Kyle Kingsbury Podcast - #44 John Baker

Episode Date: July 30, 2018

John Baker drops in to talk about playing pro baseball, BJJ, psychedelics, mindfulness meditation, and all things the are good. John Baker on Twitter and Instagram Kyle Kingsbury on Twitter and on Instagram Get 10% off at Onnit by going to Onnit.com/Podcast              Onnit Twitter         Onnit Instagram Show Notes Micnael Pollan’s new book “How to Change Your Mind” Man’s Search For Meaning by Viktor Frankel A Fighters Heart by Sam Sheridan Barking Up The Wrong Tree by Eric Barker Footprints of the Gods by Graham Hancock Future Authoring

We got something massive going on on it right now. It's called the Onnit 6 and it's a full body transformative workout you can do in the comfort of your own home in just six weeks. If you watch videos on your phone or computer and you have enough space to stretch, then you're fully equipped with a home gym compatible with the Onnit 6. You don't need to spend extra money on costly equipment, personal trainers, or some ridiculous new gadget that's going to end up collecting dust in your basement. Bottom line is we've covered all the bases with this program. Everything from in-home yoga to in-home workouts to the nutrition, motivation, and supplementation protocols. Aubrey Marcus contributed with the motivational. Liv Langdon, our expert on diet and nutrition, has helped out with cooking and different recipes and yours truly kyle kingsbury has taken a deeper dive into what type of nutrition you can get based on your goals bottom line is we've covered every possible base we can think of when it comes to this on it six program and even if you're really good at lifting weights and running and doing all the

things it's still important to retrace your steps and go back to the basics with a body weight program you can accomplish a lot in six weeks go to on it.com slash s i x on it.com slash six on it six welcome to the human optimization hour with kyle kingsbury presented by on it our guest today is john baker john is a friend of mine. He's become a close friend of mine over the years. We met not long after I went on the Joe Rogan experience a couple years ago. Just a fantastic dude. He played professional baseball for 15 years.

Played on a few different teams, finishing off with the Chicago Cubs. He works now with the Cubs, doing a number of cool things. And we take a deep dive into how he got to where he is today and all the wonderful things that he's learned along the way. It's truly one of the best podcasts we've ever done. John has a wealth of knowledge in many areas and we really break down stress and a lot of other cool things in this podcast. How we can manage that, how we can find inner peace and what are the things that make us stronger inside and out i know you guys are going to dig this one thanks for listening it is the human optimization hour with kyle kingsbury with my good friend john baker how

you doing man i'm doing phenomenal man i've been ever since i got to on it i wanted to have you out for this i shouldn't watch that i'm'm getting fast vitamin IV right now. We were just talking about how the last time I watched the needle go into my arm, I completely passed out and started hearing classical music being played. And it was beautiful. But point being, I don't need to watch. I'm going to just receive the medicine and be good to go. It was Whitney Miller, Aubreyrey's fiance's birthday on Saturday.

So we went fairly hard. And then my wife was out of town. So when she got home, she hadn't seen Bear yet, my son, our son. And so we're, you know, in the bedroom trying to do our thing. And of course, he wakes up and comes in like normal. And when he sees mom it completely wakes him up so this kid would not go to sleep and so we were reading him books at 4 30 a.m like on no sleep finally he falls asleep again at 5 30 a.m and i slept with

him from 5 30 to 8 a.m for two and and a half hours. So that was the grind through the weekend. And then yesterday I got to take a 30-minute meditation to kind of reset, which I want to dive into you with. Yeah, let's do that. And then now, of course, this vitamin IV is quite essential and necessary to keep the immune system up and make sure that I got the energy to provide a dope podcast for our listeners. Well, I'll tell you what, I need it because I come from the professional baseball world and we have just a shit schedule most of the time. It's a lot of night games.

You look at our team, I work for the Chicago Cubs and our major league team last night played 14 innings on Sunday night baseball. They didn't get out of St. Louis until probably about 3.30 in the fly to fly back to Chicago play a game tonight and even our schedule is kind of support staff and system now I was in Knoxville Tennessee for three days um and you know with my obsession with getting better at jiu-jitsu I have to find a place to train so it's like the game goes late gets gets done at midnight. I'm up at like 7am driving like 30 miles to go train with Samuel Braga in, uh, at the Gracie Baja school down there.

And then do that for a couple of days. And then I'm up at 5am on an airplane, flying to a different city, get in, try to get into a routine, see a night game, get in late. Don't even know what time zone it is. Most of the time I'm calling home going like, Hey, what time is it for you guys there? Oh shit. It's four 30 in the morning. Sorry. It was seven 30. I'm on my second flight already. So I also, my point here is I also could use this IV. I could also use these vitamins. I need them. I think we all need them. Yeah. And it's the most bioavailable form. I mean, let me, let me just say this right now. Cause I'm sure people are fucking, I can, I can see people shaking their head about, we can't just get it from good organic food and yes yeah your baseline

there's no supplement on this planet that will fix a shitty diet or lack of sleep that said because of our soil like i was telling you about the interview i just did with paul check round two um our soil's fucked through monocropping and spraying herbicides and pesticides it lacks nutrient density and we're not getting the same value from our plants that we used to period so can we uptake that a little bit and optimize our bodies especially for athletes or we're putting ourselves through a not a natural grind you know like if yeah if you live in the african savannah or wherever the fuck where you just have this chill ass day where you hunt and you forage and that's it probably a little bit more in tune with natural circadian

rhythms you're going to bed on time you're not changing you know flight flight uh flight patterns and all that where you get time zone changes you have no technology to deal with you have no technology to deal with i think that the what i've so my background on me like my playing career started in 2002 ended in 2015 and when my play so i'm i'm of the last generation that didn't have like the internet in college i'm the i'm the i'm the line the next one after that it's the internet shows up and we have made all of these things easier, more efficient, faster, and better through all this amazing technology that the human brain has come up with. I mean, it's truly amazing the stuff that we can do now.

Like I was walking just yesterday, walking away from dinner, FaceTiming my kids before they went to bed. And then thinking about go back a generation to my parents when my dad was in professional baseball and he's having to write letters to my mom. Handwritten letters. Handwritten make a couldn't make a long distance phone call but with all of these technological advances man we have messed up a lot of the stuff that like our the way our body interacts with the world we've screwed a lot of it up you know from anytime your body is in an airplane moving faster uh than it should be

there is some sort of cost there is some sort of cost. There is some sort of effect. Anytime you don't get more than, you know, five hours of sleep, there is a, there is a real cost to, to the stuff that we do. And so much of it involves technology. You think about the blue light on your phone or the blue light on the television, you know, keeping you awake and suppressing the melatonin in your brain. And I think about how many people don't even know that something like that exists, have no impetus to go out and get glasses to make sure that they sleep. And how can we make food cheaper and easier and more available for everybody? We just make it shittier. We water it down. We screw up the soil. We ruin

the stuff that we've... We ruin the natural kind of state of the earth, um, in the, in the, uh, with the idea that it's going to be expedient and easier for us to deal with something right now. And we just have no foresight for the future. Yeah. And then, then the, the, the, the draw in for all these companies is, well, this is how we'll solve world hunger. But now we're, we're in a state where we're overfed and undernourished. And so I forget what was the term

that max lugavere used if obese on the outside and metabolically physically skinny but metabolically obese that's for people that look the part like like a lot of these uh health and wellness and bikini models and shit like that that just you know if it fits your it fits your macros. Yeah, no, it's not healthy. It's like, it doesn't work. It's not healthy. It's source, everything is source dependent for me. I mean, like we have kids. So the moment we had our first kid, we're like, okay,

do you know what to feed the kids? I don't know what to feed kids. Do you know what to feed? No, my wife, Megan, I don't know what to feed. Well, let's figure it out. So you start doing your own research finally. And that's, it's the other flip side of the coin right is that we have all this information that we can access at the tip of our finger we

