Three Keys to Being Free and Living a Great Life

Chris Albert 00:00:01 (link to this point)

The Warrior Soul podcast is written, edited, and produced by me, Albert. Our mission is to provide tools, tactics, strategies, and ideas that help The US military veteran community to show up as the wisest, strongest, most capable versions of themselves in the civilian world. If you're not a veteran, stick around because anything we talk about will most certainly apply to you as well. This podcast is made possible with the help of F Bomb Nutrition. They make delicious packets of fats that you can carry around anywhere with you in little portable packets.

They make macadamia nut butters. They mix them up with chocolate. They mix them up with sea salt. They mix them up with coconut butter. They're absolutely delicious, and they're really good for you.

They don't have any sugar. They also make a lot of cheese snacks. They make meat sticks, and it's just a great company. These guys send packages of this stuff to the troops who are on the front lines overseas to supplement their MREs, and we didn't ask them to do that. They just did that on their own initiative.

Really great company. If you wanna get 20% off your first order of f bombs, head over to www.dropanfbomb.com and use the code Warrior Soul at checkout. This podcast is also brought to you with the help of Save the Brave. Savethebrave.org is a five zero one c three charity for veterans. They run camaraderie events that include fishing, golfing.

They also do a lot of work with gold star families. And unlike a lot of other organizations, their board doesn't take a salary. Really great organization that is doing amazing work. So go and check them out at savethebrave.org. With that, thank you guys so much.

Let's get into today's programming.

This is Chris Albert, and I'm here to remind you of one thing. Someday, you're going to die. Now that's not some morbid statement or scary idea. It's solid fact. Your time here on this earth is limited.

And we need to be reminded of this as much as possible for one simple reason, to live your best life while you can. This is the Warrior Soul Podcast.

What is going on, ladies and gentlemen? Welcome to the Warrior Soul Podcast. My name is Chris Albert, and today is 06/17/2020. We've been in the midst of some pretty crazy news over the past couple of months. We've been through a lot in this country.

Right? And we've been talking about this. We've been talking about the impact of COVID nineteen. We've been talking about the impact of the horrific murder of George Floyd, the following protests, and the senseless destruction that's been going on as a result of those protests. And in the midst of all this is an idea, an idea of which this country was founded on.

That idea is freedom. And when we think about freedom, we generally think about it as something that is given to us. Right? We are all we all think of The United States as a place where freedom was promised to us in some way, shape, or form, and and we've developed different concepts of freedom. And that's essentially what the big political debate is about in our in our country today.

Right? It's it's about these different concepts of what freedom represents. For many, freedom represents the opportunity to do what you want to do in this world free from the tyranny of government. For others, freedom represents an equality, an equality amongst all people, an equality of opportunity, an equality of of different different positions in society. What I wanna talk about today though, and this is gonna go beyond politics.

I have I'm trying to shy away from speaking about anything politically or anything like that. But I think what freedom should come down to regardless of your political beliefs is what choices you make in this life. Now I want you to understand something. The the the choices that you start making when you're in your late teens and early twenties, they affect you for the rest of your life. If you choose to go into lots and lots of debt when you're in your twenties, that's gonna affect you into your thirties and into your forties.

If you choose to eat like crap and put on tons and tons of weight in your twenties and in your thirties, then that's gonna affect you into your forties and your fifties. And I think that in this country with this debate surrounding freedom, right, where we think of it as something that's given to us by the government, we tend to lose sight of the fact that the choices we make in life often determine the extent to which we're able to enjoy freedom in our own lives. And that's been the basis of what this podcast is about. Right? I I sit here each week, and I try to put information out there that is going to empower The US military veteran community to live their absolute best lives.

And we do that by delivering tools, tactics, and strategies, and ideas that are gonna help you to show up as wiser, stronger, more capable human beings in the civilian world. And a lot of that is centered around helping you to have the knowledge to make the choices that are gonna allow you to be more free. Right? When we think about money, right, money is a concept that's very painful for a lot of people. It's been very painful for me throughout my life.

