489: Michael Easter—The Hard Way

Summary

Podcast Summary: The Way I Heard It with Mike Rowe

Episode 489: Michael Easter—The Hard Way
June 16, 2026

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Episode Overview

In this episode, Mike Rowe sits down in person with author and journalist Michael Easter, best known for his books The Comfort Crisis, Scarcity Brain, and his latest, Walking with Weight. The conversation explores the psychological and practical virtues of discomfort, the science behind our cravings for ease, the value of rucking (walking with weight), and how pushing through difficulty can lead to both meaning and health. Drawing from Easter’s research and personal history, the episode dissects modern comfort’s unintended costs and how simple practices from our evolutionary past can drastically improve both mental and physical wellbeing.

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Key Topics and Discussion Points

1. Comfort vs. Discomfort: The Modern Dilemma

• Comfort’s Cost:
  • Easter’s central thesis: Modern life is engineered for effortless ease, but pressing the “easy button” comes at a hidden cost.
  • Rowe reflects on his own shift from gym workouts to walking, then rucking inspired by Easter’s work.
  • Notable quote: “The most rewarding things in life come on the other side of hard.” —Michael Easter (01:41)
• Lesson of Discomfort:
  • Rowe: “Nobody ever had a great story to tell who didn’t pay a price.” (01:46)

2. Las Vegas as a Human Behavior Laboratory

• Vegas’ Power over People:
  • Easter shares observations as a Las Vegas resident: people behave in extreme ways due to the environment and cultural expectations (09:59–10:48).
  • The city as “the ultimate human behavior laboratory” (11:04), mixing all social classes and compelling actions people wouldn’t take elsewhere.
• Slot Machine Psychology:
  • Easter explains “the scarcity loop”—opportunity, unpredictable rewards, and quick repeatability—that makes slot machines (and by extension, modern apps) addictive (12:17–18:54).
    • “People today spend more money on slot machines than they do books, movies, and music combined.” —Michael Easter (16:20)
  • This system now powers social media, dating apps, and online shopping.
  • Rowe: “How is it bad for us to eliminate all of the strawman drang that comes from just getting a hammer? Is it inherently bad or just a matter of efficiency?” (37:09)

3. Scarcity Brain: Our Deep-Rooted Cravings

• Evolutionary Mismatch:
  • Easter: Our brains evolved for environments of scarcity; now, with food, information, and possessions abundant, the urge for “more” is maladaptive (28:13–30:44).
    • “The average house has anywhere from 10,000 to 50,000 items today.” (29:39)
  • Moderation is universally advised but rarely practiced due to these ingrained instincts.
• Applying Awareness:
  • Practicing deliberate friction (delaying purchases, limiting app use) can curb mindless consumption (37:56–38:09).

4. The Comfort Crisis: Stories from the Edge

• Personal Transformation:
  • Easter discusses getting sober and realizing that easy solutions don’t work: “My favorite drink was always the next one that might get you in trouble… I just sort of accepted, this is going to be really hard. And I leaned into that discomfort and it was hard. It was hell for the…I mean, your life gets worse when you get sober…But on the other side of that, things started getting better across the board.” (42:54–43:12)
• The Value of Hard Things:
  • Major life meaning and transformation are often unlocked “on the other side of hard.”
  • Great stories, and progress in life, stem from setbacks and struggle—“No problem, no story.” (69:54–70:00)

5. The Power of Rucking (Walking with Weight)

• Ancestral Roots & Military History:
  • Human beings are uniquely suited to walk long distances while carrying weight—a skill that shaped our evolution (87:16).
  • Women, needing to carry children while foraging and working, invented the first carrying slings—direct ancestors to the modern backpack (97:33).
  • Military preparedness has always centered on one’s ability to ruck; this remains the core endurance test in armies throughout history (99:47–100:24).
    • “In Iraq and Afghanistan [the load] was about 100 pounds. That’s serious, dude.” —Michael Easter (100:38)
• Modern Application:
  • Rowe shares his own rucking routine and tales: “Every day I’m home, I ruck now with 45 pounds, I walk eight miles…and I feel great.” (04:50)
  • Easter’s tips:
    • Start light (about 10% of body weight), progress gradually, and cap weight to reduce injury risk (89:18–89:43).
    • Rucking offers cardiovascular and strength benefits, multitask-ability (calls, podcasts), and is accessible for most people.
• Notable Moment:
  • Mike’s story of rucking with a 25-pound hunk of concrete he found in the street—totaling 65 pounds—to demonstrate the practice’s impact (91:09–95:04).
    • “That video happened because of you. That’s 100% because I read the Comfort Crisis and I walked with 65 pounds for the next couple of months, lost another seven pounds. And then my knee hurt and then my ankle hurt and then my hip hurt…Now I’m back to 40 every day when I’m home. And Mike, it’s totally changed my life.” (95:21–95:41)

6. Meaning Through Challenge

• The IKEA Effect:
  • People value things more if they’ve worked harder for them. Even cake mix companies had to add steps to satisfy customers’ need for effort (55:25–56:44).
• Why Trades and Tangible Work Matter:
  • Work is more meaningful when you see and feel your results—something increasingly rare in modern jobs, but central to trades and crafts (54:45–55:25).
• On Doing Things the Hard Way in All Walks of Life:
  • From raising kids, to marathon running, to writing and public speaking, the hardest parts are often the most meaningful in retrospect (60:33–62:22).
    • “I love public speaking now. The reason I love public speaking now is because I had to work my ass off at it…each time I did it, though, you’re like, you can see these improvements. You’re like, you’re getting better. Oh, that joke landed this time.” —Michael Easter (61:14–62:05)

7. Stories, Material, and the Virtue of Failing

• The most memorable stories (in writing, travel, Bourdain’s TV, Rowe’s own career) come from things going wrong.
• “No problem, no story.” (69:54–70:00)

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Notable and Memorable Quotes with Timestamps

• “The most rewarding things in life come on the other side of hard.”
  —Michael Easter (01:41)
• “We don’t like friction. It goes back to that 2% idea. We want to do the next easiest, most comfortable thing. We’re wired to do that even when it doesn’t serve us.”
  —Michael Easter (38:40)
• “Every single thing we wrote about in [Men’s Health magazine], same exact trajectory. You had to do something that was hard in the short term to get a long-term benefit.”
  —Michael Easter (43:15)
• “No problem, no story.”
  —Michael Easter (69:54)
• “If you figure out a way to love [discomfort], that’s the ultimate goal. And ask what your why is too. What am I going to get from this? …What is on the other side of this? …That becomes kind of a metaphor for life.”
  —Michael Easter (110:15)
• “If you walk through the Aria, you will pass some tables, but generally you will have to navigate a labyrinth of slot machines. Why do they have more slot machines? Well, it’s because they make more money. …People today spend more money on slot machines than they do books, movies, and music combined.”
  —Michael Easter (16:20)

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Additional Noteworthy Moments & Segments

• The Iconic Las Vegas Sign and Waiting in Line (08:52–12:02):
  • Rowe and Easter riff on the tourist ritual of sweating in line for a photo and what it reveals about herd behavior, patience, and our desire for memorable experiences.
• Silent Places in America (49:38–51:19):
  • Easter describes his research finding only 16 places left in the lower 48 states where one can stand for 15 minutes without hearing any man-made noise.
• Podcasting & Audiobooks (64:00–65:12):
  • Easter notes his books now sell more in audio than print, and shares first-time audiobook narration misadventures.
• Public Speaking Evolution (61:14–62:22):
  • Both Rowe and Easter recount learning to thrive in public speaking by embracing discomfort, practicing, and seeing growth.

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Timestamps for Key Segments

• Intro to Michael Easter and “The Comfort Crisis” — 00:25–04:19
• Modern Comfort and Easy Buttons — 00:54–01:46
• Vegas as Behavioral Laboratory & Slot Machine Design — 09:59–18:54
• Modern Cravings: Scarcity Brain — 25:09–30:44
• The 2% Club (Stairs vs. Escalator) — 33:13–33:45
• Personal Story: Getting Sober — 42:50–43:15
• Rucking: History, Science, and Practice — 87:08–97:09
• Military & Human Evolutionary Perspective on Rucking — 97:33–101:29
• The IKEA Effect and Value of Hard Work — 55:25–56:44
• No Problem, No Story (Why Struggle Yields Good Stories) — 69:54–71:02
• On Meaning, Traditions, and ‘Masogi’ — 108:29–109:52
• Closing Thoughts: Adapting to Discomfort & Appreciation for Modern Comforts — 106:47–108:27

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Final Takeaways

• Embracing discomfort in small and large ways is essential for building resilience, meaning, health, and satisfaction.
• Modern advancements, while bringing ease, also breed new forms of addiction and malaise.
• Practices like rucking, digital friction, and deliberate challenge (“masogi”) help balance our evolutionary tendencies with modern abundance.
• The richest life stories—personal and collective—are born not from comfort, but from challenge and adaptation.

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Further Exploration

• Michael Easter’s Books:
  • The Comfort Crisis
  • Scarcity Brain
  • Walking with Weight
• Michael Easter’s Podcast:
  • The 2% (Launched April 2026)
• Related Episodes:
  • Interview with Josh Smith (Montana Knife Co.)
  • Interview with Ashley Paulson (Badwater 135 Ultra winner)
  • Episode with Blake Shoal (supersonic aviation)

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This summary captures the spirit, humor, and insights of the episode, offering a comprehensive look at why—and how—doing things the hard way still matters most.

Transcript

[Mike Rowe]

Hey, it's the way I heard it. I'm Mike Rowe and Chuck. It occurs to me.

[Chuck]

Yes.

[Mike Rowe]

As we delve into the preamble for today's very special guest, that I have been crossing names off of a list in my mind, and the list consists of people who I've interviewed before, but never in person. Oh, yeah, and.

[Chuck]

And today you got to cross another one off. Yeah, actually got to cross off two.

[Mike Rowe]

But I did do two today. Let's not speak of the other one yet. Yeah, we'll save him for another time. Or perhaps you've already heard him. Difficult to know. But this guy I bet you do know, if you're a friend of the podcast. His name is Michael Easter. He's an author. I met him a few years ago at some sort of event. We were long distance, still in the lockdowns, and he was talking about a book he had written called the Comfort Crisis.

[Chuck]

Great book.

[Mike Rowe]

It really is good, man. It's a very solid, solid, fun read that has a lot of thoughtful information in it, but at its heart makes a very simple argument that if you have an easy button within reach, you can press it, but there will be some unintended consequences. Hitting the easy button almost never leads to any long term benefit. And we all know this. You know, these are lessons we've drilled into our brains growing up, but, boy, it's easy to forget, and especially today when the easy way is all around us. Mike Easter is carved out a pretty good niche, I think, in the ecosystem in favor of doing things the hard way.

[Chuck]

Yeah, I love this quote. He says the most rewarding things in life come on the other side of hard.

[Mike Rowe]

Which sounds vaguely dirty to me, and I don't want to unpack that whole thing, but I know what he meant. And I think I know, guys, there's nothing good on the other side of hard. But of course there is. We all know the importance of being challenged. Nobody ever had a great story to tell who didn't pay a price, right?

[Chuck]

Right.

[Mike Rowe]

And there's just no getting around it, I guess. What's the oldest? Do you remember that poster we were in high school? It came out, it was no pain, no gain.

[Michael Easter]

No gain, sure.

[Mike Rowe]

And they were hanging in gyms everywhere. And then I saw one of a guy sitting on a keg of beer, right? And he's like, just drinking a draft beer, and it's like running down his face, and it's a wide shot, and the caption says, no pain. No pain.

[Chuck]

Yes.

[Mike Rowe]

I knew you were gonna say that.

[Chuck]

I Do remember that one?

[Michael Easter]

Yeah.

[Mike Rowe]

And that's kind of. You know, I always think of that poster when I talk to Mike because we're kind of in the no pain, no pain world. Everything is just so daggone efficient and easy. Which is why I think we've seen all sorts of pushbacks. Like, we talk about the cold plunge and various other ways to shock yourself into a level of discomfort. So his idea isn't new, but his book was great because it blended, like, real lived experience with real science. And I've been a fan ever since he's written Scarcity Brain. Talked to him about that, and most recently. I gotta give him credit, man. I mean, his latest book is called Walking with Weight.

[Chuck]

Yeah.

[Mike Rowe]

And it's great. I love it. And we talk a lot about the benefits of this. But what makes me laugh is the conversation that he must have had with his publisher, you know, when he went in to say, okay, here's the idea. It's a book about walking with weight. With weight. It's like, yeah, well, what happens? Because that's. That's it. Yeah, that's it. And yet it holds up. It's chapter after chapter of science and history and really interesting connections that all come back to the fact that. That this ability we have. H. Sapien, with our opposable thumbs and our bipedal qualities, the ability to walk long distances with heavy weight is really the only. The only distinguishing characteristic we have in the animal kingdom.

[Chuck]

Well, I think that it is fair to say that Michael Easter changed your life.

[Mike Rowe]

He did. I've been really busy, and one of the first things to go conveniently was the gym. I just stopped going to the gym and started to exercise in more, you know, calisthenic, ish ways.

[Chuck]

Well, you had started walking during the. The lockdowns.

[Michael Easter]

Yeah.

[Chuck]

But not with weight.

[Mike Rowe]

No, no, just big, long, early morning walks.

[Chuck]

Right.

[Mike Rowe]

And. And, you know, I got in the habit of doing that, and I love doing it. I'm sold on walking. I wasn't sold on walking with weight, but, boy, rucking is the official word for it, and I've become a real aficionado of it. Every day I'm home, I ruck now with 45 pounds, I walk eight miles, I get my work done. And, you know, I'm not in the best shape of my life, but I'm older than I've ever been, and I feel great, and that's good enough. Anyway, I'm a big fan of the book. I'm a big fan of rucking. I'm A big fan of Michael Easter, and he drove himself all the way up here from sunny Las Vegas to talk about the virtues of walking with weight and the importance of being uncomfortable. It's a fun conversation. I knew it would be. And we're calling it the hard way because what else would we call it, Chuck?

