A Game Changer Interview with Jay Abraham #554

Foreign.

A state of high performance.

You're listening to Bulletproof Radio with Dave Asprey. Today's cool fact of the day is that it's actually not possible, or at least it's mega dorky, to interview yourself about your new most likely New York Times best selling book. So the only possible solution to this is to reach out to a good friend, former Bulletproof Radio guest and one of the world's top marketing consultant for decades. None other than Jay Abraham, who's a storied veteran who's helped more than 10,000 companies in a meaningful way change the way they communicate with the world and sell a whole lot of stuff. So Jay's a master. He's a dear friend and advisor and just a luminary in the field. And he's going to interview me because Game Changers just came out. It's available on Amazon, at Barnes and Noble, at indie bookstores everywhere. You want to buy books, you can download it on Audible. And this book is the culmination of years of work, tons of statistical things. And if you haven't been listening to Bulletproof Radio for eight hours a day, five days a week for three months, you, you're behind. I did it for you, Boiled down with statisticians and came up with the 46 laws of high performers. And Jay is going to interview me. Jay, welcome to being the host of the show.

Thank you, Dave. I'm laughing because I'd like to spend the first two or three minutes having fun with you because you know, I have a twisted sense of humor. But what we're going to talk about is so important and so impactful to the lives of so many people listening and so many future people who will listen that I would be doing them a disservice if I wasted really a minute of the precious time we have. So I want to get into it with a, not a sobering dower, but a reverent seriousness about something that I believe has the power to be arguably the most important single book. Many, many people listening and future listeners will immerse themselves in for the rest of their life because it will change forever the way they look, think, act, reflect on so many different issues that they've either thought superficially about or never thought about that have the capacity to transform their lives, transcend where they are, catapult, elevate, accelerate them to so many different, so many different places that they can't even fathom they can go. So I'll just say a couple things. Take 500 plus of the world's preeminent experts and authorities on some of the most unimaginably deep and breakthrough subjects. Scientists, philosophers, experts in human performance, mental agility, mental performance, personal growth, expanded perspective, happiness, humility, hopefulness, passion. Spend 60 sinewy non theoretical penetrating minutes with each one plumbing, probing, exploring the depths of what their life has meant and what their discoveries and conclusions have confirmed to be truths that are immutable. Take all of those discoveries, distill them down from each person to three distinctive and universally applicable questions that they answer. Take those 1500 plus questions, overlay them, distill them down to universal principles, categorize them in three different aspects of life performance. And now you have a mild perspective and an ever so superficial grasp of what Dave Asprey has painstakingly and remarkably dedicated a huge portion of his life to create for you. This is truly a remarkable achievement. So I want you to know that because I've dedicated my life to dis acknowledging that something could not be done, that greater achievement was not possible. Because it is. And what I found is that when you grasp the magnitude of combining multiple enhancers, multiple leverage points to elements of a business, or in this case a life, the resulting output is is not a linear improvement. It is a catapulting, compounding geometric growth that keeps multiplying, expanding exponentially into wherever exponential ends up. And that's what Dave has been able to both harvest, harness, encapsulate and then not just distill, but process down into actionable and easily graspable directions, instructions. And then he's added to it very very exciting illustrations, case studies and actual scientific proof that you can go as deep on by law as you want. Because he's got all kinds of reference in the back. So I hope that gets your creative palette, your self achievement gauge going off the chart. I want you to get excited because I am. I read the book when it first came to me for a comment and I liked it. But I read it very quickly then because I knew I was going to usurp Dave in this bloodless coup. I read it thoroughly and I read it for purposes of trying to really appreciate what he had created, what it really provided, what the import and the impact and the output of reading each chapter, each section, each law could no change that would mean to each one of your lives. And I feel a very serious and sincere responsibility, privilege and obligation to be this advocate for both each one of you listening so you'll grasp the full magnitude. And for Dave, because he didn't create this just to be doing a Book. Sadly, there's far too many superficial, hyped books. This book is a disservice to even call a book. It's a life manual that will just keep growing and evolving as you keep applying and improving. Okay. With that stated, I think it's important for me to turn it back to Dave so he can explain why and how he organized the book the way he did and why he felt going into certain areas of topics that are a little bit hot potato was important for the integrity of what he stands for and why it was absolutely critical and mandatory that he provide enormous additional substantiation and reference in the back on every point he made so that you would be able to take your application so much deeper, higher, broader in any aspect of your life. So, Dave, back to you.

