Tai Lopez On Morning Routines, Laziness, Unschooling, Investing, Owning Nice Things & More.

In this episode of the Ben Greenfield Fitness Show.

When you break a routine that you have in your mind is unbreakable, it makes it very easy to break it again. And the next thing you know, you're not following it at all. And I'll just give it to you real simple. Do the hard thing in the second chunk of your day. The chunk two makes or breaks your day. Strategies only go so far without execution. And the biggest problem with execution in modern world is is adherence. Procrastinators have not learned how to reward themselves. Instead, procrastinators beat themselves up.

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Hey folks, it's Ben Greenfield and I'm back with Tai Lopez. Now, if you are a longtime listener to the podcast, then you are already familiar with Ty and he's no stranger to you. He's actually been on the show three different times. In part one, we talked about everything from multitasking to reprogramming your genetics to checking your email less. In part two, we talked more about life and love and happiness. And we really focused on how to strike an ideal balance between being over ambitious and under ambitious. And then in part three, we kind of focused in on Tony Robbins new book money on personal finances, on how Ty feels that we should protect and grow our wealth and his own investment philosophies. So we cover a ton whenever Ty comes on the show and today we're will be no different because one of the things that Ty offers to me is mentorship, wisdom, insight, and kind of direction on random topics in life. And the cool thing is that you get to listen in as Ty does that. That's kind of how these podcasts with Ty go. So they're a little bit different than some of the other podcasts that we do in that respect. So I will put a link to all of the other podcasts that I've done with Ty over in the show Notes, which you can access BenGreenfieldFitness.com Tye4 that's BenGreenfieldFitness T A I the number 4 so in the meantime, Ty, welcome back for the fourth time to the Ben Greenfield Fitness Show.

Awesome. Thanks for having me. We gotta make sure we do this more often. I always like talking to you and your audience. A lot of good people.

Yeah. And you always have very interesting take or a very interesting take on things. You know, one thing that I subscribe to, I don't subscribe to a lot of newsletters. Like, I subscribe to my friend Ryan Lee's newsletter, and I subscribe to like a few kind of geeky science and health newsletters, like the Examine newsletter to the Sweat Science newsletter and Mark Devine's sealfit newsletter. Not many. There's like six or seven newsletters I subscribe to, but one is yours and particularly your Book of the Day newsletter. You have a huge library. I've been down there and seen your library at your house in the Hollywood Hills. And you've got books literally not even on the shelves, just lying all over the place because you have so many of them. And that's one of the things that I really enjoy about you, is you've always got kind of like a book that you recommend that's associated with pretty much any topic under the sun. And before we started recording today, you mentioned that on your podcast, which folks can find on itunes, that you also plan on doing a little bit more kind of book of the day type of stuff on your. On your podcast.

Yeah, I basically need a. I need a way to get all these. A little format to get all these book interviews I do with authors and that kind of stuff. So I've decided to use my podcast. I haven't. I've neglected my podcast, but I'm trying to. Not neglected. There's so many channels now to distribute the things that we do. So, you know, you got obviously your own website. We're big on YouTube, Facebook, Instagram. Now there's. There's Periscope Live Twitter. It's like in podcasts. Of course, all of them are important because different people want to be reached in different ways. Some people love Twitter, some people love YouTube, some love podcasts.

So what do you think about that concept of like Periscope, where you are broadcasting something that no one's ever going to see again, that is not recorded in perpetuity and that may not offer anyone value other than for that brief amount of time that they get to see it right then.

Well, so what's your take now?

Added.

They added a replay feature so you can play it if you want. But they didn't. They didn't always have that, I don't think. And. But most of the people. You're right. Like, almost all the people watch it live. If you look at the replay views, there's not that many. You can't fast forward the replay, so they make the replays kind of hard. So you're right. It's pretty much a live format. And I think it's great. I mean, I think it's a powerful tool. People want. If you look at the way entrepreneurial business is going, is people want to interact with the entrepreneur. And it's actually not new because Steve Jobs realize this in the late 70s, early 80s, so did Bill Gates. That's why they were doing their conferences and their stuff like that. So I think you're gonna see that be a continual trend in the future. So I bought into the Periscope vibe.

I think it's for real. I haven't yet. I have people on, whatever you want to call it, my social media team who are like, oh, Ben, you have to start broadcasting on Periscope and doing short videos and insights into your life. And I'm just. It's one more platform. And for me, when I create content, I'm always cognizant of whether or not it's going to be able to be accessed at a future date. But the fact that Periscope has a replay, that's good to know.

Yeah. And you can download it to your phone and then you can upload it to YouTube. Of course, it's not quite the same effect, but it's not as bad. Now they've increased some of the feature set.

Well, I know you're a busy guy, Ty. You were on phone calls and podcasts and interviews and all sorts of stuff already taught today. But one thing that I wanted to ask you about today is this concept that everybody seems to be somewhat infatuated with. Maybe it's because there's popular podcasters out there like Tim Ferriss asking folks like Arnold Schwarzenegger this question. And maybe it's because there's this growing idea that the way that you start off your day kind of sets the standard for the rest of your day, but it's this idea of morning routines. You know, I have a morning routine that I rarely stray from, even when I'm traveling. And I'm curious what your take on morning routines is, or, you know, do you think they're necessary? Do you have one? Do you think it's just like a fad, this concept that you got to wake up and do the Same thing every morning or what's your take on morning routines?

