Modern Wisdom - #438 - Michael Easter - Learn To Embrace Discomfort

Episode Date: February 21, 2022

Michael Easter is a contributing editor at Men's Health magazine, columnist for Outside magazine and Professor at the University of Nevada. The world is pretty comfortable right now. Between air conditioning, Amazon Prime, Deliveroo, Netflix, Google Maps, soft beds and automatic cars, you can get through big stretches of life without encountering any real discomfort. Michael has spent years researching why discomfort is so important to our health and fulfilment, and how to reintroduce it to your life. Expect to learn why rites of passage no longer happening in modern life is a huge loss, how Michael survived an entire month in the Alaskan Arctic, how an annual challenge with a 50% chance of failure can change your life, what nosey airport security staff can teach us about human nature, why boredom is good for you, how to overcome trauma and much more... Sponsors: Join the Modern Wisdom Community to connect with me & other listeners - https://modernwisdom.locals.com/ Get over 37% discount on all products site-wide from MyProtein at https://bit.ly/modernwisdom (use code: MODERNWISDOM) Get 15% discount on the amazing 6 Minute Diary at https://bit.ly/diarywisdom (use code MW15) Get 10% discount on your first month from BetterHelp at https://betterhelp.com/modernwisdom (discount automatically applied) Extra Stuff: Buy The Comfort Crisis - https://amzn.to/3umNyQB Follow Michael on Instagram - https://www.instagram.com/michael_easter/  Get my free Reading List of 100 books to read before you die → https://chriswillx.com/books/ To support me on Patreon (thank you): https://www.patreon.com/modernwisdom - Get in touch. Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/chriswillx Twitter: https://www.twitter.com/chriswillx YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/modernwisdompodcast Email: https://chriswillx.com/contact/  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Hello everybody, welcome back to the show. My guest today is Michael Easter. He's a contributing editor at Men's Health magazine, columnist for outside magazine and professor at the University of Nevada. The world is pretty comfortable right now. Between air conditioning, Amazon Prime, Deliveroo, Netflix, Google Maps, SoftBeds and automatic cars, you can get through big stretches of life without encountering any real discomfort. Michael has spent years researching why discomfort is so important to our health and fulfillment and how to reintroduce it to your life. Expect to learn why rights of passage no longer happening in modern life is a huge loss.

How Michael survived an entire month in the Alaskan Arctic, how an annual challenge with a 50% chance of failure can change your life. What nosy airport security staff can teach us about human nature, why boredom is good for you, how to overcome trauma, and much more. Don't forget, if you want to get access to the Modern Wisdom reading list, all you need to do is go to chriswix.com slash books. You can download it there. It is free and it has a list of 100 of the most interesting and impactful books that I've ever found. Fiction and nonfiction, all sorted and organized and looking beautiful.

Go and get access to it immediately. chriswix.com slash books. But now, please give it up for Michael Easter. Michael Easter, welcome to the show. Thanks for having me. I'm excited to be here. Me too, man. Why are you interested in discomfort? Seems like a weird thing to be interested in. I guess it, yeah, it kind of is.

So my background is I've been a health and performance journalist. My entire career, so I worked at Men's Health for a pretty long time in the US. And pretty early in my career, I noticed that everything that I was writing about in terms of lifestyle health and how to improve your health Usually had to go through some form of discomfort to see a benefit So if I want to improve my fitness have to work out working out sucks, right? I want to lose weight probably gonna have to eat less. I'm gonna be hungry being hungry sucks Even mental health proving a mental health, right? You usually have to un-peel some sort of psychological onion and get to the bottom of what is causing this issue, right? And that can often

be uncomfortable. So I noticed that, and then I just had a handful of events in my life that really sort of cemented that concept. And yeah, that led me to ultimately write the comfort crisis. You went on an experience to the Arctic with a friend of yours and that was one of the big parts of this. Yeah, I did. So the guy's name is Donnie Vincent and he is a backcountry bell hunter and filmmaker. He makes these movies that I like to describe as planet earth but with hunting. So they're not like your typical, you know,

opposite of having just planet a David Attenborough being very gentle with some monkeys in a forest. Here's some guys to next to a huge deer that he's just shot with a bow. Yeah, well, it's almost like it's got the same vibe and then all of a sudden it's like, yeah, we killed the animal. Yeah. No, they're really interesting, though. And I think that what's important about him is he's really changing how hunting is perceived and how it's practiced. He's kind of at the forefront of this movement that's really changing hunting.

So I met him through doing a story about him in men's health, a handful, it was maybe five, six years ago. And we just stayed in touch, right? And the story was super popular in men's health. We stayed in touch and he calls me up one day and he goes, hey, I'm going up to the Arctic for more than a month. You want to come along.

And my initial reaction is hell no. But he's a good salesman. He gets in on the sales pitch, right? He's like, dude, it's going to be the most epic adventure you could ever be on. We're gonna see grizzly bears, packs of wolves. We're gonna climb ancient mountains and cross glacial rivers and on and on and on, right?

And I live in Las Vegas and I'm at home sitting on the couch in my air conditioned home, and I'm thinking to myself, yeah, that sounds like me, you know? So I sign on and yeah, I start training, I get my plane tickets up there, I have to totally like overhaul how I'm living to get prepared for a journey like that. And we ended up spending more than a month up in the Arctic on this pretty epic backcountry hunt. So we were, you know, hundreds of miles from other people. I mean, middle of nowhere. It's like the middle of nowhere. And it was uncomfortable. And I think, you know, what I drew from that is

we have, we as humans have really engineered comfort into our lives in so many different ways. I mean, I think that there's ways that are quite obviously graspable. So the fact that we don't really need to put physical effort in to live anymore, right? You could have 1,000 steps a day and be fine, right? Would not have been possible a thousand years ago because you're having to hunt and gather for your food, whatever it might be. We live at 72 degrees now, right. We have food that is easily accessible. We don't necessarily have to work for it, but we've even put in things like, you know, people tend to feel uncomfortable in silence. Well, today we've like raised the, the

gladness of the world, like, fourfold and on and on and on. So in the book, I really single out these, what I consider really important forms of discomfort that we evolved to face that naturally kind of keep us healthy that we have engineered out of our lives. What was the scariest, almost uncomfortable part of the trip that you took up to the Arctic? Oh, yeah, that's a good question. So I think that what's interesting is that when I talk about grizzly bears, people are always like, oh my god, grizzly bears. Everyone wants to know about grizzly bears. You look at the numbers. It's like the crappy little planes you have to fly

to get out there. I mean, they're like these two cedars, they're such a pack of gum, they crash all the time. Like statistically, that's way more likely to kill you. That and the weather, right? So probably the most dangerous thing we did was taking the points in. I was gonna say the most dangerous part

of the trip was getting there. Yeah, it was getting there. But then we also had some pretty gnarly weather a couple of times. We almost lost our shelter one night. It was like this hurricane, force winds that were threatening to just like blow our shelter into Russia more or less. And rule number one of surviving out in the wild is making sure that you have a shelter

because if you don't, you're exposed and it's easy to find yourself in quite the pickle. So. Where were you on the Arctic? Because obviously it's a big ring above. What were you directly above? Yeah, so we're in the Alaskan Arctic. We're about maybe 150 miles above the Arctic Circle.

