[INTRODUCTION]

Hal Elrod: Today’s conversation with Ryan Levesque goes straight at a paradox we are all living inside. As AI gets smarter, faster, more omnipresent, we’re tempted to outsource everything human from our driving to our thinking, you name it. Ryan thinks that’s exactly the wrong direction. His call is simple, and it cuts against the grain of modern tech culture: Return to What’s Real. He shares three contrarian ideas that deserve to be thoughtfully considered by every single one of us. First, the best things in life don’t scale. Trying to optimize hugs or sunsets or time with people that we love is a category error. Those experiences are valuable precisely because they can’t be automated or multiplied.

Second, he argues for oxytocin over dopamine. Dopamine gives you the quick hit, but it feeds compulsive scrolling and synthetic highs, whereas oxytocin is connection, it’s trust, it’s bonding, it’s presence. One makes you chase more, the other makes you grateful for what’s already here. And third, spend less time with manmade things and spend more time with God-made things. Screens, dashboards, and algorithms might be useful, but they’ll never compete with silence, with mountains, with nature, with moments of stillness where you remember who you truly are. This isn’t an anti-AI or anti-progress message. It’s a conversation that reminds all of us that the more technology accelerates, the more intentional we need to be about grounding ourselves in what matters most.

It is my pleasure to introduce you to my good friend, Mr. Ryan Levesque.

[INTERVIEW]

Hal Elrod: The reason you’re here, A, we’re friends, but that’s not why. You and I were at a mastermind a couple of months ago, and you give a message “Return to Real.” And it was voted by, I think, the majority. It was like collectively the favorite message. For me, it was. It was a profound message, and it was talking about AI but from a perspective that I had never heard before. And it just resonated with my soul, right? And you don’t usually hear an AI talk that resonates at the soul level. So, can you unpack this? What does this mean, Return to Real?

Ryan Levesque: It’s a great question. It’s a big question, and I think to understand this concept and this phrase, Return to Real, I think it’s important to set some context around what I believe is a singular moment in human history that we are about to land on our doorstep. And there are three colliding forces that are reshaping the world in a transformative way. And I think it’s important to understand what these forces are, and I’ll kind of set the stage for what this idea of Return to Real actually is. So, with three forces, the first is an economic force. The second is an environmental force, and the third is an existential force, which creates this singular moment in history.

Economically speaking, we’re entering territory that most humans alive today have never experienced, and the most concise way that I could explain this is the way in which Ray Dalio has explained it as The Big Cycle, which is a predictable cycle. If you study geopolitics, if you study global economies where empires rise and fall over a period of 80 to plus or minus 25 years, so 80 to 100-ish years. And the last time we experienced this as a planet, as a species, was the Great Depression going into World War II. And if you look at the math coming out of 1945 to today, we’re basically on the precipice of that 80-year-ish window. And this is a cycle that’s happened predictably if you study 2,000 years of human history.

The problem is because most people only experience this at most once in their lifetime, they don’t believe, we don’t believe that it’s going to happen. This time is different. So, we have this sort of false sense that it’s going to be different this time around. Secondly, we’re living in this unprecedented time that Nate Hagens describes as The Great Carbon Pulse, and this is the environmental force that we’re facing. So, for the last hundred-plus years, we found a way to extract 4 billion years of sequestered carbon beneath the earth’s surface in the form of fossil fuel, so this is oil and coal. And that oil and coal, that fossil fuel, has powered the only life that we, alive today, have known. And when you do the math, a single barrel of oil can be the equivalent of 10 human workers working for five years straight. That’s just a single barrel of oil that you have right there.

Hal Elrod: In terms of energy production?

Ryan Levesque: In terms of the energy output relative to the energy output of a single human being working manually, just with our body, with our hands and our body. If we look at the number of units of oil produced, the barrels of oil produced on an annual basis, we have the equivalent of about 400 billion human beings, the energy equivalent through the fossil fuel that we’re extracting, supporting the life that we’re living here today. Now, the punchline to all that is when you study the actual extraction of this fossil fuel, we are most likely past the point of what’s known as peak oil, meaning we are extracting less fossil fuel out of the ground today than we were a few years ago. And depending on estimates, this may be 2010-2012 when we achieved peak oil.

