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Episode: IN-DEPTH: The Comfort Crisis (w/ Michael Easter)
Author: Cal Newport
Duration: 01:21:33
Episode Shownotes
In this episode of IN-DEPTH, Cal welcomes the bestselling author Michael Easter to talk about the importance of embracing discomfort in the quest to cultivate a deep life. Drawing from Michael’s two books, THE COMFORT CRISIS and SCARCITY BRAIN, as well as Michael’s personal journey from an unhappy office worker
with an alcohol problem to a full-time writer who enjoys daily hikes in the desert, Cal and Michael get into the weeds of our human wiring and what it feels like to build an intentional life.Video from today’s episode: https://www.youtube.com/calnewportmediaINTERVIEW: Bestselling author Michael Easter [5:56]Links:https://www.landroverusa.comhttps://www.calnewport.com/slowThanks to Jesse Miller for production, Jay Kerstens for the intro music, Kieron Rees for the theme music, and Mark Miles for mastering.
Full Transcript
00:00:12 Speaker_00
I'm Cal Newport, and this is In Depth, a semi-regular series where I interview interesting people about their quest to cultivate a deep life.
00:00:23 Speaker_00
Today's episode is presented by Defender, a vehicle designed for those seeking adventure in a distracted world.
00:00:31 Speaker_00
Now, I've been looking forward to this episode for a while, as it's a chance to talk to a writer who I've long followed and long have wanted to meet. His name is Michael Easter. He's a health and science journalist.
00:00:44 Speaker_00
He used to be the fitness director at Men's Health Magazine. He also used to be a journalism professor at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, but he is most known now for his two best-selling books, The Comfort Crisis
00:00:58 Speaker_00
and Scarcity Brain, both of which I've read and highly recommend. He's now a full-time writer who runs the very popular 2% Substack newsletter and podcast. I subscribe to it and I recommend it. If you're wondering, 2%
00:01:15 Speaker_00
refers to the fact that only 2% of people take the stairs instead of the escalator when both options are offered, even though research shows that taking the stairs would significantly improve your longevity.
00:01:29 Speaker_00
This concept encapsulates a lot of Easter's writing where he looks at the sort of common sense but no-nonsense evidence-based advice for how human beings
00:01:41 Speaker_00
can get the most out of their body, live healthy, live fit, get the most longevity out of their time here on earth. Now, in this interview, I have two purposes.
00:01:52 Speaker_00
One, I just want to learn his advice, the type of stuff he writes about his newsletter and his books. Stick around for the end of the interview where I actually just ask him point blank. I said, okay, imagine
00:02:03 Speaker_00
You know, you're, you're one of my listeners and you haven't been thinking about your health and fitness and you want to start making changes. Like what's the first thing you do? What's the entry ramp?
00:02:11 Speaker_00
And actually you're sort of a surprising answer that overlaps with things we've been talking about on my show. So stay tuned for that. But here's my, my secret secondary goal for this interview was to hear Michael's story. Right?
00:02:25 Speaker_00
Michael was a busy journalist. And then he switched from writing for Men's Health Magazine.
00:02:30 Speaker_00
He had a relatively busy writing life because he was writing freelance, working on books and teaching a pretty full, I think it was a 2-2 or perhaps even a 3-3 course load at UNLV on journalism. And he dropped all of that.
00:02:45 Speaker_00
And he now, you know, pays his expenses with his newsletter. and can just write full time. And he lives in sort of like, I don't know if you call it a countryside, but the desert makes more sense. The desert outside of Las Vegas.
00:02:56 Speaker_00
And he goes on these epic rocks and runs with his dog through these scenic canyons. His time is his own. He can write what he wants to write in his books because his newsletter covers things.
00:03:09 Speaker_00
I mean, he's cultivated a deep life and I'm interested in his story. And I take him through a story how he got from,
00:03:17 Speaker_00
working for Men's Health out of college to where he is today, including, by the way, a very meaningful first stop with substance abuse.
00:03:26 Speaker_00
And it was in him kicking substance abuse, in him learning about himself and how to do that, that this more crystallized version of the deep life that he lives now was formed. So I think his tale is fascinating.
00:03:38 Speaker_00
So you're going to hear his story and you're going to hear his advice. Now here's a side note, little insider knowledge. When I interviewed Michael, The interview you're about to hear. This was two days before me having to go in for a surgery.
00:03:54 Speaker_00
Actually, the first surgery that I had ever gotten. Spoiler alert. I survived because I'm recording this intro after the surgery has already happened.
00:04:03 Speaker_00
But I was in a mindset when I was talking to Michael where I was thinking about and taking seriously my health and fitness in a way that I probably hadn't been before.
00:04:12 Speaker_00
You might pick this up in the tone or the approach to my questions, but I was eager to learn.
00:04:20 Speaker_00
And I have come on the other side of that surgery with a lot of big plans in motion to re-prioritize the type of things that Isur talks about as I'm now in middle age. This stuff matters.
00:04:32 Speaker_00
It's going to give me a massive return potentially for the decades that follows. So I'm coming into this interview in a vulnerable state and in a well-timed state to receive this type of wisdom. All right. So this interview, extra matter to me.
00:04:44 Speaker_00
Anyways, I think you'll like it. Before we get to it, I want to say a word about today's presenting sponsor, which is Defender. Our presenting sponsor is what allows us to present the interview that follows with zero commercial interruption.
00:04:56 Speaker_00
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00:05:02 Speaker_00
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00:05:17 Speaker_00
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00:05:29 Speaker_00
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00:05:42 Speaker_00
So this is a very sturdily made car, but also it's beautiful to look at. So in other words, we think of it as a good looking car that performs perfect for finding adventure as you cultivate your own vision of the deep life.
00:05:54 Speaker_00
So visit LandRoverUSA.com to learn more about the Defender. And now here's my conversation with Michael Easter. All right, so I am thrilled to be here with Michael Easter.
00:06:11 Speaker_00
Michael, one of the ways I explain, by the way, starting to do these semi-regular interview episodes to people who ask, like, why are you adding something else?
00:06:19 Speaker_00
80% of the reason is an excuse to talk to people that I want to talk to anyways, and you are an embodiment of that. This is my evil plan coming to fruition.
00:06:28 Speaker_00
I've read your books and wanted to talk with you, and I had an excuse to get you on the microphone.
00:06:34 Speaker_01
Well, I will say that works both ways, right? Like when you emailed me, I was like, oh my God, this is awesome. I've always wanted to talk to this guy. So here we are. The world works in mysterious ways and works in good ways a lot of times.
00:06:47 Speaker_00
Everyone else can just sit back and enjoy you and I enjoying this. So I'll start by explaining the goal of the conversation for you and for the audience. So I think a lot and talk a lot about mismatches between the modern digital environment
00:07:00 Speaker_00
and the way our Paleolithic bodies and Neolithic culture operate. I think in these mismatches are a lot of disorders of the modern world that we need to address.
00:07:10 Speaker_00
One of the most consequential such mismatches, in my opinion, is what has happened when we've made our lives, professionally, personally, like all aspects of our lives, more abstract and more taking place on screens.
00:07:24 Speaker_00
So this disembodiment of our life, it's where we're disembodied from our bodies in any particular location. More and more what we do is just mediated back and forth through a screen. There's a lot of economic advantages to that to other players.
00:07:36 Speaker_00
But it has been difficult for us, the actual people.
00:07:40 Speaker_00
Now, I see you, Michael, as being at the forefront of thinking about what goes wrong when we switch to this Cartesian brain in a VAT model and how we can reclaim some of what our Paleolithic bodies are actually expecting, how to sort of fight back against this abstraction.
00:07:57 Speaker_00
So that's really what I want to get into with you today. But I want to get there. via your story, which I think is fascinating.
00:08:04 Speaker_00
I think it highlights a lot of the issues you talk about and will sort of bring us to the sort of more concrete principles we want to discuss. So if you're willing, I want to go all the way back.
00:08:15 Speaker_00
You know, you got started off, magazine journalist, Men's Health Magazine. For a lot of people, this itself would be the end goal.
00:08:22 Speaker_00
Man, if I could just live in the city and write for a well-known magazine, do cool, like, articles, everything would be cool. So, like, I want to start with just, how did you even get that job?
00:08:34 Speaker_00
Coming out of college, what did you have to do to even get that job?
00:08:38 Speaker_01
Oh, man. Yeah. So I, um, I grew up in Utah and I was raised by a single mom. I'm only child. And my mom, I mean, she's like kind of a giant. So the odds are really stacked against, uh, single moms.
00:08:52 Speaker_01
Like you look at the stats and I think more than half live in extreme poverty, but my mom, I mean, she's just like driven. super driven, super smart. She read, she usually reads like at least 50 books a year.
00:09:04 Speaker_01
And so we always had books lying around at home. And I remember when I was, I think I was 13, I read this book Into Thin Air by John Krakauer. And it was just like, whoa, this dude went and climbed Everest and wrote an account of it.
00:09:19 Speaker_01
But the way it was written was really fascinating because he was kind of weaving in and out of topics. I read a lot of Hunter Thompson when I was in high school, and that was like another, oh my God, I didn't know someone could do this with language.
00:09:33 Speaker_01
Now, when I went to college, I'd always been this book and magazine junkie, but it just, in my mind, I'm like, no one is actually a writer. Like, no one actually does that job. And if they do, they probably live in their mother's basement.
00:09:46 Speaker_01
And so I, my plan was to do like a business law degree, maybe work in natural resources, because I've always been kind of outdoorsy.
