Mind Pump: Raw Fitness Truth - 1365: Is the Way You Stand & Move Making You Sick? (Featuring Aaron Alexander)
Episode Date: August 24, 2020In this episode, Sal, Adam & Justin speak with Aaron Alexander, author of The Align Method, about the importance of posture, mobility, and movement on health and longevity. The interesting dance with... your ego. (3:53) The detriments of leading with your imposter versus authentic self. (6:09) The perception of safety. (10:12) How humans are extremely complex. (12:55) The stigma around cannabis. (15:08) The practiced skill of thinking slowly. (16:52) Disorganization can lead to parasites. (18:33) The skill of reading body language. (21:11) Always question the things you feel most passionate about. (23:05) How your thoughts and moods affect your movements. (27:12) How there is a lot of wisdom in spiritual practices. (30:42) Do people store emotions in their bodies? (33:34) How we are a product of our childhood. (40:30) The fine line of not letting your insecurities consume you. (45:23) How your perception of yourself impacts the way that you carry your movement. (48:57) Best practices to be a happier person. (59:14) The importance of disrupting your day to day life. (1:05:17) Be more honest with your biology. (1:08:45) Consistent movement matters. (1:14:47) Leveraging leverage. (1:27:18) Best practices to incorporate hip hinging into your daily life. (1:29:36) The Western Medicine bottle. (1:32:43) The power of proper nasal breathing. (1:35:15) Are we heading towards being plugged in? (1:42:34) Our perceived happiness over possessions rather than people. (1:45:20) How LA is like an oven. (1:54:05) Are you consumed by the game or a witness? (1:55:51) Ancient wisdom and science have polarities. (2:01:22) The unintended consequences of capturing rather than viewing. (2:06:26) Featured Guest/People Mentioned Aaron Alexander (@alignpodcast) Instagram Website Bishop Robert Barron (@bishopbarron) Instagram Amy Cuddy, PhD (@amycuddy) Instagram Joan Vernikos Andrew Huberman, Ph.D. (@hubermanlab) Instagram Related Links/Products Mentioned August Promotion: MAPS Performance ½ off!! **Promo code “GREEN50” at checkout** Visit ChiliPad for an exclusive offer for Mind Pump listeners! The Align Method: 5 Movement Principles for a Stronger Body, Sharper Mind, and Stress-Proof Life – Book by Aaron Alexander Thinking, Fast and Slow – Book by Daniel Kahneman Mind Pump #1165: Bishop Robert Barron On Physical Fitness, Satan, Evolution, Psychedelics & Much More Amy Cuddy: Your body language may shape who you are | TED Talk Your face and moves seem happier when I smile: Facial action influences the perception of emotional faces and biological motion stimuli. Paul Ekman: Detecting Lies, Facial Expressions, Body Language | Ep. 175 A Simple Test Assessing Ability To Sit Up From The Floor Predicts Mortality Risk Hand Grip Strength Associated With All-Cause Mortality, Other Adverse Outcomes Astronauts Showed Us How Sitting Ages Us Amazon.com: Joan Vernikos 3 Tips for Better Muscle Growth – Mind Pump Blog Home on Apple TV+ Idiocracy (2006) - IMDb HOW THE PIRAHÃ PEOPLE BECAME THE HAPPIEST TRIBE IN THE WORLD? Hit Makers: The Science of Popularity in an Age of Distraction – Book by Derek Thompson Joe Rogan Experience #1513 - Andrew Huberman
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If you want to pump your body and expand your mind, there's only one place to go.
MIND, MIND, MIND, UP with your hosts.
Saldas Defano, Adam Schaefer, and Justin Andrews.
In this episode of Mind Pumped the World's Top Fitness Health and Entertainment Podcast,
we interview our good friend Aaron Alexander.
He's a movement specialist and the author of the Align Method.
Now in this episode, we have some really, really good
conversation and discussions around movement
and posture and how the way you move,
the way you stand, the facial expressions you make,
actually give your brain feedback and tell you
how you can actually feel or how to feel.
Believe it or not, how you stand affects your mood
and there's a lot of evidence to support this.
So we dive real deep in that subject
and we talk about a few other things.
Aaron is a great conversationalist.
He has a podcast himself.
So we always have a good time when we get him on our show.
You can find his book, The Align Method,
five movement principles for a stronger body, sharper mind and stress proof life at his website
AlignPodcast.com, his podcast, of course, is called Align Podcast.
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It's an interesting dance that we have with our egos right and I remember when we first
had that psychologist on on the show sell that you that you brought. Oh, yeah. And she assessed all of us.
Yeah, I love her.
And she really like broke down like narcissism
and that there's a healthy dose of it.
It's a positive version.
Right.
And then there's obviously an unhealthy version of it.
And so I think that, you know, in our space with our peers
as you get a larger audience and more people paying attention to you,
there's that fine line that you have to constantly dance.
And I think this is a conversation
that the four of us have a lot.
And one of the things that I appreciate
about these guys so much that I think we all have in common
is as that grows for us instead of seeking it more
or letting ourselves fall into it, we actually
want to kind of run away from it.
We'd prefer to become more detached and not feed into it as much because we want to stay
grounded to your point that you brought up before we got on.
Yeah.
I've, there's a quote or an idea and I heard from some basketball coach.
The key to be the best player is to be good enough, no enough about the game to play the
game well, but not so much to realize that the game doesn't matter.
I feel like, oh, wow, I feel like a lot of the, this whole experience with, I still
thinking books or podcasts or social media or any of that stuff. You can be so deeply in the tunnel of the game, all that matters is growth and more and
numbers and quantities.
And then certain things can happen in the world, such as what's happening right now,
which I think has been immensely healthy for my own mind, where I've kind of drawn back
and I'm like, I don't even know what the hell matters.
Which I think is perfectly healthy.
It doesn't always feel great
because a nice healthy inflated ego and puffed out chest.
Temporarily, it's like cocaine.
While you're donna, you're like,
this is cool.
Yeah, well, what are they?
Then the effects with long-term use,
it's like, oh, that was problematic.
Right.
But there's another quote,
like a bad day for the ego is a good day for the soul.
And I think that's super, super true.
If you're back to the narcissist testing that we did
or what I was part of this psychological profile
that we had done on us on air, which was kind of cool,
she said, you have to have a certain dose of narcissism
in order to go out and put yourself out there.
If you didn't think that you had something valuable and that maybe people would find,
well, you have to say interesting, you would never put yourself out there in that way.
You wouldn't go on media. You wouldn't promote yourself that way.
But when it becomes unhealthy, is when you're no longer, you can no longer take criticism.
You are the greatest. You're not open to growth.
And you can become very addicting.
And like anything that you get addicted to, it can become very, very destructive.
And the worst thing that I see, we've met many influencers, right?
People with lots of followers and, you know, in their space or whatever.
And one thing that really struck me about some of these people is how conflicted and how
much in pain these seem to be
because the persona that they have created
and that they're loved for is not their real persona.
They're leading with their imposter
and not their authentic self.
And it creates this turmoil within them.
There's one person, I won't say their name,
but one person in particular who presents themselves
as a super outgoing charismatic,
you know, talks to lots of people and girls
and whatever, and this is part of their brand.
But in real life, they're one of the most shy,
introverted people.
And he says it feels conflicting, it doesn't feel good
because people love him, but they don't love him.
They love the person that he becomes.
And I don't think that's a good place to be.
So when people ask about like social media
and how do I build my business and what's important?
I say, well, you know, this isn't gonna guarantee success
or failure, but try to be as real as possible
because if you do get popular, you at least won't be in hell.
You'll be popular for being who you are
and not for being someone you're not.
Yeah, well it's just not sustainable,
I think is the big thing.
No way.
You know, and so it's like,
if you want, I mean, you can deceive people
for a certain amount of time.
There's some quote around.
I don't remember what it is exactly.
Well, your first one, Dean Smith,
do you know who the coach was?
It sounds very Dean Smith. you know who the coach was?
It sounded very Dean Smith.
I guess so many.
Yeah, okay.
I think it was Pat Ryan.
Yeah, stop that.
He's got, he just throws.
He's like some, he's got grease tape.
Yeah, I know Pat Ryan.
It's the only coach I know.
Yeah, throw it out there.
What is, what is this is nothing to do with how I was going to say?
I just want to get to the bottom of what the idea was.
It's like you can fool all of the people sometimes and some of the people all the time or something.
But not all of the people all the time.
That was totally separate idea has nothing to do
with what I was gonna say.
Um.
So, I feel like you need a whole wall of quotes to refer to.
I have one in my house, that's what I do.
Yeah, that's why I'm so quotacious.
Anytime I hear something,
you're so well-savent here.
Like a well-savent.
You know, you can pick your friends and you can pick your nose, but you can't pick your friends now.
I think it's because I'm suspicious of my own ideas.
That's an interesting way to look at it.
I think that's healthy.
I can be unhealthy, but I think that's healthy.
You know why?
You just gotta be careful, though, when you're talking to yourself.
You just gotta be careful because sometimes the quote sounds good at a context,
and then you realize where it really came from.
A Marxism quote that you posted not to another day.
That was so good.
I'm still in agreement.
I think the four alienations makes a lot of sense.
Beyond that, I think it's one of those things
where there's an individual,
like you could say Adolf Hitler,
maybe you had a handful of,
of course it would be nice to people.
Of course he had some power,
or a way that man got to,
or Trump, or any people, it's like if nice to people. Of course, he had some power, or there's no way that man got to, or Trump, or any people,
it's like if you just, we're very binary,
we're very dualistic, it's like,
you're either good or bad.
Or bad.
Yes.
I got it on my cardboard sign, I put it out,
it's, you know, it's, it's, it's, it's,
eight syllables in the boom, that's my point.
It's in a tweet, 280 characters, whatever it is,
like that's my point.
And that's the way that we communicate
because we're trained by the medium.
The medium is the massage is an interesting book
all about this.
Well, we have a, so we evolved obviously
in tight communities, so we knew everybody.
And we evolved thinking of people along those lines.
But then when you have media now and the fact
that we can know about a lot of people
that we don't know, where it's a little bit counter to how we evolved.
So if I hear bad news and I'm going to try it, right, so we're going to try a 15 or 30
people, which was most of human history.
And I hear bad news, it's bad news because it's affecting me.
Like, there's a line over there, killed three people.
Oh, shit, I need to worry about that, right?
So we still have that inside of us. But now I read something about something happening, you know, 150 miles away or a thousand
miles away or 10,000 miles away. And it still has that effect on me. Like, I'm going to
read about a story about a kid that got kidnapped and it's really terrible. Now I'm going to
be really afraid that my kids are they did this great study. It's one of my favorites to
talk about.
Remember the movie, Jaws?
Of course.
Great movie, right?
When Jaws came out, they were doing polls
and people genuinely thought, and this is because of Jaws,
news outlets reported rare shark attacks,
and it became like people would want to read about it,
because of Jaws.
The perception was that shark attacks were going through the roof. The reality of shark attacks have been about the same all the time, but people
were all of a sudden very afraid of getting attacked by a shark when you're far more likely
to die by slipping in the shower and hitting your head, for example, the same thing goes
for the perception of safety. You ask anybody today, you ask anybody that's like Doug's
generation or older and you say something like,
is it more dangerous or less dangerous now for kids
to be outside by themselves?
Oh, way safer than when I was a kid.
Statistically not true.
Statistically the kid nappings and assault on children
far higher decades ago than it was than it is today.
Today is far safer, but we perceive it as being
so much more dangerous.
And I'll take it back to our expertise, which is health and fitness, the way that we eat
doesn't match the way that we evolve, since we run into a lot of problems.
The way that we move doesn't match the way that we evolve, so we run into a lot of problems.
We created a society where our desires to move less, because that made sense a long time
ago, conserve energy, don't injure yourself.
Today doesn't make sense to continue pushing that,
because eventually we'll be like the movie, Wally,
you're watch Wally?
No.
A cartoon where the all robot guys.
Yeah, and the people are like, they're basically
like these rascal scooters on one of the spaceships.
It's like basically a crucian.
Yeah, and that's all they do.
That's all they do is drink out of slurpees.
And they don't move, so they're like super obese. Their bones got really small. The screen's right in front of their eyes. Yeah, and that's all they do. It's all they do is drink out of swerpes. And they don't move. So they're like super obese.
Their bones got really small.
They're screens right in front of their eyes.
Yeah, and they don't look at each other.
They eat yawker six.
Yeah, there it is.
Yeah, a lot like that.
And they made it to your eye.
They eat yawker six.
Exactly.
So, I don't know.
Does it exist?
So it's always a problematic.
It's a bad idea to bring up Hitler within like six minutes
of any podcast.
That's what I'm saying.
Wow.
Wow.
I'm curious if there is's what I'm talking about. Wow.
I'm curious if there is an instance with a human being where it actually is necessary
and makes complete sense to destroy any idea
or devalue any idea that ever possibly came out
of that whole time person's timeline
because of some evil shit they did along the way.
Is that a reasonable thing to think?
No, actually, I think you have to be careful
because somebody like Hitler,
who I think is, we could all agree in here
that was generally a pretty bad person.
Yes, rough childhood.
If you,
great salesman.
Yeah, if you talk about ideas that he had
or quotes that he had that may be valid, what
ends up happening, I think the fear is, I should say, that you end up validating them in
some way.
And then people start to look at the other ideas and say, well, these other ideas might be
okay.
And I think he meant it this way.
Like cracking the door.
And not that way.
And I think that's the fear.
You know what I mean?
You have to kind of be careful. But I can see how that also goes against reason.
People are extremely complex.
I mean, you have heroes of ours, for example, you might worship a celebrity or a past figure
that did something really great.
And you don't, and maybe you learn later on that they also do terrible things.
We're philanthropists or cheated on the wife
for one time they abuse someone or whatever,
and it's like it conflicts with,
but I thought that they were all good.
I'm like, no, they're human, they're complex,
so they probably aren't all good,
and somebody might not be all bad,
although I do think historically,
maybe there are some characters that fit in that category,
but for the most part it doesn't. I mean, I think I'm a good person, I don't think I'm all good. I guarantee you there's are some characters that fit that category, but for the most part it doesn't.
I mean, I think I'm a good person, I think I'm all good.
I guarantee you there's parts of me that are not good either.
Yeah, I've been cursed.
It's been problematic for me that my typical tendency is if I'm told
not to think a thing, my immediate reaction is to go deeper into it.