Well, after looking at how people answered that final question on Bulletproof Radio, that if someone came to you tomorrow and said, I want your advice on three things that will help me perform better as a human being, just everything I do, what would they be? And the idea here was not to say tell me about your work to any of these people, but tell me how you got to be at the level to make it onto Bulletproof Radio. And the data broke down into three big buckets. After a lot of crunching, sort of figuring out what bucket does that really fit in? And. And I landed at smarter, faster and happier. And the people, almost universally, not all of them, but almost universally, had figured out how to do all three in their own life. And sometimes less of one, less of the other. But generally that's that big trifecta of things that allow people to change their game. No one was born with those things. They figured out how to do it and I wanted to figure out how I could do it better.

And that's a great springboard for the next question. So you took these categories and you aggregated them and then you distilled them down into these laws. And these laws, as of right now, are pretty immutable. And if you follow them, it is scientifically, transactionally, it's impossible not to have your life multiplied by orders of magnitude in many ways, correct?

I like to think so. And that's been my results. But here's the problem, Jay. What works for me might not work for you. You might not have weighed 300 pounds. You might not be a 46 year old 6 foot 4 guy. You might be a 24 year old 5 foot 2 woman with a different genetic backgr and a different upbringing. So the danger, it isn't saying, well, it worked for me, it should work for you. But the specialness is saying, well, if it works for a bunch of these people, and many of them mentioned it. Hold on a second. What's interesting, maybe that should be your priority. Because what I did wrong, I always wanted to perform well. I think it's core to being a human that we want to do that. The problem was I didn't know how to do it. So I just did a bunch of stuff that I thought would work. I made some assumptions. Maybe I copied one expert, copied another. And that meant I wasted a huge amount of time not just being heavy, but having a braid that didn't work, having habits that weren't effective, and just wasting masses of energy. So when I got the data that said, hold on a second, they're all paying attention to this, that would have helps me now, but it would have helped me as a young man set my priorities right and then find the tools, going out and just picking a tool without knowing why you're using the tool, because it's somehow going to make you better. It doesn't work. And so the idea behind Game Changers is that you're going to read these 46 laws. Some of them are going to be areas you never thought about that massively affect your performance. You're going to read the law. It's going to tell you about the science, about why that law has merit, about the practice of the people who did it, if I've done it, what my own experience was, and. And you're going to walk out of it with a set of short exercises that tell you, hey, here's what to do to see if this law is right for you or just to start it right now, because procrastination is a huge pain in the ass. And if you read this book, say, there's too many laws, I'm not going to do it. No, no, no. You look at each law, answer three questions, you know if it's right for.

You gave the right answer. I set you up purposely because I knew. And I'm not making you. No, no, I'm serious. I wanted you to clarify one of the things that I've learned, and I'm going to extrapolate through you. You know, everyone can't do everything immediately. And you're right, everything isn't necessarily going to work or it's not going to address what the priorities are in their life. But what you've given us is the mirror to see ourselves in a very. In a very clear, deep, penetrating level where we can see all kinds of elements, areas that make no sense to continue underperforming, sub optimizing, you know, wasting the most precious assets we have. Energy, opportunity, you know, life. So I think it's wonderful. I'm going to give you. Oh, I tried to. I. I wanted to do something funny. I wanted to say, you know how they say these are very powerful methods, don't try this at home? I was going to say, definitely try this at home. But then because you have a chapter or an element on trying, I thought you have to say, do this at home. So it's just a little inside joke, which we'll get to in a minute. We're going to do Rorschach from the book. You ready?

All right.

Okay. So you talk about ways to avoid fatigue and you talk about the fact that a lot of people have a misconception. I'm not in order of the everything here. But they think that working themselves to the bone is cool and getting up early is cool. Can you consolidate those thoughts into one big, big answer or big perspective?

