The Thinker's Apprentice

This episode comes by listener request and is all about relationships and support networks. Topics discussed include:

• What a support network is, what it consists of, and how your support networks can either help or hinder your goals.
• What a secondary support network is and how you can use one to hold you accountable and keep you on track when your primary network fails
• How your growth and self-development impacts the people you care about, both positively and negatively.
• Where friction arises in our relationships when one person decides to change themself fro the better.
• How your betterment reflects negatively on the people around you and how that can make them act out.
• What I expect from my support network.
• I provide a garden metaphor as a way to understand relationships, how they grow and how they wither and wilt.
• How we can never force the people we care about to change and they can never force us to change. At this point I introduce the book The Mastery of Love, by Don Miguel Ruiz. This is a must read!
• How to navigate spousal relationships when one person is pursuing change while the other is not. 
• Then I explain how most of us act out of fear in our relationships and in our lives in general. Our fear is what brings out the worst in ourselves and each other. 
• I tell a little story about myself and some struggles of the heart I had in my early 20's.
• In this week's Call-to-Action we evaluate our relationships and assess if we are tending our gardens and if the people we're in relationships with are tending their half of the garden. And one way or another we address it so that we can make the relationship better or move on to greener pastures. 
• We also ask ourselves if we act out of love or fear in our relationships. 
• Thanks for listening. Be sure to subscribe and leave a review and share it with someone who could benefit from this information. And be sure to follow me on Instagram @ThinkersApprentice

This episode is all about how you can go about choosing a diet that's right for you. We're all different and what's right for me may not be right for you. Topics include:

• Why there's no one diet that's best for everybody.
• 6 major questions to ask yourself before choosing any diet protocol or modality
• I talk about adaptation periods and compliance as it pertains to different diets. 
• Then we hop right into the various diets that you'll likely run across these days.The list I go over today includes: keto, primal, paleo, intermittent fasting, OMAD, carnivore, GAPS, vegetarian, vegan, high carb-low fat, the standard American diet, and cleanses.
• I go over each of these and give you a general overview, the pros and cons, and my overall opinion of the diet. Please note that different diets are used for different things and I view this from a weight loss and health and well-being perspective. So if I say a diet is not efficacious for weight loss, that doesn't mean it's a bad diet.
• I then talk about what to do if you cheat, slip-up, or make a mistake in your diet. 
• I throw some serious shade at the Standard American Diet, because it deserves it. 
• Then I talk about some concepts to consider when choosing a diet. Things like insulin management, insulin sensitivity, leptin and grehlin sensitivity, glucagon, HGH, and testosterone and how these hormones tend to be optimized in low carbohydrate diets. 
• Then I give you a final diet. It's a no frills approach for those of us that have low discipline, low willpower, who don't want to plan, or track calories, who missed the deadline to start a summer bod diet. There's only 3 rules and you will lose fat. 
• Then in this week's Call-to-Action we put this knowledge to work. We answer those 6 questions we talked about at the beginning of the episode and we figure out what diet is best for us. 
• Thanks for listening. Be sure to subscribe and leave a review and share it with someone who could benefit from this information. And be sure to follow me on Instagram @ThinkersApprentice

In this podcast we talk about Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs and how they relate to your journey of growth and self-development and how they may inform why you're not able to pursue that journey at this time. Topics include:

• A call to action to begin the podcast with me soliciting feedback from the listeners on what they like, what they don't like, what they want to hear more of and any questions they have for a future Q&A episode. 
• An introduction to Maslow's Hierarchy. What it is and why we care.
• I break down each of the 5 levels of the pyramid, one level at a time beginning at physiological needs, and then moving through safety needs, social belonging, esteem, and self-actualization.
• We spend some time discussing each level and how it pertains to your basic human needs.
• We spend some extra time on level 5 because it's unique in that it's not a human requirement and many people will never pursue self-actualization even if their level's 1-4 needs are met.
• I propose a basic concept of determining what your self-actualization would look like: If money and obligations weren't a factor then what would you be doing? That's the target of your self-actualization.
• And in this week's Call-to-Action we all take a long, hard look at our level 1-4 needs and determine if we are meeting the basic requirements for humans to survive. Because if our basic needs aren't being met then our pursuit of growth and self-development will not become a priority. 
• Thanks for listening. Be sure to subscribe and leave a review and share it with someone who could benefit from this information. And be sure to follow me on Instagram @ThinkersApprentice

In this episode we talk about failure and how to use it as a powerful tool for growth and self-development. Topics discussed include:

