Muscle for Life with Mike Matthews - Michael Easter on the Power of Embracing Discomfort

Episode Date: December 15, 2021

Are we too comfortable? Do we complain too much? Modern life is filled with modern conveniences that are engineered to make life easier and more enjoyable. But what if these contemporary comforts masquerading as a panacea of pleasure are really a double-edged sword? What have we lost in the process of gaining comfort? Is there value in choosing to be uncomfortable and adding discomfort to our lives? What are the benefits? These are questions Michael Easter addresses in his book The Comfort Crisis, and in this interview. As he’ll explain in the podcast, he’s traveled all around the world and interviewed an interesting cast to learn why you should inject challenge into your life and not get too comfortable. In case you’re not familiar with Michael Easter, he’s not only an author, but a contributing editor at Men's Health magazine, columnist for Outside magazine, and professor at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. His work can be found in Men's Journal, New York, Vice, Scientific American, and Esquire. So if you’re interested in hearing why Michael Easter chose to spend a month in the Arctic, what he gained from the experience, and how you can include more discomfort in your own life, you don’t want to miss this podcast! Timestamps: 0:00 - Pre-order my new fitness book now for a chance to win over $12,000 in splendid swag: https://www.muscleforlifebook.com/ 6:20 - What is the "comfort crisis"? 7:31 - How does too much comfort harm us individually and collectively? 10:06 - Should we make things harder for ourselves? 11:15 - How do you introduce "productive discomfort" into your life? 15:22 - Boredom increases creativity. 18:27 - The effects of solitude. 19:57 - Did you learn something about yourself by being alone in the arctic? 22:46 - How much comfort is appropriate? 28:15 - Is it wrong to "savor" life? 33:57 - How long have the benefits stuck with you? 35:47 - What is misogi? 47:16 - Where can people find your work? Mentioned on the Show: Pre-order my new fitness book now for a chance to win over $12,000 in splendid swag: https://www.muscleforlifebook.com/ The Comfort Crisis: https://www.amazon.com/Comfort-Crisis-Embrace-Discomfort-Reclaim/dp/0593138767/?tag=mflweb-20 Michael Easter’s Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/michael_easter/ Michael Easter’s website: https://eastermichael.com/

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Hello. Hello. This is muscle for life. I'm Mike Matthews. Thank you for joining me today. If you haven't already, please do take a moment and subscribe to the show in whatever app you are listening to me in, so you don't miss any new episodes. And it helps me by boosting the ranking of the show in the various charts. Now, this episode is about comfortable versus uncomfortable. Are we moderns too comfortable? Do we complain too much? Do we avoid discomfort too strenuously? I think most of us would agree that modern life is filled with many modern conveniences and it is engineered in so many ways to make life as easy as possible, to require as little effort as possible, to be as enjoyable as possible. And that sounds nice, but what if these contemporary

comforts masquerading as a panacea of pleasure are actually causing problems? What if this is a double-edged sword? What if we are losing something very important in our nature through this process of becoming more and more comfortable? Is there value in eschewing comfort? Is there value in choosing discomfort, at least a certain amount of discomfort? And that is the topic of today's podcast. This is an interview with Michael Easter, who wrote a book called The Comfort Crisis, all about these kinds of questions. And in this interview, he's going to explain how he embraced discomfort in a rather extreme way, and some of the insights that he gained from that process, and his thoughts as to why we should work to inject more challenge into our

lives and not allow ourselves to get too comfortable. And in case you're not familiar with Michael, he is not only an author, but he is also a contributing editor to Men's Health. He is a columnist for Outside Magazine. He is a professor at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. And you can find his work in many big publications, Men's Journal, Vice, Scientific American, Esquire, and more. Hey, Mike, it's nice to meet you. And thanks for some of your time this afternoon. Yeah, likewise. Glad to be on. This should be fun. Yeah, I think who made this intro? Was it David? Oh, I don't know, man. Somebody did. Well, thank you to whoever made this intro because I've been looking forward to this discussion because it's something different

than the stuff I normally talk about, but something I think very relevant. And I'm curious to hear some of your thoughts about what's going on. So, you have this book. I think that's the easiest place to start, which is really the theme, I guess, of the discussion is going to be the book, right? And it's the comfort crisis. And what do you mean by that? It's the comfort crisis. And what do you mean by that? So the basic premise of the book is that as the world has become more comfortable over time in a lot of ways, I mean, just think of everything that influences your daily life.

We live in climate control. Food is easy to access. We've engineered movement out of our days. We don't really have that many challenges, I would say, outside anymore, out in nature, like we did in the past, like all these different ways that the world has become more comfortable. That's all great that that's happened, but it's also taken away a lot of the things that make us healthy, right? So if you want to get dorky about it, an anthropologist would call this an evolutionary mismatch.

