Heroic Chat with Ben Greenfield: Creating Inventive Solutions

Hey, Heroes. Today's episode features a mastery level chat with one of our friends and world class experts sharing how they show up as the best version of themselves. This heroic chat with Brian was recorded live in front of a virtual audience of heroic community members and coaches. To learn more about this series as well as how you can join Brian's daily live coaching sessions at 1:01pm Central Time. Plus get access to a ton more to help you move from theory to practice to mastery and express the best, most heroic version of yourself. Head to heroic us today and if you like this episode, please leave a positive review and hit the subscribe button. Wherever you get your podcasts. Now, here's your host, Brian Johnson.

Heroes, it is 1:01pm plus some change. It's day one. We've got a special guest, my friend Ben Greenfield, who's been one of the biggest influences on me, and my energy has helped shape my energy, my family's energy. Ben, great to have you here, dude.

Hey, it's. It's good to be here. Brian. I. I'm feeling a little bit jealous that you have the cool arete. Arete? Is that how you pronounce it?

You know what? It's debatable. Arete. Arete is how we're rolling with it.

Okay, cool. Yeah, I don't have the T shirt, but I got the book, man.

You.

You have the T shirt. So I had asked him to go grab the T shirt so we can get it.

I mean, I have it. I just don't. You know what? I do have a little bit of envy, though, because you got a bookmark in yours. I should have thought of putting a bookmark in my books, man.

So the joke here is that Ben was giving me a hard time. He's like, dude, it's a big book. I started chipping away. I got the Downpour audiobook, and I'm like, are you kidding me? So I owe Ben two philosopher's notes on two of his great books. He's getting to work out there, but I'm liking that, dude. It's a good weight, isn't it? Mine's too good. Yeah, this is yours. You're just considerably bigger.

I don't even know according to what I get billed. Sometimes if I ship it to an event, it weighs too much, dude.

Okay, well, 635 pages. I beat you on the page count, but I did not beat you on the density and the weight. But Boundless is one of Ben's books. Boundless Parenting is a more recent one. Note on both of those coming up. My. My stall on that. As I've told Ben, dude, I don't even know where to begin. I have read every single page of every single book that I have featured, and I literally was like, dude, it's. Ben is an encyclopedia of wisdom from the first time I met you, way forever ago. The depth of your.

Wait, wait, wait, wait. Sneak peek. Sneak peek. I got. I got to interrupt you there real quick because I got one other thing to show you, dude. Okay. Never before seen on any podcast before. This is a first. This is for you, Brian. This. This just arrived at my house two days ago.

Awesome.

This is the next one.

Super cool.

Down with the kitchen and look how thin it is. You're gonna love it. But yeah, dude, that's the one. This is the one with all the recipes. I've even got the raw liver smoothie recipe in here for anybody who's brave enough to try it. But there's also stuff like the cashew cream waffles with the cashew cream frosting and all sorts of goodies. So there you go.

So if you haven't noticed, Ben is on his walking. Whatever it is. Treadmill. We've got the. What is that red infrared lights next to us. I was telling him I was expecting to have him getting a stem cell treatment while we were talking. Ben is a cutting edge biohacker, as you know, if you've been following along and so good. All right, man. Well, we're already. We're already well into our chat here, but hello, everybody. I'll say hi to you at the other side of this. As you know, Ben, heroic chats with masters. I like to talk about some of my favorite people's heroic journeys, you know, the quests they've been on and would love to hear more from you. We'll get into all the practical stuff, Energy, work and love and all that good stuff. But I want to know more about you. So tell us about you, who you are, what brought you here. Ideally, through the lens of the hero on a journey. Perhaps some great guides, some great dragons that gave you an opportunity to practice your philosophy and all that good stuff.

