 It's an interesting dance that we have with our egos, right? And I remember when we first had that psychologist on the show, Sal, that you brought. Oh yeah. And she assessed all of us. Yeah, I love her. And she really like broke down like narcissism and that there's a healthy dose of it. It's a positive version. Right. And then there's obviously an unhealthy version of it. And so I think that, you know, in our space with our peers as you get a larger audience and more people paying attention to you, there's that fine line that you have to constantly dance. And I think this is a conversation that the four of us have a lot. And one of the things that I appreciate about these guys so much that I think we all have in common is as that grows for us, instead of seeking it more or letting ourselves fall into it, we actually want to kind of run away from it. We'd prefer to become more detached and not feed into it as much because we want to stay grounded to your point that you brought up before we got on. Yeah, yeah. I've, there's a quote or an idea that I heard from some basketball coach. And the key to be the best player is to be good enough, know enough about the game to play the game well, but not so much to realize that the game doesn't matter. I feel like, I feel like a lot of the, this whole experience with making books or podcasts or social media or any of that stuff, you can be so deeply in the tunnel of the game, all that matters is growth and more and numbers and quantities. Yeah. And then certain things can happen in the world, such as what's happening right now, which I think has been immensely healthy for my own mind, where I kind of drawn back and I'm like, I don't even know what the hell matters. Yeah. Which I think is perfectly healthy. It doesn't always feel great because a nice, healthy, inflated ego and puffed out chest. Temporarily, it's like cocaine, like while you're doing it, you're like, this is, this is cool. And the effects with long-term use, it's like, oh, that was problematic. Right. There's another quote, like a bad day for the ego is a good day for the soul. You know, and I think that's, I think that's super, super true. If you're back to the narcissist testing that we did or what was part of this psychological profile that we had done on us on air, which was kind of cool. She said, you have to have a certain dose of narcissism in order to go out and put yourself out there. Right. So if you didn't think that you had something valuable and that maybe people would find, well, you have to say interesting, you would never put yourself out there in that way. You wouldn't go on media. You wouldn't promote yourself that way. But when it becomes unhealthy is when you're no longer, you can no longer take criticism. You are the greatest. You're not open to growth and you can become very addicting. And like anything that you get addicted to, it can become very, very destructive. And the worst thing that I see, we've met many influencers, right, people with lots of followers and, you know, in their space or whatever. And one thing that really struck me about some of these people is how conflicted and how much in pain they seem to be because the persona that they have created and that they're loved for is not their real persona. They're leading with their imposter and not their authentic self. And it creates this turmoil within them. There was one person, I won't say their name, but one person in particular who presents themselves as a super outgoing, charismatic, you know, talks to lots of people and girls and whatever. And this is part of their brand. But in real life, they're one of the most shy, introverted people. And he says it feels conflicting. It doesn't feel good because people love him, but they don't love him. They love the person that he becomes. And I don't think that's a good place to be. So when people ask about like social media and how do I build my business and what's important, I say, well, you know, this isn't going to guarantee success or failure. But try to be as real as possible because if you do get popular, you at least won't be in hell. You'll be popular for being who you are and not for being someone you're not. Yeah. Well, it's just not sustainable, I think is the big thing. No way. You know, and so it's like, if you want, I mean, you can deceive people for a certain amount of time. There's some quote around. I don't remember what it is. Exactly. Well, your first one, Dean Smith, do you know who the coach was? It sounds very Dean Smith S. I think it was Pat Riley. He's got greased hair. I know Pat Riley. It's the only coach I know. This is nothing to do with, I was just going to say, I just want to get to the bottom of what the idea was. It's like you can fool all of the people sometimes and some of the people all the time or something like that. But not all of the people all the time. That was a totally separate idea. It has nothing to do with what I was going to say. I feel like I need a whole wall of quotes to refer to. I have one in my house. That's what I do. Yeah. That's why I'm so quotacious. Anytime I hear something. Here's the wealth of it. You know, you can pick your friends and you can pick your nose, but you can't pick your friends now. I think it's because I'm suspicious of my own ideas. That's an interesting way to look at it. I think that's healthy. I can be unhealthy, but I think that's healthy. You know why? You just gotta be careful though when you're checking yourself. You just gotta be careful because sometimes the quote sounds good out of context and then you realize where it really came from, like a Marxism quote that you posted not too long ago. That was so good. I'm still in agreement. I think the four alienations makes a lot of sense. Beyond that, I think it's one of those things where there's an individual, like you could say, Adolf Hitler. Maybe you had a handful of ideas. Of course. Be nice to people. Of course he had some power. There's no way that man got to... Or Trump or any people. It's like if you just were very binary, we're very dualistic. It's like you're either good or bad. I got it on my cardboard sign. I put it out. Even more so these days. It's eight syllables and boom, that's my point. It's in a tweet, 280 characters, whatever it is, that's my point. That's the way that we communicate because we're trained by the medium. The medium is the massage is an interesting book all about this. Well, we evolved obviously in tight communities, so we knew everybody and we evolved thinking of people along those lines. But then when you have media now and the fact that we can know about a lot of people that we don't know where it's a little bit counter to how we evolved. So if I hear bad news and I'm going to try it, right? So we're in a tribe of 15 or 30 people, which was most human history. And I hear bad news. It's bad news because it's affecting me. Like there's a lion over there killed three people. Oh, shit. I need to worry about that, right? So we still have that inside of us. But now I read something about something happening 150 miles away or 1,000 miles away or 10,000 miles away. And it still has that effect on me. Like I'm going to read about a story about a kid that got kidnapped and it's really terrible. Now I'm going to be really afraid that my kids... They did this great study. It's one of my favorites to talk about. You remember the movie Jaws? Of course. Great movie, right? When Jaws came out, they were doing polls and people genuinely thought... And this is because of Jaws, news outlets reported rare shark attacks and it became like people would want to read about them because of Jaws. The perception was that shark attacks were going through the roof. The reality is shark attacks have been about the same all the time. But people were all of a sudden very afraid of getting attacked by a shark when you're far more likely to die by slipping in the shower and hitting your head, for example. Same thing goes for the perception of safety. You ask anybody today... You ask anybody that's like Doug's generation or older and you say something like, is it more dangerous or less dangerous now for kids to be outside by themselves? Oh, way safer than when I was a kid. Statistically not true. Statistically the kidnappings and assault on children is far higher decades ago than it was today. Today is far safer, but we perceive it as being so much more dangerous. And I'll take it back to our expertise, which is health and fitness. The way that we eat doesn't match the way that we evolve and so we run into a lot of problems. The way that we move doesn't match the way that we evolve. So we run into a lot of problems. We created a society where our desires to move less because that made sense a long time ago. Conserve energy, don't injure yourself. Today doesn't make sense to continue pushing that because eventually we'll be like the movie Wally. You ever watch Wally? No. The cartoon? The robot guy? Yeah. And the people are like... They're basically on these rascal scooters on one of the spaceships. It's basically a cruise ship. And that's all they do. All they do is drink out of slurpees. And they don't move. So they're like super obese, their bones got really small. They have screens right in front of their eyes. Yeah. And they don't look at each other. Like idiocracy. Yeah, there it is. Yeah, a lot like that. They animate it to idiocracy. Exactly. So I don't know. Does it exist? So it's always a problematic... It's a bad idea to bring up Hitler within like six minutes of any podcast. Oh, that's way too many times. Wow. I'm curious if there is an instance with a human being where it actually is necessary and makes complete sense to destroy any idea or devalue any idea that ever possibly came out of that whole entire person's timeline because of some evil shit they did along the way. Is that a reasonable thing to think? No, actually, I think you have to be careful because somebody like Hitler, who I think we could all agree in here, that was generally a pretty bad person. Rough childhood. Great salesman. Yeah, if you talk about ideas that he had or quotes that he had that may be valid, what ends up happening, I think the fear is, I should say, that you end up validating them in some way. And then people start to look at the other ideas and say, well, these other ideas might be okay. And I think he meant it this way. You're like cracking the door. And not that way. And I think that's the fear. You know what I mean? You have to kind of be careful. But I can see how that also goes against reason. People are extremely complex. I mean, you have heroes of ours. For example, you might worship a celebrity or a past figure that did something really great. And maybe you learn later on that they also do terrible things. Were philanderers or cheated on their wife or one time they abused someone or whatever. And it's like it conflicts with, but I thought that they were all good. I'm like, no, they're human. They're complex. So they probably aren't all good. And somebody might not be all bad. Although I do think historically, there maybe are some characters that fit in that category. But for the most part, it doesn't. I mean, you know, I think I'm a good person. I don't think I'm all good. I guarantee you there's parts of me that are not good either. You know, I've been cursed. It's been problematic for me that my typical tendency is if I'm told not to think a thing, my immediate reaction is to go deeper into it. I think it's very common. You know, and so that was like we were talking about the history of cannabis before this. And it's a really interesting example of we've had this institutionalized guilt and shame and, you know, all of these stereotypes of the idea that a person would, that would vaporize this plant and maybe go for a hike or exercise or meditate or they've glaucoma or like any of the issues eating disorder. And so that's been put into this bucket that it almost makes it be, you know, if you have a brand, you're like, oh, can I talk about this plant? Because if there's all this stigma around it, I think charged subjects like that oftentimes have deeply held meanings that are actually even more potent than the things that culture deems permissible for you to explore. Adam and I used to talk about this all the time. You know, he worked in the cannabis industry. I have a very unique experience with cannabis having helped somebody who fought cancer with it and having it help me with some health issues in the past. So I had a different perception. I remember him and I would talk about it and we'd be like, you know, it's funny. You know, imagine you had a girlfriend, right? And you wanted to talk and you met their parents for the first time and then you introduced yourself and they're like, hey, what do you do for a living, Sal? And they say, oh, I have a vineyard. You know, I make wine. Oh my God, what a great guy. He makes wine. Now what if I said, oh, I grow marijuana plants and I, you know, we provide that for all the dispensaries. You know, oh my gosh, she's dating a drug dealer. Weed, like that's crazy. Isn't that funny? Yeah. Have you discussed the origin story of cannabis? Oh, early days. That was a big topic for us. Yeah, we talked a lot about cannabis. I want to go back to something you said though that I disagree with and that you said that the practice of someone saying something forces you to kind of go deeper or want to inspect it more and that's a common thing. And that's actually not a common thing. And it's a trained skill that you've learned to apply that I think is very important. There's a really good book. I talked about it on the show a while back called Thinking Fast and Thinking Slow. Brilliant man who wrote. A condiment? Yeah. Yes. Yes. Have you read that? Yeah. Yeah. And so that skill is you've trained yourself to switch over to the second part of the brain where you think logically about something and we're not wired that way. We're actually wired to take in information and react. Right. That's the faster part of the brain. Short cuts. Yeah, it's more advantageous for us and it's important. It's important that we have that skill set to survive because if you stopped and you tried to unpack every single moment of your life, you would never get anywhere in your life. So there's value to that first part of the brain. But it's also very important to know when you need to switch over to the other one and be like, wait a second, just because everyone's saying this or just because this is my initial reaction or they're saying, don't do this, I'm going to go deeper into it and think logically. So yeah, I don't think it's as common as you think. I think more people are easily persuaded by the first part of their brain that is just a quick reaction. And it's a practice that more of us, including myself, have to constantly be trying to think like, okay, is this something that I'm just going to take a face value and react? Or should I go deeper into this and look more into it even if the majority is saying otherwise? Yeah, you guys have heard the idea that our conscious mind is able to perceive something like 40 bits of information and then our unconscious mind is something like 40 million bits of information. It's crazy. And so we're always to kind of bring it onto a subject in relation to body and movement and fitness and all that, not that that's necessary, we don't need to talk about any of that stuff. But we're continually doing that from a body language perspective. So when you see somebody, there's some interesting research that I included in my book about when you, if you take a mugger and show them a bunch of different pictures of various different people, you'd think the common tendency would be, and they actually did this, they went into prisons and people that had violent crimes, you'd think the common tendency would be just like, okay, I mug this small, defenseless, vulnerable chick, probably. You know, it's like, no, no, no. The person that they would be the highest likelihood of trying to mug, to steal from them, to be a parasite and attach one to them would be the person that has, their movement doesn't seem integrated. So if they're kind of like, it doesn't seem like they're going in a straight line. It doesn't seem like they're well oriented. It doesn't seem like they're stacked and strong. It doesn't seem like they know where they are. So if they're looking around and there's like any semblance of disorientation or disorganization with that person, then all of a sudden the parasites of culture will start to grab on because it's an easy target. It's like finding prey. It's finding prey. And so we're continually doing that with our, I think our 40 million bits of information that's streaming through our minds. I think we're continually doing that in every instance, every time you have an interaction with any person, you're noticing the location of their eyes or eyebrows. You're noticing the style in which they breathe or don't breathe. You're noticing the positioning of their shoulders. You notice the position of their hips of their feet. You know, and so we're always in this, just we're having this plethora of information. And then you have your 40 bits. That's