Michael Easter’s The Comfort Crisis argues modern society’s hyper-comfort—soft beds, 11-hour screen time, and helicopter parenting—has stunted human evolution, linking obesity (70%+ of people) and mental health declines to lost challenges. His Arctic caribou hunt and Bhutanese monastery visits reveal discomfort as a catalyst for growth, contrasting with urban burnout and processed foods exploiting dopamine. Studies like Rachel Hopman’s "nature pyramid" show 20 minutes in parks reduces stress, while extreme trials (e.g., rucking, Misogi) unlock hidden resilience. Rogan echoes this, citing his own hunting expeditions and Thompson/Hemingway’s self-destructive legacies, framing discomfort as essential for authenticity and adaptation. [Automatically generated summary]
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 of breakfast burrito, right, 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?
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.
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 an escalator.
70% of people, more than 70% now, are overweight or obese.
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.
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-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 the Goggins of the world, like the Cam Haynes of the world.
But I think most people don't really go out and see what they're capable of.
Is there comfort in 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 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, well, stress, but mental stress.
No actual physical adversity to overcome, which stresses out the body but actually relaxes the mind.
That's what people are missing, right?
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, he looks like a fucking model for some J.Crew catalog out there wandering around.
Maybe like an Abercrombie& 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.
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.
You know, in the past, we would send young people out to do some trial.
And the idea was that, like, hey, you're at 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 gonna 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, you know, typical archetype of, you know, 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, like, how often are they challenged?
You just push all the challenge out of your kid's life.
So a good example of this would be the parents who paid to get 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?
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.
And 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.
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 lived 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.
I've had people, you know, 7 hours, 45 minutes.
8 hours, 50 minutes.
9 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.
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.
And 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.
This is associated with just burnout, anxiety, etc.
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 take these different creativity tests that scientists use, and the people who are 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?
Do you experience this when you're trying to think of stuff in your own work?
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.
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?
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.
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?
I want to say he was like a machinist or something like that.
Like, he had a normal life.
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 injury.
And the injury, 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.
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, you know, he lived the last days of his life, I think, in Washington State.
But here it shows him making various tools.
He's got like a...
Wood auger to make a hammer with and makes makes a wooden mallet and did the whole deal like he made everything But he got just this tremendous satisfaction and talked about the tremendous satisfaction he got from just being allowed to live this subsistence life and Yeah.
It's amazing that I can pull up a 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.
I don't necessarily think the answer is to...
Go live in the woods in Alaska for the rest of your life.
Although that'd 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... 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 a 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 for a lot of his writing and stuff like that.
And I feel like people don't have that as much anymore.
We pitch this thing on this, like, kind of knob, because the winds are coming in from a direction where, like, oh, it's going to be protected, and then we'll move it when the winds shift in a couple days.
While the winds 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?
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.
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.
that 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 the germs we could.
And so this has given us less of a defense and given us less variety in our guts that can improve our gut health.
I mean, 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?
But it has running heated water, and so I go in and I, you know, I pee and I get to the faucet and 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 a...
Hike down to a stream, fill up these water bags, hike them back up to camp, you know, and 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, 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, I would just sit there as we're waiting, being like, oh, God, this place is so mismanaged.
What the fuck is wrong with these people?
Can't you get your shit together?
Can't you just refill that person's water?
Move people out in a normal way?
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 2000 calories and I'm warm and I'm happy.
My friend Dan Doty actually does that with young troubled men.
He takes them on these experiences in the woods, this sort of rites of passage type deal.
A lot of young guys, particularly ones from affluent households who really don't have any challenges in their life, and he takes them and has them live in the woods with them.
For weeks and weeks at a time.
He takes them on these camping trips.
Dan was one of the producers of this show called Meat Eater.
That was the first show that I ever had a hunting experience on.
The hunting experience was in Montana, in the Missouri Breaks.
It was nine degrees outside and we're camping.
We did it for, I guess it was six or seven days.
We were successful.
We got fortunate.
And came back with Deere and then we went to this place, I believe it was Billings, we went to this 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.
So pleasurable.
To be in this ratchet ass, fake wood paneling.
You know what I mean?
Like, the whole deal.
Like, there was nothing nice about this motel room.
You know, and I had brought my own soap, you know, because I travel with— That's good planning.
This is soap that I use called Defense Soap, and it's got—it's mostly—it was developed for grapplers, but it's all to protect your skin from, like, skin issues like ringworm and stuff like that.
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.
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 It was tough.
And we, you know, at one point we are on this hill glassing, and we've 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 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.
