#225 ‒ The comfort crisis, doing hard things, rucking, and more | Michael Easter, MA

Hey everyone. Welcome to the Drive Podcast. I'm your host, Peter Attia. This podcast, my website and my weekly newsletter all focus on the goal of translating the science of longevity into something accessible for everyone. Our goal is to provide the best content in health and wellness, full stop, and we've assembled a great team of analysts to make this happen. If you enjoy this podcast, we've created a membership program that brings you far more in depth content. If you want to take your knowledge of this space to the next level, at the end of this episode, I'll explain what those benefits are. Or if you want to learn more now, head over to peterattiamd.com subscribe Now without further delay, here's today's episode. My guest this week is Michael Easter. Michael is an author, speaker and professor. His work focuses on how humans can integrate modern science and evolutionary wisdom for improved health, meaning and performance in their life and work. When he's not on the ground reporting, Michael is a visiting lecturer in the Journalism and Media Studies Department at the University of Nevada in Las Vegas. Michael travels the world to speak with different thinkers and people living at extremes, and he shares those insights in his books and his other writing. He's the author of the bestseller the Comfort Crisis, which no doubt you have heard me speak about both in other podcasts and probably on social media. Was really excited to sit down with Michael and in this episode we talk about a lot of things. We talk about his background, his parents struggle with alcoholism, his father leaving when he was young, and how these things impacted Michael's own struggle with alcoholism. From there, we talk about his realization that we are in a crisis of comfort and how this became the thesis for the book we discuss. We talk about boredom, phones, TV stress, and dealing with the possibility of failure. We talk also about hunting and the importance of thinking about death and how other cultures think about and face death differently compared to those of us, especially here in the United States. We end the conversation around one of my favorite topics of all, rucking. So if you've heard me talk about rucking, you get to now go deep on it. I think this is a very important topic and as I mentioned, this book had such a profound impact on the way I think about things and also just the way I'm trying to raise my children. You know, so much of what Michael talks about I think we intuitively kind of get a sense of, but he does such a great job articulating it and giving us a little more data around the edges. So without further delay, please enjoy my conversation With Michael Easter. Michael, so awesome to be sitting with you here today. I have been looking forward to this podcast for probably about three or four months and I appreciate you making the trek out here to do this in person.

Absolutely. Likewise, Peter. I've been looking forward to this one. Should be fun.

My wife, by the way, by the way, I just want you to know, called me like an hour ago to give me a ton of crap for the fact that we're not recording this outside in the 107 degrees here today. She's like, you guys talking about the comfort crisis in your air conditioned studio here. She's kind of called us out on the fact. Called me out on this fact.

Well, she's not wrong. I did think about that. I was like, it might be interesting if we actually did this while rucking, but here we are. We'll ruck afterwards. It'll be fine, we'll survive.

I mean, she wants to ruck with us later today, which we will, but she was mostly like, really, you should at least be just sitting outside doing this in the sweltering heat and all that stuff. And so maybe she's right. I mean, we're definitely way too comfortable right now.

There's going to be a weight penalty for our behavior with the rucks. If we were planning 40. No, it's now 50, it's now 55. So that's how we'll compensate. It'll all shake out in the end.

So, look, people have heard me talk a little bit about your book on previous podcasts. People have also heard me allude to this obsession of mine in rucking. Certainly anybody who knows me personally, they're either converted or sick and tired of me and my daughter who just got back from her first sleepaway camp in Colorado and Wyoming. So she was. First time, she was 13, gone away for two weeks. This was a hard camp. We'd sent her to a place deliberately because of how hard this place was. And it's basically a camp where you go to work, taking care of animals, doing a bunch of hard stuff. And so in prep for this, we said, look, Olivia, you really ought to just ruck with me all the time because it will make it easier for you to go. And she just kind of didn't really want to. I mean, I think when you're a 13 year old kid, the idea of going for a heavy weighted backpack walk with your dad at 5 o' clock in the sweltering Austin heat is not that appealing. The whole time she's there, you know, they have no Electronics, you get one time to speak with them. You get a 10 minute call at the middle of the thing. So the first thing she said on that middle of the thing, she goes, dad, I'm like the fastest hiker here. All that rucking totally paid off.

I love this. I could not love this anymore. This is so cool to hear because.

They were at like 10 to 12,000ft. They're at altitude. And I was having her out there with 25 to 30 pounds in her pack.

Very cool.

And we have a lot of hills here, as you'll see later today, so it was good for her.

I also love that you sent her to a camp where she's doing hard things outside. It's a theme that runs through my book, as you know, that is so valuable for kids today. So I teach at unlv and seeing a lot of the students that come in, where they're at psychologically and how embedded they are in, I would say, digital worlds and in their own head and how things that I think most people would consider maybe minor inconveniences in life can be so easily blown up. I think that ties back to a lot of what I'm talking about in the book. And I think the antidote to that is sending kids out when they are younger, trying to introduce hard things into their life. And there's obviously a lot of different ways to do that, but it sounds like what you did is a really.

Cool thing, certainly one way to do it. And we had friends that recommended this place when we reached out to friends who had older kids to say, hey, where are places you can send kids? I mean, our actual initial hope was to send her to kind of a missionary camp where you could really sort of see something challenging in Africa and things like that. A lot of times they just, for kids this age, were not necessarily looking for that. But let's take a step back and help understand a little bit about you. Remind me where you grew up.

I grew up in northern Utah, so a little town called Bountiful just outside of Salt Lake City.

Were you a skier? What was your main.

I like to say that snowboarding got me into college because when I was in high school, I was not a great student. I liked to go out, I liked to party. I was into girls, I was into cars, I was into all that kind of thing. Didn't really care about schoolwork now. Would never do homework. Did okay in school. But with Park City Mountain Resort, they would sell you a season pass for $99 if you got on the Honor roll. That is the only thing that incentivized me to do any good at school. So thank you. Park City Ski Resort. That is what got you into college.

Did your parents split when you were young?

They did. Well, I wasn't even born yet, so my mother was pregnant, five months pregnant, and my dad took off. So their backstory, which I think is relevant to understanding the context, is that my dad was always a heavy drinker, heavy drug user. When my parents met, my mom was into that lifestyle, too. So eventually my dad realizes, you know, maybe I'm a little too into this world. So he goes to rehab now as part of his rehab and.

Sorry, this is after you're born?

This is before I'm born.

Okay.

So they were married at the time. They'd been married a few years. So as part of his rehab, they give my mother the book that he is supposed to read in rehab. And they say, you read this so you understand what he's going through.

Is it 12 step?

It was, yep. She goes, okay. She explains it. She goes, so I'm sitting in the tub one night and I'm drinking a gin and tonic, and I get to this line in this book and it says, try to drink and stop. Try it twice. And she goes, oh, yeah, I couldn't do that. So she realizes that she has a problem too, and she manages to get sober. So that's the joke is my dad went to rehab and my mom got sober, and so they got back together. He stayed sober for a little while, a little bit. Just enough for her to get pregnant. And once she got pregnant, it was, you don't have a drinking buddy anymore. The fun's over. And I think he wasn't quite ready for that, so he took off. And my mom raised me, always been raised by a single parent.

Do you have a relationship with your dad today?

I do not. I haven't heard from him for. Oh, man, since I was like 8 or something like that.

How much of this history of your parents drinking did you know as you got into high school and stuff?

I knew my mom didn't drink, and I knew the reason why she didn't drink. Now, she was very respectful of my dad. She wasn't going to give me any sort of details, but I was left to assume that the reason that he was not in my life is because he didn't ever stop drinking. So that was sort of the context around that.

So when you get to high school and most kids are even though not legally allowed to drink, but obviously that's when kids are most experimenting with alcohol. Did your mom have any advice for you or did you have any thoughts about. I'm born from two parents who both have probably suffered a little bit from this. I could certainly have a genetic predisposition.

Yeah. So when I was a kid, my plan was I'm never going to drink because of that genetic predisposition. And I read books. I was kind of a nerdy kid. And then you turn into a teenager and your brain starts changing and you look for excitement and risk and all of a sudden the pull of social things become so much more rewarding than it ever was that I drank. And when that happened, I. My response was, why the hell would you not do this? That was the answer. Because the town that I grew up in, it was all one religion, except.

For all Mormon, presumably.

All Mormon, Yes. And we were not Mormon. Single parent. So a little bit of an outcast in that sense. Didn't have a dad around. And so I think you kind of. You're kind of trying to figure it out. You're uncomfortable in these situations around people, just generally. And then you have a drink and all of a sudden that goes away. So it becomes this sort of learned thing where you associate this with good things. All of a sudden I could talk to anyone. I could talk to girls. I could say funnier things. It was a lot more clever. So you get all this positive feedback and why would you not drink? Now? That eventually worked for me until it stopped working. That's the classic story. So today I'm sober, and there's a good reason for that. And I'm glad I am. Saved my life.

Talk to me about the kind of realization that this isn't working for me. They talk about how change happens really slowly and then really quickly. What was the slow descent into the quick realization? Not everybody just has a one realization where they hit rock bottom and they switch. Sometimes you have to bounce a little bit on the bottom, a hundred percent.

I'd always noticed that I probably drank a little more than other people at the same time. There were no real repercussions for that. Until I was maybe 23 or 24, I was living in New York City. I was going to grad school. I was living alone, and I had no one watching me. And I had bars that closed at 4am and that's a potent combination. And I think that was when I started to realize, oh, maybe this isn't good. And I remember exactly when I sort of realized it went on the Internet like you do. Consulted Dr. Google and signs. You have a drinking problem. And it's like these 10 questions or whatever it was. I'm going, yes to that one, no to that one, yes to that one, no to that one. Yes, yes. And I go, oh, five or six out of 10, I should be fine. It gets to the bottom. If you have answered yes to one.

Or more of do one or more.

I just go, oh. So that's when it gets on your radar. And I think I told myself, well, I'll just quit when it gets bad enough.

Once I reach 8 out of 10, then I'm stopping.

Yes, exactly. So then you just start racking them up over the years. And I had tried to stop drinking, probably started trying to stop when I was about 25. In different ways, it never worked. Just never worked.

Why is that? I'm sure you are not the first person to come to that realization of just willpower alone, without maybe a broader system or structure or awareness is tough. Why do you think that's the case?

I think there's a lot of things behind it. I think some of them are developmental. So about half of people end up getting sober around age 30. The same things that are happening in the brain that draw a teenager towards alcohol and make it this great association, they start to kind of shake out over time. You take on responsibility, you have all these other things in your life that all of a sudden make that you start to realize maybe this isn't as good for me. I also think that eventually the balance just tips where the short term relief isn't as good as what this long term thing could be. And I think that coming to that realization takes a long time. Like you said, a lot of bouncing. And for me, it was just one morning. I woke up. I was living in Pennsylvania. I was working at a magazine that was based out of there. We had an office in New York, but our editorial office was in Pennsylvania. And I woke up and my house is a mess. I'm a mess. I'd had mornings like that.

