Learn To Embrace Discomfort - Michael Easter

Michael Easter is a contributing editor at Men's Health magazine, columnist for Outside magazine and Professor at the University of Nevada. The world is pretty comfortable right now. Between air conditioning, Amazon Prime, Deliveroo, Netflix, Google Maps, soft beds and automatic cars, you can get through big stretches of life without encountering any real discomfort. Michael has spent years researching why discomfort is so important to our health and fulfilment, and how to reintroduce it to your life. Expect to learn why rites of passage no longer happening in modern life is a huge loss, how Michael survived an entire month in the Alaskan Arctic, how an annual challenge with a 50% chance of failure can change your life, what nosey airport security staff can teach us about human nature, why boredom is good for you, how to overcome trauma and much more... Sponsors: Join the Modern Wisdom Community to connect with me & other listeners - https://modernwisdom.locals.com/ Get over 37% discount on all products site-wide from MyProtein at https://bit.ly/proteinwisdom (use code: MODERNWISDOM) Get 15% discount on the amazing 6 Minute Diary at https://bit.ly/diarywisdom (use code MW15) Get 10% discount on your first month from BetterHelp at https://betterhelp.com/modernwisdom (discount automatically applied) Extra Stuff: Buy The Comfort Crisis - https://amzn.to/3umNyQB Follow Michael on Instagram - https://www.instagram.com/michael_easter/ Get my free Reading List of 100 books to read before you die → https://chriswillx.com/books/ To support me on Patreon (thank you): https://www.patreon.com/modernwisdom #mindset #fitness #endurance - 00:00 Intro 01:16 Michael’s Arctic Experience 07:56 Differences Between Elected & Unelected Discomfort 16:29 Problems Expand to Fill the Room Assigned for Them 28:32 Rites of Passage in Cultures 40:14 The Doctor who Fixed the Patriots 50:10 Curing the Discomfort of Boredom 1:02:55 How to Begin Mastering Discomfort 1:05:32 Where to Find Michael - Join the Modern Wisdom Community on Locals - https://modernwisdom.locals.com/ Listen to all episodes on audio: Apple Podcasts: https://apple.co/2MNqIgw Spotify: https://spoti.fi/2LSimPn - Get in touch in the comments below or head to... Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/chriswillx Twitter: https://www.twitter.com/chriswillx Email: https://chriswillx.com/contact/

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

  We're always going to have problems in life. Learning to live well is accepting that we are going to have problems and face challenges, but that will often come out on the other side of them better if we accept that and act accordingly.

• 0:14Chris Williamson?

  Michael Easton, welcome to the show.

• 0:16Speaker 00

  Hey, thanks for having me. I'm excited to be here.

• 0:18Chris Williamson?

  Me too, man. Why are you interested in discomfort? Seems like a weird thing to be interested in.

• 0:24Speaker 00

  I guess it, yeah, it kind of is. So my background is I've been a health and performance journalist my entire career. So I worked at Men's Health for a pretty long time in the US. And pretty early in my career, I noticed that everything that I was writing about in terms of lifestyle health and how to improve your health, I usually had to go through some form of discomfort to see a benefit. So if I want to improve my fitness, I have to work out. Working out sucks, right? If I want to lose weight, probably going to have to eat less. I'm going to be hungry. Being hungry sucks. Even mental health, improving your mental health, right? You usually have to unpeel some sort of psychological onion and get to the bottom of what is causing this issue, right? And that can often be uncomfortable. So I noticed that. And then

• 1:08Speaker 00

  I just had a handful of events in my life that really sort of cemented that concept. And yeah, that led me to ultimately write The Comfort Crisis.

• 1:16Chris Williamson?

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

• 1:24Speaker 00

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

• 1:37Chris Williamson?

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

• 1:45Speaker 00

  Yeah, well, it's almost like it's got the same vibe. And then all of a sudden, it's like, oh, we killed the animal. Yeah. No, they're really interesting, though. And I think that what's important about him is he's really changing how hunting is perceived and how it's practiced. He's kind of at the forefront of this movement that's really changing hunting. So I met him through doing a story about him in Men's Health a handful of years, maybe five, six years ago. And we just stayed in touch, right? And the story was super popular in Men's Health. We stayed in touch. And he calls me up one day and he goes, hey, I'm going up to the Arctic for more than a month. Do you want to come along? And you know, my initial reaction is, uh, hell no.

• 2:28Speaker 00

  But he's a good salesman. He gets in on the sales pitch, right? He's like, dude, it's gonna be the most epic adventure you could ever be on. We're gonna see grizzly bears, packs of wolves. We're gonna climb ancient mountains and cross glacial rivers and on and on and on, right? And I live in Las Vegas and I'm at home, sitting on the couch in my air-conditioned home, you know? And I'm thinking to myself, yeah, that sounds like me, you know? So I sign on and, uh, yeah, I start training. I get my plane tickets up there. I have to totally like overhaul how I'm living to get, uh, prepared for a journey like that. And we ended up spending more than a month up in the Arctic on this pretty epic, uh, backcountry hunt.

• 3:11Speaker 00

  So we were, you know, hundreds of miles from other people. I mean, middle of nowhere. It's like, middle of nowhere. And, uh, it was uncomfortable. And I think, you know, what I, what I drew from that is, um, we have, we as humans have really engineered, uh, comfort into our lives in so many different ways. I mean, I think that there's ways that are, uh, quite obviously graspable. So the fact that we don't really need to put physical effort in to live anymore, right? Like you could have 1,000 steps a day and be fine, right? Would not have been possible a thousand years ago. Cause you're having to hunt and gather for your food, whatever it might be.

• 3:52Speaker 00

  Um, we live in, we live at 72 degrees now, right? We have food that is easily accessible. We don't necessarily have to work for it. But we've even put in things like, you know, people tend to feel uncomfortable in silence. Well, today we've like raised the, the, um, loudness of the world like fourfold and on and on and on. So in the book, I really single out these, what I consider really important forms of discomfort, um, that we evolved to face that naturally kind of keep us healthy, that we have engineered out of our lives.

• 4:24Chris Williamson?

  What was the scariest or most uncomfortable part of the trip that you took up to the Arctic?

• 4:30Speaker 00

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

• 5:02Chris Williamson?

  I was gonna say, the most dangerous part of the trip was getting there.

• 5:05Speaker 00

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

• 5:31Chris Williamson?

  Where were you on the Arctic? Because obviously it's a big ring above. What were you directly above?

• 5:37Speaker 00

  Yeah, so we were in the Alaskan Arctic. We're about maybe 150 miles above the Arctic Circle.

• 5:44Chris Williamson?

  Pretty high, then?

• 5:45Speaker 00

  Yeah, pretty high. There's a, there's an area called the No-Attack National Preserve, which is where we were.

• 5:52Chris Williamson?

  What was the day and night cycles like, based on the time of year you were there?

• 5:56Speaker 00

  Pretty long days. I think the sun would go down at maybe, I'm having trouble remembering, like maybe 10? And then it would, I don't know what time it got up, because I was always so tired at the end of the day that I would just like, you know, sort of sleep in and be up. But what was interesting is that we were so high that we were losing, I think it was like six or seven minutes every single day. So being up there for that long, it was like, you know, when we first got up there, the sun is going down at whatever it might be, 10, 11. By the time we left, it was, you know, much earlier. In just thirty days. Yeah.

