Hey everyone, welcome to the drive podcast. I'm your host Peter Atia, 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. And we've assembled a great team of analysts to make this happen. If you enjoyed
this podcast, we've created a membership program that brings you far more in-depth content if you want to take your knowledge of the 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 Peter attea, m.com forward, slash 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
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 and 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 that 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 talked about his background
Apparent struggle with alcoholism. His father leaving, when he was young and how these things impacted Michaels own struggle with alcoholism from there, we talked about his realization that we are in a crisis of comfort. And how this became the thesis for the book we discuss talk about boredom phones, TV, stress and dealing with the possibility of failure, we talked also about hunting and the importance of thinking about death and other cultures think about and face death differently compared to those of us especially here in the
At States, we end the conversation around one of my favorite topics of all rocking. So if you've heard me talk about rucking, you get to know 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 what 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, 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 would
like it might be interesting if we actually did this while rocking, but here we are well, we rock afterwards, it'll be fine. Well so long,
I mean she wants to rock 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 it's often says 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 rocks.
So, if we were planning for T now, it's not 50, it's a 55. So that's how we'll compensate it will 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, your 13 gone away for two weeks. This was a hard can tweet sent her to a place to
Really because of how hard this place was and it's basically a camper 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 rock 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 5:00 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.
All at the middle of the thing. So the first thing, she said, on that middle of things, she goes Dad. I'm like, the fastest hiker hear all that rucking totally paid off. I love this. Yeah, I could not love this
anymore. This is so cool to hear
because they were like 10 to 12,000 feet there 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. I also love
that you sent her to a camp where she
He'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 I will 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
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 are actually initial hope which is centered 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 folks.
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,
where you 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 like to go out. I like to party. I was into girls, I was into cars. I was involved, that kind of thing. Didn't really care about school work. Now would never do homework, did okay in school, but with Park City Mountain Resort, they would sell you a season pass for $99.
So if you got on the honor roll that is the only thing that incentivizes amazing, a 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 my 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 use when my parents met, my mom was into that lifestyle to. 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, sorry, this is after you're born, this is for, I'm bored. Okay, so they were married at the time. They've been married a few years. So as part of his rehab, they give my mother the book that he is supposed to read and rehab and they say you read this. So you understand what he's going through is a 12-step, it was yep. She goes okay, she explains that 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 him. 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 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 you 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.
Is me always been raised by a single
parent. You have a really cheap with your dad today. I do
not, I haven't heard from him for no man since I was like eight 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 box is kind of a nerdy kid and then you
Into a teenager in your brain starts changing, and you look for excitement and risk. And all of a sudden, the pole of social Things become so much more rewarding than it ever was that I drank. And when that happened, 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 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 York
And 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 a sort of learned thing where you associate this with good things. All the sudden I could talk to anyone. I can talk to girls. I could say funnier things 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.
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 talked 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. 100%, I'd always noticed that I probably drink 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 4:00 a.m. and that's a potent combination and I think that was when I started to realize, oh, like maybe this isn't good. And I remember exactly when I sort of realized it as one on the internet like you do consult a doctor Google and signs, you have a drinking problem and it's like these
And questions or whatever it was, I'm going. Yes to that one. No to that one. Yes to that. One note of that one. Yes. Yes and I go five or six out of ten. I should be fine. It gets to the bottom if you have answered. Yes, to one or more of the
waterboard. 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. What's a reach? 8 out of 10, then I'm stopping. Yes, exactly.
So then you just start racking them up over the years and
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 was working at a magazine that was based out of there. We have 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 morning here, 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
It 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 5575, 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 had 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.
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. 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's the first person I called I had told Pete.
So now you're telling her to things which is I'm getting sober. The implication of which is, I'm an alcoholic. Yeah. Which you didn't know
that. Yeah, exactly.
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. The time I had a girlfriend who I really love and I was starting to realize I call. This is a really good person for me. We're not
married. What did she think of your drinking? 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 in your obnoxious and I was
And I knew it too. But once you get in that cycle, it's like you drank. Like I did. It was. What if one's good twos? Better? Three is even better for is even, but 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, you know, 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 gonna 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 stents 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 call 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 like 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 problems gone. But that ultimately was backfiring on me over time like 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,
it'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, like not drinking this weekend, he's like, I don't care. You just go golf or something and it was just like, oh, what a relief. Yeah, like that dude, I owe him a lot 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 this subtle part of this, that's really complicated. I may have told the story previous going to podcast but I can't recall when I was doing my residency in Baltimore, the time it was certainly the heroin capital of the United States. Now I don't know if that's still the case and 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.
