Kyle Kingsbury Podcast - #12 How to Get Back Up with Kyle Kingsbury

Episode Date: December 18, 2017

The Onnit Podcast Host and Onnit's Direcor of Human Optimization Kyle Kingsbury sits down for a solocast to talk about depression, drugs, Psychedelics and a process for personal growth. Connect with Kyle Kingsbury on Twitter and on Instagram Get 10% off at Onnit by going to Onnit.com/Podcast       Onnit on  Twitter  Instagram Facebook Show Notes “How to Eat, Move and Be Healthy” by Paul Chek Float Tanks A New Earth by Eckhart Tolle Art of Breath Brain Mackenzie Wim Hof Method The Science of Mindfulness by Dr Ronald Siegel Waking Up by Sam Harriss Concussion Repair Manual by Dr Dan Engle “Wired to Eat” by Robb Wolf Gene Keys by Richard Rudd   

Welcome to the On It Podcast. I'm your host, Kyle Kingsbury, and this week I'm joined by your host, Kyle Kingsbury. It's a fucking solo cast, and I'm going to rock this shit for you. We're going to talk about some heavy stuff, so prepare to be floored. Actually, no, not quite that heavy, but we are going to dive deep into the psyche. I have a fair amount of experience with a lot of things in life, but definitely with depression. And different people that I look up to have come out and talked about this in length into their own personal hero's journey, I should put it.

Aubrey Marcus has in the past. Tim Ferriss did not too long ago. I think he did a pretty cool video series with Vince Vaughn talking about fear and depression. And so I'm going to take you through my own personal journey and talk about these things. We're also going to dive deep into prescription medicines and the pros and cons of those things and a little bit into plant medicines and a little bit into just the best practices for how we fucking tackle stress, how we get the best out of life, and how we can conquer our own fears and our own personal demons. Hope you guys enjoy this one.

This is coming straight from the heart. Thank you for listening. Welcome to the Onnit Podcast. I'm your host, Kyle Kingsbury, Director of Human Optimization here at Onnit. And today I'm going to interview myself,yle kingsbury it is a solo podcast and uh yeah we're going to talk about some heavy shit today so strap yourselves in uh it ends very lightheartedly and uh we pretty much we i will walk you through the path that has gotten me here today. I will walk you through a bio that really no one has heard before. So told for the first time on this podcast. I knew when I first got into podcasting before working with Onnit, this is something I would share and discuss. Other people have kind of come out and discussed their path to success.

And this certainly isn't a, look at me now. This is more of just the road, the hard road traveled. And I think that anyone you look at in life, whether they're successful or not, has been through some shit. Everyone goes through stuff. And how we navigate those waters and what we do with it can make or break you. So, you know, looking into that stuff and being inspired by guys like Tim Ferriss, who's talked quite a bit about his depression, Vince Vaughn as well,

fear, things like that. You know, we're really going to dive into some of these topics uh i will dive into it as much as i can from a personal standpoint and speak uh as authentically as i can about my own issues and really what are the tools and techniques that have pulled me into a better quality of life and better understanding of purpose and meaning and just how to fucking live better. And I think that truly, you know, is the definition of total human optimization. That's the definition of what our goals are. No matter how you word that or how you structure that framework, we all want to live better. We all want to fucking get the most out of life. And life is tricky in that it always throws shit at you. It always finds ways to challenge us. And I think the more things

we have in the toolbox to help us and the better we are at catching ourselves in a state of being that's not comfortable, the better we are to, you know, pull ourselves out of that state and shift our awareness to something that feels fucking better, you know, and that doesn't, we're going to talk about drugs, we're going to talk about all sorts of shit. So, all right, where do we start? We start at the beginning. And I'll preface this once for people listening. There's a tendency in our society to compare. So when I talk about some of the things that I dealt with that were hard for me, it's by no means stating I had it worse than you. It's by no means stating that people have not had it worse. My mother had it far worse than I did. My father had it far worse than I did.

My wife had it far worse than I did. And those are people that I know very, very intimately and closely. There are horror stories of childhoods, and thankfully mine was not that horrific, but it was still enough to, uh, you know, cause some shit. So, um, with that preface and knowing there, there, there need not be a comparison. I'm fully aware that everyone has their stuff to deal with. And, and even looking at that, there was a study done. I like to throw studies in here and there. There was a study done that showed children that had been beat, physically abused by their parents,

did better in life than children who had been neglected by their parents. So if you imagine, and this isn't to knock wealth, but if you imagine the rich dad who works all day and takes family vacations with only his wife or whoever, and is never around with his kids and lets a nanny raise those kids or however that works out. If they're not there, if they don't show love in some way, that kid was more fucked up down the road than the kid who had been beat because the kid who had been beat felt love from his parents. He knew or she knew the parents cared on some level. And again, this is not to illustrate that you should beat your kids. And it's not to illustrate that there's a problem with working long hours and making money to put food on the table. But as with all things in life, there's balance, right? And to show that you give a fuck about your kids

means more than than anything else long term to those children and that's pretty much what this study showed so all right uh yeah my parents fought quite a bit um i wasn't physically abused i was spanked and shit i think like most kids from my generation where I'm 35 years old. The fighting constantly, I think, was one of the biggest issues that I dealt with. My family unit felt very unstable and felt like shit. I mean, I was on fucking eggshells from my earliest memories, walking on eggshells. And, um, there was times where my parents split. I went, you know, six plus months without seeing my mother before the age of five, a lot of stuff. Um,

a lot, a lot of stuff there. Um, I'm going to have to take some deep breaths here and there, but I remember seeing a therapist at six or seven. And oddly enough, the first time I had considered suicide was at seven years old. And it wasn't a consideration like, oh, you know, this life sucks. How can I get out of this? Let me think about suicide. It was fucking vivid. I would lie in bed awake and think of all the ways I could kill myself and what the likelihood would be that I would succeed.

