Ep. 509 w/ Tyler Brown a podcast host & creator of the Wake Me Up podcast

Show Notes

I host my own podcast, Wake Me Up, which uses meditation, mindfulness, and motivation to help listeners start their day with a positive mindset.

https://www.wakemeuppodcast.com/

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Kevin Horek: Welcome back to the show today. We have Tyler Brown. He's a podcast host and creator of the wake me up podcast. Tyler, welcome to the show.

Tyler Brown: Hey Kevin. Thanks for having me. It's great to be here.

Kevin Horek: Yeah, I'm really excited to have you on the show. Selfishly, what we're going to talk about today is something that I really want to learn and get better at. Before we get into that, maybe let's get to know you better and start off with where you grew up.

Tyler Brown: Yeah, sounds good. I'm from the states I grew up in North Carolina,

Kevin Horek: Whereabouts in North Carolina,

Tyler Brown: Small town kind of near the triangle Raleigh Durham chapel hill area. Where I grew up was like, on the edge of that. It was on the line of the country and not, we don't really have big cities here. It's not like New York, but the city quote unquote. Yeah. It was actually a very interesting place to grow up because I saw that duality. Right. We had rich kids from chapel hill coming to my high school and then we had, yeah. Folks who grew up on a farm and it was really, it was honestly a very good blend to grow up with as a child. I saw a lot of different things and I think it really opened my mind to seeing that life is, can be what you want it to be.

Kevin Horek: Interesting. No, I, I got to actually go to Durham a number of years ago for a conference and I didn't know what to expect, not good or bad or anything, but I actually thought it was like a really cool place to be like, I it's beautiful there. Like I know a lot of people from kind of the Eastern part of the states were like, oh, I'm definitely gonna retire down here. Like they had already plans to move. Right. I was like, sure, it makes total sense. Cause it was kind of this like peaceful, quiet town that would make a lot of sense. Obviously college town, you have the big baseball stadium and whatnot there, but I don't know like something about it. It was just fascinating to me and not what I expected at all, but in a good way.

Tyler Brown: Yeah, no, you said it very well. It's, it's a unique place. You get a lot of different things. I mean, I lived in cities for long time and I love cities. I definitely became a bit of a city slicker, but you get a nice balance here. You can, there's plenty of really great restaurants, good bars, there's music and shows and we've got a hockey team and college basketball is huge, but also I drive 10 minutes and I'm in a completely secluded state park and like at a river and there's cool. It's great. There's not a lot of places you can do that.

Kevin Horek: No, a hundred percent. The tech scene is huge and like growing like crazy,

Tyler Brown: It's popping the amount of, I mean, real estate here is insane right now. There's a lot of people moving here from California from, I mean, COVID definitely fed that, but it was happening already and yeah, from Florida, from California, from New York, I mean all of the places where it's, real hot or real crowded and people want to pay less.

Kevin Horek: No, fair enough. You went to university, what did you take and why?

Tyler Brown: I, my I'm a person of many interests and like everything in life, it has its upsides and its downsides. I grew up a huge band nerd. I mean, total band nerd went to when I went to band camp for like a month.

Kevin Horek: Every.

Tyler Brown: Summer. I mean, I loved it, humble brag. I was, I was actually quite good and I wanted to go to, college and play music and I played the trumpet and I, I did everything. I got up early to go to zero period in high school to play in jazz band. I did marching band. Right. I was also like kind of a jock too. Like I played sports. I don't know, I don't, I'm not like easily. I mean, who is, easily categorized, but I kind of burnt out on music midway through high school. I went to UNC chapel hill, go heels. I was, you're 18. I think we set, we set young kids. They're still young adults I guess, but they're still kind of kids up for failure. I had no clue what the hell I wanted to do with my life. Much less like what I should study, ?

