Two Percent with Michael Easter
Comfort is a Trap: Adventure is the Way to Freedom & Fulfillment
26 May 2026
Transcript generated automatically by AI and may contain errors.
Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
Welcome to 2%. I'm your host, Michael Easter. Most of us live in optimization mode. We pick the fastest route, the safest neighborhood, the most efficient schedule. We always seek comfort. But a life that is optimized for ease and comfort also removes us from the experiences that make life worth living.
Adventure, it has been totally engineered out of our everyday lives, and we are paying for it in ways that we don't even realize. So we have two guests who are coming on today to talk about adventure, how to get more of it in your life, and how it can fundamentally change you as a human, and how it doesn't always have to be this big extreme thing that's hard to find.
Although, if you do decide to go to the extremes, your life will probably change a lot. First, we are going to bring on Jay Carson. He was a political operator and a Hollywood producer and writer for years. He was winning the game of life, but then an emergency happened.
And he realized that although he was really great in all these worlds that had a lot of spin, a lot of narrative, he was not competent in the real world. He couldn't handle things that came his way. So what he did is he decided to take a survival course, took two weeks in the middle of the Utah desert.
Chapter 2: How did Jay Carson's survival course change his life?
He had nothing with him. And it totally changed his life. It made him happier. It made him healthier, more important. It made him a far more competent human being in his day-to-day life and made him appreciate just how amazing modern day life is. After that, we're going to bring on Sinway Xavier. Sinway is an adventurer who argues that you can find adventure anywhere, even in your own backyard.
He has learned this by taking the hard way and the path less traveled his entire life. So he's going to tell us why this summer you should get in your car, travel somewhere a little bit off the grid, and go explore the spaces that are right out your back door. So let's get into the episode. Hey guys, it's us, the Jonas Brothers. I'm Joe. I'm Kevin. And I'm Nick. And guess what?
We created our own podcast called Hey Jonas. We invented a podcast? Well, we didn't invent it. We just contributed to it. We're the first people to do podcasts. We get to ask other people questions because we're sick and tired of being asked questions. Well, sick and tired is a strong way to put it, but you know. Tired and sick. Tired and sick.
Listen to Hey Jonas on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
Just listen.
We don't care where you hear it.
Another podcast from some SNL late night comedy guy. Not quite. On Humor Me with Robert Smigel and Friends, me and hilarious guests from Bob Odenkirk to David Letterman help make you funnier.
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Chapter 3: What lessons does Sinhue Xavier share about finding adventure?
This week, my guests, SNL's Mikey Day and head writer Streeter Seidel, help an acapella band with their between songs banter. Where does your group perform? We do some retirement homes. Those people are starving for banter. Listen to Humor Me with Robert Smigel and friends on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
Why are we all so obsessed with romance? On the Radio 831 podcast, join us, Sanjana Bhaskar, and Tyler McCall, as we unpack all the trending tropes, buzzy adaptations, book talk drama, and celebrity love stories with hot takes and sharp guests.
Each episode digs into what these stories reveal about desire, fantasy, identity, and how we love now.
Listen to the Radio 831 podcast on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. The story I told myself can then shape my behavior, and that can lead me to sabotage the possibility of connection.
This Mental Health Awareness Month, tune into the podcast Deeply Well with Debbie Brown. If you've been searching for a soft place to land while doing the work to become whole, this podcast is for you. To hear more, listen to Deeply Well with Debbie Brown from the Black Effect Podcast Network on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
All right, now we're going to bring on Jay Carson. For most of his career, he was a high-level political operator. He was the communications director for President Clinton. Then he started screenwriting. He worked on House of Cards and also The Morning Show. And then during COVID... The power went out, and he realized that he had no idea what to do in the event of a big emergency.
He was not self-reliant at all. And so he took an extreme wilderness course, and it totally changed his life and taught him new ways of living in the world, acting in the world, and how to be self-reliant. All right, Jay, welcome to the show. Thanks, Michael. It's so good to be here. All right, so for people who don't know you yet, I think we need to set this up.
