The Peter Attia Drive - #225 ‒ The comfort crisis, doing hard things, rucking, and more

00:00:00.000 Hey, everyone. Welcome to the drive podcast. I'm your host, Peter Atiyah. This podcast,

00:00:15.480 my website, and my weekly newsletter all focus on the goal of translating the science of longevity

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00:00:41.720 head over to peteratiyahmd.com forward slash subscribe. Now, without further delay,

00:00:47.740 here's today's episode. My guest this week is Michael Easter. Michael is an author, speaker,

00:00:53.600 and professor. His work focuses on how humans can integrate modern science and evolutionary

00:00:57.900 wisdom for improved health, meaning, and performance in their life and work. When he's

00:01:02.440 not on the ground reporting, Michael is a visiting lecturer in the journalism and media studies

00:01:06.100 department at the University of Nevada in Las Vegas. Michael travels the world to speak with

00:01:10.560 different thinkers and people living at extremes, and he shares those insights in his books and

00:01:14.740 his other writing. He's the author of the bestseller, The Comfort Crisis, which no doubt you have heard

00:01:20.160 me speak about both in other podcasts and probably on social media. I was really excited to sit down

00:01:26.080 with Michael. In this episode, we talk about a lot of things. We talk about his background,

00:01:29.800 his parents' struggle with alcoholism, his father leaving when he was young, and how these things

00:01:34.020 impacted Michael's own struggle with alcoholism. From there, we talk about his realization that we

00:01:38.960 are in a crisis of comfort and how this became the thesis for the book we discuss. We talk about

00:01:45.720 boredom, phones, TV, stress, and dealing with the possibility of failure. We talk also about hunting and

00:01:52.280 the importance of thinking about death and how other cultures think about and face death differently

00:01:57.480 compared to those of us, especially here in the United States. We have the conversation around one

00:02:02.100 of my favorite topics of all, rucking. So if you've heard me talk about rucking, you get to now go deep

00:02:07.480 on it. I think this is a very important topic. And as I mentioned, this book had such a profound

00:02:12.300 impact on the way I think about things and also just the way I'm trying to raise my children.

00:02:17.640 You know, so much of what Michael talks about, I think we intuitively kind of get a sense of,

00:02:23.260 but he does such a great job articulating it and giving us a little more data around

00:02:27.500 the edges. So without further delay, please enjoy my conversation with Michael Easter.

00:02:36.880 Michael, so awesome to be sitting with you here today. I have been looking forward to this podcast

00:02:40.900 for probably about three or four months, and I appreciate you making the trek out here to do this

00:02:44.580 in person. Absolutely. Likewise, Peter, I've been looking forward to this one. It should be

00:02:47.560 fun. My wife, by the way, I just want you to know, called me like an hour ago to give me a ton of

00:02:52.200 crap for the fact that we're not recording this outside in the 107 degrees here today. She's like,

00:02:57.180 you guys talking about the comfort crisis in your air conditioned studio here. She's kind of called

00:03:03.200 us out on the fact, called me out on this fact. Well, she's not wrong. I did think about that. I

00:03:07.200 was like, it might be interesting if we actually did this while rucking, but here we are. We'll rock

00:03:11.040 afterwards. It'll be fine. We'll survive. I mean, she wants to ruck with us later today,

00:03:15.500 which we will, but she was mostly like, really, you should at least be just sitting outside doing

00:03:19.840 this in the sweltering heat and all that stuff. And so, maybe she's right. I mean, we're definitely

00:03:24.780 way too comfortable right now. There's going to be a weight penalty for our behavior with the rucks.

00:03:29.980 If we were planning 40, no, it's now 50. It's now 55. So, that's how we'll compensate. It'll all

00:03:34.440 shake out in the end. So, look, people have heard me talk a little bit about your book on previous

00:03:39.000 podcasts. People have also heard me allude to this obsession of mine in rucking. Certainly,

00:03:44.440 anybody who knows me personally, they're either converted or sick and tired of me.

00:03:49.640 And my daughter, who just got back from her first sleepaway camp in Colorado and Wyoming. So,

00:03:54.680 she was first time, she's 13, gone away for two weeks. This was a hard camp. We'd sent her to a

00:03:59.400 place deliberately because of how hard this place was. And it's basically a camp where you go to work,

00:04:03.500 taking care of animals, doing a bunch of hard stuff. And so, in prep for this, we said,

00:04:07.540 look, Olivia, you really ought to just ruck with me all the time because it will make it easier for

00:04:12.540 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,

00:04:16.580 the idea of going for a heavy-weighted backpack walk with your dad at five o'clock in the sweltering

00:04:21.800 Austin heat is not that appealing. The whole time she's there, they have no electronics. You get one

00:04:26.980 time to speak with them. You get a 10-minute call at the middle of the thing. So, the first thing she

00:04:32.500 said on that middle of the thing, she goes, dad, I'm like the fastest hiker here. All that rucking

00:04:37.340 totally paid off. I love this. Yeah. I could not love this anymore. This is so cool to hear.

00:04:43.580 Yeah, because they were at like 10,000 to 12,000 feet. They're at altitude. And I was having her

00:04:49.200 out there with 25 to 30 pounds in her pack. Very cool. And we have a lot of hills here,

00:04:54.160 as you'll see later today. So, it was good for her. I also love that you sent her to a camp where

00:04:59.600 she's doing hard things outside. It's a theme that runs through my book, as you know. That is so

00:05:05.380 valuable for kids today. So, I teach at UNLV and seeing a lot of the students that come in

00:05:11.060 where they're at psychologically and how embedded they are in, I would say, digital worlds and in

00:05:17.640 their own head and how things that I think most people would consider maybe minor inconveniences

00:05:23.640 in life can be so easily blown up. I think that ties back to a lot of what I'm talking about in the

00:05:28.940 book. And I think the antidote to that is sending kids out when they are younger, trying to introduce

00:05:34.220 hard things into their life. And there's obviously a lot of different ways to do that. But it sounds

00:05:37.700 like what you did is a really cool thing. Certainly one way to do it. And we had friends

00:05:41.220 that recommended this place when we reached out to friends who had older kids to say,

00:05:45.200 hey, where are places you can send kids? I mean, our initial hope was to send her to kind of a

00:05:49.100 missionary camp where you could really sort of see something challenging in Africa and things like

00:05:53.320 that. A lot of times they just, for kids this age, were not necessarily looking for that. But

00:05:57.520 let's take a step back and help folks understand a little bit about you. Remind me where you grew up.

00:06:01.740 I grew up in Northern Utah. So a little town called Bountiful, just outside of Salt Lake City.

00:06:06.500 Were you a skier? What was your main... I like to say that snowboarding got me into college

00:06:11.420 because when I was in high school, I was not a great student. I liked to go out. I liked to party.

00:06:16.380 I was into girls. I was into cars. I was into all that kind of thing. Didn't really care about

00:06:19.540 schoolwork. Now, would never do homework, did okay in school. But with Park City Mountain Resort,

00:06:25.280 they would sell you a season pass for $99 if you got on the honor roll. That is the only thing that

00:06:33.020 incentivized me to do any good at school. So thank you, Park City Ski Resort. That is what got you into

00:06:38.280 college. Did your parents split when you were young? They did. Well, I wasn't even born yet.

00:06:43.340 So my mother was pregnant, five months pregnant, and my dad took off. So their backstory, which I

00:06:48.840 think is relevant to understanding the context, is that my dad was always a heavy drinker, heavy drug

00:06:54.040 user. When my parents met, my mom was into that lifestyle too. So eventually, my dad realizes,

00:06:59.480 you know, maybe I'm a little too into this world. So he goes to rehab. Now, as part of his rehab...

00:07:05.660 I'm sorry, this is after you're born?

00:07:06.820 This is before I'm born.

00:07:08.000 Okay.

00:07:08.300 So they were married at the time. They'd been married a few years. So as part of his rehab,

00:07:13.000 they give my mother the book that he is supposed to read in rehab. And they say, you read this so you

00:07:18.980 understand what he's going through.

00:07:20.340 Is it 12-step?

00:07:21.060 Yep. It was. Yep. She goes, okay. She explains it. She goes, so I'm sitting in the tub one night

00:07:25.720 and I'm drinking a gin and tonic. And I get to this line in this book and it says, try to drink

00:07:31.220 and stop. Try it twice. And she goes, oh yeah, I couldn't do that. So she realizes that she has a

00:07:38.460 problem too. And she manages to get sober. So that's the joke is my dad went to rehab and my mom got

00:07:43.460 sober. And so they got back together. He stayed sober for a little while, a little bit, just enough for

00:07:49.360 her to get pregnant. And once she got pregnant, it was, you don't have a drinking buddy anymore.

00:07:54.840 The fun's over. And I think he wasn't quite ready for that. So he took off and my mom raised me.

00:08:00.220 Always been raised by a single parent.

00:08:01.640 Do you have a relationship with your dad today?

00:08:03.180 I do not. I haven't heard from him for, oh man, since I was like eight or something like that.

00:08:07.920 How much of this history of your parents drinking did you know as you got into high school and stuff?

00:08:12.140 I knew my mom didn't drink and I knew the reason why she didn't drink. Now she was very respectful

00:08:21.680 of my dad. She wasn't going to give me any sort of details, but I was left to assume that the reason

00:08:27.040 that he was not in my life is because he didn't ever stop drinking. So that was sort of the context

00:08:32.020 around that.

00:08:33.180 So when you get to high school and most kids are, even though not legally allowed to drink,

00:08:38.040 but obviously that's when kids are most experimenting with alcohol. Did your mom have

00:08:42.580 any advice for you or did you have any thoughts about, I'm born from two parents who both have

00:08:47.520 probably suffered a little bit from this. I could certainly have a genetic predisposition.

00:08:51.680 Yeah. So when I was a kid, my plan was I'm never going to drink because of that genetic

00:08:55.460 predisposition. And I read books. I was kind of a nerdy kid. And then you turn into a teenager

00:09:00.480 and your brain starts changing and you look for excitement and risk. And all of a sudden the pull

00:09:04.860 of social things becomes so much more rewarding than it ever was that I drank. And when that

00:09:09.600 happened, my response was, why the hell would you not do this? That was the answer because the town

00:09:16.160 that I grew up in, it was all one religion, except Mormon, presumably all Mormon. Yes. And we were not

00:09:22.280 Mormon single parent. So a little bit of an outcast in that sense, didn't have a dad around. And so I

00:09:28.020 think you kind of, you're kind of trying to figure it out. You're uncomfortable in these situations

00:09:33.540 around people just generally. And then you have a drink and all of a sudden that goes away.

00:09:39.540 So it becomes this sort of learned thing where you associate this with good things. All of a sudden I

00:09:43.800 could talk to anyone. I could talk to girls. I could say funnier things. It was a lot more clever.

00:09:48.900 So you get all this positive feedback and why would you not drink? Now that eventually worked for me

00:09:54.580 until it stopped working. That's the classic story. So today I'm sober and there's a good reason for

00:10:00.900 that. And I'm glad I am saved my life. Talk to me about the kind of realization that this isn't

00:10:06.160 working for me. They talk about how change happens really slowly and then really quickly.

00:10:11.000 What was the slow descent into the quick realization? Not everybody just has a one

00:10:17.480 realization where they hit rock bottom and they switch. Sometimes you have to bounce a little bit

00:10:21.120 on the bottom. A hundred percent. I'd always noticed that I probably drank a little more than

00:10:25.440 other people. At the same time, there were no real repercussions for that until I was maybe

00:10:30.380 23 or 24. I was living in New York city. I was going to grad school. I was living alone and I had

00:10:38.860 no one watching me and I had bars that closed at 4am and that's a potent combination. And I think that

00:10:46.860 was when I started to realize, Oh, like maybe this isn't good. And I remember exactly when I sort of

00:10:52.920 realized it was when on the internet, like you do consult a Dr. Google and signs you have a drinking

00:10:58.580 problem. And it's like these 10 questions or whatever it was. I'm going yes to that one. No

00:11:04.060 to that one. Yes to that one. No to that one. Yes. Yes. And I go, Oh, five or six out of 10. I should

00:11:09.820 be fine. It gets to the bottom. If you have answered yes to one or more of one or more, I just go, Oh,

00:11:15.760 so that's when it gets on your radar. And I think I told myself, well, I'll just quit when it gets

00:11:22.060 bad enough. Once I reach eight out of 10, then I'm stopping. Yes, exactly. So then you just start

00:11:28.000 racking them up over the years. And I had tried to stop drinking, probably started trying to stop when

00:11:34.800 I was about 25 in different ways. It never worked. Just never worked. Why is that? I'm sure you are

00:11:42.220 not the first person to come to that realization of just willpower alone without maybe a broader

00:11:50.580 system or structure or awareness is tough. Why do you think that's the case? I think there's a lot

00:11:55.620 of things behind it. I think some of them are developmental. So about half of people end up

00:12:00.240 getting sober around age 30. The same things that are happening in the brain that draw a teenager

00:12:06.020 towards alcohol and make it this great association, they start to kind of shake out over time. You

00:12:13.240 take on responsibility. You have all these other things in your life that all of a sudden make that

00:12:17.080 you start to realize maybe this isn't as good for me. I also think that eventually the balance just

00:12:23.600 tips where the short-term relief isn't as good as what this long-term thing could be. And I think that

00:12:30.340 coming to that realization takes a long time. Like you said, a lot of bouncing. And for me, it was

00:12:35.980 just one morning. I woke up. I was living in Pennsylvania. I was working at a magazine that

00:12:41.380 was based out of there. We had an office in New York, but our editorial office was in Pennsylvania.

00:12:45.940 And I woke up and my house is a mess. I'm a mess. I'd had mornings.

00:12:49.340 And you're how old?

00:12:50.260 I was 28 years old. And I'd had mornings like that before. And for whatever reason, this morning,

00:12:55.540 it was like, you could kind of see where this path was going. And it was very clear to me that if I

00:13:03.140 were to continue this drinking, I was going to die early. Now, whether it was 35, 55, 75, I didn't

00:13:11.240 know. I just knew that it was going to be earlier. And tell me about your relationship with your mom

00:13:15.640 at this point. Does she understand how much you're drinking? Is she? No. So I always hid that from her.

