How to Grow From Doing Hard Things | Michael Easter

24:29So if we lower our threshold for what we consider challenging, and I'm making myself the butt of the joke here, but it's pretty serious if you look out and think, okay, you know, some people, they're hearing us talk about doing hard things. But for many people, even though there's so many comforts, life feels hard. It's like work is hard. You know, things are expensive. It's hard to get enough sleep. Everyone's always blaring at us at all the things we're supposed to be doing. The world seems unstable. So I think many people already feel like they're an undated with challenge, even though we're talking about the creature comforts that we all enjoy.

25:10So if somebody wants to start exploring leaning into discomfort in the way that grows them and actually makes those other discomforts that we're talking about, it dissolves away, how should they start to go about that? So a couple of things come to mind. And I'm trying to think how to get into it. And what I think that I will use is an example of myself, and I'll kind of unpack that and I'll unpack it at a level where we talk about something more. It's kind of a big challenge. And then also something like people can use every day. So I'll give you the example of for the comfort crisis I go and I spend 30 days in the Arctic.

25:46A little more than 30 days. Now when I fly up there, I fly from Las Vegas to Anchorage to Cotsabew, which is this little town, just 20 miles above the Arctic Circle. And then from Cotsabew, you get in a plane that is about the size of a pack of gum and you take that plane out, you know, more than 100 miles into the Arctic and it drops off. Now when I get on that plane from Vegas, it's like a 747. And I'm like you. I hate flying, right? Because seats are too small and cramped, planes too hot, the movies in the seat back, they suck. Right? The coffee, not very good. There's usually a baby crying.

26:25If I need to go to the bathroom, bathrooms totally cramped, like flying is just terrible. I'm like, the flying is the worst. And then I go spend this 30 days in the middle of the Arctic. Right? So if I want to drink anything, I got to hike down to a stream and I got to carry the heavy water bags back up to camp. I am freezing cold the entire freaking time. If I want to go to the bathroom, I have to hike out of the tundra and I have to bring the rifle because there's grizzly bears. I'm starving the entire time. If I want to get warm, it requires picking up firewood, which there's not many, hauling it back, like everything is hard, everything is uncomfortable.

27:05That whole experience for the whole month. So then when I get onto the plane that goes from the Arctic back to Las Vegas, it's like, what do you think my experience of that flight was like? Pure luxury. Holy shit. Greatest thing that ever happened to me. I just like that chair. I didn't sat in a real chair for more than the month. It's like, this is so comfortable. Coffee was hot, like this is the best thing I've ever drank. I had like 12 bags of pretzels, right? The crying baby. I'm like, yeah, just hand me that baby. I got it. Movies in the seat back, like it was so boring up there that we were reading the labels on our energy bars.

27:45And so when you show me fast and the furious, like 79, it's like, this is the greatest thing I've ever seen. And then when I go to the bathroom, right? Not only do I not have to take the rifle, right? That would have been problematic on the plane. But I hit this button in this bathroom. Just metal thing, little red button. And hot running water comes out of a faucet and hits my hands. I hadn't had hot running water on my hands for more than the month. And it was just like, oh my god. Now let me remind you too that this is happening in a tube of steel that's hurtling through the air at like 600 miles an hour, 35 ,000 feet above sea level.

28:28And it was one of those moments where I'm like, holy shit, it is so amazing to be alive today. Like we have the most amazing access to just luxuries and comforts ever. And yet we often forget that. Right? So what did it take for me to realize that that flight is a freaking miracle instead of this huge, impersonal injustice to Michael Easter. I had to go out and I had to sort of reset that goal post and go out into a world that was totally different. That was totally challenging that taught me that the world I came from was actually quite great. So there's this psychologist. I believe he's now at Brown.

29:12When I spoke to him, he was just finishing up his PhD at Harvard. And he did the study that was published in science. I can't remember its title, but he basically came up with this theory that's called prevalence induced concept change. So what they did in this study is they took a group of people. There was like three different phases of the study. I'm going to talk about two of them because I think they're most relatable. What they did, they took a group of 800 different people in the first study. I can't remember how many people, but they had them look at 800 different phases in a row. So they look at face after face after face.

29:49And these people had to deem whether these phases were threatening or non -threatening. So you're going non -threatening, non -threatening, oh, threatening, threatening, face after face. Now at the 200th face, what they did is they started showing these people fewer threatening faces. They so, successively fewer. The second study they did, it was a similar setup that they used research proposals and these people had to deem whether these research proposals were ethical or unethical. Same deal about midway through, they start feeding these people fewer and fewer unethical proposals. Now these two scenarios, this should be pretty black or white, right?

30:32Either you look at a face entity, the threatens you or it does not threaten you. You read a research proposal and either crosses this like moral line you have in the sand or it doesn't cross it. What they found though is that people basically see gray. So as people started encountering fewer truly threatening faces, they started judging faces that were on the borderline as threatening. So they said threatening just as many times, even though the faces weren't truly threatening faces that they would have let slide before. Same with the research proposals. As they get fewer and fewer unethical ones, they start to get nitpicky, right?

31:08They're like, oh well, there's that one line in there. Yeah, that's unethical, throw it in the pile. So the guy calls this prevalence and due to his name's David LaVari calls it prevalence induced concept change and it basically finds that as people experience fewer and fewer problems, we don't actually become more satisfied. We simply sort of lower our threshold for what we consider a problem. So when you apply that to life today to make this practical, it's like as the world has become a lot more comfortable, as we encounter fewer sort of traumas and real problems in our life, we don't necessarily stop and go, this is amazing.

31:45We simply broaden our definition of what a problem is, of what a discomfort is. And so we end up with the exact same number of problems of discomforts, but they've just become progressively more hollow over time. I like to think about that as the science of first -world problems. I think you can think about it as a moving goalpost. So it's like you go into one environment and that sort of set your expectations, right? And we're sort of designed to search for problems, more or less designed, designed to search for problems. So you're going to find them in your environment. No matter how unproblematic your environment is, sort of objectively unproblematic.

32:24So when I talk to LaVari, he basically said, like, yeah, I think it makes theoretical sense that if you're going into a place where your problems are more acute and say objectively more realistically problems, when you go into this less problematic environment, you'll sort of be like, wow, this is fantastic. Now, of course, over time, you're going to adapt back and I found that under myself. So when I got back from the Arctic, I'm like a Zen monk, man, I'm just like, nothing's rattling me. That was my wife's comment. Like, nothing rattles you sent your back. For how long? Probably a month. Probably a month.

33:03Then my question becomes, well, I can't go to the Arctic every month. One, I can't, two, nor do I want to. So what can I do in my life that sort of constantly pushes that goalpost back into a place where I'm less neurotic, more or less? It's almost like we live on a neurotic treadmill in a way. As problems fade, we just keep searching for problems and finding them. So I think there's a lot of things that a person can do, like in their daily life, and people can get creative around this. For example, volunteering, like if you live a decent life, well, why don't you go help people whose lives are a little harder than yours?

33:38And you'll see what it could be like and what it's like out there. And that'll give you some sort of perspective. And that's something you can do. It takes an hour a week or something, right? I've talked to people who go to recovery meetings, including myself. You go into a meeting and you hear these stories from people who are at the most rock bottom moment of their life. Like, that'll reset what you consider a problem pretty damn fast. You just walk out going, wow, I was complaining that my tax guy was asking for a lot of papers. And this guy just told me a story that just blew my mind. Like, that's a real problem.

34:17And so I think we need to have moments like that that sort of press back against us and put things in a little bit more context. And I do think you need the sort of moment where you think about that. And you tell yourself the story around that. Like, that's a really important part. And I'm going to this is kind of going off on a weird path. I don't know where it'll take us, but we'll find out. When you think about something like a right of passage, what people would do in these, like these were, you know, tribes around the world had these different rights of passages all throughout time. And this was not like they're all communicating and figuring the same, no, these things are rose spontaneous.

34:55And the point of a right of passage is that we have a person who's at point A in their life. And we need them to get, and we need to get them to point B where they're going to be more capable, more confident, more competent. We don't just say, Hey, you're ready to go to point B. We would often send them out to do something challenging. Could be like extended time in nature. There's all these different things. And in that process, the person would struggle. They would face all these different problems. They would have to figure their shit out. And then they would come back. And they would be at point B.

35:27But there was a point where people would sort of gather around and say, what did you learn about that? What story you're telling yourself about that? And so shaping the narrative around a life event becomes critically important, I think, for mental health and how you frame issues. And so if you think of the concept of like event centrality, it's like how central is an event going to be to my life? And what story am I going to tell around it? Right? So people who tend to take like something bad that happened in their life, and they take that in as the central component of their personality, tend to have worse mental health.

36:04Whereas people who take in and say, hey, this thing happened, but what can I learn from it? How can I grow from it? What might happen in the future? Yes, the sucks hard right now. But where might it take me in the past? They're in the future. And those two people are going to have completely different trajectories. So the narrative you tell yourself becomes really important. A few years ago, I started keeping a folder where I would look back to different phases of life and just list out sort of the bullet point events of like zero to five, and five to ten with no particular endpoint in mind. It's an exercise that I find very useful because it offers the opportunity for this kind of like how do I frame this thing often times that the things that felt the worst at that time turn out to be some of the best things ever.

36:54And then you can start to create a timeline and you realize that most of the things that were felt really bad at the time turned out to be the best thing ever. And the big wins were almost always the outgrowth of those prior negative experiences. It's just kind of wild. But it gets back to this theme that I think is thread throughout so much of what we're talking about today and your work, which is that it seems like discomfort is a prerequisite for really feeling truly good about oneself in the world. Like I'm not sure that they can exist separately from one another. But I think we come into the world as these like bubbling babies and like nervous systems prepared to learn.

37:37And so hopefully the early phase of life is nothing but joy and peace and comfort. I mean, parents devote themselves to that we hope. And then at some point they ought to pull us aside and say, hey, listen, the next like 70 years are going to be these, you know, this sawtooth of really tough, really great, really tough, really great experiences. But they don't tell us that. And I think that most of us go through life trying to get back to this place where we're like where everything's taken care of. But what you're saying is that that's the exact wrong approach. And in fact, it's not, it's not, it's not, we don't want to be infants, but at some level we, from a comfort perspective, we sort of infantilize ourselves.

38:30My thought is that the vast majority of things that are good for us today and that help us grow and the help has become better humans, they're going to be hard. Right. You apply this exercise exercise sucks. When you do an exercise, it is hard. But you're going to get this long term benefit. If you're trying to get your eating in order, I can tell you a salad is less delicious than a Dorito. And anyone who argues with me, you've just been way too many salads. You've diluted yourself. Right. Or in my case, you know, I'll push back a little bit here because I love exercise and I love eating clean.

39:05And what's just happened, I got into it early. And, but, and people were like, this is ridiculous, but I just don't eat bad food. I quit eating bad food. And I stop thinking about whether or not exercise is a negotiable a long time ago. I can see that. I think for probably most people exercise is going to be an uncomfortable event. It's why what are the federal exercise guidelines? 150 minutes of moderate to vigorous activity a week, strength and 10 % of Americans actually do that. Only 18%. 18%. Yeah. Could be 20. You know, fact check me. No, I believe you. I believe you. Yeah, because it is uncomfortable.

39:46You know, we have all these, I think for most people, it's uncomfortable. We have all these sort of internal lovers that dissuade extra movement for the sake of it. You know, when you run, your legs are going to burn. Your lungs are going to hurt. But on the other side of that discomfort is improved health, improved mental well -being, all these different things. In short, I think that sort of to sort of back up from the evolutionary perspective that I often take is that the reason we have, the reason why things are often uncomfortable is because, you know, we wanted to dissuade extra movement in the past.

40:25You didn't want to feel hungry because you needed that food like on and on and on. And today, the environments have really just flipped, where oftentimes doing the uncomfortable thing is the buy -in to a better life, really. Yeah. And it applies to so many different places. I'd like to take a quick break and acknowledge our sponsor, AG1. AG1 is a vitamin mineral probiotic drink that also includes prebiotics and adaptogens. As somebody who's been involved in research science for almost three decades and in health and fitness for equally as long, I'm constantly looking for the best tools to improve my mental health, physical health, and performance.

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43:29Again, that's drinkmatina .com slash huberman. There's a kid that I've known since he was really little who has some learning challenges, but man, she gets himself into a really fine university, and then after a year, took on too many comforts of the social dynamics, let's say, and decide to leave leave of absence. He read your book about halfway through the summer where he was working construction, and he called me, and he said, I'm going back to college. He's listening now, I applaud him. He also quit a heavy cannabis habit in the same swipe, and one of his parents, I don't want to give too much information about him, because people are clever these days who figure it out who he is, and I'd like to maintain his anonymity, but one of his parents is a first -generation immigrant, and when his kid was leaving college, was just like, oh my god, he had really toiled in hopes of his son not having to have as challenging a physical labor life as he did.

44:38I talk to this kid just the other night, and he's like moving thousands of pounds of concrete every week is really hard on the body, and he's in his 20s. He goes to bed every night, not soar from the gym, but soar down to the bone. Yeah. And so I want to extend a thank you from him. Awesome. Most people will not hopefully have to go through that process to figure out that the path that they have an opportunity to take is probably much easier than the alternative in many cases. I want to distinguish between daily self -induced discomforts and these larger discomforts are like going to the Arctic.

45:25I want to get to the misogy theme and this idea of taking on things that are truly hard that you might not finish, but if we were to shrink this down to the morning, wake up, you can scroll on your phone, or you can hop in the cold plunge, take a cold shower. These days there's a lot of discussion around doing the cold shower has numerous benefits. Wakes you up, dopamine, or peniferin, but also it kind of sucks. Nobody likes cold water. If you do, send me a note because I'll send you a neurologist phone number. But we all like the feeling of getting out of it. But what are some things besides cold showers and exercise, which I do believe everyone should do and get sunlight, etc., that we can do on a daily basis.

46:08Morning or in the afternoon, if we're feeling just kind of low, besides cold showers and exercise and sunlight, that are hard. Is it if I love eating strawberries and I hate putting, I leave the holes in weird places without even realizing it, and I'll walk by a hole of a strawberry. This morning, I thought, oh my Easter is going to laugh at me. I'm like, I got to pick this thing up. I'm not just scattering them around my home, by the way. But I'm like, what is it? We create these barriers to doing the simplest of things. So what are some difficult things that we can introduce to our daily routine that have been shown to make us feel better besides exercise, sunlight, and cold water?

46:47Yeah. So sort of my big picture answer here is my substack is called the 2 % newsletter. I'll tell you why it's called 2%. So there's this study that found that only 2 % of people take the stairs when there's an escalator available, 2%. Now 100 % of people know that if they were to take the stairs, that would be better for them. They get a better long -term return on their health, on their well -being, and yet 98 % of people do the easier thing that could actually hurt them in the long run in the context of this environment where we don't move enough. So this tells me that we're sort of wired to do the next easiest thing.

