00:00:40.000I didn't find it to be appropriate, but I did say at the end, I believe we are designed by God.
00:00:45.000So that is probably just something I just want you to know before listening to this program.
00:00:49.000I didn't feel necessary to chop up our conversation there.
00:00:52.000It's just a little distinction or disagreement, not necessary to say on air.
00:00:56.000But regardless of that, that aside, we do both agree that human beings, at least in the modern context, our species, are not built for what we're currently living through.
00:01:12.000Sitting on our tail, doing nothing, and staring at a screen.
00:02:09.000His spirit, his love of this country, he's done an amazing job building one of the most powerful youth organizations ever created, Turning Point USA.
00:02:17.000We will not embrace the ideas that have destroyed countries, destroyed lives, and we are going to fight for freedom on campuses across the country.
00:03:14.000So I listened to it, and it was so profound, and it changed a lot of ways that I viewed how I was acting and things that I was doing.
00:03:23.000And then I reread it, and then I recommended, I actually told our entire senior staff, all 35 of them at Turning Point USA, that they got to read the book.
00:03:36.000And it's brilliantly written because it's written partially in a narrative form of kind of an experience of hunting in Alaska, but then also part of it really kind of from a clinical data perspective of talking to experts.
00:03:49.000And the author of that book is Michael Easter.
00:03:52.000The name of the book is The Comfort Crisis: Embrace Discomfort to Reclaim Your Wild, Happy, and Healthy, Healthy Self.
00:03:59.000Michael, welcome to the Charlie Kirk Show.
00:04:14.000So the argument is that as the world has become more and more comfortable over time, and it has, especially after the Industrial Revolution, we've lost things that help keep us healthy.
00:04:27.000So, for example, we have engineered movement out of our lives.
00:04:30.000Our food system is mostly around comfort foods.
00:04:33.000We've also removed most challenges from our lives, and especially from our children's lives, and on and on and on.
00:04:40.000There's all these different forms of discomfort that humans evolved to face that used to keep us healthy that are no longer in our lives and we're paying the consequence for it.
00:05:19.000So to give you some context, I started thinking about this because, as you mentioned, the overarching narrative of the book is that I did this month-long hunt, backcountry hunt in the Arctic wilderness.
00:05:29.000Now, hunting, for people who aren't familiar, it's not this action-packed sport that you might think.
00:06:15.000I came up with a bunch of ideas for my business.
00:06:19.000So, I told you that to tell you this: boredom is this evolutionary discomfort that basically tells us whatever you are doing with your time, the return on your time invested has worn thin.
00:06:30.000You're no longer getting a good return on what you're doing.
00:06:33.000So, boredom would kick in to tell us, go do something else.
00:06:36.000You think about, you know, let's say you and I are hunting and it's in the past.
00:06:42.000We need food or else we're going to starve.
00:06:44.000And there's no animals coming through.
00:06:46.000We would get bored and that would tell us go do something else.
00:06:49.000And that something else would probably be go pick potatoes or berries or whatever so we could survive.
00:06:54.000So, boredom is this discomfort that can push us into do something more productive.
00:06:59.000Well, now that we have cell phones, TV screens, computer screens, all kinds of different screens around us, boredom has been co-opted.
00:07:11.000We now have this very easy, effortless escape from boredom 24-7.
00:07:16.000You look at the average American, they now spend more than 12 hours a day engaging with digital media.
00:07:22.000I mean, anytime you feel boredom, you just pull up, pull out your phone or you turn on the TV.
00:07:26.000But boredom is interesting because it has a lot of upsides.
00:07:29.000It's associated with higher rates of creativity.
00:07:32.000Being bored is associated with less stress, less depression, increased happiness.
00:07:38.000So, I'm not saying everyone throws away their phone and all that, but I am saying that, you know, maybe 12 hours a day embedded in media might be quite a bit.
00:07:46.000So, if you talk about the healing properties of boredom, again, when I say this to parents, you know, parents will come to me, you know, 15, 16, 17-year-old kids, they say, my kid's super depressed.
00:07:54.000And I just, thanks to your book in the last couple of weeks, I say, how often do you see your kid bored?
00:08:11.000It needs some time to just reorganize itself.
00:08:13.000Can you talk a little bit about the potential healing properties of boredom in a world where we're just kind of drowning in kind of just this white noise of social media, of which most of the information we actually don't retain?
