A Guide To Stoic Thinking: Are You A Victim Or A HERO? - Brian Johnson

The victim complains, blames and criticizes and gives up their agency. The creator, the hero doesn't. They ask a simple question, which is, what do I want? Something's missing in your life. Perfect. What do you want? And you know, I could be in an argument with my wife. Well, I don't ever want to be in an argument with my wife. I want to fill in the blank, communicate more effectively. I want to do this, I want to do that. Then the follow on question is, all right, what do you need to do? What do you need to do right now in order to take one step toward that thing that you want? That's targeted thinking. And again, that's an all day, everyday kind of thing. Most people set their goals, you know, New Year's Eve, and then they forget about them. Five days, 10 days, 15 days later. We encourage people to recommit every day to being their best selves, knowing what they want, who they're committed to being, and then throughout the day practicing this idea of targeted thinking. But to do that, you need to embody the virtue of courage. You need to more consistently be willing to act in the presence of fear. And you do that, by the way, via love.

All right, Brian, welcome to the Man Talk Show. How you doing today, Connor?

I'm thrilled to be here. Best podcast name ever. Man Talks. Let's go.

Right. I know, I like very, my. The book that I wrote is called Men's Work. And so I joke around that I like blunt force marketing, you know, just like hit people over the head with, with what it's all about. And so, you know, yeah, we're gonna, we're just gonna be two men doing some talking today.

Right on, dude. Love it, man. Thanks for having me.

Of course, of course. So, fun fact, I've actually, I think like 10, 11 years ago when I started my company, I found your work. I didn't tell you this before we got on the show, but I found your work like over a decade ago and it's been so interesting to see the sort of evolution of what you've created with these know, through lines that have connected you and, you know, how your life has sort of changed and influenced your work. And so, yeah, so I'm really, I'm looking forward to this conversation. I think we're going to dive into some, some cool areas today that are going to serve a lot of people that tune into the show, but where we always start, where I'd like to start with you is tell us a story about a defining moment in your life. That made you who you are today.

Yeah. And you'd kind of give me the little advanced heads up of. All right, I'm going to ask this question so my mind knows already. Well there's so many. Yeah. Know. And there's different facets of my life that I can talk about.

I'll go to. Because you found my work 10, 11 years ago. My guess is you found the philosopher's notes. Is that right?

That's correct. Yeah.

Yeah. So I'll just go to that moment. So I had sold my, my second business at that time. I'm with my now wife on a pre honeymoon trip and I think we ended our engagement then did it again and then got married. So we got divorced before we got married was our joke which helped the thing. But I'm on a. I'm on a flight from Tokyo la. I open a Sky Mall magazine. I'm trying to figure out what I want to do after selling my, my second business. What am I going to do? I got enough take a little time to figure it out. And I opened up to a company that did summaries of business books. Two page spread. What do we. I just opened it straight to there. It was one of those epiphanal moments of oh cool, I'll do that for self development books. Before a lot of people were doing that, it was a, you know, exciting moment for me. And I've had a number of epiphanal moments like that. Different aspects of my life that I've learned to trust and then go all in on it. But that was, that was one that changed my life. I was going to say something else but given our connection to the notes. I'll go with that one.

No, that's solid man, that's solid. I like that. Following the gut, following the intuition or like these epiphany moments. I've definitely had a number of those. I would probably say that the name for my company in my book was sort of that like. It wasn't a lot of like brainstorming and ideating. It was just like, you know, oh man talks. That's what we're doing. You know, that's. That's what guys are here to do. I like that because I think sometimes we as men can get over analytical. You know, we can over index on the rationalizing of like is that the right choice? Is that what I should really be doing? And we have these epiphanies like you're talking about and then we cripple them with overthinking and analyzing whether or not that's the right thing. Did you have any of that rise up after you had that epiphany of like, oh, I should go do that? Or like, how did you handle that, that notion? Because that's a. That's a big thing to come into contact with.

Yeah. I mean, to me, the answer is almost always yes and yes and yes. You know, that this. This. Even the intuition, you know, you can overthink it, but you can also underthink it. So there's that beautiful dance, you know, of. Of. For me, it's been learning to trust those deep, deep intu. And there's a difference between maybe and no. I just can feel it. My company is called Heroic Public Benefit Corporation. I had that idea election night, 2020. Wake up in the middle of the night. I'm like, oh, My background is I've built and sold two social platforms. I've been waiting for a long time for someone to create an alternative to Facebook. That was another epiphanal moment. So there are. There are, like, deep, deep. No, this is just right. Kind of intuitive hits that I've learned to trust. And then I go through the rational kind of process, But I don't kill. I let the intuition and that inspired clarity kind of guide the process, if you will. But then, yeah, I mean, with that decision, with every other decision I've made, there's always the, is this the right thing to do? And courage is the willingness to act in the presence of fear, not the absence of fear. So we want to rub it up against reality and see all the things that could go wrong. And then we got to, you know, get clear on the price we're going to need to pay and decide whether or not we want to pay it. Because sometimes it's not worth it, you know, and it was a good idea, but. But I don't want to pay that price. And then you got to realize it's going to cost you twice as much as you think. So, you know, get ready for it, go do the work, etc. And I'll just say one more thing. The way that I've learned. There are many ways that I've learned to trust that voice. And I view my entire philosophy as connect to your best self. Your best self is the one that gives you that hit. And you got to know how to flip the switch and be connected to what the Greeks would call your daimon, that guiding spirit that the Romans called your genius. Everyone was said to have a genius, a guiding spirit. And it's that. That does your best work, it's that that gives you the ideas. So my entire life's philosophy is how do I connect to that more often? And when I do that, I find that it's wisdom and is solid, you know, and then when I feel a little wobbly or unsure, my number one thing is not solve the problem. Solve the thing that's getting in the way of me connecting to my best self, because that connection will solve the problem, if that makes sense. Like, that's. That's literally.

Basically my entire life's work.

Yeah, I. It's interesting because I'm a big. I studied Carl Jung for a long time, and you know that daimon he would talk about as the higher self or the soul. You know that like, your soul kind of pulls you in a certain direction. And beginning to listen to that voice, you know, whether we want to call it the wise elder within us or the soul or the higher self or the daimon, like whatever word resonates with folks out there beginning to trust that voice, I think is. It's like the first step on a path of 10,000 miles. Right. That you just have to lay one foot in front of the other. And that's been a very interesting part for me because I think for a long time, I just didn't trust that voice. I didn't listen to it. So I think we'll probably, along the way of this conversation, bump up against some good pieces in terms of how we actually start to develop that part is my guess based off of diving into your work. So let's just start with the 30,000 foot view of what is arete. And am I even saying it right?

Yeah. So then. So then I love your. You know, my branding is I go just blunt force, you know, no ambiguity. Here I am, you know, wearing a T shirt. Arete. The book, of course, is called arete. It's debatable on how exactly you pronounce that, But I've gotten. I've gotten a stamp of approval from a guy who actually just wrote Stoicism for dummies, who happened to put my tattoo in the book.

Cool.

But arete is the one word answer the ancient Stoics would have given you on how to live a good life. It's how you connect to the best version of yourself. Because the summum bonum, the greatest good of life, according to the ancient Greek philosophers and stoics, was to live with eudaimonia, which again, means good soul. To connect to that best version of yourself is the. The greatest good. What all ancient Greek and Roman philosophy, Stoic philosophy was about how do you do that? You live with arete. We translate arete in the English as excellence or virtue. But it has a deeper meaning to me. It means something closer to being your best self. Moment to moment to moment. So when you are your best self and who you are capable of being in any given moment is who you're actually being. And there's no gap between who you could have been and who you are being in the moment. I'm not talking about 20 years and where you think you should be in that gap or where you think you should be in the future. I'm talking about moment to moment to moment. If you can close the gap and live with arte, you experience eudaimonia, and if you can do that consistently enough, you create this stable sense of meaning and purpose and joy. And that's the essence of arete. Why I tattooed my body with it, why the book is named, that it's one of those words that should, we should know already. You know, it fell out of the cultural vernacular, but it was the dominant central theme of the dominant philosophy of the ancient Greco Roman world for 500 plus years. So that's the basic idea of it. And it's the one word answer to frankly, every question. All right, well what are you capable of in this moment? Can you close that gap? Can you be your best self when you do that? You know, the other things will take care of themselves.

