I’m in finishing phases of my third book, out in March 2027.

Writing a book is a strange thing. You sit alone for thousands of hours, typing your thoughts. There is no feedback or fanfare. Only a lot of time to sit in your own head.

And our heads? Well …

We all have an imaginary jury up there. We ask: What will people think of this? Should I say or do exactly what I think—or should hedge and keep things safe?

This isn’t just a writing thing. It applies to everything we want to accomplish—from big projects to physical challenges to personal choices to how we live day-to-day life.

I’m doing my best to resist that in this next book.

Strangely enough, an advertising man from the 1950s has helped me strengthen the resistance.

David Ogilvy is considered “The Father of Advertising.” He founded Ogilvy & Mather in 1948. His ideas were big and bold—and they’re still considered some of the greatest and most creative campaigns of all time.

When people asked him for advice, he had a simple response: Don’t bunt.

For those averse to watching video, here’s the quote:

Advice? I can talk for hours on this subject. The first thing I say is, ‘be more ambitious. Don’t bunt. When you get a job to do a storyboard or an ad, try to hit the ball out of the park every time. Don’t bunt. Compete with immortals.

You live once. In the grand sweep of time, no one will remember you. All we have is now, so we might as well do it our way. Don’t bunt.

From here you’ll learn:

• The four psychological errors that lead us to play it safe, but ultimately hold us back.

• Why our brains treat social rejection like a threat to your survival.

• How to stop hedging, quiet the internal “jury,” and take big swings in your life and health.

Quick Housekeeping

• Wednesday’s post covered a common workout mistake that can raise injury risk by 30%, and a framework for building better workouts.

• Friday’s Expedition post covered 21 new ideas that improved my life this month.

• Last week’s podcasts:

  • Maria Konnikova, a PhD psychologist turned pro poker player, explained why we’re bad at making decisions, and how to make better ones. Listen here.

  • Thursday, Dr. John Kedrowski talked about his “Everest Ready Mindset,” training for the outdoors, and what climbing Everest seven times taught him about taking risks and living well today. Listen 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.

  • 🧑‍🔬 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.

Why we bunt

Bunting feels safe and smart.

Years of psychological research show we have a cocktail of psychological errors that prevent us from swinging big—taking the safer and more comfortable path. These tendencies are human. But they often hold us back today.

• The spotlight effect. Researchers at Cornell coined this term in 2000. It tells us we all think the spotlight is on us, and that everyone is watching us and judging us. Surprise: They aren’t. In one study1, the scientists sent people into a room wearing an embarrassing T-shirt, then asked them how many people in the room noticed their dumb t-shirt. The wearers guessed about double the real number.

• Conformity to the norm. We do what we think won’t ruffle feathers, even when it’s not what we really want to do—or clearly wrong. Consider Solomon Asch’s famous experiments2. People sat in a room where everyone else audibly gave an obviously wrong answer to a question. About a third of participants went with the group and agreed to the wrong answer. The good news: When a single person questioned the group’s answer, conformity nearly vanished.

• Loss aversion. Maria Konnikova—PhD psychologist and pro poker player—talked about this on the Two Percent pod. It comes from Kahneman and Tversky3 and shows we’re wired to protect what we’ve got rather than reach for more. Bunting feels like it will prevent losses. The big swing feels like a risk—even when we should take it.

• Avoiding rejection. Humans are wired to avoid social rejection because—for nearly all of human history—getting cast out of the tribe could kill you. We developed a deep need to belong and a brain that treats criticism like a survival threat4. That’s the jury inside our head—overthinking what people will think.

To sum it all up: The jury in our head is small and inconsequential. When we don’t conform, we often find new followers. And today, a loss isn’t death and we’ll still have people who care.

This philosophy is not unique to Ogilvy

Maybe the ideas of a guy who created legendary ad campaigns for Rolls Royce, Dove, and Hathaway shirts don’t speak to you.

Taking big risks is a theme running through some of the most creative minds, and groups that have changed millions of lives.

If you don’t like the Ogilvy quote, consider one of these instead:

If you’re going to try, go all the way. There is no other feeling like that. You will be alone with the gods, and the nights will flame with fire. You will ride life straight to perfect laughter. It’s the only good fight there is. -Charles Bukowski, What Matters Most is How Well You Walk Through the Fire

Half measures availed us nothing. -Big Book of Alcoholics Anonymous

When you do something … you should do it completely, like a good bonfire. You should not be a smoky fire. You should burn yourself completely. If you do not burn yourself completely, a trace of yourself will be left in what you do. -Shunryu Suzuki, Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind

Spend it all, shoot it, play it, lose it, all, right away, every time. -Annie Dillard, The Writing Life

Risk! Risk anything! Care no more for the opinions of others, for those voices. Do the hardest thing on earth for you. Act for yourself. Face the truth. -Katherine Mansfield, personal journals, 1922

That’s it. That’s the full letter. A reminder that whoever you are, whatever you’re doing, no matter what it is, don’t bunt.

Have fun, don’t die, compete with immortals,

Michael

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:

• My collab with Waking Up, the Harvard of mindfulness meditation apps—plus free Two Percent phone wallpaper!

• Podcast: The Everest Ready Mindset

• Numbers on:

  • Adult kids moving in with mom and dad.

  • Why quality beats quantity for sleep.

  • Billionaires doing good.

  • How often anxiety comes true.

  • An all-time low in the death rate.

  • The decline of reading for pleasure.

  • The rise of gambling—and whether gambling addiction is growing.

  • A protein lawsuit.

  • Harvard kids (maybe) milking the system to get better grades.

  • How often we talk face-to-face.

  • What happens to your blood when you exercise.

  • Did Donald Trump get a powerful drug before it was approved?

• Why injury rates seem to be higher among Westerners compared to tribes and what to do about it (plus, what the book Born to Run got wrong).

• Not just the screens: A new theory on why kid and teen mental health is down (worth reading if you’re a parent).

• A strange new way people are dealing with anxiety.

• How strong can you get after age 50?

• A math trick that saves marriages.

• The case for remote work, from someone who runs a remote tech company.

• Three new myth-busting studies on fasting, how eating late impacts sleep, and how important rest breaks are.

• A parting quote on finding great ideas.

Check out our partners:

• 🧪 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.

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

Waking Up x Two Percent

Waking Up is one of my favorite apps. Founded by , think of Waking Up as the Harvard of meditation apps.

Instead of being focused mainly on relaxation or stress relief, it combines guided meditation with lessons on consciousness, philosophy, and living an examined life. It has daily meditations, structured courses, and conversations with scientists, philosophers, and contemplative teachers.

I also have a 10-part series on the app called Embracing Discomfort. They just ran this Stories feature on me.

• Check it out and get a free 14-day trial of Waking Up here.

Their design team created a series of Two Percent phone wallpapers. You can download one or all of them here.

🎙️ Recent Pod: Dr. Jon Kedrowski on Being Everest Ready

Dr. Jon Kedrowski has summited Mount Everest seven times, survived the 2015 earthquake that killed 20 people, and racked up first ascents of remote peaks. He explained his “Everest Ready” mindset. It’s about building a life where you could take on the world’s tallest mountain—or any of life’s challenges—at a moment’s notice. We covered what risk teaches you about how to live, and why you need adventure no matter how busy you are. Also: How to train for the outdoors, U.S. peaks anyone can climb, and why we all need risk in our lives.

• Listen here.

• Watch it here.

By the numbers

49

Percent of adults under age 30 live in their parents’ home. About 1/3 of these adults are over age 25.

Roughly half moved back home because of housing prices.

Source.

6.5

Hours of consistent, good-quality sleep each night that “probably carries less risk than a fragmented, anxious, eight-hour routine or pattern in which sleep varies wildly from night to night.”

Source.

50,000

Acres of North Carolina wilderness Fortnite creator Tim Sweeney has saved from logging. He’s spent over $200 million buying land.

Meanwhile, Snapchat founder Evan Spiegel and his wife paid off $550 million in medical debt for nearly a quarter-million Californians.

Listen to this episode of Two Percent. In it, executive coach —who works with the top 0.01%—covers the thinking patterns of billionaires. Both the good and bad—and the ones you can use to make better decisions.

90

Percent of the stuff anxious people worry about never happens.

The good news: Telling anxious people how inaccurate they are seems to help.

Source.

689

Deaths for every 100,000 people in the United States in 2025. That’s the lowest death rate we’ve ever experienced.

The death rate spiked during COVID, but fell over time. It’s now 4% lower than it was in 2019.

Source.

16

Percent of Americans read for pleasure on any given day in 2023 (book, magazine, newspaper, or listening to an audiobook). In 2004, that figure was 28 percent. That’s according to a sweeping feature in The Atlantic titled The End of Reading Is Here.

I get the sense that Two Percenters are part of the 16 percent. (Also, some in the book world say this is a moral panic).

Source.

57

Percent of Americans placed a bet in 2025. The Atlantic feature noted, “Gambling has become a more common leisure activity than reading a book.”

$250

Billion dollars Americans will lose gambling in 2026. The figure is 60% higher than it was in 2019—and a record high.

No shock: Mobile sports betting is driving the trend—39 states have legalized sports betting since the Supreme Court overturned Murphy v. NCAA in 2018, lifting the federal ban on sports betting.

Source: Joseph Politano at The Argument

1

Percent of American adults meet the full criteria for a severe gambling problem.

Anywhere from 2 to 3 percent fall into the category of having a “mild to moderate” gambling problem, meaning they meet one or more of the criteria for a severe gambling problem, but not all of the criteria.

Some think these numbers haven’t caught up with the rise in sports betting. For example, evidence suggests problem gambling rates more than doubled in men 18 to 29, and grew by about 50 percent in men 30-49. Rates among women have stayed rather stable.

Source.

20

Grams of protein in Chobani’s high protein yogurt. To reach that number, Chobani altered its serving sizes—from the industry standard 5.3 ounces to 6.7 ounces.

This has led to a legal battle over … protein.

Danone sued. Their Oikos Pro line has 20 grams for 5.3 ounces, and they claim that Chobani is being deceptive and leading consumers to believe their yogurt has just as much protein as theirs.

Source.

7

Times more Harvard undergraduate students are receiving disability accommodations today than a decade ago.

In 2014, 3% of Harvard undergrads got disability accommodations. In 2024, that figure was 21%.

Critics claim students are milking the system to get more time for tests and papers.

Worth noting: The rate of students getting disability accommodations at community colleges has remained unchanged, at 3-4%.

Source.

28

Percent decline in words spoken in-person since 2005.

In 2005, the average person said ~17,500 words to other people in person per day. That figure today is ~12,700. Researchers note this coincides with the rise of digital communications. Which: Duh.

• Skeptical pushback: Total communication with others may be higher once we factor in texts, DMs, etc.

10

Seconds it takes for blood to complete a full round trip through the body during exercise.

“That’s way faster than I would have expected,” says Jem Arnold, a researcher who studied this.

Source.

1

Person received Eli Lilly’s retatrutide—a GLP-1—through a “compassionate use” program. The drug isn’t approved by the FDA yet, but it may be the most powerful GLP-1 to date because it not only reduces appetite, but also seems to signal the body to burn more calories at rest and break down stored fat.

The person was 79 in April, overweight, and “well-connected.”

Through deep reporting, STAT News believes the lucky recipient is Donald Trump.

Source.

What Born to Run Got Wrong, Why Running Injures Us, and What to Do About It

Read more

Today’s post covers a tactic to build better workouts.

I first noticed it when I was an editor at Men’s Health magazine. In that role, I’d speak to some of the world’s brightest fitness minds: Exercise scientists or trainers who worked with pro athletes or the A-listers we put on the mag’s cover.

When they sent me workout plans, I was annoyingly curious.

Why is this exercise here? Why that one there? Why is this type of squat on Monday and this one on Friday?

From those pedantic interrogations, I noticed a pattern our best trainers were using in their fitness plans.

It’s one of those things you don’t think of. But once you see it, you can’t unsee it. It’s sensical, obvious, and totally overlooked. And it’s easy to adopt.

Use it in your workouts and your fitness and resilience will improve. You become more durable, fix imbalances, and perform better no matter what you do.

It’s helped me prep for big outdoor adventures, perform better, and stay safer out there. And I’ve seen aging adults use it to reduce their risk of one of the biggest issues of getting older.

Let’s roll …

🎙️ On the Pod: , PhD Psychologist and Professional Poker Player

studied decision-making psychology at Columbia—then became a professional poker player. High-stakes poker is a game of making good decisions with bad information. Which is exactly like life!

Maria was in Las Vegas to play in the World Series of Poker, so she came to the Two Percent studio to explain the science of making better decisions, the power of thinking in probabilities, how to spot a bluff in real life, and when to go all in on anything. Her book (which I highly recommend) is The Biggest Bluff: How I Learned to Pay Attention, Master Myself, and Win.

• Listen here.

• Watch here.

