Heroic Interview: Movement Matters with Katy Bowman

You're listening to Movement Matters, an optimal living interview with Katie Bowman and Brian Johnson. Hi, this is Brian. Welcome back to the Optimized podcast. Today I'm thrilled to be chatting with Katie Bowman once again. We have covered two of her other great books, Move youe DNA and Don't Just Sit There. We had some fun chats on those books, so check them out. And of course, check out the books. And today we're going to talk about Movement Matters, which is not quite her newest book. I just learned that she has a new new book which is called Dynamic Aging. So check that out. We're recording this the day before she's going to be on the Today show. So you might have picked that up. If not, check it out. But for now, Movement Matters Subtitle Essays on Movement Science, Movement Ecology and the Nature of Movement Katie, as you may know, is one of the world's leading thinkers on, well, a lot of things, but particularly nutritious movement. Katie, I am thrilled to have you back. Thanks for taking the time.

Thanks for having me. I appreciate it. Of course.

Well, I'm looking forward to another fun conversation. Tell us about movement and why it matters.

Oh, gosh, that's such a good question. So Movement Matters is kind of putting forth this idea that movement is a biological requirement. What I put. Which I put forth in Move youe DNA. Right. You know, in Move youe DNA, I was like, you really do need movement. Kind of similar similarly to the way that you need food. It needs to be varied in terms of nutrients and the frequency in which you get it. But Movement Matters goes a step further to say that movement isn't only part of the way that you work your personal body. It's not only the way that your cells work and that your arm muscles and your leg muscles and your diaphragm, it's part of how that works, that your movement is part of how an ecosystem works. Your movement is actually part of an ecosystem. It's how nature works. It's how the planet works. So it was kind of expanding from the really, really micro, small cellular benefits of movement or the cellular effects of movement to the global effects of when you move and when you don't, how you move and where you're not moving. And so it kind of expanded movement from a physiological argument to a sociological and environmental argument. So it matters because it's part of how. It's part of how things work.

Well, talk to us about that. Talk to us about the ecosystems.