• 6:28Chris Williamson?

  Have you read Injurance by Alfred Lancing about Sir Ernest Shackleton's trip across the Antarctic? Have you ever read that?

• 6:35Speaker 00

  I haven't. Oddly enough, everyone recommends it to me. It's on my list, but I haven't read it.

• 6:40Chris Williamson?

  Add another person to the list of those that are annoying you about the fact that you need to read that, but.

• 6:46Speaker 00

  Right on.

• 6:47Chris Williamson?

  Dude, hearing that, because they're out there for, I think, the best part of two years. And when you hear about just how savage those conditions are, you know, electing to go and do that, I suppose there is glory associated with it, but the glory of whatever it was, 1914, I think they left, they left like three days after World War I was announced. And what happened was, they sent a letter, maybe even to the king, I think Shackleton sent a letter to the king saying, I understand that I'm taking 20 good men of fighting age, some of whom have experience in war, and on yomping to the other side of the planet

• 7:30Chris Williamson?

  to go and do this stupid thing, we'll stop all of it, we'll keep endurance in port, which was the name of the boat, and we will come back and fight. And they waited for a couple of days, and they just got a letter, a telegram that said, go. So they got to go, which is pretty dope.

• 7:46Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 7:47Chris Williamson?

  But dude, hearing what they had to put up with, and the fact that you elected to do that is, do you think, this is something I think about all the time, the difference between elected and unelected suffering, or elected and unelected discomfort, you know, the difference between things being hard in life because you've elected to go and do a difficult CrossFit workout, or things being hard in life because you've just snapped your Achilles.

• 8:14Speaker 00

  Totally.

• 8:15Chris Williamson?

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

• 9:00Speaker 00

  So yeah, I'll answer that two ways. First off, you have to realize it's like, Why do we want to be comfortable in the first place? Why do humans tend to always do the next easiest thing? It's because for millions of millions of years, we lived in these environments of discomfort, where life was inherently hard, right? There was not enough food, we had to work for that food. There was danger, there was a lot of risks that were wired to avoid all risk. Alright, so doing the least risky, easiest, most comfortable thing, that kept us alive, right, that gave us a survival advantage. Great. Well, recently, especially within the last hundred years,

• 9:42Speaker 00

  our environments have tipped to those of comfort, where now it is very easy to just do the easiest thing, right? We've sort of engineered comfort into our lives. We still have this drive to do the next most easy thing. So I think that's why we need to consciously think about inserting discomfort back in our life, however that may be, right? So we choose to do a CrossFit workout and undergo that suffering as a replacement for the suffering we used to have in the past, right? That now keeps us healthy and fights back against this environment we lived in, we now live in, that's taken movement from our day, that's put a ton more food into our lives than we ever had before, right? So it's kind of an antidote.

• 10:27Speaker 00

  And then the second part, the way I'll answer that, is that when you look at the research on people who have faced trauma, or hardship, or challenge in their life,

• 10:41Speaker 00

  people who have faced a ton of that kind of stuff, they have a lot of mental health problems, okay? But at the same time, people who have not faced really any challenges, or trauma, they have equally poor rates of mental health. So there is a sweet spot, where you need enough challenge in your life, and this is stuff that is unplanned, but not too much. So part of it is finding that sweet spot, and I think that a lot of times what you find is that people in retrospect, so long as they haven't gone through complete hell... They look back and report, oh, that was actually a blessing because it led me to XYZ. Now, that could just be some weird quirk in the human brain.

• 11:23Speaker 00

  I don't really care what it is. I just care that it tends to make people more resilient.

• 11:28Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, whether you're post hoc-ing it or not, if you come out the other side and you feel better, then it's like the, it's like an experiential placebo pill, kind of. And if it works, it works. I read a study a while ago that said 66% of people report post-traumatic growth rather than post-traumatic stress after going through something. And I then read another study which refuted that, which is just like the problem of epistemics in the 21st century, I suppose, that for every study that says something's good, there's another one that says that that might be wrong. But from my own personal experience, absolutely. The times when I've gone through something which has been unelected and difficult,

• 12:09Chris Williamson?

  maybe that's because I haven't crossed that threshold into something which would be unrecoverably traumatic. And that's what you're saying, kind of there is a sweet spot between the two. You know, some absolute catastrophe of losing your entire family in a plane crash or something is probably pushing it a little bit far. But, you know, snapping an Achilles or having to deal with being poor for a while or having to deal with, you know, losing a person that you really loved or whatever, you know, difficult breakup and stuff like that. A lot of the time, when you look back, those are the lessons that expedited growth and really took you to the next level in life.

• 12:49Speaker 00

  Yeah, I think so. And I mean, a lot of it is how, you know, I think that between the event happening and the processing of it over the long run, there's often a choice. Right? It's like, how am I going to, how am I going to frame this? And I think that just having the right mindset going through those kinds of things can be the difference maker. And I also think that, especially today, it's like we tend to over-pathologize everything, right?

• 13:21Speaker 00

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

• 14:01Chris Williamson?

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

• 14:06Speaker 00

  No, interesting.

• 14:07Chris Williamson?

  Do you, would you imagine that one day you would wake up and all of your problems would be gone? As if you'd got to a level in a computer game and there was nothing there. You'd be bored. You'd be bored out of your mind. Problems are not going to go away. The problem that you have is the way that you think about your problems. And you can drop your problems if only for a moment, if you can. And then you need to be enlightened and you need to identify the difference between the self and all that. But the principle of problems are there. They're an inherent part of life. They're a feature, not a bug, right? And people treat them like bugs, not features. Like, no, this is, this is why you're here. You're not here to lie in a pool with a cocktail for the rest of life.

• 14:46Speaker 00

  And you, and part of what I talk about in the book, I talk about this, um, concept called prevalence-induced concept change. Now, that is a kind of a dorky way of basically talking about this concept called problem creep. And it was discovered by some scientists at Harvard, uh, maybe in 2018. Basically found that as humans experience fewer and fewer problems. We don't actually perceive ourselves as having fewer problems because we just find the next problem. But what I'm talking about in the book is that as the world has gotten better and better and better, the problems that we then find become progressively more hollow. So this explains why we have first world problems, right? So you think about it, I, I think that we'll probably all agree that compared to, let's say 300 years ago,

• 15:31Speaker 00

  3,000 years ago, the world is better, right? We're less likely to go hungry. We're less likely to, you know, toil in a field under a king who gives us like these meager rations. Uh, our kids are less likely to die at any given moment. But when you poll people, only 6% of Americans at least, now we're pessimistic bastards. Um, only 6% of people say that the world is improving. And it's because we're always moving the goalposts. We're always just searching for the next problem. And so I think when you apply that to daily life, it just totally messes with your perspective on things. Cause you can either like, kind of have these moments where you're just pissed off. Cause like, oh, I was like for my yoga class, right? Or you can be like, man, this is ridiculous that I'm living in temperature control and have access to food.

