Mind Pump: Raw Fitness Truth - 992: Sanjay Rawal

Episode Date: March 21, 2019

In this episode, Sal, Adam and Justin speak with Sanjay Rawal, a filmmaker with a fascinating story. The history of the 3100 race. (4:40) Why running has never gone out of favor. The evolution of marathon running. (8:25) How do ancestral people run compared to modern westerners? (12:11) What is the spiritual connection to running? (14:00) Why do other spiritual teachers/practices try to separate the physical from the spiritual? (17:50) What type of person does this kind of race attract? (20:57) Why you should workout to love yourself, not because you hate your body. (22:43)   How did he meet Sri Chinmoy and what was it like following his practices? (26:28) The importance of finding joy through the exertion. (31:30) Who made the biggest impact on him that he has met so far? (34:54) How did he figure out his passion for film making? (37:52) What is the purpose of abstaining from meat if we evolved to run down our food? (41:10) How your diet is highly based on your genetics. (47:03) The major similarities between the 3100 race and the 1000 day race in Japan. (50:12) What are the commonalities that he finds with the people who do these feats of endurance? (53:08) How does he feel about the growing anti-religious movement? (56:45) Amazing stories from the Transcendent Race. (59:28) The difficult factors of eating, drinking and sleeping during the course of the 3100. Why if you don’t have the mindset, no amount of nutrition will help. (1:01:22) Does he still do races himself? (1:08:13) What is his current relationship with his parents and have they come full circle with his current path? (1:11:40) How everyone has their own path and the most important thing is finding it. (1:14:40) How did he find Mind Pump, what drew him to them and what has kept him around? (1:16:45) Featured Guest/People Mentioned: Sanjay Rawal (@mrsanjayr)  Instagram 3100: Run And Become, the Film (@3100film)  Instagram Arnold (@Schwarzenegger)  Twitter Frank Zane (@officialfrankzane)  Instagram Bill Pearl Rich Roll (@richroll)  Instagram Joe De Sena (@realJoeDeSena)  Twitter Bishop Robert Barron (@bishopbarron)  Instagram Patti Catalano Dillon Products Mentioned: March Promotion: MAPS Aesthetic is ½ off!! **Code “BLACK50” at checkout** 3100: Run and Become - The Film3100: Run and Become Challenging Impossibility – Shot film Mind Pump Episode 595: Joe DeSena Mind Pump Episode 917: Joe DeSena The Dawn Wall | Netflix The I SURVIVED Series | Lauren Tarshis Mind Pump Episode 827: Bishop Barron - Using YouTube & Social Media to Demystify Christianity & God

If you want to pump your body and expand your mind, there's only one place to go. Mite, op, mite, op with your hosts. Salda Stefano, Adam Schaefer, and Justin Andrews. God, one of my favorite things about what we do is being completely shocked and blown away. Yeah. By meeting somebody that I had completely different ideas on in terms of what I thought the interview would go, for example. What a great interview.

I mean, Sanjay Rawal, you're about to listen to us talk to him. You know, he's a documentary filmmaker. He's done, you know, directed food chains, challenging possibility. And the most recent one, the reason why we have him on the show, he directed a film called 3100 Run and Become, which is about this insane, long distance race where people literally run around a half city block in New York City

for 3100 miles over the course of I think 50 days. And so we thought we're gonna talk all about just kind of endurance running and whatnot. We did some of that, but boy, did this episode really surprise us. I mean, the history of this guy, he was a follower of Sree Chin Moin. If you don't know who he is, it was a spiritual leader who, you know, I think he was almost got the Nobel Peace Prize at one point. And through following this leader, he met Mother Teresa, Bill Pearl, Frank Zane,

Pope John Paul, Desmond Tutu, I mean, you name it. And the teachings that Sreach Inmoe taught him had a lot to do with spirituality, but also how it's combined with physical exertion and how the physicality of athleticism, there's a strong spiritual component, which totally resonated with us. I mean, when I lift weights and work out and I've been doing it for so long, I definitely understand what he's talking about when he brings that up. And so there was a lot of really great information and just inspiring information. I was just saying, inspiring. And we haven't met a whole lot of people that have really had that kind of like impact of inspiration.

When you listen to his stories, it's just, you can't help it, man. You just like are compelled by what he has to say about it. Yeah, you got to check out the documentary 3100 Run and Become. It's a great documentary. It talks about some of the histories of running the different cultures from hunter-gatherers to Native Americans and of course to some of these races that we do in the US. Very well made. Their Instagram page is at 3100 film and then of course the documentary can be found on iTunes and Amazon. We highly suggest you check it out. We know you're gonna love this interview. Probably one of my favorite interviews I've done in a long time. I actually rented it on YouTube for I think 3, $3.99 or $4.99.

So you can also get it on the YouTube. So if you guys subscribe to the YouTube, you can do it that way. That's right. Now, before we get into the review, I want to remind everybody that Maps aesthetic is 50% off. It's still half off. You got to go to Maps, excuse me, Maps Fitnessproducts.com or maps.com, either site, and use the code black50black50 for that 50% off discount. Now also on the site maps fitnessproducts.com,

you can look at our other maps programs, and many of them, they're all designed for different goals, different athletic backgrounds, or fitness backgrounds from beginner to advanced. Make sure you go check those out. And that's it, man. Again, one of my favorite interviews, we know you're gonna enjoy this.

Here we are interviewing Sanjay Rual. Where'd you come from, by the way? How'd you get here? Where are you coming from? I live in Queens, but my parents live in Oakland. It's not like I'm going to go up. And so I just drove down here and surprised how much less traffic there is now than 20 years ago. Really?

Weirdly enough. I used to work right by, I guess it used to be called Great America. Yeah. And I would have to leave it like seven in the morning to get there like 9.45, you know. It was crazy. Yeah, I'm surprised you didn't run into a lot of traffic because I feel like it's got worse since I was Everybody says that who doesn't live in New York. Oh, you guys are worst

It's like an hour to go eight miles. Is that how you got into running like screw this trash? So I watched your your film 3100 and I was just blown away by the Just by the whole thing. I want to know let's go all the way back to the beginning like what got you to the point of Creating that film what got you into even before that I have I want I actually you are the perfect person because I think We're all very uneducated on the history of Marathon running and how that even came about so I'd love for you to start there and just kind of educate our audience on the evolution of that

where that started and then we can get to where you come into the picture. You know, I'll bounce away, way, way back and then we can pick that thread up later. But as part of the movie 3100 Run and Become, I spent some time in Botswana with hunters and gathers, and the running that I saw there, and the purpose of how they ran just blew me out of the water, and it put into context modern long-distance running. So even before the marathon was popularized, at the end of the 1800s,

people would gather in Madison Square Garden in New York City to run for six days. And it was like a horse race. People would bet on who would win. The marathon, of course, became really, really popular in the 70s when the New York City marathon went from loops around Central Park to a five-borrow run, which was in honor of America's 200th anniversary,

the bicentennial in 1976. It blew up in the 80s and 90s, but then again, it's like marathoning pre-1980 was always counter-culture. People would go like, as men, they'd go like, you're destroying yourselves. As women, they'd say like, you're never gonna have babies

if you do long-distance running. All ridiculous things debunked by science. But it wasn't the 80s that idea of doing multi-day races was revived again. Six-day races, 10-day races, and that eventually evolved into what's now the world's longest running race, the 3,100 mile self-transcendence race.

And it goes back to the principle of like taking the logistics out of these long day runs, like the ones in Madison Square Garden. People do run across the United States, but then you need your like aid trailer following you. You can't like just use the restroom on the side of a highway. So the multi-day races were staged around a loop.

And so the 3,100 mile run is staged around a half mile loop right in New York City. And so it requires people to do about 59 miles a day to finish within the 52 day window. It's the officially the longest certified race in the world. And it's literally the same loop over and over and over again every day. The variation is that you get to change directions every day. That's it. But it's the idea of like getting into a flow state. You know, people who've run across the United States,

if you start in San Francisco, you go over the searors, the Wasatch, the Rocky Mountains, and then it's like you could have a headwind all the way from Denver to Columbus, Ohio. And you're worried about traffic, you're worried about food, but when you take those logistics out and you put it on a half mile loop, then all of a sudden it's like with no traffic,

people can get into this effectively like a meditative state of mind. And you really connect with like what humans connected with 10,000, 15,000, 20,000 years ago. Well, the thing that I have communicated this on our show in the past and the thing that a lot of people, I don't think realize is that as animals, humans are actually quite terrible at most physical feats.

