Lessons From War With Tim Mak

Finding meaning in chaos, fitness, nutrition, and The Counteroffensive.

Post summary

• We’re running a conversation with Tim Mak, a journalist who runs The Counteroffensive and covers the war in Ukraine on the ground.

• Tim and I asked each other questions about topics ranging from meaning, to health and fitness, to gear, and more.

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Audio/Podcast version

The post

I recently spoke with Tim Mak. Tim runs The Counteroffensive, a publication on Substack that covers the war in Ukraine in ways you won’t see in mainstream media.

Tim landed in Kyiv right as the war started and has (mostly) been there ever since.

In today’s post, Tim and I cover:

• The wild story about how Tim ended up covering the War in Ukraine.

• What war can teach us about meaning and how we spend our time.

• What failing out of the Green Beret pipeline taught Tim about strength and intelligence.

• Safety skills that every person should have. They’re critical for war zones and home.

• How Tim approaches fitness in a war zone.

• My thoughts on putting together an exercise routine when you have limited time and equipment.

• How a hilarious insult from a Ukrainian doctor led Tim to change his nutrition habits in the Ukraine.

• My thoughts on alcohol and health, whether moderate drinking is healthy, and how that can guide our decisions around other “bad” habits.

• The gear Tim brings with him when he’s reporting stories on the frontlines.

• The gear I bring with me when I’m reporting stories in austere environments.

• What motivates me to publish Two Percent.

• My response to Tim challenging the thesis behind Two Percent.

• What Tim and I do to get a break from work.

Enjoy.

Note: This conversation has been edited for clarity, shortened and some sections moved around.

Michael

The first thing that people need to know is: how did you end up covering the war in Ukraine? Tell us how that all unfolded because that was fascinating to me.

Tim

It was not at all expected. In 2022 I was an investigative correspondent for NPR. But I was also one of the few NPR staff that had a military background. So I had been a US Army medic and had just gotten out of the National Guard a few months before the full-scale invasion started. 

Just before the war was about to break out, there was all this talk from US intelligence agencies saying that Putin was going to invade.

Now, most Ukrainians dismissed this. But NPR decided to take it seriously and send a team to Ukraine.

So I showed up with a bag full of suits expecting to take a couple weeks of meetings with politicians and diplomats and things like that. 

And I happened to land the night the invasion started on one of the last commercial flights into Kyiv. I remember going to a bar with a friend of mine who's a long time war correspondent who had covered 16 wars, and he was saying “Don't worry about it; it’s not going to happen.”

So I go back to my hotel room a little tipsy, and I wake up at three o'clock in the morning to a call from my editor saying “You better get downstairs because something's happening outside.”

And the war had started. 

I remember just being totally unprepared for that moment. I remember the first thing I did was get up and go to the bathroom. I started brushing my teeth rather than getting downstairs because I just had no idea what to expect or what to do. 

That was more than two years ago and I’ve been covering the war ever since. 

Last May, I started my own company called the Counter Offensive at counteroffensive.news.

We cover the war from a human interest perspective. We try not to tell you what happened in the news—we try to go deep into the life of someone who's experiencing a relevant news event.

And then, by learning about that person and what they're experiencing, we kind of incidentally tell you what the news is.

Michael

How has your experience in the war changed how you view your life in the United States? I’ll give you some context behind this question: In my book Scarcity Brain, I spent some time in Iraq and I spoke to a lot of military members.

For a lot of soldiers and people who spent time in conflict zones, their basic takeaway was, “Yeah war is hell, but at the same time there are elements of it that I miss. It did certain things for me psychologically—it kind of thrust me into the present moment and also reframed how I view my life at home in many ways.” 

What has your experience there been like regarding some of those topics?

Tim

I’m big fan of the journalist Chris Hedges, and you may be familiar with his book War Is A Force That Gives Us Meaning. He explores some similar themes in that book—the horrors of war but also the profound purpose it gives a lot of people. 

As a journalist, I often talk to people, and they're having the worst day of their lives.

