Finding Comfort in Discomfort with Michael Easter

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1:27Hello, I'm Anthony Scaramucci, and this is Open Book, where I talk with some of the brightest minds out there about everything surrounding the written word, from authors and historians to figures in entertainment, neuroscientists, political activists, and of course, Wall Street. Sorry, I can't resist. Before we get into today's episode, if you haven't already, please hit follow or subscribe wherever you get your podcasts and leave us a review. We all love a review, even the bad ones. I want to hear the parts you're enjoying or how we can do better. You know I can roll with the punches, so let me know.

2:02Anyways, let's get to it.

2:11The things that are good for us aren't always the things we choose, whether it's food cravings and deciding whether to exercise or ego-driven decisions at work. My guest today, Michael Easter, addresses all these issues from how we can learn to thrive with enough to the importance of finding comfort in discomfort. With the right mindset, we can do it all. So let's listen in.

2:42okay so joining us now on open book is michael easter he's a new york times best-selling author the title of the book is scarcity brain fix your craving mindset and rewire your habits to thrive with enough so i mean this book is written for me michael let me tell you i'm like a rat. I mean, I was either, I'm reincarnated dog where I want to eat to the point of explosion, sleep and have my back scratched, or I'm probably like a rat in a maze. All I want to do is eat sugar and yeah. I mean, it's just terrible. Pavlov's dog. Exactly. Pavlov's rat. Exactly. You know, I am the person you're writing about in the book.

3:20I bought the book, I read the book, and then I was like, well, I'm going to get the chance to talk to Michael. So, but let's start with the newsletter. Talk a little bit about your background. How the hell did you get into this? Yeah, great question. Well, one, I'm glad you enjoyed the book. Thanks for having me. And then second of all, my background is that I worked in magazines for most of my career. So I was an editor at Men's Health Magazine for a bunch of years. Then I left that role to be a professor and have just continued to write. But I think really my writing has always focused on, I would say, health, wellness and psychology topics, but really looking at it from a sort of fundamental view of why do we do what we do?

4:00Why are we the way we are and how can the past sort of inform the current behaviors that maybe don't seem to make sense? OK, so let's talk about that. So here's my brain. It's sort of like that 1980s commercial. This is your brain. And it's like a cracking egg. And this is your brain on drugs. and then they fry the egg. We're basically, you know, there's a lot going on up here, right? I mean, there's a consciousness, but there's also primordial things that are running the thing, right? Right. All I want to do is eat bad things. Also, Elon Musk might be right. We could be in a simulation because everything that I want to eat is bad for me.

4:37Yes. And everything that's supposedly good for me tastes like dog shit. So tell me what I got wrong and tell me where we're going. Well, I don't think you got anything wrong, to be honest. I think you're 100 % normal for that reason. So the book, Scarcity Brain, it really looks at, everyone knows that everything is fine in moderation and yet we all suck at moderation. And so why is that? And it really unpacks sort of the evolutionary roots of the things that we crave. Everything from the junk food you spoke about to the fact that we like to accumulate stuff, right? The average person today has more than 10 ,000 items in their house, information.

5:17We love hoarding information, right? People are on Twitter all day, Elon Musk being a good test case of that. And also things like status, right? People crave status. They want to sort of have eyes on them. And all these things we crave, I argue in the book, it goes back to the fact that in the past, they would have given us a survival advantage and helped us survive, pass on our DNA. So if you were the type of sort of caveman who was like to overdo things, right? Didn't moderate, you would have survived and passed on your DNA. And we now still have that DNA in a world where we have enough of a lot of these things, arguably too much.

5:51Okay. So how do I stop my sugar craving? Go. How do you stop your sugar craving? So here's what I will say is a lot of times that people will use sugar as a tool for something other than calories. And I will give myself an example. I found that when I would get stressed out, I would eat M &Ms. I would eat peanut M &Ms. I love those. Oh, they're so good. And food is really interesting because in the past, for pretty much all the time, the job of life was to have some kids, find some food and not die. We are very much wired to just seek food. If you don't eat, you die. But we now have so much of all this hyper-processed food that is just really tuned in to make us eat more of it than I think we want to crave it.