And when we when we think about the concept of money, a lot of people talk about money as if it is a sort a source of freedom. Right? I've heard people describe dollars as freedom units. Right? The the ability to choose.

Right? It's not necessarily having tons of money in your bank account that really matters. It's it's the freedom that brings. Right? The freedom to be able to do what you wanna do.

The freedom to not have to work in in a job that you hate. The freedom to be able to travel. The freedom to be able to to to help your fellow man, right, through philanthropy if you wanna make donations to causes that you love and things like that. So how do we start to how do how can we come up with kind of a meta concept here that's gonna allow us to make better choices? How can we think about our lives in terms of a way that's gonna help us to maximize freedom?

And this is a really big philosophical question, and I could stay, you know, 10,000 feet up in the air and just sit here and kinda tell you to to make better choices and and leave it at that. But what I wanna do is I wanna bring it down a notch. I wanna bring it down to our level on the ground so that, you know, we think about the things that are going to lead to greater freedom, the actual things we can do right here, right now. And a lot of you on this who are listening to this podcast, we've got a lot of different age groups. Right?

So we've got people in their twenties who listen to this podcast. We've some people who are in their late to eight late teens. Right? A lot of I get a lot of high school kids who come to me and they say they're thinking about joining the military. They're thinking about, you know, doing different different things with their lives, and they come to me and ask for advice.

Right? So we got some younger guys here. We got guys who are up in my age group. You know, I'm 41. We've got guys who are who are in their forties.

We got some guys who are in their fifties. Right? And and when I say guys, I mean girls too. Right? Women too.

I use guys as kind of a pejorative, but, you know, I and I don't mean to do that, but I'm talking to you you ladies as well. But, you know, when we think about these things, what are the things that you could focus on that are gonna bring more freedom to your life? And I'll start with this one. The first one is money. Right?

If you understand money from a young age, you are gonna be at such an advantage to somebody who might be really, really book smart, might be able to get into Harvard, but who doesn't understand basic finance. You need to understand money. You need to understand that if you're gonna borrow money, at some point, you're gonna need to pay it back. So if you're one of those young marines who goes out as soon as you get out of boot camp and you get out of, you know, infantry school or or whatever school you went to and you go to a local car dealer and you pick yourself up a car and and get it at like a 30% interest rate, no money down, you know, you're gonna have be carrying a lot of luggage there. You're gonna be carrying a huge car payment that you gotta pay every single month, and if you don't pay that, it's gonna affect your credit score, and it's gonna affect your ability to borrow money down the line.

Right? If you start racking up credit card debt, right, let's say you're not in the military, let's say you go into school, and let's say you take out a bunch of credit cards and and you max max them all out at the bar. Right? That is gonna be extra baggage that you're gonna be carrying around that is gonna keep you from doing what you wanna do with your money. Alright?

Let's say you aren't any of these things, and let's say your parents are just controlling your finances, and you're in school, and you're just focusing on your studies, you're not getting a job, you're not you're not earning your own money or anything like that, that's four years that you're not practicing to to maximize your own finances. And these are mistakes that a lot of people make these days. Right? A lot of kids aren't really growing up until they hit their late twenties, early thirties because their parents are paying for everything. And this is something that is gonna put people way way way way way back.

Right? These are things that are gonna keep you from being able to understand the things that you need to do in order to be a productive adult, in order to be a productive member of society. And if you keep your head in the sand when it comes to money, you are going to be at a massive disadvantage. Right? Or you're just gonna be in with the crowd.

And right now, the crowd doesn't look very good. Right? People are going into more and more higher higher amounts of debt. People are getting crippled by student loans. A lot of people took out tons of student loans thinking that education was gonna be the the key to their success in the future.

And then they go through their four years, and then they get out, can't find a job, and they've got, you know, $40,000, $50,000, sometimes a 100 or $200,000 worth of student loans. And when that happens, you're in a position to where your life is going to be massively crippled by the student loans that you supposedly took out in order to improve your life in the first place. Right? And of course, everybody's talking about free education, free college right now. But guess what?