Our environments, we evolved in these environments of discomfort. And so we developed this drive to always want to do the next most comfortable thing, right? Don't move if you don't have to. If you have access to food, overeat it, right? Stay in shelter, all these types of things. But now that our world has become comfortable in all these different ways, that kind of backfires and is associated with a lot of the problems that we have. And so is that now, what are some of the, let's say, knock-on effects that you have observed and obviously talk about in the book? How is this harming us individually, collectively? Yeah. So I identify a handful of discomforts that we used to face all the time in the past

that we've kind of engineered out of our lives. And all of them kind of have their own effects, but I mean, just to take a few. So hunger, right? In the past, there was not a lot of food. People were hungry all the time. We had to work for that food, right? But nowadays, when you look at the research, like 80% of eating is driven by reasons other than physiological hunger. Like people eat because it's a certain time. People eat because they're stressed, because they're bored, etc., right? So this is tied to our astronomical rates of obesity and the diseases that it can lead to. People take an average of like 4,000 steps a day because through all the time, it didn't make sense to move any more than you needed to, but life used to throw effort at us. Like to live was to put an effort into life,

but now we don't have to do that anymore. So again, that ties back to our crazy rates of heart disease, certain cancers, diabetes, etc. But even mental health problems, I argue, are often a consequence of how we're living nowadays, our lifestyle. So for example, we've engineered physical challenges out of our lives. We've engineered sort of physical challenges out of our lives. So, for example, people don't take on rites of passage anymore. Right. And that's associated with a lot of mental health problems like anxiety and depression. And we know this from when in the 90s, a lot of helicopter parenting started. So parents stopped, started taking challenge out of their kids life. of helicopter parenting started. So parents started taking challenge out of their kids' life. Those generations born after that have off the charts rates of mental health problems. But even

things like we don't go outside into nature anymore because nature is uncomfortable. It's unpredictable. We spend 95% of our time indoors. And we also know that nature, although it's uncomfortable, it is good for us, good for our brains in a lot of ways. Improves our productivity, our focus, decreases stress, decreases depression, improves health. I mean, nature is like organic Xanax, more or less, and we rarely go out into it anymore. And on and on. I mean, I identify a lot of different ones, but those are some sort of top-level ones. So then the message is if we made things a little bit harder for ourselves, we'd be a little bit happier. Yeah. Well, I think

that the, look, here's the deal is like, we're wired to not want to be uncomfortable, right? Because if you were uncomfortable in the past, that was, that was indicating you might actually be in some trouble here. But nowadays, it's not. But the stuff today that positively improves your life invariably always comes with a dose of discomfort. If you want to improve your fitness, you're going to have to train. You're going to have to train harder. Well, exercise sucks, right? It's hard. If you want to lose weight, you're going to train harder. Well, exercise sucks, right? Like it's hard. If you want to lose weight, you're going to be hungry. If you want to even improve your mental health, you're probably

going to have to unpeel some onions and go to some places you don't want to do and ask yourself some hard questions about why do I feel this way, right? And make some changes that are inevitably going to be uncomfortable. But once you get over, once you get through the discomfort, uncomfortable. But once you get over, once you get through the discomfort, the sort of adaptation period, you come out on the other side of that improved and healthier, physically, psychologically, spiritually, emotionally, all that kind of stuff. What are some of your preferred ways to introduce, let's say, productive discomfort? I mean, exercise is obvious. And a lot of people listening, they're probably doing that. And they understand firsthand that, yep, it never gets easier. You just get better. I mean, it's true though. It's certainly in the case of fitness, right?

Yeah. And a lot of people listening, I'm sure they've dieted and no matter how optimized your diet is, you're going to be hungry from time to time. You shouldn't be starving. That shouldn't be the overwhelming experience of dieting. It shouldn't just be, yeah, I was basically just hungry all the time. But yeah, you're going to be hungry and you have to be comfortable and you have to understand that doesn't mean that you need to rush and go eat. And sometimes you do, as you mentioned, it's more of a psychological or it's an emotional thing and so like if if you were to ask yourself let's say you go oh i really i really could

eat this really highly palatable food right now i'm hungry or i really want that well if you ask yourself all right what i eat uh if i if i just had some some beans that were cooked would i eat those right now if it's no, that's not physiological hunger, right? Physiological hunger, you're eating the beans and you're going to like the beans actually. Yeah, exactly. So those are a couple of things, listeners, they're already thinking with that stuff, but what are some other productive discomforts? Okay. Here's one. So the through line of the book is that I spent more than a month up in the Arctic. Okay. And so the reason for that is because I was sort of reintroducing myself to all these forms of discomforts that our ancestors would have used to face in the past all the time. Right.