And 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 thought were older and bigger.
And they come over 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.
They get within 150 yards and it's like, this is the point where I want to shoot.
But it kept going in and out of the herd.
I couldn't get him in the scope.
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 look down the scope and...
Now they're 160, 170. They pass 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.
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 gonna 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.
It hit me like it was the most depressed and alive I've ever felt at the same time.
Unbelievable feeling.
I don't know how to describe it.
Just thankful.
A lot of gratuity.
But at the same time, I'm like, I don't know if I'd ever do this again.
Those guys get back and Then we start to, you know, field dress the animal.
And 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.
They have, 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.
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, like, 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 De Carpo.
And it's on this cliff, right?
And my driver has what is essentially a smart car with a backseat.
And we have to go up this mountain road, cliff-side mountain road that's totally rutted out.
I'm like, are you going to be able to make this?
And he's just like...
I mean, we're like four-wheeling this smart car thing, and it was just unbelievable.
And after 45 minutes, you know, he pulls over, and I have to hike for maybe 10 minutes along this trail and get to this guy's shack.
And, you know, he has someone there who helps 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.
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 immediately hit with the smell of burning incense.
And on the right, there's this, there's like a big statue of the Buddha and like photos and different little, you know, trinkets, Buddhist trinkets.
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 so I talked to him for a few hours about, you know, death and, like, how do we...
How do they view it 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 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 than 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.
It's probably very important in terms of what you need to enjoy the ride.
You just think it's going to go on forever.
It's like you're saying about kind of being impatient about the waitstaff.
That restaurant and thinking what an inconvenience it is that they're so slow to get you water versus what you feel after you've been hunting for 33 days and actually killed an animal.
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'm going to have to figure out what it means to eat.
I was probably 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.
When I did go hunting, the moment I shot that animal, the moment it was down, you could actually watch it.
There's a video that's available online.
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, like, 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.
It would be hard for me to explain with just words.
Because it's such...
It's a strange emotion.
First of all, I didn't fully grasp...
Like you were saying, 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 I always gravitate towards things that I think are difficult, that are scary, whether it's martial arts competition or stand-up comedy or anything.
I gravitate towards things that I think are difficult because 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 floated down the river like 40 miles 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.
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 eaten fish, and 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.
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.
Next was a turkey.
I had a dead turkey that I shot.
People were like, hmm, I don't know what's dead turkey.
Then I had bear meat.
It just said bear meat.
Nobody said anything.
They didn't know what to say because it was just meat.
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, 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.
But people, for whatever reason, have not connected bears with food for a long time.
In terms of the history of the United States, Daniel Boone was famous for being a bear hunter and 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.
You know, I really do believe that elk meat in particular, that dark red wild animal that's running around the mountains like you're getting so it's so nutrient dense.
I think the idea of doing things at scale is lost.
You've got to 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 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, how are we 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'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've got to go back to when they're a baby.
You've got to start from scratch.
You've 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, to this day, even just doing stand-up 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.
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.
There's weird things that people do with food when they get really, really wealthy and really, really opulent and just where there's so much food, you can do whatever you want, but 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's 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.
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...
However, that doesn't stop some from eating the bird.
According to the New York Times, about 30,000 Ortolan 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.
Secret gatherings featuring the elusive meal have been documented.
In 2008, Esquire writer Michael Paternity attended one such French dinner that served Ortolan.
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.
It was like it had broken in and it had broken into their food supply.
There was a couple different issues with this particular bear.
And once they just decide, like, It would be literally like if you were really hungry and like a puppy was trying to keep you from getting to some food.
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.
They know what they're doing, and they know that certain populations of animals get out of hand.
It could be a real issue, both for prey animals and for predators, for all of them.
There's a balance that can be achieved.
I mean, it's controversial, but there's a documentary.
The reason why it's controversial is because the guy who made the documentary is a bit nutty.
But 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, 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.
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 when they're just moving in their normal trot, they're going like 12 miles an hour.
You know, so when we would see a herd and we'd think, okay, I hope it, you know, slows down 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, one time, this was super fascinating, we had gotten skunked, had this, you know, old bull 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.
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 hooves just smashing the tundra.
You know, at 70 yards, it's like you can start to smell them.
Wow.
At 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 in 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 uh I mean it's like uh It's kind of like wild as a 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.
Do you think that's also because of 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, you know?
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 this shit they have to take out in the wild and 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 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 know?
Well, that's how human beings are designed, right?
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, oh, I love the energy of the city.
Like, but that's fucking madness, man.
Like, the energy of that city is madness.
