Introducing Michael Easter and His Background

John Dehlin [00:00:00] Hello everyone and welcome to another edition of Mormon Stories podcast. I'm your host, John Dehlin. It is October 11, 2023 and today we are excited to have with us a New York Times level author. He is the author of a new book called Scarcity Brain. His name is Michael Easter. He is also the author of a book that my beloved book club and Margi and I all read together, I believe, last year and it was called the Comfort Crisis. Both of these books have a ton of wisdom and. And so we're going to talk a little bit about both, but also about Michael Easter's story. It turns out Michael grew up in Utah, went to Woods Cross High.

Michael Easter [00:00:44] Woods Cross. So he.

John Dehlin [00:00:45] He has a bit of a. Maybe a bit of a Mormon story.

Michael Easter [00:00:48] We'll see.

John Dehlin [00:00:48] I actually don't fully know his Mormon story, but we're going to talk about his life growing up in Utah, Woods Cross. We're going to talk about, you know, his two books and I. What I' interested in talking about is just his views on religion.

Michael Easter [00:01:04] He.

John Dehlin [00:01:05] If I were. If I were to read his bio really quick. Michael Easter is the author of the Comfort Crisis and a professor at the University of Nevada Las Vegas, or unlv. Go Rebels. He regularly writes and speaks on how humans can leverage modern science and evolutionary wisdom to perform better and live healthier and more meaningful lives. Yeah. His work has been implemented by professional sports teams. We want to know who. Elite military units, Fortune 5 companies and leading universities. He lives in Las Vegas on the edge of the desert with his wife and their two dogs. What breeds are your dogs?

Michael Easter [00:01:39] We have a German shorthair pointer and we have a. It's a lab Pitbull insert. Seven other dogs mix named Conway after Conway Twitty.

John Dehlin [00:01:49] And do you treat him. Conway Twitty after Conway Twitty. That's a bit of an obscure reference.

Michael Easter [00:01:53] Well, guess who Stockton is named after?

John Dehlin [00:01:56] John Stockton.

Michael Easter [00:01:57] Yep.

John Dehlin [00:01:58] I guessed.

Michael Easter [00:01:59] Yep. John Stockton.

John Dehlin [00:02:00] That's less obscure.

Michael Easter [00:02:01] Yeah.

John Dehlin [00:02:02] And is it Comic Twitty, a country western singer?

Michael Easter [00:02:05] Yeah. Old, like 70s guy, big hair. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

John Dehlin [00:02:07] Okay. Well, Michael Easter, welcome to Mormon Stories. Thanks for coming.

Michael Easter [00:02:12] Thanks so much for having me.

John Dehlin [00:02:13] Yeah. Okay, so you know, really quickly, what department do you work in at unlv?

Michael Easter [00:02:22] I am in the journalism department.

John Dehlin [00:02:24] Okay.

Michael Easter [00:02:25] And so the reason I'm there, my background is I worked in magazines for a bunch of years. So I worked at Men's Health magazine for about seven years. And once I'd been there long enough, I was asked to do things that weren't writing. So Writing has always really been my passion, and I ended up taking this job as a professor at UNLV because I teach classes. But then the other half of my job is to continue writing and doing the sort of journalist thing that. That I do. So, yeah, it's a good mix for me.

John Dehlin [00:02:56] Okay. Yeah. I love journalism and I love journalists, so this is going to be fun. Yeah. But. But also evolutionary psychology or biology, like, I guess there's a component of that. Is that just kind of a topic of interest of yours?

Michael Easter [00:03:11] Yeah, well, a lot of the. The writing that I do and the topics that I cover write about study. They're in the health and psychology realm. And I think that our past can explain a lot of the behaviors that we do today, sometimes that are often counterproductive today.

John Dehlin [00:03:33] Yeah.

Michael Easter [00:03:34] Yeah.

John Dehlin [00:03:34] Okay.

Michael Easter [00:03:34] So the sort of classic evolutionary mismatch, the, The. The example that everyone could relate to is, you know, in the past, food was always scarce and hard to find, and when you came upon it, it made sense to. To eat more of it than you needed. And we now live in a world where food is relatively abundant and kind of everywhere, yet we still have this sort of drive to maybe eat more than we need. And this doesn't exactly make sense in today's environments, but we're still working with

John Dehlin [00:04:00] our ancient brains, so, yeah, love it. Okay.

Michael Easter [00:04:03] Yeah.

John Dehlin [00:04:04] So I'm. I don't know how much you've even thought about, like, either the psychology of religion or the evolutionary advantages and disadvantages of religion, but I think we agreed maybe we'd do a teeny bit of an exploration in that regard and try to apply stuff from both books, but specifically this idea of this. How scarcity plays into many people's religious experiences. Yeah.

Michael Easter [00:04:28] Yeah, it should be fun.

John Dehlin [00:04:28] Which wasn't a focus of the book, but this will be the only interview you have like this, I can guarantee you that.

Michael Easter [00:04:34] Exactly. That's why I was like, yeah, let's do it. Let's do some exploring.

Michael Easter's Mormon Story and Upbringing

John Dehlin [00:04:37] All right, so let's start, as we always start, a Mormon stories with your Mormon story. Were you born in Utah? Were you raised by Mormon parents or non Mormon parents? Let's start there.

Michael Easter [00:04:48] So I was actually. Well, I was born in Ogden. My mom and I lived in Idaho for two years, and then we moved back to Utah to be near family. So my dad hasn't been around. Now, my mom, her parents, my grandparents weren't Mormon until my mom was about nine, I believe. And then they converted to Mormonism. They might have been raised Mormon. I don't know about that detail, but either way, they'd fallen off and then they got remarried in the temple. And so my mom, my aunt, and my two uncles were all pretty much raised Mormon. Two for two of the four. It's sort of stuck for a while now. I think it's only one of the four it's stuck for. But it's interesting because I. So I grow up in Bountiful, which is a town that is very Mormon, most especially 20 years ago.

John Dehlin [00:05:43] Yeah, it's known as a kind of an intense area. A lot of the Mormon. Top Mormon leaders historically have lived there.

Michael Easter [00:05:49] Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. And I wasn't raised Mormon, so we were kind of an anomaly in the. In the city because it was just my mom and I. So she was a single parent. I'm a only child and. But I was surround. Every other kid at school was Mormon. I was kind of the odd one out in a way, man.

John Dehlin [00:06:11] A single mom who's working and who's not Mormon. Yeah. That would stick out like a sore thumb in Utah, particularly in sort of heavily devout Mormon areas of Utah.

Michael Easter [00:06:22] Yeah. And her politics, I mean. So it's funny, I wrote a story for Men's Health about her maybe eight, nine years ago, and the story was titled My Badass mom because everything about her was not what you would picture for a mom living in Bountiful. So, you know, in the 60s she lived in Hawaii and at one point was being tailed by the FBI because she was dating and involved with a guy who was an anti war leader, basically. And in the 70s and 80s, she lived up in Idaho and kind of did a lot of, you know, partying and stuff. She obviously hasn't done that for a very long time. But then when we moved to Utah, she took a job as a salesperson for different women's clothing brand, more or less. And so she had to do a lot of traveling as well. So she would be gone for about a third of the year and I would kind of have this rotating cast of nannies as I grew up, which was also strange. Right. Because now not only are you. Not only is it the single mom and the only child, but the single mom isn't always there. And so that kind of blew people's minds.

John Dehlin [00:07:34] Was it kind of a latchkey kid thing or. I guess you had the nannies, so.

Michael Easter [00:07:37] Yeah, I had the. I had the nannies. So they were around. But I do think, and to the theories of some of my books, I do think that sometimes going through hardship teaches you things, you know, I don't think that people learn from when things are. When things are perfect. We never learn, like, these important skills and life lessons when things are perfect. And so for me, because I was kind of an outsider and because I had this rotating cast of nannies, I had to learn how to get along with people. I had to learn how to, I guess, win people over that otherwise were like, who is this weirdo? And I do think that that has been advantageous applied to a career in journalism where I get thrown into random situations and you got to go talk to a source. And by the way, the source might not want to even talk to you. So I do think that that has helped me in a way, even though it was a little bit strange.

John Dehlin [00:08:37] So, you know, middle school, high school, sometimes Mormon kids are super nice. Sometimes people in Utah, particularly kids who aren't raised Mormon, can feel excluded, can feel picked on. It can be either experience. Where did you fall in that continuum in terms of having friends, being accepted, that social stuff?

Michael Easter [00:09:00] It was a little bit of both for me. So when I was in junior high, I went to Mueller park junior high. And I remember when I was in seventh grade, I was quote, unquote, dating some girl, and then she found out I was Mormon, and it was this or that I was not Mormon. And it was this big sort of public execution for that reason only to

John Dehlin [00:09:20] her or you of her.

Michael Easter [00:09:21] Yeah. So she finds out I'm not Mormon, she's like, over. And it was like, kind of in a big public setting, let's just say. So things like that happened, how'd that make you feel? Oh, you go, of course it wasn't great.

John Dehlin [00:09:36] Yeah.

Michael Easter [00:09:37] Because, I mean, now I can kind of laugh about it, but back then, you don't. You're not old enough to have the context of. Yeah, this per. Like, this is your seventh grade girlfriend, dude. Like this, you know, you just don't have that.

John Dehlin [00:09:47] Yeah, it's your world at the time.

Michael Easter [00:09:50] Right. It makes you feel like you are excluded for something that you. You didn't necessarily make the choice. You know, if I would have said, hey, mom, I want to be Mormon, she would have been like, okay, I'll drop you off. You know, great. But it was a little strange at the same time. You know, I had scouts. I was in scouts. And by the time I was about 15, I just decided, like, I was interested in guitars and girls and stuff at that point. Not scouts, not making lean tos and rubbing twigs together, you know, and there was a scout leader who was Mormon. Cause it all ran through the Mormon Church. And he was like, hey, you. You should get your Eagle. That'll help you in the long run. And he made sure I did it. And this was just this, you know, this random Mormon guy who. He didn't have to do that. And he, like, made sure I finished everything and, like, personally made it his mission that I finished that. So nice.

John Dehlin [00:10:46] Was that a good experience for you?

Michael Easter [00:10:47] Oh, totally. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. And so it's kind of, you know, there's hits and misses.

John Dehlin [00:10:55] Yeah.

Michael Easter [00:10:55] I guess when you're on the outside,

John Dehlin [00:10:57] I have to ask what rock. What. What music you liked, I guess in high school, because that's a favorite topic

Michael Easter [00:11:02] of mine in high school. And this will. I. I guess this opens up another part of my Mormon story. I was into, like, metal. Like, I was listening to Motley Crue or Metallica. Yeah, all kinds of stuff like that stuff. That stuff with the explicit labels on the. On the CDs back then. And I do think growing up in a world where, you know, the vast majority of people all kind of had this big commonality, maybe it did kind of embrace, Allow. Force me to embrace sort of being an outsider and lean into that in some sorts of ways. So I definitely still find myself very, very, very skeptical of group think. If there's a lot of people doing one thing, I'm not the type of person who goes, oh, that could be cool. What is that? I go, what's wrong with that? Why are they all doing that? Right? I'm like, let me find the reason why there's something wrong with that. That can be an asset on a flaw. If you're a journalist, it's good to be skeptical, so it helps me in that way. But on the other hand, it can also make me cynical sometimes, which isn't always great, you know, so.

High School, Journalism, and Early Career

John Dehlin [00:12:18] So in high school, did you ever even come close to getting baptized or converting? Did you ever look into the Mormon Church in high school to see if it was true and if it was worth following? And was there any religious upbringing for you?

