before our ancestors scarcity used to take care of that, but what are we supposed to do in this era of ever increasing abundance? well, to discuss that i am now joined by a michael easter, a visiting lecture in journalism at the university of las vegas, and also also the conference crisis. michael, it's great to talk to you. congratulations on the grade book. hey, thanks so much for having me on. i'm excited to chat. now let's start with it's a subtitle which tells people to quote, embrace discomfort to reclaim your wild, happy and how fate self. why does it need to be reclaim? well, i think you hit it in the beginning and the intro there, it's that we evolved in these environments of scarcity. and so we developed these drives to always do that, which was most comfortable. for example, we avoid movement. we are wired to be lazy. when we have access to food, we have incentives to over eat it on and on and on. we avoid risk,

but in our past environments, they are actually kind of dangerous. they no longer are. and so now that we've tipped into this world of comfort in a lot of ways, if you think about the things that most influence your daily life, they're all new within about 100 years old. and they're all designed to make you more comfortable. so we have this easy access to calorie dense food. we've engineered movement to movement out of our days. we don't experience temperature swings. we don't have to put effort into why things are easy and this is great. don't get me wrong. we're living longer. more people on earth, but when all we do is follow that drive, we have to be comfortable all the time it backfires. now you keep using that we. 2 you know, we have to address, we really are at this point because when i was reading your book, i thought it was a very honest this waiter against the western in particular, the american life though, because apparently the idealized image of comfort with enormous costs in the form

of depression ability, an overall lifeless miss. you didn't intended as a social critique, did you? i don't know if i did, and i agree with you that when i say we, when i'm talking about western cultures, you know, i tend to think about a lot of the problems that i talk about in a book there. first world problems. this is we like, you know, there's that kind of funny thing we use, but i do think that, you know, as the world is generally improving, you're seeing these problems creep into parts of the developing world. i mean, obesity rates aren't really falling anywhere in the world. people aren't really moving more every day anywhere. right? so i think as, as we continue to improve the world, i think these problems are, have a tendency to grow. now shrink. now you mentioned a laziness in build evolutionary mechanism to help us save energy and abortion at

most effectively. but both individual bodies and human societies as a whole are self regulating systems. historically, they adapted pretty indefinitely to all sorts of changes. why do you think these particular time presents such a challenge? again, looking at the d and depression rates, it's clearly seems like i'm missing taishan. yeah. so if you look at the research, it suggests that our ancestors, before we really industrialized, they moved about 14 times more and we did per day. now they were not exercising. they were living life. weiss wife used to force us to have to move this much and so they wouldn't move when they didn't have to because it would just burn up extra energy that was hard to come by. so we still have that drive and now you look at today. when they do research on what percent of people take the stairs when there's

also an escalator, only 2 percent. so that really shows you how deeply ingrained misses and life no longer presents us with need to move. it's, you know, we've really shifted from weis. that is based around physical effort, whether that was hunting and gathering or farming too, a lot of work is now being done behind the screen. even the few farming jobs that are around in the developed world. there are some behind computer screens there right there. like in these gigantic machines that are doing all the work for them. so the number of jobs that really require physical effort are slowly falling over time. you know, my go, i used to fully subscribe to these evolutionary arguments for extreme discomfort, but them, if you look at kids, regardless of where they are in the world, they have no problem being uncomfortable. in fact, you know, real authentic fun almost always includes. some degree of discomfort,

it includes moment, it includes being dirty, sweat, a smelly exhaust, that oftentimes hungry, sometimes bruised or scratched. and i know many adults who managed to carry these after she had throughout life. i wonder if you've figured out what prompts people to trade this bull embodied leaving for you know, this comforting anesthesia that you describe in your book. i think you're right about kids. it's like we inherently know. we need to do these things and kids just in our adult lives, we can kind of just get pickled into our routine where you know, it's easier to not do that kind of stuff. i think that sometimes people need to hit a moment where they realize that change needs to happen. you state a lot in you know, people who lose a significant amount of weight or maybe it's a health stair. and i think that often compels people who are formally not doing

much movement to do movement. i also believe that there are some people who they just are wire till to want to move right and are kind of like the rare people. but so i worked at a magazine called mental for a lot of years. it's a, it's a really big man's mental magazine. and you know, we always said, is there any time like if you do a workout, do you ever regret it? like no. right. but actually going and doing that work out, you never want to do it at 1st because of these drives. it's not that i want to pick up an argument with you, but i think there is sort of a biological argument to be made because many of those activities they involve endorphins. so whether you do fasting or whether you do a ron or. busy you know, subject yourself to all sorts of discomfort. you are actually have a burst of endorphins. how helping you to, to deal with it. so,