Tyler Brown: I was like, I really like science cause I do like science. I still love science. I love watching nature, documentaries. I like learning about space and all kinds of things. And I was like, okay, cool. I'll study science. I'll be a doctor. Very much like white male middle-class conditioning. I got in, I started my major was biology at first and I really liked it. I, I loved biology. What I wasn't super fond of was all of the chemistry and physics, the more technical stuff, the thing, I, in science, I want it to be tangible. Right. I appreciate that. There's a lot of stuff about science that we can't see with our own eyes. We need a microscope or we use mathematics to understand how physics were I get that. At that point in my life, I was like, no, I want to talk about cells.

Tyler Brown: I want to talk about, frog, life cycles, all that kind of stuff. I mean, candidly, I was a young man and I wanted to party and enjoy college . I ended up switching my major to exercise and sports science after a few years, partly because what I just said, but also I didn't really feel a calling to be a doctor. That's what I had just thought I was going to do. I switched over to sports science, which actually has ended up being wildly useful to me throughout life. I mean, issues. I have like injuries. I have things that are going on with my body. Like I can, I'm not a doctor, but like I can get, I can pretty much self diagnose, most of your common issues, tendonitis or, whatever I've got going on. Right. I just really know how to take care of myself really well because of that, understand my body works.

Tyler Brown: So it was super useful. And, but the thing was, is, I didn't, I wasn't thinking about what I wanted to do with my life. At that time I was 20 or whatever. I got to my senior year of college and I was doing, I was a good student. I was doing an honors thesis and it was actually about college basketball. My advisor was like, Hey man, are you going to go to grad school? You need to go to grad school or something, ? I was like, yeah, I want to, I like school and I'm good at school. I want to keep learning, but I don't know what the hell I want to do with my life. So, from my college major was typically what people would do that for was to do physical therapy or outpatient therapy, or be a, a trainer, an athletic trainer of some sort, or if you want it to go more like business route, you went and sold tickets for some major league sports team.

Tyler Brown: Right. That was the paths and none of those really appealed to me at all. He suggested, why don't you think about law school? What I was writing about did have a legal tilt to it. In many ways I do have a bit of a lawyer's personality. I'd like to think not your typical lawyer, but long story short, I ended up going to law school right out of college. I moved to Washington DC and I did law school. Did all that and ended up working at a big law firm in DC after right out of law school. Very quickly I was like, man, I don't think I should be doing this.

Kevin Horek: Okay. Interesting. Why,

Tyler Brown: It just, wasn't the idea of the law, like the concept of rate writing rules and forming the structure of a society. How do we incentivize people to be good people, to, great businesses that yeah. They can sustain themselves on and their employees, but also, do something useful for everyone else in society and don't blow up the society while they do it. That's really interesting to me, the practice of law is however, very different. Especially when you're fresh out of law school and you don't have, you have, I mean, you're basically worthless there's paralegals who were 10,000, like so much more valuable to a client than I was as a, a fresh attorney. A lot of what you're doing is just like mindless. I mean, it's glorified project management to a degree interesting, kind of boring, like very niche research assignments and stuff. It just really, wasn't very compelling to me.

Tyler Brown: On top of that, you're doing these crazy hours. I mean, I could go on for a long time talking about the things in the legal field that really didn't hit me the right way, but to summarize, yeah, well, I stayed at that job for a couple of years. I didn't want to jump out right away, but I ended up moving to, sorry, let me back up. My, my thought was, I don't think that this job is right for me. I can't tell if it's being a lawyer in general or if it's just this, working at a big law firm maybe right. For me. I said, well, let's try something different. I was lucky enough to get a clerkship, which is basically, you're basically a judges. Apprentice is kind of a nice way to describe it. A lot of people actually, if you're not in the legal field, you may not know this, but a lot of, pretty much all judges have they're called judicial clerks, right?

Tyler Brown: There's the clerk of court who like calls the cases and takes the papers. Everybody in the courts called a clerk, unfortunately, there's clerks then, which is what I was. And those are attorneys. You're hired by the judge basically to split up the judges docket there's way too many cases for a judge to handle them all by themselves. There was another UMaine. We had two clerks and we split the docket. And basically you run those cases. You're doing all the research, you're preparing the opinions. Obviously the judge is making the final decisions and you're consulting with them all the way through and they, revise your writing and run the hearings. The vast majority of judicial opinions, at least in the United States are written by clerks. So fun little facts there. So that's what I did. I actually did really like that job. I had a really cool judge.

