an hour and say 30 minutes. I'm making up the times. But they think they've run that hour and five minutes, just a little bit better than the next guy. And then they'll be like, okay, I'm totally fatigued. And there's plenty of research that goes back years that basically says our psychological perceptions is a...”
2023-11-02 · The Diary of a CEO · The Exercise Expert: This Popular Lifestyle Is Killing 1 Person Every 33 Seconds! (The Comfort Crisis): Michael Easter · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That's one that has worked for some people where you could eat relatively normally, say, five days a week and then people eat, say 500 calories on their two hungry days. So basically you're just constraining your calories. You're basically just pulling the lever of time, right? If you can, at the end of the day, it Think really calories is probably the best predictor of weight gain or loss. And so the question is, okay, if you need to reduce the calories, how are we going to do that? And there's a lot of different ways to do it. I think that fasting is pretty damn simple, right? It seems a lot simpler than some of the other methods out there.”
2023-11-02 · The Diary of a CEO · The Exercise Expert: This Popular Lifestyle Is Killing 1 Person Every 33 Seconds! (The Comfort Crisis): Michael Easter · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“People who have lost weight fasting simply because they ate crap for breakfast and they would stop at Starbucks on the way to work and get some sugary drink. And like just by cutting that out because now they don't eat till noon like they ended up losing weight.”
2023-11-02 · The Diary of a CEO · The Exercise Expert: This Popular Lifestyle Is Killing 1 Person Every 33 Seconds! (The Comfort Crisis): Michael Easter · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Think that it can be a good weight control tool for some people. I think it can constrain like look, if you're a person who's eating around the clock and you go, okay, well, I'm just going to eat from noon to whatever, 6 p.m. or 7 p.m. You've just cut out a lot of meals. I also think that if you were to go, well, since I'm only eating from noon to 6 p.m., I better eat a ton every single meal. I don't know if you would lose weight. I think there could be definitely some health benefits, possibly. But I also think that if you're doing these extended fasts, that could maybe not be great for muscle mass. So I think it kind of goes back to like these things are complicated, right? And I think it kind of goes back to what is your goal? How are you trying to use this tool? Like, what do you do in this for? And then is the way that you're doing it, does it align properly with your goal? But I do, I mean, I've met plenty of people.”
2023-11-02 · The Diary of a CEO · The Exercise Expert: This Popular Lifestyle Is Killing 1 Person Every 33 Seconds! (The Comfort Crisis): Michael Easter · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, I think that you will be fuller. You will be as full eating, end up eating fewer calories if the food is not as processed. So the foods just, they take up more room in your stomach. They're not packing in as much calories per bite. Let's say for you to be full, you have to eat 10 ounces of food. And we have one food that has 50 calories per ounce and one food that has a hundred calories per ounce. So if you were to eat the 10 ounces of this food, you're going to eat 500 calories. But if you eat 10 ounces of this food, you're going to eat a thousand. And I think that you extrapolate that across the day and you start to see, oh, okay, I can see why choosing foods that help me be more full on fewer calories could be good if my goal was to lose weight or not gain weight compared to foods that are more calorie dense.”
2023-11-02 · The Diary of a CEO · The Exercise Expert: This Popular Lifestyle Is Killing 1 Person Every 33 Seconds! (The Comfort Crisis): Michael Easter · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, so there's this really interesting study out of Australia where they had people eat a certain amount of different types of foods. And then they had them go eat at a buffet, a certain amount of time later and measured how much they ate after and asked them how full they were after eating the test food. They found that the most filling food per calorie was plain boiled potatoes. I think after that was just plain white fish that was a relatively low fat fish. And then after that, I think it was oatmeal, just plain oatmeal. And the least filling foods were tended to be things like croissants, cookies, foods like that, foods that have been mixing flour, fat, all these sorts of things and baking it. And it's like this nice crispy thing. So it's really a measurement of how processed a food is, basically.”
2023-11-02 · The Diary of a CEO · The Exercise Expert: This Popular Lifestyle Is Killing 1 Person Every 33 Seconds! (The Comfort Crisis): Michael Easter · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“But you couldn't eat an equivalent amount of calories and boiled potatoes. I mean, you would get full a quarter of the way through. So, for example, you know, like an ounce of boiled potatoes might have 50 to 100 calories. An ounce of chips might have two hundred, whatever it is. And by the way, it's also not as filling because there's not as much water content. So when you process a food, you concentrate the calories and people tend to eat more of the food.”
