Lessons

Lesson Info

Positive Routine

One of the things that has proven to make people happy is doing things that make them happy and the best way to ensure that that happens every single day is by having a morning ritual so what's yours do you have one? I do people come up to me? They're just like, oh my god, you're running like eighteen businesses, you take fifteen million calls a day, you responding? The emails you're doing all this stuff, how in the world you have time to get all this done, especially when you block of time your calendar to, like, do this morning ritual or whatever and like walk your dog and meditate and write in your journal and all that stuff. How do you have time for that? I'm like because it's not something that distracts from the rest of that I am so productive for the rest of the day because off that morning ritual what that morning ritual does is primes me for the rest of the day to totally kick butt and that's what I want to do every single day. And so I found that you know what? A lot of times...

as I may have explained all record interviews that I do back to back to back to back to back, so sometimes that'll be eight or ten interviews in a row with barely enough time to pee in between and certainly not enough time to eat or anything like that when I found that, you know, on days like that, I'm like cheese. Maybe I don't have time for this this boring ritual, and you know what? Those interviews are not that good? They're not great. I'm off. I'm I'm kind of like on edge because I know that that day I'm presenting myself I'm presenting my calendar because I didn't get to do anything that I actually wanted to do, you know, like doing interviews is something that I love doing ten in a row is pretty brutal if you don't get to do the other things that you know, make you happy. So if you want to kick butt during your day, have a morning ritual, do things that make you happy in the morning, the best way to do that is to schedule it in your calendar, make it a sacred time for you, and it doesn't really matter what makes you happy. I'll tell you what makes me happy and these are things that make most people happy. As it turns out, uh, so I start the day I say pretty much as soon as I wake up sometimes a little bit before I wake up when I'm half awake, I say I love you so alison, and starting the day that way basically you're giving something right away, you're doing something extraordinarily positive it makes her feel good, it makes you feel good too so starting the day with it doesn't even matter if if you say it to a person or a dog or a cat or rodent or nobody in particular saying it helps so I do that and then I I get up drink a huge glass of water that's important helps you detoxify makes sure that you're not super dehydrated, which can happen over night drinking a huge glass of water um I generally work out for like sixty seconds I'll do some push ups or squats or pull ups or kettle bell swings or something just to get the blood flowing because I know that that helps me wake up and then I'll do some quick yoga moves it was nothing you know to complicate or anything like that, just things that kind of work for me that I've learned um and that'll probably take another thirty to sixty seconds just to kind of losing myself up get a little limbert and then I start making my coffee love coffee and as I may have mentioned, I don't tend to eat breakfast that usually don't eat until twelve or three in the afternoon sometimes even later than that what I do have is fatty coffee or something close to bulletproof exact coffee bulletproof coffee which is like I'll have some fish oil is kind of a supplement which is pure fat um or cod liver oil, fermented cod liver oil also have a bit of butter in my coffee or heavy cream or m c t oil or coconut oil or something else that's pure fat so I'm not having any carbs or protein which, if basically been shown to poll attention and energy away from your brain and push it toward digestion as opposed to fat, which is more benign and allows you just to kind of function and burn cleanly without distracting you but giving your brain energy so I start getting that ready as I start preparing the coffee and I do it in a french press and so it takes a few minutes for us to get ready and then I get my totally goofy dog who's here behind me on this living room set her name is bailey and she's an absolute terror she has eaten through my wall she has tord the gutters off my house it's a nightmare but I love her so much and I know that if I don't walk her she's going to probably eat through another wall so I make sure that I go outside, I get some sun and I walk her for about fifteen minutes through the park I get outside that's really important to getting outside where humans we need this getting sun helps you wake up get you some vitamin do you need at least fifteen minutes a day or you need to supplement to make sure that you're getting enough eso tried to do that especially in the morning it helps basically get your body into daytime mode so your quarter saul goes up in the morning that's what wakes you up you want to go down and then you want basically to get on a circadian rhythm that allows the release of melatonin at night and getting some of the morning really helps with that so I always get sun I go outside I walk my dog and that's that's making some something else happy that doesn't really even involve me and it's not like a chore it's not like oh my god I have to walk my dog it's like I'm gonna walk my death this is gonna be awesome I get to relax for you know fifteen minutes and on that walk uh I will sit down in the park usually facing the sun so I'm getting even more raised um the sun isn't bad for you getting sunburned is bad for you get some sun is good for you so I sit down I meditate for about five minutes sometimes ten minutes and that helps me get ready for the day what I imagine is a day going absolutely perfectly what's going to happen and usually what I imagine is friends and family or for someone who I'm interviewing if I know that I'm going to be doing that day laughing, I imagine people being happy and inevitably that happens because your prime ing