Barbell Shrugged - Bro Book Club: Your Top 10 Reads for 2019 w/ Doug & Anders  — Barbell Shrugged #369

Episode Date: January 9, 2019

This is a special episode, where Doug Larson (@douglaselarson) and Anders Varner (@andersvarner) talk about the best books on business, why communication is a skill you should constantly be developing, how mindset training is a skill that plays into all of life’s skills, why learning meditation will make you better at everything, and much more.   Enjoy! - Doug and Anders ----------------------------------------------------------------------- Show notes at: http://www.shruggedcollective.com/bbs-brobookclub ----------------------------------------------------------------------- Please support our partners! @drivennutrition: https://drivennutrition.net/shrugged/ to save 20%@bioptimizers: www.BiOptimizers.com/shrugged  “shrugged” to save 37% @organifi - www.organifi.com/shrugged to save 20% ► Subscribe to Barbell Shrugged's Channel Here ► Subscribe to Shrugged Collective's Channel Here http://bit.ly/BarbellShruggedSubscribe 📲 🎧 Listen to the audio version on the Apple Podcast App or Stitcher for Android Here- http://bit.ly/BarbellShruggedApple http://bit.ly/BarbellShruggedStitcher Shrugged Collective is a network of fitness, health and performance shows that help people achieve their physical and mental health goals.  Usually in the gym, but outside as well. In 2012 they posted their first Barbell Shrugged podcast and have been putting out weekly free videos and podcasts ever since. Along the way we've created successful online coaching programs including The Shrugged Strength Challenge, The Muscle Gain Challenge, FLIGHT, Barbell Shredded, and Barbell Bikini. We're also dedicated to helping affiliate gym owners grow their businesses and better serve their members by providing owners tools and resources like the Barbell Business Podcast. Find Shrugged Collective and their flagship show Barbell Shrugged here: SUBSCRIBE ON ITUNES ► http://bit.ly/ShruggedCollectiveiTunes WEBSITE ► https://www.ShruggedCollective.com INSTAGRAM ► https://instagram.com/shruggedcollective FACEBOOK ► https://facebook.com/barbellshruggedpodcast TWITTER ► http://twitter.com/barbellshrugged

Shrug family, I've got to come clean to you. I'm getting old. I have a partially torn bicep tendon right now. It's killer. It sucks. I haven't been able to put my arm over my head in like five days. This just goes to show, you've got to warm up better. Seven weeks ago, Ashley Van Houten, the muscle maven, she put up a workout. 10 to 1 burpees and dumbbell thrusters. Thought it looked simple enough. I didn't have much time to work out,

so I rolled into the gym, made it happen. Burpee number one, felt a little tweak in my shoulder. Imagine that, 195 pounds coming crashing down with gravity plus deceleration on cold shoulders, and then all of a sudden I got 55 thrusters to do on top of 55 burpees you can see how this problem happens seven weeks later after carrying my baby around in my left arm all night doing all the things stress life walked into a 24-hour fitness hopped on one of their incline bench machines that was not designed for

my body, and snap. It was not pretty. It's been really painful. It has not been fun, but we're here. It's Wednesday, and I have a massive, massively exciting news for you today. We're doing a bro book club. Doug and I have wanted to do bro book club for so long. We wanted to do bro book club because every single time we mention a book on any show, whether we're talking about books or we just reference a book, everybody always hits me up. Hey, what was that book? Whether it was principles talking about with Ben Bergeron, Jordan Peterson, 12 rules for life. Doug loves that book. He loves Jordan Peterson, 12 Rules for Life. Doug loves that book.

He loves Jordan Peterson. He's listened to everything that guy has ever done on YouTube. But we dedicated an entire two hours to Bro Book Club. Trust me, if you guys love this show, we're going to do a lot more Bro Book Clubs because we read a lot. We listen to a lot of books and we're always learning. So you want more Bro Book Clubs? I need you to take a screenshot.

I need you to tag me at Anders Varner. I need you to use the hashtag GoLong, just like we do every week. Hit me up, send me a note, tell me what your top five books are of 2018. And here it is, the very first ever Bro Book Club. Welcome to barbell shrugged. I'm Anders Warner Doug Larson We're hanging out in the garage, and we've got a huge day today because we're gonna do Hopefully, what is the first of many because we talked about this idea all the time? Bro book club we're gonna walk through My top five books that you need to be reading Doug's walking through his top five books that you need to be reading doug's walking through his top

five books that you need to be reading well let's back up so these are my top my personal favorite books from 2018 all-time favorites we'll save that for another show i went all-time because i didn't read a full five this year you didn't read five books this year uh or wait wait we're talking reading or audiobooks do they count uh reading i think i read three big ones yeah um i think i did two or three audiobooks if i had just given my top five of 2018 it wouldn't have been it would have just been the five um i only read one of my five that's on my list. I actually, the books that I put out, I have a hard time just not recommending those specific ones to everyone. I feel like they're just like the most basic educational things that everyone needs to have in their repertoire. Like I think it's just like the essential list of like if you could just do these five yeah and if you just really paid attention to these ones everything else you could figure out

like what are you what are you looking for when you actually sit down you listen to a lot of books you listen to like a book a week i listen to a lot of books yeah if i if i'm listening to audiobooks because i listen to to podcasts youtube videos and lectures and all kinds of stuff. I have apps that I have talks on and a million other things. But I also have hundreds of audiobooks. And so when I'm listening to audiobooks, I make it through at least one or two a week. Yeah. That's a lot.

Yeah. I mean, I listen for hours every day between driving and making food and training. And if I'm not training with somebody, I'll listen to something. There's hours in a day that you can easily get some education in anybody can yeah every time i call you you're youtubing something mainly jordan peterson which we have got to talk about this guy because you read his book last year yeah actually he wasn't on my on my list easily could have been but uh but yeah i listened to a lot of jordan peterson stuff there there for a while not not quite as much lately but i i do that with lots of people like i i find one

person and then i just get on youtube and i just listen to everything that's on there yeah that i can find of that one person and then then usually inevitably i'll i'll end up while in the process of listening to everything i can on that one person I'll find a new person that interviewed them or that they were connected somehow and then I'll transition once I start to feel like I'm hearing the same thing time and again that's really where I'm at with Jordan Peterson

right now like he's been on Rogan probably like six times now and it's not shtick because one of the coolest things because me and you sat down last year and we went through, we like went to his lectures page. Thinking we'd be able to go watch like one of his lectures to find out that each lecture is three hours long and he posts an entire semester of them. And then I just got lost. You went through a bunch of them though right yeah i didn't listen to every single one of them but but i listened to shy of a full

semester of at least one or two of his courses his personality course he's a personality yeah sorry he's a personality psychologist that that teaches at the university of toronto so he just puts all of his college lectures up online for free and they're totally awesome yeah i in listening to him on rogan enough times i've really like for the first time i didn't listen to the full show that he did with rogan because i heard too many of the same examples and stories and i was like oh i've i've gotten i've gotten there i know what he's going to talk about now right um the thing that i really like about jordan peterson the guy is fighting the world every single day of his life like he's so frustrated and wants so badly for everyone to

understand why his point makes so much sense and it it just you can it just to his core he wants these like people that think he's a bigot and a racist and all he's like no no no no you don't know that's not what i'm saying please please don't do this to me like i'm not a racist and then you can just watch him in pain that's a fucking losing battle anytime you say i'm not a racist like you've already lost i don't know if he's ever actually said that but he's like whatever yeah but like whatever it is like he's always so pained because he's in these interviews and he's intellectually so much smarter than whoever's interviewing him yeah it's kind and you're just like you could just see him like no how much

further can i dumb this point down for you for you to and they don't care they're not listening but he's it's the most painful thing to watch him try to get around these interviews without just killing somebody right and then one thing that was super interesting on the last time he's on rogan he was talking about those and he was like i started to not like myself or there was something there because he started to get frustrated and he was like i didn't like that about myself it's like i didn't like that i got frustrated i was like dude you have hundreds of thousands of hours of talking to these donkeys that will never under they don't want to know your point right they're there for the clickbait like they don't want to they don't want to listen to

you right and you are just so patiently i actually made my mother-in-law listen to one of the rogans on a three hour long road trip that could go either way yeah well that's awesome or she'd be like who is this fucking guy he's your role model huh you like this person so we by the way this is not going to be a fitness show for the most part we'll talk a little bit about fitness and this is a grab back grab back episode where we're talking about just fucking anything whatever's coming out yeah if if you clicked on this show titled bro book club and you thought it was fitness sorry it'll be a little bit of fitness like i got some i got some fitnessy things to say here down the line once we once we get off this unexpected rant about Jordan Peterson.

So I'm listening. So I set my phone up. Like first and foremost, I was a phenomenal guest. And as soon as I got in her car, I Bluetoothed my phone and disconnected hers. Took over control of the car. But I was like, have you ever listened to a podcast? Because I really wanted to listen to a podcast and introduce her to what we do. And she has listened to shows, but I'm like, there's a lot of people that talk about really cool things.

This is a great way to get a really good education in things that you're just interested in. And it's on demand, blah, blah, blah. And she's like, no no i don't really know who jordan peterson is or joe rogan i was like okay joe rogan is bigger than all of the news sources like he dominates everything you see on tv that you think is important joe rogan's actually really important and she could not believe that somebody on podcast was bigger than like Fox News or CNN. I was like, oh, no, no, no, no. Joe Rogan, high in his little shed up in LA is totally way more important.

He's smashing it. Yeah. So I just wanted her to listen to like a really, like I'm into it. Maybe this is a moment when i can have a cool thing even though it's probably far-fetched that i'm gonna be able to like have a we're gonna listen to jordan peterson and see if we can intellectually discuss what is going on in the world right so we put it on and she she definitely thought it was interesting but the thing that she kept coming back to was every time he goes to like make one of his big points he always it rogan's like really good at throwing up like a softball question that

has like like on its surface it should be a very simple answer but because it's Jordan Peterson and because Rogan's doing like tossing a softball up on purpose, every time he goes to answer, he's like, well, it's just such a complex question. And she looked at me like an hour and he probably said this like five times in the first hour because he just went off on something. And she's like, have you noticed that it's always like a very complex question i'm like that's what he does he sits around and he thinks about things he's literally an intellectual he just sits around and thinks but she dug it i did we didn't really have like the huge she was like by the end of it she was like that was that was nice and um I'm ready to get back to my life now. Thank you for taking over the stereo. Thank you for letting me stay at your house over Thanksgiving.

You crushed it. Could have gone worse. Yeah. Depending on what came out of Jordan Peterson's mouth, I'd imagine his audience is not like, who? That was your mom? Mother-in-law. Your mother-in-law your mother-in-law yeah i'd imagine um you know we'll say 50 year old women is not his audience at all yeah it's like young dudes mostly uh 30s men in their 30s are you still on jordan jordan peterson is he still

your dude that you're listening to all the time? No, not so much. I've been listening to mostly books lately. I kind of got off the Jordan Peterson kick. Actually, as far as YouTube goes, I've been watching mostly jiu-jitsu videos lately. Nice. I'm really enjoying that. I go through cycles of how much jiu-jitsu I'm trying to learn outside of class.

Yeah. I've really been enjoying learning more jiu-jitsu lately. Big purple belt now. Yeah, I got my purple belt. Killer! I'm happy about that. Dude, those welts purple belt now. Yeah, I got my purple belt. Killer! I'm happy about that. Dude, those welts were no joke. Yeah, I walk in the gauntlet.