• 16:16Speaker 00

  And like, this is amazing. And I'm not saying the world doesn't have problems that we should solve, but like, in the grand scheme of time and space, our problems now are, you know, not that bad. Some of the bigger ones like global warming, withstanding, I guess.

• 16:29Chris Williamson?

  Are you familiar with Parkinson's Law? Do you know what that is?

• 16:32Speaker 00

  Uh-uh, I don't.

• 16:33Chris Williamson?

  Okay, so it's a law around productivity and it says work expands to fill the time given for it. So if you have three months to complete an assignment, the likelihood is that you are going to do the assignment

• 16:48Chris Williamson?

  10 minutes before it's due to be in, right? That's why you hand, hand stuff in. Work expands to fill the time given for it. It's one of the reasons that time blocking is a productivity strategy is useful because you create time bounded constraints around different bits of work that you need to do. I was talking to a philosopher friend last night on the phone who is, uh, and I quote, trying nihilism, uh, as a, as a life philosophy. Fucking hell. And he was saying basically the same thing, that ostensibly he has absolutely nothing wrong. But he believes that there is a, uh, Parkinson's Law equivalent of suffering. So suffering expands to fill the room given for it in life.

• 17:31Chris Williamson?

  If you don't have that many things going wrong, you just magnify in on things that are ever so slightly suboptimal until they become this huge big problem.

• 17:39Speaker 00

  Yeah. Yeah, that's that's basically this idea that these Harvard researchers are talking about. And it's funny, because the way that they went about studying this is there, um, there's two of them. Uh, one of them's name is David Levari. He was the main guy on the study. And the other was Daniel Gilbert, who's kind of a famous name in psychology. They're in an airport because they're traveling to a conference, right? And they're in the line for TSA. And they make this observation about TSA. Uh, and that is that they are really good at finding problems. Right? And we've, we've obviously experienced this in our life that, you know, when we go through security, it's like our bag gets ripped apart because the agent thought that this banana we had was like a nine millimeter Beretta.

• 18:21Speaker 00

  Right? Uh, or there's like some old woman in front of us who's like 90, can't see, can't hear, can't walk. She's in a wheelchair. And they give her like the full body scan down because she's got like a half filled, you know, bottle of hairspray or whatever. So these guys wonder, it's like, okay, obviously better safe than sorry. But if all of a sudden everyone started abiding by the rules. And like the scanners never picked anything up. Uh, no buzzer, the buzzers never went off when you had to stand in that weird thing. They never caught anything. Would TSA just let everyone fly through? Like, oh yeah, have a good flight, guys. Have a good flight. And they didn't think so. Because the TSA's job is to search for problems, right? So they thought they'd probably just keep finding more, um, flipping problems over time.

• 19:04Speaker 00

  So to study this, they get these groups of people and they have, uh, the first group, uh, they look, have them look at 800 different faces. So the job of the participants is to look at face after face and basically deem whether they find this face threatening or non-threatening. Okay, so they're going like threatening, non-threatening, non-threatening, non-threatening, oh, threatening. Unbeknownst to the participants, after about the 200th face, they start showing them fewer and fewer and fewer threatening faces. Now, in the second study, same setup, except it was with research proposals. And they had to deem whether these research proposals were ethical or unethical.

• 19:45Speaker 00

  Same deal. After midway through, they start giving them fewer and fewer unethical research proposals. So these things should, they should be black or white, right? Because like a face, I either find a person threatening or I don't. Some proposal either crosses this moral line I have in the sand, or it doesn't, right? But what they found is that people actually see gray. So as people started to see fewer and fewer threatening faces, they started to deem ambiguous faces as threatening. They said the same, they said threatening the same number of times, right? Same with the research proposals. They started looking at these research proposals that were kind of like pretty ambiguous as being unethical. So that's basically how they found that as people experience fewer problems in our lives,

• 20:30Speaker 00

  we don't actually experience fewer problems. We just look for more problems and deem things that are probably not problematic as problems.

• 20:38Chris Williamson?

  I noticed this when I'm at work, so I run nightlife events. And a lot of the time, the door staff will be just checking IDs, very, very similar to the TSA thing. And there'll be someone that'll come up who is exactly the same as the last 10 people. They say their date of birth, it looks like them, but then they'll, they'll feel like there's an obligation for scrutiny because whatever the scrutiny alarm hasn't gone off sufficiently for the last 10 people. Can you give me your address and your postcode? Okay, what's your postcode backwards? Okay, can you, what's your fucking star sign? They love that one, like what's your star sign? Oh yeah, because that's going to rumble this 17 year old that's using an 18 year old's ID to try and get in. But another thing that I find, that I think this shows up in is when you have, let's say that people are at work

• 21:23Chris Williamson?

  and there is a team of people that are working. A lot of the time, if you're in a meeting, people will feel the need to contribute things that don't actually have to be said. So let's say that the design, a design that gets put forward for a piece of artwork and everybody's happy with it. But there is a sense that while I'm here to make some sort of a contribution, you go, well, what, what about, what about if we, what about if we move the image? Not much, but you know, just a little bit. And it's this compulsion to. To try and find a way to contribute as well. And I think that you see that in in work settings. I know that I do it. So again, if I'm stood outside of a nightclub and the queue is absolutely fine, nothing wrong at all. But I'll walk down and I'll just move

• 22:08Chris Williamson?

  the barriers in barriers creep out in nightlife a lot. And the goal is to keep them as tight to the wall as possible. And I'll just move them a foot, half a foot, like six inches, these barriers, they're several yards wide. And I'll just go and give them a little nudge because I'm like, oh, yeah, that's fucking helped. That's made a really big difference to this queue of 418 year olds who are all drunk, that half foot that I've just moved the barriers in. But you do it because you you try and I think it it comes from a most of the time, or a lot of the time, it comes from a virtuous place. The TSA agents are doing it because they want to try and catch the crims, right? They want to make sure that people are safe on the but yeah, there's definitely a sense that people just do shit.

• 22:53Chris Williamson?

  They feel like they should be doing shit.

• 22:55Speaker 00

  Yeah. But yeah, there's actually some research around this. And the reason for this is that humans evolved to basically want to feel like they're being useful contributors to their environment. And this is not only internally, but also more importantly, so we can show socially that we're doing something and contributing to the tribe. Because if we're standing there and like, just not doing anything because we're consciously going like, yeah, I think things are pretty good, you know, but everyone else is working. Well, if we don't work, it's like, well, get the hell out of the tribe, dude, right? And then you're on your own, you're gonna get thrashed by wolves or whatever. And I love that story you told about nightlife. And I would, I would see it in my own work, like when I was

• 23:37Speaker 00

  working at Men's Health Magazine, we would do these things called wall walks. And we would get every single article that was going to be in the magazine, including the cover. And we would go, we would go over what the headline was going to be. And it was literally like, you know, someone would throw out a really good idea. But one person would be like, I don't know that. I don't know. And then we'd have to like, go on to another one. And these would take hours and hours and hours, right? Now, before these started happening, which is hilarious, is that there was this, there was this guy who ran the magazine, and he and the number two at the magazine would just go to a bar, and they would sit down with the entire magazine, and they would do this themselves. And at that point, the magazine was selling way more, right?

