The Sevan Podcast - #342 - Michael Easter

Episode Date: March 23, 2022

Michael Easter is a leading voice on how humans can integrate modern science and evolutionary wisdom for improved health, meaning, and performance in life and at work. Partners: https://www.paperstcoffee.com/ - THE COFFEE I DRINK! https://www.barbelljobs.com/ - WORLD'S #1 JOB BOARD FOR THE CROSSFIT COMMUNITY https://thesevanpodcast.com/ - OUR WEBSITE https://sogosnacks.com/ - SAVE15 coupon code - the snacks my kids eat - tell them Sevan sent you! Support the show Partners: https://cahormones.com/ - CODE "SEVAN" FOR FREE CONSULTATION https://www.paperstcoffee.com/ - THE COFFEE I DRINK! https://asrx.com/collections/the-real... - OUR TSHIRTS ... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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Run! Collect more moments with more ways to earn. Air Mile. You do it bam we're live oh bam figured it out man good it's late it's not too bad don't worry we're here now so yeah this is disgusting michael good morning good morning how you doing uh my back is crazy tight at 350 shows in and this is the first time this has happened and i want to fucking lose my mind you know when you want everything to be perfect in the morning every day yeah i have see that can be i have that lot

laptop over there that i run my whole system off of and it just kind of sits here yeah and it started it's doing like a one hour reboot or something it says okay we're updating your computer it will take 59 minutes I'm like what yeah so I quickly grabbed this other laptop I have that's been brand new that's never been set up and so I was like oh my god I don't even have Chrome installed in it. Yeah. Matthew and I were talking, it's like you get to the point where you kick the update down the road so many times. Yeah. You're like five updates behind.

And then it's like, I don't even have like a starting point to fix myself. So we got to like, we got to figure it out. So that's where you found yourself. I go running into the house looking for the, for whatever. I don't know what just now my wife's like can you help me i'm like yeah i can tell if you're god you can help me other than that i'm screwed push time back 11 minutes there you go well we're here hey um michael how how old are you i am 35 years old. 35, yeah. I started CrossFit when I was 34. When I was 34, I got kicked out of my mom's house for the last time.

Oh, yeah? And then you found CrossFit. How did that happen? I kind of found him at the same time. There was just some yoke dude lying about his workout, telling me he did like 100 pull-ups in a workout and just stupid shit and sprints and deadlifts i was like you don't have to lie you already have a beautiful

body then i went to the website i'm like oh shit he's not lying so what year was that oh six okay when did it start uh uh ish good question ish is 2000 2001 2002 2003 basically you know greg ended up having that really wealthy client who was like like um the the guy owned one of the america america cup boats uh philippe khan billionaire dude he patented something that was like in every cell phone for like 15 years and um he um, he, he, Greg trained him and his family. And that guy said, Hey, I'm going on the road and I need, uh, I need you to put this stuff up on a blog. And Greg's like, what's a blog. And he's like, well, you need a computer. And Greg's like, what's a computer. So Greg made that first post at one

rich dude's request. And then, you know, um, from from there you kind of know what happened first responders uh special forces the dea all those people started doing it and started demanding a certification from greg it's a great story right hard work focus perseverance belief yeah see i didn't i didn't know the billionaire connection that's really interesting some guys yeah i'm gonna be on my boat. I need, I need my workouts, put it on this thing called the internet and we'll go from there. And then, and then when I showed up in oh six,

um, that was when, uh, people were just starting to put like pictures on the internet, but it was frowned upon because it slowed the upload of all the pages. And absolutely video was an absolute no, no. Yeah.

Like if you just wanted people, if you wanted to drive traffic away, put up a big ass picture or a video. Right. Butreg didn't care he was like fuck it we're doing pictures and video and if people get driven away we don't care but you know within a year or two it didn't matter all the speeds and everything was working now it works so good that there's some like kid in china who could turn off our country for three months. The internet got so good. Yeah. With one click, it could all end for us right now. Holy shit. What is going on?

You're in a weird profession, dude. Which one? I kind of have two roles. I'm a professor and I'm a journalist. Oh, God. They're both so weird. They're both so weird. No, yeah. I mean, I feel both so weird. They're both. No.

Yeah. I mean, I feel like it's strange times for a lot of professions, but maybe it's a extra strange for both of mine. Would you want to be, would you want to be a professor, a journalist or a cop? Hmm. God.

Well, I feel like sometimes I, I am a cop to my students. Yeah. Yeah, man. This book you wrote, and I always – it's like I used to work with disabled adults, and I always messed up the – I would call it alcohol fetal or fetal alcohol syndrome. I always got it backwards, and I do that with your book too. So I'm going to look at it before I – the comfort crisis.

I always want to say the crisis comfort the comfort crisis uh what what a cool book and then you wrote this other book before then in 2017 with uh maximus maximus body yep i did i helped him write that i was sort of the ghost writer on that one um yeah i've known him for a while he's a good guy he's a big dude he's a beautiful body um when you when you when you were younger and you read a malcolm gladwell book did you have aspirations i mean i mean how he must be stoked right he writes such cool books so many people buy them um they're fun they're they're easily digestible. Everyone likes it. Like even the people who don't like it, like it. And they keep reading more of his stuff. It's, it's like kind of candy for the brain, right? All the numbers and stats and stuff you can apply to

your own life. When your book, when you wrote your book, did you know you had something like that? Well, that's a good question. I mean, I don't know if i do have something like that um i mean i feel like you do well that's good i'll take that compliment yeah it's just candy it's two stories being weaved at once right the story of your trip to the arctic and then and then the story of scientists who are who are trying to prove what i don't know if they're trying to prove but they are proving what you're experiencing. And you weave the two together. You shuffle the deck together. Yeah, exactly. Look, like I've always thought like if we really just wanted pure information, right, we could just go to a textbook. Now, why doesn't anyone do that? Well,

that's because textbooks are boring as hell. Okay. So what isn't boring? What isn't boring is stories. Stories are how humans communicate. They're the reason that humans are the apex species we are because we can tell each other, uh, we can communicate information about the future, about different ideas, abstract ideas in the form of stories. So stories really speak to us. So if I want to get you to a point where you can grapple with this complicated, semi-boring concept, I can get you in there with a story, right? And I mean, Malcolm Gladwell is like the expert of this, right? You read his books and everything kind of starts with this story and you're like, what's going on here? You're kind of meeting characters. You're getting really curious. There's a little bit of suspense. And then there's this moment of change where your brain kind of goes, oh, aha, you've learned something new.

Now, if he would have just started with this new concept, like people would just be like, oh, this is kind of boring, right? If I just start telling you about numbers and data and figures, it becomes a little boring. But if I can get you in there with a tale about humans that you can identify with, all of a sudden it becomes a little more interesting. And were you, were you ecstatic when you saw the book did so well? Yeah. You know, look like writing a book.

I mean, it's a lot of work. It's crazy work. Oh God. And it's, it's, um, you know,

you basically lock yourself in your home office for two years and you talk to sources. I go out in the world and do a lot of, you know, interesting things. So that's always fun. But a lot of it is very lonely and you're just kind of like pouring yourself into it and you have no idea. And then you just send the thing out in the world and it's like, all right, well, there's, you know, two years of 80 hour weeks and we'll see what happens, you know? And so the fact that, um, it has resonated with people is super cool. Super cool. Cause it just feels like rolling some dice. Um, you, you could get a job at seven 11 or no, let's say Pete's coffee is hiring down the street from my house, 20 bucks an hour. And you could work there, um, uh, eight hours a day,

knowing that you'd make $ a day before taxes and after a year you'd be offered health insurance i mean there's like you can see the goal you can see the goals and the doors that unlock to give you benefits and you can't see that with a book no you can even see maybe it costing you money you could have spent all that time making it publish it maybe spend some of your own money to travel to places. And fucking next thing you know, it's like in one of those 50% off bookstores like stacked to the ceiling. I don't know if they still have those anymore, but I grew up in Berkeley, California. Those were everywhere. Yeah, totally.

No, it's interesting. as like little venture capital projects where they're gonna buy say 10 books and they're gonna give advances to those 10 books. And they're gonna expect that nine of those books are not gonna make up the advance. They're probably gonna lose a little bit of money on them. But they're looking for that one because one of them is going to make significantly more,

really resonate with people and sell a lot. So the classic example is, what were those? Do you remember those weird vampire books that were popular? Anne Rice? No, they were more like... Oh, the Twilight ones? Yeah, the Twilight ones. Yeah.

That brought in like 75% of the revenue for Penguin Random House that year. Everyone got massive bonuses so really i mean that's what they're looking for right it's like we're gonna we're gonna buy a bunch of books we're gonna publish a bunch of books and we're hoping for that one damn vampire book to just skyrocket us into another dimension i didn't do twilight i didn't do twilight no i didn't either i mean but a lot But I did do a little bit of Anne Rice. Did you do Anne Rice? Did you do any Anne Rice?

No. No, I didn't. She was interviewed with the vampire. That ended up being the movie that I think you may have not. God, that's so long ago. Tom Cruise and maybe Brad Pitt. It was a crazy cast. Yeah, I know the – I'm familiar with the movie.

I don't think I watched it though. Is it one I should be taking in here? No, no. The books are incredible. I mean, the books kind of swept me away and i and i'm not a fiction guy at all okay i'm not a fiction guy at all all right i'll check oh shit she died oh no and it was recently yeah recently hey let's see if she died of covid see if she died of covid look real quick i want to see see if she got if she died of COVID. Look real quick. I want to see. She got it. What are your thoughts about words? About words?

Yeah. What do you think about words? What do you think words are? Do i mean i think about using them for a purpose you know to communicate an idea to get to entertain people oh shit to give them information oh no sorry i interrupted to give people information um Yeah. To give people information in a way that's engaging and entertaining. I mean, I think words are ultimately, you know, how we find, how we communicate so we can find reward in life. Right. Some sort of meaning and communicate information. But in the way that I use them is similar in a way I do agonize over words. I can tell you that. I mean, like, you know, I'll spend three days on a paragraph. That is not a good use of time. It's really not, but like, I can't not do that.

It's like, that's my job to be a freaking psychopath about sentence placement and how a sentence is constructed and all that kind of stuff. There's this guy I heard say this the other day. His name is Israel Adesanya. Oh, the fighter. The fighter. And he said that the difference between LeBron James and Michael Jordan is the way they make people feel. That's interesting. He said they're both – I'm paraphrasing.

Sorry, Israel, if I'm fucking this up. But basically they're both equally as good basketball players, but the greatest is the one that made the audience feel better. And that's what he's going to do as a fighter. He's going to make the audience feel something that they've never felt before by his artistry, by his movement, by his, you know, and when you told me that you agonize over paragraph, I wonder if that's why, because you read it and you're like, that says what I wanted to say, but it doesn't feel, I don't know if it's conveying the feeling. the feeling? Yeah, I think that, I mean, just a single word can totally change what happens in a person's mind as they, um, read a sentence, what they, what they think of how they're viewing things. I mean, there's certain words that really speak to humans. You think of the work of Carl Jung and symbols. There's certain things that are just like you hear that,

and as a human, you get this deep sense of something bigger, but you also can picture that. Certain things stand for things to us. Making sure that you're using the right word is very important about how the reader perceives what is happening when you're trying to tell a story. All right. And like the English language is just has so many words and, you know, I tend to default to let's make this readable and simple, but at the same time, like every now and then you just have to use the perfect word that might be a little more abstract for people, but at the same time, like every now and then you just have to use the perfect word

that might be a little more abstract for people, but they're like, oh, wow. Right. Like I want to get you through the words quickly. Cause that's the 10, that's the type of books that, that I have always gravitated to. Like if I'm struggling to read something or kind of like my mind's going off in other places, I'm like, I'm out. I'm just, I'm out. But books that I can just cruise through, like what is it about them? And I think it's an ease of readability. I think there's a fact that there's a story where you want to know something happening in the future. You're also picking up new information. And so my goal is to just try and do that basically. Digestible.

digestible. Yeah. Digestible digestible. I think what, I think what can tend to happen, I mean, especially among professors. And I think too, among a lot of journalists and writers, nonfiction writers is that they sometimes forget that the average person like doesn't have a lot of the context that we have, like we're embedded in this stuff all the time. Right. And I think that sometimes we default to almost trying to impress other professors or impress other journalists. You talk at like a very high level, but it's like, that's not your audience, right? It's like your audience needs, and you're not bringing it down to them because that, that has like a strange connotation. What you're really doing is like, you're just speaking directly to them. Like you, like you would, if you were sitting at a, at a bar and having a beer or at a coffee

shop. Right. Um, yeah. I feel as if Michael is part of the archaic revival movement. I dig it along with liver King, Wim Hof, functional fitness, et cetera. Logan Mars. It goes, sorry. Did you want to say something, Michael?

Go ahead. Yeah, I would say that. Yeah. That's an interesting, uh, comment. I mean, I definitely think I definitely look at things through an evolutionary lens. I mean, I think that can tell us so much about ourselves. Like the idea of this book, the comfort crisis is that, you know, as the world has become more and more comfortable over time, we've lost a lot of the things that used to keep us healthy, right?

So if you think about it, it's like, why do people want to be comfortable all the time in the first place? Well, that's because for 2.5 million years doing the next most comfortable, next easiest thing every single time that gave us a survival advantage, right? When you have access to food, eat as much of it as you can, right? Don't move any more than you have to because you're just burning extra calories and food is at a premium. Stay out of the weather, right? You don't want to be cold. You don't want to be too hot. Stay out of the weather, right? You don't want to be cold. You don't want to be too hot. You just always avoid risk, right? And that worked for a long time, kept us alive. But now that the world has become so comfortable with, you know,

calorie dense food everywhere, we don't have to, I mean, you could walk a thousand steps in a day and still survive, right? Risk is no longer, oh, there's a tiger lurking in the bushes, or I have to, you know, get from point A to point B across this sort of dangerous terrain. It's like presenting in front of our boss or whatever. But we still sort of fear those sorts of things. And I think this is backfiring. That's the general argument I'm making in the book. And so I look at, the book looks at a handful of discomforts that we've essentially removed from our lives that used to really steal us and keep us not only physically healthy, but also mentally healthy as well. You know, I think that you can tie a lot of the really increasing rates of anxiety, depression, dissatisfaction with life,

with the fact that we have it so damn easy now, which seems counterintuitive, right? But it's just taken away. It's just totally removed a lot of people's perspective, I think, on how we have it in the grand scheme of time and space. Yeah, man, there's so many doors open. I don't know which one I want to travel down. We had this guy on. He he was head he was a psychiatrist he was head of the largest psychiatric center in stockholm what country is stockholm in stockholm sweden thank you and he basically said that what we are that the safer human beings get um that the more unsafe they get and he explained it and I'll send you the video. He did a TED talk

on it. I'm not articulating it very well right here. But basically what we have now is a society that is completely risk averse and unable to do risk assessment, which has caused a massive mass psychosis. He said he saw it about 20 years ago, but he didn't know it was going to spread so quickly. And obviously we saw it spread through the use of um the confusion of what the issue versus the symptom in in terms of covid i'll talk we'll circle back on that but um and he said basically 20 years ago the people who would come into the psychiatric center had seen horrors that he can't even tell me like shit that like dude you like no and now it's a it's a it's a woman whose dog got run over or it's a man whose girlfriend broke up with him and they're and

they're psychiatric unit and i'm just like and when i was reading your book i was thinking of all oh yeah this guy god this guy's so good yeah the security junkie syndrome so good yes check that out thanks yeah and i'll send you a link afterwards it's so good yeah the security junkie syndrome so good yes that's right i'll have to check that out thanks yeah and i'll send you a link afterwards it's so good um there was this friend of mine in college um he he was from germany and he was going back to germany like in two weeks and there was this girl he really liked who really liked him and they hadn't hooked up and we were i was going to her house for a party i'm like yo dude let's go and he's like nah i'm not going i go why he goes cause I don't want to hook up with her.