Shoutout to our partners

• Momentous just released their upgraded creatine. Their original creatine was 99% pure and the best on the market. Now it’s 99.9% pure. It has 10x fewer impurities, 2-5x tighter heavy metal limits, 10x lower microbial load, and no microplastics. This is why I love Momentous. They’re obsessive about making things better. Buy it here.

• David Protein just released ice cream. I’ve always been skeptical of “fitness” ice creams, because most suck. But David’s is awesome—especially the vanilla. A pint has 210 calories and 30 grams of protein. Eat it. Be happy with your decisions. Get your name on the list for the restock (it sold out fast).

The problem with most workouts: Same sh*t, different year

The expert trainers I spoke to told me most gym-goers do basically the same exercises and workouts for years. Decades even.

A common example: Monday is chest, Wednesday is back, Friday is legs—some version of that, typically all with the same exercises.

Even when people switch things up, the exercises are basically the same. For example, a dumbbell bench press instead of a barbell bench press. Or the leg press machine instead of a squat.

This approach beats doing nothing, no doubt.

But doing the same thing over and over can lead to strength imbalances and plateaus. It can also set us up for injury, or limit our fitness when we have to do a movement in real life that doesn’t perfectly match the moves in our workouts.

The answer, however, isn’t as simple as just doing different exercises.

From here, you’ll learn:

• How hidden muscle asymmetries quietly increase your real-world injury risk by up to 30%, even if you feel perfectly healthy right now.

• The structural flaw in standard fitness routines that limits most gym-goers.

• The framework elite coaches use to build long-term, injury-resistant joint health.

• A practical, plug-and-play weekly workout template to fix strength gaps as you age.

Read more

Navy SEALs are some of the toughest human beings on the planet. No doubt. “Never quit” is a mantra across Special Forces.

But many of them do quit—under circumstances many everyday people don’t.

“We get a lot of badass active-duty and former Navy SEALs and Special Forces soldiers on our courses,” Jay Carson, former Executive Director and now Instructor at the Boulder Outdoor Survival School (BOSS) told me. “We’ve noticed they often struggle and do the worst. A surprising number fail.”

Meanwhile, some of the most unassuming people finish BOSS survival courses strong. People like busy moms, middle school principals, and hippies without a hardcore bone in their body.

BOSS has been called “the toughest survival school in the world.” Instructors take a small group out into the desert of the Colorado Plateau and teach them to live off the land—for one to four weeks with only the clothes they’re wearing and a wool blanket, poncho, water bottle, knife, and a stainless-steel cup. No tents, sleeping bags, or other gear.

Today’s post explores the psychology behind why a SEAL would quit before a busy mom—and how it can help you get through challenges in your own life, whether you signed up for them or not.

We’ll cover:

• The reason special operations soldiers tend to struggle on BOSS courses while a middle school principal doesn’t.

• The psychological mechanisms at play, from two of the most-cited psychological researchers.

• How I saw this phenomenon play out when I ran a group Misogi Challenge in Costa Rica, and how Jay Carson saw it in his own life.

• What that can tell us about navigating life’s challenges.

• How to build this skill on purpose, so you’re ready when life hands you a challenge you didn’t sign up for.

Quick housekeeping

• In Wednesday’s post, we covered Gary Brecka and I’s disagreement about longevity on Sean Hannity’s podcast (a dive into how realistic life extension is).

• Friday’s Gear Not Stuff covered the science of a better workspace. We spend around 90,000 hours of life at work—this gear makes those hours better.

• On Thursday’s Two Percent Podcast, and I covered our favorite underrated books and what you can learn from them.

• 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.

The Observation

BOSS instructors have been talking about this phenomenon for years. They’ve landed on one big reason:

Lack of Control

The biggest lesson of a BOSS course isn’t survival. It’s learning to be OK with the unknown.

“We want people to learn how to roll with what comes their way, and not try to bend the situation to their will,” Jay said. “You have to surrender to the fact that nature is in charge. We want to teach you how to merge and mesh with what nature is doing and work with nature, rather than try to control it.”

When students ask for the plan—how far they’ll hike, what’s next, etc—BOSS instructors respond with, “we’ll see.”

After a collective hundreds of thousands of hours leading people through the desert, BOSS instructors have found that clinging to plans and trying to control the situation often hurts survival outcomes.

That’s because nature laughs in the face of plans. You can have a plan—but a storm might roll in, a water hole will be dry, or you’ll misread the terrain and get lost.

“Military types have often been trained to be in control,” Jay explained. “They’re seemingly used to knowing what’s next and controlling the outcome. They come in thinking ‘it will be this way and this way and this way and this way.’ But it’s not going to be like that. And many really struggle with that.”

People who do well tend to come from roles where unpredictability is normal.

Jay gave an example of a middle school principal who was in her 50s. “She rolls with all sorts of bullshit coming her way every day at school and no thought that she can control it, and she just navigates it,” he said. “And that person will crush a course where a Navy SEAL struggles with us not giving exact plans.”

BOSS instructors believe the lack of gear also contributes to this phenomenon. “The US Military has a big reliance on gear,” Jay said. “The thinking is that gear can solve any problem. Like, ‘we just need a better grappling hook, a better gun, better boots, whatever.’ BOSS is the opposite of that.”

If the tool disappears, so does control. “Sometimes the most rigid people really struggle with that,” Jay said.

Jay isn’t saying all military types do poorly. “We have plenty who do amazing,” Jay said. “But a surprising number can’t let go of the fact that they are not in charge and can’t know everything.”

And it’s also an observation of BOSS instructors, not a formal study. But it’s been consistent for decades.

For operators, the sources of stress change from danger, pain, and exertion—common in those roles—to ambiguity, helplessness, and uncertainty about the plan.

The Science

Two phenomena are likely at play: psychological inflexibility and certainty orientation.

The psychologist Steven Hayes1 defines psychological inflexibility as “the rigid dominance of psychological reactions over chosen values and contingencies in guiding action.” It’s basically the inability to change because you’re locked into a fixed way of thinking and behaving.

Certainty orientation comes from the researcher Richard Sorrentino2. It’s when we struggle with ambiguity—preferring a clear plan of what comes next, known outcomes, and no surprises.

Control-based coping works beautifully. Right up until control isn’t available, then it can lead to poorer outcomes.

Together, they may explain why Special Operations Forces struggle on BOSS courses.

That said, each phenomenon has a flip side:

• Psychological flexibility is the ability to pivot and switch strategies as events shift.

• Uncertainty orientation occurs in people who find the unknown interesting rather than threatening. Ambiguity tends to lead them to figure out other plans rather than shut down.

Neither style is inherently better than the other—it really depends on the environment. Inflexible people often do better with a perfect plan that has no curveballs. And certainty-oriented people often do better when the structure is fixed.

But people who are both psychologically flexible and uncertainty-oriented tend to perform far better in unstructured and ambiguous situations, like a BOSS course.

It’s why a military guy can be great at breaching a specific compound at a specific time with specific gear—but can fare worse when an instructor won’t reveal how long a hike will be and where it leads.

On the other hand, for a middle school principal who rarely knows what a day will entail and when it’ll end, a “we’ll see” hike is just an average Tuesday.

The Good News: The Military is Now Studying This

The military has realized that clinging to plans was hurting resilience and readiness among soldiers. Not just in missions, but also in life.

They’re now studying3 a group of about 600 soldiers from Fort Cavazos (formerly Fort Hood) who are frequently deployed to high-risk areas.

They split the soldiers into two groups. All will get the military’s regular resilience training. But one group will get an extra two-day training teaching them how to deal with challenges without resorting to rigid control, and why trying to control everything doesn’t work.

Day 2’s module is literally titled “Rigidity as the problem.”

The study is still being conducted, and the researchers theorize the soldiers will end up more resilient and effective not only in high-risk areas, but also back home in normal life.

In Practice: Lessons From the Field

When I was leading a Misogi event in Costa Rica, one of the participants was about as high-achieving as a person can get. He had an MD from the best medical school, a PhD, had published hundreds of studies, and led large medical companies.

We started our Misogi at a trailhead in the jungle. “Start hiking,” I told the group.

He grabbed me. “Exactly how far are we going?” he asked.

“We’ll see,” I said.

Which prompted more and more questions about distance, time, and what comes next.

“We’ll see,” I said again.

Fourteen hours later, he’d finished.

He hugged me and said, “I’ve done Ironmans, and that was the hardest thing I’ve ever done. The not knowing is what made it so hard.”

He continued, “I realized along the way that I’ve spent my entire life planning and trying to control everything. Yet I accomplished this with none of that. I think this is going to reframe a lot for me.”

That is the exact type of revelation I want out of a Misogi—a chosen challenge.

And then there was Jay Carson, the BOSS Instructor quoted above, who faced a massive challenge he didn’t sign up for. His house burned down in the L.A. fires—a giant conflagration of all plans.

It was brutal on his marriage, kids, work, and finances, and the hardest year of his life.

But he discovered that he had “this extraordinary ability to deal with difficult situations because I’ve dealt with a lot of them on BOSS courses,” Jay said. His experiences at BOSS, where control got stripped away, helped him focus on what he could do with what he had rather than what he didn’t.

When his plans burned down with his house, he knew how to pivot and keep pushing forward. He’d “been there” in a situation he chose, which helped him in a situation he didn’t.

The takeaway

argues in his book, Wild Problems, that the most important decisions and events in life—like who you marry, your career, whether you have kids—can’t be solved with a perfect plan. Instead, we can only focus on the person we want to be and become someone who can handle not knowing.

That’s what BOSS is really teaching, at a micro scale. And we can find those lessons in many ways.

We just need regular exposure to situations where our plans blow up—or are, at least, vague—and we figure it out regardless. This could be a long stint in the wilderness. A trip to a foreign place without an itinerary. A Misogi with an unknown outcome. Get creative—find something, anything, that has a chance to go awry.

As Jay discovered, these chosen challenges give us evidence that we can keep functioning in the ones we don’t choose.

It’s like the Zen Master Dizang said in the 10th century: Not knowing is most intimate. When we let go of preconceived notions and plans, we open ourselves to reality and other ways to move forward.

Have fun, don’t die, we’ll see …

-Michael

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: Science-Backed Work Gear

You may have seen a recent New York Times headline claiming that working from home is making everyone miserable. The story came from two scientists who published a study in Science linking mental health declines to the rise of remote work.

When we looked deeper into the data, we found major flaws in the study.

Commuting and office work is far more misery-inducing. Read our full analysis here, which covers three hallmarks of a bad job (no matter where you do it).

The good news: No matter if you work from home or an office, there are things you can do to improve your workspace.

Today’s post covers two things:

• The science of a better workspace—seven research-validated things you can do to improve your focus, health, and productivity.

• Gear that makes every work hour better, boosting your ability to get stuff done (well), so you can leave work earlier.

The average person spends 80,000 to 90,000 hours of their life at work. Even the slightest improvements matter.

Let’s roll …

🎙️ Two Percent pod: Underrated Books

has read 75-100 books a year for the last decade. He joined me on the podcast to talk about the best off-the-radar books we’ve read—and their takeaways you can use. We each answered questions like:

• What’s the best hidden-gem self-improvement book?

• What’s a fiction book that changed your life?

• What’s the most overrated self-help book?

• What book would you assign if you started a cult?

Listen to the episode here … or watch it here.

Thanks to our partners:

• 💪 David Protein Bars have the highest amount of protein per calorie of all protein bars. That makes them 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 you’ll learn:

• The simple workspace change linked to 46 more minutes of sleep a night.

• The ideal temperature, noise level, and air quality for clearer thinking.

• The gear that can reduce distractions, ease nagging pain, and help you work better.

Read more

I recently found myself sitting with Sean Hannity and Gary Brecka, the health influencer who famously helped UFC owner Dana White take his health back.

Mics were hot. Cameras were rolling. Sean had recently launched Hanging Out With Sean Hannity, a long-form podcast.

Gary and I weren’t there to talk politics1. We were there to talk health.

Sean looked at Gary. “Gary, you said to me that if you’re alive to the next five years, the odds of you living to 100 go up exponentially.”

“Even higher than that,” Gary said. “If you’re alive five years from now, it will be your choice if you want to live to 100. We have a unique time where there’s a convergence of early detection, big data, and artificial intelligence.”

Sean then pointed to me. “Do you agree with Gary?”

My mind said “f*ck no.” But my mouth said, “Can we all live to 100 in the next five years? I don’t think so. No.”

Today’s post explores:

• Why the average person born today lives 20,000 extra days compared to about 150 years ago.

• The flaw in early genetics studies that led the longevity industry to vastly underestimate how much your DNA dictates your lifespan.

• Trends in longevity—have we hit a ceiling?

• Billionaire entrepreneur Mark Cuban and three of the country’s top doctors weigh in and answer the question: Can we live to 100 in the next five years?

• What you can do, and where Gary and I agree: A massive dataset shows what predicts death, and how you can gain 20 extra years.

Yesterday’s podcast: Protect your brain + AMA

Neuroscientist Tommy Wood jumped back on to explain what fitness activities reduce your risk of Alzheimer’s and dementia. Plus, I answered six fitness-based questions from listeners, including one from the department of dipshit questions (involving golf, baseball, and cigarettes).

