#1: Friends, meet books. Books, friends! (#43)

You're listening to Optimize with Bryan Johnson. More wisdom in less time. Hey guys, what's up? This is Brian, Happiest of Tuesdays to you today. We've got a special edition coming at you from the studio in the barn which I'm converting into a little set that I'll use for the top three series. Etc. Barn's a mess. Or I'll give you a full tour. Little Texas flag there I asked the prior owner to keep. It's just beautiful. It used to be back here which I use as the. That's the backdrop for plus ones. We got all the lights up there. When I have this barn studio cleaner, I will give you an official tour. Still unpacking the books and all that. Anyway, that's like over 500 books. We have over 600 philosopher's notes. Managed to get 500 of them up here. So I'm going to systematically walk through my top three favorite books by 30 different categories. This morning I prepared for about 11 of them. No pen. I feel naked without a pen. I can't write. What's going on? Where is it? Oh, no. All right. Well, it is what it is. I'll walk you through that. I've got the Aura report. Ice bath again. Interesting to see some fun data on that. But first, what day is today? Oh yeah. Today is day one. Registration for class three is officially closed. Fired up about that. That is going next opportunity. January 1, 2021. Optimize me, Coach. And of course optimize me for everything else. Free two week trial, etc. So let's go to Aura. Got my top three favorite books of all time sitting up there. The tools, deep work. Happy together. Excited to kick off the series with that video. All right. Sleep was excellent. Thank you, aura. Energy is good. 83 energy, 85 sleep. Still paying back that HRV debt. What I want to share today is just the funny. Did an ice bath again last night and it's astonishing. So yesterday I think I mentioned that my resting heart rate just plummeted after I did the ice bath. Right. So long story short, did my heart rate with the little oximeter before I got into the ice bath. It was like 70. I had just gone on a walk. I sat in the ice bath maybe like 5, 10% ice. Still floating. It's not crazy cold for five minutes. And my heart rate literally within minutes afterwards just plummeted to 38. Oxygen. Oxygen saturation was 100. I'm standing up and it's 38. It's just awesome. And then I fell asleep an hour later. And look at my heart rate variability just spiked in the beginning of the night. Now it wound up going down 180 spike. That's crazy. Average wound up being 56, which is fine, you know, not great, not bad, whatever. But I thought that spike was pretty amusing. And then the other fun thing from the ice bath story was Emerson. So Emerson did it with me. He didn't want to do it for very long. He just wanted to get in and get out. I said, buddy, you know, he's all about lowering his resting heart rate, though. So I told him, dude, this is going to help you lower your resting heart rate. And then I might have squeezed in some. William James, you want to deliberately practice your will. Doing hard things right makes you stronger. I didn't quite get to the fact that his infinite potential exists on the other side of his comfort zone, but we kind of got there and then I did tell him that when you do hard things afterwards, you feel great. You're going to feel so good after this. And he did it. He got in and I told him, look, the first 30, 40 seconds are what's hard. Just get through that. Breathe through your nose, you're good. He wanted to get out, challenged him, stay in. He was good. And then he wouldn't get out. He wound up staying in for three minutes. I'm like, dude, a minute's good. He's like, no, I'm staying longer. Super sweet, super fun experience to share with him. So I am so excited about the. Never shared this coin. This is going to become my new bookmark. So this is one of the coins I got when Emerson and I got the. One of the things we got when he and I got the tour of the Navy SEAL facilities in Coronado as part of me doing my little talk with their mental performance Working group. Captain Bob, thank you so much. This is a special coin. They create them for different kind of groups. Captain Bob ran East coast seals. He was the head of character development at the Naval Academy. He's going to be joining optimized coach as well. We're excited about that as a luminary. Anyway, this is my new little kind of. What do you call that? Paperweight. Top three favorite books. I realized it's not so much favorite books as I started doing it. It's the books that have been most life changing for me. Right. Because I can have. There's. I mean, it's impossible to try to create a top list because these books, frankly, are all great. They had ideas in them that Shaped my life. Every single one of these books, you know, 600 philosopher's notes, each has about five to 10 big ideas. That's literally over 3,000 big ideas, any one of which could literally change our lives. And a ton of them have. So as I was preparing, I