The Learning Leader Show With Ryan Hawk - 465: Michael Easter - Embrace Discomfort To Reclaim Your Wild, Healthy, Happy Self (The Comfort Crisis)

Episode Date: March 27, 2022

Text Hawk to 66866 for "Mindful Monday" - A highly curated email to help you start your week off with intellectual curiosity, rigor, and thoughtfulness Full show notes at www.LearningLeader.com Twitter/IG: @RyanHawk12  https://twitter.com/RyanHawk12 "We are wired for laziness. It takes conscious thought to do the harder thing." What Micheal learned from The Pope... If you have a question, go directly to the source. The science-backed ways to slow down time? Learn and do new things. Get off "auto-pilot" mode. Benefits of thinking about death? Michael learned in Bhutan why we should think about death... In the United States, we rarely think about death—especially our own death. And when we do, it tends to make us sad and uncomfortable. But there are powerful benefits to regularly contemplating the fact that our time in this world will eventually come to an end. The shift in perspective can be profound and lead to a kind of deeply felt and enduring appreciation for life. Michael's love for his mom: "My mom got sober when my dad was in rehab. That's how my favorite story I've ever written starts. It's about my mom, a single parent who taught me everything I need to know about being a man. As I was writing that story five years ago, my mom was battling cancer. She'd just finished chemotherapy and was undergoing radiation. Doctors officially deemed my mom "cured" from cancer. In the story I wrote, "Have you ever played tug-of-war with a pit bull? It'll pull until you quit or it dies. That's Lynda Easter." How Michael dealt with alcohol - "I saw a choice. Option 1, do nothing. Cling to complacency and the numbing lifestyle that would ultimately end badly but allow me to keep drinking. Or option 2. Get uncomfortable. Ditch my liquid comfort blanket. I hadn't a clue where this second option would take me or if I could even pull it off. And I was terrified." Take The Stairs: A mantra I try to live by when traveling – "Take the stairs." When there is an escalator and stairs, always take the stairs. If you're fortunate enough to have legs that work, then take the stairs. Be a 2 percenter… 98% of people take the escalator at the airport. Take the stairs. Exercise: Exercise grows the hippocampus in the brain. This is something that is shrunken in people who suffer from depression. We exercise 14 times less than our ancestors. "We've engineered movement out of our lives." Michael traveled 30,000 miles around the world, met with experts ranging from Harvard researchers and Icelandic geneticists to Buddhist Lamas and Special Forces soldiers, and also spent more than a month in the remote Alaskan backcountry. "Discover the evolutionary mind and body benefits of living at the edges of your comfort zone and reconnecting with the wild." "If you want to improve your life, you have to go through discomfort." The benefits of boredom - Michael spent time in the Arctic on a hunt. It's very boring to sit on the hills for hours. But, boredom created ideas. It's evolutionary discomfort. In those boring times, Michael thought about ideas and wrote chapters of his book. "Your life is a culmination of that which you are aware of." - William James Go out in nature. Take walks.

This episode is brought to you by one of my favorites. It is Storyworth. Storyworth is an amazing gift for you and your loved ones. Essentially what it is, as you sign up for Storyworth, and they help you supply a loved one with a question a week. So if in my case, I did this with my dad, and Storyworth would send him one question per week, and he would answer them.

And sometimes even add some cool pictures. to make it more visually appealing to go along with his amazing writing. And then at the end of 52 weeks, Storyworth puts this together in a beautiful book, which I now have on my bookshelves at home. Along the way, I also got to read my dad's answers. So this is something that my family will treasure forever. He actually printed a number of copies and gave them to each of his kids. I would highly encourage you to do this.

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Michael Easter's investigations have taken him to meet with monks in ancient monasteries in Bhutan, lost tribes in the jungles of Bolivia, U.S. Special Forces soldiers in undisclosed locations, gene scientists in Iceland, CEOs in Fortune 500 boardrooms, and more. He's also a professor at UNLV, and he's the best-selling author of The Comfort Crisis. Embrace discomfort to reclaim your wild, healthy, happy self.

Wow. During this conversation, we discuss a lesson he learned from the Pope about how to understand everything better. And then why you should take the stairs instead of the escalator at the end. airport. And then Michael shares the science-backed way to slow down time. There is so much within this conversation. I know you're going to get a lot out of it. Ladies and gentlemen, it's the great Michael Easter. Michael, so good to have you here on the Learning Leaders Show. Welcome, man. Thanks for having me, man. Really psyched to be here. Should be fun. I want to start with some love. You wrote, you've written a lot about your mom and I was reviewing pretty much everything and I saw this

Instagram posts. It says, quote, my mom got sober when my dad was in rehab. That's how my favorite story I've ever written starts. You write. It's about my mom, a single parent who taught me everything I need to know about being a man. As I was writing that story five years ago, my mom was battling cancer. She just finished chemotherapy and was undergoing radiation. Today, doctors officially deemed my mom cured from cancer. And that story I wrote, have you ever played tug of war with a pit bull? It'll pull until you quit or it dies. That's Linda Easter. That's your mom. And tell me more about your mom and the impact she's had on your life. Oh, man. Yeah, let's just have me cry in the first two minutes. I know how that goes, dude. I know how that is. It's talking about my parents. I'm like that.

No, she said, so the story was called, I can't remember the exact title. It was like, my mom. I think it's everything, everything I know about being a man I learned from a woman. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So she got sober like two years before she had me. Her and my dad, I think, met around their mutual love of drugs and alcohol, which is, you know, not a good way to meet. So he ended up going to rehab. And she ended up getting sober while he's in rehab because they had handed her this book that he was supposed to read in rehab.

So she kind of understood what he was going through. And she read a few things. And then they go, oh, wait a minute. This sounds like me. Right. So she ended up getting sober. My dad never really cleaned up. But he, she ended up getting pregnant with me.

And then she was like off on her own, right? And we're like living in this, I mean, crappy trailer on the side of a road in Idaho. She's a single mom. This is like 1986. I mean, all the cards are stacked against her, right? Like, if you look at, if you look at the research on how hard it is to like sort of come out of a situation like that, you know, it's, the numbers are pretty dire. But somehow she managed to, man. Like she had, she was at the time, she had this couple women's stores, but they were totally failing.

