1186: Michael Easter | Embrace Discomfort to Discover Your Best Self

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Today on the show, former show guest Michael Easter returns.

This time we focus on discomfort, both physical and mental, and why this is actually good for us.

Long hikes, temperature, exercise, a whole lot more.

Turns out, being uncomfortable actually protects us from disease, keeps us healthy, and more.

We'll explore how modern life stresses us out, but it's the wrong kind of stress, and how we can actually build resilience and good stress into our day-to-day.

We also dive into the lives of young people, rites of passage, helicopter parenting, toughness, phone use, sitting, movement, and a whole lot more.

Here we go with Michael Easter.

Tell me about this crazy hike because we were going to do this a few months ago and you're like, sorry, I'm going to go hike.

Was it like a thousand miles, 500 miles?

It was about 850.

Okay, so let's call it a thousand.

That's not factoring in the times we get lost and don't know where we are and spend a day walking the wrong direction, but we'll, we'll say it.

Who's we?

Somebody was dumb enough to come with you on the side?

Someone was dumb enough to come with me.

Yeah, so I was planning on doing this thing alone, right?

Because like, who the hell is going to go?

Hey, I'm hiking.

It might be 40 days.

It might be 80 days.

I don't really know.

But I have this friend.

His name is Matt Sherman.

This guy was the longest serving American in the Iraq and Afghanistan wars.

So he's like a diplomat.

They'd like send him out to meet with warlords and stuff.

Spends all this time in the war.

When he's done with the war, he ends with this, you know, he's been drawn salary.

He was a lawyer, whatever.

He's got this like, you know, enough money where he can just kind of do whatever he wants.

And so now he hikes.

And he heard that I was doing this trail, which is called the Haydook Trail.

And so he signed on and it was us two.

Wow.

How long did it take?

Took us about 40 days.

I'm not a math guy, but that seems really, really fast for 850 miles.

Yeah, so I would say our average was 20 to 25 miles a day.

Yeah, that's really a lot because you're carrying a backpack with all your stuff.

Yeah, you're carrying a backpack with everything you need.

Some days are more slow going than others.

Like you have a lot of times where you have to sort of navigate these canyons.

So that days like that, you might be getting 10 miles.

But then you'll have days where like there's a stretch where you take the Arizona trail, which is a more established trail.

Like the Haydo Trail is a total misnomer.

A bunch of trails mashed together.

Not even that.

It's more of a route.

It's like, hey, you got like, you got to make it from here to here.

There's no established route.

Figure it out.

You're going to have to go down this canyon, figure that out.

You're going to have to go like figure it out.

But there are a couple of stretches where you're on an established trail.

So like on the Arizona trail, for example, one day, we did like 40 miles because it's relatively flat and you can just cruise.

You know, you wake up when the sun's coming up and you're just like hammer all day.

Sun's coming down.

You're going to camp and then you're like, look at your, you know, my buddy would look at this like little watch and go, holy shit, we did 40 miles today.

Wow.

You feel it after that, though.

The next morning, I was just like, God, why did we hike so far yesterday?

Is there any days where you're like, we're just sitting around today because our legs are tired?

You do take down days.

Okay.

You know, you can't carry 40 days worth of food.

There's a lot of towns where you can resupply.

So when you get to a resupplied town, you'll often take a down day.

You just hang out.

You do nothing.

You go to a diner and eat a real meal.

You go to a diner like four times and eat a ton of food.

Do your laundry, stuff like that.

Wow.

That sounds fun, but also really, really tough.

I mean, that's a hell of a pace to walk for 40 days.

Yeah, it was, I mean, it was awesome, though, because like, you know, at first you're like, what have I gotten myself into?

But then you get into a rhythm.

And it's like, I mean, imagine all the stuff that people think about and have to do in daily life.

Like you got a damn to-do list, right?

And there's like 50 things on it and 49 of them you don't want to do.

Right.

When you're on the trail, you literally just go, I guess I'm going to walk today.

Yeah.

That's all you have to do.

It's all you have to think about.

And it's great.

Are you talking to that guy the whole time?

That would get old.

Sorry, man.

I'm sure you're a great guy, but good lord.

So the first week, we were just, I mean, swapping stories, right?

The whole time.

And then after a week, it's like.

All right.

Well, I'm going to walk a little faster than you, you know, see you later.

And then you kind of meet up at the end of the day and like campsite and you BS and whatever.

But yeah, I mean, you just somebody puts the AirPods in you're like, well, I guess that's it.

Yeah.

And here's the thing.

He does a lot of hiking.

So he like has all these systems, right?

He's got like two AirPods on him at all times for battery.

And I go in there thinking like, oh, I'll just listen to stuff on the speakers of my phone.

Oh, yeah.

You're that guy?

Well, come to find out, well, I will say there's no one else out there, so I'm not offending anyone.

But I found that when you do that, it kills the battery on your phone.

Yeah.

So I basically was in silence a lot.

Oh, even worse.

Yeah.

Yeah.

You Couldn't have borrowed a pair of airplanes.

No podcast, no music.

I had to use it strategically.

So, this is essentially the notes I took were from we did this show before, or a show before, about one of your books, but I went back and got the original one that my friend Jeff Kaylee, who's also like a crazy hiker guy, who will go, hey, you want to go on a hike?

And then you find out it's like 24 hours without sleep and also through water.

So you have to hold your pack over your head for four of the hours.

Don't go hiking with Jeff Kaylee.

That's the wisdom from this episode.

Or, or you, for that matter.

No, if any of these guys ask you to go hiking, the answer is absolutely don't do it.

But the first book, The Comfort Crisis, the thesis is sort of like being comfortable prevents us from experiencing and living our best life and being most alive.

Why is that?

Because a lot of people are going, no, thanks.

I like living my best life next to my pool.

I mean, first of all, I'll say that.

Humans are wired to do the next easiest, most comfortable thing.

And that's probably because it gave us a survival advantage in the past, right?

Like in the past, life was uncomfortable.

It was hard.

You didn't want to move any more than you had to because it's just burning away calories and food is at a premium.

You wanted to avoid weather.

You wanted to avoid danger.

You want all these things.

And then our environments changed where we now have food like on every corner and gas stations, right?

We throw out like a third of our food today.

We've engineered activity out of our lives, right?

You can like walk 2,000 steps a day and survive.

live in climate control, all these things.

And what starts to happen is when our environment changes to become more comfortable and we are a species that wants to do the comfortable thing, we start to face problems.

So, you look at basically all the health problems today, like the most common modern health problems, they're all tied to being sedentary, tied to the fact that we crave like hyper-caloric junk food

and spend so much time inside.

We spend like 93% of our time indoors.

And we also face a lot fewer just challenges day to day.

And I think that when you look at how people learn about themselves, about what they're capable of and grow from that that all comes from doing hard things in the book you mentioned that people find that well that scientists find that discomfort protects us from a lot of diseases can you explain how that works yeah i mean think of like some of the fundamental human discomforts i mean one of them is like physical effort being hungry is another one even like experiencing temperature swings so physical activity exercise is like one of the best things you can do for your health.

Full stop.

And we've really engineered it out of our lives.

And in the past, like we didn't even exercise right exercise is just some shit we made up yeah when we took physical activity out of our lives yeah that makes sense hunger i mean now a lot of our diseases are tied to basically overconsuming food and there's some really fascinating studies and they find that 80 of eating today is driven by reasons other than true hunger so it's like boredom like boredom yeah like i'm stressed like stress eating is a huge thing what else it's a certain time right it's like oh it's it's noon.

I have to eat lunch.

Like we don't go, am I actually hungry?

And we've really just kind of woven hunger out of our life.

And so that's one.

And even spending time outside, I think when you're outside, a lot of really good things happen, right?

You're usually moving.

You're exposed to the sun.

You're seeing natural things.

Like if you think of life in a city, it's a lot of like right angles.

And in nature, that doesn't really exist.

And so there's a lot of these patterns called fractals, which are these like repeating patterns.

And those seem to be really good for mental health.

so a lot of good things happen that's interesting so looking at certain patterns is good for mental health yeah that's crazy science yeah what do you think that's all about i mean a lot of my work looks back at evolution and like i think a lot of the things that make people healthy and happy were things that we used to do in the past every single day and be exposed to in the past and now we're just in these like modern built environments that i will say they're obviously great right i'm not like some people will hear me talk and and they'll be like, oh, so you're saying I should go live like a caveman?

It's like, no, not at all.

What I am saying is that if you're only living and existing in the built environment and doing the next easiest thing, I can tell you that you'll probably be more dissatisfied and you'll probably be more likely to get diseases that you don't want to have.

Interesting.

So a lot of people are going to sit here and go, all right, fine.

This guy's like a super athlete.

He can be uncomfortable and it's fine.

But for me, I can't do that.

Do you want to talk about maybe not starting off as a super healthy guy?

Yeah, for sure.

So the number that I go back to on this all the time is 2%.

And so I even have a newsletter.

My newsletter is literally called the 2% newsletter.

Okay.

