The Joe Rogan Experience - #1649 - Michael Easter

Episode Date: May 11, 2021

Michael Easter was a contributing editor at Men's Health magazine, columnist for Outside magazine, and is professor at UNLV. He also is the author of the new book "The Comfort Crisis: Embrace Discomfort To Reclaim Your Wild, Happy, Healthy Self" available now.

The Joe Rogan Experience. Train by day, Joe Rogan Podcast by night, all day. Hello, Michael. Hello, Joe. What's going on, buddy? Good to see you. Good to see you as well. Thanks for coming down here.

Hey, thanks for having me on, man. What made you decide to write about comfort? Isn't comfort a good thing, Michael? What is going on? Well. You have a problem with comfort? The comfort crisis? Is it really a crisis?

I argue that it is a crisis. One, I don't have a problem with comfort. I do have a problem with always being comfortable, always leaning into comfort, which is what we're doing now. Yeah. All right. So if you think of the average person's daily life, they wake up in the soft bed, temperature controlled home, they shuffle over to the microwave, microwave a breakfast burrito that came in from who knows where and is made with who knows what. And then

it's like, I go to work, I drive to work, I sit behind this screen all day. I don't have to move at all or put any effort into this day. And then it's back to bed in front of the TV and you just rinse and repeat that. At no point in daily life, I would argue, are people really challenged or really uncomfortable anymore like we were in our past? Some people, of course. Some people. David Goggins is still alive and well. Yes, David Goggins is still alive. He's running right now. And so he's like the type of person, you see what happens when you start to push against that, right? When you kind of have this moment where you go, maybe I'm a little too comfortable. And you start to sort of investigate, okay, what is it with discomfort? How can I get into some discomfort and what can that do for me?

And then at the extreme end of that is Goggins. Yeah. Well, it's for folks that just like say if you work in an office and this is how you make a living and you have to do that commute and there's no other options and this is what you do. Like, for them to hear this, they're like, yeah, yeah. Okay, so what? What now? Well, I mean, the answer is not to totally overhaul your lifestyle, right? I mean, we have amazing lives right now.

The fact that we don't have to go out and hunt for food or put physical effort into every day is great. But at the same time, I think, and I argue in the book, The Comfort Crisis, that we need these moments that push back at us and we need to sort of investigate these discomforts that we used to face in our evolutionary past. So for example, two, that's the percent of people who take the stairs when there's the choice of- 2%? 2% people who take the stairs when there's a choice of an escalator. 70% of people, more than 70% now, are overweight or obese. Only 20% of hunger, sorry, only 20% of eating is actually driven by physiological hunger. 80% of it is just, I'm bored.

It's noon. I guess I'll eat or I'm stressed out. We exercise 14 times less than our ancestors nowadays. Our ancestors just by virtue of trying to survive, you mean? Yeah, exactly. So they didn't exercise, right? Like our hunter-g to survive, you mean. Yeah, exactly. So they didn't exercise, right? Like our hunter-gatherer, they never did chin-ups. Exactly.

That was life to them. Yeah, they just were trying to get by. Yeah, and we spend 95% of our time indoors as well. And we know that there's benefits to getting out and moving more. We know there's benefits to being outside. We also know that there's benefits to truly being challenged in life. It's like, like I said before, you can basically never be challenged as you go through life in a real sort of fundamental way. And you'll probably have a decent life. But you know,

if you think about potential and human potential, let's say that human potential is this big circle around us, right? Now, most of us live in this sort of dinner plate sized place. We never go out and explore the edges of our potential by trying to get uncomfortable and doing things that are maybe a little outside of our comfort zone. We can just kind of exist in this sort of soft space that we've created for ourselves right now. And of course, there are people who get out and, you know, into that, those edges, like, like the Goggins of the world, like the campaigns of the world. Uh, but I think most people don't really go out and see what they're capable of. No, I don't think anybody's going to push back

against this book. You don't? No, I don't. Which brings, it creates kind of a dilemma for you. Is there comfort in just writing about discomfort, right? Is there a debate here? Cause I don't which bring it creates a kind of a dilemma for you is there comfort and just writing about discomfort Right is there a debate here because I don't think there is I mean I think what you're saying is like Irrefutable, I don't I don't think anybody can say well. There's nothing wrong with being sedentary and having your body turn into jello Well, there's nothing wrong with living a boring life with no stress at all and and well stress But mental stress no no actual physical adversity to overcome which stresses out the body but actually relaxes the mind which is which is that's the that's what people are missing right that's the that's when you actually

physically exert yourself it actually calms the mind and i think there's probably a direct correlation although i haven't done any studies I would imagine there's a direct correlation between physical inactivity and mental depression. I would have to imagine that there's at least some crossover there. Yeah, there absolutely is. I think that exercise, the studies show that it grows the hippocampus, which is an area that tends to be shrunken in people who have depression. So this is why the APA now advocates that psychiatrists recommend exercise to a lot of their patients. But I think to get back to your question of am I going to have any pushback. Right. Is there any pushback? And am I staying within my comfort zone by having this argument?

So the way that I reported this book is I spent more than a month hunting with Donnie Vincent in the Arctic backcountry shout out to Johnny Vincent you handsome bastard yeah we were talking about you earlier for handsome rugged bastard for people who don't know him he's a backcountry bow hunter and filmmaker he goes out into you know super extreme off the grid areas yeah he's we were saying he's controversial but not for any real reason he's controversial because he uh doesn't wear camo and uh he wears like a lot of wool he looks good in the wild it does yeah he looks like a fucking model for some j crew catalog

out there wandering around would be like an amber crombie and fitch which i didn't know used to be like a little offside here, was a company that sold like fly fishing and outdoor stuff. Now it's like these weird young models. It was in that. Really young. There's Donnie Vinson. Look at that rugged, handsome bastard.

Yeah, he's looking. Look at him. Looks like he's walking out of a Filson catalog. He does. Right there. Completely. Good dude. Good dude. Love that. Right there. Completely. Good dude.

Good dude. Love that guy. Very good guy. Abercrombie & Fitch, like now when you go there, they spray that fucking horrible scent in the place, you know? Do they still do that COVID-wise? Maybe it's bad for COVID? Kills COVID? I would imagine it kills it, yeah.

It kills everything. I had a friend who worked there and she said like every 20 minutes, we have to do like 20 sprays or some like very specific number. It stinks in there. But that used to be a company that made outdoor stuff for like people who wanted to go fly fishing. Yeah. And now it's like these they look like they're like 18 models in the poses. They're all like real slender and they look like real slinky.

Oh yeah. Pull up a photo of like Ambercrombie and Fitch models. They were the ones that would put the shirtless dudes out at their store in New York, right? Actual shirtless dudes? Actual shirtless dudes would be on the street in their Abercrombie jeans.

I was just looking it up, though. Even when it was a hunting company back in 1900, it started in Manhattan. Really? There you go. I mean, but it was made for that. Yeah, but 1900 in Manhattan, like, everybody hunted back then. Like, you would go up to the Poconos and shit, and people would leave.

So these guys were, like, wandering around New York City with no shirts on? Yeah. Looking good, boys. Go back to that photo. Which one? The one that you just showed? The guys out there? No, the other one?

That one. Yeah. Look at the guy on the far right. Bro,? The one that you just showed. The guys out there. No, the other one. That one? Yeah. Look at the guy on the far right. Bro, you're about to show your cock. This is ridiculous. It's all dick root, right? Showing the dick root.

So what was the purpose of this? Like to get people. They're wearing flip flops too. Flip flops, jeans, no shirt, and an open jacket. It's probably like January too,uary too right yeah probably cold as shit and they're all flexing constantly look at them there you go tough work if you can get it well you you know it's you're dealing from a very small sample pool to be able to be that guy i mean these guys all have like seven percent body fat but uh it used to be an outdoor company that was

like what they sold they sold like canoes and shit, I think. I'm pretty sure. That's like an old catalog, right? Yeah. Like fly fishing gear and stuff. Yeah. Outerwear, kind of that old school cool stuff. A lot of canvas, waxed.

Yeah, look at this. Amber, Cromie, and Fitch, yeah. Canoe, guys shooting ducks out of a canoe. Why don't they put those guys out in Manhattan on the street? I would much rather buy from them. Because people would go, go back to Texas. Is that a gun? Get out of a canoe. Why don't they put those guys out in Manhattan on the street? I would much rather buy from them. Because people would go, go back to Texas. Is that a gun? Get out of here.

We don't need guns around here. But they do. Meanwhile, they do. There was a mass shooting in Times Square yesterday. Oh, yeah. Jeez. Anyway, back to this pushback against your book. You're writing about something that pretty much most people agree.

Yeah, I think. But it's like, do we really know how to get back into discomfort? And like, in the book, I argue that there are a handful of fundamental discomforts that we lost over time as the world became more comfortable. So a few of the important ones are that we don't take on these big epic challenges in nature like we used to. So, for example, traditional rites of passage, all totally gone. stage one of life right now, but we need you to get to stage two so you can be a better contributor to the tribe. And so you can almost become a new, more confident, capable person. And in order to do that, we're going to send you out in the wild to do any number of things. It depends on, you know, what the culture was. So for example, the Maasai, they would send young warriors out to hunt lions with a spear. And if you kill the lion, then you would officially transition into a warrior.

And, you know, in that space, that trying middle ground, that's where you learn a lot about yourself and your potential. And by going through something like that, you come out on the other side, an improved person. We've totally lost that. And there's all kinds of different rites of passage throughout time. They're essentially what Joseph Campbell called the hero's journey. There's this typical archetype of leave comfort of home, go into this trying, challenging, uncomfortable middle ground, come out the other end,

and you've learned something about yourself and evolved. That's gone. And you think about young people today, how often are they challenged right you start to see helicopter parenting come in in the about 1990 is when it started because there was all this media around kidnappings so parents wouldn't let their kids outside go to the playground oh is that really what caused that stuff it was it was a bunch of a bunch of media around kidnapping which kidnapping was not a big phenomenon right but it just got exploded because it's well was not a big phenomenon, right? But it just got exploded because it's... Well, it's a big phenomenon if someone kidnaps your kid. Yeah. And it did happen. Yeah, it did. That's the problem. But it becomes a story. Exactly. If you look at the statistics, like your kid is more likely to get hurt in a lot of other different ways than that. But so that

blows up. Kids start to get helicopter parented. Challenge gets removed out of their lives. Now we've kind of moved on to snowplow parenting, right? What's snowplow parenting? It's even worse. Worse than helicopter parenting? You just push all the challenge out of your kids' lives. So a good example of this would be the parents who paid to get their kids into those challenging schools, you know? Yeah.

their kids into those challenging schools, you know? So now you start to see kids who were born after 1990 have much higher rates of mental health problems, like anxiety and depression, because they essentially have no armor. Like you've never really been challenged. So when you get into a classroom or whatever it is, and someone challenges your idea, you have no idea how to deal with that. That becomes really anxiety inducing. And there's obviously a lot of different reasons why these rates of anxiety have risen. There's also, you know, a lot of time on smartphones, but that kind of goes back into that. It's like, if I don't get enough likes on this Instagram page, it's like, that is a major shot, you know? Yeah, it's more than that. I think, I think Jonathan Haidt's work points to bullying,

It's more than that, I think. I think Jonathan Haidt's work points to bullying, particularly for girls. It seems to be for girls, social media is like, Jordan Peterson talked about this, that men are more aggressive physically, but women are more aggressive in terms of reputation destruction. Yeah. And they attack other girls on social media. I've seen it. It is fucking ruthless.

I've seen like teenage girls go after other teenage girls. It's so awful. The things they say to each other is so awful. And it leads to way higher rates of suicide, depression, self-harm. And there's a direct spike that lines

up exactly with the iPhone. It's really crazy. It's like the iPhone and having social media on your phone you know because like in the myspace days people were using computers right like you and myspace was just like when people using that they were just posting things they weren't necessarily attacking each other yeah they didn't realize how to attack each other till it was on their phone it was like here's this emo band I like. Listen to that. That was what MySpace was all about. It was about, and comedians, a lot of comedians use it to promote. Like Dane Cook became famous

through MySpace. That's how he became. That's cool. Yeah. They use it to promote themselves, but something about it being on the phone and then something about Facebook, right? You could post pictures, look at this stupid bitch and she did this and you know, she stole my boyfriend, she's a slut or, and then all the other girls pile on and it's just devastating for these kids. It's like horrific. Yeah, it is terrible. So this is another thing that I point out in the book is that we're never bored anymore.

So as we evolved, boredom is this evolutionary discomfort that basically told us whatever you're spending your time on right now, it's not an efficient use of your time. So go find something else. Now, in the past, this would be like, let's say you're picking berries from a bush. You've picked the easiest to pick ones. Well, if we didn't have the skew of boredom, we'd be like reaching into the very back for the berries that are hard to pick, but they become successively harder to pick because we've picked all these different ones, right? Boredom would kick on and be like, hey, your return on your time invested has worn thin, move on to another bush, right? But nowadays with this

influx of media we have, people spend 11 hours a day engaging with digital media. Is that real? Yeah, 11. And that's the average. So you want to hear an even crazier thing? Yeah. Okay. So I'm a professor at University of Nevada, Las Vegas.

And one of the classes I teach is an intro class. So it's got about 150 students. And it's a media class I teach in the journalism department. First day of class, I'll talk about how, just how things have changed with media. You know, it's like we live 2.5 million years with no media in our lives and now it's become our lives. And then I will ask, all right, I want everyone to pull out your phone right now. I want you to look at your screen time. Tell me how much you have. Who thinks they have the highest? And we'll start to go through people. you have? Who thinks they have the highest? And we'll start to go through people. I've had people,

you know, seven hours, 45 minutes, eight hours, 50 minutes, nine hours, 16 minutes. It's like, that's your entire day all on that cell phone, right? So nowadays, when we have this discomfort of boredom kick in, we have a super easy escape from it. Right. We're not forced to be like, okay, what am I doing with my time? Is there something better I could be doing? We just pull out our phone and you see this, right? Anytime people have one moment of solitude or inactivity, it's like, Oh, might as well just check my phone. It's brutal when you see people on dates, they're not even talking to each other. They're just looking at each other's phones. Yeah. Wow. People at dinner. It's like, yeah, it's like you're in front of an actual person and you prefer to communicate in digital with someone who's not even there.

Totally. And, um, what's interesting about boredom is when oftentimes when boredom would kick on, we would go inward, sort of mind wander. And mind wandering, it gives you your brain some time to like reset and revive. Whereas anytime you're focused on the outside world, your brain is actively processing information. So this is kind of like in the book, I compare it to lifting a weight. When you're having a conversation,

looking at your phone, watching a screen, whatever you're doing, if you're focusing on the outside world, your brain is working and it's lifting. When you go inward, your brain goes into this default mode network, which is like a rest period, right? So now, because every time we're bored, we just pull out that screen and focus more. Our brains are just constantly being worked and overworked and overworked. And this is associated with just burnout, anxiety, et cetera. Yeah. There's some real benefits to boredom in terms of creativity as well. Oh, totally. Boredom is really good for coming up with new ideas.

Yeah, and there's actually research behind this. They've done studies where they'll have people watch something really boring, like a video of people folding laundry, just like they bore the shit out of these participants. And then they have them come up with, take these different creativity tests that scientists use. And the people who were bored come up with more better solutions and responses than the people who had been stimulated the whole time. And you think about this, I mean, just in terms of anecdotes from creators, it's like you need time to just sit and be with yourself and have these weird ideas bubble to the surface. If you never have that, you're not letting the weird stuff come out, you know? Yeah.

Like, do you experience this when you're trying to think of stuff in your own work yeah you have to have discomfort the worst thing that could ever happen to me if i'm writing is to just open the browser and start let me just google this real quick and see it's like i'll play little games with myself like i'll be in the middle of writing i'm like what does that mean really and then i'll google it like shut the up and get back to work yeah because like i'm just being distracted. I'm just distracting myself. And sometimes I'm, I'll allow myself a couple of minutes of distraction before I get mad, but really I shouldn't allow myself any. I should just keep working. And sometimes people say, I can't write. I just stare at the screen and nothing comes out. I'm like, yeah,

that's what's supposed to happen. Yeah. That's how it works, man. You're supposed to fucking stare at the screen. And then you just write some nonsense and eventually something good will come out of that. But if you just bail because you don't like the staring at the screen part and nothing's coming out, guess what? You're never going to write anything. Congratulations. So then you'll be at the whim of whatever random spontaneous creativity

just pops into your head throughout the day. And sometimes you'll get some, and sometimes you won't. Yeah. But Pressfield talks about that in The War of Art. Have you read that book? I haven't read that book, but I've heard about it. It's a very small book, but it's really good. It's great for writers.

