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Michael Easter is a New York Times bestselling author, motivational speaker, adventurer, professor and journalist. He’s traveled all over the world, often to some dangerous places, and helped popularize “rucking” — an exercise that involves walking or hiking while carrying weight on your back, typically in a rucksack.
This month, in collaboration with retailers GoRuck and Huckberry, Easter released a pair of limited-edition travel backpacks. The Michael Easter 2% Collection builds off of GoRuck’s already stellar GR2 and Bullet backpack designs, and features various upgrades informed by Easter’s years of experience abroad. The collection aims to help users go farther, get out of their comfort zones and stay safer while doing so.
We caught up with Easter over the phone to talk about rucking, his 2% philosophy, and how traveling to places as far flung as Baghdad, Bhutan and the Arctic helped him design the perfect backpack.
InsideHook: For some of our readers who might not be familiar, how would you describe rucking?
Michael Easter: Quite simply, it’s just walking with weight. I think most of the time it gets translated into walking with weight in a backpack, although I see that act as just kind of a branch of carrying. The bigger picture that I get into in my book, The Comfort Crisis, is that humans evolved to carry weight, so we’re the only mammal that can pick up weight and carry it for a distance. That really shaped us and built our anatomy into the way it is now, and it allowed us to literally take over the world. If we hunted, we would have to carry weight back to camp. As hunter-gatherers, you’re literally just picking up food and carrying it around. But then we can also carry tools and items into the unknown, that sort of allowed us to disperse.
What my book argues is that humans also evolved to run long distances; we’re uniquely good at running long distances in the heat. Plenty of people still run, but we’re equally if not better adapted for carrying, and we’ve just totally engineered carrying out of our lives. Carrying has all these amazing benefits. It gives you cardio while also giving you a strength stimulus, so that can help you burn more fat as you’re maintaining muscle. It burns more calories per mile than running or walking because you’re carrying weight. It leads to improvements in bone density. It gets you outside. It has all these benefits, and yet we don’t really do it now, and so I think probably the most easy and approachable way is through just throwing on a pack with some weight in it and going for a walk.
How did you first hear about rucking? And what led you to start getting into it?
I’ve been doing it for a long time now, maybe 10, 15 years. I grew up in Utah and I was in the Boy Scouts, so you’re always backpacking, but that feels different to me than just having weight in the pack for the sake of training. I really got interested in it as I was reporting my book, because the insight that we evolved to carry came from being familiar with the research that we evolved to run long distances, in order to hunt. We would chase down prey over, say, five or 15 miles, kill it, then have to carry it back to camp. That seemed to me like the missing piece. I was literally hunting when that occurred to me and so I just started going down that rabbit hole and writing about it.
What would you say is the coolest place that you’ve rucked?
Packing out a caribou in the Arctic, hundreds of miles away from anyone. That was definitely the most epic ruck of my life.
How would you describe the way that community fits into rucking?
Community is a big part of it. Running is great, and there’s definitely plenty of running clubs, but I think that one thing that happens is when you run, it’s harder to have a conversation and you’re probably going to have some people who, if you’re running as a group, are kind of going below where they want to go. You’re going to have some people who are getting a little too pressed. So I think the nice thing about rucking is that everyone can kind of get the same benefit by just changing the weight in the pack. My wife and I, for example, we’ll go on long walks, and she’ll sometimes take a ruck, sometimes she won’t. I’ll usually always wear a pack with some weight in it and we can walk together, and I’m getting more of a workout than I would if I didn’t have the pack on, but we can still have long conversations, connect and all those sorts of things. My mom is 75 and we could go for a walk together, and she could wear a light pack if she wanted to, but she doesn’t have to. I think it aids more in having genuine conversations with people.
What do you typically carry in your ruck?
Weight-wise, I usually use about 35 pounds. I would say that’s about 20% of my body weight. One thing that people should keep in mind: don’t go too heavy. You should probably never go above a third of your body weight. There’s a lot of research that says rucking is very safe. The injury rate rises over about a third of your body weight. That said, I find that the key is to find a weight that feels challenging, but at the same time doesn’t weigh so much that the act totally sucks and you’re only going to go two miles. You’re better off covering four miles with a lighter weight than you are going really heavy and doing two miles and then just being like I want to quit, this is terrible. So for me, that’s about 20% of my body weight, and I do feel like that figure tends to be a sweet spot for most people. You can get enough speed and distance, but also the weight is challenging. You’re meeting a nice middle ground between strength and cardio.