Tyler Brown: He was the man. I mean, it's so cool. He was young, really young. Just, I mean, obviously, federal judge just pretty much a genius. That job I really liked, that was more of what I thought being a lawyer would be like, it was really heady. It was intellectual, but we had deep conversations about like, rights of, people in jail, whether someone, what is reasonable doubt in a criminal case, like great, tough questions about life that you can't get perfectly. Right. You have to make a hard decision sometimes. Right? That I really liked the, the thing about clerkships is they kept them. They're really good training for lawyers. After my year of clerking was up, I, at that time, well, during my clerkship, towards the end of my clerkship actually did a yoga teacher training. That CA was the catalyst for the major catalyst. There were other little things along the way, the major catalyst for where I'm at now.

Tyler Brown: That was in like may of that year. I finished my clerkship in August. Over that summer, I was, applying to jobs and I was really like deep in my own head about here's, what am I going to do with my life? I don't think this is what I should be doing, being a lawyer, but also, every other signpost that I've ever been shown and in society is like, nah, you should do this. You should follow a paved path. It's safe. It's, comfortable life, this and that, whatever. The yoga teacher training really just like evacuated a lot of that. I don't even know what to call it stuff out of me that conditioning we have from childhood, comes from like movies and your parents and all that everywhere. I, I wasn't, I hadn't really like settled with it yet, but I, I actually did look at actually almost started my own business right before the end of my quick ship.

Tyler Brown: I looked at other non-legal jobs. The reality is I felt kind of guilty to my judge if I didn't go take another legal job, because he invested a lot of time in me training me clearly could have hired somebody else who did want to be a lawyer their whole life. I ended up taking another legal job for about six months and that job was honestly, it was pretty fantastic on paper. I didn't work a crazy amount. I worked like, nine to five 30 pretty normal work hours. I made good lawyer money. My office like overlooked, beautiful downtown views of LA and like the mountains in the back. And.

Kevin Horek: Sounds terrible.

Tyler Brown: Sounds really horrible. This is the thing it's like, I was miserable. Right. I was sitting there like trying to figure this out, like I should be happy. Right. I'm looking at it as like, is this unhappiness that I'm feeling coming from like a lack in other areas of my life, like in my putting something on work that is not my work's fault for me having this feeling. It was, no, it was work. I was miserable all day and it really just smacked me in the face. Eventually that dude what's, you're spending like eight, nine hours a day doing, you just don't enjoy these like small tasks of what a job entails. Every job has its tasks and most jobs like, a lot of, it's not pretty, just like, what you and I do. You gotta upload audio. You gotta, I don't know if you edit audio, but someone's got to.

Tyler Brown: Like, it gets tedious, and it gets boring, but every job is like that. If you love the thing that you're doing, like you, you can deal with the little tedious annoyances and, I just, it just kind of smacked me in the face that I didn't really love what I was doing. So yeah. I lasted at that job for not very long. I quit. I did work for a little while, so they could hire a replacement for me and train them. Yeah, I kind of went on like a couple of months, like soul searching adventure, I guess, and did a lot of different things. I taught a yoga thing. I learned taught myself to make websites. I really had absolutely no clue what I should be doing, but I did feel that like, I've always had this creative side, excuse me, I've always had this creative side.

Tyler Brown: And part of me is also logical. Like I said, I do have that lawyer in me. Right. I think that's what was starving in me while I was a lawyer was like, dude, you don't have any creative outlet. You're not building something new. You're nothing, nothing. It was very dry. I felt that whatever I was going to do needed to have some creative aspect to it. Yeah, fast forward a couple of months. I started, I kind of weaseled my way in at this very new company making sleep content. And that's what I still do now. It was my day job. I make sleep podcasts and bedtime stories and soundscapes and stuff for apps. Shortly after I started there, I got down and finally started doing an idea, which I had for quite a long time, which is now my podcast. Wake me up. In fact, one of the things I was thinking of doing during that soul searching period, was learning to code software development for mobile apps and stuff and making this app that I wanted to make.