So she sold them. She moved this to Utah. She got into this job where she became a sales representative for women. closed and she worked her butt off. But not so much that I ever felt like she wasn't around, which was a really interesting balance to try and, to try and hit, you know, but she was also really fascinating person and that, you know, we always had like these shitty cars, to be honest, like, like, these crappy minivans that she would like use for work and stuff. But she would spend our money by taking us on an international vacation every summer because she

felt that would be more valuable not only to my own development, but also her development as well as a person. So I think she just had her priorities aligned really well. And yeah, she was tough, man. Like still today, I don't like to give her bad news. I'm like, I still am kind of like, you know, she's like five feet tall and like 120 pounds and still damn like, yeah, I don't really want to mess with that one. So yeah, she just taught me a lot. And, you know, I'm a sober person too now. And so when I had my own problems with alcohol, um, she was a. first person I called when I decided I actually needed to like reach out for help. I called her. She gave me some advice and that was more than seven years ago. So here we are. What was her advice?

She basically just told me, you know, you are not a bad person. You're a sick person. And then she told me what she did when she had that problem. So you wrote about alcohol. I saw a choice. Option one, do nothing, cling to complacency and the numbing lifestyle that would ultimately end badly, but allow me to keep drinking or option two, get uncomfortable. Ditch my liquid comfort blanket. I hadn't a clue where this second option would take me or if I could even pull it off and I was terrified. Can you take us back to that moment when you were terrified and then made the choice,

though, I'm going to do the uncomfortable? Yeah. So if you drank like me, it led you in. to problems, right? You might know you have a drinking problem if all of your problems are caused by your drinking. And that's about where I was at. But I think more importantly, it's like, glad we can laugh about it now, by the way. Oh, totally, totally. So it was interesting because I think on paper, you would think that like I was successful. Everything was going well. This was in my sort of late 20s when I finally got my act together. But like I owned a house. I had a good

job that people thought was really rad. I worked at Men's Health Magazine. I was an editor. But on the weekends, I was just out of control. And like the walls were caving in. You know what I mean? It was just kind of like waiting for waiting for the clock to run out before it all. Just like the bottom fell out. And I tried to stop drinking plenty of times because I knew that it was problematic, right? But I just couldn't stop. I would always find myself like, you know, on Monday morning, I'd be like, nope, never doing that again. And then by Wednesday, I'd be like, it might be different next time, you know. And then by Thursday, it's like, yeah, it'll be different.

And by Friday, it would be time to drink again, right? And every time I drink, I just, I couldn't predict how much I was going to drink, except that I knew it would be a lot. And for whatever reason, dude, like this one morning, I just woke up after having tried to stop a bunch of times and became very, very clear to me. Like, it's kind of like a shifting consciousness where it's like, it's going to be easier in the short term to keep drinking. That is familiar.

I could see that the reason I drank was because it was comfortable, made life easy, right? If I was stressed, it relieved stress, made it easier to talk to people, all these other things, right? So that would definitely be easier, but I could also see that eventually it was going to end up killing me early. And, you know, as I write in the book, like, I didn't know if I was going to die at 35 or 45 or 75, whatever. I just knew it was going to be earlier than it would be if I were to take this other path to the right, you know. And that one was, you know, I was getting over. And I knew it was going to be really hard. I didn't know if I could do it.

It was going to be just like the worst experience ever. But on the other side of that, I could see that there was something there for me. And that maybe in the long term it would make things better. And so that's where I went. It was just like this moment in time where there was like, you got to take it. You know what I mean? It was like, this is the time. So you wrote.

in that statement about you had to get uncomfortable. And I think it is very common advice today that you have to leap outside of your comfort zone. That's where all the growth happened. So I think that's common. But your book's called The Comfort Crisis. And there's a lot of science and backed in your book as well as your own personal journey. Like you don't just study this and write about it.

You actually go to really uncomfortable. places in the world and put yourself on an airplane that in Alaska where you might crash or stay out in the cold, whatever it may be, camping. We'll talk about the most recent trip to the Amazon. You actually go out there and do it. To start, to set the foundation, what is the comfort crisis? Why is this a crisis today? Okay, so here's how I'll answer that question.

So I get sober. and what ended up happening after that is like totally awful in the short term. But in the long term, literally every single thing in my life improved. You name it. If it was good, it went in a good direction. Relationships. My health. My mental health, like all these things improve.

Okay. So I make this observation. Yeah, it seems like, you know, I had to go through discomfort to get all these benefits. Now, I'm also working at Men's Health magazine. And from that job, I can basically see that everything. that improves human physical and mental health also takes some discomfort, right? If you want to improve your fitness, you've got to work out. If you want to lose weight, probably going to have to eat less.

You're probably going to be hungry. That's no fun, right? Even improving your mental health, a lot of times it's like having to unpeel these onions layers of onion about what's going on under the surface. And that's not always fun, right? And then I ended up getting commissioned by the magazine to do a story. on this guy named Donnie Vincent. And this was like we go on this backcountry hunt.

Donnie's a backcountry bow hunter and filmmaker. He goes into sort of the world's most remote, extreme places for months at a time. And he does these documentaries that are a lot like planet Earth, but also have hunting in them. So he's this really fascinating guy who's like changing the face of hunting. And like, you know, before I viewed hunting is kind of like this.

I don't know. I just wanted nothing to do with it. But this guy is almost like a, he's an adventurer, he's an explorer. He's very much a foodie, locovore. He's very ethical about everything he does. Like, it's just totally different than anything I thought. So get assigned to do a story with him. And we spend like five nights in the mountains of Nevada.

We're at like 11,000 feet or something. And, you know, we weren't out there for that long. But all of a sudden, I get introduced or rather reintroduced to all these forms of discomfort. that I just hadn't really faced in normal life. So for example, we only pack in so much food, so I'm hungry a lot of the time, right? Like, how often are we physiologically hungry for an extended period nowadays? I'm bored because hunting is a lot of sitting and waiting. If we want water, I've got to hike to the bottom of this mountain, pull it out of a stream and

hike it back up. I'm freezing cold the entire time, on and on and on. So it was like, oh, I've made this observation that, you know, if you want to improve your life, you probably have to go through discomfort. But then wait a minute, there's all these forms of discomfort that we have essentially engineered out of our lives. All this stuff. So then I go down that rabbit hole.

And it's like, if you look at the average person's day, everything that most impacts our lives has been invented within the last hundred years. And its key goal is to make our lives easier and more comfortable. You wake up in a soft bed. We have temperature control. We don't have to work for our food. Our food system is built around what I would call comfort food, hyperprocessed, tastes really good.

