#1649 - Michael Easter

Joe Rogan (0:04)

The Joe Rogan Experience. Hello, Michael.

Michael Easter (0:15)

Hello, Joe.

Joe Rogan (0:16)

What's going on, buddy? Good to see you.

Michael Easter (0:18)

Good to see you as well.

Joe Rogan (0:18)

Thanks for coming down here.

Michael Easter (0:19)

Hey, thanks for having me on, man.

Joe Rogan (0:21)

What made you decide to write about comfort? Isn't comfort a good thing, Michael? What is going on?

Michael Easter (0:26)

Well.

Joe Rogan (0:26)

You have a problem with comfort, The Comfort Crisis, is it really a crisis?

Michael Easter (0:30)

I argue that it is a crisis. One, I don't have a problem with comfort.

I do have a problem with always being comfortable, always leaning into comfort, which is what we're doing now. All right, so if you think of the average person's daily life, they wake up in the soft bed, temperature-controlled home, they shuffle over to the microwave, microwave of breakfast burrito, right, that came in from who knows where and is made with who knows what, and then it's like, I go to work, I drive to work, I sit behind this screen all day. I don't have to move at all or put any effort into this day and then it's back to bed in front of the TV and you just rinse and repeat that. At no point in daily life, I would argue, are people really challenged or really uncomfortable anymore, like we were in our past.

Joe Rogan (1:15)

Some people, of course. There's David Goggins is still alive and well.

Michael Easter (1:18)

Yes, David Goggins is still alive.

Joe Rogan (1:20)

He's running right now.

Michael Easter (1:20)

And so he's like the type of person, you see what happens when you start to push against that, right, when you kind of have this moment where you go, maybe I'm a little too comfortable, and you start to sort of investigate, okay, what is it with discomfort? How can I get into some discomfort? And what can that do for me?

And then at the extreme end of that is Goggins.

Joe Rogan (1:40)

Well, it's for folks that just, like say if you work in an office, and this is how you make a living, and you have to do that commute, and there's no other options, and this is what you do. Like, for them to hear this, they're like, yeah, yeah, okay, so what, what now?

Michael Easter (1:57)

Well, I mean, the answer is not to totally overhaul your lifestyle, right? I mean, we have amazing lives right now. The fact that we don't have to go out and hunt for food or put physical effort into every day is great. But at the same time, I think, and I argue in the book, The Comfort Crisis, that we need these moments that push back at us, and we need to sort of investigate these discomforts that we used to face in our evolutionary past. So, for example, two, that's the percent of people who take the stairs when there's the choice of... Two percent? Two percent, people who take the stairs when there's the choice of an escalator.

70% of people, more than 70% now, are overweight or obese. 20, only 20% of hunger, sorry, only 20% of eating is actually driven by physiological hunger. 80% of it is just, I'm bored.

It's noon, I guess I'll eat, or I'm stressed out. We exercise 14 times less than our ancestors nowadays.

Joe Rogan (2:59)

Our ancestors, just by virtue of trying to survive, you mean?

Michael Easter (3:04)

Yeah, exactly.

Joe Rogan (3:05)

So they didn't exercise, right? Like our hunter gatherer, they never did chin ups.

Michael Easter (3:09)

Exactly, that was life to them.

Joe Rogan (3:11)

Yeah, they just were trying to get by.

Michael Easter (3:12)

Yeah, and we spend 95% of our time indoors as well. And we know that there's benefits to getting out and moving more. We know there's benefits to being outside. We also know that there's benefits to truly being challenged in life. It's like I said before, you can basically never be challenged as you go through life in a real sort of fundamental way.

And you'll probably have a decent life. But if you think about potential and human potential, let's say that human potential is this big circle around us, right?

Now, most of us live in this sort of dinner plate sized place. We never go out and explore the edges of our potential by trying to get uncomfortable and doing things that are maybe a little outside of our comfort zone. We can just kind of exist in this sort of soft space that we've created for ourselves right now. And of course, there are people who get out and into those edges like the Goggins of the world, like the Kam Haines of the world. But I think most people don't really go out and see what they're capable of.