The Expedition is our monthly journey into thoughts, opinions, ideas, observations, studies, facts, figures, etc.

Good ones, insightful ones, interesting ones, weird ones, and ones you can use to live better and longer.

It’s a roundup of all the worthwhile stuff I’ve discovered in the last month. The Expedition is a bit of an island of misfit toys. But, hey, the greatest journeys are winding.

In this month’s Expedition, you’ll learn:

• Podcast: Ellen Langer, the first woman tenured in Harvard psychology’s department, on why mindset is “the whole ballgame.”

• Numbers on:

  • The minimum dose of outdoors that improves mental health.

  • A 13-year-old’s dodgeball-related legal troubles.

  • Why bookstores are opening again after two decades of closing.

  • How many Americans have been on a GLP-1.

  • What working from home does to the birth rate.

  • The daily bad habit that just passed cigarettes and alcohol.

  • The five-fold gap in meth use between states—and which state at the bottom will surprise you.

  • London Marathon applications, and why running is having a moment.

  • Where nearly every all-time heat record in June was set.

  • How many lawmakers come from the working class.

• An 11-year-old’s epic Misogi

• What 23,000 books from year 0 to 1920 reveal about what the West values—and why that helped us grow.

• How your personality shifts with age (the good, bad, and ugly).

• A new JAMA review on continuous glucose monitors for people without diabetes—a verdict on whether they’re useful.

• Navy SEAL fitness standards worth measuring yourself against.

• A request: Tell us your three favorite TV shows of all time.

• Why Bryan Johnson’s approach to living forever isn’t the experiment he thinks it is, according to a complexity scientist.

• A parting quote that encapsulates “the point” of Misogi

  Become a premium subscriber of Two Percent and get proven, no-fluff tools to master your health, mindset, and performance for less than a cup of coffee.

Check out our partners

• 💪 David Protein bars have the highest amount of protein per calorie of all protein bars. They’re a stellar option for anyone who wants protein on the go without the excess sugar and fat of most bars. Also, a PSA: David now makes ice cream, and it’s excellent. Visit DavidProtein.com.

• 🧑‍🔬 MacroFactor is the best nutrition app I’ve found. MacroFactor uses dynamic adjustment, a scientifically-validated formula to help you find the right amount of food for your goals. It helped me realize I was under-eating. And when I ate more, my fitness improved and I felt better. Read more here, and get a free 14-day MacroFactor trial here. Use code TWOPCT.

Two Percent podcast: Mindset is “the whole ballgame”

By the numbers

10

Minutes outside improved mental health symptoms in a meta-analysis that included data from thousands of adults. It worked regardless of age or gender, and it didn’t matter if it was from a forest, park, or a backyard with a lot of plants.

Source.

13

Years of age of Abel Schipper, who was arrested for ‘relentlessly’ targeting his ex-girlfriend during dodgeball in gym class.

“I didn’t think a dodgeball would hurt. And these are small ones too. So you can squeeze them and like they compress and stuff,” Schnipper told AZ Family.

Source.

60

New stores Barnes & Noble booksellers plans to open in 2026. That comes after two decades of declining numbers, signaling that: BOOKS AREN’T DEAD YET.

In a statement, the chain explained: “In 2024, Barnes & Noble opened more new bookstores in a single year than it had in the whole decade from 2009 to 2019.” One reason their sales are improving: each bookstore is now controlled by local booksellers, who order books they know appeal to local customers.

Buy books. Read them. Be smarter.

Source.

12

Percent of Americans currently take or have previously taken a GLP-1 medication. Name brands like Ozempic and Wegovy make up 68% of current use. Compounded versions make up 19%.

Source.

1

Extra child born for every three couples that work from home at least one day a week.

This suggests hybrid work makes us more reproductive.

Source.

21.4

Million near-daily marijuana users in the United States.

For cigarette use, the number is 19.9 million. For alcohol, it’s 17.2 million.

2025 is the first year that marijuana is the most popular daily addictive product.

Source.

5

Fold variation between U.S. states in methamphetamine use.

Louisiana, Utah, Kansas, and South Carolina rank highest.

California, Hawaii, New Mexico, New York, and Nevada are at the bottom.

Source: Nicholas Badre using DEA data

1,338,554

Million ballot applicants for the London Marathon, which will accept 100,000 of those runners.

Running is having a moment. Records are falling, and races of all sizes are growing.

Source.

449

Weather stations worldwide logged all-time heat records in June. All but one of those records were in Europe.

The climate historian M. Herrera remarked:

All-time record at Pinsk (Belarus) was 36.3C in August 1905
‼️It took 121 years but it got smashed by 4.1C
INSANE

Source.

1

Percent of lawmakers in the United States are from the working class.

Source.

The coolest kid ever gave me a proud author moment

A friend sent me this article from a local Lake Tahoe-area newspaper:

LAKE TAHOE, Calif./Nev. – Grady Holman, 11, has been preparing for three months to paddleboard 72 miles around the perimeter of Lake Tahoe with goals to not only raise money for the Truckee Donner Land Trust (TDLT), but to shatter self-limitations and inspire others.

Motivated by a book called “The Comfort Crisis”, written by Michael Easter, Holman and his mother have set out on a Misogi, or as Easter describes it, “A circumnavigation of the edges of your potential to expand them.”

“I just wanted to try and push myself out of my comfort zone,” said Holman, who told the Tribune he’s been paddleboarding since he was three. “The farthest I’ve gone is about 10 miles on Lake Clementine in Auburn.”

Grady Holman, you’re going places and giving me hope for the future.

Follow this link to donate to Grady’s Misogi. Funds go to the Truckee Donner Land Trust (TDLT), which protects and maintains public lands.

What 23,000 books from year 0 to 1920 tell us about what the West values

Read more

Michael sits down with Langer, author of The Mindful Body, to talk about how much of your health is actually under your mind’s control. They cover:

• The experiment that turned back old men’s bodies

• Maids who lost weight by seeing their work as exercise

• Why the stories we tell ourselves about bad events are “the whole ballgame”

• The truth about mindfulness—what it really is and a meditation-free way to find it

• A scientific case against following the rules

• How labeling a disease changes how it impacts us

• How to think if you get a health scare

• A better way to make hard decisions 

• And more …

Listen to the episode

• Apple Podcasts

• Spotify

Watch the Episode

Go deeper

The Brain Glitch That Makes Modern Life Feel Miserable

Ellen’s book, The Mindful Body

Ellen’s study on maids who viewed work as exercise: Mindset Matters: Exercise and the Placebo Effect

Ellen’s Illusion of Control Study

Two Percent episode with Maria Konnikova, PhD psychologist and professional poker player, who explained how the illusion of control impacts gambling—and many other decisions in life.

Have fun, don’t die, think better.

-Michael

I’ve been seeing the word “cortisol” thrown around online, as if every health influencer is suddenly an endocrinologist. So I asked Two Percent journalist Sam Nichols to investigate cortisol and separate the science from the nonsense. Here’s Sam:

The internet has decided cortisol is the villain.

Across TikTok, YouTube, and LinkedIn, you’ll hear that modern life is flooding your body with cortisol, a hormone released by the adrenal glands, located just above our kidneys.

The claim is that everyone has too much cortisol. This makes us overstressed and prone to disease. It’s why you’ve gained weight. Why your face looks puffy. Why (insert nearly any other malady).

The posts also sell fixes: Over-the-counter tests can reveal if we’re having a cortisol crisis. Supplements like ashwagandha can help. Cortisol detox diets and programs.

I’ve also read many news articles that vaguely describe this as a misunderstanding without ever explaining what the misunderstanding actually is. So I dug into the research and called a top endocrinologist and a top psychobiologist for answers.

Today, you’ll learn:

• Why “high cortisol” isn’t a real diagnosis for almost anyone—and what the influencers are getting wrong.

• Why you actually want higher cortisol at some times of the day.

• What can impact cortisol, including one factor more powerful than stress.

• How cortisol impacts weight (it might), but the solution is much simpler than worrying about cortisol.

  Become a premium subscriber of Two Percent and get proven, no-fluff tools to master your health, mindset, and performance for less than a cup of coffee.

🎙️ Two Percent podcast: A giant list of questions with one of my favorite thinkers: Tyler Cowen

Tyler Cowen is a unicorn person who has a fascinating and surprising answer for anything you ask him. He also speaks efficiently—we ripped through the longest list of questions in Two Percent podcast history in just 50 minutes. Topics include:

• Why initiative now beats intelligence

• Why antidepressants are overprescribed

• What challenge teaches us about happiness

• The math of exercise and whether it’s worth the investment

• Whether America has become complacent

• How AI makes people smarter or stupider

• When AI will improve human lifespan

• And much more

Listen to the episode here.

Watch the episode here.

💪 Check out David Protein Bars

They the highest amount of protein per calorie of all protein bars. They’re a stellar option for anyone who wants protein on the go without the excess sugar and fat of most bars. Also, a PSA: David now makes ice cream, and it’s excellent. Visit DavidProtein.com.