00:08:40.000Now, focused mode is anytime we're focused on that screen, that social media, whatever it might be, your brain is actually working really hard when it's, when you're outwardly focused with your attention.
00:08:50.000And in the past, we didn't have as much time in this focused mode because now when we feel boredom, we focus on something.
00:08:57.000Whereas in the past, we would probably mind wander.
00:09:01.000We would have time to sort of let our thoughts sort of flow and see where they'd take us.
00:09:06.000And it turns out that, so this focus mode is kind of really hard work for your brain, whereas unfocused mode is more like a rest break.
00:09:13.000It's this period to sort of let thoughts percolate, to have this rest period and revive your brain and thoughts.
00:09:20.000So with all this time we're now spending outwardly focused, it's associated with burnout, stress, with drops in creativity and all these different problems.
00:09:28.000And, you know, since you brought up teens and social media, I think also we need to ask the question, what are we focused on?
00:09:35.000You know, maybe if our attention was always outwardly focused on, I don't know, volunteering, helping others, having deep conversations, maybe that would be a good thing.
00:09:46.000But what it's focused on is whatever is on TikTok, whatever nonsense is on TikTok, is on Instagram.
00:09:52.000It's like these reels that are very much just junk food for your mind.
00:09:56.000And especially for teens, there's a lot of times bullying happens on social media.
00:10:00.000And teens are particularly at risk of mental health problems for bullying because your brain is going through a stage where you're really valuing social acceptance at that point in your life.
00:10:11.000You don't have the perspective that you might when you're say 25 or 30 to be like, yeah, I don't really care what those people think of me.
00:10:34.000And then you have a kid that then stares at the screen looking for the next rush of dopamine and their brains are just getting overcooked.
00:10:43.000But I just want to talk a little bit about another part of the book here that I found super interesting, which was about diet.
00:10:50.000Can you just tease our audience a little bit about some of the discoveries you made with diet and how that ties to the general thesis of Americans or Westerners being too comfortable?
00:11:10.000Rarely do we ever step back and ask the question, why are you eating?
00:11:14.000You look at the data and 80% of eating in America is driven by reasons other than hunger.
00:11:20.000We eat because it's a certain time, because we're stressed, because we're unhappy, because all these different reasons.
00:11:26.000So I think the key insight there, and we can talk more about it later on, is just that people need to understand, one, how much they're eating because everyone totally underestimates how much they eat.
00:11:36.000And then number two, why are you eating?
00:11:48.000And we obviously have an obesity problem in our country and embracing, you know, missing a meal or fasting, pretty, pretty actually not just important, but our ancestors used to do that all the time.
00:11:59.000I mean, this idea of eating three times a day is a new phenomenon.
00:12:03.000And don't be shocked when you have all these other kind of costs associated with it.
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00:12:41.000If you didn't know, Good Ranchers is a fabulous company.
00:14:27.000I want you to expand also just on the great paradox of comfort, which is we're actually wired to seek comfort because for a long time, we as a species didn't have shelter, food, and comfort.
00:14:38.000So now that we have it, it actually makes us unhappy.
00:14:41.000So talk about diet and then unpack that paradox for us.
00:14:44.000Yeah, so to talk about diet, first of all, humans evolve.
00:14:51.000So hunger is this discomfort that basically told us you need food, right?
00:14:56.000And when we had the opportunity to eat food, we would often overeat because that provided a survival advantage.
00:15:27.000And so to your question about how does this play into the larger theme of how comfort has changed over time, in our past, seeking comfort was a good thing.
00:15:37.000We evolved in these environments of extreme discomfort.
00:15:51.000Like we were, our lives forced us to be physically active, but we had no incentive to do any more activity than we needed to, because again, food was scarce.
00:16:03.000So then you plop us in an environment that we've engineered where everything is easy, effortless, easy to come by, food.
00:16:11.000We've engineered movement out of our days.
00:16:13.000We've engineered boredom out of our days.
00:16:15.000And all these drives we have to always do the next most comfortable thing, they start to backfire.
00:16:19.000So you can, this is associated with everything from heart disease to our mental health crisis in the country to just people, you know, really sort of missing the boat on life.
00:16:30.000When you look back at your life, you know, we were just talking about boredom.
00:16:35.000William James said, your life is essentially a culmination of the moments that you were aware of.
00:16:40.000So I think when we look back on our lives, I don't think we're going to be like, man, I really wish I would have pumped up my hours on TikTok.