And you're how old?

I was 28 years old, and I'd had mornings like that before. And for whatever reason, this morning it was like you could kind of see where this path was going. And it was very clear to me that if I were to continue this drinking, I was going to die early. Now, whether it was 35, 55, 75, I didn't know. I just knew that it was going to be earlier.

And tell me about your relationship with your mom at this point. Does she understand how much you're drinking, is she?

No. So I always hid that from her. We've always been very close. We were always a team. So I kept that away from her. She would travel when I was a kid and in high school, so I would even only drink when she was out of town. She was gone about a third of the year. So even behaviors like that, I just didn't want her to know and sort of.

And it's interesting. When you kind of contemplated getting sober, did it occur to you that your mom could be the most important ally in that, given that she knew what it was like as well?

The morning where things became more clear to me, she was the first person I called. I had told people.

So now you're telling her two things, which is I'm getting sober. The implication of which is, I'm an alcoholic. Which you didn't know that.

Yeah, exactly. That was a phone call she didn't want to take, but was happy to take. So I could see this one path would lead in an early death, probably. And more importantly, it was like, you're going to lose everything in the process. At the time, I had a girlfriend who I really loved, and I was starting to realize, like, oh, this is a really good person for me. We're now married.

What did she think of your drinking? Was she aware of it fully or.

Yeah, she's like, you got to get a handle on this. She basically put it, you're a really good, cool dude when you're sober, but you start drinking and you're obnoxious. And I was. And I knew it, too. But once you get in that cycle, it's like you drink like I did. It was, well, if one's good, two's better, three's even better, four is even better. Just keep stacking them on. So once you start drinking, something happens in your brain where all of a sudden just your entire thinking and universe shifts.

I have such empathy for someone who's gone through this, but I can't actually relate to it because we are all wired kind of differently. Right. And I don't have that chemistry in my brain. Alcohol doesn't do it for me. Which is not to say I don't like to drink. I love certain types of tequila and wine, and there's even one beer I like. But I can never recall feeling what you're feeling, though intellectually, I can understand what you're saying, and I can only imagine how difficult that is because it becomes a reinforcement loop. And those can be very difficult to break.

Yeah. The problem is the Solution is the problem is the solution. So that becomes a challenge. And where was I? Well, basically the other path is that I could see this is going to be hard. It's going to be very uncomfortable. I'm going to have to relearn everything. I don't know if I can do it, but I'm going to try this thing. And I'd gone through stints where maybe I wouldn't drink for a few weeks, but I was like, I'm going to take action. And taking action was picking up the phone and calling my mom.

And then. Did your mom suggest the 12 step program?

She suggested that I talk to people who were similar to us. Yeah. So I started becoming active and just meeting other people who were sober. And a big part of it for me, which is one of the reasons why this book came about, is that I had to realize I don't have to be comfortable all the time because alcohol is the ultimate comfort blanket for me. If I had stress from work, it became this really learned behavior where if I just had a drink, then problem's gone. But that ultimately was backfiring on me over time in a very severe way.

How many of your friendships were predicated around alcohol consumption? And therefore, once alcohol was gone, those friendships didn't make a lot of sense?

That's a great question. There's a few that they stuck around. I have some really good friends who I remember I got sober on December 15th, and I had planned to hang out with a friend on New Year's Eve who was kind of my drinking buddy. And I had to call him and be like, hey, man, not drinking this weekend. He's like, oh, I don't care. We can just go golf or something. And it was just like, what a relief. Yeah, like, that dude, I owe him a lot of. But then some. It's like you just realize you don't have as much in common with them after the. It's not so much the drinking as it is. You only have this one thing in common. And so once that thing goes away, it's like, oh, well, cool. This was fun hanging out. We're probably not going to call each other again, and that's okay.

To me, that's like the subtle part of this that's really complicated. I may have told this story previously on a podcast, but I can't recall when I was doing my residency in Baltimore. At the time, it was certainly the heroin capital of the United States. Now, I don't know if that's still the case in opioids. Have expanded far beyond heroin, but we definitely took care of. It's almost like everybody that walked in the ER with an abscess in their arm or something like that was addicted to heroin. And the best advice I could ever offer, though it was not particularly helpful, it was intellectually true. But I don't know how you act on it, was, listen, you're going to die from this. It didn't kill you this time. You had a huge abscess that I cut open and drained and pulled old needles out of. And you're really lucky to be alive. And you're going to be on IV antibiotics for a few days and then oral antibiotics for a lot longer. You only get a few more of these, and that's going to be the last one. But I realize you can't just leave here and go back to the row home you're living in with all the people that are doing that same thing and expect to stop. So if you want to quit heroin, you need a whole new group of people to be with. That's just such a devastating thing to contemplate when your entire life is centered around this block of Baltimore where everybody is using and some doc is saying, look, this is going to kill you. But it's not just that you need to stop this thing. That is the ultimate comfort blanket. It's that you need a whole new social group. You need to be around people that don't do this. That's just devastating.

And it plays out in the research. You look at research on alcoholics, and I think there was a group that tracked alcoholics who day one of the recovery for a year. And the people who still stuck around their normal friend group, only 15% of them were still sober after a year.

I'm amazed it's that high, truthfully.

The group that started hanging out with different people, 60% of them were sober after a year.

The fact that your wife was not a big drinker is probably the single biggest factor in your life. I'm guessing super helpful.

I know it's definitely harder for people who have a significant other who is continuing to drink heavily. A lot harder, because you're around that all the time. Probably the conditions that maybe led to some of your drinking haven't changed at all. And it almost becomes an illogical decision not to drink sometimes in the short term, because for someone who has an addiction, using the substance is a relatively rational decision in the short term, totally.

It's completely adaptive. It's only maladaptive in the long term. So how did you Think about that issue, which was, okay, I have this adaptation that serves me well in the short term, not serving me in the long term. But what's the adaptation for? How much of this is related to your abandonment as a child by your father? One could say that that's the potential root of this, coupled with the genetic predisposition, which is kind of the way things work in life. Do you have sort of an environmental and a genetic component to something? Did you at the time think I should also probably figure out how much of this is driven by that feeling or that vacancy?

I would say early on you're just trying to figure it out day to day. You're just trying to not drink. You're just trying to make the next right decision. I think you start to unpeel that onion over time and it's something that takes a long time. Everyone has their own onion, whatever it is that needs that unpeeling. And just like with a real onion, sometimes you cry during it. But it's the right thing to do.

The magazine you're working at at that time, what are the kind of stuff you're writing about?

So I was mainly in fitness and nutrition and performance. I did some mental health stuff. So all kinds of different articles. I was running basically all the fitness coverage for Men's Health is what magazine.

Was, which is how we met originally, wasn't it?

I think it was.

I feel like you interviewed me a couple of years ago on something that was related, like a Men's Health piece. I don't remember what it was about. I think Bill Gifford introduced us, right?

Yeah, I think it was him. His background is with Men's Health. So Bill introduced us. And yeah, I worked there for six or seven years and that's where I was working at at the time.

Where did you get this idea that we are in a crisis of comfort?

A few things happen. So one is that working at that magazine, I noticed that every single thing that I was writing about because I mainly am working on lifestyle health, performance, fitness, nutrition, that kind of stuff, mental health. I noticed that anything that I'm writing about, you have to go through short term discomfort in order to improve. If you want to get fit, you're going to have to exercise harder than you are now. If you're not, if you want to lose weight, you're probably going to be hungry at some point. If you want to improve your mental health, just like I experienced, you might have to ask yourself some hard questions about why do I feel this way? What's happening? What's the underlying behavior and motivation, and that's not always comfortable. So I make that observation, then I get sober, which is the ultimate. Yeah, that was really, really hard.

And what year was this? December of 2014.

That was exceedingly hard. But after things sort of started to settle. After you're done with the white knuckling.

How long is the white knuckling?

It was probably shorter than for some people because I think I was just done psychologically.

But part of the white knuckling, I'm sure, is also just the physiology. Right. I mean, you're really giving up something that.

Yeah. So you're having to relearn all these behaviors, which is really tough, and figure out how to deal with things. But soon, literally everything in my life got better. Everything you could measure got better.

Your performance got better at work, your writing got better.

Performance, my writing got better, my finances got better. I lost weight, all these things. But more importantly, I would say internally is where the change really was. I mean, I was just like, wow, things have changed. Let's keep this energy going. And I got that from being willing to step into the fire, to enter the cave. That was the one that I feared. So that sets the stage for this idea that, okay, going through discomfort often leads to something really good in the long term. It's a necessary buy in for change. And I kind of start thinking about this idea of comfort and make some observations like, well, wow, life is pretty comfortable in a lot of different ways now and then. What really brought the idea that would ultimately become the book together is I do this backcountry hunt with Donnie Vincent, who's this backcountry bowhunter filmmaker, and I profiled him for Men's Health magazine. So we go on this elk hunt. He was up there for maybe two weeks. We were in Nevada, up in the mountains. I was only with him for maybe five days or something like that. It's a backpack hunt.

And what led you to want to do the profile on Donnie?

I came across a YouTube video of his, and it's called who We Are. I think that I had always been interested in the outdoors somewhat. I'd kind of been interested in hunting. And I think part of that goes back to maybe my father. So his profession is a hunting and fishing guide. So I just kind of had this interest in it. It's like a thing that was on my radar because of that, But I had never really come across material around hunting that really spoke to me. When you turn on the Sportsman's Channel, if you've Ever watched the Sportsman's Channel? It's the Sportsman's Channel and Donnie talks about hunting in a totally different way. Totally different way. I like to describe him as being part locavore, part naturalist, part environmentalist, part conservationist, part ultra athlete, which is funny.

Because that's the way I was introduced to it. So that's the only thing I can relate to, which is why I don't think I know what's happening on the Sportsman's Channel or whatever it's called, for better or worse. My only exposure to hunting, it sounds like came about through the same way that Donnie what you've written about him.

So I thought that was interesting and I thought that he was talking about it in an interesting way. And I thought that there was a lot of things, knowing what I knew in the health space, I thought there's a lot of different things that are probably happening around this that are good. So I joined him on this hunt and we backpack in up to like 11,000ft. And I'm freezing cold the entire this.

Is in elk hunt. So this is September, October, September.

And I'd come from Vegas where it was 100 something and we get up to these super high peaks and it's freezing cold at night. And I didn't pack well enough. Let's just say that I'm sleeping in the dirt, starving the entire time.

Because you're on public land.

We're on public land. We're only packing in so much food because you don't want to carry that around. Getting water requires that we hike down to this stream, hoof it up. Sitting in the afternoon, sort of glassing is very boring. My phone's boring.

Most people don't understand that you really only can shoot the elk at dawn and dusk. The rest of the day you're just doing recon.

I had no idea, had I known that, I might have brought up crossword puzzle. But instead I'm just sitting there going, looking around and it's like, oh, all of a sudden I'm bored again.