And it comes from a statistic that found only 2% of people take the stairs when there's also an escalator.

I'm in the 2%, man.

Unless I got a big-ass suitcase.

Even then, sometimes I'll still do it.

There you go.

I like it.

Now, 100% of people know that taking the stairs is going to give them a long-term benefit on their health, right?

All these things.

But 98% of people do the easy thing of taking the escalator, which can actually hurt them in the long run.

From just not getting the kiloric benefit of taking the stairs.

Exactly.

I see.

And so for me, it's like, that's not really about the stairs.

It's kind of just like this overall mindset shift.

It's like, how can I insert things in my life that are going to be slightly uncomfortable in the short term, but are going to give me a long-term benefit?

So if a person is just starting, say, why don't you start by taking the stairs?

And what did you learn from that?

And where else can you apply that logic into your life?

For example, if you sit behind a desk and make phone calls for work all day, like you could probably pick up the phone and walk around if you take those calls.

I started doing all calls and meetings outside and people will go, there's a little bit of noise.

And I'm like, yeah, I'm outside.

One person will be like,

but everyone else is like, oh, that's a good idea.

Because if you're going to do a three-hour day of phone calls, like if you got all morning of calls, why am I sitting here?

And people are like, oh, you're not going to turn on your camera?

No, you don't get to have me on camera.

Yeah.

I'm not going to sit here and talk to you when I could be outside.

Totally.

Why do you need me on camera?

I'm not, I'm not showing you a presentation.

You don't get to look at me just because that's like your company culture.

I'm not in your company.

Totally.

I actually did, because people face resistance and like sometimes have a hard time figuring this out.

Yeah.

I did a post on 2% that was all about like, how do you do walking phone calls well?

And it's just like

six tips of like what actually will help you pull this off and make it easy to flow into your life.

I mean, I would love to hear those tips.

My first one is just admit that you're the one who's got the street noise instead of being like, I don't know, guys.

I don't know.

Just like, if you're like, no, I won't be on camera and I won't be looking at the camera.

Oh, can you see our graphs on the screen?

Sure.

And I'm outside and there's going to be some wind and like tough crap, basically.

Yeah.

I mean, it depends on the impression, I guess, I'm trying to make, but usually I don't have to impress anybody on these calls.

Yeah.

I can be topless outside.

Yeah.

No big deal.

And people will also think that I'm like an absolutist and saying do every single call.

It's like, yeah, if you're talking to the CEO of your company and trying to get a promotion, like it's okay to take that one sitting down, like no problem.

But the vast majority of calls is totally fine.

Even things like with noise, depending on where you live, like some streets are louder than others.

Walk on the street that isn't as loud.

You know, and like just doing a little bit of pre-scouting can help a lot.

You used to drink a lot.

Yeah.

I assume you don't do that anymore.

A lot.

Okay.

Tell me about that.

Yeah.

So, and this is actually kind of what was sort of the, what would you say, the kickoff moment of this book, The Comfort Crisis is I definitely had a drinking problem.

Good sign you have a drinking problem is that all of your problems are caused by your drinking.

Oh, and that was totally me.

So, I'm like one of those people, you know, one is just never enough.

So, I was kind of like living that way for a long time and I tried to quit tons and tons of different times.

And whenever I would try and quit, I would always look for like, what's the easiest way I can handle this?

How can I drink less?

What trick can I come up with that will make not drinking easy?

And eventually, I just realized like this one morning, like, one, if you keep doing this, you're probably going to die early.

Two, is getting sober supposed to be easy?

Like, hell no, it's not.

No, like most people can't do it.

Yeah.

Right.

Or a lot of people can't do it.

Yeah.

And so I just realized like I really just had to like lean into that discomfort and like do things I didn't want to do that were going to be hard in order to deal with that.

And by doing that and really sort of like embracing the fact that it was going to be be hard, I was able to get sober.

And then that kind of made me realize like, oh, turns out to improve your life, you often have to do hard things you don't want to do.

Yeah.

Yeah.

And then that was sort of like the seed that eventually led to the comfort crisis book.

How old were you when you snapped out of that?

I was

28 years old.

Okay.

So that's not super old, but also like you weren't.

three years of drinking.

That's like a decade of drinking or something.

Yeah, it's more than a decade of drinking.

I first started drinking when I was like in high school.

Okay.

Yeah.

Gotcha.

More than a decade.

You know, I think probably by the time I was 22, it was like very clear to me that I had a problem.

I see.

And you're like, I'll just wait till this thing gets bad enough.

I needed to bite me in the ass a few times, right?

Yeah.

Yeah.

Well, I'll stop when this happens.

And then that happens.

And you just go, oh, well, maybe I'll just stop when that happens.

And then that happens.

And it's just like.

Yikes.

Yeah.

Nothing good comes from that.

You said I was a drunk, idiot, career fraud who was ruining his life.

What if someone is all those things without being a drunk, asking for a friend?

You probably have to do something hard.

Yeah, yeah, probably have to do something hard.

I love the idea of

embracing the just, it's going to be hard.

That's just how it is instead of looking for the next sort of hack.

And the book is fascinating because it does dive into our ancestors collecting food.

They're getting stung.

They're getting maimed by animals.

They're going down into the canyon, but then they break their leg and everyone else is like, you're probably just going to die here.

I mean, we can carry you out.

You could die in a tent.

Yeah.

But it's over for you, at least for a while.

One guy we know survived a broken leg but that was a couple generations ago sorry now we get it from doordash and you know or curbside pickup if my wife makes me do that what a hassle though am i right i'm gonna fight the target god come on yeah i don't want to go back to hunting and gathering per se but i do get that things are too easy like i come in and i'm like it's hot turn on the air conditioning and then it's like two hours until it's the desired temperature yeah i'm so annoyed by this we need a better hvac system i mean that is a conversation i have with myself every day totally which is pathetic now that i say it out loud Well, I mean, it's like I said, a lot of the things that I point out in my work, I like to say it's not your fault, but it is your problem to solve.

You know?

And I think that applies to like a lot of things in life.

It's like we, you know, if you don't exercise, it's like, that's not your fault.

Right.

Humans evolve to avoid physical activity.

Yeah.

Like literally, there's a reason that exercise sucks.

And if you tell me you love exercise, you're full of shit.

Right.

It's like no one really loves it.

What's up with the endorphin is that the endorphin thing is real though, right?

That's real.

They get the runner's high.

Like, I don't get that when I'm rucking.

It sucks the whole time.

And everyone's like, why are you doing this?

And I'm like, because it sucks.

I just kind of like that part.

Because your life improves later on.

Right.

After I'm done, I'm like, I did that again.

That's pretty cool.

Exactly.

Yeah.

And that's satisfying.

Yeah.

And so I think that like, that's sort of the mindset shift is that it's like, I'm going to have to do things that are hard and sucky in the short term because I know that.

If I do that, things are going to improve in the long term.

I think humans are generally evolved to take the short-term reward because that served us for all the time.

And today it doesn't.

Today it's like the opposite.

It's like you need to think more long-term.

You said lifespan is up, but health span is down.

I don't know if that's a scientific term, but you also mentioned in the same note that suicide is up.

And tell me if you were just exaggerating this.

Suicide didn't exist for most of human history.

Is that true?

Or was it just really rare?

So I've seen studies when I wrote that book, I found studies that said it didn't.

I've had people push back on me with new studies.

Okay.

Here's what I would say to that.

It was probably less than it is now.

Sure.

And so that's kind of my so rare it maybe didn't quite factor in, whereas now everybody's got some who's directly or indirectly sort of.

Yeah.

And I think that there's actually like a lot of mental health issues that are sort of new in the grand scheme of time space and like culturally shaped by messaging and what's happening in culture and all these different things.

So, I mean, it's possible that like, you know, I wouldn't say suicide never happened, but I would say it happened at a much lesser scale.

I think we can confidently say that.

Yeah, that makes sense.

That's a show I want to do, by the way, is the social contagion of disease.

But you know what?

I try to do that with people I can't even mention on the show because they won't talk about it.

They won't talk about social contagion because it pisses off people who have those mental illnesses or don't want them, the thing that they're doing to be classified as a mental illness.

So like, I wanted to ask about social contagion issues with, say, suicide, and people were like, I'm not touching that because those groups then won't work with people because how dare you sort of imply that this is a disease that my teenager caught from social media, which is unfortunate because I think that that stuff contributes massively to depression and teen issues, especially.

Yeah, I agree.

People won't, the very few people are even willing to go on the record about it.

They just won't talk about it.

Yeah.

And it's tricky because you have to like mentally separate the fact that Are real individuals suffering from this thing, whether or not it's cultural?

Yes.

So you have a lot of empathy for them.

At the same time, we should be able to talk about it from a public health standpoint that like this is happening because once we do that, maybe fewer people will suffer overall.

I agree.

Yeah.

I mean, I'm not one of those like every opinion needs to be aired on this platform, but like if it's scientifically validated, there's social contagion, it seems like you should be able to talk about it.

But they'll...

