Into the Impossible With Brian Keating - Alex Heyne: Youtube’s #1 Monk! (#074)

Episode Date: September 17, 2020

  Alexander Heyne is the creator of Modern Health Monk, a popular YouTube channel devoted to helping people learn healthy habits and manifest a happy life. Alex is also the author of “Master the Day: Eat, Move and Live Better With The Power of Daily Habits.” He joins me to talk about the book, growing his audience, and how journaling can help us all get and stay healthy. Subscribe to my mailing list to receive show notes for this episode: https://briankeating.com/mailing_list.php 00:00 Introduction 06:50 Preparing for the wedding instead of the marriage. 11:15 How to form habits for long-term happiness. 16:05 Improving yourself by 1% each day goes a long way. 22:59 Alex’s experience with Chinese healing. 27:07 How does technology fit into Chinese medicine? 32:16 What did Alex think was impossible until he did it? 33:40 What object or knowledge would Alex put on his monolith? Alexander Heyne has a doctorate in Classical Chinese Medicine. He is dedicated to helping people identify and manifest their goals for a better life. His YouTube channel Modern Health Monk has over 315,000 subscribers. Buy “Master the Day” here: https://amzn.to/3h9ioC8 Sign up for Alex’s mailing lists for access to free weight loss tips https://modernhealthmonk.com And how to live to be 100 http://alexheyne.com/free/ Find Alex on the web: http://alexheyne.com and YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/user/ModernHealthMonk/ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. It's not too often you get to talk to somebody who's not only made a difference in your life, but literally in the lives of millions of people. And that's another of my guest today, Alex Hain, who's joining us all the way from, I believe, the northern part of the country. We'll get into that in a second. But Alex has been a really good friend for no other reason that he's just such a giving, generous individual and so gracious.

And it's just a pleasure to get to know. And I've been watching them on YouTube and not knowing that I was only one degree of separation removed from you, Alex. And I want to thank you because today's my birthday and you agreed to come on the podcast as a special birthday present to me, which has two different benefits. One is that it's going to remind me not to eat too much cake because your book, Master, the Day, has really changed my life. It's helped me to lose some weight. I drop five pounds. I always say I drop five pounds from my double chin to my stomach. I dropped it all the way down to my stomach.

Nice. You know, I also, I, you know, now I'm within, you know, those last 10 pounds that are so stubborn. As soon as they get past the first 47 pounds, then I'll be in that 10 pound zone. But when I get there, I'm going to look to you for advice because really, you've, you've written such a wonderful book or an audio book. And I listen to it and your voice is malepluous and wonderful. Thank you for being on the show, Alex. Yeah, thanks for having me, Brian, and happy birthday. Thank you so much.

Yeah, it's really such a treat to have you as a guest, as a birthday present to me. And it really reminded me as I was thinking about it preparing and finishing the book, thinking about, hmm, now that I've listened to your book, can I even have that birthday cake? And the thing that really speaks so loudly to me is your book is really, it's not a diet book. It's not a book about diet. It's a book about habits. and that's some of the most powerful things I think that humankind has or habits, but so few of us can actually master them.

So the first thing I want to do, though, before we get into the book, which is such a helpful book, it's got, you know, literally hundreds of five-star reviews on Amazon and elsewhere. I urge everybody to pick up a copy. And when you do, you'll be, you know, transformed for the good. But I want to start off because you do so many different things. First of all, you're a doctor now. you're a doctor of a Chinese medicine, and we want to get into that and how that's influenced your life. But you do all these things. Now you're practicing as a health professional. You will be soon,

except in the state of California. We don't have to get into that someday. I want to ask you, you do so many things. You're a famous podcast or an author. Now you're a doctor. What do you think about how do you characterize yourself? Who are you? What excites you most? Yeah, good question. I think for me, I'm really always have been interested. in kind of human potential. So the people I idolized when I was young, especially my early teens, I had a natural kind of draw to people that had attained mastery.

And a lot of those people were in the spiritual domain or in the religious domain, like the archetypal monk or mystic, the hermit living in the woods, was something I really idolized a lot. But as I got older, like, you know, with all these career incarnations,

they're also personal incarnations, you know, that are changing and iterating. And I think for me, It's just at every phase of life, there's something else that's really drawing me and really speaking to me heavily. And it's really just trying to see, you know, as I shed those layers of what I think's possible, what would that next thing kind of be? So I think I'm just here trying to figure out, you know, if my life is a story and everyone's life is a story, what does that really look like? What is the what is the through line of that? And I think it's just progression.