On and on during the five days. Did he get an elk?

He got one right after I left. But also the underlying sense is we got really close to one. It was just a little too young for him. So we got within oh like 40 yards and this thing didn't see us. I mean, I was just saucer eyed. Oh my God, that thing is huge.

They're a magnificent creature.

It was unbelievable to see it that close and in the wild. And what ended up happening is we got in really close And a coyote came in because he's waiting. He understands, oh, this guy's gonna kill it. I'm gonna have dinner, too. So the elk spooks and takes off. But I get back home to Las Vegas and I feel great. Like, man, I haven't felt this good since I just got sober. When you're riding that pink cloud off into the sunset, man, you know, and it occurred to me, you kind of have this moment where you're like, man, the world I'm in now is so different than the world I was in up there. And it's different because this is comfortable in every way and that it was uncomfortable in almost every way, and yet that.

Yeah, why did that feel better? Right? Doesn't make sense.

Right. And yet that world is the one that humans lived in for pretty much all of time.

99.99996% of our genetic evolution.

Yes. So you go, whoa. Well, that's interesting. Now we've had this very, very rapid tip into comfort. So you start to look at all the things that most impact my daily life. I couldn't live in Las Vegas were it not for air conditioning. I drive to work as I stream entertainment from my XM radio. Right. I don't have to be alone with my thoughts. Easy access to.

You don't have to hunt or gather any of your food.

No, I don't have to work for any of my food. My food is also exceedingly calorie dense. If I want it to be, I can eat it anytime. There's an abundance of it. On and on and on. And so I just wonder, okay, well, how are all these other comforts affecting us? Have we almost become too comfortable? And what happens if you push back against this? And I guess, what are the key types of discomfort that we evolved to face? And do those still help us today? So there's the question. And that ultimately led to me going, well, that's a lot of material. This doesn't sound like a magazine article. It sounds like a book. So you write the book proposal and we shopped it out. And it's funny because this whole process, you have a book agent and stuff, and they're going, well, this is a really good idea and I think I'd like to read it, but I don't know what the hell it is. What section does it go in when you read? The way that I tell the book, which we'll get into, is, I did this 33 day trip in the Alaskan Arctic. And that is the overarching narrative of the book. And as I'm facing these important discomforts that humans used to face in the past that can still be beneficial to us now that our world is comfortable, I spend chapters on those. So I'm kind of weaving the stories in and out. And it was kind of a confusing thing for them to wrap their heads around. They're going, is this in the adventure section? Is it self help? What is it? But we took it out and luckily someone was like, well, I. I think I can probably do something with it too.

I love the way it's written and as you know, I gave it to my daughter.

And I love that nothing makes me happier.

And we're going to go into each of these in some depth. But I'll tell you, the one that nagged at me the most because most of these discomforts I've thought a lot about, but the one that I don't think I'd really given its due to was boredom. In some ways, that's the most insidious comfort we've cured.

Yes.

I love the way you talk about it. You say sort of like in the 1950s, television. No, no, no. So go back 1920s radio. So that's the first time you've got this external source of input that you can numb your boredom with, which is passive rather than active. I think that's a part of it as well. Right. So you could have read before then, but reading is not really boring. Reading is not necessarily the same type of a remedy. And then we talk about televisions in the 1950s and the 1960s. But I love what you describe as, what is it? June 292 is the death of boredom.

Yes. The advent of the iPhone. And I think that that shift. So if you back up and look at how much time people spend engaged with digital media today, when I wrote the book, the average was 11 hours and 6 minutes. It's now past 12 hours.

So I had my team look at this because I'm like, this can't be right. I said, first of all, that must include working at the computer. Does it?

That's been a question in my mind as well. But when you look at cell phone usage, it's up to like three average hours. Television, I will say this, television is the most dominant at capturing our attention.

And how much of that is the TV is on while I'm cooking, but I'm not watching it? Because when I go through these numbers, there's one of two possibilities. One is I am so out of touch with how the world lives. Or it's Capturing things that aren't direct. I've looked at these Data where it's 12 hours and yeah, TVs the biggest chunk and smartphone and computer and stuff like that. And I'm thinking if I could watch six hours of TV in a week, that would be a big week of tv. And that's only during a week when there's a Formula One race wouldn't be on a regular or a non F1 week. So how is the average person watching 4 hours of TV a day or whatever it is?

I think it's definitely possible because think about the data from Netflix. When they release a new series, something like thousands upon thousands of people will binge 12 episodes in a weekend.

I guess you're right. I just. So Netflix, like I binge watched Ozark. I'm lucky I was able to do that because you know how they missed a couple of years? Like that would have driven me nuts. I like that I could just kind of watch it.

You did it right?

I did it right. But I don't think I ever watched more than two episodes in a day. And there were lots of days I didn't watch it. So when I say binged, I'm meaning I took like three months to watch it, but that felt like a lot.

So Netflix went all in when they were trying to go to streaming. They went all in financing House of Cards and sort of as a random thing, that decision that gets made and who the hell made it, and they don't know why, let's just put it all up at once. Some crazy number of people binged the show. All of it, all of it. And they go, oh, what's this about? That's when binging show starts. This random decision made by someone. Probably just a coin flip, I guess. Let's just put it all up at once.

The thing that I've been paying most attention to is the phone. And what I've realized is if I compare myself to now versus pre BlackBerry, I didn't get the first gen iPhone in 2007. Or I got it and then I returned it after a week because I thought it sucked. But I only cared about email. So I was like in the work mode and the email wasn't that good and the phone wasn't that good. Like it wasn't actually a good telephone. It dropped calls. Like the BlackBerry was still the gold standard. But when I think about what life was like before that and I'm old enough to remember, there's a lot of time when you just. You wouldn't think to be sitting on the toilet looking at your phone, whereas now it's like, yeah, I'm pretty much always reading the news.

Yep, guilty as well.

That is so weird how if you think about something as silly as sitting on the toilet, you're not there for that long. Do you really need to be doing anything else?

So I started thinking about the idea of boredom from hunting as we talked about that. It's a lot of sitting on a hill and looking for animals when we.

Are in the Arctic, people don't understand how sparse animals are. I think people have this view of hunting is getting out of the back of a truck into a pen of animals and shooting them. They can't fathom what it actually means to scour 20,000 acres for an animal.

And I think people think it's action packed. You're always on the move and running.

It's like, no, it is 99.9999% extreme boredom and 1 point, you know, 00001% pure panic.

Yes, exactly. That's a great way to describe it. So we would sit on these hills because we're timing our hunt to the caribou migration. We're hunting caribou. So we're waiting for these.

Oh, so you're now in the Alaska hunt now.

So we're in Alaska now. Yeah. And so we're waiting for these animals to come through now. This just wasn't happening. So five days in a row, not seeing anything going, well, they should be coming through here. It's not happening. And I didn't bring a cell phone. Of course I'm not bringing books, magazines, all that stuff.

I love the stuff that you read.

Oh, dude. So to entertain ourselves, we read the labels on our food. So I can tell you, a Clif Bar has 250 calories, 6 grams of fat, 49 carbs, 10 grams of protein. These are the things you're getting into.

And you know what kind of carbs, too.

Yes. You're reading all the labels I'm coming up with.

You know who made your clothing, right? Wasn't it Hong?

Yeah, some guy named Hong in my Kafaru bag. Some guy named Hong. And I'm coming up with Christmas shopping lists for the next six years.

Did you bring a journal?

I brought one of the write in the rain notebooks that I bring on any journalistic assignment. That also led to each thing becomes boring eventually. Clif Bar reading becomes boring. Learning about Hong becomes boring. So then I go, okay, well, I'll come up with some ideas for the Magazines I write for, I come up with 17 different ideas and they're all very good. I start writing some of the books. So this leads me to point about boredom, which is that boredom is an evolutionary discomfort that basically tells us whatever you're doing with your time, the return on your time invested has worn thin. So if you and I are, it's a million years ago. You and I are hunting, we need food or else we're going to die, we're going to starve. If we're hunting and no animals are coming through, boredom is going to kick on and it's going to tell us, go do something else. And then we might go pick potatoes or pick berries, whatever it might be. So boredom tells us do something. And in the past, that something, it used to be productive. It used to often move our lives forward in a way. Well, now when we feel this evolutionary discomfort of boredom, we have very easy, very effortless escapes from it. You just pull out your cell phone. We have the ultimate vehicle for stimulation and attention capture on our persons at all times. It has really put a big dent in boredom. And boredom does come with benefits. So there's these really interesting studies around boredom and creativity, and they're totally hilarious too, is that they'll take one group of people and they'll let them do whatever they want. They'll put them in a room and people pull out their cell phones or whatever, they'll take another group and they will bore the hell out of these people. And then they'll give them a creativity test. And the bored group always comes up with more creative answers than the non board group. And I think it also gives your brain time to process information in the background, let things happen. So when you think about the sort of cliche of you get your best ideas in the shower, well, it's a cliche for a reason. It's because when we're focused outwardly on the outside world, like in a screen, our phone, Netflix, even this conversation, your brain's working hard to process that information. So it's kind of a work mode. When you have these moments of boredom, you tend to go inside for a little while as you figure out what to do, you have some weird, funky thoughts. And that's kind of more like a rest mode for your brain. I call it unfocused mode in the book. And that tends to give your brain a little bit of time to rest. And from that seems to come good things. And one of the researchers I talked to, he goes, look, boredom is neither good nor bad. It really isn't. It's what you do with it. And so what we do with it now, I think, is increasingly becoming something that maybe isn't moving our lives forward. So what I'm arguing in the book is I'm not saying burn your cell phone and go back to a flip phone or any of that, but I am saying that I think we need to think about putting more boredom back into our lives. Because a lot of times there's so much talk around how we need to reduce our phone screen time. Like, reduce your phone screen time. Reduce your phone screen time. And I think that's a good thing. But what tends to happen to people is they go, okay, I took an hour off my iPhone screen time. Well, now what do I do? So they watch an hour of Netflix. Well, your brain doesn't know the difference. It's better to have time where you're just sort of unstimulated. So it's something that I'll do in my own life, is just go for a walk every day at least 20 minutes, and just don't take your phone and just kind of let your mind do what it needs to do. That also gets you out into nature, which has its own benefits. I'm sure we'll get into.

We're going to talk about rucking a lot. And so this will be one of many, but something that I really. And I always talk about this one of my friends, when I'm getting them into it, it's like, oh, and by the way, you don't bring your phone. You're not listening to a podcast, and you're not listening to music. The whole key to this thing is going without the phone. So that all you're hearing, we're lucky here, we get to do it. And we're not hearing, we're not on a road that's busy with a bunch of cars going past it. So you're mostly just listening to the wind. But wherever you are, you have to get into that zone of not being with the phone, which for me was also the king of efficiency. I'm always listening to an audiobook or a podcast or I'm on a phone call. If I'm moving, those things are happening. There is never a time when one of those three things is not happening.

