 Um, give them a full attention. Thanks Ben. My message is probably one of the simpler ones to understand here, but I think it can also sometimes be the most one of the most challenging but yet rewarding parts of this sort of ancestral community. The message is to find your why. Why are you here on this planet? I believe I think that our ancestors were very connected to that why and we've got evidence you saw from the video that Polar showed and from the slide this morning from Mel Connor with the Mungongo nuts if you remember that. The slide or the video that the Polar showed of the effort, the painstaking effort that people used to go through just to even eat, survive. And coupled inside this, I think there's a couple things going on here. The why to me is this attitude of self achievement that is coupled with like a greater meaning and purpose in our lives. When we go in and aspire to do something that's way beyond our comfort zone, something that is difficult, it's challenging, that asks more of us and yet we're doing it for this like greater good. And it comes back to almost this like gut level feeling. I don't know if you guys have seen a TED Talk of how great leaders inspire actions. I'm addicted to TED Talk and I got to profess my love to Dr. Waldo a minute ago for her TED Talk. And even in sort of her brain right then you've got the neocortex outer layers of the brain and limbic brain, the deeper brain, deeper mind. That why that we talk about this purpose is almost a gut level feeling that's hard even articulate in the words because it's actually the neocortex that regulates and helps us with language. The deeper limbic brains are the ones that control sort of this like unconscious, subconscious, whatever you like to call it, drive to achieve, to live for something more. And yet I think something that's just as toxic as gluten in our environment is this attitude of just sort of complacency in the status quo and comfort. I mean we are naturally meant to go through periods of comfort but I think we're also meant to go through as Nasim Khaled mentioned this morning. Something more, something that's variable, something that challenges us, something that pushes us way outside of our perceived limitation. And it's not always easy. I know for me in periods of my life when I'm connected to that source, things have gone great. Like when I've struggled most it's been when I've been disconnected from that. And it's just anecdotal evidence but I'll give you an example. I was 19 years old and I got to go and release a book on like Larry King and Oprah. Overnight my life changed. I went from being a freshman student at the University of Georgia to now like full-time traveling business, you know, speakers for schools, businesses and military. When my book first came out I traveled about 60 cities in 90 days and wasn't living this whole no excuses lifestyle you know that I was supposed to talk about. It was long before I knew the Paleo diet. The book was released in 2005 and I certainly wasn't eating Paleo. I in a period of about a three month span and I push off my work out of the next day the next day no exercise, no activity. I'm sitting in a wheelchair most times. There's not really much slow-moving activity and to top it off you know I'm eating room service, hotel food or airport food and so you know maybe an extra dessert, an extra dessert. I'm looking in the mirror one day like three months into this and I realized that this guy that's like looking back at me like barely resembled this athlete, this wrestler from high school that I'm supposed to be speaking about because he had gained like 30 pounds in that like three months. Like 30 pounds on my frame is like belly and cheeks 30 pounds right? No height in my 30 pounds I assure you. And I remember going through this and I'd stand up on stage and I talked to other people about not making excuses in their own life and then every excuse that I was making would go on flood through my mind. And I realized then that probably one of the most underrated leadership characteristics in general is just authenticity. Like living and practicing the message that we talk about because the thought that kept going through my head is we're not living this message and for a while I felt like a frog and it wasn't until I reversed that and changed that that thing started to go into change and in many ways you know kind of snapped out of it and just the irony of the fact that I've become maybe one of the greatest living oxymorons that ever have existed living the life is the depressed motivational speaker. That's that combination I assure you not something I reckon in. There are two things that started happening now. One, I had lost sense of why I was doing what I was doing. I had gone after this path of pursuing you know paychat or pursuing you know some obscure form you know of way that we you know monitor success instead of really going after to go and see like how can I be the best possible speaker I can and why would I want to do that. Like and people frequently after you know after started connecting that why then people would come up and say things as powerful as the story stopped them from going as far as suicide and and all of a sudden it started going change around that time I met Rob Wolf in 2008 and for many of you in this room if Rob's touched your life in any way and I'm sure many of the other you know thought leaders in this community I mean I've touched all of our lives in a very profound way and it changed that I started pursuing this sort of this ancestral way of living and and I mean for the last me and my best friend Joey sitting here we've been