Yeah, interesting. I mean, it's fascinating because I think over the last probably five to eight years, I've noticed this sort of resurgence of Stoicism within modern culture, specifically Western culture. And I'm, I'm curious to get your perspective in terms of why is there this resurgence of this philosophy of some of these principles back into our culture? You know, it's not lost on me that it's sort of becoming more and more prominent in a time where our culture and our society is falling more and more into chaos and division and fracturing and polarization and. Yeah, so I'm just. Let's just stick with that high level view for a moment. Why, in your opinion and your perspective, do you think that Stoicism is making a resurgence? If you agree with that statement at all. And then secondly, what, what would you say is the actual functionality of Stoicism? Why is it so appealing for people?

Yeah, I mean, my playful two word answer to why, no question we're in alignment, that it has made an incredible resurgence like that, to me isn't debatable like that's. It's remarkable how mainstream and popular Stoicism has become and continues to become, particularly among men who are interested in facing life's challenges, et cetera. My playful two word answer to that is Ryan Holiday, his brilliant, you know, marketing and writing and overall approach to it. There you go, the kind of more nuanced answer to it with earnestness on that. I mean, he has played an extraordinary role. Donald Robertson, William B. Irvine, there's some other great teachers that have played a role. But stoicism is actually a much deeper part of our culture before the last five to ten years. So Albert Ellis, Aaron Beck, the guys that started rational emotive behavioral therapy, which became cognitive behavioral therapy, which is the most effective therapeutic model, is stoicism. So those guys are influenced by Epictetus and others who had took a very, very practical approach to life. So if you look at cognitive behavioral therapy and you trace it to its, its ancient roots, you'll find basically Epictetus, you'll find the ancient Stoic philosophers. So it's, it's more central to a lot of what was going on than we may think. And now it's gone to the next level and then I think you're absolutely right. My opinion is we're facing histor challenges right now. The world's been hard for 2,500 plus years since the dawn of civilization like that. That's always been the case. But it's amplified to such a degree today. Not unlike, by the way, you know, the world in which it was created. I mean, if you look at the ancient Greco Roman world in which this was the dominant philosophy. Same basic idea.

But I think it provides powerful tools that work is the, the most direct answer to it. Stoicism, when practiced in whatever your idiosyncratic kind of FL is works. I mean, when you learn that some things are within your control and other things are not, and then you do your best to reframe situations, changing your cognition, how you're interpreting things and your behavior, what you're actually doing, you're going to live a better life. That's pretty straightforward, you know. And then Epictetus, Seneca, Aurelius, these are really interesting guys. I mean, they lived engaged lives. A former slave, effectively Epictetus, a billionaire statesman, you know, in Seneca, and then a reluctant emperor in Aurelius. They're very interesting characters that I think is also appealing, particularly for men who like to talk about such things.

Yeah, I mean, I definitely, I definitely got hooked. My entry point was Marcus Aurelius. And I just found some. Some type of very deep resonance with what he was writing in his, you know, in his journals, essentially. And I remember reading his. His writing for the first time. I mean, again, like years and years and years ago. It must be like 10, 12 years ago. And having this. I don't know how to describe it, but having this sensation or notion of knowing a man who lived thousands of years ago in this weird sort of intimate way, you know, and it was almost as though there was a part of myself that recognized him or that there was a part of his introspection and his reflection that was so clear and so bare and devoid of trying to get liked or trying to get attention or trying to. To even convince other people of something about himself. You know, it was like, devoid of those things that we normally find. And it was so. Yeah, it was just so clear, even in his questioning, of trying to like, self sort, you know, of trying to figure himself out. And there was just something so wonderfully appealing to that because I think I found. I found stoicism and I found Marcus Aurelius specifically in a time where I was in that place. You know, I was really trying to sort through myself. And some of the core principles, you know, really just simple principles, started to help me a lot. You know, just some of the things that you've laid out, like recognize what you can control and what you cannot. I mean, that sort of simple principle sounds, you know, sort of trite and. And easy, but to actually implement that is brutal. You know, it's like a really hard thing because our egos and our pride want to latch on. At least my ego and my pride, I'll speak for myself, want to latch on to trying to control things that are outside of my power. I'm curious just to stay on the social unrest and the division that's happening in the world today. You told a story in the beginning of the book of your son going to a chess tournament. And your son was. Was nervous and didn't want to go. He was a little bit scared of going to the chess tournament. And you kind of walked him through this, you know, this experience of why it's important to go and actually face this challenge. Because I think he was, you know, he was like, I'm going to lose. Why bother going? Can you just unravel that a little bit? Because I thought it was such a great moment, not just from a parenting perspective, but, like, of how we can actually parent ourselves in moments where we're floundering.

Yeah, I appreciate that. And to briefly go back to your connection with Marcus Aurelius, that, I mean, he wrote this to himself. There was no preening, there was no pretense. He wasn't writing it for an audience other than himself, you know, and so there's something about the humanity and the struggle, and it wasn't a one and done thing. I mean, this was one of the wisest human beings in history who was constantly challenging himself to get, you know, clear on what he thought and his motives, etc. So I love the way you frame that up and then felt the same way as you described your resonance with him. So, yeah, so my son's into chess, you know, like really into chess. And I used it as a frame to try to explain it. Like he was 10 at the time. So explain RTA like I'm 10, you know, it was the last part of the book that I wrote. I wrote the entire book. And then I'm like, how do you introduce this idea? And then the moment occurred in this Saturday morning where he didn't want go to a chess tournament. And so we literally went on a walk and we talked about this, and I walked him through the ideas you. You kind of highlighted. But the things that arise for me when you say that is fear and laziness. The two things that my coach, Phil Stutz, says, his favorite teacher, Rudolf Steiner says are what really get in the way, fear and laziness. And so I use that, that experience as a context to talk about all of our fears and all of our kind of lack of discipline and laziness. And if we could solve those two things, we're doing pretty well. Right. But there's so many different ways we can go. I'll pause there and then you take us where you want to go on that.

Yeah. I mean, fear and laziness, I would say, are definitely the two arbiters of self destruction in many ways. What does, what does stoicism say in terms of how to handle these. These two elements of the human psyche and the human experience?

Yeah. So then. Wonderful question. So then arete is virtue and excellence. And as I've said, it's you being your best sel moment to moment to moment. So arete is like a meta virtue. But then the ancient Stoics would tell us that what you really need to get good at are embodying the four cardinal virtues. So you got to go deeper than just arete and you got to look at wisdom. I call temperance discipline. Right. But temperance is a cardinal virtue. And then courage is universal. They Call love justice, but that's. Justice is a terribly weak word for the real virtue, which is love. Stoics, we're incredibly concerned human beings about the welfare of others, and they did their best to serve profoundly. Marcus Aelius, he played his role well. He didn't want to be an emperor, but he played his role well. And he said, let your one delight be go from one service to another, with God ever in mind. That's an act of love. So the four cardinal virtues are wisdom, discipline, love, and courage. Now, two of those virtues will handle two of our challenges. And frankly, the four together are what we need in order to conquer them. So first, you need to have the wisdom to know the ultimate game and how to play it well, which means you got to know that what's going to get in the way include fear and laziness. So don't be surprised when you feel fear or when you're falling short of your standards. Perfect. Then you need to have the discipline to conquer your laziness. So now what needs to get done is the fundamental question. I don't care if you feel like it or not. If you said you're going to do something, it's time to do it. Which may become a theme of our chat. My newest tattoo is antifragile confidence, which is what I'm blessed to work with some very elite, you know, military officers and other sports organizations, et cetera. That. That's what they want me to talk about all the time. Anti fragile confidence. But you got to have the discipline to conquer your laziness. Then you need to have the courage to conquer your fear. But again, courage obviously isn't the absence of fear. It's the willingness to act in the presence of fear. And then the frame that my coach, Phil Stutz, who I've already mentioned a couple of times, he's in a NETFLIX documentary called Studs with another one of his clients, Jonah Hill, my deepest personal influence. And he talks about some of these ideas there. But he likes to say that your infinite potential exists outside of your comfort zone. I like to say, how does it feel outside of your comfort zone? By definition, it feels uncomfortable. All right, cool. That's going to be. Things like fear, overwhelm, anxiety, et cetera. So when you feel those things, we need to change our story, which is another stoic idea, reframe it, and see that you now have an opportunity to practice your philosophy and get stronger. And if you want to be the best, most heroic version of yourself, you need to get really good at responding, really well, to those moments in which you feel anxious, overwhelmed, et cetera, Perfect. But to do that, you need to embody the virtue of courage. You need to more consistently be willing to act in the presence of fear. And you do that, by the way, via love. So the ancient word for hero didn't mean tough guy or killer of bad guys. The word hero in ancient Greece meant protector. So a hero was a protector. A hero did the hard work to have the strength for two. They didn't run away from challenges. Today, victims are running away and complaining and throwing their hands up and blaming people. Heroes are saying, what do I need to do to solve this? They're protecting the things that they value that are currently at risk, significant risk. And their secret weapon of the ancient and modern hero is love. So it's love that gives you the courage to face your fears. It's love that cultivates your discipline to do what needs to get done, whether you feel like it or not. That's the constellation of four virtues that you know are the back cover of the book are those four virtues, and then the four virtues that science also says are most highly correlated to your eudaimonia or your flourishing. That's now a long answer to your great question. But that's. That's how I frame it up. And again, that's one level deeper in the philosophy for arete cardinal virtues. Then we go deeper into operationalizing all of that.