2023-11-02 · The Diary of a CEO · The Exercise Expert: This Popular Lifestyle Is Killing 1 Person Every 33 Seconds! (The Comfort Crisis): Michael Easter · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Oh, I think you absolutely could, but I just, the question is are people going to actually do that? I mean, I think there's a certain portion of the population that will do that. And, you know, I do believe that if you were to measure everything perfectly, you have, you know, you could probably lose weight eating McDonald's and there's people who have shown this. At the same time, if you are eating only McDonald's, I can tell you something. You are going to be starving throughout the day. Foods that are ultra-processed tend to be less filling per calorie than foods that have just a single ingredient. So I want you to picture. You and I have a bag of potato chips, and then we have a plate of boiled potatoes. Do you think we could have more calories of?”
2023-11-02 · The Diary of a CEO · The Exercise Expert: This Popular Lifestyle Is Killing 1 Person Every 33 Seconds! (The Comfort Crisis): Michael Easter · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Faster we can do a behavior, the more likely we are to repeat the behavior, especially if it's unpredictable. So one of the big advances in casino technology, for example, with slot machines was removing the handles because, you know, if the machine has a handle, you have to Once they got rid of handles and just put a spin button, you can keep your hand on the button and just And it basically doubled the rate of gambling. So people went from playing, I think, 400 to 500 games in an hour up to an average of 900. So that's more, if you break that down by minute, it's more than we blink. With a crazy range of outcomes, too.”
2023-11-02 · The Diary of a CEO · The Exercise Expert: This Popular Lifestyle Is Killing 1 Person Every 33 Seconds! (The Comfort Crisis): Michael Easter · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Crisp A bunch of different flavors. There's like barbecue, there's sour cream, there's salsa, there's like all these different flavors, and then velocity, it has to be quick to eat. So when you ultra process a food, as I mentioned before, people tend to eat it faster. And so the industry really leans into this. They create snacking as this totally new category. And this is in the 70s is when you really start to see obesity climb. And it's because we just end up eating more across the day. Meantime, our activity levels are dropping”
2023-11-02 · The Diary of a CEO · The Exercise Expert: This Popular Lifestyle Is Killing 1 Person Every 33 Seconds! (The Comfort Crisis): Michael Easter · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So, this is in the 1970s The food industry decided we need to come up with this new category of eating. And it's eating between meals, snacking. Now, if people are eating three square meals, they may not be super full. So they kind of need just these little meals they can have and they need to be easy to eat. They need to be quick to eat. So they come up with snack foods. And what's really interesting is that, you know, I told you about the scarcity loop. There is an executive in the food industry who's talking about what makes a snack food successful. Like, how do you sell snack food? And he said it has 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 just another way of talking about that loop. So, right? It's a good value variety. It's got to have a lot of different interesting, intense flavors. And there's got to be a lot of different options. So when you think about chips or crisps, as you guys call.”
2023-11-02 · The Diary of a CEO · The Exercise Expert: This Popular Lifestyle Is Killing 1 Person Every 33 Seconds! (The Comfort Crisis): Michael Easter · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That researchers think it's because of that massive status queue of having to walk through first class. And by the way, you're not first class because you're in coach.”
2023-11-02 · The Diary of a CEO · The Exercise Expert: This Popular Lifestyle Is Killing 1 Person Every 33 Seconds! (The Comfort Crisis): Michael Easter · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“People going absolutely nuts on flights. It's like when there's a big incident with the flight attendant or someone just losing their mind and they have to ground the plane or whatever it might be.”
2023-11-02 · The Diary of a CEO · The Exercise Expert: This Popular Lifestyle Is Killing 1 Person Every 33 Seconds! (The Comfort Crisis): Michael Easter · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, no, and that's the thing. It's like it's not super comfortable to talk about, right? And it definitely affects us. And here's a sort of fun, crazy study that I came across while reporting scarcity brain is that flights that have a first class cabin, they have a fourfold higher rate of air rage compared to flights that don't have a first class cabin. And if the passengers in second class coach have to walk through the first class cabin, the rate increases to a ninefold increase in incidence of air rage.”