doing it now for the last five years or so since 2008 and I mean I can't even I don't think it's almost enough time seven years for one complete scale will turn over and it's like I'm the same person I was back then and and it's allowed me to go and reach for something so much beyond what I was capable of before and I think in effect what I'd want you to go and leave here is to go and just to have that thought for yourself you might think like okay I'm just an everyday person like what's my role in all this like you know I'm just coming here to go and learn you know some of you may have blogs and you may have you know people that you connect with that I mean we all go through and communicate with each other on an everyday basis right we all go through and carry this message to somewhere someone else and what it requires I believe is going outside of our comfort zone outside of our safety net even if that comfort zones expanded just like the size of someone like Dr. Wall she's reached a ton of people but how many more people is she able to go and reach by doing something that is greatly uncomfortable for you know and just understanding being driven that this is too important this way of life this you know uh this culture that we have that we found and stumbled on I think is is is one of the most important things I've ever learned in my life and through this I think we have to go through and understand that it's okay sometimes to fail there may be a ton of different lies in this room I mean there may be 50 60 you know a number of people 100 people at this conference 500 different purposes that drive them but the common thread is there is that if we're going to go and reach our human potential I think that we have to go through some type of failure at first it never happens when we go through and just we're comfortable with things and the status quo when I was a um when I was a baby when I was waiting with my parents like hot media you see is a prosthetic spoon that was going wrap around the end of my arm I was born I think generally at the age doctors then and still don't have any idea really what caused that the disorder that happened it was born with congenital amplification the limbs never developed and early on though I mean it was tough for them at first they they struggled because doctors many of them would go and say like Kyle's never going to have a normal life you know never be able to go and do much of anything he's you're probably gonna have to feed him for the rest of his life probably take care of him probably have to live at home forever and they asked an important why question of why can't Kyle eat a normal life have to do everything in their power to go and push him towards that because early on it goes through those failures of time the prosthetic spoon though that wrap around the end of my arm and use that to keep up food when we leave it at home we would go out to eat at a friend's house or restaurant and not have it there my dad saw that my mom or my grandma was feeding it when we didn't have the stone so he said the world's not tailored or set up for Kyle's every need like he's gonna have to figure out how to do this on his own and so consequently when I first learned to eat just holding the spoon between the ends of my arms and kind of using my right arm to go and swing it around my left arm to go and hold it where I eat now just with normal silverware like I had to go through with this failure time dropping it hundreds of times over and over and over again maybe a thousand times and it to eventually kind of figure it out now in my life it's not that many adaptations if you guys get a glimpse I live about 30 minutes from here up in Suwannee northeast Atlanta a three-story townhouse bedrooms on the top floor only adaptation in the entire house is I have a stool to go and get up to the bathroom sink I have two stools in the main floor to go and get up the kitchen countertop to go and cook six months ago it was a terrible cloak it was like I got to fix this part of my life and I type about 50-60 words per minute in the normal keyboard and just using the ends of my elbows to go and hit these type on the normal iPhone to test and to eat and all that when I drive I drive just a Dodge Durango the only adaptations on it are just lifted up extended pedals I use my left foot to hit the brake my right foot to hit the gas it's a normal steering wheel put the seat up a little bit closer to the wheel and sometimes I really freak my friends out when I answer my cell phone and I'm driving or even now and then two coming around the corner like a Starbucks or something like that trying to pass on my credit card and like catch them off guard and swim like I will freak out for a coffee everywhere but had they focused on something had they focused on this path of the all the things that were wrong with the circumstance my life would have been very different and I and I believe that can be the case for you know our 100 tether ancestors I mean if they had only gone on the path I mean it's we have to be real about the challenges that we faced right but if they'd only gone down the path of seeing the challenges and seeing the victimhood and what was mean they would have never survived we would never be here today it is ingrained within us to be able to go and move past things to to be able to go and and rise above the challenges that were presented with but sometimes now especially over the last you know 100 years we have gotten to become progressively more and more and more comfortable in our environment not that long ago Rob Wolf shared a story about three plants that were on on his podcast one was