like thinking about checking your Instagram notifications. But meanwhile you have this mammalian reptilian center that's just gathering all of that information and by going through things, like starting to pay attention to how the hell you move in daily life, I think you can start creating successes in your world and you don't even know what's going on. It's just like, oh, when I come into the room, people kind of are like more magnetized. Yeah, yeah. You know, or when I come into the room like this, people are more like, oh, that guy's a loser. We should steal from him or... The math of that is so fascinating to me, right? Like what your brain is having to calculate to put that all together. So I like what a cool conversation because I have this where I, because of this stuff, I'm into psychology. You're more on the movement side. So it's interesting to see how they merge. Do you have, because of you are so red in this department, right? And you enjoy learning about it so much. Do you have tendencies like right away? Like we just, you walked in 30 minutes ago and we all said hi and greet each other. Do you have a tendency to read? Scan the room. Yeah, scan the room and read each one of our postures right away. Is that, or is that just subconsciously happened for you? Well, ideally you'd get to a point with any skill that you'd be unconsciously competent. You guys are familiar with that probably. Like you start off consciously incompetent, ideally. And then it works your way up the right... Four stages. Till eventually you get to the point where you just naturally are like MJ. You just, you know, you do something with the ball. You just see the scenario. I'm not at all like MJ with anything, including body language. But nonetheless, he gets to that point. He's never thinking about what he's doing. You know, so anytime there's a whole slew of different books that I'd recommend for reading body language, you know, my book has a lot of stuff in there. But if I'm reading a specific book about the thing, I will notice all that stuff. I personally haven't read a specific book about that thing for like six months. Yeah. So that's disengaged. Now I'm thinking about more, you know, like Russia and conspiracy theories. Oh, no. Oh, please, please. Oh, please, guys, please, guys. I don't want to talk about that. Don't get me in salgo. Yes. I like, I wrestle with these guys every day on the podcast right now, because I think conspiracy theories are at an all-time high in our lifetime. Everything is. Well, I mean, you mentioned reptiles. Everything's fair game right now. Yeah, let's be honest. Yeah, I mean, reptiles do run the world. You know, I don't know. Yeah. These guys themselves. I'm right. Oh, they feed on children. No, I, aliens are coming next. Yeah, it's all happening. No, you know, you guys are talking about fast and slow thinking. One of the best ways that I found to slow my thinking down, there's two ways. One is to debate and discuss, because in order to organize your thoughts enough to explain yourself well and then be able to listen because you also, in order to debate, you have to listen, right? Listen to the other person. It allows you to work things out. So I love thinking like this. I love talking to people. I love debating people. Not because I'm, you know, people, some people might say, oh, you just like to argue. The reality is that it helps me think and I can think things through. The other way is to write. When you write things down, you have to slow down and put things down. And that's why therapy utilizes reading and speaking or excuse me, writing and speaking. Those two tools are very powerful to slow the thought process down and to work things out. That's literally what you're doing. Oh, I have another exercise for you. And that is to always question the things you feel most strongly about. Yeah. And that to me is what is one of the most challenging because when you start to unpack like how the brain is operating with the fast and the slow part, much of the things that you've decided that this is my truth, it's just because you've had a collection of things that have confirmed your bias. And so you feel passionately about it. So a great exercise to challenge that or to work on the logical side is to, if I feel, so whenever I catch myself in a debate or an argument or a conversation where I'm getting emotional about it or reacting or feel strongly about it, like I'm already staying, defending myself before you finish your sentence, those are the things that I go back and go really deep in on because it's like, okay, why do I feel so passionate about I'm right in this situation? And I think that's really challenging for us because you've already had enough things in your life that have happened that have confirmed that bias that it's going to be really hard for you to change your mind unless you're open to it, right? Yeah, that's one of the reasons why I love fitness so much. I love it for me, but I loved it more for when I trained other people for that particular reason because as a trainer, I trained people for over 20 years and I really wanted to help people. I know you do the same, Erin, when you work with people, your concern is you want to make sure this person does the best, you want to set them up to be able to do the best for themselves on their own, well beyond, maybe forever, right, when you don't see them anymore. So if you're constantly working towards that, you end up questioning things as you go through the process. You have to because I'll work with this many people who my techniques and my recommendations work great with, but then they run into somebody that they just don't. And if I really want to help them, I can't be dogmatic. I can't, it's impossible. I have to question things. And so it forces you to grow and fitness is such a great way to do it because it's unassuming and it's not threatening. You know what I mean? People don't go into fitness thinking, they're going to experience tremendous personal growth in all things. They don't think that. They think I'm going to go get ripped and I'm going to get a nice six pack and I'm going to look sexy or whatever. But you stay at it long enough and you learn a lot about yourself. You also learn how to fail. You learn how to take criticism. You learn that pain isn't always bad and struggle is many times good. But the growth that comes from fitness is phenomenal. Nobody talks about it, but that I think is the biggest benefit of it. Fitness also makes the human that's doing the fitness more malleable to new ideas. Totally. And so we can talk about anything and I'll just steer it back to how it relates to the mind-body connection because that's where I'm most comfortable. Beyond that, I don't know. I get lost very easily if it's not about that specific coverage. Smart, stay in your lane. I heard that enough during BLM and coronavirus. Stay in your lane. And I'm like, all right. Lane's over here. Let's work on shoulder mobility today. What do you think about Russia? Shoulder mobility. But so a couple of things. One, in relation to arguments that's kind of fascinating. You guys can just balance off this as it feels interesting. When we're communicating with each other, typically I don't know a lot about the argument at hand because I'm just confused with what the hell's happening in the world. But what I can see is I can see body language and the way that people communicate. And so that's why you see a Martin Luther King giving a speech compared to some present-day politician because I don't want to be biased in any direction. He goes off of the speech and speaks through his heart you can see it in his body. It's like you viscerally feel that experience because you're feeling him. And so when we're communicating to each other if you're a person that is, say, chronically stuck in some hyperlordotic spine or you've got the forward head posture or you've got rolled forward shoulders or you've got valgus, collapse knees, all of those patterns. I'm intentionally using unnecessary anatomical terminology because there's a direct link in the way that people think, feel, and communicate. Based off of that, those anatomical terms. Totally. And so an interesting example of that is a person that goes into a shopping mall is another reference from the book. They are pushing a cart, so says research, with specific subjects. So I don't think anything's a law. But when a person is pushing a cart, so they're in a more upright position, shoulders are back, and they're also pushing the cart away from them, they will end up being less inclined to get sugary bullshit. And when a person is clutching a basket, all of a sudden puts them into that medial rotated spine, puts them into that clawing kind of flexors, contracting with the hand, they will end up being more likely to buy. Fascinating. Fascinating, yeah. So shop with shopping carts, not baskets. And the similar thing happens for people that have storefronts of some sort. If you pull the door open, that puts you into the more inclined towards, okay, I'm bringing in. If I'm pushing the door away, I'm more inclined to say, okay, I'm pushing, I'm starting the conversation with push away. Yeah. And so when I move into that, all of those little subtle, again this is that 40 million bits, every subtle little action throughout the day starts to inform the way that we perceive the room, ourselves, this conversation. And so if you were a person that is stuck in that, all the terms, forward head posture and having the hunchback spine, all that stuff, perhaps your tendency would be you'd have a higher inclination of being more defensive, or maybe feeling like you're under attack and you're already defeated. And versus the person that's able, like before they go into a conversation, they wiggle out their shoulders, maybe they hang from a bar, and maybe they do like a little dance and kind of open themselves up a little bit. Maybe the right and cursive, which is shown to have all sorts of great effects as well, because you're going through a fluid movement. They will go into that conversation much more fluid, much more open, much more receptive, much less judgmental, much less defensive. You know, I always feel like a Jedi opening the automatic doors. No, I'm ready. I need to express my power. I need something humorous after that. I appreciate that. You know what, you want to know an area I would love for you to read and learn about, Aaron, because this is an area that you have a lot of interest and expertise in, in terms of how movement affects mood and thoughts and vice versa, how your thoughts and mood affect movement. Look into, and this was a very fascinating point that was made in a podcast that we did a while ago, look into religious practices. We interviewed Bishop Barron, who is a Catholic Bishop, and one of the questions I had from was, what's up with all the, you know, I grew up Catholic, right? So you go to church, the Catholic Church, and there's all this standing, sitting, kneeling, moving, all this ritualistic movement. And I said, what's up with that? Like why kneel on the ground to pray? Why do all these different things? And I thought, you know, to myself, to somebody who's not privy to it, I thought, you know, it's all traditional, ritualistic, whatever. Why do, why even do that? And he said, I thought it was very wise, it's how you integrate the body. Yeah. All the movement is how you integrate the body, which allows you to, in their words, integrate the soul and being a fitness expert. I thought, oh my gosh, that's brilliant. There's a lot of wisdom in spiritual practices and in the culture of movement that they have. And every single one of them has different movements and practices that they do that are very characteristic of that particular religion. That's the value, people were tapping into that before they knew anything, but any of these studies that you are talking about. It also links you into, so it does a handful of things, and probably more than what I've picked up, another one is it moving in synchrony with any group of people, i.e. like a military marching. All right. So if you see the march and everyone's legs go at the same time or you go to a Taibo class or some kind of aerobic class or any of that stuff, the reason that those cultures or sometimes cults get so big and powerful is because you're extending the organism beyond the individual. And so you start to become in sync with other just by witnessing your movement happen in tandem. And so when you go into that church, what you're doing is you're connecting with beyond your lonely isolated individualistic self and you're going into something bigger than you. Well, you're quite literally from a neurological perspective an emotional perspective becoming the group because we're all moving together. And then beyond that, I think if you get more spiritual about it, you know, the group is, you know, a part of the grander community as a part of the country, as a part of the world, as a part of everything. And then eventually you have this, or you pop out of I, you know, and you go into something that's bigger than just this skin bag. And by moving in synchrony, it creates the potential to feel like you're starting to almost like merge with something bigger than your individual skin bag. I have a question for you, Aaron, because now that we're talking about this, there's a question that I've wanted to ask you for a little while. I used to have a wellness facility and in there I had like rooms that people would rent and there was a massage therapist who worked there and rented the space for a long time and she was exceptional. She was very, very good at what she did. And she used to say that and when I first got the wellness facility, I was at least open enough to bring different modalities in and respect them, but I still was extremely ignorant to what they did. So she would say things to me and I wouldn't roll my eyes in front of her. I don't want to disrespect her, but when she wasn't in the room, I'd think, oh, whatever. That's her thing. That's fine. People like it, but whatever. And she would say things to me like, people store emotions in their body. I remember thinking, that's so silly. Like it's in your brain. What are you talking about? It's not in your body. And then she would talk more about it and how she would find a tight area in a person's body and she would work through it, release it, and the person would have a memory that was stored within them or a feeling that they hadn't processed and they would cry on the table or they would laugh or they would get this. And I experienced some stuff like that when she would work on me. What's going on there? And I do believe now that emotions can be stored in the body in the sense that you create a pattern. That pattern maybe protecting you or whatever from this particular thought and until you fix that pattern. I've heard that with fascia. Yeah, you don't process the emotion. What are your thoughts on that? So that would be subject of potential book too because I think that's like a topic that a person could spend their whole entire life digging into and still not completely understand it. But the lens that I take from the way that emotions and such are stored in the body is less of a, you have anger in your liver and you have mother issues in your kidney and like very specific in that way and more coming back to very nuts and bolts, masculine, mechanical. If a person is scared, how are they scared? How are they physically scared? And how is their body? Everybody knows what that looks like. I don't need to describe, your shoulders go up, your jaw might clench, maybe your wrist clench, you go into like a flight type response or you could go into a freeze response which is even deeper down the chain. So if a person is, so every day you are continually aggregating various different patterns based off of your perception of the way that you interact with the world. So you have a certain like, you could call it like an identity of self, which is something that you, how old was your kid's self? My son's 15, my daughter's 10. Okay, so you had, you got to experience, do you guys have kids as well? Yeah, we all do now. Yeah, I'm a 10 and seven. One year old. Two boys. This is the dad crew. All right. Trying to make dads cool again. That's exciting. Dilves. Yeah, Dilves. It's all Dilves. That's great. I'm dating a girl that's all about Dilves. Oh, oh. You're gonna have a kid now? Bear bear girl. Bear bear girl. I feel like she's trying to sell you on this. Yeah, totally. Yeah, yeah. Careful. Yeah. What was that talking about? I subscribed to it and so on. Oh yeah, yeah, so the identity of self, identity of self. Yeah, so when you are, this happened last time, remember the trees? I got lost in the woods. So the identity of self, that's something that you, when you first come out, these are tangential points, when you first come out into the world as a baby, you are your mom. You know, so the umbilical cord gets cut, but you're like, what were you talking about? I'm like, I'm still mom. You know, so if I'm hungry, mom's hungry. You know, if I'm thirsty, mom's thirsty. Like you just, there's no separation. Sure. And then eventually