I think it's very common. And so that was like we
were talking about the history of cannabis before this. And it's a really interesting
example of we've had this institutionalized guilt and shame and all of these stereotypes
of the idea that a person would vaporize this plant and maybe go for a hike or exercise
or meditate or they have glaucoma or like any of the issues eating disorder and so
That's been put into this bucket that it almost makes it be you know if you have a brand you're like oh can I talk about this
Plant you know because if there's all this stigma around it. I think charged subjects like that often times have deeply held meanings that are actually
even more potent than the things that culture deems permittable, permissible for you to explore.
Adam and I used to talk about this all the time. He worked in the cannabis industry. I have a
very unique experience with cannabis having helped somebody who fought cancer
with it, having it help me with some health issues
in the past.
So I had a different perception.
I remember being him and I would talk about it
and we'd be like, you know, it's funny.
You know, imagine you had a girlfriend, right?
And you wanted to talk and you met their parents
for the first time.
And then you introduced yourself and they're like,
hey, what do you do for a living, Sal, and they say,
oh, I have a vineyard, you know, I make wine.
Oh my God, what a great guy, he makes wine.
Now, what if I said, oh, I grow marijuana plants,
and I, you know, we provide that for all the dispensaries,
you know, oh my gosh, she's dating up.
A guy goes, yeah, weed, like that's crazy.
Isn't that funny?
Yeah, have you discussed the origin story of cannabis?
Oh, early days. That was a big topic.
We talked, yeah, we talked a lot about cannabis.
I want to go back to something you said though that I disagree with.
That you said that the practice of someone saying something
and forces you to kind of go deeper or want to inspect it more
and that's a common thing.
That's actually not a common thing.
It's a trained skill that you've learned to apply that I think is very important.
There's a really good book I talked about on the show a while back called Thinking Fast
and Thinking Slow.
Brilliant, brilliant man who wrote a conumin.
A conumin?
Yes.
Yes.
Have you read that?
Yeah.
And so that skill is, you've trained yourself to switch over to the second part of the
brain where you think logically about something.
And we're not wired that way.
We're actually wired to take in information and react.
That's the faster part of the brain.
Short cuts.
Yeah, it's more advantageous for us.
And it's important.
It's important that we have that skill set to survive because if you've stopped and you
tried to unpack
every single moment of your life,
you would never get anywhere in your life.
So there's value to that first part of the brain,
but there's also, it's also very important to know when
you need to switch over to the other one
and be like, wait a second, just because everyone's saying this
or just because this is my initial reaction
or they're saying, don't do this,
I'm going to go deeper into it and think logically.
So yeah, I don't think it's as common as you think.
I think more people are easily persuaded by the first part of their brain that is just
a quick reaction.
And it's a practice that more of us, including myself, have to constantly be trying to think
like, okay, is this something that I'm just going to take a face value and react,
or should I go deeper into this and look more into it,
even if the majority is saying otherwise?
Yeah. You guys have heard the idea that our conscious mind is able to perceive
something like 40 bits of information and that our unconscious mind is something like 40 million bits of information.
Yes, very easy.
And so we're always to kind of bring it onto a subject in relation to body and movement
and fitness and all that, not that that's necessary.
We only talk about that in that stuff.
But we're continually doing that
from a body language perspective.
So when you see somebody, there's interesting,
some interesting research that I included in my book
about when you take a mugger and show them a bunch
of different pictures of various different people, you'd think the common tendency would
be, and they actually did this, it went to prisons and people that had violent crimes,
you'd think the common tendency would be just like, okay, I mug the small, defenseless,
vulnerable chick, probably.
And it's like, no, no, no.
The person that they would be the highest likelihood
of trying to, trying to mug,
to steal from them,
to be a parasite and attach one of them,
would be the person that has,
their movement doesn't seem integrated.
So if they're kind of like,
they're, they're, they're,
they doesn't seem like they're going in a straight line.
It doesn't seem like they're well oriented, doesn't seem, they're, they doesn't seem like they're going in a straight line. It doesn't seem like they're well oriented.
It doesn't seem like they're, oh, interesting.
stacked and strong.
It doesn't seem like they know where they are.
So if they're looking around and there's like any semblance of
disorientation or disorganization with that person, then all of a
sudden, the parasites of culture will start to, to grab on
because it's, it's an easy target.
Like finding prey.
Yeah.
It's finding prey.
So we're continually doing that with our,
I think our 40 million bits of information
that's streaming through our minds.
I think we're continually doing that in every instance.
Every time you have an interaction with any person,
you are noticing the location of their eyes or eyebrows.
You're noticing the style in which they breathe or don't breathe. You're noticing the location of their eyes or eyebrows, you're noticing the style in which they breathe
or don't breathe, you're noticing the position
of their shoulders, you notice the position
of their hips, of their feet.
And so we're always in this,
we're having this plethora of information
and then you have your 40 bits that's like
thinking about checking your intricate notifications.
But meanwhile, you have this mammalian reptilian center
that's just gathering all of that information
and by going through things like starting to pay attention to how the hell you move in daily life,
I think you can start creating successes in your world and you don't even know what's going on.
It's just like, oh, when I come into the room, people kind of are more magnetized.
Yeah, yeah.
Or when I come into the room like this, people are more like, oh, that guy's a loser,
or we should steal from him, or...
The math of that is so fascinating to me, right?
Like, what your brain is having to calculate
to put that all together.
Not like that.
So I like what a cool conversation because I have this
where I, because of this stuff, I'm into psychology.
You're more on the movement side, so it's interesting
to see how they merge.
Do you have, because of you are so read in this department, right?
And you enjoy learning about it so much, do you have tendencies like right away? We just,
you walked in, you know, 30 minutes ago and we all said, hi, I agree to that. Do you
have a tendency to read the scan the room? Yes, scan the room and read each one of our
postures right away. Is that, or is that just subconsciously happen for you? Well, I
daily get to a point with any skill that you'd be
unconsciously competent.
Yeah.
You guys are familiar with that, probably.
Start off consciously, uncompetent, ideally.
And then, you know, works your way up.
Or stages.
Till eventually, you get to the point where you're just,
you just naturally are, you know, like MJ.
You just, you know, you do something with the ball.
You just see the scenario.
I'm not at all like MJ with anything, including body language.
But nonetheless, he gets that point.
He's never thinking about what he's doing.
Right, right.
You know, so anytime, you know, there's a whole slew
of different books that I'd recommend
for reading body language.
You know, my book has a lot of stuff in there,
but there's, if I'm reading a specific book
about the thing, I will notice all
that stuff.
I personally haven't read a specific book about that thing for like six months.
So that's disengaged.
Now I'm thinking about more like Russia and conspiracy theories.
Oh, please, please, please, guys, please about that. Don't get me in style, go.
Yes, I wrestle with these guys every day on the podcast right now because I think conspiracy
theories are at an all-time high in our life.
Everything is.
Well, I mean, you mentioned everything's fair game right now.
Let's be honest.
I mean, reptiles do run the world.
Yeah, I mean, these guys themselves.
No, aliens are coming next.
No, it's all happening.
You guys were talking about fast and slow thinking.
One of the best ways that I found to slow my thinking down,
there's two ways.
One is to debate and discuss because in order to organize
your thoughts enough to explain yourself well,
and then be able to listen,
it's because you also in order to debate,
you have to listen, right, listen to the other person.
It allows you to work things out. I love thinking like this. I love talking to people. I love
debating people. Not because I'm, you know, some people might say, oh, you just like to argue,
the reality is that it helps me think and I can think things through. The other way is to write.
When you write things down, you have to slow down and put things down. And that's why therapy
utilizes reading and speaking,
or excuse me, writing and speaking.
Those two tools are very powerful to slow the thought process
down and to work things out.
It's literally what you're doing.
Oh, I have another exercise for you.
And that is to always question the things
you feel most strongly about.
And that, to me, is one of the most challenging,
because when you start to unpack how the brain is operating with the fast and the slow part, one of the most challenging because when you start to unpack like how the brain is operating with the fast
and the slow part, much of the things
that you've decided that this is my truth,
it's just because you've had a collection of things
that have confirmed your bias,
and so you feel passionately about it.
So a great exercise to challenge that
or to work on the logical side is to,
if I feel, so whenever I catch myself in a debate
or an argument or a conversation
where I'm getting emotional about it or reacting
or feel strongly about it,
like I'm already,
it's defending myself before you finish your sentence.
Those are the things that I go back and go really deep in on
because it's like, okay, why do I feel so passionate about?
I'm right in this situation. And I think that's really challenging for us because you've already had enough
things in your life that have happened that have confirmed that bias that it's going to be
really hard for you to change your mind unless you're open to it, right?
Yeah, that's one of the reasons why I love fitness so much.
Not necessarily, I love it for me, but I loved it more for when I trained other people for that particular reason because as a trainer,
I trained people for over 20 years,
and I really wanted to help people.
I know you do the same Aaron,
when you work with people,
your concern is you wanna make sure this person does the best,
you wanna set them up to be able to do the best for themselves
on their own, well beyond, maybe forever,
when you don't see them anymore.
So if you're constantly working towards that, you end up questioning things as you go through
the process, you have to, because I'll work with this many people who, my techniques and
my recommendations work great with, but then I run into somebody that they don't.
And if I really want to help them, I can't be dogmatic.
I can't.
It's impossible. I have to question things.
And so it forces you to grow.
And fitness is such a great way to do it
because it's unassuming and it's not threatening.
You know what I mean?
People don't go into fitness thinking
they're going to experience tremendous personal growth
and all things.
They don't think that.
They think I'm gonna go get ripped
and I'm gonna get a nice six pack
and I'm gonna look sexier, whatever.
But you stay out alone enough
and you learn a lot about yourself.
You also learn how to fail, you learn how to take criticism,
you learn that pain isn't always bad
and struggle is many times good.
But the growth that comes from fitness is phenomenal.
Nobody talks about it, but that I think is the biggest benefit of it.
Well, fitness also makes the human that's doing the fitness more malleable to new ideas.
Totally.
And so when you, like, our, we can talk about anything, and I'll just like steer it back to
how it relates to the mind body connection because that's like where I'm most comfortable
Beyond that I just I don't know, you know, I get lost very easily
It's not if it's not about that specific cover smart stand your legs. I heard that enough during BLM and Krodevirus
Stade your legs and I'm like all right
All right
My son's over here
Let's work on shoulder mobility today I We think about Russia, shoulder mobility.
But so, a couple things.
One, in relation to arguments that's kind of fascinating, you guys can just bounce
off this as it feels interesting.
When we're communicating with each other, typically I don't know a lot about the argument
at hand because I just
I'm just confused what the hell is happening in the world. But what I can see is I can see body language
and the way that people communicate. And so you can and that's why you know you see like like a
Martin Luther King giving a speech compared to like I don't, some present-day politician because I don't wanna be, you know, bias-nade direction.
He goes off of the speech and speaks through his heart
and you can see it in his body.
And it's like, whoa, you viscerally feel that experience
because you're feeling him.
You know, and so when we're communicating to each other,
if you're a person that is, say, chronically stuck
in some, you know some hyperlordotic spine,
or you've got the forward head posture,
you've got rolled four shoulders,
you've got valgus, collapse knees,
all of those patterns,
intentionally using unnecessary anatomical terminology
because there's a direct link in the way
that people think, feel and communicate.
Totally.
Based off of that, those's anatomical terms.
Totally.
And so an interesting example of that is a person
that goes into a shopping mall is another reference
from the book.
When they are pushing a cart, so says research
with specific subjects.
So I don't think anything's a law.
But when a person is pushing a cart,
so they're in a more upright position,
shoulders are back, and they're also pushing the cart away from them, they will end up
being less inclined to get sugary bullshit.
And when a person is clutching a basket, all of a sudden, and puts them into that medial
rotated spine, puts them into that clawing kind of flexors,
contracting with the hand,
they will end up being more likely to buy-
Fascinating.
Yeah, to buy all some big-
So shop with shopping carts, not baskets.
And the similar thing happens for people
that have storefronts of some sort.
If you pull the door open,
that puts you into the more inclined towards, okay, I'm bringing in. If I you pull the door open, that puts you into the more inclined towards,
okay, I'm bringing in. If I'm pushing the door away, I'm more inclined to say, okay, I'm pushing,
I'm starting the conversation with push away. And so when I move into that, all of those little
subtle, again, this is that 40 million bits, every subtle little action throughout the day,
starts to inform the way that we perceive
the room ourselves, this conversation,
and so if you were a person that is stuck in that
all the terms forehead posture
and having the hunchback spine, all that stuff,
perhaps your tendency would be,
you'd have a higher inclination of being more defensive
or maybe feeling like you're under attack
and you are already defeated.
And some versus the person that's able, like,
before they go into a conversation,
they wiggle out their shoulders,
maybe they hang from a bar, and they kind of,
so maybe they do like a little dance
and kind of open themselves up a little bit.
Maybe the right and cursive, which is,
you know, showing to have all sorts of great effects as well,
because you're going through that fluid movement.
They will go into that conversation much more fluid,
much more open, much more open, much more receptive,
much less judgmental, much less defensive.
You know, it's always feel like a Jedi opening the automatic doors.
No, I'm ready.
I need to press my power.
I need to press my power.
I need to press my power.
You know what?
You know what?
Perfect.
You want to know an area I would love for you to read and learn about, Aaron, because this is an area that you have a lot of interesting and expertise in, in
terms of how movement affects mood and thoughts and vice versa, how your thoughts and mood
affect movement.
Look into, and this was a very fascinating point that was made in a podcast that we did
a while ago, look into religious practices.
We interviewed Bishop Baron, who's a Catholic bishop,
and one of the questions I had from was,
what's up with all the, you know, I grew up Catholic, right?
So you go to church, the Catholic church,
and there's all this standing, sitting, kneeling, moving,
all this ritualistic movement, and I said,
what's up with that?
Like why kneel on the ground to pray?
Why do all these different things?
And I thought to myself, to somebody who's not privy to it,
I thought it's all traditional, ritualistic, whatever.
Why do we even do that?
And he said, I thought it was very wise,
it's how you integrate the body.
All the movement is how you integrate the body,
which allows you to, in their words, integrate the soul
and being a fitness expert, I thought, to create the body which allows you to, in their words, integrate the soul,
and being a fitness expert, I thought,
oh my gosh, that's brilliant.
There's a lot of wisdom in spiritual practices
and in the culture of movement that they have.
And every single one of them has different movements
and practices that they do that are very characteristic
of that particular religion.
That's the value people were tapping into that
before they knew anything about any of these studies
that you are talking about.
It also links you into, so it does a handful of things
and probably more than what I've picked up,
but another one is it moving in synchrony
with any group of people, i.e. like a military marching.
All right.
So if you see the march and everyone's legs go
at the same time or you go to a typo class or some kind of a robot class
or any of that stuff, the reason that those cultures
or sometimes cults get so big and powerful
is because you're extending the organism
beyond the individual.
