Ep. 997: Rewilding Your Life with Micheal Easter

00:00:01
Speaker 1: Welcome to the Wired to Hunt Podcast, your guide to the White Tail Woods, presented by First Light, creating proven versatile hunting apparel for the stand, saddle or blind. First Light Go Farther, Stay Longer, and now your host, Mark Kenyon.

00:00:19
Speaker 2: Welcome to the Wired to Hunt Podcast. This week on the show, I’m joined by Michael Easter. He is the author of The Comfort Crisis and Scarcity Brain, and we’re discussing tangible ways we can add wildness back into our lives and the real impact that can have on our happiness, our outdoor pursuits, and our sense of satisfaction across all things. All right, welcome back to the Wired to Hunt podcast, brought to you by First Light, and Happy New Year. A new Year’s upon us. I can’t believe that’s the case. We’re two weeks in now, I suppose, and it’s always shocking how quickly these things sneak up on us. But twenty twenty six is here, and we’re gonna be kicking off the new year.

00:01:09
Speaker 3: You know.

00:01:09
Speaker 2: Last week we discussed some of the top conservation issues to be thinking about and looking forward to today, and then again in a couple of weeks we’re going to do a couple outside the box episodes, some episodes where we explore topics that are a little bit beyond strictly deer hunting, beyond strictly how to, and we’re gonna zoom out a bit and explore some different ideas and philosophies or concepts things that can help you become a better deer hunter, but also help you become a better angler outdoors men or woman, a student, businessman or woman, dad, mom, son, daughter, person in general. We’re gonna get outside of the usual and talk about some higher level things that impact our daily lives but definitely have a significant influence on who we are as hunters or anglers. Some of these will be discussing, you know, how to perform better, how to excel, how to be excellent at something like hunting or fishing or hiking or backpacking. But we’re also going to discuss how to, you know, think about success, how to set better goals, how to be more productive or happier or enjoy the pursuits that you are chasing, whatever that might be. That’s kind of what we’re going to explore a couple times here to set ourselves up to hopefully have maybe our best year ever, and today’s guest is I think the perfect person to help us do that. As I mentioned in the introduction, this is Michael Easter. He is a journalist and an author of two really great books that I’ve enjoyed in the past. The Comfort Crisis, which explores the many different ways that our increasingly comfortable world is impacting us in possibly negative ways. Great book. It uses a really exciting Alaskan backcountry hunt as the spine of that story with Donnie Vincent, who’s a past guest of this podcast too, so highly recommend that. His book, Scarcity Brain explores how kind of the evolutionary history of humanity has led us to have this constant desire for more and more and more, and how all sorts of things out there in the world kind of spike these habits or addictive behaviors that make us crave more food, or more social media, or more status or more many different things. So very interesting read. And then here in the next couple weeks, I believe he has another book coming out called Walking with Weight, and that’s all about the very specific physical practice of rucking hiking around with a big, heavy backpack. That book’s got a lot of very relevant stuff for hunters or outdoors. People who get outside carry heavy things. So that’s the background he brings to this. He also has the two Percent sub Stack, which is a terrific website, a newsletter that he sends out and that is on a quote here that explores simple, actionable strategies to improve your physical health, mental resilience, performance, and purpose. And I think that sums up his work very well. But I would add one additional qualifier, and this is something that came up in my conversation with Michael. This idea that kind of bubbled up for me that much of what he talks about, much of what he prescribes, is all about rewilding our lives. It’s inserting stuff back into our lives that used to be just what regular wild humans used to do. Even humans one hundred years ago used to do this stuff all the time. But modern day life, cities, technology, all of that has kind of stripped it away in many ways. It’s stripped discomfort, it’s stripped challenge, it’s stripped community or structure out of our lives. And Michael has explored unique ideas for bringing that back. And so that’s what we discussed to we discuss how to rewild our lives in this new year. How that can make you a better hunter, How that can make you a better outdoors men or woman, and a happier, more satisfied, productive, successful, healthy person in whatever pursuit it is you want to apply it to. So some very specific things we discuss include New Year’s resolutions, the science behind them, if they work or not, ideas for setting goals for the new year, the possible risks of setting goals around your recreational pursuits and your hobbies like hunting or fishing. We think discussed some different things around how modern high tech life today is changing our experiences, changing what it means to be human. It’s changing our happiness, our satisfaction, even how we experience hunts or fishing trips or camping trips. How all that’s kind of infiltrating our outdoor pursuits. We talk about social media. We talk about how that’s kind of hijacked our minds and how we might be able to reclaim control over that, which is certainly relevant to us as hunters and outdoors people who you know, we of course engage in social media. But then there’s this whole other comparison culture thing that is happening within our community and influencing how we, you know, judge success, how we feel about our you know, whether it be an animal that we tagged, or the goals we set for the year, or anything like that. So there’s a lot to unpack there. We discuss different ways to set big outdoor challenges and ways to explore our edges and exploring you know, how to do things outside of our comfort zone and why that’s important, how to best do that. Some cool ideas around that. We get into some physical training, some simple ways that we can become healthier, more capable backcountry hunters or mobile deer hunters or whatever it might be. There’s some simple but useful ideas here that we discussed with Michael. So there’s a lot. This is a great conversation.

00:07:00
Speaker 4: Really enjoyed it.

00:07:00
Speaker 2: I highly recommend picking up those books I mentioned earlier. If you’re into the rocking idea, this kind of backpacking for physical fitness, check out his newest book, Walking with Weight. And I will just say again, this is a conversation that is really relevant to you as a deer hunter or outdoors person. But I think you’re going to see a lot here that can be applied across the rest of your life too. So I hope you enjoy it as much as I did. And thanks for being here all right now with me on the line is Michael Easter. Welcome back to the show. Michael.

00:07:38
Speaker 3: Thanks for having me back.

00:07:39
Speaker 2: Man, I appreciate it.

00:07:40
Speaker 5: I’m looking forward to chatting again. It’s always funny to you.

00:07:43
Speaker 2: I agree. I enjoyed our last podcast, which felt like it wasn’t that long ago. But when I went back to kind of double check that, I realized it was five years ago, which is nuts. How fast this is all going.

00:07:56
Speaker 3: I know.

00:07:56
Speaker 5: I told my wife was like, what are you doing? So I’m gone on podcasts? You said, oh, what is it? And I told her it was yours. She goes, have you ever been on that? And I said yeah, and she goes, oh, when was that same deal? I was like, I want to say it was like a year ago, but if I actually look, it’s like half a decade ago.

00:08:11
Speaker 3: Man.

00:08:12
Speaker 2: Yeah, It’s it’s pretty wild. How all the cliche things that are that our parents and teachers and everyone said about how fast life goes, It’s it’s all very true. Yes, So here we are twenty I was about to say twenty twenty five. It’s twenty twenty six now New Year, and as I think, you know a lot of people do at this time of year, there’s all this focus on New Year’s resolutions, new year, new you, setting new goals, setting new plans, all of that. And I am one of those nerds who gets into that. I’m very into that. My wife and I literally had a sit down like annual review last night, talking through our plan for the new year and our goals and some things like that. But what’s your take on that, What’s what’s your personal take on, you know, this kind of new year, new youth thing. And then what does the you know, I’m not sure if you’ve looked in this specifically, but do you have any sense of what the literature says or what the you know, the the research points to as far as the effectiveness of setting your year kind of on this kind of annual calendar type of reset.

00:09:23
Speaker 5: Yeah, I mean, look, look, man, I think it’s I think it’s good. Like people can change any time they want, right, it’s like to begin begin, but the new year gives us an impetus to change. I think that set this is the bad news when you look at their research, most people fail, so like ninety five percent of New Year’s resolutions fail. Yeah, and there’s a variety of reasons for that, which I think we can get into in this, But first I would actually like to hear how’d you fair in your uh in your annual review? Tell me all about that?