And he basically says, he talks about the muse as if the muse is a real thing. And he's like, treat it like it's a real thing. Treat it like you're a professional and you're there to summon the muse as if the muse is a real thing and he's like treat it like it's a real thing treat it like you're a professional and you're there to summon the muse and if you just show up every day and do that work it will come it will come to you and it will bestow upon you these creative ideas but if you don't do that if you don't sit down and be discomfort to be uncomfortable rather rather it won't happen and in this this day and age, like you said, we're so accustomed to having any boredom alleviated by our phone. Yeah. So in the book too, I talk about, you hear all this stuff that's like, break up with your phone, less time on your phone. Here

are a thousand different ways to use your phone less. Yes, that is important. But the problem is a lot of times when people go, okay, I'm going to use my phone less. So they put their phone in a safe or whatever weird habit they've developed. But then they go watch Netflix. It's like your brain doesn't know the damn difference between the screen on your phone and the screen on your TV. The point is that you need to remove yourself from this outside media that's totally just weaved its way into your life like stimulating you with nothing yeah it's yeah the switch from phone to netflix is like going i'm quitting smoking but i'm gonna go buy some red man and just pack that in real hard you know yeah same thing yeah um when you went with donnie you guys went to the arctic we did 33 days that was up there

and what did you do while you're up there uh so we were hunting caribou and yeah we were on a caribou hunt that's a dangerous hunt uh it's the arctic is an extreme place it's dangerous in that you get dropped off right did you get float planed in there uh no well it was a plane plane yeah bush plane tiny plane picks you up um we got ferried so me it was me donnie and his cameraman william altman who's a great dude satellite phone uh donnie had a gps thing to in order to talk to the pilot thing yeah text thing yeah if? Yeah, text thing. Oh, boy. Yeah. If that breaks, you're fucked. If that breaks, you are indeed fucked, my man. And there's grizzlies out there, too.

Yeah, we saw some grizzlies. Fun. Yeah, yeah, big animals. So at one point, we leave Kotzebue first. Me and William are in this plane that's like a three-seater. How many flights did it take to get out there? Two. Just two?

So we get in the sort of small plane. It drops me and William off. Then the smaller plane comes along. It picks up William. But you had to take a small plane to get there too though, right? Like how many planes did it take you to get to where you were going? From Las Vegas to the middle of nowhere. Yeah. One, two, five. Five planes. Five. All together. Successively smaller.

So that's what's interesting, right? It's like if you want to leave the built environment, you're getting on big plane to medium plane to little plane to really little plane to why the fuck am I in this size plane. To how much do you weigh? Yeah. How much do your shoes weigh? Yeah. Totally. You got to weigh your gear.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Weighed our gear. So I get left out there, right? Because the super small plane comes and picks up. One at a time? Yeah, one at a time.

Did you have a rifle? No. I'm standing there and there's clods of grizzly poop surrounding me. And I'm just like. Did he leave you with a rifle? I'm just like. Oh, my God. Well, here's the thing and we

can get into this but donnie's like yeah fucking bears or whatever you know that is too comfortable oh yeah um but it was also interesting because i'm i'm standing out there and it's like i have never been this alone in my entire life oh yeah right alone so think about it there's no one around me for miles and miles. My cell phone doesn't work because today we're increasingly, even when we think we're alone, we're with people through our cell phones, through text messages, through whatever. And there's just like nothing. And you start to kind of get a little, at first I'm like, man, this is dangerous. Like I don't like, I did not like it at all. man, this is dangerous. Like, I don't like, I did not like it at all. But then,

you know, sort of as time went on, it's like, actually, this is kind of interesting to be totally removed from society because now all of a sudden it's like, we have all these social narratives of like, how do we act? What do we do? What do we do as humans? And they're totally removed. And it's just like, wow. How long were you out there? Just you? Probably two, three hours, four hours probably. See, a real mountain man's laughing at you right now. They're like, this fucking pussy. Yeah, totally. Can't be alone for three hours.

As they should. Yeah. Do you know who Dick Prenicky is? Yes. Did you watch any of those videos? Total badass. Amazing videos, too. Unbelievable.

Interesting. Like, his life was really, I want to say he was like a machinist or something like that. Like he had a normal life. Uh, I, I believe that's what it was. I think he was a machinist and he got injured and I think he lost some of his vision in one of his eyes because of this, uh, injury and the injury of, I hope I'm not fucking this up, is one of the things that motivated him to decide to move to the woods and build a cabin and film and document it all completely by himself. Yeah. And it's really interesting to me. I remember seeing the documentaries and he made this little key latch on his door.

So he made this cabin. Pull up some of the his door. I mean, so he made this cabin. Pull up some of the videos on Dick Prenticky. He makes this cabin out of just stuff that he finds out in the wild, right? But, like, he had it almost fashioned like a normal home from the 50s. And you're like, how did you figure out all this shit, man? Yeah, this is his place. His place is beautiful, too. It's such a sweet-looking little cabin.

I mean, look, he's got a gold pan out there in the front and he's got snowshoes hanging from the side of it i mean it's like super cool yeah and he built all that himself he built everything i mean he even built his own tools he brought part of the tools with him like whatever he would need like for sure but um the videos are pretty crazy like you see him out there and it's again this is like i don't remember what years it says 77 one man's alaska 1970 so he filmed all this and made these videos yeah you could see how he's he'd made tools and all sorts of different things super cool yeah he made his own like canoes and shit but he filmed all this because he knew that what he was doing

was pretty extraordinary we got a little uh what is that like probably a shed where he keeps his food or something like that and went out there once I believe and then just decided that that was where he was going to live and was out there with no contact with people at all for long periods of time. Go to that last one that you were looking at, Jamie. Yeah, there's a documentary that he— The second one down. That same? Yeah, that one right there.

Okay, just play the video because this is the one I've seen. It was one of the ones I've seen, but it goes into great depth about how he built his cabin and what his history was and that he just became obsessed with the idea of being in nature and how much he loved it. And he lived there until he was in his 80s and then went to stay with his brother because his health was failing and then eventually to stay with his brother because his health was failing.

And then eventually, you know, he lived the last days of his life, I think, in Washington State. But here it shows him making various tools. So he's got like a wood auger to make a hammer with and makes a wooden mallet and did the whole deal. Like he made everything. Look at that. But he got just this tremendous satisfaction.

And talked about the tremendous satisfaction he got from just being allowed to live this subsistence life. Yeah. Have you seen these videos on YouTube where people are doing this similar thing where they'll show themselves make an entire log cabin? Yeah, I have seen some of them, yeah. Or like dig a hole and make a pool underwater. Well, that was the whole appeal of that show,

Life Below Zero. It's like those folks that would live up there and live that subsistence life. But it's like we're all aware that there's this immense gravity that comes from the digital world. It's immense. It's just constantly pulling you in

with new content and new distractions. And this is one of them, this fucking thing that you and I are on. That's what's ironic. This is one of the... We're talking shit about what we actually are doing right now. But they pull you.

They pull you. And we all know that it's probably not the best way to live, but it's so hard to break the addiction. I mean, it's, it's amazing, right? It's amazing that I can pull up the podcast and listen to almost whoever I want their thoughts and get these new ideas. But at the same time, it's like, if that's all you're spending your time doing, there's some downsides. We need to offset it. You know, I don't necessarily think the answer is to go live in the woods in Alaska for the rest of your life, although that would be pretty cool if you did. More power to you.

But figuring out, like, how do we balance this all and have these moments where we have, you know, solitude, go more inward and aren't as stimulated. So one thing that, you know, after I'm standing out there in solitude, when I get home, I start researching, you know, what are the benefits of solitude? Because we know that the data shows that being lonely isn't good for us, but there's the difference between loneliness and solitude. Like solitude is electing to be by yourself and using that time for sort of introspection. And the scientists that I talked to, they said, yeah, you really need this because a lot of times people are more conductor

circuits and they don't do well when they're alone at all. This is part of the reason we have such a loneliness problem. But if you can like build this capacity to be alone, they call it, like that can serve you well in the long time. And it also breeds deeper thinking, creativity. I mean, it's like, there's a reason that thousands of years of religious tradition, they have people who go and spend this time alone out in nature. I mean, Jesus was in the desert for 40 days. The Buddha exited the palace gates, you know, and spent a bunch of time alone and in solitude. Even Abraham Lincoln used solitude and for all his, a lot of his writing and stuff like that. And I feel like people don't have that as much anymore. Very little. And society discourages this kind of solitude. Society

encourages you to be constantly connected. And the more it can get you connected, the more it can extract revenue from you. Yeah. And we often frame it as a negative. I mean, like think of what we do with kids who misbehave. We put them in timeout. Think of what we do to prisoners who misbehave, solitary confinement. So we framed it as a negative, but it isn't necessarily. Yeah. It's a different kind of solitude though, obviously. Right. You heard about this Utah lady. She was just eating grass and moss. She disappeared for five months, and they thought she was dead, and they found her camping. Oh, wow.

But I don't think she's doing well. I don't think this is a good example. I think this lady's kind of crazy. I just saw that headline. You guys are saying these words. Yeah, meanwhile, I'm talking shit out of a headline I read, too. Yeah. Because it was like the headline I said, she was surviving off moss and grass.

I'm like, all right, this lady might have went crazy. This says she was released from the hospital. So I don't know. Mental health hospital? I think so. They took her in for evaluations is what I read. But people always just wanted to be alone. Isn't that funny?

Like they find you camping. They're like, hmm, we don't. This is not good. What the hell is wrong with you? They need to check you, make sure that you're okay mentally. Why aren't you in an apartment where you can hear people scream? Yeah, exactly. Why aren't you eating fast food?

What are you doing eating moss, you crazy bitch? Totally. Yeah, or you're living in Austin and you're just camping on Cesar Chavez. Yeah, could be that as well. When you guys were up there, what was, did you have a set amount of time? Did 33 days, was that what you agreed upon before you went out there? Yeah. Was there a reason for that?

We just thought, I mean, Donnie was just like, hey, I'm going up for more than a month. You want to come along? I'm like, yeah, sure. Why was he going for that long? It's just what he does for work. You know, he embeds himself in these places for long periods of time and does these films. So he's a good person to go with.

I'll tell you that much. For sure. He knows what he's doing up there, and he's, I don't know, he's one of those dudes who's kind of unflappable in situations like that. Like, for example, we had, we had this was our think our first or second night we had had we had this kafaru teepee you know and um we're very very intelligent people i want you to know this first of all and we we pitched this thing on this like kind of knob because the winds are coming in from a direction we're like oh it's going to be protected and then

we'll move it when the wind shift in a couple of days. Well, the wind shift overnight, I wake up and there's just like this pop, pop, pop, pop, pop, the fabric, you know, and the winds just keep coming, get faster and faster overnight. And eventually by morning, I mean, they're like 70 mile an hour gusts. And I'm just like, holy shit, we're going to lose this thing. And then like, what do we do after that? Like, it's just crazy. And it's freezing, you know, and're going to lose this thing. And then like, what do we do after that? Like, it's just crazy and it's freezing, you know? You didn't bring a tent? You just brought one of those little tarps? Yeah, that teepee.

Yeah, the teepee. That was it? Yeah. How come you guys didn't bring an actual tent? Well, if we needed one, we could. We had like, you know, emergency blankets and that stuff and Donnie could have messaged to the pilot to try and bring us something. But yeah and he's just like okay we're gonna have to do he's like this is bad we're

gonna have to do takedown you know get all your shit ready get it in your bag and it's just like he just knows exactly what to do whereas i'm like oh my god and bad we should probably explain to people the terrain yeah so it's kind of it's So it's these mountains that are not super jagged. They're very old, so they've kind of been worn by time. And the tundra is the absolute worst thing to walk on in the world. So I describe it as, think of like a Dr. Seuss book. I kind of picture it like that where it's like this big mattress that's covered in basketballs. I like to think about it like that.

So the basketballs are these things called tundra tussocks, which are these big, dense pieces of grass. It's like wound-up grass. And then the mattress in between them is kind of like muck and shale and frozen ground. So walking on this, you're like, do I step on this super soft stuff that's hard to, you know, get your bearings on? It's kind of like almost beach sand, the same idea. Or do I like step on these tussocks that are super awkward? It's like having to walk anywhere. I mean, like one mile out there is like five anywhere else. You know, it's just such a bitch to walk on. Which did you choose, the soft stop or the tussocks?

Oh, man. I never really. Did you go back and forth? Yeah, I would go back and forth. Did you ask Donnie what he does? I can't remember if I did. I don't know if he would have known either because he was looking like an idiot when he was walking as well. So there's not much you can do to be comfortable as you're walking.

No. No. Occasionally you'll find some game trails, and those can be good. They're kind of, you know, a little bit more worn. Oftentimes they're long mountain faces though. And you know, the animals on four legs are a bit more sure footed than we are on our shitty two legs. So all of a sudden you're slipping because of shale. So yeah, yeah. It's a, and so how many miles did you have to traverse on this stuff? Some days we would probably do probably our longest day was maybe 15 total in the day. Yeah. And we had one day we had seen this herd.

And so we're kind of chasing them more or less. And we ended up, you know, seven-ish miles from camp and decided we needed to, you know, head back to the teepee now. And it was so freaking cold. It was like, you know, zero out. And we've got this long march across the tundra. And part of what we had to go through then was like this sort of frozen swamp, you know. So sometimes your foot would break through into this sort of moving water. And it was one of those where I'm like this, why the hell am I out here? What am I doing? Like, this is stupid, you know? What day was this?

This was a ways into it. I don't know, maybe like 15, something like that. What if you guys had been successful early? Like what if you ran into a herd like on the second or third day? Then we wouldn't have been so damn hungry. But you were going to stay out there no matter what? Yeah, we were going to stay out there no matter what. Yeah, because, I mean, you know, Donnie, he wants footage. And I signed on because I wanted to experience that, you know.

So we would have stayed out there. Now, did you guys have a lot of supplies in terms of food or were you living off your back? We were mostly living off our back. Yeah. So you had a large backpack. Yeah. Heavy backpack. Quite heavy. Filled with mountain house. Yeah. You've probably had that. Yeah. Delicious, delicious gruel. Well, there's actually some companies that make good versions of that now. Yeah? Yeah.

What is Chad Mendes' company called? Is it Peak Fitness or Peak Fuel? Is that what his is called? My friend Chad Mendes, he's a former UFC fighter who's a hunter as well. He's got a really good company. Peak Refuel. Peak Refuel. His stuff is excellent He's got a really good company. Peak Refuel. Peak Refuel. His stuff is excellent.

But it's really healthy stuff. Companies are making it now where they're making it with much more healthy ingredients, no trans fats, no bullshit and preservatives. They're just dehydrating everything. Well, that looks good. I could have used that. Yeah. There's other companies.

And nothing's wrong with Mountain House if you're hungry. Yeah. It's okay. But my God, the gas. Yeah. The gas is outstanding. And there's no fiber in that. So over time that starts to present a problem.

Well, that's a problem anyway when you're shitting on a tussock. Yeah. Because you have to just squat and drop, right? Right. So that, I mean, we think about all the ways that we've removed activity from our lives. I mean, even think about that. Yeah. It used to be that, like, if you needed to shit, you're going to have to hold a squat for a minute there, buddy. Right. And having to go out and do that, it was like, oh man, like, it was just kind of

like, oh yeah, I guess we've, we now sit on these nice porcelain toilets. And you have to make sure you don't shit into your pants. You have to do that. That is helpful. Did you shower? I mean, bathe rather? Did you get in a stream? Like how did you clean yourself? No, just nothing. Yeah, no. Yeah. Which is interesting coming from a world of, so I was there pre-COVID. So it was interesting coming from a world of Purell and shower to a day. And now it's even more so for good reason, you know. But there's also, there's benefits to being dirty, especially if it's outside dirtiness. Not like indoor dirtiness, like, you know, raw chicken and other people's germs. What's the benefits? So when you look at cultures who

live outside and do a lot of things outside, they tend to have a lot better gut health than we do. So one of the hunter gatherer tribes that's been studied is the Hadza in Tanzania. And they did this one study where they compared poop, because that's how you figure out gut health from Westerners and the Hadza tribe. And the Hadza have way more different types of gut bacteria. And they also have these ones that we don't have. So they have more of it and they have more variety of it. Now they don't get stomach issues, basically. They don't get colon cancer. They don't get rectal cancer. And they don't get things like Crohn's and colitis.

Meanwhile, in the West, these are increasing problems, especially for younger people. And they think this is because we've completely sanitized our lives, more or less. We never get dirty and we spend less time outside. So when we figured out that germs are bad and can cause disease, it's like, yes, but the amount of germs that cause disease relative to all the germs out there is a very small percentage, but we kind of just went ahead and killed all, all the germs we could, you know? And so this has given us less of a defense and given us less, uh, variety in our guts that can improve our gut health. Yeah.

My friend David Cho, he's an artist. He's a very famous artist. He got really rich. Was it Google that he painted their lobby? Facebook? He painted their lobby. Yeah. And they gave him shares of the company back when it was nothing.

And he's worth like $100 million or more, some crazy number, right? Like preposterous amounts of cash. Yeah, that's a good gig. And he just does whatever he wants. Mostly he does art. He does a lot of painting and a lot of weird creative endeavors. But he decided to live with the Hadza for a while. Did he really?