Now, mathematically speaking, what’s happening is we are dangerously at the point where we are requiring more than a unit of energy to extract a unit of energy from the ground. So, you don’t have to be a mathematician to understand like in business, it’s not sustainable. You put a dollar into your business, and you only get $0.80 in return. Once you run out of dollars, then you go bankrupt. The business collapses. So, this great carbon pulse is a finite amount of fossil fuel. Now, advocates of nuclear energy will say we’re close to a breakthrough in fusion or nuclear energy. When you actually look at the inputs required to build a nuclear power plant, a mini power plant, largely, they are fossil fuel-based.

Electric vehicles are used. Fossil fuels produce electric vehicles. So, we know that. So, we’re kind of in this race against time right now. But I think most people recognize that the premise of infinite growth in a finite system is flawed. We have a thermodynamic reality on planet earth that there aren’t an infinite amount. There isn’t an infinite amount of fossil fuel available to power whatever it is that we built. So, that’s force number two. Force number three is existential, and I think Yuval Noah Harari probably does the best job of this in Sapiens and Homo Deus, really sort of outlining the fact that what AI brings with it is forcing us to come to terms with the superiority of the human race as a species on planet earth.

And questions that start to come up are what happens when we’re no longer the most intelligent species or the most intelligent organism in the proverbial room, so to speak. Do we become the chimpanzees to our AGI/AI super overlords? Do we become the dog sitting on the chair to our AI super overlords, but where does it leave us? Now, the short term implication is, of course, fears of joblessness and unemployment and becoming obsolete in a career that some may have spent hundreds of thousands of dollars in student loans to train themselves in and years, in some case decades, to learn all of a sudden being made obsolete overnight is really forcing us to come to terms with what does it actually mean to be human? And what is our purpose if we can be replaced?

Now, these three forces are colliding all at once. And in some ways, it feels like it’s a singular moment in history because of where we are right now, the great carbon pulse, what’s happening with AI, and this rise and fall of empires in the big cycle. But the reality is, if you study history, and I’ll get to the original question around, what is return to real, the reality is if you study history, we’ve actually been here before, that there’s a predictable path that shows up that anytime that we’ve experienced a period of great dynamic change in the world, i.e., for example, the industrial revolution, every one of these periods of dynamic change has been met with a counter-revolutionary movement that is attached to feelings of being more real, more grounded, returning to something that perhaps we’ve lost.

Post-Industrial Revolution, we had the Romantic Movement. We also had the transcendentalist, so this is where we had Thoreau. In the mechanization of the early 20th century, in response to that, we had the Arts and Crafts Movement, which is a movement back to making handmade furniture, handmade goods. Post-degradation of the post-World War II, 20th century, was the Back-to-the-Land movement. So, this is where homesteading first was born was in post-World War II. And in the highly digital world that we live in today, we have the Digital Detox Movement, which is this movement away from sort of everything digital.

So, what is Return to Real? Return to Real is this movement that’s taking shape in the world, that there is a segment of the world that’s recognizing that the path we’re on is unsustainable, that the AI acceleration that’s taking place right now does not produce a desirable outcome. It perhaps leaves much to be desired and is forcing us to make intentional choices in our life. I like to say, if you are not analog with intention, you are digital by default. Meaning, if you do not…

Hal Elrod: Say that again, please.

Ryan Levesque: If you are not intentionally analog, you become digital by default.

Hal Elrod: Got it.

Ryan Levesque: Which means if you are not intentionally making choices in your life to do what you and I are doing right here where I flew across the country, ironically, in an AI-powered vehicle to get to this room, we’ll talk about that in just a moment, to have this moment in time together, this precious moment in time together in person. And if you’re not making intentional choices for that, you will become digital by default. You will live a life where Uber Eats delivers everything you need to your doorstep. You don’t have to leave your home. You get all your entertainment through Netflix and streaming services. You do not need to have any form of contact with the outside world or humanity, and you can live your life by abstraction through proxy, through a screen.