Yeah, we're definitely going to talk about. We're definitely going to talk about that piece and the antifragile confidence. I want to close two loops before we move forward, just so that we have some continuity here, because one of the things that I wanted to talk to you about was.

How are you, you know, with all this knowledge and wisdom that you've accrued over the years and with this framework of stoicism, how are you approaching raising your son in the world today in a time where it's very chaotic, There's a tremendous amount of polarization. You know, like, porn is so easy to find. Right. I mean, it's just like if you have access to technology, you can, you know, find yourself down the rabbit hole of pornography, and there's distractions, and, you know, drugs are just everywhere. It really is, I think. And not to paint some type of, like, apocalyptic.

Picture, but I think a big question that I hear a lot of men asking is, how do I raise my son and how do I prepare him for the world that. That he's entering into, knowing that it's going to look Radically different post artificial general intelligence. Like, how do you prep your children for a world that is incredibly and increasingly hard to predict?

What again, great question that has. We could talk about that for hours. But first and foremost, my, my counsel is always, you better be the man that you hope your kids aspire to be. You know, whether you have sons or daughters. Like, are you living your philosophy? Do you know your philosophy? Are you practicing it consistently? Because if not, everything else is. It's not a non starter, but it's, it's not going to help. You know what I mean? We can say whatever we want to say, but if we aren't embodying the ideals that we believe one should consider embodying and then giving the imitation to our kids through our example, then the rest of it is just theory. And again, stoics move from theory to practice. So my whole thing is theory, practice, mastery. So you need to do the hard work to be an exemplar. Right? That's number one. Number two, number three, top parenting advice. And then the first book I read on parenting, two books before I had kids. One by Dan Siegel, the great Harvard, Maryland psychiatrist, neuroscientist, who has become a friend and mentor called Parenting from the Inside Out. And there's actually three books. The second one is called hold on to youo Kids. And then the third is Carol Dweck's Mindset. Those are my three go to books. As you know, I've distilled those into philosopher's notes that you can find the risk of plugging something in the heroic app. So I've distilled those into simple summaries. But Dan Siegel's book on parenting from the inside out, basically in a nutshell, he says the health, or lack of health of attachment of your kids to the parental figure, which is a really important predictor of their well being in life, is best predicted by the parents coherent narrative. So if the parent has a coherent narrative about their past, their present and their future, they know what they've been through, they've integrated it, and they know where they're going. That's the greatest predictor of their child's well being, essentially through the proxy of their attachment to you. And then hold on to your kids was the book I was thinking of when you asked the question hold on to your kids. I'm forgetting the authors right now is genius. And the basic idea there is you better not let culture raise your kids. You better not, particularly the culture of a school. So we homeschool our kids. I do not Want my kids being inculturated by kids plus or six months their age. That's a terrible idea. It's a brand new concept in terms of how one would be enculturated that I have refused to accept for our kids. Now we're taking extreme positions, my wife and I, but there's no scenario I would send my kids to school with respect to those who do and respect the kids. But if you are, you better be even more mindful of the fact that you better be your kid's. North Star is the main point of the book. Hold on to your kids. Don't let them fall into the enculturation, whether it's at school or online, etc. And then the third book is Mindset by Carol Dweck. And there's a lot of things we did there. They go to nature school twice a week. We've reduced screen time radically, you know, like, like other things we can discuss. But the third book is Mindset by Carol Dweck. Growth versus fixed Mindset. I was raised in a family with a dad who was a good man, but struggled with alcohol, you know, and dysfunctional family and total fixed mindset. Like I couldn't ever make a mistake in all these things and his dad killed himself. So I, I know what that's like. So we deliberately. And I know what it's like to suffer myself. We deliberately tried to do everything she teaches, which is you never award talent. You always reward effort. You really embrace your own challenges and you share the fact that you struggle in life and you like struggle and challenges are awesome. Goosebumps. Like I rub my hands together. Oh, this is hard. Awesome. That's how I'm gonna get good. So those three books have most shaped my, my thinking. Dude, that's, I mean that's, that's, that's a humbling challenge. The first one being the most challenging being worthy of my kids emulation. You know, the number of times I fall short of that, which I talk about in the book, you know, is humbling. But that's it right there. Again, so much we can talk about. And I know I just said it ton, so.

No, no, you're, you're laying down, you're preaching. You know, it's like, I think that's the best way that I could put it. I think the, the way you encapsulated it, you know, you said a bunch of great things there being worthy of your kids emulation. I feel like that's something that everyone should just pause and write down and you know, if you're a parent really asking yourself that question, am I worthy of my kids emulation and my. Somebody that I want my child to actually emulate. That's, that's something that, you know, I have a, my son's about to be three years old and, and it's interesting because when he was about to like leading up to his birth, that I didn't have that question specifically, but that general theme was on my mind so heavy, like, am I going to be able to break the patterns? I know where I've come from. I know what's happened in my life. I know where my personal faults and flaws land and I know where I want to go and am I actually living and embodying the things that I really want him to emulate. And what's been interesting is that I have found an extra layer or sort of fuel to everything that I do in life because of my son. You know, because I, I do, I like, you know, every part of me is like, I want to be a man that he can emulate. And you know, whether that's him coming downstairs and watching me work out in the gym, you know, six days a week or whatever it is how I, you know, how I handle conflict with my wife and, you know, he can view that, how I deal with challenges and confrontations, all those pieces. And it's such a beautiful gift that I think, you know, I think every child is really looking for, but specifically I think every son is looking for in a father. You know, every son is looking for in the father. And you know, I've been working with men for a decade and I don't think I've ever met a man who wasn't a son at one point and didn't desperately want his father to be somebody that he could emulate, that he could see, oh, there's a pathway for me, you know, to go out into the world and to make it through this chaos. So. And then secondly, the author of the, the book hold on to your Kids is Gabor Mate. And I think Gordon. Gordon Neufeld or Gordon Neufeld. Neufeld. So just for people that are out there, and we'll have those in there because those are phenomenal, phenomenal books. One last question on this topic and then we'll move forward.

What are some of the challenges that you think young boys are going to face today that are unequivocally just different than what you and I may have gone through growing up?

Yeah, it's interesting. I think there, of course, will be. But I try to see the similarities. I try to see 2,500-year-old challenges. And this is why we connect with Marcus, you know, Aurelius, is that we don't need to find new things. How do we conquer the most fundamental human challenges? And the most fundamental human challenges? You have two voices in your head. You have your daimon, the best version of you, and then you have your demon. Demon is the diminutive of daimon. That's where that word comes from. So best not so great. And this is, again, how I began the book is, you got a voice in your head, dude, we've all got it. Nothing's wrong with you. That you got this voice that's barking at you, telling you you don't want to go to the chess tournament. We're telling you you want to indulge in something you know you shouldn't be doing, which, again, we all do. So embrace the common humanity. But I try to find the most central, fundamental human challenges. And it's my belief that if we can dominate those. I'm like John Wooden, Dude, I want to put on my socks, right? I want to put my shoes on. Layups, boys. I don't need fancy slam dunks. I need. Give me. Give me the fundamentals. Give me the most basic things, because if I do those at a high level, I will excel. And so that's what we do with. That's what we do with Emerson and with Eleanor, our two kids named after two of our heroes, by the way. And one point, they came up for me. And then I'll come back to what I think are the challenges more directly. When you were reflecting on what we were discussing in terms of being worthy, the other reason why that's really important is if you are not living and striving to live your best, most heroic life, you can't help your kids do that, not at the level that you want to. So you have to be engaged in your own heroic quest in order to be a worthy guide for them. And that's. Dude, I spent. Gives me tears in my eyes, man. I spent last weekend on a chess tournament. Emerson's into chess. He wants to be a grandmaster. And again, I've embraced my ambition. So I'm all in on his ambition. Perfect, Dude. And you're going to get into chess. What are you going to go for? You know, a fide master and Internet dude, we're going for it. You want it? Let's go. You know, let's set it up. But I wouldn't be able to Speak confidently to his ambition, unless I was pursuing mine. So in order to see the best, most heroic version of those we love, whether it's our family or our community we serve, you better be practicing your philosophy, which better include integrated ambition and a sense of purpose and meaning, and the willingness to do the hard work to. To figure out how you achieve your goals. The Yudaimon, the ideal person in the ancient world, was successful in their pursuit of the things they wanted to achieve, you know, so anyway, that feels like an important thing. But that's, that's some of what I think on with that. Then to come back. I think the enculturation is a big deal, you know. And again, AI is AI. Like my take on that is I want to get him to be an ancient intelligence programmer, his basal ganglia, the thing that makes him be him, you know, his habits, his routines, how he shows up in the world. I want him to be an AI programmer. In that sense, can he get himself to do what he knows is best for him and really enjoy it, by the way. And that's so cool you got a three year old at that stage. I was really nervous about whether he would be socially.

