The comfort crisis, doing hard things, rucking, and more | Michael Easter, MA

**Peter Attia** (0:11)
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Now, without further delay, here's today's episode. My guest this week is Michael Easter. Michael is an author, speaker and professor. His work focuses on how humans can integrate modern science and evolutionary wisdom for improved health, meaning and performance in their life and work. When he's not on the ground reporting, Michael is a visiting lecturer in the Journalism and Media Studies Department at the University of Nevada in Las Vegas.
Michael travels the world to speak with different thinkers and people living at extremes, and he shares those insights in his books and his other writing. He's the author of the bestseller, The Comfort Crisis, which no doubt you have heard me speak about both in other podcasts and probably on social media. Was really excited to sit down with Michael. And in this episode, we talk about a lot of things. We talk about his background, his parents' struggle with alcoholism, his father leaving when he was young, and how these things impacted Michael's own struggle with alcoholism.
From there, we talk about his realization that we are in a crisis of comfort and how this became the thesis for the book we discussed. We talk about boredom, phones, TV, stress, and dealing with the possibility of failure. We talk also about hunting and the importance of thinking about death and how other cultures think about and face death differently compared to those of us, especially here in the United States. We have the conversation around one of my favorite topics of all, rucking. So if you've heard me talk about rucking, you get to now go deep on it. I think this is a very important topic. And as I mentioned, this book had such a profound impact on the way I think about things and also just the way I'm trying to raise my children. So much of what Michael talks about, I think we intuitively kind of get a sense of, but he does such a great job articulating it and giving us a little more data around the edges. So without further delay, please enjoy my conversation with Michael Easter.
Michael, so awesome to be sitting with you here today. I have been looking forward to this podcast for probably about three or four months. And I appreciate you making the track out here to do this in person.

**Michael Easter** (2:45)
Absolutely. Likewise, Peter, I've been looking forward to this one. Should be fun.

**Peter Attia** (2:47)
My wife, by the way, I just want you to know called me like an hour ago to give me a ton of crap for the fact that we're not recording this outside in the 107 degrees here today.
She's like, you guys talking about the comfort crisis in your air conditioned studio here. She's kind of called us out on the fact, called me out on this fact.

**Michael Easter** (3:05)
Well, she's not wrong.
I did think about that. I was like, it might be interesting if we actually did this while rocking, but here we are, we'll rock afterwards. It'll be fine. We'll survive.

**Peter Attia** (3:13)
I mean, she wants to rock with us later today, which we will, but she was mostly like, really you should at least be just sitting outside doing this in the sweltering heat and all that stuff. And so maybe she's right. I mean, we're definitely way too comfortable right now.

**Michael Easter** (3:26)
There's gonna be a weight penalty for our behavior with the rucks.
If we were planning 40, no, it's now 50 It's now 55 So that's how we'll compensate. It'll all shake out in the end.

**Peter Attia** (3:35)
So look, people have heard me talk a little bit about your book on previous podcasts. People have also heard me allude to this obsession of mine in rucking.
Certainly anybody who knows me personally, they're either converted or sick and tired of me. And my daughter, who just got back from her first sleepaway camp in Colorado and Wyoming. So she was first time, she was 13, gone away for two weeks.