So one of the things that I faced up there was I didn't bring my cell phone because there wasn't a bar within 100 miles, right? I didn't bring a computer. I didn't bring a TV. I didn't bring a book. I didn't bring a magazine. I didn't whatever. So all of a sudden, I found myself in an interesting position. And that's that I'm bored again, right?

When is the last time you've had sustained boredom for a long time? Probably not too often. And that's because the average person now spends more than 12 hours a day engaging with digital media. So that's from cell phones, that's from TVs, that's from computers, that's from podcasts, that's from on and on and on, right? And boredom is uncomfortable. There's a reason that we avoid it, but it actually can be a good thing. So if you want to think about why humans evolved to be bored in the first place, I basically described as this, is that boredom would kick in anytime that whatever we're doing,

the return on our time invested had worn thin. So let's say that we are, it's 10,000 years ago, you and I are sitting on a hill, we're trying to hunt a deer or whatever. So we're waiting for deer to come through. Nothing's coming through, but we need food. There's no 7-Elevens. There's no marketplaces where we can go get food. So boredom would kick in and basically be like, this is a waste of you guys' time. You need to do something else if you want to survive. It's discomfort. It's the use of discomfort to incite change. So we would go do whatever, pick berries, dig up some potatoes, whatever. So boredom often compelled us to do something more productive with our time. But now you look at what happens when people get bored today. They just pull out their cell phone or watch Netflix or whatever. Right. And this is, uh,

this is bad. So there's a few things that come with all this time that, um, we spend buried in our phones because we don't want to be bored. One is we know it's associated with increases in, uh, anxiety and depression and decreases in, um in productivity. And that's because your brain gets pretty burned out when you're focused out on the outside world all the time. Whereas boredom often takes you inward for a while as you kind of figure out what am I going to do with my time? You think inward, your mind wanders. That's kind of more a rest state for your brain. Number two, boredom is associated with increases in creativity. So there's these wild studies where they'll take one group and they'll be like, yeah, do whatever the hell you guys want.

And inevitably, people just pull out their phones and wait in the room and mess around. And then they'll take another group and they will bore the hell out of them. And then they will give both groups a creativity test. And the board group consistently comes up with more answers that are deemed more creative than the non-board group. Okay. And then finally, like I think about it like this, one of my favorite quotes is from William James, a psychologist in the early 1900s. And he says that your life is essentially a collection of that, which you are aware of. So nowadays, okay. 12 hours of media day. Like, are we really going to look back on our lives and be like, oh man, thank God that I watched season nine of gossip girl,

man. That was like one of the greater moments of my life. I'm so happy I did that. Right. No, some people, I mean, maybe I want to meet that person. So, I mean, I told you that to basically tell you this is that there's a lot of focus today on, you know, to improve your mental health, to improve your productivity, to improve all this, whatever, uh, use your cell phone less. Like we got to use our cell phone less. And it's like, everybody knows that, right? But the problem is, is that when people reduce their phone screen time,

it's like, what do they do? They go, oh shit, this is boring. This is boring. Well, what do I do? I'm going to watch Netflix. Your brain does not know the difference, right? So I advocate for trying to figure out how can I add more boredom into my life?

And the way that I, what I usually recommend to people is go for a walk outside for like 20 minutes every day and just leave your phone at home. And because there's also ancillary benefits to being outside, which we can get into if you want. But it's kind of like gives you this period to totally just like decompress. And you're going to notice more, you're going to think differently. And it just is, it's just like a good way to chill out and come up with great ideas.

Yeah. Yeah. And that's, um, I recently read a book called wired to create if I'm remembering the title correctly. And, uh, it was good. It was, uh, just kind of a, an evidence-based review of, of creativity basically. And then then and then also sharing anecdotes uh and and as you know a common denominator among many creative people and let's say creative geniuses big names that people would recognize is daily walks yeah yeah totally and they're probably not you know scrolling Twitter the whole time. You know, they're just like... Fortunately for them, there was maybe fortunately for us, for humanity, there was no Twitter then.

