618: Return to Real: How To Live Authentically In The Digital World with Ryan Levesque

Hello and welcome to the achieve your goals podcast. The show that empowers you to wake up to your full potential and achieve your biggest goals and dreams. I am your host, Hal Elrod, and I invite you to join us each week as we share actionable strategies to take your life to the next level, as well as interview world class experts and entrepreneurs who have achieved extraordinary goals themselves. And we ask them to give you a peek behind the curtain and teach you exactly what you need to do to do the same. Ready? Here we go.

Foreign.

Conversation with Ryan Levet goes straight at a paradox we are all living inside. As AI gets smarter, faster, more omnipresent, we're tempted to outsource everything human, from our driving to our thinking. You name it, Ryan thinks that's exactly the wrong direction. His call is simple and it cuts against the grain of modern tech culture. Return to what's real. He shares three contrarian ideas that deserve to be thoughtfully considered by every single one of us. First, the best things in life don't scale. Trying to optimize hugs or sunsets or time with people that we love is a category error. Those experiences are valuable precisely because they can't be automated or multiplied. Second, he argues for oxytocin over dopamine. Dopamine gives you the quick hit, but it feeds compulsive scrolling and synthetic highs. Whereas oxytocin is connection. It's trust, it's bonding, it's presence. One makes you chase more, the other makes you grateful for what's already here. And third, spend less time with man made things and spend more time with God made things. Screens, dashboards and algorithms might be useful, but. But they'll never compete with silence, with mountains, with nature, with moments of stillness where you remember who you truly are. This isn't an anti AI or anti progress message. It's a conversation that reminds all of us that the more technology accelerates, the more intentional we need to be about grounding ourselves in what matters most. It is my pleasure to introduce you to my good friend, Mr. Ryan Levesque. Hey. So the reason you're here a. We're friends, but that's not why. You and I were at a Mastermind a couple months ago and you give a message, return to real. And it was voted by, I think, the majority. It was like collectively the favorite message for me. It was. It was a profound message and it was talking about AI, but from a perspective that I had never heard before and it just resonated with my soul. Right. You don't usually hear an AI talk that resonates at the soul level. So can you unpack this? What does this mean, return to real?

It's a great question. It's a big question. And I think to understand this concept and this phrase return to real, I think it's important to set some context around what I believe is a singular moment in human history that we are about to land on our doorstep and there are three colliding forces that are reshaping the world in a transformative way. And I think it's important to understand what these forces are and it'll kind of set the stage for what this idea of return to real actually is. So we have three forces. The first is an economic force, the second is an environmental force, and the third is an existential force which creates this singular moment in history. Economically speaking, we're entering territory that most humans alive today have never experienced. And the most concise way that I could explain this is the way in which Ray Dalio has explained it as the big cycle, which is a predictable cycle. If you study geopolitics, if you study global economies where empires rise and fall over a period of 80 to plus or minus 25 years, so 80 to 100 ish years. And the last time we experienced this as a, as a planet, as a species was the Great Depression going into World War II. And if you look at the math coming out of 1945 to today, we're basically on the precipice of that 80 year ish window.

Okay.

And this is a cycle that's happened predictably if you study 2000 years of human history. Yeah. The problem is because most people only experience this at most once in their lifetime, we don't believe that it's going to happen. This time is different. So we have this sort of false sense that it's going to be different this time around. Secondly, we're living in this unprecedented time that Nate Higgins describes as the great carbon pulse. And this is the environmental force that we're facing. So for the last 100 plus years, we found a way to extract 4 billion years of sequestered carbon beneath the Earth's surface surface in the form of fossil fuel. So this is oil and coal, and that oil and coal, that fossil fuel has powered the only life that we alive today have known. And when you do the math, a single barrel of oil can be the equivalent of 10 human workers working for five years straight. That's just a single barrel of oil that you have right there.

In terms of energy production, in terms.

