How to Grow From Doing Hard Things | Michael Easter
Guests: Michael Easter
Full transcript · Read the full conversation in order, with its original context.
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Welcome to the Huberman Lab podcast, where we discuss science and science-based tools for everyday life.
I'm Andrew Huberman, and I'm a professor of neurobiology and ophthalmology at Stanford School of Medicine.
My guest today is Michael Easter.
Michael Easter is a professor at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, and a world-renowned writer.
His recent work has focused on how modern conveniences undermine our mental and our physical health,
And as importantly, the daily, weekly, monthly, and yearly steps we can all take to not just offset the damages of those conveniences, but to continue to grow and improve our ability to focus, to do meaningful and creative work, and to derive deeper connection with others.
One of the reasons Michael Easter is on this podcast is that his book, The Comfort Crisis, changed my daily life.
The comfort crisis made me realize that every activity available to us, easy or challenging, destructive or constructive, can and should be viewed through the lens of whether it spends our dopamine reserves or invests them in a worthwhile way.
This is a key distinction that we don't often hear about, but it's one that can help you access much greater levels of focus and motivation to be able to avoid and get over addictive or compulsive behaviors.
And it also brings about greater meaning and depth of connection to your relationships and leisure time.
During today's discussion, Michael and I explore these ideas and their practical implementation,
including how you can tailor them to your own life.
He explains how our choices in the physical world and in the online world shape us over
time and how to make better choices about both on a daily basis.
He also provides the practical steps of how to get mentally stronger.
You know, we hear about getting mentally stronger a lot, but he explains exactly how to do that,
as well as how to live with a pervasive sense of gratitude.
I'm certain that everyone, young, old, male, female, maybe you're driven or maybe you're a more laid back type of person, will benefit from and be changed by the conversation with Michael Easter.
The information and tools he offers and shares are that good.
Before we begin, I'd like to emphasize that this podcast is separate from my teaching and research roles at Stanford.
It is, however, part of my desire and effort to bring zero cost to consumer information about science and science related tools to the general public.
In keeping with that theme, today's episode does include sponsors.
And now for my discussion with Michael Easter.
Michael Easter, welcome.
Thanks for having me, man.
You've changed my life.
Really?
You have.
Tell me more.
You've changed my behavior on a daily basis.
So a ex-girlfriend of mine who lives in Colorado and I were in a discussion about the best place to live and raise kids.
And she grew up in the mountains of Colorado.
And she had just listened to your book, The Comfort Crisis.
And she was saying, I think this is the reason why people in her hometown are so mentally robust into their 70s, 80s, even 90s.
Her grandparents were really robust.
I think they lived into their 90s or late 80s at least.
And we talked about her childhood a bit around this.
And she said that her mom actually used to take her and put her in a basket and put her into the river and just send her downriver to a friend's house.
And I mean, this is the kind of stuff that nowadays you're like, you know, parents like lose their minds.
Yeah, like Moses.
Like exactly.
And that she, you know, grew up in cold water in the morning and of course skiing and doing all the things they do in Colorado.
But she was absolutely convinced that the sort of bodily expectation of daily activity, meaning just a sort of level of energy and almost stress if she didn't get a ton of outdoor movement every day.
was determined by that early upbringing of just being outdoors almost all the time and doing hard
things and experiencing cold and things of that sort. So I read the book and started doing hard
things on a regular basis, mostly rucking, but it has been a few years since I've had a really big
adventure. And we'll talk about big adventures that include some actual danger. And I make it
a point each week to write down one thing that I'm going to do that is truly uncomfortable.
So thank you for changing my life for the better. It's transformed my mental health and I was
already feeling really good. Amazing. I love that. It's great.
So let's talk about modern life versus ancient nervous systems. I think this is a big theme
in your writing and your life. What do you think the human brain and nervous system
were quote unquote designed to do? I'm not implying the origins of the design. That's
a different podcast. But what do you think the human species is really organized to do?
And how do you think that fits into modern life or doesn't fit into modern life?
Well, I think that we evolved in a context where we had to do hard things all the time.
Life was uncomfortable, right?
You spent 100% of your time outdoors.
It was often too hot, too cold.
You were physically active all day.
People walked something like 20,000 steps a day on average.
And by the way, as you were taking those steps, you're usually carrying something heavy, right?
This could be your child.
It could be tools.
It could be an animal that you took down.
You had to carry the meat back to camp.
You also had long periods of downtime that were unstimulated where you would talk to other people face-to-face.
I mean, life was just, it was effortful.
It was challenging.
And you had to do those challenges and go through those discomforts in order to survive.
And I think that the sort of promise and peril of modern life is that we no longer have to do these hard, challenging things to survive.
If you want food, you can go to the gas station on the corner and get it.
There's just ample food.
I think we throw out about a third of the food that we produce.
Physically, we obviously have to do a lot less physical activity to survive.
If you want to go somewhere, you just hop in your car, you walk across the parking lot.
You could actually just exist in your house and not really move, right?
You could like do Uber Eats for all your food.
You could work behind the screen.
So we've really removed that physical discomfort out of our life.
And I also think, you know, even something like boredom.
Like boredom is an uncomfortable thing.
And now when we feel boredom, we have this like very easy effortless escape from it in the form of a phone.
Temperature swings.
We can live at 72 degrees.
I mean, this list goes on and on and on.
I could answer this question for like hours, but I think that listeners get the point that we evolved in these environments of discomfort.
And now we have shifted over to environments that are much more comfortable.
Now, let me be clear, this is a good shift in the grand scheme of time and space.
But it does come with problems because you find that because we're involved in environments of discomfort,
I think humans are sort of wired to do the next easiest, most comfortable thing because that would have served us in the past.
In the past, you didn't want to move too much just for the sake of it because you wanted to conserve calories.
If you had the opportunity to eat a little more food, you would probably do that because that would give you a survival advantage.
right? You'd put on some fat. You didn't want to spend too much time if it was too cold or something.
And so we're wired to do the easy thing, but now we end up in this sort of easier world,
and those sort of instincts we have, I think, backfire. So call this an evolutionary mismatch,
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As a neurobiologist and in some sense, a comparative neurobiologist, I like to step
back and say, you know, what is a species, you know, trying to optimize for?
It sounds like a lot of what we were trying to optimize for throughout human history is
to limit discomfort and, of course, ensure that species persist. So reproduction is key. And then
making sure that our offspring, which need a lot of care over a long period of time compared to
other species, are taken care of. Like when you step back, it's just like pure evolutionary lens.
To me, it seems pretty much that simple. And all the rest is noise, as they say.
So if our goal in human evolution is to rid ourselves of discomfort and make things easier
and safer and propagate the species, then why at some point is more comfort bad for us?
There are side effects that happen, right?
And when you look at most of the diseases that kill us today, they are a result of usually
overconsumption of food, right?
We eat too much, far more than we often need.
We don't move enough.
There's a lot tied to sort of metabolic health.
And so I think that I put this in the – I like to say these are good problems to have in the grand scheme of time and space, right?
I would prefer to have my problem be that, oh, I have to go exercise or something to take care of my physical activity than the fact that like, oh, I have to go hunt and gather every single day like to get my food.
But I do think that they are problems that we need to solve.
The fact that, you know, a lot of our modern problems are driven by the fact that our environments have become so comfortable.
Does that answer your question?
Yeah, that answers the question.
I heard someone say recently that a lot of what exists now in health and wellness is just trying to bring the outdoors indoors.
So I've tried to persuade, as everyone knows, people to get outside in the morning and get sunlight in their eyes for all sorts of reasons.
But, you know, the whole business with red light, long wavelength light, infrared light, you can use one of those panels.
It can be quite useful.
There's also a lot of long wavelength light coming from the sun.
Fresh air, we could debate grounding, but many people believe it's helpful.
Green spaces.
I mean, I kind of agree with this idea that, you know, so much of what we're encouraging people to do is just mimic doing what we used to do all the time.
It's what life used to be.
Right. Like I said, we spent 100 percent of our time in the outdoors. We evolved in the outdoors.
That is kind of like our natural environment. And I think to continue with this example, when you put us in four walls where we don't get that outdoor exposure, some interesting psychological things start to happen that probably aren't that good for us.
And this you can apply this idea to everything, like I said, like even physical activity.
It's like exercise is a great example to me.
No one exercised in the past, right?
Exercise is something that we made up basically after the Industrial Revolution because what
happened is we get these jobs where now we're much more sedentary and we start to realize,
oh, these people who have the jobs where they sit all day, they're getting these strange
new health problems that we've never seen.
And yet the people who are kind of moving around all day still in their jobs, they don't
seem to get those problems.
So maybe activity is the difference maker.
Hey, you guys that are sitting all day, I want you to just go move around for the sake of it.
No, there's no actual point to it.
Just like move around for the sake of it.
That'll improve your health.
And this becomes this idea of exercise, movement for the sake of it, which is this kind of strange idea in the grand scheme of time and space.
but it does make sense in the context of a world where the average American is walking, you know,
4,000 to 6,000 steps a day. That's how we get our activities. We have to manufacture it
effectively. And I will say though, to continue with your example about how we sort of mimic what
we used to do in the past, I do think that when we try to solve for these problems, sometimes
the way we do it is sort of interesting. We go, okay, if we need to move more, well, what if we
§02Transcript — part 2
got a belt and we put a motor on it and a person could just run on this belt in this
air-conditioned building.
Oh, and then we'll put a television there.
And that way you can just watch CNN blare insane information into your face the entire
time and be totally distracted.
Yeah, that sounds like a good idea.
But when we do that, what are we missing?
So when a person runs outdoors, on the other hand, let's say it's on a trail.
Well, now you have all these other forms of discomfort and stimulation that are coming your way.
So one, you've got the physical activity, obviously.
But two is that the trail isn't this perfectly predictable thing, right?
If I'm on the treadmill, I can go, okay, 1% incline.
I'm going to run six miles an hour.
And I just do that.
I don't have to think about it.
Well, the trail, it's going to go up and down.
You're going to have rocks and ruts you have to navigate under.
That's a mental challenge.
You're also going to have to think about the weather, right?
I have to deal with the temperature changes.
Oh, that looks like a storm might be coming in.
There's also so much more that you take in from the environment.
You're running through trees.
You run into open spaces.
And that has, I think, a real emotional, I would say even spiritual benefit from that nature.
You're going to see totally random things, right?
Like my favorite thing is when I go run on trails in Las Vegas.
Like you see that random coyote or the bighorn sheep and it's just like, this is it.
Mountain lion?
Mountain lion.
Have you seen mountain lions?
I've seen them other places, but not in Vegas, unfortunately.
Most people would say, fortunately, I'm on the other side.
Like mountain lion is not going to hurt you.
But if you get to see one, that's an opportunity.
I don't know that video of that kid in Colorado, you know, where it's chasing him or stalking him.
We could talk about that.
I totally agree.
I think that optic flow of the sort that you get out when you're hiking or walking or cycling or more dangerous activity like motorcycling out of doors,
we know that it has a powerful effect in suppressing some of the areas of the brain
involved in fear. I don't know if you're familiar with this literature, but Francine Shapiro, who
was actually ran her clinic behind Stanford for a while, who came up with EMDR, this eye movement
desensitization reprocessing for trauma, came up with that on a walk and developed the lateral eye
movements that are the cornerstone of EMDR as a way to bring the walk into her clinic.
Interesting.
Because, and then for years I would hear about this and I thought it was complete garbage.
I was like this, there's, as a neuroscientist, I was like, no.
And people would say, oh, you know, the eye movements mimic rapid eye movements in sleep.
That's why it works.
And no, they don't look anything like the rapid eye movements in sleep, by the way.
They say, oh, you know, it's creating cross-hemisphere activation of the two sides of the brain.
No.
I mean, you get that if you have binocular vision, you know, vision scientists.
I was like, no, that's ridiculous.
But then somewhere around 2016 to 2020, there were four papers and then an additional paper in animal studies.
So there's a mix of animal and human data showing that when animals or humans engage in this lateralized repetitive eye movement back and forth, that it suppresses, among other areas, the amygdala.
So amygdala activation troughs. And so there's something about forward ambulation, nerd speak for walking and running, right, that suppresses the fear areas of the brain. And I'm convinced that this is a central reason why movement out of doors is so fundamentally different on our psyche and our level of calm as compared to running on a treadmill or, God forbid, just sitting at a desk all day.
Yeah, and that makes sense.
And I would wonder evolutionarily if that would be for hunting.
So something like persistence hunting, right?
That's a dangerous act.
Yes, you have to hunt every single day.
That's how you're going to survive to get that food.
At the same time, it's still very perilous, right?
You're not walking down to Walmart and getting stuff.
And so if you had that fear suppression in the context of an act that is somewhat dangerous,
that would probably give you an advantage to actually end up taking down that animal.
Huge.
there's a video of some hunters it appears to be in africa forgive me for not knowing exactly where
it was um prepared to essentially walk towards a group of lions that have are on a kill and the
lions look up from the kill and there are these hunters walking like with spears vertical right
and the lions are like wait what's going on here you know typically this is the other the scenario
else the other way around. Are you familiar with this video? And the hunters, they're translating
into the captions and assuming it's accurate. They're saying, you know, it's key that we just
keep moving forward. And that confuses the lions. And they think that, you know, that because we're
continuing to look at them and move forward, they'll move off the kill. But if we avert our
gaze, then they won't and we can get attacked and it's happened before. And they literally walk
these lions off the kill. And the lions are, you can see that they're perplexed, but like,
they're like, these guys aren't afraid at all. And they just start backing away. And a couple of
them are negotiating in their minds. You can see, and they basically walk these lions off the kill
and take the kill. And there's so much going on there that, but it relates to what we're talking
about, but forward ambulation in the context of hunting, I agree with you. I think it could have
huge implications. Also a great metaphor for life right there, right? It's like,
Just keep moving forward.
If you just kind of focus on the kill, as it were, and just keep moving forward, don't hesitate.
Like, that can get you pretty far.
So you're a writer.
Yeah.
But you get into the outdoors a lot.
I do.
And you do hard, scary things on purpose.
Yeah.
So I'm curious about the younger Michael Easter.
When you were a kid, were you the kid that would, like, hold on to the firecracker to the very last second?
Were you the kid that was like, let's jump that roof into the pool?
I'm not giving suggestions here, but I knew kids like that.
They usually were named Johnny for whatever reason.
There's a correlation there.
Were you that kid or were you the writer kid?
So I was not the kid that would hold the firecracker to the last second, jump from the second story into the pool.
And I'm still not that person.
I'm a person where if I had a good reason, what sort of bigger thing is holding that firecracker to the last end going to give me than I'm perfectly willing to accept that risk.
So the things that I do that might be considered dangerous or challenging, I always assume there's going to be a greater reward at the end.
I'm not just doing something hard for the sake of doing something hard.
Think about it like you're skateboarding, okay?
As you were learning how to skateboard, I'm sure you fell a lot.
Yeah, all the time.
You banged yourself up, got all these scuffs on your arm.
But the point wasn't to fall.
No.
Falling, however, was something that came as you got better as a skateboarder, right?
So the point is not to fall.
The point is to go, okay, what is the overall goal?
To be better as a skateboarder.
And in the process, I'm probably going to have to do some things that maybe bang me
up a little bit that have some element of danger, but to focus on that overall goal. So I'd say I've
always been like that. And I personally find as a journalist, I mean, I read a lot of studies.
I speak to experts. I call people like you who have a PhD, pick their brain. But I also find that
sometime I get the best information and can better process it and put it into a narrative that
someone can identify with and maybe learn from it more. If I actually go to the source,
And I have a story around that.
And sometimes for me, going to the source leads me into places that are a little bit, I would say, off the beaten path maybe.
Yeah, sometimes I go to labs, you know, and there's no danger there.
Plenty of coffee, nice and air-conditioned.
Nothing's going to go wrong.
But, you know, my work has taken me to some war zones, to the middle of the jungle in the Amazon.
I went up to the Arctic for 30 days.
I just completed this long hike in the middle of nowhere, Utah.
And I do find that on those trips, that's where you start to peel back the deeper layers of whatever idea I'm trying to communicate.
So I think that there's a big difference between intellectual understanding and experiential understanding.
And it's that experiential understanding, like, I want to get to the heart of that.
I want to get to the heart of that.
because if I can communicate that,
I have a higher probability of getting a person
who reads my work to perhaps take an action
that could improve their life.
And it doesn't have to be big.
I'm not suggesting people have to go to the jungle
or go up to the Arctic,
but I am saying start where you're at
and do something that's maybe a little bit
out of your comfort zone,
maybe a little bit of a challenge
and see how it goes.
Oh, you didn't die?
Great.
Maybe try it the next day and the next day.
And so by sort of continuously pushing that edge, I think that people find that you don't fall off the edge.
The edge tends to expand.
And as the edge expands, you end up a better person.
Yeah, I definitely want to talk about your 2% rule and some of the other actionable items that you've delineated in your books and elsewhere in your substack.
I want to sort of – it's not a challenge.
It's a question about, okay, if humans have introduced so many comforts to their lives that small things feel uncomfortable.
Like for me, I like flying places, but I don't like airports.
Who does?
I travel with a lot of supplements.
I'm always secondary screened.
I don't check luggage.
And it's funny because it's such a small thing, right, to wait for your bag to be secondary screened.
But, you know, these things can become annoyances.
You know, we're human.
And I love to laugh at myself when I get annoyed about these little things.
You go, oh, like this thing bothered me or something.
