Kyle Kingsbury Podcast - #355 Homeschooling, Sports, and Rites of Passage w/ Hannah Frankman

Episode Date: May 17, 2024

Hannah Frankman was kind enough to invite me on her podcast to talk parenting, schooling, rites of passage and transformational experiences. Then she went over the top and allowed me to use our audio there to release to yall. This is an excellent sample of the conversations Hannah has on, The Hannah Frankman Podcast. Go subscribe and 5-star her show to keep up with what I’m tuned into as well. Love y’all Connect with Hannah: Website: RebelEducator.co - HannahFrankman.com - FEE.org  Twitter: @hannahfrankman - @rebeleducator - @feeonline  Instagram: @hannahfrankman - @feeonline  Podcast: Spotify - Apple     Show Notes: "Health and Light" -John Ott  "Nourishing Traditions Book of Baby and Childcare" -Sally Fallon Morell and Dr Thomas Cowan  "Deschooling Society" -Ivan Illich "The Collapse of Parenting" -Leonard Sax "How To Eat Move and Be Healthy" -Paul Chek "Hold on To Your Kids" -Gordon Neufeld and Gabor Mate  John Cole's Human Design Site PurposeMountain.com - Tim Corcoran - Vision Quest Guide -     Sponsors: HVMN You can save 30% off your first subscription order of Ketone-IQ at Ketone.com/KKP Paleovalley Some of the best and highest quality goodies I personally get into are available at paleovalley.com, punch in code “KYLE” at checkout and get 15% off everything! Happy Hippo Kratom is in my opinion the cleanest Kratom product I’ve used. Head over to HappyHippo.com/KKP code “KKP” for 15% off entire store Fat of the Land Go to www.eatfatoftheland.com to buy some delicious seed oil free chips and use code “KKP” for 10% off at checkout.  That is www.eatfatoftheland.com using code KKP for 10% off at checkout. To Work With Kyle Kingsbury Podcast   Connect with Kyle: Twitter: @KINGSBU  Fit For Service Academy App: Fit For Service App  Instagram: @livingwiththekingsburys - @gardenersofeden.earth  Odysee: odysee.com/@KyleKingsburypod  Youtube: Kyle Kingbury Podcast  Kyles website: www.kingsbu.com - Gardeners of Eden site    Like and subscribe to the podcast anywhere you can find podcasts. Leave a 5-star review and let me know what resonates or doesn’t.

Welcome back to the podcast. Today's guest is the return of me. So it's not an actual episode that I did. I've had Hannah Frankman on this podcast before and she was phenomenal. Really good follow. We'll link to that in the show notes. And then she had me on her podcast. And the goal was for me to blow this up and send it out to people. It ended up being a really great episode that I loved. We got busy. I got busy. She got busy and we didn't, we just never did it. Never got to promote it. Never got to do anything. And so after a while I heard her podcasting with Tim Kennedy, phenomenal. We'll link to that as well. And it just made me want to run this back. And so I asked her if I could share our podcast together on her show via my show. That way it does get some more play and some more love and people get more turned on to Hannah Frankman and her amazing podcast and amazing follow on Twitter as well, which we'll link in the show notes.

So this was awesome. We talked alternative schooling and education. We talked about the family being educated. We talked about a whole number of cool things that led me to in the direction of where we're at now. And she had excellent questions that really made me think and loved what was coming out of me. Normally, I can't think of questions that good when I'm doing a solo cast. So I thought, why not share this with the group on our own podcast? So support this podcast by following Hannah Frankman, listening to her show, share this with as many people as you'd like.

Leave us a five-star rating with one or two ways the show's helped you out in life. And then, check out our show sponsors. These guys are awesome. We have a brand new sponsor today called Fat of the Land, started by a dad trying to make better snacks for his kids. I love this shit. You might have listened to my podcast with Paul Celadino. I'm coming up with this.

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And it's nice to know that I can give them something healthy when we're on the go and doing stuff. We're also brought to you today by HVMN. Go to ketone.com slash KKP. That's K-E-T-O-N-E dot com slash KKP. These guys are incredible. You can save 30% off your first subscription order of Ketone IQ at ketone.com slash KKP. I've had both the founders of HGUN on this podcast because like me, they're human guinea pigs and they're trying to push themselves in directions that I envy. I want to see what can I possibly do on a full fucking fast, right?

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I don't really partake in any extracurriculars these days. If I'm in a social event or something like that, I find Kratom to be the go-to. It is my favorite thing to have when I'm out and about because I feel good, I have a great time, I can dance, I can be myself, and I just feel tapped in in a different way. Check it all out for yourself at happyhippo.com slash KKP. That's H-Ap-p-y h-i-p-p-o dot com slash kkp and remember to use kkp at checkout for 15 off amazing yeah i'm really excited to introduce you to a new audience maybe i imagine there's some some overlap but there are probably a lot of people who listen to this show who've never heard of kyle kingsbury before and they're in for such a treat. I'm so stoked for this. We're going to start with a comment that you just made before we started recording that fighting in the UFC forced you to become interested in education.

You got to tell me about this. Yeah, I mean, what I meant by that was, you know, I had my teammates, and maybe your listeners aren't ufc fans of my teammates were kane velasquez uh daniel cormier luke rockhold khabib habib nobler been off all guys that wanted to become ufc world champions and they all had really you know a big skill set when they got into the sport and they came with a various background from being a division one or an olympic level wrestler or an insane grappler and luke rockholds who came from a long line of pro athletes his dad was a pro basketball player his brother a pro surfer i didn't have that and comic football had some translation you know i played at arizona state and i was a great athlete but um that doesn't transfer the same as wrestling or jujitsu or any of these other things do so when i got into fighting i recognized hey i'm a little older than

the rest of the guys at this point i don't have the same background heading into it you know i was a white belt in the ufc most guys that got in the ufc are fucking were white belts years before they're not even close to that just to make it you're probably a purple belt or a brown belt and or you're really good at something else if you're less than that you know you're like an a1 kickboxing champ uh with a blue belt but you still have you're still better than a white belt in jiu jitsu so understanding that um i wanted to learn as much as i possibly could on the body on recovery on everything and that that opened up such a big one i had a strength coach who turned me on to a guy um i always tell the story the same so sorry people it before, but I can hear his voice right now.

His name is Ray. Coach Ray had a New York accent. He goes, you fart a lot. I was like, what are you talking about? I fart a lot. I was like, we're dudes in a gym. What do you mean? It's protein powder.

He's like, no, you've got an intolerance. I was like, an intolerance to what? He goes, let's find out. He asked me if I'd read. In post-college, I was like, I'm never going to fucking read again. I couldn't stand it. I dropped out as a senior at asu after football ended i was like no i'm good i'm not doing anything that requires that degree and didn't enjoy it at all and i mean there was aspects that i enjoyed certain classes things like that but i didn't think it was worth the

loss of money and i didn't want to spend another minute of my time there and um so he asked me to read a book and i was like i'm not reading again he goes will you watch a book and I was like, I'm not reading again. He goes, will you watch a video? And I was like, yeah, I'll watch a video. And the video is called Blighten Your Abs Forever with Falchek. It was on VHS. And I was like, dope, man. I want to get shredded for the UFC and all this before I was in the UFC. And, you know, the whole video has nothing to do with getting shredded.

It has to do with the microbiome, food intolerances and all these things. And I was like blown the fuck away by Paul. And he was talking about soil quality 20, 30 years before anybody was into regenerative agriculture really really blowing the horn about that so it's all things that i'm into now um but that led me to read his book how to move me healthy which completely changed my life because when you're fighting it's the greatest test physically mentally and emotionally there is there's no greater test there's nothing harder so if something works you recognize how well it works immediately if it's not working you recognize pretty immediately holy shit i can't stay up past 11 playing video games because

i drag ass the next day like every small twist on the scale can have a profound benefit in the cage and um that just opened up a whole world because right then that was the first taste test was like if i could do this with just diet and movement, and it changes this, this big of a change, what else can I learn? And so I was critic Paul as one of my mentors for planting that seed in me. I took a deep dive into Dr. Kelly Surrett's work on mobility and becoming a supple leopard. I took a deep dive into Wim Hof and cold therapy and red light therapy and all the other shit that people geek out on you know in the biohacking space which is comical now in Austin because I think the the

main piece are those are those foundational pieces Paul Chek talks about but yeah if you want to add some other shit for sure I just interviewed Dr. Jack Cruz who's so big on light therapy he was drilling me it's like it's not the food it's not that this is not that it's not working out it's just getting the fucking sun and he kept saying that over and over again and that's such a such a big one um great book called health and light by john ott written in 1970 it's like a mind-blowing expose of what good light versus bad light does to us and so anyway i just started tracking it and that was the second mountain that i climbed was my own education from a performance standpoint.

Then recognizing how much I was getting in the head, I leaned in to learn about TBI, CTD, how do you recover from brain trauma? And then that led me into psychedelics as well as a whole bunch of other things, longevity-based. And how do I then stretch this? If I'm no longer going to fight anymore, how do I have the best body possible the longest? When we had our kid, I was already in that when we had our first son bear I was already in the mindset of knowing there's going to be shit that I need to read there's gonna be a lot that I don't anybody who has parent everybody has a kid they're like oh you got to read this one and you got to

read that one you get a stack and you're like I can't read these 30 books 90% of them suck anyways they really do but there were some key teachers that I got in there. One of my favorite books on natural healing and natural remedies and raising organic kids is the Nourishing Traditions Book of Baby and Child Care by Sally Fallon Morrell. She's the head of the West End Price Foundation in New York. And Dr. Thomas Cowan, who's been on my podcast a few times. He's a brilliant author. He's written several amazing books. And that was one of their first and you

know they pointed to so much from an education standpoint from you know rudolph steiner's understanding of every seven years there's a seven-year cycle where kids change and they're going to have you know this this big shift happens at eight there's big shifts that happen along the way and if you can understand that that allows you to parent with better with more grace and um really what the needs of the kid are what are the needs of the child and and where have we gone wrong so you know thomas callen came on the podcast he introduced me to a guy named ivan illich who wrote de-skilling de-skilling society and that was like a floor on the ground holy shit moment uh because i had been rabbit holing youing some of the more nefarious things in the world. And to see education framed in that way was a real eye opener.

Equally to that, Thomas talked about some of the teachers who had left Waldorf education due to all the nonsense in 2020. Didn't want to do online education and masks and all that shit. They just started homeschooling select families. And so one of the stories he told was a woman in Southern California who had come out of retirement to take on educating four kids. All four kids were between ages of 10 and 12, and none of them could read. So these are completely unschooled kids, de-schooled kids. They were not homeschooled.

They were not following a particular path. They're not doing Life of Fred books like our kids are. They weren't doing shit until they wanted to. And what happened with those four kids between 10 and 12 is within two years, all of them could read and write fluently. All of them had equaled their peers or passed them in every category. And all of them were taking college level courses in the things that they cared about. Two years in, so now they're 12 and 14, between 12 and 14, and they're in college level courses, they're crushing it, and they've gone,

excuse me, in such a very short time to surpass their peers in every category. And I know just through some homeschool, because it's a balance, right? Like, we don't have enough bandwidth just let our kids do whatever the hell they want to do all day long until they want to be educated so we're trying to trickle that in but between life of red mathematics books which are incredible um phonics and reading and writing and different things like that um and violin and jujitsu and other sports that's a good chunk that still leaves them a ton of time to be outdoors playing and frolicking and

building social skills and picking chicken eggs at the farm and doing different things to help out chores are super important for kids so yeah I think that's a long long answer to the question I'm not sure if I got to it but I think that's what really was pushing me was my own education and then realizing how there's still things as much as I shit on my public education, there's still things that I can grab from it that were of value. And at Arizona State, I studied sociology and communication. As a podcaster, I might be one of the few people that actually uses the degree they never got. Let's say you'll get a degree and they'll never do anything with it.

