Kyle Kingsbury Podcast - #23 Own The Day with Aubrey Marcus

Episode Date: March 5, 2018

We sit down with Aubrey Marcus, CEO of Onnit, to discuss his new book "Own The Day, Own Your Life" Check out Own The Day, Own your life Aubrey Marcus on Instagram  Twitter  Facebook or AubreyMarcus.com Connect with Kyle Kingsbury on Twitter and on Instagram Get 10% off at Onnit by going to Onnit.com/Podcast         Onnit Twitter        Onnit Instagram  

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it needs. Get 10% off the protein bars and bites or any other product at onnit.com slash podcast. Welcome to the Onnit podcast. We've got the man, the myth, the legend, the founder and CEO of Onnit. The reason we have this glorious podcast. He's joined us today to talk about his life's work. And in his life's work, he's distilled it down to a book that took him three years to write. In that, he documents the way you accomplish the best day of your life. One 24 hour cycle that will change the way you live. And if you can own the day, you can own your life. We break down chapter by chapter, everything that he puts into this book. Obviously we can't dive

too deep because a book to get into one hour, but we do go a little over time on this and we really dive deep into the thought processes and what goes on, why he wanted to put things in the book and why it's important. I think you guys are going to get a lot from this episode and you really will get a lot from Own the Day, Own Your Life. Check it out. All right, Onnit Podcast, we're with a man who needs no introduction, but I'll happily introduce our founder and ceo of on it aubrey marcus what's up brother what's up my man how you doing man i'm doing phenomenal good been excited for this one yeah we're gonna talk about your new book own the day own your life and we got a lot to talk about here and yeah i put a lot in that yeah there's uh i think i've

read it three three or four times already yeah and it's yeah it's fucking jam-packed yeah let's let's break down real quick what the the big picture of this book is because that's kind of what in my opinion and yours what sets it apart from a lot of the other books out there on how to get right it's the same thing that sets you and i apart and same thing that sets ben greenfield apart and a lot of the people who really walk the walk it's that same thing that sets you and i apart and same thing that sets ben greenfield apart and a lot of the people who really walk the walk it's that not that they focus on one thing or one thing at a time they that's focusing on everything because we all parts of the body all parts of the mind psyche spirit skin organs bones muscles skeleton everything works together ultimately in unison and every time you try to

focus on one particular part and just put all of your efforts on that then the other stuff starts to go out of balance or you lose track of some of those other things so to really make improvement you got to level everything up at once but that's a hugely daunting task so how do you make that bite size how do you make total human optimization something that's manageable well make it one day like one day of human optimization everybody can do as long as they have a really clear plan and it's not crazy expensive and that's what we wanted to accomplish with this book just be like look don't worry about your life like own your day and you'll own your life you know what i mean like just focus on that and not only that fuck a day like let's just go hour by hour let's go prescription by prescription let's

go step by step and then pretty quickly you'll get a full idea what total human optimization looks like yeah little by little as you tackle things from the morning routine onward all the way to how you finish the day off everything falls in unison and then you look back on that perfect day and it truly was the most optimized way to live you feel better on all fronts no one thing is like that hard it's just getting organized and just doing okay i got one thing to do what do i gotta do okay i gotta wake up and i gotta take my hydration drink all right a little sea salt a little water a little lemon is that hard nope not hard you know you just gotta do it and then the next All right, a little sea salt, a little water, a little lemon. Is that hard? Nope, not hard.

You just got to do it. And then the next thing, all right, get a little light. Okay, I can do that either through the earbuds or through walking outside. I'm sure we'll talk a little bit more about the circadian rhythm and the reasons for that. But like, okay, get a little light. Okay, move around a little bit. When I was filming the little video to companion to go along with this

with the book bundles, I was out. We were chasing Lobie around in the sand and getting a little light along with this with the book bundles you know i was out we were chasing loby around in the sand and getting a little light and that was that was the morning routine like get a little movement get a little light you know hit the hydration drink okay chapter one you know you pretty much got that covered and you got all the science and all the backing and all the reasons why you need to do that every day but every one of those things is fucking easy yeah yeah they're damn easy and And you touched on the first chapter here. One thing I wanted to do, which I really appreciated when Jordan B. Peterson did this, he had a

lecture that he did, I think, in the UK because it was a British dude that brought him out. And it was in front of a large audience. And this is prior to his book, 12 Rules for Life. He just went through chapter by chapter, giving little tidbits and pointers on that. And a lot of people would say like, oh, gave the book away but that's completely not the case obviously with something like what you've written here took what three or four years yeah you can either say a lifetime or two years like two years of actual writing a lifetime of of accumulating and accumulating and then gravitating towards what works because all those

stories are in here all the times i fucked up from when i was younger to when i was in college to when you know that's the part of the book that we organized called getting owned you know like we've all been there getting owned by life getting owned by bad choices by bad information and i think it's important to recognize that like me and you we weren't born perfect you know like we didn't just come out of the gate just optimizing from the drop you know like we didn't just come out of the gate just optimizing from the drop you know we fucking did a bunch of stupid shit and then we figured it out we figured out what works and we learned and we grew and we improved and then now all of a sudden you know you probably even more than me but we're living some closer

approximation to this optimized life yeah that definitely takes hustle it always strikes a nerve with me when you see like the guy who's made it and they just act like they've always been there you know it's like that means they're probably not there at all yeah because they're probably faking it they're probably faking it they're gonna be that dishonest about that i'm probably dishonest about what they're doing right now yeah i'm so dialed yeah yeah i really appreciate it when guys like tony robbins or Eckhart Tolle, they really open up and talk about the period of life where they were depressed or the shit they had to go through to get to where they are today.

Yeah. And obviously you don't leave anything uncovered in this book, but, um, you know, we touched on chapter one. You mind if we break down piece by piece like that? So we got water, light and movement. And the water is obviously a bit more special than just fucking drinking you know something out of the fridge or tap water you know it's funny it's like i always knew that i was dehydrated in the morning but i didn't realize

that we lose a pound of water overnight just breathing right because like there's an air humidity and then there's internal water vapors that come out of our moist water sack of a body. And so as we expel that moisture-rich air from our body and breathe in less moisture-rich air from the outside, we're losing water constantly. That's why we're lighter in the morning. It's not like a fucking miracle like a stork came and took some fucking fat off your body. You're like, ooh, I'm light this morning. I'm not thin. I burned fat. What do you think it went?

What does it do? No, it's water. It's water is the reason why and so making sure that you rehydrate first thing because it doesn't take much for dehydration to start to fuck you up i mean you intentionally dehydrated yourself and you probably felt the effects when you're cutting weight you know and already right from the drop the moment you start getting dehydrated your thinking is less clear you're a little disoriented you're a little more aggravated i mean how many times did you snap at people one of the calmest calmest nicest human beings the weeks prior to fight camp i was not the guy to

be around i think that's fairly common napping at people and that's you would look at all these people who all they do is drink soda and coffee all day and they're just fucking snapping at everybody like yeah well let's take care of one basic thing how about drink some fucking water you know put some put some minerals in there so that your electrolytes are getting covered too so that you're supporting your adrenal glands you're supporting your whole organ system so pinch of sea salt you know probably for you and i that's somewhere close to five grams that we're going to want in the morning we'd say three grams in the book but you know depending on that a little bit of lemon for the bioflavonoids get the gastric juices going and room temperature because obviously that absorbs better cold is contractive

warm is expansive so warm is always going to absorb typically better and um just pound that first thing yeah it's funny when i started doing this you know i'd people tell you these things and then you know sometimes you don't always put it into practice. When I was reviewing this book and going through it, it was like, Oh, okay. Let me start to fucking try, you know, let me do this stuff and practice and walk the walk. And it amazed me how far my coffee would go. If I did the water movement and sunlight first, it was like, Oh, this is just reset me. Now fucking coffee feels like the very first time as opposed to leaning on it like a goddamn crutch with half a pot each day to start

talk to me until i have my pot of coffee that's like a badge of honor for some people right well it's not the way it should be coffee should be that extra that extra bonus that performance enhancing plant that we use you know after we get through that first morning run and we feel pretty good you know yeah yeah it's cool too to see like different ways that i can implement this stuff like oh if i have to do these three things and i have to have movement and i should get sunlight like just fucking go move outside get outdoors so easy run my kid around the block you know take my dog outside hit some morning yoga do something just to move in the sunlight as it's coming up and that pays dividends well that's the circadian rhythm right there's these things that ben greenfield loves using this word it's called

a zeitgeber and the zeitgeber is like one of the signifying factors for setting your circadian rhythm which is kind of like the the balance and rhythm of life itself it's like tells us to go to sleep at night tells us to wake up at the dawn but movement and light in particular are two of the main zeitgebers that say okay we're awake we're woken up now like now it's time for waking time now it's time to be alert and you know by just doing that basic stuff you're going to have a lot more energy you're going to be a lot more in accord and you're going to get sleepier when you are ready to actually go to bed 100 brother let's talk about chapter two here we got deep breath deep freeze one of my favorites i'm so jealous of your fucking chest freezer setup that you have at home i went in there and i dipped my fingers in there and i was at 40 degrees and it's just right there available. So yeah, I mean, we're both, you know, we both know the benefits of the cold and breath.