No exaggeration—the actual worst day of their life because they just discovered that a loved one is dead or that their neighborhood has been bombed. And it's part of my job to go talk to them and pull out some elements of humanity and to make the story real for people who are really far away.

If we don't hit the right points, people couldn't be bothered to care about what happens here. 

Look, I find it hard for me to explain how it might affect my post-war life because that life hasn't fully happened for me yet. 

On the other hand, in January 2023, I left Ukraine and said I would never come back to Ukraine. 

I love surfing, so I moved to Los Angeles. I thought, “I'm just going to put the war behind me.” I had developed PTSD and was totally burnt out with my coverage of the first 10 months of the war.

And, you know, four months later, I was on a plane back to Ukraine, moving there, starting my own company, and saying I have to keep doing this. This is what I was meant to be doing.

I was just dissatisfied with the pace of life back stateside. I felt that there was something going on—I had made so many good friends in Ukraine in a short period of time. 

You talk to folks who served in the military or have done other kinds of difficult things together, and you realize that they're bonded deeply even in short periods of time in ways that your office co-workers typically won't be. Sitting in Los Angeles under the sun didn't sit right with me. 

I would say that my experience in Ukraine ultimately changed my expectations for what life should involve and the sort of meaning that was important to me.

And that's not to cast any sort of aspersions on people who find meaning in many other ways.

But for me this was the thing that jumped out: I said “Hey, you are just not going to be happy until you handle this. There's something happening in Ukraine still and if you sit stateside you're going to be upset about it.” 

Michael

You came in through the National Guard. Your plan in joining the military was to be a Green Beret. But it didn’t work out. Tell us what you learned from the process of going through the Green Beret selection and assessment.

Tim

I didn't even make it to selection and assessment. I realized early that I wasn’t cut out to be a Green Beret.

I thought being a Green Beret was about how many push-ups you could do. I remember physically preparing and getting into the best physical shape of my life.

But I learned ultimately the military is about what happens inside your head when you physically can't do any more push-ups and you're asked to do one more, or you're totally exhausted and thirsty and tired and you're put under extreme stress.

Obviously you need to be strong, but being strong or being smart in the way I thought of being strong and smart are only two small elements of what it takes to be a soldier at that level.

It primarily had to do with my understanding about what it meant to be smart and competent. I first enlisted as a medic, so in military terms that’s called a 68 whiskey.

I always scored well on the tests. But I realized for the first time in my life how many different kinds of being smart there are—and how little time I had spent thinking about the other kinds of being smart. 

I'll give you an example: There are a lot of people who didn't do well on the written test but who excelled in other ways—like when it came to hands-on exercises, hands-on tests, and being put under pressure and being able to use their hands in certain ways.

There were a lot of farm boys from Montana who would kick my butt every time at these exercises. 

I came to the conclusion that, because I was a mid-career journalist when I joined the military, I’d developed a lot of bad habits that were just not good for emergency medicine. 

When you're a journalist you have to think constantly. You’re quasi-paranoid about whether you're going to make a mistake.

So when it came to emergency medicine, I was always overthinking things. I was always trying to get from step one to step seven immediately. I wasn't able to go through the algorithm in a kind of chill way.

I remember one case where we were doing an exercise to call in a Medevac helicopter.

After I called the helicopter, I realized I had made a mistake—we had not requested a specific kind of equipment for the exercise, and we needed that equipment.

And I froze for like two and a half minutes just racking my brain trying to understand how to fix the problem—because no one had actually ever taught me how to fix that process if you had made a mistake. 

So I went over to a more experienced medic and said, “Hey I messed up on this … how do we do this …” Long story short: He just went on the radio and asks for the thing I missed. 

So that was my block in thinking.

There are a ton of different ways to be smart. I'm good with book learning but not so good in a lot of other ways. 

Michael

What has your experience in the military and Ukraine taught you about skills you think the average person should have? What should people reading this know—whether they're traveling or at home—and something goes wrong? 

Tim

I would say that basic medical knowledge and basic emergency medical knowledge is a critical skill set. 