00:16:47.000That's what I really should have paid attention to, right?
00:16:49.000So I think that we're just kind of missing these moments that are really profound for being a human and make us well.
00:17:53.000And a lot of young people who might think they are depressed, it might just be the brain just saying, like, hey, can you just cool out, man?
00:18:23.000So first you have to know that humans now spend 93% of our time indoors.
00:18:28.000In the past, we were outdoorsy in the sense that we lived outside entirely.
00:18:33.000And because we came up in these environments, they seem to do good things for the human brain.
00:18:36.000So time outside, there's different types of nature that you can be in to improve your mental health.
00:18:43.000But you can get everything from stress reduction to increased happiness, from something as simple as spending 20 minutes in a park three times a week.
00:18:51.000And then the longer you spend in the more wilder types of nature, that's when some really profound changes happen to the human brain that are, like I said in the book, akin to organic Xanax, where there's even some research now where they are taking soldiers who have PTSD.
00:19:06.000They are taking them deep into nature on, say, like a 12-day river rafting expedition.
00:19:11.000And they're coming back with marked, market improvements in mental health.
00:19:50.000So, nature, when you're in nature, it incites this mode in the brain that researchers call soft fascination.
00:19:56.000Now, this is a terrible name, but that's what happens when you leave naming up to scientists.
00:20:01.000But it's basically like meditation, except for your focus is outwardly focused.
00:20:07.000You're kind of quietly taking in this nature, you're like turned down, and you're just kind of letting your mind wander as you're seeing all these sort of nice things to see that you see in nature.
00:20:16.000Now, if you have your phone and you're looking at it, all of a sudden your attention is on TikTok or Instagram or whatever it might be.
00:20:23.000And the same goes with listening to music sometimes.
00:20:26.000So, you're kind of taking in the music.
00:20:28.000So, really, just having this quiet downtime in nature, that's where the benefits seem to really come in.
00:20:35.000Yeah, and I find that to be totally true.
00:20:38.000I mean, so I read this as I was listening to the book, I was like, Oh, yeah, I spent all this time in nature, and then I was like, Wait a second, but I always have my phone and I'm doing phone calls and all that.
00:20:46.000It's no different than just a nicer office, right?
00:21:00.000And it's kind of like Fight Club, which is there's all these rules.
00:21:03.000Like, the first rule of Masogi is you can't tell anybody about Masogi, and then also don't die.
00:21:09.000What is a Masogi, and why is it so important for we as a species to challenge ourselves in environments where we might not succeed?
00:21:18.000When you think of how humans were in the past, we used to have to do hard, challenging things all the time.
00:21:25.000This could be from hunting, this could be from moving to summer into wintering grounds, this could be from a tiger lurking in the bushes, right?
00:21:32.000And each time we would take on one of those challenges, we would learn what our potential was, right?
00:21:36.000Because we get put in a situation where we really struggled, where we really had to challenge ourselves, and we would have moments where we thought, I don't know if I'm going to make it out of this one.
00:21:45.000But when we would come out the other side, we would go, Oh, I can do pretty amazing things that I hadn't realized.
00:21:52.000Nowadays, it's all of a sudden possible to survive and never be challenged, right?
00:21:56.000You're going to have enough water, you're going to have enough food, you're probably going to have a family who loves you, all these things, and that's great.
00:22:02.000But at the same time, by not ever really being challenged, you're never going to learn what you're truly capable of.
00:22:08.000You're not going to be put in that position where you either make the decision to endure or decide to quit.
00:22:14.000And so, by not having that, we really, I think, lose something that's very important about not only being a human, but being able to level up our life in a lot of domains.
00:22:25.000So, enter this wacky idea called Masogi.
00:22:28.000To talk about the Masogi, that's where it really kind of caught my attention.
00:22:31.000Talk about this, it's like a Japanese like nature bath or something.
00:22:36.000Oh, you're thinking of so, Masogi is the challenge element of the book.
00:22:42.000Uh, the nature bath you might be thinking of is from the nature section.
00:22:45.000So, I'll quickly talk about Masogi and then, um, or do you want me to turn to nature immediately?
00:22:50.000No, Masogi, I might be conflating the two.
00:22:53.000I'm sorry, I think that I misunderstood the root of the term Masogi, but talk about Masogi as being a challenge that you might not succeed in, just don't die, and you have to keep it to yourself.
