#1: Friends, meet Optimize Compass. Compass, Friends. (#46)

You're listening to Optimize with Bryan Johnson. More wisdom in less time. Hey guys, what's up? This is Bry coming at you live Saturday morning from the Barn studio. Got the top three series going on. Next up is going to be nutrition. Top three favorite books on nutrition of all time. That'll be fun. And then we're going to do weight loss. Top three books to get to your optimal weight. And I have a fun update on some more experiments in terms of the aura data. Heart rate variability, resting heart rate, etc. We'll talk about. But the most exciting thing today is friends. I'd like to introduce you to version one of the optimize hero version, Virtue Compass. I'll walk you through that in a second. This is kind of our first little design comp. It's not quite there yet, but it is awesome. And I'm super fired up about it. Let's not get ahead of ourselves. Today is the day to recommit to being our best selves. Energy, work and love wise. There we go. Yesterday I spent three hours in our soul Force forge with our optimized coaches. We now have so fun. We have people from Coach class one, Coach class two, Coach Class three all around the world exploring a range of topics. It's one of my favorite things, period. So that's that. Well, don't need to do that. That's that. And let's do the aura. Then we'll talk about the compass. So here's what's interesting on aura. I want to show you the last three days of data, right? Just to show you different kind of patterns. And then I'll tell you what behaviors I engaged in that resulted in these different patterns. So first of all, we have last night. So last night I did a nice bath. Again, I had my last meal at 1pm I wanted to kind of have an extended fast. Use that as a tool to drop my resting heart rate because recall Yesterday it was 44. My heart rate variability was 44 average. I don't like having my resting heart rate and my heart rate variability equivalent. So I wanted to drop the resting heart rate and I wanted to increase my heart rate variability. The two things I. Well, the number one thing I did to drop my heart rate as you know at this point is I ate earlier. And again I did my three hour session from 11:30 my time to like 2:30 my time. Then I worked at the office and didn't get back until like after four. And I'm not going to eat after four. That's A commitment of mine. So I just fasted. Big deal. 1pm, latest meal. And I knew that that would drive my resting heart rate down, which it did, from 44 to 41. Awesome. Then I took an ice bath about an hour and 15 minutes before I went to bed. And I added four bags today or last night rather, and it was cold. Spent three minutes in there. And it was fascinating for me to see my resting heart rate go from 70. I just done a walk around our trail to like 40 after I got out of the cold plunge and put on the little pulse oximeter. It's astonishing to me what ice does for resting heart rate and then to see this number heart rate variability. So my heart rate variability also spiked. Literally. I went hit 211 an hour plus after I did the ice bath. And then my average for the night wound up being 79. Now let's compare that. So you see that ice boom stimulated that. But I maintained a very pretty high level over the night. Whereas the night before, my heart rate variability was very low in the beginning of the night. Can you see that? It was low versus high, low, high. That's a function of two things. One, I ate too late and I didn't do the ice bath. Right. Boom. That's fascinating to me to see. We can look at the same parallels with the. And then it went up during the night, later in the night after I digested my food and all that kind of stuff. Then you can see heart rate variability on kind of a quote, normal night was just reasonably high the whole time. Right. And you can look at my heart rate on kind of a normal night where I ate before 4, like around 3 that night. And it got down to 43, which is not as low as I tend to get it, but it was pretty flat. It wasn't jagged and crazy. Right. Whereas the night that I ate late, it was super high. My heart rate, look how high it is versus the night before. Right. So it just pegs itself at 45 and average 43 low. Whereas when I ate late, my heart rate average was 51. And the lowest it ever got to was 44. And it took a long time for it to hit that low point. Now, again, I'm just sharing this because whether you use aura or any data tracking when you eat your last meal is affecting you. And I'd love to see what your data shows. And maybe it's not quite like this, or maybe it's more, or maybe it's whatever it is. But we want to make the connection between choices. We're making during our days, and particularly how we're ending our days and how that's influencing our sleep, and then, of course, how that influences our next day. One of the things I tell our coaches is these are some of my strategic notes went off this morning. Wow. What is that? No, that's the wrong stack. One of the things I tell our coaches, we'll get out a Optimize fundamental coaching pad where you write yourself a prescription to what you need to do today. Here you go. This is the prescription pad. So one of the things I teach our coaches again and again and again is, look, if you want to create a masterpiece day, first of all, you need to know you got more control over your AM and your PM bookends. As Darren Hardy says in one of my top books