00:09:55 Speaker_01
But I ended up taking this, it was a nature writing class and it was just like, oh my God, this is what I wanna do with my life. So I ended up going to grad school because I also happened to graduate the year that the economy totally tanked.
00:10:10 Speaker_01
And so for my class, my graduating class, it was like, you're either going back to your parents' house and you're gonna work some random job you don't wanna work as you look for your real job, or you can go to grad school.
00:10:22 Speaker_01
So, I went to grad school and I ended up going in New York City just because that's where all the magazines are based. And the program that I was in grad school in, it was a science, health and environmental reporting program.
00:10:38 Speaker_01
So, really, really focused on writing about different topics in science.
00:10:45 Speaker_01
Even even in that class, though, I was kind of I was a little bit different in that, like, you know, most people took their internship at Scientific American, but I took mine at Esquire just because the writing and that that was like during the to kind of get a little bit down the rabbit hole.
00:11:00 Speaker_01
That was during the David Granger years. He was the editor in chief and the writing that magazine was just. So good, like so good. These features that just blow your mind. So I interned there for a while.
00:11:14 Speaker_01
Then when I graduated, I took these kind of two part-time jobs at Scientific American and GQ. So when you looked at my resume, I had on one hand, I had these dude magazines.
00:11:25 Speaker_01
And on the other hand, I had this science magazine and a job opened up at Men's Health. And they were like, well, we pretty much write about science for dudes. So you seem like a good fit. And yeah, I took that. I took that job.
00:11:37 Speaker_01
And what was nice about that job to kind of getting back to it. this theme of mismatches is that I had been living in New York City, which that was fun for about a month until you realize the place just drives you crazy.
00:11:53 Speaker_01
And humans aren't necessarily designed for 24-7 noise, light. never ending energy. And men's health was actually their headquarters was in this little town in Pennsylvania that was like an hour and a half away from New York City.
00:12:09 Speaker_01
So I was able to live there and I would occasionally go into the city. We had an office there, but it was like once every two weeks. So that was also another big upside of that job. And yeah, I worked that job for about,
00:12:22 Speaker_01
Seven years, and yeah, it was pretty good. I learned a lot there. I mean, that was the big thing. I learned a lot there. Where was the town in Pennsylvania?
00:12:31 Speaker_01
So the town that we were in is called Emmaus, and the closest town that people would know is Allentown.
00:12:38 Speaker_00
Okay, I didn't realize it was based out there. So were you living in like a house at that point? I mean, there's not really a lot of apartments out there.
00:12:45 Speaker_01
I was living it so it's a lot of it's a lot of kind of like row houses so when I moved out I remember I had moved from a apartment in Hoboken which was like one bedroom was like two grand a month and I moved out to that area and I had this place that had
00:13:03 Speaker_01
like two bedrooms, it had a backyard and it was $800 a month. And it was just like, oh my God, why, why haven't, why did I live in New York at all?
00:13:12 Speaker_00
Yeah. What was I trying to do? Yes. Okay. So now you're, you're at Men's Health. What's, what's that job like?
00:13:18 Speaker_00
So when you're, I don't know what the word would be, but when you're new, you just, I don't know if it's junior reporter or whatever it was, but, but what is the day to day of magazine journalism in the first decade of the 2000s?
00:13:30 Speaker_01
Yeah, so when I started, the internet hadn't really taken off. Our website at the time was we would take what was in the magazine and we would put it on the internet. And that was that.
00:13:43 Speaker_01
Like the website was this afterthought and it was all these kind of old school magazine types.
00:13:50 Speaker_01
who really just kind of saw the website as this kind of little annoyance and it was often just kind of farmed out into to another team that was sort of like looked down upon by the old school magazine editors.
00:14:02 Speaker_01
But I was mostly I was mostly on the magazine side that eventually transitioned and The job was really developing ideas and then just reporting them out.
00:14:12 Speaker_01
And also, of course, because it's a magazine, like your presentation is so much different than it would be online or in a newspaper. So it's nice because I could get creative, come up with weird ideas.
00:14:25 Speaker_01
And I will say, I mean, the first three years, probably four years of my career was me basically just realizing that I sucked. Like, I went into that job, I had my fancy graduate school degree, and I thought, oh, this is going to be great.
00:14:40 Speaker_01
And I remember I had to do this section that was called bulletins back in the magazine, where you would summarize studies. And it would be about 100 words to summarize a study. You'd have five studies on a page.
00:14:53 Speaker_01
So I sent my editor like 500 words of these five different summarizations of studies. And this dude sent me back probably a thousand words in edit. It was just like, I got that, opened the document and was just like, oh my God. And he was right.
00:15:11 Speaker_01
Of course he was right. And yeah, it was just, I mean, that first four years was just really figuring out like how, how do you write?
00:15:19 Speaker_01
How do you write in a way where you're, where you're presenting information that is pretty complex in a way that the average person can immediately understand, but also also use, right?
00:15:31 Speaker_01
Because men's health is a service magazine, meaning that when you read something in that magazine, there's an implicit takeaway about how do I use this in my life?
00:15:38 Speaker_00
Yeah. Now, did you have an implicit idea going into that, that pretty soon you would be like 1990s Susan Casey outside magazine going on like long adventures that you would report back on? Like, what was your... What were you thinking?
00:15:52 Speaker_00
Like, I've heard, for example, at Columbia Journalism School from my friends who went there years back, everyone's goal is to write long form for The New Yorker. Like, this is what I'm going to do out of it.
00:16:01 Speaker_00
But, you know, only three people end up doing that. So what was the dreams versus reality when you started doing magazine journalism?
00:16:10 Speaker_01
I thought that it was going to be that. I thought that I was going to be eventually going out to report crazy stories. And I will say this, though. I was persistent and I was always pitching ideas that would get me out of the office.
00:16:28 Speaker_01
Luckily, they said yes to quite a few of them. It's like once I pulled off one that worked pretty well, I pitched this story where I was going to go basically join a powerlifting federation. But part of it was that I was lifting.
00:16:46 Speaker_01
I was training with this guy who was the first guy to ever bench press 1,000 pounds. And his gym was this, it was in the middle of the woods. It was this rundown old garage they converted. This guy was the most giant human being you've ever seen.
00:17:01 Speaker_01
He had a mohawk that was pink. There was about five pit bulls that were running around the gym. Every single dude in there was like a bouncer in a motorcycle gang. And I roll in, you know, six foot one, 170 pounds with my notebook, like, hey, guys.
00:17:17 Speaker_01
And the story just worked because it was just so funny that I was in there. And so after I did that, I would say the editors became a little more amenable to sending me out to report pieces.
00:17:28 Speaker_01
And I really I mean, that's really what I lived for, like the day to day in the office. It was.
00:17:32 Speaker_01
You know, it was what it was, but if I could go out and meet people, get out into the world and just meet these weird subcultures, that was like, that was my jam.
00:17:40 Speaker_00
So what was your interest, you know, coming out of college, coming out of grad school, for example, were you outdoorsy at this point or not? Were you in the fitness at this point or not?
00:17:48 Speaker_00
Where was, where was your, like, why did you want to get out of the office? What was it that attracted you? What type of activities attracted you?
00:17:56 Speaker_01
Um, I would say big picture. What attracted me is, um, I've always just been interested in people and subcultures and ideas. My own personal interest is that I've always been pretty outdoorsy.
00:18:09 Speaker_01
I grew up in Utah, so you kind of have to ski or snowboard and spend a lot of time mountain biking. Fitness-wise, I've been mildly interested. I always worked out, but it was kind of like it was what it was.
00:18:24 Speaker_01
But I did actually become a lot more interested in health and fitness by taking that role just because you start to unpeel a lot of layers and you go, Oh, this is actually, this is pretty interesting.
00:18:33 Speaker_00
So then in the comfort crisis, you talk about how this dream job began to unravel or how you began the struggle. So what, what happened there?
00:18:43 Speaker_01
Well, I think that, um, I think that I'm a person, like I said, I like to get out.
00:18:53 Speaker_01
I like, I'm happiest when I'm outdoors, arguably maybe doing something a little extreme when I'm in a weird place where there's kind of a level, there's a lot of stimulation going on, right?
00:19:05 Speaker_01
Like I'm just one of these people who I just kind of need stimulation. And there could be long stretches of that magazine where I would just go into the office at nine you stay till six and eventually you're kind of doing the same thing over and over.
00:19:22 Speaker_01
And eventually when I send in those studies, those like study blurbs, I get no edits back because now I've perfected that. Like now I get it. And so it starts to kind of become. All right, I'm standing behind this. Of course, we all had standing desks.
00:19:38 Speaker_01
I'm standing behind this screen from 9 to 6 every single day. I can pretty much predict exactly what is going to happen. I'm indoors. My office for most of the time didn't have a window. It took a while for me to get a window. That was a big day.
00:19:58 Speaker_01
It just starts to kind of be at odds with what I think fundamentally made me excited to get up and go to work every single day.
00:20:08 Speaker_01
Even though I would occasionally get those reporting stories, to your point about asking about what was magazines like when you first started, the funds for those kind of stories started to kind of go away as the internet rose.
00:20:22 Speaker_01
And there started to be more of the magazine became this sort of second thing to the internet.
00:20:30 Speaker_01
And on the internet, especially as I was probably the last year of my time at Men's Health, we figured out, oh, if you run these crazy headlines, you can get clicks. And the place started running stories that literally had nothing to do with health.
00:20:45 Speaker_01
And it was all just about getting people to click. And I'm just like, what the hell are we doing here?
