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How to Grow From Doing Hard Things | Michael Easter
03:05:40
My guest is Michael Easter, a professor at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas and best-selling author.
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- [00:00]
Andrew Huberman
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 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.
- [02:16]
Michael Easter
Thanks for having me, man.
- [02:17]
Andrew Huberman
You've changed my life. Really you have.
- [02:20]
Michael Easter
Tell me more.
- [02:21]
Andrew Huberman
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 down river to a friend's house. And I mean, this is the kind of stuff that nowadays you, like, you know, parents, like, lose their mind.
- [03:13]
Michael Easter
Yes, Like Moses, like.
- [03:15]
Andrew Huberman
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.
- [04:17]
Michael Easter
Amazing. I love that. That's great.
- [04:20]
Andrew Huberman
So let's talk about modern life versus ancient nervous systems. Yeah, Right. 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?
- [04:51]
Michael Easter
Well, I think that we evolved in a context where we had to do hard things all the time. Life was uncomfortable. Right. You were out. You spent 100% of your time outdoors. It was often too hot, too cold. You were physically active all day. People walk 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, right? We can live at 72 degrees. I mean, this list goes on and on and on. I could answer this question for. 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 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, right? 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 put on some fat. You didn't want to spend too much time if it was too much, 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, really.
- [07:35]
Andrew Huberman
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- [11:08]
Michael Easter
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. 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?
- [11:59]
Andrew Huberman
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, 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 so much of what we're encouraging people to do is just mimic doing what we used to do all the time.
- [12:40]
Michael Easter
It's what life used to be, right? Like I said, we spent 100% 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 you can apply this idea to everything. Like I said, even physical activity. It's like exercise is a great example to me. No one exercised in the past. 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, 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 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 mimic what we used to do in the past, I do think that when we, 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 got. What if we 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 now 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 gonna 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.
- [15:50]
Andrew Huberman
Mountain lion.
- [15:51]
Michael Easter
Mountain lion.
- [15:52]
Andrew Huberman
Have you. Have you seen mountain lions?
- [15:53]
Michael Easter
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.
- [16:00]
Andrew Huberman
I don't know. That video of that kid in Colorado, you know, where it's chasing him.
- [16:04]
Michael Easter
Oh, yeah.
- [16:05]
Andrew Huberman
Or stalking him, and we could talk about that. I totally agree. I think that optic flow, that 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'd 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, 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. Amygdala activation troughs. There's something about forward ambulation. Nerds speak for walking, running, that suppresses the fear areas of the brain. 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.
- [18:05]
Michael Easter
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.
- [18:32]
Andrew Huberman
Huge. There's a video of some hunters. It appears to be in Africa. Forgive me for not knowing exactly where it was 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 is the other way around. Are you familiar with this video?
- [19:01]
Michael Easter
No.
- [19:01]
Andrew Huberman
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 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.
- [19:47]
Michael Easter
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.
- [20:02]
Andrew Huberman
So you're a writer.
- [20:03]
Michael Easter
Yeah.
- [20:04]
Andrew Huberman
But you get into the outdoors a lot.
- [20:06]
Michael Easter
I do.
- [20:06]
Andrew Huberman
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 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?
- [20:33]
Michael Easter
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. You know, 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.
- [21:19]
Andrew Huberman
Yeah, all the time.
- [21:19]
Michael Easter
You banged yourself up, got all these scuffs on your arm. But the point wasn't to fall.
- [21:24]
Andrew Huberman
No.
- [21:26]
Michael Easter
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 Ph.D. pick their brain. But I also find that sometimes 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 have, 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.
- [23:39]
Andrew Huberman
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 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. 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 bothering me or something. You know, it's. 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, you know, 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 dissolve away, how should they start to go about that?
- [25:24]
Michael Easter
So a couple 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 where 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 more than a hundred 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 because seats are too small and cramped. Plane's too hot. The movie's 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. So if I want to drink anything, I gotta hike down to a stream and I gotta 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. 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. 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. 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. 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, 35,000ft 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 the world I came from was actually quite great. 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. 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. 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, I can't remember how many people, but they had them look at 800 different faces in a row. 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, 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 either crosses this moral line you have in the sand, or it doesn't cross it. What they found, though, is that people basically see gray. As people started encountering fewer truly threatening faces, they started judging faces that were on the borderline as threatening. 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. They're like, oh, well, there's that one line in there that's unethical. Throw it in the pile. The guy calls this prevalence induced. His name's David Lavar. He calls it prevalence induced concept change. And it basically finds that as people experience fewer and fewer problems, 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 Lovari, 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, like a. 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 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. 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 gonna. This is kind of going off on a weird path. I don't know what it'll say, 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. 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. And we need 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. 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 face, 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 if you 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? Right? So people who tend to take, like, 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.
- [36:25]
Andrew Huberman
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 0 to 5 and, you know, 5 to 10 with no particular endpoint 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. It's not, 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.
- [38:30]
Michael Easter
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 diluted yourself. Right.
- [38:59]
Andrew Huberman
Or in my case, you know, 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. But. 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 a negotiable a long time ago.
- [39:18]
Michael Easter
I could see that. I think for probably most people, exercise is going to be an uncomfortable event. That's why. What are the Federal Exercise Guidelines? 150 minutes of moderate to vigorous activity a week. Strength train twice a week. Something like 18% of Americans actually do that.
- [39:36]
Andrew Huberman
Only 18%?
- [39:37]
Michael Easter
18%? Yeah. Could be 20. You know, fact check me, I'll.