I go, what do you mean? I'm like, he's like, dude, I really like her. I'm like, so I dig deep into that. And he's like, no, I'm like, I'm like, why? He's like, I don't want to go home and be hurt. I'm like, you don't want to go fuck dude, hurt yourself to death. Jump on the sword, fall in love with her, make the best out of these two weeks and cry your whole fucking way back on the plane are you fucking kidding me get in there and feel that shit and that always stuck with me that story and i told him like dude we could die tomorrow yeah go hurt go fall in love with her make it so the next five years of your life are ruined because you're writing her letters from fucking germany who cares um but he didn't and he didn't and i and i because this book that this book that you um write it there it's um obviously we know anyone who's like hiked el cap that the

12-hour trip to the top and back or is it el cap or what is it half done whatever that one is in yosemite that everyone and their mom's done that's a great trip if you leave like at six in the morning because you go you get to the top and back and you go through all these emotions right oh yeah so it's nuts you never you know you don't even expect it you're like i'm just gonna hike this shit down and then halfway up you're having these crazy thoughts and you're pissed and then you're happy and you're angry with the people you're at with and then you love them and you're like what is going on the weirdest trip yeah dude totally you know what i'm talking about oh yeah because yeah you're going too slow you're going too fat we don't have to do things like that anymore. That used to be a,

that used to be a part of daily life, right? We used to get thrust into, um, these challenges and it was what nature was showing us. We weren't selecting this, right? Nature would throw us these challenges. And what would happen is that, you know, along the way, we would really learn a lot about our potential. So if you fail in the past, failure often meant death. So you had to dig deep, but each time that you would dig deep, you would learn something about yourself. You'd be like, holy shit. I didn't think I was going to make it out of that one, but I did. So what does that say? I'm a little more, you sound like a UFC fighter. That's why they fight half those guys. That's the story. They try to explain what you a ufc fighter that's why they fight half those guys that's the story they try to explain what you're just explaining to me that's why they fight to see

yeah to see how bad surprised yeah and and i think that the world you know the world obviously doesn't show us those sorts of things anymore now and i think that we've lost a lot from that so kind of going back to what you were talking about with um you know the psychiatrist in sweden and what he was observing. It's really interesting because you start to see in that 1990 about, I think it was 92, mental health rates among young people start to get a lot worse and a lot worse. And what the researchers think it was, is that that's when helicopter parenting really starts. The reason for that is because there were some big examples of kidnappings in the media. Now, kidnapping was actually going down.

But there's all these stories about terrible kidnappings in the news. And so parents are like, stop going out. You can't go outside alone anymore. You can't, you know, no more like just come home at sundown thing, like hang out inside. I want to know where you are all the time. Helicopter parenting, right? And that seems to be what has really kicked off a generation that has poor mental health rates. Because we know that if you have a ton of challenges and traumas in your life, like just a ton, those type of people have poor mental health. At the same time,

if you have no challenge in your life and challenge is completely removed, those people have equally poor rates of mental health. There's a sweet spot where we need enough of this kind of stuff that is bad, that we view as like a sort of trauma or a challenge because it teaches something about ourselves and that we can get through that and survive. And it gives us, it just tells us something about ourself that's good, that we can handle things, you know? I think we have get through that and survive. And it gives us, um, it just tells us something about ourself. That's good that we can handle things. You know, I think we have less of that now. The story you tell of, um, Aaron Sorkin is, is awesome. It reminds me of my, it reminds

me of my childhood. None of my stories turned out as good as his, but, but that, that was the story of my childhood. Do you want to tell that story? Yeah. So he was, um, so Aaron Sorkin, famous screenwriter. You could be just like, no, fuck off. You tell it. Yeah, I can, I can try if I get some of the details wrong. Um, I just read it yesterday.

So, so if you fuck it up, I'll tell you what you actually wrote. Yeah. It's going to be fresher. It's going to be fresher for you. So basically, um, he lives in New York city. He City. I don't know what he was doing with his life at the time, but he's young. And he lived in this apartment with some people. And he gets home one night and no one's there. It's kind of a terrible night in New York City. No one was going out on the town. There was nothing to do. The radio was broken. The the tv was broken the only damn thing in that apartment

was a keyboard typewriter so he goes well something else to do i'm bored out of my mind i might as well just sit down and you know start writing something and he starts writing and he hasn't stopped from that that's what really kicked off his career as a screenwriter. He decided he's going to start writing screenplays for plays and TV and movies and all that sort of thing. And I think the lesson from that is that he had to face boredom, right? It's like there's nothing to do. He doesn't have any digital media that he can just lean into reflexively. Now, he says if the TV was working,

I would have sat down and just watched TV. Like that's the easy thing to do, right? So in the book, I talk about, I use that anecdote in a place where I talk about why boredom is actually a good thing. So the human brain evolved to be bored because it used to tell us that whatever we're doing with our time, the return on our time invested had worn thin. So let's pretend you and I are out hunting and gathering, right? We're sitting on this hill. We're like waiting for these animals to come through. Nothing's happening, but we need food tonight, right? So if we don't get food, we're going to starve. So boredom would kick in. It's this discomfort that's like, ah, we got to go do something else, right? Like, yeah, this is, I'm getting sick of this.

I don't like this. Go do something else. So we'd go pick potatoes or pick berries or whatever it might be, right? So boredom used to tell us to do something. And in the past, that something used to be more productive. But nowadays, when we feel boredom, what do we do? Pick up our phone. Pick up our phone, right?

We have a million really easy escapes from boredom. So the average person today, um, the data on this is crazy and it keeps rising. Like it's, it's even a higher number than since I published the book, which was in may, uh, the average person spends 12 hours engaged with digital media. And that's from all formats. That's from cell phones, engaged with digital media. And that's from all formats. That's from cell phones, TV, computers, all that kind of stuff. So I'm not saying at all that these things are inherently bad at all. I think there's a lot of great stuff online and whatever. But I am saying that maybe 12 hours a day is quite a bit, right? We've essentially killed boredom. And we know that boredom has a lot of pretty solid benefits. So it's associated with reductions in anxiety and depression.

And it's also associated with increases in creativity. This is really badass studies where the researchers will take two groups of people and they'll let one group do whatever they want to do. You know, they'll just sit in a room and like be on their cell phone. Then they'll take another group and they'll bore the hell out of these people. And the board group always comes up with more better answers on a creativity test. Like they just smoke the group that was not bored. It's because boredom gives your mind some time to rest, to wander. And that seems to lead to good ideas. It's one of the reasons why people tend to have their best ideas in the shower, right? You're not doing anything. Your mind's just off and wandering and it's like

the solution appears to what you were looking for. Yeah. Or, or, or, and I'm sure you're going to agree with this cardiovascular activity, go on the air runner in your garage and just walk backwards on the air runner. Oh, totally. Watch that creative monster startup. Um, there's a story about a kid. Um, he, he was, uh, um, he, he, um, he, he would get home from school at two and his friends didn't get home from school until three. So he'd go out in the front yard with his BMX bike and ride in circles until his friends came home and then they would all ride bikes together. But since he had an hour of free time where he was bored every day, the first day he learned how to ride. Cause no one was there with him, how to ride with no hands.

Second day, he learned how to do wheelies. The third day, he learned how to do bunny hops. Flash forward 10 years and he's the greatest bike rider in the world because he was bored waiting around for his friends for an hour. I made that whole story up, but I thought of that story. That's not a true story, but that is how bored works. And I see that with my kids. My kids, I don't let my kids watch TV except on Friday nights and Saturday after the sun goes down. And so like my seven-year-old plays the guitar every day. You got a guitar. My other kids now pick up drums. They now sing.

They think they're going to write songs. I just see boredom is to go outside and build a box and sit there and wait to try to catch the neighbor's cat with a stick under it. You know what I mean? It's fucking dope. Totally. And you got to be careful, especially with boys. They'll do some fucked up shit. You can't leave them alone too long.

You got to kind of have one eye on them. Yeah. And I think that's how kids learn about themselves. And they become more resilient by going outside and doing stuff like that. It's like when I was a kid, you know, we were allowed to go outside like all day. And so what would I do? It's like, you go to the playground, you fall, you, you hit your head. It's like, Oh, I learned not, don't do that. You know, you're going to, you're having interactions with other kids. You call some kid a shithead. He hits you in the head, then the face. And you're like, Oh, I guess I

got to be nice to people now. Right. Now all these like interactions are happening indoors. And a lot of times, um, behind screens, like on social media, it's like, it's no wonder kids' mental health is not doing well right now. It's like, I have a kid in one of my class, I have a class and I write about this in the book. Um, it's this big class of like 150 kids. It's a, it's a media fundamentals class. So we just kind of go over like all these different types of media and kind of history. Are you teaching that class right now? I am. Yep. Okay. Sorry. Go ahead. And I always pull them at the start of the semester. And I say, who thinks they have the most screen time in this class? And, you know, a bunch of people will raise their hand.

I'm like, all right, everyone raise your hand. You know, if you have eight hours, keep your hand up. If you have nine hours, keep your hand up. If you have 10 hours, keep your hand up. You know, I had a kid last semester who had 16 hours a day on his phone. 16. That is literally all your waking hours. Does that include like listening to books and like talking on the phone and everything?

So here's the thing is I go, dude, like, how is it possible that you're spending 16 hours a day? That is true. How is it possible? Yeah. So he just goes, TikTok, man. Just like, oh, my God. Like he just is in a vortex of TikTok all day. Oh my god. Like he just is in a vortex of TikTok all day.

So there's this story I read in Smithsonian many years ago. I've told the story 50 times on my podcast. But if you are not using your phone like this, then in all kindness, you're a fucking moron. So everyone who's listening to this, listen to this. I'm going to tell you something very, very fucking true right now. This Harvard professor was an entomologist. He was an artist, and he was a fucking long-distance runner. He would go up to his fucking cabin, and he only had one bowl there and one spoon. He would cook his food in the bowl with that spoon, eat it out of the bowl and spoon it did, and then he would go on his run. He would run six miles with his book. Then he would stop at the pile of shit that he had planted the day before where, you know, like some mashed up bananas with poop and that would attract a certain kind of bug. He would study the bugs. He would draw the bugs. Then he would run to the next step,

check stop six miles away. He would look at the next pile of fucking concoction he made to attract a different kind of insect at a different elevation at a different temperature. He would draw those bugs. He would study their behaviors and he would go to the next and he would come home and he'd go to sleep if you are not using social media like that you are a fucking idiot if you're browsing pussy on the internet you are a moron and you will never get ahead you will never be on my level i never ever ever ever use instagram except to fucking troll people like michael easter and get these motherfuckers on my podcast that's it exactly but see so that's that's a good point i don't look at pussy on the internet i don't i don't i don't we had we had a um elliot hustle on yesterday you make yourself great sorry for sorry for the women who are listening maybe it's

the same for you too but if you're a man make yourself great and you attract the pussy we had nick rodriguez on here from the b team he said the same thing i said how do you stay um not getting distracted by women well i don't chase women look at me you can't look at me i screwed that up guys i'm so lucky i would have been in your exact position i'm 49 now i didn't have to worry to worry about that. I spent my whole youth chasing pussy. It was a fucking mistake. I mean, I don't know if it's a mistake. It's fun. Girls are great. I love girls. I had so much heartbreak, and it's made me emotionally money or bringing you like serious, deep, creative enjoyment, like I'm speaking to what did you use your phone today? I got Michael Easter on here who wrote a book that was endorsed by the fucking CIA. He can call Dave Castro and be like, hey, I'm coming up to the ranch to interview you. This is the man. Use your phone for looking at pussy.

You fucking dipshit. Well, that's the lesson, right? see you fucking dipshit well that's the that's the lesson right is that it's like don't don't um we're not saying like get rid of this shit entirely because there's plenty of great stuff out there yeah if you're a juggler go find all the greatest jugglers on fucking instagram and only follow them and and practice amen that's that's it right but i think that i i will fully admit that i think the the algorithms are written to sort of work against us. But once you realize that, it's like what you're looking at is what you're going to see. So here's an example.

When I was working at Men's Health Magazine helping run the website, we used to get these complaints from people. They'd fucking write in and they'd be like, when I'm on Facebook facebook all you guys ever publish anymore is sex stories you go well guess what bud that's because that's all you click so that's look at look at mine look at mine it's just all buff dudes and pussy oh and it's yeah you got a watch there too okay it looks similar to mine with the watches and the fitness stuff yeah man we align there. Yeah. I think some of those stuff on the explore page too is also just based off like, what if you selected male or female when you went in there?

Because I know that the longer I stay off the explore page or the more I'm off my phone, if I go to the explore page, the more of women and different things like that, that it'll think it'll attract me down the rabbit hole will show up too. The more I'm on it, almost the less of it goes. Maybe it's because when I'm feeding the algorithm with my clicks, but it knows, it knows how to get you in the trap. Oh yeah. There's people who, there's MIT

grads who sit around a room for eight hours a day thinking of how do we get these morons to click? I'm one of those morons. It works on me a lot of the time like when did you get your first phone michael when did you get your first phone oh i would have been sometime in high school i think you know one of the basic text phones i like that's one of those things i always want to go back to a dumb phone and then something happens where like i get lost and i need google maps and it's just like oh damn i'm gonna be tied to this thing but dude this thing is so fucking beautiful it is they do a nice job they do a really nice job look at it it's like a little it's a this is a sin this is a i know but i do it but it's a sin i know i feel bad about it too the case it would be like putting a bag on Angelina Jolie's face when you humped her.

Go to hell for that. Oh, man. There is this saying that I talk about a lot on this show. I'm going back to what words mean. And it is naming is the origin of all particular things it's in this dao de ching um uh this is the stephen mitchell translation um the pocket edition and as i've gotten i always suspected that it was beyond true, that words were magical, that you could literally point at a woman's purse and say it's a chainsaw and a bunch of people would believe it. Like you can really fuck with people with words, and you can also do it with concepts and with theories.

with concepts and with theories, an example would be, um, you, we, we, the media keeps saying we have a homeless problem. And what that does is that points everyone to the fact that we have a homeless problem, but that's not the problem we have. We have a drug problem and the manifestation of it is a homeless problem. And so then if you address, um, homelessness, you will, you don't, you'll never be a cure. You'll never you'll never. It's the same thing with chronic disease. There's some people who actually there's still a lot of people on the planet who think we have a problem with a virus. But that's absolutely not the problem at all. We have a problem. We have a lifestyle problem.

