When was the last time you did something you'd never done before?

In this episode, Jonathan digs into what writer Christine Rosen calls the extinction of experience, the slow disappearance of direct, firsthand experience from modern life, and why it hits men in midlife the hardest. He tells the story of Theodore Roosevelt choosing an uncharted Amazon river over retirement at 55, Ranulph Fiennes summiting Everest at 65, and a middle-aged doctor who picked up a kayak paddle in his 40s and changed the sport forever.

Jonathan also shares his own experience at the Boulder Outdoor Survival School in southern Utah, where making fire without matches and catching a trout with his bare hands taught him that the gear he thought he needed was actually the thing standing between him and the experience he was looking for.

This episode lands with a practical challenge: before Labor Day, do one thing you've never done, go one place you've never been, and have one experience you can't research your way through in advance.

If this episode makes you want to move, share it with a man who's been sitting still too long. You know who he is.

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Against the Fade — For Men Who Refuse to Fade in Midlife

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A Second Summit Podcast.