So here's how I take a morning routine. Number one, I'm a big believer in like Aristotle talked about the balance. So I have tried both extremes. No, no morning routine. And I've tried like where you do like, what's the Italian guy? There's that. Where you do like 18 minutes on and all timed and then you're pomodoro. Pomodoro, yeah. So it's like this whole structure. And what I found I think is a mindset that will take you through your whole life because your daily routine will change with your lifestyle. You know the Rock who's kind of the modern day Arnold Schwarzenegger, he wakes up, if you read. They've got some articles, you know, he wakes up at 4 in the morning and he does cardio for about 45 minutes to an hour. Then he eats, then he lifts weights till seven. But if you read the articles, it says he generally does that because when you're doing movies. I was actually just in a movie. I'm in a big movie that's coming out next year with Andy Samberg and all these big stars. I got a little role in, in the movie and I was on a set. There's a thousand. There was 800 people on the set. You're not always going to be able to wake up at 4 because sometimes you're filming at 3 in the morning. So the Rock doesn't always have this exact schedule. But here's the principle that I find works very well. So it's the principle and it doesn't just apply to morning routine, applies to routines in general. It's called chunking. So what I do is I divide my day into chunks. And so it allows for some variability that, you know, somebody has kids. Listen to this. I don't have kids. But if you have kids, sometimes your kids are gonna be sick at 5 in the morning. You're gonna be, you know, runny noses and stuff like that. So if you don't have the chunk and you're just down to the minute, you're gonna break with your routine. And there's an interesting. I was actually reading a book. I can't. I'll try to remember the name of the book, but it's talking about what happens. Oh, it's a book willpower. It's a New York Times bestseller. Basically, when you break a routine that you have in your mind is unbreakable, it makes it very easy to break it again. And the next thing you Know you're not following it at all. And you're pretty disciplined people person. But you know, not everyone has that level of discipline. So by using chunking where you, you designate regions of your day. So think of it this way. You have the beginning of your day. You know, the mid, let's say assume you wake up in the morning, not everybody. So you got the beginning of the day, which is early morning. You got mid morning, you got early afternoon, late afternoon, early evening, late evening. So let's say depending on how you chunk up your day, 3, 4, 5, 6 chunks. So the general principle that I like to do is in the early number one or number two chunk of the day section of the day. You could call them regions of the day. The first one, I tend to kind of catch up with stuff because I'm an entrepreneur, investor, I got lots of things. Sometimes in the first five minutes I wake up, I got to kind of like check, make sure nothing's emergency level. So that early chunk, that very when I wake up is kind of take a shower, I do a little, I get on the treadmill, do a little exercise. The second chunk is the most important part of your day, in my opinion. And I'll just give it to you real simple. Do the hard thing in the second chunk of your day. Whatever is the hardest, do not immediate. Because you can't do it right when you wake up. I mean, most people can. If you wake up at. I've been testing a routine where I wake up at 4 in the morning. I read a book, Michael Milken. These guys that almost became the richest people in the world. Michael Milken, he was up at 4. If you wanted an appointment with Michael Milken, they were usually at 4:15 in the morning. And he worked till 8 at night and he took 15 minutes for lunch. And he pretty much ended up getting in trouble later. But now he's one of the most respected. The Milken Institute, multi billionaire, friends with presidents and Nobel Prize winners and so on. So he had this general chunk where he was out very early, even at the first chunk of. But that chunk number two. So let's say that's an hour or two after you wake up or when you first get into work, do the hard stuff first. That chunk two makes or breaks your day because there's a lot of science to back this. Willpower peaks that book. Willpower talks about this. The varying books that talk about willpower. Now there's lots coming out and what they find is your brain pretty much lives off glucose. That's the driving sugar that pushes your brain forward from the food you eat, the biggest part of your metabolism, in some ways, it's about 25, 30% of the food you eat goes towards that. And then, for example, somebody who's racist is more racist at night. Because if you're racist, it takes willpower for a racist person to not express it. So in the morning, people are nicer, even horrible people. Like, a racist person has more sugar in their brain to do what they need to do and fit into society. And at the end of the day, you just don't. So where you get in trouble with this chunking and this routine concept is where your routine has the hardest thing. Like towards the end of the day or even in the fourth region chunk of your day, that's where you get in trouble. But if you knock it out, and there's an Amish saying, when I live with the Amish, there was a guy named Jake Martin. And I won't try to say it in German, but it's one of the greatest sayings I've ever heard about procrastination and getting things done. And the Amish are the least procrastinating people on the planet. If you wake up at five in the morning at the Amish, you're kind of a slacker. So what? The saying, roughly translated into English, says, when you have something hard to do, just throw yourself into it. And the next thing you know, it's almost done.

Yeah.

And it's. It rhymes in German, so it sounds better. It's like 90s.

I was gonna say it's kind of. Kind of a mouthful in English, but it makes sense.

But it does.

And. And, you know, one of the things that you'll find for me, because I'm, you know, I'm in fitness. I'm an exercise physiologist. That's what I do. That's, you know, this. This whole concept of when in doubt, take action. It works for exercise. And to me, what you've just said is kind of like, when in doubt, take action.

Right?

It's like if you walk into a gym or you walk into whatever room in your house where you exercise and you don't even know what to do, just start doing jumping jacks. And then while you're doing jumping jacks, you'll be looking around and you'll see something else you want to do, and you'll go do that. Before you know it, maybe you've done five things that make your body better. And then you repeat. You rinse, wash, and repeat. And before you know it, you've been in there 25 minutes and you're, you're working out. So yeah, I love that concept. And it's curious because you hear almost everybody say, oh, wake up and do the hard thing first. Right? Like get that big thing, that big thing that scares you done with first. But it sounds to me like what you're saying is eliminate distractions first and then in the second, like make that elimination of distraction and maybe taking care of your body a little bit, that first chunk and then the second chunk of when creativity peaks, like mid morning, that's when you take on the biggest task.

Well, yeah, and I was talking to Lieberman, you were referring back to this podcast I did with the guy who wrote the story of the human body, the Harvard professor who spent 40 years studying our background, not just from a nutrition standpoint, but really, I think he's a paleo biologist. So it's like the actual hard wiring all the way back hundreds of thousands, millions of years. And, and he says, you know, think about your ancestors and even think about a gym. You, as a trainer is your advice to somebody. Walk in the gym, no stretching, no warmup, no jumping down and put on the squat rack. Your max. No, that's a good way to pull a muscle and hurt yourself. So if you just use common sense. It's not common sense that the second you get into an environment, you do the exact hardest thing. What you might say though is don't save the heavy squats till the last five minutes of your workout because by then you can't put, you can't max out the weight that you really need to do. So what you kind of want to do in a gym, you want. I played basketball a lot, real competitively and basketball is the same thing. You go out there, what does the coach have you do? You do. It's a little bit of sprinting, you do a little bit of dribbling, you do a little passing out. Phil Jackson, I had Michael Jordan's coach, his psychologist, that famous George Mumford, who wrote a great book called the Mindful Athlete. I don't know if you've read it, but you like, he was at mine. We were talking for a while.

