Dhru Purohit Show - The Top Lessons on Living a Regret Free Life with Brian Johnson

Episode Date: November 23, 2023

This episode is brought to you by Rupa Health, Whoop, and Pique. Our modern world often encourages us to pursue fame, fortune, and looks, but we know that one of the biggest pitfalls of chasing illusions of success comes at the cost of not knowing our true purpose and not living to our fullest potential. While the journey can seem daunting, and there is no straightforward guidebook to tell us if we are on the right track, there are key foundational pieces and impediments that are known to help or hinder the journey to living to our fullest potential and showing up as our best selves. Today on The Dhru Purohit Podcast, Dhru sits down with Brian Johnson, an expert on activating the hero within all of us. Brian shares the biggest impediments preventing people from creating meaning in their lives and being virtuous. He deep dives into the key objectives from his new book, Areté, and breaks down the fear or laziness that can often hold us back. On the road to living till 100, it's no secret that nurturing our souls helps us live longer. Brian is here to show us how.  Brian Johnson is the Founder & CEO of Heroic Public Benefit Corporation. Before his current company, he built and sold two social platforms. As a Philosopher/teacher, he’s helped millions of people worldwide and created a protocol that science says changes lives. In this episode, Dhru and Brian dive into (audio version / Apple Subscriber version): The biggest impediments that prevent people from creating a life of meaning (2:18 / 2:18)  Areté: being your best self and closing the gap (4:12 / 4:12) What comprises our virtue in the modern era? (6:30 / 6:30) Brian’s journey to find his purpose (14:13 / 11:37) Virtues that should be prioritized (17:35 / 14:50) Self-actualization of your potential as real as oxygen for your soul (20:16 / 18:00) Living a life where you don’t have regrets and focus on repairing relationships that matter to you (25:19 / 23:03)  How fear and laziness can prevent you from living to your fullest potential and being comfortable feeling uncomfortable (30:44 / 26:25)  Purposefully building anti-fragility in your life (33:35 / 29:16) Embracing the imperfection of life (38:00 / 33:45) How to design your personal protocol and learn how to play the game of life (41:01 / 36:10)  Foundational pieces that are a must to create zest in life ( 50:11 / 46:06)  Leaning into the why to understand each of the lessons (59:12 / 54:26) The seven objectives that Brian deep dives into his book (1:01:28 / 57:30) Also mentioned in this episode:  Areté Activate Your Heroic Potential Access more than 3,000 specialty lab tests with Rupa Health. You can check out a free, live demo with a Q&A or create an account at RupaHealth.com today. WHOOP is a personalized digital fitness tracker. To get yours, join whoop.com/dhru and get your first month free. Pique is offering their biggest holiday deal EVER. Shop now to unlock a complimentary 5-piece holiday gift set. This offer is only for a limited time at Piquelife.com/DhruTea. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

A good life comes down to putting your virtues in action. So the very bedrock of the positive psychology movement is, healthy, flourishing people, deliberately, mindfully put their virtues in action. Those four cardinal virtues are the foundation. And then there are five virtues that science says are most highly correlated to flourishing. What are the top things holding us back from stepping into our potential? And how do we break free of them so that we can live a regret-free life? If this question is something you've been thinking,

thinking about, something you've been pondering about. Today's episode is absolutely for you. Welcome to the Drew Proet podcast. Each week we explore the inner workings of the brain and the body with one of the brightest minds in wellness, medicine, and mindset. This week's guest is Brian Johnson, and he's here today to talk to us about integrating ancient wisdom and modern science to help us all win the ultimate game of life and fulfill our destiny, the destiny that we were meant to fulfill. Brian Johnson, a little bit more about him. He's the founder and CEO of the heroic public benefit corporation. He's 50% philosopher and 50% CEO and 100% committed to helping create a better world. As a founder and CEO, prior to his current company, Brian has built and sold two

social media platforms. As a philosopher and teacher, he's helped millions of people from around the world from over a hundred different countries step into designing their ideal life with science-backed protocols that have made them and their community better. His current book, which is the topic of today's discussion, is called Arateate, and it's a manual designed to help us all activate the hero that we have within. Brian Johnson, welcome to the podcast. A pleasure to have you here. I want to start big picture, my brother.

You know, we have a lot of listeners today that are on their own individual journey to what I call the Road to 100, not just living long, but living a healthy, happy life and most importantly, a life where we are minimizing or even repairing regrets that we have along the way. So starting big picture, what do you feel are the biggest blockers, the impediments that get in the way of people creating a life of meaning? What a great way to start. Good to see you, bro. I appreciate you, and I'm just excited to be here and all that you are up to. So when you said the road to 100, I thought of two things immediately.

I thought of, yeah, yeah, yeah, living to 100, but then also like feeling 100% alive right now, moment to moment to moment, which, of course, is the essence of my work and all those good things. But I think there's a couple of things. One, I think that people tend to have a lot of shame and regret about where they think they should be. You know, they look back over the last 5, 10, 15, 20, whatever it is years. And they're like, you know what, I should have done more. And I haven't been

able to change this behavior or that behavior. And we start to lose some motivation. We start to lose some hope that we truly can activate our potential, fulfill our potential. So I think, you know, getting to terms with that. And Seth Godin has a great line. He says, it's unfortunate that we didn't do some of the things we could have done, you know, in our lives. But it's unforgivable to wait any longer to, as I would say, activate our heroic potential. And then I think that people are seduced to play the wrong game. I think that we've been led to believe that going after the fame, the wealth, the hotness is where it's at. And as you know, a big part of my work is, no, no, no, you got to know the ultimate game.

You got to focus on the intrinsic factors of being a better person, deepening personal relationships, and making a contribution to your community, independent of Instagram followers, square footage in your house and all the other things. So that's, I could say a lot more, but I'll pause there. That's kind of what arose for me when you asked that question. Yeah. And you know, a big part of that is separating what matters and what does it matter. You have a word on your shirt. Break it down for us. And how does that help us play into this idea of separating the things that are important and the things that are distractions that will ultimately make it more likely that we end up with a life filled with regret?

Yeah. Yeah, so not only do I have this word, Aratee on my shirt, I've got it on my forearm, and then we, of course, named our book Aratee. You know, Aratee is the, if you were to ask the ancient Stoics, I got two of my heroes up there, Epictetus and Eurelius. But if you were to ask the ancient Stoics how to live a great life, they'd answer you in a single word. And that word is Arate. So we directly translate the word as virtue or excellence, but it means something closer to being your best self moment to moment to moment. And the way I like to frame it up is if you're capable of being this and you're actually being this and there's a gap between who you could have been

and who you actually were, it's in that gap in which regret, anxiety, disillusionment, depression exists. On one level, it's more nuanced than that. On another, it's that simple. And when you close the gap and you live with Artae, you experience a deep sense of joy and meaning and purpose moment to moment to moment. And, you know, the Greek and Roman Stoics would say that that's the sumum bonum of life. The greatest good is to close the gap and to experience what they call it eudaimonia, to have a good soul. We translate that as flourishing, but it's really a joyful, meaningful, purposeful life. And oh, by the way, you feel great right now, and that's how you live to 100. You know, so you get it both. You get the vitality and the joy and the enthusiasm for life now and increase

the odds of living a longer, more purpose-driven life in the process. You know, I feel like a big part of this journey as people are stepping down their own hero's journey is really understanding the problem. And I think that just like a good superhero film, which like half the film is first just understanding the premise, the problem, the sort of set up before we get into the real action that's there, we all have to understand that with our own life. So when you look out in this modern world and you look at the things that are continuously distracting us or having us sacrifice our own virtue, you know, what things come to mind? What is having us run amok where we've lost and forgot to ask ourselves, you know,

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W-H-O-O-O-P dot com slash D-H-R-U for your first month free of whoop. That's a long list of things, but I'll start by framing it up with this. This isn't, it's exacerbated in our modern era, but this is a 2,500-year-old challenge. So Socrates, and again, the Stoics talked about the choice of Hercules, where he was seduced by the virtue of vice who was dressed up and said that she was the virtue of happiness. And then the Bhagavigita is set on a battlefield, representing the metaphorical battle between good and evil within our own consciousness. Every culture across all time has said the same thing.