So it's the nonstop kind of not necessarily that every single day has to be a goal. In fact, you talk about the problem with goals in the book. Maybe we'll get in there. What's the problem with having goals? You know, I've got to lose 20 pounds because Alex is coming on my podcast. I don't want to look like a fat slub. It motivated me. What's wrong with that?

Well, I think, you know, I talked about this idea called wedding day syndrome, which is that everybody spends their whole life planning for the wedding day. You know, that's where all the photography and all the money is. and all of the energy is, but then no one really plans for the wedding, which is maybe less flashy, and maybe what you should have done is read 50 relationship books and try to know myself and try to know the character of the person you're dating. So goals are in the same vein.

We try to reach this endpoint, and what most often happens is we end up hating every day, hoping to feel well one day. And that one day is not even guaranteed, right? It's not guaranteed a person will lose 20 pounds. It's not guaranteed you'll ever be the YouTuber you want. It's not guaranteed you'll ever get your PhD. None of that's guaranteed.

And so you're really, it's a bet, you know, can I put off liking my life to hopefully one day get what I want? And you only hear about the success stories. There's that, what is it, the survivor or survivorship bias? I'm not sure of the term. But in entrepreneurship, it's one of the worst, right? Look, I did it. You can too.

Well, maybe not. So that's the big thing is how can you enjoy your daily life, but also reach. the end point you want. Yeah, I look at you as not only a strategist and the strategist focused on that long-term goal, even though it's not, it shouldn't be the only goal, as you're pointing out. Yeah, the wedding, you know, I've been blissfully married, although my wife might disagree, but, you know, 12 years now, we've got a bunch of kids. But yeah, you're absolutely right. You're going to be in that destination, you know, maybe for one day in some case, but then the long-time journey, which should be a pleasant one, whether that's with your kids, whether that's with your coworkers,

that's the daily work that you're putting in. So I agree with you, the goal orientation, but yet you're unique because you have this ability, this diversive ability to be both a strategist on the long-term goal, but a tactician on the short-term goals. And can you lay out this sort of structure that you use in the book? It's not a diet book. You have one or two pages or one or two minutes about specific diet suggestions,

but that's not the core essence of the book. The core essence of the book, as I see it, correct me if I'm wrong, is these daily tactics. And can you say something about how do you balance the long-term strategic goal with the short-term daily habits, balance? How do you strike such a remarkable balance? I think everything is kind of, you know, like in the book I talk about half of it is the inner narrative, the story. And I think of that as like the religion. That's the 10,000 foot few. That's the overall direction that guides your life and the overall principle.

And then specifically speaking, that clouds or religion has to be something about, it has to influence how we change our daily actions. So something about the daily action has to change. And for me, any goal I go after, I try to always, whether it's on a piece of paper or in a notebook, I try to always remind myself of both regularly. So every day I'm like, this is what I want or why I want it. And then tactically, what is one thing I can change about every day to make? make sure that, you know, I'm in the dirt. Like Gary Vee calls it. I think he calls it clouds in dirt. That is a pretty useful metaphor, which is you need to have the philosophy or the direction, and then also what has to change every single day. So for me, that's the way I balance two things

because like I could say, I want to be a successful entrepreneur. Like, cool, who doesn't? But what's the religion or the emotion or the story that's going to drive that to make that happen? And then what does that specifically look like? I try to always do both of those. Yeah, and it's unique and remarkable in the book. You give strategic tools to come up with the ultimate goal, but you say it could be a long game. We'll get into that 1% philosophy, which is so interesting, unique and provocative. But also the daily things, reminders, post-it notes, something as simple as a, you know, 10-cent or, you know, one-cent piece of paper can make the difference over the course of a year of, you know, 10 pounds, 20 pounds.

It can really affect you in a positive, way. And on your YouTube channel, you have, you have this striking ability to create these actionable tactics, as I call it. But they're not hacks. I really don't think you can consider it a hack. I think of, you know, Gary V. And maybe we'll just get into it because I look at people like Gary Vee and other people. I had, you know, the musician, rapper Zubi on my podcast not too long ago. And I've had other people, Dr. Judd Brewer, who's an addiction psychiatrist at Brown University. and we'll put links to all those in the show. But a lot of it is kind of predicated.