Pretty high then. Yeah, pretty high. There's a there's an area called the No Attack National Preserve, which is where we were. What was the day and night cycles like on the time of year you were there? Pretty long days. I think the sun would go down. It maybe, I'm having trouble remembering, maybe 10, and then it would,

I don't know what time it got up because I was always so tired at the end of the day that I was just like, you know, sort of sleep in and be up. But what was interesting is that we are so high that we were losing, I think it was like six or seven minutes every single day. So being up there for that long, it was like, you know, when we first got up there, the sun is going down at whatever it might be, 10, 11, but the time we left, it was, you know,

much earlier. It just dropped it. It just dropped it. Yeah. Have you read, uh, endurance by Alfred Lansing about Ernest Chakleton's trip across the Antarctic? Have you ever read that? I haven't. Oddly enough, everyone recommends it to me.

It's on my list, but I haven't read it now. Add another person to the list of those that are annoying you about the fact that you need to read that. I read on. Dude, hearing that, because they're out there for, I think, the best part of two years. And when you hear about just how savage those conditions are, you know, electing to go and do that, I suppose there is glory associated with it, but the glory of whatever it was 1914, I think they left. They left like three days after World War One was announced.

And what happened was they sent a letter, maybe even to the king. I think Shackleton sent a letter to the king saying, I understand that I'm taking 20 good men of fighting age, some of whom have experience in war, and on yomping to the other side of the planet to go and do this stupid thing, we'll stop all of it. We'll keep endurance in port, which is the name of the boat, and we'll come back and fight, and they waited for a couple of days, and they just got a ladder, a telegram that said, go. So they got to go. Which is pretty dope. Put to hearing what they had to put up with. And the fact that you elected to do that is, do you think, this is something I think about all the time,

the difference between elected and unelected suffering, or elected and unelected discomfort, the difference between things being hard in life because you've elected to go and do a difficult crossfit workout, or things being hard in life because you've just snapped your Achilles. Come on. You know, both of them are health challenges, physical discomfort. But one of them you chose and the other one you didn't. And I'm quite interested in the difference between those two.

I think a lot of the time, people confuse one for the other, people who are into getting comfortable being uncomfortable, training hard, maybe Brazilian Giu Jitsu or endurance running or CrossFit or whatever, but speaking as someone that thought that he had a good amount of resilience and then snapped in a kill ease two years ago, it It crosses over a little bit, but it doesn't cross over that much. And there's a big difference between those two. So, yeah, I'll answer that two ways. First off, you have to realize it's like, why do we want to be comfortable in the first place? Why do humans tend to always do the next easiest thing?

It's because for millions of millions of years, we lived in these environments of discomfort. Where life was inherently hard, right? There was not enough food. We had to work for that food. There was danger. There was a lot of risks that were wired to avoid all risk.

So doing the least risky, easiest, most comfortable thing that kept us alive, right? That gave us a survival advantage. Great. Well, recently, especially within the last 100 years, our environments have tipped to those of comfort, where now it is very easy to just do the easiest thing, right? We've sort of engineered comfort into our lives. We still have this drive to do the next most easy thing. So I think that's why we need to consciously think about inserting discomfort back in our

life. However, that may be, right? So we choose to do a crossfit workout and undergo that suffering as a replacement for the suffering we used to have in the past, right? That now keeps us healthy and fights back against this environment. We now live in, that it keeps us healthy and fights back against this environment, we lived it. We now live in that it's taken movement from our day. That's put a ton more food into our lives than we ever had before, right? So it's kind of an antidote. And then the second part, the way I'll answer that, is that when you look at the research on people who have faced trauma or hardship or challenge in their life, people who have faced a ton of that kind of stuff, they have a lot of mental health problems.

But at the same time, people who have not faced really any challenges or trauma, they have equally poor rates of mental health. So there is a sweet spot where you need enough challenge in your life and this is stuff that is unplanned, but not too much. So part of it is finding that sweet spot and I think that a lot of times what you find is that people in retrospect, so long as they haven't gone through complete hell, they look back and report, oh, that was actually a blessing because it led me to XYZ. Now, that could just be some weird quirk in the human brain.

I don't really care what it is. I just care that it tends to make people more resilient. Yeah, whether you're post-hocking it or not, if you come out the other side and you feel better, then it's like the the it's like an experiential placebo pill Kind of and if it works it works. I read a study a Wilygo that said 66% of people report post-traumatic growth rather than post-traumatic stress after going through something and I then read another study Which refuted that which is just like the problem of epistemics in the 21st

century, I suppose, that for every study that says something's good, there's another one that says that that might be wrong. But from my own personal experience, absolutely, the times when I've gone through something which has been unelected and difficult, maybe that's because I haven't crossed that threshold into something which would be unrecoverably traumatic. And that's what you're saying. There is a sweet spot between the two. Some absolute catastrophe of losing your entire family in a plane crash or something is probably pushing it a little bit far.

But snapping in a kill ease or having to deal with being poor for a while or having to deal with losing a person that you really loved deal with, you know, losing a person that you really loved, or whatever, you know, a difficult breakup and stuff like that. A lot of the time when you look back, those are the lessons that expedited growth and really took you to the next level in life. Yeah, I think so. And I mean, a lot of it is how, you know, I think that between the event happening and the processing of it over the long run, there's often a choice, right?

It's like, how am I gonna frame this? And I think that just having the right mindset going through those kind of things can be the difference maker. And I also think that, especially today, it's like we tend to over-pathologize everything. Right? Well, something bad happened. So now it's a medical condition of trauma or PTSD. We're going to slap a label on it, right? When really it's like part of it is just being a human, right? Like do people honestly expect that they're going to go

through life without ever having problems? Like life is a video, like, you know, think of life as a video game, are there any levels that are not hard? Like what if the level was just like nothing, right? It's like we're always gonna have problems in life. So like learning to live well is accepting that we are going to have problems and face challenges,

but that we'll often come out on the other side of them better if we accept that and act accordingly. Dude, I love that. There's a Sam Harris video floating around from one of his new ones, or he talks about exactly that. No, interesting. Do you, would you imagine that one day you would wake up and all of your problems would be gone?

As if you'd got to a level in a computer game and there was nothing there, you'd be bored. You'd be bored out of your mind. Problems are not going to go away. The problem that you have is the way that you think about your problems and you can drop your problems if only for a moment, if you can, and then you need to be enlightened and you need to identify the difference between the self and all that. But the principle of problems are there. They're an inherent part of life. They're a feature, not a bug, right? And people treat them like bugs, not features. Like, no, this is why you're here. You're not here to lie in a pool with a cocktail

for the rest of life. And part of what I talk about in the book, I talk about this concept called prevalence induced concept change. Now that is a kind of a dorky way of basically talking about this concept called problem creep. And it was discovered by some scientists at Harvard, maybe in 2018, basically found that as humans experience,

fewer and fewer problems, we don't actually perceive ourselves as having fewer problems. Because we just find the next problem. But what I'm talking about in the book is that as the world has gotten better and better and better, the problems that we've been fine become progressively more hollow. So this explains why we have first world problems, right?