it was a um a plant that was just exposed to natural environment sat outside another plant sat inside in a controlled environment it was exposed to some stressors like sunlight and things like that I mean even beyond that you know temperature changes there was another plant though that would have like a perfect amount of sunlight a perfect temperature and everything out that plant died because we are not you know in in our DNA we are not coded to just go through things comfortably it's it's going and asking more like what more can I go and do and live for I could give countless examples we don't have enough time for this necessarily but when I was younger with several things um wrestling lifting weights all that stuff I lost a ton at first I made a struggle wrestling I lost every match in sixth grade I started hated sport I struggled ahead before I played flip-on I was actually pretty good I was playing new guard defensive line and running back to come at me and I just tried to take my helmet and smash another shin as hard as I could the whole thing is with the defense lines about getting lower than your opponents and nobody's getting lower than me so in wrestling though I lost every match in sixth grade halfway through seventh grade still I did not want to match weightlifting I started with two and a half pounds on each arm in sixth grade looking at these high schoolers in the weight room lifting you know 200 pounds in a bench press they can like I'll never be able to go and do that someday and it was um you know even uh with as Kamal mentioned with a fight with mixed martial arts I had um people said some really harsh things people said Kyle is going to get killed in this sport and do the first televised death that you get you know and pick up and put it out of the cage someone even said you know behind an anonymous screening come take a chainsaw take my arms and legs so I can go and get on tv like Kyle in all of those instances though in wrestling finally broke through one that first match and it changed everything changed that belief system by a fast forwarded senior year of high school 136 varsity matches in place top 12 in the nation of weight class weightlifting went from five pounds total in a bench press the rope tied around my arms we're gradually working off just lifting with chains had a personal best in the bench process 2009 to 420 pounds in in the may the three rounds the guy I went up against basically ran for me didn't want to go to the ground and get choked out and then different as the fight went on I'm sitting there in the cage and thinking like you know um all the people that said the things that they said would never go and get to experience a moment this beautiful they found it easier to go and criticize me for my dreams and going out and doing something worthy of criticism and as a criticism of this community I see that a lot from the conversation that come on and I've had of you know sometimes there's so much like fighting over like the perfection inside should we eat 20% carbs or 30% carbs or is it when is it okay to go and do this we are all this stuff when we've got a web out there that is dying there's a great calling inside this community to go and connect to go and say like what is important what is important how can we go outside of a comfort zone and help you know go towards that so to go and close how I kind of found purpose in my own life was I had to go back and and start to live the message I was talking about you know the other half of not just doing paleo and and getting my health together but it was about you know going on and trying to live for for something more and that in effect is what led me and joey and seven of our other friends out to mount film jar I had hiked 12 times before we took on film the jar because I used to take three hours to go and get my gear set up I basically take you take that towels and wrap around my arms and then wrap a mountain bike tire around that and duct tape everything together finally it had gotten some gear that was more functional carbon fiber for my arms that might be and it basically just left the wheelchair at the lodge and for 12 and a half days it was a fair crawl just down at all course you know walking about half the pace of a normal group as we went along and I'm sitting there looking at the bottom of this mountain looking up at the top and saying thinking like I want to get myself into when you're in the bottom of killing the jar others um there's like rainforest trees that are three four times higher than the ceiling and you're looking through these tree clearing though and you're seeing on the top it's snow and ice on the summit so it looks like a totally different planet and as we're going along the first couple of days we're having a good time you know we're laughing joking with each other and like you know I'm just walking about six to seven hours per day in this like fair crawl and by the third day my arms and my feet started by the third day my arms and my feet started swelling up a lot and by the fourth day it was basically all I could think about the pain had become so bad it was like hard to concentrate on anything else and we had projected it's going to take 15 days to reach the summit so the fourth day we crossed up above the tree line my friend we were you know that I was laughing and joking with before and now like I could barely like even you know stomach like here's and laughing and joking so I was in a totally different place mentally I could only think about that pain I told him I was like just going hike ahead I'll catch up so they did and um hike had about 20 minutes I was with a few of our