Heroic Interview: Get Fully Charged with Tom Rath

You're listening to get fully charged, an optimal living interview with tom rath and bryan johnson.

Hi, this is Brian. Welcome back to the Optimal Living Interview series. Today I'm thrilled to be chatting with Tom Rath, one of my favorite new writers and teachers. He's written a number of best selling books. Two of my favorites that we've featured as a philosopher's note are Eat, Move, Sleep and Are you Fully charged? Eat, Move, Sleep, I would say is my number one health book these days. If you're looking for a general introduction to optimize your overall well being health wise, get Eat, Move, Sleep and then Are you Fully Charged? Integrates some other facets of well being that we'll talk about today. Another phenomenal book. And then also I thanked Tom before our chat today on behalf of my three and a half year old son because tomorrow Tom's children's book the Rechargeables is Emerson's favorite book and it is my favorite kids book as well. The characters Simon and Poppy in the book are awesome and Emerson, they basically it's Eat, Move, sleep for kids and Emerson runs around these days saying I'm getting recharged as he literally runs around or eats healthy food and takes a nap and gets a good night of sleep. So anyway, that's a long introduction. Tom, I appreciate you taking the time and really excited to explore some great ideas.

Thank you so much and appreciate your kind words about the kids book in particular. Those take a lot of time and work and it's some of the most meaningful stuff though to hear stories from kids repeating words like that and wanting to move around more and eat some of the right foods. Which as a parent with a few young children, I know how hard that is to accomplish.

It's so good and it's so beautifully illustrated and just a really fun, playful, impactful way to communicate the importance of eating, moving and sleeping. I drill them on it. What are the three ways? Eating, Moving, sleeping. Let's start there. Then let's start with Eat, Move, Sleep, which is a book you wrote in 2013. Then the newer one is Are youe Fully Charged? But I'd love to lay the foundation with the fundamentals of Eating, Moving, sleeping. But before we do that, I actually want to hear you describe some of your background, particularly with your DNA and the challenges you face because I think you're the poster child for basically no excuses. And hey, this is what we have now. Let's go do our best. Can you give us kind of an overview of your situation and what Led you to write, eat, move, sleep.

Yeah, it's probably a good background for what got me so passionate about doing a lot of research on these topics. When I was 16 years old, I was having trouble with my vision. And to make a long story short, I lost all vision of my eye to several cancerous tumors. And doctors said, well, that's probably not the end of it. You may have a rare genetic mutation that essentially shuts off the body's most powerful tumor suppressing gene for a host of organs. I was soon thereafter given a formal diagnosis. And it's essentially kind of losing the genetic lottery, at least from a cancer standpoint where, where the doctors told me that I would almost certainly face cancer in my brain and spine and kidneys and adrenal glands and pancreas over the next 20, 30 years, or however long I could potentially live. They really didn't know that point very well. And I have faced. I'm currently battling cancer right now in my kidneys and pancreas and spine pretty acutely. And so it's been an ongoing challenge where I go in and have to get MRI and CT scans every six and 12 months. And it's a pretty good reminder every six or 12 months of my own mortality as well, in terms of just reminding myself that at a minimum I've got another year, ideally when I leave those doctor's visits to do as much as I can to leave something meaningful behind. And so that ever Since I was 16, that's helped me to focus on what are all of the little things I can do on a day to day basis that essentially decrease my odds of having new cancer and new cancers and existing cancers growing and that improve my odds of living longer in good health. And so my 10 years of personal research in that after my diagnosis eventually led to spending a lot of time compiling research for other people with different cancers and heart disease and diabetes and the like to say what are all the things they can do to be healthier and live a little bit longer. And all the culmination of that work was really putting together the book Eat, Move, Sleep. And the subtitle of that book was How Small, How Small Choices Lead to Big Changes. And that phrase really summarizes most of my research, which is that we need to figure out ways to build smarter choices into our daily routine today. Because if someone like me knowing that I might have existing cancers growing even more because of the choices I make, if that's not a good motivator for me in moment to make better choices, it's certainly not going to be for someone who has a family history of heart disease a few generations removed. And so the trick that I learned from all the research around Eat, move, sleep is we essentially need to figure out ways to connect how we'll feel better and have more energy two hours from now or later on today or when my kids show up at home this evening, I need to have more energy than I normally would. When you can connect making better choices about what you order for lunch with having more energy at three in the afternoon, it's a lot easier to make decisions that also happen to align with the longer term interests.