47:27But living better in modern life often requires doing these slightly uncomfortable things that are just so obvious and in front of us. It's like you have to get to the second floor. So which route are you going to take? You're going to take the one that's a little bit uncomfortable now, but improves your life in the long run, or you're going to do the easy thing that might actually hurt you in the long run. So that to me is just a metaphor for like how do you improve in daily life, right? In the trenches of daily life, how do you improve? So I apply this, I try and apply this to as many different areas in my life as I can.

48:02So like if I can make something just a little bit more uncomfortable. I'm not talking about extreme. Do the slightly harder thing that I know will give me a long -term return? I got to take that. So for me, it's like, okay, if I'm into my office, go through some examples, and I have a phone call. I could sit here and take the phone call, or I could pop in my headphones, and I could go for a walk, and I could take that call while walking. I would say for the vast majority of phone calls, unless you're like talking to the CEO, your big boss, right? Maybe sit behind the computer for that one. But like you're getting in all these steps that are going to be beneficial.

48:36And steps are one of the metric that is most correlated to better health. Like people just need to generally walk more, and that's an easy way to do it. It's like you got to take the call. Why does well get some steps in as you do it, right? Things like that. Things like could you even just carry your groceries at the grocery store? You get the basket, you're carrying stuff. You're getting in this like low load of caring that's going to really help with back health strength, all these different things. Even the things that's simple is like, I'm going to park in the farthest spot away. Like people roll their eyes and go, that's so obvious, everyone says that.

49:13It's like, okay, but no one actually does it. And if you look at just non -exercise activity, thermogenous, neat, this is basically a dorky way of saying, all the movement in a person's life that isn't dedicated to exercise. That often outweighs the benefits of exercise in many studies. Certainly by calories burned. Certainly by calories burned. Also, some data suggests even health outcomes in the long run. There's some Mayo clinic data that says that, you know, people who just move around a lot more in their daily life, they're burning like 800 calories just from moving around this incidental movement.

49:49It's like running eight miles or something. If you do some really rough back -of -hand math, right? And so I think looking for those opportunities, even beyond exercise, something like some of the comfort crisis I write about a value of silence, for example. We have increased the world's loudness fourfold as human beings. And yet, silence is actually pretty good for us in this context of noise. So you put someone in silence and like, yeah, it's a little uncomfortable at first. People will generally report being like, oh, it's so quiet. This is weird. Well, weirded out. But as time goes on, people tend to calm down.

50:25It's sort of like a nice reset. And so can you even go, hey, like, I go into my office and I just start blasting music immediately. Like, most people keep the TV on, who keep the TV on all day. It's not that they're watching it. It's that they just need noise in the background. They'll say, feel weird. But if you can sort of cut that out, even though it's a little bit hard at first, it's probably going to improve you over the long run. Like, how can we apply this to different areas? I don't know. All my sub stacks. I'll link to it in that link I mentioned. And it lists a bunch of different ways.

50:55But I think it really is. It's just like this mindset shift. Like, how can I take this thing I have to do and maybe make it a little bit harder and get a benefit? And once you start to stack those things up, like things start moving. Things start changing. Yeah, I agree. I, my trivial example about the strawberry hulls, which I always put like next to the bowl of strawberries and they'll just sit there. This is actually really beneficial for me because I do that too. My wife goes, what kind of psychopath does this? Maybe like, well, there's two of us now. At least two of us, if you are strawberry hull, a non -throwawayer, they definitely put a comment and we'll start a support group.

51:37It taught me an important lesson, though, because it's less about the strawberry hulls than noticing the feeling of resistance. Like, what is that? And then recognizing how trivial that resistance is, but how pervasive it is. So like the things that we resist doing, like, I've got the making the bed first thing in the morning down. I've got the morning sunlight thing down. I've got all that stuff down, but it's the little things that we can get away with not doing for a while that I think are the ones that really erode this, whatever this circuit in our brain is that you're talking about. And I do want to talk about brain circuitry a little bit, but I don't think we have a name for it.

52:21Because it's a little bit of willpower, it's a little bit of tenacity, it's a bit of reflection. But what I'm getting to here, forgive me, because I'm stumbling through this a little bit because it's something I'm just arriving to in this conversation, is that there's something about the contrast between prior experience and current experience, where we could say level of discomfort from one to ten. The more uncomfortable something is in our prior experience, the better the next phase of life is going to feel, whether or not to hours or days later, as you said a month, you'd go to the Arctic for how long were you there?

52:58Thirty -three days. So more than a month, and you got a month of zend out blissed, you know, super -micro to you and to everybody else, right? And then the crazy start to slowly work their way back in. So it's way back in. And I think that it's a microcosm for a lot of things about nervous systems. They adapt and so forth. So when I think about the examples you gave, and I love the one of taking the stairs, I always think when I travel, I'm going to sit a lot. I don't want to sit too much. I always feel better when I've moved a lot. So I'm farmer -carrying my luggage of big supplement bag, you know, hence the secondary screening and the security.

53:37And then the stairs are a great opportunity. So we can reframe. By just humans, we can reframe. Tell ourselves that things are good for us. But it's these areas where we experience a lot of resistance to ourselves, I think, that are the most challenging as opposed to resistance to the world. As you point out, the world isn't lacking opportunities to walk on a call or take the stairs. It's all around us. But it's that internal kind of like, you know, shift towards what's more comfortable. What do you think about the more psychological things? Like God forbid reading a book in paper form as opposed to listening to it.

54:13And I love audiobooks. But forcing oneself to read, having the phone out of the room, read something difficult, like a hard book. Like if I want a really good hard book, I ask Mark Andreessen for a book recommendation. You usually have to go find the book from a like a special bookseller to some of these books are hard to find. And then I open up the first page and I go, well, I knew he was really smart. He's one of the smartest people I've ever met. I've met a lot of smart people. But this is really challenging. And then I have to just start leasing through it and leasing through it. And it reminds me of being a PhD student and learning about the nervous system for the first time.

54:47And that stuff feels so good when we find a nugget of understanding. Yeah. But I get through it and get through it. Yeah. But so in the cognitive domain, in the emotional domain, let you intentionally sit down with your wife and go, let's have like a really hard conversation so that we can have a really great weekend. Do you do this in all areas of your life? Well, I'm definitely not perfect. My wife and I actually, we go on very long walks. And that's where all the magic happens. There's something about walking as a couple. We'll do like 12 miles on a Saturday, eight to 12 miles on a Saturday.

55:22Yeah. And you got like four hours together. And the first hour, you're just kind of this and that. And how is your work week? How's good? How's your and then like by hour two, you're getting into like the deep and the gritty stuff. And I think there's something about forward emulation with other people that is really life giving. And there's something even sort of spiritual about in the amount of connection that you can get from people. So that's something that we definitely do. And I don't think those conversations would come if we were like, let's sit on the couch or cable, turn on this Netflix show.

55:56Hey, how are you? Like the shit just wouldn't happen, right? Yeah, the walks a little bit harder, of course. But magic happens there. I would also say there's a section in the comfort crisis. And I've written about this a little bit in my other book, Scarcy Brands, well, we're talking about the value of boredom. So boredom is effectively this evolutionary discomfort that tells us, go do something else. It's neither good. It's neither bad. Simply tells us whatever you're doing right now, the return on your time invested as running thin, go do something else. So in the past, if you think of us say, we're out foraging for food and we're in this one area and we can't find anything, there's nothing boredom would kick in because we're not getting a return.

56:43And it would say, well, go do something else. And we'd probably go say, okay, well, what if we try fishing this river or something, right? And I think what happens in modern life is that when that evolutionary discomfort that tells us to go do something else kicks in, that something else is just like really easy effortless escape. And it's in the form of a cell phone, it's Instagram, it's whatever, right? It's like this hyper stimulating content. But I think that sort of sitting with boredom and leveraging it to see where else it might take you beyond the screen can be really valuable. Yes, it's uncomfortable.

57:18But I've found I've get my best ideas and I think that there's centuries of thinkers who would say the same. Like my best ideas come when I sort of remove myself from outside stimulation. And yes, like my mind wanders on board, but then bam, some magic happens. One point of messaging around screens today that I want to touch on too is that like there's so much media around cell phones and like you got to use your cell phone less. Here's a million different ways to use your cell phone yet. Less. Yes, that's important. Yes, we should all do it. But I think it misses a big point. And that is if we take, let's say, two hours off our phone screen time, what happens is that people often get bored and they go, well, shit, what am I going to do?

58:13And then you're still just like taking this information that is being beamed into you rather than seeing what else the world can offer you and sort of coming up with your own ideas and creativity. So I like to say rather than focusing on less phone, I like to think more boredom. Get yourself in a space where like boredom is going to kick on. It's going to be uncomfortable. Your mind's going to wander and you might find some good ideas. Yeah, you'll have some weird stuff in your brain. Of course, that's what happens when your mind wanders. But I think you can find some interesting things out there.

58:41Does boredom include reflection or it's true boredom like, I think we need to be removed from the hyper stimulating stuff that we often, when we get that moment of, I've got nothing to do, like stand in a grocery line, right? What do people do? Everyone's on their cell phone. Like you can't just like sit with our thoughts for more than three seconds. So I think even just having the moment where you go, okay, going to do nothing. Might get a little weird. Might get a little uncomfortable. Might be a tiny bit bored, but like your mind's going to go some interesting places I think can be productive in the context of today.

59:16What I'm chuckling because of what were your thoughts on the brief appearance of the the raw dog flight experience that showed up last year. Did you see that where guys were posting online? It did seem to be guys saying that they quote unquote raw dog the terrible use of language. I didn't pick it. They would do a 10 hour flight or a six hour flight with no media. Just sit there as a, as a kind of sign of their toughness. I thought it was kind of interesting. Here's what, here's what came out of that is my wife said, the hell these guys are weak. She's been doing that ever since I knew her. She literally sits in that seat and she turns on the flight screen map and she just zones into that.

1:00:04I'm like, you're a crazy person. Turns out she's just like the original raw dogger. I love it. That was not the answer I expected. Yeah. That trend kind of came and went. Yeah, came and went. I think that, you know, I, and there's the there's a performance of element to that. Right. And so it was kind of became a performance for the for the algorithms and whatever. Where it's I think maybe we need to get a little more nuance behind that and put some thought into it. It's like, how it's like, okay, if I'm not on my screen, like, how am I going to use this time? Can I use it to go sort of deeper into my thoughts?

1:00:37And I do think people need time, especially when you're dealing with trying to chew off big ideas. Like I've found that a long walk where I don't take my cell phone. It's like, I need that. I think a lot of people, I think there's a lot of anecdotes historically that good ideas come from these moments where you're just that's all you're focused on. Maybe you're on a walk. You're just kind of sitting and just peeling away the layers. Not easy, but worthwhile. You know, throughout history and still now, many people get ideas from dreams during the nighttime sleep or during the kind of liminal states between waking and sleep.

1:01:16These times of inactivity that no sensory input coming in are when the brain processes things. And it makes perfect sense to me that in daydreaming or in boredom as you describe it, that new ideas would surface just as they would from the liminal state between sleep and awake. Yeah. And I think people sometimes experience this like, there's a reason we have that sort of cliche that's like, you come up with your best ideas in the shower because there's not this stimulation, right? You're not on your phone. You're removed from the noise and you're just kind of, oh, man, but you got to write them down too.

1:01:49I found that as well. Yeah, you have a good idea. Yeah. What's your idea? Capture mechanism. You read? Yeah. I just like have a notebook on me. Just write things down. And much like a nighttime dream where we wake up and like, oh, I'm going to remember this tomorrow and then you won't remember. You won't remember. I agree. It's important to write things down during the day that come to mind. Actually, it was the great Joe Strummer of the clash of escalero's fame who there's some clip of him someplace saying in that like heavy like breath voice where he's like, you, if you have an idea, you have to write it down.

1:02:21Yeah. Because not only will you forget, but even if you happen to remember it, you can't capture the essence of the the the inspiration unless you write it down at that moment. He really believe that in that moment, it carried a certain, a certain value that you couldn't replace just by writing it down later. Yeah. I agree. So I just did for a third book I'm working on. I did this. It was about 40 days as a hike through Southern Utah and it goes into through the Grand Canyon so into Northern Arizona and then ends in Zion. Took about 40 days. And so normally when I'm reporting a book like when I did the comfort crisis, when I did scarcity brain, like I'm traveling, I'm doing all this stuff, but I'm usually writing using these notebooks.

1:03:02These very particular notebooks are right in the rain because I'm in outdoor environments, whatever. But on this hike, I can't cover the mileage. We need to cover all day if I'm constantly stopping and writing. And like I can't hike and try and ride. Yeah. The row had an advantage by just staying in the spot. Yeah, exactly. Exactly. So I took voice notes actually on my phone. And I found that to be really useful to the some tool that people can use. So I had when I got back from the hike, I had like 500 different voice notes. Some of them were 10 seconds. Some of them were six minutes of me just babbling.

1:03:38But there's some good stuff in there. And so I think you do need to capture it in the moment because I did find two that I didn't really catch on to the voice note idea until maybe the second or third fourth day of the hike. And I would like I can't stop and write this down. And then I'd be in camp at night. We'd set up and I'd go and I'd start writing down the days notes. And I'd go, what was that thought you had in that canyon? It was so good. And I'd just never find it. Right? So I just was like, OK, we've got to use the voice notes tool and just take those. Who's great? There's a very, very accomplished and biologist out at Caltech by the name of David Anderson.

1:04:17And he's done some really interesting work on these more ancient brain areas like the hypothalamus primitive states like aggression, mating behavior. But it carries out to a number of things that we're talking about now about cognitive states and creativity and capturing ideas. And it's this notion of attractor states that basically that the brain, much to most people's dismay, it doesn't work such that you go, oh, I'm going to write from 9 to 11 or I'll do some hard coding or I'm going to and you sit down and you start, no, you warm up, you kind of ratchet into it. And then but over time, it's almost like a ball bearing on a flat surface.

1:04:54And then the surface starts becoming more and more concave. And eventually it's a deep trench. And then that's usually when the buzzer goes off it's time to move to something else. But those, so these attractor states are basically that the shutting down of a lot of other circuitry as one circuit kind of ramps up its activity. But that over time, we can entrain these things. We can link them to specific events in time like the making of your coffee at 9 a .m. So your nervous system unconsciously starts to predict the attractor state of being in a state of deep focus and writing. That all starts to make sense.

1:05:26It starts to just it's a different kind of lens on habit. But if you look at most people, including my own activity through the lens of attractor states and you say, well, what am I training my brain for? What am I in training? Entraining and training, EN and then also just drop the EN? What am I, what am I teaching my brain to do on a daily basis? You know, well, the attractor state is scrolling lots and lots and lots of media. It's reading people's comments. This is funny. It's talking to friends. It's texting a few people. And what we've done, I think, is that we've created these attractor states of it's not that we're we all have ADHD or something.

