Off the Record With Michael Easter

[MUSIC] Most of us are going to do the thing, it's just the easiest. The stories we tell each other are never, yeah, I sat in this really comfortable chair and watched this show. It's always the sort of things that had hardship attached to them. Discomfort is actually life, that's actually the good stuff. Discomfort and the hardship is often the signal that this really actually matters. What life in the river mirror do I want to set lived, and not the most insulated comfort, but the most adventure field and the most fun. [MUSIC] Yo, welcome to Off the Record with John, here on the Dr. John Deloni show. Dude, I'm so psyched for y'all to hear this conversation today. I'm talking with one of the greatest people on the planet. Listen, in this weird little ecosystem I live in, where there's experts, and scientists, and YouTubers, and podcasters. Behind closed doors, it's a small, tightening group of people. You're usually one or two people away from just about everybody, right? Somebody's got a number to somebody who's got a number to somebody. And whether it's rumor, whether it's fact, people's reputations get around. This guest today, this person I'm having on, is one of only a handful of people, that I've never heard one person say something negative about because he's simply extraordinary. He's a great human, he's a great husband, I can't believe I'm saying this, he's a dog dad. But he is a great pet owner, right? And he is a brilliant thinker and distiller of information. He wrote a masterpiece that you've heard me talk about a million times on the show called The Comfort Crisis. I'm talking about the great Michael Easter. He is the founder of the 2% group, right? And he has a sub-stack, it's one of a few sub-stacks that I pay money for, that comes out a couple of times a week. It's a newsletter that comes out where he takes really complex science and really complex nutrition, really complex workout information, really complex mental health stuff, and distills it down, so even a guy like you and me can understand it. He's a delightful person on this episode, we talk about comfort in relationships, discomfort in relationships. We talk a lot about marriage, we talk about loneliness, we talk about how our whole culture has been set up for us to all be comfortable. And unfortunately, that's killing us all. And most importantly, he tells us what we can do about it. So, relax, buckle up, share this episode with everybody, it's a keeper. This is my conversation with a great human being, one of my great friends, the wonderful Michael Easter. So long time no see, dude. Long time. Long time no see. Too long. I feel like we had our most of this interview over breakfast, so I guess we can just talk about our favorite movies. Well, I do want to highlight from breakfast, the biscuit. I live on the west coast, that is not biscuit country, and so I came here, and the waiter said you could add a biscuit. And you really said, you know, you're here in the south, you're here. We like to add type two diabetes to every meal. It's like a thing we do. Yeah, I can, I could feel my blood sugar just really going north. So worth it, though, you're so worth it, one in the south, get diabetes, and then you'll go back to Vegas and sweat it off, it'll be good. All right, so I was thinking about this. So I have a core life philosophy, which is have a guy, and obviously that's not gendered. I've got many women that are each out to also, but have a person for any number of things. And so I've got one of my oldest friends in the world works in HVAC. And I've had two air commissioners go out the last decade in different houses. I've never even occurred to me to Google something. I just call him, I'm like, hey, which one should I get? And he says, where do you live? And he says, buy this one, and that's the one I get. And so I was thinking of all the things where you're the guy. And I was thinking of all the times I've texted and or called you, or we've had a meal. And I'm like, hey, before we get going, and I rattle off. And so you've become my guy for mental health questions, for supplement questions, for workout questions, and now even for marriage questions. And so for everyone watching, this is my the guy on your influence over my life has expanded. So if I make it to 70 or 80, I think I got some mileage on this body from when I was younger. But if I do, I'll write you an email, or I might just telepathically, whatever, by that point. Yeah, we'll have chips, but thanks for the work that you do. Like we'll talk about this at the end, but you have the best sub stack that exists. Your podcast is awesome. Your writing is awesome. So thanks for the influence. Well, I feel the same way about you, man. Mental health questions. Well, I'll take this universally, no matter who I talk to, out in our little weird world we live in, 100%, and that's rare, because you know, I mean, like everyone has a thing with somebody, right? That guy's a lot, or that guy's annoying, or that guy didn't tell the truth, 100%, people like, oh, my cleast was the best. So thanks for being a good human. That's awesome. Well, I feel the same way about you, and I feel like we connect, I mean, for God's sakes look at us. You did roll in here in a great and a dead shirt. I had to. I would never wear this publicly beyond a dead show, but I'm like, you know what? You're always in your rock band shirts. I need to bring some hippie, I need to sprinkle some hippie dust in here. I've tried. I've tried. I've tried. What I like about your work in particular is you're very intellectual, but we also connected a, there I say, bro level. Yeah. Yeah. I could go hunting with you. I could, I could drag you to a dead show. You could drag me to a punk show. We'd have an awesome time. But then in the meantime, we'd be like, yes, but Carl Young once said, right, there's only a few people you can do that with. It's awesome. Fantastic, man. All right. So I got to like a whole list of stuff I want to talk about. And you tell me how it's good in different direction, and I'll ask you this, you've recently submitted a manuscript for a book that will come out next year. How much of that do you want to talk about or not? Yeah. We can talk about it. Sure. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. That's right. That's a problem for future, Michael. Yeah. Very good. Okay. So I want to, you recent, let's, let's start here. I've been talking about, if I were to take all the mental health issues we have as a culture and you and I talked this morning over breakfast, like, you can map the rise of the stock market in the US and almost directly on top of it, map the rise of mental health diagnostics right on top of it. Yes. In this weird way, we've solved for every problem that has plugged humanity forever. And if we just just look at data, it seems that we're going more insane. The more we solve for these problems, the crazier we're going as a culture. We're more anxious, more, more, more, more. And I think we could pull that apart and say diagnostics have expanded and that's nerds speak for like more and more people have more access to clinicians that then give more labels that go into data sets, all that, all that's fine. Yeah. And just, you know, what we would consider trauma say 50 years ago meant you had to be physically assaulted to get trauma right now. You could have seen a physical assault or say 20 years ago, you could have seen a physical assault. And then today you could, someone could have called you something rude that offended you and that could be considered trauma. Right. So it's like this sort of, it's a widening and also the just that changing definition. Yeah. There's a great George Carlin bit where he talks about, well, we're one that came back it was called shell shocked. And then after World War II, I forgot the one he had after that, but now it is post-traumatic stress disorder. And we get further and further away from what the thing actually is and it expands, right? And we talk about that. For me, if I distilled it all the way down, the one neon sign that's been flashing for me as I've read all the nerd stuff has been, we are super, super lonely as a culture. And I found myself accidentally, I don't say blaming, but pointing fingers at people saying you all need to go, I need to. We got to go make friends. Like we have kind of like, we used to have to work the farms. We don't do that anymore. So now we have to go to the gym. We got to move our bodies. Similarly, we used to be surrounded by family friends and neighbors and that was our little tribe. We don't have that. You got to go make friends. You recently published a man. It's so good. I'll be citing you at the next big talk I give. Expanding the issues with loneliness in a way that I had missed. It's way worse than I thought it was in painting all the way back at how our culture has shifted. And so talk to me about that article that you wrote and just the way you laid it out was, it was overwhelming. How much it has shifted, right? It's not a matter of us just not having friends anymore or having a quote unquote tribe. It's way bigger than that. Yeah. I believe I titled the article 1000 ways to get disconnected. Yeah. And it really just looks at how society has changed in such a way that you no longer