Like these are like, you look at the doctor, the free miracle drugs that are available in the world. And we're going to talk about a bunch of them, but we already talked about a couple. Well, water's not exactly free. We're recommending spring water. If you live by a spring, it's free. You just got to drive to it. So maybe there's some gas money or maybe you pay pay for water maybe you filter your water and then add

the sea salt you know as long as you have a good filter and add back the sea salt you're probably going to be all right so water's kind of free not exactly but fucking light is typically free especially if it's sunny and then from there you have breath and temperature which are well maybe you'll buy a chest freezer but you can use your shower depending on where you're at so most of these like and these are fucking miracle drugs man like breath and the cold in combination are incredible at reducing that kind of chronic stress that we all carry that i've carried my fucking whole life and there you know you have techniques where you can use breath the hyper oxygenation practice we talk about the wim hof breathing but there's different types like the

pranayama and yoga and fire breath and different ways to hyper oxygenate along with exposure to the cold and you're jacking up norepinephrine by 300 500 which is dropping those chronic levels of stress those chronic levels of inflammation that are basically just burning your body up faster than you want to get used you know it's like instead of lighting the candle at the top and providing the flame, it's just kind of roasting the wax constantly across the whole length of the candle. And you're, it's killing us. Like quite frankly, it's just literally killing us. It's burning us up. And this is a technique to kind of slow that process down to stop it to halt those processes which is great for the immune system just great for fucking overall perspective

it hits so many different angles from cognitive function you know like you feel alive right in the cold and when you get out for hours after i mean if i do a five minute bath i'm good for the day yeah you know and then on top of that you tie in the breath work and the breathing hyper oxygenation you know there's so many things that go into that from cognitive function to well-being your mood how it affects you emotionally and then on top of that you talked about inflammation systemic inflammation people often think of that as just a pain signal yeah like your joints yeah like oh okay i know i'm a little i have a little inflammation because i'm more sore from the work

it is that can be it but truly when you look at a lot of the causes of disease that we have in the west start with systemic inflammation or they're the caught they're causing systemic inflammation if you have serious gut issues that can just have a cascade effect because it's all one system right and as we turn down that dial of systemic inflammation that improves health in all areas yeah and and what's what's interesting is like you get habituated to the stress like really actually you know the the cortisol that you have stress should actually reduce your inflammation you know and that's that's the way it's designed for but when you have chronic stress then you get habituated to the all of those chemicals that actually shut off the inflammation inflammatory response you get habituated and you

build up a tolerance and then you just can't shut off inflammation anymore so when you get sick you get sick longer you know because well you feel sick longer all those inflammatory symptoms of any kind of cold or anything you feel your body is unable to shut it off because the normal processes that shut it off it's just used to it's habituated it's like you know when you get desensitized to insulin and you can't drop your blood sugar anymore you know insulin sensitivity it's the same thing anything that we have chronically the body develops a tolerance for and that's when you get in real trouble and this is a great way to kind of reset that tolerance yeah it's also a great way you know it's funny because wim hof talked a bit about this but for people who struggle with meditation

and i've been there before uh you can't think about anything else when you're in the cold there's no other thought you're not thinking about your wife you're not thinking about the argument with your boss you're not thinking about anything else the thing your kid did that pissed you off that's all fucking gone at 40 degrees now you've locked yourself into the present yeah right which is the teaching of so many great teachers like eckhart tolle and wayne dyer and the list goes on and on but truly to have something that just locks you in to right now even if it's just a moment in the day, it's so important because then it's easier to get to. And you talk about, uh, they say

neurons that fire together, wire together. So the more we grease that groove from a meditation standpoint, the easier it is to drop into that state of peace and calm. Look, we're built to, we're built to fight and adapt. You know, we're built to we're built to fight and adapt you know we're built to have short bursts of exertion and then long periods of recovery like that's human nature that's animal nature you know watch fucking attenborough read his planet earth and you look at all the animals and it's like run and then it's chill you know and that was the interesting thing most of the time it's chill but when it's time to go it's time to go and that's why just a few minutes of cold exposure gives you that external resistance where your body has to focus all its effort on staying warm on oxygenating and all these factors and then creating

the adaptation downstream and that's really what we're designed for it's it's flex and then relax and then recover you know and that's what we're doing for the entire body and all the hormone systems when we're pushing ourself into the cold whether that's you know the power shower i call it where it's warm water and you take care of all your morning kind of toiletry needs and your personal care and then just wash your balls start to breathe up start to breathe or not if you like the biome stay where it is then just crank that nozzle cold you know start the breath crank the nozzle cold and you'll feel fucking awesome and then if you hold your breath this is another one of the wim hof like special techniques if you hold your breath particularly at the bottom of the breath and then you get that mammalian dive reflex where you're

holding your breath that'll actually give you as much adrenaline as a fucking bungee jump you know and then at that point you don't need coffee anymore you don't need that adrenal stimulant you've done it in the most natural way possible by just holding your breath and creating that natural response that doesn't have that kind of chemical burden and you can save that other button for later so it's like you keep a button available when you need it but let's use this one while we got the chance yeah don't use all your lifelines exactly you gotta save a few lifelines for the end yeah that million dollar question yeah exactly or the 10 million rupees depending on what you're watching well let's jump into the next one in chapter three we dive into breakfast there's a there's a ton of key takeaways here it's something that both of us

have been on the front lines really pushing towards people um more fat less sugar or don't eat simple right yeah but how many times have we fucked that up you know i tell i tell the story of eating pop tarts in the book like cinnamon cinnamon pop tarts do you have a favorite pop tart i i loved i loved like the the fruitier pop tarts the blueberry ones shit like that i love the fruity for me it was cinnamon all day sometimes s'mores but look at that fucking thing like we're actually feeding that to people like can you believe that i mean it's frosting on top of like refined carbohydrate which is just like refined flour which is basically sugar that in solid form bleached wheat flour yeah exactly enriched with synthetic vitamins and then in the middle is more

frosting you know and then on the outside again is more fucking wheat flour it's just like a sugar sandwich and then you expect that to be like food you know you that's not food that's fucking poison yeah or a bowl of fruity pebbles with non-fat milk yeah exactly nothing just get in the way and slow down let's blend the high fructose corn syrup in the fruity pebbles with some fucking concentrated lactose from the non-fat milk like it's insane and then we say oh man our kids are going crazy of course your kids are going crazy the fuck are you feeding them of course you're of course you feel like shit of course you're exhausted and that's just the state that we've gotten to and we can go into a lot more about fat but part of the problem is is that somewhere along

the lines the science decided that oh fat is bad for the heart well it turns out it's not but that just allowed all of the sugar and all of the corn and all of the cane lobby to kind of come in. Big agriculture. Yeah, big ag. Just to push all of that sugar through our system and then convinced us that that's breakfast. Okay, pancakes, pop tarts, muffins, pastries, grab a donut. Donut for breakfast? Of all the times.