I joined the military after I realized that no one needs a journalist during a zombie apocalypse. 

In an emergency, no one says, ‘We need a journalist immediately.” But everyone needs a medic.

So everyone could use some basic emergency medical knowledge. Like a Stop The Bleed course or some understanding of what to do if someone has a heart attack or cardiac arrest.

Tim giving medical training to The Counteroffensive team.

It's critically important, and I see things all the time where people get hurt or even killed here in Kyiv who could have been saved had the people around them had that basic knowledge.

This knowledge gives me a basic level of confidence that I can handle emergency situations should they arise. It’s like a protective bubble that I carry with me.

• Related: If you’re interested in learning skills that can save your life in an emergency at home or abroad, sign up for the Don’t Die retreat (November 2-3 in Las Vegas)

Michael

How do you approach fitness in Ukraine? Or is it like, ‘We don't have time for that, we have a bigger mission here,” and you don’t approach it at all?

Tim

I went for a doctor’s checkup maybe about a month ago and it was a Ukrainian doctor. And she looks at my blood work, and she looks at me, and she looks back at my blood work, and she says “You haven't been eating healthily in Ukraine over the last couple of years, have you?” She says “You're looking, how do you say this in English, you're looking fluffy.”

Then she pulls out a tape measurer and puts it around my waist and she says that my waist is one centimeter too fluffy.

I see myself in the mirror every day, and I don’t consider myself to be quote unquote fluffy. But it's a good reminder to get my ass back to work. 

Actually, the electrical outages that have been happening here lately have been useful, at least in the sense that now I have to walk up and down 10 flights of stairs every single time I want to leave or enter the apartment. There’s a leg workout there.

I've also been doing a lot of interval training. For example, I've kind of fallen into the body weight side. 

Like doing a mile run, pull-ups, push-ups, sit-ups, and another mile run. Or adding some weight to that in terms of a weighted vest or something like that.

There are just innumerable ways to simplify your workouts so there’s the minimum level of excuse—you have to try to pull it off.

Related to that, how are you exercising now, Michael?

Michael

Well, somewhat relevant to your situation of having limited resources, I'm at an Airbnb all month. I'm in New Jersey but I normally live in Las Vegas.

So I ordered a kettlebell on Amazon. It was like 100 bucks and it arrived in two days. I’ve written about the surprising benefits of working out with a kettlebell for even just 12 minutes.

So I’m doing all sorts of kettlebell movements with that. I’m stripping away a lot of the details of how I work out. 

I think this has actually been beneficial because it has forced me to get into the meat of the question: how should a human being move? 

A human needs to be able to squat, we need to hinge at our hips, we need to be able to press weight away from us and pull it towards us. We need to be able to resist movement by locking down our core. We need to be able to carry weight. I’ve written about this topic of fundamental human movements too.

And so using movement as a framework has really simplified my workouts and made them much quicker. 

My normal workout if I'm at home might be an hour, but here I've realized that I can get a lot done in 20 to 30 minutes—and I'm not suffering for it. 

I do think that there's a good lesson in there: when you look at the government's physical activity guidelines, they call for 150 minutes of what they call moderate to vigorous physical activity and two strength sessions a week. And you don’t need much equipment, which I pointed out here.

I think we can overcomplicate exercise, but if you just make it as easy as you can on yourself, strip away the layers, and look at how you use your time, I think that those government recommendations are rather reasonable and easy for most people to hit.

And if you can find—much like you did with your electrical outages—opportunities to get a little bit more physical activity into your daily life it can be a huge dial mover. This is a lot of what I write about around the Two Percent concept.

Related to exercise, how have you had to approach nutrition, Tim?

This doctor tells you “You haven't been eating that well in Ukraine.” What was that a result of and did your meeting with this somewhat insulting doctor change how you’re eating?

Tim

I think her comment was a cultural difference or something. But, look, pretty much every meal I was eating beef and pork and chicken in large amounts. Because that's just what's on the menu. 

Since that conversation a month ago, I've been trying to cut back on red meat.