• 24:21Speaker 00

  So it's like, here we have this massive group of people all spending time on this little thing, just being like, yeah, I don't know, I don't know. And then these two guys would just do the same damn thing, but arguably a lot more efficiently. And I think that that's sort of a good lesson too for creative work. It's like, we know feedback is really important, but do we need feedback from 10 people? Because it's like just so much noise, right? Where it's like, if you just can find one person that you really trust and you're like, this is my dude or my girl, whatever. Uh, I think that can arguably be a lot more efficient.

• 24:53Chris Williamson?

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

• 25:04Speaker 00

  I like it.

• 25:05Chris Williamson?

  There is a non-zero chance that that's going to do. And for every person that you add into the group, that increases.

• 25:11Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 25:12Chris Williamson?

  The chance that that's going to happen increases. Whereas if it's two people, you know, you can just, is it fine? Yeah, it's fine, fine, fine, fine. All right, have a chat between two people. Fine, fine, fine. Yeah, absolutely, man. When we're doing artwork amends, one of the worst things that we can do. So we, uh, we have a new DJ that's coming to play or someone's featuring or it's a Valentine's traffic light party or whatever. And we put, or a video, this is the worst one, fuck. We put a video into the group, right? With the boys and, and the, the managers, throw it in, guys, what do you think about this? And it's just a litany of problems. They've got that, that song's not cool anymore. No one listens to that. That was big on TikTok four months ago. The, I don't like the color of the font. I don't like the this, that and the other.

• 25:56Chris Williamson?

  But if you sat down with each of the boys individually and showed them it, they'd probably say that it was fine. So another part of it is the signaling as well. It's the signaling to the rest of the group. I am somebody that looks at the work with such a high level of resolution that I'm picking up the things that you're not. And that's such a, I, I see it myself. I do it as well. I want to show off that, oh, actually, maybe, maybe the alignment could be a bit better on this. I should, it's fine, it's fucking fine. People are going to be looking at it half cut at pre-drinks when they're deciding where they're going to go out in a small window on the bottom corner of something like it's, it's going on Instagram. This isn't, it's not the ending of a Christopher Nolan movie.

• 26:34Speaker 00

  Yeah, totally. And I think it's like, it's a balance, right? It's like, you want a certain quality, but at the same time, I think we need to realize that, and I have the same problem, dude, like as a writer. I'll spend like two days on two paragraphs and I've got eighty five thousand words to write. Like that is not efficient at all. And I've had to stop myself from doing that. Like I'll have a, I'll just, I, I can recognize when I'm slipping into it and it's just like, dude, let it go. The average person is not gonna know, is not gonna notice anything, right? And it's, yeah, I think it's a definitely a tendency.

• 27:06Chris Williamson?

  There's a quote from Tiago Forte that he tweeted a couple of years ago and it fucking, it's so mad. People put stuff out on Twitter that you keep with you. Most of Twitter is absolute horseshit, but every so often you find something like this. And he said, um, one of the interesting things about people who produce, um, high leverage work is that their content has a rough edged, half-assed quality to it because polishing things to perfection is a low leverage activity. Getting something to ninety three, ninety five percent and just shipping it. That's where most of the gains are accrued. Getting it from ninety five to a hundred percent in most areas of work makes no difference. But the time sink you're talking about to get it from nought to ninety five is one unit of time.

• 27:51Chris Williamson?

  To get it from ninety five to a hundred is two units of time. Okay, you could have done two ninety fives in the time that it took you to do one one hundred.

• 27:58Speaker 00

  Yeah, and especially when we're talking about, I mean, I work in media, so with content, it's like, people like to think they'll know what is going to do really well. We have no freaking idea. So is it better to put out like one one hundred percent piece or three ninety five percent pieces? And see what happens? Cause you, I mean, it's just more at bats, right? If you're hitting, let's say you're hitting three hundred. Well, if you go to bat three times, you're probably going to end up on base instead of if you just went to one. I'm sorry, I'm talking about baseball. You guys don't give a shit about baseball, but.

• 28:28Chris Williamson?

  Give us it in the cricket analogy, that's.

• 28:29Speaker 00

  Yeah, there's probably some cricket analogy out there.

• 28:32Chris Williamson?

  Correct. All right, you looked at, um, rites of passage of one of these symbolic landmark experiences that some cultures put people through. What did you learn there?

• 28:41Speaker 00

  Uh, so I started thinking about this because I met this guy whose name is Marcus Elliott. And there's two things you need to know about this guy is that, one, he's kind of a seeker.

• 28:52Speaker 02

  What's that mean?

• 28:53Speaker 00

  Well, I'll tell you. He's kind of like, you know, he's open to experiences. He's kind of out there. So we lived out of a VW van for a while, uh, got through college by counting cards at casinos. He was going to Burning Man like way back in the day. And the second thing you need to know about this guy is that he's super brilliant. So he gets his MD from Harvard Medical School and he decides, I don't want to be a doctor. I want to revolutionize sports science, which is a declaration that is like so grand that it's almost bordering on arrogance, right? Uh, but he actually ends up doing it. So he's the first guy who really brought in like quantification of, um, human movement and performance. So he can help, uh, he analyzes, uh, athlete movement using all this high-tech stuff.

• 29:38Speaker 00

  And then he can sort of say, hey, here's what you're really good at. We need to develop that. And also like, here's where you have this injury risk. And when we see people move like that, they have a, let's say 60% chance of tearing their ACL or something in a season. So I told you that to basically tell you that, uh, he's all into numbers and data and figures, right? But he also realizes that what improves human performance, not just of athletes, of also of the average person, it can't always be measured, right? There are certain qualities that people have that you just can't measure that makes them able to do more than other people, right? So to get to that, he does this thing that he calls, uh, Masogi. And Masogi is essentially a recreation of these rites of passage that we used to have in, in the past, that all cultures would send people out on.

• 30:24Speaker 00

  So the idea is that you're going to go out into nature and you're going to do something really, really freaking hard. And it's got to be hard enough that you're going to face this moment where you're like, man, I don't think I can complete whatever this task I'm trying to complete is. But by continuing on, you can get, reach this point where you've thought you reached your edge, but you're past it. And you can kind of look back and go, well, I thought I was past my edge. But here I am past it, right? So I've clearly undersold myself in this area of my life, which raises this question of like, where else have I sold myself short, right? So it kind of helps people expand their potential and teaches people what they're truly capable of. And it's also good at reframing fear, because if you're doing something really hard

• 31:06Speaker 00

  and you're going to be afraid of failure, we're all wired to be afraid of failure. By sort of dancing on that edge, you can kind of see like, man, yeah, failure's not really that big of a deal. And so, yeah, again, it's like this recreation of these rites of passage that we used to face all the time, that all cultures had.

• 31:21Chris Williamson?

  What are some examples of the rites of passage that his athletes have done?