1:06:03Some people do. But we're right where we belong given our prior behavior. We're just we're just training up this this trench of a bunch of noise. And then the end of the day comes and you're like, shit, I'm getting out into nature and removing all of that. And and kind of forcing yourself to to go in a particular not just physical direction, but to go in a particular mental direction. I feel like it's getting back to something very fundamental. It's like it's like the overload principle of resistance training or cardiovascular exercise and increasing stroke volume. It's like the it's like the fundamentals of how the mind work, which is one of the reasons I love these practices so much, which brings me back to this question of, okay, so there's the 2 % rule.

1:06:54Yep. Taking the identity that I'm going to be this 2 % of people that's going to do this harder thing. It's going to be harder in the short term, but it's going to give me this long -term benefit. And if I can find areas to apply that in my life, I'm going to get this big long, like the benefits just pile up massively. And then at the other end of the spectrum is the misogy concept. Could you explain misogy? Yeah. So if I were to sort of give the cliff notes, I'll give the cliff notes and then the longer explanation. Cliff notes is that misogy is sort of almost a modern right of passage in order to teach people what they're capable of and to give them experience that really changes them thereafter.

1:07:33Now, I heard about this idea from a guy whose name is Marcus Elliott. He came up with this idea back in the 90s. It was like this personal thing he did and I stumbled upon it. Marcus, I believe got his MD from Harvard. And he decides, I kind of want to be a doctor. I want to get into sports science. So he runs this facility that's called P3. They're actually not far from here. They're up in Santa Barbara. And he works with all these different sort of athletes. He's got contracts with the MBA with the NFL, blah, blah, blah, whatever. But he also sort of realizes that what really changes a person, it can always be measured because he's taking a lot of movement measuring.

1:08:12It does a lot of like big data AI stuff around movement measurement, can predict injury and things like that. He realizes that like these big changes that force a player to be better, that get them in a better state when a sort of game is on the line. They can't be measured. And he does this practice he calls misogy. And the idea is that once a year, you're going to go out and you're going to do something really, really hard. Now, he defines really hard to say you should have a 50 -50 shot at completing whatever your misogy task is. So 50 -50 shot because today, I think he's right here he argues like even when we take on a challenge, we have to know we're going to complete it.

1:08:52It's like people don't run marathons and go, I don't know if I'm going to finish the marathon. They say I don't know if I'm going to finish the marathon and sort of insert some arbitrary time. So that's the challenge element. And then the second rule of misogy is that you can't die. So the implication is yeah, do something pretty hard. And what tends to happen when you go out and you do something really sort of cookie challenging that you know is really going to be hard for you. You are truly unsure if you're going to be able to finish this. As you get into this moment, and in this moment, you think you've hit your edge.

1:09:28I've hit my edge. I'm not going to be able to finish this thing. Like, all is lost. But if you can kind of just keep going one foot in front of the other, you get this other moment. And that's where you look back and you go, well, wait a minute. I thought my edge was back there. But I am clearly past it right now. So I've sold myself short here. And then the question is, okay, if I've sold myself short here in this moment, where else in my life might I be selling myself short? And that's where the big changes happen, right? That's the question that you want to leave with from the misogy. Now in the past, I would argue.

1:10:05So after I meet Marcus, he tells me about this like quirky misogy idea he does. He does all kinds of weird stuff. I start of sort of really doing some digging and going, all right, this is like an interesting idea. It's also sort of wacky, you know? But if you look back in history, I think we had things like this in the form of rights of passage. And like I mentioned before, like rights of passage just popped up naturally in all these different cultures. But there was a realization that doing something that truly thrust you beyond the bounds of what you thought you were capable of, where you had to figure things out, where you had to really doubt yourself, and where you had to overcome becomes this sort of great teacher for the human spirit.

1:10:47So that's the idea of misogy. Go out, do something that you think is going to be really, really hard. See what you learn. And even if you fail, that's fine. You're still going to learn something along the path. I'm a huge fan of this misogy concept. So once a year, picking something, could be physical. Could be physical. Could be intellectual creative. And how important is it you think to advertise that you're doing this versus important to keep it quiet into yourself? I think it's better to keep it to yourself. So I think we live in a world where nowadays people do a lot of things for external reasons.

1:11:33To get likes on social media, so your neighbor will be like, oh, that guy's the badass in the neighborhood that they did this, whatever. And I think if you can just do something only for you, that makes it sort of more valuable. Put a sort of different spin on it. Once you decide, oh, I'm going to do this thing because, oh, this guy did it in an hour. I'm going to do it in 59 minutes. Let also get puts a ceiling on you, right? Because now you're going to shoot for 59 minutes rather than, well, what if you just went out and did this for yourself and you just went all in? Potentially, you could do it in 55, you know?

1:12:11And I think today we do live in a world where there's a lot of sharing in order to get social approval. You know, you can go back and forth about what are the goods and the bads of that. But I would just argue that sometimes it's good to do things only for yourself and use that as the sort of lever that you know you have that maybe no one else knows you have it, but you can pull that damn thing when you need to. And that's going to really affect some change. I mean, one of my big, like my one of my biggest messages is like, people just need to go out and find some damn adventure. It's very easy to get locked in the cycle of doing the same thing over and over.

1:12:51You existed home and everything is nice and comfortable and like stress has come in, but they're like in the form of emails and deadlines and things just get predictable. Go out into a place that is totally unfamiliar, do something that's going to be challenging to you. Go with the wind. You will find things that will really enhance your life that will make you feel as Joseph Campbell put it, the rapture of being alive. Like I can tell you, I feel most alive when it's like, okay, I got it go out to wherever it is. The Bolivian jungle, and I got to figure this thing out because I'm going down there to meet with this Chimane tribe or whatever it is, or I got to go to Iraq and investigate the drug trade.

1:13:35It doesn't have to be that extreme, of course. But that is where I absolutely feel that I am most alive. It's like we're going into this unknown world. We don't know what's going to happen. We're going to encounter all these wacky characters along the way. There's going to be trials. There's going to be hardships, but I'm going to like get through it. I'm going to have to figure things out. And it is just like so life giving. It's like the most amazing thing. And I come back from that, and it's taught me something that allows me to function better when I get back to my normal life, because I've learned all these skills and tools that I wouldn't have gotten had I not exited normal life and gone out and just had an adventure.

1:14:11What if you and I were to run an online experiment? This is actually serious here, where we said, okay, we are going to have you and I and a bunch of people that are going to join us are going to refrain from any, any smartphone use for a certain number of hours per day. And instead of posting your sleep score, which a lot of people are now doing, you're going to post the number of hours that you may as should be offline completely at the end of the day. So we're going to compete for time away from social media. And maybe we even get on Instagram live once a week and we share our experiences. And there's this club of wackos that want to do this, right?

1:14:49And see where we get with it. Do you think that the sharing of that experience at the end and the community around it would actually detract from the experience when people are away from their phones? It's a good question. I think it's one of those complicated things where there would probably be some upsides to the sharing. Some people need that like sort of community element. Like, yeah, that would probably enhance in some ways. The community element and the competition might also bend people's behavior in a way that maybe they wouldn't have behaved had they not known that they were part of this group, right?

1:15:24So I think these questions get really complicated. And I think it's also there's probably some individual variation. Like, I know that I personally do a lot better if I don't have like a huge social element to things. Like, I don't run marathons just because I'm like, for me psychologically, I know marathons give people a lot of value because there's community and all these things. But like in my mind, for some reason, I got this weird quirk where I go give it. I could just go run like 26 miles at any time on my own time and not have to wear this bib and like pay this entry fee. You could just run 26 miles.

1:16:03So like something they don't do it for me, but they do it for some people. So I think you would have individual differences. What do you think? I think we should do the experiment. I think we should. I think it'd be a lot of fun to get a group of people, large group of people together from online to go into their lives and then create a community of people that use social media for learning and for actual social connection. But are not leaning on it for this kind of people called fast food or kind of what my dad would call the kind of chewing gum version of nutrition all day long. And I say this as somebody that enjoys social media.

1:16:42So yeah. And by I think this is an idea I wanted to pitch to you today. So I decided to do it on Mike. I have a good platform for it unless you do. How we could track it. So one of my favorite apps, it's called ClearSpace. What ClearSpace does is it when you go to select the apps that you want to sort of quote unquote block, when you go to select one of those apps, let's say it's Instagram, it gives you a nice quote like an inspiring quote about life. But you have to wait, right? There's like a 10 second pause. You wait and then it takes you to the next screen and it says how much time do you actually want to spend on this app?

1:17:22And you can select, you know, five minutes, 10 minutes, 15, 20 minutes, and then you select whatever amount of time. And only once you've gone through that process, can you use the app for the preselected amount of time. And I found it to be really useful because it gets me intentional, right? A lot of times people just pull out their phone, they immediately hit Oh, Instagram. And then you find yourself in it. And then you you went into answer DM, but like actually you watched dog videos, nothing wrong with dog videos, but you watched dog videos for 30 minutes and you go, Oh, shit, I've just lost my day, right?

1:17:51So this thing sort of interrupts that. And they do have some challenge features that could probably create us a group that would be really fun. It sounds really cool. Yeah, I I love social media. I think that in its essence, it's an opportunity to really connect with people. And I've always wanted to have like a weekly meeting with my followers where we I could learn from them and hear what they're doing and whether up to and yeah. And so I feel like there's real value to that, like going and living one's life and then meeting online and talking to people you otherwise wouldn't be able to share information and learn from them and hopefully from you and and do to really do that.

1:18:31I don't know, are there any aside from perhaps 12 step or maybe there's some religious groups, but are there any within social media platform groups that meet regularly and have for years, like we meet once a week, we get on there, we have a live. I mean, I'll pop on for a live every once in a while to connect with my audience and mostly to hear their questions. But I wonder if there are any online groups that have met consistently for for many years. That's a great question. It reminds me of that you probably saw the story about the the guys and the social media, but it's amazing. That group of guys has been playing a game of tag for like 40 years or something.

1:19:10Really? You see that story? Yeah. It's like these guys, I think they were like kids. And they kept up this like lifelong game of tag and it just never it's never ended. At weddings and everything. Yeah. Oh wow. Most people are writing things that's got to be incredibly obnoxious. So they never paused the game. Never paused the game. Yeah. And you know, someone might be it for like years. And then that person will take a secret flight to Cleveland or wherever the other guy is and then got you. You're it. You know, that's hilarious. It's still going. I think it's still going. Yeah. Amazing. Yeah.

1:19:42Amazing. Great. Yeah. You know, I've said this before many times on social media, but any dopamine reward that is not preceded by substantial effort, you know, can potentially destroy us in the form of addiction, but also leads to a drop in that baseline of dopamine at other times. This is, you know, this is the abundance of food, the ease of life that you're referring to. In this experiment that I'm hoping we can run in some form or another, the idea is that there will be some resistance to stepping away from smartphone. There will be great, hopefully, pleasure and the attractor states will take over to doing other things in one's life relationships and creative pursuits, et cetera, when we're away from the phone, but that there's a certain amount of effort to resist so that when we come together socially, it's a real dopamine, not hit, but it's a real dopamine rise that doesn't drop the baseline of dopamine.

1:20:39Yeah. It meets all the kind of criteria of dopamine dynamics that I believe are healthy, because we really can distinguish healthy from unhealthy dopamine dynamics, but it still incorporates the smartphone, which doesn't look like it's going anywhere. So it'd be fun to do this experiment. Yeah. I don't know. I think it's like that, yeah, to your point, smartphones are here to stay. There's clearly benefits to social media else. No one would use it. Problem is some of the benefits come with long -term harms, right? But I think if you can sort of train yourself to use it in a way that helps you rather than hurt you, well, that's a good thing.

1:21:15Sort of reminded me of this story of my mom. So my mom had cancer about 10 years ago. She's fine now, but she was in for one of her annual checkups, right? And this is obviously nerve -wracking because you're finding out, hey, did it come back, whatever, blah, blah, blah. So she goes to this meeting and I was out of town. She goes to this appointment and she's in the doctor's office. She's in the sort of waiting room in the gown and they're like, yeah, we'll be back in a minute. And so she sitting there and right as the nurse left, she immediately went to put out a pull, grab her phone and she left her phone in her car.

1:21:53And she's like, I realized in that moment I was grabbing that phone because I was anxious and emotionally vulnerable. And that was effectively a sedative in that moment. And I had to sit with that. I just had to sit and feel that. She's like, but by being sort of forced into that moment, it made me realize, well, why don't I want to feel this? And that leads to these questions like, oh, because I value being alive. Well, why do I value being alive? We'll hear all these reasons. Oh, I appreciate this thing. I appreciate this other thing. And that insight, I think taught her a lot about how she wants to spend her time too.

1:22:35And so having these moments where we don't immediately go for the sort of easy and comfortable or easy, comfortable thing, I think can lead to these insights. And that's just like this very micro moment, but that it stands for so much. And her behavior did change afterwards. She's awesome. She's always been amazing. She's a she's a single mom and I'm an only child. And she's been sober for 40 years, yes, 40 years. And I'm 38. So she got sober, had a kid. Cards were definitely stacked against us, but she worked her ass off and built us a pretty good life. That's awesome. Definitely weren't rich, but just amazing woman.

1:23:20And yeah, I've learned a lot from her. Sounds like an amazing woman. I'm really happy to hear she's healthy. Yeah. And that moment of having left the phone in the car, yeah, it's amazing how those small portals in time like can open up so much. I think social media offers a lot. I do also think that as your example points out, it offers the opportunity to numb out or to experience drama. And I feel like when people talk about the dopamine hits of social media, the data on this just don't square with the idea that that scrolling our phone gives us dopamine hits. It gives us low level expenditure.

1:24:08You know, I want to on the basis of your books, I wrote something down a couple days ago, I was thinking about our conversation. I was thinking, I've long believed that dopamine is a currency. It's the universal currency of motivation. It's what literally allows us to ambulate forward. It controls movement in the body. That's why people with Parkinson's who lose dopamine neurons can't move. But in terms of mental movement, it's motivation, like movement towards something, redirecting our efforts and so forth. And I was thinking about this idea that we can either spend our dopamine, right, or we can invest our dopamine on this is purely on the basis of your work.

1:24:52And it seems like all day long, we can potentially spend dopamine. It's scrolling as spending and it's the kind of spending we don't even notice that we're doing. We're sort of leaking, it's almost like leaking dopamine. We're not getting these big quote unquote dopamine hits. This is why I don't like the dopamine hit model. I don't log on Instagram and go like, wow, like, it's no, like, it's not like coming back from a misogyny going, I can lift. It's not transformative for the next month. It keeps you in the in the rut of looking for more because it's like mental chewing gum. It's my dad, a long time ago, he said, be careful of the internet.