Of the energy Output relative to the energy output of a single human being working manually, just with our body, with our hands and our body. And if we look at the number of units of oil produced, the barrels of oil produced on an annual basis, we have the equivalent of about 400 billion human beings. The energy equivalent through the fossil fuel that we're extracting, supporting the life that we're living here today. Now, the punchline to all that is when you study the actual extraction of this fossil fuel, we are most likely past the point of what's known as peak oil, meaning we are extracting less fossil fuel out of the ground today than we were a few years ago. And depending on estimates, this may be 2010, 2012 when we achieve peak oil. Okay, now, mathematically speaking, what's happening is we are dangerously at the point where we are requiring more than a unit of energy to extract a unit of energy from the ground. So you have to be a mathematician to understand. Like in business, it's not sustainable. You put a dollar into your business and you only get 80 cents in return. Once you run out of dollars, then you go bankrupt, the business collapses. So this great carbon pulse is a finite amount of fossil fuel. Now, advocates of nuclear energy will say we're close to a breakthrough in fusion or nuclear energy. When you actually look at the inputs required to build a nuclear power plant, a mini power plant, largely they are fossil fuel based electric vehicles. Fossil fuels produce electric vehicles. So we know that. So we're kind of in this race against time right now. But I think most people recognize that the premise of infinite growth in a finite system is flawed. We have a thermodynamic reality on planet Earth that there isn't an infinite amount of fossil fuel available to power whatever it is that we build. Okay, so that's force number two. Force number three is existential. And I think Yuval know Harari probably does the best job of this in sapiens and Homo deus, really sort of outlining the fact that what AI brings with it is forcing us to come to terms with the superiority of the human race as a species on planet Earth. And questions that start to come up are what happens when we're no longer the most intelligent species or the most intelligent organism in the proverbial room, so to speak. Do we become the chimpanzees to our AGI AI super overlords? Do we become the dog sitting on the chair to our AI super overlords? But where does it leave us? Now, the short term implication is, of course, fears of joblessness and unemployment and becoming obsolete in a career that some may have spent hundreds of thousands of dollars in student loans to train themselves in. And years, in some case decades, to learn. All of a sudden being made obsolete overnight is really forcing us to come to terms with what does it actually mean to be human and what is our purpose if we can be replaced. Now these three forces are colliding all at once. And in some ways it feels like it's a singular moment in history because of where we are right now, the great carbon pulse, what's happening with AI and this rise and fall of empires in the great and the big cycle. But the reality is, if you study history, and I'll get to the original question around what is Return to Real? Yeah, the reality is, if you study history, we've actually been here before, that there's a predictable path that shows up that anytime that we've experienced a period of great dynamic change in the world, I. E. For example, the Industrial Revolution, every one of these periods of dynamic change has been met with a counter revolutionary movement that is attached to feelings of being more real, more grounded, returning to something that perhaps we've lost. So post Industrial Revolution we had the Romantic movement, we also had the Transcendentalist. So this is where we had throw in the mechanization of the early 20th century. In response to that, we had the arts and crafts movement, which is a movement back to making handmade furniture, handmade goods. Post Degradation of the post World War II 20th century was the return, the back to land movement. So this is where homesteading first was born, was post World War II. And in the highly digital world that we live in today, we have the digital detox movement, which is this movement away from sort of everything digital. So what is Return to Real? Return to Real is this movement that's taking shape in the world, that there is a segment of the world that's recognizing that the path we're on is unsustainable, that the AI acceleration that's taking place right now does not produce a desirable outcome. It perhaps leaves much to be desired and is forcing us to make intentional choices in our life. Like to say if you are not analog with intention, you are digital by default.

Say that again, please.

If you are not intentionally analog, you become digital by default.

Got it.

Which means if you are not intentionally making choices in your life to do what you and I are doing right here, I flew across the country, ironically in an AI powered vehicle to get to this room. We'll talk about that in just a moment. To have this moment in time together, this precious moment in time together in person. And if you're not making intentional choices for that, you will become digital by default. You will live a life where Uber Eats delivers everything you need to your doorstep. You don't have to leave your home. You get all your entertainment through Netflix and streaming services. You do not need to have any form of contact with the outside world or humanity. And you can live your life by abstraction through proxy through a screen. Return to Real is the counter revolutionary movement that's taking place right now where there's a segment of the world that's recognizing that they do not want that outcome and there's a craving for everything that we're describing. And that's what Return to Real is.