Michael Easter [00:12:32] So when I was maybe starting When I was 7 or 8, my mom started taking us to the Unitarian Universalist Church in Salt Lake downtown. Yeah, the one that's up kind of. I forget its exact address.

John Dehlin [00:12:51] Kind of south of the U or. No.

Michael Easter [00:12:52] Yeah, yeah, right by the. Yeah, kind of close to the U. Yeah, it's a great church. Yeah. Yeah. So she thought that, you know, having some religion in our lives would probably be a good thing. And that one seemed to her like a Good fit in terms of, you know, being very accepting. And, yeah, so we went there every now and then. I didn't. I just kind of wanted to be outside as a kid and do that sort of thing. I didn't really, like, cling on to that. But there was also. No. I didn't really have any desire to look into Mormonism at any real deep level. And I will say that once I got to high school, I went to Woods Cross High, and probably just, you know, demographic reasons, I feel like Mormonism was a little less strong there than it would have been at Bountiful, which was another high school. And also some of the. I guess I will call them cultural quirks of Mormonism, specifically around status and status hierarchies and that sort of thing weren't as embedded at Woods Cross High. It was kind of more just like, yeah, there was, like, the Mormon group, but everyone just kind of hung out together and knew each other. So I didn't really feel like I had. I was missing that much. Another funny thing is that, you know, when I was in high school, I was a little bit of a hellraiser, for sure. I drank. I occasionally smoke pot. Now, being raised in Utah, I'm thinking that I'm like, oh, man, I'm the crazy. I'm just a crazy, crazy kid, right? Then I get to college on the east coast, and it's like, that's what everyone does. You know what I mean? You're the troublesome kid if you're the one who's doing drugs. Beyond that. But in Utah, because of the context, it's like these normal behaviors that high schoolers do in 49 other states make you this, like, absolute hellraiser, you know? So that was just like a funny. It's a funny example of how changing your environment every now and then can change your perspective on a behavior.

John Dehlin [00:14:59] Sure did. Were you, like, on the yearbook staff? Like, were you into journalism? What were you into in high school other than hard, you know, hard rock, metal, whatever, and girls, you know. Did you have interests and heroes that kind of inspired your direction later?

Michael Easter [00:15:17] Yeah, I remember being maybe in junior high and my mom left a copy of Into Thin Air.

John Dehlin [00:15:24] Yeah, Krakauer, I was going to say. Can I just say, your first book reminded me of Into Thin Air.

Michael Easter [00:15:29] Oh, well, that's awesome. So that book changed my life in a lot of ways. How so? It was the realization that this person went on this adventure and wrote about it and chronicled it in a way that was not just. This happened then. This Happened then this happened. It was extremely well written. It had history, it had science. It had all these different threads that got woven up into this just amazing piece of work. And I had this inclination that maybe I would want to do something like that. Now, in the back of my head, I also thought, yeah, but people aren't actually writers, like, for a living.

John Dehlin [00:16:11] Right?

Michael Easter [00:16:11] Like, that doesn't happen. So I guess throughout junior high and high school, I read a lot of books. I read a lot of magazines. I was a big fan of Krakauer. I also loved Hunter S. Thompson. I remember reading Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas and having been growing up in Utah, you're like, whoa, what is this? Right. But when I got. When I went to college, he recently passed away.

John Dehlin [00:16:40] Right.

Michael Easter [00:16:41] 2005, I think.

John Dehlin [00:16:43] Oh, wow. A long time ago.

Michael Easter [00:16:43] Yeah, it was a while ago. He wasn't that old, although he'd lived plenty of lifetimes. I. So I was just a mass consumer of the written word, I guess, all throughout high school, but didn't think you could really do that. And in college, I ended up getting a degree that you would just kind of consider the smart path. I thought maybe I'd get into natural resources in some way.

John Dehlin [00:17:09] Where'd you go?

Michael Easter [00:17:10] I went to a school called Wheaton College outside of Boston.

John Dehlin [00:17:14] Oh, yeah, Old Boston.

Michael Easter [00:17:15] Yeah. So there's one in Illinois that is very. I think it's Seventh Day Adventist.

John Dehlin [00:17:20] Yeah. Religious?

Michael Easter [00:17:21] Yeah, yeah, very religious. And then there's the one. There's one. Same name, zero affiliation, outside of Boston.

John Dehlin [00:17:28] Is it kind of a little ivy, Kind of a liberal arts. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. I know about that. Weed. Two Edens here.

Michael Easter [00:17:34] Yep. So that's. I went there, and my senior year, I took a writing class that was environmental writing, basically writing about nature. And I was like, this is what I want to do. And I graduated in 2009, which, if a handful of months before that, was the 2008 financial collapse. So there weren't any jobs to be had. You know, it was, okay, go back to Utah and live in the basement or go to grad school. And so I ended up going to grad school for journalism.

John Dehlin [00:18:06] And where was that?

Michael Easter [00:18:07] I went to NYU for journalism school. Yeah.

John Dehlin [00:18:10] What's the school called? The. What school of journalism? Don't know. Okay. It doesn't matter.

Michael Easter [00:18:14] You put me on the spot. Yeah. I can't remember.

John Dehlin [00:18:17] Okay. Had you acquired any journalistic heroes by then, people you really, really admired as journalists?

Michael Easter [00:18:24] Yeah, I would say Krakauer, Thompson.

John Dehlin [00:18:28] Oh, okay. Those. Those two. Any Others.

Michael Easter [00:18:30] Yeah, those were kind of the main ones, I'm trying to think.

John Dehlin [00:18:33] Not TV news. More.

Michael Easter [00:18:35] Yeah, more written, more magazine stuff. I was really into a lot of the stuff in Esquire and sort of these, like, long feature pieces, you know.

John Dehlin [00:18:45] Oh, yeah, okay.

Michael Easter [00:18:47] Yeah, that sort of long form.

John Dehlin [00:18:48] Yeah. When I. I fell in love with journalism, watching, like David Brinkley on this Week with David Brinkley or like Cokie Roberts or Tim Russert, you know, kind of those Political tv. That's why I asked again. But it's totally different genres, right? Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Like Atlantic. You're talking Atlantic, New York magazine, you know, New Republic, kind of journalists.

Michael Easter [00:19:10] Right, yeah, that. That sort of thing. Okay.

John Dehlin [00:19:13] Rolling Stone, Playboy.

Michael Easter [00:19:15] Right, Yep. And so I went there and part of the reason I went there is simply just because it's in New York City and that's where most magazines are based out of.

John Dehlin [00:19:23] It's expensive, though.

Michael Easter [00:19:25] Oh, yeah, yeah, it's way expensive. It was expensive. I don't recommend it unless you have a plan on how to pay that back in a decent manner. But it paid off to be there in the sense that it put me into the places I wanted to be in. So I interned at Esquire when I was there, and then after that I worked part time at GQ and part time at Scientific American. And so having the two men's magazines and the one Science magazine, a job opened up at Men's Health magazine and I ended up working there for quite a while, seven years.

John Dehlin [00:20:05] So I think of those. I don't know why. Maybe I'm wrong. I think of Men's Health articles as being very different than the Atlantic or New York magazine or that sort of thing. Right?

Michael Easter [00:20:18] Yeah, it's more of a servicey magazine where there needs to be some sort of advice that is paid off to the reader.

John Dehlin [00:20:24] Not long form investigative journalism kind of thing.

Michael Easter [00:20:27] There. There is that, but I would say that's not as much what it's known for. I mean, we definitely, when I was there, we did some pieces that changed legislation in health and these long sweeping pieces that were really important. But yeah, I don't think that people naturally think of that because you're at the supermarket and you see the COVID line that's like, you know, the 21 day X workout, you know, that's kind of what that magazine is known for. So.

John Dehlin [00:20:53] Yeah, so working out probably Men's sexual health.

Michael Easter [00:20:55] No, didn't do much of that. A lot of mine was fitness, nutrition, general wellness. That's kind of what I covered and you know, honestly, I took the job. I didn't have that much of an interest in that sort of topic like health psychology beforehand, but I took the job because again, economy's still crappy and magazines, print.

John Dehlin [00:21:17] Print journalism, print media were on the decline. Is that right?

Michael Easter [00:21:21] Yeah, they were kind of starting to decline.

John Dehlin [00:21:23] Yeah.

Michael Easter [00:21:26] But yeah, I took the job and I actually ended up liking the subject quite a bit and did a lot of different stuff on the print side. I did stuff on the website, helped sort of grow the website, which is fascinating because it was at a time where we were still kind of figuring out the Internet. And that was really, that was interesting. And things have changed so much in journalism in the past. When I first started at mental health, it was 2010 maybe. I mean, it's not that much time and it's just the shift in what the magazine looks like versus what the website looks like versus what people read versus what gets run. It is night and day. And I think for a lot of the old sort of legacy publications like that, the changes haven't necessarily been good, unfortunately.

New York City Life and Struggles With Alcohol

John Dehlin [00:22:18] So later in your two books, you talk a lot about your own personal journey. What, what do you want to say about like living kind of that New York lifestyle in terms of your own health and happiness and well being? What would you want to share about that?

Michael Easter [00:22:33] Well, I would, I would say loving it.

John Dehlin [00:22:35] Were you.

Michael Easter [00:22:36] You know, I'm not a person who fits well in New York City. Let's just say that I definitely do better with open spaces. I've also been sober nine years. I wasn't sober living in New York City and those bars close at 4am that was not a good place for me. I found, you know, when you wake up one morning and let's just say

John Dehlin [00:22:56] congrats, by the way.

Michael Easter [00:22:57] Oh, thank you. I appreciate that. Yeah, it was a good move for me. You know, when you wake up and you go, oh, wow, I have, I have receipts from four different boroughs and I don't remember leaving the one I'm in right now. Like, that's maybe a sign that you should ask yourself some hard questions about that behavior. But obviously I got over it, you know, and it was definitely hard.

John Dehlin [00:23:23] Did you go to Alcoholics Anonymous or how did you.

Michael Easter [00:23:27] My entry point was, yeah, a group of people with the same experience as me that kind of helped guide me through that. And yeah, it was hard. I mean, that's kind of one of the origin of the comfort crisis was realizing that it's not like one day you wake up and go, oh, I Have a drinking problem. I'm going to quit today. No, this happens over years. You go, I got a problem with this, but I can't stop doing it. And it's, you know, I'm choosing a short term reward at the expense of long term growth. And having long term problems pile up in my life really I think is what addiction really is to me.

John Dehlin [00:24:08] And if you don't mind, do you feel like you were missing something? Like, I guess I could imagine that. I've never tried beer, by the way. I've never tried alcohol. It's a weird. Even though I'm not Mormon anymore, I've just never tried it because I didn't for 50 years.

Michael Easter [00:24:21] So yeah, what's the point? Don't break a good streak.

John Dehlin [00:24:24] Yeah, but a lot of my, tons of my friends have and they enjoy it and that's great. But I guess I'm trying to envision there can be kind of this path of just like, hey, it's fun, a glass of wine with dinner. Socially drink, that's like one conceptualization of maybe drinking or early drinking. And then maybe there's another where it's like, well, you've got holes and you've got angst and you've got problems and you're self medicating away the problems. Was it the former, the latter for you or some combination of the two?

Michael Easter [00:24:55] Yeah, I think that. So I write about this a little bit in Scarcity Brain. I don't spend a lot of time talking about that, but I think that it is. I have a chapter on addiction and Scarcity Brain because it is the, the book really looks at why can't humans get enough right. We all know everything's fine in moderation. Yeah. Why can't we moderate? And so the extreme expression of that to me is addiction. And so that's where it sort of comes up. Talking about my own story. And as I've thought about it.