We know that because kids aren't dying. I mean, I don't know if you saw this morning, the CDC retracted 25 percent of childhood deaths. There were no childhood deaths anyway from it, but without explanation, they cut the number of childhood deaths. What did you say? It was a code error. Coding error. But what's weird is anyone can see the truth, but you have to be so careful with words. You have to be like, with words you have to be like okay what does homeless mean by the way that's a great misogi by the way i was homeless for two years and then i

lived in a car for five years i don't know if we'll get to that in this article but i wanted to share that with you if you want to do a crazy misogi there's also a movie called craigslist joe do you know that movie i've heard the name i haven't seen it though it's basically a guy who just lives off of like craigslist like so he calls someone really stay with you and i'll wash your dishes and then he's and he just with no money he just does the craigslist thing for that's great dude i love that it's in a brilliant it's a brilliant misogi and then the ultimate misogi by the way i know i'm all over place is stillness if you really really want to try the crate it's the past like and unfortunately vipassana requires a vaccination now but vipassana is like the i in my in my opinion is the

you know and you touch on that in your book loneliness is the and boredom is the is the place to enter right and i think that, it's interesting because you know, one thing that I've sorry, I opened a ton of doors there. Sorry. There's a lot of doors. We'll, we'll pick one, pick a door, any door. The okay. So like, I know a lot of people who, you know, could run a hundred miles right now, you know, and they're tough shit. Crazy. They couldn't sit,

they couldn't sit inside a room with their own thoughts for 10 minutes. So that tells me there's a, there's a little bit of an imbalance there, right? It's like, the hell are you running from man? Right. So I think that, um, one thing that I've tried to talk to people when I talk about this book is I think people hear discomfort and they go, Oh, and they associated immediately with like, Oh, a hard workout. And then I went in an ice bath and then I did a sauna and it was really hot. It's like, we're talking about a lot more things than that. You know, I'm not saying like, obviously that stuff is great, but we need to like uncover like all the different layers that we can get here. Because I think that's what ultimately is going to like round out a person and open some doors that maybe they don't want to open,

but that are going to lead to a bigger benefit for people, you know? Yeah. Go tell your wife of 20 years that in the beginning of the relationship, you cheated on her for three months. What's harder doing that? We're going for a hundred miles. You want some discomfort? Yeah, dude. Shit. Yeah. So it's, uh uh there's levels to this shit there's definitely a lot of levels you know it's like there's so many things that you know i think

that we we're always going to want to do the next most comfortable easiest thing and um sometimes even things that are uncomfortable become relatively easy for people it's like what's the one thing you really don't want to do? It's like that Joseph Campbell quote, right? The cave you fear holds the treasure you seek. I mean, I think that's like so true across life. You know, it's like, what's the one thing that you're just like, I don't want to do that.

That tells me you should probably be doing that. Hey, I have a bad back, like a really bad back. Like when I wake up in the morning, like I have to lean against the wall to take a piss like i can't even touch my knees yeah it's so bad i'm stuck right and then i take a really hot shower i have a cup of coffee and i'm good to go i can touch like i you know what i mean like i can touch my toes i'll you know i can run and deadlift and do everything um but but i've had 20 you know like i could call kelly star edit anytime i wanted i i have 20 of the fucking best body movers healers in the world have been on my podcast and they all offer me afterwards when we get up there here's my phone number call me we'll

fix your back nah i'm good i'm attached to this shit how come i haven't called them like i don't know i kind of like it maybe you like the process of like there's a rebirth there every morning man it's just like fucking i'm a moron i'm a moron yeah it's like you get 30 sounds like you get 30 years younger every morning after you after you have your cup of coffee it's just like dude it's crazy it's crazy that is pretty wild um did you did you have any injuries sustained from that trip in the arctic michael easter went to the arctic for uh a month 30 days correct yep yep uh 30 days into no man's land into a place uh where maybe other humans had never been yeah i, it's very possible because we, you get dropped off by a plane like this, you know,

plane that is the size of like a Snickers bar basically. Yeah. The description of the plane is dope in the book. How you keep referring to the wings is duct good, a different kind of duct tape. Oh dude, they are like you go, you, you want, it's basically a frame like a light metal frame that's wrapped in, um, there's a technical term for it, but it is effectively duct tape. It's like this tape that they wrap around that you go push it.

It goes in. I mean, it is like plasticky fabric. What's the name of the plane? Sousa will pull it up. Yeah. It's a PA super cub, I think is what they're called a PA 12 super cub. So they were, there's this run of them. Yeah, there's this run of them made in, I think, mostly the 40s.

And now they're still just like coveted. So the one that we were in had been crashed a couple of times. They always rebuild them because they're just great. Yeah, you were in that one that was rebuilt like to 185 horsepowers. Yeah. Okay, so that wing, that's just a frame with some material pulled over it tight. Yeah, yeah. Oh, man.

I don't like that plane with the word Garth written on it. Yeah, dude. And the great thing, too, is that, I mean, being a pilot for one of those planes, it selects for a certain type of person right yeah like you did meth in your youth and you need to get away yeah it's uh it's totally i mean there's a lot a lot of people in alaska are going up there to kind of escape from something and so you get kind of these pilots that are like they're interesting characters and they're people you're like you know if i you know, if I don't know if I would necessarily trust you with my life, but I got no other option to get out there.

So please try to be responsible this ride. You know, um, it's definitely a, it's definitely a job that doesn't have, well, it has a lower life expectancy, I would say than a lot of other jobs. So those dudes, those dudes probably don't even have insurance. Huh? Those guys don't have insurance for that shit. Oh yeah. Who the hell knows? I don't know. We had, we had a pretty damn good pilot. Um, and so definitely props to him. Um, but yeah, there's a, I've heard some stories that didn't make me feel great to get in that plane. That's for sure. So you, so you get up there and I wanted to did you sustain any injury like do you have any kinks in your back from sleeping and just still do you have any wounds from that trip that are still with you okay so i know but going in what my main concern was was rolling ankles because i've had

just terrible ankles all my life like and you talked about that in the book. Yeah. Played a lot of basketball as a kid. And just like, I used to go out trail running in the desert and I would routinely roll an ankle, you know, and I'm thinking, okay, if I'm out there and I get like a bad one, that could be, that could be pretty bad. I mean, if we're like 12 miles out from camp and it's getting dark, I mean, the temperatures drop, you know, below zero, you're totally exposed. Weather can get gnarly. I mean, it could literally be a life-threatening situation to roll an ankle. So I had to do a ton of work to just get those things as stiff as possible and, you know, ready for action. And it took a while, but I got out there and nothing rolled. Thank God. And yeah, haven't had one since. I was working with a dude named Doug Kachijan

who was out of New York City. He's got a place called Resilient PT Performance. He's a brilliant dude. He was an SF guy. He was a Air Force pararescue guy. So he's got a really wicked background. It was fun working with him. I followed him after I heard about him in your book

because he's Armenian and I'm Armenian race. And I choose people. I fit in because I choose things and people by their race. That's the way to do it these days. And, um, and he's quite the guy. He, uh, he's, he's a baller. I mean, he knows he rolls with some cool cats and he followed me back and he, yeah, he followed me back, which was kind of crazy. Yeah. Shout out to him. I mean, he went to Columbia, I guess, during when he was in the Air Force. He talks funny, right?

He talks like my dad. He talks like an Armenian dude. Like, he got an Armenian accent and shit. Yeah, a little bit. A little bit, yeah. It's okay. I can say that. You can't say that, but I can say it.

He talks funny. He sounds like my dad. He got his doctorate at Columbia. I think when he was in the air force and then moved out of the air force and now has this facility where he works with people so yeah he's he's the man i i really like i mean he's kind of like in the in the model of a k-star type where he's really molding sort of the mobility and the pt with the um traditional workout you know so he's he's definitely the man.

And he works in Hollywood? He does not. He does a lot of his stuff out of the East Coast. He's got a facility. I think they have three facilities. It's like him and two other guys. It's him. Maybe I'm confusing him with someone else.

Maybe I'm confusing him with someone else. You might be. I don't know. Yeah, he's got a facility in New York City, one in Connecticut, and one in new jersey were there any other armenian guys in your book one's a lot one one is not a lot my next book i'll make sure to include just as many armenians as possible i'm gonna start selecting for our thank you it's the way to do it dude it's the way to do it these days choose everything universities be like hey look uh i need to talk to a psychologist but armenians only like yes armenians only armenian theory um uh there was another guy in your book that i wanted to um

that i uh got interested in but then i found out he trains with the azerbaijani um wrestling team i think a big old buff white dude uh kazzy chazzy yeah yeah i really wanted to like him but he trains azerbaijan there in armenia at war so i had to cross him off the list no i, I'm like a podcast slut. I just look for people. Yeah. He'd be, yeah. He'd be a good guy to talk to that guy is, um, I mean, he's beyond brilliant, you know, because of my job, I talked to a lot of really smart people, um, you know, Nobel prize winners, all that kind of stuff, all kinds of crazy scientists. And that dude is like, probably the most intellectually impressive person I've ever talked to. And he's like 29 years old, and it just fucking frustrates the hell out of me. But he's a trip to talk to.

He's a good dude. Can you understand him when he talks? You know, some smart people, they're just like – like when I have a – I don't know if you know. Do you know who the Carnivore MD is, Paul Saladino? Yeah, I was on his podcast. He's a good dude okay yeah but when i have him on i gotta like really slow him down i can't let him just start using words like oscillates and like yo yo yo dude chill yeah too far ahead of the pack just say like plastic yeah um exactly how about this guy cashy can he talk so that like you follow him or does he use like four words in a row and three concepts in a row that you don't know?

And so you're like, shit, I'm lost. So we've become really good friends. And I've learned how to understand him over time, for sure. I mean, he's definitely good at bringing things down. And he wants to kill me a lot of time because I'm always, give me an example. Give me an example of that. Or a metaphor. always, give me an example. Give me an example of that. Yes, or a metaphor. Give me a metaphor.

Give me an example. And so he's gotten pretty good at that over time. So yeah, I just actually spent a couple of days at his house in Austin, February. So last month. And I mean, we just sit and talk for like hours and hours and hours. And his wife is like, thank God he has someone to talk to about his, you know, big ideas. Cause I'm sick of listening to, yeah, it's a good time. Um, uh, Greg Glassman was like that. He would just, just be sharing ideas. I hung out with him so much over 15 years and just hours and hours of sharing these ideas. And really I wanted to hear them all,

but I just couldn't, I would get like, I would get like, and I have tremendous focus, but I would just get burnout. I would just be like, you know, just like, I need a drink. Yeah. I think the moment I haven't talked to Greg a ton, but I've talked to him a handful of times. And I think the moment that I realized that greg is like an intellectual freak is um for you're on the phone and he was like you know it's like uh it's like the number pi 3.14 and then he rattled off like 25 digits of pi and i was just like i was just like in that moment i'm just like what is happening like this dude is on another level he's definitely like he's definitely got a lot going on inside that head. And it's, he's a brilliant dude, man.

Did you, you've dabbled with cross. Are you regular CrossFitter? No, but I've, I've like covered the sport. I mean, I'm, you know, did a story on Dave, did a story on Greg. So I spent some time and, you know, familiar enough. So. And why don't you spend more time doing it you don't like i've done i've done stuff off the website um but basically i've just always had access to either a gym when i was working at the magazine they had a pretty swagged out gym um or i had my garage so i would do the programming i just haven't gone oh right yeah that's like me too yeah yeah that's me

too yeah yeah that's me too i i do like crossfit light but i try to do it like did you work out multiple times a day i try to do it like three times a day you do crossfit light three times a day yeah you know what i mean like like like go in the garage ride the assault bike for 10 minutes while i watch a michael easter interview then do 50 burpees as fast as i can done you know what i mean like just want that okay i got 20 you know that's fresh for 5-10 minutes and then and then later on in the afternoon do another 20 minutes something and then at night at 10 o'clock at night do another but the whole time like i said multitasking gotta have yeah michael easter book or something going yeah no that's cool do you work out multiple times a day not multiple times i'll usually do

an hour a day. Usually at the end of the day, I was doing it in the morning and I found that it was kind of taking my, my writing time is in the morning. So I experimented. I was like, Oh, I'll work out from like eight to 9am. It's like, no, I still got some good energy for the writing left by eight. And I found that it was impeding on that. So I'm usually working out like, you know, right before dinner, I'll, I'll get an hour, hour and a half in, you know, and then usually Sunday I'll do, I'm like right on the edge of the desert in Vegas, like amazing trail network, you know, red rock cacti. I mean, it's just unbelievably beautiful. So every Sunday I'll usually do a relative long ish run for me. So what's, what's the most common reptile you see?

So what's, what's the most common reptile you see? Um, a lot of lizards I've seen run into some snakes. You'll see a lot of Jack rabbits out there. I'll take my dog and he is a, he's a bird dog. So he'll just like hunt anything. And, uh, he just loses his mind out there. That's the best for him. Cause it's like this mental stimulation to trying to figure out like where the animals are chasing them down.

So yeah, it's pretty rad. Jack rabbits. That's the bugs bunny one. They're the ones that sit upright they can be really tall right and they got the tall ears yeah i thought they're just goofy animals yeah they're cool though i i think i've only seen one in the wild ever and it was in joshua tree and i was kind of blown away because it looks nothing like your bunny rabbit. No, they're huge, man. They're super tall and they're awkward. The way they kind of like lumber is just very strange, but they're, they're super cool to see. You'll sometimes see big horn sheep out there,

which those are some bad-ass animals because just there you can age them based on how, um, how their horns are, you know, their horns don't unlike, um, unlike say deer and elk there, how their horns are, you know, their horns don't unlike, um, unlike say deer and elk there, which have antlers that fall off every year. Um, sheep, their horns grow like

throughout their life. So you can figure out if you can get a good look at them, you can figure out how old they are, you know, because there's a ring for every year. And they're also just the most wicked climbers ever. Like those things can just pop up the face of the mountain in like two seconds flat. So it's always fun to go out there because you see things like that. I go out there with my dog and you are immediately reminded that humans and on the grand scheme of things, we're just pathetically athletic. Like we're just, we're just not good at athletic things. Right. One of the things you talk about in your book, which was fascinating to me is, um, and I'm paraphrasing, but you have these animals that can do these amazing things like, you know,

monkeys and orangutans and gorillas. But then one of the things you talk about that we can do that they can't do is carry weight on the side. Like we can pick up a 75 pound dumbbell and carry it, you know, a hundred yards. And I was like, wow, I never even thought of that. Yeah. So we're the only, so we're good. We're basically good at two things as animals in the animal kingdom, um, running long distances slowly. So we're pretty wicked endurance athletes that only really applies. We're only the best if it's hot outside. Okay. So we're really good at cooling ourselves. We sweat, we breathe in such a way that keeps ourselves cool. Um, when it gets cold out, then all of a sudden, um, sled dogs are by far the most elite endurance athletes on the planet. Like they're unbelievable animals. You think they run four minute miles for about a hundred miles a day for weeks at a time. Okay. Wow. Yeah.

