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All right, let's get into the episode.
Hello and welcome back to the show.
Thank you so much for joining us.
I am Patrick.
I am here, of course, with Ben.
And we are joined by a new friend of ours, Brian Johnson.
Gentlemen, how are you?
Doing great, Patrick.
And Brian, awesome to have you here, man.
Pleasure to be here.
Appreciate you both.
Ryan, we've mentioned you on the show a few times before, so folks might be familiar with you, but you are the founder of Heroic.
You're the author of a book called Arete, Activate Your Heroic Potential.
You spent the last 20 plus years distilling ancient wisdom and modern science into practical tools that can help people show up as the best versions of themselves.
And for folks who want to learn more, head to heroic.us.
I would love, Brian, just like a very quick introduction as to who you are and what you focus on.
And then I'm really excited to have this conversation today.
I want to talk to you about a term I heard you say once, and that is anti-fragile confidence.
And so it piqued my interest and my curiosity.
So I want to talk to you about that.
But I would love if you'd introduce yourself to us, to our audience, so that we know a little bit more about you.
Yeah, I appreciate it.
That was a wonderfully concise overview.
I was enjoying that, but 20 years, you know, I'm rubbing the gray whiskers as I think about that.
But the last 25 years, I've spent half my time as a founder CEO.
I built and sold two social platforms before Facebook.
And when I wasn't doing that, I was a philosopher, a lover of wisdom, studying ancient wisdom, modern science, really just obsessed about trying to understand how to live a good noble, heroic life in the modern world.
I run a company called Heroic.
We're a public benefit corporation.
And, you know, we can talk more details what we do, but that's the high level overview.
And anti-fragility is one of my favorite things.
So I'm really excited to chat about it.
Cool.
Let's just jump right in.
There's a quote that I heard you say once that I think is the right entry point.
And it's from Nassim Taleb, which is the wind extinguishes a candle, but energizes a fire.
What does that mean?
I get goosebumps when you say that.
So I have a playbook on my arm.
I've tattooed my life's mission and the heroic and creating a world in which 51 of humanity is flourishing by 2051 and an anti-fragile confidence.
So this is like the thing that I get called in to talk to with elite performers about.
So to be anti-fragile is to use all of life's challenges as fuel for your growth.
So to define what antifragility means, you got to define its opposite.
So what's the opposite of antifragility?
It's fragility.
Now, most people go from being fragile to being resilient, but there's something that's way more than resilient.
It's anti-fragile.
And then Jonathan Haidt is one of the only, very few people talk about this idea.
So Nassim Taleb, Jonathan Haidt, and I talk about it a lot.
Jonathan Haidt has a great metaphor.
He says, imagine a wine glass on a kitchen table.
You knock the wine glass off, what happens?
Unless you got carpeted floors, it shatters.
That's fragility.
Now, if you have a plastic cup on the table and you knock it off, what happens?
It bounces around.
But what would happen if you had a glass or an object that you can knock off the table?
And it literally got stronger as it bounced around.
That's anti-fragility.
So when Nassim Taleb says, the wind extinguishes a candle, fragile, but it fuels a fire.
The very same wind, the very same challenge in our lives will either break us or make us stronger.
And you guys obviously comp train and all the work you do, it's going to the gym.
You go to the gym to do what?
To lift weights.
Yet, when life gives you weights in your relationships, your health, your business, you complain.
But what if instead, you use that as fuel, you use that as your own spiritual you know, soul training to get stronger?
That's what it means to be anti-fragile.
And then I've been blessed to do some work with Special Forces, and one of the generals that brought me in is that sounds nice and warm and fuzzy, but how do you bring it off the bumper sticker?
And in his introduction of me, he says, that's what I do.
So there's a way to operationalize that, but that's kind of the high level frame that I use.
Then the very important next line that Nassim Taleb says is you want to be the fire and wish for the wind.
So you quit complaining about life's challenges.
You want them.
You move out of your comfort zone because you know that's the only way you're going to get stronger and better.
So cool.
So I just have to.
We have comp train, but maybe we need soul train.
That might be trademarked already, Ben.
Come on.
You just threw that in there and there's no way we can't go back and underline and double score that.
Soul training.
That's so good.
Brian, just holding the button on that one for a second, why would we want to train our soul?
What is soul to you?
Yeah, wow.
I just had an hour and a half conversation with a great branding expert.
That's helping us really define what it means to be heroic.
So Arete, you know, wearing the t-shirt book and all that stuff.
I'm going to bring this to what it means to have a good soul.
Is the one word answer the ancient Greek or Stoic philosophers would have given you on how to live a good life? right so arete means virtue excellence basically close the gap between who you're capable being who you're actually being when you do that you live with what the ancient greeks called eudaimonia so eudaimon literally means good soul right so the highest good the summum bonum of the ancient world was to live with eudaimonia, goosebumps, to have a good soul.
So they believed that you had a daimon, a guiding spirit, right?
And in Christian theology, it would be your conscience.
There's this version of you that's like, it's there.
It knows what's best for you.
The Greeks called it a daimon.
The Romans, same idea, they called it a genius.
So we think of a genius as a person who's really skilled.
Everyone had their own genius.
They had their own guiding spirit in the ancient world.
So you and I have this daimon, the soul, the guiding spirit, and the diminutive of daimon is demon.
We also have, that's where the word demon comes from.
It's the anti-soul, if you will.
So there's a best version of you and a not so good version.
And the whole game of life is make sure you're paying attention to your inner daimon, your inner soul, and then be that best version of you.
Do what that best version of you knows is right, especially, by the way, when you feel the worst.
That's how you forge anti-fragile confidence.
If, when life hits you, instead of going off the rails and drinking or TikTok whatever, or I don't know what people, we all have our own habits.
If, in those moments when you get hit, instead of doing the vicious things, you do the things that are best for you, you change your life.
That's how you take it off the bumper sticker, which is, you know, a different part of our conversation.