I’ll tell you, another thing that the electrical outages are doing here is that you can't find non-rotten meat in the grocery stores anymore because the grocery store near me doesn't have power except for six hours a day. 

I was recently there and reached into the fridge to get some meat, and I noticed it was bad—I couldn’t buy it or I was going to poison myself. So now I can't really find meat unless I go to a specialty store where meat costs an arm and a leg. 

So I am dialing back some of my red meat consumption. I’m very much hoping that in the fall I'll get more blood work done and my doctor will take back the fluffy comment she's probably forgotten about.

I have a question for you, Michael. The first year of the war I was under a lot of stress traveling all the time. The easiest thing to do is drink with people at the hotel bar.

Where do you stand on whether alcohol fits in a healthy person's life? There's been so much new research showing that even a small amount of alcohol is carcinogenic and can have terrible effects on your health.

Do you think moderate alcohol consumption can play a role for someone who's concerned about their health?

Michael

I’ll answer this two ways.

First, I don't think alcohol is good for people from a purely biological perspective. It’s a toxin.

At the same time, I think that alcohol in moderation in the context of being social can be a good thing. Because we also know that spending time with other people, having long conversations with people, and connecting with people is very good—and that often happens in the context of alcohol.

Now that raises the question of, ‘Okay, well what is moderation?’

And to me, if someone is having a couple drinks a night—not seven—a couple nights a week with other people, that is probably neutral or a net positive for someone's health, assuming they don't have a history of alcoholism. 

I think you need to be aware of your drinking and why you’re drinking. For example, if a person finds themself frequently going, “Well I'll just have two drinks” and two turn into 12, that might be something worth looking at.

But with all behaviors that can have downsides to your health, it's like Warren Zevon’s line, “life will kill you.”

Everything has the possibility to kill you somehow. Learning to live well is about trying to figure out, “Okay, what are some things that I really enjoy? They may not necessarily be perfectly good for me, but I enjoy them.”

You only get one ride in life. It's like, what are you going to do? Are you going to eat vegetables and drink water your entire life? That sounds like hell. 

So how do you like live a good life? Of course, if you take that idea too far, then you will burn out too quick. So it’s a balance.

I think you need to run an analysis of “bad behaviors.” Many of them deliver a net benefit to our social lives, to our emotions, and more.

Simple rules like “Don’t do X” work, but they work on accident. It’s better to figure out why they work so you can use them in a way that helps you and allows you to live better. I.e., use them on purpose. I wrote about this idea here.

To sum all that up: Drinking a little bit of alcohol is probably not going to be bad and could potentially be positive. But once you start to tip into excess, that's when it gets bad. 

I definitely am not a huge fan of the recent trend of people saying that no one should drink alcohol at all. I think it's sort of “scare-tactic-ish.”

And I think it could actually be a net negative if someone stopped drinking, but they were drinking in low levels in the context of being social. 

Pivoting here, what gear do you always keep on you when you're reporting?

Tim

I always have a CAT tourniquet. But it really depends on the situation. Am I in Kyiv? Am I near the front lines? 

One of the things I realized we need more of recently is N95 masks.

Now, everyone is hearing this and having a 2020 coronavirus flashback. But one of the big things about attacks here is that they cause a lot of debris to enter the air, so I think it's important to be aware of that.

And I've been reading recently about how much asbestos has been used in various kinds of construction materials in Ukraine going back to the Soviet Union as cheap material. And no one ever thought that they'd have to deal with this asbestos being released throughout a neighborhood because bombings weren’t a consideration.

But last Monday, I put on a mask for the first time in a very long time because of a bombing at a children's hospital here in Kyiv. I realized there was a risk there. 

A N95 mask isn’t something I would wear near the front lines where it's very rural. 

At the frontlines, I'd be bringing something like a Faraday bag, which is a bag that blocks signals from my cell phone and any other electronic devices I might have so that I'm not walking around with the equivalent of a beacon telling the Russians there’s an American journalist nearby.

What gear do you keep on you, Michael?

Michael

It really depends on the reporting I'm doing.