Yeah, and so he went there, and they were like hunting baboons. Yeah. They eat a lot of baboons apparently, which is wild, and he explained what it was like being out there. What did he say about it? It was really intense. He had some pretty amazing photographs from the experience, but it's just a real reality check of what it means to be alive and what it means to try to thrive and survive in a subsistence lifestyle in a camp filled with people who've been doing this their entire life. And they allow you in and they do that occasionally with Westerners.

They'll allow you to come with them. And he was just like, God, it was like, realized how like out of shape he was, how soft he was in comparison to them and how difficult their life is. And just, it puts into perspective how many things you take for granted. Oh, we totally take so many things for granted i mean when when we got back the first thing we did is we're in this airport in kotzebue and the airport is like a shed a big shed more or less right uh but it has running heated water and so i go in and i you know i pee and i get to the faucet and i'm like it hits me it's like holy shit this is running water.

Turn it on hot. And it's just like, I mean, I had the biggest shit eating grin on my face from that hot water. It was like, oh my God, this is unbelievable. Because out there, anytime we needed water, it's like, we got to hike down to a stream, fill up these water bags, hike them back up to camp, you know? And it's, everything is effortful. these water bags, hike them back up to camp, you know, and it's everything is effortful. So having these moments where you get out of that, you know, sort of comfort zone that we're used to, it helps you become a lot more appreciative of everything that we have. I mean, we had another

one when I was just telling you, we had to go back out across, uh, back through the tundra to get back to the teepee that one night. I mean, that was one of those where, you know, it hit me. If we would have quit, like, you can't quit. You know, you have to just keep going because if you stay out there overnight, I mean, that's a lot more dangerous than just putting one foot in front of the other and making it back. And, you know, before I went up to Alaska, like, for example, my wife and I, we go to this restaurant all the time and the food is

amazing, amazing, but the service is not quite there. And before I get to Alaska, like I would just sit there as we're waiting, being like, oh God, this place is so mismanaged. Like what the fuck is wrong with these people? Just can't you get your shit together? Can't you just refill that person's water? Like move people out in a normal way. You know, all these complaints are going through my mind, right? So then I get back and we go to that restaurant. And I think back to getting back to that teepee after that long haul and having like shitty mountain house dinner and being freezing cold. And I can stand there and be like, man, this isn't bad at all.

You guys do what you need to do. I'm about to eat 2,000 calories, and I'm warm, and I'm happy, and this is awesome. All you have to do is point at the thing on the menu that you'd like. Yes, exactly. And tell them, yeah, the T-bone, please. Yes. And they come and bring it. Totally.

And so it makes you so much more appreciative, you know? And it also sort of makes me maybe less of an asshole because once you're appreciative, you're slightly less of a nitpicky person, which imagine if we could put 5% less of an asshole at scale for everyone. men he takes them on these uh experiences in in the woods this sort of rites of passage type deal like a lot of like young guys particularly uh ones from affluent households who really don't have any challenges in their life and he takes them and has them like live in the woods with him for like weeks and weeks at a time. Wow. He takes him on these camping trips. And Dan was one of the producers of this show called Meat Eater, which that was the first show that I ever had a hunting experience on. And the hunting experience was in Montana in the Missouri breaks. And it was, you know, nine degrees outside and we're camping.

And we did it for, I guess it was six or seven days and we were successful. We got fortunate and came back with deer and, and then, uh, we went to this place. I think, I believe it was Billings. We went to this, uh, just ratchet fucking motel that we stayed in and took a hot shower and it was phenomenal it was like one of the best experiences of my life like so pleasurable to be in this ratchet ass fake wood paneling you know what i mean like the whole deal yeah like there was there was nothing nice about this motel room except there was everything nice about it in that moment, right? Oh, my God. The fucking shower was glorious. And I had brought my own soap because I travel with-

That's good planning. This is soap that I use called defense soap, and it's mostly developed for grapplers. But it's all to protect your skin from skin issues like ringworm and stuff like that. But my friend Guy Sacco created it for wrestlers, and it's all tea tree oil and eucalyptus oil, so it's really good for you. So I'm in this shower. I got this legit soap, and I'm lathering up, and the water's so hot. I must have took a 40-minute shower, man.

I never got out of there. I was in there forever. I love that. I was so happy. That was me too, except I didn't have a 40-minute shower, man. I never got out of there. I was in there forever. I love that. I was so happy. That was me, too, except I didn't have a custom-made awesome soap. I wish I would have, though. Damn. That was a mess.

Fucking any soap would have been fine at that time. Yeah. For just the smell, too. God, you fucking stink so bad after a week of no shower, and you went 33 days. Oh, I smelled like a salmon run mixed with a garbage dump. Now, how long into your hunt did you get food? Did you catch fish? Yeah, we were a couple weeks in.

No, but we got a caribou. You did get a caribou. Oh, so it was two weeks in. Yeah. So you were a mountain house for two weeks. Mountain house, bars, yeah. Then we had caribou. And when that caribou came in, it was just like, honestly,

that caribou was the best meal I've ever had in my life in that teepee because food is like, it's a culmination of how hungry are you? Who are you with? What is the experience? It honestly was so unbelievably good in that moment. Were you guys in a place that actually had dry wood? We found a little bit. It was tough.

It was tough. So how did you cook? We had a little jet boil. Yeah, jet boil thing. Wow. Yeah. That's the thing about Alaska, particularly that area. A lot of it is just tundra.

It's like this open, I don't know if you'd call it tundra, but whatever it is. On and on, yeah. Just long, long, long stretches of grass. Yeah, yeah. And not that many animals either. That's what's weird, right? You would imagine the real wild. You'd imagine, oh, there's animals all over the place. Just fucking jacking each other.

No. Yeah. Except when, so we were there during the migration. And there were none until they were literally everywhere. I mean, it was like, it was almost like a war film where, like, all the soldiers come over the hill all at once. And they're like ants on an ant hill. It was just like, holy shit. It was unbelievable. And they're eating that weird

moss stuff too, right? What's that shit called? Yeah, like lichen moss. It's just all kinds of little... Yeah. Yeah. I guess you can eat that too. Like humans can eat that lichen stuff. Yeah, it tastes... It's just tasteless. No, it tastes a little bit like green beans. Does it? Yeah. Oh, you guys had it? Yeah.ichen stuff yeah it's tasteless no it tastes a little bit like green beans does it yeah oh you guys had it yeah it's not too i mean it's not like we're making a salad

with it but you're just sitting there and like i guess i'll eat this it's not too bad um did you have a tag as well or did only yeah i had a tag so i had never i had never hunted before i mean i'd been hunting but i hadn't actually been the one who was the hunter. So that was new too. That's a form of discomfort that I talk about in the book that we are very removed from the life cycle now. All right. So this goes from how we deal with funerals. Think of modern funeral. It's like we dress the dead person up to look as alive as possible. We look at them for an hour and then they go into the ground and we're told to, you know, keep your mind off it. Don't think about it, you know, stay busy. To our food system, it's like the meat we have in our grocery store is all perfectly manicured.

It's cellophane. It's like designed almost so it doesn't look like it came from a living animal, right? So I definitely had some reservations going into it. It's not that i was against hunting at all it's just like i don't know if i want to cross this barrier that i assume is going to be emotionally heavy right you know and donnie was basically like look man if you don't want to hunt you don't have to hunt but i think you'll you'll understand why we come out here more if you do hunt so i was like okay, I think I'll do it.

I think. I wasn't entirely sure, honestly, the whole time. So you had a tag, but you weren't sure if you were going to use it. Yeah. And we, you know, at one point we are on this hill glassing, and we'd been watching this herd who was on this other hill far away. There's kind of a valley between us. And they start moving

up this valley and there's a saddle. Donnie's like, okay, if they keep moving and go over that saddle and we can get to the other side of it before, we're going to be in a pretty good position. So it's like, you know, soldiers at the sound of a mortar. We're like just cranking across this hill. We get over the saddle. And once we get to the other side, we're just cranking at, you know, what we think is going to be about 300 yards. We like get into the dirt, and we army crawl. And I've got the, you know, meanwhile I have the rifle. And army crawl a couple hundred yards, pop up, can't see anything, another hundred yards.

And I'm looking through the scope, and Donnie has binoculars, you know. hundred yards and I'm looking through the scope and Donnie has binoculars you know and um all of a sudden at the apex of the saddle just like appear these antlers right and then more antlers and there's about 30 of them in this herd and we'd already identified at least two that we we thought were older and bigger um and they come over this this saddle and down like exactly as we'd hoped and you know they're 300 yards 200 yards and still at this saddle and down like exactly as we'd hoped. And, you know, they're 300 yards, 200 yards. And still at this point, I'm like, are you sure you're going to do this, man? You know, I mean, it's heavy. And they get within about 150 yards, and there's this one that had come over that we could see as he was walking.

He's limping on his back leg so it's like that's the one you know he's old really really interesting ornate antlers just old dude who'd clearly been injured somehow who knows they get within 150 yards and it's like this is this is the point where I want to shoot but kept going in and out of the herd, you know, like I couldn't get him in the scope. And, and Donnie sort of leans over to me and he's like, Hey man, if you don't want to shoot, you don't have to shoot. But if you're going to shoot, you need to do it soon. And so I looked down the scope and they're now they're 160, 170. They passed the point where they're kind of going away from us. And I'm like, shit, what do I do and all of a sudden they part and he's right there you know and it was like big deep breath pull the trigger pull the trigger again and it's like he's

down and in that moment I was like holy shit what have you done like there is no coming back from this right like it hit me pretty heavy and so we walk out and it's you know down on the tundra almost like it had been placed perfectly there's the only sign that it is dead is there's like this tiniest trickle of blood coming down its mane. And I was like, dude, what have you done? Like, look at this majestic thing. And that's on you, you know. And Donnie's a good person to go with because him and William were like, hey, we're going to go get our stuff because we left our packs back there. So he gave me a minute with it.

And as I'm sitting there, it was super interesting. I'd like to hear what you think about what your experience has been. But it hit me like it was the most depressed and alive I've ever felt at the same time. Like unbelievable feeling. I don't know how to describe it. Just thankful. You know, a lot of gratuity. And, um, but at the same time, I'm like, I don't know if I'd ever do this again, you know, but,

and, um, those guys get back and then we start to, you know, field dress the animal. And, um, in that moment, my mind started to shift because I went from, okay, you just killed this majestic creature to now I'm seeing it as meat and therefore a giver of life or less. And I think to myself, dude, you eat meat all the time at home and never once do you feel an iota of emotion, but you do here. And so it made me a lot more appreciative of not only like that animal and the place where it came from, but also all meat that I eat now, right? Like it totally woke me up to like, what goes into eating meat. And so now it's interesting, paradoxically, you would think when someone starts hunting, they would eat a lot more meat. It's like, no, I actually eat less meat now,

because I kind of better understand where it comes from and what has to go into it. And sort of this idea of death and being more aware of it, after I got back from the Arctic, I traveled to Bhutan. I wanted to know more about this and what can becoming more aware of our death do for us. So Bhutan is interesting because it's one of the least developed countries on Earth, but paradoxically, it's one of the happiest. And one thing that people are instructed to do in Bhutan

is to think about their death at least once every day. And this is part of, like, it's woven into the culture, that idea and also the idea of death itself. So like a lot of their art and traditions center around death. There's these little things called sasas, and they're basically these tiny clay pyramids. And it's clay mixed with ashes of the dead, and they are everywhere, all over the country. So you can kind of think about it as like a very death-aware country. Why are they so death-aware?

It's part of the Buddhist tradition that they follow. They've just sort of leaned into that more than other countries. And so I wanted to know, how does this idea of death and their intimacy with it contribute to their happiness? Because by all metrics, they should be miserable if we're looking at it from an economic perspective, right? But here they are. They're in the top 20 happiness rankings. And so I met with one of their economists who studies happiness in the country. But I also met with two Buddhist leaders.

And one of these, it was pretty wild. So in Bhutan, the law states that you have to have a driver everywhere you go. Tourism is very heavily regulated. So I have this driver, and I'm going to meet this guy who's a Kempo, which is essentially really high up in Buddhism. And he lives right by this monastery called the Carpo. And it's on this cliff, right? And my driver has what is essentially a smart car with the back seat. And we have to go up this mountain road, cliffside mountain road that's totally rutted out. I'm like, are you able to make this? And he's just like, I mean, we're like four wheel on the smart make this? And he's just like, I mean, we're, we're like four wheel on the smart car thing. And it was just, it was unbelievable. And after 45 minutes, you know, he pulls over and I have to hike for maybe 10 minutes along this, this trail and get

to this guy's shack. And, you know, he has someone there who's helped him with stuff. And she makes me do this like cleansing ritual with like smoke and, you know, some water. And I go into this guy's shack. It's like the first room, there's nothing in it. The second room, it's a kitchen. Very basic, like a cooktop or whatever. And the third room has this silk sort of drape in it. And I pull that drape back, and I'm I'm like I'm immediately hit with the smell of burning

incense and on the right there's this um there's like a big statue of the Buddha and like photos and different little you know trinkets uh Buddhist trinkets and and then I look over and the light is like catching this incense smoke and behind it there's this guy's face and he just looks over at me and he's in the lotus position on this platform he's in his full like buddhist robes and everything and he just looks at me and goes welcome and it was like some doctor strange shit oh dude it was like i mean if you want to talk about like cliche in terms of, you know, the gangly Western writer has come to see the guru. That was fucking it, dude. Wow. there versus us. And he talks about it in terms of when you think about the fact that, you know,

I'm going to die, you're going to die, we're all going to die eventually. You take that into your life, it changes your behavior because you start to realize like there's going to be an end to all this, right? And things that maybe were, you know, finicky in your life or these like little minute things that really work you up, that all starts to fade and you start to really center on that which is going to make you actually happy in the end. And it's interesting because Western research by scientists has actually backed this up. So they've done studies where they have people think about their own death and those people end up report that they're happier, that they're like more on track in their life. They've done this in people who are dying as well, where they like think about the end and accept it, sort of take it into their life.

They have better lives. It's really interesting. And I mean, it's something I do in my own life. And I can tell you that I think it actually works. Yeah, being aware of where this ride ends. Right. It's probably very important in terms of what you need to enjoy the ride. If you just think it's going to go on forever. You're saying about kind of being impatient about the waitstaff at that restaurant and thinking what an inconvenience it is that they're so slow to get you water. Yeah.

Versus what you feel after you've been hunting for 33 days and actually killed an animal. And yet we're so spoiled in terms of our attachment to food. I decided about nine years ago that I was either going to become a vegan or I was going to become a hunter. I was like, there's no middle ground. I was like, I'm going to have to figure out what it means to eat. I would probably have gone vegetarian because I think I would always eat eggs. Especially if you have your own chickens, it's a pretty karma-free exchange. You give them food and they give you eggs. And the eggs are super healthy.

But when I did go hunting, the moment I shot that animal, the moment it was down, like there, you could actually watch it. There's a video, um, that's available on line of, I had to shoot it twice. I shot it and dropped it at 200 yards. And then as we were getting up to the animal, it was still alive. And then I had to put it out. And they closed in on my face when I'm taking all this in. And I shot it, and then it expired instantly. And then I'm sitting there just breathing in and just trying to take in, like, okay, I just killed an animal that I'm going to eat. And I've never done this before and I'm 40.

Yeah. You know, so here we are. What was going through your head? Hmm. It would be hard for me to explain with just words because it's such,'s a it's a strange emotion first of all i didn't fully grab like you were saying like once you start cutting it up and then it becomes meat like when it was down it was like okay i've done this thing i've done a lot of things in my life that make me nervous and i think um i've always a lot of things in my life that make me nervous. And I think, um, I've, I've always gravitate towards things that I think are difficult to, they're scary, whether it's

martial arts competition or standup comedy or anything. I've, I've, I gravitate towards things that I think are difficult because I'm, I'm, I'm attracted to these challenges. This was a challenge because it was a new thing. And it was like, you know, you're doing this rugged thing. We went, we took, we floated down the river like 40 miles. Oh, that's cool. And carried all of our supplies and tents and set up on the banks of the Missouri. And it was heavy.

It was heavy. And so dropping this animal. But then once we cooked, we were eating it over the fire. That night we ate the liver. I think we ate the heart too over the fire. And I remember thinking, this is what I'm going to do for the rest of my life. This is how I'm going to eat. Like this is so much better than any other I've never felt meat that tasted this good before I've never felt connected to

my food before I've caught fish before and eating fish it's great but there's something that was so much more intense about this I guess because it's a mammal there's some weird connection where your DNA is letting you know that this is way closer to you than a fish. Yeah. You can take a fish out of an ocean and take a photograph of it online. Nobody gives a shit. I had a thing I did on social media for a while. I did a while back, rather.