• Listen here

• Watch here

Thanks to our partners:

• 💪 David Protein Bars have the highest amount of protein per calorie of all protein bars. That makes them 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.

A history of human life: mostly brief and brutal

The anthropologist Michael Gurven concluded that sometime around 50,000 years ago, humans developed the ability to live past age 702. But few were so lucky—only 16 percent of people for most of history made it that far.

A quarter to a half of people died before age five. If you survived childhood, you’d probably still die in what we’d now call early middle age—between 25 and 40, from infection, murder, childbirth, starvation, weather, falls, drowning, snakebites, you name it.

When people crowded into cities, things tended to get worse. Diseases spread faster. Food ran out more often.

Even as recently as 1860, a person born in the US could expect to live about 39 years.

Escaping early death

It wasn’t until around 150 years ago that we started improving the odds of reaching 70 or beyond.

We didn’t figure out how to live longer. We figured out how to not die so early by debugging our environment.

We cleaned drinking water and built sewers. We washed our hands. We developed vaccines and antibiotics. We fortified food with missing nutrients. We installed guardrails, seatbelts, and airbags.

In Extra Life3, author Steven Johnson calculated that because of those public health advances, a person born today can expect to live roughly 20,000 more days than someone born just a century and a half ago.

He also ran the numbers on what gave us the most extra life. Here’s what he found:

Read more

I was emailing with Sam Nichols, a new writer for Two Percent.

“The New York Times recently ran a piece about how working from home is making us mentally ill,” Sam wrote. “Which kind of makes sense, given possible social benefits of being around others … but I used to have to commute 60 to 90 minutes each way to work in a newsroom in Sydney, and that commute made me depressed. Plus it was super hard to organize my life.”

I felt that. I worked in an office from 9 to 6 for about a decade, with a 35-minute commute each way. Our work would be done by 2 or 3 p.m., but my colleagues and I would all stand around waiting until the clock struck 6, because some employers apparently love arbitrary and life-sucking rules.

Sam and I both agreed working remotely can have some downsides—less casual interactions with co-workers, and feeling like you’re “always at work.”

But there is no amount of joking around with colleagues that could get me back commuting to a 9-to-6 office job. The downsides of the office vastly outweighed the upsides.

Sam wrote, “So what’s the answer? How do we make sure remote work doesn’t make us depressed or unmotivated and impact our normal lives?”

“Figure it out,” I responded.

So here’s Sam, who analyzed the remote work study in Science that the NYT article was based on—and found some major flaws. He then spoke to experts and read data comparing office work to remote work. What he found applies to any worker—whether you’re remote, in an office, or out in the field.

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Today we’ll cover:

• The major statistical flaws hiding inside the recent Science study that blamed remote work for America’s mental health crisis.

• The single, specific group that accidentally skewed the entire work-from-home dataset.

• The psychosocial trifecta: three distinct environmental factors that predict burnout regardless of your location.

• How to deploy a simple 10-minute environmental hack that dramatically alters your daily stress and cognitive fatigue.

• One surprising mental health benefit of the commute, and how to leverage it (whether you work from home or still commute).

Quick housekeeping

• ICYMI:

  • Last Monday, we covered the science behind the best nutrition tracking app I’ve found, MacroFactor. Use code TWOPCT to try it free for two weeks.

  • On Wednesday, we looked at how the sun might add years to your life. Or take them. Read it here.

  • Thursday’s podcast was one of my favorites yet. It’s useful for anyone who’s noticed their fitness tracker makes them neurotic.

• The new Two Percent Gear shop is live. Check it out.

• 🧪 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.

Here’s Sam:

Three labor economists published a new study in Science1, analyzing five separate surveys of almost 590,000 people conducted between 2011 and 2019, and then again from 2022 through 2024.

Between those two time periods, COVID-19 altered the nature of work. Remote work quadrupled, jumping from 7% of workers in 2019 to 28% in 2023. Mental health issues climbed, too. That was not a coincidence, the three economists concluded.

The researchers penned a viral piece in the New York Times, writing “remote work has significantly deepened Americans’ isolation and distress … remote work explains a third of the deterioration in mental health between 2011 and 2024.”

That seems clean and logical. But the study had three big issues worth considering:

• First, the researchers didn’t directly study remote workers. They compared jobs that could be done remotely (like software engineers or accountants) to jobs that could not (like nurses and servers) and tracked how each group’s mental health changed2. I.e. their analysis of “remote” work included many people who didn’t actually work remotely.

• Second, everyone’s mental health got worse over that period—including people who don’t remotely. Workers in remote-friendly jobs just got worse slightly faster.

• And third, a single group of workers in remote-friendly jobs pulled the entire category down, which we’ll get to soon.

With the disconnect between the headlines and the actual findings in mind, I spoke with an occupational psychologist, an engineer, and a mental health consultant. I also combed the literature about what mental health was like before remote work.

Our answer isn’t braving subways and highways, and satisfying the “return to work” fantasies of narcissistic bosses3—office work is probably worse for our mindset than working remotely. But there are things we can do to make working from home better.

We’ll start with the evidence on office work and mental health, then we’ll look at simple things we all can do so work takes less of a toll on our outlook.

Two downsides of the commute and 9 to 5

It’s the worst part of the day

Daniel Kahneman is considered one of the greatest psychologists who ever lived (you may have read his book, Thinking, Fast and Slow). In the mid 2000s, he asked roughly 1,000 working women in Texas to log everything they did the previous day and explain how it made them feel4.

The two worst moments: Commuting and working. Commuting ranked at the absolute bottom among everything people did in a day.

Other research5, from economists at universities in Switzerland, found that a person commuting one hour each way would have to earn about 40% more money to be as satisfied with life as someone who didn’t have to commute.

Offices weren’t utopias

The Science study authors say remote work makes us less social.

But two scientists at the Harvard Business School found6 that putting people in a social office setting doesn’t automatically make them more social.

They examined the impact of open-concept offices, and found, “Contrary to common belief, the volume of face-to-face interaction decreased significantly (approximately 70%).” Workers sitting 10 feet apart just Slacked each other while wearing headphones.

The scientists explained: “Rather than prompting increasingly vibrant face-to-face collaboration, open architecture appeared to trigger a natural human response to socially withdraw from officemates and interact instead over email and instant messaging.”

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One group skewed the whole Science study

I mentioned earlier that a very specific group of workers in remote-friendly jobs brought down the whole category of remote jobs.

That group: People who lived alone. They had the biggest drops in mental health. Some went days at a time without human contact. Their mental distress and use of mental healthcare and antidepressants jumped.

People who had remote job and lived with others didn’t have nearly as much mental distress.

So what can we learn from this? And how can we use it?

First, a caveat: bad jobs are bad jobs no matter where they happen

I spoke with Leslie Hammer, an occupational health psychologist and associate professor at Oregon Health & Science University. She told me that the biggest predictor of whether your job impacts your mental health is the job itself, not where you do it.

Hammer said there is decades of research7 highlighting three factors that erode the mental health of workers:

1. Extreme workloads

2. Poor relationships with co-workers

3. Feeling like you have no control over your role.

Think of them as the trifecta of a bad job.

“These stressors transcend location,” Hammer said.

If your job hits all three, no work-from-home hack is going to fix it—and there’s probably something fundamentally wrong with the organization you work for, Hammer said.

You can ask for a lighter load, different collaborators, or more agency. And if the response is “no,” that’s why we have Indeed and Monster. If your job makes you hate your life, you won’t regret leaving it.

Assuming your job is good, the research suggests that, for some people, the office has some upsides. The problem was a set schedule, arbitrary rules, and a commute that made many people miserable.

Three rules of better work—no matter where it happens

Remote work killed a lot of the bad of office jobs, but also some of the good. Here’s how to get some of the upsides of the office without the downsides.

1. Steal one benefit of the commute

Everyone hates commuting. But researchers at Harvard Business School8 found commutes had one benefit: They served as a transition ritual and drew a clear boundary between work and home.

People who used the ride to mentally shift between “work mode” and “normal life mode” had better mental health.

Remote work has no transition. For many, the kitchen table is the office is the kitchen table. Remote employees work about 48 minutes longer per day—and they’re more likely to feel tied to work when they’re supposed to be in “normal life” mode.

The solution: Create a “starting ritual” and “ending ritual.” For example, a 5- to 10-minute walk around the block before work, and another after. Or just make a show of opening and closing your laptop.

2. Schedule in non-working time with people

The three labor economists from the Science study mostly blame social isolation. Workers in remote-friendly jobs spent about an extra hour alone and socialized less.

In offices, human connection happens by accident. You talk to people in the hallway or after a meeting without scheduling it.

With remote work, there are fewer accidental interactions.

I spoke to Megan Delp, an organizational psychology consultant and the director of Workplace Mental Health at National Alliance on Mental Illness. She said remote workers have to make interactions happen on purpose.

She works remotely and schedules hour-long meetings with a colleague every few weeks. For five minutes, they talk about work. The rest of the time, they catch up and B.S. about family, movies, books, sports, whatever.

Research9 conducted by Belgian scientists suggests remote work doesn’t automatically hurt mental health—so long as we regularly talk to colleagues.

If you have zero desire to connect with colleagues, that’s fine. The Science study found that remote workers were less likely to do things with friends, so making an effort could offset that.

3. Change your workspace

Research shows that something as simple as putting a plant on your desk or art on the wall makes people feel better. Naturally, we assume the plant or art made us happier.

But that’s probably not true, according to Leidy Klotz, a professor at the University of Virginia and author of In A Good Place, about how places shape the way we think and feel. (Michael spoke to him on the Two Percent podcast about this topic and the subtraction mindset recently).

Instead, Klotz said, the improvement comes from taking initiative and making our space the way we actually want it.

This aligns with self-determination theory. “It’s been studied ad nauseum,” Klotz says. It basically finds the more agency you have over your life, including your workspace, the better you’ll feel.

It sounds simple, but it’s actually sneakily powerful.

Consider The “Langer-Rodin” Effect10. It found that nursing home residents who were allowed to make choices about their surroundings—like caring for their own plants or arranging their furniture where they wanted it—“became more active, more alert, and happier—and half as likely to be dead eighteen months later,” Klotz wrote in his book.

“That’s just one study, and it’s one specific situation, but it’s so fundamental—this idea of having control—that it literally has life or death outcomes,” Klotz told me. “And then the question becomes, ‘Do we have control over work environments?’”

The problem is, “it doesn’t get enough attention,” Klotz said. We just sit down and work in our spaces without considering how we can make them better for us.

Whether at home or in a corporate building, rearrange your office however you want, not the way the movers or the janitor did when you moved in. Put up artwork—stuff you actually like, not what seems like it would be neutral in an office. Add some plants.

If you can, point your desk so it’s facing the window. One study11 found that something as simple as a view of nature led to lower stress among workers.

Now back to Michael. Thanks to Sam for going beyond the headlines and finding the truth.

Have fun, don’t die, work,

-Michael

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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.

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

Subscribe now

Burn the Ships: July 2026

The United States of America turns 250 tomorrow, July 4th, 2026.

This country was built by people who did hard things: Farmers who worked from dawn till dusk. Soldiers who rucked through Pennsylvania in winter fighting the British. Tradespeople who built skyscrapers and bridges with their hands until their hands bled raw. Workers who kept the factories producing ammo and tanks while soldiers fought fascists overseas.

We’ve engineered most of that difficulty out of modern life, which is a good thing in the grand scheme of things. But this month’s workout is a call to remember all of that effort.

This month’s Burn the Ships is called 250 Years. It honors the good old USA’s 250th birthday with 250 reps of movements the U.S. military has used for decades to build soldiers who are hard to kill.

Let’s roll...

🎙️ On the Two Percent podcast: Thi Nguyen on How Metrics Can Steer us Wrong and Hurt our Lives

Today’s guest has improved my life and thinking more than anyone over the last few years: philosopher Thi Nguyen, author of The Score. He explains why focusing on the numbers of our fitness tracker, salary, grades, and so much more leads us astray. It’s a phenomenon Nguyen calls “value capture.” The moment you start chasing a number, the metric takes over the goal and outcome you actually cared about and can make your life worse. It’s one of our most important so far.

• Listen to it here

• Watch it here

🧪 Check out Function Health

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 less expensive than using my insurance. Go to my page here to sign up, receive a discount, and pay just $340.

The case for one tough weekly workout

• Section summary: One challenging workout per week is ideal for health and fitness.

There’s magic in pushing it once a week. First, there are the brain benefits.

Scientists at King’s College London analyzed 58 studies on intense exercise and mental health. They found that harder efforts led to:

“Improvements in mental wellbeing, depression severity, and perceived stress compared to non-active controls, and small improvements in mental wellbeing compared to active controls.”

Translation: hard exercise doesn’t just beat doing nothing (duh). It often beats doing only moderate exercise.

Intense exercise also comes with physical upsides.