Now let’s get into the wacky world of cortisol—and discover the truth.

Read more

Tyler Cowen has spent decades studying what makes people, societies, and economies thrive. He thinks we’re living through the fastest technological revolution humans have ever faced—yet most of us are still planning our lives as if nothing is changing. I sit down with Tyler to find out how to live better today, tomorrow, and years from now. We cover:

• Whether we should panic about the future

• Why initiative now beats intelligence

• The case for free-range kids

• Why antidepressants are overprescribed

• What challenging trips abroad teach us about happiness

• The math of exercise and whether it’s worth the investment

• Whether America has become complacent

• How AI makes people smarter or stupider

• What Tyler will never hand off to AI (and what’s best to give to AI)

• When AI will improve human lifespan

• Whether AI will lead to mass job losses

• And much more…

Tyler Cowen is a professor of economics at George Mason University, the economist behind MarginalRevolution.com, and the author of nearly 20 books, including The Complacent Class. He also hosts Conversations with Tyler.

Watch the episode

Listen to the episode

• Spotify

• Apple Podcasts

The federal government tells us we need “at least 150 minutes of moderate-intensity physical activity a week, such as 30 minutes a day, 5 days a week.” Doctors, scientists, fitness apps, and more repeat this.

But a new British Journal of Sports Medicine (BJSM) suggests that figure may be far too low. Multiples too low.

The study made the rounds online, leading many health influencers to say we need to revise the exercise guidelines. (And I assume that RFK Jr. is right now stacking up a new Federal Exercise Guidelines committee with these influencers.)

Today, we’ll look at why the government tells us to exercise 150 minutes a week, how much movement we really need, and the psychology of getting more movement. We’ll cover:

• Why the 150-minute guideline was created in the first place. (Hint: Scientists were optimizing for something other than biology).

• Findings of the new BJSM study and what they can tell us.

• The amount of movement the human body evolved to get for health.

• How to use the BJSM findings in a way that helps your health in the long run without making exercise a part-time job. Pure Two Percent mindset stuff.

Quick housekeeping

• Today’s post, like all Monday posts, is free to all subscribers.

• Only Members get full access to all three of our weekly posts. Become a Member:

Subscribe now

• ICYMI:

  • On Wednesday, we ran an updated Misogi Guide. Read it. Get some great bad ideas for your next Misogi.

  • Friday’s Gear Not Stuff covered 11 pieces of gear for Misogi. I’ll be taking them on a fall Misogi, and they’re necessary for any outdoor Misogi.

• 💪 Check out David Protein Bars. They the highest amount of protein per calorie of all protein bars. They’re a stellar option for anyone who wants protein on the go without the excess sugar and fat of most bars. Also, a PSA: David now makes ice cream, and it’s excellent. Visit DavidProtein.com.

• 🎙️ Two Percent Pod: Cal Newport on Deep Work, Slow Productivity, and the Three Rules of Better Work. If you don’t listen to this episode, you will be busier, more stressed, and your work will suck.

The history of the physical activity guidelines, or how to help a lazy population

Influencer types used the new BJSM study as more evidence that the government is knowingly failing our health.

But the guidelines were never meant for optimizer types looking for the greatest reductions in disease risk.

In 1995, the CDC and American College of Sports Medicine published1 a recommendation that set the foundation for the modern exercise guidelines.

The report’s purpose was to deliver “a clear, concise public health message” to an increasingly sedentary nation. At that time, more than 75% of people didn’t meet basic fitness targets: roughly a quarter of the US was totally sedentary, and half were only active in brief, easy spurts.

The report noted that this level of mass sedentary behavior was estimated to kill about 250,000 Americans annually, making up about 12% of all deaths.

Importantly, guidelines before 1995 recommended that we all get 20 to 60 minutes of continuous high-intensity cardio a few times a week (defined as 60-90% heart rate).

Hardly anyone did that. Imagine asking a person who hasn’t exercised in 20 years to go for a hard run at 80% heart rate for an hour straight.

The panel of scientists realized: We gotta do something different. And they knew two things.

• First, more exercise is better. Six hundred minutes a week beats 150.

• Second, the biggest benefits of exercise come early. I.e., getting a person to go from 0 minutes to 150 minutes a week of nearly anything has a massive impact on health. The minutes thereafter have diminishing returns.

They thought of it like this: Telling a nation of mostly sedentary people to rack up hours and hours of exercise each week was ridiculous. It was like asking someone who’s never hiked to climb Mt. Everest.

Instead, they figured, telling us to walk up a small hill was far more doable. If they could get enough people to do that, the improvements in public health would probably be larger.

They shifted from a “exercise-fitness” model to a more approachable “physical activity-health” paradigm.

The recommendation became 20 to 30 minutes of anything physical a day, or 150 minutes a week of moderate-to-vigorous physical activity. That could be a run. But yard work, a walk, chores, dancing, etc, also all counted, so long as they were done with at least the effort of a brisk walk.

Which is all to say: The guidelines are based partly on biology, partly on psychology.

Of course, many Americans mistook that small, 150-minute hill for Mt. Everest—many thought it was optimal when really it was the bare minimum.

The new study

Researchers2 in China analyzed data from the UK Biobank, a massive British health project frequently used in research.

Their sample had about 17,000 people who completed a fitness test and also wore a research-grade activity tracker for a week. That gave them two measurements: How much the people moved and how fit they were.

Then they tracked the people for about eight years, looking for cardiovascular problems: heart attacks, strokes, heart failure, atrial fibrillation.

The findings3:

• Hitting the 150/minutes-a-week activity guidelines was associated with an 8 to 9 percent reduction in cardiovascular risk compared to being sedentary. That held whether your fitness was low or high. Good.

• Hitting 340 to 370 minutes of activity a week gave people a 20 percent risk reduction. Better.

• People who got four times the guidelines—around 600 minutes of activity a week—had a 30 percent reduction in cardiovascular disease. Best.

Why it matters: cardiovascular disease kills about 30% of people worldwide. The scientists wrote: “achieving larger relative risk reductions (eg, >30%) in this cohort appeared to require activity volumes 3–4times higher than current [guidelines].”

Of course, moving 10 hours a week is a lot. Most Americans don’t even get the recommended 150 minutes/2.5 hours a week, much less 600 minutes/10 hours.

In the study, only 11.6 percent of people got ~600 minutes. But, surprisingly enough, it’s a rest week by historical standards.

What the human body expects: lots of movement is normal

The human body evolved in the context of having a Mt. Everest-like amount of activity.

When researchers strap heart rate monitors to hunter-gatherer tribes—our best models of how humans lived for 99.9 percent of human history—they find the tribes get about 135 minutes of moderate-to-vigorous activity per day.

That’s about 14 times more activity than the average American. Cardiovascular disease and other maladies are also rare among these groups.

Researchers like Dan Lieberman at Harvard have pointed out that the human body evolved in the context of lots of movement. When we remove that activity, sickness tends to set in.

I.e., we have a modern mismatch between how much we’re built to move and how much we now move in our modern environments.

Even the new BJSM study’s optimal dose of 600 minutes a week is low by historical standards. The study’s highest movement cohort is 60 percent of our ancestral norm.

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So, what should we do?

Treat 150 minutes as it was originally meant to be treated: an absolute, don’t-die minimum per week.

But do what you can to double it, triple it, quadruple it.

The top end—600 minutes of activity a week—sounds like a ridiculous amount of exercise, but the BJSM study shows us it’s possible. The people who got 560+ minutes a week weren’t professional exercisers.

They were normal, middle-aged people who’d just built movement into their lives.

I.e., They’d adopted the Two Percent mindset. They walked places. They had hobbies that required movement rather than sitting (think: yard work, community sports, etc)

And so it is for us.

• When you need a break from work, take a walk instead of doomscrolling.

• Take phone calls while walking.

• Always take the stairs.

• Do a lap around the neighborhood when you get the mail.

• Park in the absolute farthest spot away.

• Carry your groceries.

• Walk the terminals as you wait for a flight.

• Do those physical chores instead of hiring out.

I’m not one of those fitness people who regularly goes out for 20-mile runs. But when I ran the numbers on my week, I realized I get 600-ish minutes of activity a week. And most of it isn’t from stuff I think of as a workout.

• I walk my dogs briskly every day for 45 minutes: That’s 315 minutes.

• I strength train twice a week for 45 minutes: That’s another 90 minutes.

• I do relaxed cardio for 45 minutes twice a week: Another 90.

• And on Sundays, I do a long trail run: 120 minutes.

• The total: 615 minutes on average.

The dog walks are for my dogs, so they don’t act completely psychotic all day.

The Sunday runs are my weird form of church, and more for my brain than body.

And I do research for the podcast during the relaxed cardio sessions (often on a stair climber machine).

I’m also not a slave to this. If I have stuff to do, I’ll cut one of those cardio workouts. Or I might be traveling, and I won’t get in the dog walks or trail run. But, on balance, I always get 300 minutes a week. On an ideal week it’s 600+.