So you think about it, I think that we're probably all agree that compared to, let's say, 300 years ago, 3,000 years ago, the world is better. We're less likely to go hungry. We're less likely to go hungry. We're less likely to toil in a field under a king who gives us these meager rations. Our kids are less likely to die at any given moment. But when you poll people, only 6% of Americans, at least,

now we're pessimistic bastards. Only 6% of people say that the world is improving. And it's because we're always moving the goalposts. We're always just searching for the next problem. And so I think when you apply that to daily life, it just totally messes with your perspective on things. Because you can either like kind of have these moments where you're just pissed off because like, I was like for my yoga class, right? Or you can be like, man, this is ridiculous. So I'm living in temperature control and have access to food. Like this is ridiculous. So I'm living in temperature control and have access to food.

Like this is amazing. And I'm not saying the world doesn't have problems that we should solve, but like in the grand scheme of time and space, our problems now are, you know, not that bad. Some of the bigger ones like global warming was standing, I guess. Are you familiar with Parkinson's law? Do you know what that is?

I don't. So it's a law around productivity and it says work expands to fill the time given for it. So if you have three months to complete an assignment, the likelihood is that you are going to do the assignment ten minutes before it's due to being right. That's why your hands stuff in. Work expands to fill the time given for it. It's one of the reasons that time blocking is a productivity strategy is useful because you create time bounded constraints

around different bits of work that you need to do. I was talking to a philosopher friend last night on the phone who is, and I quote, trying nihilism as a life philosophy, fucking hell. And he was saying basically the same thing that ostensibly he has absolutely nothing wrong but he believes that there is a Parkinson's law equivalent of suffering so suffering expands to fill the room given for it in life if you don't have that many things going wrong you just magnify in on things that are ever so slightly suboptimal until they become this huge big problem.

Yeah. Yeah, that's basically this idea that these Harvard researchers are talking about. And it's funny because the way that they went about studying this is there, there's two of them. One of them's name is David LaVari. He was a manganan studying. The other was Daniel Gilbert, who's kind of a famous name and psychology Third and airport because they're traveling to a conference, right?

And they're in the line for TSA and they make this observation about TSA And that is that they are really good at finding problems Right and we've we've obviously experienced this in our life that you know when we go through security It's like our bag gets ripped apart because the agent thought that this banana we had was like a 9-millimeter burrito, right? Or there's like some old woman in front of us who's like 90, can't see, can't hear, can't walk, she's no wheelchair, and they give her like the full body scan down because she's got like a half-filled, you know, bottle of hairspray or whatever. So these guys wonder, it's like, okay, obviously better safe than it's already.

But if all of a sudden everyone started abiding by the rules, and like the scanners never picked anything up, no buzzer, the buzzer's never went off when you had to stand on that weird thing, they never caught anything, would TSA just let everyone fly through? Like, oh yeah, have a good flight guys, have a good flight. And they didn't think so, because the TSA's job is to search for problems, right? So they thought they'd probably just

keep finding more flippant problems over time. So to study this, they get these groups of people and they have the first group, they have them look at 800 different faces. So the job of the participants is to look at face after face and basically deem whether they find this face threatening or non-threatening. Okay, so they're going like threatening, non-threatening, non-threatening, non-threatening. Ooh, threatening.

Unbeknownst to the participants after about the 200th face, they start showing them fewer and fewer and fewer threatening faces. Now, the second study, same setup, except it was with research proposals. They had to deem whether these research proposals were ethical or unethical. Same deal. After hot and midway through, they start giving them fewer and fewer unethical research proposals. So, these things should be black or white, right? Because like a face, I either find a person threatening or I don't. Some proposally, they're crosses this moral line I have in the sand

or it doesn't, right? What they found is that people actually see gray. So as people started to see fewer and fewer threatening faces, they started to deem ambiguous faces as threatening. They said the same, they said threatening the same number of times, right? Same with the research proposals. They started looking at these research proposals that were kind of like pretty ambiguous as being unethical. So that's basically how they found that as

people experience fewer problems in our lives, we don't actually experience fewer problems. We just look for more problems and de deemed things that are probably not problematic as problems. I noticed this when I'm at work, so I run nightlife events and a lot of the time the door staff will be just checking IDs very very similar to the TSA thing and there'll be someone that will come up who is exactly the same as the last 10 people. They say that date of birth, it looks like them, but then they'll feel like there's an obligation for scrutiny because whatever the scrutiny alarm hasn't gone off, sufficiently, for the last 10 people, can you give me your address and your post code? Okay, what's your post code backwards?

Okay, what's your fucking star sign? They'll have that one. Like what's your star sign? Oh yeah, because that's going to rumble this 17 year old that's using an 18 year old ID to try and get in. But another thing that I find that I think this shows up in is when you have, let's say the people at work, and there is a team of people that are working a lot of the time, if you're in a meeting, people will feel the need to contribute things that don't actually have to be said. So let's say that the design, a design that gets put forward for a piece of artwork and everybody's happy with it.

But there is a sense that while I'm here to make some sort of a contribution, you go, what about, what about, what about if we, what about if we move the image and not much, but you know, just a little bit and it's this compulsion to, to try and find a way to contribute as well. And I think that you see that in in work settings. I know that I do it. So again, if I'm stood outside of a nightclub and the queue is absolutely fine, nothing wrong at all, but I'll walk down and I'll just move the barriers in,

barriers creep out in nightlife a lot. And the goal is to keep them as tight to the wall as possible. And I'll just move them a foot, half a foot, like six inches, these barriers, they're several yards wide. And I'll just go and give them a little nudge because I'm like, oh yeah, that's fucking helped. That's made a really big difference to this queue of 418 year olds who are all drunk, that half foot that I've just moved the barriers in.

But you do it because you try and, I think it, it comes from most of the time, or a lot of the time, it comes from a virtuous place. The TSA agents are doing it because they want to try and catch the crims, right? They want to make sure that people are safe on the, but yeah, there's definitely a sense that people just do shit.

So if you like, they should be doing shit. Yeah Yeah. Yeah, there's actually some research around this. And the reason for this is that humans evolved to basically want to feel like they're being useful contributors to their environment. And this is not only internally, but also more importantly, so we can show socially that we're doing something and contributing to the tribe. Because if we're standing there and like, just not doing anything because we're consciously going, like, yeah, I think things are pretty good. You know, but everyone else is working.