1:25:27I said, why? And he said, it's just mental chewing gum. Yeah, and he's very regimented guy. And so we're always spending, but then there are these things that require effort that are in, we're still spending dopamine while we're doing it. Like if you go do a workout, you're spending effort to do it, but you get something back on that investment. So you're investing it. You're not just spending it. Yeah. And that's great. And the other one based on what you told me today is reflection in states of boredom or meditation or, you know, for people that orient this way prayer, whatever it happens to be, or maybe it's even just leaving a social gathering and keeping your phone in your pocket and walking back to the car and just really thinking about the richness of that interaction, but these little things that are disappearing in our lives these days, but that are so easy to recapture, that reflection is another way of investing our dopamine.

1:26:25And I think when we look at the the neurobiological literature on dopamine, we're going to realize that, yeah, of course, addictions spend out your dopamine, drop your baseline. Your bank account is in the red, deep in the red. It's a whole other discussion. But that most of us are spending and then we reset each night with sleep and then we spend the next day and then we reset. And it's a life of it becomes kind of a meaningless life. And this isn't to demonize the social media platforms that they're pretty good at letting us numb out when we don't want to feel something or feel drama when we need to feel that like lift.

1:27:01Like, oh my god, she did that. He did that. Oh my god, the lawsuit got dismissed about these two people who are arguing about who said what and who did. I'm like, how boring is it really? And how unimportant is it? But it's not boring because they've taught us how to make it not boring. And then you look at the comments and it's like, this is as gross. It's like high school forever. Yeah. But the worst part of high school effectively trains us to use it. So when I think about comfort crisis or scarcity brain, seeing it's really about how to invest your dopamine in effort and reflection as a way to capture more capability to lean into things.

1:27:38That's really to me what I like is the genius of doing hard things that you brought forward in the comfort crisis. So as I started today's discussion saying, I mean, it really changed my every day because I think so intensely now about like the like, how can I introduce more pain to and to bring about more meaning as opposed to comfort like meaning in any case. So yeah, I think you're really on to the two things that matter most, which are effort and reflection. I love that language of spending versus investing. That's just, yeah, I think you hit the nail on the head there. And the investing is usually things that are going to be a little more challenging, not as hyper stimulating.

1:28:27Things you maybe wouldn't necessarily want to do at first. And then once you've done them enough, you realize, oh, this has really changed me in a fundamental and positive way. And hopefully you start to sort of crave them. Like you said, no, I love the exercise, right? That's where we want people to get with all sorts of things that can enhance their life. And I think two, I'll add here. So if you think about people who pile up money and pile up money and invest and invest and invest and they never spend it, maybe you also need to learn, okay, now that I'm doing all this investing, it's also okay to spend it sometimes, right?

1:29:01And then I can really enjoy that because I've done all these things. And so like I find with my with my own use, I used to sort of beat myself up if I was on say Instagram or whatever, just looking at nonsense. I like nonsense on Instagram. And I would beat myself up. And then I realized, you've done all these things like you wrote for five hours, you got to work out in, you took your dog for a walk, you know, you helped out around the house, you did all these things. Dude, watch a freaking dog video for 20 minutes. It's fine. And then I could actually appreciate that more. And like I didn't have the guilt around that, you know, and it was like sort of the, all right, you've invested a bunch, you got all this, my yeah, buy that, buy that thing you don't necessarily need, but it's going to it's nice little boost, you know.

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1:31:03The problem is blood testing has always been very expensive and complicated. In contrast, I've been super impressed by function simplicity and at the level of cost. It is very affordable. As a consequence, I decided to join their scientific advisory board and I'm thrilled that they're sponsoring the podcast. If you'd like to try function, you can go to functionhealth .com slash huberman. Function currently has a wait list of over 250 ,000 people, but they're offering early access to huberman podcast listeners. Again, that's functionhealth .com slash huberman to get early access to function. The idea that we all have to become these sickos that love that love self punishment and service to just building up more dopamine reserves, that's definitely not the goal.

1:31:46I mean, I think one of the reasons that David Goggins is so popular is, well, there are many reasons. A, he is how he appears online. I've known David since before he had a book, the census before us first, but he was exactly that way. He was exactly that way. He's not playing a role. There's no acting. This is how he functions. It's a life that most people are not going to embrace. If they do embrace it partially, I think it will benefit them tremendously, but he sort of embodies that. He doesn't sort of embody that. He embodies that. I think that being able to relax and enjoy things and really savor them is another source of, I won't say everything's investing, but there are certain things that might look like spending your dopamine that are actually investing them.

1:32:32You described a beautiful one as walking with your wife, these long hikes and walks, real relating in person relating. I think makes us feel so many things. I mean, there's so much science and psychology about this. We definitely evolve to connect to other humans. Absolutely. I don't think of it as meaningless relaxation to just connect with people and have a barbecue and just relax or just whatever they call it, like Netflix and chill can be a great thing if it's not the only thing. The internet has allowed us a lot of interesting new ways to connect with other people. We were talking before we hit the red button on record, how I'm into the grateful dad.

1:33:16I think that you can find a lot of different sort of strange tribes to belong to, and they can be enhanced by the internet. When I got into the dead, it was like, okay, now I'm listening to the live shows. I'm going down this rabbit hole. I'd find these Reddit threads where people are discussing the live shows and like, hey, if you listen to how Jerry plays this song in 78 versus 79, I'm like, oh, okay, listen, oh, wow, yeah, that's really interesting. So then you start weighing in. And then your friends with, you know, Deadhead 7778, who you don't even know who the hell he is or where the hell he lives, but like this is a great guy online that I can talk to.

1:33:50And then you eventually sort of find yourself at the shows and you're connecting with these people that you would probably otherwise never connect with a normal life. And there's like, you know, the hippie who's got like two bucks in a dream to get to the next show in Tidei. And then there's the hippie who's got the Rolex and he's taken his private jet to the next show on you right, but you're all in it together. And you're sort of like connecting for this sort of big sort of group thing. And I think you could apply that to music. You could apply it to sports teams. The sort of shared cause and the internet.

1:34:21I do think can allow you to find those sort of mini -trips, you know. Yeah, I love it. I just now allowing myself to get familiar with the Grateful Dead. I did go to a bunch of shows because they were from my hometown. Yeah, awesome. They, California Avenue was where draper's music and some of those Grateful Dead band members worked. And there was a great bookstore there, Printer's Inc. And so they were kind of an institution in the South Bay where I grew up. But I fell into a different genre of music. But there's some great music that out there. But I think the culture around the dead, the fact that people would devote their entire lives to quote unquote following the dead.

1:34:59And still now, like people go like with fish and dead income. And this is like an outgrowth of of something that I don't know of any other band that that had people change their entire lives in terms of the whole structure of their lives. Yeah, I mean, I want a bunch of times when they're in Vegas at the sphere, I have another fun thing. And there's like that shared sense of connection, whether it's a sports team, whether it's a hobby, whether it's a type of music, when we were, when I was on this long hike, you get within shooting distances of towns. And that's where you have to go resupply. But you might be 40 miles from a town.

1:35:34So you're like, all right, we got a hitchhike. All right. So we got to ride into this town called Escalane, Utah. It's this tiny town. So we go restock food, you know, we each eat like a 16 inch pizza ourselves and like wings, because you got a refuel. And then we're at this gear store and we need to ride back to the trail head. It's like 40 miles away. So it's like, how the hell are we going to find a ride? Like this can take forever to hitchhike. I mean, this gear store. And they haven't had this, I can't remember what it was. It might have been like a bean year or something that had a dead head on.

1:36:05I picked it up. I'm like, oh, this is awesome. And this lady comes up to me and she goes, oh, it's like, yeah, me too. We start talking. Well, it turns out this lady seen them like 500 to a thousand times. What's her estimate? Like, well, it's a big estimate. But that's a lot of shows, right? And we just immediately connect and she's like, oh, you need to ride back to the trail head. I'm like, that would be great. Yeah. And it's just like just that thing that little emblem of the dead immediately allowed us to have this conversation and have this fun, this shared sense of connection. So kind of finding something to identify with with people, I think, can be just like a great adventure.

1:36:43I'm like, you meet new people like, well, and find interesting communities to belong to try stuff. I mean, this is the power. So you had Ryan in for the recovery and addiction podcast. Like that's what yeah, that's the power of recovery groups. It's the powers in the group. Because you've got the shared identity with people, you have people keeping tabs on you, you're keeping tabs on other people. They help you. You help them. You share your stories. They know things about you that probably no one else does. And there's an identity in that. And it's powerful. That's why that works. If you, you know, if I'm going to forget the names of the founders, Bill Wilson, if he found, if he founded that online and was like, hey, we're all just going to chat on a well messenger.

1:37:25Probably would have helped a lot of people, but it would not have the power that it would have of getting people together to converse. I think it's harder for people to go out and do that today because there is a, it's much easier to only do things sort of online and sort of, you know, be a little bit of a, a hermit, if you will. And I think forcing yourself to go into new places, meet new people, try new things, get into new stuff and go out and meet people in person can be really powerful today. I wrote a post on 2 % about the value of gathering and sort of identifying, identifying with something, like whether it be a band or a team or whatever.

1:38:08And I talked to this researcher. She's up in Oregon. I forget what university, and I'm sorry for that. But she talked about how the internet when used appropriately can be a really great community builder. And she also said, the best thing that can happen is when those type of communities then figure out ways to meet up in person. Like that's, that's the perfect next step. And it all starts with like, okay, we have this community online. Oh, I'm going to be in San Francisco. Who in the group is San Francisco based? Let's meet up and get coffee. And I do think you're starting to see more of that happen like, it's happening on substack with a lot of writers.

1:38:46For example, I do events that I call the Don't I event. And it's me, it's different than the Brian Johnson Don't Die Event. Yeah, it's different. Yeah, this is the original Don't die. This is a different type of Don't die. Yeah, the original Don't die. What we do is it's me and my friend Mike Moreno, amazing guy. Mike was a, was a CIA case officer in Iraq and Afghanistan, I believe. And we basically teach people like travel wilderness survival skills over two days. And so it's most of the people that come are from people who read my substack. And so it's people who are often active in the comments.

1:39:20They they all know each other like people show up and they know each other from the internet. And then we all hang out and we do awesome stuff together. And it's just like, it's the best. But it's like that step to get people in person, I think needs to happen. And so one thing I've even thought about too is you hear a lot about how people spend less time together and there's a variety of reasons for that. You know, people will point to the sort of less activity and organized religion, which used to be the sort of hub of sociality in in towns. But I also think things like and I talked to a woman I love.

1:39:59She's she was with the Wall Street Journal. She's back at the Wall Street Journal reporter. Her name is Gwendolyn Bounds, Wendy Bounds. And she wrote a book called Little Chapel on the River. And it's about she was at the Wall Street Journal when 9 -11 happened. And she was living in the city like she was taking a shower in the plant at the towers. And so to get out of the city she ended up moving to this town called Garrison, New York. And the heart of this town is this old Irish pub that is right by the train station. And she's like, and people from this town would come to this Irish pub. And they might have one drink, two drinks, but it was like the hangout.

1:40:38And you get, you know, people who were super right -ling, people who were super left -leaning in the bar. And they would, you know, they'd give each other shit, but it was all in fun. And it was like the heart of community and gathering and human connection. And I think you're starting to see a little bit of a death of places like that. You know, like the the community pillar institution has sort of been replaced by, you know, chains or something. And like, yeah, people can gather at chains. But there's not like that unique identity. It's all like predetermined by someone in a corporate office, three thousand miles away.

1:41:15And I think there's a case for like trying to find those places that still exist and hang out. Whether it be, you know, the pub, you don't even have to drink at pubs. I can tell you that. I don't drink. Still go hangout. And I love bars. I sometimes work in bars and I don't drink. Yeah, it's great. Restaurants, whatever it might be. I think there's a case to get out in the world. Again, you know, I'll go back to the comfort crisis that I think sometimes that is hard to just go somewhere like the new guy. Hey guys, you know, ants to strike up a conversation with someone random. But I do think it is really good for us in the launcher.

1:41:51I think to the internet dehumanizes people, right? It's it's easy to yell and scream at an icon that's, you know, the size of a thumbtack on the screen who said one thing. But if that same person was in person across from you across from the bar from you, you may not even talk about politics with that person, right? And here you've, you know, people make these crazy death threats or something. Whereas like if that person was just across the bar from you, you may not even talk about that. And you might actually think they're a great person. I'll give you another example. More hitchhiking. So we had to get, we got it to this tam when we're on this height.

1:42:29Re -supply. We need to get up to the trailhead. This trailhead's 20 -minute driveway or something. These people pull over and they say, how? Because we got our thumbs out, you know, we're like old school hobos and say, oh, do you need a ride? And it was this couple from China. They'd come over a week ago just for some vacation. They're both from China. This was at the heart of the trade war. The trade war was at its apex when this happens. All right, China had just like decided they're not even going to ship us to some rare minerals we needed. I wasn't paying too much attention to the news out there, but I was aware of that.

1:43:08We get in the car with this couple from China and like, that's all happening in the world. And guess what? No one gave a shit about in that moment. All this media on CNN and Fox and social feeds and everything about the damn trade war. These two Americans, one of who worked in government for 20 years. And these two people from China and we're just connecting, talking about the United States versus what it's like to live in China. Oh, you guys are academics. Oh, it's fantastic. We're just really, really connecting. And they're doing us this huge favor of giving us a ride up to the trailhead. And these are two people that like, this is awesome.

1:43:50These people are great. And like, no one gave a shit about all this noise happening that should seemingly put us in this like maybe tense moment, right? So I think that when you actually get in front of people and face to face, people have about 75 million more things in common than they do things that are not in common that they could argue about. And it takes that interaction and going out into the world. I found that when I travel, people everywhere are far more kind, happy, willing to help than I would have ever expected. And I had high expectations going in. But it takes those experiences to realize that.

1:44:32And I do think that if you're kind of just existing behind the screen where it's easy for people to shout, you get this distorted view of the world. It's like, go out, talk to people, have different experiences. You're going to walk away realizing that, hey, most people are actually totally fantastic. If you just give them the time to talk to them, ask them questions, and be nice. Like being nice is the number one tool in my tool book to survive and get along at my job and do all these different, like, just be nice to people. And you'll find that most people are nice back. It's this starting in the real world and perhaps bringing something online, you know, posting about or writing about the great experience later as opposed to the online experience brought it into the world.

1:45:17I have a friend who's a very accomplished musician and he doesn't do his own social media. And we get together for dinner once every couple of weeks. And once I got out there and I said, oh, yeah, I saw this thing online. He said, I don't want to hear about social media. And I realized in that moment, I was like, okay, got it. We're not going to talk about something that was on social media. Why would we do that? In his mind, why would we do that? We're here. Let's have an experience now. And I think this can be easy too. And I'm going to, because I didn't say this and it came to my mind when we were talking about Musogi.