People, scientists will get kind of canceled and then they won't be able to talk about the other things that they're interested in.

Right.

If they imply that something is socially contagious, that's not, that's supposed to be like natural or inborn or whatever it's really complicated it's a problem i didn't expect to have starting the show because you just think oh everybody wants to talk about everything not quite yeah and like some of that research actually comes out i mean it's not coming out of nowhere like it's coming out of the harvard psychology department yeah this is not fake science that's coming out of uh twitter yeah this is like totally a researcher says this and then loses their job and then we have like carol hooven came on and talked about i can't even remember her exact subject but it was something along the lines of it was a gender thing and And she basically got ostracized from Harvard for talking about it.

And she's like, it's just, this is what the study says.

There's experiences humans are meant to have that are no longer available to us is something you wrote in the book.

What kind of experiences are these?

You know, how do we, how do we know we're, that there's an experience we're meant to have that we're not having anymore?

Well, I think if you look at like the amount of time that we spend outdoors has just plummeted.

And I think that nature is such a great teacher.

And you go out, like, let's say you do a long hike or you're into whatever you're into.

You have to like figure things out.

And it's going to be hard.

And you're going to face all these problems along the way.

And there's not an easy button out, right?

You have to like figure things out.

And in that process, especially in like the doubting, like, oh, I want to quit.

I'm going to do whatever.

Once you push through, you learn that you're a lot more capable than you think.

And you just like realize, oh, I have more on board.

Where it's like, if you only exist in kind of like a bubble of safety, you never really realize that you're a lot, whatever word you want to use, tougher, more capable, whatever it might be.

I can agree with that.

I guess, I mean, my experience is limited and I don't do endurance athletic stuff, but I remember when I started rocking, I remember trying to walk two miles with a five-pound pack.

And I was like, oh, this is hard.

I'm never going to, now it's like a 60-pound pack and seven miles.

And I'm like, all right, I'll just quit now because I'm at the end of the trail, but I probably have another three miles if I really tried.

And I've done the 10 miles.

I mean, it kind of sucks the next day, right?

Your knees are all swollen.

I figure there's a line where it's, you know, the long-term benefit starts to dip when you're grinding the cartilage down in your knees.

It's pretty cool to know that I can do 10 miles of a 60-pound pack.

Like that's kind of like, wow, I could carry both my kids for 10 miles.

To see the progress too.

And to realize, like, oh, and then you can apply that logic to a lot of things, right?

Okay, well, here's like, what is the metaphorical five-pound pack right now?

Well, I did the actual five-pound pack.

Like, probably if I just keep at this, I'm going to improve.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Seeing that sort of undeniable proof that you can improve in something is an experience I think everybody needs.

It seems hard to believe that nobody has that experience, but I'm sure that especially younger people, there's a chance that they've never actually proven anything to themselves.

Before I was 18, I don't think I ever really did that.

I mean, maybe in some respects.

And then I went to Germany as an exchange student and learned like fluent German.

And it was like, whoa, I can do this.

That was one of the most shocking.

sort of life-changing experiences of my life, right?

Because then you're like, there's probably nothing I can't do if I could do this.

Right, right.

And I, I mean, I think in the past, the rites of passage were like a thing, right?

I mean, through all different cultures, you see different forms of rites of passage for young people.

And they often involved, we have this young person, he or she is at point A in their life, and we need to get them to point B.

We don't just go, hey, you're at point B, congratulations.

It's like, hey, we're going to send you out.

You're going to have to do something hard.

And in that process, the person would learn something about themselves, what they were capable of.

They would come back.

and they would be more confident, more capable, and they would be at point B, but only by going out and doing something like your trip to Germany.

Yeah.

Would they come back and have that mindset shift?

So like physically, the person isn't changing.

What's really changing is their mindset.

There's a couple of these rites of passage that still exist are crazy.

I can't remember what, where this is.

Somewhere in Africa, of course.

You know what a bullet ant is?

I've heard of this.

So it's like the most painful insect sting on the, whatever the scale is.

It's like, I think tarantula hawk is number two, which is like some kind of crazy.

bug and then bullet ants and it's just insane and i've seen these in the amazon and they just look like big carpenter ants but apparently this thing is just gnarly, comes in waves.

And everything.

So these guys, they put these gloves on that they make out of, you know, plants and they fill them with bullet ants and they just shove their hand in there and they leave it in there for however long.

And they're just repeatedly stung by these things that feel like getting shot in the hand.

And then they just sit there screaming and writhing in agony.

And then when they're done, which is like four days later, because it's so long, they're men in the tribe.

And it's like, okay, well, you didn't jump off a cliff with the pain.

You know, you can endure this crazy thing.

So you're on a different level.

Like you got your black belt and all these other kids who haven't done this.

They're not on your level.

It sounds terrible, but I get why that exists, right?

Some old dude 70 generations, 700 generations back got stung by a bullet ant and he was like, I need to make sure everyone experiences this.

So good.

Well, and dude, the important part too is the interpretation, right?

They don't just put the glove on and say, hey, put the glove on and then just walk off.

There's this big cultural narrative around it about what it does for the person.

And that's like an important part of the rites of passage.

It wasn't just you come back.

I'm like, okay, you're back.

Good.

It's like, we're going to sit you down.

We're going to talk about it.

What did you learn?

Okay.

Great.

You got it.

Congratulations.

You've made it.

That also kind of ties into what we were saying about like cultural interpretations of different things.

Whereas today, it almost seems like we've kind of lowered the threshold for what counts as a challenge or a trauma or whatever it might be.

And so when you interpret something that was at a lower scale, well, now people will start to have more trauma, more mental health issues.

Whereas like, you know, the interpretation is very important.

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There's this tribe, and I'm sure you've seen this.

They build like a really tall jungle gym looking thing.

I guess it's out of vines or sticks or something.

And they tie vines to the guy's legs and they basically bungee jump with these vines, which I assume are not bungee flexible.

And it just...

hurts a lot and is scary and people get crazy hurt doing it but then there are men after that after they jump bungee jump off this structure men especially will invent the craziest shit to do this that's like life-threatening because this is that important to their survival as a tribe that people go through this.

That I found interesting because otherwise it's like, wait, wait, wait.

If you just look at this, it's not fun.

It's actually the opposite of fun.

It's super dangerous.

People definitely die, like people who the tribe is invested in, young men who they really need for the next generation, and they die or get critically injured doing this.

So it has to serve some function that's of absolute critical importance or it's not worth doing.

It would have been eliminated.

Yeah, for the tribe moving on.

Absolutely.

And I think one of the key reasons you don't see as many things like this with women is because women give birth.

They give birth.

And that is like, that's way harder than jumping off a damn bungee jump thing.

And it's like, that's too much embedded.

Yeah.

I don't want the emails from women being like, well, women, because it's like, yeah, they don't need it.

Yeah.

Right.

That's funny.

There's, there's a, in the Jewish tradition, there's these guys, the Hasidic Jews, they wear like the box on their head and they've got the tefillin and whatever.

I remember this woman was like, why don't we get to do that?

And the guys are like, let me explain this to you.

Guys are so dense that they will forget God if they don't have a box on their head with the Torah in it.

Women don't need that because they're like better.

And she was satisfied with that answer.

There you go.

And it's kind of the same thing.

It's like, you don't need to bungee jump off of a thing because you're going to push a kid out and it's going to hurt.

My wife did it without anesthetic.

She did it at home.

Oh, holy shit.

Yeah, twice.

And I stood there with my eyes as big as saucers watching this happen and filming it on my iPhone.

That was my role.

That was all I did.

And I'm here talking about how I went on a walk in the desert.

Yeah.

That's hard.

So were you hot, boo-oo?

Your AirPods didn't work.

Yeah, that's too bad.

But this reminds me something else you mentioned in the book, Problem Creep.

You kind of touched on this earlier.

We'll joke about first world problems, but it sounds like what you're saying is when we run out of problems, we make problems out of other things, but our resilience, our ability to deal with those problems is also lower because we haven't built the capacity.

And correct me if I'm wrong, it sounds like you're saying that contributes to mental health issues potentially.

Yeah, I think so.

So this is some research.

It was done by a grad student at Harvard when he was getting his PhD and he did it with Daniel Gilbert, who's a Harvard psychologist as well.

Basically how it happened, it's interesting how it happened.

These two guys are waiting in line for TSA and they're watching TSA.

TSA like finds all these issues.

It's like there's some old lady with a half-filled bottle of water or whatever, right?

They're just like, they find problems.

And so these two guys, they wonder, like, what would happen if all of a sudden everyone started obeying the rules, right?

The scanners don't pick anything up.

That you go through the metal detector and nothing goes off.

Would TSA just say, hey, keep on going through, go through, go through.

Everyone have a good flight.

And they go, I don't think that would happen.

I think what they would do is they would just broaden their definition of what constituted a problem.

Because their job is to find problems.

So they set up this series of studies.

But in the first, they had people look at 800 different faces in a row, like one after the other.