00:20:50 Speaker_00
What do you do? Just a quick aside question. What do you do for six or nine hours at a desk? What are you doing as a journalist? That seems like a lot of time. Are you writing that whole time? Like what happens in a nine hour day?
00:21:02 Speaker_00
I mean, the capsules take you an hour to write. Maybe you're writing up a story. As someone who writes, and does a lot of other things and has to fit it in. I'm fascinated.
00:21:12 Speaker_00
Just as an aside, what was happening on your computer screen for nine hours in that windowless office?
00:21:18 Speaker_01
Oh, dude. I mean, you know this more than anyone that a person can't really crank out great writing for more than like four hours would be my absolute max. And that's if we're on a run.
00:21:31 Speaker_00
For a few days, maybe. Yeah.
00:21:33 Speaker_01
Yeah. And then beyond that, it's like maybe you're getting in two hours of solid writing a day.
00:21:38 Speaker_01
I mean, and the thing is, is that there was kind of this old school, almost like madman mentality coming out of the coming out of the magazine industry, where it's like you show up at nine and you leave at six. Doesn't matter.
00:21:53 Speaker_01
And so how do you fill that time? We would have these meetings where we would go sit on these couches in the main room, and we would come up with headlines for stories, right?
00:22:03 Speaker_01
So we'd put all the stories, like print them out, put them on the wall, and we would come up with headlines for individual stories.
00:22:11 Speaker_01
And I'm not kidding you, we could take one hour going back and forth about a headline that was gonna be on a one-page story. And you're like, people just throwing out ideas.
00:22:22 Speaker_01
And really, it was just, it really was just dudes sitting around BSing because we needed to fill the time, pretending like it was productive.
00:22:29 Speaker_01
And it was just, you know, sometimes you'd have good conversations, it could be fun, but sometimes you're just going, what the hell are we doing here?
00:22:37 Speaker_00
Oh, man. So then how did you talk frankly in your comfort crisis about the alcohol dependency? Yeah. Does that arise in this time and is this in response to this? What's your disillusionment from work or is it help create your issues at work?
00:22:54 Speaker_00
I mean, how did that begin to raise its head?
00:22:59 Speaker_01
Yeah, I don't think I don't think the boredom of the job helped. I'll say that. I think there's some I think that's one of those topics that's like really complicated and you kind of start to unpeel the layers of why over time. But
00:23:14 Speaker_01
I think the fundamental reason that my drinking definitely kicked up while I was there. Now, I will say that even the first time I drank, I was like, oh, wow, this makes life more interesting. And if and if one is good. What would two be like?
00:23:34 Speaker_01
And if two's like that, what's three like? So I always like to say that my favorite drink was always the next one. And when you drink like that, you can accumulate some problems.
00:23:46 Speaker_01
And a good sign that you have a drinking problem is that all of your problems are caused by your drinking. And that was totally me.
00:23:53 Speaker_01
And I think that when I kind of peel back, and it's taken me a while to figure this out, when I peel back, I think that because my life, especially at that time, was really kind of predictable, routine and rote, and I'm a person who kind of needs stimulation, likes to explore the edges.
00:24:13 Speaker_01
It's like if I could go back on a weekend to my apartment in Allentown or whatever, If I were to drink, I can guarantee that that night was gonna be more interesting and more unpredictable than if I were to not drink, right?
00:24:29 Speaker_01
If I didn't drink, I'd be like, all right, I'm probably gonna watch Netflix. Maybe I'll go get dinner. I'll go to bed by 10. If I have one drink, I just go rolling the dice. Who the hell knows what's gonna happen here?
00:24:40 Speaker_01
And so I think that was that like searching for stimulation and just something else to do that was more exciting was really kind of push that and drove that. And like I said, it's like, you know, some people, they do that and they're good with three.
00:24:56 Speaker_01
I was never that type of person. And that eventually just led to, yeah, a lot of problems in my life. And I kind of had to, I kind of had to figure that out.
00:25:05 Speaker_00
So, okay, so you have all this going on, and this brings us to the point that my listeners are often really interested in, which is both the practical and psychological reality of when people began doing intentional lifestyle crafting, right?
00:25:21 Speaker_00
And so we're getting to the point now where some relatively large changes happen in your life. And so I'm interested in kind of dive it into the psychology at this moment.
00:25:32 Speaker_00
What were the thoughts that began to crystallize that would eventually push you to do something different? How can we understand you beginning to think, okay, I want to change things about my life?
00:25:46 Speaker_00
What was the thought process that was happening as you were there in Allentown and going to the windowless room and drinking too much? And what's inside the mind of Michael Easter that began to push you towards let's change some things?
00:25:58 Speaker_01
Yeah, I mean, I wish I could say that I had this planned out at the time. I didn't. But I think really when you look at addiction, it's basically choosing a short-term benefit at the expense of long-term growth. That's really how I see it.
00:26:18 Speaker_01
And so for me, it's like I needed something to just like feel something. And alcohol gave me that. Now, eventually, the downsides of alcohol, they begin to really outweigh any of the benefits I'm getting.
00:26:32 Speaker_01
And yet, I don't really know how to get out of that, right? Because the thing is, is if I drink, like, immediately, I can fix whatever this underlying problem is. It's this, like, really short-term, easy way to fix a problem.
00:26:45 Speaker_01
Eventually, that stops working. And eventually, I think the downsides just start to really pile up. And I tried to quit drinking, I mean, a hundred times, you know.
00:26:56 Speaker_01
And eventually, just for whatever reason, one morning I woke up and it was kind of like this shift where I realized that if I was to continue this behavior, I was probably, not to get too dramatic here, but this is what I thought, that I was probably going to die early.
00:27:12 Speaker_01
Like, I could just kind of see it. And I kind of realized that In all the times I had tried to quit drinking before, I'd always kind of looked for the easy way out. It's like, oh, well, maybe I could do this, and then I can just drink less.
00:27:27 Speaker_01
And I came up with all these schemes. And I just kind of accepted like, hey, this is going to be really hard. This is definitely going to be hard. And another thing I did is that my mom has actually been sober for about 40 years.
00:27:39 Speaker_01
She got sober right before she had me. And I never really talked to her about my drinking. And I called her. And I told her, I'm like, hey, mom, she had no idea I even drank, much less had a problem with it.
00:27:49 Speaker_01
And I told her, hey, I got a drinking problem. And so I think that sort of that admission and that reaching out and asking for help, I think that shifted something in my mind where I just kind of went, okay. I can't figure this out on my own.
00:28:03 Speaker_01
I'm probably going to have to talk to people who've been there and who can help me. And so I talked to her. I found a handful of people that had been in a similar situation as me. And one guy in particular was just extremely helpful.
00:28:18 Speaker_01
And so I do think it was just the problems piled up so much that something had to give. And when it gave that sort of pushed me to do something other than drinking.
00:28:30 Speaker_01
And then you find the problem, okay, now we got to solve for what alcohol was solving for and we have to overhaul our life. And so I just had to add in new things that would sort of give me that stimulation.
00:28:45 Speaker_01
And once the alcohol was gone, though, it's like, okay, the job is only doing so much for me. And that's when I started looking for sort of other ways out.
00:28:53 Speaker_00
That's fascinating. Well, I mean, part of what's fascinating is we see that same effect with smartphone addiction.
00:28:59 Speaker_00
Much more attenuated, but I mean, this comes out of my work, is that people who succeed in drastically changing their relationship to their phones do so because they aggressively invest in alternatives.
00:29:10 Speaker_00
And the people who white knuckle, like, all right, well, here's what I'm gonna do. I'm just gonna use it less, and I'm not gonna have my bedroom. They start putting rules around it, but don't have any replacement for what the phone was doing for them.
00:29:22 Speaker_00
they all go back. So there's an interesting parallel. So did you try and try to replace this with other more, other stimulating activities while you still had your job at Men's Health?
00:29:32 Speaker_00
What type of things were you trying at first before you made the decision, I need to actually change my job itself, right? This was outdoors activity, like getting back in the mountain biking.
00:29:40 Speaker_00
Like what did you, what were you, what were your first steps towards adding, like recasting your lifestyle?
00:29:48 Speaker_01
Yeah, if I can, if I can think about a few of them, um, I, I started hanging out with other people that would kind of, you know, like I was the type of person that like, I would just kind of hang out either with my girlfriend or alone.
00:30:03 Speaker_01
And then on the weekends I might have some friends come in for, from college and you know, our sort of, um, thing we do together is just go out and get crazy. And, um, so I had to start hanging out with other people who, um,
00:30:15 Speaker_01
the relationships didn't revolve around drinking. And I will say that my girlfriend at the time, she is now my wife. She's never been a big drinker and she was exceedingly supportive and awesome.
00:30:27 Speaker_01
And so hanging out with a new group that had kind of been there was really useful. I also, I got a dog. And part of the reason that we're now, a lot of people would say like, and this was like a month after I'd been sober.
00:30:42 Speaker_01
A lot of people would be like, you got a dog after a month of being sober, you're insane. But here's the thing, that dog saved my life because all of a sudden I had to care about something else other than myself.
00:30:53 Speaker_01
And I'd spend like all my drinking years pretty much giving a shit about one person and that was me. And now all of a sudden I have to care for this dog.
00:31:04 Speaker_01
And so what that did, and I also got a German Shorthair Pointer, which is a hunting dog that needs a whole hell of a lot of exercise. So I would have to get up early. I would have to take that dog.