We need to win that inner battle. And it's not a new challenge. It's just amplified to, frankly, frightening degrees now with everything that is ultra-processed from the media we consume, the overwhelming amount of stimuli that we're exposed to, the refined and processed food, which breaks our brains. You know, it breaks our, breaks our consciousness when also, again, we're constantly seeing that fame, that wealth, that hotness and being told, you got to play this game. And oh, by the way, well, let me step back. It should be easy, is what I was going to say. So we're seduced to play the wrong game. Then we're told it should be easy.

But one of the things that's most impacted my own life and my own teachings is scientists say that if you're pursuing the extrinsic stuff, the hedonic stuff predominantly, and you don't need to be 100% not doing these things. But if you predominantly focus on the fame, the wealth, the hotness, even if you're predominantly focus on the fame, the wealth, the hotness, even if you're if you are successful in pursuit of those things, you will be less psychologically stable. And I quote, less psychologically stable than people focused on the, the intrinsic stuff we've been talking about. So just getting that, just stepping back,

an inch from society. And remembering Christiana Merti's dictum that it is no measure of health to be well adjusted to a profoundly sick society. 80% of us, or whatever the number is, are suffering invisibly, with anxiety, depression, burnout, innervation. We've got to step back, realize that most of us are playing the wrong game,

and then think about how we can live more in integrity with the ideas we're talking about now. How does the idea of Arete and virtues help us decide now what to give importance to? You know, once we get the big picture that, okay, we're playing the wrong game. I've been chasing the wrong things. I've been chasing people's approval. I've been chasing, you know, my parents' approval. I've been chasing material possessions. I've been chasing not wanting to be wrong or always wanting to be liked and fit into a particular bucket.

I know it's not working for me. I know it's driving anxiety. I want to start shifting in a different direction. And I like the idea of doubling down on things that are my true virtues. Where do I go from there? One of the things. So you step back and you say, look, maybe what I'm doing, isn't working quite the way I want, you know, and you're open to the ideas we're talking about.

But then I like to teach something called and practice something called targeted thinking. So my ultimate question is, well, what do you want? So when you slow down and unplug and you ask yourself, what do you want in your life, what comes up? You know, and scientists encourage us to do what they call a best selves diary where you take some time and you write down and imagine yourself in five years. imagine yourself in five years and you've worked hard, maybe you've gotten a little lucky, what does your life look like? And that's a hard exercise for most people to do, but it's a really important muscle to build to get more and more clarity on who you at your best looks like.

We break it down into what we call your big three, energy, work, and love. But imagine yourself as that best version of yourself, that's your target for the game that you want to play. Then pull it back to today and ask yourself, what do you? you need to do to bring that future to life. And it's a very simple exercise, but when practiced consistently, you can incrementally create a new life and transform your life. And we can talk about a lot of details behind that. But that's where I like to start is unplugging from all the inputs. And again, just when you think our world can't get any worse, the last 60 days happen. And people are overwhelmed and they're overwhelmingly exposing themselves to stimuli that, again,

I'm not saying put your head in the sand and ignore reality, but we need to create the space to connect to our best self so we can create a better reality for ourselves, for our families, for our communities, for our countries, for our world. And that's one of the exercises I like to use to help people get clarity on that. You know, I just want to make it a little bit personal here before we jump into the book a little bit more in some of the teachings that are there, is that you have implemented this in your own life. I mean, you are very open and honest with your own journey. You grew up in a very sort of tough household situation, not the most supportive father.

And even at points in time in your journey, we're contemplating, you know, what does actually your future look like being in the depths of despair? So walk us through just a little bit of the context of your life and this lens of, you know, who, who you were, but then deep inside knowing who you had the potential to be. Yeah, I appreciate you going there because it's really and really important to me that I like to be transparent about my own struggles. So youngest of five kids, lower middle class, blue collar family, father worked on a grocery store, good man, but he struggled with alcohol. His struggle, his dad struggled with alcohol ended his own life.

So I like to, you know, I can joke now that it looks like I lost the environmental and the genetic lottery on that one. First generation college student went to UCLA, hated my first job so much. I threw up on the way home from work on the 405, you know, side of the freeway, went to law school thinking that'd be my thing at Berkeley, knew I didn't want to be there, dropped out. And I'm spinning. I have none of these skills, none of this wisdom. And, you know, I spent a lot of time thinking about. how I could end my life. I know the depths of despair. And then for reasons we can discuss, but just kind of grace and whatever decided to keep on going, created some stuff that gave me

some more purpose, et cetera, and built systematically some scaffolding in my life and just obsessed about ancient wisdom, modern science. How can I help people move from that level of despair to, you know, we've been blessed to work with the most elite performers in the world. But I know what it feels like to suffer. And I think that that's a, it's a really important part of my story and an important part of my work. And what I'm most proud of, frankly, you know, I have a lot of fun working with everybody and the elite people, but there's something ineffably powerful about knowing that I've helped a number of people find purpose again who didn't want to live another day, you know. But I know what that feels like. I know what this feels like. I have a decent sense of the

steps I took and some frameworks people could consider embodying in their own idiosyncratic way. But yeah, that's a high-level look at kind of my background and what I think I know has really fueled my work. And so much of what I do, you know, is I wish I could find my dad when he was 17, 18, 19, 20, 21, 22, 23, 24, 25 years old and help him. So a lot of the creative work I do is how would I have been able to find him? You know, we do work with the military. Well, he was in the Navy. Oh, that's cool. How could we serve the military? And we're doing some cool things there. He was into sports. All right, well, how could we bring sports, you know, figures and their fans into heroic and all these things? But yeah, that deeply has affected me and inspires me today.

You know, a big part of the book, Arte, is helping people understand what virtues are sort of their priorities. What virtues are the most important? them. How do you help individuals navigate that process? And can you give us a few examples of these types of virtues that would be a good fit as a primary driver for someone versus somebody else? Yeah. So then the reason why I come back to virtue is twofold. It's ancient wisdom and modern science. So again, you can go to any ancient wisdom or faith tradition and you will find the exact same thing. They all say, be your best self in service to something bigger than yourself. about virtues. They talk about wisdom. They call it temperance. We call it discipline. Wisdom,

discipline, love, and courage are the four cardinal virtues of all ancient wisdom and faith traditions. Now modern scientists, when Martin Seligman and Mihai Cheek set me high and Ed Deiner created the positive psychology movement in the year 2000, they started by studying all of the ancient wisdom traditions. And what they found was what I just said, that they all said the same thing. A good life comes down to putting your virtues in action. So the very bedrock of the positive psychology movement is healthy, flourishing people deliberately, mindfully put their virtues in action. Those four cardinal virtues are the foundation. And then there are five virtues that science says are most highly correlated to flourishing. Tide for second are hope and gratitude. You can't be

simultaneously depressed and grateful at the same time. It's not possible. Don't believe me, try it. Now, it's more nuanced than that again, but grateful people tend to be happier people. And then hope is essential. There's a science to hope we can talk about. But if you don't have hope, if you don't believe your future can be better than your present and a plan to make it so, you're hopeless, literally. That's a one-way step to depression. So gratitude, hope, and then curiosity and love are two other incredibly important virtues.