And these people had to say whether a face was threatening or non-threatening.

So face after face, right?

Non-threatening, non-threatening, threatening, non-threatening, non-threatening, threatening.

And what they did is at the 200th face, they started showing these people fewer and fewer threatening faces.

The second study was similar, but they had to read research proposals.

And they had to deem whether the research proposals were ethical or unethical.

Same deal, midway through, they start feeding these people fewer and fewer unethical proposals.

So you would think, right, after phase 200, these people start saying threatening less often.

After the midway point of the research studies, they start saying unethical less often.

But the opposite happened.

They said it just as often.

They started deeming faces that were sort of on the borderline, just that they would have classified as neutral and let slide before as being threatening.

Same with the research proposals.

They get real nitpicky.

They're like, oh, well, there's that one line.

That's unethical.

And so what this told them is that as humans experience fewer and fewer problems, we don't become more satisfied.

We don't like calm down and just everything's perfect.

We start broadening our definition of what constitutes a problem.

So we end up with the exact same number of problems, but they just become more hollow over time.

I see.

So it's like, instead of not being able to afford my flight to Vegas, it's now I had to fly economy.

This is some bullshit.

Yes.

Yeah.

Totally.

I still fly Southwest.

I don't give a shit.

But yeah, I do that deliberately.

in a way with flights especially it's like i'm group c that's how this is this is going down there's no overhead room i want this well and that's hilarious too because a hundred years ago if you wanted to get to las vegas 150 years ago whatever it is you'd have to get on a damn horse steam train or something yeah for x amount of time right right and now it's like you see people on on airplanes and it's like there's no screen on my on my plane this is bullshit this is unacceptable it's like if you put that in the context of time like life now is just so unbelievable in so many ways.

But because we just constantly look for the problem, we find it.

And that makes people, one, miserable, two, insufferable.

It's true.

It's true.

Yeah.

You have to put yourself.

Well, would you say you have to deliberately put yourself in these situations?

I mean, group C, let's not be extreme, but you also don't have to take an 850-mile walk, maybe driving the car with no AC on.

I don't know.

I mean, is there, is it little things like that?

Like, look, so when I talked to the lead researcher on that study, and his name was David Lavari.

But I basically asked him like, okay, if this is a moving goalpost as the world improves, like, can you do things that push back the goalpost?

And he said, yeah, in theory, you can.

So like a big part of my message is like, go do something outside that's challenging.

Go, if you don't want to do that, what if you went down and you volunteered at the homeless shelter?

Like you'll see people that have real problems and that'll like reset what you consider a problem.

That it doesn't last permanently, of course.

So you kind of have to constantly be.

doing things that are going to just change your perspective a little bit.

And then that's going to make you more satisfied.

Is it Masogi?

Masogi?

Yeah, doing really hard stuff.

A friend of mine, he's a former Navy SEAL, or I don't know if they say former, but he's a Navy SEAL.

And he did something for some reason where he was carrying a rock underwater for five miles, not with a tank.

It was like as much breath as he could have.

And then he would pick up the rock and he'd carry it a few steps or whatever.

And then he'd come back up, take a breath, go back down, pick up the rock.

And he did that for five miles.

I mean, it's deliberately like the worst thing you can think of to do to yourself.

And he does that.

I don't know if it's annually or something, but I think it's in memory of one of his fallen comrades or something.

So it's like, it's deliberately like, we are going through this terrible thing to remember this person.

But it's really, it's actually quite inspiring.

It's just not something most people could do.

But I know he does things like that on purpose, kind of the same reason why I go rucking or why you go for an 850 mile hike.

It's just pushing the limit and then feeling, feeling a little bit more alive, maybe.

which is like a way to honor somebody who's no longer alive.

I'm not totally sure of the psychology here.

Yeah.

And I think that it shows you what you're capable of.

I think when people have moments where they're truly unsure if they're going to be able to complete something and they, you kind of think, okay, I'm going to quit.

I got to stop going.

But if you can just kind of keep going, you're then able to look back and realize like, hey, I thought that my edge was in this place, but I'm clearly past it.

So it teaches you that you have more on board than you thought.

And I think that is where the change happens.

And I think, too, that these things don't have to be extreme.

For example, I gave a talk and this woman came up to me after and she's like, yeah, I'd read your book.

I read about this idea of masogi, like do something really hard once a year.

And she's like, my masogi was trying sushi.

And she's like, but here's what happened.

I tried sushi.

I didn't die.

And it made me realize that I had all these narratives about what might happen and fears.

And it opened up this whole landscape of like, well, maybe I should try and do this thing.

Sure.

Maybe I should try and do this thing.

And her life improved.

Because trying sushi doesn't sound that impressive.

I'm not going to, you know.

Depends on where you're at.

It depends on where you're at.

And when she completes a triathlon as a result of having tried sushi five years prior, I think that's pretty impressive.

Totally.

And it all started with like that one thing.

Like, I'm just going to do this thing that scares me.

Parenting has changed, though.

I feel like kids, this is every old person says shit like this, but like when I was a kid, you could go and do crazy things.

You could even go like, I'm going to my friend's house.

We're going to camp in the backyard.

And I'm sure the parents were like, just make sure they're alive at 2 o'clock in the morning.

Just like shine a flashlight out there or whatever.

Turn the light on, make sure they're still there.

That was fun.

Now I feel like that would never happen.

You see these parenting experts and they're like, no sleepovers because all kinds of crazy, which is probably maybe it's not a terrible idea because crazy stuff does happen.

But what is that called?

Snowplow parenting, where they just remove every obstacle before the kid and like, don't make school too hard, appeal all the grades, all this stuff.

I kind of worry about doing that for my kids because since everyone is doing it, it almost seems like that's the normal way you're supposed to do things now.

I don't know.

It's hard to, it's hard to see an alternate path where you're not abusing your kids.

Yeah.

I always like to give a little preface anytime I talk about parenting.

I like to to say, I do not have kids.

So that either means that I'm going to give the worst parenting advice or the best parenting advice

because I have no skin in the game.

That's right.

My thought is that if you just look at the data, kids need to have challenges in their life.

When they don't have challenges in their life, when they encounter them in the future, they crack up and they're not able to complete them, right?

They're like, it just becomes too big of a bridge.

So I think kids need more sort of unsupervised play.

I think kids should be spending more time outdoors.

I think that parents should be there to say like, look, I got your back.

And if you really need my help, I'll be there, but you got to figure this shit out.

This is you because eventually they're going to go down to the real world.

And you as a parent are not always going to be there for them.

Right.

And if you've done everything for them, they'll be able to do nothing once you're not there.

There's a lot of that.

I mean, my kids are little, so you kind of have to do that stuff, but it must be kind of hard to turn that off.

I think that's the problem.

You're supposed to do that for your four-year-old in most ways.

I do let my five-year-old suffer a little bit, you know, like, oh, I can't lift it.

I guess we can't play Legos.

If he can't lift the box, suddenly he can move the box.

Right.

So there's, there's that.

But it's got to be tough to sort of make the shift.

And I think dads do that with boys instinctively in many ways.

I even notice now, if my daughter, who's three, is like, daddy, can you do this?

I'm like, of course.

And if my son's like, dad, can you do this?

I'm like, no, not if you can't do it.

You better do it.

And there's a switch that has to get flipped at some point where I do that more with both kids, but I don't know.

I'm a little worried that that's not like an obviously bright red switch that I'm going to know when to flip.

Yeah.

And I would be interested to hear from you because I've heard from a lot of parents who say, I agree with all this in theory.

Right.

But culturally, it's much more challenging because, like, if every other parent is saying, no, kid, you can't go play outside.

And I say, hey, kid, go play outside.

What the hell is he going to do?

Right.

He's going to play by himself.

Yeah.

They're going to be.

So there needs to be sort of this like collective movement.

And there's also like the societal pressures of like, you let them outside.

outside like i'm gonna call the coach you're the kid out yeah whose kid is like all over the place yeah yeah and then they associate that with negativity like if something gets vandalized well it must have been that harbinger kid because he's always around by himself on his bike and it's like my kid's the only one not lighting on fire come on he's busy he's building a fort under a bridge somewhere the idea that toughness translates i love this being in good shape swimming might not make you a good runner but you'll be fit enough to run it sounds like you're saying being tough in one way or another will make you tough enough to persevere elsewhere and i think that that's an important concept, especially with parenting, right?

I know that we talked about the rocking thing.

I'm way less afraid of maybe doing some kind of, I don't know, mile swim or something that somebody challenges me to because I know I did that other thing.

You're right.

Kids don't get a whole lot of that.

I mean, maybe they get it academically if they're in the right school, but they don't get a whole lot of that physically.

I really don't think that they do.

Yeah.

And I think it's like, you just have to, you have to build evidence, right?

That you can do something.

It's like, well, how do you know you can do anything?

It's like, well, you look back and you go, well, I did this thing that is kind of similar before and I was fine.

So maybe this is like that.

And that increases the probability that you'll try something.

But you need to start building those case studies so you can take on the next thing.