[Chuck]

He doesn't do it the easy way.

[Mike Rowe]

No, he doesn't. His name is Michael Easter, and we shall resurrect him.

[Chuck]

Oh, I see what you did there.

[Mike Rowe]

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[Michael Easter]

Hall.

[Mike Rowe]

Fantastic. Mike Easter. You've made the journey in your debt. Where'd you come from? Arizona?

[Michael Easter]

Las Vegas. Vegas, Vegas. Same thing, mostly. A little hotter in Phoenix. A little more sin in Las Vegas, you know, but it's all. It all balances out heat and sin.

[Mike Rowe]

I've never really ruminated on the duality of both, but I guess to a certain extent, they're hand in glove.

[Michael Easter]

No, they really are. You know, Las Vegas would not be the town that it is as deranged, I think, if it were a nicer climate. Yeah, the heat in the summer. 115, 120. It really just tacks things up a few notches.

[Mike Rowe]

It does. It does.

[Michael Easter]

People go a little crazier.

[Mike Rowe]

Am I hallucinating this, or did we speak long distance a couple years ago and did we talk at some length about the welcome to fabulous Las Vegas sign?

[Chuck]

Yes. You guys said you were going to have the. The next time you were in town, you were gonna take a picture together in front of that sign.

[Mike Rowe]

Well, you know what? I'm gonna be in Vegas in a week and a half.

[Michael Easter]

Sounds like we got a photo op coming up.

[Mike Rowe]

We really should. Why did we talk so much about that sign? What was the point?

[Michael Easter]

I don't know. Do you remember?

[Chuck]

Yeah. Basically, because it's so iconic and you were on a walk and you saw people lining up politely to take their turn to take a picture, and you just walked up like the big shot you are and took a selfie.

[Mike Rowe]

No, it wasn't exact that way. Although I thought it was a good rumination on patience and comfort and herd mentality and tourism, like, in all these elements. Because for those of you who haven't been to Vegas, there's a sign that greets you when you come in that says, welcome to fabulous Las Vegas. And you've seen it God knows how many movies and TV shows.

[Michael Easter]

Every Las Vegas movie and TV show, they're going to show the sign. It's the iconic image of Las Vegas. When people think Las Vegas, if you're thinking, am I thinking of the right sign? Yes, you're thinking of the right sign.

[Mike Rowe]

So there are probably 200 people in line. And to your point, it's 105 degrees outside. And I looked at the sign, I'm like, oh, yeah, that is a great sign. But I was on the other side of the street, and so I just got the angle and I took a selfie. And I think our point was, why do you do the things you do when you're in Vegas that you don't do anywhere else? Why do you stand there and pull the lever, waiting and hoping and praying that the thing's going to pay off? Why do you stay up all night? Why do you. What is going on in our brains that Vegas. Short circuits.

[Michael Easter]

Vegas has become culturally the place where you let loose and something. You're right, something flips in people's brains. One of My favorite experiences as a person who lives in Las Vegas is if I have to travel the flight. When I fly home, planes frequently run out of alcohol. People are just. They're ready to go. They get up from their chair, they kind of stumble because they've had, you know, four or five of the little plane bottles. But then the flight leaving Las Vegas. Yeah, Zombies.

[Mike Rowe]

Yeah.

[Michael Easter]

Everyone's just. They've lost their pride. They've lost their money. They're hungover. Like, three quarters of the plane is asleep before it even takes off.

[Mike Rowe]

They're beaten.

[Michael Easter]

It's just such a. Yeah. It's just like, welcome to Vegas and be prepared to lose. This town was not built on winners.

[Mike Rowe]

And yet I don't know anybody who's been to. I know lots of people who've never been to Vegas. And I know lots of people who go there many times a year. I don't know anyone who's only been there once.

[Michael Easter]

They keep coming back. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

[Mike Rowe]

It's like a tractor beam.

[Michael Easter]

It is a tractor beam. What I think is fascinating about Las Vegas is that I see it as this sort of ultimate human behavior laboratory. And it brings people together from all walks of life. So going back to that plane, when I'm on the plane going to Las Vegas, there's someone in first class with a, you know, $70,000 Rolex. And then there's someone behind me who goes, I spent all the money I have on this flight. I got 50 bucks in a dream. And they're going to the exact same place, and they're gonna, like, intermingle. And they're all there for the same reason.

[Mike Rowe]

And the fact that. I mean, what's the. You're not a psychologist. You're sort of a social anthropologist. You're obviously a writer. But since you evoke the B word, what's going on with our brains in Vegas? I mean, that's really why. I think we were ruminating. There's no other sign anywhere I can think of that people would queue up for in the heat.

[Michael Easter]

So Vegas has figured out to a T how you get someone to do something that is fun in the short term but can hurt them in the long run. So the. The example that I love is slot machines.

[Mike Rowe]

Yeah.

[Michael Easter]

Everyone knows the house always wins. The longer you play the slot machine, the more you're gonna lose. Yet people play them for hours. So if you've never been to Vegas, beyond the Strip, you go to a grocery store, a gas station, a restaurant. They all have slot machines. I'll go into 711 at like 7am Gotta get a coffee, whatever. And there's people at the slot machines. So I live there, I see this, I go, this doesn't make any damn sense. It just doesn't. But why? Right? That's the question. So for my book Scarcity Brain, I end up finding this. It's an actual working casino, but it's a laboratory. So they've built a real casino, turned it into a lab where they analyze human behavior.

[Mike Rowe]

Did the humans in the lab know they were lab rats?

[Michael Easter]

Yes. So they know they're in a lab setting, but they're scientists around. They're tracking things. I talked to a guy who's a slot machine designer. I'm like, how does this thing work? He goes, well, let me show you. So we go over, we start playing and basically broke it down. Like, this slot machine works on these three parts. You can think about it as like a behavior loop. So first part is opportunity. You got an opportunity to get something of value. Second is unpredictable rewards. You know, you'll get that thing of value at some point, but you don't know when. You don't know how valuable it's going to be. Third point is quick repeatability. So if you do or don't get the thing, you can immediately repeat the behavior. So with the slot machine, you got the opportunity to win money. You play a game, you could lose, you could win $2, you could win $200,000. Right. On any given game.

[Mike Rowe]

Right.

[Michael Easter]

And then you can immediately replay. So once slot machines and casino designers figured out that system, how to really dial it in. This was in 1980. There was this guy named Cy Red, and he's like the most Vegas person ever drove a Cadillac. You know, maroon suits, giant glasses, bolo tie, the whole deal. He figures this out in 1980, this system, they apply it to slot machines. And slot machines went from these games that no one really played in casinos, they were kind of off to the side. They didn't even have chairs because people wouldn't spend enough time at them.

[Mike Rowe]

Is it because the owners. Owners really just didn't have any faith initially in an attraction that required zero skill?

[Michael Easter]

It was that. But it was also that the inherent design of the slot machines were not that interesting. So because they had mechanical parts, you could only have so many different combinations. The math just didn't work out where you would win enough. Yeah, okay. Because you need these three things to line up. There's only so many of them. Just odds weren't good, so you'd play, play, play, play, Play, lose, lose, lose, lose, lose. And then when you won, you'd win, you know, you'd win a little bit. It's just not that exciting. People stop doing things that give them nothing. So the Cyrad comes in and he goes, we're going to digitize these. And because we can digitize them, we're not limited by actual real spinning reels. They're just these digital things. So we can have all these different combinations. And what we can do is we can have people bet on a bunch of different lines that are across the screen, right? And you can win this way. You can win X wise, you can win straight, you can win up and down. So now all of a sudden, when you play, something's going to happen. Like, you could win because you're betting on 40 different lines in this game. You might win on one. Here's the thing, though. If you bet a dollar, your win on that one line might be, say, $0.30, $0.40. So now that you know, the logical person here will go, well, wait a

[Mike Rowe]

minute, you didn't really win.

[Michael Easter]

You didn't really win. You lost 70 cents or 60 cents, but the machine still lights up. So it goes ding, ding, ding, ding, ding. The money goes up. And that's exciting. So once they figured that system out, slot machines take off. They start to make up, I think it's 85% of casino revenues. People today spend more money on slot machines than they do books, movies, and music combined.

[Mike Rowe]

Are you kidding me?

[Michael Easter]

No, it's insane. It's insane. These are cash cows.

[Mike Rowe]

Wait a minute.

[Michael Easter]

It's unbelievable.

[Mike Rowe]

So when I walk through the casino and wherever it is I'm staying, I think I'm at the Aria suites. This time, 85% of the total gaming revenue is slots.

[Michael Easter]

Slot machines. So when you walk through the Aria, you will pass some tables, but generally you will have to navigate a labyrinth of slot machines. Well, why do they have more slot machines? Well, it's because they make more money. So now where it becomes interesting and relevant to the listener, they might be. Why are you talking about slot machines? I don't ever go to Vegas. I don't play slot machines. I live in Utah. There's no gambling. You start to see a lot of industries look at Las Vegas and go, how in the hell are they getting these people to do this thing where they're ultimately just gonna lose? This doesn't make sense. And they go, we gotta figure out what that is. So they take that system, and I call it the Scarcity Loop. In my book, the three Part system.

[Mike Rowe]

I just mentioned system. What is it? Cired.

[Michael Easter]

Cired system. Yeah. They take that system, and it starts to pop up in all these different forms of technology. So that is what makes social media work. You have an opportunity to get a like or see some interesting reel, but it's unpredictable. If I post a photo, I could get two likes, and I go, oh, my God, no one likes me at all. Or I could go viral. And now my life has changed, right? And I can keep scrolling. Infinite, scroll. It's the exact same mechanics. You see it in dating apps. So the guy who invented Tinder what allowed online dating to really take off was the guy who invented Tinder just goes, oh, well, yeah, we just got to do for dating what slot machines did for gambling. It's a opportunity to find someone. But you just swipe, swipe, swipe, swipe, swipe. Ding, right? Oh, she's ugly. This is a loss. Ding. Oh, my God. That woman's amazing. Jackpot, right? You see it in financial apps, are using it, online shopping uses it. Great example from online shopping is those discount wheels.

[Mike Rowe]

Yeah.

[Michael Easter]

Those increase sales conversions sevenfold, sevenfold. And even the speed. The speed is another thing that was really important because the old slot machines, you would pull the handle, takes a couple seconds per game. Slot machine makers go, yeah, it's taking too much time for these people to lose their money. Give us their money. You know what we need? We need buttons that you just hit and they say, spin, and people just sit there. That took the average gamer from playing 450 games an hour to 900 games an hour.

[Mike Rowe]

Oh, my God.

[Michael Easter]

Dude. This is why Las Vegas is the ultimate human behavior laboratory. Because they have figured out, how do you get people in a place where they will do these things that are exciting and thrilling and fun in the short term, even if it hurts them in the long run? And the town has mastered that. It's like the perfect place for that. Now, of course, the problem is once that gets put everywhere else. So to me, Vegas is fine, because most people come into town, most lose money, some walk away with money, but it's this separate experience from normal life. You go back to Utah, and you don't do it again for a while until you come back. But once you start to see it in everything, now you understand why people spend four hours a day on their phones. The rise of all these crazy dating apps, the rise of sports betting in your phone, and it just. You go, oh, okay. Well, that's why we spend so much damn time.

[Mike Rowe]

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[Michael Easter]

He was a. He started in pinball machines, I believe, and I think he was from Missouri. Don't quote me on that. He moved up to Boston. He was in pinball machines. Mob comes in and they say, hey, we want to vig on your pinball machines or. And he goes, all right, I'm taking my talents to Las Vegas. So he started in pinball machines in Las Vegas. He started to get into gaming machines.

[Mike Rowe]

Wait, so were pinball machines ever used as a gambling attraction?

[Michael Easter]

Not to my knowledge, no. There's a skill element.

[Mike Rowe]

Big time skill.

[Michael Easter]

Right. So especially in a mechanized game, you could get someone who just figures out the game and fleeces. Yeah. You know, whereas something like poker, which isn't mechanized. Well, there's skill involved, but it's you and me. And then we have a dealer, right? So it's a little bit different. So, yeah, to my knowledge, yeah.

[Mike Rowe]

Poker, you can play the man. Pinball, you can, I guess, play the ball. And, I mean, there's a lot of. It's amazing to watch people who are, like, naturally good at pinball, watch people who have played it for years have become real, like, aficionados, and they're just normal people who just sit there like absolute lemmings going, how in the world that ball's coming right down the center and you can't reach it with either flipper. And somehow you save it.

[Michael Easter]

They figure it out.

[Mike Rowe]

How did you do it?

[Michael Easter]

That's my Uncle Brian. He's a pinball wizard. And he had a great hustle up in Sun Valley. Him and his friends, I think they were probably 10, you know, 12, 13. They were able to figure out, how do we jam up the pinball machines. So it'll give unlimited games. And then kids would come in, you know, Sun Valley, these rich kids, they'd say, hey, if you just give me your five bucks, I'll let you play as many games on this as you want. So this is going to be a good deal for you. And so they just raked it in that summer. Great.

[Mike Rowe]

Wow. So, okay, did you know when you moved to Vegas that so much of the behaviors specific to that town were going to inform the book that you wrote? And you've got three books. I'm going to talk about all of them at some point. But, yeah, like, this was the Scarcity Brain book.

[Chuck]

Yeah.

[Mike Rowe]

Like, did you go to Vegas to do that, or were you inspired? What? Inspired what?

