How A Philosopher CEO Has Achieved The Ultimate Combination of Fitness, Health And Happiness.

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Hey, folks, it's Ben Greenfield here, and my guest today is Brian Johnson. Brian is the philosopher and the CEO of a company called Entheos. And I love how he describes it as a company that creates cool stuff to help people optimize their lives. And I first met Brian about two years ago through my MP3 player. And I had discovered this thing online called the Philosopher's Notes. I wanted to learn more about philosophy and personal growth, and So I downloaded 100 mp3s because I figured that would be faster than me reading all the books. And it was this guy named Brian Johnson, and he was actually spending about 20 minutes walking through all of, like, the biggest takeaways from the hundred greatest personal growth books of all time from the Bhagavada. Am I pronouncing that correctly, Brian, by the way?

Yeah, Bhagavad Gita.

I got it. Well, I was close. You were close to just a ton of old stoic philosophy teachings and all these books, the names of most of which are escaping my mind. But anyways, I went through 100 of those philosopher's notes and then later, through complete random chance, ended up hooking up with Brian via a WellnessFX consult. So I think, as many of you listeners know, I am a consultant for a company called WellnessFX that does blood testing and biomarker testing. And Brian happened to be one of the people whose results I went through with, and I actually helped him and his wife kind of interpret their Wellness FX blood testing results and then began working and doing some online coaching with Brian for muscle gain and fat loss. And as I grew to know him, I realized he has this pretty incredible story. He's actually not only recorded all of these philosopher's notes, which I kind of thought was the only thing that he did, but he's actually got a lot going on from a business standpoint. He's had an incredible journey of kind of combining fitness and health and happiness and business success into a really cool package. And he also has some interesting characteristics, like he never sends email, like, ever. He just doesn't use email. And I'm sure he'll give us his tip for how to do that because I'm sure many of you would love to know how to never send emails again. He pretty much never says anything negative ever. I'm not quite sure how he pulls that off, but since I've known him, I have never heard like one negative thing come out of his mouth. And he's just this unique combination of like a self quantification biohacker kind of guy and a philosopher and a CEO and a family man. I'll put a picture of him and his family up in the show notes for if you want to go check them out over@BenGreenfieldFitness.com but today Brian's going to share with us his story and some of his biggest keys, some of his biggest wins to achieving that ultimate combination of fitness and health and happiness and business success. So Brian, thanks so much for coming on the call today, man.

Ben, thank you. That's just an extraordinary introduction and to give a shout out, we actually have Sarah Gottfried to thank for connecting us. So we did WellnessFX and then we saw you were on there and we're like, oh, we gotta work with Ben. Sarah just recommended him and my wife actually said that. And one of the best decisions we've made. You've been such a great addition to our family. You've really helped dialed us in and appreciate you and I'm excited to chat.

Well, that's fantastic. And Sarah was actually on the podcast. She did our what to do when being a badass ruins your hormones I think was the title of that podcast. But it was one all about cortisol. So if you're listening in and you didn't hear the podcast with Sarah, go listen in. So anyways, Brian, can you tell me a little bit about how you got started doing what you're doing? Because I know initially you were in law school but you didn't stick with that for long.

Yeah, so the last 15 years, since I dropped out of law school about 15 years ago, I basically spent half of it building businesses and half of it in philosopher mode, reading, writing, thinking. So I've built and sold two businesses. After dropping out of law school, the only thing I knew I wanted to do was to work with kids to coach a little league baseball team. And I did that. It led to a business idea, won a business plan competition at UCLA's Anderson School, raised 5 million bucks as a 25 year old entrepreneur, hired the CEO of Adidas to replace me and just kind of, I call it my $5 million MBA, learned a ton, created something pretty cool and then sold that and then took a few years off to kind of figure out what I wanted to do when I grew up.

And by the way, that business that you sold, that was to the Active Network.

Yeah. Which is relevant for this discussion? Yes, we sold it to the Active Network, which obviously registration for triathlons and our business.

I just registered for a Spartan yesterday on the Active Network.

Right on. So they bought us because we were the team sport market. So we helped the little league baseball teams, AYSO soccer teams. And we plugged in the registration so that when you're signing your kid up to play sports, you're doing it through E Teams, which was my company, through Active. So yeah, that's perfect to make that connection. And yeah, so spent a few years just reading and writing and thinking. Ran out of money and also wanted to create again. So created my second business. And that was basically at the time MySpace was big. Facebook wasn't around yet. MySpace for people who want to change the world. Raised a few million for that. CEO of Whole Foods, invested some great investors, sold that to Gaiam.

That's the Yoga. Gotcha. Yoga TV is what that is, right? Or something like that.