And so you start to become in sync with other
just by witnessing your movement happen in tandem.
And so when you go into that church,
what you're doing is you're connecting with beyond
your lonely isolated individualist self,
and you're going into something bigger than you,
well, you're quite literally from a neurological perspective,
an emotional perspective, becoming
the group, because we're all moving together, and then beyond that, I think if you get more
spiritual about it, the group is a part of the grander community, is a part of the country,
is a part of the world, it's a part of everything.
And then eventually you have this pop out of eye, and you go into something that's bigger
than just this
skin bag. And by moving in synchrony, it creates the potential to feel like you're starting
to almost like merge with something bigger than your individual skin bag.
I have a question for you, Aaron, because now we're talking about this. There's a question
that I wanted to ask you for a while. I used to have a wellness facility, and in there,
I had like rooms that people would
rent and there was a massage therapist who worked there and rented this place for a long
time and she was exceptional. She was very, very good at what she did. And she used to say
that, and when I first got the wellness facility, I was at least open enough to bring different
modalities in and respect them, but I still was extremely ignorant to what they did. So she would say things to me and I wouldn't roll my eyes in front of her.
I don't want to disrespect her, but when she was in the room, I'd say, oh, whatever.
That's her thing. That's fine. People like it, but whatever.
And she would say things to me like people store emotions in their body.
I remember thinking that's so silly. It's in your brain. What are you talking about? It's not in your body.
And then she would talk more about it and how she would find a tight area in a person's
body and she would work through it, release it and the person would have a memory that
was stored within them or a feeling that they hadn't processed and they would cry on
the table or they would laugh or they would get this.
And I experienced some stuff like that when she would work on me.
What's going on there?
And I do believe now that emotions can be stored in the body in the sense that you create
a pattern, that pattern maybe, maybe protecting you or whatever from this particular thought.
And until you fix that pattern.
Sure, that was fascia.
Yeah, you don't process the emotion.
What are your thoughts on that?
So that would be subject of potential book two, because I think that's like a topic that a person
could spend their whole entire life digging into and still not completely understand it.
But the lens that I take from the way that emotions and such are stored in the body is less of a,
you have anger in your liver and you have mother issues in your kidney and very specific in that way.
More coming back to very nuts and bolts, masculine, mechanical.
If a person is scared, how are they scared?
How are they physically scared?
Everybody knows what that looks like.
I don't need to describe your shoulders, go up, your jaw might clench, your wrist glens,
you go into like a fight, fight, type response, or you could go into a freeze
response, which is, you know, even deeper down the chain.
You know, so if a person is, so every day you are continually aggregating various different
patterns based off of your perception of the way that you interact with the world.
You know, so you have a certain, like, you could call it like an identity of self,
which is something that, you know, you,
how old was your kid's health?
My son's 15, my daughter's 10.
Okay, so you had, you got to experience,
do you guys have kids as well?
Yeah, I'll do now.
I was about 10 and 7, one year old.
Two boys.
This is the dad crew.
All right.
Dad's cool again.
That's exciting.
Dilves.
Yeah, Dilves.
That's great.
I'm dating a girl that's all about Dilves. Oh, oh, she's gonna have a kid over cool again. That's exciting. Dilves. Yeah, Dilves. That's great. I'm dating a girl that's all about Dilves.
Oh, oh, she's gonna have a kid there.
Oh, I'm gonna have a kid there again.
I'm trying to just try to sell you on.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, careful.
Yeah.
What was I talking about?
I subscribed to.
Oh, yeah, yeah.
So the identity of self identity of self.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
So when you are, this happened last time.
Remember the trees?
I get lost in the woods.
Yeah.
So the identity of self, that's something that you,
when you first come out, these are tangential points,
when you first come out into the world as a baby,
you are your mom.
So the umbilical cord gets cut,
but you're like, what are you talking about?
I'm still mom.
So if I'm hungry, mom's hungry.
If I'm thirsty, mom's thirsty,
there's no separation.
And then eventually you come into a point,
which I think that's what they alluded to
being like the terrible twos,
where you're starting to get that rip.
You're like, I'm separate.
You're asserting yourself in that way too.
Yeah, exactly.
So that's interesting.
And then from that point forward,
perhaps a little before or after,
you're starting to structure this story, this
narrative of who you believe you are.
And so zero to seven, you're predominantly in like a theta state.
It starts alpha delta for the first two years, and you're going to the state, which is
essentially like a hypnotic state.
And you're just gathering information, like a sponge everywhere you go, you're developing
these belief systems of who you are, that impacts the way that you move in your body.
So if you are a person that's like, man, I feel great.
And I feel loved.
I feel part of something bigger than myself.
So people that are part of religions or married, they end up having longer lifelines
and being a little bit happier and all that.
It's like, wow, man, I just feel, oh, man, I feel good.
I feel like I feel in my body.
I feel at home in myself.
That person's probably going to have more balanced blood sugar and blood pressure and
probably less tension being held in their body.
Less chronic pain, right?
Less chronic pain, all that stuff.
And then there's perhaps another person.
Obviously, there's like tens of thousands of different types throughout this, but in
the other scale, it'll be somebody that perhaps they had some big pivotal,
traumatic moment, for example, that all of a sudden they got the signal, and maybe it was like
before that age seven time frame where they're just kind of gathering, and they got the signal that
the world is not safe. The floor could fall at any time. I need to bulk up, I need to muscle up,
I need to get strong and protect it
and show superficially that I'm good enough.
I'm loved in all those things.
Maybe my shoulders are chronically stuck up
in this position where it feels like my shoulders
kind of creeping up to my ears.
Maybe my fist are chronically tight.
Maybe I have, you know, this TMJ, my jaws are,
you know, and you could isolate that
and look at it like more like Western scalpel type lens and go and isolate and say, oh, you just got TMJ.
You know, you just have some tension up here. We're going to do some MFR or whatever release that stuff.
In the process, whatever tool you utilize in order to start to open up that body, in order to create meaningful long-term change,
you're going to actually start tinkering into that person's identity structure.
So if you bring a person that's in a place of, I've been held intense and ready to fight,
and I have this physical expression of that, and you start to creep in and start to change some
of those toggles and pulleys, that all of a sudden the person gets up and their their shoulders drop and they're breathing
through their diaphragm as opposed up into their clavicles and they're they feel like their
feet are on the ground. You better believe that person will start to interact with their
relationships differently. I see this with raw thing bodywork like I mean I've seen it lots and
lots of times historically working with people. Oh, I remember hearing, especially female clients
would say the following, that then getting stronger
in the gym made them feel stronger and more confident
in the real world than the person.
And I mean, they're not like way stronger.
They may be 10 pounds on something.
But the experience of strength and struggle
and grinding through a squat or a lift
made them feel just generally stronger
and more confident in everyday experience.
So we've only known Aaron as Aaron of a line,
and you've already, we were already this guy,
like that was into all this.
So was there a process for you
where this really, you know, like a pivotal moment
where you started to see this in yourself
and you started to change behaviors and movement
and then how did it impact you?
Was that a process?
Was it an overnight thing?
What was it like for you for that transition?
I think, I think I've talked about this before.
I mentioned it in the first chapter of the book.
My dad, he's done very well now, but growing up,
he got really obsessed with crack cocaine.
And he was like pimping women and he'd come home
and have like bullet holes in the car.
And it was like, wow.
Very interesting time.
Did I mention that before?
No, I don't think he mentioned it.
I knew you had a ruff or childhood.
And I feel even more like a bitch talking about
my rough childhood when you talk about things like that.
Because mine doesn't seem so bad anymore.
I had his mind, I was fine overall.
But I think that that created this stimulus of sorts of feeling like the world's not
safe, the floor could fall out from you at any point, going into much more of kind of
just like clinging in general.
I would always have savings of money and I was just always planning for a rainy day.
And I think that in tandem with being obsessed
with bodybuilding, you obsessed with packing on as much
muscles I possibly could, all because I wanted to show
that I was strong enough.
I think there was a big thing of like being enough.
That would get into probably sensations of like,
oh, why did daddy leave me?
Oh, because I'm not enough.
Right, right.
I think as a young person, you're so narcissistic.
Everything's like kind of about you.
Right.
And so now social media,
everybody's kind of narcissistic,
but I think growing up, it's like, okay,
dad's just on his trip.
He had his own childhood trauma and all of this stuff.
And I placed that on me.
So there's kind of a sense of like moving away.
And then that kind of led to just doing everything to create sense of validation.
That going into don't press training, eventually going to like,
Rolfing School and massage school and studying psychology and psychedelics,
I think have been impactful for sure of unbinding some different nodes in my brain,
kind of like pulling the map out and saying,
okay, where are we here?
You know, and then coming back and kind of folding the map
back up and putting it back in.
So I think it's been an evolution of different events
mixed with the environmental conditions of,
you know, the world's not safe.
And, you know, now here we are now here we are talking about it.
I definitely think that we are obviously a product of our childhood,
even as older mature adults still dealing with many of these insecurities from childhood.
Do you have a particular one that tends to resurface in your life that you're constantly having to address
because of how you grew up?
Well, I think that, I mean, you can see a lot of people
that have a lot of things, you know, or, you know,
I obviously, to some degree, crave validation,
or I wouldn't, you know, put images of myself
doing exercises on Instagram.
You know, and you can say, it's, oh, it's just a business,
I need to feed myself, but nonetheless,
like I chose that route of, look at me,
I can help you, I can be your savior, in a sense,
you can see, keep on drawing it back and giving,
I'm not saying that that is why I do anything,
but you could certainly kind of, you know,
toss that dart at the board and be like,
how does that feel?
Is there something to do that of like how you got
to that point?
So people that have a lot of wealth,
people that have a lot of followers on the internet,
whatever, I think a lot of that could be drawn back
to their seeking some form of validation
from the outside world.
This was a conversation that Katrina and I had
literally last night and we were kind of going back
and forth with our own insecurities that we see.
And one of the things I said to her that I've kind of come full circle on it, because
I think that there is a positive side to them also, if you use to fuel yourself to grow
and be a better person.
And then there's a very fine line of not allowing it to rear its head.
And do you agree with that or do you think think that like, you know, any sort of
motivation from insecurity is bad. And I'll give you an example, like, so give people context of what
we were talking about last night. So, you know, I've been, I've been fascinated with real estate
since I was in my early 20s. And, you know, I've read, I read several books in my 20s, even more so,
now as I've gotten older. And, you know, Katrina's family, there was times where they were refinancing their house or trying
to make decisions.
And I felt like I had the answers for them.
And nobody asked me.
And it bothered me.
And so I told Katrina, I said, here, I'm trying to figure out, why does that bother me?
And then I also have noticed that there's patterns like this in my life, where
if people don't think that I'm smart enough in an area, it's also motivated me to go and
learn and be smarter and be better at that. So I get that attention that they recognize
like, oh, shit, this dude knows his stuff in that area. And I think a lot of that, although
fueled by insecurity, has also driven me to success.
So where is the fine line of allowing it to drive you to be better, but then not letting
it control you and consume you to make bad decisions?
Do you think about that?
Totally, yeah.
Well, I think you come back to, you know, Ramdas or like Alan Watts, I like the spiritual
people coming into
the witness part of yourself.
Like the more often that you can tap into
the witness part of yourself,
the less you are just being kind of tossed around.
Like I imagine like a rag doll in a dog's mouth
just kind of like getting wiggled around
by that person loves me.
That person doesn't like me.
Like you become the stock market essentially.
So any relatively decent investor.
Just reactive, everything.
You wouldn't be like,
dude, don't even look at it today.
Let's check in on this in 10 years.
And then you still say,
wow, you've really grown over the last 10 years.
Wow.
But that takes a savvy investor
to be able to kind of give you that education
of like let's just kind of go more in the overview and be able to witness as opposed to being completely stuck on each individual person's reaction.
I love thinking of it like that because that was this was the great and I love having these deep conversations with Katrina because she's very self-aware and we like to do this where we'll go back and have these healthy debates.
healthy debates. And the point I was trying to make to her is that I think that, and this,
you just validated that, is that the real important thing is the awareness piece, is to know that. Like, I didn't react. Like, it's not like, uh, her mom didn't ask me advice, and then I was a
dick, or I was just, or I tried to force my information on it. I just observed that it made me feel
a certain way, and then motivated me to want to learn or do something more in that area.
So I'm aware that there's work to be done inside and have an insecurity there, but I'm
also aware enough to not allow it to, you know, change my mood or just react to it.
So I don't totally think that being motivated by some of these things are all negative.
I think that there, if you, and I like what you just said,
and I think that's true, like if you are more of a witness
of it and pay attention versus just like the stock market
reacting to, you know, at things all the time.
It's your situation in your context can make you
a much better person.
Challenge is what makes you grow.
It's like that, there was a wrestler, he had no legs. I forgot his name and he was
He did very well and he did very very well for himself and he talks about how
If that if he didn't have that if he wasn't born in that situation
He probably wouldn't have been as great as he was but it drove him to grow and be this incredible person.
There's another person who's
another disabled individual who climbed,
I think it was Mount Everest,
and he said the same thing.
I don't know if I would have done this
had I not had this particular challenge.
So I think you're presented with your challenges
and it's up to you how you use them.
Does it break you?
Does it crush you?
Or does it make you a better person?
And so in that way, your mindset makes all the difference. This is a gift versus I'm cursed.
That's all in your perception. You know, you're talking about how you feel in your emotions and how
that affects your body. Can you reverse engine, you're that in the sense that,
you know, does it go both ways?
In other words, the way I feel in the inside
affects how I look on the outside.
Can I change my body and then affect how I feel
on the inside?
Yeah, well, so Zion, we pulled up that,
I've actually got to train Jiu-Jitsu with Zion.
No, wow.
Yeah, super, super interesting.
That's right. I never, that was the firstiu-Jitsu with Zion. No, wow. Yeah, super, super interesting. Better.
I never, that was the first time getting to roll with a,
what would that be called?
Amputy, what's up with that?
Oh, yeah.
His legs are gone from the femur down.
What is that called?
I don't know.
But it's just, yeah.
Yeah, so it's like chicken or the egg.
So it's like, what is the answer?
I think it's both. It just really depends or the egg. So it's like, what is the answer? I think it's both.
It just really depends on the scenario.
So all of the stuff, your perception of yourself
impacts the way that you care your movement,
and then right back to the other side,
you can move yourself into feeling a certain way.