Tyler Brown: When we started doing podcasts at work, I was like, oh man, duh, I should do this as a podcast. It's way easier, way less overhead. You don't have to, spend hours and hours like setting up the user interface and like fixing bugs and, dealing with apples code review and all that. I started a podcast and yeah, I guess here I am like two plus years later.

Kevin Horek: That's awesome. You mentioned it, but what's the podcast called and what's it about.

Tyler Brown: Right. It's called wake me up. What the podcast is designed to do is to be like a positive morning routine, a companion kind of thing. It blends mindfulness, meditation and motivation here and there to help you get out of bed. I, it, it comes from personal experience. I've always felt like alarms are just the worst implementation of a great idea, a hundred percent. Now, why should we wake up? I mean, I think there's actually studies about this, that like pressing the snooze button repeatedly every morning, jolts your heart, just, and doing that thousands and thousands of times over the course of your life is like really not good for you. I've always felt there should be a way more pleasant way to wake up such that I don't hate everything. Like, I don't feel p****d at the world for like, and the sun for just showing up when it's supposed to show up.

Tyler Brown: And you're.

Kevin Horek: Describing me to a T right now,

Tyler Brown: It's, it's so many of us, and we all have our different reasons. Why we're slow to get up. I mean, look that is comfortable. It's a warm it's, it's definitely any way you look at it. It's an uphill battle going from something really comfortable to like having to exert energy and like start doing stuff. That's what I try to offer with the podcast is just a nice guided way to get you out of bed, start your day and feel good about yourself. And, I encourage you to, there's a lot more in the weeds of the show than that, but that's the, the high level idea that.

Kevin Horek: Very cool man, I think, and we talked about this before. I was very skeptical of meditation and all kinds of the mindfulness stuff, and I've really tried it kind of on and off successfully, like for months, and then something will happen. Like, I'll go on a trip or it's vacation or whatever. It doesn't matter. Like, or it'll be like a Christmas break or something. I, I get out of it and then I have a hard time getting back into it. I know when I'm in it and it's, I'm doing it's working and I can see the benefits, but it's just, it's hard. I think a lot of people struggle with that as well. I'm also trying to like, not be so hard on myself when I slide and struggle with that. What are your thoughts or advice or how do you help people like myself that no, they should be doing it, have found value in it and, but still struggle with it sometimes.

Tyler Brown: Yeah. I mean, I think you hit the nail on the head, which it, most people, if they're not like routine meditators, they fall into two camps, which is, they kind of see it as like fru and they just haven't done it yet. Or they're like you and they've done it. They're like, oh yeah, this is nice. And makes me feel better. It's implementing it into the daily life that becomes hard. So, I would say a couple of things, first thing first is meditation is you don't, you need to figure out, like, I think about it, like exercise. Right? Okay. You love to run or you love to go to the gym and lift weights or you like to do yoga or you just, want to play basketball or tennis with your friend, whatever it is for you. It doesn't, it really doesn't matter that much.

Tyler Brown: The point is that you're being active. Right. You're getting your body some exercise. You're getting the blood flowing. That's what matters. It's the same thing with meditation, mindfulness, too. They kind of run together these buzz words.

Kevin Horek: So what's the difference. Or maybe describe each one of them just so we fully understand.

Tyler Brown: Yeah, no, totally. Like I said, they run together, meditation, I would say is a specific type of practice. Right. Whereas mindfulness is more of a way of going about life.

Kevin Horek: Okay.