00:09:58
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, without getting into too many of the gory details. Twenty twenty five passed. I had a passing grade as far as both my personal goals and what my wife was hoping for from me. There’s always a little bit of that, you know, friction, not friction, but just you know, you’re married, you know how it is with a marriage. It’s trying to bring together two totally different world views and perspectives and lives to then say like are we heading to the right direction? And are we going there in the right ways? And so fortunately it’s a great marriage. I have a great wife, and so we’re mostly on the same page. But then there’s always you know, you know, well, she’ll say things like can’t you just be normal? And I guess I don’t know how to be normal. I am what I am, so overall good, but with a typical marriage fund, So what’s exciting year for us.

00:10:48
Speaker 5: What I like about that though, is that there was some sort of analysis that happened. So I think one problem that people run into and why these things often fail, these resolutions, if you’ll call them, is that there’s no analysis of well, where have I gone wrong?

00:11:06
Speaker 4: Yeah?

00:11:07
Speaker 3: Right? We don’t look.

00:11:08
Speaker 5: Back and try and take measurements of what are my weak points, what are my failures so I can improve upon those weak points. Instead, people often say I’m going to create this new big goal and I’m just going to work towards that. But if you haven’t fixed what your biggest problems are, this is like trying to give gas to these big new habits as you have your foot on the break. So in my opinion, and I think the research backs this, is that it is our worst habits that really hold us back. Like if you don’t fix your worst habits, you’re not going to go forward at all. So I say that because I like how you did that analysis, and I think that a lot of people would benefit in the new year instead of picking some random goal and saying, no, I’m going to do this big thing, it’s going to change my life. To look back and go, Okay, well, what do I think is actually holding me back? And what can I do to sort of alleviate that whatever whatever it might be. Oftentimes you don’t have to set a big new goal. If you just take your foot off that break, all of a sudden, everything else will start changing. I mean, I think the extreme kit to just give an extreme case, because I think people like examples.

00:12:24
Speaker 3: For me at least it helps them stick.

00:12:26
Speaker 5: Is if you think about someone who’s let’s say an alcoholic, right, people who are in the grips of drinking will often go, I just need to exercise more. I just need to eat a healthy diet. My life will improve. I just need to do X y Z. It’s like, but if this person, if your fundamental problem is that, like you have this terrible habit of drinking too much, it doesn’t matter all the good stuff you do, like, you’re still going to be held back in life. So it’s like, how can you just pull your foot off the break of that bad thing? And then oftentimes everything will sort itself out afterwards.

00:12:54
Speaker 2: So I got to believe that most of your work around this for people, or I think why many people come to you really is how do they you know, build better habits, change their lifestyle, build better frameworks and systems to have a healthier, more satisfying life, et cetera. But on this topic of goals and and you know, developing some sense of direction of where you want to take things, whether it’s eliminating a bad habit or adding a better habit, or setting some kind of stretch goal or taking on something challenging. What happens when you apply that to a recreational pursuit? You know? I mean, there’s there’s the thought around, like hunters and anglers, we do this thing that brings us joy, that that brings us peace. But then there’s also the desire to set goals within that. Right, Increasingly people want to get the next big buck or a bigger buck, or they want to get three bucks, or they want to do this big new fishing trip or achieve this grand slam thing. Fish x y Z states, there’s all these different ways that we gamify recreation in our pursuits and passions. What’s the impact of that? Is that?

00:14:05
Speaker 4: Is there a.

00:14:05
Speaker 2: Danger in that? Is that a healthy thing to do? Does that risk our enjoyment or help it?

00:14:13
Speaker 3: Yeah?

00:14:13
Speaker 5: I’m going to answer that multiple ways, because I feel like there’s kind of a layering of questions in there, which I like. So on one hand, it’s good to have a big goal, right it inspires you, maybe starts you to get acting. But the problem often is that if the goal is way too big, you start to fail, and when you start to get the negative feedback towards failure, people often quit. And it’s also asking for a lot of change at once. So I think sometimes it’s better to break things up into manageable sections and to think, Okay, my goal is to complete this Grand Slam or whatever, but what are the ten things I’m going to have to do in order to actually reach that? And so the goal becomes the first step of that because that’s a lot more easy to reach. And so once you’ve hit that, you get some momentum, you get this positive feedback, and you can start to build on that positive feedback. So I wouldn’t you know, I’m not the type of person to say, like, oh, just just pick the easiest goal and go for that, because I think that can be limiting to people. Keep your big goal, but how can you chop it up into much more manageable steps. I mean, like A big part of my so might substack newsletter is called the two percent newsletter, and it’s the name comes from a study that found that only two percent of people take the stairs when there’s an escalator available. Now, to me, one hundred percent of people know that taking the stairs is going to be better for their health, well being, their mental health, all these different things, and yet ninety percent of people just default to the easy, effortless thing where if you can just start with the stairs, one set of stairs is not going to change your life. But if you take the next setistairs, the next setistairs, and then you go, oh, you know what, by going through that little bit of discomfort, I sort of improved. And where else can I apply that two percent mindset across the board to different things? Now I’m parking in the farthest spot of the parking lot, Now I’m going you know what, I’m not going to eat those oreos before I go to bed or whatever. It might be just like finding these little wins, and I think those wins can stack up and that can be applied to these larger goals too, of like, Okay, what’s the next small win I can do?

00:16:32
Speaker 3: What can I do?

00:16:33
Speaker 5: Today to sort of get me there, and you sort of keep doing that and then you find yourself going, oh my god, I just I just complained to this grand slam.

00:16:41
Speaker 2: Yeah. I like the way that James Clear puts it. He says something something along the lines of, you know, every action you take is a vote for the kind of person you want to be.

00:16:52
Speaker 3: Yeah.

00:16:52
Speaker 2: I thought about that a lot. It’s like, Okay, this is this is something that signals my end state that I want to be at it. This is the kind of thing that that kind of person would do, and so I’m gonna start to do that kind of thing, take the stairs, or drink the water or whatever it might be. It’s those little things that, to your point, they stack up. And I don’t know if you meant this with your you know, or at least when I first saw you the title for your newsletter. The two percent thought that I had was not only is two percent representative of the small minority of people who will do the harder thing, but I also think that also if you think about doing the harder thing, it’s getting like two percent better every day or every week. That’s how we get better at anything. That’s how we grow that’s how we build satisfaction or accomplishment or whatever. It’s by like stacking up these little one percents here, two percents here, week after week, year after year. That’s something we talk about in the hunting world all the time. It’s it’s stacking all these tiny little variables, getting a little better in all these different little ways over time, and that compounds, and so that mindset, I think, you know there’s a lot to it.

00:17:53
Speaker 5: Yeah, And you know it’s not two percent of people climb everest, it’s two percent of people take a freaking staircase right at Sometimes the most obvious wins in life, we just neglect them. I think a lot of this goes back to like our evolutionary wiring of we’re effectively wired to do the next easiest, most comfortable thing, because that always kept us alive in these harsh environments. But now we’ve engineered our world for comfort and ease, we still have that sort of wiring that pushed us to do the easy thing, even though it doesn’t help us in the long run. So it’s sort of overcoming that in different ways all the time. And then to sort of continue answering the question that you asked a bit ago, and you you basically asked about gamifying habits.

00:18:39
Speaker 3: Okay, to me, that’s a double edged sword.