00:31:17 Speaker_01
Every morning before work, I would take the dog to this park that was out in nature. It was right by a river. And we would just walk the park for about an hour as the sun was coming up.
00:31:29 Speaker_01
And that was like this new way of seeing like, oh, there's like something here that had kind of been removed from my life in drinking, but is kind of giving me this deeper thing I need that's making me happy, really. And so that was super useful.
00:31:47 Speaker_01
And then I started exercising more. I start like on the weekends. I would I would get up early and I'd go to I'd go for a hike. I'd go for a long bike ride. I'd go I'd go do something. And that gave me a reason to go to bed on time and to like not drink.
00:32:02 Speaker_01
And if I ever really wanted to drink, which I was lucky that I will say a lot of people have fits and starts. When I was done, I was done. It was like, we're like, we're going for this. You know what I mean?
00:32:15 Speaker_01
Like, I didn't have like urges to go out and drink. And I will also say that over time, the times that I have thought I've missed alcohol, when I unpack that, it's really that I missed the context of the drinking.
00:32:31 Speaker_01
And that's that you're with friends, you're able to let loose. And I was like, oh, well, do you really need to have two drinks to let loose? No, you can just like, you can just like let loose without having alcohol around, you know?
00:32:44 Speaker_01
And so I think it's just like kind of this long process of self-discovery where you have to, but if nothing changes, nothing changes. Yeah, you got to start making these big, deeper changes.
00:32:54 Speaker_01
And I think you see that, like you said, as a theme from getting out of any behavior that you are overdoing. That is hurting your life like you gotta you gotta change something.
00:33:08 Speaker_00
So then how did your what caused the evolution your relationship with men's health? It's not that you stopped writing for them. I mean even your guy Fieri article is not even that old and I've looked through your bibliography.
00:33:21 Speaker_00
There's periods real right six or seven articles freelance for them.
00:33:24 Speaker_00
So when it comes to that particular professional transition, you've now been exposed to other things, just to use like the terminology my audience knows, you've been exposed to these other lifestyle factors that are resonating.
00:33:34 Speaker_00
It's the time outside, the caring for someone else, the exercise, the deeper connections with community. And so suddenly you're gaining this insight into what resonates and what doesn't.
00:33:44 Speaker_00
What was the sequence of changes you made to your actual professional situation and how did that unfold?
00:33:53 Speaker_01
Yeah, so I was probably at the magazine for about maybe two years when I was sober. And so I think after, you know, I sort of go through the most acute period of, you know, white knuckling, as they call it, of sobriety.
00:34:12 Speaker_01
Then once I was through with that, you realize, OK, well, I'm still in this office. It's still boring. Nothing has changed in the magazine industry here. And so I just, I knew I loved the writing aspect.
00:34:24 Speaker_01
Didn't love the standing at a desk in an office behind a screen all day. Did like getting out in the world and reporting. and having interesting experiences meeting interesting people.
00:34:36 Speaker_01
And so for a while I thought, well, maybe I just need to find a new career. I kind of looked around at some different things, applied for some jobs, kind of got deep into them, but they didn't work out.
00:34:45 Speaker_01
And eventually it just, it occurred to me, we started talking to my, my now wife, and we decided, all right, let's try and move somewhere. Maybe I could freelance because then I would only be writing, but it would be more on my terms.
00:35:00 Speaker_01
And then it popped in my head, oh, well, I know I can only write well for about four hours a day max. So what could I do to earn income and have a safety net in those other hours of the day.
00:35:17 Speaker_01
And I'd always thought it would be awesome to work at a university in a teaching role.
00:35:24 Speaker_01
And it occurred to me like, well, if you teach journalism, like your research is continuing to do the work if you're in the professional position, like a lot of journalism departments have. And my wife and I, and this is crazy how this worked out,
00:35:40 Speaker_01
my wife and I had identified either Phoenix or Las Vegas as somewhere we wanted to move.
00:35:44 Speaker_00
Why? And that's... I don't mean that in like a dismissive way, but in like a very curious way, because you're both East Coasters, and that's like a very specific decision.
00:35:53 Speaker_01
Totally. So I'll tell you why. It's because we wanted to move West, and she said no snow, and I said no California. And so that kind of left us with, all right, we got like maybe certain parts of Texas, but definitely Arizona, definitely Las Vegas.
00:36:09 Speaker_01
We had come out to Las Vegas for some reason or another and we're like, oh, wow, this is actually a really great town. The strip is what it is. Some people love it. Some people hate it.
00:36:18 Speaker_01
I personally love it for the people watching and the fact that it's just like this big human behavior laboratory. And so I ended up sending an email. to a guy who ran the magazine program at UNLV.
00:36:32 Speaker_01
And I was just like, hey, thinking about moving out, wondering if you have any adjunct courses. Here's my background, blah, blah, blah. And it just so happened that they were looking for a full-time
00:36:48 Speaker_01
professional instructor to teach health journalism because they just opened a medical school, like they hadn't even advertised the role. And he forwarded my email on to the head of the department.
00:37:00 Speaker_01
And literally a week later, I went in, I interviewed and a week after that, this was this would have been December. They said, OK, we'd like to hire you, but can you start in January? And so we were like,
00:37:13 Speaker_01
All right, fire sale, just like pack up the house. We're driving across the country to move to Las Vegas. And that was that.
00:37:19 Speaker_00
And what were you looking for? Like, what were the properties the job had that made you say, yeah, let's roll with this?
00:37:28 Speaker_01
I think that it was the ability to continue to write for magazines, to do just the writing thing. And also I think the uncertainty and the learning that would come with the teaching aspect of that job.
00:37:43 Speaker_01
So I was teaching three classes when I started, and then the other half of my job was continuing the writing so the university could have people who were actually doing the thing in the department, because there weren't many in the department when I started.
00:37:56 Speaker_01
I think I was the only one.
00:37:57 Speaker_00
So that's a reduced, they gave you, that's a reduced load because they wanted you to write.
00:38:01 Speaker_01
Correct.
00:38:01 Speaker_00
Yeah. So it would have otherwise been like a 4-4 or something like that or a 5-5.
00:38:05 Speaker_01
It would have been a 4-4. Yeah. Yeah. They had me do three classes and then the professional work filled in that fourth spot.
00:38:12 Speaker_00
And you had, a nice thing about these jobs is it's the opposite of the standing desk 9-6. Whenever or wherever, however you get it done is up to you about these jobs. You need to be in the classroom when your class is being taught.
00:38:24 Speaker_00
You need to be in your office for the office hours. But otherwise, however you want to do it, that's kind of a nice thing about these positions. So that must have been a nice change of pace from what you were doing.
00:38:36 Speaker_01
Oh, yeah, because I was coming from, I was coming from the magazine world where you have all these 60 year old guys who were going, no, you come in at nine and you leave at six. That's just what you do. And so it gave me a lot more freedom.
00:38:46 Speaker_01
And I think that, um, that was good for me. I could, you know, go explore Las Vegas. I could, uh, I could work reporting trips around my teaching schedule. What was your, and I also, yeah.
00:38:58 Speaker_00
What was a typical day? Like, like what, how did you work out your schedule?
00:39:02 Speaker_01
Yeah. Over time. I mean, when I first started, they were kind of just like, here's your schedule. And I was in four days a week.
00:39:08 Speaker_00
You were prepping a lot probably in all that.
00:39:10 Speaker_01
Prepping a time when I first, I mean, when I first started, I didn't do as much writing as I wanted. Cause that first semester was really, we got to figure out how the hell do you do this?
00:39:20 Speaker_01
I mean, it was hilarious too, because I'd never, I'd never taught. And, um, I said, okay, like what do I do? And they go, okay, well, your class. And they gave me the names of the three classes. And I said, okay, great.
00:39:34 Speaker_01
So like, is there an instruction handbook on how to do that? And they go. No, those are the names of the three classes, figure it out. I was like, okay. So that was a lot of time figuring it out.
00:39:45 Speaker_01
But once I had figured it out, obviously a lot of that time frees up and I could then start to focus more on the writing. But I did love the teaching element, just interacting with young people. And I liked that it forced me to
00:40:03 Speaker_01
have to think about why I did the things I did in my writing work and reporting work. So someone, well, why do you do that? And you're like, oh, that's a good question. Why do I do that?
00:40:16 Speaker_01
And then you have to unpack your thinking and you find some flaws in it. It strengthens ideas. Maybe you start to see, how could I do this better? And so, yeah, that was a lot of fun.
00:40:25 Speaker_00
And what year was this when you started in Las Vegas? This would have been 2017. Oh, that's interesting. OK. And then, OK, so between your two books, there's like several really large scale reporting trips mentioned, right?
00:40:41 Speaker_00
You have investigating the rising drug trade in sort of post-war Iraq. You have your time in Bhutan. Where do those larger reporting trips that you then use in your books, where do those fall in this timeline? Was that while you were still in Allentown?
00:40:58 Speaker_00
You found a way to do these longer form pieces once you're in Las Vegas.
00:41:03 Speaker_01
Yeah, those are all when I was in Las Vegas. Now I will say the Arctic trip. I was blessed to have a good head of the department and he was like, okay, so you have to be in the Arctic from basic all of September.
00:41:16 Speaker_00
And we should explain, this is the structuring story, if we're thinking of the right story, of the comfort crisis where you go on an elk hunting trip in Arctic Alaska that was not comfortable in a very specific way.
00:41:32 Speaker_00
Okay, but that trip, was that even for reporting at the time or was that just you wanted to do it?