This is so good. And it was actually that was going to be the final question I asked you in the Are you fully charged? Is making the connection. But I'd love to just let's go to that connection now. One of the things you talk about that I want to hear you highlight as we move into that is the fact that doing all three eating, moving and sleeping together, you've discussed how research has shown that to be impactful. And the way that Tom set up his book, it's not eat, move and then sleep. Each section has eat, move, sleep and then you move into the next one, Eat, move, sleep, eat, move, sleep. And that idea of look, let's work on these together. Can you talk to us about that? And then the connection we can make to engage in these healthy behaviors and make the right choices.

I appreciate your noticing and pointing that out from the book structural standpoint because there are a lot of people who were trying to tell me, you know, you need to have these be three distinct sections because some people don't want to think about the eating part. And if you skip either any one of those three, it really doesn't work well on a daily basis. And that's why we were trying to reinforce that just pragmatically with the structure of the book as well. Because, for example, if you get a good night's sleep tonight, and I've studied this in kind of clinical research, is if you get a good night's sleep, no matter how bad of a day you've had today, it's like the reset button on a video game or your smartphone where you wake up at your back to your set point tomorrow morning. And if you get a good seven or eight hours of sleep, you're far more likely to be active in the morning. You're likely to have a healthier breakfast with lower levels of sugar, lower levels of fat in your breakfast and so forth, a much healthier meal and you're more likely to make better choices at lunch. You're more likely to get a better night's sleep the next night after you've had that active day with good food. And it starts this upward spiral. In contrast, if you get one night with just four or five hours of sleep, you're far more likely to crave unhealthy foods first thing the next day. And there's almost no way you're going to stick to your workout routine. And you won't move around as much throughout the day. And it starts these downward cycles that just perpetuate themselves. So there's something about doing those three things very practically in combination throughout the day that seems to have a compounding effect from a growth standpoint.

That's awesome. Then making the connection that on the days when you most need a good night of sleep, or when you tend to want to do the things that disrupt that sleep. So seeing how you're going to feel the next morning, not the abstract how you're going to feel in two decades, right. But tomorrow morning, be nice to that version of you, right?

It gets pretty functional where I know when I have to travel that I need to arrive at my destination a few hours earlier than I used to, because I need 10 hours of attempting to sleep to get seven or eight hours of good sleep so that I can be sharp enough for a meeting or an audience at 8 o' clock the next morning. And I know I need to get some activity before that to be at my best as well. And so you kind of have to map back to ensure you're at your best, whether that's as in your work capacity or as a parent.

That's awesome. And I think you say explicitly that sleep is the most important thing. Correct.

It is the place if that falls through. And it's the one thing we all underestimate. Where I grew up, like a lot of people, with this assumption that one, you never admit to needing a lot of sleep, and two, that sleep, if you really need to stay up to study for an exam or you have something important going on, sleep's the first expense that you cut. When in reality, where I've learned clearly from the research is sleep's the most important thing you can invest in if you want to be sharp and if you want to remember what you learned the day before, that's during sleep. Your brain's essentially connecting the dots between what you experienced that day and what information you might need at your disposal in the future. And so if you don't Allow that mapping to take place, you kind of waste the day before as well.

What's your one practical tip from a sleep standpoint?

Yeah, the most practical thing for me has been something as simple as making sure that the room that I sleep in is at least 2 to 3 degrees cooler than what I'm accustomed to throughout the day. Because there's something about that difference in temperature that tells your brain and body that not only it makes it easier to fall asleep, but it makes it easier to stay asleep because you don't unintentionally warm up too much in the middle of the night.

Yeah, that's huge. Yeah. It's funny, I've been setting my thermostat more deliberately over the last year. It's amazing what a positive impact something as simple as that, again, to go to your small choices can do for us. So then what's number two in your book? If we put sleep as kind of the. Hey, it all starts here. Would you put eating or moving?

I would probably put activity or moving as a second priority. Just because it's a. It's something that is subtly and insidiously eroding our days. I don't think most people give enough thought to the fact that we've essentially engineered activity out of our routine to the extent that we've now had a century where people have spent most of their lifetime just sitting on their rear end outside of sleeping. And I think a lot of us here, oh, you need to exercise 30 minutes a day, six days a week. And we're like, I can't do that. No way. But. And that's so intimidating that we forget that if you just moved around a little bit and stood up every 20, 30 minutes and found ways to work or socialize while you're moving around, that may be a much more important step. So I put movement, not exercise, but just subtle movement throughout the day as a second priority.