2023-11-02 · The Diary of a CEO · The Exercise Expert: This Popular Lifestyle Is Killing 1 Person Every 33 Seconds! (The Comfort Crisis): Michael Easter · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Tell people that you care about your status. Absolutely. Yet, everyone cares about it. And everyone asks, oh, no, I don't care. I don't care what others think about me. It's like, yeah, you do. Like, let's all be honest. Everyone cares to some extent what others think about them in some way. And I think by talking about it and also understanding why in the first place is important. Now, the reason why to me is that the more status and influence that you would have had in the past would have given you a survival advantage in the sense that you probably would have ton't have to do the crappy menial labor that burns energy. You probably would have had more mates. You probably would have gotten more food. You probably would have gotten all these things. And still today, when you look at how status affects health, people of lower status tend to have worse health outcomes than people of higher status. And so you might think, well, this is just because the higher status people have more money and they can go to better hospitals and get better health care. But the thing is that it holds income.”
2023-11-02 · The Diary of a CEO · The Exercise Expert: This Popular Lifestyle Is Killing 1 Person Every 33 Seconds! (The Comfort Crisis): Michael Easter · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“No, I think you're right. I think we all changed the game. And we like to think that we're either not playing the Everyone's like this. So, what's it, what's really interesting about status, which I love learning when I was reporting about it in the book, is that Psychological researchers, they didn't really research status all that much until the 90s. And this is because They didn't want to admit that status is important to humans because by researching it, you are saying this is probably important to me. So the worst thing you can do for your status.”
2023-11-02 · The Diary of a CEO · The Exercise Expert: This Popular Lifestyle Is Killing 1 Person Every 33 Seconds! (The Comfort Crisis): Michael Easter · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, I think that when you look at how humans behave, it seems to be, right? And I think it does go back to evolution because if you had more of these things that we need to survive, whether it's food to stuff, to information, to status, you would have a survival advantage and that's still built into us. I think it still is advantageous today to a point. Now I'm going to turn the question back on you. So it's like you probably have that drive, right? And that's taking you to a certain place. And now you have certain financial assets and you've sort of shifted, though, too, your career. So now I'm turning it back on you. How do you feel like that's manifested itself in your life?”
2023-11-02 · The Diary of a CEO · The Exercise Expert: This Popular Lifestyle Is Killing 1 Person Every 33 Seconds! (The Comfort Crisis): Michael Easter · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Still have to figure out how I am going to get out of this. The first step to me is just being aware of it in the first place. So once you become aware of behavior and observe a behavior, it tends to change. That's called the Hawthorne effect. And then the second part is that you can remove or change any of the three parts of that loop that I, of the scarcity loop that I mentioned. So you can remove or change the opportunity. You can remove or change the unpredictable rewards, or you can remove or change the quick repeatability. You can slow things down.”
2023-11-02 · The Diary of a CEO · The Exercise Expert: This Popular Lifestyle Is Killing 1 Person Every 33 Seconds! (The Comfort Crisis): Michael Easter · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, well, we all do. Well, first, I will say that when people fall into this loop, I like to say that you're not a bad person because this is very much part of the human brain. You know, people will be hard on themselves because their screen time is so high and like, why do I keep doing this thing? So you're not a bad person. It's your ancient brain working against you. It's not your fault. But it is your problem”
2023-11-02 · The Diary of a CEO · The Exercise Expert: This Popular Lifestyle Is Killing 1 Person Every 33 Seconds! (The Comfort Crisis): Michael Easter · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Philadelphia Eagles game because the fights are always in Philadelphia, in the US Or it could be this video, this amazing heartwarming dog video. And that makes me smile, or it could be some hilarious video that you're just laughing your butt off, and so you're kind of sucked into that waiting for the next win, right? You're scrolling, scrolling, scrolling, and then that's the one that got me.”
2023-11-02 · The Diary of a CEO · The Exercise Expert: This Popular Lifestyle Is Killing 1 Person Every 33 Seconds! (The Comfort Crisis): Michael Easter · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, totally. Yeah, think of the experience of using, we'll take Twit Now callbacks, apparently. So let's say you have come up with a little tweet that you think is hilarious. It's of the moment, right? So you put it up and then you wait, right? The reels are spinning. Then you open the app back up and you're like, did people like it? Did they retweet it? And you don't know what could have happened. It could be so clever that like, oh my God, so many people have retweeted this. And this feels amazing if this happens. But it could have fallen flat. And then you're like, now I actually look like an idiot because I put out a joke and no one thinks it's funny. It's like telling a joke in front of a room and people just stare at you, right? So there's this range of unpredictable outcomes that could happen. Same with scrolling, though, in a way. I mean, you just scroll and scroll and scroll and you're kind of searching for that video that's going to provide you with a hit of something, right? It could be, oh, here's some sort of crazy fight that happened outside of a bar after a...”