I was totally the same way. And I started digging into this research, and it really changed how I thought about it. And I do think that I tend to get a lot better ideas. My mind goes to more interesting places that it maybe needs to go when I am Disconnected. And don't bring that phone along. That's ultimately going to capture more attention.

Going back to the hunting thing, I find it takes two days for me on a hunt to find my senses. We were talking a little bit about this before we started the podcast. One of the reasons I like Access deer so much, not only is it from an environmental standpoint, you're doing something very positive for the environment. The meat itself is incredibly healthy, tastes great, but the challenge of hunting that animal is so high. It's just if you can shoot an Access deer with a bow, you have earned that animal. And the reason for that is they have really good senses. Their sense of hearing, their sense of smell, it's insane. If you try to go and hunt them in a clumsy way where your senses aren't heightened, it's a joke. It's like they're toying with you. They'll smell you a mile away. They'll see you a mile away. They'll hear you a mile away. You're not going to get within their zip code. You can only get up on them if you become as attuned to the wind, as attuned visually to what's going on, as attuned to every sound you're making. Again, I'm sure a guy like Donnie can get in that zone in one second. I need like a day or two. You don't have your phone with you, you're not listening. You don't have earbuds in as you're making this move. And I remember almost every hunt I've been on, I remember what that transition feels like. And getting there is hard. It is boring as hell, but you have to kind of go through that for your senses to wake up. At least for me.

Two things. One that's short and one that's long. I think that that's kind of a metaphor for the book as a whole, is you have to go through that to get that benefit. And I think there's a lot of different things that we've removed from our lives that going through can benefit us. The second thing is that what you're saying, it totally jives with not only my experience, but there's this concept called the three day effect. And it basically shows that after three days in nature, a lot of good things tend to happen to people. So in the modern world, your brain tends to ride what are called beta waves, frenetic, sort of go, go, go, associated with sort of stress, burnout, this sort of thing. After your third day in nature, brain tends to start to ride what are called alpha waves. And these are found in experienced meditators. They're like calm, more focused, more aware, and you just feel like, ah, like I'm sure you felt it when you're out there, when you first get into nature, you're kind of what's going on. You don't really feel in tune. You're worried, like, did I put the garage down? Does my daughter have a ride to school? That sort of thing. Once you get to day three, it's like focus centered, like you just feel like a Zen monk or something. And I think there's a good reason for that. There's a lot of things that are happening and this is why. One reason why some researchers are thinking of extended time in nature as a way to help people with ptsd, specifically veterans, because the benefits don't seem to wash off immediately. So this idea of the three day effect at the top of this concept that I write about in the book called the nature pyramid, and it basically prescribes different amounts of time you should spend in different types of nature. So this idea of three days and more backcountry removed nature is at the pinnacle of this. And it basically says we should try and hit that at least once a year.

I never really thought of it that way, but that's as you know, if you go on a hunting trip, that's another thing people don't understand. If you're going out there to try to kill an elk or a deer, it's going to take you a week. And my first elk hunt, seven days later, I didn't have an elk. That's not uncommon, not uncommon at all.

And I would, I don't know what the success rate is. It's maybe like 20%, I would say.

For the average person, it depends, obviously, but in public land, it's really got to be pretty low. You have to be an exceptional hunter to get an elk on public land.

Yeah. And I think another thing that people sometimes don't realize about hunting is that you're not hanging out on a trail, going on the trotted ground like you are embedded in the wilderness. You are bushwhacking the entire time. You can be completely off the grid like you are in it. And I think that that's what makes hunting compelling to me is that rather than becoming a observer of nature, you become a participant in it. And I wasn't sure how I would feel about that, to be honest. So the first time I ever hunted big game was for this book. And I definitely had my Reservations. But Donnie told me, you know, I think you'd understand why we go out there and do this thing if you were to actually hunt. And so I trusted him on that, and I can see the appeal.

Yeah. It's funny, my daughter again brought this up when she got back. I've taken my daughter on one hunt with me when she was 10 or 11, and in retrospect, I'm really glad I did. And I don't know what I was thinking at the same time, because it's hard to see an animal die. There's no getting around that. I don't know, maybe if you've done it, you get numb to that, but I don't think so. Even the most experienced hunters I know have a real respect for life and for what I describe as the carbon cycle. We're part of it too. We're going to die, and our carbon is going to go back into the earth and our nitrogen and it's going to fertilize something around us. And of course, the one axis deer she sees me shoot, it's a disaster because literally, I forgot my front stabilizer. You know, we're booking it in at 4 in the morning, right? Because you've got to be in position to try to see deer by 5:30 to get a shot by, you know, 5:45 or whatever. And I stupidly just took the front stabilizer off my bow the night before, something I would never do, and I forgot to put it back on. And we're an hour in and I realize I don't have it and I don't have a choice. If we go back, we're done for that morning. So I'm like, I'm going to be shooting this thing without a front stabilizer. I've never done that before. It's doable, but I've never done it before. So to make a long story short, I get a 47 yard shot at this axis deer, and I don't hit my sweet spot on an axis deer. It's not that big. It's only about that big. You've got to be able to.

How much do they weigh?

The biggest ones in Hawaii are 200 to 220 pounds. This one was probably 150 pounds. So this one was not a monster. And instead I hit him in the neck, but it hits his spinal cord because he just dropped immediately. He was paralyzed. So now we've got to run up and stick a knife into his heart to immediately kill him. Because on one hand you could say, well, he doesn't feel anything. But you could argue psychologically this is pretty traumatic. So it's not just like she sees a clean kill. She actually sees a very messy kill.

How did she handle that?

Amazingly well. She got a little nauseous. Every time I shoot an animal, I also want to take its insides apart. So you're taking the meat off is one thing, but I like to see the organs because I do think it really helps me to understand the anatomy well. And I really like to see every detail of their anatomy over and over and over again. Plus, we also eat the heart and some of the organs as well as well. When we got into me taking out the heart and doing all that stuff, she was like, I'm going to stand back here for a minute. But otherwise, she did great. And then, of course, what did we do? We took that deer back to our hotel because we were staying on another part of Maui and ate it, shared it with everyone who worked at the hotel.

Very cool.

Befriended the chef. And these are all people local to Hawaii who know about what access deer do to their community, how they destroy their farms and stuff like that. And many of them had never even eaten access deer. And I was like, you're in for a treat tonight. And so the chef prepared it for us and for the whole staff that fed, like 50 people. It was really fantastic. Again, what was the point? I was going with this. I had a point. Oh, I know. So my daughter is at this camp that she just got back from, and she's talking all about. She's like this counselor, that counselor, and she's like, you know, and one of the counselors there was a vegan. So for like a week, I went vegan, too. And I was like, oh, what was that like? And she. She's like, well, you know, it was all right, but probably not for me. And I was like, did the counselor tell you why she was vegan? Because I've sort of explained to my daughter that there are generally three reasons that people would associate with being vegan. The animal rights reasons, and then there's the environmental reason, vis a vis climate change, and then there's the perceived health reason. And I've talked to my daughter in detail about each of these, and I just wanted to understand. I said, so what was the rationale of the counselor who you were. And she's like, you know, really, for her, it was around the treatment of animals. I really respect that. And there's almost a part of me that thinks you shouldn't be able to eat meat unless you can kill it. That doesn't mean you have to kill everything you're eating. I'm not suggesting that, because that gets pretty complicated. But if you can't actually kill an animal psychologically, maybe you should question whether you should be eating it. That would be at least a discussion to have. And that's part of why I wanted my daughter to be able to see this so early in her life, which was, look, anytime we're eating an animal, you have to understand that thing was alive. What does that mean?

Yeah.

And so she. My daughter was sharing with this counselor her experience, which is, we eat elk and Axis deer most days. And she was like, yeah, this counselor was super impressed. That's a great sign when your vegan camp counselor is very impressed that you're eating wild game. Olivia was able to kind of explain the manner in which these things are killed. I thought, that's really cool to me. And it gets back to your point, which is it totally changes the dynamic of how you think about food 100%. And it also makes you realize how easy is it to be able to use a sophisticated weapon like this and think about what our ancestors had to do, Think about what we were doing just a thousand years ago. I don't know if you can see it, but right over there, we won't be able to show it on screen. You see that bow on the wall?

Oh, yeah.

A good friend of mine, Darren Aronofsky, was doing some filming for a documentary he was producing. I think these are some hunters in Papua New guinea, and that's what they hunt with. He actually brought me back one of their actual bows and their actual arrows, and out to 10 or 20 yards. They'll kill an animal with that.

I was just in the Bolivian Amazon with the Tsimane tribe, and that's what they hunt with. They do a lot of fishing. Okay, so how do you kill tapir? Tapir. I don't know how you pronounce it. Some sort of Amazon.

And they're just standing there and throwing, like, spears at them, aren't they?

Yeah, they've got bows like that. It's like, oh, my God.

So you realize, whatever I will ever do or you will ever do or Donnie will ever do, it's still an enormous step forward in technology to be able to use a bow, an actual compound bow or something like that, 100%.

You know, it's fascinating because when I kind of had my hesitations and was.

Your hesitation around the act of taking a life?

I think that's ultimately what it was. I told myself it was because we were journalists, and journalists don't get involved in the story. So you're just there to cover it. I think that was kind of a mental workaround for me to not have to. I wasn't sure how I felt about it.

That seems like a reasonable point of view as well. I could see that argument.

I can see the argument. But I think ultimately it was just.

But it's a different experience.

It's a different experience.

I don't think one's better than the other. I just think you could have been there watching Donnie do it. And. What was the other guy's name? William. Right? Yeah. Alternatively, by doing it now, you're writing about your experience.

I'm glad I trusted Donnie. Let's just say that I think that the book ended up better. I think specifically this section where I talk about death is a lot richer because of that. I mean, I feel like it is internally, the experience of actually hunting the animal is. Even when I said, okay to Donnie, it's like, I don't have to do it. I don't have to pull the trigger. He kind of told me that, just plan on it, but you don't have to. And he wasn't pushing me either direction. But, you know, you buy a tag, which in Alaska, you can buy a caribou tag over the counter. Go all the way out there carrying the rifle around for a couple weeks, and we finally get in position where we're on this hill, and there's a herd on the other side of this valley on a hill. And Donnie says they keep eating their way down this hill. They're going to probably come over this knoll. So if we can get on the other side of the knoll, we're going to be in a good position. So when that happens, we just. We're on the move up and over the knoll. We start cranking through the grass on the tundra, and eventually we kind of get into an army crawl, planning that this herd is going to come over the hill. And so we get in position. It's like something out of planet Earth where you're watching this hill, and then all of a sudden it's like the first thing you see are these antlers, these gigantic antlers that first. And then it's like there's one and two, and then eventually there are 30. And they're all kind of coming, and we're looking at them because we're only wanting to shoot something that's, you know, from the spotting scope we had Thought, okay, there's probably two older ones in there. But, you know, you want to be sure because we're super far away when we made that call.

