Brian Johnson

I have talked a lot about Brian Johnson with my family and friends, especially regarding the Vipassana meditation retreat which he inspired me to do, but I have never written about him on my blog. So here it is: Brian Johnson, the blog post.

Brian Johnson is the founder of the website Zaadz.com, which was recently bought by and assimilated into Gaia.com, a website operated by the multinational corporation Gaiam — who you might recognize from their famous yoga products. It was through Zaadz that I was first introduced to Brian over a year ago. I read his personal blog posts, received some of his group emails and friended him on the site, but that was about it.

Then at the end of last year Brian wrote about a Vipassana meditation retreat that he went to with his fiancée, and it intrigued me so much that I decided I would try it out myself. It would be several months before I was able to attend my first retreat in Virginia, but it was well worth the wait. As I have written before, learning Vipassana meditation was one of the best things I have ever done and I highly recommend it to anyone and everyone.

When I got home from the retreat it was May and I only had one month before leaving for Mongolia with the Peace Corps. I wrote a short “thank you” to Brian on Zaadz and then headed to Mongolia. During that time Brian had moved on from Zaadz and Gaia and started a new adventure called PhilosophersNotes.

His plan with PhilosophersNotes is to read a Ph.D.-equivalent quantity of spirituality, self-improvement, philosophy, and personal effectiveness books and then write five-page, CliffsNotes-style summaries of each book. These are then made available as PDF and mp3 files, purchasable individually or on a subscription basis. I read about this idea in an email a couple of months back and thought it sounded great, so I signed up to receive updates, but I didn’t think I would be able to afford a subscription anytime soon.

Then this week I received an unexpected email. After reading my Gmail auto-response, which explained that I am currently serving in the Peace Corps, Brian sent me a message which read:

Hey bud: I love it! I would love to support you and your work with a free subscription to PhilosophersNotes! Let me know if you’d like it and I’ll hook you up. — bri

Stunned, I wrote him right back and told him a subscription would be incredible. If anything about Peace Corps is universal, it’s that we Volunteers have plenty of time to read good books. Within a day I had a response from Brian with my subscription, and since then I have downloaded over a dozen PhilosophersNotes, including ones on The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People by Stephen Covey, A New Earth by Eckhart Tolle and Meditations by Marcus Aurelius, among many others.

So far I am very impressed, but I guess that’s not a surprise. Brian Johnson is a quality guy and I have a feeling he is going to continue surprising me for quite some time. Thank you, Brian, for being so helpful and generous. I appreciate your support and look forward to reading many PhilosophersNotes to come.

My interview with Brian

After following and admiring Brian for six years, I finally got to sit down with him for my Everyday Humanitarians conference.

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