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Michael Easter

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2023-11-02
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2023-11-02
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  1. “It basically puts addiction on a spectrum. It's like here's like 11 questions about addiction. And if you say yes to four of them, then you got a mild case. If you say yes to six of them, you got a medium case. And if you say yes to seven or more, you got an extreme case. And like when you read that, you could plug in a bunch of different behaviors that people do all the time and go, oh, I guess I am kind of like mildly addicted to insert whatever app you spend way too much time on. And I think that getting out of that is ultimately hard. And ultimately, I also see addiction as kind of a symptom of some underlying thing. So for me, I think the reason that I drank is because I had an office job that I found a little bit boring. It was rather sanitary, rule-based. And as I mentioned before, I'm a person who I do well on extreme experiences. And when I would drink, alcohol would allow me to be sort of wild and free in this world that's.”

    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

  2. “Because I think that another thing that's interesting about today is that. Know when people hear the word addiction, they automatically think drugs, they automatically think alcohol. But really, if addiction is choosing that short-term reward at the expense of long-term growth, it really falls on this big spectrum. There's plenty of things we all do every day that fall into that, but it's just how bad is it hurting you? To what extent? And even the DSM-5, which is sort of like the Bible of psychiatrists, the one that they use.”

    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

  3. “Well, so addiction is really consistently choosing a short-term reward at the expense of long-term growth. I knew that my drinking was causing problems in my life across the board. I mean, like, you know, I had less money. I was eating into my bank account. It was kind of messing with some of my relationships. I would never feel good the three days after I would go out on a bender, right? I would just be like a mess. And yet I couldn't stop. I mean, that's the key, right? As you go, I know this is screwing me up. I know it. And then I tell myself, you know what? Maybe it'll be different this time. Like I'm just going to have one or two drinks this time. And then you have one or two and you go, well, if one or two is this good, what would like ten more be like, right? And something shifts in your head. So it's choosing that short-term relief at the expense of long-term growth. And that is a tough cycle. I mean, I write about it in”

    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

  4. “Oh, I mean, you're just an internal mess. Wasn't an interesting case, but I wasn't the case that most people would think of in the sense that my life was totally fine on paper. I had a job at a magazine everyone knew, you know, I had a house, I had a car, that sort of thing. But internally, I was just a total mess. And it's kind of like the walls were caving in. And I tried to quit drinking a lot of times. And finally, it just occurred to me like this isn't going to be easy. And if you don't do this, you're probably going to die early, by the way. And I realized I had to just rip off the band-aid and do the hard thing. And once I went through that process, my life improved across the board.”

    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

  5. “That's a great question I think a lot of it for me is. I grew up. I grew up with an only child with a single parent who had to travel a lot when I was in my 20s. I also got sober. That was not an easy thing, right? I was choosing this short-term relief of alcohol at the expense of long-term growth and meaning.”

    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

  6. “Yeah, I think we need. I mean, so then you ask, like, okay, well, why are these people doing that? I think part of it is because having to go out and interact with another human is that you don't know is a little bit awkward and challenging at first. And so to me, I mean, a big message of my work is that you have to do challenging things in order to grow as a human because I guarantee that your relationship with an actual person is going to be more rewarding in the long haul than the AI bot or whatever they call them. But it is hard to go out in public. And I think that we live in a world where you can go, okay, I'm going to avoid the hard thing because I can get this thing that's easier, even though it's not going to be as good for me in the long haul.”

    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

  7. “It's also worth taking time to be alone sometimes and seeing what you can learn from that because I think it does help you better appreciate those social moments. Like for me, I never appreciate my friends more when I've gone off on some reporting trip into a strange place completely alone for a month or whatever it might be and then come back and I'm like, oh man, I really appreciate being around these people. And I don't take that time for granted.”

    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

  8. “Yeah, so lonely to me is I want to be with others, but I don't have anyone to be with, right? I just don't have that resource in other people. Being alone is different. It's choosing to take time to be with yourself and see what you can learn from that. And I think, too, that there is some interesting research on people who just prefer to be alone. They just like solitude. And turns out that they're just as happy as super social people. There's a little bit of individual variation. Now, of course, these people will have some people in their life that they can count on. I think that that is absolutely important. But I do think we've shifted in the last, say, 15, 20 years where the message is really, you need a bunch of friends to be happy. You absolutely need to be a socialist possible. And while I'm not saying that don't be social, that is not my message at all. I am saying 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

  9. “So, this was a study in Australia, and it was rather informal. People would take some time to just be in complete silence and they all wrote, you know, at first I felt really uncomfortable through that. But on the other side of that, they started to feel better. And I think that that's kind of a framework for a lot of things in life. It's uncomfortable at first, but when you go through that, you come out on the other side of it and you feel like you've improved. And you probably have improved.”