We're not very strong, even if you lift weights and train or whatever compared to other animals, we're pretty weak. We don't jump high, we don't do much that's really good or really spectacular in the animal kingdom, except for a couple things, one of them is we can throw it with accuracy. And the other one is we can out trek pretty much almost any animal.

I mean, a human compared to even a horse, we can out trek a horse. And so we're kind of evolved and built to be able to do these long, long distance type events. And it fell out of favor. What brought it back? Obviously we did this as hunter-gatherers. What was it that got fell out of favor. What brought it back? Obviously we did this as hunter-gatherers. What was it that got it out of favor and what brought it back into our lives?

You know, with some cultures, particularly the ones that we consider indigenous, like Native Americans, particularly in the Southwest, with the Bushmen of the Kalahari, running never one out of favor. Because running was a spiritual activity. Way of life, right? Yeah, it was a way of life. And in 3,100 we have a Navajo character, as you know, we have a Kalahari Bushman character, and we once spent three weeks in the Kalahari desert with Bushman. Now, they don't practice running. To them, like the idea of like like training for sports, to do sports doesn't make any sense.

But they're natural runners. They grow up understanding that power doesn't come from calories. Power comes from mother earth. It comes from your bare feet on the earth. They say when you run, you breathe in, father, sky, your feet are praying to mother earth. And when you look back, like you said, Sal, like at the evolution of humans, we had no advantages on the savannah. We could be outrun by anything. But the two things that we could do is we could carry water. Most animals have to be around watering holes.

And because we're on two feet, each breath we take isn't coupled to a breath. If you can imagine a horse extending, you know, all four legs extend or a dog, that's when the lungs expand. And then when you push off the ground, the body collapses and you have to breathe out air. Here we could decouple. So we're aerobic machines, whereas big animals, they can sprint, but they can't go

long distances. So with the Bushmen, we went on a hunt and they said, but they can't go long distances. So with the Bushmen, we went on a hunt, and they said, look, this might take 24 hours or 48 hours, because we first of all have to track things that are trying to run away from us. We have to be downwind, but then we have to gradually scare these animals away from the known watering holes. You know, after 24 or 48 hours,

we'll actually be able to catch them. They will not be able to run as fast as us. And the kicker is, like I thought that that meant that they would have aerobic capacity. But there's always one fellow who's there for the final chase. He's the guy who's incredibly fast and can do the final push and catch the animal and run faster than the animal in a depleted state.

And we had one of those guys with us in the movie, it was Gowlo. And we don't show this, but the guy had glutes that look like two catalogs. I mean, the power that he had in his running blew apart the idea that I had that we as human beings were weak slow runners. He actually accelerated an analogue in a depleted state and caught it by hand. Oh, shit. He didn't want to like, you got to see this in person?

Yeah, and it's in the movie. Like, that's crazy. He didn't want to destroy it and have the blood everywhere because we had to go back like 12 hours and bleeding animal would attract a lot of things that would want to eat us too. So he caught it you know he's immobilized it and somebody came and caught up with him and broke its neck. But we saw him literally chase this thing down by foot and in the movie he gets smaller

and smaller and smaller because our caromander run like him. But it showed that he had power, not just aerobic endurance. It was that sprint speed at the very end. Yeah, yeah, and which you saw, it's like, we almost didn't capture it because he took off, like he saw tracks, and he felt the presence of an animal where we didn't,

all of a sudden this animal jumped out from behind a bush, he took off and ended up wrestling it down with his hands because by the time we caught him, he was on top of it. And he didn't use his knife, didn't use an arrow or anything. Well, as somebody who's been in the sports of running and been around them as long as you have,

what do you think about the way that these ancestral runners run versus the ways that modern people tend to run? Because I notice a big difference when I watch videos, this is something that I'm fascinated by. But when I watch Hunter Gathers on video hunting and running, they seem to run and they bound and they do it in kind of this effortless, perfect biomechanic kind of way. When I see modern, you know, westerners run,

it almost looks like they're, well, it looks like they hadn't started running until they got into their teens in 20s versus born and then you just start running. I think this is the heart of your podcast, right? It's like, do you use athletics? Do you train to look better, to lose weight or to become a better person? And when you look at that last idea, like, do you run to become a better person? All of a sudden sudden the training just, it radically changes.

Instead of trying to train for like, you know, the Boston Marathon this April, you start to think like, how can I run for the rest of my life? Right. How can I get something out of this, the rest of my life? And I found through like looking at traditional runners,

they get a lot more out of it than I do. Like they enjoy it more. Every time they go for like a workout, they wouldn't even consider to work out. Every time like our Navajo character, Sean Martin, would go for his morning run, he was fully expecting that the run was gonna make him a better person.

That it was gonna add to his own personal transformation. It wasn't about the GPS watch, it wasn't about logging the miles or looking at your splits, or looking at, like if you're working out your reps and the poundage and that kind of thing, it was a totally different mindset. And he got more out of each workout than I ever, ever did.

Wow, that's fat. Now, what is the spiritual connection to running? Can you explain that? I do find that in pretty much most major spiritual practices, there's some kind of a challenger struggle that helps people bring people closer to their spiritual goal, whether it be fasting or trekking or running in this case. What is the connection for you between this spiritual aspect and then the physical athletic, you know, aspect of running?

You know, the interesting thing is like I moved from the East Bay to New York City in 1997 to study with an Indian spiritual teacher, Sri Chenmoy, and not many people moved to New York to try to find inner peace And I was one of the crazy ones that did. How did you find them? What made you do that? You know, some of his students were teaching meditation classes in Berkeley where I went to school. And you know, everything like that is a dime, a dozen in Berkeley.

But I felt that, you know, his philosophy was unique. It didn't dissociate the body from the spirit. And no harm, no foul, but a lot of spiritual practices. You know, it's like, if you do anything, you just do yoga. But it's like building physical strength isn't congruous with inner strength on some paths. But I always thought that was ridiculous.

And on his path, you know, he combined the two. And like when you look back at like ancient, like physical practices, like in Sparta and ancient Greece, you know, there was a lot of mental preparation. And you would say there was a lot of spiritual preparation to, you know, to work out and to go into battle, to go into, to competition. In the 83th, Chenmoy, as an Indian spiritual teacher, took up weightlifting. And he did so under the guise of folks like Bill Pearl. Yeah, I saw that, right?

I Frank Zane. Like, these guys that want people to think as meat heads, but like Frank has a master's degree in Buddhism. You know, so it's like some of these all-time bodybuilders, it's like they understood that to reach peak performance, you needed to have a really strong inner life. It's like basically to stand up to like Arnold's ribbing on stage, not to collapse with your

confidence, like you need to be able to match it with your own inner confidence. So Sri Chenmai was the opposite of what I thought an Indian spiritual teacher would be. It's like he was into weightlifting, he was into running, and he actually started the 3,100 mile race. He felt that sports ultimately wasn't just a metaphor for like running along the road of life that by making your body strong in this modern day and age, that's the only way to make your heart strong. Like you can't have a spiritual life unless you have a strong body. You can't just by having a strong body have a spiritual life, but they had to go hand

in hand. And when I started doing the research for the movie 3100 Runner become I saw that like these great athletes I was meeting around the world Who came from traditional backgrounds including the Kenyans the Ethiopians they looked at running and you can say this as training they looked at running as a teacher That their workout their practice of this endeavor was going to make them better people their workout, their practice of this endeavor was going to make them better people. They looked at the actual activity as a prayer or as a ritual, so every step mattered. It wasn't just like if there's a warm up and there's a this and that, there's a cool down.

Everything was a continuum. And lastly, they looked at it as a celebration of life, where sport is community. It's like when you look at the great runners, is it anybody who trains well, they have training partners? And it's like that team aspect is so important to like becoming better at your sport and better as a human being. And that's where I see the nexus between the spirituality aspect

that is not just about like, you know, disappearing into yourself. It's about looking at the activity as a teacher, as a celebration of life, as a prayer itself. It's funny you say that because, you know, my favorite thing to do in terms of athletics, if you can even call it that, is lifting weights. I like to work out weights.

