The Way I Heard It with Mike Rowe - 489: Michael Easter—The Hard Way

Episode Date: June 16, 2026

Why do so many of the things that make us stronger, healthier, and happier require doing things the hard way? Mike sits down with bestselling author, journalist, and researcher Michael Easter to explore the surprising benefits of discomfort, challenge, and voluntary hardship in a world engineered for convenience. Easter, whose work has appeared in Men's Health, Outside, Esquire, and Scientific American, discusses the ideas behind his bestselling books The Comfort Crisis and Scarcity Brain, along with his newest release, Walk with Weight: The Definitive Guide to Rucking. From carrying heavy loads to carrying life's burdens, Michael explains why the easiest path is rarely the most rewarding—and why embracing difficulty might be the key to a better life. Tip o' the hat to our excellent sponsors GoodRanchers.com Purchase any Father's Day Gift Box and get FREE Wagyu Burgers. Pestie.com/Mike to get an extra 10% off your order. K12.com/Rowe See what's possible for your child with K12's Career and College Prep NetSuite.AI/Mike to try NetSuite Next for FREE!

Hey, it's the way I heard it. I'm Mike Rowe. And Chuck, it occurs to me as we delve into the preamble for today's very special guest that I have been crossing names off of a list in my mind. And the list consists of people who I've interviewed before, but never in person. Oh, yeah. And today you got to cross another one off. Yeah. Actually, you got to cross off too, but I did do two today. Let's not speak of the other one yet. We'll save him for another time. Or perhaps you've already heard him. Difficult to know. But this guy, I bet you do know if you're a friend of the podcast. His name is Michael Easter. He's an author. I met him a few years ago at some sort of event.

We were long distance, still in the lockdowns. And he was talking about a book he had written called The Comfort Crisis. Great book. It really is good, man. It's a very solid, solid, fun read that has a lot of thoughtful information in it. But at its heart, makes a very simple argument that if you have an easy button within reach, you can press it, but there will be some unintended consequences.

Hitting the easy button almost never leads to any long-term benefit. And we all know this, you know, these are lessons we've been drilled into our brains growing up, but boy, it's easy to forget, and especially today, when the easy way is all around us. Mike Easter is carved out a pretty good niche, I think, in the ecosystem in favor of doing things the hard way. Yeah, I love this quote. He says the most rewarding things in life come on the other side of hard. Which sounds vaguely dirty to me, and I don't want to unpack that whole thing. But I know what he meant, and I think I know what... Guys, there's nothing good on the other side of hard.

Oh, man. But of course there is. We all know the importance of being challenged. nobody ever had a great story to tell who didn't pay a price. Right, right. And there's just no getting around it. I guess what's the old... Do you remember that poster? We were in high school that came out.

It was no pain, no gain. Sure. And they were hanging in gyms everywhere. Yeah. And then I saw one of a guy sitting on a keg of beer, right? Yeah. And he's like just drinking a draft beer. And it's like running down his face.

and it's a wide shot and the caption says, no pain, no pain. Yes, I knew you were going to say that. I do remember that one, yeah. And that's kind of, you know, I always think of that poster when I talk to Mike, because we're kind of in the no pain,

no pain world. Everything is just so daggone efficient and easy, which is why I think we've seen all sorts of pushbacks. Like we talk about the cold plunge and various other ways to shock yourself into a, level of discomfort. So his idea isn't new, but his book was great because it blended like real

lived experience with real science. And I've been a fan ever since. He's a written scarcity brain. Talk to him about that. And most recently, I got to give him credit, man. I mean, his latest book is called Walking with Weight. And it's great. I love it. And we talk a lot about the benefits of this, but what makes me laugh is the conversation that he must have had with his publisher, you know, when he went in and said, okay, here's the idea. It's a book about walking with weight. With weight. It's like, yeah? Well, what happens? Because that's it. That's it. And yet, it holds up. It's chapter after chapter of science and history and really interesting connections that all come back to the fact that this ability we have, H. Sapien,

with our opposable thumbs and our bipedal qualities, the ability to walk long distances with heavy weight is really the only distinguishing characteristic we have in the animal kingdom. Well, I think that it is fair to say that Michael Easter changed your life. You did. I've been really busy. And one of the first things to go conveniently was the gym. I just stopped going to the gym and started to exercise in more, you know, calisthenic-ish ways.

Well, you had started walking during the lockdowns. Yeah, but not with weight. No, no, just big, long, early morning walks. Right. And, you know, I got in the habit of doing that and I love doing it. I'm sold on walking. I wasn't sold on walking with weight, but boy, I am now.

Rucking is the official word for it, and I've become a real officianto of it. Every day I'm home, I ruck now with 45 pounds. I walk eight miles. I get my work done, and, you know, I'm not in the best shape of my life, but I'm older than I've ever been, and I feel great, and that's good enough. Anyway, I'm a big fan of the book. I'm a big fan of Rucking. I'm a big fan of Michael Easter, and he drove himself all the way up here from sunny

Las Vegas to talk about the virtues of walking with. weight and the importance of being uncomfortable. It's a fun conversation. I knew it would be, and we're calling it the hard way, because what else would we call it, Chuck? He doesn't do it the easy way. No, he doesn't. His name is Michael Easter, and we shall resurrect him. Ha, ha, ha. Oh, I see what you did there. Right after this. Do do do do do do do do do do. Dumb. Let's start this one at the end with free Wagyu burgers from Good Ranchers. for Father's Day because that's what you'll get as a free gift if you pick out a Father's Day gift box at Good Ranchers.com, which I'm about to heartily encourage you to do, especially if your dad is one of those dads who doesn't like to cut corners and likes a good steak, because Good Ranchers only partners with local farmers and local ranchers.

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Fantastic, Mike Easter. You've made the journey in your debt. Where'd you come from, Arizona? Las Vegas. Vegas. Same thing. Mostly. A little hotter in Phoenix, a little more sin in Las Vegas.

You know, but it all balances out. Heat and sin. I've never really ruminated on the duality of both. But I guess to a certain extent, their hand and glove, no? They really are. You know, Las Vegas would not be the town that it is as deranged, I think, if it were a nicer climate. Yeah. The heat in the summer, 115, 120, it really just tax things up a few notches.

It does. It does. People go a little crazier. Am I hallucinating this? Did we speak long distance a couple years ago, and did we talk at some length about the welcome to fabulous Las Vegas sign? Yes, you guys said you were going to have, the next time you were in town, you were going to take a picture. together in front of that sign. Well, you know what?

I'm going to be in Vegas in a week and a half. Sounds like we got a photo op coming up. We really sure. Why did we talk so much about that sign? What was the point? I don't know. Do you remember? Yeah, it was basically because it's so iconic. And you were on a walk and you saw people lining up politely to take their turn to take a picture

and you just walked up like the big shot you are and took a selfie. No, right. It wasn't exactly that way. although I thought it was a good rumination on patience and comfort and herd mentality and tourism and like in all these elements because for those of you haven't been to Vegas, there's a sign that greets you when you come in that says welcome to fabulous Las Vegas and you've seen it. God knows how many movies and TV shows. Every Las Vegas movie and TV show they're going to show the sign. It's the iconic image of Las Vegas. When people think Las Vegas, if you're thinking, am I thinking of the right? Am I thinking of the right? right sign, yes, you're thinking of the right sign. So there are probably 200 people in line. And to your point, it's 105 degrees outside. And I looked at the sign. I'm like, oh, yeah, that is a great sign. But I was on the other side of the street. And so I just got the angle and I took a selfie.

And I think our point was, why do you do the things you do when you're in Vegas that you don't do anywhere else? Why do you stand there and pull the lever waiting and hoping and praying that that things are going to pay off? Why do you stay up all night? Why do you? What is going on in our brains that Vegas short circuits? Vegas has become culturally the place where you let loose. And something, you're right, something flips in people's brains. One of my favorite experiences as a person who lives in Las Vegas is if I have to travel, the flight when I fly home, planes frequently run out of alcohol.

People are just, they're ready to go. They get up from their chair, they're kind of stumble because they've had, you know, four or five of the little plane bottles but then the flight leaving Las Vegas yeah zombies yeah everyone's just they've lost their pride they've lost their money they're hungover like three quarters of the plane is asleep before it even takes off they're beaten it's just such a yeah it's just like welcome to Vegas and you prepared to lose this town was not built on winters and yet I don't know anybody who's been to I know lots of people who've never been to Vegas and I know lots of people who go there many times a year.

I don't know anyone who's only been there once. They keep coming back. Yeah. Yeah. It's like a tractor beam. It is a tractor beam. What I think is fascinating about Las Vegas is that I see it as this sort of ultimate human behavior laboratory.

Yeah. And it brings people together from all walks of life. So going back to that plane, when I'm on the plane going to Las Vegas, there's someone in first class with a, you know, $70,000 Rolex. And then there's someone behind me who goes, I spent all the money I have on this flight. I got 50 bucks in a dream. And they're going to the exact same place and they're going to like intermingle. And they're all there for the same reason.

And the fact that, I mean, what's the, you're not a psychologist. You're sort of a social anthropologist. You're obviously a writer. But since you evoke the B word, what's going on with our brains in Vegas? I mean, that's really why I think we were ruminating. Like, there's no other sign anywhere I can think of that people would queue up for in the heat. So Vegas, Vegas has figured out to a T how you get someone to do something that is fun in the short term, but can hurt them in the long run. So the example that I love is slot machines.

Yeah. Everyone knows the house always wins. The longer you play the slot machine, the more you're going to lose. yet people play them for hours. So if you've never been to Vegas beyond the strip, you go to a grocery store, a gas station, a restaurant, they all have slot machines. I'll go into 7-Eleven at like 7 a.m.

got to get a coffee, whatever, and there's people at the slot machines. So I live there. I see this. I go, this doesn't make any damn sense. It just doesn't. But why, right? That's the question.

So for my book Scarcity brand, I end up finding this. It's an actual working casino but it's a laboratory. So they've built a real casino, turned it into a lab where they analyzed human behavior. Did the humans in the lab know they were lab rats?

Yes. So they know they're in a lab setting, but they're scientists around, they're tracking things. I talked to a guy who's a slot machine designer. I'm like, how does this thing work? He goes, well, let me show you. So we go over, we start playing.

And basically he broke it down like this. Slot machine works on these three parts. You can think about it as like a behavior loop. So first part is opportunity. You got an opportunity to get something of value. Second is unpredictable rewards. You know you'll get that thing of value at some point, but you don't know when.

You don't know how valuable it's going to be. Third point is quick repeatability. So if you do or don't get the thing, you can immediately repeat the behavior. So with the slot machine, you got the opportunity to win money. You play a game. You could lose.