You know, getting up early is cool if it doesn't make you tired. And for a couple years, I made myself wake up at 5am every morning, meditate for an hour or two and really do it. And what I found after two years is that, yes, I could do it and I could function, but my creativity was down. And frankly, I didn't really like my life as much that way. So I went back to what I've always done since I was a smaller child. I stay up late. And I always felt a little bit guilty about it. This idea that, you know, the early bird gets the worm. And so I changed it to the early bird works for the late bird, which isn't always true, but 15% of us are night owls, 15% of us are super early morning people, and most of the rest of us are average people. So just knowing this is incredibly liberating. Look, what you do in the morning matters greatly. But your definition of morning may be 90 minutes off from someone else, and neither one of you has moral superiority for it. And so for about, oh, 30% of people who read the book, they're going to go, oh, my God, I didn't know. So matching your circadian biology with the way your genetics works will make you perform better because you have more energy. So that side of the equation for your question, Jay, I totally buy. And it's in here, along with, in Game Changers, a couple new sleep hacks that I haven't written about before. And Most of the sleep hacks you read about on the Internet right now are derivative of the original sleep hacking posts about collagen before bed, about what brain octane can do, about raw honey and blacking out your room, and all that stuff that's circa 2013 kind of content that I wrote. And it's. It's been evolved over time. There's a lot more you can do with red lights and with certain kinds of glasses, like the truedarks that block things. But overall, some of this stuff has just not been released. I wanted to put some real meat for the biohackers listening. But here's the deal. If you're just not prioritizing sleep, a huge number of these people, they could have chosen anything on earth. They could have said, have a million dollars, anything that's going to make you perform better. No, no one said that, but a lot of them said sleep. So I was wrong when I was young because I hated sleep. Even when I started Bulletproof, I'm like, I did a year and a half of five hours or less and quite often four hours a night of sleep, and it was bad for me. But I did start a company while working full time. But I wish I hadn't done that in retrospect because I know how bad it is now.

You hit on something, but you talk a lot about the relevance of habits and why, how, and that without them, you can't possibly optimize your life. Want to talk a little bit about that?

Yeah. Decision fatigue is a real thing. And at the Bulletproof conference, I gave a talk on stage about how important this is, and it's totally invisible to us. If you're completely just zonked at the end of the day, you might know. I just. I don't want to. I to don't want. I don't want to decide anything. I just want to lay here like a log. But it's active throughout the rest of the day. This was borne out by a study in Israel where they looked at a parole board and they said, what variable decides whether someone gets out of jail or not? Is it their education, their ethnicity, their gender, Their crime? How much education they got in prison? None of those really move the needle. What mattered was whether you got the morning meeting when the parole board was fresh or whether you got the last meeting of the day when they were completely done making decisions. The swing was something like 80% between your chances of getting out or staying in. It was just based on how many decisions the board had made. There was a slight Spike after lunch, they got energy from their food for a little while before the food coma hit. And you might get out if you got that first meeting after lunch. So this is operating in your day, every day. It is for all of us. And what habits do is they take decisions that we would have had to make and turn them into something that isn't a decision whatsoever. And so I talk about some really simple habits where people oftentimes spend a lot of work. And it's really cool because for Game Changers, I just went on the Dr. Oz show, and he asked one of the members of the audience to record all the decisions that they made throughout the day, just to count them. And the poor woman lost track somewhere around 800 or 1000. She's at 5 o'. Clock. I just got tired of counting these, but I realized I made 43 decisions before I got out of bed. And they're all micro decisions, but habits let you get rid of those. And other habits can help you do things you don't really want to do because they become habitual. But the deal is, by not thinking about your habits, if they're the right habits, that not thinking saves electrons. You can use to do something that matters.

Because we're unlimited time. I'm doing hybrids, and I hope that's okay with you.

Totally. Jay, I love the way your mind works. You have a gift for language, so ask away.

People don't realize that it's not just a bunch of tweaks. You are actually giving them the ability to harness the power of geometry to create what I would call an exponential life. Because each one of these isn't just a 3 or 4 or 5% improvement in some element of their life that compounds by orders of magnitude. But that's not the point I want to make. I want you to integrate. That's just a parenthetical diversion in my ADD adult moment. So I want you to take the concept of sunlight, oxygen breathing, nature's toxicity and hygiene and combine them into a cool. A cool comment if you want to.