And people who like to lift weights and do it for decades will refer to things like the squat rack is my alter. This is my meditation. And I achieve much of what you're talking about kind of on accident through working out. I do it because I love doing it for the sake of doing it without even thinking about the goal of building muscle or getting stronger. It is, and I've said this to many people and sometimes people think I'm crazy. It's like I feel like it's a spiritual thing for me at times when I'm in there working out on my own

And I know people listening who've been working out for a long time can kind of identify with that Why do you think it is that other spiritual teachers or practices would try to separate the physical From the spiritual why do you think they try to astute that? And some of them will even demonize it to some extent. I mean, I don't wanna criticize anything, any other path directly, but if you look at the continuum of spirituality, if you look back at like ancient India

versus modern India, people don't think of modern India as the land of warriors, but like you talked about Gama, the wrestler. Yeah. Now Gama was actually modern India as the land of warriors, but you talked about Gama, the wrestler. Gama was actually Indian. Oh, was he Indian? He was in 1800s, 1900s or so. But it's like, if you look back at Indian spiritual leaders like Krishna, Arjuna, these great epics of like, you know, light versus darkness, they took place on the battlefield literally. So like spiritual warriors were also like outer warriors, inner warriors were outer warriors and vice versa. And that was 3,000 years ago, even Buddha who came

after Krishna. He wasn't a warrior, but he was a prince. And so like growing up, it's like he was an expert in like the martial arts. To spread his message, he walked thousands of miles across India. I don't know how and why that disappeared, but it definitely did. In this day and age, we look at spirituality as something weak. But when you guys are talking about your achievements in lifting, the 3,100 mile race is called the self-transcendence, 3,100 mile race. The question is like, why is it called self-transcendence? What does that mean? The founders, Sri Chinmoi, felt that by going beyond

your own capacities, you get a deep sense of joy, which is spiritual. It's like, that's progress. And weightlifting for him was an incredible example of that where if you did a little bit more than you did a month ago, it's like the gains, it's like the amount of joy that you get from that, it's pure, it's constructive, and by definition, it can't be separated from the type of joy that you get from a contemplative practice. So he thought that those two things did go hand at hand.

And it's odd that that type of tool of feeling spirituality through your physical is not a part of other spiritual traditions, when it's just as important as a contemplative meditative practice. Do you find people that are attracted to these types of events and races? What type of a person does this attract? Is it people that are really afflicted, or addicted to substances, or really going through like really hard times in life,

or is this something like, they're seeking something more meaningful? That's a great question. It's like, I think the people that have really understood the transformative properties of sports are people who have hit rock bottom. Those are kind of the best examples where there's a lot of ultra-distance runners that can put up with the pain in the outer pain because they've had worse pain inwardly.

In races, they can go like, this is nothing compared to what I've gone through. That said, it's like, you know, from an Eastern spiritual standpoint, like, you don't need to go through suffering per se to achieve bliss. Like, they don't have to go hand in hand. And so, there's tons of other people who realize that, you know, running can take them to goals, even from a platform of relative stability. But the idea I think is the same that you can make spiritual progress and transformative progress through sports and through running.

This is why sometimes I'll rail against the whole, I'm working out to achieve this particular goal. Like I just wanna look this way or I wanna be able to run this fast or I wanna be able to lift this much weight. There's nothing necessarily wrong with that, but only focusing on that, I believe negates all of the wisdom that comes from the journey,

which I believe to be the most important aspect of it. It's not the, I finished the race. It's the journey along the race that I think you gained the most weight of the process. You made a statement, Sal, were you talking about how it's like your church or altar? And I think that you represent a minority in the weightlifting world.

And we talk about this on the show a lot, which I know you know, that you should work out because you love yourself, not because you hate your body. Now, I'm curious because when we look at the landscape of bodybuilding or working outside a gym, I would say that unfortunately, a majority of the people in the gym are doing it for the wrong reasons.

They're punishing themselves. Yeah, exactly. They're punished themselves because they don't like who they are. They don't like the way their body is or whatever it may be. And that's part of our mission on our show is to try and help people make a better connection, a better relationship with exercise.

What do you see when you look at the landscape of ultra marathon running and running? Do you see something similar that, you know, few people really get it and understand the purpose behind it? Or do you think a majority of all of them are doing it for the right purposes? You know, that's a great question. And it's one of the reasons why we made the movie

3,100 Run and Become. It's because a lot of us in life will do things and have like a moment of spirituality or a moment of joy and not necessarily realize there's long traditions of looking at sports as a spiritual practice. For thousands of years in the West, we haven't used running as a spiritual practice,

but the Navajo still do. A bunch of indigenous culture is still do. By making a movie that shared that kind of language, that again, for the Navajo running, when you run on Mother Earth, you're feeding on Mother Earth, you're breathing in Father's Sky. It's like giving people the kind of language of spirituality around a common physical pursuit, I think helps people not only understand the experiences that they might have had in life, but also makes them understand that there's a way

to use running as a religion. That people have used it as a religion for thousands of years and by studying those different examples, you can look at running as a different type of tool. In terms of a great example in the bodybuilding world, Frank Zane, I believe it was in the 1977 lead up to the mystery universe, he told himself that,

if I chant my spiritual mantra, my incantation, my meditation incantation, a million times, doesn't matter how hard anybody else trains in these three months, I'm gonna win. And so he went and basically locked himself into like a gym garage in Florida for three months, you know, worked out like a madman,

but chanted his mantra like a madman. And when he showed up on the stage, and this is like the only competition that Arnold lost. You see, one of the, Arnold talks about this, this is one of the few competitions he ever lost, and he lost the Frank Zane. And Arnold was like, what, six, three, six, four Frank Zane might have been pushing five, six, five, seven. Yeah, he outweighed Zane by, I don't know, 70 pounds, it was totally different. And so according to Zane, it's like the one advantage that he had over Arnold and anybody else

was the power that this spiritual training brought him. Now, I can't explain it other than that, but it's like, if you look at that advantage that spirituality allowed Frank Zane to beat Arnold in his prime, you go, okay, there's something real here and it's definitely worth exploring. Yeah, I think we've interviewed enough high level, top level athletes in coaches,

and when you ask them what separates the best from everyone else, because at that level, you're, I mean, when you're the top 1% of 1%, everybody's amazing. But the people who beat everybody in that category, it's that. They have that inner belief, that almost spiritual aspect of what they do. It's, you know, we can label it as confidence, but it's almost beyond that and it's really interesting What was it like? following Sri Chinwain what was that whole process? How did you meet him and what was that all like because he did?

I mean there was lots of meditation involved. This was like a whole this was your whole life It was like look it was it was really difficult because I I met him when I was a sophomore in college. And he, like, look, look, if you look at like him just being a teacher, he had rules. Like, if you're going to go become, um, you know, a student of a great physicist, that person would say, like, well, you're working in my lab for like 16 hours a day and like, that's your life, nothing else. And if you didn't like the rules of that professor, you could go find someone else. So he said, if you want to follow my path

and get the kind of inner gains that I can give you, and understand the depth of universal love and universal peace, which are things that I was interested in. You have to do three things, or you have to abstain from three things, which are not an issue at all in terms of life, but it's like on my path, it's built around abstinence, like no physical relationships, no drinking, no eating meat, no smoking, and said that there's lots of spiritual paths where you can make a lot of progress by doing those things, but in terms of my path,

it's like my philosophy's based around progress with these rules. And as a sophomore in college, you can. Yeah, you're like a young man full of testosterone. And it's like, I don't want to say things like in terms of biblical terms of temptation, but it's like, there are beautiful people in college, and there are like no restrictions,

like you're no longer living under the roof of your parents. So I was like, I can let me try this for three months and Just like I said, just like I came off a breakup. So I was like I can be absidin for like a month You know and like I can be off meat for a month and it's like I don't really't really smoke because I ran. It's like I drink once a week, and I can skip four weekends. And after that month, I was like, I actually feel a lot better about myself now. And again, this isn't for everybody.