Yeah. Yeah, exactly. Because in a lot of cases, you know, these are, I mean, these are people going back hundreds of years. And even, you know, one thing too, that I talk about in the book is that we're rarely in solitude anymore. So when I was up there, I had times where I would be the only person within 20, 30, 40 square miles. Totally alone with no form of contact, which is like, whoa, that's the most alone I've ever been in my life. Because even today, when we're like, hey, I need some alone time. It's like,

you go into your room, but then people still have contact with people through text messages, through podcasts, through all this media, whatever. We're rarely just with ourselves. And it's uncomfortable at first. This is, I think, one of the reasons why lots of people like try to meditate and they stop because they're like, well, I found that the person inside my head is freaking insane. Yeah. But if you, if you look at a lot of the research and we know that like, okay, being lonely isn't good for people, but, but being lonely means that I want to be with people.

I want to have connection. I just can't figure out how to make it, right? Whereas solitude is going, I'm electing to be alone. I'm electing to spend this time to learn something about myself. And that's also something that's been used throughout history by creative people, leaders like Abraham Lincoln, Steve Jobs, all these people throughout history would take periods where they were just completely removed from society and use it to think, to come up with ideas, to be more productive, to get to know something about themselves.

Do you feel like you learned something about yourself? How long were you up there, by the way? More than a month. Okay. And do you feel like you learned something about yourself in that time? Oh, totally. I mean, yeah. I mean, across the board, a lot of different things. But in terms of the solitude thing, it's like, yeah, once you're up there, all of a sudden you go so much of how we behave in daily life is a reaction to someone else or society, right? We do things because they're on like the list of what you do in life to be a successful person or whatever right but when you remove society maybe somebody who fits in

yes i think for so many people that's probably number one on the list i just want to fit i just want to fit in be like i don't want to rock the boat yeah i just want to be liked i don't want anybody to look at me weird or think about me weird. Yes, exactly. But once you remove society from the equation, it's like, oh man, like how would I live life if there weren't society around? Like, what do I really want to do with my time? Right. And so once you start asking those questions, it starts to get kind of interesting.

And for me, at least, I mean, like I can theoretically kind of understand that. But once you are completely alone in the middle of freaking nowhere, I mean, that is like getting smacked in the face with that concept. Like it's a two by four, you know? And so for you in terms of maybe what did you experience? Was it a paradigm shift or was it just new ways of looking at things yeah i think so i think well part of the thing about being up there that long is like you start to strip away a lot of layers and like what do you end up missing right because

you're up there you're totally removed removed. And I found for me, like I missed two things. I miss my wife and I miss my dog. And I'll say like a 0.5 thing I missed is because we only packed in like maybe 2000 calories a day, but we're burning like 4,000, just like hiking around. And that would be like food, but that doesn't count. and that would be like food um but that doesn't count right yeah yeah can't get away from that you you were you were uh starving slowly starving to death uh physically speaking exactly um so i think that sometimes those periods of removal can help you like kind of strip away what's really important to you and again it's like you we can all kind of like grasp that abstractly for me. Yeah. But you have to experience it like you said.

Yeah. You've got to experience it, you know? Because then it changes your behavior. When you experience something, I think on that really deep level, it changes your behavior when you return to, for me, at least when I returned home. home yeah and so then what are your thoughts in in terms of how much comfort is appropriate to live with how much comfort you you talked about what's too much and and there is uh excess comfort in people's lives but what are your thoughts in terms of balancing hardship and, uh, in comfort? Yeah. Well, I think what happens is that people, because we have come up and with relative, I mean, I can assume probably if you're listening to this podcast, your, your life is like going all right on some level, you know, if you have to worry about, um, how much muscle you have, that suggests to me that

like your problems, your priorities are one or the other. Um, so I think about it this way. I was on this dude's podcast, um, maybe three months ago. And this guy is like unbelievably, uh, wealthy. He had this really like company he sold for a lot of money. And I told him, we were talking about, he's like, dude, you were up in the Arctic for more than a month. He's like, I could never in a million years do that. Never. And I was like, dude, you just think you can't do that because you had the luxury of being born in 1978 or whenever you were born. And now you have heated floors in your bathroom. Yes, exactly. And someone who takes out your trash and all this shit.

I don't know if this answers your question, but I think that people chronically, one, undersell their potential, what they're capable of. We hear stuff like that, and it's just like, I could never do that. And it's like, dude, think of how hard life was for thousands and thousands and millions of years, right? So the balance has tipped so far. And what happens is there's this concept I talk about in the book called prevalence-induced concept change. And it basically states that as humans and humans, as humans become more comfortable over time, we don't have an ability

to look back 20 years, 200 years, 2000 years, and be like, man, I have it so good in the grand scheme of time and space. We adapt to the next most comfortable thing. And then the last thing that came before it is all of a sudden unacceptable. Like you can't do that. Right. So I think, you know, that's kind of around. That's just, that's just part of the human condition. It seems, I mean, it applies to a lot of people's complaints about a lot of things. Yeah. Yeah, exactly. We're always searching for problems. Right. And so, I mean, I, to kind of answer your question is like, I think it's probably personal, but I think that most people are going to probably err on the side of like being too