00:13:20.120 We've always been very close. We were always a team. So I kept that away from her. She would travel

00:13:25.300 when I was a kid and in high school. So I would even only drink when she was out of town. She was

00:13:30.180 gone about a third of the year. So even behaviors like that, I just didn't want her to know and

00:13:34.060 sort of- And it's interesting when you kind of contemplated getting sober, did it occur to you

00:13:39.180 that your mom could be the most important ally in that given that she knew what it was like as well?

00:13:44.960 The morning where things became more clear to me, she was the first person I called. I had told

00:13:50.060 people- So now you're telling her two things, which is I'm getting sober. The implication of which is I'm an

00:13:55.160 alcoholic. Yeah. Which you didn't know that. Yeah, exactly. That was a phone call she didn't want to

00:14:02.320 take but was happy to take. So I could see this one path would lead in an early death probably. And

00:14:07.680 more importantly, it was like, you're going to lose everything in the process. At the time, I had a

00:14:11.840 girlfriend who I really loved and I was starting to realize like, oh, this is a really good person for

00:14:15.780 me. We're now married. What did she think of your drinking? Was she aware of it fully or? Yeah. She was

00:14:20.620 like, you got to get a handle on this. She basically put it, you're a really good, cool dude when you're

00:14:25.400 sober, but you start drinking and you're obnoxious. And I was, and I knew it too. But once you get in

00:14:31.140 that cycle, it's like you drank like I did, it was, well, if one's good, two's better, three's even

00:14:36.960 better, four's even better, just keep stacking them on. So once you start drinking, something happens in

00:14:40.740 your brain where all of a sudden just your entire thinking and universe shifts.

00:14:46.140 I have such empathy for someone who's gone through this, but I can't actually relate to it because

00:14:51.820 we are all wired kind of differently, right? And I don't have that chemistry in my brain. Alcohol

00:14:57.800 doesn't do it for me, which is not to say I don't like to drink. I love certain types of tequila and

00:15:03.400 wine and there's even one beer I like, but I can never recall feeling what you're feeling. Though

00:15:10.140 intellectually, I can understand what you're saying and I can only imagine how difficult that is

00:15:15.660 because it becomes a reinforcement loop and those can be very difficult to break.

00:15:21.480 Yeah. The problem is the solution is the problem is the solution. So that becomes a challenge. And

00:15:27.640 where was I? Well, basically the other path is that I could see this is going to be hard. It's

00:15:33.820 going to be very uncomfortable. I'm going to have to relearn everything. I don't know if I can do it,

00:15:37.660 but I'm going to try this thing. And I'd gone through stints where maybe I wouldn't drink for a few

00:15:42.320 weeks, but I was like, I'm going to take action. And taking action was picking up the phone and

00:15:46.920 calling my mom. And then did your mom suggest the 12-step program?

00:15:50.360 She suggested that I talk to people who were similar to us. Yeah. So I started becoming active

00:15:56.540 and just meeting other people who were sober. And a big part of it for me, which is one of the

00:16:02.840 reasons why this book came about is that I had to realize like, I don't have to be comfortable all the

00:16:06.340 time. Because alcohol is the ultimate comfort blanket for me. If I had stress from work,

00:16:10.400 it became this really learned behavior where if I just had a drink, then problem's gone.

00:16:15.500 But that ultimately was backfiring on me over time, like in a very severe way.

00:16:20.560 How many of your friendships were predicated around alcohol consumption? And therefore,

00:16:25.140 once alcohol was gone, those friendships didn't make a lot of sense?

00:16:29.060 That's a great question. There's a few that they stuck around. I have some really good friends who

00:16:34.260 I remember I got sober on December 15th and I had planned to hang out with a friend on New Year's

00:16:39.340 Eve, who was kind of my drinking buddy. And I had to call him and be like, Hey man, like

00:16:43.080 not drinking this weekend. And he's like, Oh, I don't care. We can just go golf or something.

00:16:47.260 And it was just like, Oh, what a relief. Yeah. Like that dude, I owe him a lot. But then some,

00:16:52.660 it's like, you just realize you don't have as much in common with them after the, it's not so much

00:16:57.560 the drinking as it is. You only have this one thing in common. And so once that thing goes away,

00:17:02.040 it's like, Oh, well, cool. This was fun hanging out. We're probably not going to call each other

00:17:06.120 again. And that's okay. To me, that's like the subtle part of this. That's really complicated.

00:17:10.280 I may have told the story previously on a podcast, but I can't recall when I was doing my residency

00:17:14.320 in Baltimore at the time, it was certainly the heroin capital of the United States. Now,

00:17:17.800 I don't know if that's still the case and opioids have expanded far beyond heroin, but we definitely

00:17:23.580 took care of, it's almost like everybody that walked in the ER with an abscess in their arm or

00:17:28.460 something like that was addicted to heroin. And the best advice I could ever offer, though,

00:17:34.180 it was not particularly helpful. It was intellectually true, but I don't know how

00:17:38.280 you act on it was, listen, you're going to die from this. It didn't kill you this time. You had

00:17:43.140 a huge abscess that I cut open and drained and pulled old needles out of, and you're really lucky

00:17:48.540 to be alive. And you're going to be on IV antibiotics for a few days and then oral antibiotics for a lot

00:17:53.520 longer. You only get a few more of these, and that's going to be the last one. But I realize you can't

00:17:59.980 just leave here and go back to the row home you're living in with all the people that are doing that

00:18:04.500 same thing and expect to stop. So if you want to quit heroin, you need a whole new group of people

00:18:11.760 to be with. That's just such a devastating thing to contemplate when your entire life is centered

00:18:18.060 around this block of Baltimore where everybody is using. And some doc is saying, look, this is going

00:18:25.360 to kill you. But it's not just that you need to stop this thing that is the ultimate comfort

00:18:29.740 blanket. It's that you need a whole new social group. You need to be around people that don't

00:18:33.120 do this. That's just devastating. And it plays out in the research. You look at research on

00:18:36.740 alcoholics, and I think there was a group that tracked alcoholics who day one of the recovery for

00:18:43.200 a year. And the people who still stuck around their normal friend group, only 15% of them were

00:18:49.480 still sober after a year. I'm amazed it's that high, truthfully. The group that started hanging out

00:18:54.080 with different people, 60% of them were sober after a year. The fact that your wife was not a

00:18:58.320 big drinker is probably the single biggest factor in your life, I'm guessing. Super helpful. I know

00:19:03.640 it's definitely harder for people who have a significant other who is continuing to drink

00:19:08.720 heavily. A lot harder because you're around that all the time. Probably the conditions that maybe led

00:19:14.300 to some of your drinking haven't changed at all. And it almost becomes an illogical decision not to

00:19:20.300 drink sometimes in the short term. Because for someone who has an addiction, using the substance

00:19:27.600 is a relatively rational decision in the short term. Totally. It's completely adaptive. It's only

00:19:33.000 maladaptive in the long term. So how did you think about that issue, which was, okay, I have this

00:19:39.960 adaptation that serves me well in the short term, not serving me in the long term. But what's the

00:19:45.940 adaptation for? How much of this is related to your abandonment as a child by your father?

00:19:51.900 One could say that that's the potential root of this, coupled with the genetic predisposition,

00:19:57.620 which is kind of the way things work in life. Do you have sort of an environmental

00:20:00.160 and a genetic component to something? Did you at the time think, I should also probably figure out

00:20:06.060 how much of this is driven by that feeling or that vacancy? I would say early on, you're just

00:20:12.220 trying to figure it out day to day. You're just trying to not drink. You're just trying to make

00:20:16.060 the next right decision. I think you start to unpeel that onion over time. And it's something

00:20:21.280 that takes a long time. Everyone has their own onion, whatever it is that needs that unpeeling.

00:20:26.480 And just like with a real onion, sometimes you cry during it. But it's the right thing to do.

00:20:30.780 The magazine you're working at at that time, what are the kind of stuff you're writing about?

00:20:34.200 So I was mainly in fitness and nutrition and performance. I did some mental health stuff.

00:20:38.180 So all kinds of different articles. I was running basically all the fitness coverage

00:20:42.400 for men's health is what the magazine was. Which is how we met originally, wasn't it?

00:20:47.300 I think it was. I feel like you interviewed me a couple of years ago

00:20:50.320 on something that was related to like a men's health piece. I don't remember what it was about.

00:20:53.760 I think Bill Gifford introduced us, right? Yeah, I think it was him. His background is with

00:20:57.420 men's health. So Bill introduced us and yeah, I worked there for six or seven years and that's

00:21:02.680 where I was working at at the time. Where did you get this idea that we are in a crisis of

00:21:07.780 comfort? A few things happen. So one is that working at that magazine, I noticed that every

00:21:13.540 single thing that I was writing about, because I mainly am working on lifestyle, health, performance,

00:21:19.500 fitness, nutrition, that kind of stuff, mental health. I noticed that anything that I'm writing

00:21:25.260 about, you have to go through a short-term discomfort in order to improve. If you want to

00:21:30.220 get fit, you're going to have to exercise harder than you are now. If you're not, if you want to lose

00:21:34.720 weight, you're probably going to be hungry at some point. If you want to improve your mental

00:21:37.500 health, just like I experienced, you might have to ask yourself some hard questions about

00:21:41.560 why do I feel this way? What's happening? What's the underlying behavior and motivation? And

00:21:45.120 that's not always comfortable. So I make that observation. Then I get sober, which is the

00:21:50.360 ultimate, yeah, that was really, really hard. And what year was this? December of 2014?

00:21:57.100 That was exceedingly hard. But after things sort of started to settle, after you're done with

00:22:03.460 the white knuckling, how long is the white knuckling? It was probably shorter than for

00:22:06.960 some people. Cause I think I was just done psychologically. But part of the white knuckling,

00:22:11.200 I'm sure is also just the physiology, right? I mean, you're really giving up something that.

00:22:15.580 Yeah. So you're having to relearn all these behaviors, which is really tough and figure out

00:22:19.740 how to deal with things. But soon, like literally everything in my life got better. Everything you

00:22:25.120 could measure got better. Your performance got better at work. Your writing got better.

00:22:28.840 My writing got better. My finances got better. I lost weight. All these things. But more importantly,

00:22:36.920 I would say internally is where the change really was. I mean, I was just like, wow,

00:22:41.600 things have changed. Let's keep this energy going. And I got that from being willing to step into the

00:22:48.160 fire, to enter the cave that was the one that I feared. So that sets the stage for this idea that,

00:22:54.840 okay, going through discomfort often leads to something really good in the long-term and it's

00:23:00.900 a necessary buy-in for change. And I kind of start thinking about this idea of comfort and

00:23:07.400 make some observations like, well, wow, you know, life is pretty comfortable in a lot of different

00:23:11.340 ways now. And then what really brought the idea that would ultimately become the book together is I

00:23:17.520 do this backcountry hunt with Donnie Vincent, who's this backcountry bow hunter filmmaker. And I profiled him

00:23:23.360 for Men's Health Magazine. So we go on this elk hunt. He was up there for maybe two weeks. We're in

00:23:28.420 Nevada up in the mountains. I was only with him for maybe five days or something like that. It's a

00:23:32.900 backpack hunt. So. And what led you to want to do the profile on Donnie? I came across a YouTube video

00:23:38.140 of his and it's called Who We Are. I think that I had always been interested in the outdoors

00:23:43.720 somewhat. I'd kind of been interested in hunting. And I think part of that goes back to

00:23:48.460 maybe my father. So his profession is a hunting and fishing guide. So I just kind of had this

00:23:53.280 interest in it. It's like a thing that was on my radar because of that. But I had never really

00:23:57.860 come across material around hunting that really spoke to me. When you turn on the sportsman's

00:24:03.060 channel, if you've ever watched the sportsman's channel, it's the sportsman's channel. And Donnie

00:24:07.980 talks about hunting. In a totally different way. Totally different way. I like to describe him

00:24:12.040 as being part locavore, part naturalist, part environmentalist, part conservationist, part

00:24:17.980 ultra athlete. Which is funny because that's the way I was introduced to it. So that's the only

00:24:22.700 thing I can relate to, which is why I don't think I know what's happening on the sportsman's channel

00:24:27.840 or whatever it's called. For better or worse, my only exposure to hunting, it sounds like came

00:24:33.000 about through the same way that Donnie, what you've written about him. So I thought that was

00:24:37.800 interesting. And I thought that he was talking about it in an interesting way. And I thought that

00:24:40.740 there was a lot of things. Knowing what I knew in the health space, I thought there's a lot of

00:24:45.680 different things that are probably happening around this that are good. So I joined him on this hunt

00:24:50.300 and we backpack in up to like 11,000 feet and I'm freezing cold the entire time.

00:24:54.780 And this is an elk hunt. So this is September, October.

00:24:57.380 Mm-hmm. September. And I'd come from Vegas where it was a hundred something. And we get up to these

00:25:02.360 super high peaks and it's freezing cold at night. And I didn't pack well enough. Let's just say that.

00:25:06.940 I'm sleeping in the dirt, starving the entire time because-

00:25:10.660 You're on public land.

00:25:11.520 We're on public land. We're only packing in so much food because you don't want to carry that

00:25:15.680 around. Getting water requires that we hike down to this stream, hoof it up. Sitting in the

00:25:20.960 afternoon, sort of glassing, it's very boring. My phone doesn't work.

00:25:24.000 Most people don't understand that you really only can shoot the elk at dawn and dusk.

00:25:28.060 Yeah.

00:25:28.500 The rest of the day, you're just doing recon.

00:25:30.600 I had no idea. Had I known that, I might've brought up crossword puzzle. But instead,

00:25:34.280 I'm just sitting there going, hmm, you know, looking around. And it's like,

00:25:38.320 oh, all of a sudden I'm bored again. On and on.

00:25:40.500 During the five days, did he get an elk?

00:25:43.000 He got one right after I left. But also the underlying census, we got really close to one.

00:25:48.620 It was just a little too young for him. So we got within, oh, like 40 yards. And this thing

00:25:54.820 didn't see us. I mean, I was just saucer-eyed. Oh my God, that thing is huge.

00:25:59.520 They're a magnificent creature.