So if we lower our threshold for what we consider challenging, and I'm making myself the butt of the joke here, but it's pretty serious if you look out and think, okay, some people, they're hearing us talk about doing hard things.
But for many people, even though there's so many comforts, life feels hard.
It's like work is hard.
you know, things are expensive. It's hard to get enough sleep. Everyone's always blaring at us at
all the things we're supposed to be doing. The world seems unstable. So I think many people
already feel like they're inundated with challenge, even though we're talking about the
creature comforts that we all enjoy. So if somebody wants to start exploring,
leaning into discomfort in the way that grows them and actually makes those other discomforts
that we're talking about kind of dissolve away,
how should they start to go about that?
So a couple of things come to mind
and I'm trying to think how to get into it.
And what I think that I will use is an example of myself
and then I'll kind of unpack that
and I'll unpack it at a level
where we talk about something more,
it's kind of a big challenge
and then also something like people can use every day.
So I'll give you the example of,
for the comfort crisis,
I go and I spend 30 days in the Arctic,
a little more than 30 days. Now, when I fly up there, I fly from Las Vegas to Anchorage, Anchorage
to Kotzebue, which is this little town just 20 miles above the Arctic Circle. And then from
Kotzebue, you get in a plane that is about the size of a pack of gum. And you take that plane
out, you know, more than 100 miles into the Arctic and it drops you off. Now, when I get on that plane
from Vegas, it's like a 747. And I'm like you. I hate flying, right? Because seats are too small
and cramped. Planes too hot. The movies in the seat back, they suck, right? The coffee, not very
good. There's usually a baby crying. If I need to go to the bathroom, bathroom's totally cramped.
Like flying is just terrible. I'm like, flying is the worst. And then I go spend this 30 days in the
middle of the Arctic, right? So if I want to drink anything, I got to hike down to a stream and I got
to carry the heavy water bags back up to camp. I am freezing cold the entire freaking time.
If I want to go to the bathroom, I have to hike out on the tundra, and I have to bring the rifle because there's grizzly bears.
I'm starving the entire time.
If I want to get warm, it requires picking up firewood, of which there's not many, hauling it back.
Like everything is hard.
Everything is uncomfortable.
That whole experience for the whole month.
§03Transcript — part 3
So then when I get onto the plane that goes from the Arctic back to Las Vegas, it's like, what do you think my experience of that?
flight was like. Pure luxury. Holy shit. Greatest thing that ever happened to me.
And it's like that chair. I hadn't sat in a real chair for more than a month.
It's like, this is so comfortable. Coffee was hot. I'm like, this is the best thing I've ever drank.
I had like 12 bags of pretzels, right? The crying baby. I'm like, oh yeah, just hand me that baby.
I got it. Movies in the seat back. Like it was so boring up there that we were reading the labels
on our energy bars. And so when you show me Fast and the Furious, like 79, it's like,
this is the greatest thing I've ever seen. And then when I go to the bathroom, right,
not only do I not have to take the rifle, right, that would have been problematic on the plane.
But I hit this button in this bathroom, this metal thing, little red button, and hot running water
comes out of a faucet and hits my hands.
I hadn't had hot running water on my hands for more than a month.
And it was just like, oh my God.
Now let me remind you too that this is happening in a tube of steel
that's hurtling through the air at like 600 miles an hour,
35,000 feet above sea level.
And it was one of those moments where I'm like, holy shit,
it is so amazing to be alive today.
Like we have the most amazing access to just luxuries and comforts ever.
And yet we often forget that.
Right?
So what did it take for me to realize that that flight is a freaking miracle instead of this huge personal injustice to Michael Easter?
I had to go out and I had to sort of reset that goalpost and go out into a world that was totally different,
that was totally challenging that taught me that the world I came from was actually quite great.
So there's this psychologist. I believe he's now at Brown. When I spoke to him, he was just
finishing up his PhD at Harvard. And he did the study that was published in Science. I can't
remember its title, but he basically came up with this theory that's called prevalence-induced
concept change. So what they did in this study is they took a group of people. There was like
three different phases of the study, but I'm going to talk about two of them because I think they're
most relatable. What they did is they took a group of 800 different people in the first study,
or I can't remember how many people, but they had them look at 800 different faces in a row.
Okay. So they'd look at face after face after face. And these people had to deem whether these
faces were threatening or non-threatening. So you're going non-threatening, non-threatening,
Oh, threatening, threatening face after face.
Now, at the 200th face, what they did is they started showing these people fewer threatening faces.
Okay, so successively fewer.
The second study they did, it was a similar setup, but they used research proposals,
and these people had to deem whether these research proposals were ethical or unethical.
Same deal, about midway through, they start feeding these people fewer and fewer unethical proposals.
Now these two scenarios, they should be pretty black or white, right?
Either you look at a face and it either threatens you or it does not threaten you.
You read a research proposal and it either crosses this like moral line you have in the sand or it doesn't cross it.
What they found though is that people basically see gray.
So as people started encountering fewer truly threatening faces, they started judging faces that were on the borderline as threatening.
So they said threatening just as many times, even though the faces weren't truly threatening, faces that they would have let slide before.
Same with the research proposals.
As they get fewer and fewer unethical ones, they start to get nitpicky, right?
They're like, oh, well, there's that one line in there.
That's unethical.
Throw it in the pile.
So the guy calls this prevalence-induced, his name's David Levari.
He calls it prevalence-induced concept change.
And it basically finds that as people experience fewer and fewer problems, we don't actually become more satisfied.
We simply sort of lower our threshold for what we consider a problem.
So when you apply that to life today to make this practical, it's like as the world has become a lot more comfortable, as we encounter fewer sort of traumas and real problems in our life, we don't necessarily stop and go, this is amazing.
We simply broaden our definition of what a problem is, of what a discomfort is.
And so we end up with the exact same number of problems, of discomforts.
But they've just become progressively more hollow over time.
I like to think about that as the science of first world problems.
I think you can think about it as a moving goalpost.
So it's like you go into one environment and that sort of sets your expectations, right?
And we're sort of designed to search for problems, more or less designed.
designed to search for problems. So you're going to find them in your environment,
no matter how unproblematic your environment is, sort of objectively unproblematic.
So when I talked to Levari, he basically said like, yeah, I think it makes theoretical sense
that if you're going into a place where your problems are more acute and say objectively,
more realistically problems, when you go into this less problematic environment,
you'll sort of be like, wow, this is fantastic. Now, of course, over time, you're going to adapt
back. And I found that under myself. So when I got back from the Arctic, I'm like a Zen monk,
man. I'm just like, nothing's rattling me. That was my wife's comment. Like nothing rattles you
since you're back. For how long? Probably a month. Probably a month. Then my question becomes,
well, I can't go to the Arctic every month. One, I can't. Two, nor do I want to. So what can I do
in my life that sort of constantly pushes that goal goalpost back into a place where I'm less
neurotic, more or less. It's almost like we live on a neurotic treadmill in a way. As problems fade,
we just keep searching for problems and finding them. So I think there's a lot of things that a
person can do like in their daily life and people can get creative around this. For example,
volunteering. Like if you live a decent life, well, why don't you go help people whose lives
are a little harder than yours. And you'll see what it could be like and what it's like out there.
And that'll give you some sort of perspective. And that's something you can do. It takes an hour a
week or something, right? I've talked to people who go to recovery meetings, including myself.
You go into a meeting and you hear these stories from people who are at the most
rock bottom moment of their life. I'm like, that'll reset what you consider a problem pretty
damn fast. You just walk out going, wow, I was complaining that my tax guy was asking for a lot
of papers. And this guy just told me a story that just blew my mind. Like, that's a real problem.
And so I think we need to have moments like that, that sort of press back against us and
put things in a little bit more context. And I do think you need the sort of moment where you
think about that and you tell yourself the story around that. Like, that's a really important part.
And I'm going to, this is kind of going off on a weird path.
I don't know where it'll take us, but we'll find out.
When you think about something like a rite of passage, what people would do in these,
like these are, you know, tribes around the world had these different rites of passages all throughout time.
And this was not like they're all communicating and figuring the same.
No, these things arose spontaneous.
And the point of a rite of passage is that we have a person who's at point A in their life.
and we need them to get them to point B
where they're going to be more capable, more confident, more competent.
We don't just say, hey, you're ready to go to point B.
We would often send them out to do something challenging.
It could be like extended time in nature.
There's all these different things.
And in that process, the person would struggle.
They would face all these different problems.
They would have to figure their shit out.
And then they would come back and they would be at point B.
But there was a point where people would sort of gather around and say, what did you learn about that?
What story you're telling yourself about that?
And so shaping the narrative around a life event becomes critically important, I think, for mental health and how you frame issues.
And so think of the concept of like event centrality.
It's like how central is an event going to be to my life and what story am I going to tell around it?
So people who tend to take something bad that happened in their life and they take that in as the central component of their personality tend to have worse mental health.
Whereas people who take it and say, hey, this thing happened, but what can I learn from it?
How can I grow from it?
What might happen in the future?
Yes, this sucks hard right now.
But where might it take me in the past or in the future?
And those two people are going to have completely different trajectories.
So the narrative you tell yourself becomes really important.
A few years ago, I started keeping a folder where I would look back to different phases of life and just list out sort of the bullet point events of like zero to five and five to ten with no particular end point in mind.
It's an exercise that I find very useful because it offers the opportunity for this kind of like how do I frame this thing?
Oftentimes the things that felt the worst at that time turned out to be some of the best things ever.
And then you can start to create a timeline and you realize that most of the things that felt really bad at the time turned out to be the best thing ever.
And the big wins were almost always the outgrowth of those prior negative experiences.
It's just kind of wild.
but it gets back to this theme that I think is thread throughout so much of what we're talking
about today and your work, which is that it seems like discomfort is a prerequisite for
really feeling truly good about oneself in the world. Like I'm not sure that they can exist
separately from one another, but I think we come into the world as these like bubbling babies and
like nervous systems prepared to learn. And so hopefully the early phase of life is nothing but
joy and peace and comfort. I mean, our parents devote themselves to that, we hope, right?
And then at some point, they ought to pull us aside and say, hey, listen, you know, the next
like 70 years are going to be these, you know, this sawtooth of really tough, really great,
really tough, really great experiences, but they don't tell us that. And I think that most of us
go through life trying to get back to this place where we're like, where everything's taken care
of. But what you're saying is that that's the exact wrong approach. And in fact, it's not,
it's not, we don't want to be infants, but at some level, we, from a comfort perspective,
We sort of infantilize ourselves.
My thought is that the vast majority of things that are good for us today and that help us grow and that help us become better humans, they're going to be hard.
Apply this to exercise.
Exercise sucks.
When you're doing exercise, it is hard.
But you're going to get this long-term benefit.
If you're trying to get your eating in order, I can tell you a salad is less delicious than a Dorito.
and anyone who argues with me,
you've just been eating way too many salads.
You've deluded yourself, right?
Or in my case, I'll push back a little bit here
because I love exercise and I love eating clean.
And what's just happened, I got into it early
and people will be like, this is ridiculous,
but I just don't eat bad food.
I quit eating bad food.
And I stopped thinking about whether or not exercise
is negotiable a long time ago.
I could see that.
I think for probably most people,
exercise is gonna be an uncomfortable event.
It's why – what are the federal exercise guidelines?
150 minutes of moderate to vigorous activity a week, strength train tries a week.
Something like 18% of Americans actually do that.
Only 18%?
18%, yeah.
Could be 20 – fact check me.
No, I believe you.
I believe you.
Yeah, because it is uncomfortable.
We have all these – I think for most people it's uncomfortable.
we have all these sort of internal levers that dissuade extra movement for the sake of it you
know when you run your legs are going to burn your leg your lungs are going to hurt but on the other
side of that discomfort is improved health improved mental well-being all these different things
in short I think that sort of to sort of back up from the evolutionary perspective that I often take
is that the reason we have,
the reason why things are often uncomfortable
is because we wanted to dissuade
extra movement in the past.
You didn't want to feel hungry
because you needed that food,
like on and on and on.
And today, the environments have really just flipped
where oftentimes doing the uncomfortable thing
is the buy-in to a better life, really.
Yeah, and it applies to so many different places.
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§04Transcript — part 4
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There's a kid that I've known since he was really little who has some learning challenges,
but managed to get himself into a really fine university.
And then after a year, took on too many comforts of the social dynamics, let's say, and decided
to leave, leave of absence.
He read your book about halfway through the summer where he was working construction.
And he called me and he said, I'm going back to college.
Hell yeah.
And I said-
If he's listening now, I applaud him.
Yeah.
He also quit a heavy cannabis habit in the same swipe.
And one of his parents, I don't want to give too much information about him because people
are clever these days.
We'll figure it out who he is.
And I'd like to maintain his anonymity.
But one of his parents is a first generation immigrant.
and when his kid was leaving college was just like, oh my god.
He had really toiled in hopes of his son not having to have as challenging a physical labor life as he did.
And so I talked to this kid just the other night and he's like,
moving thousands of pounds of concrete every week is really hard on the body.
And he's in his 20s.
He's saying he goes to bed every night, not sore, like sore from the gym,
like sore down to the bone. And so I want to extend a thank you from him.
Awesome.
Most people will not hopefully have to go through that process to figure out that the path that
they have an opportunity to take is probably much easier than the alternative in many cases.
I want to distinguish between daily self-induced discomforts and these larger
discomforts of like going to the Arctic. I want to get to the Misogi theme and this idea of taking
on things that are truly hard that you might not finish. But if we were to shrink this down to the
morning, you wake up, you can scroll on your phone, or you can hop in the cold plunge, take a cold
shower. These days, there's a lot of discussion around doing the cold shower has numerous benefits,
wakes you up, dopamine, norepinephrine, but also it kind of sucks. Nobody likes cold water. If you do,
send me a note because some, you know, I'll send you a neurologist's phone number.
But we all like the feeling of getting out of it. But what are some things besides cold showers and
exercise, which I do believe everyone should do and get sunlight, et cetera, that we can do on a
daily basis, morning or in the afternoon, if we're feeling just kind of low,
besides cold showers and exercise and sunlight that are hard? Like, is it if I, like, I love
eating strawberries and I hate putting, like I leave the hulls in weird places without even
realizing it. And I'll walk by a hull of a strawberry. And I'm thinking, and I, this morning
I thought, oh my Easter is going to laugh at me. Like, I'm like, I got to pick this thing up. I'm
not just scattering them around my home, by the way. But I'm like, like, what is it? Like we
create these barriers to doing the simplest of things. So what are some difficult things that
we can introduce to our daily routine that have been shown to make us feel better besides exercise,
sunlight and cold water. Yeah. So sort of my big picture answer here is my sub stack is called the
2% newsletter. And I'll tell you why it's called 2%. So there's this study that found that only
2% of people take the stairs when there's an escalator available. 2%. Now, 100% of people
know that if they were to take the stairs, that would be better for them, right? They get a better
long-term return on their health, on their well-being. And yet 98% of people do the easier
thing that could actually hurt them in the long run in the context of this environment where we
don't move enough. So this tells me that we're sort of wired to do the next easiest thing. But
living better in modern life often requires doing these slightly uncomfortable things that are just
so obvious and in front of us. And it's like, you have to get to the second floor. So which route
are you going to take? You're going to take the one that's a little bit uncomfortable now, but
improves your life in the long run? Or are you going to do the easy thing that might actually
hurt you in the long run? So that to me is just a metaphor for like, how do you improve in daily
life, right? In the trenches of daily life, how do you improve? So I apply this, I try and apply
this to as many different areas of my life as I can. It's like, if I can make something just a
little bit more uncomfortable. I'm not talking about extreme. Do the slightly harder thing that
I know will give me a long-term return. I got to take that. So for me, it's like, okay, if I'm in
my office, go through some examples, and I have a phone call. I could sit here and take the phone
call, or I could pop in my headphones, and I could go for a walk, and I could take that call
while walking. I would say for the vast majority of phone calls, unless you're like talking to the
CEO, your big boss, right? Maybe sit behind the computer for that one. But like, you're getting
in all these steps that are going to be beneficial. And steps are one of like, the metric that is
most correlated to better health. Like people just need to generally walk more. And that's an easy
way to do it. It's like, you got to take the call, might as well get some steps in as you do it.
Right? Things like that. Things like, could you even just carry your groceries at the grocery
store. You get the basket, you're carrying stuff. You're getting in this like low load of carrying
that's going to really help with back health, strength, all these different things. Even things
as simple as like, I'm going to park in the farthest spot away. Like people go roll their
eyes and go, that's so obvious. Everyone says that. It's like, okay, but no one actually does it.
And if you look at just non-exercise activity thermogenesis, NEAT. This is basically a dorky
way of saying all the movement in a person's life that isn't dedicated exercise. That often
outweighs the benefits of exercise in many studies. Certainly by calories burned.
Certainly by calories burned. Also, some data suggests even health outcomes in the long run.
There's some Mayo Clinic data that says that people who just move around a lot more in their
daily life, they're burning like 800 calories just from moving around, this incidental movement.
It's like running eight miles or something if you do some really rough back-of-hand math, right?
And so I think looking for those opportunities, even beyond exercise, something like – so in The Comfort Crisis, I write about the value of silence, for example.
We have increased the world's loudness fourfold as human beings.
And yet silence is actually pretty good for us in this context of noise.
So you put someone in silence and like, yeah, it's a little uncomfortable at first.
People will generally report being like, oh, it's so quiet.
This is weird.
A little weirded out.