So you could look at that from the postural perspectives
is one lens, but
you could even say just like, your muscular system, it's like an endocrine organ. So it's
releasing hormones and proteins and myocons. And irisin is like the exercise hormone that's
helpful with thermoregulation and helpful with burning fat. And they compare exercise to
being as effective or potentially more effective to antidepressants,
that's beyond my scope of even having an opinion,
but it literally informs the way
that you think the way that you feel.
Like anybody knows listening to this certainly,
that if you're feeling kind of shitty
and you go do a workout with some friends,
afterward you're like, what happened?
Oh, 100%.
Like, what was that?
100%. And you're like, well, there's a 100%. Like, what was that? 100%.
You're like, well, there's a lot of things, man.
It was community.
I'm connected to something bigger than myself.
It was exercising and flexing and pumping this endocrine
organ, the organ that we call muscle,
slash massaging all of the rest of your organs.
It was moving yourself through postural patterns
that if you get into like research from Amy Cuddy,
as an interesting example
which is very contentious. You know the Harvard researcher the whole you guys from this probably
right? No. Same because you will as I start talking about. So she was she was the one that studied
people going into like the the power woman position. Oh power postures. Yeah. Yeah. And so there was
I mentioned that in the book as well as well book as well as the contention around it.
It's interesting creating a book because it feels finalized.
You know, when you put something down in the book, you're like, this is, I'm really saying
something.
You know, where's when you're writing a Instagram post and you're toilet, you know, and
you're like, you're just, you're scared of that.
This is what we got in two weeks.
It's not just beginning on the wall. It's a real thing. and you're toilet, you know, and you're like, you're just, you're scared of that. This is what he got in two weeks.
Not just beginning on the wall, it's a real thing.
When you write the book and you say some shit,
you're like, wow, this is like, I'm defining my life.
This is how I feel.
This is how I feel.
It's very fascinating.
Yeah, no, it's, what on, I wanna tell you about
the idea of how it goes, go, go, go, feel.
So anyway, so what she was suggesting with the power poses is that she had
various different samples of people.
They had one group of people would go into
a hunched over position that I had described previously,
and then they would do saliva samples,
measuring cortisol, stress hormone, and testosterone.
And so testosterone is associated with
cognitive function, energy levels,
feeling strong, comfortable,
and that stuff, yeah.
And then cortisol is like, you're feeling,
you're waging out, you're getting ready to fight,
fight all this.
And so what she found with that,
that was that consistently when a person
be an upright, strong, what I would call a lined position,
then they end up actually increasing their testosterone levels
and decreasing their cortisol levels.
And then the inverse would happen when a person
was in a more of a hunched over kind of
Position which is essentially is submissive. Yeah, which which the the kind of the really where this gets into book two as well
And I get into book one, but I want to go deeper into it
Depression is the number one leading cause of disability worldwide presently. Yeah, you know, so you know
It's leading to Marshall McCluen.
Meeting him is the message is like a big idea from him.
So when we are in this room right now, or school would be an even better example, when
you go to school, you think that your kids are being educated by, you know, the contents
that are in the books.
I'm learning math.
I'm learning Abe Lincoln.
I'm learning math, I'm learning Abe Lincoln, I'm learning poetry.
What you are actually really, truly being formed by is the positions that you are assuming
while you're in that desk, the manner in which you're being educated by, you know, now
it's the screens.
You know, so that screen education, that is the medium that is actually the overlying, overwhelming message
that is forming you.
So we think it's just the contents of what we're getting
from the medium, but in fact, it's the medium itself.
So when you are a person that's getting all this information
and you're inside of, say you're inside of a boxed room,
maybe all the walls are just white.
And maybe you're getting these artificial blue lights.
Maybe it's, you know, thermoragulated air conditioned air.
It's always at this one set temperature.
Maybe you learn that, okay, I need to raise my hand
and ask politely if I gotta go pee pee.
Maybe like all of these different things.
No more realistic judgment wrong, right, good, bad.
You know, but the fact that you're learning some math
along the way, I think is very small potatoes in comparison to the actual, the constitution of the mold that you're learning some math along the way, I think is very small potatoes in comparison to the actual the constitution of the mold that you existed.
I totally agree and your because if you think about this way to simplify right, you're,
you have a feeling within you that it presents itself in your body, but then the way your body is positioned also sends feedback back to the inside of you, maybe your brain.
Your body is positioned also sends feedback back to the inside of you, maybe your brain. It can easily become a feedback loop.
No different than when you have a microphone and a speaker, you take the mic, you connect
to the speaker, bring the mic close to the speaker, you get that super loud sound because
the speaker is picking up the sound from the microphone, but then projecting it and picking
it up.
It becomes this positive feedback loop that obviously, you know, is very offensive and loud.
If you feel afraid or sad and your body forms itself
in the way that exemplifies fear and sadness,
then you also perceive the position
that shows the inside of you, the brain and the body
that I'm scared or that I'm sad.
And then you feel it more and your body does it more
and you get this positive feedback loop.
And one of the best things you can do with any loop
is you get to stop it in a rubber.
You have to disrupt the loop.
And so if you're feeling,
here's an easy thing you can do.
If you're feeling like a bit out of control
with negative feelings or whatever,
and it may sound, it may feel silly.
It may seem like this is whatever, what do you mean?
And I don't wanna do that.
And what's funny about feedback loops
is you wanna stay in one, which is interesting.
Just try this, you feel like you gotta go stand
or move in a way that is different
than the way you feel.
So I am feeling sad and I'm feeling unmotivated.
I'm gonna stand tall and work out, you know,
as much as I don't want to, I'm gonna go do this.
What'll happen is your brain will receive the signal that,
I know we feel this way, but here's what we're getting
from the outside, this person standing in a way that
tells us that we should probably feel a little bit better,
we should probably feel a little bit more motivated.
There's a study with, this was an interesting one, where people held a pencil in their teeth.
Yeah, smiling.
Yeah, which mimics smiling, and because of that, people felt like they were happier.
The inverse happens if you put a golf tee in your eyebrow, so you go resting bitch face.
Yeah, yeah.
Fascinating, right?
And when you see a person with resting bitch face, quite often, they're kind of aggravated more than a
person that kind of moves around all jubilant. Like, it's not just like a coincidence. Like,
you literally, and so there's another guy that I've had on my podcast actually called
Paul Ekman. He's like one of the most cited psychologists in the world, Noam Chomsky.
Noam Chomsky the most. I think so. Yeah. You've seen a recommend for American dream.
No, I haven't seen it.
Woo!
Yeah.
You gotta watch that.
Do I?
Oh, man.
I saw that long time ago.
I can't even remember it though.
Holy shit.
All right, so Paul Ackman, he's, he's interesting.
I don't think he liked me.
I think we were a conversation.
And I was like, I was like, Paul, I respect you a lot,
but I think you hate me.
So anyways, he was a fellow that studied various different facial expressions around the
world.
And he, his perspective went against Darwin's perspective that there was, you would learn
certain facial expressions based off of your cultural influence.
And then Mimicum.
Yeah.
And so that is true with like gang signs
and like waving, like waving isn't a thing
that just everybody just does.
That's like, I have no weapons.
You know, that's like something
that you're learning and showing.
You know, now we do elbow bump
because of, you know,
because of the things the exact,
that's not like just a natural thing.
Hugging probably is quite natural though,
as my guess.
But anyways, facial expressions though,
he mapped out something like 10,000
different specific facial expressions
that had specific meanings to feeling angry, sad,
scared, happy, and all of the different things.
And each subtle little change of any of the muscles on your face are
indicative of a very specific meaning to the outside world but also to yourself.
And so you see those very overt examples of a smile or the frown that causes a thing
will now extrapolate that out times 10,000 and you have like, wow, like I'm always painting
a story with my face,
all African Jim Carey.
Why is he so successful?
He can contort his face into anything.
So he plays, he's like a,
he's like a, like a survive with playing the instrument
of facial expression,
which invokes a sensation much like, if not exactly like
an instrument of person playing a saxophone.
And then you're giving it to yourself.
You're giving it to yourself and others, just like when you're playing a sax.
So what are some best practices then that we can give or what you would give to clients
without going down the rabbit hole, right?
Because what we know from, you know, all of us have trained many, many clients
and I know that there's just this plethora of information
that I've learned over decades of training
and nutrition and movement
and I have to be very careful on how much of that
I put on a client.
If I really want them to put into practice
and to see change and continue to grow in this area,
are there some best practices,
because you can get into cold therapy,
you can get into meditation, affirmations, posture,
mobility, there's so many things that are...
Now, where do you start?
Yeah, where do you start?
And are there small things that you give clients
to start with this and make this a habit,
make it become unconscious and then move to this.
Do you have things like that?
That's what the line method is.
So breaking it down, I was kind of crying earlier about how the publishers forced to be
called five movement principles for stronger body and stress proof life and all the words
and I'm like, I hate this.
I think this is so it's so much more than that, but you know, because people need something
to grab on to, they need like a good handle, we do have the second section of the book,
breaks down five fundamental principles that every person ought to have in their daily experience,
if they really give a dang about driving their body well. And so the first thing that I would
recommend to almost every client would be, I mean, one walk.
Like, you just got to walk more.
And at any time that you have the opportunity to go get groceries, it's like, dude, your
family at some point probably made a pilgrimage across a continent, for you to get to this
point.
So you can sit on your ass and order food off of your phone and wait to be delivered
to your face.
And so if you have the opportunity,
make it be a fun thing to get some reusable bags
or a backpack and like cool,
I didn't get to hike in any mountains this year,
but I did a bunch of little mini pilgrimages
to the grocery store.
While I was doing that, I got sun,
maybe I took my shirt off,
I mixed with my whole body of the sun,
maybe I took my sunglasses off, so took my whole body of the sun, maybe I took my sunglasses off,
so I'm getting that full spectrum of light
onto my eyes, which is helpful with all sorts of things,
helps your body's production of neurochemistry,
literally makes you a happier person.
Serking rhythm, all kinds of stuff.
All the stuff.
So that would be one thing.
Another thing that I recommend to everybody
is just spending a little bit of time on the ground each day.
So while I'm sitting in the chair here,
I'm treating the chair kind of like as though
we were sitting around a fire
and I'm sitting on a rock or on a ground.
In this case, I'm sitting up on a cushion,
my legs are crossed, the reason that's valuable,
I'm not just gonna go through all the five things,
I'll probably stop after this,
but I mean, we can't if you want,
but it's good to go, I'm enjoying this little monotonous.
But the big thing with spending time in the ground,
one, you end up in the book we call
Resting Postures of Repose,
which I borrowed from muscles and meridians
by Philip Beach.
But so these resting postures of repose
are these natural tuning mechanisms
that our bodies had had since the beginning
of our evolution.
You've naturally squatted all the way down to the ground, then you kneel a little bit,
then you might reach your arms up overhead for a little bit to grab something.
All of those positions, in this case, just specifically spend time on the ground lying down
in your back, lying down on your side.
You know, when you're in those positions, you might notice, oh man, like, my hip feels
a little like sensitive, feels like beef jerky on that side.
You're massaging your beef jerky hip
by being on the ground as opposed to floating in space
all day, just getting clogged up like a dam.
And then when you're going that,
you're also taking your hips through a full range of motion.
So now you're opening and expanding
and contracting those pelvic floor muscles.
You literally are a closed hydraulic system
that needs to be pumped with regularity. If you are, you will are a closed hydraulic system that needs to be pumped
with regularity.
If you are, you will be a healthy hydraulic system.
If you are not, then you will be a stuck up, damned up body.
Dams are where festering and disease and things of the sort manifest.
If the body is well circulated, then the body heals.
When the body has obstruction, there's an Andrew Taylor still quote who's the founder of osteopathy says,
harmony dwells where obstructions do not exist. So anywhere in your body that
there is obstruction, that is the beginnings of disease. Anywhere where you can
open that obstruction, allow new fluid in the form of lymphatic fluid and blood
and you know all the things things to circulate and move
your body, it starts to heal.
Imagine that.
And so that's a lot of people, they may have various differing issues ranging from whatever
the ailment may be.
Then they might go to, maybe say they go to Peru, and they do ayahuasca.
And they're like, wow, like I got healed of my thing.
They have to be in Peru for a month.
It was the ayahuasca, you know, it was the shaman.
They had, they cut a chicken head off, and you know,
they, they, they, these crystals and like all this stuff.
It's like, what, what else happened on that trip?
You were in Peru.
You were, what else happened on that trip?
Like you, you probably, you know, you got in a different bed,
maybe it was lower down the ground,
maybe you were forced to change your identity structure
because now you're in a new place.
People don't even speak the same language.
You can't be in that same rut pattern of get up,
drink too much coffee, get in the car,
sit in that same 90 degree position,
get up, stumble into the next place,
I'll revved up on coffee and I'm already kind of
in like this fight, fight, response, sit in that same position in the office, get up, walk into the next place, I'll revved up on coffee, and I'm already kind of in like this fight flight response,
sitting at same position in the office,
get up, walk to the other room,
sit in the same position, getting back in the car,
then go to the gym, do the same position,
sit on some seated row machine,
get up, get back in the car, same position,
go home, eat dinner in the same position,
then sit finally, relax and have some Netflix on the couch
in the same fucking position.
You know, you go to another place, and all of a sudden your body gets like,
whoa, everything starts to kind of change and shift.
You're starting to perfuse new fluid into all these places
by changing your physical environment.
It's crazy.
We're talking about how important this is to fight off chronic pain
and have about the body.
But there's also the side of mental and like relationship
health, then this was part of actually the conversation
that Katrina and I talked about last night too,
that we hacked into a long time,
that speaks to your point.
We make it a point to disrupt our daily life
and go somewhere out of this environment
because of that exact reason,
because I feel the same thing for relationship health.
It's very easy to get in the minutia of going through your day of laundry, clean, walk the
dogs, go to work, and it's just a cycle that you can...
We schedule sex on Tuesday.
Right, right.
You start to lose sight of...
Talk about Tuesday.
Your relationship and the growth of it and the health of it.
One of the best things that we found is to always schedule a trip away from home, even if
we're just going up an hour and a half to the beach and we stay two or three nights at
a hotel room or whatever on the beach, is just to interrupt that same pattern that we're always in.
And I think it contributes to a lot of the success
our relationship has.
And I think that's parallel to what you're talking about
with the body.
Chinese and aeravetic medicine talk a lot about congestion
and blocks of energy.
And I think that years ago I had a acupuncturist
that was in my wellness facility. And she would that, you know, years ago I had an acupuncturist that was in my
wellness facility and she would explain how acupuncture works, but through Chinese medicine
terminology. And so I'd say, you know, it's interesting. I've seen the studies, the Western
studies on acupuncture. And it does have pain relieving qualities. They've proven us
why insurance now pays for acupuncture. How does it work? And she said, oh, well, the
needles open up energy flows
from Chi and this and that.
