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Michael Blevins, co-founder of nonprophet
833 Plays2 years ago
Michael Blevins is the co-founder of nonprophet and creator of The Space Program. He has worked in the fitness industry for 15-years, training private clients, group fitness, directing training for movie projects, professional athletes, and sports teams, as well as publishing multiple original books and works on the methods and other breakthrough insights on the psychology and physiology of fitness.
Connect with Michael at @gritandteeth and @nonprophet
Check out The Space Program
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Transcript
Introduction of Michael Blevins from Nonprofit
00:00:00
Speaker
Welcome to the Between the Ears podcast. This week I had the pleasure of sitting down with Michael Blevins from Nonprofit. And there's really no succinct way that I can tell you exactly what we talked about. Probably because it won't make sense just like chapter style.
00:00:17
Speaker
And yet I think that that's very true and authentic with who Michael is and how he is and myself as well. And it was just the two of
Creative Approaches with Nonprofit
00:00:29
Speaker
us. Kay wasn't on this one. We talk about a bunch of stuff and ironically enough, none of it really has anything to do with our businesses directly, but it kind of has everything to do with how we approach what we're creating and what Michael is creating with nonprofit are
00:00:47
Speaker
They
Nonprofit's Offerings and Philosophy
00:00:48
Speaker
have an online program, the space program. They have a brick and mortar gym in Salt Lake City that I attended a symposium. They do events in October and you know, their tagline is the philosophy of effort. And I certainly don't want to reduce what nonprofit is nor reduce what the only thing that Michael does is explore this. But it really that that really rings true with us and that really resonates.
00:01:17
Speaker
So buckle your seatbelts Michael's like I said a wealth of information an awesome, dude I thoroughly enjoyed having this I enjoyed we I think enjoyed having this conversation. So I hope you I hope you do as well and It's a wild one for sure.
Online Presence of Nonprofit and Michael
00:01:33
Speaker
So If you want to check out nonprofit, their website is nonprofit. That's p ro p h e t dot media there on Instagram Michael's grit and teeth on Instagram and
00:01:47
Speaker
Yeah, man, just a, just a cool conversation, bunch of different stuff. Uh, I hope you enjoy it as much as I enjoyed having it. So here it is.
00:02:28
Speaker
All right, we're recording. Michael, what's going on, man? Good to see you. You too, man. It's been, you were here a year ago, correct? I was there in October, the October symposium. Oh, okay, so almost did. Okay, so a couple months. Yeah, it was good to watch you work and get to know you and
00:02:46
Speaker
then find out that you're doing all of this good work as well. So it was a pleasure to have you come into our space. And I'm glad to see that it's blossomed into something more than just me yelling philosophy at you while you're training. Yeah. Well, what's interesting about that is, and so for people who are like, what the hell are you talking about? Michael Blevins, nonprofit, um, you Mark twice, who's, who's the nonprofit team? Like never quite sure. What's the official roster there?
00:03:16
Speaker
I
Meet the Nonprofit Team
00:03:17
Speaker
mean, officially it's me and Mark. And obviously Aaron in the background, you know, helping with everything. And now we have apprentice Lucas Cornish, and we have a assistant coach Devin, who, and that's kind of like, that makes up the gym side of it. And other than that, we have help from Berkey from station 515, but
00:03:40
Speaker
you know, he'll do some writing for us. He'll come out and help teach some of the symposiums. And then as far as the programming, athletic side of it goes, our online program, the space program, I have myself, Keegan Dillon, Mark Dwight, Aaron will sometimes write for it.
00:03:58
Speaker
James Ellis. There's a host of people that kind of pop in and out who's been consistent for the past six months, which I'm really excited about is Andrew Tracy out of the UK. He's a writer for Men's Fitness UK. He does a phenomenal job about bridging this gap, kind of like separating the fitness industry and making it a little bit more applicable to like, I would hate to say blue collar, but like the
00:04:24
Speaker
You know middle class who might not be affiliated with sports and so kind of like health and well being and probably one of the biggest demographics that I see is missing good information. So he does this amazing job on the space program about taking these like insanely weird ideas.
00:04:43
Speaker
and kind of distilling it down so that the average person is like, Oh man, I never thought of that. You know, when people think about doing a workout, they're so often like what exercise, what duration and am I going to get yoked?
00:04:56
Speaker
You know, that's like basically what's going on. And he's feeding that need to like, you know, there's definitely like a sense of work accomplishment in it. But in it, he just loves to put these like, Zen Cohen style, hey, if you thought about your breath while you're running, and you're like, it's just like very good awareness stuff. And so
00:05:15
Speaker
I've been really excited to have him on. We've had a host of really good coaches, Paul Warrior, Elodie, Elosaurus on Instagram. We've had like kind of a whole bunch of people come in and help us build this thing out. Now it's kind of like a insane, I would say library of knowledge in training concepts and ideas. So that's kind of the, you know, the basis for nonprofit is me and Mark, and then we elicit help from anybody who will help.
00:05:46
Speaker
Yeah. So
Origin of the Name 'Nonprofit'
00:05:49
Speaker
where did the name, if you don't mind sharing, like non-profit, where did it come from? Just a deep sense of irony, I think. This is kind of how it always goes. Mark and I, we were kind of over the fitness stuff. And I mean, we're still fitnessing, but I didn't want to start a fitness brand.
00:06:12
Speaker
I didn't think that's what we had been doing. I really saw that the work that we did in movie projects and military projects was based off of kind of teaching people, for lack of a better term, just philosophy and meaning. And so it became kind of a different thing. But we didn't want to do movie jobs anymore, so we're really looking to basically just do what we wanted, which was talk about concepts. So we rented an office, and we're like, oh, let's do a podcast.
00:06:42
Speaker
And we did the podcast, and we started recording. It took us like six months to kind of like test. We didn't put anything out. We were recording episodes kind of all the time, but also having these conversations about what we should do. And we were talking about publishing zines, just like ridiculous stuff. Maybe we should publish a book. Maybe we should write a book. We started on a book, actually. Originally, I should bring this poster over, but I have a pin down my dartboard over there.
00:07:12
Speaker
We're like, let's just, it was my idea, but I was kind of like, Mark, I'm so sick of people talking about the work that you've done. I was talking about him. I didn't really care about people talking about the work that I've done. But I was like, you should just write a quick book, talk about, you know, movie training and military and get the shit out of the way and we can move on. And it'll sell like crazy.
00:07:34
Speaker
And he was like, yeah, that's a good idea. Let's write that. And I was like, no, no, no, no, no. I said that you should write it. And he goes, no, we should. And I was like, oh, fuck. So we started this project without a name, without a business, without anything.
00:07:49
Speaker
And we started writing this book, and we had really high aspirations. We were like, oh, fucking publishers are going to eat this up. We've got intimate knowledge of Hollywood. We've got all these insane stories from training celebrities. And we've done these massive transformations on some of the world's, I don't know, like A-list celebrities, basically. And you're like, it's not what I want to talk about, though. And so I know we're really pitching this so that we can get our own thing going.
00:08:17
Speaker
And in the middle of this thing, we're like, oh, in order to actually launch a podcast, you need an LLC or you need some kind of business name. And we're, we're like, thrown around concepts like call it defy, you know, call it like, I just like the most ridiculous names that were tough and like made us sound.
00:08:36
Speaker
And I was like, we just need a placeholder. And I've been playing with this funny, it was literally a joke, a play on a double entendre. And I made this poster kind of, I was playing with vectors at the time in Illustrator. And I had kind of the Che Guevara like vector. And I like gave him gold teeth. And I put like, you know, follow a profit and it was with an F.
00:09:00
Speaker
And I was like, man, those would be funny, but call it a nonprofit. And it was with a pH. And I was like, let's just call our business that it's just the LLC, we can do a DBA later, we'll do, you know, we'll change it, obviously, because that's a ridiculous name. And so we launched it as that. And then we call the podcast dissect, because we're, you know, dissecting problems and cultural issues.
00:09:21
Speaker
And I don't know what happened, but it just stuck. And it was like ridiculous because literally all we do is tell people what's going to happen and what they should do about it. And so to claim that we are non profiteering is kind of a joke because that's literally it's just irony. And now I have to live with it because it gets deep. It gets even weirder than that. I don't know how weird you want to get, but
00:09:51
Speaker
All right, so I fall into these states of consciousness, generally what most people would describe as a flow state when they start to write, right? Like everybody, they call it the muse. Writers will go for walks so they can like get these neurochemicals going. You know, if you want to induce a flow state, I think Stephen Kotler talks about like their, you know, go for a 5K, smoke a, you know, a couple hits of a joint that has like
00:10:12
Speaker
I can give as weird as we need to. Weird is good.
00:10:18
Speaker
sativa blend, THC in it or something, and then have like 65 milligrams of coffee. You're like, wake and bake, drink some coffee, go for a run, and you've started all the neurochemistry responsible for flow state. Well, when I get into these flow states, I'm highly productive, but I don't control it.
00:10:38
Speaker
So like I can't control what I'm writing about. And a lot of the stuff that I start writing about is like very weird, esoteric, semi pseudo, I don't know, I would even call it, you know, in the hermetic tradition, this is like called being an oracle where you don't like, I've never read about this stuff. I just have these concepts that come through, I'll start writing about it. Anyway, I went to go talk to some weird shaman lady about it because I was kind of freaked out. Like I,
00:11:06
Speaker
I would like pull over to the side of the road and I would kind of come back to and I would have pages and pages. One time I wrote on the side of the road in one nonstop blurb 3000 words for it was kind of like a guided meditation that became our guided meditation that I'm using now for our breath workshops.