You could win $2. you could win $200,000, right, on any given game. Right. And then you can immediately replay. So once slot machines and casino designers figured out that system how to really dial it in, this was in 1980, there was this guy named Cy Red, and he's like the most vagus person ever, drove a Cadillac, you know, maroon suits, giant glasses, bowelot, the whole deal. He figures this out in 1980, this system, they apply it.

to slot machines. And slot machines went from these games that no one really played in casinos. They were kind of off to the side. They didn't even have chairs because people wouldn't spend enough time at them. Is it because the owners really just didn't have any faith initially in an attraction that required zero skill? It was that, but it was also that the inherent design of the slot machines were not that interesting. So because they had mechanical parts, you could only have so many different combinations, the math just didn't work out where you would win enough. Yeah. Okay?

Because you need these three things to line up. There's only so many of them. Just odds weren't good. So you'd play, play, play, play, play, lose, lose, lose, lose. And then when you won, you'd win, you know, you'd win a little bit. It's just not that exciting. People stop doing things that give them nothing. So the Cyroid comes in and he goes, we're going to digitize these.

And because we can digitize them, we're not limited by actual real spinning reels. They're just these digital things. So we can have all these different combinations. And what we can do is we can have people bet on a bunch of different lines that are across the screen. Right. And you can win this way. You can win X, Y's. You can win straight.

You can went up and down. So now all of a sudden, when you play, something's going to happen. Like you could win because you're betting on 40 different lines in this game. You might win on one. And here's the thing, though. If you bet a dollar, your win on that one line might be, say, 30 cents, 40 cents. So now that, you know, the logical person here will go, well, wait a minute. You didn't really win.

You didn't really win. You lost 70 cents or 60 cents. But the machine still lights up. So it goes ding, ding, ding, ding, ding, ding. The money goes up. And that's exciting. So once they figure that system out, slot machines take off. They start to make up, I think it's 85% of casino revenues.

People today spend more money on slot machines than they do books, movies, and music. combined. Are you kidding me? No, it's insane. It's insane. These are cash cows. Wait a minute. It's unbelievable. So when I walk through the casino and wherever it is, I'm staying, I think I'm at the aria suites this time. 85% of the total gaming revenue is slots. Slot machines. So when you walk through the Aria, you will pass some tables, but generally you will have to navigate a labyrinth of slot machines. Well, why do they have more slot machines? Well, it's because they make more money. So now where it becomes interesting and relevant to the listener, they might be, where are you talking to slot machines?

I don't ever go to Vegas. I don't play slot machines. I live in Utah. There's no gambling. You start to see a lot of industries look at Las Vegas and go, how in the hell are they getting these people to do this thing where they're ultimately just going to lose? This doesn't make sense. And they go, we've got to figure out what that is.

So they take that system. And I call it the scarcity loop in my book, the three-part system I just mentioned. system or what is it, Cyred? Cyred system, yeah. They take that system and it starts to pop up in all these different forms of technology. So that is what makes social media work. You have an opportunity to get a like or see some interesting reel, but it's unpredictable. If I post a photo, I could get two likes and I go, oh my God, no one likes me at all.

Or I could go viral and now my life has changed. And I can keep scrolling, infinite scroll. It's the exact same mechanics. You see it in dating apps. So the guy who invented Tinder, what allowed online dating to really take off was the guy who invented Tinder just goes, oh, yeah, we just got to do for dating what slot machines did for gambling. It's an opportunity to find someone, but you just swipe, swipe, swipe, swipe, swipe, type, ding. Oh, she's ugly. This is a loss.

Do do, do, do, ding. Oh, my God, that woman's amazing. Jackpot, right? You see it in financial apps are using it. Online shopping uses it. Great example from online shopping is those discount wheels. Yeah. Those increased sales conversions sevenfold.

Sevenfold. And even the speed, the speed is another thing that was really important because the old slot machines you would pull the handle. Takes a couple seconds per game. Slot machine makers go, yeah, it's taking too much time for these people to lose their money, give us their money. You know what we need? We need buttons that you just hit and they say spin. Yeah. And people just sit there.

That took the average gamer from playing 450 games an hour to 900 games an hour. Oh my God, dude. This is why Las Vegas is the ultimate human behavior laboratory. Because they have figured out, how do you get people in a place where they will do these things that are exciting and thrilling and fun in the short term, even if it hurts them in the long run? And the town has mastered that. It's like the perfect place. For that. Now, of course, the problem is, is once I get to put everywhere else. So to me, Vegas is fine because most people come into town. Most lose money. Some walk away with money,

but it's this separate experience from normal life. You go back to Utah and you don't do it again for a while until you come back. Right. But once you start to see it in everything, now you understand why people spend, you know, four hours a day on their phones, the rise of all these crazy dating apps, the rise of sports betting in your phone. And it just, you go, oh, okay, well, that's why we spend so much damn time. Do do, do do do do do do do. Dumb. Let me preface this one by saying how much respect I have for the many exterminators I've met and worked with over the years. All of them are fine people doing an important job. However, for the rest of you, just because your home is overrun with pests,

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Who was this guy? C-R-R-R-R-R-E-R-E. Like, what was his background? He was a, he started in pinball machines, I believe. And I think he was from Missouri. Don't quote me on that. He moved up to Boston. He was in pinball machines.

Mob comes in and they say, hey, we want a Vig on your pinball machines or, and he goes, all right, I'm taking my talents to Las Vegas. So he started in pinball machines in Las Vegas. He started to get into gaming machines. Wait, but so were pinball machines ever used as a gambling attraction? Not to my no. No. There's a skill element. Big time skill. Right. So especially in a mechanized game, you could get someone who just figures out the game and fleeces you. You know,

whereas something like poker, which isn't mechanized, well, there's skill involved, but it's you and me and then we have a dealer, right? So it's a little bit different. So yeah, to my knowledge. Yeah. Poker, you can play the man. Pinball. You can, I guess, play the ball. And I mean, there's a lot of, it's amazing. to watch people who are like naturally good at pinball, watch people who have played it for years and become real like officinados. And there's just normal people who just sit there like absolute lemmings going, how in the world that ball's coming right down the center and you can't reach it with either flipper and somehow you save it. They figure it out.

How did you do it? That's my uncle Brian. He's a pinball wizard and he had a great hustle up in Sun Valley, him and his friends. I think they were probably 10, you know, 12, 13. They were able to figure out how do we jam up the pinball machines, so it'll give unlimited games. And then kids would come in, you know, Sun Valley, these rich kids, they'd say, hey, if you just give me your five bucks,

I'll let you play as many games on this as you want. So this is going to be a good deal for you. And so they just raked it in that summer. Great. Wow. So, okay. Did you know when you moved to Vegas that so much of the behaviors specific to that town were going to inform the book that you wrote? You've got three books.

I'm going to talk about all of them at some point. But this was the scarcity brain book. Yeah. Like did you go to Vegas to do that? Or were you inspired? What inspired what? I would say I've always been interested in Las Vegas. I'll give you the anecdote when I was a kid.

My mom said, do you want to go to Disneyland? And I said, no, mom, I want to go to Vegas. So there's always been something that pulled me to that town. I think it's just the excess. I mean, even for kids back in the 90s, they had like these amazing arcades. And it was just everything was over the top. This place is unbelievable. How did, like, how is this work?

I grew up in Utah and then went, lived on the East Coast for a while. And then when we wanted to move west, my wife said, no snow. and sorry guys, but I said no California, which gave us Phoenix or it gave us Vegas and I took a job as a professor at UNLV and ended up in Vegas and UNLV is a really great school for hospitality and gaming.

There's Casino Labs at UNLV as well and I think it was just the living there, the observing how these things pull people in and going, what's going on there? You know, because as a journalist, if I see something and it doesn't, and it doesn't make sense. I don't just go, huh, okay, I'll move on.

It just becomes an itch. Do you still think of yourself primarily as a journalist, or are you a writer now, or are you a investigative something? Like, if you had a business card, and I'm sure you don't, but if you did, what would it say? That's a good question.

I think I might just say writer. Yeah. Except when people who don't know me, they'll say, you know, what do you do? And every time I say writer, I cringe, because I'm going, that person immediately just goes, oh, so you live in your mom's basement, huh? Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah. So you're unemployed. Yes. So you're unemployed. So in scarcity brain, it's cravings. Like, or at least a lot of it, you know. Yeah.

Why do we crave what we crave? Right. And if I remember, like, when are cravings good? When are they bad? It seems like they would always be bad because the way. word itself suggests a feeling that's out of your control. But can you control cravings? Can you control all of the allure that's built in so diabolically to these casinos? Can you rehack your mind? I think so. So something else I write about in the book is that for most people,

they go play the slot machine, they lose their 50 bucks, maybe they win 10 bucks, whatever it is. took him say 30 minutes. It was just, oh, that was fun. To me, that isn't fundamentally different from saying, hey, I'm going to spend $50 and go see a movie for two hours. But there's always going to be a subset of people that just get sucked into a slot machine. But it could be anything else, right? It's like, why are some people addicted gambling?

Some, it's alcohol. Others, it's TikTok. There's like something that pulls us in. And I think the underlying thing that you tend to find with people who get pulled into these bad habits that hurt them is there is it's solving for some underlying problem. It becomes an escape. And so once that underlying problem goes away, I think a lot of serious issues tend to go away. But the book, the question of the book is, everyone knows that everything is fine in moderation,

and yet we all suck at it. Yeah. So why is that? It looks at that question. Right. Well, what's the answer? I mean, moderation, I was just talking to, Todd Rose, who I think you would really like, he wrote a book.

He wrote a couple great books. One was called The End of Average. And the other was called Dark Horse. And then his third is called Collective Allusions. You guys write about a lot of the same stuff. He runs a think tank up in New England. But this idea that we don't know why we're doing things and manufactured consensuses. And the assumptions we have of, well, I know why I'm playing this machine.

you know, all these other people around probably playing it for the same reason. But in fact, well, I don't really know how to finish that sentence. I don't know what the fact really is other than we don't feel like we're in control, an awful lot of the time. Yeah. So in the book, I think a lot of this goes back to how humans lived for most of time. So if you think about life, say 10,000 years ago, whatever it is, we never, had enough food. We didn't have enough possessions, tools, things like that. We never had enough

information. You never know what's going to happen with the weather, what was going to, what someone's intention. Well, what is the other tribe doing out there? And so if you were the type of person who goes, I'm going to overdo these things when I get the opportunity. If I find a big pile of food, I'm going to binge on that because I know famine is going to come at some point. Happens every year. Yeah. Same with information. If you're the person who goes, hey, what do we think of this? What's your, like, you're always searching for information.