• 31:26Speaker 00

  So he's done one where, they do one every year. So one, they got an 85-pound boulder and they walked it, I think, five miles underneath the Santa Barbara Channel, which is like about 10 feet deep. So one person would dive down, pick up the rock, walk this thing underwater 10 yards, come back up, the next guy would go down, on and on and on, till this rock was at point B, right? They've done ones that are a lot simpler, where it's like, we can see this mountain way off in the distance. Let's see if we can get to the top of it in 24 hours, or whatever it might be. They stand-up paddleboarded across the channel once, and they hadn't really done much stand-up paddleboarding. So the point is that it doesn't really matter how grand it is for the average person.

• 32:10Speaker 00

  There just has to be a real 50/50 shot of you accomplishing it. So like, my 50% is going to be different than your 50%, it's going to be different than your 50%. You know, it's like, if you've only run, say, 10 miles in your life, and you ask yourself, could I run 15? And you go, I probably could. Like, well, could you run 20? And you're like, ooh, I don't know if I could run 20. Go find out. Right? You're going to hit a moment where you're like, God, I really want to quit. But by not quitting, you're really going to learn something about yourself and be able to take those lessons back into your normal life.

• 32:46Chris Williamson?

  It sounds like your sports science friend was doing that as part of a group. It seems like it was a team bonding experience as well. Is there something to learn from doing it on your own versus doing it as part of a group?

• 32:59Speaker 00

  I think that if you do it as a group, you have to all be relatively equally skilled because of that 50% thing. Like if you've got someone who's just a stud and then someone who like hasn't, you know, has been on the couch for the last five years. There's going to be a sort of, someone's either going to make it really easy or it's going to be really hard for that other person.

• 33:17Speaker 00

  Marcus has done them both alone and with people. So I think, you know, if you have a good group, totally try it.

• 33:24Chris Williamson?

  I have a friend who box jumped Mount Everest. So he did in, I think it took about, it took less than a day to do. So it's Jay Alderton, who has done a bunch of other shit. What the fuck else did he do?

• 33:40Chris Williamson?

  He did something else mental. The box jump was the most recent one, but he holds a couple of Guinness World Records. It used to be in some sort of armed forces.

• 33:48Speaker 00

  Okay.

• 33:48Chris Williamson?

  Then became a champion, like bodybuilding type dude, like fitness model type guy. And then decided to do these ridiculous, but yeah, box jumped Mount Everest.

• 34:00Speaker 00

  Wow.

• 34:01Chris Williamson?

  Well, Cameron Haines is.

• 34:02Speaker 00

  Did they explode at the end?

• 34:04Chris Williamson?

  He was good. So I think he, um, the form, his form was pretty good, but he was permitted to do, it's a 24 inch box. I want to say so a standard, standard box jump height, but he was doing some smart things. He had knee wraps on. He was stepping down from the box. So there was no fear about rebound, rebounding. I think he was landing, landing fairly soft and he was allowed to put his hands on his knees if he wanted to. And I don't know whether he had to reach like triple extension at the top either. I think he just had to get to the top of the box. Which, you know, all of these things are, they're small, but when you're doing it 20,000 times or whatever it was throughout the day.

• 34:44Speaker 00

  Yeah, it would be like 15,000 box jumps if you do the math.

• 34:46Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, something like that.

• 34:47Speaker 00

  24 inches. Yeah.

• 34:48Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, something like that. Well, I mean, Cameron Haines's son just beat David Goggins's pull up record in 24 hours, didn't he?

• 34:57Speaker 00

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

• 35:11Chris Williamson?

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

• 35:22Speaker 00

  Um, I think the sacredness happens in those moments where you think

• 35:26Chris Williamson?

  Fucking hard.

• 35:27Speaker 00

  Yeah, where you're like, no, I gotta, I gotta quit. But then you don't quit. I mean, I've done, so I've started doing something like this every year. And it totally is where you're like, no, can't finish this. But for whatever reason, you just kind of keep going. And it's like, oh, holy shit. You know, I think that's when it really sets in.

• 35:45Chris Williamson?

  What was your one last year?

• 35:47Speaker 00

  Um, I've done some, I did a running one last year. So I'd only run 16 miles. The farthest I'd run at one time was 16 miles and I did like 50.

• 35:58Chris Williamson?

  Shit.

• 35:58Speaker 00

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

• 36:41Chris Williamson?

  It's not social media flex. Yeah.

• 36:43Speaker 00

  Yeah, exactly.

• 36:44Chris Williamson?

  One of the problems that you have, that's great. And I really like that idea that that's sacredness as well, right? Doing it for its own sake. However, I don't know whether you've seen 75 Hard, which is a challenge that a lot of people are doing at the moment. It's just like,

• 36:59Speaker 00

  Yeah, a lot of people are doing that.

• 37:01Chris Williamson?

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

• 37:17Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 37:17Chris Williamson?

  Those sorts of movements, I think you're going to see those increasingly kind of like social powered, simple, stoic-esque.

• 37:26Chris Williamson?

  All encompassing lifestyle changes and something like this, you know, if you were to do an equivalent of sober October, which was, it was and still is quite big or Dry January, if you were able to do something like that, I think that you would get a lot of people bought into this idea, but it's inherently self defeating because the advertisement of it, I suppose there would be a way to say, look, you can do this as a part of it and almost have the fact that you're not supposed to advertise it as one of the elements, that you know, you do, you do this, maybe you could follow the page or, you know, be a part of the group or whatever, and you would maybe be able to speak to the, those people that were within it, but outside of that, you don't, you don't talk about it.

• 38:07Speaker 00

  Yeah, I think, I mean, yeah, I think you make a really great point. I think it could potentially be a closed group, or it's just like, hey, I'm doing this, here was my experience. And maybe you just talk about it more vague, you know, you know, it's like the Fight Club rule, you don't talk about Fight Club.

• 38:23Chris Williamson?

  Have you seen the Liver King on Instagram?

• 38:27Speaker 00

  Dude, uh, yeah.

• 38:30Chris Williamson?

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

• 38:39Speaker 00

  Yeah, for sure, for sure. He's, he's an interesting cat, someone, I had never heard of him and one of my friends texted me about him and was like, dude, you gotta see this guy. I think it was more just based on the fact that he's eating so much raw meat, which I think, um, yeah, yeah. So.

• 38:56Chris Williamson?

  You don't know what to say. I think it would be cool. I've, I'm in contact with his team about podcasts and stuff, but yeah, I haven't really heard anybody go deep. There's not been a, you know, men's health article written on him yet, or any of that sort of stuff. And, um, that, yeah, that mystique kind of adds a little bit. I, it wouldn't surprise me if you see him on something like a Rogan at some point soon.

• 39:20Chris Williamson?

  Just because he's so, he's very intriguing, you know, say what you want about him, like he's an intriguing guy.

• 39:27Speaker 00

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

• 40:12Chris Williamson?

  Go on Rogan, Brian, that's what we want. Uh, talk to me about the guy that fixed the Patriots.

• 40:18Speaker 00

  Oh, that was Marcus.

• 40:19Chris Williamson?

  Oh, that was the dude. That was the same guy. So was that the Patriots that he's got doing these crazy things?