00:26:01.540 It was unbelievable to see it that close and in the wild. And what ended up happening is we got

00:26:06.380 in really close and a coyote came in because he's waiting. He understands, oh, this guy's going to

00:26:13.820 kill it. I'm going to have dinner too. So the elk spooks and takes off. But I get back home to Las

00:26:18.760 Vegas and I feel great. Like, man, I haven't felt this good since I was just got sober when you're

00:26:25.280 riding that pink cloud off into the sunset, man, you know? And it occurred to me, you kind of have

00:26:31.040 this moment where you're like, man, the world I'm in now is so different than the world I was in up

00:26:35.400 there. And it's different because this is comfortable in every way. And that it was uncomfortable in

00:26:40.540 almost every way. And yet that- Yeah. Why did that feel better? Right? Doesn't make sense.

00:26:45.300 Right. And yet that world is the one that humans lived in for pretty much all the time.

00:26:51.060 99.9996% of our genetic evolution.

00:26:57.600 Yes. So you go, whoa, well, that's interesting. Now we've had this very, very rapid tip into

00:27:05.300 comfort. So you start to look at all the things that most impact my daily life. I couldn't live

00:27:10.940 in Las Vegas were it not for air conditioning. I drive to work as I stream entertainment from my

00:27:17.380 XM radio, right? I don't have to be alone with my thoughts. It's easy. You don't have to hunt or

00:27:22.640 gather any of your food. No, I don't have to work for any of my food. My food is also exceedingly

00:27:27.200 calorie dense. If I want it to be, I can eat it anytime. There's an abundance of it on and on and

00:27:32.000 on. And so I just wonder, okay, well, how are all these other comforts affecting us? Have we almost

00:27:39.380 become too comfortable? And what happens if you push back against this? And I guess, what are the key

00:27:44.780 types of discomfort that we evolved to face? And do those still help us today? So there's the

00:27:51.200 question. And that ultimately led to me going, well, that's a lot of material. This doesn't

00:27:58.120 sound like a magazine article. It sounds like a book. So you write the book proposal and we shopped

00:28:03.940 it out. And it's funny because this whole process, you know, you have a book agent and stuff and

00:28:08.000 they're going, well, this is a really good idea. And I think I'd like to read it, but I don't know

00:28:11.780 what the hell it is. What section does it go in? When you read the way that I tell the

00:28:16.240 book, which we'll get into is I did this 33 day trip in the Alaskan Arctic. And that is

00:28:22.780 the overarching narrative of the book. And as I'm facing these important discomforts that

00:28:27.180 humans used to face in the past, that can still be beneficial to us now that our world

00:28:30.680 is comfortable. I spend chapters on those. So I'm kind of weaving the stories in and out.

00:28:35.140 And it was kind of a confusing thing for them to wrap their heads around. They're going,

00:28:37.960 is this in the adventure section? Is it self-help? What is it? But we took it out and luckily someone

00:28:42.840 was like, well, I think I can probably do something with it too. I love the way it's written. And as

00:28:47.380 you know, I gave it to my daughter and I love that. Nothing makes me happier. And we're going to go

00:28:51.820 into each of these in some depth, but I'll tell you the one that nagged at me the most, because most

00:28:56.940 of these discomforts I've thought a lot about, but the one that I don't think I'd really given its due

00:29:02.660 to was boredom. In some ways, that's the most insidious comfort we've cured.

00:29:09.500 Yes.

00:29:10.280 I love the way you talk about it. You say sort of like in the 1950s, television. No, no, no. So it's

00:29:15.440 go back 1920s radio. So that's the first time you've got this external source of input that you

00:29:22.420 can numb your boredom with, which is passive rather than active. I think that's a part of it as well.

00:29:28.220 You could have read before then, but reading is not really boring. Reading is not necessarily the

00:29:33.120 same type of a remedy. And then we talk about televisions in the 1950s and the 1960s, but I

00:29:38.000 love what you describe as, what is it? June 29th, 2007 is the death of boredom.

00:29:43.260 Yes. The advent of the iPhone. And I think that that shifts. So if you back up and look at how much

00:29:49.560 time people spend engaged with digital media today, when I wrote the book, the average was 11 hours and

00:29:56.520 six minutes. It's now past 12 hours.

00:29:59.540 So I had my team look at this because I'm like, this can't be right. I said, first of all, that must

00:30:03.600 include working at the computer. Does it? That's been a question in my mind as well. But when you

00:30:09.920 look at cell phone usage, it's up to like three average hours. Television, I will say this, television

00:30:14.680 is the most dominant at capturing our attention. And how much of that is the TV is on while I'm cooking,

00:30:22.160 but I'm not watching it. Because when I go through these numbers, there's one of two

00:30:26.920 possibilities. One is I am so out of touch with how the world lives or it's capturing things that

00:30:34.760 aren't direct. I've looked at these data where it's 12 hours and yeah, TV is the biggest chunk and

00:30:40.080 smartphone and computer and stuff like that. And I'm thinking, if I could watch six hours of TV in a

00:30:48.100 week, that would be a big week of TV. And that's only during a week when there's a formula one race

00:30:54.980 wouldn't be on a regular or a non F1 week. So how is the average person watching four hours of TV a

00:31:02.440 day or whatever it is? I think it's definitely possible because think about the data from Netflix

00:31:07.020 when they release a new series, something like a thousand upon thousands of people will binge

00:31:12.340 12 episodes in a weekend. I guess you're right. I just, so Netflix, like I binge watched Ozark.

00:31:19.380 I'm lucky I was able to do that because you know how they missed a couple of years. Like that would

00:31:22.560 have driven me nuts. I liked that. I could just kind of watch it. You did it right. I did it right.

00:31:26.420 But I don't think I ever watched more than two episodes in a day. And there were lots of days I

00:31:31.380 didn't watch it. So when I say binged, I meaning I took like three months to watch it, but that felt like

00:31:36.640 a lot. So Netflix went all in when they were trying to go to streaming, they went all in

00:31:41.880 financing house of cards and sort of as a random thing, that decision that gets made and who the

00:31:49.580 hell made it. And they don't know why let's just put it all up at once. Some crazy number of people

00:31:55.900 binged the show, all of it, all of it. And they go, Oh, what's this about? That's when binging show

00:32:04.100 starts this random decision made by someone, probably just a coin flip. I guess let's just

00:32:08.820 put it all up at once. The thing that I've been paying most attention to is the phone. And what

00:32:15.440 I've realized is like, if I compare myself to now versus pre Blackberry, I didn't get the first gen

00:32:24.620 iPhone in 2007, or I got it. And then I returned it after a week because I thought it sucked, but I

00:32:30.680 only cared about email. So I was like in the work mode of, and the email wasn't that good.

00:32:34.720 And the phone wasn't that good. Like it wasn't actually a good telephone. It dropped calls. Like

00:32:39.140 the Blackberry was still the gold standard. But when I think about what life was like before that,

00:32:44.680 and I'm old enough to remember, there's a lot of time when you just, you wouldn't think to be

00:32:49.880 sitting on the toilet looking at your phone. Whereas now it's like, yeah, I'm pretty much always

00:32:55.480 reading the news. Yep. Guilty as well. That is so weird. How, if you think about something as silly

00:33:01.620 as sitting on the toilet, you're not there for that long. Do you really need to be doing anything

00:33:07.200 else? So I started to think about the idea of boredom from hunting, as we talked about, that it's

00:33:12.260 a lot of sitting on a hill and looking for animals when we are in the Arctic. People don't understand

00:33:17.360 how sparse animals are. I think people have this view of hunting is getting out of the back of a

00:33:23.100 truck into a pen of animals and shooting them. They can't fathom what it actually means to scour

00:33:30.860 20,000 acres for an animal. And I think people think it's action-packed. You're always on the

00:33:38.380 move and running. It's like, no. It is 99.99999% extreme boredom and 1.00001% pure panic. Yes,

00:33:48.260 exactly. That's a great way to describe it. So we would sit on these hills because we're timing

00:33:53.400 our hunt to the caribou migration. We're hunting caribou. So we're waiting for these. Oh, so you're

00:33:57.200 now in the Alaska hunt now. So we're in Alaska now. Yeah. And so we're waiting for these animals to

00:34:01.420 come through. Now this just wasn't happening. So five days in a row, not seeing anything going,

00:34:06.700 well, they should be coming through here. It's not happening. And I didn't bring a cell phone. Of

00:34:12.200 course, I'm not bringing books, magazines, all that stuff. I love the stuff that you read. Oh, dude.

00:34:17.900 So to entertain ourselves, we read the labels on our food. So I can tell you a Clif Bar has 250

00:34:24.820 calories, six grams of fat, 49 carbs, 10 grams of protein. Like these are the things you're getting

00:34:29.380 into. And you know what kind of carbs too. Yes. You're reading all the labels. I'm coming up with-

00:34:34.720 You know who made your clothing, right? Wasn't it Hong? Yeah. Some guy named Hong. I'm like a

00:34:39.000 Faru bag. Some guy named Hong. And I'm coming up with Christmas shopping lists for like the next

00:34:44.980 six years. Did you bring a journal? I brought one of the write in the rain notebooks that I bring on

00:34:50.060 any journalistic assignment. That also led to each thing becomes boring. Eventually. Clif Bar reading

00:34:56.880 becomes boring. Learning about Hong becomes boring. So then I go, okay, well, I'll come up with some

00:35:02.720 ideas for the magazines I write for. I come up with like 17 different ideas and they're all like very

00:35:07.640 good. I start writing some of the book. So this leads me to point about boredom, which is that

00:35:14.520 boredom is an evolutionary discomfort that basically tells us whatever you're doing with

00:35:19.000 your time, the return on your time invested has worn thin. So if you and I are, you know,

00:35:24.660 it's a million years ago, you and I are hunting. We need food or else we're going to die. We're

00:35:28.840 going to starve for hunting and no animals are coming through. Boredom is going to kick on

00:35:32.720 and it's going to tell us go do something else. And then we might go pick potatoes or pick berries,

00:35:38.620 whatever it might be. So boredom tells us do something. And in the past that something that

00:35:45.100 used to be productive, it used to often move our lives forward in a way. Well, now when we feel this

00:35:51.120 evolutionary discomfort of boredom, we have very easy, very effortless escapes from it. You just pull

00:35:57.160 out your cell phone. We have the ultimate vehicle for stimulation and attention capture on our persons

00:36:03.640 at all time. It has really put a big dent in boredom and boredom does come with benefits. So

00:36:11.800 there's these really interesting studies around boredom and creativity. And they're totally hilarious

00:36:15.540 too, is that they'll take one group of people and they'll let them do, you know, whatever they want,

00:36:19.900 put them in a room and like people bought their cell phones or whatever. We'll take another group and

00:36:23.320 they will bore the hell out of these people. And then they'll give them a creativity test.

00:36:26.920 And the bored group always comes up with more creative answers than the non-bored group.

00:36:32.900 And I think it also gives your brain time to process information in the background,

00:36:38.100 let things happen. So when you think about the sort of cliche of you get your best ideas in the shower,

00:36:45.940 well, it's a cliche for a reason. It's because when we're focused outwardly on the outside world,

00:36:50.960 like in a screen, our phone, Netflix, even this conversation, your brain's working hard to process

00:36:56.480 that information. So it's kind of a work mode. When you have these moments of boredom, you tend to go

00:37:01.060 inside for a little while as you figure out what to do, you have some weird, funky thoughts. And

00:37:05.280 that's kind of more like a rest mode for your brain. I call it unfocused mode in the book. And that tends

00:37:10.900 to give your brain a little bit of time to rest. And from that seems to come good things. And one of the

00:37:16.140 researchers I talked to, he goes, look, boredom is neither good nor bad. It really isn't. It's what you do with

00:37:20.540 it. And so what we do with it now, I think is increasingly becoming something that maybe isn't

00:37:25.520 moving our lives forward. So what I'm arguing in the book is I'm not saying burn your cell phone and

00:37:30.780 go back to a flip phone or any of that. But I am saying that I think we need to think about

00:37:34.800 putting more boredom back into our lives. Because a lot of times there's so much talk around how we

00:37:40.740 need to reduce our phone screen time, like reduce your phone screen time, reduce your phone screen

00:37:44.600 time. And I think that's a good thing. But what tends to happen to people is they go,

00:37:49.600 okay, I took an hour off my iPhone screen time. Well, now what do I do? So they watch an hour of

00:37:54.780 Netflix. Well, your brain doesn't know the difference. It's better to have time where

00:37:58.820 you're just sort of unstimulated. So if something that I'll do in my own life is just go for a walk

00:38:03.560 every day, at least 20 minutes, and just don't take your phone and just kind of let your mind do what

00:38:07.880 it needs to do. That also gets you out into nature, which has its own benefits. I'm sure we'll get into.

00:38:11.920 We're going to talk about rucking a lot. And so this will be the one of many, but something that I

00:38:15.680 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,

00:38:19.600 you don't bring your phone, you're not listening to a podcast and you're not listening to music.

00:38:23.720 The whole key to this thing is going without the phone so that all you're hearing, you know,

00:38:29.640 we're lucky here, we get to do it and we're not hearing, like we're not on a road that's busy

00:38:33.080 with a bunch of cars going past it. So you're mostly just listening to the wind, but wherever

00:38:36.720 you are, you have to get into that zone of not being with the phone, which for me was also

00:38:41.320 the king of efficiency. I'm always listening to an audio book or a podcast or I'm on a phone call.

00:38:47.880 If I'm moving, those things are happening. There is never a time when one of those three things is

00:38:54.420 not happening. I was totally the same way. And I started digging into this research and it really

00:38:58.820 changed how I thought about it. And I do think that I tend to get a lot better ideas. My mind goes to more

00:39:06.120 interesting places that it maybe needs to go when I am disconnected and don't bring that phone along.