So I think some of that's there, but I was great at communication before taking communication classes. You know, it was a natural thing for me. So public speaking and stuff like that, I took that to get an A. I didn't take that because I need to learn it. So I think some of those gifts are already there. And that's why I think, you know,

the redundancy of it and things are not necessary. Sports is different. So we want to dive into sports. We can talk about about that but i'll leave it to you on where which direction you want to take it well there's a bunch of different things that you just said that i think are worth drilling down into because there's a lot that's interesting there i think the most obvious question though is you're painting a picture of this very stark shift where you hated learning so much that you dropped out of college when you were almost done you were almost there and you quit because you hated it i'm still a senior i'm like ben wilder

and you never wanted to read a book ever again and then suddenly this intrinsic motivation kicked in which makes sense because you suddenly had an application that you were super excited about you're gonna fight in the UFC you of course you weren't allowed but the level of voraciousness that you are describing is stark in contrast to never wanting to read a book again like you just listed off all of these books that you've read all these people that you've talked to all this content that you've consumed did you feel like you had to unwire some of the distaste of learning that you had gained over the course that was trained into you over the course of your public and college education it's a great question i don't know if i had to rewire it i think the reason it worked so well was because i had something i could test you know and that's what

Thomas was getting into as well like you wait for a kid to want to build a treehouse before you teach them geometry then they learn geometry and building the treehouse and they've they've now put something together that's in 3d that they can play with there's a use to it that they had a hand in constructing and there was an educational piece that came with that in order for them to do it but something is real here now i had very you know something the real as real as can be in a fight where i could test these things and even before then you know back in the day it was kind of comical how hard we trained we killed each other three days a week we had big gloves on and headgear and mouthpieces but we beat the shit out of each other monday wednesday and friday that was those are sparring days and they were full go, as full as a fight is. Thankfully, that's changed. The sports calmed

down a little bit, but that was the bulk of my career. So I would have three opportunities every single week to see if something was working or if it wasn't, and to teeter-totter and play with the different aspects of the body, the mind, the spirit, sleep, all the things that come in with that. So I think having that testing point where I could see like, all right, let's see what this treehouse looks like. Let's see what this treehouse looks like. I had that every week, multiple times a week. And the sweetness of it wasn't the distaste that I overcame. It was the sweetness of the thing that I was learning where I was like, holy shit, this matters. It works. What else is there like that?

And I was just drawn. I've been very fortunate that I've been drawn through podcasting. Guys like Tim Ferriss, Joe Rogan, obviously, have brought me to different people where I was like, let me try a ketogenic diet for two years. I don't recommend it for everybody, but for a guy with TBI, it was pretty fucking sensational. My brain worked better on that diet than it had for the past 30 years of my life it felt like i was a different human i even i even pondered going back to school and eventually said no because i still don't need that education and uh you know the goodwill hunting quote where i know butcher this but he's like you could have gotten all that for two dollars and fifty cents and late charges at your public library i love that quote because it's so fucking true i mean everything I've learned has been through podcast.

I buy books. I like buying, you know, Audible and all that shit. And then I'll buy the hardcover if I really enjoy the Audible. Some books you have to read. Most of the stuff I consume is auditory.

I feel like I always did better that way. If I had a teacher that would lecture us on the material and I would take notes, I was an A plus student. If I had a teacher that didn't tell a shit and told us to read it, I was an A plus student. If I had a teacher that didn't

tell a shit and told us to read it, I was an F or a D. So I recognize that about my own education, but really finding things that there's a genuine interest in, like one of my favorite teachers right now is a guy named Mark Gaffney. He did an excellent lecture called The Erotic and the Holy. And he's a Jewish Kabbalistic myst mystic he's really a polymath he's fucking super smart he's buddies with daniel schmachtenberger and a lot of people that are in these massive think tanks ken wilber and um when he talks about eros eros is this foundational principle of life it's your your raw desire that's guiding you and that is the internal gps of source it's the internal gps of your higher self that's pointing you your daemon your soul whatever you want to call that that knows what you're actually interested in

that's drawing you it's alluring you to think so before i could before i had that language that's what i was listening to when i decided like oh let me try this breath work and let me try this cold tub and let me try this red light and let me see if this works and those kind of things um and you know if it worked it worked that was the best part i could really see that and let me try this red light and let me see if this works and those kind of things. And, you know, if it worked, it worked. That was the best part. I could really see that. So we've also, it's a little bit more challenging with kids as parents because there's been different aspects of education that did work.

We had Barrett at Waldorf for a year before they, you know, before COVID and all the nonsense. And, you know, they signed this paperwork. I told you this when you were on my podcast. Excuse me. Everyone as a parent had to sign an agreement. It was one page long. It said no screens whatsoever.

If you watch Disney movies every weekend, you're going to switch to once a month. If you're watching them once a month, you're going to switch to like once a quarter. And really weed that out. And there's fucking tons of evidence to solve the problem, but don't need to get into that. We made made that agreement and they were supposed to have like-minded parents there kids are not allowed to bring cell phones to school until they're 16 and they can

drive and they're only allowed to use it to text their parents that's it they're not going on apps they're not doing anything so i appreciated all those and then you know it goes to now it's an online dedication everybody's going to stay at home And from what I knew about health and wellness is like, number one, there's zero reason to be staying indoors. And number two, you know, that's another rabbit hole in and of itself. But it made us want to try, like, try something else. And so a lot of parents had left from that school. A lot of teachers had left Waldorf because of that. And so we went to a family co-op out in BK, which was awesome. And I got to meet Mickey Willis and his kids, Del Bigtree and his kids,

James Vanderbeek and their kids, awesome people that have really become a big fan and friend of. And we were all there together for about a year and then had some hiccups too, because it was their first year. But I could see the benefit of being around other people, the benefits of having other teachers. And, you know, there's three kindergarten years in Waldorf education, four, five, and six. So you get to be, you know, the kids two years above you and two years below you. And I like that. But this third year of kinder would have been three years of kindergarten,

you know, and 1500 bucks a month or whatever it was. And like I said, my wife had homeschooled up until high school. So the question then began, if we're going to try it, should we not try it now? You know, if we fail in this third year of kindergarten to the wash, big deal. He's still ready for first or second grade. This was before Cowan and before we decided to unschool. So we get to play with different modalities. And the thing is, you know, you can have the sports is still going.

The sports is going on. I started playing football when I was eight years old and pop Warner. That didn't require me being a part of school. There's club sports that you can play year round. You don't have to be a part of any school. Jiu Jitsu. We've had Baron Jiu Jitsu since he was young, but he really started taking it serious at seven and there's tournaments and

he's in there with other homeschooled kids and he's in there with other kids that go to regular school and they're all buddies. You know, it's like, there's no weirdness. There's no like hiccups over. Oh, those are the homeschooled kids and he's in there with other kids that go to regular school and they're all buddies you know it's like there's no weirdness there's no like hiccups over oh those are the homeschooled kids like they're all fucking normal you know like you can't tell who goes to school or who doesn't other than you know who's doing really well the kids that are doing really well the kids that have more free time on their hand and don't come in dead tired from a shitty education all day long are the kids who are talking about their niche hobbies and interests that they spent all day doing that's how you flag the homeschool kids they're like i'm learning how to make you know turn of the century clothing and i'm making

myself a closet out of it using old patterns because i think it's cool and you're like you're not in public when you get up when you get a homemade scarf you know from one of the kids and you're like oh you did this you've been working out that's insane like wow you got some serious skills i didn't get those skills in school how do you think about like comparing contrasting i imagine this is something that you've thought about and are probably fairly deliberate about how do you think about the public education you had versus the self-education that you had starting in? Actually, how old were you when you started doing all of this? Was it right when you dropped out of college and you've been like 21, 22? No, there was a couple of big years of drugs there when I dropped out of college and before I started educating myself.

Yeah, there was lots of drugs at ASU. before I started educating myself. Um, yeah, there was lots of drugs at ASU. Um, I would say, I would say it was probably around 25 or 26 when I really got serious about reading, you know, cause it had been a year in the fighting prior to the UFC where, where I had this interaction with my strength coach and then that just set it all off. Um, yeah. So, I mean, it probably was 26 years old and from there i had had time where i had given up on all that i had time where um i was just a free floating you know like there is a point in that

when you're young to go see the world and don't do shit don't run right into college don't run right into your career don't run right into all these things you're supposed to do like go be a fucking nomad go see the world go see what other cultures look like and then decide with more knowledge and more background and contrast of what you want to create in your life go experience that first and i think that that is one thing as you did for me was i got to be a deadbeat i got to go down salt river for 12 hours a day getting a starch sunburn with a 20 pack of naughty ice you know like we had a lot of fun there and at the time, there were these amazing epic mountains. And I could go up to Sedona and have some of my first transcendent experiences up there.

Flagstaff, absolutely incredible. So I think there's a beauty to Arizona where it's always going to be my second home. But as far as the contrast of education, again, I don't think it came down to me saying, it came just down to me understanding if I want to learn it, it's worth learning. And I don't need to have everything else they're telling me to learn. And so really, that's what I track with my kids. Like, for sure, you need basic, basic mathematics skills. You don't want to go to a car dealer and not know how to add.

Like, you need to know. Those numbers sound good. Like, I don't know. You seem honest. You said it's only 17% APR. That's a great deal. That's a loan over. We got to figure this out.

There are basic skills that come from those things that all kids should have those basics. And history is super important. I used to think it was dog shit. But you look since 2020, as it turns out, it's really important to know our real history. That's not being taught in public schools. You got to listen to Hardcore History with Dan Carlin. You got to listen to a number of different people. And you actually have to rabbit hole some lesser known books to actually find out.

You know, like Ivan Ence's book. That's a really deep dive history of why education is what it is today. And Yuri Bezmenov, the Russian defector in the 1980s who has tons of videos. Rogan's always talking about him, about this being the last boat. The communist movement is international. It started in America. G. Edward Griffin, who wrote the Creature of Jekyll Island, along with a number of other books on the Federal Reserve. Brilliant guy in his 80s, still around.

His good buddy is Mickey Willis. he speaks to a lot of these conferences he knows the history the real history on shit why the fed was started he knows the real history on the american communist manifesto which was a book that went out all through la and all the different you know flower power areas that was seeded along with the psychedelic renaissance. So none of this stuff is happenstance. You know, grabbing teachers, CIA, you know, started getting into colleges and stuff like that. And along with a mockingbird going on TV. And that was the change education. And you can see it now in things like CRT and different things where you're just like, that makes no sense.

If I have any common sense, you're're like critical race theory is in and of itself racist how does no one fucking see that it is in and of itself racist i mean it's fucking bananas right you guys are teaching this in school and parents are forced to sign waivers where they're not going to watch the classes their kids are taking absurd what are you talking about you know the opposite of that is like tim kenney's good buddy he started a school called apogee up north have you had him on yet no i haven't i'll connect you guys he's fucking awesome really i really want to have 100 i'll connect you guys um great fucking dude one of the best guys i know um family man you know a real fucking dad who really cares and just a great great human and uh i knew him from the the UFC days, but also since I moved here, we started doing some gun training and sheepdog courses.