have the answer to every question on your phone just ask google you ask google you find the answer to the question you can find all the information and now it gets a little bit tougher now that we're kind of sometimes we choke on all the information that's out there because we have access to so much that we never had before and if ignorance is bliss then what's knowing the answer to everything that's likely frustration and and anxiety and depression um at the end of it when you really see how the world works but the answers are out there and what we found when we started looking was like exactly what you're saying is that where does your food come from one fundamental question where does it come from where we live now in arizona there's a farm down the street and there's restaurants at the farm and the food comes

from that place and it's all former dairy farms. So the soil is good where we live. So we, that's where we go and buy our food. Um, and that's what we eat. And, and that's why I think that, you know, like you're saying, can you get it from food in the beginning? You're saying, can you get this stuff from food? Maybe if you're super conscious and super careful and super mindful of where you're getting it, what you're putting in your mouth and how long you're doing it. But we all know, man, that's not easy. That's not easy. It's not easy thing to do for a lot of people. Yeah. And there's, there's certainly, there's healthy foods that are healthy, but they're not going to be nutrient dense. I don't know how many people are cramming down grass fed,

grass finished liver every week. You know know what i'm saying to top off on it's like metal there is there is a really i don't know if you guys have tried this but um and we have no affiliation with these guys but u.s wellness meats sells a liverwurst that's pre-cooked it's 15 it's 20 beef liver 15 kidneys 15 heart and 50 of beef trimming and it's fucking the highest grade meat you can get and it comes in a little log that's frozen a one pound log so i think it's 11 bucks it's the best deal and you can cut that and throw it on crackers not that neither one of us do that eating keto but but um for the kids like i throw that in scrambled eggs for bear and at fucking two years old he'll eat

it like he loves it we've made tacos in the past when we're having a cheat meal with that meat and it's incredible and that you are topped off for the week on vitamin a and a ton of different really important micronutrients it's interesting with kids man both of my kids will just eat the hell out of some chicken liver they'll eat it they just cook it it makes no sense to me it's something that um you know when you think about like the awful meats like that uh there's stuff that we have to like be like okay like buck up okay buck up we're gonna cook a calf liver and slice it up and just put as much stuff as we'll put as much cinnamon or something on it as possible to try to get that get that iron taste out of it but it's things that you have to do i didn't know you could get in a sausage that's a

that's the next step for me yeah it's awesome and you don't you don't really taste too much of the iron but when people are talking about the iron it's like well i get it from cacao or i get it from this i get it from that and the truth is like a lot of like half the population my wife and i included from a genetic standpoint cannot take a lot of plant-based vitamins and convert those into usable forms. So looking at, a lot of vegans will say, oh, you can get all the omega-3s you need from chia and flax.

Well, that's ALA and it has to be converted into DHA and EPA, which our brains need. But I cannot and my wife cannot convert ALA into EPA and DHA. So we have to get that from animal sources. Have you ever tried to eat vegan? I've done like six-day vegan fasts. It is a form of fasting, like keto.

Keto is a form of fasting with carbohydrates. And I think for detoxing, back in the day when juicing was big, I would do like a 14-day juice cleanse things like that um i think it works for detox purposes but extended periods of time across the board with exception of maybe five people on earth you know it's a real issue well the average is what like nine years and people quit um i did it i read the china study years ago when it came out and i'm like oh this you know of course you find out later that the science wasn't great. But I read the China study, and I didn't know how to decipher good research

or bad research at the time. I was still playing professional baseball, and I spent an off-season of almost two months eating vegan. And I felt horrible. I mean, horrible. Just completely horrible all the time, like low energy, tired, didn't want to work out, which is something I always loved doing. I love

training for the sport. I love training still. I can't go more than a day or so without doing some sort of like rigorous physical exercise. But that was the one, like one time in my life, that little, that little window that I was in where I would wake up and go like, I don't want to, I don't want to go do this. Only time ever. And that's the only thing that was different was not getting that food from animals. Yeah, and it's not just protein. That's the point I'm getting towards is you get all these other factors,

omega-3 fatty acids, heme iron, which is huge in red meat, and especially in liver and organ meat. That's incredibly bioavailable. And you're topped off on that for a week or two you know from one serving like you're not going to get that from plants and i'm not saying that it's i'm not a carnivore diet guy it's important to have all the things we're fucking omnivores for a reason right flat teeth and sharp teeth there are there are a couple people on this planet darren olian and rich roll that i think can pull off a vegan diet well they're probably high methylators and they can convert well from plants um but they are exceptions to

the rule they're not that's not the standard you know but let's let's we've fucking digressed here for a minute let's let's there are some topics i want to cover with you let's let's go down the baseball rabbit hole when you start playing you know obviously it was your lifelong passion and where are you now with it you know so i the cubs so i'll start at the end um i work for the chicago cubs now uh in our mental skills department which means that i kind of have like a swiss army knife of roles uh for our organization it could be uh doing research and investigating kind of maybe different optimization techniques uh for our major league players. Sometimes I'm a complaint sponge for 25-year-old, 100 millionaires. And then sometimes I'm dealing with, you know, in baseball,

it's really sad and it hasn't been covered, but there's been a lot of problems, obviously, in Puerto Rico and in Venezuela as well. And we have a very big Latin American population in our organization. And so a lot of times it's dealing with the, you know, I've had on the same day, I've had a guy tell me that it was the worst day of his life

because his Ferrari got a flat tire on the way to the field and he had to call somebody to get the car. And the same day, talk to another kid who, his parents still don't have power in Puerto Rico and he can't get ahold of him. He hasn't talked to him in eight months, you know?

So we have all sorts of different kind of psychological concerns, plus, you know, dealing with guys playing under pressure and performing under pressure and letting the practice express itself with a bunch of people watching, which is, I think, something that anybody can relate to. But I started playing as a kid. I loved playing baseball. Well, I think my dad really loved me playing baseball. He was a baseball player himself, played college baseball at Stanford. I was a student first kid, wasn the best athlete um as a kid in fact had no scholarship offers to go to

college i walked on um at university california berkeley uh where i had wanted to go to school because it's a great school yeah oh yeah super hippie well i had two stanford two stanford parents two stanford republican parents and what they produced was a hippie, a hippie Berkeley kid somehow. That's how it worked out. I listened to them. I listened to the other side and I said, I think I'm going to try my own. I'm going to take my own path here. But played at Berkeley, was a walk-on. My sophomore year of college, I won the starting job at catcher about halfway through the season. My junior year of college, I won the batting title in the conference and was drafted in the fourth round by the a's uh i thought i was going to be in the big leagues in like three years because you know i'd played so well and i thought i'd

had it figured out anytime you have it anytime you think you have it figured out um that's a good time to stop and say you're wrong especially when you're 21 years old you don't have shit figured out i still don't have shit figured out i'm almost i'm 37 you know so um i uh started playing professional baseball had some really good seasons and then hit a snag with a vision issue kind of delayed my career and i didn't get called up to the major leagues until i was 27 so i six years in the minor leagues before i got to reach my goal and that was six years of like real grind like making nine thousand dollars a year playing baseball, having to get a full-time job in the off season, having to pay for it.

We stupidly bought a house in 2005, my wife and I, that was just a, you know, at the time, that's your dream. You know, you want to own a home. We don't know. I didn't, again, like I said, I didn't know shit. I didn't know anything then. I still don't. But we buy this house, we get ourselves in a little bit of debt.

