 Hey check this out go to mindpumpmedia.com we are still offering still 30 days of free coaching 30 days of coaching by mine pumps right there it's free there's no catches all you gotta do is go to the site opt-in and you will get 30 every day for 30 days you're gonna get some coaching for mine pump again mind pump media.com it's still free it feels like Christmas but it's 30 days if you want to pump your body and expand your mind there's only one place to go mind pump mind pump with your hosts Sal DeStefano Adam Schaefer and Justin Andrews we are going to take our audience to the moon and back today we're gonna go on a ride ladies and gentlemen we need to do a proper intro for uh for this guest that you're about to hear do we do like oh is this can Doug be like one of those warnings or it's like warning warning yeah well so so a little history Paul check is he's like the godfather of combining wellness and strength training and you know different types straight up pioneer for all these things he's a pioneer and he's he's out there i guess that's the best way i mean adam said what do you call him adam crazy crazy uncle paul yeah he's definitely out there but this guy i love the guy but yeah it gets crazy a lot of times i'm gonna he's extremely controversial like if you if you talk to people this is why i love him though i this i mean we're definitely gonna ruffle some feathers with him which i think that he he knows that he's not afraid of that yeah um he was saying things about the gut way before anybody else was that's the thing like if if you talk to people that that know of check you're gonna get one of two answers either one he's a brilliant genius or two he's out there and crazy and paul is just one of those guys is definitely very polarizing but he is like people don't realize this he was using physio balls or swiss balls for exercise and teaching people how to work out on them in the 80s like this is way before any of us had ever even seen one oh yeah he was talking about gut health and its impact on fat loss muscle gain moods emotions brain activity way back when we'd even know that it really even existed uh and it was called crazy for it like people back then he's definitely ahead of his time let's be honest way ahead of his time um and then on top of it he's he's kind of a badass like if you see the guy when we met him he was you know he's how do you say 55 yeah 55 years old and the guy is like oh it's physical he's in his 20s yeah he's built he's impressive and he could probably kick our ass i mean a guy boxed for years he's just a tough son of a guy i i think one of the things that we have to point out to that i was i was at least incredibly impressed with so one of my things i always do when we get invited to somebody's home so we got an opportunity to go to his home which they is called the heaven house and it's the most it's just working office but it's a house yeah it's just beautiful it's on top of a mountain down in san diego and overviews this huge valley he's got like nine acres of things what they said but um i love to go to people's houses and just go straight for their library and see your library and eat those libraries it's like a library yeah it's like the same thing you're a librarian look at you uh so i love to go straight to somebody's library and check out what they are what they're reading right and he his whole house is a library yeah no like the whole thing fucking books and what what what is so impressive about what he does because here's what happens to a lot of times when i look at somebody's like bookshelf is you see a lot of the same type of books right they get you know this is where i talk about people getting a box and dogmatic you know all the same philosophers are all the all the same you know methodology or ideologies like this dude is reading like astrophysics well and and conflicting conflicting people you know people that don't necessarily buddhism and then yeah oh yeah he i mean everything from all the different all the across the spectrum all the different religions to all the different scientists to all the different philosophers to all i mean just the he's i mean god i i found now after we had talked to him that he's self much of his education is of most of itself educated yeah and he's one of the uncertain on subjects that we had covered smartest man you'd ever talked to i mean he he he knows the human body um at an incredible incredible detail uh and then there's some stuff that he says to us uh you'll hear in the podcast well we're just like what the fuck just happened where do we go yeah like it's super deep like really quick and we were like whoa i have to put my seatbelt on and weird like we'll start the conversation about gut health or exercise and it goes into the male and female energy of the spirits and you know quantum physics and how you know crystals have certain energy charges well i tell you what if you can if you can make it through the first 10 minutes because the first 10 minutes you'll see that right away yeah ironically uh we dove into a topic right out the gates that will probably lose a handful of people if not more when they first listen but if you actually uh you know let him get in his groove and us start talking to him i mean once you start get once you get beyond that first intro we get into some really really great talk really punctual things at the end that are just like very impactful so i mean if just give it a chance is is my sort of forewarning with that he's just again he's one of those people that he's a trailblazer he's a trailblazer in many different areas of fitness many of your fitness gurus and coaches that you look up to learned what they learned from people who learned from check there's a lot of big names out there and i won't name them who were students of his who went out and developed their own things he's responsible for a lot of the stuff that we are now starting to put together oh your level of risk i think what you said really sums it up well when you you said man i'll tell you what um you people can say whatever they want to say about paul but if i was diagnosed with cancer or some sick one oh i go to paul he's the first guy if i had something wrong with me and i nobody could figure it out i would definitely go to paul the guys worked with um some huge celebrities and sports teams and done some incredible things part of the chicago bowls during the fucking michael jordan air that is like this is cool by on its own but again keep in mind when you hear him he's he's going to talk about things that you're just going to be like what is he talking about and then he's going to say things like oh my god that's insane that makes so much sense so he's just one of those people very very interesting probably one of the most interesting people i've ever really met um you can find let's see what do we have up here doug what do we have for uh plugging here paul it's the check institute and uh is he giving our listeners a first free lesson yeah they have a course called the holistic lifestyle coach level one online course and he's giving all mind pump listeners a free um first lesson on that course and you can find that at www.checkinstitute.com check is spelled c h e k so it's checkinstitute.com forward slash mind pump h l c write that down and go on there well this will be in our show notes so you go straight to our website go to the show notes and there'll be a direct link right to this so there we go you're driving you don't have to write the first course is absolutely free you'll get the first lesson of the course absolutely free now if you want the full course it's 15 lessons and for the next seven days you can get it for a substantial discount of $197 that's $150 off the full price so that's for the next seven days until April 2nd and then after that it goes up to the full price of $347 some some of the most respected trainers that I know have gone through his courses and just two of the two of the elite trainers that we are bringing under and uh mind pump media I mean Stephanie and Mike both are they both worked under him for a little while and so great information check it out uh buckle your seat belts yeah this interview gets weird and awesome fantastical and you're not going to understand some of it meet uncle paul have a good time listening to a mind pump interviewing paul check chicago bulls were the first professional sports team to hire me to integrate swiss ball training into their conditioning for their team in 1991 when you see millions of dollars being made off things that you originated for example the whole concept of putting butter and coffee started right here in this room so I got up I ran across the ring and I hit him so hard it felt like my hand went right through his head and I knocked him out and detached his retina and he could never fight again after that if you're doing for example crossfit and your body's out of balance you have muscle recruitment problems and you've got core problems and you're doing what now is highly specific strengthening you have skipped four key stages of development and you're going to get hurt you're just going to be a good looking hurt person I don't have anything against the sport that would be like having something against a knife I would just say before you start juggling knives you ought to start with oranges you have to go test an idea to see if it works before you can have an honest opinion about it but if you don't test the idea and you think you have an honest opinion you don't have an honest opinion you have a fear-based dogma there's people right now that are listening to the show that have already turned it off because they heard spiritual they heard this they heard that and then right away they're turned off by that I'd be excited if it stirs up a lot of controversy I'd excited if people find themselves being triggered because usually when we're triggered someone put their finger right on the our growth potential we had the therapist come in we did a we did a whole test on air and she'd like just psychology or so yeah tests and it was great because it was actually really interesting to get into narcissism and the difference uh the different levels of it like that it's not all bad like everybody makes it sound like it's so bad to be uh someone there's different types of uh narcissism right so I thought it was pretty in fact this whole process was pretty revealing I mean it was like pretty accurate I felt oh yeah I know well they depicting each one of us she was saying how you need to have a good healthy level of narcissism if you need if you want to be an entrepreneur or a leader because you kind of have to believe in yourself or believe that you're a little better than you know and that you can do those types of things right I had no idea well the ego is paradoxically that something that a huge amount of old and new religious and spiritual literature tried to get rid of right it's all about abolishing the ego the ego is the bad guy but what people don't realize if you had no ego there would be no mechanism for love if I didn't know who I was how could I know who you were and if I don't know who I am and who you are then where do I send love how does love move right love requires a subject object relationship if you had no ego then you're pure subject so metaphorically God can't love as God because God is everything everyone and therefore there is no sense of other you get you understand yeah so the ego creates the illusion of other the more spiritually evolved a person becomes or the more enlightened they are the more they realize that the ego is a functional illusion that allows me to love Sal Adam Justin Doug or my wife but if my wife and I were one organism it'd be like the left hand in the right hand of an organism and I don't think your left hand and right hand spent a whole lot of time making love to each other because they're part of the same organism you know when you're walking your left leg has to go backwards and right leg can go forward right so the organism's all part of itself but if I say to you hold this up in front of yourself go ahead and do that now tell me what you're looking at my hand there you go you just used a possessive right we all do my hand my back hurts my body's tired instead of saying a hand or just hand yeah right so the point that I'm making is even in our relationship to our body we perceive ourselves consciously as separate from that which we possess as a body so the ego is what actually perceives that it has a hand or a body and perceives that it has somebody or something to love that creates the subject-object relationship I say love is the flow of energy and information from self to other through empathic or compassionate connection so if there is no self and other then where would love go so the point I'm making is that narcissism is a term that actually means too much amplification of the ego process too much self-orientation too much over focus on the self but it all stems from a subjective value system when is too much love and not enough I was just going to ask you how do you how do you define where where's the where's the point the breaking point where it's too far right well you the breaking point is very simple you have to clearly establish what your dream is so what is your dream for yourself maybe what does that mean might be what is my dream for the next six months of my life what is my dream for my career what is my dream in my relationship with my partner maybe at my my wife or my husband right once you know what your dream is then you have to have established values so my contribution in the relationship is my values on spirituality are my values on food are my values on rest are my values on movement are once you have those values that's a statement of what's valuable and important to you and then they have their values so if your focus on the relationship is so overly oriented toward your values that you cannot engage their values then you have narcissism as a pathology that creates separation in relationship if you have so much focus on your body that you actually lose touch with the soul or the spirit or the consciousness within it in other words if everything is all about your muscles but you're not aware that the person that's looking at the muscles is what's really the thing that's the most important because until you get to know that all you have is muscles you know right so if the narcissism takes you away from an integrated experience of the spirit or the soul or the consciousness of yourself the dreamer and you get trapped in the dream all I can think about is my next workout and my 32 servings of turkey a day and my pills and anything that gets in the way of that that pisses me off that's narcissism yeah but if you say well this is my goal and you make that clear to my partner honey I need to train this much in the gym I'm trying to win this body building or this athlete competition or whatever it might be this is how much time I can devote to our self what would you like to do on these days and she says well this will work for me this and then anytime there's a relationship there's got to be a compromise or there's no relationship so if narcissism is pathological it stops that process of relationship where you actually harmonize identify what's important for your partner because it's their individual dream identify what's important for you because that's your individual dream and then identify what's important for the relationship which is the collective dream if either individuals behavior is exiting their ability to influence the flow of energy into the relationship then the relationship starts to die to the degree that you're not present in the relationship because you're still in the gym or still looking in the mirror or dot dot dot yeah in my experience I found a lot of people who talk about the disillusion of ego or getting rid of ego it's becomes that that's actually a reflection of big ego where they identify so much with you know eliminating ego and eliminating all these things that they identify with it and it's actually the opposite becomes their own dog becomes the opposite what I probably no better way to open this episode than going right and I'll do it right super deep right away into the matrix let's be honest I mean that defines paul I mean he's such a unique guy for well paul you've been at this you've been in the industry of fitness and wellness for a very very long time 32 years 32 years very very long time you from what I know of you you've talked about things before other people did gut health and you know the influence you know the your emotional health and how that connects to your body and pain all these things and at the times when you were talking about them you know we're talking about in the 80s and 90s it was very polarizing I can imagine you you were you know I'm sure people called you you know woo or a quack or everything everything and you still even to this day when I bring up your name I will get to one of two responses either very extreme sides right very polarizing either you know brilliant individual who's a trailblazer in wellness or you know crazy has no idea you know it's just all over the place how do you feel about that I feel that that's quite to be expected if you look at a rainbow