I like rucking in the heat.

Tell me about this BDNF thing.

What is that stuff?

I'm not just needlessly torturing myself, right?

There's an added benefit to doing stuff like that.

Yeah, well, there's a lot of like, I think I have a post on 2% about this too, like all the benefits of.

exercising in the heat.

I mean, long story short is that it's good for humans to go through temperature swings, right?

To have times where you are hot, to have times where you are cold.

And right now we kind of live at 72 degrees.

So there's like...

There's 107 outside today in Vegas and I'm going to guess 72 in here, but yeah, pretty much.

Yeah.

And so there's different physiological adaptations that happen in the heat and in the cold.

Both are good.

It is interesting because I do think some of the heat research is a little more compelling than the cold research.

You look at like data on a lot of the Scandinavians who do their like saunas and stuff, and it seems to be really good for heart health.

So that's one that I'm like, man, there's some there there.

Yeah.

My cold plunge is a planter now because I wasn't convinced.

Awesome.

First of all, I hated it, right?

Like I don't mind doing stuff in the heat.

I'll jump rope in the heat, whatever, rock in the heat.

The cold stuff was just sort of like needlessly awful.

I was like, this better be really good for me.

And then I looked at the science and I was like, oh, it's sort of like people like doing it because it makes them look cool on Instagram or they feel good, but not super compelling that it does much of anything else.

Yeah.

And I think that there's like individual differences.

So for a long time, I was like, cold plungers are useless.

Like, there's, you look at the research, it's just like the recovery stuff, like, it actually hurts recovery.

Like, there's all the, these are stupid.

Then I heard from enough people who said, I feel awesome after doing this.

It's not everyone, because I've heard from an equal amount of people who are like you.

And I'm in that same camp.

I'm like, I would just rather go outside and on a cold day and like go for a hike.

Like, that's my jam.

But if this is helping you, like.

keep doing it.

That's where I'm at.

Like the people who run really far all the time and it's like, oh, it's not great for your knees and skin and whatnot.

But like, if you get that runner's high and it keeps you exercising, fine.

Like the benefits are there.

But yeah, the cold plunge thing was like those guys that get out and they're like, yeah, I'm not that.

No, I'm like, I need a hot shower.

This sucks.

It wasn't like the beneficial sort of like, oh, I made it through that.

It was like, this is just miserable.

I'm dreading it.

I'm stressed out thinking about it.

No, thank you.

I like the idea or the concept that new and especially hard experiences, they dilate time and make it seem longer.

Cause I'm kind of looking for ways to do that with my whole life, you know, because I, if I look at the last five years, I'm like, God, that went by really fast.

And my parents are like, yeah, we're 80.

It just keeps going faster and faster and faster.

And there's some neuroscience to this, right?

When you see an experience that you've done or you have an experience that you've had before, it sort of gets compacted into this like sliver of memory.

Whereas kids, they do something they've never done before.

And the whole thing is like just this one long experience.

that's very vivid in detail.

And they remember all this crazy.

My kids remember like what they ate for lunch at Disneyland months ago.

And I'm like, oh yeah, we went to Disneyland, right?

It's just this little sliver in my brain.

Yeah.

I think

once you've done something multiple times, what effectively happens is that like you, you know what's going to happen.

So you don't have to pay as much of attention, right?

It's like you can just zone out.

A good example is like, I'm sure everyone's had this experience, unfortunately, is that when you're driving a route that you've driven a million times, you're just like in your head the whole time.

You're not paying attention to anything.

And then you're like, wait, how long have I been driving?

You have that moment.

And it's like time just goes by fast.

Whereas when you get into a new situation, you don't know what to expect.

You can't predict anything.

So you are forced to pay attention.

And that paying attention, I mean, that's really kind of what makes life worth living, right?

You're like in the moment, things are novel.

You're having to figure things out.

And so sort of the takeaway is like, if you can try and do new things, put yourself in new scenarios without expectations.

I think that gives you memories.

I think it like gives you a greater sense of time.

I'll give you a way that I use this with my wife.

One day we were like, okay, we're we're just going to do something totally different, unexpected.

We're just going to point the car toward Chinatown and we're going to just see what we find.

We saw this restaurant.

We're like, we'll go in there.

We didn't read the Yelp reviews.

We didn't read the Google shoes.

But yeah.

We didn't, yep.

We go in, we eat.

It's great.

It's like new menu, new everything.

We tried things we've never had before.

It's awesome.

And then we're like, I wonder what's by here.

So we just kind of walked up the street.

We found this claw arcade.

Literally this arcade.

All it had is claw machines.

We're like, yeah, let's go in there.

Don't tell my wife.

She loves those.

Don't tell her where this is.

Oh, there's plenty of them around here.

It's wild.

We're never leaving.

And then we went to this like dessert place.

It was like this Korean dessert place.

We've never tried anything like that.

And it was like, it was one of those days where you're like, that was awesome because we had no idea what to expect.

We didn't know what to predict.

Every scenario was new.

It was like an adventure in the truest sense of the word.

And it's accessible to anyone.

Anyone can do that.

Yeah, that's true.

Go to the restaurant with the name you can't pronounce.

And don't read the Yelp reviews.

Don't read the Yelp reviews.

Because that's what people do.

It's like, we're like, hey, let's try something new.

And then what do you do?

You go, okay, here's the restaurant's website.

What do the Yelp reviews say?

Oh, Dave22 says to order this meal.

And then you look at the menu.

Like you've, you're having, like, you've figured it out.

You just go in there with a plan and you're just not paying attention.

It's like you need to take away all the information beforehand and just go into something totally novel.

I like that.

You mentioned that our brain is sort of never bored these days and phones are affecting our brain.

I mean, no surprise, I suppose.

Tell me more about about that because it does seem like modern life overworks my brain and I'm never bored for that reason.

Not because I'm being constantly entertained, but because there's always something I can do for work even.

Yeah.

So the reason I started thinking about this is in the comfort crisis, like the overarching narrative is this 30 days I spent in the Arctic and we were up there hunting.

And people might think hunting is action-packed.

It's like a lot of sitting, a lot of waiting.

My cell phone doesn't work.

I'm not bringing like TVs, books, magazines, all that stuff.

So we just like sit on this hill for hours and I find myself bored, right?

You're like, I'm like, what the hell is this?

Like, I haven't felt this and I can't like just immediately cure it.

So I got to start like figuring out things to do.

And my mind goes to interesting places.

And what it made me really think about is that, you know, when you have these times of boredom, your mind starts to wander into places.

Now, some of these places are totally wacky.

but some of them are filled with really interesting thoughts and ideas.

And I think in the past, humans were bored often.

And when we we were bored, we'd have to come up with things to do.

We'd have to think, okay, what could we do to improve our lives?

Think of these big new ideas.

And today, when people feel boredom, it's just like the automatic escape is in your pocket.

And so I think that we've removed these sort of long stretches of boredom that inevitably lead to new avenues of thinking.

That's interesting.

I never thought about the fact that we had to create new avenues for thinking, but of course it makes sense.

I mean, you look at things like astrology.

I know that's not science.

I mean, I argue also that it has nothing to do with reality, but the reason people came up with that stuff is because they were just laying there at night looking up at the sky.

Yeah.

Right.

So there's all these legends and mythology and all this stuff that people and ideas that people had about the natural world that they would not have had if they were just staring at the news on their tablet.

People looked up and wondered, well, how come that moves that way?

That doesn't make sense.

Yeah.

Right.

Totally.

That stuff is interesting.

I mean, a lot of science comes from, I think, just trying to explain what's around you, which you, as a human, really aren't doing if you're face down in something else.

Yeah.

And I think too, I mean, I think people will understand this.

So there's that kind of cliche, like you get your best ideas in the shower.

And it's like, well, why is that?

It's because you're bored.

Cause you got nothing else to pay to.

You're just like.

My body is like active enough where I'm not fidgeting with that.

And my brain's like, well, I don't need to dedicate too much focus to scrubbing these things.

And then bam, right?

You get this idea.

And so I think you can leverage that in ways.

Like one way that I do this is I'll just take a walk for like 20, 30 minutes outside, leave my phone at home, see where my mind goes.

Usually get some good ideas.

I have a note here that says, we evolved an aversion to boredom, caveman Barry's example.

What am I talking about?

Yeah.

Any ideas?

Yeah.

So this, no, I have no idea.

Oh, no, I'm just kidding.

It's from your book, hopefully.

So this explains like why humans get bored in the first place.

So think, we'll use the example of

hunting because I just used it.

So let's say it's a million years ago and you and I are.

sitting on a hill and we're hunting.

And in the past, we would have needed that food to survive, right?

If we don't get that food, we're going to starve to death and die.

So we're sitting on this hill and no animals are coming through.

We don't see anything, right?

We sit and sit and sit.

Boredom would kick on and boredom effectively tells you, go do something else.

So in the past, we would have, that something else would have been like, how else could we get food?

Right.

We'd come up with an idea.

How else could we get food?

And we would maybe go pick berries or pick potatoes, right?