yourself or you're ready for when you expect it to happen you pretty much subconsciously do all these things that you didn't expect that that make it happen without you even knowing about it and that's pretty cool so I meditate then I walked the dog back and uh generally what I do then is I have a journal and it's a gratitude journal and I laughed at that for a long time I'm like, oh god, a gratitude journal are you kidding me? But I'll tell you what it works. There are so many studies that studies that have pointed to the fact that it works if you want to be happy, then you need to basically train yourself just to recognize the things that make you happy that you're thankful for so it has a couple of parts sometimes I do it a little bit differently, but generally it looks like three things that you're thankful for and write them down don't just think of them because when you write something down you remember you're engaging all these different muscles that's what works that's what that's what really gives it power writing it down you don't even have to go back and look at it but putting it on paper helps so much uh so you do that it takes about two minutes, maybe less than that um I do that in the sun on my front part porch usually my dog next to me sometimes with allison next means well um and then you you can also write if you choose and I usually do things that are affirmations so I am I am confident I am positive I am happy something like that and then if you choose you can put down a couple of things that might make today absolutely excellent. So I am going to crush this creative live presentation people are going to love it. I am going to make sure that I actually start eating right today I'm not going to eat skittles today that could that could be a goal that would big make something excellent about the day, right? And then when you know that your day would be excellent if you did that, then you might just do it. You might not eat that skittles because you promised yourself that you wouldn't. Because you know all of a sudden that skittles represents a bad day instead of being something potentially yummy that you really want because you're bummed out on your board it's something that is a bad day, not something that you actually want anymore, so that helps immensely now there are a few other things I do in my morning ritual a lot of times I'll do nothing for about ten minutes very few people especially busy busy mothers and fathers and people who have, you know, fifteen jobs and responsibilities of the course the day they don't have a free minute at all if you want a free minute, take a free minute, make sure that you have ten minutes a day to do absolutely nothing don't talk to anybody, shut yourself in the bathroom and just stand there hopefully not the bathroom try to go outside, but I think you know what I'm saying it's it's like you need that time if you don't you're going to go crazy and you won't be happy and we all need to be happy so a weekly routine is really important as well. Another thing that I should say is that in my calendar my assistant and even myself I cannot and my assistant cannot schedule anything during my morning ritual every single day it is blocked off for an hour and that is valuable time lots of people want that our desperately because they can on lee do it they can on ly make that call during that hour that's what they say anyway and then turns out that that's not true at all so once he reserved that time if that hour is impossible for people around you, then all of a sudden it's impossible for people around you and it's impossible for yourself to break it because it's something that you just do its part of your identity and everyone understands that another thing that I do and we'll get this in a bit because I do a technology he talks in the morning. I don't let let myself get distracted by waking up and checking my email. The worst thing that you can do when you wake up is look at your email and freak out because that's, what happens when you look at your email? All of a sudden you have honored messages, three hundred messages, even one message from someone who wants something from you who needs something from you and all of a sudden that's pulling you away from exactly what makes you happy, what you need to do in order to make sure that you have a productive day and totally crush it and that's what you want, you want to crush it, because that makes you happy so I don't I don't check my email, I don't take calls, I don't check my text message this really ticked off a lot of my friends at first. Or when we become friends they're just like, oh my god, what doesn't this guy respond? What doesn't carry his phone around because my phone doesn't make me happy my phone makes me bummed out and stressed and if you have push notifications on your email and twitter and everything else that might work ok for you I mean george he does that he's a master of social media he loves being in touch with people very close contact I'm not like that and I know it and I think a lot fewer of us are like that than we think um because every time your phone buzzes in your pocket and I think a lot of us have probably experienced even you're not carrying your phone around I don't have my phone in my pocket right now but you might feel this phantom buzzing you like what the heck is that? I don't even have a phone here that's your brain doing that you have rewired your brain to think that you're constantly having a phone in your pocket that's buzzing alerting you that someone needs something from you and it never feels good when someone needs something from you so for the beginning of the day make sure that you reserve that time that is dedicated to you dedicated to making yourself happy if you can make other people happy at the same time that really helps that's awesome um okay, so the very end of my my morning returns that I come back and I drink my coffee and then I crush it that's that's my goal anyway that I get to work I fill up my day with meaningful work of some kind that might mean you know, writing a piece of my new book I might mean doing interviews and might the playing guitar or or scheduling out a