Well, so I think that we all get this kind of Rudimentary idea of an ecosystem. And it seems that most people are well versed in the ecosystem. When you talk about Yellowstone, what happened when they removed keystone species like the wolves? Right. So the wolves were removed by the government at that time because they were kind of encroaching on the food supply basically for the humans that were there, they threatened the cattle. They made hunting more difficult. So it was a logical conclusion to remove them. But after they sort of slaughtered all of them, what happened was that what they ate the different rodents and, you know, fox and whatever, I'm just, I don't know all the different species that are Yellowstone. But like, whatever that whatever they were eating began to flourish and grow in numbers. So now you've got more rabbits and you've got more fox and you've got more mice than you normally have. And then what they eat, what those particular species eats gets eaten down more extremely. And now you're affecting rivers because the grasses that aren't there, an entire species of bugs are normally there. And then birds can't come there because the bugs that live in the grasses are all gone too, with the grasses. And so those birds fly away. So removing the wolves, this keystone. Right. So that's what a keystone is in an archway. It's that one piece that holds all the other pieces there. When you removed it, there's kind of a collapse of an entire ecosystem. This one system, unbeknownst to the, to the government and the scientists at that time who decided to remove them, they didn't understand the effect of that animal within that system. So movement in the same way you think of, if you look around, like I can look around at my own house and I see that there's water being piped into my house and that there's always food in my refrigerator. And if there's not, there's a car in the driveway which I can drive to the gas station to fill up to go to the store and find all the food that I've ever wanted probably there in that one store. It's a phenomenon. Like it used to be specialty stores. Now it's all in every store. You can have all the different sections. And if I don't feel like actually preparing my own food, not only can I buy the ingredients of a meal there, I can actually buy the meal itself. Someone has already chopped it and assembled it and cooked it. And so I think we're used to that idea, but we're not used to that idea of how movement relates to all of those things. So if I Didn't have all those things that I just mentioned. I would have to go move and look for the source of my food, and I would have to find the source of the heat to cook the food, and I'd have to go source the water. And then I would also have to be expending energy to not only get the food, but to process it into something edible. Whether it's like mashing it with my arms or ripping or tearing it. I mean, that's after I've already gathered it or hunted it down or whatever. There's all these motions for processing and preserving. So when there is not food a little bit in the future that I'm still able to eat throughout that entire year. And so we don't think about those things anymore. You and I don't have to. Because we live in a particular place in the world, in a particular time where. Where we, probably unbeknownst to us, have outsourced all of that other movement to someone else. Meaning the water is not just spontaneously in my pipes. Someone made those pipes, and someone put them under my house. And those pipes connect to. Frankly, I don't even know where those pipes connect, but they connect to a larger system that is connected into this city that I live in. And other people's health depends on my pipes connected, continuing to work. Well, but before all of that was there, it was physical labor that I myself had to do. And it wasn't only labor. It was very diverse labor. There was many different aspects of my personal survival that are facilitated by movement. Most. I mean, you can. You can't really pick up a human need. That's not movement facilitated. Right. Like, even, like birth and death have these physical elements of things like moving through our body and being pulled and. And needing to be processed or dealt with. And so we have outsourced the bulk of that movement. And that means that other people on the planet right now are doing those movements for you. You could say that they are just getting the things. But I try to reframe everything back into understanding. Well, no, movement is the thing that's gone because the food's still there. The water's still there, the fire or the heat is still there. The clothing is still there. Your house is there. All those basic, what do humans need to survive? They're all there. The only thing that's not there for me is movement. And so the biological tax is felt by me, of course, because as we've already established in previous interviews and in Move youe DNA, I still have a tremendous biological need for movement. But I live in a society that outsources its movement, a sedentary culture that outsources its movement to other people. So the effects to me is that I'm left with a copious amount of unnecessary unmet biological needs. And then of course, if we go beyond ourselves, which I encourage people to do, when you're, when you're talking about ecological model, you have to think bigger. What does other people having to move for me mean to them? What are they not able to do in their own lives anymore? Because they still have all the same biological needs as well, equal to mine that are just basic human needs. But now they're doing my work, which then starts decreasing their ability to do their work. And so they are taxed in a different way. And then you look at environmentally, what is it like to have so many middlemen to movement? I can go by, I can go out and I can harvest the seeds from my kale from last year. I can do that physical labor and then I can save them, process them and plant them and grow that kale and gather it from the plant. Or I can drive to the store and get a plastic box of kale. And so there's an efficiency in me doing it myself because it didn't involve the car going to the store. Anything that wrapped, the final product that I bought is going to be, you know, it's going to be usually plastic. Frankly, plastic is a huge middleman and outsourced movement because you can't buy a bunch of baby peeled carrots not wrapped in plastic. Right. So we have a lot of choices that cost the planet and other humans on it very high. And I would argue that the element that we're missing is that it's only movement that we've gotten rid of that. That that movement is the sole thing that we've outsourced to other people. And the cost is, the cost is great. But it's also maybe the largest contributor to the unsustainable behavior that we have right now with, with regards to the planet like, and other people like, if this is just not sustainable anymore because you can only outsource for so long because of the lack of efficiency and how you're getting your stuff.

So obviously we can talk about that for quite a while. What do we do about it?