But that's what it means for me to connect to my inner guide, my inner Daimon, my inner soul, to live in integrity with that.
And then when you do that, you feel great.
There's no room for all the regret anxiety, disillusionment that exists when you're allowing a gap to be there between your best and your not so great self.
That's.
I think it's really really, really important just to like highlight and maybe A couple of things.
There is the inner integrity.
So that is the alignment in your actions with the kind of this, you laid up really well, right?
And this is where that angel and the devil on both shoulders and the cartoons pops up.
And when we don't live in that way and there's no such thing as perfection we're all going to fall short of it in some form or fashion a number of times.
But what day?
Yes.
Yeah, correct.
Right.
Yeah.
That is what creates this disappointment, this regret, this kind of like, oh, with where you are.
And if you have the ability to lean farther into the angel side, what the higher self would do.
That's where you live with greater joy, that's the highest level of virtue and excellence, and your life just gets better.
And I've heard you use this term of the ultimate game, right?
Which is maybe just like kind of lead into that a little bit.
How does that play into the ultimate game that we maybe should be thinking about?
Yeah, well, in my book and everything that we do with Heroic, we have seven objectives.
The second objective is to forge anti-fragile confidence.
The first objective is you got to know the ultimate game.
So this is a 2,500 year old challenge.
For 2500 years, every ancient faith tradition and wisdom tradition said the same exact thing, which is there is an eternal battle going on within your own consciousness between, as you said, that angel and the devil right.
It is a universal challenge that has always existed.
So the ultimate game is to win that battle.
Now, most people get seduced by the idea that, no, no, it's to be famous and wealth and hot.
And how many square feet do I have in my house again?
Let me make sure it's more than my neighbor.
That's a lesser game, that if you are pursuing that, even if you are successful in your pursuit of that, scientists say you will be, and I quote, less psychologically stable than people who have prioritized the ultimate game, the intrinsic things like being a better person, deepening your relationships, making a contribution to your community.
So the ultimate game is to remember that closing this gap, living with excellence and virtue and being your best self will lead to joy.
It will lead to a deep sense of fulfillment.
Now, it won't always be easy and you and i have had some great conversations about the challenges we've faced entrepreneurially, and you've been a great you know guide and buddy for me as i've been navigating some challenges like.
It isn't always easy and fun and the yellow sticker with a smiley face on it, but when you're constantly and consistently rather trying to do your best, You just have this deep sense of you're on Mount Everest but you're not complaining about the weather because you knew that.
That's what you signed up for.
And those challenges were expected, even if they were unexpected.
Right.
And so when we can approach life with that wisdom, and then the discipline to do what needs to get done, even when we don't feel like it, and the love to do it for something bigger than ourselves, and the courage to continue to go out of our comfort zone the ancient four cardinal virtues wisdom discipline, love and courage then you're consistently closing the gap and it doesn't matter what's happening in your life.
You know you're doing your best and that comes with a deep sense of goosebumps again meaning and joy and purpose, and you've got what it takes to handle life's challenges.
But if every time life hits you, You're that little wine glass.
You're the candle being extinguished.
You know you're leaving so much on the table.
And then you want to go numb yourself.
Because that gap, if you allow it to exist too often day in and day out, week in and week out, month in and month out then you go do.
We all have little addictions.
But then you start piling on some stuff that just takes your life off the rails and all that.
Anyway, the ultimate game is to remember.
And it's moment to moment to moment, by the way.
It doesn't matter what you've done in the decades preceding.
Right now, in this moment, you can flip the light switch in your room and turn the light on.
And you got to make sure you don't turn it off again.
You then need moment to moment to moment.
You get to do another rep, you know, to use the gym metaphor, just show up, do your best.
And then you feel great.
You may need to clean out the house that you got messed up when the lights were off, but you have a chance to feel that joy moment to moment to moment.
That idea of like we've shared this.
We were talking about some entrepreneurial struggles that we both had and the Everest thing came up and we're like yeah, just another dark night on the side of Everest.
It's like, what else?
What did you expect?
This is what you signed up for.
My wife Heather who I know, you know, and I've met your wife as well got a text last night because she was going back and forth with a friend about how to Live a healthier life.
Right,
Just like people look to her as a leader in that space.
And the response she got was so awesome.
The response she got was Mount Everest is littered with dead bodies of once highly motivated human beings.
Maybe you should chill out.
Her friend said this to Heather.
Her friend said that to Heather.
One vantage point, one vantage point.
I love that.
It's so good.
It's good to be climbing with other people that want to be climbing.
Yeah, right.
Exactly.
So lean into, I want to get back to, I want to actually get to, like you said that step one and you kind of tease step two a little bit.
I know it's part of the heart of this conversation, but before we move off of that, one if step one of the ultimate, if step one is knowing what the ultimate game is and winning those moment to moment battles of angel demon, is that the same thing as what other people have called Freud, or like self one, self two?
And if so, is it like literally just like resisting the temptations of immediate pleasure and gratification and taking this more like long-term approach?
Is that what we're talking about?
Or is there something a little bit more deeper than that in terms of we have to elevate beyond that, or is it simply just like what it, what does the what is your true soul wants?
And maybe, how do we get there?
How do we understand what that actually is?
Yeah, we can talk about Freud, because he has a frame that I think is helpful in this, and then, to me, it's in any given moment you're capable being this version of you.
If, in any given moment, you're being this version, it's in that gap between who you could have been and who you're actually being, in which regret anxiety, disillusionment you do it enough depression exists.
So moment to moment to moment, close the gap.
And I would offer that, for example, we don't need to make it complicated.
If I'm yelling at my wife, There's no scenario in which that's me being my best self.
Now I might have a challenging conversation and be my best self in conflict, not saying no conflict, but the version of me that's yelling at my wife and kids.
There's a gap.
Now, in that moment I might not be aware of it, but I am suffering in that moment and I certainly will be afterwards.