And the next thing I know, I'm working full time. I mean, I can remember having times and the happiest, honestly, in my baseball career that I ever was, was the year before I got called up. I was working in the off season and I had no time to work out for myself. I mean, my job was 6.30 in the morning. I was getting to the school where I was working. I was working until 3.30 and then I was doing baseball lessons until dark. And then I was coming home and we would eat a little bit of food. I would to bed wake up at three in the morning drive up to the gym where i could lift my buddy who was a bodybuilder who was a trainer at the gym would open the gym for us and we would work out at this

club sport renaissance with nobody in it uh and i i you know um the boxing trainer uh ross anima yeah he's a fucking magician on the jump rope so so ross um this is like 2007 so i was buying all of ross's conditioning books and i can remember being outside i had to go get i got glow-in-the-dark chalk and i went outside and i marked off like 200 meters 400 meters 600 meters 800 meters and i would do my i would do my ross running program outside in the dark uh listening to the rocky um montage music yes you know right and i'd get out there and i'd run and i've been looking back on my my professional sports career like those are the moments that stand out the most it's like me at 4 30 in the morning when nobody else is out there, me doing my sprinting. Like that is what gave me kind of the mental edge. I felt like, because I would,

I would go out and play with these guys. I'd be like, these guys are all better athletes than me, but fuck it. Nobody is willing. Nobody was willing to do it. Nobody else was willing to do that. And sure enough, halfway through that next season, I was in the major leagues and I played every day for two years. And then I had a massive elbow surgery. I had to get my elbow reconstructed. I tore my, tore my UCL ligament. I had what's called Tommy John surgery, which is an important name in baseball. Um, I was a starting player for the Florida Marlins. Everything was going well. I was looking like, I felt like I was going to make a ton of money playing baseball and everything was going smoothly. And then one day I woke up,

I couldn't put my arm on a table. Um, a table. I had broken my elbow swinging a bat. I didn't know, fractured my olecranon. It grew back, calcified in the joint, made too much space. I couldn't straighten my arm, couldn't throw, had to have surgery, had to have my nerve moved because I took a bunch of Darvacet so that I could play because I'm an idiot, you know?

Had to have my nerve moved, had to have my bone, my elbow kind of rebroken and shaved down and then the ligament replaced. And I lost my starting job and had to come back as a backup uh and so i went from a kind of a lifelong minor league grinder to an everyday everyday player that had with a bright future for two years to having to work my way back as a as a backup player um and extend i think i extended my career as far as i possibly could and my last year playing was 2015. When I stopped playing, I got a phone call from Theo Epstein,

who's the president of the Chicago Cubs, saying, hey, I hope you keep playing, but if you can't get a job, we would love to hire you. I'm like, well, what's my role going to be? And he's like, I don't know. We just come in and kind of just investigate every element of this business, see where you fit in. And, you know, the job of a catcher is one of the kind of a servant to, you know, you have a pitcher, right?

The pitcher, you call all the pitches, you're watching the whole defense. You're like a coach on the field and you're telling the pitcher what to do. But to do that for him to execute, he needs to be convicted. And for him to be convicted, he has to know that I care about him and he has to know that he has to trust me. And so one of the skills that I developed over 15 years was baseball players trust me. It's the life I lived and it's the people that I know. So I take those skills that I developed, how to get to know people quickly, how to become fast friends, how to learn how to say goodbye fast when they leave, and how to make an impact on people when you don't have a lot of time with them. Um, and that's, that's a big part of my job now is that I go, uh, mainly to our major league team, our AAA team, and sometimes to our AA team. So the higher end of our organization and just provide

like baseball, human resources and support, whether, like I said, whether it be research and ear to talk to or lately um you know being trained in mindfulness-based attention training guiding and leading meditations and we can even get into i'd love to get into the kind of the program that we have for these guys we start at 16 and we do this blend of mindfulness uh meditation practice some general sports psychology but man mainly it's mindfulness, stoicism, and Eastern philosophy is what we really, really talk about. Um, and it's not about the stuff that happens on the field. It's about how you live your life away from the field. Like that's where we want your conscious

thought going. Why your conscious thought going to how you're talking to your, your wife or your girlfriend or your family or your kids, you know, we're playing stick ball for money. Um, it's not that important. Uh, you're not going to be it's not that important uh you're not going to be happy if you make money you're not going to be happy if you push the push that happiness over the horizon to the end and it's another element of what we deal with all the time is guys thinking if then this if then philosophy which is just total bullshit yeah i'll be happy when you know and it's always out in front of you so that carrot just keeps moving ahead and you never reach it. The guys that I know, my friends that have made the most money or guys that I work with that make the most money,

they're generally the most unhappy people. And so I look at that and I go, well, that's not the answer. That's not the answer. The answer is kind of focusing back on figuring out what makes you happy, studying yourself learning learning the things that you actually want to do or the things that you want to learn about um it's really hard when you know we force people to make a decision on how they're going to live their life when they're 18 years old like hey you're 18 pick your major pick your major what do you want to do you want to be a doctor when you grow up what i don't know like i'm so lucky to have found have had professional sports and being able to go back to school. Like

I graduated from college last year and being able to go back to school as more of an adult, not fully formed yet in my opinion, but as more of an adult, I got to choose the things that I was really interested in. And so my two college experiences were completely different. One being, I was just checking the boxes and fulfilling the requirements. And then the other one being, I'm like going through the course catalog being like, Oh, drugs in society. Hell yes. I'm taking this course, you know? Ooh, uh, we had like racial relations in sports. Yes. That's fan. That's fascinating for me. And so like, I've taken all these classes at school and all of them are things that I want to learn about and learning about this interdisciplinary interdisciplinary approach to solving problems uh it's been a lot of fun so my my job is great i enjoy going around and and

seeing all these guys and just on this constant curve of learning all the time what can i learn new today uh and man that's makes me happy i i love that about you when first met, you'd hit me up after I was on the Rogan Experience, and I came out to your house with my wife. And we were talking keto, and of course, went down the rabbit hole on plant medicines and a number of other things. But your fascination and thirst for knowledge, I was looking in a mirror. And that's fucking rad, because very few people have that. Most people want the quick fix.

Tell me what I'm supposed to do and I'll do it. I mean, I trained people throughout my UFC career because I was making good money and needed to make supplemental income. And that seems to be the case across the board for a lot of people is that they don't want to make it their passion. They want to focus on this other thing they like

or playing video games or jerking off or fill in the blank instead of actually really trying to take the deep dive into these practices that can change their life. So I want you to unpack a couple of things for me. I want you to unpack what you're doing now with the mindfulness practice. And first just explain for people, what is mindfulness meditation? How does that differ from some of the other practices? Because there's thousands of forms and they all work in their own way. So the best definition that I've heard about for mindfulness is by john cabot zinn and that is mindfulness is paying attention on purpose in a particular way in the present moment and without judgment which there's a lot to there's a lot to unpack out of that mindfulness

meditation as a practice is to set an intention. Inevitably, you're going to be distracted because the human mind says 800 to a thousand words a minute or something. That voice never turns off. People think a lot of times that, oh, you know, we're going to meditate. I'm going to clear my mind. Sorry. It's not, that's this mindfulness. We said non-judgmentally mindfulness is about recognition of where the thinking is going. So set an intention. Inevitably, you will be distracted. The key, the deadlift for the brain

or the concentration muscle is the recognition of distraction and the reorientation of attention back. And it's incredibly important right now. We were talking a little bit earlier about technology, but the human attention span has gone down. I think Generation Z, they say it's eight seconds um it's like a it's like a goldfish or a hummingbird um and it's because we have we have the we have the we want the answer

right away we have the answer right away we don't have to think about it any further than that we don't have to do any investigation or any kind of thorough reading to find the concept we don't have to drive to the library anymore read the the book, get to page 200, and then have the answer. We don't have that anymore. We have the phone. So because of that, the human attention span is shortened.