Wow. Crazy. And there's actually, um, I think DARPA, but they can't do that. They can't do that at 75 degrees. Nope. They could not do that in the heat because they're really inefficient at cooling themselves. So dogs, um, most four legged animals pant as a way to expel heat. That's really inefficient. as a way to expel heat. That's really inefficient. So when it gets hot, the reason why we evolved to sort of run slowly, but surely in the first place is we would persistent hunt as we evolved. Okay. So you think about an animal that can't cool itself, but as a fast sprinter, we would run up on it. We would bump it. It would sprint say quarter mile, right? But then it would start

to get hot and it'd have to slow down. Well, we'd slowly but surely hit it again, bump it another quarter mile, another quarter mile. Eventually that animal gets so hot over time that it would basically fall over from heat exhaustion. And then we would just spear it and we would have ourselves some dinner. But now this brings up the second thing that we're good at, okay? Is that we're the only animal that can carry things for appreciable distances. So once we killed that that animal we would have to get it home the only animal that can pick stuff up and hoof the weight across ground right no other animal can do crossfit carry large loads carry loads and people will point out like i'll always have people go well horses and donkeys can carry stuff. It goes, yes,

but not on their own. We have to put the weight on them. Right. So there's a difference there. So this gave us a lot of different adaptations. It's like, it kind of explains why we have relatively shorter trunks. It explains why we have such a relatively strong grips compared to a lot of animals. Like we have a wicked strong middle finger. We have all these amazing adaptations that allow us to carry. And so as part of the book, you know, I talk about... Tell me about this middle finger thing. Wait, why is it? Tell me about some of the numbers around our middle finger. We can, our middle fingers are particularly strong. Most of our fingers are relatively strong, but it allows us to grip like, you know, a dumbbell or something or anything and just hold

it in our hands so we can carry it and our and our wrists also sort of lock into our arms so if you can see that and that just yeah increases the stabilization or that so your middle finger is the big daddy that's the strongest finger yeah yeah oh that's cool okay sorry sorry sorry um what was i saying oh so i think a lot of people are familiar with the idea that we can you you know, we kind of evolved to run longer distances because of that born to run book. If you ever read that. Amazing. Amazing. Yeah. Oh, it's wicked good. Wicked good. But I also argue that, you know, we're actually more so born to carry because once we ran, we would have to carry the meat home. And also gathering is essentially just walking around and then carrying food home. Right. And I think that shaped us just as much.

And in the book, like I talk about a lot of people jog, right. We still do the running thing. So not that many carry for a workout. Right. And so I, this is why I go and I meet with the guys who found a go ruck and are really trying to promote rucking as a, you know, a fitness activity. Who is that? Who's the go ruck guy? Um, so it was founded by a guy named Jason McCarthy and he's really promoting it as a sort of type of fitness you can do because for one, it gives you cardio benefits. You get a lot of the same cardio benefits as running, but you're also working your strength system. All right. So that's something that running doesn't give you.

And you, I think you talk about that a lot in your book, right? Yeah. Yeah. There's a whole section that like goes way deep into why we evolved to carry, um, the benefits of rucking and then also just generally the benefits of physical fitness in terms of health. I mean, I'm preaching to the choir here, obviously. Right, right. This is why Greg started CrossFit Health. But fitness is the best thing you can do to improve your health

and resist chronic diseases by far far or well kind of right food as well yeah did we lose him yeah i don't know that's a first uh-oh he's dropped off the computer. The computer is update is complete. There he is. Something went wrong. 350 episodes. I've never seen that. So, so I guess the nuance here is this activity is the best thing you could do, but the best thing you could stop doing was putting poison in your mouth totally

yes okay because i've heard him stand up in front of crowds and be like hey i'm the fitness guy and i want to tell you you can exercise away a bad diet you cannot you will get to the 95 line if you stop eating uh added sugar and refined carbohydrates yeah that's totally true right so so okay so So sorry. You were talking about rucking and Jason McCarthy before I rudely jumped out. No worries. Yeah. I mean, I think that's just the book that, you know, we get into the, the history of caring, why we are so uniquely adapted to carry as a species, what it does for us. And then a lot of the benefits of fitness. And I get into nutrition in the book, um, as well. Some of those ideas from Trevor,

the brilliant madman down in Texas. Um, all of these things we're talking about, um, Michael goes deep into, in the comfort crisis, of these ideas all of this stuff this book is so dense it literally you could pick it up and turn to any chapter and just start reading too and you won't even feel like you missed out like it's um and i and i highly recommend the audiobook he read that's you right yeah it was me it was a fun experience that can ruin that could ruin a book if someone someone reads it and they're shitty is that hard to do it oh way harder than i thought man like oh way harder i just i was shocked and it was it's funny because my publisher set me up with this uh recording studio here in vegas i get the address i'm like well this is an interesting part of town. And it's like below the strip, like pretty sketchy.

I pull up to this address and I'm like, it's just this brown brick building with like blacked out windows. One part, like one half of it is this closed down Puerto Rican restaurant. The other is just like totally unmarked. There's just a number. And it's like, all right, well, this is the number. I walk up and i press the button you know like i hear some rustling inside after like a couple minutes the door just cracks open it's this dude oh geez and he's like looking at me and he's like

you the writer i'm like i'm like yeah i'm. He goes, I get the fuck in here. So I go in. He literally says it like that? Yeah. And I'm like, this is the sketchiest shit ever. I get in and it opens to this room where there are platinum albums all over the wall. Like five Kenny Chesney platinum albums. The College Dropout platinum album.

Like a Mobb Deep platinum album. Allney platinum albums the college dropout platinum album like a mob deep platinum album all these platinum albums and i'm like were all these sorry i was like were all these recorded here and he goes yeah i go oh man that's crazy i didn't even know that this place was here and he just looks at me he goes that's the fucking point oh wow wow yeah it was awesome but we ended up becoming good friends what's going on here what is this bullshit what is this bullshit no no no no no no no no you were gone for two seconds so they jumped ship yeah i imagine go ahead go ahead sorry matt are you an asshole if you get a husky in the desert going back to what you were saying before these dogs are made to run in the snow 100 miles a day

for a month straight and like when i see these guys at the beach with their husky and santa cruz should i just be like you're a piece of shit well i mean they definitely shouldn't be out in the summer that's for sure like i don't take my dog out from like june to to august you know like you have a husky no i have a german short hair pointer but like oh yeah yeah that's a good that's that's a good uh hot weather dog right yeah they're but but like running when it's over 100 out like no way dogs can't do that you know they're just not they're just they just can't they're not physically adapted for it it's like asking a human to try and you know move a thousand pounds or something it's like moving a polar bear into into the mojave yeah yeah it's crazy i never have a dog i never thought of that i uh do oh yeah

i do have a dog i have a um a boar bull do you know what that is no that sounds interesting what is it? It's a cool dog. Um, Greg had one and he recommended I get one. It's basically just a guard dog. It's a, um, South African Mastiff. Oh, really? And I have this property here and I'd fenced in the whole property. And then I have a little, uh, rescue, uh, Basenji Chihuahua mix. So they're two like totally opposite dogs. But this dog, I highly recommend a Borble for anyone who wants an amazing guard dog. I mean, protects the kids like no other. And this dog is scary as shit.

Yeah. What does that look like? Can you bring it up so I can see it? And mine's really lean. I keep mine really lean. Oh, dude, that's like the dog from the sandlot. That's awesome. Yeah.

Yes, yes, yes yes yes yes and it's just a barking machine and it's got a beautiful bark but i keep mine really skinny you can see all its ribs it goes in we don't got a fat but it's still probably 120 pounds yeah it's like that oh wow yeah yes yeah it's scary uh you know i've had this dog three years and I've never walked this dog. It just runs around the property. Yeah. My wife's like, yeah. Very cool. Dave's dog is cool too. It's like, uh, that's a scary dog. Yeah. Um, it's an Argentinian something or other. I can't remember. Um, when I,

when I went and hung out with him for that men's health story dogo a dogo argentino yeah the the guy he he bought the dog was was there as bought the dog from was there as well so i heard like all about that breed they seem pretty badass i he when he got that dog i'm like you're fucking absolutely nuts and now that dog has i think he has to keep that dog separated from the other three dogs they have and it's a female yeah he might sounds about right based on what i dave's very progressive a lot of people probably don't know this he's very progressive he named his female dogo argentino doug doug i like it so good oh shit um michael in your book you mentioned by the way if you ever have to pee during this podcast you can get up and pee i did a pre-p i'm good i know okay but i just i i pride myself on the fact that

we allow our guests to do like whatever they want that's awesome i love it um you mentioned this group of people in japan it's just a quick side note you mentioned it's just like going through and you just there's a group of 500 000 people in japan how many people live in japan suza i guess that's important um 500 000 people who have quarantined themselves in their apartments not not related to covet at all but or sequestered maybe is a better word yeah can you tell me about that what the fuck is going on there yeah they're called the they have a name for them and i think it's kikimori something like that and they're these people they tend to be young it's like half a percent half a percent of the

population a little less than half a percent. Yeah. And they've, um, they've essentially just, yes, sequestered themselves inside their homes, but for like unbelievable amounts of time, like years and years and years, these people will not leave their rooms because they're so afraid of the world. And I think I, I, you know, in the book, I argue that's a very extreme symptom of modernity, especially living in cities. It seems that people are not as well adapted to live in cities as we are in the country and rural areas. So if you look at a lot of the research, the more the population, the higher the population density is, the less happy as a population people tend to be. So you look at, you know, there was this really fascinating study on 328 cities and which was most happy, which was least happy. And at the very bottom of the list was New York City because it's the most population dense.

So this is called the Savannah Theory of Happiness. It was created by a guy at the London School of Economics. And yeah, basically says that the more population dense the place you are, probably the less happy you're going to be. We just don't do as well in cities. I don't know if you've... I lived in New York City for a little while. That place drove me nuts. I mean, there's a small population of people that do seem to do well in cities, but they're

rare. They're the exception rather than the rule i used to go there a lot i would go there i've probably been there i don't know 50 times for a week at a time and of course when i visited it i i absolutely loved it i thought it was the fucking coolest place ever i i really do need to be alone a lot though like being alone is very very very very important to me i I, I, one of the things that fascinated me about your book is the, the use of the word lonely and the use of the word boredom. And the first time you used the word boredom, I was like, Oh, he better define this.

And then later I saw you give two fabulous definitions, uh, for it. And we talked about one of them in this book, um, or in this podcast already that already that, and you'll say it better than I can repeat it, but basically, and it is not the way it's used in modern times, which is fascinating, but it was when a human being realizes that the cost that he's not benefiting from what he's doing right now. And he should shift activities. He's not benefiting on the, on the level of survival being the goal that whatever however you're spending your time is not the wisest for survival and so you should switch to another activity and when i heard first for you to find boredom like that i was like fuck this

dude's a beast thank you michael like i just i need definitions for words like that i don't let my kids use words like that boredom disgusting um uh just words that don't mean shit to them. You know what I mean? Like, like, yeah, I'd rather they say bitch than, than disgusting and boredom. Like, like we know those words. I mean, it's just crazy to call a bug disgusting. What a waste. There's another one I heard. And I forget who it was from. I, I named it in the book. Um, some philosopher, you know, famous philosopher where everyone goes, oh, that person is important and smart. But he called it a desire for desires, which I thought was kind of interesting. Yes. Yes. You wrote that in the book. Thank you.

Yes. Yes. Tell us about that. That part's dope. That's it. Yeah. Just when the, in the boredom, just trying to get down to like, what is boredom? And this guy defined it as a desire for desires. And that sort of like stuck with me because when you're bored, it's like, you want to do something, but you don't know what that something is. And that's how my kids use it. Yes. A desire for desire. Yeah.

And the sort of like discomfort sets in. That goes back to the return on time thing is why boredom is uncomfortable, right? Because it's like this compelled us in the past to go do something that would increase our odds of survival. If we didn't have boredom kick on, we would sit on that hill hunting for 72 hours until we starved to death, right? You're sitting at home. Your mom tells you to go to your room. You're looking out your window and you're bored as shit. Then the neighbor's daughter comes out and starts mowing the lawn.

You're not bored anymore. Exactly. Exactly. Yeah. daughter comes out and starts mowing the lawn you're not bored anymore exactly exactly you yeah yeah there's a fly in the window and you and you think maybe i should kill the fly but then all of a sudden you get creative and you're like no i'll catch it with chopsticks exactly exactly do something so you make a little space i talk about you know, boredom is neither good nor bad. It's really what you do with it, right? Where does it take you that makes it good or bad? But I argue that because so much of our boredom is now taken by our cell phones, by all these other screens, that we're essentially just leaning into the most easy thing.

So the researcher I talked to on this, he called it, you know, the way that we deal with boredom now is essentially junk food for the mind. FanDuel Casino's exclusive live dealer studio has your chance at the number one feeling, winning, which beats even the 27th best feeling, saying I do. Who wants this last parachute? I do. Enjoy the number one feeling, winning, in an exciting live dealer studio, exclusively on FanDuel Casino, where winning is undefeated.

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Buy a stick in store at Costco, Walmart, Amazon, and other Canadian retailers. So my argument is that, you know, you hear a lot on like, quit using your cell phone, quit using your cell phone, quit using your cell phone. And it's like, yeah, you know, we do need to do that. We need to use it less. We need to do all that kind of stuff. But at the same time, when people say, take like two hours off their phone screen time, they go, oh my God, I'm bored and I hate this. I guess I'm just going to go watch Netflix. It's like your brain doesn't know the damn difference between those two at all, right?

So the real message I'm trying to say is don't think less phone, think more boredom. Because that'll take you into far more interesting places. You know, when you feel that compulsion, that discomfort in your, your next instinct is to pull out your phone, find something else, see where that takes you. So one thing I do every day is that I'll go for 20 minute walk outside and I won't take anything, you know, and I also don't really run with, with much in the desert. Cause when you have this, like when you're processing information from the outside world, like you have this, like when you're processing information from the outside world, like you would be on your phone or whatever it might be, um, your brain's

actually working pretty hard and you're, you know, you're focused on that. Whereas if you, uh, remove yourself from that, your mind tends to wander inward and that's where good ideas come from, right? It's like, you got to kind of chew on things in the background and then that answer whatever it is will kind of appear i um i watched that series uh yellowstone on netflix i watched that and um game of thrones i think those are the only two oh and ozarks those are my three in the last probably like 10 years that i've watched but but i started watching yellowstone you know i mean it's it's over now but um i i invited every single person in the cast to come on my podcast like if i'm a yeah if i'm gonna watch that shit then like like and i feel like

you would probably do the same like if you're gonna watch some show you'd be watching it you'd be like i wonder how kevin costner stayed in shape and what he ate on the set and i wonder what nutrition is like on the set and i went went, Hmm, I'm going to contact the director. And I'm like, there can't be, there can't be like these, I can't compartmentalize my life. There can't be these avenues where I'm just sitting at the beach. I mean, I can just sit at the beach in Hawaii and relax, but it better be to get bored. So then I start like, while I'm there, I'm like recharging the, the, my connection with my connection with the higher power so that I can do more podcasts again. Like there has to be a synergy with the life.

Gandhi said that you can't separate church and religion and state. And the reason why you can't is because your life is your religion. How I speak to Michael Easter is my representation of, of God. How I, how I, um, to treat my kids, how I drive my car. Yeah. Yesterday, someone, someone flipped me off. He was walking, he was walking through an intersection and I drove through it and I was in a hurry and he flipped me off. I'm like, I, yeah, I got it. Yeah. I think there's sort of, it's like kind of an indictment of, uh, of hustle culture that we live in too.

Right. It's like, you know, all these hacks to do like the next, the next thing. But I think that people really do need these sort of like slower periods to process things in the background. You can't always be, I mean, it's like driving your car at 90 miles an hour all the time. It's eventually you're going to run out of gas. You're going to run out of oil. You're going to have to get that shit changed.