We would chase down prey over, say, five or 15 miles, kill it, then have to carry it back to camp. That seemed to me like the missing piece.
– Michael Easter
Anything else you typically bring with you if you’re going out rucking?
I mean, honestly, if I’m just walking in my neighborhood, not really anything — aside from my dogs. I always throw on a ruck when I walk my dogs because I have to walk the dogs, so if I can just throw on a pack and get more from every step, that’s totally a win. If I’m going really far, it depends on the environment, but a rain jacket. It doesn’t really rain much in Vegas, but if I was somewhere else, something like that. Also water. I find most people over-plan on gear; I’m definitely more stripped down in my approach. But bring what you think you need.
Can you describe your 2% mindset and where the inspiration came from?
It comes from this study that found only 2% of people take the stairs when there’s escalator available. 100% of people know that if they were to take the stairs, they would get a better long-term return on their health, on their well-being. So 98% percent of people choose to do the easier thing that could potentially even harm them in the long run. It makes you think about how inactive people are. The 2% mindset is not really about the stairs, it’s a metaphor for living well today. Which is to say, you often have to do things that are hard in the short term but have a long-term return in order to improve your life.
So in your opinion, aside from taking the stairs, what are some other ways that our readers could embody the 2% mindset in their own lives?
Take the stairs, park far away, take calls as you walk. I actually have a post on my Substack that’s called “The 2% Manifesto,” and it lists a bunch of different ways, so you can check that out. But even things like the fact we distract ourselves with noise now, because people feel uncomfortable in silence. People will always have a podcast or music going, but when you look at the research people will say, I feel uncomfortable in silence at first, but give it time and I tend to calm down. People tend to produce more and better work in silence compared to if they’re working in loud environments. You can apply this to so many different things. You can apply it to eating, like, burritos are more rewarding in the short term than carrots are. If you take the short-term reward all the time today, you’re gonna end up less healthy.
Is there a hero or inspiration of yours you feel really embodies that 2% mindset?
Oh man, that’s a great question. No one’s ever asked me. I’d probably say my mom. I’m an only child and she was a single parent. She used to be a drug addict. She got clean the year before she had me. After she had me, her parents wanted her to take a job at the IRS, which was a safe choice, and she was like, nah, fuck that, I’m going to build my own business. Totally risky, totally hard, but she started her own business and was successful. I’m not saying we were rich, but we were way better off than we should have been. Just look at the statistics of single mothers in the U.S. — around 50% live in extreme poverty. So I think that she’s been a model of you have to do stuff that’s going to be challenging for a while in order to get a long-term gain and reward.
The 2% mindset is not really about the stairs, it’s a metaphor for living well today.
– Michael Easter
Let’s dive into these new bags. They’re influenced by your experiences around the globe?
Yes, it’s a combo between me, GoRuck and Huckberry. For my work, I travel to a lot of different places, and not all of them are safe. I’ve done some reporting on the drug trade in Baghdad, I’ve gone into the jungles of South America. So I’m kind of all over the map, often in places that are a little bit dangerous, a little bit kinetic. And I’ve used GoRuck bags for travel because in situations like that, I just want a backpack because it’s a lot more streamlined. You don’t have to check it in, it’s attached to your body, it’s fast, it’s light…all that stuff.
But one thing that I’ve grappled with is when you’re traveling for a long period of time, you need a big backpack to fit all your gear. And depending on where you’re going, you might need more gear. But then when you get to the city, it’s kind of awkward to walk around with this big backpack, so what we did is a two-bag system: We have a 40-liter GR2, which is a really great travel bag, and then a 15-liter Bullet. The idea is, when you’re moving to your main destination, you can put the bullet in the GR2, and have all your stuff in the GR2, and then once you get your home base and you’re going out to explore the area, you can use the Bullet as your day bag.
What role did you play in some of the unique design designs?