The hierarchy of dead animals on social media. And I had number one was a fish and i was like a dead fish nobody gives a shit like you take a fish look i caught a bass everybody's like hey good job uh next was a turkey i had a dead turkey that i shot people like hmm i don't know what's dead turkey uh then i had bear meat it just said bear meat there was nobody said anything they didn't know what to say because it was just meat mmm but there's photos of me with a dead bear and it is the most hate I've ever gotten for any photograph online even though I ate that bear and even though you have to eat well you have to shoot

these bears because their population in Alberta, where my friends John and Jen run a hunting camp up there, they're out of control. Yeah. And they need to control the population because they decimate the moose population. They decimate the deer population. They cannibalize each other. It's very unhealthy for them to not have predators. The only predators they have is larger, bigger bears, grizzlies.

is larger bigger bears, grizzlies. So but people for whatever reason have not connected bears with food for a long time. Right. In terms of the history of the United States, Daniel Boone was famous for being a bear hunter and selling commercially selling bear meat and they would smoke bear hides, or smoke bear hams, rather. And bear meat was actually preferred over deer meat for whatever reason. And deer were hunted for their pelts, and bear were hunted for their meat. And we have decided that they're teddy bears, and that it's Yogi. Yogi and Boo Boo, and those are our buddies and it's it's a weird we've just made this weird decision somewhere along the line put as my friend steve

ronell calls them uh charismatic megafauna put them in this category of animals that you should you should not eat or hunt yeah and meanwhile the weird thing is they're the most dangerous they're the ones that you really should hunt because they'll eat your kids yeah and meanwhile the weird thing is they're the most dangerous they're the ones that you really should hunt because they'll eat your kids yeah like a deer is not going to eat your kids no but a fucking bear will for sure you leave a baby in a backyard a bear will 100% eat it oh yeah not a question in the world totally where a deer will just look at your baby and not care at all like we don't we have a weird arrangement yeah um but arrangement but eating that animal and hunting that animal

it completely changed my idea of what food is completely and from then on I've had a completely different idea of what food is and I've gone on to hunt I've hunted every year since it's something I look forward to

I get a giant amount of my meat from it, I give it to a lot of friends I keep two commercial freezers here at the studio that's what I do now, I hunt meat and I'm healthier because of it I really do believe that

elk meat in particular, that dark red wild animal that's running around the mountains, you're, it's so nutrient dense. Super. It's so much more filled with protein than domestic beef. And it's just better for you. Yeah, I agree. Now the question is like, how do we put that at scale for everyone?

You can't. Yeah. Well. That's the thing though. It's like you're not going to. No. Yeah. Well, that's the thing, though. It's like you're you're not going to. No, I do. I mean, I do think there's almost an argument, though, that maybe maybe in elementary school we need to take kids to a slaughterhouse or junior high. Like that needs to be a field trip to understand a lot of things. Yeah. We need to understand where things come from and like what goes into this.

You know, I think this is a selfish proclamation. I realize this going in. I think the idea of doing things at scale is lost. You got to let it go. Let it go. You're not going to save everybody. I feel like that with exercise. I feel like that with meditation.

I feel like that with yoga. I feel like that with hunting. I feel like that with just trying to be the best person you can be. You're only going to reach the people that want to hear the message. And for the people that want to hear the message, those are the people that you're reaching to. But the idea of scale, the idea of like how do you feel? I've heard that argument from vegetarians or vegans that you shouldn't hunt because when you say you should hunt for your food you know how is how we're going to do that with the entire population we're not you know what else we're not going to do with the entire population get them to read you know you're not

going to get them to exercise you're not going to get them to do it i'm not here for everybody i'm here for anybody who wants to listen i'll tell you what i've done and what's changed me and what i think could maybe change you if you're so inclined to pursue it. But this idea of reaching the masses, Jesus Christ, you got to go back to when they're a baby. You got to start from scratch. You got to put somehow or another, put incentive in front of them. You got to give them motivation. You got to show them that there's a real reward in pursuing risk and then in doing difficult things and challenging themselves, even though it's hard. And there's moments, man, like to this day, even just doing standup comedy

or doing anything that's hard. I mean, especially in the public eye, you face a lot of criticism. There's a lot of like days where it's like, God, is this really worth it? But then you come out on the other end of it and it is worth it. But you have to recognize, you have to understand the process and you have to recognize that through this struggle, eventually there'll be a resolution that'll be better. You'll learn, you'll get better at what you're doing. You'll be a better version of who you are because of this struggle. Yeah. But most people don't want to hear that shit.

They just want comfort. They just want a softer seat to sit in and they want a better sleeping pill. Yeah. So they can, you know, go to bed at night. Yeah. Well, it's, you know, when you choose the opposite path, you're fighting against millions of years of evolution because back in our past environments, everything took effort. Everything was uncomfortable to do the thing that made you most comfortable back then saved your life. Yeah. Kept you out of crazy inclement weather.

Saved you from effort that just burned up calories that were hard to find. It helped you avoid risk. And so it was great. Right. Until nearly about 100 years ago, right? After the Industrial Revolution. But you had to do a certain amount of difficult work just to survive. It was part of life. You had to.

There was never a moment in history, unless you were like one of those really rich, overweight people that you see in those paintings. Isn't it amazing that those were the attractive people? Yeah, I love that. When you see a guy that was like super fat or a woman who was like way overweight, they were the attractive ones. Oh, it was a flex. It's like, look, they can eat so much.

Yeah. They're just gorging themselves with food. Oh, yeah. For sure. much yeah they're just gorging themselves with food oh yeah for sure what is that there's this weird there's weird things that people do with food when they get really really wealthy and really um really opulent and just it's just where there's so much food you could do whatever you want but there's there's that there's a bird god damn it There's this bird that they soak in brandy. It is like one of the craziest.

It's a full whole bird that's soaked in brandy, and it's a small bird. And they eat this thing. They would eat it. Duncan Trussell is the one who told me about this. They would eat it underneath like a tablecloth and the idea was that you would get the smells of this thing in because it was like literally drowned in brandy but also because you were shielding yourself from god yeah what is it called again it's depicted on the show billions oh is Oh, is it? It's called Axe, I guess. No.

No, it's in- Delicacy Axe. So you're like- Yeah, no, no. Oh, that's the character's name. I'm sorry. Yeah, it's a real thing. No, what is it called?

Yeah, that's right. Ortolan. Yeah. Okay. So this Ortolan, they would put this- It's illegal? Well, I think it's illegal now because they're very endangered. Endangered.

But it's a very small bird. And see if you can find the preparation, what it says there. Look at that photo. It looks very, very appetizing. Yeah, but that's from the movie. But you eat the whole thing. It's not gutted or anything. It's enveloped in fat that tastes subtly like hazelnut.

French chef Michael Girard told the paper in 2014, and to eat the flesh and the fat and the little bones hot all together is like being taken to another dimension. The fragile songbird from France, which weighs less than one ounce and is about the size of your thumb, was served exclusively to royalty and rich, what is that word? Gourmands. Gourmands. Gourmands.

Do you know that word? I guess that's like someone who eats gourmet food. Yes. Until it became illegal in 1999. The procedure for preparing an ordolon has long been controversial. They are kept in darkness for weeks or are blinded, which causes the bird to gorge on grains and grapes and become fat, the key ingredient to its decadence when cooked.

The birds are then thrown alive into a vat of, how's that word? Use your best French. Armagnac brandy, which both drowns and marinates them. Then roasted. which both drowns and marinates them. Then roasted, ordolans are meant to be eaten feet first and whole, except for the beak, according to the Times.

So this was like the thing to eat if you were one of those fat fucks in a painting. But arguably, barbaric preparation isn't why eating the bird is illegal. They are endangered with a decreasing population. The European Union declared a order on a protected species in 1979, though France took 20 years to act on this. In 2014, Michelin starred French chefs like Girard and Alain Ducasse were fighting to get the bird on their menus.

Of course you were, you cunts, to revive a culinary tradition dating back to Roman times. They wanted to be able to hunt and serve the bird. Hunt? Say that loosely, please. Yeah. After you've gone caribou hunting, imagine this bird the size of your thumb. I will hunt it. Yeah.

It's like a capture so I can drown it in brandy in a week. Hunt and serve the bird for one week a year. They have been unsuccessful. However, that doesn't stop some from eating the bird. According to the New York Times, about 30,000 ordolans are still being captured and sold illegally in the south of France, where a single bird is going for $180 or the price of an ounce of coveted white truffles. or the price of an ounce of coveted white truffles. Secret gatherings featuring the elusive meal have been documented.

In 2008, Esquire writer Michael Paternity attended one such French dinner that served ordelon. The chef, who was breaking the law, had to call 40 of his friends in search of the bird, for there were none to be found and almost everyone feared getting caught risking fines and possible imprisonment wow yeah so is that what we're decadence gonna go out and have for lunch after this i don't you can get it here in texas yeah no but you can get brisket which is better than that stupid fucking bird anyway it's a strange world like food can be right yeah it is but that is for sure not someone who's connected to the animal's life exactly right and so this is like the best example of a complete utter disconnect from nature first of all and i am not into eating cute things like like a little

tiny cute little bird like i would have to be hungry as fuck to eat a bird the size of my thumb yeah totally well it's interesting too what you said about fish that people didn't react to fish on your instagram feed you see that it was shit you see that mimicked in the grocery store right yep like fish they have the whole thing out there no one cares can you imagine if you just put a full dead cow like in the meat section people would lose their minds they would go crazy it's like why is that well they used to have lamb's head you could get lamb's brains my uncle used to cook lamb's brains it was like it's a i guess a delicacy okay how was it they would grill it i don't remember i was really young at the time. I remember I had it. I was like probably five or six years old.

They would grill lamb's brains, like the whole head of the lamb. Yeah. And it's just real rare that you could find something like that in an actual supermarket. You'd have to go to some weirdo supermarket. Special butcher. Yeah. Something like that. Yeah, that's interesting. All you see is meat. You don't see any of the animal. You don't see a hoof.

No, we have words to describe it that, you know, that it's not from an animal. Yeah, right? Like beef. Like certain cuts, you know? The cuts names. We don't say, oh, yeah, this is his, you know, back muscle or this is his, you know. I'll tell you one better. We don't even have a name for moo cows.

Like cows, a cow is a female animal. Yeah. And a bull is a male animal. Like a bull moose is at least a moose. But a bull is what? What is it? A bull. Yeah, it's a what is it?

Yeah. No, it's a male. We're just calling it a male. Yeah. You know? Like a bull elk is a bull. Like there's a bull, but that's an elk. Yeah.

If someone says, did you go hunting? Yeah, we went elk hunting. Did you get one? Yeah, I got a bull. Right. Or I got a cow. Yeah. But a cow, like a moo cow?

Like, what is that? We don't even have a name. I don't know. There's no name. Right. That's weird. Yes, that is weird. Because that's all we do with them.

We just eat them. Yeah. So we've decided the best way is just not even have a fucking name for the animal. Yeah. Which is so strange, right? At least we have a name for chicken. But chicken we don't give a shit about. So when you eat chicken, it's just chicken.

We don't have to come up with a name. Like, it's venison. Yeah. We don't need to use euphemisms or anything like that. Yeah is buffalo it's just buffalo i don't know i don't know why that is or bison we can call it bison but a bison is a bison right you know american buffalo is a bison yeah could be a certain type of person buys that that's more woke to the fact that they're you know eating meat from an animal i don't know use the word woke you want to punch me no no i don't hate it that way i mean it's just

that it's a word but it's like but bison meat is just bison yeah you know which is it's interesting it's yeah and it's interesting because when they do polls about who is for and against meat eating it tends the people who are most against meat eating tend to live in cities and be most removed from the food system oh it's when they pull people who live in you know more rural areas they're they're okay with it because they have the most interactions with the animals you know so it's like the the loudest voices against it tend to be people who have no clue, no intimacy or connection with it, you know? Oh, yeah.

Well, there's a real issue with that in British Columbia because British Columbia has outlawed grizzly bear hunting. Yeah. And they have a lot of them. Yeah. It's a real issue. So for people that live up there, now these animals are no – because it's been going on for a few years now. So now you'll have like two three-year-old mature bears who've never lived during a time where bear hunting was legal and so these

motherfuckers have no fear of people yeah they're just doing whatever they're doing whatever they're i mean my friend had to shoot one entering his cabin it was six feet from him when he shot it no shit what did he what did he have to do after it, do you have to call it in and like go through a big process? No, this was actually before it was illegal. Okay. But this was, this is how brazen these enormous animals are. I mean, we're talking about like 600 pound predatory giant beast. Yeah.

And it was coming into his cabin. It was like literally like six feet from his cabin when he shot it. opens the door it's right there and just boom yeah cuz it's under the dome yeah yeah I can get food they didn't had issues with it before it was like it had broken in and it would it had broken into their food supply there was a couple different issues with this particular pair once they just decide like it's it would be literally like if you were really hungry and like a puppy was trying to keep you from getting to some food you'd be like what no i'm gonna get to that fucking food that puppy's not gonna stop me

yeah but luckily for the puppy it has a rifle yeah it was a 30 at six that's really the relationship between a human and a grizzly bear. They're so big. Oh, dude, they're huge. They're like, what do they get up to? 1,500 pounds probably when they're by the coast and just really filled up with salmon. Yeah, I think they can definitely get up that big. When you were up there, what was your encounters? You had seen some? Yeah, we saw some from a distance. We had one that was going through areas that we had been hiking through and then at one point we're on this like island in this river anisak river and we show up on this bank and it's like there's just these massive paws right and grizzly shit everywhere

and there's all these salmon that they'd been eating because the salmon run had happened and and you know donnie's like well we're definitely getting bears tonight boys you know he's just like whatever about it um i think he's got some gene that just takes away his his fear or something like that i'm like why why are we camping here you know well he's been around it for yeah that's it that's it and i've developed this weird sort of like comfort level yeah being around these super predators yeah and we didn't see any there luckily we saw the bears that we think were there from a spotting scope moving out of the area like a day later we didn't have any encounters oh that's good and it's it was hilarious because we had gotten a caribou at that point and so we're donnie at one point is like

trimming the caribou in camp to you know because we're gonna have. And he's just chucking the trimmings in the bushes going, yep, definitely fucking getting bears tonight, boys. Like just whatever. I'm going, good hell. Maybe he's fucking with you a little bit. Did you think that? Like he was playing off the fact that you were a little bit nervous about the experience? He might have been.

I don't know. I don't know. If he was, Donnie, if you're listening to this. Fuck you, Donnie. Fuck you. My friend John saw a bear kill a moose. No shit. Yeah, he said he saw the bear.

He was chasing the moose and swatted the moose in the back and broke its back. Just one swat. Just one swat. That's how big and strong a mature male grizzly bear is. along a mature male grizzly bear is? So I had a, when I was in high school, I had a math teacher who would go up summers in Alaska. And if we all turned our homework in on time, he tells bear stories, right? And he had this one story. I don't know if it's true or not, but basically goes like this. There's a, there is a tourist like fishing boat or whatever. And, um, they sent one of the deckhands out to pick berries off of this bush. Right. And so this

kid is picking these fresh berries for this tourist. Well, come to find out there's a grizzly on the other side of this big bush also picking berries and they slowly converge. They're trying to yell at him like, you know there's a there's a grizzly there they converge and see each other the bear gets up on two feet pulls back his paw and freaking slaps the kid's head off i mean that's the story slapped his head off like a little leaguer hitting a baseball off a tee just just like holy shit it sounds ridiculous but i bet it's possible but they're strong enough i know it's one of i told donnie he goes it sounds kind of bullshit to me but at the same time i'm like i don't want i'm not going to find

out on that one they're so big they're so strong too cameron haynes has a photo on his Instagram from a couple of days ago of a grizzly that he shot and then also ate. Like he's got like the packages of bear meat wrapped up in his freezer. Yeah. Because people always ask, what do you even eat? Yes. Yes. Yes. It's interesting that people get so turned off by that.

Look at the size of that thing. Now imagine that thing hitting some guy in its head. Oh, yeah. It is interesting that they get turned off by the fact that someone would eat a predator, but they don't get turned off by someone eating like a duck. Yeah, or the chicken. They say that while eating beef or chicken. It's like it's all weird at the end of the day.

It's like we put different value on different things, and I don't think we necessarily stop and think why. Yeah, and Donnie loves bear. Like you talked to Donnie Vincent about it. He's like, anybody who thinks bear doesn't taste good, let me cook it for you. Let me cook it for you. He goes like even like a big, nasty, grizzly bear, he goes, if you prepare it right and cook it right, it is delicious.

He's like, it's some of the best meat. Yeah. Well, I was talking to one of the guides when we were up there in Alaska, and this guy's like, I would never eat bear meat. It just smells bad. I don't want to be around it. The bears are filthy. They smell bad.

I'm like, well, do you eat cow? Why don't you go take a walk through a slaughterhouse? Tell me if you still want to eat beef by that measure. I've talked to a couple guides that are like that, that don't like bear. That's weird. They get into this weird – and hunters. I've talked to hunters that don't like bear. Yeah.