Addicted to heroin and the best advice I could ever offer though. It was not particularly helpful. It was intellectually true. But you know how you act on it was listen, you're going to die from this, get 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. Yeah, 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
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 he need a whole new. Social group 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
truthful, the group that started hanging out with different people
Sixty percent 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 lot harder because you're around that all the time. Probably be conditions. That may be led to some of your drinking haven't changed at all and almost becomes an illogical decision not to drink sometimes in the short term because for someone who
As an addiction using the substances of 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
incheol 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 out 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 mental 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.
Usos
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 the
time. Where did you get this idea that we are in a crisis of comfort
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. That's all health. I noticed that anything that
I'm writing about you have to go through a 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 underlying behavior and motivation? And that's not always comfortable. So I make that observation that I get sober which is the ultimate. Yeah, that was really, really
hard. And what year was this?
Were
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 like literally everything in my life got better.
Everything you could measure got better. Your performance got better at work or misguiding guide are my writing, got better, 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
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, wow, you know, 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. As I do this back country hunt with Donnie Vincent who's this Backcountry, bowhunter filmmaker and I profiled him for Men's Health Magazine. So
Go on this elk hunt, he was up there for maybe two weeks, we're in, Nevada up in the mountains, I was only with him for maybe five days or something like that. It's a backpack hunt.
So 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, it 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 have 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 sportsmen Channel. If you've ever watched a Sportsman's channel, it's the sportsmen 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, environmentalists part conservationists 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
Why don't think I know what's happening on the sportsmen 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 in an interesting way and I thought 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 them on this hunt and we backpack in up to like 11,000 feet and I'm freezing cold.
Anytime this is an elk hunt. So this is September,
October September, and I'd come from Vegas. Where it was a hundred, something. And we get up to these super high peaks and it's freezing cold at night, and I didn't pack well enough. It'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 as you don't want to carry that around. Getting water requires that we hiked down to this stream. Hoof it up sitting in the afternoon, sort of glossing, it's very boring.
Life is most people don't
Understand that you really only can shoot the out at dawn and dusk. Yeah, 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 just sitting there going, hmm. You know, looking around and it's like, oh also 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 census. We got really close to one. It was just a little too young for him. So we got within like 40 yards and
This thing didn't see us. I mean I was just saucer-eyed oh my God
that thing is huge there and 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 going to kill and I'm going to have dinner too so that Alex pokes 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 was just
Sober, when you ride in 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 and 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 the time.
Ninety-nine point nine, nine, nine, six,
Percent 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. I don't have self hunt or gather any of your
food. Now it off too.
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 know, you have a book agent and stuff and they're going, this is 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 will get into is I did this thirty three 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 though, 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 as this in the adventure section, is a self-help. What is it? But we took it out and luckily, someone was like, well, I think I can probably do something with it too.
I love the way it's written that, 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
At 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
bored. Mm-hmm.
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. So it's 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 readings, not really boring reading is not necessarily the same type of a remedy. And then we talked about televisions in the 1950s and the 1960s. But I love what you described is, what is it, June 29th? 2007 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, engage with digital media today, when I wrote the book, The
Average was 11 hours and six 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
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 then 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.
Race wouldn't be on a regular or a non F1 re week. So how is the average person watching four 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 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 this one. Binging show starts this. Random decision made by someone probably just the 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 like, if I compare myself to Now versus pre Blackberry, I
Don't get the first gen iPhone in 2007. Our 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 of in the email. Wasn't that good? And the phone wasn't that good? Like, it wasn't actually a good telephone 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 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. Yeah 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, our
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 pain 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 99.99999%. Extreme boredom. And one point, you know, zero zero zero, zero, zero one percent, pure panic. Yes, exactly. That's a great way to describe it.
So we would sit on the Hills because we're timing.
Our hunt to the Caribou migration. We're hunting Caribou. So we're waiting
for them. So you're now in the Alaska. 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 did.
So to entertain ourselves, we read the labels on our food. So I can tell you.