All right. If you've listened to that original definition of biohacking that I put out there when I was starting the community around biohacking, it was really carefully written. And what I did is I said, look, it's the art and science of changing the environment around you and inside of you so that you have more control of your own biology. And that thread works its way through the Bulletproof Diet, through Head Strong now, through Game Changers, through the show. And what are all the things in the environment that you didn't think about that are either sucking energy or giving you energy. So in the book I talk about. All right, did the people who've done these game changing things, did they pay attention to this? And no, not all of them did. I interviewed a professional dominatrix who sees a lot of very powerful people in New York City once. And, and I have no idea. I didn't ask her whether she has an air filter and drinks filtered water. I mean, I imagine she probably does because she has to stay in shape. But that's not a data point I gathered. But I can tell you that 76% of the people interviewed said food or some comment about food. They don't all agree on what to eat, but they all found that if they ate the wrong stuff, they couldn't show up to win a Nobel Prize or be an abcl or whatever else it was. So there's many paths there. And this is not a book about how to eat. And Game Changer is going to tell you if you're not prioritizing that, well, that was the number one thing. So for God's sake, that isn't a mystery anymore. It's mostly solved. And so just go do that and you'll get huge dividends if you haven't already figured out that this matters. And from there, though, okay, what do your mitochondria do? Well, they sense the environment around you and then decide how much energy you're going to have. But they also, their primary function, you could say they convert air and food into electrons that power your will, they power your brain, they power everything you do. So if any of those variables can be tweaked, then you might be able to do something really powerful. So in Game Changers, I talk about some of those things, but in a very different way and with a different focus than you would read in Head Strong. In fact, there's very little overlap between this book and any of my other books. But it is all backed by science.

Good. But I want one more thing because I'm going to tell you a quick story. I interviewed Phil Jackson years ago when he first won the three championships in the Bulls. And I interviewed him for translating his methodology for entrepreneurs. And I asked him the one most important thing that every entrepreneur could do immediately that would transform their life. And I had a bunch of conservative redneck entrepreneurs on this one, so it was hilarious. But his answer was, be mindful of your breathing. And no one really grasped the magnitude and the import of that. And I would love before I Take you to my next integration, if you'll just do a minute or two on that.

Well, one of the things that will tell your body that you're about to die is taking rapid, shallow breaths or holding your breath without intention. It messes with the amounts of carbon dioxide that your body holds onto. And carbon dioxide is what drives absorption of oxygen into your body. Just about every form of meditation that there is talks about this, Martial arts talk about it. And in the west, you just don't really. You don't really hear people talking about breathing unless they're in a yoga studio, unless they're doing some sort of very esoteric practice. But it's one of the simplest ways to change your heart rate. So in the book, I talk about ways to calm yourself with breath, but I also talk about one of the laws, which is get outside your head. And one of the things that high performers do at shocking levels is almost every one of them has found a way to get far outside of their body and just get a bigger perspective on themselves, on the world, on their role in things, their behavior patterns. And the way they do that sometimes is through a technique called holotropic breathing that I am blessed to have been able to do years ago with the guy who invented it, who's now 94, Stan Grof, who's been a guest on the show. And he used it as a replacement for LSD therapy, which he was doing using his license as a psychiatrist in Czechoslovakia before it became the Czech Republic. And that resulted in a whole new field of psychology. But how many people in the world understand that the right breathing for 10 or 15 minutes, especially with some cool music in the background, you know, can make you leave your body and have an experience that could be a very altered state, spiritual experience, without having to break the law, without having to go to Peru and do ayahuasca with the shaman, the way I've also done. And so in this law, I talk about vipassana, fasting in a cave, all the different things you can do. But if you don't do it at least once in your life, and I would say, ideally, at least once a year, you don't do something. You just don't have quite the same connectivity in the brain and you don't have the same worldview, there's incredibly good data about this. And these are those things that you don't talk about this over lunch on Sandhill Road in Silicon Valley. You probably don't talk about it very much unless you're like me and you go to Burning man and things like that. But the people who are changing the game, I mean, Steve Jobs, you know, the guys who invented or at least discovered the double helix of DNA, Watson and Crick, they were using plant medicines. So this is not a call to go out and get high and go to Disneyland. It's actually the opposite of that. It's to say, if you're going to do it, do it with the proper supervision in a legal setting and actually tell people where they can go to do this stuff legally. And it has definitely changed my life. And I've done every one of the things I can think of that helps me do that. I don't mean every drug. I mean, I've done some of the pharmaceuticals, some of the plant medicines, but I've done more of the practices that help you do that. So if that's missing from your life, you've never done that. Or frankly, if it scares the shit out of you, now is the time that fear is a signal that you need it even more. And when you do it just once, and I find go fast in a cave for three or four days, it's profoundly scary. But you'll reach a point where you just realize you're not what you thought you were. And that is one of the keys to game changing. And I just wish it was a bigger part of the national conversation.