Well, so move more. Right. But key, I think to movement matters, there's a reason I didn't say exercise matters, there's a reason I said movement matters. So I think key is understanding the difference between movement and exercise. Again, Something that I brought up in Move youe DNA, I thought was really important that people said, hey, I know you're doing your fitness, but you're sedentary all around it, right? So that was this idea of like, oh, I need to do more movement through the day, more non exercise time. Movement, movement matters, takes it the next step and it says you not only need to move more. So I think the argument of Move youe DNA was really about this. It was still relative to us. Like, I want to be healthier, I want more of my parts to work better. It was still really kind of personal choice to move more throughout the day for better results for yourself. Movement matters is saying it's not only enough to move more. It's not about getting 10,000 or 30,000 steps on your personal pedometer. It's making sure that you are accomplishing something else that you need for your life during that bout of movement. That it's not doing movement for movement's sake, it's doing and which is what exercise is. Exercise is movement for movement's sake, meaning that you're exercising solely to reap the physical benefit or adaptation to that movement. Non exercise movement is movement done where you're facilitating a non physiological. Physiological isn't the right word. Like you're not trying to adapt simply to the movement. You're trying to get something that you need to eat. You are passing on traditions to another generation, teaching some sort of skill that will continue the next generation. I'm just talking about parenting right here. You know, you're helping your kids be able to do the same things, get the things that they need. It's you are able to. I mean, gosh, some of the things are like, you step outside, probably not you right now where you are, but you step outside and before you even feel the cold, you'll throw on your fleece and your down jacket because you don't even want to do the work to warm yourself up. Then of course, the down is not pleasantly sourced according to the geese that it comes from. And the fleece. Now they're finding fleece in all the waters. Plop, plop, plastic everywhere, infused in plants and waters inside fish from what we put on right away to not do the physical movement of warming ourselves up. So it is. What do we do? We start understanding that our need for movement is tremendous. And it's not exercise really that we need. It's movement to facilitate our own life, to take responsibility for the things that we require.

Yeah, I love it. One of the themes in this book and others is just our addiction to comfort. So you inspired me to, you know, it doesn't matter what the temperature is in the morning. I go out in my tank top, you know, so it's shorts and tank top. People look at me, they're all bundled up or whatever and like, aren't you freezing? And the funny thing is after, obviously after I did the work in the initial, you know, wow, what am I doing? Your body acclimates very quickly and then it's completely mental of allowing that work to happen.

Right.

And so that's just been a fun, tiny little thing I've done. Thank you for the inspiration on that. And one of the other things that I loved in this book that you talked about very practically is stacking. Can you talk to us about stacking?