So in any given moment, again, I'm at the gym, I'm at your gym.
Now I have a choice.
Do I do the rep or not?
And frankly, the answer is, it depends.
Am I going to injure myself?
If so, there's a gap if I push beyond when I know I should be relaxing, right?
Or I could push and leave it out there.
So I think noticing when we're off is what all great spiritual teachers say.
That's the hardest part is to be able to step out of your current experience and to see that's not me at my best.
Then the simple follow-on question is, well, what would be?
What could you do right now that would be a better doesn't need to be even the best a better expression of yourself.
And if you can get in the habit of doing that And again the worse you feel, the more committed you are to asking that question.
Then you're the fire wishing for the wind.
Then you want the challenges, because that gives you an opportunity to practice your philosophy at an X higher level.
And then it gets you a chance to evolve more and more and more.
I'll pause there.
No one already said a lot.
You can bring me back.
What I would love to know is I really like we said there is the noticing when you're off.
Do you have any advice for noticing that earlier?
Because what ends up happening right is like you're in an argument with your wife, but the adrenaline is going and you're right in that moment.
No, no, we're always right in those moments.
And then maybe like hours later or a day later or two later, you're like, what was that about?
Why was I so fired up about that?
A hundred percent.
So then, we've all experienced this, but for me, I noticed that the best version of me is more likely to be present when I'm dominating what I call my fundamentals.
And this is literally objective six, seven objectives.
Objective six is dominate your fundamentals eating moving, sleeping for me, breathing and focusing.
So the basic core, fundamentals are the essence of excellence, as you know better than anybody right.
So chasing excellence is chasing art.
This is why you and I connected so deeply.
Unbelievable book.
Let's go chase excellence.
Yeah, that's it.
But the fundamentals matter in any domain.
So eating, moving, sleeping, breathing, focusing.
I share that here because when I am tired, I'm eating off the menu.
I'm not training.
I'm not the best version of myself in any sense.
I'm a worse husband, a worse father, a worse entrepreneur, a worse fill in the blank.
So I like to do a quick inventory of, yeah, I'm tired.
I'm not angry with my wife or my kids.
I'm tired.
Or I didn't oscillate well today or fill in the blank on what might be contributing to that.
So my number one thing is you can solve problems before they become problems by having the physiological state that puts you in the best position to perform well when life's challenges hit.
That's my go-to always.
Get a good night of sleep.
Wake up.
Do what's most important.
I would include a meditation practice of at least a minute or three or five.
That's a deliberate way to train your awareness so you can notice more quickly in the moment.
Then after you do that, repair as fast as you can.
So when you do yell at your kids and wife, which I certainly dude, I can go back X hours and tell you.
The last time I did that literally repair as fast as you can.
Say, sorry, I lost it.
I flipped my lid, is how Dan Siegel puts it.
My prefrontal cortex came off.
Amygdala's barking at you.
Let me repair.
And then...
I like to kind of go back and use something that Lanny Basham, the great Olympic gold medal winning rifle shooter, who wrote a book called With Winning, in Mind.
He was a rifle shooter.
Anytime he missed the target, he would needs work it.
He would go back through the process and say what could I have done differently to hit the bullseye instead of missed?
Right.
So if I'm yelling at my wife after that, I repair it.
And then I say, are my kids.
It's an example in my book that I share because I yelled at my kids.
Right.
I went right back to the moment before I did it.
And I saw there was a choice point.
I could have taken a breath, or I could have done what I did, which was let the emotion simmer over and lead to me, you know, being whatever.
So I want to go back to the moment where I made the mistake, see what I could have done differently, and then play it forward to see what would have been different, and then commit to doing it better next time.
Done.
And then we spiral through rather than ruminate and shame and avoid repairing and all the things that go with it.
I get a lot of practice with this.
We could bring my wife in and she will attribute to the truth of that.
So I'm not saying I got to figure it out, but intellectually, it's pretty straightforward.
And then you spiral up and you get a little bit more graceful and then you reduce the lag.
Between you having a big gap and doing your best, because the next thing after you yell is to say sorry.
Well then, in that moment, you're back and you may need to clean up some mess that you created in your relationship or in your life, if you had too many of these moments.
But the moment you step forward you got a shot to build on that and to stop the kind of spiraling down.
You know.
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So two quick takeaways out of that.
First one is...
I really like what you said.
It's about saying sorry.
We have a framework which we call tactful conflict resolution, which I think I got from Dale Carnegie, I believe.
And it's step one is apologize.
So if there is conflict whatever, like oops sorry, I tipped my lid, or a customer walks in and goes you know Your coaches are terrible, right?
You want to defend yourself.
The first thing to do to realize that you're not fighting each other is to say sorry.
And it doesn't matter just like that.
It's so powerful.
And you said, once you say that, you're back to square one.
Then there's some stuff to work on.
Right.
You might have some repair to do, but I think that's such a powerful thing to understand is, when conflict is in place is to the fastest way to defuse it is with a sincere apology.
And there's other steps that and that's not what this is about.
I think it's really interesting that you have the book. arete.
And it's basically centered on these four fundamental principles of wisdom discipline, love and courage.
But you just lead into this other thing, which your book speaks quite a bit about, which is sleep.
And you said like the most likely thing for me to where I'm going to lose my eudaimonia is that I'm tired and my fuse is going to be shorter.
And you spend a lot of time in this book about philosophy and living the best version of yourself on that aspect of it.
I'm curious, what does a good night of sleep look like to you?
What are you doing to make that happen?
Because it's obviously a huge part of what you believe you brought up pretty early up in this conversation.
Yeah.
I mean, rule number one is you got to prioritize it.
So most people don't prioritize it, you know?
So what a good night of sleep looks like to me is why I do that is I know my physiology is driving my psychology.
