Hello, friends. It's the way I heard it episode number 319. This one's called Hunger is the best sauce.

Chuck, would you agree? Because I know you're a fan of many sauces and have experimented with many gravies over the years on all forms of pasta.

Do you think hunger could somehow be the best sauce?

Yeah, I believe if you're hungry enough, it doesn't matter what the sauce is. You don't need no sauce at all.

It reminds me of that line from Seven Brides for Seven Brothers. This steak is so good it don't need no ketchup.

Well, this interview is so good that you might just want to skip ahead right now and get into it, although don't.

Because if you do that, you won't know what you're getting into.

I guess this is Michael Easter. He's a terrific writer. Been writing for men's health for a long time and some of the other outdoor magazines.

I met him last week. I met him virtually at an event that Dave Ramsey and I co-hosted called America's Labor Crisis.

And the point of the event was to try and talk candidly about the reasons why we've got nearly seven and a half million able-bodied men sitting out of the workforce

and why it's so difficult to hire these days. He had some ideas to help entrepreneurs and small business people.

And of course, I'm doing the micro works thing. But he invited some other people onto the stage to talk about the underlying issues of this problem.

And one of those guys is Michael Easter who has written a terrific book called The Comfort Crisis.

Let me just read one sentence. This is the one that caught my eye.

In many ways we're more comfortable than ever before. But could our sheltered temperature-controlled overfed under challenged lives actually be the leading cause of many of our most urgent, physical and mental health issues?

I'm going to go with yes.

Hell yeah.

You'll get halfway through the book and realize the answer of course is yes. It's a great read and it works on a couple of different levels.

First it's just a great story about a guy who has never been hunting before, who agrees to get onto a series of increasingly smaller and smaller planes with a modern-day Jeremiah Johnson named Don E. Vincent

and get dropped off in the middle of nowhere, deep in the Arctic Circle, where they spend 33 days hunting for caribou.

What he learns along the way are a series of really personal lessons about his relationship with comfort overall but specifically with silence and with boredom and with nutrition and with exercise and with fitness.

And really it's a big giant parapetia wherein he learns that everything he thought he knew about some of these basic things was wrong.

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