But somewhat surprisingly, not for you, but for most, the number one version, You, science says that is most highly correlated with our well-being is zest. A weird word for energy, vitality, a sense of enthusiasm and, again, energy and vitality zest for life. So the basic fundamentals that you teach and have helped so many great teachers bring their wisdom out, eating, moving, sleeping, breathing, focusing your mind. Getting your energy dialed in is the most powerful thing you can do according to modern science. science. But those are some of the virtues. And then, of course, we can talk about tests that you can do to find your own virtues that I talk about in the book. But that's why virtue matters and some of the virtues that we want to make sure we're deliberately cultivating in our lives if we want to win

that ultimate game. You know, I want to pick up on zest and have you jump in that a little bit more with one of the concepts you talk about in the book, which is this idea of soul oxygen. You know, so many individuals feel that there is this trepidation they have that they know that they're meant to do something bigger. They know that that zest, they've gotten a little taste of it. And they know how great they feel and how great they make others feel when they regularly step into it. But there's part of them that feels like they're not fully actualizing on moving forward with their dreams and life. So talk about soul oxygen and how that plays into this. Goosepumps, dude.

So I don't know if you can see him. Where is he? No, I got Abraham Mazmo up there. You can't see Abraham Maslow on my wall. He's kind of the level above. But I got all my heroes back here, one of whom is Abraham Maslow. So Abraham Maslow, as you know and most know, created the hierarchy of needs. He coined the phrase self-actualizing.

So he studied Eleanor Roosevelt, who's over there, Albert Einstein, the greatest people of his generation. And the one word summation of my philosophy is, orate. The one sentence summary of my philosophy is an Abraham Maslow line, which will lead us to sole oxygen. He says what one can be, one must be. So anyone who is this far into a conversation like this has taken care of their basic hierarchy of needs, maybe not perfectly, but we live in an abundant world if we can be here in dialogue with one another. You've ascended the hierarchy of needs. And Maslow would say at a certain point, and you're at that point, if you're on this conversation with us right now, your need to actualize your potential is as real as your need to breathe. So I call that soul oxygen.

What one can be one must be. And if you're allowing gaps to be created moment to moment to moment, Maslow is way more intense than I am. I consider myself a pretty intense guy. Maslow, he didn't hold back. He says every single time you leave a gap. You know that you weren't your best self. It makes an impression on your consciousness. I framed it up. He says you can in any given moment, you can step forward into growth or back into safety, forward into growth, back into safety. I call it plus one minus one, plus one, minus one. On the days in which you allow the gaps to occur and you go back, Those are the days you want to numb yourself because you know you could have done more. But that's how I see soul oxygen. And again, I call it soul oxygen because you, dimonia means good soul. You dimon. And we all have this guiding spirit that the Greeks called your dymone. You have all the wisdom you need.

It's right there right now. The diminutive of dimon is demon. So the word demon is just the diminutive of daimon. Well, we have that voice in our heads as well. And the question is, which one are you listening to? The best within you or the less than awesome within you. And that's the ultimate game, is to slow down to recognize that in any given moment you have a choice. Victor Frankel briefly says that in between stimulus and response, there's a gap.

In that gap is your freedom. in that gap we can slow down and say, all right, well, what do I want? I don't want to yell at my kids. I don't want to compulsively do whatever. I want to be my best self. I want to be wise and disciplined and loving and courageous. All right, cool. What am I going to do? That's the game that we want to play. And this is what Maslow began studying scientifically. And very importantly, he also told us there are no perfect human beings, not one. And he studied the best among us. He says there are great human beings, movers and shakers. And but not one perfect human being. So we got to let go of the shame. We joke with our kids, you know. Oh, shoot, I was almost the first perfect human being after we make a mistake. And they laugh, they giggle, you know? Where was that when I was growing up?

I had to be perfect, fixed mindset versus growth mindset. But all these things come in. And I want to emphasize, this should be joyful. These are not chores we're talking about here that you have to check off a list. Oh, shoot, I have to go do this and this and this. These are micro moments. These are gifts you're giving to your. yourself, your future self. It's a long answer to your short question, but that's how I frame up

the soul oxygen. Oh, it's a great setup. And thank you for adding that secondary piece to it, because sometimes the number one thing that you need to do for where you're on your journey is actually slowing down and spending some time giving yourself a little bit more love. So just like you said, like it's not about always doing more. So for anybody who's hearing this is like, Oh, okay. So this is like a guy who's a biohacker who's trying to convince us to really like wake up at 4 a.m. every day and do X, Y, and Z. That's not the conversation that you're having. And that's not where the book is about. The book is about what is your definition of fully self-actualizing the things that will help you be the best version of yourself. And sometimes some weeks, that's going to be giving some more time to rest. Sometimes it's going to be picking up the phone and calling somebody who you, you were snappy with last week and apologizing. And when we don't do those things, that's that gap that weighs on us, that, oh, you know what, I could have been kind of that person and I didn't.

Oh, I was snappy with my kids. I wasn't unforgiving with my wife. And the fact that I didn't apologize, that's the stuff that will weigh on me. And if you have enough of those moments that build up over a period of time, that's how we start building up these deep regrets that people end up dying with. Dude, that's exactly it. And to put it in perspective, I mean, I was, I slept 10 hours last night. Two days ago, I gave a talk to the U.S. men's national team and I got six hours

of sleep, right? So I'm going hard right before they played their game last night. And then last time I'm making up for that. I'm in bed at seven. But it's about, you know, and again, Abraham Maslow said, if you basically decide that you aren't going to live your best life and give your best. And you decide you're going to be less than what you're capable of being. He said 50 years ago, 70 years ago, then I warn you, basically, not basically, I quote,

you're going to be miserable for the rest of your life. So it's a really important thing, you know, this is Joseph Campbell's hero's myth. You know, the hero is called to adventure. And a big part of my work is you're the hero we've been waiting for. So we got to quit being the victim complaining, criticizing, blaming and look in the mirror and say, look, if I want to change things, I'm the one that needs to start showing up and building that strength to help us meet these historically significant challenges and be the change I want to see to quote Gandhi. But there's an intensity that we want to

bring that's really important. But that intensity for me shows up in my 15, 30, 60 minute meditation practice. It shows up by being, I'm in bed for nine to 10 hours, eight to nine plus hours a night. So we want to make those beautiful waves, you know, oscillating. Well, we're intensely on and we're intensely off. We have that energized tranquility. And we discover our own idiosyncratic pathways. I'm me. We don't need another version of me.

You're you. Each of us here has our own kind of expression of our best selves. But I firmly believe each of us needs to turn up the heat, which is the subtitle of the book, activate your heroic potential. nothing happens until you get to an activation energy point, scientific phrase, where one thing becomes another thing. If you want to boil water, you have to get to 212 degrees. Nothing happens at 200 or 210 or 211. You want to start a fire.

It's 451 degrees Fahrenheit. Joseph Campbell quoted Sri Ramakrishna, who said, if you want to be enlightened, you must approach that like a man whose hair is on fire approaches a pond. And in our current world, there's a certain coolness to being overly critical and a bit cynical and even nihilistic. Fine. How's that working for you? But to be willing to turn up the heat and say, no, I want more out of my life. I want to give more to my family and to my community. And I'm going to do the hard work to get there while practicing and training our recovery, of course, is, you know, obviously what I'm all about and hoping to help more people activate. This episode is brought to you by Peak.