Return to Real is the counterrevolutionary movement that’s taking place right now, where there’s a segment of the world that’s recognizing that they do not want that outcome, and there’s a craving for everything that we’re describing, and that’s what Return to Real is.

Hal Elrod: You are leading by example, in that you now live on a farm and you grow your own food. In fact, what percentage of your food that you and your family consume is produced by you?

Ryan Levesque: Our North Star metric is 80%. So, we wanted to get to 80% of our calories consumed, which we actually measure, produced directly on the land that we store and manage ourselves.

Hal Elrod: And what does that include? What are you eating? What are you growing? What are you raising?

Ryan Levesque: We are doing a lot. So, just take a step back. Three and a half years ago, when I recognized what was happening in the world, I decided to make this very intentional choice. And at the time, we were living in Austin, Texas and I decided one summer while my kids were at sleepaway summer camp to go away and live and work on a farm in the Mad River Valley of Vermont. I actually lived in a tent. I bathed in a pond. And I learned the world of permaculture. And when I was there, my heart spoke to me and said, “This is where I’m meant to be. This is where my family’s meant to be.” And while I was there, I texted my wife. I had one bar of service in the Green Mountains of Vermont, and we had thought about possibly putting our house on the market to sell. It was a possible plan of action.

We’d lined up a real estate agent. We had photos taken, video taken, but we didn’t pull the trigger. And when I was there, I texted my wife, and I said, “Let’s do it.” I feel like this is the right thing for us as a family. She said, “You sure?” I said, “Yes.” Texting back and forth. She said, “Okay, great.” So, we had a plan of action. She texted me back a little later that afternoon. She said, “All right. Well, we have an offer. All cash.”

Hal Elrod: That fast.

Ryan Levesque: That day.

Hal Elrod: Wow.

Ryan Levesque: All cash, full price. 14-day close. So, I had to make a decision right then, “Are we doing this thing?” And I said, “Well, let’s do it.” And then I booked a flight home, got back home. We put everything we owned in storage. We sold one of our vehicles, and we decided to road trip from Austin to Vermont at this point with one car. The truck was filled with suitcases, the dog, the kids, the whole thing, with nothing but a dream and a vision. And we drove cross-country.

Hal Elrod: Place to live yet, or…?

Ryan Levesque: We had nowhere to live. We had an Airbnb lined up for the day that we arrived. And we made it across the country in three days.

Hal Elrod: What a fun adventure.

Ryan Levesque: So, we had no idea. I lined up half a dozen different farms that we were going to tour. And in the time between when we left Austin and landed in Vermont, all but one of the farms went under contract.

Hal Elrod: Oh, wow. Out of how many?

Ryan Levesque: Out of about half a dozen. I think we had six lined up. Five out of six were gone. And so, we saw the sixth one, fell in love with it, but it was the first place that we had seen in person. So, we weren’t quite ready to make a decision. So, we kind of held off, and someone else snatched it up, and they were gone. And then what you learn when you’re shopping for a farm, when you’re buying a farm in the Northeast, is, in the winter months, the market completely shuts down because no one’s buying a farm where you can’t walk through three feet of snow in the fields. The market goes cold. So, we said, “Okay. Well, let’s just use this opportunity to explore the state. So, we bounced from Airbnb to Airbnb, and we’re homeschooling the kids, and we’re looking at different communities.

Hal Elrod: How old are your kids at this time?

Ryan Levesque: Our boys were 7 and 10 at this time. Anyway, so we did that for almost a year, and then we started knocking on every door, telling everybody our story, “We’re a crazy family from Texas. We’re looking to start a farm in Vermont,” anybody who would listen to our story. And eventually, after about a year of that, we got a phone call from someone who said, “I think there’s a place that might fit what you’re looking for.” And we had a very specific list that we’re looking for. We wanted an old hill farm that had never been conventionally ag. We didn’t want any PFAS forever chemicals. We didn’t want any environmental toxins on the land.