on habits, a.m. and p.m. bookends, you have more control over those than you do the kind of middle of your day when it tends to get out of control. But what I say is, you got to know that your PM bookend counts twice, because your pm, how you ended your day before, is directly driving how you feel in the morning and then how you feel for the rest of the day. Then you have another pm. So technically, PM counts twice in any given day. And then we just hammer home the point that it just repeats itself. So if you can lock down your PM routine again by eating a little bit earlier, by turning off your electronics, by shutting down your work completely, rather than straggling till the last second you go to bed and not looking at your smartphone right before you go to bed, and then first thing when you wake up in the morning, you can create masterpiece days, which is how you create a masterpiece life. So that's the intention behind me sharing some of this granular data in details here. With that, I hereby present to you the Optimize. We'll figure out. We're probably going to put Optimize and Cursive on the COVID here. So this is like a brass. It's a true compass that actually works. I fixed it in a certain position, but let me actually move it. So if you notice, I journal. I didn't bring in my journaling this morning, but I journal every single morning the four cardinal virtues. Now, just creatively to give you a perspective here, the font size needs to be increased and the style needs to be changed so it looks more like a classic compass. So this is just V1 sample. Stoked to be holding it, though. So basically, there's four cardinal virtues of ancient Stoicism and ancient wisdom Traditions. Across all cultures. Wisdom, then they call it, which is kind of the meta virtue. Right. Then they talk about temperance in Stoicism in ancient Greece. But really that's self mastery. Let's be cool about it here. Temperance. No, self mastery. Do you know the game you're playing? That's wisdom. And can you get yourself to play it well today? Boom. Then you have courage, which is the word that everyone uses. Then you have love. Now, the Stoics and the ancient Greeks talked about justice, but if you read their stuff, you know that they're talking about something deeper. They're talking about love. Justice is basically treating people well, but also serving them profoundly. Again, you read Marcus Aurelius and his commitment to humanity. It's pure love. So wisdom, self mastery, courage, love. Those are our four cardinal virtues. Those are the four points points on our compass. Right. Then science says there are five virtues most highly correlated with our flourishing. Eudaimonia, vio arete. Flourishing by putting our virtues in action. Love again. So we already have that one covered in the cardinal. Then hope. The belief that your future will be better than your present. Gratitude. Actually recognizing how awesome your life is right now. Seeing the blessings and the gifts, taking things as granted, not for granted. And then curiosity. You got to be open to life. See what's working, see what needs work. And then zest. And again, this is actually the number one predictor. Your energy, your well being. So anyway, we're going to increase the font size on that. And then what's fun is you can kind of turn right and is it going to turn with me? There we go. But then what I noticed is and we got that little blue customize optimize blue kind of thing going. So the other day when I shut down from work, I actually locked it into love. Right. So let me see if I can do that. Where are we going? There we go. So now I can lock it into love. Boom. I want to cultivate the virtue of love. That's my focus right now. This morning I actually set it to self mastery and zest as I created some exciting distinctions with our business in next phase, which I'll actually save for tomorrow to share that with you. But there you go. Friends, meet the Optimize Hero Virtue compass. We'll figure out what we're actually going to call it. I kind of like Hero Compass. I think we're going to put optimize again in cursive on the top here. And then we're going to put Optimize equals Optimus. We're going to do that lanyard thing. Optimize equals optimus equals best equals udemo equals hero. Wrapping it around the center, then putting in the middle hero. Reminding ourselves that this is the game that we're playing. This is how we play it. Well, by engaging in virtues. And again, I'm more clear than ever that my life's purpose and my role in life is to train heroes. To train and to lead heroes. That's what our Optimize coach program is all about. Again, optimize is from the Latin optimus, which means the best, the best version of you. The Greeks called that eu daimon, a good soul. But we can't stop there. But we need to become heroes. Have strength for two, be a protector, go out and make a difference in the world. And we. I am committed, fiercely committed to training 100,000 optimized coaches over the next decade by 2030. And I see it as an army of virtuous heroes. This is our compass. And that's all I got today. All right, what do you got today? How you gonna get a little better? Give us all you got. Get on that. Look forward to sharing more with you soon. See you. 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 + philosopher's 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 + optimize + 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.