They have Gaia tv. Yeah. And they do a ton of stuff in the conscious space and NASDAQ business, I think, whatever they are. Then I spent basically four years reading and writing. I gave myself a PhD in how to live. And those philosopher's notes were my master's project. Two years distilled 100 of my favorite books. Then I spent a few years tinkering with our business and theos. And really over the last three, four months, it's just all come together and just really excited to lean into it. Our vision is let's create one of the coolest, most virtues based, impactful and profitable businesses in the world.

If we could back up for just a second to this whole idea of the philosopher's notes. Because like I mentioned, that was how I first kind of heard your Voice Inside my MP3 player was listening to you talk about Marcus Aurelius and Jesus and all these philosophers. What was the impetus there? I mean, did you just read all these books and decide you were going to record the audios for them or what got you interested in that?

What a great question. Yeah, so I was running my last business, Zods, and I was reading seven Spiritual Laws of Success. I was reading Four Hour Workweek, this sort of thing. And I got to a point where I realized that business wasn't it. It was really great for a few years and Just wasn't it. I decided to sell it within 30 days, had the deal done with Gaiam, money in the bank done. I didn't know what I was going to do, but I knew I wanted to study life and really immerse myself in wisdom and philosophy and then decided to give myself a PhD. I couldn't find a program that integrated what I wanted. It wasn't positive psychology, it wasn't religious studies, it wasn't an mba. It was all those things. And there wasn't a program that did that. Then I was banging my head against the wall, what's it going to look like? I wanted to build a business. I wanted to prove that you can get paid to do what you love to do. I wanted to get paid to read and to study and to optimize my life. Long story short, I was on a flight home. We took a trip to Tokyo. I was flying home. I opened up the SkyMall to a company called Soundview that did summaries for business executives. I had one of those choir of angels moments. That's it. That's what I'm going to do. I'm going to distill 100 great optimal living books and I'll do exactly what they're doing. Six page summaries, 20 minute MP3s. I'll do all the recording and all that stuff. That was the basic kind of process. And then that little moment. And then just, you know, moved to Bali for a year. Spent a year in Bali just reading and creating these and had a lot of fun and learned a ton and we got to meet through it. So there you go. Cool. Cool.

I like it. So from that point, you had sold the Gaiam business and started into this Entheos thing. And you know, for people who don't really know what entheos is, can you help us kind of wrap our heads around what that is and what you're accomplishing with that?

Yeah, sold zods to Gaiam. Spent basically four years as a philosopher, philosopher's notes, wrote a little book, that kind of thing. And then the last three years been kind of tinkering with entheos and playing with a bunch of different things. And it's really come together over the last really couple years, but last several months and we do three primary things. So we produce conferences, excited to be working with you later this year with extraordinary teachers. We just had one on meditation. 24,000 people attended it with the world's luminaries on meditation. So we do conferences. We'll reach hundreds of thousands of people via that. And then we do basically like a Facebook for optimal living. So we just launched our beta a few months ago. Thousand people joined on day one. Almost 10,000 people there now. And we're really excited to lean into it. And just imagine there's Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, Instagram, they're all great. But wouldn't it be cool if there's a social site that was all about this conversation and that's what we're creating, and that's my real entrepreneurial background.

So I don't get it. Can you explain a little bit more about what you mean when you say like a Facebook for optimal living? Like, is this some is like a social network?

Yeah, it's a social network. I mean, that's what I've done. So I've built and sold two social networks. I built a leading social network for teams involved in sports, and then I built the leading social network for people who want to change the world.

So how would somebody actually use something like a social network for optimal living? Is it one of those deals where they go in and create a profile and just. I mean, how would it be different than just having your own Facebook account, for example?

Yeah, well, it's exactly like having your own Facebook account, only imagine none of the negative stuff, none of the news, and people who actually care about your last workout and your last meditation, what you ate yesterday, it will be a way for you. Facebook is really great for connecting to people. You know, your brother, your sister, your aunt who lives three hours away, and your grandma who's a couple hours away. It's fantastic in that sense.

So when I posted my heart rate variability data just this morning on Facebook, your social network would be a place where something like that might be more well received.

People would be jest about it, just jacked up about it. And then the other thing is that your fans, there's literally no way for your fans to meet one another. There's no way. It's not how Facebook is architected unless someone comments on a post and you can click to their profile. And our whole thing is, look, if I'm following your podcast, your listeners right now have more in common with one another than with most people in their lives. And we want to connect them to one another. And that's what we think is transformative. And I have goosebumps as I say that because it's application only. You have to apply to join, and almost 10,000 people have already applied. We haven't done anything marketing wise. And they all say the same Thing, I'm tired of Facebook. It's awesome in so many ways, but I want something positive. I want to really engage in something that matters with people who are passionate about life and want to make a difference in the world. That's the idea. We'll have millions of people on that in the next few years and super excited. And then the third thing we do, so conferences, social. We call it the Oasis. And then we do the Academy. We think it's weird that you go from math to science to history, but you're never taught how to live. We're creating the Netflix, kind of the Udemy for that. All about optimal living, working with guys like you and women like Sarah Gottfried for health, fitness, nutrition, and then positive psychology, relationships, parenting, conscious business, all the stuff you wish you were taught in a really cool format. That's our Academy for Optimal Living. So that's a quick look at the few primary things that we do.