[Michael Easter]

I would say I've always been interested in Las Vegas. I'll give you the anecdote. When I was a kid, my mom said, do you want to go to Disneyland? And I said, no, mom, I want to go to Vegas. So there's always been something that pulled me to that town. I think it's just the excess. I mean, even for kids back in the 90s, they had, like, these amazing arcades, and it was just everything was over the top. This place is unbelievable. How does this work? But I grew up in Utah and then went. Lived on the east coast for a while, and then when we wanted to move west, my wife said, no snow, and sorry, guys, but I said, no California, which gave us Phoenix or it gave us Vegas. And I took a job as a professor at UNLV and ended up in Vegas. And UNLV is a really great school for hospitality and Gaming. There's casino labs at UNLV as well. And I think it was just the living there, the observing how these things pull people in and going, what's going on there? You know? Because as a journalist, if I see something and it doesn't make sense, I don't just go, huh, okay, I'll move on. I kind of. It just becomes an itch.

[Mike Rowe]

Do you still think of yourself primarily as a journalist, or are you a writer now? Or are you a investigative something? Like, if you had a business card, and I'm sure you don't, but if you did, what would it say?

[Michael Easter]

That's a good question. I think I might just say Ryder.

[Mike Rowe]

Yeah.

[Michael Easter]

Except when people ask people who don't know me, they'll say, you know, what do you do? And every time I say writer, I cringe because I'm going. That person immediately just goes, oh, so you live in your mom's basement?

[Mike Rowe]

Yeah, yeah, yeah. So you're. So you're unemployed.

[Michael Easter]

Yes. So you're unemployed.

[Mike Rowe]

So in scarcity brain, it's cravings. Like, we're at least a lot of it, you know?

[Michael Easter]

Yeah.

[Mike Rowe]

Why do we crave what we crave?

[Michael Easter]

Right?

[Mike Rowe]

And if I remember, like, when are. When are cravings good? When are they bad? It seems like they would always be bad because the word itself suggests a feeling that's out of your control. But can you control cravings? Can you control all of the allure that's built in so diabolically to these casinos? Can you rehack your mind?

[Michael Easter]

I think so. So something else I write about in the book is that for most people, they go play the slot machine, they lose their 50 bucks, maybe they win 10 bucks. Whatever it is took them, say, 30 minutes. It was just, oh, that was fun. To me, that isn't fundamentally different from saying, hey, I'm going to spend $50 and go see a movie for two hours. But there's always going to be a subset of people that just get sucked into a slot machine. But it could be. Could be anything else, right? It's like, why are some people addicted to gambling? Some it's alcohol, others it's TikTok. There's, like, something that pulls us in. And I think the underlying thing that you tend to find with people who get pulled into these bad habits that hurt them is there is. It's solving for some underlying problem. It becomes an escape. And so once that underlying problem goes away, I think a lot of serious issues tend to go away. But the book. The question of the book is Everyone knows that everything is fine in moderation, and yet we all suck at it.

[Mike Rowe]

Yeah.

[Michael Easter]

So why is that? Looks at that question.

[Mike Rowe]

Right. Well, what's the answer? I mean, moderation. I was just talking to Todd Rose, who I think you would really like. He wrote a book. He wrote a couple great books. One was called the End of Average and the other was called Dark Horse. And then his third is called Collective Illusions. You guys write about a lot of the same stuff. He runs a think tank up in New England. But this idea that we don't know why we're doing things and manufactured consensuses and the assumptions we have of, well, I know why I'm playing this machine. You know, all these other people around probably playing it for the same reason. But in fact. Well, I don't really know how to finish that sentence. I don't know what the fact really is other than we don't feel like we're in control an awful lot of the time.

[Michael Easter]

Yeah. So in the book, I think a lot of this goes back to how humans lived for most of time. So if you think about life, say 10,000 years ago, whatever it is, we never had enough food. We didn't have enough possessions, tools, things like that. We never had enough information. You never know what's going to happen with the weather, what was going to, what someone's intention, what is the other tribe doing out there? And so if you were the type of person who goes, I'm going to overdo these things. When I get the opportunity, if I find a big pile of food, I'm going to binge on that because I know famine is going to come at some point. Happens every year.

[Mike Rowe]

Yep.

[Michael Easter]

Same with information. If you're the person who goes, hey, what do we think of this? What's your like? You're always searching for information that would give you a survival advantage. Same with possessions. If you had more stuff, more tools, you're probably going to survive when the crazy storm hits or when you need to do xyz. So great. That helped us for all the time, this drive for more. If you got the opportunity for more, take it. But then you plop humans into this modern environment where, you know, we throw out a third of the food today, where this was a stat. That's crazy. The average person today sees more information in one day than a person in the 1400s would have seen in their entire life.

[Mike Rowe]

And you're defining information as just facts or facts.

[Michael Easter]

Any piece of information you come across in your environment, that's new. Ah, stuff the average House has anywhere from 10,000 to 50,000 items today. So it's like you take these genes that tell us more, more, more, and then you put us in an environment where we can fulfill that. You start to see, oh, okay, yeah, it makes sense why we all have so much stuff and are hooked on our news feeds, whatever it might be. White people tend to overeat, including me quite often.

[Mike Rowe]

Well, so the short version is our predisposition to binge on all things was actually a survival instinct.

[Michael Easter]

Exactly.

[Mike Rowe]

Once upon a time.

[Michael Easter]

Yeah.

[Mike Rowe]

But then modern age, I guess, agrarian to industrial, to what, tech, financial, and now AI. There's really no shortage of anything at all.

[Michael Easter]

Yeah.

[Mike Rowe]

And yet our brain is still predisposed to gobble it all up.

[Michael Easter]

Yeah, exactly. And I think that that can start to get us in a little bit of trouble, depending on how you want to define trouble.

[Mike Rowe]

All right, well, let's define it. Health and fitness.

[Michael Easter]

Health and fitness. I think 40 odd percent of the country is obese. 72% is either overweight or obese. That was never a thing for all time. Like the obesity rate was basically zero for all of human history. So there's one, we went from 0 to 72%. There's some evidence in about, you know, 200 years.

[Mike Rowe]

Have you seen photos of like, I saw one the other day of Yankee Stadium, I think taken in like 1965. You know, just, you can see thousands of people. You know, the way it's angled, you can really see them. And then today, same exact angle. And it's like people can barely fit in their chairs even.

[Michael Easter]

I mean, even when you look at photos of soldiers in World War II, the guys are just so much smaller. Yeah, part of that I think is better nutrition, even if you're not, say, fat or overweight, whatever you want to say. Like, people just have a lot more muscle, which that can be fine, but they're just bigger people because you got so much more access to food, fitness wise. And this kind of ties more into my the Comfort Crisis book. But the average person in the past used to walk 20,000 steps a day. Meanwhile, they're carrying stuff, they're physically working, they're digging for tubers, they're hunting, they're doing all these things. And the average person today walks about 4,000 steps a day because we've engineered movement out of our environment. You don't have to do any of that. You know, if you need to get from point A to point B, get in a car, call an Uber, whatever it might be.

[Mike Rowe]

And yet you didn't take the stairs.

[Michael Easter]

And yet I didn't take the stairs.

[Mike Rowe]

That's my fault. You told me, get in the elevator.

[Chuck]

Well, I'm so used to telling people how to get here. Yeah, get in the elevator, go to

[Michael Easter]

this, blah, blah, blah. In my defense, and I'm going to reiterate this because this is going out to the world. You're a very fancy man.

[Mike Rowe]

Oh, yeah, look at me.

[Michael Easter]

Penthouse. So I'm picturing, I'm picturing like the only way up is through the elevator. The doors open and it's just the gold gleams in when I hear the word penthouse. And I'm like, the stairs aren't going up to the penthouse.

[Mike Rowe]

I'll be wearing an ascot, singing a Robert Goulet song over by the grand piano.

[Michael Easter]

He was, he was.

[Mike Rowe]

Yeah, look, I didn't name it the penthouse. It's just, that's what, it's just the top, it's this top floor here at the Microworks world headquarters. But the 2% club is still a thing.

[Michael Easter]

It's still a thing. Yeah.

[Mike Rowe]

And that was, if I recall, that's the percentage of people who, given an opportunity, will choose to take the stairs as opposed to an escalator.

[Michael Easter]

Yeah, there's. If you have a choice between staircase, escalator, only 2% of people take the staircase. And that to me just shows us we're wired to do the next easiest, most comfortable thing. That also goes back to the fact that in the past, you didn't want to move any more than you had to. Right. You didn't have enough food, you don't want to burn off any extra energy. That would have been idiotic. Like exercise is something we had to invent.

[Mike Rowe]

Dumb. The problem with blaming our public school system for falling test scores and climbing illiteracy rates is that blame doesn't improve the situation. Not in the near term anyway. And if you got a kid in high school today, the data is pretty clear. Our public schools are failing this generation. And concerned parents are right to be looking for new ways to give their kids a leg up. That's why K12's career and college prep program is growing in popularity. This is tuition free online public education that prepares students for. For actual careers in construction, health care, cybersecurity, so many other fields that are expanding every day. This is an ingenious way for kids to get the industry certifications they need to hit the ground running. And it allows them to earn college credits along the way, whether they want to head into a university or jump into a High demand Trade doesn't matter. K12's career in college prep gives them something a diploma can no longer guarantee. A head start. It's practical, it's smart, and it's long overdue. Give your student the opportunity to explore the right fit for them. Right now with K12's career and college prep, you go to k12.comroe and you learn more. K12.com row the letter K the number 12.com roe the letter K the number 12. Well, is this part of the slot machine too? If you think of how much effort does it take to play and win at poker at. Just go down the list. Baccarat. I mean, down and down it goes. Like, the slot machine is truly the simplest skill free thing and it's responsible for 85% of the revenue, which means also 85% of the loss.

[Michael Easter]

Yeah, exactly.

[Mike Rowe]

Oh, God.

[Michael Easter]

More likely to lose on those games too.

[Mike Rowe]

So what's the moral of this story? To just do less of everything, consume less?

[Michael Easter]

I think for me, I think first step for most people is awareness, where you just go, oh, my brain is pushing me to do all these things that I don't really need anymore. And once you can start to see how the machinery works, it gives you a little more of a choice to go, okay, am I going to fall into this machinery or not when it comes to the idea of more? So to go back to that stat I told you about, the slot machines. Oh, they sped everything up. And then people started losing more, people started playing more. One thing that's really changed societally is speed at which we can do things. So example I like to give is shopping. Thirty years ago, if I need a hammer, okay, I need to get my car, I need to drive down to Home Depot or Ace Hardware or whatever it is. I got to walk the aisle. I gotta go, okay, they got six hammers. Which one am I gonna buy? It's like an hour long process. Now if I go, I need a hammer, I go, hammer on Amazon. One click, buy, bam, I'm out. It's on the way. It's there. Could be the same day.

[Mike Rowe]

Could be the same day.

[Michael Easter]

Yeah, could be the same day. So if you can even slow down some of the behaviors, I think that can be useful.

[Mike Rowe]

But how is it bad for us to eliminate all of the strawman drang that comes from just getting a hammer? Like, I mean, is it inherently bad to spend that time or is it just a matter of efficiency?

[Michael Easter]

The faster you can do something, the more likely you are to do it. So if that thing is a good thing, good. But when you look at how much shit people buy, frankly, yeah. And that's really just been wrapped up by the ease of online. So I'll tell people, like, if you think you want something online, put it in the cart and give yourself 72 hour rule. I can only buy this if I revisit the cart in 72 hours and go. That was a great decision. You definitely need that. Most of the time people go, I already have a hammer. I just wanted the like, cool one with the flag on it that was all nice and painted, you know, and even something as simple as taking credit cards off of Autofill. So you got to go find the wallet, you got to type in the credit card. It's a pain in the ass.

[Mike Rowe]

I forget which carrier it was, but I was on a plane the other day that I don't normally take, and their wi fi hadn't automatically saved whatever info I needed. And I needed to get online. I wanted to finish the thing I had an hour before I landed and that exact screen came up. I needed to fill in nine rectangles. I just didn't have the belly for it. I just couldn't do it. It was easier to get a gin and tonic and stare out the window, which I did. There you go. What does that say about me?

[Michael Easter]

We don't like friction. It goes back to that 2% idea. We want to do the next easiest, most comfortable thing. We're wired to do that even when it doesn't serve us.

[Mike Rowe]

Yeah.

[Michael Easter]

So I could argue in your case, you go. If you would have gone through that little moment of friction, you would have gotten these productive things done. But it was like friction.

[Mike Rowe]

Yeah.

[Michael Easter]

The escalators broken now I'm staying on the first floor.

[Mike Rowe]

Yeah, forget that.

[Michael Easter]

But.

[Mike Rowe]

Well, that's because whatever is on the second floor is not sufficiently beguiling. Right. I mean, if I had to get online in order to. To do a thing, that would result in some sort of remuneration maybe. Right. But it wasn't. The truth is, the reason I had to go online was to do something I didn't really want to do anyway.

[Michael Easter]

You didn't want to do it in the first place.

[Mike Rowe]

Right. It was like, ah, God, I was kind of dreading it. I didn't really feel like it. In fact, I kind of resented it. You know, like, Jade needed some description for a podcast episode and I just didn't feel like writing it really. And like, that was my excuse. It was like, you know, something I would have done it. But these sons of guns over here at Delta, they insist. Nope, sorry. It's not my fault. Delta's fault. Yeah, so that was. Yeah, I didn't like the friction, but maybe I was also looking for an excuse.

[Michael Easter]

Yeah, that sounds about right. I'm the same way.

[Mike Rowe]

I mean, that's your. Yeah, you. You took the elevator because a producer told you to, and you've got this weird fantasy in your brain that I'm living the vita loca up in the penthouse and the doors are going to open and you're going to step in as an adult.

[Michael Easter]

I did expect that. I don't know if I was let down or just like, oh, good, he's not full of shit.

[Mike Rowe]

He's not as fancy as I thought.

[Michael Easter]

Yeah, he's not as fancy as I thought.