That would give you a survival advantage. Same with possessions. If you had more stuff, more tools, you're probably going to survive when the crazy storm hits or when you need to do X, Y, Z. So great, that helped us for all the time, this drive for more. If you got the opportunity for more, take it. But then you plop humans into this modern environment where, you know, we throw out a third of the food today. where this was a stat that's crazy.

The average person today sees more information in one day than a person in the 1400s would have seen in their entire life. And you're defining information as just facts or... Facts, any piece of information you come across in your environment that's new. Stuff, the average house has anywhere from 10,000 to 50,000 items today. So it's like you take these genes that tell us more, more, more,

and then you put us in an environment where we can fulfill that, you start to see, oh, okay, it makes sense why we all have so much stuff and are hooked on our news feeds, whatever it might be, white people tend to overeat, including me quite often. Well, so the short version is our predisposition to binge on all things was actually a survival instinct. Exactly. Once upon a time.

Yeah. But then modern age, I guess, agrarian to industrial, to what, tech, financial, and now AI. There's really no shortage of anything at all. Yeah. And yet our brain is still predisposed to gobble it all up. Yeah, exactly. And I think that can start to get us in a little bit of trouble,

depending on how you want to define trouble. All right. Well, let's define it. Health and fitness. health and fitness, I think 40-odd percent of the country is obese, 72 percent is either overweight or obese. That was never a thing for all time. Like the obesity rate was basically zero for all of human history.

So there's one. We went from zero to 72 percent. There's some evidence in about 200 years. Have you seen photos of like someone the other day of Yankee Stadium, I think, taken in like 1965? you know, just you can see thousands of people, you know, the way it's angled. You can really see them. And then today, same exact angle.

And it's like people can barely fit in their chairs. Even, I mean, even when you look at photos of soldiers in World War II, the guys are just so much smaller. Yeah. Part of that, I think, is better nutrition. Even if you're not, say, fat or overweight, whatever you want to say, like, people just have a lot more muscle, which that can be fine, but they're just bigger people because you've got so much more access to food. Fitness-wise, and this kind of ties more into my comfort crisis book, but the average person in the past used to walk 20,000 steps a day. Meanwhile, they're carrying stuff, they're physically

working, they're digging for tubers, they're hunting, they're doing all these things. And the average person today walks about 4,000 steps a day because we've engineered movement out of our environment. You don't have to do any of that, you know, if you need to get to. get from point A to point B, get in a car. Call an Uber, whatever it might be. And yet you didn't take the stairs. And yet I didn't take the stairs. That's my fault.

You told me getting the elevator. Well, I'm so used to telling people how to get here. Yeah, get in the elevator, go to this, blah, blah, blah. In my defense, and I'm going to reiterate this, because this is going out to the world. You're a very fancy man. Oh, yeah, look at me. Penthouse. So I'm picturing, I'm picturing like,

The only way up is through the elevator. The doors open and it's just the gold gleams in when I hear the word penthouse. And I'm like, the stairs aren't going up to the penthouse. I'll be wearing an ascot singing a Robert Goulet song over by Grand Piano. He was. He was. Look, I didn't name it the penthouse. It's just that's what it's just the top floor here at the Microworks World Headquarters.

But the 2% Club is still a thing. It's still a thing. And that was, if I recall, that's the percentage of people who given an opportunity. will choose to take the stairs as opposed to an escalator. Yeah, if you have a choice between staircase escalator, only 2% of people take the staircase. And that to me just shows us, we're wired to do the next easiest, most comfortable thing.

That also goes back to the fact that in the past, you didn't want to move any more than you had to, right? You didn't have enough food. You don't want to burn off any extra energy. That would have been idiotic. Like, exercise is something we had to invent. D-DUDDU-DUDDUM. The problem with blaming our public school system

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K-12.com slash row, the letter k-the-number-12.com slash row. The letter K, the number 12.com slash row. Well, is this part of the slot machine, too? If you think of how much effort does it take to play and win at poker? Just go down the list. Back rack. I mean, down and down it goes. It's like the slot machine is truly the simplest skill-free thing.

And it's responsible for 85% of the revenue, which means also 85% of the loss. Yeah, exactly. Oh, God. More likely to lose on those games, too. So what's the moral of this story to just do less of everything? Consume less? I think for me, I think first step for most people is awareness where you just go, oh, my brain is pushing me to do all these things that I don't really need anymore.

And once you can start to see how the machinery works, it gives you a little more of a choice to go, okay, am I going to fall into this machinery or not? Yeah. when it comes to the idea of more. So to go back to that stat I told you about the slot machines, oh, they sped everything up and then people started losing more. People started playing more.

One thing that's really changed societally is speed at which we can do things. So an example I like to give is shopping. 30 years ago, if I need a hammer, okay, I need to get my car. I need to drive down to Home Depot or Ace Hardware, whatever it is. I got to walk the aisle. I got, okay, they got six hammers. Which one am I going to buy? That's like an hour-long process.

Now, if I go, I need a hammer. I go hammer on Amazon, one-click buy, bam. I'm out, it's on the way. It's there. It could be the same day. Could be the same day. It could be the same day. So if you can even slow down some of the behaviors, I think that can be useful.

But how is it bad for us to eliminate all of the strawm and drag that comes from just getting a hammer. Like, I mean, is it inherently bad to spend that time or is it just a matter of efficiency? The faster you can do something, the more likely you are to do it. So if that thing is a good thing, good. But when you look at how much shit people buy, frankly, and that's really just been ramped up by the ease of online. So I'll tell people like, if you think you want something online, put it in the cart and give yourself 72-hour rule. I can only be able to be a lot. I can only be buy this. If I revisit the card in 72 hours and go, that was a great decision. You definitely need that. Most of the time, people go, I already have a hammer. I just wanted the, like, cool one with the flag on it.

It was all nice and painted, you know? And even something as simple as taking credit cards off of auto fill. So you got to go find the wallet. You got to type in the credit card. It's a pain in the ass. I forget which carrier it was, but I was on a plane the other day that I don't normally take. And their Wi-Fi hadn't automatically saved whatever info I needed. And I needed to get online. I wanted to finish the thing. I had an hour before I landed. And that exact screen came up.

I needed to fill in nine rectangles. I just didn't have the belly for it. I just couldn't do it. It was easier to get a gin and tonic and stare out the window. Which I did. You know? What does that say about me? We don't like friction.

It goes back to that 2% idea. We want to do the next easiest, most comfortable thing. We're wired to do that, even when it doesn't serve us. So I could argue in your case, you go, if you would have gone through that little moment of friction, you would have gotten these productive things done. But it was like, oh, friction? Yeah. The escalator's broken.

Now, I'm staying on the first floor. Yeah. Forget that. Well, that's because whatever is on the second floor is not sufficiently beguiling, right? I mean, if I had to get online in order to do a thing that would result in some sort of remuneration maybe, right? But it wasn't, the truth is, the reason I had to go online was to do something I didn't really want to do anyway. I didn't want to do it in the first place. Right?

It was like, oh, God, I was kind of dreading it. I didn't really feel like, in fact, I kind of resented it, you know, like Jade needed some description for a podcast episode. And I just didn't feel like writing it, really. And like that was my excuse. It was like, you know something? I would have done it. But these sons of guns over here at Delta, they insist. Nope, sorry.

It's not my fault. It's Delta's fault. Yeah. So that was, yeah, I didn't like the friction, but maybe I was also looking for an excuse. Yeah. That sounds about right. I'm the same way. I mean, that's your, yeah.

You took the elevator because a producer told you to and you've got this weird fantasy in your brain that I'm living the Vita Loka up in the penthouse. And the doors are going to open and you're going to step into Zanidoo. I did expect that. I don't know if I was let down or just like, oh, good, he's not full of shit. He's not as fancy as I thought. Yeah, he's not as fancy as I thought. Well, so much of what you wrote about in the comfort crisis, and again, I guess this is an obvious thing to say, but in scarcity brain, it's like, why haven't we adapted to our surroundings? Comfort Crisis is about the virtue of being uncomfortable and the price we've paid for hitting the easy button in a thousand different ways.

And it really did stick in my crawl, man. We met virtually. I think it was like at a Dave Ramsey thing or something. Yeah, that's how we met. It was a Dave Ramsey event. Yeah. And like this really never happens for me, but I got your book immediately and I read it. Awesome.

I really did. And I really liked the way you came at it as a writer, but it was so personal. That's really the thing. And I want to talk a lot about rucking because it has kind of changed my daily world. Awesome. What's the big takeaway for people from this book? I'm just asking for the cliff notes because I know we've already touched on it in the past. But it's important that people understand, I think, what's sent you down this weird path of skepticism.

Yeah. I mean, the big cliff notes of the book is that as the world has gotten more and more comfortable in every way, everything from we don't have to put in too much effort to get our food to the fact that we spend 93% of our time indoors, the fact that we don't have to move anymore, we've lost some of the most important things that keep us healthy, happy, and make life interesting and bring us meaning. So it's like comfort is great, but if you're never offsetting that by doing things that are inherently challenging, uncomfortable. You start to see people get restless. They get unhealthy. Like all these bad things sort of creep in. So my, my path to that book is that I got sober and I was 28. And this wasn't like I listened to a few health podcasts and go, oh, you know, maybe if I have a few more less drinks, I'll have abs. I was like the guy that would wake up and go, where's my car? And I'd look out and oh, it's on the front lawn, Michael. Yeah. That might be a problem. Um, So getting sober, though, was extremely hard. I'd tried a bunch of times.

Never worked because I'm always looking for the easy way out of this. You know, what simple thing can I do to just fix this problem? How can I just, you know, drink a little less? That shit never worked. Really? Never. So it was never the moderation thing. No, my favorite drink was always the next one.

That might get you in trouble. And then one morning I just sort of could clearly see this was not going to end well. and it occurred to me it was kind of like one of those well duh moments where you go wait a minute did you think this is supposed

to be easy to get sober like no was that the car on the lawn morning that was probably the car in the back lawn morning that might have been that one and I just sort of accepted this is going to be really hard

and I leaned into that discomfort and it was hard it was hell for the friend I mean your life gets worse when you get sober because now you don't have the oh I feel bad crack right

your life gets worse for a while but then on the other side of that things started getting better across the board like everything got better now when this happened I was working at men's health magazine was an editor there writer for a bunch of years and I saw that like everything every single thing we wrote about in that magazine same exact trajectory you had to do something that was hard in the short term to get a long-term benefit and so from there then it became this sort of pullback on all right going through discomfort seems to improve people

in a lot of different ways. And there's a lot of different ways to do that. And then you just sort of look at modern life and you're like, wow, we've made everything way more comfortable than it's ever been. Like, we don't really have to be uncomfortable today if we don't want to. And I wonder what that's done to us.