And unfortunately you can't hack that, you know? So I do think we need more, more of these kinds of slower periods that we seem to not have anymore. I think COVID probably ramped that up because people are just sitting around like just shoving, you know, media into their minds and foods down their throat. And I don't know, it's a strange period. And you don't have to go to the Arctic. You can just not turn on your Netflix. Yeah. Go out, just go outside. Like one of the things I look at in the book is all the

crazy benefits of nature. It's like humans evolved in nature. We're adapted to it. It's like, it does a lot of good things for us psychologically. And there's all this really fascinating research that basically suggests that there's these sort of different doses of nature that we seem to do well with. So like 20 minutes outside in just a city park seems to reduce our stress, seems to make us a little bit more productive when we get back. But we also know we need wilder types of nature for longer periods. So there's five hours in a sort of more like a state park. It's a little bit wilder, but it's not Central Park. But, you know, it's not so far removed from the city.

That seems to increase levels of happiness and decrease depression. And then at the very top, there's this really fascinating concept called the three day effect. And it basically says that after three days in really wild backcountry nature, some fascinating stuff happens to the human brain. We start to ride what are called alpha waves. Now, these are these sort of slow, chill waves that are also found in experienced meditators. And they're associated with just like feelings of calm, feelings of well-being, more self-awareness, like all these amazing things start to happen. Things slow down. We start to think differently. And we don't get those alpha waves in modern living because we're always just so go, go, go. We read what are called beta waves. So there's a strong argument to spend at

least three days like deep in the wild every year, if possible. And I'll talk to people and they're like, I can't, I'm not getting in a tent, dude. Like, fuck you. So my, my answer to them is, you know, rent a cabin. But like, like, don't turn on the TV when you're there. Don't use your cell phone, right? Because a lot of the research shows that the minute you start using your cell phone, all those benefits get erased because it sort of takes your attention into this zone that is more like home and you're not focused on all this stuff happening around you. A couple of years ago, I went to Hawaii for a travel wedding and it was four days long. And on the third day there, I was like, oh shit, my wife's like, what? I'm like, I just relaxed and we have to leave tomorrow. Yeah. Takes a while. It wife's like, what? I'm like, I just relaxed and we have to leave tomorrow. Yeah. Takes a while. It's like people your brain is still sort of left at home.

I know I'm relaxed when I start thinking about moving to the place I'm at. Like I was like like I was there for three days and I'm like, all right, fuck it. I'm just selling everything I have and just stay here in a pair of shorts. And I'm like, oh man. Are you working on sorry i said yeah i get that way too were you gonna ask me if i'm working on something else yeah and you don't even to

finish that you don't even know that you're you're not relaxed like until you are relaxed it's definitely you know what i mean it's like yeah of course i'm relaxed i'm in hawaii then all of a sudden i woke up i'm like oh shit yeah yeah well it's like when i was in the arctic it was it was um you would think i'd be totally stressed out the whole time because there's grizzly bears everywhere we're out there for a month there's insane weather some days it was negative 20 and my boots were literally frozen in ice because we had to do river crossings, all this shit. Yeah. Putting on the cold boots story was crazy. Oh dude. So crazy. And so you would think that I would be like totally on edge, totally stressed out. And like, of course there were spikes in stress, but overall my stress

levels were the lowest they've been in my life by far, like more present, more focused, more aware. I just felt like, oh, this must be how like the Buddhist monks feel after they get back from the meditation retreat for like a month. Right. I mean, it's totally that. And, um, I, I do think you need those longer periods to, to really get into that. It takes a while for me. It was probably like by the fourth day, I started kind of feeling that way. And it just sort of intensified over time. like by the fourth day i started kind of feeling that way and it just sort of intensified over time do you know who dorian is dorian uh he's also went by fitness lonnie i don't think so no maybe but it's not coming it's not ringing any bells he he was he was a crossfitter um from the early days when it was like smaller and everyone knew everyone probably just like

5 000 gyms or something and he went away to become a monastic monk oh really yeah and he spent so much time in isolation now and the other day he came to my house and he hung out and it was fucking nuts you would love to talk to him michael he sent my whole house he sent my whole house sky high you could talk about anything with them it's like speaking to like the world's largest brain it's like just this open like there's like he walks in the room and there's just freedom wow that's interesting and one of the things he does and these are the kind of practices that are insane he's not allowed to eat unless you give him food and he's only allowed to receive food between 6 a.m and noon so this motherfucker

wake up every day no matter where he is in the world and go out with this fucking bowl he can't ask for food so he told me he told me about a trip he did to alabama walking around montgomery and he said so what you're doing is your interest you know this have you ever heard the phrase people who don't speak to angel people who don't speak to strangers don't speak to angels basically i mean just think about the the the powers of the universe that he sees every single day the conspiring of the universe to help him survive it's the exact kind of opposite it's the opposite and same of what you did in the arctic yeah it's crazy and he's and he's it's oh. Especially because of the cultural, I mean, like, so I know that, you know, that that's practiced in Thailand.

And so that, but that's a cultural thing. It's like, that's what you do. Like from six to noon. Yeah. I got to go out and I got to feed the monks. Right. Not in Montgomery. They don't know that.

Yeah. In Montgomery, they're like, what the hell is this dude with the bowl? Like what's going on with this? Right. Like there's no context for them to feed this dude. Like he's probably out there. He's probably starving at some point. And these beautiful people from the, with their crazy thick Southern accents will just, he would tell me stories. They would walk up to him and have questions for him and talk to him and feed him. And it was just like, yeah, it, it, it just gave you so much faith

and hope and humanity. And just like, he's like, Oh yeah, the South is great. Like that's awesome, man. I love that. So cool. My sister married into a family from the South and I'm a California Berkeley boy. So we have a lot of strong judgments about those fucking redneck hick republican racist fucks and guess what everything i thought about them was 100 wrong every fucking thing i thought about them was 100 wrong the nicest guys they stand up when women come to the table the clubs there weren't segregated like our fucking clubs in fucking california you walk in it's black white and everyone makes and dancing again it It was crazy. Yeah, man.

I believe it. I feel like we – Education in California. Yeah, preconceptions are only good because they teach us that we're wrong most of the time. Is it tough being a journalist? There is this – I'm going to be completely transparent with you, honest. I struggle with Men's Health and Outside Magazine and the New York Times and these publications that are super popular because I see stuff in them that's ambiguously malicious. Yeah. Oh, malicious. Yeah. Oh, yeah, totally.

So like, for example, the New York Times during the Harvey Weinstein era, when we're getting in Matt Lauer era, when we're getting all these examples of men doing absolutely fucking idiotic things to women in excruciating detail, then they can just point the finger at someone else and be like, yeah, he got me too, too, but not tell us why. And so then we fill in the blanks. Right. Right. And people just getting their lives destroyed. And I see these, is it hard? It's just fucked up journalism. Yeah, totally. I think the incentives are off. I think, you know, being someone who worked at a magazine for a lot of years, you know, still writes for a lot of publications and kind of had, you know, was in the media world. I think that the incentives are all off for media right now.

So I think that, you know, you find a lot of journalists are on Twitter and they follow a lot of other journalists who are on Twitter. and they follow a lot of other journalists who are on Twitter and they all kind of live in a sort of Twitter bubble where they are writing stories and saying things to get likes on Twitter and those things need to fit a certain narrative, right? You can say certain things, you can't say other things because that's what you do. And so I think that there is a disconnection from the sort of normal, I don't know if normal is right, but from a world that isn't that media world, right? Because most journalists live in New York City. They all lean a certain political way. They live a certain kind of life. They have certain conversations with other people who are like them. And so I think it creates a sort of worldview that doesn't necessarily align with that of the average person. So that's one of the reasons that

I now live in Las Vegas. It's one of the reasons I don't do that. I'm selective with the stories that I will and will not do for the publications I write for. Also, you think about what works online. And this isn't new. As far back as 1800, so we basically got clickbait as we know it now from a newspaper in the 1800s. There's this guy, Benjamin Day. And so at the time, newspapers were 6 cents a piece. Now, this was very expensive. So only businessmen could afford them and rich people. And he goes, okay, I want to make a newspaper that costs a cent, but I'm not going to be able to cover my costs. So how the hell am I going to cover my costs? Oh, I'm going to do this thing called advertising. I'm going to approach companies. I'm going to say, look, you can put your logo on my thing. You can sell your shit in my paper.

This was the 1800s, probably like 1880 something. So he goes, okay, great. I got this down. We're good to go. Well, shit. Now I need to get a lot of people to buy this because I can charge more per ad. The more people I have reading it. If you have two readers and you go to an advertiser and be like, yeah, pay me a hundred dollars. Like, well, my product's only 25. Like how many am I going to sell? Right? The more readers you can get, the more you can charge for ads, the more money you can make. Okay. So how do you get readers? Is the next question. Well, the way he did it is he basically came up with the clickbait of the time. He realized that like, Oh, I'm going to start covering murders. I'm going to start covering like rates. I'm going to start covering crazy political shit. I'm just going to cover the crazy shit because that's what people will buy.

And it took off literally within a year. He had the most popular newspaper in the entire world. And that model, that advertising model, which is effectively give people content for either free or exceedingly cheap, which media is very cheap, even if you're paying for it, right? But then make up all your costs with advertising and make up a lot more. That's how we still work. But the thing is, is the more money, the more eyes you can get, the more money you can make with that advertising. The way you get eyes is by feeding people stuff that preys on fears, preys on insecurities, makes people feel outrage, makes people feel something, right? That's how it works. Oh, going back to Israel Adesanya, he wants to make people feel

something. Yeah, totally. It's like, look what, look what people click on now. It's like negative news stories get, um, get clicked on. I think, as 80% of internet traffic, whereas positive ones are 20%. Oh, you're breaking my heart. That's a great story you just told. And was the term clickbait actually contrived? Like that was made back then too? Did they call it that in 1880? No, it's essentially what you can think of as clickbait today. Yeah. Clickbait came from really kind of started with a viral email from the guy who would end up starting, I think, the Huffington Post.

He realized that there was he was a guy at MIT Media Lab and he had. That wasn't a chick who started Huffington Post, that foreign chick. It was Arianna Huffington and this guy whose name is Jonah Peretti, I think. And just figuring out. And Huffington was married to the gay governor, right, Pete? I don't remember her back. I don't know much of her backstory just beyond the Huffington Post. Didn't we have a governor that Arianna Huffington was married to,

and then he came out as gay, and they got a divorce? Pete, Republican dude, Pete. Shit, sorry. I can't remember. That was a cool story. Yeah, and I think, you know, this is one of the reasons why I don't pay a ton of mind

to national media. Because like, they're always going to run the worst thing happening at any given moment. And I think it can skew our perception of whether or not the world is actually improving as a whole. So think about like one of the things I talk about in my book is like,

think about the last hundred years, thousand years, hundred thousand years. The world is clearly unbelievably better than back then. You're less likely to starve. You're more likely to be literate. You're less likely to be in bondage. You're less likely to die at any given moment. I mean, on and on and on, right? You live in temperature control, all these things. But if you poll the average American, only 6% of people think that the world is improving.

That is a serious miscalculation. Well, why is that? It's because of quirks in our human brain that basically tell us to look for problems this is a concept i talk about in the book and also we sit around watching news all day that is incentivized to feed us all this negative shit it's like of course you think the world is terrible and i'm not saying the world doesn't have problems like we should all be aware of the fact that like russia is invading ukraine but there's been so much other stuff where it's just like is this really going to impact my life? And yet I'm reacting to it. Like this is an existential

risk. Like it's just, it's not a healthy news system we live in right now. And then there's people like me who are reacting to the people who are reacting, thinking I'm better than them doing the exact same shit they're doing. Yeah, man. When you say you moved to Las Vegas, where did you live before and why Las Vegas? What were the implications of that statement you made? It somehow insulates you or? No, just outside of the East coast media bubble. Um, so I'd lived in New York and then I was living in Pennsylvania, which, Pennsylvania which that was interesting because I

was working for Men's Health Magazine and you know arguably the reason that that magazine did so well and at its peak it had a higher readership than all our competitors combined GQ, Esquire, Men's Journal roll them all up we still outdid them i think one of the main reasons for that is another horrible publication gq some fucking shit that makes me hope that there's a hell but sorry go on the uh ad people i think one of the reasons for that is because we were based out of Pennsylvania rather than Manhattan. So our editors tended to live more quote unquote, normal American lives, right? Like we are living lives more like our readers. And so we were able to

tackle issues and translate things in a way that, um, was more relatable for people. And, you know, it people. And it's been interesting because I think the magazine has changed over the years, but it's still a solid print product. But the website, like publications are treating their websites totally different. Like I cannot read that website anymore.

I just can't even go on it. It's just terrible because the incentives online are just all off. And you say that on here, aren't you afraid that you will be something will happen to you there'll be some blowback like michael you can't say that like like when i worked at crossfit like i wouldn't dare like do you say the shit i'm saying about crossfit now well i mean look like these are conversations i have with people who work there. Right, right. This is like, I don't, look, I don't think that, I don't read the website anymore. Yeah.

I don't know if it was meant to happen. Story in the magazine, like a well-reported story. Like, all right, well, it is what it is. But I just, I do think that, I just think it is kind of too bad what what has happened to not to a lot of media, especially around how they run their websites. You know, that's just, that's how I feel. I'm not going to, I'm going to stand there and, you know, take your shot if it hits me in the head and I don't get it right from men's health anymore. So it'll be it. Um, we started going down the Avenue of, if you're working on another book. Oh yeah, I am. I am. Yep. So I've been sort of traveling

the globe, meeting with people. And, uh, it is about how humans evolved in environments of scarcity of all different things, of food, of information, of stuff, of the number of people we could influence. And now we live in an abundance of all those things. And so what is that doing to us? Are you going to have the same outline for this book? Are you going to put yourself in a situation where there's scarcity and talk about your 30 days of... There won't be an overarching narrative in this book. I want to see you put yourself somewhere in scarcity. Can you walk across India or something? Do you still have the car that that you lived out of i'll live in it for a month or whatever hey dude homelessness is a trip it was it was the best years of my it was those were the two best years of my life that's really fascinating

why do you think that is um because i well one, the, the sad part is, is that 99% of my peers were drug addicts. So my colleagues in the homeless life, it's, it's a really sad place. But I chose that because I wanted to experience the ascetic lifestyle. I wanted to experience the lifestyle of a, of a Siddhartha or a, or a Buddha or a Jesus. I wanted to see what would happen if I gave everything up. If I didn't, and you learn some fascinating things that basically anyone will be your friend if you don't tax them. No one wants to be taxed.

Hey, Michael, can I have one of those cigarettes? Hey, Michael, can you give me a ride here? Like all of those things, you're spending your equity. So you never, you just want to create space and let the universe, you want to let the universe bring you stuff. Like that thing we talked about Fitness Lonnie does. His name is now Tissero.

You – I think it was in Little Buddha with Keanu Reeves. There's a point in the movie where he sits under a tree and the tree actually grows over him to give him shelter. And so that – when you start witnessing that miracle, there's an excitement and an energy you get from the universe that's um indescribable holy fuck this fucking thing is conspiring to fucking make my shit happen like maybe it's just you see karma that's in real in real time who knows you it's like it's it's empathy and there's like a lack of questioning among people or like what is it that just like the guards are down because you're no longer trying to get something out of people or you make space for them to give i'll tell you i'll tell you a really superficial version of

the story a friend of mine i used to travel all over the world with his name's howard shiffer he's the founder of vitamin angels it was like the largest distributor of vitamins to free anywhere in the world and i traveled all over the fucking world with him and he told me a story one time about this lady he used to travel with. And every time they pulled up to the airport, he would want to get out of the car and get her luggage out of the back. But before he could do that, she would always say, Hey, can you get my luggage from the back? And it fucking really pissed him off because he wanted to do it. But she stole that from him by saying, will you get my luggage? And so there's this thing we can do where we make space for people to be good.