you come into a point, which I think that's what they alluded to being like the terrible twos, where you're starting to get that rip. You're like, I'm separate. You're asserting yourself in that way too. Yeah, yeah, exactly. So that's interesting. And then from that point forward, perhaps, you know, a little before or after, you're starting to structure this story, this narrative of who you believe you are. You know, and so zero to seven, you're predominantly in like a Theta state. It starts off Delta for the first two years, then you go into this Theta, which is essentially like a hypnotic state. You know, and you're just gathering information like a sponge everywhere you go. You're developing these belief systems of who you are that impacts the way that you move in your body. You know, so if you are a person that's like, man, I feel great and I feel loved. I feel part of something bigger than myself. You know, so people that are part of religions or married, you know, they end up having longer lifelines and they end up, you know, being a little bit happier and all that. It's like, wow, man, I just feel, man, I feel good. I feel like I feel in my body. I feel at home in myself. That person's probably going to have more balanced blood sugar and blood pressure and probably less tension being held in their body. Less chronic pain, right? Less chronic pain, all that stuff. Yeah. And then there's perhaps another person. Obviously, there's like tens of thousands of different kind of types throughout this. But on the other scale, it'll be somebody that perhaps they had some big pivotal traumatic moment, for example, that all of a sudden, they got the signal. And maybe it was like before that age seven timeframe where they're just kind of gathering and they got the signal that the world is not safe. The floor could fall out at any time. You know, I need to bulk up. I need to muscle up. I need to get strong and protected and show superficially that I'm good enough. I'm loved and all those things. And maybe my shoulders are chronically stuck up in this position where it feels like my shoulders are kind of creeping up to my ears. Maybe my fist are chronically tight. Maybe I have this TMJ and my jaws are, you know, and you could isolate that and look at it like more like Western scalpel type lens and go and isolate and say, oh, you just got TMJ. You know, you just have some tension up here. We're going to do some MFR or whatever. We'll release that stuff. In the process, whatever tool you utilize in order to start to open up that body, in order to create meaningful long-term change, you're going to actually start tinkering into that person's identity structure. You know, and so if you bring a person that's in a place of I've been held intense and ready to fight and I have this physical expression of that and you start to creep in and start to change some of those, those toggles and pulleys, that all of a sudden the person gets up and their, their shoulders drop and they're breathing through their, their diaphragm as opposed up into their clavicles and they're, they feel like their feet are on the ground. You better believe that that person will start to interact with their relationships differently. I see this with Rolfing, body work, like I mean, I've seen it lots and lots of times historically working with people. Oh, I remember hearing, especially female clients would say the following that, that them getting stronger in the gym made them feel stronger and more confident in the real world. And I mean, they're not like way stronger. They may be 10 pounds on something, but the experience of strength and struggle and grinding through a squat or a lift made them feel just generally stronger and more confident in everyday experience. So we, we've only known Aaron as Aaron of Align and you've already, we were already this guy, like that was into all this. So was there a process for you where this really, you know, like a pivotal moment where you started to see this in yourself and you started to change, you know, behaviors and movement and then how did it impact you? Was that, was that a process? Was it an overnight thing? What was it like for you for that transition? I think, I think I've talked about this before. I mentioned in the first chapter of the book, my dad, he's done very well now, but growing up, he got really obsessed with crack cocaine. And he was like pimpin' women and he'd come home and have like bullet holes in the car and it was like, very interesting time. Did I mention that before? No, I don't think you mentioned it. No, I knew you had a rough childhood and I feel even more like a bitch talking about my rough childhood when you talk about things like that. Because mine doesn't seem so bad anymore. I was fine overall. But I think that that created this stimulus of sorts of feeling like the world's not safe, the floor could fall out from any point, going into much more of kind of just like clinging in general, feeling like I would always have savings of money and I was just like always planning for a rainy day. And I think that in tandem with being obsessed with bodybuilding, be obsessed with packing as much muscle as I possibly could all because I wanted to show that I was strong enough. I think there was a big thing of like being enough that would get into probably sensations of like, oh, why did daddy leave me? Oh, because I'm not enough. Right, right. So I think as a young person, you're so narcissistic. Everything's like kind of about you. Right. And so now with social media, everybody's kind of narcissistic. But I think growing up it's like, okay, dad's just on his trip. He had his own childhood trauma and all of this stuff and I placed that on me. So there's kind of this sense of like moving away. And then that kind of led to just doing everything to kind of create senses of validation. And so that going into don't press training and then eventually going to like roughing school and massage school and studying psychology and psychedelics I think have been impactful for sure of kind of unbinding some different nodes in my brain and kind of like pulling the map out and saying, okay, like, where are we here? And then coming back and kind of folding the map back up and putting it back in. So I think it's been an evolution of different events mixed with the environmental conditions of the world's not safe. And now here we are talking about it. No, I definitely think that we are obviously a product of our childhood. And even as older mature adults still dealing with many of these insecurities from childhood, do you have a particular one that tends to resurface in your life that you're constantly having to address because of how you grew up? Well, I think that, I mean, you can see a lot of people that have a lot of things, or I obviously to some degree crave validation or I wouldn't put images of myself doing exercises on Instagram. And you can say it's, oh, it's just a business. I need to feed myself. But nonetheless, I chose that route of look at me. I can help you. I can be your savior in a sense. You can keep on drawing back and giving. I'm not saying that that is why I do anything, but you could certainly kind of toss that dart at the board and be like, how does that feel? Is there something to that of how you got to that point? So people that have a lot of wealth, people that have a lot of followers on the internet, whatever, I think a lot of that could be drawn back to they're seeking some form of validation from the outside world. This was a conversation that Katrina and I had literally last night and we were kind of going back and forth with our own insecurities that we see. And one of the things I said to her that I've kind of come full circle on it, because I think that there is a positive side to them also. If you use to fuel yourself to grow and be a better person. And then there's a very fine line of not allowing it to rear its head. Do you agree with that? Or do you think that like any sort of motivation from insecurity is bad? And I'll give you an example. So give people context of what we were talking about last night. So I've been fascinated with real estate and since I was in my early 20s. And I've read several books in my 20s, even more so now as I've gotten older. And Katrina's family, there was times where they were refinancing their house or trying to make decisions. And I felt like I had the answers for them and nobody asked me. And it bothered me. And so I told Katrina, I said, here I'm trying to figure out why does that bother me? And then I also have noticed that there's patterns like this in my life where if people don't think that I'm smart enough in an area, it's also motivated me to go and learn and be smarter and be better at that. So I get that attention that they recognize like, oh shit, this dude knows his stuff in that area. And I think a lot of that, although fueled by insecurity, has also driven me to success. So where is the fine line of allowing it to drive you to be better, but then not letting it control you and consume you to make bad decisions? Do you think about that? Totally, yeah. Well, I think he come back to Ram Dass or like Alan Watts or anything like the spiritual people coming into the witness part of yourself. Like the more often that you can tap into the witness part of yourself, the less you are just being kind of tossed around, like I imagine like a rag doll in a dog's mouth, just kind of like getting wiggled around by, that person loves me. That person doesn't like me. Like you become the stock market, essentially. So any relatively decent ambassador. You're just reactive to everything. You wouldn't be like, dude, don't even look at it today. Like let's check in on this in 10 years. And then you still say, wow, we've really grown over the last 10 years. Wow. But that takes a savvy investor to be able to kind of give you that education of like, let's just kind of go more in the overview and be able to witness as opposed to being completely stuck on each individual person's reaction. I love thinking of it like that because this was the great. And I love having these deep conversations with Katrina because she's very self-aware. And we like to do this where we'll go back and have these healthy debates. And the point I was trying to make to her is that I think that, and this you just validated that, is that the real important thing is the awareness piece is to know that. Like I didn't react. Like it's not like her mom didn't ask me advice and then I was a dick or I was just, or I tried to force my information on it. I just observed that it made me feel a certain way and then motivated me to want to learn or do something more in that area. So I'm aware that there's work to be done inside and have an insecurity there. But I'm also aware enough to not allow it to change my mood or just react to it. So, and I was like, so I don't totally think that being motivated by some of these things are all negative. I think that there, if you, and I like what you just said, and I think that's true. Like if you are more of a witness of it and paying attention versus just like the stock market reacting to things all the time. It's your situation in your context can make you a much better person. Challenge is what makes you grow. It's like that there was a wrestler. He had no legs. I forgot his name and he was. Black guy lives in LA. I think so. And he did very, very well. And he did very, very well for himself. And he talks about how if that, if he didn't have that, if he wasn't born in that situation, he probably wouldn't have been as great as he was. But it drove him to grow and be this incredible person. There's another person who's another disabled individual who climbed. I think it was Mount Everest. And he said the same thing. I don't know if I would have done this had I not had this particular challenge. So I think you're presented with your challenges. And it's up to you how you use them. Does it break you? Does it crush you? Or does it make you a better person? And so in that way, your mindset makes all the difference. This is a gift versus I'm cursed. That's all in your, in your perception. You know, you were talking about how you feel and your emotions and how that affects your body. Can you reverse engineer that in the sense that, you know, does it go both ways? In other words, the way I feel on the inside affects how I look on the outside. Can I change my body and then affect how I feel on the inside? Yeah. Well, so, so Zion, we pulled up that. I've actually got to train Jiu-Jitsu with Zion. Oh, wow. Yeah. Super, super interesting. Badass. I never, that was the first time getting to roll with a, what would that be called a amputee? What's his legs are gone from like the femur down. What is that called? I don't know. But he just, yeah. Yeah. So it's like chicken or the egg. You know, so it's like, what is the answer? I mean, I think it's, it's, it's both. You know, it just really depends on, on the scenario. You know, so all of the stuff, your perception of yourself impacts the way that you carry your movement. And then right back to the other side, you can move yourself into feeling a certain way. You know, so you could look at that from like the, the postural perspectives is, is one lens, but you could even say just like, you know, your, your muscular system, it's like an endocrine organ. You know, so it's releasing hormones and proteins and myokines and, you know, irisin is like the exercise hormone that's helpful with thermoregulation and helpful with burning fat. And you know, they compare exercise to, to being as effective or potentially more effective to, to antidepressants. That's beyond my scope of even having an opinion. You know, but it literally informs the way that you think, the way that you feel. Like anybody knows, listening to this, certainly that if you're feeling kind of shitty and you go do a workout with some friends, afterwards you're like, what happened? Oh, a hundred percent. Like, what was that? A hundred percent. And you're like, well, there's a lot of things, man. It was community. I'm connected to something bigger than myself. It was exercising and flexing and pumping this endocrine organ, organ that we call muscle, slash massaging all of the rest of your organs. It was moving yourself through postural patterns that if you get into like research from Amy Cuddy, is an interesting example, which is very contentious. You know, the Harvard researcher, the whole, you guys from the, it's probably right. No. So Amy, you will as I start talking about it. So she was, she was the one that studied people going into like the power woman position. Oh, power bosses. And all that stuff. Yeah. And so there was, I mentioned that in the book as well, as well as the contention around it. It's interesting creating a book because it feels finalized. You know, when you put something down in the book. It's there. You're like, this is, this is, I'm really saying something. You know, whereas when you're writing a Instagram post and you're toilet, you know, and you're like, you're just, your hair's not done. This has gone in two weeks. It's not just spaghetti on the wall. It's a real thing. When you're writing the book and you say some shit, you're like, wow, this is like, I'm defining myself. This is how I feel. This is how I feel. Yeah. It's very fascinating. Yeah. No, it's it. Hold on. I want to tell you about it. Oh yeah. Oh yeah. Go, go, go. So anyway, so what she was suggesting with the power poses is that she had various different samples of people. They had one group of people would go into a hunched over position that I had described previously. And then they would do saliva samples, measuring cortisol, stress hormone, and testosterone. And so testosterone is, you know, associated with good cognitive function, energy levels, you know, feeling strong, comfortable and that stuff. Confidence. And then cortisol is like, you're feeling, you're waging out, you're getting ready to fight, fight all those. And so what she found with that was that consistently, when a person being upright, strong, what I would call aligned position, then they end up actually increasing their testosterone levels and decreasing their cortisol levels. And then the inverse would happen when a person was in more of a hunched over kind of position, which is essentially is. Submissive. Yeah, which the kind of the really where this gets into book two as well, and I get into book one, but I want to go deeper into it. Depression is the number one leading cause of disability worldwide presently. Yeah. You know, so, you know, is alluding to Marshall McLuhan medium is that the message is like a big idea from him. So when we are in this room right now or school would be an even better example. When you go to school, you think that your kids are being educated by, you know, the contents that are in the books. I'm learning math. I'm learning Abe Lincoln. I'm learning poetry. What you are actually really truly being formed by is the positions that you are assuming while you're in that desk. The manner in which you're being educated by, you know, now it's the screens, you know. So that screen education, that is the medium that is