Well, if we don't work, it's like, we'll get the hell out of the tribe, dude, right? And then you're on your own, you're gonna get thrashed by wolves or whatever. And I love that story you told about nightlife. And I would see it in my own work, like when I was working at Men's Health magazine, we would do these things called wall walks. And we would get every single article that was going to be in the magazine,

including the cover. And we would go, we would go over what the headline was going to be. And it was literally like, you know, if someone would throw out a really good idea, but one person would be like, I don't know that. I don't know. And then we'd have to like go on to another one. And these would take hours and hours and hours, right? Now, before these started happening, which is hilarious, is that there was this guy who ran the magazine and he and the number two at the magazine would just go to a bar and they would sit down with the entire magazine and they would do this themselves. And at that point, the magazine was selling way more. Right. So it's like, here we have this massive group of people all spending time on this little

thing just being like, I don't know, I don't know. And then these two guys would just do the same damn thing, but our group will be a lot more efficiently. And I think that that's sort of a good lesson too for creative work. It's like, we know feedback is really important, but do we need feedback from 10 people? Because it's like just so much noise, right? Where it's like, if you just can find one person that you really trust and you're like,

this is my dude or my girl, whatever. I think that can arguably be a lot more efficient. There is a non-zero chance that somebody is going to feel a compulsion to contribute because of this, whatever, contribution compulsion, that's what we'll call it. I like it. There is a non-zero chance that that's going to do. For every person that you add into the group, that increases. Yes, the chance that that's going to happen increases.

Whereas if it's two people, you can just, is it fine yet? Fine, fine, fine, fine, fine, all right. Have a chat between two people. Fine, fine, fine, yeah, absolutely man. When we're doing artwork amends, one of the worst things that we can do. So we, we have a new DJ that's coming to play or someone's featuring or it's a Valentine's traffic light party or whatever and we put or a video this is the worst one Fuck we put a video into the group right with the boys and and the managers throw it in guys What do you think about this and it's just a Litany of problems. They've got that that song's not cool anymore. No one listens to that That was big on tiktok four months ago

The I don't like the color of the font, I don't like to diss that any other, but if you sat down with each of the boys individually and showed them it, they'd probably say that it was fine. So another part of it is the signaling as well. It's the signaling to the rest of the group. I am somebody that looks at the work with such a high level of resolution that I'm picking up the things that you're not.

And that's such a, I see it myself. I do it as well. I want to show off that, oh, actually, maybe, maybe the alignment could be a bit better on this. I should, it's fine. It's fucking fine. People are going to be looking at it, half-cut it, pre-drinks, when they're deciding where they're going to go out in a small window on the bottom corner of something. Like, it's going on Instagram. This isn't, it's not the ending of a Christopher Nolan movie. Yeah, totally. And I think it's like, it's a balance, right?

It's like you want a certain quality, but at the same time, I think we need to realize that, and I have the same problem to do, like as a writer, I'll spend like two days on two paragraphs. And I've got 85,000 words to write. Like that is not efficient at all. And I've had to stop myself from doing that. Like I'll have a, I'll just, I can recognize when I'm slipping into it.

And it's just like, dude, let it go. The average person is not gonna know, is not gonna notice anything, right? And it's, yeah, I think it's definitely intended too. There's a quote from Tiago Forte that he tweeted a couple of years ago. And it's so mad people put stuff out on Twitter that you keep with you.

At most of Twitter is absolute horseship, but every so often you find something like this. And he said, one of the interesting things about people who produce high leverage work is that their content has a rough edged, half-assed quality to it because polishing things to perfection is a low leverage activity. Getting something to 93, 95% and just shipping it.

That's where most of the gains are accrued. Getting it from 95 to 100% in most areas of work makes no difference. But the time sync, you're talking about to get it from naught to 95 is one unit of time. To get it from 95 to 100 is two units of time. Okay, you could have done two 95s in the time that it took you to do 1-100.

Yeah, and especially when we're talking about, I mean, I work in media, so with content, it's like, people like to think they'll know what is going to do really well. We have no freaking idea, so is it better to put out like, one 100% piece or 3-95% pieces and see what happens. Because you, I mean, you just more at bats, right?

If you're hitting, let's say you're hitting 300, well, if you go to bats three times, you're probably going to end up on base instead of if you just want to one. I'm sorry, I'm talking about baseball. You guys don't give a shit about baseball. But there's a problem with some. Give us a, give us a, give us a, give us a, give us a, give us a, give us a, give us a, give us a, give us a, give us a, give us a, give us a, give us a, give us a, give us a, give us a, give us a, give us a, give us a, give us a, give us a, give us a, give us a, give us a, give us a, give us a, give us a, give us a, give us a, give us a, give us a, give us a, give us a, give us a, give us a, give us a, give us a, give us a, give us a, give us a, give us a, give us a, give us a, give us a, give us a, give us a, give us a, give us a, give us a, give us a, give us a, give us a, give us a, give us a, give us a, give us a, give us a, give us a, give us a, give us a, give us a, give us a, give us a, give us a, give us a, give us a, give us a, give us a, give us a, give us a, give us a, give us a, give us a, give us a, give us a, give us a, give us a, give us a, give us a, give us a, give us, analogy out there. That's correct. You looked at rights of passage of one of these symbolic landmark experiences that some cultures put people through. What do you learn there?

So I started thinking about this because I met this guy whose name is Marcus Elliott and there's two things you need to know about this guy is that one, he's kind of a seeker. So I lived out of a little while. He lived out of it. He's kind of like, you know, he's open to experiences. He's kind of out there. So we lived out of a VW van for a while, got through college by counting cards at casinos. He was going to Burning Man like way back in the day.

And the second thing you need to know about this guy is that he's super brilliant. So he gets his MD from Harvard Medical School and he decides, I don't want to be a doctor. I want to revolutionize sports science, which is a declaration that is like so grand that it's almost bordering on arrogance, right? But he actually ends up doing it. So he's the first guy who really brought in like quantification of human movement and performance. So he can help, he analyzes athlete movement using all this high tech stuff, and then he can sort of say,

hey, here's what you're really good at. We need to develop that. And also like, here's where you have this injury risk. And when we see people move like that, they have a, let's say, 60% chance of tearing their ACL or something in a season. So I told you that to basically tell you that, he's all into numbers and data and figures,

right? But he also realizes that what improves human performance, not just the athletes, of also of the average person, that can't always be measured, right? There are certain qualities that people have that you just can't measure that makes them able to do more than other people, right? So, to get to that, he does this thing that he calls misogi. And Masogi is essentially a recreation of these rights of passage that we used to have in the past that all cultures would send people out on. So the idea is that you're going to go out into nature and you're going to do something really, really freaking hard.

And it's got to be hard enough that you're going to face this moment where you're like, man, I don't think I can complete whatever this task I'm trying to complete is. But by continuing on, you can reach to this point where you thought you reached your edge, but you passed it. And you can kind of look back and go, well, I thought I passed my edge,

but here I am past it, right? So I've clearly undersold myself in this area of my life, which raises this question of like, where else have I sold myself short, right? So it kind of helps people expand their potential and teaches people what they're truly capable of. And it's also good at reframing fear because if you're doing something really hard

and you're gonna be afraid of failure, we're all wired to be afraid of failure. By sort of dancing on that edge, you can kind of see, like, man, failure's not really that big of a deal. And so, yeah, again, it's like this recreation of these rights of passage that we used to face all the time that all the cultures had. What are some examples of the rights of passage that his athletes have done? So he's done one where they do one every year. So one, they got an 85 pound boulder and

they walked it, I think five miles underneath the Santa Barbara channel, which is like about 10 feet deep. So one person would dive down, pick up the rock, walk this thing underwater, 10 yards, come back up, the next guy would go down on and on and on, tell this rock was a point B, right? They've done ones that are a lot simpler where it's like, we can see this mountain way off in the distance. So let's see if we can get to the top of it in 24 hours or whatever it might be. They stand up paddle boarded across the channel once and I hadn't really done much stand up paddle boarding.