But as time goes on, people tend to calm down.
And it's sort of like a nice reset.
And so can you even go, hey, like I go into my office and I just start blasting music immediately.
Like most people keep the TV on, keep the TV on all day.
It's not that they're watching it.
It's that they just need noise in the background or else they feel weird.
But if you can sort of cut that out, even though it's a little bit hard at first, it's probably going to improve you over the long run.
And like, how can we apply this to different areas?
I did a post.
It's called the 2% manifesto on my sub stack.
So I'll link to it in that link I mentioned.
And it lists a bunch of different ways.
But I think it really is.
It's just like this mindset shift.
Like, how can I take this thing I have to do and maybe make it a little bit harder and
get a benefit?
And once you start to stack those things up, like things start moving.
Things start changing.
Yeah, I agree.
You know, my trivial example about the strawberry hulls, which I always put like next to the
bowl of strawberries and they'll just sit there. This is actually really beneficial for me because
I do that too. And my wife goes, what kind of psychopath does this? I'm going to be like,
well, there's two of us now. At least two of us. If you are a strawberry hull,
a non-throw-a-wayer, definitely put a comment and we'll start a support group.
It taught me an important lesson though, because
it's less about the strawberry hulls than noticing the feeling of resistance.
Like, what is that?
And then recognizing how trivial that resistance is, but how pervasive it is.
So like the things that we resist doing.
Like I've got the making the bed first thing in the morning down.
I've got the morning sunlight thing down.
I've got all that stuff down, but it's the little things that we can get away with not doing for a while
that I think are the ones that really erode this,
whatever this circuit in our brain is that you're talking about.
And I do want to talk about brain circuitry a little bit,
but I don't think we have a name for it.
Because it's a little bit of willpower.
It's a little bit of tenacity.
It's a bit of reflection.
But what I'm getting to here,
forgive me because I'm stumbling through this a little bit
because it's something I'm just arriving to in this conversation,
is that there's something about the contrast between prior experience and current experience,
where we could say level of discomfort from, you know, one to 10. The more uncomfortable
something is in our prior experience, the better the next phase of life is going to feel, whether
or not it's hours or days later, as you said, a month, you go to the Arctic. For how long were
you there? 33 days. So more than a month. And you got a month of zenned out, blissed, you know,
super Michael to you and to everybody else, right? And then the crazies start to slowly
work their way back in. Starts to work its way back in. And I think that it's a,
this is a microcosm for a lot of things about nervous systems. They adapt and so forth.
So when I think about the examples you gave, and I love the one of taking the stairs, I always think
when I travel, I'm going to sit a lot. I don't like to sit too much. I always feel better when
I've moved a lot. So I'm a farmer carrying my luggage of big supplement bag, you know,
hence the secondary screening and, you know, security.
And then the stairs are a great opportunity.
So we can reframe, right?
As humans, we can reframe, tell ourselves that things are good for us.
But it's these areas where we experience a lot of resistance to ourselves,
I think, that are the most challenging as opposed to resistance to the world.
As you point out, the world isn't lacking opportunities to walk on a call
or take the stairs.
It's all around us.
But it's that internal kind of like shift towards what's more comfortable.
What do you think about the more psychological things?
Like, God forbid, reading a book in paper form as opposed to listening to it.
And I love audiobooks.
But forcing oneself to read, having the phone out of the room, read something difficult, like a hard book.
Like if I want a really good hard book, I ask Marc Andreessen for a book recommendation.
and usually I have to go find the book from a, like a special bookseller because some of these
books are hard to find. And then I open up the first page and I go, well, I knew he was really
smart. He's one of the smartest people I've ever met. I met a lot of smart people, but this is
really challenging. And then I have to just start lathing through it and lathing through it. And
it reminds me of being a PhD student and learning about the nervous system for the first time.
And that stuff feels so good when we like find a nugget of, of understanding.
Yeah. And get through it.
And get through it.
Yeah.
But so in the cognitive domain, in the emotional domain, like do you intentionally sit down with your wife and go, let's have like a really hard conversation so that we can have a really great weekend?
Do you do this in all areas of your life?
Well, I'm definitely not perfect.
My wife and I actually, we go on very long walks and that's where all the magic happens.
There's something about walking as a couple.
We'll do like 12 miles on a Saturday, 8 to 12 miles on a Saturday.
§05Transcript — part 5
Those are long walks.
Yeah.
And you got like four hours together.
And, you know, the first hour you're just kind of this and that.
And, you know, how was your work week?
It was good.
How was yours?
And then like by hour two, you're getting into like the deep and the gritty stuff.
And I think there's something about forward ambulation with other people that is really life-giving.
And there's something even sort of spiritual about it and the amount of connection that you can get from people.
So that's something that we definitely do.
And I don't think those conversations would come if we were like, let's sit on the couch.
okay, we'll turn on this Netflix show. Hey, how are you? Like the shit just wouldn't happen,
right? Yeah, the walk's a little bit harder, of course. But magic happens there. I would also say
there's a section in the comfort crisis, and I've written about this a little bit in my other book,
Scarcity Brain, well, or talk about the value of boredom. So boredom is effectively this
evolutionary discomfort that tells us go do something else. It's neither good, it's neither
bad. It simply tells us whatever you're doing right now, the return on your time invested is
running thin. Go do something else. So in the past, if you think of us, say we're out foraging
for food and we're in this one area and we can't find anything, there's nothing, boredom would kick
in because we're not getting a return. And it would say, well, go do something else. And we'd
probably go say, okay, well, what if we try fishing this river or something, right? And I think what
happens in modern life is that when that evolutionary discomfort that tells us to go do
something else kicks in, that something else is this like really easy, effortless escape.
And it's in the form of a cell phone, it's Instagram, it's whatever, right? It's like this
hyper stimulating content. But I think that sort of sitting with boredom and leveraging it to see
where else it might take you beyond a screen can be really valuable. Yes, it's uncomfortable.
but I've found I've get my best ideas and I think that there's
centuries of thinkers who would say the same like my best ideas come when I've sort of removed
myself from outside stimulation and yes like my mind wanders I'm bored but then bam some magic
happens one point of messaging around screens today that I want to touch on too is that like
there's so much media around cell phones and like, you got to use your cell phone less.
Here's a million different ways to use your cell phone yet less. Yes, that's important. Yes,
we should all do it. But I think it misses a big point. And that is, if we take, let's say,
two hours off our phone screen time, what happens is that people often get bored and they go,
well, shit, what am I going to do? And then they turn on Netflix.
not much different right it's not an algorithm no but you're still just like taking this information
that is being beamed into you rather than seeing what else the world can offer you and sort of
coming up with your own ideas and creativity so i like to say rather than focusing on um less phone
i like to think more boredom get yourself in a space where like boredom is going to kick on it's
going to be uncomfortable your mind's going to wander and you might find some good ideas yeah
you'll have some weird stuff in your brain of course that's what happens when your mind wanders
But I think you can find some interesting things out there.
Does boredom include reflection or it's true boredom?
Like, I think we need to be removed from the hyper stimulating stuff that we often when we get that moment of I've got nothing to do, like stand in a grocery line.
Right.
What do people do?
Everyone's on their cell phone.
Like you can't just like sit with our thoughts for more than three seconds.
So I think even just having the moment where you go, OK.
Going to do nothing.
It might get a little weird.
It might get a little uncomfortable.
It might be a tiny bit bored, but your mind is going to go some interesting places that I think can be productive in the context of today.
I'm chuckling because what were your thoughts on the brief appearance of the raw dog flight experience that showed up last year?
Did you see that where guys were posting online?
It did seem to be guys saying that they, quote, unquote, raw dog, terrible use of language.
I didn't pick it.
they would do a 10-hour flight or a six-hour flight with no media, just sit there as a
kind of sign of their toughness. I thought it was kind of interesting.
Here's what came out of that is my wife said, the hell? These guys are weak. She's been doing that
ever since I knew her. She literally sits in that seat and she turns on the flight screen map and
she just zones into that. I'm like, you're a crazy person. Now it turns out she's just like
the original raw dogger. I love it. That was not the answer I expected. Yeah. Yeah. That,
that trend kind of came and went. Yeah. Came and went. I think that, you know, and there's the,
there's a performative element to that. Right. And so it was kind of became a performance for the,
for the algorithms and whatever, where it's a, I think maybe we need to get a little more
nuance behind that and put some thought into it. It's like how it's like, okay, if I'm not on my
screen, like, how am I going to use this time? Can I use it to go sort of deeper into my thoughts?
And I do think people need time, especially when you're trying to chew off big ideas. Like I've
found that a long walk where I don't take my cell phone, it's like, I need that. And I think a lot
of people, I think there's a lot of anecdotes historically that good ideas come from these
moments where you're just, that's all you're focused on. Maybe you're on a walk, you're just
kind of sitting and just peeling away the layers. Not easy, but worthwhile.
Throughout history and still now, many people get ideas from dreams during nighttime sleep
or during the kind of liminal states between waking and sleep. These times of inactivity,
no sensory input coming in are when the brain processes things. And it makes perfect sense to
me that in daydreaming or in boredom, as you describe it, that new ideas would surface just
as they would from the liminal state between sleep and awake. Yeah. And I think people sometimes
experience this. Like there's a reason we have that sort of cliche that's like you come up with
your best ideas in the shower because there's not this stimulation, right? You're not on your phone.
You're removed from the noise and you're just kind of, oh, man. But you got to write them down
too. I found that as well. If you have a good idea. Yeah. What's your idea capture mechanism?
you write yeah i usually have a notebook on me just write things down and much like a nighttime
dream where we wake up and like oh i'm gonna remember this tomorrow and then you you won't
remember you won't remember i agree it's important to write things down during the day that come to
mind actually it was the great Joe Strummer of The Clash and Mescaleros fame who there's some clip of
him someplace saying in that like heavy like breath voice where he's like you if you have an
idea, you have to write it down because not only will you forget, but even if you happen to remember
it, you can't capture the essence of the, the, the inspiration unless you write it down at that
moment. He really believed that in that moment, it carried a certain, um, uh, a certain value that
you couldn't replace just by writing it down later. Yeah, I agree. So I just did for a third
book I'm working on. I did this, um, it was about 40 days as a hike through Southern Utah and it
goes into through the Grand Canyon. So into Northern Arizona and then ends in Zion took
about 40 days. And so normally when I'm reporting a book, like when I did the comfort crisis,
when I did scarcity brain, like I'm traveling, I'm doing all this stuff, but I'm usually writing
using these notebooks. I use a very particular notebook. It's a Rite in the Rain because I'm
in outdoor environments, whatever. But on this hike, like I can't cover the mileage we need to
cover all day. If I'm constantly stopping and writing and like, I can't hike and try and
write. Yeah. Thoreau had an advantage by just staying in the spot. Yeah, exactly. Exactly.
So I took voice notes actually on my phone and, um, I found that to be really useful to that some,
a tool that people can use. So I had, when I got back from the hike, I had like 500 different
voice notes. Some of them were 10 seconds. Some of them were six minutes of me just babbling,
but there's some good stuff in there. And, um, so I think you do need to capture it in the moment.
Cause I did find too that I didn't really catch onto the voice note idea until maybe the second or third, fourth day at a hike.
And I would like, I can't stop and write this down.
And then I'd be in camp at night.
We'd set up and I'd go and I'd start writing down the day's notes.
And I'd go, what was that thought you had in that Canyon?
It was so good.
And I just never find it.
Right.
So I just was like, okay, we've got to use the voice notes tool and just take those.
It was great.
And there's a very, very accomplished neurobiologist out at Caltech by the name of David Anderson.
And he's done some really interesting work on these more ancient brain areas like the hypothalamus, primitive states like aggression, mating behavior.
But it carries out to a number of things that we're talking about now about cognitive states and creativity and capturing ideas.
And it's this notion of attractor states that basically that the brain, much to most people's dismay, doesn't work such that you go, oh, I'm going to write from 9 to 11 or I'll do some hard coding or I'm going to – and you sit down and you start.
No, you warm up.
You kind of ratchet into it.
And then – but over time, it's almost like a ball bearing on a flat surface and then the surface starts becoming more and more concave and eventually it's a deep trench.
And then that's usually when the buzzer goes off, it's time to move to something else.
But those – so these attractor states are basically the shutting down of a lot of other circuitry as one circuit kind of ramps up its activity.
But that over time, we can entrain these things.
We can link them to specific events in time like the making of your coffee at 9 a.m.
So your nervous system unconsciously starts to predict the attractor state of being in a state of deep focus and writing.
That all starts to make sense.
It starts to just – it's a different kind of lens on habit.
But if you look at most people, including my own activity through the lens of attractor states and you say, well, what am I training my brain for?
What am I entraining, entraining, entraining, E-N and then also just drop the E-N.
What am I teaching my brain to do on a daily basis?
Oh, well, the attractor state is scrolling lots and lots and lots and lots of media.
It's reading people's comments.
This is funny.
It's talking to friends.
It's texting a few people.
And what we've done, I think, is that we've created these attractor states of – it's not that we all have ADHD or something.
Some people do.
But we're right where we belong given our prior behavior.
We're just training up this trench of a bunch of noise.
And then at the end of the day comes and you're like, shit, I didn't get anything done.
This kind of thing.
So when you describe getting out into nature and removing all of that and kind of forcing yourself to go in a particular – not just physical direction but to go in a particular mental direction, I feel like it's getting back to something very fundamental.
It's like the overload principle of resistance training or cardiovascular exercise and increasing stroke volume.
It's like the fundamentals of how the mind work, which is one of the reasons I love these practices so much, which brings me back to this question of, okay, so there's the 2% rule.
Yep.
Taking the identity that I'm going to be this 2% of people that's going to do this harder thing.
It's going to be harder in the short term, but it's going to give me this long-term benefit.
And if I can find areas to apply that in my life, I'm going to get this big, long – like the benefits just pile up massively.
And then at the other end of the spectrum is the Misogi concept.
Could you explain Misogi?
Yeah.
So if I were to sort of give the cliff notes, I'll give the cliff notes and then the longer
explanation.
Cliff notes is that Misogi is sort of almost a modern rite of passage in order to teach
people what they're capable of and to give them experience that really changes them thereafter.
Now, I heard about this idea from a guy whose name is Marcus Elliott.
He came up with this idea back in the 90s.
It was like this personal thing he did.
I stumbled upon it.
Marcus, I believe, got his MD from Harvard, and he decides, like, I don't want to be a doctor.
I want to get into sports science.
So he runs this facility that's called P3.
They're actually not far from here.
They're up in Santa Barbara.
And he works with all these different sort of athletes.
He's got contracts with the NBA, with the NFL, blah, blah, blah, whatever.
But he also sort of realizes that what really changes a person, it can't always be measured because he's taking a lot of movement measuring.
He does a lot of like big data AI stuff around movement measurement, can predict injury and things like that.
He realizes that like these big changes that force a player to be better, that get them in a better state when a sort of game is on the line, they can't be measured.
And he does this practice he calls Misogi.
And the idea is that once a year, you're going to go out and you're going to do something really, really hard.
Now, he defines really hard as saying you should have a 50-50 shot at completing whatever your Misogi task is.
So 50-50 shot.
Because today, I think he's right here.
He argues, like, even when we take on a challenge, we have to know we're going to complete it.
It's like people don't run marathons and go, I don't know if I'm going to finish the marathon.
They say, I don't know if I'm going to finish the marathon and sort of insert some arbitrary time.
So that's the challenge element.
And then the second rule of Misogi is that you can't die.
So the implication is, yeah, do something pretty hard.
And what tends to happen when you go out and you do something really sort of kooky, challenging,
that you know is really going to be hard for you, that you are truly unsure if you're going to be able to finish this,
is you get into this moment.
And in this moment, you think you've hit your edge.
You know, I've hit my edge.
Like, I'm not going to be able to finish this thing.
Like all is lost.
But if you can kind of just keep going one foot in front of the other, you get this other
moment.
And that's where you look back and you go, well, wait a minute.
I thought my edge was back there, but I am clearly past it right now.
So I've sold myself short here.
And then the question is, okay, if I've sold myself short here in this moment, where else
in my life might I be selling myself short?
And that's where the big changes happen, right?
That's the question that you want to leave with from the Misogi.
Now, in the past, I would argue, so after I meet Marcus, he tells me about this like quirky Misogi idea he does.
He does all kinds of weird stuff.
I started sort of really doing some digging and going, all right, this is like an interesting idea.
§06Transcript — part 6
It's also sort of wacky, you know.
But if you look back in history, I think we had things like this in the form of rites of passage.
and like I mentioned before, like rites of passage just popped up naturally in all these
different cultures, but there was a realization that doing something that truly thrust you
beyond the bounds of what you thought you were capable of, where you had to figure things out,
where you had to really doubt yourself, and where you had to overcome becomes this sort of great
teacher for the human spirit. So that's the idea of Misogi. Go out, do something that you think is
going to be really, really hard, see what you learn. And even if you fail, that's fine. You're
still going to learn something along the path. I'm a huge fan of this Misogi concept. So once a year,
picking something, could be physical. Could be physical. Could be intellectual, creative.
Could be anything. And how important is it, you think, to advertise that you're doing this
versus important to keep it quiet and to yourself?
I think it's better to keep it to yourself.
So I think we live in a world where nowadays people do a lot of things
for external reasons, to get likes on social media
so your neighbor will be like,
oh, that guy's the badass in the neighborhood,
that lady did this, whatever.
