Learn To Embrace Discomfort - Michael Easter

Michael Easter 0:00 We're always gonna have problems in life. Learning to live well is accepting that we are going to have problems and face challenges, but that we'll often come out on the other side of them better if we accept that and act accordingly. (wind blows)

Chris Williamson 0:14 Michael Easter, welcome to the show.

Michael Easter 0:16 Hey. Thanks for having me. I'm excited to be here.

Chris Williamson 0:19 Me too, man. Why are you interested in discomfort? Seems like a weird thing to be interested in.

Michael Easter 0:24 I guess it... Yeah, it kind of is (laughs) . Um, so my background is I've been a health and performance journalist my entire career. So I worked at Men's Health for, uh, a pretty long time in the US. And, um, pretty early in my career, I noticed that everything that I was writing about, in terms of lifestyle health and how to improve your health, uh, you usually had to go through some form of discomfort to see a benefit. So if I want to improve my fitness, I have to work out. Working out sucks, right (laughs) ? If I want to lose weight, probably gonna have to eat less. I'm gonna be hungry. Being hungry sucks. Even mental health, improving your mental health, right? You usually have to un-peel some sort of psychological onion and get to the bottom of what is causing this issue, right? And that can often be uncomfortable. So I noticed that, and then I just had a handful of events in my life that really sort of cemented that concept. And yeah, that led me to ultimately write The Comfort Crisis.

Chris Williamson 1:16 You went on an experience to the Arctic with a friend of yours, and that was one of the big parts of this.

Michael Easter 1:24 Yeah, I did. So the guy's name is Donnie Vincent, and he is a backcountry bow hunter and filmmaker. Um, (clears throat) he makes these movies that I like to describe as Planet Earth, but with hunting. So they're not like your typical, you know, 30-minute hunting show.

Chris Williamson 1:36 That's like the opposite of Planet Earth. David Attenborough being very gentle with some monkeys in a forest. Here's some guy stood next to a huge deer that he's just shot with a bow.

Michael Easter 1:45 Yeah. Well, it, it's almost like... It's got the same vibe, and then all of a sudden it's like, "Oh-"

Chris Williamson 1:49 Death.

Michael Easter 1:49 "... we, we killed the animal." Yeah.

Chris Williamson 1:51 (laughs) Yeah.

Michael Easter 1:51 Um, no, they're, they're really interesting though. And I think that what's important about him is he's really changing how hunting is perceived and how it's practiced. He's kind of at the forefront of this movement, um, that's really changing hunting. So I met him through doing a story about him in Men's Health. A handful... It was maybe five, six years ago. And we just stayed in touch, right? And the story was super popular in Men's Health. We stayed in touch, and he calls me up one day, and he goes, "Hey, I'm going up to the Arctic for more than a month. Do you want to come along?" And, you know, my initial reaction is, uh, "Hell no" (laughs) . But he's a good salesman. He gets in on this sales pitch, right? He's like, "Dude, it's gonna be the most epic adventure you could ever be on. We're gonna see grizzly bears, packs of wolves. We're gonna climb ancient mountains and cross glacial rivers," and on and on and on, right? And I live in Las Vegas, and I'm at home sitting on the couch in my air conditioned home, you know, and I'm thinking to myself, "Yeah, that sounds like me," you know (laughs) ? Uh, so I sign on, and, uh, yeah. I start training. I get my f- plane tickets up there. I have to totally, like, overhaul how I'm living to get, uh, prepared for a journey like that. And we ended up spending more than a month up in the Arctic on this pretty epic, uh, backcountry hunt. So we were, you know, hundreds of miles from other people. I mean, middle of nowhere. It's like middle of nowhere, and, uh, it was uncomfortable. And I think, you know, what I, what I drew from that is, um, we have, we as humans have really engineered, uh, comfort into our lives in so many different ways. I mean, I think that there's ways that are, uh, quite obviously graspable, so the fact that we don't really need to put physical effort in to live anymore, right? Like, you could have 1,000 steps a day (laughs) and be fine, right? Would not have been possible 1,000 years ago 'cause you're having to hunt and gather for your food, whatever it might be. Um, we live in se- We live at 72 degrees now, right? We have food that is (laughs) easily accessible. We don't necessarily have to work for it, but we've even put in things like, you know, people tend to feel uncomfortable in silence. Well, today, we've, like, raised the, the, um, loudness of the world, like, four-fold, and on and on and on. So in the book, I really single out these what I consider really important forms of discomfort, um, that we evolved to face that naturally kind of keep us healthy that we have engineered out of our lives.

Chris Williamson 4:24 What was the scariest or most uncomfortable part of the trip that you took up to the Arctic?

Michael Easter 4:30 Oh. Uh, yeah, that's a good question. So I think that what's interesting is that (clears throat) when I talk about grizzly bears, people are always like, "Oh, my God, grizzly bears." Like, everyone wants to know about grizzly bears. You look at the (laughs) you look at the numbers, it's like, the crappy little planes you have to fly to get out there. I mean, they're like these two-seaters. They're a pack, the size of a pack of gum. They crash all the time. Like, statistically, that's way more likely to kill you. That and the weather, right (laughs) ? So probably the most dangerous thing we did was taking the planes in realistically.

Chris Williamson 5:02 I was gonna say, the most dangerous part of the trip was getting there.

Michael Easter 5:05 Yeah, it was getting there (laughs) . Um, but then we also had some pretty gnarly weather a couple times. We almost lost our shelter one night. There was, like, this hurricane force winds that were threatening to just, like, blow our shelter into Russia, more or less. And rule number one of surviving out in the wild is making sure that you have a shelter, 'cause if you don't, you're exposed, and it's easy to, uh (laughs) , yeah, find yourself in quite the pickle, so.

Chris Williamson 5:32 Where were you on the Arctic? 'Cause obviously it's a big ring above.

Michael Easter 5:35 Yeah.

Chris Williamson 5:35 What were you, what were you directly above?

Michael Easter 5:37 Yeah. So we were in the Alaskan Arctic. We were about maybe 150 miles above the Arctic Circle.

Chris Williamson 5:44 Pretty high then.

Michael Easter 5:45 Yeah, pretty high. There's a, there's an area called the Noatak, uh, National Preserve, which is where we were.

Chris Williamson 5:52 What was the day and night cycles like based on the time of year you were there?

Michael Easter 5:56 Pretty long days. I think the sun would go down at maybe...... mm, I'm having trouble remembering, like maybe 10:00? And then it would, I don't know what time it got up because I was always so tired at the end of the day that I would just like- (laughs)

Chris Williamson 6:08 Yeah.

Michael Easter 6:08 ... you know, sort of sleep in and be up. But what was interesting is that we were so high that we were losing, I think it was like six or seven minutes every single day. So, being up there for that long, it was like, you know, when we first got up there, the sun is going down at whatever it might be, 10:00, 11:00. By the time we left it was, you know, much earlier-

Chris Williamson 6:26 Move rapid.

Michael Easter 6:26 ... in just 30 days. Yeah.

Chris Williamson 6:28 Yeah. Have you read, uh, Endurance by Alfred Lansing about Sir Ernest Shackleton's trip across the Antarctic? Have you ever read that?

Michael Easter 6:36 I haven't. Oddly enough, everyone recommends it to me. Um, it's on my list, but I haven't read it, no.

Chris Williamson 6:41 Add- add another person to the list of those that are annoying you about the fact that you need to read that, but-

Michael Easter 6:46 Right on.

Chris Williamson 6:47 Dude, hearing that, 'cause they're out there for I think the best part of two years.

Michael Easter 6:52 Mm-hmm.

Chris Williamson 6:52 And when you hear about just how savage those conditions are, you know, electing to go and do that, I suppose there is glory associated with it, but the glory of whatever it was, 1914, I think they left, they left like three days after World War I was announced.

Michael Easter 7:09 Hmm.

Chris Williamson 7:09 And what happened was, they sent a letter, maybe even to the King, I think Shackleton sent a letter to the King saying, "I understand that I'm taking 20 good men of fighting age, some of whom have experience in war, uh, and I'm yomping to the other side of the planet to go and do this stupid thing. We'll stop all of it. We'll keep Endurance in port," which was the name of the boat, "and we will come back and fight." And they waited for a couple of days, and they just got a letter that, a telegram that said, "Go." So they got to go.

Michael Easter 7:45 Nice.

Chris Williamson 7:45 Which is pretty dope. Um-

Michael Easter 7:46 Yeah. That's cool.