    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

  10. “Yeah, it's definitely surprising, right? Because we do live in a lot of noise. And another thing that was interesting while I was reporting that section on noise and sound and how that's changed is that most people today say that they feel at first uncomfortable in silence.”

    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

  11. “Yeah, well, and it's funny because what I found fascinating about the studies on that is most people don't realize that being in a lot of noise impacts their productivity. But when you look at what they actually produce, people tend to produce more better work when they're in more silent environments.”

    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

  12. “Just interesting. Yeah, there's this interesting WHO study where they estimated that 2,000 heart attack deaths a year or heart disease deaths a year in Europe were due to how loud the noise that people live in, and that's simply because loudness increases stress and stress is a key factor for heart disease.”

    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

  13. “Fourfold sense before we became this species that overtook the planet is the estimate. And people tend to get stressed out when they're in lots of noise all the time. So if you think about noise in the past, if you heard a loud noise, it was probably danger. Stormrolling, it's an animal that thinks she would be a delicious dinner and is letting out a roar, right? So we tend to become stressed when we hear loud noises. Now in the past those were likely infrequent and today we kind of live in this low grade loudness that seems to be associated with stress. Even dise”

    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

  14. “Yes, that was part of the comfort crisis, the overarching narrative of that book as I spent 33 days in the Arctic. And the thing that I really didn't expect to happen. So in that book, I tell the story of my time in the Arctic. And as I experience these different forms of discomfort that humans would have experienced in the past, I sort of peel off and explain the science behind them and other travels I did about them. It was unbelievably silent. There's no one around for hundreds of miles. I mean, one day you're standing there and I hear this. I'm going. Was that turns out it was my wristwatch? It is so silent up there that you're just standing and you just pick up that The second hand, which normally you would have to hold up, right? And so I got curious 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

  15. “Gauge happiness levels where people who live in the most densely packed cities tend to be on average most unhappy compared to people who live out in rural areas. Of course, I'm not saying that everyone that lives in a densely packed city is unhappy. Of course I'm not. I'm just saying on average you compare those two groups. You're going to find that people who live in countrysides and they're less packed in with groups are going to be happier.”

    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

  16. “So the number is called Dunbar's number, and it's by this researcher Robin Dunbar. I hope I got his first name right. The theory is that groups of people, as we evolved, we probably didn't get over 150 people. Now, because of this, today when we have groups of more than 150 people, things get complicated, right? Because once a group of people gets over 150, you got to remember a lot more interconnected relationships. You got to remember a lot more names. You got to remember a lot more faces. You got to remember all these things. No, by the way, now that we have this big group of people, we need to establish laws. We need to establish all these different things. So it gets rather complex. And the takeaway is that this seems to be a lot of work and stress for most people. And so living in environments where you are sort of jam-packed in with fewer people seems to make most people happier most of the time. So you can sort 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

  17. “Entire life. Think of status and influence, right? It used to be that we would be in these tribes of people that would have maybe 150 people max. And it was very clear what your sort of rank was, right? Because we got a leader, we got some whatever. But now you can blast out stuff about yourself to millions of people at one time.”

    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

  18. “Particular, you know, I'm looking at how Everything we needed to survive in the past was scarce and hard to find. And so it made sense to when you got the opportunity to overdo those things, whether it be food, whether it be gathering possessions, right, tools, whether it be trying to gain status over other people, trying to gain influence, whether it was information. And now we have an abundance of all of those things, right? We've got grocery stores packed with thousands and thousands of foods on all sorts of corners. Information. Think about the internet. The average person in one day today sees more information than a person seven hundred years ago would have seen in their entire 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

  19. “Thank God. Concentrate the calories. So, one the food tastes. Way better than anything you'd find in the jungle. Like when I was living with these people, I'm not going to lie, the food was not that delicious. It really wasn't. So you make the food taste a lot better and you also concentrate the calories. The food becomes a lot easier to eat. You can eat more faster. So there's these interesting experiments at the NIH where they will lock people in a lab and they will give them a unprocessed diet. And then for the next period of time, they will give them an ultra-processed diet, a sort of junk food diet. Now, everything about these diets is matched, like the calories, the carbs, the protein, the fat. And they say, you know, eat as much as you want until you're full. And when people eat the foods that have fewer ingredients, the unprocessed foods, they end up eating 500 fewer calories a day and they end up losing weight. So that's just one example of how things have changed. So when scarcity brain...”