In terms of how we tweaked the bags — one thing is that GoRuck has this military history, it was founded by soldiers, which is great. But let me tell you what you don’t want to look like when you travel to a dangerous area: an American soldier, full stop. I went to them and was like, Hey, thank you for your service, but we don’t want the bag to look like someone should come up to you and say, “Thank you for your service.” We took the webbing in the front off of the GR2. We also switched the material from Cordura, which is very common in military bags, to ripstop Robic so that it looks a little less military-ish.
The other benefit of that fabric is that it’s about as tough as Cordura, but it’s also more waterproof and it’s also lighter, so that’s a huge benefit. And then to make it even more waterproof — because, you know, I’ve dropped my bags in rivers before — we did YKK AquaGuard zippers, which really kind of waterproof the system. Another thing we did is GoRuck’s bags are typically a single or a double big compartment bag, which is fine, but if you need to, say, quickly access stuff, hide stuff, get to stuff, you have to open the big compartment. So we built two side pockets that are concealed in the bag. The idea is no one’s gonna know these two side pockets are there, and you can use them to put things like cash, a passport, GPS unit or burner phone in there.
The other awesome feature came from one of my best friends that I run events with — he was in the CIA in Baghdad during the height of the war. I told him all the features we were doing and he suggested we add a tiny pocket on the inside of the shoulder strap, which could be quickly accessed from the front. So you can hide something like a key, a memory card, a little map. So that’s just another fun safety feature. Those are really good additions that I think make the bag more user-friendly, and they can also increase your sense of safety depending on where you’re traveling to.
I know you mentioned rucking in the Arctic, is there another favorite place you’ve visited that you want to talk about?
I’d say two places. I really loved Bhutan, and I think that’s because they’ve really limited development, for lack of a better term, and so you go there and it very much feels like you’re walking back in time and it’s just a fascinating, very cool place. I also really like Baghdad. It’s a really amazing, fascinating city filled with a lot of people who are just the nicest, funniest people. I think there’s benefits to going places where we have to be a little more aware, it kind of forces you into a sense presence and focus that we often don’t get in daily life. You have to pay attention and think about what you’re doing and be in the moment, because if you aren’t in the moment, that can lead to dangerous things.
Any crazy stories from your travels in Baghdad?
There were a few. I got set up with this fixer who promised me the world in emails, like, We’re gonna have an armored SUV, and you’re gonna stay at the safest hotel in Baghdad, and I have all these meetings for us…you know, all the people you need to talk to. And I get there, and the dude rolls up in this beat-to-shit Hyundai, I’m staying at this total bombed-out dump, and he hadn’t gotten any meetings. It was just like, oh my god. So I had to really go into journalist mode and just start making contacts on the ground. Yeah, it was just absolute chaos, but it was a blast.
So, when you get back from a trip or you finish a ruck or a workout, what do you like to do to unwind?
I definitely work a lot, but me and my wife just hang out. We’ll play board games sometimes, because it’s like getting away from tech for a while. I do a lot of hiking in the desert, and I don’t bring my phone. I don’t bring podcasts or music, and I don’t wear a weighted pack for that either, I just slowly walk and think and decompress. I think that has a lot of benefits, the removal from tech, the walking, the being in wild nature. I live on the edge of the desert, so I can very quickly get into some very remote desert, be by myself.
Is there anything coming up this year, either in the rucking space, 2% space or anything else you’re working on? What’s next for you?
I’m always plugging away at 2%, which has been a super fun project. We’re doing more live conversations, which is cool. I kind of think about it as a podcast, except it’s live, which means that I can’t edit it after the fact, and that raises the stakes. We’re doing more video, audio, all that kind of stuff, which is growing the community, and starting to do in-person events, focused around travel safety and being more prepared in everyday life. We do two of those a year. And then I’m starting to work on another book, too. So in a couple weeks, I’m going to do this hike through southern Utah, it’ll probably take about 45 days. That’ll be part of the book, and so that’ll be a good time to be away from screens for a while.
Anything about the book you want to share, or is it all kind of under wraps for now?
I’m figuring that out! You send a proposal, and then the first conversation I have with my editor, she’s like, Just go do the hike and you’ll figure out what the book is. It’ll kind of be a follow up to The Comfort Crisis, but more focused on mental health and mindset, I think.
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