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ever. Shop now to unlock a complimentary five-piece holiday gift set. This offer is only available for limited time at Peak Life slash Drew T. That's P-I-Q-U-E-L-F-com. Peak life.com slash drew d hr u t tea to get access to this exclusive holiday deal some people feel like i want that call to adventure like there's something inside of me where i feel that desire that soul oxygen but and they might put themselves into two camps but camp one i'm lazy i don't think that i have the drive enough. I want it, but I don't know if I want it bad enough. And then there's another camp that says, I have too much fear that's blocking me. What do you want to say about fear and laziness and how it relates to this journey? I love it, dude. This is, as you know, one of the early chapters

in the book, my coach, Phil Stutz, who's back there on the wall, who's featured in a Netflix documentary with Jonah Hill called Stutz. I've worked with him 400 one-on-one coaching sessions. He's my spiritual father, just a beautiful human being. His favorite teacher is Rudolph Steiner. Rudolph Steiner said there are two things that are preventing you from living a life that you want to live, fear and laziness. So we need to conquer fear and laziness. We need to cultivate the courage. Fear's never going to go away. Fear is a great thing. Fear is a sign that you're out of your comfort zone. Perfect. How do you feel when you're out of your comfort zone? By definition, you feel uncomfortable. Now, if every time you feel uncomfortable, you pull back and you want to avoid the

challenge, you're never going to grow. You don't need to be crazy about it and go 20 miles out of your comfort zone. But you want to go 4%, 4%, 4%, 4% all day every day. And when you do that, you tap into your infinite potential. So cultivating courage is huge. And then even Yogananda. Yogananda was Steve Jobs' favorite teacher. At his memorial service, Steve Jobs had it set up so that everyone got a copy of Yogananda's autobiography on the way out. Goosebomb. You know, you read Yogananda, who was the first yogi, of course, to come to the U.S., beautiful man in the early 1900s throughout just in same intensity, same exact intensity. He didn't, you loved ambition, you know, even Echneth S.ron's one of my favorite teachers as well. It's easier for really ambitious people to succeed in spirituality because they have the energy, they have the ambition, they have the discipline to move through laziness.

So again, that overly critical, cynical, nihilistic, we got to reconnect to that fire within and conquer both fear and laziness systematically. And of course, I talk about that a lot in the second objective, forging anti-fragile confidence. But this all comes back to turning up the heat and then sustaining it and that those two ideas of fear and laziness makes it easy. You know, we're all always more fearful and more lazy than we'd like to. to admit, perfect. Nothing's wrong with you. Let's just get to work and see what we can do to get a little better today, you know? We're jumping around a little bit, but because you mentioned it, what do you want people to know about building anti-fragility in their life and how it helps us head down the virtuous path and ultimately lead to, you know, less regrets or no regrets along the journey to

100? Yeah. So anti-fragile confidence is probably my favorite. favorite part of the book and everything that I do. So first you need to know, all of this you need to know, you can create it. So whatever it is you want in your life. And again, you got to rub it up against reality. Some things are fantasy based. And I want to rub it up against reality. But you can create the things you want to create. That agency and that hope is important. So antifragility is the opposite of being fragile. Nasim Talib coined the word. And it's an important word because, you know, if you're fragile and you're a package, I like to say, it's like you write, handle me with care as you go through your life. If you, if you handle me roughly, I'm going to

break. COVID happens, I'm going to break. Relationship challenge, I'm going to break. Health crisis, I'm going to break. That's fragility. Resilience is better than being fragile, which means you can handle more pressure before you eventually break down and then you bounce back faster than most. But what would happen if you were the opposite of being fragile? What would happen if literally when you got hit, you got stronger. If you wrote on your box, throw me around. The more you challenge me, the stronger I get. You'd be anti-fragile. It's a really important concept that I combine with confidence. So the word confidence means etymologically intense trust, confidary, with intense trust. Now, if you want to cultivate trust

in any relationship, what do you need to do? Now, if we had scheduled this time and I didn't show up, You may give me a pass because we're friends, right? And you're like, oh, if something came up, you know, but if I did it again, you'd be like, dang, I don't trust Brian. And you shouldn't trust me because I'm not doing what I said I would do. Now, if you want to build a great relationship with yourself, you need to do what you say you will do. You don't need to be perfect. But if you say you're going to meditate or eat a certain way or move a certain way or spend time with your kids in a certain way and you don't, you're eroding your trust with yourself such that when life hits you, boom, you fall apart. it. Anti-fragile confidence, Phil Stutz calls that emotional stamina. In one of our earliest chats,

he told me that I had a lot of it. I said, oh, thanks, but I have no idea what that is emotional stamina. Next session, I said, what is it? He said, you can handle pressure and stress and you can respond to that well. And then, of course, my follow on question was, how do I get more of it? And what he said profoundly changed my life, and this is the thing that I teach that has changed the most people's lives. He said, the worst, if you want emotional stamina, if you want anti-fragile confidence, the worse you feel, the more you're being pushed by life, the more committed you need to be to your protocol. So the old me used to when I got hit, go go off the rails and do all the things that I knew weren't good for me, you know? For me, I'd be watching stuff late at night,

never drank. My dad and his dad did enough of that. But we all have our kryptonites. So the question is when life hits you, what if instead of doing those things, you decided to slow down and double down in their protocol and do the things you do when you're at your best? But that presupposes you know what your protocol is, that you know what you do when you're at your best. So helping people get clarity on that and then encouraging them to do it when they least feel like it is what it's all about. And this is, you know, when I talked to the men's national team, what did we just two nights ago, that was the thing their coach wanted me to talk to them about the most, was to make their prior best their new baseline. Because we've all performed at a high level, but then we give away the

games. You can't give away those games. You got to bring it back, set up a new baseline, and then have fun seeing just how great you can be in your energy, your work, and your love. Again, that's a long answer to your short question, but that's, that's objective to on anti-fragile confidence. And even getting three, five, seven percent better at this changes your life. Because if when you get hit, you do the things that are best for you instead of the others, you're as close to invincible from my vantage point as you can get. I don't remember what it was, but there's also a concept in the book that you pair right along with that, which is this idea that, you know, the idea that we're going to get everything right,

we got to let go of it, right? What's that concept called and can you break it down a little bit? Well, yeah, that would be called insanity. But I'm a recovering perfectionist, dude. Like, I was so fixed mindset. I thought I had to do every single thing perfectly. You know, youngest of five, golden child, hero child in the dysfunctional alcoholic family. You know, you got to get it all right.

My first job, dude, I would stress out about the staple. I wanted to make sure that it was perfectly parallel to the top of the line at the top of the page. And thankfully, this is now almost 30 years ago. But it's like, oh my goodness, bless that guy. Perfectionism will do it. I mean, we can go right there. But just embracing the imperfection of life. Again, to go to the Gita, you can't create a fire without smoke.

Not possible. Like there's going to be imperfections and defects, everything that we do. And again, to go to Phil Stutz, those are reverse indicators. You know, when you're feeling the pressure, the anxiety, the overwhelm, and you're on a hero's journey, that's not a sign you're doing it wrong. It's a sign you're doing it right. You're supposed to battle dragons. Life is supposed to be challenging when you're striving to give your best to the world. world, it's like going to the gym, you know. You're not lifting styrofoam weights. You're lifting

real weights if you want to get stronger. Those challenges in life that are making you feel ways you don't want to feel are signs that you're pushing yourself. It's a good thing. If you embrace it, you can use it to get stronger, but you've got to get your mind right and realize that that's how you get better. We win or we learn. Learning is winning is what I emphasize in the book, as you know, with my son who's into chess. But operationalizing these ideas is super important. So perfectionism, self-compassion, which we briefly talked about, all these things are really, really essential as a base to give us the confidence to even try, right? I'm not sure if that's where you wanted to go, but that's what arose for me. Oh, that's perfect. You know, big picture, like, how do the folks

that are listening to today think about designing their personal protocol, right? Once they are convinced that, okay, I want to step into my anti-fragility. I want to double down on the things that I know that are going to keep my mind and my body healthy. In fact, I think we recently highlighted some research on the podcast about how, you know, if you didn't sleep well that night, first of all, when you don't sleep well, you tend to crave carbs, more sugar the next day. But interestingly enough, when we don't sleep well, we're like, ah, I don't want go to the gym, I don't want to work out. But working out actually is one of the best antidotes. Not that you have to go crazy, but getting in a challenging workout for you is one of the

antidotes to actually help you feel not as sleepiness throughout the day. So if people are thinking about designing their personal protocol, how do they go through that process and can this book help them out with that journey? Do you. Great question. And again, we're kind of walking through the talk I just gave. So right after, I did that spiel to the guys. I had them bust out a piece of paper. Imagine busting out a piece of paper to get clarity on your protocol. So if you have a piece of paper close by, bust it out, blank piece of paper, draw a line down the middle.