2023-11-02 · The Diary of a CEO · The Exercise Expert: This Popular Lifestyle Is Killing 1 Person Every 33 Seconds! (The Comfort Crisis): Michael Easter · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, well, you could think if you. Mean, say you get an update on your phone. Let's say you go onto Instagram and you get an update and it's a comment. I mean, you could argue. Comment it could be good, it could be bad. Is this a comment from someone that I think is super cool that's saying, oh, that's an amazing photo? You look wonderful in that photo. Or is it some troll online going, man, you look like a complete idiot in that? Right. So there's always unpredictability embedded in social media. It wouldn't work if you knew what was coming.”
2023-11-02 · The Diary of a CEO · The Exercise Expert: This Popular Lifestyle Is Killing 1 Person Every 33 Seconds! (The Comfort Crisis): Michael Easter · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, near miss. So near misses are a term from the casino industry. And in slot machines, let's say you have five reels and you need these bars to line up, these gold bars or whatever. We'll use cherries. That's a better example. You got four cherries line up. And if this fifth cherry hits, you're going to want a bunch of money. Now what'll usually happen in slot machines is that fifth root wheel, they will be programmed to have that thing roll longer and longer and longer. So they extend that out because you are sucked in. You're like, if this thing lands, I'm about to win a bunch of money. And then it lands. It's not the What ends up happening is that this leads people to repeat the behavior quicker, actually. And because near misses are mathematically more likely to happen than actual wins, it compels people to repeat the behavior.”
2023-11-02 · The Diary of a CEO · The Exercise Expert: This Popular Lifestyle Is Killing 1 Person Every 33 Seconds! (The Comfort Crisis): Michael Easter · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Exactly. Think about starting a car. Okay. You start your car. It turns on every time. That's not that exciting, right? Like it's not going to capture your attention. Let's say you turn it on and it doesn't turn over. So you try it again. It doesn't turn over. You try it again. It doesn't turn over. What are you going to do? You're just going to be like, okay, well, my car's not starting. I'm going to fix it. Now what happens if you go to start your car and it doesn't turn over, but it kind of putters. It goes like it's going to turn on and then it stops. Then you do it again and then it doesn't do that. And so you're like, okay, well, what's going on? So you do it again. It starts to sound like it's going to come on. It's like, but then it doesn't. You're going to sit there messing with that so long as that car is giving you signs of life, right? There's this unpredictability embedded into it. And that'll capture attention of, yeah, any animal, pretty much.”
2023-11-02 · The Diary of a CEO · The Exercise Expert: This Popular Lifestyle Is Killing 1 Person Every 33 Seconds! (The Comfort Crisis): Michael Easter · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, they are. So the guy that I spoke to at the University of Kentucky does research on pigeons. And pigeons will play a gambling game that gets them less overall resources compared to a predictable game that gets them more food. So he can basically turn pigeons into these sort of degenerate gamblers. And you see it in rapture.”
2023-11-02 · The Diary of a CEO · The Exercise Expert: This Popular Lifestyle Is Killing 1 Person Every 33 Seconds! (The Comfort Crisis): Michael Easter · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So you go to point A no food B? No food C ding ding ding Jackpot You find this massive elk that you end up killing and it feeds you for weeks. So that is the exact same architecture as a slot machine You play the game you don't get anything you play the game you don't get anything you play the game It's right there Amazing and you couldn't predict any of that right and you've got to repeat that behavior every day for life So we seem to be inherently attracted to behaviors that fall into that loop because if we weren't in the past we wouldn't have had as much incentive to continue searching for food and in turn survive so we still have that sort of ancient hardware”
2023-11-02 · The Diary of a CEO · The Exercise Expert: This Popular Lifestyle Is Killing 1 Person Every 33 Seconds! (The Comfort Crisis): Michael Easter · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Get that this thing is in a lot of different places, but why? Why in the first place? He just looks at me and he goes, I don't know, like he just makes money off it. He doesn't care. I end up calling a guy who's a psychologist at the University of Kentucky. And this guy is an old school behavioral psychologist. Like he got his PhD in 1968. He's been doing research ever since. And he explained that it likely evolved to help us find food in the past. So if you think of humans in the past, you basically had to find food every day or else you're going to die. You don't know where the food is, and you don't know how much you're going to find”
2023-11-02 · The Diary of a CEO · The Exercise Expert: This Popular Lifestyle Is Killing 1 Person Every 33 Seconds! (The Comfort Crisis): Michael Easter · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“When I look at the things that Aren't good at moderating whether it's I check email way too much or I check my stocks way too much and this drives me nuts it usually falls it's usually behavior that falls into that scarcity loop and so the book unpacks you know what it is where it came from why we get hooked on it in the first place and I can explain that And then where it pops up in modern life, you don't know where it came from Okay, so I had the same question. So I talked to the slot guy and I'm like, okay, I get that gambling and slot machines are so compelling.”