Google this if you don't know what I'm talking about. I walk in the gauntlet at belt promotions for jiu-jitsu. I got the back of my thighs, like right behind my knee, like lower hamstring, like completely black and blue and purple. It's on my Instagram if you want to go see it. But I got whipped pretty hard a couple times because there's like 80 people there yeah they fold their belt in half and they whip you as hard as they can and there's like 80 people like i said i had to walk six lengths so i got whipped a couple hundred times and the the back of my leg like

i i reached down and felt the back of my leg and like it was like it it was completely swollen and lumpy it was like it was like fuck man the back of my legs completely destroyed that's it was like i got how how long were you um like what whatever it is to get your purple belt in between belts what's below purple well it there's not very many belts in jujitsu goes white blue purple brown black um but i wrestled and then did no gi for a long time um and so i had i had a lot of experience before i really started training in the gi so i really have only trained gi specific jujitsu for about four years yeah i really was only going actually there's not there's not like

an estimate this is actual real numbers i only went about one and a half times a week on average for most of that time and then this past year i went i went even less than that so i wasn't just not training that much like i used to train four or five or six days a week back when i was fighting and in mma and all that but uh lately you know since since i've had i have three kids under four years old right now like once i had three kids and and you know a couple of companies and all that but i have not trained jujitsu as consistently as i uh as i would prefer to but uh so i've really only been doing gi jujitsu for about four years uh but i was i was given a blue belt back when i was fighting mma just because um you know i certainly had as much

enough experience with with no gi jujitsu to be to be qualified as a blue belt even even um not really training with the gi very much but but as far as like gi jiu-jitsu goes i feel very comfortable as a purple belt even though i was i was told by my now current jiu-jitsu coach again because i moved back to memphis and i trained with the same guy he told me like six or eight years ago that i was a brown belt, no gi, but he really couldn't justify giving me pretty much anything beyond a blue belt with a gi if I didn't know how to use the gi. Brazilian jiu-jitsu is a sport with a gi.

So he was like, you know what I mean? You even know the basics of the gi in a lot of cases, like basic grips and basic chokes. Like I can't give you a purple belt. Like no gi, we'll say you're a brown belt. But now that I train in the gi, I feel just now comfortable enough chokes like i can't give you a purple belt like like no gi we'll say you're a brown belt but now that i train in the gi i feel i feel just now comfortable enough to really feel like yes i'm definitely a purple belt with a gi on killer it's a totally different sport wait it's really fun by

the way which one do you like better is there a better or it to you um i i i do like no-gi better. Yeah. It's certainly faster. It's not nearly as complicated. Gi jiu-jitsu is way more complicated than no-gi jiu-jitsu, simply because there's more options. Yeah. Like, there's so many more variations. It's like you have one or two chokes in a position for no-gi, and then you double or triple that.

Now you have six options because you have you have other just more handles to grab onto you have more options of things to choke people with or to just establish a position or to do a sweep or whatever it is yeah jiu-jitsu is fucking rad dude yeah well i dude i am i'm moving back to these coasts and i'm so stoked to get back into hockey i actually really want to do mma i just don't have time like if i was you know what's real i'm really interested in it is because it is a there's a thinking piece to it like i feel like when you are in the even when you're doing you're just sparring or in practice rolling probably for the first year whatever's happening in that practice is like really fast and really intense because you just haven't developed like an eye for the conversation that goes on between two people and like enough

flow between two people to actually do it yeah i very much would like to get to the state in which i can just like casually go roll with somebody and like practice at 80 right like that's kind of how i feel like i lift weights now and it's the most fun to me because i'm like i'm really like in a flowy state where i'm just kind of like i don't have a plan in the gym but i I'm just like doing it. And I'm lifting really well. Everything's moving really well. But I would love to get to a place, granted, 22 plus whatever years later, you better be there. But I would love to be in a place where I could just like go wrestle and roll with somebody and do it well.

But that's probably like a three-year journey. Yeah, at least probably yeah i mean now you mean you could get to doing something within a year or two if you if you practice really consistently but that's actually what's called by the way it's called a flow row really yeah yeah yeah you even say that you want to flow there's flow you just go 80 and move well probably less than that for a flow roll it's like 50 you're just like you let you're letting people do things to you you're you know like it's kind of like you know when it flow roll. It's like 50%. You're letting people do things to you. It's kind of like you know when it's your turn.

Is that like a big piece of the practice? No. Usually it's like, usually at practice, you drill. Like you warm up. You learn a new move or two. You do some drills, positional stuff. You start with your in and arm bar position, and then you've got to fight your way out of it,

and then you've got to try to finish it, things like that. And then you just roll. You do 500 rounds or whatever it is. But you can opt to, if you're injured or whatever, you can just be like, hey, I got my neck fucked up. You just want to flow? Is that cool? And they go, oh, sure, no problem.

And or just like if it's open mat, you just go ask people, hey, you want to flow? If you come in late and you haven't warmed up at all, like, hey, this is my first roll. I just didn't even fucking warm up. Like, can I, you mind if we just flow a roll? Like, oh, sure. Sick. I feel like if you had all day long, like, if you were an Olympic jujitsu-er,

jujitsu athlete, they're called something else. What are they called, jujitsu athletes? Jujitsu athletes? Yeah, competitors, yeah. called something else what are they called jujitsu athletes jujitsu athletes yeah competitor yeah um i feel like if you were just like in the gym all day long you would do that many hours if you were like trying to be a competitive like the best in the world that's probably a massive piece of the practice like the daily routine right i totally think you should flow roll all the time yeah and actually if you're if you're brand new we're going to talk about books someday. Yeah, we're definitely going to.

If you're brand new, I actually think it's really beneficial to just have a training dummy, someone ideally who's actually better than you, who's just kind of letting you do things to them, but they're also defending a little bit, but they're just enough to give you something to work against, but then they're letting you do the thing that they know you're supposed to be doing. So if you can actually talk your way through each of the moves like okay i'm gonna do i'm gonna do a double under pass so i'm gonna

you know i'm gonna put both arms under i'm gonna grasp my hands together and i'm going to pressure pressure pressure until your knees touch your face slide across establish side control like if you can talk your way through it as you are doing it then then it really makes you it's like it's like it's like writing down yeah your thoughts like you really have to know what you're doing like it's like you're you're thinking through as you're doing the writing yeah and then you establish on yes this is this is exactly what i want same thing when you're if you're just wrestling you're just reacting you're pushing on things like it's hard to really it's not hard you can do it everyone does it this way but i think it's better

if when you're learning to talk your way through it as you're doing it like step by step yeah the first thing is to you know step in with my right foot you know lower my position wrap around the knee clasp my hands together drive in head pressure like like as you're going through it step by step then you really know what you're doing yeah as opposed to just kind of just feeling your way through it yeah so there's definitely something to be said for feeling your way through and just like you know anytime you're doing athletics like there's a feeling component is a huge component but if you're learning you're trying to learn technique on something then understanding the step by step i think is really important yeah i gotta do it one day let's talk about some books dude do it bro book club dude i want to do bro book clubs so

badly bro book club so rad the first bro book club i did uh i did it with my friends and only three people three the like five people read the book one kid didn't even show up because he didn't read it. Epic fail. Yeah. Nothing worse than going to a bro book club and they just haven't read, and like your friends didn't even try. They just wanted to like get dinner. Like, no, no.

I want bro book club to be awesome. It's hard to get people to read the same book in a certain given period of time. It is. But dude, we got 10 books to get people to read the same book in a certain given period of time it is um but dude we got we got 10 books to get through and i will ping pong it back and forth yeah we're gonna do you i'll do me all right you started off sure dude all right first book um the first book is called flourish by a guy named martin seligman i've never even heard of this one. Okay, this book's totally dope. So Martin Seligman, he is basically like one of the fathers of positive psychology,

which is huge. The whole positive psychology slash happiness movement really started, I'm not sure about all these details, but I might be overstating this, but it really was started by Martin Seligman. And this book called Flourish is what the actual science shows makes people happy you know

there's all the things that that um you know people do to to establish happiness you know they they want a good job and they want financial stability and they want to you know have nice stuff and like this is kind of like the um the classic things people kind of subconsciously do to like feel like you know if you have money and opportunity then you'll be happy but then people find out uh the older you get the more you meet more and more people at least my experience that have a lot of money and wealth and status and fame and whatever else and they're fucking depressed and they're pissed off and they're fighting with everybody and like they still have challenges and and they're not as happy as their Instagram profile would suggest.

So Seligman laid out this really cool model. The acronym for it is PERMA. And I didn't know we were doing this. So I actually didn't do any like – I didn't like go back and research these books to remember all this stuff. What inspired this? Our social media manager, badass intern, Samantha,

sent us an email asking us what our top five books were. And I was like, this is going to be rad. We're going to talk about these. So we turned microphones on because that's what we do. I remember this model, though. You've sent this to me. Yeah, I've talked about it before with you, for sure, because I think it's really dope.

So the acronym is perma and so these are like the the five things that that this guy um has i'm assuming through the research um shown to actually make people happy and fulfilled in the real world which actually i think i'm not sure if this is from this book or not but um happiness and and fulfillment i think are very different things i think you can i think happy is a very temporary transient state you know like someone someone gives you good news or you have a really fun time out with your friends like you're happy but fulfillment i think is radically different i actually think you could you could be unhappy most your life and die fulfilled like because you're you're doing things that matter so um But of course you can be happy and fulfilled both at the same time. So PERMA, the P is for positive emotion.

Which I think, actually I'll get back to this in a second. P is positive emotion. The E was engagement, I believe. The R is relationships. M is meaning. And A is accomplishment. So these five things are the things that make people happy. So positive emotion, I feel like that's the one that make people happy so positive emotion i feel

like i feel like that's the one that that's like almost a trap in a way where people think that doing lots of things that provide them with instant gratification will lead to long-term fulfillment or if they just do enough of it they'll be happy if they you know if you're unhappy they're like well i'll go on vacation i'll'll go to Hawaii. And then I'll go. That's how people end up with gambling. It's fun, but you can't just have a bunch of fun every day. If you just party every day and you just gamble every day and you just go to strip clubs and you just do all this. You do a bunch of drugs.

You do everything that's like insert gratification even if like you're happy for large parts of your day your life kind of feels empty and meaningless and like you're depressed and kind of like chasing highs yeah if yeah if you just say chase the highs of life then it's it seems like it would make you happy because you're happy all the time you're having fun all the time but for some reason it just doesn't doesn't work so it doesn't work all the way but but it is one positive emotion is one of the five things that makes people happy like you if you want to be happy it's like it's good to have some positive emotion every once in a while it's like good to laugh every once in a while and smile and be happy so but it's only one out of five so if you just do instant gratification happiness stuff you know transient happiness stuff

where you're going to parties and whatnot and you don't do all the other stuff then it's not going to be enough so uh positive emotion is one and then uh was p e e was engagement yeah i think the meaning and the engagement piece they likely go hand in hand in a lot of cases so engagement is just everyone's talking about being present and being in a flow state right now. I feel like all that stuff's really popular. you know, Kotler stealing fire and, and,

uh, uh, Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi has a book called flow. It's kind of a classic. He like really introduced the concept of flow. When you, when you're doing something that is engaging and you're present and fully in the moment,

it's, it's difficult difficult but not too difficult and so you you have to really you have to really work hard at it but it's not so difficult that you get the roadblocks and those roadblocks kick you off and you and you stop and you go do something else like anytime you are you're doing something and all of a sudden like time just flies by and and you're like damn like four hours has passed i feel like we just got here like that's that's because you were in that likely in the moment and you were really engaged in what you were doing so engagement seems to be really big for

people being happy you know i've heard it said before that you know living in the past being lost in thought loops of the past wishing it was the past that's where depression comes from and being lost and thinking about the future that That's where anxiety comes from. But if you're just present in the moment, this is why people meditate and why mindfulness is being, becoming so popular. It's about, you know, just being in the moment and not thinking about, um, basically any, anything else except for just being engaged in what you're doing. So if you can have positive emotion and be engaged, you're much more likely to be happy. And then the R is relationships, which I kind of feel like is obvious.