I feel like Weight Watchers would go out of business if everybody actually followed the advice the first time. It's like, okay, we did the, you know, we lost the weight. Okay, but it's like these things, but they stay in business and they're quite profitable because of, for lack of a better word, recidivism. So, you know, what is the difference between kind of these, you know, many, many people who will get the get rich quick or get fit,

slow, you know, quick rules? and what you are purveying with your book and with your podcast. At first, I didn't think it was real. I woke up to this blinding light, and I was transported to another place. Pluto TV. Then I heard a voice. Come with me if you want to live. There were thousands of movies and shows, and they were all free.

The truth is ours. It's just so beautiful. On Pluto TV, free streaming of Terminator 2, Fringe Arrow, the 100 N.EX files may cause excitement, loss of sleep, and sudden belief in extraterrestrials, no credit cards or alien encounters necessary. Pluto TV, stream now, pay never. I think the big thing is what we're really talking about is psychology. So understanding deep psychology about why people behave the way they behave is really the most important because just the very fundamental premise, everyone's experienced someone doing something different than what they say. If you've ever dated somebody, you also know that sometimes like,

you know, maybe person on the nicer side of the spectrum may say yes, but they mean no. And that's very confusing if you just take it at face value. So obviously understanding what people do influences or is a reflection of psychology. For me, I try my best to understand why psychologically, why am I really doing the things that I do? Or why is a person really doing the things that they do? And when you ask people the right kind of questions, like what you kind of peel back is that a lot of it is just self-soothing. So there's a rough day, a stressful day, the person comes home. Do they really want to exercise, maybe intellectually?

But what they're actually trying to do is they want to feel better right now. And so I think the big difference is trying to find the short term, whatever makes you feel better in the short term, but also understanding your own psychology, which is usually through your actions. And I come across from reading the book and from watching your wonderful YouTube channel, which is called Modern Health Monk. We'll put a link to that. Not that you need my dozens of subscribers.

No, hopefully my subscribers are rabid. They're brilliant. That's what's most important. They're handsome and fit. So yeah. Dept over with. Beautiful, exactly. So you have these actionable things.

So they're actually takeaways. And it seems to me I just did kind of a Google trend search on your own website, on your channel. And it's the most common things that come up sort of in the word cloud are things like journaling, meditation. You know, if you only had one, a, two, tool in your tool bag, which would it be of all the ones that you purvey? For what outcome?

For having, you know, just optimizing happiness. I think that's the key that I take away from your videos. I would say it probably would be journaling, but not in a traditional sense of just journaling about feelings, but a self-reflective self-knowledge type of journaling. Because I find the deeper and the more complex a thing, the more essential it is to be written down because it's easy to just turn it into a mind game.

And are those things that can help also with other types of issues that aren't as tangible. You know, for example, losing weight, there's a tangible outcome. There's a metric that you can, I find sometimes the hardest things to deal with are things that don't have metrics like fear, anxiety. Do you think journaling also is applicable in that to those particular types of proclivities? I think especially that it's especially useful because like you take fear, for example, you know, I've coached hundreds of people one-on-one. And the main thing I see that the reason they don't go after from weight long, to business to writing a book they've always wanted to write is some kind of fear. But they may not have articulated that it's actually fear. But when they speak, what they're saying is I'm

afraid of. And I found that if you take that person, you just have them write down what exactly it is they're thinking, then they can actually realize psychologically. It's actually that I'm afraid. And it's actually that I'm worried about what my friends will think if I write this book. And then they're judging me for, you know, who are you like to be writing a book? But I think also So if it is something even more intangible, like finding your life purpose, for a long time, I coached 20-somethings. And they would always say the exact same thing, which was, you know, I have all these ideas. And then in a coaching session, I would say, okay, write down every single idea that you have. I want you to write down every idea.

And they'd say, I want to be an opair and go to Spain. I want to go backpack around the world. I want to try being a blogger. I want to try going to get my PhD in physics. I want to try medical school. And when we wrote down all their ideas, it turned out to be less than 10, almost always. And by having that abstract, like, I have all these ideas, but making it concrete, it was less than they thought.