I'm not trying to like advocate a type of lifestyle, but it worked for me. And it's like, if you look at all of us and how many years we each search to find our own like best routine, to be the best person we can be, I was so lucky that I found that when I was 19. I think the message of abstinence in different forms

doesn't have to be abstinence from all the things you said, but I think that message is gonna get more and more popular today because we have access to more and more things unlimited access to food, pornography, some people's drugs, some people's money, and I think that there's meaning that you find an abstinence. So you left school to do this, did you live with this group and how did that work? So I finished my undergraduate, but then I said, let me, instead of going to graduate school,

let me consider this as an inner graduate school. And so I moved to New York and, Street Chen, my lived in a rough and tumble neighborhood. We weren't living in Soho or the West Village or someplace fancy, because his idea was in order to really serve the world, you have to be a part of it. So we were living in a neighborhood that was effectively not that much more like affluent

than like East Oakland in the 90s. So it was rough and tumble. How did you parent, like you tell your parents, hey, hey, mom, dad, I'm not going to go to college anymore. I'm going to go live in this neighborhood and live with this group of people. Yeah, they weren't happy because they both had PhDs. They were both professors and stuff like that. You were supposed to be a doctor, right?

Yeah. I was like, going to be the good Indian kid, where a doctor, seriously, programmer or lawyer or whatever. But you know, in my 20s, I traveled with them. So it's like, I met Mother Teresa. He was great friends with Mandela. Yeah. Oh wow. He met with Pope John Paul. Yeah. Yeah. And so like, I traveled

around the world and you go like, how did that happen to me in my 20s? And at the same time, it's like, he was really good friends with Bill Pearl. And so I got to spend a lot of time with Bill Pearl, Carl Lewis, Frank Zane, all these people that like, you know, I was much more interested in them than the Desmond Tutus and Mendelos of the world. And after that 10 years, you know, he passed away in 2007, you know, I realized that I became a fully formed person really by virtue of him being my teacher. You know, it's like one of the most important things. It's like if you find a really good mentor and it's like if you learn how to be obedient,

and like if you have clients, for example, the worst thing, the worst quality, I would say, is like they're disobedient. It's like if they're coming to you to make progress, and they don't wanna listen to you, you go like what can I do for you? At the same time, it's like they're lucky to have coaches like you, and if they understand that,

they're gonna make more progress than if they like try to read from a book. Well, I love that you said the word obedience because I think sometimes there's a negative connotation to that. Like, oh, you're just doing what someone says. But oftentimes when you are learning from a good mentor, someone who has integrity and has your best intentions, you need to be obedient or you need to do what they say to experience what you need to experience to gain the wisdom.

So it's like if I tell a client do these things and they're like, well, I don't know what's going to do for me, but I'm going to do what you're saying. And oftentimes if people did, they would experience the benefits and the feelings. And then that became their teacher. That became what gave them their wisdom. But it took them to have that faith first, that obedience that you're talking about. You know, I did a long run with a bunch of Native Americans last March to kind of run from the Southwest to Bears' ears, like a national monument that was just stripped of

its status. But a Hopi elder said, as we were beginning one day's journey, you know, we were running 30, 40 miles, he said, find joy through exertion. And that, to me, is exactly what you said. It's like, it's not mindless obedience. It's like, maybe the first step is mindless obedience. But then you realize you've got joy from that obedience and that it's taken you a step further

by listening to your mentor or your teacher. And when this Hopi elder said, find joy through exertion. I realized like that's for me, that's like the key to athletics. You can't just exert, but it's like if you can find happiness in that struggle, if you can find happiness

and that extreme push to go beyond your boundaries, like that kind of unlocks a different sense of purpose. What do you think about how modern life aims to make everything easier and easier and how struggle is what we're constantly trying to remove from our lives and eliminate from our lives? I mean, that's why I love running because if you're trying to make progress, it's not a one, two, three-month crash course, nor is it with your training.

You have to look at it in terms of like six, nine, 12-month cycles. I'm going to want to be a recent program. You talked about how you can't just binge on weekends. You have to look at a continuum. You have to understand that it's like nothing comes comes easy and there's no tips and tricks. And oftentimes, the best examples of athletes were, you know, 2500 years ago when they didn't have like workouts on YouTube,

they didn't have like heart rate monitors, they didn't have the kind of like ease that we've gotten now. It's interesting. My dad has worked very, very hard for most of us. He grew up very poor in Sicily. And since the age of nine, he'd been working and earning money, giving it to his parents. And then of course, he, as he got older, earned it for himself.

And you know, through those years of hard labor, he was unable to continue working at a relatively young age at the age of, I think he was 52 or 53, developed a lot of arthritis in his back and his work was very manual. And he went through this period of almost depression because he had lost that purpose of that work that he had done for so long, that struggle. It's like he was at home and he's like, okay, this is supposed to be great. I'm supposed to be relaxed. After about two weeks, he was like, I don't know what to do. And it's funny, they show when people retire and lose that, that the life expectancy drops considerably as a result of that. So I would love to hear, I want to hear more about, I mean, you've got an opportunity to meet some amazing people. When you name like the Bill Pearls, Nelson

Mandela, you talk about Mother Teresa, like who made the biggest impact on you that you got to meet, and you have any cool stories of what that was like. You know, to be frank, and I think this is also kind of reflects how unusual Street Chinemois approach was. My favorite person was Bill Pearl. You know, Street Chinemois once said,

and I'd read this before I'd even really become a student of his, that a bill pearl went into hospitals, he could cure people by touching them. I mean, type verbally, but it's like the idea that it's like his body and physique and people of that caliber, they're so imbued with what in India we call prana, life energy. Like there's a life force and the Greeks and ancient Spartans talked about this too. It's like when the body gets close to the ideal of perfection, it develops this kind of magnetic spirit around it.

You can call it confidence, but it's like another like engine of energy. And like when I first met him, even though he's like five foot eight, five foot nine, he might have been 70 years old still working out every morning at 3am and his famous barn and organ. And it's like, I was at this weightlifting exhibition and I was like kind of a helper in the in backstage. I came around the corner and I slammed right into him, right into him. And he was like, it's like hitting an elephant.

If you're like a dog, the elephant just gonna look down on you and go like, are you okay? And he said that to me, he's like, are you okay? It was like hitting a brick wall, but the weird thing in this sounds like woo-woo. But as I walked away, it's like, I felt this like, magnetism. Transfer of energy.

Yeah, and I was just like, oh my God, like this guy has something incredible. And I won an interview to him for like a 28-minute film I did on on Street Chin and Ways of Weightlifting called Challenging and Possibility. I spent three or four hours with him, and I wouldn't have thought that someone classically, someone so like outwardly powerful

was also as in touch with his emotions. And confident enough to express these emotions that you don't think of like masculinity of like aggressiveness. But again, it's like looking at an elephant, like an elephant walking through a market does not care what you think of it. It's like, it'll do what it wants to

and it's like, you're gonna live with it. And when I saw how, like people like him in Frank Zayn, that read the peak of testosterone, the peak of physical development, that they were also incredibly in touch with their hearts. I realized there is a way to have an incredibly balanced life where you can have the most focused, aggressive, physical pursuit and not neglect the idea of being happy.

You make films now and they seem to come from something inside of you like your purpose. How did you figure this out for yourself? How did you figure out that this was your purpose to do this? I thought it's kind of you to put it in that context. I think I came into it by accident. You know, I kind of, you know, bumbled around, you know, in my 20s, doing some human rights stuff here and there, and then after I've reached my past,

like after your teacher leaves you, you know, you're kind of forced to, to like assimilate what he or she taught you. And being with him was like a whirlwind. We were always flying around. You're always meeting people. And I never really like had the time or the presence in my 20s to sit back and go like, oh my God, I just spent an afternoon with Desmond Tutu. Oh my God, we just met Mother Teresa. It was just like, oh, that's cool. Who's next?

So it was in my 30s, I stepped back and said like, I've had so many opportunities to come in contact with stories that I think a lot of people haven't heard. And like maybe I can be of service to people by telling stories that are inspirational. That, I mean, there's plenty of great stories to talk about, like the difficulties of human life and like the unusual aspects of like war or culture,

but I had the opportunity to like approach life just through the lens of inspiration. And we all know the importance of like being inspired. And so I figured like, I can make movies like that. So my first movies were on surfing, on weightlifting. Then I did one on farm workers, which again was about this small group of farm workers that were like fighting Walmart, fighting these gigantic corporations, and overcoming them just through their discipline and through their inner focus on like a goal. And then I made 3100 run and become. Which I thought kind of combined everything.