So the point is that it doesn't really matter how grand it is for the average person. There just has to be a real 50-50 shot of you accomplishing it. So like my 50% is gonna be different than 50%, it's gonna be different than your 50%, it's gonna be different than your 50%. You know, it's like, if you've only run, say, 10 miles in your life and you ask yourself,

could I run 15 and you go, probably could, like, well, could you run 20? And you're like, oh, I don't know if I could run 20. Go find out, right? You're gonna hit a moment where you're like, God, I don't know if I could run 20. Go find out. You're going to hit a moment where you're like, God, I really want to quit. But by not quitting, you're really going to learn something about yourself and be able to take those lessons back into your normal life. It sounds like your spot science friend was doing that as part of a group. It seems like it was a team bonding experience as well.

Is there something to learn from doing it on your own versus doing it as part of a group? I think that if you do it as a group, you have to all be relatively equally skilled because of that 50% thing. Like if you've got someone who's just a stud and then someone who hasn't, you know, has been on the couch for the last five years, they're just going to be a sort of, someone's either going to make it really easy or it it's gonna be really hard for that other person. Marcus has done them both alone and with people. So I think, you know, if you have a good group, totally, try it.

I have a friend who box jumped Mount Everest. So he did in, I think he took, about, he took less than a day to do. So it's Jay Alderton who has done a bunch of other shit. What the fuck else did he do? He did something else mental. The box jump was the most recent one, but he holds a couple of Guinness World Records.

Used to be in some sort of armed forces. Okay. That became a champion bodybuilding type dude, like fitness model type guy, and then decided to do these ridiculous but yeah box jumped Mount Everest Well, camera. I was in the explode at the end. He was good. So I think he um The form his form was pretty good, but he was permitted to do is a 24 inch box I want to say so as standard standard box jump height

But he was doing some smart things. He had knee wraps on. He was stepping down from the box, so there was no fear about rebounding. I think he was landing fairly soft, and he was allowed to put his hands on his knees if he wanted to. I don't know whether he had to reach

like triple extension at the top, either. I think he just had to get to the top of the box, which all of these things are small, but when you're doing it 20,000 times or whatever it was throughout the day, um, yeah, it would be like 15,000 box jumps if you do the math. Yeah, it's something like that. Yeah, something like that. Yeah, something like that. I mean, Cameron Haynes' son, just beat David Goggins' pull-up record in 24 hours, didn't he? I think so. I saw him on a hunting trip in September and he's, it's very impressive because he's a big dude, too. Like, you know, I would imagine pull-up people being like pretty small gymnast types,

but he's like, he's a big dude, so it's pretty impressive. Yeah. What is there something with this right of passage that people are supposed to do to add some sense of sacredness to it, either in advance or afterward? Um, I think the sacredness happens in those moments where you're like, no, I got to quit, but then you don't quit. I mean, I've done, so I've started doing something like this every year. And it totally is where you're like, no, can't finish this. But for whatever reason, you just kind of keep going and it's like, oh holy shit, you know, I think that's when it really sets in. What was your one last year? I've done some, I did a running one last year, so I only run 16 miles.

The farthest I'd run at one time was 16 miles and I did like 50. Okay. Yeah, I think it was maybe mile like 35 that I was just like, yeah, I got to quit. No way. And I just kind of kept going and something kicks in at like mile 40 where it's just like, you know, you're in. And one of the things too that I talk about in the book is I'm kind of breaking this rule, but in the interest of getting it out to people, is that you're not supposed to advertise this at time, right? Because a lot of what we do in modern life now,

especially physically, is just so we can put it on the ground for likes, right? We're not doing it for ourselves. And this really is something that you are supposed to do for yourself. So one of the guidelines is like, you know, you can talk about it with friends and stuff, but this is not like, I did it for the grant.

It's not a social media flex. Yeah. Yeah, exactly. One of the problems that you have, that's great. And I really like that idea that that's sacredness as well, right, doing it for its own sake. However, I don't know whether you've seen 75 hard, which is a challenge that

a lot of people are doing at the moment. It's just like, yeah, a lot of people are doing that. To water a 240-45 minute workout, to read 10 pages of a nonfiction book, stick to a diet, something like that, right? It's just a simple, here is the basics for nutrition, training, bit of mental health, and you're sleeping well, or something like that. Yeah. Those sorts of movements, I think you're going to see those increasingly kind of like social-powered, simple, stoic-esque, all-encompassing lifestyle changes. And something like this, you know, if you were to do an equivalent of sober October, which

was, it wasn't still is quite big or dry January. If you're able to do something like that, I think that you would get a lot of people bought into this idea, but it's inherently self-defeating because the advertisement of it. I suppose there would be a way to say, look, you can do this as a part of it and almost have the fact that you're not supposed to advertise it as one of the elements, that you do this, maybe you could follow the page or be a part of the group or whatever, and you would maybe be able to speak to those people that were within it, but outside of that, you don't talk about it. Yeah, I think you make a really great point.

I think it could potentially be a closed group, or it's just like, hey, I'm doing this. Here was my experience. Maybe you just talk about it more vague, you know. Yeah. You know, it's like the fight club rule. You don't talk about fight club. Have you seen the liver king on Instagram? Dude, yeah. Well, he seems like a guy that I'm depending on how legit or not you think he is, but he

seems like a guy that's trying to add discomfort into his life as much as possible. Yeah, for sure. For sure. He's an interesting cat. Someone I had never heard of him and one of my friends texted me about him and was like, dude, you got to see this guy. I think it was more just based on the fact that he's eating so much raw meat, which I think, um, yeah.

Yeah. Yeah. So you don't know what to say. Yeah, yeah, so. You don't know what to say. I think it would be cool. I'm in contact with this team about podcast and stuff, but I haven't really heard anybody go deep. There's not been a mental health article written on him yet

or any of that sort of stuff. And that, yeah, that mystique kind of adds a little bit. It wouldn't surprise me if you see him on something like a Rogan at some point soon. Just because he's so, he's very intrigued. You know, say what you want about him, like he's an intriguing guy. That's totally how I feel.

I'm like, would I do a lot of the things that he does? No, hell no. I think that there's always, like, especially with people on the extremes, I think it's relatively fair to say that he's on an extreme. I think there's a nugget of utility in what they're doing. I mean, I don't think it's irrational to say that like, yeah, like organ meats are good for people, right?