Tyler Brown: Like you would go about life mindfully, right? Paying attention to how you're feeling, paying attention to how your body's doing, paying attention to what you're eating. Basically just being attentive to yourself. Here's where it gets confusing is that's basically what meditation is being, being attentive in the present moment. Right. Am I scarfing down my dinner? Like watching YouTube? Or am I like actually enjoying each bite and be like, oh yeah, I made a tasty dinner tonight. You know, that's technically meditation. If you go to places like, you go to a yoga retreat center or like some Buddhist temple or something, somewhere where you can go do like a meditation retreat. Oftentimes you'll do walking meditation or you'll have silent meditation while you eat. You don't talk while you eat and that's considered a form of meditation. It's totally understandable why people get confused and it's, I mean, it's true.

Tyler Brown: The words are in certain instances interchangeable. The way I think about it is again, meditation is like more thinking about it as a practice, right? I'm going to sit down on my chair or whatever, and close my eyes for five minutes or I'm going to do some breathing exercises, or I'm going to put my phone away. I'm not gonna listen to music. I'm just gonna go for a walk in the woods, listening to things, the birds and the whatever is going on around you being present. That's the practice of meditation. I think that's what a lot of people struggle with and, or they struggle with implementing a practice into their life. That's my first point is going back to the exercise thing is, look, I, I will definitely not diminish the value of sitting quietly with your eyes closed for long periods of time. The like, if you have time to go to like, yoga retreat center or something like that, where it's implemented into your day, go for a weekend, go for a week.

Tyler Brown: The like the insights and the PC we'll find with yourself. I there's, I just can't put words to that constantly only be experienced, but that's just not feasible for a lot of people where they're like, they're going to go to the Amalfi coast for their vacation, which I totally understand that. I support you going and living your best life. But the key is like exercise. Figure out what you like, what works for you? Like, I'll be honest. I don't sit down and I have a little meditation cushion. I have one right here in my living room. I don't sit down on it and meditate every day, straight up. I don't, I do it probably. Well, I go through phases where I know that I need to meditate. Like if I got a lot going on or something, it's like, stressing me out, then I'll sit down and do it.

Tyler Brown: I have a quiet walk by myself, no phone for about 20, 30 minutes almost every morning. And for me, that's my meditation. That's the point is to be there with yourself, be like, what's stressing me out. Just kind of our minds get so wound up. We got phones, we got work, we got emails. We got people to call. We got, you know, rent bills. We got trying to build a new career, have a side hustle and like, be a good parent father, wife, all these things, man, no wonder. We're all stressed out. Like the whole America's so depressed. This is why, because there's way too much pressure on us. And we don't give ourselves time. Like our time, our wind down time is watching Netflix or watching, whatever sport, whatever. Yeah. Or reading a book, you're putting more into your head when you do that, instead of letting your head solve problems that are already in there, that's what your head is designed to do solve problems.

Tyler Brown: You just have to give it the time to do that. And it doesn't actually really very well. That's what I would say is like figure out a way to build quiet undistracted time into your day. Doesn't need to be hours, 10, 15 minutes a day. And that the key is no distractions. Like you can't go talk to your neighbors, can't talk to your spouse or your kids or your roommate or whatever. Like it needs to be, distractions, if you want to have like some ambient music or something fine, no lyrics though. Like the point is to not be putting something new in your head, think about it. Like, like a spring coil, like you wind it up and it keeps getting tighter and tighter and tighter. Like you have to let that to release the energy of that. That's like what happens in your brain?

Tyler Brown: When you keep putting more content, more things to do in there, you have to give that your isn't a spring coil that, you have to give it time to unwind. It's like combing out the knots of hair. You know,

Kevin Horek: Interestingly.

Tyler Brown: You have to, you have to stroke through your hair with the comb. It doesn't come out in one stroke. It's really, the key is time giving yourself the time to let your mind unwind and do that in whatever way works for you. It's gonna take experimentation and it's gonna vary at times in your life. Like, like I said, I go through phases where I'm like, man, I really just, I want to like sit down and like properly meditate and I will, or, I've been to plenty of yoga retreats. I mean, like, I love those things and that's why I recommend them is because if you do some really deep meditation, like a phase of really deep meditation for a month, two months,

Kevin Horek: Yeah.

