Dying Breed Dialogues: Michael Easter

The case for rucking, under and overrated health trends, and how your fitness tracker is lying to you

If you’re here on Dying Breed, there’s a good chance you’ve listened to the interviews I do on the Art of Manliness podcast. One text-based format I want to experiment with here on Dying Breed is interviews. I’ve always been a fan of the kind of text-based interviews you see in magazines like Rolling Stone or Esquire. They’re fun to read. Plus, with text interviews, you can easily revisit specific ideas without scrubbing through timestamps or rewinding. I appreciate audio interviews, but I appreciate this distinct flavor of interview as well.

To kick off the Dying Breed interview series, I talked to fitness journalist Michael Easter. Michael’s written two hugely popular books — The Comfort Crisis and Scarcity Brain — and he regularly writes about health and fitness at his Substack, Two Percent.

What I like about Michael's approach to health and fitness is that he cuts through the noise of the modern fitness industry. Instead of pushing overpriced supplements, convoluted workout routines, and super-involved wellness protocols that only work if you have the schedule of a retired aristocrat, Michael focuses on practical, no-nonsense advice that actually fits into the life of a regular person — someone with a job, a family, and limited time to spend chasing six-pack abs.

While Michael’s approach to wellness is practical, he also champions an inspiring vision of the good life — one that urges people to reject the world’s comfort-driven defaults and intentionally embrace small, health-promoting challenges. To make life a little harder, on purpose.

I recently chatted with Michael about fitness myths, practical exercise approaches, and what historical moment of extreme physical exertion he’d teleport himself to.

The interview has been edited for length and clarity.

So Michael, what's the story behind Two Percent? Why did you start it?

People always ask, “What the hell does Two Percent mean?” It comes from a study that found only 2% of people take the stairs when there's also an escalator available. To me, that's a metaphor for why we get in trouble with our health today. We've engineered our world for comfort, but sometimes being too comfortable hurts us.

Everyone knows if you take the stairs, you'll get a better long-term return on your health and well-being. But 98% of people take the escalator. The idea is to interpret how to live well in a modern world that is seemingly designed to not lead us to live well.

With Two Percent, I’m trying to position myself as a middle ground between super dumbed-down health information from major media and the world we're in now with four-hour podcasts that go down crazy rabbit holes of protocols that you could only do if that's all you did for a living and had no kids or other responsibilities.

[Note: The McKay family has adopted the practice of always taking the stairs, and when we’re making our kids climb them somewhere like the airport, we encourage them by saying, “Be a two-percenter!”]

You’ve been doing fitness journalism for 15+ years. What's been the most overrated fitness trend you've seen?