How far were you when you guys made the first spot?

It was pretty far. I mean, maybe a mile. It's a big valley. And we eventually see in this herd that there's this really old bull that's limping. And so still at that moment, I'm going to. I got the rifle, I'm in position. I don't have to pull the trigger. But when we saw that limping bull, it was like, okay. It felt right. And it was a tough process to get the shot off because they're going in and out of the herd and you want a clean shot. And Donnie, at one point, because they were maybe within 150 yards of us, was going to be the closest point, and I couldn't get them in the scope, and they kept going. And Donnie kind of looked at me and goes, if you don't want to take the shot, don't take the shot.

But if you're going to take the shot, you got to do it right. And this is when you got to do it.

You got to do it soon. And right after that, the herd sort of parted. It was right there, just perfect shot. Pulled the trigger, pulled it again. Herd ran, hole fell. And my initial reaction was, oh, my God, what have you done? It was immediate regret, to be honest, and sadness. And we come up on the animal that didn't help things. What was really interesting, though, I had a lot of emotions around that and.

Remind me what day of the hunt this was.

This was probably a couple weeks in. So we start breaking in town, and all of a sudden that shifts the relationship there because you kind of go, well, wait a minute, that's me. And Donnie's like, yeah, that's why we're doing this. That's why we're doing this. But you don't really understand that until you experience it. Then it kind of occurs to me, dude, you eat meat all the time.

And you've never questioned it.

Never questioned it. You've never felt one iota of emotion. And here you are now with this, a mess.

And not only that, this animal that you just shot died more humanely and suffered less than anything you've ever eaten to date in your life.

100% lived out.

It's not even a comparison. Lived a beautiful, traumatic life in nature, which is what it is. Let's not romanticize nature. But wasn't in a corral. Wasn't force fed antibiotics. And one of the things that I really love about this project we're doing in Hawaii is I never appreciated this until I met Jake Muse was the stress that an animal is in in the final hours of its life impacts the food quality. And even if you're eating the most shishi grass fed organic cow, make no mistake about it, the final hour or two of that animal's life is very stressful as it goes through the process. As it goes through the process. Yeah, I believe it. And it's totally different when an animal gets a bullet through it and dies within trying to make sure it's an instant death for that meat process. There's no cortisol surging through it, there's no lactic acid surging through it. So yeah, what you did is actually about the most humane thing you could have offered that animal relative to anything you've eaten, but also given to what its natural history is like. That's the other thing people have to understand. Like these old animals don't go to old animal folks homes.

No, they do.

They don't have graceful exits either.

He's gonna get, he's gonna get killed by other animals, by wolves, he's gonna drown crossing rivers because when they make this migration, they have to do a bunch of river crossings. He's gonna freeze to death. They have a harder time getting food as they age. So he's gonna starve to death or.

He'S gonna be killed by another caribou.

Yeah. So it was really this, really just a deep appreciation set in after that and sort of gratitude, you're very thankful for that meat. But also the fact that all meat, you know, I wish that our meat system had some changes to it, but you become grateful for all the other meat that we have because you're like, wow, look at the buy in that goes into this. You see that it is a life. So I think it made me realize you kind of have this very intense realization that for one life to go on, another has to die. To your point about the carbon cycle. And then the next step is, wait a minute, I'm not left out of that, am I? And so this eventually gets me thinking about death in general and how I'm going to die, you're going to die, we're all going to die. And if you think about that, if you think about right now, we're just sitting here having a moment. Very soon in the near future, you're going to be having a moment and then all of a sudden there won't be a moment anymore. That is an uncomfortable thought. So I start thinking about that. And this idea of death is the most uncomfortable thing that we can think about, really. When you do it right, you ball up like a child. But when I started practicing that, I found that it improved my life because it improved my behavior. Changed my behavior. When you realize you're going to die, all of a sudden, you don't pop off in traffic, someone cut you off. You start to make decisions about work and what you're going to do with your time that are better. It improves your interactions with other people. Everyone from my wife to the lady at the 7:11. And the thing is that in the US we don't think about death. We sort of want to ignore it. If you look at our structures, so we've talked about our food system, our food system is based around meat that you don't really know that it's come from an animal, the way that it's processed. We even have euphemisms for different cuts of meat instead of saying muscles, the muscles that they are. And it's also in our funeral system. Whereas after someone passes away, what do we do? We dress them up to look as alive and youthful as possible. We have a viewing and then we're told to take our mind off it. It's like, take your mind off it. Don't worry about it, don't think about it. And I just wondered what some of the repercussions of that are. And it got me also thinking about, well, are there other ways that places do this? And so this leads me to this trip to Bhutan that I take. So Bhutan is a very fascinating place.

You have a whole chapter on it, which is amazing. And I want to hear all about it. Were there other candidate places you looked at besides Bhutan?

Bhutan came on the radar and it kind of became. I think that's a place I should go.

It's an amazing discussion about the contrast. So how do they die?

Well, first of all, what's so fascinating about them is if you measure it by GDP, they're 160 something out of 180 ye.

184 or something.

Yeah, they just don't.

Dirt poor.

Yeah. But in a lot of happiness measurements, they rank in the top 20. So they punch way above their weight. This idea of death and how they approach it I think factors in. There's a lot of things going on, but I think their relationship with death does factor into this. And in Bhutan, it's. They just take it into their life. So the Bhutanese are told to think about death three times a day. It's kind of a cultural practice. Death is woven into a lot of the art and the cultural dances and heritage. And there's even these little clay pyramids called sasas. So this is mud mixed with ashes of cremated people. And they're all over the country. All over the country. You take a turn, like on a bend in a road, and there might be 300 of them. They're in the window sills in the city. I mean, they're everywhere. So there's this constant reminder, and it flows in with this idea of impermanence and Buddhism. And I think that Bhutan as a country really plays that up. So I travel there to learn more about this.

And this was after the hunt?

This was after the hunt because it.

Grew out of this understanding.

I met with three different people there. The first was a guy whose name is Dasho Karma Ura. And Adasho is secretary in the U.S. we have Secretary of State. Secretary of State.

He's like Secretary of Happiness, right?

Secretary of Happiness, yes. So I meet with him and he just does these happiness measures all around the country, and he finds that I think 92% of Bhutanese say that they are happy, more or less. They have different variations. I think they have narrowly happy baseline happy. Yeah, very happy, or like, I'm extremely happy. 92% say they're at least some form.

Of happy, by contrast. Do we know what that is in the us?

I don't know. Although I know that some of our numbers there are dropping for sure. We're definitely not 92%. 40 comes into my mind, but definitely don't quote me on that. So he does all these really fascinating.

It's hard for people to kind of wrap their head around some of this stuff. Michael, I'm quite familiar with this research. I've talked a lot about it with Arthur Brooks, who also studies this. And it's so perplexing until you actually go and experience places away from what we do. I don't think one can cognitively appreciate what you're saying. If your only exposure is what we are doing here, you don't necessarily have to go to Bhutan, but you have to see other parts of the world. Several years ago, interviewed this amazing physician named Tom Catena, who's like a missionary physician in Sudan, and he's in one of the worst parts of Sudan. At least it was. It's getting a little bit better now. It's in the Nuba Mountains. There's about a million people there with no Access to healthcare who are being bombed by their government. So he's running the hospital that takes care of these people who are getting shrapnel and plus all the normal things that come up, you know, infections and things like that. You know, one of the things we talked about in our discussion was the fact that nobody's depressed and there's only been one case of suicide that he's ever seen and it was probably related to a brain tumor that completely altered the person's brain. And I'm thinking to myself, Tom, the circumstances that you're describing sound so miserable. How are people not just in a state of pure misery? And it turns out there's an amazing sense of community which we're going to talk about in Bhutan. There is no place you go to die that isn't around here. The oldest person, the youngest person, everybody's together. They don't seem to be any less happy, which again, it's mind boggling that that can be the case.

I think that there's generally more economic equality too. I think that can affect it. The place definitely feels slower, much slower than the pace of life here. They have more exposure to nature, more time in nature. Also they have no debt.

Yeah, you mentioned everyone there. How do they own their own homes? Obviously they're modest homes, but I just.

Think it's inexpensive enough.

It's so inexpensive, it's all universal healthcare.

And the guy that I spoke to is Dasho. He goes, look, our healthcare isn't perfect, but you have something that needs to be treated that is beyond what we're capable of treating. The country will pay for you to. They'll fly you to India, somewhere else and that's fully taken care of and fly you back. So people generally don't have debt. And yeah, there is a big sense of community. So the.

And of course they're so much healthier too. Is the other thing you said the obesity rate is 6%.

6%. So that is one of the things that factors into it as well. They're generally healthier. The entire country does not have a stoplight. What? Right. There's no McDonald's or Starbucks or Burger King. I'm not saying those things are bad, but I think what they've tried to do is really prevent the influence of other places from coming in and let Bhutan figure itself out without other places intervening. I don't know if intervening is the right way influencing that. So that seems to factor into it. I think the whole country is maybe 3 million people, 600,000 live in Thimphu which is the capital. And then most other people live sort of in the countryside and mountainsides in small communities of maybe 200 people.

The stress thing is an interesting one. As I mentioned, we just got back from Italy, and the thing that I spent the most time thinking about while we're there is why is their life expectancy four or five years greater than ours, despite the fact that they smoke nonstop? Because this is the part I couldn't wrap my head around. I've been to Europe many times. I've been to Italy once before. So it's not like this was the first time I was seeing it. It was just the first time I really, really thought about it. Smoking is the national pastime here. And by the way, it didn't bug me, which is weird. Like in the United States, when I smell cigarette smoke, it's like I have an allergic reaction. I hate it so much. Somehow being in Italy, smelling their smoke, I was like, look, it still smells disgusting to me. But it just felt so culturally appropriate that I was like, you know, it is what it is. I'm not going to be that American who's going to open my mouth and complain about smoke in their country, but I'm like, their life expectancy, it's like four or five years greater than ours, despite the fact that they're participating in the single most damaging thing you can do to your health. Well, of course, what I came to realize after contemplating this for two weeks was everything else they're doing is so much better. They're eating a fraction of what we eat. And by the way, they're still eating pasta gelato. It's just the serving sizes are like this tiny. Yeah, they're much more active. But the thing that really blows my mind, and it's not surprising, is the pace. The pace is just so much lower. I really would believe. And I don't know what metrics we have to measure this, but I can't imagine they are under the stress that we put ourselves under now. The flip side of that is because I've also thought a lot about this and talked a lot about this with people. Maybe there's a reason the US Is the world's biggest economy and maybe there's a reason that most of the innovations are coming out of here and not Italy for that matter, or pick Bhutan for that reason. So I don't want to sound so naive to suggest that we should all be like that, but you start to appreciate the trade off. We are paying a price to be the world's Leaders in innovation. We are paying a price to have unlimited access to food and comfort. When we were in Tuscany, in the middle of nowhere, the home we were staying in in Tuscany had no heat and no air conditioning. So in the winter it is freezing. And in the summer it is basically just a sauna. It's a sauna with clay walls.