We make this space for the universe to change their mind. There's nothing better. This is another superficial version. There's nothing better. This is another superficial version, but there's nothing better than someone like you cut someone off. They flip you off and you say sorry, and then they pull their finger down and they go. You know what I mean? Yeah, totally. You did it right there. You fucking went to war and fucking had it signed a treaty, a Versailles right there. Boom, done in a second.

Yeah, exactly. And like it's like that, but it's like a slower version of that where you see like the very first day I was homeless when I was homeless, I remember being in the middle of this park and I remember going, Oh fuck, I need to get, and I had a great day and it was just me in this great day. And I'm like, I gotta get, how am I going to feed this dude tonight? And right then this, this homeless dude comes walking up to me with a black garbage bag. And it was a dude I kicked out of my fucking yard at least a dozen times over the past year right like hey dude what the fuck are you doing in my yard get the fuck out and he walks up to me when i had a house and he walks up to me and now the

first time i was and he opens up this black garbage bag and he says hey um do you want one of these chickens and it's fucking like 30 rotisserie chickens that he got like day-old rotisserie chickens he got out of a dumpster somewhere and i'm like fuck yeah and i took one and he's like later brother and he takes off and me and my dog sat there and ate that thing you know what i mean i'm like i'm like oh shit this shit's gonna work out so did you become homeless by choice or like what happened there oh yeah kind of by choice kind of by choice yeah i mean as I mean, as an undergrad at UC Santa Barbara for seven years in my mom's finally like, yo, dipshit, you know, like fucking whole smoking weed and like and like playing video games all day and like. into a dirt-tortling hippie. I wasn't a hippie at the time. And then I realized there's also two different kinds of hippies. There's the hippies like me who just didn't have shoes, and we had to get our clothes out of the free box. And then there were the rich kids who were

cutting holes in their pants and sewing the patches in, and they had the cool glass bongs and shit. It was crazy. It was cool. The trustafarians, as we call them. Yes. There's a point in one of your interviews where you say – well, I want to go back to this journalist thing. So do you – are you evolving? What is – how different is Michael Easter who started writing this book? What year did you start writing this book and the Michael Easter that I'm speaking with, Matt, Susan, and I are speaking with right now? How different are you guys? Yeah, I started writing the book and maybe like 2018, 2017. I mean, definitely very different.

I definitely have a different perspective on life. Um, a lot of it I think comes down to gratitude and being like, Holy shit. Like the world that we live in now is unbelievable. Like when, you know, going to Alaska, it's like I had to fabricate this thing that basically showed me this, right? And it's like an example that I use a lot of times is that, you know, to get up to Alaska, I got to take like seven planes, right? So the first plane flight is from Vegas to Seattle. Now I've, I hate flying. I fucking hate flying because it's the worst thing that could ever happen to a human you're packed into this little thing the chair is uncomfortable it's always too hot the coffee sucks if you want to get up to go to the bathroom you're cramped

the movies are always shit on the screen in front of you it's just god awful right it's b level everything it's but then i go out into the people are assholes and the P the nicest people in the world turn into assholes on a plane. You're like, what's going on in here? Yes. A hundred percent.

Then I'm out in the Arctic and it's like, there's no way to get warm. I'm freezing the entire time. If I want water or a drink, I got to hike down to a stream. I got to fetch water out of it and I got to hike it all the way back home. If I want to go to the bathroom, I got to hike out on the tundra. I got to bring the rifle because there's grizzlies and I got to squat.

I got to carry things everywhere I go. I'm hungry the entire damn time. I'm bored out of my mind because there's not a screen within 200 miles and I don't bring a book or any of this, right? So what happens when I get back on that flight that goes from Seattle to Vegas home? Right. My experience is 100% different. I'm like, holy shit. This is the most unbelievable thing that has ever happened to me. I haven't sat in a chair for more than a month. So cozy. It's warm, dude. I like,

I asked for like, you know, there's girls on the plane. Dude. And when I, you know, when I go to the bathroom, it's like, Oh great. I don't have to take the rifle to the bathroom for once. And then it's like, you know, I hit this little thing to wash my hands in the bathroom and like hot running water hits my hands at 30,000 fucking feet in the air. It's like, how the fuck could anyone ever complain about like, like today? And like, you know, part of what I talk about in the

book is that like, even people who are in relative poverty, the importance there is relative, right? Right, right, right, right. People are still living like kings in the grand time of grand scheme of time and space. And I'm not saying people don't have problems at all. I'm not saying that at all, but I'm saying that the problems that we have now, we are in a better position to face them than we ever have before. And I think generally we take for granted just how amazing things are right now. And for me, like, unfortunately I couldn't just get that. I had to go do this thing that sort of taught me it.

And I think that that's what, you know, part of the message I'm trying to convey is that like, when you put yourself in positions of discomfort in different ways, it'll help you start to appreciate all of life and just make life more meaningful. I mean, for me, it's like, I I'm definitely more aware and I savor a lot more of the moments i have you know i think that's definitely going to change do you know um so well thomas so well the the 95 year old black dude who's a hoover institute guy economist do you know who that is no you i think you would like his stuff because he what does is he arms – and I'm going to make a leap here – he arms to the teeth people like me and you who probably come from a similar ideology and upbringing with – kind of like Jordan Peterson with facts and numbers that can really fuck people up. with facts and numbers that can really fuck people up.

And I'm sorry if I made some – well, I made some presuppositions about you just now, and I'm sorry if they're wrong. But like one of the – I'll give you an example. So a newspaper may present to us that the discrepancy in wealth between the races is massive and the ethnicities is massive and that the average Puerto Rican in the United States makes $25,000 a year and the average Jew makes $100,000 a year. And they leave it at that, and then at the bottom you can sign up for the Diversity, Equity, Inclusivity Club so you can fix this world disaster of Puerto Ricans and Jews having discrepancy in wealth. so you can fix this world disaster of Puerto Ricans and Jews having discrepancy in wealth. And then Thomas Sowell says, but you may want to notice that the average Puerto Rican is 25 years old in the United States and the average Jew in the United States is 50 years old. So now he's giving you a stat that transcends the superficial stat of ethnicity and racism, gives you a mathematical number based on the day that you came out of your vagina versus how many days on the calendar and how many times the earth has gone around the fucking sun to actually think clearly about this

fucking thing because at 25 i was fucking homeless as an armenian man and now at 50 i'm sitting here talking to michael easter a millionaire and it's like so like like you can't you can't fucking compare me to the 25 year old armenian sevan yeah totally well i think that's kind of the rule of media is just context gets removed right it's it's a lot sexier just to run my heart that's the rule fuck yeah i mean i think that happens and i think that it you know sometimes that context might be in the piece but it's definitely not the lead of the piece the headline is here's some here's something that is seemingly outrageous. So you'll be like, what the fuck is up with that?

And then you'll click, right? And you may not learn that critical context until a handful of paragraphs down. But I think the damage has already been done. What do you think? Are we just getting at it now, Michael? We're just going to get at it. What do you think – are we just getting at it now, Michael? We're just going to get at it. What do you mean? What do you think about Trump's – the Nelk brothers interviewing Trump?

Did you ever get to see that before it got pulled down last week? No, I didn't see that. Do you know what I'm referencing? I don't. No, remember I don't watch that much national news. So there's these guys there. When I was a kid, there was this group called Jackass. I don't know if I'm 49.

I don't know. Were they around when you were a kid? Johnny Knoxville? Yeah, those guys. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. OK. And so then there's a new group of these guys and they're called the Nelk Brothers. And I only know about them and they're cool.

They seem like really nice dudes. And I know about them because they're friends with Dana White and I watch the UFC. But of course, everyone knows I watch the UFC because I bring those guys onto the show. Remember what we talked about. Don't scroll for pussy. And so the Nelk brothers interviewed last month or a couple of weeks ago, they interviewed Donald Trump.

It's an awesome interview. Yeah, there's the cats. And it's like, it was like an hour. It's totally chill. They were asking him just like questions like questions like hey dude if you're friends with putin why don't you just call them and just tell them to chill i mean just just real talk you know what i mean donald trump tells them hey youtube's gonna pull this down and um and uh they're like no they're not and within fucking i got i got to see it because i ride the assault bike and watch youtube every six hours 24 hours a day but um i got to see the view

but within 24 hours that shit was pulled down yeah that it's an interview with the ex-president of the united states i'm just he didn't say anything. He wasn't like nuke Israel or do you know what I mean? He, I mean, even if he did, but do you have any thoughts on this? Um, yeah. I mean, if that, if that got pulled down, that's, I, I don't think that we should be leaving it up to, you know, some people in Silicon Valley to decide what we can and can't watch. If someone wants to put that out to the world, I think that's pretty, um, I think that's not only dangerous, but also it's like, it's super arrogant to think that like, I should have any idea what another person should, should see. Like, I think that there is a general, um, kind of arrogance that can come out of the tech sector.

And you see it not only in like how we are going to censor ideas, but also even in things like, you know, this whole idea of investing billions of dollars so that humans can live forever. You know, it's like that's not going gonna, like, it's just a fundamental misunderstanding of like where we are with science. And I think that it would do us a lot better to realize like, you know, I don't know what I don't know, but I should like, you know, consume things and see how that makes me feel and form opinions, but also understand that like,

I'm probably not gonna think the same way in a week, much less three years. Like people need to be better at realizing that like more will be revealed. So let's not censor in the meantime, like, you know, like, wow, I never heard the argument like that. It's just, it's just a bad road to go down. We don't know what we don't know in the moment. And obviously there, you know, there's a limit to this. I'm not going to say that people should just be able to put totally absurd, hateful, terrible things on there. But an example like that, that seems like there's some limit that's been crossed. There's some limit that's been crossed. There was a friend of mine one time said a mutual friend of ours one time said to me, the only debate you bring a gun to is the freedom of speech debate. Yeah.

And if you lose, you shoot the you shoot the guy. There you go. Well, I think you've seen that generally in the Supreme Court, too, like in past. And it seems like today we're tipping into this strange thing where it's like there's a million different words that are akin to Voldemort now, where if you say them, everyone, oh, it's like the Harry Potter book where you just can't, it just offends people to the core. And so like, well, we can't say that. I don't think that's healthy. I don't think that's healthy. I realize that, you know, certain people feel a way about certain words, a psychosis and a delusion that's so strong in their brain that they conflate the noise in their head with fucking reality i'll give you a couple examples i was at a coffee shop one time in one of the most liberal coffee shops in the fucking world in santa cruz california and there were two guys at a table talking about trump and the lady at the table next to him stood up and starts fucking screaming at them. I don't want to hear his

fucking name. And they're like, we weren't saying anything nice about him. And I'm like, oh, this is good. You know, I got a warm cup of coffee and they're just boring. And, and there's a, there's a, there's a, there's other words that we've based on people's skin color that we require a whole – we require people when they're born to be offended by this word based on their skin color. And all that is is a narrative inside of people's heads that turns on, and they go into their head because in the outside world, that word has no meaning. It's just a vibration. That word has no meaning. It's just a vibration. But you give a word so much power that you go into your head and tell yourself racial slurs are like that, abortion, Trump.

Like they just start up these programs in people's head, these unconscious fucking loops so that they can't see it fresh, right? Yeah, it's interesting. When you saw a bear, what program – did you see a bear when you were out there? Yeah, we saw a few of them. Do you remember your thoughts when you saw the bear, the one that was closest to you? It's a large animal. Yeah, I mean, they get gigantic up there because they eat. They try and catch salmon on the salmon run and so we're timed to that so they've been literally gorging on this like super fatty fish for you know a month

and they're just they're ready for winter dude when you see a real threat as a human being i should have tony blauer on to ask him about this but i suspected well there's two there's two kinds of people. You've seen the videos of a girl or like a weight drops on someone in a gym, and they're crushed under it, and there's someone going, oh. And then there's the other kind of person who runs over and pulls the weight up. But like right now, if you were sitting in your room and you heard like a – and you looked over and you saw a rattlesnake you wouldn't you probably wouldn't go in your head yeah you just react like you're just you fucking come out of your head yeah you're like okay where the fuck is the bat where's my gun where's my wife like you know you know you you become hyper

alert on the outside right correct you don't let some like program start up well that's a rattlesnake and it's very those are bad guys and i should be offended that he got in i can't believe the exterminator didn't get rid of him yeah it's like it's like the the bull it's just crazy this fucking world we lived in we live and it's like you know there are certain words that i'm never gonna say and that i don't think certain other people should say but i also don't believe that they're beyond discussion for the right people you know like it just the fact that you know i i think it we should be having conversations rather than just shutting down speech generally across the board yeah i'm a little more i'm i'm not a little i'm way way way way more

extreme i think that everyone should say every single word that they want to say they should also realize that there could be consequences for saying those words but i also think that like when you if i if i um if i did something to you and you get offended – let's say you call me – I find out you made fun of my nose, right? And then – so I have a choice. Let's say I'm offended by it, and then throughout my life, people keep saying things about my nose, and I'm always offended by it. At some point, I'm just like, I have to get over that. But the people who say sorry to me, what they're really saying to me is that you should be offended by that do you get what i'm saying they're they're bolstering the story

and it's it's a i'm just talking about the deep mechanisms of how the human mind works like they're just setting the trap up for me to get offended again the effect and at the end of the day the offended have to take response if they want happiness if they want to be cool as fuck like me and just like live the dream you got you got to just own it it's all it's all you yeah i think sometimes what can happen is there's like a hierarchy where certain people tell other people they should be offended yeah yeah those are the worst those those people are actually arguing other people's limiting was there anyone in your life by the way who said to you hey don't go go to the Arctic, like try to talk you out of it? No, my wife is pretty cool.

She was like, yeah, do it. Yeah. No, but like here's an interesting example that I think flows in with this is that I had someone review. She was like a person who worked at a magazine. They reviewed my book and they said, you know, really good book. But like, I think that, you know, it doesn't apply. Uh, it's flaw is that it doesn't apply to, um, Pete, I can't remember the exact language. I want to say it was like BIPOC groups and women. What's BIPOC mean?