So you spent about and are still spending 25 years in some of these super optimized high pressure environments. And then in 2021, you sign up for this 14 day survival course in the Utah desert. And now you are an instructor at the school. So give us the short version of how you got from that world to being like, I need to go out in the desert and trying to survive for 14 days.
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Chapter 4: How does adventure contribute to personal fulfillment?
I was like, what's the only thing harder than politics or Hollywood? No, I really... I think... Yeah, I went from probably the second worst business in America to the worst business in America, from politics to Hollywood. But I... I joke, but I think that there's something to that. There's an unreality to the world in both politics and Hollywood.
And the world's less real in Hollywood than it is in politics. In what sense? there are actual consequences to decisions in politics, right? Like actual consequences to real human beings. And that's not the case in Hollywood, right?
Like there's consequences to the people on your show or your movie, but it's not, you know, the decisions that one makes in Hollywood don't affect the lives of millions of people. I want to be clear. I love writing, right? I'm not complaining about that part. It's an amazing job to get to have, but...
I think that I was, without knowing it, I think I was longing for something more real, more concrete, more tactile. And there was a few incidents that happened that we can get into that led me to want to go do a Boulder Outdoor Survival School course. But I think what was going on under the surface was this feeling of a lack of connection to the real world. And I wanted to fix that.
Yeah, for those who are not familiar with BOSS, give us the breakdown of what it is. It's so awesome. I mean, it is so awesome. I will, I can fact check that as a journalist. I did a mini course. It's awesome.
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Chapter 5: What skills are essential for surviving in the wilderness?
It's so awesome and so difficult. And I think that, you know, I only understood why it had, why my 14 day course had such an impact on me after I read your book, right? The Comfort Crisis. It was this thing where ex post facto, I think that I used my Latin correctly. I'm from, I went to a public school in Macon, Georgia. So, yeah.
I was like, oh, that's why it felt like my life was changed over 14 days. But that is what happened. My perspective on life in general and on my life was changed over the course of 14 days. And so essentially... What we do at Boss is take people in the wilderness and teach them how to survive with the land using almost no gear, right? It's essentially a knife and a water bottle.
You know, there's a little bit more than that, but there is no tent, no sleeping bag, no GPS, no matches, no phones, no internet, no any of the other stuff. And so you really learn how to live... off the land and with the land. And the power of that and the difficulty of that is just profound.
I say, and it's true, that it's the most profound experience of my life aside from my marriage and the birth of my kids. And wasn't it prompted because, was it a power outage or something? And you realized like, oh my God, if an emergency actually happened, I am completely incompetent. I have no idea what to do.
Chapter 6: How can one find adventure in their own backyard?
So tell us about that. I, um... So I grew up, I just mentioned, I grew up in Macon, Georgia, and I was a really outdoorsy kid, right? It was pre-phones and pre, my parents, we had a TV, but my parents wouldn't let me watch it basically ever. I spent a bunch of time outdoors and I love the outdoors. I feel very at home in the outdoors. When my kids were born, My oldest is 13 and a half.
I didn't know what to do with them. I was like, what do you do with a kid? And I had this instinct inside that you take them outdoors. And we had moved, we live in Los Angeles, but we had moved to Topanga Canyon, which you can see in the background is not skyscrapers. And, you know, there's a lot of nature around us.
Some of the best hiking trails, some of the most beautiful hiking trails in America are like right out the door. So I started taking these kids out into the wilderness and it wasn't long before I realized inside, you don't really know what you're doing. You know, if you, if you got you out there by yourself, not knowing what you're doing. Okay.
But you're taking little kids into the wilderness and going deeper and deeper because I'm someone that pushes myself.
Yeah.
And then we started camping, and I just realized I didn't have a clue what I was doing. But it was a nagging, quiet voice in the background for a while until the beginning of COVID. And remember, there's stories on the news that the world is ending, and it sort of feels like a zombie apocalypse a bit. I have to set that back up so that I don't seem totally crazy with this next part.