actually the overlying, overwhelming message that is forming you. So we think it's just that the contents of what we're getting from the medium, but in fact, it's the medium itself. So when you are a person that's getting all this information and you're inside of, say you're inside of a boxed room, maybe all the walls are just white, you know, and maybe you're getting these artificial blue lights. Maybe it's, you know, thermo-regulated air-conditioned air. It's always at this one-set temperature. Maybe you learn that, okay, I need to raise my hand and ask politely if I got to go pee-pee. Maybe, like, all of these different things. No moralistic judgment, wrong, right, good, bad. You know, but the fact that you're learning some math along the way, I think, is very small potatoes in comparison to the actual, the constitution of the mold that you exist in. Oh, I totally agree. And you're, because if you think about this way to simplify, right, you're, you have a feeling within you that it presents itself in your body. But then the way your body is positioned also sends feedback back to the inside of you, maybe your brain. And it can easily become a feedback loop. You know, no different than when you have a microphone and a speaker. You take the mic, you put it, you connect to the speaker, bring the mic close to the speaker. You get that super loud sound because the speaker's picking up the sound from the microphone, but then projecting it and then picking it up. And it becomes this positive feedback loop that obviously, you know, is very offensive and loud. If you feel afraid or sad and your body forms itself in the way that exemplifies fear and sadness, then you also perceive the position that shows the inside of you, your brain and the body that I'm scared or that I'm sad. And then you feel it more and your body does it more and you get this positive feedback loop. And one of the best things you can do with any loop is you have to stop and interrupt it. You have to disrupt the loop. And so if you're feeling, here's an easy thing you can do if you're feeling like a bit out of control with negative feelings or whatever. And it may sound, it may feel silly. It may seem like this is whatever. What do you mean? And I don't want to do that. And what's funny about feedback loops is you want to stay in one, which is interesting. Just try this. You feel like you're at it. Go stand or move in a way that is different than the way you feel. So I am feeling sad and I'm feeling unmotivated. I'm going to stand tall and work out. You know, as much as I don't want to, I'm going to go do this. What'll happen is your brain will receive the signal that, I know we feel this way, but here's what we're getting from the outside. This person standing in a way that tells us that we should probably feel a little bit better. We should probably feel a little bit more motivated. There's a study that this was an interesting one where people held a pencil in their teeth. Yeah, smiling. Yeah, which mimics smiling. And because of that, people felt like they were happier. The inverse happens if you put a golf tee in your eyebrow, so you go resting bitch face. Yeah, yeah. Fascinating, right? And when you see a person with resting bitch face, quite often they're kind of aggravated more than a person that kind of moves around all jubilant. Like it's not just like a coincidence. Like you literally, and so there's another guy that I've had on my podcast actually called Paul Ekman. He's like one of the most cited psychologists in the world, Noam Chomsky. Noam Chomsky the most? I think so. Yeah. You've seen Requiem for American Dream? No, I haven't seen that. Woo! Yeah. You gotta watch that. Do I? All right. All right. Man. I saw that a long time ago. I can't even remember it though. Holy shit. All right. So Paul Ekman. He's interesting. I don't think he liked me. I think or a conversation. I was like, I was like, Paul, I respect you a lot, but I think you hate me. So anyways, he was a fella that studied various different facial expressions around the world. And he, his perspective went against Darwin's perspective that there was, you would learn certain facial expressions based off of your, your cultural influence. And then mimic them. Yeah. And so that is true with like gang signs and like waving. Like waving isn't a thing that just everybody just does. That's like, I have no weapons. You know, that's like something that you're learning and showing. Oh, okay. You know, now we do elbow. Bump because of, you know, because of things. Yeah, exactly. That's not like just a natural thing. Hugging probably is quite natural, though, is my guess. But anyways, his facial expressions, though, he mapped out something like 10,000 different specific facial expressions that had specific meanings to feeling angry, sad, scared, happy, and all of the, all of the different things. And each subtle little change of any of the muscles on your face are indicative of a very specific meaning to the outside world, but also to yourself. You know, and so you see those very, very like overt examples of like a smile or the frown that causes a thing. Well, now extrapolate that out times 10,000. And you have like, wow, like I'm always painting a story with my face. I'll have freaking Jim Carrey. Why is he so successful? He can contort his face into anything. So he plays, he's like a, he's like a, like a savant with playing the instrument of facial expression, which invokes a sensation much like, if not exactly like, an instrument, a person playing a saxophone. And then you're giving it to yourself. You're giving it to yourself and others, just like when you're playing the sax. So what are any instruments? What are some best practices then that we can give or what you would give to clients without going down the rabbit hole, right? Because what we know from, you know, all of us have trained many, many clients and I know that there's just this plethora of information that I've learned over decades of training and nutrition and movement. And I have to be very careful on how much of that I put on a client. If I really want them to put into practice and to see change and continue to grow in this area, are there some best practices? Because you can get into cold therapy. You can get into meditation, affirmations, posture, mobility. There's so many things. Yeah, where do you start? Yeah, where do you start? And are there small things that you give clients to start with this and make this a habit, make it become unconscious and then move to this? Do you have things like that? That's, yeah, that's what the line method is. So that's so breaking it down. I was kind of crying earlier about how like the publishers forced to be called five movement principles for your stronger body and stress-proof life and all the words and I'm like, I hate this. Like, I don't like, I think this is like, it's so much more than that. But, you know, because people need something to grab on to, need like a good handle, we do have a, the second section of the book breaks down five fundamental principles that every person ought to have in their daily experience if they really give a dang about driving their body well. And so the first thing that I would recommend to almost every client would be, I mean, one walk. Like you just got to walk more. You know, anytime that you have the opportunity to like go get groceries, it's like, dude, your family at some point probably made a pilgrimage across a continent and she was like, for you to get to this point so you can sit on your ass and order food off of your phone and wait for it to be delivered to your face. You know, and so if you have the opportunity, you know, make it be a fun thing to, you know, get some reusable bags or a backpack and like, cool, I didn't get to hike in any mountains this year, but I did a bunch of little mini pilgrimages to the grocery store. While I was doing that, I got sun. Maybe I took my shirt off. I exposed my whole body to the sun. Maybe I took my sunglasses off. So I'm getting that, you know, that full spectrum of like going to my eyes, which is helpful with like, you know, all sorts of things helps your body, your body's production of neurochemistry literally makes you a happier person. Right. Circadian rhythm, all kinds of stuff. All the stuff. Yeah. You know, so that would be one thing. Another thing that I recommend to everybody is just spending a little bit of time on the ground each day. You know, so while I'm sitting in the chair here, I'm treating the chair kind of like as though we were sitting around a fire and you know, I'm sitting on a rock or on a ground. In this case, I'm sitting up on a cushion, my legs are crossed. The reason that's valuable, I'm not just going to get through all the five things. I'll probably stop after this, but when we can, if you want, but it gets a little monotonous. But the big thing with spending time on the ground, one, you end up in the book, we call them resting postures of repose, which I borrowed from muscles and meridians by Phillip Beach. But so these, these resting postures of repose are these natural tuning mechanisms that our bodies have had since the beginning of our evolution. You've naturally squatted all the way down to the ground, then you kneel a little bit, then you might reach your arms up overhead for a little bit to grab something. All of those positions, in this case, just specifically spend time on the ground lying down in your back, lying down on your side. You know, when you're in those positions, you might notice, oh man, like my hip feels a little like sensitive, feels like beef jerky on that side. You're massaging your beef jerky hip by being on the ground as opposed to floating in space all day, just getting clogged up like a dam. You know, and then when you're going that you're also taking your hips through a full range of motion. So now you're opening and expanding and contracting those pelvic floor muscles. You, you literally are a closed hydraulic system that needs to be pumped with regularity. If you are, you will be a healthy hydraulic system. If you are not, then you will be a stuck up, dammed up body. Dams are where festering and disease and things of the sort manifest. If the body is well circulated, then the body heals. When the body has obstruction, there's a Andrew Taylor still quote, who's the founder of osteopathy says, harmony dwells where obstructions do not exist. So anywhere in your body that there is obstruction, you, that is the beginnings of disease. Anywhere where you can open that obstruction, allow new fluid in the form of lymphatic fluid and blood and you know, all the things to circulate and move your body. It starts to heal. Imagine that. And so that's a lot of people, they may have various differing issues ranging from whatever the element may be. And then they might go to, maybe say they go to Peru and they do ayahuasca and they, it's like, wow, like I got healed of my thing. After being in Peru for a month, it was the ayahuasca. It was the shaman. They had, they cut a chicken head off and these crystals and like all this stuff. It's like, well, what else happened on that trip? You were in Peru. What else happened on that trip? Like you, you probably, you know, you got in a different bed, maybe it was lower down the ground, maybe you changed, you were forced to change your identity structure because now you're in a new place. People don't even speak the same language. You can't be in that same rut pattern of get up, drink too much coffee, get in the car, sit in that same 90 degree position, get up, stumble into the next place, all revved up on coffee and I'm already kind of in like this fight, flight response, sit in that same position in the office, get up, walk to the other room, sit in the same position, getting back in the car, then go to the gym, do the same position, sitting on some seated row machine, get up, get back in the car, same position, go home, eat dinner in the same position, then sit finally, relax and have some Netflix on the couch in the same fucking position. You know, you go to another place and all of a sudden your body gets like, whoa, everything starts to kind of change and shift. You're starting to perfuse new fluid into all of these places by changing your physical environment. It's crazy. We're talking about how important this is to fight off chronic pain and have about the body. But there's also the side of mental and like relationship health that then this was part of actually the conversation that Katrina and I talked about last night too that we hacked into a long-term that speaks to your point. We make it a point to disrupt our daily life and go somewhere out of this environment because of that exact reason because I feel the same thing for relationship health. It's very easy to get in the minutiae of going through your day of laundry, clean, walk the dogs, go to work, and it's just a cycle that you can- We schedule sex on Tuesday. Right, right. You start to lose- I love Tuesdays. You start to lose sight of- Ta ta Tuesday. Your relationship and the growth of it and the health of it. And so one of the best things that we found is to always schedule a trip away from home even if we're just going up an hour and a half to the beach and we stay two or three nights at a hotel room or whatever on the beach is just to interrupt that same pattern that we're always in and I think it contributes to a lot of the success our relationship has and I think that's parallel to what you're talking about with the body. Chinese and Ayurvedic medicine talk a lot about congestion and blocks of energy and I think that years ago I had a acupuncturist that was in my wellness facility and she would explain how acupuncture works but through Chinese medicine terminology and so I'd say you know what's interesting I've seen the studies the western studies on acupuncture and it does have pain relieving qualities they've proven it this is my insurance now pays for acupuncture how does it work and she said oh well the needles open up energy flows from Qi and this and that and she's talking through Chinese medicine terminology I thought to myself okay well here's what I know about western medicine I know we have referred pain I know that oftentimes when you go to the doctor and you hear you hurt somewhere they know that you might have an issue with your kidney or your heart for example your left arm everybody knows that I get left arm pain getting a heart attack maybe it's affecting the nerves but really the point is it doesn't matter how we explain it it's been observed it's been observed by many many people and this congestion this blocking thing that you're talking about Ayurvedic medicine Chinese medicine talk a lot about it and here's some more interesting stuff about getting on the ground they've done studies on people and they're constantly trying to find one way one test that can help predict all cause mortality right because that would be beautiful I'll be great for insurance purposes for medicine purposes and it's hard to find it is it blood pressure is it cholesterol is it triglycerides is it fasting insulin is it all but now they're starting to stumble upon it and there's there's one that they found which was can you get up off the ground yeah can you get out if we put you on the ground and don't help you can you get up all by yourself that is a greater predictor of all cause mortality than any other singular measurement that we have the second closest would be your grip strength test just how strong you are with your hand how interesting is that so I have so the one of the third movement principles in the book is is hanging with regularity each day you know so my recommendation with spending time on the ground is you know I recommend 30 minutes but you know that's like half of a yoga class you know so if you're a person that just eats breakfast on the ground you know where you get some big cushions and you maybe get like a low coffee table maybe you go outside and some grass and you're getting sun you're stacking variables got to stack variables you know when you're living in an environment where you're very kind of like medicinal isolated supplement form of fitness and life and all of the things you're not living life like you're living this broken narrative of the way you're supposed to do it if you just take your ass outside you know during a nice day get down on the ground eat some food that's maybe you know helpful for your body maybe do it with community you know all of those different things it's like it's this whole storm of positive variables all stacked together and so the so that's just one thing of kind of like making the spending time on the ground you know make it comfortable you know put your ground territory like near a window or something like that get a really comfy rug and we get some foam rollers down there maybe put a yoga mat down on the ground someplace so it welcomes because you become your environment Marshall McLuhan meeting this message but then hanging that's another one of those things that it could be hypothesized or argued that we are our ancestors were these arboreal creatures in Africa that started off in trees whether that's true or not you