With black coffee. Of all the times. Don't do that. And what ends up happening is like that you know you get that big spike in blood sugar and then that big spike maybe you feel good on the rise oh okay i'm awake i got a rise in blood sugar i'm feeling good but real quick that body dumps a bunch of insulin and the thing about when the body dumps insulin and you have a bunch of sugar coming in it doesn't know how much sugar is coming in and that it needs to scuttle that sugar

out of your blood as fast as possible because high levels of sugar in the blood is toxic so the body's like i don't know how much this fucking crazy monkey's eating he found some fruit that he shouldn't have found he found the sweetest fruit on earth and i don't know he's going crazy so let's just dump as much insulin as we possibly could to reduce that you know and overcompensate so then all that comes in then you go hypoglycemic and you're exhausted and tired and irritable and we go ping-ponging back and forth and that's when i better get another snack you know like so you're just bringing these sugary snacks with you all day and just ping-ponging up and down and up and down and that constant flood

of insulin yeah that's what's going to make you fat that's what's going to give you diabetes that's what's going to make you feel like shit all day and as you're tired then you drink more coffee and then more sugar and it's this vicious vicious cycle that some impossibly large number of people are just dealing with on a day-to-day basis yeah if you if we i you know it's funny because paleo gets such a bad rap for the name paleo and what did the paleo man eat and blah blah blah it fucking varied wildly but at the same time there is none of our ancestors across any any fucking corner of the earth that ate six meals a day that were loaded with sugar so heavy and devoid of fiber and fat yeah that they don't exist in nature that shit doesn't exist in nature it's been chemically engineered for our taste buds through some of the best or worst scientists in the world

yeah yeah that's that's that's the worst roller coaster on earth to be on and that's why so all right so basic basic points here eat fat it's going to give you sustainable energy it's going to fuel that other energetic system the ketone system that is also you know probably one of the cleanest fuel sources we can have best for like mental clarity and also you know if you if you look at mark sisson's work and talk about providing both fuel sources both from the sugar and both from the fat as well from the carbohydrate from the fat then you're like a two-powered jet instead of a jet that's running off one engine yeah metabolic flexibility sure a jet can run off one engine but off two is a lot better and it doesn't create those big blood sugar spikes so

in the morning just keep it high fat keep it high protein you know and or if you don't have those options just don't eat the idea that breakfast is the most important meal of the day like that like fucking nabisco or kellogg's came up with that shit like that's not real it's not real i got some other fucked up ideas too he rocks the road to wellville like this guy was fucked up or read chris ryan's book i think it was kellogg who was like fucking putting on chastity belts and don't masturbate about people masturbating and shit like that i mean he was a fucking legit weirdo legit weirdo and that's not it's it's all pseudoscience it's all like things that the media has kind of put out and said oh yeah breakfast no it's not it's not the most important meal of the day and actually with the science of intermittent fasting the easiest way to intermittent fast

compress your feeding window to eight hours for a normal social human is to just skip breakfast then you have a nice lunch and then you can have a nice dinner with friends or family you know if you start your first meal at 12 and then eat again at seven easy enough you know you can even have some bone broth or some optimized coffee or something in the middle of the day keep the fats high easy easy and you'll live a longer life you'll have more mental clarity you'll have more energy doing it that way and there's some caveats you know some women with some you know sensitive hormones it might not be the best idea this isn't for everybody but certainly if all you got is sugar don't stress just fucking skip it yeah it's an easy way to get hydrated too as i've condensed down to that eight hour feeding window if i wake up and i'm hungry i just drink more high quality water and in doing that by the time i have my you know i start

along a lot of days my day with an optimized coffee or an optimized yerba mate yeah high in fat moderate protein and in doing that i've given my space the time to actually soak in all the water and the electrolytes from that so now it's like i said it's twofold in the energy that i get and then it's very easy for me to have just two solid meals after that i'm not snacking and grazing all fucking day long because i've front loaded the fats and i've given myself space to take that in yeah and this other idea that we need to eat a bunch of small meals a day like that became really popular it's like oh no eat a bunch of small meals a day like that's not doesn't have scientific basis either unless you're putting out constant exertion like yeah if you're on a bike and you're

fucking riding the tour or climbing a mountain for sure you know if you're an actual bodybuilder yeah exactly eat all day great you know but for most people that's not gonna you know we want to use our metabolic system and then rest our metabolic system use it and rest use it and rest this is the cycle this is the pattern that repeats all throughout the book stress great use it and rest okay food great use it and rest everything we do do it and rest that's the way we're supposed to that's the way we're supposed to operate not constantly grinding constantly eating constantly you know i mean i guess the only exception would be you can probably constantly be sipping on water or something like that you know that's fine but for the most part you know con that idea of little meals at all different times is not going to allow

your body the time to actually recover yeah these things are meant to be placed on hold you know and then and there's so much science coming out about the circadian rhythm of the microbiome yeah a lot to it well let's dive into the next one supplements we know a thing or two about supplements here we do know a thing or two about it i think that you know really i just wanted to focus on the key ones yeah and i also wanted to say like we shouldn't look at supplements just as pills like sunlight is a supplement it creates a vitamin d boost in the body when you get sunlight on your skin and that is a supplement so you can take your vitamin d supplement outside or you can take it in a squirt bottle like we have

it either way it's a supplement you know you can take your omega-3 supplement you can take krill oil which is awesome or you can eat your can of sardines you know and intentionally choose food that'll make that happen you can take your greens powder or just crush a smoothie with a bunch of greens and micro greens and broccoli sprouts and spinach and all kinds of different stuff or greens juice you do it that way so really i wanted to talk about a lot of different ways and expanding that definition of supplementation but it's really going after some major groups you know antioxidants omega-3s minerals minerals is also huge you know an epsom salt bath for magnesium or you know key minerals you know

you can take that there's so many ways to go about it but there's certain basic things and systems that we just need to hit yeah and it's important we cover those bases because it we're looking at the big picture globally sure absolutely and you know so talked about b vitamins um you know of course the the tpc packs you know when we talk to different athletes or different people coming in um who we know might not have the most under the greatest understanding of what they should eat like that's a great starting point because it's got the krill oil it's got the spirulina chlorella and then it's got the special stuff that we really can't get from food i mean that's what on it's known for right the alpha brain the shroom tech sport like

you're not going to go find ashwagandha bundles in whole foods that are ready to go or forage for cordyceps yeah yeah no unless you're in the pool yeah you know and then you're really lucky to find some shit like that or you know and and the the pond scum in your pool is not huperzia serrata like that's not the right moss you know so there's certain other supplements that are really going to enhance performance and you know obviously that's that's one of our specialties yeah and i think one of the keys that really is outlined here is that you know you can't just like i mentioned with coffee and people on the facebook lives we do weekly things like that you know it's like oh what's you know i got brain fogged would alpha brain help and it's like well alpha brain is going to help you but you don't want to

lean on that the way i used to lean on coffee you know let's get your shit in order and then you'll take yourself to a whole nother level with that supplement because you're right you know your body is right your mind is right now you add something in extra and that's how you really see it shine so what's causing the brain fog well it's probably the chronic inflammation so you start doing those cold cold water immersions and the hyper oxygenation drop your chronic inflammation your brain fog is already better and then you boost the acetylcholine through alpha brain and then you're like you're like a superhuman you know you got superpowers at that point so on all eight cylinders yep so we got this is one of my favorite chapters this is something i've been doing for probably the last year and a half talk about driving

and mindfulness and mindfulness yep let's break that down driving is like a lot of people think of it as wasted time and robert green calls it dead time versus the live time like it's just the the time in between where you're actually doing stuff well what if we made that time really valuable because if you're going to have a day and you're going to do this i mean people commute for sometimes years of their life if you accumulate it all total you know so what can you do with that time in transition well there's basically two ways one is to empty out your mind and the other is to add stuff into your mind mindfulness or mindfulness you know and that's really the uh really the principle there and there's some techniques like people think like meditation has to be done in the right room with the right incense

with the right music and the candles burning and i like it that way too but it's not necessary you know there's ways to be mindful by just simply being you know and not distracting yourself not checking your phone at every stoplight not listening to distracting music and you know stressing about work but i talk about the wide peripheral gaze which is something i learned from tom brown where you just allow all of the available information from your entire visual spectrum to come at you at once. And then combine that with six deep breaths, which a Japanese study showed drops blood pressure, starts the state shift. And just allow that all to come in.

And you're still seeing everything. So obviously if you're in a crazy, hectic driving situation, maybe not the time, maybe wait till you're stopped. But just allow the the presence of everything that's happening at once to just take over your mind and empty out your mind of all the other shit and then all of a sudden you're meditating on the way to work and by the time you get to work you're in a really good place and then when you're done with that all right what about filling your mind what about listening to the own the day audiobook or a great podcast from one of the many outstanding podcasts that exist you know then you're leveling up and you've already done

some meditation and all you've done is drive so the drive is like a benefit oh i got a 45 minute drive instead of it being like man i have a 45 minute commute it's like oh i have the opportunity to learn or be present for 45 minutes twice a day sweet yeah and just kind of reframe that principle you're killing two birds with one stone i think the the the visual you gave was the opening scene in office space which is fucking classic right it really is a situation where i mean it it can be brutal if we don't have an idea on how to use that time effectively uh-huh you know but when we do shift that hey this is something i'm gonna learn i'm really looking forward to that like i love traveling alone not with the little guy where

i have to play fucking dad the whole flight but when i'm traveling alone like i can grind through books and grind through podcasts i can throw on binaural beats and meditate and it and it turns a three-hour flight into one of the greatest experiences i could possibly have that's what my mom talked about too because she was a she was traveling for as a pro tennis player and she was you know when she was landed she always felt like she had to be either training or stretching or decompressing or strategizing for her next match or figuring it out there's something that she could do but back in the day when she was traveling i mean this is 40 years ago 50 years ago um there wasn't shit to do so she's on a plane she could didn't she was traveling through europe