as a scale of consciousness the bottom which not a lot of people do right not a lot of people look at a rainbow and go consciousness yeah so that takes some skill set or some well you know understanding it's really looking at it from as a vibrational reality right uh an enlightenment experience is one where the male and female the opposite polarities like light and dark for example female dark male light which is the basis of the tai chi symbol you know yin emptiness yang fullness something measurable weighable a house a mountain a car that would be a yang expression a projection of energy in form yin would be the womb so the concept the archetype the idea of and the space with which to create it okay but in the womb of yin comes the production of something tangible as yang so my point in prefacing that is that consciousness is only possible when you have those two polarities to quote edward edinger a famous union analyst and psychiatrist consciousness is a psychic substance created not blindly but in living awareness of opposites so you could say that there's two kinds of consciousness for lack of a better term god consciousness which is the all and that consciousness is like a flat line so if you draw a line that would represent the absolute the absolute is everywhere and nowhere simultaneously it's like an infinity is everywhere and nowhere simultaneously but the absolute contains all possible infinities there's can be lots of infinities you know the infinite life of an ant versus the infinite life of a star for example so consciousness is the unmoved mover but anything that's oscillating up and down as a polarity like your heartbeat oscillates up and down your inhalation is yang also you fill up your exhalation yin so if you were to sine wave your breath it would look just like a heartbeat wouldn't it if you look at an electroencephalogram when someone's thinking you have oscillation of polarity so consciousness cannot be aware of something and become conscious of it unless it's moving and changing its state from relatively positive to relatively negative and interestingly if your eye if an eye doctor paralyzes the muscles of the eye you can't see because the eye has to keep moving in saccades in order for you to consciously pick up something from your environment what i'm saying is that consciousness if you just use a vibrational structure goes from completely unconscious at the bottom i can only think about my immediate survival needs food sex water safety all the way up to the highest level which is consciousness of what is important for the survival and the sustenance of all living beings not only in the world but but the world as a participatory element in a cosmic play of reality in other words the earth can't be separate from the sun where do you where do you find most people fall in that range well studies show that about 70 percent of people fall into what's called the magical mythical level which relates to traditional religious ideas which is based on what is written is the word of god harsh judgments this is for example why we have donald trump in presidency because the majority of the people that voted for him are polarized to these harsh ways of relating get rid of the mexicans close down the borders keep drilling for oil nationalism nationalism which is segregation right so it's not integration it's segregation it's a move backwards really in the evolution of consciousness which always produces pain which produces more consciousness right so to answer the question is how do i deal with how well i just am aware that anybody is going to have a different viewpoint of my teachings based on what their belief system has room for based on their own development and i'm sure every one of you at this table could tell me if i asked you what were your opinions on any number of topics 10 years ago and have any of those opinions change now you'd probably be able to write me quite a little laundry list of of things that you no longer would put energy into as a belief that you did 10 years ago because you've just become more enlightened and realize i was not adequately informed or i wasn't aware enough so the my reaction to those people is one i feel sad because a lot of the negative opinions come even when i'm talking about simple things like food water sleep balancing an exercise program rebuilding your body which is really just scratching the surface yeah topics like this you're not even getting into it well i mean like a lot of what you're saying is going to go way over the head of a lot of people who are interested in making themselves feel better lose weight build muscle whatever and hearing you talk for those are listeners who don't know what you look like they're probably thinking that you look a lot different than you do you're actually a very well built very strong gentlemen you lift weights quite a bit we actually how old are you fifty five fifty five so he looks thirty five and he's very very built more like a bodybuilder than a yogi which the way you're talking would make someone picture that we walk through your gym and two hundred pound dumbbell well we would love i mean it's a place we'd love to work out and it's it's like it's almost like dichotomies you know like and that i think do you think maybe that's where it's coming from where you'll talk about things that people will connect with and then you're going to talk about these other things let's say okay though that's totally how's this person talking about both things how's it giving weight to both of these things for example let's talk now now it's much more popular much more accepted now when people talk about gut health yeah but you were talking about gut health when i started doing a lot of work with gut issues and everything involved with it from food intolerance testing and food allergy testing and digestion elimination whole food eating in 1989 in 1989 i still have records from all my original tests on people and let's be honest if in if we could go back in time if we had a time machine we went back in time and we brought up gut health and the uh how the gut uh you know communicates to the brain and influences our emotions and could make us feel anxious or stressful and how you know the you know the internal microbiome influences everything from chemicals to hormones in our body they would have laughed yeah and and and you probably they probably did how did you how were you able to communicate that and were you able to communicate it in terms like for example today we know it's the microbiome we know that there's a you know the lymphatic system connects the brain or did you understand it through different means or did you give a shit because you had your your mindset on what you wanted to learn and where you well i had to give a shit because i'm a professional therapist so uh and i'm also an educator so my my give a shit is that when people come and pay me money for help because they need help and they're investing money in it then it's my job to use analogies and to frame the information in a way that uh is meaningful to them so if i'm talking to an electrical engineer i'll use electrical type explanations for how things are happening if i'm talking to a plumber i'll use plumbing analogies if i'm talking to a race car driver then i'll try to correlate things that are happening in his body so how does hydraulics work well that relates to circulation how does internal combustion work that relates to metabolism if your fuel ratio is wrong then you're dropping performance and so if your fuel ratio is wrong in here then you drop performance because metaphorically the fire is not optimally balanced so um you know the i want to just take a brief segue on this topic and say i went through just as much bullshit and stress and accusations when i brought the swiss ball into the exercise industry i was the first guy to develop this is true by the way now we all we've all been in fitness for i've been in fitness professionally for 20 years these guys almost just almost as long and i we remember when the swiss balls came into the gym popularity and it was like this big deal i started that then that was how when when did you start using those uh i started using 90 something right no uh i started all my research and development on swiss balls in 1988 and produced my first videos chicago bulls were the first professional sports team to hire me to integrate swiss ball training into their conditioning for their team in 1991 so this is way before we even knew that they existed okay so this makes me want to take a little bit of a left here because we've had a chance to tour with you and already the house and and uh and i kind of knew a bit about you because of all the youtube's i've watched the things i've read on you but i had no idea how many how many things that you played a huge role in in this industry now that being a guy who was a part of that and seeing that i didn't even know that was connected to you how much does that bother you that you started a lot of these really good movements yeah and you don't get credit for it well the ego part of me uh can bleed a little bit now and then mostly because i have to make a living like everybody else takes a lot to admit that when you see millions of dollars being made off things that you originated for example the whole concept of putting butter and coffee started right here in this room oh get to see this i developed all that i taught lerd hamilton that he talked all over about it and then he uh got into a relationship with bullet proof and and it just boomed from there but i've been teaching athletes that since 1990 wow i did all sorts of research into how to slow caffeine down and studied this extensively and only after i developed all this did i find out for example that they use yak oil and and teas in to bet in places like that so i i just got confirmation but you know what i was really trying to bring up is we're talking about gut health but when i brought the swiss ball into the industry i literally had guys walking up into me in the gym telling me i was a fag wow but people criticizing me i had gym owners telling me to get that fucking play ball out of the gym that's for pussies and you know i had very well canned answers for people like that you know i'd say okay look i just did 20 reps with 180 pound dumbbell over that swiss ball right there let me see how many you can do well most of them wouldn't even try and the ones that did couldn't even hold the weight usually they'd fall right i have to watch them that fall off the ball like a kid that couldn't walk i met constant resistance but remember there's three phases an idea goes through first it's violently opposed then it's accepted with scorn then it's used as if it was theirs and i have watched many of my ideas go through that gotta be crazy i mean you're listing more than i had no idea like the bulletproof coffee and stuff i mean dav asprey makes it seem like it's something that he creates well i mean and you know some of the stuff can be confirmed there's some old videos of you doing squats on swiss balls that are dated way before gyms had these things i saw those cable machines out there too and you're describing like your involvement with that we see that now in free motions and yeah that's a pretty common place let's let's go let's talk a little bit about you how did you get into this how did you start with this i saw a picture of you at 12 years old with a better physique than i've ever had in my entire life you've been doing this for a long time yeah how did how did you get into this what motivated you to to be so passionate or even some people would even say obsessive about learning the body and the mind and you know how they all integrate together i'll have to give you a synthesized version of that but my my real father died when i was eight but my mother and father had split up three years before that unfortunately my father was quite an abusive man he was a professional drag racer and a competitive dancer and used to take off with all his dance partners and and treat my mother very poorly and my mother had three children by the time she was 18 and then was left on her own and then married another man who turned out to be a very very dangerous and scary man and uh we were raised on a farm and he was very very physically abusive and very very dangerous i mean visits to the hospital were not uncommon uh and it was you know he point his finger and if you didn't get it done immediately and if there's any back talk or anything else it was scary so what happened was is i lived in this pressure cooker of an environment where i was worked physically extremely hard um as a young man i could outwork multiple grown men and uh anybody that ever came to my farm and worked with us was immediately shocked that these kids little kids could outwork the adults like lifting hay bales for example the paradox of all this is is that i had so much survival fear and the need to protect my mother that i felt i had to make myself strong and i got myself into boxing and martial arts as quickly as i could and it was really my fear my survival fear that not only drove me to make myself stronger but my mother's a yogi so my mother's mode of coping with all this was the practice of yoga and meditation so my mom's extremely holistic and artistic you've seen her sculptures and on the other side my father was very violent but also a genius he was a special effects man for universal studios he's can build anything he's a master farmer he's a master with animals i mean he's got a lot of talents he's just a dangerous dude right so through my mother i was getting all this education on food nutrition and a balanced lifestyle and where you know our teacher was paramahansa yogananda who believed in exercise and a lot of the things that i teach today were part of my foundation and from my father i got the discipline to get shit done and learned to solve problems practically and effectively immediately but the drive to survive that and the pain of being controlled like that and and like almost living in a prison camp environment when i went to play sports when i was in boxing when i was in football when i was in motocross when i was in hockey all that emotion now i had a place where i could hit back and now i had a place where i could do stuff that was legal so paradox my anger and fear channeled into athletics got me to be a celebrated athlete and that's one of the problems if we use our anger and fear and it carries us too far we come to the point in our life where we're realizing it's causing us more harm than good on the inside but we're afraid to let go of it because it's got us so much love and so much success and that's one of the connect with it that's one of the crises i have to help a lot of athletes through so what i'm sharing with you is that my drive to be fit and to be strong came from two things one the need to protect myself from my father but two the desire to win and also was fueled by the fact that my anger and emotion channeled into boxing and knocking people out which is really what i wanted to do to my dad but i got to practice on someone for when the big day might come made me a successful athlete and to be a successful athlete means you want to keep winning and for me that meant study every damn thing you need to study whether training diet meditation i don't care what it is find out how it works test it and if it works put it to use and keep doing that when did when did you free yourself from those chains when did you free yourself from that being a major motivator and you and you elevated from that um the the big change came when i joined the united states army and i was going through basic training and i watched how you know in my basic training cycle four guys tried to commit suicide because they couldn't deal with the stress people were getting sick left right in the center breaking down of complete exhaustion and you know just literally dying on the vine i was always getting in trouble for trying to help these guys i felt sorry for them but basic training for me was i got i got fat and basic training i gained eight pounds i'm like jesus murphy i'm getting out of shape in here and i thought i came here to be with the tough guys so that was the beginning of it then i went into the 82nd airborne division which is the same shit but twice as intense and even then they were dropping like flies and they couldn't kill me and i were always trying to do it and i had a realization my father prepared me for the toughest situations in life like nobody's business and these mama's boys here and the kids that grew up in households where everything was just so rosy can't deal with the realities that they just signed on the dotted line to go face in the name of the united states military and they're mentally unprepared they're emotionally unprepared they're physically unprepared also i learned over the years that i had a unique way of of seeing and relating to information and problem solving that was very very practical but very very integrated which my father was the prime source of and my mother's also quite intelligent and very artistic so you put those two together and i woke up one day and just realized it was a painful internship but it gave me everything i needed to fulfill what i came