Name: Joe Rogan Experience #1649 - Michael Easter
Uploaded: 2021-05-11T00:00:00.000Z
Description: Watch the stand-up comedy video 'Joe Rogan Experience #1649 - Michael Easter' from PowerfulJRE on Comedy Buff. Published 2021-05-11. Transcript available.

Watch the stand-up comedy video 'Joe Rogan Experience #1649 - Michael Easter' from PowerfulJRE on Comedy Buff. Published 2021-05-11. Transcript available.

Joe Rogan Experience #1649 - Michael Easter

Joe Rogan Podcast, check it out.
The Joe Rogan Experience.
Train by day, Joe Rogan Podcast by night, all day.
Hello, Michael.
Hello, Joe.
What's going on, buddy?
Good to see you.
Good to see you as well.
Thanks for coming down here.
Hey, thanks for having me on, man.
What made you decide to write about comfort?
Isn't comfort a good thing, Michael?
What is going on?
Well...
You have a problem with comfort?
The comfort crisis?
Is it really a crisis?
I argue that it is a crisis.
One, I don't have a problem with comfort.
I do have a problem with always being comfortable, always leaning into comfort,
which is what we're doing now.
Yeah.
So if you think of the average person's daily life, they wake up in the soft
bed, temperature-controlled home.
They shuffle over to the microwave, microwave of breakfast burrito, right, that
came in from who knows where and is made with who knows what.
And then it's like, I go to work, I drive to work, I sit behind this screen all
day.
I don't have to move at all or put any effort into this day.
And then it's back to bed in front of the TV.
And you just rinse and repeat that.
At no point in daily life, I would argue, are people really challenged or
really uncomfortable anymore, like we were in our past.
Some people, of course.
Some people.
David Goggins is still alive and well.
Yes, David Goggins is still alive.
He's running right now.
And so he's like the type of person, you see what happens when you start to
push against that, right?
When you kind of have this moment where you go, maybe I'm a little too
comfortable.
And you start to sort of investigate, okay, what is it with discomfort?
How can I get into some discomfort?
And what can that do for me?
And then at the extreme end of that is Goggins.
Yeah.
Well, it's for folks that just, like, say if you work in an office and this is
how you make a living and you have to do that commute and there's no other
options and this is what you do.
Like, for them to hear this, they're like, yeah, yeah.
Okay, so what?
What now?
Well, I mean, the answer is not to totally overhaul your lifestyle, right?
I mean, we have amazing lives right now.
The fact that we don't have to go out and hunt for food or put physical effort
into every day is great.
But at the same time, I think, and I argue in the book, The Comfort Crisis,
that we need these moments that push back at us.
And we need to sort of investigate these discomforts that we used to face in
our evolutionary past.
So, for example, two, that's the percent of people who take the stairs when
there's the choice.
Two percent?
Two percent.
People who take the stairs when there's a choice of an escalator.
Seventy percent of people, more than 70 percent now, are overweight or obese.
Only 20 percent of hunger – sorry, only 20 percent of eating is actually
driven by physiological hunger.
Eighty percent of it is just, I'm bored.
It's noon.
I guess I'll eat or I'm stressed out, right?
We exercise more – we exercise 14 times less than our ancestors nowadays.
Our ancestors just by virtue of trying to survive, you mean?
Yeah, exactly.
Yeah, so they didn't exercise, right?
Like our hunter-gatherer, they never did chin-ups.
Exactly.
That was life to them.
Yeah, they just were trying to get by.
Yeah, and we spend 95 percent of our time indoors as well.
And we know that there's benefits to getting out and moving more.
We know there's benefits to being outside.
We also know that there's benefits to truly being challenged in life.
It's like I said before, you can basically never be challenged as you go
through life in a real sort of fundamental way, and you'll probably have a
decent life.
But, you know, if you think about potential and human potential, let's say that
human potential is this big circle around us, right?
Now, most of us live in this sort of dinner-sized place.
We never go out and explore the edges of our potential by trying to get
uncomfortable and doing things that are maybe a little outside of our comfort
zone.
We can just kind of exist in this sort of soft space that we've created for
ourselves right now.
And, of course, there are people who get out and, you know, into those edges,
like the Goggins of the world, like the Cam Haynes of the world.
But I think most people don't really go out and see what they're capable of.
Now, I don't think anybody's going to push back against this book.
You don't?
No, I don't, which creates kind of a dilemma for you.
Is there comfort in just writing about discomfort, right?
Is there a debate here?
Because I don't think there is.
I mean, I think what you're saying is, like, irrefutable.
I don't think anybody can say, well, there's nothing wrong with being sedentary
and having your body turn into jello.
Well, there's nothing wrong with living a boring life with no stress at all and,
well, stress, but mental stress.
No actual physical adversity to overcome, which stresses out the body but
actually relaxes the mind.
Yeah.
Which is, that's what people are missing, right?
When you actually physically exert yourself, it actually calms the mind.
And I think there's probably a direct correlation, although I haven't done any
studies, I would imagine there's a direct correlation between physical inactivity
and mental depression.
I would have to imagine that there's at least some crossover there.
Yeah, there absolutely is.
I think that exercise, the studies show, it grows the hippocampus, which is an
area that tends to be shrunken in people who have depression.
So this is why the APA now advocates that psychiatrists recommend exercise to a
lot of their patients.
But I think to get back to your question of, am I going to have any pushback?
Right.
Is there any pushback?
And am I staying within my comfort zone by having this argument?