00:18:42
Speaker 5: On one hand, having gamification and numbers can incentivize people because it allows us to measure and see our improvements. The downside, though, is that the way that we gamify things narrows the goal to a set of numbers, and we get fixated on those numbers, whereas if we look at the actual big thing we’re trying to accomplish, it’s often not to just get a number. I’ll use the example of like fitness trackers and step counts, so people will get a step counter. So we’re gonna quantify our activity. We’re gonna tell ourselves I need to get twelve thousand steps a day. So you start to like, okay, twelve thousand’s my number, right, goal, go twelve thousand. I got to get this twelve thousand every day, and you get fixated on that number.

00:19:41
Speaker 3: But if you pull back, what is the point? What is the overall point?

00:19:46
Speaker 5: The overall point is not to get twelve thousand steps a day. The overall point is to become a more active person. Why do we want to become a more active person, so we can get healthier, maybe our mindset will improve, maybe will be less stressed, all these other thing But when we start to fixate on the number, we often lose sight of those bigger, larger goals, and that can sometimes steer us wrong. So it’s again, it’s one of those double edged swords, and you have to kind of realize, how is the gamification helping push me towards this larger like this larger goal I’m going for, But you also have to avoid getting sucked into just the goal of this number for the sake of the number. If that makes sense.

00:20:26
Speaker 2: It does. And here’s another kind of double edged sword issue within this that I’ve wrestled with a lot, is like this tendency that many of us have to want to be achievement oriented, to want to grow, to want to get better at something, and how that impacts something that is a passion, a recreational pursuit. Again going back to this core example of like hunting or fishing, right, for a lot of people, they come to that as just like a thing for fun. And you write about in the Comfort Crisis about the importance of you know, having space and peace and boredom and quiet time and all of that. And you experience that in the Arctic when hunting with Downey, and I think many other people do when they’re deer hunting or fishing or anything like that. Right, that’s a place for you know, it’s not necessarily boredom, but it’s it’s space and quiet and indifferent than normal everyday life. But then so many times this thing all of a sudden like builds momentum, and all of a sudden it’s like, well, now I want to get more or I want to get better, I want to do this, and so you start attaching goals to this thing where all of a sudden, what was just a fun, peaceful joy experience transitions to this achievement experience, and all the things that you just talked about there where all of a sudden it’s like I need to get ten fish, I need to kill you know, one hundred and seventy five inch buck, or I need to do whatever the thing is. And then all of a sudden, there’s not only the you know, there’s not only kind of this like reinforcing effect of chasing, you know, losing sight of the forest for the trees kind of thing, but then you’re also attaching pressures to it, and I don’t know. I mean, there’s there’s these two things that there’s the value of doing hard things that you talk about so often it makes a lot of sense, But then there’s also this value to sometimes just having experiences or just joy for the sake of that too, like being a human. How do you reconcile that?

00:22:28
Speaker 5: Yeah, I think your example of Antler scores is that the correct terminology. Yeah, that’s a perfect example. Yeah, where it’s like, why’d you start hunting in the first place? Probably day one, it wasn’t oh I want to get one hundred and seventy five, Like it’s just it’s such an arbitrary y exactly, But once you get deeper into it, that becomes the goal and like not really the goal of hunting is like you’re going to get outside, You’re going to move around, You’re going to engage in this practice that humans have engaged in ever since we started walking on two feet, and even before then when we weren’t even humans.

00:23:04
Speaker 3: Right. So for me.

00:23:08
Speaker 5: To answer your question about how do I sort of balance those things, I just try and not pay attention to the numbers. I try and always ask myself why am I doing this thing in the first place? I could apply that to like, I don’t know weekly run mileages. I’ve never really gotten into antler size and hunting, and I don’t hunt all that often, maybe like once a year about the past couple of years.

00:23:34
Speaker 3: Haven’t made it out at all. I just like, I don’t know.

00:23:38
Speaker 5: I’m just very cognizant of the fact that, Okay, why, I’m.

00:23:41
Speaker 3: Always going back to the why, the deeper why? What’s that?

00:23:45
Speaker 5: Like a istn’t there’s some practice in Toyota. The guy who found a Toyota was like, you got to ask why six times?

00:23:53
Speaker 2: Interesting?

00:23:54
Speaker 3: So you go, okay, well why are we doing this? But why? Let’s the answer to that. But why?

00:23:58
Speaker 5: And then once you get down to the sixth time, you’re like that, that’s what we’re after right there. So I think if people can do that, you can sort of get back to the original joy and purpose of an activity you’re doing. M and I will I will admit this is like very philosophical, right I. Unfortunately with a question like this, I can’t give you, Well, here’s my three step framework. Just do exactly this and your life will change immediately. It’s like, well, life is actually a lot more complicated than that. Yeah, which is probably why, which is probably why I don’t know my sub stack couldn’t be as good if I could, couldn’t have as many subscribers. If I would just say, here’s a secret to life, two steps to do it, pay me my seven dollars month, we’ll move on.

00:24:42
Speaker 4: Uh huh.

00:24:54
Speaker 2: Well, well to your point that life is not black and white and simple. It is complex, and your work I think ties in very well and is a part of a growing collection of thinkers and writers and other people exploring something that I think is succinctly I mean, you call it the comfort crisis. Another way of describing that I saw with the title of book is like the extinction of experience, that being kind of this losing, this losing connection to like, our humanity because of all of these different forces of the modern day kind of bearing in on us. Whether that be more and more people living in cities and all the chaos that comes with that, whether it be the addiction to screen time you’ve written about that of course, whether it be the way that corporations are hijacking our psychology to get us to go deeper and deeper into all those things. Now you have AI, which is infiltrating our lives in all these different places, and now you know whether it’s filling all media with a bunch of AI slop, whether it be distorting what we can believe is true or not, or whether it be actually like creating intermediaries where we are now interfacing with machine intelligences instead of real people when we have relationship problems, or when we need advice, or when we look for answers to questions. There’s all of these things that are pulling us further and further away from being I think what we what a fundamentally means to be a human. And I feel like hunters and anglers, like outdoors people are fortunate and that we’ve maybe stumbled into one of the potential antidotes to much of this. But even within this community, I know from myself experiencing it and from talking to many other people like we’re feeling it too. We’re still experiencing many of these other things. So you wrote The Comfort Crisis five years ago, You’ve you’ve done similar We’ve explored this overarching top I’ve talked about in the Scarcity of Brain. I’m sure in your new book you’re working on. I know in your newsletter, what is your prognosis of where we are today five years after the Comfort Crisis was published? Now that AI is overwhelming, We’re in a different world than we were five six years ago when you worked on that first major piece. What’s your sense of where we are right now? And are the things that you started writing about then more important now less important? Do you have a different perspective in any kind of way?

00:27:32
Speaker 3: I think they’re more important.

00:27:35
Speaker 5: I will say that there are signs that people are starting to realize this, probably because I mean, you know, like you said, there’s people writing, but a lot of people are noticing this and writing about it and thinking about it and thinking what can we do about it? Like I read an article in the New York Times the other day about a group of high school kids who went back to flipflons just started hanging out in person.

00:27:57
Speaker 2: That’s great, yea.

00:27:58
Speaker 5: At the same time, these are rare instances. I think technology the point of technology is to make life easier, more thoughtless, more effortless, more nice, comfortable.

00:28:12
Speaker 3: Whatever.

00:28:13
Speaker 5: The problem is is that humans don’t grow and learn through everything being effortless and comfortable. I think a lot of the thing. There’s fundamental problems with the technology, but I think one of the biggest problems is that it takes us out of the experiences that we need to have in order to be healthy, happy.

00:28:33
Speaker 3: And well. So, what are you doing when you are sitting at home on your phone watching the seventy ninth Instagram reel of the last you know? Five minutes you’re indoors. You’re not outside.