And I brought my wife to the sheepdog courses. They're incredible. They have the all-women's course. We did a tactical trauma where you basically learn how to keep someone alive who's had a limb knocked off or been shot. I haven't taken these yet, and I so want to. They are so amazing. Really high on the list. But yeah, he started a school called apogee i think a year ago

and he's just a little too far you know we knew we were moving to lockhart um we're about 45 minutes away from him right now in cedar park i don't want to add another 30 to that in the opposite direction and try to make that work but his school is is based on a socratic education where the parents are included and not only included but are required to read the same materials as the kid as the kid are reading it. Think about that for a second. Like as your kids educated, you are being educated in the same way. And in doing that, you're going to stir up useful conversation and useful ideas that are going to be brought together to bring about the philosophy of what's being digested the virtues all of the things that are that are classically known in ancient philosophy they're brought to the dinner table

because you're all being educated at the same time as you walk through that mind-blowing it's so mind-blowing yes of course and it makes so much sense right yeah yeah that's the thing i think i've tweeted about this a couple times i think that's the thing I'm most excited about to homeschool my own kids someday is the fact that you get to be reeducated along with your kids. And so it's really cool. And a school model also enforces this because usually they don't. And parents are not engaged at all with what the kids learn. Like you said, they're not even allowed sometimes to know what the kid's working on. And there are, you know, there are scenarios in which that is

beneficial to the kids working on something they have to bring it home and debate it with their parents or something the parents aren't prepped like there are good versions of those well your strategy is not a good version of that what most people are experiencing but being able to decide that i'm going to teach my kids US history or the history of physics or whatever. And then I also have to go study it because I have to be able to point my kids to the right materials and discuss it with them. Like, that's so cool. I think homeschooling parents have this superpower where they're going through another round of education that, because I mean you can you you

need all this foundational stuff when you're growing up you don't need all of it but you know like it's good and useful to be to have this just deep well of context for how the world works there's a reason why we expose kids to lots of different things over the course of their childhood is their foundation for understanding the world at large i want to move back in on that with sports too because that's the exact conversation with sports okay we're gonna come back that's a huge that's a little ping put a little ping in your heart if you just heard that statement from hannah it's perfect we're coming back to this um but you're not your rational faculties are not evolved to a point where you can you're going to have the same type of internal dialogue about it or internal questioning and grappling with the ideas as

you will when you revisit it as an adult with different perspective. And so you have homeschooling parents who are, they pull their kids out of school. Like, well, I don't know anything about anything. I don't know how to teach my kid algebra. I don't know how to teach kid u.s history it's been so long since i've learned this i have to go back and re-educate myself in order to be able to even if you're unschooling your kids and you don't have to assign them things you still want to be able to talk to them about it and kind of assess like where they're at and how their understanding of things is evolving and then all of a sudden you're getting a second level education that's probably way more valuable than the first one you got because you're going to remember it this time and you also have real world context to attach it to these people have superpowers

and it's i i think this is one of the underlying benefits of homeschooling that i don't think people talk about enough i don't think people appreciate enough i think it's going to take a while for the effects of this to get noticed because the huge proliferation of homeschooling that we've seen over the past handful of years is still getting off the ground but it's like the whole family is being educated and then you have this intergenerational dialogue and discussion but also this intergenerational expansion of knowledge that like you know people talk about intergenerational wealth what about intergenerational knowledge what about families that are educating themselves together there's so much about this that i think people don't talk about as a secondary benefit but i

think is really cool about the model you just described at apogee that i just think is important to recognize and also like factor into the equation of your homeschool your kids you're benefiting too you're not just sacrificing for your kids you're also learning but we're going to come back i want to hear what the connection that you're going to draw with the sports that that's yeah yeah we got we got two things here so i didn't remember a second one i just want to pull up the dude's name because this really when it comes to the education piece i'll find on audible here when dr leonard sacks don't let me forget leonard sacks okay i'm writing this down too

sports one of the one of the greatest strength coaches of all time is a guy named Pavel Tatsulin. Tim Ferriss put him on years ago, I think 2012, 2014, around that time. He was the guy who rocked kettlebells to the US. Oh, amazing. Trained Russian special forces, started training our special forces, then became a world-renowned coach. And he partnered with other great coaches like Dan John, who's an Olympic-level coach. And they've written books about that and one of the things that one of my favorite books is a book called easy strength an easy strength that's full of little gems that go well beyond

strength training like if it's worth doing do it every day there's tons of quotes like that where it's like ah there's a little aha moment that goes beyond strength training right if it's worth doing do it every day and one of the things paul talks about is in the Soviet Union, they wanted to be the best in the world in Olympics. So what they did is they started to specialize and they over-specialized. And so what they do is be like, all right, dad is 6'6", mom is 6'2", your kid's a swimmer. And they'd stick the kid in the pool at six months and never let them get out. And by the time they got to be 18, they would rather die in a coal mine than swim again. That's how much they hated it, right? Kids need the widest variety of things before specialization just so they have contrast

and they can see all the different things. It may be that that six-foot-plus kid wants to play baseball or basketball instead of swimming. As long as they've had the exposure to all those things, they can then choose to specialize when the time is right. basketball instead of swimming. As long as they've had the exposure to all those things, they can then choose to specialize when the time is right. And so the same thing applies to education. You want to get them a broad stroke because you have no fucking clue what the thing that they're going to be attracted to. And that may change over time, right? One of the things I like in Robert Greene's book, Mastery, is mastery of, what does it say? Mastery in anything is mastery of everything. And the reason for that is, it doesn't make you a master in multiple disciplines,

but you know what it took to get you to your mastery in that one thing. I know how hard it was to get a black belt in jiu-jitsu. I also know when I got my black belt in jiu-jitsu, there was a sea of black belts that could still beat my ass. And it was like, welcome to the lower rungs of black belt right there's a fucking infinite levels of game here um but i knew the hours that took i knew all the things that went into that so if i wanted to be a master or a black belt in something else i know the requirements to get that now right for the mastery and i think even if your kid rabbit holes a certain thing and we know this too from people who went to college they never used

their degree and they became experts in a different field. They became entrepreneurs, right? They mastered one thing and then took that over to something else, right? So that's still possible. There's no mistake in that sense. You know, if your kid wants to rabbit hole math and then they get like Daniel Griffith, one of my favorite people, he's an author, a polymath, a Renaissance man, whatever you want to call this guy.

He was a math major in college, health and sickness issues, hit him like a Mack truck. And then he got into food and then he got him into regenerative agriculture. He's one of the smartest people in regenerative agriculture. He's who we've apprenticed under from, he's an apprentice of Alan Savory's work. So anybody that's watched Kiss the Ground or Biggest Little Farm, movies like that, Alan Savory's name gets tossed around quite a bit he's on you know one of the the mount rushmore of regenerative agriculture that was daniel's mentor but daniel is a fucking poet and he's still a brilliant mathematician and he sees the world differently so he's applied that skill set to what he's doing now in a way no one else is doing so there's nothing wrong with rabbit

holing math first and then getting into something else, right? Yeah. It's the exposure to those things that allows him to choose. And he still takes the abilities that he picked up along the way into what he's doing now. I think that the point that you just made about it being important for kids to have foundational or like a broad foundation before they specialize is so important because, and this goes back to, you know, you were at ASU, you talk about this being a place where you could just explore things that were interesting. You explore the world, not even like, you know, philosophical or intellectual ideas that are interesting to you, but you just like be for a while before you figured out, you know, I want to fight. I want to go do something else more specific. I think there's this weird paradox where, like, and I try to represent both sides of this paradox as much

as I can, because I think both are true and they're disproportionately applicable and useful to different people. These young people have this huge advantage where if you do figure out something that you're interested in and you go deep on that thing, you give yourself such an advantage by digging into something young because the whole world wants to help you. Before you turn 25 or even 30, you're a young person who's actually doing something in the real world or exploring ideas that people normally don't get to until they're well settled into their adulthood, the world is so much more likely to respond to you because they find it so exciting

that a young person is interested in this. If you reach out to somebody, you're like, hey, I read your book and I'm 17 or I'm 21 and I'm trying to break into this field. People are so excited about that. And so there's this huge advantage if kids do figure out what they're interested in young, there's this huge advantage that they have

for things that they can, like things in the world they can leverage, connections that they can build and leverage. But at the same time, we put so much pressure on kids to figure out what it is that they want to do before they turn 18. And I really think it's

like, it's criminal to do that to children. Like it's a violation of the integrity of their own development, the sacredness of their development to force them into a box before they've even decided that they're done tasting all the different things and are ready to start whittling down the pile of things that they're interested in. Yeah. You've had five minutes at the buffet and they're saying, what's your favorite food? You're going to eat it for the rest of your life. Yeah. It's cool. This is dinner every day permanently. You don't get to eat anything else. Just this one dinner. Have you tried everything? No, I haven't tried everything. I've been here for five minutes. Well, have you made your choice yet?

No, I haven't made my choice yet. I've been here for five minutes. Well, have you made your choice yet? No, I haven't made my choice yet. I've been here for five minutes. Like this exact same thinking. Yeah. I think you're describing it very well. This contrast between the force of, or even the coerciveness of, or even the arrogance and the ignorance of thinking that you can make kids decide what they want to do by the time they're 18 and expecting them to be developmentally ready to make decisions that affect them for the rest of their lives. Where a year prior, they weren't even old enough to go somewhere without permission or even walk around a school building without permission to go somewhere in between bells. It's wild. I want to talk about the sports stuff though, because this is, there's so much here to unpack. One of the biggest questions that I see people ask, or one of the biggest objections that people have to pulling kids out of school or or starting to deconstruct the monopoly of public education

and advocating for, what if there were two dozen micro schools in your town to choose from instead of one big public school? One of the big objections is sports. Like team sports are really important for kids. You played team sports. You played football at a very serious level for

quite a while. And then you went on to fight in the UFC, which is obviously very different from what you're getting in terms of sports in high school and college. But it was still a very formative experience for you. And I imagine the sports that you played growing up had a strong impact on both how you approached the UFC but also your readiness for it do you think sports are important for kids and if they are is there any soundness to the argument that public schools are important because they are these hubs for sports that might not exist in the same way or with the same level of access if it was left up to the free market to provide opportunities for kids to play different sports. Yeah. There's two pieces there. One, I mean, my sports career, football saved my life in many ways. It was my outlet growing up.

My parents fought all the time. And that really was the, the way to, to let the fucking fuse go where I could just blow off some steam every single day. And, um, I loved it. I loved hitting people. It was the different game. It's when you could still tackle using your head. You know, we had, when I was eight years old, they had, they say, grab grass, you'd be on all fours and then put your face mask on them. And we'd slam face mask to face mask against each other with a mouthpiece. And thankfully, they'd done away with drills like that. But it was a different time.

And that was something that I fucking loved. I relished having the ability to have that kind of contact. And with a better home, my son may not need that. He might want to play wide receiver or something else. And he's really interested in football now because he's at the age when I started. That said, he's been in jujitsu on and off since he was three, which is really, when you're three, it's tumbling, it's gymnastics, it's body flow, it's stretching, it's strength, it's all the things you'd want from gymnastics for less money. And then it's body awareness, self-defense,

and jujitsu is from eight years old up. There's tournaments that he can go to. He's been participating in a bunch. He's got a bunch of gold medals. More importantly, he's lost and hasn't just walked through everybody as he's been promoted. Single sports are incredibly important for that. You can't blame your team. You can't blame your coach. You can't blame the quarterback. It's on you when you step out there. And I think there's something incredibly valuable in that, which I got from wrestling prior to fighting. That's unique to wrestling as a combat sport, especially with how hard it is. That said, team sports helped me be a team player. So how did team sports, when I first got to Onnit, that was the only corporate job I've ever held. I was director of human optimization, met Aubrey, Marcus through a

list of synchronicities, shared the same flight back to Vegas. And he fucking said, you're going to come work with me. And it worked out that way. I took over their podcast. I was director of human optimization. I was designing supplements and the office guinea pig for anything that was worth a shit from everything from biohacks to new ingredients that could potentially go in a supplement. And that was my job. I was not the head honcho. I had to be a team player. Aubrey was the head honcho and actually had two or three people ahead of me in between me and Aubrey, even though I had a proximity to Aubrey, most people don't. That said, having been a role player, having sat the bench my entire senior year at ASU, I got to learn what being a role player, having sat the bench my entire senior year at ASU,

I got to learn what being a role player meant. I knew halfway through the season I wasn't going to play in the NFL. I wasn't going to keep going after this year. This is my final year. And I saw guys quit their senior year when they realized they weren't going to get the same playing time that they had hoped for. I didn't want to do that. I wanted to finish on the field, even if it meant finishing on the bench. And they did a couple things for me.

One, it showed me the value. When we won a bowl championship, I knew I had helped those guys. I knew by going hard every day in practice against the starting offensive linemen, they had the best look so they could be the best versions of themselves. And they were. And a lot of those guys went on to be pro football players because they were good. Not because I was good, but because they were good. And they had a real look from me every single day.

As well as that, that left a chip on my shoulder where I said, I'm not done with my athletic career. I'm going to do something else. And then got into mixed martial arts and fought 10 fights in the UFC. It was a pretty long standing career there. That's the first part of the question. There's benefits to singles, there's benefits to team sports and how it shows up in your life. It shows up in a myriad of ways you can never describe until they go through it. Then you're like, oh shit, I'm a bench player right now. And that's okay.