to this planet to do which was to help people find what health really is meaningfully so at that moment you feel like you you shifted your motivation from from almost like the resentment and anger towards your father to almost being grateful that you went through all those trials and tribulations as a kid yes there was a it's a hard thing to go how old are you at this point i was 22 there was a an event that i'll share that really was the pinnacle moment of this i fought on the army boxing team but i also fought in the 82nd airborne division championship of the 30 fighters on our boxing team which was ranked the third best team in the world only butan beaten by kubernetes at the time of the 30 guys 29 of them were paratroopers so once you enter into the 82nd airborne division boxing contest you've got to fight all the guys on your own boxing team if they're in your weight class and it's a tough go it's against the military law for an officer to box in competition because if he gets beat by an enlisted man it destroys morale and respect sure so somehow some way a captain got approved by the general of the 82nd airborne division to enter into the 82nd airborne division boxing uh tournament and none of us knew who this guy was did they feel like he was a were they confident he was going to whip everyone of course they were of course right and so the as the story would happen you know how tournaments go a big huge tournament with like 150 fighters you're watching who keeps moving up the pyramid right so i keep noticing this guy i can't remember his name but he's knocking everybody out before the second rounds over and i started watching him and every time i would knock someone out he would knock someone out this went on for like three days and sometimes we'd fight two or three times in a day for this tournament so i got all the way up there and i thought oh my god man this is gonna so the main event was me against this guy and this guy was a very skilled fighter and he gave me a flash knockdown in about the first round and he hit me so hard that i didn't even know where it was at and my whole left arm went completely numb i couldn't move it and i thought i am in trouble here and i'm i'm fighting on one of the best boxing teams in the world and sparring three weight classes up and three weight classes down this guy just hit me as hard as a heavyweight boxer and i'm like i have to do something and i knew lots of generals were betting on me my my wife was there my the whole boxing team was there so the moral of the story is i got up and it was the first time in my life i felt like my my life might be at risk because this guy could hit so hard i didn't know he might just take my head off right and so the work week before we'd been practicing a technique that's rarely ever used because it's dangerous but if it works it works and that is when they ring the bell and especially we use it if you get taken down and get counted out because that's when they least expect this out of you as soon as they ring the bell you sprint from your corner across the ring and hit them with the hardest right hand or whatever you want to throw at them but make sure you don't miss so it's very unconventional to run in a boxing ring but instinctively i knew i had to knock this guy out right away because i didn't think i could take too many more hits like that from him and he was really fast so i got up i ran across the ring and i hit him so hard it felt like my hand went right through his head and i knocked him out very bad and detached his retina and he could never fight again after that holy shit and so when i went into the change room i had a complete emotional breakdown because for the first time in my life i felt i crossed the line of sportsmanship and hunted a man and i realized that the intensity with which i hunted him was the same intensity that my father had developed in me as a survival mechanism and that he had just gotten hit by my father and i i had a spiritual crisis because i could no longer distinguish between survival necessity and sportsmanship because my life was in survival mode in a sport or sporting event does that make sense absolutely so i i couldn't find the the distinction anymore and it scared me so bad because i could have killed the guy i mean it took him about three minutes to wake this guy up he was convulsing three feet off the ground he was in such shock and i knew it was scary even for me i'd never really hurt someone that bad in a boxing match before and i broke down and cried i just and i promised myself and it's even emotional for me to talk about it i just said i'm never gonna box again i have to convert this energy into helping people i can't i cannot let fear govern my actions govern my choices force me to exercise and do all these things that are ultimately only energizing more fear and i told the coaches i was going to leave and they said we want you to stay and be the trainer because however you see i also represented represented united states army and triathlon while i was fighting on the boxing team so i actually was on two military teams i trained six hours a day in a boxing ring and trained four hours a day for triathlon and they could never figure out how the hell i could do that because the boxers couldn't handle the boxing training and the way i ate was different the way i lived was different and they they always just thought i was like some weird hippie dude that could hit really hard so they they weren't that wrong i love that role yeah so they said stay and we'll make you the trainer and we'll let you run the boxing uh all the training all the fitness all the nutrition and i asked them if i could do massage for the fighters because i wanted to do that because it had been so helpful in my triathlon training so i actually took on the role of caring for the fighters organizing their diets managing all their gym training working with the team physician to care for all the acute sports injuries and chronic injuries we had so i studied with an osteopathic physician for two years and i did all their massage therapy and no one had ever been a massage therapist for a boxing team before so there was all sorts of criticisms called gay and people messing with me and i'd be working on guys and they'd walk by and stick their fingers up athletes rectums just to kind of be silly so it really was it created like this turmoil in the military because it was so unusual what year is this uh 1984 that pinnacle moment where i hurt that guy was the day that i had to make a decision about what i was going to let govern my sense of who i am and what i use my life force energy for and what i'm going to create in the world and that's the day i realized not only did my father give me everything i needed to protect myself he gave me the motivation to learn to protect myself he gave me the discipline to get a job done and not complain and to stay focused under pressure but i also realized that spiritually i had to channel that energy into creating more connection more harmony and more unity because the pain that it caused in me to face the fact that i just ended a guy's boxing career and could have killed him just because he scared me it sounds like i mean you you had your 22 you had trained half your life to become tougher to protect yourself to become aggressive to be fierce yeah and it expressed itself uh fully and you you did you did it and afterwards you realized well that's not what i thought it would be and um uh that's probably why i mean that sounds like well you can also see too i mean you can just tell the the emotions it brings up when you share the story you know how how much of this do you you still feel that you have to work through like is this something uh i don't feel like i have to work through it it was a very uh as you said sell a complete experience uh it was uh kind of like an orgasm of self realization that was full of both awakening but the realization of all the pain that i had caused myself to try to accomplish things that ultimately were not taking me in the direction of a greater sense of unity with closing a one door opening of another yeah i was getting more and more trapped into uh individualism if i'm stronger i can do this if i'm faster i can do this but you know i work with power animals and one day i was working through some challenges and my first chakra power animal is the bee family and i went to my bee spirits and i said you know this is the problem i'm having and what do you suggest and the bees gave me an image of the whole hive working together to make honey and the the bee spirit said to me just this few words nobody can make honey alone and that was the message no one can make honey alone and i realized that the further you go into individuality the more you believe you can handle issues with strength power and show but the further you go into making honey or sweetness in your life or something meaningful the more you have to let go of individuality and enter into relationship with others because you can't accomplish anything truly meaningful by yourself or we wouldn't be here right now would we now now knowing that and knowing what you came from how hard is that because you know being someone who had kind of a rough childhood myself you know it kind of forces guys like us to be very independent you know now you you had this happen to you you're making this transition was it a smooth transition i mean did you this boom that happened and then you totally like oh i'm gonna all of a sudden align myself with other like-minded people and grow and continue this path or did you struggle with this you know you know wanting still to do things your own or your own way and independent and not allowing others to or let go like you said it was a shift in intention it wasn't a case where i had to then go find out how to live in that new way because my mother raised me that way right i watched my mother get beat up and go sit and meditate and not lose her composure and and do her best to have empathy and compassion knowing that this man himself was broken and that that was the partnership she'd committed to so she spent 24 years doing her best to create light in the darkness and use her art to express herself and her creative pursuits to move that energy so i learned that and i learned about the importance of diet and the importance of exercise and the importance of meditation and she sent me away to spend time with the monks on my 15th summer so i spent a summer with monks going deeper into the techniques and so by the time this event happened i already had the the spiritual foundation and the awareness but i just hadn't reached a pivotal point where i made the switch in orientation from exercising and living well and succeeding in sport or in academia or in my career where before my orientation was man i can make a lot of money and i can buy a big house and and uh you know if i'm stronger and no one's going to kick my ass and you know fuck all these tough guys i got something for them and you know just kind of that that that harsh young man need to feel safe and feel meaningful in the world you know when you're young like that power says something right so for me it was just a realization that i saw clearly that if i continued to project myself in that direction it would take me into more and more having to hurt people or more and more having to win at the expense of somebody else becoming a loser per se and i'm not against competition but there's a time when uh winning actually turns out to be losing in the long run right i'll give you a good example of that a painful one my brother and i used to fight a lot and my brother um didn't handle our upbringing as well as i did and he committed suicide when he was 34 and when my brother died i spent a lot of days and a lot of nights crying and remembering all the times when we were fighting and i beat the shit out of him but i could have stopped because i knew i had the situation under control and so when you see that that quest for individuality if you look at it as a knock on effect on effects the other person it leads that person into isolation and separation and fear heavy and he could not bridge to the spiritual side he got too isolated into a loan and too trapped in drugs and became part of the hell's angels and went at downhill from there and so when i saw that i had the chance to use the same amount of life force and i could still keep myself fit and i could still compete but that my intention was to use my knowledge and my experiences to help other people have positive experiences that would enhance their life instead of detracting from their life and their relationships it was almost as though i had to go through that experience to kind of knock me into the next quantum shift of where i needed to go to fulfill my life legacy if i would have been too successful as a i was very successful as a stock car racer i could have gone pro but spirit guided me out of that i was very successful motocross racing i was successful in sport i was successful enough in boxing but i was not good enough fighter to turn pro without getting my brain scrambled because i like to fight too much and i started late most of the guys i was fighting had 320 fights under the belt by the time there were 20 so i started boxing at 12 so that's a huge difference that's like trying to ski against someone who's really good that started when there were three and you started when you were 12 that's a lot of important years you're missing out on so it really um what i'm sharing is if it's not clear is that i already had the background training but i still was using the fear as the motivation at an unconscious level and still trying to succeed by being better and stronger and pushing the underdog down and i realized that in order for me to really get a meaningful message to people and help people heal that i had to help them over the same problems many times that i had and the first thing i did when i really made this realization is i sat all the boxers down in a circle this is when i was their trainer and they all had a lot of respect for me because one they watched me competing and training for triathlon and i won the army triathlon at fort bragg and my wife won the women's division so they they already knew this guy's some kind of weirdo because for him to train like that plus do what we do in the gym he's from another planet so i sat down with the boxers and i and there was 30 of them at that time i said how many of you right now have painful unresolved issues with your father and really wish you could have kicked his ass when you were at home guess how many hands went up probably most of them all of them 29 only one guy did not have those issues so as i started looking into this i saw all of us were there for reasons of fear and all of us were there to try to create safety but we were empowering ourselves to create safety with fear and the problem is is when the ego gets too narcissistic you get what we had on the boxing team we regularly had problems with them going out at night going to bars getting drunk and beating the shit out of everybody in the bar and the next thing you know the cops are showing up with the boxing arena looking for these key people and we often had to try to hide these guys so they didn't get put in jail and this is a big problem because now you're using highly evolved fighting skills to go to a bar where people don't really have a chance against you'll be like fighting someone with no gun when you have a machine gun and so you see that it doesn't know how to contain itself without spiritual awakening without meaningfulness without an understanding of the importance of relationships and so we're right back to how do you make honey well you can't do it alone so so knowing this we have a ton of athletes and competitors of all different sports that that listen to the show and and we've already learned so much of all the athletes that you've impacted what advice do you give when you when you take on a team or you take on an individual athlete in this in this what we're talking about right now since that's probably true to about 80 plus percent of people a lot of the motivator is fear driven yeah what do you say to them well i there's a number of pathways i take i do a very comprehensive assessment to see what their belief systems are and what their most stressful events in their life have been to see how their their psyche got formed they're so will you will you change your message then if if i'm if i'm somebody who's like for me i have i love listening to someone talk like this i'm not closed minded i'm very open minded to hearing almost anyone speak about anything but that's not common a lot of people there's people right now that are listening to the show that have already turned it off because they heard spiritual they heard this they heard that and then right away they're they're turned off by that so when you meet an athlete or a person like that how do you how do you deal with that well what i do is i look at where their structure stage of conscious development is at so there's several different models you can use but there's also what are called values memes which are value a meme means ideas an idea about values that's been studied in their strata just like a rainbow again