Have fun, don’t die, move, move, move,

-Michael

Check out the Two Percent Shop

It’s time for Gear Not Stuff.

We live in a world of mass consumerism and have more stuff than ever. As I point out in Scarcity Brain, the average home contains at least 10,000 items. Yet minimalism, as I wrote here, has failed us.

When considering how to make smarter purchasing decisions, I’ve started distinguishing between gear and stuff.

• Stuff is a possession for the sake of it. Stuff clutters. We buy stuff impulsively to alleviate boredom or stress, or to solve problems we could have tackled creatively with what we already have.

• Gear, on the other hand, has a clear purpose of helping us achieve a higher purpose. Gear is a tool we can use to have better experiences.

This Month’s Gear Not Stuff: Misogi Gear

On Wednesday, we ran our Updated Misogi Guide. Read it if you’re looking for a great bad idea.

The first rule of Misogi is to “make it really hard.” We define that as having a 50/50 shot at finishing.

Failure is part of the deal.

Of course, there are good and bad ways to fail.

A good way is that your Misogi was too hard. You found your edge. And even though you failed, you still learned something in the process.

A bad way to fail: gear. You picked the wrong shoes or got a blister. Your pack was ill-fitting and didn’t work for the terrain. You ran out of water. A storm rolled in, and you didn’t bring the right clothing system. You got hopelessly lost.

That point is, you want the Misogi to be hard because of physical, psychological, and even spiritual reasons—not because of bad gear.

I’ll be attempting a Misogi this fall involving distance and navigation in the desert.

Today’s Gear Not Stuff covers the gear I’ll be taking.

None of this gear is unique to my Misogi. Most of the 11 items are standard pieces anyone can use when they’re attempting whatever great bad idea they’ve chosen.

Take this gear. If you quit, it’ll be for the right reasons. And, most importantly, it’ll help you not break Misogi Rule 2: Don’t die.

🎙️ Two Percent Pod: Cal Newport on Deep Work, Slow Productivity, and the Three Rules of Better Work

This episode is a must-listen for anyone who does knowledge work. Cal Newport is a professor at Georgetown University and the author of the influential books Deep Work, Slow Productivity, and more. He explains why modern work is designed to make us miserable, the case for fewer meetings and emails, interval training for better focus, and his three rules of Slow Productivity: do fewer things, work at a natural pace, obsess over quality.

• Listen to the episode here

Send me questions

We’re running a Q&A on the podcast soon. Please submit questions in the Two Percent chat here. Anything is welcome: health/wellness/mindset based questions, life advice (I’ll bring on an expert for that), anything else on your mind.

Check out our partners:

• 💪 David Protein Bars have the highest amount of protein per calorie of all protein bars. They’re a great option for anyone who wants protein on the go without the excess sugar and fat of most bars. Visit DavidProtein.com.

• 🧪 Function Health offers 5x deeper insights into your health than typical bloodwork. The info can guide you into feeling better every day. It helped me identify a mineral insufficiency—and was cheaper than my insurance. Go to my page here to sign up, receive a discount, and pay just $340.

From here, we’ll cover 11 different items that will keep your Misogi hard for the right reasons, including:

• A pack that solves the main issue with packs: bounce and sway while moving fast.

• The clothing system that’ll help you not break Rule 2: Don’t Die.

• A light and collapsible WHO-certified purification and hydration setup.

• The shoe-and-sock rules and gear that prevent swollen feet and blisters from ending your mission early.

• A stripped-down first-aid kit (all necessities, no fluff).

• The navigation app and one download step that keeps you from getting hopelessly lost.

Read more

Modern work has a giant problem: It keeps us stressed enough to be miserable, but never stressed enough to quit. Cal Newport, a computer scientist at Georgetown, says that’s not an accident: When work switched from factories and farms to offices, we never figured out how to measure the productivity of knowledge workers. Looking busy became our flawed metric, even though busyness keeps us from producing better work.

I sit down with Newport, author of Deep Work and Slow Productivity, about how to do deep, valuable work in a world that rewards fake productivity. We cover:

• Why emails and meetings are killing our ability to do work that means something.

• The conversation to have with your boss when you have too many meetings and other tasks.

• The three core rules of “Slow Productivity:” do fewer things, work at a natural pace, obsess over quality.

• Enduring myths of productivity, from Jane Austen to Jack Kerouac.

• How to say no without burning a bridge.

• How to use AI to enhance your work without hurting your thinking.

• How to rebuild your attention span the way you’d train for a mile.

• And more…

  Become a premium subscriber of Two Percent and get proven, no-fluff tools to master your health, mindset, and performance for less than a cup of coffee.

Watch the episode

Listen to the episode

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One of the most common questions I get is “What should I do for my Misogi?”

The problem: I can’t answer it, even though I put the idea in your head.

For the unfamiliar, a Misogi is an epic challenge we take on once a year to learn something about ourselves and uncover new possibilities.

Marcus Elliott, from the Misogi chapter of The Comfort Crisis, explained: “Misogis are an emotional, spiritual, and psychological challenge that masquerades as a physical challenge.”

There are two rules:

1. Make it really hard (defined as a 50/50 chance of completion).

2. Don’t die (self-explanatory).

There are also guidelines. One of which is not to publicly advertise it.

Marcus continued:

Everyone today has such outward-facing lives. They do stuff so they can post on social media about some badass thing they did to get a bunch of likes.

Misogis are inward-facing … I’m going to do something really uncomfortable. I’m going to want to quit. And it’s going to be hard not to quit because no one is watching. But I’m not going to quit because I’m watching. And then I can reflect on how I was the only person watching myself, and I still rose to the occasion in a big way. There’s some deep satisfaction in that. We had this guideline before social media, and it seems more relevant today.

The personal nature of Misogi is what makes it powerful. You plan an epic and offbeat challenge that will help you, and then make a bold attempt.

This is also why I can’t tell you exactly what to do.

Fifty-fifty is different for everyone—my 50/50 is not yours, his, hers, or theirs. And many factors alter 50/50, including landscape, weather, preparation, your age and background, etc.

The point is to find your edge. Joseph Campbell described “the edge” as the interface between what’s known and what’s to be discovered. The edge is different for all of us, but the point is to get out and find it. He explained:

What all of us have to deal with is a transformation of consciousness—that you’re thinking in THIS way and you have now to think in THAT way. How is the transformation performed? By trials and illuminating revelations. Trials and revelations are what it’s all about.

The other problem is this: The quirky and unpublic nature of Misogis makes it harder to get ideas for your own Misogi. The options are endless. It takes reflection and creativity to come up with your own.

I love the self-examination of dreaming up what weird task I may or may not be able to complete.

But I also realize that some people need more direction. Paralysis by analysis is real!

And I’d rather someone do a Misogi with a little guidance than never try because they can’t figure out what to do.

The Misogi list

And so, three years ago, I asked you to send me your Misogi. Nearly 100 of you did. Then I asked again last week, and the submissions kept rolling in.

I read about many inspiring tasks.

Below is a sampling1 of Misogis by theme: Quirky Misogis, Walking Misogis, Misogis that Break Psychological Barriers, Spontaneous Misogis, and Wilderness Misogis.

You did these Misogis despite life’s inevitable challenges: self-doubt, anxiety, hectic schedules, deaths of spouses, and after overcoming dire health diagnoses like cancer.​

A warning: your Misogi won’t be an exact copy of any of these. Use them as jumping-off points rather than IKEA instructions.

The list is getting me fired up as I plan my own Misogi this fall. Let’s roll …

🎙️ On the Two Percent Podcast: Lessons From the Most Dangerous Job: Hotshot Firefighting with River Selby

River Selby spent years on elite hotshot crews—the firefighting equivalent of Navy SEALs—who jump into the worst blazes in the wilderness. We talked about lessons from fires, the physical and psychological qualities that make someone a good hotshot, why proximity to danger brings a proximity to life, and more. Their book is Hotshot: A Life on Fire.

• Listen to the episode here.

• Watch the episode here.

Check out our partners:

• 💪 David Protein Bars have the highest amount of protein per calorie of all protein bars. They’re a great option for anyone who wants protein on the go without the excess sugar and fat of most bars. Visit DavidProtein.com.

• 🧪 Function Health offers 5x deeper insights into your health than typical bloodwork. The info can guide you into feeling better every day. It helped me identify a mineral insufficiency—and was cheaper than my insurance. Go to my page here to sign up, receive a discount, and pay just $340.

Quirky Misogis

When designing your Misogi, consider making it quirky, creative, and uncommon. When you remove superficial metrics, you can accomplish far more. Here are some of the quirkier submissions I received. Let’s start with Francis, who left for his Misogi the day after he submitted this:

Read more

Hotshot firefighting is one of the most physically demanding and dangerous jobs in the United States. River Selby spent seven years as a wildland firefighter, four of them on elite hotshot crews, the teams that jump into the worst blazes in the country.

I sit down with Selby, author of Hotshot: A Life on Fire, about what the job costs and what it teaches. We cover:

• Lessons River learned fighting some of the West’s biggest wildfires.