So stacking comes from permaculture. So it's not. Interestingly enough, I came up with the term on my own, but later found out that it's a form of gardening. You know, agriculture often gets kind of a, a bad rap because agriculture was the first time migrating. You know, there's migrating humans all over there in a particular relationship with the plants of the season and, and what was available. And then humans started to get a little more, we could say, thoughtful about it, where they're like, hey, I, we can reduce our movement. So you're going to see that I will refer to everything as we can see, we can see. We can call things like great mental advancements, but for most of what we would perceive as our great mental advancements, I will see lockstep, a great bit of trying to reduce movement. So there was this like, let's not move so far. Let's try to grow the things that we need here. But of course, if you move over 1,000 or 2,000 miles, the diversity of what you see is going to be pretty great. When you do it all in one place, that diversity can't occur in that one location. So then you had to reduce the diversity of what you were going to eat because it would be the thing that would grow in the place that you wanted to stay. And then of course, when, when there was an economics around it, then you only started to grow the thing that people liked more or the thing that was less likely to fail was more dependent or maybe the fail cycle was on a much greater scale and not easily seen. It wasn't something that failed every other year, it was something that failed every 30 years. So we've kind of self selected for what works. Well, I would hypothesize moving as little as possible, even to the point of like rows. Now we have rows. Why do we have rows in plants? Well, we have rows because it makes it easier to walk in between them. Right. You're not going over uneven terrain and all these types of lumpy, bumpy movement because we perceive that as inefficient. Not understanding that it's the lumpy, bumpy movement that nourishes more parts of us than the over flat ground. So in agriculture there's been a movement, if you will, to go back to more natural ways things occur. So like, if you were to step out in my backyard or into the forest, you're going to see that trees are growing all different types of trees in a certain area. It's not usually like an orchard of one type of tree. And every one of those trees gives off a different size debris. And then as it falls, it mulches well, it holds moisture on the ground that the debris. What we perceive as debris could also be a thermal blanket. Right. It could be warming the earth. It could be holding the water so that you don't have to pipe water in, but we clean it all out for easy planting. Now you're missing your blanket and your water source. So now you have to pipe in water. Now you have to add plastic. So permaculture is this idea that nature does it most efficiently. The modern way of doing can yield a higher volume of a particular thing, although the time period over which it can do that is unknown. But in a period of observable time, it can increase a large production of something. But there's a lot that you have to bring to the table and move from another place to bring to that place. Inefficient efficiency just depends on the scale at which you're looking at something. So permaculture is like, no, we're not going to rake, we're going to leave our stuff here and, and we're going to recognize that, you know, dead things are part. And dead things in the ground are part of what the soil needs. Where we don't even, you know, we have special areas of where we put things in the ground. You're not even allowed to plant your dog or your horse in your garden after it passes away. Because we're worried more about what happens when a lot of people live together in a high volume. So we, in order to protect that, we start decreasing practices of moving the waste far, far away and then getting manure from something else and bringing it in. Right. I think people forget fertilizer is just manure that. That plants that were edible to human were cultivated through humans eating them and pooping them out. And those two things being there, like, we've just kind of forgotten how it all came about because we're trying to manage more society than we are trying to manage natural biological systems. So movement, permaculture is that same. I knew I'd get there sometime. Movement culture is coming back to that idea to say movement is not something that happens over here on the farm gym, in rows, reps. It's something that happens as you're picking up your kid and walking and gathering the food, that it's supposed to be distributed throughout the day and varied throughout the day, season, lifetime. That there is a frequency and a distribution that we're trying to look for the stack your life. This idea is, if you apply that permaculture principle to your life, look for where you're currently outsourcing movement or choosing activities that aren't meeting any more. Like, bringing in water is one need. Bringing in plastic over rows is another need. But leaving the ground cover would be a different option that meets both of those needs at the same time. You didn't have to do two different steps. In fact, you didn't have to do three steps. You didn't have to rake, you didn't have to bring in the water, you didn't have to lay down the plastic. So I'm really encouraging that perspective towards movement, which is. And in the book, the example is, you know, I'm a parent of young kids. Every day is this kind of wrestle of I have to feed my family, I have to move my body, I have to move my family. We need a certain amount of fresh air and sunshine. And I also want to be with them, right? Which I've kind of started to file as a need. Like, oh, I have to spend a certain amount of minutes with my kid on my to do list. And that mentality, I was struggling and failing with it every single day because I also had to work and I had to go to the grocery store. And so I visualize these compartments of my life in the same way that we've been told to be a, you know, efficient human. Like, you schedule everything in your book, right? Write that, make sure you schedule that workout. And it's holding this physical space where nothing else is happening during that time. And then you start scheduling it in math, it's called in series. They're discrete and separate, and they happen one after another. I had so many hours of daily obligation and I'm talking not about like a lot on my to do list as much as biological obligation. I had to eat, I had to source the food, I had to, you know, raise my kids, I had to be with my partner. All these things that are needs, human needs. I have to be with other human beings and I have to engage with the planet that I'm on. But I had them all parsed in a way that kind of reflects how our society was like the, the separation that is the foundation of our particular society. It was affecting the way that I was thinking. Right. Like, I just think of that agriculture as a really good example of how we structure everything. It's this very efficient in rows, non varied, separate, segregated. And so I started looking just one day. I couldn't take it anymore. I'm like, let's go for a walk. But no kids want to go for a walk. So I was like, no, we're going to walk to the apple tree. Awesome. Kids are all in now same exact distance, but now it's not a walk because no one wants to go for a walk, especially not if you're under five. But to go to the apple tree, they would walk two hours to go to the apple tree, especially if they got to eat the apple when they were there. And as we were going, there's the berry bushes, there's the neighbor that had the overgrown zucchinis who are passing to my kids now my kids are carrying things, you know, they're carrying all this weight. And we ended up being out there for, I don't know, two or three hours. And I realized, oh, this is how, this is the natural behavior really for humans. And when I'm doing it, everything falls into place. So in that same, instead of having the hour walk that I wanted to take and the hour playing or doing some sort of schema or, you know, flip card game with my kids so they could learn and driving to the store in between that and starting some foods and packing snacks, I got to get them snacks, they need snacks. I was like, this is all accomplished in that same period of time. So I could just walk to the train back. And that two hours met six hours of what would normally be separate, separately scheduled obligations. So it's more stacked. So I started to see those separate circles instead of being in series. It's like, oh, I need to pick activities where I'm meeting multiple obligations in the same period of time in the same expression of energy. So that's movement, permaculture with stacking as.