00:41:39 Speaker_01
Yeah, that was for reporting. So I had done, what happened with that is I had done a magazine article for Men's Health that was a profile of the guy, Donnie Vinson, who I was in the Arctic with.
00:41:52 Speaker_01
He's this sort of, for listeners, he's this backcountry bow hunter and filmmaker who's really, I think, changing the face of hunting, how it's perceived, how it's practiced, and just a really deep thinker in the space.
00:42:06 Speaker_01
And so I had profiled him and done this short hunt with him, and I realized that piece could probably be blown out into a bar. I mean, there was just so much that I wanted to write in that story.
00:42:19 Speaker_01
And of course, it could only run at 3,000, 4,000 words or something. And so from that piece, I ended up pitching the book to publishers. And as part of that, it was,
00:42:33 Speaker_01
okay, the overarching narrative is gonna be this 30 plus day journey I take into the Arctic on a hunting trip with him to sort of get into these fundamental discomforts that humans face every day in the past that we no longer face anymore that can be healthy for us.
00:42:51 Speaker_01
And so I pitched that and once the publisher bought it, I had to go to my head of the department and be like, hey, I gotta be gone in September. Can someone just fill this one class I have?" And I was able to get the others online just for the month.
00:43:06 Speaker_01
So I had two that I was able to put online for that month and then come back in person. And then I had one that was just a lecture every week that my department had, he had taught the class before. And so he was like, all right, I'll get it for you.
00:43:20 Speaker_01
And he's just a saint to do that. But then the other trips, I would just plan those during times I wasn't teaching.
00:43:28 Speaker_00
So I mean, it's interesting to me that the type of reporting you wanted to do all along, you really started doing after you weren't a full time employee of a magazine. Is that so? How did that I guess there was still.
00:43:40 Speaker_00
Maybe the pay wasn't great for the pieces, but people were still willing to take long form reporting like this. But if you were on salary, they're like, no, no, no, we need seven articles a week from you for the web.
00:43:55 Speaker_00
How did that happen that you began doing the reporting that you really wanted to do after you left being a full time journalist?
00:44:02 Speaker_01
Yeah, well, I mean, the answer is that if you're on salary as a editor, writer, they want you in the office a certain amount of time. And you can only leave the office so much because you've got a million different tasks.
00:44:14 Speaker_01
The budgets are kind of constrained. And frankly, they would rather just give it out to a freelancer who has ample time to spend to doing these crazy reporting trips. So I almost kind of took on
00:44:28 Speaker_01
left the magazine and took on the role of what would be a freelancer. And what was able to fund those trips was the book advances, basically.
00:44:38 Speaker_00
Because economically, you can't really make a living doing those long-form freelance pieces. It just doesn't work out because you can only do, what, two a year if they're really reported?
00:44:47 Speaker_00
And here's your $6,000 or whatever for six months worth of effort that the economics don't work out. So that, okay, that's fast. Okay, so then we get to your book. So I love how this is unfolding.
00:44:58 Speaker_00
So we get to your book, The Comfort Crisis, your first book, and then The Scarcity Brain came second. So you pitch it, you've done a profile already of the main person, but you had not yet done the trip.
00:45:09 Speaker_00
So if I understand this right, when you did the actual hunting trip, this was after you already sold the book, and you had pitched like, here's, I'm gonna go back out, I'm gonna go to the Arctic with this character I wrote about over here.
00:45:21 Speaker_00
Were you imagining, and I love that we're going to get into this, now we can dive into the book, so it's perfect.
00:45:26 Speaker_00
Were you imagining, I think most writers, myself included, my first instinct would be thinking of coming to America, this is going to be John McPhee, it's going to be really just character-driven, whereas the book ended up being one of the big idea books.
00:45:42 Speaker_00
You know of of the of the last however many years and it's a fantastic book I mean it really became much more of like a Gladwell Ian idea book without is the spine where you went off and met lots of other people.
00:45:53 Speaker_00
The talk about or the help on uncover these other types of principles so. You know, how did that evolve from this is going to be me and this character and what I'm learning from this exposure to like, that's going to be the spine of an idea book.
00:46:07 Speaker_00
It's going to actually have a lot of ideas, a lot of science back stuff, a lot of actually like talking to other people. And how did that unfold?
00:46:16 Speaker_01
Yeah, I think that it was really just noticing that the books that I liked to read usually had a narrative, a kind of a big overarching narrative, but also realizing that I've also always been fascinated with research that can hopefully improve the reader's life.
00:46:35 Speaker_01
And realizing that I, and I think most people the story gets them into the big idea. So when I teach this, it's like, if I'm trying to write a book, like I have this, I'm sure you're the same way. I have this big idea I need to communicate, right?
00:46:51 Speaker_01
But the big idea is often abstract. It's somewhat complex. And if I just go right into the big idea, I've lost you because you haven't bought in. So the story, it almost acts as the vehicle, sort of the expressway into that bigger idea.
00:47:08 Speaker_01
Because if I can get someone in with a story, they buy in, they buy into a character, they want to know, you know, the character is in this precarious position. It's like just basic storytelling.
00:47:19 Speaker_01
And they got to figure things out and they're learning things along the way. And as the character is learning things along the way, that is to say me in these books,
00:47:28 Speaker_01
I can peel off into these bigger ideas where the person will have bought in and hopefully have more interest in the big idea because they bought into this interesting story that's sort of getting there.
00:47:42 Speaker_00
One of the energies I see in the book, and my audience knows it because I've raved about both your books, but about Comfort Crisis in particular, I really thought it was one of the better idea books the last half decade.
00:47:53 Speaker_00
And there's a symmetry I saw between it and my book Deep Work, which was, you know, when I was writing Deep Work, I was also very personally invested in this idea because I was a young professor and I was trying to figure out cognitive life and
00:48:06 Speaker_00
and the incursions into it. And I think that there's an energy that comes into it. And then the comfort crisis has that as well. You can kind of sense there is a personal, this big personal investment you have in these ideas.
00:48:18 Speaker_00
There's an energy in them, which sells them as potentially transformative. So you're at this stage of your life when you're writing this book where you've just started making a lot of changes. You've grabbed the reins of autonomy.
00:48:30 Speaker_00
What happened in your own personal life in terms of like your habits or how you lived or etc? What changes began to come out of working on the book about discomfort?
00:48:41 Speaker_00
Like, what was that feedback loop between the book and then how you were actually living your life?
00:48:46 Speaker_01
Yeah, well, I think you're right. And I have deep work right here. I think you're right that like a lot of times writers are just kind of figuring out their own shit on the page, you know.
00:48:57 Speaker_01
And so that was definitely the comfort crisis, like coming out of getting sober, figuring that out.
00:49:06 Speaker_01
And I think it was this recognition that all the work I did for men's health, we were talking about these sort of lifestyle changes that would lead to improvements.
00:49:18 Speaker_01
Every single lifestyle change that we talked about, it was usually uncomfortable, right? If it's exercise to improve your fitness, exercise is uncomfortable. If it's losing weight, you're probably gonna have to eat less. You're gonna be hungry.
00:49:28 Speaker_01
That's uncomfortable. Mental health, getting over your mental health stuff is usually uncomfortable. So seeing that sort of, path that doing things that are uncomfortable leads is sort of a necessary buy into improvement to these greater goods.
00:49:44 Speaker_01
And having that exact same story in my sobriety, I mean, that's absolutely the most uncomfortable thing I've ever done. But once I went through that, my life improved so much, like unbelievable changes, like everything got better.
00:49:58 Speaker_01
And so sort of seeing that and then through my time outdoors, realizing that the outdoors are uncomfortable. too hot, too cold. Everything takes effort. You have long stretches of boredom, like just on and on and on.
00:50:18 Speaker_01
And then you go back from the outdoors into everyday life. And it's like, oh, my God, like everything is so comfortable in our world.
00:50:26 Speaker_01
And just realizing that that shift where I kind of go, well, humans live for all of time, walking around outdoors, looking for food, basically trying to keep their kids alive. Nothing was ever comfortable.
00:50:42 Speaker_01
And then we as a species suddenly get place, we engineer our environments to be comfortable in so many different ways across the board. And then the big idea question is, okay, well, how has that changed us? And what can we do about it?
00:50:57 Speaker_00
Yeah, well, and I think the digital, when it enters this conversation, brought us cognitive comfort. So there's a lot of things in the last 200 years, maybe even just 150 years that gave us physical comfort.
00:51:07 Speaker_00
It's the cars and HVAC and comfortable mattresses. But what's the story of the last 10 years is this cognitive comfort of no boredom, take out all of the friction of sociality.
00:51:19 Speaker_00
and all the sort of like uncertainty and just it's on here and I can just tap this thing. Get rid of the difficulty of putting yourself out there for leadership and community. I can be a leader by posting things on Twitter that gets like comments.
00:51:32 Speaker_00
You can kind of play with these like these human drives. And it takes away all cognitive discomfort. And that was one of the big threats to your book is, you know, it's not just physical, but also cognitive discomfort that there's something to it.
00:51:47 Speaker_00
How do you think about this theory? Here's a theory I've been pitching, which I don't have science for it, but it sounds reasonable, right?
00:51:53 Speaker_00
So one of the things I've been pitching on my show recently is this idea that we have fundamental human drives, you know, there's like for community and leadership and food, obviously. Boredom is a big drive, it feels really bad, right?
00:52:09 Speaker_00
So alleviation of boredom. And the goal of these drives is to push us to do hard things that will be rewarding in the future. Because we have a very strong pull in fundamentally human drives.