- [39:41]
Andrew Huberman
No, I believe, I believe you.
- [39:44]
Michael Easter
Yeah. Because it is uncomfortable. You know, 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 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 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 you can. And it applies to so many different places.
- [40:44]
Andrew Huberman
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- [44:04]
Michael Easter
Hell yeah. And I said, if he's listening now, I applaud him.
- [44:07]
Andrew Huberman
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, you know, 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.
- [44:48]
Michael Easter
Yeah.
- [44:49]
Andrew Huberman
He's. He's saying he goes to bed every night not sore, like sore from the gym, like sore down to the bone.
- [44:57]
Michael Easter
Yeah.
- [44:58]
Andrew Huberman
And so I want to extend a thank you from him.
- [45:02]
Michael Easter
Awesome.
- [45:03]
Andrew Huberman
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 like going to the Arctic. I want to get to the misogy 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 halls in weird places without even realizing it and I'll walk by a hole 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?
- [46:48]
Michael Easter
Yeah. So sort of my big picture answer here is my substack 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. 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 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 in 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 odd. Yeah, 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.
- [49:32]
Andrew Huberman
Certainly by calories burned.
- [49:34]
Michael Easter
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, it's so quiet. This is weird. Well, weirded out. But as time goes on, people tend to calm down. 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, who keep the TV on all day. It's not that they're watching it is 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. Like, how can we apply this to different areas? I did a post, it's called the 2% manifesto on my substack, 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.
- [51:08]
Andrew Huberman
Yeah, I agree. My trivial example about the strawberry hulls, which I always put like next to the bowl of strawberries and they'll just sit there.
- [51:17]
Michael Easter
This is actually really beneficial for me because I do that too. And my wife goes, what kind of psychopath does this? I'll be like, well, there's two of us now.
- [51:26]
Andrew Huberman
At least two of us. If you are strawberry hull, non throwawayer, 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 1 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?
- [52:58]
Michael Easter
33 days.
- [52:59]
Andrew Huberman
So more than a month. And you got a month of zenned out, blissed. Super Michael, to you and to everybody else. Right.
- [53:08]
Michael Easter
And then the crazies start to slowly.
- [53:10]
Andrew Huberman
Work their way back in, work its way back in. And I think that it's a. There's 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, hence the secondary screening and 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, like God forbid reading a book in paper form as opposed to listening to it. And I love audiobooks, but, you know, 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. 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've 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 find a nugget of understanding and get through it. And get through it.
- [54:56]
Michael Easter
Yeah.
- [54:58]
Andrew Huberman
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 that? Do you do this in all areas of your Life.
- [55:11]
Michael Easter
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. 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's 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, shit just wouldn't happen, right? Yeah, the walk's a little bit harder, of course, but magic happens there. I'd also say there's a section in the Comfort Crisis, and I've written about this a little bit in my other book, Scarcity Brains well, where I 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. 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 just 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 wanted 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 less phone, I like to think more boredom. Get yourself in a space where like boredom's gonna kick on, it's gonna be uncomfortable, your mind's gonna wander and you might find some good ideas. Yeah, you'll have some weird stuff in your brain. Of course. Let's what happens when your mind wanders? But I think you can find some interesting things out there.
- [58:41]
Andrew Huberman
Does boredom include reflection or. It's true boredom.
- [58:45]
Michael Easter
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, okay, gonna do nothing might get a little weird, might get a little uncomfortable, might be a tiny bit bored, but like, your mind's gonna go some interesting places that I think can be productive in the context of today.
- [59:17]
Andrew Huberman
I'm chuckling. Cause 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 that did seem to be guys saying that they quote, unquote, raw dogged, a terrible use of language. I didn't pick it. They would do a 10 hour flight or a 6 hour flight with no media, just sit there as a kind of sign of their toughness. I thought it was kind of interesting.
- [59:49]
Michael Easter
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.
- [60:09]
Andrew Huberman
I love it. That was not the answer I expected. Yeah, yeah, that. That trend kind of came and went.
- [60:15]
Michael Easter
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. 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 deal 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.
- [61:06]
Andrew Huberman
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.
- [61:35]
Michael Easter
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 simulation. Right. Yeah. You're not on your phone, you're removed from. Remove from the noise, and you're just kind of, oh, bam. But you got to write them down too. I found that as well. If you have a good idea.
- [61:52]
Andrew Huberman
Yeah. What's your idea? Capture mechanism. You write.
- [61:57]
Michael Easter
Yeah, I usually have a notebook on me. Just write things down.
- [62:00]
Andrew Huberman
And much like a nighttime dream where we wake up and we're like, oh, I'm going to remember this tomorrow. And then 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, Escalero's 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 inspiration unless you write it down at that moment. He really believed that in that moment it carried a certain value that you couldn't replace just by writing it down later.
- [62:40]
Michael Easter
Yeah, I agree. So I just did. For a third book I'm working on, I did this. It was about 40 days. It was 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 ride 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.
- [63:18]
Andrew Huberman
Yeah. Thoreau had an advantage by just staying in one spot.
- [63:20]
Michael Easter
Yeah, exactly. Exactly. So I took voice notes actually on my phone, and I found that to be really useful, too, 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 so I think you do need to capture it in the moment because I did find too, that I didn't really catch on to the voice note idea until maybe the second or third, fourth day of the hike. And I was 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'd just never find it. Right. So I just was like, okay, we got to use the Voice Notes tool and just take those. It was Great.