00:11:24
Speaker
And I've never edited it. I've never even tried to edit it. It's just it is what it is. And I have no idea where it came from. But it's essentially a story of, you know, leaving your body, cleansing yourself by passing through the earth and coming into the core of what I would call the earth's big power and your big power, removing your egocentricism and then rising back through like a filtration system up above the earth to get a, you know,
00:11:52
Speaker
you know, 20,000 foot view, 40,000 foot view of kind of the cosmos and the feeling of being connected to everything,
Shaman's Revelation and Nonprofit
00:12:01
Speaker
and then having that earth pull you back down into your body. And in all of this was in kind of a trance state. So I started asking this shaman lady, who is really wild, she never
00:12:13
Speaker
She knows your name and that's basically it. And she like goes off for an hour or two and I guess she's consulting the, I guess you'd call it the Akashic Records. I told you it's weird, so I'm warning you, but she came back.
00:12:29
Speaker
She knew my genealogy. She understood my heritage. She knew where my family was from. She knew things about me that nobody could possibly know. And one of the things that she said, she's like, you keep calling it, you keep calling it like,
00:12:48
Speaker
I guess performance of an oracle because you don't know where these words come from. She's like, but they are you, you can trust, you can trust this like sense of yourself. She's like, but technically it's your seventh generation ancestor that was you. And he was Norwegian and he grew up in this town and he was also what people would call a prophet.
00:13:10
Speaker
And I was like, are you fucking kidding me? And I was like, do you realize I own a company called Nonprofit? And she just started laughing hysterically.
00:13:19
Speaker
And she goes, do you know what's funny? Like one of the things I got is that your, your life is defined by irony. Like whenever you can find a deep sense of irony, you'll actually enjoy that process because you love paradox. And I was like, Oh my God. Okay. So that, that's a, that's a long journey of the name into the company and kind of the weird shit that we're into. So that's kind of where it stemmed from.
00:13:47
Speaker
It's, I mean, it reminds me of kind of what people refer to when, you know, having like maybe like a psilocybin journey or a psychedelic experience of like the download, where it's not like this, you know, manufactured kind of like one level of the mind, but this
00:14:08
Speaker
Net like just sort of like oh, it's there. I'm just kind of pulling it down and experiencing it and then just Being like the the antenna to then transmit through Yeah, I would say that's pretty accurate. I and I should say like most of these are are
00:14:28
Speaker
Most of the experiences that I have are, they're lucid and sober states, but not all of them. And maybe I opened up something when I started using substances like that. I don't use as many anymore, but originally I got deep into maybe like six or seven years ago, I got really into trying to understand psychedelic use and
00:14:57
Speaker
that led to like quite a lot of development just not even just emotionally but professionally like how how I think about you know our industry that we're involved in and the very close approximation that we have between like movement as medicine and therapy and process and kind of
00:15:20
Speaker
all of these things that people might look to substances in order to pull out and they might be interested in it because they hear somebody had epiphanies and like divine experiences or and i think it you know the language changes but it's all kind of the same concept i think we all kind of understand like no no no no this is not information that i had in my brain and now i'm saying it and that doesn't make any sense
00:15:46
Speaker
I would say to get out of the metaphysical or supernatural sense of it, it is you. It's just the same thing with having this conversation, but it's magnified. I don't know what I'm going to say next. But something coordinates in my brain based off of a subject or a word that you say, and ideas start to flow. And I think the more you open up that channel, the better you get at it.
00:16:14
Speaker
and the more connections you're making between your experiences and your ideas and your feelings and your thoughts and all of this stuff kind of like coalesces into maybe a written piece or an artistic piece or a musical piece. I never realized
00:16:31
Speaker
until I started learning music, that this was the process for learning music, that some of the best artists in the world, and it's not that it's not work, like when you're actually composing music, you're sitting down and you're doing hard work every day. You're listening to notes and chord progressions and tones and different keys, and you're harmonizing with that, and you're coming up with different rhythms.
00:16:57
Speaker
But eventually something will spark and maybe it's a word, maybe it's a sentence, maybe it's a paragraph, and then a song will start to form and then you will broaden it out. But the song doesn't actually exist. And from what I've learned from music teachers that teach me and people that I've respected kind of in the same vein is they will never attribute their songs to their own creation.
00:17:23
Speaker
they think about it as a revelation. They're revealing an intricate part of the universe and maybe putting it together for other people, but they inherently think about it as like a download. Like, oh, something is transmitting and I'm picking up on that signal and I'm playing it for people. And this becomes kind of a responsibility for people as musicians. I've trained very hard just so I can
00:17:49
Speaker
receive and then also give this transmission, which I think is profound because it maps on to what I respect about mathematics
Creativity as Discovery vs Invention
00:17:58
Speaker
and the difference in like when people get into high line mathematics, they don't ever say that they invented it.
00:18:08
Speaker
Nobody invented a formula or Euler's proof or any of these really sound philosophical mathematical proofs. People will always refer to it as I discovered it. It was already part of the universe. I just unmasked it.
00:18:25
Speaker
And so I think that goes, A, it takes your ego out of it, which is a huge part in the creative processes, is removing a deep sense of self and arrogance out of the out of the way so that you can reveal what the universe kind of wants you to do. Or maybe that sounds a little bit too esoteric for people, but there's some kind of thing there that I think is important.
00:18:49
Speaker
And no matter what the subject, whether you're talking about healing or you're talking about athletics, there is this, I don't know, different stages of recognizing yourself on the world. And that's a lot of what I think we do and talk about is kind of the
00:19:06
Speaker
bigger subjects are related to this but it's also there's nowhere to talk about it and that becomes what people think is maybe that's what people are attracted to our thing is they come into a symposium and we're talking about ideas and concepts that aren't exactly being shared at you know a work room break table or even a family dinner table or you know our dinner table is a little bit different but
00:19:30
Speaker
I go to a family dinner and like, man, this is like the most superficial. You talking about, you know, politics and Ukraine and, you know, what are the covid or like whatever these kind of like you notice immediately like, oh, that's why the media is powerful because they control these conversations. You know, not that it's bad or we should know what's going on in the world. But man, if if that's what most of your conversations about, you're missing a big piece. And I think what we've done is is go
00:19:59
Speaker
Man, people want to have these. They don't have an open space to talk about them. And I'm not going to say it's safe because it's definitely not a safe space. But we do treat conversation like a sandbox, right? Like build your idea.
00:20:14
Speaker
out of sand and let other people step on it and don't get hurt by it. Understand that it wasn't a good concept to begin with, or let other people build onto your idea and let it topple over or whatever. And that's kind of the metaphor that I think of pretty much all ideas is they're not good until other people try to destroy them. That's kind of the center of how we work.
00:20:40
Speaker
Yeah, it's interesting in that sort of like relating it back to the fitness industry too, which I think we share many of the same just like
00:20:53
Speaker
frustrations with to put it mildly. But like, in a world where everyone owns something, it's like, it's like, that's mine. Like I was talking actually with messaging a little bit with Andrew Tracy about this. And I was like, Yeah, it's really cool to see you people, you know, Michael nonprofit, all these like dudes, or gals and people who are like,
00:21:16
Speaker
together uniquely, differently, but similarly, and not this incessant need to piss on every single fire hydrant you see. You're like, oh, that's right on. There's plenty of fire hydrants to go around. They serve the purpose of, when needed, pools together, almost like a mycelial network where they're connected, but it's not so
00:21:44
Speaker
you know, like, no, this is the limit of my boundary or my border or this is like what I own. And I guess that's one of the things that I appreciated at symposium was it was a conversation. It was a discussion. It was an exploration. It wasn't like a dogmatic, you know,
00:22:06
Speaker
overly defensive proving situation, but also not weak in the sense of if challenged, unable to be like, well, actually, there was a vibrancy to the entire event and the entire experience, which I think shows not only the effect of the signal that it reaches people that they can process and then relate back to,
00:22:33
Speaker
but also can change, if that makes sense, with different environments or different people, different kind of resonances.
00:22:42
Speaker
Yeah, I've always liked, I've always really liked this term, and I can't remember where I originally held it, but it's like strong opinions held loosely. It's like, if you come and discuss, I will fight tooth and nail, but not to prove my point, but to understand my own view a little bit better. And I think, you know, I dug up this article from 2016 that I've written,
00:23:05
Speaker
And it was funny because reading it, I was talking about using argument as a way to help you better understand your own ideas. Basically like steel manning your own ideas. No other intention in a debate. And the utility I found in it is A, I detach from my identity in this idea.
00:23:27
Speaker
right i go above it and i go yeah yeah this is the idea of taking part and when they make points about where the idea is weak or why it doesn't hold up if if you have a good debate whatever call a good debate partner i would i would argue that um
00:23:43
Speaker
I would argue that it gives you the opportunity to refine it very, very well and gives you opportunity to shift yourself. And it's funny because at the time that I wrote it, I thought totally differently about the world. So I'm reading about myself, talking about how to change yourself.
00:24:02
Speaker
And also knowing that this is before I made very drastic changes to my ideas. And so what I saw is this is the soil that I planted a bunch of seeds in, and I had no idea what was going to get grown. And it's almost like coming back and looking at a deep, intense jungle and realizing that at one point you had dropped all these seeds and that nothing but, I mean, not nothing, but
00:24:28
Speaker
an insane amount of positivity came out of that thing. And so I repost it just because it wasn't written very well. It's not my favorite piece, but it really spoke to something that I believe in is the exchange of ideas. And the only way that happens is if you're not defending them, if that makes sense.
00:24:47
Speaker
It does, yeah. I'm trying to think, politically it could be very interesting. I am very socially liberal and I'm pretty fiscally conservative. I think freedom of choice is probably the most important aspect, but it's not a single issue because obviously some regulation comes in somewhere. So fairly down the middle,
00:25:10
Speaker
But I would entertain the idea of voting one way or another for an extreme politician. I can kind of see why somebody would vote for this person or that person. I wildly disagree, but I also am totally interested in hearing why people might. Because it gives me, A, the first thing is that most people do not think very deeply about their opinions.