comfortable at the end of the day. It's like, you know, I mean, humans used to walk like 20,000 steps a day, every day every single day right and now it's like whoa i had this crazy crazy day with with like 15 uh nutritional deficiencies and yes exactly all that kind of stuff and then and then worrying about getting attacked by one of 42 different animals that is going to kill you you're not going to get away and right with like a piece of you know their shoes are like a piece of reed on their foot or whatever if they're even wearing something like that so like it's a long way of saying that like humans are capable of doing a lot of things and a lot of and tolerating a lot and so i think that

sometimes we just tend to err on the side of like, not, um, of underselling ourselves. Frankly, we just are like, oh, I can't do that. No, that's too hard. That's too, whatever. That's too X, Y, Z. Um, when the reality is, is that we, we probably could do things if we just put ourself in a position to be willing to tolerate things. And I'm not advocating like destroy your body or go to extremes, that kind of stuff. But I do think that, you know, hopefully that answers your question. It's kind of one of those that's like a case by case. So. Did you know that right now I am in the middle of a big book launch bonanza for my new fitness

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me on social media, and more. So again, to get all of spread the word, you can follow me on social media and more. So again, to get all of the giveaway sauce, go over to muscleforlifebook.com, muscleforlifebook.com. Do you think it's also connected with, I think this came from Ray Dalio in his book Principles. He talked about a spectrum of savoring life on on one end and striving on the other end and uh the point that he was making is you can't have both you can have one or the other and he's not going to tell you he chose what he chose and he's he was a striver for a long time and then now he's more of a saver or he's becoming more of that in in his later in the later part of his life.

He has unlimited money and whatever, right? He did what he wanted to do. But that's something that has just stuck with me because I think there's truth in that. That if you want to achieve significant things, you are going to have to deal with a lot of discomfort. There's just no way around it. But that may not be for everybody. Some people, they may, so long as they're making the conscious choice of, eh, I'm going to take it easy. I'm going to take it slow. I'm going to save her life. I'm going to

put more time into relationships and just having fun and messing around that that wouldn't be for me, but that doesn't necessarily mean that it's the wrong choice to make. Yeah. I mean, I think about it as like, you need one for the other. So in order to really appreciate, I guess, the savoring element of this, and I haven't read his books. I'll probably be getting this wrong. But in order to appreciate the savoring element, you probably have to like strive one point, right? Like if he had just kind of like people though, that it seems like there there's not much striving. There's never been much striving. They just take it easy. And you know,

they, I'm sure they have their ups and downs. We all do, but I've just never seen, they've never really displayed that. Yeah. And I would, I would argue that probably the highs for them are going to be lower than they would be for someone who who strived for something and then got the win and then can save it so i'll tell sure i'll tell you a story to like sort of illustrate this point um for me and it kind of goes back into what we were just talking about about you know finding problems and perspective so when i fly up to the Arctic, I got to take, uh, five different flights just to get to this plane. That's like the size of a pack of gum to take it out. And it like lands on the tundra. Right. But the first flight I had to take was from Las Vegas up to Seattle. It's a seven 47.

Now I hate flying. Okay. I hate the turbulence. I hate the fact that the bathroom is cramped. I hate the fact that the coffee sucks. I hate the crying baby next to me. I hate the movies on the screen in front of you. They're always terrible. They're like B-rate movies, right? Everything about flying is awful. Okay. Then I go and spend a month in the Arctic. If I want to get water, I want anything to drink. I have to hike down to a stream and get it. And I got to carry it back up to camp. I'm carrying an 80 pound pack on my back the entire time. If I want to go to the bathroom, I got to hike out across the tundra and I got to squat. And I have to bring a rifle too, because there's grizzly bears time. I'm wildly underfed. So when I take that 747 back to Las Vegas,

what do you think my experience of that flight was like? It was freaking amazing. I hadn't sat in a chair in more than a month, right? So like all of a sudden this seat that's all cramped is like, oh my God, this thing is great. Right. When I go to the bathroom, it's not ice. Exactly. It's not ice. They have hot coffee. That's great. And had coffee and more than a month. Right. I ate like 20 bags of pretzels. When I watched that movie on the seat back, it's like, you know, fast and furious, like 29 or whatever one we're on. It's like, oh my God, this movie is unbelievable. How is it not one like 29 Oscars? This is great. And then it's like, when I go to the bathroom, I hit that little button and hot water, which I hadn't had on my hands for more than a month