- [64:12]
Andrew Huberman
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, 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 9am 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. It 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 in training and training and training en. And then also just drop the yen. What am I. What am I teaching my brain to do on a daily basis? You go, 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, 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've. We're right where we belong. Given our, our prior behavior, we're just, we're just training up this, this trench of a bunch of noise. And then 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, it's like the overload principle of resistance training or cardiovascular exercise and increasing stroke volume. It's like the, 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.
- [66:54]
Michael Easter
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.
- [67:10]
Andrew Huberman
And then at the other end of the spectrum is the misogy concept. Could you explain misogy?
- [67:16]
Michael Easter
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 Masogi 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 that can't be measured. And he does this practice he calls Musogi. 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 Musogi 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 musogi is that you can't die. So the implication is, yeah, do something pretty hard. 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 masogi. Now, in the past, I would argue. So after I meet Marcus, he tells me about this, like, quirky masogi idea. He does. He does all kinds of weird stuff. Stuff I started sort of really doing some digging and going, all right, this is like a interesting idea. 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 masogi. 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.
- [71:00]
Andrew Huberman
I'm a huge fan of this msogi concept. So once a year picking site 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?
- [71:25]
Michael Easter
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, 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 gonna 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. 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 gotta go out to wherever it is, the Bolivian jungle, and I gotta Figure this thing out because I'm going down there to meet with this Tamaane tribe or whatever it is, or I gotta go to Iraq and investigate the drug trade. 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. Because 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.
- [74:12]
Andrew Huberman
What if you and I were to run an online experiment? This is actually serious here, where we said, okay, 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?
- [75:02]
Michael Easter
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 community element. Like, yeah, that would probably enhance in some ways the community element. And 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. Like, I know that I personally do a lot better 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?
- [76:12]
Andrew Huberman
I think we should do the experiment.
- [76:13]
Michael Easter
I think we should.
- [76:14]
Andrew Huberman
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. So, yeah, But I think this is an idea I wanted to pitch to you today. So I decided to do it on mic.
- [76:48]
Michael Easter
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 it 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, 5 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, 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.
- [77:59]
Andrew Huberman
It sounds really cool. Yeah, 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 we. I could learn from them and hear what they're doing and what they're up to and. Yeah, and. 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 from you. And to really do that, 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.
- [78:59]
Michael Easter
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 has been playing a game of tag for like 40 years or something.
- [79:11]
Andrew Huberman
Really?
- [79:11]
Michael Easter
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.
- [79:20]
Andrew Huberman
At weddings and everything.
- [79:22]
Michael Easter
Yeah.
- [79:22]
Andrew Huberman
Oh, wow. Most people are writing, that's got to be incredibly obnoxious. So they never paused the game.
- [79:27]
Michael Easter
Never paused the game. Yeah, I know. 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, that's hilarious.
- [79:40]
Andrew Huberman
This is still going.
- [79:41]
Michael Easter
I think it's still going. Yeah.
- [79:42]
Andrew Huberman
Amazing.
- [79:42]
Michael Easter
Yeah. Great.
- [79:44]
Andrew Huberman
Yeah. You know, I've said this before many times on social media, but any dopamine reward that is not preceded by substantial effort 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.
- [80:56]
Michael Easter
I think it's like that. 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 of 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, yeah, we'll be back in a minute. And so she sitting there and right as the nurse left, she immediately went to put out her pull, 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, it stands for so much. And her behavior did change afterwards. You know, she's, she's awesome. She's always been amazing. She's a, 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.
- [83:18]
Andrew Huberman
That's awesome.
- [83:18]
Michael Easter
Definitely weren't rich, but just amazing woman. And yeah, I've learned a lot from her.
- [83:23]
Andrew Huberman
Sounds like an amazing woman. I'm really happy to hear she's healthy and that moment of having left the phone in the car. Yet it's amazing how those small portals in time can open up so much. I, 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. You know, 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. It's the universal currency of motivation. 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, it's motivation, like movement towards something, redirecting our efforts and so forth. And I was thinking about this idea that 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, we're not getting these big quote unquote dopamine hits. This is why I don't like the dopamine hit model. I don't log on Instagram and go like, wow, like it's, it's no, like, it's not like coming back from a misogy and going, I lived. It's not transformative for the next month. It keeps you in the. In the rut of looking for more because it's like mental chewing gum. It's my, my dad who a long time ago, he said, be careful of. Of the Internet. I said, why? And he said, it's just mental chewing gum. Yeah. And he's very regimented guy. And so we're always spending, but then there are these things that require effort that are in. 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.
- [85:54]
Michael Easter
Yeah. And that's great.
- [85:56]
Andrew Huberman
And the other one, based on what you told me today, is reflection in states of boredom or meditation or 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. These little things that are disappointing, 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. 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? And how unimportant is it? But it's not boring because they've taught us how to make it not boring. Look at the comments. It's like, blech. It's just like, gross. It's like high school forever. But the worst part of high school.
- [87:25]
Michael Easter
That effectively trains us to use it.
- [87:27]
Andrew Huberman
So when I think about comfort crisis or scarcity brain, see, it's really about how to invest your dopamine and effort and reflection as a way to Capture more capability to lean into things. That's really, to me, what I feel like is the genius of, 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 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 onto the two things that matter most, which are effort and reflection.
- [88:13]
Michael Easter
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 to 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, okay, now that I'm doing all this investing, it's also okay 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, 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, you got all this money. Yeah, buy that, buy that thing. You don't necessarily need, but it's gonna, it's a nice little boost, you know.