Oh, the hero's journey. Okay, well, I suppose we'll start with the. The ordinary world before the. The approach to the. The crossing of the threshold and. And the Innermost Cave and the Allies and the Mentors and the Enemies and the Resurrection and the return with the elixir and all the stuff that comes after that ordinary world. For me, I was born in North Idaho, grew up homeschooled K through 12, roaming around the the hills and the sticks of Idaho with me and my two brothers and two sisters. I had zero interest at all in physical culture and human science and physiology or biomechanics or any of the things I play in these days. Instead, I was just a consummate nerd. I, I must have read JRR Tolkien's Lord of the Rings and CS Lewis Chronicles of Narnia half a dozen times by the time I was 13 years old. I, I loved fantasy fiction. My, my happy place was the library. I played violin for 13 years. I was president of the chess club. And I was dead set on designing computer games and video games, which was another passion of mine. I got put into tennis lessons by my parents 11 year when I was 13 and fell in love with the sport of tennis. And that really got me interested in everything from, you know, convincing my dad to take me to the sporting goods store six miles down the road where the nearest city was to buy a couple of 10 pound dumbbells that I had no clue what to do with, but I'd like lay on the edge of my bed and do dumbbell curls. And I started running up the hills behind the house and I started researching things like, you know, protein to put on muscle and hydration, electrolytes and man. I just fell in love with human science and how to get the most out of the human body and brain. And by the time I graduated from high school When I was 15, I started college. I was 15. I decided to study exercise physiology instead of going off to, to intern with one of my friends who was a Microsoft computer programmer to do video game design and at that point just like fed through the fire hose for five years. I got a master's degree in exercise physiology and biomechanics. I completed all my med school coursework and got accepted to six different medical schools and opted instead to work in the private sector. Coming out of college in hip and knee surgical sales with the hopes that that would kind of make me more palatable to a couple of MD PhD programs that I actually didn't get accepted into and really wanted to. Long story short, though, over about eight months of working in the modern medical field, I became pretty disillusioned with medicine and the fact that I was standing there with the laser pointer in a surgical room with these doctors, you know, showing them how to install, you know, forty thousand dollar overpriced hip and knee implants into patients who would have been better served via preventive medicine and an education on you know, how to take care of their joints and how to lose weight and how to eat right and move well, all the things I knew from college. And so basically I quit that job about eight months in. I, I walked across the street from my apartment in Liberty Lake, Washington. I slapped my resume on the counter of the local gym and I asked for a job. I got a job managing the Liberty Lake Athletic Club. And about two years into that I met up with a physician who was the orthopedic surgeon for Rock and Roll Marathon, an Ironman triathlon. He and I partnered up and we launched this massive one stop shop for sports medicine with chiropractic docs and massage therapists and physical therapists and doctor and I was director of sports performance. So you know, I, I was already pretty geeked out back in the day, Brian. I loved biohacking and technology and, and I kind of loved all the cutting edge science. I was already also racing in Ironman triathlon myself after coming out of a couple of years stint in bodybuilding. And so, you know, I, I loved to figure out how to get the most out of the human body and brain with all these, you know, crazy sports I was competing in. So basically I had all these high speed video cameras and indirect calorimetry equipment and you know, blood centrifuging equipment. It was kind of like a tricked out, geeked out personal training environment. And I guess as a result of all this kind of forward thinking stuff I was doing, I got voted as America's top personal trainer back in 2008. And that kind of thrust me into the limelight of traveling around the country giving talks at all these health conferences about how to run brick and mortar personal training studios and how to use technology to get the most out of your clients. And you know, I'm traveling, I'm running all these studios and gyms and then, gosh darn it, my wife gets pregnant with twin boys. And I realized there was no way I could sustain the life I was living. You know, I was pretty successful in terms of my businesses, but pretty much barely at home at all. And I had this desire to be like a really present at home, father and husband and homeschool my sons and I had to kind of reinvent my lifestyle. So I was sitting at one of these health conferences and this guy got up and gave a talk about how to create online information products, how to like take all of your knowledge and package it up and make it available online. And that was just a foreign world to me at the time. Like I Had a little website and newsletter and that was about it. But I took copious notes. And I spent the next eight months after sitting there at that conference hearing this guy talk about how to create online PDFs and have different companies print and ship your stuff. And I would get home from the gym at 9 or 10pm I'd have a quick bite to eat with my wife and then I'd go into my home Office until about 2 or 3am Coding my website and reading Tim Ferriss's 4 Hour Workweek about how to delegate and outsource. And you know, I open a Craigslist ad in Manila, Philippines and hired my first VA and just got into this whole world that was totally different to me, like online publishing and content creation. I wound up creating this entire package called the Triathlon Dominator. It was a program that taught you how to race an Ironman Triathlon, but be able to do so with a minimum effective dose of exercise. Like be able to climb this huge mountain without neglecting your personal life and your social life and your hobbies and your career and your family and your friends. And I wound up finishing it all, packaging it up. And I launched it during the Ironman Hawaii race week because I knew there were a lot of eyeballs on the sport at that time. And I got like, I was kind of, kind of ballsy with it. I even got to the point where I had all my, my tweets lined up for exactly where I'd be in the race. Like, oh, hey, here I am coming out of the water. I use the Triathlon Dominator plan to, you know, to get through the swim. And then I'd have like tweets pre scheduled for different points in the bike ride where I'd be like 90 miles in and feeling good. I use the Triathlon Dominator program to get ready for this race. And of course I could have totally shot myself in the foot because you're pretty seasoned in endurance sports, Brian. You know, a lot of stuff can go wrong and you might not do exactly what you thought you'd do, but it all turned out pretty well. I crossed the finish line exactly, like down to 10 minutes of what I'd predicted with, you know, all of the, the elements of the program that I created. And long story short is like over the course of a week after finishing that race and marketing the program, you know, I made in a week about like $50,000 in sales of this, this triathlon training program. And that was, you know, about, at that time, about half as much as I was making a whole year as a personal trainer. And so I, I wound up selling all my gyms and studios and stepping down as like a brick and mortar personal trainer. I started a podcast. You know, I, I built my newsletter. I started freelancing for magazines and writing books and doing online coaching and continuing to create information products for marathoning and for swimming and for different injuries and for nutrition and. And you know, basically that was 15 years ago. And I. That's a lot of what I do now. You know, I podcast, I write books, I create articles, I create programs, I do some online coaching. But it really started off with me just kind of getting into the sport of tennis and geeking out on exercise science and eventually kind of creating my own lifestyle design based business at home. And just in case you're wondering, my boys are 15 now. They're unschooled slash homeschooled. Something I talk about a lot in that boundless parenting book you held up. And we just have an amazing life. They wake up in the morning and they study all those things that they're passionate about and have a deep interest and desire in. And we hang out as a family every day. It's a big party at our house every night with family dinners and songs and games and. And so, yeah, that's kind of the short version of the hero's journey, I suppose.

Yeah, that's great. And you remind we had a call earlier this week with the guy that started Comic Con and it's like the same chat, just his passion was comic books growing up, and he followed that bliss, as Joseph Campbell would say, and he pushed a lot of edges. He's willing to be ballsy, as you said, and just take risks and do different things. And boom, here we go. He created a life of meaning based on that. I love your story. There's so many different threads we can pull on that. Ben's also a child's book author. What's the name of your kid's book again?