[Mike Rowe]

Well, so much of what you wrote about in the Comfort Crisis. And again, I guess this is an obvious thing to say, but in Scarcity Brain, it's like, why haven't we adapted to our surroundings? Comfort Crisis is about the virtue of being uncomfortable and the price we've paid for hitting the easy button in a thousand different ways. And it really did stick in my crawl, man. We met virtually. I think it was, like, at a Dave Ramsey thing or something.

[Michael Easter]

Yeah, that's how we met. It was a Dave Ramsey event.

[Mike Rowe]

Yeah. And, like, this really never happens for me, but I. I got your book immediately, and I read it.

[Michael Easter]

Awesome.

[Mike Rowe]

I really did. And I really liked. I liked the way you came at it as a writer, but it was so personal. That's really the thing. And I'll. I want to talk a lot about rucking because it has kind of changed my. My daily world, but.

[Michael Easter]

Awesome.

[Mike Rowe]

What's the big takeaway for people from this book? I'm just asking for the Cliff Notes because I know we've already touched on it in the past, but it's important that people understand, I think what sent you down this weird path of skepticism?

[Michael Easter]

Yeah, I mean, the big Cliff notes of the book is that as the world has gotten more and more comfortable in every way, everything from we don't have to put in as much effort to get our food to the fact that we spend 93% of our time indoors, the fact that we don't have to move anymore. We've lost some of the most important things that keep us healthy, happy, and make life interesting and bring us meaning. So it's like, comfort is. Is great, but if you're never offsetting that by doing things that are inherently challenging, uncomfortable, you Start to see people get restless, they get unhealthy. Like all these bad things sort of creep in. So my. My path to that book is that I got sober and I was 28. And this wasn't like I listened to a few health podcasts and go, oh, you know, maybe if I have a few more, less drinks, I'll have abs. I was like the guy that would wake up and go, where's my car? And I'd look out and it's on the front lawn, Michael. Yeah, that might be a problem. So getting sober, though, was extremely hard. I'd tried a bunch of times. Never worked. Because I'm always looking for the easy way out of this. You know, what. What simple thing can I do to just fix this problem? How can I just, you know, drink a little less? That shit never worked.

[Mike Rowe]

Really?

[Michael Easter]

Never.

[Mike Rowe]

So it was never the moderation thing?

[Michael Easter]

No. My favorite drink was always the next one that might get you in trouble. And then one morning, I just sort of could clearly see this was not gonna end well. And it occurred to me it was kind of like one of those will, duh moments where you go, wait a minute, did you think this is supposed to be easy to get sober? Like, no.

[Mike Rowe]

Was that the car on the lawn morning?

[Michael Easter]

That was probably the car in the back lawn morning? That might have been that one. And I just sort of accepted, this is going to be really hard. And I leaned into that discomfort and it was hard. It was hell for the. I mean, your life gets worse when you get sober, because now you don't have the, oh, I feel bad crack, right? Your life gets worse for a while. But then on the other side of that, things started getting better across the board. Like, everything got better. Now when this happened, I was working at Men's Health magazine, was an editor there, writer for a bunch of years. And I saw that, like, everything, every single thing we wrote about in that magazine, same exact trajectory. You had to do something that was hard in the short term to get a long term benefit. And so from there, then it became this sort of pullback, going, all right, going through discomfort seems to improve people in a lot of different ways, and there's a lot of different ways to do that. Then you just sort of look at modern life and you're like, wow, we've made everything way more comfortable than it's ever been. Like, we don't really have to be uncomfortable today if we don't want to. And I wonder what that's done to us.

[Mike Rowe]

So the unintended consequence, the Unintended consequence.

[Michael Easter]

Yeah.

[Mike Rowe]

And it was Donnie Vincent, right?

[Michael Easter]

Yeah. I went hunting with him so that that book came out of a profile I did of him for Men's Health, where we went hunting for a week. You know, I'd never been hunting, and

[Mike Rowe]

this guy probably hasn't eaten anything he hasn't killed in decades.

[Michael Easter]

He's one of those types, like, true.

[Mike Rowe]

Off the grid, like, walking the walk.

[Michael Easter]

He's legit. He's not, you know, going to a hunting resort and staying in a nice lodge. And then he goes out for the day and hunts and shows the photo of the. Like, look at this. Crazy.

[Mike Rowe]

I did.

[Michael Easter]

Yeah. No, he's out there for, like, months at a time in the middle of nowhere, very dangerous hunts. He's a real deal. I did a hunt with him for Men's Health. I realized, you know, it was one of those stories. I sat down where my word count is 2500, and I said, well, I could probably do, like, four times this. Not four. My math is not good. I'm a writer, not a mathematician.

[Mike Rowe]

Well, that's 10,000 words.

[Michael Easter]

Yeah. 40 times this, so I can. 40.

[Mike Rowe]

Oh, yeah.

[Michael Easter]

So that's like 80,000 words. Yeah, yeah. So I pitched it as a book, and then as part of that, I'm like, all right, well, we needed through line. The hunt that I had done. Done with him in Nevada. I'm like, that was the spine of this story I wrote. But I had to leave out a lot. So I talked my way into going up to the Arctic with him for more than a month. Like, hey, could I do one of these hunts with you? And he's like, yeah, maybe this is a caribou. Yeah, it was a caribou hunt. So we were up in the Arctic for more than a month hunting. And, yeah, I got what I wanted out of that, which was, let's see what being uncomfortable for a while does. And, I mean, that trip, it was hell up there. Like, I'm freezing cold. Like, I wasn't warm for a second. But there's some days where, like, negative 40.

[Mike Rowe]

Yeah.

[Michael Easter]

And I'm coming from Las Vegas.

[Mike Rowe]

It's so cold.

[Michael Easter]

It's so cold. Bored out of my mind for a lot of it. Which. That's new today, Right. If I'm bored at home, I just go, bam. Cell phone, Netflix. Let's check my email for the 99th million time today. Maybe new ones in.

[Mike Rowe]

Who knows? Maybe she's there waiting, Waiting.

[Michael Easter]

Hungry, too, because we had to pack in all our food. Like, now. I. I just. I'M one of those people that I'm kind of bored. I think I'll just eat, you know. So now I'm hungry again. All these different. The silence. Holy hell. Like, once you get up there. There was one time I was out on the tundra. It's probably peeing or something. And you see this, like. And I'm like, what is that? What is that? It was my watch. It is so silent that any noise just gets amplified and it's almost like your perception just gets really dialed up and it's.

[Mike Rowe]

We don't realize how noisy it is here day to day.

[Michael Easter]

Yeah.

[Mike Rowe]

We don't realize. It's kind of like light pollution too. Right?

[Michael Easter]

Right.

[Mike Rowe]

Like noise pollution and light pollution are, you know, like a duplex. But even in Vegas, I remember being out in the desert and just being blown away by the amount of stars I could see. Once you're really away from the lights. Because if you live in Vegas or really in any city, it's amazing what you can get used to. You get used to not seeing the night sky, not hearing nothing.

[Michael Easter]

Yeah.

[Mike Rowe]

So when you do. Yeah. It's breathtaking. Dumb. Try and imagine running your business today without the Internet.

[Michael Easter]

Could you?

[Mike Rowe]

Maybe. But it wouldn't be easy because all of your competition is on the Internet. Right. It's the same thing with AI. Now people are hesitating, they're skeptical. I get it. But if you're in business, you really can't afford to drag your feet with this because everybody else is moving forward and they're moving forward quickly. You need to know about NetSuite next. You probably know about NetSuite already. That's the AI powered business management suite that brings everything together. Financials, inventory, commerce, HR, CRM, all that stuff. Well, NetSuite Next is the next leap forward and how business gets done. And it's happening in real time. Netsuitenext will automatically surface custom insights throughout your workday. The AI agents work alongside you to solve every problem and handle routine work and challenges as they present themselves. Whenever you have a question about anything, you just ask, just like you're having a conversation with a colleague. NetSuite is customized for a wide range of industries, so it supports the way your business truly works. And most Importantly, I think 43,000, 43,000 companies are already doing this. I don't want to tell you what to do, but if I was going to tell you what to do, I would tell you to get with the program. The program is NetSuite Next. You can try it for free if Your revenues are in the seven figures. Go to NetSuite AI Mike. That's NetSuite AI Mike. It's free. Try it and be amazed.

[Michael Easter]

That's NetSuite.com.

[Mike Rowe]

Netsuite. Yes, Netsuite. I said Netsuite.com. you said Netsuite.com/Mike.

[Michael Easter]

There's a stat I have in that book that we've increased the world's loudness by fourfold. So four times louder than it was. The other thing I found, there's a study that found there's only 16 places in the lower 48 where you can stand for more than 15 minutes and not hear any human created noise. Only 16 places left.

[Mike Rowe]

Wow.

[Michael Easter]

Yeah. Like where one was in the. What's that place people canoe in? Minnesota. It's not like bad, I want to say bad waters.

[Mike Rowe]

Minnesota. I thought they were all lakes up there.

[Michael Easter]

River. Yes, I think it's a lake and river system.

[Mike Rowe]

Okay.

[Michael Easter]

Places. There's a place in Washington in the forest. There's a guy who's literally, his job is, I think he's called a audio ecologist or something.

[Mike Rowe]

Come on.

[Michael Easter]

One of those. Where you go, what is that major?

[Mike Rowe]

That's not a job.

[Michael Easter]

Yeah. And then you hear what he does and you're like, oh, so you just go on a hike and you take like a sound meter and publish research. Sounds like you figured it out, man.

[Mike Rowe]

Well, look, he. He made it into your book.

[Michael Easter]

I guess he made it in my book. But. But I think to your point about, you don't even realize, I think a lot of this is very subtle. It definitely affects us, but you get used to it and you don't realize you are being affected by it. It's just kind of like, you know, you're like a fish in water. You don't realize you're surrounded in water.

[Mike Rowe]

How much of what is going on today in just the whole general kind of body hacking thing, you know, like when I think of, you know, people exercising in a sauna, you know, like Laird Hamilton just getting on a stationary bike and going bananas in 220 degrees and then jumping in his pool and walking across the bottom holding a 50 pound boulder like, or cold plunges. These things are all, all seem to be deliberate choices to be uncomfortable. And I was just so surprised to see them catch on the way that they did. Were you surprised? Is it part of the theory that, you know, we come out of this trance at some point the way you did when you realized the benefits of all of this discomfort? I mean, do you take Any credit for the cold plunge today? Did you write about that? I don't remember.

[Michael Easter]

I did not write about the cold plunge, no. I think to your point, people get something from it, right? It does something for them, or else they wouldn't go back to the basket. So you go, okay, well, what is that? Well, it turns out that people inherently value things that are harder to get or work for. When we do things that challenge us and are harder, the end result, whatever it might be, becomes way more valuable than had we got it in an effortless way. Good example I like to give people is kids. So I don't have kids, but you talk to any parent, you go, what's the most important thing in your life, the most meaningful thing in your life? They always say kids. You go, was that really easy? They go, no, one of the hardest things I've ever had to do. Bingo. That's it. And there's strong psychology going back decades for that. And so when you look at two, if you look at polls on meaning in the country, people are feeling like their life is more meaningless. They're just not finding meaning. I think part of that is so much of the friction that once, although it was hard, it taught us something about ourselves, gave us this inherent, like, yeah, I'm a person who can do stuff. Like this is my life is important. Removing the dial that's been removed in a lot of ways. I was actually thinking about you, because I did a piece on my sub stack, 2%, that was about that. How when you have to do something that has some sort of challenge, you got to figure something out and you get an end result. People get meaning out of that. And so I was thinking about it with jobs, because a lot of people today, if you work in an office at a big corporation, say, you don't really know, like, what is the end product. You know, you fill out a spreadsheet, it goes to this guy who goes, yeah, I sent it to that guy, who then maybe sent it to this person. And then it just. You just don't know. There's just no end product. You're like, the spreadsheet was kind of a pain in the ass. But, like, I have no idea what happened. I'm just kind of like, doing this stuff. I don't know what it does. I mean, the stock price kind of goes up every now and then, I guess. I guess I help that, me and the 30,000 other people who work here. But I think trade jobs have an element where there's a quick return. You did. You did something you put work in, you had to figure things out. Did you fix it or not? You figure it out within. If it's a quicker thing, you figure it out by the end of the day.

[Mike Rowe]

You always know how you're doing.

[Michael Easter]

You always know how you're doing. And you can walk away going, fixed it? Yeah, like your hat. I fix stuff.

[Mike Rowe]

Right. And you're surrounded by the visual proof of that thing, you know, Right. I can't tell. I mean, there's nothing here to indicate when the podcast is over, except I stopped talking, you know, like there's no obvious thing. And most people don't have clear and present visual reminders of their progress at every stretch. But Donnie Vincent does. Hunters do. And to your point, a lot of trade workers do too. But it is.

[Michael Easter]

They called this. The, this came from a study I was writing about. It's called the IKEA Effect. So basically, these researchers had people either put together a piece of IKEA furniture or they said, hey, do you want this pre made one? And then they asked them, how much would you pay us for this? And the people who had to make it said they would pay far more money for it than the people were if they would just hand it over. So this indicated, oh, there's something that inherently makes this thing more valuable because I had to do it. And one of the great anecdotes they used to open up the study was, in the 50s, food manufacturers start making instant cake mixes. The first time they go out with it, they're like, we're gonna make this as easy as possible. You just get the powder and you mix in the water and you put it in the oven. That's all you got to do. No one is buying it. And they go, why is someone buying this? It's so easy. They realize, oh, maybe that makes it not as valuable to the baker. The baker feels like they haven't really done anything for the people they're serving the cake to. The people eating it. Go, you didn't do anything for this. So they literally started for no reason, just to add friction. Now you have to put an egg and a little bit of oil in it. Adding that little bit of effort, it made the cake mixes take off.