That's what the team needs. The team needs me to contribute in a very specific way. And I'm not going to get the touchdown pass. I'm not going to get the highlight. I'm not going to get the fucking, the pat on the back, but I'm going to do this and the team's going to do well. So that was important for that. The secondary piece of this is, can this stuff still exist without schools? And it's funny because Tosh, my wife, she was homeschooled up until high school. The only reason she went to

high school was to run. She wanted to run cross country. Her mom was a great runner. And so she said, can you put me in school so I can join the team? My understanding, having looked into this now, is if you're homeschooled, you can select schools in your area to play on that sport. You don't actually have to attend that sport. And if you have a good sports program and your kid's a good athlete, they would love to have your kid come on

even without the educational piece. You don't have to sign up for their education if they're educated at home. You have to make sure that your grades are at the standard that's required for each year. But you can just test. And if you test out of those things, then you get to still show up for the sport. So, and again, that's only when we're talking about high school athletics, college athletics, and things like that. And that's a very small window too. So like we get really, Americans are very, and I'm sure this is the other way in other countries where it's like, soccer's the only thing, football's the only thing. And then you're

like, no, jujitsu is just as dope in Brazil. And there's fighting and there's a whole much other stuff, volleyball, whatever the thing is. There's so many club sports out there for team stuff that go on all the way around the clock. I mean, most of the guys that really love high school basketball, they're in a summer league. They're in a, uh, they're in multiple leagues throughout the year. Sometimes it's two weeks, sometimes it's three months, but if they love basketball and they're a junior or senior, they might be doing that year round at this point. Right. Um, football has limitations on that for, for important reasons. You can't play it year round, but even still, you know, there's flag football right now. If you're worried about your kids getting hit, you could sign up.

That's a club sport. There's nothing to do with a school. When I played Pop Warner, one of the things that I loved is all my teammates went to different high schools in the same district. So when I played high school football, I played against all my old teammates from Pop Warner. Those were some of my best friends. I have years of memories with them. And I would tell my teammates, this guy, Steve Munoz is going to light you up. Don't get in

his way. He's going to light, he hits like a Mack truck. And so we had scouting reports on different teams. I knew who their best player were because I'd played with them since I was eight. So it folded back in then that way. And all at the same time, it really doesn't fucking matter. The chances of your kid being a pro athlete are slim to none. And I was a pro athlete. They're very fucking slim. If you watch Trophy Kids that Chris Bell and Mark Bell did, the amount of parents trying to create the next Michael Jordan and the next Tiger Woods is fucking heartbreaking. And watch that documentary. It's fucking hard you know, so Strong caution into creating great kids, right strong caution and i'm I can name drop a ton of people

I'm buddies with lance armstrong. I'm buddies with some of the best in sports Those guys still have issues with their dad I don't want that I don't want a world champion If my son's gonna have an issue with me if I have to create that big of a hole in his heart So that he becomes a world champion, not worth it. So balance those things out. Give kids what they want.

In my personal opinion, their education is far more valuable than what they do in sports. And sports are uniquely a part of that education. They should be a part of that education. The same as art, the same as music, the same as all these other pieces that have been slowly slivered out from modern education.

And that's what I really want. Like we built this house on the farm. We have a room that's dedicated to music and art. It's the music and art room. And the kids' desks are in there so they can do schoolwork in there. It's a beautiful room. It's teal colored.

So it's different than the rest of the house. There's floor to ceiling glass facing the West so they can watch the sunset. If they're done, we won't even probably be in that room unless we're teal colored. So it's different than the rest of the house. There's Florida ceiling glass facing the West so they can watch the sunset if they're done. We won't even probably be in that room unless we're playing music late. Cabinets for art supplies, for painting and doing all the things like that shit I love that I just got into five, 10 years ago. And having a space that's dedicated to that is a really cool way. Not everyone's going to get to build their dream house. I understand that. But even just making a room where you're saying this is the purpose of this room and giving it access to that, there's a convenience level and an invitation that happens from that.

I got 100 square feet of MMA mats that I had in my mom's garage because when I fought in the UFC, I had no money. I still worked at two other garage. Cause when I fought in the UFC, I had no money. I still worked at a, um, I had two other jobs as personal training. I was working as a, as a manager, bouncer and bartender at a strip club, not an ideal circumstance, but that put food on the plate. And, um, we had these hundreds, it was hard, you know, it was a detached garage. So we, it was a studio, but it was concrete floor. We put these, uh, MMA mats down and that would invite us to the floor for food, for wrestling, for yoga, for tickle time. And Bear grew up in that garage until he was almost two years old before he moved and got our own place. Those mats have stayed with us at every house we've come to. They're going to be in the new house. We put a rug over it so it doesn't look like MMA mats,

but the invitation is still there. The invitation to get on the floor, to wrestle, to tickle, to play, to play board games, that's always there. And it's conveniently waiting for us, right? Like when you talk optimization, the odds of you doing an ice bath grow 100x if you have an ice bath that's cold and you don't have to go by ice and load your bathtub, right? It's night and day because it's exponentially easier to get to. And you can do this from an education standpoint, an art standpoint, a music standpoint, any of these things that you're grabbing towards,

they're available when you make the convenient. And same thing with martial arts. You talk to your kids. There's a big reason I talk about jujitsu and you listen to people who come from a jujitsu background. It's the fucking end to bullying for multiple reasons. Number one, bullies find out really quick who knows jujitsu and they don't fuck with them the hard way, right? And jujitsu is the gentle art, right? If I train boxing, one kid trains boxing and one kid trains jujitsu and the boxer punches the bully in the face, the boxer can get in trouble. Even if you laid him out in self-defense, the jujitsu guy can take him down and hold him and maybe put him to sleep with a gentle choke. He's exercised restraint in the eyes of the law. At any age, that's exercising restraint. That's why they

teach cops jujitsu, not boxing. So there's a benefit there. But the most beautiful thing is if you take the same bully and put him in jujitsu, that gets rid of the bully because now he has a genuine outlet to learn. It's incredibly humbling. Anybody who makes it to black belt has been tapped the same bully and put him in jujitsu, that gets rid of the bully because now he has a genuine outlet to learn. It's incredibly humbling. Anybody who makes it to black belt has been tapped literally thousands upon thousands of times. I've had to tap out. And if I didn't, I had six months to think about why I didn't tap from an injury, right? Like I just held that a little too long. That was very dumb. And I'm going to learn the hard way from that. So I think there is something medicinal in our society about jujitsu and martial arts in general. But the beautiful thing about martial

arts or jujitsu specifically of all martial arts is that you get tested all along the way. It's not, hey, throw 10 roundhouse kicks and a spinning back kick and then break this piece of wood and now you get your belt. No, do it with another person and show me, you know, your shit. Show me, you know how this works and show me you can defend yourself. And as you graduate up, then you get the new belt through actual practice, through being with another human and working on these things. And that makes it unique to other martial arts. Also, you're not getting hit in the head.

That makes it incredibly valuable for our little ones to not, not take brain damage all along the way. So I think strong push for kids. I get these questions all the time too. Like, well, we're uncertain about jujitsu because we don't want our kid's arm to be broken. And there's a Kung Fu place down the street where they don't really hit each other. And it's like, don't go to fucking Kung Fu. Don't do any of that stuff.

Your kid's not going to get his arm broken. Teach him to tap early, tap quick. He's going to be just fine. She's going to be just fine. Our little girl, three and a half. I can't wait.

She's always jumping on our backs, trying to choke us. She's going to have a ball being in there. Two, my best friend have three kids that are all homeschooled. They have two girls that are eight and 11 and a little boy who's five. And the girls are crushing it in jujitsu. I'm gonna coach one this Saturday at a local tournament.

It's just as valuable for women and just as valuable for boys. And the fact that it is just you, again, that gives you a piece of the sliver that team sports can't get. And at the same time, all of your training partners in the gym make you better. If you're addicted to those guys,

you don't get them better. They're not going to want to train with you. And so you still have team sport dynamics, even in a single sport. As wrestlers, we always knew this. We always knew like, we got to keep our guy healthy. If he doesn't want to turn over on his back

and you got his arm in a bad spot, don't keep cranking it just to show him you can pin him. Understand like that's your teammate and you want to take care of him. So you still get a lot of the team sports basics and the things that you need in training with a team of like-minded individuals for individual sports. So I think there's something there too. Is it optimal to get both, do you think, to have the team sport psychology and the individual sport psychology as part of your foundation for not just how you play sports, but how you interact with the world? I think so. One is better than none for certain.

But even that, I just had this conversation with Tosh because she was like, well, what about jujitsu with Bear starting football? And I'm like, he's not supposed to do jujitsu year round right now. If he had three or four sports, that would be ideal. When he's in college or 18, if he wants to go into that full-time, cool. He doesn't need that yet. He needs variety. And like, even amongst that, there's hobbies. Like we've got a pickleball court. We play pickleball. That's something athletic that's different. He loves disc golf, frisbee golf. You's not super athletic, but he loves it. And it gets us outside. We're launching a disc and walking and talking the whole way. Probably don't need to be a great athlete to do that sport, but it's still fun and you're outdoors and it gets you in the sunshine and out in nature. So I think anything

like that, that's going to help with movement, hiking, jogging, anything that's fun for kids. Like my kid doesn't want to run with me while I run because it's too far for him. Can I ride the scooter? Fuck yeah, ride the scooter while I jog on the sidewalk. Absolutely. Then now we go the same distance. You're having fun. I'm having fun.

We're both outside. We're both breathing hard. And it's variety. It's something different. But yeah, to your question, team sports uniquely address something that individual sports can't because you have to work as a team in the moment. And we see that in sports like football and basketball.

We see the greatest players of all time become the greatest players of all time because of how they engage their teammates. It's very rare where you see somebody, somebody's unconscious, and he's throwing 80 points down and that won the game. It's like, maybe there's a game like that for Kobe. Maybe there's a game like that for Jordan. But for every game like that, there was 10 or a hundred games where Kobe and Jordan

made everyone else on the team better. Right. And that's a key takeaway you only get in team sports because you're out there with them together at the same time. Where would you rank the education benefit of sports versus other areas that a child is educated? How would you rank that in comparison to having a child that loves to read or having a child that is really excited about math or history or something else that's very traditionally academic or a child who's really interested in grappling with the real world. So, you know, they want to build a business or they want to learn woodworking or something that has like a very tangible value in like the economic marketplace or their capacity to build

something. Do you like, is there a hierarchy in your mind of like, okay, if we have a list of boxes that we'd like to check of things that we expose our kids to, you can kind of work your way down the list in terms of importance. Does it really vary by the kid? How do you think about that? It varies a hundred percent by the kid. And it's funny, our kids are five years apart. Our little girl, Wolf, is five years younger than Bear. She's three and a half now. And before she could read, she would sit with a book quietly and just flip each page and analyze like a robot. And she was taking it in.

She didn't understand the runes, the language, but she got it. And she's been doing that since she was probably six months old. She has the ability to play alone much better than our son does. She has a lot of differences there and a lot of similarities.

She's also a bull in a China shop that'll run through and dig a knee into my ribs if I'm not paying attention. She's crazy like him too. But they may differ completely in what they enjoy physically. The checkbox to really look at, there's a fantastic ebook. Remember the book that I'm mentioning from Paul Cech is called How to Eat, Move, and Be Healthy. And in that, there's a summary of this, which became its own ebook, The Last Four Doctors You'll Ever Need. The last four doctors you'll ever need are doctor movement, which is anything you do to move. It's yoga, it's running, it's walking, it's hiking, it's swimming, it's fucking pickleball, it's disc golf, it's anything for movement. Jiu-jitsu, you name it. Any team sport.

Dr. Quiet, when do you go to bed? And what is regenerative for you? So Tai Chi, meditation. And kids aren't going to have those pieces yet, but that all folds into Dr. Quiet, restoration. Dr. Diet, what do you put in your body? From supplements to water to food, everything in between.