But my friends John and Jen that I was telling you about up in Alberta, they've been running bear hunting camps up there for years, and they've got amazing recipes. Like they'll slow smoke a bear ham on a Traeger and if you have it it's like the best roast beef you've ever had in your life sounds like they brine it and then they'll like have a certain preparation they'll put like a traeger rub on the outside of it slow cook it for hours and hours and it's just falling off the bone tender you there's a lot of ways to cook bear that yeah but it's in our heads it's, you know, you fucking piece of shit.

You just want to kill it because you're a monster. Yeah. But it's one of the smartest things to kill. Yeah. Like if you love deer and elk and caribou and all these animals, you really do have to control the population of these super predators, and there's only one way to do it. You have to hunt them.

Yeah. They're not going to control themselves. can't give birth control things will get totally out of whack yeah i mean because we you know you could argue it's like well you guys are trying to play god but at the same time it's like we've had such a impact yeah on the wild that if we don't do anything i mean things are going to get a little weird i mean we could let it go yeah but like okay see what happens you know and i don't know that you guys are going to get a little weird. I mean, we could let it go. Yeah. But like, okay, see what happens, you know? And I don't know. That you guys are going to try to, you guys are playing God argument is actually valid.

Yeah, I think it is too. I mean, if you want to be honest about the whole thing, like when someone says, oh, managing wildlife, you're playing God. Like, yep, I think you're right. I think they are. But I think sound wildlife practices based on real sound research by wildlife biologists is valid too.

Like they know what they're doing and they know that certain populations of animals get out of hand. It can be a real issue. Yeah. Both for prey animals and for predators, for all of them. Yeah. predators for all for all of them yeah there's a balance that can be achieved like i mean it's controversial but there's a there's a uh documentary the the reason why it's controversial is because the guy who made the documentary is a bit he's a bit nutty but uh it's about how wolves it's called how wolves changed rivers and it's about yellowstone and it's about the reintroduction

of wolves and now the reintroduction of wolves. And now the reintroduction of wolves, although it lowered the amount of elk, the amount of elk that were in the area, it was essentially an unnaturally large population because there was no predators. So the hunters loved it because it was easier to go find and kill an elk. So they were upset that these wolves Came in but then in this Documentary he's explaining how The wolves killing

The elk actually Made more vegetation Because the elk weren't grazing on the Vegetation it opened up these Pathways for all these animals To grow and plants to grow And all these other things survive because there's more vegetation now because the populations of these deer and these cervids are

down. And that there's a real balance that needs to be achieved. And part of it is how we've structured the lower 48, right? Like there's roads everywhere, so these animals can get sort of caged in and wolves are a lot more successful. Whereas like in the Arctic, it's all open space. Yeah. And the caribou can see a wolf coming that way more often than not, like wolves don't have a chance.

They have to really work together as a team to converge and find a caribou that's injured or younger or whatever. But most of the time, caribou are getting away or you know younger or whatever but most of the time caribou are getting away so they're not as successful right they see them coming a long way yeah exactly and caribou are fascinating because they are they're fast as shit i mean they top out at like 50 i think really and when they're just moving in their normal trot they're going like 12 miles an hour you know so when we would we would see a herd and we'd think okay i

hope it you know slows down and and starts to eat its way up this hill we're going to try and swing around if it caught our scent it was just like see you later dude good luck you know we had um one time this was super fascinating we had uh we got in skunked uh had this you know old old bowl that was like the size of a buick that just got away. So we're coming back to camp and, you know, we've gotten our asses kicked and we get inside of the teepee that night and there's a herd like literally in our camp, you know, and so we're like, oh God, of course it works out that way. So William kind of sneaks in to get a view of these guys, get some

footage and he ends up spooking them and donnie and i are lying on the tundra and this herd sprints but they're sprinting like right at us i mean they don't see us so they get within you know 300 yards 200 yards 100 yards at 100 yards you start to really hear their who's just smashing the tundra you know at 70 yards it's like you can start to smell them wow 50 it's like the ground is vibrating it was like one of those moments where i'm just like like a zen monk just totally looking at this herd and just like totally in the moment and maybe like 30 yards out one of them sees us peels up and they all follow they all react as a group and sync, you know. So they go up the top of this hill and Donnie and I just look at each other like, holy shit, man.

Unbelievable. And it's, I mean, it's like, it's kind of like wild as religious experience, to be honest. Like you get in those positions like that where you're out there and you have things like that happen to you. I mean, that shit changes you. It's like purity, right? The purity of the nature the nature yeah it's not like a zoo exactly and we're out there for you know i'm we're out there encountering all these risky sketchy things you know so you would think that i would be on edge the entire time it's so damn cold we've got this weather there's grizzlies you'd think that i'm like just a nerve-shaking

anxiety-ridden fool it was the complete opposite of course we had moments where there'd be spikes and nervousness but like overall i was way calmer than i'd ever been in my life and like really just super chill do you think that's also because the physical exertion you're doing all day? Because you're walking multiple miles and you're really burning off any excess energy that you have. I think that has something to do with it, but not everything. So I get back and I follow up on this idea, like what the hell's going on out there? And I meet this woman whose name is Rachel Hopman. She's a neuroscientist. And she's basically studying what happens to the human brain after different doses and time in nature. So she's got this thing.

There's this idea called the nature pyramid. And you can think about it a lot like the food pyramid except saying like eat this many servings of grain and this many of meat, it basically tells us how long we should spend in what type of nature. So at the base of this pyramid, the research says that if you spend at least 20 minutes a day, three times a week, that's associated with less burnout and less stress and just kind of overall more well-being. And that's the type of nature that you could find like in a city park. Nothing too crazy. At the next step of this pyramid is five hours a month in a little bit more out there nature. So this is the type of stuff that you might find like in a state park.

You have to go a little bit more out there to get it. And this is associated with a lot less depression, better well-being. And then at the very top, there's this thing called the three-day effect. And it basically says that after three days in nature, it leads to these brain changes in the waves that your brain rides. So generally, in this sort of modern, frantic world we live in, people ride these waves that are called beta waves. And they're associated with, like, stress, just kind of go, go, go, go, go, you know. On the third day in nature, people's brains, when they do scans out there, they have, like, this shit they have to take out in the wild and, like, put these caps on people's heads.

People are riding what are called alpha waves. And those are waves that are found in experienced meditators. And people start to report like, man, I just feel so much calmer and more collected and more like at peace and in tune with my surroundings. It's almost like kind of going on a meditation retreat, except there's no gurus and they're not charging you and you can eat whatever the hell you want, you well that's how human beings are designed right we or how we evolved we evolved in those kind of environments and so it really comes to highlight what we're doing by living in these urban environments like my friend jeff lives in new york he loves it and one of the things he

talks about i love the energy of the city like but that's fucking madness man like the energy of that city is madness yeah like what you're doing is something that's completely contrary to the way human beings evolved in nature for hundreds of thousands of years you're stacking people on top of each other you're constantly surrounded by people that you don't know at all which puts you in this heightened state of anxiety which is so bizarre because as tribal creatures, our whole inclination is to be surrounded with people that we can trust and be distrustful of people that we don't know. And then when we see others coming, we look at them and we get nervous. I mean, that's the whole reason why we have Dunbar's number, right?

Exactly. Right. Dunbar's number, which is what, 150 people that you can keep, a tribal number that you keep in your head. Yeah, exactly. So that's one of the reasons. So there's a lot of reasons why researchers think that this time in nature is good for us. That's one of them, that 150 number. It more closely mimics when we're outside, especially after three days, we're usually not with as many people. So we're out of these people-packed cities that just seem to like stress us out. There's also the physical thing that you talked about. Usually when people are out in nature, they're moving, doing stuff. But also the sites in nature seem to be calming for

us. So nature, it tends to be made up of what are called fractals. So these are these repeating patterns that sort of make up the universe. So if you think about a tree, it's like tree goes into a branch, goes into a leaf. It's these repeating patterns. Or like a river system, right? It's like small river to medium river to big river. And those seem to be calming for people. This is pretty interesting. One of the reasons that Jackson Pollock's paintings, I think, are so popular and really speak to us is that they're

made up of fractals. So if you think about it, how he does his paintings. Really? Yeah, yeah. Are they? I thought it was just splatters. Well, they're designed much like fractals, where it's like these, you kind of have these big splatters that go into these smaller ones, and they all kind of fade in and out, you know? So we see those patterns in nature and in the wild, but you don't get them in cities cities because cities are just a bunch of right angles and concrete. So when we get out in nature, we are embedded in those. Flowers. Yeah, exactly.

Pine cones and all the different things that fit into the Fibonacci sequence. Yeah, exactly. And even the smells of nature are associated with better well-being and calmness. So it's like this cascade of things that happen when we go out and spend time outdoors. It only makes sense. Totally. We are from that. Exactly.

That is how we evolved. And there's all these reward systems that are built into being a human being. And some of them come from being outside. Like you're rewarded with sunshine which creates vitamin d you get that feeling that feeling when you go outside like ah that's like that's your body saying yeah yeah stay out here yeah we need to refuel totally yeah come get some of this and we lost a lot of that with being locked indoors and yeah covet i mean unfortunately yeah not good this has been a fucking really strange year for mental health and physical health yeah and a really

strange year for counting on our so-called leaders to guide us in terms of what's the best course of action for being healthy yeah the best course is not wear a face diaper and wait to get jabbed. The best course is take care of your physical health first. That's number one. There was no discussion about that. There's no discussion about vitamins and exercise and healthy behaviors versus unhealthy behaviors. And maybe this is a good time to lose weight.

More than 70, I think it was 78% of people in the ICU for COVID were obese. That information was not distributed widely because they're worried about fat shaming people. Instead of worried about giving people the information that they could use to boost their natural immune system and to bring their physical body into a healthier state. No, we have to protect people. We have to protect people from their feelings.

Like, get the fuck out of here, man. You're supposed to tell people to lose weight. You're supposed to. Go out there and move around. Be healthy. Yeah. And if you look at the numbers, I mean, that was one of the biggest risk factors. Biggest comorbidity factor. Yeah. And I don't know. And it's projected to get even worse. Like the overweight obesity rate is supposed to go up into the 80s by 2030, the CDC projects. So yeah, I'm not surprised. It's a, and it's, I mean, there's a lot of reasons for this, right? It's that we don't, our environments, we don't have to move as much. Like you could literally today take like a thousand steps every day and be totally fine. You could live on, right?

Whereas in the past, it's like, yeah, good luck. Our food system, it's like we have so many foods that are designed to tap into this evolutionary reward system that we have, you know, with like dopamine spikes. Sugars. Sugar, salt, fat. Did you wear a Fitbit when you're out there in the Arctic? God. Well, I don't know where I would have charged it, but I would have loved that. How many steps do you think you would have gotten in a day if you had an Apple

Watch or a whoop strap? God, I don't know. Well, I think that I would have had to tweak the algorithm because were they normal steps or were they fucking Arctic steps on these Tundra tussocks where you're just like someone kill me out here please. Well, that's where something like a whoop strap would come in handy because it would give you an indication of where your heart rate was and heart rate variability.

So it would show you how much stress you've – Day strain. Yeah, how much strain you've blown out during the day. Yeah, well, I mean, I can tell you the hardest thing after I killed the caribou is packing it out. Oh, my God. On the tussocks. On the tussocks in the tundra. We were about five miles from camp,

and it was just because, you know, karma's a bitch, it was all uphill on the way back. So I've got, like, you know, 100 pounds or whatever. And my background is I worked at Men's Health for a lot of years, and, you know, I'm kind of into the outdoors.

I've done some fitness stuff. It's like, look, at the end of the day, I'm a gangly-ass rider, but my work has forced me to go into some interesting physical situations. So it's like, whatever, done some stuff. That was the hardest thing I've ever done by far. I would imagine it would take a long-ass time, too. How long did it take you to hike out five miles with 100 pounds on your back? Five hours.

Wow. Yeah. So we're going about a mile an hour, one foot in front of the next. It was a mess, stop, dude. And you must have been so tired when you got done. Oh, yeah. Oh, unbelievable. Like, at one point, we run into these two doll sheep, just amazing animals,

and I just kind of looked at them like, okay, good to see you. I just need to keep moving. Like I'm just going, I don't give a shit. I just want this to be over. How far away were they? Pretty close. I would say maybe 50 yards. Wow. Yeah.

If you had a tag, there's not a chance in hell they would be that close. No. No. But it was interesting because then, you know, I get back and it kind of made me think about how we approach exercise, even in the modern world. Like, you could argue we even try to make that comfortable too, right? Right. Because we do it in this air-conditioned gym and we get on a treadmill and we zone out to, you know, dog the bounty hunter or whatever the hell we want to watch. Or you're taking a spin

class and someone's like motivating you yeah come on keep pushing let's go yeah totally and the beat comes on yes fucking yeah i've never done a spin class but i've seen them on tv i don't know man it sounds like you have that was pretty good i didors. I did. I'll tell you the truth. I love yoga. I'm not opposed to doing a spin class. No. I took a cardio kickboxing class recently. How was that? It was fun.

Yeah. It was fun. Yeah. They, like, play music, and everybody has a bag, and then they call out combinations, and you go off on the bag. It was pretty fun. That's cool.

Yeah. All right. I might dabble. It good all right it was like me and uh my wife and my daughter and like mostly ladies i think i was the only maybe there was one other guy in the room okay get out of your comfort zone yeah um but the guy doing it was like it was you know, it was more of like a, what's the best way to describe it? It's exercise, but it's fun. It's like a fun thing. Like, it's not like, you know, like you go to a regular kickboxing class.

They're hard people, you know, like real kickboxers. They're scary people. Yeah, they're hard people, you know, like real kickboxers, scary people. Yeah. They're trying to kick something in real life. Yeah. They're trying to fight internal demons externally through this martial art. There was no demons in that room. It was all yoga pants. Yeah. So I've, I've been to one spin class and it was for a story when I was, uh, on staff at men's health, they thought it'd be really funny if they had me exercise with a bunch of old guys for like a week because I was like kind of hard charging, you know. They're like, you're going to have to exercise with this group of old guys for a week.

How old were these guys? 70s. Old. Were they fit? No. No? No. No, dude. so like one of the things that these old guys like to do is going to spin class and i'm in there and uh there's this one in front of me that like was in this group and uh you know he had before we got there he'd been like telling me he's like yeah i'm really into you know rare jefferson airplane recordings or whatever the spin class starts and i like realize and i'm just looking at this old dude's butt the entire hour spinning don't you want somebody well i'll tell you what i thought about all the joy within you dies man i'm just like holy hell it was it was an interesting story he's really in a jefferson airplane that's dating yourself. Yeah. Before Jefferson Starship. Yeah.

Because Jefferson Airplane was first. Yeah, totally. Yeah. They have great fucking music, though. Oh, yeah. They're interesting. Listen to some of their old shit. I was watching this Hunter S. Thompson documentary.

And in it, it talked about how he was really in a great slick when she was performing in San Francisco. Mm-hmm. He was really in a great slick when she was performing in San Francisco. And it showed them performing, and it showed you listen to some of the music, and you realize, like, wow, I forgot. I forgot how fucking good they were. Yeah.

So are you a Thompson junkie? Yeah, I'm a giant fan. Good. Yeah. Me as well. Yeah. Yeah, I think that's why I got – I think two things got me into writing. One of them was Thompson, the kid I grew up in Utah. So you can imagine this kid who grew up in Mormon country. I wasn't raised Mormon, but. Oh really? And then I read, you know, the great shark hunt and it was like, holy shit, what is this? And it was just like, it was on, you know? Yeah. He was a fascinating guy. Yeah. But there's a cautionary tale in there as well too, right? Oh, totally.

For excess substance abuse. Well, that and even as I think of him as one of the best things that ever happened to writing and one of the worst things that ever happened to writers because there's a lot of people who try and mimic that and they just can't. Right. You know, I have students who that's what they want to do and they'll like get messed up before they go out and report a story and i'm just like pump the brakes bud well you know what man it's like that's who he was the problem the problem is that's who hunter was like you i know you want to be like hunter but

you very rarely get to be yourself by trying to be like someone else. Yeah. You just got to find out who you are. And maybe one of the ways is to try to be like that guy, and then along the way you realize, hey, this is not for me, and then you find yourself. One thing that does happen with stand-up comedians

is, especially in the open mic days, you find yourself mimicking the comedians that you admired. Yeah. The ones that inspired you to get into comedy sound just like them. Patrice O'Neill used to call them babies. He'd be like, I got a lot of babies out there. Because people that wanted to talk like Patrice. And Dave Attell had probably the most babies of anybody. Because there's all these comedians that wanted to talk like Patrice and David tell I had probably the most babies of

anybody because there's all these comedians that wanted to talk like David tell okay they would have their punchline sound like his because he's got this very hilarious and very specific way of delivering material that makes sense that's funny but most of them, and I've known some guys that started out like that, that did sound like a tell or whoever, and they mostly, if they stay in a long time, if they're legit, they come around and then they become themselves. You've got to just give them time. Yeah. It's like you take a little bit from everyone and that's how you become you.

