Second Brains, Befriending Authors, 100 Podcast Episodes, and MUD/WTR

7 Highlights From The Past 18 Weeks

Jun 20, 2022

Happy Monday from Phoenix, AZ 🌵

Since last time (Feb 7), I’ve been traveling nonstop (trips to DC, Pennsylvania, Texas, Ohio, Florida, Nevada, and Arizona). I put the full itinerary at the bottom for the curious.

This edition summarizes some highlights from the past 18-ish weeks of my life.

Enjoy!

7 Recent Highlights & Ideas

1) Interviewing MUD\WTR’s CEO and Founder

Caffeine is a helluva drug, and MUD\WTR (Mud Water) is a helluva alternative.

As a big fan of the product, I thoroughly enjoyed interviewing Shane Heath, CEO and Founder of MUD.

We discussed his journey taking the company from idea to a $138 million valuation in only 4 years.

We also covered the decisions behind vocally supporting psychedelic research and providing every employee with a sleep tracker.

2) Going To The Bitcoin Conference in Miami

This year’s Bitcoin conference was a phenomenal event.

I still firmly believe that promoting Bitcoin adoption represents one of the most important humanitarian, non-partisan causes of our time, and many great presenters helped people understand why.

It’s fun to reflect on how quickly things can change and progress. I went to last year’s event in June 2021 as a way of exploring my interest in working in the industry.

Within a 10 month period, I came back as a member of the crypto-workforce (and former employee of the hosting company).

I can’t wait to see what the team has planned for 2023.

3) No More Masks in Airports/ Airplanes

I don’t know if I have commentary here besides that I am very glad this rule ended.

By the way, I hear they still let you wear a mask if you want to!

4) What It’s Like To Know An Author

I met Faolan Sugerman-Lash on an AMA (ask-me-anything) zoom call hosted by Third Door author Alex Banayan during the first few weeks of the lockdowns.

Faolan and I have kept in touch since then, and we check in with each other every few months to discuss our overlapping interests and similar projects.

Faolan recently published his first book, Why Live?: The Beautiful and Painful Mess of Learning to Love Life.

First of all, the book was outright very good. Here’s what I told Amazon about it 👇

“This book is an excellent demonstration of what can happen when you embrace living a life true to your honest self. What happens when you are brave enough to introspect. What happens when you are brave enough to be vulnerable. What could happen if more people were as well. Full of wisdom and very motivational to find ways to grow emotionally...”
— Louis’ Amazon Review

But more than being just another good book, it was a profound social experience to read a book written by someone I had an existing relationship with.

I’m still trying to decide the long-term takeaway here, but it was one-of-a-kind in my life so far and I was deeply moved by it.

In short, I was struck by how much I could learn about someone I thought I knew well.

In hindsight it’s obvious why.

For more than two years, Faolan sat in silence and condensed his life experiences into a few hundred pages. Then, sometime later, I dedicated a few days to sitting in silence and absorbing his life story with complete focus.

Casual, unplanned conversations will never get anywhere close to matching that level of interaction and communication.

I feel more strongly than ever that most people possess an inner-depth way beyond what we give them credit for. The problem is that so few of us ever find a way to reveal the inner workings of our minds to the outside world.

I’m not saying everyone should write a book and broadcast their diary to everyone they know, but I guess I’m also not saying that people shouldn’t 🤷‍♂️

PS… This is a link to Faolon’s book, Why Live

5) Seed Oil Disrespect Gains Steam

I’m moderately obsessed with a movement called seed oil disrespect.

My first time mentioning canola oil (one of the most notorious seed oils) in this newsletter was Louis' Learnings 9 - Sleep, Snoozing, Happiness, and Mindset.

The cliff’s notes of seed oil disrespect goes as follows:

Ingredients like canola oil, cottonseed oil, and soybean oil were added into the human diet only within the past 100 years.
That intervention coincides suspiciously well with the rapid deterioration in the average person’s health.

While published literature to connect the dots here is persuasive, the tidal wave of anecdotal evidence of people removing seed oils from their diets and seeing improved health outcomes is what’s most compelling.

The movement is getting increasingly mainstream coverage, and that excites me. The Vice article (below) was big, and I expect the conversation to grow in popularity as more and more people wake up to the extent of the damage being done by these “food” additives.

A healthy bodyweight, no prescribed SSRIs, and freedom from auto-immune conditions shouldn’t make me an outlier among my peers, yet it does. That’s why I won’t stop bringing attention to possible natural explanations to those problems no matter how annoying or repetitive it is.

Following my content is voluntary, and you can always opt out with a few clicks.

If only removing seed oils from your diet was that simple!

If you want to become a disrespecter, this mini-documentary is the “start-here” button.

6) Interviewing Tiago Forte from Forte Labs

When Kyle and I first started our podcast, we wrote down 50-100 names of the people we’d like to someday interview.

We’ve slowly been chipping away at this list and it is beyond exciting everytime we publish an episode with a “day-oner” (someone who was on the list before we released our first episode).

As one of the world’s most sought after thinkers on productivity, Tiago Forte was a “day-oner” that we finally had our chance to meet and interview.