Tyler Brown: You will feel the benefits of even if you don't meditate regularly afterwards, you'll feel the benefits of that for years and years. I mean, I still feel that way. It's just the practice of becoming attuned to yourself and then, like, oh, I am super stressed out. I need to take more time to meditate. And so yeah. Does that answer your, I think that answers your question.

Kevin Horek: It's actually the interesting thing that you said to me that was going to be my follow up question and you kind of answered it is I think I've been doing meditation wrong in a lot of cases because like, I think the times where I get discouraged from it are where I try to sit in the proper pose and I got a million things on my mind and I'm already, I probably had too much coffee and I'm kind of jittery. I like, I have like a million, like my to-do list is so long. I, I'm trying to force myself to sit calm and meditate where if I just like took my phone and listened to and went for a walk for 30 minutes and use that as my meditation instead of like forcing myself to sit still when I'm not ready to sit still. I think that to me, what you just said was eyeopening to me.

Kevin Horek: And, and that's why I say like, I feel like I'm doing it wrong sometimes when I'm always trying to force myself into what we traditionally think of as meditation. It's interesting to me because like I find sometimes like, I'll go longboarding on a nice night. Like after the kids go to bed and I just listen to music and for me, I never considered that as like meditation. Right. I'm listening to music with lyrics, but maybe I need to change that. To me it's like that to me, it was like peaceful and I never considered that as meditating. Right.

Tyler Brown: Yeah.

Kevin Horek: I've been wrong about that.

Tyler Brown: Here's the question though, when you're doing that, like, are is it like you're being there with yourself, you're enjoying the moment, like, these thoughts and problems that you're having to deal with later, whatever your daily issues are, they're coming up and like you're processing them like, is that what you're doing in that time?

Kevin Horek: A hundred percent.

Tyler Brown: Then you're meditating. I mean, yeah. I think you, again, you hit it on the head like there. We have so much pressure in life. Meditating is a no-pressure experience. If you're putting your pressure, you're putting pressure on yourself. You're saying I'm doing it wrong. Like you're probably the only thing you're doing wrong is telling yourself that you're doing it.

Kevin Horek: Yeah. But, and I don't know how you feel about this and you could tell me if I'm crazy or not, but I'm so tired of those lists the, of like 10 things that successful people do every morning or 10 things to get over burnout or 10 things to get over stress or whatever the thing is because they don't actually address what we just talked about. It's like, cause they all say you should meditate, but they never say that. Like, because when I hear meditation, it's what we just talked about. It's like, you need to sit on your mat and you need to be in the proper pose and you need to close your eyes while you don't have to close your eyes. Like nobody talks about, what, it doesn't have to be the traditional sense of meditation. You can find meditation in riding your bike or longboarding or going for a walk or I don't know whatever that is for you.

Kevin Horek: Right. And, but nobody talks about that. Part of it with so many things in life. That's what has been so aggravating for me over the last few years with figuring out anything in life. Do you agree with that? Or what are your thoughts around that?

Tyler Brown: I do agree with that. I mean, when you look back the, the ultimate goal of the, like the OJI meditators, ? Yeah. Buddhists, those people, like the ultimate goal was to be meditating in everything that you do. All that means is like being present, not.

Kevin Horek: Interesting,

Tyler Brown: Not worried about what's going on over there. Like, what your kids doing in school. Just like if you're cooking dinner, just cook dinner.

Kevin Horek: Yeah.

Tyler Brown: Interesting. You don't have the team, you know? That's, I mean, I think that's really, the goal is just to, and the thing that's funny is if you're doing that, if you're meditating at all times of day, wherever you're doing, then you're living a mindful life, so to speak. That's like again where the two words overlap. But yeah, no, I totally agree. Take the pressure off of yourself. Do what works for you because the most important thing is that you have quiet time to yourself. I mean, you don't spend time. Like there's no one in your life that you spend more time with than you. Right? Like ultimately the whole joy in life is like getting to know you, what can you do? What are you capable of? What do you like? What do you find interesting and people, if you think about it, that's really what you spend all of your, like when your free time, that's what you spend your free time doing, watching things that interest you going and doing activities that you like, that you find fulfillment from.