Oh, well, it's. I mean, actually it's funny you say that because I am kind of like trying to finish an illustrated kid's book about these kids that are whisked away into this magical land of candies and trees that, that grow, you know, chocolate covered cherries and, you know, it's kind of like a Willy Wonka meets fantasy fiction. But what I actually wrote was a fantasy fiction novel for young adults called the Forest, inspired by my boys, where they're wandering in the forest, you know, and there's this old shed Back behind me in the forest where we live. And you know, that turned out to be the inspiration for a portal. These guys are whisked off to another world where they, you know, fight dragons, rescue princesses. But yeah, that book's called the Forest and it's the part one of a book series I plan to finish where there's a winter world, an ocean world, a desert world, and then the final book will be a space world. But right now I only have one book written for that series.

We got it. We got that book. We got the audiobook version of it. It's awesome.

Oh, nice.

Yeah, dude, so good. You do a little bit of everything. I want to talk more in a moment about how you do all those things. But, but 15 years old, you already graduated from high school. Like, what's going on? You've been driven since obviously a very young age to excel at whatever you're doing. How would you explain that? In that energy and just that I don't even know what the word is for it, but kind of drive to excellence, really. I mean, what's going on in that part of your life?

Well, I think a couple of things, Brian. The first is that you can't deny the neurochemical and biological hardwiring that some people have that causes them to be driven individuals. There are books like the book Driven by Doug Brackman, which is excellent, goes into how to manage the busy monkey mind that a lot of people who are driven hard charging, high achieving individuals tend to have. There's another newer book by Jeff Hayes called the Entrepreneurial Brain. It's kind of similar, but you know, in many cases, you know, and this is kind of my wheelhouse is when you dig into the genetics of this, certain people have wiring and what are called their comt genetic pathways that dictate that they're wired up from a dopamine standpoint to need constant stimulus, constant achievement. They really thrive on getting things done on checklisting. They're the same type of people who wind up laying in bed awake at night with ruminating thoughts and needing to constantly be taking notes and delegating and checklisting and accomplishing. And even on most of the personality profiles I've done, I rank very high as a timekeeper, a deliverer, an integrator, a visionary. And so a lot of that is technically neurochemically driven from a genetic standpoint. And so part of it's hardwiring. And of course it's not just nature, there's also nurture. My father growing up was A serial entrepreneur. His father was one of the top stainless steel cookware salesmen in Florida. His best friend was Zig Ziglar. I don't know if you know who Zig Ziglar is, a motivational speaker, you know, back in the day. And so my father or my grandfather was a, was an entrepreneur. My father was a serial entrepreneur. As I grew up, he went across all spectrums from a bagel and a coffee shop franchise to a telecommunications company. You know, I was the first amongst my friends with a pager and a giant brick sized cell phone because my dad was an early adopter of technology. You know, we were the cool kids with the 56,6K modem back in the day when everybody else had the 28, 8 and he, you know, he had a non ambulance or a non emergency medical transport ambulance company. You know, he was the chairman of the local pregnancy counseling board. Volunteered a lot in the local community. Both my parents were, they were the heads of the local homeschooling group. And so we constantly just had an influx of kids and adults at our house all day long, just playing and socializing and studying together. And so having grown up with a father who was a serial entrepreneur, being hardwired just from a genetic standpoint as a driven individual, I think both of those things really influence my current energy and drive and infatuation with finding solutions to problems and creating ways to help people and creating businesses around those. I think one other really important thing is that being homeschooled in general, you tend to think outside the box. You don't learn via an educational system that largely in our westernized society is borrowed from an old German system of creating factory workers and people who can line up in a row and who do a good job making widgets and putting square pegs into square holes and round pegs into round holes. But I think that the creative, resilient, free thinking human being of the future is one that's able to create inventive solutions to problems who can move and adapt on the fly. As things like AI and automation and computer programming and robotics tend to replace a lot of these rote factory worker style jobs. And I think anybody who grows up homeschooled or unschooled tends to kind of be put into a category where they're not learning at the same pace as the rest of the classroom. They're not memorizing rote facts. They're instead often, you know, at least this was the case with me and my sons involved in a lot more experiential learning, right? Like hands on activities and you know, lifestyle based activities, you know, such as my son's math curriculum a couple years ago was just like building a tree fort rather than learning math, instead learning to work with angles and, and, and woodworking and geometry. And of course the test for that is a pass fail for whether or not the tree fort blows down. Right? But the idea here is that when you grow up homeschooled, you adapt this outside the box thinking mentality that basically comes down to questioning a lot. As a matter of fact, my father is battling with cancer right now and we've had a lot of really meaningful chats. And one thing that he reminded me during a chat we had last week was, Ben, one thing I taught you growing up was to question everything. To question everything. Look into the reason why people think or operate in certain ways and analyze whether or not that's really true or whether or not it's just something that they've borrowed or inherited from someone else without questioning whether that actually works or what the reasoning is behind it. My father takes that to a pretty extreme point where, you know, he's a, he's a flat Earther. You know, he thinks the moon landing was fake. You know, he thinks the Internet is here to control our minds. And of course you can question everything and go kind of overboard with it. But ultimately I think that being homeschooled, being hardwired to be driven, and also growing up with a father and a grandfather who are both very entrepreneurial has certainly influenced me.