of our guides and just kind of alone in my thoughts and I was thinking like if it hurts this bad on the fourth day what's day nine going to look like what's day 12 going to look like and we pulled in this camp for the Sierra Plateau it's about 12,000 feet starting to cold outside and a bunch there's maybe a hundred or so other climbers there in the mountain and as uh so we pulled into the camp my friends that had made it before you know shared our story what we were doing people wanted me to take pictures and stuff like that and like normally it would have been something I would have loved to have done at that point like I was like was just in so much pain I told him I was like I just need to be alone and it was felt discouraged dejected went and walked inside my tent lay there by myself on top of my sleeping bag for a while and about an hour just lay there and cried and I started thinking I was like one of the reasons why we were there was to provide hope for some of our heroes in the military that had sacrificed their limbs literally for our freedom I thought this isn't going to provide a whole lot of hope for these troops now that I can't even make it a third of way up this mountain I really started crying when I started thinking about promise that I was close to breaking and it was from a mom that I met out in Arizona before we left the trip and her name was Vicky she's been a mother of a marine who in May 2011 had lost his life in a firefight in Afghanistan and saved several of their marines before he passed away his name is Corey Johnson so he had a wife and three daughters that one daughter he hadn't met yet he's been born after his last deployment and she said he just passion to travel to see the world he talked about climbing to him in Jarrow and out of the blue in this gym she looked me in the eye and she asked me would you promise to bring Corey's ashes to the summit I promised her there that I would and laying in that tent I can tell you that was the only thing in that moment in that darkest moment that kept me going and I think in order for any of us to reach that potential and what we're capable of in our lives we have to find a why Corey in that moment became my wife the pain didn't go away but I got real of where I was pain threshold wise and I made a decision there in that moment I was like I'm not going to come back home and tell you that I didn't make it and so we decided to look at our alternatives and decided to go up and take a risk and route that was called the western breach of the western side of the mountain that's fewer than one percent of climbers until in the jar of cake this is a route that's full of ice and snow basically so with a small ice bike that is for my arm uh the ice bike and the right arm was kind of malfunctioning and smaller ice bikes for my feet uh my right arm was basically useless because of malfunctioning ice bike at three points of contact for the ninth day and we're taking on we had to pass through three thousand feet of ice and snow so we're going along and and the rule of mountain climbing is always have three points of contact down at all times I'm breaking this rule already without my mouth hunk of ice biking started off in these ice fields the only thing you'd see is just they'd go on for hundreds of feet at a time and just we started at 2 a.m. 3 a.m. we're hiking woke up at 2 you just barely see just you know 10 15 feet in front of you from your headlamp they're trying to off the ground and so as we're going through these ice fields I would get my firm footing and just have to punch into the ice and step through these ice fields just punch through the ice halfway through this first big field I didn't punch into the ice hard enough the ice bike on my left arm slid out from underneath me I went belly down on the sheet of ice and slid several feet a second my guy jumped on me bear hug me probably saved my life my heart rate was through the roof you know tunnel vision came in all that you know nervous system response that we know too well i mean cordial jack it was my uh in the immediate thing that came into my head then in that moment there was a mantra that just like kept repeating over and over and over again that I heard from a baby seal and the mantra was not dead can't quit and I just kept repeating this not dead can't quit and I'd ask myself theoretically throughout that day are you dead no can't quit it was um it was 12 hours across through the western breach slept at 18 500 feet woke up with a layer of ice on top of our sleeping bags and sleeping three to attend and then next morning just pushed through another uh it was uh 900 feet thousand feet to go stand at the roof of Africa 19,340 feet got to go and take it in for about an hour almost before anyone showed up then you know the climbers and um get to have that time to go and pay tribute to Cory and the most amazing thing happened for these two and a half days to come back down the mountain and as we came back down the very next day we had to take a shower which was pretty awesome had a shower in 12 and a half days but we got to go and visit a school for kids with disabilities and at the school there were about 80 blind students 25 of all vinyl students and these kids had been because of their disability in Africa were passed out of their families couldn't contribute to the subsistence culture and there were orphans and allowed to go to uh private school because of being blind in albino about a hundred of them went and gathered around me and I was giving them a talk translated to their headmaster in Swahili and I was here about 10 years old so I'm talking to them and you know toned