#1: A Handbook for the Modern Hero + Surveillance Capitalism + Roman Masterpiece Days (#47)

You're listening to Optimize with Bryan Johnson. More wisdom in less time. Hey, guys, what's up? This is Bry, happiest of Sunday mornings to you. I just had a super epic Sunday morning AM one genius work block about ready to check into Deep love. Before I do that, let's check in. I added a couple of stacks of papers to the desk, my Optimal Living 101 collection and my Mastery series collections of notes and some other exciting stuff I look forward to discussing today. We've got some data on our aura score. I've got a sleep score of 91. And we're going to talk about what's working there and then also want to mention a book I'm reading right now called the Age of Surveillance Capitalism by Shoshana Zuboff. She is one of the main speakers featured in the Social Dilemma, which is that must watch documentary. Seriously, if you haven't watched it yet or haven't planned to watch it yet, get on that. It is a very, very important documentary that addresses one of the most fundamental challenges of our modern society. The Social dilemma. Shoshana, the Age of Surveillance Capitalism. Powerful stuff. I'm actually going to do the top three today. Well, I'll tell you about that in a second. Let me do our official kickoff here. Today's the day, day one that we're going to recommit to being the optimist, best version of ourselves or however we frame that Energy, work and love wise, moving from theory to practice to mastery, operationalizing virtue, playing the game well today. By the way, I'm loving the which pocket did I put it in? I am loving our optimized virtue compass. So I introduced you to this. This is version one. Let me see if I'm learning how to get into this thing. How do you open it with one hand. There you go. So this is version one of the optimized compass. So fired up. And you can set it to different points as I discussed. So I actually had it set this morning between courage and wisdom, which of course is hope in our model and mapped out some things I'm very excited about in terms of next steps for us. Actually, I'll just go there, sneak peek. I'm finally writing my book. I've been working on it kind of behind the scenes for a while. I thought I was going to take another few years, frankly. Get to a thousand philosopher's notes, then write it. Then I realized that's absurd. Now's the time to write the book for a lot of different reasons. So here you Go optimize a handbook for the modern hero in which I'm going to distill the best big ideas from those 500 plus books. These 600 philosopher's notes, these 50. This is a stack of 50 Optimum 101 master classes I've produced on a range of subjects. And then of course we have our mastery series. That's the foundation cornerstone of our optimized coach program. Basically this book is taking all of that, moving it through here and then summarizing our mastery series, which again is the 600 philosopher's notes. Thousand plus ones. Fifty. Optimally 101 classes distilled into a 300 day program. Well, this is going to be a 300 day, a 300 page book. So this morning's assignment was to chip away at it. I know what the seven modules are, sections for the book. Module zero, heaven or hell. You got to make the choice. Are you going for mastery or are you going through the motions? Module one, Eudaimonology, in which ancient wisdom plus modern science says that the ultimate game of life is to express the best version of yourself. And you do that by operationalizing virtue. Module 2 is Hero. Ology Optimize equals optimist equals best equals eudaimon equals hero, in which we operationalize the wisdom from Joseph Campbell's. Wisdom in Finding Joe, in the power of Myth, et cetera. We want antifragile confidence such that the more we get kicked around by life, the stronger we get. We want heroic courage. I talk about the etymology of both of those words and responsibility to be able to step in between stimulus and response and choose our most powerful response. This is habit number one of Stephen Covey's seven habits. Be proactive. Everyone talks about that. Module three. After we set the big picture with Eudaimonology, the game we're playing, to high five our inner souls to be heroes. Then we boil it down into the more concrete. We call it the big three times two. Energy, work and love. Times identity, virtues and behaviors. I talk about an origin story. Stephen Covey has his roles and goals. Tony Robbins has categories of improvement. Right. Freud said life is about work and love. We say, ah, I like that simplicity. But we need energy for our work and love. And this is how we articulate our big three times two. Module four is carpe diem. So