Yeah. Cool. I love it. And I know for. For those of you who are podcast devotees and listen to my episodes, I think I have mentioned before that I'm creating kind of like an online series of about 30 different courses with different experts. And that's actually going to be one of the. One of the and Theos courses later on this year. So you will, of course, be the first to know about that when it comes out. But, Brian, let's delve into some of your big wins. And one of the things that you're obviously into is health and optimizing your health. And have you always been that way, or was there something that happened in your life that got you more interested in that?

Yeah. Another great question. I haven't always been like that as an entrepreneur. Building my first business at 24, 25, 26 raised 5 million bucks. I called the learning curve. It was like rock climbing, you know, Went from two employees, me and my co founder in our pajamas in the living room, crushing it to 45 employees in nine months. And it was tough. And I didn't work out. I ate like crap and I felt like crap. I didn't even know what the series of events were, but I was kind of always into this stuff. But I was just so busy, it didn't come in and it just wasn't working. Over the last 15 years, I've been kind of dialing it in. After I sold that business, I actually became a trainer just because I wanted to learn this stuff.

You mean like a personal trainer?

Yeah. No intention to actually train anyone, but just figured that'd be a good way to start getting some mastery in the domain, knowing that if I wanted to reach my potential, I got to dial in my energy. So I got into that and then just realized that scientifically, just established. I know you know this and all of your, your listeners know this, but not exercising is like taking a depressant. It's just we're biologically developed to move. It's become a fundamental part of my life. And I used to be super up and down. I'm super passionate and then super down and stressed and overwhelmed and exercise is my number one thing. Non negotiable, won't do it. And then you dialed me in because I was just rowing a ton. I rode a million meters two years ago and show up and log my 5K and. And that kind of thing, I was doing fine. But what you put me on with the high intensity interval training, some really great strength training, and then the nutrition that went with it just literally took me to a whole nother level. That's just been awesome.

So what about the nutrition side of things? Is that something that you've always been dialed into?

Well, I've always been experimenting on and again, that's been transforming quite a bit. I was vegan for seven, eight, nine years or something like that. And for a lot of compassion reasons and also believe that that was a good nutrition approach. And then I felt fine. But I get migraines once in a while and my wife had some skin issues. We were open to experimenting as we were having our baby, whose name is Emerson and Emerson says all life is an experiment. The more the better. We're like, you know what, just try it out. We read it starts with food and a couple other books and some people on our team were really into it. We're like, let's just do it. Went basically paleo and super clean. It was huge. My energy levels just transformed. Just felt so much better. Then the work you and I did six months ago whenever we started of looking at the blood panel and really quantifying this and just dialing in any even further has been awesome. So, you know, that's where I'm at now.

So let's go into a day in the Life of Brian which threatens to sound like a Family Guy episode, but I think that is a Family Guy episode. Day in the life of Brian, but in the Life of Brian Johnson. I'm curious not only about kind of how you structure your day from a business standpoint of, for example, not checking email and kind of how you manage your team, because I know a lot of people listening to our podcast who are entrepreneurs, who are into business, but then also kind of like how you're eating, how you're exercising, what a typical day is looking like for you.

Yeah, again, really fun question. So my days start in nearly the identical way every single day. And we have a 19 month old, so there's a little variance. I check in for dad duty in the mornings, and depending on when he gets up, some things may move around in terms of timing, but sequence wise, they all get done every morning. So I wake up. I tend to wake up early. 5, 5:30, go to bed super early. Block whatever you call those things. No blue light glasses at night. We're just a dorky family. Get up early. And the first thing I do is meditate. I meditate for 20 minutes every single morning. In the last five years, I've missed one day, which was really funny. Whole nother conversation.

This is something I'm curious about because you hear a lot of people talk about meditation, frankly, and a lot of people say, I get up in the morning and I meditate. What do you do? Do you do it while you're lying there in bed? Before you get out of bed, do you go outside? Do you have a special room that you go into? Or what do you do?