What's it called? The Mindful.

The Mindful Athlete. I think it's the best New York Times bestseller. It's all what he.

I always take notes when I interview. So if you're, if you're listening in and like, if Ty mentions a book, don't worry, I will, I will link to it in the, in the show notes. So go ahead Ty.

Well, he was just, you know, he worked with Michael Jordan and Phil Jackson and same thing like Phil Jackson started every practice with bounce passes. So that's, that's fourth grade basketball with the greatest basketball players in the world. It was just let's get some fundamentals, let's get you warmed up and then let's get into the hard stuff. So I think it's more common sense, I also think it's more practical. There are some people listening that are just hardwired to pop out of bed and do 500 pound squats and they're not going to pull a muscle. But for most of us mortals I find you're going to have to really, you're going to have to chunk up your day. And that first chunk can be five minutes, it can be 15 minutes. For me it's about an hour. You know, I need about an hour to get the juices flowing. So if I wake up at four, around five o' clock I can start knocking out the hardest thing. My office, I have a, you know, I, I'm an investor. So we're incubating a new company. So I'm hiring 150 people and I got the officers for that company, they come in, they're there by five in the morning and by six o' clock I want them knocking out the heavy stuff so that by nine when the rest of the main shift comes in, they've already been three hours. You know, they're already worked up into a lather of mental exercise and they're rocking and rolling and then what you. And I'll tell you the cool thing about this technique. This is so that part, what I said, do the stuff relatively at the second shift of life or the shift of the day. Here's where it gets interesting. Because it's not the plan you make that helps your life. Like people ask me, how do you make a million bucks? I'm like, well you need an insanely good strategy. So this trunking idea is a strategy. But strategies only go so far without execution. And the biggest problem with execution in the modern world is adherence. You know, you do this at fitness. You can give somebody the greatest fit diet plan you can lay out step by step, what to eat, how to work out if people don't adhere and execute. It's just, it's just mind games that we play with ourselves. We feel satisfied. I made a strategy, I made a plan. So what makes this whole thing work for me is you chunk the End of the day to massive reward. So let's say you wake up at, let's say somebody listening. Average person wakes up at 6 or 7. So you wake up at 6 or 7, you warm up for an hour. A lot of people go to work. So you go to work by then. By the time you get to work at 8 or 9, you should be warmed up. You've maybe read a book, you walked on the treadmill, you play with your kids. Now you're right. When you get into work at nine, do all the hard stuff before lunch. Nine to 12, that's what I tell people, do the hard stuff. So by the time you get to work, you don't need a work warm up. Most people do the opposite. They come in, they check some emails, they dink around. No, knock it out. And here's if you're an entrepreneur, it's a little easier. Reward yourself because you can set your own. Then you take your lunch break then. And this kind of ties into what you were asking me about laziness. What you do is by the time you get to that late afternoon, like 3 to 6 chunk of the day now you start doing fun stuff. Like in my office we have ping pong, we have chess, connect four basketball hoops in the office. So like all of a sudden my office starts being playful, but it's still like we're collaborating. That's the time to casually talk about what we're going to do tomorrow. Then when you're done working, let's say you're done working as an entrepreneur or as an employee, you know. But from between three to six, you kind of wind down. Now time to massively do the rewarding things. Let's say you like movies, okay? Watch a movie every night. Now some people would say, isn't this waste of time? No, you can't go on hyperdrive, you know, I don't know if you saw my Instagram where I was at the movies with Elon Musk. You know, this is the hundredth richest man in the world and he's at the movies now. He's a hard, hard worker. I was, you know, the scenes of Elon Musk is not all going in movies, but he does do stuff like that. So use the night because the night see social stuff. Assuming you're around trusted friends, you don't have to have your guard up very much. So you don't need as much glucose in your brain. You can just be yourself. When you need a lot of Glucose is at 9 o' clock when you're calling a belligerent client or you're, you know, dealing with a sales situation or firing an employer, whatever you're doing. But by six, seven o'clock now, what you have to do is dump on the rewards. So if you like to spend time game night with your kids, do it a lot.

Yeah, you know, it's interesting, if I could interrupt for a second, it's interesting how you're tying that into to fuel for the brain because I'm a firm believer in once you have that first chunk done and I do that first chunk fasted, right, like I wake up and I do the little bit of exercise, the mindfulness, a little bit of meditation, some sunshine exposure, and then the little busy tasks like the email. All of that I do without any food in my stomach. It's just fast. It's not that cognitively demanding. And then I have my big breakfast and then I jump into the huge podcast interview or the chapters in the book or the article or whatever while I have nutrients pouring into my bloodstream. And at that point, most of the rest of the day, there isn't a huge emphasis on food. And as I get towards the end of the day, I can feel like, you know, especially after I've done like an afternoon or an evening workout, blood glucose has dropped a little bit, my energy levels are down a little bit. But it doesn't matter that much because for me that's the time of day when I'm sitting around playing guitar, hanging out with my kids and basically doing some of the, some parallels to what you're doing like at your office or going to the movie. Now one exception though is after dinner. So I have a big dinner and part of that is because I'm doing a late afternoon, early evening workout. And when you do that and you have a big dinner, you get a big increase in anabolism and post workout protein synthesis and a big amount of those nutrients get partitioned into muscle and into liver for the next day's activities. I get a big surge in energy about an hour or two after dinner and I have this, this second huge surge in productivity that almost parallels the morning surge in productivity from about 8:30pm until around 10:00pm in the evening. And so I've personally found that I have like this period of time in the evening from like 6pm until 8:30. That's kind of like relaxation and play time kind of like you're talking about. And then when that second bout of nutrients hits my system, and potentially it's a little bit based off of like circadian rhythm and creativity as well. I have another bout, another surge of productivity, kind of like before bed. So it is interesting how some of this can tie into, like, meals and feedings and circadian rhythm.