know I don't I don't really care what you do know is that human hands are really good at reaching up over your head grabbing on to trees or things of the sort and pulling yourself up well look at the shoulder structure with the scapula yeah but it's longer so you're able to do it we evolved to be able to reach up above our head hang into throw things correct and if otherwise we would have totally different shoulders yep and so that's that's one of those things that what do you naturally is so if you hear that study about how you know grip strength is a higher indicator of cardiovascular disease than blood pressure then you're like okay cool I'm gonna go get you know one of those dinometers and just start squeezing the shit out of it it's like no you're doing the supplement bullshit form of life and fitness do shit that naturally engages that whole chain of muscles that would be indicative of a strong grip strength play jujitsu grab a lapel you know grab go climb a tree with your kids like why are kids such good teachers because they're they're they're more honest with their biology they don't they don't know they're not supposed to they don't know they don't have stories yet they don't have narrative yet you know and so at some point you were taught you were misinformed that it's it's not mature to play you were misinformed that it's not mature to balance on that curb or you know I'll just climb that tree so no we have we have things to do we have I've got my watch here I've got my my apple cell phone I got like I'm in alignment I got my schedule my agenda kids are like what this is a play opportunity what are you talking about like I don't want to leave right now what a great lesson no it's what a great lesson and I've always been such a big advocate of rotation and like that's something I've just noticed right away just being in the gym environment how little that's incorporated in anybody's programming doesn't matter if you know personal trainers having their client go through exercises they're not really incorporating rotation as much as and this is a vital components how our body moves you know it's funny Aaron again having trained people for so long towards the end of my careers when I really learned how to be really effective and one of the most effective things I ever did for a client was integrate movement into their day into their everyday ritualistic daily life it was so effective at getting people to move more so instead of doing the do 30 minutes of cardio every morning on your stationary bike it was well you already breakfast lunch and dinner so that's already a ritual walk 10 minutes after each one the consistency was amazing here's the thing studies also show it's more effective when they compare a one hour cardio session to three 20 minute sessions the three 20 musicians burn more body fat improve stamina better and are have physiological benefits that are that are better than the singular the single time of spending on a piece of cardio equipment we notice this with strength you know you go to the gym for an hour and you want to just get stronger what if instead of you know doing 15 pull-ups three sets of that in your back workout you had a pull-up bar in your house and every time you walk back by you did one pull-up every time you walk by you just did a pull-up that's it you know what's funny the studies support that and then try it out by the way the strongest I've ever been at certain lifts was when I practiced like that rather than doing the structured one hour or two hour workout it's literally integrating these things into your life so that's why I love so much what you said about eating breakfast on the ground because if because sometimes and here's what I'll even I'm even guilty of this when I hear you say get on the ground I immediately think I'm going to schedule 30 minutes of just being on the ground instinctually right oh I got to do this I got to put this in my routine then you said eat breakfast on the ground and I'm like oh yeah all right that was 25 minutes I'm already almost there I'm already eating breakfast I might as well get on the ground what about watching TV on the ground I watch TV every night for 30 minutes or an hour you know hanging out with my what why don't I just sit on the ground instead of on the couch it's and it's in from a psychological standpoint or from a consistency standpoint people are far more likely to be consistent when it's integrated in that way versus the make sure you schedule your cardio make sure you schedule your weight training session make sure you schedule your mobility session it's like well what if you just when you brushed your teeth you you got down into a squat or you were barefoot and did some calf raises or what if you know you had a pull up bar in your house and it's next to the TV and whenever you're watching TV you kind of hang a little bit and play on the pull up bar way more effective yeah well then you alluded to the research around the physiological part there's research to support the behavioral side that it's more likely to be consistent if you do pair it with another ritual so I mean that it's funny I love that you started with the walking thing too because we've talked probably at nauseam on the show about how we used to scoff at that in our early years as a trainer when a client would say like oh I walk every day and be walking you're not working out yeah you're not training you're not exercising show me burpees bitch yeah right and then you look you look at the way I talk to a client full circle and that is actually the very first thing that I address it's just let's move and let's pair it with something you're already doing I'm not going to ask you to go get on a treadmill for an hour every single day to do cardio let's break down your day and let's see a way that we can integrate that into your lifestyle because I know that 20 minutes of that for the rest of your life every time after dinner is far more valuable than a six month run of doing one hour cardio every single day totally and here's a big part of it too Aaron because we're constantly trying to get people to it to adopt some of these habits and to do them first we have to get them to accept them and so you have to sell the idea so I'm going to sell this for you right now right years ago a device hit the fitness scene and it was you know a big part of the the gym that I started my career in 24 hour fitness it's called a body bug and a body bug and there's a lot of these things now but they were the first ones you put it on and it was relatively accurate at calculating how many calories are burned and it did through through movement and skin temperature and it was a very complicated device it was actually groundbreaking and it was relatively accurate you put it on and you could you know get into your computer and look I'm like oh I burned 2,500 calories today I burned 3,000 calories today or whatever and again it was it was it was relatively accurate and even when you compared it to the very complex metabolism measuring machines that you have at universities and I remember this it was it was mind blowing for me I'd have clients that would come in and work out three days a week with me or in two days a week on their own five days a week they'd put on the body bug and we would look at their calories and remember that we would look at their that I'd pull it up on the computer and I'd be like oh man what did you do on Saturday and Sunday you burned like 30 percent more calories on Saturday and Sunday like why did you work out like I thought you only worked out five days a week oh no no I was just oh I was I was gardening and then I watched the car oh that's when I went to the mall with my friends and we were shopping and I remember like melted my brain because I'm like holy cow five days a week you're in here working out for an hour but then you go to work and do nothing all day long on those days you're not even scheduling a workout and you burned way more calories so here's how I sell what we're talking about you just want to get lean do this anyway incorporate it into your everyday life anyway even if you don't care about all the other stuff that Aaron's talking about and what I'm talking about if you want to burn fat effectively the most effective way to do it is to incorporate it into your daily life into small doses into the rituals that you already have it's far more effective than trying to do scheduled calorie burn workouts yeah well that yeah I mean that's exactly what the intention of making this thing called the align method which again I wanted to call it a line because I have resistance towards dogma and so as soon as something's called a method I'm like oh no no when the publisher's like no bitch like it's a method we're selling a method I'm like all right whatever but that was the whole thing is being able to be somewhat of a Trojan horse and be able to slip into people's lives without feeling as though we are adding something new totally you know so it's with anything it's like you know start the book out with an analogy of the the golf swing which isn't my analogy but you know when you're swinging in a club or swinging a club at a ball you know it's all it takes is the little fraction of a centimeter to be off you know in any direction and you don't notice the change right in the beginning but then you know give it 30 yards 50 yards it's way off and you're like oh that's wow like that's where that ball ended up you know and so that's what was you are moving throughout the day what I created the book for was essentially to give people the lens to be able to examine what's the angle of their club in any instance throughout the day so they can make literally every moment an opportunity because you got the know how to do it beyond that whether you want to or not it's up to you I don't really care I'm gonna bring it all down to the current situation okay this is why I love home gyms so much so a couple years ago I invested in a home gym I have a garage gym basic setup but everything you need right barbell, dumbbell cage you know bands all that stuff right and there was a weekend that was coming up and my wife and I like we don't really have anything scheduled this weekend I said you know I remember reading these Soviet studies on Olympic weight lifters and how when they'd work out all day they got these phenomenal results I said I'm gonna give this a shot so what I'm gonna do is every other hour I'm gonna go out to the garage I'll pick three exercises my goal is gonna be strength so I'm gonna do like a row a bench press and overhead press or something like that right and I go out and I do six reps of each three sets each and it was moderate intensity not intense not super easy but nothing crazy and I'll do that every other hour and the strength gains I got from a single session and how I felt blew me away so I'm gonna bring it now to the to the current situation current climate a lot of people out home they can't go anywhere they can't do anything here's a great opportunity to do instead of your 60 minute workout why don't you do three 20 minute workouts or six 10 minute workouts throughout the day schedule them throughout the day first of all you're gonna feel better because you're gonna get those good feelings from movement throughout the whole day it's like a an ivy drip of a feel good chemical rather than a single shot of it one time during the day and on top of it you will notice that your body will respond a little bit better it's crazy but it's 100% true and watch how that bleeds into every other aspect of your life your communication with your friends exact business that you're doing like the production that you get done get done it's amazing so that's it seems like there's not a necessity to keep on confirming the point that consistent movement matters but another person that I've had on the podcast called Joan Vernacos she's worked with NASA for like the last 40 years I don't think she liked me either actually you're so you're so likeable though what's what are you doing bro I think there seems to be a consistent trend with when I do podcasts over the internet remotely and if it's with a baby boomer I think there's been a consistent trend where I'm like I think that person kind of hated me afterwards I think it's something maybe I'm arrogant I'm not sure what it is exactly but that's what I've noticed you're polarizing but I love her but nonetheless I like her and I like her books and one of the things that she pointed out was that astronauts she was studying that the health of astronauts in space without gravity and what she found was that the astronauts that would do small bits like little tight traits so you said like drips of fitness throughout the day they would age significantly slower typically versus the ones that would do like the CrossFit blowout workout in space for three hours and just really don't and then the rest of the day just kind of float in space you know and work with instruments so the people that would do that they would go through literally this rapid aging process where their bones would become less dense and their muscles would atrophy and cognitive CrossFit doesn't even work in space but so what's really interesting with that is it's like the same analogy salad that you were referencing that I have I've referenced before describing as like you wouldn't drink all of your water first thing in the morning or three days a week and so you wouldn't say okay cool I want to have whatever you want to have say you want to have a gallon of water a day which might be a lot or a little whatever but you don't smash out two gallons on Tuesday and then another two gallons on Thursday it's sips you know and so those systems are literally they're you know they're congruent they're working with each other you drink water you eat food and then you move it through your body you know so all of those systems are integrated and they're all based off of continual movement you know and so when you start to look at things like that like okay cool while I'm having this conversation maybe we could do a walking meeting you know so throughout the day like where can I start to fill without how can I just make my day more efficient better more productive more happy and not lose any of the the progress that we were doing or lose any of the productivity you know and so if you go for a walking meeting with you you actually get more productive you get more productive absolutely and you start thinking outside of the box and so if what you need is your employees or yourself to be more of like a a scantron type thinker you know you have the information or you just got to jot it down studies show that sitting in that you know sitting on the chair or I would recommend being on the ground and just being focused in and getting it done you can access that information quite fine even more effectively but if you want to go start thinking outside or divergently thinking then you need to diverge your body out of that same stuck focused convergent position I don't know if convergent divergent exactly work in that as far as like describe movement of the body but when you move the body in a a way that's not just the standard mold that we get when we're sitting in chairs all day long being cogs in a wheel when you go outside of that all of a sudden you start thinking oh what if we you know Steve Jobs he had walking meetings with everybody you know and so that's like you start thinking of things like man what if we made these computers different like we have I have all of this intrinsic information that's already in my brain you know and the way that I've been formed is such that I can kind of treat myself like a catalogue and just go in and sit and go through the catalogue but if I start to move a little bit differently then I start bucking against the system you know and then I start becoming somewhat of like a revolutionary but it could could potentially start from actually the way that I move my body because as I move my body I'm moving my mind yeah there's many systems of adaptation of the body that react and adapt better when it's small doses and frequent you know the way your skin tans for example is a good example going outside and getting just absolutely hammered by the sun isn't going to give you a great tan like going out and getting doses of it throughout the day the way that we learn it's better to rather than doing one eight hour class and trying to learn everything doing you know eight one hour classes throughout the week is probably going to be more effective and the way you build muscle you know the way that we designed our maps programs for example is how we've observed that frequency just works better for most people I identified this with blue collar workers in my family who didn't work out but you know the my mechanic uncle had muscular forearms and my male carrier aunt had great looking calves everything else looked out of shape I couldn't figure out what's going on is because that frequent stimulation so we've injected that even into the workouts that we designed where we're throwing in these frequency builders because it works and even from a superficial build muscle burn body fat and here