What is BIPOC? Yeah, it's basically like people of color. People of color and women. Is Mexican a BIPOC? That's a good, I think so. Sousa, can you find BIPOC for us? Yeah. Define it for us. Sounds like a telescope to me. Sounds like a telescope that I want to own it, get by from B&H. But the point, the point was though, is that I was like, oh man, like maybe, you know, yeah,

like maybe she's right. And my wife goes, I'm a woman. I read the book. Like she's, she seems to be implying to me that a person of color or a woman could never be comfortable. Like, oh, these sad people, they could never reach a stage of comfort in their life. They just live in this discomfort all the time from all these forces. My wife's like, it's not me. It's not most people I know, you know? And so I think that there's like, I think that basically, I mean, people, and I need to do this myself, but you know, people like this reviewer, like we need to just shut up and listen more. Are you just assuming something about an entire other group of people? Right. Based on this narrative, like, let's not do that. Like, again, let's default to having conversations and listening more. Yeah, there you go. more yeah there you go hey do you know what's crazy too here's what here's what here's what's crazy too so so um black when you say black people you you're choosing a color of skin based on the spectrum of light that's reflected off of them when you say indigenous people you're

saying two totally different things something totally totally different, and that's where – that is at the essence. That right there, that word and that idea is what – is the root of systemic racism. That's what keeps people in – that curates and maintains racism when you see the world like that. Because if she would have said that's not applicable to people who've been raped i could be like okay let's talk about that let's talk about why michael easter's book doesn't but black is just like they want us then to characterize all black people but all people based on the color you cannot do that you cannot it's just color there's i need there's no example there's no objectification you're forcing me to build a racist paradigm. And by racist, I mean, in the essence of judging all people based on the color of skin. It's fucking insanity. It's building a prison for fucking people of color. Don't do that to people of color.

bad like i understand my dad came from the middle east he opened a liquor store it's a very common job for middle eastern people other ones armenians open oriental rug shops um they're the uber drivers in la i'm not saying you can't be um discriminate like a healthy level of discrimination not maybe that's not the right word prejudice discriminate like um you know that if a snake has a big mandible and that fucking rattle thing on the back you should probably stay away from it you know the kids with their pants showing underwear showing down and they're walking down the street it's okay to cross the street because they're trying to act hard like i'm not saying you can't use your brain but this shit is fucking nuts what that lady said about you i mean well i think for me it's also like no life i just need to like listen to other people and see what happens it's like

you know i was like oh maybe she has a point but then you know my wife brought up that point and then i look at my readership the people that i get reached out you know reach out to me on things like instagram or email and dude like more than half of my readers are women and they come from all backgrounds so it's like like it was just that's just because you're hot though that has nothing to do with you right that's just because you're hot um so yeah it's just interesting i mean it basically just told me that i kind of like shut up observe listen and you know make a judgment from there but i i again back to the main point is that i don't think we should censor i think censoring is a slippery slope you know yeah yeah even even hate

speech because what you call hate speech all they'll do is change the definition of hate you you can't even trust anyone to define hate you cannot you cannot stop hate speech either you have to let all speech go have you been to africa uh i've been to Morocco. Okay. And have you been to India? I haven't been to India now. Or China? I've been to China. Yep. What took you there? Um, I have a mom who's pretty cool. You know, she, single mom, single parent. I'm an only child. Um, my dad wasn't really around and, um, she sort of lifted herself up out of drug addiction and, you know, created a pretty decent life for us. It was it was interesting because we never had nice cars when I was a kid. We always had kind of just like a, you know, a minivan that was kind of crappy and needed a few repairs.

But she would save money to every summer. We'd go somewhere international, somewhere interesting because she thought it could be something we could both learn from, you know, and that would improve us as people. And so one of those years we ended up going to China for like two weeks. That's how I ended up there. So I was probably like, I don't know how old I was. I must've been like 14. So this was a while ago. Do you have siblings? Nope. So just, just you and your mom. Yeah. Yeah. Pretty much. Is she still alive? Yep. She's still around. She actually has a winter place in Vegas now. That's not too far from where I live. So we see her in the winter. It's good. Oh, that's. And what does she think about your book? Yeah, she's fine. She, I mean, she likes it. Like she reads a ton. Um, but what's been interesting is like some people,

the, the book has really affected and impacted, you know, I'll have people be like, yeah, I quit my job because your book. Yeah. Yes. Yes. I got divorced because of your book. I realized it was a situation. Yeah. I mean, stuff like that it's like heavy and she's like yeah i thought it was really good and i liked it but you know like i'm not gonna quit my job because it's like shut up mom so yeah i think that she i think she um she likes it i don't think she understands it to a deep level that some people do you know know, it's like, I think there are certain, certain pieces of, I guess, art or whatever you want to call it, information hit certain people at the

right time. And that seems to have, it seems to have hit a lot of people at the right time. Um, were you raised to avoid discomfort? avoid discomfort? I mean, yes and no, you know, uh, she would let me kind of go outside till sundown. I was in scouting. I would do a lot of stuff outside. Um, but also, you know, I didn't, there's also a limit there because she was also working all the time and like, you know, she wasn't going to take me on these like crazy adventures outside. I mean, we'd go to these other countries. So that was like, of course, a form of discomfort because especially because this was, you know, 20, 25 years ago when, I mean, even then people weren't traveling as much as they do now. And we went to a lot of countries that just like, they had never seen a white boy before, you know, like I remember we were in one country and there

was a group of like 20 people just following me, just observing me. Like where was that? This was in Thailand. Yeah. So it was before they really made their push for tourism and yeah, just, you know, fascinating. So yes and no, you know, I, I definitely wasn't a, uh, like grew up on a farm or in some like super extreme poverty. We were comfortable. We were by no means rich, but we were middle class, whatever. So yeah. Susan, do you remember that movie about those – or have you seen this movie, Michael Easter, about these boys?

They went to – they were from Baltimore, and they go to school in Kenya. I think it may have won the Academy Award five or six years ago or was nominated maybe 15 years ago. I forget the name of it though. It's these kids in Baltimore. They end up going to a school in Kenya. It was when Bush was president because I remember it was when the embassy got bombed. So it's – fuck, how long ago was that? that was when the embassy got bombed so it's fucked how long ago was that anyway africa's africa's fascinating just in terms of the whole the whole idea of racism and just

judging people by their color because you you see that um people aren't like in this where it's cultural it's cultural shit that we're actually talking about and not people's skin color like if you see people with the same skin color with completely different cultures it's just like armenians in la are nothing like armenians in yet avon the capital of armenia nothing they're completely different fucking people and um oh is that what it is boys of barack you know do you know that movie by any chance no i don't know i'll write it down though yeah yeah i'll send you that too it's i think you'll be fascinated by it. Africa and India are just cool because they're such,

and you've been to China. So, you know, they're just totally different social experiments that are going on. If you haven't been to these places, it's like what you said before, you don't know what you don't know. And it's like, until you go to these other continents, you're just like, well, you have had now that experience in the Arctic. Like, you know what silence is and other people – like you talk about that. Oh, sorry.

I'm going to completely shift here. Have you been to that room you talk about, the silence room? No, I haven't. I want to go. I was like trying to get him to let me go. He's like, no. Oh, really? Yeah.

What was that room called? The Odor? Orfield Labs in Minnesota. And I think he's retired. I was emailing with him recently. Yeah, Orfield Labs. And they had used it. I think he had updated me on what he's doing.

Because when I talked to him, he was about to retire and, in theory, put it as a nonprofit and use it for research into into, um, PTSD treatment and a handful of other things. But yeah, I think it got named the quietest room on earth, I think by the Guinness book of world records, but like, you can't just, you know, he doesn't let people just like go in there and hang out and ask, do you have to, um, have a good reason, dude, I want to go in there for three days. Yeah, he says that people, like some people freak out, but people tend to freak out

the first like 10, 20 minutes, and then all of a sudden they like calm down and they get a lot more aligned and does a lot of interesting things for people, and that's just in an hour. Weird. Hey, look at the floor there what so

what oh yeah so you're standing like they need um yeah the foam killing or the sound killing foam cone things are just around everything you so you stand on that sort of grid in the middle so you have something to stand on it's like a cube of sound killing foam essentially um well what if the off gassing in there just fucking takes 10 years of your life away from all that hey what's that room right there it says the quietest room on earth. There's shit floating in the air. Let me see that one. Incredible. Have you done Moab, Michael?

Moab? Yeah, in Utah? I guess you're in Vegas. You have been there? Pretty quiet there? Yeah. Pretty quiet, pretty quiet there. Yeah. Yeah. It's, it's definitely quiet. I mean, we, even now we live in a relatively quiet place, but we move, we used to live on the other side of the city. It was a little bit less developed. And I had a friend from LA visit me and he stayed in our, you know, guest room and he comes out in the morning, like it was like eight or nine. He like jesus first thing he just looks at me goes dude it is so quiet here i'm freaking out

you know because he's used to just sleeping in like horns he lives in like west hollywood or something you know so yeah um i think we got derailed from the Japanese people in their rooms. I probably interrupted you. Oh. 500,000 people. They're in their rooms. Oh, they're afraid of sickness. They're afraid of disease.

So they're in there because they're afraid of the outside world. That's the reason. Afraid of the outside world, yeah. So they just – yeah, they don't, some of them haven't left their room for like seven years. I think the address, I think the average is like three years.

And how do they make money, those people? I assume they just, I mean, it's possible that they could work from just that room, but I think a lot of them just like live, you know, live with their parents too or something, you know, it's just like,

Oh, right. Almost like we would treat a disabled, you know, live with their parents too or something, you know, it's just like. Oh, right. Almost like we would treat a disabled, you know, if we had a disabled child or something. And they're probably ecstatic about the coronavirus. People who don't want to go outside are stoked on this shit, right? Yeah. They're like, oh, great. Now no one's telling me I have to go outside. I'm, when my kids were, when my kids were born, we didn't do this on purpose but when my first kid

was born he was just born on the living room floor and then after like i don't know like a month i remember one time seeing my wife like turn on the kitchen sink and put him in the kitchen sink i'm like oh shit is that his first bath and she's like yeah i was like oh that's crazy because he came out of the vagina right he's just covered in all that goop and then you just kind of he came out of the vagina right he's just covered in all that goop and then you just kind of just he starts he just starts breastfeeding and he never got a bath or wiped off or really anything just that shit just dries and falls off he flakes off around the house and with my twins it was probably three months before they had their first bath oh wow and my kids are now two five year olds and a seven year old um never mask, never took – we never take any precautions.

They almost never, ever wear shoes, only if like they're skateboarding or doing activities that could – that they've fallen and cried. But my kids don't get sick, and you talk about that in your book about being – about health. about health. And although I didn't do those things on per about health and germs and bacterias, and although I didn't do those things on purpose, it's fascinating because my kids don't get sick. Because they were covered in mom's bacteria upon their birth when their hypothalamus was the most active in cataloging bacterias and viruses and sicknesses. And then they breastfed for 18 months apiece. And they're they're like bomb proof. Yeah. There's some interesting work I talk about in the book. There's a, I met with this lady who studies the Hadza hunter gatherer tribe. And, um, what's interesting about them is they

don't get any of really the stomach sicknesses that we do. So they don't get Crohn's. They don't get IBD. They don't get colitis. They don't get colon cancer. they don't get Crohn's, they don't get IBD, they don't get colitis, they don't get colon cancer, they don't get, you know, all these different things. Wow. And the reason they think is because they are exposed to so much natural bacteria that their body has just built up an immune system that can deal with that sort of thing. You know, so they study, it's pretty funny how they study this, they basically study their shit, more or less. So this research right now, she like, she goes and she buys like Tupperwares at Whole Foods and

she goes, travels to Africa and spends all this time with them, collects their shit. And then they get shit from people who live in a city in Italy and they compare it. And the gut bacteria is just so radically different. You know, what was, what was fascinating about that study at the time is that the Hadza had all these gut bacteria that we have traditionally thought are bad for us. And they didn't have much of the stuff that we think is good for us. Like all the stuff in the probiotics that we eat and in like probiotic yogurt, they didn't have any of that. And yet this microbiome that they've created has really impacted their health and made them healthier as a whole. They also don't, I mean, they don't get really any lifestyle diseases, you know, they, they do get, they will get, um, you know, viruses and illnesses

like that sort of acute sicknesses. It was weird when, when everyone was freaking out. Well, I guess the people still are, but in the early days, people were freaking out about the coronavirus for like a year because my boys, I don't know how much time you spend around children, but they just, they put their hands on everything. And then they put their hands in their nose and in their eyes and in their mouth. And it's just rinse and repeat all day, all day. There's no stopping it. I mean, it's just like literally you go somewhere and they'll drag their hand along a wall of a building in a strip mall for fucking half a mile.

Yeah. Out of their face with it. It's like, I'm like like hey uh fuck it what am i gonna tell them like yeah it's futile it's futile it's it and meanwhile i'm walking by other kids who are double mass i'm like i don't know yeah it's just it's just bizarre yeah it's definitely an interesting time and i think it you know for me it's just bizarre. Yeah. It was definitely an interesting time. And I think it, you know, for me, it's like, I think the whole situation highlighted how I think we did a pretty good job figuring things out, like in such a short time, but still there was just like, how do we know what we know?

Right. It's like, how do we know what we know? Oh, you're more optimistic than me. Still, still like people don't i mean i don't think we can say anything like with absolute certainty about that that virus no just like you know and people have such firm stances on it and i'm just like dude i hell if i know you know i think we well it's interesting i think do know, and I'm open to talking about this, but I think we do know that if you – that when this happened, your best bet for survival was to stop eating added sugar and refined carbohydrates and to start exercising and to stop drinking alcohol basically to do anything that would inhibit the um nk cells and t cells from doing their job um which uh which are deeply deeply disturbed by eating sugar because it

causes such a hormonal spike it basically puts a traffic jam in your bloodstream i know a lot of people like this the new cool thing is to say sugar isn't toxic or it's okay to eat sugar it's really sugar has dramatic dramatic effects immediately on your NK cells and T cells and their ability to stop sickness. So I feel like I don't know anyone who – I feel like I can't find a single story of someone who died who was healthy. There's two people that people keep bringing up in my – whenever I say that, there's these two people that they keep bringing up. But, man, there's 8 billion or seven billion people on the planet we know why there weren't a lot of deaths in haiti you know because yeah there's not a fucking lot of mcdonald's there you know what i mean yeah i think that definitely definitely being active and having your weight in an ideal

range seem to be protective as a whole i know some people with the exception of like pro bike riders and shit like if you're a pro bike rider yeah like like and you live on a living off of goo packs that i mean you basically have no immune system yeah well i think they're they're their body is basically like you train so much that we just we need to like keep this train going like fuck your immune system. And then when the virus comes, because their body's like, clearly we need to adapt to this.

And so then when the virus comes along, I think those people had... Yeah, at a certain point, I do think that probably being super, like a shitload of training probably wasn't as good if you had just backed off. I know a few people who you're like, Whoa, that person's so fit. They train all the time, but they got the virus. It's like, well, yeah,

that's because all their body's done for the past four years is like build up fitness at the expense of the immune system. This is something that Daniel Lieberman at Harvard has talked about how sort of overtraining can compromise your immune system. And so I'm not, you know, but yeah, and it's tricky. And then you have, you have outliers too, where it's like, man, this person seemed to be doing all the right things and they got really sick. But as a whole, I think that we can safely say that if you were sort of living like an asshole for lack of a better way to put it, and you've got coronavirus, probably you were going to have a harder time with it you know yeah yeah yeah

and everyone get tons of people get sick just all the time yeah yeah for sure yeah definitely a definitely a strange time in like health and how to live and and also i think even just information around health that was that was what was interesting is that there's just so much out there it's like how do you decide anything like right i don't know i like the idea though um i don't know if i read it in your book but um ancient ancient meals aren't causing modern sicknesses and so that's kind of i like to kind of like think of that like it's sort of like my my true north yeah yeah i think so i mean i think we can yeah it's like if you're drinking you know three sodas a day that's probably not

going to be good for you or honestly even one soda and the reason why i say that is because even a little bit of peanut butter and in my um toyota sienna my van just if i put a little bit like just like one little dollop in the gas tank yeah i know we're more resilient than a sienna but like yeah i know we're more resilient than a sienna but like yeah i can't even endure i can't even endorse a little bit of soda unless unless you're in the arctic and it's all you had yeah i mean yeah it's interesting um i feel like i just kind of default to like you know eat foods that are ingredients rather than that contain ingredients that's pretty decent advice you know um and that's even

smarter than what i said i like it yes if you you know if someone goes to wherever the hell they go eat and they have like some crazy burger and fries like i don't think it's gonna kill you in the long term but like let's not make this a regular thing like part of part of enjoying modern life is the fact that you can be like oh shit man you know this insert any weird food combination that you might see on triple d is just like hell yeah i'll eat that right shake check do that all the time though and we're gonna have some problems yeah that's good stuff and um and in sort of in sort of this uh a regulation you know at 16 i would probably go to mcdonald's and get a um 20 piece chicken mcnugget and a shake and if for some reason i were to go to mcdonald's

today i'd get a six piece chicken mcnugget and i'd get water yeah like there's no fucking way like at 49 or no shit i keep saying 49 i'm 50 50 uh there's no way at 50 i just turned 50 i'm having trouble i'm trying to turn off yeah i think that's part of it too is like and i think that um the way the nature of today, I think makes it much easier to overeat. Yes. I still, I still overeat even, even like I still overeat on the reg. Yeah. And I, yeah.