And I would think about taking one of my dad's rifles, but that my arms weren't long enough to reach the trigger, not knowing where he kept his handguns. I would think about if there was a way I could use the bow and arrow. Thought about jumping off of things, but we lived in a condominium at that point, and I knew I'd even asked my dad,

like, would I die if I swan dove off this thing? And he laughed, and he was like, why would you ask that? No, of course you wouldn't die. You'd break your neck or hurt your body real bad, but you wouldn't die. I don't think he realized I was asking because I wanted to fucking know. I wanted to know

what would do the job. And this wasn't how I thought all the time, but when shit hit the fan so often and you're in that kind of pain and that kind of stress and every time it comes back, it feels like there's fucking no way out. I think something that people go through, myself included, and again, I'm trying to illustrate my path here, this feeling of constriction. There's no fucking way out. There's no way this will improve. It'll always come back to be the same. And this level of sameness is so bad. I don't want to fucking live with it anymore. And, um, thankfully, you know, I was able to pull through those things. Uh, football

was a tremendous outlet for me when I started playing football at 10 years old, nine or 10 years old. Um, I had an outlet for my anger. I fought a lot growing up and fighting, you know, on the street was some of the most peaceful Zen moments of my early life. I felt complete satisfaction in being in a fight, complete satisfaction hitting somebody face to face in football, you know, put your face mask on them. This is pre CTE studies, pre awareness of that. You know, when we started playing football, they, they, they used to have us grab grass on all fours and butt heads with one another like fucking Rams. And it taught me how to hit hard, but I, I thoroughly enjoyed that. You know, there was a lot of kids that didn't, and I gravitated towards that.

It was an outlet, and I didn't mind if I experienced pain in order to dish out pain. That's for sure one of the precursors to why I was able to fight professionally. I think you have to be okay with receiving pain in order to dish it out. So having had some therapy and things like that, but really finding that outlet in football, that got me through a lot of tough times. Parents divorced at 13. And oddly enough, as I suspected for years, a weight had been lifted. My parents were less stressed out than they were before my interactions with my father were much better my relationship with him now is fucking incredible you know he's one

of my best friends and um football really got me through a lot and in college you know i went to arizona state university uh it was the number one party school in the nation right at the gate at 19 uh it was like fuck it let's go let's go ham and uh smoked weed every day i had a four-foot bong i named the big show uh i'd wake and bake and be high all day because i was not comfortable in my own skin i felt awkward in social interactions i was either the life of the party or, uh, just a fucking mute in the corner. Like, Oh, I don't, I don't like this place. I don't feel comfortable here. Really. It was me not being comfortable with me, not being comfortable in the way I interacted with people or trying to put on an act where I would please everyone and be the funniest guy there.

And, you know, I would see my relationship with alcohol. You know, I started drinking when I was 13 with my buddies. And I can't count how many times I blacked out drunk or snapped out of it in my underwear, just covered in vomit. And that was my relationship with with drugs and alcohol and in college it got it got worse not from the sense that um depression had sunk in but from the sense that the availability and the kinds of drugs i were using was not um they were the kind of drugs that fuck with your brain. And I'm going to dive into this stuff in detail. So cocaine and ecstasy were a big thing at ASU, probably still

are. And those things have repercussions on cognitive function as well as neurotransmitter production. So over time, even if I'm just partying on the weekends, that will systematically take me down over time. And I'm saying this because I'm going to discuss, as I have in the past, the difference between a good drug and a bad drug. And we can call them drugs. Hamilton from Hamilton's Pharmacopia on Viceland. It's an excellent show. And something he argues with people all the time when they talk about teacher plants and plant medicines and cannabis is a medicine. And, and I fucking agree. I think they're all great things, but if it's psychoactive, it's a drug. Coffee

is a drug. Caffeine is a drug. Nicotine is a drug. Uh, what we call legal and illegal. That's those are, those are agreements. They have little to do with what's beneficial to you and what's not. And especially regarding the legal stuff, prescriptions. I had a doctor at some point in college that was prescribing me. I told him I got anxious when I'm in public, so he prescribed me Valium. And then at a certain point in time, Valium didn't work anymore, so he prescribed me Xanax. Keep in mind, as I illustrate these drugs that I would call problematic, I know there's a large number of people that say, I can't live without that. It helps me in tremendous ways, and I don't see a downside to it.