00:25:35
Speaker
Yes. And second, maybe I'll learn something. Like there's, you know, I've learned a lot about, you know, we went through, you know, this kind of four years of Trump and it was interesting because man, I did not understand why people liked him. Like I didn't
00:25:53
Speaker
I couldn't understand it. I was having a really hard time. And then it kind of dawned on me that it has nothing to do with what he's actually saying. It has to do with how he's saying it. It's like an energy in his communication style. And it's something that I don't resonate with because it hits me. And I go, oh, that's factually incorrect. Or he's lying. Or it's this. And I make statements about this, that, or the other. But I'm not getting the feel. You know when somebody can
00:26:21
Speaker
lie to you straight up, but you get a feeling that they mean well, right? They're on my side. And that's the truth. And as soon as I understood that, I could let go of any of the disbelief and I could move on. I'm not angry about it. I'm not whatever. Not that I was angry about it before, but you know, I always thought it was kind of funny. It was too reality TV for us.
00:26:42
Speaker
But it is kind of amazing with that too, where it's like this dude who was elected or whatever,
00:26:54
Speaker
And he was like a giant, I view that situation almost like he was like this enormous scratching of an itch that people have. But when you scratch an itch, you see you're breaking your skin, like you're hurting yourself, but knowing the truth of the scratch. And it's like,
00:27:15
Speaker
And that's when I think back to those years, I'm like, Oh my God, that was how people were just like, really itchy. And here he comes. It's this scratch of the edge. And then I kind of think about where else those are. And you know, just all of the other
00:27:33
Speaker
Not to say I have anything really figured out more than anybody else, but when you see something with, maybe like we talk about this difference between like a filter and a lens where, you know, the filter sort of changes everything, but the lens provides wide, narrow, whatever.
00:27:49
Speaker
different ways of seeing it, depending upon what you're sort of looking to see. It's kind of like, oh, I can't now unsee that or just go back to the filter where I see everything distorted in the same.
Psychedelics and Broader Perspectives
00:28:05
Speaker
I think this can kind of bring us back to the subject of psychedelics because I think this is, you know, admittedly one of the benefits and to like full discretion. I don't think that anybody should do them. I don't recommend them. I also, you know, if I don't condone them, I don't condemn them. I think they're
00:28:25
Speaker
They're very interesting for very specific people, but those people will know and then they can figure it out. So I have to like start with that because I'm super not into the, you know, the advertising and marketing of substances to people that you don't know. But I have to say that like their use down the scientific realm is almost disgusting to me.
00:28:48
Speaker
Like it's like very off putting to try to reduce and explain and come up with chemical concentrations and reactions in the brain that are
00:29:02
Speaker
supposed to be representative of your experience. And I'll leave it to that because if I could explain to anybody, what you're able to do is get that view that you're talking about. You can call it ego death or whatever. There's lots of different names, but there is a consistent experience
00:29:23
Speaker
that is too consistent to not be noticeable. And one of them is that you have this kind of subjective experience to an objective perspective, right? Which is to look at yourself from kind of above yourself and see how your actions or behaviors play out. And I think that is probably one of the most useful cases. So when people ask when they're like,
00:29:48
Speaker
Because they'll run into the same conundrum. What they're trying to do is take it down to the molecule. This molecule does this, and it alleviates the default mode network in the brain, and this is why it works. And you go, cool. It doesn't really matter. But in the end, it's really not that. If anything, you could just describe it subjectively in these deep experiences. And they can go south, for sure. I think the reason they're useful is because they're inherently dangerous.
00:30:16
Speaker
Like there's inherently risk with it, which means there is some reward, but that you have to suss that out for yourself. But essentially, what I can feel from the experiences is that, and they used to say this a while ago, like taking psychedelics is like taking the elevator up, you know, instead of the stairs or whatever.
00:30:35
Speaker
And I would agree with that, but I would also disagree. I would say you have potential in you as a human being. And the hard work that you do is walking the stairs. You're talking about controlling, managing your state, becoming more aware of yourself through
00:30:50
Speaker
every activity that you can possibly think of. That's essentially, spoiler alert, that's what our entire business is about is teaching people to become more aware of themselves and others. What you become aware of is that there's nothing that I could do about anybody else. I can only become aware of myself and modify myself, which is a very stoic Zen whatever.
00:31:15
Speaker
But if I do that hard work over consistent years, different religious practices get you there, different athletic endeavors can get you there. The amount of enlightened bike racers that I've met is uncanny. There's just something about
00:31:31
Speaker
doing hard work for hours and hours a day for decades that gets you to this part in your brain where you can access this higher view. And so that's the hard work. What psychedelics do is they kind of slingshot you up to your potential.
00:31:48
Speaker
Like in a passing five, six hour experience, you're kind of looking at what is possible if you're willing to do the work. But you are going to crash back down to where you are. It didn't fix anything. It just gave you a glimpse of what's possible. And that, I don't know how that is not helpful. It might be one of the most helpful things ever. Like if there were, I don't know, do you have any goals? Like any like physical goals, any career goals for yourself?
00:32:18
Speaker
Yeah, I mean, throw me a lofty one. Give me something good. Okay. Well, I'll go on the physical side. I would actually like to do an Iron Man mostly because I don't really know how to swim.
00:32:35
Speaker
Ooh. Okay, good. Perfect. Swim. Yeah. Okay. So imagine for a second that in a psychedelic experience, or it could just be a state change of consciousness, maybe it's through breath work or whatever, you were able to see yourself in the midst of this
00:32:56
Speaker
Experience right you could imagine yourself Finishing or you saw it directly so directly and there's a difference here It's not a vision as much as it's a feeling you have felt yourself finish this thing and then you come back and realize that it was a hallucination or you know approximation of a hallucination and But you're still left with the feeling
00:33:20
Speaker
And the feeling is that, man, that felt really good to do that thing. So instead of just it being in the back of your head, you start thinking about it. You're like, man, that was a really real feeling. I felt the tingles. I felt the sensations of the bike. I felt the pain and the fatigue in the muscles. But it was totally worth it. And you're like, the fear for swimming or something that is keeping you back from that starts to be more of a curiosity than actually something that's keeping you from doing it.
00:33:47
Speaker
It's like, well, if I'm going to have those sensations, I'm going to have to go through this door. And that's really how you start to use these substances to deal with phobias and goals. And it basically looks at potentiality. If you could see your potentiality, you can do a lot. If we can show somebody that they're actually stronger than they think they are,
00:34:09
Speaker
you know by leaps and bounds like somebody doesn't know it but we unsuspectingly change the weights and they lift a bar and it's heavy and they look at it they go oh that's a new PR and we go yeah you didn't think you could do it so i didn't tell you the number and now psychologically they start questioning their other you know self-imposed limitations that that's what i care about you know i'm pointed back here because this gym is back here but
00:34:33
Speaker
That room, just so for reference, people think like, what am I deadlifting in a closet? But that's my interest in athletics is not, I don't care about a big number. I'm not interested in setting any world records. Although if that's what you're into, you're into. The interest in me is the unlocking thing. And that's why it's very similar to psychedelic use. It's very similar to breath work. It's very similar to,
00:35:00
Speaker
bike racing is like, it's a practice. And that's really what I think that it is. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, so much of that is like, I just, I love it. Um, cause and so much of it too is like similar to us. That's, you know, our, our company between the ears, like the work we do, we have a program called the dose where it was like, it's like, you know, a dose of this awareness. Um,
00:35:25
Speaker
And I will say on that too, like the point and so I'm actually in a psycho, a year long like psychedelic assisted therapy training program for doctors, there's just psychonauts, there's all of the, it's a really cool kind of diverse group there. But like, one of the dudes who was giving a one of our teachers
00:35:45
Speaker
like Bill Richards who's been like he's like he's like a founding father of the like modern day thing he was saying like enough with trying to make it this compound this molecule for this DSM thing and like you gotta kind of
00:36:03
Speaker
his little mantra is beautiful. He's like, you got to trust, you got to let go and you got to be open. And then you just experience the thing. And I was like, what a gem. I will say also, I have done what's sort of been described as like the Mount Everest of psychedelics and I began into 5MEO DMT
00:36:28
Speaker
And when we speak of these experiences of like the elevator, this or that, and the whole ego death thing and, and just how challenging the five MEO experience was by far the most horrifying, destabil, like dangerous. Like, yeah, like for sure. Like it was, was your synthetic.
00:36:53
Speaker
Yeah, synthetic. Yeah. But it was and it was like, you know, it was a learning lesson for sure. But coming back from that and then what it what it highlighted, which is in a state of mind that is and body and spirit and whatever that is like, you know, so not
00:37:18
Speaker
clean and orderly and like, you know, this state. But it was the integration element of that, the follow through, the like, okay, so what? For like the next year was continuously like hard and difficult work. And I think, you know, I'm concerned frankly with how psychedelics are. I think it's obviously very incredible and there's a lot of hope and there's
00:37:48
Speaker
amazing stories and stuff, but it is almost very transactional, kind of like a capitalism sort of like, hey, I just got to go and do my thing and it's fixed. And it's like, I just don't see how that's any different than all of the other stuff that we're talking about because it's a process, it's a practice, it's not just the compound.
00:38:15
Speaker
Yeah, I think you're right. It's not going to be a panacea. Not that the medicines themselves aren't very, very effective, but you are orchestrating their distribution off of a very corrupt and bad system, like a badly incentivized system, which is not trying to seek autonomous health, but it's trying to seek dependency.