Bar has 250 calories 6 grams of fat 49 carbs, 10 grams of protein. Like these are the things you're getting and
you know what kind of carbs to yes,
you're reading all the labels, I'm coming up with,
you know, who made your clothing, right? Wasn't it
hung? Yeah. Some guy named Hong, I'm like a fire bag, some guy named Hong and I'm coming up with Christmas shopping lists for like the next six
years. Did you bring a journal? I
brought one of the right in the rain notebooks. I bring on any journalistic assignment. That also led to
Each thing becomes boring eventually Clif Bar. Reading becomes boring learning about hung becomes boring. So then I go. Okay, we'll come up with some ideas for the Magazine's I ride for I come up with like 17 different ideas, they're all like very good. I start writing some of the book 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
Our two million years ago, you and I are hunting. We need food or else we're gonna die. We're going to starve for 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 that used to be productive 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 time, it has really put a big dent in boredom and boredom does come with benefits. So there's this really interesting studies around boredom in creativity and they're totally hilarious. To is that they'll take one group of people and they'll let them do whatever they want. Put them in a room and like, people bought their cell phones or whatever. We'll take another group and there.
Bore the hell out of these people. And then they'll give them a creativity test and the board 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 cliché 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 brains 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 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. Now, one of the researchers, I talked to, he goes, look, boredom is neither good nor bad. It really, isn't it? It's what you do with it. And so, what we do with it now, I think is increasingly becoming
Saying 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 and Netflix will your brain doesn't know the difference. It's better to have time where you just sort of unstimulated. So if 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 get you out into nature, which has its own benefits. I'm sure we'll get into.
We're going to talk about rocking a lot and so this will be the 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.
You're not listening to music. The whole key to this thing is going without the phone. So that all your hearing, you know we're lucky here we get to do it and we're not hearing like 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 one which for me was also the king of efficiency. I'm always listening to an audiobook or a podcast where 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 when 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 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. You know, one of the reasons I like Axis 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 taste great, but the challenge of hunting that animal is so high. It's just if you can shoot an axis, 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. Those 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 a tuned. Visually to what's going on as a tune to every sound you're making again. I'm sure a guy like Donnie can get in that zone.
Own in one second. I need like a day or two. You don't have your phone with you. You're not listening to you. Don't have earbuds in as you're making this move and I remember most every hunt I've been on. I remember what that transition feels like and getting there as 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
short one that's long. I think 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 ways? Frenetic, sort of go go, go associated with sort of
Your eyes burn out and 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, I'm sure you felt it when you're out there. When you first get into nature, your kind of what's going on. You don't really feel in tune. You're worried. Like did I put the garage down? This is 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 effects at the top of this concept that I write about in the book, called The Nature pyramid and 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,
you know, 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 gets 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 twenty percent I would say for the
average person, it depends obviously but in public.
And 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 try to 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 first time I ever hunted, big game was for this book and I definitely have 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 them 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.
Even and 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 in. 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 to your, she sees me shoot, it's a disaster because
Literally I forgot my front stabilizer, you know, we're booking it in at 4:00 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. 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, 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 or 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
So now we've got a run up and stick a knife into his heart to immediately kill him because the one hand you can 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 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. 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, would be do. We took that dear 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
Access to your due to their Community, how they destroy their farms and stuff like that. And many of them have never even eaten access to here and I was like you're in for a treat tonight and so the chef prepared it for us. And for the whole staff like Johnson fed like 50 people, it was really fantastic. Again, was the point I was going, I'm going with this, I had a 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, one of the counselors, there was a vegan. So for like a week I went vegan too and I was like, oh wow.
What was that? Like, and she's like, well, you know, there's all right, but probably not for me. I was like, did the counselor tell you why? She was vegan? Because I've sort of explain to my daughter that they're generally three reasons that people would associate with being vegan, animal rights reasons and then there's the environmental reason. These would be 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 want to understand, I said so what was the rationale of the counselor who you were in? Then 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
Don'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 any time, we're eating an animal, you have to understand that thing was alive. Well, what does that mean? Yeah, and so sheet my daughter was sharing with this.
Allure her experience, which is we eat elk and access to your most days and she was like, yeah you know this counselor was super impressed, that's a great sign. Like when you're vegan camp counselor is very impressed that you're eating Wild game, you know, 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 also makes you realize how easy is it to be able to use of sophisticated.
Cated 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 if you can see it, but right over there that 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.
Animal with
that. I was just in the Bolivian Amazon with the term on a tribe and that's what they hunt with. They do a lot of fishing. Okay. So how do you kill to peer Tapper? I don't know how you pronounce it, some sort of a
and they're just standing there and throwing like Spears at the Mark. Yeah, they've got balls like
that. It's like, oh my God. So you realize whatever I
will ever do, or you will ever do, or Donny 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 a hundred percent.