recording that I want to do something like that doesn't really matter whatever your job is felt do it you need a purpose you need something to move you forward because if you don't get bummed out because you're just bored and if you're bored it's your fault it's not it's not the external environment you go ok so my brother lives on on organic farm he lives in this this farmhouse that's hundreds of years old and it has a record player and that's about it that's their entertainment and so you go there and it's just it's crazy like all the rooms are completely dark you get this appreciation for what it used to be like to be human even just a few decades ago right? We're so out of touch the things that we do right now are very bizarre biologically physiologically psychologically it's unprecedented it's very strange and it drives us crazy we're not nearly as happy as we think all of these gadgets would make us so you go there and you know what happens when you don't have a tv and you don't have a bunch of gizmos or anything else you just have a record player you sit around the table playing cards listening to tom waits records and that's cool that's something that hardly anyone does anymore no one's checking email no one's, you know, sitting down at dinner kind of like going like this or running to the bathroom to go like this and play angry birds a buddy of mine is a doctor and his free time what he does what makes him happy is running to the bathroom and sometimes he doesn't come out for three thirty minutes because he's playing angry birds that's his that's his time but I think what what actually makes you happier is not necessarily angry birds and filling up all that time with with, you know, flying birds and pigs or anything like that it's it's all about connecting with yourself, it's all about finding something internally that actually makes you happy when you realize that the things that are outside have nothing to do with the things that are inside that the external influence isn't what actually makes you happy and fulfilled and entertained that's when everything changes you become a source of creation of production instead of just being entertained and and one thing that people who actually change the world one thing that they do they knew themselves as sources off production what they do with their time is read they get information, they digest it, they re calibrated they see what works for them they usually write it down they haven't journal whether you like that or not even if it's blue and cheesy doesn't matter, it works that's what people do who are changing the world anyway and after they do that they produce something they instead of playing a game or reading news or doing whatever else people do when they're standing in line or in the passenger's seat or just have a free moment for whatever reason or another they're creating something they're doing something because they know that their place in this world is to actually contribute to it not just be entertained and annoyed by it. So if you don't want to change the world then keep checking the news and keep playing little games if you think that they make you happy but for most people that's not what actually makes them happy what makes them happy is being happy what makes you happy and what makes you be happy is doing things and creating things and contributing, contributing to the world everybody wants to change the world even if they say they don't and they're totally bummed out and whatever they actually do we all want to do meaningful work look, we all want to matter and mattering won't just happen you need to make yourself matter so do things like that part of that is having a routine one part of my weekly routine is I make sure that I scheduled days for work that I really want to do, and so I could be distracted. I could have negative meetings every single day, all day, but that's not what actually allows me to contribute to the world and I want to change the world that's the whole reason that I do this, I think the world is going wrong. I think there are two types of people the people who are getting better and the people who were getting worse and I want to make this one bigger. I want to help the world get better and so I know I won't help the world get better if I'm doing meetings all the time, even if people want to have meetings all the time. So I dedicate days of my week to sit in a coffee shop or to stand on my desk or to go outside and create something that's going to change the world. That's what I do with my time, that's what you should try to do with yours if you have a job that you don't believe in, that you don't think is helping anything it's your job. That's the job that whether you like it or not you chose and it's not just the environment around you that kind of like it happened you have this job and you know you need it forever of course you need a job we need to make money sometimes, but if you actually want to change the world, do something that makes you happy that you actually believe in that you're passionate about and then you can actually change the world instead of just like being tied into this job and having this this mortgage in this car that you know needs to be repaired but you have to much debt to do it. So you need to keep this job that you hate that's what we're all kind of doing and that's what having no routine almost guarantees so it's part of bi weekly routine, I also know that I need to exercise I need to train so about once a week I will do some sort of heavy lifting and we'll get to that in a later segment I'll do a compound full body exercises l d dead lifts I'll do squats, bench press overhead press burpees pull ups things like that about twice a week I do something called krav maga, which is a style of self defense that basically involves kicking people in nuts and it's a style that that I kind of enjoy because it's it's, where the rubber meets the road. It's supposed to be very easy to learn. It's based off of instinct instinct, it's the the defenses are counter attacks, it's a really interesting thing. We'll get to that in a little bit. But it's something that I realized I kind of need to keep myself entertained