If you put rest your your future financial hopes and dreams on the idea that government might give you a break on your student loans, you're not really thinking or you're and you're not really planning. So whatever you believe about that, you gotta start thinking about how those loans will cripple you if you move forward with them or if you take out too many. And if you have that that large amount of student loans, you got to start thinking about how you're going to pay it off. So the first thing I think everybody here should do is go out and start reading about money, start reading about personal finance, start reading about how you can start saving. And the best book that I've come across on that is a book called The Millionaire Teacher by Andrew Hallam.

I talked about it quite a bit before. It is fantastic book that talks about the power of saving. This is a guy who was a teacher. He was earning $40,000 a year, and he managed to to get a million dollars into his retirement account by the time he was in his late forties. And that's something we should all be striving for.

You know, if you it doesn't necessarily matter if you've got a job that is paying you tons and tons of money. If you're able to save and you're able to invest wisely, then you can get there. You can get there. And so, you know, I get a lot of people who think, oh, I didn't go to college and I don't have this awesome job. You don't necessarily need that to be saving and to be living a comfortable life.

So check out that book. A few really good concepts to understand there is how much you should be saving, trying to save at least 10% of your monthly income. Right? And before you start saving, if you've got credit card debt, you wanna pay that debt down because the interest rates are so high, so ridiculously high on those credit cards. You wanna start paying that debt down before you start trying to invest or put anything in the cryptocurrency or anything like that because, you know, your interest rates on your credit cards are like 20%.

And then, you know, with your with the the the amount you're generally earning from an investment account is gonna be 8% per year. Right? That math just doesn't add up, so you want to pay that credit card debt down. So that's the first concept, understanding money. The next concept is understanding your body, understanding what is going to keep you healthy and what is going to make you sick.

And this is something that I see so many people struggling with. So many people out there putting fast food and alcohol and and sugar and all kinds of garbage into their bodies. And then when they get to be my age, when they're in their forties, they start suffering. They start suffering the health consequences of poor eating habits, of lack of exercise, of inactivity. And that is something you're eventually going to pay the piper on.

And and if you don't look out for it, I mean, you could be somebody who is debilitated by the time you're 50 years old. That is not a place you want to be. I know that a lot of you are young right now, and when you're young, you feel invincible. Right? When I was young, I could go out, I could drink a case of beer, I could go to sleep, I could wake up the next day, go to work.

But that doesn't continue, and you start to face a lot of health consequences when you start to get into your thirties, when you start to get into your forties. You know, if you get close to having diabetes, if you get get into having liver problems, if you if you get into having heart problems, autoimmunity, all these different things that are rising across the board, these things are things that are drastically going to limit what you're going to be able to do in your life. Right? And I say that as somebody with chronic disease. You know, I suffer from ulcerative colitis, and and it's put a massive limit on what I've been able to do in my life, and my disease isn't even that severe, or as severe as a lot of people have it.

There's a lot of people out there who are insulin dependent right now. They say that one in four veterans in the VA system right now has full blown diabetes. That's insane. Right? And that's regardless of age.

There's far too many of us who are letting that stuff go. So I highly recommend you start learning as much as you can about your body, about how to take care of yourself. For you guys in the military, I think and and those who just got out of the military, I think a really, really good book to read here is Ben Greenfield's Beyond Training. And the reason for that is because Ben wrote that book with triathletes in mind, guys who had been beating up their bodies, guys who had been misinformed about nutrition practices, you know, because of the types of diets that were around in the early two thousands and in the nineties. Right?

There was a lot of people eating a lot of junk to do triathlon. And what was happening was these guys were often dropping dead by the time they were 35. There were there was a massive amount of triathletes who were just dropping dead, and they were trying to figure out why. And so Ben Greenfield, who's been a guest on this podcast before, writes about some of the nutrition practices that you can start implementing that will mitigate that damage that's been done to you already. Starts to talk about the exercise habits that you can start to build to be as healthy as possible.

And I I just think it's a fantastic book. But you guys gotta start learning about that. And again, it starts thinking about starting slow, and then slowly building yourself up. You know, I think a lot of people get discouraged by the fact that they're not superstars in the gym, and they're not lifting hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of pounds, and they're not able to to do the the long distance runs and things like that. Start slow.