have to interact with people as much. So I had a bunch of examples, but to take one, people now wear earpods everywhere they go. Well, you're not going to talk to people when you have earbuds in your ears. We were talking about how the other day on the show, how when you went to order fast food, you did so through a screen and the food just sort of appears. You no longer even had to have that minute long conversation with the checkout clerk, which sometimes that's just, hey, I'll have the number two and he goes, okay, that'll be five dollars. But sometimes it goes, hey, how's your day going? Oh, yeah. And then he tells you a funny story. You tell him a funny story. And those tiny interactions are really important. And this goes, I mean, this goes all the way down. Like if you just start to pick apart how life has shifted over the last hundred years, we have four more interactions. I would argue one with the people that are closest to us for a variety of reasons, but also just people in our community that we would have used to talk to for maybe say two or three minutes and that might seem like a throwaway. Oh, yeah, not a big go. Who cares? No, those are actually really important when you look at the data. Yeah. Like those tiny interactions. I mean, think you check out the grocery store self checkout now. Yeah. Right. You know, I even talked to the clerk. What else? What else did I have? There was people go to bars less, which I'm not advocating, hey, people go out and drink your face off. I'm not saying that at all. But bars used to be really important community gathering places where people would find common ground. They would go back and forth on political issues, but it was in kind of a safe space. And now how do people talk about politics? On Facebook screaming at each other, right? Because you don't have, you don't see the humanity in the other person as you have that little conversation. Or you might see a button on a on a teller that said, I voted a certain way. And they would smile at you and say, how's your day going? There was a humanization too, right? Or somebody might stand in front of you with a shirt of a band that you thought was evil, but they're a real nice person, right? Or whatever. But all that has been, I was thinking even of Daniel Tosh has a hilarious bit about this. But like, when I was a kid, you'd pull up and park at the airport and you'd walk all the way through and you'd wait. I'd wait for my mom with my dad for my mom to get off the plane. And that you just all stood around and waited, but you're standing around with a whole bunch of other people. And it was not a good quote unquote optimization of our time. And we missed potential clients or whatever we nonsense we've piled into that. But there was a whole bunch of people standing around. And I got to watch all these different hugs and cheering and signs, all that stuff. And now you pull up to the to the if you don't Uber, right? Now if somebody asked me to write to like, hey, can you give me right to the airport? My first thought is like, why don't you just Uber like an adult, right? But somebody hops in the car and you're off. And there's no human, right? And then I get this message that says these humans are trying to kill you. They hate you. They want you dead. And then I've got an ancient nervous system, this system. Like you wrote about like the ATM machines, like everything has been optimized to become frictionless, right? But yeah, a lot of transactions that used to occur in person like you'd have to go to the bank, right? And then you talk to the teller. And well, now that's just all digital. And you can you can apply that to so many different parts of our lives. And when I looked at the date, I think it said that people interact with random others about 70% less than they used to. And so this is a cutting out of about, I believe it was 20 hours a month of time that we would just be interacting with random people. Like that's a lot of time. Yeah. And it turns out that time was actually really important, not just beyond the, hey, you and I had a fun conversation and it lifted my spirits and you told me funny story and we connected. But also to go back to, you see the humanity and all these other people that live around you work from home, has rows, super convenient that I don't have to commute at the same time. When you're in an office, you're having to talk to people, like you have all these little side conversations, right? It's not just, oh, you have the meeting and then you're done. There's the meeting after the meeting, which is like, hey, let's noodle on this idea a little more. Oh, by the way, how are your kids doing? Did they get into that school you wanted? Oh, they did fantastic, right? Oh, they didn't. Oh, yeah, share that with each other. Yeah, and you can empathize and there's even, there's even minor in their, they're this big, they're teeny tiny. I'm going to get a cup of coffee at the coffee machine and right when I get there, somebody gets, she gets there right in front of me and so I have to wait and that's just a normal social interaction. I'm gonna wait, but when I live in my headphones and then I work from home and then my food gets delivered and my toilet paper gets delivered, then I go to the restaurant and what you have to ask twice for napkins and it's like a major crisis. Yeah. This place is awful, right? Because I've lost that ability to just interact like a person. Yeah. Here's where, here's where this started to land with me, I think, is when I was, so for this book that I just submitted, the throughline is this 850 mile hike I did through Southern Utah. Super hard hike. There's no trail, so you're navigating, but you got to resupply, right? So you got to get to a town at least like every week to resupply. So I'm with my friend Matt Sherman, wonderful, amazing human being. We'd pop out on these highways, like 40 miles from a town. Let's go. Why are we going to get to the town? Well, I guess we've got to stick our thumbs out and pray to God that someone will pull over. And the first time you're doing that, you're gone, who's going to pull over? No one's going to pull over. People don't do that. And if they do, they're probably going to murder us, right? But we would get in these cars with these people, and we'd be in there for, you know, half an hour, 45 minutes. You don't smell great. We don't smell great. We didn't shave and cut our hair. We would have the most amazing conversations with people. And you would just connect at this extremely human level, because we enter the car going, is this a serial killer? Right. And as we're getting in the car, they're thinking to themselves, are these two serial killers? Right? Those bodies in their backpack. Yeah. But we would find that, and we got in cars with people who were from all different walks of life. I'm talking deadheads like me out in the desert doing heck knows what to ranchers, super right wings. I've got their, you know, their rifles and their cars to just sort of like vagabonds to tourists from other countries. And we would connect on this really human level. But I was like, this just doesn't happen anymore, because there has been sort of this grand siloing off of ourselves through various means that we did all this stuff to make life easier, right? Self-check out is easier. I don't have to think of what to say to the clerk. They don't have to pay a clerk. I can mobile order my coffee. I don't have to wait in line. That seems convenient. And it is convenient in the short term. But we lose something in the long term that I think is really important. And so I think my takeaway from those experiences, and there was one that was particularly awesome. This was at the height of the U.S. China trade stuff. And that morning like this breaking news had dropped that was, you know, China's restricting this element, whatever, you know, news is saying we're on the brink of war. This couple pulls over. And like, where are you from? Like, we're from Beijing. And we're like, oh, guess what we didn't talk about? Right. That. Yeah. Guess what we did. Talk about, oh, you have kids. Where are you guys going? Talk about being outdoors, our interests, our end of us like, you go, we hear all this stuff in the news. But when you sit down with people, whether that's from the other political aisle, whether that's from a quote unquote, you know, hostile country, you find we're all just humans on this big spinning rock just trying to figure it out. Yeah. We just want to have some friends. We don't want to be alone and we want to be loved. That's what it all comes down to. And it's easy to miss that. If you just kind of go through the motions and do the easy thing that allows you to avoid others. I was speaking at an event a few years ago that Malcolm Gladwell was speaking at. And he said something I'd never considered. And he said, I just want to recommend before you debate something, quickly pull out a piece of paper and y'all write down all the things you agree on. Just start there. And he's like, I promise you that list will be a thousand things, healthy kids, air conditioner that works like no skin cancer, like the list will be long. And then let's talk about the things we disagree with. It'll be six or four or two, right? And if you start there and and man, that's a