Chris Williamson 7:47 But dude, hearing what they had to put up with, um, and the fact that you elected to do that is... Do you

Chris Williamson 7:56 think, th- this is something I think about all the time, the difference between elected and unelected suffering, or elected and unelected discomfort. You know, the difference between things being hard in life because you've elected to go and do a difficult CrossFit workout, or things being hard in life because you've just snapped your Achilles.

Michael Easter 8:15 Totally.

Chris Williamson 8:15 Um, you know, both of them are health, uh, challenges, uh, physical, physical discomfort. Um, but one of them you chose and the other one you didn't. And I'm quite, I'm quite interested in the difference between those two. I think a lot of the time people confuse one for the other. People who are into, um, getting comfortable being uncomfortable, training hard, maybe Brazilian jujitsu or endurance running or CrossFit or whatever, um, but speaking as someone that thought that he had, uh, a good amount of resilience and then snapped an Achilles two years ago, it crosses over a little bit, but it doesn't cross over that much.

Michael Easter 8:59 Yeah.

Chris Williamson 8:59 And there's a big difference between those two.

Michael Easter 9:01 So yeah, I'll answer that two ways. Um, first off, you have to realize it's like, why do we want to be comfortable in the first place? Why do humans tend to always do the next easiest thing, right? It's because for millions of millions of years, we lived in these environments of discomfort where life was inherently hard, right? There was not enough food. We had to work for that food. There was danger, there was a lot of risks, and we're wired to avoid all risk. All right, so doing the- the least risky, easiest, most comfortable thing, that kept us alive, right? That gave us a survival advantage. Great. Well, recently, especially within the last 100 years, uh, our environments have tipped to those of comfort, where now it is very easy to just do the easiest thing, right? We've sort of engineered comfort into our lives, yet we still have this drive to do the next most easy thing. So I think that's why y- you, we need to consciously think about inserting discomfort back into our life, however that may be, right? So we choose to do a CrossFit workout and undergo that suffering as a replacement for the suffering we used to have in the past (laughs) , right? That now keeps us healthy and fights back against this environment we lived in, we now live in, that's taken movement from our day, that's put a ton more food into our lives than we ever had before, right?

Chris Williamson 10:25 Yeah.

Michael Easter 10:25 So it's kind of an antidote. And then, uh, the second part, the way I'll answer that is that, when you look at the research on, um, people who have faced trauma or hardship or challenge in their life, people who have faced a ton of that kind of stuff, they have a lot of mental health problems, okay? But at the same time, people who have not faced really any challenges or trauma, they have equally poor rates of mental health. So there is a sweet spot where you need enough challenge in your life, and this is stuff that is unplanned, um, but not too much. So part of it is finding that sweet spot. And I think that, um, a lot of times what you find is that people, in retrospect, so long as they haven't gone through complete hell, they look back and report, "Oh, that was actually a blessing because it led me to XYZ." Now, that could just be some weird quirk in the human brain. I don't really care what it is. I just care that it tends to make people more resilient.

Chris Williamson 11:28 Yeah, whether you're post hoc-ing it or not, if you come out the other side and you feel better, then it's like the, it's like an experiential placebo pill, kind of.

Michael Easter 11:38 Yes. Exactly.

Chris Williamson 11:38 And if it works, it works. I read a study a while ago that said 66% of people report post-traumatic growth rather than post-traumatic stress after going through something.

Michael Easter 11:49 Yeah.

Chris Williamson 11:49 And I then read another study which refuted that, which is just like the problem of epistemics in, uh, the 21st century, I suppose, that for every study that says something's good, there's another one that says that that might be wrong.

Michael Easter 12:01 (laughs)

Chris Williamson 12:01 Uh, but, b- from my own personal experience, absolutely.... the times-

Michael Easter 12:05 Mm-hmm.

Chris Williamson 12:05 ... when I've gone through something which has been unelected and difficult. Um, maybe that's because I haven't crossed that threshold into something which would be, uh, unrecoverably traumatic. Um, and th- that's what you're saying, kind of, there is a sweet spot between the two. You know, d- some absolute catastrophe of losing your entire family in a plane crash or something is p- probably pushing it a little bit far.

Michael Easter 12:28 Yes.

Chris Williamson 12:28 But, you know, s- snapping an Achilles or having to deal with being poor for a while, or having to deal with, you know, losing a, a person that you really loved or whatever, you know, b- difficult breakup and stuff like that, a lot of the time when you look back, those are the lessons that expedited growth and really took you to the next level in life.

Michael Easter 12:49 Yeah. I think so. And I mean, a lot of it is how ... You know, I think that between the event happening and the processing of it, um, over the long run, there's often a choice, right? It's like, how am I gonna f- how am I gonna frame this? Uh, and I think that just having the right mindset going through those kinda things can be the diff- difference maker. And I- I th- I also think that, especially today, it's like we tend to over-pathologize everything. (laughs) Right?

Chris Williamson 13:20 How do you mean?

Michael Easter 13:21 Well, something bad happens, so now it's a medical condition of trauma or PTSD. We're gonna slap a label on it, right? When really, it's like, part of it is just being a human, right? Like, d- do people honestly expect that they're gonna go through life without every having problems? Like, life is a vide- like, y- you know, think of life as a video game. Are there any levels that are not hard? Like, what if the level was just, like, nothing, right? I- it's like, w- we're always gonna have problems in life. So like, learning to live well is accepting that we are going to have problems and face challenges, um, but that we'll often come out on the other side of them better if we accept that and act accordingly.

Chris Williamson 14:01 Dude, I love that. There's a Sam Harris video floating around from one of his new ones where he talks about exactly that, that-

Michael Easter 14:06 Oh, interesting.

Chris Williamson 14:07 ... would you imagine that one day you would wake up and all of your problems would be gone, as if you'd got to a level in a computer game and there was nothing there? You'd be bored. You'd be bored out of your mind.

Michael Easter 14:16 Oh, totally.

Chris Williamson 14:16 Problems are not going to go away.

Michael Easter 14:18 Yeah.

Chris Williamson 14:18 The problem that you have is the way that you think about your problems, and you can drop your problems, if only for a moment, if you can, and then y- you need to be enlightened and you need to identify the difference between the self and all that.

Michael Easter 14:30 Yeah.

Chris Williamson 14:30 But the principle of problems are there, they're an inherent part of life, they're a feature, not a bug, right? And people treat them like bugs, not features. It's like, no, this is the, this is why you're here. You w- you're not here to lie in a pool with a cocktail for the rest of life.

Michael Easter 14:45 Right. (laughs)

Chris Williamson 14:46 Um-

Michael Easter 14:46 And y- and part of what I talk about, in the book, I talk about this, um, concept called prevalence-induced concept change. Now that is, uh, a kind of a dorky way of basically talking about this concept called problem creep. And, uh, it was discovered by some scientists at Harvard, uh, maybe in 2018, and basically found that as humans experience fewer and fewer problems, we don't actually perceive ourself as having fewer problems, 'cause we just find the next problem. But, what I'm talking about in the book is that as the world has gotten better and better and better, the problems that we then find become progressively more hollow. So this explains why we have first world problems, right? So you think about it, I, I think that we probably all agree that compared to, let's say, 300 years ago, 3,000 years ago, the world is better, right? We're less likely to go hungry, we're less likely to (laughs) , you know, uh, toil in a field under a king who gives us, like, these meager rations. Uh, our kids are less likely to die at any given moment. But when you poll people, only 6% of Americans, at least, now we're pessimistic bastards, um, only 6% of people say that the world is improving. And it's 'cause we're always moving the goalpost. We're always just searching for the next problem. And so, I think w- when you apply that to daily life, it just totally messes with your perspective on things. 'Cause you can either, like, kinda have these moments where you're just pissed off 'cause like, oh, I get, I was late for my yoga class, right? Or you can be like, "Man, this is ridiculous, that I'm living in temperature control and have access to food. Like, this is amazing." And I'm not saying the world doesn't have problems that we should solve, but like, in the grand scheme of time and space, our problems now are, are, you know, not that bad. Some of the bigger ones, like global warming withstanding, I guess.

Chris Williamson 16:29 Are you familiar with Parkinson's Law? Do you know what that is?

Michael Easter 16:32 Mm-mm. I don't.

Chris Williamson 16:33 O- okay. So it's a, a law around productivity and it says work expands to fill the time given for it. So if you have three months to complete an assignment, the likelihood is that you are going to do the assignment w- 10 minutes before it's due to be in, right?