Like if you have really positive, healthy relationships with people that you enjoy being around, that you look up to, and that also you care for them and they care for you, then that's just going to obviously lead to happiness. But I actually think it runs deeper than the obvious piece where there's two really good TED Talks independent of this book where one of them showed that two things. Like very close, high-quality relationships was one big component of long-term happiness. But then also of longevity. People that have these deep deep meaningful relationships live longer even that correlated higher than like blood pressure and cholesterol and like other more common identifying markers of health um it was deep meaningful relationships and the other one was something along the lines of of social integration or that might not be the exact term they use but something like that where

it's just do you talk to people you know if you're at the grocery store and you're waiting in line to check out and do you talk to the person that's that the cashier at the grocery store like how's your day going or like have you seen this movie or what like just even if it's small talk people that do more small talk just tend to be happier people and there was even a study done where they they showed something along the lines of even if in the moment two people are kind of like oh how's the weather oh it's great like what are you doing here oh you're from town oh yeah like like a nothing conversation and both people in that interaction actually kind of want to get out of the interaction they both feel better after the interaction for having connected with somebody

interesting i thought that was an interesting point because i've actually noticed that about myself where someone talks to me and i'm just kind of like why why are you talking to me but then i pay attention to how i feel afterward and once they're gone like if i didn't want to talk to them i'm like relieved that they're gone because i if i'm working and they're talking to me and it's like kind of annoying so i want to get the work done or whatever because i work in public place a lot of time um when they leave i do kind of feel like a little a little bit of a pick-me-up where i'm just like hey like i i connected with another human which is really important if you have three kids you don't get out as much as i used to um and i want that i don't want them to

come back but i'm like for some reason like subtly happy that it happened yeah it's interesting that coffee shop life that. That coffee shop life. That's the coffee shop life for sure. Is there a plug underneath you? It's a Wi-Fi code. Yeah. Real human interaction. Real humans.

Which actually, that's a really interesting one for me. It's good for me to know that stuff because I would, this is more of a personal thing of mine, like when I was, when I was a kid, like I was basically not, this was not intentional by anyone, I don't think. But like I had the idea in my head that like if you were being social and having fun with your friends, then you're being bad. Like you're – like even to some extent, even now, like if I'm having a good time and like laughing with my friends, I'm like – I like don't want to get to get caught yeah like i don't want my wife to walk in the room and see me having a good time

she's gonna be pissed like get back to work yeah or anybody like any anyone that that has any like slight authority or power over me or anything like um or even even as an equal like if i don't know why i don't know why, I don't know how this got drilled in my head, but it was just like between school and sports, like if you're waiting in line at practice, you're supposed to sit there or stand there and not say anything and pay attention.

And if you're talking to your buddy, then like, hey, quiet down, pay attention, shut up. Yeah. Like being social was like. Funny how you've picked a profession in which you're supposed to talk to people you're supposed to just kind of hang out well actually i don't think it's that funny i think i enjoy this so much because i'm working right now yeah i want to be talking to people all the time and this is like one of the only ways i can feel really good about it yeah does that make sense oh that totally makes sense that's

like coaching people at crossfit i thought was so fun because I was like – I think part of it was subconscious where like I'm talking to these people about something I really enjoy. Yeah. But I'm working so I can't get in trouble for it. Oh, yeah. I think that's a big part of my – I never think about the getting in trouble for it part. But I always think about I get to do this for work.

How cool is that? Yeah. Yeah, I never think about that like so i'm not getting in trouble yeah it's interesting there's more thoughts going on in my brain than just those thoughts but i feel i feel like that's that's underlying a lot of it a lot of times uh so that's a relationship piece um so per and then m is meaning so i think this is really interesting like with the universal basic income conversation, people are always talking about like, well, if people don't have to work, how are they going to get their meaning?

If you don't have meaning, you don't have purpose, then people get depressed. Like that's why people sell $100 million companies and then they don't have anything to do and they get really depressed and they start drinking. You need something that's like a big deal to work on that that you can say like like you know this thing is bigger than me and i'm contributing to it and what i do matters and people care what i about me in my contribution to this thing whether that's like raising a kid or owning a company or or you know training to fight in the ufc or whatever it is. You need something that matters to you.

And a lot of people don't have that. I'm very lucky to have that in a lot of cases between loving fitness and sports and now business and now I do have a family and kids and all that. I have a lot of things that do matter to me. I feel really lucky in that case, but a lot of people don't have that. People do not ever find that thing that really matters.

It's really hard to find that thing. We got very lucky by loving what we did well before it was ever a job. Right. Like if somebody just told you you have to go be a fitness coach, you'd be like, I don't really fucking want to be that. But you showed up and did the thing every day it's a really really challenging thing i actually think about um i think about that a lot meaning to me means is a very very important thing it provide like man what would i do without lifting weights like what what if you weren't trying to be incredibly good at your job how weird would that be yeah like it would it's incredibly strange to me to think that some people

just show up to work and do the job and then go home right and i i can't do things like that and i think it's because i've been able to somehow turn this thing that I just like doing into a career. Like it's really, really strange to me that so many people, it's like an overwhelmingly large number, percentage of people, never actually find out what they like to do. Yeah. Or what they would like to maybe potentially spend their time becoming good at it's a weird one it's very weird and i feel like they practice not doing what they like doing so much that it's impossible it becomes borderline impossible to actually ask yourself the questions of like what do you want to do like it's a it's a really one to me. And we are on the opposite side of it.

So when I know what we've been through in order to get to the part where we get to do this, to live a life filled with meaning and our goals to, like, become the best that we can be, I see the struggles that, like, we've been through of like just sleeping in the gym, being incredibly broke, not really knowing the future of what your gym is going to do. The shows are going to do like there's, there's so many times where it should have broken. You probably were supposed to stop and that.

And then I see like the hangups and people were like, why they don't advance it or the, why they bounce around in career. And it's like if you just really actually did the thing that you like you love doing in your life but most people can't even answer the question like i love strength and conditioning holy shit and i get to do that all the time there's times where it's incredibly challenging trying to be good at it every day is hard as hell like it's really challenging but man we we we literally get to go on this ride like we get to find out if we're good all the time every day like we get to find out how good we can really be at this thing that we've

been doing since we were 13 14 15 years old years old. Like that's an insane life. I'm incredibly grateful for it. But it's also like, man, meaning is real. Putting some purpose behind stuff and why you do things really matters. Just so we can move on past this book, I'll up this you don't have to we can just talk about one book uh there's no rules we didn't have rules we thought 10 was a good number so we went with it okay well samantha told us to put pick five so we're talking about them she's playing samantha you can see her wadapalooza tell her tell her we need fewer books so the last one

accomplishment that's fairly straightforward like if you are working on things that have meaning in that matter and that you're engaged in and then you actually accomplish those things it feels really good to get that sense of accomplishment you know the bigger the things that you're accomplishing

the more meaning it potentially has behind it the longer you strive for it you know accomplishing you know getting I guess getting my purple belt. Very proud to get a purple belt. Hopefully I get a jiu-jitsu black belt someday. I'll feel really good about it. Would I really care that I have a black belt specifically? Am I doing jiu-jitsu to get a black belt?

Fucking not at all. I don't give a shit about earning the belts specifically. I just love to roll because I love to roll. It's my favorite thing to do. It makes me feel really good. And it's nice to get some recognition for that. So I'd like it for that. But in my opinion, if I was doing jiu-jitsu in this example,

just so I could get a black belt, and I didn't really like it that much, but I thought having a black belt's badass and people would think I was really cool, then that would not be fulfilling. And accomplishing it wouldn't mean the same thing. I just think the accomplishment of getting the black belt means more if I'm not even working toward the black belt,

but someone just hands it to me one day and says, hey, you're good enough. And I go, great. Let's go roll. Let's go do the same thing that we did yesterday. Like nothing changes. I just want to keep rolling. Yeah.

Hang out with your friends. Go lift the weights. Dude, I'm throwing you for a loop because in the middle of you talking, when I filled this thing out, I totally forgot about the book because I listened to it on audiobook. Therefore, it was not on my list because I went over to my bookshelf and went through them. And I was like,

these are five really good ones that I think everyone should read. And then there was something that you said while you were walking through that that made me think of this one, which is hands down in my top five. So I bumped out the one thing

because as we joked on earlier, it's a phenomenal book if you are really good at not being able to stay focused on what you do in your life and need to learn all of the methods um but this is actually one of my favorite books of all time i just completely forgot because it's not on the bookshelf but um joshua waitzkin the art of learning have you read that no i haven't actually so radical yeah. Yeah. Do you know who he is?

I do. Tim Ferriss talks about him all the time, but I haven't read the book yet. I might have listened to the audio book years ago. He was the kid that they made the book Searching for Bobby Fischer after. Right. So I have a massive obsession with understanding, like, if I sit down with you and i say and i've never we do this like on on basically like on every show but the reason the shows i think are so interesting and why the interviews are so fun is because i'm beyond interested in the like you brought it

up earlier today that you watched like a 10 minute video on a time lapse of them building a cruise ship and all i can awesome yeah and all i can think is like man if we had the cruise ship guy on that would be an awesome interview because i would be so interested to learn the progress that he's been through in his life and all the big pieces along the way to be able to build a gigantic city on the water with like a casino in it. Like how did that design process go? When did he start looking at boats and like doodling? That boat's not that cool. Like I could make that boat cooler and then draw it out and then like actually go through the process the learning process is so radical right like there's

always these like little things like why did you start lifting weights well i need to be better for sports well okay how do i get better for sports gotta get bigger or stronger how do you do that well you probably learn how to back squat wonder if nutrition's important ah go to the books turns out i need to eat okay well now i to learn about protein and fat and carbs and timing. And, like, it's just endless. And when he talks about chess and becoming world champion at such a young age, the amount of the process at which, like, it takes somebody to become a grandmaster and then become the best in the

world and he did it when he was like 14 years old or something and it was so cool because i would never be able to sit down and talk to somebody about becoming the best chess player in the world much less at that young age and i would love to know like what the practice schedule looks like like how often are you doing it and when they start talking about like there's an incredible amount of math clearly that goes on there's an incredible amount of strategy that goes on but they also do a lot of just like situational things and playing theory in practice all day long so they're not much, it's kind of like you were talking about like flow rolling, right? Like they don't sit down and play chess, right?

They sit down and have super intellectual conversations about chess theory. The zillions of different ways that something could play out. How far down, how many moves ahead do we need to be? And it was just so fascinating because like as the book's titled the art of learning i'm obsessed with how people learn things like i really love listening to people that are really smart and have reached some massive amount

of success in their life and like how did you do that like your body you're not born that way you're not born elon musk you're born with some crazy weird obsession to go to Mars because you watch some thing, and it progressed year after year after year, and you continue to obsess over it, and then all of a sudden you're some wacko building tubes underneath L.A., and you say it's safer than being on the ground when the earthquake hits. Prove it. Yeah, right. The chess player thing, thing though is incredibly interesting

because i i've just never been a part of that conversation and then the amount of time that he spends in like deep meditation playing out chess games matches and independent moves and how many different variations can play off that it was fascinating and then once he was done playing chess he went and became tai chi chuan do you know what that is mr martial arts i know what tai chi is yeah this is like hand battling where you try and knock somebody off but he can But he became world champ of that as well. And he said, I also read this in the middle of like really trying to get into understanding like what everybody's talking about, meditation things. And this book like shows up in my life

right at the right time at the right thing. Oh, we can think deeply about it. Watch our subconscious go crazy and swipe left swipe right which thoughts do you want to keep blah blah blah and the ability to like just sit there and deeply focus on the specific thing and then getting into the tai chi chuan piece becoming world champ he's been world champ in chess as a child now tai chi chuan tai chi chuan did i say that right i think i'm right whatever google it um to become world champion at two different things at a relatively young age is a really really challenging thing to do one being a mental kind of battle and the other one

being a physical battle in which you're trying to like move somebody and get them off balance. Thought it was pretty cool. You should check that book out. That was my rant on The Art of Learning. Since we said we're going to do 10 books, people are probably wondering what the other books are.

Let's throw out the rest of the list real quick so people can have an idea of where we're heading. We want to just talk too. The point of Pro Book Club is to talk about the books. I already did Flourish. I already did Flourish. Chasing Excellence by our friend Ben Bergeron.

Awesome book. Atomic Habits by James Clear who we were supposed to interview in New York and we pushed that one back. Everything he does is great. Let's see. I read a book called You Just Don't Understand. I don't remember who wrote that.

That was about kind of the communication dynamics between men and women. And then finally, The Aging Brain, which is all about brain health and all the things you can do to kind of ward off dementia and Alzheimer's and have the healthiest brain for the longest period of time, which I think is really important.