Start with a walk and start with lifting light weights or doing calisthenics. Just implement it as a plan every day. And that's one good thing about COVID nineteen is I think it took a lot of people's reliance off of the gym and onto their personal initiatives. Right? And that's something you really gotta think about.

Right? You wanna think about how you're gonna be able to do fitness regardless of what else is going on in your life. And it starts with a why. Why are you doing it in the first place? I think far too many people think about the abs, think about the look, think about, you know, trying to look like a fitness model, and what they forget is the reason to do fitness is because of freedom.

Right? The freedom to live your life the way you wanna live it as long as you can live it for. And that includes spending time with your family. Right? Being able to raise your grandkids when you're 70, 80 years old and play with them.

Right? Being able to be an active father or an active mother, being able to to do things with your family without getting tired. Right? Being able to have a really awesome sexual relationship with your wife or your husband. Right?

All of these things are things that can come about from having a good fitness and eating regimen. But far too many neglect it, far too many people put it on the back burner because of work, because of finance. And I think one thing that COVID nineteen's taught us is that regardless of what's going on in the world, you gotta take care of yourself. And if you're not taking care of yourself, you are going to suffer the consequences. Right?

Lot of the people who died, there were some very fit people who died from COVID nineteen, but a lot of the people who died died because they didn't have the capacity built up in their bodies to fight the disease. And that is not a good thing. Right? We've got far too much obesity, far too much chronic morbidity in this country. And we in the veteran community are no different than the average person out there.

In fact, in our community, actually extremely prevalent, and we've got to step up on this. If we're going to be leaders in this society, we've to be taking care of ourselves. So those are two things I think that you guys should focus on. I think the third thing is this, you know, we talk about this concept of spirituality, and I'm not going to push religion on people, I'm not going to push my own moral values on people. But I think that at some point, you need to have some moral code as to how you're gonna guide yourself.

If you are not guiding your life on a basis of a concept of right and wrong, then you're gonna face a lot of hurt, and you're gonna deal out a lot of hurt on other people. And if you are not living your life in a way that that you're teaching your kids properly, honoring your partner, honoring your wife, honoring your husband, honoring your family, you know, you're gonna be far less happy. Because one of the things that happens as you get older is your social relationships, they decrease. Right? All those people who who are your boys, your circle of friends when you're in your twenties, they tend to go away.

And what happens as people get older is they get a lot more lonely. We are a tribal species. We're supposed to be around people. We're supposed to have people in our lives. We're supposed to have good people in our lives.

And I think a lot of that revolves around having a good moral code, The way you treat people, the way you respect people, the way you interact with people, the value you bring to other people's lives, that's gonna determine who sticks around for you, who's with you in the end, who's with you when things get tough, who's with you when a global pandemic comes around and rips the economy apart. Right? And, again, I always say hard times breed hard people. These were hard times, and I think a lot of people are realizing what our weaknesses were. You know, we we got far too too far apart.

We allowed ourselves to get pulled too far into social media. We allowed ourselves get to get pulled too far into these these, you know, kind of surface relationships and and all these different things, and and COVID nineteen really brought this to light. So those are just a few bits of advice from from an old man who's been around the block a few times. I've made a lot of these mistakes myself. In fact, normally, when I'm talking to you about something like this, it's because I've experienced the pain associated with what I'm talking about.

And the big reason I do this podcast is so that you guys don't have to face the same problems that I faced as I was coming into adulthood and and getting older and learning about being an adult and learning about getting out of military and learning about the civilian world. So I hope you take this to heart. As always, if you have any questions, just feel free to reach out on me reach out to me, not reach out on me. Reach out to me on social media. I'm on Facebook.

I'm on Instagram. Warrior Soul Agoge on Instagram. Just DM me. Let me know what your thoughts are. And I hope you're all doing well out there.

I hope you're all staying safe, and want you all to live your best lives while you can. Thanks for listening, guys. This is Chris Albert with the Warrior Soul Podcast, and I am out.