Michael Easter 16:50 Yeah. (laughs)

Chris Williamson 16:50 That's why you hand, hand stuff in. Work expands to fill the time given for it. It's one of the reasons that time blocking as a productivity strategy is useful, because you create time-bounded constraints around different bits of work that you need to do. I was talking to a philosopher friend last night on the phone who is, (laughs) uh, and I quote, "Trying nihilism, uh, as a li-, as a life philosophy." (laughs) Fucking hell. And he was saying basically the same thing, that ostensibly, he has absolutely nothing wrong, um, but he believes that there is a, uh, Parkinson's Law equivalent of suffering. So suffering expands to fill the room given for it in life. If you don't have that many things going wrong, you just magnify in on things that are ever so slightly suboptimal until they become this huge, big problem.

Michael Easter 17:39 Yeah. Yeah, that's, that's basically this idea that these Harvard researchers were talking about. And th- it's funny because the way that they went about studying this is they're, um, (clears throat) there's two of 'em. Uh, one of 'em's name is David Levari. He was the main guy on the study, and the other one's Daniel Gilbert, who's kind of a famous name in psychology. They're in an airport 'cause they're traveling to a conference, right? And they're in the line for TSA, and they make this observation about...... TSA, uh, and that is that they are really good at finding problems (laughs) , right? And we've, we've obviously experienced this in our life that, you know, when we go through security, it's like our bag gets ripped apart because the agent thought that this banana we had was, like, a nine millimeter Beretta, right? (sniffs) Uh, or there's, like, some old woman in front of us who's like 90, can't see, can't hear, can't walk, she's in a wheelchair, and they give her, like, the full body scan down 'cause she's got, like, a half-filled, you know, bottle of hairspray or whatever. So these guys wonder, it's like, okay, obviously better safe than sorry. But if all of a sudden everyone started abiding by the rules, and, like, the scanners never picked anything up, uh, no buzzer- the buzzers never went off when you had to stand in that weird thing, they never caught anything, would TSA just let everyone fly through? Like, "Oh, yeah. Have a good flight, guys. Have a good flight." And they didn't think so, because the TSA's job is to search for problems, right? So they thought they'd probably just keep finding more, um, flippant problems over time. So to study this, they get these groups of people and they have, uh, the first group, uh, they look, have them look at 800 different faces. So the job of the participants is to look at face after face and basically deem whether they find this face threatening or non-threatening. Okay? So they're going like, "Threatening, non-threatening, non-threatening, non-threatening, ooh, threatening." Unbeknownst to the participants, after about the 200th face, they start showing them fewer and fewer and fewer threatening faces. Now in the second study, same setup, except it was with research proposals, and they had to deem whether these research proposals were ethical or unethical. Same deal. After ha- midway through, they start giving them fewer and fewer unethical research proposals. So these things should, they should be black or white, right? Because, like, a face, I either find a person threatening or I don't. Some proposal either crosses this moral line I have in the sand or it doesn't, right? But what they found is that people actually see gray. So as people started to see fewer and fewer threatening faces, they started to deem ambiguous faces as threatening. They said the same, they said "threatening" the same number of times, right? Same with the research proposals. They started looking at these research proposals that were kind of, like, pretty ambiguous as being unethical. So that's basically how they found that as people experience fewer problems in our lives, we don't actually experience fewer problems. We just look for more problems and deem things that are probably not problematic as problems.

Chris Williamson 20:38 I noticed this when I'm at work. So I run nightlife events, and a lot of the time, the door staff will be just checking IDs, very, very similar to the TSA thing. And there'll be someone that will come up who is exactly the same as the last 10 people. They say their date of birth, it looks like them, but then they'll, they'll feel like th- there's an obligation for scrutiny because whatever, the scrutiny alarm hasn't gone off sufficiently for the last 10 people. "Uh, can you give me your address and your postcode? Okay, what's your postcode backwards? Okay, can y- what's your, uh, fucking star sign?" They love that one. Like, "What's your star sign?" Oh, yeah, because that's going to rumble this 17-year-old that's using an 18-year-old's ID to try and get in. But another thing that I find that I think this shows up in is when you have... Let's say that people are at work, um, and there is a team of people that are working. A lot of the time, if you're in a meeting, people will feel the need to contribute things that don't actually have to be said. So let's say that the desig- a design that gets put forward for a piece of artwork, and everybody's happy with it, but there is a sense that, "Well, I'm here to make some sort of a contribution." You go, "Well, well, what, what about, what about if we, what about if we move the image, and not much, but j- you know, just a little bit." And it's this compulsion to, to try and find a way to contribute as well. And I think that you see that in, in work settings. I know that I do it. So again, if I'm stood outside of a nightclub and the queue is absolutely fine, nothing wrong at all, but I'll walk down and I'll just move the barriers i- uh, barriers creep out in nightlife a lot, and the goal is to keep them as tight to the wall as possible. A- and I'll just move them a foot, half a foot, like six inches, these barriers, they're several yards wide, and I'll just go and give them a little nudge, because I'm like, "Oh, yeah, that's fucking helped. That's made a really big difference to this queue of 400 18-year-olds who are all drunk, that half foot that I've just moved the barriers in." But you do it because you, you try and... I, I think it, it comes from a, most of the time, or a lot of the time, it comes from a virtuous place. The TSA agents are doing it because they want to try and catch the crims, right? They want to make sure that people are safe on the... But, yeah, there's definitely a sense that people just do shit.

Michael Easter 22:54 Oh, yeah.

Chris Williamson 22:54 Because they feel like they should be doing shit.

Michael Easter 22:56 (laughs) . Yeah, um, th- yeah, there's actually some research around this. And the reason for this is that, um, humans evolved to basically want to feel like they're being useful contributors to their environment. And this is not only internally, but also more importantly, um, so we can s- show socially that we're doing something and contributing to the tribe. Because if we're standing there and, like, just not doing anything because we're consciously going like, "Yeah, I think things are pretty good," you know, but everyone else is working. Well, if we don't work, it's like, "Well, get the hell out of the tribe, dude." Right? (laughs) And then you're on your own. You're gonna get thrashed by wolves or whatever. And, uh, I love that story you told about nightlife, and I would, I would see it in my own work, like when I was, uh, working at Men's Health Magazine, we would do these things called wall walks, and we would get every single article that was gonna be in the magazine, including the cover, and we would go, um, we would go over what the headline was gonna be. And it was literally like, you know, someone would throw out a really good idea, but one person would be like, "Eh, I don't know that. I don't, I don't know." And then we'd have to, like, go on to another one, and these would take hours and hours and hours, right? Now, before these started happening, which is hilarious, is that there was this, uh-There's this (laughs) guy who ran the magazine and he and the number two with the magazine would just go to a bar and they would sit down with the entire magazine, and they would do this themselves. And at that point, the magazine was selling way more, right? So it's like, here we have this massive group of people all spending time on this little thing, just being like, "Eh, I don't know. I don't know." And then these two guys would just do the same damn thing, but arguably a lot more efficiently. And I think that that's sort of a good lesson too, for creative work. It's like, we know feedback is really important, but do we need feedback from 10 people? Because it's, like, just so much noise, right? Where it's like if you just can find one person that you really trust and you're like, "This is my dude," or, "my girl," whatever, uh, I think that can, uh, arguably be a lot more efficient.

Chris Williamson 24:54 There is a non-zero chance that somebody is going to feel a compulsion to contribute because of this, whatever, uh, contribution compulsion. That's what we'll call it. Uh-

Michael Easter 25:04 (laughs) I like it.

Chris Williamson 25:05 Um, there is a non-zero chance that that's gonna do it. And for every person that you add into the group, that increases.

Michael Easter 25:12 Yes, totally.

Chris Williamson 25:12 The chance that that's going to happen increases. Whereas if it's two people, you know, you can just, "Is it fine?" "Yeah, it's fine. Fine, fine, fine. Uh, all right." Have a chat between two people, "Fine, fine, fine." Yeah, absolutely, man. When we're doing artwork amends, one of the worst things that we can do, so we, uh, we have a new DJ that's coming to play, or someone's featuring, or it's a Valentine's traffic light party or whatever, and we put... Or a video, this is the worst one. Fuck. We put a video into the group, right? With the boys and, and the, the managers. Throw it in. "Guys, what do you think about this?" And it's just a litany of problems they've got. "That, that song's not cool anymore. No one listens to that. That was big on TikTok four months ago." The, "I don't like the color of the font." "I don't like the this, that, and the other." But if you sat down with each of the boys individually and showed them it, they'd probably say that it was fine. So another part of it is the signaling as well.