00:39:11.680 That's ultimately going to capture more attention. Going back to the hunting thing. I find it takes

00:39:17.320 two days for me on a hunt to find my senses. We were talking a little bit about this before we

00:39:24.300 started the podcast. You know, one of the reasons I like axis deer so much, not only is it from an

00:39:29.320 environmental standpoint, you're doing something very positive for the environment. The meat itself is

00:39:34.780 incredibly healthy, tastes great. But the challenge of hunting that animal is so high. It's just,

00:39:40.840 if you can shoot an axis deer with a bow, you have earned that animal. And the reason for that is they

00:39:47.680 have really good senses. Their sense of hearing, their sense of smell, it's insane. If you try to go and

00:39:54.220 hunt them in a clumsy way where your senses aren't heightened, it's a joke. It's like they're toying with

00:40:00.860 you. They'll smell you a mile away. They'll see you a mile away. They'll hear you a mile away. You're

00:40:06.140 not going to get within their zip code. You can only get up on them if you become as attuned to the

00:40:13.020 wind, as attuned visually to what's going on, as attuned to every sound you're making. Again, I'm sure

00:40:20.360 a guy like Donnie can get in that zone in one second. I need like a day or two. You don't have your

00:40:26.900 phone with you. You're not listening. You don't have earbuds in as you're making this move. And I

00:40:32.860 remember almost every hunt I've been on, I remember what that transition feels like. And getting there

00:40:38.300 is hard. It is boring as hell. But you have to kind of go through that for your senses to wake up,

00:40:45.400 at least for me. Two things. One that's short and one that's long. I think that that's kind of a

00:40:49.480 metaphor for the book as a whole is you have to go through that to get that benefit. And I think

00:40:54.820 there's a lot of different things that we've removed from our lives that going through can

00:40:58.800 benefit us. The second thing is that what you're saying, it totally jives with not only my experience,

00:41:05.340 but there's this concept called the three-day effect. And it basically shows that after three

00:41:11.320 days in nature, a lot of good things tend to happen to people. So in the modern world, your brain

00:41:17.920 tends to ride what are called beta waves, frenetic sort of go, go, go associated with sort of stress,

00:41:22.440 burnout, this sort of thing. After your third day in nature, brain tends to start to ride what are

00:41:27.960 called alpha waves. And these are found in experienced meditators. They're like calm,

00:41:31.800 more focused, more aware. And you just feel like, ah, like I'm sure you felt it when you're out there.

00:41:38.340 When you first get into nature, you're kind of, what's going on? You don't really feel in tune.

00:41:42.200 You're worried like, did I put the garage down? Does my daughter have a ride to school? That sort of

00:41:46.760 thing. Once you get to day three, it's like focus centered. Like you just feel like a Zen monk or

00:41:52.080 something. And I think there's a good reason for that. There's a lot of things that are happening.

00:41:57.860 And this is why, one reason why some researchers are thinking of extended time in nature as a way to

00:42:05.720 help people with PTSD, specifically veterans, because the benefits don't seem to wash off

00:42:10.760 immediately. So this idea of the three-day effect is at the top of this concept that I write about in

00:42:14.820 the book called the nature pyramid. And it basically prescribes different amounts of time you should

00:42:19.680 spend in different types of nature. So this idea of three days and more back country removed nature

00:42:24.740 is at the pinnacle of this. And it basically says we should try and hit that at least once a year.

00:42:29.680 You know, I never really thought of it that way, but that's, as you know, if you go on a hunting trip,

00:42:34.120 that's another thing people don't understand. If you're going out there to try to kill an elk or a

00:42:38.520 deer, it's going to take you a week. And my first elk hunt, seven days later, I didn't have an elk.

00:42:44.220 That's not uncommon.

00:42:45.540 Not uncommon at all. And I would, I don't know what the success rate is. It's maybe like 20%. I would say,

00:42:49.580 for the average person.

00:42:50.260 You know, it depends obviously, but in public land, it's really got to be pretty low. You have

00:42:55.400 to be an exceptional hunter to get an elk on public land.

00:42:57.900 Yeah. And I think another thing that people sometimes don't realize about hunting is that

00:43:03.500 you're not hanging out on a trail and going on the trotted ground. Like you are embedded in the

00:43:09.640 wilderness. You are bushwhacking the entire time. You can be completely off the grid. Like you are in

00:43:14.840 it. And I think that that's what makes hunting compelling to me is that rather than becoming a

00:43:22.060 observer of nature, you become a participant in it. And I wasn't sure how I would feel about that,

00:43:29.020 to be honest. So the first time I ever hunted big game was for this book. And I definitely had

00:43:34.200 my reservations, but Donnie told me, you know, I think you'd understand why we go out there and do

00:43:38.760 this thing if you were to actually hunt. And so I trusted them on that and I can see the appeal.

00:43:43.760 Yeah. It's funny. My daughter again, brought this up when she got back. I've taken my daughter on one

00:43:48.940 hunt with me when she was 10 or 11. And in retrospect, I'm really glad I did. And I don't

00:43:55.840 know what I was thinking at the same time, because it's hard to see an animal die. There's no getting

00:44:01.480 around that. I don't know. Maybe if you've done it, you get numb to that, but I don't think so.

00:44:05.120 Even the most experienced hunters I know have a real respect for life and for what I describe as the

00:44:10.280 carbon cycle. We're part of it too. We're going to die and our carbon is going to go back into the

00:44:14.780 earth and our nitrogen and it's going to fertilize something around us. And of course the one axis

00:44:19.040 deer she sees me shoot, it's a disaster because literally I forgot my front stabilizer. You know,

00:44:25.260 we're booking it in at four in the morning, right? Cause you've got to be in position to try to

00:44:30.120 see deer by five 30 to get a shot by, you know, five 45 or whatever. And I stupidly just took the

00:44:37.780 front stabilizer off my bow the night before something I would never do. And I forgot to

00:44:42.520 put it back on and we're an hour in and I realized I don't have it. And I don't have a choice. If we go

00:44:48.280 back, we're done for that morning. So I'm like, I'm going to be shooting this thing without a front

00:44:52.120 stabilizer. I've never done that before. It's doable, but I've never done it before. So to make

00:44:56.360 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

00:45:04.400 deer. It's not that big. It's only about that big. You've got to be able to, how much do they weigh?

00:45:07.780 The biggest ones in Hawaii are 200 to 220 pounds. This one was probably 150 pounds. So this one was

00:45:13.980 not a monster. And instead I hit him in the neck, but it hits his spinal cord because he just dropped

00:45:20.720 immediately. He was paralyzed. So now we've got to run up and stick a knife into his heart to

00:45:26.600 immediately kill him. Cause on one hand you could say, well, he doesn't feel anything, but you could

00:45:31.200 argue psychologically, this is pretty traumatic. So it's not just like she sees a clean kill. She

00:45:36.220 actually sees a very messy kill. How did she handle that? Amazingly. Well, she got a little

00:45:41.100 nauseous. Every time I shoot an animal, I also want to take its insides apart. So you're taking

00:45:46.380 the meat off as one thing, but I like to see the organs. Cause I do think it really helps me to

00:45:50.940 understand the anatomy well. And I really like to see every detail of their anatomy over and over and

00:45:56.800 over again. Plus we also eat the heart and some of the organs as well. When we got into me taking out

00:46:01.160 the heart and doing all that stuff, she was like, I'm going to stand back here for a minute, but

00:46:05.460 otherwise she did great. And then of course, what did we do? We took that deer back to our hotel

00:46:11.080 because we were staying on another part of Maui and ate it, shared it with everyone who worked at

00:46:16.480 the hotel. Very cool. Befriended the chef. And these are all people local to Hawaii who know about

00:46:21.400 what access to your due to their community, how they destroy their farms and stuff like that.

00:46:25.700 And many of them had never even eaten an access deer. And I was like, you're in for a treat

00:46:29.380 tonight. And so the chef prepared it for us and for the whole staff, like fed like 50 people.

00:46:34.800 It was really fantastic. Again, what was the point I was going, I was going with this. Um,

00:46:38.900 I had a point. Oh, I know. So my daughter is at this camp that she just got back from and she's

00:46:45.040 talking all about, she's like this counselor, that counselor. And she's like, you know, and one of the

00:46:48.220 counselors there was a vegan. So for like a week I went vegan too. And I was like, Oh, what was that

00:46:52.280 like? And she's like, well, you know, it was all right, but probably not for me. And I was like,

00:46:55.720 did the counselor tell you why she was vegan? Cause I've sort of explained to my daughter

00:47:00.220 that there are generally three reasons that people would associate with being vegan. The

00:47:03.660 animal rights reasons. And then there's the environmental reason vis-a-vis climate change.

00:47:08.180 And then there's the perceived health reason. And I've talked to my daughter in detail about

00:47:11.980 each of these. And I just want to understand, I said, so what was the rationale of the counselor

00:47:15.660 who you were in? And she's like, you know, really for her, it was around the treatment of animals.

00:47:19.420 I really respect that. And there's almost a part of me that thinks you shouldn't be able to eat

00:47:22.860 meat unless you can kill it. That doesn't mean you have to kill everything you're eating. I'm not

00:47:27.220 suggesting that because that gets pretty complicated. But if you can't actually kill an

00:47:32.840 animal psychologically, maybe you should question whether you should be eating it. That would be at

00:47:37.620 least a discussion to have. And that's part of why I wanted my daughter to be able to see this

00:47:41.580 so early in her life, which was, look, anytime we're eating an animal, you have to understand that

00:47:46.400 thing was alive. What does that mean? Yeah. And so she, my daughter was sharing with

00:47:51.120 this counselor, her experience, which is we eat elk and axis deer most days. And she was like,

00:47:57.800 yeah, you know, this counselor was super impressed. That's a great sign. Like when your vegan camp

00:48:02.600 counselor is very impressed that you're eating wild game, you know, Olivia was able to kind of

00:48:07.760 explain the manner in which these things are killed. I thought that's really cool to me. And it gets back

00:48:12.500 to your point, which is it totally changes the dynamic of how you think about food.

00:48:17.240 A hundred percent. And it also makes you realize how easy is it to be able to use a sophisticated

00:48:22.080 weapon like this and think about what our ancestors had to do. Think about what we were doing just a

00:48:28.640 thousand years ago. I don't know if you can see it, but right over there, we won't be able to show it

00:48:32.660 on screen. Do you see that bow on the wall? Oh yeah. A good friend of mine, Darren Aronofsky was

00:48:37.180 doing some filming for a documentary he was producing. I think these are some hunters in Papua New

00:48:42.240 Guinea and that's what they hunt with. He actually brought me back one of their actual bows and their

00:48:46.600 actual arrows and out to 10 or 20 yards, they'll kill an animal with that. I was just in the Bolivian

00:48:55.080 Amazon with the Chimane Trab and that's what they hunt with. They do a lot of fishing. Okay. So how do

00:49:01.560 you kill Tapir? Tapper? I don't know how you pronounce it. Some sort of Amazonian deer.

00:49:04.780 And they're just standing there and throwing like spears at them, aren't they?

00:49:07.420 Yeah. They've got bows like that. It's like, oh my God. So you realize whatever I will ever do,

00:49:12.980 or you will ever do, or Donnie will ever do, it's still an enormous step forward in technology to be

00:49:18.200 able to use a bow, an actual compound bow or something like that.

00:49:21.060 A hundred percent. You know, it's fascinating because when I kind of had my hesitations.

00:49:25.200 And was your hesitation around the act of taking a life?

00:49:28.220 I think that's ultimately what it was. I told myself it was because, well, you're a journalist and

00:49:33.240 journalists don't get involved in the story. So you're just there to cover it.

00:49:36.100 And I think that was kind of a mental workaround for me to not have to,

00:49:40.440 I wasn't sure how I felt about it.

00:49:41.600 That seems like a reasonable point of view as well. I could see that argument.

00:49:44.940 I can see the argument, but I think ultimately it was just that I-

00:49:47.660 But it's a different experience.

00:49:48.460 It's a different experience.

00:49:49.040 I don't think one's better than the other. I just think you could have been there

00:49:51.640 watching Donnie do it. And what was the other guy's name?

00:49:54.500 William, right?

00:49:55.100 William.

00:49:55.260 Yeah. Alternatively, by doing it, now you're writing about your experience.

00:50:00.100 I'm glad I trusted Donnie. Let's just say that. I think that the book ended up better.

00:50:03.480 I think specifically this section where I talk about death is a lot richer because of that. I mean,

00:50:10.720 I feel like it is internally. The experience of actually hunting the animal is, even when I said,

00:50:17.780 okay, to Donnie, I was like, I don't have to do it. I don't have to pull the trigger.

00:50:21.480 You kind of told me that. Just plan on it, but you don't have to. And he wasn't pushing me either

00:50:25.160 direction. But you buy a tag, which in Alaska, you can buy a caribou tag over the counter,

00:50:30.980 go all the way out there, carrying the rifle around for a couple of weeks. And we finally

00:50:37.020 get in a position where we're on this hill and there's a herd on the other side of this valley

00:50:41.860 on a hill. And Donnie says they keep eating their way down this hill. They're going to probably come

00:50:46.400 over this knoll. So if we can get on the other side of the knoll, we're going to be in a good

00:50:49.480 position. So when that happens, we just, we're on the move up and over the knoll. We start cranking

00:50:55.440 through the grass and the tundra. And eventually we kind of get into an army crawl planning that

00:51:00.200 this herd is going to come over the hill. And so we get in position, it's like something out of

00:51:04.400 planet earth where you're watching this hill. And then all of a sudden it's like the first thing

00:51:07.560 you see are these antlers, these gigantic antlers that first, and then it's like, there's one and

00:51:12.920 two, and then eventually there are 30 and they're all kind of coming. And we're looking at them because

00:51:18.600 we're only wanting to shoot something that's old, you know, from the spotting scope, we had thought,

00:51:23.780 okay, there's probably two older ones in there, but you know, you want to be sure. Cause we're

00:51:27.520 super far away when we made that call. How far were you when you guys made the first spot?

00:51:32.160 It was pretty far. I mean, maybe a mile and it's a big Valley. And we eventually see in this herd that

00:51:40.580 there's this really old bull that's limping. And so still at that moment, I'm going, I got the rifle.

00:51:47.480 I'm in position. I don't have to pull the trigger. But when we saw that limping bull,

00:51:51.700 it was like, okay, it felt right. And it was a tough process to get the shot off because they're

00:51:57.740 going in and out of the herd and you want to clean shot. And Donnie at one point, cause they were

00:52:02.000 maybe within 150 yards of us was going to be the closest point. And I couldn't get them in the scope

00:52:08.440 and they kept going. And Donnie kind of looked at me and goes, if you don't want to take the shot,

00:52:11.580 don't take the shot. But if you're going to take the shot, you got to do it right. And this is when

00:52:14.820 you got to do it. You got to do it soon. And right after that,

00:52:17.200 the herd sort of parted. It was right there. Just perfect shot. Pulled the trigger,

00:52:22.100 pulled it again. Herd ran, bull fell. And my initial reaction was, oh my God, what have you done?