I love it. And I almost forgot that you inspired me to get my walking treadmill. Was it eat, move, sleep, or was it are you fully charged? That you typed you wrote while walking, right?

Both. Both. The answer is C. Both. Okay. I haven't. I haven't. I haven't spent any time working in a traditional seated station except for when I have to on hotel, in hotels or on airplanes. Ever since I started deep move sleep. I'm three and a half or four years into that experiment now, and I can't see myself ever working any other way now because I realized that as I started to sit or as I started to stand and sit and alternate five years ago gave me a little bit more energy than I did, mostly standing, even more energy. And eventually I got on a treadmill. And it's, it's just amazing how much more I get done and how much better I feel on days when I'm walking around, whether that's an outdoor walking meeting or I'm writing or editing while walking at a slow pace on my treadmill, which is, it's, it's really. I, it's hard to explain. Even when I'm on vacation or traveling for work, where I don't have access to my walking workstation, I, it. I just don't feel the same. Wow, okay.

You're inspiring me to. I did it. For the first few weeks, I couldn't quite get to a place where I was comfortable with. I think I just needed to move through what I was used to, you know, and kind of those individual.

And it takes at least, it takes at least a month then the first two weeks. For most people, the first two weeks, it does not seem to be an improvement from a concentration, productivity standpoint and balance everything else. But if you can kind of power through that and not push yourself, where you don't say, I'm going to ramp the treadmill up to 2.2 miles an hour. You got to stay below 2, sometimes below 1.5 miles an hour, so you barely notice it. It's basically not allowing you to be completely still is the goal not getting your heart rate up. Dr.

So this is good. So my problem was, and for those of you thinking about doing this, take note. I have a pedometer. One of your other great ideas is whatever you measure improves. And I'm old school. I use one of those old, you know, non techie, omron things. But I didn't get the steps when I had it at anything less than, I think two. So I like to get, you know, the steps. I'm doing it. So I think I jacked it up too high. So what you're saying is, look, just the basic idea of not sitting and moving, however slowly, even if it doesn't register as a step on my little thing here is worth doing. So that's, that's good feedback.

It's an important, you know, it's really an important delineation for human health that may seem like down in the weeds, but nobody's talking about where, if, if the floor in a workplace or in a training room in an office building or whatever, if it even moved subtly on people every 90 seconds at less than 0.1 miles an hour. That would do a lot of good because it prevents you from being in one fixed position without any movement for 10 minutes in a row, which is what 99% of people are doing in the next 10 minutes in this world.

Amazing. So then, do you read books still or do you listen? And if you read, do you do so on your walking treadmill?

You know, I'm experimenting with a lot of different things from a physical reading standpoint where I'm trying to read when I stand up or on a bike right now it's I still that for long form reading for books, the treadmill with a, with a backlit screen. It's actually the backlit screen that's mostly the issue where we people, when you sit down to read 2300 pages, you don't want to do that with that backlight straining your eyes. Eyes. So I'm right now I'm experimenting with a bike, stationary bike with my Kindle mounted to it.

Awesome.

But I also do audiobooks all the time when I'm traveling. So it's a mix of those two. Right. Now back to the thought about sleep. That electrical light exposure is a real issue for sleep as well. So from what I've read, even a Kindle helps a little bit because it doesn't have the real bright backlight that can suppress the sleep hormone melatonin and keep you up at night.

Yeah, that's good. Let's talk about that for a second. Walker. My wife does that with her little funny blue light blocking glasses, you know, the orange tinted lenses.

Right.

And then we turn off. We have red lights in our little changing room for our son as we get ready for night. And blue light friendly or blocked lights when the sun goes down. I mean, tell us about that and why it's so important.

It's really a lot more important than I ever realized when I got into. Until I got into the research where our bodies need kind of a dimming period in the evenings where we're not exposed to bright light, especially from that bluish part of the spectrum that's bright. And so anything you can do to even subtly dim the lights in your environment in the hours leading up to bedtime, and then to block out almost all of the real bright backlight from an iPad, a smartphone, or a laptop in particular in the hour before bed is pretty important because that allows the natural hormone melatonin to kick in, which helps us to fall asleep and to stay asleep through the middle of night. Now you want some of that light in the morning to perk you up and to get going. So it's not that light's always bad. It's about the continuum throughout the day from what I've learned.