Hey, Hiro, have you heard the news about Brian's book? Arete, activate your heroic potential. Head to Heroic US Book to learn more and get your copy as well as check out exclusive content and bonuses. That's Heroic US Book. Now back to today's episode.

That's amazing. Which is a kind of a follow on question to the hero on his quest is what guides have supported you? And it sounds like your father, your grandfather, who else has been kind of formative for you. And then we can start getting into some of the applied wisdom and all the things that have come out of that.

Well, I'm horrible at having mentors. I don't really have like a coach who I call up on a regular basis, someone who I lie upon regularly for advice. My mentors are people like you, Brian. My mentors are books. Right. And I think that's, that's something that we're incredibly blessed with. You know, post printing press is we have the ability to be able to learn from the ancients and the moderns via readily accessible written word and now audio, word and even video that allows, you know, guys like me who want to learn something to just be able to pick up a book and learn. And I have a massive library even in our house with my sons, Right. There's this unwritten rule that, you know, if you want a Lego set or, you know, or a Nerf gun or what have you, you know, you can save up for that and buy it yourself. But books are pretty much one of those things where if either my sons comes to me and wants a book, it's almost no questions asked, I'll buy it. I think books are an incredible resource and a source of everlasting wealth. So I have a massive library that I'm proud of. I read typically three to five books a week. I always have a book on the bedside, a book in the office, a book in the, you know, in the Zen den where the sauna and the hyperbaric chamber are, you know, and I'm just reading all the time. Even when I go to the gym, you know, I'm. It's always an audiobook that I'm listening to. Very seldom is it music. And I'm just a lifelong learner, so my mentors really are our books. And, you know, sometimes I don't read them cover to cover. That's where your. Your philosopher's notes, later optimized, now heroic, have come in pretty handy because they're a great way for me to digest books on the fly and get the best of the best. You know, making a guy like you read the whole thing, then tell me what's in it. But yeah, you know, there are other book summaries that I like out there. Like, Derek Sivers has some good ones, James Clear has some good ones. You know, I'm a big fan of digests that consolidate a lot of information. You know, even in research science. I subscribe to, like, the exam and newsletter and research feed to Alan Argon's research feed newsletter, to a variety of journals and newsletters that allow me to get a lot delivered to me in short chunks all at once. And then of course, there's other services you're aware of, like, you know, like, like Blinkist or Scribe or, you know, other ways that you can get a lot of stuff kind of condensed down for you. But ultimately, between book reviews and reading full books, I. I go through a lot of learning materials.

That's amazing. All right, so then if we were going to make a list of, dude, you got to read this book. What would be on that list? Knowing it's impossible to answer the question. But what comes up?

I have a whole shelf that's behind me. Since I dropped this green screen, I can't see it, but it's. It's this one shelf in my office that are all the books that I want to return to and read on a regular basis. Like every year or two. You know, there's, there's a wide variety. I'm a big fan of the spiritual disciplines, so books by Richard Foster or Donald Whitney on the practices of silence, solitude, meditation, fasting, etc. Very similarly books on the stoic lifestyle. You know, Ryan Holiday's books like Stillness is the Key. Ego is the Enemy. Books that consolidate a lot of human thinking, whether rational or irrational, like Robert Green's Laws of Power or who's Warren Buffett's partner?

Charlie Munger.

Yeah, Charlie Munger's Poor Charlie's Almanac. Principles by Ray dalio. You know, 10 rules for life by Jordan Peterson. I'm a big fan of these type of books that consolidate a lot of human thinking patterns and allow you to, to, to understand the way that humans think a lot better. You know, I'm also a big fan of religious texts. You know, not only the Bible, but for example, I've been going through the Torah recently, which is obviously a formative part of our Western theology and Western law. Know, there's a guy named Dennis Prager who has a great series on the Torah like Leviticus and Exodus and numbers and Genesis and Deuteronomy. You know, from, from a Hebrew law standpoint, I'm a big fan of that. And then I would say besides that, I, I love to study human communication and human habits. So you know, guys like James Clear and Mark Manson and Charles Duhigg, you know, when it comes to how to form habits, how to work with willpower, how to get things done. Benjamin Hardy is another great author who's written some books and also co written some books with Dan Sullivan that I really like and I even have a couple months ago I published like the top 20. It was gonna be a top 25. I think that was the top 27 formative books of my life. If you do to search on Amazon like Ben Greenfield top books, I think it's one of my public shared Amazon lists. I also wrote an article about it@BenGreenfieldLife.com where I summarize each of those books. But many of the titles that I just mentioned are on that list. I also should mention, and this is really Interesting if you have kids. So I choose a new book every week or two and my sons and I go through it. There's the longest time where I'd pay them to write a book report on a massive book like they did Jordan Peterson's 10 Rules for Life when they were like 8 years old. And you know, I'll pay like $100 for a really nice two to three page book report. But then we also go through a new chapter of a book every single Evening before dinner, 10 minute discussion on the chapter that we've gone through. So. And sometimes it's two books at a time. So we are immersed in the study of human communication, debate, logic and the like. So right now we're going through Chris Voss's Never Split the Difference and also a book about logical fallacies like Tu Quoque or Ad Hominem or the Transfer Fallacy or Bulgarism. That book's by Doug Wilson and Nate Wilson. And so we, we systematize the process of going through and reviewing books in our house. So my sons and I, you know, they're 15 now and we've probably gone through close to 80 books together now.