And I think if you can just do something only for you,
that makes it sort of more valuable.
It puts a sort of different spin on it.
Once you decide, oh, I'm going to do this thing because, oh, this guy did it in an hour.
Well, I'm going to do it in 59 minutes.
That also puts a ceiling on you, right?
Because now you're going to shoot for 59 minutes rather than, well, what if you just went out and did this for yourself and you just went all in?
Potentially you could do it in 55, you know?
and I think today we do live in a world where there's a lot of
sharing in order to get social approval. You know, you can go back and forth about what are
the goods and the bads of that, but I would just argue that sometimes it's good to do things
only for yourself and use that as the sort of lever that you know you have that maybe no one
else knows you have it, but you can pull that damn thing when you need to and that's going to
really affect some change. I mean, one of my big, like my, one of my biggest messages is like,
people just need to go out and find some damn adventure. And it's very easy to get locked in
the cycle of doing the same thing over and over. You exist at home and everything is nice and
comfortable and like stresses come in, but they're like in the form of emails and deadlines and
things just get predictable. Go out into a place that is totally unfamiliar. Do something that's
going to be challenging to you. Go with the wind. You will find things that will really enhance your
life, that will make you feel, as Joseph Campbell put it, the rapture of being alive. Like I can
tell you, I feel most alive when it's like, okay, I got to go out to wherever it is, the Bolivian
jungle and I got to figure this thing out because I'm going down there to meet with this
Chimane tribe or whatever it is, or I got to go to Iraq and investigate the drug trade.
It doesn't have to be that extreme, of course, but that is where I absolutely feel that I am most
alive. It's like, we're going into this unknown world. We don't know what's going to happen.
We're going to encounter all these wacky characters along the way. There's going to be trials. There's
going to be hardships, but I'm going to like get through it and I'm going to have to figure things
out. And it is just like, so life-giving. It's like the most amazing thing. And I come back from
that and it's taught me something that allows me to function better when I get back to my normal
life. Cause I've learned all these skills and tools that I wouldn't have gotten had I not
exited normal life and gone out and just had an adventure. What if you and I were to, um,
run an online experiment? This is actually serious here where we said, okay, uh, we are going to have
you and I and a bunch of people that are going to join us are going to refrain from any smartphone
use for a certain number of hours per day. And instead of posting your sleep score,
which a lot of people are now doing, you're going to post the number of hours that you
managed to be offline completely at the end of the day. So we're going to compete for time away
from social media. And maybe we even get on Instagram live once a week and we share our
experiences and there's this club of wackos that want to do this, right? And see where we get with
it. Do you think that the sharing of that experience at the end and the community around
it would actually detract from the experience when people are away from their phones?
It's a good question. I think it's one of those complicated things where there would probably be
some upsides to the sharing. Some people need the like sort of community element. Like, yeah,
that would probably enhance in some ways.
The community element in the competition might also bend people's behavior in a way that maybe they wouldn't have behaved had they not known that they were part of this group, right?
So I think these questions get really complicated, and I think it's also – there's probably some individual variation.
um like i know that i personally do a lot better um if i don't have like a huge social element to
things like i don't run marathons just because i'm like for me psychologically i know marathons
give people a lot of value because there's community and all these things but like in my
mind for some reason i got this weird quirk where i go yeah but i could just go run like 26 miles
like at any time on my own time and not have to wear this bib and like pay this entry fee.
Like you could just run 26 miles, you know? So like something, they don't do it for me,
but they do it for some people. So I think you would have, I think you'd have individual
differences. What do you think? I think we should do the experiment. I think we should.
I think it'd be a lot of fun to get a group of people, large group of people together
from online to go into their lives and then create a community of people that use social
media for learning and for actual social connection, but are not leaning on it for this kind of
people call it fast food or kind of what my dad would call the kind of chewing gum version of
nutrition all day long. And I say this as somebody that enjoys social media. But I think
this is an idea I wanted to pitch to you today. So I've decided to do it on mic.
I have a good platform for it, unless you do, how we could track it. So one of my favorite apps,
it's called ClearSpace. What ClearSpace does is that when you go to, you select the apps that you
want to sort of quote unquote block. When you go to select one of those apps, let's say it's
Instagram, it gives you a nice quote, like an inspiring quote about life, but you have to wait,
right there's like a 10 second pause you wait and then it takes you to the next screen and it says
how much time do you actually want to spend on this app you can select you know five minutes
10 minutes 15 20 minutes and then you select whatever amount of time and only once you've
gone through that process can you use the app for the pre-selected amount of time and I found it to
be really useful because it gets me intentional right a lot of times people just pull out their
phone, they immediately hit, oh, Instagram. And then you find yourself in it. And then you,
you went in to answer a DM, but like, actually you watched dog videos, nothing wrong with dog
videos, but you watch dog videos for 30 minutes and you go, oh shit, I've just lost my day.
Right. So this thing sort of interrupts that. And they do have some challenge features. They
could probably create us a group that would be really fun. It sounds really cool. Yeah. I, I,
I love social media. I think that in its essence it's an opportunity to really connect with people.
And I've always wanted to have like a weekly meeting with my followers where I could learn from them and hear what they're doing and what they're up to.
Yeah.
And so I feel like there's real value to that, like going and living one's life and then meeting online and talking to people you otherwise wouldn't be able to share information and learn from them and hopefully them from you and to really do that.
But I don't know, are there any, aside from perhaps 12-step or maybe there's some religious groups, but are there any within social media platform groups that meet regularly and have for years?
Like we meet once a week.
We get on there.
We have a live.
I mean, I'll pop on for a live every once in a while to connect with my audience and mostly to hear their questions.
But I wonder if there are any online groups that have met consistently for many years.
That's a great question.
It reminds me of that.
You probably saw the story about the guys, and this wasn't social media, but it's amazing.
That group of guys that's been playing a game of tag for like 40 years or something.
Really?
Did you see that story?
No.
It's like these guys, I think they were like kids.
And they kept up this like lifelong game of tag.
And it just never, it's never ended.
At weddings and everything?
Yeah.
Oh, wow.
Most people are probably thinking that's got to be incredibly obnoxious.
So they never pause the game.
Never pause the game.
Yeah.
And, you know, someone might be it for like years.
And then that person will take a secret flight to Cleveland or wherever the other guy is.
And then, gotcha, you're it.
You know, it's just never end.
It's awesome.
This is still going.
I think it's still going.
Yeah.
Amazing.
Yeah.
Amazing.
Great.
Yeah.
You know, I've said this before many times on social media, but any dopamine reward that
is not preceded by substantial effort, you know, can potentially destroy us in the form
of addiction, but also leads to a drop in that baseline of dopamine at other times. This is,
you know, this is the abundance of food, the ease of life that you're referring to.
In this experiment that I'm hoping we can run in some form or another, the idea is that there
will be some resistance to stepping away from smartphone. There will be great, hopefully,
pleasure and the attractor states will take over to doing other things in one's life,
relationships and creative pursuits, et cetera, when we're away from the phone, but that there's
a certain amount of effort to resist so that when we come together socially, it's a real
dopamine, not hit, but it's a real dopamine rise that doesn't drop the baseline of dopamine.
So it meets all the kind of criteria of dopamine dynamics that I believe are healthy,
because we really can distinguish healthy from unhealthy dopamine dynamics, but it still
incorporates the smartphone, which doesn't look like it's going anywhere. So it'd be fun to do
this experiment. I don't know. I think it's like the, yeah, to your point, smartphones are here to
stay. There's clearly benefits to social media. No one would use it. Problem is some of the
benefits come with long-term harms, right? But I think if you can sort of train yourself to use it
in a way that helps you rather than hurt you, well, that's a good thing. Sort of reminded me
this story of my mom. So my mom had cancer about 10 years ago. She's fine now. But she was in for
one of her annual checkups, right? And this is obviously nerve wracking because you're finding
out, hey, did it come back, whatever, blah, blah, blah. So she goes to this meeting and I was out of
town. She goes to this appointment and she's in the doctor's office. She's in the sort of waiting
room in the gown and they're like, okay, we'll be back in a minute. And so she's sitting there
and right as the nurse left, she immediately went to put out, grab her phone.
And she left her phone in her car.
And she's like, I realized in that moment, I was grabbing that phone because I was anxious
and emotionally vulnerable.
And that was effectively a sedative in that moment.
And I had to sit with that.
I just had to sit and feel that.
She's like, but by being sort of forced into that moment, it made me realize, well, why don't I want to feel this?
And that leads to these questions like, oh, because I value being alive.
Well, why do I value being alive?
Well, here are all these reasons.
Oh, I appreciate this thing.
I appreciate this other thing.
And that insight I think taught her a lot about how she wants to spend her time too.
And so having these moments where we don't immediately go for the sort of easy, uncomfortable or easy, comfortable thing, I think can lead to these insights.
And that's just like this very micro moment, but that it stands for so much.
And her behavior did change afterwards.
You know, she's awesome.
She's always been amazing.
She's a single mom, and I'm an only child, and she's been sober for 40 years.
Yes, 40 years.
And I'm 38, so she got sober, had a kid.
Cards were definitely stacked against us, but she worked her ass off and built us a pretty good life.
That's awesome.
Definitely weren't rich, but just amazing woman.
And yeah, I've learned a lot from her.
Sounds like an amazing woman.
I'm really happy to hear she's healthy.
Yeah.
And that moment of having left the phone in the car,
it's amazing how those small portals in time can open up so much.
I think social media offers a lot.
I do also think that, as your example points out,
it offers the opportunity to numb out or to experience drama.
And I feel like when people talk about the dopamine hits of social media, the data on this just don't square with the idea that scrolling our phone gives us dopamine hits.
It gives us low-level expenditure.
I want to – on the basis of your books, I wrote something down a couple days ago.
I was thinking about our conversation.
I was thinking I've long believed that dopamine is a currency.
we it's the universal currency of motivation right it's what literally allows us to ambulate forward
it controls movement in the body that's why people with parkinson's who lose dopamine neurons can't
move but in terms of mental movement is motivation like movement towards something redirecting our
efforts and so forth um and i was thinking about um this idea that we we can either
spend our dopamine, right? Or we can invest our dopamine. This is purely on the basis of your
work. And it seems like all day long, we can potentially spend dopamine. Scrolling is spending
and it's the kind of spending we don't even notice that we're doing. We're sort of leaking.
It's almost like leaking dopamine. We're not getting these big quote unquote dopamine hits.
§07Transcript — part 7
This is why I don't like the dopamine hit model. I don't log on Instagram and go like, wow,
Like, no, like, it's not like coming back from a Misogi and going, I can live.
It's not transformative for the next month.
It keeps you in the rut of looking for more because it's like mental chewing gum.
That's my dad.
A long time ago, he said, be careful of the internet.
I said, why?
And he said, it's just mental chewing gum.
Wise, wise guy.
Yeah, and he's a very regimented guy.
And so we're always spending.
But then there are these things that require effort that are – we're still spending dopamine while we're doing it.
Like if you go do a workout, you're spending effort to do it, but you get something back on that investment.
So you're investing it.
You're not just spending it.
Yeah.
And –
That's great.
And the other one, based on what you told me today, is reflection in states of boredom or meditation or, you know, for people that orient this way, prayer, whatever it happens to be.
Or maybe it's even just leaving a social gathering and keeping your phone in your pocket and walking back to the car and just really thinking about the richness of that interaction.
Like these little things that are disappearing in our lives these days but that are so easy to recapture.
That reflection is another way of investing our dopamine.
And I think when we look at the neurobiological literature on dopamine, we're going to realize that, yeah, of course, addictions spend out your dopamine.
Drop your baseline.
Your bank account is in the red, deep in the red.
Yeah.
It's a whole other discussion.
But that most of us are spending and then we reset each night with sleep and then we spend the next day and then we reset.
And it's a life of – it becomes kind of a meaningless life.
And this isn't to demonize the social media platforms.
They're pretty good at letting us numb out when we don't want to feel something or feel drama when we need to feel that lift.
Like, oh, my God, she did that.
He did that.
Oh, my God, the lawsuit got dismissed about these two people who are arguing about who said what and who did.
I'm like, how boring is it really?
Yeah.
And how unimportant is it?
But it's not boring because they've taught us how to make it not boring.
Yeah.
Totally.
And then you look at the comments.
It's like blech.
It's just like gross.
It's like high school forever.
Yeah.
But the worst part of high school.
It effectively trains us to use it.
So when I think about comfort crisis or scarcity brain,
I'm saying it's really about how to invest your dopamine in effort and reflection
as a way to capture more capability to lean into things.
That's really, to me, what I like is the genius of doing hard things
that you brought forward in the comfort crisis.
As I started today's discussion saying,
I mean, it really changed my every day because I think so intensely now about like the – like how can I introduce more pain to bring about more meaning as opposed to comfort like meaning in any case.
So yeah, I think you're really on to the two things that matter most, which are effort and reflection.
I love that language of spending versus investing.
It's just – yeah, I think you hit the nail on the head there.
And the investing is usually things that are going to be a little more challenging, not as hyper stimulating, things you maybe wouldn't necessarily want to do at first.
And then once you've done them enough, you realize, oh, this has really changed me in a fundamental and positive way.
And hopefully you start to sort of crave them.
Like you said, no, I love exercise, right?
That's where we want people to get with all sorts of things that can enhance their life.
And I think, too, I'll add here. So if you think about people who pile up money and pile up money and invest and invest and invest and they never spend it.
Maybe you also need to learn, OK, now that I'm doing all this investing.
It's also OK to spend it sometimes. Right. And then I can really enjoy that because I've done all these things.
And so like I find with my own use, I used to sort of beat myself up if I was on, say, Instagram or whatever, just looking at nonsense.
I like nonsense on Instagram.
And I would beat myself up.
And then I realized you've done all these things.
Like you wrote for five hours.
You got a workout in.
You took your dog for a walk.
You know, you helped out around the house.
You did all these things.
Dude, watch a freaking dog video for 20 minutes.
It's fine.
And then I could actually appreciate that more and like, I didn't have the guilt around that, you know, and it was like sort of the, all right, you've invested a bunch, got all this money and buy that, buy that thing you don't necessarily need, but it's going to, it's a nice little boost, you know.
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The idea that we all have to become these sickos that love self-punishment and service to just
building up more dopamine reserves, that's definitely not the goal. I mean, I think one
of the reasons that David Goggins is so popular is, well, there are many reasons. A, he is how
he appears online. I mean, I've known David since before he had a book, since before his first book.
He was exactly that way. He was exactly that way. He's not playing a role, right? There's no acting.
This is how he functions. It's a life that most people are not going to embrace. And if they do
embrace it partially, I think it will benefit them tremendously. But he sort of embodies that.
He, excuse me, he doesn't sort of embody that. He embodies that. I think that being able to relax
and enjoy things and really savor them is another source of, I won't say everything's investing,
but there are certain things that might look like spending your dopamine that are actually
investing them. And you described a beautiful one as walking with your wife, these long hikes and
walks, like real relating, in-person relating, I think makes us feel so many things. I mean,
there's so much science and psychology about this. I mean, we definitely evolved to connect
to other humans.
Absolutely.
So I don't think of it as meaningless relaxation
to just connect with people and have a barbecue
and just relax or just whatever they call it,
like Netflix and chill can be a great thing
if it's not the only thing.
The internet has allowed us a lot of interesting new ways
to connect with other people.
So we were talking before we hit the red button on record
how I'm into the Grateful Dead, right?
And I think that you can find a lot of different
sort of strange tribes to belong to, and they can be enhanced by the internet. Now, it's like,
when I got into the dead, it was like, okay, now I'm listening to the live shows. I'm going down
this rabbit hole. I'd find these Reddit threads where people are discussing the live shows and
like, hey, if you listen to how Jerry plays this song in 78 versus 79, and I'm like, oh, okay,
listen. Oh, wow. Yeah, that's really interesting. So then you start weighing in. And then you're
friends with, you know, deadhead778, who you don't even know who the hell he is or where the hell he
lives, but like, this is a great guy online that I can talk to. And then you eventually sort of find
yourself at the shows and you're connecting with these people that you would probably otherwise
never connect with in normal life. And there's like, you know, the hippie who's got like two
bucks and a dream to get to the next show and tie dye. And then there's the hippie who's got the
Rolex and he's taking his private jet to the next show on your right, but you're all in it together,
you know, and you're sort of like connecting for this sort of big sort of group thing. And I think
you could apply that to music. You could apply it to sports teams, the sort of shared cause.
And the internet, I do think can allow you to find those sort of mini tribes, you know?
Yeah. I love it. I just now, um, allowing myself to get familiar with the Grateful Dead. I did go
to a bunch of shows because they were from my hometown, right? They, California Avenue is where
Draper's Music and some of those Grateful Dead band members worked. And, uh, there was a great
bookstore there, Printers Inc.
So they were kind of an institution in the South Bay where I grew up.
But I fell into a different genre of music.
But there's some great music out there.
But I think the culture around the dead, the fact that people would devote their entire
lives to, quote, unquote, following the dead.
And still now, like people go with Phish and Dead & Company.
This is like an outgrowth of something that I don't know of any other band that had people
change their entire lives in terms of the whole structure of their lives.
Yeah.
I mean, I went a bunch of times when they're in Vegas at the Sphere.
I have another fun thing, and there's like that shared sense of connection,
whether it's a sports team, whether it's a hobby, whether it's a type of music.
When I was on this long hike, you get within shooting distances of towns,
and that's where you have to go resupply.