Competent because we didn't send him to school. We broke a lot of rules, you know, and whether he'd perform, you know, we didn't force reading on him. My son could create a fire. I mean, he won the Texas state championships in chess for his division a year ago before he could read at grade level. At 10, you know, we really allowed him to take the lead, not, not in a ridiculous way, but kind of homeschooling, slash, unschooling. And we just wanted to create the environment where we. We were teaching him what we thought was most important, which is wisdom, discipline, courage, love, gratitude, hope, curiosity, zest. The virtues that help you live a great life. That dude knows more about how to get your eating, moving, sleeping, breathing, focusing right then. Most people I train, you know, like, because this is what my wife and I teach him all day, every day. That's what you should be taught how to live. Those are the skills that will let him flourish. And now he's training himself on how to master something. Chess is the small game he's playing to win the ultimate game. So as you know, in my book, objective one is you got to know the ultimate game. If you want to live in an ever changing dynamic world, you better know how to win the ultimate game. He is learning how to win the ultimate game, as is my daughter. Then you have the equanimity the stability again, the wisdom, discipline, et cetera, to show up to an ever changing world if you do not have that base and that ability to connect to your best self. I'm nervous for you. And that's frankly why I'm so nervous about our society is people have lost that ability. The wisdom and discipline in particular are absent in our world, you know, and we need to bring that back. And that's what my wife and I are most committed to doing and how I think we conquer the unknowable challenges along with the obvious ones that have existed forever.

I love all of that. And I mean, what, what you said around how.

How you're raising your son and what you're teaching him, I think resonates very deeply.

I've seen with my boy, you know, he sits down with me and does breath work, you know, albeit he'll, you know, he'll take a couple breaths and then he'll want to sit on me, and then he'll go back and then he's. But, you know, he's. He's going through the motions that, you know, not. He's not even three yet, but he's going through the motions of, like, sitting on the cushion. And, you know, when dad says, like, you want to do breath work? Yeah, breath work. And then he'll go and pull out the cushions and set them all up and then, you know, there we are. And it's that type of habit. And, you know, he wants to know, know how to build the fires. He wants to. If I'm sitting and meditating, he's, you know, he's climbing on me, and then he's curious about what I'm doing and why I'm not reacting. And then he's sitting with me, right? In the gym, I installed rings, the, like gymnastics rings because, you know, obviously he can't work out yet. He's not even three and so. But he loves to swing. So he'll come downstairs, I'll get the rings out for him and I'll be working out, and he'll just, you know, hang on the rings for 5, 10 minutes, swing around on them, pick up some of the stuff in the gym and play. And I think it's that type of stuff that is so understated when it comes to raising kids and parenting. And we focus so much, especially in Western culture, on can you memorize and regurgitate, you know, what you were, whatever that you were told in school or, or that you need to memorize so that you can regurgitate on a Task. And it's like when I look back at my education, I'm like, man, so much of that, but like 95% of it I haven't used at all in, in my life. I didn't learn about how to do taxes. I didn't learn about how to make money or save money or invest money. I didn't learn about social skills, you know, other than playing on the playground and getting into lots of trouble.

But you know, I think it's those types of things that are incredibly important. So I really appreciate you laying that out.

Just to speak to discipline and what's not taught in schools was the trigger for this. So we know that willpower or discipline, self mastery, whatever you want to call it, the ability to get yourself to do what you need to do whether you feel like it or not. Right? That out predicts IQ for academic performance by a factor of two. Right. So if you know a kid's IQ and you know their discipline quotient and you wanted to predict how well they would do in school, discipline out predicts IQ by a factor of two in terms of the accuracy of your prediction. And discipline is trainable. Self mastery is teachable. I shared that with the prep school where Elon Musk used to send his kids when he was in la. And they commissioned me immediately to create content for them to teach that. So when I look at the vision for our, you know, movement and our Public Benefit Corporation, education is really important that should be taught in schools. The ideas that we're talking about right now are the most fundamental things that one should be taught how to live of which taxes and making money is important, but very small fraction. It's this. Can you live with wisdom, discipline, love, courage, etc. The virtues we know lead to what we really want. We want our kids to flourish, obviously, and that's what's so absent in our society today. But I just wanted to double tap on that and it's teachable. But again, as men in particular and as fathers, you better be be the most disciplined person you know. And again, not in a rigid overbearing you break when things don't go your way, but in a flexible, spontaneous, yet very beautifully integrated way. That's the number one thing I'm trying to teach our kids and then teaching them to make the connection if this, then that. So our kids were blessed. You know, never taken an antibiotic, 11 and 7, you know, and they don't like getting sick. You know, if they got Covid a couple times and they've gotten runny noses or whatever. But we make the connection. Oh, when you eat that or you don't sleep as well, then you feel this way. So we were nervous about his social interaction. Not an issue whatsoever. And then also about is he going to rebel? And probably he will at some point, but he knows that. That people who are carrying too much weight eat too much sugar and refined foods because blood is. If he was here right now, he'd tell you blood is toxic in your bloodstream, so insulin comes in to shuttle it out and stores it in fat cells. And if you keep on eating and drinking sugar, well, then you're going to have this experience and you're going to not feel great. And all the other things like making the connection. If this, then that. Then he autonomously decides that the culture we're creating is one he wants to be part of. And then he looks at it like an iconoclast and says, I don't want that. I don't want to be sick. I don't want to be the kid acting up who, oh, my God, is eating the worst food. Make the connection. These things go together. And I have goosebumps when you were sharing some things. And as we go deeper into this. But anyway, just wanted to riff on that real quick because I think it's. It's such powerful ideas.

No, it's very. That's very, very important. And I mean, I'm surprised at how much we're talking about parenting, but I think all of these things that we're talking about also apply to us as individuals. You know, even if. Even if you don't have kids, it's like all of these things, you know, you have a little kid living inside of you, and sometimes that little kid is the one pulling the strings in your maladaptive behaviors and in your coping mechanisms, because those were adaptive strategies to help keep you safe. And a lot of the therapeutic work that's out there is really about how do you re parent your younger self in a lot of ways so that you can shift out of those maladaptive strategies that, again, that kept you safe when you were young and into strategies that are actually going to help you thrive. So I think on that note, how does an individual that's listening to this podcast who maybe feels a bit undisciplined themselves, use the principles that you're talking about and begin to build out some infrastructure of being more disciplined without, you know, the shaming, without the punishment, without the, you know, the rigidness that can sometimes come along with that, that they might Be avoiding discipline in the first place because they witnessed that. So how do we start to develop this discipline that you're talking about?