[Mike Rowe]

But then, which is it? I didn't log on because the friction of the form, right. The juice wasn't worth the squeeze. I didn't want the friction. In that example, if I had had 18 squares instead of nine, maybe I would have looked at it as more of a challenge. Somehow or another, how does the psychology Translate.

[Michael Easter]

How does it square? For me, it's that had the cake maker said, you got to do 20 steps. Now you're like, no, right?

[Mike Rowe]

What do I look like a cake maker?

[Michael Easter]

Yeah. But because it was just a little bit, people go, okay, I've put in some effort to this. I feel like it's more meaningful. And the way that squares for me is once you add too much friction, once you add the actual staircase, now that's a lot of friction.

[Mike Rowe]

Yeah.

[Michael Easter]

People start to shy away.

[Mike Rowe]

Yeah.

[Michael Easter]

But you'll see people kind of walk up the. Up the escalator, and they're like, okay,

[Mike Rowe]

I did something, you know, just a little inside baseball. But I know for me, and I've learned this lesson a couple of different ways over the years, but when I decided I wanted to make money impersonating a public speaker. Right. Well, you know, I. I put the word out, and I came up with a rate that I thought was fair, you know, and kind of put myself out there, and there was. There was some interest, and, you know, I got a lot of. A lot of good feedback. Once I went and did it. Turns out I had a facility for it. But I was like, you know, how can I. How can I do better? Like, what do I have to do? Because I thought the rate I was charging was pretty frothy. But as it turns out,

[Michael Easter]

as it

[Mike Rowe]

turns out, if you charge a lot more, then people start to wonder, well, what the hell does this guy really have to say? And then somebody pays it, and then you realize, oh, shit, I actually need an act now. I need a message. Right? And so this happened years ago. It was. I think it was Motorola invited me to the Innovation seminar down in Boca Raton, and I had a conflict. And I literally told my business partner, who you just met, Mary. I said, you know, I would really love to do this, and it sucks that I can't because of this. And she said, well, look, they're still asking for a rate. They really want you. And I said, just for grins, find out what Bill Clinton charges. That's how long ago it was. And just give it just to see what happens. She's like, ugh. And they said, yeah, all right.

[Michael Easter]

Pressure's on.

[Mike Rowe]

So I had to cancel my gig. I wound up going to Napa for a weekend and just thought really, really hard, what could I possibly say at the Innovation Seminar that would justify this ridiculous rate that I know I'm not. I don't have the value. Like, I was really nervous about it, but made me care more than I did. And it made me think really hard about the lessons from the dirt. And so I wound up going. I wound up getting overpaid in my mind, but I did the best job I could. In fact, I attacked their whole notion of celebrating innovation at the expense of imitation and made what I thought were some fairly contrarian points. And they invited me back the next year. So I get it, like, the moral. I think sometimes the key to figuring out whatever it is is just to go dead the opposite direction, way further than you otherwise might, which is why people are jumping into, you know, water that's absolute zero.

[Michael Easter]

Yeah. And I would argue, had you said, okay, charge him the lower rate, we wouldn't be talking about this. You still remember that talk, and you had to put in extra, and it's becomes. It's burned into your memory.

[Mike Rowe]

It became a big part of my business today.

[Michael Easter]

Yeah, you had to get there. Yeah, I had the same thing. So I am not. I've never liked public speaking. That's been my thing. And so I write this. You know, I'm a writer. Just put me alone in a room and just let me peck some keys. Yeah, that's where I'm happy. So I come out with a book, and then someone asked me to speak in public. I'm going, hell, no. Like, I don't want to do that. And they go, well, here's how much we'll pay you. Tell me more.

[Mike Rowe]

Yeah, yeah, I'm listening.

[Michael Easter]

Yeah. So I say yes. And I love public speaking now. The reason I love public speaking now is because I had to work my ass off at it.

[Mike Rowe]

Dare I say, is it because it made you uncomfortable?

[Michael Easter]

Made me uncomfortable. And each time I did it, though, you're like, you can see these improvements. You're like, you're getting better. Oh, that joke landed this time. What did you do there? And I learned something. And so it really was something that did not come natural to me. I needed the incentive of a check to do it. But once I started, I'm like, I really enjoy this. And now it becomes this thing that I love, because every time I give a talk, I'm always like, I'm nervous. Am I going to land this? What's going to happen? But then you get through it and you're like, glad I did that. Yeah, it was great.

[Mike Rowe]

Would you say that's among the greatest good things that have happened to you as a result of deliberately being uncomfortable?

[Michael Easter]

I think so, yeah. You mean the public speaking or just the lesson from that?

[Mike Rowe]

Well, I mean, specifically, like, from What? I've read your substack and I've listened to your podcast. I assume podcasting wasn't probably on your bingo card either before you wrote the Comfort Crisis.

[Michael Easter]

No, I was hoping I could do the Salinger thing. And you write a book, sells a bunch, and then it see you later, world, and never hear from me again. Well, it turns out you can't do that anymore.

[Mike Rowe]

Can't do that.

[Michael Easter]

No publisher's going, would you put a picture on Instagram of yourself holding the book and talking about the book? And you're just like, jesus.

[Mike Rowe]

Yeah. But you can't say no because it makes you uncomfortable. Because that would make you the worst kind of ironic hack.

[Michael Easter]

Exactly. Exactly.

[Mike Rowe]

So now everything you have, everything I

[Michael Easter]

do, I have to do everything I hate to do. I can't. I have no excuse.

[Mike Rowe]

You wrote a book that destroyed your entire excuse architecture.

[Michael Easter]

Oh, yeah. And it's funny now. Cause I'll travel the towns and, you know, go to events or hang out with people, and they'll be like, oh, you're here. You want to go for a hike? There's this peak where we might die. You'll love it. I can't say no.

[Mike Rowe]

Or you're in your hotel room, right, and the air conditioner's not working. So you call down, you say, yeah, this is. And they're like, oh, is it a little warm up there for you, Mr. Comfort Man? Is it like, suck it up, dude?

[Michael Easter]

Yeah, well, I can never fly first class. I can never sit, go to, like, five star hotel. I can never go to a five star restaurant because it's just too. But I'm fine with it.

[Mike Rowe]

You wrote the wrong book.

[Michael Easter]

Yeah, I wrote the wrong book. Should have been. Why? Why Comfort is so great for you. And I could just do Nothing.

[Mike Rowe]

Here he is, 2% with Michael Easter.

[Michael Easter]

Yep.

[Mike Rowe]

With a. You're nicely quaffed there.

[Michael Easter]

Yeah, that's. That's Buffalo Larry in Las Vegas.

[Mike Rowe]

Is this. Is this the pod?

[Michael Easter]

Yeah, this is the pod. We just launched it in April. It's been fun. It's been a blast. I wasn't sure if I was gonna like it. I've loved it. You talk to a lot of interesting people. You just gotta ask them questions. Why didn't you tell me about this?

[Mike Rowe]

I get it. Look. Well, I came to. Look, I spent 20 years crawling through sewers and having this exact conversation, you know, hanging upside down like a bat in a cave with. You know, and I'm like, there's gotta be an easier way to do this. But No, I mean, if you're genuinely curious and you genuinely enjoy the language, there's no better way to make a living today. Which is why there are four and a half million podcasts.

[Michael Easter]

Sounds right.

[Mike Rowe]

Can you imagine there's four and a half million of a thing that didn't really exist a decade ago?

[Michael Easter]

Yeah, it's wild. And part of it for me is my books were selling more in audio than they were print. And so people.

[Mike Rowe]

So why do you figure?

[Michael Easter]

I think people listen to my books when they go out for walks, they're exercising, they're doing other things, so they're being active, which. Which I like. But then people.

[Mike Rowe]

Did you read it yourself?

[Michael Easter]

I did read it myself, yeah. Yeah.

[Mike Rowe]

You happy with that?

[Michael Easter]

You tell me. I don't know.

[Mike Rowe]

I actually read your book, the Old Fashioned, Inefficient, Pro Magnum Way. Yeah?

[Michael Easter]

Yeah, it was fun. I did it at a studio in Las Vegas and they gave me a, you know, email. Here's the address. Show up here at this time, and I go down. If anyone's familiar with Vegas, I'm on South Maryland, which is a good place to get shot.

[Mike Rowe]

Yeah.

[Michael Easter]

And I pull up and there's this restaurant, and then there's this building with just a number, totally blacked out.

[Mike Rowe]

Door.

[Michael Easter]

I knock, I wait. Door cracks open, eyes come out. I can kind of smell weed. And guy just looks at me, goes, you the writer? That's me. They let me in and I open the door and there's all these platinum albums on the walls. There's like Kenny Chesney albums. There's like Kanye albums. These are all recorded here. And he goes, yeah, idiot, let's go record. And it's like a full on, you know, I don't even think they'd ever had a writer there. It was like a rap studio, a country studio, and it was great.

[Mike Rowe]

That's so funny. The same thing happened to me over in Bermuda. I guess the Deadliest Catch got jammed up and they needed an emergency session. And I wound up in a place where Sean Connery lived there. It was not far from his house, and he had just been there doing a movie trailer or something. And it was this. God, you look at the walls and all these famous cats are there, and it's a very weird set of muscles and a very strange environment. Like, if you're the first time you enter that to sit there alone, headphones, microphone, just you and your own voice made doubly strange. By now you're reading your own words, right? So you're kind of Telling yourself a story that you wrote, and is it making you crazy when you do it? Are you. Are you finding sentences that you're saying out loud for the first time and

[Michael Easter]

going, God, why'd I write it that way?

[Mike Rowe]

I sure would like another pass at that.

[Michael Easter]

And then you got a producer in your ear, piped in, and he's this erudite guy from New York. And I mispronounce words, apparently, and I'm an idiot for it. What did I. I mispronounced something. And he just goes, stop. And he pronounces it correctly, like, in the most demeaning way ever. And I'm just like, sorry, I'll go back to the basket.

[Mike Rowe]

It's not the comfort crisis. Yeah, you've been saying the title of your book wrong.

[Michael Easter]

Yeah. There was one word in Scarcity brain that he finally just gave up on me. He corrected me so many times.

[Mike Rowe]

Remember the word monk?

[Michael Easter]

I was saying monk. M O, N, K. Monk. Yeah, I was saying monk. And he was like, it's monk.

[Mike Rowe]

Like bonk.

[Michael Easter]

Yes. I was saying monk. And I wouldn't stop saying it. And he corrected me so many times.

[Chuck]

Monk.

[Mike Rowe]

Like a monk?

[Michael Easter]

Yeah, like a Benedictine.

[Mike Rowe]

That's what he's trying to say, Benedictine.

[Chuck]

And he's so in.

[Mike Rowe]

Monk.

[Michael Easter]

Monk. But I kept saying monk.

[Mike Rowe]

Right.

[Michael Easter]

And finally he just goes, screw it. I'm. I'm done with this. So part of the book has monk, part has my cut ins with monk, and then eventually it just transitions to monk.

[Mike Rowe]

Yeah, I had a fun.

[Michael Easter]

Fun.

[Mike Rowe]

I had a horrible script for the Science Channel once. It was a line about bloodworms. And naturally, I mean, I'm reading. I'm pretty good at this, you know, I mean, I've done it a lot, and I don't spend a ton of time in the booth anymore. But I came across an assemblage of letters that I had not seen before. The word was circumflex ganglion. And it's the smooth, fleshy, round part on a worm, like in the middle of it, like, it's ridged everywhere. But then there's this smooth thing. And inside the circumflex geneal ganglion are all the organs. That's where you put the hook when you bait them. Because that's. That's a tough part. But, man, it just. It's. It's so jarring to your brain. You're just sitting there and you're reading along, you're narrating, and everything's good. And then there's this. It's a hard stop, man. And yet I had to walk away from it. Had to say it out loud a few times, because you can't just say it in the blind. You have to actually read the sentence.

[Michael Easter]

Right.

[Mike Rowe]

But, yeah, you know, that was uncomfortable. But you know something?

[Michael Easter]

Well, listen, you just said it perfectly.

[Mike Rowe]

What would I. I wouldn't have, like, how many cocktail stories, how many just good tales exist as the result of being uncomfortable.

[Michael Easter]

Exactly.

[Mike Rowe]

I'd say virtually all of them.

[Michael Easter]

Every single. So my. This sort of mantra I've. Mantra, mantra, mantra, mantra.

[Chuck]

Excuse me.

[Mike Rowe]

Stop, stop.

[Chuck]

It's mantra, Mantra.

[Michael Easter]

Okay?

[Mike Rowe]

Chuck's a producer. If you haven't.

[Michael Easter]

This mantra I've come up with for myself is no problem, no story. So when I would have to do these reporting trips for my books, and I'll go to all over the world. You're like, flying. You're going to the Bolivian jungle. You got to get there. You're going to Iraq. You got to figure it out. I would go in wanting everything to be perfect, Right. Like, we're in dangerous places. I want everything to line up. I want to feel safe. I don't want things to go off the rails. Things would go off the rails naturally, and I would be like, oh, you know, you're kind of anxious about it. But then I would get home and write the book and go, this is what makes the story good.

[Mike Rowe]

That's called material.

[Michael Easter]

The fact that my fixer in Iraq is just completely full of shit.

[Mike Rowe]

Yeah.

[Michael Easter]

Is what makes the book interesting. If the guy's, like, perfectly dialed and everything goes right, that's not a good read.

[Mike Rowe]

You need.

[Michael Easter]

You need bullshit inserted in your life so you can come back and go, let me tell you this story.

[Mike Rowe]

Do you. Were you a fan of Bourdain?

[Michael Easter]

I was, yeah. I liked a lot of his stuff.

[Mike Rowe]

Yeah.

[Michael Easter]

I think he was unfair to some people.

[Mike Rowe]

He was.

[Michael Easter]

He was unfair. He was.