And I, I mean, if I'm going to overeat like potatoes and meat say, I mean, it's much harder to over overeat when we look at it from just like a caloric load standpoint than it would be, you know, nachos or something like that. Right. Well, the nachos you feel in the morning, the potato and eggs, at least by the time you wake up, you feel. Yeah. A little bit better. I had the liver king on the podcast. Do you know who that is? Yeah, I just became familiar with him.

Someone was like, tell me about him. He's like jacked and eats liver yeah yeah yeah yeah i find him like i find him um just deeply inspirational he's the living embodiment of your book he's he's he's um oh anyway he's living embodiment of your book and and I had him on the podcast, and at the end of the podcast, he said to me, we got off. He goes, oh, you just taught me something. I go, what's that? He goes, to set time limits before I come on podcasts. He sent me a nice note afterwards. He goes, those two hours and 40 minutes flew by fast.

But. But, yeah. Right on, yeah. He seems like a good dude good he's he's a great guy it was fat it's fascinating to me um he's a great guy because he's just a good role model he's just living his life in a way that like people should pick and choose from like what you like you know what i mean i'm not saying do all of it but if you can if you can if you can you there's lessons to be learned it's like it's like your book it's exactly like i'm gonna start rucking because of your book what some of my closest friends have been rucking for fucking 10 years and they're fucking seal team six guys and i'm just like okay they rock okay they rock

it's so funny then this fucking journalist fucking writes about it in his book. I'm like, oh, I'm going to start doing that. And I'm like, God, I had these guys telling me about it for like, I'm going to start rocking because your book. Yeah, right. Well, my wife generally has always just kind of laughed at all my weird fitness shit I do. And even she, we rock now, dude.

It's awesome. So sold her. That was the hardest sell in my life. And she's in. Yeah, it's awesome so sold her that was the hardest sell in my life and she's in yeah it's cool it's cool i like it because um of the walking i was in your book you said that you did it and you kept the heart rate of like 156 did you talk about your heart rate in it about getting strong that was maybe that was when i was packing out the caribou. Yeah. Okay. Yeah. Do you wear a heart rate monitor a lot?

I used to a bit. Now I can kind of just gauge it based on how I feel. Once you kind of, I don't know, see the data and I feel like, oh, yeah, I'm probably in between 120, 130 or whatever it might be. Right. Okay. Okay. Okay. Yeah. But I think you took the words out of my mouth though, with, you know, you have people at the extreme, there's so many people at the extremes now like him. Right. Um, and I think that you're totally spot on with like, what tends to happen is that you get all these tribes and like the health and fitness world

where like the people, some people might be like, this guy is like the Lord and savior do everything he does. And then you have another group who's like, everything he says is completely wrong. Right. Or fuck you. He's on steroids. I'm like, why do I care? Yeah. And it's just like, you know what? There's probably like, the dude probably is doing some stuff that you shouldn't do maybe, but he's probably doing a lot of stuff that would be good for you too. Like his overall message as a whole is totally fine. You know? And so I think that back to the pick and choose thing, it's like, dude has some great ideas. Pick the ones that you

think work for you and are going to work for you. If there's something in there, he's doing that you don't think is going to work for you. Don't do it, but you can find other ideas from people. It's like, we're so extreme on like, you got do all this and, or all of this or whatever. It's like, you know, you pick a little bit. That's why I think like, see a lot of hate around diets online and it's like, try it. It's the worst that can happen. You quit it in a month, but you probably learned something about how you eat and about yourself. And I think that, you know, over time you just start to like, take these little things from other places and you figure out what works. There was this guy posted this thing the other day. His name is Rob Earth. You may remember him. He was, he was a CrossFitter and his name was

Ronnie Teasdale and he used to wear jorts. Do you know who that is? Sounds familiar. Yeah. Rob Earth. And he made a post the other day that said, Hey, if you want to become God, take ultimate responsibility in everything and anything basically in your world take full personal responsibility accountability and i reposted that and i said this is really going to offend some of you i go but you don't have to be offended you could just try it but you're not going to because it's way too fucking hard to take personal accountability and responsibility for when the guy flips you off for when your dog dies for every single fucking thing you do in your life. But it's

so funny that you would get offended by it because he just, you can just try it instead of get offended. Yeah. He just told you how to try, how to do it, but you're not. It's like, don't know what we don't know. Yeah. Um, on one level doing, doing hard things really like it's good for you and and then um it's like uh you shouldn't meditate when shit's bad you should meditate when shit's good so when shit gets bad you have that tool that's not the time to be like okay and you start working on this tool my breathe you want to have some breathing chops before the bad shit happens but also like um But also like there's like real hardships sometimes they can't be replicated.

Like growing up – like the way you mentioned that you were brought up in a household by a single mom who went through a drug addiction. Like that can't be replicated i i feel like you and you can't even come close to it and you're never gonna fake it and it's made you of who you are and why you're so successful and um why you know to enjoy um the see how you can um put things in context of being in the art a shitty plane ride out same ride back it's the best plane you ever been on in your life i mean it's i don't know where i'm going with it but but it's all the shitty i had this guy on the on the show um he's a writer what was that guy's name michael creek he did three self-published books like fuck you fuck me and fuck your dog or something i can't remember what they were nice um but i don't know what is it kyle kyle creek do you know who that is michael no i don't

have to look him up and i i'm sorry i i none of these people that i brought up you like you should know by the way i'm not insinuating that i I mean, you should know who Stephen King is if I bring him up, but none of these other people. It's just a podunk podcast. But you've done all the big ones already. You're really slumming it now. life eventually they turn to fertilizer and like and the greatest plants in the world will grow from them and when he said that i was like oh shit that's what it's like um being like a comedian like the time i shit in the van was the worst time of my experience in my fucking life my kids vomiting in there because i'm shitting in there but now it's like the funniest story i own this guy right here oh they call him the captain okay cool i think you'd like him just because he's he what he self-published and killed it. Like, killed it.

Nice. Which is kind of fun to see, right? Yeah. Yeah, 100%. But do you feel that in your life? That your real hardships, like you talk about this Arctic hardship, but that the real hardship came in your youth and that's really where you got your chops? your youth and that's really where you got your chops like yeah i think that i mean i think the lesson is i was talking about this with um someone the other day is that like life is always gonna have problems like you know it's not i think it's some it's like sam harris was talking about how

you know life is like playing a video game. If you get to a level and there's like nothing to do on it, it's like, it's not a video game, right? Like you're always going to have problems. We can't expect to not have problems. And so I think that the way to live is to sort of put those in context that like, I'm probably going to grow from these. These are experiences that, that I can use to learn something from and then grow from. And that's definitely been, that's definitely been my experience. And I think too, if you look at that research I referenced before, you know, if, if everything just always goes terribly wrong for you, like all the time, that's probably not good. Um, but having like a normal amount of bad things happen to you, I think can be good. You know, I look back on that and like,

okay, so for example, my mom, part of for her job, she would travel about a third of the year, and we're from a third of the half of the year. So I had I always had this rotating cast of nannies, I'd have a nanny for like a year or two, then I'd have a new nanny, then I'd have a new nanny, then I'd have a new nanny, right. And so you could see that that would be like kind of strange but at the same time what do I do for a living now I talk to people I don't know I learn to read people I learn about people I watch their quirks well I learned how to do that by having to deal with this rotating cast of nannies because I'd have to like learn how to like adapt myself to fit with them to communicate communicate with them, to understand what they were all about, right? If I didn't have that awayness from my mom, I wouldn't be doing what I'm doing now. So it's become this trial that I had as a kid has actually become an asset for me now. And I think we all have examples like that,

of something that in the moment seemed like, man, this is tough, but that we can now use as an asset. You can even thank the people in your life. Oh, totally. Yeah. Boy, it almost sounds like you take responsibility and accountability for your life. It's an insane concept. Rarity these days for sure um yeah i think you just gotta you know own things and some things are look some things are hard to own i've done things where i'm like that took me a while to own up to but you know there might be something i'm doing right now that i'm unaware of that i'll have to own up to later. Right. I think it's like, you know, there's this evolution for sure. So I'm sure, I'm sure you guys have experienced that as well.

Oh man. Uh, yeah. But, but it really is true. The more discipline I have, the more accountability I have, the more responsibility I take, the happier and happier I come. It's, it's like, it's, it's almost addicting to constantly refine your habits to like, like, like allow less and less to be outside of your personal accountability and responsibility. Dog, dog threw up in the house. You don't get mad at the dog. Right. You left the wrapper. You left the plastic wrapper out that he ate and he threw up in the house you don't get mad at the dog right you left the wrapper you left the plastic wrapper out that he ate and he threw up totally yes you you you you you dog chewed your shoes well why did you get a dog that's what dogs do they chew shoes yeah because you expect the dog to not ever chew anything yeah someone flipped you off while you were driving well that's what

happens when you drive people flip each other off it's part of the it's part of the game yeah get in where you fit in bitch um what was it like being on rogan oh it was fun man he's he's a he's a good dude um super nice really chill uh you know it's like you expect a ride and it was definitely a ride you're like it's not the standard podcast where you're going to and yours isn't like that either which i've which i've enjoyed because i get the same questions all the time and um we definitely haven't like like what was it like being on rogan that's why i saved it for the end that's why i was gonna say no yeah it was fun he's a good dude um yeah is it unsettling like you're like okay i i'm either gonna hit one out

of the park or i'm gonna fuck myself i'm gonna fall on a sword because it is such a great it's a great opportunity yeah for me it's like you know you learn you're going on there and you go oh this is awesome and you go yeah this is awesome because there's like 200 million people who listen that you go hold it wait 200 million people it's a lot of people let's yeah you're like you know and you can't so you got to be careful but you can't be so careful but you're like yes no you know so it's just right you just kind of go in there and i'll tell you what like he's so skilled at what he does that like you just kind of forget and then you look up and you thought a half an hour had gone by but somehow you know it was three hours or whatever so yeah i'm panicking that when he asked me to come on

i'm gonna have to pee in the middle of the show just uh well what he does is there's a big i'm gonna tell him no fuck you i'm not going on there's a big bucket under the desk and you just pee right there. No one actually realizes that time. That's insider information for everyone. Thank you. And you flew out there? Yeah. Flew out there. Um, he's got this little kind of like the recording studio I mentioned before. It's kind of this little unmarked space and uh, yeah. And the actual studio itself is pretty small, so it's kind of this little unmarked space and uh yeah and the actual studio itself is pretty

small so it's good and you just go in and contribute to the to the massive library this dude has yeah yeah pretty much sit down start talking and it's like oh yeah we should probably hit record you know because you get on some random topic as they're kind of getting everything dialed in, which I'm I'm pretty sure is calculated. Right. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Someone talking. So. Yeah, man, that's cool. Fuck, you did it. Have you been on Fox? I haven't. No.

Have you been on CNN? No, I haven't done a ton of TV. I've done a lot of podcasts. Haven't done a ton of tv i've done a lot of podcasts um haven't done a ton of tv though yeah personal accountability and hardship doesn't seem to be a popular subject with the yeah yeah it's interesting too because like the book has done the book has done really well and we didn't get a ton of like traditional media book reviews you know like and i think that that speaks to where people are finding value now who do we trust now you know like yeah i know people who got great write-ups in the times and things didn't it didn't move the dial for him at all and it's just that's just kind of crazy but i

think that's where we are now where there's you know um that sort of thing isn't as isn't as important it's not i'm not saying it's – that sort of thing isn't as important. I'm not saying it's not important anymore, but I am saying that it probably isn't as important as it once was. Well, you wrote a really crazy inspirational book, and the timing couldn't have been better because we have a fucking whole generation, generations of people who are unwilling to, who not unwilling. It's not even their fault. They've been brought up to take the easy way. We're raised to take the easy way. And, and, and the most important thing is that there's no life fulfillment in there. The hard way is where all the fun is. It's where, it's where all the pretty girls are. It's where all the laughing is. It's where all the money is. It's where all the beautiful frolicking is. It's everything. There's nothing. There's nothing. The most fun most kids have had people have had in their whole entire life was going out in the street and playing flag football with their friends in the seventh grade. And then after that, their life is just fucking downhill. And it's like, I think, you know, it doesn't have to be that way. Doesn't have to be. that way. I said Joe Rogan was going to be the final question.

One more question. Are you going to have kids? I don't know. Maybe. We haven't – we're kind of leaning towards no for now, but more will be revealed. We'll see. Yeah. You have two kids?

I have three kids. My wife was – I probably shouldn't tell you this, or don't let your wife listen to this part, but we weren't going to have kids and we weren't going to get married. That was just like all tool of the man. You're a tool if you do any of that stuff. And then we started hanging out with these ladies who were like, who had kids who were like breastfeeding and that shit got my wife all jazzed up. Yeah. jazzed up yeah and then one lady said to my wife she says if you don't have kids you might regret it if you do have kids you won't regret it so then she was like hey we're gonna let's get one i was like all right so then we then we pulled the goalie and then from there was just three years of just doing it with no goalie and then kids just start showing up everywhere yeah that's what happens apparently yeah now we got three kids but but i started i there's no rush i'm like i said i'm 50 and my oldest is seven so there's no rush but um and then we ended up we got married too

just in case like one of us and i thought that was stupid but now i'm actually like really glad to call her my wife it's so weird yeah it's really really weird man yeah i can't even we don't know what we don't we don't know what we don't know in the moment right right right yeah dude all right well hey thank you um yeah that was super fun i enjoyed it good thank you that that's really sweet of you to say that that's the biggest compliment people can give me my mom always told me to treat my podcast like it's my living room. And I know some people and, and that people, no matter whether you like them or not,

they should leave and, and you should have explored something deep inside of both of you and everyone should leave wiser. So, and I feel like I got that from you. Yeah, this was super fun. I liked it.

Cool. I I'm going to email you my phone number. Oh, maybe I did already, but feel free to text me anytime. I don't sleep on my phone. Any ideas, anyone you would suggest for me to be on the podcast? I am like a podcast slut. Like every day I'm going, I'm going to be Joe Rogan and Howard Stern had a baby and I'm the guy. I like it, man. Yeah, I'll send you, I'll send you some names. Be some good people from the book that you can pull from. All right, brother. Congratulations. Thank you. Thank you for the great read i loved it yeah thank you a lot guys i appreciate it thank you michael bye for now