6:37And so it can become a sort of tool for something else. So another stat from my other book, The Comfort Crisis, that I love this stat, is that 80 % of eating today is driven by reasons other than true physiological hunger. Totally true. Yeah. I'm never, I mean, Michael, I'm just going to let you know what a gluttony. I'm never hungry. I'm eating and rummaging and stuff is going in like I'm Jabba the Hutt. You know, I have, you know. You got to. We all have those days. Yeah. Yeah. 100%. All right. So let me ask you this because I've been dying to ask you this. how did you you're a great writer by the way and you you've captured that men's health like journalistic succinctness like you you're giving really good actionable things to do in the book but how how did you get into this like what was your when you're growing up you said i'm always want to be a writer and then how did you go from being a writer into health tell us a little bit about that yeah i grew up a single mom raised me um she was a voracious reader we always had books around the house.

7:39And one day I picked up this book that she was reading called Into Thin Air by John Krakauer. And that book just grabbed me. And that was it. That was what I wanted to do with my life. So in that book, he chronicles this Everest expedition that he was on that went totally wrong. A handful of people died on the mount. But just the way he wrote that story, the crispness of the writing, but also the fact that he could weave in these really informative pieces of information in a way that was not at all like what I was forced to read in my science classes was just like I was hooked and sort of became a magazine junkie, started reading a ton and just decided to try and pursue it as a career, despite all the statistics telling me that was a terrible idea.

8:24But you're good at it. Let me tell you, there's money to be made everywhere. One of the things about you is you have your own brand and you have your own equity. So you don't, you know, you can, you'll be just fine. I'm sure your newsletter is kicking ass. You have traveled the world. You've talked to innovators, scientists. Tell us about some of the people that you've met. Yeah, I have the good fortune of definitely being able to talk to some brilliant people. And, you know, my rule is just that the person has to be interesting. and they have to have something that, some piece of information that I think could enhance the reader's lives.

9:01And so whether it's from my books or my newsletter, which is called 2%, I'm always talking to interesting sources. So I've talked to Nobel Prize winners, I've talked to Super Bowl MVP winners, but some of the most fascinating conversations I have happen on a lot of my travels. So for example, in the comfort crisis, I spoke to this Buddhist Kenpo, which is kind of like a cardinal in the Buddhist faith about that rank. And I've, you know, I found really interesting people like another character in my books and in my newsletter is a guy whose name is Trevor Cashy. And he looks like a hell's angel.

9:37He's about 29 years old, but he has this IQ that is, you know, it's well over 160. And he's the most brilliant, succinct thinker I've ever met. And he's, he runs a nutrition consulting business and the amount of people that he's helped by just cutting through so much nonsense and just the clarity in his thinking. It's just amazing. And it's really given me this saying that I think everyone has an interesting story, has interesting stuff to share. You just have to ask enough questions and be willing to go there and meet them face to face. Okay. So, I'm reading a note from my producer about the comfort crisis.

10:15And you've got a tie-in between the scarcity brain and the comfort crisis. And so if you had to summarize those two books for us, what would you say? Well, I would say when I started writing scarcity brain after comfort crisis, I didn't think they were related, but I since quickly found out that they are. And the comfort crisis is basically looks at what happened to us when our environment changed to one that is very comfortable, where we have easy, effortless access to food stuff, everything we want, right? We live at 72 degrees. All these things, these advances, they're good in the grand scheme of time and space.