We're all creatures of DNA and flesh and blood and cells. It's like people, we almost. Anthropomorphizing is where you take something that's not real, like a tree or something, and you give it a name or a car or something. And humans tend to anthropomorphize things to understand them. It's like the thunder is somebody mad in heaven. But we also, in a sense, even though this is kind of not grammatically correct, we anthropomorphize ourselves into thinking we are more than we are. It's even, no matter what religion you are, they all kind of end up with from dust you will return. You know, for dust you came industrial return. So when people start going, no, I'm superhuman. I can maintain powers equal at all moments of time. It's just like, you gotta come back to planet Earth, my friend. By the time the night hits, you're gonna be, you know, even if you're a night owl. I'm a naturally a night owl person. But this thing of, you know, the reward at night. Because here's what happens, and I'll tell you what's gonna happen if someone tries this. You're gonna go out and let's say you're. You're a chronic procrastinator and you're listening to this. So in whatever way, work, making money, health. So you're gonna hear this podcast. You go out at nine in the morning, you get to work, and the first day, I'm gonna hit the hard stuff first. Well, it's not that easy because the human brain tries to avoid pain. So you're gonna try to avoid pain. Now, there's only one thing. There's 25 cognitive biases, impulses that cause us to take action or do things. Sometimes the right thing, sometimes the wrong thing. And pain is number two, the number two most powerful thing. Then there's only one thing that will beat pain. You know, you can try social proof. You can try writing down a routine in the journal. Those are not high enough to overcome pain. There's literally almost nothing that overcomes pain except for one thing. Reward. So procrastinators have not learned how to reward themselves. Instead, procrastinators beat themselves up. You can't do it. You know, you take a kid. I don't. You. You name the kid, the laziest, fattest kid who just sits and watches, plays video games or whatever he does. That kid can be motivated. I have seen it. You put a beautiful, you know, you put Megan Fox in the room and it's like, hey, she wants to go jogging. That kid's gonna put on his clothes and go. You go. You take the laziest person. And there's been a lot of science on this. Very interesting. A lot of the things, let's say in ghettos, you know, there's a lot of stereotypes of people who grew up in poverty and go, well, they're just, you know, they're lazy. That's why no, people don't want to work hard. If you're born in Compton, I was born in Long Beach. It's kind of like Compton. It's a bad part of la. My dad was in prison when I was a little kid. If I had grown up continuing in that environment where no matter how hard you work, you're not rewarded, society won't hire you, then you stop working. So a lot of the problems in the world are ones of not properly incentivizing. And if you want to change the world, start with changing yourself and become a reward king. So going to this question, I know you, you were talking a little bit earlier about, like, what was it kind of laziness or.

Well, yeah, but before we started recording, you know, I mentioned to you that I recently read this, this essay called Laziness A Manifesto. And it. It's specifically about this idea that we need to plan for plenty of free time. We need to not have this pressure to constantly produce and learn. And that being lazy and just like, kind of like hanging out with your feet up is a good thing. What's your take on that?

So I think again, trying to find what Aristotle said, this middle ground. The truth is almost always in the middle ground. And listen to Charlie Munger when he said, avoid extreme ideologies in everything, politics, religion, life, philosophy. So you can go. You can definitely be too lazy. And to me, laziness, what laziness means to me, it's not about total hours worth. It's about am I motivated. And I recently did a thing on the four M's of motivation. And so if you are not focused on those four M's of motivation, which are material things, mating, mastery and momentum. If you don't, then, then that's bad laziness. So if you're going, nah, nothing matters. I'm just gonna sit here. That's a lot different than Purposeful rest and purposeful, like letting the mind just like there's nothing to do. And great creators. I think it was Leonardo da Vinci. I read an interesting thing. It was one of the great artists, Michelangelo. I think it was Michelangelo, actually. And he was almost fired. He got commissioned to do a piece of art. Let me see if I have. I'll read you this quote. It's such a great, great quote. If you're in the lazy, if you like to. To argue for laziness, you'll love this quote. Let me see if I have it. But the flip side, okay, here it is. It is Leonardo. Dimitri Will Durant, in his book the Renaissance, talks about the prior. The abbot complained of Leonardo da Vinci's apparent laziness and wondered why Leonardo sometimes would sit before the wall for hours without painting a stroke. Leonardo had no trouble explaining to the Duke that an artist's most important work lies in conception rather than in execution. And men of genius do most when they work least so. But let me just put a caveat. Leonardo da Vinci was staring at the wall, trying to make a painting, and he was strategizing. And so it wasn't that he was listlessly purpose, with no purpose and intention at all, just laying there. So I think, you know, going back to Lieberman, humans, our ancestral makeup of our DNA, has a lot of time for just chilling out, and you have to do that. But think about it this way. Life comes in phases, and this is a much healthier way. And I learned this from my first mentor, Joel Salatin. He said, ty, we're at this farm in Virginia. You know how this farm works? It works by not crossing Mother Nature. He told me, mother Nature laughs last. And we see that in the world. Mother Nature says, do not have 100 grams of sugar every day. So you drink two Sprites a day. Guess who's gonna laugh last? Mother Nature gonna give you diabetes. That's how this thing goes down. Mother Nature's like, don't go 90 miles an hour and hit the pavement. So what happens if you drive a motorcycle a lot without a helmet? Mother Nature laughs last. And the world is full of Mother Nature laughing last. And all the things I don't like in my life is Mother Nature laughing last. And when it comes to this kind of concept of seasons is the way to think about laziness, it's by far the most so on a farm. I arrived at Joel Salatin's in the winter. It was literally February, I think, or December. And I got there, and it's snow on the ground. And he has this house that he lives in that was built before the US was a country. It's like 1750. It's an old log house. And he's down in the basement, and I'm sitting with him and his wife and his kids, Daniel and Rachel. And he has the chainsaw out and a fire going, and he's just sharpening the chainsaw, laughing and telling jokes with his family. Then he would get up sometimes and go to his desk, and you'd see him with a notepad, and he'd be writing some stuff out. Then he would go and read some books, and he had chores to do. He had a couple chore. He had animals. He still had a couple hundred cows and pigs and sheep and chickens. And so he'd probably spend an hour in the morning doing chores because they were inside. He has pastured animals, but in the winter there's snow, so you bring them inside a barn. And so he said, ty, this is the winner. This is when we catch up. This is when you get extra sleep. This is when you plot and plan. This is when you learn from your mistakes. This is when you socialize and rebond with your family. Then the spring comes. What do you do in the spring of your life? Same thing you do as a spring or your farm. You begin to plant. And to me, that's the experimentation mode. You begin to experiment. Maybe you're starting a new business or trying a new exercise program. You don't skip the spring because the spring is experiment. What you do on a farm is you plant. Let's say you're planting corn. You plant more corn than you're actually going to harvest because you're going to cut away the corn that's not growing so well. So you plant maybe a hundred seeds of corn in a row, knowing that you're going to come and they call that thinning. And you're going to thin out. Usually for every one that you let go, you're going to thin away two or three. So you're maybe only left with 15 corn stalks of corn on that row. So this is when you do the same thing in your life. And it's somewhat. It's not a super hectic time that you're starting to get active. You're starting to work a little harder. Then the summer comes. And what do you do in the summer? In the summer is when it's just relentless activity. Joel Satson's wife used to tell me, work more, sleep less, burn the candle at both ends of the both End of the stick, you know, you might on a farm then you'd be making hay, you'd be butchering chickens there you'd be planting. So maybe we'd wake up on average then you're waking about 4:30 in the morning. You're out eat breakfast out at 5 and you go to bed at 9. But you know what, you feel good in that time because you know what's coming. What's coming. And this is where I got the chunking. Chunking is kind of like the season. The fall is coming and the fall is the greatest time. It's when you get paid, is when the crops, all the apple trees got lots of apples. So you're walking down, eat. When it starts to get cool, there's not as much to do and you're reaping what you've sowed. You're rewarded for the goodness of the last three seasons. And then guess what happens? It starts over. And this never ending cycle, this is what you want. I promise you, I have. I was born in the city, I've lived, I've been to 51 countries, I've been around billionaires and I've lived with the Amish and people like Joel Salatin. You'll want a seasonal life. And even if you look as a, if you look at geography, the study of, of of locations around the world where there are seasons almost always are, where humans have thrived the most, where it is continually hot or continually cold, like if you lived in Antarctica. I was just reading a book about the Eskimo. You know, various tribes, tribal groups there now, they live great lives, but they're not, it's not quite as productive as those areas where you had four seasons. And obviously I'm not indicting people for where they live. I'm saying a general principle of not always working super hard but not always lounging like you do in the winter is very, very healthy in my experience. And there's a tremendous amount of science. So that's my very long answer to your question.