So the unintended consequence. The unintended consequence, yeah. And it was Donnie Vincent, right? Yeah, I went hunting with him. So that book came out of a profile I did of him for men's health where we went hunting for a week. You know, I'd never been hunting.

And this guy probably hasn't eaten anything he hasn't killed in decades. He's one of those types. Like true off the grid, like walking the walk. He's legit. He's not going to a hunting resort and staying in a nice lodge. And then he goes out for the day and hunts and shows the photo of the like, look at this crazy shit I did. No, he's out there for like months at a time in the middle of nowhere.

Very dangerous hunts. He's a real deal. I did a hunt with him for men's health. I realized, you know, it was one of those stories I sat down where my word count is 2,500. And I said, well, I could probably do like four times this. There, not four. My math is not good. I'm a writer, not a mathematician.

Well, that's 10,000 words. Yeah, 40 times this. 40. Oh, yeah. I could get to like 80,000 words. Yeah. So I pitched it as a book. And then as part of that, I'm like, all right, well, we needed the through line.

The hunt that I had done with him in Nevada, I'm like, that was the spine of this story I wrote, but I had to leave out a lot. So I talked my way. into going up to the Arctic with him for more than a month. He's like, hey, could I do one of these hunts with you? And he's like, yeah, maybe. This is a caribou?

Yeah, it was a caribou hunt. So we were up in the Arctic for more than the month hunting. And yeah, I got what I wanted out of that, which was, let's see what being uncomfortable for a while does. And, I mean, it was hell up there. Like, I'm freezing cold. Like, I wasn't warm for a second. But there were some days where, like, negative 40.

Yeah. And I'm coming from Las Vegas. It's so cold. It's so cold. Bored out of my mind for a lot of it, which that's new today. Right. If I'm bored at home, I'd just go, bam, cell phone, Netflix. Let's check my email for the 99th million time today.

White left. Who knows? Maybe she's there. Waiting. Yeah. Waiting. Hungry, too, because we had to packing all our food. Like now, I just, I'm one of those people that, I'm kind of bored.

I think I'll just eat. you know so now i'm hungry again all these different fronts the silence holy hell like once you get up there was one time i was out on the tundra it's probably peeing or something and um you see this like ch-ch-ch i'm like what is that what is that it was my watch it is so silent that any noise just gets amplified and it's almost like your perception just gets really dialed up and it's we don't realize how noisy it is here day to day yeah we don't realize it's it's kind of like light pollution too right right like noise pollution and light pollution or you know like a duplex but yeah even in Vegas I remember being out in the desert and and just being blown away by the the amount of stars I

could see once you're really away from the lights because if you're you live in Vegas or really in any city, it's, it's amazing what you can get used to. You get used to not seeing the night sky, not hearing nothing. Yeah. So when you do, yeah, it's breathtaking. Try and imagine running your business today without the internet. Could you? Maybe.

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so four times louder than it was. The other thing I found, there's a study that found there's only 16 places in the lower 48 where you can stand for more than in 15 minutes and not hear any human-created noise. Only 16 places left. Wow. Yeah. Like where? One was in the, what's that place people canoe in Minnesota?

It's not like bad. I want to say bad waters. It's not. Minnesota. I thought they were all lakes up there. Is it a river? Yes, I think it's a lake and river system. There's a place in Washington in the forest.

There's a guy who's literally his job is, I think, He's called a audio ecologist or something like that. One of those where you go. What is that major? That's not a job. Yeah. And then you hear what he does and you're like, oh, so you just go on a hike and you take like a sound meter and publish research? And that sounds like you figured it out, man.

Well, look, he made it into your book, I guess. He made it in my book. But I think to your point about you don't even realize, I think a lot of this is very subtle. It definitely affects us. but you get used to it and you don't realize you are being affected by it it's just kind of like you know you're like a fish in water you don't realize you're surrounded in water how much of what is going on today in just the whole general kind of body hacking thing you know like when I think of you know people exercising in a sauna

you know like uh laird Hamilton just getting on a stationary bike and going bananas in 220 degrees and then jumping in his pool and walking across the bottom holding a 50-pound boulder or something like or cold plunges. These things are all all seem to be deliberate choices to be uncomfortable. And I was just so surprised to see them catch on the way that they did. Were you surprised? Is it part of the theory that, you know, we come out of this trance at some point the way you did when you realize the benefits of all of this discomfort? I mean, do you take any credit for the cold plunge today? Did you write about that?

I don't remember. I did not write about the cold plunge. No, I think to your point, people get something from it, right? It does something for them or else I wouldn't go back to the basket. So you go, okay, well, what is that? Well, it turns out that people inherently value things that are harder to get or work for. When we do things that challenge us and are harder, the end result, whatever it might be, becomes way more valuable than had we got it in an effortless way.

Good example I like to give people is kids. So I don't have kids, but you talk to any parent, you go, what's the most important thing in your life, the most meaningful thing in your life? They always say kids. You go, was that really easy? They go, no. It's also one of the hardest things I've ever had to do. Bingo.

That's it. And there's strong psychology going back decades for that. And so when you look at two, if you look at polls on meaning in the country, people are feeling like their life is more meaningless. They're just not finding meaning. I think part of that is so much of the friction that once, although it was hard, it taught us something about ourselves, gave us this inherent like, yeah, I'm a person who can do stuff.

Like this is, my life is important. Removing the dial. That's been removed in a lot of ways. I was actually thinking about you because I did a piece on my substack 2% that was about that. How when you have to do something that has some sort of challenge, you got to figure something out and you get an end result. People get meaning out of that. And so I was thinking about it with jobs because a lot of people today, if you work in an office at a big corporation say, you don't really know like what is the end product? you know you fill out a spreadsheet it goes to this guy who goes yeah I send it to that guy

yeah who then maybe send it to this person and then it just you just don't know there's just no end product you're like the spreadsheet was kind of pain in the ass but like I have no idea what happened I'm just kind of like doing this stuff I don't know what it does I mean the stock price kind of goes up every now and then I guess I guess I help that me and the 30,000 other people who work here but I think trade jobs have an element where there's a quick return, you did something, you put work in, you had to figure things out. Did you fix it or not? You figure it out within, if it's a quicker thing, you figure it out by the end of the day. You always know how you're doing. You always know how you're doing. And you can walk away going,

fixed it. Yeah. Like your hat. I fixed stuff. Right. And you're surrounded by the visual proof of that thing. You know? Right. I can't tell. I mean, there's nothing here to indicate when the podcast is over, except I stop talking, you know, like there's no obvious thing. And most people don't have clear and present visual reminders of their progress at every stretch. But Donnie Vincent does, you know, hunters do. Yeah. And to your point, a lot of trade workers do, too. But it is...

They called this the... This came from a study I was writing. I was called the IKEA effect. And so basically they, these researchers had people, either put together a piece of IKEA furniture, or they said, hey, do you want this pre-made one? And then they asked him, how much would you pay us for this? And the people who had to make it

said they would pay far more money for it than the people were if they would just hand it over. So this indicated, oh, there's something that inherently makes this thing more valuable because I had to do it. And one of the great anecdotes they used to open up the study was in the 50s, food manufacturers start making instant cake mixes.

The first time they go out with it, they're like, we're going to make this as easy as possible. You just get the powder and you mix in the water and you put it in the oven. That's all you got to do. No one is buying it. And they go, why is someone buying this? It's so easy. They realize, oh, maybe that makes it not as valuable to the baker. The baker feels like they haven't really done anything for the people they're serving the cake to.

The people eating it going, you didn't do anything for this. So they literally started for no real. reason just to add friction. Now you have to put an egg and a little bit of oil in it. Adding that little bit of effort, it made the cake mixes take off. But then, which is, I didn't log on because the friction of the form, you're right, the juice wasn't worth the squeeze. I didn't want the friction. In that example, if I had had 18 squares instead of nine, maybe I would have looked at it as more of a challenge somehow or another. How does the psychology translate?

How does it square? For me, it's that had the cake maker said, you got to do 20 steps. Now you're like, no. Right? What do I look like a cake maker? Yeah. But because it was just a little bit, people go, okay, I've put in some effort to this. I feel like it's more meaningful.

And the way that squares for me is once you add too much friction, And once you add the actual staircase, now that's a lot of friction. Yeah. People start to shy away. Yeah. But you'll see people will kind of walk up the escalator and they're like, okay, I did something. Yeah. This is a little inside baseball.

But I know for me, and I've learned this lesson a couple of different ways over the years, but when I decided I wanted to make money impersonating a public speaker, right? Well, you know, I put the word out and I came up with a rate. that I thought was fair, you know, and kind of put myself out there. And there was some interest. And, you know, I got a lot of good feedback once I went and did it. Turns out I had a facility for it. But I was like, you know, how can I do better?

Like, what do I have to do? Because I thought the rate I was charging was pretty frothy. But as it turns out, as it turns out, if you charge a lot more, then people start to wonder, well, what the hell does this guy really have to say? Yeah. And then somebody pays it.

And then you realize, oh, shit, I actually need an act now. I need a message. Yeah. And so this happened years ago. It was, I think it was Motorola invited me to the innovation seminar down in Bocca Raton. And I had a conflict. And I literally told my business partner, who you just met, Mary.

And I said, you know, I would really love to do this. And it sucks that I can't because of this. And she said, well, look, they're still asking for a rate. They really want you. And I said, just for grins, find out what Bill Clinton charges. That's how long ago it was. And just give it, just to see what happens. She's like, ugh.

And they said, yeah. All right. Pressure's on. So I had to cancel my gig. I wound up going to Napa for a weekend and just thought really, really hard. What could I possibly say at the innovation seminar that would justify this ridiculous rate that I know I'm not? I don't have the value. Like I was really nervous about it.

Yeah. But it made me care more than I did. And it made me think really hard about the lessons from the dirt. And so I wound up going. I wound up getting overpaid in my mind, but I did the best job I could. In fact, I attacked their whole notion of celebrating innovation at the expensive imitation and made what I thought were some fairly, you know, contrarian points. And they invited me back the next year.

So I get it. Like the moral, I think sometimes the key to figuring out whatever it is is just to go, dead the opposite direction way further than you otherwise might, which is why people are jumping into you know, water that's absolute zero. Yeah. And I would argue had you said, okay, charge him the lower rate, we wouldn't be talking about this. You still remember that talk and you had to put in extra and it's become, it's burned into your memory. It became a big part of my business today. Yeah. You had to get there. Yeah. I had the same thing. So I am not, I've never liked public speaking. that's been my thing.

