Whats the easiest way to learn an instrument?

practice every day for at least 20 minutes

Nowadays the internet makes it easy to get instruction on how to learn guitar. Learn your basic chords first. Develop finger strength through scales before trying to play licks/solos. Finger strength is EVERYTHING when playing guitar. This can be as simple as playing half steps, whole steps, and step and 1/2s up and down the fretboard. It's boring, but helps. Like Petrucci says "it's like doing ab exercises". If you don't have the finger strength, you can't play most things and will get frustrated and want to quit. I tried jumping straight in to learning songs without any knowledge of guitar and it really set me back. That being said, you can learn songs as you go along. But get those fundamentals down! If you really enjoy it, nothing will stop you. Good luck!

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Learn your basic chords first

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This big time.

Get a chord book, or look on the internet.

Learn 3 chords that go together. D G and A are good candidates. Or G C and D.
You can play a bunch of simple songs with just 3.

Practice strumming them and switching between them till you can do it without pause.
Throw in the appropriate minor chord that goes with them. (Em fits in with G C and D)
Once you can play them well, learn 3 more. E A and B. F C and B.

Learn bar chords next. This takes some finger stregnth. You will muffle strings for a while before you can pull these off. KEEP AT IT!

That should keep you busy for a while.

I would say a fair amount easier, though I don't actualy play bass.
Theres no chords.
Bass can be as simple or complicated as the player makes it (depending on the songs played)
You can get by with just some minimum plucking or you can add some funk into it.

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No chords? You just pluck away?

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You don't just pluck away at open strings all of the time.
There may be some positions to keep your fingers within scales that may resemble chords. I'm not sure.
But at bare minimum, you can get by in simple songs just by holding a string and pluck it.
Switch notes, pluck it. It would sound boring, and be boring to play for a real bass player, but it would work.

I used to sit in with a kind of open mic night band at a lil place.
Playing rhythm guitar and singing.
A couple of times the bass player wanted to play rhythm and sing, so he handed me the bass over my protesting.
I didn't realy know what I was doing, but I know just a little bit of scales, and there were other guitars and a harmonica to help drown me out.

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How much easier is it to learn bass guitar than regular guitar?

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Like any other instrument, bass has it's own levels of complexity depending on what you want to do. You can do the straight root 1-2-3-4 over 4, or you can two hand tap sextuplets. That said, modern rock bass is often simplistic and easy to pick up on.