We sit all day. We work behind screens, whatever, on and on and on. You get the point. Which I'm not saying that's a bad thing inherently. Progress is obviously awesome. But at the same time, we evolved to essentially do the next most easy, comfortable thing, because that kept us alive forever because we involved in these environments that were like really uncomfortable. Everything was hard. So if you did the easy thing, if you did the comfortable thing,

that gave you a survival advantage, right? Told you like, don't move any more than you have to. When you have the opportunity to eat a lot, eat a lot. Don't take risks. Why would you take risks? The world back then was dangerous, right? But nowadays, all those things are reversed. It's like we're, we still have this drive to be lazy in a world where it's very easy to be lazy. We still have this drive to overeat in the world where we are surrounded by food. We still have a tendency to not take risks. When risks are no longer a tiger lurking in the bushes, they are, I have to give a presentation to maybe launch my business or whatever it might be. So these sorts of things backfire, right? So I went down that rabbit hole and the book looks at these handful of what I would call

evolutionary discomforts that we have engineered out of our lives and the consequences we've paid for that and how by sort of putting these things back into your life, you can improve your health. I am not suggesting that, you know, people go build a yurt off the grid and whatever. I think sometimes people like hear two sentences about the book and think that's what I'm advocating. It's like, no, I want you to live totally normally. Progress is awesome. But at the same time, if you're always leaning into these amazing things we have in our life, like you're going to have some problems.

So here's how you push back. What are some of the problems? Because some skeptic might say, Michael, yeah, I get it, dude. but this is, we've made progress. We've made progress to where we can live a good life, looking at our phones, never being bored, never being hungry, always having air conditioning or heat, having a comfortable bed. What's wrong with that, man? I feel pretty good. What's the problem? Yeah. So, I mean, if you just look at the numbers of how people are doing today physically and mentally, I mean, I think that just sort of highlights it. You look at something like 70 plus percent of

people are either overweight or obese. And that is the main driver of our, are astronomical rates of chronic or astronomical rates of chronic diseases like heart disease, diabetes. I mean, those two diseases were basically non-existent even 100 years ago. Really? It just didn't really happen. Yeah. Really?

Yeah. It's all driven by our food system. Yeah, you look at the obesity rate, I think in 1900 was like 1%. Now it's 40 some odd percent, right? And it's the difference has been food because we are just surrounded in it. Not only that, but we've also engineered movement out of our life. too. And that's another reason too, right? Because we have no incentive to, we used to not have any incentive to exercise. It made sense to not move more than we need to. Now it backfires, right? Things like

anxiety, depression. And even you look at, you know, like political polarization that's crazy in this country is driven by how much time we spend down these rabbit holes of social media and Reddit boards and news, right? And we're paying for it with our mental health. Like, for example, the report that came out was a few months ago where Facebook basically knows that Instagram is like really, really hurting young girls. Yes. You know, there's, it had to come out from a whistleblower because they don't, they're not incentivized to not send, not have people spend more time on these devices, right? And so, I mean, it just goes on and on and on. on. Yeah, and we don't even fully realize it. And it almost happens kind of slowly and it just becomes so

normal, eating bad food, being able to be lazy and still be okay. Certainly the phone, as you wrote, talk about boredom. Finally, on June 29, 2007, boredom was pronounced dead, thanks to the iPhone. Great part of your book, which I thought was like, yeah, that's so true. And we all can fall victim to this. Can you talk a little bit more about the benefits of boredom and how, and I notice this, I feel this man, I'm like, especially our seven-year-old who's, I was just home for lunch and, you know, she's watching a YouTube video on my wife's phone. And I'm like, I'm about talk to Michael and I know this is the worst thing ever. You know, and I'm sitting here like, beating myself up about it because I'm like, you need, she doesn't know what boredom is. And that's our fault.

And so can you talk to me about the benefits of boredom? Yeah, for sure. So I saw, I started really thinking about this. As part of the book, I spent more than the month up in the Arctic backcountry on this caribou hunt. It was sort of a way to really thrust myself into an uncomfortable world and just let's see what happens. So that trip is sort of the overarching narrative of the book. But as part of hunting, I mean, I think if people don't hunt, they don't realize that hunting is actually very boring.

People tend to think it's like this action-packed thing. So we would be sitting on these hills for like hours. and hours because we're waiting for herds of caribou to come through on their migration. But we're in a bad spot, right? We're not, they're not coming through. So we sat literally for like five days straight on this hill just waiting for nothing. And I didn't bring my phone. Even if I like, there wasn't a bar within a hundred miles, right? We're in the middle of nowhere. Didn't bring a book. Didn't bring a magazine. Didn't bring a computer. All that stuff. So all of a sudden, I find myself bored again, right? It's like, okay, what did I do to have to deal with my boredom?

We started reading all the labels on the food we brought it. So I can tell you, Cliff Barr has 250 calories, 10 grams of protein, 49 carbs, six grams of fat. I mean, this stuff is embedded in my brain. This is how bored we were, right? You should have brought books or something, man. Too heavy. Ah, okay, okay.

We read the labels on our jackets. I do a bunch of push-ups on and on, come up with Christmas lists for like three years. But I also came up with a bunch of story ideas for the math. I write for, the magazines I write for. I wrote some of the book, et cetera. So I told you that to basically tell you this, is that boredom is this evolutionary discomfort that kicks in anytime what we are doing is no longer giving us a good return on our time invested. So if you think about a million years ago, if we're sitting on that hill hunting and we know we need dinner, nothing's coming through, boredom kicks on, makes us uncomfortable, makes us go,

let's go do something else and we go find food somewhere else, right? But fast forward to today, anytime we fill this discomfort of boredom, what do we do? We pull out our phone or we hop on a computer or we turn on Netflix because all this tech we have in our lives has given us a very easy, effortless and stimulating escape from this discomfort of boredom. It makes sense to just do that thing, right? But this definitely has repercussions because if you look at the research on boredom, what happens when you're bored is you tend to go inward and mind wander. And it turns out that mind wandering is actually this state that sort of rests and revives your brain. It's kind of like a rest period during a workout. Well, anytime you are focused on the outside world, like on your phone or Netflix or computer,

that's more like an active rest state. And your brain is like actually working really hard, sort of like you're lifting the weight, right? Well, we spend so much time outwardly focused now that it's just sort of burning out our brains in the way is one of the reasons they think that anxiety is so high is we're just focused on the outside world for so long. There's also really interesting research around boredom and creativity. So they will take two groups of people and they will let one do whatever they want. You know, just sit in this room. People inevitably take out their cell phones or whatever.

And then with the other group, they will bore them, get them really bored. Then they'll give them a creativity test. And the board group always comes up with more answers that are more creative because they've had this mental downtime to kind of let their mind go to weird. weird places. And then finally, so the numbers show that people today spend anywhere from 11 to 12 hours a day engaged with digital media. So you think about all this stuff, wasn't in our lives 100 years ago. For two and a half million years, we didn't have it. Now it's literally become our lives. There's this William James quote where he says, your life is essentially a culmination of that which you were aware of.