[Mike Rowe]

Oh, he was unfair. He was very flawed.

[Michael Easter]

Yeah.

[Mike Rowe]

He was a terrible host in the traditional sense of the word.

[Michael Easter]

Right.

[Mike Rowe]

He was so uncomfortable that he couldn't look at the lens of the camera. And his producers became so panicked when they realized they were working with a guy who was hosting a show at the time called no Reservations, who couldn't look in the camera because he just felt so false and so fake and so inauthentic whenever he was doing that, that they figured a way for him to be himself without looking at the camera ever, you know? And so that. That was the first thing that, like, really changed the way that show felt and then years later, I saw him off the coast of. Where was it? Was it like Sardinia, maybe? Octopus.

[Chuck]

Yeah.

[Michael Easter]

Yeah.

[Mike Rowe]

So he's. He's spear diving for octopi, and he has a fixer, as you always do when you travel. And this guy was very eager to please and wanted to make sure that they had some octopi to spear. And so while Tony's down there looking for one with a legit spearfisher, this guy is up top dumping, like, frozen octopi into the water.

[Michael Easter]

Unbelievable.

[Mike Rowe]

And they're just. They're falling around him, you know? And so in narration, you hear Tony telling you what is happening in this moment, and he's so angry after the fact. And how he got this on the network is one of the great mysteries of tv, but he throws everybody under the bus, and he's basically saying, this is it. This is why I hate my job. Here I am, you know, 15ft down, trying to legitimately show you what it takes to get an octopus on your plate, and this asshat is trying to do his job in the worst possible way, and I hate everything about it. And this happens early on in the episode, and he's so pissed as a result that all he does is drink for the rest of the episode. Now, he's not only looking at the camera, he's just. He gets drunk on camera and stays that way in protest of this moment of falseness, I guess, you know. And so, you know, I'm only. I'm riffing on it because all of that came from being uncomfortable and frustrated. And every single thing that happened as a result in any other media, with any other director on any other network in any other form would have all been cut out. Yeah, but it wasn't. And so it became my favorite episode of that whole thing. It was one of the more honest things I'd seen on TV ever. So if you can find that on the page, in front of a camera, on stage, in a recording booth, in song, whatever it is. That's the trick. And it's always preceded by pain.

[Michael Easter]

Yeah, preceded by pain. It became authentic because of the pain. Why do you think that show worked then?

[Mike Rowe]

Well, in part because it was surrounded by lots of other examples that did not comport. It's the same reason Dirty Jobs worked when it did. It's not that it was particularly or inherently good, instead was surrounded by the commute. And so when you take the reverse commute in the face of all the other stuff, like you mentioned, Salinger, you know, why did that book work as Good as it worked. It was one great book. And I think it's because there was nothing else like it at the time.

[Michael Easter]

Yeah, timing is a thing. I think that Comfort Crisis has done pretty well as a book. I don't think anyone would be talking about it had that book come out in 2019.

[Mike Rowe]

Correct.

[Michael Easter]

That book came out in 2021. About a year anniversary of all the pandemic lockdowns. People had spent a year in their house. I've been trapped in this cage of comfort for a year. And then. Oh, this book. Okay, I'll check this out.

[Mike Rowe]

Right.

[Michael Easter]

Well, a lot of it is luck. That said, I just like to say you gotta at least throw the damn dice, so you're never gonna have any luck.

[Mike Rowe]

The other reason your book worked and the other reason I hustled to get it after hearing you talk about it is that it was an interesting combination of a lived experience. Like you actually went on the caribou hunt. You actually shot one, you actually butchered it and walked across the tundra for many miles to hump it out. You know, it's. But then you back it up with science or at least other people with large brains who have done deep work, who can actually put some meat on that bone. Not a lot of books do that. And you were uniquely qualified to write it in part maybe because, you know, maybe because you weren't sober and then you were. Maybe because, you know, you needed your own cage shook.

[Michael Easter]

Yeah. Yeah. I do think I definitely get better material going out into the world. I think we were just talking before we hit record how a lot of nonfiction books are. It's harder to sell them now. I think one of the problems is that a lot of people who are in the non fiction space, especially journalist types, it's just. I'm going to sit at my desk and write a book. Yeah, I'm going to read some studies. I'm going to find some random anecdote online. Here's your anecdote. Here's the study. Okay. It's like, go out in the world and talk to people. Find an interesting narrative. Like, it becomes too formulaic. Like, some of those books I think are great. Some I'm like, I've read this before. I read this 20 years ago. You got to go find something new. It takes like, you got to exit the bounds of normalcy.

[Mike Rowe]

Truly, man, I mean, that is the. That's the sameness.

[Michael Easter]

Yeah.

[Mike Rowe]

That's why most tv, I think, is bad, because it's, it's derivative. Somebody did something that was Different. And that was a hit. And then everybody rushed to, you know, do the same show, write the same book. Why does so much music sound the same? It's always that.

[Michael Easter]

Yeah.

[Mike Rowe]

You know, that was my theme at Motorola. In a way, they were there to celebrate innovation. And I was there to say, how come all you cats in Silicon Valley brand yourself as great innovators, when in reality, the money that you made wasn't just a result of this great thing that you innovated? Right. It's really your ability to do this, like, millions of times in a row. This. This iPhone. Right. It's like, that's when you have a business, you know, you have to be able to do the same thing over and over. I mean, maybe, I reckon Donnie Vincent would like, if you're going to be a good hunter, you better do smart things over and over and over and over.

[Michael Easter]

Do smart things over and over and over. Go places people won't go, spend more time in those places. Like, he's just willing to put the time and the work, and not everyone can do that. He does it professionally, but he's figured out, how do I turn this into a living? Yeah, that's like every. You know, and a lot, I would imagine, of building a good brand is if someone has one thing. But you go, well, what's wrong with this? And how can I just make this thing so much better? It's like we had the. Not to pick on your old client here, but we had the razor. And Steve Jobs comes along, goes, yeah, but look at this thing. And it's the iPhone, right? The end of the day, both make calls. But this thing can do so much more. Or like coolers. Coolers used to be suck, right? You put the ice in. You put the drinks in. The ice is melted in three hours. Yeti comes along and goes, we got an idea. And now the ice stays there for 48 hours. Or like, did you have Josh Smith on the podcast?

[Mike Rowe]

Oh, yeah, yeah. He was just here.

[Michael Easter]

Yeah. I'm gonna make an unbelievable knife. I'm gonna make it in America. It's gonna be the best damn knife you ever seen. And the branding is gonna be phenomenal. And bam. Montana. And then Montana knife company just goes from his garage to now. They got this giant facility.

[Mike Rowe]

Were you there for the opening?

[Michael Easter]

I wasn't there for the opening, but I saw him actually with Dave at. Dave Ramsey did an event. Yeah, In April.

[Mike Rowe]

How are you guys friends? How did he get in your world?

[Michael Easter]

Me and Josh.

[Mike Rowe]

Yeah.

[Michael Easter]

I was hanging out with one of the Toughest human beings in the world, if not the toughest. Her name is Laura Zara. Amazing new one.

[Mike Rowe]

Check that thing out.

[Michael Easter]

Awesome. Oh, yeah. This guy knows what he's doing.

[Mike Rowe]

He's so unbelievable. He so knows what he's doing.

[Michael Easter]

Yeah.

[Chuck]

Do you know that that new knife sold out in less than 10 seconds?

[Mike Rowe]

Yeah, that flipper that people. Yeah, the flip.

[Chuck]

The flip knife.

[Mike Rowe]

Oh, you mean the pocket knife.

[Chuck]

The pocket knife. People lined up, like, I think there were three. Since 3am that day to wait for it to drop, and it was gone online. It was like. Because I happened to be watching it go down. No kidding.

[Mike Rowe]

You know? I know that.

[Chuck]

And when it went down, click, sold out.

[Mike Rowe]

Let me tell you what this guy's done. Just sidebar. He sat right here a month ago.

[Michael Easter]

I can feel his aura.

[Mike Rowe]

That's. That's not his aura. Yeah, no, he. We talked about the great American pocket knife three, four years ago, and. And how, like, it's. No one's doing it, and how it was such a talisman for generations and how everybody's granddad had one and what a truly useful tool it was.

[Michael Easter]

Yeah.

[Mike Rowe]

And then somehow it out of favor, and, you know, he said, I'm gonna bring it back. He gave me the first one sitting right here on the air, and they. They're gone now. Chuck in. In. Yeah, like, literally. Like, literally, like, I love that, man. Yeah, I love it. You know, Josh has got. He built that facility, but He's. He's got 130 people working for him in Missoula making knives the uncomfortable way, the public way. I mean, it's like everything is totally transparent. And he's doing it in the age of tariffs and taxes and a lot of stuff. I mean, talk about an uncomfortable, risky, entrepreneurial bet. And he's. You know, I think his story matters.

[Michael Easter]

When I first met him, his factory was his garage.

[Mike Rowe]

Yeah.

[Michael Easter]

And he walked me through the whole process. You're going, this is where you make these. And this is when the brand was pretty young.

[Mike Rowe]

Did you write a story about him for one of the magazines?

[Michael Easter]

I don't think I did, no. I was up there. I was up there with a lady named Laura Zara, who is just tough as nails. She literally will just go live in the woods for months at a time. She's just. She's awesome.

[Mike Rowe]

My kind of girl.

[Michael Easter]

Yeah. She's great. Very feral person, but great. So she takes me. She knows Josh.

[Mike Rowe]

That's probably not, you know, at least not one of the classic compliments that the. That the ladies Are just.

[Michael Easter]

You can edit that out.

[Mike Rowe]

She's a lovely woman. She's feral, like a cat.

[Michael Easter]

Yeah, well, she literally lives in a cave for a lot of the year. She got this. She meets this old guy in Montana. He's like, oh, I really like you. You're just out, you know, you just hang out in the wilderness all the time. And I think he left her a big piece of property, and there's a cave on the property, piece of land, and she just lives in the cave.

[Mike Rowe]

What's her last name?

[Michael Easter]

Zara. Laura Zara. Look her up. She was in Scarcity Brain.

[Mike Rowe]

Yeah, See if you can find her. Chuck. I want to meet the feral woman who lives in a cave.

[Michael Easter]

She's awesome. She's one of the greatest humans. And she's not, interestingly enough, if you were to just meet her in normal life. Very normal.

[Mike Rowe]

Yeah, you don't go immediate cave dweller.

[Michael Easter]

No, she went to. She went to, like, Connecticut college for undergrad or something. You know, it was like this liberal arts kind of hippie school, and. Yeah, great. But anyway, she took me to meet Josh, and that's when the facility was in the garage. Walked me through the whole thing. He gave me a knife. I'm like, oh, my God. This is like. You're making these out of here.

[Mike Rowe]

Yeah.

[Michael Easter]

And at the time, they were building the bigger building on his property, which. That. I think probably by the time the roof got raised on that, he was like, we need a bigger boat.

[Mike Rowe]

Yep.

[Michael Easter]

And the bigger boat just opened, I guess. So congrats to him. Great guy.

[Mike Rowe]

You know what else he did, man? He did a knife for Microworks as a fundraiser and gave us, like, I don't know, 100. You know, these things sell for 354 bucks apiece. You know, sold out right away. And then he created one called the Rocker, which was, in his words, the ultimate working man's utility knife. You know, he was a lineman before he was a.

[Michael Easter]

Right.

[Mike Rowe]

You know, like, in for money. And he's been given 10% of the gross sales of that thing back to Microworks.

[Michael Easter]

That's cool.

[Mike Rowe]

And he does it every quarter. I mean, it's. It's. It's over $200,000 now that he's contributed to our scholarship program. That's a guy making knives up in Missoula who understands discomfort, who loves the country, and who appreciates what we're doing. Is that Laura?

[Michael Easter]

That's Laura.

[Mike Rowe]

God, what is she doing? What is on her back?

[Michael Easter]

She shed hunts. So she'll go find her thing Is she gets her thrills by finding antlers. She literally is just like. This is how she spends her time. She's great. One of the most fascinating, interesting people, and wise.

[Mike Rowe]

Shout out to the driftwood, log, and pinecone that helped take this pic after only talking to Naron for a few weeks. That's her dog. They were also great for a fresh conversation. Just kidding. I was enjoying the solitude and refused to respond when they tried to strike up banter.

[Michael Easter]

All right, look at. See how her legs are all cut up, huh? Because she only wears shorts and gators, like, even if there's snow on the ground. And she. I don't like. She's like, I'm not a pants person. I just like shorts. So she emerges from the wilderness and her legs are just cut to hell. It's. It's awesome. She's great.

[Mike Rowe]

You know what? I'm gonna ask Nest Chuck. We're gonna need to get. I mean, not Laura. Get.

[Chuck]

Get Laura.

[Mike Rowe]

I mean, does she have a phone in the cave? How does she. How does she communicate?

[Michael Easter]

Send her a text. You'll get a reply in a month when she comes back.

[Mike Rowe]

Well, you know what? Yeah. Between you and Josh, I'm sure we can. We can get her out here. I love to talk with a girl that doesn't wear pants. Yeah, that just seems like a sport.

[Michael Easter]

Yeah.

[Mike Rowe]

Come on.

[Michael Easter]

Bloody legs be great.

[Mike Rowe]

Your latest book, I laughed out loud when I saw the title. Walk with Weight.

[Michael Easter]

Walk with Weight.

[Mike Rowe]

It's my favorite part of comfort crisis. And I guess of all the different forms of discomfort that you discuss in that book, boredom is actually my. My favorite one to talk about. I just think it's so important to be bored. And man, do I think we've forgotten that. But the business of carrying weight. And you write about it with so much affection that it almost feels like a duty as a species that we have, because it's really the one thing we can do that is unrivaled.

[Michael Easter]

Unrivaled. That's the physical thing that humans are built to do and are very good at.

[Mike Rowe]

Explain.