I can accept that. But for me, these things did come with a downside. And the downside was if I didn't take them, there was a yo-yo effect. There was a rebound of anxiety that was greater than my baseline anxiety was to begin with. And so kind of going back and forth. And then, you know, you got uppers, downers, things that pick you up, give you energy, let you party all night, things that level you out, keep you calm, let you sleep at night. It was kind of like the mom in Requiem for a Dream. You know, it was not a good situation. Sport kept me in shape. It kept me lifting weights and doing things that

were good for my body. I didn't really know a lot about diet and nutrition at that point, so I was still eating like shit. And we'll dive into a little bit about how food can impact emotion and state of mind. But really what it boiled down to in college was this idea. When I got to college, I thought, I'll be a business major. I'll do this, I'll do that. And just to stay eligible for football, because I didn't do well in school, I didn't get good grades, they kept changing my major around. And this is not a blaming on the education system. This is a blaming on me for partying too much and not taking school seriously. But by the end of college, my senior year um i had like a

bachelor of interdisciplinary studies basically two minors to equal a major and i'm looking down the pipeline at what that means and it didn't fucking matter to me anymore like i didn't give a fuck about my degree i didn't give a fuck about what I would use it for. And I certainly never wanted to be stuck in a cubicle. Now I work in a job that has a cubicle and realize a lot of people listening to this work in cubicles, but that frightened me. The idea that that's what life looked like when I got done with college. And I knew I wasn't going to play professional football. I set the bench at ASU. I had a lot of bitterness from that, a huge chip on my shoulder from not being able to play when I got to the Division I level.

And everything started to boil. It started to boil inside me, and my future did not look bright. It looked like shit. So after football season ended my senior year, I just stopped going to class. All I did was party and take bad drugs, and I didn't mention this. I know I've mentioned it on other podcasts,

but a good drug, in my understanding, is one that leaves you feeling good and whole and just a lasting peace in the days that follow. A bad drug would be something where the next day you feel like shit, whether it's a hangover, alcohol is a bad drug, feel like shit the next day. Obviously, coke, ecstasy, anything that leaves you feeling empty inside or fucks with your sleep, bad drugs. So I was using a lot of bad drugs and, um, at the same time had, uh, not really figured out how to talk to women, how to be a good partner in a relationship. And because of my mental states fluctuating fucking up and down left and right i wasn't a good partner with the girl that

i was dating and um she was not down with a lot of the things that i was doing and with my behavior and the way that i acted and i saw that failing relationship as well and so i reached a fairly critical low. I would say maybe the lowest I had ever felt and decided I was going to kill myself. Really, having had experience since age seven, thinking of this, I had put in some time on how to do this properly so i took every remaining pill that i had xanax valium bike it in drank them all and uh drove myself to the top of parking lot seven at uh arizona state and stripped down naked to jump uh i think six or seven stories down and because of the tight was in the middle of the night when i went a security guard saw me going up and he was like hey this guy's up to no good so he followed me up there and i got to the edge and as i stood on the edge um pills hadn't yet kicked in so very much willing to jump and sobbing you know tears

running down my face i could barely see the ground below me i had this fucking incredibly warm peaceful calming sensation go throughout my body and i'll I'll never forget that feeling. It's the first time that I felt connected to something bigger than myself. And I never felt close to religion or the churches that I went to. Never embodied any of that shit. But for the first time in my life, I felt a deep peace wash over me.

And the underlying message was, it's okay. It's all okay. You're going to be okay. And right as I was feeling that, I heard, hey, man, get the fuck down. I want to help you down. Don't jump. Let me get you down. And I looked back at the guy and I said, I'm sorry, threw up in, I guess, I guess it was a hospital before I

got transferred to the loony bin, as my mom called it. I think it was the suicide ward. But yeah, waking up, I remember this male nurse being a complete dick. And I was like, my family flew out, you know, my mom, my dad and my sister being a complete dick. And I was like, my family flew out. My mom, my dad, and my sister, they were there. And they were like, you really don't remember? And I'm like, no. You know how many fucking pills I swallowed? I don't remember a damn thing.

I was like, why is everyone such a fucking asshole right now? And they were like, you are not cooperative and quite mean to the staff. And I was like, oh, okay. So I got to accept some of that. When I got to the other place, the loony bin, as mom calls it, there was a huge shift in how they treated me. Everyone was extremely welcoming and kind. And I could feel that kindness. And a lot of the other people I was there with that were checked in were like, why the fuck is this guy here? Like, you're good looking, you're obviously an athlete, your family's here supporting you. It made no fucking sense to them. These were people that didn't have families or came from extremely broken homes

where they could have attempted suicide a hundred times and never had one person show up. And it kind of started to put things in perspective, even though I was still pretty down. So when I got out of there, I saw a psychologist, a therapist, and a psychiatrist. And the psychiatrist's job is to find drugs for you to take to help balance neurochemistry and um it's a funny thing you know i don't think there's a lot that's good with western medicine but i don't like the concept it's never resonated with me that i'm so broken i'll need to take a pill every day for the rest of my fucking life. It just did not resonate with me. And knowing my, uh, some of people in my

family had struggled with finding the right SSRIs and antidepressants and how it just becomes this fucking rollercoaster of take this one. All right. Well, it kicks in in six to eight weeks. All right. And then let's add this other one in and then, Oh, that's not working. Um, let's take this one. All right. Well, it kicks in in six to eight weeks. All right. And then let's add this other one in and then, oh, that's not working. Let's take this other one for some of your side effects. And next thing you know, you're taking fucking 15 pills and it's never the right one. And again, there's some people where that saves their lives and they fucking get the most out of life with it, but it didn't resonate with me. In my description of my symptoms, they said, yo, I think you're bipolar. You know, you have experienced really high highs and really low lows. Well, no shit. I experienced really high highs and really low lows. Look at the fucking street

drugs I'm taking. Look at the family history. Look at the things. Look at the fact that I had no idea what meditation was. I had no tools in the toolbox to pull me out of a rut other than substance. And so they put me on lithium. And lithium, again, for some people works, but for me, it made me feel like a fucking mute. There was no high and there was no low i didn't give a fuck about anything i didn't talk uh i didn't think i just was i was existing with zero emotion and i felt so shut off that i went back and told the guy like i'm not taking anything anymore i don't want to take anything. I told him I wasn't going to drink, but I just didn't want to have anything in my body for