to keep myself learning, which is really important to keep myself interested. S o I do that about two times a week, philip. My week with meaningful work and make sure that I do things that that I have to do. I do have to have meetings, so I schedule off usually one day a week, at least to just fill it up with meetings. So when you have your weekly routine, when you find the things that make you happy another thing that's, that's really important for detoxification, as well as relax ation, um, is some sort of bodywork, and that could be yoga that and you don't. I mean, this might sound elitist or expensive, or something like that. It doesn't have to be. I mean, you can go outside, you can. There is this magical thing called the internet, where you can find almost anything for free you can learn how to do yoga, you can learn how to do krav maga you can learn how to do anything for almost three or the price of you know, twenty two dollars a month or whatever internet costs or just go to a library or coffee shop and learn it and then it costs a dollar fifty right for a cup of coffee you can learn this stuff um so I make sure that every couple of weeks and I was bad about this for a while and allison had to do it for me but I uh make sure that I schedule a time for a massage and what that does is especially if you're lifting heavy and you're doing probably gotten in the crap beat out the most the times really important if you want health over the course of your life to maintain symmetry in the way that you move to make sure that things that are totally locked up like my shoulder right now are fixed so that you're not hobbling around for the rest of life it also helps you detoxify because a lot of this junk from exercising and toxins and the rest of it can build up in your system and getting a deep tissue massage can help alleviate that someone so instead of just like, you know, hoping that a massage might happen during my free time which I think everyone kind of accepts and acknowledges that they don't have any free time as george would say ain't nobody got time for that way all do we all have exactly the same amount of time and if you just wait for your free time to happen and then hope that you fill it up with things that you want to do, it won't. So I make sure that I have a massage scheduled into my counter usually like once a month, maybe every every two weeks if I'm really jacked up or something like that or fireman in thailand probably every day, but make sure if you want something in your weekly routine, if you know that it makes you happy, then put it in your weekly routine put it in your calendar and then it will happen instead of just waiting for something to happen that you hope happens it will actually happen because you have an appointment with yourself and you don't want to break that now will power is almost useless. I think we all can relate to that when you have ah bag of oreos in the covered when you have been in jerry's in the fridge when you say that you're going to exercise that may or tomorrow, you know that will power is something that's pretty much useless is not really gonna happen we think that you know, oh yeah, I'm I'm ironclad I can I can make this happen I can force myself into doing this but the thing is if you if you do that with one thing over the course of the day usually willpower tires you khun do that you could make a few decisions with absolute certainty and absolute power over the course of the day but each decision that you make makes the less one less the next one less powerful makes it harder to do it with enthusiasm and confidence so design will power out of your life there a few ways that you can do that now I uh uh someone who's become a friend of mine very cool guy named michael fishman on my show he's not someone who is really a major player in the consumer health movement or anything like that like he doesn't have his own show or ah diet book or anything like that but I head him on the show because he's an interesting personality and he's someone who has struggled with sugar addiction for his his whole life pretty much and had habits that didn't work well for him he was drinking alcohol, eating sugar, eating other things that didn't agree with him and he has been sugar free for over a year when he came on the show is just coming up on that and he still is as far as I know and if you're not michael come on but one of the things that we discussed on the show is that there is a monumental difference between saying that I can't and I don't and george and I touched on this a little bit yesterday. A lot of people say, well, this this diet is way too restrictive, I could never do that because I love oreos or I need my weekly toast or my morning toast or orange juice or whatever and saying that you can't have toast were saying that you can't have orange juice because it makes you fat is taking disempowering yourself, that's what you're doing, you're saying I can't do it because this diet or like this guy who was on creative life says that I can't. So I need to listen to what he says you don't have to listen to what I say, you need to listen to yourself, you need to listen to what what is out there, digested yourself and basically put it in your bag of tricks, see what makes sense to you try it on yourself, see how you feel, and then instead of saying, oh, I can't do this because I'm following the cabbage soup dot catholics seek that, which is the most preposterous that on the face of this earth, um, all of a sudden you're not saying I can't do this, you're saying I don't do this because I'm paleo or because I'm committed to having a great body and a great life or because I'm committed because I know that that makes me feel like crap when people say, why are you eating the chips? I'm just like because that's going to make me feel like crap and I need to do something later today because it's in my calendar and so I'm not going to eat the chips, I don't even want the chips, they don't look like food because it's something that I don't do, this is a part of my identity. The cool thing about that is it at the very beginning, you know, I was this the strategy consulting professional