I'm actually more, as far as health and fitness stuff goes right now, that's, that's actually one of my, my big focuses whenever I'm reading about nutrition is about how it affects my brain. Like my, my grandma had dementia and like just watching that my grandma has it right

now. It's, it's a pain. It's gotta be just excruciatingly painful thing for the my grandma has it right now it's it's a pain it's got to be just excruciatingly painful thing for the person that has it but then it but it affects the whole family like watching watching that whole process unfold was brutal uh which makes me very concerned about my own and the other people that i know and love yeah their uh their brain health. Both of the great grandmas in my family, my immediate family and Ash's each side, the great grandmas have it.

It's crazy. My grandma's a little bit more feisty than hers. Yeah. Yeah. A little more feisty. Not afraid to mix it up in the nursing home. Oh, yeah? Yeah, she's not afraid.

She'll talk some smack to people and forgets it. Crazy lady. All right, my books. Hold on. We got to go through them. Buddha's Brain. I think everybody should really like you should really read that book it teaches you a lot about how your brain works and how you have the ability

to control your thoughts your well you don't have the ability to control your thoughts you have the ability to choose which thoughts you would like to really pay attention to how to treat people how to understand compassion equanimity, all kinds of cool stuff. Originals, I read that this year and I am really, really into this book because like our whole lives we are taught to stand in like this straight line and follow the leader and nobody needs to color outside the lines because you know then you're just going to get in trouble and man the older I get the more I realize I feel like everybody needs to be coloring outside the lines and doing like finding the thing that makes them very unique and just really, really diving into those personality traits

because that's why people like you. I don't have any friends. One of the funniest things of my entire life is every time I get my friends come around, Ashton always looks at me and she's like, your friends are such lunatics like they're all weird they always have these like really intense deep conversations and i'm like i know isn't it awesome she's like yeah but can we all just ever just hang out without having having to have like 15 layers of why you're doing this and why you're thinking this way and i'm like we could but it wouldn't be as fun we have to dive into subjects super deep um but it just it talks about kind of

what makes people original um and and how you can turn that trait into a skill and then into something that impacts the world and it goes through just a host of people that have impacted the world and why they they thought the way they did what made them special how that then turned into probably the iphone that i'm holding on to right now steve jobs probably pretty original dude but um just people that chase their own path and didn't um conform to what everybody kind of wanted. But it's a really cool thing to me because I really think about just in reflecting on my career or my life as whoever I am. Man, I got a lot of trouble and every single year of my life in school was okay grades followed by,

oh, it would be really good if Anders didn't talk so much. Oh, it would be really good if Anders applied himself. And they were 100% right. Like, I talk a lot, and I like talking to people. And I also never applied myself to school because I thought it was really boring and easy. And now that I get to like do this thing that i love i'm there i don't think i lack like i'm very i know how to apply myself now and i think that they're like i didn't want to fit into the thing that they were doing i think

that's a big piece of how education needs to change right now it's like yeah like instead of just putting everyone through the exact same system the exact same way like finding out what makes people unique like what type of personality traits they have yeah what what type of type of interests they have what kind of skill sets they kind of naturally have and then like figuring out like how to take this this combination of factors and and come up with a few different options for where this person really fits in the world rather than like the basics of, you know, doctor, lawyer, school teacher or whatever.

Like there's so many other things out there between like machine learning algorithms and artificial intelligence or whatever. Something that can aggregate a mountain of data and then select like from many hundreds or thousands or hundreds of thousands of occupations slash hobbies, etc. There's got to be a way to point people in the right direction. Instead of telling people, hey, quit talking so much. Say, this guy loves to talk.

He talks all the time. What are the best things for this person to go into? I wonder if it would be even possible. I don't even know what the public school system looks like like daughter hasn't gotten to that stage of the game yet after just six months but um it's very we're actually putting her in a real daycare here in the next month or so it'll be really interesting just to see like what a curriculum looks like that somebody else has put together um i don't know like how intense it is for infants in, in like what they do actually in daycares or in a learning curriculum of

whatever, whatever they have. But yeah, it's, it's something I think about a lot of these things I didn't really think about. Well, I think I thought about them like professionally a lot,

but now I think about them a lot on like, like I, I was very aware when i owned the gym that like the culture of the gym was very similar to just the way i viewed strength and conditioning lifting the intensity like the commitment level to it um and and all that stuff like yeah by the end of it and i was broken and all that, and, you know, it all changes. But, yeah, like, being a parent now is wild because that little fireball up there is going to have something unique about her. And the whole school system or the whole world is going to try and be like,

don't go do that thing. Like, that will make you stand out. And it's like, no. I want you to stand out. I want you to go do the weird thing like i don't know but i don't know how i like i say all these things it's really funny my mom totally called me out on it over christmas break but she listened to the show that we did with bergeron and we talked a lot about parenting in it and just like how to raise kids and this ideal way to do it and she uh she goes hey it was a really great thing you did like everything you said was really really topical but um way to be way to act

like you're an expert parent after six months and I was like got you mom thank you I'm I've got all figured out everything I'm doing is hypothetical i have no clue what i'm actually doing um but yeah it's weird because i think about that stuff and i know that i mean even if she follows a little bit and be in in my steps she's going to talk a lot she's going to be a social human being she's going to be very loud and people are going to be a social human being. She's going to be very loud. And people are going to try and tell her not to be. I'm going to tell her to be louder. Who cares what your teacher says? You just mentioned Steve Jobs and the iPhone and all that.

Actually, probably every six months or at least once a year, I end up on a Steve Jobs kick where I get on YouTube and I watch a bunch of Steve Jobs videos. And I just recently did one of those, him and Larry Ellison. And I was listening to the launch team for the iPhone talk about making the iPhone and what that was like. It was really interesting. You should totally get on YouTube and watch some videos about the iPhone being made not by Steve but by the team that actually made it. Yeah. And the big sticking point they had was the keyboard, was getting the keyboard to be functional enough

where you could just type and it was easy. And so at one point they took all the engineers that were working on all these other projects and said, everyone's building keyboards. We've got to get the keyboard fixed. If the keyboard doesn't work, no one's going to use a phone. Yeah. So everyone independently started making their own keyboards,

and then they all brought them in, and they went through each one one by one to see who had the best keyboard. And this one guy's worked way better than everybody else's. And what they ended up doing was if you hit the letter T or whatever it is, then the machine learning algorithms will know that the most common letters that will come after T are H and O or whatever the most common ones are. It'll take the space on the digital keyboard.

Visually, the letters will look the same, but the touch area will expand or contract based on the the likelihood that that letter is coming next and so if you hit you know t then like the h zone gets bigger and so even if you don't hit the h right on the money and you're like a little bit off it'll still select the h because it's close enough and then if i can get t and then h then like you know does one is one of the most common words in the world or in the English language. It's used all the time.

So maybe the E space now is like fucking huge and the Z space is non-existent. You know what I mean? And so that was like the big switch that they figured out. Like, okay, this is how we're going to make the keyboard work. Well, that guy's a genius because I can no-look text message now. Right. I don't even need just, because I can no-look text message now.

I don't even need – I'll just – not driving, not driving, potentially not driving though, just texting away, not even looking. Dude, so that's the people that I like talking to. Like you would never – I'm just endlessly curious about the conversations that people have in their own world. Like, man, to be in that room and just watch literally the smartest software engineers in the world having a conversation about how do we put a keyboard together. That's insane. That's like – what an epic conversation to just watch that room have just such an elevated conversation. Like, that one conversation probably has thousands of years of expertise in one specific area. And to get into that room, you're widely considered one of the best probably.

And they're all trying to solve a single problem. Who wouldn't want to be a part of that conversation? I would love to just sit in that room. One of the things that I've, over the last couple months, because Tiger Woods is cool again. Do you know Tiger Woods is cool again? I don't know much about Tiger aside from he's awesome at golf and then he went through a whole fucking fiasco yeah and now he's coming out of that fiasco so he's had like a zillion surgeries he got i want to say like four discs

and his low back fused together jesus like Like four knee surgeries, multiple back surgeries, the works, right? Yeah. Not to mention the other problems, the affair problems that happened like 10 years ago. 10 years ago? Yeah, it was a long time. It may even be longer.

So he got his spine fused and went out and started hitting golf balls again, pain-free. And had a phenomenal year. Ended up winning one of the bigger top five events. He didn't win a major, but he was in, at the British Open this year, he was in first place going into the last day. I know that. But he ended up winning, I want to say it was the Players' Championship.

But whatever it is. When I step up to a tee box to play golf, and at one point in time I was a six handicap. Used to be able to hit the ball pretty well when Tiger Woods stands on the tee box or like walks the golf course he is shaping the golf course in a way to set himself up for the best possible shot for his game. He knows exactly how hard to swing with what club, the number, the total distance, the draw, the slice, the fade. And when he talks about it, if you can catch him just doing like golf language, like if me and you were lifting weights, not many people, unless you've been in the gym or fully understand

what's being said in that conversation, when you step onto the golf course with Tiger Woods, if he's hanging out with Phil Mickelson, you will not know what they're talking about. Their conversation is so deep in the woods of golf lingo that you probably, because you have to understand the hole-by-hole, shot-by-shot gambling score. You have to understand what they're trying to do when they hit the ball, how they're shaping the ball, how they're shaping the golf course, what they're looking for in their next shot, maybe two shots down. And I've been able to to watch so HBO did a documentary because he played Phil Mickelson heads up for nine eight million dollars nine million dollars one afternoon one head-to-head golf match so they did like a 24-7 like lead up like four shows and they were

just kind of following around but like getting the golf lingo in and they were playing the course and they were not only talking about how they were going to be like putting the ball here because this is going to happen or i need to be carry the ball like that's like the the average basic good golfer conversation how far do you have to carry the ball blah blah blah but by going through hole by hole how they were going to try to win money off of each other gambling on each shot because they knew that they could hit better shots in specific places than tiger but i guess there's no way you can like turn down the golf bet if someone's close to the pen for, I think they were playing for like $1,000 a shot or something fucking crazy.

But like, yeah, when you hear the people that are the best in the world that are so immersed in their little bubble, in the thing that they do, I love hearing those conversations because it's so far above and beyond. Like you have to be like invited into that conversation. It would take you a lifetime to be accepted into that group.

But if you get invited to listen to it or like watch it or there's a documentary on it, like that's just, that's the ultimate. That's why I love the learning books. I didn't even get to my other books. Hold on a second. That's why podcasting is so cool because it's this raw, unedited, long-form conversation. You can just hear what a normal conversation sounds like between people.

Yeah. I remember 10, 15 years ago, I actually used to say that. I wish I could just stand in the room and just listen to a normal conversation and just see what the whole thing sounds like. I was usually referencing it in the context of like a business negotiation yeah i want just like when you know like when

apple does a deal with google or like like it's like a big thing and it's like hundreds of millions of dollars of billions of dollars are on the line they're making making big products and they're going back and forth like on terms and and all that like i want to hear like what the hell they're talking about like yeah when it really matters and you're really good at it. But podcasting basically fills that gap in a lot of cases. Maybe not for big business deals or not just going to make it public like that,

but you can listen to two people that have been doing something for 40 years each and just listen to what their conversation's like. It's awesome. The fact that we do two hour long shows now, I really, really love them. The shows that we did in New long shows now, I really, really love them. Yeah.