And so I write this, you know, I'm a writer. Just put me alone in a room and just let me peck some keys. Yeah. That's where I'm happy. So I come out with a book and then someone asked me to speak in public.

I'm going, hell no? Like, I don't want to do that. And they go, well, here's how much we'll pay you. Tell me more. Yeah, I'm listening. Yeah. So I say yes. And I love public speaking now.

The reason I love public speaking now is because I had to work my ass off at it. Dare I say, is it because it made you uncomfortable? Made me uncomfortable. And each time I did it, though, you're like, you can see these improvements. You're like, you're getting better. Oh, that joke landed this time. What did you do there?

And I learned something. And so it really was something that did not come natural to me. I needed the incentive of a check to do it. But once I started doing, I'm like, I really enjoy this. And now it becomes this thing that I love because every time I give a talk, I'm always like, I'm nervous. Am I going to land this? What's going to happen?

But then you get through it, you're like, I'm glad I did that. Yeah. That was great. Would you say that's among the greatest good things that have happened to you as a result of deliberately being uncomfortable? I think so. Yeah. You mean the public speaking or just the lesson from that?

that. Well, I mean specifically, like from what I've read your substack and I've listened to your podcast, I assume podcasting wasn't probably on your bingo card either before you wrote the comfort crisis. No. I was hoping I could do the Salinger thing and you write a book and it sells a bunch and then see you later world. Right. And never hear from me. Well, it turns out you can't do that anymore. You can't do that. No, the publisher's going, would you put a picture on Instagram of yourself holding the book and talking about the book? And you're just like, Jesus. Yeah, but you can't say no because it makes you uncomfortable, because that would make you the worst kind of ironic hack there is.

Exactly. Exactly. So now everything you have. Everything I do, I have to. Everything I hate to do, I have no excuse. You wrote a book that destroyed your entire excuse architecture. Oh, yeah. And it's funny now because I'll travel to towns and, you know, go to events or hang out with people and they'll be like, oh, you're here? You want to go for a hike? There's this peak where we might die. You'll love it. Right. Right. I can't say no. Or you're in your hotel room, right? And the air conditioner is not working. So you call down and you say,

yeah, it's serious. And they're like, oh, is it a little warm up there for you, Mr. Comfort, man? Is it like suck it up, dude? Yeah. Well, I can never, I can never fly first class. I can never go to, like, five-star hotel. I can never go to a five-star restaurant because it's just too. But I'm fine with it. the wrong book. Yeah, I wrote the wrong book. It should have been, why comfort is so great for you, and I could just do nothing. Here he is. 2% with Michael Easter. Yep. With a, you're nicely quaffed there. Yeah. That's, that's Buffalo Larry in Las Vegas. Is this, is this the pod? Yeah, this is the pod. We just launched it in April. And it's been fun. It's been a blast. I wasn't sure if I was going to like it. I've loved it.

You talk to a lot of interesting people. You're just going to ask them questions. Why didn't you tell me about this? I get it. Look, well, I came to, look, I spent 20 years crawling through sewers and having this exact conversation, you know, hanging upside down like a bat in a cave with, you know, something. And I'm like, there's got to be an easier way to do this. But no, I mean, if you're genuinely curious and you genuinely enjoy the language, there's no better way to make a living today, which is why they're four and a half million podcast. Sounds right. I can you imagine?

There's four and a half million of a thing that didn't really exist a decade ago. Yeah, it's wild. And part of it for me is my books were selling more in audio than they were print. And so people... Why do you figure? I think people listen to my books when they go out for walks. They're exercising. They're doing other things.

So they're being active, which I like. Did you read it yourself? I did read it myself. Yeah. Yeah. You're happy with that? You tell me. I don't know.

I actually read your book, the old-fashioned inefficient, pro-magnam way. Yeah, it was fun. I did it at a studio in Las Vegas, and they gave me an email. Here's the address. Show up here at this time. And I go down, if anyone's familiar with Vegas, I'm on South Maryland, which is a good place to get shot. Yep. And I pull up and there's this restaurant, and then there's this building with just a number, totally blacked out door.

I knock. I wait. door cracks open eyes come out I can kind of smell weed and guy just looks at me and goes, you the writer?

That's me. They let me in and I open the door and there's all these platinum albums on the walls there's like Kenny Chesney albums there's like Kanye albums I'm like these are all recorded here

and he goes yeah idiot let's go record and it's like a full on you know I don't even think they'd ever had a writer there It was like a rap studio, a country studio. It was great. That's so funny.

The same thing happened to me over in Bermuda, I guess. The deadliest catch got jammed up, and they needed an emergency session. And I wound up in a place where Sean Connary's lived there. It was not far from his house. And he had just been there doing a movie trailer or something. And it was this, God, you look at the walls, and all these famous cats are there. And it's a very weird set of muscles and a very strange environment. Like if you're the first time you enter that to sit there alone, headphones, microphone,

just you and your own voice made doubly strange by now you're reading your own words. So you're kind of telling yourself a story that you wrote. And is it making you crazy when you do it? Are you finding sentences that you're saying, loud for the first time and going, God. Why'd I write it that way? I sure would like another pass at that way. And then you got a producer in your ear piped in, and he's this erudite guy from New York,

and I mispronounce words apparently, and I'm an idiot for it. What did I, I mispronounced something, and he just goes, stop. And he pronounces it correctly, like in the most demeaning way ever. And I'm just like, sorry, I'll go back to the basket. It's not the comfort crises. You've been saying the title of your book wrong. Yeah, there was one word in Scarcity Brain that he finally just gave up on me. He had corrected me so many times.

You remember the word? Monk. I was saying Monk. M-O-N-K. Monk? Yeah. I was saying Monk. And he was like it's monk.

Monk like bonk. Yes. I was saying monk. And I wouldn't stop saying it. And he corrected me so many times. Monk like a monk. Like a Benedicting. That's what he's trying to say.

Benedicting. And he's saying monk. Monk. But I kept saying monk. Right. And finally, he'd just go screw it. I'm done with this. So part of the book has monk.

Part of the book has Monk. My cut-ins with Monk. And then eventually it just transitions to Monk. Yeah, I had a... It's a fun, fun. I had a horrible script for the Science Channel once. It was a line about bloodworms. Naturally.

I mean, I'm reading quick. I'm pretty good at this, you know, I mean, I've done it a lot, and I don't spend a ton of time in the booth anymore, but I came across an assemblage of letters that I had not seen before. The word was circumflare genal ganglion. And it's the smooth, fleshy, round part on a worm, like, in the middle of it. Like, it's ridged everywhere, but then there's this smooth thing, and inside the circumflaregeneal ganglion or all the organs.

That's where you put the hook when you bait them, because that's a tough part. But, man, it just, it's so jarring to your brain. You're just sitting there and you're read along. You're narrating and everything's good. And then there's this, it's a hard stop, man. And you had to walk away from it, had to say it out loud a few times because you can't just say it in the blind. You have to actually read the sentence.

Right. But yeah, you know, that was uncomfortable. But you know something? Listen to how you just said it perfectly. What would I? I wouldn't have like how many cocktail stories? How many just good tales exist as the. result of being uncomfortable.

Exactly. I'd say virtually all of them. Every single, so my, this sort of mantra of mantra, mantra, mantra. Excuse me, stop. Stop, stop. It's mantra. Montra. Chuck's a producer if you haven't.

This mantra I've come up with for myself is no problem, no story. So when I would have to do these reporting trips for my books, and I'll go to all over the world. You're like flying, you're going to the Bolivian jungle. You got to get there. You're going to Iraq. You got to figure it out. I would go in wanting everything to be perfect, right?

Like, we're in dangerous places. I want everything to line up. I want to feel safe. I don't want things to go off the rails. Things would go off the rails naturally. And I would be like, you know, you're kind of anxious about it. But then I would get home and write the book and go, this is what makes the story good.

That's called. material. The fact that my fixer in Iraq is just completely full of shit is what makes the book interesting. If the guy's like perfectly dialed and everything goes right, that's, it's not a good read. You need, you need bullshit inserted in your life so you can come back and go, let me tell you this story. Do you, were you a fan of Bourdain? I was, yeah. I liked a lot of his stuff. I think he was unfair to some people. Mm-hmm. He was?

I think he was unfair. He was a little... Oh, he was unfaired. He was very flawed. Yeah. He was a terrible host in the traditional sense of the word. Right. He was so uncomfortable that he couldn't look at the lens of the camera.

And his producers became so panicked when they realized they were working with a guy who was hosting a show at the time called No Reservations, who couldn't look in the camera to, Because he just felt so false and so fake and so inauthentic whenever he was doing that, that they figured a way for him to be himself without looking at the camera, ever. And so that was the first thing that really changed the way that show felt. And then years later, I saw him off the coast. Where was it? Was it like Sardinia, maybe?

Octopus, yeah. Yeah, so he's spear diving for Octopi. and he has a fixer, as you always do when you travel. And this guy was very eager to please and wanted to make sure that they had some octopi to spear. And so while Tony's down there, looking for one with a legit spearfisher, this guy is up top dumping like frozen octopi

into the water. Unbelievable. And they're just, they're falling around him. You know, now, and so in narration, you hear Tony, telling you what is happening in this moment. And he's so angry after the fact and how he got this on the network is one of the great mysteries of TV. But he throws everybody under the bus. And he's basically saying, this is it. This is why I hate my job. Here I am, you know, 15 feet down, trying to

legitimately show you what it takes to get an octopus on your plate. And this ass hat is trying to do his job in the worst possible way and I hate everything about it. And this happens early on in the episode. And he's so pissed as a result that all he does is drink for the rest of the episode. Now he's not only looking at the camera, he's just, he gets drunk on camera and stays that way in protest of this moment of falseness, I guess. Yeah. You know. And so, you know, I'm like, I'm riffing on it because all of that came from being uncomfortable and frustrated. And every single thing that happened as a result, in any other media, with any other director on any other network, in any other form, would have all been cut out.

Yeah. But it wasn't. And so it became my favorite episode of that whole thing. It was one of the more honest things I'd seen on TV ever. So if you can find that on the page. In front of a camera, on stage, you know, in a recording booth, in song, whatever it is, that's the trick. And it's always preceded by pain. Yeah.