comes out of a freaking plane at 30,000 feet. So that's a long way of saying like, So that's a long way of saying there are so many amazing things about modern life that we just don't appreciate. Modern life is freaking amazing in every way. But if you don't ever get out of that, if you don't ever deprive yourself of certain things and have to put yourself in positions that are going to be tough. I don't think you can appreciate it as much. We could probably try intellectually, at least to maintain some sort of perspective. You can try, but it's not going to hit you as hard. I mean, it's like, if you would have told me, hey man, no, the plane flight is great on that plane up there, I would have been like, yeah, go yourself. It's like, yeah, I get it, but this sucks right now. That's not going to change my feelings on it. Yeah, I can intellectually process that. But until you actually experience things, back to what you said before, it doesn't hit as hard. And I'm not suggesting at all that everyone go up to the Arctic for more than a month. But what I am suggesting is that there

are ways to sort of get yourself out of that loop that can sometimes lead to complacency where you're maybe not as grateful. Because I think the number one thing for me, how I changed is like, of course, I came back and I was fitter than I'd ever been. All these things, right? But the biggest shift for me was perspective and appreciation for my daily life and what I have. And that colors every single interaction I have. It's just really deep gratitude. And so if I have that, then every moment of my day is going to be better. And how much of that has stuck with you? How long has it been now since you've returned? So I was up there, that was like two years ago now. And definitely it's

hung around. I mean, it's not as intense as when I first got back. I mean, when I first got back, it was just like, I was just like walking around like a smiling idiot because it wasn't cold outside. But it's definitely hung around because I'll find myself, I think we adapt to the circumstances that we put ourselves in most often. So I'll definitely catch myself where I'm complaining about something. I'm like, why am I complaining about this? And when I can do that, that's a win. I can't always do it.

But that's why I still try to do something that mimics that, not to that extreme, but every year because it's kind of like a nice reset. It's like we're kind of living, I argue in the book like on one end of the pendulum right now and it's like if you don't ever swing that pendulum over to that other end from time to time you know we miss a little bit i think that's a part of i haven't done any of them myself but probably part of the appeal of spartan races and Tough Mudder. And I think there are others where you just go get dirty and tired and you just do hard stuff. I know also Mark Devine, the ex-Navy SEAL guy, nice guy. He's come on the show a couple of times. He does what I think he calls a coro or something. It's kind of an intense two or three day,

what I think he calls it, Koro or something. It's kind of an intense two or three day, mimics a little bit of Hell Week, gives you a little bit of a taste of what that's like. And, you know, he gets people coming to it. And I know people who do those types of things will often say similar things to what you're saying right now. It just, it helps them maintain perspective. Yeah. Yeah, for sure. For sure. And, and, and one other question I have for you, what, what is Masogi? I don't know. Am I pronouncing that right? Masogi, Masogi, one of those. Yeah. Yeah. So, um, it's part of this, uh, journey. I meet this dude whose name is Marcus Elliott. Do you, have you heard of him? Nope. Okay. So there's two things you need to know

about him. The first is that he's a little bit of a seeker. So he counted cards to get himself through college. He was going to Burning Man when it was just like this little thing in the desert, right? Old school Burning Man. And he lived out of a VW van for a while. But the second thing you need to know about him is that he's brilliant. So he got his MD from Harvard, and he decided he didn't want to be a doctor. He wanted to revolutionize sports science. And he actually did it. So he's one of the very first people that really started to quantify human performance. He does all this stuff with movement tracking and AI and big data and whatever. So he has contracts with the NBA. Every NBA draft pick goes through his system. He's got a facility in Santa Barbara and one in Atlanta. He's got contracts with the NFL, all these other leagues.

But he also realizes that what improves human performance and potential can't always be measured. Right. There are like certain intangibles that you just, I don't know, you can't measure it. Right. It's like, why is it that certain players you're just like, end of the game? Yeah. And some don't. Yeah. Why is it Tom Brady sucks at being an at everything athletic, right? Like I could beat him in a foot race, but he's the greatest ever because he's got something on board, right? He's figured out ways to work with what he's got. So what is that? So to sort of get to that, he does this thing called Masogi. And the idea is that once a year, it's going to do something really, really hard in nature. Okay.

So there's two rules to Masogi. The first rule is it's got to be something really, really hard in nature. Okay. So there's two rules to Masogi. The first rule is it's got to be really hard, which he defines as saying you should have a 50-50 shot of finishing it. And the second rule is that you can't die. And that's kind of like the tongue in cheek. That's going to be my question. What about dying? Tongue in cheek way to say, basically, be safe. Don't be an idiot.