she didn't bring enough books to carry her the whole way through either so she would just get to sit on the plane and be you know they didn't have in-flight entertainment screens and shit like that and she said it was one of the things she looked forward to the most because she was off duty ah i'm off duty i can just totally be at peace here there's nothing i can do to improve my tennis tennis playing there's nothing i can do to improve my career i can just be and that was you know a little escape for yeah 100 brother well now we get juicy now now i should say the caveat here right when we got to this chapter chapter six the power plants i was hoping we would dive deep into the into the jungles as you've mentioned before but that's that's for a later time another book right

different book so because you don't want to do psychedelics every day it's yeah and then this is on the day this is that truly could be an entire fucking book right and it will be so we you you dumbed it down into i shouldn't say dumbed it down you intelligently selected the plants that can influence us the best way and also fucking it up how we fuck it up what are the wrong how do we take something good from mother nature given to us in tandem from whatever source there is and fucking turn it into one of the most toxic substances on earth you know the right way we've done that with so many plants right and we have a right way and a wrong way to do anything so let's break that down a bit well yeah i mean the plants have provided so

much for us from nutrition to some of the best drug interactions with the human brain that we could possibly fathom and when we get greedy we try to isolate that and make it stronger and make it more addictive but when we do it in natural accord then and we have our own mindfulness surrounding it they can be like incredible incredible allies so we've kind of talked about one we talked about caffeine and so all right there's the super concentrated way there's pounding a red line you know corn syrup and more caffeine than anybody should have at one time you know hundreds of milligrams of caffeine well that's in and of itself an abuse of what came from a plant from coffee beans that were full of antioxidants or

tea that's full of l-theanine polyphenols and all kinds of benefits and then there's also just the overuse of it you know like you said where you're basically using coffee or caffeine just to get normal let alone you know boost you and give you extra powers it's just like oh i need caffeine now to make me normal so we talk about you know caffeine is one of those main ones the different types of tea the different ways how if you blend it with fat fat becomes the rate limiting factor for absorption because the gallbladder has to release bile and the bile has to break down the fat and the caffeine gets bound with the fat and so you absorb the caffeine more slowly so it's like this own time release mechanism so instead of a quick spike and then a drop in those hormone levels

you can stabilize it more over time so you know the idea of putting cream in coffee was a good idea but when it became non-fat milk or soy milk or something like that, or black, that's already when we're taking a step backwards. And then when it became energy drinks, that's when we're taking a bunch of steps backwards. Yeah. We're adding six pumps of sugar and everything else.

They want to totally shit. Well, let's talk about probably the largest red flag. You thought the editors would have an issue with we dive deep into nicotine that's something that i have you know i would always smoke cigars and i would like that but that was something that was very rare for me so it was more like a it was more like my own ritual and my own kind of recreational ritual but i didn't really understand the capabilities of nicotine until you turned me on to these these guys right here

which is you know i was preparing for tim ferris's podcast and we're talking about the thing under a hundred dollars that made the most significant impact in my life in the last you know in the last year or so and it's these snooze packs you know and this allows me to deliver caffeine and deliver nicotine into my system in one of the least toxic ways possible like the royal london college of physicians says it's over a hundred times less harmful than smoking a cigarette which by the way cigarettes like there's no excuse you know like under no circumstances did you ever fucking smoke cigarette and a lot of the negative stigma around tobacco is due to cigarettes you know even my shaman down in

peru don howard lawler says the problem with tobacco is inhaling it like the problem is the damage that's done to the lungs over time and the over abuse and that choice of delivery mechanism but nicotine in itself is an incredible um it's an incredible compound that opens up all kinds of different mental energy creativity i mean yes just yesterday last night it was about six o'clock just dusk i was watching the sunset walking up the hill in my house i put in one of these swedish snooze packs which is just a really clean tobacco pouch that you turned me on to it's called volt put in a volt i can only like last like five minutes with a volt maybe five minutes i might

be giving myself extra credit i might be like pumping pad my stats it might be like three minutes walking the hill and then the moon was rising the sun was setting i put that in and boom like two dope poems came to me and i just popped open my recorder and they came to me they would not have come to me if it wasn't for the tobacco that i was using that like opened up a connection and that's why in south american tradition when you smoke mapacho they call tobacco a chacaruna a bridge and chacaruna is quechua for bridge and it's a bridge to another access level of consciousness another access level of thinking and then i got in and i wrote both of those poems within half an hour because i got the download but i owe credit to that and everybody who reads it

for this little fucking this little tin from fucking sweden like that i have no doubts in my mind that that's what that's what enabled that thing to kind of click in place so it's been one of like the best allies i've had now could you abuse it for sure you know could you get addicted to it for sure no doubt and and that's why it's important to take breaks to rest even if you think like oh i could quit anytime like prove that like always prove that shit i know a lot of stoners that say the same thing yeah totally yeah yeah and we we talked we talked one one more and that was the uh the beautiful plant moss that we have in our alpha brain i think that was the third and final yeah i mean that's

that is another thing that acts directly on the neurotransmitter level acts on acetylcholine and we touched on that a little bit and you know it's one of those plants that you really can't get in any other easy delivery mechanism than in a compound like we have in AlphaBrain. And we've surrounded that with a lot of other supportive plants as well. And that's just another one of those tools that really locks in different clarity. You know, and like AlphaBrain for unlocking like poetry and creativity and sensitivity to, you know, my surroundings, that's not it. That's nicotine for me, you know, or that's sometimes marijuana, but in a, in a kind of different way, you know, but that's not alpha. Alpha brain is remembering shit,

being on my game, being focused, getting a bunch of shit done, you know, and I think having all these tools in your arsenal from the caffeine to the nicotine to the alpha brain then you really have like you're like a gunslinger you know like okay what do i want to do how do i want to perform what superpower do i want to put on what cape do i want to wear right now i want to wear the i'm fucking super focused and i'm crushing it cape all right cool i'll go grab the alpha brain i want to wear the i'm not tired at all i have boundless energy you know all right let's put on the fucking optimized coffee cape you know all right oh i want to unlock creativity have more focus you know drop into

a state of kind of calm attention all right boom i'll bust out the snooze can you know and then when you have those tools available it just allows you to be that much more productive and that much more effective and that much more powerful as a human. It's like we're almost taking these plants on as like a wizard takes on spells or something. Yeah. Time to power up in the video game. Yeah, exactly. Yeah.

Exactly. I love it, brother. So we drop in next to doing work. Doing work. Know the why. That's a fucking big one. I think that goes into so much that we drop in next to doing work doing work know the why that's a fucking big one i think that goes into so much that we have in life right i fucked this up twice twice on a recent podcast the quote a man who knows any how will get will accomplish the why it's reverse of that a man who knows any why can accomplish any how to get it done yeah right let's talk about

the importance of that as we're doing work whatever we're going through whatever job we have paul check talked about the prostitute archetype on a previous podcast so i'll bring that up but i think it's applicable totally you know and um and desk hygiene minimizing distractions let's dive into that how can we make the most out of our work day yeah well again why is the thing because why is the you have to know why for all these questions like why are you doing this why are you doing anything if we don't know why we won't really do it and if we don't know why we're working really and we're just saying well i gotta do it for for this or i gotta do it for this or this is what my parents told me i should do or we got to assimilate that into our big why like why are we here what do we want to do do we want to live a

full life do we want to leave the world a better place than what we found it do we want to support those that we love okay now we have a pretty good why that's starting to form all right well how does work fit into that well maybe it's a temporary why well right now this is the best damn job that I could get and I got hungry mouths to feed including my own so that's why i'm here so what can i do while i'm here that accomplishes that why the most effectively well probably make the most amount of money with the limited amount the least amount of energy and the most availability to do the other shit that you really love so maybe that's your why and that was my why for a while when i was slanging fleshlights and doing other you know slanging yeah fucking gold mining and

and all these other crazy you know things that i had when i had my marketing company it was like i just gotta bide time because i know i'm gonna create something i love at some point but i'm not ready yet i don't have the money i don not ready yet. I don't have the money. I don't have the resources. I don't have the connections. And I was miserable before that. So I'm like, what am I doing? Why am I here? And then finally I realized like, oh, I'm here to bide time, to collect money, to gather resources. And that's why I'm here.

So how can I be as effective as I can in this job, but still leave my mind available, leave my energy available, not get stressed, still keep my options open for the next why that's coming. And then totally reframed everything. So I didn't slump through the door like, oh my God. I was like, no, I know why I'm here. I'm here for this particular fucking reason. I hate it, but that's cool because I'm doing it for an intention. And that is by far the biggest thing, you know, to take away from that work chapter. And then there's a bunch of other little, you know, tips, tactics, and hacks to just kind of make yourself more productive wherever you're at. Yeah.