Anything you put in your body is Dr. Diet. And Dr. Happiness. So Dr. Happiness is the things that fill your cup each day. Why are you here? What's your vocation? What's the thing that lights you on fire? Mark Gaffney, what's alluring you right now? And Dr. Happy is going to change wider for everybody,

more so than anything else. So if you've got a kid who loves something academically, that's their allurement, drawing them to that. That's Dr. Happy for them. That's a full fuck yes. But still have a movement practice, that's beneficial for them. And it may not be something that's a sport where they're going to compete against others and things like that. I don't think that's for everybody. But if there's an interest there, if there's allurement to that, if your kids are asking you, I want to try this sport, there's a full fuck yeah. You say yes to that. Even if you're worried about injuries and other things, say yes to that because there's something in their heart that's drawing them in that direction

and they're going to learn more than you think they're going to learn that inner compass of a child is so important I know you've said multiple times that this is a thing that you also have a deep respect for but I think it's something

I talk about this a lot so I used to work before I got into like the deep education stuff my first foray into education after I graduated from being homeschooled was working for a startup apprenticeship program I was helping kids skip college and go land apprenticeships at startups instead super cool place to be a homeschool graduate and be figuring out how the world works and also how this whole education economy works. But one of the things I was, I was a coach. So I talked to people going through the program multiple times, like every day. And one of the things that I kept coming back to is I watched these different people's journeys unfold as they'd come into

the program and they have no idea really what they wanted to do, or they knew they wanted to, you know, work at a startup. That's why why they were there they didn't really know like how their different interests intersected and how it all fit together it was very much a personal discovery process of okay like I have this interest and this skill set and this other thing over here like how do I kind of start to compile all of that to find either a place in the marketplace where I can be useful as somebody and start to make money from these skills I've built? Or how do I start to think about the career track that I want less in the very authoritarian and absolutist, like I'm going to be a teacher

and I'm going to do this for the rest of my life, but more how do I get on the path towards wealth, abundance, success, competence? Like what is the starting point and what will be a very iterative process over the course of many decades. One of the things I kept noticing was that when people have things that they're interested in,

there tends to be a reason why they're interested in it. And even if that reason is just their innate curiosity, and usually there's something more than that, but even if it's just their innate curiosity, the common denominator among all your interests is you. And you change and evolve, but you're also like an entity that in some ways stays very the same.

The essence of you is always present with you even as you grow and change throughout your life. And so if you're interested in things, like just trust that because usually your interests will be recurring and they usually evolve in a way where you start digging into a way where, you know, you start digging into a topic like your own journey, becoming interested in health and

fitness and like how to take care of your body because you wanted to figure out how to be successful in the UFC and also just in life. That iterates over time where at first you kind of become curious about this thing. Like maybe you want to get good at playing football. So you're kind of like, okay, like how do I like train and like get more jacked so that I can hit people harder and, you know, be a bigger force for a bigger thing for people to have to get through in order to get to my teammates. And then over time you become interested in, well, like, okay, now I want to like, it's kind of fun to get stronger, but now I want to learn how to be more mobile. Or now I want to learn how to like, what if my diet doesn't just affect my body? Like what if it affects my

cognition or my energy levels or these other things? And you iteratively become interested in more and more things in the same vein over time, you kind of follow the thread. And I think people worry way too much about how an interest is going to materialize. It's like, okay, but how's this going to make you money eventually? Or like, what is this? So in like 10 years, if you read this book now, like how is that going to pay off? And like, what's the expertise that you're building? And I think people don't just like just innately trust enough kids' curiosities. Like if your kid's interested in something, the chances that they will be continually interested in it is very high. If they're not continually interested in it,

they're probably going to be interested in something related later because the thing that made them interested in this is going to manifest in other places. And I think, I don't know, I think we don't trust that in kids nearly enough. And I get really excited whenever somebody's talking about an approach to life that honors that, the things within us that we can't always explain,

but that are very real and very deeply ingrained. So I love all of that. I also love when you're talking about the house that you've set up and the way that different things inside of the space are invitational. I find that really interesting too. I love setting up spaces.

I do this with my own house. I put things in places where I'm going to have, like I have to walk past my yoga mat to get to the kitchen because I want to remember that it's there multiple times a day because I want to use my yoga mat. Fuck yeah. Put some quick sun salutations and be on with it. Yeah. I'm really curious what else. So you had your kids in Waldorf or you had your older son in Waldorf school for a while and then COVID happened. You pulled them out. You didn't want to do online school. You started this homeschooling process. Eventually that iterated into unschooling. I'm really curious about the process that you went through and thinking about, because your

wife was homeschooled. I'm sure you guys had, because of her experience, had a lot of thoughts around what you wanted an education, a homeschooling education to be. And then then eventually it sounds it sounds like it was an iterative process to go from maybe more traditional homeschooling to unschooling so I'm really curious about that but also like how you started to think about what types of invitations in your child's world felt important to you from like a values standpoint that you wanted to be either encouraging your kid to explore even if you're not giving them a ton of direction or that you wanted to be intentionally nurturing because you feel like they're going to be valuable in your child's life trajectory yeah that's a loaded one let me think here um the first part of it uh refresh me on the first part because I'm thinking of this in two

that's a long question I know that was more complicated than it needed to be I'm like alright I have rooms there's different rooms the art music and art room is just one how you're thinking about the invitation and then the invitation to the kids and then how you're thinking about

as your philosophy was becoming more and more kind of free range, less structured schooling, more unschooling, how you thought about, if you're not telling your kid what to do, you kind of have to lead through example or through invitations. What are the invitations that you wanted

to be putting in front of your kids? Yeah, that's a great one. I can just go through the house. We have a music and art room. I have a podcast studio, which is a library and a study. So there's floor to ceiling bookshelves. My goal is to have that filled out within 10 years. We have a dojo.

The three-car garage is actually a dojo where we still have overhead storage, but underneath that are heavy bags and mounted bags. And some of the things are just for the kids. They're like focus bags that'll be set at a specific height just for them to punch and kick. So they'll have the materials in there that are designed for them to use. It's 450 square feet of mat space. So we've got that all matted out. Eventually we'll have it spring loaded, just like Tim Kennedy's gym, where it's the nicest like floating on a cloud type experience. A bunch of

speakers in there so we can jam and that whole door can be opened up so we have natural light coming in while we're moving. This is a big one from Jack Cruz. Don't work out indoors. Work out outside as much as you possibly can because indoors is fucking your system up way more than people understand.

And again, don't take my word for it. Don't take Uncle Jack's word for it. Read Health and Light by John Ott, O-T-T. It's like 200 bucks on Amazon because it's out of print. It is still worth it. Read Health and Light by John Ott, O-T-T. It's like 200 bucks on Amazon because it's out of print. It is still worth it. I would spend 200 bucks on that if I didn't already have a copy of it. But that said, there are rooms specifically designed to bring about different things. Different ages are meant to bring about different things. As a parent, I understand these through my own rites of passage. One of the ways that I came, I didn't grow up learning to trust myself. That came to me through plant

medicine experiences. Specifically, I've had multiple intervals in my life where I was like, I don't know what the fuck I'm going to do. When I retired from fighting, I knew it was time. I knew I wanted kids. I didn't know how long or short that would be in between. But I retired in 2014, sat with Ayahuasca and Ayahuasca showed me, just keep doing what you're doing. I literally had a vision of me reading while I was at the strip club. I would read for five hours while it was slow.

You do a 10 hour shift, first five hours are slow. I'm reading Mark Sisson's books. I'm reading Paul Chexbo. I'm reading all these different things. Just follow that, follow the breadcrumbs. And then a year later, we have Bear. A year and a half later, I go on Rogan's and he's like, start a podcast.

Just like he tells everybody. And then I go back and forth on that a year later, I've got a podcast. Then I meet Aubrey. I mean, all these things kind of unlocked. But the synchronicity machine unlocks when you say yes to what's going on inside. And it is something where those breadcrumbs

start to become more and more apparent. And it's like gears where all of a sudden you just hit your stride. And I want that to be available to my kids. But I also know as a parent, it's my job to help set up some of those doorways for them to pass through. A rite of passage is necessary for boys.

For women, it's super important to honor their rite of passage via the red tent and different modalities that say you're now becoming a woman and all the women of their tribe hold that together. This is what it means to be a woman in the modern world. This is where the modern world has things a little wrong. And this is going to be one of our things we need to correct through you, through your presence as a woman, through your presence as a man, this is what's going to be needed from you. Hunting, I think is a big one for boys and girls to be a part of. And I'm excited to hunt with both my kids. There will be plant medicine experiences for my kids at the right age

to really help them unlock and refine that for themselves. What is that inner compass telling them? Connect to that piece and listen to it always. It's always there, whether the plant medicines are there or not. It takes a lot of people time to figure that out. You can see a lot of people going in for another ceremony. It's round 100 or round 200. And it's like, you still haven't figured out that medicine's always in you. It's always there. The guiding light's always inside you. Listen to that. It's never going to steer you wrong. And as far as anything mandatory, it's hard to mandate anything when you're unschooling but i've known from the beginning because of jiu-jitsu and because of my life growing up that

You know you talk to a guy like tim kennedy We live in a fucking bubble within a bubble And outside of those bubbles shit is dark It's not it's not an easy life for a lot of people and most people in Europe and other countries that have been in war and seen war, they know it. They're not held behind the safety net of bubbles within bubbles within bubbles. They live in real reality. And understanding that, it's important to do things that empower our kids. And you can be empowered through wisdom, right? But you can be empowered through knowledge, but only if it's applied. And knowledge applied is what becomes wisdom. So it's the experience of things that actually helps them ground that into

reality. And the experience of defending yourself, super important. The experience of learning how to save people's lives, super important. Now I can practice with Bear how to apply a tourniquet. If daddy gets a knife in the leg or a bad accident with the skid steer on the land, which is probably more prominent than a knife going into my leg. How do we apply this so I don't die? You know, he gets to work on those things with me. They're real world there. Other real world things

that I think are just as important, planting a tree and watering it. Remember we talked about building the tree house. Kids love seeing something they contributed to. My son planted a seed next to an oak tree that was really shitty pre-plant an oak tree that was really shitty, pre-planted oak tree. Love oak trees, but this one was diseased and not a very healthy organic tree. So they want you to put that seed right by the sprinkler there and we'll see if it takes off.

And it took off. And I was like, damn, dude, this is cool. And I was like, oh, it's a cottonwood. Cottonwood's a medicine tree from the Lakota tribe. They cut one every year and stand it up for Sundance. It's like really cool. We ended up cutting down the oak. That tree's so big in two years, it's taller than our two-story house. He can climb on it. And he does climb on it every fucking day.

Like that's his tree. When we plant things in the ground and we get to see them and for the first time we had, you know, on our farm, we ate a peach that was ripened on the tree. I had never done that in my whole fucking life, eating something that was ripened on the tree, off the tree. And he got to experience that where he eggs this morning that he collected,

he collected those eggs from our chickens that we raised at our house and brought out to the farm. There's things like that, that become, they make life real and our interactions to it real. And they make the experience of life, you know, via chores and things that aren't necessary, desirable. They give them light at the end of the tunnel. They're like, oh, cool. That's dope. You know, like that felt really good. I feel really good right now eating these eggs.

And I feel really good knowing that I know all their names and that we helped them. We made that possible, right? And the tree thing is a big one too, because you watch that thing grow over time, a good tree will outgrow your kid, you know, even a slow tree should, but I think there's a lot of things you can do in reality that tie them to their space. And, you know, now it's easier to get them. If my son wants another tree, he knows he's the one that's got to water that tree. He's got a fig tree and a couple other ones. We've got a little lemon tree. And these are just little, we have a 400 fruit and nut tree food forest at our farm.

The trees he's getting now are going to be by our house that we're building. So it's his job to water those. It's his job to take care and tend to those things. And that pulls them into reality as well. So I think from a mandatory standpoint, it is important. This brings us back to Leonard Sachs. Leonard Sachs is a PhD in psychology

and a family medicine doctor. He wrote The Collapse of Parenting. He also wrote phenomenal books on the differences between boys and girls. He has one just for boys and one just for girls. Came out in 2012 when it was still kosher to talk about shit like that before people

lost their minds. And he's brilliant. And he talks about everything that he ran into because it's a little older, it's kind of pre-shit hitting the fan for lack of a better term. And when it was still kosher to talk about these things and what he came to understand is there was a big divide between what parents thought were their responsibility versus the schools. And so parents wanted to hand it off to the schools. You teach my kid ethics. You teach my kid value. You teach my kid how to talk to one another.

That's not me. I got work to do. I'm sending my kids to you for that. And teachers are saying, that's your job to do. It's not our job to do. And then eventually that became the doctor's job. So we've talked before about the issue with all these treatments and medicines for kids that are like ADHD. Your kid doesn't want to fucking sit because it's a shitty education. They're not meant to sit down.