Social skills have degraded. Eye contact has gone down. All of these things improve with mindfulness meditation practice, the social skills loop. If I become more self-aware of who i am i have a better opportunity to regulate my emotions i can self-regulation right when i can when i can self-regulate i can now think about how you're feeling right and i can weigh how this is how i feel i wonder how he feels what am i doing there i'm i'm expressing empathy

i'm thinking about how you're how you're thinking that's the, that's the social skills loop that leads to like emotional intelligence, me understanding myself, thinking about you and comparing, not comparing to you on the keeping up with the Joneses level, but comparing to you on how you feel about what, whatever just happened, um, or how you feel about this interaction, thinking about how, how it makes you feel, uh, that increases the social skills loop. And so you have, benefit coming off of it. But back to the definition of mindfulness, paying attention on purpose in a particular way in the present moment and without judgment. It's very simple, right? I'm going to say, I would say like in a meditation, I give people two options a lot of things to focus on. The first one being you can follow your breath

as it enters into your nose and feeling the sensations all the way down to the bottom of your stomach and you can follow it back out. And that becomes the object of your attention. And every time your mind wanders away, and it will because it always does, the goal is just to recognize it and non-judgmentally bring it back.

Not go like, oh shit, there I go again. Damn it, I shouldn't do that. So many people beat themselves up for that. bring it back and not go like oh shit i'm there i go again damn it i shouldn't do that so many people beat themselves up for that and and that feeling of i'm fucking this up i'm doing it wrong that will create a fight or flight response that is if you go down the rabbit hole of judging yourself on how well you're doing that is the exact opposite of what you're trying to accomplish to catch it in the moment and just to be like oh fuck i did it again okay and then go back to the breath that that's the practice and that strengthens the muscle you're talking about that's the hardest part for people to understand

is without judgment the the like the last little kind of icing on that definition without judgment the hardest one for people to understand because i i and i can say it's the hardest one for me to do too because i will i'll you know i practice every day and i'll sit down and i'll go into my practice and i'll you know i'll start planning and i'll go damn it i'm planning again and i'm like oh man i just had it i just i'm making a judgment and then i judge myself for making a judgment it just never it just if you let it go the you know the human brain's incredible if you you let it go, the human brain's incredible. If you just let it go, it'll keep spiraling. All we are as people, our perspective comes from our perception of the world. And this is what this practice is, right? It's a modulation of attention is what you're

working on. You are consciously directing your attention to where you want to do it. How does that carry over in the moment? It carries over in the moment because if I'm on the baseball field or if I'm on the jujitsu mat, right. And I start thinking about all these things that are not going to be helpful for me, I can recognize that. Um, and I can bring it back to what needs to happen right now, uh, which is the only real time. And we can get really like metaphysical and philosophical about tomorrow, you know, tomorrow, like Bo Burnham, the comedian says, tomorrow's a relative term, doesn't exist. And so much of our lives is about,

at least nowadays and how we're raised in the United States, so much of our lives is about preparing for something that hasn't happened that might not happen in the future. And when we start to focus too far away from where we are right now, that's the path to depression and rumination in the future. Um, and when we start to focus too far away from where we are right now, that's the, that's the path to depression and rumination in the past and fear and anxiety

and fight or flight in the future. And it's easy how it's easy to get so worked up to so get so worked up about something that's so unlikely to happen. Uh, and in sports, especially being in the present moment, you know, backing up on that definition, being in the present moment, you know, backing up on that definition, being in the present moment, we have a saying with the Cubs, it's be present, not perfect. Like what we want you to be is you, right? I need you to understand yourself. I need you to understand when you're out on the field, when you make, when you're making

mistakes, when you're struggling, I don't need to understand. I don't need to understand why like mechanically or technically it's happening. I just need to understand that. I need you to understand how you feel about it in the moment and what your focus is. Can you control that? Can you modulate it so that you can point your attention on something beneficial? And that applies on the macro scale to life. What are you looking at?

Because that's what, I mean, the old saying, I love the saying garbage in garbage out, right? If you're looking at garbage, that's your worldview I mean, the old saying, I love the saying garbage in, garbage out, right? If you're looking at garbage, that's your worldview. It's your worldview. If you're not willing to look inside and you hit on it earlier, and this really gives you the space to do it, but it's scary as hell to take a look inward,

to really assess yourself. And that's where, at least for me in the past, that's where plant medicine has come in. Because you hear people that, or I've done it in the past, eat too much cannabis, eat too much on purpose and sit there. You know what's going to find,

you know what you're going to think about? You're going to think about your kids dying, your wife dying, your parents dying, yourself dying. You're going to go down, or dying, your wife dying, your parents dying, yourself dying. You're going to go down, or at least for me, it always pops up. Just what are the worst possible things that I can think about? And then I have to sit there consciously with my brain on fire.

I have to sit there consciously and come to terms with that stuff. And so many people in our society, I feel like, and so many people in professional sports, they want to shove it down and act tough. I don't need to see that. I don't need to face that. Yes, you do. Yes, you do. Because that's therapy.

That's therapy. Looking at the most difficult possible circumstances as objectively as possible, accepting how you feel. We're talking about mindfulness. If you're sad, you're sad. There's no reason to stop it. The mind is like the weather, right? mindfulness if you're sad you're sad there's no reason to to stop it like you we don't the mind is like the weather right today it's it's sunny and beautiful and clear other days you wake up

and the mind is cloudy and it's dark and it's sad it's not our responsibility to go i'm gonna i'm gonna i'm gonna change this by by saying no no it's our responsibility to recognize it oh that's how i feel today well i'm feeling sad what are the things that makes me happy to do well for me it's like exercise and jujitsu yeah and why am i feeling sad right we constantly distract ourselves and you talk about the garbage in garbage out like fucking millions of people will sit down and watch reality tv which is pure trash like you're not learning anything that is a depiction of what a producer wants you to see in the life of someone fake.

There's nothing real about that at all. That's not what happens when the cameras are off and is fucking scripted half the time. And we're drawn to that because it distracts us from being in our own bodies. It distracts us from seeing what's going on in our life. Let me follow someone else. It's not like a fucking inspirational movie or reading a good book it has nothing to do with that right

and i think that i mean just getting into psychedelics did you hear michael poland on uh tim ferris podcast recently no he crushed it he has a fucking new book coming out on plant medicines and um he was talking about the more research that they're doing now stateside you know there comes this this um this issue with it being looked at as a panacea like it does cure so many different things right but it only becomes so many different things by definition because in medical literature we have to categorize each thing as an individual ailment for the prescription medication model but if we look at those things that a lot of the times when we go through a plant medicine ceremony we find that it's all on one continuum right the positive and the negative exists all in one plane polarity

is not really it doesn't really exist you can't have fat without thin you can't have tall without short you can't have good without bad they're all on the same plane and um he was talking about when you look at depression that is regret from the past and when you look at anxiety that is regret from the future and neither one of those exists now all that ever exists is right now yeah it's not real yeah it's and and your experience was real and but it isn't really that's he's exactly right um you know and you get into you get it gets really philosophical like that when you start talking about time um where we are right now compared to where we're going you know we have there are some things that tell us that we have to plan but i think that it's in those anytime anytime you can find something you're talking

about a panacea the panacea is the search within right that's that you you and a lot of times i tell our players too like they'll ask me a question about how they're supposed to feel or how they're supposed to act and what i tell people all the time like you already know the answer to that question we already know we already know like we have a very good sense. I think of if, if we're doing something wrong or we're doing something right, we have a, we have a, we have a very good sense of that. But what's really funny to me is at least in my own self too, cause I do this shit all the time. Um, I will know I'm doing something wrong and regret it as, as it's happening, but I'll continue to do it. And then like three days

later, I'll do it again. What is that? What is that? And that's why the investigation needs to go inside. Like it's, yes, you are your perception, but you know, get real deep into Gulag Archipelago or Viktor Frankl's Man's Search for Meaning. You know, you get into those things and you recognize that, okay,