- [89:48]
Andrew Huberman
I'd like to take a quick break and acknowledge one of our sponsors Function. Last year, I became a Function member after searching for the most comprehensive approach to lab testing. Function provides over 100 advanced lab tests the that give you a key snapshot of your entire bodily health. This snapshot offers you with insights on your heart health, hormone health, immune functioning, nutrient levels, and much more. They've also recently added tests for toxins such as bpa, exposure from harmful plastics, and tests for pfas or forever chemicals. Function not only provides testing of over 100 biomarkers key to your physical and mental health, but it also analyzes these results and provides insights from from top doctors who are expert in the relevant areas. For example, in one of my first tests with function, I learned that I had elevated levels of mercury in my blood. Function not only helped me detect that, but offered insights into how best to reduce my mercury levels, which included limiting my tuna consumption. I'd been eating a lot of tuna while also making an effort to eat more leafy greens and supplementing with NAC and acetylcysteine, both of which can support glutathione production and detoxification. And I should say by taking a second function test, that approach worked. Comprehensive blood testing is vitally important. There's so many things related to your mental and physical health that can only be detected in a blood test. The problem is, blood testing has always been very expensive and complicated. In contrast, I've been super impressed by function simplicity, and at the level of cost, it is very affordable. As a consequence, I decided to join their scientific advisory board, and I'm thrilled that they're sponsoring the podcast. If you'd like to try function, you can go to functionhealth.com Huberman Function currently has a wait list of over 250,000 people, but they're offering early access to Huberman podcast listeners. Again, that's functionhealth.com huberman to get early access to function. The idea that we all have to become these sickos that love, 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, real relating in person. Relating, I think, makes us feel so many things. I mean, there's so much science and psychology about this that, I mean, we definitely evolved to connect to other humans.
- [92:52]
Michael Easter
Absolutely.
- [92:53]
Andrew Huberman
So I don't think of it as meaningless relaxation to just connect with people and have a barbecue and just relax or just. What do they call it, like, Netflix and chill can be a great thing if it's not the only thing.
- [93:05]
Michael Easter
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. You know, 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 in 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, this sort of shared cause. And the Internet, I do think, can allow you to find those sort of mini tribes, you know?
- [94:25]
Andrew Huberman
Yeah, I love it. I just now allowing myself to get familiar with the Grateful Dead. I did go to a Bunch of shows because they were from my hometown.
- [94:33]
Michael Easter
Awesome. They.
- [94:34]
Andrew Huberman
California Avenue is where Draper's music and some of those Grateful Dead band members worked. And there was a great bookstore there, Printers Inc. And 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 that 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, oh, totally. Like with Phish and Dead and company, this is like an outgrowth of the. Of. 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.
- [95:15]
Michael Easter
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 we were. 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 got a hitchhike, alright? So we got a 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 gotta 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 gonna find a ride? Like, this is gonna 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 dead head on it. I picked it up, I'm like, wow, this is awesome. And this lady comes up to me and she goes, oh, you like the Dead? 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 seen them like 500 to a thousand times was her estimate 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, with people, I think can be just like a great adventure. And, like, you meet new people, like, 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.
- [96:54]
Andrew Huberman
Like, that's.
- [96:55]
Michael Easter
Yeah, that's the power of recovery groups. It's the powers in the group because you've got this 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. That'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, 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 there is a. It's much easier to only do things sort of online and sort of, you know, 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, 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 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 Substack with a lot of writers. For example, I do events that I call the Don't Die event. And it's me.
- [98:51]
Andrew Huberman
This is different than the Brian Johnson Don't Die event.
- [98:53]
Michael Easter
Yeah, it's different.
- [98:54]
Andrew Huberman
Yeah, this is the original Don't Die.
- [98:56]
Michael Easter
This is a different type of don't die.
- [98:57]
Andrew Huberman
Yeah, the original Don't Die.
- [98:59]
Michael Easter
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 substack. 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. You know, 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. Like, she was taking a shower when 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, you know, 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 at a bar.
- [101:27]
Andrew Huberman
And I love bars. I sometimes work in bars and I don't drink.
- [101:30]
Michael Easter
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, and to strike up a conversation with someone random. But I do think it is really good for us in the long term. I think too, the Internet dehumanizes people, right? It's, 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, because we got our thumbs out, you know, we're 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 toolbook 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.
- [105:06]
Andrew Huberman
It's this starting in the real world and perhaps bringing something online, you know, posting about it, writing about the great experience later, as opposed to the online experience, brought it into the world. The I have a friend, this, he's a very accomplished musician and he doesn't do his own social media. And 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're not going to talk about something that was on social media. Why would we do that? In his mind, like, why would we do that? We're here, like, why? Let's have an experience now.
- [105:45]
Michael Easter
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 m. When I talk about this and I say, you know, something I did that might seem hard for people, 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 masogi 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 masogi idea. And she goes, my masogi 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, 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. Like, oh, 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.
- [107:16]
Andrew Huberman
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.
- [107:39]
Michael Easter
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 a asterisk there that I also go to bed early. So I wake up at like, in between 3:30 and 4:30.
- [107:59]
Andrew Huberman
What time do you go to sleep?
- [108:00]
Michael Easter
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?
- [108:42]
Andrew Huberman
How does your body feel physically? Is riding 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?
- [108:54]
Michael Easter
I would say it's more mentally. You 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, work. And I. 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 3,000 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, 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 that'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.
- [110:27]
Andrew Huberman
Okay, I confess, I've never seen that one.
- [110:30]
Michael Easter
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 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.