John Dehlin [00:25:23] Do you want to tell that story

Michael Easter [00:25:24] or in terms of why I. Yeah, sure. I mean, you know, there's all sorts of different theories about why do people come addicted to something. And I think that they're all different. I don't think there's any one reason. You know, there's some people have said, oh, the opposite of addiction is connection. Well, when I was drinking, I felt totally connected to people. I felt like I had plenty of friends. I felt like I was close to them. You also hear that it's a brain disease and that there's sort of no agency whatsoever. And I also don't necessarily think that's entirely true. Obviously, addiction changes the brain, but I don't think that it totally obliviates choice. And I think that there's plenty of examples from the past that suggest that, for example, Operation Golden Flow in the Vietnam War. Are you familiar with that?

John Dehlin [00:26:15] No.

Michael Easter [00:26:16] So what happened is in the Vietnam war, something like 25% of soldiers were addicted to heroin. And Nixon decides, I don't want to let all these addicts back into the country. So if you want to come back as a US Soldier from Vietnam back into the US you have to pass a drug test. You have to provide clean urine. So with the idea of the brain disease model is that once you're an addict, you're an addict, choice is sort of gone. It's a repeat disease that you're kind of fixed into that. Right? Well, if that were the case, then you would expect that 25% or so of soldiers in Vietnam would still be there. The reality is that when they gave these people the drug test, every one of them passed. And when back in the United States, they all stayed sober, the ones who relapsed, the relapse number was very low. They tended to be people who had used drugs before the war. And so I think that addiction is often more a symptom of something. You're using it to solve a problem, and that problem can be different for everyone. For some people, yes, it might be a lack of connection. For our Vietnam soldiers, well, yeah, you're in absolute hell of war. Like, I would be shooting heroin too if I saw the things those guys did. But when they're back in the US they don't necessarily need that anymore. Right. For me, it was. I think I've always been drawn to extreme experiences and sort of exploring the edges in life. Like I just want. I've just been drawn to extreme experiences. Now I was at the time, the magazine job. Even though people think, oh, that must have been really cool, working at Men's Health, I was in an office every day. I wasn't able to get out in the world all that much. I was living in a place I didn't love. Like, there were all these reasons why, like, life was just kind of boring and sanitary and blah, blah, blah. And being a person who needs the complete opposite of that. Alcohol fixed that for me. I mean, it allowed me to be sort of wild and free in a world that is increasingly orderly and rule based and sanitary. And I could kind of get that extreme experiences from nights of drinking. Now when I get sober as I sort of realize this over time. I'm like, okay, well it seems like you need to find that in a way that's more productive. Right. You can get it from drinking, but guess what? That's going to cause you real long term problems. So now I have to find it in other ways that can enhance my life rather than ruin it over the long term. So that might. I mean, the comfort crisis, for example, I spent 30 days in the Arctic on this like extreme expedition in scarcity brain. I went to Iraq to study addiction. And so I need to find that from something else that's going to. I mean, these are all things that have helped my career. Right. I've sort of inserted that into my life in a way that I think has been beneficial.

John Dehlin [00:29:23] Love it. Okay, maybe should we jump into the comfort crisis first and have you talk a little bit more about that?

Michael Easter [00:29:29] Yeah, sure, whatever you want.

John Dehlin [00:29:30] How many years after your sobriety you. Did you go to

Michael Easter [00:29:36] the Arctic?

John Dehlin [00:29:37] The Arctic, Yeah.

Michael Easter [00:29:40] I would say probably six.

John Dehlin [00:29:41] Okay. She had six years of sobriety before that.

Michael Easter [00:29:44] Six, yeah.

John Dehlin [00:29:44] So talk about the origins of the comfort crisis.

Michael Easter [00:29:48] Yeah. So when I get sober, it was totally hard, Right. It's the hardest thing I've ever done, really.

John Dehlin [00:29:56] Still?

Michael Easter [00:29:58] Well, it was.

John Dehlin [00:29:58] Writing a book is not easy, by the way.

Michael Easter [00:30:00] What was that?

John Dehlin [00:30:00] Writing a book is not easy.

Michael Easter [00:30:02] Writing a book is hard too.

John Dehlin [00:30:04] But hard than that.

Michael Easter [00:30:05] Yeah, harder than that. But on the other side of that discomfort was growth. My life improved across the board, full stop. I mean, things you could measure, things you could not measure. Right. My bank account, that number became bigger. The number of people who wanted to hang out with me, that number became bigger. The number on the scale, that number went lower and all these important things. But I think more important was the unmeasurables and that I, internally, I was just totally different. I had a lot more gratitude. I was more at peace with myself. I was more calm. I was just like. It was just a better human. I was a better, better boyfriend to the person I'm now married to. I was just better overall.

John Dehlin [00:30:50] If you had to give like a one minute how you did it, what would you say, you know, in terms of like how you pulled off something that some people can't pull off. Right.

Michael Easter [00:30:59] I think you have to get to the bottom of why you are doing this behavior in the short term or why you're doing this behavior. Addiction really is. You're taking a short term reward that's causing you long term problems. And so why are you choosing that short term thing when you know it's hurting you in the long run. And I think it usually comes down to those underlying things like I talked about.

John Dehlin [00:31:21] So did you move? Was that part of your.

Michael Easter [00:31:24] I didn't move, but I had to. I had to hang out with a different group of friends. I couldn't put myself in certain situations for a while. Like, you can throw me into a bar now, and it's like, fine, you know, I'll have fun. I'll hang out, but I'll order a seltzer. You couldn't do that the first year. You know, that would have just been too much. So I had to change a lot of different things in my life and figure out, okay, where am I most vulnerable to? So I wasn't the type of person who would drink seven days a week. I was like, Friday and Saturday, I'll make up for all those lost days in 48 hours. And so I had to change where I was in the weekends. I had to change who I hung out with on the weekends. I had to ask people who had been in that situation before, what do I do? And I also think that I was a little bit lucky in the sense that once I kind of hit wherever my bottom was, I was like, okay, I realized that this is gonna kill me early. I don't know how early. I just know it's gonna be earlier than if I were to get sober. And I think that realization, too, triggered something.

John Dehlin [00:32:32] Okay.

Michael Easter [00:32:33] It's like, once it was like, okay, this needs to happen. It was like, this needs to happen. No, I lost my train of thought.

John Dehlin [00:32:41] No, I appreciate you sharing that. Just as some pointers for any of our listeners who may be struggling with this right now, maybe that gives them a little bit of direction. Yeah.

Michael Easter [00:32:52] And. And also, there's hope, because if you think of addiction as persistence despite negative consequences applied to drug use or alcohol use, that's not good. Applied to work, that's great.

John Dehlin [00:33:08] Can be writing a book, right?

Michael Easter [00:33:10] Yeah, that's hard. You get a lot of the whole deal is negative feedback. For three years. You write a sentence, your editor tells you it's shit. Sorry, I don't know if I can start. You have all this. You're trying to deal with these vast amounts of research that's really confusing and frustrating, and you have to sit in the chair and put the words on the page or else nothing happens. But if you can fight through that, persist despite those negative consequences, well, you end up with a book. But it could be applied to any job, could be applied to raising kids. I imagine that's not very easy. Right. So when you take that tendency and apply it in the right place, I think it makes people unstoppable. And so realizing that if you are a person struggling, not only will you not be in this bad spot you're in, you'll probably be a lot more effective than you ever imagined because you've got this weird little brain. It's just not working in the right. You're just not applying it to the right place right now.

Sobriety, the Arctic, and The Comfort Crisis

John Dehlin [00:34:08] You know, okay, let's jump to the Arctic. So you're several years sober at that point. Yeah, yeah. How do you get that crazy idea?

Michael Easter [00:34:16] So I noticed that, you know, in order to improve my life by getting sober, I had to go through discomfort to get the benefit. Now, this is the same story of every single topic that I cover at Men's Health on a different scale. If you want to improve your health, you have to exercise. That's uncomfortable. If you want to lose weight, you might have to eat less. You might be hungry. That's uncomfortable. If you want to improve your mental health, you might have to ask yourself some hard questions, do some hard things. But on the other side of that is growth. Same with, you know, if you're in a church that you're really conflicted with, how hard is that to leave? I can imagine that's got to be very, very hard. But once you do that, you know, if you know that that's the thing you need to do, your life is going to improve. So once I make that realization, I have these sort of different experiences in life that make me realize, oh, wow, like, the world has become really comfortable in a lot of ways. You know, we live at 72 degrees. We no longer have to work for our food. We don't experience temperature shifts when we're bored. We have easy, effortless escapes from it. We've engineered all these different forms of discomfort out of our life. And I wondered how that's changed us as a species. And I end up having a friend whose name is Donnie Vincent, who's this backcountry bow hunter and filmmaker guy, invites me to come up to the Arctic with him for more than a month. And I think, all right, I've made this observation that going through short term discomfort can lead to long term benefits. This is a good way to really test this theory. So I say yes to the guy and decide, I'm going to go up there and just see what happens. And in the book, the book is written in such a way where that journey in the Arctic is the overarching narrative of the book. And as I experience these forms of discomfort that our ancestors used to face every single day.

John Dehlin [00:36:15] Give some examples.

Michael Easter [00:36:16] Oh, boredom, for example. Boredom has changed a lot.

John Dehlin [00:36:22] Food just sitting there, waiting, like you try and you try and kill some. Was it elk?

Michael Easter [00:36:26] Yeah, we were hunting caribou.

John Dehlin [00:36:27] Caribou, yeah. You have to just sit there for. Forever.

Michael Easter [00:36:30] Forever. Silence. So that was one of the craziest things about being up there, is that it's so silent. And at first it's very eerie and strange, but it turns out the silence is actually good for us, even though we find it uncomfortable at first, afterwards we start to calm down. People tend to be more productive. Another one is even just exposure to nature. People spend 93% of their time indoors now. Now, our ancestors were outdoorsy in the sense that they lived outside. Right. Every day was camping physical effort. So in the past, people probably walked at least 20,000 steps a day, not to mention they were usually carrying things. They were also walking across rough land outside. Now the average person takes about 4,000 steps. And if you look at overall physical activity, we are about 14 times less physically active than our ancestors would have been. And all of those things have changed us as humans. I mean, it's just this constant removal of all these different inputs. And you do that enough over time, it changes us. And so the book really looks at each of these fundamental discomforts that we've engineered out of our lives that used to keep us healthy in a lot of ways, and now we've sort of taken them out and we've suffered the consequences. So, for example, most of the diseases that kill us today track back to the fact that we're just not that physically active anymore. And we also. We also eat too much because we're creatures that are driven to overeat when we have the opportunity. And so you add in excess food, and under less and less movement, you start to see things like heart disease and certain cancers and diabetes and all these things rise.

John Dehlin [00:38:26] Yeah. And that stuff, just the types of food, the processed food. I think I remember you talking a bit about that, right?