Hal Elrod: Very specific.

Ryan Levesque: We wanted a specific aspect that we’re looking for. So, like the slope and the soil quality. We had a very long checklist. So, it was finding a needle in a haystack. And eventually got a phone call and found a place that fit the criteria. And as soon as we stepped on the land, we said, “This is for us. This is our place.” So, with no prior experience, we decided to embark on this adventure.

Hal Elrod: Except your permaculture class that you attended in the tent.

Ryan Levesque: Except for the permaculture class and read dozens of books. And we, as a family, watched dozens of documentaries, and we’ve since gone through workshops.

Hal Elrod: You were educating yourself for what was to come.

Ryan Levesque: Yeah, exactly. And today, fast forward to today, we raise cattle, we raise pigs, we raise meat chickens. We raise laying hens. We raise trout or fish. We have 48 beehives. We tap about a thousand maple trees to produce our own maple syrup. So, we produce 100% of our protein between the beef, pork, chicken, eggs, and trout on farm, 100% of our sweetener on farm between the maple syrup and honey that we produce on site. We’ve planted about 500 fruit trees, nut trees, and berry bushes. So, we have everything from the typical berries you’d expect, raspberries, black raspberries, blackberries, blueberries. Also, things like seaberry, blackcurrant, gooseberry, jostaberries. We have two dozen different forms of berries.

We have black walnuts and oaks, and chestnuts. We have apple trees and plums and pears, and persimmons. We have dozens of different varieties of perennial food sources that will produce food. Probably not just for my generation and my kids’ generation, but hopefully my great, great-grandchildren.

Hal Elrod: Wow. So, you’re all planning staying here indefinitely, and making this a family, you know.

Ryan Levesque: Don’t know. I think there’s that expression that hit me hard when I first heard it, which is, “Great men plant trees under whose shade they will never sit.” And I think it’s just thinking on a timescale that, until you actually take a moment to step back, it’s just not something that we think. We think quarterly. We think, “All right, what’s my 90-day plan in my business? What’s my plan for this weekend?” We don’t think in terms of hundred-year timescales.

Hal Elrod: Generational.

Ryan Levesque: Generational timescales. And whether you’re a student of AI or you’re a student of ecology and botany, I think when we think in longer timescales, we open ourselves to possibilities that maybe we never considered.

Hal Elrod: Yeah.

Ryan Levesque: So, we do all that. We have annual production gardens. We raise everything. Like, for example, we overwinter all of our potatoes, our onions, our squashes, our carrots, root vegetables, parsnips, beets. We have a garden filled with perennial herbs and greens. We do all of our greens. We freeze-dry everything. So, we have fresh greens and fresh, basically green smoothies from the powder from our garden in the winter. And so, we were ambitious, but we had an ambitious goal.

Hal Elrod: So, two things come up for me right now, in terms of where we can go with this. One is the average person is like, “Either I can’t afford to do that,” or even for me, like my wife, we have a little mini farm, but y’all take it to another level. So, that’s the first thing that comes up for me. And so, wanting to speak to like, how do we make this, for someone listening, what can they do? What’s relevant to them? And the second thing that I wanted to bring into the conversation is you’re not just a farmer. Like, we were just talking. You just spoke last week at Tony Robbins’ highest-level mastermind that people are paying $250,000 a year to be a part of. And you are teaching those people the highest level in business.

So, you’re a very interesting cat, right? With the beard, you kind of look more the farmer at this point, but I know what a brilliant business mind you are. So, I’m not sure which order. I’ll let you kind of pick where you take these, but like, A, probably making it relevant for people, but also like, what does your life look like in terms of how much are you farming, how much are you running a business? Are you able to do this because of the businesses you’ve sold in the past? So, kind of figuring out how to weave that in to the next direction of the conversation.