Yeah, that's fantastic. Moving to eating. Talk to us about nutrition.

Yeah, you know, it's. It's been fascinating for me to watch that. My big takeaway from all the work I've studied on eating is that the right idea is probably to build some of the right food choices into your lifestyle that you think can last for good instead of bouncing from one fad or trend to the next, which is the easiest thing to do nowadays. And when I say that, I mean, sure, there's conflicting advice out there, and it'd be real easy to just throw your hands in there and say, it's too much. I can't keep track of it. I can't follow it. Coffee's always good or bad or wine's always good or bad in the news, and they change their mind on it every day. The reality is there are a lot of striking consistencies across all of the research that I've looked at where there's nobody telling you you need to go add more sugar to your diet tomorrow. I just don't hear it. There's nobody telling you you need more fried foods. And there are not. At least I haven't picked it up yet. There aren't people out here saying, you need fewer green leafy vegetables and fewer apples and berries in your diet. And so if you can take some of the commonalities that I just mentioned there and really structure your diet so that you're eating fewer refined carbohydrates, you have almost as close to no added sugar in your diet, and you're eating more and more green leafy vegetables in particular, you will find yourself making healthier choices and doing something that's hopefully sustainable over a period of years and decades.

Yeah, this is good. And I want to drill in a little bit more to this because one of the reasons why I really enjoyed your book is that it's easy to get one side or the other, you know, And I was a pretty dogmatic vegan for the better part of a decade, so I'm very familiar with that perspective. But it's also easy to go the other side and be dog dogmatically passionate about the alternatives. What I loved about your book was that there was a very kind of broad, hey, look, let's just look at the research and do what you just said. Find what everyone agrees on, and then you Structure what's gonna work best for you. But I wanna talk about a couple of the things. One, the phrase that stuck in my mind, one of the phrases that stuck in my mind was candy for cancer cells and the toxicity of sugar. I'd like to hear you describe that. And then also I wanna move into after that into the refined carbs discussion a little bit more. But can you tell us about and just highlight the toxicity of sugar for everyone listening, particularly parents, you know, who are thinking about this. And I think it was give a long prelude to this question. I think it was John Ratey who said that fruit juices and the sugar in fruit juices are one of the kind of hidden things that great parents, good parents are doing that is suboptimal not knowing that there's so much sugar in there and the effects that it has. Talk to us about candy for cancer cells, please.

Yeah, you know, it's, it's a good, it's a good point you mentioned with fruit juices because sometimes you think of sugar is just coming from these artificial sources. But I'm like, a lot of kids probably grew up with the healthy thing to do and when I was in grade school is to drink a 12 ounce cup of orange juice, which if you were to actually eat 12 oranges over a period of time wouldn't be as big of an issue. But when you just extract all the sugar and you miss, most of the good nutrients are in the peel by the way. In some col, they eat the peel which is very bitter taste. But even apple juice, orange juice, grape juice, those have far more concentrated sugar than full fledged Coca Cola or Mountain Dew in many cases. And so if you look at the sugar counts of juices and dried fruits, they can concentrate sugar about as much as some of the things that people think of as being more artificial. So. Well, there's nothing wrong with eating an apple a day or even an orange a day. Most likely if you just take the concentrated sugars from what would have been 15 or 20 apples or oranges, that can cause real spikes in blood sugar, which, I mean at the center of both heart disease and cancer and diabetes, you do see this commonality of refined carbohydrates and sugars. And it's been something that I've studied pretty carefully over the years. Just because I rem. This isn't, I don't think this is any of the books, but going in to do all my studies for cancers over the years, especially the cancers of the, in the abdominal area and that's, I Mean, that's the best way to pick up cancer cells on radiographic scans, in many cases is just the uptake of glucose, which is the way sugar's metabolized in the body. And I think, especially when you think about cancers of a digestive tract, there's more and more evidence emerging that just she consumption of whether. Now it could be sheer consumption of sugar and sugar itself. It could be the effect of sugar on things like inflammation in the body and other signaling pathways that lead to these very direct relationships between sugar consumption and various cancers. And I think something else that you alluded to earlier, a lot of that's personalized. Knowing my risk, I avoid sugar altogether as much as I possibly can. And I guess on the flip side of the equation, it's important to challenge people about what are the good things that sugar is doing for you that compel you to add it when we only have limited things we can eat in a given day. I've yet to hear anybody really argue that in a way that compels me at least. And it's when I've got. My kids are 5 and 7 now. And if you think about the way sugars just built and literally baked into almost everything, that may be our biggest challenge as a society is minimizing added sugars in food products over the next quarter century.