I am selling it again but I think this is important you need to sell these ideas to get people to even try them these frequent levels of stimulation these small doses they get your body to get in shape more effectively and then again you throw in the behavioral aspect you're more likely to stay consistent on top of it so it's something that is we often don't talk about I know fitness tends to be designed around hard intense singular sessions and then rest and I know bodybuilding was like hammer your biceps on Monday and then wait till next Monday to do it again doesn't work nearly as well for people to do it that way versus instead of doing 20 sets of Monday for your biceps why don't you do you know five sets four days a week yeah and see what happens and start looking at your your fitness which I always do fitness and quotations because I think it's kind of a funny word you're fit for whatever you do you know if you're sitting on a computer you know hammering out tweets all day that's how you're gonna fit for that then you're fit for that you'd be better at that than a person that's climbing trees and stuff because the tree climb in park core jujitsu sun beach guy is you're like ah like it's freaking me out like I'm not fit for this you know so fit first it's just define what your goals are and then from there if you have a vision then you can define what the best approach or route is yeah what's method four we have we've addressed three what's four oh hinging from the hips okay that's a really big one yeah so so so really speak to that so so leverage leveraging leverage you know if if if give me a lever and I can I can move the world you know so it's like who said that a philosopher philosopher fella it was I don't remember his name I've got it written there it's really what is it look it up Dr. Sees Dr. Sees that's my favorite philosophy but yeah so figuring out okay I've got all these levers on my body I'm not I've never been taught to take advantage of any of them you know so when in high school or middle school gym class like it's like okay you need to remember to bring your shorts you need to show up on the Archimedes lever yeah there you go I can't believe I don't remember his name I know I can't believe that I was very sad you know so so that's a big thing is is understanding if you've ever done any kind of martial arts maybe did judo or maybe did jujitsu you can understand that the difference between my hips being just half an inch this way or that way a huge difference is all the difference in the world because you've granted yourself the power of leverage so as you are moving through the world you can do certain things you can make it so literally your whole entire day is like an opportunity to make yourself better like I truly a million percent believe that and and one of those things is when you say you pick something up off of the ground maybe you're chopping vegetables maybe doing anything you can start to play with those basic mechanics that you would learn I'm sure you guys teach in your maths program or sure if anybody's ever had a trainer or read a muscle and fitness they'll talk about hinging those hips so nice long neutral spine and driving the hips backwards as you're doing that you're literally you're starting to be able to activate all of the powers of the hips if you don't do that then you're going to be outsourcing more of that energy into the knees and into the quads and into the thoracic spine and all these places like that's not you're not doing it right like you're trying to you're trying to lift your car up and you got the lever thing yeah it's like who gave you a a three inch lever it's like I have a six foot lever in the garage like do you want me to grab that for you? yeah you know it's like oh no I got this thing and you're like you are so ineffective at picking your baby up off of the ground so let's okay so four is hip hinge so what are some simple best practices I mean I could think of just simply you already touched on getting on the ground just you being down in a squat I love to talk about squat and scroll right practicing if I'm going to get on my phone and I'm going to go on Instagram or whatever to drop down into a full deep squat I mean where you're practicing the hinge there or do you have other things that you like to incorporate with clients? no I mean with working with clients specifically you know so in like my programs or book or any of those places I give you the mechanics I give you a few basic exams like okay here's how you do it now what I'm really interested is can you start to be curious about making this happen in your daily life what do you do with it? creative with your movement anytime you pick something up you you know hip hinge you know exactly how to do it whether you do it or not totally up to you do you know how to do it? right most people will say I don't know how to do it right and if you really look if we got a thousand people in here and everybody did a squat I mean all four of us would be like oh oh man yeah yeah majority bad all bad oh people can't hit hip that's all that's something it's one of the fundamental things you have to teach as a trainer as the foundation bend here not here bend here and it's like well they can't tune our assessment and so it's like of course it is you know and so it's like why was that not in your assessment as a as a eight-year-old? you know why because we have we've designed a world where you don't do that you lose it you don't do that you lose that and then you start blaming your body for failing you and then you start seeking out to heal this system that it's inherently healing if you give it the proper fundamental raw materials nuts and bolts schematics of how the freak to move how to eat how to be in nature occasionally you know how do you maybe okay I can't be in nature I got to be in this office all day bring some nature into your office you know maybe open the window and let that full spectrum of light come through oh next maybe bring some plants in there maybe get a little waterfall device next studio we build we've talked about this that we're going to have a retractable yeah all those things yeah so we can just just open it up so we have to do it all and we'll do it right after this because we this is we've already been in here now it's this this morning since we have four or five hours we always always feel this and we've now made it a practice that if we spent a couple hours in here that we stop whatever we're doing we go out and we walk around the block four or five times if you're having pain in your body it's been shown that people who have access I know you guys are familiar with this if they have access to looking out a window or even seeing a painting with nature they'll have less necessity for painkillers yeah that's interesting if you give them not weird if you give them the power to choose how the the dosage of painkillers they will choose less because you've empowered them yeah so I care way more about empowering a person to say give me an equation I learned how to process this it doesn't matter what it is as opposed to saying okay I don't know any of the you know tens of thousands or whatever people that are are listening to this I don't know what you do but I can give you the basic fundamental equation that will relate to any situation then it's like oh okay cool kind of off-subject but you just reminded me of something have you seen the I think it's Apple TV that did a series called Homes did you see have you seen that no that was amazing so you just made me think it's something that I hope that we we have some research in the future because there's like a movement and I believe it started in Sweden Justin I don't know I think it's becoming popular where they're building these greenhouse homes yeah greenhouse homes so a home inside of a greenhouse and so it'd be really interesting to see like a family that was raised in that and if we had multiple people that we could measure like what what kind of long-term effects that that potentially hasn't I mean I I love the idea I speculate that it would make a huge difference so everything boost your immune system you know the fighting sides off of the plants you're literally creating a little hermetic stressor on your immune system that's saying boom boom boom okay bulk up be strong you know but if you put yourself into this is very relevant for for the now if you put yourself into a hyper sanitized sterile environment you begin to die your body needs something to wrestle with and so if you're continually just nuking your own natural microbiome and skin biome with all of this stuff that just okay just kill it all kill it all kill it all multiply that you can do that you can wage war on yourself for a little bit multiply that times a whole cultural shift for years and see what happens with that as opposed to the people say that you know the what are they what are they called the people the centarians what are they called the blue zones yeah you know there's like what are they doing oh and there's there's there's contention on everything including blue zones but right you know what are they doing oh they're doing what sound if they're in the freaking garden what's in the garden a whole lot of dirt you know kids that grow up with the dog or around a farm what does a dog bring into the house oh lots of different bacteria and viruses oh I think the content allergies the contention around blue zones is that many people have cherry picked the data to support whatever they're trying to sell right but there are some things and we've talked about that that are very common and community and being outside is one of the most common themes amongst all of them yeah they feel connected yeah the western medicine model is to isolate the one thing that does all the stuff and we forget about the context and the combination of things you know like oh that that solves pain that's uh let's make aspirin because that's based off the white willow bark and then we forget that it has all this other stuff in it that prevents things like overdose and actually can be good for you whereas if you just take too much aspirin all the time it can cause problems and we forget about that so we we stopped on four what's five you're gonna you're gonna put me in a position where I forget to get the fifth one is nose breathing okay I can't wait we didn't even go that I was like of course that has to be in there I tell you do you talk about one of the most breathing in general but nose breathing with emphasis on nose breathing maybe one of the most underrated ones man I know so I I'm notorious for having a really hard time at night settling my brain down and and you know going to sleep but just for some reason in I'm sure I've trained myself this way to work long hours and you know because we talk about how important it is to get good rest it's something I'm always trying to put all these practices in place to improve that and but sometimes life happens sometimes it's a very stressful long day and you know a lots on my mind or I got bombarded with multiple things and so it really challenges those practices that I've tried to put in place and some of them are uncontrollable like I was still working till 11 o'clock at night and I had nothing I could do about it and my saving grace is is the is the nose breathing or taking or box breathing is what I use before I go to bed and you know and Katrina and I will actually do it together and she's she believes that she can hear me thinking like show it will be laying in bed and like I won't even say anything will be have been there for probably 20 minutes and I'll get like an elbow stop it I can hear you you know she'll do that to me sensitive yeah yeah and then she'll do that to me and then you know if it's if it's bothering her so much that it's ruining her sleep she'll say breathe with me you know and then we'll breathe together and I swear to God man that's it's wild how powerful that that can be and how impactful it can be well you know not breathing through the nose changes the structure of your face and your nose they actually have shown this they've done studies where people will purposely block their nose and then the structure of the the jaw the mouth and the nose actually change so people with deviated septums for example who can't breathe and then they get it fixed it's life changing for them and if you look at pictures of them after the procedure you see some structural changes to the face it's I just learned this recently it's really crazy that's why you can tell I mean for if you want to go just completely superficial you know I don't care about any scientific stuff chicks will be more attracted to a guy with a chiseled jawline why is that it's an indication that biologically speaking that's a high functioning male that could provide they're probably more testosteroneic and they've probably got better sperm count and they're they're just it's like a tesla versus like an old civic so the old civic guy is the person with the receding chin and they're kind of a little bit kind of just like soft and you know all of those all of those things it's like nothing wrong nothing right no moralistic judgment anything like that but there's a difference between a tesla and a 15 year old civic you know and the and the tesla you get in and you're whoa really whoa what was that it's like oh well the mechanics are pretty on point you know everything is sharp and so when you're breathing through the nose I mean a lot of things will happen one naturally if you want to get into kind of more of like an like an eastern type perspective you're connecting the tongue naturally to the roof of the mouth you know so if you want to get weird you can say you're you're completing the the microcosmic orbit you know it's getting into like meridians and all that stuff it's like connecting this energy channel goes all the way up top of the head all the way down to the front down the perineum and up the back and I don't I you know I don't know I think I think from a you know for just mechanical again nuts and bolts like lifting heavy stuff perspective you can get more strength that of that calling a thing a microcosmic orbit immediately puts me into like a tinfoil hat kind of like category but it is interesting it just so happens that that east and west cross the intersect a lot yeah a lot I don't know all the time but I think if you give it enough time it's pretty close to all the time it's it's it's it's wisdom it's all wisdom and there's truths in all of them and sometimes they say it differently but they're saying the same thing oftentimes and there's different approaches and I think you're it's a huge disservice to yourself to just stick to one just like with exercise I'm only going to do this one method and I'm going to ignore all these others huge disservice and so that so with more more facial structure stuff so you're the the your facial muscles will naturally be kind of pulling you know so when you are closing your jaw and you're going through and you're breathing with the nose especially like growing up as a as a baby if you just kind of allow that just like lack slack jaw it'll you literally start to cave in on yourself like you need to you need to create some internal pressure you need to push out in order to grow into a strong body and so that person that's continually just slack jaw you know breathing through their mouth you're they're missing out on filtering the air they're missing out on changing the temperature of the air to be more you know ready to be actually assimilated they're missing out on the production of nitric oxide so that now they're missing out on cardiovascular function now they're missing out coming back to picking up chicks if you that's what you're interested in if you're a guy will now ed a rectile dysfunction if I'm not if I'm going to go out and get a supplement maybe I'll go get beet juice or something in order to increase nitric oxides well you realize that you naturally just through tapping into your own innate mechanics you can produce this stuff just by you know walking through a room and breathing right see now you're selling it I love it you want boners breathe through your nose dude seriously all that stuff is look at it it all comes it's all comes back to evolution man everything that we're doing it all comes back to a bunch of animals trying to figure this thing out we're trying to eat we're trying to get laid and we're trying to create shelter and we're trying to perpetuate the species and because we're so complex a big part of that is trying to find purpose and meaning because without that it's too big of a struggle for smart apes like us what a weird time yeah I know back to russia and russia we're talking about from a virus don't you dare yeah hey listen you're you're always a good time dude yeah yeah you're always a great time man hopefully you feel like we like you right you know well you don't get the divide that we don't like it feels like ta ta tuesday yeah we're not having sex okay we're not gonna have not this time sex it's a pandemic we're gonna maintain distance yeah yeah or we could do with canada recommended canada had this like this recommendation