So why I eat, I move, I sleep the way that I do is I know that the downstream effects on my psychology and interpersonal relationships, et cetera, is directly impacted by that.
And then I know myself well enough to know that if I'm not getting a good night of sleep, I'm a different person.
Therefore, I prioritize it.
So for me, today started last night.
So how I feel?
This is all obvious, but how I felt this morning when I woke up was directly determined by how I ended my day.
I like to feel really good when I wake up in the morning.
So I prioritize my PM bookend in a certain way.
So for me, I want to restrict blue light.
If you came to our house, you know, at night, you would just see red lights.
That's all we have.
We haven't had a normal colored light on at night.
And I don't know how many years in our house.
So I'm going to wind down at the end of the day.
I'm going to get my digital stimulation, you know, taken care of such that I can get in bed, such that I'm in bed for eight.
I'm in bed for nine to 10 hours a night.
That is my main thing is time in bed.
So I want to make sure I get the best shot at eight hours of sleep.
And I'm going to be in bed for a certain amount of time.
Wake up without an alarm at five.
So I'm literally in bed last night, like 730.
Sunsets at five or whatever it is, 530 in Austin, the middle of the winter.
But dude, sleep is a sport for me.
So I'm prioritizing that.
I'm up for like... hour, hour and a half last night.
I'm thinking I'm working hard right now, but I got to train my recovery.
And if I'm in, if I'm in bed long enough and I got my aura 90 sleep score a 92 sleep score this morning 90 average over the last month, I think 91 92 average over the last year.
So sleep is like my number one thing, not having good sleep is my kryptonite.
Therefore I prioritize it.
And then it's a simple sleep hygiene stuff that um includes time in bed.
Lights down, get the blue light restrictions.
Temperature 67 degrees, all the obvious things.
I sleep with an eye mask.
I have earplugs in, like whatever.
Like that's just a little filter going on.
Dude, it's literally like a sport for me.
All those little marginal gains of let's get a great night of sleep, you know?
I love it.
I think it was from your book, where it was like you have your protocol and what's the one non-negotiable right?
What's the one like?
I don't know if that came from you or not, but it's a question I ask a lot of people now.
It actually has been part of my kind of like go-to.
I'll use it in social circles, but what is the one thing that you are not willing to negotiate on in terms of operating at your best?
And, you know, is it training?
Is it sleeping?
Is it eating well?
Is it journaling?
And I asked my staff this and a bunch of things.
Mine also is the sleep thing.
You know, I own a gym and I train six, seven days a week.
But I also realize that me missing a workout is not nearly as bad as missing a good night of sleep.
It's just so fundamental where the physiology drives the psychology.
I think it's an awesome way to kind of lay that up.
Yeah, can we actually double click on that just real quick?
Because I think it's really interesting, this idea of physiology controlling or certainly influencing psychology.
And I think it's really easy to skip the physiology thing.
And I'm curious Brian, why you think so many people go straight to psychology I'm just going to use the term mental health without first going to physical health, recognizing everything you just laid out, which is that how you do these things and we call them here.
We call them the five factors of health, and it's including nutrition and training, and sleep and connection.
It's so easy to skip over those physical things and go straight to my mindset, or straight to fill in the blank whether that's talk therapy or something else.
I mean, it's frankly one of the most alarming failures of our mental health kind of practitioners.
And I rarely criticize, but like even the positive psychology movement, Zest.
So positive psychology, obviously founded by Martin Seligman, and all the things they're doing to demonstrate how one can not just get out of depression and all these other things, but really flourish.
They identified the virtues that are most highly correlated with your wellbeing.
The English translation of the word eudaimonia, by the way, is flourish, which is the name of the most recent book by Martin Seligman, the founder of the positive psychology movement.
So the one word summation of a good life is identical.
Ancient wisdom, modern science, flourish.
Now what modern science has done is scientifically proven that virtue is the basis of a good life.
It's phenomenal.
It's fascinating.
And they know the virtues that are most highly correlated with flourishing.
Tied for second are hope and gratitude.
If you don't have hope, you're hopeless, etc.
You're going to be depressed, right?
Gratitude, it's hard to be depressed and grateful at the same time.
Don't believe me?
Try it in any given moment.
But the number one virtue most highly correlated with your well-being is zest, a sense of vitality, right.
And one layer deep is your physiology, right?
Now there are more and more people talking about this in the positive psychology field, but not enough.
And then, when you look at the mental health field, there are some people I admire who start with your eating and moving and sleeping.
But to not start with that when you go to a therapist or a psychiatrist is it's a tragedy.
So much of our mental health challenges could be solved if we started with eating moving, sleeping and the basic fundamentals of a well-lived life.
And if you're trying to solve those downstream effects, That's hard to find your purpose in life, meaning to do all the things that are like hard psychological challenges.
It's a lot easier to change what you eat.
It's a lot easier to start moving your body a little bit more than it is to solve the abstract.
You know huge challenges in life.
So physiology drives psychology.
The science proves it.
I mean, so much of the work that I admire.
Georgia Ede is my favorite nutritionist right now. change your diet, change your mind.
Who's established.
You know working with these young adults in colleges.
Elite colleges are coming to her with more mental health issues than ever.
She changes their nutrition and solves their mental health crisis.
Wow.
How'd that work?
Because your physiology drives your psychology, your guts producing 90 of your body's serotonin.
But you're going to take it.
And again, Bless medications for the roles they play when appropriate.
But why wouldn't we go to the source?
Why won't we go and heal the underlying physiological structures and make the connection of how that's driving?
But it's one of those blind spots that I'm excited that more and more people are addressing and that we're really committed to bringing more awareness to.
Because, again, dude, I'm a guy that wanted to end my own life 25 years ago.
I know what it feels like to not know if I wanted to live another day.
My father struggled with alcohol.
His father struggled with alcohol and killed himself.
I have a genetic and environmental conditioning that I lost the lottery twice.
So I know what it feels like to feel that depth of despair.