On the upper left put do, on the upper right put don't. Line, do, don't. And then think back to a time in your life when you were at your best. You know, it could have been a day, a week, a month, a year, a decade. But you were at your best. you were energized, you were productive, you were connected to your loved ones. What were you doing and what were you not doing? So we want to take some time to get clarity on that.

And again, when you pair this up with the best selves diary of five years out, and then you look back and see what you were doing when you're at your best in the past, we can start to make some real progress here. So you look at what you were doing. And again, our commitment here is to make our prior best, our new baseline. And we need to quit giving away our gains. So then the practical question as you look at that list is, what's the one thing that you know you could be doing that you did when you were at your best that you're not currently doing that would most change your life if you started doing it now? Step one in your protocol.

And then what's the thing that you're currently doing that you don't do when you're at your best? Right. So for me, I don't say I'm late blowing myself up. I'm not binge watching Netflix or whatever it is, right? What are the things you don't do when you're at your best? Circle the number one thing that if you stop doing it would most change your life. And then no, that's the fastest way to change your life. The kryptonites, as I call them, that are just bringing you down physiologically and psychologically

and eroding your trust in yourself. Boom. Getting rid of that is the fastest way to change your life. And we talk in the book about installing and deleting habits, the art and science of behavioral change and whatnot. But that's the first step in getting a protocol. Then the next step I go into is, I want you to do the same thing, energy, work, and love. Three more pieces of paper. Do and don't when you're at your energetic best, when you're at your work productive best, when you're at your connected best.

And then we can systematically architect clarity on who you are at your best, what virtues you embody, and specifically what behaviors you engage in. And then my joke to our coaches we train and our community is do the top three things that you do it your best in energy, work, and love, and good luck having a series of bad days. You'll still have highs and lows. But I can't go off the rails, dude. When I'm in bed for eight to nine hours a night, when I meditate for at least 11 minutes a day, and I do a certain sequence of movement every day. One sun salutation, 10 pull-ups, 100 burpees, 1,000 meters of rowing, and 10,000 steps. I've missed less than two hands worth of that in the last decade. Then I do certain things in work.

Then I do certain things in love. It's literally not possible for me to feel what I felt before doing even a fraction of those things. Again, I have highs and lows because I'm human and I have better days and other days, but you don't go off the rails. And when you have a rough day, instead of going way down that spiraling down, you recommit. You make the next day, what I call a rebound day, again, the worst you feel, the worst you feel, the more committed you are to your protocol. Now you know your protocol. One, two, three. I'm going to do this today. It's exciting. And it brings joy in, and a sense of agency and confidence that you can handle what life throws at you. And again, life becomes a lot more fun. As I said in the book, when you know

how to play the game, you know, and you can bring in that joy to the process of becoming your best self in service of something bigger than yourself. It's a beautiful reminder, especially for people who tend to stop because they're hard on themselves and they're using their tough day, tough week, tough month, tough year as evidence that I'm not good enough. And really the reframe that you're bringing in is that no, doesn't matter how tough it's been. If you have that sole oxygen inside, there's party that knows you are meant to be more, which means that you have to be more. You are designed and destined to step into it. Then now this, this tough, tough day or a series of days is evidence that it's time to double down on actually what makes

you alive and feel good. It's a completely different outlook in life. Dude. And let's go there real quick because I think this is a really important distinction. BJ Fogg, I really admire him, Stanford behavioral scientist on whom Charles Duhigg based a lot of his power of habit research and of course James Clear with atomic habits. They basically go to to this guy, among others, but BJ Fogg. So B.J. Fogg wrote a book called Tiny Habits. The number one distinction among many, but the number one distinction he made for me that I emphasize in the book and our work is, most people, when they've struggled, and we all have,

you get to a point where you just think something's inherently wrong with you, that you have a character flaw. Because you haven't been able to do this, this, and this that you know you should be doing, you basically give up because you think it's a character flaw. something's wrong with you. BJ Fogg says, yeah, yeah, but maybe it's not a character flaw. Maybe it's a design flaw. Maybe you weren't taught how to install and delete habits.

And it's a really profound distinction. The way that I playfully frame it up in the book is, I went to go play laser tag with my son after a chess tournament, right? And we're showing up at the laser tag place and the guy says, oh, sorry, you missed the session. You can't, you can't play. And the next one was so late, we wouldn't be able to go, right? And I said, hey, man, can you sneak us in? You know, they hadn't quite gone in. And he said, yeah, but you're going to miss the training for it. And my son had gone the prior week, and I'm sitting there thinking, dude, it's laser tag. Like, how

hard is laser tag? I don't need to be trained on how to play laser tag. I'm like, dude, we're good. Let's go. If you can get us in. So he gets me in. And my son, we go in, leave. All right, cool, let's go. The training had just ended. Put on the little laser tag vest thing, get the little laser tag thing, and I go out and play. And I absolutely suck. And my wife, the week before, had gone with our kids, and she was so bad, she got a minus 99 score. And we laughed at her and with her, right? It was awesome. The guys said they'd never seen a score that bad. Anyway, I'm sitting there 10 minutes into this game. I'm at minus 100, worse than my wife. And I'm literally my psychology is, mental toughness is gone. I'm like, I'm an idiot. This sucks. I should just stop playing. I am so

bad at this. It was just terrible, miserable. Anyway, and I was trying to shoot, and I was like, I couldn't shoot. And then I somehow realized that in order to shoot this laser, I had to hold down a button at the top. And I did that, and it fired. And then I realized, oh, that's how you play this game. Then I went out and I'm channeling my inner seal as I playfully say in the book, and I have a great time. And I wound up finishing and having a great time. But the moral of the story is, laser tag is a lot more fun when you know how to play the game. Life is a lot more fun when you know how to play the game. So when we step back and we see that it's not that something's wrong with us, it's that we haven't been taught properly how to play the game. And this is what I've dedicated my life to,

and what we've gotten feedback on with my work and what we hope to see in the book is, here are some ideas, 451 of them. It's a big book. We got 450,000. one little micro ideas on how to help you play the game of life. But it's really important we get out of the shame, that we get out of the story that something's wrong with us and realize maybe we just haven't been taught the right little distinctions. And that when you figure out how to shoot the metaphorical laser tag thing, everything changes. And that's what I've experienced in my life from the depths of my despair to where I'm at.

And again, it brings joy to it. And these aren't chores. These are gifts. We don't shame ourselves. We play the game as well as we can. You know, Andrew Huberman has been on this podcast before. And one of the lessons that he left our audience with is the best way to quiet. And I'll add in a little entryway into it is also like the best way to focus.