Ryan Levesque: It’s a great question. And what I’ll say is I’ll take a step back. And the life that I’ve created for my family is not a life that I’m trying to prescribe or preach to anybody. This is just my embodiment, my living of this Return to Real. It doesn’t have to mean that you sell everything, move to Vermont, and start a farm. But there are a few shifts that I think are worth considering. And I’ll talk about these three shifts, and I think these are shifts that will perhaps challenge your thinking as you think about maybe the mainstream advice that we typically hear around business and what to focus on. And I want to invite you to really ask yourself, how does this land? Where does this confront your beliefs that you have already?

And to your point about that visceral feeling, that feeling in your soul, what do you feel to be true? If I take a step back, when you and I first connected, it was probably through what I call my first mountain work, which was building this marketing methodology known as the ASK method, which was a methodology to understand any market at a deep emotional level, asking questions in a way to understand why is it that people are struggling or challenged or frustrated with the pain that they’re facing, and then being able to build a product and message that ultimately services that.

What I failed to explore in that book was how to listen to the most important voice of them all, which is the one inside your heart. It’s what I describe as the contrarian voice of your heart and learning how to tune into that. When I was in the Green Mountains of Vermont, and I was living in that tent, I was working on that farm, something cracked open inside of me where I just felt in all my being that this is what I was meant to do. This is what I was put on this earth to do. Everything in my life up until that moment took me to that very moment in time. So, with that backdrop, as you pay attention to the somatic experience you have, when I unpack some of these ideas, I want to invite you to just think about what lands.

So, the first contrarian shift that I’ll invite you to consider is, “The best things in life don’t scale.” In business, we are taught how do we scale this. Immediately, the question that shows up when I speak in rooms of other business leaders is, “But does it scale?” But I would posit that the best things in your life don’t scale.

Hal Elrod: Give us some examples of things that don’t scale.

Ryan Levesque: A hug with your daughter.

Hal Elrod: There you go.

Ryan Levesque: How do you scale that?

Hal Elrod: Yeah.

Ryan Levesque: Sunset.

Hal Elrod: Well, I have four dogs, so I can scale. I just do a big group hug.

Ryan Levesque: I said your daughter, but…

Hal Elrod: Oh, you said daughter. I thought you said dog. Daughter. Alright. Fair.

Ryan Levesque: A hug with one of your kids. A sunset with your sweetheart. You can’t scale that. It’s a moment in time. That’s experiences. That’s what we live for. And yet we think that business operates differently. There’s a story that I’ve told before where, a few years ago, I had this experience where we had scaled my business pretty significantly. We’d built a seven-time Inc 5000 fastest growing company, $100 million in revenue, built a team of almost 100 employees across two related companies. And one of the things that we started doing was to write in our brand voice, we would hire a team of writers. They would get trained up in our brand voice, they’d learn how to write from our voice, which was signed with my name at the end of it.

Hal Elrod: Ah, I remember this. I love this story.

Ryan Levesque: And, increasingly, I felt that what we were putting out with my name attached to it at the bottom sounded less and less and less like me. And so, I wrote this piece. I had no plan. On a whim, I decided enough is enough. I’m going to write this email. I’m going to tell one person on my team, I don’t care what anybody says, send this email. And I titled it An Embarrassing Confession. And the embarrassing confession was, for the last seven years, this may not come as a surprise, but every piece of content with my name attached to it was actually not written by me but was written by a team of writers. And over time, I felt increasingly uncomfortable about this, and it’s reached a boiling point for me.

And the reason for that is I’ve noticed that over time, that as we brought in more writers and as we started to use AI, the work that we’re putting out starts to have the flavor of watered-down orange juice from a can instead of the freshly squeezed variety that you get at Sunday brunch. And this bothers me. And I went on to say that your audience wants the freshly squeezed version of you. Can you feel that this email was written by a real human being with a real beating heart? Can you feel it? Exactly. Your audience wants to feel your beating heart, too. And I wrote that. I put that out. And I got more response from that email than anything that we’d put out in probably five years.