no matter how horrible we think the outside situation is, we always have our mind and our mind is safe if we build it to be so. If we build it to be so, the only way that we build it to be so is by taking risks and by putting ourselves maybe out of our mind or going outside to come back inside and find out because i again i believe that we have we have the answers to most of the questions of how we're supposed to act or what's going to make us happy inside of us but like you said we've taken so much time to just get as distracted as possible you know to watch this and that and this or listen to this or or go do this thing you know whether it be for me for years we've been numbing our numbing our social

awkwardness with alcohol, for example. You know, like that's not a real that's not a real perception of the world. It's a skewed one where you've you've taken down some walls and windows like I prefer to go the other way. I want I want more intensity. I want I want to I want a greater view of myself. I don't want to be numb to anything yeah and I mean I think there's a time and a place for alcohol but when we lean on anything

as a crutch that becomes a real issue and if you live for the weekend where you grind through a shitty job 40 50 hours a week just you can get fucked up on Friday and Saturday night and do a little day drinking watching the games that's no way to fucking live that shit will catch up with you on top of that you're never you're never really comfortable because you're doing this thing you don't like during the week and then you're drowning yourself on the weekend still not being present still it's an alcohol is an anti-psychedelic it drops awareness it doesn't increase awareness right so you'll never really figure out what is making me tick why do i feel the way that i feel what's

going on inside without taking a look through practices like meditation or doing a deeper dive you know getting in the float tank yeah or doing plant medicines so we have a float tank um at wrigley field in the locker room because we recognize with our guys that this is exactly what it's all about. It's not about drinking eight beers with the boys afterwards anymore. That's the past. That's gone.

It's about doing exactly what we're talking about is how deep of a dive can we possibly take as an advocate of all of this stuff. Floating, it's tough we were talking before the podcast about what can and can't talk about it's tough because um you know we have stuff like for example we have a young player who is not protected by the major league union that you know he tested positive for cannabis and he got like in 50 game suspension without pay and i see this stuff happen to these kids that i care about you

know and uh i'm like where is the where in major league baseball where is where is the research behind your point to suspend this kid where is it i don't see it anywhere um i don't understand like all of all of like the plant medicine stuff especially you know there's this there's this stigma in i think the older generations that it's hippie medicine sex cult like uh weird stuff there's no um i'm not even medicine just drugs you know drug blanket statements just drugs there's no there's no willingness to like go read jack harrier's book or or go check out doblin and maps or look at or go go look at the go look at the research or go talk to people or read erwin about the about the about other people's experiences nobody is willing to look at the information and as soon as people

do they go like well it's bs or you know they want to they want to discount it because of how they've been raised and it's just it's really that's one of the sad things for me to see all the time is people's you know like you i want to know i just want to know that's it i don't i don't i don't i want to know and i want i want to give people especially the guys that i work with um i want to give them the best possible information and so as a result you have to read scientific research you read scientific research and you start to understand how to read a scientific study and reading the abstract and then figuring out, okay, this is really real. Look how many people they actually tested.

It's 3,000 people. It's not 50 or something, you know? And you look at those things. What you find is that a lot of the things that you might believe or that you were told when you were growing up are just simply unsupported by any sort of evidence of research. Whereas other things that people told you for years, that horrible you'll go crazy if you take lsd um look no further than fucking reefer madness yeah right it's amazing which is a large scare it was a scare tactic about black guys and mexican guys fucking white women yeah you know like you're

gonna smoke this reefer and all the white women will be raped it's like what yeah that mexican that mexican tobacco uh-huh the mexican tobacco marijuana um was it william randolph first just ruined it for everybody now paper's worse because of that guy because they're not making out of hemp they're making it out of out of trees how'd that work out for the environment cut all the damn trees down thanks a lot um no it's all it's all it's all interrelated and it's all it's all for people on the pursuit of looking inside you know i think um beyond looking inside too it's it's for our guys i think when you when you do take that that deep look in it provides freedom you know like jocko willing talks a lot about discipline as freedom right discipline's freedom i couldn't agree. But also the discipline to face,

objectively face what you're actually doing. That's the toughest part. It's not doing the burpees. It's recognizing that you need to do them, right? It's really recognizing that this is something that's important for me and I'm going to feel good. Nobody ever goes and works out and walks out of the gym or walks out of the field from running sprints

or walks out of, nobody ever walks off the mat and goes like, shouldn't have done that. Yeah. Yeah. You always have that. And there's the cascade effect of a shift in neurochemistry, whether that's endorphins or just the bar being raised with dopamine and adrenaline, whatever the case is, you feel fucking good. That changes the way you operate through the day. And obviously there's underdoing the medicine of training and movement

and there's overdoing that. And a lot of people overdo it. But when you find the happy medium, that's what fucking has carryover in all the things. Dive into for me the benefits of putting yourself in, as we deemed, uncomfortable situations and, and what that looks like? Well, the, you know, we're talking about acceptance. You know, I hate the term, I hate the term be comfortable being uncomfortable because the definition of

uncomfortable is literally not comfortable. So it can't, they can't both exist in the same time. Right. But accepting being uncomfortable because it is the discomfort that leads to growth. And, you know, you have the lobster story, right? The lobster's got to shed a shell and it hurts, and then it gets better, gets bigger. Sure. It's like the old parables, right? But I'll use an example. We had a pitcher, actually he pitched last night here, pitched really well. But I saw him when they were in Nashville earlier in the season. And he was working on some stuff in the bullpen

and he was trying to throw the ball higher, which is not comfortable for him at all. And 22 year old kid, young, drafted at high school. He's pitching, he's pitching, he's pitching. And afterwards he comes over to me and he's like, you know, I'm like, how'd that go? And he's like, it was tough. It was really hard.

He goes, but one thing I've recognized from my kind of small career, he said, is that when things are difficult for me to do, but I kind of get them a little bit right sometimes, it gives me this hope. And I understand that this is the discomfort that leads to my improvement. And so he's like, how did it go?

I didn't execute everything I wanted to execute, but man, that was awesome because I know that that just made me better. I know it made me better. I'm tapping into that feeling. And I think that that's the same thing for most people. Like if you want to challenge yourself, the reason to do it is because as human beings,

and this goes back evolutionarily, but we need to be scared we have this we have this meter we have like stress we look at stress so often it's it's in the context of negative stress we're not true like we we have these sensors built in to like be able to dive under the table if a tiger jumps through the window, you know? But when we don't give that sensor any like reps, it, it will just, we will supplant that with psychological stress and fear and anxiety and depression. We will, we will do that when we don't, we don't take the opportunity. I call it like you have to select it. So learning to be comfortable being uncomfortable or just accepting the discomfort is you actually taking control and, and choosing where you're going to get your stress from. Do I want to get it from, I don't know, do I want to get it from

being outraged about something that Ricky Gervais said on social media? Or, or do I want to get my stress from something that I select that I know is positive and healthy, whether it be going outside and it could just be going outside and walking your dog for an hour, you know, but getting away from getting away from the, the internal psychological stress by providing yourself an opportunity, the best opportunities are the ones where you're super uncomfortable and you don't feel like you want to do it. I tell people all the time, look for something that's equal parts, interesting and scary and try it and see how you feel afterwards. And you can go through a bunch of different things. It could be, I'm going to jump off, I'm going to jump out of an airplane

or something as small as I'm going to do jujitsu, or I'm going to go to kickboxing, or I'm going to do something that I'm uncomfortable with that kind of freaks me out. It might even be horseback riding, but I'm going to go try it, see how it makes me feel afterwards. And then if it makes me feel the way I want to feel,

then I'm going to put that into my routine. That's going to be something that I do. That's how I found jujitsu as a whole from, there was a big hole in baseball. I competed for so long, 162 times a year for 15 years. That's a lot of competition. That's more than half the year where I'm competing all the time. I lose that. I'm home for like two and a half months trying to beat everybody in Monopoly.