So now I'm going to integrate three more things, and I had 90 minutes. We have a tight schedule. But I can't underscore how many epiphanies that you have packed into this organized illustrated example and then referenced so that it can't be refuted. It doesn't mean that it's appropriate for everyone. But you've given so much documentation, so much reference, so much articles, so many. It's really impressive. But here's my integrated next one. I want you to talk about, if you can, will want power, money, success, gratitude together. Because those themes come in and out in about two or three different areas.

The first thing that stands out from this structured interview and this survey of people done some really incredible things is that when you ask them the three most important things, no one, not one, said money, power or fame. None of them had that as a motivator. And yes, those are all nice. But I mean, Jay, you talk about what happened when you got your first Mercedes, and that story is actually in the book.

Yeah, it is.

You know, and I asked Jack Canfield about this on the show and about what effect that had on him. And bottom line is, if you are Listening to this, and you're saying, I'm going to start a company or I'm going to get the next big job. And you're looking at it framed by money. Game Changers is going to teach you why making that decision is the worst decision you can ever make.

I agree.

The people who made the list, so to speak, by and large, had found a way to do the things that made them happy. And for the ones who became wealthy, and some of them didn't become wealthy, they just did what they wanted to do. They became a tenured professor, able to immerse themselves in the things they loved, things like that, but met a definition of success, of having a big impact. They're happy because happiness is the lubricant for success. And I believe very fervently, and I'm pretty open and vulnerable in Game Changers when I tell the little part of that law that is my own story. I believe that when I had more money or more success, I would be happy. So I would spend all my time and energy. I burn myself out trying to do this. And then you hit a milestone and you get there like, oh, I just need a little bit more. So it's a fool's errand. But no one told me that because we have this common, weird cultural perception that that's what it is. It's just not that. And the people who made it, they just realized, you know what? Screw that noise. I need to make enough money to take care of myself and take care of my family. But the amount of money that creates happiness, and I review a lot of the actual survey data on this, it's about $74,000 household income on average in the U.S. it's probably more in New York or California or maybe now Seattle, given how much real estate's gone up here. But no matter that, what that means is that if you go from 74 to $84,000, your happiness won't change. Your convenience might change. Your car might be faster. You get some other move. It's a nicer vacation. But above that, you can triple your income. No more happiness. So they're not correlated after your basic needs are net are met. But do they teach you that in school? They don't. So a lot of us spend our lives just saying, man, I'm miserable, but I know if I just earn more. And you gotta stop that right now. That was one of the biggest things that came out of the happiness chapter. Is that happiness, in fact, the law that you're talking about, Jay, is that wealth is a symptom of happiness, not the other way around.

No. And you say it. And you and I both know this. We've worked with enough very, very, very wealthy people. Well, wealth won't buy happiness, but happiness has a profound tendency to create wealth. It's very interesting. You ready for the next. Okay. You ready?

Absolutely.

And I've got to say this. It's a disservice because there's so much really, unimaginably, directly applicable content and instruction and guidance and nourishment for the mind, the soul, the body in this book. But try to connect these. Why, when you say, I'll try, you are lying. But add to that the law of the power of no. I think they can go together. It's not. Then just take one. You have the right to refute what I ask.