Desk hygiene is one that comes to mind. That's obviously something we've talked about quite a bit. Kelly Starrett wrote an entire book called Deskbound, which is a phenomenal deep dive into that. But I think there's some very easy takeaways like having a standing desk having a foot pedal something you can fidget with so that you're not just standing in place which is ultimately not that much better for you than just sitting in place right we like to move we're made to move so if we can move around at our desk that can have a tremendous impact on blood flow getting oxygen and nutrients to the brain

staying awake being productive it's one of the biggest things that i've still fucked up like this is you know so when i meet aaron alexander and you know started to develop that relationship who's a movement specialist and is really kind of whole taking me to task with my own posture and my own movement patterns and looking at my body like i'm already in a deficit my head pitches forward i have kind of chronic stress in my traps and as the body is tight so is the psyche so is the emotional body as you have these things that are constricting you physically you have these things that are constricting you energetically and staying in these locked unnatural patterns for too long

will do that you know so i am going to have to be on the computer for many many hours a day but how i am in physicality while i'm on that computer is my choice that's my choice whether i'm on the computer or not is not my choice right now you know at some point maybe i will have that choice but right now i gotta be on there that's my task management software that's my emails that's where i write that's where i do all the things that i need to do but i can do that a variety of different ways and finding the ways to do that intelligently where you're being conscious of your posture of your of moving in between of standing and sitting and alternating your your position we have that choice so if we start doing that stuff you know and i start doing that now then i won't be all curled up and gnarled when i'm 60 and start

i'm already starting to have different tension injuries and different things in my mid back and low back and and all of that is not because i'm not fit it's not because i'm not working out i'm doing all that but it's because i'm spending 10 hours a day in an unnatural position yeah and we can't affect that kelly talks about passive sitting or active sitting like pat when we're in the car we're passively sitting there's no fucking choice to be made we can't stand up i mean unless you're aaron alexander you're not going to sit in full lotus yeah within a wreck spine like you just that's not that's not on the table of choices but if we have the choice we can choose to do it right yeah you know i've tried to get like

in pigeon in a car where i like lift one leg up and i always end up fucking like catching the steering wheel i'm like swerving around one legs on the dashboard it's not safe i mean i can kind of get my left leg up like when like lizard like on near the left window there but my right leg if i start fucking with my right leg it's all hell breaks loose in the car so yeah you're right i mean but still you can if you have something that can push your kind of lumbar forward you know and really sit on your sit bones and then drop your shoulders pull your neck back you know there's a lot of things you can do in any position that'll really help you out yeah and and being mindful of how your neck feels you know am i fucking squeezing that wheel like i'm in combat or am

i just relaxed in my approach in my drive yeah like all those things add up over time so we get here to eat a weird lunch which we thought we shot an awesome video yesterday well we ate a fucking weird lunch yeah dive into that a bit let's break that down yeah i think there's like 12 foods that comprise like some astronomically high percentage of our food intake. And those 12 foods, a lot of them are nutrient devoid. We're talking wheat. We're talking chicken. We're talking like, which is fine.

You know, they have some macronutrient. You know, well, wheat's probably not the best. It's mostly carbohydrate. But they do have some macronutrients, especially when you get get into the protein but it's the variety that's going to cover all the micronutrient bases those things that support your gut biome those things that support healthy inflammation response those things that have antioxidants and have those rare minerals like boron and copper and molybdenum and manganese and all these things that when you actually research you're like oh damn this is involved in a lot of different reactions and a lot of different parts of the body and the best way to

do that even to have a healthy gut biome there's good science and studies behind that is to eat a varied diet eat the widest variety of food possible and we have a fucking unbelievable opportunity to do that like our grocery stores provide a plethora of different options you know like if you don't know what rutabaga is we'll try it one day you know look up something make mashed rutabaga instead of mashed potatoes and check it out and it just so happens that rutabaga has you know a lot of indications for benefiting candida imbalance okay cool so now you have a medicinal food that you can mix with grass fed butter and try it. And you've probably just walked by that thing and said, what the fuck is that in the produce section? I'm not cooking that shit.

Yeah, exactly. Cause you don't know how, but like make it a game, you know, make it something you explore and like try and figure out and have fun with. Yeah. And it's easy to, for, for the people that are on a time crunch or they don't pre-pack their meals and bring them to work. Like if you live in a city, odds are there's a lot of different ethnic foods out there. You know, you can try Thai food.

You can go to the Ethiopian restaurant that we love. I mean, it's limitless options when it comes to stuff like that. And they're going to use ingredients that we just don't really know how to cook with or we haven't been introduced to and and you got to take it easy on the spice level at some of these restaurants but for the most part like you're going to get a lot of other things that can help our body in a number of ways yeah you take one spice from ethiopia the berbera spice and it's

actually a combination of 12 different spices and each one of those 12 have different micronutrient qualities different benefits that you have so you take some spinach you saute it in some butter olive oil avocado oil and then you put some berber on it and all of a sudden you have a food that has like 15 different foods you've already busted out of that 12 that 12 food number immediately with one side dish you know you're at 15 already you got avocado oil you got spinach and then you got fucking 12 spice berbera maybe with a little dash of sea salt and it's a delicious you can put some primal kitchen ranch on it to make it even more delicious maybe

some pumpkin seeds on it give you that nitric oxide bump and then you're at like 16 foods and you got all kinds of all kinds of benefits and the other thing is is you don't have all those anti-nutrients that we put in our body all the time and i talk about this again going back to kids if you got kids you know probably one of the worst things you can give them is some of that yellow craft cheese because that's going to have not only the preservatives preservatives like sodium benzoate which guess what increases hyperactivity in kids increases the opportunity for add you know and my kid doesn't listen to me i don't know why yeah and not only that it has yellow number six which also increases hyperactivity

and you know add so what are you doing here you know like are you going to really look at the cause of some of this stuff the micronutrient deficiencies you know they've shown that kids who have micronutrient deficiencies are exponentially more likely to end up in juvenile hall and actually if you correct those micronutrient deficiencies they're exponentially more likely to not come back you know like a lot of the things that are happening we're trying to handle with the criminal justice system we could handle with the fucking cafeteria you know like that's going to be way more effective that i should let you know they are serving craft singles in jail from the experience that i have it's a whole different side story but yeah maybe that's how

they keep them coming that's how they keep them coming back exactly the the uh what is that the prison industrial prison industrial complex there we go the for-profit prison system that we have in our country get you hooked on fucking yellow number six and sodium benzoate starve you of nutrients come out fucking hungry and ready to commit crime again i can't help but come out of boredom you're just fucking attention attention span won't allow you to not. You got a craft singles addiction you can't kick. Yeah. Well, let's talk about another one of my absolute favorites, the binaural power nap.

Yeah. That's something I've been big on for many years. I think, you know, read a book that you turned me on to, Sleep by Nick Littlehales, where we think of sleep differently instead of having, and we'll dive into that, but really how we can optimize cognitive function, rest and recovery, and how important it is that we're, not everyone can take a nap, but look at across the world, how many cultures still have siesta. They still take a break where they can commit time to themselves for resting, relaxing, and just being. Yeah. that's what the human organism was meant to do this eight hours of sleep a night is fucking nonsense like you're you really have to

be a special individual to be able to get that like live langdon can do it like whitney can do it i certainly can't i haven't been able to do that shit since i was a child you know so i was always feeling like man i'm, I got no option. I just have trouble sleeping at night. And what am I going to do? Because I wasn't a napper. But then when I started looking, first of all, I read Nick Littlehale's book who says, no, fuck eight hours of sleep a night.

Let's talk about 30 to 35 sleep cycles a week, which is like a 90-minute block where ideally you dip into deep sleep and then go into your interphase and then end up in REM sleep and then wake up for a brief period and then dip back in usually forget the fact that you wake up but you can count it basically like a 90 minute block let's try to get 30 to 35 of those a week and guess what taking a power nap a 30 minute nap counts as one of those cycles so if you only slept six hours in the night but you get that 30 minute nap in according to nick little hills who's worked with like david beckham the manchester united ronaldo the best the best you know some of the best athletes in the world tried and tested this you know is a much

better model and the other thing is it takes the pressure off like you know how stressful it is when you got like five hours before you have to wake up you You're like, oh my God, I can't sleep. I got to get up in five hours. I'm going to be fucking destroyed. I'm like, okay, I'm going to get four hours tonight. That's cool. Or four and a half, let's say. All right, that's cool.