• The physical and psychological qualities that build grit and make someone a good hotshot firefighter.

• Why proximity to danger brings a proximity to life.

• How River proved they belonged on the team as someone who didn’t fit the hotshot mold.

• Failures in how the government manages fires, and why it’s led to more extreme fires.

• How River’s hard childhood helped them tolerate the hardships of wildfire fighting.

• And more …
  

  This episode includes discussion of childhood abuse, addiction, and suicide.

  Become a premium subscriber of Two Percent and get proven, no-fluff tools to master your health, mindset, and performance for less than a cup of coffee.

  Watch the episode

  Listen to the episode

  • Spotify

  • Apple Podcasts

Let’s say you’re one of those people who feel down. So you go to a doctor. Chances are, you’ll leave with a prescription, a referral for therapy, or both.

You probably won’t be told to try exercise.

Two psychiatrists just spent a day arguing online about whether that’s a good or bad thing.

It all started when Dr. Nicholas Fabiano, a psychiatrist and researcher at the University of Ottawa, tweeted the following:

And because the internet is the internet, he got pushback. Specifically from Dr. Tyler Black, pediatric emergency psychiatrist and suicidologist at the University of British Columbia.

Tyler followed up with another Tweet, explaining:

18 to 38% of elite athletes have depression, and have a risk of depression 2x the rate of the general population. So, like, maybe exercise isn’t a panacea.

So here we have one MD, Nick, suggesting that exercise helps for depression and should be talked about more often. Then we have another MD, Tyler, suggesting the idea is questionable and that exercise is “not a panacea.”

Two MDs. Two people who have both spent far too long in school studying mental health, both working with patients, both looking at the same evidence—yet drawing opposite conclusions.

Debating 280 characters at a time is limiting, so I looked at the research and spoke with an outside expert.

The two arguments

Nick’s point is that psychiatry overlooks recommending exercise as a way to improve patient mental health. Exercise is free. It improves physical health and the side effects are minimal. Psychiatrists not recommending it leads to more suffering.

He wrote a whole paper titled, “Could not prescribing exercise for depression be psychiatric malpractice?” in the British Journal of Sports Medicine1.

Tyler works in emergency psychiatry. He sees the worst cases, many of whom can hardly get out of bed, much less go to a gym. His argument: exercise is being oversold, and overselling it has real costs. Telling depressed people to exercise only prevents them from getting more effective care.

So who’s right?

Today’s post unpacks the nuances in exercise and mental health: whether it works. And if it does, for who, when, what, and why.

Quick Housekeeping

• This post, like all Monday posts, is free to all subscribers. But only members get full access to Wednesday and Friday posts. Become a Member here:

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• In case you missed it:

  • On Wednesday, we took an evolutionary view on elite fitness, covering four movement patterns humans are designed to do and why they can help you.

  • Friday’s Burn the Ships took the info from Wednesday’s post and put it into one of our more epic workouts.

  • Last week on the Two Percent podcast we had talking about how to get better healthcare, and The Humane League CEO Dan Shannon talking about his new and radical vision to reduce animal factory farming. Listen here.

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What the studies show

On to the research. The somewhat messy, nuanced research.

Nick pointed to studies showing that exercise helps with depression. Tyler fired off a few studies showing that exercise doesn’t help.

Science is messy. Findings depend on many factors.

For example, the study Tyler referenced about elite athletes having double the depression risk looked at retired elite athletes. We don’t know if those athletes still exercised, and we don’t know if their depression arose from retiring2.

So then the question is, where should we look?

Cochrane reviews and meta-analyses are considered “gold-standard” for high-quality, reliable information3. They’re used to inform healthcare policy and how doctors practice.

This year, Cochrane updated their review of exercise for depression4.

They looked at 73 studies that involved roughly 5,000 adults with depression.

Their conclusion: “Exercise may be moderately more effective than a control intervention for reducing symptoms of depression.”

That is to say: For many people with mild to moderate depression, exercise can help. That doesn’t mean it will help all people with depression. It seems to depend on the person and situation.

Exercise vs. therapy or medication

You might think: meh. “Moderately more effective” than a control sounds a bit weak.

But here’s the thing: That effect was about the same as therapy and medication.

The Cochrane authors wrote:

There is probably little to no difference in depressive symptoms between people undertaking exercise and those receiving psychological therapy. There may be little to no difference in depressive symptoms between people doing exercise and those taking antidepressants.

That all said, the scientists noted that there aren’t many studies that directly compare medication or therapy to exercise, and they’re small and imperfect.

You can’t blind an exercise study the way you can a drug trial—nobody finishes a set of squats wondering if they got the sugar pill/placebo.

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Tyler pointed out that when researchers look at the most rigorously designed trials, the benefit of exercise shrinks. (These studies use blinded assessors, concealed group assignments, and full accounting of dropouts.)

In the 2013 version of that Cochrane review, six studies met all three of those standards. Their combined effect was rather weak.

That might sound like it destroys the case for exercise, but it turns out to be one of the more interesting findings in this field—more on why below.

And remember, Tyler is a suicidologist in emergency psychiatry. He’s working with the worst cases.

People with severe depression often can’t bring themselves to exercise. It’s totally irresponsible to tell someone who has severe biological depression to just go for a run or do some pushups.

For example, one meta-analysis found that depression severity predicts the likelihood that someone will drop out of an exercise study. The sicker you are, the less likely you are to actually exercise.

And for some people with mild to moderate depression, it may not help (for a variety of reasons). But so it is with standard treatments like therapy and medication.

Two types of depression

The modern mental health system largely sees depression as biological: I.e., your brain chemicals are out of whack. But that’s likely not true for all cases.

I spoke to Dr. Randolph Nesse, who’s considered the founder of Evolutionary Psychiatry. He told me there are basically two types of depression5:

• Life circumstances depression: This comes from things not working out in your life the way you want them to. Bad job, bad relationship, or any other bad circumstances.

• Biological depression: This is largely driven by your biology rather than circumstances. Everything in your life can be going great, but you still find yourself depressed.

He estimates about 1/3 of depression cases are biological, 1/3 are purely life circumstances, and another 1/3 have a mix of both.

Nesse views mental health from an evolutionary point of view. He sees low mood as an ancient adaptation that helped us conserve energy when our circumstances weren’t working.

Think of it this way: if we’re out hunting and can’t find any animals, our mood drops. Those feelings cause us to mope back into camp, sit around, and think. Classic signs of depression are less movement, lower energy, loss of interest.

What else improves depression? Do something.

As we just learned, low moods may have helped our ancestors save energy.

But today, energy isn’t scarce, so those feelings are not always helpful. For mild and moderate depression, forcing yourself to do something often helps counter those symptoms.

This isn’t unique to exercise. The following have also been shown to improve depression:

• Dancing6

• Going outside7

• Singing8

• Gardening9

• Interaction with dogs and horses10

• Meditation11

• Gratitude journaling12

• Performing acts of kindness13

You get the point.

Which brings us back to those rigorous studies where exercise didn’t show a clear benefit.

When researchers compare exercise against people doing nothing—sitting on a waitlist—exercise looks great. But when studies compare exercise to something—e.g. stretching, meditation, relaxation—exercise shows less of an advantage.

This sounds like bad news for exercise. And in a narrow sense, it is. Exercise is probably not a unique, all-powerful antidepressant.

But look at what those control groups were doing: stretching, meditation, relaxing. They were doing something.

This same pattern shows up in therapy. One meta-analysis14 compared seven different psychotherapies and seven different theories of what depression is. Every single one beat being placed on a waitlist for treatment. The effects were all moderate-to-large, and the differences between them were small.

TL;DR: Every decent treatment for depression is a different recipe. But they share a common ingredient: doing something.

An Example: The Hot Yoga Study

Consider recent research15 conducted by scientists at MIT, Harvard, Brown, and Mass General Hospital.

They had a group of 65 people with moderate-to-severe depression do hot yoga (105 F) at least twice a week for eight weeks. The scientists discovered a clear pattern: the more hot yoga classes people attended, the more their depression symptoms decreased.

A few explanations why:

• Depressed people did something new. Some depression benefits from action and changes in environment.

• Hot yoga is generally community oriented—they did something with other people.

• Heating the brain—which happens in a sauna or hot yoga class—may increase serotonin production (the same mechanism that SSRI’s target) and reduce brain inflammation, which is linked to depression. Bill Gifford talked about how heat health impacts our physical and mental health on the Two Percent Podcast. Listen here.

Takeaway

This saga of Twitter disagreement involves a unicorn: an eventual agreement.

Nick and Tyler went back and forth on their perspectives, culminating in Tyler writing:

Where we actually agree: Exercise is a reasonable adjunct, well tolerated, worth offering. Guidelines already say that. And sure, more physicians could follow guidelines and learn better to do so.

He continued:

If [exercise] works for you: great.
If you can do it: go ahead and try.
However most people with significant depression are beyond any point of being able to exercise their depression away.