a while to see what that felt like. And that I think was the first period of time in my life where I really just felt depression. I felt sadness come up. I felt happiness come up. I felt laughter when I watch a comedy. I felt all the emotions. And that was so transformative for me to experience that and to know this is existence. This is what it fucking means to be human, is to feel, to be present with all this shit. It's the same things you read about in Eckhart Tolle's books, any of the spiritual traditions. You find that the whole gamut of existence is what we're meant to experience. You can't peg the meter at happy your entire existence because eventually through homeostasis, the body not wanting to feel the same all the time it's it's not going to leave you there happy becomes quieter

and you got to feel both there's no fat without thin there's no tall without short it's all of it and that's we're meant to fucking experience that so to give myself that time to feel that it helped me rethink why i'm here you know and um shortly after that i got into um i started training mixed martial arts i really felt like a fucking rat on the wheel uh with my workouts after football i was still lifting weights and running and without coaching, without training partners. And it just seemed stupid. Like I was only doing it for aesthetic purposes. And my motivation went down further and further and further with that. So I thought maybe I'll do mixed martial arts just to stay in shape and to have like that community and um and to feel like the

human interaction of practicing and playing and working with other people and just as that initial thought uh that i had um on the subject i mean i couldn't have been more right it gave me everything that i needed in that regard I fucking loved it right out of the gate and even though I'd fought a lot growing up I wasn't sure that I'd enjoy fighting professionally but there was a local guy who with the gym I was training ran a local promotion and he told me like look dude you're big you're athletic we should have you fight and if you don't like it you never have to do it again but at least get in there and fight once and if it goes well you can do it again and my first two fights I won under under 30 seconds so I was hooked like I felt that rush of adrenaline I felt the rush and the roar of the crowd

and that was better than any drug I had ever done and I had done plenty so immediately I was hooked with fighting and realized like okay, I should probably start training a bit more and taking care of myself. And it gave me, not only did it give me purpose and direction, it gave me a reason to take care of myself. It gave me a reason to do better, to eat cleaner, to learn about meditation and breath work and how to how to hone the skills of the mind how to quiet my mind because if your mind's racing and you're panicked when you fight you fight like shit and so getting into bruce lee and and looking at some of the better fighters that were around you know everyone has fear but how you tackle that fear right that? That was a big, big piece for me. Um, around the same time,

uh, as I got off, uh, lithium and these things, the psychiatrist had recommended fish oil and so that it can balance neurochemistry and help with, um, mood. So I got into fish oil and then I started looking into other supplements and things like that and really paying attention to diet. I had a strength coach tell me that you fart a lot. And I laughed. I was like, that's a weird thing to say to a guy. But he said that, you know, seriously, I think you have a food intolerance. So he turned me on to Paul Cech, who was a guest on our show. And I did an elimination diet, paleo diet, whatever you want to call it, for 30 days. When I added back in gluten, realized I have a gluten intolerance. And to people saying like, ah, yeah, this guy's going to fucking bash gluten and all that.

I mean, like it's not terrible for everyone. What's with wheat is an incredible documentary that talks about our modern wheat practices. But without going down that rabbit hole, if you eat a food that you don't tolerate well, it's going to fuck up your microbiome. And we now know 80% to 90% of our neurotransmitters, serotonin, dopamine, it's all created in the gut by our good bacteria. So if we fuck with the levels of those bacteria, we are essentially fucking with our emotions. We're fucking with our ability to feel good and our ability to process things in an intelligent way and in a healthy way where if something gets us down we're able to spring back not we go down and we stay down so diving into books like how to eat move and be healthy by

paul check um that really planted the seed for wanting to do better for myself and having um uh like a checklist a a blueprint a map of how i could go about this you know and fighting still was an outlet for my anger it was an outlet for my physical nature and it really helped me in that regard. The first time I read How to Eat, Move, and Be Healthy, he had shown some Qigong breathwork in this section of the book, and I just laughed at it, like, I'm not going to fucking do this. This is weird. And when I reread that book, I've reread it several times, but when I reread that book years down the road, fighting, I had already worked with a sports psychologist on breath work, on one of the ways we can change neurochemistry through breathing and how that can help build calm

in the face of a fight. You know, when I know I'm going to get my head ripped off, how I can alter my consciousness through breath work to achieve a Zen state and fight my best. And so when I reread that book and saw the Qigong practices, I started doing them. And that was a game changer as well. And it added another tool to the toolbox of ways that I could facilitate change in how I feel without taking anything. Along the way, I had, you know, my boxing coach, Huitzi, who's passed away, was Mexican and Native American. He would take me out to a reservation where we would do traditional sweat lodges. And he would sing and we would meditate.