Yeah.
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?
Well, they're designed much like fractals, where you kind of have these big splatters that go into these smaller ones, and they all kind of fade in and out.
So we see those patterns.
In nature and in the wild, but you don't get them in cities because cities are just a bunch of right angles and concrete, right?
So when we get out of nature, we are embedded in those.
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.
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.
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.
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...
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...
So, like, one of the things that these old guys like to do is go into spin class, and I'm in there, and there's this one in front of me that, like, was in this group, and, you know, 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.
Yeah, 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.
He had this insane routine that it was documented in, I forget what book it was, or article some woman wrote about him.
I'm pretty sure it was a woman, but Greg Fitzsimmons and I read it on the air, like read just what he did, like 6 o'clock in the morning, cocaine, all these different things that he did.
And then, who's the fucking guy that turned it into a song?
Something Man.
What is his name?
But it's...
6am in the hot tub with champagne was the end of the day for Hunter.
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, and even though he was odd, and he was clearly like...
Very unusual dude who liked to party.
You can understand him.
He had deteriorated in a way that I don't think he was aware.
You know, it's one of those questions where you go, do 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 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 100 years ago.
But 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.
You know, my mom 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, you know?
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, I'm shitting my pants on the runway.
I'm like, you want me to get in that little thing?
I don't like flying on a 737, much less this plane that's the size of a Snickers bar.
But then we go out, and we face all these different things, and you just keep putting one foot in front of the other.
Each situation is hard, but you get through it.
When that plane comes and picks me up a month later, Fuck it.
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.
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.
And he's also kind of a far-out character.
Like, 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 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, 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 individualized programs.
He dropped the hamstring injury rate to 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 them, 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 Misogi.
So it's named after an ancient Japanese myth.
And the basic idea is that once a year...
I'm gonna 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.
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'd sort of dive 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 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?
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 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 and prove.
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%.
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 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, no, 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 are.
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.
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?
One of the things that I found really interesting is, like, after packing that caribou out, I started thinking about exercise.
And when you look at humans, we're actually pretty damn athletically pathetic.
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 caring.
We're the only animals who can carry.
Most other animals, they've 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 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.
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?
Like, 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?
Don't you think that what happens when people get involved, whether it's weightlifting 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 weightlifting and 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 say, ah, you don't need to run.
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, 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.
When you wrote this book, did you write this book 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.
So, I mean, the way that the book is written is 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, It's not like just doing any one of these is going to solve all your problems.
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, 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...
Probably for a while, though, I was 185. And so I was within what's considered healthy, but I'm still at the higher end of the healthy BMI. And just from running, my hips would hurt afterwards.
And I started working with this dude who's in the book, and his name is Trevor Cashy.
He's, I think he's 28 now, but he graduated college, I think, when he was 17 or 18. Got his PhD when he was 22, I believe.
He's interesting because when he was in college, he started working with a lot of athletes and just like everyday people helping him 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 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 can pick any random diet, and if you follow that diet, you're gonna lose weight.
But the question is, well, why the hell don't people follow diets?
That comes down to the why, is 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.
So things like it'll increase your hunger signaling.
It'll slow down your metabolism.
So 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 him figure out how do I discern the difference between, you know, this sort of, I guess in the 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.
So there's this one famous study that found It looked at overweight people who said that 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 2,000 calories.
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 300 to 400 calories a day.
People who are overweight, they tend to miscalculate by about 700 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.
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 whose this is their last stop on the quote-unquote diet train, the 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.
He worked for, I can't remember, one of the Eastern countries Olympic teams for a while, too, and helped him win some medals.
So he's kind of all over the board.
Most interesting now, 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 Hells Angels to help them make meth, more or less.
This is one of the ways he helped himself get through college, which is totally wacky.
And for Bronson, he started during COVID because he has a child, and he realized that a lot of people were 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 and he wanted to be there for his wife and his child and he just made a conscious decision that I'm gonna be a healthier person and he's a chef too which is also kind of crazy because you know 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.
I feel like our food system is set up in such a way in our lives overall that, I mean, 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 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.
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.
Yeah, what's interesting is like going back to this idea of challenges, like 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 life-changing thing.
It was like marrying the physical with the mental and having to get through things.
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.
I think difficult things, whatever those difficult things are, whether it's running marathons or something where you can accomplish very significant goals.
Where you are pushed and that these aren't easy accomplishments.
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.
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, like, for others at all.
It's like, this is 100% you becoming this different, more capable, confident person, you know?
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.
I'm going through and 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, blah, Mozart.