All right, let me ask you a question. How many apps are you using for your personal development? Maybe a meditation app like Calmer Headspace, an affirmation app like I Am, or Think Up a book summary app like Blinkist, a journaling app like 5 Minute Journal, a visualization app like Envision, an exercise app like 7 Minute Workout, and maybe even a habit tracking app to keep it all together. That is a lot to manage and a lot to pay for. What if you could replace all of them with just one app? Yes, it is called the Miracle Morning app and it is essentially seven apps in one. Hundreds of guided meditations and Breathwork tracks a full library of affirmations, plus tools to create your own visualization prompts for 10 key areas of your life. Guided workouts from 2 to 10 minutes long, book and audiobook summaries of top personal and professional development books, and a journaling tool with guided prompts. The Wheel of Life or a blank page to write freely. It simplifies your morning, saves you money, and helps you start every day with clarity, purpose and energy. And it's one of the only apps in this space with a 4.9 out of 5 star rating. Try it free for 7 days. Just search Miracle Morning in your app store or go to miracle morningapp.com to get started. All right, back to the show. You are leading by example in that you now live on a farm and you grow your own food. In fact, what percentage of your food that you and your family consume is produced by you?

Our north star metric is 80%. So we want to get to 80% of our calories consumed, which we actually measure. Yeah, produced directly on the land that we stored and manage ourselves.

And what does that include? What are you eating?

So what are you growing? What are you raising so, just taking a step back.

Yeah.

Three and a half years ago, when I recognized what was happening in the world, I decided to make this very intentional choice. And at the time, we were living in Austin, Texas, and I decided one summer, while my kids were at sleepaway summer camp, to go away and live and work on a farm in the Mad River Valley of Vermont. I actually lived in a tent. I bathed in a pond.

Wow.

And I learned the world of permaculture. And when I was there, my heart spoke to me and said, this is where I'm meant to be. This is where my family's meant to be. And while I was there, I texted my wife. I had one bar of service in the Green Mountains of Vermont, and we had thought about possibly putting our house on the market to sell. It was a possible plan of action. We had lined up a real estate agent. We had photos taken, video taken, but we didn't pull the trigger. And when I was there, I texted my wife and I said, let's do it. Let's do it. I feel like this is the right thing for us as a family. She said, you sure? I said, yes. Texting back and forth said, okay, great. So we had a plan of action.

Okay.

She texted me back a little later that afternoon. She said, all right. Well, we have an offer. All cash that day.

Wow.

All cash. Full price, 14 day close. So I had to make a decision right then. Are we doing this thing? Wow. And I said, well, let's do it. And then I booked a flight home, got back home. We shipped, put everything we owned in storage. We sold one of our vehicles, and we decided to road trip from Austin to Vermont at this point with one car, the truck was filled with suitcases, the dog, the kids, the whole thing. With nothing but a dream and a vision.

Okay.

And we drove across country.

Place to live yet?

Or we had nowhere to live.

Okay.

We had an Airbnb lined up for the day that we arrived.

Got it.

And we made it across the country in three days.

What a fun adventure.

So we had no idea.

Yeah.

I lined up half a dozen different farms that we were going to tour. And in the time between when we left Austin and landed in Vermont, all but one of the farms went under contract. Oh, wow. And this was in the.

Out of how many?

Out of half a dozen, I think we had six lined up. Five out of six. Oh, my goodness. Were gone. And so we saw the. The sixth one. Fell in love with it. But it was the first place that we had seen in person. So we Weren't quite ready to make a decision, so we kind of held off, and someone else snatched it up, and they were all gone. And then what you learn when you're shopping for a farm, when you're buying a farm in the Northeast, is in the winter months, the market completely shuts down.

Okay.