00:23:04.000So, you can't, you can't live stream your Masogi, which I found to be a brilliant component of it.
00:23:10.000So, I just told you all that about challenge to basically tell you in order to recreate these challenges that we used to face in the past that are important for us as a species.
00:23:22.000And the idea is that once a year, you're going to go out into nature and you're going to do something really, really hard, challenging for you.
00:24:19.000They work with all kinds of professional athletes.
00:24:21.000They do all this data and modeling, very scientific.
00:24:24.000But he started doing Masogi because he realizes that what ultimately improves human spirit and potential, it can't be measured.
00:24:31.000So they do these Masogi tasks where, again, you go out into nature, do something really hard.
00:24:36.000But the important thing is that along the way, you're probably going to have a moment where you think you have to quit, where you think that you have reached your edge and there's no going past this thing.
00:24:46.000But if you can just keep putting one foot in front of the other, you're going to get another moment.
00:24:51.000And that's where you look back and say, hey, wait a minute.
00:25:24.000And so you write in the book that they must be inward facing.
00:25:28.000And I found it interesting because it would be tempting for most of modern culture to want to tell the world of the difficult nature task they did after they did it.
00:25:38.000I did a rim to river to rim run, or, you know, I ran 48 miles or whatever it is.
00:25:46.000It's only a true Masogi if you might tell your wife or one other person, but it's not the world's business.
00:25:51.000In fact, that screws up the incentives to talk about that.
00:25:55.000Yeah, we do so many things today just because we want validation from others.
00:25:59.000And we have a million different ways to get that validation.
00:26:02.000Now, I mean, millions of people could follow a person on Instagram and you could get yourself a million pat on the backs by posting about something.
00:26:10.000But what tends to happen is that people start to steer their behavior towards what they think others will approve of.
00:26:17.000It's basically saying, I want you to go out and see if you can do something only for you.
00:26:23.000Because at the end of the day, that's going to be what's really important at improving your potential and improving the human spirit.
00:26:31.000And the other thing that I like about Masogi is it's best to think of something quirky, something made up, right?
00:26:39.000So don't run a 10K or a 5K because then you can compare yourself to others.
00:26:44.000And comparing yourself to others, it ultimately just sets a ceiling on your potential because you're going to fall to what others have done, not rise to what they've done most of the time.
00:26:54.000So by just making up some weird thing, like for me, it might be, oh, yeah, there's this, there's this mountain peak I see every day.
00:26:59.000I'm like, mute, I'm going to see if I can get up there in a day.
00:27:03.000The 50-50 chance part of it is beautiful because, you know, for example, example, my mother, she's 72 years old, going on 73 and next week.
00:27:13.000And she read about this concept and she challenged herself to a hike that was farther than she'd ever done before.
00:27:20.000Now, of course, it wasn't that long of a hike, right?
00:27:22.000She's 72, but at the same time, it was really long for her.
00:27:25.000And it showed her that she was a lot more physically capable than she thought.
00:27:29.000And because of this, there's this trip she wanted to take overseas, but she decided she wasn't going to do it because she didn't think she could do all the walking that it required.
00:27:36.000Well, after that, she signed up for the trip and she's going.
00:27:42.000Once you see your limitations actually aren't your limitations, it's unbelievably liberating.
00:27:47.000And the other rule of Masogi is: don't die.
00:27:49.000Just for everyone out there that's listening to this, yes, quirky and all that.
00:27:53.000I mean, when I was listening to it, you were describing one of these masogi's.
00:27:56.000They're like moving a barrel, they're moving a boulder on the bottom of like the Santa Barbara Bay.
00:28:01.000I'm like, geez, I hope they thought this through.
00:28:06.000That's a very important part of this because if it's quirky and if it's in nature and you have a 50-50 shot, I want to be very clear: it's a 50-50 shot of completing the Masogi, not a 50-50 shot of survival.
00:28:21.000So, Michael, I want to ask you also just about your own personal story, which I found to be super interesting.
00:28:27.000And you know, you're a very talented writer, and the way you did the book was brilliant because it weaves in and out of narrative.
00:28:33.000So, it's not just all this, you know, data after date after data, but it's this story of you going up to Alaska for this caribou hunt, which was obviously out of your comfort zone.
00:28:43.000And it seemed as if this almost had, you know, I don't want to say religious significance, but almost like a rebirth significance.
00:28:49.000It was definitely out of your comfort zone.