Michael Easter [00:38:32] Yeah. So in this new book, too, Scarcity Brain, because that book really looks at how we evolved in these environments where everything we needed to survive was scarce and hard to find. Food, stuff, information, number of people that we could influence. All these things, scarce and hard to find. So we evolved to crave those things because if you got them, they saved your life. But now we have an abundance of all those things, and it often works against Us. So food is one of them. And in that chapter, this was a fun journey. When you look at the main killer of humans today, it is heart disease, like full stop. What's interesting is that people, it's the disease that people worry the least about. When you look at what people Google and what the media covers and all that stuff. And I came across this study that found a tribe of people in the Bolivian Amazon that don't get heart disease. Like, they don't have any signs of it at all. And so I travel down there and it's, you know, we fly into La Paz, we take this 12 hour car ride down these dirt roads to this jumping off point to the jungle. Then we take a canoe about six hours upriver and, you know, then the, the canoe driver guy just kind of pulls up in one at one bank and you're like, we've been staring at what appears to be the exact same greenery for the last six hours. How do you know it's here? It's here. So then we hike in and yeah, there's this tribe of people, and the reason they don't get heart disease, it tracks back to what they eat. And what they eat, it goes against all these different diets that we've, you know, fad diets that we've been sold over the past years. So it's not low fat, it's not low carb, it's not, you know, keto, vegan, carnivore. Just name them all.

John Dehlin [00:40:32] Atkins.

Michael Easter [00:40:34] Yeah, yeah. The one commonality all the food has is that it has just one ingredient and so it's not really processed, right. So they're eating rice, they're eating red meat, they're eating fish, they're eating plantains, potatoes, a bunch of different fruit. That's the one thing. Now I'll tell you that the diet isn't that exciting. This was, the food did not taste that great. But they end up not overeating and doesn't have all these triggers that lead us to overeat. So in the US I think like 70% of what we eat is ultra processed. And when you ultra processed food, what you do is you concentrate the calories and you increase all these different signals that tell human brains to eat this, eat a lot of it and eat it fast. Because the other thing, by ultra processing it, it's faster to eat. So when there's these interesting studies that the NIH has done where they'll lock people in a lab and give them an unprocessed food and then ultra processed food, but everything else is equated, like grams of fat, grams of protein, carbs. And on the unprocessed diet, people end up eating 500 calories less a day and they end up losing weight where the opposite happens with, with the others.

John Dehlin [00:41:52] So eat more unprocessed food.

Michael Easter [00:41:56] Yeah. So good. Rule of thumb, one ingredient. And now I'm not, I'm not going to tell you, like, never touch a food that has more than two ingredients ever again. Like, that's ridiculous. And I don't want to live in a world where I can't eat Doritos. Right? But the question is, is how do we balance this? And I think that if you're skewing most of what you eat to foods that are the same foods that humans have been eating for hundreds of thousands of years, you're probably going to be healthier than if you are eating mostly ultra processed food, which is what has just crept into our life in such a degree that we don't even realize it. And I think one of the big things too is that all of these kind of diet foods were sold. They're packed with crap, right? It's just like, oh, we're going to make a Snickers bar. But because people want more protein, we're just going to like inject protein into it. It's like it's not actually healthy. Like, we're missing the forest for the trees here.

John Dehlin [00:42:49] You know, let me do a quick just. I would just want to take a moment. I just want to thank all the donors to Mormon Stories and Yoga Stories foundation that make all this possible. We often talk about super chats and stuff. And our bread and butter is those who just go to the MormonStories.org and click on the donate button, become monthly donors. That's how we pay our staff, predominantly. So thanks to everyone who supports us that way. I'm also going to just stop and say, hey, everybody, right now I want you to consider buying two books. Go buy two books. Buy Michael Easter's the Comfort Crisis. And if you don't mind, buy Scarcity Brain. There are audiobooks for both. I consumed both of them primarily on audiobooks, but I have a hard copy of this one, thank you. And I've been marking it up as well. I promise you they're both worth your time and interest and we should support good authors. So please buy. And I don't get any compensation for saying this. This is not endorsed in any way. But these are good books. So please buy. Go to Amazon right now if you don't mind if you're open or audible. And get these two books, Comfort Crisis and Scarcity Brain, before we dive in a little more to Scarcity Brain. I want you to sell the Comfort Crisis because we loved it. Talk about three to five of the craziest SC most outrageous things you do in the book. You don't have to give details, but just to give people a flavor for kind of the craziness of that first book.

Michael Easter [00:44:22] Yeah, well, the month in the Arctic. I mean, this is not a comfortable place. And you're basically dropped off there in a plane that is the size of a can of Campbell's soup with wings.

John Dehlin [00:44:32] So getting there is crazy.

Michael Easter [00:44:33] Oh, getting there is crazy. And then the pilot goes, okay, we'll see in a month. And I mean, we have a lot of super dangerous scenarios. But I would say the larger point of the book is not to say, oh, I did this crazy thing. Really, it is a way for me to better understand how our lives have changed, how all of our lives have changed. So I'm not doing this for me. I'm doing it so I can better understand this topic in order to sort of disseminate it. And I will say that it's been a book that a lot of parents have read and given to their teenagers because it spends a lot of time on, you know, what makes a person resilient, what improves mental health. And it's often not the easy thing. Right. And I think learning that is can be transformative for people. And there's a lot of ideas in there that people have really taken and put in their life that have benefited their life, surprisingly. I mean, you've written books. You sit in a room alone for, like, three years and you want to tear your hair out, and you go, what the hell is going to happen? And when the thing gets out and it changes people's behaviors, that's pretty rewarding and pretty cool.

John Dehlin [00:45:46] Yeah. So you didn't want to say some of the more extreme kind of crazy things because you're not. It's not like extreme behavior porn. Right. You're. You're basically saying it's about understanding what we can learn from how we used to live as humans to kind of get back to some of the things that'll bring us most health and fulfillment.

Michael Easter [00:46:05] Yeah, exactly. And I think that really, stories are how we understand things.

John Dehlin [00:46:10] There's bears, there's caribou, there's arrows.

Michael Easter [00:46:13] Right.

John Dehlin [00:46:14] Hunting.

Michael Easter [00:46:15] Yep. Stories are how we understand things. So I think if I can tell a compelling story for why to get into the larger point. It makes it more interesting for people. It's definitely not a book that's just packed with science. It's like a lot of stories. So you understand the greater why.

John Dehlin [00:46:30] Yeah. Okay, well, that's book. That book's been received really well. I'm guessing people like it.

Michael Easter [00:46:35] Yeah.

John Dehlin [00:46:35] Yeah. Okay. All right, so check that book out. You won't be disappointed. It's. It's John Dehlin, Margi Dillon Book Club endorsed. So. All right, so. So Scarcity Brain. Because I. I have a PhD in psychology, by the way. I have not written any books. I've published a dissertation and tons of academic articles. I'm trying to a book now, so.

Michael Easter [00:47:00] Oh, so you're in the thick of it.

John Dehlin [00:47:02] Yeah, I'm at the beginning of the thick of it.

Michael Easter [00:47:05] Well, the dissertation, I think, qualifies as a book. Probably same level of effort, if not more.

John Dehlin [00:47:10] Yeah. But for some reason that the rigidity and the framework of academia was a little bit easier than like, I just got to figure out what I want to do creatively. A little less structure has been harder for me.

Michael Easter [00:47:24] I think that that's the challenge that that academics face is getting going from this is how this thing is for this sort of smaller niche group of people that also have PhDs, to. Here's something that if I throw it on your table there anyone that you can get something from that is definitely a challenge. Because working at UNLV, I don't have a PhD, but working at UNLV, we kind of talk a lot about that. Our department is about half people who have PhDs and the other half more from a practice background like I have.

John Dehlin [00:48:00] So, yeah, it's always fun for me. It's the. I like writing and I feel like I'm okay at it. For me, it's more kind of imposter syndrome. It's like, is anybody going to care? Is this good enough? Is this going to be entertaining? Is this narcissistic? Is this self indulgent? It's. For me, it's a lot of those voices in my brain that I just have to like, just force myself to not. And there's a million different reasons to not write because I, I love what I do. We're. We're very. We're. We're having a lot of success. There's a million people who want to work or work with or interact with or come on the show. And there's media that we're now interacting with constantly. Like, Sorry, journalists that we're interacting with constantly. So It. It really. You. You really have to force yourself. And I don't have to write a book. Like, for me, it's not like, a matter of survival. It's like, yeah, I'd rather not die without writing a book. I think I've got something to say. Do you have anything to say about that?

Michael Easter [00:48:55] Well, I can tell you that you're doing it right. If you're struggling, it's always going to be tough. I mean, so I have a lot of students, and I always tell my students, the sign that you're a bad writer is that you thought it was easy and you think it's great.

John Dehlin [00:49:15] That's a bad sign.

Michael Easter [00:49:16] Yeah, it's the people who are like, oh, this is so tough. And having those internal discussions. I mean, I do the same thing. I don't think the work is ever gonna be good if you are the type of person who is satisfied with it. I can't even read my books after they're out because I know that I'm gonna find even now, a sentence that I'll go, why did you phrase the sentence that way?

John Dehlin [00:49:41] And it'll drive me nuts.

Michael Easter [00:49:43] Like, this sentence could have been five words, but instead, you made it a lot. Eleven words. What are you doing? You know, and so I just. I can't. But you need to be able to do that. That's how I know that your book is going to be awesome when it comes out.

John Dehlin [00:49:55] Thanks. I don't listen to my podcasts after I release them, I can tell you that. Okay. All right.

The Scarcity Brain and the Scarcity Loop

Michael Easter [00:50:01] So

John Dehlin [00:50:03] I've really enjoyed reading the Scarcity Brain, getting to know it better. And as I expected, there's a lot about pigeons and rats and behavioral psychology, which I got an introduction to. You talk about University of Kentucky and a lot of that stuff. Why don't you start? And, of course, as a Vegas guy, you talk a lot about slot machines and casinos and variable reinforcement rates as I learned to discuss them. Why don't you give us an introduction into variable reinforcement rates? It sounds boring. It's ruling your. I guarantee you it's running your life right now, so you better learn about it. Okay, go.

Michael Easter [00:50:42] You're the perfect person to have this conversation with. So, I mean, the overall, like I said before, it's like everyone knows everything's fine in moderation, but, okay, why are we so bad at it? And living in Las Vegas, you see a lot of, let's say, people who struggle with moderation and a lot of different things. Now, the slot machines, to me, have always been the fascinating Thing because one, they're everywhere. I mean, they're all over town, grocery stores, gas station, all that. And two, people play them around the clock. And it seems like a completely irrational behavior, right? It's like everyone knows the house always wins, yet people play and play and play for hours at a time. So being a journalist, it's when I make an observation that doesn't seem to make much sense, my next move is to go, okay, well, let's figure out why people do that now. So the long story short is that I end up in this casino on the edge of town in Las Vegas. And it's brand new, it's cutting edge, but the catch is that it's a casino laboratory. So it's used entirely for research on human behavior within casinos. And while I'm there, I meet a guy who is a slot machine designer and he basically explains why people get hooked on slot machines. And it goes back to juice, that variable reinforcement. And I call it the scarcity loop in the book. So I talk to a bunch of different people in practice. I talk to behavioral psychologists, I talk to people who are anti gambling researchers and are like, here's a way to describe this. So I call it the scarcity loop.

John Dehlin [00:52:17] There's three components, right?