But you might be 40 miles from a town, so you're like, all right, we've got to hitchhike.
All right, so we got to ride into this town called Escalante, Utah.
It's this tiny town.
So we go restock food.
You know, we each eat like a 16-inch pizza ourselves and like wings because you got to refuel.
And then we're at this gear store, and we need to ride back to the trailhead.
It's like 40 miles away.
So it's like, how the hell are we going to find a ride?
Like, this is going to take forever to hitchhike.
I'm in this gear store, and they happen to have this – I can't remember what it was.
It might have been like a beanie or something that had a deadhead on it.
I picked it up.
I'm like, oh, this is awesome.
And this lady comes up to me and she goes, oh, you like the dead?
I'm like, yeah, I like the dead.
And she works in the shop.
And she's like, yeah, me too.
We start talking.
Well, it turns out this lady's seen them like 500 to 1,000 times was her estimate.
I'm like, well, it's a big estimate, but that's a lot of shows, right?
And we just immediately connect.
And she's like, oh, you need a ride back to the trailhead?
I'm like, that would be great.
Yeah, and it's just like just that thing, that little emblem of the dead
immediately allowed us to have this conversation
and have this shared sense of connection.
So kind of finding something to identify with people, I think,
can be just like a great adventure.
I'm like, you meet new people.
Go out and find interesting communities to belong to.
Try stuff.
I mean, this is the power.
So you had Ryan in for the Recovery and Addiction podcast.
Ryan Soave.
Yeah, that's the power of recovery groups.
It's the powers in the group because you've got the shared identity with people.
You have people keeping tabs on you.
You're keeping tabs on other people.
They help you.
You help them.
You share your stories.
They know things about you that probably no one else does.
And there's an identity in that.
And it's powerful.
It's why that works.
If you, you know, if I'm going to forget the names of the founders, Bill Wilson, if he found, if he founded that online and was like, hey, we're all just going to chat on AOL Messenger.
§08Transcript — part 8
Probably it would have helped a lot of people, but it would not have the power that it would have of getting people together to converse.
I think it's harder for people to go out and do that today because it's much easier to only do things sort of online and sort of be a little bit of a hermit, if you will.
And I think forcing yourself to go into new places, meet new people, try new things, get into new stuff, and go out and meet people in person can be really powerful today.
I wrote a post on 2% about the value of gathering and sort of identifying with something, like whether it be a band or a team or whatever.
And I talked to this researcher.
She's up in Oregon.
I forget what university, and I'm sorry for that.
But she talked about how the Internet, when used appropriately, can be a really great community builder.
and she also said the best thing that can happen is when those type of communities
then figure out ways to meet up in person like that's that's the perfect next step and it all
starts with like okay we have this community online oh i'm going to be in san francisco who
in the group is san francisco based let's meet up and get coffee and i do think you're starting to
see more of that happen like it's happening on sub stack with a lot of writers um for example
I do events that I call the Don't Die event.
And it's me.
This is different than the Bryan Johnson Don't Die event.
Yeah, it's different.
Yeah, this is different.
This is the original Don't Die event.
This is a different type of Don't Die, yeah.
The original Don't Die.
What we do is it's me and my friend Mike Moreno.
Amazing guy.
Mike was a CIA case officer in Iraq and Afghanistan, I believe.
And we basically teach people like travel, wilderness survival skills over two days.
And so it's most of the people that come are from people who read my sub stack.
And so it's people who are often active in the comments.
They all know each other.
Like people show up and they know each other from the internet.
And then we all hang out and we do awesome stuff together.
And it's just like, it's the best.
But it's like that step to get people in person, I think needs to happen.
And so one thing I've even thought about too, is you hear a lot about how people spend less
time together.
And there's a variety of reasons for that.
People will point to the sort of less activity in organized religion, which used to be the sort of hub of sociality in towns.
But I also think things like – and I talked to a woman I love.
She was with the Wall Street Journal.
She's back at the Wall Street Journal, a reporter.
Her name is Gwendolyn Bounds, Wendy Bounds.
And she wrote a book called Little Chapel on the River.
And it's about – she was at the Wall Street Journal when 9-11 happened.
and she was living in the city.
She was taking a shower and the planes hit the towers,
and so to get out of the city,
she ended up moving to this town called Garrison, New York,
and the heart of this town is this old Irish pub
that is right by the train station,
and she's like, and people from this town would come to this Irish pub,
and they might have one drink, two drinks,
but it was like the hangout,
and you'd get people who were super right-leaning,
people who were super left-leaning in the bar,
and they would, you know, they'd give each other shit, but it was all in fun. And it was like
the heart of community and gathering and human connection. And I think you're starting to see
a little bit of a death of places like that. You know, like the community pillar institution
has sort of been replaced by, you know, chains or something. And like, yeah, people can gather
at chains, but there's not like that unique identity. It's all like predetermined by someone
in a corporate office 3,000 miles away.
And I think there's a case for like trying to find those places that still exist and
hang out, whether it be, you know, the pub.
You don't even have to drink at pubs.
I can tell you that.
I don't drink.
Still go hang out in a bar.
And I love bars.
I sometimes work in bars and I don't drink.
Yeah, it's great.
Restaurants, whatever it might be.
I think there's a case to get out in the world.
And again, you know, I'll go back to the comfort crisis that I think sometimes that
is hard to just go somewhere like the new guy. Hey guys, you know, um, and to strike up a
conversation with someone random, but I do think it is, um, really good for us in the long term.
I think too, the internet dehumanizes people, right? It's, um, it's easy to yell and scream at
an icon that's, you know, the size of a thumbtack on the screen who said one thing, but if that same
person was in person across from you, across from the bar from you, you may not even talk about
politics with that person, right? And here you've, you know, people make these crazy death threats or
something. Whereas like, if that person was just across the bar from you, you may not even talk
about that. And you might actually think they're a great person. I'll give you another example.
More hitchhiking. So we had to get, we got into this town when we're on this hike,
resupply. We need to get up to the trailhead. This trailhead's 20 minute drive away,
or something. These people pull over and they say, oh, because we got our thumbs out, you know,
like old school hobos and say, oh, do you need a ride? And it was this couple from China. They
had come over a week ago just for some vacation. They're both from China. This was at the heart
of the trade war. The trade war was at its apex when this happens, right? China had just like
decided they're not even going to ship us some rare minerals we needed. I wasn't paying too much
attention to the news out there, but I was aware of that. We get in the car with this couple from
China and like, that's all happening in the world. And guess what? No one gave a shit about in that
moment. All this media on CNN and Fox and social feeds and everything about the damn trade war.
These two Americans, one of who worked in government for 20 years, these two people from China.
And we're just connecting, talking about the United States versus what it's like to live in China.
Oh, you guys are academics.
Oh, it's fantastic.
We're just really, really connecting.
And they're doing us this huge favor of giving us a ride up to the trailhead.
And these are two people that like, this is awesome.
These people are great.
And like no one gave a shit about all this noise happening that should seemingly put us in this like maybe tense moment, right?
So I think that when you actually get in front of people and face-to-face, people have about 75 million more things in common than they do things that are not in common that they could argue about.
And it takes that interaction and going out into the world.
I found that when I travel, people everywhere are far more kind, happy, willing to help than I would have ever expected.
And I had high expectations going in.
But it takes those experiences to realize that.
And I do think that if you're kind of just existing behind a screen where it's easy for people to shout, you get this distorted view of the world.
It's like go out.
Talk to people.
Have different experiences.
You're going to walk away realizing that, hey, most people are actually totally fantastic if you just give them the time today, talk to them, ask them questions, and be nice.
Like being nice is the number one tool in my toolbox to survive and get along at my job and do all these different – like just be nice to people.
And you'll find that most people are nice back.
it's this uh starting in the real world and perhaps bringing something online you know
posting about it or writing about the great experience later as opposed to the online
experience brought into the world the i have a friend this uh uh he's a very accomplished musician
and um he doesn't do his own social media and um we get together for dinner once every couple of
weeks and once i got out there and i said oh yeah i saw this thing online he said i don't want to
hear about social media. And I realized in that moment, I was like, okay, got it. Like we were
not going to talk about something that was on social media. Why would we do that? Was in his
mind, like, why would we do that? We're here. Like why let's have an experience now. And I think this
can be easy too. And I'm going to, because I didn't say this and it came to my mind when we
were talking about Misogi, when I talk about this and I say, you know, something I did that might
seem hard for people. Um, I'll put a caveat on that is that there's way more people out there
doing even more extreme things.
At the same time, there's people whose entry point,
like you got to meet, you got to do the thing where you're at.
So I gave this talk, right?
And I talked about Misogi in the talk.
And afterwards, this lady comes up to me and she goes,
hey, I had read your book and I learned about this Misogi idea.
And she goes, my Misogi was trying sushi.
I go, trying sushi?
And she goes, it's trying sushi.
I go, okay, tell me about that.
She goes, I just always had this fear around sushi, but people told me it was good, but
I just couldn't, I couldn't do it.
I forced myself to do it.
She's like, I didn't love it, but I didn't hate it.
But more importantly, it taught me what other fears do I have about things that are probably
totally fine?
And that opened this big door for me to go try all sorts of new things.
I go, well, I'm kind of afraid of flying alone.
What if I went and took a trip and visited a friend?
Now I got to go hang out with my friend.
Like it just opens doors, right?
And so really it can be anything.
It can be something totally objectively extreme and crazy.
It can be trying sushi.
Just try something.
So it's really about pushing up against those edges in real life.
Wherever the edge is.
Do you think it's possible to structure one's day around making the morning and day really tough?
And when I say tough, I mean in the sense that you go against your impulse to do things the easy way.
And then making your evenings and nights really relaxing.
Yeah, I try and do that.
I'll get into the heinous details about my evenings in a moment, but I'll tell you about my mornings.
And I'd actually like to hear about how you approach this too.
So in the morning, I wake up usually very early.
Now I'll put an asterisk there that I also go to bed early.
So I wake up at like in between 3.30 and 4.30.
What time do you go to sleep?
Probably 8.30.
Okay.
So wake up at 3.30, get a cup of coffee.
Immediately I go to my desk and I just, I write.
And I sit there.
And to your point, it takes a little bit of that warmup, right?
But I know as a writer, the more time I'm in my chair behind that keyboard,
the more likely I am to produce words that work for the goal I'm trying to accomplish.
So I need that, say, four or five hours every single day.
And it is hard.
It's usually like the first two hours of just like, oh, you suck at this.
This is terrible.
Why did you choose this career?
How does your body feel?
It physically is writing hard for you.
Like, is the chair comfortable?
Are you feeling strained?
Are you relaxed?
Is it all just mentally hard?
or is it physically demanding as well? I would say it's more mentally.
Kind of just get in it. For me, it's like you get in this zone and you're like,
I got this idea. Like, how am I going to put this down? And you write something out,
you're like, that's not it. But there's like this one nugget. Okay, take that one nugget.
Now what can we do with that? And it's kind of like putting together this really
kind of difficult puzzle. But I've also found that eventually you kind of start to
hit a stride and things start to work. And I know that some days I'm going to sit there for five
hours and I'm going to get out like 300 words and they're going to be okay. But some days like just
boom, magic happens. And I might bang out like 3000 words and I'm like, those are, those are
decent. Those are decent words. But if I'm not there doing that every single morning, despite
knowing that most days it's probably going to be hard, like book's not going to write itself.
All right. So I do think like with a lot of things that a person might want to improve in,
you really do have to be willing to put in the time and realize that this is going to be there's
going to be really challenging moments but those challenging moments they also make the days when
you get the metaphorical 3 000 decent words they make it just awesome so to lean into that so it's
kind of like how i approach my mornings and evenings like i kind of alluded to with social
media how now i've just kind of let off and just let myself be okay with just letting my brain turn
off. My wife and I watch some pretty heinous reality television. That is our thing. Turn on
big fan of Real Housewives of Salt Lake City. I will admit it.
Okay. I confess I've never seen that one.
Don't start. Just watch stuff like that. And it's just like, you know,
can connect over this totally just mindless show. And it's almost like it's kind of a reset. It's
§09Transcript — part 9
like you know those ladies throwing drinks in each other's faces screaming at each other it's
just a nice little beep your brain's reset for the day so you're writing from about 3 30 in the
morning four in the morning until you said about four hours yeah four or five hours okay all you're
getting up to use the bathroom yeah yeah you're drinking some more coffee some more water i might
get another coffee you have breakfast before usually after after and then what happens um
between 8 a.m. and, uh, and usually house and Salt Lake city housewife.
After I've got like the key core writing in, I would say that then I, um, focus on what I not
eloquently at all say would be the sort of bullshit, you know, like I would got all these
emails to respond to got to do sort of this task and that task. Um, whatever project isn't sort of
like my main writing, probably bullshit is not the right word for it. Cause it's important stuff,
but I just sort of value that writing time. And then I will usually, I'll usually exercise before
I eat dinner, usually around four. I tried exercising in the morning for a while,
but I realized that that is like my peak hours for writing. And that was kind of getting
interrupted. And so I'm like, okay, I'm good with it being before dinner.
Do you do caffeine before your afternoon workout? I'm just curious.
No, not usually.
I usually shut off caffeine probably around noon.
Probably heard that on this podcast actually.
But I found I actually years ago I did a sort of caffeine audit and my caffeine was out of control.
And so I just did cold turkey, quit.
I felt like I was literally had the like felt like I had the flu for about 28 hours.
And then I slept for 18 hours straight.
And then I had a headache for a week.
But I felt a little better.
And so I've tried to be a little more cognizant of how's the intake going.
Some days I'm better than others, you know.
Sometimes I go.
So you had two 32-ounce cold brews today.
Seems like a lot of caffeine for one man, you know, but you can do.
I mean, you're talking to a lifelong caffeine addict here.
So unless I've had a cold or a flu, I don't take breaks and I consume an outrageous amount of caffeine.
How much do you think you consume?
I'm going to shock some people, but I'm very caffeine tolerant.
I should say that first.
And I'm actually a pretty mellow person.
Yeah.
And I probably consume distributed from the morning until about 2 or 3 p.m.
Usually 2 p.m. is my cutoff, somewhere between 600 and 800 milligrams of caffeine a day.
But before people balk at that, keep in mind that when you look up online, you go, oh, ChatGPT, how much caffeine is in a typical cup of coffee?
It's going to say like 150 milligrams of caffeine.
If you go to like a Starbucks or a Peet's coffee, they're brewing it much stronger than that.
So a small probably has somewhere between 200 and 250.
Medium is going to be 350 to 500.
I once said that, you know, a venti coffee, what I call a large, but just to orient people, can have 800 to 1,000 milligrams of caffeine.
People are like, no way.
And then I got some brushback on that.
Like people have tested this out.
Different places are brewing them differently.
So what most people are consuming a lot more caffeine than they realize, which is why they have a headache when they don't drink it.
I like caffeine, but mostly in the form of yerba mate.
Either this or just brewed leaves.
And it's a very different caffeine high.
It rises more slowly.
It kind of arcs down.
If I drink a coffee as opposed to espresso or yerba mate, it's a real punch.
So I'm not drinking 800 milligrams of caffeine from coffee.
It's a very different –
That's interesting.
I mean my day looks quite different than yours.
But I definitely agree that once we figure out our optimal circadian schedule, which for you sounds like you're a true, probably genetically from what we understand, early bird.
You like to go to bed somewhere between 8 and 9 p.m., wake up somewhere between 3 and 4 a.m.
Most people who try and get on that schedule really struggle and they start to revert toward the more typical schedule or the night owl schedule.
But most people like me go to bed somewhere between 10 and 1130 at night.
I can get to bed by 930, but it's tough.
Typically 1030 in bed, 11, I'm out.
And then if I do that, I need maybe six and a half hours of sleep and I'm fine.
And then the night owls definitely exist.
There are people for whom their genetic polymorphisms in their genome make them want to go to bed
at 1, 2, 3 a.m. and sleep until, you know, 8, 9, 10, even 11 a.m.
And they do best.
But I agree that once you figure out your optimal circadian schedule, early bird, typical, or night owl, that there are a couple of three to four hour pockets during the day when our attention and wakefulness is just at its greatest and you have to decide what you're going to devote that to.
and from what we understand that morning bout which for you falls very early is when the
catecholamines dopamine norepinephrine and epinephrine are really being released at their
greatest amount it's almost like the bank account to invest you go okay you can you can invest now
you're gonna spend you're gonna invest and i think many people spend it out um and exercise is great
I noticed that cardio, so to speak, gives me a lot of energy and focus in the hours that follow.
Whereas resistance training, which arguably I like to train hard and I like training heavy.
Afterwards, if I shower up and eat something, my brain is fatigued in a way that I'm like, damn, I invested it in exercise.
I can't invest in everything.
So I think finding those times when we are optimal is great and not just spending it out on meaningless stuff.
Yeah.
And that's what's happened to so many of these.
I hear from a lot of young guys on this in particular, guys who are like hitting their early, mid, late 20s.
And they're like, my life is like not heading in a particular direction, the so-called failure to launch kids.
And it's scary.
And then you say, well, what are you spending your time on?
I'm like, well, I get some exercise, but then a lot of YouTube, a lot of video games, a lot of spending out.
And I realized that there are some people who can make a career out of video games, but most can't.
So I think there are a lot of casualties of that kind of spending out of those key hours.
Yeah, I think so too.
And I do agree with you that it's all about finding whatever is going to work for you.