It's interesting when I started to look at a lot of what kills us now. It's all things linked to pace and comfort.

Yeah, it's overnutrition under movement, too much stress.

Too much stress. You know one thing that I learned, when it comes with stress, the question becomes, what is causing our stress? A lot of it is manufactured. No one causes your stress. You cause your stress. There's this concept in the book I talk about called prevalence induced concept change. And that's kind of a nerdy way of saying basically problem creep. So these scientists at Harvard, they did this fun study and they noticed this by the way. They're waiting in line for tsa. They're going to a conference and they're looking at tsa. They're going. A lot of people who are clearly not that threatening get patted down. Grandma's getting the full body pat down because she had a half filled bottle of hairspray in her purse and they just pulled out my banana thinking that it was a Burger Beretta or something. So they start to wonder if all of a sudden everyone just followed the rules. Would they let everyone flow through and go onto your flight or would they start looking for successively smaller things and they thought it would probably be the latter.

I bet the reverse is true. If every fourth person coming through actually had a gun, would the other three of us who have never carried a gun or threatening thing to an airport never get patted down again?

So they do this study and there's two different studies they did where they had people look at 800 different faces and the people had to deem whether the face was threatening or non threatening to them. So the people are going non threatening, non threatening, threatening, threatening, non threatening, non threatening. About midway through, they started showing the people successively fewer threatening faces. The other one they did was very similar, except they were having them read these research proposals. So you'd have to say whether the research proposal was actually ethical or unethical. And again, somewhere in the middle, they started feeding him fewer unethical ones. So you would think that people would just start saying threatening fewer times. They would start finding fewer things unethical. The person either threatens you or they don't. And Something either crosses this moral line you have in the sander, it doesn't.

Which you've already established through the first half of the study.

Well, it did. What ended up happening is they said threatening the same amount of times, same ratio of times. They found that same amount of studies. What word am I looking for now?

Unethical.

Unethical, yes. So what their takeaway was, as we experience fewer and fewer problems, we don't actually perceive this. We simply go out and look for other problems. We don't become more satisfied. But the thing is that as the world improves over time, and I think we can agree that even though things aren't perfect right now, everyone knows it.

There's never been a better time to be a human being with respect to the benefits we have.

Yes, compared to 100 years ago, you're more likely to be literate, educated, you're less likely to die at any moment. On and on and on. But when you poll people, only something like 12% of people think the world is improving. It's because we're always moving the goalpost. I think this makes evolutionary sense because in the past, when the world was hard, when you did have serious life threatening problems, if you were always identifying the next problem, okay, that's going to give you a survival advantage. Okay, we got to fix this thing, this thing, okay, this is a problem. Fix that, fix that. But in today's age, as things become successively better, we look for problems where they maybe don't exist or our problems become more hollow.

I think there's another issue at play here, and I've thought about this so much. The first time I started thinking about this problem was 10 years ago when I read Guns, Germs and Steel, Jared Diamond's book, which I'm sure you've read. And if people haven't read it, it's a great read. I suspect some of it has now dated and I don't know if he's written an updated version of it. But what it got me thinking about a lot of was how awful life was. I mean, there's just no other way to put it. We can sit here and talk about romanticizing some elements of a world with no iPhone. The reality of it is I wouldn't want to be one of the Hadza right now. Even if you look at the Hadza today, which are one of the last tribes of hunter gatherers, one of our final windows into what people were doing 10,000 years ago, there's like literally not a second of that that I think of as Desirable outside of a vacation. And by vacation, I mean a hard experience you would go through for a couple of weeks to make you more appreciative of what you have when you're back in plush Austin, Texas. But I can honestly say I would never want to exist back in that world. It was awful. It was so awful that I can't believe we survived it. I just can't believe I am tied to the genetics of people who managed to survive that.

It's unbelievable. And especially after we start to establish cities, because then all of a sudden, you have one king, and you're out in the field for 12 hours a.

Day in service of that king, in.

Service of that king, and you're starving the whole time, and you have problems with malnutrition. You're living in. With, like, no sanitary. It's just totally terrible.

Did you ever see that movie, the Duel with Matt Damon and Adam Driver?

No.

It's loosely a true story based on the last time there was a duel, the last time the king of France authorized a duel. And I believe it's. I don't know, I want to say 16th century, maybe 15th century. So call it like 500 years ago, directionally. Really good movie. I really quite liked it. But again, I'm looking at the movie through a different lens, which I'm always doing when I'm watching movies. And the lens I'm looking at it through is this is a movie about the most privileged people in France. The kings, the knights, the most privileged. And at the time, France and England were the most privileged in the world. So you're looking at the most privileged people in a society that is the most privileged society on the planet. And this is only 500 years ago, which might sound like a long time, but when we start Talking about what 1159,33 means, people will understand how not long that is. And I'm thinking, I would rather be homeless today than the king of France 500 years ago. It is unbelievable. Abject misery they lived in.

It's very crazy. And to your point, what you said earlier, a lot of it gets romanticized and it's. You should check it out. Go back there, see if you can. It's terrible. Life is amazing today.

I mean, we have this incredible privilege today to be alive. Because to me, this is how I read the book. I don't read the book as saying we need to go back and be hunter gatherers. No, it's like an Uncle Ben moment with Spider Man. It's like with great power comes great responsibility. We have this great power today. We have processed food, which, by the way, and the guy that you talk about in your book, I think, does a great job of explaining to you out of the gate, hey, don't think processed means bad. Processed is actually what allows us to not get poisoned every time we eat food. So you have all of these things that allow you to so much latitude, do more with it. That's, to me, really what it comes down to is we have the ability to help more people. If you think about what it was like 500 years ago, if a person had mental illness 500 years ago, I don't know how many other people were bending over backwards to try to make their lives better because you were just too busy trying to survive. Whereas today you can help somebody else. That's the responsibility that comes with the privilege of having so much you can afford to try to feed other people that aren't being fed. And again, in a world of overnutrition, it seems almost absurd that anybody would go without.

I think the argument that I'm making is that in a way, we've become victims of our own success. And if we don't have times that push back against what we have and sort of reframe how lucky we are in the grand scheme of time and space and give us insight into these things are all wonderful, but if I use them all the time, seems like bad things tend to happen. Processed food, great. Keeps us all alive. That's why there's nearly 8 billion people on the planet same time, if that.

Is, who don't have to move around.

Yeah.

Think about this. Like, we get to sit in the.

Same place, but if you're always eating the most comforting food all the time, you're going to have some problems. It's great that you don't have to, quote, unquote, exercise or physically work for your food every day. It's great. But at the same time, if you never reinsert exercise into your life to make up for that, you're going to have some problems. It's great that if I feel bored, I can go on Instagram and watch the most entertaining 15 seconds of my life and probably laugh my ass off for a week because I found something.

So funny, which is hard to imagine that couldn't have been done 100 years ago.

But if you're always doing that, that comes with problems. So the argument that I'm making in the book is that we need moments that push back at us and reframe things.

If the entire history of this Universe were laid out in a calendar year. Can you give some milestones? Where did you read about this or learn about this?

I was driving to work in my truck 2009 and it was on a podcast. Someone walked through it and I just started bawling. I'm driving past a Chipotle. Just this fitness bro, like, oh my God, so much time.

Give the answer and then I want to talk about what that meant to you emotionally.

So the answer is that the big bang happens.

If the big bang happens on January.

1, I believe that our galaxy forms. I might get the months shaky. September Earth forms in November. Dinosaurs die off on December 25th after.

Appearing on December 20th or something.

Yeah, they were around for five days on this calendar.

That's right, the 25th to the 29th or something. Right. Of December.

Of December.

Amazing.

All of human history that we have written down happens New Year's Eve 1159, starting at 33 seconds. 33 seconds in. That is all of recorded human history. That is how little time we've been here. It's crazy.

It is unbelievable. All of recorded human history is 27 seconds. The last 27 seconds of a year.

Yes. So for me, I started thinking about you're not that damn important in the grand scheme of time and space. Now that sounds like you're being hard on yourself. But at the same time, I would.

Go one step further. It's that you are completely unimportant. You couldn't be less relevant.

Yeah, you know, that can be unnerving at first. But at the same time, I need.

To do the calculation of what an average human lifespan is because it's milliseconds on that scale.

And once you have that realization, I think that it can change your behavior in a positive way because we're all here, we're all going to die.

And so going back to this. And again, it's just fresh on my mind because I just got back. So we're staying with this friend in this place in Tuscany and 400 acre farm that has been built up over years. So the first thing that was built on that farm was 500 years old, was an old church. And 50 years later this other house got built. And then a hundred years later, this other thing got built. And then 100 years. The newest thing on this farm is 300 years old. The oldest thing is probably five, 600 years old. That's your timeframe. And I had this sense that came over me while I was there, which was I felt so good being in a place where I knew so many people had lived and died.

Why do you think that was?

For the exact reason that you just said, which is it really made me feel appropriately irrelev. And I said to my friend, so my friend's an American, but he lives there like three months out of the year. I said, dude, I'm not being facetious, so you can say no, but if my death is reasonably inevitable, like I have cancer or something like that, would you be cool if I came and died here and was buried here? And he's like, yeah, man, that would be fantastic. Because I feel like I would really like to die in a place where I'm just an irrelevant piece of. Of the long, beautiful history of our species. And then I've never liked the idea of these funerals and things like that. Could I just be buried there by the olive trees so that my carbon and my nitrogen become a part of an olive tree that someone will drink olive oil from 25 years later? I don't know how to describe it. I'm sure there are some places in the US where you might find that feeling. But again, certainly Nothing here that's 300 years old, let alone 500 years old, let alone a couple thousand years old. I think that as morbid as it is to think like that, I don't know, I feel like I'm excited about the possibility of, hey, will I be fortunate enough to have enough of a warning when I'm going to die that I could go and die there?

When I was getting sober, a phrase I Learned is Rule 62, don't take yourself so damn seriously. And that reinforces that for me. I think people have a tendency to take themselves and the things in their life so seriously. And once you realize things aren't that big of a deal, you got one ride, you don't have to always ride the gas all the time. You can slow down sometimes. That's been relatively freeing for me and also, I think, improved. I mean, if we want to talk about improving performance at work and in life, that's kind of a life hack. Because once you kind of let off yourself, it's like you're free to do the things I think you want to do and let your mind go where it needs to go. Especially for me doing creative work, if I don't put all this pressure on myself, I'm like, no one's going to read this book in 200 years, 100 years, well, 20 years, who knows? Just make it good. It's a ride. I remember watching this documentary about the grateful Dead. One of my favorite. They are my favorite band. Maybe it was 67, when they're kind of coming up and they take a bunch of acid as the Grateful Dead do. Living in San Francisco.

How big was the band at that point in time?