realized, okay, well, it's not favorite books per se. It's the ones that changed my life the most. Right? And I'm going to kind of share a life changing idea and why I picked these top three books. And we're going to launch this series on October 1st. I'm going to film them all. We're going to put them into post production and then kind of share them one a day over the month of October. And you're gonna be able to get the free trial and then the top three will have a page that has all my top threes, all 30 of them. We're really excited about that. We're also gonna run a special lifetime offer of 250 bucks to be lifetime optimized members. As we lean into some exciting things ending 2020 strong and going off on 2021, let's alchemize all the challenges from this year. Anyway, top three favorite books. As you know, the tools, Deep work, Happy together. That's going to be fun to talk about why each one moved me so much. And then we've got top three most life changing books of all time, Habits Wise. As you know, if you've been following along, I'm all about using your willpower wisely to install habits that run on autopilot via algorithms. I obsess on that. We have Willpower101, Habits101 and Algorithms101 as part of the general membership at Optimize Me. Then I just go off on this. In the Mastery series for optimized Coach, this is how you fundamentally and permanently change your life. You get this, right, you learn how to design your behavior, right? So of course, we got to start with Tiny Habits. BJ Fogg is the man out of Stanford. Atomic Habits. James Clear is amazing. And then I actually move this one around a bit. Mini Habits is great. Superhuman by Habit is great. Power of Habit by Duhigg is great. There's a number of other books. Slight edge talent, Code Talent is overrated. They're all amazing. But the compound effect surprised me coming in at the third. But I realized, no, it has to be because this book literally changed my life. Darren Hardy introduced me to the idea of bookends AM and PM bookends, which again, if you follow my Work. You know that that's become a huge part of it. And I, of course, have created the AM PM Boom. Your PM bookend drives your next day concept. So that's that. Then we've got Ancient Wisdom Top three. This was a fun one, too. Nicomachean Ethics. Aristotle's got to be in the top slot because I base everything in Eudaimonology of the Mastery series on his ideas. And then I've got Epictetus, as we discussed. I actually haven't shared the video yet. My top three favorite teachers ever. Epictetus, Maslow and Joseph Campbell. Epictetus discourses. It's Stoicism 101 and then the Bhagavad Gita. That was another tough one. The top two were easy. The third one was hard because there's so many great ancient wisdom books. Aurelius, Seneca, a number of books. Musonius, Rufus, even Confucius, the Daode, jing, the Dhammapada, etc. But I wound up going with the Gita. We'll talk about why. Favorite books of all time. Modern Science. You got to put Seligman in the top slot. Flourish. Then you got Rethinking Positive Thinking. This is extraordinarily powerful. Gabriel Oettingen, one of my favorite teachers. Again, she's part of our coach program. You got to rub your ideal vision up against reality. Whoop. Her Whoop process is something that is a key part of my life. I whoop everything. I have our coaches whoop everything and their clients, etc. Then the third one was another hard one because I got. There are so many books. When I set up my books, I actually started with the Science of Happiness. Literally all of these are positive psychology books. Dozens and dozens and dozens of positive psychology books, which is the foundation of all of our work together. We got to know what science says. Tal Ben Shahar one the third slot. Happier. Tal taught the largest class in Harvard's history. He bridges, as he says in Happier, the bridge between academia and Main Street. He's got some great ideas we'll share. Tull has also become a friend. Feels like a soul brother and I didn't know, but he gets our Optimize plus ones and our stuff every single day. We actually have a testimonial from him on the site, which he shared with us and just super moved to know he's digging what we do. Actually a number of our luminaries and my favorite books actually use Optimize as well. So. Happier. Yeah, that's it right there. We'll Talk about grit, peak presence, power of agency, the psychology of hope. And I'm going to find ways to get these books in different categories because they're so good. Like I'll do a top three on hope. Got to do that, right? Top three. Favorite Most life changing books on fitness, we usually call this Oops, did I skip nutrition? I did nutrition. I actually did that one. I did this one last in my prep this morning because nutrition is the most complex subject that I want to. I really respect the fact that there are so many different ways to approach nutrition. Right. This could get long so I'm going to be quiet but got the nutrition books