You got to find that sort of magic, those magic hours, as I would call them in a non-scientific way.
the example I always like to give is Hunter S. Thompson where he would sleep in till noon
and then he would start writing at like 11 p.m. maybe and he would go till four in the morning
and of course he's fueled by all this nonsense on you know going into that but that was like his
that was sort of his magic hours where he got the best work done and it's like you got to find you
got to find what yours are yeah it's interesting uh the reliance these days on energy drinks and
caffeine and supplements, some of which we've talked about on this podcast, like alpha GPC,
they'll have a meaningful effect on your levels of alertness and focus. I think it's a mistake
to use those to just kind of exist, like sipping an energy drink just to get through your day.
I do think there's a place for the occasional use of things like alpha GPC or caffeine,
certainly. Some people nowadays are using non-smoke, non-vaped nicotine. The great Joe
Strummer said that one of the worst things that ever happened to creativity is people stop smoking.
I'm not encouraging people to start smoking.
He died young, sadly, 50.
But, you know, I think the idea there was that nicotine is cognitively enhancing.
You don't want to take it in in a way that kills you.
But I think if you're going to explore chemistry for changing your brain state, which is what it's all about, that you want to be really careful about what you do with that enhanced brain state.
Yeah.
Like just drinking a bunch of energy drinks to scroll the internet is truly a waste of a life.
Yeah.
Getting all ramped up to do nothing, basically.
Right.
Yeah.
Get all ramped up to do something.
That's a good rule to follow.
When you're out on these adventures, do you have all your comforts from home of like to bed at a certain – at your early hour, up at an early hour?
Are you still writing before you head out?
I guess some days you can't.
Do you bring coffee?
I mean, there are certain things that you bring with you so that you're not just in a complete stoic mode.
You're not like naked in the woods.
I think that's a different reality TV show.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah, we don't watch that one.
I will bring – so I'll give you – it kind of depends on the trip.
A lot of them, if it's international, things get a little skewed with time changes and things like that.
Um, but if it's sort of a outdoor adventure, I'm usually up pretty early with the sun.
I also noticed that I sleep a lot better and longer when I'm out in the wilderness, just
way better.
Um, so I usually get up and, um, I usually bring coffee if it's an outdoor thing, just
like instant crap coffee, but it tastes great out there cause that's what you got.
I often don't bring a stove when I do outdoor adventure stuff simply because one, it's more weight to carry.
Two, I've heard horror stories of people who are boiling water on these awkward stoves and then, oh, they knocked it into their lap.
And now we have like a serious emergency in the middle of freaking nowhere.
So I don't bring a stove.
And so I'll just mix the instant coffee with whatever temperature.
The water temperature is like the outdoor temperature, right?
So if it's 33 degrees outside, the water is 33 degrees.
I'll drink that.
And then usually just –
Wait, you don't bring a stove on these long adventures?
No, no.
Wow.
Yeah, and then I'll get moving.
On this last hike, a lot of bars for calories.
You're basically just looking for foods that – so sort of the rules to kind of give people some advice here.
And I can put that in the link we talked about.
One, it's got to be good on my stomach.
That's rule number one.
Because if you eat something that's going to upset your stomach and you've got to hike 25 miles, you're going to have a really, really bad day.
All right.
So figuring that out, that tends to be foods that aren't super, super fibery and are a little more processed rather than less.
So your stomach's not doing the processing.
Two, it obviously has to be calorie dense.
because if you take, let's say, to give a kind of extreme example, two pounds in peanut butter,
that has way more calories than two pounds in apples. And it also takes up less room in your
pack, right? So stuff tends to be calorie dense, so like nuts, bars, things like that. At night,
I'll have like tortillas and salami and some dried fruit, things like that. Number three is that it
has to taste good because if you don't like how it tastes, you're probably not going to eat it.
and if you don't eat it, it's not going to help you, right?
You're just carrying it.
And then four, I kind of look at like nutritional composition.
I'll go, okay, am I getting enough protein?
Now, granted, when I'm out in a scenario like that,
you're eating so much food that you basically get enough protein on accident.
Like it's hard to not get enough protein when you're eating 4,000 calories a day.
But those are sort of the rules I follow nutritionally when I'm out on these journeys.
Interesting.
Yeah, one big win that I found are these bars from, and I have no affiliation with these guys.
I think it's made by MetRx, and it's called the Big 100 Bar.
So this is like a bar designed for straight-up meatheads, okay?
But it's got like 400-something calories in it.
It's got 30 grams of protein, and I stumbled upon these in this little gas station.
in this is the town is one gas station in a hotel and they have all these different flavors. They
taste like candy bars. And I'm like, this is a thing that I am probably never going to eat in
normal life, but this is magic out on the trail. Cause it's just a hunk of calories with protein
and they like inject it with all sorts of vitamin and minerals, just like way over fortified. Like
this is trail food right here. As you pointed out, very different than what you recommend people eat
back home. Totally. People should probably eat exact opposite way back home. Exact fruits,
vegetables, clean meats, eggs, fish, you know, this kind of thing. Yeah. Generally like my,
people will ask me about nutrition advice and mine is basically just like try and eat more foods that
are ingredients rather than have ingredients. If you can just follow that and you're probably
going to be all right. In real life. In real life. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I definitely follow it.
Not on the trail.
On the trail, just realize you're going to be eating a lot of crap for 30 days.
And then when you get home, or 40 days, whatever it might be, when you get home, maybe lean into salads.
Well, it's survival out there.
You said you're losing weight even though you're consuming a ton of calories when you're out on these adventures.
Yeah.
So for the last one, for example, that was 40 days.
We probably averaged 20 to 25 miles a day.
Some days are a little more slow going because you might have to navigate a canyon.
There's a lot of ups, a lot of downs.
But we also had sections on the Arizona Trail, which is like this really well-maintained trail.
So we had like a 40-mile day that day.
And you have everything in your pack, so you're carrying the pack.
And I was trying to eat between 4,000 and 5,000 calories a day, and I still lost about 13 pounds.
Wow.
§10Transcript — part 10
Yeah.
I talked to Herman Pontzer at Duke, and he did some back-of-the-hand math.
He was like, okay, I'm going to figure this out.
He's like, caveat, I'm just doing this in my head right now.
He's like, okay, how much did you weigh?
How much did you?
Okay.
He thought I was probably burning about 6,300 calories a day.
Wow.
Yeah.
It's a lot of work.
I think some people will hear 40 days and go like, okay, I don't have time for this.
I can't get away from this.
But you mentioned something that I think is worth pointing out, and it offers an opportunity
for people to access some of the incredible things that these outdoor adventures provide,
And that's the reset to sleep and sleeping outside.
There's a guy, a researcher at University of Colorado Boulder by the name of Kenneth Wright, who's done these really beautiful experiments where he takes students camping, where they go to sleep shortly after sunset.
I think they have a nice campfire and enjoy, you know, s'mores and socializing.
And then they get into their tents and maybe read a bit and they go to sleep.
And then they wake up somewhere circa sunrise.
Not exactly.
But no one's using an alarm.
No one's being told when to wake up and they get up and they do their breakfast.
So they're just camping in the Colorado mountains for a couple of days.
What he found was that just two nights and the days around those nights of camping in
the Colorado mountains allowed them to reset their circadian rhythms for melatonin, which
elevates at night, kickstart the sleep process, as many people know.
And for cortisol, which is why we wake up in the morning, the so-called cortisol awakening
response, you know, precedes the time we wake up, which for you comes at a God awful hour.
from, but, and was able to reset that, those cortisol melatonin rhythms, which really bookend
our days and are, and, and really establish regularity of circadian rhythm. So while there
are a lot of things one can do, like cold showers and exercise and forced at early hours and dimming
the lights, et cetera, when getting out into nature and camping for a couple of nights,
really getting away from cell phone contact and getting more oriented to the sunrise and sunset
as the cues for circadian rhythm has a long lasting effect on circadian rhythms of these
hormones and wakefulness. So it's, you know, it's getting back to the fundamentals. I just offer
that because some people might hear like 40 days and like, shit, I don't want to like just eat
peanut butter. And when I hear that you don't bring a stove, like now I'm looking at you
different. I'm like, this guy's psychotic in the, in the, in the, in the good sense of the word.
Right. I think it's awesome. No, no, it's, it's, when I say psychotic, it's in the form of a
It's a good kind.
Yeah, it's a good kind.
But I think most people can think, okay, I could probably get away for two, three nights and camp.
Or talk to someone who knows how to backpack and get a proper kit together and go backpacking.
And the level of adventure and life reset and meaningful experiences that one brings back from that and reset of circadian rhythm is super significant.
Totally.
And it's amazing.
I mean, when you look at how much of the U.S. is actually like developed, it's some crazy number, like only three, four percent is occupied by people.
And the rest is just like farmland and open land.
Like we have so much amazing, unbelievable public lands in the United States.
And by the way, as I experienced, the best stuff isn't necessarily in national parks.
The best stuff is often in these sort of middle of nowhere places where it would just be a giant logistical nightmare to try and put a national park there and get all these people into it.
Like you can find some just incredible places in the U.S.
And even I think three nights outdoors, one night, two nights, whatever, any amount of time outdoors, especially if it's a little more rugged, a little more off the grid.
And hell, you can even car camp.
Like you don't have to like walk 20 miles out to the middle of nowhere.
You can car camp.
I think that has just so many benefits. There's this guy at University of Utah named David Strayer, and he's done this work on what he calls a three-day effect.
And he's basically found that after three days in nature, like some really beneficial things happen to people, and people come back reporting that they just feel so much calmer, more collected.
They're just like more reset, more aligned in their life. And I think that's absolutely a thing.
the reason he started studying it is because a guy who owns this sort of famous rare bookshop
in salt lake city the guy's name is ken sanders he was calling this thing that would happen to
him the three-day effect he goes yeah we just call it the three-day effect among my friends
and he was like a friend of edward abbey the environmental writer he's like yeah we call it
the three-day effect like after three days in the wild you like just totally reset you're a better
human you think better you're nicer you're more empathetic you're just a great person and strayer
was kind of like, wait, I feel like that's happened to me, but I've just never heard anyone sort of
put a term on it. And so he started kind of doing some research into it. And it's actually pretty
interesting stuff. Super interesting. I think my mind as the neurobiologist goes to these
attractor states. I think that it takes some time for us to drop into these different ways of being
and ways of being sounds kind of mystical, psychological, but it's also neural, right?
is that our nervous system shapes itself around the interactions and vice versa.
And I think – I find your work so interesting because you're a sit-in-a-chair-for-four-hours
cognitive thinker, toil-with-words-and-ideas guy.
But you like these long extended adventures, which are really adventures of the body and mind.
I've been wrestling with this idea.
As you can tell today, I wanted to just present some ideas to you to get your thoughts on them.
And one of the ideas, and I've talked to a couple of MDs that work specifically on dementia about this,
and the idea hasn't been killed yet, which is a sign that they might have legs.
And the idea is that it comes from this, it originates with this sea squirt.
Do you know this story about the sea squirt?
No.
So the sea squirt, I've been learning about them.
They're in this phylum of a tunicata.
They're tunicates, which means nothing.
Anytime somebody throws something like that or a Latin name, they're really just trying to impress you.
But what's interesting about tunicates is that they live two lives.
They have a nervous system.
They live two lives.
They are mobile.
They swim for part of their life.
And then they at some point descend onto a rock typically, fix themselves to the rock, and live the rest of their life fixed to that rock.
And when they land there, they eventually learn how to harvest nutrients from the ocean around them.
But they eat their own nervous system.
They eat their own brain.
And they specifically eat – they don't really have a brain.
But they eat the components of their nervous system that aren't required for moving around anymore.
Interesting.
So one idea – I'm sorry to now like noodle with this.
And I was thinking, you know, we hear so much now about the relationship between exercise and longevity.
And, you know, I try and get my zone two cardio.
I definitely ruck.
We're going to talk about rucking.
I do my resistance training.
I'm very interested in some of these functional patterns folks online.
They're very combative people.
But they've got some really interesting points about the need to do more real-world throwing, sprinting-type activities.
But here's an idea.
If we step back from the human species and we go, okay, what do humans need?
We need to reproduce, take care of our young, propagate, all the stuff we talked about before.
But throughout human evolution, humans have gotten to a point where – in everyone's life where at some point the young are old enough and educated enough about what's required to be a human that they don't have to throw, run, or do any of these things.
And perhaps – and someone should look at this, I think – perhaps the areas of the brain that atrophy first, the neural pathways that atrophy first in everybody – we're not talking about Alzheimer's necessarily – are the areas involved with jumping, landing, throwing, navigating.
navigating, uneven surfaces, lack of familiarity. And it could be that the deterioration of those
pathways sets in motion a cascade of things that cause the loss of neurons in other areas. And then
like so many things, it tends to... And then we get like, everyone gets demented with age.
No one is sharper at 90 than they were at 70. No one. Unless maybe they lost a lot of weight and
took a bunch of, you know, acetylcholine promoting drugs or something, but that's very rare.
So the idea here is that maybe we're a lot like the sea squirt.
We're just starting earlier nowadays.
That's interesting.
And that perhaps some of the things that you're doing in these Misogi adventures are forcing
you to do things that are maintaining brain circuitry that allow you to sit in that office
and attack it with more vigor with each year.
I like this idea. First of all, it's not testable. That sucks. It's going to be hard to do. You can do jumping and plyometrics and landing and look at brain scans. You can do that. But it's going to be hard to do in the real world.
But I like this idea because everything that you've told us is that we need to do the thing that we could easily offload onto devices or other people.
But if we don't do that, we actually have more pleasure in these moments of watching television with a spouse or perhaps even more intellectual vigor.
Because how old are you?
I'm 38.
38.
I have to think about that.
So if you were to – now I'm kind of leading the – I'm seeding the question.
But if you were to kind of plot in your mind like your cognitive vigor across these years before, during and now you're continuing to do these Misogis, would you say your cognitive vigor is declining or is increasing or is staying flat?
Definitely increasing.
I'll put the confounding – the confounder here is I stopped drinking when I was 28.
So basically up to 28, I was a damn idiot.
But I think that where I've sort of taken things, I mean, I've definitely become a sharper writer, a sharper thinker over time.
And I think there's something to that.
I'll say just from the perspective of a writer, you will write better and have more material to work with and more interesting writing if you go out and do things.
Shocker.
Right. There's so many people who it's just like entirely behind the keyboard, looking at a screen, not even talking to another human being, like even just the reporting part.
They're not even talking to another human being, much less like going out and going there and seeing what they find.
so just from a writing perspective like of course I still sit behind the screen and read the studies
but like I'm also going to go out and talk to this person and I'm going to go do these things
that give me so much more to work with and for the average person like okay you're not a writer I get
it but that's a story like you want to die with a lot of badass stories like that's a life well
lived right you got to like shape your own narrative and go out and be able to find these
moments and things that you've done that you can look back on and be like, that was awesome.
And if you can fill your life up with that, because in the moment they're awesome too.
Like happiness is sort of, it's not this end point, right? It's like this rolling average
of your behaviors. So what do your behaviors look like? Do you have more awesome behaviors?
More crappy behaviors? Okay, let's try and get more awesome behaviors. Okay, well, what are
awesome behaviors? It's like probably involve other people, probably involve doing things that
push you a little bit and teach you something about yourself. It probably involves getting
out of your damn office every now and then and away from the screen.
And so just trying to get enough of that, that's like – it's a thing.
And I think you're probably right.
There's a lot happening in the brain too, but I'll leave that up to you.
Well, yeah.
I love the notion of creating a life of adventures and happiness as a rolling average.
I think that the word happiness is very, very slippery slope.
Oh, totally.
You're chasing feeling states and Buddhists have talked about this and people talk about
this endlessly online.
And no one's talking about being miserable.
It's talking about feeling, to make it neurobiological, that feeling of dopamine being trickled out in response to effort and getting the rewards of that effort. Repeat.
Yeah.
And then the rewards, of course, include the non-effort states of being able to lean into social things with more ease and more relaxation because you know you put in a really great day or just the richness of what you've built in your life.
That's happiness.
That's like deep pleasure, right?
That can only be built through this kind of connection between these different gears we've been talking about.
And it just has to be pursued and lived out.
And no one does it perfectly.
I think that's an important component.
Yeah.
You can't do the perfect Misogi just like because that sort of defeats the purpose, right?
You're supposed to catch splinters and feel miserable.
And that's part of the perfect Misogi.
Totally.
You're not supposed to feel great.
But it's not you feel so miserable that you regret the entire experience.
Yeah, you want some calluses.
I'd be interested to hear your thoughts here because this isn't a fully formulated thought.
But I think a lot of it is channeling that same sort of framework into something that helps you over the long run.
So if you think about like the structure of a lot of the behaviors that hurt people in the long run
can also have a similar structure to behaviors that help them in the long run.
So I'll give you an example.
Something like gambling, right?
It's like this random reward schedule, right?
But when people get hooked on that random reward schedule in the context of gambling,
it's like the house always wins, right?
And that leads to misery.
When I think of my own job, though, it's a very similar random reward structure in terms
of searching for information in an open environment with different care, and I don't know what
I'm going to get.
It's like, okay, I'm going to this city.
It's like when I got to Baghdad.
I'm like, I got a report on the drug trade.
I'm going to have to link up with all these characters.
I have no idea what's going to happen.
It's so exciting.
§11Transcript — part 11
The reels of the slot machine are spinning.
The dice are falling.
Same exact thing.
But it's channeled into a thing that becomes more rewarding to me over the long run.