Yeah, again, such a great question. The word parent means to bring forth. So to parent is to bring forth. So we want to bring forth the best within our kids and within myself, you know, so it's to make the connection to this is we're not not. It's all the same conversation, you know, what do you need to bring forth within yourself so you can bring forth within others? Discipline. You know, there's an art and science and discipline. And there's kind of two objectives in my work and in the book that I think of as you ask that question. The first objective in the book, just to set the context, is you got to know the ultimate game. Most people have been seduced to play the wrong game. They're going after fame, wealth, hotness, other extrinsic motivators that modern science say even if you're successful in the pursuit of them, you will not be happy. So you got to know the ultimate game, which is be your best self in service to something bigger than yourself. And I can walk you through exercises to wake you up. Part of the problem is people are a bit lethargic. People are a bit critical, cynical. If you're this far into this show, you want a better life, no question about it, right? But you got to turn that up. You got to turn the heat up. You've got to really, really, really, really want it. Not in a manicy way, but in a. No, no, this is my one precious life. What do I want to see in my life, and what am I going to do in order to create that? And with that, you move to the second objective, which is you got to forge antifragile confidence. And that connects to the fifth objective, which is self mastery and mastering yourself. So there's a few ways to frame it up, but I'll start at the high level. Then we'll drill into practical what you can do right now, literally to change things. The first thing is you got to know the discipline is the greatest predictor of everything you want in life. And if we're all lazy, more than we'd like to be and more than we'd like to admit. Perfect, okay, whatever. Common humanity. But that's really important to recognize. And it's the science of self compassion that you need to start with. So nothing's wrong with you per se. I mean, there's plenty of wrong with you per se, but nothing wrong with you per se. That is preventing you from getting better. Everybody struggles. As BJ Fogg, who inspired James Clear and so many other great writers out of Stanford, says, you think it's a character flaw. You think the reason you haven't changed your life is because you're inherently flawed from a character perspective. And again, I playfully say maybe that's contributing a bit. But the real issue is it's a design flaw. You haven't been taught how to actually install and delete behaviors at will. There's a science to it in an art that goes to it. And I would encourage people to get really good at mastering that. I spend an obsessive amount of time on that. In the book, we train coaches, you know, this is where we spend a lot of time. But then, practically speaking, I want to go past just cultivating discipline and I want to cultivate antifragile confidence. So to frame that up real quick, anti fragility is the opposite of fragility. So what I want to teach my kids more than anything else, my son and my daughter, to be heroic, is when life hits you, you get stronger. That's what it means to be antifragile. You're way more than resilient, you're antifragile. Literally, when life hits you, you get stronger. You don't break and go off the rails, you get stronger. And then confidence. Antifragile confidence. The word confidence means intense trust confidera. Intense trust in what? In the fact that you have what it takes to respond to whatever life throws at you. The way you build trust in any relationship, whether it's with your 3 year old, or my 11 and 7 year old, or my wife or my team or other, is you do what you say you will do. So if I didn't show up for our scheduled time, you'd give me a pass? Maybe because we have some friends in common and whatever you, you know, whatever. But if I didn't do it again, you'd be like, I don't trust this guy and you shouldn't. So if you want to build confidence, if you want to build trust in yourself, you need to start doing what you say you will do more consistently. You don't need to be perfect, but you need to do it more consistently. And then if you can get yourself to do what you need to do when life is hitting you and you actually double down on your protocol, then you forge anti fragile confidence. And the things that used to break you make you stronger. That's the essence of frankly, what I'm most excited about and as I mentioned briefly that some of the most elite performers come to me to talk about. And it's also what has helped a number of people who have shared their stories save their lives, who didn't know if they wanted to get out of bed and live another day. When you get clarity on who you are at your best and what you do when you're at your best, which is the practical exercise we can go to after I shut up, then when life hits you, you do those things and you literally get stronger from the things that used to break you. And life becomes. I mean, it becomes a lot more fun, you know, becomes a game where these aren't chores. Oh, shoot, now I got to go do breath work. And now I got to go. No, no, no, dude, this is it. Let's approach this literally like a game that we want to. To master and enjoy and get better at. And now I said an absurd amount. So I'll be quiet again and excited to go where you want to go. Get me fired up here.

I get the sentiment. I do the exact same thing when I'm on podcasts. I like my. My usual statement is, and I just said a lot, so I'm gonna stop.

Yeah, but dude, so many places we can unpack that. So excited to go wherever you want to go.

Yeah. Well, I think what's interesting is for a lot of people, it's. It's a really brutal uphill challenge. Like, I remember, I remember exactly what it felt like to think about waking up early and going to the gym, to think about not falling into the coping mechanism. Late night eating, watching porn, smoking weed, you know, whatever it was that was on my list of coping mechanism. I remember what it was like to get stuck with those things and not feel like I had discipline and I had confidence, but it was kind of, you know, fabricated in some ways. It was. It was illusory in a lot of ways because I didn't feel like I had a good sense of discipline internally. And I think if I, if. If I always try and put myself back into who I was, you know, 10, 12 years ago, when I was really in the shit, when I was really struggling, because I like that filter of what would my older self had said or reacted listening to this. And I think part of what my older version would have said is, yes, that's great, but are you just saying that I have to eat shit for a while and do the really hard stuff in order to develop the discipline? Like, that's the big question. Do I just have to go through the suck. Is there a way for me to do it that's easier? I can hear the old part of me that's trying to negotiate and barter and bargain. How do you deal with that?

Dude, I love it. So then, just to be clear, I wanted to end my own life 25 years ago. So I know what it feels like to feel the absolute depth of. Depth of despair and have no sense of me being able to get to a point where I could create a life of meaning. I was this intense with no sense of being able to fit into the normal world. I'm driving home from work, first week of all my job after graduating from ucla. I'm working at Arthur Anderson, right? I drive home from work on the four or five rush hour traffic. I pull over to the side and I throw up on the side of the freeway. I was so not what I wanted to do. Went to law school as an escape hatch. That wasn't it. Threw up and I moved into, into my apartment there when I went to Berkeley, Lawrence. And then I spun. Dude. I had none of these abilities, right? And so what I. I know what it feels like to feel that. So to run it through that filter and what I would want that version of me to see is me. This version of me that's, that's grounded, that's. That's embodying these ideas. That's living a life of meaning and purpose. So what I would encourage someone who's in that state to do is goosebumps again. Imagine yourself in five years. Imagine the best version of yourself. You actually start doing these things, you figure it out. You're going to fall short. Dude. The path to mastery is hard. I'm not going to tell you it's easy. Everybody's telling you it's easy. And I'm not telling you you need to eat a sandwich made out of things that I'm Mr. Rogers in public. But you don't. Yeah, dude, but you can make those things awesome. If Seneca said 2000 years ago, how much better to pursue a straight course when doing what is best for you is what you most enjoy. So how you feeling right now? Are you feeling good? Staying up late last night. And I wouldn't tell you to get up early and go to the gym. I'd tell you to go to bed early tonight so you wake up without an alarm. I was in bed for 10 hours last night. Woke up without an alarm with 8 hours and 40 minutes of sleep according to aura. Boom. I'm ready to go. And by the way, My son got an aura ring two weeks ago, and he now can tell you about deep sleep REM and all the other things, making the connection of this and that. But I would want the individual to get clarity on themselves at their best, right? And see that, feel that, know that they can create it. There's a science to hope we can talk about. You got to see it, you got to believe you can create it, and you got to have a plan to create it. Then I go to the most basic fundamentals. Eating, moving, sleeping, breathing, focusing your mind. And the reality is you can change your life overnight if you're not getting. And again, I'm not that guy. But if you're not getting the recommended seven to eight hours of sleep per night, not time in bed sleep, which 90% efficiency means you need to be in bed for eight to nine hours to get seven to eight hours of sleep. If you were staying up late watching Netflix and your other pseudo heroes on a football field or whatever, rather than prioritizing your own life and going to bed and getting a good night of sleep, that's the fastest way to change your life. So then my encouragement would be, consider that as a possibility and see if you can get one more hour of sleep tonight by turning off your electronics. Will it be hard? Yes. Will it be that hard? No. Harder than you want it to be. Not as hard as you think it will be is one of the ways I like to frame it up. And then you got to have a burning desire. You got to know what you want. You got to know the price you need to pay. And then these aren't chores. These are gifts. Then everything you're doing is a gift to your future self. And we can talk about making that connection to your future self. You can study people in an fmri. People with more discipline have a deeper connection to their future self than people who don't. I'll go there for 30 seconds. Bring people into a lab, put them into an fmri, measure their, ask them to think about themselves, and your self center in your brain will light up. All right, cool. Then ask them to think of a stranger. A different part of your brain will light up. Then the study is, now think of your future self. And the question is, which part of your brain lights up, yourself or the stranger? For people with higher levels of discipline, this self center lights up when they think of their future self more than it does for those who don't have as much discipline. So making the connection between the choices you're making today and your future self whether it's five seconds from now or five minutes or five hours or five days or five weeks or five years or I'm not, dude, I'm turning 50 in three months. I don't have five decades. You know, make the connection and then close the gap. Live with Arete. Be your best self. Never perfectly, but more and more consistently.

Yeah, that's how I, I frame it the same way, dude. I wish I could go back and meet not only me, dude, but the 17 year old version of my dad. That's the guy that I wish I could meet. That's what drives me. And I've learned that doing however many of these interviews I've done, I'm like, oh my God. That's why I do. What I do is I want to be able to. How could I have found him, you know, goosebumps again. Could I have found him or found someone and trained someone who may have interacted with him at his job or when he was in the Navy or whatever, you know, But I hear it and those are some of the thoughts that I have about it. And then you feel how good it feels, dude. And then you want to do more of it. And then what's best for you is what you most enjoy. You couldn't pay me to not do the things I do now because I like feeling like this. And dude, if I didn't change and focus on these things, I don't know if I'd be here from either, you know, chronic disease or.