10:52But we also know that the things that most improve humans, they often take going through short-term discomfort, whether that's exercise, whether that's sitting with boredom rather than immediately reaching for the slot machine in your pocket, whether that's sitting with a little bit of hunger. And with scarcity brain, it really looks at, whereas comfort crisis looked at, what have we removed, which is discomfort and the benefits of it. Scarcity brain really looks at all this stuff that we've added in. Screen time, the average person spends 12 hours or more a day on digital media, food, possessions, and those systems that we have that used to help us survive really get co-opted in this wonderful new world we have.

11:32Yeah. I mean, so there was a great book that Jeff Hawkins wrote. This has got to be 10 years ago, but you've heard of the book. He's the inventor of Palm Pilot. He's a contemporary of mine. Grew up out here on Long Island with me. We didn't know each other, but when he was out in Huntington. I was in Port Washington. But he said that the brain, the way it evolved, you have the front part, the neocortex is the new cortex. And then you have this subcortexes, which are more primordial. And so you've got a lot going on in your brain, a lot of animalistic, atavistic impulses. And then you have your self-awareness and your ability to look at yourself and observe the universe and obviously adapt and learn from the universe.

12:14Why is it so hard for the part of our brain that I would call the 160 IQ part of the brain? At least I don't have one, but your friend did. Why can't the really smart part of the brain have better control of the primordial part of the brain? Like right now, you've totally screwed me. I'm going to just tell you why, Michael. I want to run upstairs and I want to eat peanut butter M &Ms. And they are in my house. That's probably the biggest problem. They probably shouldn't have them there. Just letting you know, you put it in my brain. I think my IQ is okay, pretty good. And I don't know if I'm not going to have them or not.

12:50I'm probably going to have them as soon as I get off this show with you. So what's wrong with me and what's wrong with us? We can't fight the primordial instincts inside us. Yeah, well, I've cued myself to go eat peanut M &Ms after this as well. So the short answer is that doing the thing that was rewarding in the short term, the eating immediately, the grabbing the new item, the whatever it might be, that always made sense in the grand scheme of time and space, right? Because you didn't know if you were going to survive. You didn't know if you were going to have food tomorrow. That piece of information clamoring over the next piece of information about someone that could have saved your life, right?

13:34Because you don't know the intention of another person. So having sort of short term, impulsive thinking and actions made sense for all the time. And then now we find ourselves in a world where it doesn't quite make as much sense. We're still kind of driven to make that for evolutionary reasons. And it is a fight to kind of go, okay, well, you know, I want to go eat, you know, 10 servings of peanut M &Ms after this. And man, that would be fantastic. So I'm going to have to be willing to sit with this discomfort. Hopefully I can do it of saying no to that and realizing that now today, in order to live well, you have to make decisions that help you in the long term.

14:13So I'll give you a study that I love that I think sort of wraps this up. it found that 2 % of people take the stairs when there is also an escalator available. 2%. So what does this tell us? Tells us that humans are wired to do the next easiest, most comfortable thing, even when it doesn't serve us in the long run. Because 100 % of those people knew that taking the stairs would give them a better long-term return on their health, maybe even their mental health. But 98 % of people choose the short-term comfort and ease. And that is simply passed down to us from evolution, even though it doesn't make sense today to do the easy thing in every scenario.

14:49So my newsletter is called the 2 % newsletter because it really takes that idea of the fact that humans are wired to choose short-term comfort, even when it hurts us in the long run, and that choosing to embrace discomfort in the short term can give you a long-term benefit. Okay, so very well said. And of course, Andrew Huberman, I believe single-handedly has stopped a large swath of a younger generation than me from drinking. There's a lot of teetotaling going on. And I'm a Wall Streeter. I'm watching the earnings of some very big liquor companies go down where they were rising. And there was tons of people drinking tequila and all this great stuff.

15:29And all of a sudden now they're doing this. And Juberman has explained to people what happens to your body under alcohol. And people are like, wait a minute, I don't know if I want that to have there, I can tell you this, I have this ring. It's an aura ring. If I drink, this ring is like a nanny. This is like owning a nanny state on your finger. The nanny state alerts me that I'm a moron and it says, this is bad and this didn't go well. My sleep was screwed up. And so stop drinking. I basically said, I'm not going to drink anymore. Why am I doing this to my body? So what are your thoughts on drinking?