powerful story. I fall victim to they like they hate us. And it's like, well, Dan doesn't and I know Dan, Dan just our kids go to school together, right? And so I can't figure out a way through that other than and you've coined this, which I just love. The 2% like I see that everywhere now. Talk about 2% and I'll try to thread them together and you tell me if I'm right or wrong. So the 2% comes from a statistic that found only 2% of people take the stairs when there's also an escalator available. Now 100% of those people know that taking the stairs it's going to be better for them long term, but 98 percent of people choose to do the easier, more effortless thing that could actually harm them in the long run. Now, to me, this isn't a thing where you go, "Oh, those 98% of people are idiots." No, it's more like, it suggests that we're wired to do the easy, effortless thing that is good in the short term, but we don't think of the long-term consequences. And so it's not really about the stairs. It's sort of a metaphor for all these decisions we make every single day. It's like every day in life, we have to make choices where you got to get to that metaphorical second floor. And you can either take those stairs, which are going to be a little bit harder now, but it's going to move the ball farther downfield for you in the way that you want. Your ultimate big goals in life, or you can kind of do this easy, effortless thing. It's not going to help, right? The metaphorical escalator. And so I think when you widen that lens, you really can see it everywhere. Everywhere. Everywhere. Even as something as simple as I think I highlighted in that article, like if you need to ask a question of a friend. Most people just text, right? I mean, we text. I do it all the time, which can text. The phone calls a little more of a pain, but what happens after you ask the question? How are you doing? What's new? The conversation spends is in an interesting way, and you connect as humans, you each get, I mean, it's like a minor therapy session, right? And that's important. Yes, a little harder in the short term, but the long term gains are there. I think it's not even more important. I think now it's when you look at the data on loneliness, right, with everything from Alzheimer's to heart disease to cancer to, I mean, everything. I've come to believe it's a matter of life and death, and maybe not in this immediate moment, but over the long haul. So two months ago, I had this big, and again, I've got big existential drama. I'm Michael. We'll tell you a lot about like AI and who's going to know what? And so I just said, this month I'm going to not disconnect my phone from my car. I took off every tracking thing I have, and I went and got cash out of the bank. I'm going to, oh, and I turned off Amazon Prime. I'm just going to navigate it this way. A couple of things happened. One was I found myself more and more calm throughout the day, and I found myself not, quote unquote, needing as much stuff as I thought I did. Just stuff, right? And it was a big pain, like it was a pain when I could just click something and know it would show up tomorrow. It's a bit like, uh, one of kids getting a car, we got to go over to this thing and get one picture frame for a thing, right? And it was inconvenient. But if I pan all the way back out, go into the bank, and you should have seen the teller was a real young guy, there's only like two people in the bank now. And I was just telling him this month, I'm doing this. And he was like, man, I was like, I like coming into the bank. We ended up talking with 30 minutes, a young kid. He's like, what am I going to do with like, I'm thinking about doing it in it, miss me like, now I'm the old man. And he's the young kid, right? Awesome. But it was a great interaction. And I walked out of the smile on my face and it cost me a quote unquote hour of my day, right? Like it wasn't, it didn't optimize my day. And that's forced me to ask deeper questions about what do I think is optimization? What do I think about how like I have tried to automate everything in my life? It just has walked me through what it's cost me. And I keep coming back to the 2% most of us are going to do the thing myself included. That's just the easiest. And I don't think that's the right thing. And the gap there means I'm going to be uncomfortable a lot more than I thought I was going to be, right? And that discomfort is actually life. That's actually the good stuff. Yeah, that's the good stuff. And I would also argue that once you go through that initial, oh, this is a huge pain, you start to understand the payoffs. Yes. And then you go, no, actually, now that I'm done with this month-long experiment, I think I'm going to pop into the bank more. Yes. I think I'm going to get behind the wheel and go someplace to get this item that I could just get because you start to realize, oh, there's these intangibles behind that, right? So the time savings is very easy to measure. That's clear. I save 30 minutes doing that. We can put a number on it. What's much harder to measure is all these other things that happen. How do you measure how much happier you felt after that? How much more peaceful? These little things you learned, all these other things. Now, because this is easy to measure, I think we can go, oh, that is clearly the optimal choice. And because these things are not easy to measure, they're a little more complex, can't put a number on them. We often devalue those. But life is not measurable. Like living a good life is not measurable. It's usually the things that are the thorny, big, existential questions. Those are what are worth living for, really. But that's a, that is a bold rejection of the bill of sale we've been, we've been given, right? Totally. If you can't measure it, it doesn't matter. Which is the mantra of the last 20 years in our world. Anything worth anything is measurable. That's business talk, that is personal talk, that is, and I'm finding more and more. Yeah, the short term, there's a lot of data on when you hand cash over to a teller, you actually spend less. And it's easier when you're putting down this piece of plastic to just be like, yeah, yeah, you're super sized, yeah, go ahead. Because it's not real. It's not a real transaction. When I'm hitting you cash, it's like, yeah, I'm not cost something. It costs something real. But I'm, I got to say, man, like, I recently saw some literature on what bodies opposite genders find attractive, right? And it ended up, I walked away, being like, oh, women are trying to create a picture that they think other women think is attractive, and men are trying to create a picture that they think other men think is attractive. Yeah. But the, the big neon sign for me was, here's this picture of this rip dude that I would, I'll write you a check if I could get a body like that. But and I ran it by my wife and she's like 1,000%. And it was the first time I believed her. I did the same thing. Oh, did you? Yeah. Because she said that body comes at a cost. I know that if you had that body, I would have to live with a guy who was always bickering with the waiter about what he cooked the food in. And we couldn't have ice cream and we couldn't and we couldn't and we'd miss a date because you got to get your workout in. I don't want that. Yeah. And it goes opposite way too. Like when she was like, what about this? I'm like, objectively, it's a beautiful person. I know what that life would entail for me. And I don't want to be married to that person. It becomes a marker of personality. Yeah. Yeah. And it was like, oh, I've missed the whole boat. I don't need to optimize optimize. I want to be healthy. And I think looking at these things once a year, once every two couple is important because it gives me direction. But man, I'm watching folks and I would say, I don't know a way to say it, but in health and wellness spaces, reducing, I notice you don't like, I don't need like reducing the number of trackers and the number because it's played itself out. Like I know, I kind of know ish what my HIV is. I kind of know ish these things. And unless I'm trying to hit a and trying to do a cut for an event or something, I want to have a pretty good life. And that means sometimes looking at my wife being like, you and I scream for dinner, not all the time. Or sometimes that's, yeah, let's just go for a long, long hike. And let's just go hang out. Right. Well, like if we want to pull back and get all heavy and theoretical as you and I sometimes do, there's this idea called value capture. Okay. And it's by this philosopher from the University of Utah's names, the new end. So it's THI, NGU, YEN, his parents are Vietnamese. He's going to be on my podcast next week. And we often start a process we'll take weight loss as an example. So why do you, why does a person generally want to lose weight? They want to look better. They want to feel better. They want to look a little better. They want to feel healthier, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. How do we measure weight loss? Pounds. One number, that's one number, right? So oftentimes people will get to a certain number on the scale and they go, oh, I want that lower. So they go, we got to keep getting that number lower. But as that number gets lower, you start to do things that don't actually help this overall larger goal you were after, feeling better, being happier, actually being healthier, being more energized. And so the number is like this crisp target. But it's really just a stand-in for all these bigger goals we want in life. And so sometimes those two things track, but oftentimes we can get so focused on the number that we lose side of the overall goal. Another example, grades, right? So why were grades even created in the first place? It's to make the lives of administrators easier, right? And when I was a professor, I'm sure you experienced this yourself, our goal is to get students prepared for the future. Okay, so what do you need to do that? They need to learn all these things. They need to learn to function as a human being. They need to sort of learn the material in a way that they can apply it to the life and leave the university and be an effective human being in the world. But when we start to put in grades, what are the students' care about? How do I get that grade? They lose sight of this overall goal. We get so obsessed with the GPA or the specific grade that it captures that value. Because all of the sudden, this is this thing. This is the target. This is now the target. That's what they ultimately care about. Not am I ready to go out in the world and like be a good human being who has a fulfilling career and can make an income and do all these other things. And you see that really any big sort of institutional measurement, that tends to happen, salaries another one, right? And for professors, and I've seen this data, we got judged on one thing, besides research and whatever. We got judged on class e-vows, and so then there became that implicit, I'll give you guys areas of these, y'all give me good e-vows, we'll have five, and together, whether it's explicitly I've had professors just say, hey, I'll take care of y'all, you take care of me. But more implicitly, you get further and further away from the goal, which is, dude, I had a very real lived experience after PhD-1 for me when there was a student who was suicidal, that really struggling, and a guy came in and sat and talked with him. And I remember walking away, thinking this, and this is embarrassing to say it out. Oh, he knew what to say. I need to learn that, right? And that's what sent me to, like, my next degree was like, I need to learn this skill set, because now I'm in the real world, and there's real consequences to me knowing, or not knowing, that forget the grades, and by the way, grades took care of themselves. When I was that invested in the material, learning this stuff, grades are an afterthought, right? They're just a marker on the way to a race I'm running, right? But how can I help somebody? But it changed the whole dynamic. My son's 16, and he's like, chemistry, blah, blah. And I actually get that, like, no one has ever pulled me over and put a gun to my head and say, hey, you know, what's a mole, right? And also, there's bigger things here that, like, anyway. But you get these, almost you get what you measure, and that means you better be really careful what you're measuring, because it can take you on a weird trip away from where you wanted to go. So take away for people to pull back from the philosophy and just be like, how do you actually use this is? Those measurements can be useful, but you need to ask, what are we trying to, what's the larger goal I'm trying to accomplish, you know, with, with a salary, right? People just want, I just need to make more money, make more money, make more money. Why do you want to make more money? Well, because I think it'll make me be happier, I'll have less trust in my life, okay? Well, what do you need to do to get that higher salary? Well, I need to work a ton and get super stressed at work and be miserable. It's like, well, it sounds like maybe that's backfiring, maybe you would be better just sort of settling. So asking those questions, like, what's my ultimate goal here becomes really important? And it is this, it takes a minute, right? It's not as easy, because if I just say, if you just go 150K a year, is better than 130K, that's much easier to just intuitively, oh, better. When these thorny or questions are harder to grapple with, it goes back to that 2% concept, but if you can kind of make that analysis, that becomes much more rewarding for you in the long term. Well, and useful. I think we've done ourselves culturally a disservice by answering the question, hey, what are you worth with a number? Totally. And because that gives me an objective finish line, I'm worth this much dollars versus I think the answer to the question, what are you worth is who do you love and who loves you? Yeah. I love the question thing to measure, right? Switching gears to marriage, but really along the same line. When my wife and I were sitting across table saying, are we done, right, we're being adults here? Are we going to call this thing? And it was a hard, hard conversation. What was that? This was years ago, but it was like, we'd reach the end of the marriage as we knew it. And the question was, are we going to build a new one or is this it, right? One of the things, and that was, that was nuclear conversation number one, right? And then obviously there's a bunch of little aftershot conversations like in my, I think it was my wife. I'll give her credit. One of us asked. I'm pretty sure it's her. She usually asked the wiser questions. It was out of exasperation, but she asked a very similar question. What do you want this house to feel like when you walk in? And I remember for the first time in my whole life vomiting up like, I want you to be happy. I'm here. I want my daughter to come running at me and give me a hug and I want my son to be making fart noises over there because he lives in a house where that's hilarious, right? And as I just threw up like, here's what I want this place to feel like. That was the first time she was like, okay, we can get there and it's going to take a lot of work to get there because you can't bring your last meeting home. And if you skip working out for three days, you're tough to be around, right? And for her, like, I've got to change this and like seeing you walk in and be happy that you're here has to be more important than a perfect kitchen, right? But it's that one thing, what do you want this thing to actually look like? And let's reverse engineer that, not let's get a couple of quasi arbitrary metrics and try to say that's our goal, right? When I was, I also just hit send on a thing. It's got sent back to me with lots of edits, so such as the part of writing books. It's a good thing. I called you and I end as I was asking people, like, why did you just get married? You had by far the most romantic love story about why you chose to get married. Would you be willing to share it? When we actually decided to get married or what I said about it, it was by far the best. I didn't put it in the, in the, put it in the manuscript, but the sun was setting across a remote beach in the Bahamas. That's right. Now, setting is Las Vegas, Nevada, clearly the, you know, the most lovely city honor. It's where romance happens. It's where romance happens very quickly and often, oftentimes at the cost. Very short. Yeah. So we're in the parking lot of Barnes and Noble. We had just moved to Las Vegas, me and my, now wife, Leah, then girlfriend, we moved to Las Vegas. Leah had just gotten out of law school. I had just started a job at the university as a professor. Her health insurance ends while mine is kicking in. She's stressing about health insurance and how she doesn't have it. You know, we're sitting in the car literally just about ready to go in, but we got to finish our conversation. She's stressed out and I was like, well, you know, what can we do about it? And she goes, well, we could get a civil union, right? I go, why don't we just get married? She goes, hold on a minute, she pulls out her cell phone, says here, the marriage is only five bucks more than a civil union. And I think it has more tax benefits, Michael. So yes. That's the romance. That's the romance. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And then came the, to bring it back into Ramsey financial world, it goes, well, what are we going to do for the wedding and she's like, man, my parents are going to have a hundred people at this wedding and where are we going to have it? Because my family's in Utah, hers is in like New Jersey area. So you go, why don't we just go get married? We'll go get a marriage license. We show up to get it. We think that's the thing. They're like, no, you actually have to have a witness in a thing. Now in Las Vegas, because it's a place where people get married on a win, there are literally homeless people who hang out outside of the courthouse and will be your witness for 20 bucks. Now, that was just too much. No, no, you know, the guy with track marks in his arm, did you need a witness? Yeah, yeah. Now we're good. So we got married at a casino by a three times divorce deficient whose name was Earl. And it was awesome. But what was interesting is that, and I think this is the reason you called me because you were like, why would you get married? Why would you get married? You guys were fine. And I will say something internally changed. And I think the thing I told you that it's like, now you're doing the crossword in ink. The decisions now matter. And now I have to factor this other person and this larger thing into all these decisions I make. I can't be a selfish anymore. Now that is a giant pain in my butt. I would love to just live on Michael Island and it's a big two percent staircase to walk a day. It's a big staircase. But it's the most rewarding relationship I have. And it became more rewarding once we started writing it in ink, despite the struggles. And if you pull back, people value things that are harder to get and maintain. There's very good reasons for that. I think it goes back to raising kids, keeping the tribe alive, raising kids. I don't have kids, but everyone I've talked to who does, they say that is a giant pain in my butt. Oh my god, these kids so much work. But if you ask people what's the most important thing in your life, where have you gotten the most meaning, it goes back to kids, but that's just kind of like this big metaphor for all these other decisions we make in life. And so kind of as you said it, the discomfort and the hardship is often a signal that this really actually matters. You get something for free, for no work at all, yeah, it seems great, but really it's not as rewarding. [BLANK_AUDIO] example, lottery winners. Someone cut you, the government cut you to check for 200 million because you want the powerball. Seems awesome for about a week. And then you find they get totally miserable because there was no struggle in that. Had they had to earn that 200 million dollars, things would probably be very different for them. So how do we, I think the, she's a writer, her name is Freya India. And she was writing about this idea of commitment. And I was raised in an ethos where, if I didn't have another line in the water for work, right? The picture I grew up with is I'm fishing. And if I ain't married and I got kids, I would be insane to have a job, one line in the water, that my boss could take away from me at any moment. That would be dumb. I should have other lines in the water at all times. I should be always quote unquote networking as a network event similar. I should always have a plan B and C and D. And then that leaks over into relationships, like man, if you go all in on this one, all in, both feet in the boat, everybody's in this thing. And you can get really burned bad on this, right? And what she writes is we've been told the only commitment that you can make is a commitment to yourself. And I called you a second time, I think, maybe it was a longer version of that first conversation. But I think the only thing that matters, tell me if I'm crazy here, if I look back all the data, we were made here, we've been, we've evolved to this thing where the only way I'm going to achieve this thing called pieces, if I put myself in a position where I'm as healthy as possible so that I can give my entire self away. And in a marriage, if that person does the same thing, we'll write or die forever, right? One writer says everyone in a marriage should, the best marriages that each person should be secretly thinking they got the better into the deal, right? How do you back all the way out of a culture that it says the only person you can count on is you? And the best way to do that is to simplify your life, I mean, to ease your life as much as possible, to be as comfortable as possible. When really the opposite is true, the more challenging commitments I anchor into, or as a psychology mentor, mine once said, what if you lived your life as though you could never move? Like what things would you do differently there? It feels so counterintuitive, countercultural to say, because there's, there's reason, one of the reasons we're still married for several times is it was going to be too much of a pain to unwind it, right? We'd put, we got had a government thing. We have a joint checking account, all of our, all of our wills, it would be such a pain to unwind it. And I don't want to see my kids only three days a week. I'll see you tomorrow. And we'll start over again, right? And culture would tell us, oh, that means this is over instead of, no, it's hard today. But to begin tomorrow, right? How do you push back on a culture that it's just said? The whole reason for living is, we talked about some more, like the hit on a treadmill, get on it and then find suck as much pleasure out of this thing as possible, extract as much pleasure as possible so that you can live this little bubble gum life. Well, I like your boat metaphor. When it comes to marriage, who are you getting in the boat with? That's an important decision, right? If you think you're a pretty good sailor or a rower, sailing, you still want a crew member who's like, I can row two. Yeah. I'm a good sailor too. Who are you going to go through the storm with, right? You want to make sure you're making the good call on someone that you'll have good teamwork with in navigating those storms because they will come. And so for me, it's, I think, being willing to, one, you got to work on yourself too, but also finding someone who has that quality in them as well. And I do think that to sort of pull back to your larger question, yes, society does say through the next easiest, most comfortable thing. Despite, despite all the podcasts where people say do hard things is like, and I'm one of those people, you still look at what people do day to day in the way society set up. It's things of art designed to be as easy as possible. But I think it's finding in yourself and others the quality to be willing to work through things when it gets hard and keep on pushing the boat takes water. Are you like, oh, we're going to die in drown. We got to shoot up the flare. No, you want somebody to go, all right, we got to start bailing right now. We're going to start bailing right now. And it's willing to do that work. I mean, I think if I, if I think of my own marriage, it's like, well, why did I marry Leah? A lot of it is sense of humor. Fun, there's like three people on earth who can make me laugh. She's one of them like a laugh out loud. And we had, so we actually met at work. We're at a big media company, kind of like this, never really saw each other talk for a year. And then this was at a big magazine. And so the internet was sort of eating magazines. And there was this crazy round of layoffs. And this is sort of a contextual joke. But the company was owned by this family. It was really hippies. And in this new HQ, which they poured a ton of money in, they created an energy vortex, Keeva in the middle. It was the stupidest thing. I totally messed up the design of the building. You had to walk around it. But the whole idea is like, energy circulates in the Keeva. And it'll make us all more creative, you know, and Kelly's always doing, she brings her crystals in here and her stuff like that. And we're in the mail room after this. I'd never really talked to her. Our co-workers are scurrying around the office in a panic. And she just looks at me and goes, not even the Keeva can save the energy in this place right now. And I just lost it. It was one of the funniest things. I just like dry, deadpan sense of humor. And I was like, I immediately liked this person. And then I was like, oh, you want to hang out later, you know, like fingers crossed? Sure. And then we just hit it off. And so I think it's like finding similar personality traits. And we both don't take ourselves too seriously. Humor is how we deal with the world for better or worse. But it was kind of aligning on that. And I found that like, we've definitely gone through some hard things in our lives. But we know we can count on each other. We'll be there for each other. Whether it's with a joke, a hug. For me, it's usually me trying to hug her and just be and her excited to sort of, not get off of me and saying a joke, you know, but it's like it's just finding that sort of strange alignment, like leaning into your personality quirks, I think, and using those as a superpower when things get hard. I don't know if that answers the question. What would she say about you? She would say that I probably have the same quality in that I just try and find humor in things. I mean, big picture to me is that there is never a better time to be born right than right now, in ever in human history, ever in human history. And if you want me to rattle off some stats, I can and I might as well. Your kids are literally more than 100 times less likely to die before reaching the age of five than they were even a couple hundred years ago. Like the infant mortality rate was more than 30% on average. People, the average age used to be 35 because everyone was dying off at before age five. And most people didn't even hit 35 because you'd get murdered. You'd fall off a cliff. You would get a nick and it would get infected. Not to mention you're walking around looking for food all day. You're starving. You could rarely find enough food. You're exposed to the elements on and on and on. Like it has never been a better time to be alive. So for me personally, that's where humor comes in because it's like, could always be worse. It could always be worse. So we have a bill that sucks and it's going to be stressful to not cover. It's like this is a ridiculous problem in the grand scheme of time and space. A thousand years, the problem was, well, we pissed off that tribe and that other canyon and now they're coming to chop our heads off. That's a real right. You know what I mean? So I think we align on the humor thing. I think she would say about me, I probably, this can be a good thing and a bad thing. But I'm able to remain like, yeah, it'll be fine. Yeah, even, you know, even when things do get bad. Whereas she sees a problem about 10 steps away and starts to solve for it, which can be good in the event of a real problem that offsets my own like, but also if it's not a big problem, she can get sort of like neurotic. She's a lawyer. So we compliment each other's faults is what I'm trying to say. You know, we meet like, we're able to compliment each other on our good things, but we're able to sort of offset each other's personality traits that sometimes backfire, I think. And so it's just like that, how do you keep in taking those personality traits that are different personally? I struggle for years. my wife would do a thing, and often what I found is, spouses do a thing that they would want done in a situation, like there's some conflict. I wanna watch this, you wanna watch that. You never wanna, immediately goes to never and always, right? You never wanna watch it, I wanna watch it always. And let's say she steps away, because in that moment, she would want me to step away, right? Well, for me, that sets off every alarm I got, like you're not lovable and you're always gonna get abandoned. And then I'm like, no, right? And how have you learned to not take stuff like that personally? The things that might be innate responses in her that are different than how you would, like your automated system would respond to it. Maybe you're just more mature than me. You mentioned how your wife likes the kitchen perfect. Mine Lee is the same. She likes our house to look like a museum, (laughs) and if we're up to her, my profession would be cleaning the house, correct. I'm opposite. - Yes. - I'm a clean person in the sense that things aren't dirty, but like I'm a writer, there's stuff everywhere. There's studies and whatever, and so that raised some conflict because all the crap out stresses her out. Or for me, it's just like, this is just part of the tornado that ultimately ends up helping us add money to the bank account. This is my process. And ultimately I had to ask myself, I learned this from another person who was wise, so do you wanna be writer, do you wanna be happy? How hard is it for you to organize the studies at the end of the day and put them in a cupboard, Michael? - All right. Good question, the answer is just really not that hard. (laughs) And so now when things come up, I'm just like, just put the freaking cup away that you left out for a day. Like, just put it away now, I don't always remember that, but I try and keep that in the back of my mind. How hard is that? Like, ultimately I want her to be happy. That's my goal. And if the path to getting there is just stacking some books orderly at the end of the day. Like, that's a pretty low cost to entry, you know? - And on the other side, my wife has been like, he's not leaving books out me because he's trying to make a point 'cause he hates me. Like, I could just shut this door and go on about my life 'cause he's a pretty good guy, right? And so it works, yeah, it works both ways. - She's definitely given some grace, right? If I had given entirely the house would look like a museum, it looks much closer to a museum than it did, but that's one of those things where like, you know, if you were to pick one or the other, I would say her path is probably right. So let's like, yeah, exactly. - Give me some grace, but I'm gonna lean that way. I'm gonna try and do it wrong. Not always perfect. She's probably listening to this being like, dude, you still leave so much stuff over there. - There's a, my big light bulb was, there was some Godman's research, and obviously they're the big marriage researchers, but essentially to still down beneath religion, sex, money, all these things that we proxy wars that we fight over, right? Thousands of books have been written on. It was really good marriages are all great friends. And I have a buddy named John. He goes, I go by hyper John, he goes by fat John, right? So I've known him for 30 years. But there was always a joke like, that guy leaves stuff out everywhere. And when we're at his house, we're at my house, wherever we happen to be, it's just stuff's out. And not one time in 30 years, have I driven home from hanging out with, a guy that has stood between me and literally getting my teeth knocked out of my head, right? A guy who has shown up for me in wild ways, right? Have I ever driven home and thought, what is he trying to say about our friendship? - Not one time ever, 'cause that's just him. - Right. - And yet I'll drive up to my house, walk in the door, and there'll be a laundry basket with towels in it. And my first thought is, really, to about my wife, you couldn't, like, what are you trying to say? Instead of my default setting be, what must have her day been like? I'm gonna fold these real quick, and I'm gonna go see if anything else in the dryer. That takes me a net three and a half minutes. - Totally. - Three and a half minutes. And it reduces my strokes. It reduces my blood pressure, right? But it's like, oh, she's my friend. And so what else needs to be put up around here, right? And it's just that I would do that at any of my friend's house. - Right. - Yeah. - But for some reason, for 15 of the 25 years, I'd walk in the door and be like, what about instead of, oh, that's my friend? She was at a crazy day. - Yeah, I had a friend to your point about being sensitive on the same way. And I had a friend I was talking to, and I was kinda laying some stuff. You know, I was airing my grievances. I was laying out my case like it was in court. Well, I was right. Here's the evidence, and calling a witness. Here's the case, clearly I'm in the right. And he just looks at me and goes, "Did it ever occur to you that you might be too sensitive?" (laughing) - But you're not allowed to ask that on Instagram, right? - No, it did not occur to me, but you may have some good counter evidence in this hearing. - Yeah. - And I try and think about that too. Like I just, you know, if she says something that maybe hurts my feelings, I go, you know, there's a lot of different ways to interpret that. And I don't know why she's saying. I can, I know that she loves me. I know we're best friends. So I'm going to guess probably my interpretation that was completely negative is probably wrong in at least some ways. - I think Becky told me it was called the, she said it so beautifully, as she does. Most generous interpretation. Maybe that's it. Like you just someone just said a thing. I get to choose what story I make up about what they just said. And I can make up one where they're coming after me. And I'm going to come back or I can make up one that was like, I said that kind of dumb, but I know what they meant. Right. The story is, I get to make up the story. - Yeah, the story you tell yourself about your life events determines everything. That's, I mean, you hear all these things online and fitness spaces about like mental toughness and this and that and that. It's like, no, it's really just what story you're going to tell yourself about an event. And that 100% shapes your outcomes. And there's so many different. Of course, there are very extreme events where it's going to be hard to get a good story. - Yeah, when your house burns down, there's not a good story. - Yeah, it isn't it. - But I would say in the trenches of daily life, the narrative you place behind an event and where it's going to lead. So there's these two different types of stories. I'm going to forget their exact name because I wrote about this six months ago and things just sort of fly into the ether afterwards. There's called, one is contamination stories and one, I forget the exact wording but we'll say strengthening stories. Okay, so same event happens. Condemination story is this thing happened. It is going to mess me up. All these bad outcomes are going to happen and I'm never going to be good again. Strengthening stories are this bad thing happened. But what did I learn from it? How am I going to go grow from it? Could there be a way in which this actually makes me a stronger, better person? Same exact thing happens. Someone who tells himself the contamination story is going to have a worse life course, worse health outcomes, worse mental health. - 'Cause your body starts solving for that story. - Yes, exactly. Whereas with the strengthening story, you have better outcomes and you actually become better off from those events because you learn from them. People don't learn from one times or easy. People learn from when things are hard. This is why you and I have talked at length about Joseph Campbell and his work, but that's what the hero's journey is. But that's post-traumatic growth. And post-traumatic stress disorder, like just a small percentage. Most people have a really awful thing and given the right tribe, you become stronger, right? Or maybe not even stronger, but you become a different version of yourself. - Yeah, great example, I love. There's a study on cancer survivors. Most of them retrospectively said that cancer was one of the best things that ever happened to them. - Yeah, I know why. - 'Cause why would that be? 'Cause it reset how they saw their life. They go, oh, it sort of put like a firm, like it made me realize that, yeah, this ride is gonna end. And that changed how I rode the ride. You know, they start to go, oh, okay, I'm gonna drop all this stuff that's not really gonna matter in the end. I'm gonna spend more time with friends, with family, I'm gonna do things I really like. And so that's like cancer's extreme. And the vast majority of people find they grow from it. And I read that study and I'm like, well, let's see if this is BS. So I called it my mom. She's been cancer-free for 10 years. So I read this study, what do you think about this? And she goes, oh, yeah. She's like, I feel like it shaped my decisions lowered my stress because I see things differently. I'm like, it's not as bad as cancer. You know, this thing that happened in my life, she spent more time with me. She said it even made her nicer. My mom has a tendency to like, don't piss her off. - Yeah, yeah. - She's like, maybe much nicer around people. So I do think that's sort of like a metaphor for sometimes these things can actually turn out to be good things. - So I just got a picture of my mind that I've never had before. So if we all view it, our life as though we're on a roller coaster. And there comes a day when it runs out of track. It will. That's a hundred percent guarantee. This roller coaster runs out of track. And it might run out of track over a cliff. It might run out of track up against the brick wall, but it runs out of track. I can spend all of my time on that roller coaster gripping this thing as hard as I can, or I can throw my hands up and enjoy that ride. Yeah, totally. That's a wild, like that to me just changed. That's a good frame for me. And here's another thing. How fun is a roller coaster that's perfectly flat with no turns and no quirkscrews and no upside-downs and no bubble all this crazy stuff? Yeah. It's the worst. No, you need the crazy stuff to make that ride thrilling. Yeah. I would also argue that today it's never been easier to avoid the thrilling stuff. Yeah. BS pops up in your life. You can avoid it. You got a problem with a relationship. You can ice them out. You can just, you know, like your boss. I quit. I'm going to go find another job. Or your spouse. I'm just going to swipe right, man. Yeah. I don't want to deal with this conflict. I'm out. Totally. Yeah. And so those sorts of things are what make life interesting. It's funny. You say that because I was writing on a kiddie roller coaster with my daughter, which was really young. And it was, but it wasn't high. I said, "Here comes the big one." And it went, "Mm." And she said, "Dad, I wasn't." You know what I mean? But I tried to manufacture some. It was a really small little hill, but I tried to let it out. Here it comes. She's like, "That's not that big a deal." All right. Man. Okay. You wrote about this a long time ago, maybe in a couple years ago. And it stuck with me. And in fact, it reoriented how I think about mental health because I've been trying to wrestle with it for years. As I was a grad student and then out in the real world, we've told ourselves a story about mental health, which is if you get all the thoughts in the right order, you will somehow be mentally well. We need to keep talking about it and talking about it and talking about it. And if you talk about it enough, you'll order this thing in the right way. And your body will go, "Ah, we're well." You told the story, and I love for you to tell it here, about the magazine where you were one of the associate editors and it was clearly not going to make it. And you had a run, and I don't even know what story I'm telling. But you were talking to maybe it was the editor-in-chief, somebody, and you said, "What are we going to do?" That follow-up line that he gave you has shifted everything for me. And I would love to hear that. Everything for me, too. There's a reason 10 years later I'm writing about it. Yeah. So context out of Big Magazine Internet is like killing print, not to mention at this magazine we'd had a bunch of layoffs. We didn't have an editor-in-chief, we'd lost half our staff, we got to get a magazine out in the next week. Like magazines are a lot of work. Yeah. And we got to figure out like new stories to do with half the staff. All this, I mean, the walls are crumbling, right? And leading up to that, I had had all these ideas for stories. But I needed to get them just perfect. They needed to be absolutely perfect before I sent them in. Everything had to be dialed, perfect. And Tom stressing out about all this, everything. And I walk out in the hall and guys named Bill Stump. What a great name. It Bill Stump. Yeah. Raised by a pastor, I believe. Awesome guy. I said, "Bill, what are we going to do?" And he just looked at me and he goes, "Do something." That was it. Those two words have changed my life, Michael. Do something. Yeah. Just like, "Oh, okay." So I go back into my office and I'm like, "Do something. We need story ideas. You've been sitting here in your head trying to get everything perfect for some imaginary jury that you think is going to read a line and be like, "This guy's so dumb, it's fire him." Yeah. I send in imperfect ideas. One of them hit. I wrote the story as my first big feature in the magazine. That literally launched my career. Do something. So I think the lesson is when things come up in your life, whether it be a mental health problem or a relationship problem or work problem, whatever it is, if you're anything like me, you're probably pretty good at sitting around and over-analysing every possible angle. Your reality is, is unless you're a really good fortune teller, you have no idea where those are going to lead. Yeah. So take the evidence you have, pick the best path, do something because the more shots you take of the basket, the more likely something's going to go in. Yeah. And I do think we, societally, like the rise of mental health conversations and therapy, good thing overall at the same time, we can sit around and just talk and talk and talk. This and that, we've got to unpeel every layer of, you know, when I was a child, this thing happened and this thing happened and it's like, just do something. Yeah. Right? Like, you can't change that. I'm not saying that's bad, but I am saying all talk, no action, that's probably bad. I think that leads, I think it pours gasoline on a fire. Totally. The more you talk about a mental health problem, the more symptoms set in. That's been shown in the data all the time. In fact, it's odd because we are told to sit down and like really analyze our thoughts deeply. But in general, for most people, most of the time, with the problems of general living, expression enough and be like, yeah, yeah, or go do a thing, right? Yeah. And what's so strange about the way when you wrote about that, it locked in. I looked back over the course of my professional life and whether I'm sitting in a house helping police officers move bodies, right? Or I am sitting with a parent whose child is dead in that next room right there, or I'm sitting with a kid who just got beat up as when I was working at universities because they were the wrong color in the wrong place or they loved the wrong way. Whatever the thing was, no matter what we were going through, it always distilled down to a question, which was, what are you going to do now? Yeah. Right? And here's some options for you. Here's some resources for you. Here's how I'll walk with you, but what are you going to do now? Yeah. And I can't believe that I hadn't crystallized that my own life on not the big things, right? If my house blows over, I know what I'm going to do next. If I've been on a campus where there's an active shooter, I know what to do in those things. But at the granular level, when me and my wife are just being pissy, what are you going to do now? Are you going to turn on the TV or are you going to go find one thing to do for her, right? Like do a thing. When me and my 10-year-old daughter, I still try to take on a 10-year-old, which is so stupid. I can't remember calling a buddy a few years ago, and I was like, "Hey, I was arguing with my 14-year-old about any of those." I'm going to stop here right there. Why are you arguing with a 14-year-old? This guy is the CEO of a landscape company. No mineral, and he's like, "Why are you arguing with a 14-year-old?" And I was like, "All right, that's all I need to do. That's it." But when I find myself in those moments, what's a thing I can do to lean towards that relationship that I'm with forever? What's a thing? My boss doesn't appreciate what's one value that I could give to my company right now. What's one thing my financial situation? What's one more hour I could work somewhere to get someone money in my house? Or what's one thing I could not buy this month? But it's weird that I have a podcast and I write and I, whatever, and I'm telling people, maybe listen to a few less podcasts and go start doing some of that stuff. Or I'm surrounded by religious people who go from Bible study to church service to personal journaling type, go feed a homeless person. Go find some addicts that are struggling and sit with them and just bring water, man. Start going to do something. And I find, for me, that's the most exposing thing, is not what are you thinking about and what are you talking about. I've gotten to a point where I honestly don't care a lot of people say, I just want to know what are you doing? Like what are you doing in the world? When it comes to health stuff, mental health stuff, and scarcity of brain is one of my favorite things you've written, talking about just kind of peeling back the layers of addiction. I think the first thing I asked you yesterday was, I may or may not have a nicotine pouch problem, but I've got a hyper addictive personality. What are some things that the exhausted mom with three kids listening to the show or the dad who's working to jobs? What are some things we can do that are low level that you've seen across all your books, all your research that like, here are some value ads to your day when you're time strapped, when you're like, here's some things you can go do that's going to make a positive impact on your life. That's a broad question. There's a lot, it's case by case, but if I looked at most people most of the time, what helps, movement helps, call it exercise if you want to, and if you're busy with kids, get them involved. You can sit on the couch and watch Netflix, that's fun, it's a distraction, but you could also go for a walk with your kids, take them to the park, run around. You're going to get movement, you're going to spend time outside, that's really good for mental health, you're going to connect at a more human level because you were talking to each other rather than both watching the screen. You might see another parent and you'll all you'll do is this just the eyebrow rays and you realize, oh, we're all in this, right, little thing, yeah. Okay, work with other people, help other people, that's like consistently linked if you can. If you don't have time for that, I get it, there's different seasons for life, you might have to the weight, tell your kids. or say eight or 10, you know, after writing the comfort crisis, for example, I had a lot of parents reach out to me. They said, okay, should I take my kid on this, you know, two week crazy backpacking trip, or should I move, I even had one friend who was like, should I move into like the worst part of town? Would that make him more resilient? It's like, no, don't do that. Like the reason you work is so you can have a good life. But you could take them to volunteer at a homeless shelter. Like your kids are gonna be exposed to other ways of living and maybe realize they have, they have it pretty good in the grand scheme of time and space. And by helping people, that's gonna help everyone's mental health. Like when you're helping other people, yes outwardly you're helping them, but you're also helping yourself significantly. That, yeah, I mean, I think like for me, a lot of it is just like, what did humans do for most of the time? We worked outdoors, we moved our bodies, we were with other people, we ate food that wasn't filled with 50 million ingredients. - Right. - Like that stuff still really works at a fundamental level. And I think we over complicate things. - I remember this is probably 10 or 12 years ago, and this is when the word biohacking was first getting thrown around, right? With some of the OGs. And I remember a colleague of mine he since passed away, but he came, we were talking over dinner one night, and I was like, what did you learn at the conference? And he's, and I'll never get this. He said, oh, that all goes away. And I was like, what do you mean? And he goes, because if you just already look, all the biohacking stuff is gonna say, move your body, hang out with good people, we're a pair of bonded species, so marry one person to do really well and have lots of good sex and raise good healthy kids. He's like, it's just gonna end up there, right? And so all this stuff will be cool and great, but a lot of it will be theater, just do those basic things. And for me, one of the big do some things is, and this may not be fair, but I've kinda distilled my life into, I'm doing an action for me, or I'm doing action against me. And there are some moments when they, right? Like this morning, I skipped my big long workout, right? I'm at the end of school season with my kids, I'm at the end of a long project, I'm tired. - Yeah. - So how do you biscuits with me? - You did have to have biscuits. But I traded, I did a slap in an extra 45 minutes, and that meant, I got a 15 minute walk, I threw on a ruck sack, thanks to you. And I took off and I told my son, I'm gonna get you to school, but I'm gonna go do this real quick. And, but it was something, right? And it was a little bit of a thing, and it wasn't my big grandiose plans and whatever, and I made this trade for this trade. And tomorrow I might trade 45 minutes of sleep for a longer time, but it's not even gonna be the same thing all the time, but it's, what am I trying to solve for it today? I'm trying to solve for peace in my house, I'm trying to solve for a relationship with my kid, I'm trying to solve for being on time, and I need to do human stuff, man. And my goodness, what a different way to live. - Yeah, and I would say, think try to be creative with a 2% idea we talked about. - Yeah, I finished, come for a crisis, and handed it to my, he was 12 at the time, and I said, everything stopped, she read that, and he read it in like two or three days, and he's always good, Dad. But even him at five in the morning, when we're walking into somebody's ranch that they're letting us hunt on, and I'll be like, I'll just drive us up and he goes, not, Dad, come for a crisis. We're gonna walk, I'm like, I'm like, dude, okay. - He's keeping you honest. And I'm climbing up a tree and I could barely breathe, but it's that those stories he'll tell in my funeral about the time, Dad and I hike through it five a.m. Not, we drove up with the heater on until the last possible. You know what I mean, it's, what life in the rear of your mirror don't wanna set lift, and not the most insulated comfort, but the most adventure-filled, the most fun, the most best relationships, it's awesome. - Yeah, no one, the stories we tell each other are never, yeah, I sat in this really comfortable chair and watched this show. It's, it's always the sort of things that had hardship attached to them, right? Like, go out and live a life where you get a lot of stories. You can tell it a party. There you go. - Yeah, and the, the Eulogy versus Resume thing has stuck with me. Like, I want stories with my kids. Did I keep my suit perfectly clean? Or, do I want my daughter wipe and wait tears at my funeral saying, one time Dad was in his suit and he, I bumped him and he went flying into the mud puddle and then he dragged me down. Like, that's the story he'll tell, right? - Totally. When I think about like my, when I'm reporting books and I travel all over for these, if everything goes right, the book is not gonna be as good. When I had to go to Iraq, that trip went off the rails. - Yeah. - But the whole time in the back of my head, I'm thinking this is a pain, this is mildly dangerous. But guess what? This is gonna be awesome. - It was not mildly dangerous. - It was pretty dangerous, okay. But it's gonna be awesome in the book. So, one of the takeaways for me was no problem, no story. If you don't have a problem, probably not gonna get a story out of it. Now, for me, that's really important as a writer, but I would argue for us as humans that communicate with each other and wanna live an interesting life. That's also like pretty good rule. - Yeah. And to pan back, everybody's scared about their work. Everybody's scared about AI. Everybody's scared about the economy. Everybody's scared about war. You've been a good model for me in, you know what I wanna do? I wanna go be a journalist, right? And I wanna be a journalist and write at a major magazine. Oh, here comes the internet, right? So, I'm gonna pivot and become a professor. Oh, higher ed's turning into a cesspool. I know I'm gonna do, I'm going to, and you have been a great job. I've been a great example for me from afar of saying every one of us is gonna go through those things. And so, I can't, you could. You could still be trying to be one of those bitter, burned out journalist who smokes four packs a day and trying to find a smaller and smaller magazine to write up 'cause I'm a magazine writer. Or you could still be the, we both have friends who are just hating their life as college professors right now. Or I'm gonna do something, right? I'm gonna go find the next thing you did. Well, yeah, same thing, right? But it's like, okay, I'm seeing the same play out in front of me. I can sit here and be bitter about it or I can grieve it and be sad. I would be awesome to still be writing for magazines. I still love getting magazines, right? Be awesome. The idea of being a college professor is still the greatest job on the planet and interacting with the college students. It's amazing. And what I have in my head doesn't exist anymore. Yeah. And so, I can choose that reality and then go do something. It's awesome. Thanks for being my friend, man. Likewise, dude. This is fun as always.