It has an edge over less intense exercise for increasing VO2 max—one of the strongest predictors we have for longevity and disease resistance. A rule of thumb: the higher your VO2 max, the farther you are from death, disease, and decay.

In sum: All exercise helps. But going hard—sometimes—matters.

What’s “sometimes?”

The smartest trainers I regularly speak with suggest that one tough workout a week is the sweet spot for health and performance (info on that here).

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.

Enter Burn the Ships.

This month’s workout: 250 Years

Equipment needed

• A ruck

• A pullup bar (optional)

Time commitment

• This workout should take you 40 to 70 minutes, depending on your fitness level.

• I’ve also included ways to shorten the workout in the Questions and Substitutions section.

What I’m listening to as I do this workout

• John Philip Sousa, the composer who wrote American military marching music, is the obvious answer.

• That said, I have no desire to listen to marching music for 40 minutes.

• So we’re going with Bruce Springsteen, arguably the most American living musician.

How to do it

From here, you’ll learn:

• Exactly how to do the 250 Years 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.

The Warmup

Start with the Two Percent Warmup (or a warmup of your choice).

The Workout

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

Read more

When I was 31, one of my best friends from high school called me. He’s the type of dude who spends his weekends driving the hell out of anything motorized and dangerous—ATVs, side-by-sides, dirt bikes, you name it.

“I have skin cancer,” he said. “It’s Stage 2.”

I immediately got a checkup. I was fine. And, thank God, my friend ended up fine, too.

Being outside and active is one of the best medicines on earth. Then again, the sun might give you cancer.

Given that it’s summer and we’re all spending more time outside—and with competing claims online about getting sun—I asked Sam Nichols to figure out what we should actually do. Sam is a top journalist who started his career at ABC News and Vice. He also happens to be from Australia, where, in 1956, a curious experiment revealed something important about the sun and health …

Some quick housekeeping before Sam

🎙️ On the podcast: The Art and Science of Mindset

I sat down with two people. First, , a meditation teacher. But not the woo-woo kind. She’s profane. She’s hilarious. And she has an excellent approach to staying grounded when the world feels like it’s going to shit—with wars, inflation, and insanity in Washington. Then Roy Baumeister, PhD. He’s the top researcher on “negativity bias.” Roy explained why we evolved to focus more on bad than good—and what science says about building a more positive outlook.

• Listen to the episode here

• Watch the episode here

🧪 Check out Function Health

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.

Now here’s Sam:

I’ve always been conscious of what the sun can do to my body. It comes with the territory of growing up in a place like Australia.

But I’ve also always been confused, because this glowing orb is a contradiction: We need its light to be healthy, but its rays can also kill us.

Online, it’s just as unclear. Sunlight is either a cure or a threat.

The psychiatrist and health influencer Paul Saladino—who is, somehow, incredibly tan year-round—contests that sunscreen is poisonous and argues that sunlight is “a nutrient that we need.”

On the other hand, we have Bryan Johnson, the man spending literal millions to slow his aging process. He completely avoids the sun whenever possible because of the potential skin damage. Like when he did this interview at the Enhanced Games in Las Vegas:

The sun is famously a source of Vitamin D1, a nutrient that’s essential for healthy bones, immune function, and more. But we’ll also have more than 8,500 deaths2 from melanoma in the U.S. this year, making it the fifth-leading cause of cancer-related deaths.

So, how should a reasonable person relate to the sun?

To find out, I spoke with a leading epidemiologist and a dermatologist, and dug into the literature. Here’s what I found.

From here you’ll learn:

• How a 1956 experiment first mapped out the global prevalence of skin cancer

• Whether simply avoiding sunburns is enough to avoid skin cancer.

• Where melanoma most commonly strikes men versus women, and whether skin cancer detection apps work.

• The truth about Vitamin D pills, and the food swaps that unlock Vitamin D absorption.

• A massive 20-year study of 30,000 women showing what hiding from the sun does.

• Harvard researcher JoAnn Manson’s precise timing for safely gathering the sun’s non-vitamin benefits, and why where you live changes the UV math.

Read more

We get a lot of brands that want to advertise on Two Percent.

My standard response: I’m happy to consider their product for at least a month1. If I don’t love it and think it would be useful to the Two Percent community, we pass. I’d guess 95 percent of stuff doesn’t make the cut.

A nutrition tracking app called MacroFactor recently reached out. I ran them through the standard lines, then tried it for a month.

It’s the best nutrition tracking app I’ve found for active people who want to improve.

It helped me identify that I was under-eating. And when I started to eat more, I immediately felt and performed better.

You can check it out with a free 14-day trial here. Use code TWOPCT

Check Out MacroFactor

Today we’ll cover

• Why tracking your food can be a massive win for how you feel, perform, and look.

• Why blanket calorie recommendations from online calculators and most apps can be off by 800 calories.

• How MacroFactor solves data issues other trackers face with “dynamic adjustments.”

• The hilarious origins of activity calorie burn estimations (and how wrong they are).

• Why “flexible cognitive restraint” beats rigid rules for nutrition (and most things in life).

Quick housekeeping

• Get full access to all three of our weekly posts by becoming a Member of Two Percent:

Subscribe now

• ICYMI:

  • Two great podcasts last week: Tuesday covered the World Cup (for people who watch soccer every four years) and why sports fandom is great for mental health. In the second, Dr. Tommy Wood, who wrote The Stimulated Mind and works with F1 Drivers, explained how to future-proof your brain from dementia and enhance your mind at any age. Listen here. Watch here.

  • On Wednesday, we covered a Harvard professor’s running and rucking prescription.

  • Friday, we ran a totally revamped AMA. Producer Robbie Hiser asked me 15 of your questions and pushed back on my thoughts.

The case for tracking—and its limits

At face value, tracking food is a giant pain in the ass. Usually, we eat with zero cognitive effort. And when we do think, it’s rather basic: eat the salad, not the Doritos.

But putting forth a bit of effort via measurement vastly improves the odds you’ll reach your goals—whether weight loss, gain, or maintenance; or improving your fitness performance.

Measurement—even for a few weeks—leverages a phenomenon researchers call the “Hawthorne Effect,” or “Observer Effect.”

It was discovered in experiments from the 1920s and 1930s on workers at the Hawthorne Works electrical plant. Scientists were there to observe and measure worker productivity. But let’s say you’re a worker, and a scientist is tracking your productivity. What are you going to do?

You’re going to be far more productive. The simple act of measuring a behavior tends to change that behavior, usually in a positive direction. The Hawthorne Effect is a pain in the butt for scientists conducting experiments, but we can use it to our advantage.

It worked for me. I first tried measuring and tracking my food about a decade ago. I didn’t change anything—just measured and tracked what I ate.

I had many “aha” moments in the process. The biggest came when I measured peanut butter, which I ate every day at lunch. What I thought was a 200-calorie serving was actually three servings—or 600 calories.

I naturally started eating a true serving of peanut butter, and everything else. Results came fast, almost by accident. And because I just made some portion sizing tweaks rather than completely overhauling my diet, the results lasted.

Greg Nuckols co-founded the MacroFactor app. He’s a former champion powerlifter who also started Strength by Science and is generally considered one of the brightest minds in the fitness world.

Surprisingly, Greg is rather non-evangelical about tracking. “Most people don’t want to track their food,” he said. “And it is kind of annoying. If you are able to reach your goals without tracking and you don’t like tracking, I would just say don’t track2.”

But if you want better, more precise results, years of data suggest tracking helps most people most of the time. The same principle applies elsewhere: If you want to overhaul your finances, track your spending. If you want to improve your business, track your revenue and the cost to acquire a customer.

Nutrition tracking is also not something you have to do for life. A couple of months of tracking pays massive dividends in the long run because you learn the foundations, and the lessons stick.

• Section takeaway: Tracking your food leverages the Hawthorne Effect, helping you improve your nutrition without overhauling your diet. It’s also not something you have to do for life.

MacroFactor: The science and why it solves issues other trackers have

When you onboard with most apps, you give them your age, size, and activity level. They then estimate the calories you burn daily from your resting metabolic rate and activity level. Then you get a daily calorie target that doesn’t change.

The problem: Those targets are wildly wrong.

“Even the best BMR (basal metabolic rate, or the calories your body burns keeping you alive) formulas can be off by 700 to 800 calories,” Greg told me. “You can have two people of the same age, sex, height, weight, and muscle mass. If a BRM calculator estimates that they burn 1500 calories a day at rest, for one of them it might be 1,100, and for another it might be 1,900.”

Then come the problems with estimating calorie burn from activity. They’re basically made up.

“The standard (daily calorie burn calculators) everyone uses came from like a throwaway table in a textbook from 1993,” Greg said. “The textbook authors were just kind of like, ‘In our opinion, this is roughly how we’d describe the calorie burn of activity. Use this as a baseline, I guess.’” Again, some degree of wrong.

Which means the number most daily calorie burn calculators spit out are likely inaccurate by hundreds of calories. That leaves you either undereating or overeating for your goals.

Here’s how MacroFactor solves that. They have to start with estimations3. But as you use the app, you also log your daily weight. How your weight changes over the next month of data adjusts your daily calorie target.

If your goal was to maintain weight (as mine was) and your weight trended upward for a couple of weeks, the app reduces your daily calories. If you wanted to gain weight and your weight was stagnant, it would adjust your calorie intake upward.

This is called “dynamic adjustment.” And the idea is this: your metabolism isn’t static, so your nutrition plan shouldn’t be either.

“If you know the rate at which someone’s weight is changing and how much they’re eating, you can have a pretty good idea of how many calories they’re burning,” Greg said. “If you have a computer in your pocket, there’s no reason it can’t just do that math for you.”

It’s a complex, scientifically validated formula Greg originally built in a spreadsheet to help clients from champion lifters to everyday people reach their goals.

The app is that formula in a tracking app—a user-friendly experience with a database of nearly every food, plus the ability to snap a photo of your food and get a close calorie estimation.

How it worked for me: Online calorie burn calculators—including ones PhD scientists recommended to me—told me to eat about ~2800 calories a day. So that’s about how much I ate.

When I started using MacroFactor, I learned that actually wasn’t enough food for me. The app increased my calories, and I landed around 3,100 a day.

I woke up feeling more energized and better recovered. It’s amazing what 300 extra calories a day feels like.

Years of data show that undereating leads to feeling more tired, decreased performance, increased risk of injury, and more. If you’re really undereating, it can lead to depression, as we learned in this post.

When I told Greg about my experience, he said, “People like you trying to gain weight or maintain weight when they’re active are a really underserved demographic in the nutrition space.”

He continued, “The same math that applies to losing weight applies equally and identically to gaining or maintaining weight. Unfortunately, most nutrition apps push people to weight loss.”

That’s where I think tracking, done right, pays off for active people. Yes, it can help you lose weight. But it can also make sure you’re eating enough. And if you’re eating enough, you'll feel better every day. That was worth the hassle.

• Section takeaway: Most apps give you a static calorie target—a rough estimate that never changes. Those estimates are wrong. MacroFactor continuously recalculates your nutrition needs based on real data.

No Food Shaming + Flexible Cognitive Restraint

To Greg’s point, most nutrition tracking apps are pitched and designed for weight loss.

We see this in pop-ups that shame us for entering a food that has too much fat or sugar. Or when we get a big red warning when we go over a calorie target.

Not only do these warnings make you feel bad, but years of behavioral research also suggest they can backfire.

The science hinges on two ideas: the “abstinence violation effect” and “rigid versus flexible cognitive restraint.”

Abstinence Violation Effect

The abstinence violation effect4 occurs when a minor setback feels like total failure, leading us to go off the rails and give up completely.

“If you go, say, 200 calories over your calorie target and the app tells you you screwed up, that can flip a switch in your head that says, ‘I already failed. I might as well just eat a whole pizza now.’” And that sets you back much more.

“We chose to display things neutrally,” Greg said. “If you go over your target, nothing changes, nothing suggests you screwed up or did something bad. So it’s a lot easier to look at that and say ‘Okay, I went a little over my target, but I’m still close and things are fine.’ That mindset is more conducive to sticking with things long term.”

Rigid Vs. Flexible Cognitive Restraint

The food psychology literature shows a massive difference in outcomes between the two approaches to nutrition goals.

Rigid restraint is rule-driven. If you deviate from those rules and targets, “that’s a violation. Like you’ve done something bad,” Greg explained. “And a lot of the messaging in the fitness industry is based on rigid restraint.”

With flexible cognitive restraint, “There’s a direction you’re pointed in, but you consider trade-offs and don’t dichotomize things as good or bad,” Greg said. “If you deviate from your goal, it’s not a failure. You’ve thought it out, realize that even if you’re moving towards your goal a little bit slower, you’re still making progress, and you don’t judge yourself for deviating from your targets.”

The literature is very clear that flexible restraints are more effective for long-term goal adherence5.

MacroFactor is designed around that. But it’s an idea you can apply to fitness, finances, and work habits.

• Section takeaway: Behavioral research shows that rigid, rule-based approaches to nutrition backfire. MacroFactor is designed around flexibility, and that same principle applies to any goal.