So in the past, boredom was often this cue of do something else and the something else was more productive.

Today, the something else is TikTok or Instagram or check your news feed for whatever chaos is ensuing in Washington, et cetera.

Or LA,

as is today.

Yeah.

What's going on in LA?

I thankfully not sure.

Yeah.

I'll give you a good example, too.

And I think one of the issues, too, is that like bad things happen in the world, but I think we also have this stream of media that heightens our focus on these bad things.

And I think it affects us.

So when we're on this hike, we don't have service for like 10 days in a row.

And we get into striking distance of seller reception.

We have like two bars.

And the guy I'm hiking with pulls out his phone because it starts binging.

And we were out there when there was all the trade war tariff stuff.

So he sees all these things about the economy crashing, checks his stock portfolio.

I was going to say checks his portfolio for sure.

And he just goes, oh my God, like, you know, lost all this money.

And then he kind of paused and he goes, I'm living out of a tent right now.

Like literally, this is my life hasn't changed in the least bit.

And it's not going to change after this.

And I guarantee when we hike another 10 days and get back into service, that number will have changed again, but it doesn't matter.

But if you're home and you're just like checking that, you're just like sitting there nervous, wrapped up in these changing numbers.

And it's just like, that affects us, even though it's not going to really change our lives in the long term.

It's true.

I mean, I bought the dip.

I was like, everybody's panicking.

Come on.

Good.

We've seen this movie before.

How much free cash do I have?

Settled the trade.

Boom.

Index fund.

Oh, my dad's like, oh, you made it, you made a bunch of money the other day.

Yeah.

Everybody else is freaking out because they're watching the news.

I don't even know what's going on.

I just checked it this morning and was like, what the hell?

Everything fell off a cliff.

Can't get much worse than this.

Famous last words, but whatever.

Yeah.

I mean, that stuff always works, especially because it's long game, right?

Like the economy is not going to crash until I'm 70 years old.

And if it does, well, I got other problems.

So, yeah, whatever.

And now for some uncomfortably good deals on the fine products and services that support this show.

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All right, now for the rest of my conversation with Michael Easter.

Tell me about creativity, because there's this phone book test, and creativity seems to have predicted kids' long-term success.

That's pretty damn cool.

There's a creativity test, and basically what these researchers found is that they tested kids' IQs, and then they gave them this standardized creativity test.

And they found that the kids who were most creative actually did better in the long run than kids with the higher IQs.

Basically, creativity scoring high in that was a greater predictor of the long-term success.

And I think one of the things those researchers talked about as well, and there was like some follow-up stuff by a group, they basically argued that like when you look at creativity scores over time, they've been going down in younger generations.

And their thinking was probably exposure to media.

So, if you think about how old are you?

45.

I had to think about that.

Yeah.

So, when you were a kid, when I was a kid, it's like you go outside and like, you just had to come up with shit to do, right?

Yeah, sure.

We're going to make up a game, you know?

And today, I think as we've, kids have spent less time outside, more time indoors with screens, your time has been sort of offloaded to something that's going to entertain you rather than you having to be the person who goes, we got to figure out how to entertain ourselves and we're going to come up with some wacky ways to do that.

Yeah.

My kids, we encourage this.

My wife and I have this love-hate relationship, right?

Cause it'll be like.

with our kids doing this because it'll be like, dad, I need boxes, tape, scissors, and a plastic window.

And it's like, oh, this is going to be so messy.

But then we gave him all this crap because we're like, at least we don't have to deal with it for him for a minute.

And he made a bench and a place where he could sit in a table out of boxes and tape.

And he said, this is my creation station.

He sat down and started drawing.

And we were like, what?

I was so proud of this.

He was doing something with the bench or the table.

I said, what are you doing?

And he goes, it's uneven.

So I don't want it to be slanted.

I want to make it even.

So he's like fixing problems he had.

And then he cut a hole in this big box and he put this iPhone screen protector that I discarded over this window thing and was looking through it and I was like, okay, this is definitely better than the iPad.

Oh, totally.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Like we got him this chomp saw.

It's basically like a table saw, but it only cuts cardboard.

Yeah.

So kids can use it.

Right.

It's really cool.

I mean, he's just, he was like addicted to this thing for a while.

Yeah.

And like think of all the things.

he's having to do that wouldn't happen behind the screen.

Like, right?

There's like, he's having to move around.

He's having to problem solve.

He's having to like, I think one thing that's happened too is like, yes, problem solving can happen behind the screen.

Think of a video game.

The whole damn point is to solve a problem.

Yeah.

Right.

But I think the integration of problem solving with your hands as you do it, I think that's something that happens far less.

And I think there's probably something important about the interplay of like, I have to think about this thing, but then I have to physically do this thing to solve the problem.

There is something to that.

And I don't want to be the guy who craps entirely on screen time because I don't think that zero screen time is the answer.

A lot of people,

yeah, a lot of people disagree with us on that.

However, just when I think, you know, we got to do something about this iPad thing, my daughter will go, carrots grow in the ground.

And I'll go, oh, okay.

How do you know that?

Oh, I saw it on YouTube.

And then I'm like, okay, well, that's basic knowledge, but fine.

And then I can't remember if we were identifying animals and I thought she was going to be like dog, cat, bird, whatever.

And she was like, Elephant, leopard, tiger.

And she got all these animals.

And I was like, what's this one?

And she's like, oh, that's a snake.

And this one bites, but this one doesn't.

And I was just like, okay, you're learning a lot on YouTube, like way more than I expected.

Totally.

And all the colors and then, you know, different ways.

She'll know letters.

We're not teaching her this.

She's not in school.

She's just learning all this from Miss Rachel or whatever, explaining it on YouTube.

And so it's like, okay, zero is not the answer to this, but also like six hours a day is not the answer to this either.

Yeah.

And I mean, it's like any tool.

It's like how you're going to use it.

You know, I think one of the issues is that it's a tool that changes as you use it.

Right.

And so like, if the algorithm is feeding you educational stuff, great, like you're going to get more educated.

And I agree with you that even if someone is taking in educational material, like we should probably have them do something else as well.

Yeah.

But sometimes people get pushed into stuff that like I think doesn't service in the long run.

So it's like definitely a balanced strike.

But I agree with you that zero screen time is not the answer.

It's unreasonable.

Because the other thing is like, all right, so your kids spend zero minutes a day on a screen.

Well, when they get into the real world, they're gonna have to use screens eventually.

So, like, how do we teach them to use these things in a way that helps them rather than hurts them?

Yeah, I had a huge advantage as a kid.

I mean, look, we're maybe a little bit past that, but I got a computer kind of early because my mom was a teacher.

So, she got like a school discount and I was really interested in it.

And then, my friend, whose dad was a doctor, got like a nice computer a few years later.

And I bugged my parents until they were like, we're going to end up killing ourselves if we don't give into this freaking kid.

So, they got me a really nice one.

I discovered the internet.

This is like early 90s.

Massive advantage later on.

Massive.

The same thing can be said as a disadvantage if your kid hasn't seen or used an iPad or an iPhone or messed with that stuff until he's a teenager.

Yes, it's intuitive now, but my kid was like, if you hold the button long enough, everything starts dancing.

And I'm like, oh, then you can move the icons around.

And he's like, oh.

So he figured out how to rearrange the icons on the iPad on his own.

Yes, it's intuitive.

Yes, it's supposed to be.

My dad can't do that.

He's 80 years old.

He can't do that.

He asks me every week how to do that and I have to repeat it.

And so having kids get that intuitive understanding of how technology works, there's, there's a massive advantage there somewhere.

But yeah, I don't want to use that as a replacement for parenting, I suppose.

Totally.

It's a hard balance to strike, I'm sure.

What about sitting?

I heard a few years ago, it was like sitting is the new smoking.

And I will say that once I stopped sitting as much, my knee problems went away, my hip problems went away.

I got a trainer that also helped, but that's also why I don't sit as much because he told me not to, right?

And he's like, yeah, all these imbalances you you have in your body are from like sitting, like your right hip does it.

When I was a kid, we had those desks, right?

The school desks.

And instead of having my feet in front of me, which is uncomfortable, I put my legs crossed behind me.

And now my right hip literally points outwards 45 degrees.

And I can't help but think maybe some of that's genetic, but maybe some of it is having spent six hours a day for 12 years or however long that was with my hip pointed in the wrong direction, crossed under my desk.

Yeah, most people lean into their right side.

Yeah, yeah.

So people will generally be have a quote-unquote looser right hip and a tighter left hip.

Oh, I think I had the opposite.

Okay.

It shows up everywhere.

And it took my trainer like two years to get me to be able to squat because I couldn't even do it on one side.

So with sitting, here's what I'll say is that

people in the past sat just as much as we do.

There's really interesting research.

I think it's by a guy named David Reichlin, who is now at USC.

He basically measured, you know, we would think that like hunter-gatherers, they're just moving around all freaking day.

Yeah.

And they do move a lot.