Because no one's buying a farm where you're. You can't walk through 3ft of snow in the fields. It's just the market goes cold. So we said, okay, well, let's just use this opportunity to explore the state. So we bounced from Airbnb to Airbnb, and we're homeschooling the kids, and we're looking at different communities.

All your kids at this time.

Our boys were 7 and 10 at this time.

Got it.

Anyway, so we did that for almost a year, and then we started knocking on every door telling everybody our story. We're a crazy family from Texas. We're looking to start a farm in Vermont. Anybody who would listen to our story. And eventually, after about a year of that, we got a phone call from someone who said, I think there's a place that might fit what you're looking for.

Wow.

And we had a very specific list that we're looking for. We wanted an old hill farm that had never been conventionally agged. We didn't want any, you know, PFAS forever chemicals. We didn't want any environmental toxins on the land.

Very specific.

We wanted specific aspect that we're looking for. So, like the slope and the soil quality. We had a very long checklist. So it was finding a needle in a haystack.

Yeah.

And eventually got a phone call and found a place that fit the criteria. And as soon as we stepped on the land, we said, this is for us. This is our place.

Wow.

So with no prior experience, we decided to embark on this adventure and.

Except your permaculture class that you attended in the tent.

Except for the permaculture class and, you know, read dozens of books, and we as a family watched dozens of documentaries, and we've. We'd since gone through workshops.

And you were educating yourself for what was to come.

Yeah, exactly. And today. Fast forward to today. We raise cattle. We raise pigs, we raise meat. Chickens. We raise laying hens. We raise trout or fish. Wow. We have 48 beehives. We tap about a thousand maple trees to produce our own maple syrup. So we produce 100% of our protein between the beef, pork, chicken, eggs, and trout on farm. 100% of our sweetener on farm. Between the maple syrup and honey that we produce on site. We've planted about 500 fruit trees, nut trees, and berry bushes. So we have everything from the typical berries you'd expect. Raspberries, black raspberries, blackberries, blueberries. Also things like seaberries, black currant, gooseberry, yoasta berry. So we have two dozen different forms of berries. We have black walnuts and oaks and chestnuts. We have apple trees and plums and pears and persimmons. And we have dozens of different varieties of perennial food sources that will produce food, probably not just for my generation and my kids generation, but hopefully my great grandchildren.

So you're all planning staying here indefinitely and making this a family.

You know, don't know. You know, I think there's that. There's that expression that hit me hard when I first heard it, which is, great men plant trees under whose shade they will never sit.

Yeah.

And I think it's just thinking on a timescale that until you actually take a moment to step back, it's just not something that we think. We think quarterly. We think, all right, what's my 90 day plan in my business.

Yeah.

What's my plan for. For this weekend?

Yeah.

We don't think in terms of 100 year time scales, generational, generational time scales. And whether you're a student of AI or you're a student of ecology and botany. I think when we think in longer timescales, we open ourselves to possibilities that maybe we never considered.

Yeah.

So we do all that. We have annual production gardens. We raise everything. Like, for example, we overwinter all of our potatoes, our onions, our squashes, our carrots, root vegetables, parsnips, beets. We have a garden filled with perennial herbs and greens. We do all of our greens. We freeze dry everything. So we have fresh greens and fresh, basically green smoothies from the powder from our garden in the winter. And so we were ambitious, but we had an ambitious goal.

So two things come up for me right now in terms of where we can go with this. One is the average person is like, either I can't afford to do that, or even for me, I'm like, that's like my wife. We have a little mini farm.

Yeah.

But y' all take it to another level. So that's the first thing that comes up for me. And so wanting to speak to like, yeah, how do we make this for someone listening? What can they do? How can. What's relevant to them? And the second thing that I wanted to bring into the conversation is you're not just a farmer. Like we were just talking. You just spoke last week at Tony Robbins. Highest level mastermind that people are paying $250,000 a year to be a part of. And you are teaching those people the highest level in business. So it is a. You're a very interesting cat.

Right.