Yeah, but doing acid and going to the Kentucky Derby, it's been done, bro. Yeah. You might not want to do that. The Kentucky Derby is decadent and depraved. It's a fantastic piece, though. Oh, yeah. It talks about getting off the plane and going, meeting that dude at the bar. Just the way, just the dialogue is just unbelievable.

Well, there's so much energy to his writing, you know? It's like, what does he say? He's like, I'll have a margarita. And he's like, oh, hell no, you won't a have a bourbon on ice and he's like okay whatever yeah just like i'd love that he um he had this insane routine uh that it was uh documented in i forget what book it was some or article someone wrote about him i'm pretty sure it was a woman but greg fitzsimmons and i uh read it on the air like read the just what he did like six o'clock in the morning all these different things that he did and then uh who's the fucking guy that turned it into a song something man Something man. What is his name?

But it's 6 a.m. in the hot tub with champagne was the end of the day for Hunter. Okay. And so the song's called 6 a.m. in the hot tub with champagne. Nice. But it's just me and Fitzsimmons going over the entire day of his drug use. That's great. Cigarettes, Dunhills, cocaine. Lots of grapefruits.

Chivas. Yeah. Beardy Man. That's right. There you go. It's pretty funny. Nice. But it's 6 a.m.

And he would become ready to write at like midnight. With morning papers. 3.45. Cocaine. Another glass of Chivas. He woke up at 3 p.m. 4.05 p.m., by the way, first cup of coffee and a Dunhill, 4.15, cocaine, another Dunhill, 4.30, cocaine, cocaine, cocaine. Yeah, I mean, so you want to be the guy that they write, you know, a story and someone makes a song about your routine. You want to be this legendary guy where you show up with a fucking Vegas visor on and, you know, when.

That weird walk. Yeah. Well, he had a bad hip. Yeah. That's what's fucked. Like, it's one of the reasons why he killed himself at the end of his life. He was in agonizing pain. You know, he had hip replacement surgery and all this i don't even know how he blew his hips out but he was uh by the end of his life he was fucked yeah couldn't talk you know he

he would go on these talk shows like he would go on uh conan in particular and he was, you could not decipher what he was saying, because he had literally destroyed his ability to communicate through cocaine and drugs and alcohol, and he was always drunk, and it was just like. You go back and see him in the 60s, like when he would talk, you know even though he was odd and you know it was clearly like a very unusual dude who liked to party he was you can understand him yeah he had

deteriorated in a way that i don't think i don't think he was aware no you know i don't think he was very self-aware i think he was alwaysicated. I think he was always under the influence of something, unfortunately. Yeah, yeah. I think so, too. Yeah. I don't know. People lose sight of it. There's also a great documentary where he talks about how he's become Gonzo.

Like, he's become this guy where he doesn't know what they want when he shows up. Do they want Hunter S. Thompson or do they want Gonzo? Right. He becomes a character. So he has to like every single day it's like, well, I can't not do this crazy routine because this is this character and I have to put on this show for everyone, you know. That happens with people, right? You become a prisoner of your image. Yeah.

Kinnison said that. Sam Kinnison said he would show up at parties and they would just go oh like he wrote about like oh it's him it's him and they would just make this giant line like a yard long of coke and he would do it his heart would be ready to leap out of his chest yeah just assume that that's what he did that's what yeah that's what they wanted to see they wanted to see him chug booze and do lines and just be this party animal yeah it's too bad i don't know you just gotta get that across to your your students that want to be hunter yeah there's a fucking dark ending to this story yeah because when he died i want to say he was 70 how old was hunter when he

died he was not old no he wasn't that old in like, you know, there's people that are 70 right now that are very lucid. You can talk to them. They're very interesting. 68. 68. 68. Okay, so listen to this, man. I'm 53.

Just stop and think of that. So he's 15 years older than me? Yeah, that's crazy. What in the fuck? Couldn't walk, couldn't talk. Yeah. He was gone. Well, that shows you what

basic maintenance will do for you working out eating well being aware of all this stuff that's so crazy I thought he was older than that yeah that's crazy fuck

that's crazy very tell your students That's crazy. Fuck. Yeah. That's crazy. Very. Tell your students. Maybe you want to be Matt Taibbi. Maybe he's a better example. Yeah, he's got that tone and that rhythm and pacing and style, but I don't think he's going to. But he's 100% there. Yeah, totally.

He's doing some of the best journalism in America right now. I agree. It's interesting. Being a writer has always been way back to the Hemingway days, right? It's always been conflated or it's always been connected rather to being kind of a drunk and a crazy person. Yeah, totally. It has been. And look, I don't drink anymore.

And there's a good reason for that. And at one point I had to be like, I used to idolize like Thompson and Hemingway and all these people. And it's like, oh, if you want to be good at writing, I guess you got to drink. And then it occurred to me, wait a minute, those guys put a gun in their mouth and they're like sixties. Like maybe that's, maybe that's not a good path to go down. But there's something else going on here. They did some great fucking work before they pulled that drill. Yeah, they did. That's the problem.

Exactly. The problem is, like, that's what Christopher Hitchens said as well. Like, at the end of his life when he was dying of cancer, you know, they said, you burn the candle at both ends. And he was like, yes, but what a glorious flame it created. Yeah. You know? Yeah.

Interesting. I don't know, man. know yeah i don't know man yeah i don't know i just i don't think it's 100 necessary that's the problem i'm not sure though i mean maybe it is for them you know it's one of those questions where you go did the people just have this gear and that gear also happens to come with substance abuse problems? Whereas, like, had they never picked up a drink or drugs, like, they would have been that damn good regardless. And, like, there's, like, a gene that, like, these two go step together. I don't know. Maybe.

It's hard to say. It's hard to say. I mean, look, one perspective is no one lives forever. Look, one perspective is no one lives forever. And, you know, there's areas that these guys hit, these places these guys hit. Would they have hit those areas without substance abuse? I don't know. Yeah, I don't know. There's a reckless aggression to, like, some of Hunter's writing.

Yeah. Like, maybe you do when you're on coke and Chivas and you're just fucking blasted out of your mind. Yeah. And you're talking about, you know, the wave of civilization washing back. Yeah. You know.

That's an amazing line. But, you know, at the end of his life, it's like his writing really fell off, you know. It did bad. Yeah. Yeah. It did. It did bad.

So I don't know. There's like a, I think there's probably think there's probably this sweet spot, right? But if you keep going after it, you're never going to hold that and just keep chasing. And it's just never going to come to that. It's always going to be rolling back. The wave doesn't, you know, say it like him. It's like the wave doesn't roll back and then spontaneously go back up. Did you learn anything in writing this book?

Did you learn anything about yourself, about your own relationship with comfort? Did it change your perspective in approaching it and in this deep study of creating this book, The Comfort Crisis? I think so. I think the biggest thing for me, and this kind of goes back to that story I told you about the restaurant, is we don't realize just how different our lifestyles are now than they were in our recent past, even a hundred years ago. But like we evolved in these uncomfortable environments and we have tipped the balance so far into everything being easy and effortless and challenge- free that we take so much for granted, you know?

And so for me, it was like, I had to go through that in order to see that. And from that, I found a lot more gratitude. Like when I was out there and things really sucked, like I just thought to myself, like I just was filled oddly with gratitude. It's like, I appreciated my wife, my mom. I appreciated everything that I had at home. And it's like that – I mean it was a deep, deep sense that I haven't ever felt in my life. But also I think that the other thing is I think that people are capable of way more than we think. So going into the Arctic, I'm like, man, I don't know if I'm gonna be able to do this

and sort of hang on. I mean, I was, you know, I was sketched out about it. It's like when I got in that plane for the first time, like shitting my pants on the runway, I'm like, you want me to get in that little thing? You know, like I don't like flying on a 737, much less this plane that's the size of a Snickers bar, you know?

But then we go out and it's like we face all these different things and like you just keep putting one foot in front of the other. Each situation is hard, but it's like you get through it. When that plane comes and picks me up a month later, fuck it. I'll get in it. Fuck it. Yeah. Yeah.

So I think a lot of fears fade when we reintroduce challenges into our life so this is a concept i talk about in the book you know it's like as we evolved we would we did hard shit all the time this could be from a hunt this could be from trying to migrate across the pass you know and a storm hits this could be from tigers lurking in the bushes and this was often without safety nets right right? But in modern life, we don't face any of these challenges anymore. So we have an outsized fear of failing. And we have a, I mean, nowadays it's like, you slip up giving a presentation at work, you say the wrong word. You want to kill yourself.

Yeah. It's like, oh my God. Or you didn't get enough likes. It's like, that is failure. Yeah. And these failures are often in our head. Whereas in the past, it was like, there was real consequences to failure. So I think trying to figure out ways where, how can I insert these moments where I'm facing these, you know, sort of evolutionary challenges can show us that we have way more potential than we thought. It's like we get out to that edge of our comfort zone and all of a sudden it expands and it expands and we learn something about ourself. We learn that we're capable of more and then we come back into our modern life. It's like,

bitch, I got this. Yeah. I think, um, I've definitely found that personally that, uh, Um, I've definitely found that personally that, uh, in doing challenging things, it makes the challenges of regular life less nerve wracking and also the opposite. When I'm not doing challenging things, it makes the challenges of regular life more daunting. I agree a hundred percent. It stacks up on you and you could feel it. It's not like, it's not like I've known I've done a lot of dangerous shit and a lot of crazy stuff so i'm i'm immune forever yeah like no it seems like it's like sweeping the floor it has to be constant yeah you have to sweep it every day or the dust

comes back yeah you have to experience difficult shit yeah i don't i think we're designed that way at least some of us are some people feel some there's some people that just for whatever reason they're okay yeah they're calm I think yeah I think people are different but I think most of us benefit from that it's like yeah you know we need to reintroduce these metaphorical tigers back into our life in a variety of ways and so I met up with the I like that word that term reintroduce the metaphorical tigers yeah it's like I met up with a... I like that term. Reintroduce the metaphorical tigers. Yeah, it's like I met this guy afterwards. His name's Marcus Elliott, and he's a Harvard MD,

and he didn't want to be a doctor. He wanted to get into sports science because he thought he could really move the dial on it. This was like the early 2000s. He's also kind of a far-out character. He would always go to Burning Man back in the day, and he got himself through college by counting cards. And so I'm telling you this to let you know, he's kind of a seeker a little bit, you know. So he decides, I don't want to be an actual doctor. I want to get into

sports medicine because I think I can revolutionize the field with by bringing more data and science into it. So the first job he gets is with the New England Patriots. And when he took the job, into it. So the first job he gets is with the New England Patriots. And when he took the job, they at the time had about 26 hamstring injuries a year. I mean, they weren't good. They were racked with injuries. He came in and added more science, basically did a lot of testing, came up with these like individualized programs. He dropped the hamstring injury rate to like three a year, ended up winning a couple Super Bowls with the team. Went on to become the MLB's first performance director. And then now he does his own thing. He has a facility called P3, and they have a contract with the NBA. So what they do, and a few other leagues too, what they do

is players come in and he attaches all these reflective markers all over their body, and he has them run through all the movements they would in a game. Meanwhile, there's cameras capturing these movements, and then that gets fed into an algorithm so they can see how the player moves and compare it to other players and basically be like, look, the way that you jump, the way your whatever knee caves in, that's putting you at a 60% risk of having an injury this year.

So this can also tell you what's interesting, some of the promises in your game. So for example, I don't know if you're into basketball at all, but Luka Doncic, guy for the Mavericks, Rookie of the Year, NBA All-Star, he started coming to P3 when he was, I think, 15. He was a decent player then. They did all this stuff, and they go, Luca, we have bad news for you. You can't jump to save your life. But we also have some good news.

You are off the charts at decelerating or slowing down. Like, you're very, very fast at slowing down. So we want you to develop your game around sprinting, stop, defender careens forward because you can slow down faster than, shoot. So he developed his game around that, and now he's sort of the future of the NBA. I told you all that to basically tell you that this Marcus Elliott dude, he's obviously into this big data and how can we use that to improve ourselves and improve our performance. But he also understands that not everything that improves an athlete, that improves a human, can be measured.

So another thing he does with his friends and players that are interested is this idea that he calls Masogi. So this is named after an ancient Japanese myth. And the basic idea is that once a year, I'm going to do something really hard. And the way that he defines hard is I have to have a 50-50 shot of finishing it. So that's rule one. Must be really hard. Rule two, don't die.

And then there's two guidelines beyond that. The first guideline is that it has to be something kooky. So something you just make up. And the reason for that is because so much of what we do today is, especially athletically, is comparison shopping. It's like, oh, well, this person ran this distance in this time. I got to do it better than them. So if you just make some weird shit up, it's like it's only you against you. Right.

And then number two is that you don't really brag and boast about it and share whatever you do on social media. Because, again, it's you for you. It's not so you can get a bunch of pats on the back. So some things that he's done with people is one year they got a 85 pound rock and they walked it five miles underneath the Santa Barbara channel. So one, you know, the rock was at the bottom of the ocean. They had sort of dived down, you know, 10, 20 feet, whatever it was, walk 10 yards or 20 yards, guy would come up, next guy would come down. And after five five hours it's like the rock is at point b so it kind of goes back to that idea of these challenges where you like sort of separate you go through this trying middle ground you're like i'm not gonna be able to do this what the

hell you know um but by doing it you get on the other side and you're like man i really learned something about myself so he's done all kinds of different strange weird kooky challenges So he's done all kinds of different strange, weird, kooky challenges with different people. And a lot of them are athletes who are really clutch performers in the playoffs. It's like the guys that go through this because once they've gone through that, it's like now all of a sudden the stress of that playoff game is perhaps not as heavy. Because you've had these times where you're like, man, this is really, really crazy and trying against me, you know. So you come out on the other end of that improved. So I think that doing something like that can be a good thing for the average person because going back to that rule one is that it has to be hard,

which is defined by a 50-50 shot of finishing it. It's like my 50% is different than your 50%, is different than your 50%, is different than your 50% is different than your 50% is different than your 50%. So if you're the type of person who, I don't do shit, I'm super lazy. The farthest I've ever run is three miles. Well, you could ask yourself, okay, could I run three miles again? Well, probably. Could I do six?

That would be pretty tough, but I think. What about nine? Ooh, I don't know about nine. Go find out if you can, man. By going through that, finishing it, you're going to learn that you maybe had a gear that you didn't realize was there, and that'll help you sort of move on.

And the nice thing is, like, you don't have to over-prepare. It doesn't have to be a massive production. It's just, like, they do it once a year, and again, it's one of those things that like he's like look i can't i can't measure this do they have a time where they do it uh just once a year but they have like a like a this is the week to be in hell no i don't think so just any just randomly yeah yeah yeah so i mean i've started doing this in my own life um since i got back to the Arctic and met him.

And I mean, I'm, you know, trained as a science journalist. I read a shitload of studies. I read probably a thousand studies going into this book, talk to researchers all the time who are, you know, nerds at the NIH and that type of thing. And doing this, I can tell you, man, there are certain things about being a human that you just can't measure. And it's like a feeling you get when you go out and you do these hard things, like that'll teach you a lot about yourself. And that goes a long way. What have you done since these?

So I'm breaking a guideline here, but I'll talk about it. So for example, this was about a month ago. So the farthest I'd ever run in my life was 16 miles. And I'm like, okay, I'm going to do some sort of outdoor trail run. How far should I go? Like, could I do double that? 32 miles? And I'm like, I think I probably could. If I got I'm like, I think I probably could. If I got, you know, I think I probably could. What about triple that? Fuck, I don't know if I could do triple that.

So I'm like, hey, let's go find out. So I went out to Red Rock Canyon in Las Vegas. And there's a trail that's 12 miles. It's called the Grand Circle Trail. And there's quite a bit of elevation change and I ran that thing four times first two laps were like okay I got this third lap I was I had a freakin breakdown I'm like fuck this I'm not gonna be able to do this okay I just can't do this we're just gonna call it quits after I got back on that third lap and

it was like, okay, we're going to, we're going to make a go at the fourth one, just whatever. And on that fourth one on the way up, like I literally had this moment where I'm like running over this. I mean, the trail is unbelievable because you go through all this red rock and just beautiful, beautiful country. And especially because you're changing elevation. So like the, the environment is changing as you do it. I had one of those moments where literally like I started giggling and laughing and just being like, holy shit, I am thankful to be alive. Like this is unbelievable. And I get done with that. And it's like, it's from like 48 miles, dude. The farthest you've ever run is like 16. It's like, how many hours? Took me 10 hours. Wow. Yeah, the total elevation change was 13,000 feet.

So, I mean, look, that's the 50-50 thing. It's like if it was like Cam Haines, he'd be like, 48, you little bitch, you know. Right. But for me, it's like, I didn't know I could do that. What do you attribute, what caused you to like cruise in the fourth one? Like what was that feeling? What gave you that extra energy? Was it knowing that you were going to do it?