Again, so much more we can talk about there. I want to do one more point on Eat, Move, sleep, and then we'll talk about. Are you fully charged? So much great stuff there. Refined carbohydrates. So sugar is kind of one of those unambiguous. Yeah, yeah, okay. No one's going to argue for that. But talk to us about the pastas and the breads and all of that stuff. Yes, I'll leave it at that.

Again, I'm not just a disclaimer. I'm a lifelong patient, not a physician on these topics. But what I've gleaned from the research on that is that basically when you're consuming refined carbohydrates, so you're thinking about bread in particular, which that converts into glucose in the bloodstream and is essentially interpreted by your body in your cells as if that's sugar intake in a similar regard. And so the challenge. And it's also, there are all kinds of other adverse effects from refined carbohydrates that we talked about and referenced in Eat, Move, Sleep and on that website. But the. The thing that's been interesting to me is that it also leads consumption. Those are fine carbohydrates make you want more and they make you eat less healthy. More likely to eat less healthy foods throughout the duration of the day if you have real high refined carbohydrate intake early on. And, you know, I was fascinated. I was telling my wife this just a couple weeks ago that I went to lunch with a group of colleagues in San Francisco, and I noticed at three consecutive meals that not one person around a table of five or six ever reached into the free bread basket they give you. Right. So it's. It was kind of inspiring for me to see that it's become the new marshmallow test for adults nowadays where, you know that you. If it's. It's kind of a sign of weakness if you do reach for that breadbasket that everyone knows they shouldn't touch.

That's funny. Whole other conversation. But I love your point of buy your willpower at the store. Right. So buy your willpower by saying, please don't bring the bread out. We don't want that.

I don't know if you've seen this yet. We've just put out a documentary called pulley charged that I was a part of. And Brian wansink is one of my favorite characters in the documentary. And he talks about the way even in his house, he's the guy that wrote the mindless eating book. But even in his own house, he. We went in, filmed him and his family and their routines, and he has to put the tortilla chips in the laundry room on a different level of the house, or he says he'd eat them for breakfast. And I'm in the same camp where if those chips are sitting there staring at me when I open up my cupboard in our kitchen, I'd eat those right away. So you essentially either need to make sure they don't make it into the house and they don't make it into your shopping cart or structure what you do see in your home. So that's not the first thing. Yeah.

God bless people that have that level of willpower. I play offense.

Oh, yeah. I wish I had.

And if it does, it's going to be gone. And it was a treat and very deliberate.

Absolutely.

That's great. So then really quickly, there is it eatmovesleep.com where people can learn more about the eating, moving, sleeping.

Yes. Emovesleep.org is where they can learn more about that and go through and get a customized plan. Because a lot of these things, like you mentioned, it's personalized to the individual what you should eat. Sure. There are some commonalities There are also things that are best for you based on what influences your energy and your risks and conditions. And that site allows people to put together a free customized plan for 30 days about little choices they can implement.

Awesome. And then fully charged the movie.

Is that.

What's the URL there?

That's. Yeah, that's. I think it's fully charged movie.com or you can just go to tomrath.org and link to all those.

Okay, cool.

And that's a. That's the new. It's a feature length documentary with a lot of the top scientists we've been talking about that I've admired over the years.

Right on. I can't wait to watch it. Okay, so again, so much more we can talk about with Eat, move, sleep, but I'd love to briefly touch on are you fully charged? A couple of ideas in there. In particular I'm going to just kind of. Well, tell us about Are you fully charged the three keys. The subtitle Are you fully charged the three keys to energizing your work and life, which are meaning, interactions, energy. Talk to us about that briefly and then I want to drill into a couple of points. I think I'd just love to hear you reflect on.