when should we put all of this wisdom into action? Today. Yep, today's the day. Which is why I signed this thing every single day to become a master of masterpiece days. You want a great life? Make today a great Day. That's how you create a great life. Module 5 is Algorithms in which we use your willpower wisely to install habits that run on autopilot. We walk through the art and science of behavioral design leaning on all the great wisdom there. Module six is the fundamentals. Eating, moving, sleeping, breathing, Focusing, celebrating and prospering. Exciting. And then module 7 is optimist U practicing your philosophy. Boom. Repeat. This is really chapter infinity. Come back to it. Every single day is day one. Anyway, this morning my challenge to myself was, oh, okay, great. Create the framework in which I'm going to write the book, which is I use paper, Dropbox paper for all my writing, plus ones, etc. So basically I created a table of contents and then I linked to the page on which I'm going to write each of those modules and I'll probably break it down a little bit more, but that was my assignment for today. Super simple. Take a chunk out. Boom. Module one, we got it. It's going. Module two, three, four, five. So here's my seven page book and I will show you behind the scenes this book as it becomes a book. We're going to publish this by the end of the year, so we're going to go high velocity mode on it. We're going to publish it. Optimize press. We've got a lot of ideas beyond this one book that we're going to pursue that I've been kind of incubating for a long time and I'm clearing my calendar so I can go off on it after I do the top threes and a few more PNTVs to get ahead. This is just going to be my 100% exclusive focus. Really, really excited about it. So back to the age of surveillance capitalism. Shoshana Zuboff. The answer to the challenge that we face with the social dilemma is digital minimalism. We have a class also called conquering Digital Addiction 101. So I'm going to do the top three on my favorite three books. I was going to call it focusing, but I'm going to adapt it to conquering digital addiction. Digital Minimalism is our number one book. Irresistible by Adam Alters number two, and then Stillness is the Key by Ryan Holiday. So I'm going to do that today. I'm also going to hit the nutrition top three and weight loss top three. We still have our nutrition books framed there. All of which leads us to the aura. What do we want today? Sleep score is great. Readiness is 83, which is good. My resting heart rate was a little high. And I'm still paying off some HRV debt, which is fine. But when I got this, I immediately looked at the, at the sleep. I'm like, oh, cool. What's working? Excellent. 91. I'll take it. Eight and a half hours of sleep I was in bed for. Oops. Yes, I am feeling refreshed, thank you. Eight and a half hours of sleep in bed for nine hours and 15 minutes. 92% efficiency. That's great. So now I'm thinking, as I look at this data, what did I do differently? Well, I did the cold, not quite super icy bath, but basically an ice bath for five minutes. But then I actually took a warm shower, which was an interesting little tweak, dropped my heart rate. Then I came back up as I took the warm shower, got hour and a half rem, hour and a half deep. But the thing that I noticed that was most significant, that was different was I went to bed earlier. So we went to bed at 7:47 last night, which is early. Although I need to do research on what time did the sun set last night. I haven't looked at it yet. And I realized that I tend to get a better night of sleep when I go to bed a little earlier because then I get more REM sleep because I always get up by 5, if not like 4, 30, whatever. And I know that I sleep better when I go to bed a little earlier. And all of that. Now I need to operationalize that. And then it made me think of the Roman sundials. So this is a longer chat and I did a plus one on this. But in ancient Rome, they kept track of time via sundials. And in a lot of ways, their sundial was much better than our, you know, clocks that we have now. Now, of course, clocks are amazing, blah, blah, blah. But the sundials were epic because the sundials reflected the sunrise and sunset. So they had time blocks, basically. Right. They had 12 hours of, quote, day and then 12 hours of night. And so the length of a particular time block during the day changed depending on whether it was winter or summer. So during the winter and summer, the days are obviously shorter in the winter and longer in the summer. But their 10th hour is always their 10th hour. But it showed up at a different time. Right. So in the winter, it was earlier than