Was it that your body had just accepted the fact that this is just what we're doing? And, you know, you're pumped up with endorphins? What do you think it was? I think it's a combination. I think a lot of things are going on. I think some, you know, again, can't be measured. I think some innate evolutionary machinery gets triggered when we go out and we do challenging things in nature, and we can just do them. And I also think that humans probably evolved to believe they could do a lot less than they're actually capable of. Because if you think about

it, if we would have evolved to just have this outsized idea of what we're capable of, we'd be like, yeah, I could definitely do that. Hold my beer, watch this. You die. Whereas if we're like, oh no, I don't want to do that. I'm afraid of doing that. I think it's a little bit too risky. But then when we got put in those real positions of risk, which would have happened, if we could outdo that, we have a better chance of survival over time. You know, you don't want the hold my beer people who are incapable. You want the people who are a little more risk averse who are actually more capable than they. That's how your genes pass on. Yeah.

more capable than they. That's how your genes pass on. Yeah. What do you, do you think there's a mechanism that happens in the mind or in the body where the body realizes like, no matter what we think, how we're trying to deter this guy from doing this very difficult thing, he's going to keep doing it. So maybe we need to release. Just let go. Or, or let some endorphins fly. Like there's probably some sort of a biomechanical mechanism in the mind and in the body that allows you to accomplish. Like, you know, like adrenaline, right? Yeah. Like adrenaline kicks in. You can do things that you can never do without adrenaline.

Yeah. Like maybe there's something along those lines. I think so. We know that endorphins get released, right? Yeah. Endorphins get released. I think some stuff just turns on. I mean, because I don't know if your body necessarily really knows like, oh, we're doing this, you know, 10 miles or 15, 20 miles from the Las Vegas Strip.

You know, it doesn't know. It just thinks, oh, we're running really fucking far. Something's wrong. Something's wrong. We got to keep on going here, you know. So yeah, I don't know, man, but it's powerful. Um, so you're going to continue to do this every year? Yeah. Do you think you'll hunt again? Yes, I will. You're going to do it with Donnie every time or what are you going to do? I don't know. I'll probably do some on my own. I got to, a um donnie's a nice dude he set

me up with a really sweet bow um but i got it right before covid so i was like trying to take lessons and then all of a sudden it was like shut down that's a difficult way to do it yeah that's a different thing yeah have you practiced at all a little bit but i've also heard everyone be like you're gonna develop really bad habits dude so i'm kind of on the fence what do you think well there's a there's a place in Vegas we can go and take lessons what is it called there's an archery store in Vegas that I've been to um I want to say performance archery without San Diego that's San Diego. That's it.

Thank you very much. Impact Archery. I've been there before with John Dudley. They can steer you in the right track. They can give you some lessons. There's people there that can show you how to do it right. But, yeah, you need someone who's showing you how to execute correctly, and then you have to understand, like, what's – there's a lot of steps that happened.

It's one thing to pull the trigger on a target when there's no pressure. Right. Like you're standing in front of a target and you're just trying to hit the bullseye. That's not easy. There's a whole other thing that happens when your body's under pressure. Yeah. There's shotiq.com. There's a guy named Joel Turner. I think that's his website.

I'm pretty sure. And he's dedicated this course. He's created a course. He used to train snipers. There it is. I've taken his lessons. I've studied his uh videos but it's all about uh dealing with target panic um and there's target panic for archers that are competitive

archers and then there's target panner but he goes into the psychology of it like what actually happens in the mind and what it is about it oh look at that's me look scroll down you look at that dude that's a monster yeah that's an elk i shot in utah wow um and directly learned what happened to that um because of his videos that that helped me a lot that's cool yeah what is like what's the main thing you walk away there's a difference there's the main thing that you walk away with? There's two different things that happen in the mind. There's open loop thinking and closed loop thinking. I always forget which one is which. But open loop thinking is I think that's the one you don't want,

which is like swinging a baseball bat. Like the bat comes, you just swing. Closed loop thinking is executing a process where you have like a very specific shot process like i have a whole routine that i go through in my head and joel has a series of things that he has you recite like for him is you know he's got like I think it's three or four different things like that you recite in your head to keep you present so instead of just giving into this panic am I getting this open loop closed route thing right fuck it up all the time I would think that I know it by now but

the idea is that you're in control the entire process you're not allowing yourself to spaz out and a lot of times when you're drawing on an animal and i it could have easily happened to you with rifle shot with the rifle shot on the caribou as well yeah like you panic and you just pull the trigger like you want it to be over the anxiety is so intense that when you have the crosshairs on the animal you just want it to be over. The anxiety is so intense that when you have the crosshairs on the animal, you just want it to be over. With archery, it's even more intense because you never have a rest. You're never sitting on something.

With a rifle, you could have sticks, like shooting sticks, or the rifle sitting on that, and you're pressed against your body, and it's not moving. You could just squeeze, squeeze, squeeze, squeeze, boom. Yeah. And if it's a good rifle and it's zeroed in, you're going to make a good shot as long as you don't flinch. But people do flinch. And with archery, they flinch a lot because in archery, you're drawing back, you're holding the bow,

and you're doing – you're holding everything. Yeah, because that's heavy. Yes. It's like a heavy pull. And you're also trying to execute what they call a surprise shot. So you don't really want, you don't want to hit the trigger. You kind of want to pull back with your back muscles and have the shot break without you even knowing exactly when it's going to happen. Okay. So all I'm doing is I'm concentrating on the reticle. I'm concentrating on the little dot that's on my site,

and I'm concentrating on making sure the bubble's in place. So the bubble's in the center, meaning that my bow is level. And then I'm concentrating on relaxing my front shoulder. I've got all these things I go through. And then I'm concentrating on squeezing with my back muscles. And then something my friend Remy told me once, Remy Warren, he said, it sounds corny. He goes, but this is what I do.

I become the arrow. I be the, like you want the arrow to go to a specific spot. Don't just think that's the spot I want it to hit. Be the arrow. Like be that arrow. So as you're drawing back, you're thinking entirely like you're that arrow. Yeah. And you're going to that spot. That way there's no deviation from this plan of hitting exactly where you want to hit.

That's interesting. And even then it's hard. And then I practice virtually every day. I mean, I take a couple days off sometimes if I get sore or tired or I'm too busy, but I practice a lot. Yeah. And you have to. And when I'm practicing the months up until if I'm too busy, but I practice a lot. Yeah. And you have to. And when I'm practicing like the months up until like if I'm hunting in September, July,

August, September, I'm doing it every day. Yeah. And I'm thinking every shot is an elk. Every shot I'm seeing the animal walking between the trees. There's a gap. There's a spot. It stops. And I have to just be calm in that moment yeah

well i would imagine that's why it's so rewarding right like you're every single day you're putting work in and then when you actually get out into the wild like you're putting a lot of physical work in i mean hunting is challenging man well mountain hunting is the most challenging you actually have to be in shape too. Totally. So I do all this crazy cardio just to get in shape in order to do that. I do a lot of squats. I do a lot of like – I have a Stairmaster, one of those stair mills.

Yeah. I do a lot of those, and I do it sometimes with a weight vest on. That's cool. One of the things that I found really interesting is like after packing that caribou out, I started thinking about like I was telling you about exercise. And when you look at humans, we're actually pretty damn athletically pathetic. And that's, and that is not my language. I stole that from a Harvard anthropologist who studies physical activity. You compare us to other animals. We're very slow. We're not that strong.

We're good at two things. We're good at running long distances in the heat and carrying. We're the only animals who can carry. Most other animals, they got to grab something with their mouth and they can't drag it far because that's inefficient. So these Harvard scientists I talked to, I mean, they think that doing the activities that we evolved to do that we're uniquely built to do can have a lot of benefits. So I started looking into this idea of carrying, and it really shaped what we became. Like this is why we have really strong grips. It's why we have sort of relatively shorter torsos that are really strong, longer legs.

It's why we don't have much fur and why we sweat to cool ourselves. So you probably have heard the idea of that we're born to run, right? But we're actually, I argue in the book, probably more so born to carry. We did it a lot more. Anytime, I mean, we evolved to run so we could run down animals slowly but surely in the heat. It's called persistence hunting. So we would chase an animal for 10 miles, 20 miles. We'd sort of slowly run. We'd bump it and it would sprint and then pant. And eventually the animal would topple over from heat exhaustion because we're really good at cooling ourselves. So then we'd have to cut it up, carry it all the way back to camp. And as gatherers, we evolved to just walk out in our environment, find stuff to eat,

and carry it back to camp, right? Now you think about exercise today, it's like everyone, not everyone, but a lot of people run, right? Running is a relatively common physical activity, probably the most common physical activity. But how many people carry for a workout? Very few. Carry weight, very, very few. These few people have their rucking. Yes, exactly. So I followed up on this and I went down to Jacksonville, Florida. So there's guys who were special forces soldiers. I mean, they're the only people who have really reintroduced carrying back into their days, right? The military, the fundamental of military fitness is rucking. It's their main form of fitness. And it's really

sort of turned those guys into some of the fittest people in the world. You can argue, right? So in Jacksonville, I meet with this guy who's a Green Beret, and he started this company called Go Ruck. And they make these really beautiful backpacks, but that are up to military specs. So they can basically carry more weight than you could ever really, you know, carry yourself. And he's teamed up with some researchers at the Mayo Clinic who are advocating for rucking for a lot of their patients. Because when people start walking, like walking is great, you know, but it's not, it's not really that hard, you know. Running is good, but at the same time, the injury rate of running is really high, you know, especially for people who are out of shape and who have been

sitting a lot. But you put a weighted backpack on a person, it adds an element of strength, and it also increases the cardiovascular demands on the person, but the injury risk is really low. So there's all these amazing benefits to rucking that people just, you know, they don't really think of and they don't really know. It's like this fundamental activity that we can do that's super beneficial. And like I said, injury rates low and it doesn't matter. You can basically modulate it based on where you're at physically. So I could go rucking with my mom, right? She could take five, 10 pounds and I could take 50. We'd go the same pace, have a conversation and we're getting the same effect.

Yeah. Yeah. So I've added that definitely into my routine. I think it's helpful, and especially for hunting. It's like that's the foundation of getting from point A to point B. You're always carrying stuff. There's actually a company called Outdoorsmans, and they make this pack that's specifically designed it's a pack frame that has a weight lifting you know you have a post where you would put

plates on it yeah I have a pack what the fuck is it called again I have one too trying to remember the name of it but it's like a legit backpack so like they they out the outdoorsmans are they're pretty famous for their backpacks they make like a really good pack for carrying uh carrying out animals because it's the company's entirely geared around hunting yeah and so they have this uh i don't know what the fuck is the name of it at Atlas trainer. Atlas, that's it. Thank you. So this Atlas trainer has a post on the back of it. You could slide a 45-pound plate. You could put two plates on there. So you could have 90 pounds on your back and bolt that sucker down.

Wow. And then go for a run or a walk, rather, with a real backpack on. So that's it right there. Oh, that's cool. See how it works like that? So you could do all your workouts. You could lift weights. You could do all kinds of crazy shit.

And you can have serious weight on your back. But you see how the pack itself, that is a rugged backpack. That's a frame, all right. They're famous for, I have one of their packs as well. They're famous for being really good at carrying a lot of weight. So it's not the lightest pack in the world, but it's really good for carrying weight. The way it distributes the weight on your hips and the way it sits on your shoulders. Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah, that makes sense. The GORUCK guys, they sell plates that are specifically fitted to their packs. I don't know. It's a great, like, having to essentially rock across the Arctic for a month. We get back to the quote-unquote airport, which is a shed where the bush planes come in, and I took my pack off, and I had to, like, step up, I don't know,

maybe 24 inches or so to get into the place. And dude, it was like I levitated up. You know, it's like I was so, my legs were so damn strong after that. For just 30 days. Yeah. Like I was, I was in the best shape of my life and I hadn't been into a gym. I hadn't run. I hadn't done all my normal stuff. And I'm like, I'd also lost weight, right? Because we're not eating that much and we're just moving all day. Like I looked, you know, once I got to the hotel and like went to shower, took my clothes off. I'm like, shit, I look like Conor McGregor at a weigh-in right now, you know. I'm just like, damn.

Completely slimmed down. Oh, yeah, just shredded and just like super, just way fitter than I've ever been. It was fascinating. Did you think at all to yourself like, okay, now I have to maintain this? Well, how? Yeah, I guess. You're bucking, right? Yeah.

Hello, honey. I'm moving to the Arctic. I've bought us a shed in Kotzebue. Well, you're in the Vegas area. That's one thing about Vegas people don't realize. There's a lot of trails., you're in the Vegas area. That's one thing about Vegas people don't realize, like there's a lot of trails and that, you know, when you get outside of the city. No, I still do ruck a lot, to be honest, is I'll throw a plate in a pack and I'll just go out into the desert. So I live on the edge of town west by Red Rock Canyon. So I can walk like three minutes through

my neighborhood and there's a gate that leads to this whole trail network so I'll go out there and rock all the time and it's awesome because the like I said it's just it feels solid you just feel you're getting um you're getting cardio and strength the the SF guy I talked to was like yeah it's uh it's essentially cardio for people who hate running and lifting for people who hate the gym, you know? And we know that there are health benefits to doing both cardio and strength. It's like, I feel like we kind of live in this world where the runners are like, oh, lifting, you don't need to lift. Lifting's overrated. And the lifters are like, ah, running sucks. Running's overrated. It's like, no, you need, you look at the data. It's like having a good level of fitness

is the number one thing you can do to avoid death. It's like, you go down the list of things that kill Americans, fitness fends off all of them. It's like, number one is heart disease. People who are fit or even increasing your running speed from five to six miles an hour, you'll be 30% less likely to die. So the fitter you are, the farther you are from having heart disease. Fends off some cancers. Then there's accidents. If you are fit, even getting in a car accident, you're more likely to survive. Like it just helps with everything. And we've engineered our world to be like completely effortless. Like we're so damn out of shape now.

Don't you think that what happens when people get involved whether it's weight lifting or running they get really interested in the results in whatever particular discipline they're involved in more than overall health it's not that common that people start thinking well i want to do a little bit of weight lifting a little bit of running a lot of times they get obsessed with the thing. That's why the runners will say, ah, you don't need to lift weights. Or the weightlifters are like, ah, you don't need to run. Like, I just want to get jacked and strong. And the runners are like, look, I'm just trying to put in miles and get my numbers under X amount of minutes per mile.

Yeah, hit some random time. Yeah, and we get tribal about it. It's like everything, man. Yeah, we get tribal about it. Super tribal. It's like, and then all of a sudden sudden yeah this this way is the only way i think that's that's one thing we see you know pick anything in life where there's two different ways to do it the people on the left side are like no this the other thing sucks and vice versa you know it's just we're tribal creatures man that's real common it's real common. It's real common. And it's real common to mock people that do other kind of activities.

What are you, rock climbing, bro? Yeah. People get crazy with those things. Like fucking rock climbing is hard. Yeah. All those things are hard. Rocking is hard. Yes.

Lifting weights is hard. All these things are difficult to do. That's why it works. Yeah. You should really do a variety of things if you're being wise about it and looking at it in terms of like, I'm trying to engineer a more sound fitter body that can do a lot of different things that I ask it to do. Yeah, exactly. I mean, if you're shooting for like, if you're shooting only for performance, that's not health, right? You know, like people who run a two-hour marathon,

they're not necessarily healthy. Right. Like they're healthier than someone who's 600 pounds. Don't get me wrong, but you're not going for health, right? Yeah, if somebody had a—if they had a wrestle, it'd be a real problem. Yeah, exactly. When you wrote this book, did you write this book just—

not just to document all these issues that people are having with comfort, but also to give people maybe some feedback or some pointers or some direction in terms of like how to maybe possibly move your life into a better place. Yeah, yeah, for sure. So I mean, the way that the book is written as I tell this story of this hunt that I did in the Arctic, and that's the overarching narrative. And as I'm facing these specific discomforts we used to face as we evolved, then I sort of peel off and then I investigate each one in different sections. And I talk about different on-the-ground reporting that I did. And at the end, there's always some takeaway. Now, it's not like explicit advice in

like a box that's like, okay, here are the steps to do this. But it's all inherent and you leave knowing, okay, here's how I can weave this back into my life. And I think going back to that idea that our environments have changed so much, you know, it's not like just doing any one of these is going to solve all your problems. Like, yes, it'll be helpful, but it's like we really need to think about how are these different ways that I can weave this stuff throughout my days, weeks, months, and years. Some of this stuff is relatively easy to work in. For example, like even the data on keeping your house colder is really interesting in terms of weight loss and overall calorie burn. And even just things like people are never hungry anymore.