the rainbow strata so all the way down at the bottom you have beige in claire graves model which is just pure survival someone who's has got a disease and in bed is in beige any time you're wounded and can't take care of yourself you're at the beige values level the next level is purple which is family and tribe the next level level is red which is personal power so here you see someone going against the chief or against the parents uh or against the military a rebel someone who says screw you i'm doing it my way and this is where a lot of gangs are centered in the red values meme then you go out of there to blue which is where all organized business and religion is so people that are in red usually create so much stress and so many enemies and so much fear that they have to turn to jesus because they are afraid they're going to die and they need to make sure that they're not going to go burn in hell so you see a lot of the gangsters jumping up this is why you see all this talk about jesus for example and even in athletes you see a lot of talking about jesus and god but they don't realize that because their fear of what they're creating makes them hope that god is up there and that god is this or god is that but the point that i'm making is that i can tell by talking to somebody and hearing what's important to them where they're at where their value structures are at where their psyche's at in their own psychic development and therefore i have a saying i developed for my students always tell a person exactly what they want to hear but give them what they need so if you say to me paul my dream is to win a kickboxing contest we'll call that the red values meme i might be aware that they're too self-oriented or narcissistic and it's causing problems in their relationships maybe they're not getting along with their girlfriend or they're not getting along with their coach which is very common so the next level up is blue which requires a lot of people to work together and to have systems in place to accomplish things so that energy flows efficiently so i simply say to them okay well if you want to accomplish this who's cooking your food oh my girlfriend okay um who's boxing gym are you training at sam's boxing gym who's your coach this guy who's your trainer this guy do you use massage therapy yeah i love massage goods and so what i do is i show them in a few minutes they cannot accomplish the dream i say well if you had no coach and you had no trainer and no one cooking your food and dot dot dot could you accomplish this objective well most of them would say no well good so you see now you need to be aware of the fact that the way you've been managing yourself is producing a lot of pain and all these key relationships because you're so self-oriented that you're actually defeating your own objective which is to achieve a championship so i take them one step up and say look this is how the next level of consciousness works these are the people you have to have on your dream team they need to each be aware of what your dream and goal objective is so that when they're working with you they're also contributing and you need to be aware of what their dreams are because then you know what you're contributing to so if this guy's dream is to become a celebrated trainer well you know if you become a celebrated athlete with his support that you can shine some light on him and say he was one of the people to help me make it now you're inspired to train because the better you do the better they do and you know what makes them feel good you know what makes them feel loved so now the athlete's orientation goes from totally self and screw everybody else that won't sustain my narcissistic childlike attitude very typical of a professional athlete and you go to say wow now i realize that without the guy that makes the boxing gloves and about the guy that runs the gym without the lady that cooks the food and without the dot dot dot i got nothing yeah and these are the people i've been shitting on so i take them there and each level up comes with its own unique set of challenges spiritual growth and development is no different than physical growth and development if you walk in the gym and you got three plates aside and you're supposed to deadlift 8 to 12 but you can do 20 it's time for more weight on the bar well when you're growing spiritually if you get to the level of narcissism and you learn how to handle that like i described then god says now you get to deal with the challenges of real relationships instead of just telling everyone to fuck off and punching them in the face now you got to do the work to create honey together and so now the spirit bar gets heavy now you have to go from you have to make an interesting transition from willpower to won't power where i used to say fuck you get out of my way or i'll smack you now i have to slow down and say wait a minute what's my dream and is that going to create what i want so you have to learn to use the brake pedal first we start off with the gas pedal we crash into everything then we have to learn to use the brake pedal slow down think ahead a little bit and be really clear on what our destination is so we're not going sideways to the destination but narcissism as a concept means i'm only interested in what i want but i forget there's several other people in this bus with me who also want to go places right so it's a transition and i did want to kind of go back to you know now you're the boxing trainer or for your division united states army army now you where do you go from there because obviously now you've got courses and she's so there's a process at this point are you developing your your your theories and did you know that this is something that you were going to eventually put together and and to a business and teach others and certifications or where did you go from this from this point i always had a strong intuitive sense that my life's work would be oriented around exercise and health because of they were the only things that i truly felt passionate about in fact i hated school i never finished the i finished the ninth grade never which is ironic from a guy who's surrounded by books and loves to read and research well i'm going to tell you a funny story on that when i was 22 on the way back from the army a usa 10 mile run at the pentagon which is a big competition amongst army running teams all of a sudden on the bus i stood up and screamed hallelujah whoo and they looked at me and they said what's the big deal the race is over and i held up the book what was it nutrition nutrition a holistic approach by roodolph ballantine 479 pages was the first book i read cover to cover my whole life oh wow and so they said what's the fuss all about i said i just finished my first book and they all thought i was just completely lunatic right they couldn't even believe it right and they said well what is it and i showed them they go you're really sick man and um you know i found that when i was studying this is how the soul works you get that charge when you're moving in the direction you're supposed to be moving your heart turns on and you lose track of time what do you think sorry to interrupt you but what do you think about people that refer to that as like the flow state right when you that's what it is okay the flow is when the consciousness of the individual the heart of the individual and the instincts of individual are all dancing and harmony so when your gut instinct is in line with your heart's love and your ideas are um polarized to those motives you lose your sense of separateness you lose your sense of time you you know many times i thought i'd only been studying something for an hour and it had been eight hours and i hadn't even eaten and i forgot i even needed to eat crazy right so you're you know you're deeply in this state of oneness with something that's far greater than your ego could perceive but it only takes sometimes it takes longer for people to be aware for example if they're out running and they have a oneness state they think it has something to do with just running and they like to run but when you pay attention and you learn to induce oneness states with other things be it painting or studying or yoga or preparing food or whatever it might be for you you realize that the knock on effect of being in those states is that you have greater sensitivity to when you're moving toward or away from what your heart is pulling you to do and as long as you live true to that and you're honest about what your needs are in a relationship you find that everything starts to harmonize around you that people get along better and they appreciate what you're doing where if they don't appreciate what you're doing it's like oh he's addicted to studying or he's addicted to exercise and then it becomes a painful in relationships so my point is those oneness states actually go from something you induce with exercise or x or y or z to something that brings you into a state where all of a sudden you realize that your questions are answered very quickly in that state for example if I'm in a oneness state or a peak flow state when I'm painting and I look at the diagram or the thing that I'm painting or I'm working on stuff from my work and I just hold the intention of asking my soul what's next and all of a sudden I get a vision that I realize that in that oneness state I can get answers to questions that might have taken me a year looking through books and doing research on the internet to find the answer to or I get pointed in the right direction and I know oh wow I gotta go look under that rock I never realized that I needed to go there now did you start feeling this with that first book is that when you start to no I felt it I felt it in in meditation with the monks many times and they're so powerful 15 years old he's getting to get him to go hang out with months so where are they where are they located yeah what is this well my parent my mother switched from Christian science to to the Self-Realization Fellowship which is Paramahansa Yogananda's gift to the west of yoga that's a philosophy based in eastern yoga the principles of yoga but you know yoga for the mind yoga for the heart there's several yogas but they're all mixed together we would travel to the temple in Vancouver from Vancouver rather than it was like a whole day over and then stay overnight and come back so we will often do that on the weekends and so I got this week by week just like going to church indoctrination but learning to meditate learning to breathe learning how to move your body the importance of moving and breathing the importance of diet things that are very pinnacle to my whole system now but then when I was 15 my mother sent me away to a summer camp where I got to spend several weeks with them on a daily basis and that's all you did all the time you lived with them all day you meditated with them you ate with them you worked in the fields with them you did everything with them I had very deep meditative experiences even as a young child and interestingly my first full-blown samadhi which means total union with all that is happened when I was 35 in a sort of a strange and unusual situation I was teaching check practitioner level three and two of my students from Australia said you know Paul we'd really appreciate if if you could show us how to meditate while we were here we you know we're we're having a hard time meditating and one you know to know if you'd be willing to teach us so I said well you know the Self-Realization Fellowship Gardens are right a mile away where where you'll get on to actually wrote the book the autobiography of yogi and where the monks go and live and train each other and offer services to the public and there's a phenomenal meditation garden there sitting benches on a cliff overlooking the ocean with surfers and dolphins and everything else so I intuitively knew I'm going to take them there because there's a bench that I like to meditate on there and it's right overlooking the ocean so I took these two guys who had never meditated before spent you know 10 or 12 minutes just talking them through the basics about breathing and how to work what you do with your mind and things like that and it was on our lunch hour we entered into meditation together and I went full blown into a state of complete super consciousness but no identity of self I was just one with everything and all of a sudden I realized with conscious awareness oh my god I am one with everything and I got afraid like where's my body and I realized that my body was sitting on this bench so I was you can't really describe in words the experience but it was as though the whole universe was looking back at the bench as opposed to me looking out at the universe and I came back into my body with just oh I shook like and it was like I didn't know what reality I was in for a minute it took me a second I was actually almost panicked it was such a shocking experience and right when I jumped those two jumped and they both looked at me and said they're twin brothers and they said it simultaneously Paul what just happened we were completely gone one with the universe and we've we don't even know what that is and it scared the hell out of me and they realized that right when I came back they came back so the the paradox of it is I had my first samadhi which takes people sometimes years of meditation to get to and that the same day I had one these guys on their first try to meditate with me had that experience but typically when you meditate this is why people meditate groups they would say this would be group flow right the ability of so because I know how to meditate it just happened that the fruits of my practice brought me to to shall we say the orgasm of it all the very day that they were there so they got swept along in the current and it was a very profound experience so that you know that's beyond a peak state because in a peak state you're still there do you know where those guys are at currently now have you have you communicate with him and one of them I know unfortunately the other one committed suicide and he had some challenges and and the one that committed suicide was a bodybuilder and was shall we say very deeply caught in narcissism and the one that committed suicide was the one that wasn't very academic he was more shall we say kinesthetic in his his natural way of learning his other brother was very academic so his other brother could handle the depth of my training and could ingest it and digest it but his brother felt so inferior because he had a hard time understanding it and they were constantly measuring themselves off each other so he kind of drifted away from practicing the things I was teaching and got more and more into bigger muscles more power and never really could follow the flow it was just the world wasn't the right place for him to to make it into that do you find this is somewhat of a common theme with people in search of this because it's almost like there's this fine line when you when you start talking about spirituality and flow and consciousness that it's almost like this pain drives them but it can many times they can succumb to it yeah it's like you either totally make it or go the other way opposite right you can but you know those are the extremes like if you look at statistics right well if you're doing a statistical analysis of what's the effects of 79 grams of white turkey meat on bodybuilders well you study 500 of them and you'll have a bell curve three of them said it made no difference at all or made them worse and 37 percent said they felt much better and gave them better mass and then you have some range of everything in between right so humans are the same way some are on the left of that curve some are on the right of the curve and some are somewhere in between in that rainbow spectrum again so there's always a range of receptivity and a range of readiness and then there's also the the real issue that freedom osho says freedom is the most dangerous thing you'll ever experience so when you have an experience like that and you realize you are more than your body and you realize that god is unconditional love and you realize that god doesn't want anything from you because god has everything including you right you know one of my favorite sayings to say to people is people used to ask st. Francis of Assisi all the time what is god and he would say what you are looking for is what's looking okay so when you get that and you truly get that then there's no need to ask questions about god anymore but it it really brings up the importance of this thing called love and this thing called we because if you realize what god is you realize that everything that you're looking at is the physical manifestation of that thing we call god and to look for god is an admission that you really don't understand what the word means yet um so the point i'm making here is that with an experience like that comes a level of awareness that if you embrace it makes you so radically different than almost everybody else that you now have to go the path of a pioneer you know pioneers are easily identified by the arrows in their backs so what do you do when you go back and tell your mom and dad that you know you don't have to go to church to find