Tyler Brown: A lot of this is spending just spending time with your number one, your best friend, and it's selfish, but it's, you can't be a good friend. You can't be a good coworker. Can't be a good leader. I don't care what role you're playing. You can't be good at it. If you don't understand yourself and appreciate yourself, know your own strengths, your weaknesses. That's really what this practice of meditation, mindfulness, whatever you want to call, it offers.

Kevin Horek: Fascinating. You, you have my mind, I'm thinking about so much stuff right now. The thing that I also find interesting about what we're talking about today is I don't know, like I just look back on myself like three, five, even 10 years ago. The stuff that I always thought was kind of hokey or stupid, for lack of a better term for it. I end up doing as I get older. Like, if you would ask I'm 39 and like, if you look back at 30 year old, Kevin, I would have been like, why would you do any of this stuff that I do now? Like, I'd be like, that's stupid, but it's so funny how, like you just try some of these things. Right. And, and it's hard. I think that's the thing that the point I'm trying to get across is like, I think I thought a lot of this stuff was stupid because I tried it when I was younger and I maybe half-assed did it best.

Kevin Horek: Didn't try it for more than, a few minutes or maybe an hour or whatever, depending on what I'm trying. I didn't give it that like true shot that I wish I would have, because I think I would be like a lot further along. I wish it was a lot further along if I actually didn't make like a half-ass effort and kind of wrote some of these things off earlier on. Do you agree with that? Or what are your thoughts around that?

Tyler Brown: I mean, I absolutely understand I've done the same thing, but you can't beat yourself up about that. I mean, things come to us, life is very, it has its phases, certain things resonate with us more in certain phases, like the first time a really good example of what you're talking about for me is yoga. Like growing, I was like, nah, I play basketball. Like I played lacrosse. I was like, boys. Yeah. Like, Ooh, let's hit each other kind of stuff. Like, yoga's like for wimps or whatever, that whole thing. The first time I ever did yoga, I remember it very specifically. Do you, do you remember those like workout videos, P90X it's like on a DVD, like you got the DVDs? Me and my buddies. I think it was like, it was either like summer in high school or like were back home during summer, like in college or something like we're going to get jacked.

Tyler Brown: So we did like the P90X thing. Right. And one of the videos is yoga. That was actually the first time I did yoga and were like laughing and like, oh, these poses are stupid or whatever. Like, I look at myself now in many ways, yoga may have like saved my life. Like I was, I mean, I started doing yoga because my body was just under so much, like just w***e. I was in, I was seated reading law books, all day long. Right. I could just, I was like in law school was like 23. I was like, dude, I'm way too young for my body to be aching and like losing my posture. I went to yoga because I was like, well, I mean, I'll stretch. That seems like the obvious solution to this. Right. Through that, I, a, I started taking better care of my body, but be like, that's how I got into meditation.

Tyler Brown: I mean, Headspace is how I learned to meditate with Andy. Right. Yeah. I've used that before. I mean that dude, all the props to Andy, but all of those doors, I mean, like where I am right now, what I'm doing with my time in life. Like I can't beat myself up about laughing at P90X yoga when I was 19 or whatever, because in some way, something in me when I was doing that, even though I was laughing at it, I was like, oh, maybe this whole stretching thing, like there is something to it. I, I wouldn't beat yourself up about like, not having been perfect and like having done more when you were younger, like you can't, there's no way for you to win that game. The thing to take advantage of, it's like, okay, I'm here now. And I just do like this now.

Tyler Brown: How can I like dive in and make the most of this right now? It's like relationships, you have friends, some friends lasts a lifetime. There's certain things that we all have that we're interested in our whole life, but other things we go in and out with, we have friends that were college friends or friends while we lived in such and such place. It's not that you hate each other, you just, your life's going in different directions. That's true about the activities we do and the things we care about as well. Just like you don't hate your old buddies from, wherever the last place you used to live or college or growing up, like you don't have any animosity towards them just because you've moved on. So, I don't think you can beat yourself up for not having taken, something more seriously at an earlier phase of life.