It's something we don't eat anymore. And we know that it has, it's more nutrient dense than a lot of the cuts that we now Good advice Is eating it at the expense of everything else good advice? I don't know I'm not you know, I'm not a PhD holding nutritionist, but I talked to a lot and I they might push back on that but you know whatever Go on Rogan Brian. That's what we want.. Talk to me about the guy that fixed the Patriots. Oh, that was Marcus.

Oh, that was the dude, that was you saying guy. So was that the Patriots that he's got doing these crazy things? So he worked with the Patriots, that was his first job out of college, out of medical school. So he worked for them. I can't remember how many years,

but he was there when they were winning some Super Bowls. One of the main things he did is that they had, I think it was like 26 hamstring injuries in the season. And he was able to drop that number down to three, right? So that really helped them. So now he's got contracts with the NBA. He works with some NFL teams. He works with MLB people. He works with some world soccer, NASCAR And yeah, what he does is he basically he doesn't make anyone do Musogi because it's totally an elected thing Right, but he tells all his athletes to come through about it and some of them do it with him And he does say too. He says

There are people who hear about it and they go go, no, I'm not doing that. Like hell now. He's like, the people who are like, I'll do that. And not doing it. He's like, those are the dudes that like have it have that extra element. Like at the end of the game, you give them the ball type people. There's just, you know, something about them. Like if someone says they'll do that with me, I'm like, that person's going to be fine in their career. So what? What, did he have anything to say if you fail your misogi? Because obviously, you know, if there's a 50% chance of you failing it, then a good group of people are not going to get this done, you know, feelings of disappointment or insufficiency might crop up. If you do that,

did you have any insight around that? I think that there are still lessons there though, right? So he talked to me about one where he was going to do a rim-to-rim-to-rim of the Grand Canyon. And so it's like 45 miles maybe, but really what kills you is the elevation change. It's a lot. All right, because you start at like 8,000 feet, in just a handful of miles you're down to 2000 or like 1000 feet or something. I mean it's more than 20,000 feet of elevation change easy. Well more like 40 actually if you do the math because you're going down and then you're going back up.

And his knee is just blew up on the way down and so he got to the top of the north. He started the south through him, went down, went across Canyon Bottom, went up, started to go back down. And it was just like, I'm going to have to get helicopter data here. But he talked about how like, it's still an amazing lesson because there's so much adventure in that. And he was like, even though I had to stop, I was able to get farther than I anticipated once things started going south. It's still an amazing experience that you're going to learn from. And I was going to say, yeah, 50-50, you should, like if you were doing something like this every year and you succeed, you're doing it wrong. Because there's so much in life now that we choose to do, but we know we're going to succeed.

I mean, think of how people approach running a marathon. They don't go, I don't know if I can run a marathon. They say, I don't know if I can run a marathon in four hours or whatever some time goal is, right? We know we're going to be able to accomplish the things that we're going to try, but we just like set these kind of artificial time goals too. So one of the ideas here is like, I want a true 50, 50 shot every other year, I should be failing more or less. You say that humans are wired to believe that we can, that we're far less capable than we actually are as well. As opposed, evolutionarily, that makes sense. If you were this like hubris filled asshole, you'd be dead within, you know, you wouldn't make it out if you'd the digit years of your life you'd have tried to

I don't know tightrope walk across a branch over a lion's den or so yeah, I'll be sweet and then very dead. Oh yeah those jeans would have died off right whereas on the other on the other hand if you're a person who's going no I'm not gonna do that like that ridiculous. But you get thrust into that situation, which used to happen to us all the time. But you're able to make it out, then that gives you a survival advantage. So we chronically undersell our potential,

and there is a good reason for that. How can people push themselves emotionally or mentally? I think pairing the emotion and the emotionally and physical stuff with what we're talking about right now is important, right? But in terms of relationships, too, I think that dudes, especially are just like freaking terrible with opening up and honestly, like having those conversations with a loved one or whatever you need to be open with people is just as tough sometimes for people as like doing this kind of physical stuff.

It's like, I don't know, I know plenty of people who could probably run 100 miles right now if you asked them. I'd be like, yeah, I got this right. But if you asked them to sit in silence alone with their own thoughts for five minutes, they would go absolutely bonkers. So I do think it's important to think like where, what am I bad at, right, and sort of dive into that. So like for me, I've done these physical ones, right? But I haven't done like a real psychological one. So I'm thinking of doing some like extended meditation retreat or something just to see what the hell is going on up here that you know

Meditation retreats an awesome idea for a ritual, you know a right of passage Yeah, there's a concept I learned from Isaiah Berlin called the inner citadel. Have you heard of this? Mm-hmm. I haven't dope fucking dope insight. So I haven't. Dope, fucking dope insight. So, when the world around us doesn't give us something that we want, a lot of the time we recede into ourselves into this sort of walled off garden, retreat into an existential inner citadel. So one of the examples would be, if you were in a war and your leg got wounded, you might

try and treat the leg, and if you couldn't, you would chop the leg off and announce that the desire for legs is misguided and that nobody should have legs at all and I never wanted legs in the first place. You see this, it appears in tons of different areas, right? So in the diet industry, you have fat acceptance and body positivity, which is, I don't need to lose weight. The world needs to accept me at the weight that I am. Your conception about what an ideal body

or your idea of fitness is, is inherently wrong. I'm fine as I are. Or another one that you see in relationships, a lot is polyamory. You know, how many people are desiring to be polyamorous, because that's their genuine compulsion and they believe in it. And how many of them just struggle to hold down a successful monogamous relationship,

so polyamory becomes their inner citadel and they retreat into this, right? They chop the leg off and announce that the desire for being single and monogamous is misguided. And this inner citadel thing comes up with what you're talking about, that you have people whose capacities may be totally extreme in one domain, just a freak, strength, endurance, some sort of physical attribute. But say, hey, man, would you go to five sessions of counseling with your wife and sit down and genuinely go through the way that you feel? That's their citadel, right? They're going to retreat into where they find their comfort, which is the physical pursuit.

Or for women, the reverse might be true, or it might be something to do with body image, or it might be something to do with being disagreeable or being forthcoming, you know? But yeah, that inner citadel thing appears fucking everywhere. No, I think you're absolutely right. And a lot of it too is,

I mean, I don't know if it's related, but it just made me think about it is sort of like a lot of people have unhealthy behaviors, but their unhealthy behaviors are things that society celebrates. So it's okay, right? So if I inject heroin or smoke weed every single day, I'm an addict. If I thrash myself in the gym, I'm a hero, right? But at the same time, it's like people use those behaviors because they don't want to deal. It's covering up some other thing that they don't want to deal with. So to your example about the person who can do all this crazy stuff in the gym, but won't have this conversation, it's like, you're just compensating for this.