The takeaway for us: When you’re feeling low, do something. See if it helps. If it doesn’t, try something else.

The reason exercise is a good “something” is simple. Therapy is expensive and takes time. Medication helps some people and carries side effects. Exercise is free, and its main costs are time and discomfort. Critically—and this is where it’s unique—it also improves physical health.

When it comes to exercise, even a little goes a long way. One study in JAMA Psychiatry16 found 75 minutes of brisk walking a week was associated with an 18% lower depression risk. One hour a week, at any intensity, was associated with enough lower risk that researchers17 estimated 12% of future cases could have been prevented.

Have fun, don’t die, do something.

-Michael

It’s the first Friday of the month—which means it’s time to Burn the Ships.

On the first Friday of every month, we publish a new Burn the Ships workout for Members only.

If Two Percent is a cult, these Burn the Ships workouts are our Kool-Aid.

Burn the Ships workouts are hard, safe, and effective. They improve your strength, cardio, movement quality, and mindset—and, in turn, your life.

Members of the Two Percent community do the workout every weekend—a bunch of us satellites, spread out across the world, all sweating and improving together as one extended network.

One truly tough workout a week tends to be the sweet spot: More than that, and we tend to get burned out and beat down. Less than that, and we miss out on some health and performance upsides.

For each workout, we give scaled versions and exercise swaps, so anyone and everyone can do them. That is to say, you.

Burn the Ships: August 2026

On Wednesday, we covered how the strength and conditioning team at the University of South Carolina Football is taking an evolutionary view of elite fitness to train its players.

Luke Day, head S&C coach, leans into what he calls “The Four Horsemen of Hardship.” They’re four movements humans used that shaped the human body and turned us into apex predators: crawling, carrying, covering ground, and changing levels.

By taking workouts out of the gym and focusing on the Four Horsemen, Luke has built what is arguably the fittest team in NCAA football.

Luke designed today’s workout, and it’s based around The Four Horsemen.

It builds a potent balance of strength and endurance—and transfers over to life and aging well.

Let’s roll...

🏔️ Quick favor: Send me your Misogi

We’re updating our Misogi guide. If you’ve done a Misogi in the last two years, reply to this email and tell me what you did. If you consider it a Misogi, it counts. Provide any details you want.

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🎙️ Two Percent podcast: Improving Animal Welfare Without Going Vegan

I talked to Dan Shannon—a 30-year vegan and CEO of The Humane League, one of the biggest and most effective animal welfare organizations—about a heretical position he recently took. Dan says the animal welfare movement needs to embrace meat eaters. Eighty percent of Americans support laws that improve the welfare of factory farmed animals. His goal: welcome more people into the movement to incite change at the corporate level to improve the lives of millions of factory farmed animals. We talked about that, whether veganism is any healthier, easy ways to eat more plants, and more. It’s an important conversation.

• Listen here.

• Watch here.

💪 The Best Nutrition App I’ve Found: Macrofactor

MacroFactor uses dynamic adjustment, a scientifically validated formula to help you find the right amount of food for your goals. Other apps work on guesswork—leaving you eating too much or too little. It helped me find “enough” food for me, and my fitness and recovery improved. Read more of the science here. Get a free 14-day MacroFactor trial here. Use code TWOPCT.

🧪 Check out Function Health

Function offers 5x deeper insights into your health than typical bloodwork. The info can guide you into feeling better every day. It helped me identify a mineral insufficiency—and was cheaper than my insurance. Go to my page here to sign up, receive a discount, and pay just $340.

This Month’s Workout: Carry What You Kill

Why the name?

• On Wednesday, we covered how and why the University of South Carolina is changing college football training by leveraging four key movements humans evolved to do.

• Covering ground and carrying makeup two of those four movements.

• Our species is unique in our ability to run great distances in the heat and carry weight. We’d run down animals, kill them, then carry the meat back to camp. Hence the name, Carry What You Kill.

Why it works

• In a presentation on his training methods, Luke said: “When we came to the part of The Comfort Crisis about carrying and how it gave us a predatorial edge, we decided to add it to our long runs. Everyone runs, and everyone says they are training the demanded energy systems of football. But if we are not including a skill that made us the food chain champions, are we really developing our players to their fullest potential? The result: We took a page from legendary Michigan Strength Coach Mike Gittleson’s ‘Getting Yards’ drill and married it to (carrying).”

• He continued, “The result was a difficult aerobic and cardiovascular demand paired with a loaded chassis demand expressed via the gait pattern while in a fatigued state; The ‘sweet spot,’ as Michael Easter puts it.” Translation: It forces you to carry and cover ground while tired. That builds endurance, functional strength, and toughness.

• “I realized we needed to call this drill ‘Carry What you Kill,’” Luke said. “Carry What You Kill asks our players to be strong while they run—and run while being strong. That’s what made humans who we are.”

Equipment needed

• Something heavy-ish that you can carry. A sandbag is best (that’s what I’ve listed in the workout, and what the Gamecocks use).

• If you don’t have a sandbag, you can get one from Amazon in 48 hours for $35.

• You can also use a heavy medicine ball, a ruck, a bag of sand from Home Depot, etc. Ideally, this weight is anywhere from ¼ to ½ of your body weight.

Time commitment

• This should take you between 35 and 75 minutes.

Song I’m listening to while doing this workout

• Sandstorm. It plays in the University of South Carolina football stadium at kickoff and whenever the team needs it during the game. Here’s a way-too-in-depth story from ESPN about how a song from a Finnish DJ took over the Gamecock football stadium. (And yes, despite our commitment to decency, we’re listening to electronica. I don’t make the rules. I just follow them.)

If this workout were an animal, it would be a:

• Gamecock. Obviously.

A note about this workout:

• Luke and I collaborated to adapt Carry What You Kill for Two Percent. The Gamecocks do a different version of the workout as an end to a day of training. Here’s what the team does:

• “I’m not sure how hard our drill would be if you just did it on its own, as a standalone,” said Luke. “It’s so hard for us because we’ve done an hour and a half of brutal work before it, and you’ve exhausted all of your capacities at that point.”

• To make the workout a tough enough standalone, Luke and I added more rounds and greater distances, and included crawling and a level change, the other two fundamental human movements.

How to do it

From here, you’ll learn:

• Exactly how to do the Carry What You Kill workout.

• The full breakdown of reps and rounds for your fitness level and time.

• Substitutions and scaled versions of the workout so anyone can do it, no matter your equipment or fitness level.

• Videos of each movement.

The Workout

Now move on to the workout. Do the exercises in the following order, moving from one to the other.

Read more

There are billions of animals living inside America's factory farms right now. Most live terrible, painful lives. Dan Shannon runs the Humane League, one of the largest and most effective animal welfare organizations in the world.

Most organizations like his push people to go vegan—but Dan says that’s a critical error. Meat-eaters might be the most important people in the animal-welfare movement—and should be welcomed.

I sit down with Shannon, a vegan of almost 30 years, to unpack why he wants meat eaters in the animal welfare movement and what actually improves animal welfare. We get into how to avoid B.S. labels food producers use to make you think you’re buying ethically, why a phone call to a grocery chain can do more for animals than a perfect diet, the animal welfare law 80 percent of Americans agree on, and how to eat fewer animal products without pretending you'll be perfect. Shannon's message is the one worth keeping: you have more power than you realize.

Go deeper: Protein Myths Part II

Watch the episode

Listen to the episode

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A couple of summers ago, I was in South Carolina, sitting on a dock on Lake Murray. I was with Bert Sorin, owner of SORINEX fitness equipment.

Then I heard a giant voice down the dock. “MICHAEL EASTER.”

It was Luke Day. Luke has the presence and level-11 intensity of an SEC strength coach—because he is one.

He’s the Head Football Strength and Conditioning Coach for the University of South Carolina Football team—part strength savant, part firebrand preacher, part motivational guru.

Luke had read The Comfort Crisis, and he spends his days thinking about many of the same questions I do.

What physical skills did humans evolve to have, and what happens when we stop using those skills?

The difference is who we’re answering those questions for.

• For me, it’s people from many different backgrounds and demographics who all have one thing in common: we want to live healthier, happier, longer lives.

• For Luke, it’s giant, 20-something football players in the most competitive conference in college football, the SEC.

Luke and I became fast friends.

I talk to him and Chip Morton, who coached in the NFL for 27 years and now helps Luke direct the Gamecock football strength and conditioning program.

These two are doing something heretical. How they train the team is fundamentally different from what most college football strength and conditioning programs have done for the last 30 years.

And it’s built the Gamecocks into arguably the fittest team in the game heading into this season.

The upshot: Their heretical exercise ideas aren’t limited to the football field. They’ve boiled human movement down to the fundamentals. And those work whether you’re playing football or just want to live and age well, avoid injuries, and more.

Today you’ll learn:

• Why chasing pure lifting numbers increases injury risk and can increase some disease risk.

• How SEC strength coaches subverted 30 years of D1 training ideology to build the nation’s fittest team.