1:45:51When I talk about this and I say, something I did that might seem hard for people. I'll put a caveat on that is that there's way more people out there doing even more extreme things at the same time. There's people who's entry point like, you got to meet, you got to do the thing where you're at. So I gave this talk. Right? I talked about Musogi in the talk. And afterwards, this lady comes up to me and she goes, hey, I had read your book and I learned about this Musogi idea. And she goes, my Musogi was trying sushi. I go, trying sushi. And she goes, it's trying sushi. I go, okay, tell me about that.

1:46:32She goes, I just always said, I had this fear around sushi, but people told me it was good, but I just couldn't, I couldn't do it. I forced myself to do it. She's like, I didn't love it, but I didn't hate it. But more importantly, it taught me what other fears do I have about things that are probably totally fine and not open this big door for me to go try all sorts of new things. I go, well, I'm kind of afraid of flying alone. What if I went and took a trip and visited a friend? Now I gotta go hang out with my friend like it just opens doors, right? And so really, it can be anything. It can be something totally objectively extreme and crazy.

1:47:12It can be trying sushi. Just try something. So it's really about pushing up against those edges in real life. Wherever the edge is. Do you think it's possible to structure one's day around making the morning and day really tough? And when I say tough, I mean, in the sense that you go against your impulse to do things the easy way. And then making your evenings and nights really relaxing. I try and do that. I'll get into the heinous details about my evenings in a moment, but I'll tell you about my mornings. And I'd actually like to hear about how you approach this too. So in the morning, I wake up usually very early.

1:47:53Now I'll put a asterisk there that I also go to bed early. So I wake up at like in between 3, 3, 3, 4, 30. What time do you go to sleep? Probably 8 30. Okay. So wake up at 3 30. Get a cup of coffee. Immediately I go to my desk and I just, I write. And I sit there. And to your point, it takes a little bit of that warm up, right? But I know as a writer, the more time I'm in my chair behind that keyboard, the more likely I am to produce words that work for the goal I'm trying to accomplish. So I need that, say, 4 or 5 hours every single day. And it is hard. It's usually like the first two hours. I'm just like, oh, you suck at this.

1:48:39This is terrible. Why did you choose this career? How does your body feel? It physically is writing hard for you. Like as the chair comfortable, are you feeling strained or you relaxed? Is it all just mentally hard? Or is it physically demanding as well? I would say it's more mentally. Kind of just get in it for me. It's like you get in this zone and you're like, I got this idea, like, how am I going to put this down? And you write something like, that's not it. But there's like this one nugget. Okay, take that one nugget. Now what can we do with that? And it's kind of like putting together this really kind of difficult puzzle.

1:49:12But I've also found that eventually you kind of start to hit a stride and things start to work. And I know that some days I'm going to sit there for five hours and I'm going to get out like 300 words. And they're going to be okay. But some days, like just boom magic happens. And I might bang out like 3000 words. And I'm like, those are those are decent. Those are decent words. But if I'm not there doing that every single morning, despite knowing that most days, it's probably going to be hard. Like, book's not going to write itself. All right. So I do think like with a lot of things that a person might want to improve in, you really do have to be willing to put in the time and realize that this is going to be there's going to be really challenging moments.

1:49:55But the challenging moments, they also make the days when you get the metaphorical 3000 decent words, they make it just awesome. So to lean into that. So it's kind of like how I approach my mornings and evenings. Like I kind of alluded to with social media, how now I've just kind of let off and just let myself be okay with just letting my brain turn off. My wife and I watch some pretty heinous reality television. That is our thing. Turn on big fan of real housewives assault like city. Okay. We'll admit it. Okay. Have I confess I've never seen that one. Is it don't start? Just watch stuff like that.

1:50:33And it's just like, you know, can connect over this totally just mindless show. And it's almost like it's kind of a reset. It's like, you know, those ladies throwing drinks in each other's faces screaming at each other. It's just a nice little beat your brain's reset for the day. And so you're writing from about 330 in the morning, four in the morning until you said about four hours. Yeah, four or five hours. Okay. Yeah, all you're getting up to use the bathroom. Yeah. Yeah. You're drinking some more coffee, some more water. Yeah, am I getting another coffee? Yeah, breakfast before. Usually after.

1:51:02After. And then what happens between 8 a .m. and and usually house one and assault like city house one. After I've got like the key core writing in, I would say that then I focus on what I not eloquently at all say would be the sort of bullshit, you know, like I would got all these emails to respond to, got to do sort of this task and that task. Whatever project isn't sort of like my main writing, probably bullshit is not the right word for it because it's important stuff, but I just sort of value that writing time. And then I will usually, I usually exercise before I eat dinner usually around four.

1:51:42I tried exercising the morning for a while, but I realized that that is like my peak hours for writing. And that was kind of getting interrupted. And so I'm like, okay, I'm good with it being before dinner. Do you do caffeine before your afternoon workout? I'm just curious. No, not usually. I usually shut off caffeine probably around noon. Probably heard that on this podcast actually, but I found I actually years ago. So I did a sort of caffeine audit and my caffeine was out of control. And so I just did cold turkey quit. I felt like I was literally had the like felt like I had the flu for about 28 hours.

1:52:25And then I slept for 18 hours straight. And then I had a headache for a week. But I felt a little better. And so I've tried to be a little more cognizant of how's the intake going. Some days I'm done others, you know, sometimes sometimes I go. So you had two 32 ounce cold brews today. Seems like a lot of caffeine for one man, you know, but you can do. I mean, you're talking to a lifelong caffeine addict here. So I've, unless I've had a colder flu, I don't take breaks and I consume an outrageous amount of caffeine. How much do you think you consume? I'm going to shock some people, but I'm very caffeine tolerant.

1:53:02I should say that first. And and I'm actually a pretty mellow person. And I probably consume distributed from the morning until about two or three p .m. Usually two p .m. is my cut off somewhere between 600 and 800 milligrams of caffeine a day. But before people bulk at that, keep in mind that when you look up online, you go, oh, chat, GPT, how much caffeine is in a typical cup of coffee? They're going to say 150 milligrams of caffeine. If you go to like a Starbucks or a pizza coffee or they're brewing it much stronger than that. So a small probably has somewhere between 200 to 50 medium is going to be 350 to 500.

1:53:47I once said that, you know, a venti coffee, what I call a large, but just to orient people can have 800 to a thousand milligrams of caffeine people like no way. And then I got some brushback on that. Like people have tested this out. Different places are brewing them differently. So what most people are consuming a lot more caffeine than they realize, which is why they have a headache when they don't drink it. I like caffeine, but mostly in the form of of your bimote, either this or just brood leaves. And it's a very different caffeine high. It rises more slowly. It kind of works down. If I drink a coffee as opposed to espresso or your bimote, it's a real punch.

1:54:32So I'm not drinking 800 milligrams of caffeine from coffee. It's a very different. I mean, my day looks quite different than yours, but I definitely agree that once we figure out our optimal circadian schedule, which for you sounds like you're a true, probably genetically from what we understand early bird, you like to go to bed somewhere between eight and nine p .m. wake up somewhere between three and four a .m. Most people who try and get on that schedule really struggle. And they start to revert toward the more typical schedule or the night owl schedule. But most people like me go to bed somewhere between 10 and 11 30 at night.

1:55:08I can get to bed by 9 30, but it's tough. Typically at 10 30 in bed, 11. I'm out. And then if I do that, I'd need maybe six and a half hours of sleep and I'm fine. And then the night owls definitely exist. There are people for whom their genetic polymorphisms in their genome make them want to go to bed at 1 2 3 a .m. and sleep until 8 9 10 even 11 a .m. and they do best. But I agree that once you figure out your optimal circadian schedule, early bird typical or night owl, that there are a couple of three to four hour pockets during the day when our attention and wakefulness is just at its greatest.

1:55:49And you have to decide what you're going to devote that to. And from what we understand that morning bout, which for you falls early, is when the catacolomines dopamine, or epinephrine, and epinephrine are really being released at their greatest amounts. It's almost like the bank account to invest. You know, okay, you can invest now. You're going to spend, you're going to invest. And I think many people spend it out. And exercise is great. I noticed that cardio, so to speak, gives me a lot of energy and focus in the hours that follow. Resistence training, which arguably I like to train hard and I like training heavy.

1:56:28Yeah. Afterwards, if I shower up and eat something, my brain is fatigued in a way that I'm like, damn, I invested it in exercise. I can't invest in everything. So I think finding those times when we are optimal is great and not just spending it out on meaningless stuff. And that's what's happened to so many of these, I hear from a lot of young guys on this in particular. Guys who are like hitting their early mid late 20s. And they're like, my life is like not heading in a particular direction. The so -called failure to launch kids. And it's scary. And then you say, well, what are you spending your time on?

1:57:04I'm like, well, I get some exercise, but then a lot of YouTube, a lot of video games, a lot of spending out. And I realize that there are some people who can make a career out of video games, but most can't. So I think there are a lot of casualties of that kind of spending out of those key hours. Yeah. Thanks so too. And I do agree with you that it's all about finding whatever's going to work for you. You got to find that sort of magic, those magic hours, you know, as I would call them in a non scientific way. The example I always like to give is Hunter S. Thompson, where he would sleep until noon.

1:57:40And then he would start writing at like 11 p .m. maybe. And you'd go to four in the morning. And of course, he's fueled by all this nonsense on, you know, going into that. But I was like his, that was sort of his magic hours where he got the best work done. And it's like, you got to find, you got to find what yours are. Yeah, it's interesting. The reliance these days on energy drinks and caffeine and supplements. Some of which we've talked about in this podcast, like alpha GPC, they'll have a meaningful effect on your levels of alertness and focus. I think it's a mistake to use those to just kind of exist, yeah, tipping in energy during just to get through your day.

1:58:15I do think there's a place for the occasional use of things like alpha GPC or caffeine. Certainly, some people nowadays are using non smoke non -vaped nicotine. The great Joe Strummer said that one of the worst things that ever happened to creativity is people stop smoking. I'm not encouraging people to start smoking. He died young, sadly, 50. But, you know, I think the idea there was that nicotine is cognitively enhancing. You don't want to take it in in a way that kills you. But I think if you're going to explore chemistry for changing your your brain state, which is what it's all about, that you want to be really careful about what you do with that enhanced brain state.

1:58:57Yeah, like just drinking a bunch of energy drinks to scroll the internet is truly a waste of a life. Yeah, getting all ramped up to do nothing, basically. Yeah, get all ramped up to do something. That's a good rule to follow. When you're out on these adventures, do you have all your comforts from home of like to bed at a certain at your early hour, up at an early hour? Are you still writing before you head out? I'm guessing some days you can't do you bring coffee? I mean, there are certain things that you bring with you so that you're not just in a complete stoic mode. You're not like naked in the woods.

1:59:34I think that's a different reality to you. Yeah, we don't watch that one. I will bring, so I'll give you it kind of depends on the trip. A lot of them, if it's international things get a little skewed with time changes and things like that. But if it's sort of an outdoor adventure, I'm usually up pretty early with the sun. I also notice that I sleep a lot better and longer when I'm out in the wilderness, just way better. So I usually get up and I usually bring coffee. It's an outdoor thing, just like instant crap coffee, but it tastes great out there because that's what you got. I often don't bring a stove when I do outdoor adventure stuff, simply because one, it's more weight to carry.

2:00:25Two, I've heard horror stories of people who are boiling water on these awkward stoves and then oh, they knocked it into their lap. And now we have like a serious emergency in the middle of freaking nowhere. So I don't bring a stove and so I'll just mix the instant coffee with whatever temperature. The water temperature is like the outdoor temperature, right? So if it's 33 degrees outside, the water is 33 degrees. I'll drink that and then usually you don't bring a stove on these long adventures. No, no. Wow. Yeah, then I'll get moving. On this last hike, a lot of bars for calories. You're basically just looking for foods that, so sort of the rules to kind of give people some advice here and I can put that in the link we talked about.

2:01:10One, it's got to be good on my stomach. That's rule number one. Because if you eat something that's going to upset your stomach and you got a hike 25 miles, you're going to have a really, really bad day. All right, so figuring that out, that tends to be foods that aren't super, super fibery and are a little more processed rather than less. So your stomach's not doing the processing. Two, it obviously has to be calorie dense because if you take, let's say, to give a kind of extreme example, two pounds in peanut butter, that has way more calories than two pounds in apples and it also takes up less room in your pack, right?

2:01:48So stuff tends to be calorie dense, so like nuts, bars, things like that. At night, I'll have tortillas and salami and some dried fruit, things like that. Number three is that it has to taste good because if you don't like how it tastes, you're probably not going to eat it and if you don't eat it, it's not going to help you. Right, you're just carrying it. And then four, four. I kind of look at like nutritional composition. I go, okay, am I getting enough protein? Now, granted, when I'm out in a scenario like that, you're eating so much food that you basically get enough protein on accident, like it's hard to not get enough protein when you're eating 4 ,000 calories a day.

2:02:24But those are sort of the rules I follow nutritionally when I'm out on these journeys. Interesting. Yeah, one big win that I found are these bars for him and I have no affiliation with these guys. It's, I think it's called, it's made by MetRX and it's called the Big 100 bar. So this is like a bar design for straight up meat heads, okay? But it's got like 400 something calories and it's got 30 grams of protein and I stumbled upon these in these little, in this little gas station in this, the town is one gas station in a hotel and they have all these different flavors. They taste like candy bars and I'm like, this is the thing that I am probably never going to eat in normal life.

2:03:05But this is magic out on the trail because it's just a hunk of calories with protein and they like inject it with all sorts of vitamin and minerals, just like way overfortified. Like this is trail food right here. As you pointed out, very different than what you recommend people eat back home. Totally. People should probably eat exact opposite way back home. Exactly. Food snatchables, clean meats, eggs, fish, you know, this kind of thing. Yeah, generally like my people will ask me about nutrition advice and mine is basically just like try and eat more foods that are ingredients rather than have ingredients.

2:03:39If you can just follow that and you're probably going to be alright. In real life. In real life. Yeah. Yeah, I definitely follow it. Not on the trail. On the trail, just just realize you're going to be eating a lot of crap for 30 days and then when you get home or 40 days, whatever it might be, when you get home, maybe lean into salads. Well, it's survival out there. Yeah. You said you're losing weight even though you're consuming a ton of calories. When you're out on these adventures. Yeah. So for the last one, for example, that was 40 days.

2:04:09We probably averaged 20 to 25 miles a day. Some days are a little more slow going because you might have to navigate a canyon. There's a lot of ups and a lot of downs. But we also had sections on the Arizona trail, which is like this really well maintained trail. So we had like a 40 mile day that day. And you have everything in your pack. So you're carrying the pack. And I was trying to eat between 4 ,000 and 5 ,000 calories a day. And I still lost about 13 pounds. Yeah. I talked to a Herman Ponsor at Duke. And he did some back of the hand math. He was like, okay, I'm going to figure this out.