00:38:38
Speaker
And I noticed it. I mean, so I've never done Ibogaine. I haven't been drawn to it. There was really no reason. I do know quite a bit about it because I've looked into it because I was kind of like a, you know, whatever journey. I've used
00:38:56
Speaker
quite a bit in ayahuasca ceremonies and psilocybin, and I would say that probably the third is San Pedro, quite a big experience with San Pedro. So between the cactus, the vine, and the mushroom, close to 500 experiences or something, I quit counting it, like 100 in ayahuasca. But the depth of it is kind of what you're talking about.
00:39:25
Speaker
Understanding how to let go, how to surrender to the idea that you can change. I think maybe it works best when people are at their last-ditch effort to try to heal themselves or understand themselves. You see very profoundly good things happen.
00:39:42
Speaker
And I think that that's because of kind of what you described. I would say that in this goes this is not talked about very much because mostly people are talking about how can we take these from indigenous practices and and like put them into a first world capitalistic health care system.
00:39:59
Speaker
and that's the mismatch because I think what you're seeing is when you use these things indigenously people do not use them because they are emotionally or mentally injured or diseased. They use them for physical corrections in their body and that would be if you go back and you take like the general use and it could be
00:40:21
Speaker
medicine men from, you know, 100 to 10,000 years ago, you have one consistent thing, and that is that they knew about how to control the state of a person, right? That was like unbelievably or overwhelmingly consistent between every civilization, every hunter-gatherer group that we found is that we found drumming.
00:40:43
Speaker
and drumming in coordination and in close relation to medicine. That's because the rhythm of beats sets your brainwave. So theta, delta, alpha, all of these things can be modulated. So hear that traditional shamanic beat. Boom.
00:41:01
Speaker
Boom, boom, boom, boom, boom. It'll be under a certain amount. The reason why it's so transcendental is because the beat is highly predictable, right? So you listen to that for 20 minutes and your brain knows what's coming next. So it sets up a pattern in your brain not to reduce this down to scientific jargon or not.
00:41:23
Speaker
But it basically puts you into a state where you can relax because the future is predictable. Everything is safe. The sound allows you to go into a deep parasympathetic state. One in which that we know that you rest and digest. Your body actually starts to heal itself. So it's a controlled healing pattern. So that's the first thing to notice about traditional medicines is that music was basically the foundation for it in most cultures.
00:41:50
Speaker
And if it wasn't the foundation, it was closely related to the practice. Only in 14% to 15% of the societies that we found is their known use of psychoactive substances. And I think it's going to be higher once we kind of understand how they were using them. But that's the evidence so far. I think it's probably closer to a quarter or half. But conservative-wise, let's say 15% because that's what the data says.
00:42:17
Speaker
The next thing that you're taking out of context when you apply, you know, plant or other kind of medicinal use into a population like this is Dunbar's number, right? So Dunbar's, the groups of 150 people, the importance of that can't be overstated. And I see it now because I've been a part of so many of these ceremonies where you bring people in,
00:42:41
Speaker
um it's a great appropriation of indigenous practices they're wonderful like the music is great the people are lovely everybody's saying really cheerful happy things and it's all blessed light and happiness and all the fucking spiritual gaslighting wisdom that you could ever get out of anything and then they you know they take your 500 bucks a night and then you know the
00:43:04
Speaker
blessings brother and well-wishing and then they go on and the thing that you're missing is in traditional societies of 150 people or less, you're dealing with one medicine man that has an intrinsic incentive to get you better.
00:43:19
Speaker
Right? So it's not a here, take this thing and hopefully it works. It's a we're going to try this. And when that doesn't work, we're going to try this. And when we're going to when that fails, we're going to do they never stop trying to help because they are deeply connected to one another. And that is the key ingredient that you can't sell in America. You can't sell community. You can try. I mean, CrossFit has been trying for decades. But we all know that if it's if it's arbitrary or it's like falsely held up in this
00:43:48
Speaker
sub genre or subculture, it doesn't really have a stranglehold. And that's one thing that we've been trying to be very aware of is that when people come in, they have very meaningful experiences, right? And that's by design, you know, we want people to have meaningful experiences, but we also understand that there's this deep sense that they want to belong to something. And that is most often used in our culture
00:44:18
Speaker
not to be a cynic, but maliciously, not maliciously, but negligently maybe is the better. Maybe it's not on purpose, but they use this meaning making to sell things. And I do think that's because if we look at our programming from like
00:44:34
Speaker
the big, you know, capitalistic point of view, it's make money, make money, make money, make money, be productive, be productive, be productive. These are the like, this is the messaging, hustle, hustle, hustle, so you can get more, more, more. And if that's going to happen, that underlying program doesn't really go away. So you add plant medicines on top of this, and see that it's valuable for people.
00:44:56
Speaker
and you take their intimate emotional and deep healing states and you kind of leverage that to do one ceremony after the other. Do another one. Keep the healing process up because that's dependency. And what you see is like even in these people that denounce allopathic
00:45:14
Speaker
medicine, right? You know, these what we call plastic shamans, people go down to Peru or, you know, they go to a retreat center and they get a certificate and now they can serve ayahuasca or whatever. And they come back wearing shippebo garb and all white and, you know, they're basically levitating into the fucking room. And they're gonna provide
00:45:35
Speaker
all sorts of, you know, they basically listen to Wayne Dyer for a year and they just quote him and then serve powerful medicines. And there's a huge difference, you know, that like, they're, even if they're well-meaning, even if they are good people, and I know a lot of them are good people, subconsciously, they have this societal conditioning to get more and more and more. And that happens by leveraging people's experiences.
Community, Healing, and Capitalism
00:46:04
Speaker
Yeah. I think it's so difficult because the, I don't know about difficult, but obviously we exist within the constraints of capitalism and financial requirements and this and that. But when it comes to community, there's this need for obviously connection and there is this need for meaning and belonging.
00:46:34
Speaker
You know to exploit that I do think is like that is malicious that is. You know and the best way to.
00:46:44
Speaker
the best way to like rile up people is to have some sort of external threat or an enemy or something to have this sort of foe inherent or intrinsic need to heal the person or have the person come together. And so like just this constant creation of enemies that provide the tension or the sort of pushback
00:47:12
Speaker
to have then this camp or this tribe of like, you know, now it's Russia, now it's this people, now it's those people, now it's, you know, all of these things. And that just does seem like, that's like building a house with like the siding first versus like the foundation and the framing.
00:47:36
Speaker
Yeah, so getting back to a little bit about, you know, this stuff too with fitness, because obviously, you know, there's there's medicines and compounds. And, you know, even I was listening to somebody talk about psychedelic use. And, you know, he's been in the world. He's a sound guy. I'll send you the podcast is fascinating.
00:47:56
Speaker
But he was like saying, he's like, yeah, I don't really like calling the medicines just because of the loaded sort of implications with that. He's like, these are like technologies that, you know, they're, they're just technologies. Like that's what he refers to him as. Um, which with the music thing is interesting because with Iboga, um, and the Bwiti tribe, their music is wild. It is like, Oh yeah.
00:48:22
Speaker
totally chaotic and they were saying that the Iboga showed them the instruments to build during the journey and then they built it and you're like, holy crap, this is so unlike anything I've ever heard before.
00:48:45
Speaker
And this is what's so fundamentally strange about this because no one really knows where, there's lore that comes behind where these substances were discovered. And the Buichuia, I mean, they didn't crack you over the head, right? Because they used to, how I understand the original ceremony is like, yeah, as I crack open and let out the spirit. So they basically give you a concussion at the end.
00:49:10
Speaker
Hopefully, they changed that part. But yeah, these wild stories about what came first or whatever, I like your point to not calling it medicines. I had a guy who facilitated for me incredibly talented, like, I mean, the most unreal musical talent that I've ever heard.
00:49:29
Speaker
Uh, and very good at working with this plant in general. And he said right off the bat, he goes, cause somebody said like plant medicine to try to talk about it. He's like, look, if you're not sick, it's not medicine. If you were well, it's a teacher and that's it. They're using it to learn. And that always clarified for me what I was coming to it with, which is like, Oh, I'm here to learn. And this is why I should be quiet. And I should listen, because it's like, I can learn something from the experience.
00:49:59
Speaker
from the from the maybe the generate the the generation of or the revelation I should say of musical instruments or whatnot it's you can't that sounds like bullshit until you have some of these experiences and you go oh no that makes sense early on
00:50:22
Speaker
I made a kid, I don't know how it happened, but I made a kid who cooked his own ayahuasca, right? And I'd heard about him and he had never sat with a shaman. He had no training in it. He was a cook. I was a chef down in like Arizona and a friend introduced me to him. I don't know how he met him. And he came and taught me and my friend how to cook ayahuasca in a crock pot.
00:50:46
Speaker
and I was like listening to him and it was very like he just had this process and I was like where did you learn this and he was like well originally I was trying to extract DMT but then I found a recipe that I kind of put together that I could figure out how to make ayahuasca so I made it and then the first time it didn't work and then I had a dream that night and it taught me how to fix it and the next day I recooked it and took it and it worked
00:51:12
Speaker
And then from there, every time I took it, it taught me how to refine it. So it told me to quit using aluminum to cook in. It told me to use glass to, you know, to store me in. And like all of these really bizarre things where it's essentially he's claiming that the plant is the instructor. And whenever he sits with the plant, it teaches him how to refine the process all the way to the point where he was called egg white leaching.
00:51:40
Speaker
So this is something that they don't do in the traditional brew that he had figured out. And maybe some of it had to do with some internet forum stuff, but essentially said it was a pure revelation. He claimed as a pure revelation that the tannins in the ayahuasca are what make you physically very ill. Like your gut has a very hard time processing them and you're more likely to eject it, which is not a bad thing. It's not a good thing. Vomiting is purging as part of it.
00:52:07
Speaker
But he claimed that the revelation told him to use half an egg white for every ounce of reduced ayahuasca, and he could clarify the tannins out. So he would cook it.