If you have no desire to track, as Greg said, “Don’t.”

But if you do, try MacroFactor. You’ll probably learn something. Maybe, like me, it’ll be something that helps you live better.

Have fun, don’t die, eat enough,

Michael

We’re approaching this AMA differently.

The producer of the Two Percent podcast, Robbie Hiser, had a fun idea.

“Let’s field questions and I’ll ask you them.”

The idea is to have another voice in the room, so the AMAs are more conversational. Robbie will ask me your questions and some of his own, be there with followups, force me to clarify anything confusing, and defend my position.

Watch the video above, which we filmed in the Two Percent studio.

We covered 15 questions ranging from rucking to nutrition to mental health to the real health impacts of alcohol and much more. Below, we have a transcript for the readers.

Yesterday’s podcast: A Neuroscientist for F1 Drivers

Cognitive decline as you age is not inevitable. But whether you keep your edge depends almost entirely on what you do right now. I sat down with Dr. Tommy Wood, a neuroscientist and performance consultant who works with Formula 1 teams. His book, The Stimulated Mind, changed how I think about staying mentally sharp.

We got into why retirement may be the most dangerous thing you can do to your brain, the science behind “super agers” who keep their 50s brains into their 80s, how AI will impact our brains, and best practices you can use now to stay sharp tomorrow.

• Listen to the episode here.

• Watch the episode here.

Quick housekeeping

• Become a Member to get full access to the AMA and all three Two Percent posts a week.

Subscribe now

• Momentous made me feel good about supplements again. Every single product is heavily tested for purity because Momentous has contracts with professional sports teams and the U.S. military. They also sell what works rather than offering a million fringe options that don’t offer benefits. I use Momentous’ Plant Protein Powder, Multivitamin, and Creatine daily. Get a discount here.

June ‘26 AMA: 15 questions

• Is there something about martial arts training that makes it better than other forms of exercise for longevity? I see lots of old, ripped guys doing it.

• What’s the actual difference between rucking with a backpack and just wearing a weighted vest? Because from the outside they look like the same thing.

• How many days a week should someone ruck? Can you do it daily?

• I’m worried about long-term knee issues from rucking (I have bad knees). What should I do?

• When you had Andy Galpin on the podcast, he laid out his six-pillar exercise protocol. Andy’s idea of a “pretty resilient” person—someone that can just go on a 20 mile hike—is above average. Him prescribing that stuff is like rattling off ways to become a millionaire: technically true, but useless if the average person can’t actually do it or fit it into their life. How do you respond to that?

• When you had Dean Statmann on the podcast talking about alcohol, you said drinking “a bit” seems fine. But what does “a bit” even mean? And if it’s one or two drinks, how many people who drink every day actually stop at one or two? I think most daily drinkers blow past the seven-to-fourteen drinks-a-week threshold. What do you think?

• I gave up on natural peanut butter (like the one you recommend from Costco). Even with a fancy mixer, oil was going everywhere and it still wasn’t mixed. Do you have a system for this, or did you give up on it too?

• You mentioned how sugar is important to have in electrolytes. Does Stevia do the same job? Are we losing the benefit by going sugar-free?

• I want to learn how to camp without a sleeping bag and how to start a fire from scratch—basically, real bushcraft skills. Where can I learn that?

• When you had Julie Gurner on the podcast, she said most people get in their own way. They’re the obstacle between themselves and what they want. How do you tell someone to deal with a lack of motivation when the thing in their way is depression? You’ve written a lot about doing hard things. How would you talk to that person?

• If you had a walk-up song that played every time you walked into a room, what are you choosing?

• Three books on a desert island. Go.

• You can swap lives with one person alive today for twenty-four hours. Who are you picking and why?

• Aliens come to Earth and ask to meet “your leaders.” What three people are you taking them to?

• Someone has never heard your favorite genre of music. What’s the first song you’re playing to introduce them, and why that song?

Have fun, don’t die, thanks for the questions. And thanks to Robbie for suggesting this.

-Michael

Transcript for the readers

Note: I’ve bolded each question if you want to skip ahead in the text.

Michael: To queue up the people who read 2%, we’ve been doing AMAs written out for a long time. Sometimes I would do them live. Now, the problem I think we had with them as they existed is that people would submit questions, and I would just answer them, but there was no conversation behind them, like no back and forth.

If I wrote something and the reader’s going, “Well, why did you think that?” Or, “I think that’s kinda bullshit,” no one’s there to push back on me. So you have been the producer on the 2% podcast, Robbie Hiser, and we figured, all right, let’s run it like this as a conversation. That way we can hopefully get more out of AMAs and give people, give people better answers.

Robbie: Totally. Totally. And before we jump in, just to let everybody know, we do have some new merch up in the store.

Michael: We do have new merch.

Robbie: You’re currently wearing one of the shirts.

Michael: The Old Time Religion tee. This was one of my freak ideas that you said yes to ... and I’m, I’m glad we did it.

Is there something about martial arts training that makes it better than other forms of exercise for longevity? I see lots of old, ripped guys doing it.

Robbie: All right. Well, let’s get into these questions. Um, the first one is from our episode with Tyler Minton on the Science of UFC. It comes from New Carpenter. “Is there something unique about training in martial arts that makes it better than other forms of exercise for health, fitness, longevity?

Robbie: The actor Scott Glenn, while not a UFC fighter, has done a lot of martial arts training, and he seems fitter in his late 80s than I could ever hope to be at half his age. I’ve often wondered if that’s specifically from his martial arts training.”

Michael: Here’s how I’ll answer that. Do I think UFC, MMA training is more unique than any other type of physical activity that would give you the same sort of stimulus, meaning you’re getting cardio, you’re getting high-intensity work, you’re also getting strength work?

Michael: No. But what I will say about MMA and UFC is that you do it with other people. I think that’s one thing that can, one, you get more social benefits. Um, two, I think you find that when people are doing exercise with other people, it tends to improve adherence rates. So the number one thing that matters when we look at exercise in terms of longevity is, are you gonna do it across your lifespan?

Michael: Right? Like, one workout done for a month repeated, that’s not gonna help, and you’re doing it at 30 years old, that’s not gonna help you live till 90 if you quit. If you can find something that improves adherence, that’s super useful. So I think that in that sense, MMA does have those qualities. So I think it’s a good one, but at the end of the day, it’s like, with exercise, the best exercise is the one you’ll do for the longest.

Michael: It just so happens that MMA hits cardio, it hits high intensity, it hits strength, and then you got the social thing, so.

Robbie: Gotcha.

Michael: It’s kind of a yes and no.

Robbie: So you get exercise, community, and you stick with it.

Michael: Exactly.

What’s the actual difference between rucking with a backpack and just wearing a weighted vest? Because from the outside they look like the same thing.

Robbie: All right. Our, uh, next question comes... Actually, we have three questions back to back, uh, from YouTube that are all about rucking.

Robbie: So we can just hit all of them.

Michael: Here we go.

Robbie: What is the difference between rucking and just a weighted vest?

Michael: So would classify them both as rucking and use that word. I think what the question’s really trying to get to is, like, what’s the difference between wearing a weight vest and a weighted backpack?

Read more

Last Wednesday, we looked at a study led by scientists at Harvard that identified an ideal amount of strength training per week for health.

Today, we’re returning to something I learned while reporting The Comfort Crisis, but didn’t put in the book. It gives us an ideal weekly rucking or running distance.

Most cardio recommendations measure endurance in time. The Federal Exercise Guidelines tell us to get at least 150 minutes of cardio for health. Other research suggests 300 minutes maxes out our benefits.

But measuring in time forces vague terminology like “moderate-to-vigorous exercise.” That can make things more confusing than they need to be (as the researchers in Wednesday’s post noted).

Measuring in distance is simpler. Do cardio on foot—walking, rucking, or running—a specific distance each week. Don’t overthink the intensity.

Then the question becomes: what’s the ideal distance of cardio we should get each week to maintain our health and a lifelong level of fitness?

To answer the question, I’m publishing unreleased material I discovered in a lab at Harvard while reporting The Comfort Crisis.

Before we dive in, a quick word on yesterday’s podcast and some housekeeping.

Yesterday’s Podcast: World Cup + Why Sports Fandom Is Shockingly Good for Wellbeing

First, professor and journalist Leander Schaerlaeckens, author of The Long Game, explains why this World Cup is the “biggest sporting event in human history.” He shares why Team USA is actually … kind of good?, the players you need to know, and why America took so long to get decent at the world’s game.

Then psychologist Dr. Daniel Wann, who has studied sports fans for 40 years, explains why caring about sports is one of the most underrated and powerful things you can do for your mental health and social connections.

• This link opens the episode in your podcast player of choice.

• This link takes you to the video version.

Quick Housekeeping

• Become a Member of Two Percent to get full access to this post and all three of our weekly posts:

Subscribe now

• In case you missed it:

  • The Two Percent shop is revamped with new shirts, hats, and patches. Please wear them while having fun and not dying.

  • Friday’s Expedition post covered 17 of the best ideas I found last month, including the 5 Enemies of Greatness, a comparison of sleep trackers, a classic Russian exercise everyone should try, and more.

• Check out Momentous, the brand that made me feel good about supplements again. I use Momentous’ Plant Protein Powder, Multivitamin, and Creatine daily. Get a discount through this link.

The role of endurance in human evolution

In short

The human body is uniquely adapted for endurance exercise.

The details

While reporting The Comfort Crisis, I traveled to Harvard University. This was 2019. I was there to speak with Daniel Lieberman.

Lieberman studies the evolution of the human body and why we’re built the way we are, especially as it relates to human movement and physicality. He’s the guy who discovered just how important running is for humans.

Humans aren’t fast compared to other animals. Many other mammals can beat us in a sprint. Because of this, anthropologists since the discipline’s inception thought that running was something of a useless parlor trick.

But Lieberman found that, no, we can’t go fast. But we can go far—especially in hot weather.

Most other mammals can’t do this. On a hot day, a relatively fit human will beat most other mammals in a distance race. Lions, tigers, bears, dogs, etc.

Humans are “born to run”—and carry

In short

Cardio exercise is likely more important for us than raw strength. Carrying weight is our most unique strength act, and it also works our cardiovascular system.

The details

Humans can run far in the heat, Lieberman’s “Born to Run” Nature1 paper explains, thanks to a handful of adaptations we developed over millions of years.

We stand on two legs, have springy arches in our feet, long tendons in our legs, big butt muscles, sweat glands across our body, no fur, complicated noses that humidify air before it hits our lungs, and more.

Other mammals gallop quickly for a few minutes, then have to stop and pant to cool down.

Endurance was our killer app—and we used it to kill. We practiced what’s called persistence hunting: slowly but surely tracking and chasing down prey for miles upon miles until the animal toppled over from heat exhaustion. Then we’d spear or club it and have dinner.

Because humans have undergone intense evolutionary selection for endurance and aerobic activity, Lieberman believes cardio exercise is more important for us than raw strength. We also saw this in the study covered in Wednesday’s post—people who did enough cardio had a 26-43% lower mortality risk, while lifters had a 7-11% reduction.

If you read The Comfort Crisis, you know that I agree with Lieberman—with a caveat.

I believe carrying was equally if not more important to us than running.

After we’d speared that animal, we’d have to carry it back to camp.

Carrying is where our strength shined. It wasn’t raw strength. We’d have to engage relatively low levels of total body strength as we covered miles of rough ground.

We’d also carry all day when we gathered food. We’d carry our kids for the first years of their lives (the research on carrying children is fascinating).

We’re the only mammals who can pick up something and carry it for distance2. And it shaped us. Humans are, in fact, “extreme” in their ability to move items from point A to B, wrote researchers in a study in PLOS One.

Lieberman’s great insight

In short

While I was at Harvard, Lieberman told me something that forever changed how I view exercise.

The details

I spent the better part of an afternoon at Harvard. Lieberman and I chatted in his office, and he showed me his laboratory (which has all sorts of incredible, lab-grade treadmills).

We talked about how physical activity keeps humans healthy, and how the way we now approach exercise is rather strange in the grand scheme of things.

For example, we both agreed that people in the gym community overhype the benefits of strength training compared to cardio. Meanwhile, people in the running community overhype the benefits of cardio compared to strength. “It’s kind of a Rorschach test,” he told me.

Which, naturally, led me to ask him what exercise he does.

He told me he prefers running. He’s run the Boston Marathon a handful of times.

But he also tries to lift weights a couple of times a week. “I’m really realizing the value of strength training as I age,” he said.

Then he said something I haven’t forgotten. It’s shaped how I approached my own exercise routine. And when I put it to use, I feel better. He told me this:

Read more

I was chatting with the health journalist Jen Murphy the other day. She spent two decades writing the Wall Street Journal’s What’s Your Workout? column, which covered the exercise habits of high-profile people. Think: presidents, CEOs, and founders of major companies.

Some of these busy people trained hours a day for triathlons and other sports. They skipped meals with friends because the menu didn’t fit their nutrition requirements. They avoided social gatherings that might go too late and impact their sleep.