• The “Four Horsemen of Hardship”—four human movement patterns that evolved over millions of years. We should still do them today.

• Practical tips to integrate the movements into your routines.

• The exact Gamecock conditioning drill you can perform with dumbbells or kettlebells today.

🎙️ Two Percent podcast: on Getting Better Healthcare

Only 5% of healthcare spending goes to conversations between the doctor and patient. The average checkup is 12 minutes. And the modern system is built to manage disease after it appears, not necessarily to unpeel the underlying factors behind why you’re sick in the first place. I spoke to , author of the new and necessary book, Beyond The Prescription.

We covered five rules to follow for better healthcare, where the wellness industry helps and hurts, the future of AI in medicine, rapid-fire verdicts on Prenuvo full-body cancer scans, direct-to-consumer blood tests and CGMs, and questions you must ask your doctor to get better care.

• Listen Here

• Watch Here

🧪 Check out Function Health

Function offers 5x deeper insights into your health than typical bloodwork. The info can guide you into feeling better every day. It helped me identify a mineral insufficiency—and was cheaper than my insurance. Go to my page here to sign up, receive a discount, and pay just $340.

Read more

Americans spend more on healthcare than any other wealthy nation and have the worst outcomes to show for it. Dr. Lucy McBride, a Harvard-trained physician who has practiced for more than two decades, says the problem is baked into the system.

The modern medical system is built to manage disease after it appears, not to treat the whole patient well. What’s more, doctors are forced to see far too many patients each day. The underlying factors that help or hurt our health—stress, sleep, grief, and life events—never come up in a rushed 12-minute visit.

I sit down with Dr. McBride, author of Beyond the Prescription, to talk about the five rules you must follow to stop being passive and become the CEO of your own health. We get into where the wellness industry genuinely helps and where it preys on you, what AI can and can't do in the exam room, rapid-fire verdicts on Prenuvo scans, direct-to-consumer blood tests and CGMs, and questions you must ask your doctor to get better care.

Go deeper: Read more about The Comfort Crisis in the Doctor’s Office.

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Maybe you eat beans because that’s what 110-year-olds in Costa Rica do. Or drink wine from Sardinia at 5 pm because that’s what the 100+ year olds of Sardinia do. Or eat until you’re 80 percent full—something called hara hachi bu—because that’s what the oldest folks in Okinawa do.

If so, you’ve been had by the Blue Zones.

The Blue Zones are places on earth where people supposedly reach exceptionally old ages, often beyond 100. The idea started as a 2004 paper1, which became a National Geographic cover story—and took off.

It spawned an entire industry of Blue Zones books, microwaveable meals, resorts, tours, and Blue Zones-certified communities. Netflix even did a Blue Zones documentary.

The pitch is this: if we copy the habits of Blue Zones people, we’ll also live to over 100.

The problem: No one ever really checked whether the people in these places are as old as they say they are2.

Then someone finally did. Saul Justin Newman is a demographer at the University of Oxford Institute of Population Ageing and author of Morbid: Debunking Modern Longevity Science. He spent the better part of a decade digging into the data on Blue Zones.

His finding: The data is terrible—very few people in these places reach past age 100. In fact, they might live shorter lives on average.

But Saul’s work is more than a debunking. It’s a strange, shocking, and hilarious saga. I spoke to Saul on Thursday’s Two Percent podcast.

You’ll learn: Just how bad some centenarian data is, tales of sweet old people defrauding the government, and how some Blue Zones were invented for a good story—and big business.

Listen here

• This link opens the episode on your preferred podcast player.

Watch it here

For the readers, the post will dive into why the Blue Zones are a myth.

Let’s roll …

Quick housekeeping

• ICYMI:

  • On Wednesday, we covered the Bare-Minimum Strength Plan—the least amount of exercise you have to do to maintain strength.

  • Friday’s post gathered 7 Ideas That Changed How I Lived.

• 🧪 Check out Function Health. Function offers 5x deeper insights into your health than typical bloodwork. The info can guide you into feeling better every day. It helped me identify a mineral insufficiency—and was cheaper than my insurance. Go to my page here to sign up, receive a discount, and pay just $340.

The Blue Zones Mistake: Bad Data

This saga started when Saul came across two papers published in major scientific journals that looked at lifespan—how long humans can live. These papers used data on supercentenarian and semi-supercentenarian death records.

But there were problems.

1. They came to opposite conclusions.

2. Their data were a mess.

In the first study, the authors had accidentally rounded most of their data to zero. If they hadn’t rounded, among other errors, their study would have reached the opposite conclusion. In the second, the authors “used the most biased mathematical model possible, and it was the only one that gave them a publishable result,” Saul said.

“So the fact that this [lifespan] debate was being undertaken with such terrible evidence was amazing to me,” he said. He started looking at more data on centenarians and supercentenarians.

That led him to dig into the Blue Zones. People in the Blue Zones weren’t living to extremely old ages. Instead, these locations just had terrible record-keeping.

Most very old people don’t have a birth certificate. Still today, a quarter of the world’s children don’t get a birth certificate. The U.S. didn’t hit full statewide birth certificate adoption until 1933.

What’s more, the way many countries track deaths is fundamentally flawed—and there are incentives for people to not report deaths of their older relatives.

The evidence, presented in four acts:

Act I: The United States

In 2025, Saul ran an analysis3 of American supercentenarians.

He found that in the U.S., the single best predictor of being a supercentenarian is not having a birth certificate.

Eighty-two percent of all American supercentenarians were born before statewide birth certification. When a state hit complete birth certificate coverage, its supercentenarian count fell about 80% per year.

Saul even went as far as tracking down the world’s oldest man.

The guy had multiple papers with different birthdates. “One of his birthdays was, by admission, made up by his family. And then he got married to the same woman three times, apparently without being divorced. He also changed his name, but there’s no record of the name change. [The story] is just astonishingly full of holes. But nobody cares, because it’s a story about a sweet old man reaching an astonishing age.”

Loma Linda, California is a famous American Blue Zone.

The Netflix documentary shows an overhead photo of Loma Linda. The town sits on the south side of the I-10 freeway. And the documentary claims that the people on the north side of I-10—literally hundreds of feet away in San Bernardino—live much shorter lives. When I saw that, I thought “that makes no sense.” So I asked Saul about it.

When the CDC independently measured Loma Linda’s average lifespan, he said, “it is nowhere near the best place in the U.S. At least a quarter of the U.S. and perhaps three-quarters of the U.S. has higher longevity than Loma Linda.”

The popularizer of the Blue Zones, a journalist, told the New York Times4 that he included Loma Linda because “his editor at National Geographic told him, ‘you need to find America’s blue zone.’”

“The next day, on the drive between [the Blue Zones popularizer’s] house in LA and Las Vegas, there’s a turn at Loma Linda Heights,” Saul said. “And for 20 years, he has marketed this as if there was the Fountain of Youth beneath the freeway next to the Costco.” The author of the original 2004 Blue Zone study never acknowledged Loma Linda as a Blue Zone.

Act II: Japan/Okinawa

In 2010, the Japanese government went looking for the oldest man in Tokyo, who was supposedly 111. They wanted to throw him a big party.

Government officials traveled to his house, where his granddaughter also lived.

The granddaughter told them the man was out visiting Gifu Prefecture, which was 250 miles away. A 111-year-old guy just out for a jaunt, naturally.

The government returned. This time the grandfather was apparently at his girlfriend’s house a few towns away. They tried again. Still, he was out and busy.

Eventually, the family gave up. They called the police to report that grandpa had barricaded himself in his room and was fighting off relatives.

When police opened the door, the guy was there—but he’d been dead for about 30 years.

The family had been collecting his pension checks for three decades—and collected six figures.

This led Japan to check everyone. And they were able to find 92% of centenarians—but 82% were dead. “That’s over 230,000 people who are dead in reality and alive on paper,” Saul said.

How could this happen? When someone dies in Japan, their death is self-reported by family members.

“It’s not like there’s a giant death radar machine the government can use to know when someone dies,” Saul said.

If a family doesn’t report a death, the government doesn’t know—and that family can keep cashing pension checks.

Or there could be an event that kills an entire family. That means there’d be no one left to report a death and correct the paperwork, so the government assumes that all of those people are still alive.

Case in point: World War II. Okinawa is a famous Blue Zone area. Towns around the area were destroyed during the war, killing entire households.

A town being destroyed in the war predicted about 80% of the variation in people reaching age 100. “So if your town’s been firebombed, everyone reaches 100 on paper,” Saul said. “Because they all died in 1944.”

Eating sweet potatoes was a key tip from Okinawa. Because of this, Netflix even put purple sweet potatoes on its poster promoting the Blue Zones documentary.

The problem: Japan has tracked national nutrition obsessively since 1975. Okinawans in the older age cohort had some of the worst health measures in the country, year after year—and Okinawa ranks dead last in Japan for sweet potato consumption.

Act III: Greece/Ikaria

Greece had more than 9,000 centenarians on the books.