And we would do this at the beginning of every fight camp as a way to focus our intention on what we wanted to accomplish, and we'd do it after every fight. We'd reflect on the fight, look back on things we could change, good and bad, and, you know, he would tell me about the different ways the natives lived and what they embodied and talk about teacher plants and plant medicines. And so finally I asked him like, yo, when are we going to do a traditional sweat? When are we going to use the plants? And he just started laughing and he said, I was just waiting for you to ask. And so we had done a sweat with psilocybin mushrooms and it was completely different than anything I'd ever done before. I'd taken mushrooms before incorrectly. There's a right

way and a wrong way to do anything in life. And I certainly taken mushrooms before incorrectly. There's a right way and a wrong way to do anything in life. And I certainly had done them incorrectly with alcohol and at house parties and random people, you know, not in the correct setting and not or environment and not with the right mindset going into it. You know, no intention other than to feel good and be out of my head as opposed to setting an intention, having a reason, having questions to ask that I could hopefully receive answers to. And he really taught me how to approach the correct utilization of these plants. And over time, I was able to do ayahuasca with H wheatsy and that that was the thing that that was the tipping point

for me really in understanding life differently and understanding the connection to all things that um it ignited a spark in me that nothing else has. And this is not, again, this is one of the tools. This is not a everyone should do, teach plants. This is what worked for me. And oddly enough, if you talk to a lot of yogis, they're like, no, that's the cheat code. You got to meditate for 30 years.

Oftentimes they have not done that path. Many paths lead to the same truth. Many paths lead to the same truth. Many paths lead up the same mountain. But oddly enough, ayahuasca taught me what my quiet center was. It taught me how to be silent and it taught me how to be comfortable in my own skin. And that facilitated me wanting to meditate that facilitated me understanding what it what's the fucking goal here when i sit quietly in a dark room i didn't know that when i had practiced meditation prior to it um and i can't say like which which ceremony this this uh happened in you know i've done ayahuasca now 22 times and uh that's a lot to some people and that's very little compared to um

people that work with this plant often and um but at some point in time i i learned how to find my quiet center and that was another tool another gift that i had where i could tap into that space anytime shit hit the fan um around the same time I had gotten into float tanks. Rogan was talking a lot about it. I had a float company sponsor me because I was still fighting. And I think that's really the ultimate quiet. You have no sound, no sight, no smell. Your skin temperature is the same as the water. You're floating. You have no gravity and you're forced to be alone with yourself. You know, if your mind wants to race, it'll race, but there's no other inputs. There's nothing externally coming in. I found it good for

contemplation and visualization, but truly the best floats I've ever had were the ones that just ended. And I was like, wait a minute, that was an hour or that was 90 minutes like i can't believe it just flew by like that that's where i felt deep peace that lasted for the days and weeks to come um you know so so what now we've kind of painted a picture of some of the ways that i've pulled myself back together and you know it's it's, it's funny, I guess I'll talk about the end of fighting. Um, and I did this on Robins, but the podcast is a year and a half old. So probably not a lot of people have heard it. Um, when I finished fighting, you know, I had done an ayahuasca ceremony and I asked like, why did I do that last fight? Because when I was in the cage fighting, I was like, this is it. I'm not going to fucking do this again.

I thought in reflection, remembering that I had that feeling while I was in the cage, I'd never felt that before. But when I remembered that in the ayahuasca ceremony, I just asked, why did I fucking need to do that again? And the vision I had showed me everything, the way that I had lived, you know, cause even while I was fighting, I would eat super clean in camp. I would do breath work meditation. I would read books that could help me grow as a person, help me recover better, help me be more mobile. Um, I would take care of myself in every way possible and then when the fight ended it was like hey i've been a good boy for eight weeks now i'm gonna eat like shit

even though i know i have a gluten intolerance i'm gonna fucking mow down pizza i'm gonna drink heavily i'm gonna snort coke do ecstasy whatever i can get my fucking hands on because i was good for eight weeks and it showed this polarized life that I had that was so unhealthy for me and so inhibiting of my growth as a person and really inhibiting in my, my mental state, you know, how I behaved, how I acted, how I, how I was in relationships with friends, family, and, um, my significant other. And it, it was was fucking, you know, these things aren't easy. They call it the work. And it was work to fucking see that and to see how I treated myself and to use that excuse that I had done so well that now I've earned the right to fucking destroy myself.

And I think a lot of people have the misconception myself included in the past that if i'm good if i if i lose 10 pounds i can eat this donut if i do these things i can do it but the reward should never be something that diminishes you it should never be something that takes away from the goal the reward should be something that adds to the goal the reward should be something that benefits you and um that was such a huge realization like i didn't need the fight anymore to treat myself right i didn't need the fight anymore to live properly and to do what's best for me and from that point on really started to eat clean year round you know occasionally i'd i'd fucking have a cheap meal things like that i'm still human but the out of the whole you know i really um you know looking at an entire year that was the first year where i really took care of myself uh throughout the year

and you know i was working at a uh strip club as a bouncer and bartender the whole time I was fighting, you know, you don't make much money unless you're Conor McGregor, some of these top level guys. And I needed to work a part-time job to support myself. And, um, I just had this piece about it. You know, it's not the best environment to work in, but I had a deep peace that as long as I take care of myself, it doesn't matter where the fuck I'm at. I can control the variables that are controllable and the things that I can't control,

I can just accept the fact that I can't control them. Let me work on the things I can work on and not worry about the things that I can't. That shift in consciousness was one of the biggest i've ever had that shift alone it gave me um peace of mind in knowing like some shit's not in my control and that's okay i can just go with the flow and allow it and accept what is and i spoke before before, you know, on Aubrey show about Eckhart Tolle talking about the three levels of acceptance. And he gives the, the illustration that you're, I think it's in a new earth. He gives the illustration that your

tire just blew out and it's freezing rain on the side of the road. And you got to get out and change a tire. It is what it is. You can can curse you can fucking be upset about it that's not going to make you feel better the base level to entry and acceptance is just to accept what is like okay it's cold outside it's raining but i got to change this tire and you just accept it at face value for what you got to do right now focus on that thing don't dwell on it don't beat yourself up like why did i drive over that thing or that fucking pothole or that guy cut me off? Like, no, I just got to change this tire right now. And that's all you worry about. The next level is enjoyment to actually enjoy what you're doing, you know, and you may not enjoy changing that tire, but in a different circumstance,

there's enjoyment. And then the highest level is enthusiasm where you are fully engulfed in it. You could say you're in a flow state. You could say a lot of different terminologies and vocabulary to describe that. But as Eckhart mentions in the book, enthusiasm comes from a Greek word like in, I'm going to fuck that up. But it means to be in God. It means to be in God. And I know God is a touchy word. Aubrey speaks about that quite a bit. It's a touchy word for me.