00:28:50
Speaker 5: The temperature is perfect, right, it’s exactly dial to your specification, so you’re not getting any sort of outside friction from the weather and temperature changes. You’re also not moving right, You’re not moving your body. You’re not with other people because you’re sucked into this device. There could be your wife or your kid could be sitting right next to you, but you’re not with them at all. And so I think that fundamentally technology is taking us out of these things that are really important for us. Whereas if you go out on a hunt with your friend or your son or daughter, what happens all of a sudden you’re outside. There’s a million reasons why being outside is good for us. Some of them we don’t fully understand. We just know that all the data says that being outside is really good for us too.

00:29:37
Speaker 3: You’re having to move your body.

00:29:40
Speaker 5: That’s very good for us. Best thing you can do long term for your health, and longevy is moving. You’re also with the other person, right, and you’re not just with them b yesing, you’re on a quest together that’s really important. The quest is to this like goal of finding a buck, right. Humans are most happy and engaged when we have a goal or a mission to accomplish. Even if you don’t get along with the person, if you put two people on a mission together, that’ll repair relationship really best. And there’s actually data that suggests this insert like twenty to thirty other really good things that are happening in that environment. So I think the fundamental issue as technology is taken over, which don’t get me wrong, it’s had a ton of upsides, but is that it’s removed us from the things that make us most well. So then the question I think for me and everyone else becomes, Okay, how can I get back to those rhythms that humans you still live and exist in for all of time? But also I’m not telling people to go, you know, build a yurt and hunting fish for all of their food. But it is like, how do you how do you find small ways to weave that into your daily life every single day, whether it’s just like a walk on the trail by your house with your kid or your spouse, and then also in bigger things like your you know, your annual hunt, your insert whatever it might be.

00:31:17
Speaker 2: Yeah, I feel like a lot of a lot of this for me echoes an idea within conservation. There’s this idea of rewilding, and so in many places across the world, we’ve lost wildlife species that used to exist in that region, and there’s a growing movement now rather than just trying to stop the bleeding where species are disappearing, they’re actually trying to rewild areas, so bring back these native species that used to exist on the landscape. And I feel like a lot of what you’ve prescribed, and a lot of what some of these other people have talked about is almost like rewilding our lives. I’ve thought a lot about, like my general philosophy of this, and much of what I’ve taken from the Comfort Crisis, from your other writing is like ways to bring back our wild past, our evolutionary history. What it means to be human if you want to keep it a little simpler and bring that back into us, make us wild again, make us human again. I think that’s a big part of why hunters and anglers love doing this and being a part of this and having that lifestyle. And I think, you know, many of these other things that can help us deal with modernity in general all kind of tie back to that kind of rewilding idea. But one thing I’ve noticed is that even when doing the right things, like you talked about, you’ve written about the importance of nature, the many different benefits of being outside. Right, there’s all sorts of studies that you’ve referenced about, you know, the ways that sounds and smells and fractals and all these different things give us real physiological benefits, right, And hunters and anglers have stumbled on this, and we have, accidentally, you know, in many ways, built a life around being outside. And that’s great, and we’re all benefiting from it. But even those of us who do this stuff, we’re still bringing in this outside world. And I remember reading that there’s this idea, the three day effect that you talked about, which is like, after three days in the back country, it’s like a mental re there’s something really special that happens after three days in the wild in the back country, right, both of us have experienced that. But then a very important qualifier was including that, which is that if you have your phone, it negates that. And I’m curious if you can expand on that a little bit because I feel like there’s an epidemic of phone use by hunters too. And I’ve like there’s memes that go around. There’s like, you know, people saying, like what hunting was, and you know, the year nineteen fifty was somebody actually out there hunting. What hunting is in twenty twenty five is a guy sitting in a tree looking at you know, Instagram reels for four hours. So how does introducing our phones and in time to our outdoor pursuits maybe changing the benefits, changing the experience, pulling away from what’s actually supposed to be.

00:34:10
Speaker 5: Yeah, big picture is that you’re not actually hunting, you’re on your phone.

00:34:16
Speaker 3: Right.

00:34:17
Speaker 5: So there’s some interesting studies and they there’s a lot of these. A short term one was at the University of Utah. They took people to this outdoor area outside of Salt Lake City and they had one group do a hike, they couldn’t use their phone at all. They had another group take the hike, but they could use their phone. They could call people, they could look at it, whatever the hell they wanted to do. And when they got back, they measured stress levels attention levels of the two groups, and the people who were on their phone saw no benefits, whereas the people who weren’t on their phone couldn’t use their phone, their stress levels had gone down significantly, their attention levels had been restored.

00:35:00
Speaker 3: Focus was much better.

00:35:02
Speaker 5: All these different markers improved, and then the longer term studies, like the three day effect, same thing happens. If a person is using their phone for a lot of the time outdoors, it just sort of negates all the benefits that you get from that, and it goes back to attention. So if I’m in the wilderness and I’m paying attention, i don’t have my phone, your brain goes into this mode that researchers call and this is a terrible name. It should never allow scientists to come up with names. It’s called soft fascination. And what you can think about it is it’s sort of like sort of like a form of meditation, but with meditation, you’re kind of going inward. It’s almost an outward meditation where you’re sort of lightly focusing on all this stuff around, this natural stuff, and that does really good things for the brain. Once you insert a phone, not only are you taking yourself out of that, but what are you looking at on your phone? If you’re on Instagram reels, you’re like, Okay, here’s a fight video that’s going to stress me out. Here’s some political video that’s going to stress me out. Here’s some news about all the terrible things happening in the world that’s going to stress me out. And so you’re just adding this outside stressor and while not getting all the benefits. Now, I think that there’s a balance to be found. So, for example, I did this. It’s about eight hundred and fifty mile route in southern Utah in the spring last year. It takes about forty five days. Now, I could have carried in all these topo maps right, but now I’m not going to do that, like so many damn maps, so heavy.

00:36:45
Speaker 3: So I brought my.

00:36:46
Speaker 5: Phone and I used a GPS mapping application for that. So I had to be on my phone occasionally out there, but I didn’t have service. I didn’t download anything. I didn’t download pods, even yours.

00:37:01
Speaker 3: I’m sorry.

00:37:03
Speaker 5: I didn’t download a bunch of music and stuff. I only use my phone when I really needed to use it, and I also asked myself, do I really need to use this phone? So, for example, when you navigate, you can do it two ways. You can stare down at the thing and look at the blue dot and follow the line the whole time, or you can actually pull back and read the map and go, Okay, here’s where I am situated in this landscape.

00:37:26
Speaker 3: If I look, oh, I can see a bluff over there.

00:37:29
Speaker 5: Looks like I just kind of need to walk toward that bluff, and it might be five miles. I don’t need to look at my phone. I just know I generally need to go in that direction, and so that way I can pay attention. So I think there’s a good balance to be found with technology because it can absolutely help us. I know, like apps like on x really help a lot of hunters. But the question is how reliant are you going to be on that? How much of your attention are you focusing on that? And can you sort of just use it to the minimum effective dose that you need to users as a use it as a tool rather than it sort of using you.

00:38:07
Speaker 2: So on that line of thinking of the technology using you, I feel like the best example that might be social media. Right, can you expand a little bit on just how and why social media can be still particularly dangerous or toxic slash addicting? Spell that out a little bit for us.

00:38:32
Speaker 5: I’ll give you a surprising answer for the same exact reason hunting is addicting. So social media works on random rewards. Random rewards capture the attention of every single animal, always have. Now, the difference is social media is able to really tweak that random reward schedule to get it to the perfect, perfect amount of random rewards that keep us coming back.

00:39:00
Speaker 3: And it’s also very accessible.