Now we're essentially aware of media, it's become our lives, right? And so I'm not advocating that anyone just like give up, you know, Instagram and Netflix and your computer entirely. Of course not. But I am saying that maybe 12 hours is a little too much time. And maybe we'd see some benefits if we just kind of let our minds go into

bored places. One of my things, Michael, I love this stuff on my, Sunday after I kind of run and do sprints and then I do a long, long walk, part of it with my dog, part of it without. And I just said like one rule as it pertains to my phone is I'm only allowed to get it out if I'm documenting an idea. So it's amazing how much of my most recent book was written as I would take a pause during a walk, jot the genesis or like the beginnings of an idea of a chapter. or a story. I wouldn't write the whole thing, but I'd give myself the idea and then I would

eventually get to a writing session on my computer. And I was always so grateful that that idea was started, because that's the hardest part about writing books, right, is the idea or starting the chapter or whatever, the section. And most of them, they weren't fully written on the walk, but they were begun, which is the hardest part. The friction of writing, I think, is getting started. And so much of that happened on those Sunday, super long walks. And I say super long because it usually wouldn't happen right away. It would take a while. I'm talking 30, 40, sometimes 60 minutes before you kind of get to the plate.

It's almost like your brain has to warm up to being a little bit bored and noticing nature. And there's value there. I'm going to ask you about that too. And then like stuff started to flow. But it wasn't right away because I think some people could go out for a 10 minute walk or whatever. It's still good. Don't get me wrong. It's better than nothing.

Well, they're like, what's going on? Why am I not getting ideas? I think it takes time. Like it takes time to kind of settle in. And then as you wander and your brains rest it a little bit, it seems to start firing in a way. And then that's when the good stuff happens. And maybe combined with being in nature and seeing the trees and the water or whatever is helpful too. Do you what can you tell me about the science of being out in nature in addition to being bored?

Yeah. Well, first, I mean, your observation is spot on. And I'm the exact same way. And there's one of the main keys of advice I give to people. where they're like, okay, well, how do I use this? Is that I think we need time away from our phones and the way that we tend to use them. So what you're doing, totally great because I'm the same way.

Like, I'll bring my phone, but I'll just, I bring it because I'll go way out in the desert. And, you know, if I broke a leg, be bad or whatever. But also for the notes feature. I do a lot of voice memos as well. And I think that when we have this time where we're just sort of like letting our brain go into strange places it does, does, that's when the good stuff happens.

I mean, this is why people say they have their best ideas in the shower. Yeah. Because you're not doing anything. Right? You're just kind of, your brain's going wherever it needs to go. But then the outdoor element is also important. So when I'm up in Alaska, it was pretty extreme, pretty dangerous, right? Yep.

We had like these crazy, crazy storms. We saw grizzly bears all the time. we're like having to carry our 80 pound packs everywhere. I'm freezing. I came straight from Las Vegas to the Arctic. Like this was the stupidest idea ever. I was freezing cold the entire time. So you would think that I would be like as stressed out as any human could be.

Like, right? Like this is the most, must be the most stressful thing ever. But I found that the opposite was actually true. So I had moments of stress where it would spike, like when you see some crazy animal. But overall, I was like the calmest,

most collected. Like I was like, honestly, man, I felt like a Zen monk after like a month at a meditation retreat. Just like just, you know. And so when I get back from the Arctic, I decide I want to figure out, okay, well, what the hell was that all about? So I travel to Boston and I meet this lady who is a neuroscientist and she is researching the human brain on nature.

And she tells me about this concept called the nature period or nature pyramid. And it's a lot like the food pyramid. but instead of having, say, like, eat this many servings of grain, this many servings of vegetables, this meaning of meat or whatever it might be, basically tells you how long you should spend in different types of nature. So at the very bottom of the pyramid, she's found. The research shows that at least 20 minutes a day, three times a week, is associated with just feeling a lot less calm, less stressed out,

you're a little more productive. And then next up on the pyramid is five hours a week. or five hours a month, sorry. And this isn't the type of nature that's like wild state park, like not super far removed, but also not like just a tree line street or like central park type thing, you know. And that's associated with a lot more happiness and less depression. And then I think where it gets really interesting is at the very top is what's called the three day effect.

And her research on that has basically found that after three days in nature, people's brains start writing what are called alpha waves. And these are the waves found in experienced meditators. They're associated with calm, with feelings of well-being. They're associated with just totally different thinking patterns than you would normally have in normal life. And normal life, because everything's so frenetic, we're writing what are called beta waves, which were like really kind of spiky, just go, go, go. So I think she makes a pretty strong case of like you need to spend X amount of time outside every week.

you need to go on some stuff kind of like in a little bit wilder spaces maybe a state park and then once a year at least for three days like just go out in the backcountry and just marinate in it and the catch to all of it though as she said you can't bring along your cell phone and be like talking on the thing and check on instagram and all that kind of stuff the entire time or else it totally offsets all the benefits it seems like I think some might say well that's that's not possible for me. I got a family and I got a job, but I bet if you plan ahead, all that stuff's very possible and very doable. I don't think these are to the extremes of things to plan out and to actually go and do. No. I mean, like, so for me, I have a book, do another book due in October, but I always do a backcountry, backcountry backpacking trip with a handful of my friends from high school. And so I've just already blocked it out. Like it's it is what it is. I've had to schedule things around it. And, it because I think that one problem that, especially people who are worried about business and

productivity and all that stuff, what you don't realize is that by spending the three days or the five days or whatever it is in the wild is that it is such a reset for your brain that you're going to come back and you're going to have, you're going to be way more productive. You're going to make it up on the back end. But also the type of stuff and ideas that you put out are going to be, they're going to be better than what you would have put out had you tried to like sit in the office and grind through those five days. You know, I mean, like these are really resets. It's like you can't let your car run all the time.

You got to take it in for oil changes. I mean, our brain is literally the same way. And nature seems to really be like an oil change, man. Even just made me think of this. I go to Tahoe every year with my younger brother. We go for like five or six days. And we stay in a house with friends. And so we still have our phones and everything.

But we, we have a wake up a sunrise swim. and that very cold Lake Tahoe, which is amazing. It's so crisp. It's just the best. The one thing, though, that we don't do that is part of our normal lives, we don't watch TV that week. And it's not because of like an intentional thing. It's just because we're with our friends.