• The breakdown of my 2019 marathon goal. How I chose it, what the plan was, and where it went south.
• I mention David Goggins' book Can't Hurt Me, which I highly recommend to anybody that needs some inspiration or motivation. 
• I dive deeper into the execution of my marathon plan and explain the domino effect that resulted in 2 knee injuries. 
• I use this example to highlight the ways that failure can be used as a tool for growth. 
• I talk about things to avoid after a failure, mainly denial and rationalization.
• That segues into accepting and embracing failure, which means taking full ownership of your failure.
• Then we talk about how to do a post mortem on your failure in order to determine the "cause of death" of your goal so that you can learn from your mistakes and grow. 
• I talk about looking at failure as a fork in the road instead of the end of a road. This goes deep into the types of decisions that define who we are and who we become as individuals. 
• I explain why failure is a necessary and inevitable part of life if you hope to ever achieve anything meaningful. 
• Then in this week's Call-to-Action we all pull a failure out of our past and do a post mortem on it and determine what that failure taught us and how it continues to inform the decisions we make today.
• I use an example of my time as an EMT in the Coast Guard and some hard failures I experienced during that time and how they taught me a lesson that has stuck with me ever since. 
• Thanks for listening. Be sure to subscribe and leave a review and share it with someone who could benefit from this information. And be sure to follow me on Instagram @ThinkersApprentice

In this episode we talk about the MBTI-style personality testing and how it can be used as a tool of growth and self-development in all aspects of your lives. Topics discussed include:

• What the MBTI, or Meyers Briggs Type Indicator, is and what it tells us about ourselves.
• The 4 sets of 2 opposites that make up the 16 unique personality types.
• I go into introversion and extraversion, sensing and intuition, thinking and feeling, and judging and perceiving. Then we do a little guessing game to see if you can guess your personality type before you take the test.
• I dig into my own results and explain how I can use them to inform my future actions and decisions. I identified some of my blind spots that need work and I learned what types of work best suit my style. 
• I also had my wife do an MBTI and I explained where our 2 personality types would run into some troubles and how to work around them and how to maximize our strengths to improve our relationship. 
• I also explain how this podcast was affected and influenced by the various aspects of my personality. 
• So using my own results and life experiences I explained how I would use this tool to self-actualize. And then we moved on to this week's Call-to-Action. This week we take a personality assessment on 16personalities.com. It only takes about 12 minutes and the report it gives you (for free) is extremely valuable and actionable. 
• Thanks for listening. Be sure to subscribe and leave a review and share it with someone who could benefit from this information. And be sure to follow me on Instagram @ThinkersApprentice

This podcast is all about play and why it's crucial not just for kids, but for adults as well. Most of the podcast was derived from the book, Play: How it Shapes the Brain, Opens the Imagination, and Invigorates the Soul, by Stuart Brown MD and Christopher Vaughn.

  Topics include:

• Why we play at all. what is the purpose of play.
• The cognitive advantages of play.
• Why we stop playing as adults. 
• The 8 different play personalities.
• The 3 subtypes of social play: friendship and belonging, rough and tumble play, and celebratory and ritual play.
• I do a deep dive into the rough and tumble play and explain why it's important and why parents need to let it happen.
• Then we talk about how play is the lubrication that allows societies to function.
• And in this week's Call-to-Action we play. That's it. plain and simple. Play for the pure joy of it and have fun because you deserve to. 
• Thanks for listening. Be sure to subscribe and leave a review and share it with someone who could benefit from this information. And be sure to follow me on Instagram @ThinkersApprentice

In this episode we talk all about communication including:

• The origin of communication, or more specifically the impact of our learning how to communicate.
• How communication has enabled every achievement our species has ever accomplished since it's inception
• I define communication a few ways and give some examples of communication from a theoretical perspective
• I dig into the common statistics many of us have heard about communication as it pertains to words, tone, and non-verbal.
• Then we talk about how we have now removed the tone and body language and rely simply on the words with text messaging, social media, emails, etc. And then I talk about the extreme impact this is having on our society (hint: it's mostly negative)
• Then we move into echo chambers and how they create dogmas out of unsubstantiated beliefs.
• We move into the pure vitriol and venom that is spewed online every day as well as the way people generally try to make their case for the things they believe in (hint: it's mostly fallacious logic)
• Then we talk about silencing the opposition as opposed to debating your ideas versus theirs. And we also talk about some atrocities of the last hundred years that began in much the same way.
• We talk about moral arguments and drawing conclusions based on emotion and then trying to prove it right after you've already decided you believe it.
• I provide an example of much of what I'm talking about with our current political situation in America. And then I explain why we NEED both parties for the country to operate properly. 
• I debunk the myth of pure evil
• And then I talk about recreational outrage, and the type of people that engage in it. 
• And for our Call-to-Action this week I challenge the listeners to challenge one of their deepest held beliefs and try to prove it incorrect. Find the ways it is wrong. Then find someone on the opposite side of the argument and have a civil conversation and try to understand their point of view and how they arrived at it. You may be surprised to learn that they aren't evil or ignorant and that from their perspective things might even make sense. You might learn something. 