00:39:02
Speaker 5: So in my book Scarcity Debrain, I talk about this thing called the scarcity loop, and it’s the ultimate vehicle for capturing human attention. And so I’m going to unpack it’s a little bit complicated, but bear with me. It’s got three parts. It’s got opportunity, unpredictable rewards, and quick, quick repeatability. So opportunity, you have an opportunity to get something of value, unpredictable rewards. You know you’ll get that thing at some point, but you don’t know when. You don’t know how valuable it’ll be. And quick repeatability you can immediately do the thing again to try and get that thing of value. So with social media, if you unpack that, it’s opportunity. I might see a hilarious reel or a reel that makes me pissed off about politics, or I might get a like or a DM, but it’s unpredictable. You don’t know when that’s going to happen, right, Could happen in half a second, could happen in thirty seconds. You don’t know how valuable it’s going to be. Is it like a DM that’s from someone I don’t really know this person, that’s a random request I don’t like it.

00:40:05
Speaker 3: Or is it like a.

00:40:06
Speaker 5: DM being like, hey, come on my podcast and blah blah blah, and then you can recheck and recheck and recheck.

00:40:12
Speaker 3: So it just points you into this book.

00:40:14
Speaker 5: Right, And it’s because it’s on your person all the time. Now, hunting works on the exact same schedule. Yeah, opportunity. You have an opportunity to kill a giant buck, but it’s unpredictable. You don’t know where the hell it is. You don’t know when you’re going to see it. You don’t know if that oh I might have seen a buck, I don’t know if it’s a was it actually dough or.

00:40:37
Speaker 3: Was it that giant buck I got on my camera?

00:40:41
Speaker 5: And then you just repeat that. Right, you’re out there and you’re searching and searching for that buck. It’s the exact same schedule that makes both of those activities so addicting. But what’s happening in the meantime When you’re hunting, you’re outside, you’re moving around, you’re often with friends, Like all these good things are happening as you’re in aged in that three part game, as it were, Whereas with social you’re sitting at home, you’re not doing anything. The stuff that’s coming into you is often making you ramped up, anxious, anxietiss and you’re not doing all these things that make you better as a person. So the big question is, you know, with these sort of games that we get pulled into and they’re everywhere, Like basically I can tell you if listeners open their phone and look at the apps they spend the most time on, I will guarantee that they fall into that scarcity loop, whether it’s email, whether it’s sports betting, whether it’s of course social media, whether it’s even finance apps, the exact same thing. But the question is I lost my train of thought a little bit. But the question is, is that three part game, that scarcity loop doing things that are helping you in the meantime rather than hurting you?

00:42:00
Speaker 2: And I wonder, you know, given that, you know, what do you you know in the case that there’s positive scarcity loops and there’s negative scarcity loops like you mentioned, and so in these ones, you know, like social media, that seems so you know, so clear to so many of us that there’s these obvious negatives to it. But for most of us, we kind of just fell into it. We started using social media fifteen years ago or twenty years ago or whatever, when everybody got a Facebook account, and then the next thing was like, oh well, you got to get an Instagram account, and then oh yeah, you got to be on Twitter, and then oh yeah, you got to get on TikTok, and you’re just kind of doing it and using it, and then all of a sudden, you said this earlier, it starts to use you and we don’t even realize it. But it becomes a compulsion. It becomes this thing that you’re doing, and you don’t know why you’re doing it. It doesn’t bring you all that much value. And then to your point, all of a sudden, all this time goes by and you have nothing to show for it, and you write about this and scarcity brain, the fact that there’s Yeah, this isn’t happening by chance. This is not random. This is highly engineered by people using very you know, seriously researched practices to take advantage of our psychology to do this, to hijack our brains to do this. So we’re up against like a serious challenge here. It’s not just that we are like weak minded people. It’s also that people are using very sophisticated like weaponizing of this stuff that we think is like a fun little thing for us to look at. But instead there’s people on the other side who are really gearing this to suck us in. How do you break out of that? How do we reclaim some kind of control.

00:43:43
Speaker 5: Yeah, so that just for context, why we fall into this this system, the reason we’re attracted to it is evolved out of hunting and hunting and gathering in our ancestors. Like I said, hunting is hunting and gathering. It is fundamentally a random awards game, and if humans weren’t inherently attracted to that and willing to keep playing it all day.

00:44:05
Speaker 3: We would have all died off today.

00:44:08
Speaker 5: Though it gets put into like you said, all these different technologies, and in the book, I actually talk about how we really started to figure out how to tweak it perfectly for the desires of corporations in Las Vegas in the eighties. It’s crazy story, But how do you get out of it? Like I said, there’s three parts, and if you just remove or change any of the three parts, you can fix it. So for me, the biggest part that’s relatively easy to tweak is that quick repeatability. So the faster you can do a behavior, the more likely you are to do a behavior. If we had to say, run a mile to check our Instagram, no one would check their damn Instagram like ever, So I think the question is how do you add friction into getting into Instagram or your apps, or turning on Netflix or whatever it might be that’s hurting you. How do you how can you slow down that process? So on cell phones, and I realized it’s ironic to tell people to download an app so they can use other apps less. There’s a great app that’s helped a lot of people. It’s called clear Space, and what it does is you pick the apps that you want to limit. Let’s say you pick Twitter. When you go to open Twitter, clear space makes you pause, take a breath in, take a breath out. Then it asks you, do you actually want to use this app? Because a lot of times we just pull out our phone like reflexively to check whatever app it is we’re addicted to. And then once you say yes, I would actually like to check Twitter, it asks you how long do you actually want to stay in Twitter?

00:45:51
Speaker 3: And it gives you options.

00:45:52
Speaker 5: You can you know, you can set up for five minutes, ten minutes, twenty minutes, so you pick ten minutes. Because the problem is we’ll often go open Twitter to go, oh, I need to respond to that direct message, or I want to see what Mark Kenyon has tweeted about this season’s hunting, and then we often just start scrolling into all this southern nonsense. In an hour has gone by. So by limiting the time, you’re forced to kind of do what you actually want to do. So I think that’s a good use for bones. But also, I mean, people get like the scarcity loop isn’t shopping. One of the reasons people buy so much crap now is because it’s so easy and fast to buy stuff. So if you can even tell yourself, all right, this thing I think I want, I’m going to put it in my cart, my online shopping cart, and I’m going to wait seventy two hours, I’m going to slow this down.

00:46:46
Speaker 3: You’ll buy way less.

00:46:48
Speaker 5: Stuff, like so much less stuff because so much is this stuff is just on board. I was online, Oh I saw this, Yeah, I’ll buy it. You insert a little bit of time and friction, purchasing tends to go down. And so the question is, with any behavior you have that is something you’re compulsively doing that’s hurting you, how can I slow it down?

00:47:10
Speaker 2: So I want to circle back to to I guess a little bit more of One of the best ways to slow things down is to get outside. Is to insert this big pause in normal life, everyday life, by experiencing nature, which again I know a lot of people that’s like a big thing for them to go out and do anything right. Getting there twenty minutes. You know, three times a week is like a stretch goal. You know, asking someone to go out in the back country for three days a month or a year is like a big deal for some people. For folks listening to this podcast, it’s not that big of the deal. It’s what we want to do. But you have recommended something that’s even beyond that, which I loved when we talked about last time, and I’ve thought about it since and then kind of forgot about. And then when I reread your book recently, was reminded of And that’s the Massagi idea, this idea of pushing you know, we talked earlier about pushing yourself, having goals and everything, and is that a good thing or can that sometimes get you out of focus of why you love something? But there does seem to be this benefit to kind of pushing the edges of the possible. And I’m curious over the last five years or so since you I think I think you can be widely credited with popularizing that idea. It’s really caught on. Where’s your head on this? I guess for people who aren’t familiar, what is it? Number two? Where are you now? Five years into this as it’s grown, and as people have been increasingly coming to you to talk about this, and you’ve been talking about it, and I guess where what are your best practices now, five years after you first brought this idea out to the world, give us that.