down a little bit you know we're talking about climbing this big mountain in their backyard but kids got so excited and fired up they just like started spontaneously on their own like chanting something like over and over and over again and so I was like asking their headmaster like what are they chanting where they're chanting and chanting is Swahili so kids didn't start chanting in English what they were chanting was anything is possible anything is possible anything is possible I sat back to her though and I was like reflecting on that and I was like I don't think this would have been possible for me if if I didn't have like Cory in that moment becoming my wife and I don't think that any of us can reach our potential in our lives and you know do what we're capable of doing and help the people that we are if we don't find our so challenge you you know find your why find your truth and realize then I think anything really is possible thank you guys very much I'm guessing there might be a question or two maybe if you have a question then line on up here I have a lot of questions actually I read Kyle's book and I had a question for every page well I've done interviews with Howard staring through and he didn't hold back too much so you guys are happy okay so um so Kyle's book is called no excuses and uh my question is I think you wrote it when you were 19 yeah um what's it like to have that strength of character when you're young because when I was 19 uh you know I had I had no idea about anything at a sort of inside joke with a friend here that if we wrote a book it'd be called excuses so were you just always like that did you have that you know that will or did that develop over time well I've seen my friend Joey smirking is that he knows every excuse that I've ever made in my life and there are plenty uh now man it's something where I think that some of the experiences that we have sometimes you know it does shape us and who we are and I know that you've gone through your challenges too and everybody in this room has got some type of disability some type of challenge for me you can look at me and see that I was born a little bit different and I can't look at you and see your big challenges but I think it is one of the one things that kind of unites every single person on this planet so we all have something and the coolest part I think about this ancestral community is that like a lot of us are brought here as a consequence of a challenge you know whether it is some type of autoimmune disease that you would never be able to see on the outside until they do the later physical manifestations of it but it causes us to go in in that you know sometimes darkest moments like interest back and to grow and I think it's through that first of all like we've come a little bit better but I mean a lot's changed in a couple years in the book I was Joey and I went back and like we're reading like the dietary recommendations that I gave people and I'm like this is a disaster there's got to be a revised version right now so if you guys see that and keep that in mind it's it's pretty bad but now I mean we're on we're on a mission one of the next steps I want to go and do is try to go and incorporate last year I got to go and give probably close to 100 speeches and maybe speak to about a quarter million people and you know in every speech that I gave I got to pop off maybe for three four minutes about paleo at least kind of interject that in there and it's been so cool to see just like the growth that this is like the rise that this is having and and before five years ago no one had any idea what it was right but now it's like we're we're making headway but it's it's to go and realize that like every one of us in here has a role it's not just Dr. Walls and Rob Wolf and you know Chris Kresser I mean it's like every one of us in here with every single conversation that we have like it's the ability to be able to go on and help other people and it's through our experience and sometimes those vulnerabilities those challenges that brought you here like those can be some of the greatest gifts that we've ever been given so if nobody else has any questions crowd well oh there's one I was just curious in your wrestling career what were some of your power moves and how did you learn to adapt you know it's funny like I couldn't emulate what other people were doing in wrestling so me and my dad and my coach would go and they would wrestle on their hands and knees and try to get down from my perspective to go and see what would work and I remember the first match that I won and it was like grab the kid's arm and like just like manage to like flip them and land on top of them and like I was more shocked that he was I think and actually the funny thing was leading up to that in six grades I said I lost every match in seventh grade I had lost every match until halfway through that season but prior to signing up in seventh grade my dad sat me down and he had this conversation with me yeah I knew that he'd been a successful collegiate wrestler and he said I want you to know something he said when I first started he said I didn't win a single match my first year either he said hardly anybody wins a match for the first year in wrestling so then everybody's going to go and every every you know first year person has to go up against a second year person so he's like if you sign up this year you're going to find somebody who's their first year and you're going to beat them and so I believed him and signed up and I was just interviewing people from my book I was interviewing my grandpa my dad's dad for this book and I asked him I was like