We have big group dinners. We go to the golf course during the day. It's part of the vacation. There's no TV. And even just taking that out and adding in the morning swim and we swim in the afternoon when we get home as well and then have like a break bread with loved ones and friends, it is it's not the same as that but that is a great reset and like uh it just changes how i feel afterwards in such a positive way of there's obviously no news there's no Netflix there's no

tv it's just some nature yes there's some golf and things like that where we have fun with other people and i think the the having meals with loved ones at night which we do every night that combination is like an amazing reset that's different from the normal everyday life and I feel so much more like refreshed and ready to go when I get back. That's that's five or six days. That's a lot. That's a lot of days to like not really do any work and just have fun. But that's that in itself is a reset. And that's still not to the extreme of what you're talking about. Yeah. I mean, I think people need that. Like when you schedule that in. And to your point, like really being trying to be as away from normalcy as possible,

I think is good. And I love your idea of like, have the notepad with you. And I, and I love your idea of like, have the notepad with you. So when the strange idea, you're like, oh, my God, that's a good idea. Because if you're like me, you forget them in about seven seconds, you know, like I need to write things down. So I think that's a good way to approach it. Yeah. You know, use technology for the good parts, right? I think that's the, that's the good part of it for safety, right? If you're, you're going to be far away, you need a phone for safety or to jot down notes. I want to talk about exercise because I, I've read a lot of your writing about this and heard you speak about it. Um, we, is this right? We exercise 14 times less than our ancestors on average. And let me see if I

read this right. Exercise grows the hippocampus in the brain. This is something that is shrunken in people who suffer from depression. Is this, is that accurate? Did I read this right? Yeah. When it comes to exercise. I mean, tell me more about the benefits of this or why we must move our body. Yeah. So you look at how we lived and to, um, to, get this information, basically what researchers do is they will follow hunter gatherers. And there's this guy who's at USC that I spoke to. And he basically put like GPS watches on hunter gatherers for a week and was just like, all right, yeah, just live your normal life. We'll see how much you walk. They walk some crazy amount of, they walk like 20 odd thousand steps a day or something. But along the

way, they're also doing all this other stuff, right? They're digging. They're hunting. They're carrying stuff. So the math adds up to about 14 times more than the average American exercises now. So if you think about the adaptation of the human body, like we are adapted and built to move for a lot of the day. And now we've totally removed that from our lives. So I think, you know, a lot of times exercise gets positioned as like, you need to do this thing. This thing is healthy for you.

I tend to see it slightly differently in that like, no, this is a necessary thing for you. and by not doing it, we tend to slip into disease. So this is like, I think that sort of framing changes it from being like, here's this additional thing you can do to be healthy. It's like, no, this is a thing you need to do to like avoid disease. This is a very necessary thing for you. And, you know, you look at all the research on like pills and procedures and all this like amazing medicine we have.

It's great. Don't get me wrong. But literally exercise beats most, most of those things. You know, if you want to live long, like exercise. is the best thing you can do. And like, we get in these strange debates online about like, oh, you should take this supplement and it's got like 40 letters in its name. And it's just like, no, dude, just like go for a walk every day.

Like literally that's like what's going to do it for people. But it's like we want the easy thing. I would rather take a pill than have to actually put in effort, right? It's exercise, man. I can't say enough about this. Well, and so the other thing too is, and I think little ways to kind of inject this into your mindset to like the James Clear, like have the identity of a person and new exercises is one example.

This is something I observe because I've kind of instituted to get another little rule. I travel a decent amount for my work, you know, going out to give speeches or whatever. In the airport, take the stairs. In the airport, instead of getting on the tram, especially if you have time, like I remember the, I'm a Delta guy. So I fly, I go through Atlanta a lot as I live in Ohio. And so there's usually a layover in Atlanta. And they have the tram or you can just walk from your gate to the next one. usually go down the stairs, then you get on the, and everyone just waits to get on the tram.

They'll wait for like 90 seconds. And I'm like, let me just walk. Usually you have time. Or if you have to run, then run. I don't get it. Or they take the one, the machine, which takes you, whatever that's called, like the fast walking machine, like the treadmill that pulls you. Walk, not on that thing. Walk normal.

And then when you get to the stairs and the escalator, the stairs are never crowded. Never. You know what's crowded? The escalator. So it's just two simple things. take the stairs and walk or run when you're in the airport. And like it almost creates this. I view it as a way of being grateful for having working legs.

I literally say that. I'm glad my legs work. I feel grateful that my legs work. I want them to continue to work. So I'm going to use them. Right? Yeah. Like take the stairs,

not the escalator. I don't feel, I feel like I'm surprised more people don't do this. What do you think about this? Take the stairs mentality. Take the little bit harder. It's still not hard. It's just walking.

It's not really that hard. What do you think about this mentality? Yeah. So there's the, it's funny you bring this up. So I always have to fly through Vegas because that's where I live. And there's this like epic staircase flanked by escalators. And there was a study conducted. I can't remember how many years ago pretty recently where they counted the number of people

who took the stairs versus those who took the escalator at like a mall. Only 2% of people took the stairs. Wow. 2%. So that just shows you how like wired we are. to do the easy, lazy thing. Used to make sense for two and a half million years. It doesn't make sense today.

Right. But so one day I take a photo of the stairs and there's all these people on the escalator. The stairs are totally empty. I go to the stairs and I say like, be a two percenter, only 2% of whatever. I like say the stat. And like for some reason this caught on with people. Like I thought it was just like a dumb thing at first. But like people are like, yeah, I never really thought of it that way.

You know? And it's funny because like the more I thought about this, you look at. a lot of the science around exercise. Just moving more throughout the day can burn actually a lot more calories than you would get like a 30 minute workout. So I think one of the issues, like I would never advocate to someone don't exercise. Like exercise as much as possible. But I think that one problem we have in modern society is that we look at exercises like

this 30 minute thing that I do. And then the other 23 and a half hours of my day, I'm completely freaking lazy. Right. Like it really shouldn't be that. You should do the 30 minutes and look for all these little wins that you can rack up throughout the day because those are arguably more powerful than your workout. Workout's a supplementary thing to that. That's how I really want people to view it. I just went on a tangent.

I can't remember the rest of the question. No, I mean, I'm wondering why do you think 98% of people choose the lazy route? It's just because they follow the crowd? We're like lemmings or like, what is it? Like, why do we choose the easy path when I think most people know the benefits of moving your body? Like I wouldn't say all 98% of those people are like, no, I don't need to extraize. I don't need to do anything. I'm just go sit on the escalator, take the tram and sit down as opposed to just walking from one.