You know, other things that, you know, have arisen in my past.

I'm with you on that front. And I'm. I was also chuckling because you were talking about optimal sleep and my son had a pretty bad fever last night. And so I was in bed for nine and a half hours and got five hours and two minutes of sleep.

Because you're paying it, dude, you know what I mean?

But that's a rough one. But it happens. I still got my workout in this morning. I still did my routine this morning. You know, I still, still went through it. Talk to me about the science of hope. And then I do want to go deeper into antifragile confidence after that.

Yeah, brilliant, dude. Science of hope has three components. So first, if you don't have hope, you are by definition hopeless. Hopelessness is a one way ticket to depression and all the other things you don't want. So cultivating hope is a very important virtue. Science says that there are three virtues most highly correlated with your well being. Hope and gratitude are tied for second the number one virtue, somewhat surprisingly, is zest. It's your sense of energy and vitality, which is why I obsessively come back to eating, moving, sleeping, breathing, etc. Your physiology drives a lot more of your psychology than you think. But hope has three components, according to the researchers that I believe. One is you have to have a vision of a better future and a specific target. You need a goal. You need something that you're excited to get out of bed to pursue. Two, you need to have agency. You need to have a belief that you can achieve that thing. And there's a way to kind of test whether or not you think you can have it. I don't want you saying you want something you don't actually think you can achieve. We want to rub that up against reality. We want to know the price you need to pay. And if you don't want to pay it, be honest about it and set a better goal. But you have a goal, a target, then you have agency, a belief you can do it, and then you have a plan, and then you're willing to explore multiple plans to get there. Those are the three dynamic aspects of hope. And you can look at where you're at if you don't feel hopeful. Either you don't have a clear vision that inspires you, you don't believe you can have it, or you don't have a plan to get it perfect. Let me see what I can do to get a little bit better in each of those. And I will repeat, getting energetically in your most powerful state, such that you are connected to your daimon more consistently, should always be, frankly, your number one priority. It's always my number one priority. I have huge creative challenges. I don't want to solve it per se. I want to connect. And then it's crazy how much easier it is to solve with that clarity again through the basic fundamentals of eating, moving, sleeping, breathing. But that's the science of hope. As I kind of frame it up.

I like this notion of having a vision that. Whether it's, you know, the sort of like, vision of yourself, the direction that you want to go, that version of I know, and you might not have it fully formed like I know 12 years ago, I could never have predicted what my life would look like today, Just never in a million freaking years.

But having a vision. I knew that there was a direction that I wanted to go. I knew that I wanted to be much more disciplined. I knew that I wanted to get rid of a lot of the coping mechanisms that I had, because I knew that they were holding me back and I knew I wanted to replace them with, you know, more effective habits. Like, I. I had some very clear, tangible things, but writing out. I went through an exercise. I went through the phase of, like, writing quite a bit and journaling quite a bit, and. And just spending time writing about who I knew I could become. And that kind of gave me an aim or a trajectory. And I've. You know, my wife is a couples therapist, and we do a lot of work with couples. And one of the things that I've told a lot of guys is develop a vision for your relationship. Like, do you actually have an aim or a direction or a vision for your relationship? Because if not, you're just kind of like in the back seat of the car trying to steer and you don't really know where you're going.

Right.

It's like, like if you don't have a, you know, if you don't have an aim of where you want to go, then it doesn't matter where you go. And for a lot of people, that's what happens to their intimate relationships is that they just end up somewhere that they've never wanted to be because they didn't have an aim of where they actually wanted to go. So I love that notion of, like, creating a vision for the self and then how hope sort of ties into that, I think.

Yeah, it's, it's, it's interesting because I've heard so many different people talk about hope, and sometimes it's very much like, you know, kill off your hope and let go of the need to hope. And so it's a very interesting thing to hear how different people relate to hope. But I think it can be a very useful tool as long as you are living in reality. You know, as long as you are realistic and you're not, like, off in La la land.

Yeah, I think that there's a more sophisticated approach then. Oh, it's attachment. It's naive, secret, esque. I'm going to put it up on a vision board, and if I think about it enough, then it's going to manifest in quotes, right? Yeah, we're not talking about that.

It's James Stockdale, dude. Jim Collins asked him, all right, well, who survived the POW camp? So James Stockdale is the commanding officer of the prisoners of war in Vietnam. Right. Who survived? The ones who never gave up their hope, their faith that they would get out. And they knew that it would be brutally hard. So the naive optimists, which is what you're talking about the ones with, quote, hope in an uninformed foolish. There's wise hope and there's foolish hope, which is the opposite of wisdom is foolishness. Right. So the foolish, foolishly optimistic or hopeful prisoner in the Vietnam prisoner of war camps thought they would get out, you know, by Thanksgiving. Thanksgiving came and went. I'm going to get out by New Year's. New Year's came and went. Oh, okay. By Easter. Easter comes and goes and then they give up. So James Stockdale, that Jim Collins called the Stockdale Paradox, said, no, no, no, you need to do two things. Never give up your hope and then embrace the harsh constraints of reality. So again, there's this Pollyannish idea that, oh, it should be easy and if it's hard, then I'm not doing it right. No, no. He knew it would be at least five years before he got out. It was seven. So that's what I'm talking about. And then there's a science to making your dreams a reality. Gabrielle Oettingen is probably tied for first is my favorite scientist studying well being. She goes off on all the secret things we talked about and she says, you got to start with a wish, right? For a desired outcome. And then you need to rub it up against reality and see the obstacles you're going to face. Then you need to create a plan and you may find that you can't overcome the obstacles. Then you get rid of the wish. But again, it's a similar chat to ego. I think ego is used incorrectly oftentimes in the spiritual world. And this is, I mean, you call whatever you want, but you need to have this sense of my future is going to be better than my present because I'm going to make it so and I'm going to do whatever it takes. I'm going to pay whatever price is required to create the life that I want. And that's. There's a fierceness to that that again, people tend to lose the agency. Dude. And then, and then things get really weird and wobbly and then I want to go to another plant medicine trip and I'm going to solve it in that epiphany moment. But I have no skills to actually scaffold my life so that I have the discipline to create the things that I want to see in my life. Not to throw shade at people that get a lot out of that, but I got a lot of friends that go up here. State experience, Ken Wilber says, is very different than who you are. And oftentimes you feel this high, literally or metaphorically, whether it's on one of those trips or a weekend event or whatever, you come back to reality and no one told you, dude, you got to do the work now. You've got to lay the scaffolding such that you can make that experience who you are. And that takes hard work over an extended period of time. But that can be joyful. Hard work is great. Why do we need to make that something other than, you know, an expression of the divine or whatever you want to describe it as, you know.

Yeah, I call it chasing kensho or chasing satori, which is basically means like chasing sudden enlightenment, right? Because I think a lot of people, they go, they go and have these peak experiences where something clicks in. But then it's very hard to make a change in their life because there's not an integrative process and there's not the infrastructure in their life of discipline, of, you know, healthy habits that can actually reinforce and integrate what's, what they learned in that experience. And this is something that I've been playing around with a lot because a lot of guys have reached out and said, hey, you know, do you ever do plant medicine weekends? And you know, have you, have you ever led like, you know, psilocybin weekends? And it's legal in, in a couple states now. And I know some very, very good psychedelic assisted therapists that are certified. And I've been playing around with this idea of, of, you know, putting something on like that. But one of the things that has stuck out to me is there has to be some type of integrative process. There has to be some type of follow up. It can't just be like you go and have this peak psychedelic experience and then you're thrown back into your life. It's like, you got to have some structure after that, otherwise it can be disorienting and you don't actually integrate the lessons that you get there. Let's shift gears because I think we're coming up on some time here. I want to talk about a couple other things. What is targeted thinking? I love this concept in the book Targeted thinking because I think a lot of guys are like, we're big thinkers, we're constantly rationalizing. And I think for a lot of guys, they like the idea of being able to optimize or at least refine their thinking process. So what is targeted thinking?