musician and, uh, I basically found that I turned my health around, I learned all this stuff, and while I was doing that, my friends were not, um I was I was paleo before I even knew what paleo was before it was an enormous community like it is now before it was cool, certainly I was doing all this bizarre stuff, and my friends were making fun of me and that's what happens when you start to change when you start to do things that are different? People are threatened by that because it's weird and it implicitly says it implies that they're wrong, that they're doing something wrong, because if though those people touch those chips than all of a sudden they think that you're judging them because they're wrong and it doesn't have to be like that, so one of the cool things that happened with me personally is, you know, I wrote my book the wild diet, which is basically just like a manifesto of everything that I think that people should know about this sort of thing because it's not hard to be healthy and lean and happy it's it's easy, it really is, but making changes hard, so I started doing this and I started not eating the chips and we'd go out and I drink less beer at first um and the chicken wings that were that were at porker night or whatever I wouldn't touch you might have something else or I philip first name just like, oh, how's, your diet gone and I think we can all kind of relate to that, um after a couple of months and they saw that I went from being moon shaped and of fatten and just kind of like sickly looking and pale like the rest of them and turned into basically what I look like now, which is someone who's who looks young and healthy and it's full of energy after a couple of months they're just like, so what was that guy you're doing? Like what exactly did you do that kind of I I want to try this I didn't eat chips yesterday it is that is that right? Is that thing on then all of a sudden the people we were riding the hardest at the beginning start rallying around you and copying what you're doing because it works and then you have this group of people around you who are like oh my god is the best thing ever and they all of a sudden find themselves at the table with some of their friends and they're not leaving the chips and they're like well how's the diet going and that's fascinating so what happens at the beginning is it's hard? You need that mo mentum to say it's not just something I can't do with something I don't do because this is may it needs to be a part of your identity the reason that michael fishman doesn't eat sugar right now is because that's a part of his identity and so now when I go out to eat especially if people know who I am and what I do, they're not just like hey, why aren't you eating the chips? I'm not someone who eats the chips and they know that and so it's not threatening it's just like this totally cool thing like when you go out with someone who you know has struggled with alcoholism or they don't drink for religious reasons or some other reason it's like you're not going to showing the beer on their face because that's not who they are and that threatens who they are and that's that's a bummer you don't want to do that, and so if you make this, if you make being a healthy person, a part of your identity, then people will stop questioning you most of the time. There's, no question, you will still try to ride you sometimes, but most of the time, they'll just kind of let you be, and they might ask you what you're doing and why it works so well, and you might even change their life, but you can't change it for them. They have to do that themselves. So this is me with a delicious cheesecake that alison made, and one of the best ways to make sure that you don't rely on willpower is to actually design bad decisions out of your life. So if you know that there's, ben and jerry's and freezer, your brain knows it and that's bad, because the part of the brain that you actually know and understand is a small percentage of the the piece of your brain that the whole brain that is actually functioning and determining most of your behavior, you think that you're in control, you're not your subconscious monkey brain is in control, as dave asprey says, you're labrador brain controls more than you think. Your limbic brain your reptilian brain these were the ones that actually make the decisions for you you just think that you're making the decisions you're not so if you could make the decision to finally after a warning it all day not going get that ben and jerry's from the freezer that's great, but as soon as you get a bad phone call and you're like, oh my god, mom really again and you're bummed out because of whatever it was like oh, I'm gonna have some penan cherries and then you eat it and then you feel even worse but if there's no ben and jerry's in the fridge then like it's not talking at you all day and you get that bad coal from someone your bosses is saying that you did a horrible job on that power point sedation or whatever and you have to do it again you have to come in on sunday there's no ben and jerry's you're not about to run to the store and get ben and jerry's mostly timeless you're really bummed out, but don't do that make it inconvenient for you to make bad decisions make it almost impossible so what we have in the fridge is good stuff if you have like like a kink or something that's directly in your field of vision that's bad for you, you're going to eat it I don't care what it is. I don't care what your goals are. I don't care how much will power you have. You are going to eat that because it's there and you know that it's there, and more importantly than that, your subconscious mind knows that it's there and it's almost going to reach out for you and make sure that you stuff it down your gullet don't let that happen designed bad decisions out of your life. So on another example of that, my girlfriend alison, is a former professional gamer, which means that we had all sorts of games around the house and she could with anyone's, but at halo still totally cool and it's kind of fun to like, you know, unwind. I'm not a someone who fears technology or anything like that. I don't want