As you know, there's a human rights aspect because the Kalahari Bushman, as one of the most ancient cultures in the world, are, you know, the victims of a genocide. Like the government in Botswana does not want them to exist. They do not want them to hunt and gather and to require thousands of acres to live on, because the land which they're living on now, it's been discovered has a ton of mineral potential. It's terrible, right? The government told them, you can't hunt anymore,

but don't worry, we'll just give you guys rations, literally becoming dependent on government, which is unbelievable. It's the same thing that happened here. It's like when Native Americans were pushed to reservations, they were moved off their ancestral hunting grounds, where they ran and they hunted. And some were agriculturalists,

but the first thing that happened was they were separated from their food. And so the government said, like we will give you food as part of treaties. You know, it's flour, it's sugar, it's coffee, it's alcohol, it's oil, bad oils. And so that's how the modern food system rose because corporate entities

realized that people were becoming addicted on the reservations to these effectively military rations, and that's how the food industrial complex got built here. But in Botswana, it's the same way. They say, like, if we see you hunting, you know, we have the right to shoot you and to kill you as a way to really deter these ancient practices. Now speaking about the food, I have the question, it's interesting to me that a lot of what we're talking about is evolved from these hunter gatherer type tribes and that's where this all first stem from. What is, and they're hunting animals, what is the purpose of abstaining from meat?

And why is that a common practice now? And it friends like Rich Roll, I know he's a vegan, I'm assuming you are, I think you mentioned that too. What is the purpose of being vegan if it evolved from something where we're chasing down meat and killing it? You know, I look at this as two ways, like one from the more esoteric side of things.

Like if you are trying to lead a really calm life and especially at the beginning, where you kind of need to take advantage of like every tip and every trick, and this isn't accurate for everybody, but as a kind of common starting place for spirituality, like when you eat things that are aggressive, like animals, you imbue those qualities in you,

which can be incredibly effective for sports. So I'm not saying this is like any hard and fast rule. I'm gonna start eating some lion meat pretty soon. You're selling me on it. Oh yeah, yeah. It's gonna go over well, so. Sorry. But it was like some athletes in the old days

that's like before their competitions, they would eat a heart. And it's like it athletes in the old days that's like before their competitions, they would eat a heart. And it's like it's not just for the nutrition, it's for like, you know, the feeling you get from eating something's heart, like you can view that quality. And again, I'm not judging. But when you're trying to spend long hours,

you know, in contemplation, it's like when you're eating a softer diet, like vegetables. Interesting. It's adequate for that. And so I don't come at it from, you know, I hate to say this, but I don't come at it from an environmental standpoint.

I don't come at it from like, this is the way to live as humans. It's like, it depends on what activity you do. If you're like digging ditches all day, especially in the 70s and 80s, when there wasn't like sources of vegan protein. Like if you weren't eating meat, you could not do your job.

But then again, it's like Bill Pearl, they came eating meat, you could not do your job. But then again, it's like Bill Pearl became a vegetarian, I think, in 1956. Yeah, he was a bodybuilder vegan. I didn't know that. Yeah. That's interesting. Now was he pure vegan or was he a vegetarian? He was a vegetarian.

So he ate dairy. Yeah, and if you have conversations with him now, like he will not stop eating cheese, he will not stop eating milk, because it's not about environment for him. It's like he wanted a cleaner, more digestible source of protein, and he found personally that when he shifted from animal proteins to, or meat, I should say, to like, you know, to soy, to like, you know, just smooth dairy proteins, he could digest it, and he could make gains faster.

Arnold writes about Burial Pearl. I read an article where Arnold was talking about Burial Pearl. And he says, Burial Pearl convinced him that a bodybuilder could be vegetarian. And Bill Pearl was a, I mean, very strong muscular, various bodybuilder. Of his time, he was considered the mass monster back in those days. And remember, in those days, they used, oftentimes were either natural or if they did use antibiotics, it was like an insanely low dose,

like five milligrams of, of deep all or something like that a day. And you look at, so if you're listening, you can look up Bill Pearl and see what I'm talking about. It looks kind of like a, a John Cena. Yeah, just Jack. Yeah, he does. And very strong, one of the stronger bodybuilders of all time, especially in that context.

I mean, it was like you guys were talking about in an early bodybuilding competitions, you'd have to do a feat of strength. So he could tear license plates. He could blow up hot water bottles with his mouth and burst them. But when it comes to diet, it's like, I actually think that being a vegetarian

in the 90s, I'm 44 right now, it saved me from a lot of health problems. Because there was no such thing as grass fed before, like free range chicken. Like when we grew up in the 80s and 90s and 70s, even it's like the stuff you were taking, that's so many chemicals and we didn't even, we didn't even know, nobody cared.

But like now it's like you can get really pure meat. You can get things that don't have the chemicals and the side effects of like the 60s and 70s protein heavy meat diet. So again, it's like, for me, it's kind of come from like a spiritual perspective. But that said, it's like I spent a lot of time with Native Americans and with indigenous around the world

where certain types of meat are things that they worship. Like, you know, the salmon tribes up in Northern California and in Washington state, I think that salmon, or they believe that salmon was given to them by the creator. And so if you're with them and you don't eat salmon, it'll be like me saying, Adam would you like a glass of water

and you go like, I don't drink. Like no, it's doing a glass of water. I don't drink liquid. I go like, I don't drink. Like no, it's doing a glass of water. I don't drink liquid. Like, how do you survive? So I've definitely been with people who would be like, you don't eat salmon, how do you survive? And when we were with the Bushman, and we chased this animal down,

for their food and for the film, and they gave us some afterwards, I wasn't gonna say like, no way, man, I don't eat meat. It's like there was a spiritual aspect of that exchange. And so I don't have the capacity myself to like make every single meal spiritually focused. And I find it easier with my lack of discipline and consciousness that if I eat vegetarian,

I'm able to keep that kind of like spiritual balance, but I know plenty of people historically, spiritual giants, like Jesus ate meat. So it's like there's no one size fits all. I firmly believe respecting and valuing your food, and even if it comes in the form of spirituality, is far better than what most people do with food, which is it is not only just an afterthought,

it's just, I'm eating this for taste, and there's literally no value, no respect, give into their food. So when you see people who look at food as something that is either spiritual or something to respect, the quality of food that they eat, and they put thought into it, that's the thing. Most people put zero thought into what goes into their mouth.

I wanted to ask you about the current health of the of the Bushman now, because I know in America, Native Americans now suffer some of the worst rates of diabetes, and maybe one of the theories is that they were hunter-gatherers for so long that they, and then we switched them to this heavy grain sugar and alcohol, western diet. And I think it's like in some tribes,

it's like 50 or 60 or even higher percent have diabetes, are the bushmen suffering from terrible health now as well? This is the difficult thing I think about where we are in terms of diet. Like diet is so based on your genetics. I mean, if you think about Darwin and like the adaptation and survival of the fittest,

you know, if you could not eat the foods that were around you, you were dead. Like if you were born as an Inuit tribes person up in Alaska and you couldn't like digest and process heavy amounts of fat, you were dead. I'm from East India, my dad's from the North, my mom is from the South. So at least I know the two places in the world where I'm from East India, my dad's from the north, my mom is from the south. So at least I know the two places in the world

where I'm from. I've done research on the way their diet was 150, 200 years ago, and it's so different from how I eat now. But it's where my genes are from. And for people that come from a European background, you don't always know whether you are 100% Sicilian, whether you're half Irish, half German. But until we know the basis of where our genetics come from,

we're just guessing. At the same time, like in this day and age, if you cannot survive on a McDonald's high sugar diet for the first 12 years of your life, you're dead. Because that's all we eat as kids. That's what you're attracted to. And at the same time, none of us are eating that ancestral diet. We're all eating from supermarkets. We're all eating eat is kids, like that's what you're attracted to. And at the same time, like none of us are eating that ancestral diet.

We're all eating from supermarkets. We're all eating the same stuff and we have no idea if it's something that we're evolutionarily adapted to or not. And so like you said, with the Native Americans, when they started getting diets that were so foreign to how their bodies and their physical genetics evolved over tens of thousands of years. There were certain things that their physical bodies had incredibly bad reactions to, like super high-starch. When we were with the Bushmen, I did not see them eating

any carbohydrate at all. It's like they were eating stuff that was basically all from an animal. They were chewing on roots mainly to absorb the water that was in roots. They didn't have cassava, even things like cassava all came from the new world, but they were subsisting mainly on calories that they were getting from fat

and protein. And these things that we don't think anybody can survive on, it's like a full-time keto diet, but like you guys have discussed, it's like they were genetically and evolutionary evolved to like do well on a keto diet. But if they got a whole bunch of carbohydrates, which they're getting right now, body goes bonkers.