Where's the exploding head emojis? So many places we can go on that. So good. All right, so then focusing that on what have you learned? Energy, work and love are the big three that we like to talk about as, you know, kind of coming down to. You get those right, you're doing pretty well. We first met forever ago. Talking about my energy and helping optimize that. Again, thank you. Bless you for all the things. But what would you say are the biggest distinctions you've learned in general? And then we can go into each of those domains and again, the idea being theoretical distinctions that you've practically applied to your life that have most changed your life that someone here with us today might be able to do something similar with.

When you say theoretical distinctions, what exactly do you mean by that?

So when I learned this, that was a new distinction for me. And then I changed my behavior in this way and that was life changing and I've never looked back kind of thing. And then of course, you've aggregated and compounded so many of those distinctions.

Yeah, I would say the first would be related to habit forming. I'm a creature of consistency, achieving things in small bite sized chunks each day. That's the way I write books. Right. With anywhere from 20 to 30 minutes carved out each day during the year or so that I might spend writing, you know, books like those books that you held up. And when, when I went through, I would. I would probably say it would be Atomic Habits and by James Clear and the Power of Habit by Charles Duhigg. Willpower Isn't the Way by Ben Hardy. And then those would probably be the main ones. I realized that I really needed systems. So when I sit down to tackle any given new skill or learning. Let's use guitar as an example, right? For the longest time, I was what many people might call a lifelong beginner at guitar. Because I would sit down at the end of the day and be like, well, what song do I want to mess around with tonight? Or what I hear on the radio that I think is kind of cool? I want to pull up the YouTube video for. Or you know, what, what guitar book I randomly grabbed on Amazon because it looked cool. Am I going to try to tackle. And I now have a really systematic approach to guitar that has allowed my skills to increase in leaps and bounds. I mean, to the point where I just got back from recording my first album in Nashville about four months ago, you know, have a six song EP just based on this dedication to guitar. So I have one single system that I go through. It's 10 minutes each evening, it's in a specific place of the house, and I have a specific value or why behind playing the guitar. So what I mean by that is there's kind of three different things that I think about when it comes to guitar or any other skill in life. Three different areas of life that I. That I hack, so to speak. The first is that I hack my why, meaning for me to consistently return to a habit, there must be a strong why behind it for guitar. It's not that. And for a long time it was murky to me. I'm like, why am I even doing this? Is it because I like the sound and the vibrations for my body? Is it because I like to sing? Is it because I want to show off to people I can play this thing? Is it because I want to play on stage in front of a whole bunch of people or play an open mic night or be famous and make an album? And really I realized after some, you know, searching and introspection, it comes down to I want to be able to take out my guitar when I have friends and family around, play them songs that they like and can sing along to, and create a magical moment for the people close to me with music. Because music, like food can be kind of a bonding activity that people engage in together. By the way, I'd throw pickleball in there as a strong third anyways though. So my why for guitar is I just want to bring friends and family together with music that I love to play. So I make sure I hack my purpose and my why. The second thing is you want to make sure that you hack your environment, right? To radically change your habits, you must radically change your environment. You want to write a novel, have one single place in the house where you sit down. That is your place where you write a book. It's not the same place where you might reply to emails or take consult calls or work on other elements of your business. Is just the place where you write right? For me, I have a special place in my office that set up and that's the place where my brain and body identify writing as the core activity for guitar. End of the dining room table, sitting on my cool little saddle chair that keeps my back in an upright position. Opening up the browser. That's a separate browser tab with no other tabs open to my 10 minute guitar practice each day because it's a small bite sized chunk that's delivered to me as a lesson each day that's structured that I can wrap my head around and go through on a regular basis in an environment that my body has associated with practicing the guitar. And then finally, in addition to hacking the why and hacking the environment, I hack the system, which is pretty redundant with what I just mentioned. I have a system for everything. Every Sunday night I write down every workout I'm going to do Monday through Saturday. So there's no decision making fatigue or scratching my head or what am I going to do now when I walk into the gym. Every day that I finish writing, I leave one sentence in mid fragment so that when I jump in the next day to start writing again, I have one unfinished sentence and there's very low friction to me starting back in and writing from that sentence. With guitar I have no distractions. I know exactly what browser window I'm going to open. I already have the lesson for that day loaded up. I press play and I go. So I reduce friction as much as possible by creating systems around anything that I want to learn or create. So hack your why, hack your environment and hack your system. So that's one thing that I've learned is basically habit forming as a theory in my life that I use quite a bit from some of those books that I talked about. I'll throw one other at you for now. It would be that idea that I remember back when I was driving up to the short course world Championships for triathlon in Vancouver, BC. And this would have been what, like maybe 17 years ago. And all the way there and all the way back, I listened to the audiobook by this young guy named Tim Ferriss, who'd written the Four Hour Work Week, which I mentioned earlier. And I'd never really thought about this concept of not doing everything right at the time. I did all my own car repairs, I mowed my lawn, I coded my websites, I wrote my newsletters, I edited everything, I did all of my interactions with affiliates and community members and partners and clients. And that was when the delegation, slash, outsourcing light bulb went on for me. I have to admit that at that time I had a little bit of a spirit of scarcity. Meaning why would I pay someone to do something I could easily do myself? But when you begin to think with the mindset of, as Gary Keller writes about in his book, you can get like for free on Amazon, called the one thing, you identify the one thing or the few things that are your core skill set in life, your purpose, what it is you're called to, what it is that makes time go by quickly. Or as Mark Manson says, the things that make you forget to eat and poop and you focus hardcore on those things and outsource ruthlessly everything else to other people who can do those things better than you or ruthlessly outsource activities that don't best serve that core purpose, right? So I don't mow my lawn, I don't change my light bulbs. I, you know, I don't do, I don't even know how to log into my website or my Instagram or my social media or anything. I've outsourced all of that so I can basically write, podcast, speak, and be with my family. Now, there are going to be some exceptions to that. Like, for example, I actually really like to cook. I love to cook. I, I'm not going to ever outsource things to a personal chef. And yeah, I could probably like write books faster if I had 45 extra minutes per day when I wasn't like sous videing and stirring and cooking and blending and chopping and looking at recipes, but I just love to do that. It feeds my soul. There are other things you're not going to outsource, like your workout, right? There are some things you just have to do, but at the same time, I'm pretty ruthless when it comes to delegation and outsourcing and overcoming the spirit of scarcity that says, why would I pay for someone else to do that? When I can do it myself. Because if you can free up your time by having other people do things for you, it's just a huge life changer, game changer. I don't think that's a news flash for anybody, but I think the implementation of it sometimes is weak and it's just something I now ruthlessly do. I'm always auditing my weekly and daily activities and asking myself, do I need to do this or can I hire this out? Is it worth the time that I'm paying to hire it out? Usually it is if you've placed a certain value on your time. And so, so yeah, I'd say habit forming via systems and, and ruthless delegation outsourcing would be 2. Just real quick, I'd have to say back to what I mentioned about spiritual disciplines that a definite third would be take care of your spirit before anything else. It's the one part of you that after your body fades and your brain begins to degrade and deteriorate, for better or worse, will be able to be strong and around and fully present for the rest of eternity. So, you know, I prioritize my daily activities in the following order. Number one is God, meaning I wake up Bible, prayer, devotion, gratitude, journaling. I feed my spirit and do my spiritual workout first. I talk about this a lot in my book called Fit Soul and in the follow book, follow up book that came after that called Endure. Number one is God. Number two is spouse slash children slash community, right? Connectivity. As a result of my father's cancer battle, one book I recently went through is called the Cancer Connection. And the number one thing, Brian, above all the NAD and coffee enemas and Garrison protocols and you know, T killer cells in Mexico or whatever else that prevents cancer and allows you to heal faster is human connectivity. You know, displayed by the 110-year-old cigarette smoking, gin chugging, great grandma in Sardinia who doesn't do any of the biohacks. But he still lives a long time because he's just got friends over all the time, you know, for lunches and dinners and community and family. So you've got spirit, you've got community slash family. Then you have your health, right? Your morning workout, your sauna, your cold plunge, your walk, whatever it is. And then finally, last place is business. Because if your business comes first, your business is going to eat you alive. You'll get to zero inbox and then 10 minutes later there'll be five emails. There will always be a new task. There's always going to be something to create, even if you're making a billion dollars a year. There's going to be an extra few hundred million you can make here and there's. And many people are going to be driven to do that. So you have to prioritize your spirit and God, then community, family and spouse, then health and business. And that's, that's another real, real big theoretical distinction for me.