as we're thinking about your main advise of sort of setting discomfort as a way through a live or a way of getting out of this malise. i wonder if it really has to be discomforting . because at the end of the day, you get a lot of pleasure out of doing that. actually the nature evolved. all those ways of helping you leave life without that much discomfort and pretty challenging physically challenging lives. yeah, i mean i, i think that that sort of the lesson of the book is like, things will be uncomfortable at 1st, but there are rewards to this on the other stock. people have a problem dealing with the discomfort that is the inherent bias. so if you look at something like exercise, now you look at the u. s. exercise guidelines says you should do 150 minutes a week of physical activity. should stress train twice a week. the guidelines are not that hard. they were talking things like gardening,

challenge, only 20 percent of americans hit them. a lot of other countries have similar numbers. so i think that what people really have problem with is bridging that gap and sort of going through that discomforts because that's a little too scary. but once they do, yeah, there's a lot of benefits there. now, i don't want to get you political, but i have to ask you how much all of that is a result of this so called free capitalism with its incessant paddling of consumption and the ever present comparisons with the, with the jones's and the many points of advertising and so on and so forth. is that to some extent, a function of the economic system that in times people to, to be miserable in the way. yeah. i mean, i do think that the system is set up in such a way that people unconsciously just feel like they need to work more. right.

there's a really great then con, i love and, and basically the message is kind of ask them, why do we do the things we do? why do you go to college? why do you get a job right after college? why do you buy a car? why do you buy a house? there's all this stuff in the american dream, right? it's like we never stop and wonder why. and by chasing that, we often get locked into a system that incentivizes work that is more intellectual. so we're not forced to work. and we're not forced to think about some of the bigger questions that might force us to do things where there is more meaning. i think you mentioned some of the why. and i think what one me why we all have to ask is why do we eat? because in the book you sign an amazing speaker that only 20 percent of our meeting is driven by your logical hunger. you go on to say that, well, most of us leave in the dinner, played size place and what i hear in that is many of the lives and worlds reaches

and treasures gets traded for. i've been now act of eating that is not even satisfying or nourishing at the end of the day. am i taking too far? no, i don't think so. so if you think about the environment that we evolved in, we developed these incentives, the form of opening to when we had food to eat too much of it and to really prefer a calorie dance for. now this is to make sense one, so it was at a premium would store that food on our, on our body as fat and it would help us live on if we ever couldn't find it. well now nase, there's food everywhere and it is ultra process and really designed to sort of hijack these evolutionary don't mean mechanisms we have and open me makes us feel good. so you find that a lot of people will often be for reasons other than real hunger. right. and one of the big ones is that food is a really effortless,

easy escape from stress. you know, if you're feeling a little bit down and you're feeling anxious, you've got too much work. while hand of eminem's makes you feel a little bit better, but it's only a short term for a long time. yeah. so this has consequences over the long term. so i argue in the book, you know, when we think about weight loss, at least in the us, i know a lot of other countries. there's so many kind of wacky diets, and i'll tell you that one type of food is evil and the other is good. at the end of the day, i mean, most of the research suggest that has to do with the fact way gain is just eating too many calories. and why are people eating too many calories will often because they're eating for reasons other than true hunger. a moment ago, michael, you mentioned the consequences of aging too much, and i think there is also an applicant dimensions here of google proportions because of the food production industry is the biggest polluter of this planet. even if we take the garbage problem out of the equation,

isn't the biggest and the most practical thing, all of us could do for reining in climate change to simply a plas, i think so. yeah, i mean we, we know that a lot of the developed world just eats too much. i mean, we're very good people. you look a 100 gathers, these people weigh like 110120 pounds. and so i think that, you know, our nutrition is great. now it's given us a lot of you know, we're living longer, we're living better. we are diseases are no longer a lack of nutrition. our diseases are fueled often by over nutrition. and i think that we eat a lot of meat too, and we know that there are consequences to really have a meat consumption environmentally. i think in the book, you know, i argue that one of the most owing foods is potatoes and potatoes are also one of the most sustainable foods. you know, nowadays in diet culture,

sort of weight loss culture. you see a lot of traditional staple crops, they're vilified as like, oh this is why you're overweight. it's like, no. the problem is that we take our staple crops, we process the heck out of them. we add sugar salt and that to them and they come out in the form of a twinkie. that's why we're over way if we would eat foods in their single ingredient source, right? plain potatoes, plain being, things like that. those are very, very sustainable. they're very sewing and they're very healthy, but we don't want to do that right, because it's not quite as delicious as a 20 years. let's take a very short break right now. we'll be back to the discussion in just a few moments. me or i join me every 1st day on the alex summon show and i'll be speaking to guess in the

world. the politics sport. business. i'm show business. i'll see you then me a new gold rush is underway, and gunner thousands of ill equipped workers are flocking to the goldfields, hoping to strike it. rich children are torn between gold and education. my family was very poor. i thought i was doing my best to get back to school, which still it will have the strongest appeal. the the news the me