- [110:48]
Andrew Huberman
So you're writing from about 3:30 in the morning, four in the morning until you said about four hours.
- [110:53]
Michael Easter
Yeah, four or five hours.
- [110:55]
Andrew Huberman
You're getting up to use the bathroom.
- [110:57]
Michael Easter
Yeah.
- [110:58]
Andrew Huberman
Drinking some more coffee, Some more water.
- [110:59]
Michael Easter
Yeah, I might get another coffee.
- [111:00]
Andrew Huberman
You have breakfast before?
- [111:02]
Michael Easter
Usually after.
- [111:02]
Andrew Huberman
After. And then what happens between 8am and and salt Lake City housewives.
- [111:13]
Michael Easter
After? I've got like the key core writing in. I would say that then I focus on what I not eloquently at all say would be the sort of bullshit, you know, like, oh, we got all these emails to respond to, got to do sort of this task and that task, whatever project isn't sort of like my main writing. Probably bullshit is not the right word for it because it's important stuff. But I just sort of value that writing time and then I will. Usually I 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.
- [111:54]
Andrew Huberman
Do you do caffeine before your afternoon workout? I'm just curious.
- [111:57]
Michael Easter
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, sometimes I go, so you had two 32 ounce cold brews today. Seems like a lot of caffeine for one man, you know. But what you can do, I mean.
- [112:49]
Andrew Huberman
You'Re talking to a lifelong caffeine addict here. So I, I, unless I've had a cold or a flu, I don't take breaks and I consume an outrageous amount of caffeine.
- [112:58]
Michael Easter
How much do you think you consume?
- [113:00]
Andrew Huberman
I'm gonna shock some people, but I'm very caffeine tolerant. I should say that first. And, and I'm actually a pretty mellow person.
- [113:08]
Michael Easter
Yeah.
- [113:09]
Andrew Huberman
And I've probably consume distributed from the morning until about 2 or 3pm Usually 2pm 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 know, you go, oh, chat GPT. How much caffeine is in a typical cup of coffee? It's gonna say like 150 milligrams of caffeine. If you go to like a Starbucks or a Pete's Coffee or they're brewing it much stronger than that. So a small probably has somewhere between 200 and 250. Medium was gonna 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 800-1000mg of caffeine. People like, no way. And then it got some brush back 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, 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 coffee. Caffeine from coffee. So very different. 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 9pm, wake up somewhere between 3 and 4am Most people who try and get on that schedule really struggle and they start to revert to toward the more typical schedule or the night owl schedule. But most people like me, go to bed somewhere between 10 and 11:30 at night. I can get to bed by 9:30, but it's tough to believe at 10:30 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.
- [115:19]
Michael Easter
Yeah.
- [115:19]
Andrew Huberman
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, 3am and sleep until, you know, 8, 9, 10, even 11am 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 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 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. Okay, you can invest now, you're going to spend, you're going to invest. And I think many people spend it out. 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. And that's what's happened to so many of these. I hear from a lot of young guys, 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? 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.
- [117:15]
Michael Easter
Right.
- [117:16]
Andrew Huberman
So I think there are a lot of casualties of that kind of spending out of those key hours.
- [117:23]
Michael Easter
Yeah, I think so too. And I do agree with you that it's all about finding whatever's 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 until noon and then he would start writing at like 11pm Maybe and he would go till 4 in the morning. And of course he's fueled by all this nonsense on the, 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 gotta find, you gotta find what yours are.
- [117:56]
Andrew Huberman
Yeah, it's interesting, the reliance these days on energy drinks and caffeine and supplements, some of which we've talked about in this podcast, like Alpha gpc, like 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. 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. 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.
- [118:58]
Michael Easter
Yeah.
- [118:59]
Andrew Huberman
Like just drinking a bunch of energy drinks to scroll. The Internet is truly a waste of a life.
- [119:04]
Michael Easter
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.
- [119:12]
Andrew Huberman
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, are there 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.
- [119:36]
Michael Easter
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. But if it's sort of an 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. So I usually get up and I usually bring coffee if it's an outdoor thing, just like instant crap coffee. But it tastes great out there because 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 output temperature. Right. So if it's 33 degrees outside, the water's 33 degrees, I'll drink that. And then usually just.
- [120:51]
Andrew Huberman
You don't bring a stove on these long adventures.
- [120:54]
Michael Easter
No.
- [120:56]
Andrew Huberman
Wow.
- [120:56]
Michael Easter
Yeah. Then I'll get moving on this last hike. A lot of. 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 got to hike 25 miles, you're going to have a really, really bad day. 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, 2 pounds in peanut butter, that has way more calories than 2 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 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.
- [122:28]
Andrew Huberman
Interesting.
- [122:29]
Michael Easter
Yeah. One big win that I found are these bars from. And I have no affiliation with these guys. It's. I think it's called. It's made by Met Rx and it's called the Big 100 Bars. So this is like a bar designed for straight up meatheads. Okay. But it's got like 400 something calories in. It's got 30 grams of protein. And I stumbled upon these in these little. In this little gas station. In this. The town is one gas station and 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 because 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.
- [123:17]
Andrew Huberman
As you pointed out. Very different than what you recommend people eat back home.
- [123:20]
Michael Easter
Totally.
- [123:21]
Andrew Huberman
People should probably eat exact opposite way back home.
- [123:24]
Michael Easter
Exact opposite.
- [123:25]
Andrew Huberman
Fruits, vegetables, clean meats, eggs, fish, you know, this kind of thing.
- [123:29]
Michael Easter
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, you're.