Michael Easter 26:02 Yeah.

Chris Williamson 26:02 It's the signaling to the rest of the group, "I am somebody that looks at the work with such a high level of resolution that I'm picking up the things that you're not." And that's such a... I, I see it in myself. I do it as well. I wanna show off that, "Oh, actually, maybe, maybe the alignment could be a bit better on this." Like, shut u-... It's fine. It's fucking fi-... People are gonna be looking at it half-cut at pre-drinks when they're deciding-

Michael Easter 26:26 (laughs)

Chris Williamson 26:26 ... where they're going to go out, in a small window on the bottom corner of something. Like, it's, it's going on Instagram. This isn't, i- i- it's not the ending of a Christopher Nolan movie.

Michael Easter 26:34 Yeah, totally. And I think it's like, it's a balance, right? It's like you want a certain quality, but at the same time, I think we need to realize that... L- l- l- and I have the same problem, dude. Like, as a writer, I'll spend, like, two days on two paragraphs. And I've got 85,000 words to write. Like, that is not efficient at all. And I've had to stop myself from doing that. Like, I'll have a, uh, I'll just, I, I can recognize when I'm slipping into it and it's just like, "Dude, let it go." The average person is not gonna know, is not gonna notice anything, right? And it's, yeah. Uh, I think it's a definitely a tendency. (laughs)

Chris Williamson 27:07 There's a quote from Tiago Forte that he tweeted a couple of years ago, and it... Fuck, he's so mad. People put stuff out on Twitter that you keep with you. Uh, most of Twitter's absolute horse shit, but every so often you find something like this.

Michael Easter 27:18 Yeah.

Chris Williamson 27:18 And he said, um, "One of the interesting things about people who produce, um, high leverage work is that their content has a rough edged, half-assed quality to it because polishing things to perfection is a low leverage activity."

Michael Easter 27:32 Yeah.

Chris Williamson 27:32 Getting something to 93, 95% and just shipping it, that's where most of the gains are accrued. Getting it from 95 to 100% in most areas of work makes no difference. But the time sink. You're talking about to get it from naught to 95 is one unit of time. To get it from 95 to 100 is two units of time.

Michael Easter 27:54 Yes.

Chris Williamson 27:54 Okay. You could have done two 95s in the time that it took you to do one 100.

Michael Easter 27:59 Yeah. And especially when we're talking about... I mean, I work in media, so with content, it's like people like to think they'll know what is going to do really well. We have no freaking idea.

Chris Williamson 28:10 No.

Michael Easter 28:10 So is it better to put out, like, one 100% piece or three 95% pieces and see what happens? 'Cause you, I mean, you're just more at bats, right? If you're hitting, let's say you're hitting .300. Well, if you go to bat three times, you're probably gonna end up on base instead of if you just went to one. I'm sorry, I'm talking about baseball. You guys don't give a shit about baseball, but there's probably something-

Chris Williamson 28:28 No, give us, give us it in the cricket analogy. That's what I wanna know about.

Michael Easter 28:29 Yeah, there's probably some cricket analogy out there. (laughs)

Chris Williamson 28:32 That's correct. Uh, you looked at, um, rites of passage of one of these symbolic landmark experiences that some cultures put people through. What'd you learn there?

Michael Easter 28:41 Uh, so, uh, I started thinking about this 'cause I met this guy whose name is Marcus Elliot, and there's, uh, two things you need to know about this guy is that, one, he's kind of a seeker. So we lived out of a-

Chris Williamson 28:53 What's that mean? Okay. Well, I'll tell you. (laughs)

Michael Easter 28:54 (laughs)

Chris Williamson 28:54 He lived out of a... He's kind of, like, you know, he's open to experiences. He's kinda out there. So we lived out of a VW van for a while. Uh, got through college by counting cards at casinos. He was going to Burning Man, like, way back in the day. And the second thing you need to know about this guy is that he's super brilliant. So he gets his MD from Harvard Medical School, and he decides, "I don't wanna be a doctor. I want to revolutionize sports science," which is a declaration that is, like, so grand that it's almost bordering on arrogance, right? (laughs) Uh, but he actually ends up doing it. So he's the first guy who really brought in, like, quantification of, um, human movement and performance. So he can help, uh, he analyzes, uh, athlete movement using all this high tech stuff, and then he can sort of say, "Hey, here's what you're really good at. We need to develop that." And also, like, "Here's where you have this injury risk." And when we see people move like that, they have a, let's say, 60% chance of tearing their ACL or something in a season. So I told you that to basically tell you that, uh, he's all into numbers and data and figures, right? But he also realizes that what improves human performance, not just of athletes, of, of also of the average person, it can't always be measured, right? There are certain qualities that people have that you just can't measure.

Michael Easter 30:09 ... that makes them able to do more than other people, right? So to get to that, he does this thing that he calls, uh, Misogi. And Misogi is essentially a recreation of these rites of passage that we used to have in, in the past, that all cultures would send people out on. So the idea is that you're gonna go out into nature, and you're gonna do something really, really freaking hard. And it's gotta be hard enough that you're gonna face this moment where you're like, "Man, I don't think I can complete whatever this task I'm trying to complete is." But by continuing on, you can ge- reach this point where you thought you've reached your edge, but you're past it. And you can kinda look back and go, "Well, I thought I was past my edge, but here I am past it," right? "So I've clearly undersold myself in this area of my life," which raises this question of, like, "Where else have I sold myself short?" Right? So it kinda helps people expand their potential and teaches people what they're truly capable of. And it's also good at reframing fear, because if you're doing something really hard and you're gonna be afraid of failure, we're all wired to be afraid of failure, by sort of dancing on that edge, you can kind of see, like, "Man, yeah, failure's not really that big of a deal." And so, yeah, again, it's like this recreation of these rites of passage that we used to face all the time, that all cultures had.

Chris Williamson 31:21 What are some examples of the rites of passage that his athletes have done?

Michael Easter 31:26 Um, so he's done one where... They do one every year. So one, they got an 85-pound boulder and they walked it, I think, five miles underneath the Santa Barbara Channel, which is, like, about 10 feet deep. So one person would dive down, pick up the rock, walk this thing underwater 10 yards, come back up. The next guy would go down. On and on and on till this rock was at point B, right? They've done ones that are a lot simpler where it's like, we can see this mountain way off in the distance. Let's see if we can get to the top of it in 24 hours or whatever it might be. Uh, they stand-up panel- paddleboarded across the channel once, and they hadn't really done much stand-up paddleboarding. So the, the point is that it doesn't really matter how grand it is for the average person. There just has to be a real 50/50 shot of you accomplishing it. So, like, my 50% is gonna be different than your 50% is gonna be different than your 50%. You know, it's like, if you've only run, say, 10 miles in your life, and you ask yourself, "Could I run 15?" And you go, "Eh, I probably could." Like, "Well, could you run 20?" And you're like, "Ooh, I don't know if I could run 20." Go find out, right? (laughs) You're gonna hit a moment where you're like, "God, I really wanna quit." But by not quitting, you're really gonna learn something about yourself and be able to take those lessons back into your normal life.

Chris Williamson 32:46 It sounds like your sports science friend was doing that as part of a group. It seems like it was a team bonding experience as well.

Michael Easter 32:54 Yeah.

Chris Williamson 32:54 Is there something to learn from doing it on your own versus doing it as part of a group?

Michael Easter 32:59 I think that if you do it as a group, you have to all be relatively equally skilled because of that 50% thing. Like, if you've got someone who's just a stud and then someone who, like, hasn't, you know, has been on the couch for the last five years, there's gonna be a sort of, someone's either gonna make it really easy or it's gonna be really hard for that other person. Um, Markus has done them both alone and with people, so I think, you know, if you have a good group, totally try it.

Chris Williamson 33:24 I have a friend who, uh, box jumped Mount Everest. So he did-

Michael Easter 33:28 Oh, God.

Chris Williamson 33:29 ... in, I think it took about, it took less than a day to do, so it's, uh, Jay Alderton, who has done a bunch of other shit. What the fuck else did he do? He did something else mental. The box jump was the most recent one, but he holds a couple of Guinness World Records. Uh, used to be in some sort of armed forces.

Michael Easter 33:48 Okay.

Chris Williamson 33:49 Then became a champion, like, bodybuilding-type dude, like fitness model-type guy, and then decided to do these ridiculous... But yeah, box jumped Mount Everest.

Michael Easter 34:00 Wow.

Chris Williamson 34:01 Well, Cameron Hanes is-

Michael Easter 34:02 How was his? Did they explode at the end?