Yeah, well, two things on that. One, I taught a class on this, which is the very first class I taught at the Academy, because I think most people go super out there and it's just whatever or it is what it is. But I wanted to teach it based on science and based on just practical common sense stuff. I taught a class called how to Meditate Without Moving to the Himalayas. We'll hook you up with a link so you guys can get it for just. It's kind of my approach of why I do it and how I do it. But the short answer is I don't do it in bed. I'd fall back asleep. I get out and I literally just have a spot in my office. And I sit in what's called hero's posture, which I like for more than one reason, kind of gets me there, which is basically my butt on my heels. When I first started, I had about 100 cushions to make it work. Now I can basically whatever little pillow thing. And then I sit in what's called strong determination, which means you don't open your hands, you don't open your eyes and you don't open your legs. You don't move because your physical discomfort is actually your mind. If you just let it be there, it Would go away in 20 seconds or 30 seconds. That's a big practice. Then I do mantra work. I do following my breath. I do different things depending on what I'm feeling, but I do it. I do it every day. That's my day. That and exercise and nutrition are my top three kind of hacks.

That meditation is right when you get up in the morning.

Right when I get up. It's the most important thing.

And then what happens next after that?

So then I do five minutes. You got me into this. You wanted me to do 10 minutes of yoga. I got five. You know, I do a derivation of the video you sent me. You know, I make sure I do at least one sun salutation in the morning, just as at a principle. Haven't missed that since you and I started working together. And basic opening series, you know, just get the body open, nothing fancy. I mean, five minutes, right? And then I immediately go and I actually read a philosopher's note. I started doing that at the beginning of the year. Haven't missed a day. I'm on like 140 out of my.

So you have those things not just as MP3s, but condensed into PDFs too, right?

Yeah, so I have them all printed out and I wrote them five, four, three years ago. So I read them and it's like, damn, this is like reading it for the first time. It's just, it's, you know, Marcus Aurelius, like you said, an Emerson in positive psychology. So I read one of those a day. And then actually I do the five minute journal thing, which is awesome. It's really cool. Our whole team.

I do that every morning and evening, of course.

Yeah, yeah, Nuts. I mean, we bought that for our team and for some of our partners and just. We love it. And then I journal. I journal every single morning and I journal basically the exact same thing every single morning. I use a sketchbook. On the left hand side, I put my virtues. So as you know, I'm all about virtue and classic Greek ideal of arete, which we can talk about and just what's important to me and who I'm going to be in life. And just I literally write that every single morning. On the left hand side and then on the right, I journal about our business and what our business is committed to being, what our big vision is over the next 5, 25 years and then what our kind of micro goals are this year and then what. What is most important right now. I literally do that every single morning. I can't remember the last time I Missed a day and I snap a picture of it and I send it to our COO who does the exact same thing.

Did you start into a practice like that? Would you say before you became successful or after you became successful?

I'd say yes. And I'd say that I've started doing it casually. When I really needed to do it back in the day 15 years ago, and I really needed to come up with good ideas. I wouldn't go to the office and I'd joke, journal unconsciously. I didn't know any of this stuff. Since I've learned the power of consistency on fundamentals and that's the hallmark of greatness, I've just decided, well, what are the things that keep me in the game? They keep me plugged in and I'm 100%, I absolutely committed, non negotiable. I do these things and journaling has become that. And it's been that for probably, I don't know, five, six years. And it's an accelerant. You know, I just groove it.

The reason I ask that is so many people, I get this from a lot of people. They hear about my morning routine and it's similar to yours. I wake up, I journal, and while I'm journaling, I take my heart rate variability and then I get out of bed and I do about 10 minutes of yoga and then I go and take my cold shower. And the feedback that I get over and over again from people is, that sounds exhausting. How do you find all the time to do that? And it's one of those things where you make these little morning practices a part of your life and it's not exhausting. And what I find, I don't know about you, Brian, but what I find is that when you start off your day slow and with purpose like that, it creates almost like this affluence of time, this mentality of having an affluence of time that sticks with you the rest of the day and you don't feel rushed or stressed. It's a totally different feeling. And I think that it would seem to me that most of the people who say that that seems exhausting or time consuming are the people who most need that affluence of time.

I think you can remove the qualifier with all respect to people who say that, if you are saying that you need twice as much of it, period. That's what all the great teachers say. I mean, that's just a. And then maybe not experiment with it. Your life might be working just optimally and there's no room for optimization. Fantastic. But all of us have room to optimize. And from what I've learned in both my studies and my experimenting is, it's huge. And it does exactly what you described. We pay our team. We pay our team an hour a day. The first hour of their day is on us to do these things. Every single person in our team meditates, they journal, they exercise, and there's absolutely no drama. Our team is so high functioning, so high energy, so awesome to be around, and we invest where we think it matters. So, yeah, I'm with you. The other thing I do is I do one of those. What are they called, T and Qi that you recommended. Yeah.

One of the Chinese adaptogenic herb.

You got me on the monthly deal with them and I rip open, I've got that ready, it's sitting there, my big old 20 ounce or 25 ounce of water based jar ready to dump that thing into it. And I have that while I'm journaling.