And I know what it feels like to feel a pretty good, pretty consistent level of joy and flourishing.
And I have a decent sense of what I did to go from here to there.
And so these and I would.
You couldn't pay me to eat the way I used to eat, to not move and to not sleep with regularity, because I know who I would be.
I'd be a circus just like I was then, you know, and I prefer feeling this way and I've made the connection.
Anyway, I don't think societally we've made the connection.
And then it's easier to you know solve problems in one way rather than doing the work in a separate way.
So we have that.
You went from there to here and we laid up the step number one, which was know the ultimate game.
I think we teased number two and then we said number six was the basic fundamentals.
Can you fill in the gaps between those two?
Yeah, I mean, we didn't talk about the most important, about how to forge anti-fragility, which I would love to come back to if time permits.
But you want to know the ultimate game.
You got to forge anti-fragility.
And basically that is you got to know rule number one of a good heroic life.
It's supposed to be hard.
So you would never go to a hero's journey movie and expect the hero to sit on a beach drinking pina coladas.
You want to see them challenged because the challenges make them evolve.
Right.
But yet when life hits you with a problem, you're the hero of your own life.
You complain.
You want to be on the beach drinking pina coladas.
But look, that's a good hero's journey.
So rule number one is supposed to be hard.
Then objective three is you got to optimize what I call the big three.
Energy, work, and love.
Freud says a good life comes down to two things.
Your work and your love.
You get those two right, you're going to win.
Now Stephen Covey, Tony Robbins talk about roles and goals, categories of improvement which can get overwhelming.
So I say work and love.
But if your energy sucks, good luck in your work and your love.
So the big three, energy, work and love.
A good life comes down to that.
That's objective three.
And then objective four is you got to make today a masterpiece.
Today's the day to move from theory to practice.
You can't set New Year's resolutions and forget it the next day.
Today's the day to wake up and do your best.
And then objective five is you got to master yourself.
There's a reason why James Clear's Atomic Habits is the best-selling self-help book of the modern era.
You need to understand how to build habits.
There's an art and a science to mastering yourself.
Discipline outpredicts IQ for academic performance in kids by a factor of two.
And it out predicts everything, meaning if you know someone's discipline quotient, you'll be able to predict their grades better than if you knew their IQ.
Yet we don't teach kids discipline.
This is part of our work with Heroic Education.
So you need to master yourself.
You have to understand how to install and delete habits.
That's objective five.
Objective six is dominate the fundamentals.
I'm a UCLA guy, John Wooden, all of his championships.
The first thing he taught his players was how to put on their socks.
If you can't put on your socks right, you will not play at your best because you might get a little blister, et cetera, et cetera.
The basic fundamentals matter.
You want to see how tall a building is going to be?
Look at how deeply they're digging the foundation.
Again, this is preaching to the Pope here, Ben.
But the fundamentals matter, you know, like eating, moving, sleeping, etc.
And then objective seven is is basically the consummation of the prior six.
When you know the ultimate game, you're forging anti-fragile confidence.
You're optimizing your big three energy, work and love.
You're making today a masterpiece you've mastered yourself.
You're dominating the fundamentals.
You activate your superpower.
I call it soul force, which is actually from gandhi.
Gandhi's satya graha was his sanskrit word that we translated as nonviolent resistance and all the things he's known for.
But what Gandhi said we needed to do was activate our soul force.
So when I look at all of my favorite heroes, they're very, very different, but they all have one quality in common, which is they have this essence to them.
They have a moral charisma that you can almost feel.
So Gandhi and Churchill are two of my heroes.
They're as different as possible.
Gandhi's thin and would go days without talking.
Churchill's poor idea would never stop talking.
But they had the same essence.
Their soul force was palpable.
So Martin Luther King quoted Gandhi in his I Have a Dream speech where he talked about soul force.
So it's my belief that each of us, when we're expressing our best selves, has that power latent within us and we need to activate it.
And you do it by being in integrity with those values, objectives I just mentioned.
Anyway, that's the seven objectives, the super quick run through and yeah.
Perfect.
Now let's double back to forging antifragility and how do we do that?
So here's the deal on that.
And this is again when I'm brought in to do my work.
This is what I talk about, whether it's Naval Special Warfare or SEAL commanders or Notre Dame football or fill in the blank right.
This is what they want me to talk about.
How do you forge anti-fragile confidence?
We defined anti-fragility, fragile, resilient, anti-fragile.
You get stronger when life hits you.
Confidence, confidere, two ancient words means intense trust.
To have confidence means to have intense trust.
In what?
That things are going to go the way you planned?
Absolutely not.
That it doesn't matter what happens.
You know what you're going to do in response.
So anti-fragile confidence, right, is what we want to forge.
And the way I explain this is my coach is a guy named Phil Stutz.
I've worked with him like 500 one-on-one sessions over nearly a decade.
He calls anti-fragile confidence emotional stamina.
And in one of our early sessions, he said I had a lot of it.
And I had no idea what he was talking about.
And I said, what's emotional stamina?
And he said, it's your ability to tolerate life's inevitable pain, uncertainty, and hard work.
He's in a documentary called Stuts with Jonah Hill.
Highly recommended if you like F-bomb dropping psychiatry.
Anyway, so I'm like, okay, that's nice.
How do I get more of it?
How do I cultivate emotional stamina?
What I now call anti-fragile confidence.
And his line is what changed my life more than anything else.
He said, in order to have more emotional stamina when life hits you, you must be more committed to your protocol than you've ever been.
So, when life is hard, the harder life gets, the more committed you are to your protocol, which begs the question what's a protocol, and do you have one?
So then the question is, who are you at your best?
When you're at your best, how do you eat?
How do you move?
How do you sleep?
How do you show up in your energy, your work and your love?
Follow on question.
When life hits you, what do you do?
Do you go off the rails and do vicious things, or do you use that as a signal that right now is the time for you to double down on your protocol?