I would just like to hear, how do you think about taking that sort of structure and making it helpful for a person?
Yeah, well, the first thing is that the structure and the circuitry is exactly the same for gambling and going out and finding a great story and building a great story and having those experiences, including the pitfalls, the losses.
That, by the way, set a lower threshold for what you consider a win and then you ratchet up through there.
And, you know, it's like I'll never forget my dad being a scientist who's been on this podcast before.
I'll never forget the first time I published a paper in science, which is like, you know, it's like Super Bowl ring.
He didn't say congratulations.
You know what he said?
He said, expect yourself to feel kind of low in a few weeks and expect yourself to wonder if it will ever happen again.
And I said, will it ever happen again?
He said, well, if I told you that, then the experience wouldn't be worth much, would it?
I'm like, damn it.
the other thing i'll just this is answering your question uh indirectly uh but it's meaningful
perhaps is that my graduate advisor when we published that paper i was like are we going
to throw a party like are we going to celebrate she's like i guess we could get a pizza or
something but um the celebration was the work i was like what do you mean she's like the work was
why was the fun right you had fun doing the experiments i'm like yeah but are we going to
celebrate. We didn't celebrate it. And as a consequence, you know, humbly, we went on to
publish many, many more papers in excellent journals, not all in science, most of them in
other journals, but that the point being that she was teaching me to attach the reward to the effort.
And I was like, ah, the fun is doing the experiments, getting the paper, like you have
to take the reward and, and, and relegate it to a place below the effort. You can celebrate wins,
but you can't let yourself internalize the wins more than the effort to get there.
So there's that.
So same circuit, it's this dopamine circuitry.
And of course, when I say dopamine, that's a proxy for adrenaline and norepinephrine.
Adrenaline is operating in the body to make you feel alert.
Norepinephrine is operating in the brain to make you feel alert.
So those three work together.
They're cousins to like get out, get up and go, pursue things.
And it doesn't matter if it's a 4.30 wake up or 4 a.m. wake up, sit down.
mental movement or it's physical movement. I mean, evolution designed it this way and it's
incredibly efficient and it has these pitfalls of gambling. If you have a proclivity for alcohol,
alcoholism or methamphetamine or cocaine, or if you like stimulants or for the process,
like fill in the process addiction, shopping, sex, whatever it happens to be. And that base,
you're draining the bank account on these catecholamines and then the reset is always abstinence.
Yeah.
It's just abstinence, right?
Yeah.
And then people in their second or third year of sobriety are like, oh my God, the world just feels so incredible.
There are these magnificent moments from things that I just completely missed before.
Yeah.
And it's because what brings about pleasure now is you could say it's at a lower threshold, but the level of meaning is sky high relative to before.
So there's that.
So there's real value to understanding dopamine-catecholamine dynamics because you can identify where you are on the map at a given moment.
That can tell you the direction to go.
I agree.
And I wish I could tell you, you know, you have dopamine-catecholamine circuits for writing versus gambling versus wandering through Antarctica.
Not wandering, but trying to survive Antarctica.
Yeah.
It's the exact same circuit.
Yeah.
Which is, you know, one of the reasons I want to shift us to rucking.
Okay.
I really dislike rucking, but now you've got me rucking.
So tell us why rucking and things like it are so valuable and are distinctly different than like, quote unquote, hitting the gym.
So I'll tell you how I sort of came to this realization, started writing about this in the first place, is that when we were in the Arctic, we're hunting.
all right so when you look at why humans are good at running and by the way we're good at
two things we're good at running and we're getting it good at carrying i'll tell you why we're good at
carrying so the reason we're good at running is because we evolved to run long distances
to chase down animals in the heat and spear them so humans are really good at cooling ourselves
in the heat right and we can run these long distances other animals can't manage their heat
so we'd slowly but surely run down animals.
Eventually they would get too hot.
They'd topple over from heat exhaustion, and then bam, we'd kill them.
So this is a theory called persistence hunting.
So we won the thermoregulation game.
We won the thermoregulation game.
So we sweat, we don't have much fur,
and then our bodies are also designed for this type of persistence hunting.
There's a guy at Harvard, Dan Lieberman, who had this,
I think it was in 2004, paper about this, how the reason we're built the way we are,
one of the key reasons is so we could run long distances for persistence hunting.
So I'm familiar with that research.
I'm like, oh, that's really interesting.
Cool.
I'm like, yeah, this explains why I have, like, you know, these big butt muscles, these arched feet, whatever.
So we go up to the Arctic.
We're hunting.
Eventually successfully hunt a caribou.
And we, you know, we're taking every usable part of it.
we can. So we load our packs with all this weight. It's like a hundred something pounds in this damn
pack and start walking back to camp. And I'm just thinking about this research about, okay, humans
evolved to run long distances so we could hunt. Great. But what happens after you actually kill
an animal? You got to carry that damn thing back to camp, right? And so it occurs to me, well,
wait a minute. We're also pretty unique among animals in that we can carry weight. Like no other
mammal can just pick up weight on its own and carry it a long distance. I was like, huh, that's
interesting. So I just start looking into this and yeah, humans are the only mammal that can pick up
a weight and carry it a long distance. And it absolutely shaped us into who we are. It allowed
us to really conquer the globe because we could take tools into the unknown, right? We can walk,
we can cover these long distances in our two legs and our feet. Our hands are freed up to carry our
tools to carry whatever it might be. And it really turned us into who we are. Now, the thing is,
is when you look at running, plenty of people run, right? Like running and marathons, that is a
popular activity. But how many people are just like carrying weight as a regular form of exercise?
The answer was really not that many. So I'm thinking like, okay, who actually still maybe
does this? And it turns out it's the military. So rucking is sort of the main activity,
of physical training in the military, just throwing weight in a backpack and going for
a long walk. And I've actually started to sort of even shift my language from using the term
rucking to simply saying walking with weight or weighted walking. And the reason for that is,
is if I tell my mom, hey, you should ruck, she goes, oh, okay. And she types in ruck and she goes,
the hell is this military stuff, Michael? I'm 75 years old. So I've started to call it more
walking with weight. So it's a little more approachable for the masses. But I think the
benefit of it is that you're getting cardio stimulus because you're covering ground, but
you're also getting strength work because you've loaded your skeletal system, your muscular system.
And that comes with a lot of benefits. You kind of got this two in one. So it generally will burn
more calories per mile than walking or running. And that is simply because you've added extra
weight. Of course, if you're running, you might cover more distance in the same amount of time.
but if you just compare it by distance, it's burning more calories.
And I think it's one of these activities that can really fill in gaps in people's training.
And to what you sort of alluded to in your question is there's a variety of reasons it fills in gaps,
but one of them is simply that it gets people outside.
Like there's a lot of gym people who are like, yeah, I lift all the weights,
but like I'm not doing that running thing.
A lot of people can't run and like, oh, by the way, walking feels a little too easy.
I'm not going to do that.
So if you can throw some load on someone and have them go for a walk, it gets them outside, helps them preferentially burn fat, it seems, compared to something like running.
So there's this interesting study, and I'll caveat this by saying it was a very small study.
I think it was only 12 people because they could only find 12 crazy enough people to do it.
It was on backcountry hunters in Alaska.
And so these guys carry these heavy packs out into the mountains for a week or whatever, and they test them, and they ended up losing a significant amount of weight, but it was all from fat.
They actually gained like a very minute amount of muscle.
And that really shouldn't happen in the context of going out and losing weight, right?
You're probably going to lose fat along with muscle.
But with this, they ended up losing mostly fat.
So I just think it's this amazing activity that we really wove out of our lives due to technology.
Humans evolved to carry.
People were carrying babies all the time, every day in the past.
We'd go hunt and we'd have to carry all the meat back to camp.
We would carry food that we gathered, like gathering.
We're hunters and gatherers.
Gathering is literally walking around, finding some food, carrying it, finding more, carrying it back to camp.
And then we got cars.
We got grocery carts.
We got X, Y, Z.
We got furniture dollies that we don't carry as much.
And I think we've lost a really important form of human movement and physical activity that we were literally born to do.
And so my suggestion to all the listeners is get some weight and carry it.
Easy to throw some weight in a backpack and go for a walk.
And it'll be good for you.
How much weight and how far?
So if someone is just starting, I tell them to start light.
I think – so after I published The Comfort Crisis with the – there's a chat.
There's an entire chapter on walking with weight or rucking.
I got all these people in the military.
Rucking destroyed me.
okay well how much did the military start you with 100 pounds it's like well yeah it's like
if you did anything at that intensity immediately just immediately went into like the red you're
going to get injured you know it could be squatting it's like yeah i tried to max out on my deadlift
every time i deadlifted the first time i deadlifted therefore no one should deadlift
you need to ease into this so i tell people um women can start with anywhere from five to say
20 pounds suggest, um, men, anywhere from 10 to 30, depending on your fitness level,
I would rather have someone really ease in and sort of get used to it. Cause a lot of people
will say, yeah, I went a little too heavy and it really sucked. Like I want you to sort of
on ramp slowly. And then from there you can build up over time. And so I have plenty of, you know,
women who might weigh 130 pounds who now use 30 pounds, which is a significant amount of weight.
Yeah. Um, I'll have men who, you know, maybe they started with 20 and they're like, that's way too light. Like I just have too much of a base of fitness. It's like, okay, good. Well, I'm glad we started there though. So we know for sure. And then they've ramped up to say 40, sometimes 60. I mean, for me, I generally, my sort of go-to weight is probably 35 to 40 pounds.
and I find that that's a weight where it's uncomfortable, it's challenging,
but it's also not so soul crushing that I'm like, I got to end this walk.
This absolutely sucks.
I can still enjoy it.
And of course I'll go heavier sometimes.
If I'm going really far, sometimes I might be like 20 pounds or something.
I think it's really just like start light, take a walk, see how that feels.
It doesn't have to be too complicated.
Yeah, I said I hate rucking, but I love the way I feel afterwards.
Maybe that's the form of exercise I don't like.
There, I just outed myself as not liking it.
I find that it forces me to pay attention to some of the smaller stabilizing muscles.
Like you can't be as loose with your gait.
You have to be pretty thoughtful, especially if you're hiking.
You can't stride too long here or there.
It just naturally keeps you moving more like a packed mule, which I think can be helpful.
And I do notice that when I take off the rucksack or the vest on a different day and I run, I definitely feel faster and lighter just by way of comparison.
Probably a real change too due to the small stabilizing muscles.
This thing about losing more body fat will get people motivated.
Yeah.
People love that.
I think it's also a good tool for runners because the injury rate is much lower.
So if you're within a reasonable amount of weight, like of course if you go up to these crazy weights.
So I generally tell people, if you just want like a firm number, don't go over 50 pounds.
If you want a more sort of dialed in number to your body weight, don't go over a third of your body weight.
There's a lot of military research that suggests that.
But even for me, like I don't go up to a third of my body weight all that often unless I have a really good reason.
I'm training for something like backpacking or hunt or something.
So if you're within a reasonable amount of weight and not too heavy, the injury rate is exceedingly low.
It's not that much higher than the injury rate of walking and walking is pretty safe.
Do you ever experience the kind of crossover of understanding between your physical pursuits and your creative intellectual pursuits?
Like do you find that, for instance, if you ruck that there's a certain – you start to recognize where the resistance is.
Is it putting on the pack?
Is it a third of the way through you tend to feel pretty good?
Do you notice those contours and do they map to the contour of sitting down and writing that it's hard at first, then it gets easier, and then at some point there's a breakthrough or else it just plain sucks the whole time?
I think so.
I'd like to hear your experience with running.
But my experience with running is that the first, say, three miles, they suck.
You know, this is hard.
Like things just start – you just feel like resistance.
and then eventually usually after say mile three all of a sudden i feel like oh i could do this
§12Transcript — part 12
forever i could do this the rest of the day if i wanted to but if i don't go through that first
three miles i'm never going to get to four plus or whatever it is and i do feel like that's the
same um with writing where it's it's challenging at first the things aren't moving but then things
just things start to move you know and you but you need to you need that buy-in like you need the
you're not going to have those amazing four plus miles after mile four or sentence after the 20 paragraphs you deleted if you don't run the first three miles or write the first 20 paragraphs.
And then a related question is specifically about writing, but it could carry over to school, music, or any sort of kind of pursuit.
You said that some days getting 300 quality words feels like an accomplishment.
other days you get 3,000 words. Do you think prior to the days that you got the 3,000 words
that your brain is processing it unconsciously? Do you think it all happens in the session?
Or is there something, like if you look back into your days and hours before those incredible days
where you just feel amazing, can you map it to anything or is it just mysterious?
I think it's somewhat mysterious, but I guess here's how I would answer that. Is there some
writing I've done where you sit down and it's just, it comes out and it comes out
not needing many edits. And it's just like, like, I'll give you an example. Um, a lot,
there might be some bias, um, but a lot of my friends and people who've read my work say,
one of the best things I've written is this essay I did about my mom. It originally appeared in
men's health in 2017 maybe it's called my badass mom I have it on my sub stack I'll link to it in
that post I wrote that in about seven minutes sat down and just and it's like a thousand something
words and it was like printed it and was like I don't know if I need to change this and so why is
that because I've been thinking on that piece for 30 something years and it was just that was the
moment and just the energy got captured and then that was it a good example of this and this is a
person at a much higher level is um i was watching a tom petty documentary apparently he sat down
flipped on a recorder and just came up with wildflowers literally started just playing
those chords and making up the lyrics as he went and recorded wildflowers just went holy shit right
That is like there are times when like magic happens and just lightning strikes and you got to be you just got to be there for it, though.
It's like I think things like that can happen.
But I think to your point, why could that happen?
It's because he had like all this experience that just sort of like was swelling and bubbling under and finally just like converged.
Brings me to an earlier point in our discussion.
I genuinely believe that the raw materials of great writing and music and science and whatever, podcasting, visual art, painting, those raw materials are collected away from the actual craft.
And so you have to get out into the real world and experience those.
Where have you gotten your best material, scientific work, ideas you're flowing into podcasts?
Like how does all that unfold for you?
For me, PubMed is – it's like the – it's the intellectual wilderness of published material as are books and lectures but mostly PubMed.
So the more time I can spend foraging papers and looking at graphs and seeing things and connecting it to something else and that's where the ideas – those are the raw materials.
Like this year, I haven't been doing quite as many solos as I work on the book, but I'm getting back to solos soon.
And I've got these folders upon folders of papers that no one's ever discussed out there that I think have real gems in them.
So those are the mines in which I'm mining for information that I then have to work with.
So for me, it's PubMed.
And occasionally it's getting on the phone like I did yesterday with a neurosurgeon friend of mine and having a discussion about the vagus nerve and realizing that everything that's out there about the vagus nerve, everything is exactly backwards.
Interesting.
And going – and I was like, is this possible?
And he's like, yeah.
And I'm like, why hasn't the narrative been corrected?
And he's like, well, because there's never been a real neuroscientist talking about it.
I was like, oh, wow, we have it exactly backwards.
Just for – not to be cryptic here, the vagus nerve, even though it's classified as parasympathetic, is not a calming pathway.
It's a pathway by which physical movement wakes up the brain, period.
Or mechanical changes in the gut wake up the brain.
It's all excitatory.
Everyone thinks the vagus calmed down.
No, the only quieting signals come from the brain to the body.
Interesting.
And there are a few of them in there, but the vast majority of the vagus is this way that the way to wake up your brain is to move your body.
Awesome.
So that's – anyway, I don't want to go too far down this rabbit hole.
This sounds like what I was just talking about when I'm in a place and having to find information for a story.
And I experience it's that.
You use the word foraging, right?
It's that like the chase of the thing.
What's the thing I'm going to find here?
I got this question.
I got to go find these.
And I don't know what I'm going to encounter out there in the wilderness, as you put it.
That is the best.
It's why people get hooked on social media.
It's why people get hooked on gambling.
It's why people get hooked on dating apps or whatever the hell it is.
I think the problem today is that you see it getting put into technology and leveraged in a way that maybe hurts people over the long run.
Whereas if you can find a way to leverage that, as you have and are telling me now, that helps you in the long run, that's like the unlock, right?
Yeah.
That's what a lot of these failure to launch kids are not accessing.
Totally.
And Anna Lembke of, you know, the author of Dopamine Nation has said this, you know, and she's like, what are people who haven't found their passion supposed to do? And she'll say, mow the lawn. And people go, this just sounds like a mom telling me what to do. But she understands it's the same circuitry. You're trying to get that, that you do something you don't want to do. You complete it. It's job well done.
you're learning a process and then you start to, you know, superimpose the understanding of that
process onto things that are hopefully meaningful and generative, you know, as opposed to destructive.
The problem is it's like a trail where on either side you can slip – every day you can slip down
the slope of numbing out or drama. You're trying to stay on a trail to keep it in the language of
Michael Easter. Like you're trying to stay on a trail this narrow and you don't know where it's
going and it's splitting off and you don't know which is the right one. And there are just so
many opportunities to slide down the edges every day, all day. And those edges continuously get
tweaked to be slipperier, easier to fall down, steeper. So in scarcity brain, I, um, so I live
in Las Vegas, right? And so you see people playing slot machines all day long and there's
slot machines everywhere. And I just look and I go, why do people do that? Because everyone knows
the house always wins, right? You want evidence? Why would there be those bajillion dollar casinos
down there if people were actually winning at gambling? And I'll keep this story short, but
I ended up in this casino that's new, but it's used entirely for research on gambling behavior.
levers, I'll say, that can be pulled in casinos to get people to effectively gamble more. And it's
funded by Caesars is one of the companies in it. There's also a bunch of tech companies in there.