to say that that you have to either, but as a way to unwind, it was something that we found were doing a little bit too much. I don't know four times a week we'd play call of duty and blow things up kind of fun, but we found that it wasn't really helping us meet our goals. So I did one thing I went out into my shed in the backyard and I got an old box that may or may not have that may or may not have come with scotch in it as it turns out and I brought it inside to the back room where the tv wasn't the time and instead of having all the controllers out that the xbox controller and then the tv controller right next to it I put those things in the box, I put the remote controls in the box and then I put him right below the tv and then what happened instead of sitting down on the couch and just kind of like my guess was going to play call of duty whatever that that sounds fun, you know need to unwind I did not play more than one to two times in the next six months went from going four times a week to couple times the four times a year just by moving the controllers underneath the tv and then what happened after that is I'm just like, you know what? This is a beautiful room might my back living room where I do the show if you watch the show behind me, you know there are guitars and lots of windows in a couple of couches instead of having this enormous tv there, we replaced it with a picture of the ocean and move the tv to the other side of the house. Even so, actually move the master bedroom into a smaller bedroom, which was more like a cave, and we'll learn why that's important later, but having a huge, monstrous bedroom doesn't actually make you sleep any better. Well, makes you sleep better is basically living like and sleeping like a cave man. So moved the tv and all that technology into that room so that the back room now the living room doesn't have a tv and it has guitars and it has a picture of the ocean, and it has my computer where I pretty much on lee do interviews and, you know, has a camera set up in that sort of thing, and I don't really do much else on that computer except for playing music, which is something that I know that I love, so I've designed the bad decisions out of that room, so if you if you walk into a room and you see a tv there in your board or you think that you're bored, you think you have three minute, you're gonna watch tv, but if that tv's not there, you're going to put on your record player and listen to tom waits and play cards and that's a better decision for you, for most of us anyway. Now you can also design good decisions in your life. I was just talking about my computer in the back room where I do a lot of my interviews on this is it right here and you might not notice what this is that's a little bizarre it's like this black box actually, what that is so there's this desk that I have this enormous desk that even for a long time and then this right here that this keyboard is on and this here the imac is on those air speakers from my back shed so that I could make my own standing desk because I found doing eight to ten interviews in a row where you can't move because it would make a sound of the russian rustling of your shirt or something like that is absolutely excruciating and one of the worst things you could ever do for your body is sit all day. Well, you want to do a stand you want to move were built to move because it makes you happy makes you think better aa lot of the greatest thinkers who are out there walked around and that's how they got their ideas so I try to do that as well, and when I'm doing my interviews, I'm standing up all day instead of sitting all day I mean, you know how bad it feels to sit all day sorry about that guys um feels awful but if you're standing most of the day then when you sit down it's like oh this is awesome I deserve this um so having a standing desk like the period of time that you're burning fat as we learn is not when you're exercising it's when you're not exercising you know if you if you exercise a few minutes a day it's not those few minutes when you're burning fat you know burning off in turkey you are burning fat when you're not doing those things that's that's the rial hack to burn fat all the time instead of a few minutes on the treadmill or a few hours on the treadmill is some people are or want to do so designed good decisions into your life if you can have a standing desk or something that allows you to stand or walk around or take a walk or do some work like do a walking meeting you'll find that you get a lot more done because you feel better you're thinking better your blood is flowing your brain is oxygenated if you can do that then you're going to be more productive you're going to be happier as well this is an extraordinary example of what can happen when you change your environment and when you change your goals this is a crappy iphone picture off my parents when they lived down south for a few years befriended a bunch of their landlord actually landlords, I should say where musicians, great musicians and wonderful people like, you know, you guys should should really get into it, and they saw, you know, that I became musician, my dad, you know, played guitar in college, like everyone else didn't played trombone in high school and that sort of thing, but they were never really into music. Uh, but they decided that that's something that they wanted to do, so they just kind of had all these instruments, and this is what this is about. The living room looked like and that's, not even all of them. I mean, they're a heck of a lot more instruments than that. And the interesting thing here is that they didn't even really play music. They just wanted tio, so they had all these instruments lying around skip ahead a few years, and now my dad teaches banjo and that every family function that we have, they are the band, and they invite me to come play with them, and they're playing songs with my ninety year old grandmother, and they're all singing my mom's on this enormous standup bass. My dad is rocking out on the banjo or guitar, and they're all singing, and they're not musicians, except that they are because they they made themselves