    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

  20. “And so for me, the takeaway was that when you look at what the average person in a developed country eats, it's a lot of very ultra-processed foods. So if ultra-processed foods are basically, that's a euphemism for junk food. That's what scientists use to describe junk food, you know? And it's stuff packed with all sorts of ingredients. Or less. So A food through a ton of processing, right? Like a Dorito. You guys have those in the UK”

    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

  21. “The reason they don't seem to get heart disease, as well as a lot of other chronic diseases that we get and that kill us, for example, they don't seem to get Alzheimer's, tracks back to what they eat. And what they eat at some point in the day, which is fascinating, is that it is going to give the middle finger to every single fad diet you've heard of over the last 40 years. So it's not necessarily low fat, it's not low carb, it's not vegan, it's not paleo, it's not all these different diets you've heard of, right? But the one commonality that all their food has is that it has just one ingredient. So they're eating things like foods like rice, they're eating potatoes, they're eating red meat from Amazonian deer, they're eating a lot of fish, they're eating nuts, they're eating fruits, they're eating, they even eat sugar do we have where they're like if you eat a gram of sugar, your kidneys are going to explode and you're gonna die on the spot”

    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

  22. “Yeah, I mean, well, food is one of them, right? So, as part of this new book, Scarcity Brain. When you look at the diseases that kill humans, modern humans, it's hard disease. Now, the crazy thing about heart disease is that people also don't worry about it. So when you look at what people worry about is going to kill them, it's cancer, it's terror attacks, it's the crazy neighbor next door with the gun. It's all these whatever things. And heart disease is way down the list. But what actually kills people is heart disease. Full stop. Like that is the number one killer of humans globally, especially if you live in a developed country. So I have that in the back of my mind. I come across this paper, this study, and it found a tribe in Bolivia with the healthiest hearts ever recorded by science.”

    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

  23. “So, when they do studies on hunter-gatherers today, which are a way to get to the ideas of how humans used to live in the past, Gruth will generally walk more than 20,000 steps a day. And that's just an average day. Today, the average American, and I would assume probably the average Brit as well, were probably about in the same place, walk anywhere from 4,000 to 5,000 steps a day. That is just so little in the grand scheme of time and space. We had to be active to live and survive. And this drive that we have to do the next easiest, most comfortable thing, it often backfires today”

    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

  24. “Chronic diseases. So, for example, you know, people didn't really get heart disease until we started engineering movement out of our lives with our new jobs and started eating more because we had a massive supply of food thanks to advances in agriculture. I think there's mental health issues too. People are burned out, stressed out our collective lack of fitness, I think, too, has led to a lot of health issues. So for example, In the past our ancestors probably were about 14 times more physically active than us. 14 times. It's a crazy number.”

    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

  25. “No. So we, you know, a lot of my work, it looks at anthropological lens, really. It looks at how humans were shaped over time and how we have these adaptations that used to make sense in these environments where what we needed to survive was scarce, where the world was hard and uncomfortable and life took effort. And those things kept us alive, right? But when you put us in a world where we've engineered the world to be kind of a lot easier in a lot of ways, where we have an abundance of all these things that were sort of built to crave everything from food to stuff to information to even status and influence, we now have an abundance of all those things and these sort of ancient drives we have, this ancient hardware, it can backfire in these new environments. So that's called an evolutionary mismatch.”

    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

  26. “They're all relatively new in the grand scheme of time and space. They're all new within the last hundred years. I mean, here's a great example. Digital media. The average person today takes in 12 to 13 hours of digital media a day. The radio was invented maybe 100 years ago. That is an insane shift in how people spend their time and attention every day.”

    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

  27. “I think that in the context of today in the world we live in now, you often have to embrace short-term discomfort to get a long-term benefit. So I think the world is set up in a way now where things are easy, things are more effortless. And while that is good, overall, that's a result of progress. I think by not having moments that press back against us, and this could be everything from taking the stairs to being willing to have hard conversations in your life, all those sorts of things, we lose something about being a human and lose the things that keep us healthy and happy. I would argue, I argue in the comfort crisis that the things that most impact your day-to-day life today, how you live, everything from cars, climate control to the food system to on and on and on.”

    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

  28. “I call this concept being a two percenter. And if you apply this, I guarantee you will end up healthier and learn what you're capable of. The first step is...”

    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

  29. “And negative words like hate increased. We need to realize that 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

  30. “As a species, we evolved to do the easiest, most comfortable thing, but we eventually end up paying a price for it. People are burned out, stressed out, more mental health problems, and we're looking for the next pleasure. And the industry really leans into this addiction. For example, slot machines. Once they got rid of handles and just put a spin button, people went from playing 400 games in an hour to an average of 900. If you break that down by minute, that's more than we blink. And then we engineered movement out of our lives with our new job sitting in these chairs eight hours a day. Now 2% of people take the stairs when there is also an escalator available. And now we have heart disease, the number one killer of humans globally. This drive that we have to do the most comfortable thing is a problem. 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

  31. “Heart disease deaths a year in Europe were due to Noise that people live in World we live in now. That is not how humans are designed to live.”

    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