Like I didn't lose it. I didn't lose a tic-tac-toe game to my three-year-old at all. I'm like, you don't know how to do it here. That's three in a row. Dad wins again. Dad wins again. Dad wins again. He wants to play charades. I went again. I went again. My wife was like, you need to find something. And I'm like, well, all right. I had trained, I had trained in the past. I'd always been an MMA fan. Um, and I had trained, uh, in kickboxing in 2006 at Cesar Gracie's gym. Uh, and went off season off season i took a i accepted a smoker until my organization found out about it that i was playing for and they're like no you can't do a kickboxing

fight and i'm like i'm from the suburbs i've never been punched i need to see what it feels like i need to know what happens like i have i understand that there's something here it might have been i that i read sam sheridan's book i think and like his whole story is you know leaving yale or wherever he was and going to thailand and doing a kickboxing what was the name of that book fighters fighters heart that's right i remember my dad got me that when i was first getting in the usc it's a great book it's a great book and the fighter's mind is a great book too he goes and interviews you know dan gable and randy couture and uh andre ward and all these great all these great fighters about their process and their routine and how they think about life and sports and what motivates them and what drives them. And it's fantastic to read, but I read that book and I'm like,

I need, of course I've just, I need to do a kickboxing fight. I'm a pussy. I don't know what to do. You know, like I need to, I need to go put myself out there and try it. And so I was kickboxing a bunch. And then like a couple of times a week, I would do a little jujitsu and the standup part, because I'm used to things flying at my face as a catcher was, I picked it up really fast. Like that was easier. Once I could keep my eyes open when somebody was punching me, oh, this is good. We're playing, we're going to play hand-eye coordination game.

I'm good at this game. Might not be the fastest or the strongest, but I'm good at moving my head and watching things go right by. Cause I'm catching stuff going a hundred miles an hour all the time. But the jujitsu part, I was just like got in i realized first day i'll never forget i got off that mat and i'm like that is like i was in the ocean and i can barely tread water

barely tread water i'm getting strangled and thrown on my head you know i was 235 pounds at the time and fit and didn't matter i'm getting tapped by people 50 pounds lighter than me you know that have been they've been training for 10 years and they're legit at jujitsu so they know what to do and so i kind of knew when i was done playing that i was going to pursue that and my wife was like get out of the house please and go do something walked into this jujitsu gym 35 years old got strangled by some 17 year olds and walked out like that's it driving home i was so happy never been happier to get my ass kicked in my life and it still makes me happy it still makes me happy doing it but again it's because just what we're talking about like the acceptance of discomfort there's just such an opportunity for

growth and when you challenge yourself like that it builds your self-confidence and not that confidence is the best model to to follow it's truthfully not self-compassion is like the ability that's eric barker barking up the wrong tree ucla research's truthfully not. Self-compassion is. Like the ability, it's Eric Barker, Barking Up the Wrong Tree, UCLA research. He talks about self-compassion, like the Buddhist concept of self-compassion, being able to forgive yourself

when you screw up and understand that it's okay to fail is more important than being confident going in. That's what the research shows. But that's the place for it. The mat for me is the place that I get that.

Baseball used to do it. 70% of of the time of baseball or 30 of the time if you're successful you're the best in the world so that means the best in the world experience like a 70 failure rate offensively that's a lot of outs to make that's a lot of times that you practiced all day doing something that you did it wrong and 30 is great great. It's great. So, you know, I'm used to a life of failure and there's no better place to find more failure than go roll with a bunch of black belts. Have fun. You just, I just fail the whole time. Yeah. And incredibly humbling, you know, like few things in life have the ability to humble you regularly, you know, and you look at other martial arts like point karate and a lot of what the traditional

martial arts have become for money pay to play for belts that kind of shit and you're never really tested you have no idea to gauge yourself like how good am i at this or how can i actually excuse me can i actually defend myself and i think it's such a big deal especially for men who go through this world i was speaking at Paleo FX on the death of the American male. And, you know, Aubrey had mentioned, like, there's no winning in this conversation, so make sure you play at PC. And it ended up being a great conversation. an issue with a lot of people out there that are that are focused on power in other areas power plays in in their relationships in their office in the the acquisition of things it has to do with with not feeling safe in the world you know and uh jaco's talked about this a number of other people

have brought this up that have gotten into jiu jitsu because there's this this factor of i know i'm not the best at this but i know i can handle myself right and then and then the fact that you're tested so regularly in jiu-jitsu daily you know you have your warm-up you've got your drilling you're learning something brand new it's it's novel you know there's there's always something new and then you get to practice jiu-jitsu and in that practice you're going to get tapped and if you don't tap quickly you're going to get hurt and i speak from experience because i'm fucking gimping it right now oh i had a guy that was probably 40 pounds weighs 40 pounds less than me put me in a side knee bar and it didn't hurt and i didn't want to tap to him now that's like a heel hook like i should have

fucking tapped immediately i should have yelled tap and not even fucking tapped him with my hand just to get out of that right and so now i pay the consequence right so then that's incredibly humbling too to know it's it's a white belt move to not tap early it's absolutely you know what i'm saying i mean there's a time and a place to try to work your way out of an arm bar or any any position you know in competition but outside of that there's no reason to you tap and you can roll again you tap and you get to come back and you know every black belt that's been in the game they've tapped thousands of times yeah you know and i see it i see it with the black belts at our gym they tap each other all the time and they

get tapped out. Sometimes every once in a while, you'll see, I've had it where randomly I find myself in the perfect position with a black belt and I'm sorry, but I outweigh you by 50 pounds. I got your arm. I'll rip it off. I got a hold of your lower body and I got you in a Kimura and I outweigh you by 50 pounds. You're going to have to tap. I'm going to have to tap. I have to tap all the time. And I think what you're talking going to have to tap, right? I'm going to have to tap. I tap. I have to tap all the time. And I think what you're talking about with defending submissions, I mean, I'm only a couple stripes into a blue belt, right? But I do know that with defending submissions, if you get locked in a battle of I'm going

to hold my arm, we're going to play the spider web position. I'm going to hold my arm for the last four minutes of the round because you got there really quickly. What did I learn? Other than I could hold my own arm for the last four minutes of the round because you got there really quickly what did i learn other than i could hold my own arm for four minutes you know i i feel like crank right at that biceps i feel like it's better off just just okay just go maybe try a hitchhiker okay no he got it i tap tap tap okay let's start over again there's no and it's it's the beautiful thing about that sport the os and the and the fist bump afterwards and then you go on and you leave the mat and there is no like the hierarchy is already established there's belts so there's already this hierarchy

but there's nobody at least in my limited experience now of three years of training there's nobody that that walks around like oh i tap that guy in practice or i did that to that guy like nobody ever says that yeah where as in baseball or gyms most most good gyms most good places i'm sure there's a couple that stand out in any one place but of course those those guys either get weeded out of the equation and don't come back or they learn right and they are humbled and then they have the respect and i look at guys you're probably the same way but everywhere along the way you know like i look at guys now with with lower belts and if they're tapping me it's like fuck yeah dude you're coming up man i see this i see people making jumps you know and there's times in jujitsu where you see this this it's not linear

you know this progression like there's times where people kind of plateau and they're doing the same game over and over again and something clicks for them and they have this accelerated learning curve where all of a sudden they're fucking way better than they used to be and that's awesome to see that you know it is awesome i get to i get to mess around with um one of the guys at our gym you probably know jesse forbes so i didn't realize he's training there jesse is nutcase training there yeah jesse likes to like just like hold me on the ground by my neck like a you know like a dog i mean he's probably jesse's heavier than i am now he's probably 225 firefighter now and in in phoenix but you know he fought in the ufc for a long time he's a black belt um but it's