You know, it's fascinating because what 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 as because we are a journalist 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 work around for me to not have to. I wasn't sure how I felt about. It 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 a different experience, the different extent, think one's better than the other. I just think you could have been there.
King Donnie, do it. What was the other guy's name? William right? Well 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 the 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 say it, okay to Donnie. Like I don't have to do it. I don't have to pull the trigger. Yeah, kind of
tell 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 Ani. So they keep eating their way down this hill. They're gonna probably come over this null. So if we can get on the other side of the know we're going to be in a good position. So when that happens we just were on the move.
Up and over the null, we start cranking through the grass on the tundra and eventually we kind of get into an army. Crawl planning. That is heard is going to come over the hill and so we get in position. It's like something out of planet Earth. We're watching this hill and then all of a sudden it's like the first thing you see. Are these
antlers hips
gigantic? Antlers that first. And then it's like there's one and two and then eventually there are 30 they're all kind of coming and we're looking at them because we're only wanting to shoot something that's old.
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 and you guys made the first spot. It was pretty far. I mean,
maybe a mile and it's a big valley and we eventually see in this heard that there's this really old bull that's limping. And so still at that moment, I'm going, I got the rifle. I'm in position, I'll have to pull the trigger, but when we saw that limping Bowl it was
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 to clean shot and Donny 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 do any 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 gotta do it, you gotta do it
soon. And right after that at the heard sort of parted, it was right there. Just perfect shot. Pull the trigger.
Pulled it again, heard ran whole fell and my initial reaction was, oh my god, what have you done? Hmm. 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 it.
Down and all of a sudden that shifts the relationship there because you kind of go, we'll wait a minute. That's me, you know, Don he'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. Did you eat meat all the time and you've never questioned and 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, 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 forced 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 this 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 sheshe grass-fed organic cow. Make no mistake about it. The final hour or two of that animals. Life is very stressful goes through 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 an in 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 thing. People have to understand like these old animals. Don't go to Old animal, folks homes. Now that you don't have graceful exits, either, he's going to get, he's gonna get killed by other
wolves. He's going to drown crossing rivers because when they make this migration, they have to do a bunch of river. Crossings, it's going to freeze to death. They have a harder time getting food as they age. So he's going to starve to
death because he killed by another
Caribou. Yeah. So it was really this really
A deep appreciation set in after that and sort of gratitude you're very thankful for that me but also the fact that all me you know I was 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 by and it 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
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 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 started thinking about that and this idea of death is the most uncomfortable
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 an improved my life because of the improved, my behavior changed my behavior. When you realize you're going to die, all the 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 and improve your interactions with other people, everyone from my wife.
To the lady at the 7-Eleven and thing is that in the u.s. 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 that 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 at is alive and Youthful as possible. We have a viewing and then we're told to take our mind off it, it sounds 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. We're there. Other candidate places. You looked at besides
Bhutan, Bhutan came on the radar, and it kind of became that think that's a place I should
go. It's an amazing discussion about the contrast to how do they die?
Well, first of all, what's so fascinating about them is their few measured by GDP their 160
something. I learned wait, 184
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 in the cultural dances and Heritage. And there's even these little clay pyramids called saucy.
Has. 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 the road and there might be three hundred of them there in the window seals 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 is a country really plays out up. So I travel there to learn more about this and I
and this was after the hunt this was after the hood.
Route of misunderstanding, I met with three different people there. The first was a guy whose name is Da, show Karma, or and Adagio is like secretary in the u.s. like we have Secretary of State said
he's like Secretary of Happiness right?
Secretary of Happiness. Yes, so I meet with him and he just does his happiness measures all around the country. And you know, he finds that I think 92% of bhutanese say that they are happy or less. They have different variations. I say I think they have narrowly. Happy Baseline happy. Yeah. Very happy.
Appear like I'm extremely happy 92 percent. Say they're at least some form of Happy by
contrast. We know what that is in the
u.s., I don't know. Although I know that some of our numbers there are dropping for sure. We're definitely not 92%. I want 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 cut a wrap their head around some of this stuff. Michael, I am quite familiar with this research. I've talked a lot about it, with Arthur Brooks who also studies this, and it's so perplexing.