2023-11-02 · The Diary of a CEO · The Exercise Expert: This Popular Lifestyle Is Killing 1 Person Every 33 Seconds! (The Comfort Crisis): Michael Easter · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“To be so with slot machines, it's like you play, you could lose your money, you could win a couple dollars, you could win hundreds of thousands of dollars. It's crazy. And then three, quick repeatability. You can immediately repeat the behavior. Now, the important part is that, and why I'm talking about this, is because that three-part behavior loop, it is the most powerful behavior loop at getting people to repeat behaviors and get sucked in. It's like the serial killer of moderation. Okay. And it's now in all sorts of other tech and institutions. So for example, it's what makes social media work. It's what makes dating apps so compelling. It's being put in financial apps like Robin Hood. It's being leveraged by different gig work companies, right? It explains the rise of sports betting. It's embedded in a lot of these behaviors that we can't seem to moderate.”
2023-11-02 · The Diary of a CEO · The Exercise Expert: This Popular Lifestyle Is Killing 1 Person Every 33 Seconds! (The Comfort Crisis): Michael Easter · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So it's a collaboration with the gambling industry and a bunch of different tech companies. So you go into this place and I went in there and it is just a real casino. There's hotel rooms. There's like restaurants. There's a coffee bar. There's all these different things at the casino would have, like the slot machines, like the poker tables, like the sports book, like insert whatever. And while I'm there, I end up talking to a researcher who designs slot machines. And slot machines work on what I call the scarcity loop. It is a three-part behavior loop and its three parts are one opportunity to unpredictable rewards and three quick repeatability. So one opportunity. You have an opportunity to get something of value that's going to enhance your life. In the case of a slot machine, it's money, right? Two, unpredictable rewards. You know you'll get that thing of value at some point, but you don't know when, and you don't know how valuable it's going to be.”
2023-11-02 · The Diary of a CEO · The Exercise Expert: This Popular Lifestyle Is Killing 1 Person Every 33 Seconds! (The Comfort Crisis): Michael Easter · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yet we all suck at moderation in some way or another in our life, right? We all have a thing that we're not great at moderating, let's say. So I live in Las Vegas and I have this underlying question and Las Vegas is a fascinating town. And so I want to know why slot machines work. Why are they so good at grabbing attention? Now, long story short is this leads me to this place on the edge of town in Las Vegas. And it's a brand new, fully working cutting-edge casino, but it's used entirely for research on human behavior.”
2023-11-02 · The Diary of a CEO · The Exercise Expert: This Popular Lifestyle Is Killing 1 Person Every 33 Seconds! (The Comfort Crisis): Michael Easter · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, it is in a way with our cells, but it's also, I think, in a way with this sort of ancient hardware that we have. So I'll answer this this way, and it might provide some insight. And we can kind of go from there. So in this book, scarcity brain. This underlying question I have that is everyone knows that everything's fine in moderation.”
2023-11-02 · The Diary of a CEO · The Exercise Expert: This Popular Lifestyle Is Killing 1 Person Every 33 Seconds! (The Comfort Crisis): Michael Easter · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Become increasingly sanitary, increasingly rule based, whatever. But that's like not a good way to find that. There's a lot more productive ways to find that. And I can find that now by applying it to a job that allows me to go into extreme and interesting places. And so I think that, you know, the message for the average person is that. Once you figure out why you have an issue in the first place, and if you can figure out, okay, well, how do I apply it to something that enhances my life, that can be a good life hack.”
2023-11-02 · The Diary of a CEO · The Exercise Expert: This Popular Lifestyle Is Killing 1 Person Every 33 Seconds! (The Comfort Crisis): Michael Easter · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT