Episode 43 - Reclaiming Mind: It's Getting Uncomfortable

In Episode 43, Scott and Michael discuss highlights from Michael Easter's Comfort Crisis; discussing the importance of pushing your mental, physical, and emotional boundaries and exploring your true max potential at least once a year in an outdoor experience that builds resilience and greater understanding of your self and life. 

Transcript

Scott: 0:06

So what are we on? 42? 3. 42. 43.. We're almost at the year mark. That's wild.

Michael: 0:13

It

Scott: 0:14

is. It's really cool. All right. Welcome to episode 43 of the Reclaiming Man podcast. I am your host, Scott Silvey, and with me today, as always, Preston. Oh. Oh. No, Preston is not with us today. He's making money. He is making some money. So with me, as always, we have the mastermind, Michael Beckwith, sir. How are you, buddy?

Michael: 0:39

Pushing on. Ready for Christmas. Ready for

Scott: 0:43

We are recording this the week before Christmas, and we have some big shoes to fill with Preston out today, but actually I think he wears size nine, so they're not actually like gigantic shoes to fill. All right. Today, let's let's chat about there's a book that many of us in our men's group, have read recently, and I know both you and I have, completed it, and there's some pretty interesting and maybe slightly different things in this book from some of the other things that we've talked about but, certainly a lot of parallels as well, but so the book itself is The Comfort Crisis by Michael Easter, it's pretty funny. Did I buy it? And then you had just bought it or did you buy it and I had just bought it, or other, I think I

Michael: 1:35

You, received it. Yeah, I think and sent, a polo of it and I had just received it as well. So it was within a day. Yeah. And that's how, that's

Scott: 1:45

how synchronicity works. I had recommend it. Yeah. I, had a couple of people recommend it to me, like in the few days before, and so I bought it and, I, I'm looking right now at a stack of. 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10 books, as of right now, that I've not yet read, that I purchased, and that was on there. So I'd been reading a couple others, finished them, and I opened this one up, and it was just like I barely put it down, like it was really good. Not only really good

Michael: 2:17

storytelling in addition to the content and sort of the divergence into the science and everything else. Yeah, it was, it

Scott: 2:24

was a really good book without spoiler alerting it. It interweaves this tale or the story of the author going into the Africa or the African, the Alaskan wilderness. And a lot of the things that happened over the course of those five or six weeks relate to the more scientific and maybe clinical perspective of some of the things that he was sharing. But then they played off each other really nicely and the storytelling itself was very entertaining. But, the, general thesis, I guess you could say of the book is that when you consider the modern world, modern comforts and, conveniences. How in some ways those things are great, they've led to a significant decline in our physical and maybe more importantly, our mental well being. So maybe a couple of key takeaways for you from, your read.

Michael: 3:29

From my read, one quote that really stood out was, Aging is the aggressive pursuit of comfort, as our society views it. Not that I want to live forever. And not that, in the sense of perhaps this current state of what, technology, what medical advances live. I don't necessarily want to live forever, but I do want to live long enough to see my grandkids grow up and to experience life as fully as I can with the people who I love. And in order to do that, I know that there's just so many. Components of health that we need to be paying attention to at a young age and then throughout our life And I feel like this book did a great job of highlighting some of those So my takeaways are really around like you mentioned the mental health Components that you receive from putting yourself in uncomfortable positions, but then also the physical benefits that you get and How important it is to consistently schedule and plan situations where you're stretching yourself and you're putting yourself out on your boundaries so you can determine, are these actually my boundaries or were they just limiting beliefs that I had about myself? And so that's I would say the,

Scott: 4:47

synopsis. Yeah. That last one in particular, I think really stood out to me in terms of how it's, actually your mind that will quit far before. Your body will and so he references a lot of Navy SEALs and he describes the, American special forces military as potentially the greatest. How did he describe it? The, the most advanced version of humans that we've ever had in terms of physical ability, and it's not like I've read about I'm not a Navy SEAL expert by any stretch, but I've read about how the selection process, I think there's 4, 000 men a year that, that apply or can women be Navy SEALs? I don't actually know that.

Michael: 5:33

Yeah. This is what I just downloaded. Nice special forces assessment and selection. So physical training handbook. Yeah,

Scott: 5:42

it's not the dudes that are six, four to 65 of just solid muscle and massive athleticism that when I think he said, the average special forces soldier is like five, 10 or five, 11 and 175 pounds or something like that. And it's not about physical strength, although that certainly plays a part. It's about the mental toughness of recognizing that your mind is going to try to shut you down before your body ever will. And so it really is about. And part of what that training is designed to do is to raise your awareness that your body can actually go through way more than you think it can. And it also can go through way more than it thinks it can, right? Like in the moment, it's going to want to shut down, but it's your mind, not your body. So that was really interesting. And this idea of really trying to push yourself. And I know we'll get into the Misogi here momentarily, but this idea of really pushing yourself on a regular basis to reestablish what that boundary is. Like what you thought your limits were are almost never anywhere close to where your actual limits are, but in a world or culture where we live in 70 to 72 65 to 75 degree temperatures, like 95 percent of the time, to your point, we're never. Putting ourselves like it's, a, an aggressive, what did you aggressive race? An aggressive pursuit

Michael: 7:12

of comfort, pursuit

Scott: 7:13

of comfort. And that's you think about what most of us, how we exist and, the people who go on RV in retirement Oh man, I'd love to do that. As a guy who has spent seven months living in an RV, almost all of those folk pull their RV into the place. They get it nice and level and then they sit inside and watch TV all night. That's the extreme version of retirement. And so I really do like this idea. Like for me, there were, I guess there were a couple of things he was talking about how even running on a treadmill or running indoors. Is not the same as running outside because there's a connectedness that you get when you're running in nature and when it's not just a smooth path where you actually get additional benefit mentally from that connectedness that you have with nature. And I think that was another thing, the mental health in general, I think, was probably what I found most interesting is, this idea that so much of why our mental health suffers. Is because we live a life of so much comfort and that if you look, he's even talking about sleeping, go sleep on the ground and see how uncomfortable you are like our bodies would constantly be like, almost never in a source of actual comfort, like we sit down on our sofas and our couches and even our cars, and they're way more comfortable than what most of these people our ancestors spent their entire Lives experiencing, right? Like they didn't sit down in lounge, they squatted, right? And you, think about even when even people who do it all day long, like they did. They're still moderately activating their muscles, even when they're at rest. And then you compare that to like most of us

Michael: 9:12

today, sitting

Scott: 9:13

at a desk, sitting at a desk, going from one seated position to another seated position in. Nowadays, especially you folk up in, in Canada, like you press a button and it starts your car. So your car is toasty warm before you even so you just have to bundle up in your gear and race up to the car. And then you get in the car and unbundle. Cause you're sweaty. Because it's 75 degrees inside of that car, right? There's so little, so much of the advancements we see in society are really about making us comfortable. And In some ways that's great, but there is a second order consequence to that, that I don't think I'd really paid attention to in it until I'd until I read

Michael: 9:55

this book. Yeah, as I was thinking about it more, it made me appreciate going to the Boundary Waters every year, growing up, and at the time, completely ignorant of what that was, and it was essentially minus the ritual purification in a waterfall, which is the sort of, the culmination of the Misogi after you prepare yourself for it. But in the boundary waters we would often get to a portage that as a kid you look at and you say, this looks impossible. Like I have to carry this 50 pound pack, elevation change through mud. Through whatever is in your way over logs. And there was this sense of great accomplishment when you had passed what you believed your boundary was because you kept on going and you made it to the other side and not only that, you went back and you got another pack and did it again. And so it was just an early introduction to this concept that I wasn't really aware of. And the water up there was pretty cold. It was pretty much like a cold plunge to be honest with you, but. It was a really good reminder as I was looking back at that was really a formative part of, I think, what I consider part of my DNA now, part of my genetics now, because I do believe the environment is what signals the gene, and I think that's a big reason, and I attribute those trips to building more of the desire for doing hard things, because At some point, when you do it every day, or like with cold plunges, or if you do it every year in the concept of Misogi you're going to push yourself, you're going to achieve a different level of potential, and looking back the last year it's, the same thing I, thought my potential was at X, when I, started on the Reclaiming Man journey, and nearly a year later, I think it's X squared. And that's a really cool, feeling. So that's pretty, I think, evident throughout the book.

Scott: 12:09

I think you mentioned cold plunge and I know we talked about cold plunge a lot. But yeah, one of the things I thought was really interesting is they talk about he talks in this book about people from women from Japan and Korea. Is it the AMA? Was that what they were? The AMA people? AMA?

Michael: 12:34

That's a good question. I don't remember.

Scott: 12:41

Yes, AMA, I don't know if it's called the AMA, but they are traditional Japanese female divers known for their practice of diving into cold waters without modern diving equipment. So for thousands of years, these women have gone out into the Pacific Ocean, the Sea of Japan, and they might dive 150 times in a day. And it can be as deep as 90 feet, to go down and get food, and get supplies or whatever from, the ocean floor to, to live, to survive. And these women This is, fascinating, right? Like at the time, physiologically speaking, our understanding of the body was if your core temperature dropped below 95, then that was hypothermic and you were at risk of dying, they did a study of 20 of these AMA women. And there were two interesting things that came out. Number one is their instance of disease. Was down across the board. So they were far more resilient to disease than your average every day. Not just like American, they took the AMA divers and then other villagers, like from their same region and area. So it wasn't like it was comparing different, the only significant difference. Maybe there's more, I didn't get into the whole culture. I don't know, but in the study, what they called out is the difference being. These are the women divers and then these are other tribe members or whatever they, I don't know if they call it tribe, but whatever it was. Significantly lower markers for disease across the board. The other interesting thing was in winter, their core temperature, average core temperature was 94. 7 degrees. And it completely upended what we thought we understood about our physiology. And that led to the study of what we've talked about, which is brown fat, which is the good fat that sits around your core organs. And he goes in and talks about like their, metabolism is, significantly higher. And they so they burn a thousand calories more per day and et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. And that's a result of not just the dyes, but like at rest. Their metabolism is so high and this brown fat activates so many good healthy things for us. So that was one thing I found really interesting is it reinforced this idea of cold plunging that we do, right? It's not just a mental challenge, but then you also read this book and it did both, right? It reinforced it as there's actual physical health benefits here that, that we can get from it. But then it also described you're getting uncomfortable and you're becoming more resilient. And then there are Mental health benefits of doing that. So I don't say that as like a pat ourselves in the back it is validating for sure to start to understand more about what these things that we're doing are actually doing for us. But it was really cool that he mentioned that

Michael: 15:32

And it helps. Reinforce that progression into conscious competence where we were doing something literally for the entire last year and we knew about some of these physiological benefits. Thanks to Huberman and some of the other proponents of it, Rogan, et cetera, but then I think this was a great sort of culmination of it to where it's okay, now we're completely aware of all of these benefits and it gives you a Another level of motivation to continue doing it helps reinforce the discipline of it. So it was really good. And trying to think about what, sort of challenge I should do. I should, so from Michael Easter's perspective,

Scott: 16:13

pause for a second, give the background on what this concept is. I know we've talked on Misogi's, but we haven't actually

Michael: 16:19

described it. Yeah. Yeah. So he had come to the conclusion that at least once a year, he wanted to put himself into a very challenging environment, had to be outdoors and really only had two rules. One, you had to survive. Which I loved and don't die. Yeah you, had to have at max about, about a 50 percent chance of being successful. And he did relay that there were efforts that he's made and not been successful on these challenges. But the goal is to put yourself in a position that tries and tests your level of endurance and resilience, mentally, physically, outdoors, away from the comforts that we've come to know and appreciate. And, And spend that time exploring the limits of your potential. And as you're pushing up against those boundaries, evaluate, is there more? Do, I have greater potential than I think I have? And I just, yeah, so it was a really, I was a fast read, to be honest with you. Because like, you said, I had a tough time putting it down. The other, gosh, the other thing I wanted to. Chat on briefly is rucking because that was one of the things I was gone. Okay, great. Why don't you talk about it? Because you've done it more than me. You're more

Scott: 17:41

on the path. I could show you the gnarly blisters. I have for my 12 mile ruck in the rain a couple Saturdays ago, but Yeah, so I mentioned at the outset These specimens, physical specimens who can push themselves further and harder and faster than anyone has ever done. Obviously we don't know what they were like thousands of years ago, but it's actually quite interesting to think about how much we've devolved in some ways athletically. But he starts to talk about the evolution of humans. And he describes how, we're not particularly fast. A Chihuahua is significantly faster than we are that and it has no, it's, that's, it's one strength relative to us. And it's got an annoying bark that might cause us to go insane, but I'm just kidding for anyone that loves Chihuahuas. Yeah. Just not a yippee dog kind of guy. Agreed. So I guess I'm not kidding. Like not kidding. Those dogs. I'm just kidding. I'm just kidding. I'm not kidding, but I'm kidding about the F the dogs. Okay. I love dogs. Jesus. All right. We're not fast, right? And then you look at other animals, we're just simply not fast. But what are we? As much as anything, we can sweat. We have sweat glands, so we don't have to lay down and pant for hours to cool down, right? And we evolved, and how we stalked and ultimately killed prey. By simply outlasting them, by exhausting them. So we would chase, insert animal of delicacy choice here, until it literally just lay down and said, Alright I'm, done, I'm exhausted, please stab me in the throat and make it quick, and may, the bounty of my body fulfill you. Pretty sure they didn't say that, but. So now imagine you're human. And your tent or teepee or cave or whatever is at location X, but you just went on a 15 mile Mary chase. Now you're, not moving at a 30 minute mile there. You're probably humming along pretty quick. So we had endurance and part of what the ability to sweat allowed us to do is. Raise our body temperature, but then cool it down at the same time. Now you're 15 miles away from home. And I know we all played the Oregon trail where you'd go out and slaughter 2000 pounds of meat, but then you can only carry 150 of it back. So we all know that story, but it's the same idea, right? If you're out and you and your three tribe mates that were chasing down this deer or elk or whatever you finally catch it, you kill it. If that's a couple hundred pounds of meat. And hide, you're carrying every pound back. So he's describing how we evolved to move not at great speed, but at great distances, and then also carry. a heavy load. And if you look at other primates, like he uses a chimpanzee, their ability to carry to this, like to their side is essentially non existent, right? Whereas how we evolved, we can carry significantly higher percentages of our body weight, either at our side or on our shoulders than other primates. So that is one of our great advantages. So then he starts talking about how there's one group of humans left that has have adhere to this, or double down on this evolutionary advantage we have to move long distances and carry heavy shit. And that's our military, especially American special forces, the best trained military in the world. And then he starts talking about rucking, which was fucking cool. Cause I have started rucking recently and what I didn't know at the time. So I was introduced to rucking by our sales partners. And what I didn't know is that they're huge Michael Easter fans. And now I get it because in this book, he talks about how. Rucking is not only what we're evolutionarily predisposed to doing well, but in the military they encourage rucking as a form of exercise because the, injury rate is six times higher for running than it is rucking, right? But you get a lot of the same benefits in caloric burn, et cetera, and fitness and cardio and strength. Arguably even more.

Michael: 22:15

Yeah, there's the, there's a much greater strength development perspective, which is why I'm so fascinated into it

Scott: 22:21

with it. Yeah. So you think of all the, like when you start rocking, you actually rock with very low, 10, 20 pounds. Maybe you work yourself up to 50 is apparently about the optimal number to still be able to move. With maximum efficiency, carry all your gear. So you, work your way up to 50 pounds, but all of the additional weight that's putting on your joints and your ligaments and tendons and all of that's going to strengthen those things. So you're getting strength, but then it's you don't really some people run, but what I've heard is if you're my, if you do an eight minute mile and you're carrying a 50 pound ruck, that's for every 10 pounds, it's an extra minute. So now you're doing a 13 minute mile. So if you're comfortably doing an eight minute mile, it's not you're going from a fast jog to a light run and now you're going to a light jog.

Michael: 23:17

And I did the first one just as like practice with 10 pounds. So that was like, okay, I'm able to clip along here pretty good, but. There's a very quickly, the goal is to find the weight where it really forces you to adhere to a little bit of a different, healthier, safer technique for movement. And you're really keeping your weight centered a lot more and keeping your feet underneath you. Your stride length goes down, but your cadence goes up a little bit relative to what running is. Exactly.

Scott: 23:49

But it's really It's like a shuffle.

Michael: 23:51

Yeah, it's yeah, definitely. And so I've just, been experimenting with it. I'm really excited about it. So that was one of the other things that I think came out of it as a, good unlock, because it's a way to combine in many ways, like where I want to keep doing cardio six days a week, but when I get stronger and I think it's going to be. What we'll see over the next quarter here, because I just wrapped up this 75 day period from October 1 to December 15th tomorrow. The next quarter is really the start of where I'll be integrating rucking every other day. So I'll run one day, rock the next, and I'm going to, see what kind of upper body strength and back strength I can get from it. Looking forward to it, for sure.

Scott: 24:39

I'll tell you about my rucking history here momentarily, but I got a message actually this morning. The case for rucking is indeed pretty compelling. And I replied, what prompted this? Nearing completion on Comfort Crisis. That was from Mr. Zach Linden. Yes, I think, when you read it it, for me it, really, I've been thinking a lot about running. And, adventure racing, obviously did the Tough Mudder. It was fucking blast. We're doing Ragnar, in May, by the way, I have a couple of people that have, who are, colleagues with Zach and I, that are interested. So we should really finalize all of our plans around that at some point. But, so we're running Ragnar in May. I'm planning on running the 15K Tough Mudder in Atlanta in April. And then the 15K in Nashville in, September, October, whatever that is. Zach is running a half marathon one weekend and a full marathon the next weekend in in Ohio in January, I believe. So all this running activity, then I read the book and I'm like, actually what I'm, I think what I'm really interested in is getting like. It's not that I enjoy running, but one of the things the book did is it made me realize I can't over index on that. Like I need to, I think it's something that

Michael: 26:07

you can do. To, there's so many things that I think are flawed right now with my current thinking around limitations and our ages, but, when I was talking about running, people are like, Oh, you're not gonna be able to do that forever. The, undying pessimists out there, right? Like the antithesis of me. And I'm like There's going to be something right to substitute or replace. And I think it's probably from what I understand, it should be such a strong supplement to running where I bet I'll be able to run

Scott: 26:36

longer. Yeah, but I see him as more discipline. Yeah. And I see it as like the areas that your body is going to break down and running. We'll be strengthened by rocking.

Michael: 26:50

Yeah.

Scott: 26:51

Yeah. So I actually see a lot of more sustainable, like complimentary. Yeah. So yeah, so rucking was another big takeaway for me is I finally, it really clicked for me on why this has become a thing and why I hear a lot of people talking about it. So that, yeah that was, another good takeaway. All so I know we're. At pretty good time here. What I'll wrap with is actually nothing to do with the comfort crisis. But a very brief, cool story that I shared with y'all earlier. I got a random Marco Polo from a guy I hadn't talked to in eight or nine months today. Yesterday basically saying that he'd been going through. Some hard times and like one of the few things that, that he didn't put it that way. He said one of the things that really helped out was he did 75 hard as a result of him. And I had talked about it earlier this year and he said it was the, those little daily wins. We're so important for him to get, back out of the hole that he had been in and, start to feel better about. And, he, mentioned the show and he'd been following along and all that. And I just thought it was a really one of the things that, that we've talked about from the beginning is. We haven't spent a ton of time like promoting and advertising this podcast, quite honestly, and there's more, certainly much more we could have done. But as much as anything, the reasons we were doing it was for ourselves and each other and like continuing this dialogue and conversation. And that success to us was not 100, 000 downloads a week. It was Are we helping ourselves and each other? And if the answer to that was yes, awesome. And then it was like, the absolute bonus would be if it helped anybody, one, one person. So just to get some validation on that, I thought it was really neat and like where I'm going with this is not to pat ourselves on the back, although we should acknowledge that it is a cool thing to hear. I think it's more part of what he reached out to me for was. He said, I don't have men in my life who I can have these types of conversations with. And would you be that person? And so we're going to have a conversation tomorrow. And we'll see where it goes, but where I'm going with this is I think our thesis that we started out with, which is. Building quality, strong relationships with other men is really fucking hard in society. In fact, I had another buddy of mine, I used to adventure with him a ton. So we spent many a night sitting around campfires in the middle of the wilderness, talking about a lot of deep things, right? He wasn't just a surface level friend. We were on a, we were poloing actually recently, and I just made a comment on how he looked really good. He's been working out and in shape and he said, yeah, I'm like unprompted said, I'm not having any problem with the ladies. He said, what I'm having a problem with is the men. And I was like, wasn't aware of that. for you. And he said, I don't mean like that. And he said, I'm just having a hard time. He's in his forties, like building the types of relationships that I want with other men. So it's just again, certainly reach out if you want to. We're very, open to that. But absolutely. Just recognize that there are Michael and I have known each other for 10 years or however many years it was. And it wasn't until I And so he saw me post something on a similar topic that he was like, Hey, I'm feeling the same way we should connect and, that has led to us being, becoming extremely close friends. So I just want to encourage people like they're anybody who's listening to this, that is feeling isolated and alone, right? Like we all feel it and we've all felt it and guarantee you there are people in your life who are feeling, they may look amazing. They may sound amazing, but they're, they have this deep void and emptiness inside of them. And part of what can fill that is, is having these types of conversations. So I really just encourage people to like, be the one that sends. Like you talk about separation season. Mylet talks about this. Don't just send a Merry Christmas on Christmas. Send, that just says Merry Christmas. Send a, take 15 seconds to send something thoughtful, but do it on the 22nd. Hey, I just wanted to be one of the first people to wish you Merry Christmas. I was thinking about XYZ and that we, some shared experience or whatever. And I really just wanted to reach out and say, I hope you're doing well and I miss you. Something as simple as that could be a catalyst to, in a lot of ways, it was the types of catalysts that we've seen with each other and with other people in our lives. So don't like, don't, you don't feel like you're alone. We're certainly here. We're, around, we're available. Y'all know how to get ahold of us, how to find us we're on social, et cetera. But like, real talk, if you're feeling any bit of what I just said, recognize that. Most of the men in your life are feeling the same way and that they are, whether they recognize it or not, like screaming out into the void for somebody to be the one that sends them that text that says, Hey, we'd love to catch up. And then you get together and we don't talk about the Vikings losing a. Horrible playoff game, which is what will happen by the time most people listen to this. I'm sure so true or the weather or the holidays or work or all the bullshit surface level stuff that like, yeah, we all just do. So anyway that's, what I wanted to end with is just a call to action on

Michael: 32:36

yeah, please reach out. Yeah. Please, if it's not us to somebody else in your life that needs it. And that could be the start or that you

Scott: 32:44

don't know needs it. Because the reality is, they do need it. I'll tell you what, I have, I've got a men's group, I'm joining a new men's group in January, not replacing one, but I'll have two men's groups as of January and I have better and more strong quality relationships with men than I've ever had in my life. And I would still love more, right? Like it's, you can't have enough. There's a limit, I'm sure, but you can't I have not reached a point where I'm like, Oh, I've got too many amazing friendships in my life.

Michael: 33:20

And I I think that there is no magic number, but I know that if I think in my head, I'm like it would be great to have. At any point, like a dozen guys where, you know, across the country, across the globe, even if you're someplace you have someone that you can call and is going to be there and yeah good call to action and certainly thanks for listening. Thanks for, for reaching out. For those folks who have, because the, I've had a similar experience and, it helps reinforce that while we are, perhaps a relatively smaller regular audience, we are making progress. We are being persistent in our efforts and putting in the work and committed to to helping each other and, to help the folks that are listening.

Scott: 34:17

Amen. All right, cool. With that episode 43 in the books,