They walk like, you know, about 20,000 steps a day, but they sit just as much as we do.

They have just as much time sitting.

Now, the difference is

that, right, is how they sit.

So when they sit, they're not in these comfortable chairs like we have, which comfortable chairs, they're comfortable because they're offloading the work your muscles have to do.

So when they sit, they're often on the ground where you're having to shift around a lot because it gets kind of uncomfortable.

They're squatting and there's this low level of muscular activity happening the entire time.

Well, I think the takeaway for the average person is don't sit quite as much.

One, stand when you can.

Also figure out ways to sit that like aren't quite as easy.

Give you an example.

There was a guy who read my book and he used to read like in bed with his back propped up against the thing.

And he's like, what if I just like read for a while with my trunk upright?

So I have to like physically do the work to keep it upright.

And he would read for 30 minutes a night doing that.

And his back problems went away because it trained his back to be strong enough to keep upright.

So I think it's like adding times where if you are sitting, can you make it like, so you aren't just like falling into this couch where every muscle goes slack?

Like, can you sit on the ground for like 20 minutes as you watch the office?

Can you like squat a little more?

Just like adding more of those different stimulus into how you're moving and living.

When I was a kid.

in middle school and high school, I used to sit straight back like this and everyone made fun of me and I started to slouch so that I would fit in more.

And now I can't freaking sit up straight.

I used to spend the whole day just upright like this.

And I was taller as a result.

And people were like, oh, you look.

And now I'm just like this frumpy old man.

It really bothers me.

It's amazing how I changed a really healthy habit that people would spend a lifetime building so that people would stop making fun of me for sitting upright, for God's sake.

Also, I notice a lot of tall women, they slouch because they don't want to be taller than guys.

And then they end up like.

permanently slouched.

It's such a shame.

My wife was like you as a kid.

She's always like, I'll go in.

She's at her desk and she's just like perfectly upright.

I'm like, crazy person, but keep doing it.

Yeah.

You've got an interesting perspective on bacteria on the body.

And I actually really like this because I was a dirt ass throughout childhood and barely ever showered.

And even now I'm like, I don't use, this is gross, whatever probably some people think it is.

When I wash in the shower, I just rinse off.

Of course, I use shampoo because, you know, hair is oily.

I don't soap up my body or anything.

I mean, if my pits are like gross, I'll use a little bit of body wash in there, but I don't, I don't do that whole cover your whole body with soap thing.

And I don't smell at all.

I mean, my wife might disagree here and there, but generally I don't smell.

And I feel like me being kind of a gross kid, you know, picking up that goose poop off the ground when I was little might have actually done me some good, if your theory is correct here.

Yeah, there's a researcher's name is Stephanie Preston, I believe.

And she was actually at UNLV.

She had like two spots.

So I live in Vegas, so I'd go meet up with her or whatever.

She did some research where they compared the poop, for lack of a better word, of people living in cities versus hunter-gatherer tribes.

And basically she found that the hunter-gatherers had much healthier gut bacteria because they had this exposure to, and these are people who they're not washing their hands and sanitizing their hands every 15 seconds like we do.

They're not showering with all the body wash.

There's like generally a little dirtier lifestyle.

But because of that healthy bacteria, a lot of other reasons, they don't get a lot of the stomach problems that people in the West do.

So they don't get like IBS, colitis.

They don't get certain stomach cancers.

And so I think the theory suggests that like we've sanitized our world so much that, yes, we have wiped out the bad stuff.

But in wiping out the bad stuff, we've also wiped out a lot of stuff that can be good for us.

And so I think the takeaway for the average person is not like, hey, go handle raw chicken and then don't wash your hands.

Like no.

It is, however, like, go outside and get dirty sometimes.

It's totally fine.

Like when I'm on my hike and we don't shower for a week, we're in the dirt.

Like we're fine.

That's probably actually good for us.

Yeah.

When I was in Bhutan, I remember couldn't sanitize.

We were going to eat.

And I, I don't know, like they were sort of like, okay, you can like wash your hands off.

And I had all kinds of, I don't even know what it was, like sunscreen or something all over my hands.

And I remember wiping them off in the dirt.

And then I found campfire ash and I just did one of these.

My hands were absolutely disgusting.

But I was like, they somehow still feel cleaner than they were when they had all the like chemical sunscreen on them.

And I just ate with that.

And I remember some of the monks, we were at this monastery that was on the top of the hill.

They were like, oh, yeah, you know, sometimes we'll do that too with dirt or whatever, just to wipe off the other dirt.

Or like if you go to the bathroom, it's like, well, if there's no water, you just kind of like rub dirt on it.

And

hope for the best.

I thought that was quite interesting.

And that tea that, have you been to Bhutan?

You have, right?

Yeah, yeah.

That tea they have with the goat butter in it.

Yes.

Frah, it's gross.

But you know what?

It's the tastiest thing after like a nine-hour uphill hike.

Yeah, totally.

And all the like chili they put in everything.

Oh, yeah, that I can kind of get behind because otherwise the food gets a little.

Yeah, that's a fascinating place.

Yeah.

For sure.

It's weird because it's like one of the happiest places.

And you're giving hats to kids that live in a cold-ass mountain that don't have hats or gloves.

And you're like, this is the happiest place.

But it's a lot of it is.

They spend a ton of time in nature.

They don't have a lot of outside stress.

I mean, they did during the pandemic because they had a...

they didn't have much of a safety net, but it was, it was quite incredible.

Yeah, I talked to a guy.

I went and I talked to the guy guy who is the, he's basically the, so we have like the secretary of state, the secretary of defense.

Right.

This guy is the secretary of happiness for Bhutan.

So all he does is he studies happiness and like figures out government plans to improve happiness and maintain it.

And he pointed out time and nature.

He pointed out that there's more like a deep sense of community.

He pointed out that people generally don't have debt in Bhutan.

Like most people own their land.

They struggle a lot, but it's not like insurmountable struggle.

Right.

Exactly.

Oh, and then in the book, I talk about how death is sort of woven into the culture.

Right.

So when you were in Bhutan, you probably saw those little clay pyramids everywhere.

I actually, maybe I did.

They're like in like windowsills.

You'd go around curves.

I noticed the dicks everywhere.

You noticed.

A lot of dicks with wings on them.

Yes.

Winged dicks.

Yep.

Non-stop.

But the death thing, and like people are told, you know, think about death.

Like, take it into your mind.

And, you know, his, one of his theories is that that factors into the sort of sense of presence it gives and it gives people a focus in life.

It's the memento mori thing Ryan Holiday talks about.

Yeah.

And that's actually like this idea that's like been embedded in Buddhism for a long time.

And it sort of like just aligns people's priorities.

And there's like some research from the States that basically found like people who thought about their death, yes, they said was uncomfortable in the short term.

Sorry, the most uncomfortable thing you can think about.

But then they tend to make decisions afterwards.

that improve their life in the long run, right?

You kind of go, all right, I know this ride is going to end.

How do I want to ride it?

You know, whereas like, if you don't do that, you just kind of run the ride.

You're like, yeah, you just kind of go with the wind rather than sort of making your own decisions that you think are going to help you.

Yeah, I like that.

It probably helps you plan a little bit longer term as well, counterintuitively, right?

Because

you're thinking about short term, it's uncomfortable, but long term, you're like, actually, I want to be healthy and maybe live a little bit longer, potentially.

Yeah, exactly.

And like, do, what do I want to do with my time?

Right.

That's the big thing.

Here's something I'm skeptical about, but I like and trust you.

So I'm going to give you a chance to tell me why this is not total bullshit.

Shinrin Yoku, being in nature and its effect on the body and disease.

So I'm skeptical naturally.

It seems like an extraordinary set of claims.

Nature strolls and things like that.

I mean, are there actual studies that show that being in...

You mentioned fractals and stuff earlier, smells, sunlight.

Do we know why this is working?

Here's what I'll say.

I was with you.

I thought that this was just some hippie bullshit.

It does sound like hippie bullshit.

Hippie bullshit.

Yeah.

But there's actually exceedingly strong research around this going back from the 80s.

So it started, a a lot of the research started in Japan and they found that like spending time in nature, it lowers people's blood pressure, it lowers their stress levels.

Like a lot of good things happen, like it lowers people's diabetics, their blood sugar will go down.

Also, a lot of good mental health things happen where people just come back calmer, more collected.

And in the book, I talk about this concept, which I call like the 25-3 rule.

There's a study that found that 20 minutes in a city park, three times a week, like it can just be like a park, it could be a tree-lined street.

That seems to reduce people's stress levels significantly.

And then the five is five hours a month in a little bit wilder nature, like a state park.

That's been shown to increase happiness and decrease depression.

That was like this big study that was conducted in Finland.

And then the three days is three days a year off the grid, like in the backcountry.