Michael Easter [00:52:19] Three components. So one, opportunity. You have an opportunity to get something that improves your life. In the case of a slot machine, it's money. Two, you have unpredictable rewards. So you know you're going to 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. So with a slot machine, when you play a game, you could lose your money, you could win a little bit of money, you could win 50 cents, 60 cents on a dollar bet, or you could win a ton of money, a life changing amount of money. And then three, quick repeatability. Once you finish the behavior, you can immediately repeat it. So with a slot machine, people play, I think 16 games a minute, which is more than we blink. Now, the reason it's important and why it's in the book, I mean, I just go to the slot machine lab to tell you, oh, here's how slot machine machines work is that that system is in so many of the different technologies and institutions that now impact our life. So for example, it's what makes social media work. It's in dating apps. That is a variable rewards game, right? Unpredictable rewards game. It's being put in different financial apps like Robinhood, it's in our food system in a way. And so once you start to sort of look for where this thing is, you start to see that it's definitely affecting your life in some way. And I don't think there's anything better at capturing attention, holding it, and leading people to repeat behaviors over and over and over, oftentimes to their detriment.

John Dehlin [00:53:58] Yeah. Talk about if you don't mind the variable rewards, because, you know, you. I think you talked about the pigeons, and they're pecking. They're pecking the thing, and the. And the pellets are coming. And what they find about, you know, you know, the different ways that you can motivate. How did they. How did they discover that variable rewards were the most addictive? And it doesn't necessarily mean the biggest payout at the end. Correct?

Michael Easter [00:54:27] Right, Right. Well, the very first observation, I believe, was from B.F. skinner. So he's teaching rats to hit a lever, and he gives. They get a treat. They get a reward for hitting the lever. Now he starts to run low on treats. Instead of making more treats, he decides, you know what?

John Dehlin [00:54:44] What?

Michael Easter [00:54:45] I'm feeling a little bit lazy tonight. I'm just gonna give these rats this treat randomly when they hit the levers. So I'll just give it to em every now and then. And he thinks that the rats will slow down hitting the levers. They might walk off and go do something else because they're not getting as many treats for the behavior anymore. He's wrong. He's very wrong. What ends up happening is that these rats get obsessive about hitting this lever. So they just. It's like, whoa. So years later, there's this guy, Thomas Zantal, I talked to at the University of Kentucky, who's, I think he got his PhD in 68. So he's been around a while, and he studies this phenomenon. And this paper that I refer to in the piece, I think is called Gambling Behavior in Pigeons. And this guy's literally made pigeons into sort of degenerate gamblers. So he will present pigeons with two games where on the first game they get a predictable reward. And so it's 15 units of food. Every other time they peck a light. So they go peck, they don't get food, they go Peck. They get 15 units. Peck. They don't get food. Peck. They get 15 units of food. Great. It's all predictable. The second game, they get food every fifth peck. But it's random, right?

John Dehlin [00:56:09] How much?

Michael Easter [00:56:10] 20 units.

John Dehlin [00:56:11] The quantity is random. What's random if it's every.

Michael Easter [00:56:13] The random is when the reward is dispersed.

John Dehlin [00:56:15] Okay.

Michael Easter [00:56:16] So about every fifth peck, they're getting food. So it could be peck, peck, peck, food, peck. The next sequence, it could be peck, food, peck, peck, peck. They can't predict it.

John Dehlin [00:56:29] Got it.

Michael Easter [00:56:30] But they also get 20 units of food lessons.

John Dehlin [00:56:34] Is that right?

Michael Easter [00:56:34] Which is more compared to 15. But if you do it over the sequence of behaviors, so if you play game one, you're going to end up with a bigger pile of food, full stop. So it makes sense to go play game one if your goal is to get food. And there's this theory called the optimal foraging theory that suggests that animals are going to do whatever it takes to get the most amount of resources for the least amount of effort. Semi controversial, but it makes sense. Right? And what he finds is that 97% of these pigeons pick the gambling game. They pick the unpredictable reward game. And they sit and they peck that light, peck that light, waiting for. Waiting for the reward to pop up at a time they can't predict. That is the exact same things that humans do with a slot machine. Right.

John Dehlin [00:57:23] And not just with the slot machine.

Michael Easter [00:57:25] Not just with a slot machine, exactly.

John Dehlin [00:57:27] And, but for me, there was kind of a mini climax in the book because you make the point that it's not the eating that brings the joy. It's not the getting the thing and doing the thing. It's what.

Michael Easter [00:57:42] It's the searching for the thing, it's the waiting. So gambling, I have this great example now. For me, I'm always going to talk to the scientists because you need to, to understand some of the underlying things. If you really want to see what people are going to do, ask the people who are profiting off of it. That's. Who's going to tell you that the bottom line, I talked to a guy who, the slot machine designer. He goes, gambling is not when the dice have fallen and you know, whether you've won or lost or when the reels set and you know whether you've won or lost, it's when the reels are rolling, it's when the dice are rolling across the table and you are waiting in anticipation. That is the excitement right there. And then once it happens, you go, oh, that's fun. Let's do it again.

John Dehlin [00:58:30] Yeah, yeah. And that it's. So it's not just gambling. Let's just say which commercial incorporations or adaptations of this little nugget of learning are probably most prevalent in our lives today. You know, in 2023, which companies and or products are monetizing this? Because this lab that one of the people you talk to. It's funded by all these corporations.

Michael Easter [00:59:00] It's funded by 73 different companies. So some of them are in gambling, but many of them are in big tech. Which leads me to my answer. It tends to be so. Social media is a classic example of this. So let's say you post, you have an opportunity to get some sort of social status points. Right. Likes, comments, notifications, all that, but you don't know how many you're going to get.

John Dehlin [00:59:26] Yeah.

Michael Easter [00:59:26] And you don't know how good they're going to be. Is it going to be a comment from that, you know, person that you really like, that you're kind of attracted to and they're going to comment and say you look great or is it going to be nothing? You could get nothing and then that doesn't feel great. And so you're going to check and recheck that behavior. Could be dating apps. Right. So you have an opportunity for a mate. Swipe, swipe, swipe, swipe, swipe, swipe, swipe. Oh, I got a match. But who is it with? Is it with the person where I'm like, eh, kind of on the fence about that person but I'll swipe that direction? Or is it the person where you go, oh my God, that person's great. Right. There's that waiting and anticipation. It's a random rewards game. It's being put in a lot of the. So the stock market has always been a kind of a random variable rewards game. But companies like Robinhood, the stock trading app that everyone downloaded and got obsessed with over the pandemic, they realized that if you can increase the rate at which people can do the behavior, you will increase the behavior. So speed. Speed is generally a good determinant of whether someone can will repeat a behavior. So they took away trading fees, very simply, they baked them into the trades. And so people would make trade after trade and recheck and recheck and see, oh, did my number go up, did to go down, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. That's just a handful. I mean it's in so many of the areas in our life now. Yeah, yeah, email's a good one, right. Your phone pings, you go, I got an email. Is it an ad or is it an email from my boss telling me about that raise that I've been hoping for? Right. So it's random and the excitement comes when the ping happens and you immediately have to look like no one gets a ping from an email and goes, I'm just going to Ignore it. Some people can, but the vast majority of us are going, especially if we're waiting on important information, are going to check that phone.

Social Media, Addiction, and Craving Certainty

John Dehlin [01:01:23] Yeah, there was a, during the pandemic, there was, I want to say either an Amazon or a Netflix about social media and the addiction of these devices. The social dilemma.

Michael Easter [01:01:38] Social dilemma. Probably. Yeah, that.

John Dehlin [01:01:40] You thought you probably saw that, right?

Michael Easter [01:01:41] Yeah, yeah.

John Dehlin [01:01:43] I mean, it's, it's scary how, you know, Instagram, you know, YouTube, Twitter, tick tock are, are dominating our lives to such, to such a large extent. You, in the book, you, in the book, you, you have several chapters on different domains. Escape, certainty, influence, food, stuff, meaning, you know, conspicuous consumption of things and information and happiness. So those are some of the domains. The one that I jumped to is certainty because as I was trying to think about religion, I wondered whether you were going to be talking about religious certainty. Right. That's not exactly what you, what you were going for in that chapter, but I ended up really resonating with what you were able to talk about. So let's talk about the, the scarcity. Scarcity loop as it applies to certainty. We have a little bit.

Michael Easter [01:02:39] But yeah, I mean, I. Humans love certainty. We crave certainty when we're not. When we're uncertain about something. It is our natural inclination to search and search and search until we feel like we found an answer to whatever it is we are searching from searching for. And we get that answer. We get this sort of aha feeling. And that's how we gauge whether we have good information or the right answer. And so it is sort of that like, you know, you have an opportunity to get this information that you think is important to you. You search and search and search for it. You go here, it's not there, you go there, it's not there. And then, oh, no, this makes sense. This adds up. Aha. I got this feeling of certainty. And then you move on to the next question or whatever it might be. Now the problem is that, you know, I talked to a guy who's actually a researcher at the University of Utah go Utes, go Utes. And we talked a little bit about how, you know, in the past, this feeling, this aha feeling we get of certainty, it probably was a rather reliable indicator of whether we had good or bad information. Because in the past our lives were a lot simpler. We were dealing with questions like, do we have enough food to survive? Is our shelter going to weather this storm? Xyz. I mean, these are simpler questions. And so you could, I think, better Trust that feeling of certainty. But today we have so much information and so many different competing theories, and there's just so such bigger questions that are ultimately ambiguous. Yet we still feel. When we feel that aha. Feeling, we still sort of evolve to trust it. Whether or not the information is reliable or not.

John Dehlin [01:04:28] Yeah.

Michael Easter [01:04:29] How did you think about this, given what you sort of COVID and think about when you read that chapter? What did that, I guess, make you think about when you're thinking about religion? Because I. I want to hear that.

John Dehlin [01:04:41] Oh, you want to jump into that?

Michael Easter [01:04:42] No, I want to hear. I want to hear your thoughts. Yeah.

John Dehlin [01:04:44] Well, I will say, I really. Just to tell you the part of the chapter that really. It started resonating with me, you start talking about grades and academia and how grades is sort of this arbitrary rating system that's applied to learning how some of the best learners get the least good grades and some of the least creative people are the ones who get the best grades. And grades can rob you. And this is something Margi and I have known as we've raised kids. Grades can be this artificial, extrinsically motivated structure that can really deprive you of learning and some of the richness of learning. So I really enjoyed that. You talk about, you know, other sorts of artificial external constructs like bmi. That's another one. That's huge. You know, Margi, my wife, ran cross country at byu. She's really into nutrition, and she recently read a book called the Anti Diet, and it really does challenge our perceptions of, like, body size and BMI and the type. We're often looking at the wrong things, and we're often measuring ourselves by the wrong things, and we're often depriving ourselves of joy. By the ways that we're measuring our success or lack of success. Does that resonate? I mean, I think that's central to what you're talking about.

Michael Easter [01:06:10] Yeah. And part of the chapter looks, too, is the rise of numbers.

John Dehlin [01:06:14] Quantification, right?

Michael Easter [01:06:15] Yeah, quantification. So numbers are relatively new in the grand scheme of humanity. I think they're maybe 10,000 years old. In the past, we probably thought in terms of we could count up to a few, but then we just thought in terms of small, medium, large. We're like, well, this one's bigger than this one. But once we get numbers, that really changes how we behave and think. So now if you can put a number on things, we believe that you've sort of done the. You've said the right thing. Right. You've really said something about this. And you have, like, data to back up this assertion. And that makes us feel like, oh, well, you've done the right thing, right? So if you value salary, for example, if you value your worth of, like, how am I doing compared to my neighbors? Oh, well, I can look at the salary number and that tells me, oh, I'm doing better than them. Like, I feel good about that. But there's a million different ways you could compare yourself to someone and whether how you're doing in life, you're a great example. It's like I said, students tend to obsess over this, you know, 0 to 4.0 scale because it tells them, gives them this sense of, like, okay, I'm doing this thing right because I've got the 4.0. But you don't go to college to get a number. You go to college to prepare yourself for the future. You go to college to make friends. You go to college to learn how to do things in a timely manner, how to interact with people that are positioned almost in a sort of above you in the terms of, like, the student professor relationship. And there's many other things. And unfortunately, we often forget all these other benefits you get from going into college and instead just focus on, did the person get the right number in their grades? And so, you know, I argue in the book that the minute you stamp a number onto something, we tend to want to focus too much on that number at the expense of all these other things that the behavior gives us or we miss a lot of the ancillary goals, basically, that are oftentimes more important.