The power of no is the first law in Game Changers. And on his face you could say, oh, yeah, saying no, that's a good thing. But it's what you say no to that matters. And a lot of my learnings on this came from Joe Polish and Dan Sullivan, who've been on Bulletproof Radio, who've both been coaching and working with entrepreneurs at the highest levels for very long periods of time. And we're all, whether we're entrepreneurs or not, we're all faced with a bunch of people who want something from us, a bunch of things that we're supposed to do, a bunch of opportunities to immerse yourself in social media or whatever else. The people who changed the game for themselves and did what they wanted to do, they realized that saying no to things that suck their energy is most important. So it's a very different mindset. Hey, is the return on this activity high or low? And so it's around the holiday time right now. And what that means is if going to that one holiday party is really just going to suck your energy, like, I really don't want to do that. You know what the right thing, what a game changer would do is they'd say, you know what? I'm not going to go to the holiday party. And the same thing goes in your career if your parents or your, you know, your society or just your programming tells you, if I go out and I have X career, I'm going to be successful, therefore I'll be happy. But when you start doing that, you realize, you know what? This makes me tired. I don't like it. And you say, I'm just going to keep doing it. I have to do it. You are setting yourself up for a life of mediocrity. And that's why the power of no is so important. It's no to the things that suck your energy so that you can save all the energy and put it towards the things where you're actually really good. The things that. Not just that you're good at, but things that give you energy when you do them. This is one of my other favorite laws, is one of my early blog posts, and it's about the power of weasel words. Mindset really matters. And if you read the Napoleon Hill book Think and Grow Rich, which was the first book in this genre that I read back when I was 16 or something, and many, many people listening have read the book. If you haven't, you owe it to yourself. It's a classic. Even there, he talks about the power of language, and Jack Canfield has a similar list. And many other people on the show have talked about this. And the words that I call out as weasel words and the words that I'm really working on just stripping out of the vocabulary with my team at Bulletproof, which is tough because we're wired to use these words. One of the words is try. If someone says try, jay, I'm going to try to pick you up at the airport tomorrow, you know, right away, call an Uber. They're not going to be there. Right. It's actually a way of disempowering yourself and the other person. So in my house, in my company, I really don't want to hear the words I'll try. Either you're going to do it or you're not going to do it. You say, I'm going to do it. Say I have no idea how I'm going to do it, and there's a really good chance I'm going to fail. It's very different. Then I'll try. And the other word that goes right along with that is the word can't. And can't, frankly, pisses me off maybe more than most of the other words in the English language because it's full of arrogance and it's arrogant. Because when you say you can't do that, well, you're presupposing a bunch of things. And what's really going on is you don't know how to do it. You don't have the resources to do it. No one's ever done it before. But if you believe the canned people, there were people who said, you can't go more than 30 miles an hour in these newfangled automobile, horseless carriages because It'll suck all the air out and you'll die of asphyxiation. This was a true statement. This is what they believe. They said this. You can't fly all those things. No, can't. It simply means it hasn't been done. So don't say that. Say the truthful thing, which is, we don't know how that looks really hard and expensive.

And.

And if someone says, hey, can you make it to dinner tomorrow? No, I can't make it. No, you could make it. And one of the four agreements, a very famous book, is have integrity in your word. It is profoundly relaxing when you say, I'm not going to make it. And when they hear you say that, they look at you and go, oh, this person is solid. And the difference is so big. But it's these little things. And the people who, like Peter Diamandis, a mutual friend who did the X Prize, he single handedly just about brought private exploration of space to fruit in one lifetime. And he doesn't believe in the word can't either, because you can't do all the things that they did. He just did it anyway. So just cut that out of your life. And you could say, well, what does this have to do with biohacking? Your brain believes everything you say, literally. And there's neuroscience about this. So when you do that, it frees you. And everyone who sees you speak with truthfulness and integrity will respect you more as a result.

The next one, I'm going to try to do an interpretation.

Did you just say try, Jay, right after that long monologue?

I did that on purpose to see if you'd catch it. You did? That's good. Don't I have good returns?

That was awesome.

Thank you. We are definitely going to do something very connected because you covered in many different ways a concept that I don't think people really grasp. And I want to make it not implicit but very explicit about the fact that everything they do, every decision, every action, every effort, every consumption, whether it be internal or external, intellectually experientially, words, actions, things, conversation, food, nutrition, crap, alcohol, it basically is an investment that is going to produce a positive or a negative yield. And somebody said to me one time, if your body or your business were a mutual fund and you had 12 different investment classes in it, one was producing 2% yield with a 40% risk and another was producing 40% yield with a 2, would you put the same amount of, of allocated assets? That's not exactly what I want you to talk about, but I think most People don't realize that everything they do is an investment. And they should get optimal, highest and best yield. And I've threaded a needle weirdly, but you can take it now and stitch it any way you want.