Our primary theme again. So Many things there that have influenced my life. And doing a lot of the same things. You just described a little differently, obviously in our context, even for me, just something as simple as, you know, we have a little home gym and I'd row in there and it was very much I would row for this period of time, this many meters, and I would accomplish that functional exercise activity. Now it's a hike, but it's not just a hike. It's that varied terrain I'm in nature that tech de stress, the time just to kind of be away from everything. I do choose to do that alone just because. Because that's my meditative alone time in that regard. But I'm stacking all these things in a way for me that's just so much more nourishing then same amount of time. But I just accomplished all the sunlight, all that nature, all the very terrain, the movement, of course, slash exercise is still there. So I found that super helpful. And then finding ways to do the same thing with our family of can we be inside doing this, or can we go outside and do this, this, this, and this and accomplish this six hours in two hours? So I just love that idea and the way you unpack it here.

And in the book, it's been a game changer for us, you know, especially in the work that we do in this idea of optimization. It never ends. Like you just keep getting more and more pieces. And when you have 100 steps to optimization, it becomes quickly overwhelming because perhaps it's my personality, maybe it's yours too. When I can only get to a small percentage of optimization, all I see is the percentage that I get into and my mind going, well, then I'm just clearly deoptimized, right? And then that's the mental space all the time. So I do, you know, I'm a biologist at the core. Biomechanics, like is the physics really of biology. And so it's been really helpful for me to understand that nature, what we call nature, is stacked. It's just everything happening all at once. And everything that happens because of all the things that happen all at once. And that when I hear some element of optimization, what I go searching for is its natural counterpart or its nature counterpart. Because then I find that it's much more easily integratable. And oftentimes I realize that I might have already had it. But it has a different name in nature, right? Because nature doesn't name things. And so that has been. That has. That is probably has been the game changer is to Recognize I can always refer back to the whole state of something because we all have, I think, a pretty good sense of the natural world or the, you know, so interesting in the book too, we talk about, like, what does nature actually even mean? But you know, what we're considering the wild or behavior that's not superhuman influenced. It makes it a lot. It makes it a lot easier to meet my own needs.

It's cool. And another way that you, that you frame it that I think is helpful in this context is the. I think you're referring to your gardening and simply just choosing to try equaled nailing it. So I think that's actually a good thread to pull as we look at the, you know, the opportunities to be overwhelmed by all the things we could be doing, and we're only doing a small fraction of them. But just embracing that, choosing to try equals nailing it. Can you walk us through that?