John Dehlin [01:08:19] Absolutely. All right, well, I'll ask our viewers and listeners to bear with me because I did tell Michael that it would be fun to just do an exploration of these concepts around the topic of religion, even though that's not a core theme to the book. And because you're realizing now you kind of were raised in a secular, largely secular way and have lived kind of a largely secular life, I'm going to just guess that you haven't been spending a large percentage of your thoughts on. On the role of high demand religions in people's lives and how it affects them and how it applies to your first, you know, two major books. Right? So a lot of this is just going to be freeform thinking. It's a conversation between two dudes. This is the conversation we'd be having at dinner, but instead we've invited you along. If those of you are frustrated that you came to this interview only wanting to hear Michael, then freak can Go buy his two books and listen to the audiobooks and you'll hear him for a good 30 to 40 hours. Is that right between the two audiobooks?

Michael Easter [01:09:23] Probably not, thank God. Probably not that long.

John Dehlin [01:09:26] At least 30, I think each of

Michael Easter [01:09:28] them, or maybe nine. So we're, we're just under 20.

John Dehlin [01:09:31] Okay. Yeah, that's, that's, that's a good number. Okay, so welcome to my conversation with Michael Easter as we talk about scarcity and religion. So let me tell you my how I think about it. Okay, so, and this goes back to evolution a little bit, but humans, they do best in groups, right? And this, you know, this comes from sapiens and Yuval, Noah Hararis. It's also informed by the Righteous Mind by Jonathan Haidt. You know, but a lone monkey is dead monkey. We do better in groups. But aside from kind of social interactions, we need a certain set of categories to do well. We need a sense of identity, we need a sense of morality, we need some sense of spirituality, some sense of things being higher than usual. We need some sense of meaning and purpose in life, some sense of hope. And oftentimes we need some sort of resolution for what happens when we die, because after all, we're conscious creatures and you know, unlike many other animals, likely we can contemplate our death. So given that it's really difficult for a human to acquire all those things on their own, if you have to spend your time figuring out the right morality, the optimum spirituality, how to find your own community and friends and develop your own meaning and purpose, you know, that's. People spend their lives doing that and they can't solve one of those problems, let alone eight of them. And so for me, what religions often do is it's just like this, this package deal, just, hey, here it is. Here are all those things, you get it really cheap. You get it when you're young. Follow the, follow, follow these things, conform, fit in, and all these needs are going to be taken care of. Now I've tried to create secular community and what I found is that it's hard because there's this, these, these two secret ingredients that religions have that you can't pull off with integrity in a secular community. And for me, that's guilt and shame and absolute truth claims. So you're not going to find a healthy secular community that's saying we're the true community, right? They're going to say, well, we're doing our best, we're evidence based. But, you know, but religions are like, this is the one true path. This is the path. So just by having an exclusive truth claim, you're creating scarcity. In other words, all those other paths you might choose, you're gonna either be screwed, live in hell, or you're gonna have some suboptimal outcome unless you follow our path. Right, right. So, so there's the exclusive thing and then there's the guilt and shame thing. And in Mormonism, a sort of a torch that I've been carrying for a long time is the way that sexual guilt and shame and is used to. But you can even go broader than that and just say the teachings of Christianity, with atonement, with Christ's suffering, he bleeds for our sins, we're the ones that commit the sins. Even though it's retroactive. Somehow he lived 2000 years ago, but somehow our sins now caused him to suffer back then, caused him to be killed back then. And we should feel really horrible about adding to the suffering of Jesus. Jesus. This is definitely, in Mormon theology it's called the atonement, you know, but, but somehow the, if I'm a 13 year old boy who masturbates, it caused Jesus extra suffering 2000 years ago. And that's somehow, that's cosmically how it works. But what it does is it creates this internal scarcity of value, scarcity of worth. You're not, you're not inherently good. And by the way, your inherent wants and needs and interests are not important because remember, your job is to plug in to the institution that has already provided, has already established what your morality should be, your identity, your meaning, your purpose, what you should do with your life. Right? So the goal is not self knowledge, self discovery, self empowerment, self enlightenment. The goal is check the boxes, which goes a little bit towards quantification. In Mormonism, it's get baptized, it's get the priesthood if you're a man. It's get your boys, get your Eagle Scout up until a few years ago. It's get your young women's medallion, it's end up going on your mission, getting married in the temple and all that time. If you ever make any sort of sexual transgression or try beer or try alcohol or try weed, okay, Those are reinforcing the idea that you are a sinner, that you're broken, that you need the church. And so the church creates this manufactured scarcity, both of heaven, the afterlife, the true organization, and internally, where they've kind of got you. And so you need Jesus, you need the church to make you whole. You gotta go talk to your bishop. If you sin you gotta go repent, pray to Jesus, pay your tithing, go on your mission. If you've screwed up your life and then over time, you're gonna be okay by the, by the pellets. You know, you as the religious person, you peck that thing and the church is gonna sort of, with some sort of non fixed and periodic reinforcement schedule. Okay, good boy. You get your ego. Okay, good. Okay. You get your ego. Scout. Hey, you went to the temple. Good job. Oh, pat on the back. He gave a good talk. Oh, you screwed up. And there's punishments as well as rewards, but for me, that's, that's been. You know, I don't consider this podcast to be anti religion, because I believe religion kind of brought us to our current status as humans in terms of our level of sophistication and enlightenment and social order and structure. So I'm not anti religious. And I also have empathy and understanding for how religion uses guilt and shame and scarcity as the secret formula to hook its members, because I've tried to hook them in secular ways. There's nothing as powerful as guilt and shame and exclusive truth claims and the fear that comes with not being on board. So I get why they do it, but I also, you know, I, as a mental health professional, I live on the other side of that. Seeing the LGBT kids kill themselves, seeing the women who are raised to be mommies and housewives, which is awesome, unless that's not what they're wired to do based on their structure, brain structure, et cetera, personality or religious people that end up loving science and truth and evidence, and then the religious dogma falls apart. They study the history and then their lives can be turned upside down. Especially if they've married in the church and gone on the mission and dedicated their career and their education and their lives down one path to then find out it's not true. So it's not entire religion, but I see the dark side of the shame and scarcity based religious doctrine and theology that can ruin a lot of lives, you know, when it, when it does. So that's my theory, that's my premise, that's me thinking about scarcity from a religious standpoint. And now I've totally put you on the spot expecting you to even have three things to say about that. But, but your turn. Tag, you're it.

Religion Through the Lens of Scarcity Brain

Michael Easter [01:17:30] No, that. That tracks. And my thoughts in terms of religion, I think are similar to yours and that it was. It's an expensive thing. And so there's probably a reason it's still around, right? It was adaptive in that it helped us survive in groups, it helped us pass along our genes. So let's take the example of the teen masturbating. Okay, well why don't you want a teen to masturbate? Well, okay, let's say that this kid is masturbating and then he has an opportunity to procreate, which would add another person to our, our community, which is something that humans evolved to do. Well, he can't do it now because he's, you know, he's, he's masturbated. He can't, he can't perform for the next, whatever it is, 30 minutes, an hour. So okay, don't masturbate. Now if I try and explain that to a 13 year old kid. So, so humans, like we need these more people. Like this is a very complicated thing, right? If I can just say, God, you know, like there's this person up high and by the way, they say that this is going to put you in hell. And you're like, oh, okay, well that's pretty simplified, right? It's a black and white story, like don't masturbate because you'll go to hell if you do. Okay, now I can buy that because that's a very simple story. It's not like I'm not having to unpack all these details more or less. But then, okay, well how do I get you to do that? Well, guilt and shame, that comes in because that is a great motivator and you can apply that to all sorts of different behaviors. So the behaviors that that religion tend to frown on, some of them are, I think at their core behaviors that the vast majority of people think we shouldn't do. Don't murder like most groups say. Yeah, probably shouldn't murder. Right. But then some of them become more ambiguous. But if you track back to the past, well, why would it have made sense in a large group setting or for the individual to not do that in the past? You can go, okay, well I can see why that, that might make sense now. Apply that same thinking to 2023 though, and maybe it doesn't make sense. Just like when you had food that was calorie dense in the past, Eat as much of it as you can as frequently as you can. Well, that doesn't make sense today. Right? In the past, no one ever exercised because exercise wasn't even a thing until the industrial revolution because it never made sense to move if you didn't have to. You don't want to burn any extra energy. Well, we still have that drive today in a world where we don't have to move. And so I think a lot of these things that cause us suffering are simply mismatches between our ancient environment and sort of tools we use to survive as individuals and as a species and as a group. They gave us some sort of advantage. But applied to this totally different environment we live in now, I don't think they always make sense. And this is why. Okay, well, when do you start to, to see people leaving? Religion really starts in like the 70s, right. When you start to see the mass die off, it's like, okay, well that's also when the vast majority of changes in the world really happen. So you start to see, for example, junk food take off, you start to see technology spread around the world. You start to see obesity climb around the world. And so I think some people have realized, like, maybe this doesn't make sense today, but at the same time there are still certain advantages that can be drawn from religion for certain people. But it's a balance, right? So if you decide, okay, well, I want to make more money and you live in a small Mormon town and you own a business, being Mormon gives you an advantage. It gets you more business, right?

John Dehlin [01:21:14] Absolutely.

Michael Easter [01:21:16] But it might also make you miserable in the process if that's not. If it's not working for you. Right. And so I think that like life is just this big complex thing of trade offs. And trying to explain complexities is so difficult and challenging. It's just so challenging because everything is so uncertain. We're never going to know. And that doesn't feel good. That sucks. What happens after you die? Think about it. Is it a black hole? Like, do you know your great great uncle's name? Are people going to remember you either? Jesus, this just got pretty heavy. But if I just say, oh no, like, here's what happens after you die. You go to this place, it's awesome. It's like lagoon on a slow day.

John Dehlin [01:22:05] You know, that feels a lot better in the fall. In the fall, perfect weather, it's free

Michael Easter [01:22:10] cotton candy day, you know, that feels you go, oh, okay. And I think that there's a reason why religious leaders tend to be charismatic convincing people too. Because I think humans are also kind of skeptical. Certain people have it more than others. But if you have someone who's a charismatic leader and is very convincing, then the ideas that they have, I think can rise up and, and take foot and take hold. And it's so much a product of time and place as well. You would know more about the Mormon history. But you tend to see these trends happen and you look at, well, what was the cultural context then? And you're like, oh, this makes sense, why this would rise up at this time. And so it's just so complicated. And I think it makes things more certain. And we know, we love certainty, but along with that comes a cost.