Like, this rally cry of, “Hell, yes, absolutely.” And it was in that moment in time that I realized that there are certain things that are not meant to scale. On our farm, we have half a dozen cows. That’s what the land supports. If we tried to 10X that, if we tried to scale what we’re doing and scale our beef operation or scale our pig operation, or scale our maple operation, or any one of our operations, we would shift from a regenerative paradigm to an extractive paradigm. So, in agriculture, most of the world’s food is grown through an extractive paradigm, meaning we extract from the land. We bring in fertilizer from an outside source. We pile it back on the land that we extract from, and we repeat this process.

We pull from the other. But there’s not an infinite other. And in our business, what we do is we extract from ourselves. We work ourselves to the bone until there’s nothing left, and then we burn out, and then we wonder, “Why is this not working?” A regenerative paradigm, on the other hand, has a limit to its growth, meaning there’s only so much that we can do on my farm. There’s a thermodynamic reality. There’s a land base that limits the amount of calories that we can regeneratively grow on the land that I manage. Otherwise, it becomes extractive. And business is the same paradigm. Not every business is meant to scale to the moon. Every business has a right size, and I believe that it’s more valuable to understand what is the right size of your business as opposed to, “How do I scale?” Because the best things in life don’t scale. So, that’s the first sort of contrarian shift around this.

Second contrarian shift is to optimize for oxytocin over dopamine. So, oxytocin and dopamine, these are two neurochemicals in the brain.

Hal Elrod: The feel-good, right? Yeah.

Ryan Levesque: Two of the feel-good chemicals in our brain. So, we all know dopamine. Dopamine gets all the headlines. We’ve lived through a decade of dopamine where we are taught that if we want to succeed in business, we need to create these dopamine loops. We need to make our products addictive in the same way that social media is addictive. We’re taught that with the right shade of red on the alert that you put on your app, on the iPhone, that it’s actually going to get people coming back. And so, we build these dopamine loops. The reality is that the world does not want any more of that. Like, even as I say it right now, you probably feel like, “I don’t want that in my life. I don’t want any more than that in my life.”

Oxytocin, on the other hand, is the neurotransmitter of trust. Oxytocin, unlike dopamine, is a neurotransmitter that cannot be hacked in the same way. It requires what you and I are doing right now to have it elicited. It requires physical presence. It requires human-to-human touch. It requires compelling storytelling. And if you look at most of the mental health crises that we’re facing right now in the world, the loneliness epidemic, the fact that we are more medicated than we ever have been in any time in history to deal with the modern maladies of life, you can interpret that through the lens of a global oxytocin deficit.

I mentioned just a moment ago, the contactless world that we are living in, the fact that I was driven to this interview from my hotel in a Waymo vehicle, a driverless vehicle, to have this conversation of you and me together in a room in person is the definition of irony right there. But the reality is this is what we’re craving. Even though we don’t necessarily have the words to describe it, our brains, our bodies, everything that we do is designed to chase after a finite set of neurochemicals that the end of the day make us feel good. We just have different algorithms and stories that we believe are going to actually get us there. And if you’re pursuing that screen-based reality and growth at all costs, what happens is it’s at the expense.

Efficiency squeezes oxytocin out of your life. Ordering food from Uber Eats is the antithesis to growing with your own hands, the food that you eat, even just a portion of it. So, to answer the question that you brought up a moment ago, a practical move doesn’t necessarily mean growing 80% or 100% of your food yourself but maybe growing an herb in your kitchen that you actually see from seed reconnects you with the reality of the natural world, which takes me to the third contrarian shift.

Hal Elrod: Before you go to that, something that came up for me. We talked about dopamine and how we have plenty of dopamine, right? All of the social media, our phones, it’s designed to stimulate the dopamine, versus the oxytocin. What came up for me is, and I’m curious if you would say that dopamine would be akin to pleasure, whereas oxytocin would be akin to fulfillment.