Yeah, my. The big question and challenge I started with with a book and documentary on Fully charged was, you know, sure, I've studied all this stuff and there's a lot of good research out there, a ton of it, but what do I really need to do tomorrow in order to have a day that not only is good for my well being, but I feel like I contributed to something that'll last when I'm gone and made a difference. And so I sat back and asked myself, based on all this work, what are the things, not all the things you need to do to have a good life, but what do you have to do in a given day, ideally every day, in order to really be at that optimal state where you feel like you're making a difference and you want to do a lot more of it. And so the three elements that when we surveyed tens of thousands of people really needed to be present on a daily basis. The first one was doing meaningful work and just recognizing how something you're doing through your work makes a difference for another human being, whether that's helping your child to recognize a new word when she's reading or serving a customer who is irate and getting them back to neutral, or preparing food for someone and being able to see the smile on their face. So that's the Meaningful work that matters each day. The second element that has to be present in and to have a really good day is you have to have far more positive than negative interactions. More than 80% of your interactions need to be more positive than negative because a bad interaction just counterbalances 3, 4, 5 positives. And then the third element of having a good day that we've talked a little bit about is making sure you have the physical energy to be your best. It was fascinating to me after I wrote the book. Eat, Move, Sleep, spent a lot of time with healthcare workers, nurses in particular, and also with business leaders. Both of those groups, the thing they had in common is they're so quick to put everyone else's needs in front of their own that they forget about themselves. And as much as I admire that from kind of an altruistic and meaningful standpoint, the reality is if you're. I spend time with hospice nurse. If you're a hospice nurse and you eat all the wrong foods, you're not active, you didn't get much sleep, you put it, because you're putting everybody else's needs in front of your own, you're not going to be able to be as effective and sharp and compassionate for a patient who's in their most dire hour or for that patient's family at 7 o' clock in the evening when they need you to be your best. And the same holds true in any profession. We need our surgeons and pilots and parents and teachers and leaders to put their own health first. It's kind of like the old oxygen mask example in order to be most effective, even if it's all about serving others.

So good meaning interactions, energy for meaning. You have a great description of how the strengths and interests meet the world's needs. And you also, your background of course, is with strengths and your discussion of doubling down on your talents I found really, really inspiring. Can you tell us about the importance of that?

Yeah, you know, it's. There's kind of a conventional wisdom as we go through our formal education in almost every country I've studied, where the point is to be well rounded and make sure that you' semi competent at everything to some degree. And while that's important at a basic grade school level with maybe reading and writing arithmetic and learning how to talk to another person competently at some point, what really differentiates us in life is the natural talents where we excel much easier than other people do. And so when I've gone around, interviewed some of the most successful leaders and individual performers over the years and what they've realized is that if they spend their entire career, once they're done with school, if they spend their whole career just trying to be a jack of all trades and a little bit good at everything, there's really no chance they'll ever be great at anything. And I mean, I'm a numbers guy, as you can tell. And so if I look at this even from a math standpoint, If I invest 50 hours each week and just trying to be a little bit of everything statistically, it eliminates my odds of being great at anything in life. It just does. And so we've got to find ways to focus our efforts in the areas where we already see some inklings of natural talent. And I'm not in the strengthsfinder parlance that I've spent some time on, there's a theme that we call woo, which is winning others over and that's the super extrovert who's really outgoing and boy, that's the opposite of me. I get to a cocktail party and want to find a corner to hide in.

You find me in that corner.

If you told me I was in a job where I had to just cold call people all day and sell in rooms like that, I'd be in so much trouble. Whereas so I realize that in any professional endeavor I'm doing, I need to partner with people and surround myself with people who can do that a lot better than I ever could or it limits my ability to be effective. And so that's the good news is that it's entirely possible to do a lot of things if you build, you can build well rounded teams where each person feels like they can be their best in the context of that team or that effort. Yep.

How would you describe your strengths that you're doubling down on?

My a couple of my top talents that come to the top from our early work on strengths and through strengthsfinder were futuristic and analytical rows two that come up there. And I'm always thinking about where the future and how I'm obviously just convinced by now nature and through the work that I've been doing that the future for the next generation, my kids will be a heck of a lot better than it was for me or for generations before me and eager to think about real specific ways to map that out and make that happen.

That's awesome. And the analytical is the 2,600 big ideas you and your team found in the data that's research oriented that supports all these choices we make.

Yeah. You know, it's interesting that you have to Prove things to people to get their energy aligned behind it and then kind of map out. I also have a theme called strategic about kind of how that happens in a real specific way. So it's. Yeah, I like boiling down from a lot of this research what's practical that people can do and how do you rally organizations and economic resources behind it? Because it's also connected to things that. That drive economic growth as well, which is really which economic growth is important to get people's time and energy behind things.