• 40:25Speaker 00

  So he, um, he worked with the Patriots. That was his first job out of college, uh, out of medical school. So he worked for them. I can't remember how many years, but he was there when they were winning some Super Bowls. One of the main things he did is that they had, I think it was like 26 hamstring injuries in a season and he was able to drop that number down to three, right? So that, that really helped them. So now he's got contracts with the NBA. Um, he works with some NFL teams. He worked with MLB people. He works with some world soccer, NASCAR. And yeah, what he does is he basically, he doesn't make anyone do a Masogi because it's totally an elected thing, right? But he tells all those

• 41:06Speaker 00

  athletes that come through about it and some of them do it with him. And he does say too, he says, uh, There are people who hear about it and they go, no, I'm not doing that. Like hell no. He's like, the people who are like, I'll do that. And out of doing it, he's like, those are the dudes that like, have it, have that extra element. Like at the end of the game, you give them the ball type people. There's just, you know, something about them. Like if someone says they'll do that with me, I'm like, that person's gonna be fine in their career. So.

• 41:35Chris Williamson?

  What, what, did he have anything to say if you fail your Masogi? Cause obviously, you know, if there's a 50% chance of you failing it, then a good group of people are not going to get this done. You know, feelings of disappointment or insufficiency might crop up if you do that. Did you have any insight around that?

• 41:53Speaker 00

  I think that there's still lessons there though. Right? So he talked, he talked to me about one where he was gonna do a rim to rim to rim of the Grand Canyon. And so it's like 45 miles maybe, but it really what kills you is the elevation change. It's, it's a lot. Alright, cause you start at like 8,000 feet and in just a handful of miles, you're down to 2,000 or like 1,000 feet or something. I mean, it's more than 20, 20,000 feet of elevation change, easy. Well, more like 40 actually, if you do the math, cause you're going down and then you're going back up. And his knees just blew up on the way down. And so he got to the top of the north. He started the south rim, went down,

• 42:35Speaker 00

  went across canyon bottom, went up, started to go back down. And it was just like, I'm gonna have to get helicoptered out of here, you know? But he talked about how like that it's still an amazing lesson, cause there's so much adventure in that. And you know, he was like, even though I had to stop, I was able to get farther than I anticipated. Once things started going south, like it's still an amazing experience that you're gonna learn from. 50/50, you should, like if you are doing something like this every year and you succeed, you're doing it wrong. Cause there's so much in life now that we choose to do, but we know we're going to succeed. I mean, think of how people approach running a marathon.

• 43:14Speaker 00

  They don't go, I don't know if I can run a marathon. They say, I don't know if I can run a marathon in four hours or whatever some time goal is, right? We know we're going to be able to accomplish the things that we're going to try. But we just like set these kind of artificial time goals too. So one of the ideas here is like, I want a true 50 50 shot. Every other year I should be failing, more or less.

• 43:37Chris Williamson?

  You say that humans are wired to believe that we can, that we're far less capable than we actually are as well. I suppose evolutionarily that makes sense. If you were this like hubris filled asshole, you'd be dead within, you know, you wouldn't make it out of you the single digit years of your life. You'd have tried to, I don't know, tightrope walk across a branch over a lion's den. I said, oh yeah, yeah, yeah. Fine. I'll be sweet. And then very dead.

• 44:04Speaker 00

  Oh yeah, those genes would have died off, right? Whereas on the other, on the other hand, if you're a person who's going, no, I'm not going to do that. Like, that's ridiculous. But you get thrust into that situation, which used to happen to us all the time, right? But you're able to make it out. Then that gives you a survival advantage. So we chronically undersell our potential and there is a good reason for that.

• 44:25Chris Williamson?

  How can people push themselves emotionally or mentally?

• 44:29Speaker 00

  Uh, I think pairing the emotion and emotionally and physical stuff with what we're talking about right now is important, right? But in terms of like relationships too, I think that dudes especially are just like freaking terrible with like opening up and honestly, like having those conversations with a loved one or whatever you need to, you know, be open with people is just as tough sometimes for people as like doing this kind of physical stuff. It's like, I don't know, like I know plenty of people who could probably run 100 miles right now. If you asked them, be like, yeah, I got this, right? But if you asked them to sit in silence alone with their own thoughts for five minutes,

• 45:10Speaker 00

  they would go absolutely bonkers. So I do think it's important to think like, where, what am I bad at, right? And sort of dive into that. So like for me, I've done these physical ones, right? But I haven't done like a real psychological one. So I'm thinking of doing some like extended meditation retreat or something, just to see what the hell is going on up here that, you know?

• 45:35Chris Williamson?

  Meditation retreats an awesome idea for a ritual, you know, a rite of passage. Yeah, there's a, a concept I learned from Isaiah Berlin called the inner citadel. Have you heard of this?

• 45:47Speaker 00

  Mm hmm. I haven't.

• 45:48Chris Williamson?

  Dope, fucking. Dope insight. So when the world around us doesn't give us something that we want, a lot of the time, we recede into ourselves into this sort of walled off garden, retreat into an existential inner citadel. So one of the examples would be if you were in a war and your leg got wounded, you might try and treat the leg. And if you couldn't, you would chop the leg off and announce that the desire for legs is misguided and that nobody should have legs at all. And I never wanted legs in the first place. You see this, it appears in tons of different areas, right? So in the diet industry, you know, you have fat acceptance and body positivity, which is, I don't need to lose weight. The

• 46:33Chris Williamson?

  world needs to accept me at the weight that I am. Your conception about what an ideal body or your idea of fitness is, is inherently wrong. I'm fine as I are. Or another one that you see in relationships a lot is polyamory. You know, how many people are desiring to be polyamorous because that's their genuine compulsion and they believe in it? And how many of them just struggle to hold down a successful monogamous relationship? So polyamory becomes their inner citadel and they retreat into this, right? They chop the leg off, announce that the desire for being single and monogamous is misguided. And this inner citadel thing comes up with what you're talking about, that you have people whose capacities may be totally extreme in one domain, just a freak, strength, endurance,

• 47:16Chris Williamson?

  some sort of physical attribute, but say, hey, man, would you go to five sessions of counselling with your wife and sit down and genuinely go through the way that you feel?

• 47:27Chris Williamson?

  That's their citadel, right? They're going to retreat into where they find their comfort, which is the physical pursuit. Or for women, you know, the reverse might be true, or it might be something to do with body image, or it might be something to do with being disagreeable or being forthcoming, you know? But yeah, that inner citadel thing appears fucking everywhere.

• 47:48Speaker 00

  No, I think you're absolutely right. And a lot of it too is, I mean, this is, I don't know if it's related, but it just made me think about it is sort of like.

• 47:59Speaker 00

  A lot of people have unhealthy behaviors. But their unhealthy behaviors are things that society celebrates. So it's okay, right? So if I, if I inject heroin or smoke weed every single day, I'm an addict. If I thrash myself in the gym, I'm a hero, right? But at the same time, it's like, people use those behaviors because they don't want to deal. It's covering up some other thing that they don't want to deal with. So to your example about the person who can do all this crazy stuff in the gym, but won't like have this conversation. It's like, you're just compensating for this. Like you're using this as a tool to like, deal with this other thing that you're not addressing. Right?

• 48:38Speaker 00

  And it's just like, what are people using to, to sort of deal with this larger problem? Um, and there's a range of social acceptability.

• 48:49Chris Williamson?

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

• 49:09Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 49:10Chris Williamson?