musicians, because instead of having ben and jerry's and pie and tvs and all that other nonsense that people think will make them happy they had a bunch of instruments just lying around their house and no it's not like perfect funk shway but it works so because I want to play mortgage tar because I know it's something that's really important to me I don't keep my guitar in a case in the closet I keep it right out in the living room so that I can see it in your some people probably well yeah but you don't want to leave that out that looks ugly no one doesn't like guitars are cool I don't have space for it a lot of people might say well how do you have space for a seventy inch flat screen and not have space for a banjo so any excuse that you have is pretty much irrelevant you're creating that excuse for yourself so trying to do that another thing is really important is to accept and realize that we are from a diff and world then this I grew up as I said in the middle of nowhere in a town of like less than a thousand people during the offseason anyway it's kind of a touristy area where a bunch of people from massachusetts come visit uh and this is what it looks like behind my parent's house in new hampshire where I grew up and every time I go there it's like you don't get cell service anyway, so I'm pretty much unreachable, and every time I go there, I feel better. I feel alive and the world is different were not built for this. We're not built for airports and office buildings. Ah, and cities and all that we need to accept this is this is something that makes us feel better how many people go camping or go to the beach or go somewhere outside and feel worse, not many of us unless you're complaining, as you know, an eleven year old like I used to do because you're home body or something like that. You you need this, everybody does because this is something that's been a part of human existence for almost the entirety of human existence and the thing that we think is normal now these these cityscapes not being able to see the horizon, not knowing what a tree is, this isn't something that we're used to, so going for a little detox and some nature time is something that is proven to make you happy detoxing from technology is absolutely important. I encourage everyone to do it pretty much as much as possible. There are ways, and we'll go over some of those that you can fight fire with fire, you can use technology. To basically counter act the effects of technology we're going to talk about that with dave asprey one of the things that I do is I have a grounding man I have blue blocking glasses that make me look supercool maybe I'll bring him on in a later segment and there's certain things like that there were hacks where you can basically say all right, I'm going to still use technology but I'm gonna cheat by like using these blue blocking glasses so they're not as bad for me as technology usually is you can do that but it's better just to detox every once in a while and I mean technologies magic it's amazing I'm talking to I don't know tens of thousands hundreds of thousands of people right now through the magic that is the interwebs and everything else but I think the thing that makes me absolutely saying is being able to get away from that every once in a while and just kind of take it easy so I encourage everyone to do that especially for young kids because those air developing brains and developing brains need to be treated with absolute care ground yourself grounding is something that sounds totally whoa but it works like I said before when you go barefoot on the beach or when you go camping you feel better you feel balanced you go to sleep when the sun goes down you go sleep it like instead of staying up until two thirty three o'clock in the morning drinking beer and all that stuff you all of a sudden you're sitting around a campfire and you're like a hobo close so tired it must be like tomorrow midnight or some you look at your watch it's eight fifteen because that's what your body is it is designed to dio this artificial lighting it was bad for us that kind of like tweaks us out I remember a few months ago this always happens in new hampshire never happens in austin. It was probably around ten o'clock at night and we were in the back room uh with some of the lights on and all of a sudden we heard this and everything went black the power went out and it's a couple seconds really? Really? The power just went out and then we're like holy smokes I feel really good right now this is awesome! Like having no lights around we looked outside all the lights were off it was beautiful you could see the stars you could see the moon this is what we need. This is what makes us happy and grounding is something that is actually scientifically proven to make you feel better there are grounding matt it's all cover some of the science of that with with dave asprey who's coming on this afternoon but all you really need to know is that if you want to cure jet lag or if you're around technology a lot of the time you khun dramatically reduce your stress you can sleep better you khun improve your recovery time if you are performance athlete just by going outside for about thirty minutes a day taking off your shoes and having direct contact with the dirt we don't even know why this works we just know that it does work at least thirty minutes a day especially if you've been flying on a plane or involved with a lot of technology absolutely helps you there are also grounding mats that are fairly inexpensive I have one in my hotel room it helps me sleep we went from sleeping basically I don't know six hours a night I'm a really light sleeper to uh you know, six to seven, but I would wake up a lot in the morning when we brought in the grounding that toe toe our bed I think was like seventy bucks or something like that we went from sleeping like sixty seven hours toe like nine I think was even ten for the first two days and was like, I haven't done that since I stayed up till six am in college or whatever and slept for the rest of the day it was something that was absolutely shocking but grounding absolutely works it's an awesome hack harnessing the