The shows that we did in New York were so – We could stay a little more focused on them to get to our books along the way, but I love going long form. Yeah. We've got two hours to tell you the names of ten books. We've only done one of them. That's all right. That's all right. The book that – so we've gone – the one thing was the one that I threw out,

but you should definitely check that out, especially if you need to understand how to focus on things you like. The Art of Learning from Waitskin, The Buddha's Brain, Originals, and then the book that I'm currently in the middle of, and we talked about with – you read it as well, but we talked about it with Bergeron, and I had some people reach out asking what the name of the book was, but Principles by Ray Dalio dalio um man that guy i love he's one of those guys

so he calls did you when you read it what did you have like the personality the shaper personality did you did you dig into any of that stuff? I have not done his personality tests, although I've done many personality tests. Yeah. Well, I think this is more just like a personality of somebody that – of people inside companies and what he considers himself to be, which is a shaper, but somebody that kind of is able to go in and like see the gigantic picture but work

incredibly hard at creating the product or the goal that helps fix this like massive problem in whatever industry he's in hit for him and slid um stock market things um but the graph also that's in there is it a graph is it a model what is it the loopy line the loopy line yeah i'm sure it's not really cool yeah i'm sure he's gonna hear this and be like dude the loopy line 500 pages and you said the loopy line dalio listens to shrug he definitely does he definitely does yeah um the loopy line i think i i think that's probably a model yeah it's a model yeah um i love that sometimes things just hit you right at the right time and that model with the always going up into the right linear line but understanding

that there's some falling off rebuilding and relaunching yeah over and over and over again but always progressing in the right direction up to the right and a linear and a less linear but over time what it looks to be a linear graph yeah he basically says that as long as you don't quit like you're going to make progress yeah progress is not linear you're going to make some progress go up and up and up and then you're gonna you know you're gonna trip and fall and then you're gonna stand back up and you're gonna make some more progress and you're gonna trip and fall and sometimes those those trips and those trips and falls are uh are not very fun and maybe they might even last a couple years depending on what kind of horrible travesty happens to you but you gotta just keep picking yourself back up and just moving forward i really can't believe that that guy sat down and

like deeply thought about so many people spend their whole lives like somebody like him you would think that all he's really interested in is like learning the stock market but his book is well the first 100 pages of it is about his business and growing his firm. But that guy's done more of the self-work and personal development and understanding what the people around him are good at and how to make them better and putting them in the right roles with the right titles and the right job descriptions and just it seems like he pretty much figured the whole game out like if you're going to try to be the best in the world especially at something that you can't

control the outcome you're guessing and making bets all day long on what this market's going to do and nobody really knows what it's going to do like he he seems like he figured out how to work with the right people get the right people in the right place make good decisions balance a portfolio so that you've got eight to ten things that are always moving up. That way, when one of them falls, you're still on the right path. It's just a very minor hit to the overall performance of what you're doing. Yeah, a really interesting thing about him. Ray Daly runs the world's largest hedge fund. He's a billionaire many times over.

A very successful person. His fund is two or three times as big as the next biggest one. It's like the second place fund, he's twice as big. It's a ridiculous thing. He won't talk to you unless you have $100 million to play with. That type of thing. Is that a fact? Did you hear that?

Yeah, he said that many times. He probably says it in the book. but there's, again, many. I went down that rabbit hole with him on YouTube, and I've heard him say that many times. I watched the video you sent, Understanding Markets. He has a very good video called How the Economic Machine Works. It's like 30 minutes long. It really explains the big zoomed out big picture of how the economy works.

You totally should go watch it. He's just the right person to make it but he he uh he basically used to be like a very hard-nosed kind of ass holy person like all of his he was demotivating his employees and he would he would berate people and yell at them and and and uh you know he i'm putting words in his mouth here but like i think he kind of was one of those guys that like felt he was doing the right thing because he was being honest but like really he was just trashing people yeah making them feel really bad unintentionally maybe but uh now he's he's kind of gotten through that and he's he seems to be a great person to work for and um he does this thing where he had software built called the

dot collector where uh for any decision in the company like whenever they're whenever they're in a meeting or making decisions, like everyone has a way to, you know, on their iPhones through an app or whatever it is to like kind of vote and or insert their opinion about something. And then like the machine learning algorithms or whatever is in this software like kind of vets and sorts all the opinions of all the people to come up with all the pros and all the cons and like ranks them. And like there's this cool setup where he calls it an idea meritocracy where between all of us,

we get all the ideas out and then the best ideas win. And it's not, it doesn't go by like rank and status and how long you've been there. He's trying to make it where whatever they're doing, the best ideas, no matter who they come from, went the you mentioned the word the mechanisms or mechanics of the market at the beginning of what you're saying did i get that right i said how the economic or the machine yeah the that's a that's a big theme in the beginning of the book i haven't finished the

book it's already on my list of you need to go read this because I just like the way that the guy thinks so much. Like he's a great thinker. But the machine of the economics or the economic machine, that piece of the book was super cool to me how he would go in and he was just doing the commodities market at the beginning or trading commodities and understanding all of the different pieces and like going to work with farmers to understand all the different pieces that went into the price of selling a pig i was like oh that's genius i bet most people don't do that. Most people wouldn't think past this is what a pig costs or this is what we traded at. This is why we're trading it.

I hope I get lucky tomorrow. Yeah. Dude. That was the most aggressive sneeze. I can't believe I even got through. Sneeze, cough, fart at the same time. Oh, my God. I can't believe I got through that full sentence.

I was dying. I felt it coming on. And then you started talking. I was so happy. And then I just exploded. Yo, similar to what you were talking about with Ray Dalian trading commodities and markets and all that,

big business decisions are so much different than small business decisions. I heard this story about, I want to say it was McDonald's when they first decided they were going to make chicken nuggets like like the kinds of things that they have to think about it's like okay well we want to make chicken nuggets we're gonna these details might be wrong but but the concept still stands so we're gonna make chicken nuggets we have i don't know how many stores mcdonald's has but say tens of thousands of stores i could put chicken in all those stores?

Okay, well, how much chicken do we need? Okay, we're going to buy 30% of the world's chicken, so we're going to have chicken nuggets. Look at this, an absurd amount. Okay, well, we've got to make sure that we're going to have that many chickens constantly available at all times. And then we need to make sure that we hit our margins and the price of chicken doesn't fluctuate, which just could absolutely kill us. Can you buy futures on chicken? I have no idea.

That's not my game at all. You're not the chicken guy? We've been hanging out all this time and you didn't tell me you were the chicken guy. You knew. I'm not into the stock market enough to be able to make any claims about anything. Why are you asking that? Well, it's interesting because you're right. I mean, they have to play these games. If you're going to unleash chicken nuggets, you have to buy, like you said, 30% of it.

So now it becomes a financial model that you have to guess what's coming up. Right. And then what are the mechanisms that influence chicken prices right got it okay now we need somebody that's an expert at feed right corn and soy and now yeah now like the weather's a huge factor and and there's all these things you're not just buying chickens right you're not going to sprouts and getting the chicken not even costco all the chickens they have yeah it was it was that was a long time ago that I heard about that, but it was really interesting to hear the step-by-step

of all the things that had to be considered to just put one additional menu item. Yeah. It seems like it's no big deal. How does Taco Bell do it? They got a new one every week. Every time I see the Taco Bell commercial, they got a new one.

It's like a new... Oh, man. Maybe they don't have the same model. Hold on. I got one more. We're always on principles. That can be the best of the rest of this, but I got one more. We're going to take a quick break. Look at that cliffhanger. My number one

book when we get back. Shrug family, I got to tell you about my morning routine. You ready for it? Of course you are. Everyone wants to know my morning routine. Everyone wants to know what I'm doing as soon as I get out of bed. So here's what it is. I've got a brand new baby. So the very first thing we do is we go in and get the baby. We go to get the baby, probably have to change the diaper, but then we go downstairs to the kitchen and in the kitchen waiting for me every day because they deliver three meals to my door daily. That's pretty cool. Every day they deliver three meals, but there's a breakfast waiting for me that is a very paleo-friendly breakfast. That's because cateredfit.com gives me the option of the classic menu,

the meatless menu, boo, no meatless menu, and the paleo menu. Additionally, if I would like, they've got snacks, desserts, juices, all kinds of fun things delivered straight to my door. And if you go to cateredfit.com, you can get $25 off your meal using shrugged 25, but it gets better. Before I even eat that meal, because I'm trying to maximize the amount of protein that I'm digesting per meal, I use my bio-optimizers, digestive enzymes. So if you would like those, I use the HCL and I use the Mastzymes. Digestive enzymes, specifically protease, are very important to the amount of protein that is broken down into amino acids, which help you build muscle. It helps with your bowels. It helps with the digestion. You don't get that bloatiness. I've made it through a Christmas dinner. I've made it through a Sunday brunch with my wife and the all you can eat form down at the

Hotel Del Coronado, which costs me way too much money for just food. And I made it through a Thanksgiving dinner and without any of the bloated feeling because of the Masszymes HCL combo. So get over to BioOptimizers, B-I-O-P-T-I-M-I-Z-E-R-S.com forward slash shrug. Over there, you're going to save 20% on the Masszymes. If you get the entire package, the four, including the Gluten Guardian and the gut bacteria, the probiotics, you're going to save well over $100 on all four of those. So get to biooptimizers.com forward slash shrug and make sure you use the coupon code shrug. And if you notice, I haven't gotten into my vegetables yet. Vegetables, super important to your health, right? Well, I don't really have like a ton of time in the morning to go and make the beautiful salad or the beautiful vegetables and steaming all the things.

Because remember, I got a baby. The baby is making me have to change my life a lot. So I go to the fridge. I take out my one gallon of almond milk. I pour a double serving, that's 16 ounces of the almond milk into my Organifi shaker bottle and then I grab the green drink and I put two scoops in there to get all of my vegetables and micro vitamin needs it's an incredible process if you go to Organifi.com forward slash shrug you can save 20%. I highly recommend you getting the pumpkin spice one too. It is like Christmas in your mouth. You don't even know how good this thing is. I literally took a scoop of it to try it out the other day

and it made me chuckle out loud. I'll put a video up on Instagram. It made me chuckle how loud. I'll put a video up on Instagram. It made me chuckle how incredibly delicious it was. Organifi.com forward slash shrug. Use the coupon code shrug to save 20%. I'm so stoked. Organifi is back in my life. We were missing it, hanging out with them for two months at the end of the year. And they're back in the house and I am so excited about it. But that's the morning meal. Cateredfit.com. Use Shrugged25. Get your paleo-friendly meals. You're going to love them. They're delicious and they're delivered daily if you would like that.

You can set up the schedule however you'd like to, but I go daily because I want it to be fresh. And then to make sure you're digesting all the protein. Make sure you go to Masszymes, or you get your Masszymes and your HCL, plus your probiotics, plus your Gluten Guardian at biooptimizers.com forward slash shrugged. Use the coupon code shrugged. You're gonna save over $100 on the package of all four of those. And then get all of your micro vitamins,

all your vegetable needs over at organifi.com forward slash shrug and use the coupon code shrug to save 20 back to the show welcome back to barbell shrug this is the most fun of all time i'm having a blast doing brobo club right now we are literally in my garage right now. We have a space heater oscillating to keep Doug and I warm. It is a very, very, very chilly 62 degrees outside.

Doug's got his bare feet popped up against the space heater over here like it's a campfire. People survive out here in this southern California. Man, I'm not going to be in it soon. That's right. Moving away.

We're going east coasting. We're going to go to some property. Me and Christmas Abbott, we're going to hang out. Pretty exciting stuff. We're going to move to Raleigh. You're number one something. What was the tease? That was a great tease. The number one book. The Talent Code.

Dan Coyle. Have you read it? No, not that one. I read Talent is Overrated. I think it has some similar concepts. Yeah. Talent Code. Learning how to learn.

I think it is the most important skill that when I read this book, I instantly was put me in a headspace of, oh, I can really go do anything. Like it is possible if you actually commit yourself to really deep practice and understanding how your brain learns things and it gets into um this little thing called myelin myelin is basically a little information packet that your brain creates from your brain to whatever action needs to be done or learning process it's a it's a coding on your neurons that accelerates the speed of the transduction that was such a better fucking scientific intelligent way of saying that i like the little information packet um if you combine enough of those little information packets the highway at which your brain is able to communicate to getting the end result of whatever you're looking for becomes much easier. That process becomes much smoother.

And that is how you get good at things or become good at things. And all you have to do is commit to being really good at something, finding what that thing is, and then practicing it. And practicing the skill as a whole until you get relatively decent at that skill and then practicing the skills that make you better at that larger skill and then practicing the skills of those skills and you can literally like it's not a lie that you literally can be good at anything if you sit down and put the work into understanding what are the components of being good at that, people are born maybe with two smart families that have the ability, but you can make yourself smart and you can make yourself understand business.