  However, it doesn't stop the fact that the fundamental mechanism, which both people are following is one of escape. That person is escaping from something. And I think that this is why you're seeing psychedelics amongst a particular group of people have such a, a renaissance, so much popularity at the moment, that it strips away your ability to hide from the things that you've been hiding from for a very long time.

• 49:36Speaker 00

  Totally. Yeah, I think you nailed it.

• 49:39Chris Williamson?

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

• 50:05Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 50:05Chris Williamson?

  Ayahuasca is coming in with a huge fucking catapult. And it's gonna annihilate it. What about boredom? Cause this is something that I think has been completely eroded, obviously, by the invention of the smartphone. But that's a type of discomfort as well.

• 50:22Speaker 00

  Yeah, so I started thinking about this because when we're up in the Arctic, we're hunting, right? I think a lot of people think that hunting is like this action-packed thing. It's not. It's a lot of waiting.

• 50:30Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, it's waiting. That's what it is.

• 50:32Speaker 00

  It's a lot of waiting because we're hunting caribou as they're migrating, right? So we're sitting on these hills, waiting for these animals to come through and they're not coming through.

• 50:42Speaker 00

  We're like all day, right? So I didn't bring my cellphone. I didn't bring a computer. I didn't bring an iPad. I didn't bring a book. I didn't bring a magazine. I didn't bring all this stuff, right? So all of a sudden I find myself bored again, right? Just this like, oh, the hell's this? Uh, so we had to come up with creative ways to deal with our boredom, right? So we would read the labels on all the food we brought up, you know? We would read the label. We would read the tags on our jackets. So it was like, oh, this is coated in something called dermazak. Wow, interesting. Sounds like an acne medication, right? We would, I did more pushups than I'd ever done in my life because it's like, oh, I guess I'll just do some pushups. What the hell else am I going to do? Uh, came up with a bunch of story ideas for the magazines I wrote for, wrote some of the book,

• 51:25Speaker 00

  did all this shit, came up with the Christmas list for all the people I know, like for the next five years, right? So I basically told you that to say that like, if I were at home, this is radically different than how I would have dealt with boredom. Because I would have just dove into a screen, whether that be my cellphone, whether that be Netflix, whatever. But when you think about boredom from an evolutionary context, it's essentially this evolutionary discomfort that told us, whatever you are doing with your time right now, the return on your time invested has worn thin and you need to go do something else. Tells us to go do something else. So imagine that you and I are hunting and we, it's a million years ago, we actually need dinner, right? Or we're going to starve to death and die. Well, if the animals, animals weren't rolling through and we knew we weren't going to get anything,

• 52:10Speaker 00

  boredom would kick on and be like, yeah, well, you want to go pick some potatoes or something? Like, that's a better use of our time, right? So it's this evolutionary discomfort that tells us to do something. And that something that we used to do in our past was often productive and improved our lives. Nowadays, when it kicks on, we have easy, easy escapes from it. So I talked to this one neuroscientist that basically told me the way that we deal with boredom now is like junk foods for our mind. Right? We just pull out our phone anytime we feel the lightest twinge of it. We're not forced to introspect and come up with something else to do. And this definitely has consequences. So it's associated with all the, the rising rates of anxiety and burnout that people face.

• 52:51Chris Williamson?

  Why is that?

• 52:52Speaker 00

  Uh, so when you're, when you're focusing on the outside world, like on a screen. Okay. And, and one thing that I'll add too, is that the average person now spends 12 hours a day engaging with digital media. More than 12 hours a day. I mean, it's crazy amount of media, right? And this is all stuff that's a hundred years, uh, at most a hundred years old. So when you're focusing on the outward world, your brain is actually working really hard. It's a, it's a work state. When you have these moments where you have to go internally and you're sort of mind wandering, that's a rest state for your brain. So your brain sort of relaxes and revives. So nowadays we spend with all this media we take in, we spend so much time in that work state and so few times, so little time in

• 53:37Speaker 00

  that sort of rest state that our brain just becomes overworked and it's just like way too much outward stimulation and focusing. So it seems to be that that is sort of what's driving a lot of like the burnout and just feeling like, oh God, like mentally fatigued. Right? Whereas if we spend time bored, we're going to have this moment where we kind of go inward, we mind wander for a while. And eventually we spit out something to do.

• 53:58Chris Williamson?

  So boredom is restorative in a way.

• 53:59Speaker 00

  Restorative. Yes, exactly. Um, it also increases creativity. So this is pretty interesting. Some of these studies I love are that, uh, they will take two groups of people. They will let one group do whatever the hell they want. They'll put them in a room and usually people just pull out their cell phone, right? And just start scrolling, do whatever. Then they'll take another group and they will bore the living hell out of these people. And then they'll give them a creativity test and the bored group always comes up with more, more creative answers than the non-bored group. And that's simply because their minds have had time to go internally, to rest, to sort of reset. And good ideas seem to come out of that. And then there's also the fact of like, You think about that William James quote, it's basically like your life is essentially

• 54:44Speaker 00

  a collection of that which you were aware of. Well, we're now aware of 12 hours of screen stuff every single day, right? So our life has effectively become Instagram, Netflix, whatever. So when I talk about this, you hear the message of like, we need to spend less time on our phones a lot. And I think that's obvious. It's like, spend less time on your phone, spend less time on your phone. Yeah, everybody wants to do that. Everyone gets it. But the problem is, is that when people take, say, an hour off their phone screen time, they're now go, well, what the hell do I do now? I'm bored. And then they'll like, go watch Netflix. Right? Well, your brain does not know the difference between those two things. So I advocate for thinking more boredom. And

• 55:28Speaker 00

  the way that I work that into my life is I just make sure I have 20 minutes every day, maybe go outside, take a walk where I'm just completely disconnected. I just let my brain go wherever the hell it needs to go.

• 55:40Chris Williamson?

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

• 56:22Speaker 00

  And you probably figure some things out. So you think about like, people always talk about, where do you have your best ideas? You have them in the shower, right?

• 56:29Chris Williamson?

  Dude, let me tell, let me give you the fucking life hack of the century for this. So there is a thing called a shower notepad. So it's waterproof paper with waterproof pencils. And we've got one of them in the shower upstairs. And it's a two different colored pencils. Now, the problem is that I live with two of the lads. So we just write abuse to each other in different types of pencils. So it's just like comments, comments on the fact that one of us has gained weight, or comments on the fact that somebody left some fucking dishes out last night or whatever. However, the purpose of it is that if you have an idea in the shower that you're supposed to write it down, get them on Amazon.

• 57:06Speaker 00

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

• 57:31Chris Williamson?

  Have you ever been meditating and come out of a meditation session with a to do list of things that you've thought of during the meditation session? You're like, right, so so I need to ring mom because I need to let her know about this and I need to tell my assistant about that thing and I've got that that I've got to buy the insurance for the car because the car gonna get you're like fucking hell like that wasn't the purpose of this meditation session, but alas, look at me with this fucking to do.

• 57:53Speaker 00

  Here we are, yep.

• 57:54Chris Williamson?