So I think there's a real psychological advantage to writing things down. Yeah, there's a famous scene from the movie Wall Street, the original one with Charlie Sheen and Michael Douglas back in the 80s. Greed is good, Gordon Gecko. And at one point, I think Charlie Sheen, saying to his girlfriend, you know, my dream, my life dream is to get in a motorcycle and ride across China. And I'm just trying to make enough money to do that. You actually did that in Thailand or somewhere, right? You actually, and how much of that cost you? Was that like $20 million?

You had to say, it's like $500, right? Yeah, exactly. Exactly. So I think most people have this barrier that they impose its limiting beliefs is one other language for it. You know, that, oh, I can't do it. It's too expensive. It's too hard. I'm not the type of person that loses weights, lose away. But you know, you point out and remind me of another quote by Derek Sievers, who's another kind of inspirational figure to me. And that is, you know, if lack of information were the reason we'd all be, you know, if information was the key to success, we'd all be billionaires with six-pack abs. And what I love about your book and your philosophy in general is you have a sort of serenity that's not just like, you know, Gary B's a little hyper and a little bit,

you know, kind of just too, to catchphrase-ish and, you know, kind of like hustle, hustle, hustle. I feel that's kind of like hustle porn or even like failure porn. And you're very candid with your audience. I mean, I subscribe to your newsletter, would have put links to that. And you talk about, you know, why you got into this, why you changed, you were an introvert. Maybe you're still a little bit of an introvert, but you're using the tools as a superpower to overcome some of the limiting beliefs that you might have had before, whether it's relationships, whether it's, you could complete your doctorate, whether it's you could, you know, achieve the, the many goals that you've already achieved at such a young age. It's incredibly impressive. But I think, yeah, this kind of,

I think there is an obsession with like, oh, I'll get all the information and then I'll apply the information. It's not like getting your PhD, right? Even your PhD or even your doctor. It's not about information, is it? Right. So what I want to turn to you next is kind of this fascinating aspect that I have, you know, taken from you, is that this 1% difference and that a 1%, you know, people think, if you ask the average person out there, if you change, improve one dimension, one axis of your life by 1% each day, how much would you have improved by the end of the year? And everyone will say 365%. But of course, it's closer to about 3,200% because of the magic of compounding. And I want to talk about the concept that you call how.

habit interest. Can you explain that for the audience? Yeah. So again, coming back to what you were saying, most people fall into this perfectionism category, which is that there's going to be a great day to write my book that I've always wanted to write. There's going to be a great day to start building my business. But when you look at how they're really built, you know, it's really unsexy. And people don't like it because it means that you could, you could have started any time. You could have started 10 years ago. But all of the books I had written, I just allocated the first hour of my day, seven days a week. And I had multiple books out self-published before I was 30. My own business is another good example. I've never worked 40 hours a week in my business. I don't think I've ever even

worked 30 hours a week. It's been an average of three hours. Are you a professor also? Because, you know, we work three hours a week on average. Just kidding. Just kidding, Gavin Newsom. Is that with or without tenure? That's how it's with. Oh, you better believe it's with. Oh, man, man. But, you know, even like with my business, a good example. So many people would love to be an entrepreneur.

I never in a millionaires thought I would be. I've never even worked 30 hours a week in my business. And yet when I entered school, I just promised I would dedicate three hours per day. And then if I was too much, I would dedicate less. I entered school, this four-year doctoral program with 15,000 YouTube subscribers. And a business that was making me like 2,000. $1,000 per month. Four years later, I graduated with 315,000 YouTube subscribers and a six-figure business. And that I was, if I could have done that faster, I would have. But the point was that

I just chose what was that kind of lead measure, the lead metric that I have to do every week or every day. And for me, it was published two videos per week. That was it. And try to learn each week and try to improve or do something different. And it wouldn't seem like that would lead to the results I got. And I would not have been able to predict that because for years I wanted that, those goals. But it was the very decision to choose the little thing that you can do the most often without failing. And then you'll look back, whether it is three months, six months or four years. And the growth is tremendous. And it's surprising. The growth is stealthy because on anything that's an exponential curve. So I'll put a figure of this in the in the animations of the background.

for those of you watching on YouTube, when you have compounded interest, for a long time, as Alex works out in the book, let's say you want to lose 10 pounds in a year. That's stubborn last 10 pounds that I'm going to get to after I get to the first 47 pounds. When you get to do that, you go through this wonderful exercise,

like the first 30 days, you lose 0.6 of a pound. And that's barely noticeable. I mean, you can go and have literally, you know, a can of beer or even a can of water, or even a can of water, and that will completely obliterate the exact amount that you lost and even more. And then two or three months, three months later, a quarter of a year, you might have lost a pound.