Chris Williamson 34:04 He was good. So I think he, um, the form, his form was pretty good, but he was permitted to do, it was a 24-inch box, I wanna say, so a standard, standard box jump height. But he was doing some smart things. He had knee wraps on. Um, he was stepping down from the box, so there was no fear about rebound- rebounding.

Michael Easter 34:22 Yeah.

Chris Williamson 34:22 Um, I think he was landing, landing fairly soft and he was allowed to put his hands on his knees if he wanted to. And I don't know whether he had to reach, like, triple extension at the top either. I think he just had to get to the top of the box.

Michael Easter 34:34 Yeah.

Chris Williamson 34:34 Which, you know, all of these things are, they're small, but when you're doing it 20,000 times or whatever it was throughout a day, um-

Michael Easter 34:44 Yeah, it would be like 15,000 box jumps if you do the math.

Chris Williamson 34:47 Yeah, something like that.

Michael Easter 34:47 It's 24 inches, yeah.

Chris Williamson 34:48 Yeah, something like that.

Michael Easter 34:49 It's crazy.

Chris Williamson 34:49 Uh, well, I mean, Cameron Hanes' son just beat David Goggins's, uh, pull-up record in 24 hours, didn't he?

Michael Easter 34:57 I think so. Um, I saw him on a hunting trip in September and he's, it's very impressive because he's, he's a big dude too. Like, you know, I would imagine pull-up people being, like, pretty small gymnast-types, but he's, like, he's a big dude, so it's pretty impressive.

Chris Williamson 35:11 Yeah. What, um, is there something with this rite of passage that people are supposed to do to add some sense of sacredness to it, either in advance or afterward?

Michael Easter 35:23 Um, I think the sacredness happens in those moments where you think-

Chris Williamson 35:26 Because it's fucking hard. (laughs)

Michael Easter 35:27 (laughs) Yeah, co- where, where you're like, "No, I gotta, I gotta quit," but then you don't quit. I mean, I've done, so I've started doing something like this every year, and, um, it totally is where you're like, "Nope, can't finish this." But for whatever reason, you just kinda keep going and it's like, "Oh, holy shit." You know, I think that's when it really sets in.

Chris Williamson 35:45 What was your one last year?

Michael Easter 35:48 Um, I've done some, I did a running one last year, so I'd only run, uh, 16 miles. The, the farthest I'd run at one time was 16 miles and I did, like, 50.

Chris Williamson 35:58 Shit.

Michael Easter 35:58 So, yeah, it was, yeah, I think it was at maybe mile, like, 35 that I was just like, "Yeah, I gotta quit. No way." (laughs) And then I just kinda kept going, and something kicks in at, like, mile 40 where it's just like, you know, you're in. And one of the, one of the things too that, um...... I talk about it in the book is, and I'm kinda breaking this rule, but in the interest of getting it out to people, is that you're not supposed to advertise this a ton, right? Because a lot of what we do in modern life now, especially physically, is just so we can put it on the 'Gram for likes, right? (laughs) We're not doing it for ourselves. And this really is something that you are supposed to do for yourself. So, one of the guidelines is like, you know, you can talk about with friends and stuff, but it's, this is not like, "I did it for the 'Gram."

Chris Williamson 36:41 It's not a social media flex, yeah.

Michael Easter 36:44 Yeah, exactly.

Chris Williamson 36:44 What's, uh, one of the problems that you have, uh, that's great, and I, I really like that idea, that, that, that sacredness as well, right? Doing it-

Michael Easter 36:50 Yeah.

Chris Williamson 36:50 ... for its own sake. Um, however, I don't know whether you've seen 75 Hard, which is a challenge that a lot of people are doing at the moment. It's just like-

Michael Easter 36:59 Yeah, a lot of people are doing that.

Chris Williamson 37:01 ... it's water, two 45-minute workouts, read 10 pages of a nonfiction book, stick to a diet, something like that, right? It's just a simple, here is the basics for nutrition, training, bit of mental health and you sleeping well. It's something like that.

Michael Easter 37:17 Yeah.

Chris Williamson 37:17 Those sorts of movements, I think you're gonna see those increasingly kind of like social-powered, simple, stoic-esque, all-encompassing lifestyle changes. Um, and something like this, you know, if you were to do an equivalent of Sober October, which was, it was and still is, quite big, or Dry January. If you were able to do something like that, um, I think that you would get a lot of people bought into this idea, but it's inherently self-defeating, because the advertisement of it... I suppose there would be a way to say, look, um, you can do this as a part of it, and almost have the fact that you're not supposed to advertise it as one of the elements. That, you know, you do, you do this, maybe you could follow the page, or, you know, be a part of the group or whatever, and you'd maybe be able to speak to the, those people that were within it, but-

Michael Easter 38:04 Yeah.

Chris Williamson 38:04 ... outside of that, you don't, you don't talk about it.

Michael Easter 38:07 Yeah, I think that, I mean, yeah, I think you make a really great point. I think it could potentially be a closed group, or it's just like, "Hey, I'm doing this. Here was my experience," um, and maybe you just talk about it more vague, you know.

Chris Williamson 38:19 Yeah, yeah.

Michael Easter 38:20 Um, you know, it's like the Fight Club rule. You wanna talk about Fight Club? (laughs)

Chris Williamson 38:24 Have you seen The Liver King on Instagram?

Michael Easter 38:27 Dude, uh, yeah. (laughs)

Chris Williamson 38:30 Well, he seems like a guy that, um, depending on how legit or not you think he is, but he seems like a guy that's trying to add discomfort into his life as much as possible.

Michael Easter 38:39 Yeah, for sure. For sure. He's an, he's an interesting cat. Someone, uh, I had never heard of him and one of my friends texted me about him and was like, "Dude, you gotta see this guy." Um, I think it was more just based on the fact that he's eating so much raw meat. Which I think, um, you know, uh, uh, yeah. So... (laughs)

Chris Williamson 38:56 You don't know what to say. I think it would be cool. I, I've, I'm in contact with his team about podcasts and stuff, but-

Michael Easter 39:02 Yeah.

Chris Williamson 39:03 ... I haven't really heard anybody go deep. There's not been a, you know, Men's Health article-

Michael Easter 39:07 Yeah.

Chris Williamson 39:07 ... written on him yet, or any of that sort of stuff. And, um, that, yeah, that mystique kind of adds a little bit. I, it wouldn't surprise me if you see him on something like a, a Rogan at some point soon.

Michael Easter 39:19 Yeah.

Chris Williamson 39:19 Um, just because he's so, he, he's very intriguing. Now, say what you want about him, like, he's an intriguing guy. Um...

Michael Easter 39:27 That's how, yeah, that's totally how I feel. I'm like, would I do a lot of things that he does? No.

Chris Williamson 39:31 (laughs)

Michael Easter 39:32 Hell no. Um, I think that there's always like, uh, especially with people on the extremes, I think it's relatively fair to say that he's at an extreme. I think there's a nugget of utility in, in what they're doing. I mean, I don't think it's irrational to say that like, yeah, like, organ meats are good for people, right? It's something we don't eat anymore, and we know that it has, it's more nutrient-dense than a lot of the cuts that we eat now. Good advice. Is eating it at the expense of everything else good advice? I, I don't know. I'm not, you know, I, I'm not a PhD-holding nutritionist, but I talk to a lot, and I, they might push back on that, but, you know, whatever.

Chris Williamson 40:12 Go on Rogan, Brian. That's what we want.

Chris Williamson 40:14 Uh, talk to me-

Michael Easter 40:15 Yeah, exactly.

Chris Williamson 40:15 ... about the guy that fixed the Patriots.

Michael Easter 40:18 Oh, that was Marcus.

Chris Williamson 40:20 Oh, that was the dude. That was your same guy.

Michael Easter 40:22 Yeah.

Chris Williamson 40:22 So, was that the Patriots that he's got doing these crazy things?

Michael Easter 40:25 So, he, um, he worked with the Patriots. That was his first job out of college, uh, out of medical school. So, he worked for them. I can't remember how many years, but he was there when they were winning some Super Bowls. One of the main things he did is that they had, I think it was like 26 hamstring injuries in a season. And he was able to drop that number down to three, right? So that, that really helped them. So now, he's got contracts with the NBA, um, he works with some NFL teams, he worked with MLB people, he works with some world soccer, NASCAR, and yeah, what he does is, he basically, he doesn't make anyone do Musogi, because it's totally an elected thing, right? But he tells all his athletes that come through about it, and some of them do it with him. And he does say too, he says, uh, there are people who hear about it and they go, "No, I'm not doing that." Like, "Hell no." He's like, "The people who are like, 'Yeah, I'll do that,' and they're doing it," he's like, "Those are the dudes that like, have it. Have that extra element, like at the end of the game, you give them the ball, type people." There's just, you know, something about 'em. Like, if someone says, "I'll do that with me," I'm like, that person's gonna be fine in their career, so...