[Michael Easter]

There's no other animal that can pick up a weight and carry it somewhere for distance like no other. And people will listen to this and go, what about a horse? What about a donkey? Well, the key point is pick it up.

[Mike Rowe]

Pick it up. So a wolf grabs its prey in its jaws, right? And heads out, hauls it a little

[Michael Easter]

ways, but they're not carrying it far, right? So once humans start walking on two feet, well, we got these free limbs. What do we do with them. Oh, we can manipulate the world, we can carry our kids, we can carry tools into the unknown. And that really shaped us into who we are and allowed us to take over the world. And so in the comfort crisis in this Walk with Weight book, I argue when you look at physicality and what people do for fitness, it's like we lift weights, we run, that's great. But we've totally overlooked this thing that we are uniquely good at that shaped our bodies. And so the argument is add some caring back into your life. And I think the argument I make in the book is that the most practical, easy way to do that, easy quote unquote, is with rucking, which is just putting some weight in the pack, going for a walk.

[Mike Rowe]

A noun and a verb.

[Michael Easter]

Exactly, exactly. And what makes it interesting from a physical perspective is that you're getting cardio because you're walking and the weight makes it harder. But you're also getting a strength effect because you got weight on your skeletal system. So you're kind of getting like a two in one. Also, the injury rate is much lower than running, like multiples lower than running. A lot of people have gone out, they've run. My knees hurt, can't run anymore. If you can walk, you can rock. I just think it's this tool that is so useful for people. I mean, I do it every day because if I'm gonna walk my dogs, I'm just gonna throw a rock on. I get more from every step.

[Mike Rowe]

30, 40, what do you carry normally?

[Michael Easter]

Usually a 30 for me.

[Mike Rowe]

Yeah, so it's not a ton of weight, but it's just enough to affirmatively kick in all the systems you're gonna kick in anyway. But faster.

[Michael Easter]

Yeah, exactly, exactly. I tell most people when they start, start with like 10% of your body weight just to get going, see how this feels. I don't want people to have like some soul crushing weight because then they go, oh, I can't do that, I'm never doing that again.

[Mike Rowe]

Yeah, yeah.

[Michael Easter]

And then just add up from there. And I also tell people, don't go over a 30 year body weight. That tends to one, it'll suck beyond belief.

[Mike Rowe]

Yeah.

[Michael Easter]

Two, it can kind of raise the injury rate a little bit. That's from old military data going back to the 50s.

[Mike Rowe]

Yep, I did it. I screwed up. I got very enthused after comfort crisis. I had already started during the lockdowns. I was in the habit of getting up super early and walking usually 8 miles, like between 5:30 and 7:30, just you know, just a big loop in the neighborhood where I live. It's pretty walk, you know, the bay is there. You know, I'm in like, the Tiburon area.

[Michael Easter]

Right.

[Mike Rowe]

And then I called our buddies over at Goruck. I got my pack and I put in the 30. And I was stunned at the difference. Walking eight miles, I was totally used to it. Walking eight miles or 30 pounds is totally different. And I did that for a couple months and lost probably £4, £5. Didn't do anything different at all than I'd been doing. Then I went to 40. Then I went to 45, and I was just feeling great. And then I really screwed the pooch, man. I'm fine now. But do you. Oh, yeah, you know what? Find the video for it. Did you ever see the video I posted?

[Michael Easter]

I don't think so.

[Mike Rowe]

Oh, dude, this is. This is funny. We don't have to watch the whole thing, but find it so he'll recognize. But what happened was I decided. I mean, it's homeostasis, Right. Your body's. You have to mix up your workouts.

[Michael Easter]

Yeah.

[Mike Rowe]

Otherwise your body knows what you're gonna do and it cheats.

[Michael Easter]

Yeah. You adapt and that's it. You gotta do something else. Yeah.

[Mike Rowe]

So I thought, no, you know what? I gotta go to 50. I gotta go to 50 pounds. And that meant I should order a. I guess another 10 pound plate. But I'm like, I don't want to order a ten pound. It's just ten pounds. And like, I put it off and I'm having this conversation with myself. I'm out for a walk, And I got 40 pounds of this thing. And I look down, and in the street is a rectangular slab of concrete that had washed off the top of a water main. Like, it literally said property of water something on the front of it. But I looked at it, I'm like, damn that thing. I bet that would fit in the ruck. And I picked it up, and it was heavier than 10 pounds. I wasn't sure how heavy, but it was. It had it.

[Michael Easter]

But sure enough, 20.

[Mike Rowe]

It weighed 25 pounds. Okay. So I walked that day eight miles with 65 pounds on my back.

[Michael Easter]

Eight right into. So you went 50% heavier than normal?

[Mike Rowe]

Pretty much, yeah. But to your point, I weighed, say, say 200 pounds. Right. So, yeah, that's a third of my body.

[Michael Easter]

Close to the max.

[Mike Rowe]

Wow. I mean, every single thing so good. It's a level of misery that you can't really explain. Unless, I mean, certainly people in the military understand they Walk routinely with, you know, they have £100 on their back. Yeah, but if you're not used to this. So this is me just explaining to the viewer because somebody said, bullshit. You know, there's no way you walk with this amount of weight here. You can turn it up too, Chuck.

[Michael Easter]

You can even tell how you got up.

[Mike Rowe]

Yeah. Oh, it hurts. Yeah, it hurts. But here you go.

[Chuck]

Where's the volume?

[Mike Rowe]

Lower. Right, Unmute. There you go. You can do it. Because the whole, the whole rucking process makes you sweat a lot. I usually put it back on in the evenings, but that's another story. The Goruck bag itself looks like this.

[Michael Easter]

Just the, the effort ago.

[Mike Rowe]

You're going to love this. And it arrived with a 30 pound plate already in it. And I'll show you that plate. It's. First of all, I added ten pounds to it a couple months later because you get, you know, you get used to the weight and you want to trick your body into avoiding what you call homeostasis. See, I know stuff. That's why it's important to increase the weight from time to time. But this is, this is a 30 pounder right there. And, and I added another 10. So I was walking around with 40 for about a year and I thought, you know what, it's time to go to 50. So I decided walking home one morning, I was going to order another 10 pound plate from Goruck. And then I saw this thing in the street just lying there on the other side of my driveway.

[Michael Easter]

It is perfectly shaped.

[Mike Rowe]

It's unbelievable.

[Michael Easter]

Perfectly shaped.

[Mike Rowe]

But there was no open hole nearby. Just this slab of concrete in the middle of the street. So being cheap, I, I picked it up and I. And I put it in my ruck bag and. And then I kept walking. And you know what? It was very heavy. And when I got home, I got on the scale and it said 265 pounds. And at the time I weighed 200 pounds. So I did the math and that's how I got the 65 pounds. Anyway, that's what I walk with every day, Jack. So, so there.

[Michael Easter]

Awesome.

[Mike Rowe]

So I mean that I can't. That video happened because of you. That's 100%. Because I read the Comfort Crisis and I walked with 65 pounds for the next couple of months, lost another seven pounds.

[Michael Easter]

Wow.

[Mike Rowe]

And then my knee hurt and then my ankle hurt and then my hip hurt. And then I, then I stopped rucking for a couple of weeks and I thought, oh God, I really, what have I done? But I was still walking and I Felt okay. And long story short, now I'm back to 40 every day when I'm home. And Mike, it's totally changed my life.

[Michael Easter]

That's awesome to hear.

[Mike Rowe]

And I don't have time to go to the gym anymore. I'm trying to maintain the illusion of fitness, you know, but we all are. But nothing, nothing. This allows me. Sometimes it's 90 minutes, sometimes it's two hours. But maybe I'm prepping for a podcast, Maybe I'm on the phone, it's early, I'm getting stuff done. I'm sweating like a whore in church. The calories are getting burnt. I'm atoning for all my sins the night before in a way that is just. I mean, it's just so efficient. I get home, then I do as many push ups as I can. I wait three minutes. I do as many push ups, I can wait three minutes. There's many push ups. That's it. That's all I do.

[Michael Easter]

That's awesome.

[Mike Rowe]

And it's, you know, it works for me.

[Michael Easter]

I've heard from so many people on my sub stack who, same deal. They go, I hate running. Or running hurts my knees.

[Mike Rowe]

Yep.

[Michael Easter]

Walking. If I really want to get something out of it, I got to go for like 20 miles. And then they get into rucking and it totally changes their life. It allows them to get more from the walk. It becomes like an actual workout. Yet to your point. Oh, I can make calls while I'm doing this. I can send some emails if I have to. So I'm able to multitask. I don't feel like I'm carving time out of my life entirely in order to get this physical activity in.

[Mike Rowe]

I can listen to Michael Easter mispronounce Monk, Monk exactly as I'm strolling.

[Michael Easter]

Exactly.

[Chuck]

Or mantra.

[Mike Rowe]

Or mantra.

[Michael Easter]

Mantra.

[Mike Rowe]

That's my mantra.

[Michael Easter]

Mantra.

[Mike Rowe]

In your book, you credit women primarily for creating this thing, and I want you to explain that, but I also want you to really link its significance to virtually every military that's ever existed or walked the planet. I dare say.

[Michael Easter]

Yeah. Okay, so go back who knows how long, Many hundreds of thousands of years. You have a kid, okay. Most kids died before the age of five. Infant mortality rates like 50%. So in order to keep your kids safe, you got to carry this thing around all the time. Well, women were a major contributor to gathering food, doing all these other things, so. Well, now they're carrying this kid in their arm all day. They're one handed, right. They're not as good. You cut your production in Half. So at some point in time, one very wise woman goes, well, what if we built these little sort of sash type things and we put the kid in there? So they do that. Now it frees up two hands. So now they're back to business as usual. Being able to gather food, help with other things, and our productivity just completely expands. So we invent these initial backpacks. And then, of course, because humans are smart, we go, well, if we can carry kids in these, what else can we carry in these things? Right now we have a means of transporting items for long distances. Because when you have something attached to your back, it's like, what do backpackers do? They throw all their gear in their back and they go out into the unknown. They go down the trail. So that expands how we can explore it, makes us more productive. Like it. It changes humanity forever. So fast forward to the military militaries. Throughout history, the most important physical act was, can you march a certain distance while carrying the gear you need to fight in the war? And so there have been tests going back throughout time. Like, even, even the Greeks and Romans, they would say, you're fit enough for the military if you can carry X amount of load Y distance in Z time. Like it's always been. The most fundamental act of the military is rucking. And obviously you need it because you're going to fight a war. You need to get your gear. And in the past, it wasn't like you're not flying in soldiers, you know, from Germany into the war zone. You're going, well, we got to go invade this place that's 250 miles away. That's where the battle is. All right, everyone, get your stuff, get your gear. We're going for a long walk. So that was just fundamental to moving troops and being able to fight.

[Mike Rowe]

Yeah. And it's. I think what's surprising about it to read about that anyway, for the first time is that you never see that part of war or rarely do you see it leaned into, like, you see the battles, you. Cinematically, I mean, Right. Yeah, because it's not great TV to just to show people marching, you know, for hour after hour after hour. But of course, in the Civil War, I mean, those guys would not unusual to walk 30 miles and then fight.

[Michael Easter]

Right. You know, and the gear back then is heavy. Yeah, it's super heavy.

[Mike Rowe]

It gets wet.

[Michael Easter]

Yeah.

[Mike Rowe]

Canvas. So, I mean, you're talking about young men carrying. I mean, it could be, what is it, like 60 to 100 pounds on average?

[Michael Easter]

I read today, especially as we sort of Ramped up technology. The loads became heavier over time. Today in the military, the average loads, I think in Iraq and Afghanistan were about £100. That's serious, dude.

[Mike Rowe]

I'm.

[Michael Easter]

That's including, like, body armor, all your stuff. I mean, that is a lot.

[Mike Rowe]

As we just established, I know what 65 pounds feels like. Throw on another third of that. Now, to your earlier point, you're talking, like, in the Second World War, these soldiers were. What do you think the average weight was? I bet it was, like, of a soldier.

[Chuck]

Yeah.

[Mike Rowe]

Of a fighting infantryman in the Second World War. I bet it was a buck 40.

[Michael Easter]

I was gonna say exactly that. It was probably 140 pounds. And then they're loading them down with, say, depends on what your job is. Right. 80 ish pounds.

[Mike Rowe]

These guys are carrying two thirds of their weight and then hand them a Thompson gun on top of it.

[Michael Easter]

Yeah.

[Mike Rowe]

Did you ever read. There was a book, a terrific book about Vietnam by Tim o'. Brien.

[Michael Easter]

It's called oh, the Things I Carried.

[Mike Rowe]

Yeah. Yeah.

[Michael Easter]

That's. That's one of the best written books ever. If you're a writer listening to this,

[Mike Rowe]

I think it's the best war book.

[Michael Easter]

Yeah. And if you're a writer listening to this, don't read that book because you will go, yep. Okay. There's people out there that are far better than me.

[Mike Rowe]

They can do that. Yeah. Salingers, you know, like, what else did he write? Was it Tim o'? Brien? I think that was the author.

[Michael Easter]

That was his biggest books. Yeah. Big biggest book was Tim o'. Brien.

[Mike Rowe]

Yeah. If you don't know what we're talking about, it's basically. I mean, it's a literal explanation of the things a soldier carried out of his ruck. You know, and if that were all it was, it would be an eye opener. But of course, it's really a, you know, a metaphysical rumination on the emotional weight.

[Michael Easter]

Yeah. And even training for big missions.

[Mike Rowe]

Yeah.

[Michael Easter]

Rucking was the foundation. It's like all the people who stormed D Day. Like, the. The rucking was legendary. They would go on these legendary ruck marches to get ready for that. And then one of my favorites that I came across was 10th Mountain Division.

[Mike Rowe]

Oh, yeah.