You can make yourself be a good trainer, a good athlete. You can learn how to move. And it was one of the most, it is the number one book that I tell every single person that asks me what book I should go read because it lays out in such a beautiful way the founding principles of learning and how your brain works with your body to create whatever it is that you would like it to do. It's so malleable. Even at this age, I say this age, like 35 is really old, but I feel like it's do we it's so malleable even at this age i say this age like 35 is really old but i feel like it's really old um that we can continuously learn things create great habits

shed the trash that we're bringing with us like it's just it's it's a process of wiring your brain thinking about a result that you'd like to get out of it, and then doing the work. And it can be applied to anything, whatever you want it to be, to make you good at something. Yeah. I've said this to you before,

but I feel like we're spectrums on a spectrum. Yeah, I love this. We're about to go on such a good dive. Where no matter what you are, what category you're thinking about, whether it's like being a great basketball player, just like as far as like raw talent, right? And then someone else, their raw talent is at 95%, right? You can, if you start at the 50th percentile, you can work really, really hard and practice a lot, and you can move really far up that spectrum. Maybe you go from the 50th percentile to the 95th percentile. But I feel like that's your cap.

Yeah. You can only go so far depending on where you start. And so if you want to be truly great at something, if you want to be the best in the world at something, you have to start with a lot of talent kind of natural raw ability and then also work really really really hard to to hone and refine the skills that make you truly the best at whatever that is i actually wonder um can do you think that you have to be genetically inclined? In sports, yes. But in intellectual realms or in business, do you think that you can't become great at business?

I don't think that business isn't necessarily... Or like coaching. I don't think that those things are in our genetics. I think that's business and coaching and things like that. Those are things that humans made up that did not really have any meaning for survival until somewhat recently. Right.

I think it's much harder to say you're in the 50th percentile for being something like a CEO because there's so many different skills that go into being a CEO compared to a bench press champion. There's less things going on with someone who just needs to bench a lot of weight than someone who needs to run Google. Yeah. But I do think, now that it's brought up, the bench press. just need to bench a lot of weight than someone who needs to run google yeah all right um but i

do think kind of to the point now that it's brought up the bench press like if you look at physical skills like you know bench press or being a strongman competitor whatever it is like if you go to a trainer and you say like i want to be a world champion bench presser well they go okay well say you bench 185. They can probably take you from 185 to 500 over a course of a long time. And if you bench 500, you bench more than everybody. Yeah. Except for the people that bench 900.

There's a handful of those guys, and you can't never beat those guys because the guy that benches 900, the first day he ever bench pressed when he was like 12, he bench pressed like 225. And then when he was 15, he benched 400 pounds with no coaching. You have to be a certain type of person to get to the highest levels of, in this case, physical activity. If you want to be an NFL tackle, well, you have to already be 6'7". You just have to be. If you're 5'4", it doesn't matter how much practice you put in.

You just can't be that person because you just aren't that person. If you've ever trained with an NFL person, when they walk in, you go, Oh, that's why you play in the NFL. It's so obvious because you're a giant. Right. So it's easier to see in the physical world that, oh, some people just aren't cut out to do certain things. If you take that 6'7 tackle and you ask him to be a gymnast,

there's just no chance. He isn't the right person for the job regardless of how much he learns and how much he practices and who his mentors are. He's just the wrong person for the job. I think that likely is still the case for other more intangible things like intellectual pursuits

and even emotional pursuits. To be really, really phenomenally good with people, there's certain people who just have this like this thing about them that just like draws people to them and they they just they have charisma and and no matter who you are you could probably develop some charisma and you could work on your communication skills and you could get really really good and lead a totally normal, if not extraordinary life. But to be the best, you have to start with a certain amount of talent. So I think to say it's just about practice, I think is overstating it. Although that's probably what you are more likely to hear more often because that's what people say when they're trying to sell you.

Like anybody can do it, that type of thing. But I think both the things both of these things are correct like you you can get way better than you are right now at almost any task i think almost everything in life has some degree of making it a learnable skill but at the same time if you truly want to be the best at something it's also important to know hey am i am i putting my eggs on the wrong basket? I could be world class at something, but I'm choosing the wrong thing. Back to the gymnast versus football player. Well, yeah, I think that it's interesting because when you see the absolute best in the world,

like maybe the greatest of all time, like LeBron comes to mind. Right. Like LeBron was born looking like lebron his whole life this is the thing that i find so gnarly about people like him right people that play business don't learn business most of the time until like they may have dabbled in doing like small projects or like dreamed about running businesses when they were younger. But there's not many like nine year old standouts running businesses. Right.

When LeBron was born, he was the most gangster basketball player on his street. And then they were like, man, that guy's really good. Like, he should go play the people at surrounding neighborhoods and crushed all of them. And then they were like, man, we should get this guy to, like, see if he's any good in our city and crushed all of them. And then the state and destroyed them. And then when he didn't go to college, he was in high school driving around in a Hummer. I remember when that happened.

High school, he was a man-child against those people. I watched the McDonald's high school all-star game thing that he did. Yeah. He scored like 38 points and just made it look easy. Back right before he went into the NBA. Yeah. And then he gets into the NBA. And. And then he gets into the NBA, and, like, year one, he's the best. I mean, like, Kobe, of course, but, like, you knew LeBron.

You were like, whoa, that guy is so different. Could you – so not only was he born the most physically freaky dude that existed and was more athletic than everyone he ever talked to in his entire life and never lost a game probably ever because he was so much more physically dominant probably off to be better all the time. And he has like an eight-figure expense on his balance sheet for body maintenance, trainer, building a gym in his house, like the works. It's like an eight-figure number that he spends every year on just his body. That guy can't be reached you can't go and be anders varner and think that you're gonna go be lebron james spending eight figures like that just that you weren't born there yeah so you can't get there but in intellectual capacity because everybody kind of starts playing business or starts playing some games at a that physical capacity doesn't really matter i mean it matters it definitely matters but uh maybe on the highest level you wouldn't think that your your in-shapeness

matters in business and making business decisions. Like, you don't start that game until so much later in life. So being born with it, how would you know that Elon Musk, when he was seven, was going to be flying spaceships to Mars, launching Falcon things over my house? Beautiful Southern California there's a freaking alien up in my nightly walk with my wife and daughter I look up and there's an explosion in the sky what is that thing I don't know it's not an alien Elon Musk is shipping some rocket out to Mars he's gonna try and fly half of it back and

land it on this little pedestal so he can reuse it. Yeah right, Elon. Is that thing on Mars right now? Does he have things on Mars? Elon hasn't. We have Mars Rover and other things on Mars, but Elon didn't do it. He's bringing people.

Who's going to go to Mars? Are you going to Mars? No. I'm not. No way. Who's going to go to Mars? Are you going to Mars? No. I'm totally not going to Mars. I'm not. No way. They don't have podcasting in Mars.

I would get to Mars and think I was cool for like an hour and then be like, shit. I'm not coming back. I got things to do. I got to go to work on Monday. This whole thing was just a funky little idea I had. Now I'm stuck here in a greenhouse on Mars. We're so fucking sad. I was waiting for you. You opened your mouth and then nothing came out.

So that was what? That was all. That was talent code. Killer. Go read the talent code. That was talent code. Killer. Go read the talent code. That was all five of mine. I even gave it a five and a half because I got rid of, if you go in the one thing, it's a pretty solid book, people.

You should go read the one thing. It just isn't. When I forgot about Weedskin, that one got me. I had to pull an audible there. I was saying this to you earlier. I always think it's funny. The book, The One Thing, is basically a book about focus

and just find out what the one most important thing is to you and just go all in on that one most important thing. There's no reason in your day you should be working on number 10. No. Why? You should be working on number one. That's the only thing.

If you're only working on one thing at a time, it should be your most important thing. So focus on the only thing you if you're only working on one thing at a time it should be your most important thing so focus on the one thing yeah but then there's a book with like you know a hundred different pieces of advice for you to focus on the one thing and it's like it's like it's a contradiction of sorts like i always think it's funny when people don't use the advice they're telling you to use as they're telling you to use it like if you're like the best salesman ever you have like the best sales process ever and you're trying to sell me your system on on on selling and the way that you're selling me isn't what the system is saying you should do then it's just like there's a total disconnect yeah i've never they um if if this list is not your all

time list this is only 2018, what books make your all-time? Oh, man. Pressure on the spot. You probably won't remember the actual number one. So if we go top two. Drive, I think, is a very good book. I have that, I believe, upstairs, but I haven't read it.

Yeah, Drive by Daniel Pink is great. What's that about? It very well may not be my favorite book at this point, but I've kind of always just said it was since I read it back in 2010, on the way back from the CrossFit weightlifting event that they had in Colorado Springs. Did you go to that? I did not.

That's the first time that I was exposed to the book drive. Daniel Pink, he's a behavioral psychologist or something along those lines. And he studies the psychology of behavior. And so he points out a bunch of really interesting things in that book about incentives and motivations and what drives people to be intrinsically versus extrinsically motivated. Easy examples. He has this concept called if-then rewards

versus now-that rewards. Most of this is in the context of getting people to do creative work as opposed to monotonous, drudgery work like yeah you know if if you're on an assembly line or you're just fixing widgets and like you're supposed to do 10 a day and i incentivize you by saying hey if you you know get get you know 12 a day then you'll get this bonus

or whatever it is then your people tend to if they get more for doing more, they'll do more and they'll get more. That's no mystery. But for creative work and for being intrinsically motivated to do future quality creative work, he points out a couple of interesting things. So if you tell somebody, if you do this, then I will give you this reward, then they tend to do what you ask them that that one time but if you don't keep giving them that same reward in the future then then they're demotivated they don't do anymore um this even applies to like if someone does something for free and then you pay them to do it and then you take away the payment then even though they were doing

it for free before they'll do it radically less after you then even though they were doing it for free before they'll do it radically less after you turned it into you're doing it for an external reason the internal intrinsic motivation goes away or at least like lessons so if you know if you play basketball for three hours a day since we're just talking about basketball and then someone says hey you know i'll pay you to play basketball and then they they stop paying you to play basketball then just without thinking about subconsciously after that people tend to play less basketball interesting it's a weird weird thing so um he says instead do instead of doing if then rewards you want to do now that rewards which is basically like a surprise bonus.

People do the thing and then afterward, you say, hey, man, that was really awesome. You did that thing. Here's a little thing. Here's a little reward, money or a gift or whatever it happens to be. And then in that case, even though you gave them the same amount since it was a surprise people tend to after the fact stay just as motivated as they were before they got the reward as opposed to yeah in the other scenario where they actually lost motivation it's one of many concepts in the book i haven't spent like eight years since i read it but the whole book's dope so it's all about like how you how you kind of accidentally or intentionally can influence the

behavior of other people if you're if you're a leader if you're um you know someone that just interacts with people on a daily basis and like you know their performance matters to you whether you're like the you know the star player or or captain of you know your high school football team or or you're a ceo of a fortune 500 company like and you influence other people then understanding how how incentives and and rewards and you know compensating people or whatever it is like factors into their motivation is really really important killer killer that was a good rant. That was good. That was the surprise book. How much do you think you actually, like if you read a book like that, and you read, I mean you're reading, your intake of information is on the very high side.

Yeah. Do you feel like you are actually implementing from each book you read like a small piece of it multiple pieces of it or do you think it's more about just the thought pattern washing over you over time yeah it's actually a really good way to put it i feel like um earlier today uh we were we were talking and we mentioned that listening listening to or reading to a large volume of similar information like you just tend to notice the patterns does everyone say the same thing about one piece or another okay well that's you know we're talking about principles earlier at lunch like if you read enough books in a category whether it's training or nutrition or or business or or whatever it is, you'll start to, over time, see the same patterns emerge.

And that's kind of what I'm looking for with the high volume of information that I tend to listen to is I'm just looking for the patterns. If everyone converges on the same thoughts or ideas, there's probably something there. And some people said, why don't you read more books? Well, reading books is great too. You definitely should read books. Reading books is totally awesome. But I feel like the audio piece,

you won't take in as much as if you read it. But number one, I can listen to a full book in two or three days and I can choose to go read it based on having listened to the entire book. And or two, it's free dead time throughout your day. It's like if you're driving, you've got a 45-minute drive, you might as well listen to something.