You're using this as a tool to deal with this other thing that you're not addressing. Right? And it's just like, what are people using to deal with this larger problem? And there's a range of social acceptability on people. Correct. A lot of it's to do with the framing of how both you and other people see what you're doing. You know, I think that objectively you could say that the person who goes to the gym

every night is, uh, that inner Citadel is generally more effective and beneficial for them and society at large than the person who decides to take heroin. Yes. However, it doesn't stop the fact that the fundamental mechanism, which both people are following is one of escape. That person is escaping from something. And I think that this is why you're seeing psychedelics amongst a particular group of people have such a renaissance, so much popularity at the moment, that it strips away your ability to hide from the things that you've been hiding from for a very long time

Totally. Yeah, I think you nailed it You take a big gulp of ayahuasca and you hold it down for 30 minutes you're you don't get to choose What you hide from you don't have your coping mechanism anymore. You don't have the escape of Crossfit or powerlifting or hill walking or bow hunting or whatever it is that you do drugs. Any of that, you know, fucking Netflix and cuddles,

wherever it is that you go, whatever your citadel is, those walls are down. And I ask her's coming in with a huge fucking catapult and it's gonna annihilate it. What about boredom? Because this is something that I think has been completely eroded, obviously, by the invention of the smartphone.

But that's a type of discomfort as well. Yeah, so I sort of think about this because when we're up in the Arctic, we're hunting, right? I think a lot of people think that hunting is like this action-packed thing, it's not. It's a lot of waiting. Like, it's waiting. It's waiting, that's what it is.

It's a lot of waiting. Because we're hunting It's waiting. That's what it is. It's a lot of waiting. Because we're hunting caribou as they're migrating, right? So we're sitting on these hills waiting for these animals to come through and they're not coming through. We're like all day, right? So I didn't bring my cell phone. I didn't bring a computer. I didn't bring an iPad. I didn't bring a book. I didn't bring a magazine. I didn't bring all this stuff, right? So all of a sudden I find myself bored again, right? But just this like, oh, hell's this?

So we had to come up with creative ways to deal with our boredom, right? So we would read the labels on all the food we brought up, you know, we would read the label, we would read the tags on our jacket. So it was like, oh, this is coded in something called Dermas Act. Wow, interesting.

Sounds like an acne medication, right? We would, I did more pushups than I'd ever done in my life. Because it's like, I guess I'll just do some pushups with the hell some I'm going to do. Came up with a bunch of story ideas for the magazines I wrote for wrote some of the book, did all this shit. Came up with the Christmas list for all the people I know, for the next five years, right?

So I basically told you that to say that like, if I were at home, this is radically different than how I would have dealt with boredom, because I would have just dove into a screen, whether that be my cell phone, whether that be Netflix, whatever. But when you think about boredom from an evolutionary context,

it's essentially this evolutionary discomfort that told us whatever you are doing with your time right now, the return on your time invested has worn thin and you need to go do something else. Tell us to go do something else. So imagine that you and I are hunting and we, a million years ago, we actually need dinner, right? Or we're gonna starve to death and die.

Well, if the animals weren't rolling through and we knew we weren't gonna get anything, boredom would kick on and be like, well, you want to go pick some potatoes or something? Like, that's a better use of our time, right? So it's this evolutionary discomfort that tells us to do something.

That's something that we used to do in our past was often productive and improved our lives. Nowadays, when it kicks on, we have easy, easy escapes from it. So I talked to this one neuroscientist that basically told me the way that we deal with boredom now is like junk foods for our mind, right? We just pull out our phone anytime we feel the lightest twinge of it. We're not forced to introspect and come up with something else to do.

And this definitely has consequences. So it's associated with all the rising rates of anxiety and burnout that people face. Why is that? So when you're focusing on the outside world, like on a screen, and one thing that I'll add to is that the average person now spends 12 hours a day engaging with digital media.

More than 12 hours a day. I mean, it's crazy amount of media, right? And this is all stuff that's 100 years, at most, 100 years old. So when you're focusing on the outward world, your brain is actually working really hard. It's a work state. When you have these moments where you have to go internally

and you're sort of mind-wondering, that's a rest state for your brain. So your brain sort of relaxes and revives. So nowadays, we spend with all this media we take in, we spend so much time in that work state and so few times, so little time in that sort of rest state that our brain just becomes overworked and it's just like way too much outward stimulation and focusing. So it seems to be that that is sort of what's driving a lot of like the burnout and just feeling like, oh god, like mentally fatigued, right? Whereas

if we spend time bored, we're going to have this moment where we kind of go inward, we mind wander for a while, and eventually we spit out something to do. So, bulldoin kind of... Don't kind of restorative in a way. Restorative, yes, exactly. It also increases creativity. So, this is pretty interesting. Some of these studies I love are that they will take two groups of people.

They will let one group do whatever the hell they want. They'll put them in a room and usually people just pull out their cell phone, right? And just start scrolling, do whatever. Then they'll take another group and they will bore the living hell out of these people. And then they'll give them a creativity test. And the board group always comes up with more,

more creative answers than the non-board group. And that's simply because their minds have had time to go internally, to rest, to sort of reset, and good ideas seem to come out of that. And then there's also the fact of like, you think about that William James quote, it's basically like, your life is essentially a collection of that which you were aware of. Well, we're now aware of 12 hours of screen stuff every single day, right? So our life has effectively become Instagram, Netflix, whatever. So when I talk about this, you hear the message of like, we need to spend less time on our phones a lot.

And I think that's obvious. It's like spend less time on your phone, spend less time on your phone. Yeah, everybody wants to do that. Everyone gets it. But the problem is is that when people take, say, an hour off their phone screen time, they're now going, well, what the hell do I do now? I'm bored.

And then they'll go watch Netflix. Well, your brain does not know the difference between those two things. So I advocate for thinking more boredom. And the way that I work that into my life is I just make sure I have 20 minutes every day, maybe go outside, take a walk where I'm just completely disconnected. I just let my brain go wherever the hell it needs to go. One of the things that I find, man, when I go for a walk,

now I do daily when I wake up and then usually in an afternoon, so I probably accumulate 45 minutes ish of walking per day. My brain, especially if it's after a pretty intense period of either learning or researching or working or whatever, I have more than enough stuff going on in my brain to keep me entertained for 45 minutes of walking. There is boredom there, but there's so much bouncing around that I don't really get to the stage where I think, oh, fucking, you got nothing to think about. It's like, whoa, whoa, no, no, no, no, the volume was really, really high, and now it's just a little bit lower. And you probably figure some things out. So you think about like people I was talking about, where do you have your best ideas? You have them

in the shower, right? Let me tell, let me give you the fucking life act of the century for this. So there is a thing called a shower notepad. So it's waterproof paper with waterproof pencils and we've got one of them in the shower upstairs and it's a two different color pencils. Now the problem is that I live with two of the lads so we just write abuse to each other in different types of pencils. So it's just like comments on the fact that one of us is gained weight or comments on the fact that somebody left some fucking dishes out last night or whatever. However, the purpose of it is that if you have an idea in the shower that you're supposed to write that.