Brilliant. That you've clearly applied in your life. Again, insert exploding head emoji. Let's go. Actually, energy, work and love. Let's go to. You're known for energy. Check out Ben's podcast and all that and of course, all the other body pieces of your body of work, including the work with your Christianity and your faith and your practice there. Talk to us about love. So how have you, how do you practice love? You mentioned the beautiful exercise you have with your sons and integrating exploration of different themes, wisdom wise and otherwise. But, but what specifically do you do in your day to day life to ensure that that's a priority? That's exercise and practice consistently.

Yeah, I love that you've brought this up. You know, there's a passage in the Bible, First Corinthians 13 that goes into how love is patient and kind. Love does not boast. Love is not arrogant or rude. Love bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things. Love never fails. Love covers all. And so we have this rule, it's not even an unwritten rule in the Greenfield House that basically says when anything comes between you and any other person, the very best thing you can do is to be like Jesus Christ and to love that person unconditionally and to be the better person sometimes and to resist the urge to spew back or fight back or bring back, you know, old woes and bitterness and to instead cover everything with love. We worked with a legacy building program for families called Legato. We were locked away in a cabin in the mountains for three days, writing all of our family values on the windows and then forming those very similar, as you would do for like a business branding exercise, into our family mission statement, which later became all of our family colors, our family logo, our family power animals, our family crest, which hangs proudly above the fireplace, along with our family logo, which is on the family pepper grinder, the family throw pillows, the family flags hanging proudly outside the front door, the family bumper stickers, even the family logo on the family pickleball paddles. And that's an incredible exercise to do. We even have a family constitution that has everything from every family member's end of life directives to every family member's unique, you know, hex code for their color that they use in styling to the power animal. You know, I'm the gray wolf. My sons are the white wolf and the arctic fox. My wife is the dolphin to, you know, the family logo. And each element of that stands for what we want done at our memorial service and our end of life directives, the contact details for every person who runs the family bank and the family office, the family insurance policies, everything is in there, all the way down to here's what we eat on Christmas Eve and here's who does what for the Thanksgiving meal, and here's how we organize our morning family huddle. Here's how we do our family dinners and our family game time. Here's the parts of the Bible that we memorize on a regular basis. It's basically a playbook for running the Greenfield family that when my sons get married, I can hand off to them. And they've got all of this written down to not only build legacy and continue to make legacy even better, but to avoid that all too common rags to riches to rags scenario that arises in a lot of families. And I unpack a lot of this in that book Boundless Parenting, which is me and 31 other really great parents spilling all their parenting secrets. But a big part of that mission statement of value statement or set of values is love covers all. And so we are constantly displaying physical affection for each other through, you know, hugging and kissing and, you know, structured eye gazing a couple of times a month, structured one on one dates, quarterly retreats, my wife and I always pray for five minutes as the very last thing we do at the very end of the day when our heads hit the pillow. But we just saturate our home with empathetic and sacrificial love towards everybody else in the family that spills forth into the community. And because love is such a powerful emotion, if you're kind of like in the woo woo quantum, and you go look at, you know, David Hawkins book Healing and Power in the scale of consciousness that he has in that book, love is near the top of the totem pole, along with peace and joy and emotions like anger and fear and shame are towards the bottom. And so because love is such a powerful emotion, physically, spiritually, electromagnetically, it's one of those things that will drastically affect your life lifes, those around you and your immediate family members. If you've made it a point of systematically prioritizing ways to love each other throughout the entire day.