Some really interesting things happen there where people just like calm down significantly.

life priorities start to like get more aligned and people come back just like it's almost like going to a meditation retreat right it just like really sort of resets changes your frame of mind creativity goes up and the effects tend to last afterwards so now there's like some research um with soldiers who have had ptsd and taking them out into like these nature excursions and they tend to come back and be like i feel a lot better with my life my symptoms are down it tends to last a little while do you have to be alone or can you be with a group of people no you can be with groups oh that's good see that that doesn't sound so terrible yeah like the the research on the three-day stuff, it's all conducted in groups.

A lot of it comes out of the University of Utah.

So they tend to be like, one of them was a college class.

They took them down to actually the area that I was hiking in, middle of nowhere in southern Utah.

Southern Utah generally is like the most remote place in the 48 states if you just look at like proximity to populations.

Oh, I see.

I was going to say, what about Alaska?

But I've, yeah, 48 states.

Then they'll like measure their, they do like these complicated brain scan things.

And basically, you find that after three days, like kids have really calmed down, their thinking changes, like their brain waves change to these more relaxed alpha waves and good things happen.

I always wonder if ADHD is just like an evolutionary, like you're just not suited to the environment that you're in as opposed to a disorder.

I had a lot of trouble paying attention in school.

It was bad.

I could sit here, teacher could be talking to me and then go, any questions?

And I would go, holy shit, is it what class am I?

I'm just math.

Oh, God, I don't even know what I'm doing.

That happened constantly.

The only reason I got good grades is I would look at the test and go, I think I can figure this out.

And I'd get like an A minus or a B plus.

That was my whole, all the way through school.

And then college was like, forget the lecture, just read the book, but I'd read a page and go, what did I just read?

And I would read it again.

And it would, I'd read the whole page three times.

And so it's like 10 minutes per page instead of a minute per page.

I mean, this is a serious kind of thing.

But now when I run my own business and I'm on my own schedule and I can design systems my own way, I don't ever go, oh, gosh, I don't can't pay attention.

I'm totally fine.

And again, I'm not trying to be like hippie fake doctor, but these kids who can't sit and pay attention and do stuff, maybe they just need to be like outside more doing more active things, like the equivalent of learning in school, but you're also in the shower, right?

You have the shower mode, but then you're learning things because that seems like that would have worked for me.

Yeah.

Something like that.

Yeah, I think there's plenty of things that we classify as disorders that are only disorders in the cultural context that we're in.

And so a lot of what I think about is how can you take something that is quote unquote a disorder and apply it to the right thing?

Because then it can be a superpower.

I'll give you an example from my life.

So stop drinking, addictive personality, right?

Applied to alcohol, an addictive personality will kill you early.

Right.

Applied to writing, just like addiction is really just persistence despite negative consequences.

Okay.

Right.

That's really what addiction is.

Sure.

If you can apply that to something else that's more productive, in my case, it's writing.

It's like writing is freaking hard, right?

You'll sit for two hours and it sucks, but you keep doing it and doing it.

And eventually you end up with a book, right?

So if I just had to apply that to the right place, and then it became a superpower.

Even the guy I hiked with, he had a

thing called an encoding decoding problem.

It's similar to what's the disorder, dyslexia, but it's different, but it's, you can think about it as sort of dyslexia.

So he was like.

almost last in his class in high school, got into like one college that was like the lowest on the ranking.

What it taught him though is that like in school, he would get these, everything was so hard for him.

But he learned like, okay, if I can listen, I can pick up a lot of information.

So he got really good at listening.

He also got really good at reading people.

He also got really good at bullshitting with people.

So after class, he would come up and talk to his teachers and he would make them like love him, right?

Got really good at just like winning people over quickly.

And then come like grading time when he had the F, they'd be like, ah, but we really love him.

He knows this stuff.

He just had a bad day.

He just had a bad day.

Right.

Give him the C-min or whatever it is.

Brilliant.

So when he goes out into the world of like Iraq and Afghanistan as a diplomat, well, guess what?

This dude had the superpower of being able to listen and retain information in these conversations with generals, with warlords, with like, you know, the president of Afghanistan.

He had a really good skill at reading people and reading the subtext of how people were behaving.

He was also really good at getting people to like him.

And then all of a sudden, sudden, he becomes like one of the main guys in the war efforts simply because this quote-unquote disorder just got applied to the right environment.

And then it becomes a superpower.

So, like, for the average person, it's how can you take this thing that you think is a disorder and just redirect it into a place where you can just use it to kick ass.

Yeah.

Well, him and I have something in common.

We're probably both terrible at trigonometry or whatever we were supposed to be learning in high school.

But yeah,

I'd take the other skills any day.

Man, we're out of time, but I have to say this interview was highly uncomfortable.

Mission accomplished.

I am glad we got to do this in person.

Absolutely, man.

I appreciate you coming out.

What's your next torturous adventure that you're going on?

The next torturous adventure is writing a book about the torturous hike I just went on.

So I'm in the trenches of that.

And then we'll see from there.

Every time I do one of these books, I'm like, no more of this like.

big adventures and then the book you know the next book comes out and i go

i wonder what i could do yeah i gotta find something else i gotta find something.

I got to find, what am I going to do?

I'm getting stir crazy.

So we'll see.

Yeah, I'm so curious what it is.

Because once you hiked 850 miles, I don't know.

That sounds pretty miserable.

How are you going to tout that?

I don't know.

Maybe I'll just have to go opposite.

And they're going to be like, you have to, like,

I don't know.

I lived on a yacht for a year.

Here's my new book.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Exactly.

Not quite the same level of compelling, but we'll see what happens.

Thank you.

Yeah, man.

Thanks a lot.

What if your life depended on slipping past KGB surveillance using nothing but a fake mustache and a a latex mask?

Former CIA chief of disguise Jonathan Mendez takes us deep into the shadowy world of Cold War espionage, where outsmarting your enemy meant mastering the art of becoming someone else entirely.

I worked for 27 years for the CIA.

The office that I worked in was like Q.

We had all kinds of techs.

One half of the office was technical, it was chemists and physicists and engineers, electrical and mechanical, people with such esoteric specialties.

It was so important.

It was was the bottom line to a lot of the things we did.

The other half of the office was my half, which was people who would deploy those tools, who would take them to the field, who would hand them to James.

Sort of an inside joke.

Holy case officers.

We called them all James.

And part of us didn't trust James with our gear, as we might have spent $5 million on a program to develop that.

camera system that fit into a Mont Blanc pen.

We usually figured out how to go with him.

So if he broke it, we could fix it.

If he lost it, we could find it.

If he forgot how to operate it, we could refresh him.

It was a little inside joke.

If he left it on the subway, maybe we could go get it.

So we traveled around with James.

We not only equipped him and we trained him, but we also very often accompanied him.

A lot of our technical expertise would come into play.

People are very aware of the threat that that technology can play.

How can you use it?

What can it do for you?

It's given us opportunities to do things we never dreamed of.

The real work in OTS was solving problems.

To hear more about how spy tech, disguise, and raw nerve shaped modern intelligence as we know it, check out episode 1027 of the Jordan Harbinger Show.

Super interesting guy.

Really glad we got a chance to do this one in person.

His book, we didn't have time to get through everything, but his book has interesting data on how phones ruin our focus, even if we only use them for a moment or so.

While we're out in nature, for example, silence really is worth seeking, even if it's uncomfortable at first.

It's amazing how productive I think I am at a cafe, for example, while multitasking, and that I do the exact same thing at home in my office in a quarter of the time.

There's also a section in the book that we didn't get to about hunger, actual real hunger versus reward hunger, or maybe like boredom hunger.

Food is dopamine, right?

And figuring out how to control that was absolutely huge for me.

It allowed me to lose at least 50 pounds worth of fat.

Now instead of eating, I go for walks instead.

I play with kids.

I still eat a lot of really good food.

I just don't eat instead of doing everything else in my life that's slightly less comfortable than eating.

It used to be my go-to distractor.

Not healthy.

Not a good way to live.

Of course, I also weigh all my food now.

I go over how that particular habit changed my entire life and body in episode 1166 with Andy Morgan.

So if you haven't heard that yet and maybe you want to get in shape or lose a little bit of that flubbada, definitely check out 1166 with Andy Morgan.

By the way, folks, I hate to rub it in.

It takes almost 25 years off of your life.

Eat right, get out there and move, people.

All things Michael Easter will be in the show notes on the website.

Advertisers, deals, discount codes, ways to support the show, all at jordanharbinger.com slash deals.

Please consider supporting those who support the show.

Also, our newsletter, We BitWiser.

You love reading this and a lot of great feedback.

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If you haven't signed up yet, I invite you to come check it out.

It really is a great companion to the show.

JordanHarbinger.com/slash news is where you can find it.

Don't forget about Six Minute Networking as well over at sixminutenetworking.com.

I'm at Jordan Harbinger on Twitter and Instagram.

You can also connect with me on LinkedIn.

This show, it's created in association with Podcast One.

My team is Jen Harbinger, Jace Sanderson, Robert Fogarty, Tata Sedlowskis, Ian Baird, Gabriel Mazrahi.

Remember, we rise by lifting others.

The fee for the show is you share it with friends when you find something useful or interesting.

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And we'll see you next time.