John Dehlin [01:23:06] Yeah, yeah. So just in the spirit of back and forth, let me just react to a couple things. So the masturbation example, and you know, it's kind of interesting just in the sense that you actually can have kids and masturbate. So masturbation doesn't prevent you doing something that would be considered pro social, which is having offspring. Unless we're talking about like within a 10 or 10 minute or one hour stretch or whatever. But just generally speaking, maybe that's not the best example of kind of genuine authentic pro social behavior or antisocial behavior that want, that a group leaders would want to either discourage or encourage. A better example might be premarital sex and, you know, unwed pregnancies or pregnancies, because it takes a lot to raise a kid. You don't want a bunch of kids out there that aren't being taken care of. That's not good for the tribe. You want a stable environment to raise the kids so they can reach adulthood and contribute to the community. So there are all sorts of valuable, credible pro social behaviors that a religion would want to use guilt and shame to encourage. So like, yeah, you go to hell if you steal because that's bad for the tribe. You go to you hell if, if you cheat and you know, cheat with someone, cheat on you, cheat on your spouse or someone else's spouse, you're destabilizing the homes, you know, lying, you know, you want to be able to trust what people say. So don't lie and murder and, you know, those things, you know, ten commandments stuff kind of really makes sense in, in our culture. Let's just take being lgbtq or I'll just say masturbation. Those are things I don't think. You know, you look back in history, trans, you know, gender fluid people have always been around. Same sex attract, same gender attracted people, same sex attracted people. They've always been around. And I think history tells us they've always contributed to their societies in really valuable ways. So it's probably not pro social to get rid of those groups of people, especially when they make up 5 to 10% of your population, depending on how you define it. And in terms of people who masturbate that's kind of almost all men and a big chunk of women. So I think it's, I guess it's useful when religions use guilt and shame for legitimate pro social behaviors, but when they pick behaviors that aren't antisocial and in some cases are actually healthy and normative, even if not majority based behaviors, and then use guilt and shame over that, that's when it can turn particularly pernicious and damaging, leading to massive shame, depression, anxiety and sometimes even suicidality. Does that make sense?

Michael Easter [01:26:03] No. Yeah, that makes sense. Yeah. I think you're right. The masturbation example is a.

John Dehlin [01:26:08] And I often get it.

Michael Easter [01:26:09] I off it small time period. You could maybe argue, well, okay, at scale over millions of people and X amount of examples, like maybe they default. Yeah, I do. I've always been fascinated because you make a wonderful point about, you know, trans people, people who are attracted to the other sex, like they're contributing. And I really do wonder why. You see, like, why do you see many religions frown on that? Because it doesn't make any, it doesn't make any sense to your point. And so that's where I start to, I start to get. But I find it very confusing because I haven't studied enough.

John Dehlin [01:26:54] Yeah. So I've, my dissertation was on the LGBTQ Mormon experience. And so I surveyed 1612 Mormons who identified as same sex attracted. And I thought about this a lot. And several loved ones close to me also identify along the various sexual identity and, or gender spectrums. And what, what I've thought about is there's an efficiency that comes from a gender binary and gender norms and a traditional family. Because you fit in. It's just like, okay, you're either the man or the woman, you're either the breadwinner or you're home raising the kids. And it's just a really efficient way to sort people into the right bucket so that then the nuclear family can be put together so that someone's making the money and then someone's raising the kids and we all know what our role is and then the most amount of healthy kids get popped out. And I'm saying that in air quotes for those who are just listening. And so the bigger your tribe is and the more cohesive your tribe is, then the more success your tribe is going to have relative to other tribes. So for me, I think even if it's subconscious, it's just all about efficiency of, of a scenario that leaders believe would lead to the optimal outcome of the children.

Michael Easter [01:28:15] So it's not that person who is LGBTQ is not adding to the tribe. It's the perception from other people that they're not. Is that what it is? And so then there's ostracization happens there,

John Dehlin [01:28:33] or they're not filling the role. They might be contributing, they might be writing plays or, you know, doing, being a great singer, a great compassionate pastor to the people. But it's like, wait a minute, are you man, you need to be breadwinner, are you woman? You need to be having lots of children that you want everybody on board in a simplistic society with their major role, because at the end of the day, you need their strength in numbers. So if you're optimizing for the maximum number of children created, guys and guys and girls and girls and gender fluid expressions may not maximize the total number of offspring generated.

Michael Easter [01:29:21] Does that make sense? Yep, that makes sense.

John Dehlin [01:29:23] I don't know. That's just my thinking. So, so anyway, I, I do see especially the theologies of high demand religions as being scarcity driven with an artificial scarcity of like one true path. We have the authority. Heaven is, you know, Jesus even said, narrow is the gate and few there be that find it. Right.

Michael Easter [01:29:48] Yeah.

John Dehlin [01:29:48] And, and it's hard, like you say, it's hard to make it to the celestial kingdom in Mormonism. It's hard to become exalted. There are all these things you got to do, and here's the checklist. And what I see is in that middle age, what I see is all these Mormons who get on that Mormon train in their teens and twenties, and they make all these crucial life decisions. Marriage, kids, education, career. But then they get to their 30s and 40s, not only do they sometimes discover it wasn't what they thought, but they discover that it doesn't bring the fulfillment and the satisfaction that they thought it would. Because going back to the grades, right, going back to the quantification, you're, you're living someone else's set of check boxes for you, and you're not doing, maybe you don't like being a stay at home mom, maybe you're a guy and you don't like the rat race of the, of corporate New York America. And so you're, you got on this train that wasn't the, the train or the destination you were hoping to get to. And that's when I see lives falling apart, marriages falling apart, people achieving lots of the types of depression and anxiety, frankly, that you started with when you went to New York. They end up there. And then you see within Mormonism, very high Rates of SSRI use, very high rates of opioid addiction, ironically, very high rates of porn and masturbation, quote addiction and a lot of obesity, because there's just a lot of. And I'm not bashing Mormonism. I love Mormonism. I love the Mormon people. I even love things about the Mormon church. But you get a lot of people in their 30s and 40s and 50s either self medicating or developing addictions because that sort of Stepford Wives kind of idyllic, Harry Truman esque destination that they thought they were going to arrive at, that's not what they get, right?

Michael Easter [01:31:47] Yeah, it doesn't happen. It's interesting. You use the checklist in the comfort crisis. I traveled to Bhutan and I met with a guy who is a Kenpo in the Buddhist faith, which is rather high up. And he was interesting because he had lived in America for a while. He lived in Atlanta because he was dating a woman who was the Dalai Lama's translator. So he lived in Atlanta for a handful of years. And he pointed out that American culture generally is a lot about a checklist. Right? He described it. He goes, you guys live life like it's a checklist. A lot of you, it's like, you know, you graduate high school, then you graduate college, then you buy a car, then you, then you meet a nice person, and then you get married, and then you buy a house and then you have kids. And then he goes, and each time you check one of the boxes, you think that this is like, this is it, like, I'm going to be happy here. And then right when you check that box, you just kind of go, what's the next box?

John Dehlin [01:32:42] You know, it's like rolling the dice. Right?

Michael Easter [01:32:44] Right.

John Dehlin [01:32:44] It's like pulling the lever on the jackpot. Right? Right on the slot machine.

Michael Easter [01:32:48] And so the search is what matters. The searching part is where we are actually happiest. There's a. This is another funny one. I talked to a guy who used to be a club promoter in London and there had someone did a big survey for clubs. They paid them and they asked them, you know, what was the funnest part of your night? Because these clubs in London would just put on these crazy events. And so they'd survey all these people who would come to the clubs and they would say, yeah, what was the best part of the night? You know, what did you like? Did you like the dj? Did you like the way we were pouring drinks? We had this like crazy room that was full of bubbles. I mean, just name any crazy thing that happens at a big club like that. And the vast majority of people reported no, the best part of the night is when I met up with my friends and we were getting ready to go to the club. It was the preparation for the event. It was the journey to the sort of final destination that's kind of like a metaphor for life. Right. And so if there is so much focus on what is the ultimate destination of this, you miss the fact that like what you're doing right now is actually, that's the whole deal. I mean, this is where you're gonna feel the most. And I think by missing that and focusing only on the next checklist or only on the final destination, you miss the real sort of richness of what the actual fascinating, fun, interesting part of it is.

Practical Advice, Meaning, and Closing Thoughts

John Dehlin [01:34:16] And let's move to maybe the final chapter of your book because you offer some closing thoughts, but also some recommendations. And you do throughout the whole book. But you talk about some veterans who come back from, from foreign tours missing the action of their tour. And you talk about how sometimes the proximity to death actually heightens the enjoyment. So let's, let's talk about that. And you know, given that there are a lot of 20, 30 and 40 and 50 somethings and higher in who have just left a high demand religion or thinking about leaving a high demand religion, they've been living the checkboxes and now they've got to figure out an alternative. So they've been pecking at the thing and now. Now what? Right, so start, start with the, the, the war veterans of what that lesson is.

Michael Easter [01:35:07] Yeah, well, so when I, in the book, I go to Iraq to investigate addiction. And before I go to Iraq I, you know, I kind of have to prepare for it. And so I meet with a friend who's. His name is Mike Moreno and he was in the CIA for a bunch of years in Baghdad at the height of the surge. And he teaches me all this different stuff, these different skills I'm going to need to survive should things go wrong, basically because being a solo journalist in countries where there's a lot of conflict in the Middle east, it comes with some dangers and yeah, be prepared. And so we spend eight hours of him telling me all these possible ways that I could be kidnapped, that I could die, that all these terrible things could happen to me. And then, you know, we're sitting on tailgate of his car and he goes, man, I'm really jealous you're going over there. I'm like, what are you talking about? And he told me that he misses being in that environment where every decision you make is of consequence, where you are forced into presence and awareness, even though it is a high tension situation. And I went. So I go over to Iraq, I'm there for like a week. And I get back and I call them up. I'm like, I understand what you're talking about now. There is something to being in an environment of consequence where your decisions matter, where things aren't coming easy, where you're just forced into presence and awareness. That. That can be oddly very life giving. Now when I get back, I also call, I'm like, okay, are we like the two crazy Mike and Michael here? I call some friends who have fought in wars and done things like that, and they said, yeah, same deal. I miss it all the time. And so the question is, how do you take some of the lessons from that and apply them to sort of everyday life? And I think it comes down to, you know, especially for this audience, it's like you've gone through something of a war, right? Having to make this consequential decision. That was hard, that was tough, that came with consequences. Now that you're on the other side of that, you're kind of in this like pink cloud zone they call it after people kind of get sober, you know, where, like, things are good. But I think that you have to keep. I think you have to be vigilant and find experiences that are going to challenge you, that are going to push you kind of out onto your edges. Because I think that's ultimately where humans find meaning and get reward from. It goes back to the conversation I had with Thomas Santal, the psychologist. He said, people value things that were hardest to accomplish, that were hardest to get. We value that more. The reason he sort of tracked it back to evolution going, you know, if you had to search and search and search for food and you were almost didn't find it and you were going to starve when you found it, that had to be way more rewarding.

John Dehlin [01:38:13] Best meal you'll ever eat.

Michael Easter [01:38:15] Best meal you'll ever eat. Even though it was the same food,

John Dehlin [01:38:17] same type of food, or worse, or

Michael Easter [01:38:20] worse, had you found it before you started getting hungry. So we evolved to value the things that are hard to get, the struggles. And so keeping that in the back of your mind as you live your life, a sort of dumb phrase that I always tell myself as a journalist, is no problem, no story. So when I go to some of these places, I go, when things go perfect, the story's not as good, it's just not. It's the times when, you know, in the book, it's like, I get to Iraq and I have this fixer who just totally BSed me the whole time and the trip is a mess. When I go to Bolivia, like all these things went off the rails. That ultimately leads to a better story. And you also learn something about yourself because we ultimately learn from our problems through going through trials and find that most rewarding.

John Dehlin [01:39:10] Yeah. There's a couple quotes you have in the final two pages. You quote Joseph Campbell, whom I love. And do you want to tell us that quote?