They're meant to be outside right now, learning outside. They're not meant to be sitting in the desk that's too small for them. Certainly too small for me. That fidgetiness is them not liking their surrounding. It's a bad environment. The lighting overhead is a bad environment and their body recognizes that. There's no drug to fix that. They might give them drugs that help patch up some of the issues so they can sit still and focus and get good grades. That's not going to pan out in the long term. That's going to destroy your kid's neurology over the long-term. It's not going to be good for them. And so Leonard really deep dives this stuff from a very practical level, all the way to the medicine side of it, where he's had parents come in that are like, well, the teacher recommends, we saw this thing on polyphasics bipolar disorder for young people

and how that's different than bipolar disorder for older people and how, you know, when it's biphasic, it's faster. So it's going to be like, they could be laughing five minutes and then screaming in the next five minutes and then laughing in five minutes later. You know, whereas like a true manic depressant might have three weeks in mania and three months in depression. And this doctor went on, this Harvard kids doctor was talking about this. It was two years later that Harvard doctor was found to have received millions of dollars from two different pharmaceutical companies. He didn't break the law,

but highly unethical to talk about these things in this way. He created a disease on behalf of the drug companies, drugs that had just come out. That fucking disease doesn't exist. He goes, you get an eight-year-old boy, totally normal for them to be laughing five minutes and then five minutes later be losing their mind. And then for them five minutes later to go back to laughing again, that's an eight-year-old boy's job. He's right in that interval of figuring shit out.

Steiner, every seven years it changes, right? So when we understand that, we have to take responsibility for ourselves. We have to take responsibility for our own health, our own education, our own everything. No one's going to hand you that. No one's going to get you to the place you want to go by following in someone else's footsteps. And as parents, it's incredibly important that we understand, even if you send your kids to school, their education is still up to you. And more importantly than that, who they become as a person is 100% up to you. And I think Collapse of Parenting is a phenomenal book. Hold On to Your Kids by Garber Mate, also another phenomenal book that really talks about the parent-child bond and how that's lost to peer-to-peer bonds.

And when you have peer-to-peer bonds, both these books talk about it, when you have peer-to-peer bonds. And when you have peer-to-peer bonds, both of these books talk about it. When you have peer-to-peer bonds, this is what's creating fragility. And he goes through an athlete who's, this kid's great at online Madden games. He's great at football games. Never wants to play sports. His dad's like, you want to play football? He's like, no, I'm just playing games. And he's overweight because all he does is play games. Then he goes to a couple of his friends say, hey, we're going to do JV football next year. And he tries out and he tries out and his coach pulls him aside and he says,

dude, you're way out of shape. You need to show up tomorrow at 7 a.m. He doesn't show up tomorrow at 7 a.m. He doesn't have it in him. He's too fragile, right? Another one's a straight A student who wants to sign up for AP courses and ends up taking a physics class too early.

And now she's a C student. She's never had a C in her life. She uses her fucking mind, right? Because her idea of herself is, if I'm not this person, if I'm not great in academics, then who am I, right? That's because they built peer-to-peer bonds. And in the peer-to-peer bond, you recognize there's every friend I have out there who I'd consider my bestie. If I say one wrong thing, that relationship can end in a fucking heartbeat. There's some knowing on a soul level that the friend to friend relationship is fragile. And so we take that fragility into everything we do. If I'm not this, then what?

Right? And he explains this far better than I am. But your parents, you know, if you have good parents, they love you no matter what. It's truly unconditional. I could be in fucking jail right now and my mom would still love me. She'd be disappointed, but she would love me just as much as if I'm not in jail, right? I have that same love for my kids, you know, and it's so important for them to know that because there's nothing fragile about that relationship, right?

Like nothing fragile at all. So I think in reality, keeping that bond through various means, which also means sometimes you're not the best friend. Sometimes you got to tell them what's acceptable and what isn't acceptable. Kim Jong-Pain is an awesome author as well on kid stuff. And he says, your job is to be the governor.

And if you do that right, they will love you. They will respect you. They will honor you and they'll become good people. And later on when they're adults, that's when you're fucking best friends, right? Because you did a good job. They grew up, they had everything they needed. And then they look at you and they say,

fuck, you did a good job, guys. And I can still look at my parents for all the shit I didn't like growing up. They did a fucking great job. And I love them for that. I got a great relationship with both parents. So I think that is, that is super important and it isn't an easy piece for people to do, but you can't, we can't keep putting our health into a doctor's hands or to pharmaceutical companies hands. We can't put our children's education into the government's hands. We can't put our children's behavior into the doctor's hands. It has to be something that we acknowledge as our job.

That's all I got. I want to talk, there's so much here to unpack, but I want to talk about the progression of your understanding of a lot of this as it relates to like how you raise your kids um because you have such an interesting story of being you know an athlete

who hated school to the point that you dropped out partway through your senior year because you couldn't stand it enough to finish college. Your wife is homeschooled. I imagine more traditionally homeschooled as opposed to unschooled would be my guess. Unschooling is less. Yeah, she was more homeschooled for sure. I mean, they did a lot where it was traveling and things like that. So it was a rich homeschool, but it was homeschooled.

It wasn't unschooled. Yeah. And then you had your oldest in Waldorf school for a while pre-COVID, then brought him home to homeschool him and then started going down these rabbit trails that eventually led you to unschooling. I'm really curious about the evolution of your own thought around educating your kids.

I imagine like the way you talk about it, it sounds like it's been a discovery process of figuring out what is the correct level of freedom to give my kids and what is the correct level of structure. What did that process of going from Waldorf to homeschooling to unschooling philosophy look like? And how did you find the balance of like the correct level of freedom to give the children that you wanted to raise? That's a great question. I think there's a couple of things. One, trial and error.

Of course. The fucking firstborn. The guinea pig. That's me. I think on a soul, that's me too. I think on a soul level, the firstborn says, all right, you guys can fuck up with me. The kids that come next will have it better. I think there's some agreement there on a soul level

that the firstborns could agree to that. My son's five years older than our little girl. We did a lot of shit with him that we don't do with her. I was six years older than my sister. Very similar experience. It's a chunk of change, right? That's a long enough time to say what worked and what didn't. Yeah, you can see the results of your experience you ran.

You're like, wait a second, maybe this wasn't such a good idea four years later. And fortunately, we can see what was a phase, right? Like right now, our little girl's at three and she's like, no, you know, everything's, no, I don't want to eat that. And it's like, you just ate this two nights ago. She's like, no, I don't want it. It doesn't look right. You know, you're like, okay, well, you know, Leonard Sacks says you can eat this or not eat tonight. And there's a shit ton of science on why he says that and why parents 30 years ago knew to do this, but don't now. There's a lot of

science on why parents who say we'll give you whatever you want, wind up with obese kids that don't listen. Right? So that's still the option. You can not eat if you don't want to, but we encourage you to eat and softly and gently hold our governorship on what is allowed and what isn't allowed. And it works, it works. Eventually she'll eat or she won't eat, but we hold her through that experience.

I don't, you know, I forget which book I was reading, but they say, first thing we're taught is to spank, you know, cause we were spanked. And then we realized spanking doesn't work. So yelling, yelling's the next thing. I'm fucking pissed. Don't talk to me that way. How could you?

Ram Dass says, there's an air of how could you anytime you're upset, right? So it's totally true. How are you? I could never talk to my fucking parents this way. Are you talking to me this way? Don't do that. Yell, yell, yell.

And they were like, well, that doesn't work. Third option is over explaining. So now you get to give them the lecture and you find like 30 seconds in kids staring off in a space, like a space cadet. They're clearly checked out and you're either still talking out of habit or you ask them to pay attention. No, look me in the eyes. And then you're saying, no, look me in the eyes. every other word, because your kid's still checked out. You've

over-explained too much, right? Those are the three pitfalls. And we had that hard with Bear. We don't have that with Wolf. And she's a different person too. That's another factor. She's a she, not a he. That's another factor. There's a whole bunch of reasons for that, but it has been trial and error. It has been really through, everyone needs structure. There's a whole bunch of reasons for that, but it has been trial and error. It has been really through, you know, everyone needs structure. It's funny because like when you start parenting, you're like, oh, structure is one of the most important things.

What do they do with an old person in a nursery home? Structure. They got to know. You fucking watch like a, how do you help autistic kids? Structure. And Rain Man, you know, Judge Wapner's at five.

Judge Wapner's at five. I can't miss Judge Wapner, right? The structure, if you fry the structure, it fries the mind. And somehow we believe because we don't have autism or because we're not young or old, that that doesn't apply to us. Structure totally applies to adults as well. And so we have that, there's safety. And we see this like first day, a kid in a schoolyard, if you send your kids to school, it's going to stay pretty close to the teacher. Second day, they'll venture off a little further. By day three to seven,

you'll see them work on the whole yard. But that's a natural progression to a kid studying its environment and coming into being okay with it. Whatever your structure looks like, whether that's on a 118 acre farm like ours and it's homeschooled, unschooled, whatever that looks like,

there's progressions to that. And one of the key ways to tell if your kid is satisfied or not is how upset are they? How are they talking to you? Right? And like I said, the trial by fire has been with Bear for certain because we know when we're missing something. We know when he doesn't have enough structure. A lot of times it comes around holidays. So we won't, we'll be doing less schoolwork. We won't be holding him to violin. We might miss a few jujitsu practices. He will, his behavior is shit when that happens. When we are just checking small boxes each day,

hey, you're going to make your bed. Morning time, we've got violin and a little bit of Life of Fred. And then you can read to dad at any point in the, during the day when dad's off work. Check those boxes. We do that. We go to jujitsu together. He's a really good fucking kid. He's a great big brother. He's not

antagonizing a sister. If he's antagonizing a sister, there's a need that's not being met. And likely it has to do with structure and how we are. So, and it could be my energy. It's not like woo-woo energy. If I'm worried about the move and I'm worried about job changes, I'm worried about all these things, that's going to bleed into fucking everyone in my environment. Whether I can put words to it or whether I recognize it or not, it's going to affect all of them. So again, fill my cup, come into my hollows, quiet center, and then operate from there. That's the job. I have to have that mastered. I have to be the mountain energy. And if I can do that, then I can hold all the chaos just fine.

But it is trial and error. And we really were just experimenting that first year with Bear in homeschooling and then came more to an unschooled approach. And then now with his desire, he wanted to learn music. He got into music before anything else. He could read music before he could read pages. Whoa, really?

Yeah. Wow. And he loves violin. We've, and Without paying for school, we can easily hire a tutor to come teach him violin once a week. And then we go based on that. Now that he can read, we're getting him different books. We don't need the tutor for now.

It'll come to a different space where if he wants to really accelerate, we'll bring that back. But that's not necessary at this point. So there's an ebb and flow of structure and still allowing the gift of free time. And with that understanding, there are certain requirements, right?

Like you don't just get to play with sister and dad all day long. Dad has to work in the morning and you've got your checklist in the morning. And so they have their own calendars. And on that, you get something, you get a little T for brushing your teeth. You get a B for bed. You get to write all these things up there. And that shows what you did that day. And on that, you get something, you get a little T for brushing your teeth. You get a B for bed.

You get to write all these things up there. And that shows what you did that day. And at the end of the day, they can say, wow, I did all this today. At the end of the week, they can say, look what I did all last week. And so something very gratifying. It's like putting a star on a notepad, right?

Like how many stars and smiley faces did you get this week? It's gamifying it, but it's all for the right reasons. And it's not bribery. It's not anything else. It's just saying like, this is what's required of us. And there is something innately required of all human beings. There's no human being that gets by in a tribe who doesn't give back to the tribe. There's no human being that's in a take, take, take mode cancerously that survives in a tribe. Those people get fucking outed. And you can go through any historical reference on that, where you look at how indigenous cultures operated and they had things to weed people out of that. So you could come into

more of a gifting idea of how do I contribute to the group? How do I contribute? What are my gifts and how do I give those back to the group? And what is it that I enjoy? And I've had conversations with Bear about that too. I don't love folding laundry, but I still do it because it helps mama. And I do love vacuuming. It's kind of a weird thing that's highly meditative for me. So I got a fucking $1,100 cordless vacuum that makes vacuuming more fun. I don't have to unplug it and replug it. And now he's vacuuming and he enjoys it for the same reasons. The hum of that vacuum is meditative and it clean. I don't have to unplug it and replug it. And now he's vacuuming and he enjoys it for the same reasons. The hum of that vacuum is meditative and it clean, you know, have it a little dog. Like that's something we got to do every other day. You know, it's not like a once

a week thing. It's pretty often. So like getting them involved for those and really seeing, you know, one of the things you mentioned is if I want my kids to do this, I have to practice it in front of them. You know, they got to see dad do that. You can't just be, hey, I'm at work all day. You vacuum while I'm gone. No, they see dad vacuum enough. They see dad doing dishes. Now Baron wants to come and rinse his dish before he puts it in the dishwasher. Basic stuff. Leave this space better than you found it. Basic stuff. When we go from, and it's really hard for Wolf, but she's still getting it because this is how we do things. When it's framed in that way, we know if still getting it because this is how we do things, right? And when it's framed in that way, we know if we're going to move from one thing to the next, we have to clean up the game we just played.