a welcome back to world, of course with michael is to offer all of the conference crisis. embrace this conference, your claim, your while happy and healthy. michael before the break we were talking about eating and how some people trade. most of live grade treasures for the simple and banal act of eating. and i'm not reaching here because i used to be in that position myself until i discovered fasting in the many, the grading things that come with it. and one of them was learning how to leave through fear. this is also something that you are right about in the book contending with the fear of death. what did it give you? so as part of the overarching narrative, this book spent more than a month in the arctic on a back country hunt. and, you know, i was hunting,

and i think it's part of the modern develop world, at least in america, in particular, we don't think about dest ever. and this goes from our food system to the fact that me just sort of magically appears at the grocery store and it's design, you know, made to look in such a way that didn't come from something wedding to our funeral system as well. you know, we dress people up after they die to look, there's lifelike as possible. we have a viewing that's a half an hour, and then we put them in the ground and we're told to take our mind off that don't think about it. but through hunting, i sort of had this realization that life requires that for one thing to live on, another thing has to die, whether it's an animal or a plant, right. and i'm wondering about thinking about my own mortality and to learn more about this. i travel to baton, which is a in terms of development metrics, it's ranks very low on the un development scale,

but they consistently rank really high and happiness scores, which is interesting. so there's this kind of what's going on there, and there's a lot of reasons for this, but one of them they think is that the death is woven into the culture. their citizens are instructed to think about their data at least once a day. a lot of cultural celebrations and traditions focus around downstairs, even all around the country. there's these clay pyramids that are clay mixed with ashes of the dead are everywhere. and you know, i spoke to some of their economists as well as buddhist leaders and to take away and essentially that, you know, by realizing and taking into your mind that one day you are going to die. this changes your behavior because i feel like least in america, people tend to like i mentioned before, we have this list of things we need to do, right? and when you think about death, it change your behavior in such a way that you realize maybe what's more important to you. and that leads you to behave in a way that can make you happier. now, whether we like it or not,

the current them damage of covet 19 bring death back into the public consciousness . do you think it's going to make things better or worse? i think you saw 2 things happen with covered. i think that most people maybe 6070 percent just personally to set more to be at home more to eat more. so you saw things like drinking smoking, food consumption, tv, watching all that stuff, rose among most people. but then there was this other group where it almost acted as a sort of wake up call. you know, a spend a lot more time outside. so in the us of more people spent more time inside. there was this, there was also this run to the outdoors and you couldn't get your hands on outdoor activity like that outdoor gear. the national parks were packed with people. and so

i think that there's been 2 reactions. and i think that in terms of work, we're going to see a lot more going in word and we're moving even more movement days even more time behind screams. but i'm hoping that at least one lesson of death will be that we need to do hard things. occasionally we need activity. we need to rethink our how we each, we need to rethink a lot of these things that set us up for a pandemic. that is probably worse than it could have been, had we been taking better care of ourself over the last 100 years into something i think covered, i can give you a bill on your previous life, at least when it comes to your house. it's, you said, could you top on people who i used to put in comfort above the house? and i think even on some level it makes many of your recommendations or your advice

which a you provide on a voluntary basis. it makes it pretty and non negotiable because if they want to survive, they ever imitating virus. we will have to dolphin up a little bit. don't you think? so? yeah, i think so. i mean, when you look at the data, people who you know, are inactive or maybe obese. they add a lot more risk factors when, again, in fact, or come down to co come down with coal, that they were more likely to end up in the hospital on ventilators. and you know, this of course is just a general trend there. of course, very jimmy when healthy people who does not also happen to but i think as a whole, living a certain way that perhaps we know isn't healthy lead. you put you in a risk factors that were more likely to have severe consequences. should you get covered? this is where coughing agent gets a bit mystical for me because it's really a disease that huge hard them metabolic functions, that it's an energy generating function. and indeed, it's much harsher on people who are carrying

a lot of stored energy in their bodies. i'm talking about that. it also leaves a lot of people with chronic weakness or life less natural which you write about regardless by the way of how much they eat. so it's really messes up with your ability all transform, you know, energy into your life force. and in a way, i mean, i almost feel like it was waiting to happen given how absolutely a wasteful we are with energy around us. don't you think that sooner or later some, something like that evolutionary. what happened, isn't that in nature's way of, in a way of teaching a lesson? yeah, i mean, i think that you see these bugs come around. right. i mean, there's, happens often there is slow of 1918. these things are going to happen. and we tend to have a really short term memory. so the way that we've been living, we sort of set ourselves up for when the inevitable happened to be in