here. And again, it was most life changing. Like for example, it starts with food. I went from being a low fat, high grains vegan for a decade and I had a ton of migraines. The moment I switched and got off of my grains, I no longer had migraines. Just caught that rhyme this morning. No grains, no migraines for me. And I had some skin issues that resolved immediately, literally within days of adopting a more paleo esque diet via Dallas Hartwigs. It starts with food and Melissa Hartwig. Right, that's life changing. And again, I've kind of evolved from that. There's a lot of different nuanced discussions there, but that's an important book. Happiness diet, super powerful. Just looking at the fact that carbage ultra processed food is highly correlated with depression, we got to know that then of course, food fix. We're going to talk about our optimized food rules briefly there, which I think is a way to allow for all the different approaches to kind of play together. Whether you're vegan or paleo or whatever, that's fine. But here are the three food rules we've come up with. The optimized three plus one rules. Don't drink your sugar. Don't eat factory food, ultra processed factory farmed animals and factory fats. And have an eating sunset at least 13 hours and then eat like your favorite philosopher. Then as I was creating the optimal nutrition, I realized I've got to create one on weight loss, which I never use that phrase, but it's really optimal metabolism. But if you want to lose weight, here's what we need to think about. These are the three books that I lean on to help our coaches lose weight. And again, we actually hold our coaches to a standard of being at their their optimal weight because the number one measure of morbidity via Fat Chance by Robert Lustig is your waist to height ratio. Visceral Fat is dangerous. We need to get it off of our bodies. And the way you do that is you optimize your insulin. And the way you do that is you quit eating so much sugar and fast acting or ultra processed carbs. It really isn't that complicated. But you got to understand the difference between the metabolic theory and the Energy balance theory. Long chat on that. But that's why Eat Fat Get Thin is a great book. So is Always Hungry. And then I picked the Case Against Sugar by Gary Taubes in that category. Then we've got the fitness books. The Joy of Movement, the Maffetone Method, Super Life Changing for Me. And then Sitting Kills Moving Heels. These two aren't really popular books per se, but they changed my life. I'll tell you why. And then I almost forgot. Spartan Up. Joe decenna. Joe's Become a brother and you know we're all in on Spartan. Our coaches need to do a Spartan race with us to graduate. We had the second largest group in history. And the next time we can do a Spartan race together, we will have the largest group in history. We had over 500 people do it together last year. When we get together next year, we're gonna have over a thousand people. Dale Valente, Sleeping, of course. We've got three great books on why we Sleep. Sleep Revolution, Sleep Smarter Than Breathing. That was fun. I actually had fun with the third one here too, which was not a breathing book, but true to form, taught me proper posture. Chest up, chin down, to breathe properly. Focusing. Digital minimalism. Irresistible and stillness is the key. How to get your mind focused on what's important right now. We'll talk about that. And then celebrating life. It starts with self, compassion, accepting yourself. Then you got to have gratitude. Then you got to find pathways to bliss, Joseph Campbell style. Living heroically, celebrating your life. That'll be fun. Then I realized I got to do one on antifragile confidence, which will include Phil Stutz and Barry Michaels Coming Alive, Ray Dalio's Principles and Lanny Basham's With Winning In Mind. Then we've got prosperity. Do that one last. Basically. You know, I don't talk about money a whole lot, but we need to talk about it's important. We come at the end to this in our fundamentals. Spiritual economics, the Science of Getting Rich. Wealth Warrior. Then there's thinking to grow Rich. Rich Dad, Poor Dad, Secrets of the Millionaire Mine. Total Money Makeover. I've got some books on the fire movement coming out soon. Blah, blah, blah, blah. There you go. It's going to keep me busy today. Fired up. All right, there you go. Quick look. Hope you're doing great again. All of those notes, every single one of these books has a note on it. You can get access to all 600 for free. Optimize me. Check it out. Two week trial. That's all I got. That and let's make today a great day. See you tomorrow. We hope you enjoyed this episode of Optymyze 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 Optymyze, check us out at Optimize. The team has set up a free two week trial where you can get instant access to all 600 plus philosophers notes, all the PDFs, the MP3s, get it on the app, et cetera, 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.