The mind is through the body. And a lot of people start with the mind. They think of a problem. They think that this is something tough that I'm going. Well, if I ruminate on it, whether it's conscious or unconscious, whether I think about it a ton, whether I just sort of sit and zone out and try to forget about it. Again, all those things are trying to access a problem of the mind through the mind. And part of your book is focused on those lessons that many people have not learned about taking care of their body. and tapping into energy.

Let's talk about some of those things. What are some of the foundational pieces that if we want zest, which you said is the number one attribute that is associated with a long and well-lived life, if we want to create more zest in our lives, how do we take care of our body to allow that? Yeah. I'm so happy we're going here and so happy that Huberman echoed, frankly, the obvious, but it's not obvious in our medical world and in our consciousness. I think the most important thing is to make the connection.

And again, you know this, and this is your podcast and all the work you've done with all the great individuals that you've supported behind the scenes. Your gut produces 80, 85, 90% of your body's serotonin. Yet when's the last time you went to a psychiatrist for the depression you may be experiencing and they prescribed a better diet? you know, this just, it's, it's shockingly not part of our cultural norm.

But your physiology drives more of your psychology than you may be aware of. And just getting that fact is really important. Then we go to, all right, let's say I buy that. And again, why I emphasize it is, I know what it feels like. I mean, to feel the depths of despair. And I used to order, buy one pizza, get one free. Oh, perfect. I'll have one for dinner and I'll have the next one for breakfast and lunch. All right, cool. I would go to bed, you know, at the latest hours, I rarely moved eating, moving, sleeping. None of these things were taken care of. And I felt that. Now that's the scaffolding. And you couldn't pay me to not do the things I do. And oh, by the way, if I did what I did 25 years ago, I'd feel the way I felt 25 years ago. My goosebumps, like, frightening certainty on that is, is profound. So again, we got to make the connection that these things matter. They're driving our

psychology and then get excited because it's a lot easier to control what you put into your mouth when you go to bed, how long you stay in bed and how you move your body, then it is to figure out your ultimate purpose in life and all these other things. And I can assure you you will not figure those things out on six hours of sleep and night, eating refined processed foods and rarely moving your body. It's not going to happen. So eating, you know, I lean on a lot of what you are so in, you know, again, you've helped amplify the wisdom of the guys that I go to, whether it's Mark Hyman or whoever, right? Rule number one, stop drinking your sugar, eating wise is number one in our food rules. And two, obviously reduce, eliminate, refined foods, all the garbage, et

etc. We can talk about that forever. But then the movement, as you said, you know, you get a little bit of metaphorical riddlin and Prozac and you literally release hope molecules. That's what the scientists call the runners high you feel when you train. Hope molecules. You want more hope? Cool. Work out. And then sleep sleeps my thing. It's my it's my kryptonite and it's my superpower when I when I live in accordance with my philosophy. Jim Rome and I had a chat on his podcast yesterday. He said, hey, can people change their life overnight? And he was kind of framing it up as a, of course they can't.

And I said, well, of course they can't, yet they can. And the way I tell them to is get one more hour of sleep tonight. If you're not getting the recommended, I get, here's my saying that, dude, if you're not getting the recommended seven to eight hours of night of sleep, first of all, you are not, the odds of you being the human being who a genetic mutation that allows you to get by on less than seven hours of sleep a night, Matthew Walker in his great book, Why We Sleep says, are about the same as the odds of you being struck by lightning in your lifetime, one in 11,000. So you need seven hours of sleep.

Sorry to break the news. Now, good news is if you're not getting that and you give yourself one more hour of sleep, you can literally change your life overnight. Countless people have come to me and said, geez, I ignored you when you said that to me the first 50, times. And then I started paying attention to it. And oh, yeah, I shut down. I turned off the electronics. I did all the obvious things I know I could be doing. And boom, I got an extra hour of sleep, two, three nights in a row. And then I'm a different person. So again, I'm saying a lot, but eating, moving, sleeping are the three things we focus on the most. You get your physiology right. It drives your psychology. And oh, by the way, not only do you feel better physiologically,

you feel better, you're building confidence. You're winning twice. You're. You're doing the things that are best for you, so you're getting the physiological benefits of that. And you're doing the things that are best for you. So you're closing the gap and getting the psychological confidence building side of things. And those two things go together versus the opposite happens when you don't do those things. And again, life gets a lot more fun. It gets a lot more exciting. The joy, the enthusiasm comes back at the most fundamental mitochondrial, energetic and psychological level.

Love that. Brian, hold up the book if you could for a second. And just like, I want people to understand, like, we're talking about which. Dear, where's your copy? What are we got here? My copy's here somewhere. My assistant's not here right now. What are you? In Drew's hands, that's going to be a good looking book in your hands. Let's go. This is a thousand plus pages of a book. As you mentioned, 400 plus lessons that are inside of there. and how should somebody tackle? Because for somebody, it's like, whoa, that's a big book. Can people flip two different chapters, see what resonates with them after reading the introduction and go through?

How do you recommend ingesting this? I just literally opened up to a chapter on circadians and old tradians in which I talk about the rhythms of life, which would be another huge. That's the fourth food rule in our four food rules for our coach certification program with Heroic is don't eat. You have at least a 13-hour fasting window and all the data on the science of, you know, cancer and all these things. But anyway, there are 451 microchapters. Each chapters of page two or three long. I reference over 200 of my favorite teachers, ancient wisdom, modern science, practical tools. And the idea was, and I had a normal book in quotes written,

normal 250, 300 page book. I was basically done with that and I realized, no, no, no, that's not my style. It's not my book. So there are 451 ideas in here because it takes 451 degrees Fahrenheit to ignite a fire. But each one of the ideas is a two, three minute read. So you can pick it up and open up anywhere and you're either starting or ending a chapter, wherever you pick it up. Now, there's literally, and this is actually really cool, your future self in an in an fMRI is one of my favorite ideas, which I'd love to talk about. But you can open up anywhere or you can go from page one on because they're organized around the seven objectives that we've been kind of talking about that have been scientifically proven to work. But that's the basic idea with the book. And, you know, I'll tell you what, we've, I've been blessed to receive some endorsements that make me blush.

But the number one endorse. So now it's coming a lot. Kids are picking it up. 11 year olds, 12 year olds, 13 year olds, 14 year olds, tears my eyes. And they're picking it up and they're getting into it. You know, a military officer who's abroad to whom we sent an advanced reader copy had it in his car weekend tournament. His 11 year old son picked it up, stayed up late on a Saturday night reading the first 100 pages. And I'm like, dude, that's that's it right there.

To be able to connect to obviously everyone. you know, who's watching or listening to this, but then our kids, that's the ultimate mission that I have tattooed to my body, you know, is changing the world. You're going to do it. We're going to do it by being the change, raising the next generation of heroes, et cetera. Again, long answered your short question, but that's what I was thinking when we put the book together. I heard you say, and I'm paraphrasing here, so you might have to dial it in in terms of your actual quote, but I've heard you say that the most important thing is realizing like why something is important, right? Like, you have to understand why does this matter? Why is this important in every

aspect of your life? Like, why do you want to have and activate that inner potential inside of you? Why do you want to have more energy inside of your body? Why is this thing, this individual thing, like, why is it important? When we understand the importance, then we can give something the true attention that it deserves. Is that accurate? Oh, dude, it's better stated than I'm going to say it. Yeah, that's exactly right. A hundred percent. Just it needs to be your truth. Even with our kids, you know, we're not, we're not trying to tell them, hey, this, we're trying to make it a felt sense of they get it. So one of the phrases we use is make the connection. You want the why, then you want to make the connection between certain behaviors and certain outcomes in your life.