Chris Williamson 41:35 What, what, did he have anything to say if you fail your Musogi? 'Cause obviously, you know, if there's a 50% chance of you failing it-

Michael Easter 41:44 Yeah.

Chris Williamson 41:44 ... then a, a good group of people are, are not going to get this done. You know, feelings of disappointment or insufficiency might crop up if you do that. Did you have any insight around that?

Michael Easter 41:53 I think that there are still lessons there, though, right? So, he talked to, he talked to me about one where he was gonna do a rim to rim to rim of the Grand Canyon. And, um, so it's like 45 miles, maybe? But it really, what kills you is the elevation, uh, change. It's, it's a lot. All right, 'cause you start at like 8,000 feet, and in just a handful of miles, you're down to 2,000 or like 1,000 feet or something. I mean, it's more than 20, 20,000 feet of elevation change, easy.... well, more like 40 actually, if you do the math, 'cause you're going down and then you're going back up. Um, and his knees just blew up on the way down, and so he got to the top of the north... He started at the south rim, went down, went across the canyon bottom, went up, started to go back down, and it was just like, "I'm gonna have to get helicoptered out of here." You know? But he talked about how, like, that, it, it's still an amazing lesson 'cause there's so much adventure in that. And s- you know, he was like, "Even though I had to stop, I was able to get farther than I anticipated once things started going south." Like, it's still an amazing experience that you're gonna learn from. 50/50, you sh- like, if you were doing something like this every year and you succeed, you're doing it wrong 'cause there's so much in life now that we choose to do, but we know we're going to succeed. I mean, think of how people approach running a marathon. They don't go, "I don't know if I can run a marathon." They say, "I don't know if I can run a marathon in four hours." Or whatever some time goal is, right? We know we're going to be able to accomplish the things that we're going to try, but we just, like, set these kind of artificial time goals too. So one of the ideas here is, like, I want a true 50/50 shot. Every other year, I should be failing, more or less.

Chris Williamson 43:37 You say that humans are wired to believe that we can... that we're far less capable than we actually are as well. I suppose, evolutionarily, that makes sense. If you were this, like, hubris-filled arsehole, you'd be dead within... You know, you wouldn't make it out of your... the single-digit years of your life. You'd have tried to, I don't know, tightrope walk across a branch over a lion's den and said, "Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. I'll f- I'll be sweet."

Michael Easter 44:02 Yeah.

Chris Williamson 44:02 And then you'd be very dead.

Michael Easter 44:04 Oh, yeah. Those genes would've died off, right? Whereas, on the other s- on the other hand, if you're a person who's going, "No, I'm not gonna do that. Like, that's ridiculous," but you get thrust into that situation, which used to happen to us all the time, right? But you're able to make it out, then that gives you a survival advantage. So we chronically undersell our potential, and there is a good reason for that.

Chris Williamson 44:25 How can people push themselves emotionally or mentally?

Michael Easter 44:29 Uh, I think pairing the emotion and the ph- and the emotionally and physical stuff with what we're talking about, uh, right now is important, right? But in terms of, like, relationships too, I think that dudes especially are just, like, freaking terrible with, like- (laughs)

Chris Williamson 44:43 Mm-hmm.

Michael Easter 44:43 ... opening up. And honestly, like, having those conversations with a loved one or whatever you need to, you know, be open with people is just as tough sometimes for people as, like, doing this kind of physical stuff. It's like, I don't know, like I know plenty of people who could probably run 100 miles right now if you asked them. They'd be like, "Yeah, I'm, I got this," right? But if you asked them to sit in silence alone with their own thoughts for five minutes, they would go absolutely bonkers. (laughs) So I do think it's important to think, like, where... "What am I bad at?" Right? And sort of dive into that. So like, for me, I've done these physical ones, right? But I haven't done, like, a real psychological one, so I'm thinking of doing some, like, extended meditation retreat or something, just to see what the hell is going on up here that, you know. (laughs)

Chris Williamson 45:36 Meditation retreat's an awesome idea for, uh, a ritual. You know-

Michael Easter 45:40 Yeah.

Chris Williamson 45:40 ... a rite of passage. Um, yeah, there's a, a concept I learned from Isaiah Berlin called the inner citadel. Have you heard of this?

Michael Easter 45:47 Mm-mm, I haven't.

Chris Williamson 45:48 Dope. Fucking dope insight. So, um, when the world around us doesn't give us something that we want, a lot of the time we recede into ourselves into this sort of walled-off garden, a r- retreat into an existential inner citadel.

Michael Easter 46:03 Mm-hmm.

Chris Williamson 46:03 So one of the examples would be, um, if you were in a war and your leg got wounded, you might try and treat the leg, and if you couldn't, you would chop the leg off and announce that the desire for legs is misguided and that nobody should have legs at all and, "I never wanted legs in the first place." And you see this, it a- appears in tons of different areas, right? So, uh, in the diet industry, you know, you have, um, fat acceptance and body positivity, which is, "I don't need to lose weight. The world needs to accept me at the weight that I am. Your conception about what an ideal body or your idea of fitness is, is inherently wrong. I'm fine as I are." Or another one that you see in relationships a lot is polyamory. You know, how many people are desiring to be polyamorous because that's their genuine compulsion and they believe in it, and how many of them just struggle to hold down a successful monogamous relationship, so polyamory becomes their inner citadel and they retreat into this, right? They chop the leg off, announce that the desire for being single and monogamous is, uh, is misguided. And this inner citadel thing comes up with what you're talking about, that you have people whose capacities may be totally extreme in one domain, just a freak. Strength, endurance. Some sort of physical attribute. But say, "Hey man, would you go to, uh, five sessions of counseling with your wife and sit down and genuinely go through the way that you feel?" That's their, that's their citadel, right? They- they're gonna retreat into where they find their comfort, which is the physical pursuit. Um, or for women, you know, the reverse might be true, or it might be something to do with body image, or it might be something to do with being disagreeable or being forthcoming, you know. Um, but yeah, that inner citadel thing appears fucking everywhere.

Michael Easter 47:48 No, I think you're absolutely right. And it, uh, a lot of it too is, I mean this is, uh, I don't know if it's related, but it just made me think about it, is (clears throat) sort of like, a lot of people have unhealthy behaviors, but their unhealthy behaviors are things that society celebrates, so it's okay, right? So if I, if I inject heroin or smoke weed every single day, I'm an addict. If I thrash myself in the gym, (laughs) I'm a hero, right? But at the same time, it's like, people use those behaviors because they don't wanna deal... It's covering up some other thing that they don't wanna deal with. So to your example about the person who can do all this crazy stuff in the gym, but won't, like, have this conversation, it's like, you're just compensating for this. Like, you're using this as a tool to, like, deal with this other thing that you're not addressing, right? And it's just like-... what are people using to, to sort of deal with this larger problem. Um, and there's a range of social acceptability (laughs) on what people do, right?

Chris Williamson 48:50 Correct. Yeah, and a lot of it's to do with the framing of how both you and other people see what you're doing. You know, it- I think that objectively you could say that the person who goes to the gym every night is, uh, their inner citadel is generally more effective and beneficial for them and society at large than the person who decides to take heroin.

Michael Easter 49:09 Yes. Mm-hmm.

Chris Williamson 49:10 However, it doesn't stop the fact that the fundamental mechanism which both people are following is one of escape.

Michael Easter 49:19 Yes.

Chris Williamson 49:19 That person is escaping from something. And I think that this is why you're seeing psychedelics, amongst a particular group of people, have such a, a, a renaissance, so, so much popularity at the moment that it strips away your ability to hide from the things that you've been hiding from for a very long time.

Michael Easter 49:36 Totally. Yeah. I think you nailed it.

Chris Williamson 49:39 You take a big gulp of ayahuasca and you hold it down for 30 minutes, uh, you're- y- you don't get to choose what you hide from. You don't have your coping mechanism anymore. You don't have the escape of CrossFit or powerlifting or hill walking or bow hunting or whatever it is that you do, drugs, any of that, you know, fucking Netflix and cuddles or w- wherever it is that you go, whatever your citadel is, those walls are down. And-

Michael Easter 50:05 Yeah.