Again, that's something you could easily overlook. Then 180 days, six months roughly through the year. You've only lost two or three pounds. But then it's that last exponential half of the year. You lose the remaining seven pounds. And then you're there. But if you had given up at any point before then, then you reset the, the, the, the, the, the exponential growth curve because that compound interest as Alex is promoting, which is absolutely correct.

It's what Einstein called the greatest invention of the human mind, which actually surprised Jim Simons, the world's smartest billionaire. He didn't know when I interviewed him that particular quote. So I'll have a link to that where he was kind of taken aback by it. But he actually agreed with it. And it's really this miracle that compounding anything good, conversely, anything bad can have. So I wanted to just, you know, congratulate you for pointing that explanation out and really just think about it. I wanted to give you one other way to visualize it. So similarly, if you take a chess board and you put one little drop of water in the first square and then two drops of water in the second square, three drops of water in the third square, how many squares do you have to get to

before you flood out an entire football stadium? It turns out you don't even get to the end of the chessboard if you keep doubling every square because something like two to the 48th power is this enormous compounded interest whereas you started in the very beginning just with a single drop this is never going to fill up the room even let alone a football stadium but that is really the magic of it and why do you think so many people give up when they're on that slow part of the growth curve is just natural human frustration or we want results quickly as the crispy chicken sandwich from 711 people always call me loud and I'm like yeah I know. I'm crispy. Did you expect me to whisper? If you want quiet, go eat some soup and reflect.

Like, I know I'm a handful. I'm bold. I'm juicy. Throw some pickles and barbecue sauce on me. And baby, I'm a whole meal. And with seven rewards, I'm just $4. Quiet. No. Krispy, saucy, and $4? Very. Only at 711. Valley 36, 2326, participating stores only while supplies lastly out for full terms. I think it's both that, but also we're indoctrinated into doing things we don't like. I think that's really it. If I was like, I'm going to pay you a million dollars if for one year you find the most enjoyable form of exercise, you do it 20 minutes a day, people could probably do that for a million dollars. They'd quit their jobs just to make sure they get those 20 minutes. So I think a lot of it is we've been trained to believe there's only one way to reach the endpoint. And there's not.

There's a lot of ways. And the more enjoyable, the way should be the choice. So I think there is that short term, you know, the beach seasons in four months, got to get fit. But I think there's also just, everyone does the same thing. Like they try to do the hardest, most difficult over the top thing rather than figuring out what's the more enjoyable way to do it. And as you also point out in a recent email, you point out that habits are even better than compound interest.

You know, compound interest gives you more money, which is great. No one's going to turn down that. But with habits, once you accomplish a habit, then you become the type of person who has good habits. And habits stacking can then take place where you can then apply it to writing your book or writing, you know, lost weight. I didn't think I could lose weight. I didn't think I was a type of person that could lose weight. I didn't think I was the type of person that could write a book. And then these things become compounding. And I think that's really quite a quite amazing thing to point out and inspirational to people. So I want to ask you, when you accomplish a goal,

you've accomplished so much, you wrote many books before you turn 30. This book is a runaway bestseller. and it's been influential, hundreds of reviews, which is almost about them talking about Master of the Day. You have other books. Where do you go from here? You've really done so much at such a young age. Now I know you're just starting off in your Chinese medicine career. Well, first of all, Alex, can we talk about that?

What drew you to that versus conventional Western medicine? Yeah. Well, when I was 22, I bought a one-way ticket to China, thinking I'd become a monk and Kung Fu Master, and I'd come back with a sagely orientalist Hu-Fung-Chu trying to be an Asian. You know, this little white boy watched way too many kung fu-movies. I stay for a year. I do learn to read, write and speak Chinese.