That, you know, with the beard, you kind of look the more the farmer like at this point. But I know what a brilliant business mind you are, so I'm not sure which order. Yeah, I'll let you kind of pick where you take these. But like a. Probably making it relevant for people, but also like, what does your life look like in terms of how much are you farming? How much are you running a business? Are you able to do this because of the businesses you've sold in the past? Like, so kind of figuring out how to. How to weave that into the next direction of the conversation.

It's a great question. And what I'll say is I'll take a step back. And the life that. That I've created for my family is not a life that I'm trying to prescribe or preach for anybody. This is just my embodiment, my living of this return to real. Doesn't have to mean that you sell everything, move to Vermont and start a farm.

Yeah.

But there are a few shifts that I think are worth considering, and I'll talk about these three shifts, and I think these are shifts that will perhaps challenge your thinking as you think about maybe the mainstream advice that we typically hear around business and what to focus on. And I want to invite you to really ask yourself, how does this land? Where does this confront your beliefs that you have already? And to your point about that visceral feeling, that feeling it in your soul, what do you feel to be true if I take a step back. When you and I first connected was probably through what I call my first mountain work, which was building this marketing methodology known as the ask method, which was a methodology to understand any market at a deep emotional level. Asking questions in a way to understand why is it that people are struggling or challenged or frustrated with the pain that they're facing, and then being able to build a product and message that ultimately services that. What I failed to explore in that book was how to listen to the most important voice of them all, which is the one inside your heart. It's what I describe as the contrarian voice of your heart and learning how to tune into that. When I was in the Green Mountains of Vermont and I was living in that tent, I was Working on that farm, something cracked open inside of me where I just felt in all my being that this is what I was meant to do. This is what I was put on this earth to do. Everything in my life up until that moment took me to that very moment in time. So with that backdrop, as you pay attention to the somatic experience you have, when I unpack some of these ideas, I want to invite you to just think about what lands. So the first contrarian shift that I'll invite you to consider is the best things in life don't scale. In business, we are taught, how do we scale this immediately? The question that shows up when I speak in rooms of other business leaders is, but does it scale? Yeah, but I would posit that the best things in your life don't scale.

Give us some examples of things that don't scale.

A hug with your daughter. There you go. How do you scale that?

Yeah.

Sunset.

Why a four dog? So I can scale. I just.

I just said your daughter, but.

Oh, you said daughter. I thought you said daughter.

All right. Fair with one of your kids. Yeah. The last. The. A sunset with your sweetheart. You can't scale that. It's a moment in time. Experiences what we live for.

Yeah.

And yet we think that business operates differently. And there's a story that I've told before where a few years ago, I had this experience where we had scaled my business pretty significantly. We'd built a seven time, Inc. 5000 fastest growing company, $100 million in revenue, built a team of almost 100 employees across two related companies. And one of the things that we started doing was to write in our brand voice. We would hire a team of writers, and they would get trained up in our brand voice. They'd learn how to write from our voice, which was signed with my name at the end of it.

I remember this. I love the story.

And increasingly, I felt that what we were putting out with my name attached to it at the bottom sounded less and less and less like me. And so I wrote this piece. I had no plan. I just. On a whim, I decided, enough is enough. I'm gonna write this email. I'm gonna tell one person on my team, I don't care what anybody says. Send this email. And I titled it an Embarrassing Confection, A Confession. And the embarrassing confession was, for the last seven years, this may not come as a surprise, but every piece of content with my name attached to it was actually not written by me, but was written by a team of writers. And over time, I felt increasingly uncomfortable about this. And it's reached a boiling point for me. And the reason for that is I've noticed that over time that as we brought in more writers and as we started to use AI, the work that we're putting out started to have the flavor of watered down orange juice from a can instead of the freshly squeezed variety that you get at Sunday brunch. And this bothers me. And I went on to say that your audience wants the freshly squeezed version of you. Can you feel that this email was written by a real human being with a real beating heart? Can you feel it? Exactly. Your audience wants to feel your beating heart too. And I wrote that, I put that out, and I got more response from that email. Thank you. Anything that we'd put out in probably five years.