Then the financial crisis hit, tanked their economy, and other European countries had to bail them out.

The German government suspected Greece might have a problem with its pension system. So they did a pension audit before they’d give Greece any bailout money.

The audit found that at least 72% of people over 100 were, in Saul’s words, “collecting the pension from the graveyard.”

After the audit, the famous Blue Zone island of Ikaria went to a normal rate of centenarians.

Act IV: The big picture

Which is all to say, these places that supposedly have many, many people over age 100 probably don’t.

“It’s simply a combination of pension fraud and clerical error,” Saul said. “It’s much easier to be an error in paperwork than someone who has outlived the rest of humanity.”

The entire theory also just doesn’t make sense.

Saul told me that there’s a joke in epidemiology that “every map is a poverty map.” Disease and bad health outcomes track with poverty. Many of the Blue Zones are poor and their citizens, on average, don’t live that long—yet small hotspots somehow manage to rack up a lot of centenarians.

In one study5, Saul looked at old-age populations provided by local governments and curated by the United Nations. He wrote:

[Our] analysis of 236 nations or states across 51 years reveals that late-life survival data is dominated by anomalies at all scales and in all time periods. Life expectancy at age 100 and late-life survival from ages 80 to 100+, which we term centenarian attainment rate, is highest in a seemingly random assortment of states. The top 10 ‘blue zone’ regions with the best survival to ages 100+ routinely includes Thailand, Kenya and Malawi – respectively now 212^th and 202^nd in the world for life expectancy, the non-self-governing territory of Western Sahara, and Puerto Rico where birth certificates are so unreliable they were recently declared invalid as a legal document.

I asked him who the oldest verified human being in history actually is. “Not the foggiest idea,” he said.

Listen to the Blue Zones Podcast Episode

Why it matters

I asked Saul whether he was just correcting the record—arguing over pub trivia, as he put it—or whether there was real harm in the Blue Zones being bunk.

He told me extreme old-age data is used to model the future and determine how much things cost.

If you want to know how long a 30-year-old will live, you look at the oldest people alive right now and assume the 30-year-old will live to that age or longer.

This assumption is used to determine pension contribution rates, life insurance pricing, and long-term healthcare planning.

If the models assume you’ll live longer than you will, “You have to pay way more every single day,” Saul said. Governments and insurance companies are using this bad data, and it’s costing us money.

Then there’s the wasted time of scientists. There are 100+ papers on Loma Linda, and more on other Blue Zones. There are genomic studies, biomarker studies, telomere studies. They’re all hunting for the magic behind a phenomenon that appears to be a fairy tale.

That time could be used to conduct other studies that actually improve our healthspan and lifespan.

And finally, 70+ American cities have paid the Blue Zones Project millions to become Blue Zones certified—money that could have gone to other projects. For example, Brevard, North Carolina paid $3 million over three years.

Towns and non-profits have paid large sums to be graded against a sketchy standard.

What Works

When people ask Saul for the secret to longevity, his most honest response is “be born in a rich place that has free health care.” That’s what the data suggests, anyway.

Nobody can act on that. So the market fills with things you can act on, whether or not they work.

What does work: See a doctor. Exercise. Don’t smoke. Don’t drink. Don’t eat too much junk. Have some friends.

It’s free. It’s boring. You can find it anywhere on the map.

In that sense, the Blue Zones behaviors were fine. Most are decent, common-sense advice: walking, eating single-ingredient foods, having friends. The problem is the claims attached to them. And that steered science off course, cost us all money, and led us to believe a few things that may actually be harmful.

“Absurdly, one of the Blue Zone habits was drinking every day,” Saul said.

Is it possible that there are places on the map where people tend to live longer? Of course. Researchers and the Blue Zones creators have admitted6 initial Blue Zones “are waning right now.”

If I had to guess where people in the U.S. live longest on average, I’d look to well-educated, health-conscious, wealthy communities. For example, the wealthiest suburbs of big cities, resort towns like Aspen and Park City.

That, however, would have less to do with the town itself, and more to do with a combination of good health practices, good hospitals, and people having enough time and money for health.

Why the Blue Zones captured us

“We’re still in this mindset of Ponce de Leon,” Saul said. “We want there to be a fountain of youth [somewhere] because it’s easier than the tough reality of just taking care of your health. We’re all susceptible, even scientists, to this beautiful idea that things are better in a faraway place.”

He also pointed out the business genius of the whole longevity industry, going back to the first emperor of China: “If people don’t live forever, they can’t complain because they’re dead,” Saul said. “So your customer complaints division has very little to do.”

In 1825, a British actuary named Benjamin Gompertz figured out that once you hit 40, your odds of dying double roughly every eight years until they don’t double anymore because you’re dead.

A lot of people find that upsetting. Saul doesn’t.

The probability of any of us reaching 80 has never been higher, and those 80 years are unrecognizably better than 80 years in any previous era.

“It’s fine to not make it to 105,” Saul said.

Have fun, don’t die, and if you do die, don’t tell the government so your kids can keep collecting checks,

Michael

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Fridays are reserved for our signature posts: Burn the Ships, Gear Not Stuff, The Expedition, Q&As.

On the rare fifth Friday of a month, we run our All Killer, No Filler posts.

These posts feature something that’s improved my life lately. They’re quick, practical, and potent.

This fifth Friday, we’re featuring seven of the best insights and advice from recent Two Percent podcast episodes.

We’re almost 40 episodes in. Every episode, I walk away with ideas and practices that make me think or act differently.

Selecting episodes and pinning down one takeaway from each was hard—most podcasts have many ideas I love and use. But we like doing hard things around here.

These seven altered how I live day to day. They’re free and easy to implement. They’ll help you live better, too. Each one ends with exactly what I’m doing differently because of it.

Let’s roll …

🎙️ Two Percent podcast: Debunking the Blue Zones

Turns out the Blue Zones—those magical spots on earth where people supposedly live to extremely old age—are totally fake. I spoke to Saul Justin Newman, PhD, who uncovered Blue Zone fabrication in his research and wrote Morbid: Debunking Modern Longevity Science. (We’ll dive deeper into this topic next week).

The Best Nutrition App I’ve Found: Macrofactor

MacroFactor uses dynamic adjustment, a scientifically validated formula to help you find the right amount of food for your goals. It helped me realize I was under-eating. And when I ate more, my fitness improved and I felt better. Read more of the science here. Get a free 14-day MacroFactor trial here. Use code TWOPCT.

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Everybody wants to live longer, and for two decades the Blue Zones, places with the highest percentage of people 100+ years old, have promised to show us how with nine tidy behaviors we can all copy. According to Saul Newman, a demographer at the University of Oxford, almost none of it holds up.

I sit down with Newman, author of Morbid: Debunking Modern Longevity Science, to take apart one of the most popular ideas in health and longevity. When the Japanese government actually checked, 82% of its "over-100" population turned out to be long dead, many killed in World War II and kept alive on paper to collect the pension. Greece found most of its centenarians were drawing checks from the graveyard. America's Blue Zone in Loma Linda was, by the founder's own admission, spotted from the freeway on a drive to Vegas. And the towns with the most 105-year-olds tend to be the poorest places with the worst records, because it's far easier to be a clerical error than to outlive everyone else.

Newman explains where the real errors come from, why the longevity industry keeps selling the same con sold to the first emperor of China, how bad centenarian data quietly shapes your pension and insurance rates, and what actually works if you want a longer, healthier life. (Spoiler: talk to your doctor, exercise, don't drink, don't smoke, and stop panicking about living to 105.)

Check out Saul's new book here.

Watch the episode

Listen to the episode

• Spotify

• Apple Podcasts

I recently traveled to Portland, Maine. I arrived late and got four hours of sleep my first night.

There are times—and that next day was one of them for me—when we have zero desire to work out. None at all.

Maybe we slept awfully the night before. Or we have a hellish work schedule. Or we have family in town or kids that need to be doted around. It happens to all of us.

So I wondered: What’s the best way to half-ass strength training—even quarter-ass it, if we can? What’s the minimum amount of strength training it takes not to lose strength?

I sat in my hotel and did a quick literature review—and the answers revealed themselves. Afterward, I forced myself down to the hotel gym and did exactly what the science suggested. No more, no less.

This post is about what I learned, and what I did: A scientifically validated bare-minimum strength plan. It recognizes that perfection is the enemy of progress, and that life is always going to life.

Today you’ll learn:

• U.S. military researcher on a bare-minimum plan that maintained peak physical strength for 32 weeks.

• The threshold where exercise stops building baseline fitness and enters maintenance mode.

• The rule for making a bare-minimum plan work.

• The key difference in how younger vs. older adults should approach doing the bare minimum to maintain strength.

🎙️ Two Percent podcast: The Vastly Underrated Health Benefits of Art

10,000+. That’s how many studies show that art has health benefits. According to Daisy Fancourt, one of the world’s foremost researchers on arts and health, art is a missing pillar of health, alongside sleep, diet, and exercise. People who regularly engage with the arts have about half the risk of developing depression over the next ten years. Music has outperformed anti-anxiety meds in head-to-head studies. And new research suggests that arts engagement may slow biological aging about as much as exercise does. I sat down to talk with Daisy about the best way to approach art, and afterward, with my favorite artist and Iraq War veteran, Jesse Albrecht.