You actually go and experience. Places away from what we do, like I don't think one can cognitively. Appreciate what you're saying. If you're only exposure is what we are doing here. You want to say, we have to go to Bhutan but you have to see other parts of the world. Several years ago, interviewed this amazing physician named Tom, Cote know 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.
For now, it's in the nuba mountains. There's about a million people there with no access to health care that were 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, I'm thinking myself, Tom, the circumstances that you're describing
I'm 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 to 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. You mentioned, everyone there. How do they own their own homes? Obviously, their modest homes,
but I just think it's an expensive enough. It's so inexpensive. It's all Universal Health Care. And the guy that I spoke to his Dash our egos book, our Healthcare isn't perfect, but you have something that needs to be treated that
Beyond what we're capable of treating, the country will pay for you to the fly 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
of course, there's so much healthier to is everything. You said, they'll be City 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,
NG 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 sort of 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 Tempo, which is the capital. And then most other people live sort of in the countryside and mountainsides and small communities of maybe 200 people.
Distress 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 smoked non-stop? Is this 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 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 their participation
A painting 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 those people. Maybe there's a reason the u.s. 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
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 over nutrition under movement too much stress, too much stress.
You know, one thing that I learned when it comes with stress, at 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
About called prevalence induced concept change and that's kind of a nerdy way of saying, basically problem Crete. 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 we're looking at TSA there going you know, a lot of people who are clearly not that threatening get patted down. Grandmas getting the full body pat down because she had a half-filled bottle of hair spray in her purse. And, you know, they just pulled out my banana thinking that it was a Beretta or something.
So they start to wonder if all of a sudden everyone just follow the rules, would they let everyone flow through and go on to your flight or where they start looking for successively smaller things and they thought it would probably be the
latter, but the reverse is true. If, every fourth person coming through actually had a gun with the other three of us, who have never carried a gun or threatening thing to an airport. Never get patted down again, right? So they do this study and there's two different
studies they did when they had people. Look at 800 different phases in the
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're having them read these research proposals. So, you'd have to say, whether the research proposal is ethical or unethical. And again, somewhere in the middle, they started feeding them fewer unethical ones. So you would think
That people would just start saying threatening fewer times they would start finding fewer things. Unethical person either threatens you were. They don't something either crosses. This moral line you have in the sand or it
doesn't you've already established through the first half of the
study. Well it didn't end up happening is I said threatening the same amount of times same ratio 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
Receive this. We simply go out and look for other problems. We don't become more satisfied but the thing is is that as the world improves over time and I think we can agree that even though things aren't perfect right now. One
knows it, there's never been a better time to be a human being with respect to the benefits. We have
yes, Peridot hundred 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 pull people only something like twelve percent of people think the world is improving. It's because we're always
Moving the goalposts. 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. 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. No, the first time I sort of think about this problem.
It was ten 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 rate, read. I suspect some of it as now dated and there's I don't know. He's written an updated version of it. But what it got me thinking about a lot 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 hodza right now, even if you look at the hodza 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
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 can 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.
See that movie The Duel with Matt Damon and Adam Driver. It's Loosely a true story based on the last time there was a dual. 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 15 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 nights, 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 11:59 33 means, people will understand how not long that is. And I'm
Thinking I would rather be homeless today. Then the king of France five hundred 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. So if you can't, it's terrible. Life is amazing. Did I mean we have this
incredible privilege today to be alive. Kissed me. This is how I read the book. I don't read the book as saying we need to go back and be hunter-gatherer know.
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 talked 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 process is actually what allows us to not get poisoned every time we eat food. So you have all of these things that allow you so much, latitude do more.
It that's to me. What 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 are
Being fed and again, in a world of overnutrition, 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 eight 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
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. Like that couldn't have been done a hundred 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.
Truck 29. And it was on the podcast, someone walks through it. And I just started bawling, you know, I'm driving past the Chipotle. Just this business, bro. Like, oh my God, so much time, you know,
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. The Big Bang happens on January
1st, I believe that our galaxy forms, I might get the
months like September, and he
September Earth forms and November dinosaurs died off.
December
25th after appearing, on December 20th or something. Yeah, they're around. 45 days on this calendar. That's right. The 20/25 to the 29th or something, right? Of December of December,
all of human history that we have written down happens. New Year's Eve 11:59
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 your 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 life span is because it's Ms 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 and 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 fifty years later. This other house got built and then 100 years later.