it's the it's the ultimate fighter seven right with cb dolloway yeah he was on the ultimate guy that got uh kicked off for going going crazy at the strip club at the end did jesse do that i think that was him off that i'm not gonna ask him about it i don't want to i might be i might be messing up the name here it might be no no you're thinking about jesse taylor jesse taylor that's right jesse taylor who was back he was back yeah he got kicked off because he he kicked him he kicked the car okay that's right yeah forbes was was he an asu guy i think so okay he wasn't as he wasn't okay yeah i've trained with him with bader and the guys out there yeah have you done any training oh they're they're they're they

closed power they're gonna open that back up soon they're opening it back up no we have like our um Josh Rodriguez and uh Gustavo that I know that they both was one of my first guys to train me in the gi that's way back in the day right when I got out of college yeah he's amazing he I met him uh I did um I think it was pan ams as a blue belt and my coach wasn't there and he saw me and ran over to fucking coach me in the match and i hadn't trained with him in like two years that was the man he's an amazing human so talking about being humble and jujitsu i got a here's a great gustavo dante story this october we had like our team kind of party and they did a couple black belt promotions and gustavo stood up and it's something i've never seen and i'll never see it in baseball

or the other sports but he came up and he said hey guys i want to talk to you um i am not going to be doing any of the lower belt promotions anymore he's like the only ones i'm going to do are black belt and he goes the reason is i've been pursuing these other business interests outside of jujitsu and i haven't been studying the game as much as i used to when i was coaching all the time and i don't feel comfortable teaching this game because the game's evolving and i understand that it's passing me by um so your instructors now are going to be bo and josh and orlando and marcio when they're here and you guys are going to see me here but i'm taking the place of a student again so i'll promote people to black belt but i'm not doing

i'm not the coach anymore here the gym the gym the gym has my name, but I need to come back in and learn as a student again. And I looked at that and went, this guy has been, I think what's four stripes on his black belt is how many years that's 10 or 12 years as a black belt. And he had the, the, the foresight and the understanding to recognize that he was going somewhere else. And even though he's won world championships and stuff, turned around and reentered the class as a student. So sometimes we'll go to,

well, he actually just recently dislocated his elbow. He was training takedowns to go compete in Abu Dhabi at that thing that they just did. And he got taken down, didn't break fall, tried to stay up on a single leg. Oh, but went the wrong way in class. Damn. That's the guy whose name is on the front of the thing,

and he's showing up with the other black belt as a student in class. And I saw that, and that really cemented to me that I'm in the right place. When the guy whose name on it is willing to humble himself like this and put himself at the bottom, that's truly, I think, the spirit of martial arts, and we get it there which is awesome yeah let's dive let's dive a little deeper into the plant medicine all right if you're willing i'm willing yeah um what have been some of your most most transformative experiences and and you know favorite medicines favorite experiences and elaborate a little bit on on what you've gained from those. I think that psilocybin, um, for me has been the most

kind of formative, uh, because I, I notice, uh, um, uh, a recurring theme, um, where I will have like big emotional outpouring in the midst of it, of the and a lot of times what i like to do um you know if i'm going to do it when i do it now i'll go by myself sometimes i'll go in the dark and i'll put some music i'll just lay on my bed and where's mckenna style just wait to see what happens yeah um and most of the time it's it's different there's no anxiety for me uh that comes out of that. There's like, you know, I'll be, you get the energy to kind of flow through you

and I'll get some shakes and I'll get some visuals. But overwhelmingly after that stuff happens, I get this like profound sense of like love, happiness, so much so that most of the time I end up crying. And I end up in a good way. Uh, I'm not a, um, daily person. Um, I'm a more of like a set of time aside once a month to have my own like private time. I consider it my therapy. I consider it something very, um, special and, special and powerful. And I really try to treat it

with as much respect as possible. Because anytime you're messing with your brain, there's a potential for something to go a little sideways. And so for me, it's all about look again, like I've been saying all the time, but it's all about looking inside and like what comes up and being mindful of the things that I'm thinking about when I'm there, because your mind is always there.

I had a last time I had an interesting moment where I was in a hotel room and I walked in and I looked in the mirror and I saw the lines on the, on the sides of my eyes and they started to just kind of go over like my face and then throughout my whole body. And I had this, you know, like the memento mori stoic moment where I realized I was gonna die and it made me happy. And I can't explain why, why that, why, why I can't, I have no, there is no why for that, you know, but I was just overwhelmingly joyful about,

about experiencing and truly feeling like I understood my own mortality. And I don't get to that place. I can't get there just with nothing. I mean, I imagine you could if you were an MBSR type meditator where it was an hour a day for 10 consecutive weeks. I imagine maybe you could get somewhere like that, but just having that assist, um, you know, that, that assist, that transport, uh, kind of more deeply into your own brain, you know, like the signals get crossed a little bit and it's like in crossing the signals, we see clearer, we see clearer to how we actually feel. Um, so I think that is, that is for me, the, like the approach level one for everybody. Um um and it doesn't have to be i know

i know people that that microdose psilocybin all the time to kind of combat their depression and i've seen that highly successful um but that's that's that's for me the the way to go and i always think about it around christmas time too especially you know you think about the the rituals of those people up in the mountains and the and the guy the guy picking the Amanita muscaria from underneath the fir tree and, and reindeers getting high and going through that whole thing. So like, that's a time like that kind of pairing that stuff with like some Christmas lights and a family experience is it's just, it's like a love enhancer for me. And that's for me the way, like I said, I want to go introspective, positive, affirmative, loving, and caring. And that's a good conduit for me.

Yeah, brother. I think it allows me to reintegrate so many of the teachings of the East, you know, like just to embody that, to feel gratitude with every fiber of my being, to know why you walk the path with discipline. You know, like when that gets cemented in and you feel that, that's fucking lasting. You know, it doesn't need to be an all the time experience because there's this deep sense of inner peace and wellness that lasts for a very long time if you approach it correctly with intention and reverence for the medicine intention i think is is so important you know this isn't like and i think it's also what people think negatively about this kind of stuff is that the context that most people i think think about plant medicine is 16 year olds buy mushrooms and they eat them

because they're just being, there's no thought, like, oh, I freaked out, I can't do that stuff, made me freak out, I saw this and it was crazy. That's, there's no intention there. The intention can't be, I'm gonna do this because I want to get fucked up. Like that's, I've never thought about that, like anything, with anything,

besides maybe being younger and drinking. Like that's, we're drinking to get, like if you're drinking natural ice, you're drinking to get like- Nat that's what we're drinking to get like if you're drinking natural ice you're drinking to get like natty ice you're drinking to get like that's the you're drinking to get drunk that's what you're doing you're not you're not doing it for any other reason doesn't taste good doesn't make you feel good you're doing it for that one thing you're doing it to inebriate yourself i don't look at these ones um i don't look at the plant medicine like that at all like Like that's essential. I mean, I really do believe, I read Footpunch of the Gods

and I really do believe that there was something to the evolution of the human brain that I can't explain it. I'm not a scientist that has to do something with psilocybin. And I read the research on what it does with depression. And I look at it and I go, yeah, like you said earlier, is this stuff a panacea? It might possibly be,

but so is maintaining a healthy lifestyle, feeding yourself with food that comes from the right source, challenging yourself daily to provide yourself the right stress, and then you add this stuff on top of it. It's the finisher, I think, for the path to happiness. When we look at, and you said gratitude, but the way that we designed our mental skills program for our minor league organization this year is that we went through modules every week. We used to do meetings where you'd come in and we'd teach you about the growth mindset for 35 minutes. And I'd be like, Hey, you got to have the growth mindset. Well, we realized with this day and age, you know, five to 10 minute little conversations, way more impactful than 35