And she's talking through Chinese medicine terminology.
And I thought to myself, okay, well,
here's what I know about Western medicine.
I know we have referred pain.
I know that oftentimes when you go to the doctor
and you hear, you hurt somewhere they know
that you might have an issue with your kidney
or your heart, for example, your left arm,
everybody knows that, right?
You left arm pain, if you get in a heart attack.
Maybe it's affecting the nerves,
but really the point is it doesn't matter how we explain it.
It's been observed.
It's been observed by many, many people
and this congestion, this blocking thing
that you're talking about,
aerovetic medicine, Chinese medicine,
talk a lot about it.
And here's some more interesting stuff
about getting on the ground.
They've done studies on people
and they're constantly trying to find one way,
one test that can help predict all cause mortality, right?
Cause that would be beautiful.
That would be great for insurance purposes,
for medicine purposes.
We, and it's hard to find it.
Is it blood pressure?
Is it cholesterol?
Is it triglycerides?
Is it fasting insulin?
Is it all?
But now they're starting to stumble upon it and there's there's one that they found which was
Can you get up off the ground? Yeah?
Can you get out? Can you if we put you on the ground and don't help you?
Can you get up all by yourself?
That is a greater predictor of all cause mortality than any other singular
Measurement that we have the second closest would be your grip strength test Just how strong you are with your hand. How interesting is that?
So I have, so that the, one of the third movement principles in the book is,
is hang with regularity each day. So my recommendation with spending time on the ground is,
I recommend 30 minutes, but that's like half of a yoga class. So if you're a person that
just eats breakfast
on the ground, where you get some big cushions,
and you maybe get a low coffee table,
maybe you go outside and some grass,
and you're getting sun, you're stacking variables.
Got to stack variables.
When you're living in an environment
where you're very kind of like medicinal, isolated,
supplement form of fitness and life and all of the things,
you're not living life.
Like you're living this broken narrative of the way you're supposed to do it.
If you just take your ass outside, you know, a nice day, get down the ground, eat some
food that's maybe, you know, helpful for your body, maybe do it with community, you know,
all of those different things.
It's like, whoa, it's this whole storm of positive variables.
I'll stack together. And so the, so that's just one thing of kind of like making the spending time
on the ground, you know, make it comfortable, you know, put your ground territory like near a window
or something like that, get a really comfy rug. And we get some foam rollers down there, maybe put a yoga
mat down on the ground someplace so it welcomes because you become your environment.
Marshall McClellan, me, it was a message.
But then hanging, that's another one of those things that it could be hypothesized or
argued that we are ancestors where these arboreal creatures in Africa that started off in
trees, whether that's true or not, you know, I don't really care.
What you do know is that human hands are really good
at reaching up over your head,
grabbing onto trees or things of the sort
and pulling yourself up.
Well, look at the shoulder structure with the scapula.
Yeah, but it's longer.
We are able to do it.
We evolve to be able to reach up above our head,
hang into throw things.
Correct.
Otherwise, we would have totally different shoulders.
Yep.
And so that's one of those things that what do you naturally is,
so if you hear that study about how grip strength
is a higher indicator of cardiovascular disease
than blood pressure, then you're like,
okay, cool, I'm gonna go get a, you know,
one of those denominators and just start squeezing
the shit out of it.
It's like, no, you're doing the supplement bullshit
form of life and fitness.
Do shit that naturally engages that whole chain of muscles that would be indicative of
a strong grip strength.
Play Jiu Jitsu.
Grab a lapel.
Grab, go climb a tree with your kids.
Like why are kids such good teachers?
Because they're more honest with their biology.
They don't know they're not supposed to.
They don't know they don't have to play for you.
They don't have narrative yet.
And so at some point you were taught, you were misinformed that it's not mature to play.
You were misinformed that it's not mature to balance on that curve.
Or I'll just climb that trace.
No, we have things to do.
I've got my watch here.
I've got my Apple cell phone.
I've got like, I'm in the limo.
I've got my schedule, my agenda.
Kids are like, what?
Yeah.
This is a play opportunity.
What are you talking about?
I don't want to leave right now.
What a great lesson.
No, it's a, what a great lesson.
And that has always been such a big advocate of rotation.
And like, that's something I've just noticed right away,
just being in the gym environment,
how little that's incorporated in anybody's programming.
Doesn't matter if you know,
a personal trainer is having their client go through exercises,
they're not really incorporating rotation as much as,
and this is a vital component to our body moves.
You know, it's funny, Aaron. Again, having trained people for so long incorporating rotation as much as, and this is a vital component to our body moves.
You know, it's funny, Aaron, again,
having trained people for so long
towards the end of my career
is when I really learned how to be really effective.
And one of the most effective things I ever did
for a client was integrate movement into their day
into their everyday ritualistic daily life.
It was so effective at getting people to move more.
So instead of doing the
do 30 minutes of cardio every morning on your stationary bike, it was, well you already
breakfast lunch and dinner, so that's already a ritual. Walk 10 minutes after each one.
Yeah. The consistency was amazing. Here's the thing, studies also show it's more effective.
When they compare a one hour cardio session to three 20 minute sessions, the three 20 minute sessions burn more body fat,
improve stamina better,
and have physiological benefits that are better
than the singular, the single time
of spending on a piece of cardio equipment.
We notice this with strength.
You go to the gym for an hour
and you wanna just get stronger.
What if instead of doing 15 pull ups,
three sets of that in your back workout, you know, doing 15 pull ups, three sets
of that in your back workout, you had to pull up bar in your house and every time you walk
back by, you do one pull up.
Every time you walk by, you just did a pull up.
You know it's funny, the studies support that and then try it out by the way.
The strongest I've ever been at certain lifts was when I practiced like that rather than
doing the structured one hour or two hour workout, it's literally integrating these things in your life.
So that's why I love so much what you said
about eating breakfast on the ground,
because sometimes, and here's what I'll even,
I'm even guilty of this.
When I hear you say, get on the ground,
I immediately think, I'm gonna schedule 30 minutes
of just being on the ground.
Instinctually, right?
Oh, I gotta do this.
I gotta put this in my routine.
Then you said eat breakfast on the ground,
and I'm like, oh yeah. That was about five minutes. I'm already almost there. I'm already eating breakfast
Yeah, I might as well get on the ground. What about watching TV on the ground? I watch TV every night for 30 minutes
Or an hour, you know hanging out with my wife. Why don't I just sit on the ground? Yeah instead of on the couch
It's in it's in from a psychological standpoint or from a consistency standpoint
People are far more likely to be consistent
when it's integrated in that way versus the,
make sure you schedule your cardio,
make sure you schedule your weight training session,
make sure you schedule your mobility session.
It's like, well, what if you just,
when you brushed your teeth,
you got down into a squat or you were barefoot
and did some calf raises, or what if, you had a pull-up bar in your house
and it's next to the TV and whenever you're watching TV,
you kind of hang a little bit and play on the pull-up bar.
Way more effective.
Well, you alluded to the research around the physiological part,
there's research to support the behavioral side.
That it's more likely to be consistent
if you do pair it with another ritual.
So I mean, it's funny, I love that you started with the walking thing too because we've talked
Probably at Nazim on the show about
How we used to scoff at that in our early years as a trainer when a client would say like oh, I walk every day
You're not working out. Yeah, you're not training. You're not exercising. Show me burpees bitch
Yeah, right and and then you look you look at the way I talk to a client full circle,
and that is actually the very first thing that I address.
It's just, let's move.
And let's pair it with something you're already doing.
I'm not going to ask you to go get on a treadmill
for every single day to do cardio.
Let's break down your day and let's see a way
that we can integrate that into your lifestyle.
Because I know that 20 minutes of that
for the rest of your life, every time you after dinner,
it's far more valuable than a six monthmonth run of doing one-hour cardio every single day.
Totally.
And here's a big part of it, too, Aaron, because we're constantly trying to get people to
adopt some of these habits and to do them.
First, we have to get them to accept them.
So you get to sell the idea.
So I'm going to sell this for you right now, right?
Years ago, a device hit the fitness scene
and it was a big part of the gym
that I started my career in, 24 fitness.
It was called a body bug and a body bug
and there's a lot of these things now,
but there were the first ones.
You put it on and it was relatively accurate
at calculating how many calories you burned.
And it did through soup, through movement
and skin temperature and it was a very complicated device. It was actually groundbreaking, and it was relatively accurate. You put it on, and you could,
you know, get into your computer and look at it, and be like, oh, I burned 2,500 calories today,
I burned 3,000 calories today, or whatever. And again, it was relatively accurate, and even when
you compared it to the very complex metabolism measuring machines that you have at universities.
And I remember this. It was just mind blowing for me.
I'd have clients that would come in and work out three days a week with me
or two days a week on their own, five days a week.
They put on the body bug and we would look at their calories.
And I remember that we would look at their, I'd pull it up on the computer
and I'd be like, oh man, what did you do on Saturday and Sunday?
You burned like 30% more calories on Saturday and Sunday.
Like, why, did you work out?
Like I thought you only worked out five days a week.
Oh no, no, I was just, oh I was gardening
and then I washed the car.
Oh that's when I went to the mall with my friends
and we were shopping.
And I remember like melted my brain
because I'm like, holy cow,
five days a week you're in here working out for an hour.
But then you go to work and do nothing all day long.
On those days, you're not even scheduling a workout, and you burned way more calories.
So here's how I sell what we're talking about.
You just want to get lean, do this anyway, incorporate it into your everyday life anyway, even
if you don't care about all the other stuff that Aaron's talking about, and what I'm talking
about, if you want to burn fat effectively, the most effective way
to do it is to incorporate it into your daily life, into small doses, into the rituals
that you already have, far more effective than trying to do scheduled calorie burn workouts.
Yeah, well, yeah, I mean, that's exactly what the intention of making this thing called
the align method, which again, I wanted to call's exactly what the intention of making this thing called the align method,
which again, I wanted to call it a line because I have resistance towards dogma.
And so, as soon as something's called a method, I'm like, oh, no.
No.
With a poet like, no, bitch, like, it's a method.
We're selling a method.
I'm like, all right, whatever.
But that was the whole thing is being able to be somewhat of a Trojan horse and be able
to slip into people's lives without
Feeling as though we are adding something new. Totally. You know, so it's with anything
It's like you know start the book out with it with an analogy of the golf swing
Which isn't my analogy, but you know when you're swinging in a club or swinging a club in a ball
You know, it's all it takes is the little fraction of a centimeter to be off
You know in any direction.
You don't notice the change right in the beginning, but then give it 30 yards, 50 yards,
100 yards.
You're like, oh, that's, oh, wow, that's where that ball ended up.
That's what you are moving throughout the day.
What I created the book for was essentially to give people the lens to be able to examine what's
the angle of their club in any instance throughout the day so they can make literally every
moment an opportunity because you've got the know how to do it.
Beyond that, whether you want to or not, it's up to you.
I don't really care.
I'm going to bring it all down to the current situation.
Okay.
This is why I love home gems so much.
So a couple of years ago, I invested in a home gym,
I have a garage gym, basic setup,
but everything you need, right,
power bell, dumbbell, cage, you know, bands,
all that stuff, right?
And there was a weekend that was coming up
and my wife and I, like, we don't really have anything
scheduled this weekend.
I said, you know, I remember reading these Soviet studies
on Olympic weight lifters and how,
when they'd work out all day,
they got these phenomenal results. I said, I'm going to give this a shot.
So what I'm going to do is every other hour, I'm going to go out to the garage,
I'll pick three exercises, my goal is going to be strength.
So I'm going to do like a row, a bench press,
and overhead press or something like that, right?
And I'd go out and I'd do six reps of each, three sets each,
and it was moderate intensity, not intense, not super easy but nothing
crazy.
And I'll do that every other hour.
And the strength gains I got from a single session and how I felt blew me away.
So I'm going to bring it now to the current situation, current climate.
A lot of people at home, they can't go anywhere, they can't do anything.
Here's a great opportunity to do, instead of your 60 minute workout,
why don't you do three 20 minute workouts
or six 10 minute workouts throughout the day?
Schedule them throughout the day.
First of all, you're gonna feel better
because you're gonna get those good feelings for movement
throughout the whole day.
It's like an IV drip of a feel good chemical
rather than a single shot of it one time during the day.
And on top of it, you
will notice that your body will respond a little bit better. It's crazy, but it's 100%
true. And watch how that bleeds into every other aspect of your life, your communication
with your friends, your business that you're doing, like the production that you get done,
get done, it's amazing. So that's, it seems like there's not a necessity to keep one confirming the point that consistent
movement matters, but another person that I've had on the podcast called Joan Vernecoast,
she's worked with NASA for like the last 40 years.
I don't think she liked me either actually.
I think you're so likeable though.
What are you doing, bro?
I think there seems to be a consistent trend with when I do podcasts over the internet remotely.
And if it's with a baby boomer,
I think there's been a consistent trend where I'm like,
I think that person kind of hated me.
Afterwards, I think it's something maybe I'm arrogant.
I'm not sure what it is exactly,
but that's what I've noticed.
You're pulling right here, my eyes are in peace.
But nonetheless, I like her and I like her books.
One of the things that she pointed out was that astronauts, she was studying the health
of astronauts in space without gravity.
She found that the astronauts that would do small bits, like little titrails, so you said
like, drips of fitness throughout the day,
they would age significantly slower.
Typically, versus the ones that would do like the CrossFit blowout workout in space for
three hours and just really don't it.
And then the rest of the day just kind of float in space, you know, and work with instruments.
And so the people that would do that, they would go through literally this rapid aging process,
where their bones would become less dense
and their muscles would atrophy and cognitively
and it doesn't even work in space.
That's cool.
That's cool.
That's cool.
But so what's really interesting with that
is it's like the same analogy that you were referencing,
I have, I've referenced before describing this,
like you wouldn't drink all of your water
first thing in the morning or three days a week.
And you see, you wouldn't say, okay, cool,
I want to have whatever you want to have.
So you want to have a gallon of water a day,
which might be a lot or a little whatever.
But you don't smash out two gallons on Tuesday
and then another two gallons on Thursday.
It's Sips.
You know, and so those systems are literally, they're congruent.
They're working with each other.
You drink water, you eat food, and then you move it
through your body.
So all of those systems are integrated,
and they're all based off of continual movement.
And so when you start to look at things like that,
like, okay, cool, I'm having this conversation.
Maybe we could do a walking meeting. So throughout the day, like, where can I start to look at things like that, like, okay, cool, I'm having this conversation, maybe we could do a walking meeting.