jesus because i found him on the cliff looking at the seals with paul uh what do you do when you uh find that you uh don't believe in things like maybe you were anti-gay and all of a sudden you realize god loves being gay is god loves being homosexual or heterosexual or transsexual and you used to stand at rallies and scream at people and be abusive to them so if a person's not it could be very scary for somebody who's not ready for that if a person doesn't have enough spiritual courage to transition from one behavior and belief system to another and they have a lot of self-judgment because if they transition now everybody that they were clu clux clanting with says wait a minute what are you doing you're now now you're the outcast and now if you don't have enough confidence to be at peace with yourself as your best friend and love yourself and meet your own needs and not have to have mom and your daddy or someone rescuing you then the journey into spirituality and freedom is is extremely hard to endure just reminds me of a message that we always like to give with working out sal says this a lot which is you know don't work out because you you hate yourself but work out because you love yourself yeah and how many people are really motivated honestly when going to the gym because they're disgusted and how they look or how they feel and that's really the main motivator and really the main motivator should be because you actually love yourself you want to take care of yourself now paul when did you start uh formulating and putting together what you teach now uh that's you know organized together when you teach your the check you know practices or the check institute or training yeah i have the check practitioner program which focuses on the first three phases of focus on proper physical assessment anatomy physiology functional anatomy um digested everything you need to know about the basics of how the body works and how to design exercise programs for every level from injured people all the way up you know it's very comprehensive and then the holistic lifestyle coach is how do you focus on diet and lifestyle how people organize their lives what are their dreams and goals or do they have goals what are they eating what is their body's unique individual needs do they know how to have a relationship with their gut so they know when their body's saying don't eat more of that versus just reading a recipe and eating it because it says so on paper or reading a pill prescription and taking it instead of checking in with what the body wants because the body will guide you to health so the hlc uh goes into all the things that you need to know in order for corrective or high performance exercise to actually work so you can't have one without the other but our culture isn't ready for fully holistic integration so i had to keep the two apart so the first three years of training i teach you to be a master mechanic but then i blow your head right off in the fourth year and say now guess what i need you to forget everything i taught you because you're believing in numbers too much now we got to look at why that rib hurts why the head's forward why the penis prematurely ejaculates or won't stand up and get to the real issues and to do that you have to go out of your intellect and into intuitive at relationship and into a relationship with the person sitting across you in other words instead of them being an object you're working on they have you have to develop a relationship with them and get inside and see where their hearts really wounded and what their real needs are and what their real fears are and what their beliefs are and why they're having a hard time creating something that isn't so painful all the time now what percentage of people do you go one two three and then just say i'm not doing four like that's just i would say only about two percent uh well there's tests that you have to go through you have to send in case histories live case histories that i can follow up on to demonstrate your effective use of the training to get into level three because it's a very very advanced course and then level four you have to do the same thing or i won't let you in the course and most people aren't disciplined enough to do the actual work and study and they don't uh they don't have enough bravery to stand alone as a check professional when what they're doing is so radically advanced and different than everybody else because people criticize it whenever they're insecure about someone that has that much knowledge and power they attack them so if a check practitioner or hlc practitioner isn't rooted enough and doesn't have enough connection to other check professionals they often fall back into the fold because they can't take the pressure of being different in other words they would have just stopped using a swiss ball when they started getting criticized is what i'm saying over the years how many people would you say have taken your courses uh probably probably now 12 i don't know 12 or 13 000 the advanced training courses but countless thousands in my lectures and workshops now we've talked off air and we talked about dogma and how that's that's not good that's bad in any form or any way of thinking and a lot of the people that follow uh your courses will refer to themselves as checkies and do to develop these groups and from the outside looking in sometimes it can almost seem like they're identifying so strongly with it that it comes across that way do you find any challenges with that with seeing that or hearing that or is it just interpreted wrong well uh like any program just like we talked about that rainbow values i have people in my program um all the way up to level three that are at any level of those values so maybe they're taking this training to be a bad ass and to show everybody else how smart they are and to make a lot of money versus someone who's at a higher level which would be the ones that typically make it to level four which have already crossed through the realization that there is no i without we and therefore what i should be doing is not only working to create my own dreams but to support others in creating theirs so you see that there's a sort of stratification of consciousness and the ones that are at the level where they realize that in order to fulfill their own needs to achieve and to create they need more information then they climb up till they reach that sense of satiation or realize that paul put a package together and there's none of it that's useless because it's all there for a reason so those are the more tapped in uh but i'd say only about three percent make it to level four probably only about 15 or 20 make it to level three probably about 60 make it to level two in the check practitioner program it's like a pyramid you know each level gets narrower as you go up i've had uh friends who were uh from the medical field physical therapists and you know doctors who've taken um you know level one two and it's very based on uh like you said measurable tangible uh physical things like you know um it definitely wouldn't be out of place in western medicine uh but then like you're saying all when you get to four it's very very different it's completely different um and do you think that may be why some people don't go into that okay no the real problems uh level three because it takes a fair bit of discipline of using the materials that i teach to be effective enough to turn in a case history that shows me that you're actually applying everything but our culture has a fast food education mentality so they take courses and they delude themselves into thinking that they're an expert the week they walk home with a certificate put it on the wall but then they don't actually do the work to practice that to change their practice to do the evaluations and do the real work that produces authentic experience so what happens is they operate on the intellectual kite of the certificate but don't do the real work of integrating that and the first person i challenge them all to integrate it with is themselves and i'm watching that very very carefully and so uh those people uh distinguish themselves as separate from the others because they when they turn their case histories in to try to get to level three it's as obvious to me in 10 seconds where they're at and if they don't want to do the work to do another case history which means go out and practice it then they won't come to the class so a good example is one year i had 39 people apply for check level three and i only accepted nine so as my wife as the numbers woman reminded me that's uh something like 3600 bucks ahead i just lost uh you know three probably about 100 grand and i said honey i i know we need money but i refuse to sell my soul i'm i may not be here to educate the masses but i am here to create masters and i know any one of the check level four practitioners in the world has the power to not only educate but help countless thousands of people and anybody that didn't do the work is usually still struggling to try to make a living and can't figure out why they're they're not making it you know do you often find yourself at odds with the business side of yes yeah i was gonna say didn't didn't you get offers from supplement companies and like major money came your way to kind of be involved with but just decided to pull out i wouldn't get involved because uh you know um you name drop people like bill philips and stuff i mean these are big some of the big movers and yeah i i didn't have any offers from bill philips i wrote for muscle media uh dr connelly offered to uh build an entire gym at my design this is metrics the guy that yeah metrics is so that i could oversee the rehab and conditioning of all the metric sponsored athletes which is many millions of dollars at the time and but but i could not ethically align myself with a company using aspartame because i'd done tons of research on it so in my meeting with him i said i'm willing to work with you under one condition you need to take aspartame out of all your products and i said i can give you a stack of research as high as your ceiling showing it does things like burn holes in people's brains and he said that's all bullshit i'm not going to take that stuff out of there and i said well it isn't bullshit because 150 scientists can't be wrong and none of them are on the payrolls of an aspartame company so they don't get they're not you know pros scientists are considered the modern prostitutes because you can pay them to get any result you want um so i just got up and walked out and that was it um and there's been other opportunities just like that but i can't let money dictate my moral principles or ethical principles yes i have to make a living yes i have a business to run but the reality of it is if i wanted to get rich i could repackage my material and just make it all about having flat abs and big muscles and being a badass and i'd sell truckloads of stuff but we know that i can't i can't uh i can't i don't that that something inside me starts to die the instant that i move in that direction well i also think that your your level of awareness and understanding you you know already that even if you made all that crazy amount of money you wouldn't be fulfilled it wouldn't be rewarding it wouldn't you wouldn't it'd be short-lived you know i've always i've always trusted in whatever word you want to use uh the universe will use that but uh my life experience has brought me into many painful and scary places and when i felt trapped and alone and got very still and asked for help and for guidance from whatever it was that was listening i always got it i always got the direction i always came up with ways to make money i've had money come to me in large sums when i never expected it from places i never expected it you know out of the blue i'll have some rich athlete or something hire me for you know $50,000 worth of therapy or something and i found that um the universe is always there to support me as long as i am sticking to the principles of supporting people in the world um and i don't have to resort to um challenging my ethics in order to get money uh so my my spiritual relationship is is that you're we're not we're not alone and we are part of a much much bigger process which is ultimately driven by the grand total need for collective awareness of what we all are um once we come to the realization that we are all expressions of the same thing meaning if you use a standard scientific model if the big bang is correct which i don't believe in at all but since it's a standard model you realize we were all in bed together at the beginning of all this i'm serious right we were packed together with a density that the whole universe itself could fit in to a teaspoon right so if that's not incestuous and so all i'm saying is when everything blew apart incest is best came came apartness you understand the concept everything blew apart in this big bang but everything that seems to be separate that planet over here it all came from one point and so even if you use an outdated old materialistic model it if you look at it from a spiritual perspective that materialistic model is actually a model of spiritual unity that says everything that is or can be known or will be came from one point in space time and one location and that means every one of us is brothers sisters aunts uncles whatever the hell you want to call it we're all relatives we're not different and so when you realize that you have a choice to either contribute to the illusion of separation and meanness or money money money or um focus on doing the things that make you feel love because power and position and money without connection is a death sentence and i work with a lot of very rich people at one time i had 10 billionaires flying their own jets to see me for help so i'm very indoctrinated to the spiritual challenges and the real challenges of wealth and abundance and they're as deep and painful as poverty it's just the whole thing flipped over maybe deeper right it can be deeper because you have more choices so there's more to confuse yourself with is that you know bringing it back to the business is that uh is that still a challenge for you in the sense that several times now you've brought up uh ideas or concepts that you originated that are now that became bigger you talked about the coffee we talked about the swiss ball and yeah and other things and it's it sounds like maybe someone's listening can say wow he sounds like he's angry that he didn't get credit for it no i'm not angry it it it's uh you know i or is that a struggle is that a struggle for you to see it and go oh god i should get credit for that or i couldn't it it is emotional at times because i only expect the kind of respect that i would give somebody else if you study any of my courses there is a long trail of references i reference reference reference i made a habit of always sending any new courses to the people who are key contributors because i reference their material to ask am i misrepresenting you are you at peace with how i'm sharing and always got amazing positive responses from all over the world so my philosophy is never cap a knowledge well right don't be disrespectful to the source of your own abundance and to the source of your own personal growth or intellectual growth or professional growth and pennie and i spent probably 35 to 50 000 a year on lawyers just to write cease and desist letters of people writing books making videos and starting programs that were just ripped off right out of my stuff but this lawyer has always said you know it'll cost you more to sue them most of these people aren't they don't have enough means to make it worth the lawsuit does that happen a lot does that happen a lot from people who take your courses and then go off and yes it does it happens at a very alarming rate so and what and what you want what do you want from them because you do cease and desist you just want either accuracy or credit just just all i want them to do is to follow the standards that are given in academia if you're in a university for referencing appropriately for respecting copyright laws for example i've seen many books published that have art that i created and paid for to have an artist's job based off my own drawings and it's in their work but it has no reference to me and they know who i am because i know who some of these people are but the the key point that i'm trying to drive home here is that pennie and i reached the point and my wife's always been the one to kind of be my my chief medicine woman she says you know plagiarism is the finest form of flattery she said be happy that they're stealing your stuff that's very true she says your material done poorly is better than most of what's taught out there so it's hard when you have an overhead and it can get tough at times and you don't have you know big money supporting you and it and it can be stressful when you see people i remember one girl was making like 20 000 a month off of an ebook that she was very good at marketing but it was just stolen right out of my material almost forbade them and so we both reached a sort of a situation where we made an agreement to just stop spending money on lawyers and just focus on doing what we