That's awesome. Yeah, I like it. Yeah, well, the reason that we do have ideas in the showers because it's this time that we're like totally unstimulate and we're just like our minds kind of go in weird places and it you tend to find that people you know they think on an idea for a while that we're working on a project and the idea will spontaneously kind of arrive like the solution will spontaneously arrive at some later point when your brain just has a while to sort of process things in the background. Have you ever been meditating and come out of a meditation

session to do list of things that you've thought of during the meditation session? You're like, right, so I need to ring mom because I need to let her know about this. And I need to tell my assistant about that thing. And I've got to buy the insurance for the car. Because the car's going to get like fucking hell. Like that wasn't the purpose of this meditation session.

But a lot's looking at me with this fucking to do. Here we are, yeah. Is that related? Is the boredom thing related to how quickly we perceive time and our lives going past, do you think? Yeah, for sure. Well, this is really related to new experiences. So we also evolved to slip into predictable routines, right? Just kind of do the same thing over and over. And the reason for this is that again, gave us the survival advantage. If we could predict where we would find

food, if we could predict, you know, where our shelter would be on and on and on. If we had this sort of habitual routine every day, we'd be more likely to survive. Now we still have that quirk in our modern life, but in modern life, we're not really worried about survival, right? And what happens when you've done the same thing over and over and over, your brain sort of goes into this autopilot mode. We don't really have to be present and aware. You're sort of just going through the motions and that seems to be associated with time

going by faster. So you think about when you're a of just going through the motions and that seems to be associated with time going by faster. So you think about when you were a kid, right? Everything seemed to take so much longer. Well, it's because everything was new and you were constantly learning. So sort of the takeaway there is that learning and doing new things is kind of like a wake up almost, right?

It's like you're forced into presence and awareness because you don't know how to do the thing and it can slow down time, you perception of time, which is pretty cool. Bro, you fucking nailed it. You absolutely nailed it. I've been thinking about this for so long. I put a tweet out the other day that said, life doesn't go past any quicker as you get older, you're just paying less attention. And I got a load of replies from people that were adamant that, no, well, it's because one year, one year, one year old means that that's 100% of your life. And one year, when you're 50 years old is one 50th of your life. Okay, that's true.

But you're not absorbing your entirety of existence all at the same time. That's not how life works. The reason that your life appears to move quicker is that you no longer have a learner's mind. You are simply paying less attention. What people mean when they say life seems to be moving so fast, where did the days go, is I don't remember where the days went. Like people spend fucking months on end

doing nothing memorable with their time and then complain that they can't remember it. It's like, bro, you're making your days forgettable. You're not doing anything that is worthy of your mind remembering it. You drive the same route to work, to and from work. That's a thousand journeys maybe that you've made over the last couple of years. They've all been condensed down into one memory.

Think about the last time that you went away on holiday. Here's the two things. The two things that I've learned on my research that you want, if you want to slow your life down, a novelty and intensity. Those are the two things that you can manipulate most effectively. So think about the last time that you went away on holiday and think about not who you were sat next to on the plane because you've done plane journeys before, but if it was a new airport where you arrived and the person that greeted you at immigration and the taxi driver that picked you up outside,

and dude, I went to Africa five and a bit years ago, and I remember the book that the guy who met us at reception carried under his arm as we walked down. I remember the way that he shoes luck. I remember the favorite bird that he had from the local environment. I remember his net, Dennis, it was like a given name. He was, it was like Rwandan. He definitely wasn't called Dennis. I remember all of that. Why? Well, I can't remember the 16-digit number off the front of my fucking credit card that I've had for four years. Why is it that I can remember Dennis and his shoes and his book and his favorite

bird, novelty and intensity? That is the way to slow down life. So for the people, and this is, you know, to remember, remind of me as well, I get pissed that it's the same. It's your routine that's causing that to happen. Very the things that you do, and very the route that you drive to work. It sounds so dumb, but like very the route that you drive to work, very way you sit in the coffee shop that you go to every day. Say something different to someone, go up and speak to somebody, the more that you do that, the slower that life is going to exist. And really, the goal of life, as far as I can see, is to live a life that in retrospect you're glad you lived. Very much of our existence is actually lived looking backward at the days

that we've had, because the present moment is fleeting. The present moment exists now, and now, and now, and now, and now, it never exists for a prolonged period of time, but memories last forever. So the way that you can see your existence is basically that every single moment that you live can be a gift to the future version of you to look back on with pleasure. Yeah, exactly.

And I think this phenomenon also explains what you have people report that time has seemed to go by super fast during COVID. People are like, oh, God, we're in 2022. How did that happen? It feels like it's been a month. Because we've all been sitting in our houses the last two years and haven't gone out as much,

haven't gone to concerts, haven't gone to restaurants, haven't done any new stuff, I haven't been traveling, haven't done a lot of stuff. Where should people start with this discomfort stuff? What habits have you used in your life that are useful for creating a routine out of this? Yeah, so I kind of lay out a whole action plan in the book inherently,

and it's, but I think that doing one really hard thing a year, like I talked about, more time outside, I talk about really the benefits of that. And there's these different like doses and kinds of nature that we need to add back into our life. I think the boredom thing is huge. And the book I talk about, I get a lot into nutrition and talk about how hunger is like so important.

It's this like discomfort you're're gonna have to go through. I also talk about the benefits of carrying heavy things as a form of exercise that we've essentially compared out of our lives. Lever King's got that. Fucking speak to him about, he speak to Brian Johnson about it. Lever King's carrying also to shit.

Yeah, and on and on. There's a bunch I mentioned in the book, first share. Yeah, one of the things that he does, fucking deliver King podcast here. One of the things that he does is he purposefully creates a physiological hunt before he breaks a fast. Have you seen this that he does? I haven't now.

So he'll do a workout that finishes with a carry prior to breaking a fast and say what you want about him, but that is a really smart way to replicate evolutionarily what we would have done. Yeah, something down, a little bit of a work at some monostructural stuff, maybe he's on a assault bike or a roller or something like that, and then he'll do a heavy carry at the end of his workout. And you think, I don't know if you can physiologically replicate that in a more convenient way, or if it really, really matters too much, but if you want to get close to what you were doing, doing some monostructural cardio for maybe, you know, an hour, and then carrying a heavy thing for half a mile or a mile is probably a pretty fucking good way to replicate it.

Yeah, for sure. For sure. I will say that he's probably a hundred pounds more than humans would have been in the past. Imagine people will look like that. It's funny because like the paleo community pictures hunter gathers is like these jack people. It's like they weigh like a hundred pounds.

Yeah, they were distance runners. They were endurance athletes. Yeah, yeah, yeah. No, but that's cool though. I love the creativity and thinking about like, I mean, it's all, it's all interesting. And like it's ultimately gonna benefit your life. So super cool.

Michael Easter, ladies and gentlemen, the comfort crisis, embrace discomfort to reclaim your wild, happy, healthy self will be linked in the show notes below. What else should people follow if they want to keep up to date with the stuff you do? I'm on Instagram and Michael underscore Easter. I got a website Easter Michael and there's a link there to a newsletter if you want to keep up with that.

Yeah, I'm easy to find. I mean, Google's a thing. You can find me there. So thanks, mate. Okay, thank you.