Yeah, no, I completely agree. And I remember when you mentioned that on a podcast about this idea that there are periods of time that we, that we sleep a long time and periods of time where we might short ourselves on sleep. And that's one thing that's really stuck with me. I've been okay with having those periods of life where I might sleep six or seven hours just because I know I got to put my nose to the grindstone and keep my fingers crossed that I might squeeze in a 30 minute nap after lunch. Then there's some days where I wake up at 6am and I'll roll over and use a little passion flower or put some lavender on the pillow and put some binaural beets on and fall back asleep until 7:30 or 8. Because it's that time of season that my body needs that rest and I give myself that permission. So I love that take on, on how you don't have to have the same routine day in and day out, 365 days a year when it comes to this concept of laziness. Now, Ty, you mentioned that you are starting a new company, and I know that you do a great deal of investing. One question that I have for you, because I am based on previous conversations that we've had on these episodes that you and I do and conversations that I've had with others, is, you know, I'm looking to invest more in those areas that I'm passionate about, health and fitness and longevity. And so based on what, you know, connections and conversations that you've had, if you were to invest right now in a company or a product or an idea specifically focused on human health or human longevity, what would you invest in?

Ah, that's a great question. I'm actually, you know, I did a talk recently. Someone wanted me to talk on how to make a million dollars. And I said, people who make a million dollars traditionally are people who catch trends. So you must be a trend, you know, Netflix. Every single one of you listening to this podcast, including me and Ben, we have the iq, have come up with the idea of Netflix. It's pretty simple. And you could have seen the writing on the wall. Would you rather have to go to a video store all the time or just have the videos delivered to you? And one man, Reed, not Reed Hastings, Yeah, he came up with this idea of Netflix and he was ahead of his time. And it's such a, it's such a good idea that about 30% of the Internet at peak times in the United States is running through Netflix. That's how good of an IDEA it is. 10% of all the Internet in the US is running through their servers at any given time. And surge times 30%. It's insane. So how do we catch trends like this in general? You're asking about. Because you're asking about this in health. So what I like to think of stacking and the way stacking works is you go, all right, if one sit up works, two setups are going to work better than one. And you keep stacking until you reach this point of the point of marginal reaction not being as good. So you want to stack trends. So what are some big trends we see? And you've already done this in your business. So now I think it's just you need to stack a few more trends. So there's a trend, the Internet that's is obviously the biggest trend of the last 10, 15 years. And it really kicked in, I'd say about 10 years ago, kind of the Facebook MySpace fight. And Facebook won around 2005, 6, 7, 8. Okay, so that's one trend. We want to stack what we're doing. Make sure you keep that in mind in your ideas that you invest. Number two, another trend according to the Milken Institute, this very smart think tank is not education. Online education. And online education last year grew from 54 to billion dollar industry. So a very big industry, online education. And it now grew in one year from 14 to 15, 2015, it grew over 100 billion. It doubled in a year. Anytime you at that scale, not like 1 billion to 2 billion, like 50 billion to 100 billion, you want to stack that trend in so education and so forth. What's another trend? People. And this is not a new trend, but it's accelerating. People want to live longer, people want to be healthy. So those are three trends and you're kind of doing that. So now the question is, what's the next trend? I'll just throw out a few off the top of my head. Measuring yourself in health, the concept of wearables and things like this. This is not new to you, but I'm just kind of brainstorming here. My fitness pal was started. I just read an interesting their story and they start MyFitnessPal. It's an app where you can put in your diet what you're eating, what you're exercising and kind of track. It's a little bit of social network. They just sold it to Under Armour, bought them for $475 million. So almost a half a billion dollars. So another thing to stack is social. Okay, apps. So you got a social element where people interact. I think that's a. We've seen this for the last 10 years. It's something to add into the ingredients of your future apps. Certainly a dedicated environment on people's phone for sure. Another thing, mobile. Mobile is going to run the future. People are not going to be using desktop computers much anymore. Even if you think about yourself, where do you check your email when you're not at work? You're always basically checking it off you know, you're checking it on your phone so you just stack, stack, stack, stack and other trends. I think longevity stuff is going to be big.