Are you single B.C.D. growl that crazy there? Yeah, obesity, diabetes, all the things that come from a diet that your body is not genetically adapted to. So when I first heard about this race and I immediately thought we had Joe DeCino on the show. Yeah. Right. Great storyteller had all these like incredible races he was bringing up. And one of them that caught our attention was this thousand day race out in Japan. I wanted you to talk about that and kind of, you know, the similarities maybe between that and the 3, 300.

So this is crazy. I took, I'm really glad you brought this up in a nutshell. Once a generation, this small sect of Japanese monks in the Highlands of Kyoto and this mountainous forested region, they'll pick one aspirant to do a thousand days of trekking. They're dressed in these robes. They look like Star Wars. It's like bamboo sandals, these longstaffs, long...

You listen to the show. Bamboo hats. I love it. So they have to do, people can put their math hat on. They have to split the thousand days into 10 hundred day chunks. And those thousand days are spread out over seven or eight years. So every year you do 100 or 200 days of trekking. Each day in each cycle has a set number of miles.

So the first few cycles are 11 and a half miles a day. But by the time you get to the last one, it's 56 miles per day. This is the kicker though. If you don't complete your daily mileage on any single day, you have to take your life. Oh my God, no big deal. No big deal.

There's a strap, a knife to them, a small body. Yeah, yeah. They have a knife, you have a choice between a knife or a stringing yourself up on a tree. Wow. In the last 150 years, nobody has taken their life because there are a lot more selective on who they choose to do it.

But the idea is that if you're not ready for this at the starting line, you're going to have problems. And that's like the 3,100. It's like they say, how can you do 3,100 miles? How can you do 60 miles a day? Like, what about all the problems you're gonna have if you're not ready for that by the time you tow the line You're toast And I think that's the similarity. It's the idea of

really Understanding that everything that's in front of you can be a problem and Every day can be the worst day of your life or in the case of the be the worst day of your life, or in the case of the Japanese, the last day of your life, unless you understand that problems are only problems if you make them into those. So they haven't had anybody have to kill themselves since they've done that? In 150 years, but they've been doing it for about almost 2,000 years. There was somebody...

So it was 150- year win streak so far. Well, it's like the, in fact, race, it's like, you know, the last injury was, or lasted celebrating 150 years of no death. Wow. We must be very motivated to finish that, the whole time. Well, like he said, we got involved and we got smarter. We stopped even attempting the race

unless we had done some prerequisites right before. Make sure you could even finish a race. What are some of the commonalities you find in people that are drawn to these kinds of feats of athleticism? Like, what do you see in common? What the people that tend to do this? You know, I have to be honest,

like, there are completely different breed of human than me. It's like, they have an understanding of pain in the way that I don't. It's like, the pain tolerance is super, super high. But it's built up. Like people who do the 3,100 don't just come in. They don't allow them to just like sign up and do it. You have to have done a six day race, a 10 day race,

and kind of built an understanding of what problems really are. And realize like there's very few things they can kill you. Really, it's like, you know, the miles won't kill you, you know, but the little things will, like dehydration, lack of calories, blisters won't kill you, your feet aren't gonna fall off, you know, if they're covered with blisters,

it's just that, you know, can you get enough joy out of an activity to counteract the suffering? It's crazy. You know, because you can't do 52 days of running every day is miserable. You have to understand, you have to figure out a way to get some blisters out of them. There must be like in the beginning though,

that must be the most difficult part, like to overcome the mental aspect of how daunting it really is, right? I think that's the trick. And so it's like if people are going to go climb a Himalayan mountain, you know, you could be out like an Everest base camp for 10 weeks or if you're, if you're climbing a gigantic ledge, you know, like in the movie Dawnwall, you know, you might spend 21 days like perched on Al Capitan, like in a portalege.

And can you handle like spooning with your tent mate for 21 days in a row? You know, like what happens in the tent stays in the tent? Like can you withstand like on those things like pooping in a bag every single day? So with the 3,100 it's like you're gonna have skin like no one's ever seen. It's like you're gonna have blisters, you're gonna have chafing everything that could possibly go wrong on any type of run.

It's gonna go wrong. You're gonna lose probably all your toenails. You're gonna have to do 52 miles, 59 miles on days when you know, you have like stomach upset. Like can you look at those problems as being as momentary as they actually are? Is it common to lose all your toenails when running? People do. Wow. People do, you know. It's like, and you'll see in the movie, like people will cut out the toe box of their

shoe. They look like homeless people because the shoes are like, they cut big holes in them. All the areas that can traditionally like shape your rub, you don't feel it on a five mile run or a 10 mile run, but you know, you'll feel it after 300 miles. Wow. Yeah, it makes a perfect sense that there's a spiritual component. When you read about people who survive some of the most horrific conditions, POWs, for example, the ones that tend to

survive are the ones that have a very strong spiritual component or religion that look at it and a day-by-day basis. They're the ones that make it. It's never the people who are like, ah, the sucks every day. I mean, those are the best books. I think one of them is called like why they survive. Like all these stories of like people being stuck in a raft for like six months and being with raft mates that freak out on the first two days and jump out and try to swim a thousand miles to shore and get eaten.

And so it is that attitude. It's like, do you have an understanding of how to get positive energy from the worst situations and those are the people that thrive and race is like this. How do you feel about the growing anti-spiritual, anti-religious, kind of atheist movement that we're seeing nowadays? Do you think that that's going to cause problems in the sense where people are gonna have trouble making it through very struggling difficult times

because they don't have that component? You know, it does frighten me. And I would look at it as, you know, people not having any sort of confidence in faith. And even stripping away the idea of religion, from an Eastern standpoint, like if you have faith in something, if you're a Buddhist or if you're a Christian or if you have faith in physics, you know, that faith strengthens my own spiritual practice. And so the difficult thing I have with this, like atheistic, agnostic view of life,

is that it strips meaning away from life. People become cynical to the point where they think of faith as weakness. But it's like if you look at Frank Zayn and his like, you know, defeat of Arnold, he had more faith as weakness. But it's like if you look at Frank Zane and his like, you know, defeat of Arnold, he had more faith than Arnold. It's like he had faith in himself because he achieved his goal of chanting

that mantra a million times. Like faith is a muscle. At the same time, you know, that combined energy of global faith will help anybody who wants to tap into it. So I look at like this idea of faith as weakness as being one of the kind of like core problems in society right now.

I would agree. I interviewed Bishop Baron a while ago and he put it so well where he explained, you know, this is something that helps us find meaning and purpose and when you eliminate that, you still feel like you need to fill that hole, and you end up filling it with money, or power, or sex, or drugs. And it's impossible to fill that purpose of meaning with that,

and you end up becoming anxious, depressed, and severely nihilistic. And the evidence is in all the celebrities that tend to commit suicide. Here's people with all the money and power and access in the world and they're so miserable that they take their own lives. I mean, I think cynics and critics in general, and I'm not saying this as a profession, but cynics and critics are like,

they've succumbed to failure. They've failed at something and they don't think that they can ever go beyond it. And so like the idea, like, you know, when you're in the gym and there's somebody that you can tell has worked out for like 20 seconds, but they're super positive and they're super excited. I look at them and go like, I want what they have

as opposed from the guy in the corner that's just like lifting massive amounts of weights but it's miserable. It's like that enthusiasm. It's like that's what I want in my life. Keep it. On the race, you call it the transcendence race. Are there any like amazing stories of you know, somebody going through this race, this process, and then it completely changing their life? That's a great question. I'll tell you one story that scares me. So there was a guy named Yuri Trusten-Yuk, Ukrainian runner, who

three or four years ago when he was running this race, he said that he saw angels. And, you know, a lot of people, myself included, who have run like Altered Ditzens races, you get to a mindset where you actually literally start hallucinating and you're not seeing angels. You know, you're just like seeing stuff that's like, you think you're seeing. And so when you reset, like I saw angels, you go like, you know, okay, whatever. But it was such a powerful experience for him that after he finished the race, he stayed in New York for the next three or four weeks and every morning went out and ran 30 or 40 miles on the course because he was still living in addition to after the race.