A practical example, Luke Donnell is the captain of the Ryder Cup team.
If you're into golf, you know the Ryder Cup, right?
He's been following my work for a decade.
He reached out to me to try to figure out how his team can forge more anti-fragility before they played in New York.
So I flew out to Scotland 15 months before the Ryder Cup began to kick off their mental toughness training.
And you follow golf.
You know, the European team just crushed it.
And what I told them was when the wind blows in New York City, which they knew it would, what are you going to do?
You're going to be fragile or anti-fragile.
In that moment when the crowd is yelling is when you need to, I call it flip the switch.
You need to assume that posture of you at your best.
Slow down your breathing, get your mental focus tight.
And the louder the crowd is, the more committed you are to doing that.
I'm in an elevator Saturday night in New York watching the Ryder Cup and Americans are saying, oh my God, the worse we are, the better they play.
Literally, quote unquote.
So that's anti-fragility.
In that acute moment on a golf course, what do you do when it gets hard?
Now in our lives...
What do you do when life gets hard?
What do you do?
Do you go off the rails and do all the stupid things you know you shouldn't be doing?
Or do you take a breath and say I just got a health diagnosis, or my kids sick, or my relationships on the rocks, or my job might be, my business might go out of business?
What do you do?
Well, if you want to forge anti-fragile confidence goosebumps, you better if I dropped F-bombs.
Work your protocol of you at your best when you feel your worst.
And if you could do that if, when you feel your worst and life is hitting you, you literally use that as a trigger, a cue, a prompt to double down on your protocol, your life completely changes.
What used to knock you down and extinguish your little fragile candle, now fuels your fire.
And then you quit bitching about life's challenges and you say, I'm the fire.
I wish for the wind.
I want life to challenge me because that's how I get stronger.
And oh, by the way, I go to my comp train gym and I noticed that the more often I lift weights that are right out of my comfort zone, the stronger I get.
And the longer I do it, the stronger I get and the faster I recover.
I wonder if that same principle would work as I train my soul in the soul train.
Let's go.
Then life gets exciting, dude.
And then we quit complaining about the challenges and we show up in our lives Like we do at your gym.
And again, it changes everything.
Because then you used to go here.
Now you go here.
And then you quit complaining about the challenges.
And you rub your hands together.
And your relationships get better.
Right on the other side of that yelling fit we talked about.
What if that became the catalyst to you being better, etc., etc.?
I should get excited about something.
But that's the basic idea and what...
But I'm obviously most passionate about, you know, teaching people how to how to master.
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Anti-fragile confidence.
And we know what anti-fragile is now.
It's beyond resilience.
Resilience is like you get knocked down, okay, you get back up.
But this is you get back up and you are stronger for it.
Confidence, love it.
Intense trust.
Trust in what?
Not in the outcome, but in the fact that you will be able to respond.
Respond being the super key word there, not react.
So good.
The example you just gave of the Ryder Cup is so phenomenal.
You also were called in to talk to Notre Dame football and have a similar story.
Can you tell that one?
Yeah, I mean I was blessed to meet Marcus through a mutual friend and day one of their preseason, not this season but the season before when they went to the national championships.
I would have said, hey, thanks for inviting me here day one of their preseason.
We're here to win a national championship.
That was their unequivocal goal that I was brought in to help them do.
And I said, the ultimate game is not on the field, guys.
The ultimate game is off the field. said the same exact thing that Ryder Cup everybody I train.
So you got to be the best version of you.
And I have goosebumps right now because somebody asked Marcus Freeman about me.
Because at the end of the season, As you may know if you follow college football, Notre Dame lost, I think, the second game of the year.
And it was a team they shouldn't have even been playing, and they lost.
Now, I told the guys, win off the field, be your best self, and you'll win on the field.
That's how you win that game.
Then I said rule number one of a good hero's journey is you will get your ass kicked.
That's not a question of if, it's a question of when.
I promise you that there will come a time this season where you are going to get hammered.
That's rule number one of a good hero's journey.
Don't act surprised when it happens.
Here's what i want you to do.
I want you to take that pain and use it as fuel to double triple down on your protocol, because if you actually want to win a national championship, you better get good at that.
And so then fast forward.
They run it out right.
They're whatever they were, 10 and one, 11 and one or whatever it was.
And a reporter asked him, how'd you guys do that?
And a bunch of the guys said me.
They were humble enough and coachable enough.
They said hey, this guy came in and he gave us a book and he gave us t-shirts and he told us about this idea of anti-fragile confidence.
So that was the Notre Dame example in whatever small role I played there.
I mean, Marcus Freeman, I've never met a more coachable human being.
That dude is the living embodiment.
He's soul force...
He is what a football coach should look and sound and feel like.
He's a perfect example of soul force.
You look at him and you're like, there's a man living in integrity.
There aren't a perfect team in baseball.
You look at him and you're like that's just what a football coach should look like and how he has operationalized this with his team.
And they did it again this year.
Lost the first two games and boom, run it out.
A little different outcome this year, but perfect.
Back next year, stronger than ever, let's go.
Those are a couple of examples.
You talk about.
So when disaster strikes, we return to our protocols and we build our protocols, I think, at least in part, by recognizing what we're doing when we're at our best.
Is that correct?
Dude, so much there.
Yeah.
So can you talk a little bit about how we start to create that picture for ourselves of what it looks like when we say when we are at our best, so that we can reverse engineer that and say OK, that's inside of that, even if it's unconscious inside of that is my protocol.
Patrick, it's like you and I run these workshops together.
That's exactly the next step.
A couple of things come into mind.
The ancient Stoics said, disaster, this is Seneca, disaster is virtue's opportunity.
Just such a cool idea.
2,000 years ago, boom.
I mean, Stoicism was founded by Zeno, who arrived in Athens by shipwreck.
Lost his entire fortune.
Out of that came Stoicism.