Proceeded by pain. It became authentic because of the pain. Why do you think that show worked then? Well, in part because it was surrounded by lots of other examples that did not comport. It's the same reason dirty jobs worked when it did. It's not that it was particularly or inherently good. It's that it was surrounded by the commute. And so when you take the reverse commute in the face of all the other stuff, like you mentioned Salinger, you know, why, why did that book work as good as it worked is one great book?

And I think it's because there was nothing else like it at the time. Yeah. timing is a thing. I think that comfort crisis has done pretty well as a book. I don't think anyone would be talking about it had that book come out in 2019. Correct. That book came out in 2021, about a year anniversary of all the pandemic lockdowns. People had spent a year in their house.

I've been trapped in this cage of comfort for a year. And then, oh, this book. Okay. I'll check this out. Right. Well, it's just a lot of it is luck. That said, I was like to say, you got to at least throw the damn dice, so you're never going to have any luck.

The other reason your book worked, and the other reason I hustled to get it after hearing you talk about it, is that it was an interesting combination of a lived experience. Like, you actually went on the caribou hunt. You actually shot one. You actually butchered it and walked across the tundra for many miles. to hump it out. You know, it's, but then you back it up with science, or at least other people with large brains who have done deep work,

who can actually put some meat on that bone. Not a lot of books do that. And you were uniquely qualified to write it, in part, maybe because, you know, maybe because you weren't sober and then you were. maybe because you know you needed your own cage shook yeah yeah i do think i definitely get better material going out into the world i think we were just talking before we hit record how a lot of nonfiction books are it's harder to sell them now i think one of the problems is that a lot of people who are in the nonfiction space especially journalists types

it's just I'm going to sit at my desk and write a book. Yeah. I'm going to read some studies. I'm going to find some random anecdote online. Here's your anecdote. Here's the study. Okay. It's like, go out in the world and talk to people.

Find an interesting narrative. Like, it becomes too formulaic. Some of those books I think are great. Some I'm like, I've read this before. I read this 20 years ago. You've got to go find something new. It takes like, you got to exit the bounds of normalcy. Truly, man.

I mean, that is the, that's the sameness. Yeah. That's why most TV, I think, is bad because it's derivative. Somebody did something that was different, and that was a hit, and then everybody rushed to, you know, do the same show, write the same book. Why does so much music sound the same? It's always that, you know. That was my theme at Motorola, in a way.

They were there to celebrate innovation. And I was there to say, how come all you cats in Silicon Valley brand yourself? as great innovators, when in reality, the money that you made wasn't just a result of this great thing that you innovated, right? It's really your ability to do this like millions of times in a row. Yeah. This iPhone, right? It's like, that's when you have a business. You have to be able to do the same thing over and over. I mean, maybe I reckon Donnie Vincent would, like, if you're going to be a good hunter, you better do smart things over and over and over and over and over.

Do smart things over and over and go places. People won't go. Spend more time in those places. He's just willing to put the time and the work in. Not everyone can do that. He does it professionally, but he's figured out how do I turn this into a living? Yeah.

That's like every, you know, and a lot I would imagine of building a good brand is if someone has one thing, but you go, well, what's wrong with this? And how can I just make this thing, so much better. It's like we had the, not to pick on your old client here, but we had the razor. And Steve Jobs comes along and goes, yeah, but look at this thing. And it's the iPhone. Right. At the end of the day, both make calls, but this thing can do so much more. Or like coolers. Coolers used to be suck. Right? You put the ice in. You put the drinks in. The ice is melted in three hours.

Yet he comes along and goes, we got an idea. And now the ice stays there for 48 hours. Or like, did you have Josh Smith on the podcast? Oh, yeah. Yeah. He was just here. He's like, I'm going to make an unbelievable knife. I'm going to make it in America. It's going to be the best damn knife you ever seen.

And the branding's going to be phenomenal. And then Montana Knife Company just goes from his garage to now they got this giant facility. Were you there for the opening? I wasn't there for the opening, but I saw him actually with Dave at Dave Ramsey did an event. Yeah. in April. How were you guys friends? How did he get in your world?

Me and Josh? Yeah. I was hanging out with one of the toughest human beings in the world, if not the toughest, her name is Laura Zara. Amazing. New one. Check that thing out. Awesome.

Oh, yeah. This guy knows what he's doing. He's so. Unbelievable. He so knows what he's doing. Yeah. Do you know that that new knife sold out in less things? 10 seconds. Yeah. That flipper. That people yeah, the flip the flip the flip knife. Oh, you mean the pocket

knife? The pocket knife. People lined up like I think there were three since three a.m. that day to wait for it to drop and it was gone online. It was like because I happened to be watching it go down. No kidding you know I didn't know that and when it went down click sold out. Let me tell you what this guy's done just sidebar he sat right here a month ago. I can feel is all right? That's not Azora. No, we talked about the Great American Pocket Knife three, four years ago. And how, like, no one's doing it. And how it was such a talisman for generations and how everybody's granddad had one.

And what a truly useful tool it was. And then somehow out of favor. And, you know, he said, I'm going to bring it back. He gave me the first one sitting right here on the air. And they're gone now, Chuck, and like literally like that. I love that, man. Yeah. I love it.

You know, Josh has got, he built that facility, but he's got 130 people working for him in Missoula, making knives the uncomfortable way, the public way. I mean, it's like everything is totally transparent. Yeah. And he's doing it in the age of tariffs and taxes and a lot of stuff. I mean, talk about an uncomfortable, risky, entrepreneurial bet. And he's, you know, I think his story matters. When I first met him, his factory was his garage. Yeah.

And he walked me through the whole process. You're going, this is where you make these. And this is when the brand was pretty young. Did you write a story about him for one of the magazines? I don't think I did. No. I was up there, I was up there with a lady named Laura Zera. who is just tough as nails.

She literally will just go live in the woods for months at a time. She's just, she's awesome. My kind of girl. Yeah, she's great. Very feral person, but great. So she takes me, she knows Josh. That's probably not, you know, at least not one of the classic compliments that the ladies are just. You can edit that out.

She's a lovely one. She's feral. Like a cat. Yeah. Well, she literally lives in a cave for a lot of the year. She got this, she meets this old guy in Montana. He's like, oh, I really like you. You're just out, you know, you just hang out in the wilderness all the time.

And I think he left her a big piece of property. And there's a cave on the property, piece of land. And she just lives in the cave. What's her last name? Zara. Laura Zara. Look her up. She was in scarcity brain.

Yeah, see if you can find her, Chuck. I want to meet the feral woman who lives in a cave. She's awesome. She's one of the greatest humans. And she's not, interestingly enough, if you were to just meet her in normal life, very normal. Yeah. You don't go immediate cave dweller. No.

She went to like Connecticut College for undergrad or something. You know, it was like this liberal arts kind of hippie school. And yeah, great. But anyway, she took me to meet Josh. And that's when the facility was in the garage and walked me through the whole thing. He gave me a knife. I'm like, oh, my God, this is like, you're making these out of here? And at the time they were building the bigger building on his property, which I think probably by the time the roof got raised on that, he was like, we need a bigger boat.

And the bigger boat just opened, I guess. Congrats to him. Great guy. You know what else he did, man? He did a knife for Microworks as a fundraiser. Oh, cool. And gave us like, I don't know, 100. You know, these things sell for 350, 400 bucks a piece, you know, sold out right away.

And then he created one called The Rocker, which was, in his words, the ultimate working man's utility knife. You know, he was a lineman before he was a, you know, like for money. And he's been given 10% of the gross sales of that thing back to Microworks. That's cool. And he does it every quarter. I mean, it's over $200,000 now that he's contributed to our scholarship program. that's a guy making knives up in Missoula who understands discomfort

who loves the country and who appreciates what we're doing is that Laura? That's Laura. Oh my God, what is she doing? What is on her back? She shed hunts so she'll go find her thing is she gets her thrills by finding antlers. She literally is just like, this is how she spends her time. She's great. One of the most fascinating

interesting people and lies. Shout out to the driftwood log and pine cone that helped take this pick after only talking to Naron

for a few weeks. That's her dog. They were also great for a fresh conversation. Just kidding. I was enjoying the solitude and refused to respond when they tried to strike up

banter. All right. I want to meet her. See how her legs are all cut up? Uh-huh. Because she only wears shorts and gaiters.

Like even if there's snow on the ground and she's like I'm not a pants person I just like shorts so she emerges from the wilderness and her legs are just cut to hell it's awesome she's great you know what I'm going to ask that's Chuck we're going to need to get I mean not Laura get get Laura I mean does she have a phone in the cave how does she how does she communicate send her text you'll get a reply in a month when she comes back well you know what yeah between you and Josh I'm sure we can we can get around here I'd love to talk with a girl that doesn't wear pants.

Yeah. It just seems like a sport. Yeah. Come up with bloody legs. It'd be great. Your latest book, I laughed out loud when I saw the title. Walk with Weight. Walk with Weight.

It's my favorite part of comfort crisis. And I guess of all the different forms of discomfort discomfort that you discuss in that book, boredom is actually my favorite one to talk about. I just think it's so important to be bored. And man, do I think we've forgotten that? But the business of carrying weight, and you write about it with so much affection that it almost feels like a duty as a species that we have

because it's really the one thing we can do that is unrivaled. Unrivaled. That's the physical thing that humans are built. to do and are very good at. Explain. There's no other animal that can pick up a weight and carry it somewhere for distance. Like, no other.

And people will listen to this and go, what about a horse? What about a donkey? Well, the key point is pick it up themselves. So a wolf grabs its prey and its jaws. Right. And heads out. Holes it a little ways, but they're not carrying it far. Yeah.

Right. So once humans start walking on two feet, well, we got these free limbs. What do we do with them? Oh, we can manipulate the world. We can carry our kids. We can carry tools into the unknown. And that really shaped us into who we are and allowed us to take over the world.

And so in the comfort crisis in this Walk with Weight Book, you know, I argue when you look at physicality and what people do for fitness, it's like we lift weights, we run, that's great. But we've totally overlooked this thing that we are uniquely good at. that shaped our bodies. And so the argument is, add some carrying back into your life. And I think the argument I'm making the book is that the most practical, easy way to do that easy, quote unquote,

is with rucking, which is just putting some weight in the pack, going for a walk. A noun, and a verb. Exactly. Exactly. And what makes it interesting from a physical perspective is that you're getting cardio

because you're walking and the weight makes it harder. But you're also getting a strength effect because you got weight on your skeletal system. So you're kind of getting like a two and one. Also, the injury rate is much lower than running. Like multiples lower than running. A lot of people have gone out and they've run.

My knees hurt can't run anymore. If you can walk, you can rock. I just think it's this tool that is so useful for people. I mean, I do it every day because if I'm going to walk my dogs, I'm just going to throw a rock on. I get more from every step. 30, 40?