Yeah. That's why it freaks me out. Like wanting to see him again. Well, because to him, it's like their presence was still there. It wasn't just like he saw them for a moment like he made it sound. He felt the presence of angels there. And it was something that he knew that if he just kept going back there, he would still feel that presence.

And he was so enamored and so filled with joy from that experience that he kept going out doing 20, 30 miles a day and it freaked me out because I would see him just, it races over. And he's still out there running. You go like, he's not doing it for anything other than spiritual purposes. It still frees me out.

I don't have any way to identify with that. I did not anticipate to be this inspired to go work out from talking with you. I like going to go work out so bad now. You know what I mean? Team No Sweat, now I'm like, I'm going to start running. So on your film, it said that the people who do this race, this 3,100 mile race, have to consume something

like 10,000 calories a day. How do they do that? What is that in the form of? This is the tricky thing, right? Like in modern science, people say that you can't, when you're doing a rubric exercise, you can't absorb more than 400 or 500 or 600 calories at most per hour when your body is not focused on digestion.

And so these athletes, they train with eating. It's like you have to be able to like get your body, not just fat adapted, but able to like divert energy from like slow aerobic running to massive like interfered or like digest heavy amounts of food. And so they have to take, you know, 12,000 calories a day across 18 hours, that's about 650, 660 calories per hour. Which is crazy. Yeah, I mean, that's what they eating. So so that's got to be a lot of fluid, obviously, a lot of fluid. There's a there's a full time kitchen there that's

providing a few meals a day, but they're constantly providing food in like dixie cups. And so it'll be like, you know, here's an eight-ounce shot basically of zucchini soup, but that probably has 300 calories from fat. Oh, well. And so the difficult thing with this race is that you have to come into the 3,100

like with a high BMI, in terms of body fat even. You gotta have the energy store on you. Because they say the first three weeks of the race, you're burning fat. And then after those first three weeks, you're pretty much down to four, five percent body fat. The next three weeks, you're burning carbohydrates. And inevitably, the last one or two weeks, your burning muscle.

Wow. And so you start seeing people like across the race, you know, not just getting lean and shredded, but at the end, like losing weight. And they have to get weighed every day to make sure that it's not water weight that they're losing, but diet there is so wacky and so critical. What kind of fats are they put as like coconut oil as a bone broth?

What are they putting in these? You know, like the basic food that most people eat is vegetarian. Like people who do eat meat, like they'll have like, you know, another person kind of as a personal chef. But in this one kitchen that provides the race, it's all super clean burning avocados, coconut oil, ghee, clarified butter, a lot of easy to digest, sources

of protein, but everybody's on their own diet, like some people will say, like no tofu, no wheat, no gluten, no this, no that. But people tend to eat, I would say, 60 to 70% of their calories from fat, probably 20 to 30 from carbohydrates, and maybe 10 to 15% from protein at most. But then again, it's like, if you're taking 12,000 calories. It's still a lot of protein. Yeah, you're looking at 300 grams of protein if you're looking at 10%. Wow.

And when you're trying to consume that many calories, it only makes sense that you're looking at 300 grams of protein if you're looking at 10%. And when you're trying to consume that many calories, it only makes sense that you're gonna be consuming a lot of fat because it's dense. Otherwise, you have to consume a lot of volume. And at the same time, like your metabolism is churning so heavily 24 hours a day, that most people find that if they wanna try to get five solid hours of sleep, they have to eat about 2,500, 3,000 calories right before bed.

Otherwise, they'll wake up at two in the morning, starve. Wow. Now what about going to the bathroom? Are they using the bathroom more frequently because of all the calories you're consuming or less because they're burning so much or do they have terrible digestive issues? That's a trick.

It's like you have to be able to like have, you have to train your digestive system not to have problems. And you have to know what you can eat, how you can eat. There's, you know, there's portapodes up, you know, there. But the difficult thing is the combination of fluid and eating because you have to be drinking. I mean, you're sitting in the summer, gets to be 95.

That's the other thing. This is done in the summertime. It's crazy. It's crazy. And with humidity, the real feel is like 104, 110 degrees. And so it's like you're not only taking 600 calories per hour, but you have to drink probably a quart of fluids. And like imagine that in your gut.

So that's a tricky thing. The first couple of days for any runner are you're quite, yeah, you're played with every single issue you can possibly think of. Well, and sleep wise, how are they sleeping more than the typical eight hours? They're there between anywhere between four and a half and six hours. So not why so little?

You know, it's like, I've found this through doing like, you know, six day races that you, like when you go to sleep at night in those races, it feels like you're laying in a bag of broken glass. Oh, man. sleep at night in those races, it feels like you're laying in a bag of broken glass. And you realize like you recover through circulation. Like you're recovering. So you feel all the pain because you stop. Yeah. You feel pain everywhere. And so the first couple of hours every morning on the course, everybody is like doing a longer extended warm-up. But they're only taking like 10 and 15 minute breaks during the day. It's like doing a longer extended warmup, but they're only taking like 10 and 15 minute breaks during the day.

It's like, your mind doesn't need sleep. You know, it's like your body needs rest, but the rest happens from changing your pace. It doesn't happen from stopping. Like when you stop the lack to ask it, it is no longer flushed. It's like all of a sudden the inflammation you know, just explodes because you're not getting

circulation. And so nights, nights can be rough. Yeah, what about any supplements or anything that seem to benefit these, these real long extended forms of, you know, sport? You know, it's tricky because our main character in the movie 3100 run and become as a finished paperboy boy who's now done the race 14 times. Oh my God. So he's raised more than 53,000 miles, including some other races on the streets in Parks of New York City.

Like he says water is boring. So if it's up to him, like he would drink Coke and Fanta all day long. If it was up to him, he would eat cheesecake. Again, high fat, hard carbohydrate, he would eat cheesecake and pizza all day long. If it was up to him, he would eat cheesecake. Again, high fat, hard carbohydrate, he would eat cheesecake and pizza all day long and he does. And he says, yeah, he takes vitamins, but he takes about a thousand milligrams of calcium, 500 milligrams of magnesium. And that's it. Like, he says, like, for him, the nutrition doesn't mean anything. Whereas other runners are taking

50, 60 different types of things. But for him, he says, like, if you don't have the mindset, none of the nutrition is going to help. At the end, it's like, it's calories in because your body is... That's the most important thing. It's the priority. And it's burning. It's such a high rate that it's like calories in, you know, a basic spectrum of vitamins, but it's much more about being adapted to what you're eating and what you have and don't have than trying to like fix it with supplements. You said you've done quite a few these long six day races yourself?

I've done a handful. I've had enough experience of the pain. Now, how is your training currently? Do you still do lots of running? It's part of your spiritual practice, right? You know, so the worst thing for training is travel, right? And so we opened the movie in theaters last August. So between August and January of this year 2019,

everything was bonkers, everything. But then it's like, I told myself, like, I have to like, you know, get back into things. So I went and got a new coach, a woman named Patty Catalano, Patty Dillon, who from 1977 to 1984, as a female runner, held every single American record between the 10K and the marathon. She was Nike's first sponsored athlete,

but nobody knows about her because until the 1984 Olympics, there wasn't a meddling event for women above 3000 meters, which is slightly less than two miles. I mean, the men had, you know, the 5K, the 10K, the marathon, but people felt that if women ran long distances, they would never be able to give birth. And all these absolutely ludicrous, you know, theories. And what's crazy too is when you look at sports

in many categories, men will outperform women, but when it comes to distance sports, the longer the distance becomes, the more equal that we become. And in fact, in some cases, some people argue that women are actually better because of their ability to store more body fat. So in the 3,100, and actually people also feel that women run with a deeper sense of

community. And so people looked at the Boston Marathon in 2018 that was 25 degrees at the starting line, freezing rain. Everybody in good shape was hypothermic because they've got no body fat. A lot of the elite men dropped out, but most of the elite women didn't. The winner, Des Lyndon, actually stopped to help a training partner adjust something during the race. People say the women weren't necessarily running with the same single-minded focus on their race. They were running with this idea that they were like, a pack.

I'm not gonna put it in a derivatives term, but like a pack of lionesses, all like feeding off of each other and at the end one would push to win or to make the kill. In a 3,100, they usually get three to four women, eight to 10 men, but in general, maybe about 50% of the men finish, 75% of the women finish, and those women do better, the winning women probably do better than, you know, 80% of the men. Yeah.