It's just such a beautiful, real-world example.
And then I went from Notre Dame to Chicago and I actually worked with Billy Donovan and the guy that runs the Bulls.
And an hour conversation turned into four hours.
Changed my flight and spent another four hours with him the next day.
I'm working with Billy Donovan on this and he mentioned Trevor Moad and the work that he did with Tiger Woods.
Trevor Moad, the great mental toughness coach of Russell Wilson and these other guys.
And I'll bring it to a point with the specific exercise that we have people do, Patrick.
But Trevor Moad worked with Tiger Woods after his peak.
And he said, Tiger, when you were at your best, what 10 things did you do?
When you were just dominating, what did you do?
10 things.
And he wrote them down.
I did these 10 things.
He said, Tiger, how many of those things are you doing right now?
And it was a fraction of them.
And he said, well, who do you think is going to win?
The version of you that's doing those things or the version of you that's not doing those things?
It's not complicated.
The version of you that's doing what you do when you're at your best.
And I told this to Notre Dame.
The version of you, Mr. Cornerback or whatever, which version of you wins?
The version of you being your best self day in and day out, or the version of you that's your best self when you feel like it?
It's not even debatable.
This version kicks this version's butt every time.
Which version of your team wins, guys?
So what we do to concretize it is we bust out a piece of paper and literally put do on the upper left and then don't on the upper right.
So I've got my little, I don't know if the lights allow it to show up, but do and don't.
And you could spend 30 seconds right now.
When you're at your best, what do you do? what do you not do?
My hunch is you don't binge, drink Netflix doom scroll, whatever it is that you may be doing right now, right.
Your kryptonites, which by the way, that's the fastest way to change your life.
Stop doing this stuff that is destroying your life.
Then what do you do?
Well, I do this, this, this, and this.
Then, when we do the workshops that we do, the next step is do the same thing for your energy, your work and your love.
Do don't.
When I'm at my best, most healthy, I'm doing this, I'm doing this, I'm doing this, I'm not doing this, I'm not doing that, I'm not doing that.
How about your work?
Oh, when I'm most productive, I'm doing deep work first thing in the morning, and then I'm doing this and I'm doing that.
I'm not doing this.
Okay, cool.
How about your love?
Oh, in my love, I'm doing this, I'm doing this, I'm doing this.
I'm definitely not doing this, this, and this.
Now, perfect.
We got your protocol.
The top three things that you do and Ben your number one non-negotiable your energy, your work and your love.
But it's not just the things you do, it's the things you don't do which again, is the most important.
Superman is superman until what Kryptonite comes in.
When kryptonite is present, when you have your vicious, you know off the rails kryptonite behaviors.
All your power is gone.
So taking care of that's always the most important.
But again, that's how we, Patrick, you're great question.
That's how we concretize it.
Move it off the bumper sticker into your real life.
And then remember, when life hits you, you have a protocol.
You need to know if you don't know what it is, how are you going to operate?
You need a checklist like a airplane pilot.
I always say you usually fly to my talks, right?
I wouldn't have gotten on the plane if the pilot didn't go through a checklist.
Surgical teams that have checklists kill like 40 percent less people than surgical teams without checklists.
Not all of them have them.
The joke when I give that part of the talk is make sure you check next time you have a checklist.
Well, you shouldn't start your day without a checklist of protocol of who you are at your best.
And remember, when life hits you, you make sure you do those things.
That's how you develop intense trust, by the way.
And then I say, if you want to develop intense trust in any relationship, how do you do it?
If I said I would be here at the time that we had scheduled, and I don't show up, Ben may give me a pass because we've had enough connections.
But if I didn't do it again, he wouldn't trust me and you shouldn't trust me.
So if you say you will do things and you don't do them, you shouldn't have trust in yourself.
Stated positively, you should be insecure frankly, and you should not have trust.
But if you, when life hits, you do the things you say you will do, then you can forge anti-fragile confidence.
Because you know it doesn't matter what happens as you reframed Ben, you're going to do what you do when you're at your best.
Then you're as close to invincible.
You're still going to get kicked around.
You're still going to get knocked up and bruised and scarred, but you're going to know you can handle it and you're going to bounce back.
And then Admiral McRaven says you can't surge trust.
So if I'm running an organization, I can't surge trust.
I better have earned the trust before the emergency happened.
So if I want to be able to respond to a big challenge in life, I better have earned my own trust day in and day out preceding it, such that when life hits, I know I've got what it takes.
And it's just a grooved pattern, which is why John Wooden started his first practice with the greatest athletes of his era, teaching them how to put on their socks.
Championship time at the end of the season, those dudes knew how to operate day in and day out.
That's the take on bringing it all together.
The thing that just screamed at me as you were just saying that is...
We so badly want to know how to become, they bring you in for mental toughness.
You're the guy to create more mental toughness.
And what you just talked about and the word you use over and over again just then, was do do, do and don't don't, don't.
Do's and don'ts of behavior.
It's not in the head.
It's in the actual act of doing things.
Did you show up on time?
Enough times creates the trust.
In this case, the anti-fragility confidence comes from the trust in yourself.
And the only way that happens is if you're actually doing the things.
And I love the idea of like, let's take it off the shelf.
Let's take it out of the book.
Let's take it off the bumper sticker.
And how do we actually do mental toughness?
It's stop swirling around in the thing that's causing the issue and actually put it into practice in the doing part.
I think it's so powerful to highlight in terms of saying because otherwise you just kind of like you stay up there.
Yep, 100%.
And then for all of us, it's different.
This is what's exciting is that my do and don't is different than yours, Ben.
There'll be some parallels, but different than Patrick's.
So anyone watching or listening to this right now, what is your idiosyncratic protocol?
Who are you at your best?
What do you do?
And take the first step and get that clarity.
Even writing down one or two or three things on your do and don't list and then checking in on your life.