Awesome. Awesome. It's funny that you should mention that because this is probably the first day in months where I haven't had a TNT in the morning. And it's because I actually, I broke one of my own rules this morning and I scheduled a phone call in the morning. I try and avoid any business at all in the morning. And it was one of those phone calls back east where it was the only time they could schedule it into. And so I started off my day after I'd finished my yoga and my cold shower. It was literally, I stepped out while I was still wearing my towel to get on this phone call. I'd throw off my whole morning and I haven't had my T and she. But we're gonna make it through this interview either way.

That's fantastic.

I'll hang on for dear life.

Yeah.

Without my drugs. So. So you got your T and she and then what. What's your, what's the rest of your morning routine look like from a. From kind of like a breakfast to a business standpoint.

Yeah. Well, then it's family. You know, for me it's. I'm on dad duty, my wife has taken over night duty and we, you know, our little guy got up a ton and she's just been a stud. So, you know, I'm first guy, first person he sees in the morning and we've got our little deal, you know, and he gets up between 7 and 8. So I've got that period of time and I'll do a little work after I do that stuff, you know, I'll go in and check out our Oasis and how the business is doing and respond to some emails and stuff like that or whatever else has come up. And then it's dab duty. So, you know, I love starting my day reading some books with him and changing his diaper and bringing them to his mommy. And we'd spend a little bit of time together. And then I hit it, whether it's eight or nine. And I don't schedule calls before nine. That's when my day this morning, I had one at seven, but that's unusual. And then nine o', clock, I'm on. And then one of the other things we do with our team that I frankly don't do consciously all the time is we identify what's the most important task. Right now I'm raising money, so that's my most important task. There's not a lot of ambiguity there, and I'm just hitting that super hard.

So do you live by that philosophy of doing the hard thing first?

Yeah. And then I stretched back a little bit. We follow something called the domino strategy. So I love the physics of dominoes. So researchers say that you want to set a goal that's about 50% likely. It's a stretch. I was doing some research and I'm like, dominoes, what's the next thing we're all about? Straight lines, line A to B. What's the next highest leverage thing? How do we 80, 20, and just crush it? And then I found this video by a physics professor on the physics of dominoes. And it's just awesome. And I can send you a link to this as well. But they've got 13 dominoes. The first one is literally the size of your fingernail. He needed to use, like, tweezers to put it in place. The next one is 50% bigger, and each one after it is 50% bigger. The 13th one is 3ft tall, 100 pounds heavy. And this guy tells you that each domino can knock over a domino that's 50% bigger than it. And it's amazing. He starts this chain and boom, boom, boom, Boom, boom, boom. 13th domino falls easily. And he says, you extend it another whatever dominoes, and you've got the Empire State Building. So for us, we're always ruthlessly focused on the next domino that we know we can crush and that we know that if we can hit that domino, the next one will fall easily, and we just line them up. So that's how our team orients. We have very clear goals. We know precisely what we're up against and what we're going for this year, this quarter, this month, this week. And then what do we need to do today so that we can hit that goal? And it's, you know, we talk about high velocity. We kind of say we run our business like a two minute offense, you know, just super aggressive, always offensive and always really focused on what matters. And so that's how we approach it.

Now at some point there in the morning after your yoga and before you kind of start business and in between kid time or whatever, are you doing breakfast, are you a fasted morning guy or what's your routine look like?

You know, I did your. We did our. What do you have me on the autoimmune protocol. And I did that like literally to the T. Didn't break it once for like six months.

Yeah, we wanted to, hopefully I'm not breaking hip regulations by saying this, but we wanted to shut down inflammation. You had some inflammation and. And yeah, we had you on the autoimmune.

It's nuts. So you can say, you have my explicit permission to say any and everything you ever want to say about our work together.

So my inflammation sucked and you had malaria and hiv.

Jesus. Terrible Jesus. Thank God we were able to get both of those. Parasites were horrible. Oh my God. Still need to get that tested, by the way. But my inflammation wasn't where we wanted it to be. And it was nuts. I mean, what you had me do. We got on the autoimmune. I did my ginger golf ball of ginger. I did my bone broth like to the. Just impeccably. I follow directions very well. And we knocked it down. I don't even know where it went.

But you know, you went below 0.2, went to rock bottom nuts. And there was no, there was no Big Gun supplements. There was, it was honestly mostly ginger and bone broth. And I believe. Were you doing curcumin as well? Yeah, the curcumin. The phenocaine. Yeah. And that was it. And it was amazing as far as the inflammation was concerned. And for you, after you kind of got off of doing kind of the paleo autoimmune thing after going through that protocol, which is by the way, for those of you listening in, it's a wonderful protocol, but it's a phase, it's a chapter, not something that you would use for your whole life per se, unless you have an autoimmune condition. But where did you go to from there? What's kind of a typical breakfast for.