There's a change when it comes to longevity. What, what are you specifically just with what you've been exposed to? Because, because I know you're aware of your own health and you're aware of this concept of wanting to, to live as long and as high a quality of life as possible while you're doing it. When it comes to pills, self quantification devices, companies, tests, stuff like that. Are you personally doing anything for yourself when it comes to longevity actively? Like are you using astragalus root or are you doing a specific form of self quantification or blood testing that you think everybody should be doing or you think is highly beneficial and gives you a lot of bang for your buck when it comes to longevity.

I've done the research. It seems to me by far the most science around reversing aging is lifting weights. So try to lift weights every day. My dad, I saw that with my dad one he was one of the first bodybuilders in America. He was, he looked, my dad always looked 20 years now, now he's about 80. So he quite look as young or he's not quite 80, but whatever. He's in his 70s and so now he's, he's finally age caught up to him. But my dad at 65, he could literally trick girls. They're like 30 years old. Not trickle but he could go on a date and just be like I'm 40 and girls could not figure it out until then. He's like, they would get mad at me when they'd figure out I'm 60. He went on a date with a very one time he had this. I opened. I didn't grow up with my dad but I saw met him later in life and he had this picture of this very famous girl. I won't say who it is but it's an A list actress on TV. Everybody knows who she is. She was like 28 and my dad was like 60. And I was like what happened?

He's like, yeah.

We went out for a while then when my friends said, you know, oh, Ernie's 65. And she freaked out, got mad at me for telling her. I think he had told her he was 40. So weightlifting and there's a lot of science university I think of Utah, New Mexico did a study about telomere. You know, it's your telomeres changing size and weights is one thing that Reversed that. So I think that now that's a lot of people don't like that answer because it entails work.

Right. And if I, if I could throw this in here before you move on to your next point, something that I recently brought up on a podcast was that you can actually take that one step further with weightlifting. And they've done some really interesting study in of all things guinea pigs. They've shown that, that it's not actually like what's called hypertrophy or satellite cell proliferation or like an increase in your muscle fiber number or size. And that is what imparts those longevity benefits. And it's actually potentially deleterious to longevity to have what's called cardiomegaly or like a bunch of hypertrophy in your heart or to have a lot of muscle that you got to carry around and cool. And what is more important and lends you even more longevity is to do the type of weightlifting that gives you wiry, powerful muscles that are very strong related to their size. And so the idea is that you want to not just lift, but lift specifically for strength and power, not for mass.

Yes. And I'll tell you this. I read a great book. It's called I forget the name. I'll try to get it to don't sit. Basically I've eliminated sitting. There's a head of a Mayo Clinic, wrote a book. I think it's called God, I wish. It's on my Instagram. I did a book of the day. Basically Don't Sit more than three hours a day. This is the thing he says this is the number one thing killing people. It's sitting everything that you don't want to have happen your body. So in terms of I think the now if you want to. That's hard to turn into a business. He's the guy who kind of came up with these treadmill deaths that I use. These lifespan ones, there's a good one. I don't make any money off it. So that's my unbiased recommendation. The ones I've tested a few but I. So going back to how you can productize this and turn this into business, online education is a great one. But specific niche ones like creating one around longevity, creating one for 60 year olds that want to. You know, there's different broad categories. I think another thing I do think supplements are big and can be grown into. You know, if you look at P90X, they are doing something I like. They just passed a billion dollars in revenue. They're doing online education with their P90X. In addition to that, they've got this Shakeology and this and that. And so there's so much power to it. Just a simple product you sell over and over like Shakeology, I think that's their big seller and you end up with a billion dollar company. So I think, I think things that are reduce stress, get people to move some supplements that are around because the supplements are almost like a placebo effect. Sure they help, but you can't just take a supplement and sit on your butt all day. So the supplement business I think will be huge in health because what it'll do, it's kind of like Dumbo's feather. You know, Dumbo needed the feather in the Disney movie so he could fly, he thought, but it wasn't the feather. Right. So the supplement adds some value to people. There's no doubt a good supplement worth its weight in cost. But the supplement drives, gives them a physical thing in their hand. Then you bring the education behind it and you change mindset I'm all about, you know, my parent company of all my businesses is called Knowledge Society and I believe we're ushering in the time where we've been in the information society where you can Google anything you want, get information. But businesses that show people how to go from information to knowledge and all knowledge is information in action. So if it takes a supplement to give people, if it takes a wearable, that's great. I think those are not the core business that I'm interested in. So if you're asking my trend, I'm interested in changing how people think. And if you can change how people think, this is what will revolutionize fitness. And you use the wearable, you use the app, you use the supplement as the vehicle to get something. People generally need something tangible in their hand to get excited about it. So that's my, that's my take on.

That makes sense and changing the way people think. I mean one of the things that you brought up is something far as like rapidly growing categories is this online education. I mean we have everything from Khan Academy to Udemy to itunes University out there now that allow you to digest a great deal of information and even educate yourself online in a way. If you had children, how would you educate them?