Well, that's a mindset that I had to have. And I, you know, being kind of coming from like an exercise physiology background, I feel like everyone can relate to this idea of if you wanted to run a marathon, you understand, through good marketing of whoever's in charge of marathons, like, you understand this idea that there's a goal of a certain body of miles. But on your first run, when you've chosen to train for the marathon, I don't think anyone is going, I can't believe I can't run a marathon right off the bat. Like, I don't think anyone really thinks that that's a possible thing. Like, they're just gonna get up and do it, you know, and so if you could see every. And you're not really, like, you're not running a marathon. What you're doing is you're transitioning your physiology to be able to run a marathon. And, and you do that right up until the time that you're done with the marathon. It is a very long journey made up of many, many steps at different speeds, including the times when you're not actually literally stepping. Those are also part of your adaptation phase. That the goal of to be able to run a marathon does not imply that your constant state is running a marathon. That physiological adaptation, the fact that you understand that you have to grow more capillaries and that your tissues need to change their molecular structure to be able to deal with the force and to be able to deal with the amount of oxygen that has to come in and waste that has to move out, and the amount of food you have to displace to Be able to grow those tissues and let tissues that need to atrophy to let those go. That atrophy itself is a process that requires fuel because your body has to consume something, right? Like when you start thinking about things on that more physiological or molecular level, you realize like that me choosing to have a garden, I don't have any gardening skills. My relationship with food has been driving to. And I pride myself to. I always. I know how to make an awesome salad and I can eat well, but I actually don't have a skill set for getting my own food. And so there's growing it. And then I thought, well, this is a lot of work. How about letting nature grow it and finding where it already exists? So miner's lettuce. It turns out miner's lettuce grows all around me. I don't even actually have to grow my own lettuce. I under. I found the thing that I needed, and now I can take with my walk with my kids like we did last night, and go harvested a bunch of dandelions. Things that people throw away or will put pesticides on or will have to work to mow my. Those are like nutritious things that are just down there. But that wisdom's been lost. So I've just been slowly transitioning, transitioning to someone who knows how to get more of the things I need. Recognizing that I'm not a bad person because I didn't run a marathon and didn't know how to grow lettuce that no one had ever taught I. No one had ever modeled that that was something that I should or have. Should have known how to get. It's something completely brand new. I don't have the. I don't know the motions to be able to do it. It's like, same thing with, you know, you're rowing in a gym and the idea is like, I'm rowing, but to put that person an actual boat and then to realize there's all these other movements and skills, like rowing does not in a. In a machine, does not really parlay that well to its natural counterparts. In that same way, eating and being a conscious shopper and even going to the farmer's market, you know, like, it didn't prepare me for actually needing to till the soil myself and to be in a relationship with the seed. Right? Like you're in a relationship with your plants. I'm in a different relationship with my food now. My food is something that I need to live, and I also require that my food lives. Like, so you see What I'm saying, like it's not. I don't need it so that I can live. I need it to live, I need it to survive. I need to be able to know what it needs in the same way that I need to know what my children need. Someone modeled for me what to do for children. And I have found that the ways that were modeled to me are different than the ways that there are to nourish and feed and grow your children. So I made conscious decisions to be able to change it, but never did I feel like a failure for not doing it. These things are lost to us because we don't have an elder based society. Right? Like that's the role of elders in a society is to go here's how the society did it before and why they're still here. And then you get it passed on. So in that way, a culture, like a sociological culture, is very similar to a culture in a petri dish. It's a cell that's replicating more of cells that behave in a particular way. And so I think it's really interesting whoever came up with the culture if it was already biologically minded, but in order to change the culture, which is what I'm trying to do, I cannot behave as my predecessor. As my predecessor cells have behaved because their behavior came from a particular place and is going to a particular place that I don't necessarily want to go or that I don't think is sustainable to go. So I make really small shifts and they're just. I just think of them as adaptations like, oh, everything. Like my land is learning how to be with me and I'm learning how to be with it. And my partner is learning how to adapt to the fact that I'm in a relationship also with the land. Right. So sorry, I can't go with you right now. I'm in a relationship with the land and it has my attention. If you'd also like to be with me, we can be with the land together. And then that requires someone else do a change. And now the children, they need me, but they're also in learning mode. So like, oh, we're with the land. Okay, great. This is what we're doing now. And it's. We're back to that, echo that ecology, right? We're back to the change of one thing affects everything else and requires everything else change or adapt.

And the, I love the, the idea of just those tiny adaptations. We call them optimizations. So there's those incremental optimizations, aggregating those and Compounding them over time. And then in that relationship and connection to something bigger than ourselves is exciting. And then there's that celebration of taking that next step forward and each step after in such a beautiful way. Well, I want to be sensitive to our time. Is there anything like a favorite idea that you wanted to make sure we chat about in the limited time we have left?