What do you carry you normally? Usually a 30 for me, yeah. So it's not a ton of weight, but it's just enough to affirmatively kick in all the systems you're going to kick in anyway, but faster. Yeah, exactly, exactly. I tell most people when they start, start with like 10% of your body weight just to get going, see how this feels. I don't want people to have like some soul-crushing weight because then they're

I can't do that. I'm never doing that again. Yeah, yeah. And then just add up from there. And I also tell people don't go over a 30-year body weight. That tends to, one, it'll suck beyond belief. Yeah. Two, it can kind of raise the injury rate a little bit.

That's from old military data going back to the 50s. Yep, I did it. I screwed up. I got very enthused after comfort crisis. I had already started during the lockdowns. I was in the habit of getting up super early and walking, usually eight miles. Like between 530 and 730. Just a big loop in the neighborhood where I live.

It's pretty walk. You know, the bay is there. You know, I'm in like the Tiburon area. And then I called our buddies over at Go Ruck. I got my pack. And I put in the 30 and I was stunned at the difference. Walking eight miles, I was totally used to it. Walking eight miles with 30 pounds is totally different.

And I did that for a couple months and lost probably four pounds, five pounds. Didn't do anything different at all than I'd been doing. Then I went to 40. Then I went to 45. And I was just feeling great. And then I really screwed the pooch, man. I'm fine now, but do you... You know what?

Find that video for... Did you ever see the video I posted? I don't think so. Oh, dude. This is funny. We don't have to watch the whole thing, but find it so he'll recognize it. But what happened was, I decided, I mean, it's homeostasis, right? Your body's, you have to mix up your workouts.

Yeah. Otherwise your body knows what you're going to do, and it cheats. Yeah, you adapt. That's it. And you got to do something else, yeah. So I thought, no, you know what, I got to go to 50 pounds. And that meant I should order a, I guess, another 10 pound. plate. But I'm like, I don't want to order a 10 pounds. It's just 10 pounds. And like, I put it off.

And I'm having this conversation with myself. I'm out for a walk. And I got 40 pounds of this thing. And I looked down and in the street is a rectangular slab of concrete that had washed off the top of a water main. Like it literally said property of water something on the front of it. But I looked at it. I'm like, damn, that thing. I bet that would fit in the ruck and I picked it up and it was heavier than 10 pounds. I wasn't sure how heavy, but it had it. But sure enough, it weighed 25 pounds. Okay.

So I walked that day eight miles with 65 pounds on my back. Eight right into, so you went 50% heavier than normal. Pretty much, yeah. But to your point, I weighed, say 200 pounds, right? So, yeah, that's a third of my body weight. Yeah, you're getting close to the max. Wow. I mean, every single thing. It's a level of misery that you can't really explain unless, I mean, certainly people in the military understand.

They walk routinely with, you know, they have 100 pounds on their back. Yeah. But if you're not used to this. So this is me just explaining to the viewer because somebody said, bullshit, you know, there's no way you walk with this amount of weight. Here, you can turn it up too, Chuck. You can even tell how you guys. got up. Yeah, oh, it hurts. Yeah. It hurts. But here you go.

Where's the volume? Lower right. Unmute. There you go. Okay. Because the whole the whole rucking process makes you sweat a lot. I usually put it back on in the evenings, but that's another story. The go-rug bag

itself looks like this. Just the effort. Two years ago. You're going to love this. And it arrived with a 30-pound plate already in it. And I'll show you that plate. It's a, first of all, I added 10 pounds to it a couple months later. Because you get, you know, you get used to the weight and you want to trick your body into avoiding what you call homeostasis. See, I know stuff. Anyway, that's why it's

important to increase the weight from time to time. But this is, this is a 30-pounder right there. and I added another 10, so I was walking around with 40 for about a year, and I thought, you know what, it's time to go to 50. So I decided walking home one morning I was going to order another 10 pound plate from Go Rock. And then I saw this thing in the street, just lying there on the other side of my driveway. It is perfectly shaped. It's unbelievable. Perfectly shaped. But there was no open hole near.

by just this slab of concrete in the middle of the street. So being cheap, I picked it up and I put it in my rock bag. And then I kept walking. And you know what? It was very heavy. And when I got home, I got on the scale and it said 265 pounds. And at the time, I weighed 200 pounds. So I did the math and that's how I got the 65 pounds. Anyway, that's what I walk with every day, Jack. So there. Awesome. So, I mean, that, I can't, that video happened because of you. That's 100% because I read the comfort crisis and I walked with 65 pounds for the next couple of months, lost another seven pounds.

Wow. And then my knee hurt. And then my ankle hurt. And then my hip hurt. And then I stopped rucking for a couple of weeks. And I thought, oh, God, I really, what have I done? But I was still walking and I felt okay. And long story short, now I'm back to 40 every day when I'm home.

And Mike, it's totally changed my life. That's awesome to hear. And I don't have time to go to the gym anymore. I'm trying to maintain the illusion of fitness, you know. We all are. But nothing. Nothing. This allows me, sometimes it's 90 minutes, sometimes it's two hours.

But maybe I'm prepping for a podcast. Maybe I'm on the phone. It's early. I'm getting stuff done. Yeah. I'm sweating like a whore in church. The calories are getting burnt. I'm atoning for all my sins the night before in a way that is just, I mean, it's just so efficient.

I get home, then I do as many push-ups as I can. I wait three minutes. I do as many push-ups as I can. Wait three minutes. That's many push-ups. That's all I do. That's awesome. And it's, you know, it works for me.

I've heard from so many people on my substack who, same deal. They go, I hate running or run. Running hurts my knees. Yep. Walking, if I really want to get something out of it, I got to go for like 20 miles. And then they get into rucking, and it totally changes their life. It allows them to get more from the walk. It becomes like an actual workout.

Yet to your point, oh, I can make calls while I'm doing this. I can send some emails if I have to. So I'm able to multitask. I don't feel like I'm carving time out of my life entirely in order to get this physical activity in. I can listen to Michael Easter, mispronounce monk. Exactly. As I'm strolling. Exactly.

Or mantra. Or mantra. Or mantra. Mantra. That's my mantra. Mantra. In your book, you credit women primarily for creating this thing. And I want you to explain that.

But I also want you to really link its significance to virtually every military that's ever existed. Or walk the planet, I dare say. Yeah. Okay. So go back. Who knows how long? Many hundred of thousands of years. You have a kid. Okay, most kids died before the age of five. Infant mortality rates like 50%. So in order to keep a kid safe, you've got to carry this thing around all the time. Well, women were a major contributor to gathering food, doing all these other things. So, well, now they're carrying this kid in their arm all day. They're one-handed, right? They're thought as great. You cut your production in half. So at some point in time, one very wise woman goes, well, what if we built these little sort of sash type things and we put the kid in there? So they do that. Now it frees up two hands. So now they're back to business as usual, being able to gather food, help with other things, and our productivity just completely expands. So we invent these initial backpacks.

And then, of course, because humans are smart, we go, well, if we can carry kids in these, what else can we carry in these things? right now we have a means of transporting items for long distances because when you have something attached to your back it's like we'll do backpackers do they throw all their gear in their back and they go out into the unknown they go down the trail so that expands how we can explore it makes us more productive like it it changes humanity forever so fast forward to the military militaries throughout history the most important physical act was can you march a certain distance while carrying the gear you need to fight in the war. And so there have been tests going back throughout time. Like even the Greeks and Romans, they would say, you are fit enough for the military if you can carry X amount of load, wide distance in Z time. Like it's always been the most fundamental act of the military is rucking.

And obviously you need it because you're going to fight a war. You need to get your gear. And in the past, it wasn't like you're not flying in soldiers, you know, from Germany into the war zone. You're going, well, we've got to go invade this place that's 250 miles away. That's where the battle is. All right, everyone, get your stuff, get your gear. We're going for a long walk.

So that was just fundamental to moving troops and being able to fight. Yeah. And it's, I think what's surprising about it to read about that anyway for the first time is that you never see that part of war or rarely do you see it leaned into. Like, you see the battles, you, cinematically, I mean, right? Yeah. Because it's not great TV to just to show people marching, you know, for hour after hour after hour. But of course, in the Civil War, I mean, those guys would not unusual to walk 30 miles.

Right. And then fight. Right. You know? Long, and the gear back then is heavy. Yeah. It's super heavy. It gets wet.

Yeah. Canvas. So, I mean, you're talking about, you. young men carrying I mean it could be what is it like 60 to 100 pounds on average I read

today especially as we sort of ramped up technology the loads became heavier over time today in the military the average loads I think in Iraq and Afghanistan were about 100 pounds

that's serious that's including like body armor all your stuff I mean that is a lot as we just established I know what 65 pounds feels like. Throw on, you know, another third of that. Now, to your earlier point, you're talking, like in the Second World War, these soldiers were,

what do you think the average weight was? I bet it was like a soldier? Yeah, of a fighting infantryman in the Second World War. I bet it was a buck 40. I was going to say exactly that. It was probably 140 pounds. And then they're loading them down with, say, depends on what your job is, right? 80-ish pounds.

These guys are carrying two-thirds of their weight. Two-thirds of their weight. And then hand them a Thompson gun on top of it. Yeah. Did you ever read? There was a book. A terrific book about Vietnam by Tim O'Brien. It's called...

Oh, the things I carried? Yeah. Yeah, that's one of the best written books ever. If you're a writer listening to this... I think it's the best war book. Yeah. And if you're a writer listening to this, don't read that book. Because you will go, okay, there's people out there that are far better than me.

They can do that. Yeah. Salingers, you know. Like, what else did he write? Was it Tim O'Brien? I think that was the author. That was his biggest books. Yeah, the biggest book was Tim O'Brien.

Yeah, if you don't know what we're talking about, it's basically, I mean, it's a literal explanation of the things a soldier carried out of his ruck. You know, and if that were all it was, it would be an eye-opener. But, of course, it's really a, you know, a metaphysical rumination on the emotional weight. Yeah. And even training for big missions, rucking was the foundation. It's like all the people who stormed D-Day, like the rucking, was legendary. They would go on these legendary ruck marches to get ready for that. And then one of my favorites that I came across was 10th Mountain Division.

Oh, yeah. Their training was insane. Because you have to do that at altitude. And you're carrying cold weather gear. Yeah. You're carrying skis. It is so heavy. And you're in the mountains.

The terrain is the worst. Is it the worst? Because who was that psycho you just had on your podcast? Grandmother of four. Purple Hair. Running. Running in, what's the name of the race? Badwater 135.