We don't leave that out. So we sing the clean up, clean up, clean up, everybody everywhere, clean up, clean up, everybody do your share. And that little ditty just goes through her head till she's singing it and she's helping us. She's no longer pissed off. She's just doing the cleanup song. Simple as that. So you can engineer things like that based on our own participation in it. Much easier to grab.

I had a good buddy. And then I'll finish this thought. Dr. Mark Chang, phenomenal guy, lifelong martial artist, trained under Danny Nassanto out in Santa Monica, who was Bruce Lee's main student. He's still close with Danny Nassanto. And a beautiful human, lifelong martial artist, trained under Dan Inosanto out in Santa Monica, who was Bruce Lee's main student. He's still close with Dan Inosanto. And a beautiful human, lifelong martial artist,

very intelligent guy who was a parent as well. And he said he saw his dad do Tai Chi every day for 10 years and he would laugh at him. And he's like, why do you do Tai Chi? And he goes, it's a martial art. He goes, no, it isn't. And he goes, attack me. So at 10, he goes to attack his dad and his dad launches him through the drywall.

Doesn't hurt him at all, but he shows him like, this is a significant fucking martial art and it matters. But more importantly than that, he saw him practice it for 10 years. Now he saw that witness the power of it. And that's what got him into it. He said, I want to practice this. I want to know this skill. My son still doesn't do Tai Chi with me, but I do it for me and he sees it. And at some point in time, he's going to say, why do you do this, dad? And I'll say, I do it for these reasons. Try it for yourself.

And then he may adopt that for himself. The dojo is also our yoga room. We've got four yoga mats. We've got a yoga hammock and all the cool stuff to stretch and open up the body. Our kids join us sometimes, you know, like Wolfie will do like down dog and three-legged down dog. And then she'll just crawl underneath us the open up the body. Our kids join us sometimes, you know, like Wolfie will do like down dog and three-legged down dog.

And then she'll just crawl underneath us the rest of the thing. She does things she can do. And then after that, she just crawls underneath this. But it's her witnessing us doing those things that is attractive. This is what my parents do. They live health and wellness.

They don't talk about it. They live it. One of my favorite quotes is, don't talk about it, be about it. And I think that really matters for kids. It absolutely does. The things that you model are what your kids become. They are the epitome of I'm going to do not what you say, but what you do. It's how kids are hardwired to do. You watch them playing and they're miming adults. They're doing what they observe an adult is doing because they desire more than anything else

how to, they want to figure out how to grapple with the real world the way an adult does because they're hardwired to figure out how to become an adult over the course of the first, you know, however many 12 to 18 years of their lives. So I think that's exactly the right way to think about it.

And I love the specifics of how you're approaching this. When you think about your kids reaching a level of competence, I don't want to say adulthood necessarily, because there's different benchmarks throughout their childhood where they become competent in different areas, like you're fully fledged in some parts of your life when you're 12 and you're not fully fledged in some parts of your life until you're 25. Like it's a, it's not a continuum where all of a sudden there's, or it is a continuum. There's not just like one line where all of a sudden you're magically an adult in every area. My buddy just turned 30 who works in the farm as our plant manager. And I was like, yay, Brent's finally a man. Sort of, sort of. He's not a dad yet. He's sort of there. There's a gray area to that. But I think, I'm curious how you think about, because you're such a curious person

and you're deeply knowledgeable on many topics. It's very interesting to talk to you and hear you describe yourself as someone who used to think that he never wanted to touch a book again for the rest of his life and then hear you rattle off all these different books that you've read and all these different thinkers

that you've studied and how all of their ideas intersect with each other and shape your philosophy you are you have a lot of qualities that I often laughingly attribute to homeschoolers it's like oh you read a lot. You must have not learned to hate reading in school. And like you did and then you overcame it.

But I imagine that a deep well of knowledge is a value that you have for your kids too. It's something that you want them to go into adulthood having. How do you think about, like if you're not exposing them to the traditional sort of buckets or like the traditional buffet that kids are supposed to sample from it's like okay try some history try

some like basic science and i don't know to what extent you're you're thinking i'm actually really curious how you're thinking about you know if you want to give your kids a very broad lay of the land to show them what's possible as a series of invitations they can then choose what they want to drill into do you have a sense of like intellectual things that you want to expose them to before they become adults is it very free form like they should read whatever they're interested in because that is how you learn to embody a habit of reading and that is infinitely more important than the exposure or are there things even as you're thinking about designing a homeschool or an unschooling environment that's

full of invitations for your kids is there some sense that like a lot of the things that you're supposed to grapple with in when you're in school like science and history and like advanced mathematics like all these things are important to expose my kids to before they turn 18 what is what is the balance that you think about there? Yeah, I think it really does come down to desire. Like I said, if Bear didn't have an interest in reading because he has friends that are older than him that can read, we wouldn't be practicing that right now.

He has an interest in math because he would get allowance and he'd say, he'd want to know how far things go and we'd teach him how to add. And then it was like, I actually want to know more than this. So we started off with the Life of Fred books, which are great because they

go all the way through college level mathematics and story time. And every time Tasha and I read that to him, we're refreshed on the material of what we're learning right now. He's doing pre-algebra shit right now that I wouldn't have touched until way later on, like 12, 13 years old, 12 years old, something like that. But it's really cool. It's kind of a mind fuck at the same time to see how little time we spend on education and how far that goes. And then to see kids spend eight or nine hours a day

in classes and be held at a certain level, it's mind blowing when you first get there. And you talk to a lot of homeschool parents, they're like, yeah, we teach for one and a half to three hours a day. And then the rest of the day is doing X, Y, and Z. And it fries people who have still this hold on modern education being the thing.

What are they doing? Surely it's not as good. What are their test scores? Blah, blah. They can't, it's like a fembot about to explode like a short circuit out, right? They can't, they can't get it. You can't compute it. Um, but that is the truth, right? And that's one of the cool things about homeschooling, unschooling. Uh, I think, you know, the reason I, you know, when I talk about my own path, one thing did lead to the next. And even like fitness and shit like that, we were

doing, I'm teaching a lot on the physical body now in Fit for Service. We have a Fit for Service Academy coming up this year. And I'm the coach for the physical, physically fit. Physically fit is not what I'm teaching. I give a fuck about fitness. I think that's like low hanging fruit, like aesthetics, your body, that's a side effect of being healthy. I want to teach people how to be healthy. And with that, that encompasses everything that I've studied. It encompasses the light from Health and Light with John Ott and Dr. Jack Cruz. It encompasses food.

It encompasses the four doctors of Paul Cech. Doctor Movement's just one tiny little sliver of that. We were filming some shit on it with Aubrey to promote it, and I'm doing steel mace work or something. I'm like, I don't give a fuck if people do steel mace work. I'm not going to be teaching this shit. They're like, I'll teach you to get outside and do something that you enjoy. Sure. If that's pickleball, that's just as good as disc golf. This is just as good as jujitsu. It's just as good as weight training. There are benefits to different things that are more beneficial than

others. But my point is my desire led me to each of those paths. How I connect those dots has been made available to me because it makes sense now. Trust was the thing that was necessary. I don't have to see the light at the end of the road, but there's a trust fall necessary for me to take that leap forward and know that I'm gonna put this together in a way that makes sense for me financially,

that makes sense for me as a contribution to the world. And there's no doubt that it's there. So some of the things that I frame for Bear right now is there's a lot that's wrong in the So some of the things that I frame for bear right now is there's a lot that's wrong in the world and we're not here to patch it up. We're here to design something completely different. And what does that look like for you, right?

People listening to this may not give a fuck about health and wellness, right? But if you care about finances, you're going to need energy, physical energy to become an entrepreneur. You're going to need fucking energy to make that business work at 3 a.m. If you care about relationships, you want to look your best, but you also need energy in the fucking firewalk that relationships require. And your body better be right for you to do that. So I would argue, you know, mentally fit, emotionally fit, financially fit, relationships

fit. All these things are classes that we're teaching. My argument is that the physical is the foundational piece for that. And some people have that. They're great athletes for various reasons. You know, like Jack Cruz always talks about how Usain Bolt and Michael Phelps ate chicken McNuggets and won, you know, more world medals than anybody else, but they were outside a lot. His thing is the sun, that kind of thing. I think that's one piece of it. Um, there are certain things they're attracted to where it's like, I don't have to talk my son into jujitsu. If I tell him, watch your attitude and we're not going to jujitsu, he'll straighten right up because he wants to go. It's a privilege for him to go. It's not a force. It's not like,

Oh, I got to go do this thing. And that could be different. It could be AYSO soccer. But whatever that is, like helping them find that thing, that's a draw there. And they're going to want to learn more because of that thing to be better at that thing. When it comes to the sciences and different things like that, he's kind of got my dad in him. My dad was more of an engineer's mind. He would tinker on old cars and trucks every weekend with a 12-pack with one of his best friends. He did that for fucking years. Started a construction company when he was 18 with his

brothers. Did that for 20 years. Started his own business in shelving and did really well with that and sold it. He's always wanted to tinker with stuff. And so as a gift, one of our uncles got Bear like this, it's a Crunch Labs. So every month they send him something new and he's got to build it. Fantastic for STEM. Fantastic. And that actually,

he couldn't stand Legos before that. Now he fucking loves Legos because it got him into the mode of, I can construct something and here's what it does. So I think those exposures, if I was exposed to that as a kid, like erector sets and stuff, like meh, try it. Meh, it's cool every now and then at so-and-so's house, but I don't want that at my house. It wasn't something

that lit me up. It's recognizing what lights them up and saying yes to that. How do we funnel more energy into this thing that they're already gravitating towards and allow them to naturally shift gears? I don't know, familiar with human design, it's kind of woo-woo. And at the same time, you know, there's a great guy named John Cole who lives in Austin. I think his website's metamorphichumandesign.com. I don't know if I got that right,

but highly recommend this dude. He did the human design for both our kids and they were unbelievably spot on. And with that, one of Bear's characteristics is the jack of all trades and ace of none. So that means he's going to grapple with things for a while until he has proficiency and then leave it behind. And it doesn't mean he'll never use that again, but he's going to get to a certain point and then shift gears. And recognizing that's a part of his natural progression is super important. Recognizing he has a very competitive mind, you know, like how do I, if I can't erase that, how do I siphon that off

and funnel it into the right direction where now he's using that competitive mind in a positive direction? You know, those are all pieces where I, and we knew there's guys never met my kids before and he was telling me shit about them. Only me and Tosh knew, you know? And I think that's been an important piece too is understanding, you know, what are the inner workings of them and how do we say yes to that? And letting them write their own path.

You mentioned earlier the importance of rites of passage for boys. Can we talk about that for a second? Absolutely. What, it's funny that you brought that up without me asking of rites of passage for boys. Can we talk about that for a second? Absolutely. It's funny that you brought that up without me asking because this was on the list of things I wanted to ask you about. It's the thing I've been thinking about recently. I was like, I'm sure Kyle of all people is going to have a take on this.

What are the right rites of passage for boys? Or like what makes a good rite of passage for a boy and why is it important? All right. So let's see here. What makes it a good rite of passage? There's one of my favorite books on this subject and there's many great teachers here, Bill Plotkin, Tim Corcoran. Tim Corcoran actually does a lot of events for father, son, even has mother, daughter, survivalist camps. And he also does traditional vision quests, which the OG vision quest was no food or water for four days in a circle of tobacco prayer ties

out in nature. So you go out there, you might get a pint of water and a knife, or you might get a pillow and a sleeping bag, but you're just going to stay out there for four days for no food, no water. Now, understanding health and wellness and growth, that would put your body into fight or flight, and you're not going to grow. But the long-term growth of that is well beyond what that's doing to the body. So then the question is, when are they ready for that? I think 16 seems to be a really good age for boys. Female body is completely different. Men finish maturing, I think at 28 or 30,

women finish at 22. It's a huge difference. From a food standpoint, if women go into ketogenic state for too long, it'll mess up their monthly cycle. And that rhythm is libido. Libido is life force energy. It's not just your sexual nature. It's the litter, the life force, the chi that runs through you. So you don't want to do anything that's going to fuck that up. So it is different for boys and girls, but Maladoma Patriso May was an amazing West African shaman. And he wrote of water and spirits, one of my favorite books on this topic. And one of the things he said is a true rite of passage

for an order for it to be a true rite of passage and not just something transformational, death must be on the line. So hold that in one hand and hold in the other hand, I don't want to kill my kid. Right? But like hold that there and then understand real rites of passage required kids to challenge themselves and not all of them came back. Right? That's a fucking whole different world we're talking about.