And then the thing that I do whenever I'm wobbly which is all the time and just feeling the pressure of life as I strive to live a heroic life on Everest, where a lot of people have died and frozen, but I'm committed to being there and doing my best to summit it.
Perfect.
I always ask myself what's the number one thing I could start doing right now that, if I started doing it, would most change my life.
And then what's the number one thing?
I need to stop doing that.
If I stopped doing it would most change my life.
That's how I a metaphor I use is when you get spinned around by life and you can actually do this in your room if you could do it safely.
Spin yourself around until you're dizzy, Right.
And then look around the room and what will happen is you'll get more dizzy.
But if you spin yourself around again and you're feeling the dizziness, but then you bring your eyes to a focal point in front of you, you will immediately get stable.
So when life hits you, a question like that grounds you, you get clarity on it's just one thing.
I don't need a perfect life.
What's the one thing I could start doing right now?
What's the one thing I need to stop doing?
And then boom.
You regain your centeredness and you're able to move forward.
And then we practice that over and over and over again.
General Fenton is the former four-star general who ran SOCOM and I've been blessed to do a couple of talks with his top commanders.
His mantra in Special Forces is you do it over and over and, over and over again until you can't get it wrong.
Not until you get it right the first time, obviously.
And I know that I'm, again, preaching to the Pope of this.
You do it until you can't get it wrong.
Is that boring?
Of course it is.
Is that what greatness is founded on?
Of course it is.
And then we get excited about those most basic fundamental practices.
And when we find ourselves off, flip the switch, bring ourselves back that one thing we're going to get recommitted to.
And then this whole thing becomes less of a chore and a laundry list of stuff you don't really want to do and gifts.
Every single time you do this is a gift to your present and future self boom.
I'm giving that future version of me everything that I hope to have by in this moment doing a little better to activate myself and close that gap.
And then we bring joy to it and not the whiny, oh, I got to add another thing to my list.
And you know the types of response we tend to get.
It's the chore becomes a gift, which I think is another really powerful distinction that we can make.
Last question for you, Brian.
You said something today, and I've seen you say it somewhere else, that I think is really powerful.
I think it underpins the process of slowly but surely building antifragile confidence, which is the recognition that it's supposed to be hard.
As we kind of exit this hopefully this first conversation with you I'd love to have you back on to keep this conversation going.
But what advice do you have for us to get into a place where we recognize that when things get hard, it's not the problem but in fact it is the opportunity?
Yeah, goosebumps again.
A good heroic life has challenges.
And that's easy to say and it's easy to hear and it's easy to recognize for other people.
The challenge is in the moment you experience your challenges, what do you say to yourself?
If you say to yourself, there it goes again, I'm an idiot.
I've got relationship challenges.
I put the five pounds back on or my business sucks.
Everybody else has got it figured out.
I should have had it figured out by now.
You need to have the wisdom to To know that those challenges you're facing are not a sign you're doing it wrong.
It's a sign you care.
It's a sign you're on Mount Everest and it's another cold, dark night.
And hopefully you got friends and I got tears in my eyes now that you can call, like Ben, and he'll say yeah, it's another cold, dark night at Everest.
Let's go.
You know.
So I think the recognition, having the wisdom to know, that is rule number one of a good noble, heroic life.
It's not because you're you per se, it's because you're human.
Now I'm not perfect, you're not perfect, none of us are.
But to put a scientific frame on it, that's self-compassion.
So you gotta have the self-compassion to know that it's Kristin Neff calls it common humanity.
Nothing is wrong.
A lot is wrong with me and ben and everybody and whoever's thinking about it, but nothing's wrong with you that everybody else on planet earth isn't experiencing their own way.
Know that, be nice to yourself and notice when you start beating yourself up.
Then i like to make it heroic, self-compassion.
You start with a flashlight to notice what's wrong.
Then you bring a hammer to nail in the things that needed to be nailed in.
Even Eckhart Tolle says this if you eat a certain type of food that makes you sick, stop eating that type of food.
You need to move beyond acceptance of shortcomings and do something different.
But if we can have the wisdom to know it's supposed to be hard, then use it as a catalyst to practice our philosophy at an even higher level.
AKA do those things and stop doing those things we do when we're at our best.
Then life's challenges become opportunities to grow.
And another final thought, an obscure 20th century teacher named Vernon Howard, was brilliant.
And he said if your ultimate goal is enlightenment it's not really a word I use often but actualization being your best heroic self, whatever you want to call it.
If that's your ultimate goal, then anything that helps you become that is a good thing.
Then you need to know that the thing that's going to accelerate your growth the most is the thing you least want to have happen the hard workout in a gym.
But the hard workout in your life is literally the thing that, if you approach it with the right mindset, is going to be the catalyst to your growth.
Therefore, Love it.
It's Byron Katie loving what it is.
The Stoics called it the art of acquiescence.
You have to radically accept reality, embrace all the things we've talked about and then just take the next step and close in the gap and hopefully do it with a smile and hopefully do it with friends, you know, that are on the same mission and committed to being there when you need them there, and vice versa, right.
Thank you so much, Brian.
You guys are great.
Yeah, I love it, man.
I appreciate you both.
Ben, you know how much I admire you and your work.
And again, we're brothers before we knew it.
Jason, all right, Jason, excellent.
To get to know you more personally over the last year plus a couple of years, and just really excited about deepening our friendship and finding ways to affect change in the world together man.
You got it, man.
Good, noble life, heroic.
Let's go do it.
Day one, all in.
Thank you so very much for tuning into the show this week.
Two quick things before you go.
First, if you want even more from this episode, go check out the full five three, one breakdown.
We give you the five big ideas from the episode, three reflection questions to help you process it all.
And one key takeaway that you can put into action right now, the link is in the show notes.
The second thing while you're there, check out the chase club.
It's our premium membership, where we include bonus content, add three episodes and a brand new chase tracker app.
Check it all out at chasingexcellence.email.