For example, for my last book, Scarcity Brain, I went into the middle of nowhere in the Bolivian Amazon to spend some time with a remote tribe that are some of the healthiest people on earth in one chapter and to Baghdad to investigate the drug trade in another chapter.

Michael reporting on the drug trade in Baghdad

From just a purely reporting perspective, I always carry a Rite In The Rain notebook with an orange cover.

I use the one with the Orange cover so I can see it and so I don't lose it. I also carry a Fisher space pen because they will always write and I don't want to have to carry a bunch of pens, so those are always with me.

If I'm in a place that is a little higher risk, like the Middle East, I will carry a burner cell phone. And I’m usually sharing my location at all times with someone who's back in the US and another who is in the region.

Then I’ll carry a tourniquet and GPS unit and stuff like that too. 

I also have a kind of long long-standing friendship with the people at GORUCK, and I've always found their packs great to keep all my gear in. 

If I'm doing a reporting trip, I usually travel out of one backpack. I keep things really light. I usually use GORUCK’s GR2.

I write about gear every month at Two Percent in our Gear Not Stuff column. Here’s an example related to this.

Tim

Can you walk us through a little bit of what Two Percent’s philosophy is grounded in?

Michael

The Two Percent name comes from a study that found that only two percent of people take the stairs when there's also an escalator available.

And to me, that sets up why society as a whole at least in developed countries has found itself in the place we are with declining rates of health, with increasing rates of disease.

The stat tells us that humans are wired to do the next easiest, most comfortable thing—even when it doesn't benefit us in the long run. 

Basically 100 percent of people know that taking the stairs is going to give them a benefit over the escalator, but we don't do it. And that's simply because evolution wired humans to do the easy thing—but we've created a modern environment where you can do the easy thing in a lot of ways. And that ultimately backfires. Anthropologists call this an evolutionary mismatch.

So the project is ultimately about finding the most practical, highest-return things we can do in order to improve our health, improve our mindset, and improve our life across the board. And I'm not saying everything is going to be easy, but it's going to be worth it. I wrote a whole “manifesto” about this idea.

Tim

As you do this, what motivates you beyond the obvious?

Michael

What motivates me is that I write posts on Two Percent, and I might hear back in two or three weeks from someone who did the thing that I wrote about. And it literally changed their life. It improved their life in some way. 

We've had people who've lost more than a hundred pounds. We've had people who've repaired relationships with family members because of research I wrote about that dealt with psychology. Or a post led to some very small behavior tweak.

Here’s some background: I worked at Men's Health magazine for a very long time. I started in print magazines. And as the internet started to sort of take over the health and fitness reporting world, you saw a lot of the traditional health media brands really pivot into getting clicks—but what gets clicks isn't necessarily what gives readers the best information. Things get dumbed down. Information gets diluted. 

But when that started to happen, you saw a rise in new health media that went the far opposite direction.

I’m talking about three, four, five hour long podcasts that go down the rabbit hole of all these studies and biomarkers and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And that information is often not that useful, right? It becomes like academic porn or something like that. It’s out of context for real people.

I saw that there wasn't a middle ground that could translate what was happening in the realms of science and practice in health, psychology, and wellness and keep it true, but also explain it in such a way that is easily digestible, but most importantly, practical. It's like, okay, how do I actually use this health information? 

And does this health information really matter in the context of a person who works 40 hours a week, who has kids, who has all these other commitments, and wants to improve their life?

And so that's what we're after. Accurate, practical, high-ROI information. Here’s a full explanation of what we’re trying to accomplish with Two Percent. And I think it’s working.

Tim

This is making me think of all the stairs I'm involuntarily climbing here as a result of the power outages in Kyiv, so I want to challenge you a little bit.

If there's an escalator here, why am I taking the hard route? Taking the escalator doesn't mean I can't go work out or make other kinds of healthy decisions in my life.

I know this is just a very minor metaphor for other stuff, but there's a reason human development is driven by making things more convenient and easier and less costly to our bodies. Why do the hard thing, I guess, is the fundamental question. Why should we take the stairs when there's an option to do an easier thing? 