2:04:45He's like, caveat, I'm just doing this in my head right now. He's like, okay, how much did you weigh? How much are you? Okay. He thought I was probably burning about 6 ,300 calories a day. Wow. Yeah. It's a lot of work. I think some people will hear 40 days. I don't have time for this. I can't get away from this. But you mentioned something that I think is worth pointing out. And it offers an opportunity for people to access some of the incredible things that these outdoor adventures provide. And that's the reset to sleep and sleeping outside. There's a a guy researcher at University of Colorado Boulder by the name of Kenneth Wright, who's done these really beautiful experiments where he takes students camping, where they go to sleep shortly after sunset.

2:05:28I think they have a nice campfire and enjoy some orders and socializing. And then they get into their tents and maybe read a bit and they go to sleep and then they wake up somewhere or circus sunrise, not exactly there. But no one's using an alarm. No one's being told when to wake up and they get up and they do their breakfast. So they're just camping in the Colorado mountains for a couple of days. What he found was that just two nights and the days around those nights of camping in the Colorado mountains allowed them to reset their circadian rhythms for melatonin, which elevates at night. And I kickstart the sleep process as many people know.

2:06:02And for cortisol, which is why we wake up in the morning, the so -called cortisol awakening response, you know, precedes the time we wake up, which for you comes in a god -awful hour from. But and was able to reset that those cortisol melatonin rhythms, which really bookend our days and and and really establish regularity of circadian rhythm. So while there are a lot of things one can do like cold showers and exercise and forced it early hours and dimming the lights, etc. when getting out into nature and camping for a couple of nights, really getting away from cell phone contact and getting more oriented to the sunrise and sunset as the cues for circadian rhythm has a long lasting effect on circadian rhythms of these hormones and wakefulness.

2:06:45So it's getting back to the fundamentals. I just offer that because some people might hear like 40 days and like shit, I don't want to like just eat peanut butter and when I hear that you don't bring a stove, like now I'm looking at you different. I'm like this guy is psychotic in the in the in the good sense of the word, right? I think it's awesome. No, it's it's when I say psychotic in the form of a couple. Yeah, it's a good kind. But I think most people can think, okay, I could probably get away for two, three nights. Yeah. It and camp or talk to someone who knows how to backpack and get a proper kit together and go backpacking.

2:07:18Yeah. And the level of adventure and life reset and meaningful experiences that one brings back from that and reset of circadian rhythm is super significant. Totally. There's and it's amazing. I mean, when you look at how much of the US is actually like developed, it's some crazy number like only three, four percent is occupied by people and the rest is just like farmland and open land. Like we have so much amazing unbelievable public lands in the United States. And by the way, as I experienced, the best stuff isn't necessarily in national parks. The best stuff is often in these sort of middle and nowhere places where it would just be a giant logistical nightmare to try and put a national park there and get all these people into it.

2:08:04Like you can find some just incredible places in the US. And even I think three nights outdoors, two one night, two nights or whatever. Any amount of time outdoors, especially if it's a little more rugged a little more off the grid and hell, you can even car camp. Like you don't have to like walk 20 miles out to the middle of nowhere. You can car camp. I think that has just so many benefits. Scott University of Utah named David Strayer. And he did, he's done this work on what he calls a three day effect. And he's basically found that after three days in nature, like some really beneficial things happen to people and people come back reporting that they just feel so much calmer, more collected, they're just like more reset, more aligned in their life.

2:08:50And I think that's absolutely a thing. The reason he started studying it is because a guy who owns this sort of famous rare book shop in Salt Lake City, the guy's name is Ken Sanders, he was calling this thing that would happen to him the three day effect. He goes, yeah, we just call it the three day effect among my friends. And he was like a friend of Edward Abbey, the environmental writer. He's like, yeah, we call it the three day effect. Like after three days in the wild, you like just totally reset. You're better human, you think better, you're nicer, you're more empathetic, you're just a great person.

2:09:20And Strayer was kind of like, wait, I feel like that's happened to me, but I've just never heard anyone sort of put a term on it. And so he started kind of doing some research into it. And it's actually pretty interesting stuff. Super interesting. I think my mind as the neurobiologist goes to these attractor states, I think that it takes some time for us to drop into these different ways of being. And ways of being sounds kind of mystical, psychological, but it's also neural, right? Is that our nervous system shapes itself around the interactions and vice versa? And I think I find your work so interesting because you're sitting a chair for four hours, cognitive thinker, toil with words and ideas guy.

2:10:02But you like these long extended adventures, which are really adventures of the body and mind. I've been wrestling with this idea as you can tell today, I wanted to just present some ideas to you to get your thoughts on them. And one of the ideas, and I've talked to a couple of MDs that work specifically on dementia, about this. And the idea hasn't been killed yet, which is a sign that they might have legs. And the idea is that comes from this, originates with this C -squirt, do you know this story about the C -squirt? No. So the C -squirt are, I've been learning about them, they're in this, the phylum of a tunicata, they're tunicates, which means nothing.

2:10:44When anytime somebody throws something like that or a Latin name, they're really just trying to impress you. But what's interesting about tunicates is that they live two lives, they have a nervous system, they live two lives, they are mobile, they swim for part of their life. And then they, at some point, descend on to a rock typically, fix themselves to the rock and live the rest of their life, fix to that rock. And when they land there, they eventually learn how to harvest nutrients from the ocean around them. But they eat their own nervous system, they eat their own brain. And they specifically eat, they don't really have a brain, but they eat the components of their nervous system that aren't required for moving around anymore.

2:11:22Interesting. So one idea, I'm sorry, I didn't know like noodle with this, and I was thinking, you know, we, here's so much now about the relationship between exercise and longevity. And you know, I try and get my zone to cardio. I definitely rock, we're going to talk about rocking. I do my resistance training. I'm very interested in some of these functional patterns, folks online, they're very combative people, but they've got some really interesting points about the need to do more real world throwing sprinting type activities. But here's an idea, if we step back from the human species and we go, okay, what do humans need?

2:11:56We need to reproduce, take care of our young, propagate it, all the stuff we talked about before. But throughout human evolution, humans have gotten to a point where in everyone's life, where at some point, the young are old enough and educated enough about what's required to be a human, that they don't have to throw, run, or do any of these things. And perhaps, and someone should look at this, I think, perhaps the areas of the brain that atrophy first, the neural pathways that atrophy first, in everybody, we're not talking about Alzheimer's necessarily, are the areas involved with jumping, landing, throwing, navigating uneven surfaces, lack of familiarity, and it could be that the deterioration of those pathways sets in motion a cascade of things that cause the loss of neurons in other areas.

2:12:45And then like so many things, it tends to, and then we get, like, everyone gets demented with age. No one is sharper at 90 than they were at 70. No one. Unless, maybe they lost a lot of weight and took a bunch of, you know, a cytokoling, promoting drugs or something, but that's very rare. So the idea here is that maybe we're a lot like the C -squirt. We're just starting earlier nowadays. And that perhaps some of the things that you're doing in these misogyned adventures are forcing you to do things that are maintaining brain circuitry that allow you to sit in that office and and attack it with more vigor with each year.

2:13:28I like this idea. First of all, it's not testable. That sucks. It's going to be hard to do. You can do jumping and ply metrics and landing and look at brain scans. You can do that, but it's going to be hard to do in the real world. But I like this idea because everything that you've told us is that we need to do the thing that we could easily offload onto devices or other people. But if we don't do that, we actually have more pleasure in these moments of watching television with a spouse or perhaps even more intellectual vigor. Because how old are you? 38. 38. So if you were to now, I'm kind of leading the, of seeding the question.

2:14:14But if you were to kind of plot in your mind like your cognitive vigor across these years before, during, and now you're continuing to do these misogies, would you say your cognitive vigor is declining or is increasing or is staying flat? Definitely increasing. I'll put the confounding, the confounder here is, I stopped drinking when I was 28. So basically up to 28, I was a damn idiot. But I think that where I've sort of taken things, I mean, I've definitely become a sharper writer or sharper thinker over time. And I think there's something to that. I'll say just from the perspective of a writer, you will write better and have more material to work with and more interesting writing.

2:15:02If you go out and do things, it's a shocker. There's so many people who it's just like entirely behind the keyboard, looking at a screen, not even talking to another human being, even just the reporting part, they're not even talking to another human being, much less like going out and going there and seeing what they find. So just from a writing perspective, of course I still sit behind the screen and read the studies, but like I'm also going to go out and talk to this person and I'm going to go do these things that give me so much more to work with. And for the average person like, okay, you're not a writer, I get it.

2:15:42But that's a story. Like you want to die with a lot of bad -ass stories. Like that's a life well with, right? You got to like shape your own narrative and go out and be able to find these moments and things that you've done that you can look back on to be like, that was awesome. And if you can fill your life up with that because in the moment they're awesome too. Like happiness is sort of, it's not this end point, right? It's like this rolling average of your behaviors. So what do your behaviors look like? Do you have more awesome behaviors? More crappy behaviors. Okay, let's try and get more awesome behaviors.

2:16:13Okay, well, what are awesome behaviors? It's like probably involve other people, probably involve doing things that push you a little bit and teach you something about yourself that probably involves getting out of your damn office every now and then away from the screen. And so just trying to get enough of that. That's like, you know, it's a thing. And I think you're probably right. There's a lot happening in the brain too, but I'll leave that up to you. Well, yeah, I love the notion of creating a life of adventures and happiness as a rolling average. I think that the word happiness is very, very slippery slope.

2:16:45Oh, totally. You're chasing feeling states and Buddhists have talked about this and people talk about this endlessly online. And what's talking about being miserable is talking about feeling, I have to make it neurobiological, that feeling of dopamine being trickled out in response to effort and getting the rewards of the that effort repeat. Yeah. And then the rewards, of course, include the non -effort states of being able to lean into social things with more ease and more relaxation because you know you put in a really great day or just the richness of what you've built in your life. Like there's that's happiness.

2:17:19That's like deep pleasure, right, that can only be built through through this kind of connection between these different gears we've been talking about. And it just has to be, it just has to be pursued and lived out and no one does it perfectly. I think that's an important component is like, like you can't do the perfect misogi, just like because that sort of defeats the purpose, right? You're supposed to catch splinters and feel miserable and that's part of the perfect misogi, right? You're not supposed to feel great, but it's not, you feel so miserable that you regret the entire experience. Yeah, you want some calluses.

2:17:55I'd be interested to hear your thoughts here because this isn't a fully formulated thought. But I think a lot of it is channeling that same sort of framework into something that helps you over the long run. All right, so if you think about like the the structure of a lot of the behaviors that hurt people in the long run can also have a similar structure to behaviors that help them that help them in the long run. So I give you an example, something like gambling, right? It's like this random reward schedule, right? But when people get hooked on that random reward schedule in the context of gambling, it's like the house always wins, right?

2:18:32And that leads to misery. When I think of my own job though, it's a very similar random reward structure in terms of searching for information in an open environment with different care. And I don't know what I'm going to get. It's like, okay, I'm going to the city. It's like when I got to Baghdad, I'm like, I got a report on the drug trade. I'm going to have to link up with all these characters. I have no idea what's going to happen. It's so exciting. The reels of the slot machine are spending. The dice are falling. Same exact thing, but it's channeled into a thing that like becomes more rewarding to me over the long run.

2:19:05And so I would just like to hear like how do you think about taking that sort of structure and making it helpful for a person? Yeah, well, the first thing is that the structure and the circuitry is exactly the same for gambling and going out and finding a great story and building a great story and having those experiences, including the pitfalls, the losses. That by the way, set a lower threshold for what you consider a win and then you ratchet up through there. And you know, it's like, I'll never forget my dad being a scientist who's been on this podcast before. I'll never forget the first time I published a paper in science, which is like, you know, it's like it's a big deal.

2:19:40Superbowl rate. He didn't say congratulations. You know what he said? He said, expect yourself to feel kind of low in a few weeks and expect yourself to wonder if it will ever happen again. And I said, will it ever happen again? He said, well, if I told you that, then the experience wouldn't be worth much. Would it? Damn it. The other thing, I'll just, this is answering your question indirectly. But it's meaningful perhaps is that my graduate advisor when we publish that paper, it's like, are we going to throw a party? Like are we going to celebrate? She's like, I don't know, I guess we could get a pizza or something, but the celebration was the work.

2:20:17I was like, what do you mean? She's like, the work was the fun, right? You had fun doing the experiments. I'm like, yeah, but are we going to celebrate? We didn't celebrate it. And as a consequence, you know, humbly, we went on to publish many, many more papers in excellent journals, not all in science, most of them in other journals. But the point being that she was teaching me to attach the reward to the effort. And it was like, ah, the fun is doing the experiments, getting the paper, like you have to take the reward and and and relegate it. Yeah. To a place below the effort, you can celebrate wins, but you can't let yourself internalize that the wins more than the effort to get there.

2:20:56So there's that. So, um, so same circuit, it's this dopamine circuitry. And of course, when I say dopamine, it's that's a proxy for adrenaline and norrappin effort. And adrenaline is operating in the body to make you feel alert. Norrappin effort is operating in the brain to make you feel alert. So those three work together, their cousins to like get out, get up and go, pursue things. And it doesn't matter if it's a 430 wake up or 4am wake up, sit down in mental movement or its physical movement. I mean, evolution designed this way in a in it's incredibly efficient. And it has these pitfalls of gambling.

2:21:28If you have a percolivity for alcohol, alcoholism or methamphetamine or cocaine or if you like stimulants or for the process, it like, you know, fill in the process addiction, shopping, sex, whatever it happens to be. And that basal, you're draining the bank account on these cataclysmines. And then the reset is always abstinence. Yeah. It's just abstinence, right? And then people like people in their second or third year of sobriety are like, oh my god, like the world just feels so incredible. Like there are these magnificent moments from things that I just completely missed before. And it's because what brings about pleasure now is a, you could say it's at a lower threshold.

2:22:07But the level of meaning is sky high relative to before. So, so there's that. So there's real value to understanding dopamine and cataclysmine dynamics because you can identify where you are on the map at a given moment. That can tell you the direction to go. I agree. And I wish I could tell you, you know, you have dopamine, cataclysmine circuits for writing versus gambling versus wandering through Antarctica, not wandering, but trying to survive Antarctica. Yeah. It's the exact same circuit. Yeah. Which is, you know, one of the reasons I want to shift us to rocking. I really dislike rocking. But now you got me rocking.

2:22:43So tell us why rocking and things like it are so valuable and are distinctly different than like, quote, unquote, hitting the gym. So I'll tell you how I sort of came to this realization, start writing about this in the first place is that when we were in the Arctic, we're hunting. Right. So when you look at why humans are good at running. And by the way, we're good at two things. We're good at running and we're good at caring. And I'll tell you why we're good at caring. So the reason we're good at running is because we evolved to run long distances to chase down animals in the heat and spear them.

2:23:23So humans are really good at cooling ourselves in the heat. Right. And we can run these long distances. Other animals can't manage their heat. So we'd slowly but surely run down animals. Eventually, they would get too hot. They'd topple over from heat exhaustion and then bam, we'd kill them. Okay. So this is a theory called, it's called persistence hunting. So we won the thermoregulation game. We run the one the thermoregulation game. So we can we sweat. We don't have much fur.