Jen told me there was often a fascinating tension to those pieces. “I regularly had spouses—or ex spouses—email me to say they wished their partner put as much energy into their relationship and family as they did into their workouts,” she said.

Health practices, pursued beyond a certain point, stop making your life better.

Your body fat percentage, VO2 max, and biomarkers may look perfect on paper. But the damage shows up between your ears. Anxiety rises, relationships suffer, life becomes robotic.

So, a question: How much is enough?

Health practices exist on an inverted U-shaped curve. Too few and physical health suffers. Too many, and life does.

Today’s post explores:

• The inverted U-shape curve of health.

• Why the coauthor of the most famous longevity book now believes the modern obsession with optimization has become “cult-like” and possibly destructive.

• Underlying cultural reasons for the rise of health optimization (one ties directly into The Comfort Crisis).

• Where your cardio minutes, daily step counts, and dietary restrictions stop yielding benefits, and two costs of overdoing health practices.

• How I try to find the sweet spot, and a quote from a wise friend that can help anyone find it.

Quick Housekeeping

• In our recent survey, many of you asked us to expand the Two Percent gear store. Ask and you shall receive. The new Two Percent shop is live.

• We’ve got new hats, shirts, restocked patches, and even a Grateful Dead-inspired lot shirt. We’ll continuously add more gear. Let us know what you want to see in the shop, and we’ll make it happen.

Optimization as neurosis

Jen’s comment suggests this problem isn’t new.

Fifteen years ago, she wrote a WSJ piece titled, “A Workout Ate My Marriage,” covering the rise in marriages impacted by one spouse’s exercise obsession. She spoke to a therapist who noted, “Exercise is getting more and more couples into my office.”

But after COVID lockdowns, health optimization went mainstream. Longevity books became bestsellers. Podcasts spending hours in the weeds of health took off. Social feeds filled with people posting about their extensive health routines.

Far more people began adopting complex health practices: The right morning routine, hours of zone 2 cardio, and detailed diet plans timed down to the minute.

Some of the country’s top doctors have told me they’ve experienced an influx of healthy patients seeking fringe longevity treatments. In 2024 alone, longevity startups raised $8.49 billion in investment—a 220% increase from the year before.

This increased focus on health has been a great thing overall. After all, 70 percent of Americans are either overweight or obese, and researchers at UNC found that only 1 in 8 of Americans are metabolically healthy.

But as with any practice, some subset of the population will take it too far and experience downsides: health anxiety, orthorexia, isolation, social issues, health problems caused by preventative interventions, and more.

An example: A few years ago, I came upon a post from an MD and health influencer with millions of followers. He was frazzled. Things had gone completely off the rails.

He looked into the camera and explained that he was traveling and had missed one of his four 30-gram protein doses that day. He said this lapse stressed him out. He had to do better—we all had to do better—to plan for moments when we couldn’t eat a specific amount of protein at specific time intervals.

Imagine that: Psychologically yeeted because you (checks notes) forgot to eat some beef jerky at 3 p.m.

So what’s the underlying reason all of this is happening right now? It’s multifactorial, but two things come to mind:

The first is identity. For many, health practices have become an identity, rather than just a good habit. When your health practices are who you are, not just a thing you do, missing them becomes a personal failing.

The second is shifting anxieties in a safe world. Research shows that when real threats dissolve, we don’t relax. We find new things to worry about. This was a useful brain feature for our ancestors living in dangerous environments. But as the world has become safer and more comfortable, our threat-detection system still needs something to latch onto. Health became a logical target, because death is ultimately the final threat and something we can’t solve for.

Health neurosis: the research

To be clear, there isn’t much reliable research confirming a rise in psychological harm from health obsession. The optimization trend is rather new, the measurement tools are inconsistent, and health addiction isn’t a formal clinical diagnosis.

But the wellness industry has grown massively, and the number of people identifying as health-focused has skyrocketed. Meanwhile, social media and podcasting have turbocharged optimization culture, pushing health to its most time-intensive and quantified conclusion.

More people are now living in conditions that can produce these psychological patterns.

Observation is also the first step to starting a study. And what I’m observing—in my inbox, DMs, and social and podcast feeds—is a level of health neurosis that didn’t exist a decade ago.

People send me extremely long and in-the-weeds messages about obscure biomarkers, exactly how to stay in Zone 2 while rucking, and precisely how many grams of protein to eat (and from what sources and when).

The salient point is that these aren’t questions from sick people trying to get better. They’re from healthy people trying to be perfect.

When I spoke to Ryan Soave on the podcast—he’s one of the country’s top therapists, who started his career in addiction therapy—I asked him if he thinks people can be addicted to healthy behaviors, like exercise. His response:

Depending on how we define addiction, yes. I think exercise and other healthy behaviors can be an addiction. If we rephrase your question to something like ‘can people be harmed or can their lives be affected negatively by their relationship with things that everybody sees as healthy?’ Then 100%.

Of course we should exercise, of course we should eat right. But if you’re doing that at the expense of enjoying your life or the expense of the people you’re in relationships with. Or if you can’t exercise today, you become miserable, then there’s something to look at there.

As I was writing this post, published a piece also arguing that health optimization has gone too far and is affecting broader wellness.

And here’s a doozy. In response to that piece, Bill Gifford, who co-wrote the book Outlive, which turbocharged the longevity trend, commented on X:

As coauthor of Outlive, I feel at least partly responsible for motivating this “cult (of health optimization)” …

I think it’s a good thing that more people are trying to take control of their health … But the obsession with “optimizing” every aspect of life, often by people who are already very healthy, is unnecessary, in my opinion. And possibly destructive. For some, the quest for perfection seems to be little more than narcissism by another name. If your wearable is sucking the joy out of your life, where is that getting you?

It’s not enough just to try to live longer and stay healthier—you need a reason, something larger than yourself. You need a Why. And, once in a while, maybe a drink with a friend.

The balance between health and health practices

Most scientists agree that there’s a rate of diminishing returns for lifestyle health practices.

We see it in the data on exercise. For example, going from nothing to 150 minutes of cardio a week is massively beneficial for health. But when you exceed 300 minutes, the benefits plateau. Same goes for strength training. Same goes for steps per day—going from, say, 3,000 to 8,000 is associated with a 50 percent decrease in all-cause mortality1. But exceeding 12,000 steps a day doesn’t seem to deliver more measurable benefits.

PhD nutritionists say the same about diet. Alan Aragon says that so long as your diet is, say, 80% “healthy,” you’re not losing a step by leaving 20% for what he calls “junky goodness.” In fact, he’s found that leaving room for indulgences seems to help people eat healthier over the long term.

But neglecting your health entirely has its own costs. These costs arise in the body, not the mind.

Recently, Leah and I were eating breakfast at a diner sitting next to two people who looked to be in their mid-70s. At least one of them smoked. Their orders were the answer to the question: “What on this menu could give me heart disease and diabetes ASAP?”

“Get the French toast,” the man told us with a smile. “You won’t regret it.”

They were having a wonderful time—laughing, lingering, and completely engaged with life. But when the check came and they stood up to leave, both of them limped out the door. They’d clearly found joy. They just couldn’t walk anymore.

And that might end their joyous run early: Data from the HUNT2 study suggests a sedentary lifestyle is linked to ~2x the risk of dying early compared to being active.

The costs of going all-in

I see two main downsides to excessive optimization: Stress and social isolation.

When a minor lapse in your health practices stresses you out—as we saw with that protein-starved MD—something has indeed gone off the rails.

Stress is one of the major drivers of heart disease. It also factors into metabolic syndrome, GI issues, immune system issues, pain, and more. I.e., optimization meant to protect your health could create a health threat.

Also: stress sucks. It makes our days worse.

Then there’s the social costs. Many of these practices can isolate people, removing them from social connections, which can be just as powerful as traditional health practices.

One study3 with half a million people found that frequent time with others had about the same effect on longevity as exercise.

Meanwhile, the Harvard Study of Adult Development4—which has run for 85 years—found, “Across decades of data, the people who stay meaningfully connected are happier, healthier, and live longer.”

We’re starting to see some health optimizers realize this. I recently spoke to Dean Stattmann on the Two Percent podcast. The guy has always been healthy—eats well, exercises consistently.

To further optimize his health, he cut alcohol entirely. He’d never been a problem drinker, and all of his health markers were solid, but he thought it would give him an edge.

A handful of months later, he found himself far unhappier. Borderline depressed.

He realized that he’d drink in the context of being social: Going to the bar with friends after playing pickup soccer. Or out on the town with his wife, where they’d spontaneously check out new places and meet with friends.

He resolved to start drinking again. And he wound up healthier and happier. Light drinking was simply a path to the power of social connection.

How I think about this

An admission: I’ve fallen into this trap. Right after I got sober—more than a decade ago—I leaned fully into health practices.

But it was often at the expense of other important parts of life. I’d have to work out at certain times as Leah waited around for us to do something together. I’d get annoyed with myself if I missed a workout. I’d say “no” to certain restaurants if the food was unhealthy.

Luckily, I noticed I’d overcorrected rather early, after about a year sober—and chilled TF out.

Since then, I try to hit 5-ish hours of exercise a week. Sometimes I don’t reach it. Sometimes I exceed it. Whether I do or don’t isn’t a big deal.

I try to eat healthy when I’m at home, but I don’t worry about “junky goodness” when I go out to restaurants a couple of times a week.

Once a year, I do something big, a “Misogi.” Mostly for my brain, not my body.

I don’t always get the balance right. Nor do I claim my approach works for everyone.

To determine whether a behavior is helping or hurting, Ryan Soave tells his clients to ask themselves, “Does it have me, or do I have it? Do I continue to do this even though it harms me physically or psychologically?”

As that couple left the diner, I griped to Leah. “Why am I like this?” I said. “I wish I could smoke and eat French toast every day and not care about the consequences.”

“Sure,” she said. “But you can walk. And that can take you a lot further.”

Have fun, don’t die,

-Michael

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.

Check out our partners:

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

• Friday’s podcast on why health beliefs function like religion.

• A good podcast on women’s health

• Numbers on:

  • Pro wrestler lifespans.

  • The cost of good sleep.

  • The only rule of Waffle House.

  • The global wellness market.

  • The steroid Olympics crash.

  • The safety of walking at night.

  • The Knicks’ game 4 comeback.

  • The physiological toll of the Knicks game 4 comeback.

  • What that comeback did to an entire city’s heart rate.

• What happened when a reporter wore four popular sleep trackers to bed at once, then slept a night in a Stanford lab to see which ones were actually telling the truth.

• A tech founder’s contrarian take on sleep trackers that struck a nerve with thousands of people.

• Why the fight over banning GLP-1s in sports is suddenly heating up, thanks to one very famous comeback.

• The five “enemies of greatness” Nick Saban warns about (you’ve almost certainly met at least one).

• Why I quietly stopped calling an Uber at the airport, and what I do instead.

• Why I keep sending people the same two-minute video of one underrated exercise.

• Plus a new (and possibly unhinged) addition to the family.

Latest Two Percent Podcast

Quick note. Monday’s podcast poll results are in. Most of you want podcasts mentioned in the Wednesday/Friday letters. We’ll make the change now. The poll was rather split, though, so I’m considering a Saturday podcast digest. That’ll give us fewer emails but a dedicated home for podcast updates + extras.

Topic: Why health beliefs have become the new religion, and why that’s leading us to make worse decisions about our health.

Guest: Alan Levinovitz, a religion scholar, writer, and author of Natural: How Faith in Nature’s Goodness Leads to Harmful Fads, Unjust Laws, and Flawed Science (a great book).

Why I spoke with him: Alan argues that our health beliefs carry the same hallmarks as religion—purity, contamination, salvation, gurus, and tribes that turn into mobs when others question the doctrine. He recently wrote a feature for Wired magazine arguing that long Covid research has been corrupted by cultural pressure. Online groups tried to destroy his reputation. The backlash proved his point.

Listen here.

Watch it here.

A reliable women’s health podcast

Pushkin, Malcolm Gladwell’s podcast company, released a new podcast on women’s health with a great host. Dr. Elizabeth Poyner has a hell of a background: magna cum laude from Princeton, MD from Columbia College of Physicians and Surgeons, PhD in cell biology and genetics from Cornell. Her show, Decoding Women’s Health, covers women’s wellness, disease prevention, and how to age well. Check it out here.

By the numbers

3

Years less, on average, that professional wrestlers live compared to the general public.

“The most common causes of death were cardiovascular disease, external causes of death (ie, drug overdose and suicide), cancer and neurodegenerative disease,” wrote the scientists.

Steroid use likely drives up the heart disease number. It impacts the heart and tends to elevate obesity rates.

Source.

~50

Percent the Enhanced Games (A.K.A. “Steroid Olympics”) stock crashed shortly after many drug-free athletes outperformed those using performance-enhancing drugs, and only one world record was set (quite controversially).

Of the Enhanced Games sprinters, Usain Bolt wrote “Them Slower than a Parked Car.”