Ryan Levesque: I don’t want to take an overly reductionist view because the cocktail of neurochemicals in our brain is complex. Dopamine fuels the chase. So, dopamine is released in a way that causes us to chase after rewards. We get into these dopamine loops, however, where this can actually be hacked, meaning if you are playing a video game on your phone or you are playing the video game of business, and you’re looking for social media validation because you created a piece of content, and you want to see, “Does it get any comments? Does it get any likes? How did it land? How many views is it getting on YouTube?” which is just another game.

You can get caught into that dopamine loop where you’re chasing after something, which is effectively a proxy for the role dopamine, if you want to say, originally has played in our brains, which is the pursuit of reward. So, going after food, for example. So, when we have a pleasurable eating experience, we eat food because we’re hungry or it tastes really good. That’s a response to the dopamine release in our brain that causes us to chase after something that’s actually healthy for us. So, dopamine, well-placed, is necessary and healthy. Oxytocin has a different role in our brain. Oxytocin is often described as the neurotransmitter of love because the oxytocin release is what happens when a mother is with her newborn infant for the first time. There’s a massive release of oxytocin, and this just overwhelming feeling of love.

One of the key differences between dopamine and oxytocin is the way in which it’s elicited. Oxytocin, as I mentioned a moment ago, requires presence. It’s not something that can be easily or even entirely hacked with a video game or a YouTube video. It requires actually being in the room with someone. It requires feeling the presence of that person, physical touch. The closest thing we’ve gotten to that, if you study, for example, the research of Paul Zak, is around storytelling. A good story, like if you’ve ever watched a movie, and the story has moved you, and you’ve just had this visceral feeling, or you’ve read a passage, or you’ve seen a short video, and it’s had this visceral experience. That is oxytocin at play.

Hal Elrod: One thing that came for me, if anybody’s listening or watching this, as a return to real low-hanging fruit way to increase oxytocin in your life is to extend the length of your hugs. That’s something that I think that either, A, our hugs are like transactional, where it’s like a real, “Oh, hey, bye sweetie.” You know, quick little one-arm hug. And what I’ve been really trying to do, and it’s been a game changer, is hold my hugs. And with my daughter, she’s 16, so it’s like I can only get maybe five, maybe a little more, a few seconds. And she’s like, “Dad, let me go.” And I’m like, “I just love you.” But, yeah, that’s again, for anybody listening, that’s like a low-hanging fruit. I encourage you to and let them know. You can warn them like, “Hey, sweetie, I want to actually try hugging you for let’s like start with 10 seconds, right?” I get up to 30, but my wife and I have been doing these long hugs, and my son.

And again, same thing. Son is 13. Daughter is 16. It’s harder to get. You know, it’s kind of like dog years where I scale. If I get three seconds out of my daughter, that’s like 17 seconds with my wife. But yeah. So, just that came up for me as you’re talking about oxytocin and how that just feeds my heart and my soul when I have those like real extended physical contact with my loved ones.

Ryan Levesque: I love it. The way I interpret that is, don’t be the first one to let go. Yeah. I love that. So, oxytocin over dopamine. And the third shift that I would advocate for, or at least throw for consideration, is more time with God-made things, less time with man-made things.

Hal Elrod: Let’s go. High five you on that, dude. I love that. I love that.

Ryan Levesque: In the same way that if we are not intentionally analog, we become digital by default. If you think about your daily existence and even just today, for example, I was on an airplane that was created by man. I was in a Waymo vehicle that was created by man. I was on pavement as I walked through these doors. We’re in a room where virtually everything around us is manmade. Now, I know that there’s an ontological argument of what is manmade, what is God-made. Because if man is made by God, then anything that is God-made is made by man. So, I don’t want to get caught in the semantics of it. What I’m talking about is time spent in nature. Time spent with hands in the dirt. Dirt underneath your fingernails. Getting reconnected to reality.