00:28:51.000I wouldn't say that the hunt was a masogi.
00:28:54.000I mean, you wrote about it, so it wouldn't necessarily be, but it was something that really pushed you to your boundaries and had a profound impact.
00:29:01.000There's a lot of young people watching this.
00:29:03.000Talk a little about your story, but kind of some of your background and kind of how you've become this kind of thought leader in this ever-growing genre of discomfort can actually lead you to happiness.
00:29:45.000And then one morning, for whatever reason, I just woke up and I could very, very clearly see that if I were to continue on this path of drinking, it would be very much more easy and comfortable in the short term, but it would ultimately end up killing me early.
00:30:00.000Now, I didn't know if I was going to die at, say, 40, 60, 80.
00:30:04.000I just knew it would be earlier than I needed to.
00:30:06.000And more importantly, is that my life would be a lot less interesting and well-lived and significant.
00:30:11.000And this other path I saw, that was going to be very uncomfortable.
00:30:15.000I was going to have to relearn how to live and go through, go essentially into the dark cave where you don't know what lies there.
00:30:23.000But I chose that path and I ended up getting sober, and it was very, very uncomfortable in the short term.
00:30:30.000But on the other side of that, and this is what's important, is that my life improved across the board.
00:30:48.000I was able to, you know, pay off my car.
00:30:50.000But, but even more important is how I felt internally.
00:30:53.000I finally felt good about myself, right?
00:30:55.000Because I think most people, when you have a problem like that, you're drinking to find comfort because for whatever reason, you're not comfortable with yourself or something in your life is wrong.
00:31:06.000And in order to get over that, you have to go through the discomfort of fixing that, figuring out what is going on.
00:31:36.000If you want to lose weight, you're probably going to be hungry.
00:31:39.000If you want to improve your mental health, you're probably going to have to unpeel some onions and ask yourself some hard questions.
00:31:45.000And so that all kind of accumulated to basically ending up meeting a guy whose name is Donnie Vincent.
00:31:52.000Great guy, backcountry bow hunter and filmmaker, real thought leader in space.
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00:32:56.000You met Donnie, who has a little bit of a colorful language based on the book.
00:32:59.000Tell us about Donnie and how that got your journey going.
00:33:14.000We first do this hunt in Nevada, and I sort of realize, oh, the world has become very, very comfortable because I'm up in the backcountry for five days, freezing my butt off, starving, having to hike around everywhere to get water, hunting, bored out of my mind.
00:33:28.000Then I get back home to Las Vegas and my house is air-conditioned.
00:34:03.000But I'm also not saying that everyone has to go up to the Arctic for 30 days to see the benefits of discomfort.
00:34:09.000In the book, I talk about a lot of little ways that you can weave discomfort purposefully into your life to improve your health.
00:34:16.000I'm really an advocate of thinking, how can I make everyday life just a little bit harder in different ways?
00:34:21.000Because I think that's where the benefits usually accumulate the most over time.
00:34:26.000So in closing here, Michael, you know, right now, young people are living in the most suicidal, depressed, alcohol-addicted, anxious, and psychiatric drug-addicted generation in history.
00:34:37.000Your book, I think, addresses a lot of that, but just any other thoughts on how we go about solving it?
00:34:43.000I think your thesis is profound and is really kind of, in some ways, pioneer work where you argue that the best of modernity is actually now harming this generation, where they have everything on demand, and now it's time to embrace discomfort as a virtue.
00:35:00.000Just any closing thoughts on what we're up against, which I consider to be the crisis of our time, which is a generation that is killing themselves at record numbers, medicating themselves at record numbers, and no one really seems to know why, but I think you've done the best job of pinpointing that closing thoughts.
00:35:16.000Yeah, you know, I'd be pretty sad too if I sat around on TikTok for 10 hours a day and in my home and not ever in nature.
00:35:23.000And I think that we've lost out on a lot of connection.
00:35:26.000And I think that when you look at all the research, what makes humans happy is struggling for something, really going up against it, going through challenges, and coming out on the other side, having learned something about yourself.
00:35:38.000We're really missing these experiences that we used to have that bolstered our youth, that brought them from point A to point B in their lives.
00:35:47.000And there's just so many different ways that life has become so easy for young people.
00:35:51.000And I think it goes from easy access to entertainment on cell phones to the fact that they spend so much less time outdoors, the fact that nothing is hard anymore.