No, but you know, I think I'm at this point in my career, I'm very sensitive to the listener. The potential overwhelming feeling that comes from these really big ideas. And I did another interview this morning and the woman, it was more of a. It wasn't like an optimization perspective. It was like a, it was like a midwestern radio show. This is like, wow. Like what do you mean? There's different types of exercise and movement, right? So really a particular demographic where this would be particularly radical, you know, and she was talking about like just this idea that you could walk and go pick apples from a tree was profound. But I said, you know, for, you know, this audience right now, we talked about what, not going to the farmer's market, but rather growing something yourself. But let's just say that you are many, many steps from that. You know, maybe that's someone who already would run a 5k before they decided to run a marathon. Now we're talking to someone who has been lying down on the couch and just opened their eyes right now. Like I'm so far from a garden. That will never happen to see that. You know, let's say that you usually go have fast food. That's a particular outsourcing, right? If you look at the plastic, the paper, the oils that things are being cooked in, and I'm not even talking about the nutritional quality, we can add that in. But like you're, you're looking at the fact that you're sitting in your car going to the drive through and get this ready made eel. It's like the ultimate short of having it injected straight into you, it's the ultimate outsourcing of anything that you have to do to be able to eat. So what if you just go to the store and buy a box of macaroni and cheese? That person just took a step and all they have to do is add water. That person just took that step, that you just took a step towards optimization. So I think it's really important that when you understand that to see someone making macaroni and cheese for that person, that's a home cooked meal. But then maybe you're going to step from there eventually you're like, okay, well I've never made the kind where you actually grate the cheese and you add more ingredients, you're doing a little bit more work. You had to go walk to three or four different places in the grocery store to get the things that you needed. Maybe you always buy pre sliced beets, you know, at Trader Joe's or things that are already clean. Like just buying them on a stock would be a way to outsource less. So I just want to always really make clear that no matter where you are is a probably extremely easy to achieve. Small step to get more movement, to outsource less, to tax the environment and other people less. It's like the scale is so big, the continuum is so big. Anyone can be successful. Even if it's simply taking the meal that you are eating inside, eating it outside. Just that alone. More vitamin D. Sitting down on the ground, using your body a little bit more to deal like your ears a little bit more. Getting over the fear of the dirt or whatever. That all of those are steps towards natural movement, moving your DNA, optimizing being more sovereign. Sovereign is the word that I, that I really feel like you're ultimately having that responsibility and are able to make those decisions for yourself because a lot of the decisions are made for us because we don't have any skills otherwise. So that just I think you making macaroni and cheese could be your exercise program, you know what I mean? Like that, that could. And that's perfectly okay.

I love it. Again, the plus 1% is one of the things we use to plus 1%. We don't need to be 100%. You don't need to go change everything radically. Start run that marathon tomorrow if you haven't been training 1%, 1%, 1%, 1% aggregate compound over time and then enjoy the process. I love it. Appreciate you. What's the best place for people to learn more about you and your work? Nutritious movement.com Nutritious movement.com There you will find a ton of information. The podcast is linked from there, of course. All these different books. Fantastic. Thank you.

Thank you, Brian. Always a pleasure.

Likewise. Isn't it a bit odd that we went from math to science to history, but somehow missed the class on how to live? For some wacky reason, optimal living 101 never made the schedule. Of course it's too late to go back and change that and you're too busy to read full time to catch up yet. If you're like us, you're all about optimizing your life and actualizing your potential. So imagine this. Imagine having someone read the best books on optimal living and pulling out the big ideas that can truly change your life. You know those sections you asterisk and underline and mark all up? Then imagine that guy me connecting those ideas to other great books and helping you apply them to your life today. Well, that's what I do with something we call Philosopher's Notes where I break down each great book into a simple 6 page PDF, 20 minute MP3 and 10 minute Philosopher's Notes TV episode. Then imagine me taking the absolute best big ideas from those great books and sharing them with you in fun, inspiring, super practical optimal living 101 classes on stuff like purpose 101, confidence 101, business 101, meditation 101, that sort of thing. You've got a personal trainer? I'm kind of like your personal philosopher. Ancient wisdom plus Modern science plus Common Sense plus Virtue plus Mastery plus Fun. That's what our optimized membership program is all about. We'd love to have you join us. Check us out at BrianJohnson. Me join.