Michael

I'll answer your direct question on stairs and then the sort of larger metaphor for what it stands for.

So if you say, “Okay, I'm not going to take the stairs I’m going to take the escalator, but then I'm going to go do a 30-minute workout later.”

Well, when you look at the research on what actually leads people to burn the most calories, it's not the workout—the workouts are this tiny tiny drop in the bucket of daily activity and calorie burn.

What actually matters more is our incidental daily activity. This is the movement you do across a day as part of life. Like walking from point A to B, taking the stairs, whatever it might be.  

If you're making the decision to take the stairs over the escalator—or the metaphorical stairs, like I'm going to park in the farthest spot, etc—the research shows those decisions can add up to over 800 extra calories burned a day, which is the equivalent of an eight-mile run. Which no one does and is far more impactful than a 30-minute workout.

And so you look at all these small decisions and they really outweigh this idea of doing a workout later on for 30 minutes. Like, if your goal is weight loss, 30 minutes won’t cut it. I wrote about the debate around whether exercise leads to weight loss here.

Not to mention the practicality. OK, you take the escalator, and then, oh, your mom calls, and she needs help with something. So you didn't do your workout. Life often gets in the way. 

So the message is about little wins and daily choices. If you can do the thing that’s slightly harder, you can score a little win—and the wins add up.

And it’s not removed from normal life, like a workout is. Like the stairs—you have to get up to the second floor. You can take the escalator or you can take the stairs.

Now to answer the big picture question: I am not saying that all this progress we have is bad or that we did it for a bad reason. I'm not saying abolish the escalator.

But I am saying that when you look at how we've engineered the world, the modern world in a lot of ways does lead us into behaviors that ultimately can reduce our health span, our mobility. 

And so by choosing that slightly harder thing—if it's the stairs, if it's saying maybe I don't need the fourth slice of pizza, whatever it might be—that can really add up to big changes over the long haul and lead you to live much better. 

And, yes, it's hard in the short term. Although I'm not saying don't eat pizza. I'm saying, you know, maybe don’t eat five slices. Maybe three will fill what you actually need without tipping you into excess. You can extend this idea to anything—personal relationships, work, etc.

Tim, what do you do to get a break from work?

Tim

Well, it’s not healthy, but I don't. I mean, I just don't get a break from work. 

I work seven days a week. There are some days where I feel like I've been grounded to dust and then I realize that I can keep going. 

But I think your body takes back the time in some way. So I found myself doom scrolling on social media probably a little bit more than I care to admit, but that's probably a consequence of my brain saying, “Hey, I'm going to switch off for the next 40 minutes, and you're probably not going to have much to say about that.”

And even my breaks turn out to be reporting trips.

This whole publication happened to me accidentally. I came back to Ukraine last year and I didn't set out to create a journalism business or a journalism startup in a war zone. 

I just thought I would go do some freelance writing in Kyiv, and one thing led to another, and the next thing you know I've got this publication that we've grown to over 70,000 subscribers.

Michael

I can identify with that. I started my Substack in May of 2023. I had traditionally been working on books.

And so when I write a book, it might be commissioned to 80,000 words, but I might write 160,000 words.

And then my editor goes, “Ok, yeah, this part is good but it doesn't fit the book.” And he’d cut thousands of words.

So then the question is like, what the hell do I do with all this stuff? One of the guys at Substack had reached out to me and said, “Hey we think you could make a cool Substack.”

I saw it as a way to use some of that material that didn't quite fit the book but that I thought was very valuable.

So I launched Two Percent and found that I have a lot more to say about health and wellness and psychology topics. 

I think the community element of Substack is the secret sauce—being able to get feedback from people and change what I cover based on comments from readers all around the world. And build a community. The community is actually why I returned to Substack, which I talked about here.

Have fun, don’t die, check out The Counteroffensive. To get you started, here are three posts:

• Gambling addiction’s growing grip on the frontlines.

• The great Ukrainian cheese heist.

• The epic battle that saved Kyiv from Russian occupation.

-Michael

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