00:48:51
Speaker 3: I guess yeah.

00:48:52
Speaker 5: So a masogi easiest way to think about it is it a big epic challenge that you take on once a year for the sake of growth. There’s two rules. Make it really hard, don’t die. So the second rule, it is kind of tongue in cheek, just be safe. But the first rule we define by saying you should have a fifty to fifty shot of accomplishing whatever your masogi task is. So the fifty to fifty shot that means two things. One is that everyone’s fifty to fifty is going to be different.

00:49:26
Speaker 2: Right.

00:49:26
Speaker 5: Let’s say that my masogi is I’m going to run fifty miles. Well, the lady down the street from me, who’s you know, sixty seven years old, first might be to run ten miles. But we’re still going to do something that we think we only have a fifty percent shot of doing. And the fifty percent shot part second part of this is that it’s really important because it means you have a really high chance of failure. And today, when we take on challenges, we often pick things that are well within the range of possibilities, like ninety percent. Sure we’re going to acomplish this thing. But the problem is is we don’t ever get pushed out to our edge. So whether you actually accomplish this thing or not is irrelevant. The point is that you want to meet this point where you think you are going to fail this. You’re like, I’m done, I can’t go any further. But if you can just push a little bit past that, just keep pushing, you get this second moment where you realize, well, wait a minute, I’m past what I thought was my limit back there. So I’ve sold myself short here, and then the important question becomes where else in my life could I be selling myself short? So I’m a firm believer that humans don’t learn through sitting around thinking all the time.

00:50:47
Speaker 3: Right.

00:50:47
Speaker 5: We can intellectually understand a lot of concepts in our brain, but they don’t actually stick until we get out in the world and we actually experience them. And the massogi teaches you through experience, you’re probably a lot more capable then you think, and that changes your worldview afterwards. So then to follow up on the second part of your question is how has my thinking evolved on this? Yeah, I think a couple things. I think when I first wrote about it, like the book really focused on physical things. I don’t think masogis always have to be physical. So let’s say you took a I don’t know someone who’s into ultra ultra marathon running right, A tendency for that person would would be, Okay, I’m gonna my masogi is a fifty miler. Oh, I completed that. Now I’m going to do one hundred miles. Completed that, Now I’m going to do two hundred miles. And it just becomes this arms race. It’s like you kind of know you’re going to do it, and it sounds to me like you’re actually pretty good at running. That’s a strong spot for you. So for me, what if that person your masogis you have to go do a meditation retreat for twenty four hours because a lot of times these endurance types they just can’t sit still. I always got to be moving. So it’s like the question becomes what is the thing that really scares me that I’m not doing and how can I try that, because I’ll tend to peel away new layers of the onion that you haven’t explored. And again, I mean, this could really be anything. I was given a talk one time and I talked about this masogi idea of my talk, and this woman came up to me afterwards and she said, hey, I read your book and I did a masogi.

00:52:27
Speaker 3: I was like, oh, great, what was it?

00:52:29
Speaker 4: Was?

00:52:29
Speaker 3: My masogi? I was trying sushi.

00:52:32
Speaker 5: I was like, really, tell me about that, you know, and she goes all my life I had all like a fear of different foods, especially sushi, just like, oh, I can’t do that. I’m just you know, because I tried it, because I didn’t love it, but also didn’t hate it.

00:52:51
Speaker 3: It was totally fine.

00:52:54
Speaker 5: And it made me realize that I had all these irrational fears that I’d never tested, and that opened the door for me to start questioning, Okay, what are this other laundry list of heres?

00:53:06
Speaker 3: Is this rational?

00:53:06
Speaker 5: Is this? We’re trying and experiencing and seeing what I think, and that is what we’re after that big opening of the door of our thoughts, how we see ourselves how we think about the world.

00:53:16
Speaker 3: That’s really what we’re going for.

00:53:29
Speaker 2: What’s been the most impactful masogi you’ve experienced yourself.

00:53:37
Speaker 3: Oh, that’s a good question.

00:53:38
Speaker 5: I mean, I think probably my Arctic trip qualifies as one that was really I hadn’t been hunting. I’d never killed an animal with a weapon besides my Nissan Ultimate in high school in an unfortunate accident, and that really sort of changed my thinking around the food system. I think that happens for a lot of hunters, so that one had a lot of these moments that just changed my thinking about things and affected my behavior moving forward. And I think too, probably more recently, as that hike I just did. I mean, I didn’t enter it thinking it was a masogi, But the reality is is probably wasn’t masogi. Because I didn’t, I probably had a ten percent chance of finishing it. I won’t tell you if I finished it or not. You can learn that in the book when it comes out, and whoever the hell knows how long. But I think it changed a lot of my thinking around what I was capable of, and also how we should think about living in the modern world, and also friendship. I did it with a friend and I’ve always been one of those people who, you know, I like people, but only in smallish and fleeting clusters more or less. And that was like, you know what, dude, Like, maybe you need to go go out and hang out with people more time. Like you really got a lot out of this, and I think that just changed my perspetition perception about some of the social stuff in my life.

00:55:05
Speaker 2: Have you figured out how to harness or how do you take something like that? How do you have an experience? And for so many of us, we have these things, We have these transcendent experiences, oftentimes in wild and then wild places right awe is something that seems to be really important to humans. It’s something that comes in spades in the wild world. It often, you know, doing hard things often inspires like you just said, reflection and self kind of understanding. How do you carry that forward? Like, how do you take that and not just let it slip away over the next week or two, but instead somehow bottle that up and use it for the rest of your life. Have you figured that out? Do you have any idea?

00:55:49
Speaker 5: That’s the great question. I mean, Joseph Campbell wrote about this. You had a quote, It’s like you get up to a height and then your question becomes do I stay with that or do I return and back to normal life. So in the Hero’s Journey, there’s typically I assume people are somewhat familiar with the Hero’s Journey, but it’s basically someone goes out into this really trying environment, encounters these challenges like a big adventure, and it fundamentally changes their self concept and they have these you know, peak experiences, and there’s always there’s two paths. It’s like the hero either stays out in this wild world or they have to return back to their normal life and figure out, Okay, how do I stay with this thing? And it’s not easy, and I think most of us are going to be returning back.

00:56:36
Speaker 3: To the normal world. So for me, I think it’s.

00:56:43
Speaker 5: I think when you first get back from something, whether it’s like a big hunt or whatever it might be, that changes you. The lessons and the feelings are really kind of intense, but they fade over time naturally the longer you stay in normal life. And for me, it’s always trying to bring to mind what did I learn on that, and then making sure I have new things on the horizon, you know, It’s like you can re up that every year if you go out and you do something interesting that changes you and finding new things to do. I think the big takeaway is how can I add adventure back into my life, both big and small? What am I doing yearly? But what am I doing weekly? You know, there’s a lot of ways to spend a weekend. You can hang around and watch Netflix, so you can be like, hey, family, get in the truck. I saw this place on the map. Looks kind of interesting. I don’t know anything about it, but that’s the point.

00:57:44
Speaker 3: Let’s go.

00:57:46
Speaker 5: And so it’s having to constantly do something. I think it’s easy in modern life to get kind of caught in the exact same routine and people start to have these kind of feelings of restlessness discontent. Okay, what’s the point. But you can sort of break that up by getting out of your routine and doing something new and interesting and adventurous and continuing that over time. That’s helped me anyways.