00:52:30.580 It was immediate regret to be honest and sadness. And we come up on the animal and that didn't help

00:52:39.180 things. What was really interesting though, I had a lot of emotions around that.

00:52:43.540 And remind me what day of the hunt this was.

00:52:46.120 This was probably a couple of weeks in. So we start breaking in town and all of a sudden that

00:52:53.700 shifts the relationship there because you kind of go, well, wait a minute. That's me. You know,

00:52:59.400 Donnie's like, yeah, that's why we're doing this. That's why we're doing this. But you don't really

00:53:03.180 understand that until you experience it. Then it kind of occurs to me, dude, you eat meat all the

00:53:08.300 time. And you've never questioned it. Never questioned it. You've never felt one iota of emotion.

00:53:13.540 And here you are now with this, a mess.

00:53:15.600 And not only that, this animal that you just shot died more humanely and suffered less than

00:53:21.680 anything you've ever eaten to date in your life.

00:53:24.780 A hundred percent.

00:53:25.540 Lived out.

00:53:25.820 It's not even a comparison. Lived a beautiful, traumatic life in nature, which is what it is.

00:53:30.620 Let's not romanticize nature. But wasn't in a corral, wasn't force-fed antibiotics.

00:53:36.400 And one of the things that I really love about this project we're doing in Hawaii is,

00:53:41.080 I never appreciated this until I met Jake Mews, was the stress that an animal is in,

00:53:46.500 in the final hours of its life impacts the food quality. And even if you're eating the most

00:53:52.700 she-she, grass-fed, organic cow, make no mistake about it. The final hour or two of that animal's

00:54:01.680 life is very stressful as it goes through the process. Yeah. I believe it. And it's totally

00:54:06.500 different when an animal gets a bullet through it and dies within and trying to make sure it's

00:54:12.460 an instant death for that meat process. There's no cortisol surging through it. There's no lactic

00:54:17.640 acid surging through it. So yeah, what you did is actually about the most humane thing you could

00:54:22.760 have offered that animal relative to anything you've eaten, but also given to what its natural

00:54:26.660 history is. Like that's the other thing people have to understand. Like these old animals don't go to

00:54:30.900 old animal folks' homes. No, they do not. They don't have graceful exits either. He's going to

00:54:34.980 get- He's going to get killed by another- Picked off by wolves. He's going to drown crossing rivers

00:54:38.880 because when they make this migration, they have to do a bunch of river crossings. He's going to

00:54:42.840 freeze to death. They have a harder time getting food as they age. So he's going to starve to death.

00:54:47.260 Or he's going to be killed by another caribou. Yeah. So it was really this, really just a deep

00:54:52.280 appreciation set in after that and sort of gratitude. You're very thankful for that meat, but also the fact

00:54:58.580 that all meat, you know, I wish that our meat system had some changes to it, but you become

00:55:03.220 grateful for all the other meat that we have. Cause you're like, wow, look at the buy-in that goes

00:55:06.760 into this. You see that it is a life. And so I think it made me realize you kind of have this very

00:55:13.360 intense realization that for one life to go on, another has to die to your point about the carbon

00:55:17.880 cycle. And then the next step is, well, wait a minute. I'm not left out of that. Am I?

00:55:22.760 And so this eventually gets me thinking about death in general and how I'm going to die.

00:55:31.100 You're going to die. We're all going to die. And if you think about that, if you think about right

00:55:36.440 now, we're just sitting here having a moment very soon in the near future, you're going to be having

00:55:40.980 a moment. And then all of a sudden there won't be a moment anymore. That is an uncomfortable thought.

00:55:46.620 So I started thinking about that. And this idea of death is the most uncomfortable thing that we can

00:55:52.480 think about. Really? When you do it right, you'll ball up like a child. But when I started practicing

00:56:00.500 that, I found that it improved my life because it improved my behavior, changed my behavior.

00:56:06.280 When you realize you're going to die, all of a sudden you don't pop off in traffic. Someone cut you off.

00:56:10.940 You start to make decisions about work and what you're going to do with your time that are better.

00:56:16.620 It improves your interactions with other people, everyone from my wife to the lady at the 7-Eleven.

00:56:24.640 And the thing is that in the US, we don't think about death. We sort of want to ignore it if you

00:56:30.960 look at our structures. So we've talked about our food system and our food system is based around

00:56:36.940 meat that you don't really know that it's come from an animal, the way that it's processed. We even

00:56:41.020 have euphemisms for different cuts of meat instead of saying muscles, the muscles that they are.

00:56:47.420 And it's also in our funeral system. Whereas after someone passes away, what do we do? We dress them

00:56:53.940 up to look as alive and youthful as possible. We have a viewing and then we're told to take our mind

00:56:59.480 off it. It sounds like, take your mind off it. Don't worry about it. Don't think about it. And I just

00:57:04.380 wondered what some of the repercussions of that are. And it got me also thinking about, well, are there

00:57:09.680 other ways that places do this? And so this leads me to this trip to Bhutan that I take.

00:57:17.200 So Bhutan is a very fascinating place.

00:57:20.780 You have a whole chapter on it, which is amazing. And I want to hear all about it.

00:57:23.720 Were there other candidate places you looked at besides Bhutan?

00:57:27.180 Bhutan came on the radar and it kind of became, I think that's a place I should go.

00:57:31.460 It's an amazing discussion about the contrast. So how do they die?

00:57:35.400 Well, first of all, what's so fascinating about them is they're, if you measure it by GDP,

00:57:40.660 they're 160 something out of 180.

00:57:43.280 Yeah, out of like 184 or something.

00:57:44.720 Yeah, they just don't.

00:57:45.660 Dirt poor.

00:57:46.260 Yeah. But in a lot of happiness measurements, they rank in the top 20. So they punch way above

00:57:51.760 their weight. This idea of death and how they approach it, I think factors in. There's a lot

00:57:55.740 of things going on, but I think their relationship with death does factor into this. And in Bhutan,

00:58:01.300 it's, they just take it into their life. So the Bhutanese are told to think about death

00:58:05.300 three times a day. It's kind of a cultural practice. Death is woven into a lot of the art

00:58:09.900 and the cultural dances and heritage. And there's even these little clay pyramids called Sasa's. So

00:58:17.180 this is mud mixed with ashes of cremated people. And they're all over the country, all over the

00:58:25.880 country. You take a turn like on a bend in a road and there might be 300 of them. They're in the

00:58:30.920 windowsills in the city. I mean, they're everywhere. So there's this constant reminder

00:58:34.560 and it flows in with this idea of impermanence and Buddhism. And I think that Bhutan as a country

00:58:38.980 really plays that up. So I travel there to learn more about this. And I-

00:58:44.160 And this was after the hunt.

00:58:45.600 This was after the hunt.

00:58:46.380 Because it grew out of this understanding.

00:58:48.520 I met with three different people there. The first was a guy whose name is

00:58:51.460 Dasho Karma Ura. And a Dasho is like secretary in the US. Like we have secretary of state,

00:58:58.680 secretary of defense.

00:58:59.480 He's like secretary of happiness, right?

00:59:00.420 Secretary of happiness. Yes. So I meet with him and he just does these happiness measures all

00:59:04.820 around the country. And he finds that I think 92% of Bhutanese say that they are happy, more or less.

00:59:11.520 They have different variations. They say, I think they have narrowly happy.

00:59:14.760 Baseline happy.

00:59:15.700 Yeah. Very happy. Or like, I'm extremely happy. 92% say they're at least some form of happy.

00:59:21.280 By contrast, do we know what that is in the US?

00:59:23.100 I don't know. Although I know that some of our numbers there are dropping for sure. We're

00:59:28.860 definitely not 92%. I want 40 comes into my mind, but definitely don't quote me on that.

00:59:34.200 So he does all these really fascinating-

00:59:36.380 It's hard for people to kind of wrap their head around some of this stuff, Michael. I'm quite

00:59:39.700 familiar with this research. I've talked a lot about it with Arthur Brooks, who also studies this.

00:59:44.440 And it's so perplexing until you actually go and experience places away from what we do.

00:59:50.660 Like, I don't think one can cognitively appreciate what you're saying if your only exposure is what

01:00:00.280 we are doing here. You don't necessarily have to go to Bhutan, but you have to see other parts of

01:00:04.320 the world. Several years ago, interviewed this amazing physician named Tom Katana, who's like a

01:00:09.080 missionary physician in Sudan. And he's in one of the worst parts of Sudan. At least it was. It's

01:00:16.040 getting a little bit better now. It's in the Nuba Mountains. There's about a million people there

01:00:19.740 with no access to healthcare who are being bombed by their government. So he's running the hospital

01:00:24.740 that takes care of these people who are getting shrapnel and plus all the normal things that come

01:00:30.080 up, you know, infections and things like that. You know, one of the things we talked about in our

01:00:33.340 discussion was the fact that nobody's depressed and there's only been one case of suicide that

01:00:38.240 he's ever seen. And it was probably related to a brain tumor that completely altered the person's

01:00:42.520 brain. And I'm thinking to myself, Tom, the circumstances that you're describing sound so

01:00:47.600 miserable, how are people not just in a state of pure misery? And it turns out there's an amazing

01:00:54.600 sense of community, which we're going to talk about in Bhutan. There is no place you go to die

01:00:59.460 that isn't around here. The oldest person, the youngest person, everybody's together. They don't

01:01:05.480 seem to be any less happy, which again, it's mind boggling that that can be the case.

01:01:11.240 I think that there's generally more economic equality too. I think that can affect it. The place

01:01:17.000 definitely feels slower, much slower than the pace of life here. They have more exposure to nature,

01:01:23.600 more time in nature. Also, they have no debt. Yeah. You mentioned everyone there. How do they

01:01:30.320 own their own homes? Obviously they're modest homes, but I just think it's inexpensive enough.

01:01:34.580 It's so inexpensive. It's all universal healthcare. And the guy that I spoke to is Dasha. He goes,

01:01:40.240 look, our healthcare isn't perfect, but you have something that needs to be treated that is beyond

01:01:47.180 what we're capable of treating. The country will pay for you to, they'll fly you to India somewhere

01:01:51.900 else. And that's fully taken care of and fly you back. So people generally don't have debt. And yeah,

01:01:57.140 there is a big sense of community. So the... And of course there's so much healthier too,

01:02:00.440 is the other thing you said, the obesity rate is 6%. 6%. So that is one of the things that factors

01:02:06.040 into it as well. They're generally healthier. The entire country does not have a stoplight.

01:02:12.340 What? Right? There's no McDonald's or Starbucks or Burger King. I'm not saying those things are bad,

01:02:18.100 but I think what they've tried to do is really prevent the influence of other places from coming

01:02:22.180 in and sort of let Bhutan figure itself out without other places intervening. I don't know if intervening

01:02:28.420 is the right way influencing that. So that seems to factor into it. I think the whole country is maybe

01:02:33.400 3 million people. 600,000 live in Tempu, which is the capital. And then most other people live

01:02:39.420 sort of in the countryside and mountainsides in small communities of maybe 200 people.

01:02:44.300 The stress thing is an interesting one. As I mentioned, we just got back from Italy. And

01:02:48.860 the thing that I spent the most time thinking about while we're there is why is their life expectancy

01:02:55.820 four or five years greater than ours, despite the fact that they smoke nonstop? Because this is the

01:03:02.200 part I couldn't wrap my head around. I've been to Europe many times. I've been to Italy

01:03:05.340 once before. So it's not like this was the first time I was seeing it. It was just the first time

01:03:09.200 I really, really thought about it. Smoking is the national pastime here. And by the way,

01:03:15.080 it didn't bug me, which is weird. Like in the United States, when I smell cigarette smoke,

01:03:19.440 it's like I have an allergic reaction. I hate it so much. Somehow being in Italy, smelling their smoke,

01:03:23.880 I was like, look, it still smells disgusting to me, but it just felt so culturally appropriate that I was

01:03:29.980 like, eh, you know, it is what it is. I'm not going to be that American who's going to open my mouth and

01:03:35.400 complain about smoke in their country. But I'm like, their life expectancy, it's like four or five

01:03:40.740 years greater than ours, despite the fact that they're participating in the single most damaging

01:03:46.240 thing you can do to your health. Well, of course, what I came to realize after contemplating this for

01:03:51.720 two weeks was everything else they're doing is so much better. They're eating a fraction of what we

01:03:58.560 eat. And by the way, they're still eating pasta, gelato. It's just the serving sizes are like this.

01:04:04.960 Tiny, yeah.

01:04:05.760 They're much more active. But the thing that really blows my mind, and it's not surprising, is the pace.

01:04:13.140 The pace is just so much lower. I really would believe, and I don't know what metrics we have to

01:04:19.920 measure this, but I can't imagine they are under the stress that we put ourselves under. Now, the flip side of

01:04:26.420 that is, because I've also thought a lot about this and talked a lot about this with people.

01:04:30.480 Maybe there's a reason the US is the world's biggest economy, and maybe there's a reason that

01:04:35.280 most of the innovations are coming out of here and not Italy, for that matter, or pick Bhutan for that

01:04:40.400 reason. I don't want to sound so naive to suggest that we should all be like that, but you start to

01:04:47.080 appreciate the trade-off. We are paying a price to be the world's leaders in innovation. We are paying

01:04:54.940 a price to have unlimited access to food and comfort. When we were in Tuscany in the middle

01:05:03.340 of nowhere, the home we were staying in in Tuscany had no heat and no air conditioning.

01:05:08.380 In the winter, it is freezing, and in the summer, it is basically just a sauna. It's a sauna with

01:05:15.360 clay walls.

01:05:16.660 It's interesting. When I started to look at a lot of what kills us now, it's all things linked

01:05:23.140 to pace and comfort.

01:05:24.960 Yeah, it's over-nutrition, under-movement, too much stress.

01:05:28.960 Too much stress. You know, one thing that I learned when it comes with stress, the question

01:05:33.980 becomes, what is causing our stress? A lot of it is manufactured. No one causes your stress.