I think I built and then 100. You the newest thing on this Farm is 300 years old. The oldest thing is probably five six hundred years old. That's your time frame 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 irrelevant and I said to my friend to my friends in American but he lives there like three
Months out of the year, I said, did, 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 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
Read there by the olive trees. So that my carbon and my nitrogen become a part of an olive tree, that someone will drink all of oil from 25 years later, I don't have 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 five hundred 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.
Stability 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 phrase, I learned is Rule 62, don't take itself. 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, it's 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.
And 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. So 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, 20 years. Who knows just make a 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 test 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. We're kind of starting to come up there in LA. And there's this big L8 H thing that this guy had like built over years and years and years.
And Garcia talks about people with tourists, would come to see this big tower. This guy had built 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 Gonna remember you, you're not gonna have this big Monument to you. It's like man, right?
Add this thing out, like, give yourself some space and just enjoy it.
So, what's misogi? Misogi.
So I learned about this concept from a guy whose name is Marcus Elliot. He went to Harvard Med school, but he decided he didn't want to be traditional doctor. He decided that he wanted to get into sports, science wants to revolutionize support site and kind of ends up doing 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 be
They 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 MBA, whatever. So it'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 always be measured in the way. There's intangibles that some people have. And so to get to these, he does this idea called misogi. 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 Summer into winter and 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 something, it went well made
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, the 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 its really great. But he argues, and I am with him on this, that if you think of human potentials like a really big circle, most people are kind of in this little dinner plate.
Sighs thing right here because we never explore those edges. Really what we're capable of. So, enter Muskogee. 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 misogi. Rule. Number one, is that it has to be really hard. So he defines this by saying you have a 50/50 shot at finishing, whatever it is this misogi Tassie. Decided to
Gone, 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 gonna be able to finish this Marathon. So, what is my time going to be? I don't know if I'm gonna be able to finish this marathon in under three hours or whatever. The second role of misogi,
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.
And be safe on this thing, isn't there?
Also a third rule of misogi? There's guidelines. Oh, I thought there was a, we don't talk about misaki. Like you don't go and have your misogi doesn't get up on
Instagram. Yes, then there's two guidelines. The two guidelines are one. You don't talk about misogi 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
Today as often for the gram going 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 misogi 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
R time, you're thinking about all these different things that are socially constructed. Whereas if you just pick some random tasks, it's like well let's just see if we can do it. We have no framework for this and I kind of opens up the door for some interesting experiences. So some of the misaki's 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 ten yards, drop it.
About 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 under sell your potential. So if you choose an appropriately hard task, you are going to have a moment where you go.
I'm done. I gotta quit. I've reached my age. 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. We'll wait a minute. I thought my edges back there, but I am clearly passed 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
Something 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 it, not fail, but today, failure isn't death. It's Miss typing in an e-mail misspeak when you're speaking to a group of people something like that, yet we still fear those kinds of things like their desk dancing, on the edge of failure. You can realize that it's not that big of a deal when I first learned.
Learned about this concept, it sounded cool, it sounded intriguing 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 confident 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
Struggle. They would battle they would have moments of Doubt, but they would ultimately come out on the other side. Realizing that they are 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, wasn't that one tribe said, hey, we're doing this thing, it's pretty cool. You should try it to 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 and the hero's journey, the hero exits, the
comfort of home. He or she goes into a trying Middle Ground. We'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. 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
Your daughter to that camp. I got so excited because I think kids really would benefit adults to. But kids, in particular, really benefit from having times where they get pushed to their edges. And I have those moments where of Doubt, but 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, right, 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 quirky know when you start to learn more it goes oh wow! This is actually a powerful thing and when you look at research on challenges and 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. We're having enough challenge in your life that you learn that 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,
Challenges now that we get to talk about even though it would never rise to the level of a misogi, 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
rocking rocking is carrying weight for the sake of weight and a backpack. The word grew out of military circles. So in the military rocking is just a standard Fitness practice. It is the main Fitness tool that the US Military and
Military is all around the world, going back, hundreds and hundreds of years used to build Fitness for soldiers is just tearing weight on your back and 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.
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 and meeting Lieberman. Yep. I 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, not even
running over 24 hours. We could walk further in a day than an animal could go at whatever pace of chose. Yeah, absolutely. We don't have to be running. We can just simply be walking three.
I was in an hour and we'll walk 75 miles in a day. Where 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 adaptation. So we sweat our nose was a really complex nasal. Cavities of cool are all these different things and so we would Chase animals down until they essentially toppled over from heat exhaustion and we would spare 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.