00:58:13
Speaker 2: I mean, yeah, there’s this guy’s names I I of get his last name wrong, Jesse Eisler. I think or Ike’s like, you know, you know, Jesse. He’s all over the place and he has this rule that he got from some friend of his, where he basically says, I’m going to get the specifics run. But I think every single year he does one thing basically a masogi every year, like one thing that he never thought would be possible, some crazy, big adventure of some kind. And then once every other month he tries to do something that he never would have thought he would do, just like something out of the ordinary, something outside of his comfort zone. And basically what the idea is like, Hey, if you live a life like that where once every year you do some really big adventure and then every other month you’re doing something outside of your comfort zone, one of those things will stand out. You know, when we go outside of the normal, those are the memories that stick with us. Those are the experiences that form a life. It’s typically not just sitting and watching Netflix. Right, So if you do that, you build a very full, rich life, which I think is which I think falls right in line with a lot of what you’re saying here now with that goal, I guess out there, I’ve recognized one challenge in my own life in trying to live this way, which is my daily life. Like you, in many ways of sitting in a computer and writing right taping on the keyboard, or recording podcasts or doing stuff in an office, which increasingly more and more of us are. So we’re very sedentary for large parts of our lives. And then ever once in a while, whether it be every weekend doing a smaller thing, or a handful times a year doing some big back country trip like ILL have. Like maybe I’m lucky I get to do more than most. I might have three or four or five or six like big, very intense backpacking trips or big hunts or something like that where you’re carrying a lot of weight and you’re doing really strenuous things. It’s it’s intense. So my life goes from like very sedentary to very intense. And I’ve gotten very good at having a consistent cardio base, but not as well with my strength base for that, and I have had, you know, injuries because of that. I have had problems where I’ve jumped from you know, thinking, yeah, I’m in pretty good shape. I run a ton and do a lot of this stuff, and I go and do this big, intense thing and I’m not quite ready for that. You have popularized another idea that I think addresses this for a lot of people, which is the very simple but seemingly powerful idea of walking with weight. It seems like that might be a solution to what many people today, especially hunters and anglers, are dealing with, and that they’re probably working some kind of office job, relatively sedentary, and then all of a sudden they want to go out for their weekend, or they’re once a month or once a year big adventure hunting or fishing, going somewhere and maybe aren’t quite ready for Tell me about how walking with weight might be a solution for that kind of lifestyle. Why that’s so powerful?

01:01:09
Speaker 5: Yeah, I think the short answer and I’ll say, in the comfort crisis, I use the word rocking. It’s basically walking with a weighted backpack. I’ve started to shift to the term walking with weight because when I would tell women about rocking and that they should do it, rocking is a military term, so when they’d google it, they’d see these special forces dudes with these giant backpacks and go, yeah.

01:01:30
Speaker 3: That is not for me.

01:01:33
Speaker 5: But the reality is is that humans are built to carry weight over distance. We are the only mammal that can do that. We are uniquely good at carrying weight for distance, and it totally shaped us into who we are today, allowed us to take over the world, but we often don’t do it anymore. And I think the reason it’s so particularly good for backcountry hunters and anglers is you’re building strength while also getting cardio. So if you are too skinny, it’ll help put some muscle on your fame. If you’re too if you have too much fat, you have too much muscle, it’ll lean you out because you actually don’t want too much muscle when you’re covering a lot of ground.

01:02:18
Speaker 3: Because it’s just extra weight you have to carry.

01:02:20
Speaker 5: So it’s kind of this dual activity that hits both strength and cardio at the same time. And of course it’s very applicable to the pack out right. That is exactly what you’re doing when you have to pack out an animal. And I think too, it’s nice because it’s very approachable. A lot of people run, it’s great. A lot of people also get injured by running. So the data on this is everywhere, but anywhere from I think twenty to I think seventy five percent of runners get injured every single year. It’s a lot of people, a lot of injuries but when you walk with weight, the injury rate is basically like that of walking, rises as you add more weight. But I think if you’re walking with anywhere from ten to say, thirty percent of your body weight, like you’re probably not going to get injured, and you’re going to build a really good base of strength that’s going to apply to the mountains and the streams wherever you might be. That’s gonna make you a lot more physically prepared for the activities of backcentry hunting.

01:03:25
Speaker 2: So one of the pushbacks I’ve internally had to it has been like an ROI on my time. If I have an hour that I can devote to some kind of exercise, I could run. I don’t know, in an hour, I’m going to run five miles or something like that. I feel like that I’m going to get a really good workout and fire you know, five miles in or six miles in or whatever it is in that hour that feels like something. I’ll really feel it afterwards, I’ll work up a good sweat, et cetera. But with an hour hike, you know, I’m only going to go two and a half miles or three miles or something. It doesn’t seem like I’m going as far, it doesn’t seem as high output. Maybe do you have a sense in your new book, I know you’ve charted out some of this. Could you speak to you know, how does like a run stack up to a ruck or walking with weight and how much weight do we need to get the same ROI out of that hour if we’re walking with weight versus going for a trail run or something. Can you is there some way to kind of compare apples to oranges?

01:04:29
Speaker 4: There?

01:04:30
Speaker 5: Yeah, so the way you would compare it if you just want to think about it as energy burned i e.

01:04:36
Speaker 3: Calories.

01:04:37
Speaker 5: So when you add weight to your walk, you start to burn anywhere from twenty to as much as say, two times more calories per mile when you add weight. Out of course, that number change is based on the amount of weight you have, So effectively, the more weight that you add, and I do tell people keep it under thirty percent of your body weight. That’s usually kind of the cut off point where some bad things can start to happen if you go over thirty percent. But you’re not going to be burning that much less calories by walking with weight. And the important thing is too you’ve just told me, Yeah, my endurance is good, but I’m sucky at strength. It’s like, okay, well, so you’re gonna go do more endurance and do less strength work, like if you want to balance this out. So I would never tell people, hey, don’t ever run, no matter who you are, if you’re a hunter, no matter you know, whatever thing you’re into. But I do think adding some walking with weight in can’t help round out a lot of your fitness. I said, caring weight is a fundamental human movement pattern that we don’t do now, and once we start to do it, it tends to fix a lot of the issues that modern people tend to have just because of desk work. Not to mention, you can just throw in a backpack whenever you’re doing everyday stuff if you have to, Like if I have to take my dogs for a walk, I’m going to toss on a backpack and throw out a thirty pound backpack and take them for a walk. So now I’ve taken that walk from something pretty low level relaxing to now it’s actually kind of in the workout zone. I would have to walk my dogs no matter what. So if I just toss on that pack, now I’m getting a lot more out of it. Or if you take a nightly walk with your wife. My friend John Deloney, who also has a pot podcast, does this. He was like, you know, my wife and I would always have these great conversations on our walks, but I always felt like I was taking time away from my workouts. You know, He’s like, man, I just start throwing on a pack and now I’m like, Okay, I’m solid. I’m getting some work from this. And I would also say probably, you know, I’m not one of those people who’s going to sit here and tell you that rocking walking with weight is the only thing you should do. I don’t believe that at all. Humans are extremely versatile. I think you should run. I think you should rock. I think you should.

01:07:00
Speaker 3: Lift things, carry things.

01:07:01
Speaker 5: I think you should basically do everything because that’s what the mountains ultimately demand of you. You’re having to hike some sketchy terrain, you often have a pack on. You’re taxing your cardio system, you’re taxing your strength system. You’re going to have to pick up some stuff and carry it. So you want to be doing everything if the mountains are demanding everything from you.