They rose by playing the original acid tests that Ken Kesey would do that eventually got written about in the electric Kool Aid acid test. So this would have been three years after that. They're kind of starting to come up. They're in la, and there's this big LA tower thing that this guy had built over years and years and years. And Garcia talks about people at tourists would come to see this big tower this guy had built. He looks at it and he's like, you know, I want to just create things that live and explode in the moment and just have fun in this moment. And that ultimately guided them as a band forever. You can see that in their music, that every song is like its own exploding moment. And that's kind of what we are as humans. No one's going to remember you. Not going to have this big monument to you. It's like, man, ride this thing out. Give yourself some space and just enjoy it.

So what's Masogi?

Masogi. So I learned about this concept from a guy whose name is Marcus Elliot. He went to Harvard Med School, but decided he didn't want to be traditional doctor. He decided that he wanted to get into sports science. He wants to revolutionize sports science, and he kind of ends up doing it in a way. He's the first guy to really bring AI and movement tracking into pro sports. And by using this data, he can basically tell people the way that your knee caves in as you do this. You might have a 60% chance of injury based on all the other cases we've seen of men of your size in the NBA, whatever. So he's kind of all about these numbers and data and figures that can improve performance. But he also believes that what improves performance and potential, it can't always be measured in a way. There's intangibles that some people have. And so to get to these, he does this idea called musogi. Now, the setup, the backup for this is why it's important, is that if you think about how humans evolved, we used to have to do hard things all the time. No safety net. This could be from a big hunt, moving from summering to wintering grounds, tiger lurking in the bushes, all these different things. So we were challenged all the time, and if we failed, we would die. But Each time we would take on one of these challenges, you would inevitably learn what your potential was. You would really have to dig deep, push, and you would come out of that, assuming it went well, made it out the other side, knowing what you were capable of. But now in modern life, you start to see a shift where you can live a decent life and you're never really challenged, especially physically, in a way that almost blends mind, body, spirit. You'll have your running water, you'll have your food, you'll have your home, you'll have your family. And it's really great. But he argues, and I'm with him on this, that if you think of human potential as like a really big circle, most people are kind of in this little dinner plate size thing right here because we never explore those edges, really what we're capable of. So enter Masogi. And this is this idea that once a year, going to go out into nature, going to do something really hard, some challenging task. So there are only two rules of masogi. Rule number one is that it has to be really hard. So he defines this by saying you have a 5050 shot at finishing whatever it is. This masogi task that you've decided to take on. It has to be true. 50 50. Because now I think when people take on challenges, especially when there's a physical element, they pick things that they know they will finish that are within their capabilities. So if you look at how marathoners approach running a marathon, it's not, I don't know if I'm going to be able to finish this marathon, so what.

Is my time going to be?

I don't know if I'm going to be able to finish this marathon in.

Under three hours or whatever.

The second rule of masogi, which I.

Like as much as the first rule.

So you can't die, don't die. Kind of a tongue in cheek way of basically saying, be safe on this thing.

Isn't there also a third rule of Musogi?

There's guidelines.

Oh, I thought there was a. We don't talk about masogi. Like you don't go and advertise your masogi doesn't get up on Instagram.

Yes. Then there's two guidelines. The two guidelines are, one, you don't talk about masogi publicly. You can talk about it with friends, with your wife and close ones, but you don't put it on Instagram and Facebook and Twitter. And the reason for that is this guideline was a guideline before social media. But so much stuff that people do today is often for the grammar. You want to do something so you can post it. And by removing this, all of a sudden you have this question of if you're doing something really hard and you want to quit, are you going to keep going for you, knowing that it's not going to be for a pat on the back with social implications? The second guideline is that the masogi should be somewhat quirky. Make something up. The reason for that is because once you remove sort of artificial metrics, that changes the game. If you're doing a marathon, all of a sudden you're thinking about your time, you're thinking about all these different things that are socially constructed. Whereas if you just pick some random task, it's like, well, let's just see if we can do it. We have no framework for this. And that kind of opens up the door for some interesting experiences. So some of the masogis that this guy has done is one year, him and a few guys, they got an 85 pound boulder and they walked it underneath the Santa Barbara channel. I think it was five miles. So one guy would dive down, pick up the boulder, walk 10 yards, drop it, go up. The next guy would dive down, rinse and repeat until you're at point B. There's also simpler things like, here's this mountain that we see every day, let's see if we can get up there in a single day, things like that. Now, the point of these, there's two big reasons for doing something like this. One is that it teaches you that you chronically undersell your potential. So if you choose an appropriately hard task, you are going to have a moment where you go, I'm done. I got to quit. I've reached my edge. There's no going back from this. But if you can keep putting one foot in front of the other, then you get this other moment that's much more important. And that's where you look back and go, well, wait a minute, I thought my edge was back there, but I am clearly past it now. And that suggests that I'm selling myself short. And the more important question that comes from that is, okay, where else in my life am I selling myself short? So you see that you're capable of more. The second thing that comes from this is that it can reframe fear for people. Because we're wired to avoid failure at all costs. Because failure in the past used to mean death. So of course we would want to not fail. But today, failure isn't death. It's mistyping in an email misspeak when you're speaking to a group of people. Something like that. Yet we still fear those kinds of things, like their deaths. Dancing on the edge of failure. You can realize that it's not that big of a deal. When I first learned about this concept, it sounded cool, it sounded intriguing. At the same time I'm like, okay, it's kind of quirky, just like some made up thing. Then I started really researching what was happening here. And we used to call things like this rites of passage. So when we had a young person who was at point A in their life and we needed to get them to point B where they were more competent, a better contributor to the tribe, what would we do? We would send them out into nature to do something really hard. And along the way they would struggle, they would battle, they would have moments of doubt, but they would ultimately come out on the other side realizing that they were capable of a lot more and they could bring that back into society and improve the tribe as a whole. What's interesting is you see these across cultures. It wasn't that one tribe said, hey, we're doing this thing. It's pretty cool. You should try it too. And that tribe put the word out.

This arose independently throughout culture.

It just arises and it's also in mythology. So if you look at the work of Joseph Campbell in the Hero's Journey, the hero exits the comfort of home. He or she goes into a trying middle ground. They're faced with battles, they have to go inward and they have to physically strive. And then they come back into society with treasure or the talisman or whatever it is. Well, what is the treasure of the talisman? It's not the actual physical object. It's the way that person has changed and that change that they can bring back into society. You've seen a falling away of traditional rites of passage like this. Which is why when you were talking about sending your daughter to that camp, I got so excited because I think kids really would benefit adults too. But kids in particular really benefit from having times where they get pushed to their edges and they have those moments where of doubt that they're not sure what they're capable of. But then they cross it and realize, oh, I've got more on board than I really ever imagined. You look at what people can accomplish when the conditions are survive condition. It's incredible what people can do. And it also makes evolutionary sense to undersell yourself.

Yeah, keeps you safe, keeps you safe.

You don't want to be the hold my beer guy, that person dies. So it's a practice that I do in my own life. And as I said, it's when I first kind of heard about it, I go, yeah, sounds kind of fun. Also kind of like, eh, quirky. And then when you start to learn more, it goes, oh, wow, this is actually a powerful thing. And when you look at research on challenges in people's lives, the people who have the worst rates of mental health are the people who have had a ton of challenges, like an overwhelming amount of challenges and traumas. But on the opposite end of the spectrum are people who have no challenge in their life and no traumas, they have equally poor rates of mental health. So it's kind of a U shaped curve where having enough challenge in your life that you learn what you're capable of, that you can persist through things that you've got, this seems to be healthy for people.

So speaking of challenges, one of my favorite challenges now that we get to talk about, even though it would never rise to the level of a masogi, but as a daily practice, is rucking. So why is it that people like you and I have taken to this thing and maybe we could start by just kind of defining what is rucking.

Rucking is carrying weight for the sake of weight in a backpack. The word grew out of military circles. So in the military, rucking is just a standard fitness practice. It is the main fitness tool that the US Military and militaries all around the world, going back hundreds and hundreds of years use to build fitness for soldiers. It is just carrying weight on your back in a backpack.

And it's interesting because this is again, a feature that is unique to our species.

Yes. I started thinking about this when I was hunting because once you kill the animal and you have the meat, you have to pack it out. So if you look at why the human body is built the way it is and what we're physically good at, we're good at two things. The first is running long distances in the heat. So if you've read Born to Run or that was spawned from a 2004 paper in Nature by Dan Lieberman. Yep, by Dan Lieberman. And we have all these adaptations that make us good at running long distances slowly in the heat. And we would use that to hunt on hot days, but it's not even.

Running over 24 hours. We could walk further in a day than an animal could go at whatever pace it chose.

Yeah, absolutely.

We don't have to be running. We can just Simply be walking three miles in an hour and we'll walk 75 miles in a day.

We're unbelievable at covering ground animals on a hot day. Four legged animals, they're not efficient at cooling themselves, we are. That's one of our adaptations. So we sweat. Our noses are really complex nasal cavities of cool air, all these different things. And so we would chase animals down until they essentially toppled over from heat exhaustion and we would spear them. And then this leads to the second thing that we're good at, which is we would then have to carry that animal back to camp. And we also have adaptations that make us really good at carrying. And we are, in fact, the only animal that can carry.

Yeah, I was really surprised to learn how lousy primates are at carrying.

They're terrible. I think we can hold up to 33% of our body weight and still be more efficient at covering ground than most other primates with no weight. With no weight, just on their own, they have this sort of tipsy, weird gait. There's a technical term for it, I forget it. But it's not efficient at all.

I weigh up 180. I could easily carry a 60 pound kettlebell in one hand. It's easier if I could make it a 30 and a 30. But even a 60 in one hand, it's like nothing.

Yeah, most people can.

And to think that that's more efficient than a primate is with nothing.

With nothing. It definitely shaped us. And the experience of carrying out meat had me starting to think that, because I had been familiar with the Lieberman work and all that, and it was in my mind and thinking about how this running is linked to hunting, but then you carry and you're like, oh, they would have had to do this too. We also seem to be the only species that can really do this. Well, you know, arguably we carried a lot more as early humans than we would have run, because running is mostly reserved for hunts, whereas you look at what is gathering. So you go pick up some stuff and carry it around as you get more stuff and then you carry it back to camp. So I actually went to Harvard to meet with Lieberman. Really fun meeting. He's a fascinating guy. I enjoyed talking to him. So I argue in the book that running is obviously popular. Jogging's a thing, right?

Or is it yogging? I can't remember if the J is saying it's yogging.