I'm using the airport because it's an easy metaphor that we all know about. But, I mean, you can do that in many areas. Why do you think we're like this? Oh, it's very straightforward. it's that for two and a half million years, having this tendency to not move any more than we absolutely need to, that kept us alive for two and a half million years. Because when food was at a premium as we evolved, if you were moving more than you needed to, you were going to starve to death and die.

So this gene to like do extra, it didn't pass on as much. Like we are wired for laziness, right? And so now that you put us in this modern world where we can be lazy, we're always going to take that opportunity, even though it's. not the best opportunity to take. Like, that's what we'll default to. It takes conscious thought and effort. Like, we're having a conversation about taking the stairs, right? This is taken, like, we have to think about this, you know? Yeah. That's why. And so I think a lot of living in modern life is learning what adaptations do humans have. By adaptations, I mean like these things that

come from evolution, right? They used to help us in our past. What things that used to help us in our past are now backfiring against us and actually hurting us. I just started laughing as I thought of a story. So we take our dog on walks a lot, my wife and I. And I get, it's probably the worst to be in a relationship with me. But like if she cuts a corner, like when we're making a turn, I'm like, what are you doing? She looks to me like I'm an idiot. I'm like, we don't cut corners.

Like go to the end and then make the hard. left turn or whatever like we're not cutting corners and we we got like in a funny argument about this i'm just like i just feel bad about cutting the corner so i can't i have to go all the way the end and then make a hard like 90 degree turn so that i didn't go walk like off the sidewalk onto the grass a little bit because i i think i'm a little bit messed up but it's just like this mentality of like that's the easier path the easier path is to cut the corner to most people i know But they're like, dude, why do you even worry about that? To me, though, like, I think about those things because I think that I think I grew up with

these amazing high school football coaches who I saw that hard work led to great performance, which led to me getting a college scholarship and a lot of really good things. So, like, it's been ingrained in me if you choose to do the harder thing, it will prepare you when the lights are bright. And then the rewards that come from, you know, winning games and breaking records and getting scholarships. So I've felt the benefit of choosing to do the harder thing because it prepares you for these big moments. I think that's where it comes from for me.

So I'm curious when you hear this crazy story of not cutting corners on a sidewalk when you're walking your dog and getting in a funny argument with your spouse, like what you think about these types of things. Well, I love that. And okay, so made me think of something. Let me think of what I had something at the top of my mind. Okay. Okay. Yeah. So I think the metaphor of this book is a whole. Yeah. Is that doing the uncomfortable harder thing, it sucks in the short term. Yep. You don't want to do it. Like think back to your football days. You don't want to wake up super early every morning in practice. No. But now you don't cut corners because of that, right? So it's like you go through hardship. You realize one, it wasn't that bad. But two, oh my God, I got all these amazing benefits.

from this. So that has to be taught and experienced, right? So I think going back to your question about the escalator too, it's like, well, if you hadn't regularly taken the stairs and saw the benefit that gave you, of course you're just going to take the escalator. Why would you take the stairs? It's idiotic, right? Yeah. But it's not idiotic if you've regularly taken the stairs and you're like, oh, this actually helps me feel better, helps me look better, gives me more energy. There's all these benefits. But yeah, it sucks as I'm actually taking them. But I'm okay with that. Yeah. So I've read a of your writing beyond just the comfort crisis, which, you know, is a book that absolutely is a must read. You wrote about learning. And learning, obviously, is in the title of this podcast, the

learning leader shows. So that's big to me. And one of it's like the one thing all great learners know. And this is a lesson you said from the Pope, sort of, that taught me how to understand everything better. What is that? Oh, yeah. So I was a, I used to work at Esquire back in the day. And we had this section called The Answerfella. And so my job was to report this section out. And the question is basically a Q&A. Like people would send in weird questions and we would like answer them for people.

Bizarre questions. So someone sent in, you know, how much money does the Pope make? And so me sort of thinking, all right, like I'll figure this out. I start calling all these like sources like historians, Catholic historians, blah, blah, blah, right? Like all these experts with all these letters in their name. And I take it to my editor. And he just,

he looks at him and he just looks at me and he goes, no, no, you call the fucking Vatican. And I'm like, oh. And so I think that the lesson for me, the bigger lesson.

So now when I think in my mind, like call the fucking Vatican is a metaphor for like, go directly to the source to learn something. go right to the source, right? Like we circle around it with these experts and self-proclaimed experts. It's like, you want to know how much money the Pope makes. Call them up and ask, right? And I think that that's a metaphor for like any kind of learning.

Go straight to the source because so much of our world now gets filtered through all these different like media bubbles and whatever. And it's great that we have so much access to information. But I think if you really want to learn the underlying thing, just ask the thing, right? not being afraid to ask. There's this amazing Steve Jobs video where he's interviewed. You may have seen it where when he was 11 or 12 years old, he needed these, he wanted to spare parts to build what he called a frequency counter.

I don't even know what that is. But instead of like, you know, going to his parents or no less, he just called Bill Hewlett, right? Bill Hewlett of Hewlett Packer, right, who was still in the phone book, hey, this is Steve Jobs. I'm 12 years old. I was wondering if I could get some spare parts to build a frequency counter. And Hewlett invited him right in, gave him the spare parts. He built the counter and he gave him a job.

And the reason he shares this story is because he's not afraid to just go for it and ask. I'll link it in the show notes. But it's an amazing short video that and he ends the kind of answer to this Q&A session that the difference between the people who dream about doing things and the people who actually do things and get them done is they're not afraid to ask. They're not afraid to be rejected. They're not afraid to be ignored. Again, I think this goes in line with the comfort crisis of, you know, is it an ego hit?

Who cares? Right? Like, just go for it. Go straight to the Pope. Call the Vatican. Whatever. Like, make the ask. I think that's another thing that, especially sometimes people, maybe if they've

accomplished one thing in another area, are they afraid because they've got a bit of an ego now to then go and ask and be a beginner again? I think that's a superpower, the willingness to ask and the willingness to be a beginner again, especially after you've accomplished some stuff, that is super important. That's a part of being uncomfortable. That's a part of this comfort crisis, I think, as well. Yeah, oh, 100%. Yeah, I think that there's, for a long time, like, it doesn't make, it doesn't feel good

to, like, have to look down and admit you don't know things. But, like, even in the course of my own life, like, when I start, started realizing that like I don't know everything. This is particularly after I started after I stopped drinking. It was like, whoa, the world like opened up. Like just admitting like you think about the word humility. And I think a lot of people think it means like, oh, I make a lot of money, but like I don't flash it or like, you know, I win a game and I like thank something else other than myself, whatever. And like, yeah, that's like a signal of it. But I think what humility really is is realizing that you're just like not that important in the grand scheme of time and space and that you have

definitely limitations like everyone has limitations right and so once you accept that it's like okay well how do I rectify some of that I can't rectify at all it's like okay we'll ask people questions like realize that there are people out there who are smarter than you and think about the world differently and it's worth talking to them because that'll totally change your mind yeah 100% what are some of the science-backed ways to slow down time? I think you've written about the fact that time seemed slower as a child. So now because one of the common things you hear, especially as you get older, is, God, the time goes so fast.