But to be truly inspired and enamored and fully engulfed in what you're doing, that's what we want to shoot for. That's what we're trying to get to, to have that passion and drive for what we want to shoot for. That's, that's what we're trying to get to, to be, to have that passion and drive for what we're doing. And, um, just knowing I have these things that I can focus on. And of course the new earth has been a tremendous tool as well. Um, what kind of tools can we add to the toolbox that help us? I think that's what this is about. And there are many, there are many, you know, it doesn't have to be the plant route. A lot of people are adverse to

that because it is a drug, but keep in mind the drugs that our government decides is okay for you to take because you have big pharmaceutical companies lobbying them. They're not the same. They don't have this lasting value. I could never do ayahuasca again, and it would have changed my life permanently for the better. I don't want to be, I don't want to rely on something constantly, you know, for the rest of my life that I have to input. If it's a tool that benefits me positively, like breath work or meditation or qigong, these are things I can do that cost no money. These are things that I can do that reset my outlook on life. They shift my perspective. They give me inspiration. And to be inspired means to be in spirit. There are words that come up from time to time. Life still throws shit at me. But to have these tools where we can access and shift

our state of being, those are some of the most powerful tools you could ever adopt. They're some of the most powerful tools you could ever adopt. They're some of the most powerful tools you could ever put into the box because they can be used anywhere. And because it's your choice, it's your choice on when to use it and how to use it. And when you have that, it's empowering. And those are things you can change. Those are things that you do control those are the variables where you are able to say you know what i can't change what happened i can't change the fact that this guy did this or my boss yelled at me or i'm in a fight with my wife or whatever the fucking case may be but i can change the way i look at it wayne dyer once said if you change when you change the way you look at things, the things you look at change. And that was powerful to me because that is the shift that takes place personally when you meditate.

It's the shift that takes place personally when you do breath work, when you hyperoxygenate the body and the brain. And you are shifting not only from a sympathetic fight or flight state, high in cortisol, high in fucking, I don't want to call them bad, they're there for a reason, but high in brain chemicals that make us feel like our life's in the line. Fear, anger, sadness. You can shift that with breath work. You can shift that with meditation into the parasympathetic,

into the quiet, calm, the peace, the stillness, in the happiness, you know, shifting to raise dopamine and serotonin and feel good neurotransmitters that make us feel great inside and help level that out you know that something that i figured out you know from ayahuasca was that you know in the weeks to come it didn't matter if someone cut me off in traffic it didn't matter if someone yelled at me there was

a lasting peace inside and it made me realize like there are other tools that can help me achieve that state like floating like good meditation like breath work where you don't sweat the small stuff you know and and fucking thousands of books have been written on topics like this and very few have resonated with me or they're fleeting because the tools that are given are not exact. And, you know, as I mentioned, things like this, like breath work, I should probably dive into that. I think Brian McKenzie's Art of Breath on power, speed, endurance has been a tremendous tool.

The Wim Hof Method from wimhofmethod.com has been a tremendous tool for breathing techniques and how to shift. Hyperbaric oxygen can be great for healing the brain and changing emotional states um and different forms of meditation you know there's a fantastic book i'm going to link to all this shit in the show notes so you don't have to take notes but um ryan make sure you jot this down brother uh the the science of mindfulness by dr ronald siegel is one of the great courses on Audible. And for one credit, you get a fucking college-level course on mindfulness meditation.

And he'll dive into all the science. He'll dive into the different spiritual practices that use it. But if you're not a spiritual person or you don't believe in God, it doesn't matter because he gives you hard science. So for the science geeks that geek out on that, like myself, they're going to get that for the people that are diving into spirituality and, uh, God talk for the lack of a better term. There's, there's, there's info for that. You know, there's info, info on the traditions that have used these things for thousands of years. You know, a lot of this stuff, whether you agree with it or not, uh a whole, religion-wise, has given us pointers on how to live better.

And the more that I've studied this and dove into it, the writing's been on the wall literally for thousands of years from some of these cultures, especially in the East. Waking Up by Sam Harris, atheist, talks about buddhism talks about meditation talks about mindfulness meditation in particular you know there there are ways we can change how we operate from the inside out we can hack our own consciousness without substance and um they can be extremely transformative and again these are tools that we want to have in our fucking tool bag. They're tools that we need to have

because there's no limit to the amount of crap that's going to be thrown at you throughout your life. It doesn't matter how hard you had it growing up or how easy you had it growing up. There will always come a point where you're challenged. There's always going to come a point where stress levels are at an all-time high. And to have these tools, they can be the best way to navigate through life, the best way to navigate through challenges,