You now yeah, so I used to do the salmon, greens, olives, avocado basically every day. That's what I did when I was on it hardcore. And now I've actually, I reset. I used to have terrible blood sugar issues, as you know, and my energy level would be weird and I'd need to eat all the time when I was vegan, you know, and now it's amazing where I never could skip meals without the risk of me literally getting a migraine back in the day, years ago, even two years ago. And then it just became literally bulletproof. Where I actually this morning I started off, I'm doing kind of the. We do fat tea. I do longevity tea with a huge scoop of ghee and sometimes a little mct, although I pulled back on that a little bit and I just feel great. So really having that built in, I forget what you call it, but fasting period. And then want to make sure I ate a little bit this morning. So wife cooked me up a little bacon and greens. But then I'll usually do lunch, which is pretty straightforward. The protein and ton of greens and a ton of fat. And then you've got me also, you know, checking how much fruit I'm eating and do a lot of blueberry, not a lot of blueberries, but blueberries and cherimoyas were in season so enjoying, you know, one of those a day kind of thing, but super simple. And then another fat tea in the afternoon and you know, simple dinner a little lighter than lunch and it just feels so good.

Yeah. And for, by the way, for you vegan listeners listening in, you know, very, very common to have that inability to turn yourself into more of a fat burning machine because of the propensity for starches, for grains and for some of the more simpler sugars and fruit based sugars when you're following a plant based diet. But I've actually seen some vegans be able to get themselves into pretty high levels of fat oxidation. And it takes things like nuts of all kinds and avocados and ground flaxseeds and olive oil and even a lot of these EPA DHA sources for vegans like spirulina and chlorella in algae forms. Like, you know, I don't want vegans or vegetarians listening in to think that, you know, you're always going to have appetite fluctuations. But you know, Brian kind of alludes to a really good point, is that it's, it is important to be able to train your body to be able to oxidize fat. And frankly it's important from A productivity standpoint too, to just be able to work and not have to worry about taking breaks for snacks.

Yeah, my mind is just, you know, in the afternoons it would get a little, you know, less grounded and it's just, it's just solid, you know. And now I know, like I don't go to fruit or something. I go to a fat tea. It's just bam. I'm just, I just walked in and feel so good.

So your fat tea, you're using ghee in that and what are you using? A green tea or a black or white or what's your teaspoon? Dr.

So I do something called longevity tea. I think it's dragon herbs, which I love. And I'll do one or two of those a day and then, you know, just an herbal tea. I don't do any caffeine. I get enough energy to do that. I just, maybe I'll experiment with that at some point. But I like to keep it right where I like it and it's nice and even without any caffeine. But mostly the longevity tea and then some herbal, even chamomile in the afternoon kind of thing.

Yeah, I see that longevity tea. It's here on Amazon. I'll throw a link for folks in the show notes. You can check this out. And is it all caffeine free, that longevity tea that you.

Yeah, it's got some different adaptogens in it, but my understanding is it's caffeine free. Yeah.

Cool, Cool. I like it. So from an exercise standpoint, you're obviously doing the meditation and a little bit of yoga in the mornings, but when do you do youryour harder stuff when it comes to exercise?

Yeah. So I'll do my workout after our chat. Today's I'm just still following your plan. Literally you had me on three strength, two hits. I'm now doing three, four, five of those a week.

Kind of fluctuates, but making sure listeners who haven't had the the pleasure of experiencing one of my hiit workouts or one of my harder workouts. Can you kind of go through a sample workout like what you'll do today or what you did yesterday?

Yeah, friggin awesome is how I'd start by saying it. So you hooked me up too. We've got a rowing machine, a little gym at home and rowing machine, box jump and stuff like that. So you hooked us up with something specific to our thing. So I love to row. So my hiit workout rested yesterday, day before was I did the five minute warmup on the row and then I did interval 20 on, 20 seconds on, 10 seconds off, eight cycles and then a five. Cool. You know, kind of keep it going, rest and then hit that again for another eight cycles and then five minute cooldown. I think it's a 23 minute workout. It's perfect. I mean, it's nuts. I can be just on fire in the morning and start feeling myself getting a little up, you know, and just go, hit that and I'm just, boom, done. So I usually do that around now, you know, we're talking right now at 10 something and between 10 and noon.

Yeah, yeah. And for those of you listening in, who might be a triathlete or a marathoner or someone of that nature, you know, Brian's goal here is to. Well, it's basically to maintain lean muscle, to burn fat and to have enough fitness to feel really, really good cardiovascularly and from an energy standpoint. And if you're a busy person listening in, you can do those type of workouts, those 20 to 30 minutes high intensity type of workouts that I have Brian doing. And then if you want to go out and do a marathon or triathlon or something like that, you just pick one weekend day and you use that for a stamina day. And I think a lot of people are under the impression that, oh, you can't just work out 20 minutes a day. You got to do an hour long lunchtime run or for a morning bike ride and an evening swim. But frankly, high intensity interval training is something I personally incorporate quite a bit. I do it at the end of my day, not in the middle of my workday. And then you throw in one stamina effort on the weekend and you can really go out and do quite a bit with that type of routine. If you're a busy person who doesn't have time to do the longer stuff.

