2 Percent with Michael Easter

An older Moseten woman in Bolivia at work, photographed during my time visiting the Moseten and Tsimane tribes. “Retirement is the worst idea the brain ever encountered.” That’s what neuroscientist Tommy Wood told me when he appeared on the Two Percent podcast. He watched it happen while conducting studies and working with older adults. “And when I speak to doctors in neurology and geriatrics, they start to see people decline around retirement and when they’re recently retired,” he said.

John Schaeffer in the basement of champions. A handful of years ago, I found myself in the basement of a nondescript house in the middle of Pennsylvania farm country. I’d never been to this particular basement before, and I’d just met the man who was pushing me to what felt like the brink of death. I was visiting John Schaeffer, a former world champion powerlifter and kickboxer.

I speak with physician and competitive powerlifter Dr. Jordan Feigenbaum about what peptides are, why they suddenly seem to promise everything, and what the human evidence actually shows. We discuss: What is a peptide? BPC-157 and the evidence problem Why pain relief doesn’t prove peptides work Promising peptides and unknown risks Where people buy peptides The FDA’s peptide debate Why peptides are suddenly everywhere Would Dr. Feigenbaum prescribe peptides?

Upgrade to paid to play voiceover I recently spoke to Ellen Langer on the podcast. She’s the first woman to be tenured in Harvard’s psychology department, and she’s been conducting groundbreaking research on how the mind impacts the body for nearly five decades. We covered a lot of fascinating findings about mindset—how to think in a way that expands the possibilities of health and performance rather than constrains them. Watch the episode here. Listen on Apple Podcasts here. Listen on Spotify here.

I spoke with Eric Frohardt about his twelve years on SEAL Team 6 as a sniper and assaulter—and what you can learn from it.

After my long Sunday run in the desert, I feel better—lighter, more relaxed, less stressed, with better perspective. And the feelings tend to last for days. This isn’t a unique observation. Humans have long known that nature does good things for us. The Egyptians around 1550 B.C. built a complex network of gardens designed to de-stress. Cyrus the Great around 500 B.C. commissioned gardens for the crowded urban capital of Persia to increase his citizens’ health and the sense of “calm” in his city.

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.

We treat aging, fatigue, and even disease as things that just happen to us. Ellen Langer, the first woman tenured in Harvard’s psychology department, has spent five decades showing that our way of thinking has a massive say in all of it. Michael sits down with Langer, author of The Mindful Body, to talk about how much of your health is actually under your mind’s control.

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

Americans spend more on healthcare than any other wealthy nation and have the worst outcomes to show for it. Dr. Lucy McBride, a Harvard-trained physician who has practiced for more than two decades, says the problem is baked into the system. The modern medical system is built to manage disease after it appears, not to treat the whole patient well. What’s more, doctors are forced to see far too many patients each day.