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

• 58:04Speaker 00

  Yeah, for sure. Well, this is really related to new experiences. So we also evolved to slip into predictable routines, right? Just kind of do the same thing over and over. And the reason for this is that gave us, again, gave us a survival advantage. If we could predict where we would find food, if we could predict, you know, where our shelter would be, on and on and on, if we had this sort of habitual routine every day, we'd be more likely to survive. Now, we still have that quirk in our modern life, but in modern life, we're not really worried about survival, right? And what happens when you've done the same thing over and over and over, your brain sort of goes into this autopilot mode. We

• 58:46Speaker 00

  don't really have to be present and aware. You're sort of just going through the motions and that seems to be associated with time going by faster. So you think about when you were a kid, right? Everything seemed to take so much longer. Well, it's because everything was new and you were constantly learning. So sort of the takeaway there is that learning and doing new things is kind of like a wake up almost. Right. It's like you're forced into presence and awareness because you don't know how to do the thing. And it can slow down time, your perception of time, which is pretty cool.

• 59:18Chris Williamson?

  Bro, you fucking nailed it. You absolutely nailed it. I've been thinking about this for so long. I put a tweet out the other day that said, um, life doesn't go past any quicker as you get older. You're just paying less attention. And I got a load of replies from people that were adamant that, no, well, it's because one year, when you're one year old, means that that's a hundred percent of your life. And one year when you're 50 years old is one fiftieth of your life. Okay, that's true, but you're not absorbing your entirety of existence all at the same time. That's not how life works. The reason that your life appears to move quicker is that you no longer have a learner's mind. You are simply paying less attention. What people mean when they say life seems to be moving so fast, where did the days go?

• 1:00:03Chris Williamson?

  Is I don't remember where the days went. Like people spend fucking months on end, doing nothing memorable with their time. And then complain that they can't remember it. It's like, bro, you're making your days forgettable. You're not doing anything that is worthy of your mind remembering it. You drive the same route to work, to and from work. That's a thousand journeys, maybe, that you've made over the last couple of years. They've all been condensed down into one memory. Think about the last time that you went away on holiday. The two, here's the two things, the two things that I've learned on my research that you want, if you want to slow your life down, a novelty and intensity. Those are the two things that you can manipulate most effectively. So think about the last time that you went away on holiday and think about,

• 1:00:46Chris Williamson?

  not who you were sat next to on the plane, because you've done plane journeys before. But if it was a new airport where you arrived and the person that greeted you at immigration and the taxi driver that picked you up outside. And dude, I went to Africa five and a bit years ago. And I remember the book that the guy who met us at reception carried under his arm as we walked down. I remember the way that his shoes look. I remember the, the favorite bird that he had from the local environment. I remember his name, Dennis, it was like a given name. He was, he was like Rwanda and he definitely wasn't called Dennis. I remember all of that. Why? Well, I can't remember the 16 digit number off the front of my fucking credit card that I've had for four years. Why is it that I can remember Dennis

• 1:01:30Chris Williamson?

  and his shoes and his book and his favorite bird, novelty and intensity?

• 1:01:34Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:01:34Chris Williamson?

  That is the way to slow down life. So for the people, and this is, you know, it's a reminder for me as well. I get pissed that it's the same. It's your routine that's causing that to happen. Vary the things that you do and vary the route that you drive to work. It sounds so dumb, but like vary the route that you drive to work, vary where you sit in the coffee shop that you go to every day. You know, say something different to someone, go up and speak to somebody. The more that you do that, the slower that life is going to exist. And really, the goal of life, as far as I can see it, is to live a life that in retrospect, you're glad you lived. Very much of our existence is actually lived looking backward at the days that we've had, because the present moment is fleeting. The present moment exists now and now and now and now and now. It never exists for a prolonged

• 1:02:18Chris Williamson?

  period of time, but memories last forever. So the way that you can see your existence is basically that every single moment that you live can be a gift to the future version of you to look back on with pleasure.

• 1:02:30Speaker 00

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

• 1:02:56Chris Williamson?

  Where should people start with this discomfort stuff? What habits have you used in your life that are useful for creating a routine out of this?

• 1:03:04Speaker 00

  Yeah. So I kind of like lay out a whole sort of action plan in the book inherently and it's, but I think that doing one really hard thing a year, like I talked about, more time outside. I talk about really the benefits of that. And there's these different like, Doses and kinds of nature that we need to add back into our life. I think the boredom thing is huge. In the book I talk about, I get a lot into nutrition and talk about how hunger is like so important. It's this like discomfort you're gonna have to go through, right? I also talk about the benefits of carrying heavy things as a form of exercise that we've essentially engineered out of our lives.

• 1:03:43Chris Williamson?

  Liver King's got that. Fucking speak to him about it. Speak to Brian Johnson about it. Liver King's carrying all sorts of shit.

• 1:03:49Speaker 00

  Yeah, and on and on. I mean, there's a bunch I mentioned in the book for sure.

• 1:03:55Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, one of the things that he does, fucking the Liver King podcast here, one of the things that he does is he purposefully creates a physiological hunt before he breaks a fast. Have you seen this that he does?

• 1:04:10Speaker 00

  I haven't, no.

• 1:04:11Chris Williamson?

  So he'll do a workout that finishes with a carry prior to breaking a fast. And say what you want about him, but that is a really smart way to replicate evolutionarily what we would have done. Chase something down, little bit of a workout, some monostuctural stuff, maybe he's on a assault bike or a rower or something like that. And then he'll do a heavy carry at the end of his workout. And you think, I don't know if you can physiologically replicate that in a more convenient way, or if it really, really matters too much. But if you want to get close to what you were doing, doing some monostuctural cardio for maybe, you know, an hour, and then carrying a heavy thing for half a mile or a mile is

• 1:04:54Chris Williamson?

  probably a pretty fucking good way to replicate it.

• 1:04:58Speaker 00

  Yeah, for sure. For sure. I will say that he's probably 100 pounds more than humans would have been in the past.

• 1:05:04Chris Williamson?

  Imagine if people would look like him.

• 1:05:06Speaker 00

  It's funny because like the paleo community pictures Hunter gathers as like these jacked people. It's like, dude, they weigh like 100 pounds.

• 1:05:13Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, they were distance runners. They were endurance athletes.

• 1:05:15Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. No, but that's cool, though. I love, I love the creativity and thinking about like, I mean, it's all, it's all interesting and like it's ultimately going to benefit your life. So super cool.

• 1:05:26Chris Williamson?

  Michael Easter, ladies and gentlemen, the comfort crisis, embrace discomfort to reclaim your wild, happy, healthy self will be linked in the show notes below. What else should people follow if they want to keep up to date with the stuff you do?

• 1:05:36Speaker 00

  I'm on Instagram at Michael underscore Easter. I got a website, Easter Michael, and there's a link there to a newsletter if you want to keep up with that. And yeah, I'm easy to find. I mean, Google's a thing. You can find me there.

• 1:05:46Chris Williamson?

  So thanks, mate.

• 1:05:47Speaker 00

  All right. Thank you.

• 1:05:48Speaker 02

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  With great power comes great deniability.

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  I'm not the first then.

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  Digger. See the trailer online. Only in theaters October 2nd. Rated R. Under 17, not a minute without parent.