Chris Williamson 50:05 ... ayahuasca is coming in with a huge fucking catapult and it's gonna-

Michael Easter 50:09 (laughs)

Chris Williamson 50:09 It's gonna annihilate

Chris Williamson 50:10 it. What about boredom? 'Cause this is something that I think has been completely eroded, obviously, by the invention of the smartphone.

Michael Easter 50:19 Yeah.

Chris Williamson 50:19 But that, that's a type of discomfort as well.

Michael Easter 50:22 Yeah. So I started thinking about this 'cause when we're up in the Arctic, we're hunting, right? And I think a lot of people think that hunting is, like, this action-packed thing. It's not. It's a lot of waiting. Like all you-

Chris Williamson 50:30 It's, yeah, it's wait- it's waiting, that's what it is.

Michael Easter 50:32 It's a lot of waiting because we're hunting caribou as they're migrating, right? So we're sitting on these hills waiting for these animals to come through and they're not coming through. For, like, all day, right? So I didn't bring my cellphone, I didn't bring a computer, I didn't bring an iPad, I didn't bring a book, I didn't bring a magazine, I didn't bring all this stuff, right? So all of a sudden I find myself bored again (laughs) , right? With just this like, "Oh, what the hell is this?" Uh, so we had to come up with creative ways to deal with our boredom, right? So we would read the labels on all the food we brought up. You know, we would read the label- we would read the tags on our jackets. So it was like, "Oh, this is coated in something called Dermasac."

Chris Williamson 51:10 (laughs)

Michael Easter 51:10 "Wow. Interesting. Sounds like an acne medication," right? We would- I, I did more push-ups than I'd ever done in my life 'cause it's like, "Oh, I guess I'll just do some push-ups. What the hell else am I gonna do?" Uh, came up with a bunch of story ideas for the magazines I wrote for, wrote some of the book, did all this shit, came up with gr- the Christmas list for all the people I know, like, for the next five years, right? So I basically told you that (laughs) to say that, like, if I were at home, this is radically different than how I would have dealt with boredom 'cause I would have just dove into a screen, whether that be my cellphone, whether that be Netflix, whatever. But when you think about boredom from an evolutionary context, it's essentially this evolutionary discomfort that told us, "Whatever you are doing with your time right now, the return on your time invested has worn thin and you need to go do something else." Tells us to go do something else. So imagine that you and I are hunting and we- it's a million years ago. We actually need dinner, right? Or we're gonna starve to death and die. Well, if the animal- animals weren't rolling through and we knew we weren't gonna get anything, boredom would kick on and be like, "Yeah, well, wanna go pick some potatoes or something? Like, that's a better use of our time, right?" So it's this evolutionary discomfort that tells us to do something. And that something that we used to do in our past was often productive and improved our lives. Nowadays when it kicks on, we have easy, easy escapes from it. So I talked to this one neuroscientist that (laughs) basically told me the way that we deal with boredom now is like junk foods for our mind, right? We just pull out our phone anytime we feel the lightest twinge of it. We're not forced to introspect and come up with something else to do. And this definitely has, uh, consequences. So it's associated with all the, the rising rates of anxiety and burnout that people face.

Chris Williamson 52:51 Why is that?

Michael Easter 52:52 Uh, so when you're (clears throat) - when you're focusing on the outside world, like on a screen, okay? And, and one thing that I'll add too is that the average person now spends 12 hours a day engaging with digital media, more than 12 hours a day. I mean, it's crazy amount of media, right? And this is all stuff that's 100 years- uh, at most 100 years old. So (clears throat) when you're focusing on the outward world, your brain is actually working really hard. It's a, it's a work state. When you have these moments where you have to go internally and you're sort of mind-wandering, that's a rest state for your brain. So your brain sort of relaxes and revives. So nowadays, we spend, with all this media we take in, we spend so much time in that work state and so few time- so little time in that sort of rest state that our brain just becomes overworked and it's just, like, way too much outward stimulation and focusing. So it seems to be that that is sort of what's driving a lot of, like, the burnout and just b- feeling like, "Oh, God," like, mentally fatigued, right? Whereas if we spend time bored, we're gonna have this moment where we kinda go inward, we mind-wander for a while, and eventually we spit out something to do. So boredom is kind of-

Chris Williamson 53:58 So boredom is restorative in a way.

Michael Easter 54:00 Restorative. Yes. Exactly. Um, it also increases creativity. So this is pretty interesting. Some of these studies I love are that, uh, they will take two groups of people. They will let one group do whatever the hell they want. They'll put them in a room, and usually people just pull out their cellphone, right, and just start scrolling, do whatever. Then they'll take another group and they will bore the living hell out of these people. And then they'll give them a creativity test. And the bored group always comes up with more, more creative answers than the non-bored group. And that's simply because their minds have had time to go internally, to rest, to sort of reset, and good ideas s- seem to come out of that. And then there's also the fact of, like, you, you think about that William James quote that's basically like, "Your life is essentially a collection of that which you were aware of."Well, we're now aware of 12 hours of screen stuff every single day, right? So our life has effectively become Instagram, Netflix, whatever. Um, so when I talk about this, you hear the message of like we need to spend less time on our phones a lot, and I think that's obvious. It's like spend less time on your phone, spend less time on your phone. Yeah, everybody wants to do that. Everyone gets it. Uh, but the problem is, is that when people take, say, an hour off their phone screen time, they now go, "Well, what the hell do I do now? I'm bored." And then they'll like, go watch Netflix, right? Well, your brain does not know the difference between those two things. So I advocate for thinking more boredom. And the way that I work that into my life is I just make sure I have 20 minutes every day, maybe go outside, take a walk where I'm just completely disconnected. I just let my brain go wherever the hell it needs to go.

Chris Williamson 55:40 One of the things that I find, man, when I go for a walk now, I do daily when I wake up and then usually, uh, in an afternoon, so I probably accumulate 45 minutes-ish of walking per day. My brain, especially if it's after a, a pretty intense period of either learning or researching or working or whatever, I have more than enough stuff going on in my brain to keep me entertained for 45 minutes of walking. Like, there is boredom there, but there's so much bouncing around that I don't really get to the stage where I think, "Fucking got nothing to think about." It's like, "Whoa, whoa. No, no, no, no. The volume was really, really high, and now it's just a little bit lower." Um...

Michael Easter 56:22 And you probably figure some things out. So you think about like people always talk about, where do you have your best ideas? You have them in the shower, right? That's a cliche.

Chris Williamson 56:29 Dude, let me tell, let me give you the fucking life hack of the century for this. So there is a thing called a shower notepad. So it's waterproof paper with waterproof pencils. And we've got one of them in the shower upstairs, and it's, uh, two different colored pencils. Now, the problem is that I live with two other lads, so we just write abuse to each other in different types of pencils. So it's just like com- comments-

Michael Easter 56:54 That's awesome.

Chris Williamson 56:54 ... comments on the fact that one of us has gained weight or comments on the fact that somebody left some fucking dishes out last night or whatever. Uh, however, the, the purpose of it is that if you have an idea in the shower that you're supposed to write it down-

Michael Easter 57:04 That's awesome.

Chris Williamson 57:05 ... and get them on Amazon.

Michael Easter 57:06 I like it. Yeah, well, the reason that we do have i- ideas in the shower is because it's this time that we're like totally unstimulated, and we're just like, our minds kind of go in weird places and it... You tend to find that people, you know, they, they think on an idea for a while, they'll be working on a project, and the idea will spontaneously kind of arrive, like the solution will spontaneously arrive at some later point when your brain just has a while to sort of process things in the background.

Chris Williamson 57:31 Have you ever been meditating and come out of a meditation session with a to-do list of things that you've thought of during the meditation session? You're like, "Right, so, so I need to ring mum because I need to let her know about this, and I need to tell my assistant about that thing, and I've got that, that I gotta buy the insurance for the car 'cause the car is gonna get..." You're like, "Fucking hell, like that wasn't the purpose (laughs) of this meditation session. But alas, look at me with this fucking to-do list."

Michael Easter 57:53 Here we are. Yep.

Chris Williamson 57:55 Is that related? Is the boredom thing related to how quickly we perceive time and our, our lives going past, do you think?