2:23:53And there's a guy at Harvard Dan Lieberman who had this, I think it was in 2004, paper about this. How the reason we're built the way we are when the key reasons is, so we can run long distances for persistence hunting. So I'm familiar with that research. Right. I'm like, oh, that's really interesting. Cool. I like that. This explains why I have like, you know, these big muscle, these arch feet, these whatever. So we go up to the Arctic. We're hunting, eventually successfully hunt a caribou. And we, you know, we're taking every usable part of it. We can so we load our packs with all this weight and it's like a hundred something pounds in this dam pack.

2:24:33And start walking back to camp. And I'm just thinking about this research about, okay, humans evolved to run long distances so we could hunt. Great. But what happens after you actually kill an animal? You got to carry that damn thing back to camp, right? And so in it occurs me, well, wait a minute, we're also pretty unique among animals in that we can carry weight. Like no other mammal can just pick up weight on its own and carry it along distance. I was like, huh, that's interesting. So I just start looking into this. And yeah, humans are the only mammal that can pick up a weight and carry it along distance.

2:25:09And it absolutely shaped us into who we are. It allowed us to really conquer the globe because we could take tools into the unknown, right? We can what we can cover these long distances in our two legs and our feet, our hands are freed up to carry our tools to carry whatever it might be. And it really turned us into who we are. Now the thing is is when you look at running, plenty of people run, right? Like running and marathon, that is a popular activity. But how many people are just like carrying weight as a regular form of exercise? The answer was really not that many. So I'm thinking like, okay, who actually still maybe does this?

2:25:46And it turns out it's the military. So, rucking is sort of the main activity of physical training in the military. Just throwing weight in a backpack and going for a long walk. And I've actually started to sort of even shift my language from using the term rucking to simply saying walking with weight or weighted walking. And the reason for that is, if I tell my mom, hey, you should rock. She goes, okay, and she types in rock and she goes, that was just military stuff, Michael, I'm 75 years old. So I've started to call it more walking with weight. So it's a little more approachable for the masses.

2:26:22But I think the benefit of it is that you're getting cardio stimulus because you're covering ground. But you're also getting strength work because you've loaded your skeletal system, your muscular system. And that comes with a lot of benefits. You kind of got this two in one. So it generally will burn more calories per mile than walking or running. And that is simply because you've added extra weight. Of course, if you're running, you might cover more distance in the same amount of time. But if you just compare it by distance, it's burning more calories. And I think it's one of these activities that can really fill in gaps in people's training.

2:27:00And to what you sort of alluded to in your question is there's a variety of reason it fills in gaps. But one of them is simply that it gets people outside. Like there's a lot of gym people. And we're like, yeah, I lift all the weights, but like I'm not doing that running thing. A lot of people can't run. And like, oh, by the way, walking feels a little too easy. I'm not going to do that. So if you can throw some load on someone and have them go for a walk, it gets them outside. Helps them preferentially burn fat. It seems compared to something like running. So there's this interesting study. And I'll caveat this why saying it was a very small study.

2:27:32I think it was only 12 people because they could only find 12 crazy enough people to do it. It was on backcountry hunters in Alaska. And so these guys carry these heavy packs out into the mountains for, you know, a week or whatever. And they test them and they ended up losing a significant amount of weight. But it was all from fat. They actually gained like a very minute amount of muscle. And that really shouldn't happen in the context of going out and losing weight, right? You're probably going to lose fat along with muscle. But with this, they ended up losing mostly fat. So I just think it's this amazing activity that we really wove out of our lives due to technology.

2:28:09Humans evolved to carry. People were carrying babies all the time every day in the past. We'd go hunt and we'd have to carry all the meat back to camp. We would carry food that we gathered like gathering. We're hunters and gathers. Gathering is literally walking around, finding some food, carrying it, finding more, carrying it back to camp. And then we got cars. We got grocery carts. We got X, Y, Z. We got furniture dollies that we don't carry as much. And I think we've lost a really important form of human movement and physical activity that we're literally born to do. And so my suggestion to all the listeners is get some weight and carry it.

2:28:54Easy to throw some weight in the backpack and go for a walk. And it'll be good for you. How much weight and how far? So if someone is just starting, I tell them to start light. I think so after I published the comfort crisis with the, there's a chat, there's an entire chapter on walking with weight or rucking. I got all these people in the military. Rucking destroyed me. Okay, well, how much did the military start you with? 100 pounds. It's like, well, it's like if you did anything at that intensity immediately, just immediately went into like the red, you're going to get injured. You know, it could be squatting.

2:29:32It's like, yeah, I tried to max out on my deadlift every time I deadlifted. The first time I deadlifted, therefore no one should deadlift. You need to ease into this. So I tell people, women can start with anywhere from five to say 20 pounds, suggest. Men anywhere from 10 to 30, depending on your fitness level, I would rather have someone really ease in and sort of get used to it because a lot of people will say, yeah, I went a little too heavy and it really sucked. Like I want you to sort of on ramp slowly. And then from there, you can build up over time. And so I have plenty of, you know, women who might weigh 130 pounds, who now use 30 pounds, which is a significant amount of weight.

2:30:15I'll have men who, you know, maybe they started with 20 and they're like, that's way too light. Like I just have too much of a base of fitness. It's like, okay, good. Well, I'm glad we started there, though. So we know for sure. And then they've ramped up to say 40, sometimes 60. I mean, for me, I generally, my sort of go to weight is probably 35 to 40 pounds. And I find that that's a weight where it's uncomfortable, it's challenging, but it's also not so soul crushing that I'm like, I got to end this walk. I hear this absolutely sucks. I can still enjoy it. And of course, I'll go heavier sometimes.

2:30:48If I'm going really far, sometimes I might be like 20 pounds or something. Yeah, I think it's really just like start light. Take a walk, see how that feels. Yeah, it doesn't have to be too complicated. Yeah, I said I hate rocking, but I love the way I feel afterwards. Maybe that's the form of exercise I don't like there. I just added myself as not liking it. So I find that it forces me to pay attention to some of the smaller stabilizing muscles. Like you can't be as loose with your gate. You have to be pretty thoughtful, especially if you're hiking. You can't stride too long here or there. You just naturally keeps you moving more like a pack muble, which I think can be helpful.

2:31:30And I do notice that when I take off the rucksack or the vest, on a different day and I run, I definitely feel faster and lighter just by way of comparison. Probably a real real change to do to the small stabilizing muscles. This thing about losing more body fat will get people motivated. People love it. I think it's also a good tool for runners because the injury rate is much lower. So if you're within a reasonable amount of weight, like of course, if you go up to these crazy weights, so I generally tell people, if you just want like a firm number, don't go over 50 pounds. If you want a more sort of dialed in number to your body weight, don't go over a 30 year body weight.

2:32:08There's a lot of military research that suggest that. But even for me, like I don't go up to a third of my body weight all that often, unless I have a really good reason I'm training for something like backpacking or hunt or something. So if you're in a, within a reasonable amount of weight and not too heavy, the injury rate is exceedingly low. It's not that much higher than the injury rate of walking and walking is pretty safe. This episode is brought to you by LifeLock. Between two factor authentication, strong passwords and a VPN, you try to be in control of how your info is protected. But many other places also have it, and they might not be as careful.

2:32:46That's why LifeLock monitors hundreds of millions of data points a second for threats. If your identity is stolen, they'll fix it, guaranteed or your money back. Save up to 40 % your first year. Visit LifeLock .com slash podcast for 40 % off terms apply. Do you ever experience the kind of crossover of understanding between your physical pursuits and your creative intellectual pursuits? Like do you find that for instance, if you rock that there's a certain, you start to recognize where the resistance is. Is it putting on the pack? Is it, you know, a third of the way through, you tend to feel pretty good.

2:33:26Do you notice those contours and do they map to the contour of sitting down and writing that it's hard at first, then it gets easier, and then at some point there's a breakthrough or else it just plain sucks the whole time. I think so. I'd like to hear your experience with running. But my experience with you just feel like resistance. And then eventually, usually after saying mile three, all of a sudden, I feel like, oh, I could do this forever. I could do this the rest of the day if I wanted to. But if I don't go through that first three miles, I'm never going to get to four plus or whatever it is.

2:34:06And I do feel like that's the same with writing where it's challenging at first. The things aren't moving, but then things just things start to move, you know. But you need to, you need that buy it. Like you need the, you're not going to have those amazing four plus miles after mile four or sentence after the 20 paragraphs you deleted if you don't run the first three miles or write the first 20 paragraphs. And then a related question is specifically about writing. But it could carry over to school, music, or any sort of kind of pursuit. You said that some days getting 300 quality words feels like an accomplishment.

2:34:48Other days, you get 3 ,000 words. Do you think prior to the days that you got 3 ,000 words that your brain is processing it unconsciously? Do you think it all happens in the session? Or is there something like if you look back into your days and hours before those incredible days where you just feel amazing, can you map it to anything?

2:35:14Or is it how I would answer that? Is there some writing I've done where you sit down and it's just, it comes out and it comes out not needing many edits? And it's just like, like I'll give you an example. A lot, there might be some bias. But a lot of my friends and people who've read my work say one of the best things I've written is this essay I did about my mom. It originally appeared in men's health in 2017 maybe. It's called my bad ass mom. I have it on my sub stack. I'll link to it in that post. I wrote that in about seven minutes. Sat down and just drooping. It's like a thousand something words and it was like printed it and was like, I don't know if I need to change this.

2:36:02And so why is that? Because I've been thinking on that piece for 30 something years. And it was just that was the moment and just the energy got captured. And then that was it. A good example of this. And this is a person at a much higher level is I was watching a Tom Petty documentary. Apparently he sat down, flipped on a recorder and just came up with wildflowers. Literally started just playing those chords and making up the lyrics as he went and recorded wildflowers. Just went holy shit, right? I just like there are times when like magic happens and just lightning strikes and you got to be you just got to be there for it though.

2:36:43It's like I think things like that can happen. But I think to your point why could that happen? It's because he had like all this experience that just sort of like was swelling and bubbling under and finally just like converged. Brings it me to earlier point in our discussion. I genuinely believe that the raw materials of great writing and music and science and whatever podcasting, visual art, painting those raw materials are collected away from the actual craft. And so you have to get out into the real world and experience those. Where have you gotten your best material, scientific work? Ideas you're flowing into podcasts?

2:37:28Like how does all that unfold for you? For me, you know, PubMed is it's like the it's the intellectual wilderness of published material as our books and lectures, but mostly PubMed. So the more time I can spend foraging papers and looking at graphs and seeing things and connecting it to something else. And that's where the idea is that those are the raw materials. Like this year I haven't been doing quite as many solos as I work on the book, but I'm getting back to solos soon. And I've got the like folders upon folders of papers that no one's ever discussed out there that I think have real gems in them.

2:38:08So those are those are the minds in which I'm mining for information that I then have to work with. So for me, it's PubMed. And occasionally it's getting on the phone like I did yesterday with a neurosurgeon friend of mine and having a discussion about the Vegas nerve and realizing that everything that's out there about the Vegas nerve, everything is exactly backwards. And going and I was like, is this possible? And he's like, yeah, and I'm like, why hasn't the narrative been corrected? And it's like, well, because there's never been a real neuroscientist talking about it. I was like, oh, wow, we have it exactly backwards just for it's not to be cryptic here.

2:38:41The Vegas nerve, even though it's classified as parasympathetic, is not a calming pathway. It's a pathway by which physical movement wakes up the brain. Hmm. Period. Or mechanical changes in the gut wake up the way it's all excitatory. Everyone thinks the veys calm down. No, the only quieting signals come from the brain to the body. Interesting. There are a few of them in there, but the vast majority of the Vegas is this way that the way to wake up your brain is to move your body. Awesome. So anyway, I don't want to go too far down this rabbit hole. So this sounds like what I was just talking about when I'm in a place and having to find information for a story.

2:39:15And I experience it's that you use the word foraging, right? It's that that like the chase of the thing, what's the thing I'm going to find here? I got this question. I got to go find these and I don't know what I'm going to encounter out there in the wilderness as you put it. That is the best. It's why people get hooked on social media. It's why people get hooked on gambling. It's why people get hooked on dating apps or whatever the hell it is. I think the problem today is that you see it getting put into technology and leveraged in a way that maybe hurts people over the long run, whereas if you can find a way to leverage that as you have it or tell me now that helps you in the long run, that's like the unlock, right?

2:39:57Yeah, that's what a lot of these failure to launch. Kids are not accessing. Totally. And on a Lemki of the author of dopamine nation has said this, you know, what do you, what are people who haven't found their passions supposed to do? And she'll say, mow the lawn and people go, it just sounds like a mom telling me what to do. But she understands it's the same circuitry. You're trying to get that, that you do something you don't want to do. You complete its job well done. You're learning a process. And then you start to superimpose the understanding of that process on two things that are hopefully meaningful and generative, you know, as opposed to destructive that problem is it's like a trail where on either side, you can slip to every day, you can slip down the slope of numbing out or drama.

2:40:46You're trying to stay on a trail to keep it in the language of Michael Easter, like you're trying to stay on a trail this narrow and you don't know where it's going and it's splitting off, you know, which is the right one. And there are just so many opportunities to slide down the edges every day all day. And those edges continuously get tweaked to be slip rear easier to fall down, steeper. So in scarcity brain, I so I live in Las Vegas, right? And so you see people playing slot machines all day long and there slot machines everywhere. And I just look at that and I go, why do people do that? Because everyone knows the house always wins, right?

2:41:26You want evidence? Why would there be those bajillion dollar casinos down there if people were actually winning at gambling? And I'll keep the story short, but I ended up in this casino that's new, but it's used entirely for research on gambling behavior. Levers, I'll say that can be pulled in casinos to get people to effectively gamble more. And it's funded by Caesars, there's one of the companies in it, there's also a bunch of tech companies in there. And I think that that is like a metaphor for the world we live in, where now because things can be tracked and digitized that like people who are using this in a way where it's maybe arguably not helping people in the long run, there's just so much information that that sock can continuously be sharpened and sharpened and sharpened.

2:42:18I think slot machines are also just the ultimate metaphor because they in the 80 up until about 1980 no one played them. And then you had a guy come in in the 1980s his name was Sairad and he had noticed that his kids, his grandkids would play Atari all day long. He's like they just get hooked on Atari and he's like, that's interesting. What can I take from that and apply to these machines that I make? So what he does is he makes the first screen -based slot machines. And when slot machines go screen -based, all of a sudden you can program the odds rather than be constrained by actual spinning reels, because there's only so many symbols you can fit.