That's three sleep cycles. Well, I can probably get a 30-minute nap on the plane because usually a lot of times that's when I have a flight to catch. You get a 30-minute nap on the plane. I'll get a 30-minute nap when I arrive and i'll be at five i'll be like fine you know like i'll be not only in deficit but let's say i only got one of those and i have four that day cool well i'll maybe try and go for seven and a half hours overnight the next night and get one more and i'll get six the next day and then i'm right on course for my 35 or however it goes it just allows you to to modulate a little bit yeah and you have flexibility because it's a weekly process right but it's some somewhere along the lines

probably the same doctors that were saying whatever number of brain cells we have as a kid is all we get our whole lives which turned out to be complete bullshit same thing it's like oh well you can never make up sleep like no that's not fucking true at all like we can and our body knows how to respond to that so it's typical if you had a shitty night's sleep and you have decent sleep hygiene that when you go to bed the next day you will have more deep sleep and more REM sleep yeah and you can track that shit on a fucking aura ring tell that to a navy seal that comes off a fucking you know time out in the field and they sleep for 36 hours straight you know like duh we make up on sleep

of course we do yeah you know it's just the body the body wouldn't be that dumb you know like the bodies are amazing and that's another thing like we have this idea that we're these faulty machines bodies aren't you know the bodies aren't dumb they've evolved to be as effective as possible and there's going to be times when you're not going to be able to sleep so there's going to be mechanisms at play that allow you to catch up and naps is one of those one of the studies that i love though is you know they did a study comparing more overnight sleep with coffee and napping for alertness mental acuity and performance and napping just crushed the other two categories so like napping is better than more coffee and better than overnight sleep so actually you're better off getting less sleep napping in the day than getting more sleep at

night it just that doesn't usually work with the traditional nine to five industrial civilization show up at work stay all day come home eat dinner play with the kids go to bed repeat but we can build that in especially if we pack our own lunch and then slap on some noise canceling headphones. And just, even if you don't go all the way to sleep by dropping the brainwave state into something more parasympathetic, which is what the binaural beats do. It's this brainwave entrainment that takes you from that waking beta state, that super stressed alert state into a more parasympathetic state like the theta state where the brain waves drop like that counts too that's what nick little hail calls a controlled recovery

period so if you got an hour for lunch at your office go in your car put on the air conditioning put on your noise canceling headphones have a 30 minute binaural beat and allow yourself to recover after you've eaten you know a nice weird lunch for 30 minutes as well and then you got your hour you haven't gone anywhere and you're fully recharged and recovered and you're going to kill it in the afternoon yeah it's excellent excellent reboot so we come to training and we we we kind of went back and forth a lot of people have um particular times a day that they can train and there's room for that. It's not a, this is the only prescription, right? Uh, but, but there is an optimal time to train in the day and that's

why we've left it here post lunch. Um, anybody who's ever performed strength feats and tried to do a max effort first thing in the morning, right when they wake up, we'll notice my grip isn't there. Things aren't firing, you know, like it takes some time for our nervous system to wake up will notice my grip isn't there things aren't firing you know like it takes some time for our nervous system to wake up for our body to really start firing on all eight cylinders and then we can get the most high performance workouts done in that early afternoon to early evening yeah talk about a lot of stuff training chapter is massive in there and some of it is you know the way that we go about you know first of all it's just getting it's just exercising and just training period like this is the miracle drug of all miracle drugs that

is absolutely free you want to look at any fucking marker depression anxiety sexual performance sleep performance what hormone balancing you fucking name it exercise is going to help you know and that's why when you talk to someone like tim kennedy you know he'll say some outrageous things about you know different medical conditions and i'll be like well are you training then don't talk to me about your fucking medical condition because he knows that there's a miracle drug that's available that all of us should be taking at some level first before we start chasing down other pills that shake in little bottles let's let's make sure that we're at least taking the minimum effective dose of this miracle drug you know

and that's and that's movement that's exercise so that's like the first key point and then the next point is like all right how are we going to do that are we going to do a bunch of fixed position cybex weight machines and try and just pump up our pecs and biceps and curl our shoulders yeah totally or are we going to move in patterns that the human organism likes to move are we going to use kettlebells and maces and clubs and ropes and sprint and move around and callous just body weight calisthenics you know that's or yoga that's going to be a much better way to get the body moving than the very kind of vain aesthetic driven approach that a lot of us have preacher curls aren't in the book anywhere i mean i'll do them

occasionally i mean i'm not saying you can't do them but then what else are you doing to balance it out like how are you lengthening the arms are you using some indian clubs and snapping through to really open up the arms are you doing you know tea kettle exercises for your shoulder mobility are you doing myofascial release you know after you do a big day a bench to make sure that your chest and pec minor isn't too tight like mine chronically is from fucking 27 years of benching yeah same here you get what kelly stirret calls douchebag shoulders like a douchebag because you're just as too tight yeah exactly so that's that's a key and we built a little training pyramid that give people an idea

of like all right ideally you want this much power training this much strength training this much durability training this much cardiovascular training and this much just movement and mobility you know so yeah i mean it's a pretty comprehensive chapter but it gives a full outline of just the basics and also a couple workouts that anybody can follow some just body weight so if you haven't bought any of the on it shit all good yeah you have your body it's beautiful because you can start with anyone like anyone can can get better from from this and it's something i was talking to john wolf about as we're rolling out the on it six a full six week body weight only program for people and

obviously you you jumped in for the motivation inspirational piece of that i talked a bit about diet and supplementation we had live lang lynn to go over some incredible recipes ways you can cook for yourself so you're able to hit it from all angles get one of those mushroom burgers in about 30 minutes hell yeah brother but um just this idea that you can start anywhere and even matt vincent talked about that you know like there's no excuse you can move a certain way no matter where you're at when he had his i think his fifth surgery on his knee in two years he would hobble into the gym on uh crutches and he would plan his ass into an incline bench with two 20 pound dumbbells and he would crush his upper body for an hour and like that's not heavy enough weight for him to get

stronger but he could for damn sure burn fat get a pump and feel better about his day still taking the miracle drug he's still getting the miracle you know and that's that's the key thing you know and it's not just it's not just what you do in the gym. It's what you're doing all the time. Like you can do that at any point. And I think we get these kind of ego driven ideas of like, Oh, if I didn't go to CrossFit today, I'm fucking worthless. Like, okay. Or you just walk extra with your dog or you run around and you, you know, play game or you go for a swim or do something else. that's cool too like take some of the pressure off and really understand like what's your goal here you know and your goal is to take

the take the miracle drug feel great be able to live you know play on the playground that is life like if your buddy's going out surfing like all right be good if you could paddle and try to get up on the board you know because that's a dope experience you know or if you're gonna go play a little you know pick up game of basketball can you move around and and laugh and talk shit with your friends like okay that's a fun thing to do like just allow yourself to participate in life like that's the biggest that's the biggest thing you know at least at that level maybe you're not an elite performer but at least you're you're in the game yeah you don't want to be stuck on the sidelines watching other people play exactly right exactly so we move from training

into rest reset and reconnect yeah this is where another part of the book that's you know going to catch people off guard like and this is another thing that ben greenfield's great at who is a big part of the you know organization of this timeline in this book he's like all right what's the best time to have a have a drink what's the best time to have a glass of wine and he has elderberry wine that he brews in his own backyard not all of us are going to have that but if you're going to have a glass of wine after training is actually the best time and you know everybody talks about oh you know there's this a lot of stuff just trickled down from like hardcore bodybuilding like oh yeah there's that anabolic window you got to fucking stuff yourself right after yeah you can you know maybe that's good for bodybuilding but the human

body you know the hormone growth hormone adaptation actually if you wait can actually be preferable if you don't feed yourself yeah mark sisson talked quite a bit about that and i think three of his books yeah and so ben says all right at this point you're going to be a little bit dehydrated from your workout and you so you're going to have less blood volume so the same amount of alcohol that your liver has to process that your body has to process is going to have an even greater effect so you'll feel an even bigger buzz and that's why obviously if you you know drink on an empty stomach you feel it more but also if you drink after a workout you feel it more because and and that's a good thing you just means you drink less you know like don't have this badge of honor like let a little go a long way yeah

exactly save your wallet it'll save your your liver your brain it's if you're participating in the ketogenic diet that means less total carbs all of it factors in yeah 100 so have a glass of wine and that's also going to help you connect with your family or connect with your kid or connect you know it just allows you to be social if it's not a glass of wine maybe it's a maybe it's a fucking hit of cbd or maybe it's a hit of thc or maybe it's a zevia soda or something like that some kind of reward for you at the end of the day something that you can look forward to like oh man this first main push of the day you know the real doing part of the day that's behind me now we got a different kind of sunset into the rest of the night and it's nice to have that line of demarcation and it's helpful because you know you'll accumulate

a lot of different stuff at work. The workout will help. But, you know, I remember just a couple nights ago, I went through work day. I did my workout, came back, just checked to see if there was anything else that came up at work. And sure as shit, something did. Big kind of blunder that the team made. And I was kind of dealing with that. I get home at that point, and I'm just still like a ball of stress and anger and thinking about all these things that have that have come up and how could this how

could i miss this i was blah blah blah and taking that time to like let that go before i start pouring that out on whitney and the people i love and the people around me so combination of yeah a little bit of wine. I brought out my flute. I played some music through there, got myself out of my head, hit the drums a little bit, played the didge a little bit. And then all of a sudden I was reset and it was a different mode. And when you're in that different mode,

then you can really connect with those around you and connect with yourself and kind of reset from that big work and and go part of the day yeah when i was talking to anahata about this this this is de-weeding we take shit out you know we we broke down the the native american wheel and in the in the west is the fall they want to remove shit that no longer serves us and obviously that's looked at as one of the four seasons. But if we take that into our day on a daily practice, we can really use that sunset time, that transition from work to going home to say, all right, let me think about the shit that went wrong today now.