00:52:24
Speaker
Cool it bring it to a boil drop egg whites into it let it simmer down cook Leat the egg whites boil out and he pulls it out and the egg whites leach the tannins out and you get this very pure substance It's the most bizarre thing I've ever seen because we did it and it works
00:52:42
Speaker
it legitimately works. And it was all based off of this revelation. So you saying that the Buitui tribe learned how to make instruments that are insane is completely realistic in my experience. And I think other people could laugh, especially people with the skeptics, because I was one of them. And they'd be like, oh, they're just hallucinating, whatever. But in my experience, that is dead true. Have you done anything other than Ayaboga in 5.0?
00:53:12
Speaker
No, not yet.
00:53:16
Speaker
Yeah, they're pretty strong. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, a couple ideas kind of coming up or things coming up. But you know, and as the teaching, you know, as the teacher and not to, you know, have it be something that helps me finish a book or, you know, wrap up a project or like not this. It's I don't view these as like springboards for outcomes and products, but genuine
00:53:45
Speaker
you know, for me at least with some of the things that I struggle with, you know, with like paralysis and analysis and rumen and like the known and you know, just different things. It's like, they're beautiful reminders of like the we because Elon Musk exists. It's like, look at us, we've got the iPhone and the
00:54:06
Speaker
this is SpaceX and we're so smart and it's like, no. The dumbest thing I've ever thought was that my mind is really smart by my own doing and my own, again, fabrication. But that is where I think with some of the stuff, kind of started saying like shouting philosophy in the gym while working out, but
00:54:28
Speaker
I see this very much as a similar practice that you do, that Andrew Tracy's kind of guiding people through, that we do, that, I don't know, I don't think there's many that are like exploring this because it's not like how many reps or what the weight was or what your time or some sort of performative
00:54:50
Speaker
measure, and in a world that's, I think, trying to explain everything with research and theories, we're kind of being like, look, just have the experience, and that's it. What did you notice in the experience? And people do have these
00:55:09
Speaker
moments of insight, I'm not gonna say necessarily like divine intervention or any sort of intervention, but like the surges of a state, maybe it was a little bit of a piece, maybe it was anger, maybe it was whatever it was and not to say though like, hey,
00:55:28
Speaker
this workout, this FYF or this, you know, engage session that we do or this piece of equipment is going to give you, this is going to repair the relationship with your dad because like,
00:55:43
Speaker
You know what I mean? But that's what's so cool. This is such a good way to put it actually, to put it in the context of imagine thinking that three sets of 10 something would repair childhood trauma. It's the same. I get the same laugh out of somebody thinking that if they take five grams of psilocybin, they're somehow going to deal with a youth rape scenario.
00:56:06
Speaker
Um, I think you're right. Like maybe that was what my attraction was originally to substances like that is because it really reflected what I had felt inside of training, either on a bike for racing bikes or in a gym, you know, scenario. I felt very powerful sensations that had nothing to do with rep sets or weight. It had something to do with just placing myself in an environment.
00:56:39
Speaker
I think I was coming to learn and I thought I knew what I was gonna learn. And it really slapped me back and made me learn the hard way. And then I had to be really careful about saying that I wanna learn because learning, I don't think most people realize this, but to say that I wanna learn something essentially is saying that you're rewriting what you know, right? You're either filling a gap or changing something.
00:57:01
Speaker
And I think maybe I solidified this lesson later with some substance use that
00:57:05
Speaker
And that hurts. That is not a pleasant experience. Like, when I've learned a lesson, what is it? It's usually, I learned the lesson the hard way. But who learns it the easy way? I've never met that person.
00:57:20
Speaker
So it intuits the same thing about people coming to a gym space and they go, oh, I'm going to get strong or I'm going to develop X quality. And you go, yeah, but if you know what you are going to learn, then you wouldn't need to learn it. And the same thing is true for physical efforts. To assume that you know the lesson already means you're not doing the right thing in order to actually learn the lesson.
00:57:47
Speaker
And so it's rewritten a lot of how I feel, like the creativity process, the openness to the day, and this is something that we try to teach people, albeit mixed unsuccessfully successfully, in how to be creative on the day to give people a physical experience that they can pull something out of that you're not dictating what they should pull out of.
00:58:10
Speaker
That has been probably the biggest realization and also the biggest challenge that we've recognized that our work is kind of geared towards in this fitness industry space, which to be fair, and I've been trying to talk about this for a little bit, I don't think people realize what they're up against.
Challenges of Being a Fitness Coach
00:58:30
Speaker
You notice the frustration, like people that are like coaches and the fitness people, they're like,
00:58:34
Speaker
man like just sucks and they just they have this like very downtrodden cynical perspective of what the world their world views is that the world sucks right yeah even though they're still doing their job they are dismayed by
00:58:52
Speaker
non-compliant clients seeking easy button answers and pill formula, formulaic application of practices and yada, yada, you could name all of the stuff. We take that, if you're a good coach, you will criticize that person because they're not getting the results that they want because they're not good at practicing. That might be true. So I don't want to take that off the table because I hear a lot of coaches just get pissed that somebody didn't do what they told them.
00:59:21
Speaker
And they go, that's not the job, actually, to tell people what to do. The job is to problem solve with a person so that they end up changing their behavior in a way that you both agree to. And sometimes you have to trick them into it. But essentially, you have a job of manipulation. You understand where they need to go. They have told you where they need to go. You know how they need to get there. And your job is to try to trick them into that path, or not just trick, but lead them to the path that works for them, whether that has to do with,
00:59:50
Speaker
changing their diet, their training, their lifestyle stuff doesn't really matter. That's your job. But there's another side to this that I don't think is talked about enough, and that is what you are as a coach. I am a fitness coach, for lack of a better term. So I am concerned with people's overall well-being first and foremost, and then maybe some performance metrics on top of that. If you don't have the well-being down, you will never get the performance.
01:00:20
Speaker
if you leverage performance against health you'll always lose and then you'll lose lose because then the person is in a worse spot than when they started. Most people come to me ready to leverage and lose and we have to turn them away because we have to
01:00:36
Speaker
We don't have time to teach them that they're wrong in their approach, that they're too late, they're in dis-health, that the weight that they want to lose or the body that they want is on the other side of other corrective psychology. A lot of this is limited in our head, obviously, but a lot of it has to do with, man, you thought that you wanted to change your body, but you didn't realize that it was opening up a huge
01:01:02
Speaker
problem between you and your partner who doesn't want you to change, or your change is a reflection of their inability to change, and now you have marital problems because you're training. And that is something that occurs so commonly. And people laugh at it, but that's a legitimate problem that we have with people. It's the first question I get with people wanting to make drastic transformations. How long will it take? And I go, well,
01:01:29
Speaker
How fat is your partner? Or how unhealthy is your partner? Or what is their state? Because that will largely dictate your state. And you don't think so, but you start shedding 15, 20 pounds, looking good, feeling good, and your partner hasn't done that. They're gonna start baking you cakes and brownies and shit to slow you down. And not because they don't love you, but because they're looking at you changing, thinking that you're accelerating, and they see themselves as stagnant. So it becomes a real issue.
01:01:56
Speaker
But on top of even just the interpersonal client-coach connection, you now have industrialized bad incentives all around. Our culture has made it so that the obese person is the best customer.
01:02:16
Speaker
Like, it's by design, you know, that the person that is overweight or obese needs more food, right? Generally speaking, they buy things that they don't or can't use or quit using, so they keep re-buying stuff. They have the most need for entertainment because they have the highest sedentary rate out of pretty much anyone in the population.
01:02:40
Speaker
And then when their metabolic diseases catch up to them they need the most pharmaceutical intervention and when the pharmaceutical intervention can't continue to keep them quote unquote healthy by the numbers they then need drastic medical intervention so we're talking about.
01:02:56
Speaker
an upsell if you look at it the right way. This is not a problem that is trying to be solved. It is a problem that has been solved, which is how do we get people to nonstop consume? Well, we engineer food types that are so palatable that you can't stop eating them, that they overwrite literally neurotransmitters in your brain so that you will continue to crave these foods over foods that actually have helpful impact. In fact, they are so palatable
01:03:25
Speaker
that they make healthy food for you taste bad right you tell you what's that you can't eat like they manipulate your whole sensory uh experience and then on top of that uh you know you get to the food type thing but then the pharmaceuticals are just basically
01:03:43
Speaker
The goal of the United States healthcare system is essentially to keep people on prolonged medications. And if you don't understand what the incentive would be for that, it's pretty simple. It's just economics. If I care a disease, no more money.
01:03:59
Speaker
If I treat a disease for a lifetime, lots of money. So Ozempic will become the fastest growing, most profitable drug of all time. Now, granted, I don't I raise the alarm bell about it because there's some issues with muscle wasting. But semaglutide is a long chain peptide that has some phenomenal uses in type two diabetics, you know, adult onset diabetes. That being said, its side effect is for weight loss is real.
01:04:29
Speaker
The reason why it's dangerous is because people will not proactively protect themselves against the wasting away part. They won't feel hungry, and the foods that they do wanna eat will be low quality, so they will fall into malnutrition even worse than they already are. And they won't protect by having increased protein or amino acid profile or activity to mitigate the muscle wasting. So they will see,
01:04:57
Speaker
I'm not even going to talk about the psychological problems of suicidal ideation, but I think in the next 10 years, you'll see an extreme explosion of osteoporosis, probably young age mortality rate by falling, stuff like that from people that will use this for a lifetime.
01:05:13
Speaker
So when you're a coach and you're trying to make people better, you have a whole industry that is working against you. And so when you feel that frustration, you don't know what that frustration is. You blame it on the person that's in front of you that's unable to change. But what might allow you some help in this industry is a little bit of compassion and imagining that if somebody is asleep, and I'll use this term asleep all the time because I think it's a
01:05:41
Speaker
you know, a synonym for an antonym for attention, right? Imagine if, if somebody was asleep, you can't really blame them for something, they're, they're not conscious of what they're doing, right? They get up sleepwalk, they fall down the stairs and like break your pot or something.