do best and that's taking what spirit gives me and and what i can cultivate and teaching people how to use it putting it into play and putting our energy on abundance instead of lack so yes there was a fair bit of pain to get to that point of realization but was that one of your more recent uh i guess growth periods that was probably i don't know where she's at that's probably been uh since about uh probably around 2005 i think we just realized it was an endless stream of stress and expense and could see that the lawyers were the only ones winning well that's that makes sense i mean around the internet boom when it would probably became yeah super apparent right it was happy probably left and right yes it was and it was probably getting thrown in your face all the time yeah well what's interesting too uh just moving you know with technology you know uh copywriting and patenting things like good luck yeah you know you're not going to be able to anyway you know moving and moving ahead so you know businesses finding ways around it yeah and business is trying to you know find ways to to you know for example one of the models now i know you have a youtube channel for example is just to give out information which i always have and gain a large audience and then that can be monetized quite easily and it doesn't matter if people copy or whatever yeah and that brings up an important point one of the challenges probably the biggest challenge to my system is two things one i require that the individual do the work on themselves as an essential element of coaching or guiding other people or you really don't know what you're trying to get people to do right if you've never gotten yourself off sugar gluten or caffeine and you're telling someone else to do it you haven't really got any idea how hard this can be and how it affects your relationships your every part of you is touched by these things for for many reasons it takes a real commitment and a real discipline so if someone's taking the training like i said for the wrong reasons if they're looking for a you know ego paper they're not going to make that transition they're just interested in controlling people for money but if you're interested in helping people then you have to have that sense of confidence within yourself that you're authentically offering them something that works and it is possible to make that transition off a gluten off a sugar or out of a screwed up marriage or whatever it is very few people are willing to do that so that's my first barrier to my system is I heavily emphasize do not go out and do things to people that you are not willing to do for yourself or you're actually putting them and you in jeopardy and you will have very false expectations of these people and you will often think that they're not complying or that they're you'll blame it on the client when really it's not that the client's not trying the client's scared to death and doesn't know how to do it and you're making them go too fast and you're not giving them nearly the support they need to make a transition of that significance the second thing is that it is a lot of work to do this amount of study and grow yourself with the understanding of anatomy physiology diet lifestyle hormonal limbic emotional psychological I mean one has to be fairly honestly interested in the depth of what a human being is and what human life is about and not just dealing with it at superficial levels which already separates a grand majority of the people that could be my students out there just like you see a strata from religions of heavy polarity like Christianity Islam and Judaism but by the time up you get up to Zen Buddhism which there is no god and there's no one going to rescue you and there's no one going to burn you in hell either right but the transition from a daddy in the sky which means your psychological development is that of a child to nothing in the sky but pure potential that says whatever you create is what you get back be wise about how you use your awareness and your intention is a transition of significance so you know you've got a few people up there we'll call the Dalai Lama the leader of that consciousness and then down at the bottom you've got all the people preaching in church that Jesus is going to come burn you in hell but as long as you pay us enough you'll be safe. So Sal's made a comment about you know your YouTube channel stuff you know Generation X has proven that you know social media is going to drive the future of business Generation Z is going to demand it yeah what are you currently doing within your company right now to handle that a lot that's you know we we are faced with a pretty monumental task because most of the work that we teach requires hands-on training with an instructor and the cost of flying and the trouble of flying and the cost of food and the cost of hotels and the cost of time off work is quite prohibitive for the model that I kind of developed you know many years ago so we've been working with web-based technologies on and I've been working with live online seminars where you can see me and I could see you the student and I teach you just like I was in a classroom except you're sitting in your house in Germany or Switzerland or Australia and I'm sitting in my office right here and we've broken up like we did eat moving we did HLC one online which is a comprehensive version of how to eat moving be healthy we broke it into 15 shorter lessons so a person could sit there do that little lesson get whatever they needed and if they have questions they can either contact the institute or hire a mentor whatever and I've been finding that I can do just as good a job the only exception is I can't show you how to mobilize an atlas or you know check the integrity of the anterior cruciate ligament hands-on so what we have been doing is we've been taking as much of the education as we can putting it into either prepackaged online training sessions and then we have mentorship meetings with instructors or they come in for hands-on training for the material that they covered online so now that you've gone through the theory of it you've seen us demonstrate this you've tried a few of them with your partner at home we're going to come put you through the training hands on and test you but that brought the number of hands-on group meetings down significantly because they can do about 90% of the training remotely so I'm also running mastery groups now where people that want to develop themselves to their capability whether it be a holistic lifestyle coach or a check four quadrant coach which is my most recent and most comprehensive program or a patient I do I probably do 90% of my work through Skype and I've been doing that for years all over the world and and people come to see me maybe once every three to six months usually for two to four days at a time and then I do deep personal work such as healing work or shamanic work or the things that I can't do without them here but I do all the development and the progressive day by day growth and development through Skype and so I have I am just feeling overjoyed because Penny and I traveled the world for 20 plus years non-stop giving hundreds of presentations worldwide making it around the globe at least twice a year every year for a very long time and I just became completely and utterly exhausted of moving so much and also just got tired of constantly outputting and being in front of so many people all the time and having to really struggle to do my tai chi and find a tree in the middle of some cement disaster of a city like New York to meditate with or trying to find food and so the technology timing is beautiful because right now the technology works well enough that I can do a fantastic job coaching people at a distance and it's at a time when I don't want to travel but I've been testing these groups and the results are phenomenal it literally is like I'm just coaching you right here but you're just through a window an electronic window and so I'm we're all working to make our courses much more accessible and easier in smaller chunks you know one of the things about my courses they're very intensive you know they range from five to nine days long and you're getting more information sometimes in a day than you get in a university in a year when it comes right down to rock solid stuff you've got to know not just theory and fluff this allows people more time to digest and we set up these mentorship groups to guide people along and forum so they can talk to each other and get questions answered so it's a it's a it's a transition but I'm excited because the technology is there to support it and I'm working at getting more of my core information out to the public things like my book how to eat move and be healthy movement that matters you are what you eat audio books the last four doctors e-book I got piles and my whole pps success master program is 12 online lessons helping you address the 12 most common challenges that stop people from achieving their dreams and being healthy in life so I'm I'm excited because it's a time that I'm ready to stop moving and and output and on my own terms and the world is ripe for that right now so we're digging it what are a few just key things you could tell someone like a listener who is not familiar with your your your your courses and your philosophies that you can tell them on let's say nutrition what would be because you mentioned sugar gluten and I know you just for illustrated purposes and I do know you talk a lot about those things but what are some key things that you could tell someone like okay here's some easy takeaways when it comes to and diet and if you would compare it to what most of the industry is talking about because I feel like you know a lot of it is different and although you're hearing some a lot of it now I mean you know avoiding gluten now it's kind of gone mainstream but I mean how long we've been talking about avoiding gluten for yeah but even the people I feel that are doing that it's like a fad versus yeah with 90 98 yeah exactly I mean what are some good key things that someone could take away just certain well I start with what western price identified to be the very source of what caused disease and native tribes that first made contact with white man and that's what we call the four white devils so pasteurized dairy white sugar processed sugar white flour and sodium chloride white table salt those are the four I call them the four devils that's my name for them so if you get rid of if you get off of pasteurized dairy and onto raw dairy then you're getting food with enzymes in it and that's important if you get off of processed table sugar and start using natural sources of sweetener whether it be stevia or fruit juice or honey or there's many things you can use I mean I could give you a long list of them but but switching from synthetic and or highly processed to natural is critical because there's nutrition in it and there's a whole rainbow of options that you know from hardcore healthy to somewhere in between and then if you switch from sodium chloride which is actually a poison to the body so you know sea salt salt in its natural state has typically got at least 40 different minerals in it and up to 40 plus trace minerals trace elements nutritional elements from the ocean itself so when you take sodium chloride you're actually using one molecule there's nowhere in nature you can find a sodium chloride molecule all by itself and eat it so when someone goes to tables uh from sea salt high quality sea salt they're getting a wide variety of minerals and they're getting a wide variety of trace elements that help regulate the hormonal system for one in the body and it actually becomes a source of nutrition so because those four are at at kind of the foundation of the standard american diet which we call s ad standard american diet crap carbohydrates refined foods additives and preservatives so the standard american diet is sad crap that's great is that yours that worked out too well you know I don't know uh I've had that in my slide shows it might have come from dr oliver who's a great uh physician and nutritionist and who's helped me build my programs years ago but uh it's a fact and so do you see that the simple transition is stop eating pasteurized dead anything because it's dead uh milk is the first one because that's one of the most common food allergies and intolerances in the world actually not just the united states um go from dead salt to real minerals because those are critical hormone regulators and and many other things um go from um white flour to whole grain but now I would say get a food intolerance test to make sure that you don't put a gluten containing grain in there and if you have a gluten intolerance you better take all grains out to your gut heels because once your gut starts to leak then you will create antibodies against any food you're eating because there's nothing keeping them from moving into the bloodstream the gut wall is is permeable right I actually did a gut I actually did a food intolerance test during a period of time when I was having very bad autoimmune issues and I was intolerant to a whole array of foods and I took a test later after I had you know taken them all out I allowed my gut to heal and I was surprised to find that there were only a few leftover and I did not have intolerances to many of the foods anymore um I had experience exactly what you're talking about yeah and the ones that last the longest in other words if you were to stay on a four-day rotation diet like I teach and then retest yourself in another six months you might find another one of them or two of them drop off and then another six months later but sometimes you reach the point where the immune system like for example eggs dairy um beef um chicken the more of rice is the most common thing that people are allergic to in Japan for example the more a person eats any food the more likely they are to develop immune reaction to it if their gut's leaking and the number one cause a leaky gut syndrome is stress which is out through the roof today so uh the point I'm making is you can reach a point where the immune system becomes so sensitized that no period of time will allow you to ever eat it again it's just like it's too indoctrinated you've gone too far you've gone too far and then now there there are some energy medicine techniques that have been tried and some people claim that they work well I've just never seen any evidence of it in my practice what is the four-day rotational diet they're talking about that's in my book how to eat moving be healthy basically because it takes on on average 56 to 72 hours for a food stuff to go from mouth to anus so you have two types of timing um you have retention time which is if you eat red beets the last time you see red in the toilet would be how long you retain the beet the first time you see the red beets in the toilet would be a measure of transit time how long it took to get from mouth to anus but I but once you eat something it gets strung out through the digestive process as the body works with it and and you know manipulates it and some things move faster so that red beet if you take a red beet chew it up it'll first show up in about 14 to 16 hours in a normal body and it'll last show up in 56 to 72 hours and while it's in your body your immune system can react to it for as long as one atom of that stuff's in your body your immune systems shall we say monitoring it so a four-day rotation diet is built so you can eat anything you want from a list of foods on day one so you might have a pork day on day one and I have genetically developed it through taxonomy so that in the four days each of the foods on any one of the four days has no genetic similarity to the foods on the other days I see okay so you eat let's call it chicken on day one beef on day two pork on day three fish on day four and only then do you go back and eat any of the meats or vegetables on any of those other colors you can eat beef all day on beef day you can eat eggs all day on egg day you can eat squash all day on squash day and your favorite romaine lettuce all day on the day that it fits with the flesh that you're on that way because of that it's a four day rotational cycle but the retention cycle ends in 56 to 72 hours so it means that your immune system gets a 24 plus hour break from exposure to any genus of food and that calms the immune system down so it doesn't keep on putting posters all over the wall wanted bad guy named chicken right the more you stimulate the immune system the more it becomes like the fbi putting pictures of your face all over wanted with a reward because it wants to get you out of there because it's considered a threat to your own survival and the longer that goes on the longer it takes in rehabilitation to get those foods back but many people have overstimulated so they reach a critical point you can't come back anymore so you must cringe at the way bodybuilders eat with the same foods six times a day yeah every day yeah bodybuilders and everyone else you know i saw research once i saw two independent research studies years ago and it was very shocking and this is the kind of way i work i look at a lot of different angles on things one