So I'm not lying in bed awake with it still there because I've distracted myself and all that in between time until i hit the sheets where now i'm alone with myself right now it's going to come up right and if i can remove it then it's going to be a much more enjoyable experience with the people that i'm around or if i'm alone a much more enjoyable experience with myself and i've let that go before i go to sleep that'll improve my sleep even before you bring it to dinner because you know when you're aggravated and you're eating you're just kind of rushing through it you're not really thinking about the food you're not enjoying cursing while you're cooking yeah it's

like it and then the people around you who've been a lot of times waiting to see you all day you know for you it's you know little bear and natasha waiting at home like if you brought all that shit from a hard day at work back home and they're like hey dad's home and you're like you know and you can't work through that then you're really never going to get to connect with the people that you love until you create some vacation where you try and let it all go by just getting hammered and like trying to relax for a minute but then the stress just mounts and the unhealth and un you know dis ease of life will start to mount again and so yeah it's it's important to pay attention to the transition times the commute to work and then the transition time between your work day and your workout and

then into dinner and sex and connection which is what we're talking about next fuck yeah let's start let's dive into that eat dinner like a king like a king so so we worked out so we've been kind of shitting on carbs for a while but that's not the point the point is there's time for carbs and now is probably the time i mean going having a more keto approach where you're eliminating carbs that's a fine choice too but if you like bread if you like some grains if you don't want to go all the way then this is the right time because you've depleted the glycogen in your system from your workout maybe the wine has built it back up a little bit but you still have some room for that lump of sour dough with grass-fed butter your or whatever kind of you know nice hot yeah yeah fucking honey and whatever that is now is going to be a better time to do it so that's part

of the feast approach you know we have some recipes in there with some quinoa pasta and i just made that the other day it's fucking awesome with chicken and garlic and spinach and but the other thing i wanted to focus on there too is eating foods that boost dietary nitrate levels and that's for what's coming next bump it to get pumped everywhere i'm coming everywhere i'm coming on stage i'm coming in the gym i'm coming on the beach when i run with my shirt off yeah well we want to come a lot so we got more better sex yeah yeah well and that's and that's why we eat these foods with dietary nitrate so we we got red wine is one of them. So you've already started that. And nitrates turn into nitric oxide.

And nitric oxide is like the gas. It's like the gas valve on the capillaries that either opens up the capillaries from one blood flow. I thought you were going to say your penis instead of capillaries. I think they're either opens up. They are there for sure. So it's either gas or it's less nitric oxide is brakes. And we want to hit the gas because we want full expansion of all of our capable parts, right? And that's what's going to

allow sex to be more pleasurable. It's going to allow your sexual performance to boost. It's going to allow all those things. Even happiness in general is linked to nitric oxide as well. So red wine, dark chocolate, pumpkin seeds, beetsets arugula swiss chard you know all of these things are going to boost these nitric oxide levels and that's going to be huge for you know bedroom performance yeah which is doesn't matter who you are doesn't matter what you like that's an important factor yeah yeah i mean and and that's um i mean if you look at the look at the things we get to do in life you know dinner and into sex these should be two of two of the favorite actually the you know all three of these things all right you know altering your consciousness

playing the musical instrument eating a great meal having sex like you gotta enjoy that shit you know if you're looking at how much how good and how awesome life is and you're not doing any of those things well you're missing out you know like those things are a huge part of the enjoyment of life it's the sensuality it's the physical love we get to experience so yeah i mean you know you can obviously do it by yourself and that's fine as well. You know, and we've all had periods where we've had long stretches where that's all we were doing. Three years at ASU. Three years. The longest dry spell. And that was, you know, if we're

probably being honest, the longest dry spell, that was not because of your body or because of your looks, that's because of your head. Oh yeah, yeah no doubt and that's what we talk about in the book too like the ego and all of the performance anxiety and all the pressure that we put on i was in the same boat all of that stuff that we do all the things that we've made sex like a measure of your manhood like that just fucks it up you know sex is just an exploration between two people and it starts the moment you smile at somebody the moment you touch them the moment you kiss them you know how you use your mouth not just for oral sex but how you communicate like sex is the whole experience you know it's the back scratch at the end of it it's how you provide the washcloth you know if you're not trying to impregnate your lover like yourself

everything everything is the sex it's not just that act of penetration that we put so much emphasis on like the whole thing is sex and when you look at it in that broader perspective then you can really start to enjoy it and just fucking take the pressure off like sex doesn't make who you are sex is just what is just what you do you know yeah so much of that this part of the book really goes into play. Yeah. And we think of like, oh, what does he mean when he says we should play more? And so many people, so many smart people who figure out this right and correct balance in life always talk about play. Like it's something we do as kids and we don't really fill that need as adults. Or we think that I'm going gonna bust my ass all week and then i'll play on

the weekend by getting shit faced or i'm gonna work this shitty job my whole life and i'll play when i retire you know but as we build or i'm gonna live this shitty life and i'll play in heaven yes yeah that's the ultimate ultimate right right the fucking the best martyr i'm gonna fucking do the the most sacrifice and the least enjoyment until the very end but yeah as i love that i love that i someone someone mentioned something to me that there's like this you know parable that of someone who was doing that just waiting their whole life for that moment to come to heaven and then they reach there and god looks at him and asks so how is heaven and they go oh and immediately they lose their erection like damn it i was already there there's a lot more than 40 virgins yeah yeah

there's way more than 40 virgins and who cares if they're virgins exactly you know like it's so much to experience like all the physical love available in the world and like we're in the kingdom of heaven if we so choose it like we've both put ourselves in hell because of our mind getting in the way of our sexuality you know like and that's because as young men and this idea of the measure of the man being our performance, and both of us are super performance crazed people whose ego got way ahead of our spirituality as young men. So we couldn't keep that in balance.

And we just basically ruined a couple of really good years of having sex. Prime years. So yeah, and that's one of the pitfalls that we can fall and i really try to shepherd my younger self or kyle's younger self or whoever's might be reading this through some of those dangers in this chapter and then layer on a couple interesting things like the power exchange dynamics which increase flow state and transient hypofrontality and you know really take this sexual experience to another level um and talk about those things as well but it's really all about like getting back to what this animal does

like it's back to the basics all right what we eat how we move how we drink how we fuck like okay let's get that shit right at the bare minimum you know and then everything starts to get really fun again oh yeah we follow up sex with turn off tune in yeah there's got to be a time where we shut our phones off like i'm not great at it you know but i'm trying to get better and it feels damn good when i do you know when i when i turn on airplane mode and i hit the bio mat and i'd like yesterday i take this news i go for a walk on the hill and even though my phone i actually used my phone to record it but it was in airplane mode so i wasn't getting distracted like if that if that poem download came and i got a text from somebody you know i answered it right then bye bye see you later see you later that shit ain't coming back either you know it's like taking the time to just shut

down unplug and then i have a journaling practice to help kind of prepare you for the next part of the day um which is well prepare you for tomorrow and that's writing your mission your big why up on top and then your three objectives for the following day so you at that point you really have nothing left to think about like you've at the point that you close your journal it's just one page on a moleskine your your mission at the top of the page your three objectives for the following day get that down on paper know that that's what you're why you're doing it and that's what you have to do close that moleskine up and you are fucking off duty you don't emails can't reach you text can't reach you people can wait people can wait they can wait you know like you don't have to please