01:07:22
Speaker 2: Yeah, So for people specifically looking to train for a backcountry hunt. You know, walking with weight is the prescription for a lot of people. Right. There’s a lot of different, you know, training plans that have been built out there. There’s a lot of best practices that people expert hunters have have pitched and talked about and gyms promote. But I don’t think any of these people have written an entire book all about the science and research behind walking with weight. You have which is coming out soon for somebody who is who is not just rucking to establish a fitness but is specifically walking with weight to train for a backcountry elk hunting trip or mule deer trip or caribou hunting trip or something like that. Excuse me, what is your what’s your what are your best practices or recommended you know, ways to build out a plan to actually practice for that. So that’s like, hey, I need to be ready to pack out one hundred pounds and it might be ten miles over and over or whatever might be. You’ve experienced it, what would you prescribe for that person in that situation.

01:08:31
Speaker 5: It’s a great question. My first word is if a person had never rucked before, never walked with weight thrown weight in their pack is to start lighter than you think. Especially with guys, we tend to just low the thing up and then we get out We’re like, this sucks, I hate this, my shoulders hurt, I’m never doing this again, and then we don’t ever do it again. Yeah, So I tell people to on ramp slowly, start with say pounds, work your way up from there, and then find a weight eventually through trial and air that feels uncomfortable and challenging but also not soul crushing. You want to find a weight where you feel like you could just go for miles and miles and miles. Yes, it’s hard, but you’re gonna be able to accomplish it. So for me, like my go to is thirty pounds thirty five about and I feel like you can also push that every now and then, So sometimes I’ll do say sixty something, because I know, okay, I might have to have a really heavy pack out if you just structure this across a week, if I was leading into a hunt season, I would probably want to do three days of rucking each week per se. I don’t know an hour each time. And granted this goes back to the dog walking thing. It’s like I have to walk my dogs anyway. I’m just throw my damn pack on. It’s not even really lot. I’ve done an extra workout. Do three days of rocking with week. You might want one day where you’re a little bit heavier to kind of get used to those heavier loads. Don’t go above a thirtyier body weight. I don’t think it’s really worth it. You’re not going to gain anymore when you go do that much heavier pack out. You’ll help avoid injuries. Three days of rucking do say one day. If it were me, I would maybe do one day of long slow run, like really slow. You’d also do a bike something like that, and then I would want to do two days of strength training a week, really focusing on lower body because in the mountains the legs feed the wolf. The mountains don’t give a shit how big your biceps are. They really don’t. So you want to do some heavy squats. You definitely want to be doing a lot of weighted carries like farmers walks, suitcase carries, things like that.

01:10:55
Speaker 3: Upper body stuff that uses a lot of your body.

01:10:58
Speaker 5: So for example, a bench press, you’re just lying on this thing you don’t have to engage your core as much. You just sort of press, but a push up like you actually have to engage your core, and it’s more realistic for like, oh I fell on the mountains, now I need to like get up using my entire body. So really just trying to mimic, like what are the exercises that I’m going to be doing in the mountains. That’s very vague. It’s hard to like lay out an entire week of fitness, but I do think probably two days of strength training a week, three days are rucking, and then another day of some other type of cardio.

01:11:34
Speaker 2: Makes sense. You are in a you’re in an interesting line of work, and I can relate to it, and that you have attacked a single problem or idea in book form, and I know that takes years and years before it finally comes out. So I’m sure you’ve worked on the comfort crisis for years behind the scenes, and then finally it came out in twenty twenty one or whatever it was, and then you talked about a bunch, but it had been like three or four years or however long of that kind of marinating in your subconscious And then same thing with Scarcy of bring you. You went off into the dark, and you work for years, and then you finally came out into the world with it, and then everybody wants to talk to you about that set of ideas. But you’ve already been working on for three years now. You’re doing that with Walking with Weight. But oftentimes the thing that you just published is something that you’re almost tired of already thinking about because you’ve been writing about it for so many years, right, yes, exactly. Even though nobody else realized that you’ve been thinking about this entire time, you have, and so you’re almost sick of it. So you do this newsletter where you’re talking about kind of this intersection of fitness and mental health and mindset and nutrition and all these different things. And you’ve written these books about kind of the intersection of all these different things. What right now are you actually not sick of talking talking about, not exhausted by, but genuinely most excited and fascinated about when it comes to the world that you were working What’s this is? This is my last question for it. What’s the one thing that you are the most full of, bestination by and excited about and that we could kind of leave off with one set of ideas around.

01:13:21
Speaker 5: That’s a great question, and my answer will be somewhat unsatisfying because it’s this next book I’m working on about that long hike I did and the book. I’ll kind of give you a preview without giving too much away. And I also don’t want to talk too much because I’ll say something that will get cut out of the book entirely.

01:13:38
Speaker 4: I know it is.

01:13:40
Speaker 3: So the book really looks at.

01:13:43
Speaker 5: I think we can all agree that the world has never been better if you look at it in the grand scheme of time and space. We’re living twice as long, we have roofs over our head, vast majority of people have ample food, we have climate can We have modern medicine that would make the gods jealous. We have instant entertainment at our fingertips all the time. Things should be perfect, But when you look at mental health, things have never been worse than slow down trend despite things being perfect. And so why is that? And that’s what the book gets into, and I think I think it goes back to some of what we’ve been talking about in this conversation, is that the world no longer forces our hand in a way and what actually makes people healthy and happy and feel alive is having your hand get forced and having a mission and having to figure shit out and being pressed up against and it can be hard in the short term, but you get through that and it teaches you something fundamental about being a person where you stand in the world, and about what it means to be alive. And as the world got better and more comfortable, yeah, it’s been great because I can watch a thousand dog reels if I want, and modern medicine is amazing and all these things. It really is amazing what we have in the process lost these really fundamental things that make us happy and satisfied. And so to me, the answer, to sort of re quote myself from before, it’s not, oh, I’m just going to go live in the woods like hell no, But it’s what can I do in my day to day life that pushes back against that so I can get the best of both worlds. So that’s kind of what the book covers. And that’s the I as I know you’re down a rabbit hole with your book as well, that’s the rabbit hole I’ve been down.

01:15:33
Speaker 2: Well, it sounds like a fascinating one, and it you know, it’s almost back to the idea of like rewilding your life. I feel like is kind of part of the answer to many of those questions and many of the questions that a lot of us are asking. So I can’t wait to see the new book when that one comes out. I’ve enjoyed every single one of the things you’ve written to this point. For those people who have not yet picked up the books, and obviously the one that’s going to be releasing here shortly, could you plug a quick description of what those are, where they can find them, how they can connect with you and your substack and all that.

01:16:07
Speaker 5: Yeah, Probably the best place to find me is on my substack. It’s called two percent. It’s at two pct dot com. There’s links to all the books there, and that’s kind of where I publish about three times a week. It’s a lot of writing, but it allows me to think and get my ideas out, and that’s probably the best place to find me.

01:16:25
Speaker 2: Perfect. I appreciate this time, Michael, I enjoyed it. I you know, as I’ve mentioned already, really appreciate your work and what you’re bringing into the world. So keep it up. Yeah, try to stay sane in the midst of this book project, and I can’t wait to circle back.

01:16:42
Speaker 3: Yeah you two likewise man, all right, and.

01:16:48
Speaker 2: That’s going to do it for our episode today. Thanks for being a part of this community, were tuning in today here. I hope this is a useful way to kick off the new year, giving you some ideas that can, you know, come with you throughout twenty twenty six, help you as you start planning your next hunting season, or your next fishing trip or outdoor adventure, or maybe just your next regular day of life, because those sometimes need some pick me ups too, and some new ideas as well. So, without any more from me, thanks for being here, and until next time, stay Wired to Hunt.