Wow.

Like this rally cry of hell, yes, absolutely. And it was in that moment in time that I realized that there's certain things that are not meant to scale.

Yeah.

On our farm, we have half a dozen cows. That's what the land supports. If we tried to 10x that, if we tried to scale what we're doing and scale our beef operation, or scale our pig operation, or scale our maple operation, or any one of our operations, we would shift from a regenerative paradigm to an extractive paradigm. So in agriculture, most of the world's food is grown through an extractive paradigm, Meaning we extract from the land, we bring in fertilizer from an outside source, we pile it back on the land that we extract from, and we repeat this process. We pull from the other. But there's not an infinite other. And in our business, what we do is we extract from ourselves, we work ourselves to the bone until there's nothing left, and then we burn out. And then we wonder, why is this not working? A regenerative paradigm, on the other hand, has a limits to its growth, meaning there's only so much that we can do. On my farm, there's a thermodynamic reality. There's a land base that limits the amount of calories that we can regeneratively grow on the land that I manage. Otherwise it becomes extractive. And business is the same paradigm. Not every business is meant to scale to the moon. Every business has a right size. And I believe that it's more valuable to understand what is the right size of your business as opposed to how do I scale? Because the best things in life don't scale. So that's the first sort of contrarian shift around. This second contrarian shift is to optimize for Oxytocin over dopamine. So oxytocin and dopamine, these are two neurochemicals in the brain.

The feel good, right? Yeah.

Two of the feel good chemicals in our brain. So we all know dopamine. Dopamine gets all the headlines. We've lived through a decade of dopamine where we are taught that if we want to succeed in business, we need to create these dopamine loops. We need to make our products addictive in the same way that social media is addictive. We're taught that with the right shade of red, on the alert that you put on your app, on the iPhone, that it's actually going to get people coming back. And so we build these dopamine loops, but the reality is that the world does not want any more of that. Like, even as I say it right now, you probably feel like, I don't want that in my life. I don't want any more of them in my life. Oxytocin, on the other hand, is the neurotransmitter of trust. Oxytocin, unlike dopamine, is a neurotransmitter that cannot be hacked in the same way. It requires what you and I are doing right now to have it elicited. It requires physical presence, it requires human to human touch, it requires compelling storytelling. And if you look at most of the mental health crises that we're facing right now in the world, the loneliness epidemic, the fact that we are more medicated than we ever have been in any time in history to deal with the modern maladies of life. Yeah, you can interpret that through the lens of a global oxytocin deficit. But I mentioned just a moment ago the contactless world that we are living in. The fact that I was driven to this interview from my hotel in a Waymo vehicle, a driverless vehicle, to have this conversation of you and me together in a room in person is the definition of irony. Yeah, but the reality is this is what we're craving, even though we don't necessarily have the words to describe it. Our brains, our bodies, everything that we do, designed to chase after a finite set of neurochemicals that the end of the day, make us feel good. Yeah, we just have different algorithms and stories that we believe are going to actually get us there. And if you're pursuing that screen based reality and growth at all costs, what happens is it's at the expense efficiency squeezes oxytocin out of your life. Ordering food from Uber eats is the antithesis to growing with Your own hands, the food that you eat, even just a portion of it. So to answer the question that you brought up a moment ago, a practical move doesn't necessarily mean growing 80% or 100% of your food yourself, but. But maybe growing an. An herb in your kitchen.

Yeah.

That you actually see from seed.

Yeah.

Reconnects you with the reality of the natural world. Which takes me to the third contrarian.

Shift before you go to that something that came up for me. You talk about dopamine and how we have plenty of dopamine.

Right.

All of the social media, our phones, it's designed to stimulate the dopamine versus the oxytocin. What came up for me is, and I'm curious if you would say that dopamine would be akin to pleasure, whereas oxytocin would be akin to fulfillment, is.