research was looking into exercise how many exercises did the average person know they found the average person if they interviewed them and had them demonstrate how many exercise they know the average person in society knew 10 to 12 exercises found a completely different study that looked at thousands of people's diets and found the average person only 8 10 to 12 different foods their entire lifetime so there there you see the mind's capacity to handle novelty it's very limited unless your parents or your elders or your your influencers guided you there so once a society gets programmed into this kind of minimalistic thing and you you know if you talk to ben greenfield you probably i'm sure he talked about we need a lot of variety for nutrients we have to have a wide number of varieties we used to eat with the seasons you know you if you're if there's a pheasant there you get it you don't say well i'm waiting for the doc you take the pheasant right um so we're constantly getting a flow of nutrients and we moved a lot for a long time in human history we're a nomadic so we weren't eating from the same soils here if you go to Safeway and you buy pork it was probably raised in the same commercial farm for the last 100 generations of that animal eating commercially raised farm of animal foods that are full of fungal mycotoxins that are the low-grade foods that can't be sold to human because they're too nutritionally deficient so you're eating an animal that's already sick and already deficient now if you keep eating from the animal it would be like a farmer who never checks the composition of his soil and checks the microorganism population to see where the imbalances are and adjust it so the food gets less and less and less and less nutritious and so how do people expect to be healthy with those kinds of nutrition problems then they go get drugged by doctors and get surgeries instead of looking at the real deal so the importance of the rotation diet is not just about excluding foods it's about i love it when people have a lot of food and tolerances because i say fantastic now you get to go to hindu markets and chinese markets and japanese markets and find out all sorts of vegetables and fruits and meats that you've never ate before i think oh i could never do that okay good if you don't want to do that then you don't need my help you're committed to being sick and just take the drugs and go that path i'm cool with that if that's what you want but you either take this as an opportunity to learn grow and become wiser or you take an opportunity to become less conscious more drug and more disabled right and so many people are blown away when they find out you know what ostrich tastes like or what eel tastes like and all these things and all these neat vegetables they never heard of and their health gets great and they learn that there's so much more out there and they get so excited and i say good now let's just look at that same principle in the rest of your life and it makes it obvious they say okay i've been being dogmatic and restricted with my spiritual beliefs my exercise beliefs and practices dot dot dot right so a health crisis is actually probably the greatest spiritual opportunity you'll ever have because pain is a great awakener of consciousness because you have a real motive to change your behavior and be observant excellent yeah makes sense do you follow that same philosophy with exercise rotating yes uh it's much more scientific than that but as a general rule of thumb for a general population yes you'd want to like if you look at my book how to eat moving be healthy i have example exercise programs that are so when you do your question here is the more total stress you're under the easier your exercise program should be and the more oriented it should be towards balancing your internal systems or harmonizing biological oscillators which are the brain the heart and the gut the more fit you are i mean the more vital you are the more healthy you are the less your total stress the more oriented you are to being able to work out which means to spend resources right to work out literally means to spend to push energy and resources out of you like if you're going to light a fire you got to have some gasoline to run it with and the more the fire burns the more gasoline it takes gasoline being fuel but if your diet and lifestyle is not replenishing the fire and you keep the fire burning well then the fire just burns out and that's called adrenal fatigue or chronic fatigue or any number of chronic diseases so the um uh orientation that I have toward exercise is one the best exercise in the world is the one you'll do regularly so we got to start there right and if you can't get someone to do something they like to do then exercise is really not another task or another item on their to-do list which is irritating so first I get them to do something that they love enough to do regularly once they've gotten the habit of exercising and they know how important it is and how good it feels then I say now let's improve that and look at exercises that will bring you movement nutrition or that would be better for your internal state or would would be better for you to increase muscle strength or muscle mass because you need it because you're a park ranger or a police woman or a policeman or a nurse for example who's got to move people off of gurneys all the time depending on the level that the individuals at whether they'd be a seriously injured person or whether they'd be a seriously competitive athlete those two need the highest levels of complexity of exercise science and in Mike Salemi is an example of someone who had a very very complex challenge one because the sport is brutal and requires very very intense training that most people if you want to do what Mike did and when you know world championship type event there's no room for farting around so it takes tremendous discipline and you have to learn a lot and you have to learn a lot of self-management tactics and so I taught him about monitoring his morning heart rate which is technique that I developed and how to read that and how to adjust his food every day based on his feedback I taught him my system for managing his hormonal system everything that he talked to you guys about that's the basic system that I developed over years from monitoring and managing elite level athletes and even serious amateur athletes and so I put all that together but the the key point that I'm making is I can make it very simple when simplicity is the first and most important thing but if you're injured sick or you're trying to achieve a high ranking position such as an Olympic medal or a world level competition then the complexity has to be there to meet the demands of the environment. Paul when you look at the the current state of the fitness industry right now what frustrates you the most? First of all you know some consider me the father of functional exercise because I was one lecturing on all this stuff back in the day where there's nothing in gyms but machines and I was showing them the science of human movement and how this would ruin athletes and how it did in fact one of the professional rugby teams in Australia when I got there and analyzed their whole team because they were the top 10 players were injured I took one look at these athletes and I said I need to see your gym they said why I said because these guys have all the common motor problems and injuries that come from machine training and not functional exercise and they both the two guys that were the doctor and the therapist I mean the strength coach both stern white and I go okay I just hit the nail on the head so we walk down in their gym and they had a quarter of a million dollars of cybex and you know what was it nautilus and and one of the the lever ones I can't remember hammers hammers yeah oh yes and they were so proud of that and I said this is all shit this is why you're getting your ass kicked and this is why your athletes aren't rehabilitating and I gave them demonstrations to prove it I did things at 100 and then 185 pounds that the strongest athletes on their team couldn't even come close to doing and it freaked them right out and they said how the hell are you doing that I said because I know how to train and this is not how you train this is how you make poor investments and expensive athletes and they said what should we do I said well my advice to you would be call your the team that gives you the most trouble tell them you're expanding your facility and you're bringing in a bunch of new equipment and offer them this equipment at half price and that's exactly what they did low and behold that team bought it it did it's a true story it's awesome and then we moved in a bunch of custom built cable columns olympic platforms swiss balls medicine balls dumb bells and I taught not only their professional team but their entire farm team how to lift weights properly and taught them every every basic lift as part of my consultation for the team and you know the so the frustrating thing is that we now have gone from using machines and very very functionally inept exercise technologies to using highly complex functional technologies that require very careful preparation with mass people that are not ready for it yeah so you like crossfit well you know crossfit is uh one of the categories where people do not know what they're getting into but they get swept into the hype into the group thing and the rah rah rah the go go go and and there's the ego needing to establish safety for itself right that's in our story that's me when I was still trying to learn to beat my dad up to feel safe right so there's always some kind of ass kicker motive in there but that comes at the expense of not being prepared and the human body is very complex so when you take a bunch of people eating four white devils and shit food and can this and microwave that and fast food this and steel bars and metrics and all this bullshit really poison and then trying to exercise at a level that requires professional preparation you know you have to go through the stages technique technique too right gosh I got pictures of people in classes like that crossfit or otherwise that look like they're about to die yet they're in competitions and everyone's cheering them on I'm like this yeah giving birth is less painful than what I'm watching here with these clean and presses yeah so I to make sure you're clear I don't have anything against the sport that would be like having something against a knife I would just say before you start juggling knives you ought to start with oranges great analogy and then go to a knife juggling contest right and so crossfit and some of these you know even programs like px90 they're very very dangerous to do if you're not developed so you get you know a term I coined actually is the fit sick person you get people that are very fit and look good in the mirror but on the inside they're exhausted burnt out and they're a functional medicine field day right and they make functional we see people like that all the time well that's because the world's full of them so my point is the pendulum looks like it went from here to way over yeah yeah so we went from people not even knowing what a medicine ball was or how to use dumbbells properly to riding down the road in the back of a push-up truck doing a swiss ball push jacks on top of four balance boards while holding a kettlebell bottoms up and calling that exercise and uh you know it's just like you know so contorted but it's so classically American I mean only Americans could take yoga and turn it into combat yoga you know it's just like completely inverted body weight through heat yeah just you know it seems as though our culture has an affinity for self-inflicted torture and it's almost like the more you can show someone else how much torture you can take the more of a hero everyone's martyr syndrome yeah you know it's just like this is non-productive and it leads to a lot of problems but the good news for a guy like me is it always brings a spiritual crisis because what do you do when you're when you can't get your muscles to keep growing when your dick won't stand up and you could squat a thousand pounds but you still can't get along with your wife and kids right now there's no answer for you in the gym anymore and if the church counselor can't straighten you out then your health gets worse and worse and your sense of self-esteem gets worse and worse because the the the sort of I'm a badass your house of cards yet that you're a paper boat as Osha would say right and and so it brings a spiritual crisis and that's the perfect time for me as a teacher to have my hands on somebody because they've already thoroughly tested bad ideas so it's easy to show them that there's better ways to do it yeah I I get called out a bit because uh I get I get frustrated when I see you brought up the machines and you know there's this wave in this generation now and especially with social media that you know anybody can become insta famous you know where they have a million people following them because they look sexy or whatever and it's it's tough being you know professionals in the industry and seeing some of these people providing information to the masses you know teaching them how to do a sideways chest press on a on a fucking hammer strength machine like yeah what are you doing you know and then I go to the gym and I and you start seeing it duplicate all over and I'm like oh my god we're going backwards yeah and but you know that the paradox of that is is that if you study consciousness and you study uh physics and quantum physics only the people that resonate with that are attracted to it you understand that like if we start talking about deep spiritual practices that are a long ways away from Christianity Islam or Judaism we're going to lose a lot of people because they don't they're not there yet so the point I'm making is consciousness is stratified so the same way people grow to be more enlightened in how to love their partner or more enlightened in how to garden or more enlightened in what God really is they grow more enlightened with what exercise really is and how to use it so the the you know pain is the chief motivator it's just a fact so when people are at the level of I gotta be somebody different I gotta make sure everyone in the gym sees me I'll dye my hair red I'll shave half my head and I'll do the double double back sided dog twister with a triple uh fuck on it or something you know um can I write down something I want to try that you know so the point that I'm making is you see there's that real need for attention which is usually an indication of a broken family situation like I described my own to be and then they come to an impasse where that doesn't work anymore so that you're saying the next time that I see a kid doing a sideways chest press I should walk up and say how's your relationship with your mom just fucking just right breaking down right there make them start start crying inside the gym I'll tell you what Paul talking to you uh just carry those with you when you do it yeah talking to you do you find it difficult to because I gotta imagine you blow people out of the water sometimes like you know you've got answers uh to you know simple questions and then you get very complex and do you find people go okay I don't want to listen to you that's just I just blowing me out of the water is it is that do you find that difficult with a lot of people or do you communicate differently to depending on the individual that you're talking to yeah yeah are we having a different are we having a different conversation right now because of who we are what we are searching versus yeah to some degree um I it depends you know as many types of conversations if I'm having a conversation with a client then I have to be very careful to make sure that the conversations most likely to inspire the person to move in the direction that they have come to me to move which is what I call their dream if I'm talking to a group of people and I'm giving a lecture on how to eat move and be healthy and I say I got news for you the way you're eating could be the biggest factor and whether or not your spine is stable and your abdominals are ever going to be visible and they might think that's pure bullshit all you got to do is exercise like Helen you'll have a great washboard but they don't seem to realize that they've been doing that for years and it hasn't worked or they have the washboard but they can't shit or they you know or their dick don't stand up you know which is very common so they they they yes you do get this stratification and you know when I start talking on deeper concepts in conferences you'll see three or four or five people just get up and walk out of the room but I just know that they're not do you say some shit to them on their way out or do you just let it go no I don't I don't want to minimize the chance of them coming back when they're ready you don't say something your mom loves you yeah no there's deeper meaning in the world yeah no I say it's not your fault I save dragon poking for those that want to poke this dragon you know so when people are getting cocky and lectures and thinking they're know-it-alls I usually