Michael Easter [01:39:18] Yes. The cave that you fear to enter holds the treasure you seek.

John Dehlin [01:39:22] That's a little bit of Yoda, Luke Skywalker stuff going on there, right?

Michael Easter [01:39:25] Yeah, yeah, yeah, absolutely.

John Dehlin [01:39:27] And then the very final quote, the last line of the book, you risk.

Michael Easter [01:39:33] You risk so much by hesitating to fling yourself into the abyss.

John Dehlin [01:39:36] Yeah. And that's what so many of our viewers and listeners have done by leaving the safety ness of the train. Right. Of the cave, of Plato's cave they're facing. Or the Garden of Eden they're facing thorns and thistles and noxious weeds. Sometimes they're turning to self medication as a way to self medicate the difficulty of then the pain and the suffering of flinging themselves into the abyss. And I say that in quotes. So let's end with a final, you know, five minutes of tips of like, these people are out of a high demand religion. They sometimes are their heads spinning with not knowing their identity, their meaning, their purpose, their morality, or let alone the afterlife. What are some, you know, short of going to the Arctic or hunting caribou or going to Iraq, what. What would be some. Some of the tips that you kind of end your book with or that you sew into your book along the way or books, I should say.

Michael Easter [01:40:37] Yeah. So the question for me is, what is your Arctic caribou hunt? What is your trip to Iraq? What is. And it's going to be very different for everyone. But like I just said, the times where we put ourselves in positions of challenge, where we have to figure things out and see what we're capable of, that is ultimately how we grow. So in the comfort crisis, for example, I talk about this idea called masogi.

John Dehlin [01:41:02] Masogi, Masogi. What's masogi?

Michael Easter [01:41:05] The idea is that once a year you're gonna go out into nature and you're gonna do something really hard. There's two rules. One, it's got to be really hard, which we define by Saying you should have a 50, 50 shot at finishing whatever it is you decide to do. And then number two, don't die. Which is straightforward. Now, the idea from this.

John Dehlin [01:41:25] Or do permanent damage.

Michael Easter [01:41:26] Yeah, the idea for this came from this guy whose name is Marcus Elliot, who's long story short about him is that he revolutionized sports science by applying AI and movement modeling and big data to how players move. And so he can make all these predict. So he's a numbers, data, and figure guide on human performance. But he realizes that what really unleashes the most performance, it doesn't happen physically, it happens up here. And so how do you get to that? It's by putting yourself in these positions where you really have to figure yourself out. Because if you think about humans of the past, we used to have to do challenging things all the time to survive. This could be from a big hunt. This could be from moving to summer into wintering grounds. This could be from a tiger lurking in the bushes. Every single time we would take on one of these challenges, you'd learn something about what you were capable of. You would get thrust out onto the edges of your comfort zone, and you'd have to figure things out. And in the process of doing that, you learn something about yourself and you come back to your normal life, and you have this sort of new confidence and competence and capability. We would even engineer this into life in a rite of passage. Right when we had these, when we had people that we needed to get to point A in their life, we'd send them out to do something really challenging so they could learn about themselves and have moments of doubt and fear. And, you know, they're walking into the cave that we talked about going, I need to get out of this cave. But if you keep sort of putting one foot in front of the other, you realize that you do have a lot more on board than you think. But you're never gonna find that out unless you actually go into the cave. Really? That is it. And then everyone's cave is different though, right? So for me, it was unpacking. Okay. I get sober why that was the cave. And then it's like, well, why was I drinking in the first place? How can I replace that in a positive way? Then it's doing books. It's like, I'm never gonna understand this whole idea of comfort and how it's changed over time unless I put myself in a world that is totally uncomfortable and can teach me a lot. And I wouldn't have. The book would not be the same Had I not done that? Because there are so many things I learned out there that I just didn't even realize are not part of our life anymore. Like silence, like boredom, like all these different things. Right. And so I think that's really, really it. At the end of the day, it's, you know, your mind can sort of tell you, don't do this thing, don't do this thing. But if you're drawn to it, there's probably a reason, even though you're kind of got this protective gear on. And going into that space, that abyss that I mentioned is. It's where the sort of answer lies.

John Dehlin [01:44:14] It's almost like going through a faith crisis is its own musogi. It's its own entering the cave. It's its own leap into the absurd. And the benefit is it's difficulty. Like, yes, if you're suffering, if you're in pain, and that's the bug, but it's also the feature.

Michael Easter [01:44:31] Yes.

John Dehlin [01:44:31] And lean into the difficulty of it because that's where the growth is going to be. It sounds like that's what you're saying.

Michael Easter [01:44:37] Yes, that is exactly it. And as you were going through that, I think recognizing that you knew this was going to be challenging and this is how it's manifesting itself. But to your point about it being a feature, not necessarily a bug, going, okay, this might be the worst it gets and it's all downhill from here. And in fact, if this wasn't happening, it probably wouldn't be worth it. So it's just a necessary buy in.

John Dehlin [01:45:07] Yeah, yeah, yeah. And so if you had to give a sentence, I'm just going to give you a sentence. So in terms of. Let's just say food. Yeah, I guess we already covered that. Eat more simple foods. Michael Pollan probably gives some good advice there.

Michael Easter [01:45:25] Yeah, just single ingredient foods. And realize that a lot of times fad diets, there's usually some flaw hidden within them. And if you think back to what have humans been eating for the past hundred or so thousand years?

John Dehlin [01:45:38] Keep it simple.

Michael Easter [01:45:39] It's simple stuff.

John Dehlin [01:45:40] How about influence?

Michael Easter [01:45:42] Well, we evolved to crave influence because it used to keep us alive. But the difference in the past was that it was clear what your rank was and you could only influence so many people. Now you could influence millions of people on social media. Not to mention it's not really clear whether you've actually achieved the rank that you say you have. So in the past, it's like if you were the fearless warrior. Well, you had to show that on the battlefield. Well, now you can go on social media and be like, I am the fearless warrior, even though you've never fought a battle. And so I think that we live in a time where our drive for influence has been changed in so many ways, and it often in turn changes us.

John Dehlin [01:46:27] How about stuff?

Michael Easter [01:46:28] Well, here's a crazy stat is even just 150 years ago, people owned a handful of things that were handed down often. The average home now contains more than 10,000 items of all different kinds of stuff. So we have a drive to acquire things because that kept us alive and we can operate often use these things as signals to show that we're part of a group or that we're above people or whatever it might be. And so really, the takeaway on that section is thinking of framing purchases through the lens of gear rather than stuff can be useful because it means that you're using this to achieve a higher purpose. Right.

John Dehlin [01:47:08] This is something you use versus things you collect. Is that right?

Michael Easter [01:47:11] Things you're actually using to achieve this sort of higher purchase purpose beyond just the act of buying. Because it is so easy to buy today. I mean, even just 15 years ago, if I have the impulse to. If I get bored and I go, oh, it'd be nice to shop, I would have to drive down to the store. Yeah. Now I can just, oh, Amazon. Oh, prime day. Oh, well, this item's. It's 40% off. Eh, what the hell, let's buy it. Right? You repeat that over time and you come to figure out why we have more than 10,000 items in our homes.

John Dehlin [01:47:42] And do we just delete all our apps? Is that the answer? Delete the apps?

Michael Easter [01:47:45] No, I don't think so. I talked about that loop earlier, the Scarcity loop. I think even just becoming aware of it can help you understand why you fall into it.

John Dehlin [01:47:53] Of the Scarcity Loop.

Michael Easter [01:47:54] Yeah.

John Dehlin [01:47:54] You can see what they're doing to you.

Michael Easter [01:47:56] Yes.

John Dehlin [01:47:57] Yeah.

Michael Easter [01:47:57] Once you know how the machine works, you can better decide if you want to opt in. Yeah. Use the machine and opt in. Yeah. So for me, just understanding why these apps that use that are so compelling and so great at capturing attention, it changes your relationship with them enough that you tend to see you use them less or at least intentionally so, you know, I don't want people to walk away going, oh, this book tells me, like, never use this stuff. It doesn't. If you want to be on Instagram for 16 hours a day, go ahead. I don't have a problem with that. So long as you're doing that Intentionally. And that is what you want to be doing with your time. It's so easy to go, I want to check Instagram for two minutes and then you look up in 32 minutes of your life have gone by.

John Dehlin [01:48:43] Yeah.

Michael Easter [01:48:44] So that's what we're trying to counteract here.

John Dehlin [01:48:46] Yeah. All right, well, I'm going to just. I'm going to do some shameless plugs for you. The two books. The author is Michael Easter. The two books are the Comfort Crisis and Scarcity Brain. Please buy them both, or at least one. They're available in audiobook and hardcover. Is there paperback of the Comfort Crisis yet?

Michael Easter [01:49:11] I think paperback for Comfort Crisis is in the spring maybe. Nice.

John Dehlin [01:49:15] Yeah, that's nice.

Michael Easter [01:49:16] Yeah, they've kept it in hardcover for a while. I think part of it is because Amazon sells books for relatively cheap now that the price difference between the hardcover and soft cover isn't that much. And they're just like, yeah, we're just going to be lazy on it.

John Dehlin [01:49:28] It so. Well, let's support good writers and good authors that are doing good work. Let's support our fellow Utahns and. And most importantly, let's support Michael. Michael is really lovely that you reached out. Your books have positively impacted Margi and me and several of my close dear friends and I'm sure a lot of other people. So Utah. Utah's proud of you. Whether you care or not, we're grateful for you and we're grateful for what you've done. And thanks for coming on and entertaining me with this discussion and for sharing what you do and for turning your purpose into something that helps others. Thank you.

Michael Easter [01:50:13] Well, I really appreciate you having me on. I know plenty of people who live in the state have been sort of affiliated with Mormonism in one way or another that absolutely love this show and get a ton of value out of it and that's awesome. You're really making a difference in people's lives and giving people, I think, good, fair information. You know, you're down the middle and. Yeah, I appreciate that, being a journalist, so.

John Dehlin [01:50:36] All right, thanks. Do you know what's next? Do you have a book? You're. Do you do a three book contract? Three book deal?

Michael Easter [01:50:41] I haven't signed the contract for the third book. I'm waiting a little bit on that. I'm gonna come up for air for maybe a couple months here and then go back into the dungeon of writing.

John Dehlin [01:50:50] Okay, so you're too soon to talk about might be next.

Michael Easter [01:50:54] Yeah.

John Dehlin [01:50:54] But there probably will be a third book.

Michael Easter [01:50:56] Probably, you know, it's a, it's a bad habit I have, so.

John Dehlin [01:50:59] Okay, well, we'll look for it. All right. Well, thanks again, Michael Easter. Thanks to everyone. Check out, check out these books. And thanks for joining us today on Mormor Stories. Again, I'll just end. Somehow my hair got goofed up. I'll end the way I began. We rely on your donations to make this possible. Thank you to the monthly donors who subscribe, and that's how we pay our staff and our bills. If you are not a monthly donor and you feel so called, if you value programming like this, please consider becoming a monthly donor by going to MormonStories.org clicking on the Donate button and signing up for whatever you can afford. We're tax deductible in the US we're transparent in our finances and and all our effort is towards informed consent, healthy, happy living, supporting Mormons in a transition and helping people build big, beautiful lives like Michael's if they need to leave Utah and or Mormonism for some reason. So thanks for your support. Be good to each other, be kind to each other. Buy this book and we'll see you all again soon on another episode of Mormon Stories podcast. Take care of.

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