Listen to the Two Percent podcast episode with two journalists who were on the ground chatting with Enhanced Games founders, athletes, and outside scientists before, during, and after the games. Their stories are wild.

Source.

5

Hours of sleep per night that, if you got and died at 75, you would have spent just as many years awake as a person who sleeps 8 hours a night and dies at age 89.

Which: I have no idea what to do with that information.

50

Percent you should tip your server at Waffle House. That’s the rule at Waffle House.

And we must follow it because it’s the only rule at Waffle House. Evidence.

$6.8 Trillion

Total worth of the global wellness economy in 2024. That figure is double what it was in 2013.

Source.

26

Percent of all sports anti-doping rule violations are traced back to contaminated supplements. Another study found that 12 percent of supplements tested included a substance banned by the FDA.

The takeaway: An alarming amount of supplements are tainted. Use products tested by a third party for purity. Like Momentous.

Source.

73

Percent of adults worldwide feel safe walking alone at night.

Source.

27

Points the Knicks trailed at halftime during Game 4 of the NBA finals, before coming back to win in epic, buzzer-beating fashion. Here’s the full ending.

In NBA history, 23 teams have trailed by 20+ points at halftime. Every other team lost by double digits.

3.7

Beats per minute above baseline heart rate recorded across New York City during the insane ending to the Knicks’ Game 4 NBA Finals comeback. The data comes from Oura ring users in the New York City area.

The city’s sleep scores and next-day readiness scores also dropped by 1.5 and 1%, respectively.

Source.

Which sleep tracker is most accurate? A Stanford Sleep Lab analysis

Read more

I am not a professional exerciser. I’m a writer and, as of April, a podcast host.

I have about five hours a week for exercise. Maybe six or seven hours when the stars align.

So, big question: How should that time be spent?

Think of exercise like a stock portfolio. How do you diversify to protect yourself while also maximizing returns? What percentage of your time should go to cardio, and what should go to strength?

Problem is, the answer has always typically on who you asked. Endurance researchers and coaches will tell you that strength hardly matters. Meanwhile, a strength scientist, bodybuilding trainer, or CrossFit coach will tell you strength is everything and to just lift weights faster for your cardio.

What we need is data. Good data on the amount of strength and cardio training that will help us get as many benefits as possible out of our limited time.

We have a decent handle on the cardio numbers. The Federal Exercise Guidelines suggest 150 minutes of moderate-to-vigorous (or 75 minutes vigorous) cardio exercise a week. We also know that we maximize the benefits if we double those figures.

But strength is murkier. We don’t really have a time range. The same Federal Exercise Guidelines say adults should strength train “two or more days a week.”

Two days is vague. So is “or more.” Like, how much time is that, exactly? And does “or more” mean you just keep improving the more you do?

We’ve needed research that puts a specific time stamp on strength training and health outcomes (dose-reponse data), with enough participants and enough follow-up to feel confident about the numbers.

The good news: That data now exists, and we’re covering it today.

Researchers at Harvard tracked more than 147,000 people for up to 30 years. It’s among the largest and longest investigations of strength training and mortality ever conducted.

They were looking for where the benefits of time spent strength training peak, and where they stop. This could tell us an ideal amount of time to lift each week.

More lifting might be better. Or there might be a ceiling above which extra time in the gym gets you more time in the gym and not much else for your health.

Today you’ll learn:

• The weekly minutes of lifting linked to the biggest decreases in all-cause mortality, heart disease deaths, and brain disease.

• Why cancer responds to strength training differently, and a good amount of training to target.

• The sweet spot of time spent strength training that improves all of these outcomes, and at what weekly time training they disappear.

• How to flex within that range based on whether you’re chasing strength, endurance, or just trying to get out of the gym faster.

Quick housekeeping

• ICYMI:

  • Last Wednesday, we covered why morning routines can be a distraction.

  • Friday’s Gear Not Stuff covered 10 Buy-It-For-Life pieces of gear (not stuff).

• Shoutout to our partners:

  • 💪 David Protein Bars have the highest amount of protein per calorie of all protein bars. That makes them 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.

The strength training sweet spot

Read more

Let’s play a fun hypothetical: What if you juiced a roster of athletes to the gills with performance-enhancing drugs and let them compete for millions in prize money? This may sound like something college students dream up in a dorm room while stoned out of their minds.

But it actually just happened a few weeks ago. That’s the Enhanced Games, the billionaire-backed “Steroid Olympics” held in Las Vegas. And the results? Well. They weren’t what investors expected.

In today’s episode, I sat down with journalists Chris Gayomali and Sam Eagan, hosts of the Superhuman podcast, a 6-part limited series. They were embedded with the Enhanced Games’ founders, athletes, and scientists before, during, and after the event.

Despite being hyped as the future of human performance, almost no world records fell at the Enhanced Games. In many cases, drug-free athletes beat the juiced ones.

Within about a day, it became clear the event was really a marketing engine for selling testosterone and peptides to the public, and a glimpse of how we’re increasingly being sold a frictionless, “enhanced” version of ourselves—all for the swipe of a credit card.

This episode covers the aftermath of the Enhanced Games, what we learned from them, and questions about where health and wellbeing are headed in the brave new world of internet peptide and TRT companies with giant advertising budgets.

Watch the episode

Listen to the episode

• This link opens the episode in your podcast player of choice.

Show notes

• Listen to the SuperHuman podcast, a 6-episode series about the Enhanced Games: Apple Podcasts or Spotify

• Sam’s website.

• Chris’ website.

• Enanced.com

• Anabolic-Androgenic Steroid Use in Sports, Health, and Society; ASCM position stand.

My Biggest Takeaways From the Episode

As a reminder, this new section is for Members only. Below are 8 of the highest-impact, most actionable takeaways from the episode, including:

• The scientific flaws inside the Enhanced Games’ research model, and how to spot fake data in the wild.

• The draconian, 24/7 surveillance state rulebook that forces world-class athletes to look for alternative systems.

• Why the modern wellness industry’s obsession with making life “easier” is actively sabotaging your psychological and physical resilience.

• Chris and Sam’s unfiltered breakdown of safety, when tools like NAD+ and peptides are actually justified, and the one foundational habit you cannot out-inject.

Read more

A bit over a year ago, I got a DM on Instagram.

“I have a business proposition that I would like to talk to you about. Specifically to see if there’s interest and curiosity, and partnering with you in a founding role. It’s right in your core passion arena and wheelhouse.”

I get a lot of DMs with far-out propositions. Most are from bots. The rest are from wackos.

But the sender was Christopher Gavigan. I was familiar with him. In fact, my house was filled with his products. In 2011, he co-founded the Honest Company with Jessica Alba—the brand that kickstarted safer home items like soaps, cleaners, kids’ products, and more.

Christopher was thinking about a company built around walking with weight, using lessons he’d learned from the Honest Company.

The gear would be ergonomic and adapted for everyone, especially women. It would be functional and approachable—and not hardcore.

This was an issue I’d spotted in the rucking world. When I told people about “rucking,” they’d Google the word and see Special Forces types hauling huge loads.

Some people thought that was cool. Others immediately said, “Not for me.”

Walking with weight was adopted by the military because it’s necessary for combat and the most effective way to prepare a body for warfare.

But humans carried weight long before we had organized militaries. And it’s one of the most effective ways to improve any body—health, mindset, durability, and much more. No matter your age, sex, fitness level, background, or anything else. The first backpacks, for example, were invented by women to carry children.

I was worried that rucking’s hardcore military angle was scaring a lot of people who’d benefit from walking with weight.

Christopher and I started talking. I eventually said yes. And now here we are: WalkFully is live at Walkfully.com.

Check Out WalkFully

(P.S., get a 30% discount with code: EASTER30)

WalkFully, and why carrying weight matters

You may already be familiar with the backstory of how I helped popularize rucking/walking with weight.

Quick reminder: in 2019, I spent a month in the Alaskan Arctic reporting The Comfort Crisis. I was familiar with the research on running and how humans evolved to be uniquely good at long-distance running so we could hunt.

But after successfully hunting a caribou, I found myself carrying about 120 pounds of meat across the tundra. And a question popped in my head: What would we do after we hunted? We’d have to carry the meat back to camp. And I couldn’t name any other species that could pick up weight and carry it for distance. That seemed like the missing, and perhaps more important, side of the equation.

After the Arctic, I visited Daniel Lieberman, the Harvard anthropologist behind the famous “Born to Run” research.

He confirmed that carrying shaped our physiology and health, and his lab was even beginning to study it. We’re adapted to carry. Carrying gave us a unique advantage that helped us conquer the globe. And for all of time, we walked the earth on two feet, carrying items.

Then we invented grocery carts, roller bags, and cars—and engineered carrying out of our lives. We’re now paying for it with our strength, endurance, bones, and brains.

I wrote two chapters in The Comfort Crisis: One covering all the benefits of carrying. Another covering how loading a pack with some weight and walking is one of the most practical ways to add carrying back into your life and get the benefits. I told that story through the military’s history of rucking.

What ensued was a bit of a boom. Then a problem arose.

The gear problem WalkFully solves

Most weighted gear—rucks, weight vests—descends from the military. I love that history.

But I started hearing from people who told me the gear didn’t work for them. They said the gear was rubbing them raw and bloody, trapping heat, making breathing harder, and was impossible for many women to wear comfortably, due to their anatomy.

I went on a fact finding mission.

After speaking with military researchers, I learned the packs are designed around the anatomy of large men who need to carry more than 100 pounds. Many weight vests are based on body armor.

For example, when I interviewed Kelly Starrett, the physical therapist who consults for pro teams and the military, he pointed out that weighted vests “were originally designed to protect people if they got shot.” Not to walk efficiently for health.

Because many rucking pack and vest designs are built for men in combat, they don’t always transfer over to those who want to improve their fitness and health, leading to problems.

The aesthetic of military-inspired gear also says, “I’m staging a coup against the HOA.” Some people dig that. Some don’t.

And the people who arguably have the most to gain from walking with weight—women, older adults, beginners, or anyone else who wants to add load to a dog walk or stroll with friends—look at the military options and aura and reasonably say “not for me.”

That’s the gap Christopher and I noticed.

He had an idea and a business mind. And I’d spent more time than anyone researching walking with weight for the average person. I could weigh in on gear designs, science, and messaging. Now here we are.

WalkFully’s mission is simple: Get more people out walking, ideally with weight and gear that works for them.

Mike Fischer is also on board. He’s a top pack designer and built gear around real bodies—especially female bodies. Martha Stewart (yes, that Martha Stewart), Milica McDowell DPT, and Dr. Melissa Sundermann are also part of WalkFully.

The science, briefly

The research-backed benefits of walking with weight can fill a book. (Trust me, I wrote it.) The easiest way to think of it: Walking with weight helps you get more from every step.

Here’s a brief rundown of benefits.

1. It burns more calories

In 2024, David Looney, a physiologist who researches with the US Army Research Institute of Environmental Medicine, published the best data we have on calorie burn from walking with weight. He found that it burns anywhere from 20 to 133 percent more calories per mile compared to running or walking an equivalent distance, depending on the load and other factors.

2. It burns fat while preserving (and, in some cases, building) muscle

This has been my experience—after long backpacking trips, I lose fat but not muscle. A study of backcountry hunters backs my observation. It found that over 12 days, hunters who carried packs all day lost about 10 pounds, reduced their body fat by 14 percent, maintained their muscle, and improved their VO2 max by 8.4 percent. That’s unique. When we lose weight, we usually lose a mix of fat and muscle. If you can maintain muscle as you lose weight, that’s far better for health.

3. It helps your bones

Everyone starts losing bone density around age 30, and postmenopausal women lose it fastest. Aging women in the US are 2, 5, and 8 times more likely to break a bone than to have a heart attack, get breast cancer, or have a stroke, respectively. About a third of people who break a hip after age 60 will be dead in six months. Bones respond to load, and weighted walking seems to maintain or even improve bone density.

4. It’s safer than running

The injury rate of running is anywhere from 20 to 79 percent, depending on which study you read. The rate for walking with weight is much lower. A University of Pittsburgh study tracking 451 soldiers. It found they were 6 and 2.3 times more likely to get injured while running or lifting (respectively) compared to walking with a weighted pack. And those soldiers were using loads much heavier than the average person would.

Big picture: walking with weight delivers a cardio and muscle effect—safely.

5. It’s approachable

It requires no gym, no monthly fee, and sometimes no shower afterward. Just wear some weight and take a walk. Do it while walking the dog, getting the mail, or taking a work call.

That’s just a handful of examples. Read Walk with Weight to go down the rabbit hole.

What we built: the packs

We launched WalkFully starting with two pieces of gear, both built around one unique design decision. Think of our first two items as weighted fanny packs. (We’ll release a weighted vest and weighted pack later this year.)

Why put the weight on your hips? That’s your body’s natural center of gravity and load-bearing area. This is exactly why packs have hip belts—to distribute the load to your strongest area.

Weighting the hips helps you maintain your natural gait, keeps strain off your spine and shoulders, runs cooler than a vest or pack, and works for all body types.