Massive reward. I mean I can answer this question. Our education system is not only not that effective, it is again, it's anti science. It is just so non unscientific that it boggles my mind because teachers are smart, the academics writing the textbook are smart, but they're forgetting One thing, it's called behavioral economics. There's a great book called Misbehaving by a guy named Thaler. And these are all Nobel prize winning guys. And people don't react like you think. So you can't say to a student, a kid, hey, this is going to be good for you. In 30 years, learn calculus. I mean, this experiment has been run. You can just think back to your own education. Unless you're an engineer or a rocket scientist. What do you remember of seventh grade? I'll tell you what you remember. You got a crush on or the guy, the, the kids, you know, you being popular or you being bullied. You remember one great teacher that had an impact by their, by what they did. So this antiquated way of raising kids, it's. I hope it goes. And it's not just raising kids, it's. It's all humans. So what you want to do is remember the 25 ways your kids will decide on every path in their life. Come in a hierarchy. And the second one is pain. So schools now use number two. They go, summer's over, back to exams, having to wake up early. Pain, pain, pain. Oh, you know why you should learn this so you do good on a painful exam. It doesn't work. So what works is lead with reward. I did a commercial video on YouTube which is now almost the most watched video in human history. It passed 500 million views this year. And, and that's a mix of us. We advertised it and it went viral and blah, blah. And. And it's me in my garage with a Lamborghini that I bought a real. Sometimes people think I rent it. I didn't rent it for the shoot. I actually had. I have Lamborghini, Ferrari and Maserati, all these cars that I collect. And. But I had just bought all these bookshelves. And this was an after. The video was an afterthought. I didn't set this up. I was literally in London and I, one of my assistants was like, ty, we have about 2,000 books here that you've ordered new ones. We have nowhere to put them in your house. And I said, put bookshelves in my garage. That's some empty space because I already have three other libraries in the house. So I said, do it there. And then I had the Lamborghini. I was just in there one day. So I'm gonna shoot a little selfie on my iPhone and I shot it. And it said, basically people watch it and go, lamborghini. I want that. Obviously a lot of young guys like this. And then they see, I go, but what I like more than my Lamborghini is these books. And these books are what showed me how to create an income that would allow me, if I wanted to, to buy a Lamborghini. And so it led with reward. And it trumps. There's not a video on YouTube besides Justin Bieber and some of these ones that's been more viewed. And so it's not because I'm special, I'm not. It's not because I'm a master marketer. I know a thing about two about marketing. But it's because when you lead with reward, big things happen. A guy, my brother, did his birthday party at my house about a month ago. And there was a lot of people I didn't know at my house. And as I walked, there was a kid walking out of my house. I mean, a guy walking out of my house. And he said, hey, Ty, I want to tell you a story. You don't know me, but I'm a schoolteacher in here, in the, in the rough part of la, in like South Central la. He said a kid the other day was walking around with a textbook and he said, you got to know something about this kid. He's been in and out of juvenile hall his whole, you know, junior high and high school. He's a troublemaker, you know, Fs and everything. And he had a book, and it wasn't a book I had assigned him. And I said, what's going on? You reading now? He said, yeah, I saw this commercial, I saw this YouTube video where this guy said, I can get a Lamborghini if I read a book. Now I don't say that, but that was the association this guy took. And he said, this kid, nobody's been able to get him read. And what got him to read is the thought of, wait a second, there's something better out there for me. All those big dreams I have, I want to focus on those. And then the rest is just to get to it. So you tell your kid, hey, you take your kid. I'll give an example. Take your kids to Beverly Hills, take them to a mansion. Let's say you have a kid who loves that. Take your kid. Let's say your kid loves music. Take him to a Justin Bieber concert, whatever. Whatever your thing is. Then say, let me tell you the backstory of Justin Bieber. This guy, Scooter Braun out of Atlanta was a 20 some year old kid. He knew about business. He had been a nightclub promoter and he knew business. And so he saw Justin bieber on a YouTube video at 12 years old, and he said, I'm gonna sign that kid. And he signed Justin Bieber. And now Scooter Braun sits on an empire of about $300 million. He's business partners with Justin Bieber, and he runs music. He runs Ariana Grande, and all these big. You want to be like that guy? Let's. Let's get you like Scooter Braun. Now, one little thing. Scooter Braun knew a thing or two about math because he needed to know business math. And your kid will do the business math when you lead with the reward. Trust me, if kids in juvenile hall will read text, and that's not. I get three to 5,000 emails a day, a lot of them from parents, from people in and out of prison, and they're saying the same thing. They're going, this new approach where you lead with the reward. Don't force your kids to do stuff. The Amish are the master. I'll tell you the fun. I got to go in a few minutes, but I'm. I know you got to go. I want to tell you something. The greatest parenting lesson I ever learned. I live with this Amish guy named Sam Chuck, one of the greatest people I've ever met in the planet. Lived with him for two years in Virginia and an Amish community, and he had six kids. He had a small family. For the Amish, it was very small. Six is teeny. But his youngest son, David, did something wrong. I forget what it was. The Amish very rarely use physical spanking. Once or twice, maybe in the kid's lifetime, they'll get spanked. So they're not completely anti spanking, but they don't use. Basically, they think it's kind of like training horses. If you hit a horse a lot to train it, it's gonna get gun shy and not be a good horse. So. But once in a while, you gotta give a little pop to a horse. So his son did something wrong. I think his son wouldn't. Didn't get the eggs. So, no, it didn't milk the cow. That's what it was. So David came in for breakfast, and Sam said, how'd the morning go? And did you milk the cow? Your mom said, there's no milk here in the bucket. And the kids said, oh, I was too tired. I forgot. And Sam said, you know, that cow, it hurts it when you don't milk it. And you really, you know, you got to do that. And he said, you know what? Because you did that you're not going to get to come on the work crew with me and your brothers. We're going to build a log house and you're not going to be able to come with us. And David wept. That was the greatest punishment was, you can't do work with us. Because David perceived working with his brothers and dad as the ultimate reward. I'm working with the big guys. And Joel south and said, people, he said, ty, I have. Because he's kind of from that Amish mentality. Even though he's not Amish, he goes, I meet parents who punish their kids. He goes, oh my. They have been at that moment. The second you punish your kids with, you got to do the dishes. You've rewired that work is bad. And he's like, you might as well brainwash your kids to be the worst people on the planet. The moment you do that, you want to do what Sam chubbs it the reward. And then the next thing you know, kids are doing what they need to be doing without you pushing them. Like Voltaire said, it's not enough to conquer, you have to seduce. And that's what it is.