for sex and they actually advocated for for glory holes yeah whoa bold move canada yeah because of the pandemic hey if you want to bang somebody just do it through a hole in the wall yeah that'll keep you safe damn yeah that was not funny I saw wearing masks during coitus that was I thought that was pretty interesting yeah I don't understand there was a time there was a time when condoms weren't a thing you know and then the hiv came out and that's like well yeah full body robot robot banging well perhaps you know this gets into like elon musk simulation stuff will be sitting inside of a tube someplace plugged up to nutrients while we're like leading digital lives that's the only safe way to do it do you think you don't want your actual biological body to go out there you could die yeah yeah do your digital I think we'll quickly we will quickly realize we don't we don't really know what we need I think we're gonna give us ourselves everything we ever wanted and desired and be extremely depressed Aaron are you a sci-fi guy do you watch sci-fi stuff not enough I'd be more creative if I was oh no I'm just interested if you think there's a there's a movie that's out there that depicts our future the best idiocracy oh man yeah I haven't seen that you haven't seen that what no dude oh yeah this guy so I saw this long time ago but it's an old movie he gets broke he gets frozen or whatever and he he's you know reanimated or whatever in the future and this like pro wrestlers president and dumb people were having more kids than smart people anyway everything went backwards and everybody's really dumb and they don't drink water they drink the soda the soda because that's full of electrolytes and they feed it to their plants yeah oh it's a comedy it's a comedy oh I'm gonna have to painfully and he's a painfully he's a normal dude he's an average dude but but because the future gets so stupid he's like the smartest man in the world when they when they really bring it back just because he's an average guy I can't believe I've never seen this or even heard of this before I've got to watch you got to watch it I thought Sarah gets Sarah gets to me with Bruce Willis that I feel like is very close to where we're heading I believe that Matrix Matrix is another yeah right but that's those are kind of very similar right that we're gonna be plugged in I think there's gonna be I think there's gonna be a clear division of humans in the future they live that's what I say yeah there's gonna be the plugged in and then the unplugged people I think they're I think we're smart enough and there's enough of us that see the writing on the wall and then I think if it keeps going crazier and crazier that direction that I think will revolt and go the other direction but I do think there will be a mass majority that will fall in line I think a hundred percent our own arrogance is gonna be our downfall we're so smart we give ourselves everything we think we want we can satisfy every pleasure which is gonna start to get closer and closer to that and then we're gonna realize this is not it's like that scene in the Matrix when when they capture what's his name Morpheus and Agent Smith is that his name Agent Smith is talking to him and he says you know in the beginning the first Matrix was a Utopia for humans we made it perfect and your feeble mind couldn't perceive that things could be so good and we lost entire crops of humans we rejected it they had to remake they had to remake the Matrix with all the challenges of of real life in the 90s or whatever at that time that they because humans can't live in a we don't know what Utopia is we think we know and we we create it if we could digitally we'd be too bored with perfection not just that there's no meaning and purpose of things imagine if you could just this is when people ask us this question all time what if there was a pill that made you fit lean and healthy like would that be the answer and I'm like well no because most of the benefits you get from eating right and exercising is the pursuit of doing so it's not the it's not the the result of it it's the pursuit of it that's what we know I think we see examples of this with the uber rich all the time I mean I feel like I see celebrities yeah like I feel like there's more uber rich or celebrity people that look depressed sad or have so much pain and sorrow in their life that I think of that like oh man they they look really happy or they really like got it all together so and yet they have the ability to pretty much buy or have anything that this earth has to offer do you know Daniel Everett don't sleep their snakes have you heard of that book no no no sorry the paraha people on the amazon no I said the amazon so it's just one country I think it was brazilian amazon I'm not sure but but what he found in studying these these paraha people he went out there as a christian missionary and so his intention was to go and you know convert him over and get him bibles and the whole thing and uh he went out there kind of with his own version of like resting bitch face and the paraha paraha people they documented the amount you know there's a book they documented the amount that they smile to uh determine like level of happiness it's kind of a weird thing whenever you see like oh I've heard somebody reference this whatever university is the happiest place in the world I was like how do you figure that out who takes surveys like what is it yeah just measuring the amount of time that they're smiling throughout the day and comparing it to all other cultures that they compared it to these paraha people apparently were the the most smileiest people and what was interesting with that is they don't have any of the their language structure and their belief systems are completely different than that of modern hyper analytical aggregate stuff quantity quantity quantity and so they don't even have any numbers they don't have any sense of history beyond their life so if you tell me about Jesus I'm like is this your brother is this your like give me more details and they're like oh no this is a guy 2000 years ago they're like 2000 what does that even mean what are you talking about so they even have a conception of that you know who talked about that um Justin who went over to the Congo and he talked about their perceived happiness within their community with having like nothing nothing like they had like one pair of clothes a pair of sandals and like we're we're we're like I don't know enough about computers to deem whether this is an appropriate analogy but I think we're like computers in the sense that we only have so much bandwidth and so if you offer the majority of the bandwidth out to material unanchored shit then that's where your energy goes you know and so if that's where you're thinking that's where your mind is occupied and now all of a sudden well I have evidence I've got two Lambo's I got the new Lambo SUV dog I'm coming up you know and I was like oh it's like that's me it's like no no no you know so if you don't have any of that you don't even have the opportunity to make that you you know I mean opportunity to identify with that right you know and so if you don't have the opportunity to identify with that it's like what do I have around it's like well I have people I have my body I have my my friends right I have my kids this cool stick that I made right well I have this this food wow it's not amazing it's not you know comparison to like if I was like Paris Hilton you know but it's like it's you don't even have that you don't even have that comparison though that's all you know right but but if it's like if that's what you have it's like the five movement principles like breakdown those like simplistic like what do I have in front of me if you have less it makes it easier for you to actually pay attention to the things that matter because those are intrinsically with you oh yeah well I mean you know we live in these modern market-based societies and and markets do one thing better than any other system they give us what we want and they innovate very very well what's the weakness in that it's what we want and we don't know what we need we only know what we want and what I want right now is pleasure distraction entertainment good tasting you know you know hedonistic value of the food and I don't want to move so you're going to get a lot of that and uh it's not really what you need I think sometimes when you're forced in a situation then you start to really you know realize things the thing is it's it's no one's fault you know so I think it's really easy to like shit on modernity and shit on western culture it's like oh like these guys and they don't know it's it's learning yeah and so but if you think about the amount of commercials that you're exposed to I think it's something like by the age 30 you're exposed to something like 20 million commercials or some ridiculous number your whole life since you're a little person and then also multiply that times you know your your parents perspectives and the world they grew up and all the commercials they've been exposed to it's literally all of those commercials are selling you the idea that you will be enough you will be loved you will be supported you will be all of the things when you have our shit and so literally like you're your software system unless you un choose to actively unlearn it you need to go out of your way to actively unlearn it is such that I will be whatever you know enough when I make this money and buy that thing dude I had a such a a mind blowing paradigm shift a while ago and I'm going through it now so my wife's pregnant right she's in the third trimester of pregnancy and a while ago on the podcast I have very minimal knowledge of natural childbirth and the history of it my knowledge at the time was what I had heard and I remember on the podcast I said oh yeah childbirth is so dangerous number one cause of death and women throughout all the history thank god for modern medicine and blah blah blah well anyway I got a message from a midwife who is like you're so wrong and that's not how it works and you know she's obviously an expert and I went back and forth with her and debated and discussed and she got me to the point where I became open minded and I said okay this is interesting then I started learning more about the natural childbirth process and I started to see that the way that we treat childbirth in western societies is the way we treat everything with western medicine which it's a medical emergency because that's what western medicine does really well you cannot compare with western medicine for dealing with medical emergencies there is no system that's better at that but like anything you're really good at if you are a hammer everything's a nail right so that's how they treat it and you see it in movies this is how it was conditioned oh my god the woman water broke rushed to the hospital ah my wife's pregnant what's gonna happen and she gets in the hospital and then the muscles of the the cervix or like sphincters and like any sphincter muscle it ain't gonna relax unless you're relaxed and your body's not gonna have this baby unless you your body feels safe right and so we have this cascading event of interventions with oh you're not moving fast enough here's this this chemical called pitocin oh now it really hurts we gotta give you an epidural oh you can't have the baby let's do a c-section and so I started learning about this so now we're in this process of we're gonna be doing you know childbirth with a midwife I've learned about natural childbirth I'm taking these courses and it's so interesting I didn't know this right this is something that happens sometimes with women right they go through the process of natural childbirth and when they get there's different stages of it and once they start to get to the last stage which is the most intense and things are really happening sometimes the body will stop for about 30 minutes 30 minutes to an hour they'll just stop and the midwife say oh yeah the body knows you need a break it'll just stop doesn't mean you're not having the baby it gives you time to get your energy back because the next phase is the baby's gonna come out then the other thing they said was don't worry about pushing you will push it just happens naturally they said and they said something to me which was like well duh if you do nothing about childbirth your body would have this baby it's gonna happen you don't need to know anything and there's a lot of instinct and natural things that happen and we've countered it so much that we've created something entirely different it reminded me of that when what we're talking about what we're talking about that we you know we go counter to what's natural for ourselves so much that we're causing ourselves a lot of problem and it's everything from how much stuff we have all the stuff we think that's gonna make us happy when in reality a lot of what makes you happy your mindset what's within you how you perceive things and people people is what really makes people happy in fact it's a people that care about you that's right for more than the shit that you've worn on your sleeve right right good people so it's so it and once again it is I like the idea of taking full responsibility for everything and also at the same time saying okay it's not my fault because I'm just a part of this algorithm and environment for me and all that but your friends the people that you have around you that it's you created them so by you leading with oh like me because I have this sweet car like me because I have this like me because I have that like that's the people you'll have I mean like what like welcome to LA you know LA's yeah how the hell do you live in LA by the way you're so opposite of LA I needed you gotta be a fish out of water I went to LA because I've you know come from like nature stony mechas around you know so I lived in Boulder, Colorado and then been Oregon and Hawaii for a while and did a bunch of traveling in between that and I felt as though the way that I described LA is LA is like an oven you know so you go to the other places in the world and you gather your ingredients and you make a pizza and you see you put it and you get it all sorted down it's a nice circle and you got the pepperonis or whatever maybe it's vegan and then at some point can you politically correct it's some example you know I'm afraid I'm like I'm withdrawn I picked up on that I could be vegan could be vegan could be vegan totally don't judge me plant-based pepperoni but at some point my sensation which may or may not have been accurate was like I need to I need to put the pizza into the oven and so you know I drove my car down to the oven and I've been there for the last four years and now I have you know the book and I have filmed my program and the podcast has grown don't leave the pizza in there too long I was gonna say it but you don't want to leave the pizza in too long and so now I'm planning on moving to Texas Austin, Texas for a short amount of time California is losing everybody I swear to God dude it's nothing but for lease signs like around my neighborhood like every block it's just like for lease for lease it's almost down there it's like sad and almost like an interesting game in a way we're gonna see another for lease and I get this weird dope meat and I'm like well another one wow because I'm not a landowner in LA so I'm like whatever you know and I own a place in a more rural setting in Bend, Oregon so my individualistic perspective is like as people surge out of these places they're gonna go to like nicer more rural type spots so Aaron you live living in the secular capital of the world next to probably Vegas right do you do you feel there is a a healthy balance of some of these things right we talked we you alluded to the Lamborghini and you know Sal's alluded to us chasing pleasure and getting things for the hedonistic value you know can we can we be in pursuit of growth and being a healthy person and also find ways to allow some of those things to come into your life or is it all bad I think it comes back to the same response is are you consumed by the game or are you able to have like more of a witness role of the game right if you're in that position it doesn't matter what you do in my opinion because you're not consumed by it you know you could be consumed by any game you know if you think that all you are is I mean there's some games that would probably be better if all you are is a father or all you are is this or that but even within that you can step back and observe and say oh wow I'm playing this human game here you know and so I think it's you know it's like religion you know it's like because you were raised in this specific culture with this specific book in my perception it doesn't mean that that book is true it's just the one that you happen to have been dropped into so within that religion are you able to gather the tools and the benefits from that religion or from that perspective or city or whatever but not just identify entirely with it because you you're not that I think the person how depending on how healthy they are and I mean that in a full sense