And we're like 10 days into it and a bunch of countries in Europe are shut down and America is starting to shut down and the power goes out at our house. And I describe it in my book, which is because it was nighttime and the hum in the house, the hum of all the electric stuff, you know, the fridge and the dishwasher and the things charging and it just went out and I was like, That's the power.
And my head went to the worst movie I've ever seen. I was like, it's definitely 28 Days Later. Totally. Because the context is like, no one knows what's going on.
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Chapter 7: What role does discomfort play in personal growth?
Everyone thinks the world is ending. And then, bam, power's out. There's your sign. Yeah. And I just, I really believe that things are meant to be. Like, that was supposed to scare me. And it turned out that it was a power outage on our street because they were working on the Transformers, right? But we don't have cell service here.
So I drove into town and I called Southern California Edison, sure that, like... no one would answer or I would hear them being eaten by the zombies. And she was like, yeah, it's an outage on your street. It'll be back on in 90 minutes. And it was. But the moment stuck with me. Yeah, it's like this realization that power goes out. You have no service.
You just go, I have no idea how to figure this out. I got to call someone and I don't have service. Maybe I should start to figure out what I should do in a situation like this and anything else that might pop up. Yeah, exactly. So Boss is in Boulder, Utah. And for listeners who don't know where that is, which is probably every single listener. Boulder, Colorado. I know that place.
And it's like, no, no, no, Boulder, Utah. Boulder, Utah. It's in southern-ish Utah, middle of the state. How many people live in Boulder? Four or five hundred. Yeah, four or five hundred.
Chapter 8: How can embracing risk enhance life experiences?
So how soon after that happened do you end up driving up to Boulder, Utah and taking the course? The beauty of it was that there was a long lead time to going. So I got to have the... reassurance of signing up, but I didn't have to actually do it for a while. And I think if it had been two weeks from then, I would have been like, oh, they have a course available in two weeks.
I got to go twist my ankle so I can't do it. Yeah. But there was a it was I was basically a year away. from the next courses because the season shut down, that first season shut down because of COVID. And so I, um, I signed up, it was about a year later. And, um, I showed up for a September course, a September 14 day, and it just changed my life. We were sort of at boss.
We max out at 12 students on a course. There were 12 of us, two instructors, these incredible instructors, Michael Torello and Tobias Corwin. Um, um, Just, I mean, the most, I would be like, what's that? What's that? How do I do this? I never met two more capable humans in my life. I mean, they knew how to do everything. I would be like, what's that plant? He's like, well, it's this.
And the Latin name for it is this. And you could use it for this, but not only the leaf, the stem will actually do it. And it's just like, what? Yeah. This information that is so, there's something that's so inherently cool about that, right? And I almost think it goes back to the fact that humans did have to know that sort of information for all of time.
And then things changed and life modernizes. And now, you know, if I walk outside and someone said, hey, what plan is that? I'm like, I don't know. Yeah. I mean, until 200 years ago, that's the crazy part. Until 200 years ago, we all basically knew how to do everything we needed to do to take care of ourselves.
And then I think the more modern we get, the more, the less we know in terms of what to do to take care of ourselves. And I just, I felt like I was missing something as a human.
Yeah.
I was hungry for more generalized skills and a greater sense of capability. And I got that through 14 days. Like a sense of like, I can do that. You know, I can try it. It might not be as good as the carpenter would do, but I can try. And then there's this feeling of... There's a feeling of self-worth, honestly, no better way to put it. Like I am a capable person.
So it's 14 days, but tell us what was the first day like? Just real. I don't want to scare people away from the courses because they're amazing. But like it is, it's insane. Yeah. So you show there's 11 other people there. Mm-hmm. You get these two instructors, then what happens? You spend a bunch of time your first day... By the way, we do seven-day courses and 28-day courses, too.
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