A caring and we are in fact, the only animal that can
carry. Yeah, I was really surprised to learn how lousy primates are at carrying
their terrible. I think we can hold up to 33 percent of our body weight and still be more efficient at covering ground than most other primates
with no weight with
no weight just on the ground. They have this sort of Tipsy weird gate, there's a technical term for it. I forget it, but it's not efficient At All,
by way of 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 me. They had me starting to think that because I had been familiar with Lieberman work and all that and it was in my mind and thinking about how this Runnings linked to hunting and but then you carry and you're like, oh, they would have had to do this to, we also,
Oh, 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, it's you go pick up some stuff and carried 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, enjoyed talking to him. So I argue in the book that running is obviously popular. Jogging is a thing,
right? Bruised, it yogging. I
Remember if the J is stocking it's jog
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 caring is the military through rucking. That's like the only group is really putting this at scale and goruck is a company that makes backpacks that are specific for rocking and their Founders 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 too deep into the mountains and they'll test their body fat.
And after, and those Hunters across I think was a 10-day study the small study. 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 like announcer to a muscle. So it's really good at melting fat and preserving
muscle for me. Something I really enjoy about it is, you know, 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 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 don't 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
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 way. So when you're rocking, 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 percent, 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 then running. Yes, and you're still getting, I mean yesterday was the first ad rucked in two weeks, we just got back from vacation. I've been walking non-stop while we were there, but it wasn't the same. Holy cow like much harder. Even just taking two weeks off. Its really like a type of
workout, my
heart rate hit like 165. I was in the 150 and 160, which is totally uncommon for me when rocking
Normally in the 130s 140s but I guess because I was heard 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 end? Your soldiers is running, they'll do studies where they look at injury rates across something like a selection, which is a long process, where the
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 rocking 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
So in my daughter might be the only 13 year old to really be able to explain, to the difference between eccentric and concentric strength, because all the times were walking down Hills. I'm explaining to her, how this is working her eccentric strength and her quads. And this is where you get your brakes 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 never mind running, can you walk downstairs without collapsing?
Seing. 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 that's not something you get easily in the gym. Now, 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 rocking because it also is rather good at improving bone density, really interesting studies on women wear, it improves bone density, better than weightlifting, allowing 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 MacDougall argues,
We were born to run, I would argue were 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
caring, 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 okay.
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 percent of your body weight. Carried for a minute is one of like are multiple year. We have many strengths metrics, we put people through.
That's a great. One thing 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.
Trucking was when I was kind of doing it in 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 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 in 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 were 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 Miguel who's the back expert up in Canada and he's a huge fan of rocking. 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, rocking 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 rock because 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 of 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 pounds on your shoulders, for very
long. When I was in the Arctic and we were packing out, Caribou, we were happy. I met over 100 pounds, you know? Maybe. 1/10, 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
Stop it. Your shoulders for a while and you can just kind of go back and
forth. 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 rocking with me and my wife is like I think she's a super tough chick. I think she's a very high pain. Tolerance. The first time she ever did a dead. Hang she went three minutes and eight seconds. Oh wow. Is like insane and she's gone longer since
But the first couple times she did it, she was like, is 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 going to lie to you. This is not something that ever. If you're doing it the way we're doing it, which is right about a third of our body weight and we're walking as quickly as we can. While walking now, this is just uncomfortable, there's no two ways about it,
it will be uncomfortable, but the upside is that I'll even take rucking meetings where I'll toss in 20 pounds or so.
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 goruck. So I've sent so many people there. I think we
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 Wrecking specifically and they definitely are my favorite sweater in the book and they thought about it deeply
they've got some great content as well. Some great videos and stuff for wink to I think this has been such an interesting Journey. As I 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 and you're like, yeah of course but if it's not pointed out to you, it's
We 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 it against it. I have
Ends that can run 25 miles now if I ask them to but 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 why I'm trying to present in the book. And then how do I intelligently weave them in my life? Because 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 it's 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 10 day water-only fast. 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's sleep or go out and
And 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. And then yes, sir. Well, you know, we get to do now, are we going to go rock? 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 a rock and suffer a little
bit and for dinner L can access dear awesome,
perfect day. Alright,
awesome man, that was fun. Yeah, that's great. Thank you for listening to this week's episode of the drive if you're interested in Diving
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