ask them questions that if answered honestly make it clear to everybody in the room that they don't really know what they're talking about speaking of that who has challenged you most what interview what conversation who is who is oh there was a guy named Dave Driscoll in Australia who's got like three phd's because you know we all know Dave Driscoll is right you're Dave Driscoll I think I did I get the right name yes yeah I think so yeah yeah yeah right yeah I think so in Australia um he works for Met no Gatorade uh he was violently opposed to my system and worked for uh I can't remember the name of the big personal training organization over there already we have motive right yeah and so he was upset because they were about 60 percent of the education that this company was using and they have 2,000 trainers at the time was coming by way of the Czech Institute but he was trying to sell their educational system so he kept going to the owners and saying how bad my system was and it was really upsetting my instructor my chief instructor over there Donald Carr because the the owners were actually starting to believe the guy and he was telling them how much money you could make if you just would sell this stuff and get rid of this Czech stuff and stop the trainers from thinking that way blah blah blah so we had a meeting where Donald said Paul I'm really worried because the owners are now telling me they want me to cut back on the Czech education and take more this guy's education but this guy's stuff is everything we teach not to do and I don't want this to happen what do I do I said no problem if he's so confident in himself ask him if he will be willing to debate me publicly and we'll make it an event and we'll invite people and we're gonna film it and if he beats me on film then we'll share it with the world if I beat him on film we'll share it with the world well we had the debate and he asked me did you film this yes oh we need yes we have to be able to finish the story yeah yeah so this will be the show notes for sure yeah yeah so I and he contacted me by email and asked could he bring five other PhDs with him shut the fuck up oh no I said bring 50 oh yes bring 50 bring everyone yeah I don't care you know I'm I'm I didn't say this out loud but inside myself I am not debating debatable principles water is fucking necessary food needs variety I mean nothing that I nothing I'm debating is rocket science right it's just everything that's so important that nobody wants to pay money to learn in a university so they bury it under a pile of bullshit and fluff and and you know occasionally some good stuff but anyhow so none of his guys showed up we had 250 something people show up to the debate and I won at a vote I think it was 83% voted that I was the winner and the rest voted for him and then he rescinded he had a lawyer rescind his contract so that we couldn't show the video oh killed it so Paul a lot of people say that you are dogmatic about health in fitness that you got to do everything perfect and this is the way it's got to be defined by no defined dogma first yeah right dogma is a fixed set of beliefs so if you study the science of mind you can look into Dr. Daniel Siegel's work he's probably the psychiatrist who's done the most to help us understand the mind of anybody so far first one to give a definition of mind he says mind is an embodied process that regulates the flow of energy and information and in his teachings of mind in the middle he shows a river and a boat going down the river or yeah that's one of his models and he says the in the middle of the river of mind is integration one bank is rigidity in the other bank is chaos so rigidity and dogma mean the same thing okay so fixed ideas that are not adaptable to changes in the environment okay or remember the only universal constant there is is change so when someone's ideas do not leave enough flexibility to adapt to a changing environment they become rigid dangerous and that's a dogma but i want you to know that the actual function of dogma comes from all the way back in the beginnings of religion in its attempt to keep that which must be practiced as a pure form pure okay so there's some there is some purity and yes yeah if you if you want to study there's a documentary by houston smith um on the uh the nature of fundamentalism which is dogma and and so what houston smith who is one of the world most respected experts in world religion and someone who i studied extensively shows is that dogma in its original form was the church fathers and mothers being very clear about what must be practiced authentically in order for you to get the spiritual growth and development that the religion intended for its people the growth and development and integration of people so uh when people say i'm dogmatic yes there are certain things i'm dogmatic about if you take anybody and you do not restore optimal flexibility and make sure that they have adequate stability for the tasks or and exercises or practices or sports they want to engage in and then progress them into uh baseline levels of strength into functional strength and then to sport specific strength somewhere in there if you're doing for example crossfit and your body's out of balance you have muscle recruitment problems and you've got core problems and you're doing what now is highly specific strengthening you have skipped four key stages of development and you're going to get hurt and you're just going to be a good-looking hurt person wow did we just become best for i know okay so finally somebody said that yeah okay so do you see that my dogma is based on a lifetime of study and treating thousands of people from fat old ladies to yogis and meditators to the best athletes in the world with world records and and taking people out of medical retirement and hard evidence that my techniques work undeniable on many many letters and books and you know read laird hamilton's book he talks about my work with him right in there um and many others so uh i am dogmatic about that which must be kept pure like uh drinking half your body weight and ounces of water and realizing the best solution for pollution is dilution and waters nature's chief solvent is is something you can't get around you know if you want to party good party but eat good food and drink good water so that the party doesn't kill you or you don't get to party more you get to party less so if you want to party let's do it right and let's get clear on what you need to be dogmatic about money to friday so you can enjoy the weekend right so a dogma actually has a very specific function of stabilizing concepts ideas or energetic structures that need to be in place you could say carpenters are dogmatic about having a good foundation well anybody that says you don't need a foundation is either living in a bubble theoretically or literally or a shitty house or they don't know why they why their doors don't fit and their windows don't fit but they got a million dollar chandelier hanging over their dinner table right but they got uh cheese whiz as a foundation on their house so i am dogmatic about what is important to be dogmatic about and when it comes to assessing people's bodies and designing exercise programs properly and assessing what's wrong in people's lives there are certain necessary steps and if they're missed no matter what you fantasize you're missing essentials and basics are basics because they have to be adhered to and when you look at ufc fighters and the best boxers in the world and the best athletes in the world in interviews after they've won the championship or the world record or the medal how many times have you heard them say i stuck to the basics yeah every time right the greatest fighters always say i stuck to the basics they didn't say oh i learned the double twisted dog fucker and practice that until i could impress everybody i need to do that it's level figure that one out level four they say i drilled the basics when i was a boxer on the army boxing team we used to spend hours till your arms were dying doing the theme same thing you do in a beginning boxing class with the best fighters in the world jab they've called out numbers one jab two one two one two three one two three four and we did this information for hours unlike it's like the old saying the young kid says i goes to a martial arts master he says i want to become a badass and the master says okay fine today we're going to begin with the front snap kick he teaches him a front snap kick and he says i want you to do a hundred of those he does a hundred he waits and waits and waits the master comes and the master says how'd it go he said good let me look okay you need to do some more another hundred well he does this about five times then the next day the kid comes back he does the same thing the third day the kid says to the master i said can we do something else i'm just sick and tired of these front snap kicks the master says no a hundred front snap kicks i'll be back in a while and the kid says well this is just bullshit i'm not learning anything and the master grabs him by the neck stuffs his head in the fountain and waits till he's about to drown pulls his head out of the fountain and says when you're as hungry to learn as you are for air come back i think that was mr miyagi who i don't think mr i was that aggressive wasn't it bruce lee that said i don't fear the man that knows three thousand kicks i fear the man that knows one kick three thousand different ways or something like that or bruce lee said i do not fear the man who's tried a thousand kicks once i fear the man who's done one kick a thousand times that's the one right there very good so that's a dogma that what is he saying you must do something ten thousand times to be a master of it and if you're not then you don't have a good dogma as a foundation so you know how to throw 48 different kicks but you don't have subconscious mastery of them and when someone's moving faster than your nervous system can process if you don't have unconscious mastery then you can only react consciously well i got news for you you don't have time a good fighter will hit you three times before that impulse gets from your brain to your hands now knowing that and and explaining that very well how do you not become dogmatic or so attached to that dogma where uh you know you allow yourself to have a cheeseburger and a french fire every once in a while because you're not so you know hell bent on everything has to be this how do you allow flexibility or what does that look like to you well what do you explain that well that that really really goes to what it means to be a healthy person and um if a dogma is stopping you from living and being creative and playful then you are losing the essence of life itself so everything becomes outcome oriented i have to do this everything's a squared plus b squared equals c squared and there's no uh creative impulse in there there's no everything's always trying to become work toward an objective but it takes all the awareness away from the process and life is a process life is not an outcome it's a process so if a person uh needs the freedom of eating donuts once in a while and the stress of not eating the donuts is actually more detrimental to their overall psychology and physiology than the stress of eating donuts within a range of manageability then i say eat the donuts but when the donuts are actually stopping you from accomplishing your dreams goals and objectives then it's no longer a functional dogma or it's no longer even functional play it's now um some form of distraction some form of addiction or some form of medication in other words what was playful now becomes some sort of medication and then you always have to look for what is it that they're medicating and that's where the deep work that i teach the more advanced practitioners comes in because that really all behaviors are the expressions of beliefs so you have to get to the beliefs so when in other words when someone's using things for reward and play to the degree that it's stopping them from achieving their objective it's no longer reward or play it's a delusion so my philosophy is you can do anything you want and a healthy person is not someone who has a perfect body or a perfect skin or any idea like that a healthy person is someone who realizes that the way they manage themselves either increases their ability to engage life and create meaningful relationships and meaningful outcomes in their pursuits or it's getting in the way of them so if drinking a glass of wine at night makes you feel rewarded for your day and and gives you a little loosening and a little sense of freedom or smoking a joint that's good but if it gets to the point where you're smoking joints and drinking wine for breakfast and your body starting to fall apart and your dick doesn't work or your your sex drive is gone or you know any of the things that are meaningful to make life go now you've you're not healthy anymore I feel like you've seen a lot of non-working dicks well you know if you look well that's party I mean I think that's a sign man it's a sign of health it's a sign of sympathetic stress it's sympathetic overload it's a key indicator that a male is under too much stress a woman loses her sex drive so her she doesn't have a dick to stand up but uh if a male is under too much stress it shuts down the reproductive system as a coping mechanism because why would you want to reproduce another living organism in an environment where the parent organism cannot survive I literally just talked about this the only thing that'll affect my libido is poorly is stress the only thing yeah everything else is no problem I connected that you know for sure once I hit my 30s I totally noticed that in fact it's something that I know if I ever noticed that in our relationship I always tell Katrina like take me away it's time for a vacation we need to get away it's not working I need to de-stress I know I know that and I can I can feel it I can sense it and that's something that I make sure that I get away and do that reset you know well I have to say Paul you're easily one of the most interesting people that we've interviewed and that I've met and I know we have a lot of listeners who are like it just like I thought very polarizing we're gonna have listeners that are going to be like oh my god great information awesome he gets it and we're gonna have listeners that are gonna be like what is he talking about and I appreciate that I actually appreciate that quite a bit because it it's gonna spur conversation it's gonna spur debate we welcome it you know you have a lot of what you say especially in regards to things our resonates with us for sure well when especially in regards to exercise and nutrition is a lot of stuff that we've talked about on the show a lot of the other stuff that you go on is definitely beyond the scope of the some of the things we talk about but I found also very fascinating and thought provoking whether you know people agree or not I think it's important that we provoke thought debate and discussion with them people because that's where yeah where growth happens so it's been pleasure having you yeah thank you for letting us into your home we truly appreciate it my pleasure place and just to close you know people don't realize this but uh conflict is an important part of a healthy relationship like if we don't really explore each other's ideas and uh work on each other in order to make us demonstrate evidence that those ideas work then there is no legitimate growth right you know you you have to go test an idea to see if it works before you can have an honest opinion about it but if you don't test the idea and you think you have an honest opinion you don't have an honest opinion you have a fear-based dogma right if he's right then I'm wrong well what if you're both right what if what you're doing is right for you and what he's doing is right for him but until you talk about enough and experiment enough in other words open yourself to the natural conflict as long as the conflict is in the spirit of higher intelligence or or higher wisdom or growth and development but if the conflict is all about screw you you're wrong and I don't like you then you might as well just go back to the christian crusades and uh now we're back to the damaging kind of dogma you know so uh my only reason for saying that is I'd be excited if it stirs up a lot of controversy I'd excited if it people uh you know find themselves being triggered because using when we're triggered someone put their finger right on the on our growth potential excellent there you go well thanks we'll sign off with that listen if you like mine pump leave us a five star rating review on itunes if we like your review we pick it you'll get a free mind pump t-shirt also go to youtube check out mind pump tv we put out a new video every single day you can also find us on instagram at mine pump radio you can find me at mine pump sal adam at mine pump adam and justin at mine pump justin thank you for listening to mine pump if your goal is to build and shape your body dramatically improve your health and energy and maximize your overall performance check out our discounted rgb super 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