Heroic dude, I'm sitting here and one of the jokes we have, I forget who it was that said, you think you're at an 8, but you're really at a 2. So if you're not listening to Ben thinking, I thought, you know, eight approaching eight and a half maybe I'm like, all right, reset, folks, reset. Bring the standards up.

Well, you know, you know what, Brian? Anytime that I have that type of thought come across my mind, I have two sayings. My wife and I have one saying that we have back and forth between each other. It's no regrets, only gratefulness. No regrets, only gratefulness. And then the other one is the best time to plant a tree is 20 years ago or today, right? Anytime you hear anything, you're like, I should done that. I should be doing that. It's never too late. Even things with parenting, right? Even if all your kids are grown up and out of the house or they're like 16 years old or whatever, there's no reason you can't start passing on wisdom to your children that's going to affect your children's children and your legacy, even if they're already grown up. And that's another big parenting principle of mine. I'm not raising my children. I'm raising my children's children. So when I take out my phone at the dinner table to glance at it four times because there's like an email I was expecting or I want to make sure there's a fire that I don't need to put out, well, I'm based on my two sons, let's say three generations down the road, raising like 119 people who are all going to be looking at their cell phones during dinner. And that's a pretty powerful way to check yourself when you think it's just this one time. It's just this little thing, you know, I'm going to skip the workout today and show my sons that they can skip their workout. And, you know, the green fields that are around a thousand years after me with, you know, diabetes and insulin resistance and cardiovascular disease, because all of a sudden they learn that, you know, if life gets busy, definitely sacrifice the workouts and the health because, you know, that's not as important. So, you know, it's a real powerful way to just think about life in general. You're not raising your children, you're raising your children's children.

So good. One of the things I do in our app, we've got the big three Energy, work in love, and then the identities from which you want to live, James. Clear, inspired, repeated, clarified, repeated beingness. The virtues you want to embody, which again, all ancient wisdom traditions, modern science says it's what it's all about. Then the specific things you do when you're at your best. So my first commitment in the heroic app in love is committing to being with Alexandra, my wife, of course, for 51 years, which means something for me for the mission I'm committed to and then BFFs and Papa. So every single morning I'm thinking about being my kids who are now 11 and six best friends, being worthy of being one of their best friends when they're adults and being their kids. Papa. So it's a split second boom, fast forward. Today's the day to be worthy of that. But dude, earnestly, really inspiring just to feel the intensity with which you're showing up in every aspect of your life and just modeling what it looks like to be 101%. All in all the time. What else have we done that time flies when you're having fun with friends? We're already. What else have we not talked about that in the last few minutes together you want to make sure we discuss.

Okay, here's one for you. We haven't talked a lot about health and health science. Obviously, that's kind of my wheelhouse. And as you can imagine, there are certain things that you just don't read about in like Men's Health magazine or Women's Health magazine or popular fitness advice you might come across at the gym or in a newsletter or whatever. And here's. Here's a big takeaway for you and our friends who are on the call today. Your Body is a battery. Okay. Your body is a battery. And there are books that you can take a deeper dive into if you want to explore this concept, like Healing is Voltage by Jerry Tennant or the Body Electric by Robert Becker. But if you begin to think of your body as a battery, you begin to appreciate the idea that each of your cells should have a slightly negative charge on the inside and a slightly positive charge on the outside to maintain proper depolarization and electrical conductivity in that cell. And to allow just about every metabolic reaction in your body to take place efficiently. You can drain that battery. For example, constant exposure to WI fi electronics, dirty electricity, EMF appliances, and a non stop post industrial lifestyle allows for gradual calcium leakage and calcium influx into the cell. Calcium is positively charged, so that's one way you can drain your battery. Another way you can drain your battery is by always wearing Big built up rubber soled shoes, outdoors, flying on airplanes, disconnected from the surface of the planet, and just never getting outside barefoot, walking on the beach, swimming in a natural body of water, and soaking up all of the negative ions that the Earth is constantly emitting. It's one of the best ways to charge your body's battery is to go outside barefoot or even to go outside swimming in a natural body of water. So that's one thing to think about. What else would allow you to keep the body's battery charged? There's a few things. Photons of light, particularly sunlight, or I've got this red light panel next to me. Infrared light, near infrared light, and red light are all absorbed by your cells and used to charge that battery and create energy. And I mean, there are ways you can hack this. Like human beings can photosynthesize like a plant in terms of creating ATP in response to photons of light, particularly if you have certain elements in your bloodstream that allow you to better do that. One popular thing a lot of biohackers use these days is called methylene blue. Another one is like a Russian superfood supplement called Shilajit, right? It's a dark black or the dark blue or the dark green blue, like photo cyanins from algae like spirulina or chlorella. Any of these in your body allow you to better harness photons of light to charge the battery and create energy. It's like I did an infrared sauna this morning and I actually took a capsule of methylene blue before I got in the sauna to amplify my ability to charge my battery in response to the lights that I was getting under in the sauna. So we've got photons of light, we have connection to the earth, we have avoidance of constant drainage of the battery via electricity. Water and minerals help to carry the charge through your body. So focus on good, clean, purified, filtered water with minerals added back in. And hefty use of natural salts like Celtic salt and Kona salt and Klima salt and Florida cell to allow electrolytes to be sprinkled across your food. With the added bonus, the food tastes a lot better when you do that. Right? Those are my three friends. Good salt, good olive oil and a decent hot sauce. And I can make any meal amazing. But the salt and the water is super important for keeping the body's battery charged. All the way down to the point where I start off every single day with a giant 32 ounce Mason glass jar full of water and electrolytes to just pump that battery up from the first hour that I wake. And then finally, fluctuations of temperature help to move electrolytes through the body and keep the body's battery charged. Specifically, a regular sauna practice and a regular cold practice. Like cold showers, cold soaps, cold tubs, cold lakes, rivers, oceans, even cold temperatures. So think of your body as a battery. Avoid constant exposure to modern electricity that drains that battery. And then engage in regular connectivity with the planet Earth, regular exposure to natural light, good intake of pure clean water with minerals, and a hot and cold practice. And if you're doing that, plus the movement and healthy nutrition, that's all too common, the only advice that you get, you're going to notice a profound uptick in your energy, in your health, and in the way that you look, feel and perform.