a relatively poor position to face that. so that is one thing that i hope we can start to think about. now, you know, i'm certain governments around the world will be thinking about how do we stop or control the next damage. and i'm hoping that people will, you know, governments will give equal weight to thinking about how can we improve the health of our citizens. michael, with all due respect, government, can i tell you what you're going to put into your mouth or how you're going to spend your day? i mean, they can come up with exceed, they can introduce low down, but at the end of the day with a disease that is so metabolic ram depend. 3 you know, some on us should be on the, on the people to, i mean it's 100 percent. yeah. i think so. i think so. i mean, they can do things like incentivized, healthy, eating, incentivized, movement. there's different programs people are thinking about, especially with the rise of wearables. there could be some interesting things and, and, and insures, as well on the private sector. it's

a risk factor. if you have someone who's, you know it's, it's going to cost you more money as an ensure if you have someone who is doing poor lifestyle habits. so i think there's some incentives there that may be people be thinking about, but i 100 percent agree that at the end of the day, individual behavior trumps everything and the research backs up. it's also a philosophical question. to me is because many world religions have the victim of not taking more than you can give to their world and in a way times well with the main thesis of your book. if you're taking too much comfort, you're down one way or another psychologically, physiologically environmentally, etc. but i guess the hardest thing here is to disband your all the measure or find your own golden middle. how did you go about it? my own. so i mentioned that i'll give you sort of an anecdote. i mentioned that i spent more than a month up in the alaskan arctic. and when i got back,

i had just totally reframed how great we now have it in modern life. so before i go up there, it's like i use hot running water every day. never thought about how great that is driving the car, but they never saw great that was don't have to go out and walk 5 miles down hill the stream and bring it back up to get my water. right. but after alaska, like i had to do all those things. and so when i get back into my water, my modern world and i turn on the faucet and hot running water comes out and hits my hands was like, oh my god, this is unbelievable. this is the most amazing thing that i've ever had happened to me, my life. and for 34 years of my life, i have never once thought about how great that is. so i think that sometimes putting yourself in a position where you are removed from somebody, amazing us a modern life helps you become more grateful for that. and that can also, i think change your behavior. i know my behavior change afterwards. you know,

so yeah, you know, there are many discomforting thoughts in your book, but one of them gave me a lot of comfort than that is learning that big. but muscles is in nature gift to allow us walk along distances and carry weight. and i'm sure it, it may give, it may take some weight off people's shoulders, but you're actually arguing that it should be put back on. right? yes. yeah. so the human body of the reason that it is built the way it is, it's basically for 2 reasons. to run long distances in the heat route rather slowly compared to other animals, we would slowly but surely chase animals down. it would eventually topple over from heat exhaustion and we spare him and have dinner, and then we have to carry the animal home. so that's the 2nd thing that we're adopted for is carrying weight over long distances. and we are the only animal that can do that. and so in the book, you know, i argue a lot of people job, a lot of people do the 1st thing. they run long distances,

but how many people for exercise carry heavy stuff? well, it turns out that's probably a better form of exercise because you're getting the cardiovascular benefits. and you're also getting strength benefits. and most people today, the number of people who strain train is really low, but we know that strain training is just as important for your overall health, as is endurance exercise. so i make a case that people should start doing what is called rocking. and this is a foundation of military training where you just simply get a backpack put some way to go for a walk, burns 2 to 3 times, calories of walking. a lot, lot better for you than running cars running can have some risks. it has rather high injury race and gives you that element of strength. i think your book is ultimately about the downsides of progress and, and the great costs that are always associated with it. i wonder if working on it change your belief system in any way because to some extent you are arguing for

a conservative not a political conservatism, but just sort of lifestyle conservative or some sort of ask it isn't. yeah, i did. i mean, i'll go back to that the experience really made me think differently about how good we have it today. go back to our gratitude elements so that definitely change me, but i agree. it also made me realize how important it is to not be complacent. you know, i think it's easy today to whether you are gaining weight, whether you feel like you know, things id or you are depressed. the answer is often not doing the super easy thing . you look at the research and people need to be challenged. we need to move more, we need more time in nature. we need all these things and discover that we used to feel every day as we evolve. and those can often solve a lot of our most pressing problems. so i'm not saying they're going to solve everything by any means, but it does

a lot. and i think that people need us sort of lean into this comfort while michael this is all we have time for, but thank you very much for sharing your thoughts. thank you. i thank you for watching hope to hear again next week on a wells far as me me ah, me. it doesn't look like this is off the old

c o 2. can you to actually use the machine which is at the milk put your budget that i would have to continue with that in the each cookie famous from a credit issued by both of us choose what we've got to do is identify the threats that we have it's crazy. even plantation let it be an arms race is on often very dramatic development. only personally, i'm going to resist. i don't see how that strategy will be successful,

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