Michael Easter 58:04 Yeah, for sure. Well, this is really related to, um, new experiences. So, we also evolved to slip into predictable routines, right? Just kind of do the same thing over and over. And the reason for this is that it gave us, again, it gave us a survival advantage. If we could predict where we would find food, if we could predict, you know, where our shelter would be, on and on and on. If we ha- had this sort of habitual routine every day, um, we'd be more likely to survive. Now, we still have that quirk, uh, in our modern life. But in modern life, we're not really worried about survival, right? (laughs) And what happens when you've done the same thing over and over and over, uh, your brain sort of goes into this autopilot mode where you don't really have to be present and aware. You're sort of just going through the motions. And that seems to be associated with time, um, going by faster. So you think about when you were a kid, right? Everything seemed to take so much longer. Well, it's because everything was new, and you were constantly learning. So sort of the takeaway there is that learning and doing new things, um, is kind of like a, a wake up almost, right? It's like you're forced into presence and awareness 'cause you don't know how to do the thing. And it can slow down time, your perception of time, which is pretty cool.

Chris Williamson 59:18 Bro, you fucking nailed it. You absolutely nailed it. I've been thinking about this for so long. I put a tweet out the other day that said, um, "Life doesn't go past any quicker as you get older. You're just paying less attention." And I got a load of replies from people that were adamant that, "No, well, it's because one year when you're one year old means that that's 100% of your life, and one year when you're 50 years old is one fiftieth of your life." Okay, that's true, but you're not absorbing your entirety of existence all at the same time. That's not how life works.

Michael Easter 59:51 Yeah.

Chris Williamson 59:51 The reason that your life appears to move quicker is that you no longer have a learner's mind. You are simply-

Michael Easter 59:56 Exactly.

Chris Williamson 59:57 ... paying less attention. What people mean when they say, "Life seems to be moving so fast, where did the days go?" is, "I don't remember where the days went." Like, people spend fucking months on end doing nothing memorable with their time and then complain that they can't remember it. It's like, bro, you're making your days forgettable. You're not-

Michael Easter 1:00:17 Yeah.

Chris Williamson 1:00:17 ... doing anything that is worthy of your mind remembering it. You drive the same route to work, to and from work. That's a thousand journeys maybe that you've made over the last couple of years. They've all been condensed down into one memory. Think about the last time that you went away on holiday. The two, here's the two things, the two things that I've learned on my research that you want if you want to slow your life down are novelty and intensity. Those are the two things that you can manipulate most effectively. So think about the last time that you went away on holiday and think about not who you were sat next to on the plane, because you've done plane journeys before, but if it was a new airport.... where you arrived, and the person that greeted you at immigration, and the taxi driver that picked you up outside, and the... Dude, I went to Africa five and a bit years ago, and I remember the book that the guy who met us at reception carried under his arm as we walked down. I remember the way that his shoes look. I remember the, uh, h- the favorite bird that he had from the local environment. I remember his na- Dennis, it was like a given name. He was, he was like Rwandan. He definitely wasn't called Dennis. Um, I remember all of that. Why? Wh- I can't remember the 16-digit number off the front of my fucking credit card that I've had for four years. Why is it that I can remember Dennis and his shoes and his book and his favorite bird? Novelty and intensity.

Michael Easter 1:01:34 Yeah.

Chris Williamson 1:01:34 That is the way to slow down life. So, for the people... And this is, uh, you know, it's a mem- a reminder for me as well. I- I get pissed that it's the same. It's your routine that's causing that to happen. Vary the things that you do, and, uh, vary the route that you drive to work. It sounds so dumb, but, like, vary the route that you drive to work. Vary where you sit in the coffee shop that you go to every day. You know, say something different to someone. Go up and speak to somebody. The more that you do that, the slower that life is going to exist. And really, the goal of life, as far as I can see it, is to live a life that, in retrospect, you're glad you lived. Very much of our existence is actually lived looking backward at the days that we've had, because the present moment is fleeting. The present moment exists now and now and now and now and now. It never exists for an, a prolonged period of time, but memories last forever. So, the way that you can see your existence is basically that every single moment that you live can be a gift to the future version of you to look back on with pleasure.

Michael Easter 1:02:31 Yeah, exactly. And I think this phenomenon also explains why you have people report that time has seemed to go by super fast during COVID. People are like, "Oh, God," that like, "We're in 2022? How did that happen? It feels like it's been a month." Well, it's because we've all been sitting in our h- houses the last two years and, like, haven't gone out as much, haven't, you know, gone to concerts, haven't gone to a restaurant. Like, just haven't done any new stuff, haven't been traveling, haven't done a lot of stu-

Michael Easter 1:02:55 stuff.

Chris Williamson 1:02:56 Where should people start with this discomfort stuff? What, what habits have you used in your life that are useful for creating a, a routine out of this?

Michael Easter 1:03:05 Yeah, so I kinda, like, lay out a whole sort of action plan in the book, inherently, and it's, um... But I think that doing one really hard thing a year, like I talked about. Um, more time outside. I talk about, really, the benefits of that, and there's these different, like, doses and kinds of nature that we need to add back into our life. I think the boredom thing is huge. Um, in the book I talk about... I get a lot into, uh, nutrition and talk about how hunger is, like, so important. It's this, like, discomfort you're gonna have to go through, right? Um, I also talk about the benefits of carrying heavy things as a form of exercise that have, we've essentially-

Chris Williamson 1:03:42 Liver King.

Michael Easter 1:03:42 ... engineered out of our lives.

Chris Williamson 1:03:43 Liver King's got that. Fucking speak to him about it. Speak to Brian Johnson about it.

Michael Easter 1:03:46 There we go.

Chris Williamson 1:03:47 Liver, Liver King's carrying all sorts of shit.

Michael Easter 1:03:49 (laughs) Yeah, and, uh, and on and on. I mean, there's a bunch I, I mention in the book, for sure.

Chris Williamson 1:03:55 Yeah, one of the things that he does... (laughs) Fucking Deliver King podcast here. One of the things that he does is he purposefully creates a, uh, physiological hunt before he breaks a fast. Have you seen this that he does?

Michael Easter 1:04:10 I haven't, no.

Chris Williamson 1:04:11 So, he'll do a workout, uh, that finishes with a carry prior to breaking a fast. And say what you want about him, but that is a really smart way to replicate, evolutionarily, what we would have done.

Michael Easter 1:04:24 Yeah, that's interesting.

Chris Williamson 1:04:24 Chase something down, little bit of a workout, some monostructural stuff. Maybe he's on a, uh, a assault bike or a rower or something like that, and then he'll do a heavy carry at the end of his workout.

Michael Easter 1:04:34 Hmm.

Chris Williamson 1:04:34 And you think, I don't know if you can physiologically replicate that in a more convenient way, or, you know, if it really, really matters too much, but if you wanna get close to what you were doing, doing some monostructural cardio for maybe, you know, an hour, and then carrying a heavy thing for half a mile or a mile is probably a pretty fucking good way to replicate it.

Michael Easter 1:04:58 Yeah, for sure. For sure. I will say that he's probably 100 pounds more than humans would have been in the past, but- (laughs)

Chris Williamson 1:05:04 (laughs)

Michael Easter 1:05:04 ... it's okay.

Chris Williamson 1:05:04 Imagine if people looked, looked like him.

Michael Easter 1:05:06 It's funny because, like, the paleo community pictures hunter-gatherers as, like, these jacked people. It's like, "Dude, they weighed, like, 100 pounds."

Chris Williamson 1:05:13 Yeah.

Michael Easter 1:05:13 (laughs)

Chris Williamson 1:05:13 Yeah, they were distance runners. They were endurance athletes.

Michael Easter 1:05:15 Yeah, yeah, yeah. No, but that's cool, though. I love, I love, um, the creativity and thinking about, like... I mean, it's all, it's all interesting, and, like, it's ultimately gonna benefit your life, so super cool.

Chris Williamson 1:05:26 Michael Easter, ladies and gentlemen. The Comfort Crisis: Embrace Discomfort to Reclaim Your Wild, Happy, Healthy Self will be linked

Chris Williamson 1:05:32 in the show notes below. What else should people follow if they want to keep up to date with the stuff you do?

Michael Easter 1:05:37 I'm on Instagram at Michael_Easter. I got a website, Easter Michael, and there's a link there to a newsletter if you wanna keep up with that, and yeah, I'm easy to find. I mean, Google's a thing. You can find me there.

Chris Williamson 1:05:46 Dope. Thanks, mate.

Michael Easter 1:05:47 All right. Thank you.

Chris Williamson 1:05:48 What's happening, people? Thank you very much for tuning in. If you enjoyed that episode, then press here for a selection of the best clips from the podcast over the last few weeks. And don't forget to subscribe. Peace.