01:06:01
Speaker
And you're like, oh, you know, I really liked that pot, or I really liked that vase, or I really liked that thing that you broke, or you crashed into the TV when you were asleep. But immediately our conscious, like our subconscious is like, I can't be as mad at that person because they were not in control of their actions. Well, take that over and apply it to, you know, just normal behavior. You see a baby crying, right? And your first thought, besides if it's not your kid being irritated is like, well, there's probably three things. The kid's hungry,
01:06:31
Speaker
tired or unloved, right? It's like one of those three things. But something happens when we become walking, talking adults and those three problems go away, but those are still the three problems. You meet somebody in a traffic incident that's yelling at you and freaking out, and you're like, man, that guy sucks. He's a bad person. I wish he would die. But really, the question is, is he hungry? Is he tired? Is he unloved?
01:06:57
Speaker
Right. And one of those is probably true and it changes the aspect. The other thing that I'll throw in there after those three is like, are they unaware?
01:07:05
Speaker
Are they asleep? Most people are asleep. And I don't mean physically, eyes closely. I mean that their cognitive process for understanding the world is on autopilot. Driving to work is on autopilot. Doing work is on autopilot. Watching Netflix is on autopilot. Most relationships are had, most interactions are had on autopilot. When you wake somebody up, what do you get? You get somebody who's kind of terrified.
01:07:32
Speaker
You've seen those videos of the person sleeping in the car and they come alive and they start freaking out and they're like, oh God, it's a heart attack. When we talk about making people aware, I'm very aware that this is actually what you run into. I make somebody aware of the poison that is involved in the food that they're eating or the relationships that they're involved in or the lifestyle that they have ignored for 40 years.
01:07:57
Speaker
And suddenly the panic starts to overwrite what I'm saying, right? And so I have to think about clear and concise ways to gently wake people up to little things here and there so that they can be aware that actually you have trillion dollar organizations that are looking to undo them. Like their dis-ease and their unhealthiness is a profit margin to them.
01:08:20
Speaker
And as you start to wake people up, some people will panic and go the other way. But the more people you can wake up to this, the better because then collectively we can have constructive conversations about food quality and lifestyle and kind of what the pressures of society are kind of leading to.
Responsibility with Increased Awareness
01:08:39
Speaker
Yeah, it's funny you say that because
01:08:43
Speaker
you know, it is almost that like awareness sounds like, Oh, like, like just like learning. It's like, yes, like awareness learning, like awesome. And it's like, and then you're in some painful shit and you're like, Hey, this is learning. You're like, no, no, no, this is not learning. It's like, this actually like the awareness torture, but the, and then all of a sudden like aware, well now you see, now you actually are,
01:09:10
Speaker
like the burden of responsibility with what you see. Now you look at the person we live in an area where I would generally say there's many, many sleep drivers for one. But you know, and it's like chasing the things and all of the whatever the you know, the the shekels and the tokens and the status stuff and not really into any of them. But it's like,
01:09:38
Speaker
when you are aware or becoming aware and certainly not making claims to be like the enlightened one or an enlightened one or anything like that. But like through my own process, it's like, well, now I have to look at the things that I've been in an environment with the culture and with society and with things that really not only celebrate, but make it very easy to turn away from. So of course, this person is going to consciously or subconsciously
01:10:08
Speaker
not want to open their eyes, not want to see. And your bit about compassion, man, talk about some, like, we do hard things, like, yeah, offering some compassion and some grace to someone who is living in this life, in this world that I would believe there's, at some point within them, a recognition of don't look, like deny, like don't look over there, don't,
01:10:37
Speaker
don't become aware. And it's super difficult because
01:10:44
Speaker
You can be like, yeah, but if you just sort of saw what is really going on, perhaps the problems that continue to be spoken about could maybe be ameliorate or maybe be down a bit. Like, it's not the next thing that's, you know, we had a, my former job, I was in the military and my team star and I were talking late one night and we were like, you know, we were talking about a certain area of the world and a certain mission.
01:11:12
Speaker
And we're like, yeah, you know, the problem is that the problem is the solution is the problem. And that's what we're in. That's what we're entangled and grappling here. And for us, I think in the fitness space, like there's almost this perpetual sort of, I don't know if you've noticed this too, but like healing, like, like healing is like, I'm on my, and yes, people are healing journeys and I get it, but it's like the best way to be on this healing loop.
01:11:43
Speaker
is to constantly be sick or constantly. If you keep breaking your leg, you're always going to be healing. You're just in this Sisyphean-like situation and man-
01:12:00
Speaker
You're not on a healing journey. You're on a healing roller coaster. Like you're just doing the same thing over and over again and thinking that it's a thrill. But you're literally just on a manufactured loop. And the things that are that you're damaged by, you're exposing yourself to. And I think that's that's a very common actually.
01:12:17
Speaker
Yeah, within the psychedelic space even too or some of the philosophical underpinnings within that. A lot of the people who are advocates for obviously responsible use and whatnot, they have this beautiful metaphor which is like Ralph Metzner I read it from. He was saying like when you plant something back to what you were doing previously, when you plant something, you have this plant
01:12:45
Speaker
The roots are growing. You can't continually unearth it to check to make sure that there's roots. You have to let it be in the thing. I think that's something with the practice of using physical movement, of using what you're putting into your... Are you aware of your body in space and time? Are you aware of how you are walking in? We don't even have... At our gym, we don't have a set workout.
01:13:12
Speaker
We have programming like for the week or whatever, but like somebody might do like a lower body session today. Someone else in the same training session might just do like some cardio conditioning with some breathing protocols and it's like they're there, they're both there at nine in the morning.
01:13:33
Speaker
They're teaching us. They're telling us we're checking in with our state, but it's not an easy thing for people to digest because they're like, well, I come to the gym. You're the expert. You're supposed to tell me what to do. Tell me what to do. Yeah. And so we were like, you know what? Because we had to cross the gym for a long time.
01:13:56
Speaker
Yeah, obviously done a lot for a lot of people and we're grateful for that for what that's done. But when we opened up between years, we're like, we're not doing our enemy is actually in many ways, like within the little fitness slice of it. Our enemy is in the gym around the corner.
01:14:14
Speaker
Our enemy is the calendar telling people what they should do on a set day. And we can remove that and now partner with them and be like, all right, so what do we got? It's amazing to see that click.
01:14:28
Speaker
The harm that you see from structured programming that never considers the person consider their own state before they apply X amount of stress is probably one of the most devious damaging things that is just an inherent truth because we get told, shut up, fucking train hard, shut up legs.
Adaptable Fitness Programming
01:14:50
Speaker
We're basically admonished to David Goggins our way into fitness.
01:14:56
Speaker
the use of it, the use of it is, and I would say the same thing. It's like, the analogy there for me is like thinking that psychedelics are good, and that you should just put it in the water supply, right? Everybody should do it. And you're like, that's the same thing with fitness. It's highly potent.
01:15:12
Speaker
right especially you get into intense training with heavy loading and heavy central nervous system fatigue that these are not things that should be applied willy-nilly and i agree with you we ran into that same issue when people just are we so we we mapped our system a little bit differently probably a lot it's probably really close to what you were talking about where i go
01:15:35
Speaker
people are coming to learn here so they don't need us therefore they're going to learn to come up with their own sessions based off of themes we still have like a running program hey here's if you want to uh if you want to use the energy of the group and you want to use intensity as a modality here's the workout that you can do
01:15:56
Speaker
We would first say to warm up and then decide what to do. And sometimes that'll be, now that I'm warm, I don't feel like doing that. And you go, cool, figure out what would be beneficial to you. Most of the time it's cardiovascular, easy aerobic stress, or it's mobility work, or sometimes it's actually, no, I just need to lift a heavy weight and then get out of here. And you're like, cool.
01:16:18
Speaker
That process takes maybe a year to learn for most people if they're actually wanting to learn it, right? Which is engaging with them and trying to ask them how they feel after certain sessions or what kind of training affected them a certain way. And they are conscious of this process while it's going on. After a year, I find that most people don't need us. Now, that doesn't mean they know how to do everything.
01:16:41
Speaker
But I think they could show up to a gym and figure it out. And that's really what our goal has been, is to not just facilitate people's addiction to high intensity exercise or their hustle culture mentality. The six AMers are the worst. They're like, they're every time, but they also never get better. And this is what drives me crazy. I'm like, you're wasting an hour of your day.
01:17:05
Speaker
and you're not getting any better. Just sleep in, man. If you could choose, just sleep. I have one thing that I don't want to lose. You mentioned that you're not enlightened. I would ask you, I have a very simple equation for figuring out levels of enlightenment. What is your most toxic trait?
01:17:30
Speaker
Like what is the thing that you think is, is the thing that you're aware of that you're just like, man, I wish that wasn't me. Um, I can be incredibly vindictive to the point of I will, I want to,
01:17:51
Speaker
go off the foreign lands in exchange in the transmission of life. That vindictive, I guess like that justice seeking vindictive just
01:18:08
Speaker
that part of to varying, right? There's like an escalation of force with that. Of course, if somebody busts into my home, like, sure, that's not I'm not gonna hold any hold any, you know, kind of qualms about that. But the the
01:18:26
Speaker
the orders of magnitude greater than what's probably called for. I think that's pretty for me. I noticed that's toxic because not only is it fucked up to
01:18:46
Speaker
And I'm not like a raging maniac. Like I don't like doing that. Like I'm not like kicking in people's like car doors if they like, you know, do whatever. But like, man, I really go there and super quick and it was, you know, in a job that was like, yeah, right on, man, we got, you're right. What we're looking for. You know, like, yeah, but also like,
01:19:09
Speaker
Ali, do I pay a price for that? Like the toll that my inner world has paid for that. I've had my eyes open to that in the past couple years. Yeah, that's a tough one.