So throughout the day, like, where can I start to fill without, how can I just make my
day more efficient, better, more productive, more happy, and not lose any of the progress
that we were doing, or lose any of the productivity?
And so if you go for a walking meeting with you,
you actually get more productive.
You get more productive.
Absolutely.
And you start thinking outside of the box.
And so if what you need is your employees or yourself to be more of a scantron type
thinker, you have the information or you just got to jot it down, study show that sitting
in that, you know, sitting on the chair or I would recommend be on the ground and just being focused in and getting it down. Study show that sitting in that, you know, sitting on the chair or
I would recommend being on the ground and just being focused in and getting it done,
you can access that information quite fine, even more effectively. But if you want to
go start thinking outside or divergently thinking, then you need to diverge your body out
of that same stuck focused, convergent position. I don't know if convergent divergent exactly work in that as far as like
describe moving to the body.
But when you move the body in a way that's not just the standard mold that we
get when we're sitting in a church shares all day long being cogs in a wheel,
when you go outside of that, all of a sudden you start thinking, Oh, what if we,
you know, Steve Jobs, he had walking meetings with everybody. And so that's like you start sudden you start thinking, oh, what if we, you know, Steve Jobs, he
had walking meetings with everybody.
And so that's like, you start thinking of things like, man, what if we made these computers
different?
Like, we have, I have all of this intrinsic information that's already in my brain, you
know, and the way that I've been formed is such that I can kind of treat myself like
a catalog and just go in and sit and go through the catalog.
But if I start to move a little bit differently, then I start bucking against the system. And then I start becoming somewhat
of like a revolutionary, but it could potentially start from actually the way that I move my body
as I move my body, I'm moving my mind. Yeah, there's many systems of adaptation of the body that
react and adapt better when it's small doses and frequent.
The way your skin tans, for example,
is a good example.
Going outside and getting just absolutely hammered
by the sun, isn't gonna give you a great tan
like going out and getting doses of it
throughout the day.
The way that we learn, it's better to,
rather than doing one eight hour class,
it trying to learn everything,
doing eight one hour classes throughout the week
is probably gonna be more effective.
And the way you build muscle, the way that we designed
our maps programs, for example, is how we've observed
that frequency just works better for most people.
I identified this with blue collar workers in my family
who didn't work out, but my mechanic uncle
had muscular forearms and my male carrier aunt had great looking calves.
Everything else looked at a shape.
I couldn't figure out what was going on.
It was because of that frequent stimulation.
We even injected that even into the workouts that we designed where we're throwing in these
frequency builders because it works.
Even from a superficial build muscle burn body fat, and here I am selling it again, but
I think this is important.
You just sell these ideas to get people to even try them.
These frequent levels of stimulation, these small doses, they get your body to get in shape
more effectively.
And then again, you throw in the behavioral aspect, you're more likely to stay consistent
on top of it.
So it's something that is, we often don't talk about.
I know fitness tends to be designed around hard, intense, singular sessions and then rest.
And I know bodybuilding was like, hammer your biceps on Monday and then wait till next
Monday to do it again.
It doesn't work nearly as well for people to do it that way versus instead of doing 20 sets
of Monday for your biceps, why don't you do, you know, five sets, four days a week and
see what happens.
Start looking at your fitness, which I always do fitness and quotations,
because I think it's kind of a funny word.
You're fit for whatever you do.
You know, if you're sitting on a computer,
you know, hammering out tweets all day.
That's how you're gonna fit for that.
And you're fit for that.
You'd be better at that
than a person that's climbing trees and stuff,
because the tree climb in parkour,
Jiu Jitsu, sun beach guy,
is you're like, ah, like it's freaking me out.
Like I'm not fit for this.
You know, so fit.
First, it's just define what your goals are.
And then from there, if you have a vision, then you can define what the best
approach or route is.
Yeah.
What's method for?
We have we've addressed three.
What's four?
Oh, hinging from the hips.
Okay.
That's a really big one.
Yes.
So, so, so, so a really so so leverage leveraging leverage
You know if if if if give me a lever and I can I can move the world, you know, it's like it's said that
Philosopher philosopher fella. It was I don't remember
Got it written there. It's really what is it look it up? Doctor. She's doctor
That's my favorite philosophy. Yes, so figuring out okay, I've got all these levers on my body.
I've never been taught to take advantage of any of them.
So in high school or middle school gym class, it's like, okay, you need to remember to bring
your shorts.
You need to show up on the Archimedes lever.
There we go.
Can't believe that.
I know I can't believe that.
That's very sad.
So that's a big thing is understanding
if you've ever done any kind of martial arts,
maybe did judo or maybe did juditsu.
You can understand that the difference between my hips
being just half an inch this way or that way.
Oh, here's difference.
Is all the difference in the world
because you've granted yourself the power of leverage.
So as you are moving through the world,
you can do certain things. You can make it
to literally your whole entire day is like an opportunity to make yourself better. Like I truly
a million percent believe that. And one of those things is when you say you pick something up off
of the ground, maybe you're chopping vegetables, maybe doing anything, you can start to play with
those basic mechanics that you would learn. I'm sure you guys teach in your maths program, or
if anybody's ever had a trainer or read a muscle and fitness, they'll talk about hinging
those hips. So nice, long, neutral spine and driving the hips backwards. As you're doing
that, you're literally, you're starting to be able to activate all of the powers of
the hips. If you don't do that, then you're going to be outsourcing more of that energy
into the knees and the quads and into thoracic spine and all these places like that's not that you're not doing it right.
Like you're trying to you're trying to lift your car up and short cover thing.
Yeah, it's like dude, who gave you a three inch lever?
It's like, I have a six foot lever in the garage.
Like do you want me to grab that for you?
Yeah.
You know what I was like?
Oh, no, I got this thing.
And you're like, you are so ineffective
at picking your baby up off of the ground.
So let's, okay.
So four is hip hinge.
So what are some simple best practices?
I mean, I could think of just simply,
you've already touched on getting on the ground,
just you being down in a squad,
I love to talk about squat and scroll, right?
Practicing if I'm gonna get on my phone
and I'm gonna go on Instagram or whatever,
to drop down into a full deep squat.
I mean, you're practicing the hinge there
or do you have other things that you like
to incorporate with clients?
No, I mean, with working with clients specifically,
so in my programs or book or any of those places,
I give you the mechanics, I give you a few basic examples.
Like, okay, here's how you do it.
Now, what I'm really interested is,
can you start to be curious about making this happen
in your daily life?
What do you do with your creative with your movement?
Anytime you pick something up, you know, hip-hop.
You know exactly how to do it.
Whether you do it or not, totally up to you.
Do you know how to do it?
Most people would say, I don't know how to do it.
And if you really look, if we got 1,000 people in here
and everybody did a squat,
I mean, all four of us would be like, oh, oh man.
Yeah, yeah, majority.
It's bad, all bad.
Yeah.
People can't hit, that's something,
it's one of the fundamental things
you have to teach as a trainer.
As a foundation.
Yeah, bend here, not here, bend here.
And it's like, well, they can't do it.
And so it's like, of course it is.
And so it's like, why was that not in your assessment
as a eight year old?
You know, we have designed a world where you don't do that.
You don't do that.
You don't do that, you lose that.
And then you start blaming your body for failing you.
And then you start seeking out to heal this system
that it's inherently healing.
If you give it the proper fundamental raw materials,
nuts and bolts, schematics of how the freak to move,
how to eat, how to be in nature occasionally.
You know, how do you maybe, okay,
can't be in nature, I gotta be in this office all day,
bring some nature into your office.
You know, maybe open the window
and let that full spectrum of light come through.
Maybe bring some plants in there.
Maybe get a little bit of waterfall device.
Next studio we build, we've talked about this
that we're gonna have a retractable.
Oh really?
Yeah, all those things.
Yeah, so we can just open it up and have some.
We have to do it all, and we'll do it right after this
because we've already been in here now,
this is this morning since we have four or five hours.
We always, always fill this.
And we've now made it a practice that if we've spent
a couple hours in here, that we stop whatever we're doing,
we go out and we walk around the block four or five times.
If you're having pain in your body,
it's been shown that people who have access,
I know you guys are familiar with this,
if they have access to looking out a window,
or even seeing a painting with nature,
they'll have less necessity for pain killers.
Yeah, that's interesting. If you give them, if you give them the power to choose how the
dose of painkillers, they will choose less because you've empowered them. So I care way more
about empowering a person to say, give me an equation, I learned how to process this. It
doesn't matter what it is. As opposed to saying, okay, I don't know any of the,
you know, tens of thousands or whatever people
that are listening to this, I don't know what you do.
But I can give you the basic fundamental equation
that will relate to any situation.
Man, it's like, oh, okay, cool.
Kind of off subject, but you just reminded me of something.
Have you seen the, I think it's Apple TV
that did a series called Homes?
Did you see, have you seen that?
No.
That was amazing.
So you just made me think of something
that I hope that we have some research in the future
because there's like a movement.
And I believe it started in Sweden just then.
I don't know.
I think it's becoming popular
where they're building these greenhouse homes.
Yeah, greenhouse homes.
So a home inside of a greenhouse.
And so it'd be really interesting to see
like a family that was raised in that.
And if we had multiple people that we could measure
like what kind of long-term effects that potentially has,
I mean, I love the idea.
I speculate that it would make a huge difference.
Yeah, everything.
It's boosts your immune system.
The fight inside off with the plants, you're literally creating a little hermetic stressor
on your immune system that's saying, okay, bulk up, be strong.
But if you put yourself into, this is very relevant for the now, if you put yourself into
a hyper-sanitized sterile environment, you begin to die.
Your body needs something to wrestle with.
And so if you're continually just nuking
your own natural microbiome and skin biome
with all of this stuff that just, okay, just kill it all,
kill it all, kill it all.
Multiply that, you can do that,
you can wage war on yourself for a little bit.
Multiply that times a whole cultural shift for years
and see what happens with that.
As opposed to the people say,
what do they call the people, the centarians,
what do they call the blue zones?
There's like, what are they doing?
Oh, and there's contention on everything,
including blue zones, but what are they doing?
Oh, they're doing what's sound like.
In the freaking garden, what's in doing? Oh, they're doing what's sound like they're in the freaking garden.
What's in the garden?
A whole lot of dirt.
You know, kids that grow up with a dog or around a farm,
what does a dog bring into the house?
Oh, lots of different bacteria and viruses.
Oh, I think the contingent.
The contingent around blue zones is that many people have cherrypicked the data
to support whatever they're trying to sell, right?
But there are some things and we've talked about that that are very common
and community and being outside
is one of the most common themes amongst all of them.
Yeah, we've connected.
Yeah, the Western medicine model is to isolate
the one thing that does all the stuff,
and we forget about the context and the combination
of things, you know, like, oh, that solves pain,
that's, let's make aspirin,
because that's based off the white willow bark.
And then we forget that,
it has all this other stuff in it
that prevents things like overdose,
and actually can be good for you
whereas if you just take too much aspirin
all the time, it can cause problems.
And we forget about that.
So we stopped on four, what's five?
You're gonna put me to position where I forget again.
The fifth one is nose breathing.
Okay.
I can't wait we didn't even go there.
I was like, of course that has to be in there.
I tell you what, talk about one of the most.
Breathing in general, but nose breathing
with emphasis on nose breathing.
Maybe one of the most underrated ones.
Man, so I'm notorious for having a really hard time at night
settling my brain down and going to sleep.
It just, for some reason,
and I'm sure I've trained myself this way
to work a long hours.
And because we talk about how important it is
to get good rest, it's something I'm always trying to put
all these practices in place to improve that.
And, but sometimes life happens.
Sometimes it's a very stressful long day
and a lot's on my mind, or I got bombarded with multiple things.
And so it really challenges those practices
that I've tried to put in place.
And some of them are uncontrollable.
Like I was still working till 11 o'clock
and I had nothing I could do about it.
And my saving grace is the nose breathing,
or taking it or box breathing.
It's what I use before I go to bed.
And in Katrina and I will actually do it together.
And she believes that she can hear me thinking,
like she'll be laying in bed,
and I won't even say anything will be up in there
for probably 20 minutes,
and I'll get like an elbow.
Stop it, I can hear you.
She'll do that to me.
Do you sense the baby?
Yeah, yeah, and then she'll do that to me,
and then if it's bothering her so much
that it's ruining her sleep, she'll say,
breathe with me, and then we'll breathe together.
And I swear to God, man, it's wild,
how powerful that can be and how impactful it can be.
Well, you know, not breathing through the nose
changes the structure of your face and your nose.
They're actually of shown this.
They've done studies where people will purposely
block their nose and the structure of the jaw, the mouth,
and the nose actually change.
So people with deviated septums, for example, who can't breathe and then they get it fixed,
it's life changing for them.
And if you look at pictures of them after the procedure, you see some structural changes
to the face.
I just learned this recently.
It's really crazy.
That's why you can tell, I mean, if you want to go just completely superficial, I don't
care about any scientific stuff, chicks will be more attracted to a guy with a chiseled
jawline.
Why is that?
It's an indication that, biologically speaking, that's a high functioning male that could
provide, they're probably more testosteroneic and they've probably got better sperm count
and they're just, it's like a Tesla versus like an old Civic.
So the old Civic guy is the person with the receding chin
and they're kind of a little bit kind of just like soft
and all of those things, it's like nothing wrong,
nothing right, no more realistic judgment,
anything like that.
But there's a difference between a Tesla and a 15 year old Civic.
And the Tesla, you get any, whoa, whoa, what was that? It's like, oh, well, the mechanics are pretty on point.
Everything is sharp.
And so when you're breathing through the nose,
a lot of things will happen.
One, naturally, if you want to get more of an Eastern type perspective,
you're connecting the tongue naturally to the roof of the mouth.
So if you wanted to get weird, you can say you're completing the microcosmic orbit,
you know, it's getting into like meridians and all that stuff, it's like connecting this
energy channel, goes all the way up top of the head, all the way down to the front,
down to the pernium, and up the back, and I don't know. I think from a, you know,
just mechanical, again, nuts and bolts, like lifting heavy stuff perspective, you can get more strength out of that. Calling a thing
a microcosmic orbit immediately puts me into like a tinfoil, kind of like woo, category,
but it is interesting. It just so happens that that is, East and West cross the intersect.
A lot. A lot. I don't know if all the time, but I think if you give it enough time,
it's pretty close to all the time.
It's wisdom, it's all wisdom,
and there's truths in all of them,
and sometimes they say it differently,
but they're saying the same thing oftentimes,
and there's different approaches,
and I think it's a huge disservice to yourself,
to just like with exercise,
I'm only gonna do this one method, and I'm gonna ignore all these others, huge disservice. And so just stick to one, just like with exercise, I'm only gonna do this one method,
and I'm gonna ignore all these others,
huge disservice.