I studied Kung Fu with a guy who is a, he's actually a Tai Chi practitioner, who was a bodyguard for the Communist Party. And I ended up coming back because it was a good year, and I ran out of cash, and I was like, well, what do I really like? And I came back and as I was figuring out my 20s, I started building a business. And I had always had lifelong GI problems, even though I was raised in a healthy family. And as soon as I went to college, I cooked every single day. But I always had digestive problems.

And I was always super underweight. And I went through the conventional medical system. I went through a general practitioner, a dietitian, a GI specialist. And I didn't get any results. And I was surprised by how aggressive some of the interventions were. You know, I was 22 or three. And the GI doctor talked to me for less than five minutes and said, let's get you a colonoscopy. So he was, he didn't really even know much about me. He was ready to put a robot up my blood, essentially. And I was like, if I was like,

this is. Can we date first? I mean, let's go on day first. Come on. Come on. He's, he's telling me like about his vacation to Aruba in the most saccharine way. And I was like, dude, your rapport building skills so bad. But really, it wasn't his fault because it was a him he'd been trained in, right? And so I'm a very systematic thinker. So I just saw him as a highly trained cog in the system. And that wasn't working very well for most chronic illnesses. So it was actually a Chinese herbalist that ended up getting me the best results I ever had in 29 years. And that led me to begin studying this a little bit more and realize that since I was a kid, this is a lot like what I'd always been reading about, these kind of mystic physicians living in the

woods that were hermits and, you know, the hero of the saga falls off the cliff and is revived. Like, I realized that I always wanted to study with that kind of person. And it was more of these people in the Chinese medicine field. And so from there, it was a series of years of seeing these renowned Chinese medicine doctors that ended up resolving my GI problems. So for me, the big thing, though, was I was looking for really that unified field theory of medicine. And I did not see that in conventional medicine. And that. And that. That's why it seemed kind of so pedantic, where it was always changing based on research, because it seemed like the core threads were not that strong.

But I saw that in Chinese medicine. And so that was like, it was like love at first sight. That was really like, this is my purpose, my Dharma. So that really resonated with you almost at the end. And it certainly resonates with me to find this universal theory of everything, kind of unification of these ideas. Because there are so many different ideas and so much conflicting information. It's one thing if you have information, but you have also decision fatigue.

You know, how do I decide if I should go with Alex or Zubi or, you know, whatever? And I think, you know, some of the things that are out there, I wonder from your perspective, if, you know, if there is an analog, no pun intended, with all the digital apps that are useful in, for example, I use this meditation app, which comes with a band called the muse band, messes up my hair, as you can tell. But also I use, you know, 10% happier. And I use this new one by my friend Rockwell Shaw called Mesmerize, which is like a visual meditation app that's quite phenomenal. What would the Chinese kind of tradition, the oriental medicine tradition, what does it have to say of anything about these? Or is it just like, we've been here for 5,000 years, talk to us when you're a thousand years old?

Do you mean in terms of like specifically the psycho-emotional stuff going out? Or just like the use of technologically. in the Eastern practices? Is it frowned upon? Is it seen as like just whatever Western are kind of liability? Or what is the perspective from Eastern philosophy in terms of using these apps and technology to gain mindfulness or develop habits? Well, I think in general, like you have Chinese medicine, which is its own medical philosophy.

And you can, you could use an app to do some of the diagnostic stuff. I mean, like even with acupuncture, they use a lot of electroacupuncture, so a low frequency. see that's just kind of mimic stimulation. But I think in general, it would be interesting to see where Chinese medicine meets technology. One of my mentors is a cancer specialist in Portland. And I think it was a Chinese pharmaceutical company gifted him a thermography machine. And what's really fascinating is when you look at cancer and when you look at a lot of illnesses in Chinese medicine, a lot is due to circulation.

I mean, our top two killers, heart disease, obviously, cardiac. cardiovascular related cancer as a large cardiovascular component. And what's interesting is that a lot of the formulas we use are trying to reintroduce circulation to these areas that have been impaired for a while. So these byproducts get accumulated. And he showed us some thermography scans of cancer patients. And you could see just the areas of heat versus cold, like in breast cancer. You could see just the dark blue areas in areas around the nipple or on the breast.