Yeah, I love it, dude. And again, so much we can talk about there. And I love your approach to it, systematically architecting it such that again, that state becomes A trait. It's just who you are. That's your diamond, by the way. So in those states, you get access to something higher than yourself, you feel something. That's true. And the whole game of life is to make that who you are. It's how you show up, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. It's practicing enlightenment rather than chasing it. That's all I tell you. Anyway, targeted thinking comes back to hope. So Aristotle would have called that being teleological. So happy people are teleological. Telos means target. So the patron God of ancient philosophy was Apollo. Apollo was an archer. So the metaphor is healthy people have targets. If you don't have a clear target at which you're aiming your life force, you will not be as happy as the version of you that does. Full stop. And that's a moment to, moment to moment thing that you can construct in a lifetime mission, in a decade set of goals, in a five year and a one year, and a one month and a one week and a one day with dynamicism. But you got to have targets to which and at which you're aiming your life force. So that's the root of targeted thinking. And then I like to practice it in general and particularly when I feel off. So when I feel off, I like to step, step back, which is of course a skill in and of itself to step out of the thing that's stressing you out. And to see it is a practice skill which one cultivates through your breath, work, meditation, and just the intention to be good at developing that discipline. But then when you step back and you look at your life, the question I like to encourage people to ask is, well, first of all, you need to accept reality, quit arguing with reality. So full stop. And this again is the stoic idea, the art of acquiescence. So Byron Katie calls it loving. What is? You got to embrace reality and love it. So what is is? Then you step back. Then you say, what do I want? The victim complains, blames and criticizes and gives up their agency. The creator, the hero doesn't. They ask a simple question, which is, what do I want? Something's missing in your life. Perfect. What do you want? And you know, I could be in an argument with my wife. Well, I don't ever want to be in an argument with my wife. I want to fill in the blank, communicate more effectively. I want to do this, I want to do that. Then the follow on question is, all right, what do you need to do? What do you need to do? Right now, in order to take one step toward that thing that you want. That's targeted thinking. And again, that's an all day, every day kind of thing. Most people set their goals, you know, New Year's Eve, and then they forget about them. Five days, 10 days, 15 days later. We encourage people to recommit every day to being their best selves, knowing what they want, who they're committed to being, and then throughout the day practicing this idea of targeted thinking. Yeah, that. That's how I frame it up.

Coming back to this forging of antifragile confidence, because I think that rec, you know, I think that that really hits home with a lot of people, this notion that you can have almost like an unshakable confidence and perspective of how you're going to move through life. Are there any tacticals or. Let's just two pieces. Are there rules that men need to know when it comes to developing antifragile confidence? And what are the sort of tactical steps that they can take to start to develop this trait, which I think is very, very important. What a lot of guys are looking for.

Brilliant questions, dude. Appreciate the frame. First I got antifragile confidence. It was an adaptation of Phil Stutz again and a phrase that he uses called emotional stamina, which will give us the first rule, and then we'll go into a practical exercise we can do right now. So anyway, I've worked with Phil almost 451 on one sessions over the last seven plus years. In one of the early ones, he complimented me on emotional stamina. Told me I had a lot of emotional stamina. Perhaps more than he's ever seen, he said, to which I'm like, that's awesome. I have no idea what that is, but cool. Thank you. Next session. What is emotional stamina? He told me that I have a high ability or emotional stamina is an ability to handle life's pain, uncertainty, and hard work. The three unavoidables, as he describes them. All right, cool. Thank you. Follow on question. How do I get more of it? And this is the distinction that changed my life, that I would encourage us all to think about deeply. He said, the way you cultivate emotional stamina is when life hits you, the worse you feel, the more committed you are to your protocol. So the old me used to do the exact opposite. When life hit me, I would then go do all the numbing, coping stuff. But what if instead, same event, and I feel terrible, but that's when I double down on my protocol. Now that presupposes you have a protocol which leads us to the practical exercise. So my question is, you looked back before to the 10 year ago version of you that was just flailing, like the 25 year old version of 25 year ago version of me, which happened to be 25 years old, that was flailing as well. 23, 24, 25. Okay, that's one way to look back, which is important. But I want to look back right now and I want to look back to you at your absolute best. I want you to imagine a time in your life. We could have been a day or a week or a month or even a year or more, but you were on fire. You were just showing up, you were energized, you were productive, you were connected. And I want to know what were you doing and what were you not doing? So the exercise is bust out a piece of paper right at the top of it. We'll draw a line down the middle at the top of it. Put do on the left and don't on the right. Then spend 60 seconds thinking about a time in your life when you were on fire. Write down the things you were doing and the things you were not doing. Then look at your current life and think about the things you aren't currently doing that you did do at your best. And circle the number one thing that you think would most change your life if you started doing it. Then do the same thing for the don't. You weren't doing this particular thing and you mentioned the number of kryptonites is what I call them. I got mine, you've got yours. But what were you not doing then that you are doing now? Circle the number one thing that you could stop doing. Know that the fastest way to change your life is to stop doing that stuff, full stop. You can add 20 things, but if you keep on doing the thing that you know you need to stop, good luck. That's how I frame it up. And then the Josh Waitzkin idea. He wrote a great book called the Art of Learning. This phrase tattooed itself on my consciousness. He said, you got to make your prior best your new baseline. We all have achieved heights that we gave up. You can't do that. You got to understand who you were at your best and then create a life in which you do the things that you do when you're at your best. Then it becomes really fun. The ups and the downs get ironed out. You still have them because you're human. But then your prior best becomes your new baseline. And then what can you do going forward. I shared exactly this. I Talked to the U.S. men's National Soccer team a couple months ago. They happened to be in town, happened to be connected to their head coach. After my talk, I shared exactly this anti fragile confidence. He comes up and says, dude, the best being your prior best being your new baseline is like, was like, you know, head emoji exploding for him. That's a, that's. That combined with. When you are at your worst, you're most committed to your protocol. You combine those things and you even get 3, 5, 10% better. It's life changing. You build scaffolding if you're in despair and you go next, next next level if you're already performing at a really high level. I come back to this exercise all the time when I want to go next level or I'm a little bit wobbly. Get clarity. All right, what's the thing I need to start doing? Stop doing. That's, that's theoretically how I frame it up. And then practically how we, how I think we can take next steps right now to get clarity. Then there's all the art and science of, well, how do I delete a habit? How do I install a habit? James Clear's Atomic Habits is a phenomenal book worth studying. This. I talk about it a lot in my book to the extent you resonate with how I'm sharing ideas, but that's, that's how I think about anti fragile confidence. And again, I. This is it, dude. This, this is how you show up and move from victim to hero and truly, truly give your best to the world.

And that, that's, again, that's what I want to teach my kids. That's the focal point of a lot of the work that I'm doing these days.

Awesome. No, I love, I love that. And it's, it's interesting. I actually had James Clear on the show right after Atomic Habits launched. And then his. I mean, that book just like exploded. It was crazy.

One of those things you just can't, can't predict how, how well something's going to hit with people. But I like that. I love that notion of, of your best is your new baseline. And what was, what was the other piece? When you're, when you're going through your worst, double down the protocol.

The worst you feel. Yeah, the worse you feel, the more committed you are to your protocol. The worse you feel, the more committed are your protocol. But it presupposes you have a protocol and then you can actually do it.

Yeah, I mean, that's Huge. I feel like that is probably a good place for us to pause the conversation for today. Mostly because I think those two things have in a lot of ways shifted my life. Like when I've felt terrible, when my confidence has been hit or something's not going my way. Doubling down on the things, the protocol, as you call it, but doubling down on the things that I would call generative habits, things that like, are going to reinforce that I'm moving in the right direction. Breath, work, meditation, journaling, you know, spending time with good friends, calling a buddy and, you know, saying, this is what I'm dealing with right now. I could use some support or help or advice or direction or, you know, I just need you to tell me that that's hard. You know, like, whatever it is.

Getting to double down on those things when my life has been tough has really changed the game. And I've watched some of my friends do this as well. I actually just sent a, a voice memo last night. I meet with a group of friends every single week and we're all in a similar space. And one of the guys I used to live with in Vancouver a long time ago, and I have watched his life, you know, he's gone from like $500,000 of debt to having, you know, two kids and he's the primary breadwinner. And you know, he's doing very, very well for himself now financially. And you know, he's waking up at 3:30 in the morning, he's reading, he's, you know, training for an iron man. I'm like, bro, like, who are you now? You know, like, you are a radically different person. But I think in some ways, one of the things that, that I've seen is that he's, he's inadvertently living these two pillars that you're talking about. He has been for the last decade where his, his best has become his new baseline. And he continues to build and evolve on that. And then on the other side is that when things get hard is when he doubles down on the, the system and the protocol that he has in place. And that's worked magic for me as well. I've seen it really work for in their lives. And so I think that's a good place for us to pause because I think that's something that's tactical, tangible, that guys can take away. And, you know, maybe they do need to build their protocol of like, here's what I'm doubling down on. Maybe. Any last thoughts on the protocol on, you know, if a guy's listening to this and he's like, I actually don't really know what my protocol is. Where should I begin? What should I start with? What would you recommend for that?