00:52:18 Speaker_00
They're hard to ignore, so eventually they make us get up and do stuff. a big difference from some other animals because like we're not just energy conserving.
00:52:28 Speaker_00
We get up and do things and that one of the issues with technology is it subverts the drives.
00:52:33 Speaker_00
It kind of simulates the reward like these drives need just enough that like you lose that motivation to get up like the video game makes you feel just competent enough
00:52:44 Speaker_00
that like you don't get up in a way that if you didn't have the video game, like eventually that like drive towards competency, it's like, I got to get up and go learn how to hunt or whatever. Right.
00:52:54 Speaker_00
And so I have this theory that like when the technology, we have drives that push us to do the type of things that you talked about in your book and technology can subvert them just enough to prevent action, but we get none of the rewards that the action gives us.
00:53:07 Speaker_00
Is this kind of track?
00:53:09 Speaker_01
Oh, yeah, I agree 100%. And I'll give you a good example. So when I was in the Arctic for a month, we're up there hunting. Hunting is, for those who've never hunted, it's actually not action-packed at all. It's like a lot of waiting.
00:53:29 Speaker_01
And so we'd sit on these hills waiting for caribou to come through, because we're kind of timing our hunt to this migration. No caribou were coming through for like a couple weeks. And I didn't have my cell phone.
00:53:41 Speaker_01
I had my cell phone, but it didn't, it was useless, right? I didn't have televisions and computers and iPads and all this stuff. And so when you're sitting out there, all of a sudden, I find myself like really bored.
00:53:56 Speaker_01
And so when boredom kicks on, I kind of think about it as this uncomfortable cue that tells people, go do something else. So it's neither good nor bad.
00:54:05 Speaker_01
It's just this drive that says, hey, the return on your time invested with what you're doing right now, it is worn thin, go do something else. So when you think about it in the context of evolution,
00:54:17 Speaker_01
If it's a million years ago and you and I are sitting on this hill hunting and we need food to survive, if no animals are coming through, boredom kicks on and it says, go do something else.
00:54:26 Speaker_01
And in the past, that something else was often productive, to your point. So you and I would go, hey, no animals. Why don't we go? Why don't we go search for berries? Why don't we go to hunt another species?
00:54:35 Speaker_01
Like there's all these things we would do that were often productive, pushing us towards survival. But now we have this easy, effortless escape from it that is just highly stimulating in the form of cell phones, right?
00:54:47 Speaker_01
It's like you feel that, and obviously everyone sees it, everyone experiences it. The moment you feel it, you immediately pull the phone out. Now, in the Arctic, I didn't have that.
00:54:56 Speaker_01
So, like I said, neither good nor bad, some of the stuff we would do to alleviate our boredom was just totally stupid. Like, we would read the labels on our food. We would just tell these ridiculous stories that went nowhere.
00:55:10 Speaker_01
On the other hand, I also came up with more good ideas for my writing than I've ever come up with in my entire life. I wrote things that ended up in the book that are probably some of the best things I've ever written.
00:55:22 Speaker_01
I came up with like Christmas shopping lists for all of my friends and family, like all these like weird productive things that I just never would have gotten had I been bored at home because the default would have been.
00:55:34 Speaker_01
Oh, go to the screen and work. Oh, an alert just came in from your cell phone.
00:55:39 Speaker_01
And so I think that kind of to the bigger points, that's why kind of this removal, having these times where you remove yourself and yes, you will have to be uncomfortably bored for a little bit. But seeing where that takes you.
00:55:55 Speaker_01
is going to be a lot more interesting and arguably productive than watching the next amazing dog video that comes upon your Instagram feed or whatever it might be.
00:56:05 Speaker_00
So was your book, your first book, was it a success right away or was it a slow burn? What was the experience like when that came out?
00:56:13 Speaker_01
Um, it, uh, so we got lucky the first week I got on some big podcasts. So we had a big, pretty big opening week.
00:56:20 Speaker_01
Um, but then it kind of just kind of slowed and it, you know, it was like a steady, steady, but over time it took about a year for it to really pick up in sales.
00:56:29 Speaker_01
So, um, yeah, it took about one year and there was, you know, I think it was a word of mouth. It was. People who had platforms, eventually it getting to them and them saying, just like you right now, right?
00:56:43 Speaker_01
The book Comfort Crisis came out more than three years ago and we're talking right now. That sort of spread. I think the idea is just spreading people. I know people liked reading it. Not everyone liked reading it, but enough people liked reading it.
00:56:55 Speaker_00
It's a good news and bad news about publishing, right? You can't, there's no formula to make your book sell a lot of copies.
00:57:03 Speaker_00
It just has to be, it's simple in the sense that it just has to be something that like people are really interested in and want to tell people about. The bad news is that's really hard to do. But that is the common experience of,
00:57:14 Speaker_00
Not everyone, sometimes your book is the right book for the right time and everyone reads it immediately. This is like John Haidt in The Anxious Generation.
00:57:20 Speaker_00
Like if you've been working for a decade on a topic that everyone cares about and your book comes out right at the right time, then it can just like immediately be a big success. But Deep Work had a similar experience.
00:57:31 Speaker_00
That's never, it was never on the New York Times bestseller list, never on a weekly national bestseller list and is like 2 million copies in. You know, it's just like, yeah, that's it.
00:57:42 Speaker_01
That's it. People agree. It's like, it's you. It's you wrote a book that is really good, that helps people, that's actionable, that they can apply. And word just spreads, you know, that's fantastic.
00:57:55 Speaker_00
So then what was the plan? You have the first book come out. Did you have like a new plan? Like, OK, here is here's my plan for my life.
00:58:01 Speaker_00
Like I'm going to write books on a certain frequency while my position at Las Vegas, like I'm sure it changed your thought of like, OK, here's my rhythm between freelancing books and professorship.
00:58:13 Speaker_00
How did you revise your kind of life plan, if at all, in this sort of post first book period?
00:58:20 Speaker_01
I wish I could tell you that I had a life plan going in. I mean, I wrote like, you know, my thought then was like, you write a book to write the book, and then you realize that
00:58:31 Speaker_01
Oh, the book opens up all these other doors that I just had no idea were there. And so a lot of it was kind of figuring out, all right, now that this book seems to be resonating with people, it's like, what the hell do you, what do you do with that?
00:58:44 Speaker_01
Right. And so it kind of, I think it took me a while to figure out what I wanted to do. And I actually, I signed the contract for Scarcity Brain right before the comfort crisis came out.
00:59:00 Speaker_01
Because I was like, all right, this will guarantee I have more work because I don't, I have no idea if this book's going to sell or not. So let's strike while the iron's hot.
00:59:08 Speaker_01
And so I immediately just started working on scarcity brain, um, eventually just through. sending out some random newsletters here and there. My newsletter list had grown and I started to get more regular with that.
00:59:23 Speaker_01
And then I eventually took that over to Substack and I publish on that three times a week because that allows me to kind of write in real time. I'm sure you've noticed that with a book,
00:59:39 Speaker_01
I love books because it kind of gets to the heart of things and you get real clear on ideas. At the same time, it's, you know, on a two, three year cadence or whatever it might be.
00:59:50 Speaker_01
And so being able to talk about things in real life or in real time, rather, I think has been useful for Substack.
00:59:57 Speaker_00
And then how did that start changing? Let me be more specific. When did you, first of all, when did you go over to Substack? When you fixed a regular cadence of three times a week, when was that?
01:00:10 Speaker_01
That would have been May of what year, 22, no, 23. Yeah. So I've been doing that for about a year and a half now coming up on two years. And that really was just that I had this newsletter that was going out once a week. I enjoyed writing it.
01:00:25 Speaker_01
And, um, one of the guys that Substack reached out and said, Hey, we think you could do a successful Substack. You want to try it? And I was like, no one's going to. sign up for this and like pay for this, you know, it's not going to happen.
01:00:37 Speaker_01
Um, but I was just like, all right, worst that happens is like, it's not a success. And then I just go back to once a week, you know, what the hell do I care? And so I tried it and I had this like goal.
01:00:46 Speaker_01
I was like, Hey, if I can, if I can have this many subscribers and this amount of time, that'll be a success. And I kind of pushed that. I said, all right, if I can do that in like three years, then this is worth it.
01:00:58 Speaker_01
And I think I hit that goal in like three months. So it was like, all right.
01:01:02 Speaker_01
looks like substack is the thing we'll be doing this so and it's it's been fun it's been awesome i mean i will say that it is um a lot of work but it has also trained me to get better at distilling my thoughts and writing them quickly whereas i was like in book mind where i'm like oh i got i got i got two years for this project man we can just take this real nice and slow and it has kind of trained me to get faster so it took me about a year
01:01:27 Speaker_01
to not feel like I was constantly in sort of crazy sprint mode. But once I got it, I got it. And it's been a real fun project.
01:01:35 Speaker_00
And do I understand right that now you write full-time? Yeah. Okay. And was, was substack that success a big part of that decision? Just because that's more, it's more immediate, it's more regular.
01:01:47 Speaker_00
Um, from just like a financial perspective, it feels somehow more predictable than books, which, you know, it could be years till it comes out. You don't know how it's going to go.
01:01:55 Speaker_00
Was substack the thing that changed, like made that an option in your mind or was it like the success of the books?
01:02:02 Speaker_01
Um, I would say it was a little bit of both, but I would say that sub stack made me feel like I had something that was more predictable and regular. Right. I mean, with books, I'm like, okay, things are going great now, but next week, who knows?