So in terms of. And I do, I know you need to go pretty soon. And so this will be kind of, kind of the last little poking question, prodding question that I have for you. But the concept of reward seems like more of a model. But as far as like unschooling versus prior private schooling versus homeschooling versus Waldorf versus Montessori, etc, like, do you like any of those models in particular?

I know Montessori produces tremendous amount of amazing kids. Jeff Bezos was Montessori. I know that. Here's what I would do. I would use DNA stuff. So what. What's our DNA built to learn in the first, let's say seven years. Language, social skills, music stuff. So I would go heavy on that stuff. I mean, is there a human alive that would be mad at their parents if their parents had made sure, you know, six languages? No. Every. It's kind of common sense. What's the stuff you wish people had done to you when you were young? The golden rule of parenting do that? I wish. I'll tell you what I wish. I taught myself piano at 16. I'm a decent piano player. I'm no concert pianist, but had I started at 6, I'd probably be a concert pianist. And I'm like, mom. You know, my mom was a single mom, so she had a lot on her plate. But I'm like, mom, when you're Six. If you had made the piano like something that I couldn't play that much or like Ty, the piano is only for awesome time when you do really well. She would have tricked me into playing the piano. My mom tricked me into eating. I love pretty much healthy food. I don't have a super problem with that. I remember as a five year old, I saw the movie the Hulk and my mom or the TV show, my mom's like, avocado will turn you green, like the Hulk. I remember going nuts eating avocado my whole life. I still love avocado. And so at early age 0 to 7, rewire the brain of your children. If it's Montessori school or homeschooling, I don't like to get into that framework because there's so many different varieties. Like some homeschooling is horrible because the parents don't know how to teach and it's a bad environment. It's definitely better to be in private school. A lot of private school, it depends on the teacher and the philosophy. But the end game that you should never deviate from is make them excited to learn and then follow the natural cycles. Very young is very good time to be active, do a lot of active stuff, learn. So you learn social skills at a very young age. And you also learn language and music quick. So I would go heavy on that. And then as you get older, you know, math and things like that start to become easier. And so, and then by, I'll tell you this, by the time the kids at 12, 14 is when your IQ peaks and people argue with me, I don't know why, because it's been proven over and over by Alfred Binet started it, the guy who invented the modern IQ test. And it's been confirmed. There's two types of IQ. You have a static IQ, which is like raw brain power. It peaks at 14. So when your kid's 12, treat them like an adult. You know, the Amish kids at 12, I often say with these employees I hire, I'm like, I wish I don't say this out loud because I want to insult them. A 12 year old kid is more responsible. A 12 year old Amish kid is more responsible than any 30 year old I've ever hired in the modern world. Because the Amish are like, you're 12, you're basically an adult. You look back, George Washington, Benjamin Frank, all these people are going to Yale at 12. So by the time the kids 12 or 13, keep in mind their DNA, they're peaking at their IQ. Be like Steven Spielberg's parents at 7, they're like, you like film. They gave him lenses in this, and he was making his first movie before he's 10. Warren Buffett liked finance. By 7, they had him reading finance books. Bill Gates liked computer software. At 12, his parents gave him that. And 19 years later, he became the richest man in the world. Sixteen years straight. Okay. He dominated the world because. And he went to private school. So you have examples of private school. I think Warren Buffett went to public school. It's not that as much in my. That's the form, it's the substance. And the substance is reward, reward, Reward. That's it. You ask yourself, is that rewarding? When you were 6, was that rewarding? If the answer is no, then don't do it that way. So when I was 6, if my mom would have forced me to have a piano lesson, I would not have done it. But I'll tell you what, when I saw or she would have forced me to eat guacamole, I wouldn't have done it. But just showing me one Hulk movie got me hooked on guacamole the rest of my life. She was a genius on that. You know, my mom was smoking. My mom was like, you want to smoke? Go ahead. She didn't try to conquer me. I remember smoking one time I was like seven, I threw up. So I've never been interested in cigarettes since then. Versus parents who go, pain, you can't do it. All the other kids smoke, but you can't do it. No. Just be like, do it. And then be like, smoke. 10. Tony Robbins has that thing where a guy was like, I'm addicted to chocolate. Can you help me? And. And it was a three day conference. And Tony Robin said, great, eat chocolate. And he made the guy eat chocolate like every hour for three days. And the guy was like throwing up and got all this visceral reaction. And the guy now associates reward with not eating chocolate. The guy never ate chocolate again.

Yeah. It's interesting, the whole concept of using rewards. I like it though, both, both negative and positive rewards. One thing I'm careful not to do is not to use exercise as punishment for my kids. That was one thing I learned about from you, is that you actually use something as a reward for exercise, but you don't use exercise as a punishment.

Exactly.

So, you know, you talked about Arnold Schwarzenegger, how he would do a bunch of push ups before breakfast, and breakfast was his reward for exercise. But if my kids get in trouble, I'm careful not to use exercise as a punishment. Usually I'll use something like chores or even, as you have alluded to, taking away something that might be a chore or that might be, for example, spending time with the family or maybe they got to eat dinner by themselves, things like that. But yeah, it's really interesting how these rewards can work for or against you depending on how you use them. Ty, you're always chock full of really interesting takes on things and very, very good advice. So if you you are listening into this episode with Ty, everything we talked about. I've been taking notes. I'll put them over@BenGreenfieldFitness.com TY4 it's BenGreenfieldFitness.com Tai the number 4. I'll also link if you want to just tune in to previous episodes I've done with Ty, you can listen to part one, Part two, Part three. I'll link to all of those there, as well as Ty's 67 steps to getting anything you want out of life, health, wealth, love and happiness. I'll link to his Millionaire Mentor program where he mentors you in business and also his retreats and his seminars that he does in Hollywood, London, New York, etc. So Ty, thanks for your time today and for coming on the show, man.

Well, thanks for having me. I always learn a lot from you and hope to see you soon in person, my friend.

All right, man, sounds good. Take it easy.

All right, talk to you soon.

You've been listening to the Ben Greenfield Fitness podcast. Go to BenGreenfieldFitness.com for even more cutting edge fitness and performance advice.

Sam.