Yeah, we had the 80, 20. I wanted you to get me where I wanted to be. And then data wise too. I didn't do the specific way. We didn't have a scale or body fat, but my hunch is we wanted to put on 10 pounds of lean muscle. And I didn't have the precise measure, but I guess I was probably 18, 20% body fat at 160, 158 at 6ft tall, a little over that in 170, 10%. So you probably put on, and I had you check my math here, 25 pounds of muscle. And I feel like you did it. All I did was do what you told me to do. I'm like, damn, that's amazing. But lost whatever that was in fat. 15 pounds of fat and put on 25 pounds of muscle and it was nuts. Just doing what you asked me to do. Just deep appreciation for you. And my wife had her similar gains in the work you did with her. So I just want to make that clear how much we appreciate you.

I appreciate that. Obviously the day does not end with dinner and having checked off your workout and business. You've got, of course, evening routines. You talked about how you journal, I think, or do the five minute journal in the evening. What else does your evening routine consist of? What are some of the big wins for you for your nighttime routine?

Simplicity. So we're super boring. We have a 19 month old and one of our practices is called boring sameness. So we really wanted to give him a context in which he can flourish where he just has boring sameness. We don't go out a ton, we take him. He sleeps when he needs to sleep and we do the exact same thing every night. He's been alive for 19 months, which is however many days, that is over 500 days, 490 of them, we've done exactly the same thing, which is we get ready, have dinner, get ready, do a little playing and we go for a walk. 15, 20 minute walk, come in, put him down. And then my wife and I, this is 7, 7:30. 8 is with the time change, et cetera. We get ready. So we don't turn on any lights. We play a game. It's all whatever you call that blue light, friendly lights, you know, we've got them around the house and we've got our little glasses on and you know, we're getting ready for bed at 8. Like 9's a late night for me. I hate to be wrapping up by my nine. I got five and a half hours of sleep a few nights ago, which is the first time I've gotten less than seven in a long time just because something came up and it's fine. But you know, I might. I love eight hours. I've got my little up band, so I can track that and see how we're doing. And I'm just all about that. And we both are, which helps. And I take a shower. I love taking a hot shower. That's kind of part of my evening. Yeah, that body temperature drop I find really helpful. I was testing the little bit of MCT and it's a tiny bit of honey, a little bit just for stabilization, aspirin style. And I don't do that all the time. But if I didn't eat quite enough and I don't want to eat a full meal, I'll do that. Which feels good.

Yeah. What's been working for me with that whole if I don't get a chance to eat a good big dinner before bed and I know I'm going to wake up later on at night hungry for a good mix of those medium chain triglycerides and amino acids that actually taste good. What I'll do about an hour or so before bedtime is I'll just take a little bit of full fat coconut milk and put that into a little bowl. And I add about 2 tablespoons of collagen so you get this nice amino acid release while you're asleep. And then I put about a teaspoon of dark chocolate powder in that.

Nice.

And stir all that up and then I put it into the freezer and it's kind of like this bittersweet chocolate coconutty ice cream once you pull it back out before you go to bed. But that's something that I've been doing lately for that nighttime snack, if I need a nighttime snack. And then speaking of the mct, actually for the first time last night, based off of an article that I read from Dave Asprey, and I've done this before with other oils, but never with mct, is I did oil pulling. Have you done this before?

You know, a bunch of people on our team are doing it. Tell me.

Yeah, so oil pulling is this Ayurvedic practice of swishing oil in your mouth as an antiviral and antibacterial for your gums and your mouth. And what you do is you just kind of work the oil through your teeth and around in your mouth for about 10 minutes. And the idea is that it improves your oral health and can potentially help with things like, you know, breath, teeth whitening, things of that nature. And so yeah, did that for about 10, 15 minutes last night while I was going about my bedtime routine. It was interesting. But there's a new use for MCT oil for our listeners.

Who would have known. That's fantastic.

I think traditionally in Ayurvedic practice they'll use like sesame oil or ghee for something like that. But yeah, if you have some extra MCT oil lying around, there's that.

Very cool.

So another thing that I wanted to ask you was about supplements. Like we talked about you taking Chinese adaptogenic herbs and doing your golf ball size of ginger every day. And I'm curious if you're doing anything else when it comes to supplementation, because we're all nerds when it comes to biohacking over at Ben Greenfield Fitness. Of course.