- [123:41]
Andrew Huberman
Probably gonna be all right in real life.
- [123:42]
Michael Easter
In real life.
- [123:43]
Andrew Huberman
Yeah, yeah, yeah. I definitely follow it.
- [123:44]
Michael Easter
Not on the trail. On the trail, just. Just realize you're gonna 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.
- [123:58]
Andrew Huberman
Well, it's survival out there.
- [123:59]
Michael Easter
Yeah.
- [123:59]
Andrew Huberman
You said you're losing weight even though you're consuming a ton of calories when you're out on these adventures.
- [124:04]
Michael Easter
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.
- [124:37]
Andrew Huberman
Wow.
- [124:38]
Michael Easter
Yeah. I talked to Herman Poncer at Duke and he did some back of the hand math. He was like, okay, I'm gonna 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 wave? How much did you. Okay. He thought I was probably burning about 6,300 calories a day.
- [124:55]
Andrew Huberman
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, that these outdoor adventures provide. And that's the reset to sleep and sleeping outside. There's a guy 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 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 there, 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 precedes the time we wake up, which for you comes at a God awful hour, and was able to reset those cortisol melatonin rhythms which really bookend our days and really establish regularity of circadian rhythm. So while there are a lot of things one can do, like cold showers and exercise enforced at early hours and dimming the lights, etc. 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, 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. Like this guy's psychotic in the, in the, in the good sense of the word. Right. It's awesome. No, no, it's. When I say psychotic in the form.
- [127:05]
Michael Easter
Of a good kind.
- [127:06]
Andrew Huberman
Yeah, it's a good kind. But I think most people think, okay, I could probably get away for two, three nights.
- [127:12]
Michael Easter
Yeah.
- [127:12]
Andrew Huberman
@ and Camp or talk to someone who knows how to backpack and get a proper kit together and go backpacking.
- [127:19]
Michael Easter
Yeah.
- [127:19]
Andrew Huberman
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.
- [127:29]
Michael Easter
Totally. And it's amazing. I mean, when you look at how much of the US is actually developed, it's some crazy number. Like only 3, 4% 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 US and even I think three nights outdoors, two, two, 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 into the middle of nowhere. You can car camp. I think that has just so many benefits. There's sky at University of Utah named David Strayer. And he did, 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 book shop 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 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.
- [129:31]
Andrew Huberman
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, it's also neural. Right? Is that our, 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 comes from this, originates with this sea squirt. Do you know the story about the sea squirt?
- [130:36]
Michael Easter
No.
- [130:37]
Andrew Huberman
So the sea squirt, I've been learning about them. They're in this, the phylum of A. Tunicata. They're tunicates, which means nothing. When, 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.
- [131:22]
Michael Easter
Interesting.
- [131:23]
Andrew Huberman
So one idea. Sorry to kind of 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 comfortable, 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, 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, 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, uneven surfaces, lack of familiarity, you know, as. 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, you know, it tends to. Then we get like, everyone gets demented with age. Yeah, no one is sharper at 90 than they were at 70. No one. Unless, you know, 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.
- [133:10]
Michael Easter
That's interesting.
- [133:11]
Andrew Huberman
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 could do jumping and plyometrics and landing and look at brain scans. You could 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?
- [134:06]
Michael Easter
I'm 38.
- [134:07]
Andrew Huberman
38. So if you were to. Now I'm kind of leading the ceding 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 masogis, would you say your cognitive vigor is declining or is increasing or is staying flat?
- [134:29]
Michael Easter
Definitely increasing. I'll put 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 endpoint, right? It's like this rolling average of your behaviors. So what do your behaviors look like? Do you have more awesome behaviors or more crappy behaviors? Okay, let's try and get more awesome behaviors. Okay, well, what are awesome behaviors? 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, you know, 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.
- [136:34]
Andrew Huberman
Well, yeah, I. 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.
- [136:46]
Michael Easter
Oh, totally.
- [136:47]
Andrew Huberman
You're chasing feeling states. And Buddhists have talked about this, and people talk about this endlessly online. 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. 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. Like there's, that's happiness, that's like deep pleasure, right? That can only be built through, through this kind of connection between these different gears we've been talking about. And it just has to be. It just has to be pursued and lived out and no one does it perfectly. I think that's an important component is like you can't do the perfect masogi 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.
- [137:48]
Michael Easter
Totally.
- [137:48]
Andrew Huberman
You're not supposed to feel great, but it's not. You feel so miserable that you regret the entire experience.
- [137:54]
Michael Easter
You want, 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, 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, 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. You know, it's like, okay, I'm going to the 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. 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. And so I would just like to hear, how do you think about taking that sort of structure and making it helpful for a person?
- [139:11]
Andrew Huberman
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 that. 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 was like, damn it. The other thing I'll just. This is answering your question indirectly, 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 was like, I guess we could get a pizza or something. But the celebration was the work. I was like, what do you mean? She was 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 the point being that she was teaching me to attach the reward to the effort. And it was like, ah, the fun is doing the experiments, getting the paper. Like you have to take the reward 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 the.
- [140:56]
Michael Easter
There.
- [140:57]
Andrew Huberman
So there's that. So, yeah. So same circuit. It's this dopamine circuitry. And of course, when I say dopamine, it's. That's a proxy for adrenaline and norepinephrine. Adrenaline's 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 doesn't matter if it's a 4:30 wake up or 4:00am Wake up, sit down and mental movement or it's physical, 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, you know, 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 abstinent. Yeah, it's just abstinence. Right. And then people, like, people in their second or third year of sobriety are like, oh, my God. Like, the world just feels so incredible. Like there are these. These magnificent moments from things that I just completely missed before. And it. And it's because what brings about pleasure now is at a. You could say it's at a lower threshold, but the level of meaning is sky high relative to before. So. 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.