power of visualization is something that is proven toe work, so the human nervous system actually cannot tell the difference between an actual experience and an experience imagine vividly in detail, so visualize if if one of the things that I do if I know that I'm going to be doing a particularly difficult workout um, if I'm doing a crop mugabe belt level tests, which is seven hours in a row where they try to break you the whole time, literally I imagined myself at the end of that sweating and elated because I just crushed it. So if you we are doing a robot a session or something like that or a quick but very diff pickled extra size set session and you're not that psyched about, you know, doing it right now, he was like doing that first sprint you're like, oh my god, this is going to be terrible, I imagine yourself crushing it and just having finished with your blood pumping with, you know, muscles going on, you know, like feeling awesome, and when you do that that's going to be your goal instead of dreading the process, you're going to be trying to reach that goal and then you will scare yourself, make yourself uncomfortable this is basically like bobsledding face first we're at whistler, I was with some friends of mine and they're just like it was a surprise they're like we're going to go skeleton racing I'm like what is that? Is that what I think it is? And yes it's just like catapulting yourself head first on this tiny little piece of metal's that's a sled down a bobsled course as fast as you possibly can and by the way don't hit your your shelters on the sides as you go down it's not pleasant when you scare yourself you push your reality to the next level and that's something that's really important if you want to be happier if you want to produce more if you want to do more with your life you need to make yourself uncomfortable we were just in thailand and we ate bugs it was one of our goals it's weird something that you know humans have been doing pretty much forever it's it's also something that in the u s is absolutely disgusting almost is disgusting is eating a kidney or a heart or eyeballs or chicken feet or something else like that? Book bugs are actually, you know, relatively nutritious that makes sense that they would be a food sources they're not that different than a land born shrimp or something like that at the same time I don't want to be picking legs out of my teeth again for the next thirty minutes after I finished them but at least I tried it and I know that that's not something that I really want to seek out again, so doing things weird things like eating bugs, that's, what makes you happy? You know, you don't remember those times where, instead of going out and doing something fun with your friends are doing something adventurous going cliff diving or sky diving or something like that. You don't remember those nights where you, you just decided to stay in your bathrobe and watch malcolm in the middle like you remember those those times when you had your first kiss, you remember the times when you ate your first bug the times when you pushed yourself to your ultimate limit and then push a little bit more and realized that you could doom or than you think is possible? Those of the things that you remember and what's interesting about that is that the more you dread, something more afraid of it, you are oftentimes the more salient it is in your memory, in them, or it affects you in an extraordinarily positive way. So if you want to die without regrets, you need to make yourself uncomfortable habitually, we're coming up on time, so I don't want to spend too much time on this but there's a great block post that I wrote about this that was really popular about my krav maga belt test which is basically where they try to break you and break you but you have to keep going if you want to pass and that's pretty much all you have to do two passes is get beat up and keep going um and a lot of people are just like, oh my god like that sounds miserable I was all tourney up um I couldn't move for like three days I was an old man and a lot of people are just like I would never do that that sounds totally crazy and it sounds impossible on it sounds dangerous and all this other stuff, but what I did during during that test was basically I visualize the end of it I made sure that I was properly fueled I did not fast that day a plenty of sweet potatoes and they were absolutely delicious. I also had lots of butter and m c t s even some anthracite tam, which we'll get to later but I refrained it. I'm just like if george my dear friend george from yesterday can go to war and basically run two helicopters with his legs exploding at the time running away from gunfire after like an eighteen hour shift or whatever it was of being weak been saying that I can't do a seven hour level one belt test for krav maga is an absolute joke, so reframe it if you find something that seems impossible, just like find an example of someone preferably someone you know, who's done something way more ridiculous way more difficult, way more dangerous. Yeah, it was like people were trying to beat me up, but they weren't trying to shoot me in the face. That's a big difference. So when you find something like that that that you know you really want to do, but you're afraid of doing it, or you think that you might not be able to get through, find an example of when someone did this is something that he's very important if you want to live this way because right now they're the people who are getting better and the people who are getting worse and if you join the people who are getting better and most people are getting worse, you're going to catch a lot of flack, a lot of flack and that's, okay, as long as you're strong songs it's part of your identity so I love this quote it's, this is from steve jobs it's more fun to be a pirate that had joined the navy and that's how I live my life and that's how if you want to live this way, you can live yours and I can almost guarantee that it will make you happier. If you do that, if you make that choice, if you're the person who makes that crazy choice, that just might be right. And that could make you happy.