So the way that I reported this book is I spent more than a month hunting with
Donnie Vincent in the Arctic backcountry.
Shout out to Donnie Vincent, you handsome bastard.
Yeah.
We were talking about you earlier.
Handsome, rugged bastard.
For people who don't know him, he's a backcountry bowhunter and filmmaker.
He goes out into, you know, super extreme, off-the-grid areas.
Yeah, we were saying he's controversial, but not for any real reason.
He's controversial because he doesn't wear camo and he wears, like, a lot of
wool.
He looks good in the wild.
He does.
Yeah, he looks like a fucking model for some J.Crew catalog out there wandering
around.
It would be, like, an Abercrombie & Fitch, which I didn't know used to be, like,
a little offside here,
was a company that sold, like, fly fishing and outdoor stuff.
Now it's, like, these weird young models.
You know, like, really young.
There's Donnie Vincent.
Look at that rugged, handsome bastard.
Yeah, he's like, look at him.
Looks like he's walking out of a Filson catalog.
He does.
Right there.
Completely.
Good dude.
Good dude.
Love that guy.
Very good guy.
Abercrombie & Fitch, like, now when you go there, they spray that fucking
horrible scent in the place, you know?
Do they still do that COVID-wise?
Maybe it's bad for COVID?
Kills COVID?
I would imagine it kills it, yeah.
It kills everything.
I had a friend who worked there and she said, like, every 20 minutes, we have
to do, like, 20 sprays.
There's some, like, very specific number.
It stinks in there.
But that used to be a company that made outdoor stuff for, like, people who
wanted to go fly fishing.
Yeah.
And now it's, like, these, they look like they're, like, 18 models in their
poses.
They're all, like, real slender and they look, like, real slinky.
Oh, yeah.
Pull up a photo of, like, Abercrombie & Fitch models.
They were the ones that would put the shirtless dudes out on, at their store in
New York, right?
Actual shirtless dudes?
Actual shirtless dudes would be on the street.
Oh, really?
You know, in their Abercrombie jeans.
Yeah, it was ridiculous.
I was just looking it up, though.
Even when it was a hunting company back in 1900, it started in Manhattan.
Really?
There you go.
I mean, it was, but it was made for that.
Yeah, but 1900 in Manhattan, like, everybody hunted back then.
Like, you would go up to the Poconos and shit and people would, they would
leave.
So these guys were, like, wandering around New York City with no shirts on?
Yeah.
Looking good, boys.
Go back to that photo.
Which one?
The one that you just showed?
The guys out there?
No, the other one?
That one.
Yeah.
Look at the guy on the far right.
Bro, you're about to show your talk.
This is ridiculous.
It's all dick root, right?
Showing the dick root.
So what was the purpose of this?
Like, to get people, they're wearing flip-flops, too?
Flip-flops, jeans, no shirt, and an open jacket.
It's probably, like, January, too, right?
Yeah, probably cold as shit.
And they're all flexing constantly.
Look at them.
There you go.
Tough work if you can get it.
Well, you know, you're dealing from a very small sample pool.
To be able to be that guy?
I mean, these guys all have, like, 7% body fat.
But it used to be an outdoor company.
That was, like, what they sold.
They sold, like, canoes and shit, I think.
I'm pretty sure.
I saw, like, an old catalog, right?
Yeah.
Like, fly fishing gear and stuff.
Yeah.
Outerwear.
Kind of that old-school, cool stuff.
A lot of canvas.
Like, waxed.
Yeah, look at this.
Abercrombie & Fitch, yeah.
Canoe guys shooting ducks out of a canoe.
Why don't they put those guys out in Manhattan on the street?
I would much rather buy from them.
Because people would go, go back to Texas.
Is that a gun?
Get out of here.
We don't need guns around here.
But they do.
Meanwhile, they do.
There was a mass shooting in Times Square yesterday.
Oh, yeah.
Jeez.
Anyway, back to this pushback against your book.
You're writing about something that pretty much most people agree.
Yeah, I think.
But it's like, do we really know how to get back into discomfort?
And, like, in the book, I argue that there are a handful of fundamental
discomforts that we lost over time as the world became more comfortable.
Okay.
So, a few of the important ones are that we don't take on these big, epic
challenges in nature like we used to.
So, for example, traditional rites of passage, all totally gone.
Yeah.
You know, in the past, we would send young people out to do some trial.
And the idea was that, like, hey, you're at stage one of life right now, but we
need you to get to stage two so you can be a better contributor to the tribe.
And so you can almost become a new, more confident, capable person.
Yeah.
And in order to do that, we're going to send you out in the wild to do any
number of things.
It depends on, you know, what the culture was.
So, for example, the Maasai, they would send young warriors out to hunt lions
with a spear.
And if you kill the lion, then you would officially transition into a warrior.
And, you know, in that space, that trying middle ground, that's where you learn
a lot about yourself and your potential.
And by going through something like that, you come out on the other side, an
improved person.
We've totally lost that.
And there's all kinds of different rites of passage throughout time.
They're essentially what Joseph Campbell called the hero's journey.
There's this, you know, typical archetype of, you know, leave comfort of home,
go into this trying, challenging, uncomfortable middle ground, come out the
other end.
And you've learned something about yourself and evolved.
That's gone.
And you think about young people today, like, how often are they challenged?
Right.
You start to see helicopter parenting come in in about 1990 is when it started
because there was all this media around kidnappings.
So parents wouldn't let their kids outside go to the playground.
Oh, is that really what caused that stuff?
It was a bunch of media around kidnapping, which kidnapping was not a big
phenomenon, right?
But it just got exploded because it's...
Well, it's a big phenomenon if someone kidnaps your kid.
Yeah.
And it did happen.
Yeah, it did.
That's the problem.