So our kids don't like to be sick. And we're blessed. They're six and 11. they've never taken an antibiotic. But the few times they've got, not a few times, the number of times, of course, they've gotten runny noses and things like that. They don't like that. But what we do in those moments is,

all right, buddy, can you make the connection between this state and something you did? Oh, it was that sugary thing that I ate with grandma or whatever. Or it was, you know, we were up a little bit late and this and that happened. So making the connection between the state that you're experiencing

that you don't want to experience in behaviors and the positive states you've experienced, experienced in the past and more positive behaviors and then grounding it in the fact that this isn't a dress rehearsal. You know, like this is it. This is our opportunity. So yes, to everything you said, that why. And then also the agency that we can affect change, which is why I keep on coming back to the

self-compassion, the character versus design flaw, and the sense of hope that you can create that future that you desire. And here's how. Here are some very practical ways to go about doing it. When you combine the why with a what, with a how that's believable, you know, because it's grounded in scientifically proven and frankly very obvious ideas, hopefully in a compelling way that helps you move from theory to practice to mastery. Then as I've said, a half a dozen times, it becomes a lot more fun.

And life has that joy and that meaning. that we know is latently possible. And when enough of us come alive like that, I think things will change more and more significantly in the months and years and decades ahead. So far in the interview, I've been highlighting a few lessons that spoke to me that I've kind of gone through.

I want to give you a chance. Like, is there one that we haven't had a chance to talk about yet that really comes to the forefront, especially in the context of this conversation? Again, goosebumps for the 20th time. I've only mentioned it several times, but I love the way that you led our dialogue. I think that we talked about basically,

objective one is know the ultimate game. Objective two is forge anti-fragile confidence. Objective three, we talked about implicitly. It's optimized the big three, energy, work, and love, where we simplify self-development. Objective four is to make today a masterpiece. Objective five is master yourself, which we talked about, the art and science of behavioral change.

Objective six is dominate the fundamentals, which we talked about, eating, moving, and sleeping. But all of that leads to objective seven. Activate your superpower. We call it Soul Force. So Gandhi, who's on my wall back there as well, above me, named it. So Satya Graha was the name he gave.

He coined the kind of word in Sanskrit, Satya Graha. We translated that as nonviolent resistance, which was a terrible translation of his beautiful words. Satya-Graha means truth force or love force or virtue force or soul force. So what Gandhi cultivated in himself and activated in himself was soul force. In Gandhi's presence, you felt a palpable sense of moral charisma. Martin Luther King referenced his hero, Gandhi's phrase, soul force, in his I Have a Dream speech. That's what he was trying to cultivate in his followers in order to write the wrongs in

America. So all of our favorite heroes, and let me actually just frame it up, who are your two favorite heroes, Drew? Oh, my favorite heroes. Like people in society or like family, it could be anybody, man, that inspires you? You look at them and you're like, wow, I'll share the first one. I genuinely feel, and I felt this from a young age, and my parents are human beings, my dad in particular, I really feel like I won the lottery, like I won the family lottery, you know, and I feel, especially as you were sharing about your father and the experiences, again, this was a man who was doing the best that he knew how. And my dad was a byproduct of the environment that he was brought up in. And he felt that same way about his grandfather, who felt that same way about his father.

Again, my dad was a human being. Sure, he yelled at us sometimes, this, all that. You know, we all are going to be that way. When I have kids, I'm going to be like that. But the component and the agency that my dad gave for me at a young age to allow me to build my life, the way that I wanted to pursue my passions, my interest, and generally allow me to almost in a way, he was there for guidance. He had the bumper, you know, the rails like when you're bowling and you put little bumpers that are there. He would provide guidance, but he allowed me to figure out my life,

which in this day and age, it's tough to also let your kid fall in their face, learn that lesson on their own, and then get up. You know, and I'm sure he struggled with it, but I truly feel that my dad, for whatever spiritual reasons or his family context, I won the lottery by having him as my dad and then my mom as my mom. Oh, geez. Beautiful. I get tears my. I was just feeling your love for your dad.

And it's interesting because I interviewed Hal Elrod for our launch weekend. And he had his mom and his dad as well. And it was just a sacred feeling. Now, your mom and your dad, so beautiful that you see them as you're here. are two very different human beings, is my guess. We didn't talk as much about your mom. Yeah, can I talk about my mom just real quick? Because she listens to this podcast.

So my mom grew up in a very challenging household. And both my parents are from Kenya. That's where I was born. We're four generation Kenyan. And then mostly, you know, I grew up in the United States. My mom, the reason that I look up to her and consider her a hero besides bringing me into this world is that she grew up in such a challenging environment. I remember even from the youngest of ages when I would meet my grandfather, my mom's dad,

I would think, I'm not sure if we're related. There must be some sort of fluke. And my heart goes out to him, but he was an individual who truly felt that he was a victim most of his life, that things happened to him. And unfortunately, as we all know, and we've talked about on this podcast before, is that hurt people, hurt people. When you don't feel good, you take out that complaining, that energy. And my mom was one of those individuals, along with her two siblings, her sister and her brother, that my grandfather regularly brought his negativity on, his complaining, his feeling that they weren't good enough, that they couldn't do right.

And that led to a situation where my mom naturally inherited that. You know, we tend to do what we feel is the thing that is most familiar to us, even if it doesn't work for us. And so growing up, my mom and I would butt heads, butt heads, but heads. And as you similarly went down your own journey of studying ancient philosophy, I around the same time went through that journey myself, end of high school, beginning of college. I also dropped out of school. And I am so thankful that as I started to peel into some of these lessons and we had been friends for a long time, like right around that period, we probably like met just a little bit after that and have known each other since.

My mom was open. It was tough for her, but she was open to the idea. that maybe there's something to learn outside of what experience she had and she knew she didn't feel good. And it was the toughest thing for her. I saw her bring that intensity every single day. I was very lucky. I went to college nearby where my parents left. So I'd spend time with her every single day and we would have conversations and debates and other stuff. And I literally saw my mom transform in my eyes from somebody who complained quite often, was negative quite often. to now people meet her and they're like, this is somebody that is literally one of the happiest people

and the most encouraging women that we know. And so she didn't start that way. But I think of her as even just as much, even more of a hero than my dad because she put in that work at a later stage in life where it's difficult to combat all that inertia that we were brought up in. So that's my mom. Oh my goodness. Love you, mom. Thanks for bringing Drew into the world. And you're just a good man, dude, just to listen to you and your affection for your mom and your dad. And then Adam Grant's new book, Hidden Potential, the big distinction from that book is, it isn't how far you go in life. It's how far you went from where you started.

That's kind of the big idea that he talks about in the book. So you may never become the one that everyone looks at as, oh, my goodness, just a world-renowned whatever, right? But those who have gone the furthest from where they started are, as you described, a goosebumps, kind of the most heroic. You know what I mean? Like, that was the biggest challenge. So what a blessing. And to bring it back to the soul force, your mom has activated hers at even higher levels than

ever. Your dad has embodied that in their presence, you feel something. And this is what my life's work is about, is helping people activate their own idiosyncratic, heroic potential and have that moral charisma is what the ancient Chinese philosophers called it. Their whole idea of Uwe that almost all of us have heard of at this stage that we think of as effortless action, Uwe, but it means something closer to effortless right action or effortless virtuous action or effortlessly being your best self. When you are that, there's a neuroscience to it.

People feel drawn to people who are living in integrity with their values. There's literally like a neurological magnetism to those people. And this is what the ancient Chinese philosophers cultivated in their leaders so they could lead well. They called it the word in ancient Chinese was duh, DE, but it means moral charisma. So this sense of moral charisma is the thing that I'm most committed to activating within myself, within people in our community, people listening to this, because that's how we change the world. That's how we live with the wisdom, the discipline, the love, and the courage that will allow us to be the change Gandhi encouraged us to be. And then our very presence is what's inspiring and empowering others. You know, it's not what we're saying.