Man, it's like, boom, the years over. It goes so even during like pandemic times, they're like, man, time's still going so fast. What are some of the science-backed ways to slow down time? Yeah, it's to learn and do new things. So when you think about when you were a kid, time seemed to be so slow because you were constantly learning and doing all this new kind of stuff. You're in all these new situations.

And so what happens is that the human brain has this thing that's kind of a feature or a bug, depending on how you look at it, where after we've done the same thing over and over and over, we can just kind of zone out, right? We're just kind of on autopilot. So these scientists at Cambridge that I talked to, they described it as an autopilot mode.

So we're not really aware. And life just kind of goes by because we're not paying attention to anything, right? But when you do something new or grapple with a new idea, learn something new, all of a sudden you don't know what to expect and predict. You can't be on autopilot in a completely new situation. So it sort of kicks you out of that and you have to be aware. And that seems to lead people to perceive time going by as much slower. What about thinking about your death?

What are the benefits of that? Oh, yeah. So as part of the hunting trip, I actually killed an animal. I killed the caribou. We used all its meat. I had never hunted before. To be quite honest, before we, in planning to go up there, I was just planning on observing. But Donnie said, you know, I think you'd understand like what this is all about if you hunted.

And so I trusted him on that. And so after I shoot this animal, and we were very selective, we only shot the oldest in the herd that were on like the last year of their life because that actually tends to improve the health of the herd. After that, I was just totally like a complete emotional wreck. I mean, I'll be honest. I was just like, oh, my God, what have you done? But once we got to the animal and started breaking it down for meat, my mind shifts.

because all of a sudden it was like, oh, wait a minute. Like, this is meat that I'm going to eat. It's like, I eat meat every single day and never once do I think about it and feel any iota of emotion. It's like, what's going on here? You know? And it also made me realize that, you know, it hits you in the face with this abstract idea that for one thing to live on, another has to die. And then the next jump is like, well, shit, Michael, you're not excluded for you. from that bargain, are you, right? And so I started thinking about, you know, this idea of death and like, man, that's going to happen one day. And that led me to Bhutan, which is this country in Asia, it's right by Nepal. If you're looking at a map, it's pretty small. And Bhutan is one of the

least developed countries on earth. The entire country does not have a stoplight. There is no Starbucks, no McDonald's, no outside chains, none of that. But they're also one of the happiest places on earth. So when researchers in Japan do all these really extensive happiness studies, Bhutan is always in the top 20, right? And yet they don't have a ton. So I wanted to get to why. And I find out that the way that they view death probably plays into this happiness equation they have. So people in Bhutan are told to think about their death at least once every day. Death is sort of baked into the culture in a lot of ways. It's like in the art. It's in, there's these things called saw saws and they're these like clay pyramids that are about that big and they're all over

the country and they are mud mixed with ashes of the dead and when i say they're everywhere i mean like every window still every bend in the road you see these so there's this constant reminder that like this ride is going to end and while i was there i end up meeting with this guy who is a kempo in the buddhist faith which means he's super high up and to get to this dude we have to like take what is essentially a smart car up this crazy mountain road like my driver's like bahawing this thing up and then i have to like hike in and this guy to this guy's shack and i get in and there's like the first room is just completely empty the second room is a kitchen with like i don't even think they had running water i think it was like a bucket system the next i like open this drape and

there's like this massive statue of the buddha and like all these like religious icons around it the room super smoky with incense. There's like light streaming in through the smoke. I kind of look and I just see this face and it's this dude and he's like sitting in the lotus position and he's in his orange robes and his head shaved and he just turns his head and he looks at me and he goes, welcome. It was just like, holy hell. This is like seeing the guru, right?

This is like something from a movie straight up. But I sit in there and I talk to him and I ask him about death. This guy turns out this guy had written an entire book about. death and the benefits of thinking of it, how they think about it in Buddhism. And he basically explained it to me like this. He's like, pretend that you are walking on a trail. Now, at the end of the trail, in about 500 yards, is a cliff. The catch is that cliff is the cliff is death. Now, if you're walking on this trail, don't you want to know that there's a cliff there? Because if you know there's a cliff there, you're probably going to walk it a little differently, right?

you're going to take time to recognize the beauty of the trail. You're going to have different conversations with the people you're walking with. He said, well, in the United States, generally, you guys don't want to hear about the cliff. I think he's right. Think about our funeral system. People are immediately put into the ground. We're immediately told, take your mind off it. Keep yourself busy.

You don't want to think about it, right? Even our food system, it's like meat just magically appears, right? We've got all this stuff that tells us, don't think. think about death. But in Bhutan, it's very different. It's like, we want to hear all about the cliff because what tends to happen is that once you sort of take death into your mind, think about its implications, all that sort of things, what that means, yeah, it's very uncomfortable. It's probably the most uncomfortable thing you could ever think about, right? But what tends to happen is that it tends to align people. You start to think about, okay, what really matters to me?

because if I know this ride is going to end, I'm not going to spend it worked up about this random email I got from someone I work with that tended to piss me off or whatever. I might spend more time with my wife and kids, right? So what tends to happen is that it tends to make people happier by changing their behavior. And when I talk about this, people are often like, well, this is like some mystic crap, you know, mumbo, jembo. But what's interesting is that there has been follow-up studies in the U.S.

from like Stanford from the University of Kansas. And they've basically found that after people think about their death, they report being happier consistently. That's because it tends to align behaviors and help people come to the realization of what really matters to them and what's going to matter to them in the end. Wow. I think of like sometimes when someone's taken a little bit too early, maybe they're near your age.