Tiago has spent over a decade teaching people about effective time management with a special emphasis on digital organization.

If you feel like the digital world makes your life more complicated, disorderly, and unproductive than I’d check out this conversation with Tiago.

7) Milestones: 100 episodes and 2 years for Louis & Kyle🏅

Since the last issue of this newsletter, the podcast reached two huge milestones.

Over 100 episodes published (now 107)
Over 2 years of publishing

If I could only share one takeaway from the experience so far, it would be gratitude.

Grateful to guests who have been so generous with their time and attention, and grateful to listeners who encourage us to keep going. To everyone who’s shared their time and attention with us as a listener or guest, thank you!

Many, many podcasts have come and gone in the 2 years I’ve been publishing, and it’d be a bold face lie to say we’ve never thought about quitting.

Luckily, every single time that we came close to quitting, we were saved by a pending interview a few weeks out. The day comes, we get back on air, fall back in love with the game, and excitedly schedule a few more interviews for some weeks down the line.

Turns out, this happens to everybody.

In March I read popular podcaster Andrew Warner’s new book, Stop Asking Questions: How to Lead High-Impact Interviews and Learn Anything from Anyone.

The book was a concise masterclass where Andrew shared everything he learned from hosting a popular business show for over a decade.

There were interview tips, memorable anecdotes, and lots of subtle conversational hacks, but by far the most important moment happened when Andrew gave me the vocabulary to understand why we had never quit.

Despite all of the chaos of the past two years, we just kept putting conversations on our calendar.

If someone at the top of the game has the exact same strategy as us, I knew we’d be in good shape. Even if our publishing cadence slows down periodically, I’m confident in the long term health of this project.

Kyle and I both formed the habit of interviewing people who spark our intrinsic curiosity and love of learning. If we read a great essay, buy an interesting product, or meet some motivating entrepreneur, we bring them on the show. Unless we live in isolation for the rest of our lives, we’ll have fuel for the fire indefinitely.

There’s no life path where Kyle and I won’t benefit from continuing to meet subject matter experts and asking them questions. For that reason, we’ll keep doing the show. Pretty simple to me :)

The Links!

Things I’ve Published (Podcast Episodes) 🎧

Maria Brito: Helping Celebrities with Buying Art and Learning Creativity
David Perry: Selling companies to Atari, Disney, and Sony
Shane Heath: Founder & CEO of MUD\WTR
Joel Hansen: The Advantages of Mastering LinkedIn and Storytelling
Jack Niewold: Keys to Responsible Altcoin Investing
Stefan von Imhof: Farmland, Music Royalties, ADUs, Collectibles + More
Tiago Forte: Build A Second Brain To Maximize Productivity and Creativity
Faolan Sugarman-Lash: The Beautiful & Painful Mess of Learning to Love Life
Kenny Rose: Franshares CEO, Investing In Franchises With As Little As $500
Brady Morgan: Hiring Virtual Assistants 101
Bryan Clayton: GreenPal CEO, On-Demand Lawn Care For 300,000 Americans

Thanks for reading 👋

Life was non-stop motion these past few months, so it feels great to slow down and write again. I hope to have the next issue out sooner than 18 weeks from now 😄

As always, I’m happy to hear from you with comments, questions, or updates from your own lives!

With gratitude,

Louis

Photo Of The Week 📸

My cousin Elise is a pro fighter. She’s a huge inspiration for why I’ve started BJJ, and ever since her pro-debut, it has been a goal of mine to train at her home gym in PA.

We finally made it happen back in May, and it was such a special experience to glimpse into her day-to-day world.

Rolling with Dave Diddy (another cousin)

I’ve done far fewer BJJ classes than intended these past 6 months, but still have every intention to invest time into the sport once I’m back in a settled life rhythm (ie 4 weeks in one place).

Full Recent Travel Summary (for anybody who cares)

The Abbrevatied Story of My Travels Since Feb 7

Got back in vegas after traveling for all of January (Tenessee, Georgia, Florida)
Cousins stay with my family for 10 days in Vegas, then friend I met in Israel stays with my family in Vegas for 7 days
Vegas for a few more days, then went to Miami for 10 days for the bitcoin conference and to see family
Visit DC for 5 days to see childhood friends who moved there
Visit Colombus, Ohio for 5 days to see my cousin in his element
Visit Austin, TX for 4 days with friends from college
Briefly reset in Vegas for 2 weeks
Visit Pennsylvania for a week for family activities
Visit Florida for 10 days for an in-person workweek, retrieving my car that I left there in January, and visiting family
Vegas for a week, then drove to Phoenix AZ where I’ll be for all of June

I’m kind of amazed my habits, routines, and side-projects haven’t completely fallen apart. Straight up, that was too much travel and I hit diminishing returns about 4 bullets into that list.

That being said, I wouldn’t trade the amount of time I was able to spend with important people in my life for anything, and I’ve very thorougly satisifed the itch to travel for quite some time.

Longtime readers know my plans change frequently, but going forward, my intention is to finish the month of June in Phoenix, go back to Vegas until September, and then spend a full year in Phoenix to enjoy some of the benefits of stillness and routines.

I guess we’ll see how accurate those plans end up being 😆

Louis' Learnings