01:19:25
Speaker
I mean, it's it was just, you know, it's it's I don't think people look into it, right? Like they they feel these negative emotions or they feel these sights and you know, it doesn't feel good. But also, I am also driven to more than justice. Like I like retribution. Like I I think people should pay in the deepest sense for crossing me the wrong way. And that is a knee jerk reaction that I also have to be like,
01:19:55
Speaker
Okay, most people are not malicious. Most people are just asleep. And therefore, it's like me attacking some sleeping people, which doesn't give me a good visual.
01:20:08
Speaker
So that's usually how I but what I would say is like understanding your like toxic or negative traits I think is that is the path of enlightenment and enlightenment not being some eastern place that you arrive but in the place that you arrive internally the landscape internally starts to be a flourishing garden because you know where the weeds are
01:20:32
Speaker
And you can't really kill those parts off because it's all an ecosystem. What was hard for me to contend with was without this negative or toxic trait that most people do not appreciate about me, I don't have the other
01:20:50
Speaker
right? I don't have the deep sense of loyalty, like other people who have, you know, I don't, that doesn't exist without this like idea of retribution. So therefore, once I recognize it, I can go, okay, I'm aware that I tend to go off this side. But I'm not trying to get rid of it, because something happens to Aaron or Mark or the people that I care about, you bet.
01:21:13
Speaker
I'll be there in a second with a pitchfork and whatever ready to burn shit down because that's just in my personality. I think you can activate me and weaponize me and I can be kind of easily manipulated which is why I have to be very careful about people that I am loyal to.
01:21:31
Speaker
Yeah, man, that's so funny. I agree 100%. It's similar in that I look at that and I think the whole killing that part of you or whatever, it's just such nonsense, internet hype talk. But
01:21:51
Speaker
man does it it's again like I think it's like another itch because when and I'm the same thing like deeply loyal so and and frankly like yeah there's sometimes I'm like I'm embarrassed I'm not really embarrassed now it's just what it was it was ignorance I was asleep but like you're like man I really like
01:22:08
Speaker
I outsourced my own agency and sense of perhaps what's right to this loyal, this pseudo-loyal, whatever. Maybe it's more complicated than that, but
01:22:26
Speaker
looking at the killing off the parts of yourself or David Goggins and all of that, it's like, that's just a giant itch scratcher because that part, like what you asked, what a beautiful question, like, yeah, what's the most toxic thing about you?
01:22:44
Speaker
or that you're aware of, that is like an itch that you'd rather probably not feel. You'd rather scratch it, pain you'd like to distract from. And along comes this thing that is like an itch scratcher. And you're like, I don't understand. Like psychologically and physiologically, this makes absolutely no sense, kind of like some of like the Trump stuff. And yet it's like, yeah, yeah, yeah. Like David Goggins your way through dealing with
01:23:11
Speaker
like literal component of of who you are just an activation of different things and experiences and you're supposed to like eradicate that because with that yeah goes the goes the the there's the maladaptive response to it but then there's also the adaptive responses like
01:23:31
Speaker
Well, I guess in many ways for what you're doing with nonprofit and your family and Mark and all the people, it's like, but something's driving you to say, I want to do this better. I want to maybe not do this better as far as like a comparison, but serve and provide and reveal kind of like what you were saying before. Yeah. And maybe this brings us to my toxic trait, which is like,
01:23:58
Speaker
So this business exists out of spite. Like I hate so deeply that I want to succeed in order to shut other like, I don't know, detractors of mine down. But that energy doesn't last anywhere. And that's like, man, I...
01:24:19
Speaker
I think it brings me to my real toxic trait, which is like a deep sense of insecurity, that I'm not good enough, I haven't proven myself, that I'm never gonna be satisfied. Like I have, sadly, counterbalanced two parts of me. One, I do think that I'm better than other people, like none.
01:24:39
Speaker
Not like in a sense that I deserve more, I'm entitled, but from the sense that I think that I think more, I try harder. I think that I put more effort in than most people. And that is a deep sense of superiority to the average person.
01:24:56
Speaker
Not that I want harm from them or I think I deserve, but it's just, but then it's balanced by a deep sense of inferiority, which I'm never going to live up to my own expectations. And that cuts at me every, like, if you want to like an alarm bell that makes me go off and makes me more anxious and more frantic and desperate, it's I wake up and I go, I have, I don't have that many years left.
01:25:19
Speaker
realistically, like 40, fuck, half of it's gone, at least, you know, the very least, you know, it's like, it's like, it's this ride's almost over. And I feel like, man, I'm still living in the same state, man, I'm still doing the same stuff, still talking about exercise. And that's why I get a little bit frantic. But then
01:25:39
Speaker
I relax and go man if i didn't have that motivation i wouldn't show up to help people if i didn't have that motivation i wouldn't sit down to write about the things that have experienced i wouldn't go to the work to try to like ensure that the teachings that i give people in exchange for money are profoundly true and that they are effective and.
01:26:00
Speaker
So I have to understand that every once in a while I fall back into that feeling of like, I'm not good enough. I'm not doing the right thing. I need to change. And that is where I get stuck. But because I'm aware of it, I can at least notice it and then just like let some of it go. I know it's not going to go away, you know, but
Insecurities and Imposter Syndrome
01:26:20
Speaker
I can warm people around me you know i can tell hey this is what i'm like and they already know obviously so you know hit me and have like probably the most open. Like dialogue in weird i mean if people are we know every like we're pretty open about what are.
01:26:42
Speaker
Dark sides are like that's what we talk about most the time is like this is what i'm afraid of that it took a while to get there to go a while for us to mature into a place of communication to be like. For a while i wanted to hide all the stuff from her cuz i wanted to be the protector i wanted to be the person who's capable and i did her to sense my fear.
01:27:01
Speaker
But what she got from that was that I was lying about something she could sense that I wasn't being honest about my fear and that became a distrust of me and that amplified my fear and anxiety and eventually broke through that pattern it was like.
01:27:17
Speaker
Oh, okay, I just need to tell you that I'm worried, actually, like, I don't know what's going to happen. You know, we own our own businesses. I'm not real good with like planning things. So I kind of like fly off the seat of the cuff. And I'm going to be terrified pretty much all the time.
01:27:35
Speaker
And we're in one of those modes right now where I'm like, man, we jumped ship. We moved to this new loft. We are renovating our entire gym. We're changing kind of our business direction. We're changing nonprofit to be a little bit like separated from other, siloed from other endeavors and trying to coordinate things that are more organized. But right now it just looks like pure mayhem. And when I wake up, I go, Oh my God, I have no idea what I'm doing.
01:28:02
Speaker
and I start to panic a little bit but because Erin knows she's like well you just start you just get your coffee walk over to the gym and start teaching and then when you're done teaching do something for yourself go play the drum or play some music and then go get in the office type some stuff when you get tired of that go out do some stuff for yourself and it just becomes like
01:28:24
Speaker
Once you start moving, you can tolerate the deep sense of panic. But I still have it. It's not like I'm cool and collected. Inside, I'm like, nobody knows that I'm a faker yet. And so I'm constantly trying to prove that I'm not a faker. And I think just knowing that about yourself,
01:28:44
Speaker
is what it's about. Understanding it, dealing with it, forgiving yourself for being like that, whatever the new age spiritual speak is for acceptance or whatever. That is what they've been talking about for 5,000 years. That is awareness. That is
01:29:02
Speaker
That is the thing that every single person is like, yeah, we know everybody like that is the suffering. The suffering is that you know, you're not the person that you want to be. And then once you know that you can then try harder or not. Doesn't matter. That's what I actually think discipline is,
Dopamine, Motivation, and Discipline
01:29:20
Speaker
which is like the efforts we take to ameliorate ourselves from the pain of knowing we're not yet who we want to be.
01:29:31
Speaker
if that's like because that sort of and then like kind of the whole I don't know how like I really want to do more digging into like the I don't know some new agey person we need like a like Andrew Huberman dopamine expert combined with like a shaman you know like a Gabor Mate like who's like just
01:29:57
Speaker
fewer compassion in heart and being like, I'm really curious about that because that decline of dopamine, the pain of saying I need to motivate action to do and pursue and to get the thing and using the function of the dopaminergic system, well, that's the pain
01:30:20
Speaker
is the pain of not being who we can be or who we aspire to be and the actions we take to ameliorate the pain, to not feel the pain. To me, I think that's discipline or a disciplined pursuit.
Discipline and Loving the Unliked
01:30:40
Speaker
Wow, I just kind of blacked out for a second.
01:30:43
Speaker
Oh, no, I like that thought. I think it was Mike Tyson who just said this the other day, I think, and he said his idea of discipline is learning to love what you don't like. And that is like, man, at first you're like, oh, whatever. And then you kind of think about it and you go, yeah, that's basically like,
01:31:02
Speaker
I don't like the feeling of hard exercise actually. I like the result from it. So I learned to like the process in order to get the other thing. And I don't like sitting down to write. And there's your, you know, your dopamine response is basically in the sitting down to write a thousand words a day is not fun. It's painful, actually.
01:31:21
Speaker
But the response is delayed gratification because once something comes out clear and concise and it resonates with people, now I get a flood and I get the results that I was looking for. People are able to understand my view of the world and that is all I've ever wanted really. It was like, I want somebody to understand how I see the world. They don't have to see it like that, but I want them to understand where I'm coming from.
Desire for Recognition in Creative Work
01:31:47
Speaker
And that's the pain in learning to write or take pictures or, you know, seeing.