Tyler Brown: If, if it's landed in this phase, then great. Make the best of it.

Kevin Horek: Yeah. I think that's actually really good advice. I, and I hope like just by us sharing these kinds of stories, it inspires other people to maybe give something another shot right. And, and take, and I'm still trying to get better at this too, is like taking better care of myself or figuring out what works for me or what doesn't work for me. I don't know if that journey ever goes away because it's hard and it's challenging to figure out what works for you or what you like or what you don't like. Because like, I hate going to the gym, for example, because it just makes me uncomfortable. Like, I'm just not that person. Right. I don't mind doing some stuff downstairs in my basement. Right. So like that works for me. I don't really like lifting weights, for example. Like I prefer running on the treadmill or going for a run outside or going longboarding or something like that.

Kevin Horek: It took me a long time to figure that out. It's just the sad thing is until I really made the effort and put in some time. I think what got me really shifting my mindset. I'm curious to get your thoughts after is I've had the luxury of talking to some actual, really busy people that run well-known companies just through this show. And, and they're busier than me. I will ever be. I would consider myself a busy person. I don't mean that to brag because I don't think it's being busy. Isn't something to brag about. I think I would wish I was less busy.

Tyler Brown: Right.

Kevin Horek: And, but what the point I'm trying to get at is like the CEOs of big companies that have thousands of employees that their to do list is probably decades long. They could work constantly, still find the time to go for that 45 minute run or work out or meditate or both every day or most days of the week. There's no reason I can't do that with somebody that's way busier could do it. I can do that. I hope the listener takes that away as well and says like, you can do it too, if you want to do that.

Tyler Brown: Yeah. I think you nailed it. I mean, the key life is an experiment. The key is to figure out what you like and just do that, ? And it takes time. Part of it, one of the things you just have to get okay with is trying stuff and not liking it and being cool with that. I mean, there's a lot of things that you learn in life. I mean, I can plenty in my own life that I can think of where I figured out what I did. Like by first doing things that I didn't like a hundred percent, I mean, my career is a perfect example of that.

Kevin Horek: Interesting. Yeah.

Tyler Brown: So, there's just a lot, you can't win every game, but every loss can you can, I'm of the opinion that everything does have, you can put a positive outlook on everything. I'm not one of those people who's like crazy positive. Like the fire island guy, like, no, that's not it like bad stuff happens in the world. There are problems. From like, there's, it's, we live in a gray area. Life is not white and black. It's not good and bad. It is both. Everything is both. The sooner you can see that, like, 45 minutes spent at the gym and absolutely hating it and never wanting to go back to work out in public again, like, great, that's still a win. You're not, you're not going to go waste your time at the gym, doing something you don't like, you're going to like buy a treadmill or, go for a run outside or, exactly.

Tyler Brown: You're going to try new things. The more you experiment, the more you can make yourself happy.

Kevin Horek: No, I, I, a hundred percent agree with you, but we're coming to the end of the show. How about we close with mentioning where people can get more information about yourself, the podcast, and any other links you want to mention?

Tyler Brown: Yeah, absolutely. Just look up the podcast online, wake me up podcasts.com. You can find links there to go listen to it. You can also just search for it and whatever podcast player you use. I'm pretty much in all of the major ones as far as I know. Yeah, if you are interested in sleep stuff, go check out the work I do for, we have apps slumber, also podcasts get sleepy, bookshelf, deep sleep sounds. Yeah.

Kevin Horek: Very cool Tyler. Well, I really appreciate you taking the time out of your day to be on the show. I look forward to keeping in touch with you and have a good rest of your day, man.

Tyler Brown: Thanks. I really appreciate it, Kevin. It was, it was great to chat.

Kevin Horek: You as well, man, have a good rest of the day and we'll talk soon.

Tyler Brown: All right, take care. Bye.

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