There's some value in being alone with your own thoughts and not being on all the time. But most of the time, I think it's free education. You should take advantage of free, like no hassle education. If you educate yourself an extra two hours a day, every day,

and you do that for five, 10, 20 years, you're going to be a fucking totally different person completely different i feel like that is i i didn't read much at all until i learned in business that i was going to have to become smarter or i was going to fail epically like fail very fast and um that once I got in I think like that book outliers was the first one where I was like oh this is really interesting like there's like a path to success it's practice I could do 10,000 hours like Like, cool. But yeah, reading is so rad. I feel like reading to me, I do a lot more. I mean, I listen to every show we put out each week.

So I have most of my audio intake is us meatheads laughing at each other and having really good shows on our network. So that I don't get to do much of the of the audiobook um i like reading because i write a lot and reading is like passively learning how to write better for me like i love the ideas of the book and i love the learning that goes on but you're when you're reading like a book like principles that's 500 pages long you're reading really well written sentences that have been through many many editors over time with really strong vocabulary and really strong sentence structure and really strong, just complete ideas.

And you just read that over and over again. And next thing you know, your writing gets better because you read that sentence back to yourself that you've written. And you're like, oh, that didn't sound like what that guy wrote. You can feel the difference in your writing by reading more. Because when you read it to yourself and it doesn't sound like the book that you're reading, you know that's a bad sentence. That's not a complete thought.

And it needs to be rewritten to be better. That's one thing I've really, I've, I've noticed about my, my writing and reading like flowing together. Um, and then this, I feel like podcasting now, especially cause we're doing such long shows is, is like thinking out loud with another human. Yeah. Like we have this list, but I really, man, it's so funny cause I feel like I'm going to say something one time, like in the flow of the conversation that I'm just thinking out loud.

Yeah. And someone's going to go try it in the gym and be like, I tried that move. And you're like, you shouldn't have done that. I didn't know the answer. I was thinking. I was talking to someone. I was asking a question.

But that is the best because then I've noticed just in doing this, it's like it puts a whole bunch of thoughts into your brain, and then you have to go back. And when I go back or when I'm writing, like I'm answering those questions to what we do on these shows most of the time when I'm doing whatever writing it is. So thinking out loud, recording conversation go really well together.

Reading really helps me passively understand better sentence structure, complete storytelling, having a better vocabulary. And then writing is kind of, I really want to be a good writer i enjoy being a good writer and the uh it all it all helps that big goal of mine yeah uh this actually ties in well with one of my books so i'll talk about atomic habits real quick yeah uh atomic habits uh by james clear who again we need to have on the show uh at some point actually i actually did interview him like three or four or five years ago um just like over a skype type interview just to try it out

and that's not really not really my style but we we've done a few of those in the past just to just try it but so that that's floating around out there somewhere. Google that one. It's so much more difficult over Skype than it is just sitting here like this. When you're a good talker and you go on someone's Skype show, you can just take it over. Yeah. It's kind of like because there's that weird like half a quarter of a second

of awkward dead time, and it's enough for my brain to be like, empty space talk and then i could just like take it and like all of a sudden i've talked for 30 straight minutes like sorry i took your show over it's just that little bit it was so awkward i had to fill it and then another thought popped in my head actually really interesting point before i talk about atomic habits about how i I got James Clear onto that interview. I was listening to a podcast. They mentioned him. I was like, I don't know who this guy is.

I got on Twitter, looked him up, sent him a message. Fifteen minutes later, I'd never heard of him before. And within 15 minutes, I had an interview scheduled with him. Wow. It's like, that's the coolest part about the internet. Never heard of the guy. Fifteen minutes later, I have a scheduled interview with him. Yeah.

Dope. I don't use Twitter for much, but it helped me that day. It worked out. So, Atomic Habits. Everything James Clear does is about behavior and habit formation, and this book was totally dope. He just talks about establishing daily routines that way just like the listening to to audio for two hours a day or whatever it is we just mentioned like if that's just a part of your daily routine that stacks up over the years it's a big deal yeah um and you know i'm kind of famous so to

speak for having my headphones on all the time which um like they're always hanging out of my shirt back when i had cords before i got airpods which i really really like by the way so that's that part of my outfit is gone it's gone now but i was kind of known for it for years because i have them everywhere i go and you know the convenience factor of having my headphones within inches of my ears at all times is huge yeah like if it's that easy just to they're always hanging in front of my shirt just pick them up put in my ears click the button and all of a sudden the education just rolls yeah rolling rolls on through uh that's that's huge the fact that that you have that level of convenience now um but that's that that's what made it a daily thing if it was like,

you know, it was 20 or 30 years ago, like you have to buy like a, you know, go to the store, buy a tape, you have to have your tape player and like you have to like

sit and listen to your tape player like on your free time. Yeah. You're not going to do three hours a day. You just, no one has time just to, I mean,

you do have time. Some people have time to sit around for three hours and listen to educational videos, but, or audios in this case. But if you just have it convenient, like, the habit will be so much easier to stick because of the convenience. Another thing that he talks about is having, if you want to establish a habit, you have to tie it to a different habit. Right? if you want to establish a habit, you have to tie it to a different habit. So, like, easy example, if you want to floss, you never floss,

well, you always floss right before you brush your teeth or right after you brush your teeth, whichever one. Like, you tie those two together. That way, every time you go to brush your teeth, you're like, oh, I also floss. So, like, you need a trigger to activate the habit. I think in the other main book about habit, Power of Habit, excuse me.

I have it upstairs. I want to say it's this book. All the habit books talk about cues, habits, and rewards. So you can't stop habits. You just have to replace habits. It's like what some people say. Where if you have the trigger and then you just switch out the habit,

and then you still have a reward, then now you've replaced the habit, and it'll stick. Do you want to hear a good one about that? Sure. So I told you earlier tonight, I can't believe I hadn't told you this in the past, but that for 10 years, chewed tobacco right so in a in a longer story my wife i hid it from her when we were casually beginning our dating process because who wants to have that conversation um and you you like that right yeah yeah do you mind if i throw a dip in real quick? I know this is romantic. But when it all came out and she saw me chewing tobacco,

she was like, you're quitting tomorrow. And I was like, yeah, mate. No, she was like, no, you're going to quit. I was like, okay, I'll do it. So instead of quitting dipping, which i had done many many many times to no success i quit going to convenience stores so i used to always go get like chocolate milk or something like after working out if there was nothing around but you do that enough consistently over a week and every time you go there standing behind the cashier guy

is a can of skull and it's just like oh yeah and one of those right but if you stop going to the place that sells it everything else becomes much easier and it becomes a much different question you're no longer quitting dipping you're no longer quitting the thing that you're addicted to you're quitting going to convenience stores it became much easier in my head it was easy for me to quit going to convenience stores but it would have been really hard to quit dipping which i had failed at many times yeah it was a really really interesting thing i got that um actually from the i didn't get that from there but the the idea of practicing doing like getting out of my my um my general system, my habit of going over there to get post-workout, whatever it was, and then clearly standing in line, seeing it.

So, yeah, that was my – it works. The less time anyone spends in a convenience store, the better. Totally. Every time I find myself in a convenience store, I'm just like, what am I doing in here? I've got to get out of here. It's a different caliber of everything it's just just not my not my jam when you go in there in the morning and there's somebody and i actually don't go to convenience stores at all now like that is what's stuck around of that yeah like only when i'm on the road and i gotta get

gas that's it yeah but yeah that's what i i would end up doing when i was like training a lot it was just like work out go smash chocolate milk find some protein somewhere repeat didn't have enough time most of the time in between classes and all that crap to like really think about food um what did you say about buddha's brain um um that i really like it no but the buddha's brain thread there's a lot of pieces to that book was super influential gym in which i i was re-lost i knew what i wanted to do but like losing not losing selling your business losing all of those people around you every day, it's very freeing, but also it leaves you with a lot of empty time. Even if you're starting a new business, it takes a while for your business to become busy and no matter what you're doing you can be creating blogs and doing all that stuff endlessly but it's also like you haven't been around long enough for there

to be problems or situations to improve like you just you're just starting a new business and it's hard and it's a grind and it's empty most of the time and I went from having this radical gym where there was hundreds of people around me all the time that wanted to talk to me and then selling it and going back to zero and it was like fuck I need to like so I really dug deep into like meditation for a little while and really just wanted to understand what that was all about and that book so i actually went to a psychologist a couple times that was just focused on like breath work and mindfulness training just a bunch of cool what i still think it's super cool but um yeah so that book is i wish i could remember all of the details right now um but it

just teaches you about like compassion a lot for yourself um eliminating the ideas of like good and bad and just accepting things as they are like this is getting rid of the stories that we tell ourselves about what's true um being right and wrong and just being instead like accepting things as they are um so yeah it was it was it's it's a very cool outlook i think that there there's – I'm really – I don't do religion. Like, as soon as that conversation happens to me, I'm like, slowly step away. Or we're, like, a couple minutes away from me listening to you do your thing, and then I'm going to make, like, a wise crack because it's too serious.

But, like, there's something about the Buddhistdhist thing that like they kind of just want to like they just want to chill and like make everybody get rid of the stress and just be happy being themselves and um maybe that's my little hippie side that kind of came out being in southern california too long um but it's a it's a very cool look at just understanding the brain what what makes the brain work i think that um when you if you can simplify how your how you make decisions and become aware of your decision making process like i focus a lot of the time just like where's my attention at throughout the day and or just over time and like this is a really good week to understand when you think about attention right so it's the

week it's literally new year's day Doug just flew out here and tomorrow we're going into our like quarterly meeting to set planning and business plans and all kinds of fun stuff for the last two weeks I've been traveling and on the road and it's the end of the year and everyone's scattered and everyone's running around and I feel like work has been like the third thing on my plate when usually it's the first between eight o'clock and five o'clock six o'clock whatever it is um when i have to go be dad and husband um but work still is is a massive piece to it and then we are oh nice we're getting plugged in um so my when i think about like my attention throughout the day or throughout the week my ability to be just focused on the things that we're working on thinking about them all the time not just doing the things but like being really focused on what

it feels like am i enjoying what the final product is are we are we creating something that's worthy of like being distributed to all these people like you're absorbed or you're you're consumed by all the things that go into what we're doing, most of the time, my attention is focused on all of the pieces of our business and building great shows and writing great programs and things along those lines. This book does a great job of just explaining that you, through practicing meditation or whatever it is,

can start to get into the subconscious of your brain. Your subconscious brain is firing information to your higher level brain, sub-prefrontal cortex or frontal cortex, right? Your prefrontal cortex? Yeah. That's the monkey part. It's late. I'm drawing a blank right now.

I think that's right. I'm definitely not a brain expert. Yeah. We're going to go, I think it is the frontal cortex. God, I'm going to sound like an idiot right now. It's late. But whatever,

so your subconscious is firing these thoughts out, and you don't have, if you can sit down and watch your brain just move, you will start to realize that it says a whole bunch of things. And the act of actually carrying these things out happens, but you don't have to take action on all the thoughts and feelings and things that swarm your brain and i think that so many people are unaware of where their thoughts come from what inspires these thoughts that they just act on what comes to the front of their brain and that is the thing that is going to leave you scattered and not able to really focus it in on what you'd like to be good at or what you would like to pursue because you're just doing everything that pops into your brain and if you can start to through meditation or through just journaling there's a lot of there's endless ways to do it

but if you can sit down and just start to recognize and be aware and objectively view your thoughts without taking action, you get really good. It's kind of like the idea of Tinder. A thought can pop up, and you can swipe left and just say, I'm not going to pay attention to that one. Another thought can pop up, and you can swipe left, and it doesn't matter. If a good one comes up, you can totally swipe right and think, wow, that's really cool. And then you can go on

thinking about that and hold on to that. And it's going to create really amazing things in your life. And you're going to have the ability to kind of control your thoughts and your subconscious going forward because you'll be very dialed in on training your brain of what is a good thought and that's something that you can actually create i think people should go read that book it's on my list i haven't gotten to it yet let's see speaking of brain i one of the books on my list was The Aging Brain. I mentioned earlier, mostly referencing how to keep your brain healthy to ward off dementia. I think Alzheimer's is thrown in there as well. I'm not actually 100% sure what the exact distinctions are between dementia and Alzheimer's. But to me, they're both fucking terrifying. And so I want to live the kind of the healthiest lifestyle that I can possibly stand to keep my brain as healthy as long as possible.