and in prostate cancer, colon cancer, really, really interesting to see what part of the body is really hot and what part of the body is really cold. So maybe something like that in the future, but on the consumer end, I don't know too much yet. I know there are definitely like wristbands for nausea, like pregnant women that are stimulating acupuncture points, the median nerve. But it's an open field for that, for sure. You might be the ideal person with your kind of tech savviness and your, you know, you know, unrivaled familiarity going into this study and practice. I want to sort of come, come to a close by asking some questions that I ask a lot of people. But I guess before we even

do that, you know, the last thing I want to ask about is, you know, pertinent to things that you can have direct control over, like sitting down and writing, you can actually write 1% more than you did yesterday. Or, you know, I have an Apple watch or a Fitbit. And I can say, well, yesterday I burned 700 calories, you know, tomorrow I want to burn 707. You know, so that literally you can quantitatively do that. What about with things like, you know, after the book is out or your YouTube channel, as you said, I mean, you've grown it, you know, 60X or, you know, or something like that in just a few years, that's not something directly under your control.

You said you made two videos a week, but, you know, were they all the same quality? Were you also improving them 1% per week? You know, how do you look at it in terms of things that you don't have control? over, such as, you know, subscribers and critical and commercial success. Yeah, there's a really good book. I think it's called the four disciplines of execution. Okay. And what it really talks about is how we don't really have a huge amount of control over many different outcomes. So what we have to do for something like, let's say it is audience growth or it is something like, how about finding a partner that someone wants to date? How do you really control that? What are the metrics that lead to

an increased percentage of that. And it's really about finding what is the closest thing to something that guaranteed will affect the outcome. So, for example, you know, like if you're a farmer, you can't control the weather. But what you can control is the kind of crops you plant and maybe the fertilizer and the soil you planted in. So you optimize for what you can control. Creating content, I can control the frequency and the quality. That's a very kind of amorphous, non-tangible thing. but I know if I just control the frequency, that's one metric that will guarantee

affect something. And I can figure out what my system is for quality and then try to improve that. So for me, it's trying to find whatever metric you think is the most related to the outcome. And that's not always easy to find. Yeah. That's great. Yeah, so I'll put a link to that book. Yeah, the four disciplines of execution. I'll put a link to that in Amazon.

we can find that. Great. So what I want to do now is kind of take you on a journey that I ask my guest that I'm blessed to have on my show. And it really involves kind of looking back, looking forward in time, and connect in some way or another, either to religious or science fiction traditions. As you know, our podcast is called Into the Impossible. And that's named after Sir Arthur C. Clark's famous three laws, one of which is the only way that's, possible to discover what the, sorry, I always mess up these three different hours. The only way of discovering the limits of the possible is to venture a little way past them into the impossible. And so I kind of want to ask your first question, you know, going backwards in time,

what sorts of things did you think were impossible as a 20 year old? You know, usually I ask, or it's 20 something or a 30 something, but you're 30 something now. So it's not like you're a 70 year old, like I've asked, you know, much older people than you. So what would you give your, your advice to your former self that to overcome maybe anxiety about what was to be come your future. So something that perplexed me that makes perfect sense today. Yeah. Let me give you a cheeky answer. Okay.

All right. Women. I spent so much time being this nerdy dude just trying to find a girlfriend. And I'll give you an example how I changed my philosophy. I was trying to figure out what do women like, right? That's the, that's the religion up here. Yeah. What do they like?

But I realized I was asking the wrong question. Because the real question was, did I respect and admire myself? Right. What kind of person did I have to become to kind of attract the kind of women and really the life that I wanted? And so, honestly, that was one of those things. That was stupefying to me. But in retrospect, it's about, you know, the more you invest into your own self-improvement,

the more you focus on living a full life, the more that will not be a problem. Well, let me know if you figure out, because you're in for a Nobel Prize. Range check on that, yeah. That's right. Harder than all of theoretical and experimental cosmology. Right. Next thing that's connected to Sir Arthur C. Clark takes this perhaps into the future,

which is, I don't know if you've ever seen the movie 2001, a space odyssey. Have you ever seen that movie? Oh, maybe a long time ago. Yeah. Well, there were these scenes kind of iconic where these chimpanzees or primates or whatever, they discover this monolith, this black object, like this thing over here. And they chuck it up into the air. They chuck a bone up into the air.

They don't really understand what it is. And then later on in the movie, there's also these same exact monolith, this huge black, you know, structure. We don't really know what it is at first. And that is, that's found on the surface of the moon. And it's obvious that, you know, whoever put this there was not intending for primates to find it. They were intending for the advanced version of the primates in the long future to find it.