2:43:04So now you can offer this total crazy world of different combinations and jackpots and he realizes, oh what we can do because we have all people bet a bunch of different lines. So unlike a digital slot machine you can bet like 40 different ways the line is going to go and the things are going to fill up. And what we can do from there is that if you get a win you might quote unquote win, but let's say you bet a dollar you'll win say 50 cents or 40 cents. That is what casino companies call a loss disguises a win. The thing is is when that happens to people doesn't necessarily register as a loss.

2:43:46Something exciting happened, right? And so all of a sudden the machine can start to have something exciting happen far more times, but you're just slowly losing your money instead of quickly losing your money. So the reason that people weren't playing slot machines up to 1980 is because simply by the constraints of space and the way that reels were like physical reels you just couldn't win all that often. So you might play 20 games and you nothing ever happens. So that behavior is going to extinguish like really quick, but if you can get someone on a machine where like maybe every third pull maybe every second pull something happens the machine lights up ding ding ding ding ding congratulations you won.

2:44:29You won 40 cents on your dollar bet. Isn't this exciting? Congratulations and welcome to Las Vegas. Now all of a sudden you start to see slot machines go from like being thrown in the corners of casinos to taking over casino floors. So they now bring in 85 % of casino revenues and people spend more money on slot machines than they do books movies and music combined. And it was really just this tweaking of this perfect reward schedule where you're getting just the right amount of rewards at a random schedule and it's just been sharpened and then you see companies go what the hell is happening in Vegas and then that gets placed into social media into dating apps into online shopping like you go on shopping places now there's a damn spinning wheel right to get a discount.

2:45:18It's like that's what happens when you're walking to a Las Vegas casino too. The first thing you see is a spinning wheel because it's a suckers game and then just spread everywhere. Wow yeah and the speed speed is a big thing. So the other thing with the spinning wheels when it's physical you pull this handle it's a slow process. Pull clunk clunk clunk okay pull clunk clunk clunk so the side -red guy he realizes hey this pulling the handle thing that's just slowing people down what if we made that spin a button and what happened is the average slot gamer went from playing 400 games an hour to 900 games an hour.

2:45:59Yeah swipe right swipe left swipe right swipe left infinite scroll right infinite pages that just load as you shop you want no friction everything needs to be frictionless the faster you can do a behavior the more likely you are to do a behavior and this all got figured out in this strange heartless but freaking beautiful town I live in Las Vegas. Wow yeah I would love to go to a casino with you sometimes just sometimes just to like watch you analyze people and be like that's what's happening to this person. Well you they're baseline on dopamine is dropping they'll get the little inflections the winds or the perceived winds right what you don't perceive is your baseline right right we're not in touch with our dopamine baseline we're in touch with the inflections from that baseline and that can be very distracting I mean and there's a whole set of parallel conversations about addiction here I mean this is what you just described makes me remember what Anna Lemke one of our first guests ever on this podcast right as dopamine nation was published said which was that hurt formerly addicted patients who get sober from whatever cannabis alcohol gambling whatever it is that they are her heroes and I thought oh that's beautiful right she her patients are her heroes what what more beautiful thing could a doctor say she's an MD after all and now she's saying no no I not only do I respect and admire them but they're my heroes because they are better equipped to deal with the landscape of life than people who have not experienced the deep hole that addiction can bring and then getting themselves out of it and understanding these dopamine dynamics these cataclycule mean circuits is I'm referring to them that's what she was saying she wasn't saying they overcame a lot I mean she was saying that too but it was that they understand life at a deep level to be able to go into the world now into really glean tremendous meaning and benefit from the smallest of things and that's where I just filled it down to as I needed to make it succinct for social media ironically to the statement that addiction is a progressive narrowing of the things that bring us pleasure and that happiness or maybe even enlightenment if there is such a thing is a progressive expansion of the things that bring us pleasure what she's saying is these people were in the pit got out of the pit and therefore she admires them so gosh I want to visit this very diabolical casino I guess all casinos are kind of diabolical actually really like gambling my team knows this I really enjoy it I it changes my internal kind of RPM that's vague language here but when I I play a little roulette or I'll like just I don't gamble on a on a game or something like I can feel the lift it gives me which is why I don't gamble I know myself and I can feel that thing it's like a it's an energy that feels kind of like throughout the body and you're unaware of of really anything else it's a little bit of a tunnel and I've never gambled much money I've never thought to but I recognize that feeling and I'm like oh no yeah yeah you you have it too I enjoy it I also once I hit a certain amount of and I keep my threshold very low for what I'm gonna gamble because I live in Las Vegas like probably not a good idea to get really into gambling if you live in a town where it's everywhere like you go to the grocery store and you can gamble so I keep it pretty well we gamble like once a month I mean we're like you know we're not spending much money but it's enjoyable that's that's the thing right is like with so many things that can be addictive is there's vastly more people that can go in have a little bit of fun that's a good time and then move on with our life and then there's a small subset of the population that gets for whatever reason it's that thing that does it for them and it sucks them in there's also because we're talking about gambling and addiction there's some research I believe this woman was at NYU and she studied problem gamblers and went to Las Vegas and reviewed a bunch of them and she found that a lot of the seriously problem gamblers when they would get a big win it would piss them off and here's why it's when you get a big win if it's over $1 ,200 what happens is your machine locks up and the casino boss pit he comes over and you make you fill out a tax form because you know once you get over $1 ,200 and you got to pay taxes on it they weren't there necessarily the win they were there to just get in the flow of the machine and just have the ups and the downs and just like ride that out and having a big win it would interrupt that and that would frustrate them which is just nuts the way you offer up these real -life examples for me and I know for the listeners provides such a rich substrate for understanding the kind of universal circuitry and I'm so grateful to you for that you talked earlier about the speed of the slot machine yeah so what I think is very dangerous and we talked about before in this podcast is this notion of dopamine that's not preceded by effort but I think you said it best and I'd like to replace that with something that's a much more fast -cil for people and hopefully intuitive as well basically anytime we find ourselves in frictionless or low friction foraging we're in serious trouble get out get out then like the moment you're in a frictionless foraging mode your your baselines dropping and you don't realize it totally a good example of a way this was used relatively recently that has I think been disastrous especially for younger men is in sports betting so sports betting gets you know legalized in a bunch of different states well it used to be that in order to play sports bet you had to drive to the casino and you could bet on the game that was hours away and then maybe you would watch the full game at the casino how long's a game take three hours so you waited the casino and then you either cash in or you know you lost your bet well once it gets sort of legalized and now it's in all these different states and it goes to cell phones okay so now it's like I don't even have to drive the casino I can do this right now through two buttons and then one thing that the gambling industry did that was good for the profits probably not good for the user is to go okay well if we know that speed will increase gambling rates and the more a person gambles we can look at the math and go we just need them to gamble more because that's how we win our money it's in the volume um what can we do to solve this problem the fact that a game is three hours long because how many games are there in a day wait a minute what if you could bet on a play how many plays are there in a game I don't know hundreds okay let's bet on this place so now you have like these live in -game thing like is this person gonna score up to bad is this there's all these different ways of person commit and then the addition of uh parlay as well where you've got like twelve teams or whatever and like these like bonus things they throw in it's just like there's a train wreck when you said there's a growing problem nowadays among young men I thought you were going to talk about frictionless foraging and online pornography oh yeah that's and we got we got planning problems right and so what I'm realizing is there are numerous examples of this out there but hopefully this framework of rate and low friction low friction high speed foraging means you're you're just gonna end up in a pit yeah totally go figure out ways to slow things down if you can I think there's I think it's hard but I think there's ways to do it um another interesting example and this one isn't I don't think is as sort of one to one is the others we've been talking about but there's a guy from a jump from the junk food industry and you see this rise in junk food in the 1970s and what happened is um sort of like the casino's looking at sports going well like well these things are long there's long stretches between these events um in the 70s the food industry was like well people are eating three square we need them to eat more food what if we invent snacking let's make snacking a big industry so they start they come up with this new thing snacking right like snacking becomes this thing and this guy from the junk food industry basically said if you want to get a um a junk food to sell and take off it's got to have three v's it's got to have value it's got to have variety and it's got to have velocity meaning cheap meaning lots of different options so think of Doritos there's like 10 different flavors right you got a nacho cheese normal cheese chili cheese whatever on and on uh and then velocity it's got to be quick and easy to eat it's got to be a food that you can just pound a bunch of calories in one sitting and want to just keep going and once they sort of lock that in you start to see that's really you start to see obesity take off in the 70s in the US or mental obesity and tick tock seriously yeah I mean again these these uh these parallels between the physical and the cognitive right you know it's I mean uh there's an incredible moment in that the band men series where they bring a uh um a vending machine into the office and suddenly you know the like people are eating it work before they would leave to to go eat no one was eating at their desk right I remember when I was a postdoc no excuse me when I was a graduate student so this would be 2000 to 2004 when I was doing my PhD we had a German postdoc I'm from overseas and um and he was just blown away that people would take their coffee in their car now you hear this you're like oh of course he was like this is crazy like you go to the cafe you drink your coffee or you would make a coffee at work after lunch and then drink it in the lunchroom and then go back to your bench and work but everyone's walking around he's like everyone's walking around with their coffee all the time who puts going on here you know now he's a professor up at the University of Oregon I bet you he uh he carries his coffee out yeah he's been here a while but um it was like this is crazy yeah like people carry their drinks around you know and now you'd be uh you'd be hard press to find so when not carrying their coffee out of a coffee shop most it's it's more like a like a fast food restaurant you're trying to get people in and out as fast as possible yeah and snacking in general just food eating food and all sorts of situations too I think it's relatively new I mean if we were getting more productive and there was more incredible creative work that I'd say okay fine like it's all in service to something else but once again we land ourselves in the in the landscape of neuroscience where it's one circuit so um I don't believe how you do one thing is how you do everything otherwise based on my strawberry hull example earlier like I'm really in trouble yeah but I believe that we have areas of life where we are a little bit uh less regimented in others where we're even just like outright neurotic but I do think that once we start to see these patterns and where they are um hopefully it helps people navigate better I mean I think the way you describe they're making the the the slopes on the het narrow trail very like steeper and steeper it's getting more perilous to be a human yeah it's getting riskier harder it despite these conveniences and it's no coincidence it's because of the conveniences yeah and I think two one of the issues is we face is that yeah a lot of this is all technologically driven um but one of the issues becomes that um it's becoming harder and harder than ever to opt out of the technology so I'll give you an example as I have this uncle and um he's old school railroad worker not a big fan of people does best when he's in his 1960s bus up in the mountains just alone awesome awesome dude far out um he was totally anti getting a smartphone he's like no I'm not getting a damn smartphone like no no way well not that guy can't even get on a plane if you wanted to without a smartphone right so like there's all these things in life that you know you basically have to do to function that run through a smartphone and by the way the smartphone is the thing that is making you crazy so you can't even opt out of the technology and that's where it starts to get scary one thing that I've done that's been very helpful for me is I put social media so Instagram and X on a on an old phone so if people send me something like if you were to send me a clip on it's your I can't on my normal phone I can't look at it I mean I suppose you can go in through the annoying thing where you have to cancel out some windows but I just don't do it and by the end of the day no one writes to me and goes what do you think of that thing I said so um so I make very designated time them I'm on social media and then you know I don't access it elsewhere but it is tough and we have the fact that we have to set up these barriers yeah you're doing incredible work I want to say I think of you as a researcher even though you're writer slash researcher you research things in depth for your writing and it's clear you put so much care and time and thought into your craft and I've loved your book The Comfort Crisis I will put links to all your books and to the sub stack links that were discussed today um I'm curious what the next book is I feel like you should write a book about addiction and dopamine and you know how to overcome it you might have the I know that you have the recipe you told us the recipe today um can you share with us whether it's about or is that like parents who are expecting a kid revealing the name before it's born you're not supposed to I think it'll be a mental health extension of the Comfort Crisis and um a little bit of a case for adventure and you know I think the question that I really grapple with is why when you look at our world sort of objectively things have never been better than ever could all the numbers like we're living longer more people know how to read fewer people are hungry you can get from point A to point B in like 30 minutes so you used to take you you know uh entire day to walk that all these things and yet people are less satisfied and more neurotic than ever so it's like well why is that and then what is the answer to it so I think the book will probably get into that somehow with the my long hike I just did being the overarching narrative and some lessons I learned along the way awesome yeah um and let me thank you for having me on doing the work that you're doing you're changing a lot of lives man um I can't tell you the number of people because I got sober when I was 28 I can't tell you the number of people who have reached out and said I watched this Huberman episode and I decided to stop drinking and my life is way better and that's like bam that's like all happening right here in the amount of people that's rippled to and changed and not just them because when one person stops drinking it's not just their life that improves everyone in their orbits life improves say drink like I did and so that's awesome and everything else you're doing is awesome so I really appreciate you having new men thank you I'll take that in and I want to thank you for coming here today and for uh sharing with us your knowledge and wisdom at when places I didn't anticipate and as always I learned from you uh as I started off today's conversation by saying you've completely changed my life because I do things differently every single day I look at the friction points of like oh I don't want to do this as like opportunities and I do think it's made my life better and hopefully me better for the other people in my life I also curse you every day so I just saved this to the end I have a 72 pound kettlebell set in my living room and when I wake up in the morning I pick it up and I suitcase carry it back and forth once with one arm and I suitcase carry it back and forth with the other arm and the entire time I'm cursing you because it hurts it doesn't feel good to do first thing in the morning my grip isn't as strong as it is in the mid -morning after a cup of coffee and um I've this little forearm twin -winter thing but I told myself if I do this every single day then I'll be able to um continue to do it the rest of my life it'll probably make me live longer oh that's a that's a uh Michael Easter curse cursing carry process done every single day so you've changed my life for the better in some painful ways that pay off certainly with less pain down the road and certainly with more meaning so I really want to thank you for everything you're doing yeah of course you put so much intention and heart into what you're doing and thanks also for sharing a bit about um addiction about the value of going to meetings and um and the landscape that we're all facing out there it's not easy but you're making it better I appreciate it I'll make you a deal I'm gonna do the same thing every morning I'm gonna get my 72 pound kettlebell and I'm gonna join you in those morning walks and then I will be cursing your name from that one so it'll be fair perfect appreciate you come back again yeah thanks man thank you for joining me for today's discussion with Michael Easter to learn more about his work his books and to find links to the sub -stack that he mentions throughout today's episode please see the show note captions Michael has generously made the sub -stack articles mentioned during today's episode available to Hubertman Lab podcast listeners at zero cost you can find that link in the show note captions as well if you're learning from and or enjoying this podcast please subscribe to our youtube channel that's a terrific zero cost way to support us in addition please follow the podcast by clicking the follow button on both Spotify and Apple and on both Spotify and Apple you can leave us up to a five star review and you can now leave us comments at both Spotify and Apple please also check out the sponsors mentioned at the beginning and throughout today's episode that's the best way to support this podcast if you have questions for me or comments about the podcasts or guests or topics that you'd like me to consider for the Hubertman Lab podcast please put those in the comments section on youtube I do read all the comments for those of you that haven't heard I have a 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