Yeah, again, I love your. Your reflection back. And we've all done this, by the way, at our peak moments. We just need to make the unconscious conscious, then do it more deliberately, et cetera. This is the entire heroic app. This is what we architected the app to help people do. Give them a lot of theory, then help them architect their protocol. I mean, that's literally it. We've done scientific research on it that shows that it works. But the third objective that we didn't talk about is simplify everything into the big three. Energy, work, and love. So the exercise that follows that is. All right, you did a first pass. Do and don't. Now go deeper and get three pieces of paper. Now I want to know what you did at your best. Energy, work, and love wise. Because a good life in my mind comes down to those three things. So what were you doing when you were super energized? What were you not doing? What were you doing when you were super productive? And what were you not doing? And then what were you doing when you're super connected to your loved ones and what were you not doing? And then the simplest way to do it is just find one thing in each of them. But frankly, I'd find one thing. Like, if I was going to give a practical tip right now, it'd be all right, what's the one thing you know you could start doing that would most change your life that you actually want to do? It's not a should. It's like you want to do it and you think you can do it. And then what's the one thing you need to stop doing and then to go. James, clear on it real quick. And I'll try to keep this super tight. To install and delete habits, he has four things. Charles Duhigg has got his habit loop. He's got his four things. I've got three things. So leaning on all of them. Number one, if you want to install a habit, you need to make the cue, the trigger, the prompt obvious. So if you want to meditate, you got to trip over your meditation cushion. When you get out of bed, you want to go for a run, you got to trip over your running shoes. That cue trigger prompt starts the behavior. No cue trigger prompt, no behavior. The second thing is you got to make it easy. It can't be. I've got to meditate for an hour in the Morning and an hour at night. I had a high after a vipassana meditation that I was told, yeah, meditate an hour in the morning, an hour at night. You'll keep it. Good luck, dude. I had none of this discipline. I did that for a while, but it didn't have a minute. If you want to meditate, you know, what do we do? A burpee. Perfect. There you go. There's your workout. And then you got to celebrate when you do it. You got to recraft your self image that you're the kind of person that can do the things you say you're going to do. 1, 2, 3. You make the cue obvious, you make it easy to win, and then you celebrate when you do it. If you want to delete a habit, which I will repeat is more important than installing habits, you need to do the opposite. So if you have a drinking problem, get rid of all the alcohol. Literally right now. Go get rid of all the alcohol. You're not a friend to give it away. Don't dump it. Sunk cost, it's gone. The cue, the trigger, the prompt is not there. You struggle with your weight, eating refined foods, get rid of it. Get it out of sight. Don't get tempted when you see it. Make the cue invisible. Then you need to make it harder to do, which is related. All right, now you need to drive to the liquor store. At least if you're gonna go get a drink. Now you deleted the app or you blocked that site you're addicted to. So at least you gotta go through a few different steps to make it happen again, which will reduce the likelihood of doing it. And then when you inevitably fall short in deleting the habit, when you do avoid the habit, celebrate it. When you fall short. Needs work it. So one of my favorite mental toughness guys won a gold medal in rifle shooting. Lanny Basher, with winning in mind is his book. When he missed the target, he didn't ruminate on how horrible he is. He looked at it quickly and said, oh, I could have done this. He needs works it right. So if he misses, the eyes need to go a little bit this far and a little bit this way. I share a story of how I do it with my kid. But if you do the thing you wish you didn't do, go right to the moment where you made the bad choice. Because there's always a moment, it's preceded by some other things. But notice that, oh yeah, I was overwhelmed by this conversation and that and I was stressed and then I did this all Right. Well, what can you do a little better? Well, I'm going to block that pathway by doing whatever. Or maybe instead I'll take a breath or I'll go do a cold plunge or I'll go do 50 burpees or I'll go do call my buddy or whatever else might be a positive thing. Then you use the failure as data to get better. You don't shame yourself. You dust yourself off. Use it to get better. And you do that enough, you'll finally get to a point where you're, you're deleting that habit more consistently. Anyway, super quick abridged take on installing and deleting. Yeah, man. And then have fun. Like this is, you know, we're, I'm obviously, you know, being intense and all this, but this is, there's a joy to it. It's not a joyless urgency to change everything. It's a joyful embrace of the finiteness of life, which is another stoic ideal memento mori. And then, hey, let's go. You know, this isn't a dress rehearsal. I'm capable of more. Let me remember my prior successes. Rebuild a life that allows me to achieve more. What do you want? What do you need to do? Do to go get it and repeat, you know, with a smile, hopefully.

Yeah, man. The, the over seriousness can be crippling sometimes. You know, I think when we're, especially when we're trying to make progress and trying to make change. I see a lot of guys enter into, you know, the work, whatever you want to, whatever that looks like.

With this kind of intensity that is maybe pointed in the wrong direction. You know, intensity is great when approaching this, but it's usually shame fueled. You know, it's like if I don't get this right, if I'm not perfect, perfect, then I'm going to beat the living crap out of myself internally. I'm going to shame myself. And then that causes us to spiral. And then we're, you know, we're back to the, you know, we're back to leaning on the coping mechanisms because we feel like crap and then we don't want to keep going.

So then there's two virtues missing there. The wisdom to know it's going to be hard, right? And to practice your philosophy when you fall short, which would include not shaming yourself, which is an absence of love for yourself. So you've got to embrace the process. We've got to have the wisdom to know it's supposed to be hard, which is rule number one of a good life. It's supposed to be hard, but anyway, it all comes back to that. You hold the high standards, you embrace reality, and then you quit making excuses. You know, you do what needs to get done. Like at the end of the day, man, talk like, let's go, step up. You know, we need you to show up, be your best, most heroic self. And again, this deep into this conversation, dude, I mean, I'm a better person, you know, whatever it is now, 90 minutes into our chat and more soaking our consciousness in this, guys that are, you know, humbly yet heroically going for it, you know, and sharing their struggles and. And trying to. To iron sharpens iron style, you know, of setting a good pace and keeping up with it. And. And that's fun, man. You know, it hurts, but at times, but. But that. That pain is a beautiful pain, right?

I agree. I agree entirely. It's like my theme. My theme for 2024 is just. Just do the hard. That was my theme for 2024. And it's what. It's what I've invited all my clients into. Anybody that works with me, it's like, theme for 2024 is just do the hard. Whatever the hard is that you have not been wanting to do. That's what we're going to focus on this year. And that has been. It's exciting, you know, it's like. It's exciting. It's grueling sometimes where, you know, he was like, I don't want to go do that today. It's like, okay, but I committed to it, so I'm going to go do it, dude.

That's antifragile confidence, by the way. And the more whiny you are in your head, the more committed you are to doing it. Goosebumps. I mean, that's exactly it. I'm glad we got to that that phrase, because that's it. Do the hard. And when you have that attitude, dude, it's funny. You're like, there it is again. There's the whiny voice, you know, and it's like a f you to that voice of, no, dude, I'm in charge, you know, and I'm gonna go do this. And the hard stuff might be be in bed for nine hours tonight. It's not. Again, I love David Goggins, but I'm not gonna say, go get five hours of sleep to get up to go run 50 miles. I'm gonna say the hard thing. Maybe turn off everything, you know, and go to bed half an hour. If you put your kids into bed, you Know, like. But I love it, dude. That's such a cool phrase. And yeah, appreciate the conversation and super fun to connect.

Likewise. Well, we'll have the links to your book, we'll have the links to your website in the show note and your socials. Is there anywhere specific that you'd like people to go just straight out the gates if they want to learn more about you and your work?

Yeah, Heroic us is the kind of the website heroic. You know, you can find our app in the iOS Android app stores. We built it with the same company that built Slack, Tinder, Uber Eats, Elon, Musk, Neuralink, and then, yeah, I mean RT wherever you buy books. But dude, appreciate you. Great, great, great chat. Man talks let's go.

Man talks time.

Awesome, brother. Well, thank you so much. And for everybody that's out there listening, as always, always, don't forget to man it forward. Share the episode with somebody that you know is going to enjoy it, it's going to benefit from it, that could use it, and as always, man it forward and share in a dialogue about it. What did you take away from this? What did you learn? What did you love? What concept? What you know, what did you need to write down? Those things can be very helpful because, you know, there's a lot of content out there. Sometimes people don't have time to listen to the whole thing. But if you can share that nugget of wisdom that you heard in this conversation that made you pause and think like, damn, I need to share that, that can go a long way as well. So thank you so much for joining in. And as always, this is Connor Beaton signing off. See you next.

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