This has happened to me a couple times over the last maybe four or five years. that they're similar age and maybe they have like cancer or something just awful and they die what i start thinking about during those times are like not wasting my days of being grateful for them and the people and making the most of them and sometimes like when a friend's parent dies you know i have both my parents and they're very close that also makes me think of that too like how am I being intentional about calling my mom multiple times a week, about seeing them, you know, when we're in the same place? And so I think thinking of those terrible things of your friends, parents that maybe die or a friend of yours who got sick and unfortunately didn't make it,

it can wake you up a bit. And so I like your thought of instead of waiting to have those thoughts only when the really bad stuff happens when you go to the funeral. whatever, do it regularly, do it daily. And that could, in a sense, wake you up to be more grateful, to not worry about stupid stuff as much, right? To be more intentional about love with your friends, the people closest to you. I love that story, man. That is an amazing story. Yeah. I mean, the wildest part about it is I met with another guy who was, a Buddhist monk, but he worked at the hospital there in the city. And he counseled people who were dying. And, you know, he echoed a lot of what the other guy had said. But he was like very,

he kept saying to me like, look, death can come at any time. Death can come at any time. When I leave this guy's place, he goes, remember, death can come at any time. So then I have a day of like tourism in Bhutan because I'm there, I'm there to work. But I get to, you know, okay, I'll take a day and go see the site. So we go to this, it's essentially this Buddhist monastery that is embedded on a cliff. And it's called the tiger's nest. You can look it up like it's, you've, everyone has seen pictures other. They just don't know what it is or where it was. You're like, it's that thing. But to get up there, you have to walk up this like five mile trail. It's at like 10,000 something feet. So it's like this pretty gnarly trail. So whatever. I walk up with my driver. You have to have a driver in

Bhutan by law. And we go check it out. And it's amazing. And, you know, very cool. and all the sudden, you know, I'm leaving the place to go the five miles back down the trail. My driver runs up to me and he's like, hey, someone's sick. Like the guy's English is not good. He points and there's these guys who are kind of on the trail like by a cliff and there's someone who's clearly down on the trail. So I go over there and it's this Buddhist monk. He's probably like in a 60. I'd say he's probably 60 something.

He's on the trail. He's down. but he's on these like weird gnarly stair place so i'm like we got to move you know because in preparation to go to alaska i'd taken all this extensive like CPR emergency courses thing um so we move into a flat area of this trail that's still kind of like surrounded by cliffs and i start doing CPR on him basically because he's he's not in a good spot right and as i'm doing this these doctors um these two women who were from hong kong these tiny women come up they're both doctors and they're like yeah like keep doing CPR they had someone else um they had a

female monk do mouth to mouth on him they're timing it and whatever and we're just like going whatever and the dude ends up dying because we're on a cliff they can't get a life flight in the guy dies after like 20 minutes to CPR and literally this guy like there was this lady standing by me and she's like I literally had a conversation with that guy at the bottom and he walked the five miles up the trail and then just something. happened and he was gone and it was just like holy shit like death can come at any time i mean that was like one of the more profound moments in my life where the context of what i was there in boutan for the fact that like i leave this one monk teacher guy and he's like death can come at any time the

next day i'm doing CPR on this guy and like he's gone and he was like seemingly totally healthy before like it was one of those where you're like the course of your life just shifts in a moment and it's just like oh we're not taking anything for granted now are we you know I mean, it was intense, but it was also profound and like a huge teacher for me. That's nuts, man. One more question. We're going to take off. Let's say, I mean, you teach you're a teacher, right, for a living.

You're a writer. You're a teacher. Writing is obviously a form of teaching as well, but you're legitimate, like, college teaching people. What are, let's say you're talking to someone who's like a recent grad, maybe they're in their early 20s. What are some general pieces of. life slash career advice you regularly give to somebody at that age? I think at that age, especially with the students that I'm working with, I mean,

polishing your writing skills is so important because so much of life now is like writing message, like email messages. And if you can't write an email message and a good cover letter, like when I was hiring people at men's health, I didn't care what school you went to. I honestly, I didn't even care what your grades were.

if you could write a damn good cover letter, I'm like, ooh, that's tells me this person's intelligent in some way. And the second part of I think that our educational system under values, I feel like part of my role is because I have more professional background than a lot of the other professors into my department because journalism is an interesting department because you tend to have a lot of academics with PhDs, but then they also pull in like professors of practice, which is what I am. So a lot of mine is like offsetting the academia that's been drilled into people's brains. And a huge part of it is EQ is how good are you with people? Can you have a conversation with people? Are you fun to work with? Do you get stuff done in a timely manner? And if you don't, are you communicative about why and when the person will get it?

Like those sort of just soft things that like I think don't get talked about enough in the university system, I found are just so important. be it is it is wild like be easy to work with is shockingly good advice yeah it's it should be should be obvious but it be pleasant to work with will get you pretty far like get your stuff done do what you say you're going to do you know be timely in your response all of that stuff is is wildly useful yet for some reason not always done it's it's interesting yeah Yeah, totally. It's not done. And I think it like it doesn't get talked about enough in universities. The book is called The Comfort Crisis. I want to thank my friend Mike Frumhold for first introduce me to this concept in this book. And then I just want all in on all your stuff beyond

just the book, but what you published online. And I'm so grateful that then that prompted me to send you a cold email because I love your stuff, man, and I'm really appreciative that you're taking the time to get it out of your head onto the page, which is also not comfortable. I'm excited to hear and see what your next piece of work is, but I highly recommend people get the comfort crisis and follow all your work. And I love to continue our dialogue, Michael, as we both progress. Yeah. Amen, man. I appreciate all the research you put into that. I can tell that you read a lot of my stuff, which is, I think, rare in the podcasting world today. Yeah, that was awesome. Great conversation. I appreciate it. I'd love to keep chatting, man. Awesome.

Thanks, man. Wow, what a way to end it. The benefits of thinking about death. God, I was really moved by that story. I hope you were as well. I love that conversation with Michael. What a thoughtful guy and caring and giving and intelligent. I'm so grateful that I got a chance to talk with him. A few more takeaways from my notes. Be a two-percenter. 98%. of people take the escalator at the airport. Take the stairs. Go outside for a walk. Allow your brain to wander. Exercise grows the hippocampus in the brain. This is something that is actually shrunken in people who suffer from depression. We exercise 14 times less than our ancestors. Go outside, go for a walk, be bored, allow your brain to wonder. And then,

What is the science-backed way to slow down time? Learn new things. Get off autopilot, right? Become a beginner. Be willing to not be so good at something. All of that is how we slow down time and grow and learn and improve and get uncomfortable. I really hope you enjoyed this one as much as I did. I thought this was packed.

so much useful stuff for us to become more effective leaders. I hope you choose to tell a friend or two, hey, you should listen to this episode of The Learning Leader Show with Michael Easter. He'll help you become a much more effective leader. And because you continue to do that and you continue to write reviews on Apple Podcast and rate the show, hopefully five stars, you continue to give me the opportunity to do what I love on a daily basis. And for that, I will forever be grateful.

Thank you so, so much. Talk to soon. Can't wait.