16:01And where do you think drinking's going? My thoughts on drinking are that if a person, so this one gets really complicated, because when you look at big studies of population, drinking is often associated with health benefits, so long as it's in moderation. And so then you go, okay, well, why is that? And the answer is that it's not the alcohol. It's what people do when they drink in moderation, which is that they socialize. So being social is very good. So I think personally, that if a person is having, say, one or two drinks a couple nights a week, very importantly, in the context of being social.

16:37So they're going to a bar, they're hanging out with people. You're not sitting at your home bar. You come home, you're a Don Draper and you're popping like four martinis for dinner. Exactly. No bueno, right? Exactly. So if you're drinking in a way that's social, I think it's probably, I think it could potentially be a positive. At the same time, alcohol is a toxin. We don't need it. So I think really it just comes down to personal choice. But if a person does find themselves doing the Don Draper thing. That's probably worth having a hard conversation with yourself with. All right. So drink is not so bad, but you prefer to be social because you like when people are social, but obviously don't drink and drive.

17:14Okay. So you spent your entire career and you built all of this great research, all this learning into these books. What's one habit or lifestyle change that you believe you get the greatest return on investment? Me personally or the general population? Both. I don't know why I just asked you that because I think my answer would be the same for both. It would be exercise. Exercise. Okay. I think for me personally, it's the thing that keeps me sane. I'm a high wired person. As a kid, I was always running around. If I don't burn off steam, I just go a little, I go a little wacko. And then when you look at for the general population, when you look at what kills people today.

17:58It's all these chronic diseases like heart disease, certain cancers, diabetes, metabolic diseases. And the number one thing that you can do to prevent those is exercise, full stop. I mean, if a person exercises, it radically increases the odds that they are going to live not only a longer life, but that every year they have of that long life is better spent. It increases your mobility. It's linked to better mental health. I mean, it literally is one study that I love called exercise the miracle drug. It's about the closest thing we have to that. Now, of course, it's hard in the short term, but like all things, you get that long-term benefit afterwards.

18:37Okay. So I'm going to add something. I'm not great at it, by the way. So I'm a better exerciser than I am a sleeper. I have a hard time actually in bed because I'm always moving, ready to go. What do you think about sleep? Very important. I also think that there's a lot of information out about sleep that can make it very confusing. I actually wrote a whole newsletter about this. It's on the website. I think it's called eight sleep tricks that actually work or something like that. But I think the long story short of that piece is that a person has to find what works for them with sleep. So we hear a lot of rules like you must sleep in a blacked room, you must absolutely sleep eight hours a night, you must absolutely have silence.

19:19and it turns out when they do larger studies, sleep is very individual. Some people are great with six hours. Some people need eight and a half. Some people actually do better with a TV on. Some people do better with a little bit of light, a little bit of sound. And so I do think that it's one of those things where people often can become anxious that they're not getting eight hours when you might be actually best on seven. So kind of learning your own habits, a little bit of introspection, I think can be really useful for people around sleep. Yeah. I think it's been a big thing for me personally.

19:53I can say that when I'm sleeping better, I'm thinking better. I'm also, my metabolism is better. So people got to try to get into that habit. Okay, so what's the easiest change? Let's say that I am the laziest rat in the rat cage, in the rat maze, and all I think about are M &Ms, peanut M &Ms. What's the easiest change I can make? I mean, I go back to that 2 % stat, to be honest, and trying to figure out how can you translate that idea of doing what you're already going to do, but making it slightly harder and applying that across the board. So if you take the stairs and the escalator idea, it's like you have to get up to the second floor.