The Ritual Belt goes up to 10 pounds

Wear it on walks, errands, and around the house. It has a pocket for your phone, keys, and a water bottle—and a low-profile look that doesn’t scream fitness gear.

One early customer wears hers to clean the house, grocery shop, or walk her dog. It’s on her for a lot of the day, and that’s the point. It allows her to wear a normal fanny pack but get more out of it for her health.

The Wander Pack goes up to 16 pounds

It has a similar design, but allows for more weight.

You can carry more items in it. It’s good for longer or harder walks, or for when your body has adapted and wants more.

Two notes on the weighted hip packs:

• They’re light enough and practical enough to wear all day. That makes them good options for people who want to leverage the gravitostat hypothesis. It suggests that prolonged loading of our skeletal system curbs appetite, leading to weight loss and other benefits. Read a deep dive on the gravitostat hypothesis here.

• The Ritual Belt is light enough and secure enough that you could run with it. It sits at your hips, which improves biomechanics. That said, don’t run with any weight if you’ve had recent running injuries.

And I’ll note: Christopher and Mike have a hell of an eye for design. The products turned out incredible. Both use magnetic buckles, safe fabrics and plastics, and inserts so you can add load as you get stronger.

We’re releasing the belts first, because we think they’re unique—and a missing component of walking with weight.

Later this year, we’ll release a weighted vest and a pack. Both will be heavier than the hip belts and have easily modifiable weights. And they’ll fix the issues caused by military vests and packs.

Get a 30% discount with code: EASTER30

Check Out WalkFully

Check out the free 14-Day Walking Reset

Part of what we’re trying to do at WalkFully is remind us all that walking is important, weighted or not. I’ve written about this extensively.

You don’t need our gear or any gear to start walking. I helped create WalkFully’s free 14-Day Mind & Body Reset.

It’s two weeks of daily walking prompts designed to build a sustainable walking practice. Each day pushes you in a different direction, with new ways to think about pace, attention, terrain, and what a walk can do for your head, not just your body.

There’s no pressure to perform—just two weeks of walking with a bit more intention than usual.

Fitness doesn’t need to be a fast-paced grind to work. In fact, that can backfire. It’s worth slowing down and taking back the mental side of it.

Sign up for the 14-Day Reset here.

And if you want to see the gear, the science, and the rest of what we’re building, head to WalkFully.com.

Before we end, a quick poll about the podcast:

You’ve always received 3 emails from me a week (Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays). Since April, you’ve also been getting podcast emails on Tuesdays and Thursdays, for a total of 5 emails a week. I want to make sure this works for you. Tell me how you’d like to receive podcast updates:

1. Change nothing. I’ll keep sending each podcast (description, takeaways) as its own email on Tuesdays and Thursdays. (5 emails a week.)

2. Create a once-weekly podcast digest. Sent on Saturdays, with links and takeaways from both podcasts that week. (4 emails a week.)

3. Fold the podcast into our Wednesday and Friday letters. Think: a brief section with the guest, topic, key takeaway, and links. (3 emails a week.)

Have fun, don’t die, walk with weight.

-Michael

Subscribe now

Today’s Friday Gear Not Stuff post hit your inbox on Saturday.

I was traveling yesterday. What should have been a two-hour flight turned into 13 hours of delays, captain and crew swaps, boardings, deboardings, reboardings, non-existent airport WiFi, and more.

Told you that to tell you this: As many of my fellow passengers melted down around me, I wanted to join them. But only for about half a second. Then I was fine. I had enough mental space to realize no amount of frustration (or screaming at the flight attendant, as many did) would get the plane in the air. We were all safe. We would get to our destination eventually. Might as well enjoy the time to do nothing.

I wasn’t always like this. It’s something I picked up by voluntarily doing things harder than waiting at an airport.

This, I submit, is why we weirdos in this Two Percent community go out and do hard things. Why we burn the ships, take on Misogis, and lean into life’s challenges rather than away from them.

In situations like my delay, we might feel first-world rage for a moment. But we have experiences that allows us to locate mental space to resist it and take a different point of view. That’s stress inoculation, and there are years of research behind it.

The real magic happens between the ears.

Thanks for being here. Keep on doing hard things. And let us know in the comments if you’ve had a moment—traffic, travel, DMV lines, whatever—where you kept your calm and perspective.

Now onto June’s Gear Not Stuff.

Financial savant George Kamel recently appeared on the Two Percent podcast. We talked about how to save money on health food and avoid the biggest financial traps.

George has a great YouTube channel, and he just posted a video I loved: My Top 10 Buy-It-For-Life Items.

He ran the video after asking his boss, Dave Ramsey—who has helped millions overhaul their spending habits and get out of debt—a simple question with a surprising answer, given that Dave is all about saving money.

• George Kamel: “What’s one thing you still refuse to spend money on?”

• Dave Ramsey: “What I refuse to spend money on is cheap stuff that’s not going to last. Instead, I’ll double the amount and buy one good one instead of five bad ones.”

Dave’s right. Some items are worth spending more on. Buy it once rather than five times—saving money in the long run. And you get something you love instead of something you settled for.

I’m following George and Dave’s leads with today’s Gear Not Stuff post. Ten Two Percent buy-it-for-life items.

I’ll explain why each category is worth the investment—why it can save you money over time, and why you’ll love it more. Then I’ll give my favorite pick for each category.

Let’s roll …

Check out our partners

• 🧪 Function Health offers 5x deeper insights into your health than typical bloodwork. The info can guide you into feeling better every day. Function 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.

• 🦌 Maui Nui Venison, the healthiest meat on planet Earth. And Maui Nui might be the only company harvesting meat ethically. I’m a massive fan of their venison jerky sticks, and Maui Nui just launched a new flavor with chila pepa, the Hawaiian chili pepper. Chef’s kiss. Get a deal on the new flavor here.

• 🏃‍♀️ Janji makes my favorite endurance apparel—comfortable, durable, unique. I wore Janji on a (very) hot trail run on Sunday. They’re the only brand making gear specifically for 200-plus-mile adventures—the best kind. The 7” Multi Short 2-in-1 is a classic. Find Janji at Janji.com and at REI stores nationwide.

From here, you’ll learn:

• The one pair from my boot collection I’d wear forever

• Why legendary knife companies are getting worse

• The category where buy-it-for-life doesn’t apply, but cheaping out could kill you

• The carry-on that outlasts roller luggage

• Why you should marry one running shoe

• The single number that reveals a car’s true cost and reliability

• The coffee maker that’s already paid for itself

• How online reviews are secretly making your clothes fall apart faster

• A watch that tells the time, holds its value, and can bail you out in a pinch

• The free kettlebells I got 20 years ago that I’ll still be swinging in my 80s

Read more

On Tuesday, we had UFC great Miesha Tate on the pod. One of the hardest parts about fighting, she said, was the weight cuts.

Fighters lose up to 20 pounds just a few days before weigh-ins—and then gain it all back in the 36 hours before they step into the octagon to fight.

It’s wild, but fighters provide a window into the impacts of dieting, weight loss, and better nutrition for the average person.

Today, we’re talking with Tyler Minton, RDN. Tyler is a real one—a guy with a big brain sitting between two cauliflower ears from years of fighting.

After a dangerous weight cut as a UFC fighter, Tyler pivoted and helped revolutionize weight cutting and nutrition in MMA. He’s worked with some of the greats: Max Holloway, Khabib Nurmagomedov, and more. He now also works with Navy SEAL teams at Dam Neck Annex, in VA.

Tyler and I got into the full mechanics of UFC weight cuts and then covered lessons that matter for everyone else: Problems with crash dieting. Why your metabolism tanks faster than it recovers. A GLP-1 mistake Tyler notices many people making. His three-part framework that explains everything you need to know about nutrition.

This episode airs a few days before UFC 250, arguably the biggest fight card in UFC history (and on the White House lawn, because apparently that’s the world we live in now). So Tyler also gives his fight picks at the end.

Watch the episode

Listen to the episode

• This link opens the episode in your podcast player of choice.

Show Notes

• Tyler’s Instagram

• Tyler’s Nutrition Coaching Company: Ethos Nutrition (he’ll work with you and you’ll get fitter for it).

• Tyler’s fight page. His nickname was “Melee.” Perfect.

• International society of sports nutrition position stand: nutrition and weight cut strategies for mixed martial arts and other combat sports

My Biggest Takeaways From the Episode

As a reminder, this new section is for Members only. Below are 7 of the highest-impact, most actionable takeaways from the episode, including:

• How a UFC weight-cutting trick was used to falsely market modern low-carb diets to the public.

• The metric Tyler uses to ensure fighters perform at their best while also eating enough to fuel better recovery, mood, and performance.

• Why your metabolism drops rapidly during a crash diet but doesn’t recover post-diet—and what to do about it.

• A mistake Tyler sees many GLP-1 users making, and how to fix it.

• A simple nutrition framework that leads to holistic health and performance (not just a lower number on the scale).

• Tyler’s UFC Freedom 250 picks.

1. UFC weight cuts are mostly water—a phenomenon that made the low-carb diet explode

Tyler helps UFC fighters drop 10 to 20 pounds in the 72 hours before weigh-ins, and then gain nearly all of it back within 24 hours. Surprise: It’s nearly all water weight. The carbs your body stores also store water. One gram of glycogen holds “3 to 4 grams of water,” Tyler said. During fight week, fighters cut carbs and swap in fat, which gives them 9 calories per gram and doesn’t hold much water. Many eat as many calories that week as they did during camp. “But they wake up lighter every morning,” he said. This trick (along with heat exposure) helps UFC fighters cut water, and their scale weight drops dramatically. But it was also leveraged in low-carb diet marketing—people would report losing 10 to 20 pounds in a week. It seemed great, but it wasn’t actual fat loss. It was water.

Read more

I recently posted a thought on social media that drew some love—and pushback:

What I enjoy most about Two Percent is that we can dig into the nuance in a way we can’t in a 280-character Tweet1.

I’ve appeared on a lot of podcasts over the last handful of years. I enjoy every conversation.

The question I’m asked most often that isn’t directly related to my work is, “What’s your morning routine?”

At first, I found it strange that I was getting this question so often. Then I realized morning routines are having a moment.

The idea is that a well-choreographed morning routine is the secret to success in (insert anything). As one popular podcaster said, “a correctly scripted series of steps in the first 60 to 90 minutes of your day dictates whether you’ll have an optimal day.”

Morning routines first rose among self-optimization gurus, then spread to the masses. Google searches for “morning routine” are now up 600 percent. Major media outlets, from the New York Times to CNN to Self, are running stories on building the perfect morning routine and unpacking celebrity morning routines. TikTok videos tagged with #morningroutine have been viewed around ~30 billion times.

We’re not talking about common morning behaviors, like brushing teeth and eating breakfast.

These routines are filled with complicated wellness- and productivity-related practices. Lots of them.

It can sometimes feel like a Saturday Night Live Stefon skit, with online influencers telling us our morning routine should have “... everything: 4 a.m. wakeups. Twenty minutes of meditation. Gratitude journaling. No screens. Athletic Greens. Cold plunge. Fifteen minutes of sunlight exposure. Breathwork. Butter coffee but only after 90 minutes of being awake. Zone 2 cardio …”

First things first: A routine is just a repeated pattern of actions we tend to do in a given context.

Whether we design them intentionally or fall into them by accident, we all rely on routines. They shape our days, reduce the number of decisions we have to make, and free up mental energy for other things.

A good routine improves our ability to reach our most important goals. A bad one does the opposite, often leading us into distraction and procrastination.

So the idea of designing a morning routine is good: it’s a conscious effort to clear the runway to reach our biggest goals.

But the more I’ve looked at the rise of morning routines, the more I wonder if we’re straying away from that intent. I worry that, instead of clearing the runway, we’re actually putting barriers on it.

From here you’ll learn

• The psychological reason why we crave complicated morning rituals when facing life’s biggest goals.

• How a fascinating study from Texas A&M proves your perfect routine might actually be a liability to your daily performance.

• The chaotic, wellness-guru-defying morning habits of self-made billionaires like Warren Buffett and Serena Williams (and my favorite writer).

• Morning routines done the right way, from a popular doctor and podcaster.

Shoutout to our partners

• 🧪 Function Health offers 5x deeper insights into your health than typical bloodwork. The info can guide you into feeling better every day. Function 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.

• 🦌 Maui Nui Venison, the healthiest meat on planet Earth. And Maui Nui might be the only company harvesting meat ethically. I’m a massive fan of their venison jerky sticks, and Maui Nui just launched a new flavor with chila pepa, the Hawaiian chili pepper. Chef’s kiss. Get a deal on the new flavor here.

• 🏃‍♀️ Janji makes my favorite endurance apparel—comfortable, durable, unique. I wore Janji on a (very) hot trail run on Sunday. They’re the only brand making gear specifically for 200-plus-mile adventures—the best kind. The 7” Multi Short 2-in-1 is a classic. Find Janji at Janji.com and at REI stores nationwide.

Let’s roll …

Read more