But carrying is not as a form of fitness and activity. And I ultimately ended up traveling to Goruck hq. And this is the tribe. I argue that has really adopted carrying is the military through rucking. That's like the only group who's really putting this at scale. And Goruck is a company that makes backpacks that are specific for rucking. And their founder, whose name is Jason McCarthy, he sort of leaned into rucking as a form of fitness as I started to really look at the research on it. It's really great for us because you're working your cardiovascular system, but you're also working your strength system to a degree. So you're not going to get that with running or cycling, something that is a pure endurance act. Whereas with rucking you're getting the endurance but also you've got load on your body and so that is stimulating your muscles to a greater degree. And there's some really fascinating studies on backcountry hunters who will carry in loads to deep into the mountains and they'll test their body fat before and after. And those hunters across, I think it was a 10 day study, it was a small study. There's, you know, there's only so many weirdos like that. They lost 14% of their body fat and they actually stayed with same amount of muscle. Some actually gained an ounce or two of muscle. So it's really good at melting fat and preserving muscle.

For me, something I really enjoy about it is most of my cardio is done on a bike, but as you said, there's no load on a bike. I used to run a lot growing up. That was sort of my thing. I feel pretty fortunate that despite 60 mile weeks growing up, I still still have perfectly fine knees and hips. But I also realize as much as I would love to go back to running, I don't want to poke the bear. I dodged a bullet in life being able to run so much without hurting myself. But as I'm older, I just don't think that's the case. I think it's about eight times your body weight is the force experienced by your knees with every step. When you run, obviously weight matters and the lighter you are, the better. And it's not a surprise that the best runners are feather light for obvious reasons. But with walking it's only about three times your weight. So when you're rucking, you're walking, not running. And yes, you're adding more weight. So let's say you increase your body weight by a factor of 30%. The 30% increase at a 3x multiple of force is much less than your body weight at eight times the force if you're running. In other words, as hard as Rucking is, with all that extra weight, it's still much easier on your knees than running.

Yes.

And you're still getting, I mean, yesterday was the first AD rucked in two weeks because we just got back from vacation and I'd been walking nonstop while we were there. But it wasn't the same. Holy cow. Like much harder. Even just taking two weeks off, it's really like a type of workout. My heart rate hit like 165. I was in the 150s and 160s, which is totally uncommon for me when rucking. I'm Normally in the 130s, 140s, but I guess because I was sort of deconditioned because all my walking in Europe was without load. So it really made a difference. It really showed me just how demanding it is.

It is. And the injury data is really interesting. To your point, when you look at studies on people in the military, what tends to injure soldiers is running. They'll do studies where they look at injury rates across something like a selection, which is a long process where these guys are being just hammered and they're all getting injured by running. That's not to say that some people don't get injured by rucking, but it's like very, very small numbers comparatively. So for that reason, I think it's a lot safer. But it also gives you, to your point, your ability to get higher heart rate than you would from walking and also preserve muscle.

The thing that I've got my daughter really embracing is the hills. Because on the uphill you're just obliterating your heart and lungs. But also, and my daughter might be the only 13 year old to really be able to explain to you the difference between eccentric and concentric strength. Because all the times we're walking down hills, I'm explaining to her how this is working, her eccentric strength in her quads, and this is where you get your breaks from. But I love the walking downhill as well and really trying to be as deliberate about it as possible and really making sure, because in life that's where people fail. So when you get older, nevermind running. Can you walk downstairs without collapsing? Can you walk off a step and not hurt yourself? Well, if the answer is I don't know how to decelerate, the answer is no, you're hosed. And there's no better way to learn to decelerate than with a big load on your back walking downhill. That will teach you how to decelerate. And, and that's not something you get easily in the gym. No, it's not something you get easily running. You just don't get that skill any other way that I'm aware of.

And if you do fall, you're going to be better off if you've been rucking because it also is rather good at improving bone density. Really interesting studies on women where it improves bone density better than weightlifting alone, better than cardio alone. And that becomes so important as women age. You look at women in hunter gatherer societies that are always carrying things. I mean, they stay strong and vital their entire lives. They just don't get hip fractures.

You stated in the book, and we sort of loosely described it here, but I just think if McDougall argues we're born to run, I would argue we're born to carry.

That is my argument. We are born to carry. If you look at what people in hunter gatherer societies actually spend their time doing, physically, no one runs. You even look at the Tarahumara, they very rarely run. And it's not for fun, it's for ceremonial purposes, but work life is carrying.

You know, a reasonably well trained person. We can get most of our patients to the point where they can carry their body weight. Now, again, you're not going to start out there if you're not well trained. But a reasonably fit person could for a minute carry their body weight in their hands. You could carry it longer on your back. But even the fact that we have the grip strength, the limb strength to carry our body weight is just fantastic. One of the metrics we use with female patients who obviously have less upper body strength is 75% of your body weight carried for a minute is one of like our multiple. You know, we have many strength metrics we put people through.

That's a great one.

Think about that for a moment. That's pretty impressive, especially in light of what you said earlier. So by the way, you know, I didn't even know what rucking was when I was kind of doing it in trouble training for hunts. But I realized what I do now is so much better because then I was just using a weight vest. You'll see later, our backyard is really, really steep. In the weeks leading up to hunts, I would put on a 50 pound weight vest and just go up and down, up and down, up and down, up and down the hill. But why is it that a rucksack, we would agree and argue is better than a weight vest? What is it offering over a weight vest?

It tends to pull your spine into a better position. So most people today, since we work in front of desks. We're slumped over all the time. We're naturally slumped. When you put weight on your back, it sort of puts your spine in a safer position. Seems to relieve and prevent back pain. Now that is according to spoke with Stu McGill, who's the back expert up in Canada, and he's a huge fan of rucking. He's a very careful person when it comes to exercise, in my experience with him. I mean, he's very nuanced and he's a person I trust because of that. And he said rucking is a great way to add some durability to people in a way that's safe.

The other thing I think about rucking and I also own several rucksacks from Goruck now as well. The belt really makes a difference when you get that belt on your hips. You know, I had shoulder surgery four months ago and one of the things I was super stressed about was not being able to ruck because I'm going to have my shoulder operated on and amazingly, I was probably rucking three weeks after surgery and I couldn't do much else. Let's be clear. But how was I able to do that? Well, first of all, you've got really well placed straps on your shoulders. It's not putting my joint at risk, and more importantly, the majority of the weight, because you control where the load is by how you adjust it. But I basically just said, I'm going to put all the load on my hips. I'll cook my legs a bit more, but I will spare my shoulder. So that's to me, the other thing about the rucksack that really, really beats the weight vest, you have the distribution load posteriorly, but you also can really distribute the load on your hips, which anyone who's hunted or done any backcountry stuff knows. Like, it's so important to have your pack fit well on your hips, otherwise you Simply couldn't carry £100 on your shoulders for very long.

When I was in the Arctic and we were packing out caribou, we were heavy. I mean, over 100 pounds, you know, maybe 110, who knows, 20. It was nice to have the hip belt because I would spend most of my time with the weight on the hips, but eventually that just starts to burn and you need to wash that out. So you pop it your shoulders for a while and you can just kind of go back and forth.

I love that. Back and forth. On, off, on, off.

Just trying to find something that isn't absolutely awful for a moment. Good burn, though.

It's funny, when my wife started rucking with me and my wife is like, I think she's a super tough chick. I think she has a very high pain tolerance. The first time she ever did a dead hang, she went three minutes and eight seconds.

Oh, wow.

Which is like insane. And she's gone longer since. But the first couple times she did it, she was like, does this ever stop hurting? And I was like, no, I wouldn't say it ever really stops hurting. I mean, you can lighten the load, but no, it's uncomfortable. I'm not gonna lie to you. This is not something that ever. If you're doing it the way we're doing it, which is we're at about a third of our body weight and we're walking as quickly as we can while walking. No, this is just uncomfortable. There's no two ways about it.

It will be uncomfortable, but the upside is, is that I'll even take rucking meetings where I'll toss in £20 or something and I'll just walk around while on this. I know I'm going to have to be on this phone call. I could sit in my desk and office in the dark or I could go outside and have a light load and get it all taken care of there and sneak in a bunch of steps with some weight on my back. I mean, it's very easy to flow into life if you know you're already going to be walking the dogs. We'll just toss on a pack and all of a sudden that becomes a lot more effective.

I've got so many friends and I don't get any kickback. I don't know anybody at gorucks. I've sent so many people there. I think we will at some point hopefully do a subscriber discount with them because I would love to get more and more people doing this.

I've tried a handful of packs for rucking specifically and they definitely are my favorite.

Why?

They're in the book and they've thought about it deeply.

They've got some great content as well, some great videos and stuff we'll link to. I think this has been such an interesting journey. As I've said to you many times before, I think this is just on some level, it's such an obvious thing. It's one of those books where you read it and you're like, yeah, of course. But if it's not pointed out to you, it's really easy to miss how this has happened. Comfort has become so ubiquitous that I don't think we're aware of it anymore. It's kind of like the David Foster Wallace this is water thing. The ubiquity of the water, of course, creates the irony of the fish not knowing what water is. And I kind of feel like that's what comfort has become for at least those of us in the developed world.

I also think that sometimes even if you're pressing against it in one way, there's probably a lot of other ways that you're not pressing against it. I have friends that can run 25 miles now if I ask them to. What if I said, hey, why don't you sit in silence for 10 minutes? It's like, what? I couldn't handle that. So there's all these things that we've removed from our lives over time that I think have a benefit. And it is figuring out, well, what are those things? Which is what I'm trying to present in the book. And then how do I intelligently weave them in my life? Because as we talked about earlier, I'm not trying to suggest in any way that we go back to living as hunter gatherers. Like, no way. Life today is amazing. But it's, how can we use some of those things from the past to build a better future?

I agree. And part of its hunger. I used to do a lot of fasting. I don't fast as much anymore, but one of the things I loved about fasting was how much I learned what I could do when I was hungry. Would do seven up to ten day water only fasts, but I'd keep working out hard throughout. And the first couple of times it almost killed me. I remember the first time I tried to put myself through serious workouts during a seven day fast. I mean, I thought I was going to die. And it's not to suggest that during those fasts I was as strong or my performance was what it was. Normally it wasn't, it never was, but I just couldn't imagine. And other things, like I remember going to bed so hungry sometimes thinking, I'll never be able to sleep. But yet I did. And you realize, like, of course you did. There's no way our species would be here if we couldn't figure out how to do these things when we're hungry, be it sleep or go out and hunt or do something like that. So when you think of all of these forms of discomfort, it can be hunger, it can be boredom, it can be a physical challenge. That's the take home is we have this incredible privilege and it just comes with a little responsibility, which is just make sure on a daily basis you are inserting brief windows of discomfort so that you're never too far from realizing that you're in the water.

You said it.

In other words, if you're the fish, just make sure you jump out of the water a few times a day so that you never lose sight of the water you're in.

Amen. Yes, sir.

Well, you know what we get to do now?

Are we going to go ruck?

We sure are.

Yes.

Michael, thanks very much for coming. I enjoyed talking about this a lot and I hope everybody picks up the book because it's fantastic.

Thanks a lot, Peter. I really enjoyed the conversation. And now we get to ruck and suffer a little bit.

And for dinner, elk and access deer.

Awesome. Perfect day.

All right.

Awesome man. That was fun.

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