I believe after years of biohacking and measuring what works and what doesn't work, there are a bunch of things that work that are simply not worth the effort because you don't get very many results that take a long time. And it takes a lot of time. It takes a lot of energy, a lot of effort, or a lot of money to do it. So if you could live 5% longer, but you had to spend four hours a day doing something that was unpleasant, very few people on earth would choose to do it because the juice isn't worth the squeeze. And this is happening with every little micro decision you make, what you put on your plate, look, it has an roi. Some of the return on that investment is, well, how did it taste? And if it tastes like garbage, it's unpleasant, you're probably not going to eat it for very long. I'm talking to you, Kale. And then the, the flip side of that is you can get something that makes you feel amazing. Okay? Or you could just say, I put it on my plate, it tastes pretty good, it'll do. At least I'll be full. Well, there's a different return and there's also a different investment because the grass fed meat that I recommend you eat, it's probably a dollar or two a pound more than the industrial meat that poisons our water, our soil, and is mean to animals and bad for your gut bacteria. The return is pretty high on eating a smaller amount of higher quality meat, the list goes on and on. You're going to meditate. Did you want the meditation that got you there in one minute or in 10 minutes? And it is righteous and moral to say, hurry, meditate faster. And people who meditate, they sort of roll their eyes and laugh. And you know, I've done advanced meditation lots of different ways. There are ways to just have a higher ROI on that. So when you treat your time on this earth as a precious gift, gift, and you say, I don't want to waste is not egotistical, but it is profoundly lazy in that why would you do more work than you had to? Because the work you save, you could put it into something else that's important to you. It's just that you don't see yourself frittering away these little bits. So you just reframe those decisions. And the things that you don't like. Those are the things that have a very high cost because they suck your energy and you don't like to do them. So those are the ones you should cheat at.

I love that you make a really great point and it resonates with me for many reasons. But you say if you don't track it, you can't hack it. You want to go into that a bit?

Yeah, that's law 29 in the book. It's track it to hack it. And it is entirely possible with the stuff that we have today, you could actually spend huge amounts of time just monitoring all sorts of things. But it's probably not worth it because if you want to change it, then you go to the trouble of measuring it. Because guess what? That ROI conversation we just had, measuring your body has a cost. There's an investment made on that. So only measure the stuff that's easy to measure or stuff that you're really looking to change. So if you measure your inflammatory markers, and that's an expensive blood test, it's relatively painful. You got to go to the doctor or order it online, and it's inconvenient. Well, you spent a couple hundred bucks on that. You're probably going to work on your inflammation markers and test it again in a while, but you're not going to get one of those tests every quarter, just for a while, unless you're like me and you just want to know everything because you might want to hack it. And it's just that same mindset that says don't waste your time and money on tracking stuff unless you're going to do something about it. And here the subtext of the law reads you have the ability to target any state of high performance you choose, decide what you want to change, measure where you are and get moving. Check again later, rinse and repeat. You can surpass previous generations because you have access to more data about yourself and others than was available throughout history. The playing field is more level than it ever has been, and technology will help you correct course when necessary. Today, our mutual friend Naveen Jain, who started viome, the company who's been on the show several times. And Viome is looking at every single thing in your gut and all the bacteria, what they're doing, what they're making, what species are present. And that's pretty cool for you. But what's really cool is they're comparing you to, I don't know how many at this point, but many tens or hundreds of thousands of other samples. So now you can Say, well, I'm pretty far away from normal. I think I have a problem. But you go back 10 years, you couldn't even measure it in yourself, much less compare yourself to a bunch of other people. And it's that ability to say, what is the new human condition we can measure that we didn't know about five or 10 or 20 years ago. And where do I stack rank? That's going to tell you where to put your effort.

That's great. Okay, I'm going to integrate two other points. I'm saving the really fun good things for last. But there's so many outrageously, they're unimaginably impactful. And I'm not saying that to pander, patronize. I'm saying that you have caused me to reflect very profoundly on altering my own life. But let's talk about two integrative things. First of all, why you are a reflection of your community. And if it correlates, why getting high with a little help from your friends is valuable. And if those don't correlate, pick one or don't even talk about either. You have that latitude.

One of the things that stood out more than I would have expected from looking at the data from all these interviews was the number of people who talked about community. And that get high with a little help from your friends is actually about oxytocin and what having a community does there. But having a community who supports you does very interesting things to your neurochemistry. And what this comes down to in my take on the world, which is that a lot of our unconscious behaviors are just emergent things that happen when quadrillions of ancient little bacteria work together to try and force your meat to stay alive. Well, they are wired to work as a community. And that rolls up to us. We're wired to work as a community. And probably a community of about 150 people is the size that scientists have have identified as the likely size of early tribes. And if you are not surrounded by a community of people that you trust, doesn't have to be anywhere near that big, it creates a subtle unease, or maybe dis ease, you could call it in your body. And it changes the way you show up in the world. It changes what you're going to do. And that myth of the lone wolf entrepreneur toiling away all by himself, one man against the world. And it's BS that's not how the game changers do it. They consciously build communities. And what really was interesting here was Esther Perel's work, where she talks about the.