01:02:17 Speaker_01
I'm sure you've, you've probably seen the numbers on your books where it's like one week for whatever reason you sell a lot. And then the next year, like, well, why did we sell less than like, you just don't know. So sub stack was a little more, um,
01:02:29 Speaker_01
predictable. And the other thing that kind of made me switch to writing full-time is that the university kind of altered how they were going to approach things, and they wanted me to teach four classes.
01:02:42 Speaker_01
And it was just like, I can't do Substack and books and teach four classes, guys. Sorry, this just isn't going to work out. And luckily, the books and the Substack had put me in a position where I was totally fine with that. And also,
01:02:55 Speaker_01
God bless my wife who works for a big insurance company and brings in the healthcare and all that sort of things, so.
01:03:02 Speaker_00
Yeah, so that worked out okay. What is now your writing, so just a geek question, writing geek question. So how do you structure your week in terms of when you work on the newsletter versus when you might be working on a book or freelance?
01:03:17 Speaker_00
Do you have a rhyme or reason to how you do it? I'm curious like how much time these different things take up and what your workday now looks like.
01:03:24 Speaker_01
Yeah, so I'll first say that even if I was a plumber or an auto mechanic or a lawyer, I would still be writing. So writing, I love it. I'm passionate about it. It's my hobby. It just so happens that I'm lucky that it's also the career.
01:03:43 Speaker_01
pretty much every day. I get up pretty early, usually in between four and five a.m. and I immediately just start writing.
01:03:53 Speaker_01
I once read this book called Deep Work and it told me that finding your most productive time and really guarding that is a good plan.
01:04:00 Speaker_00
Which I ironically stole from you this morning for this interview, which we're doing. Ironies about only I get to do the deep work. Come on.
01:04:09 Speaker_01
Yes, you get it. You obviously get a pass because you've greatly improved my productivity. So yeah, I usually will write until I don't know, maybe nine.
01:04:20 Speaker_01
So just having that time where it's like, we're really just focused on the writing has been really great.
01:04:27 Speaker_00
And it's just and you differentiate between newsletter and book writing. Is it like that?
01:04:32 Speaker_00
That morning is when I'm writing books and then I have other time for newsletter or it's just like whatever is next on whatever you want to work on next, you're doing it that way. You put those, you mix those two together.
01:04:41 Speaker_01
Yeah, I would say those two get mixed. And then, you know, after that, I'll do the kind of other things that don't take as much thought.
01:04:49 Speaker_01
And then a lot of times I can get some good time in, in the afternoon, like after breakfast, I usually eat at like 10.
01:04:55 Speaker_01
And then I can jam some more time in there depending on what's going on with meetings and things that obviously kind of fluctuates based on what else is happening in my life. Yeah, I mean, a lot of it is just riding every day.
01:05:08 Speaker_01
I try and get outside every day.
01:05:09 Speaker_00
You do these long walks. So like when do you normally do those long walks, those desert walks you talk about?
01:05:15 Speaker_01
That'll sometimes be before breakfast, sometimes it's after breakfast. Sunday is probably the one day where I eat into that writing time where when the sun's coming up, my dog and I will usually go do a long run.
01:05:30 Speaker_01
But by Sunday, I've usually kind of figured out the coming week of sub-stack and all that stuff.
01:05:36 Speaker_00
What about exercise outside of walking? Do you do it at home? When do you do it? How much time do you spend?
01:05:42 Speaker_01
at home before dinner, usually. So just because at that time, it's like I try to get my most productive time of thought and ideas and creativity.
01:05:59 Speaker_01
I try and do the writing then, you know, and I think kind of the takeaways you've talked about, it's like, What's your goal? What's your big goal? Um, what's the time that you were most productive to your big goal? All right. Pair those two things. Yeah.
01:06:12 Speaker_01
Right. It's like at one point I had, I had tried exercising in the morning cause then it's like, all right, I'll, I'll be done with this. But it was cutting into my most important writing time and I wasn't as good of a writer between three and five.
01:06:23 Speaker_01
And so it was like, all right, put exercise at the end of that. And I think that, um, I don't, you know, there's a lot of talk online about morning routines.
01:06:33 Speaker_01
And, um, my morning routine is immediately start writing because anytime that I'm, you know, drinking magic mushroom coffee or meditating or writing at a gratitude journal, I'm not doing the writing that is like my main goal.
01:06:49 Speaker_01
So I try and just go right into it and then put the other stuff other times of the day, if that's useful.
01:06:55 Speaker_00
Fascinating. I love the schedule, jealous of the schedule. And are you, when it comes to the exercise in the afternoon, you know, I just met Peter Atiyah for the first time and I know you know him.
01:07:06 Speaker_00
Are you like in the Atiyah school of like, it's very locked in exactly what I'm doing because it's part of, you know, I'm building my mitochondrial through six hours of zone two on a 17 schedule. Are you more of a, let's,
01:07:19 Speaker_00
let's, you know, carry a heavy thing and like run up a mountain or where do you fall on that spectrum of just moving rocks and you know, doing your carefully calibrated zone too.
01:07:33 Speaker_01
Yeah, I'm definitely not as calibrated as as Peter. I don't think many people are. He's he's the man. I love that guy. He's so great. I I try and strength train at least two or three times a week. Most of what I'm doing goes back to my physically capable
01:07:52 Speaker_01
outdoors and in the mountains, because I like to do a lot of backcountry hunting. I do like long stuff outdoors. I do think when you look at humans, I think there's a really good case to be made for taking exercise outside. One, it gets you outside.
01:08:09 Speaker_01
That has plenty of, you know, mental benefits. But also when you think about the context of the outdoors, there's a lot more unpredictability. So I'll give you an example of running on a treadmill versus running on a trail. When you run on a treadmill,
01:08:22 Speaker_01
You can just totally zone out. You're watching Mari Povich or whatever the hell it is. Each step is the exact same. You can perfectly dial up the up and down. The incline doesn't change. The ground below you doesn't change.
01:08:36 Speaker_01
You're just totally out there, right? You can just totally zone out. But if you're on a trail, all of a sudden that changes.
01:08:43 Speaker_01
That all of a sudden becomes very cognitively demanding too because where you place your foot really matters so you don't roll an ankle. Your heels are going to be up and down so you have to learn to pace yourself.
01:08:53 Speaker_01
You're getting all this outdoor exposure. You're seeing all these interesting things along the way that are taking your attention and also I think kind of forcing a little more creativity, not to mention things are just unpredictable in other ways.
01:09:07 Speaker_01
Like the other day I was out running and there's this like pack of coyotes just, you know, coming up the trail, ran right past me. It was like, hey, what's up guys? And they're like, huh, what are you doing out here? And we went our separate ways.
01:09:17 Speaker_01
And that's something that I'm always going to remember. Whereas if I'm indoors, really kind of trying to dial in everything perfectly, I don't get that.
01:09:26 Speaker_00
Yeah, there may be a coyote attack in the Maury Povich episode, you never know. All right, so I know we're up against time, so my final question is going to be an advice-oriented question.
01:09:36 Speaker_00
I'm working on this new book called The Deep Life, and you don't know this yet, but I talk about you somewhat extensively in it, because one of the big ideas of the book is we too often jump right into the big changes we want to make to make our life more intentional, and we skip the first part where we prepare.
01:09:54 Speaker_00
to succeed with those changes. There's the get your act together. I talked about this a lot on my show. You kind of have to get your act together first before you make major changes to your production or the changes are going to sort of fizzle out.
01:10:04 Speaker_00
And I talk about you and I talk about the comfort crisis in part because one of the things a lot of people have to get used to first is there's going to be a lot of discomfort in all these changes that are going to follow.
01:10:16 Speaker_00
So why don't you get comfortable with discomfort early on? That's part of your preparation. So to that end,
01:10:22 Speaker_00
If you're talking to, I'll give you a sample audience member you're talking to, like it's maybe someone in their 20s and they have a job, they're doing okay, they're not really that happy, they're zoned out a lot on their phone, right?
01:10:34 Speaker_00
And maybe otherwise partying, playing a lot of video games or what have you. And we're saying, okay, we want to give you the six month plan for just turning up your comfort with discomfort off of zero. So we don't want to overwhelm you.
01:10:49 Speaker_00
We don't want to send you in the Arctic, you know, to do the hunting of the caribou right away. What are the like...
01:10:55 Speaker_00
The things you would suggest, whatever it is, the two or three things of someone who is overly comforted in that first six months that just break the seal on, I can survive discomfort.
01:11:05 Speaker_00
What type, what have you found from your readers and experience to be like good ways into that?
01:11:11 Speaker_01
Yeah, so here's what I'd say is big picture. I call this the 2% mindset.
01:11:17 Speaker_01
OK, so there's this study that really sort of changed how I think about humans and human behavior, and it found that 2% of people take the stairs when there's also an escalator available.
01:11:29 Speaker_01
Now, 100% of those people knew that if they were to take the stairs, they would get a better long-term return on their health, probably on their mindset. They'd get all these different benefits, right?
01:11:41 Speaker_01
But 98% of people choose to do the thing that is easier in the short term that actually often causes them long-term harm, right? And so this tells me that humans are wired to do the next easiest, most comfortable thing, even when it doesn't serve us.
01:11:57 Speaker_01
And so I think if you can, the sort of bigger metaphor here is that it's not just about the stairs and the escalator. It's about if you have an opportunity to do this slightly harder thing, it's like you have to get to the second floor.