01:05:40.540 You cause your stress. There's this concept in the book I talk about called prevalence-induced

01:05:45.960 concept change, and that's kind of a nerdy way of saying basically problem creep. So these

01:05:51.200 scientists at Harvard, they did this fun study, and they noticed this, by the way,

01:05:55.460 they're waiting in line for TSA. They're going to a conference, and they're looking at TSA. They're

01:06:01.060 going, you know, a lot of people who are clearly not that threatening get patted down. Grandma's

01:06:06.400 getting the full-body pat down because she had a half-filled bottle of hairspray in her purse,

01:06:10.020 and they just pulled out my banana thinking that it was a Beretta or something. So they start to

01:06:15.080 wonder if all of a sudden everyone just followed the rules. Would they let everyone flow through and

01:06:20.140 go onto your flight? Or would they start looking for successively smaller things? And they thought

01:06:24.200 it would probably be the latter. I bet the reverse is true. If every fourth person coming through

01:06:28.980 actually had a gun, would the other three of us who have never carried a gun or threatening

01:06:35.280 thing to an airport never get patted down again? Right. So they do this study, and there's two

01:06:41.460 different studies they did where they had people look at 800 different faces, and the people had to

01:06:44.980 deem whether the face was threatening or non-threatening to them. So the people are going

01:06:50.100 non-threatening, non-threatening, threatening, threatening, non-threatening, non-threatening.

01:06:55.100 About midway through, they started showing the people successively fewer threatening faces.

01:07:00.600 The other one they did was very similar, except they were having them read these research proposals.

01:07:04.740 So you'd have to say whether the research proposal was ethical or unethical.

01:07:07.760 And again, somewhere in the middle, they started feeding them fewer unethical ones. So you would

01:07:14.120 think that people would just start saying threatening fewer times. They would start

01:07:18.620 finding fewer things unethical. The person either threatens you or they don't. And something either

01:07:22.520 crosses this moral line you have in the sand or it doesn't.

01:07:25.100 Which you've already established through the first half of the study.

01:07:27.780 Well, it did. What ended up happening is they said threatening the same amount of times,

01:07:31.000 same ratio of times. They found the same amount of studies. What word am I looking for now?

01:07:35.940 Unethical. Unethical. Yes. So what their takeaway was, as we experienced fewer and fewer problems,

01:07:42.240 we don't actually perceive this. We simply go out and look for other problems. We don't become more

01:07:47.820 satisfied. But the thing is, is that as the world improves over time, and I think we can agree that

01:07:53.980 even though things aren't perfect right now, everyone knows it. There's never been a better time to be a

01:07:58.900 human being with respect to the benefits we have. Yes. Compared to a hundred years ago, you're more likely to be

01:08:04.580 literate, educated, you're less likely to die at any moment, on and on and on. But when you pull

01:08:10.380 people, only something like 12% of people think the world is improving. It's because we're always

01:08:14.280 moving the goalposts. I think this makes evolutionary sense because in the past, when the world was hard,

01:08:20.160 when you did have serious life-threatening problems, if you were always identifying the

01:08:24.500 next problem, okay, that's going to give you a survival advantage. Okay. We've got to fix this thing,

01:08:28.800 this thing, okay, this is a problem, fix that, fix that. But in today's age, as things become

01:08:33.620 successively better, we look for problems where they maybe don't exist or our problems become more

01:08:38.060 hollow. I think there's another issue at play here. And I've thought about this so much. You know,

01:08:42.880 the first time I started thinking about this problem was 10 years ago when I read Guns, Germs,

01:08:46.920 and Steel, Jared Diamond's book, which I'm sure you've read. And if people haven't read it, it's a great

01:08:51.180 read. I suspect some of it is now dated and there's, I don't know if he's written an updated

01:08:55.460 version of it. But what it got me thinking about a lot was how awful life was. I mean,

01:09:02.660 there's just no other way to put it. We can sit here and talk about romanticizing some elements

01:09:06.920 of a world with no iPhone. The reality of it is I wouldn't want to be one of the Hadza right now.

01:09:11.960 Even if you look at the Hadza today, which are one of the last tribes of hunter gatherers,

01:09:15.960 one of our final windows into what people were doing 10,000 years ago. There's like literally not

01:09:23.040 a second of that, that I think of as desirable outside of a vacation. And by vacation, I mean

01:09:28.200 a hard experience you would go through for a couple of weeks to make you more appreciative of

01:09:33.360 what you have when you're back in plush Austin, Texas. But I can honestly say I would never want

01:09:40.400 to exist back in that world. It was awful. It was so awful that I can't believe we survived it.

01:09:48.600 I just can't believe I am tied to the genetics of people who managed to survive that.

01:09:55.460 It's unbelievable. And especially after we start to establish cities, because then all of a sudden

01:10:01.200 you have one king and you're out in the field for 12 hours a day.

01:10:07.240 In service of that king.

01:10:08.480 In service of that king. And you're starving the whole time. And you have problems with

01:10:11.500 malnutrition. You're living in with like no sanitary. It's just totally terrible.

01:10:17.560 Did you ever see that movie, The Duel, with Matt Damon and Adam Driver?

01:10:21.360 No.

01:10:21.820 It's loosely a true story based on the last time there was a duel. The last time the

01:10:26.300 king of France authorized a duel. And I believe it's, I don't know, I want to say 16th century,

01:10:32.160 maybe 15th century. So call it like 500 years ago directionally. Really good movie. I really

01:10:36.100 quite liked it. But again, I'm looking at the movie through a different lens, which I'm always

01:10:40.480 doing when I'm watching movies. And the lens I'm looking at it through is, this is a movie about

01:10:45.640 the most privileged people in France. The kings, the knights, the most privileged. And at the time,

01:10:53.940 France and England were the most privileged in the world. So you're looking at the most

01:10:59.160 privileged people in a society that is the most privileged society on the planet. And this is

01:11:04.060 only 500 years ago, which might sound like a long time. But when we start talking about what 1159.33

01:11:10.420 means, people will understand how not long that is. And I'm thinking, I would rather be homeless today

01:11:17.080 than the king of France 500 years ago. It is unbelievable abject misery they lived in.

01:11:25.000 It's very crazy. And to your point, what you said earlier, a lot of it gets romanticized and it's,

01:11:30.800 you should check it out. Go back there. See if you can. It's terrible. Life is amazing today. I mean,

01:11:34.600 we have this incredible privilege today to be alive. Because to me, this is how I read the book.

01:11:40.280 I don't read the book as saying, we need to go back and be hunter gatherers. No.

01:11:44.340 It's like an Uncle Ben moment with Spider-Man. It's like, with great power comes great responsibility.

01:11:50.300 We have this great power today. We have processed food, which by the way, and the guy that you talk

01:11:56.740 about in your book, I think does a great job of explaining to you out of the gate, hey,

01:12:01.020 don't think processed means bad. Processed is actually what allows us to not get poisoned every

01:12:06.540 time we eat food. So you have all of these things that allow you so much latitude. Do more with it.

01:12:14.800 That's to me what really what it comes down to is we have the ability to help more people.

01:12:19.920 If you think about what it was like 500 years ago, if a person had mental illness 500 years ago,

01:12:26.920 I don't know how many other people were bending over backwards to try to make their lives better.

01:12:30.560 Because you were just too busy trying to survive. Whereas today you can help somebody else.

01:12:36.120 That's the responsibility that comes with the privilege of having so much. You can afford

01:12:42.000 to try to feed other people that aren't being fed. And again, in a world of overnutrition,

01:12:47.160 it seems almost absurd that anybody would go without.

01:12:50.160 I think the argument that I'm making is that in a way we've become victims of our own success.

01:12:55.160 And if we don't have times that push back against what we have and sort of reframe how lucky we are

01:13:02.220 in the grand scheme of time and space and give us insight into these things are all wonderful,

01:13:07.460 but if I use them all the time, it seems like bad things tend to happen. Processed food, great.

01:13:12.720 Keeps us all alive. That's why there's nearly 8 billion people on the planet.

01:13:15.980 At the same time, if that is who don't have to move around. Yeah. Think about this. Like we get

01:13:20.340 to sit in the same place, but if you're always eating the most comforting food all the time,

01:13:25.040 you're going to have some problems. It's great that you don't have to quote unquote exercise or

01:13:29.760 physically work for your food every day. It's great. But at the same time, if you never

01:13:34.120 reinsert exercise into your life to make up for that, you're going to have some problems.

01:13:38.520 Sometimes it's great that if I feel bored, I can go on Instagram and watch the most entertaining 15

01:13:45.100 seconds of my life and probably laugh my ass off for a week because I've found something so funny.

01:13:50.060 Which is hard to imagine. Like that couldn't have been done a hundred years ago.

01:13:53.820 But if you're always doing that, that comes with problems. So the argument that I'm making

01:13:58.200 in the book is that we need moments that push back at us and reframe things.

01:14:02.200 If the entire history of this universe were laid out in a calendar year, can you give some

01:14:09.060 milestones? Where did you read about this or learn about this?

01:14:12.140 I was driving to work in my truck 29 and it was on a podcast. Someone walked through it and I just

01:14:20.360 started bawling. I'm driving past a Chipotle, just this fitness bro like, oh my God, so much time.

01:14:27.220 Give the answer and then I want to talk about what that meant to you emotionally.

01:14:30.640 So the answer is that the Big Bang happens.

01:14:33.300 If the Big Bang happens on January 1st.

01:14:35.420 I believe that our galaxy forms, I might get the months.

01:14:38.400 Like September?

01:14:39.340 Shaky September. Earth forms in November. Dinosaurs die off on December 25th.

01:14:45.420 After appearing on December 20th or something?

01:14:49.440 Yeah, they were around for five days on this calendar.

01:14:51.940 That's right. The 25th to the 29th or something, right?

01:14:55.720 Of December.

01:14:56.620 Of December.

01:14:57.420 Amazing.

01:14:57.860 All of human history that we have written down happens New Year's Eve, 1159, starting at-

01:15:06.480 33 seconds.

01:15:07.300 33 seconds in. That is all of recorded human history. That is how little time we've been here.

01:15:14.420 It's crazy.

01:15:15.960 It is unbelievable. All of recorded human history is 27 seconds, the last 27 seconds of a year.

01:15:23.320 Yes. So for me, I started thinking about, you're not that damn important in the grand scheme of

01:15:28.920 time and space. Now that sounds like you're being hard on yourself, but at the same time-

01:15:32.820 I would go one step further. It's that you are completely unimportant. You couldn't be less

01:15:37.480 relevant.

01:15:38.580 Yeah. You know, that can be unnerving at first, but at the same time-

01:15:43.600 I need to do the calculation of what an average human lifespan is because it's

01:15:47.020 milliseconds on that scale.

01:15:48.780 Yeah. And once you have that realization, I think that it can change your behavior in

01:15:51.940 a positive way because we're all here. We're all going to die.

01:15:54.380 And so going back to this, and again, it's just fresh on my mind because I just got back.

01:15:57.580 So we're staying with this friend in this place in Tuscany and 400 acre farm that has

01:16:04.460 been built up over years. So the first thing that was built on that farm was 500 years old,

01:16:09.600 was an old church. And 50 years later, this other house got built. And then a hundred years

01:16:13.880 later, this other thing got built. And then a hundred years, the newest thing on this farm

01:16:17.200 is 300 years old. The oldest thing is probably five, 600 years old. That's your timeframe.

01:16:21.860 And I had this sense that came over me while I was there, which was, I felt so good being

01:16:28.740 in a place where I knew so many people had lived and died.

01:16:31.820 Why do you think that was?

01:16:32.760 For the exact reason that you just said, which is it really made me feel appropriately irrelevant.

01:16:39.800 Yes.

01:16:40.260 I love that.

01:16:40.300 And I said to my friend, so my friend's an American, but he lives there like three months

01:16:44.220 out of the year. I said, dude, I'm not being facetious. So you can say no, but if my death

01:16:50.220 is reasonably inevitable, like I have cancer or something like that, would you be cool if I came

01:16:54.720 and died here and was buried here? And he's like, yeah, man, that would be fantastic. Because I feel

01:17:00.980 like I would really like to die in a place where I'm just an irrelevant piece of the long, beautiful

01:17:08.080 history of our species. And then I've never liked the idea of these funerals and things like that.

01:17:13.260 Could I just be buried there by the olive trees so that my carbon and my nitrogen become a part of

01:17:20.880 an olive tree that someone will drink olive oil from 25 years later? I don't know how to describe

01:17:27.040 it. I'm sure there are some places in the US where you might find that feeling, but again,

01:17:31.800 certainly nothing here that's 300 years old, let alone 500 years old, let alone a couple thousand

01:17:35.940 years old. I think that as morbid as it is to think like that, I don't know. I feel like I'm

01:17:43.180 excited about the possibility of, hey, will I be fortunate enough to have enough of a warning when

01:17:47.640 I'm going to die that I could go and die there? When I was getting sober, a phrase I learned is

01:17:53.540 rule 62, don't take yourself so damn seriously. And that reinforces that for me. I think people have

01:18:02.000 a tendency to take themselves and the things in their life so seriously. And once you realize it's

01:18:06.820 things aren't that big of a deal, you got one ride. You don't have to always ride the gas all

01:18:12.700 the time. You can slow down sometimes. That's been relatively freeing for me. And also I think

01:18:17.680 improved. I mean, if we want to talk about improving performance at work and in life,

01:18:23.280 that's kind of a life hack. So once you kind of let off yourself, it's like you're free to do

01:18:28.080 the things I think you want to do and let your mind go where it needs to go, especially for me

01:18:33.120 doing creative work. If I don't put all this pressure on myself, I'm like, no one's going to

01:18:37.120 read this book in 200 years, 100 years, 20 years. Who knows? Just make it good. It's a ride. I remember

01:18:43.240 watching this documentary about the Grateful Dead. They are my favorite band. Maybe it was 67 when

01:18:50.380 they're kind of coming up and they take a bunch of acid, as the Grateful Dead do, living in San

01:18:54.660 Francisco. How big was the band at that point in time? They rose by playing the original acid tests

01:18:59.720 that Ken Kesey would do that eventually got written about in the electric Kool-Aid acid test.

01:19:05.060 So this would have been three years after that. They're kind of starting to come up. They're in LA

01:19:08.740 and there's this big LA tower thing that this guy had built over years and years and years.