I feel like losing your mind has got to be like one of the most excruciating things yeah like if you if you could find yourself in a situation where like internally you're still thinking clearly enough to know that something's wrong but you're not good enough to like your brain's not healthy enough to actually do anything about it in the real world yeah and you just you're just locked in this prison and you can't do anything about it. You can't even really ask for help. But internally, you know, things are very, very wrong.

Yeah. This has got to be awful. And so I'm just like, I'm so fucking terrified of that, that I, 99% of my thought process these days, as far as like how healthy I'm trying to be, isn't about winning jujitsu competitions and everything else.

It's about trying to minimize joint pain and keep my brain as healthy as possible for as long as possible this is the longest people have ever been alive on like a mass scale most of the time for humans if you live this long you just got eaten yeah but we don't get eaten anymore and now we now we're finding out like what the end limits are for a brain. Right. There's probably a lot of things you can do, but this is probably one of those genetic things of like, you just got a brain that's going to be around a long time.

If you can keep the physical going, like, dude, how old are your grandparents? Are they still alive? My grandparents aren't alive. I have one that's like 94 95 she's the one with dementia yeah and it's terrifying body works like a charm walks around eats the ice cream at the home crushes it but man no brain dude it's super sad yeah um it's really really sad you were talking about earlier about like the family thing like it's heavy my mom had to take care of her for i mean she still

does but she goes to the home and yeah they found a they finally found a home that looked like it's gonna work out it's not like an easy process but yeah it's brutal um my mom's a savage for doing that i think about that because she's going through it yeah and like she's talking to me about it and i'm like fuck like what if we have to do that for you like that would be crazy we what if our family has long brains like that just go but you lose them like the body just outlasts the brain yeah it's crazy how much is like eating and exercise matter it's like 10 days you're gonna get an extra 20 good days is that it is that it am i gonna get two years maybe a fucking boss in those two years like is it gonna be awesome yeah oh there's so many questions

there's a woman i want a woman that i want to get on the show and i i can't remember her name right now for life me uh but i watched youtube video uh where she was talking about her whole books on on us on alzheimer's um so i can't remember her name but i want to get her on the show i'm going to reach out to her very soon but one interesting thing that she pointed out was and this is like my very

uneducated theory at the moment it's half-baked at best but related to ketones and kind of the mental clarity that people get with ketones it's always seems toones it's always it's always it seems to me it's always older guys that are like i tried i tried ketogenic diet and i i could

think so clearly like i had like all the mental fog was gone it was amazing and then like all my friends try it and they're like it was fucking awful like i could i just had no energy and i everyone tells me like like I'm so mentally clear. But, like, I was not. I couldn't focus on anything. You know, it might be overstated on both sides. But what this woman was saying was that, so a lot of people call Alzheimer's type 3 diabetes. It's your brain.

Your brain's number one fuel source is glucose. And for the brain cells that can't process glucose, they don't work very well. They're starving. You lose brain mass when you have Alzheimer's. And I think they're not actually 100% sure, or maybe they are and I'm just not sure, do you actually lose brain cells or are they just shrinking in size because they're they're starving so to speak but you lose brain mass but what they found was that all these brain cells that can't process glucose they still can process ketones and they can run on ketones so if you take take someone who has starving brain cells, so to speak,

and then you, because they can't process glucose, and then you either give them exogenous ketones and or you put them on a ketogenic diet and now all of a sudden all these starving cells are getting fed a fuel source

that can make them function normally, then all of a sudden this person has like all this mental clarity and they can think again. And so, maybe this is confirmation bias on on my part but i feel like it's always older guys that might already have some degree of of brain tissue loss or you know the they're not processing glucose at full capacity like they used to and then then they try a ketogenic diet, and it's like this amazing thing,

but the younger people don't see it because they haven't kind of gone down that path yet. So they have a normal healthy brain that is functioning with glucose, and until they get into a situation where they can't process glucose and they need ketones to have a normal functioning brain, they're not going to have that mental clarity experience. I don't know if this is true. This is my half-baked theory at the moment. Have you done the ketogenic diet?

No. I don't know if I did it, but I used to not really eat many carbohydrates. Rob will fuck me up, dude. Yeah. Thanks, Rob. Way to be the only podcast about nutrition for the first three years of podcasting. Yeah, I was like the hardcore paleo, except like Saturday night when I would just get like cheat meals. Yeah. But, yeah, I feel like I spent the majority of my time training really hard on a ketogenic diet.

Like, really just eating a lot of meat, like three pounds of meat every day. But yeah, I don't... I feel like if you do it that long, I don't know if it... Your body just kind of like starts to stabilize these things. Like, it's just going to survive doing the ketogenic diet like and then and then your body adjusts itself back to where it's supposed to be and i don't know i feel like uh once you once you have the basics of of that one ketogenic diet might not be for you just eat healthy for the most part uh on the aging brain they've everything else in there is pretty basic it basically says like eat high quality foods

don't be processed junk you know minimize your sugar intake eat meat vegetables nuts and seeds on and on and then also of course workout exercise some supplements have some efficacy there omega-3 fatty acids since your brain's made out of fat and it's mostly omega-3 and omega-6 fatty acids you need to have essential fatty acids so especially fish oil because fish oil is made out of EPA and DHA and DHA is one a very large component of your brain and neural tissue specifically so having DHA is really important that's why mothers who are pregnant or soon to be mothers who are pregnant supplement with DHA that way they it helps the the baby's brain development rhodiola was mentioned also and I don't remember the other supplements but mostly it was just like basic healthy advice.

You can't silo having a really healthy body and an unhealthy brain as far as your nutrition, lifestyle, behavior, and habits. If you're healthy, then you're healthy. If you're unhealthy, then you're unhealthy everywhere. Just be as healthy as possible. It'll all shake out, hopefully. Are your parents retired uh my mom just retired my dad is about to retire yes so my parents are both retiring this year yeah i'm slightly terrified about it oh yeah why i i have I have this theory. It might be half-baked as well. And it goes back to two hours ago when we were talking about meaning. These are hypotheses for the record.

We both have theories, but we know they're hypotheses. Yeah. Yes. That's really good. Yeah, this is us thinking out loud. So my parents, both of them are retiring. And I have this fear of retiring. Granted, I don't have to worry about it for quite some time.

But I feel like because of business and because of working out and because of my brain has to stay sharp. I have to keep learning or I get left behind. Right. And it's very much like a survival of the fittest thing. Like I have to stay sharp. It's not really a question right now. But what happens if you don't have to be smart?

Yeah. What happens if you just, you literally could just sit there and have Amazon ship the living essentials to you. And you have enough money to do it. And you don't have anywhere to be so it's fucking terrifying to think that you don't have to be smart like that's a real um it's a real thing that we have to do it's it's part of our survival as humans that like me and you and mike and everybody that is once like that has to go out and make their own dollar like it it's it you you're gonna you'll get left behind you'll die your business will die if you don't stay smart and stay on your game

and your brain is a muscle that has to be like, dude, your brain's got to get its pump on. It's got to be worked out. It's got to progress. And I feel like it's really terrifying if you don't do things with meaning that you constantly want to be getting better at because then your brain doesn't have to keep working.

Did I lay that out enough for you? You said your brain is a muscle. All I could think about was I used to know this girl who actually thought your brain was a muscle. Like it's in there, like contracting and extending, like over, no. Right. Your brain was just like a bicep or a hamstring.

It's a metaphor. Your brain. Your brain muscle. Yeah. It was like a – What exercise should I do? Math. It was like a trivia thing.

They were like – it was like name a muscle. She was like the brain. The brain is a muscle. People were like no. That's an expression. She was like no, it's not. Your brain is a muscle. No were like, no, that's an expression. She was like, no, it's not. Your brain is a muscle. No.

No. What exercise? How do I contract it? See, we haven't mentioned Chasing Excellent with Ben Bergeron. That dude smashed that book, by the way. That was one of the books that I actually did read, read. I don't even know if he has an audiobook version of it he totally should but it was so easy to get through yeah like it was it just there was no resistance to reading the book it just pulled me through the whole thing like it was like it's talking about character

traits and mindset and how to behave what to think about what not to think about you know think about things that are in your in your control versus not in your control, etc., all done through the narrative of Frazier and Katrin at the CrossFit Games. I think Cole was in there too, Cole Sager. So it was just him telling the story of the CrossFit Games and how each of these athletes did in their various events and using these these character traits to get them through and it was it was really entertaining and at the end of it like i felt i felt you know really like really motivated to be the best person i could

possibly be while reading a very fun story yeah killed it the author tells the story um in a language that you can understand. Weightlifting. How cool is that? Like if you, just the books, like the talent code tells multiple different stories. Like one of them is about the soccer players in Brazil that played. It wasn't soccer. It was on a smaller field with a heavier ball. So, and you had to be super quick with your feet the passes were much

snappier but that was like the game that they played just on the streets well now if you take that game and double triple the field and call it soccer now all of a sudden we've got the best footwork people the fastest players they connect better they're faster moving the ball because they played on this super compact thing and then all of a sudden they had space and they played a very different game than everybody else played but that was just how they learned how to play soccer was on a completely different playing field i don't know soccer that well. I know weightlifting.

That's why Bergeron's book is awesome. Because all of the examples are so easy to understand if you really like lifting weights. Yeah. And you understand CrossFit. Especially if you watched the CrossFit Games that year and you remember a lot of that stuff. Yeah. Let's see.

Also, the only book that I had mentioned yet was You Just don't understand we haven't talked about that at all no i mentioned at the very beginning but uh it's this book's a basically about the the communication dynamics between men and women and and of course to cycling back all the way to the beginning of our show here to jordan peterson's point there there are many differences in a winner together here There are many differences. We're really piecing a winner together here. There are many differences between the genders. In this book, they're talking about kind of like the theoretical stereotypes, average woman and the theoretical stereotype, average man.

Of course, how men are and how women are won't apply to all men and all women. Each person is their own individual. But this woman talks about kind of like the you know what the studies have shown on average how men tend to behave and how women tend to behave in regards to communication so um it's it's stereotyping each gender for sure but there's there's a lot of value in kind of learning what the averages are and then of course in your day-to-day life you need to figure out you know is the person you're actually speaking with um the individual person you're speaking with? Do they subscribe to the traits and the kind of the common elements of communication that that gender might convey on average?

But each person is their own individual person. So you can't necessarily say that all women are going to behave a certain way or all men are going to behave a certain way. But the average is help. Yeah. Do you read a lot of books on communication? I do, but I haven't a lot lately.

Yeah. Yeah. I like books. I assume, I'm trying to think off the top of my head if I've read any recently. I don't know. I don't know.

I don't know. Dude, do you want to go get some food? Okay, we're not even going to dig into it. You just don't understand, but you should go buy it. Okay, dig into it. Let's go. Tell me about it. Let's see.

How about your number one poll? The number one thing I remember. The number one thing you remember. Sorry, audience. My wife has dinner made upstairs tikka masala I can smell it it was good during the break we went upstairs and was like whoa you've been working

I actually don't want to get into it right now because I don't remember that much from it but I want to go eat because tikka masala is awesome and I love Indian food google it at Douglas E. Larson at Andersarner, at the Shrug Collective. We're going to go eat some food. We'll see you guys next week.

Shrug family, I know you love that. I know you love Bro Book Club. Make sure you take a screenshot, tag me at Anders Varner, hit me with the hashtag, go long. Look, look we're like two and a half hours right now just talking about bro book club what an unbelievable life make sure you get over to caterfit.com use the coupon code shrugged25 save 25 off all your meal delivery needs biooptimizers.com saving 37 using the coupon code code shrug biooptimizers.com forward slash shrug and organifi.com forward slash shrug save 20% on your order make sure you're getting the green drink

make sure you're getting the gold drink i really enjoy having the probiotics and if you can find, if they even have any of the pumpkin spice leftover, you better get on that. We'll see you guys on Saturday.