- [142:22]
Michael Easter
I agree.
- [142:22]
Andrew Huberman
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. It's the exact same circuit.
- [142:34]
Michael Easter
Yeah.
- [142:35]
Andrew Huberman
Which is, you know, one of the reasons I. I want to shift us to rucking. I really dislike rucking, but now you 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.
- [142:53]
Michael Easter
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. 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 good at carrying. And 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 bamboo, we'd kill them. Okay, so this is a theory called persistence hunting.
- [143:41]
Andrew Huberman
So we won the thermoregulation game.
- [143:43]
Michael Easter
We run the. Won the Thermoregulation game. Yeah. So we can. 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, right? I'm like, oh, that's really interesting. Cool. Like that. 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 100 something pounds in this damn pack, and start walking back to camp. 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. It's 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, 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 reason 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 gonna do that. So if you can throw some load on someone and have them go for a walk, it gets em outside, helps them preferentially burn fat, it seems, compared to something like running. So there's this interesting study, and I'll caveat this, while I was 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 xyz, 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 the backpack and go for a walk and it'll be good for you.
- [148:59]
Andrew Huberman
How much weight and how far?
- [149:02]
Michael Easter
So if someone is just starting, I tell them to start light, I think. So after I publish the comfort crisis with the, there's a chat, there's an entire chapter on walking with weight or rocking. I got all these people in the military rocking destroyed me. Okay, well, how much did the military start you with? £100. 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, you know, I tried to max out on my deadlift every time I deadlifted. The first time I deadlifted, therefore no one should deadlift. Right. You need to ease into this. So I tell people women can start with anywhere from five to say 20 pounds. Suggest 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 because 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. 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 gotta end this walk like this. 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 or something. You know, I think it's really just like, start light, take a walk, see how that feels. You know, it doesn't have to be too complicated.
- [151:00]
Andrew Huberman
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 us. Or 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. And I run, I definitely feel faster and lighter, just by way of comparison. Probably a real, real change too, due to the small stabilizing muscles. This thing about losing more body fat will get, will get people motivated. People love. People love it.
- [151:50]
Michael Easter
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. 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 in a 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.
- [152:32]
Andrew Huberman
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, you ruck that there's a certain. You start to recognize where the resistance is. Is it putting on the pack? Is it, you know, 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.
- [153:09]
Michael Easter
So. I'd like to hear your experience with running, but my experience with running is that the first, say, three miles, they suck. I go, 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 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 with writing, where it's challenging at first, the things aren't moving, but then things just. Things start to move, you know? 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.
- [154:03]
Andrew Huberman
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?
- [154:42]
Michael Easter
I think it's somewhat mysterious, but I. 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 a lot. There might be some bias, 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 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 gotta be. You just gotta 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 cause he had like all this experience that just sort of like was swelling and bubbling under, and finally it just like converged.
- [156:27]
Andrew Huberman
Brings me to 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. The actual craft. And so you have to get out into the real world and experience those.
- [156:51]
Michael Easter
Where have you gotten your best material? Scientific work, ideas. You're flowing into podcasts. Like, how does all that unfold for you?
- [157:01]
Andrew Huberman
For me, you know, 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. This year, I haven't been doing quite as many solos as I work on the book, but I'm getting back to solo 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 minds 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. A real neuroscientist talking about it. It's 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 calm down. No, the only quieting signals come from the brain to the body.
- [158:29]
Michael Easter
Interesting.
- [158:30]
Andrew Huberman
There are a few of them the in there, but the vast majority of the Vegas is this way. That the way to wake up your brain is to move your body. So that's. Anyway, I don't want to go too far down this rabbit hole though.
- [158:39]
Michael Easter
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, that like the chase of the thing. What's the thing I'm going to find here? I got this question. I gotta go find these. And I don't know what I'm gonna 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?
- [159:27]
Andrew Huberman
Yeah. That's what a lot of these failure to launch kids are. Are not accessing.
- [159:34]
Michael Easter
Totally.
- [159:35]
Andrew Huberman
And Anna Lemke of, you know, the author of Dopamine Nation has said this, you know, when she's like, what. What do you. 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, she understands it's the same circuitry you're trying to get 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 superimpose the understanding of that process onto things that are hopefully meaningful and generative 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, 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.
- [160:31]
Michael Easter
And those edges continuously get tweaked to be slipperier, easier to fall down, steeper. So in scarcity brain, I. 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 like 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 as a name was Syred. 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, 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 like a, on a digital slot machine, you can bet like, like 40 different ways the line is going to go and 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, 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, 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 you. 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, 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's 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 suckers game. And then just spread everywhere.
- [164:57]
Andrew Huberman
Wow.
- [164:58]
Michael Easter
Yeah. And the speed. Speed is a big thing. So the other thing with the spinning reels, when it's physical, you pull this handle. It's a slow process. Pull. Clunk, clunk, clunk. Okay, Pull. Clunk, clunk, clunk. So the Cy Red 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.
- [165:30]
Andrew Huberman
Swipe right, swipe left, swipe right, swipe left.
- [165:34]
Michael Easter
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 called Las Vegas.
- [165:58]
Andrew Huberman
Wow.
- [165:59]
Michael Easter
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.