Check out our partners

• MacroFactor is the best nutrition app I’ve found—by far. MacroFactor uses dynamic adjustment, a scientifically validated formula to help you find the right amount of food for your goals. It helped me realize I was under-eating. And when I ate more, my fitness improved and I felt better. Read more of the science here. Get a free 14-day MacroFactor trial here. Use code TWOPCT.

• Momentous made a new creatine that’s 99.9% pure and the best on the market. It has 10x fewer impurities, 2-5x tighter heavy metal limits, 10x lower microbial load, and no microplastics. Momentous is obsessive about making its products better, safer, and more effective. Buy it here.

The bare minimum strength plan

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Art is not a luxury. According to Daisy Fancourt, one of the world's foremost researchers on arts and health, it is a missing pillar of health, right next to sleep, diet, and exercise. People who regularly engage with the arts have about half the risk of developing depression over the next ten years. Music has outperformed anti-anxiety meds before surgery in head to head studies. And new research finds that arts engagement slows biological aging about as much as exercise does.

I sit down with Daisy Fancourt, author of Art Cure, to unpack the science that shows how arts engagement may be the missing pillar of modern healthcare. Then Iraq war veteran and ceramic artist Jesse Albrecht tells the story of coming home from combat, how art became his lifeline — and why his story and the power of creativity apply to everyone.

Watch the episode

Listen to the episode

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Friday, July 24th, was Pioneer Day in Utah.

I grew up in that state. The holiday always reminds me of a woman in my family who made the journey the day celebrates.

Her life story resets what I think counts as a problem. It also happens to illustrate a psychological concept discovered by Harvard scientists—a quirk in the human brain that explains why modern life can feel harder than it actually is.

Pioneer Day celebrates the arrival of Mormon settlers in Utah. Mormons in the 1830s and 1840s were persecuted for their faith. They’d been violently driven out of Ohio, Missouri, and Illinois. Their leader, Joseph Smith, was assassinated by a mob in Illinois.

Smith’s successor, Brigham Young, realized that Mormons would probably always be persecuted so long as they lived in the United States. He decided they should escape the U.S. and establish a Mormon colony somewhere in the wild area that was then Mexico.

In early 1847, Young gathered about 150 from the faith. They began to head west into a savage landscape with no particular destination.

After months of hard trekking, on July 24th, 1847, historians explain what happened next—the basis for Pioneer Day:

Young and his followers emerged out onto a broad valley where a giant lake shimmered in the distance. With his first glimpse of this Valley of the Great Salt Lake, Young reportedly said, “This is the place.” That year, some 1,600 people arrived to begin building a new civilization in the valley. The next year, 2,500 more made the passage. By the time Young died in 1877, more than 100,000 people were living in the surrounding Great Basin, the majority of them Mormon.

My great-great-great-great-great aunt, Nellie Unthank, was one of those 100,000 pioneers.

But getting to Utah wasn’t exactly a first-class flight.

Today, you’ll learn:

• A 1856 survival story that reframes modern hardship.

• How a 2018 Harvard study uncovered the science of first-world problems (and why comfort makes it worse).

• Why your brain is hardwired to create problems to save energy.

• How to override it, get some perspective, and live better every day.

Quick housekeeping

• ICYMI:

  • Wednesday’s post was Don’t Die: Sprint. We covered the evolutionary and statistical case for sprinting.

  • Friday we showed how many protein claims on food are misleading, and a simple formula to learn if a food is actually a good protein source.

  • On the podcast: Robert Young Pelton on lessons from the world’s most dangerous places; Dr. Gabrielle Lyon on muscle and building it.

• Shoutout to our partners:

  • Momentous made a new creatine that’s 99.9% pure and the best on the market. It has 10x fewer impurities, 2-5x tighter heavy metal limits, 10x lower microbial load, and no microplastics. Momentous is obsessive about making its products better, safer, and more effective. Buy it here.

  • MacroFactor is the best nutrition app I’ve found. MacroFactor uses dynamic adjustment, a scientifically validated formula to help you find the right amount of food for your goals. It helped me realize I was under-eating. And when I ate more, my fitness improved and I felt better. Read more of the science here. Get a free 14-day MacroFactor trial here. Use code TWOPCT.

Two Frozen Legs, One Butcher’s Knife

Nellie was nine when her family and a group of ~575 other Mormons left Iowa City for Utah, pulling handcarts loaded with their belongings. This was in July of 1856.

Things went well for most of the journey.

But when the team reached Wyoming in October, a freak early-season blizzard hit. It slowed them to a crawl. Snow piled, temperatures plummeted, and they began running out of rations.

Every moment became life-or-death. Nellie’s father slipped during a river crossing and died from hypothermia. Her mom died from exposure five days later.

Word of the team’s situation eventually reached Salt Lake City. Leaders sent a team of rescue wagons, who found the group buried in snow near the Platte River Bridge in Wyoming. About 150 had died.

When Nellie finally made it to Utah in late November, her feet were frozen.

Doctors knew she’d die without medical intervention. One old news report described what happened next:

Nellie was strapped to a board to hold her down while the crudest of tools, a butcher knife and a carpenter’s saw, was used to amputate her lower legs, not far below the knees. As if that were not bad enough, the surgical procedure was [without pain medication and] so primitive that the wounds healed badly and bone continued to protrude from the end of her stumps.

Because the hackjob surgery left her bones exposed, Nellie couldn’t wear the wooden prosthetics of the time. She wrapped her exposed bone in leather and got around by crawling on her knees.

She crawled the world in constant pain the rest of her life. And yet …

Historical records show that she went on to have six children and was about as productive as everyone else in the community. She never complained and made a solid income weaving clothing and other goods.

Nellie lived to 68. A local leader wrote about her after she died:

In memory I recall her wrinkled forehead, her soft dark eyes that told of toil and pain and suffering, and the deep grooves that encircled the corners of her strong mouth. But in that face there was no trace of bitterness or railings at her fate. There was patience and serenity, for in spite of her handicap she had earned her keep and justified her existence. She had given more to family, friends and to the world than she had received.

On Prevalence-Induced Concept Change

Two weeks ago, I was on a flight to Boston where the WiFi wasn’t working. I found myself, let’s say, mildly annoyed that I couldn’t connect.

In chapter four of The Comfort Crisis, I wrote about an idea called “Prevalence-Induced Concept Change.” Harvard psychologists discovered it in a series of studies1 in 2018. You can think of it as “problem creep.”

It explains that as we experience fewer problems, we don’t become more satisfied. We just lower our threshold for what we consider a problem.

We end up with the same number of troubles. Except our new problems are progressively more hollow. It’s why we can often find an issue in nearly any situation, no matter how good we can have it relative to the grand sweep of humanity.

We are always moving the goalpost. There is, quite literally, a scientific basis for first-world problems.

David Levari, the lead researcher, told me that the human brain likely evolved to make relative comparisons because doing so uses far less brain power than remembering every instance of a situation we’ve seen or been in.

This brain mechanism in early humans allowed us to make quick decisions and safely navigate our environments.

But applied to today’s world? “As people make all these relative judgments,” Levari told me, “they become less and less satisfied than they used to be with the same thing.”

I am not saying that we don’t have problems. Many of us do. Some of us are dealing with illness, financial or work-related stress, problems with loved ones, and so much more. And that is absolutely hard.

But what I am saying is that we are all in a better position to deal with our problems than we ever have been.

We have modern medicine and more safety nets. We’re not having to flee America by handcart across perilous terrain due to religious persecution. We’ve made so much progress over the last 150 years. We must keep progressing.

The graph below shows how far we’ve come—and the work we have to do, especially in the developing world, where there are still many dying of malaria and a lack of nutrients2. But, unlike back in 1856, we can all help. These charities, for example, save the most lives per dollar donated.

Yet if we let our mind do its thing and focus only on our first-world problems, we miss the beauty of this insane lottery we’ve won of not only being alive, but being alive today.

We find “problems” that are not problems at all in the grand scheme of time and space.

FFS, an aunt of mine just a handful of generations ago had to trek for half a year to get to Salt Lake City and lost her legs along the way.

As for me? I traveled double the distance in a climate-controlled, plumbed, well-rationed, safe tube of steel in five hours. And I was annoyed over … spotty WiFi?

On my best days, I think of Nellie and her utter lack of complaining about her life. And it gives me some perspective. Like it did on that flight. I was only annoyed for about one minute, then I thought of her, laughed at myself, and read a book instead.

That helps me find equanimity and gratitude. It improves my internal conditions—suddenly, I can see and feel that my situation is a blessing. It also reminds me that I have it good enough I can help others.

And those are the best days.

Have fun, don’t die, and please absolve yourself of first-world problems.

-Michael

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