01:19:14.500 And Garcia talks about people at Taurus would come to see this big tower this guy had built.

01:19:18.940 He looks at it and he's like, you know, I want to just create things that live and explode in the

01:19:26.540 moment and just have fun in this moment. And that ultimately guided them as a band forever. You

01:19:33.380 can see that in their music, that every song is like its own exploding moment. And that's kind of

01:19:37.840 what we are as humans. No one's going to remember you. You're not going to have this big monument to

01:19:42.300 you. It's like, man, ride this thing out. Like give yourself some space and just enjoy it.

01:19:46.960 So what's Masogi?

01:19:49.000 Masogi. So I learned about this concept from a guy whose name is Marcus Elliott. He went to

01:19:55.460 Harvard med school, but he decided he didn't want to be a traditional doctor. He decided that he

01:19:58.960 wanted to get into sports science. He wants to revolutionize sports science and kind of ends

01:20:04.060 up doing it in a way. He's the first guy to really bring AI and movement tracking into pro sports.

01:20:11.700 And by using this data, he can basically tell people the way that your knee caves in. As you do

01:20:17.360 this, you might have a 60% chance of injury based on all the other cases we've seen of men of your

01:20:22.660 size in the NBA, whatever. So he's kind of all about these numbers and data and figures that can

01:20:27.480 improve performance. But he also believes that what improves performance and potential, it can't

01:20:34.380 always be measured in a way there's intangibles that some people have. And so to get to these,

01:20:39.820 he does this idea called Masogi. Now the setup, the backup for this is why it's important is that

01:20:46.200 if you think about how humans evolved, we used to have to do hard things all the time. No safety net.

01:20:53.940 This could be from a big hunt, moving from summering to winter and grounds, tiger lurking in the bushes,

01:20:59.740 all these different things. So we were challenged all the time. And if we failed, we would die.

01:21:04.200 But each time we would take on one of these challenges, you would inevitably learn what your

01:21:07.780 potential was. You would really have to dig deep, push, and you would come out of that,

01:21:12.820 assuming it went well, made it out the other side, knowing what you were capable of.

01:21:16.380 But now in modern life, you start to see a shift where you can live a decent life and you're never

01:21:22.280 really challenged, especially physically in a way that it almost blends mind, body, spirit.

01:21:29.420 You'll have your running water, you'll have your food, you'll have your home, you'll have your

01:21:32.920 family. And it's really great. But he argues, and I, I'm with him on this, that if you think of

01:21:38.820 human potentials, like a really big circle, most people are kind of in this little dinner plate

01:21:43.460 size thing right here, because we never explore those edges, really what we're capable of.

01:21:49.360 So enter Masogi. And this is this idea that once a year, going to go out into nature, going to do

01:21:57.220 something really hard, some challenging task. So there are only two rules of Masogi. Rule number one

01:22:05.080 is that it has to be really hard. So he defines this by saying you have a 50-50 shot at finishing

01:22:11.280 whatever it is, this Masogi task that you decided to take on. And it has to be true 50-50, because now I

01:22:18.300 think when people take on challenges, especially when there's a physical element, they pick things

01:22:22.400 that they know they will finish that are within their capabilities. So if you look at how marathoners

01:22:26.380 approach running a marathon, it's not, I don't know if I'm going to be able to finish this marathon.

01:22:30.840 It's what is my time going to be? Right. I don't know if I'm going to be able to finish this marathon

01:22:33.660 in under three hours or whatever. The second rule of Masogi. Which I like as much as the first rule.

01:22:39.040 So you can't die. Don't die. Kind of a tongue-in-cheek way of basically saying, be safe on this

01:22:44.940 thing. Isn't there also a third rule of Masogi? There's guidelines. Oh, I thought there was a,

01:22:50.180 we don't talk about Masogi. Like you don't go and your Masogi doesn't get up on Instagram.

01:22:54.400 Yes. Then there's two guidelines. The two guidelines are one, you don't talk about Masogi publicly.

01:22:59.820 You can talk about it with friends, with your wife and close ones, but you don't put it on Instagram

01:23:05.200 and Facebook and Twitter. And the reason for that is this guideline was a guideline before social media,

01:23:11.440 but so much stuff that people do today is often for the gram. You want to do something so you can

01:23:17.100 post it. And by removing this, all of a sudden you have this question of if you're doing something

01:23:22.620 really hard and you want to quit, are you going to keep going for you knowing that it's not going

01:23:26.920 to be for a pat on the back with social implications? The second guideline is that the Masogi

01:23:32.320 should be somewhat quirky. Make something up. The reason for that is because once you remove

01:23:38.620 sort of artificial metrics that changes the game, if you're doing a marathon, all of a sudden you're

01:23:43.240 thinking about your time, you're thinking about all these different things that are socially

01:23:46.940 constructed. Whereas if you just pick some random task, it's like, well, let's just see if we can do

01:23:52.220 it. We have no framework for this. And that kind of opens up the door for some interesting experiences.

01:23:56.960 So some of the Masogis that this guy has done is one year, him and a few guys, they got an 85 pound

01:24:05.460 boulder and they walked it underneath the Santa Barbara channel. I think it was five miles. So one

01:24:10.880 guy would dive down, pick up the boulder, walk 10 yards, drop it, go up. The next guy would dive down,

01:24:15.440 rinse and repeat till you're at point B. But there's also simpler things like here's this mountain that we

01:24:21.560 see every day. Let's see if we can get up there in a single day. Things like that. Now, the point of

01:24:28.440 these, there's two big reasons for doing something like this. One is that it teaches you that you

01:24:35.840 chronically undersell your potential. So if you choose an appropriately hard task, you are going to

01:24:40.660 have a moment where you go, I'm done. I got to quit. I've reached my edge. There's no going back from

01:24:48.380 this. But if you can keep putting one foot in front of the other, then you get this other moment

01:24:52.960 that's much more important. And that's where you look back and go, well, wait a minute. I thought

01:24:57.660 my edge was back there, but I am clearly past it now. And that suggests that I'm selling myself short.

01:25:04.640 And the more important question that comes from that is, okay, where else in my life am I selling

01:25:09.340 myself short? So you see that you're capable of more. The second thing that comes from this is that it

01:25:16.060 can reframe fear for people because we're wired to avoid failure at all costs because failure in

01:25:23.280 the past used to mean death. So of course we would want to not fail, but today failure isn't death.

01:25:29.680 It's mistyping in an email, misspeak when you're speaking to a group of people, something like that.

01:25:35.300 Yet we still fear those kinds of things like their deaths. Dancing on the edge of failure,

01:25:39.560 you can realize that it's not that big of a deal. When I first learned about this concept,

01:25:45.780 it sounded cool. It sounded intriguing. The same time I'm like, okay, it's kind of quirky,

01:25:50.940 just like some made up thing. Then I started really researching what was happening here.

01:25:58.580 And we used to call things like this rites of passage. So when we had a young person who was at

01:26:02.580 point A in their life and we needed to get them to point B where they were more confident,

01:26:06.160 competent, a better contributor to the tribe, what would we do? We would send them out into nature

01:26:10.940 to do something really hard. And along the way, they would struggle. They would battle. They would

01:26:15.600 have moments of doubt, but they would ultimately come out on the other side, realizing that they

01:26:19.740 were capable of a lot more and they could bring that back into society and improve the tribe as a

01:26:24.520 whole. What's interesting is you see these across cultures. It wasn't that one tribe said,

01:26:28.940 hey, we're doing this thing. It's pretty cool. You should try it too. And that tribe put the word out.

01:26:32.840 This arose independently throughout culture.

01:26:36.040 It just arises. And it's also in mythology. So if you look at the work of Joseph Campbell

01:26:41.360 and the hero's journey, the hero exits the comfort of home. He or she goes into a trying middle ground.

01:26:48.140 They're faced with battles. They have to go inward and they have to physically strive.

01:26:54.080 And then they come back into society with treasure or the talisman or whatever it is. Well,

01:26:59.560 what is the treasure of the talisman? It's not the actual physical object. It's the way

01:27:02.440 that person has changed and that change that they can bring back into society.

01:27:08.100 You've seen a falling away of traditional rites of passage like this, which is why when you were

01:27:13.000 talking about sending your daughter to that camp, I got so excited because I think kids

01:27:18.580 really would benefit adults too, but kids in particular really benefit from having times where

01:27:26.960 they get pushed to their edges and they have those moments where of doubt that they're not sure what

01:27:32.460 they're capable of, but then they cross it and realize, Oh, I've got more on board than I

01:27:36.520 really ever imagined. You look at what people can accomplish when the conditions are survive

01:27:43.680 condition. It's incredible what people can do. And it also makes evolutionary sense to undersell

01:27:49.800 yourself. Yeah. Keeps you safe. Keeps you safe. You don't want to be the hold my beer guy,

01:27:54.460 right? That person dies. So it's a practice that I do in my own life. And as I said, it's when I

01:28:01.920 first kind of heard about it, I go, yeah, it sounds kind of fun. Also kind of like quirky. And then when

01:28:07.080 you start to learn more, it goes, Oh wow, this is actually a powerful thing. And when you look at

01:28:11.080 research on challenges in people's lives, the people who have the worst rates of mental health

01:28:16.080 are the people who have had a ton of challenges, like an overwhelming amount of challenges and

01:28:21.660 traumas. But on the opposite end of the spectrum are people who have no challenge in their life

01:28:26.860 and no traumas. They have equally poor rates of mental health. So it's kind of a U shaped curve

01:28:31.200 where having enough challenge in your life that you learn that what you're capable of, that you can

01:28:36.960 persist through things that you've got, this seems to be healthy for people. So speaking of challenges,

01:28:42.620 one of my favorite challenges now that we get to talk about, even though it would never rise to

01:28:46.780 the level of a Masogi, but as a daily practice is rucking. So why is it that people like you and I

01:28:53.440 have taken to this thing? And maybe we could start by just kind of defining what is rucking?

01:28:59.000 Rucking is carrying weight for the sake of weight in a backpack. The word grew out of military circles.

01:29:06.720 So in the military, rucking is just a standard fitness practice. It is the main fitness tool

01:29:11.960 that the US military and militaries all around the world going back hundreds and hundreds of years

01:29:17.440 used to build fitness for soldiers. It is just carrying weight on your back in a backpack.

01:29:22.080 And it's interesting because this is, again, a feature that is unique to our species.

01:29:29.940 Yes. I started thinking about this when I was hunting, because once you kill the animal and you

01:29:35.520 have the meat, you have to pack it out. So if you look at why the human body is built the way it is

01:29:41.600 and what we're physically good at, we're good at two things. The first is running long distances

01:29:45.940 in the heat. So if you've read Born to Run, or that was spawned from a 2004 paper in Nature.

01:29:51.200 By Dan Lieberman.

01:29:51.660 Yep. By Dan Lieberman. And we have all these adaptations that make us good at running long

01:29:57.340 distances slowly in the heat. And we would use that to hunt on hot days.

01:30:00.620 And it's not even running. Over 24 hours, we could walk further in a day than an animal could

01:30:07.820 go at whatever pace it chose. Yeah, absolutely.

01:30:10.980 We don't have to be running. We can just simply be walking three miles in an hour and we'll walk

01:30:15.240 75 miles in a day. We're unbelievable at covering ground. Animals on a hot day, four-legged animals,

01:30:20.640 they're not efficient at cooling themselves. We are. That's one of our adaptations. So we sweat.

01:30:24.540 Our noses are really complex nasal cavities of cool air, all these different things.

01:30:28.740 And so we would chase animals down until they essentially toppled over from heat exhaustion

01:30:32.480 and we would spear them. And then this leads to the second thing that we're good at,

01:30:37.820 which is we would then have to carry that animal back to camp. And we also have adaptations that

01:30:43.120 make us really good at carrying. And we are, in fact, the only animal that can carry.

01:30:47.900 Yeah. I was really surprised to learn how lousy primates are at carrying.

01:30:52.200 They're terrible. I think we can hold up to 33% of our body weight and still be more efficient

01:30:58.960 at covering ground than most other primates. With no weight.

01:31:03.580 With no weight. Just on their own. They have this sort of tipsy, weird gait. There's a technical

01:31:08.860 term for it. I forget it. But it's not efficient at all. I weigh up 180. I could easily carry a 60

01:31:14.300 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,

01:31:19.840 it's like nothing. Yeah. Most people can. And to think that that's more efficient than a primate is

01:31:25.100 with nothing. With nothing. It definitely shaped us. And the experience of carrying out meat had me

01:31:31.600 starting to think that because I had been familiar with the Lieberman work and all that. And it was in

01:31:36.260 my mind and thinking about how this running's linked to hunting. But then you carry and you're

01:31:41.800 like, oh, they would have had to do this too. We also seem to be the only species that can really

01:31:45.860 do this well. You know, arguably we carried a lot more as early humans than we would have run

01:31:52.220 because running is mostly reserved for hunts. Whereas you look at what is gathering. And so

01:31:56.260 you go pick up some stuff and carry it around as you get more stuff and then you carry it back to

01:31:59.880 camp. So I actually went to Harvard to meet with Lieberman. Really fun meeting. He's a fascinating

01:32:05.220 guy. I enjoyed talking to him. So I argue in the book that running is obviously popular. Jogging is a

01:32:11.840 thing, right? Or is it yogging? I can't remember if the J is. Yogging. It's yogging.

01:32:16.000 But carrying is not as a form of fitness and activity. And I ultimately ended up traveling to

01:32:26.440 GoRuck HQ. And this is the tribe I argue that has really adopted carrying is the military through

01:32:32.640 rucking. That's like the only group is really putting this at scale. And GoRuck is a company

01:32:36.760 that makes backpacks that are specific for rucking. And their founder, whose name is Jason McCarthy,

01:32:40.820 he sort of leaned into rucking as a form of fitness. And I started to really look at the

01:32:45.780 research on it. It's really great for us because you're working your cardiovascular system, but

01:32:50.840 you're also working your strength system to a degree. So you're not going to get that with

01:32:54.020 running or cycling, something that is a pure endurance act. Whereas with rucking, you're

01:32:58.460 getting the endurance, but also you've got load on your body. And so that is stimulating your muscles

01:33:03.680 to a greater degree. And there's some really fascinating studies on backcountry hunters who will

01:33:09.200 carry in loads to deep into the mountains and they'll test their body fat before and after.