them anymore at that point this is about you this is about the loved ones that you're with you know and that should have already started with the dinner and the sex but this is a point where you know take that last check make sure all everything in your life is good there's no fire and then just shut the fuck shut the whole thing fucking down and if you can do it earlier great more power to you but shut it down set your objectives for the next day and you're done you're done so take your time to enjoy yourself play some you know non-video games maybe watch your favorite show hang out talk discuss you can write you can read but you're off duty this is your time hell yeah and we dive we circle back to sleep which we talked we tackled quite a bit in the

nap phase yeah yeah i mean that's sleep is you know that next miracle drug it's just this one's actually harder to take because it's not your willpower that does it right but it does take willpower to have the discipline to do all the things that lead to sleep like sleep is this kind of ephemeral thing like the more you chase it and the harder you go after it the less likely you are to get it sleep so hard tonight yeah exactly and that's that's the challenging thing with sleep it's a little bit like erections too i guess in that way you know like the more you obsess over it the more it's going to fucking elude you um but yeah i mean doing all the work beforehand to prepare yourself mentally physically and everything is going to really allow you the best sleep and then just taking the pressure off and knowing that you

know whatever you don't get that night you can get the next day and it's going to be all good and another few you know tips and tactics i definitely recommend taking minerals before you go to sleep you know i take magnesium before i go to bed every night some sea salt is great to really support yourself with those electrolytes and minerals to help your body relax and then you know letting it go keeping it dark keeping electronics away from you keeping the bedroom like a clean and kind of safe haven so it's not just trying to sleep amidst chaos yeah you're not falling asleep with the fucking tv on that shouldn't be in your room in the first place yeah or the laptop with the wi-fi buzzing right by your head and a lot of that is based on fear right like a lot of people leave the tv on because they're scared of the dark they're scared

of the quiet and i really highly recommend you get to the bottom of that. You know, whether it's you don't feel safe in your house, well, maybe you need a better alarm system or you need to find ways that you feel more safe or just work with the fear itself. Yes. Be with yourself alone so you're comfortable in your own skin and you can see where fear, anxiety, and stress is coming from. Yeah.

And you know, look, it may be be different it may be different for everybody you know like i do like having if i'm at my house and i'm there i like having a gun nearby you know and that may be that's just something that for me i'm more comfortable with and i'm trained a lot of hours with that and i feel like all right my doors my doors are locked my alarms on i got my gun you know maybe i've put a little sage in the room for other for other reasons and then fucking i'm safe this is my sanctuary right now do you oil your gun with paulo santo i do when i go hunting actually i actually do oh shit i actually do smudge my gun and smudge the bullets and say some prayers for a swift kill of the animal but uh so close but it's funny you know i mean i think safety and security is a big one like when i'm gone wit sleeps like shit at the house and that's because

she doesn't really feel safe it's also because people have actual tattoos of her image on their body that is true. That's true. If you're listening, it's cool, man. It's cool. We're friends. We're friends. We're all good. Yeah.

Yeah. And they talk, you know, there's another way, you know, usually like the most secure position. I think it's also hardwired. Like sleep is the time where humans used to get ambushed the most, by another neighboring tribe or somebody's nocturnal animal yeah if still you can't get comfortable the most uh secure position that they say that you can be in like to wire that into your body is going to be sleeping on your side with your dominant arm up right so if you're kind of feeling a little uneasy you know sleep on your side with the dominant arm up because that triggers the body like okay i'm the most prepared so if something comes i could like block

an attack i could ninja skills ninja skills show off your very particular set of skills it's funny i was just listening to my podcast with tim kennedy i did recently and he goes to sleep exactly the opposite he just fantasizes about somebody breaking in he's got that i wish they would he's like please let tonight be the night that the terrorists come i hope he's got like multiple like traps and fucking guns stationed in certain spots he knows his kill zone he knows his like last resort where like his body lays before his family goes he might think about that pre pre-sex also to get him going like that might be the ritual to get his dick hard i was i was cracking up and that

that was one of my favorite podcasts if you guys want to go shop over to the aubrey marcus podcast and listen to it one of my the other favorite part with him is uh i was talking about you know there's that show to catch a predator and he does like a lot of that stuff too but it's just in surveillance design so we talked about him he's doing a lot of tv shows now it's like what if there's a show and it's called surprise motherfucker and the show surprise motherfucker is like to catch a predator except you're you're stationed in the house right and if the predator actually comes you watch from the closet and then at that point if they start being a dirt bag surprise motherfucker and then the cameras turn down snatch the condoms out of his hand and it's just fucking

a mad mad tim kennedy to deal with the 13 year old girl runs off to safety yeah surprise and then if he's cool you know then maybe he's like tim just sits there and fucking munches on a warrior bar or whatever so how do we how do we bring this all home final chapter final chapter you know so one of the big things about this final chapter which is all about bringing it home and actually putting into work is if you're going to make these radical changes you have to feel like you deserve to change like if you don't feel like you deserve to change if you don't feel like you deserve to be happy you deserve to be healthy because you're punishing yourself for some past failures or you don't think you're worth it or you're worthless or you haven't been all of these different stories that we have from our past self and the decisions we made then you're not going to change you're not going to do it you're going to subconsciously find ways to not do these

things maybe you'll try them once and it'll work but you won't like that it worked because you'll feel like you deserve not the good but the bad you'll try to balance out your own equilibrium by punishing yourself and keeping yourself in a state of suffering and i think that's something that people really overlook like can you really look in the mirror and say i deserve to be fucking happy i deserve for things to go right i deserve to feel great i deserve to have the purpose you know my purpose my the job of my dreams i deserve to have the lover that i want i deserve all of these things you know and not because i've done something for it i deserve all that just because i am just because i'm alive just because i'm a person i'm a human and

whatever stuff i've done in the past at any point we can decide that that is the past you and this is the new you you can choose to forgive yourself for that you know and i think that's a real key practice and i talk about the practice of ho'oponopono which is the hawaiian kahuna practice of radical forgiveness like getting to a zero state. And you tell yourself, I love you, thank you, I'm sorry, forgive me. And you just fucking keep telling yourself that over and over until you really believe it, until you really believe at that point you're a new person.

And at that point, all of these changes, you're going to find a lot easier to make because you're going to feel like, oh, I deserve it. And that's probably one of the most important things that i could bring home from my own mindset and my own philosophical understanding which i try to weave through the whole book but chapter 16 is that in its purest form like how do we get to a state where we're ready to be a different person hell yeah brother yep nailed it yeah it's a it's a fucking you know it's a it's a good it's a fun read too it's me yeah the book is me this isn't this isn't you know i didn't outsource this shit

you know i had some help from a brilliant like writer editor neils parker but i rewrote it personally wrote it in a hundred thousand word outline and then rewrote it six seven times like to make sure everything is in line and he just helped with the structure and some of the, some of the way that it wove through. But this book is me, you know, there's jokes, there's admissions, there's honesty, there's the whole thing. It's a real, it's not like a dry guidebook. This isn't an encyclopedia. You know, this is a story about how anybody can live a great day. And it has stories from other great performers and people i know and some people i don't know like marcus aurelius and tony robbins i don't know them personally but they're woven in there and um people are really going to dig it yeah they're

going to love it i do yeah and the audio version is going to be dope too that was like recorded that myself so five of the hardest days of work you've ever put together unreal man unreal that amount of focus that it took to just read for seven and a half hours straight you know and really really know i mean help that i wrote it i mean that helped a lot but obviously i don't remember everywhere i was going with every sentence so like reading ahead and then reading and then really expressing the truth of what i was writing through my voice without any preparation because you can't like read the page ahead of time and then say there's not enough time for that we're paying for the recording studio mr marcus

can you reread that sounds like you're floating off in space yeah exactly they would it would call me out for stomach gurgles that was the thing that was really frustrating like before lunch be like um i heard a little stomach in there can we do that again i was like you heard a little stomach in there like what do you mean you know but it was it turned out awesome so you know you can get that on audible you can pre-order it now too awesome brother where can people find you online yeah um definitely you know if you're interested in the book check out own the day book.com and there's a bunch of perks if you buy book bundles anything from hanging out with me to the video companion to all kinds of cool shit if you wanted to get more than one book and give it off to friends and um you know store this up as birthday and

christmas presents or however you want to do it um and yeah just go to own the day book.com check that out and aubrey marcus podcasts and at a Marcus podcasts and at Aubrey Marcus fuck yeah brother fuck yeah thanks for joining thanks man let's eat that fucking mushroom burger let's do it thank you guys for tuning in to the on it podcast absolutely loved

getting a chance to sit down with Aubrey Marcus to talk about on the day make sure you guys go to own the day book dot com to check out different ways you can purchase the book if you love the book you can buy some for your friends and you can purchase the book. If you love the book,

you can buy some for your friends and you can also purchase at audible.com. Thanks a lot, guys.