and the best way to shift from a stressful state, from a constricted, fuck, this will never get better, to, you know what, it's okay. It's all okay. And no matter what happens, I'm safe. I'm going to be okay. And those are big takeaways. They're big takeaways for me, and I think they're big takeaways for a lot of people. Another thing I've been getting into that Dr. Dan Engel, who we had on, was talking about in the concussion repair manual. And again, I'll illustrate the into that Dr. Dan Engel, who we had on, was talking about in the concussion repair manual. And again, I'll illustrate the fact that you don't have to have been hit in the head and have concussions to get a lot from the concussion repair manual. You could have a great, you know, normal working brain and even high working brain. And a lot of the techniques in there not only build

the brain from someone who has a beat up brain like myself, but someone who has a normal working brain can benefit greatly from a lot of the topics covered in the concussion repair manual. But one thing people think about, and myself included in the past, was that if my brain works better, I will think better. I will think more clearly. I'll have more cognitive output, more mental energy and focus, more memory recall. And those are all terrific tools to have. It's one of the reasons I take AlphaBrain. It's one of the reasons I meditate is that I want more mental power and memory when I read books. I want to be able to fucking embody that knowledge. I don't want to just read it and forget it. there's this whole other piece to the brain when we fucking heal the

brain and help it work and perform optimally we are helping our our body to be in a positive emotional state we're helping our brain to have better neurotransmitters, the ones that make us feel good, the serotonin, the dopamine. And we're giving ourselves, we're laying a foundation down that's lasting. And so this work that I've been consumed with, it's become my life's passion. The reason I think Aubrey hired me to be director of human optimization is because of the fact that I'm not just reading this shit. I'm trying everything. I want to be a guinea pig and in the best way possible. I'm not saying sign me up for this weird study.

I'm saying if I read a book and it sounds good to me, I'm going to figure this out. You know, when I read Wired to Eat with Rob Wolf, I did a seven-day carb test for fucking four months. Every fucking day I was testing blood sugar because I knew if I was eating foods that were problematic from a blood sugar standpoint, even if on paper that they're good carbohydrates on paper, they might not be good carbohydrates for me. And just by doing that, I could lower systemic inflammation. And systemic inflammation is going to impact the microbiome. It's also going to impact cognitive function and the brain. And again, that's not saying it's going to make me dumber. It's saying it's going to fuck with my emotions. It's going to fuck with the way that I feel as I go through life.

And that's something that is controllable. that's a piece of the equation we can control we can control our diet we can control the foods that we put in our mouth we can control our thoughts and emotions if we are given the right tools to navigate that space so that's i think, where I'm at. You know, I think there's a lot of words that keep coming up. I will mention one more book. It's called Gene Keys by Richard Rudd. It's about 20 bucks on Amazon.

It has been an excellent resource for me to navigate through words and terminology. And I won't dive too much into the book, but I will say that in my meditations and in ayahuasca ceremonies and the heroic dose of psilocybin mushrooms, there's been a lot of words that have come up for me that stood out to me. Discipline being one of them. And I was speaking to a shaman who told me that his father beat the fuck out of him, his whole upbringing. And discipline was a very hard word for him to understand. But he too had been given this word discipline. I saw it in bright fucking gold letters in my mind's eye.

Eyes closed, clear as day, bright gold letters, the word discipline multiple times. And discipline to him had always been, I'm going to get beat. I'm going to get in trouble. I'm going to be disciplined with a belt or with a fucking piece of wood or a whip or whatever the guy had. So for him to overcome that, he had to rethink the word. And I've, I've spent a lot of time thinking about that word and a lot of the words that have come up for me, enthusiasm being one of them, but discipline. Discipline has to be about you. It has to be about what your goals are and how you treat yourself. And no matter what your goal is, like I want to lose 20 pounds or I want to improve my cognitive function or I want to

improve my emotional state or I'm going to meditate every day for 30 days and you miss five days and feel like you fell off the wagon you didn't fuck up just goals are goals discipline ultimately is how you treat yourself it's this concept of i'm going to do what's best for me and i'm going to stay on track ultimately, even if there's some leeway, even if 80% of the time I eat clean and 20% of the time I fuck off, even if 80% of the days I get my meditation in and 20% of the time other shit comes up and I don't get the meditation in, there's no need to beat yourself up. You just get back on it. You get back on the wagon. You go back to doing what you know is good for you. And you dive in wholeheartedly to the things that can help you grow. You dive in to meditation.

You dive in to the books and the literature. And as Einstein and Tim Ferriss and a lot of people have said, you stand on the shoulders of giants by reading their work. People put fucking years into these books to tell you everything they know, to give you what they're an expert at. And the right books can change your life. If I watch TV, I'll watch Game of Thrones. I'll be entertained by TV, for sure. I still watch a lot of documentaries.

But when I read, I read nonfiction. I read books that I know I can take something from. And not every book I read is going to be worthwhile. Not every book you read will resonate with you. You might read A New Earth and say, the fuck is this guy talking about? And it doesn't sink in. Similarly to the way I skimmed over the Qigong practice and Paul Cech's How to Move and Be Healthy. At the right time, those words will resonate with you. But that doesn't mean to stop. That doesn't mean to stop trying to figure out what are the ways you can live better. And your diet, what you put in your body, your movement. You know, Paul Cech talks about the last four doctors you'll ever need. And it is the most simplified version of what this guy knows.

But you have Dr. Quiet. That's your sleep, your rest patterns, your circadian rhythm. It's also your meditation practice, your mindfulness practice. Dr. Diet, the food you put in your body, the supplements you take, how you construct a healthy living environment and boost your life force energy through food and water. Then we have Dr. Movement.