Modern rites of passage, you know, hopefully have some of those aspects, but not all of those aspects, right? And I say that for a number of reasons, but also in case fucking CPS is listening or anything like that, right? Like we're not going full on, full on traditional. I think the death of the ego is probably a better way to look at that. And if you put someone in an altered state of consciousness, that's easily achieved. You can do that through holotropic breath work, Stanislav Grav's work. You can do that through a vision quest.

And there's also plant medicine journeys where there are places where it's completely legal and in the Amazon and Costa Rica, and it's much more available stateside. I would say if you follow some of the wisdom of the indigenous is that the parents are never allowed to be there. Aunties and uncles who care for them will take them through that experience. You have to divorce, especially with boys, them from their parents. So that way they have to figure shit out for themselves. And then Henry Rollins talked about that travel to a country when you

get out of school by yourself and see what that does for you, right? When you can't call mom, when you, you know, don't have extra money in your bank account and you got to figure all this shit out on your own, that, that provides somebody something that's necessary for them to feel safe wherever they are. Right. Same is true, you is true with making your way to the Amazon and things like that. And I wouldn't send my kids alone to the Amazon. I'd want them to be with aunties and uncles that can take care of them and watch over them. That said, I think ayahuasca is probably the number one thing that I would lean towards when it comes to a real rite of passage where ego death is certainly on the line. They're going to come

into contact with their higher self, their soul, whatever you want to call that, mother ayahuasca, God, many names describing one particular attribute from one particular series of plants. But that to me speaks volumes. I've had a long list of years working with different medicines and I've had the fortune, my boxing coach in the UFC also happened to be a medicine man before he passed away. And he would take me out for traditional sweat lodges and working with psilocybin. And eventually he brought ayahuasca to us on the reservation. So I had that for 12 years, I had the guidance of him. And that is something I would never do alone. I'm not talking about doing shit like that alone.

You want expert care. Dr. Dan Engel, who's a good friend, he spent 18 months in the Amazon apprenticing as an ayahuasquero and he's a licensed psychologist and shrink. He can write prescriptions for drugs. He doesn't write prescriptions for shit drugs because this guy's a medicine man in real life as well.

So he's really combined these things. And one of the things he says is, when you go in for psychic surgery, you want someone with a steady hand. You want a black belt teaching you. That's not going to be found in America, most likely, unless they're flying a Shipibo shaman in from Bucalpa, Peru, which is very rare.

I've had one experience like that stateside. It's pretty rare. And there is something to taking the trek. You're going to leave home. You're not going to be with your parents. It's a long way to get there. And when you get there, you know why you're there. You're going to spend eight days to two weeks there, and you're going to come back different. Maladoma says that's usually done between 11 and 13. Any older than that is a little hard because the ego is too well formed. And I would agree with that. So I think somewhere in there,

and your kids will let you know, if you have experience, if you have no experience with this shit, try it for yourself first and do it well. If you don't do it well, you'll see what it's like getting psychic surgery from somebody with shaking hands. It's not a fun experience, right?

Just as much can go bad from that experience as can go good. But when it's done well, and I recommend people go to Sultara. It's one of my favorite places on earth. It's in Costa Rica. Easier to get to. They fly Shibibu shaman in three times a year. They'll stay for four months at a time. We worked with a couple, Amerigo and Olga, who have been married for 15 years. The husband's been practicing. They've been married for 15 years. The husband's been practicing. They've been married for 30 years. The husband's been practicing for 33 years. Wife's been practicing for 18.

Why the 15 year discrepancy? She raised their kids till they were 15 years old. And then she started practicing with them, right? But they've been doing this. It's their life's work. It's intergenerational work. It's not, hey, I went down to the Amazon and I really like this and I'm gonna pour medicine now. Like this is all they fucking know. And it's all they live for.

Those are the people I want working with my kids. And, and because there's no real one where their life is actually on the line, it's probably in the modern world is where the modern world is. It's probably going to take a series of minor initiations to do that. I believe hunting is an initiation like that. I believe the vision quest is an initiation like that. I believe ayahuasca can be an initiation like that. Something that's challenging, right? They call it the vine of the soul or the vine of the dead for a reason. Like you will recognize you are not your body fairly quickly at one of the, at least at one of those nights that you're drinking. And I think that's a necessary to come, a necessary component to come into the greater intelligence that's working

through us all the time. The internal GPS that's within me, that's within Gaia, that's within the sun, that's within the whole cosmos is going to speak to us in different ways. And I want to know how to communicate with that part of me. I want to know how to tap into that intelligence. And so that's one of the doorways I want to set up for our kids is that they come into contact with that as early as it is beneficial, but not sooner and not later. For parents that either don't have experience with ayahuasca or any type of plant medicine themselves,

or they're just not comfortable with the idea of exposing their kids to it early, does doing things like hunting and traveling alone and a vision quest are those the primary things that you would recommend as a rite of passage as a child gets older and also is it different for boys and girls like are there are there certain rites of passage that you would recommend for girls versus boys and vice versa or are there other ones that are also besides hunting and vision questing and traveling alone, are there others that you also feel like are good environments

or situations to put a child in that will push them to experience some of that potential ego death? Yeah, no doubt. I mean, I think the reason I mentioned Tim Corcoran, he's a good buddy. There's quite a few guys like Tim, but Tim is an excellent guy.

He looks like Ned Flanders, except he drops F-bombs, which is great for a hootily-doodly Ned Flanders type. Fucking awesome guy. Gilbert Walking Bull was his mentor for 20 or 30 years. He's hosted hundreds of vision quests where he sits and guides. And his job as the guide is to tap into you and see where you are at in your four days. Are you in any real trouble or not? Do you actually need support physically or not? And a good guide will be able to know that without communication. That's kind of hard to imagine if you grew up in scientific materialistic reality like we all did. But once you've experienced the other side, you recognize that is a known, it's a known fact, it's a known deal. And you can't have trust in that if you have somebody that carries those qualifications.

Tim Corcoran does. And he's stateside. He lives in Northern Idaho. Ben Greenfield turned me on to him years ago. His sons did a vision quest with him. He also does, like I said, these survival outings where like you're in the fucking snow and you need to build shelter

and you're gonna sleep there. You're not getting in your truck. You're not going home. You have to survive the night in snow and you're going to learn how to build shelter and then build that shelter and fucking sleep in it. That's a different layer, right? It adds a different complexity to life as opposed to video games where we're playing a game within the game and houses and boxes where we're separated from our natural environment and all the different ways we do that, go dive in headfirst into that. As far as the difference between male and female, I think women can do vision quests, no problem. I would just wait for

them to be a fully fledged woman. In addition to that, breath work is an altered state of consciousness. If you do holotropic breathing, think Wim Hof for an hour. When you do that, you're tapping into altered states of consciousness. DMT is getting loaded up. Your pH is changing in a way to where the DMT can actually work in your brain that we already produce without monoamine oxidase and inhibitors and things of that nature. So as it turns out, there are many paths that lead us up the same mountain. And if you wanted to go the completely legal route based on any reason, fear, the unknown, CPS, anything that you're worried about, there are good reasons to stay with something that's

completely legal. These are the things we do at Fit for Service. Like we can't, Aubrey's too well known to be serving people fucking medicine, nor would we do that, right? We'd go down in a heartbeat if we were doing something like that. Yet we bring in the best breathwork practitioners in the world and 150 people will go through this together. And you come out of the other side of that, I mean, everything comes up. Traumas, childhood shit, divorce, anything that's pinging. When you get in the altered state,

you pull back the curtain and you see what you've been hiding from yourself. And that can be jarring for a lot of people. But when it's done with respect and reverence and with intention, you say yes to that. And what's cool about breath work is your foot's on the throttle or the brakes. You can say, I want to go further and you control that with the breath or you can hit the brakes. And so it's a beautiful thing for people to not yank the ripcord and say, all right, I'm all in.

It's all or nothing, right? Like you have the ability to kind of push and break and push and break. And, you know, for it to truly be transformative though, it needs to be something deep. And I think that would mean, you know, going all the way in, in breath work. That would mean having a series of those sessions to really open up and dive deep. And then the before and the after care becomes one of the most important things. In King, We're a Magician Lover, they talk about the sacredness

of the rite of passage. And in the first chapter, they talk about the temple. Why was the temple created? The temple was a space where a container was set for transformation. And that container is not only the physical structure, it's the master that's holding space for you before, during, and after, right? And you want to have a fucking master holding your child's hand before, during, and after that has been there a thousand times that can walk them through. And if you think of ancestrally, like paleo, all these different food types and ancestrally, ancestrally, we're outdoors more. So the light thing makes plenty of sense. We're going to have fake light're outdoors more. So the light thing makes plenty of sense.

We now have fake light that doesn't give us the same frequencies. All that makes sense. What else did we miss ancestrally? We missed having a tribe of elders and the tribe of elders had gone through it all already. Polyamory, whatever the fuck you're gonna talk about it. That tribe had experienced it.

The old ones knew about it. The old ones had worked through all the kinks and you could go rely on them to be elders, not olders. Elders were somebody that would fucking be a wealth of knowledge that you generally had a deep respect and reverence for, and they could hold you through that. We're not going to get that in America, but we can find that if we find the right people to work with that can be the elders for us that walk us through these experiences. We could keep going down this rabbit hole for a long time, but we need to wrap. If people enjoy this conversation and they want to know more about you or they want to hear you speak more, where would you send them next? You have a podcast, you have all kinds of cool stuff.

Where would you send people? There's three main places. Kyle Kingsbury podcast, you can hear the weekly episodes. Every now and then we'll do a farm-based episode. We've got the regenerative farm where we do permaculture practices and regenerative agriculture and a whole host of other cool shit. That's gardenersofeden.earth.

So if you guys have any interest in that, we're going to be doing some really fun events at the farm in Lockhart where it'll be a weekend in the life of. We go for a jog. We hit the sun on the ice bath, we shovel the shit out of the chicken pen, we plant plants in the ground, we help move the cows together, we do a harvest, right? Most people want to be a part of a harvest before they actually hunt. What does that look like to actually watch an animal die and to pray for its body and to hold

it and then to field dress it and then to eat that animal? We're going to get to do that. So, you know, it's, it's all the things in a weekend, you know, and I think that'll be really cool. Gardeners of Eden.earth, you can go to sign up for the newsletter and then you'll be first to know about events that we have like that coming up this year. And then fitforservice.com, that's where the bulk of, of our education piece, you know, I'm a student first and a teacher second, always will be. But I love that I've figured out a way to get paid to learn, you know, and not just learn on paper, but actually learn through experience and wisdom.

And I get to relate that wisdom. And so I'll be teaching all year long. We've got three trimesters. This first one starts early March and it'll end with a big event in Montana in May. And we'll be doing breath work. We'll be doing all the things I talked about, altered states of consciousness, going through challenging things. And that 13 weeks I have with people is really how to become the healthiest you've ever been for many reasons. Aesthetics are a side effect. All these other,

if you want to fucking bench press, cool, dude, you can do that. But we're going to be the healthiest, best version of ourselves. We're going to have energy to accomplish everything we set out to do. We're going to feel and look better than we ever had in our entire lives. And I guarantee that in those 13 weeks, you're going to get it. So fitforservice.com for that good stuff. If you're more drawn to something else, like my body's pretty good. I want to work on mental emotional. We've got coaches for that. If you want to learn finance, one of that class is filling up very quickly with Aubrey Marcus and Clay Herbert and relationships. We've got that. We've got, we're doing a round table on spiritual. So we'll be talking a lot about plant medicines and some of these teachings in the spiritual

course, which I'll be a coach in alongside everyone else. So we got about six coaches for that. But all that's at fitforservice.com. And I really appreciate you having me on, buddy. This was so much fun. Thank you so much for taking the time. Look out, my pleasure. This was great. Thank you.