Let's figure out why you're eating in the first place. And then by reintroducing hunger back into your life, you're probably going to lose some weight if you can determine, oh, I'm eating because I'm stressed or bored versus I'm physiologically hungry. Then some of them are a little bit more challenging. Like we need things that really push back against us. That's something like the Masogi idea I talked about where it's like, dude, do something epic. Like you may not think that you can do it. Like you can do it. It's like freaking humans were hunter gatherers for 2.5 million years. And now people are like, well, I couldn't go outside for three hours. It's like,

what the hell are you talking about, man? You know, like we're just, we can do a lot more than I think we, we believe. The, um, the data about keeping your house cold. I mean, it's just basically your body needs to burn off more calories to stay warm, right? Yeah, exactly. It's just basically your body needs to burn off more calories to stay warm, right? Yeah, exactly. So when you get cold, your internal furnace cranks on, uses calories, and it's a small effect. But over time, you can have decent results. So one study and a scientist I talked to said 64 degrees is a sweet spot. So my wife loves that I found this stat, right, because now our house is 64 all the time. She's like, I'm freezing my ass off. But, uh, but wouldn't you rather just eat

less food and stay warm? I would never like to eat less food. Never. But you're a thin guy. Like, it seems like you've got it under control in terms of like weight loss or the need to lose weight. More or less. I've, I've been helped along the way. Did you ever seesaw? Probably the, so I'm like a buck 70. Probably for a while though, I was 185. And so I was within, you know, what's considered healthy, but I'm still at the higher end of the healthy BMI. And like, just from running, my hips would hurt hurt afterwards and i started working with this dude who's in the book and his name is uh trevor cashey he's i think he's 28 now but he graduated college i think when he was 17 or 18 uh got his phd when he was 22 i believe he was 17 when he

graduated college he's He's mega genius. Like the way I describe it is like, you know, to say that Trevor's smart is to say that LeBron James is pretty good at basketball. You know, like, I mean, and look, for my work, like I talk to people at Harvard, people at the NIH, like scientists everywhere. Like this guy is blow your mind smart, can just unpack arguments. Imagine you're going to your high school prom and he's graduating from college and you're both the same age. I know, right? Okay. Yeah.

And it pisses me off because I'm older than him, obviously. And I'm just like, man, you're just so much smarter than me. This sucks. So anyway, what did he? He's interesting because when he was in college, he started working with a lot of athletes and just like everyday people, helping them lose weight. Like he was in a lab doing cancer research but found that he just was really into strength sports. So he has like a couple of national strength records and was working with people like ultramarathoners, other strongmen, and was just really damn good at it.

So now he has this nutrition company he calls Trevor Cashy Nutrition. And his approach is really interesting because he doesn't really give a damn what you eat. He cares why you eat, really, because most people he says, like, look, you can eat a lot of different ways. You could pick any random diet, and if you follow that diet, you're going to lose weight. But the question is, well, why the hell don't people follow diets? That comes down to the why. We often eat because we can't mitigate stress, because we're bored. And your body also, as it loses weight, it starts to pull all these little tricks

to try and keep you at a higher weight. Because back in the past, it's like your body losing weight was a threat, right? So things like it'll increase your hunger signaling, it'll slow down your metabolism. So this is when people, this is why around five weeks, people usually hop off diets and fall back into their normal patterns because they can't deal with that discomfort of hunger. And they often fall into intense cravings that aren't really physiological cravings. It's just your mind being like, Snickers, Snickers, Snickers, you know. So he works with people to help them figure out how do I discern the difference between,

you know, this sort of, I guess, in the book book I call it real hunger versus reward hunger. And then how can I become aware of what I eat? Because people don't know how much they eat. You look at research and people miscalculate their daily intake by hundreds, sometimes even thousands of calories. Sort of similar to miscalculating the amount of screen time they use? Exactly. Exactly. So there's this one famous study that found,

it looked at overweight people who said that they just could, they could not lose weight despite eating just 1,000 calories a day. Well, they went in and they did precise measurements and tracking, and the people were eating 2 thousand calories, right? So this is like saying, well, whoops, I ate a half a pizza and I totally forgot. I didn't realize it. But this even happens with everyday people. So on average, people who are at a normal BMI, they tend to miscalculate by three to four hundred calories a day. People who are overweight, they tend to miscalculate by about seven to 800. So people just don't know how much they eat. And we are wired to overcompensate

and eat more, right? More food has always made sense throughout all of time. So if you can get people aware of like, what is an actual portion? How much food do I actually need? How do I just become more aware of not only what I'm eating, but also all my other habits? That seems to move the dial for people. He's got, I can't remember the exact number, but it's something like he's helped people lose like 200,000 something pounds. I mean, it's crazy. And he works with everyone from, you know, people who's, this is their last stop on the quote unquote diet train. Next thing is going to be bariatric surgery to he's worked with strong men who have been, you know, champions and ultra runners and stuff like that. So he worked for I can't remember one of the Eastern countries Olympic team for a for a while too and helped him win some medals so he's

kind of all over the board most interesting though this doesn't have anything to do with food is when he was in college he's a super genius i told you knows everything about chemistry he got recruited by the hell's angels to help them make meth more or. Like this is one of the ways he helped himself get through college, which is like totally wacky. What? Yeah, man. Really? Like he's like a real-life Heisenberg, yeah.

Oh, my God. Yeah. How much did he make selling meth? I don't know, enough to get through college. I didn't ask him for the exact figure, but, yeah. And then he said, all right, guys, I graduated. Thank you. Bye. Yeah, they had sort of a falling out, I guess. I wonder why. Yeah. for the exact figure but yeah and it was and then he said all right guys i graduated thank you bye yeah they had sort of a falling out i guess and wonder why yeah he's cooking this fucking amazing

math so he didn't actually cook it but he would meet with them and be like here's the problem here's exactly how you have to do it here's the problem here's how you have to make this steps more efficient you have too many steps in the chemical process by removing it you're gonna like whatever so we'd meet up with these guys. And they wanted him to keep going, obviously. Yeah, and then it didn't go well. They at one point accused him of ripping them off or giving them bad information. And he goes, no, you just didn't follow it.

That's your problem. And he's interesting because he grew up kind of in a somewhat broken home. So as a teen, he had some issues with, like, depression. And he's like, dude, I just didn't even really care. Like, all right, kill me, whatever, you know, like, fuck off. And eventually they just left him alone. Wow. Yeah.

That's rare. Trippy dude. Wow. Figuring out how the fuck does he even know how to make meth? Was he making his own meth? No, just he's a chemist. Like he really understands. But I would imagine when you're telling the Hell's Angels how to correctly make meth,

there's got to be a little bit of trial and error there. Yeah, I don't know. Meaning he probably made it a little bit himself, and maybe that's how he got through college by the time he was 17. Could have. Who knows? Might have been a little. I mean, right?

Like a lot of people take Adderall. Yeah. Yeah. I don't know. It's not that far off from meth. No. No, it's really not, I guess. He's a meth head. Your friend's a meth head.

That's what I'm trying to say. Isn't it funny how talking about food makes you hungry? I'm hungry now. Oh, no. We're talking about all this food. Well, I'm fine. I'm not trying to lose weight. But I'm hearing all this food talk.

I'm like, damn, I fucking could eat right now. Yeah. That'd be nice. Yeah. And that's a big problem. I've had a couple people on that have had pretty dramatic weight loss, one of them being Action Bronson, who's a chef, and Ethan Suplee. How do you say his last name?

Suplee? Suplee? Suplee. Who's an actor who's lost more than 270 pounds. Wow. I mean, he was enormous at one point in time, and now he looks great. But we were talking about food, and one of the problems with being addicted to food is that everyone has to eat like if you're addicted to gambling you don't have to go to a casino right to stay alive but you need to eat

to stay alive so if you're addicted to food like fuck that is such a mind game you're playing all the time i thought about that what so what did they do to, I mean, how did they mitigate that? Fucking stay strong. Yeah. Stay gold, pony boy. I don't know. You just got to stay strong. I mean, there's really no easy way out of it.

Yeah. You have to just decide this is what you do. And in Ethan's case, Ethan had gone through many ups and downs. Like he had even had a bunch of skin removed and then gained another hundred pounds so yeah so he's he had gone on that yo-yo many times until you know and this is over a 20-year period of losing weight wow but he's done it now i mean he looks fucking incredible now it's it's it's amazing that's amazing. And for Bronson, he started during COVID because he has a child and he realized that a lot of people are saying that obesity is a real problem during COVID. And

he also realized he was just way too fat and out of shape and he was just so unhealthy. And he wanted to be there for his wife and his child. And he just made a conscious decision that I'm going to be a healthier person. And he's a chef too, which is also kind of crazy because he likes fantastic food. But he's lost 130 pounds just this year, and I worked out with him. We took him to the Onnit gym, and he looked great. Really? It's amazing. He gets after it and does it every day. Works out every day. Every day.

Yeah. I feel like, I mean, I, I feel like our food system is set up in such a way in our lives overall that, I mean, it's, it's a wonder that not more than 70% of people are overweight. You know, it's like the food that we have now being so ultra processed and calorie dense, like it sort of preys on these internal mechanisms we have where it's like you get a shot of dopamine from eating this ultra processed stuff. And it's it doesn't fill you up. It's so calorie dense. I think this is where thinking about the type of food you're eating and like how do you control hunger you know it's like having foods that are less processed we know is you're going to be more filled up on fewer calories and that seems to help people it's like there's a reason why people didn't become overweight or obese until about 100 years ago you know well it was also difficult to get food. Yeah. That's a big issue.

But foods that are healthy, whether it's salads or grass-fed meat, you don't gorge on those. You gorge on pasta and ice cream and cake. Totally. That stuff just – you can't get enough cake. You start eating cake and you just want to – oh, it's so good. The frosting. Because there's no place in nature where sugar comes in that form. No.

So your body gets that. You're like, what the fuck is this? And the next thing you know, you have 1,000 pounds of cake in your face. Yeah. Do you know the only form of just pure sugar in nature? What is it? Honey. Oh.

To get that, you have to climb up a tree and get in a big-ass fight with some bees. But honey also has like some medicinal properties to it. Yeah. It's actually good for you. Yeah. And, you know, there's actually some thought that honey, dependent upon the area that it's in, can help. This might be total woo-woo horse shit. Maybe we need to Google this now that I'm thinking about it.

Is it the allergy thing? No. Yeah, that it has something, some protectants from the area, from the pollen in the area in which the bees are processing this honey. Yeah. You've heard that too? I've heard that too. I don't know if it's legit or not.

I don't know if it's legit. But, yeah, so the Hadza, I mean, honey is like their prized food, right? Because it's calorie dense. And so when you eat that, you get this nice shot of dopamine because it's so calorie dense. And nowadays we're like just swimming in foods that are more calorie dense than honey. Here it says, but these results haven't been consistently duplicated in clinical studies. Okay. Honey has been anecdotally reported to lessen symptoms in people with seasonal allergies. The results have not been consistently duplicated in clinical studies. Okay, honey has been anecdotally reported to lessen symptoms in people with seasonal allergies. The results have not been consistently duplicated

in clinical studies. The idea isn't so far-fetched, though. Honey has been studied as a cough suppressant and may have anti-inflammatory effects. I think it's also good for people that have, like, cuts and skin injuries. It was also used back in the day to preserve food. Oh, that's cool.

They think that when humans ate a lot of psychedelic mushrooms and they wanted to preserve them, they would do one of two things. They would either dry them out or they would preserve them in honey. Oh, wow. Yeah. That's fascinating. Interesting. Yeah.

Well, there's also a very specific type of honey that is a psychedelic drug. There's like a psychedelic honey that's very difficult to get. It's blue honey. Yeah, there it is. Oh, wait. Didn't we talk about that one? This is a different honey. Yeah, yeah, yeah. As you were saying it, I remember we talked about it. That's the honey that's preserving psychedelic mushrooms in honey. But there's a type of honey that the way these bees gather the pollen, that they're somehow or another getting pollen from some plant that has some sort of a psychoactive ingredient in it.

Okay. Yeah, there it is. Mad honey, known to be a powerful hallucinogen and recreational drug, as well as being ascribed many medicinal features. The honey is thought to be effective in treating everything from hypertension and diabetes to poor sexual performance when taken in small doses. Holla, Himalayan bees. Yeah.

Man. But look at how they get it. It's really wild. They get it off a cliffside. Oh, wow. See how they get it? Like there's some wild – see how they do it? Oh, that's crazy.

Yeah. So these guys have to get this fucking honey. They have to climb up that side of a fucking mountain. And then they have to, you know, get the shit stung out of them while they get this stuff. Oh, wow. Yeah. Look how it grows. Thank God it's on a cliff.

I was thinking, what if the bears get into that thing, man? Tripping. Tripping balls. Yeah. Wild. I wonder how you get that stuff. It's in Nepal. Think you can get it here?

Yeah. I remember the last time we talked about this. I think we looked it up. It's not easy to get, but you can get it. Oh, look at that dude's fingers. Scroll down. Look at his fingers where he's been jacked by the bees. Yikesies.

Oh, God. Yeah. Just fucked up. Covered in honey and swollen fingers. But later on, tripping balls. Yeah, you can buy it. It's not cheap, but you can buy it. Oh, yeah.

You can buy mad honey. There you go. All right. Well, we'll see. We'll see. I don't know if they ship it, but you can buy it. Yeah, you can buy it. It's not cheap, but you can buy it. Oh, yeah. You can buy mad honey. There you go. Well, we'll see. We'll see. I don't know if they ship it, but you can buy it. Yeah, right? Is it legal?

I don't know. Well, there's some psychedelic drugs that are still legal. They fucked up and they slipped through. Like salvia, which is one of the most potent. It's for whatever reason. They never caught it. Oh, interesting. Salvia divinorum is crazy stuff,

and you used to be able to buy it in head shops. Wow. Yeah, what's interesting is going back to this idea of challenges, even Native American tribes, when they would go get the peyote, it was often like there was a physical ceremony that went into that. It was a long hike to go down to that area that it grew, and it became like a ritual, like almost a religious practice, right? So it was like this physical trial they'd go

through to get it and then bring it back up. So it became this overall like life-changing thing, you know? It was like marrying the physical with the mental and having to like get through things. Yeah, like the ayahuasca rituals that they'll have in the jungle and different rites of passage. Yeah, I think for a lot of young people, there's this weird thing that happens as you become an adult where you're like, okay, am I an adult now? Yeah.

Am I an adult now? Do I have to wait a week? Now I'm an adult, but I feel the same. When do I become a fucking adult? Yeah. But if you do go through some sort of a rite of passage, it would make sense that there would be, especially if it's a difficult thing, that you would feel like you had crossed over and you'd become whole.

You'd become a new thing. Yeah. Yeah, exactly. We don't have that. I mean, what, like, I don't know what the closest thing to compare it to that we do today. You know, it's like- Yeah.

It's like, it's not getting your driver's license driver's license not graduating college because then you're in debt and you feel fucked over yeah totally like where's the jobs yeah exactly um i think difficult things you know whether whatever those difficult things are whether it's running marathons or you know something where you can accomplish very significant goals where you are pushed and that these aren't easy accomplishments. Yeah. You're breaking through some new area of your fortitude where you recognize that you do have capabilities beyond what you thought before you did this. Yeah, exactly. Like that crazy run you went on, like anything like that.

Yeah, I think, look at Joseph Campbell. I'm going to mess up this quote, but in his Hero with a Thousand Faces, he's got this line that's like, when we go out and think we're slaying another, we're actually slaying ourselves. When we go out into discomfort, we're actually coming into the center of our own existence. So it's like we don't go out and do these things're actually coming into the center of our own existence. So it's like,

we don't go out and do these things like for others at all. It's like, this is 100% you becoming this different, more capable, confident person, you know? And that's what we're missing. Yeah. Did you do the audio book? I did. So that's good. Thank God. God, I hate it when somebody else reads someone's book, especially've got a good voice, like solid. Oh, good. Good to read an audio book. You know, if you have like some weird way of talking, it would be an issue. Yeah.

Even then, I'd want to hear it from the guy. It was more, well, one, it was more challenging than I thought. And two, the producer was hilarious because apparently I have certain words and phrases that are, you know, the generations of whatever it is, Easter generations from the sticks in Idaho. And I'd say them wrong and he'd be like, hold up. Like at one point I'm reading. What words? You want to hear an embarrassing one? Yeah. Do you say you say especially no it wasn't that i think it might actually be worse i'm going through and uh i have a reference to mozart in the book but i'm going through and i just see it m-o-z-a-r-t and so i'm like you know blah blah

mozart and he just goes hold up he He goes, it's Mozart. Yeah, you're right. Sorry. Mozart is how I would say it. Do you say Mozart? I wouldn't. I might give that a strong pronunciation on the T there. Mozart.

Yeah. I don't know how I would say that. Yeah, Mozart. Now I have to think that I would say it correctly, but I probably wouldn't have. I probably would have said Mozart. Yeah, and then I got in the studio the next day. He goes, you know, did you listen to some Chopin when you got home? Ah, what a dick.

Oh, yeah. He was a good, he was a funny dude, though. Yeah, it was an interesting experience for sure. Well, listen, man, I really enjoyed our conversation. Thank you very much for coming in here. Yeah, man, it was fun. So your book, The Comfortfort Crisis it's available right now you can get it

you can get it on audio you can get it on regular book if you're a masochist you want to sit down and torture yourself exactly

thank you very much man yeah thank you enjoyed it alright bye everybody Thank you.