in the summer. So I'm really excited to revisit this. And practically speaking, what I'm going to do is adjust my shutdown complete. Your shutdown complete. Time shouldn't be the same, obviously in the winter as it is in the summer, it should be a little later or a little earlier, depending on from my vantage point when the sun's setting and when you want to wrap down so you can get a good night of sleep. Because when you go to bed should be tied to the sunset, not to the time on a clock. Right. Anyway, longer chat on that. But when I looked at this data I thought to myself, oh, awesome. So then practically speaking, what I'm going to do differently is my shutdown complete is going to go from 6pm I thought I was going to go to 5:30, but I'm actually going to go back to 5 and then meditate from. We'll see if I actually do 5:30 or 5 and then meditate for the last half an hour, then transition from deep work to deep love. That's a big deal for me. I'm very excited to take that and run with it again. Longer chat on Roman time and masterpiece days. I got my buddy, I gotta give a shout out. My anonymous buddy who's going to start crushing burpees. Love you brother. We're trading tech. So he's doing the 100,000 step game now. So he's sending me his little data. I'm at 100,000 steps, so I'm sending him my suunto watch. You know, here's my average step count. And it's been really fun to see that when we compete with friends like that, we do better. And the word compete means come patere, right? It's from the. I think it's ancient Latin, right? It means to strive together, not to strive against. So when you have someone who you admire and who you have fun doing great things with, you strive together. It's like an Olympic racer. They run faster when the person next to them is also training hard and running faster. So I love that idea of competing together, right? To strive together, not against, but together. It got me to go out and do another walk yesterday. We talked about nutrition and weight loss. Top three is coming. Surveillance capitalism again. If you want to understand this domain, that's a book worth exploring. I'll be doing a note on it once I get through this push. And then we've got the handbook. Couldn't be more excited to share the distillation of my life's work into Again, I'm setting some playful constraints. A 300 page book in which we integrate ancient wisdom, modern science, practical tools and give you a handbook. So the handbook is from why I'm going to name it a handbook is Epictetus my Favorite teacher. His enchiridion literally means handbook, right? It's translated as handbook, but it really means ready at hand. So Epictetus taught that your wisdom as a philosopher, a lover of wisdom, it should be literally like a tool or like a weapon that's ready at hand, right? That's what his handbook was. It was wisdom that you can use in your life today. And that's how I'm picturing our book. It's a handbook for the modern hero. Someone who's committed to having the strength for two going out and making a difference in the world, playing their roles well, energy, work in love, wise, and as I say, all the time in a vicious world. We need more virtuous heroes than ever before. We need you to be a modern hero. And I'm excited to share my thoughts on the subject soon. For now, let's do this. Make today an awesome day. Time for me to go work out. Actually, I'm going to do a walk with the wifey. We've got our AM walk routine installed. I do a walk with the wifey in the morning and then a walk and work out with the kids. And at night I do a walk with the wifey and then another walk with the kids. So we're doing four loops. I'm doing four loops with the family. Then dropping Emerson off at his bow making class. He's in nature school and he's making a bow and arrow set. Pretty awesome. Hanging out with Eleanor and having a great day. Hope you have a great day. Look forward to sharing more. Big love. See you. We hope you enjoyed this episode of Optimize with Brian Johnson. To find out more, go to Optimize Me. Hi, this is Brian. Hope you enjoyed that number One quick note. If you want to go deeper into Optimize, check us out at Optimize Me. The team has set up a free two week trial where you can get instant access to all 600 plus philosopher's notes, all the PDFs, the MP3s, get it on the app, etc. And 50 optimal living 101 classes on a range of subjects and of course the thousand plus Optimize plus ones. And then if you want to go all in, check out Optimize Coach. Optimize Me for the free trial for the core wisdom Optimize Me Coach. If you want to go all in and master yourself, serve heroically and empower others to do the same, have a great day. See you tomorrow.