And it's sort of a time capsule that lasted a billion years or so. We don't know exactly what, but it was put there to be discovered at a certain time. So I'm wondering if you were making a time capsule and it was some material object or some knowledge, not wisdom, we'll get to that in the second, some fact, something meaningful that you've discovered or that you'd want humanity to discover, what would you put on this billion-year long-lasting USB drive? So there's a great physician in Chinese medicine called Simiao. and a story about him is that he left some of these most famous Chinese medical formulas

engraved on, I think on his actual tombstones. And the reason was that, so that the poor could have access to those formulas to heal themselves for the rest of their life because those were formerly heavily guarded. And I think for me, you know, I've been working on this book, I'll show you here, that I highly pretentiously call the masterwork.

And this book is... Yeah, exactly. Exclusive. If I did distill the, you know, the single most important things that have made the difference, what would those be? And I think, you know, whether I give this to my kids, I don't know, or it's something else. But for me, these are all things that fall into that religion category. What are the fundamental principles that dictate the direction of life?

And it would probably be something along the lines of what we talk about, which is that everything is one part of your philosophy and your religion that dictates how you act, but then also what you do and how you act. So I don't know. Maybe I'd leave them this. We'll see. It must me in 50 years. Yeah, exactly. Well, yeah, they'll be able to get one of the great things about writing a book is that it's there for all time. As Carl Sagan said, a book is proof that humans can work magic because you'll have this book or I have a book that I'm reading now that was written by Galileo in 1632.

And I'm reading this, you know, modern printing of it. But it's just phenomenal to think, you know, as Carl Sagan said, you have the voice of a long dead, you know, human being in your ear. And they're communicating to you across them. millennia in some cases. And I was thinking, and in that book, this may or may not be interesting to folks, but in that book, he's really railing against Aristotle and how Aristotle thought the universe was centered on the earth and not the sun, as we now know it to be, or later Galileo essentially contributed to our understanding of that.

And the book's about it. It's called the dialogue. And I was thinking about it, well, Aristotle lived, you know, Aristotle lived, you know, in a couple centuries BC, and here's Galileo. So literally, he must have been reading some. translation of it into Italian or Latin from the ancient Greek. And it was like 1700 years old or more, maybe something like a 2,000 years old. And then he's criticizing this great, you know, mind Aristotle. And then now I'm reading it criticizing Galileo, criticizing Aristotle. It's just

amazing. So it's a phenomenal accomplishment. You have worked magic. I changed also my slogan to a podcast is proof that humans can work magic, stealing that from Carl Sagan. And I really I really want to thank you for all the things that you do. We're going to have links to all your materials and where people can find you online. But I really want to thank you for the service you've done for me personally and for our audience. And just being such a gracious, humane, sophisticated person that is obviously a deep thinker. And I wish you so much blessing on your journey. I know you're on a mission to do good in this universe.

And I want to thank you for sharing a little bit of that time that's so precious with our audience. today, Alex. Yeah, thanks, Brian. Happy to help in any way. Great. So I want to do one last thing. I'm going to have you just look into the camera, say who you are, and whatever you want people to connect to you with online or your newsletter or website or YouTube. So just say, I'm Alex. You know, give where people can find you. And we'll do that in three, two, one. Hey, I'm Alex Heim. If you guys want to follow along, check out what I'm up to. You can check out Modern Health Monk on YouTube or my book, Master the Day, on Amazon. Thanks, Alex. What a great birthday present, man. And so it's so nice to talk to you. I'm going to be on cloud nine all day.

Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable and magic. If you enjoyed this episode of Into the Impossible, please subscribe, comment, share, rate, and review. For a chance to win a free copy of our most recent guest's newest book, send a screenshot of your review to info at imagine.ucsd. We appreciate hearing from you and are always open to your suggestions for future episodes. For more information, go to imagination.ucsd.edu. Find us on Twitter at ImagineUCSD. Watch us on YouTube. Listen on iTunes. Into the Impossible is a production of the Arthur C. Clark Center for Human Imagination

in the Division of Physical Sciences at the University of California, San Diego. Eric Viri, Director, Brian Keating, co-director, Patrick Coleman, Associate Director, produced by Stuart Volko.