What's your movement practice? Your exercise, and not even just exercise, walking, being in nature, hiking. Of course the exercise, the working out. And then the working in, doing qigong, tai chi, breath work as you move. That's all movement as well, as well as Dr. Quiet. And then Dr. Happy, perhaps the ultimate. Do you fucking play?

Do you play enough? Something that I've dealt with my whole life was being too serious. Got that from my parents, got that from football coaches, got that from a lot of people, but I embodied it. So ultimately it's on me. It's not on the teachers that gave me that seriousness. It's on me to embody that. And that's a word that's come up in ayahuasca as well. People purge in these ceremonies. They throw up. You can have violent number twos. I've had it all, but I've never laughed as a purge. And I had always heard people laughing. And I was like they're not they're not respecting the ceremony they're not respecting the quiet time the fucking personal space this is meditation

we're trying to do work i can't focus on my own shit with this guy cackling next to me like a hyena and a shaman told me like no no no that is a purge that laughter is a purge that that person needs uh it may be that they haven't laughed in a while it may be a number of things but that laughter is a purge and somewhere i think around my 20th ceremony i could i had uncontrollable laughter and it blew me away and i was trying to keep quiet to be respectful of others just with the fucking past issues i had had with other people laughing and the more i try to keep quiet the more it came out of me the more i laughed and i asked why am i

laughing so much and the answer was it's not that serious and so i said oh okay the ayahuasca ceremony is not that serious and quickly i was corrected no it's not that serious. And quickly I was corrected. No, it's not that serious. Life is not that serious. And that fucking blew me away. I personally took life so seriously. Every fucking thing that happens had so much weight to it. And the truth is, none of it does. We're here to experience. We're here to learn and to grow and to share with one another, to lift each other up, to get back up. There's a great quote in Batman Begins. It's funny, I'm getting choked up thinking about this fucking Batman Begins quote

out of all the things I've talked about, but it really hit home when I watched this. I've talked about, but it really hit home when I watched this. I've seen the movie a hundred times, but this always gets me. When young Bruce Wayne falls down, and I think it's his dad or Alfred that picks him up and says, why do we follow Master Wayne? So we can learn to get back up. That's what it's all about. We're going to fall. How do we pick ourselves back up again?

How do we recover from that knockout? Nothing's going to keep us down. And to embody that, to know inside, through and through, that I will get back up, that I i will survive and that i won't just survive i'll fucking thrive i will enjoy the shit out of this life i'll make the most of it for myself and by doing that for me i'll be a better partner i'll be a better lover i'll be a better dad i'll be a better son i can repair be a better son. I can repair and everything is fucking fixable. It's never too late. All is forgiven. And that starts with forgiving yourself

for the mistakes you make. It's taken a long road for me to do that, but it all can be done. All is forgiven. It's powerful. I'll leave you guys with that. For those that finished listening to this whole thing, I appreciate you taking a dive in and a peek into some of the troublesome pieces and parts of my life. And if you guys have questions, you know, we run this Facebook Live every Wednesday at 6 p.m. Central on Facebook through Onnit. We always follow up these podcasts the week they launch, and they launch on a Monday. We try to keep the topic of discussion to that. Inevitably, people ask about supplements, and that's cool.

I know about supplements, but really encourage you guys when this podcast comes out, if you listen to it, when it comes out. And even if you listen to it three weeks later, jump on a Facebook Live if you've got questions. I'd love to talk more about this. I'd love to give you guys as many tools as I can. For those that are interested in some of the plant medicines and things like that, unfortunately, with our current legal system, I can't give you guys too much information, but I can point you to an article that Aubrey Marcus wrote that is absolutely incredible.

And we will link to that in the show notes. I'll also have Lizzie link to that in the Facebook lives when people ask about it. And I'll try to give away as many resources as I can for, for the tools that have helped me in my life. Thank you guys for tuning in. Thank you guys for listening to the Solo On It podcast with myself and myself. Talking about myself. But trying to extrapolate out to the masses, different techniques that can help us all. If you enjoyed it, please write me.

Please write on it. Please write me on Twitter and Instagram at Kingsboo. I'm not on my Facebook that often. I'm usually on Onnit's Facebook. And speaking of which, make sure you tune in to the Onnit Facebook Lives where we can really get a chance to talk face-to-face. Just dive a little deeper into these things. We do this every Wednesday, 6 p.m. And write in your questions ahead of time.

That way we get a good Q&A, and we'll take it from there. I know this is something that affects many, many, many people, even whether they like to admit it or not. We all go through our own shit in life, and there's many, many paths that help us up the mountain. So let's climb the mountain together. Thanks for listening. And I'd also like to bring up a wonderful product that I take from on it called Shroom Tech Sport.

It has adaptogens and cordyceps sinensis, which is a mushroom that is an amazing product. It helps the body with ATP production as well as oxygen utilization. That means you're going to be able to work out harder and longer. It also is caffeine-free. So even though I like to work out with a little bit of caffeine in my system, I can do that with a different product like some good optimized coffee and then throw the wonderful Shroom Tech Sport in on top of that. The fact that there's no caffeine in it also helps me if I'm going to have a late workout

and I don't want to be up all night after the workout. For people who are just pressed for time and really need to get a good hard workout in, a lot of the best jiu-jitsu classes I attend are late at night, and you want to have the best workout you possibly can, but you don't want to be up until midnight or 2 a.m. because of the fact that your pre-workout contains caffeine and other stimulants. Shroom Tech Sport is the one that's right for you.