And I think that that is like a metaphor for the world we live in, where now, because things can
be tracked and digitized, that people who are using this in a way where it's maybe arguably
not helping people in the long run.
There's just so much information that that saw can continuously be sharpened and sharpened
and sharpened.
I think slot machines are also just the ultimate metaphor because they, in the 80s, up until
about 1980, no one played them.
And then you had a guy come in in the 1980s.
His name was Si Redd.
And he had noticed that his kids, his grandkids, would play Atari all day long.
He's like, they just get hooked on Atari, and he's like, that's interesting.
What can I take from that and apply to these machines that I make?
So what he does is he makes the first screen-based slot machines.
And when slot machines go screen-based, all of a sudden you can program the odds rather than be constrained by actual spinning reels,
because there's only so many symbols you can fit.
All right, so now you can offer this total crazy world of different combinations and jackpots.
And he realizes, oh, what we can do, because we have all these options now, is we can have people bet a bunch of different lines.
So on a digital slot machine, you can bet like 40 different ways the line is going to go and the things are going to fill up.
And what we can do from there is that if you get a win, you might quote unquote win.
But let's say you bet a dollar, you'll win, say, 50 cents or 40 cents.
That is what casino companies call a loss disguised as a win.
The thing is, is when that happens to people, it doesn't necessarily register as a loss.
Something exciting happened, right?
And so all of a sudden, the machine can start to have something exciting happen far more times,
but you're just slowly losing your money instead of quickly losing your money.
So the reason that people weren't playing slot machines up to 1980 is because simply by the constraints of space and the way that reels were like physical reels, you just couldn't win all that often.
So you might play 20 games and nothing ever happens.
So that behavior is going to extinguish like really quick.
But if you can get someone on a machine where like maybe every third pull, maybe every second pull, something happens.
The machine lights up. Ding, ding, ding, ding, ding. Congratulations. You won.
You won 40 cents on your dollar bet. Isn't this exciting? Congratulations and welcome to Las Vegas.
Now, all of a sudden, you start to see slot machines go from like being thrown in the corners of casinos to taking over casino floors.
So they now bring in 85% of casino revenues and people spend more money on slot machines than they do books, movies, and music combined.
And it was really just this tweaking of this perfect reward schedule where you're getting just the right amount of rewards at a random schedule and it's just been sharpened.
And then you see companies go, what the hell is happening in Vegas?
and then that gets placed into social media,
into dating apps, into online shopping.
Like you go on shopping places,
now there's a damn spinning wheel, right?
To get a discount.
It's like, that's what happens
when you walk into a Las Vegas casino too.
First thing you see is a spinning wheel
because it's a sucker's game
and then just spread everywhere.
Wow.
Yeah.
And the speed, speed is a big thing.
So the other thing with the spinning wheels,
when it's physical, you pull this handle,
it's a slow process pull clunk clunk clunk okay pull clunk clunk clunk so the Si Redd guy he
realizes hey this pulling the handle thing that's just slowing people down what if we made that
spin a button and what happened is the average slot gamer went from playing 400 games an hour
to 900 games an hour yeah swipe right swipe left swipe right swipe left infinite scroll
right infinite pages that just load as you shop you want no friction everything needs to be
frictionless the faster you can do a behavior the more likely you are to do a behavior
and this all got figured out in this strange heartless but freaking beautiful town i live in
Las Vegas wow yeah i would love to go to a casino with you sometimes just sometime just to like
watch you analyze people and be like, that's what's happening to this person.
Well, their baseline on dopamine is dropping. They'll get the little inflections, the wins
or the perceived wins, right? What you don't perceive is your baseline.
Right.
Right. We're not in touch with our dopamine baseline. We're in touch with the inflections
from that baseline. And that can be very distracting. I mean, and there's a whole set
of parallel conversations about addiction here. I mean, this is what you just described
makes me remember what Anna Lembke, one of our first guests ever on this podcast,
right as Dopamine Nation was published, said, which was that her formerly addicted patients
who get sober from whatever, cannabis, alcohol, gambling, whatever it is, that they are her heroes.
And I thought, oh, that's beautiful, right? Her patients are her heroes. What more beautiful
thing could a doctor say? She's an MD after all. And she's saying, no, no, not only do I respect
and admire them, but they're my heroes because they are better equipped to deal with the landscape
of life than people who have not experienced the deep hole that addiction can bring and then
getting themselves out of it and understanding these dopamine dynamics, these catecholamine
circuits as I'm referring to them. That's what she was saying. She wasn't saying they overcame a lot.
I mean, she was saying that too, but it was that they understand life at a deep level to be able to go into the world now and to really glean tremendous meaning and benefit from the smallest of things.
And that's where I distilled it down to, as I needed to make it succinct for social media, ironically, to the statement that addiction is a progressive narrowing of the things that bring us pleasure.
And that happiness, or maybe even enlightenment, if there is such a thing, is a progressive expansion of the things that bring us pleasure.
What she's saying is these people were in the pit, got out of the pit, and therefore she admires them.
So, gosh, I want to visit this very diabolical casino.
I guess all casinos are kind of diabolical.
I actually really like gambling.
My team knows this.
I do too.
I really enjoy it.
It changes my internal kind of RPM.
There's a vague language here.
But when I play a little roulette or I'll like just, I don't know, gamble on a game or something, like I can feel the lift it gives me, which is why I don't gamble.
I know myself and I can feel that thing.
It's like a – it's an energy that feels kind of like throughout the body and you're unaware of really anything else.
It's a little bit of a tunnel.
And I've never gambled much money.
I've never thought to.
But I recognize that feeling and I'm like, oh, no.
Yeah. Yeah. You have it too. I enjoy it. I also, once I hit a certain amount of, and I keep my
threshold very low for what I'm going to gamble. Cause I live in Las Vegas, like probably not a
good idea to get really into gambling. If you live in a town where it's everywhere, like you go to
the grocery store and you can gamble. Um, so I keep it pretty low. We gamble like once a month.
I mean, we're like, you know, we're not spending much money, but it's enjoyable. That's, that's
the thing, right? It's like with so many things that can be addictive is there's vastly more
people that can go in, have a little bit of fun. That's a good time. And then move on with their
life. And then there's a small subset of the population that gets, for whatever reason,
it's that thing that does it for them and it sucks them in. There's also, because we're talking
about gambling and addiction, there's some research. I believe this woman was at NYU and
She studied problem gamblers, went to Las Vegas, interviewed a bunch of them.
And she found that a lot of the seriously problem gamblers, when they would get a big win, it would piss them off.
And here's why.
It's when you get a big win, if it's over $1,200, what happens is your machine locks up.
And the casino boss pit, he comes over and he makes you fill out a tax form because, you know, once you get over $1,200, now you've got to pay taxes on it.
they weren't there necessarily to win. They were there to just get in the flow of the machine and
just have the ups and the downs and just like ride that out. And having a big win, it would
interrupt that and that would frustrate them, which is just nuts. The way you offer up these
§13Transcript — part 13
real life examples for me, and I know for the listeners, provides such a rich substrate for
understanding the kind of universal circuitry. And I'm so grateful to you for that. You talked
earlier about the speed of the slot machine. So what I think is very dangerous, and we talked
about before on this podcast, is this notion of dopamine that's not preceded by effort. But I
think you said it best, and I'd like to replace that with something that's much more facile for
people and hopefully intuitive as well. Basically, anytime we find ourselves in frictionless or low
friction foraging, we're in serious trouble. Get out. Get out then. Like the moment you're in a
frictionless foraging mode, your baseline's dropping and you don't realize it.
Totally. A good example of a way this was used relatively recently that has, I think,
been disastrous, especially for younger men, is in sports betting. So sports betting gets
you know, legalized in a bunch of different states. Well, it used to be that in order to
place a sports bet, you had to drive to the casino and you could bet on the game that was
hours away. And then maybe you would watch the full game at the casino. How long does a game
take? Three hours. So you wait at the casino and then you either cash in or, you know, you lost
your bet. Well, once it gets sort of legalized and now it's in all these different states and
it goes to cell phones. Okay. So now it's like, I don't even have to drive the casino. I can do this
right now through two buttons. And then one thing that the gambling industry did that was good for
the profits, probably not good for the user is to go, okay, well, if we know that speed will increase
gambling rates and the more a person gambles, we can look at the math and go, we just need them to
gamble more because that's how we win our money. It's in the volume. What can we do to solve this
problem the fact that a game is three hours long because how many games are there in a day
wait a minute what if you could bet on a play how many plays are there in a game i don't know
hundreds okay let's bet on this play so now you have like these live in-game thing like is this
person going to score up to bat is this there's all these different ways a person can bet and then
the addition of uh parlays as well where you've got like 12 teams or whatever and like these like
bonus things they throw in. It's just like, there's a train wreck.
When you said there's a growing problem nowadays among young men, I thought you were going to talk
about frictionless foraging and online pornography. Oh, yeah. We got plenty of problems, right?
And so what I'm realizing is there are numerous examples of this out there, but hopefully this
framework of rate and low friction, high speed foraging means you're just going to end up in a
pit. Yeah, totally. You got to figure out ways to slow things down if you can. I think it's hard,
but I think there's ways to do it. Another interesting example, and this one isn't,
I don't think is as sort of one-to-one as the others we've been talking about,
but there's a guy from the junk food industry. And you see this rise in junk food in the 1970s.
And what happened is sort of like the casinos looking at sports going, well, like, well, these things are long.
There's long stretches between these events.
In the 70s, the food industry was like, well, people are eating three square.
We need them to eat more food.
What if we invent snacking?
Let's make snacking a big industry.
So they come up with this new thing, snacking, right?
Like snacking becomes this thing.
And this guy from the junk food industry basically said, if you want to get a junk food to sell and take off, it's got to have three V's.
It's got to have value.
It's got to have variety.
And it's got to have velocity, meaning cheap, meaning lots of different options.
So think of Doritos.
There's like 10 different flavors, right?
You got nacho cheese, normal cheese, chili cheese, whatever, on and on.
And then velocity.
It's got to be quick and easy to eat.
It's got to be a food that you can just pound a bunch of calories in one sitting and want to just keep going.
And once they sort of lock that in, you start to see – that's really you start to see obesity take off in the 70s in the US.
Or mental obesity and TikTok.
Yeah.
Seriously.
Yeah.
I mean, again, these parallels between the physical and the cognitive, right?
I mean, there's an incredible moment in the Mad Men series where they bring a vending machine into the office.
And suddenly, you know, like people are eating at work before they would leave to go eat.
No one was eating at their desk.
Right.
I remember when I was a postdoc.
No, excuse me, when I was a graduate student.
So this would be 2000 to 2004 when I was doing my PhD.
We had a German postdoc.
come from overseas.
And he was just blown away that people would take their coffee in their car.
Now you hear this, you know, like, oh, of course.
He was like, this is crazy.
Like, you would go to the cafe, you would drink your coffee, or you would make a coffee at work after lunch, and then drink it in the lunchroom, and then go back to your bench at work.
But everyone's walking around.
He's like, everyone's walking around with their coffee all the time.
Like, what's going on here?
You know, now he's a professor up at the University of Oregon.
I bet you he carries his coffee around.
Yeah, he's been here a while.
But it was like, this is crazy.
Like people carry their drinks around, you know, and now you'd be hard pressed to find someone not carrying their coffee out of a coffee shop.
It's more like a fast food restaurant.
You're trying to get people in and out as fast as possible.
Yeah, and snacking in general, just eating food in all sorts of situations too, I think is relatively new.
I mean, if we were getting more productive and there was more incredible creative work, I'd say, okay, fine.
Like it's all in service to something else.
But once again, we land ourselves in the landscape of neuroscience where it's one circuit.
So I don't believe how you do one thing is how you do everything.
Otherwise, based on my strawberry hull example earlier, like I'm really in trouble.
But I believe that we have areas of life where we are a little bit less regimented than others where we're even just like outright neurotic.
But I do think that once we start to see these patterns and where they are, hopefully it helps people navigate better.
I mean, I think the way you described, they're making the slopes on that narrow trail steeper and steeper.
It's getting more perilous to be a human.
It's getting riskier, harder, despite these conveniences.
And it's no coincidence.
It's because of the conveniences.
Yeah. And I think, too, one of the issues we face is that a lot of this is all technologically driven.
But one of the issues becomes that it's becoming harder and harder than ever to opt out of the technology.
So I'll give you an example. I have this uncle, and he's an old school railroad worker, not a big fan of people.
does best when he's in his 1960s bus up in the mountains just alone awesome awesome dude far out
um he was totally anti getting a smartphone he's like no i'm not getting a damn smartphone like no
no way well now that guy can't even get on a plane if he wanted to without a smartphone right
so like there's all these things in life that you normally you basically have to do to function
that run through a smartphone and by the way the smartphone is the thing that is making you crazy
So you can't even opt out of the technology.
And that's where it starts to get scary.
One thing that I've done that's been very helpful for me is I put social media, so Instagram and X, on an old phone.
That's smart.
So if people send me something, like if you were to send me a clip on Instagram, I can't – on my normal phone, I can't look at it.
I mean I suppose you can go in through the annoying thing where you have to cancel out some windows.
But I just don't do it.
And by the end of the day, no one writes to me and goes, what do you think of that thing I sent you?
So I make very designated time that I'm on social media and then I don't access it elsewhere.
But it is tough, the fact that we have to set up these barriers.
Yeah.
But you're doing incredible work.
I want to say I think of you as a researcher, even though you're a writer slash researcher, you research things in depth for your writing.
And it's clear you put so much care and time and thought into your craft.
And I've loved your book, The Comfort Crisis.
We'll put links to all your books and to the Substack links that were discussed today.
I'm curious what the next book is.
I feel like you should write a book about addiction and dopamine and how to overcome it.
You might have the – I know that you have the recipe.
You told us the recipe today.
Can you share with us what it's about or is that like parents who are expecting a kid revealing the name before it's born?
You're not supposed to.
I think it'll be a mental health extension of the comfort crisis and a little bit of a case for adventure.
And, you know, I think the question that I really grapple with is why when you look at our world sort of objectively, things have never been better than ever.
Look at all the numbers.
Like we're living longer.
More people know how to read.
Fewer people are hungry.
You can get from point A to point B in like 30 minutes.
It used to take you, you know, an entire day to walk that, all these things.
And yet people are less satisfied and more neurotic than ever.
So it's like, well, why is that?
And then what is the answer to it?
So I think the book will probably get into that somehow with my long hike I just did being the overarching narrative and some lessons I learned along the way.
Awesome.
Yeah.
And let me thank you for having me on, doing the work that you're doing.
You're changing a lot of lives, man.
And I can't tell you the number of people because I got sober when I was 28.
I can't tell you the number of people who have reached out and said, I watched this Huberman episode and I decided to stop drinking and my life is way better.
And that's like, bam, that's like all happening right here.
And the amount of people that's rippled to and changed and not just them, because when one person stops drinking, it's not just their life that improves.
Everyone in their orbit's life improves if they drink like I did.
And so that's awesome.
Everything else you're doing is awesome.
So I really appreciate you having me, man.
Thank you.
I'll take that in.
And I want to thank you for coming here today and for sharing with us your knowledge and
wisdom.
It went places I didn't anticipate.
And as always, I learned from you.
As I started off today's conversation by saying you've completely changed my life because
I do things differently every single day.
I look at the friction points of like, I don't want to do this as like opportunities.
and I do think it's made my life better and hopefully me better for the other people in my
life. I also curse you every day. I decided to save this to the end. I have a 72 pound kettlebell
set in my living room. And when I wake up in the morning, I pick it up and I suitcase, carry it
back and forth once with one arm. And I suitcase, carry it back and forth with the other arm. And
the entire time I'm cursing you because it hurts. It doesn't feel good to do first thing in the
morning. My grip isn't as strong as it is in the mid-morning after a cup of coffee. And I have this
little forearm twinge thing. But I told myself if I do this every single day, then I'll be able to
continue to do it the rest of my life. It'll probably make me live longer. And that's a
Michael Easter cursing carry process done every single day. So you've changed my life for the
better in some painful ways that pay off, certainly with less pain down the road,
and certainly with more meaning.
So I really want to thank you for everything you're doing.
You put so much intention and heart into what you're doing.
And thanks also for sharing a bit about addiction,
about the value of going to meetings
and the landscape that we're all facing out there.
It's not easy, but you're making it better.
I appreciate it.
I'll make you a deal.
I'm going to do the same thing every morning.
I'm going to get my 72-pound kettlebell,
and I'm going to join you in those morning walks,
and then I will be cursing your name.
from now on. So it'll be fair. Perfect. Appreciate you. Come back again.
Yeah. Thanks, man.
Thank you for joining me for today's discussion with Michael Easter. To learn more about his work, his books, and to find links to the Substack that he mentions throughout today's episode, please see the show note captions.
Michael has generously made the Substack articles mentioned during today's episode available to Huberman Lab podcast listeners at zero cost. You can find that link in the show note captions as well.
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For those of you that haven't heard, I have a new book coming out.
It's my very first book.
It's entitled Protocols, an Operating Manual for the Human Body.
§14Transcript — part 14
This is a book that I've been working on for more than five years, and that's based
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And it covers protocols for everything from sleep to exercise to stress control, protocols
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And of course, I provide the scientific substantiation for the protocols that are included.
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