Brilliant. Dude, we could talk for a weekend. I'm so happy we're able to connect. Forward to seeing you soon. I've got flashback to the last time we were hanging out. It was Spartan World championship pre Covid. We're out walking together. I'm taking my shoes off and going for a walk on our trail immediately after we get off today, dude. But great to see you. Thanks for all your support. And again, thank you for being what we call a radiant exemplar. You know, this at the end of the day is the most important thing to see someone as alive as you are, demonstrating in your own idiosyncratic, iconoclastic, heroic way what it looks like to come fully alive. So bless you, ma'. Am. I appreciate you. Appreciate you taking the time to be with us and share your essence and your spirit with us.

Yeah, I appreciate you. And you know, I'd rather be a radiant exemplar than an exemplified radiator. So thanks, man.

Hey, I'm here for you anytime. Shout out. Enjoy. Enjoy the rest of your day.

All right, later.

There you go. Ben Greenfield, folks. How you doing? Soul Force at a thousand and one. Oh, my goodness. I am not kidding that I'm going out.

I got a.

It's funny because I used to be the one walking around barefoot and the kids would complain and mommy, now I'm the one wearing my little vivo barefoot shoes. But they're coming off. If you didn't get a injection of pure soul force there, there's stem cell injection, then there's Ben Greenfield, Soul Force injection. That's how it's done. I didn't say hi, but great to see you. Dave, Kevin, Gary, Teresa, Gene, Dan, Ryan, Beth. So enjoying seeing you all on Social as well. Josh, D, Darren, plus one. Hey, good to see you both. Robin, Jonathan, Sarah, Fran, Christopher, Simon, Mike, Stacy on a walk as well. Roy, great to see you. Vinnie, Pauline and Herlesia and Richard on my first screen. That was awesome. We have had a week full of. It's so cool to see. You know, I talk about the fact that all of our heroes have one thing in common, which is soul force. Idiosyncratically, uniquely expressed in their own special way. We saw that this week so far, three times. We're going to see it tomorrow with Michael Bungay Stanier as well. We've got Ben, and there's one Ben Greenfield. We had Gabrielle Lyon, had her own style of showing up with her wisdom. And of course, gosh, I'm slipping his name right now. Our friend who started Comic Con who's doing such great things, each with such different expressions, but the same exact essence of them. Connecting to their ultimate purpose and then going all in. I mean, I. I playfully said, yet earnestly said, I thought I was at an eight, folks. Really at a two. Let's flip the switch and recommit to being our best selves in our own idiosyncratic, iconoclastic way, connected to the best, most heroic version of ourselves in our energy, our work and our love. Flipping the switch with our posture, our breath, our mental focus. We are wise, disciplined, loving, courageous, grateful, hopeful, curious and zesty as we move from theory to practice to mastery together today to help create a world in which 51% of humanity is flourishing by 2051, starting with us. Let's go. See you tomorrow, Nat. If you can connect those who would like to stay, that'd be great. Really enjoyed today and I look forward to tomorrow. Again, Michael Bungay Stanier, brilliant human being who will talk to us about a bunch of things. He's one of the world's leading thinkers on coaching and the methodology of coaching, finding your purpose, et cetera. So that'll be another fun chat. And again, it's going to be so fun to juxtapose the two of them. Just, just same person, very different people. Can't wait to have that chat. Nat, great to see you. Thank you for your support in connecting all of us today.

Hey, hero. We hope you enjoyed this heroic chat to learn more about this series, as well as how you can join Brian's daily live coaching sessions at 1:01pm Central Time. Plus get access to a ton more to help you move from theory to practice to mastery and express the best, most heroic version of yourself. Head to heroic us today. And if you liked this episode, please leave a positive review and hit the subscribe button on your platform of choice. Have a fantastic day.