Yeah. Well, you got me on the ginger, you got me on the bone broth. We've constantly got bone broth in the freezer. We do it like once every week, 10 weeks. We actually put two chickens into a huge. Whatever you call that thing, crock pot.

And cook it up.

Yup. I do the curcumin on your recommendation. You got me into. I might have been doing it with my wife, but you made sure I got into it. The krill oil. I do. What's the other kind of. I do vitamin D, of course. What's krill oil? Cotton liver oil. I do that as well. And then, you know, now I do the ginger tea. So I do a little ginger lemon honey tea several times a week. I just like it and it's kind of mymy fun way to do it these days. And I think that's what I do. I might be missing something, but that's about it.

Yeah, interesting. It's a good protocol. So you're getting your omega 3 fatty acids, you're getting your anti inflammatories, you're getting some of those herbs. So it's a good baseline protocol without too much complexity. Now the other question I have for you, Brian, because there's so many different places we can go, but. And so many things you've been involved with. But I want to hit on this other thing, and that is there's a documentary on Joseph Campbell called Finding Joe. And apparently you were involved with that. I've heard wonderful things about that documentary, but I'm curious what that's all about.

Yeah. So a guy named Pat Solomon, just extraordinary human being. He actually was a philosopher's notes guy. And I have three notes on Joseph Campbell. And he had been kicking around the idea of kind of modernizing the Bill Moyers interviews on the power of myth and making it cool in the 21st century. And I think my philosopher's notes helped catalyze that for him. He reached out to me as the first person he wanted to interview, thinking I was in Topanga, California. He was in Venice. I was actually in Bali at the time. Long story short, he flew out to Bali and filmed me. I introduced him to some friends and he just hustled and got a great group of people talking about the modern day hero's journey. So bringing Joseph Campbell's wisdom to life. Tony Hawk, Laird Hamilton, the founder, the guy who runs the Joseph Campbell foundation and a bunch of great teachers. So, yeah, I happened to be part of that. And he just did a great job. I watched. I've watched it probably half a dozen times, and each time I get something out of it that just really catalyzes my life, my own hero's journey. So I'm sure if you're into this and you're listening to this, you'd love the movie.

Does somebody need to be a philosophy nerd to really. The reason I ask is I've never really been that into philosophy. Honestly, I thought it was kind of one of the more boring classes that I took in college. And when I listened to your philosopher's notes, that was the first time that this stuff kind of practically made sense to me. But I'm curious about this Finding Joe movie. Like, if people are going to be able to get something out of it if they're not just totally enamored with philosophy.

I do. I hated my philosophy class. I got a B in my philosophy class at ucla. I hated it. One of my least favorite classes because they went intellectual on it. And philosophy means love of wisdom. Wisdom is knowledge of life. That's a life. Hacker, that's a biohacker. Is a philosopher, a lover of wisdom. Not these pedantic ivory tower, let's see if we can count the number of angels on a pinhead type of discussion. It's how do you live? What I want to do is rebrand the idea of what a philosopher is. If you're into this stuff, you're doing Ironmans. You're performing at the level that you're performing at. If you're this far into this interview, you, in my mind, are a philosopher. You're a lover of wisdom and optimizing your life. And you love the movie. You're also a hero. You're committed to living a truly extraordinary life. And that's what Joseph Campbell talked about. Every single movie that we love. Star Wars. George Lucas was. Joseph Campbell was one of George Lucas mentors. He based Star wars on his work. All mythology is based on what he calls the hero's journey. And so this movie is about that and about translating those ideas into our lives. So I think I can't wait for you to see it. We're going to send you a copy. And if you're into living your hero's journey, living an extraordinary life, you're going to love the movie.

All right, cool. Well, I'll put a link to that in the show notes as well. And obviously there's tons of other stuff we talked about. For those of you who want to check out Brian's how to meditate without moving to the Himalayas free class that he's going to hook us up with. I'll put a link to that. I've taken a bunch of notes from all of his big wins from his longevity tea to his wellness effects testing to of course, the philosopher's notes, which is where I first found Brian. And Brian, anything else that you wanted to share with folks before I let you go?

Well, you know, I'm going to share my deep appreciation for you again. You are a wizard in our work together and the calls we had. I'm like, dude, who is this guy? Alexander and I would joke about that. Your depth and your commitment to this stuff is awesome. So I appreciate you and what you've done for our family. And yeah, I just really enjoyed our chat. Keep up the great work. We're thrilled to be playing together.

That makes my day. Well, cool. If you're listening in, you can head over to BenGreenfieldFitness.com I'll have links for everything that Brian and I talked about and you can just go over there and do a search for Brian Johnson and or just click on the show note link that you'll find over in itunes and you'll be able to get it there. So until next time, this is Ben and Brian signing out from BenGreenfieldFitness.com have a fantastic week.

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Sam.