01:33:15.220 And those hunters across, I think it was a 10-day study. It was a small study. There's only so many

01:33:20.400 weirdos like that. They lost 14% of their body fat and they actually stayed with the same amount of

01:33:28.140 muscle. Some actually gained like an ounce or two of muscle. So it's really good at melting fat and

01:33:33.680 preserving muscle. For me, something I really enjoy about it is, you know, most of my cardio is

01:33:39.740 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

01:33:45.580 sort of my thing. I feel pretty fortunate that despite 60 mile weeks growing up, I still have

01:33:52.420 perfectly fine knees and hips. But I also realize as much as I would love to go back to running, I don't

01:33:58.300 want to poke the bear. I dodged a bullet in life being able to run so much without hurting myself.

01:34:04.060 But as I'm older, I don't, I just don't think that's the case. I think it's about eight times

01:34:08.400 your body weight is the force experienced by your knees with every step when you run. Obviously weight

01:34:15.600 matters and the lighter you are, the better. And it's not a surprise that the best runners are feather

01:34:20.080 light for obvious reasons. But with walking, it's only about three times your weight. So when you're

01:34:25.780 rucking, you're walking, not running. And yes, you're adding more weight. So let's say you increase

01:34:31.100 your body weight by a factor of 30%. The 30% increase at a 3x multiple of force is much less

01:34:40.880 than your body weight at eight times the force if you're running. In other words, as hard as rucking

01:34:46.360 is with all that extra weight, it's still much easier on your knees than running. Yes. And you're

01:34:51.820 still getting, I mean, yesterday was the first dad rucked in two weeks because we just got back

01:34:56.560 from vacation. And I'd been walking nonstop while we were there, but it wasn't the same.

01:35:00.600 Holy cow, like much harder, even just taking two weeks off. It's really like a type of workout.

01:35:06.140 My heart rate hit like 165. I was in the 150s and 160s, which is totally uncommon for me when rucking.

01:35:13.760 I'm normally in the 130s, 140s, but I guess because I was sort of deconditioned because all my walking

01:35:18.800 in Europe was without load. So it really made a difference. It really showed me just how demanding

01:35:25.920 it is. It is. And the injury data is really interesting to your point. When you look at

01:35:32.780 studies on people in the military, what tends to injure soldiers is running. They'll do studies

01:35:38.700 where they look at injury rates across something like a selection, which is a long process where

01:35:43.600 these guys are being just hammered. And they're all getting injured by running. That's not to say

01:35:48.620 that some people don't get injured by rucking, but it's like very, very small numbers comparatively.

01:35:54.480 So for that reason, I think it's a lot safer, but it also gives you to your point, your ability to get

01:35:59.760 higher heart rate than you would from walking and also preserve muscle.

01:36:04.060 The thing that I've got my daughter really embracing is the hills because on the uphill,

01:36:09.960 you're just obliterating your heart and lungs, but also, and my daughter might be the only 13 year

01:36:16.400 old to really be able to explain to you the difference between eccentric and concentric

01:36:20.440 strength. Cause all the times we're walking down hills, I'm explaining to her how this is working

01:36:25.060 her eccentric strength and her quads. And this is where you get your breaks from, but I love the

01:36:30.600 walking downhill as well. And really trying to be as deliberate about it as possible and really

01:36:35.820 making sure. Cause in life that's where people fail. So when you get older, nevermind running,

01:36:41.220 can you walk downstairs without collapsing? Can you walk off a step and not hurt yourself? Well,

01:36:47.820 if the answer is, I don't know how to decelerate. The answer is no, you're hosed. And there's no better

01:36:54.640 way to learn to decelerate than with a big load on your back, walking downhill that will teach you how

01:37:01.120 to decelerate. And that's not something you get easily in the gym. No, it's not something you get

01:37:06.680 easily running. You just don't get that skill any other way that I'm aware of. And if you do fall,

01:37:12.760 you're going to be better off if you've been rucking, because it also is rather good at

01:37:18.340 improving bone density. Really interesting studies on women where it improves bone density better than

01:37:24.020 weightlifting alone, better than cardio alone. And that becomes so important as women age. You look at

01:37:29.660 women in hunter gatherer societies that are always carrying things. I mean, they stay strong and vital

01:37:35.520 their entire lives. They just don't get hip fractures. You stated in the book and we sort of

01:37:40.040 loosely described it here, but I just think if McDougall argues we're born to run, I would argue we're

01:37:45.360 born to carry. That is my argument. We are born to carry. If you look at what people in hunter gatherer

01:37:51.180 societies actually spend their time doing physically, no one runs. If you even look at the Tarahumara,

01:37:57.060 they very rarely run and it's not for fun. It's for ceremonial purposes, but work life is carrying.

01:38:03.940 You know, a reasonably well-trained person, we can get most of our patients to the point where

01:38:08.220 they can carry their body weight. Now, again, you're not going to start out there if you're

01:38:11.700 not well-trained, but a reasonably fit person could for a minute carry their body weight in

01:38:17.260 their hands. You could carry it longer on your back. But even the fact that we have the grip strength,

01:38:22.520 the limb strength to carry our body weight is just fantastic. One of the metrics we use with

01:38:28.140 female patients who obviously have less upper body strength is 75% of your body weight carried for a

01:38:33.120 minute is one of like our multiple, you know, we have many strength metrics we put people through.

01:38:37.260 That's a great one. Think about that for a moment. That's pretty impressive, especially in light of

01:38:40.700 what you said earlier. So by the way, you know, I didn't even know what rucking was when I was kind

01:38:45.240 of doing it in training for hunts. But I realized what I do now is so much better because then I was

01:38:50.920 just using a weight vest. You'll see later, our backyard is really, really steep. In the weeks leading up

01:38:56.300 to hunts, I would put on a 50 pound weight vest and just go up and down, up and down, up and down,

01:39:01.180 up and down the hill. But why is it that a rucksack, we would agree and argue is better

01:39:06.140 than a weight vest? What is it offering over a weight vest? It tends to pull your spine into a

01:39:10.860 better position. So most people today, since we work in front of desks, we're slumped over all the

01:39:15.620 time. We're naturally slumped. When you put weight on your back, it sort of puts your spine in a safer

01:39:21.080 position, seems to relieve and prevent back pain. Now that is according to, spoke with Stu McGill,

01:39:26.760 who's the back expert up in Canada. And he's a huge fan of rucking. He's a very careful person

01:39:33.440 when it comes to exercise. In my experience with him, I mean, he's very nuanced and he's a person

01:39:39.480 I trust because of that. And he said, rucking is a great way to add some durability to people in a

01:39:44.020 way that's safe. The other thing I think about rucking, and I also own several rucksacks from

01:39:50.900 GoRuck now as well. The belt really makes a difference when you've got that belt on your

01:39:56.320 hips. You know, I had shoulder surgery four months ago. And one of the things I was super stressed

01:40:01.680 about was not being able to ruck because I'm going to have my shoulder operated on. And amazingly, I was

01:40:09.120 probably rucking three weeks after surgery and I couldn't do much else. Let's be clear.

01:40:14.880 But how was I able to do that? Well, first of all, you've got really well-placed straps on your

01:40:20.580 shoulders. It's not putting my joint at risk. And more importantly, the majority of the weight,

01:40:26.540 because you control where the load is by how you adjust it. But I basically just said,

01:40:30.420 I'm going to put all the load on my hips. I'll cook my legs a bit more, but I will spare my

01:40:34.880 shoulder. So that's to me, the other thing about the rucksack that really, really beats the weight

01:40:40.360 vest. You have the distribution of the load posteriorly, but you also can really distribute

01:40:44.920 the load on your hips, which anyone who's hunted or done any backcountry stuff knows. It's so

01:40:49.880 important to have your pack fit well on your hips. Otherwise, you simply couldn't carry 100 pounds on

01:40:55.220 your shoulders for very long. When I was in the Arctic and we were packing out caribou,

01:41:00.660 we were heavy. I mean, over 100 pounds, maybe 110, who knows, 20. It was nice to have the hip belt

01:41:07.200 because I would spend most of my time with the weight on the hips, but eventually that just

01:41:11.080 starts to burn and you need to wash that out. So you pop it, your shoulders for a while,

01:41:15.660 and you can just kind of go back and forth. I love that back and forth on, off, on, off.

01:41:20.340 Just trying to find something that isn't absolutely awful for a moment. It's a good burn though.

01:41:25.900 It's funny when my wife started rucking with me and my wife is like, I think she's a super tough

01:41:32.740 chick. I think she has a very high pain tolerance. The first time she ever did a dead hang,

01:41:37.360 she went three minutes and eight seconds, which is like insane. And she's gone longer since.

01:41:43.320 But the first couple of times she did it, she was like, does this ever stop hurting? And I was like,

01:41:49.560 no, I wouldn't say it ever really stops hurting. I mean, you can lighten the load, but

01:41:53.160 no, it's, it's uncomfortable. I'm not going to lie to you. This is not something that ever,

01:41:57.540 if you're doing it the way we're doing it, which is we're at about a third of our body weight

01:42:00.720 and we're walking as quickly as we can while walking. No, this is just uncomfortable. There's

01:42:06.300 no two ways about it.

01:42:07.280 It will be uncomfortable. But the upside is, is that I'll even take rucking meetings where I'll

01:42:11.820 toss in 20 pounds or something. And I'll just walk around while on this. I know I'm going to

01:42:17.120 have to be on this phone call. I could sit in my desk and office in the dark, or I could go outside

01:42:23.320 and have a light load and get it all taken care of there and sneak in a bunch of steps with some

01:42:28.160 weight on my back. I mean, it's very easy to flow into life. If you know, you're already going to be

01:42:31.860 walking the dogs, we'll just toss on a pack. And all of a sudden that becomes a lot more effective.

01:42:37.080 I've got so many friends and I don't get any kickback. I don't know anybody at GoRucks.

01:42:41.100 I've sent so many people there. I think we will at some point, hopefully do a subscriber discount

01:42:45.560 with them because I would love to get more and more people doing this.

01:42:49.520 I've tried a handful of packs for rucking specifically, and they definitely are my

01:42:53.960 favorite sweater in the book. And they've thought about it deeply.

01:42:56.780 They've got some great content as well. Some great videos and stuff we'll link to.

01:43:00.700 I think this has been such an interesting journey. As I've said to you many times before,

01:43:04.500 I think this is just, on some level, it's such an obvious thing. It's one of those books where

01:43:08.620 you read it and you're like, yeah, of course. But if it's not pointed out to you, it's really easy

01:43:14.260 to miss how this has happened. Comfort has become so ubiquitous that I don't think we're

01:43:20.120 aware of it anymore. It's kind of like the David Foster Wallace, this is water thing.

01:43:24.240 The ubiquity of the water, of course, creates the irony of the fish not knowing what water is.

01:43:30.200 And I kind of feel like that's what comfort has become for at least those of us in the developed

01:43:34.680 world.

01:43:35.260 I also think that sometimes, even if you're pressing against it in one way, there's probably

01:43:40.400 a lot of other ways that you're not pressing against it. I have friends that can run 25 miles

01:43:45.900 now if I ask them to. But if I said, hey, why don't you sit in silence for 10 minutes?

01:43:50.900 It's like, what? I couldn't handle that. So there's all these things that we've removed

01:43:55.320 from our lives over time that I think have a benefit in just figuring out, well, what are those

01:44:00.120 things? Which is what I'm trying to present in the book. And then how do I intelligently weave them

01:44:03.720 in my life? Because as we talked about earlier, I'm not trying to suggest in any way that we go back to

01:44:08.100 living as hunter-gatherers. Like, no way. Life today is amazing. But it's, how can we use some of

01:44:14.700 those things from the past to build a better future?

01:44:18.240 I agree. And it's part of its hunger. I used to do a lot of fasting. I don't fast as much anymore.

01:44:23.480 But one of the things I loved about fasting was how much I learned what I could do when I was hungry.

01:44:30.600 I would do seven up to 10-day water-only fasts, but I'd keep working out hard throughout.

01:44:36.380 And the first couple of times, it almost killed me. I remember the first time I tried to put myself

01:44:41.760 through serious workouts during a seven-day fast. I mean, I thought I was going to die.

01:44:46.680 And it's not to suggest that during those fasts, I was as strong or my performance was what it was

01:44:52.900 normally. It wasn't. It never was. But I just couldn't imagine. And other things, like I remember

01:44:57.400 going to bed so hungry sometimes, thinking I'll never be able to sleep. But yet I did. And you realize,

01:45:03.100 it's like, of course you did. There's no way our species would be here if we couldn't figure out

01:45:07.960 how to do these things when we're hungry. Be it sleep or go out and hunt or do something like that.

01:45:15.380 So when you think of all of these forms of discomfort, it can be hunger. It can be boredom.

01:45:20.160 It can be a physical challenge. That's the take-home is we have this incredible privilege.

01:45:26.440 And it just comes with a little responsibility, which is just make sure on a daily basis,

01:45:31.440 you are inserting brief windows of discomfort so that you're never too far from realizing

01:45:38.200 that you're in the water. You said it.

01:45:41.340 In other words, if you're the fish, just make sure you jump out of the water

01:45:43.840 a few times a day so that you never lose sight of the water you're in.

01:45:47.300 Amen. Yes, sir.

01:45:48.960 Well, you know what we get to do now?

01:45:50.720 Are we going to go rock?

01:45:51.880 We sure are.

01:45:53.140 Yes.

01:45:53.500 Michael, thanks very much for coming. I enjoyed talking about this a lot. And I hope everybody

01:45:57.540 picks up the book because it's fantastic.

01:45:58.940 Thanks a lot, Peter. I really enjoyed the conversation. And now we get to rock and suffer

01:46:01.980 a little bit.

01:46:02.740 And for dinner, elk and axis deer.

01:46:05.180 Awesome. Perfect day.

01:46:06.620 All right.

01:46:07.220 Awesome, man. That was fun.

01:46:08.420 Yeah, that was great.

01:46:09.540 Thank you for listening to this week's episode of The Drive. If you're interested in diving deeper

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The Peter Attia Drive - October 03, 2022

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

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