It's who we are. So that's, again, now a long answer to your question. That would be the one thing that I feel like, and there's so much we could talk about, of course. But the most salient thing that we had yet to talk about is that ultimate. activation of your own idiosyncratic superpower that we call Soul Force. And I appreciate you framing that up. Beautiful. Ryan, this has been fantastic.

I so appreciate you coming on the podcast and outlining not just the book, but the timeless. That was the one thing that really hit for me is that, sure, we're dealing with new versions, but these are all the same struggles that people in the past have dealt with. And what I hope that does for people, we know the research on this, but when people feel overwhelmed in life, when they feel like things are not working out, they tend to retreat and they don't ask for help. They don't tend to lean on other people.

And a lot of that narrative becomes focused on, well, this is happening to me and I'm alone in this journey, that there's nobody that can relate to it. So if that's you who's listening today, I hope that you can appreciate the fact that you're not alone. This is something that not only are billions of people dealing with today themselves, but billions of people have dealt with in the past throughout the history of humanity. And the beautiful part about that is that there are time-tested ideas, principles, concepts that can help us lead our way out of the darkness into the light. And Brian, that's what I feel like you're doing with your book.

I just want to acknowledge you and appreciate you for one, number one, writing it. It's truly a masterpiece that's out there. And then more importantly, doing the work to promote it to get it out there in the world. Give us a little bit of a landscape of your world, right? We didn't go too much into your story and what you're building in the company. But in addition to, you know, the book and if there's anything fun that you're doing right now where people can sign up, please tell people how to do that. And then also give us a sense of the company.

that you're building, that plays right into the concepts of the book. Brilliant, dude. All right. So then, you know, I showed off this tattoo. We got Artae on this arm. And then on this arm, I've got heroic. So, uh, that's my life is, you know, the book is called Aratee. We talked a lot about that.

Um, but my day job is I'm the philosopher and CEO, founder, philosopher and CEO of heroic public benefit cooperation. Um, and it's funny, Drew, because we met, you know, and you had some like it raw. I think is what you called. We like it raw. We like it raw. We like it raw.

That was so good. Just for everybody who's listening, it was like, what the hell is that? I started off my journey in the world of health in the plant-based community. And that was when the raw food movement

was really big. I was also into, I was also into Wutang clan. And I was like, you know what? Let's create a website. So we like it raw became the name. It was so good. But it was a cool community

where people came together and they connected. And you and I, you know, We've tested everything. That's the only way you get good. You know, let's put on the lab code. Go experiment, test relentlessly.

But my background is I've built and sold to social platforms before Facebook. And now I felt inspired to share that because you were talking about you're not alone. And it's really, really important that we know that. And that we know that, you know, listening to a podcast like this or reading a book like mine and all the others, that's a great, important way to change your life. but the fastest way to change your life science says isn't that it's to join a community of people with high standards and in a world like ours you're pulled to the center of gravity of a current consciousness ken wilbur talks about this so in a world like ours people like us are pulled down now that's

important to have a center of gravity because some people are pulled up but in a world like this where we're trying to move past some of the limitations of our culture it's tough so if you can join a community of people whose center of gravity is higher, you instantly become a better person. Again, whether that's joining the USA, you know, men's national soccer team, well, I'll tell you what, your standards are high on that. The Navy SEALs, boom, they're high. So what we're ultimately trying to do with heroic is build a social training platform with guides to help people live their most heroic lives.

So again, my background, as you know, entrepreneurially is I've built and sold to social platforms before Facebook. Heroic is a social platform. We made history, first company to ever raise five million from our community via the new regulations from the SEC. We hired the same company that built Slack, Tinder, Uber Eats, and Elon Musk's Neurlink to build our platform, using the absolute best of social and persuasive technology for the best to create, have you seen the social dilemma that documentary by Tristan Harris? I've seen clips, but I didn't watch the whole thing. Oh, dude, you need to watch it. Again, I rarely make statements like that, but it's a beautiful film that highlights the unintended catastrophic consequences of social media platforms built on the

attention economy hacking your mind and your attention. The political polarization, the self-harm and suicide ideation among the young generation in particular can be directly connected to those platforms. So our platform is, We intend to make it an answer to all the toxic platforms out there. So imagine a community where you can connect with us and the individuals participating in this conversation. We haven't talked about it in a while since I had the idea years ago. We're now ready. So you're a guide, a hero on their quest.

They answer the call. What do they get? They get a guide. And then they get buddies. Harry Potter got Dumbledore. Then he got Hermione and Ron. And then they went through enough quests. And then the hero becomes a guide.

Harry, Hermione, and Ron trained the Hogwarts students. And it was the hero becoming the guide and training more heroes that allowed them to win the fictional war in their world between vice and virtue. So that's my mission in life is to help create a world in which 51% of humanity is flourishing by 2051, helping people move from theory to practice to mastery together today. that's all at heroic.us or you can find us in your iOS and Android app stores. Just search Heroic. We're the training platform. But dude, I can't wait to chat offline because when I've been architecting it,

it's with you in mind, literally, as a guide, bringing your community together outside of the toxicity of the YouTube's, I'm not the YouTube's, but YouTube's better, the Facebooks, the Instagrams, et cetera. I mean, dude, the fact that you can say things on those social platforms that you couldn't even say at a gas station or a fast food restaurant is insane. When you pause and think about it, you're like, how is that allowed? I can't even yell at people in my gas station and be served the next time I want to come through. Like, that's craziness. So anyway, bringing all these ideas to life with Heroic is ultimately why I wrote the book.

It's easier to give people a book and explain these ideas than it is, frankly, to get them. into an app and the abstraction that happens when you get out of the concrete field. But it's the combination of Aratei and heroic that I'm so excited about. And just appreciate you, man. I admire you. I'm inspired by you and who you are and how you show up. And I'm so happy that you're now doing this. You know, you've played such a big role behind the scenes for so many people. But it's a real joy to see you flourishing in this role. And I'm just all in on doing everything. I can. can to support you and feel blessed to be here with you. So thank you. I appreciate you, brother. I feel the same way. Aratea, the book is out there everywhere where

books are sold. We'll have the link in the show notes. Brian Johnson, thank you so much for coming on the podcast. And by the way, I'm so glad to have this Brian Johnson on because I told a few of my friends, hey, Brian Johnson's coming on the podcast. They're like, the liver king is coming on your podcast. I'm like, which one, dude? Where's it? The biohacker, extraordinary. wants to whip to 2000. He's been on the podcast too. He's been on the podcast too. That was a good conversation. A lot of overlap. But I'm glad to have this Brian Johnson on, the original Brian Johnson. I appreciate you, brother. Thanks for being here. I appreciate you so much. Thank you. Hi, everyone. Drew here. Two quick things. Number one, thank you so much for listening to this podcast.

If you haven't already, subscribe, just hit the subscribe button on your favorite podcast app. And by the way, if you love this episode, it would mean the world. to me, and it's the number one thing that you can do to support this podcast is share with a friend, share with a friend who would benefit from listening. Number two, before I go, I just had to tell you about something that I've been working on that I'm super excited about. It's my weekly newsletter, and it's called Try This. Every Friday, yes, every Friday, 52 weeks a year, I send out an easy-to-digest protocol of

simple steps that you or anyone you love can follow to optimize your own health. We cover everything from nutrition to mindset to metabolic health, sleep, community, longevity, and so much more. If you want to get on this email list, which is, by the way, free and get my weekly step-by-step protocols for whole-body health and optimization, click the link in the show notes that's called Try This or just go to Drew Perot.com. That's D-H-R-U-P-U-R-H-I-T dot com and click on the tab that says, try this.