- [166:05]
Andrew Huberman
Well, their baseline on dopamine is dropping. They'll get the little inflections, the winds or the perceived winds. 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 Lemke, 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 now 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.
- [168:11]
Michael Easter
I do, too.
- [168:12]
Andrew Huberman
I really enjoy changes. My Internal kind of rpm, this vague language here. But when I play a little roulette or I'll 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.
- [168:53]
Michael Easter
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 because 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. So I keep it pretty well. 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, is 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, 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. Because 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 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.
- [170:29]
Andrew Huberman
The way you offer up these 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.
- [170:47]
Michael Easter
Yeah.
- [170:47]
Andrew Huberman
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.
- [171:21]
Michael Easter
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 the game take? 3 hours. So you wait at the casino and then you either cash in or 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. So now it's like, I don't even have to drive to 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 gonna score up to bat? Is this. There's all these different ways a person can bet and then the addition of 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.
- [173:03]
Andrew Huberman
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.
- [173:12]
Michael Easter
Oh, yeah, that's. We got plenty of problems.
- [173:15]
Andrew Huberman
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.
- [173:30]
Michael Easter
Yeah, totally. Got to figure out ways to slow things down, if you can. I think there's. 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, 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 start, 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.
- [174:56]
Andrew Huberman
And TikTok. Yeah. Seriously?
- [174:58]
Michael Easter
Yeah.
- [174:58]
Andrew Huberman
I mean, again, these parallels between the physical and the cognitive. Right. You know, I mean, there's an incredible moment in the Mad Men series where they bring a vending machine into the office and suddenly people are eating at work before they would leave to go eat, no one was eating at their desk.
- [175:18]
Michael Easter
Right.
- [175:19]
Andrew Huberman
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, and he was just blown away that people would take their coffee in their car. Now you hear this, you know, like, of course he was like, this is crazy. Like, you go to the cafe, you 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 and 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's walking around with. He carries his coffee. 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, 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.
- [176:15]
Michael Easter
Yeah. And snacking in general. Just food. Eating food in all sorts of situations too, I think is relatively new.
- [176:22]
Andrew Huberman
I mean, if we were getting more productive and there was more incredible creative work, I'd say, okay, fine, 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, in 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, 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.
- [177:16]
Michael Easter
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, as I have this uncle, and he's 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.
- [177:46]
Andrew Huberman
Awesome.
- [177:47]
Michael Easter
Awesome dude. Far out. 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 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.
- [178:15]
Andrew Huberman
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.
- [178:24]
Michael Easter
That's smart.
- [178:24]
Andrew Huberman
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. I'm on social media, and then I don't access it else elsewhere. But it is tough. I mean, the fact that we have to set up these barriers.
- [178:50]
Michael Easter
Yeah.
- [178:51]
Andrew Huberman
But you're doing incredible work. I must say, I. 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. I will 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, you know, 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.
- [179:34]
Michael Easter
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, 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.
- [180:22]
Andrew Huberman
Awesome.
- [180:22]
Michael Easter
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. 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 orbits, life improves if they drank like I did. And so that's awesome. Everything else you're doing is awesome. So I really appreciate you having me, man.
- [181:04]
Andrew Huberman
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. 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 then 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 curse 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 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.
- [182:41]
Michael Easter
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.
- [182:54]
Andrew Huberman
Perfect. Appreciate you come back again.
- [182:56]
Michael Easter
Yeah. Thanks man.
- [182:58]
Andrew Huberman
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. If you're learning from and or enjoying this podcast, please subscribe to our YouTube channel. That's a terrific zero cost way to support us. In addition, please follow the podcast by clicking the Follow button on both Spotify and Apple. And on both Spotify and Apple you can leave us up to a five star review. You and you can now leave us comments at both Spotify and Apple. Please also check out the sponsors mentioned at the beginning and throughout today's episode. That's the best way to support this podcast. If you have questions for me or comments about the podcast, or guests or topics that you'd like me to consider for the Huberman Lab podcast, please put those in the comments section on YouTube. I do read all the comments. For those of you that haven't heard, I have a new book coming out. It's my very first book. It's entitled Protocol An Operating Manual for the Human Body. This is a book that I've been working on for more than five years and that's based on more than 30 years of research and experience and it covers protocols for everything from sleep to exercise to stress control, protocols related to focus and motivation, and of course, I provide the scientific substantiation for the protocols that are included. The book is now available by presale@protographsbook.com there you can find links to various vendors, you can pick the one that you like best. Again, the book is called Protocols An Operating Manual for the Human Body. And if you're not already following me on social media, I am Huberman Lab on all social media platforms. So that's Instagram, X threads, Facebook and LinkedIn. And on all those platforms I discuss science and science related tools, some of which overlaps with the content of the Huberman Lab podcast, but much of which is distinct from the information on the Huberman Lab podcast. Again, it's Huberman Lab on all social media platforms and if you haven't already subscribed to our Neural Network Newsletter. The Neural Network Newsletter is a zero cost monthly newsletter that includes podcast summaries as well as what we call protocols in the form of one to three page PDFs that cover everything from how to optimize your sleep, how to optimize dopamine, deliberate cold exposure. We have a foundational fitness protocol that covers cardiovascular training and resistance training training. All of that is available completely zero cost. You Simply go to hubermanlab.com, go to the menu tab in the top right corner, scroll down to newsletter and enter your email. And I should emphasize that we do not share your email with anybody. Thank you once again for joining me for today's discussion with Michael Easter. And last but certainly not least, thank you for your interest in science.