Right. tongue in cheek way to say basically be safe don't be an idiot right so he's done things with uh he'll get like a group of you know four people or whatever he's done some alone but he'll get a group of like four people and a couple of them are probably like pro athletes and then the other two could be like an accountant or whatever who just you know um and they'll go do a task in nature so one year for example they got this 85 pound boulder and they'll go do a task in nature. So one year, for example, they got this 85 pound boulder and they, they walked it, I think five miles underneath the Santa Barbara channel. So like 10 feet. So one guy would dive down, pick up the boulder, walk 10 yards, come up for air. The next guy would go over and over and over until this rock is a point B they've also done

simpler stuff where it's like, Hey, we can see that mountain in the distance. Let's try and get to the top in a day. And the idea is that he is trying to mimic challenges that humans used to face in the past. So as you think about how humans evolved and when we were for thousands of years, we had to do challenging things in nature all the time. Like all the time. And this was without safety nets. And this was stuff that the world would just show us. So this could be from a hunt, having to move from summer into wintering grounds, could be from like a tiger lurking in the bushes, right? And each time we would accomplish one of these, we would learn something about our potential.

We would be shown what we were capable of doing. Right. But in modern life, you're often not challenged that way anymore. Right. Like you can never be challenged. To your point about the savers is like you can kind of go through life and have a halfway decent life. Right. You got a job, you got food on the table,

you'll have a family to come home to and never be challenged. But by not being challenged, you sort of miss something about your potential. So if you think about human potential as a big circle around us, by never going out on the edges, it's like you just kind of live in this little circle inside of that, right? So the idea of Misogi is that I'm going to go explore those edges and see what's out there. Because again, it's got to be really hard. 50-50. Even today, when people take on marathons, it's not, am I going to finish? It's, am I going to finish in my goal time of three hours, 45 minutes or whatever it is. So what happens is that two things tend to happen for people when they do these. The first is that you inevitably reach a point where you think you've hit your edge.

You got to quit. You can't go any further. But if you can put one foot in front of the other, you'll get to a point where you can look back and be like, hey, I thought that was my edge back there, but I'm past it. So I have sold myself short here. And that raises the important question, well, where else in life am I selling myself short? Right. And then the second thing is it helps people reframe fear. So fear, as we evolved, like failure used to mean you could die. Right. So we are wired to really avoid failure at all costs. But failure today is often like, oh, I spelled something wrong in an email to my boss, or I messed up on a slide or whatever it might be. We still fear those things. We just fear

failure at all costs. So by engaging in an environment where you could fail, you can also kind of realize, you know what, failure is not that big of a deal. And then you can take that back into your everyday life and it can sort of move the dial for you. It's interesting to think of that from an evolutionary perspective, too, because naturally people who could just figure out how to not die were being selected for, obviously. how to not die were being selected for obviously. And, and it makes me think of that X factor that, that certainly kept some people alive and it might've just manifested as luck, but some people, they just seem to get more luck than average or they just figure out ways. I mean, you see it a lot in the business sector now, I guess is where you see a lot of this, right? And you see people who are just repeat offenders. They go from one industry to the next, and they just figure out how to make things happen.

Yeah. And I think a lot of that is that X factor. Yeah. It's that X factor. And also, they're willing to put themselves in a position where they might fail. Right? It's like everything you do in life that has a reward is they might fail yeah right it's like everything you do in life that has a reward is going to come with some degree of risk you know some things

are riskier than others um but i think one of the one of the great things about this idea is that is that first rule of 50 50 right so like my 50 is going to be different than your 50 is going to be different than your 50 so for example my to be different than your 50%. So for example, my mother, who is 72 years old, she walks her dog on this mountain every day. There's a trail that's like six miles. It goes to the top of this mountain. But she'll do three miles, basically, because she can't go that much farther.

Well, she read about this concept in my book, and she was like, I'm going to try and get to the top. And along the way, she's like, it was hard. I had to stop. I breathe, whatever, but she made it. And when she got home, she was like, man, I didn't think I could do that. This indicates to me that I probably am more physically capable than I thought. And she ended up booking this trip that she had been putting off because she was like, I don't know if I can take that much walking that this thing is going to require of me. So if you put yourself in a position, you can learn a lot about what you're capable of. Because I think that people chronically

undersell their potential, which back to talking about why that might be is that as we evolved, I think that you didn't want people who thought on like thought they could do everything right those are the people who were the hold my beer people and get in trouble right it's like hell yeah i could jump over that through that chasm watch this it's like see you later yeah there he goes yeah uh you want the people who are afraid of that but if if the world forces them to do that if something is chasing them, they have to do it for survival. They can do it. Right. Endurance exercises is good for this kind of thing, because a lot of endurance athletes, I mean, they'll say that, uh, one of the main reasons