That I don't want to take an overly reductionist view because the cocktail of neurochemicals in our brain is complex. Got it. Dopamine fuels the chase. So dopamine is released in a way that causes us to chase after rewards. We get into these dopamine loops, however, where this can actually be hacked. Meaning if you are playing a video game on your phone or you are playing the video game of business and you're looking for social media validation because you created a piece of content and you want to see, does it get any comments, does it get any likes? Did it get any. You know, how did it land? How many views is it getting on YouTube, which is just another game. You can get caught into that dopamine loop where you're chasing after something which is effectively a proxy for the role dopamine, if you want to say, originally, has played in our brains, which is the pursuit of reward. So going after food, for example. So when we have a pleasurable eating experience, we eat food because we're hungry or it tastes really good. That's a response to the dopamine release in our brain that causes us to chase after something that's actually healthy for us. So dopamine well placed is necessary and healthy.

Got it.

Oxytocin has a different role in our brain. Oxytocin is often described as the neurotransmitter of love, because the oxytocin release is what happens when a mother is with her newborn infant for the first time. There's a massive release of oxytocin and this just overwhelming feeling of love. One of the key differences between dopamine and oxytocin is the way in which it's Elicited oxytocin, as I mentioned a moment ago, requires presence. It's not something that can be easily or even entirely hacked with a video game or a YouTube video. It requires actually being in the room with someone. It requires feeling the presence of that person, physical touch. The closest thing we've gotten to that, if you study, for example, the research of Paul Zak is around storytelling a good story. Like, if you've ever watched a movie and the story has moved you and you've just had this visceral feeling, or you've read a passage or you've seen a short video and it's had this visceral experience, that is oxytocin at play.

One thing that came out for me, if anybody's listening or watching this as a return to real low hanging fruit way to increase oxytocin in your life is to extend the length of your hugs. That's something that I think that either a we're our hugs are like transactional, where it's like a real, oh yeah, bye, sweetie. Quick little one arm hug. And what I've been really trying to do and it's been a game changer is hold my hugs.

Yeah.

Like, and with my daughter, she's 16, so it's like I can only get maybe five, maybe a little more, a few seconds. And she's like, dad, let me go. You know, And I'm like, I just love you. But yeah, again, for anybody listening, that's like a low hanging fruit. I encourage you to and let them know, you can warn them. Like, hey, sweetie, I want to actually try hugging you for like, let's like start with 10 seconds, right? I get up to 30. But my wife and I have been doing these long hugs. Ryan, my, you know, and my son. And again, same thing. Son is 13, daughter is 16. It's harder to get, you know, it's kind of like dog years where I scale. If I get three seconds out of my daughter, that's like 17 seconds with my wife, you know?

Yeah.

So just that came up for me as you're talking about oxytocin and how, how like that just feeds my heart and my soul when I have those like real extended physical contact with my loved ones.

I love it. The way I interpret that is don't be the first one to let go.

Yeah, yeah, I love that.

So oxytocin over dopamine and the third shift that I would advocate for at least throw for consideration is more time with God made things, less time with man made things.

Let's go. Any high five? Yeah, dude, I love that. I love that.

If we. In the same way that if we are not intentionally analog, we become digital by default. If you think about your daily existence, and even just today, for example, I was on an airplane that was created by man. I was in a Waymo vehicle that was created by man. I was on pavement as I walked through these doors. We're in a room where virtually everything around us is man made. Yeah. Now, I know that there's a ontological argument of what is man made, what is God made? Because if man is made by God, then anything that creates by man. Sure. So I don't want to get caught in the semantics of it. What I'm talking about is time spent in nature. Nature time spent with. With hands in the dirt, dirt underneath your fingernails, getting reconnected to reality. So in the carbon pulse explanation that I shared a moment ago, there's a thinker. His name is Nate Hagens, and I mentioned his name briefly. He's had a big impact on my thinking. And this something that he's shared with me is, in my mind, is profound. And it's that the building blocks of human life do not originate on planet Earth. The only conditions that have been capable of producing the building blocks of human life, and all life on Earth have occurred in the crucible of an exploding star. Hmm. The intense heat and pressure of that environment is required to produce what is life here on Earth. In other words, when we look up at the heavens up in the sky, we are literally the children of stars. We are stardust. And even more profound than that, we are stardust that's been reassimilated and reassembled in such a way that this is how the universe observes itself through our eyes. We are an extension of the universe. Observing the universe right now. Now, I know that's super deep. And getting there in a very short amount of time in this format.