that's what determines the things that they chase and the things that they want so in the sense I what you're saying it's true it doesn't matter what you're doing but who you are changes what you're doing and you won't be doing certain things it's chicken or the egg right she goes back to the same thing mine by the mind I mean I I kind of I subscribe to what you're talking about and I really feel like that it comes back to the awareness thing right you keep alluding to the witness thing I think that is just self-awareness is that I'm aware that this is a materialistic thing I'm aware that it is not me it doesn't make me anything but I can also say like boy is it fucking fun to drive fuck yeah you know boy is it boys it cool how it corners you know what I'm saying yeah be LeBron James just don't drink your LeBron James Kool-Aid like do everything you can to play that game well and realize that this is a this is just just that right you know and then from there I have got no hate for you know hate for the player you know he's like he's like damn he plays the game well that's great but does he think that he is that shoe moving around the board right until you you know monopoly right you know it's like do you really you really think you're the shoe it's like yeah yeah I'm the shoe because I'm winning you know and then all of a sudden you lose hard and you're like I'm not this shoe and you go through some form of existential crisis where you have to analyze yourself deeper and now maybe all of a sudden you become you know born again something you know you start to really come out and say God I was never the shoe I was it was bigger than this the whole man I needed some figure up maybe I choose to elect it's some figure in space you know some God figure whatever it may be like that's that's the leader it's taking me home but before I thought I was the shoe my whole life because I was winning the game I'm not even realizing you're the sock within the shoe hey it's it's interesting and I don't you know what whether you subscribe to a religion or you speak it like universe it's pretty wild how that lesson is taught it will be taught at one point oh yeah it's physics it's spiritual wisdom yeah spiritual physics I think it's really it's like there's a science to it it's the same way that people are built up in culture to be torn down you get to a certain level where all of a sudden it's like wow I mean there's a handful of comedians right now that that I've one of which I'm fairly close with it's going through kind of like the whole all the stuff of like me too and all that stuff yeah watch that is it they grow grow grow grow grow grow grow grow and then all of a sudden it's like okay now you're you're in position the trees are so much taller it's you can see it from miles away now you have there's like there's something scientific about it of all the rest of the nodes I think we'll have the tendency of like how can we chop that thing yeah yeah down because if that's down then I'm up and it's like there's some equilibrium thing that happens with it and so we seek out to be at that point and then eventually some people play the game well enough that they arrive at that point and then very often they resent that point so yeah I find it interesting that you know science wants to prove it that it's it's some physiological thing that happens or that we can break it down scientifically and then spiritually we want to just attribute it all to God there's got to be something there and I feel like no matter which one you subscribe to it's a religion everything is science is one of the biggest religions yeah yeah well scientism is a is a very dangerous obviously religion lacks morality it's purely objective right become computer well it asks it doesn't ask should I it always says can I oh let me see yeah it's not a should you know let's see if we can that's always the question I think you have to look at different lenses to understand different types of wisdom it doesn't make sense to use science to understand art or poetry it doesn't make sense to use we sure tried you though we do doesn't make sense to use religion to understand science religion and spirituality has its own wisdom and they're all look you know if you believe in evolution you have to believe in the evolution of ideas and if things stick around a long time it's because it's probably valuable yeah there's probably some wisdom in there something's been around for a long time don't just throw it out ask yourself why is why have people found this particular thing valuable for as long as they have because it's it's gone through a lot of different people who you know and come combining them all is definitely going to be smarter than you find the wisdom with that don't just cut it out yeah and all that I think it comes back to like the same thing ancient wisdom you know having polarities yin and yang and light and dark and sun and moon east west science you know whatever the other ism is science scientism and whatever other ism that's more like a holistic more artistic more you know expressive you know so you you said it with if we never were instructed how to deliver a baby we would naturally figure it out obviously you know and so it's one of those things where it's like we have the scientific flashlight from a western person that grows up indoctrinated into the world that we have it feels comforting to be able to come back and say don't worry everything's been defined everything's been measured we have a scientific term there's that arrogance you know yeah it's like don't worry we understand we've we've put the definition on it we got the DSM you've got the the ADHD and you're like oh okay I got the ADHD great don't worry we have drugs for that great great great you got a drug okay go on we're good you know and then beyond that it's like so that's the more scientific realm it's great I'm glad that we have pharmaceutical drugs I'm glad that we have surgery I'm glad that we have all of that stuff behind that it's like well how do you define and confine and delineate you know say someone playing a violin that's making people weep in a subway in Paris you know like what's the science there it's like well you see that the song it it's struck some chord in the amygdala is just like shut the fuck up listen to the song doesn't need definition no you're not gonna solve you're not you're not gonna solve spiritual illness with uh with medicine just like you're not gonna solve a bacterial infection with art or whatever and that's when this the science mind can become judgmental of that same person we referenced before that went to Peru and did the ayahuasca journey and all that stuff and then but there's a lot of missing pieces that science hasn't completely classified yet but perhaps in five years maybe we might create some definitions for that interesting book Derek Thompson's Hitmakers have you read that before no so that you'll appreciate that for this conversation just the we're talking about the science of art and music and that book makes the case for that yeah yeah yeah read it it's a good it's an interesting read you know I only I mean it's it contradicts what I think what we're saying and what we believe but they I mean they believe that you can scientifically break down all that yeah I think everything it's I describe science as it's like you're in a car and you're driving down a dusty road and your experience in the car just mobbing down and switching gears that's art and you're just in the moment you're feeling it and you're like I hit the jump from whatever maybe with a power slide whoo you know and then behind that that artistic expression that just felt authentically it was like I was like moved by something it just came out I don't even know how to explain it behind that once the dust starts to settle with time you can have the scientists and the nerds coming up behind nothing against their mean nerd in an endearing way they come up behind and they they're analyzing the tire tracks and they're analyzing the type of rubber that was used and they're and it's this very dry sterile kind of definitive okay this is what happened we've got it you put it into the books it's like great we have some science about that rad experience it reminds me of trying to trying to break down flow state right like that's how it is like when you have athletes and people that have been doing this for you know decades and probably centuries of you know doing things and they've been able to just drop into that without thinking about anything and now we're trying to pick it apart and figure out how do we how do we formulate but the person in the car it would be very easy for them to be like you know just right off the nerd brigade falling behind and be like ah they don't know anything you know just they're not even in the experience yeah you know and then the nerd brigade could be looking at the people in the car and they're like they don't even understand the type of rubber in their tie like they don't know anything about this experience it's like they're looking at almost to it's like two different languages describing the same thing and then they're having wars about it it's like what if we just team up and then you know I think that's how people that reminds me of the potential consequences that I feel I see when I go to like a live sporting event now and you know because I've been watching live sports for a very long time I've watched this crazy evolution in the last like decade of where you saw none of this before and and then I watched a little bit of it and then more and more of it than the majority of it now like everybody when you're at it like a live concert or a live game has gone from being in the moment feeling the music feeling the game and and being so into the environment to caring more about recording it through your phone so you could post it and share it on on instagram they're watching the whole thing through their phone yeah yeah I always I always think about like what are the unintended consequences of that like will they will they experience less joy because of that or will they never get the fullest feeling of what that is like being almost one with that moment because they are so concerned about sharing that with others it's just they're just in a different medium you know their medium as opposed to being absorbed by the the sound and being with the people and all that their medium is capture I want to capture and I'm looking into the screen and you know even inherently looking into the screen as opposed to utilizing panoramic vision and your eyes are an extension of your brain and the way that you use your vision if you're narrowing in your focus that goes back into you know say I'm pulling a bow back and I'm focusing all my energy into that one prey that's out there I you know I get my proper cocktail of cortisol and stress hormones and I'm really focusing like a shark versus say I take in the whole panoramic vision which is Andrew Huberman Dr. Andrew Huberman he's like the he reviewed my whole chapter about this thankfully because I had all sorts of errors and he was like this is how it actually should be written and so he's he's like he's a researcher up in Stanford which is Stanford's like right beside here huh yeah so he's he's back and forth through here have you done a podcast with him no okay it would be really great for you guys to have cool introduce he's like one of the the smartest humans and his perception of the way that our visual muscles inform our autonomic nervous system and so when you go into taking in that that panoramic view of the whole entire you're watching the all the crowd and you're watching maybe it's an outdoor concert and clouds there all that it literally informs the nervous system that you're in a more open flow calm receptive place when you narrow your vision in you organize your nervous system to more executive function get shit done I'm here to capture oh that's interesting because do you remember when we theorized about this Sal we talked about this on the podcast about the experience you have when you go somewhere like Yosemite uh-huh and and you and you have this kind of why do we all have this breathtaking moment it's just rocks and trees and sky yeah you can look at it in a picture right but exactly but why when you go there and I we theorize that it had something to do with really at that moment recognizing how small you are in comparison to something so the scale is overwhelming but what you're saying is a little bit different than that that's very interesting it's both yeah that's interesting so it's so first did it puts you into a place of receptivity and then and then that allows those pots those pots those thoughts to start to kind of stir up in that cauldron but first you need to be in a receptive place so if you are just watching Yosemite on a screen you're seeing the same image but it's not nearly going to hit you in that visceral way and that's because literally it's like you first are opening the container through those visual muscles slash everything else that sounds that you're being enlivened you know and so in our modern day where you're taking all of those potential have you guys hunted ever I have when I was younger so I went bow hunting for the first time last summer in Maui Hawaii and as I was out there it's this insane sensation like literally like all the cliche things like feeling like more alive than I ever had and all that stuff it was quite true because I was being forced to have this sense of sound and wind and you know everything like behind me to the left I was measuring distances okay cool like that bush is 20 yards and you know taking my my range by that bush is 30 yards that bush is 50 yards you know so I'm literally like just by me just posting up here I'm I'm enlivening my brain I'm so like I'm like an electrical storm inside my mind to be able to cast a net in my environment and like become the environment whereas when you just put all of that information of that moment into some like bow hunting special on TNT you're like like you're kind of dying in a way Wow if if if the reference point the other side of the spectrum was becoming enlivened by your environment right I think capturing all of that putting it into a screen and calling that your your life I think that would you know be kind of the opposite always an interesting time hanging out with you doing yeah thanks for coming yeah man yeah it's always a good time how long in the area for I don't know few more hours just for this oh hey that's great I was trying to double it up with an I'm coming up here again in like three days and I've been trying to stay with my word I think that's a very important thing it is and so we appreciate it and so I think in general it's a huge it's a huge deal like it's into so now you're going back to the oven yeah well I leave the don't burn your vegan pizza so here's so here's the plan hopefully we can come back and do another podcast assuming this plan goes through because I'll have stories and I'd love to have you guys back on mine and all that all that stuff I'll probably co-release this if you guys permit it or something no let's do that we'll figure it out but the plan next spring would be to have a whole bag of new stories because this winter the plan you know world permitting is to go out to Papua New Guinea and Tanzania and Sri Lanka and all sorts of places that people have been kind of living the way that they've been living for lots of years and be able to have a more real visceral anthropological perspective of what the hell has been going on in our bodies for thousands of years and then that would be the beginnings of book number two oh I'm excited for that dude I hope world permitting we'll see what the heck is happening in the world yeah I know but I appreciate you guys so much having me here thanks brother this is the first interview since yeah since physical interview we haven't had anybody here since the pandemic started yeah how was that I know we need to wrap up how has that affected you guys not having in person versus doing remote well luckily for us our podcast episodes with just us do the best and we have each other so we're able to build this interviews haven't been as good typically right we have some interviews that do very very well and we enjoy it I love meeting people but it hasn't hurt us business wise from a from a personal personal perspective I like being around people and it does suck that you know it's the way things are right now and it's a bit difficult to to work through but but yeah we're open back up we had we started with you that's great man well thank you so much thanks for coming man I'm honored to be here really appreciate spending time with you guys thanks brother thank you great way to progressively overload in a time when people or weights are scarce totally it's so many people are having a hard time getting plates or getting weights it's like you could we always I think that's like the default and that's trainers are just as guilty I am too of like when I first start training you always just think like more reps more sets or more weights like this is how like we're gonna get better we're gonna keep