they are so good at whatever endurance sport that they're good at is they, they can just suffer more than the next guy or gal and, and they just don't give up. They just keep going. Right. And a lot, and a lot of just everyday normal people who really like to bike or run or swim or whatever. Um, they, they'll say that one of the reasons they really like it is to get to that point where it's hard and they feel like, I mean, their body just wants to stop, but they keep going. And then if they can push past that, if they can turn that corner, then they feel, I mean, I've experienced it only a couple of times. I'm not really into, I do cardio every day, but it's, you know, 30 minutes of moderate biking.

I'm not pushing myself that hard. I treat it more as exercise than training uh but but i know again a lot of people that is a big allure is to reach that state but i mean they're i'm not thinking of the term there's a term that they use for it but where then they feel like they could run forever their body feels light. Um, and, and often emotionally now they have like a, almost an ecstasy kind of feeling. Yeah. Yeah, for sure. Um, I mean, I've done some like, not like crazy, crazy, crazy long stuff, but enough that, yeah, that's totally where it's at. Like once you get to a certain point, you realize that it's what determines how far you're going to go is what's going on upstairs. That's assuming you don't like blow out a knee or something. Right. Um, and also I think that there are some people who are wired to take it too far, right? These are the same type of people

who would like, who are probably dealing with some sort of honestly, like a psychological issue. And, you know, it's a lot more socially acceptable to go run a hundred miles than it is to like drink your face off or cut yourself or something like that. And so like there can be some, it can raise some questions, you know, but I mean, I think people can, I mean, when you think about what the human body has evolved to do well, one of the things is to run long distances relatively slowly compared to other animals in the heat. So we would, as we evolved, we would use this to our advantage on hot days to hunt animals, right? Because other animals are way faster than us, but they can only sprint.

So we'd keep bumping these animals slowly, but surely chase them down, bump them, bump them, bump them. And eventually they would just get so tired from sprinting, they topple over and then we'd spear them, right? And we'd have we'd have dinner and um but those hunts on average they lasted 13 13 miles but of course they could go beyond and be like 20 miles right so nowadays picking up dinner is going through the drive-thru at wherever burger king and back then you just order you just order it on your phone yeah having. Having some dude bring it to you. Delivered into your face. You don't even get off of the couch.

Yeah, exactly. Well, hey, man, this was a great discussion. Again, I really appreciate you taking the time. And the book is The Comfort Crisis. And then where can people find you? And if there is another project you're working on that you want them to know about or anything else, let's let them know. Yeah.

So I'm at eastermichael.com is my website. There's some other resources there. You can find stuff about the book. The book's available for sale everywhere. It's called The Comfort Crisis. I am working on another book that I'm keeping people in the loop about on my Instagram feed. And that's Michael underscore Easter. Cool.

And what's that book about? It is called, so the working title is the scarcity brain. And it's basically about how as humans evolved, we lived in these environments of scarcity of all different kinds of things, like from food to information, to stuff, to the number of people we could influence, uh, and on and on. And now we live in environments of abundance of all those things and how that is in turn affecting us. Yeah. That's a problem and a logical follow-up, I think too. I'm assuming it came out of your experience with the first book. Yeah. Yeah. I think so. So I've been doing some traveling for that. I was down in the deep into the Amazon in Bolivia over the summer and I'm headed to Thailand in a little bit.

So yeah, should be interesting. It's always fun to report these things. I think sometimes my editor thinks that it's just an excuse for me to go do rad stuff. Maybe you get to write it all off though, because that's a writer. Hey, that's good research. Exactly. Well, thanks again for taking the time. I appreciate it. Yeah off though, because that's a writer. Hey, that's good research. Exactly. Well, thanks again for taking the time. I appreciate it. Yeah, of course. That was a blast. I appreciate you having me on.

Absolutely. Well, I hope you liked this episode. I hope you found it helpful. And if you did, subscribe to the show because it makes sure that you don't miss new episodes. And it also helps me because it increases the rankings of the show a little bit, which of course then makes it a little bit more easily found by other people who may like it just as much as you. And if you didn't like something about this episode or about the show in general, or if you have ideas or suggestions or just feedback to share, shoot me an email, mike at muscleforlife.com,

muscleforlife.com, and let me know what I could do better or just what your thoughts are about maybe what you'd like to see me do in the future. I read everything myself. I'm always looking for new ideas and constructive feedback. So thanks again for listening to this episode, and I hope to hear from you soon.