what was it like for my dad losing every single one of these matches this first year how did he deal with it he was like what that was a complete lie so but it was an effective one I probably wouldn't be here for one before it so I know that when you have like a pattern or a history of like not living up to the way other people do or living in a different way and then you kind of block that trend you become successful in some way there's there's a weird societal pressure to like be ashamed of that almost or to like go back to your place did you experience that and if so how did you deal with it that's a really good question Jim Rohn this is not scientific but he's one of my favorite motivational speakers of all time and he said that we're probably most influenced in our lives by the five people we spend the most time with and I think it's true that sometimes when we do go and expand and sort of transcend where we were before sometimes it exposes almost like a mirror it exposes other people's vulnerabilities and sort of expresses their their challenges or you know weaknesses whatever and I think it does also there's probably some evolutionary psychology and protective mechanism going on there right like we go and expand ourselves and go and expose ourselves to failure well failure in the hunter-gatherer world would admit death and we've got to realize now that that barometer is different and in a lot of ways we have to kind of find it from within and I'm really glad my grandmother especially she used to teach me that randomly in grocery stores and she would go and take me and just help me be comfortable with myself and going taking and setting up the grocery store and just practice meeting people going out to reach out shake their hands some of my friends that I've already gotten to meet here you guys know when I meet you my first instinct to reach out shake your hand it's what she had taught me and it was uh she said once people can hear your voice you can see your face they can shake your hand disability will fade away something something we'll think about and I'd say 99 times out of 100 it goes over really smoothly without a hitch I'll reach out shake somebody's hand and get like a normal handshake back there's like one time out of 100 I'll reach out shake somebody's hand and just see them like freeze and panic but like whoa it's kind of in my hand what does he expect me to do I'll just hang out and wait eventually we'll come in for like a fist bump or elbow tap and make it up some secret empty handshake on the fly but I think it's we have to realize then that you know we we are the ones that get to go in to choose every moment every day whether we go down that path of living up to other expectations or if we go in and and you know and and and are guided by the people that lift us up but also to just ask a little bit more of ourselves and just go in question like what is really possible in my life if I sort of let go of some of these excuses and all this other stuff and all those other limiting beliefs other people have about us I think it's it's a really important thing in our spot that's this really cool question thanks I actually have another question so when you're doing something challenging like climbing a very large mountain I can't relate to that kind of thing and I'm wondering since you do that sort of thing a lot do you have a method to relax or to you know whether sitting watching tv or meditating or I don't know what to make those things easier yeah you know it's the crazy thing is like I mean in my life I think I will spend a significant amount of time the whole like idea of like the sun you know being down to like 14 hours in the winter and it being dark outside like I tell myself that all the time when I want to go and sleep for like 12 hours straight I do you think it's such an important thing right it's that natural like ebb and flow of life it's not about resisting and being motivated every single day to go and achieve things realizing that some moments you just got to take a step back and you know and kind of recollect refocus frankly it's the people that pretend to be positive 365 days a year that are like the hard charges all the time like those are the people that really freak me out those are people that are hiding something serious you know I think it is such an important thing I mean just to be able to enjoy this path that we're on but sometimes in order to get to that place of enjoyment we have to go through that period of being uncomfortable first I mean give you for instance if you're in a job you can't stand you know and you go to work every single day and spend so much of your time doing that I might be comfortable to go and stay inside that job but what stresses is that causing on your life in an unconscious level that could be changed as a consequence of pursuing something greater might be fearful to go out and they go and take on and do something new but and it might be really difficult at first but I don't think that that's necessarily a bad thing I think as long as we really love and have passion for what we're doing then it that entire perspective changes so Kyle will also be hosting a workshop on a combat movement session that might be full but it's at 9 a.m. on Saturday so now we'll break for about 10 minutes for networking sessions and if you look on your schedule there is a networking session for scientists self experimenters and patients one for providers healthcare providers and business owners another one for policy and information sharing and the last one for fitness and those take off these two rooms as well as at lana one and two and at lana three