[Michael Easter]

Their training was insane because you have

[Mike Rowe]

to do that at altitude and you're

[Michael Easter]

carrying cold weather gear.

[Mike Rowe]

Yeah.

[Michael Easter]

You're carrying skis. It is so heavy. And you're in the mountains. The terrain is the worst.

[Mike Rowe]

Is it the worst? Because I. Who was that psycho you just had on your podcast? Grandmother of four, purple hair, running, running. In. What's the name of the race?

[Michael Easter]

Badwater 135.

[Mike Rowe]

Jeez. This woman, she gets out of the

[Michael Easter]

car at night to start this race. It starts at 11pm in Death Valley. Yeah, it's 120 degrees at 11pm and she goes, okay, we got 135 miles ahead of us. And she won. She won it that year. It's considered the world's hardest race. Her name's Ashley Paulson. Yeah. She is literally a grandmother. I don't know how old she is. I would say late 40s, but she's literally a grandmother, has four kids, didn't even start getting into running and racing until she was on her fourth kid, and she set the women's course record, won the race that year. Unbelievable. It gets to, like, 130, 135 in the heat of the day. And then when you factor in, it's all on a road, which actually makes it harder because the heat coming off the road. The heat coming off the road is like 180. It's unbelievable.

[Mike Rowe]

Your shoes melt.

[Michael Easter]

Your shoes melt. What I love about her, though, is there's people who would do that race, and they go, I'm the baddest person who ever lived. You know what I mean? Like, they just are like, it's a lot of. And she's. She's a grandma with pink hair. And hey, Yeah, I ran it. It was really hot. It was really. And you're just like, I love this person. You won the thing, and there's no flexing.

[Mike Rowe]

Yeah.

[Michael Easter]

I just love that about her.

[Mike Rowe]

Is she indicative of the kind of guest you're looking for on the 2%?

[Michael Easter]

Yeah, we like to mix it up with people who are going out in the real world doing interesting things that are inspiring. And also, we'll bring on scientists who can explain, well, why is this important? So the episode was her was with. Was paired with a guy who wrote a book called Hot Wired, and it looks at the science of the heat and why heat is good for humans. So humans lived in the heat for all of time. We're unique in that we're really good at cooling ourselves. We're really good at endurance exercise in the heat that totally shaped us. And then we started living in air conditioning for 95% of the time. And we don't get these temperature swings that are actually really important for physical health, even mental health. There's really interesting research on depression and how exposing yourself to the heat seems to help with that for various reasons. So, yeah, we try and try and keep it in. You know, my sort of guiding thing is, do I want to talk to this person? Do I think they would be a fascinating conversation? I'm like, yeah, let's do that.

[Mike Rowe]

So as north stars go, that's a good one.

[Michael Easter]

Good.

[Mike Rowe]

You know, and it's a good place, I think, to land the plane here. Because we started with the heat of the desert and we started with wondering, why do people do what they do? Maybe part of the reason they stand in that line in front of that ridiculous sign is just because they're having a heat stroke. Maybe it's just the heat, but wow. You know, I mean, I read it in your book too. But the idea that. I mean, for only the thinnest little blip of measurement have we lived in air conditioning. For only the thinnest little blip of the relative timeline have we. Have we enjoyed a hot shower at the end of a cold day. My granddad didn't experience that till he was 50, you know.

[Michael Easter]

Right.

[Mike Rowe]

Never had a hot shower. Right. And my God, have we become soft. How?

[Michael Easter]

Like, because we adapt to our conditions, we adapt to whatever level of comfort we're at, and if that gets reduced now, it's an emergency. So a lot of the message of my work is, well, adaptation works both ways.

[Mike Rowe]

Yeah.

[Michael Easter]

So if you go put yourself in situations that are going to be uncomfortable when you get back to your normal world, that changes how you view it. All of a sudden, it becomes this hot shower is unbelievable. Hot running water. Oh, my God. Like, when I'll go do stuff outdoors, when I come home and eat the first meal and you have the hot shower, you just go, why have I ever complained? Like, this is unbelievable.

[Mike Rowe]

Yeah.

[Michael Easter]

It's all so new. And so that's the case for me. Yes. You get all the physical benefits. That's important. I don't want you dropping dead of a heart attack at whatever age. But more importantly, I want you to view your daily life in a way that is in perspective of how good things are and helps you appreciate just how amazing things are.

[Mike Rowe]

Yeah.

[Michael Easter]

Because that colors your worldview.

[Mike Rowe]

Yep. And. And again, we talked about the speed with which, you know, things can happen. I. The fact that my granddad had a. Had his first hot shower at 50, and the fact that really, a generation later, people were deliberately plunging themselves into the freezing water. Right. Either to push or challenge or whatever. The reason, it doesn't really matter because I think the bigger point is we get to choose. Like, there's a whole long list of stuff we can't control. But the sliding scale on the comfort and discomfort spectrum, that's up to us.

[Michael Easter]

Totally.

[Mike Rowe]

You know, and maybe you can't go on a caribou hunt with Donnie Vincent. And maybe you. Maybe. Maybe you're not going to do that thing, but maybe you'll do the other thing. What did you tell me about Masochi?

[Michael Easter]

Yeah, masogi. Take on one. One big challenge a year where you have a 50, 50 shot at failure can be anything. Because today, I would argue a lot of times, even when we take on challenges, we're in the safe zone. We're like, I know I'm going to. I'm going to do it. Yeah, it's going to be hard. But when you get that 50, 50 right now, you got to dig deeper.

[Mike Rowe]

That's right.

[Michael Easter]

You're gonna have times where you go, I don't know if I'm gonna be able to. I need to quit. This is terrible. But if you can just keep going. That becomes kind of a metaphor for life because you go, oh, I realize I have more on board than I thought. And that changes you. And this isn't me just making stuff up. You look at every myth, important myth, throughout human history, that is exactly how they are structured. You take someone out of the comfortable world, you throw them into an uncomfortable world, they have to deal with all this shit down there. It's hard. They want to quit. But eventually they make it through and they come out of the other side a new person. Like, literally a new person. And we've, like, removed that. You need moments like that. There's a reason humans had these stories for all of time. That stories are how we told ourselves what was important about living and all these different lessons. So, yeah, I just think we need to get back to that.

[Mike Rowe]

What is boot camp? What is buds?

[Michael Easter]

Why do we give you the Ranger tab or the seal trident? Because it's a symbolic representation of the fact that you are a new person. It's exactly what that is.

[Mike Rowe]

Last question with regard to discomfort, is the goal to endure it or figure out a way to love it?

[Michael Easter]

I think if you figure out a way to love it, that'll be. That's the ultimate goal. And ask what your why is too. What am I going to get from this? It's going to be like, what is on the other side of this? Because that makes sure, like the guide, you got a good rudder there guiding you into the right things.

[Mike Rowe]

Well, the odds of finishing your first book were probably 50 50, but the odds of actually getting it published were Skinnier. And the odds of writing another one and another one after that. Skinny, skinny, skinny. The odds of you narrating it with that voice. Very slim, very slim, very slim. And yet there you are. Public speaking. No, not likely. There you go.

[Michael Easter]

That was the hard one for me.

[Mike Rowe]

Yeah.

[Michael Easter]

But it's been awesome. Just had to get up there a few times.

[Mike Rowe]

I really appreciate you coming out here from the desert. You head back tonight.

[Michael Easter]

Heading back tonight, yeah.

[Mike Rowe]

And you're on a plane, right?

[Michael Easter]

Obviously, I'm driving.

[Mike Rowe]

Oh, you drove.

[Michael Easter]

If I have. He's rucking, he's rucking. I'm walking back, It'll only be 115. I'm the type of person where if I have. If I do the math and I go probably door to door on a flight versus driving, there's a two hour difference. You'll take the drive, I'll do the drive.

[Mike Rowe]

Yeah.

[Michael Easter]

I don't want to have to wait. I don't trust the pilot. I'm like, I got this.

[Mike Rowe]

I want to introduce you to my friend, Blake Shoal, who made that plane. Not the model, but the actual plane.

[Michael Easter]

Oh, really?

[Mike Rowe]

Yeah. He's bringing supersonic back. The company's called Boom. You should interview him. You would absolutely love this guy. He has been on a mission since we went to the moon and broke the sound barrier commercially that same year and just kind of quit both. I mean, for all intents and purposes, we just quit. The fact that we're going slower now than we were in 1969 at 40,000ft is appalling.

[Chuck]

Really?

[Mike Rowe]

I didn't know that the Concorde was flying like 980 miles an hour.

[Michael Easter]

I remember. Why did that shut down?

[Mike Rowe]

Well, there were these things called sonic booms, which people didn't appreciate. And then there was a crash. The Concorde took off. I forget where it was. Was it in Paris? I think there was a piece of debris on the Runway. The wheel exploded, kicked up some crap, ruptured a fuel line maybe. And then before they could swing back around and land, blow up, everybody died. So they had a big PR problem. But when I think about how fast tech has moved in virtually every measurable way to your point, social media, et cetera, if we were breaking the sound barrier in commercial flight in 1969, we should be flying from LA to Paris in about two hours today. Like, we should be flying 2,200 miles an hour.

[Michael Easter]

Yeah.

[Mike Rowe]

But we affirmatively said, nah, that's fast enough. Everything since then has conspired to make air travel miserable.

[Michael Easter]

Miserable. So he's bringing it back. That's his goal.

[Mike Rowe]

Talk about a masogi.

[Chuck]

Yeah, he's already got, what was it, 130 orders.

[Mike Rowe]

He's got orders from every major.

[Chuck]

Yeah, American, United and Air Japan.

[Mike Rowe]

Dude, he's.

[Michael Easter]

Thank God for people like him, honestly.

[Mike Rowe]

His episode is up right now. In fact, listen to it on your drive back.

[Michael Easter]

Yeah, I'll listen to it.

[Mike Rowe]

And you know what? Take Josh's knife with you. Since you drove, you don't have to check a bag. It's my gift. He left me too.

[Michael Easter]

Josh did give a say a joke. He says, you know, when I gift people knives on trips like this, they always get taken to tsa. Now they gotta check their bag and end up hating me.

[Mike Rowe]

No, it's a running gag. But the fact that you're driving is perfect.

[Michael Easter]

Awesome.

[Mike Rowe]

Here, take it.

[Michael Easter]

Anything.

[Mike Rowe]

It's a great knife. That's his.

[Michael Easter]

Amazing.

[Mike Rowe]

That's a new one.

[Michael Easter]

Very cool.

[Mike Rowe]

Yes.

[Michael Easter]

It's a last forever. Yeah, take it on a rook, hand it down.

[Mike Rowe]

Might save your life. Or to help you get to the front of the line in that welcome to Las Vegas sign. Yeah, just flash that thing around.

[Michael Easter]

Either way, just wave it. It's very regular for people to wave a knife around Las Vegas on the Strip. It's just like.

[Mike Rowe]

Yeah, people love it.

[Chuck]

They call it Wednesday.

[Mike Rowe]

Michael Easter. His podcast is called the 2%. His latest book is called Walking with Weight. His prior books are Scarcity Brain and the Comfort Crisis.

[Michael Easter]

I assume you're working on another coming out next year.

[Mike Rowe]

What's it going to be called? Can you say?

[Michael Easter]

We don't know yet. There's that debate. But it's the through line on this is a 850 mile hike I did in southern Utah, which is its own. Go back to the no problem, no story concept.

[Mike Rowe]

Like St. George.

[Michael Easter]

Southern Utah started in Arches national park, ends in Zion.

[Mike Rowe]

Yeah.

[Michael Easter]

You go up and down the Grand Canyon six times. There's no trail. I did it with one of my best friends who's. His name's Matt Sherman. So one of the longest serving Americans in the Iraq and Afghanistan war.

[Mike Rowe]

No kidding.

[Michael Easter]

He was a sort of off the books diplomat type. They'd send out to meet with warlords and he'd come back and report to generals. A lot of stores, a lot of amazing stories. He's wonderful.

[Mike Rowe]

Lots of problems, Lots of stories.

[Michael Easter]

Lots of problems, Lots of stories.

[Chuck]

Yeah.

[Mike Rowe]

Who was a kid who had to cut his arm off down there?

[Michael Easter]

Aron Ralston.

[Mike Rowe]

Yeah. Geez.

[Michael Easter]

Let me tell you, my mom and wife mentioned him a few times before we left.

[Mike Rowe]

I bet you're going through. Was that Zion, or was that what we ended in?

[Michael Easter]

Aaron Ralston. He was. I think he was somewhere on the Colorado Plateau outside of Moab when that happened. He's in the middle of nowhere.

[Mike Rowe]

Yeah.

[Michael Easter]

You know, people don't understand how remote that part of Utah is.

[Mike Rowe]

Yeah. Yeah.

[Michael Easter]

Truly, we would not see anyone for a week.

[Mike Rowe]

Yeah.

[Michael Easter]

Until we had to hitchhike into a town to resupply and then go back to the trail and. Yeah.

[Mike Rowe]

What was that movie? Was it James Franco?

[Michael Easter]

Franco played him 128hours, I think, because that's how long he was stuck. And he probably had, like, a little Swiss art. He should have had this knife.

[Mike Rowe]

That knife would have no problem.

[Michael Easter]

Yeah. Just one. Okay. See you later.

[Mike Rowe]

Yeah. That's why Josh made it, you know, he said. Yeah. Here's a knife for people who take long hikes alone with a propensity to

[Michael Easter]

get their Ralston model.

[Mike Rowe]

Hey, man, thank you again for coming.

[Michael Easter]

Yeah, thanks.

[Mike Rowe]

All right. See y' all next week.

[Michael Easter]

If you like what you heard and

[Mike Rowe]

even if you don't Won't you please Won't you please, Pretty please Pretty please subscribe well, I hate to beg and I hate to plead but please, pretty

[Michael Easter]

freak please

[Mike Rowe]

sub Please submit.