01:31:53
Speaker
there's also like a deep sense of just wanting to be like, not to be like the Bernie Brown, but like just being seen and like, as a human, like being acknowledged, like, you know, like, yeah, the, the work that you're doing, the creation, the revelation, the interesting, the pursuit of learning, I find incredibly valuable. I mean,
01:32:19
Speaker
I don't follow every single space program. I think I'm doing it well because it's not like, all right, just what I'm doing today. It's like the anti-program. It's like, no, fuck fate. This isn't a Monday through Saturday thing. But I find that what you and the crew and everybody are doing, it's like, oh, this is really cool. This is a, what a gift it is. And yeah, like,
01:32:47
Speaker
the lack of acknowledgement, perhaps, it's like, you know, going into that, like wanting to be, wanting to be acknowledged, wanting to, not in a, you know, grandiose, like, oh, I need to be, you know, like worship. No, like the purity and the truth, like it's right and true.
Vulnerability vs Self-Assessment
01:33:02
Speaker
that is being asked or perhaps yearned for is being acknowledged as the human being that you are. And I don't know, I'm not trying to kiss your ass. I love what you guys are doing and obviously like all good. I really appreciate it. I think I think these things like this, this is the hard. So when people come to a symposium
01:33:26
Speaker
We don't know what's going to happen, but I do know like the mechanisms that are involved are if I'm not honest about myself, other people won't be. And so essentially it becomes about what we say is like cutting your own belly open and like letting things out to let the vulnerability kind of act as a
01:33:47
Speaker
uh you know a contagion almost right you see one person is able to be honest about themselves and be open about what they're working on and then you see it kind of multiply and it's not i should be i should reframe this because there is a fucking vast difference between self-assessment and self-deprecation and i think
Dealing with Criticism and Self-Realization
01:34:10
Speaker
One might start, but it usually ends with the other because people love to say that they're on the healing process, but really they're just self-deprecating. And one of the ways that if, man, I had a hard time, in instance, I didn't really know how to handle, because I wrote this article kind of on the shifts that we wanted to do. We really needed to take into consideration that in order to affect an industry, we have to become a part of it and not be apart from it.
01:34:40
Speaker
Because we've really like not paid attention to it. We've ignored it We've demeaned it but really if we want people to like learn at a bigger level We really need to integrate into it and broadcast using some of the same methods although ethical To get people to pay attention and now that's not like waving a hand pay attention to us that that's hey We have valuable information that will save you time and could help you and therefore How do we get this information out to people? So I wrote this article kind of explaining that thesis
01:35:10
Speaker
And most of the comments are like, awesome. I got a ton of people offering to help from marketing to business analysis. I haven't even got back to most of them because it was just too many people offering help. And I think that was really what we were bad at. We were really bad about asking for help, about being like, hey, we need experts in this field and this field because we don't know it.
01:35:31
Speaker
people responded, tons of comments, tons of emails, even text messages. And then there's one comment on the fucking article. And you know, it's always one, it's one fucking comment. Anonymous guy. Hey, I think you guys would be way more valuable if Blevins shuts the fuck up and like Mark Twight gets more involved. And I was like,
01:35:56
Speaker
Man, and when I thought about it, it's like this is the idea that I'm talking about when I go, okay, I'm really good at defending myself, right? And if people didn't know, I do everything.
01:36:11
Speaker
Okay, non-profit, like I design the website, I send all the emails, I send all the shipping, I train all the people, I teach all the apprenticeship program, I come up with all the t-shirt designs, I order all the t-shirt designs, I come up with all the stickers. Everything that's going on, every new symposium I'm scheduling, everything for. That being said, that was like my first reaction. Okay, so that's not the, I don't need to actually defend this.
01:36:36
Speaker
What I always noticed is that if somebody goes to defense, it means you hit some kind of key of honesty, right? You hit something that is actually meaningful. So I took a couple of days without responding. I never responded actually, but I took a couple of days to think about what he meant. Oh, he actually pointed something that I'm very insecure about actually, which is that I don't know if I could do this without Mark. I don't think I could, like I think
01:37:01
Speaker
I think, in some sense, I think I'm writing Mark's coattails. That's really like what I'm subconsciously afraid of, is that if Mark were to go away and do a different venture or not be involved in this, I'm like, who would carry it? Who would be the guy, the guru or whatever, the name? And I go,
01:37:20
Speaker
That's what it is. And that is really good to be aware of, actually. And I should thank that person for bringing it to my attention that I had this kind of like subconscious insecurity that was keeping me from being like proud of myself for what I've already done.
01:37:37
Speaker
Actually, what it did was make me step into it and go, No, I actually run this place. And I feel good about where I'm going. And if Mark decides to retire, I'll support him 100%. He'll always be like a father figure. And I mean, like legitimately, a family member to me. And that is the role of good mentors is they make it impossible to fill their shoes, but they also don't want you to.
01:38:03
Speaker
Right? Like, Mark doesn't want me to be him. He wants me to be me. And therefore, somebody pointing out that I'm not him is a gift. And just it's like you can make these tiny little thing. Now, I'm not going to say that was all beautiful. I was fucking pissed. I wanted to, like, tear that person apart.
01:38:23
Speaker
It's not like a pleasant sight, but what it led to was actually a very peaceful, present awareness of who I am as a person. I think that is what healing really looks like. That's what transformation and change looks like in a very realistic, attainable level.
01:38:43
Speaker
I didn't lose any weight. I didn't overcome any emotional distress really other than the violent rage that I felt right at the beginning of reading it.
01:38:55
Speaker
And in the end, I went about my day, I did all the same stuff, but in the background was this programming that I was unaware of and I was able to just slightly alter the code so it didn't have control over me and my emotions. And now when I read that comment, I'm not mad at all. I'm actually like quite grateful that somebody was allowed to offer me a tool of introspection. Yeah. Yeah.
01:39:19
Speaker
Well, you it sounds like you were learning.
Honesty vs Vulnerability
01:39:21
Speaker
Like it was Yeah, like the painful like learning of that. Man, you should like take a screen grab of that and put on a fucking t shirt. Oh, yeah. Yeah, it is. I do appreciate that. You know, because
01:39:44
Speaker
It's true. It's honest. And to your point about, you know, being like vulnerable sharing, you know, I think it's it does bother me that
01:39:57
Speaker
It does bother me that a lot of these concepts and these words and these ways of being maybe are like, they are like latched onto and then like everybody's got to be vulnerable or like, you know. And I was actually having a discussion with this with a client one time and he was like, I kind of rolled his eyes. You know, like it's a standard like dude kind of situation.
01:40:19
Speaker
Like, fuck that vulnerability stuff. I'm like, okay, I'm like, what would just like check in right now if I were to change the word and just say just, just, just honest. How does that sound? And he's like, yeah, fucking honesty, right on. I respect that. I'm like, we're talking about the same thing, man.
01:40:33
Speaker
and like, you know, mental toughness and all this stuff. It's like, let's boil all the, let's reduce all the noise and get to the message, which is there's just a, there's like a energy to truth and an energy to honesty. And I do think that we, that that is felt and that not under, not, you know, understood by like, we proved it out with the evidence, but the experience feels true and right. And
01:41:02
Speaker
Yeah, I mean, just going back to it, that's I think such a that is such a it's such a powerful thing that certainly symposium did. You know, obviously, the space program at like the daily sort of weekly, you know, formulation of that. It's cool, man. It's really cool. Thank you for what you're doing. It's cool.
01:41:26
Speaker
appreciate it, man. I think I think we're on the right. I mean, I, I should say I know that I'm kind of on the right path because
01:41:36
Speaker
It grows. It's like an organic mixture. It's not out of control. The people that need to get involved, get involved with it. We have deep and meaningful relationships with people after they come here.
Teaching and Mutual Learning
01:41:50
Speaker
Most people come here multiple times to experience something like that. We also sometimes tell people not to come back.
01:41:57
Speaker
not because they're bad, but because they haven't done the work yet. And we don't want to see the same person back here. And not that everybody needs to make a 180 degree change, but my thing is I want to teach people so that they will go out and learn and come back and teach me. That is the root of it for me. I like
01:42:15
Speaker
fast-tracked, amplified, or exponential learning rates. And so if I can teach people how they can learn about themselves, they can learn about themselves better, faster, and among different people, that comes back to me. Famously, at least for us, I have shared things with certain people, and they come back and bring me these tidbits that are life-changing.
01:42:39
Speaker
The only way I can be open to that is to continue to be open to changing the process and sharing it with people like yourselves and your wife. And that has been something all...
Symposium Culture and Learning Environment
01:42:51
Speaker
always be indebted for. It was like this opportunity that we got with whatever it is this thing is. Business, sure, but kind of like quasi wannabe cult following kind of deal. So I appreciate you guys supporting. I mean, I could go on for, I could talk to you guys for forever, but we'll have to plan another one. And if there's something else useful, we can, we can plan it out.
01:43:14
Speaker
Yeah, dude, that sounds great. That sounds great. Let's call it because we can definitely definitely go down and keep going. I think my wife's probably also like, um, where are you? But yeah,
Conclusion and Call to Action
01:43:26
Speaker
appreciate it. So any kind of like, if the three people still still listen, like, you know, like, but any sort of things you want to draw people's, you know, attention and awareness and perhaps action towards
01:43:40
Speaker
If you're interested in finding more, our website has everything, so it's non-profit with a ph.media that has tons of free articles. I mean, there's hundreds on there. There's some, there's obviously books and stuff that we publish and sell, manuals on fitness and also on philosophy. We have the space program that's also hosted on there that's like daily training concepts, philosophy, hundreds of videos, thousands of posts, yada, yada, yada.
01:44:10
Speaker
I think pretty much everything you would find would be there. If you want to learn more, feel free to email me and I can point you in the right direction depending. Cool, man. Michael, it's been a treat, dude. It's painful to have to click stop recording, but I think it's what we got to do. Awesome. I appreciate it, man. Let's do this again. Yeah, dude.