So, a women's naturally store more body fat, which becomes a major advantage in these very, very long distance competitions. And you see it as well with the English channel. It's like with the English channel, because you're swimming in 50 degree water, you need to come in with 20, 30 pounds more weight. And so people generally have to gain those 30 pounds to do the channel. And women are fantastic at the channel because of that high percentage of body fat in the insulation. That's awesome Yeah, it's funny. We joke about this all time. You know, we're always trying to get so shredded

But if the shit hit the fan it'd be the shredded people would be the ones that would die first. Yeah You talked earlier about when you you first decided that you weren't going to go off and be a doctor, we kind of just kind of glazed over that. I love to go back and hear what that challenge was like with your parents and you deciding, hey, I'm not going to go off to be a doctor. I'm going to go follow the spiritual guru. I mean, did you, what happened with you and your parents and do they ever come full circle? How do they feel now?

You know, my parents, they're great. They definitely have come full circle, but they got a lot of crap from my relatives in India who said, like, why are you living in America? If you're gonna go follow an Indian spiritual teacher. Like, you aren't you making money? Why aren't you like having a big family and all these things that we think of as the American dream.

And my parents grew up in Indian villages in East India and it was education that took them out of the village and got them to America, got them to go to school here and to get good jobs. And they saw me as throwing away everything. Like I had great parents and I was growing up. Like I hated it, but I was in Boy Scouts, I was swimming, I was playing soccer,

I was playing basketball, I was running, I was playing baseball, learn the saxophone, learn the flute, all those things. But all those things you think of as like useless when you're a kid and then when you're in your 30s and 40s, you go like, I got some skills. So like they push me in all that. It's like I went to Cal and all of a sudden afterwards I was like, you know, I'm going

to go to New York and I'm going to work in a health food store and I'm going to follow an Indian spiritual teacher and I'm going to become a vegetarian and I don't know if you guys are ever going to have grandkids right now. I'm telling you you're not and so my parents were just like, whoa. Your mom's crying. Oh my poor mom. And they were okay, but then it's like, you know, like for my cousins who are listening to this, they know that I was the smartest cousin growing up.

And like, their parents are giving my parents crap because that's like those cousins were getting jobs at Microsoft and like then they were like in hedge funds. And they're going like, what is your kid doing? You know, he's working 40 hours in a health booster. Well, he met mother Teresa and they go like, okay, whatever. But then by my 30s, like all my relatives and my parents saw that like, I was happy.

I don't have a mortgage. You know, I don't have all these things that are just like, you know, are part of like human responsibility that you know can drain you without the right attitude. I had this sense of freedom that all my cousins were like, dang, now I see why I didn't do it. That's awesome. It's the irony of it is you come to this, my parents are immigrants also, you come to this country because of the opportunity and part of that opportunity is the freedom to choose

your own path. And that's exactly what you did. So my dad, like in tears say like, like it was, it's my American dream to know that my kid could become a documentary filmmaker, you know, like some kind of like pansy artistic thing that doesn't require your hands or muscles like that's the American dream. Like you can go and be soft and I'm happy. That's awesome.

So are you married now or did you maintain that abstinence or are you still? You know, it's not that I don't look at, in my case, I know I'm straight, it's like I can't look at a woman and go like, oh my god, she's beautiful. I still have those reactions, it's not like I've transcended those.

But I've understood that, and looking back at past relationships, I'm the worst person to have a relationship with. And I realize that I suck at it, and I'm happy not having them. And I realize, everybody's got their own path. And it's like the most important thing in life is finding it.

And I was lucky to have found it when I was 19. And I go like, it's working. I'm happy, it's not about whether I'm free and you're not, whether I've got a mortgage and you don't or vice versa. I've found what makes me a good person. And I found a lifestyle that allows me to look at each day as a new day. And I feel enough love. Like I'm living in a community of people that I love

and love me. And so it's like I don't have that absence of community. And so it's just like, I feel grateful for what I have. So how long have you been abstaining for? How many years now? 19. You know, 19 years old. And you, it's, it, it, it, it, it, it, it, it, it, it, it, it, it, it, it, it, it, it, it, it, it, it, it, it, it, it, it, it, it, it, it, it, it, it, it, it, it, it, it, it, it, it, it, it, it, it, it, it, it, it, it, it, it, it, it, it, it, it, it, it, it, it, it, it, it, it, it, it, it, it, it, it, it, it, it, it, it, it, it, it, it, it, it, it, it, it, it, it, it, it, it, it, it, it, it, it, it, it, it, it, it, it, it, it, it, it, it, it, it, it, it, it, it, it, it, it, it, it, it, it, it, it, it, it, it, it, it, it, it, it, it, it, it, it, it, it, it, it, it, it, it, it, it, it, it, it, it, it, it, it, it, it, it, it, it, it, it, it, it, it, it, it, it, it, it, it, it, it, it, it, it, it, it, it, it, it, it, it, it, it, it, it, it, it, it, it, it, it, it, it, it, it, it, it, it, it, it, it, it, it, it, it, it, it, it, it, it, it, it, it, it, it, it, it, it, it that like I know how to love myself, I know how to love other people without their beings' strings attached.

And I know that like from friends and from like listening to you guys, it's like obviously like there are ways to achieve unconditional love, you know, through any type of relationship. And I feel like I've gotten a sense of that. And that's the only important thing in life, right? It's like if you feel love and you give love.

So let's talk about that. You know, something we talked about off air before we've got on here. And I didn't know this about you that you actually listen to the show. You said you've probably listened to about 120 episodes of mine pump. One, how did you find us to what drew you to us and what made you stick around? You know, I found you through suggestions on my podcast app on overcast. And number one, it's like this sheer amount of content. And this is the problem I have with most podcasts that I like.

It's like, it's one episode a week. Or it's like two episodes, and that's it. And it's not like a radio program where you can just listen to banter. And so, frankly, I enjoy the first half an hour of every single episode. Oh, that's true. At the same time, I love how you kind of tee it up by like talking about like what we're going to talk about in the next half an hour to say like, well, I only have a half, I only have a 40 minute drive. So let me like fast forward to like minute 60 and

get to like the real content. Even recently, it's like, the science aspect and the spirituality aspect, like the clarity you bring, like you're kind of like debunking of keto, even this week, it's like, I listened to that episode twice. And again, it's like, I listened to it because there is keto in the title, just like you guys said. That was the plan.

But the idea of looking at mental preparation, at science, at physical preparation, understanding that each individual listener is going to be unique in on their own journey, but it's like if they look at the journey as something transformative rather than like a mindset of being so attached to a goal that if they realize they're never going to get there, they give up. Like that resonates with the type of work I try to do. And that's like in 3,100, it's the idea of looking at sports as transformation. And once you realize that it's transformative, it becomes religious. It becomes something that you need to do to become a better person,

both as a physical being and as a spiritual being. And I think ultimately it makes you a better person in the lives that you're a part of. That's a hundred, yeah. I couldn't agree more and I did not anticipate this to be as inspirational as it has been. And it's been an absolute pleasure talking to you. I think you're an awesome human being.

But you guys are like modest heroes of mine. Like I, you guys occupy more of my life than probably most people, so it's great to finally meet you guys first. That's awesome. We're really close friends now. That's awesome. Yeah, thanks, thanks for coming on. Really appreciate it.

Yeah, absolutely. Thank you. Great time, man. Thank you for listening to Mind Pump. If your goal is to build and shape your body, dramatically improve your health and energy, and maximize your overall performance, check out our discounted RGB Superbundle at MindPumpMedia.com. The RGB Superbundle includes maps and a ballad, maps performance and maps aesthetic. Nine months of phased expert exercise programming designed by SAU, Adam and Justin,

to systematically transform the way your body looks, feels and performs. With detailed workout blueprints in over 200 videos, the RGB Superbundle is like having sound and an adjustment as your own personal trainer's butt at a fraction of the price. The RGB Superbundle has a full 30-day money bag guarantee and you can get it now plus other valuable free resources at MindPumpMedia.com. If you enjoy this show, please share the love by leaving us a five-star rating and review on iTunes and by introducing MindPump to your friends and family. We thank you for your support and until next time, this is MindPump.

This is Mindbump.