20:31You can either take the stairs or the escalator. One's going to give you a long-term return on your health and improve your life across the board. And another is just going to be nice in the short term, but could actually add to chronic disease. So, so interesting. I have a boss. My old boss, who still thinks he is my boss, by the way, I'll point that out. But my old boss, Michael, is in good shape. He's 72. He's got me by 12 years in very good shape. I said, you know, I'm impressed. You're in very good shape. And he said to me something that I'll share with you. I want you to react to it. He said, you know what?

21:02I'm doing 100 push-ups and 100 sit-ups a day. I don't care what day it is. I don't care what I'm... And if I can't do 100 in a row, I'm going to do 10 and then 10 and then 10 until I get to 100. And I do it every single day. What is your thoughts on that? Just the incremental few things to do if you can't do everything. I love that because it tells us two things. One, his main thing is that he's consistent, right? He's doing it every single day. So a lot of people will go, oh, I'm going to exercise. And they'll do it for a week. They'll pick some big, crazy plan. And then after a week, they're like, I can't really sustain this.

21:39So he's able to do it consistently. And then two is that he has found something that works for him. Right. And I think that's a big key is finding a type of exercise that you actually enjoy, because the best exercise, in my opinion, is the one that you will do consistently. And that often comes down to enjoyment. I like this guy. Yeah. I mean, he's in good shape. You know, he's better shaped than me. I've been I've been doing five pushups a day. I'm going to try to get it up there. Okay. Now at the point of my podcast, we pull out five ideas from your book, call it our five famous words. I'm going to say the word.

22:15You're going to respond to me with what comes to your head, the first thought that comes to your head. I'm going to say the word cravings. You say what? I'm going to say ultra processed slash junk food. So one part of the book, I went into the Bolivian Amazon because there's a tribe there that doesn't get heart disease. And heart disease is what kills Americans. I mean, by and large. And the reason these people don't get heart disease is because they don't eat all the super processed food we do, which is engineered to be craved and packed with calories. It all comes down to what they eat. Okay.

22:50I'm going to say mindset. My reaction to that is your mindset changes based on the conditions you put yourself in. In the comfort crisis, I talk about this idea that you can basically think of as problem creep. And this research found that as people experience fewer and fewer problems, we don't actually become more satisfied. We simply lower our threshold of what we consider a problem. And so as the world has gotten better, we have ended up with first world problems. And the answer to that, to build a mindset that can accomplish things, that can get through things, that doesn't complain and find problems, is to do things that challenge you because that really resets the sort of goalpost.

23:34Okay, I say fitness. The simple definition of fitness is move your body and objects. Okay. I say comfort. My response is that comfort is good, but too much comfort is linked to all the things that make us sick, all the things that make us crazy, all the things that are associated with poor outcomes. So you've got to balance comfort and discomfort. So be comfortable with being less comfortable. Yes. Ultimately, right? You've got to get comfortable with being in a little bit of discomfort if you want to stay healthy. Yeah. It's a necessary buy-in. Right. I say scarcity, Michael. You say what? We used to live in worlds of scarcity and now our worlds have shifted to abundance.

24:24So the ancient problem was scarcity and the modern one is abundance. And is that good or bad? Or a little bit of both, maybe. A little bit of both, right? I like the fact that after this podcast, you and I are going to go to the pantry and smash M &M. Definitely having them because I have a prehistoric brain and I'm just slightly better at craving control than I guess a rat and a maid. I'm definitely going to have some. But I mean, the truth of the matter is I've got to make sure I don't have too many. Exactly. Then I'll be sluggish and I'll feel terrible and blah, blah, blah. But, you know, the point the points of your books are get in the gym.

25:05Everything that you're feeling and you're fighting is part of your evolution. It's part of your survival. But think about it. switch your mindset about it and get into some good habits incrementally and you'll change your health. Is that the resonating messages? Yeah. Do what, you know, do the great thing about living today is we have so much opportunities and we don't have to worry about running around in the landscape outside in the weather, hunting our food. But because we don't do that, that also has downsides. And so if you can figure out ways to sort of do things that humans have been doing for all of time.