Jeez, this woman. She gets out of the car at night to start this race. It starts at 11 p.m. in Death Valley. Yeah. It's 120 degrees. degrees at 11 p.m. And she go, okay, we got 135 miles ahead of us. And she won, she won it that year.

It's considered the world's hardest race. Her name's Ashley Paulson. Yeah. She is literally a grandmother. I don't know how old she has, I would say, late 40s, but she's literally a grandmother, has four kids. Didn't even start getting into running and racing until she was on her fourth kid. And she set the women's course record, won the race that.

year. Unbelievable. It gets to like 130, 135 in the heat of the day. And then when you factor in, it's all on a road, which actually makes it harder. Because the heat coming off the road, the heat coming off the road is like 180. It's unbelievable. Your shoes melt. What I love about her, though, is there's people who would do that race and they go, I'm the baddest person who ever lived. You know what I mean? Like they just are like it's a lot of and she's she's a grandma with pink hair and she. Hey yeah. I ran it. It was really hot. It was really and you're just like, I love this person. You won the thing and there's no flexing. Yeah. I just love that about her. Is she indicative of the kind of guest you're looking for on the 2%? Yeah, we like to mix it up with

people who are going out in the real world doing interesting things that are inspiring and also we'll bring on scientists who can explain well, why is this important? So the episode was her was paired with a guy who wrote a book called Hot Wired and it looks at the science of the heat and why heat is good for humans. So humans lived in the heat for all of time. We're unique in that we're really good at cooling ourselves. We're really good at endurance exercise in the heat. That totally shaped us. And then we started living in air conditioning for 95% of the time.

And we don't get these temperature swings that are out. actually really important for physical health, even mental health. There's really interesting research on depression and how exposing yourself to the heat seems to help with that for various reasons. So yeah, we try and try and keep it in. You know, my sort of guiding thing is do I want to talk to this person? Do I think there would be a fascinating conversation? I'm like, yeah, let's do that. As North Stars go, that's a good one. Good. You know. And it's a It's a good place, I think, to land the plane here because we started with the heat of the desert. And we started with wondering, why do people do what they do?

Maybe part of the reason they stand in that line in front of that ridiculous sign. It's just because they're having a heat stroke. Maybe it's just the heat. But, wow, you know, I mean, I read it in your book too, but the idea that for, I mean, for only the thinnest little blip of measurement have we lived in air conditioning. For only the thinnest little blip of the relative timeline, have we enjoyed a hot shower at the end of a cold day? My granddad didn't experience that until he was 50, you know? Right.

Never had a hot shower, right? And my God, have we become soft. How, like... Because we adapt to our condition. we adapt to whatever level of comfort we're at and if that gets reduced now it's an emergency so a lot of the message of my work is

well adaptation works both ways yeah so if you go put yourself in situations that are going to be uncomfortable when you get back to your normal world that changes how you view it all of a sudden it becomes this hot shower is unbelievable hot running water oh my god

like when I'll go do stuff outdoors When I come home and eat the first meal and you have the hot shower, you just go, why have I ever complained? Like, this is unbelievable. Yeah. It's all so new. And so that's the case for me. Yes, you get all the physical benefits.

That's important. I don't want you dropping dead of a heart attack at whatever age. But more importantly, I want you to view your daily life in a way that is in perspective of how good things are and helps you appreciate just how amazing things are. Yeah. Because that colors your worldview. Yep. And again, we talked about the speed with which, you know, things can happen.

The fact that my granddad had his first hot shower at 50 and the fact that really a generation later, people were deliberately plunging themselves into the freezing water, right? Either to push or challenge or whatever the reason, it doesn't really matter. Because I think the bigger point is we get to choose. Like there's a whole long list of stuff we can't control. But the sliding scale on the comfort and discomfort spectrum, that's up to us. Totally. You know?

And maybe you can't go on a caribou hunt with Donnie Vincent. And maybe you're not going to do that thing. But maybe you'll do the other thing. What did you tell me about? Masogi? Yeah, Masogi. Take on one big challenge a year where you have a 50-50 show. shot at failure. It can be anything. Because today I would argue a lot of times even when we take on

challenges, we're in the safe zone. We're like, I know I'm going to, I'm going to do it. Yeah. It's going to be hard. But when you get that 50-50 right, now you got to dig deep. That's right. You're going to have times where you go, I don't know if I'm going to be able to do. I need to quit. This is terrible. But if you can just keep going, that becomes kind of a metaphor for life. Because you go, oh, I realize I have more on board than I thought. And that changes you. And this isn't me just. making stuff up. You look at every myth, important myth throughout human history. That is exactly how

they are structured. You take someone out of the comfortable world, you throw them into an uncomfortable world. They have to deal with all this shit down there. It's hard. They want to quit. But eventually they make it through and they come out of the other side, a new person. Like literally a new person.

And we've like removed that. You need moments like that. There's a reason humans had these stories for all of time. That stories are how we told ourselves what was important about living and all these different lessons. So yeah, I just think we need to get back to that. What is boot camp? What is buds?

Why do we give you the Ranger Tab or the Seal Trident? Because it's a symbolic representation of the fact that you are a new person. It's exactly what that is. Last question. With regard to discomfort, is the goal to endure it or figure out a way to love it? I think if you figure out a way to love it, that'll be. That's the ultimate goal. And that's what your why is too.

What am I going to get from this? It's going to be like, what is on the other side of this? Because that makes sure like the guide, you got a good rudder there, guiding you into the right things. Well, the odds of finishing your first book were probably 50-50, but the odds of actually getting it published were skinnier. Skinnier and the odds of writing another one and another one after that. Skinny, skinny, skinny. the odds of you narrating it with that voice, very slim. Very slim.

Very slim. And yet, there you are. Public speaking, no, not likely. There you go. That was the hard one for me. Yeah. But it's been awesome. I just had to get up there a few times.

I really appreciate you coming out here from the desert. You head back tonight? He heading back tonight, yeah. And you're on a plane, right, obviously. I'm driving. Oh, you drove? If I have a... He's rucking.

I'm walking back. It'll only be 115. I'm the type of person where I'm, If I do the math and I go probably door to door on a flight versus driving, there's a two-hour difference. You'll take the drive. I'll do the drive. Yeah. I don't want to have to wait.

I don't trust the pilot. I'm like, I got this. I want to introduce you to my friend Blake Scholl, who made that plane, not the model, but the actual plane. Oh, really? Yeah, he's bringing supersonic back. The company's called Boom. You should interview him. You would absolutely love this guy.

He has been on a mission since we went to the moon and broke the sound barrier commercially that same year and just kind of quit both. I mean, for all intents of purposes, we just quit. The fact that we're going slower now than we were in 1969 at 40,000 feet is appalling. Really? I didn't know that. The concrete was flying like 980 miles an hour. I remember why did that shut down? Well, there were these things called Sonic Boom. which people didn't appreciate.

And then there was a crash. The Concord took off. I forget where it was. It was in Paris? I think there was a piece of debris on the runway. The wheel exploded, kicked up some crap, ruptured a fuel line maybe, and then before they could swing back around and land,

blow up, everybody died. So they had a big PR problem. But when I think of it, when I think, about how fast tech has moved in virtually every measurable way, to your point, social media, et cetera, if we were breaking the sound barrier and commercial flight in 1969, we should be flying from L.A. to Paris in about two hours today. Like, we should be flying 2,200 miles an hour. Yeah. But we affirmatively said, nah, that's, it's fast enough. Everything since then has conspired to make air travel miserable.

Miserable. So he's bringing it back. That's his goal. Talk about him, Asogi. Yeah. That's awesome. He's already got, what was it, 130 orders? He's got orders from every major.

Yeah, American, United and Air Japan. Thank God for people like him. Honestly, his episode is up right now. In fact, listen to it on your drive back. I'll listen to it. And you know what? Take Josh's knife with you. Since you drove, you don't have to check it.

bag. It's my gift. He left me too. Josh did give a, say, a joke. He says, you know, when I gift people knives on trips like this, they always get taken to TSA, now they've got to check their bag and they end up hating me. No, it's a running gag, but the fact that you're driving is perfect. Awesome. You're taking it. It's a great knife. That's his, amazing. That's a new one. Very cool. Yeah. It's the last forever. Yeah, take it on a rock. Hand it down. Might save your life. We're to help you get to the front of the line in that, welcome to Las Vegas sign.

Yeah. Just flash that thing around. Either way. Just wave it. It's very regular for people to wave a knife around Las Vegas on the strip. It's just like, yeah, people love it. They call it Wednesday. Michael Easter, his podcast is called The 2%.

His latest book is called Walking with Weight. His prior books are scarcity brain and the comfort crisis. I assume you're working on another. Coming out next year. What's it going to be called? Can you say? We don't know yet. There's that debate.

But it's the through line on this. This is a 850-mile hike I did in southern Utah, which is its own. Go back to the no problem, no story concept. Like St. George, Southern Utah? Started in Arches National Park, ends in Zion. Yeah. You go up and down the Grand Canyon six times. There's no trail.

I did it with one of my best friends who's, his name's Matt Sherman. So one of the longest serving Americans in the Iraq and Afghanistan war. No kidding. He was a sort of off-the-books diplomat type. they'd send out to meet with warlords and he'd come back and report to generals. A lot of stories. A lot of amazing stories. He's a wonderful. Lots of problems. Lots of stories. Lots of problems. Lots of stories. Who was a kid who had to cut his arm off down there and one of those.

Aaron Ralston. Yeah. Jeez. Let me tell you, my mom and wife mentioned him a few times before we left. I bet you're going through it. Was that Zion or was that what? We ended in, Aaron Ralston, he was, I think he was somewhere on the Colorado Plateau outside of Moab. when that happened. He's in the middle of nowhere. Yeah. You know,

people don't understand how remote that part of Utah is. Yeah. Yeah, truly. We would not say anyone for a week. Yeah.

Until we had to hitchhike into a town to respline and then go back to the trail. And yeah. What was that movie called? Was it James Franco? Franco played him 128 hours, I think,

because that's how long he was stuck. Oh. And he probably had like a little Swiss art. He should have had this knife. That knife would have been easy. Yeah, just one way. Okay. We're good to go.

See you later. Yeah. That's why Josh made it. You know, he's like, yeah, here's a knife for people who take long hikes alone with the propensity to get their limbs stuck. The old Ralston model. Hey, Matt, thank you again for coming. Yeah, thanks.

All right, see y'all next week. If you like what you heard. And even if you don't, won't you please? Won't you please, pretty, please. Well, I hate to beg and I hate to plead, but please, pretty, please, so.