• Thanks for listening. Be sure to subscribe and leave a review and share it with someone who could benefit from this information. And be sure to follow me on Instagram @ThinkersApprentice

This episode was all about stress and all the ways it can silently ruin your health and well-being. Topics include:

• What stress is
• Good stress vs bad stress: eustress vs distress
• How the stress response is linked to inflammation 
• How the stress response works
• The 3 types of stress: physical, chemical, and psychological
• How your body deals with stress. The GAS or general adaptation syndrome and the 3 stages it goes through.
• We talked about how chronic stress leads to prolonged cortisol levels in the body and eventually leads to the exhaustion stage, which is where serious diseases start to show up. 
• We talk about how psychological stress has a tendency to be indefinite because those stressors can go unresolved for long periods of time.
• How stress affects working memory and leads to cognitive issues over time.
• How prolonged stress leads to antisocial behaviors and a propensity to misinterpret unclear social signals negatively as well as a tendency to lash out. We explore how this is affecting our youth.
• And in this week's Call-to-Action we take steps to control our stress. These include identifying the sources of your stress and taking steps to mitigate the ons that are within your control. 

• Thanks for listening. Be sure to subscribe and leave a review and share it with someone who could benefit from this information. And be sure to follow me on Instagram @ThinkersApprentice

In this episode we dive deep into inflammation, but more specifically chronic inflammation. Topics discussed:

• Acute inflammation and how that process works and why it's absolutely essential to life.
• Chronic Inflammation, also referred to as systemic inflammation or cellular inflammation. What is it and what diseases, disorders, and maladies is it starting to be connected to.
• We introduce some of the major players which are pro-inflammatory cytokines, the free radical chain reaction, and AA/EPA ratios. Insulin resistance may be one of the largest contributors, but we don't address that until later in the episode.
• Then we move into the various pathways that will lead you to be chronically inflamed and I give you 10 different pathways. You may not be affected by all of them, but I guarantee you are affected by at least a few of them.
• The 10 pathways I explain are:
  1. The free radical chain reaction 
  2. Polyunsaturated fatty acids
  3. AA/EPA ratio also referred to as Omega-6/Omega-3 ratio.
  4. Gluten
  5. Lectins
  6. Insulin resistance
  7. Excess body fat, more specifically excess visceral fat
  8. Cortisol
  9. Chronic exercise
  10. Insufficient/inadequate sleep
• Afterwards we talk about how 7 of those pathways are diet related and 3 are lifestyle related. 
• And in our Call-to-Action we talk about the best ways to reduce or eliminate sources of chronic inflammation. This includes a ceiling on daily carbohydrate intake, some foods to avoid, some foods to add, as well as some possible supplements that can help you combat your inflammation. 

• Thanks for listening. Be sure to subscribe and leave a review and share it with someone who could benefit from this information. And be sure to follow me on Instagram @ThinkersApprentice

This week's episode is all about exercise and how we can use it to optimize our genetic expression. Some things we discuss are: 

• Genetic expression and how our genes respond to environmental stimuli.
• Our sedentary lifestyles and the effect they have on our health.
• Why we age at an accelerated pace due to the mismanagement of our genes.
• The 3 exercise laws of The Primal Blueprint, by Mark Sisson, which are Move Frequently, Lift Heavy Things, and Sprint Once in a While. We dive deep into each of these laws and discuss how to apply them to your life to optimize your genetic expression.
• Chronic Cardio. We define what chronic cardio is and the myriad ways it's actually ruining your health.
• The Maffetone aerobic zone and how to do proper cardio.
• Mobility. We spend a good amount of time talking about this. So many long-term physiological issues are the result of poor mobility and it's not that hard to stay mobile. 
• In this week's Call-to-Action we put it all to work and create a new fitness plan that is the minimum input required for the maximum genetic expression. In this podcast we like to work smarter, not harder. 

• Thanks for listening. Be sure to subscribe and leave a review and share it with someone who could benefit from this information. And be sure to follow me on Instagram @ThinkersApprentice