Yeah. That's awesome. So then interactions. So that's a very, very, very, very, very quick look at one of my favorite ideas from Meaning we could obviously talk about that for a weekend or two or 10 interactions. One of the coolest ideas from that section, from my perspective, was the iPhone effect. Can you tell us about the that.

Yeah. You know, I realized this as I started to get into the work that we've obviously been kind of driven to distraction where, I mean, at any given moment, there's notification on our desktop and our phone's dinging and something's vibrating in our pocket, and there's so many distractions at our disposal that paying attention to another human being who you chose to spend time with and be in a room with harder and harder by the day. And so it's gotten so bad that I realized we reached kind of a tipping point where when scientists, as a part of a study, they ask people to. When you're sitting at a table with colleagues to put their smartphone on a table face down. And it was actually the phones were powered off, so they weren't dinging or vibrating or blinking or buzzing, nothing else. But even when the phones are powered off, it sends an implicit message to everyone else around the room that that darn device comes before the other people in the room, and it statistically degrades the quality of the conversation for everyone. So, boy, of all the things I've read that's changed my daily behaviors as much as about anything where even though phones are getting too big to keep in your pocket anymore, I've learned to keep my phone stowed away, if at all possible, because of the imagery and message it sounds, especially with my kids, where at the dinner table, if I have. I do everything possible not to have that phone out or when I'm reading to my kids at night, the last thing I want is to have that phone visible or present or them thinking that it might jump in and come before them. And of course, there are emergencies where you have to be able to have something Ring or be notified. But 98% of what we allow to disrupt us right now is not a life threatening emergence. It's.

Yeah. This is so powerful. It's one of the most deeply impactful ideas for our lives as well. And there's just the humor in it of really like 10, 15 years ago. Leave a voicemail on the home message system.

Yeah. Or ride a horse across the country.

Exactly.

Really need to disrupt.

Exactly. Oh, so good. Well, this was again, such a fun quick tour. I appreciate you taking the time. Eat, move, sleep. Are you fully charged? Both of them are just awesome. I really appreciate your humility and passion and vision for a better future and your ability to bring the data analytically to our lives in a really inspiring way. Best place for people to connect with you. We talked about a couple of websites, eatmovesleep.org and then fully charged the movie. Google that and you can find it all@tomrath.org Tom R A T H. Tom, thank you so much.

Thank you, Brian. You know, it's been inspiring for me to see just how much knowledge you're helping people to benefit from and learn and synthesize. And it's just a blast talking with you.

Hi, this is Brian. A lot of people don't know all the stuff I do beyond these free videos I share on YouTube. So I thought I'd do a quick video to give you an overview of.

Our membership program that you can get.

Access to and get a ton of other stuff. So here's a quick look. Ten bucks a month. Join the Optimal Living membership program. You get Instant Access to 250 Philosopher's Notes on some of the best Optimal Living books out there. Old school classics, positive psychology, modern stuff, Mindfulness, peak performance, purpose, neuroscience, wealth, etc. What you may not know is that in addition to the PNTV episode, I create PDFs on all these great books. So six page PDFs. Let's take a look at one of them. Joseph Campbell, you want to figure out how to live your hero's journey? Well, this is a great place to start. I basically pull out my favorite big ideas, riff on them, connect them to other books and other ideas, and help you apply this wisdom to your life today. That's what the PDF looks like. Again, we have 250 of these on all these different great books. And then I record those PDFs as an MP3 so you can listen to that MP3 while you're on a walk or working out or doing some errands or whatever that is. Philosopher's Notes. A lot going on there. And then in addition to Philosopher's Notes, you get access to optimal living classes. Optimal Living 101 idea here is that all those great teachers come back to the same big ideas again and again and again. I distill those ideas into classes. Super practical, fun, inspiring classes ranging from Habits 101, Confidence 101, Getting Stuff Done 101, Meditation 101, instant access to all those classes. And then Future classes include Relationships 101, Energy 101, Purpose 101, Business Goals, etc. Those are our full length classes. And then I create micro classes. Two to three to five minute little bursts of wisdom on my favorite great ideas from these great books across the domain that you want to optimize in your life. So we have dozens of these so far. I create 50 new micro classes every month and 10 new philosopher's notes every month for 10 bucks a month. So we're blessed to have thousands of members who are enjoying the program and sharing some incredibly kind words with us. And super simple 10 bucks a month. Cancel anytime. Would be honored to be a bigger part of your life and I appreciate your support. And here's to optimizing and actualizing.