Yeah.

Is not as profound as being on the farm in Vermont, overlooking the ponds with the mountains in the background and just feeling it in that presence.

Yeah.

But when you put yourself in that mindset, in that environment, it completely reshapes your perspective. It completely reshapes your perspective on what is our purpose, how to become deeply fulfilled. If you go down the rabbit hole of studying the science around time spent in nature, children are something like 50 to 60% more likely to suffer from mental illness when you take them outside of nature. Makes sense that we are 80% more creative when we spend time inside of nature, connected to the natural world around us. So, no. Does it mean that you need to move to a farm in the middle of Vermont? No, it doesn't. But I'll give you a simple practice when you're doing your miracle morning, as one thing, you might consider adding to the mix. First thing that you do before you do anything else. One of our mutual friends, Ali Jafarian, was the first that gave me this, and it's become part of my daily practice, my miracle morning. Touch earth before touching a screen.

Love that.

Before you reach for your phone, before you do anything in your morning routine, you walk outside, take off your shoes, take off your socks, and you find a bare patch of earth. It could be a one foot by one foot patch of grass. It doesn't have to be meadows and fields in the middle of nowhere. You touch your feet to bare earth, close your eyes, and you just connect for just a second before you get caught up with everything in your day. And just that one exercise alone will reground you to God made things over. Man made things. So three shifts that are perhaps contrarian in nature that I want to invite you to think about. One is the best things in life don't scale. Pursue fewer, deeper. Less. Fewer relationships. Deeper relationships. Less oxytocin over dopamine. For people to trust you in a world where the default state is distrust, they need to see three things. They need to see your heart, your humor and your humanity. And then number three, hands in the dirt. More time with God made things over man made things. Three shifts in the AI world.

Return to real.

Return to real.

When does that book come out, brother?

Spring 2026.

Oh, that soon. I'm excited, man.

Around the corner.

I can't wait. I'll be preordering the day it comes out. Well, Ryan, I love you, brother.

Appreciate it, man.

I'm so grateful. You and I are about to head to Front Row Dads Live.

That's right.

That's gonna be great. Well, I love this again. When you shared this message, it felt real, it felt right. And I love of all three of those contrarian perspectives, more time with God made things. Something that I recently started doing. Actually invited, bro. I called John. I was all excited. I said, hey, John, do you go to the bathroom with your phone or do you go to the bathroom with God? He's like, what do you mean?

I go.

You really can't do both because if you're on your phone, you're completely distracted from the silence and the voice and the whispers and the insight and higher intelligence. I said, so something I'm doing for the month of December is I'm going to the bathroom with God instead of going to the bathroom with my phone. So just another low hanging fruit practice that people can add to their putting their feet in dirt before they look at. How did you say it?

Touch earth before touching a screen.

Touch earth before touching a screen. I love that. Well brother, you are a wealth of love and wisdom and I'm so grateful that we got to do this today.

Likewise, man.

All right, and goal achievers, welcome. Thank you for listening to the podcast. I love you so much and I'll talk to you next week. If you enjoyed today's conversation with Ryan Levesque, I highly recommend subscribing to his weekly newsletter, the Digital Contrarian at the digital contrarian.com over 100,000 entrepreneurs already read it every week. Every weekend, Ryan breaks down what's actually changing in the digital world, with an emphasis on navigating AI. He gives a clear analysis on what's working, what's breaking, and what's coming next. And as you learn from this interview, he's one of the most brilliant minds of our time. So if you think differently or you want to head over to the digital contrarian.com and subscribe one email a week written by Ryan himself. No AI, unfiltered insights, no fluff. You'll be glad that you did.

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