And so with more facial structure stuff,
so your facial muscles will naturally be kind of pulling you in.
So when you are closing your jaw,
and you're going through and you're breathing with the nose,
especially like growing up as a baby,
if you just kind of allow that just like lack,
slack jaw, you'll literally start to cave in on yourself.
Like you need to create some internal pressure.
You need to push out in order to grow into a strong body.
And so that person that's continually just,
slack jaw, you know, breathing through their mouth,
you're, they're missing out on filtering the air,
they're missing out on changing the temperature of the air
to be more ready to be actually assimilated.
They're missing out on the production of nitric oxide.
So now they're missing out on cardiovascular function.
Now they're missing out coming back to picking up chicks.
If that's what you're interested in, if you're a guy,
well now ED, rectile dysfunction.
If I'm not, if I'm gonna go out and get a supplement,
maybe I'll go get beat juice or something
in order to increase nitric oxide,
well, you realize that you naturally,
just through tapping into your own innate mechanics,
you can produce this stuff just by,
you know, walking through a room and breathing right.
See, now you're selling it, I love it.
It's very, you want boners, free-through notes.
Dude, seriously. All that stuff is, it, I love it. It's very, you want boners, free three notes. Dude seriously, all that stuff is legit.
It all comes back to evolution man.
Everything that we're doing
it all comes back to where a bunch of animals
trying to figure this thing out,
we're trying to eat, we're trying to get laid,
and we're trying to create shelter,
we're trying to perpetuate the species.
And because we're so complex,
the big part of that is trying to find purpose and meaning.
Because without that, it's too big of a struggle
for smart apes like us. What a weird time. Yeah I know. Back to
Russia. Hey listen you're you're always a good time. Yeah you're always a
great time man. Hopefully you feel like we like you right you know you don't
get the divide that we don't like feels like ta ta Tuesday. Yeah. We're not having sex.
Okay.
We're not going to have not this time.
The pandemic is going to maintain distance.
Yeah.
Yeah. Or we can do it Canada recommended see what can a Canada had this like this recommendation
for sex and they actually advocated for glory holes.
Yeah.
Whoa.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah. Yeah. Canada. Yeah, yeah, because of the pandemic. Hey, if you want to bang somebody just do it through a hole in the wall
Yeah, it'll keep you safe day. Yeah, that was not funny. I saw wearing masks during coitus
That was I thought that was pretty interesting. Yeah
There was a time there was a time when condoms weren't a thing, you know, and then the hiv came out and it's like well
Yeah, now it's the next the next level. Yeah, pretty soon. We'll just be
Full body robot Robot banging.
Well, perhaps this gets into Elon Musk simulation stuff.
We'll be sitting inside of a tube someplace,
plugged up to nutrients while we're leading digital lives.
Do you think there's the only safe way to do it?
Do you think there's your actual biological body
to go out there?
You can die.
Do your digital life.
I think we'll quickly, we will quickly realize
we don't really know what we need.
I think we're gonna give ourselves everything
we ever wanted and desired and be extremely depressed.
Aaron, are you a sci-fi guy?
Do you watch sci-fi stuff?
Not enough, I'd be more creative if I was.
I'm just interested if you think there's a movie
that's out there that depicts our future the best.
Idiocracy.
Oh, yeah. I haven't seen that. the best. Idiocracy. Oh, man.
Yeah.
I haven't seen that.
You haven't seen that?
Wow, dude.
This guy saw it's long time ago, but it's an old movie.
He gets frozen wherever.
Nice.
And he, you know, reanimated or whatever in the future.
And it's like pro wrestlers president.
And dumb people were having more kids than smart people.
Anyway, everything went backwards,
and everybody's really dumb,
and they don't drink water, they drink soda.
The soda, because that's full of electrolytes,
and they feed it for their plants.
Yeah, it's a comedy.
It's a comedy.
Oh, I've got to have some painfully acting.
And he's a normal dude, he's an average dude,
but because the future gets so stupid,
he's like the smartest man in the world. Oh, they really bring him back. He's an average dude, but but because the future gets so stupid. He's like the smartest man in the world
I can't we've never seen this or even heard of this before I've got to watch it
I thought Sarah gets Sarah gets to me with Bruce Willis. I feel like it's very close to where we're heading
I believe that we're matrix matrix is another yeah, right
But that's those are kind of very similar right it that we're
loved in I think there's gonna be I think there's gonna be a clear division of
Humans and they live that in. I think there's gonna be a clear division of humans in the nature.
That's what I say.
Yeah, there's gonna be the plugged in
and then the unplugged people.
I think we're smart enough,
and there's enough of us that see the writing on the wall,
and then I think if it keeps going crazier and crazier
that direction, that I think we'll revolt
and go the other direction,
but I do think there will be a mass majority
that will fall in line.
I think 100% our own arrogance is going to be our downfall. We're so smart. We give ourselves
everything we think we want. We can satisfy every pleasure, which is going to start to get
closer and closer to that. And then we're going to realize this is not... It's like that scene in
the Matrix when the capture was his name Morpheus.
And Agent Smith, is that his name?
Agent Smith.
As talking to him and he says,
you know in the beginning,
the first Matrix was a utopia for humans.
We made it perfect.
And your feeble mind couldn't perceive
that things could be so good
and we lost entire crops of humans.
So they rejected it.
They had to remake the Matrix
with all the challenges of real life in the 90s or whatever
at the time of the day.
Because humans can't live in a, we don't know what utopia is.
We think we know and we create it if we could digitally.
Maybe too bored with perfection.
Not just that, just no meaning and purpose of things.
Imagine if you could just, this is when people ask us this question all the time, what
if there was a pill that made you fit, lean and healthy?
Would that be the answer? And I'm like, well, no, because most of the benefits you get from eating
right and exercising is the pursuit of doing so. It's not the, the, the, the, the result
of it. It's the pursuit of it.
Well, we have things. I think we see examples this with the uber rich all the time. I mean,
I feel like I see celebrities. Yeah. Like, I, like where I feel like there's more uber rich
or celebrity people that look depressed, sad,
or have so much pain in sorrow in their life
than I think of that like, oh man,
they look really happy or they really like
got it all together.
So, and yet they have the ability to pretty much
lie or have anything that this earth has to offer.
Do you know Daniel Everett, don't sleep there snakes.
You heard of that book? No,
no, no. The Paraha people in the Amazon. No, I say the Amazon. So it's just one country. I think
it was Brazilian Amazon. I'm not sure. But what he found in studying these these Paraha people,
he went out there as a Christian missionary. And so his intention was to go and convert him over
and get him bibles and the whole thing.
And he went out there with his own version of resting bitch face.
And the Paraha people, they documented the amount, they documented the amount that they
smile to determine level of happiness.
It's kind of a weird thing whenever you see like, oh, I've heard so many references.
Whatever, university is the happiest place in the world.
I was like, how do you figure that out?
Who takes surveys?
Like, what is it?
But so the way that they documented
was literally just measuring the amount of time
that they're smiling throughout the day.
And comparing it to all other cultures
that they compared it to,
these Paraha people apparently were the most smileiest people
and what was interesting with that is they don't have any
of their language structure and their belief systems are completely different than that
of modern hyper analytical aggregate stuff, quantity, quantity, quantity.
And so they don't even have any numbers.
They don't have any sense of history beyond their life.
So if you tell me about Jesus, I'm like, is this your brother?
Is this your like, give me more details? And I'm oh, no, this is guy 2,000 years ago.
They're like, what is that even me? What are you talking about?
I don't even have a conception of that. You know who talked about that? Justin who went
over to the Congo and he talked about their perceived happiness within their community
with having like nothing. Like, yeah, like one pair of clothes, a pair of sandals.
We're like
I don't know enough about computers to team whether this is an appropriate analogy
But I think we're like computers in the sense that we only have so much bandwidth and so if you offer the majority of the bandwidth out to material
Unankered shit, then that's where your energy goes now
And so if that's where you're thinking that's where your mind is is occupied, and now all of a sudden, well, I have evidence.
I've got two lambo's, I've got the new Lambo SUV dog
I'm coming up.
You know, and that's like, oh, that's me.
It's like, no, no, no.
So if you don't have any of that,
you don't even have the opportunity to make that you.
And I made an opportunity to identify with that.
And so if you don't have the opportunity to identify with that,
it's like, what do I have around?
It's like, well, I have people.
I have my body, I have my friends.
I have this cool stick that I made.
Right?
Well, I have this food.
Wow, it's not amazing.
It's not, you know, comparison to like,
if I was like Paris Hilton, you know,
but it's like it's, you know, it's,
it's not like, you don't even have that comparison though.
That's all you know.
Right.
But if it's like, if that's what you have,
it's like the five movement principles,
like breakdown of like simplistic,
like what do I have in front of me?
If you have less, it makes it easier for you
to actually pay attention to the things that matter
because those are intrinsically with you.
Oh yeah, well, I mean, you know,
we live in these modern market-based societies
and markets do one thing better than any other system,
they give us what we want and they innovate very, very well.
What's the weakness in that?
It's what we want.
And we don't know what we need,
we only know what we want.
And what I want right now is pleasure,
distraction, entertainment, good tasting,
heedingistic value of the food
and I don't want to move, so you're gonna get a lot of that
and it's not really what you need.
I think sometimes when you're forced in a situation,
then you start to really realize things.
The thing is it's no one's fault.
So I think it's really easy to like shit on
modernity and shit on Western culture.
No, no, no, no, no, like these guys, and they don't, they're learning. No, it's really easy to like shit on modernity and shit on Western culture. No, no, no, no, no, like these guys,
and they don't, they're learning.
It's a learning thing.
No, it's learning.
Yeah, and so, but if you think about the amount
of commercials that you're exposed to,
I think it's something like by the age 30,
you're exposed to something like 20 million commercials
or some ridiculous number, your whole life
since you're a little person, and then also multiply that time's,
you know, your parents' perspectives
and the world they grew up,
and all the commercials they've been exposed to,
it's literally all of those commercials
are selling you the idea that you will be enough,
you will be loved, you will be supported,
you will be all of the things when you have our shit.
And so literally, like your software system
unless you choose to actively unlearn it,
you need to go out of your way to actively unlearn it
is such that I will be whatever, you know, enough
when I make this money and buy that thing.
Dude, I had such a mind blowing paradigm shift a while ago
and I'm going through it now.
So my wife's pregnant, right?
She's in the third trimester of pregnancy.
And a while ago, on the podcast,
I had very minimal knowledge of natural childbirth
and the history of it.
My knowledge at the time was what I had heard.
And I remember on the podcast, I said,
oh yeah, childbirth is so dangerous.
Number one cause of death and women throughout all the history.
Thank God for modern medicine and blah, blah, blah.
Well anyway, I got a message from a midwife who was like, you're so wrong.
And that's not how it works.
And you know, I, she's obviously an expert and I went back and forth with her and debated
and discussed.
And she got me to the point where I became open-minded and said, well, okay, well, this is interesting.
Then I started learning more about the natural childbirth
process.
And I started to see that the way that we treat childbirth
in Western societies is the way we treat everything
with Western medicine, which is a medical emergency.
That's what Western medicine does really well.
You cannot compare with Western medicine
for dealing with medical emergencies.
There is no system that's better at that. but like anything you're really good at, if
you are a hammer, everything's a nail, right?
So that's how they treat it.
And you see it in movies.
This is how I was conditioned.
Oh my God, the woman's water broke.
Rush to the hospital.
Ah, my wife's pregnant.
What's gonna have, ah, and she gets to the hospital and then the muscles of the cervix
are like sphincters and like any sphinct muscle, and ain't gonna relax unless you're relaxed.
And your body's not gonna have this baby
unless you your body feels safe, right?
And so we have this cascading event of interventions
with, oh, you're not moving fast enough,
here's this chemical called pitose.
Oh, now it really hurts.
We gotta give you an epidural.
Oh, you can't have the baby.
Let's do a C-section.
And so I started learning about this.
So now we're in this process of,
we're gonna be doing childbirth with a midwife.
I've learned about natural childhood with them taking these courses.
And it's so interesting.
I didn't know this, right?
This is something that happens sometimes with women, right?
They go through the process of natural childbirth.
And when they get, there's different stages of it.
And once they start to get to the last stage, which is the most intense and things are really
happening, sometimes the body will stop for about 30 minutes,
30 minutes to an hour.
They'll just stop.
And the midwife say, oh yeah,
the body knows you need a break.
It'll just stop.
Doesn't mean you're not having the baby.
It gives you time to get your energy back
because the next phase is the baby's gonna come out.
The other thing they said was,
don't worry about pushing, you will push.
It just happens after they said,
and they said something to me,
which was like, well, duh.
If you do nothing about childbirth,
your body would have to say, baby, it's gonna happen.
You don't need to know anything,
and there's a lot of instinct and natural things that happen.
And we've countered it so much
that we've created something entirely different.
It reminded me of that when we're talking about what we're
talking about, that we go counter to what's natural for ourselves so much that we're causing ourselves a lot of problem and it's everything from how much stuff we have all the stuff we think that's gonna make us happy when in reality a lot of what makes you happy is your mindset what's within you how you perceive things and people people is what really makes people happy in fact it a... People that care about you for more than the shit that you've worn on your side.
Right. Good people.
So it's been, and once again, it is... I like the idea of taking full responsibility for everything,
and also at the same time saying, luckily it's not my fault, because I'm just a part of this
algorithm and environment for me and all that. But your friends, the people that you have around you,
that it's, you created them.
So by you leading with, oh, like me,
because I have this sweet car, like me,
because I have this, like me,
because I have that.
Like,
that's the people you'll have.
I mean, like what, like welcome to LA, you know, LAs.
Yeah, how the hell do you live in LA, by the way?
You're so opposite of LA. I needed to be a fish, I don't want to live there. I went to LA, because I've, you know, LA's. Yeah, how the hell do you live in LA, by the way? You're so opposite of LA.
I needed to be a fish, I don't want to.
I went to LA because I've, you know,
come from like nature, stony mecha's around.
And so I lived in Boulder, Colorado,
and then Benurgan, and Hawaii for a while,
and did a bunch of traveling in between that.
And I felt as though the way that I described LA
is LA is like an oven.
And so you go to the other places in the world
and you gather your ingredients and you make a pizza.
And you see, you put it and you get it all sorted out
and it's nice circle and you got the pepperonis
or whatever it means.
And then it's some point.
Can we politically correct some exactly?
Yeah.
Well, there's the only thing here.
I'm afraid.
I'm like, I'm withdrawn.
I picked up on the hatch.
It could be bigger.