01:12:10 Speaker_01
You can take the stairs, you can take the escalator. You take the stairs, that's going to give you this longer return. And so sort of taking that mindset and thinking, okay, where else can I apply that into my day?
01:12:20 Speaker_01
It's like if I come up on a set of stairs in the escalator, I'm taking the stairs. If I am gonna, if I need to talk to someone, I can either send this like text where I have no real interaction with them, or I can call them.
01:12:33 Speaker_01
Can you figure out what, like if I have a phone, a work phone call, you can take it sitting at your desk doing nothing, or you can like pop in your earbuds and like, hey, go for a walk.
01:12:43 Speaker_01
I have a whole 2% manifesto on the sub stack that really gets into a bunch of different ideas, but I do think it is,
01:12:50 Speaker_01
thinking of ways to just make what you're already gonna do a little bit more challenging, a little bit more uncomfortable in a way that's gonna give you a long-term return.
01:12:58 Speaker_01
And once you start doing that, it's like, I like to explain that once you get out to edges, people don't fall off them. The edge expands. So you're kind of slowly like really just stretching this comfort zone. And then eventually you look back
01:13:13 Speaker_01
And you've made these big changes and now you can do all these other things that you weren't able to do in the past. And what you used to think was uncomfortable is just everyday routine things.
01:13:22 Speaker_01
And along the way to that, things have changed and you've become a better person.
01:13:27 Speaker_00
Oh, I love that. So it's not just, okay, I want to make a change tomorrow. It's 90 minutes a day of, you know, endurance runs in the mountains. It's maybe starting with,
01:13:37 Speaker_00
all of these mild ways throughout the days in which you can choose slight discomfort over comfort in a way that's gonna have value, that rewires your brain, that changes your thresholds.
01:13:46 Speaker_00
And then as you say, that edge expands, you might find yourself six months later, now doing something that if you had tried day two, would have fizzled out. Yeah, so I think- Exactly.
01:13:57 Speaker_00
I think there is a great message for my audience, especially when it comes to the preparation point of the deep life. You'll even find, I would argue for my audience, the struggles you're having with the digital,
01:14:07 Speaker_00
will get easier by adding discomfort to the analog. And that we often separate these two, like the digital is its own problem. And I need to like stop using my phone so much. Oh, unrelated. I should like take the stairs more. I should exercise more.
01:14:19 Speaker_00
They're completely connected because it's uncomfortable not to use your phone in the way you're using before. And if you're comfortable with discomfort, like, yeah, of course it is. So are a lot of things.
01:14:30 Speaker_00
So is like the runs I do and this, I, you know, that's fine. You're much more likely to say that's fine. you know, it's not going to overwhelm me. So.
01:14:38 Speaker_01
Totally. And I'll also say that sometimes when I'll talk about this, people, people will kind of go, yeah, right. Just taking the stairs. I can't, I can't do that much. Well, one, it's a metaphor. Two, I'll give you a good data point.
01:14:52 Speaker_01
There was this study that found that people who took, I think it was just five flights of stairs a week, they had a 30% lower risk of all cause mortality.
01:15:01 Speaker_01
Like we've engineered so much discomfort out of our life that just adding a little bit back in, especially if you were like the most comfortable, um, it has huge outsized returns and it's not interrupt to your point. It's not interrupting your life.
01:15:14 Speaker_01
You're not going from, well, I used to do nothing and now I'm doing 90 minutes of zone two and this heart rate, but it's like. No, you're just doing something that you're already going to do.
01:15:23 Speaker_01
You're just making the slightly more uncomfortable version that's going to give you these big benefits. It's not upending your life. Yeah.
01:15:28 Speaker_00
Well, I love this. Well, Michael, this has been fantastic. You know, for my listeners, the books are The Comfort Crisis and It's the Scarcity Mindset. I have that right. I actually read Scarcity Brain.
01:15:40 Speaker_00
I've read both, Scarcity Brain and The Comfort Crisis. The sub stack that Michael's been talking about is at 2% PCT, T-W-O-P-C-T.com. It's also in podcast form. So I subscribe, Michael, so I know about this. Oh, amazing.
01:15:55 Speaker_00
You can get, you can read it, but also you get the subscriber access to the podcast. And if you want to decide whether to be a paid subscriber or not, is it one out of three? What does the non, the free subscribers get? One out of three articles a week.
01:16:09 Speaker_01
Yep, so Monday is always free. And then Wednesday and Friday, I try and I try and give some useful information. So if you're if you're a free subscriber, you still get Wednesday and Friday, you'll get a little bit of useful information.
01:16:23 Speaker_01
But paid subscribers kind of get the full boat on Wednesday and Friday that has like all the deeper stuff.
01:16:28 Speaker_00
Yeah, and I'll often find myself maybe seeing your email in my inbox, like, oh, I'm interested in that article, but I'm in a hurry. And then later, if I'm doing a workout, there's the podcast version.
01:16:37 Speaker_00
It's like, great, I'll just listen to it, which I think is a nice touch. All right, well, Michael, this has been fantastic. I loved having a chance to talk to you, and thanks for sharing your wisdom.
01:16:47 Speaker_01
Yeah, thanks so much for having me, man. This was great.
01:16:51 Speaker_00
All right, so there we go. That was my conversation with Michael Easter. presented by Defender. Visit LandRoverUSA.com to learn more about Defender. All right, I really enjoyed that interview. I love the mix of Michael's story plus his advice.
01:17:06 Speaker_00
I think just hearing Michael's story actually helps us learn a lot of the way he thinks about the things he writes about. We see where his advice comes from.
01:17:16 Speaker_00
One thing I wanted to underscore here at the end of the interview was that advice he gave at the end.
01:17:22 Speaker_00
Right, so it looks like you're suffering from the comfort crisis, you're a knowledge worker, you're on your screens all the time, you listen to a lot of Cal Newport, caring about not using social media and having your emails organized.
01:17:34 Speaker_00
How do you, what's the first step, I asked him, to trying to move towards this embracing discomfort, living more the way that our Paleolithic bodies were evolved? What's the first step? And notice what he said, start very small.
01:17:50 Speaker_00
You don't have to come out of the gate saying, all right guys, I'm rucking 10 miles a day in the woods. I'm gonna walk 50,000 steps a day and lift rocks and carry rocks underwater and rivers. You don't have to come out of the gates.
01:18:06 Speaker_00
like an endurance athlete. It's a mindset shift. He says, do something every day, a little bit of discomfort, and your mind begins to learn it's okay to not try to optimize comfort. It changes its story about yourself.
01:18:23 Speaker_00
And on top of that new story, you can then weave over time, a life that much more aggressively engages with the health and fitness tips that he gives later on.
01:18:33 Speaker_00
This is very similar to the discipline ladder concept we talk about on our podcast, where I say, look, discipline is not a personality trait you're born with or not. It's also not something you turn on or off binary.
01:18:44 Speaker_00
It's a belief you have about yourself. I am a disciplined person that you build through evidence and the discipline ladder says start with something simple. that helps you begin to rewrite your stories. Like I talk about daily metrics.
01:18:56 Speaker_00
I have a few daily metrics that are tractable, but non-trivial for the things that matter. Take you a couple of minutes every day.
01:19:04 Speaker_00
But you do those for a month or so, your mind says, I'm someone who's willing to take extra effort on the things I care about. I'm willing to put in extra effort on the things I care about, even if I don't have to, and even if it's a little hard.
01:19:16 Speaker_00
And then once your mind believes you're that type of person, you can ladder up to slightly harder things. And from there to something slightly harder. That's exactly what I think Michael is talking about with health and fitness here.
01:19:26 Speaker_00
You start with a little discomfort, you teach yourself discomfort's okay, and then you start laddering.
01:19:34 Speaker_00
And so it's the walk before the sun, the 10 minute walk before the sun comes up becomes later the longer rock, which later becomes the burn to ships workout that Michael talks about on his newsletter every Friday.
01:19:49 Speaker_00
every Friday as they called burn the ships. It's like crazy workout all of his readers do. So I love that. So Michael and I are in sync. And of course, I love to hear stories of people who have a very similar life to mine.
01:20:01 Speaker_00
They're academics, they're writers, they're busy, who simplify things and spend time walking in the desert with a dog. Michael, you are convincing me.
01:20:08 Speaker_00
Don't be surprised if you find me six months from now as your new neighbor saying, all right, when are we rocking? I just started a sub stack and it's what I'm doing now. Very appealing. It was a cool interview.
01:20:17 Speaker_00
Read The Comfort Crisis, read Scarcity Brain, 2percent.com. That's 2-T-W-O-P-H-C-T.com to learn more about his newsletter. And I hope you enjoyed today's in-depth. I don't know when the next one's coming, but I'm enjoying this now.
01:20:29 Speaker_00
I'm able to talk to people I like about. So in January, I want to do at least one, maybe two more. If you have suggestions, you can send those to Jesse at calnewport.com.
01:20:38 Speaker_00
Otherwise, I'll see you back on Monday with the next normal episode of the podcast. Until then, as always, stay deep. Hi, it's Cal here. One more thing before you go.
01:20:54 Speaker_00
If you like the Deep Questions podcast, you will love my email newsletter, which you can sign up for at calnewport.com. Each week I send out a new essay about the theory or practice of living deeply.
01:21:11 Speaker_00
I've been writing this newsletter since 2007 and over 70,000 subscribers get it sent to their inboxes each week.
01:21:19 Speaker_00
So if you are serious about resisting the forces of distraction and shallowness that afflict our world, you got to sign up for my newsletter at calnewport.com and get some deep wisdom delivered to your inbox each week.