So, in The Carbon Pulse explanation that I shared a moment ago, there’s a thinker, his name is Nate Hagens, that I mentioned his name briefly. He’s had a big impact on my thinking. And something that he shared with me, in my mind, is profound, and it’s that the building blocks of human life do not originate on planet Earth. The only conditions that have been capable of producing the building blocks of human life and all life on earth have occurred in the crucible of an exploding star. The intense heat and pressure of that environment is required to produce what is life here on earth. In other words, when we look up at the heavens up in the sky, we are literally the children of stars. We are stardust. And even more profound than that, we are stardust that’s been re-assimilated and reassembled in such a way that this is how the universe observes itself through our eyes.

We are an extension of the universe, observing the universe right now. Now, I know that’s super deep, and getting there in a very short amount of time in this format is not as profound as being on the farm in Vermont overlooking the ponds with the mountains in the background and just feeling it in that presence. But when you put yourself in that mindset, in that environment, it completely reshapes your perspective. It completely reshapes your perspective on what is our purpose, how to become deeply fulfilled. If you go down the rabbit hole of setting the science around time spent in nature, children are something like 50% to 60% more likely to suffer from mental illness when you take them outside of nature, that we are 80% more creative when we spend time inside of nature, connected to the natural world around us.

So, no, does it mean that you need to move to a farm in the middle of Vermont? No, it doesn’t. But I’ll give you a simple practice when you’re doing your Miracle Morning, as one thing you might consider adding to the mix. First thing that you do before you do anything else, one of our mutual friends, Ali Jafarian, was the first that gave me this, and it’s become part of my daily practice, my Miracle Morning: “Touch earth before touching a screen.”

Hal Elrod: Love that.

Ryan Levesque: Before you reach for your phone, before you do anything in your morning routine, you walk outside, take off your shoes, you take off your socks. And you find a bare patch of Earth. It could be a one-foot by one-foot patch of grass. It doesn’t have to be meadows and fields in the middle of nowhere. You touch your feet to bare earth, close your eyes, and you just connect for just a second before you get caught up with everything in your day. And just that one exercise alone will reground you to God-made things over manmade things. So, three shifts that are perhaps contrarian in nature that I want to invite you to think about. One is the best things in life don’t scale. Pursue fewer, deeper, less. Fewer relationships, deeper relationships, less.

Oxytocin over dopamine. For people to trust you in a world where the default state is distrust, they need to see three things. They need to see your heart, your humor, and your humanity. And then number three, hands in the dirt. More time with God-made things over manmade things. Three shifts in the AI world.

Hal Elrod: Return to Real. When does that book come out, brother?

Ryan Levesque: Spring 2026.

Hal Elrod: Oh, that soon? Oh, I’m excited, man. I can’t wait. I’ll be pre-ordering the date it comes out. Well, Ryan, I love you, brother.

Ryan Levesque: Appreciate it, man.

Hal Elrod: I’m so grateful. You and I are about to head to Front Row Dads Live.

Ryan Levesque: That’s right. That’s going to be great.

Hal Elrod: Well, I love this. Again, when you shared this message, it felt real, it felt right. And I love all three of those contrarian perspectives. More time with God-made things is something that I recently started doing. I actually invited Vroman. I called Jon. I was all excited. I said, “Hey, Jon, do you go to the bathroom with your phone or do you go to the bathroom with God?” He’s like, “What do you mean?” I go, “You really can’t do both. Because if you’re on your phone, you’re completely distracted from the silence and the voice and the whispers and the insight and higher intelligence.” I said, “So, something I’m doing for the month of December is I’m going to the bathroom with a God instead of going to the bathroom with my phone.”

So, just another low-hanging fruit practice that people can add to their putting their feet in dirt before they look at what, how did you say it?

Ryan Levesque: Touch Earth before touching a screen.

Hal Elrod: Touch Earth before touching a screen. I love that. Well, brother, you are a wealth of love and wisdom, and I’m so grateful that we got to do this today.

Ryan Levesque: Likewise, man. Thanks.

Hal Elrod: All right. And, goal achievers, welcome. Thank you for listening to the podcast. I love you so much. And I’ll talk to you next week.

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