It could be bigger.
Don't judge me.
But at some point my sensation, which may or may not have been accurate, was like, I need
to put the pizza into the oven.
And so, I drove my car down to the oven.
I've been there for the last four years, and now I have the book, and I have the one that I program,
and the podcast has grown.
Don't leave the pizza in there too long.
I was gonna say it.
But you don't wanna leave the pizza in too long.
And so now I'm planning on moving to Texas,
Austin, Texas for a short amount of time.
California is losing everybody, I swear to God.
Dude, it's nothing but Philly's signs.
Like around my neighborhood, like every block, it's just like Philly's signs. Like around my neighborhood, like every block,
it's just like Philly's Philly's.
It's almost down there.
It's like sad and almost like an interesting game.
In a way, we're gonna see another
Philly's sign, get this weird dope meathead.
I'm like, whoa, another one, wow.
Cause I'm not a landowner in LA, so I'm like, whatever.
You know, and I own a place in a more rural setting
in Bend, Oregon.
So my individualistic perspective is like as
people surge out of these places, they're going to go to like nicer, more rural type spots.
So Aaron, you living in the secular capital of the world next to probably Vegas, right?
Do you do you feel there is a a healthy balance of some of these things, right? We talked
we you alluded to the Lamborghini and you know, Sal's alluded to us chasing
pleasure and getting things for the hedonistic value. You know, can we, can we be in pursuit of
growth and being a healthy person and also find ways to allow some of those things to come into your
life or is it all bad? I think it comes back to the same response
is are you consumed by the game
or are you able to have more of a witness role of the game?
If you're in that position,
it doesn't matter what you do, in my opinion,
because you're not consumed by it.
You could be consumed by any game.
If you think that all you are is,
I mean, there's some games that would probably be better
if all you are is a father or all you are is this or that.
But even within that, you can step back and observe
and say, oh, wow, I'm playing this human game here.
So I think it's like religion.
It's like because you were raised in this specific culture
with this specific book,
in my perception, it doesn't mean that that book is true. It's just the one that you happen to have been dropped into. So within that religion, are you able to gather the tools and the benefits
from that religion or from that perspective or city or whatever, but not just identify entirely with it
because you're not that.
I think the person,
depending on how healthy they are,
and I mean that in a full sense,
that's what determines the things that they chase
and the things that they want.
So in the sense, what you're saying is true,
it doesn't matter what you're doing,
but who you are changes what you're doing.
And you won't be doing this.
The chicken of the egg.
The chicken of the egg.
Well, something so, right?
I mean, I kind of, I subscribe to what you're talking about, and I really feel like that.
It comes back to the awareness thing, right?
You keep alluding to the witness thing.
I think that is just self-awareness, is that.
I'm aware that this is a materialistic thing.
I'm aware that it is not me.
It doesn't make me anything, but I can also say like, boys, it fucking fun to drive.
Fuck yeah. You know, boys, it's boys, it cool how it corners. You know, I think, yeah, be LeBron James.
Just don't drink your LeBron James Kool-Aid. Like do everything you can to play that game well and realize that
this is just that. And then from there, I have got no hate for the player. He's like,
he's like, damn, he plays the game well. That's great. But does he think that he is that
shoe moving around the board? Right.
Not really.
Right.
You know, it's like, do you really,
you really think you're the shoe?
It's like, yeah, yeah, I'm the shoe because I'm winning.
You know, and then all of a sudden you lose hard.
And you're like, I'm not this shoe.
And you go through some form of existential crisis
where you have to analyze yourself deeper.
And now maybe all of a sudden you become,
you know, born again, something.
You know, you start to really come out and say,
God, I was never the shoe.
I was bigger than this.
The whole, man, I needed some figure up.
Maybe I choose to elect it, some figure in space, some God figure, whatever it may be.
That's the leader.
It's taking me home.
But before I thought I was the shoe my whole life, because I was winning the game.
I'm not even realizing you're the sock.
I'm not even realizing you're the sock. Within the I'm not even realizing you're the sock. Hmm.
I'm not even realizing you're the sock.
Hmm.
I'm not even realizing you're the sock.
Hmm.
I'm not even realizing you're the sock.
Hmm.
I'm not even realizing you're the sock.
Hmm. I'm not even realizing you're the sock.
Hmm.
I'm not even realizing you're the sock.
Hmm. I'm not even realizing you're the sock.
Hmm.
I'm not even realizing you're the sock.
Hmm.
I'm not even realizing you're the sock.
Hmm.
I'm not even realizing you're the sock.
Hmm.
I'm not even realizing you're the sock.
Hmm. I'm not even realizing you're the sock. Hmm. Hmm. I'm not even realizing you're the sock. Hmm. Yeah, I mean, it's spiritual physics. I think it's really, there's a science to it.
It's the same way that people are built up in culture
to be torn down.
You get to a certain level where all of a sudden,
it's like, wow, I mean, there's a handful of comedians
right now that I've, I'm one of which I'm fairly close with
it's going through kind of like the whole,
all the stuff of like me too and all that stuff.
And it's such an interesting thing to watch the development, you know, watch the,
is that they grow, grow, grow, grow, grow, grow, grow, and then all of a sudden it's like, okay,
now you're, you're in position. The trees are so much taller, it's, you can see it from miles away.
Now you have, there's like, there's something scientific about it of all the rest of the nodes.
I think we'll have the tendency of like,
how can we chop that thing back down?
Because if that's down, then I'm up.
And it's like there's some equilibrium thing
that happens with it.
And so we seek out to be at that point.
And then eventually some people play the game well enough
that they arrive at that point.
And then very often they resent that point.
So I find it interesting that science wants to prove it that it's some physiological thing that
happens or that we can break it down scientifically and then spiritually we want to just attribute it
all to God. There's got to be something there and I feel like no matter which one you subscribe to,
it's a religion. Everything is science is one of the biggest religions. Well, scientism is a very dangerous obviously religion. It lacks morality. It's purely objective.
Right. The computer. Well, it asks, it doesn't ask, should I? It always says, can I?
Oh, let me see, yeah, it's not a should, you know, let's see if we can. That's always the question.
I think you have to look at different lenses to understand different types of wisdom.
It doesn't make sense to use science to understand art or poetry. It doesn't make sense to use.
We sure tried to though. We do. It doesn't make sense to use religion to understand science.
Religion and spirituality has its own wisdom. And they're all, look, if you believe in evolution,
you have to believe in the evolution of ideas. And if things stick around a long time,
it's because it's probably valuable.
There's probably some wisdom in there.
If something's been around for a long time,
don't just throw it out, ask yourself,
why have people found this particular thing valuable
for as long as they have?
Because it's gone through a lot of different people
who, you know, combining them all
is definitely gonna be smarter than you.
Find the wisdom with that.
Don't just cut it out.
Yeah, and all that, I think it comes back to like,
the same thing, ancient wisdom, you know,
having polarities, Nian and Yang, and light and dark,
and sun and moon, east, west, science, you know,
whatever the other is, science,
science, and whatever other is, it's more like a science, you know, whatever the other is, science, science, and whatever other is,
it's more like a holistic,
more artistic, more, you know, expressive.
And so you said it with,
if we never were instructed how to deliver a baby,
we would naturally figure it out, obviously.
You know, and so it's one of those things where it's like,
we have the scientific flashlight
from a Western person that grows up
indoctrinated into the world that we have it feels
Comforting to be able to come back and say don't worry everything's been defined everything's been measured
We have a scientific term for there's that arrogance, yeah, it's like don't worry We. We've put the definition on it. We got the DSM, you've got the ADHD.
And you're like, oh, okay, I got the ADHD, great.
Don't worry, we got a drug for that.
Great, great, great, great.
You got a drug?
Okay, go out, go out, go, go, go, go.
We're good.
You know, and then beyond that, it's like,
so that's the more scientific realm, it's great.
I'm glad that we have pharmaceutical drugs.
I'm glad that we have surgery.
I'm glad that we have all of that stuff. Behind that we have surgery and glad that we have all of that stuff behind that
It's like well, how do you define and confine and delineate?
You know say someone playing a violin that's making people weep in a subway in Paris
You're like, what's the science there? It's like well you see that that's a song
It it's struck some chord in the Amid the
Blood, it's like, shut the fuck up. Listen to the song.
Doesn't need definition. No, no, no. No, you're not going to solve spiritual illness with
medicine, just like you're not going to solve bacterial infection with art or whatever.
And that's when the science mind can become judgmental of that same person we referenced
before that went to Peru and to the Iwaska journey and all that stuff.
And then, but there's a lot of missing pieces that science hasn't completely classified
yet, but perhaps in five years maybe we might create some definitions for that.
Interesting book, Derek Thompson's hit makers,
have you read that before?
No.
So you'll appreciate that for this conversation.
Just we're talking about the science of art and music
and that book makes the case for that.
Yeah, yeah, read it.
It's a good, it's an interesting read.
I mean, it contradicts what I think what we're saying
and what we believe, but they, I mean,
they believe that you can scientifically break down
all that.
I, yeah, I think everything.
It's, I, I describe science as it's like you're in a car and you're driving down a dusty road
and your experience in the cars, blah, mopping down and switching gears, whoa, that's art.
And you're just in the moment, you're feeling it and you're like, I hit the jump from whatever, maybe a power slide, whoo.
You know, and then behind that, that artistic expression
that just felt authentically,
it was like I was like moved by something,
it just came out, I don't even know how to explain it.
Behind that, once the dust starts to settle with time,
you can have the scientists and the nerds coming up
behind, nothing against nerd,
it'd be nerd and doing way.
They come up behind and they're analyzing the tire tracks
and they're analyzing the type of rubber that was used
and it's this very dry, sterile kind of definitive.
Okay, this is what happened.
We've got it.
You put it into the books.
It's like, we have some science about that red experience.
It reminds me of trying to break down flow state, right?
Like that's how it is.
Like when you have athletes and people that have been doing this for decades and probably centuries of doing things
and they've been able to just drop into that
without thinking about anything
and now we're trying to pick it apart and figure out.
How do we formulate this?
But the person in the car, it would be very easy for them
to be like, you know, just right off the nerve grade
falling behind and be like, ah, they don't know anything.
You know, just that they're not even in the experience.
Yeah.
And then the nerve grade could be looking
at the people in the car and they're like,
they don't even understand the type of rubber in their tie.
Like, they don't know anything about this experience.
So they're looking at almost,
it's like two different languages describing the same thing
and then they're having wars about it.
It's like, what if we just team up
and then I think that's how people start to respond? That reminds me of the potential consequences that I feel I see when I go to like a live
sporting event now.
And, you know, because I've been watching live sports for a very long time, I've watched
this crazy evolution in the last, like, decade of where you saw none of this before.
And then I watched a little bit of it and then more and more of it than the majority of
it now, like everybody, when you're at, at like a live concert or a live game has gone from being in the moment feeling
the music, feeling the game and being so into the environment to caring more about recording
it through your phone so you could post it and share it on Instagram.
They're watching the whole thing through their phones.
Yeah, yeah, I always I always think about like what are the unintended consequences of
that? Like will they experience less joy because of that or will they never get the fullest
feeling of what that is like being almost one with that moment because they are so concerned about
sharing that with others. It's just a they're just in a different medium.
You know their medium is opposed to being absorbed by the sound and being with the people and all that
their medium as opposed to being absorbed by the sound and being with the people and all that, their medium is capture.
I want to capture.
And I'm looking into the screen and even inherently looking into the screen as opposed to
utilizing panoramic vision, your eyes or an extension of your brain, and the way that you use
your vision, if you're narrowing in your focus that goes back into, say I'm pulling a bow
back and I'm focusing all my energy into that one prey that's out there.
I get my proper cocktail of cortisol and stress hormones
and I'm really focusing like a shark.
Versus, say I take in the whole panoramic vision,
which is Andrew Huberman, Dr. Andrew Huberman.
He's like the, he reviewed my whole chapter about this, thankfully,
because I had all sorts of errors, and he was like,
this is how it actually should be written. And so he's like he's a research rep in Stanford which is,
Sanford is like right beside here, huh? Yeah, so he's he's back and forth through here. Have you
done a podcast with him? No. Okay, it would be really great for you guys to have him. Cool. He's
like one of the smartest humans in his perception of the way that our visual muscles inform our autonomic nervous system is brilliant.
So when you go into taking in that panoramic view
of the whole entire, you're watching all the crowd
and you're watching, maybe it's an outdoor concert
and the clouds and all that, it literally informs
the nervous system that you're in a more open,
flow, calm, receptive place.
When you narrow your vision in,
you organize your nervous system to more executive function,
get shit done, I'm here to capture.
Oh, that's interesting because do you remember when we theorized
about this?
So we talked about this on the podcast,
about the experience you have when you go somewhere like
you simmity. And you and you have this kind of why do we all have this breathtaking moment?
It's just rocks and trees and sky. Yeah, you can look at it in a picture. Right, but exactly.
But why when you go there and I we theorized that it had something to do with really at that moment
recognizing how small you are in comparison to something so brand.
The scale is overwhelming.
But what you're saying is a little bit different than that.
That's very interesting.
It's both.
Yeah, that's interesting.
So, first, it puts you into a place of receptivity, and then that allows those pots, those
thoughts to start to kind of stir up in that cauldron.
But first, you need to be in a receptive place.
So if you are just watching
your semity on a screen, you're seeing the same image. But it's not nearly going to hit you in that
visceral, boi way. And that's because literally it's like you first are opening the container
through those visual muscles. Slash everything else. It sounds, you're being in live end. And so
in our modern day where you're taking all of those potential,
have you guys hunted ever?
I have one, I was younger.
So I went bow hunting for the first time last summer in Maui, Hawaii.
And as I was out there, it's this insane sensation,
literally all the cliché things, feeling more alive than I ever had and all that stuff
It was quite true because I was being forced to have this sense of
sound and wind and you know everything like behind me to the left I was measuring distances. Okay, cool like that bushes 20 yards and you know taking my my range find that bushes 30 yards
That bushes 50 yards, you know, so I'm literally like just by me b is posting up here I'm I'm in liveening my brain I'm
like I'm like an electrical storm inside my mind to be able to cast a net in my environment
and like become the environment whereas when you just put all of that information of that moment
into some like bow hunting special on TNT, you're like,
you're kind of dying in a way.
If the reference point, the other side of the spectrum was becoming alive and by your
environment, I think capturing all of that, putting it into a screen and calling that
your life, I think that would be kind of opposite.
Always an interesting time hanging out with you, dude.
Yeah, well thank you so much.
Thanks for coming on, man.
Honored to be here, I really appreciate.
It's been time with you guys.
Thanks brother.
Thank you.
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