minute classroom style meetings. So we broke it up into modules. The first module we talked about was control. Um, you know, the, the oldest adage and cliche in the book is control the things you can control. Don't worry about the rest, but sure. If that's so important, have you ever written that down? Anybody, have you written that down? So that's what we had to do. We had a fuck it list. These are all the things I think about that I have no control over that bother me. And when I get to this place, revert back to the top. Fuck this. It's not going to help me at all. I'm making myself upset. And yes, I'm going to think about it, but do I have practice reverting back? Yes, I do, because we're going to pair that with mindfulness meditation. So you make a list of control, um, and then you do some mindfulness meditation,

every do a daily practice. And then we're going to give you a practical life exercise. You're going to, you're going to eat one meal, mindful eating exercise, where you're going to think about every bite, where it came from and what it tastes like and what you're doing. That's called, that's learning how to be in the moment. the second week we move to gratitude so control is this is what i can and can't control right gratitude is this is what is already great and if you want to be happy you have to learn how to point your attention at that stuff because we could all think negative like i said it earlier we all think about i'm gonna die and this is sad we could all think about that but can i consciously you know we have practice

modulating that attention can i consciously point it on the things that are great? And you think about gratitude, do mindfulness meditation with gratitude at the beginning, at the end, wake up every day for a week and write down three things you're really happy about and then set some intentions. And that's what we start to get to that second week.

And the third week we get to visualization, not just visualization of, you know, mirror neurons and me seeing myself do the things that I want to do through my own eyes, but what is my aim? This is what I can do. This is what I love. This is what makes me happy. What's my aim? This is where I want to go. And when we talk about visualization and exercises, we write those things down like take five minutes a morning to write out what your life is like um there's a fantastic program i know a lot of people don't like jordan peterson um i guess i don't know i like him i think we got some fans on the show

yeah a lot of people are turned off by for various reasons yeah they don't like people just don't like their ideas being challenged you know and so it's very easy to just try to label something alt-right racist sexist whatever misogynist i don't think that ideas being challenged. So it's very easy to just try to label something alt-right, racist, sexist, whatever, misogynist. I don't think that he's coming from that place. And I read his book. But fantastic program, man. Future authoring. I did it when it came out.

That's dope. I totally want to do that. What did you start with? Did you do the past? Did you do the future? I did the future authoring. Okay. And I did it right after i stopped playing

and it was fantastic because i had to write out what i wanted where i want to be like like hey where do you see yourself in 30 years i never thought like that before i was always in the moment i was playing sports so you know you're on top of a hill you're looking down at the at your life like where are you and so you write out all these things that you think you want to do and then you get challenged and you have to write for five minutes about like, are you doing this because you want to do it? Or are you doing this because you think that society wants you to do this? You had to really consider those things because you're forced to write for a certain amount of time, three minutes, five minutes, keep typing, keep going. And eventually it'll start to come out. And then at the end of it,

you get a whole, you get a whole printout of all your stuff. They send it back out. And so you can go back and reference it. But it's a fantastic exercise to find out what your aim actually is. And so for our guys, we have, what is your aim? Where do you want to be? Where do you see yourself? Let's start thinking a little bit about where you want to go. But at the same time, we work on exercises, visualization exercises. We're going to work on seeing ourselves do what we want to do technically from our own eyes and before competition, because we know with mirror neurons, if you do two reps in your mind, it's almost the same as doing one rep physically, right? So we can get there if we're hurt or whatever, we can develop these techniques. So we go control, gratitude,

visualization. Then we get to the fourth week of spring training and we talk about being present. So this is what I can and can't do. This is the things that make me happy and what I do the best. This is where I want to go. We get to being present. This is me doing it in the moment. This is me doing it right now. This is me focusing on my process.

So we start writing down process-oriented goals. We do a body scan meditation that week for him because if I can connect to the physical body, the body doesn't know the past or the future. The body only knows right now. So anytime I can connect with how I feel, I'm more completely in this moment right now. My mind is, right? And then the final thing that we do is competition. And competition, the interesting thing about competition,

competition is just getting out of the way. It's getting out of the way. It's putting myself in a position where I trust all the things I practiced. So much so that I can have the freedom of expression and just kind of be artistic in the moment you know when you watch the great athletes um if you're going to talk about mma for example you watch the great athletes if you watch john jones you watch this kind of open adaptability where whatever's happening he's he's always in it you know he's always he's always in it oh this guy's going to wrestle him out he can do that Oh, this guy's going to wrestle him out.

He can do that too, right? This guy's going to stand up and box with him. He can do that too. But he can make adjustments and he finds the little lanes and the ways around. And you can see that he's just fully in the moment, right? There is no rigid and strict game plan of this has to happen. And when it goes off the rails, I don't know what to do. It's just him being there and letting all of that practice

and training express itself in the moment. And that's, I think, the highest level of performance. That's what we call the flow state or the zone or whatever the hot streak is. That's what we call those things. But those come from us having faith and trust and all the stuff that we've done up to this point, believing it in a hundred percent and then just letting it happen out of the way.

We're a passenger at that point. The conscious mind's out. You know, we, we measure sports and games consciously, but man, we actually play them subconsciously. There's not a, there's not an inner monologue going like in baseball going like, well, if he throws this pitch here, I'm going to be able to do this. And then, oh, it's a curve ball. So I'll wait on it and then I'll hit it. No, it happens in less than four tenths of a second. So it's, it's, if your body's not ready

to do it and you don't trust your body and that's why it kind of pairs competition kind of pairs well with the week before when we, when we talk about being present, because when you are in competition, if you're having trouble bringing your mind back, recognizing when you're out, there's different techniques that you can do. You can go to some basic relaxation where you're going to inhale and make a fist and exhale and release to get yourself back into the moment. And what we're trying to arm these guys with is this kind of perspective on life, how they can approach life in a way that that makes them happy um and then how

they can compete in a way where they compete with freedom right and that freedom again we talk about trusting your routine it comes from discipline are you willing to put in all the extra work all the work that's that's desired of you i mean it's easy as an athlete now especially in our organization we cater whole foods to every every field um from from able to damn well there's no whole foods in the dominican republic at our academy but in mesa in mesa arizona we have multiple teams i mean the food is as a quality as it can possibly be you get all the way up to chicago and you're talking about grass-fed grass finished beef skewers and free-range chicken and organic vegetables and chefs making things every

single day and float tanks and cold therapy and these kind of open discussions about vulnerability and honesty there. We're really optimizing all this stuff and it's easy. But as a player, you have to, again, back to the very beginning of this conversation, you have to study yourself, understand what makes you happy, understand what you need to do, and then you have to go out and do it in the present moment. And you go and do that. And then you can walk away from your career like I did at the end and say, it's the best I could have done. And that's the best place. That's to me, that's self-actualization is the recognition that this is the best that I could do with the given information. This is, this was, this is me. This is all me. And so like,

when I stopped playing, people like, are you sad that you're not playing anymore? I said, no, I'm not sad. I'm not playing anymore. Like said, no, I'm not sad I'm not playing anymore. I walked on in college. Every day that I played after high school was a bonus. And every day that I played after high school lasted 16 years. And I look back on my career and I go, man, I couldn't have done any better than that. Like 192, whatever I hit my last year, terrible batting average. That was the best I could do.

I could not have done. There's nothing I would have changed looking back, except for maybe I would have practiced a little bit less because I was so crazy about wanting to make sure I was okay. But that to me is kind of self-actualization in sports. And when you get to that place, that's when I think it's much easier to access happiness. Fuck yeah, brother. We did it. You crushed it. Where can people follow you online uh i got um a twitter

my names are all messed up i got a twitter at no own it it's so savage at man bear wolf um that uh background on that one um i went to iraq in 2010 to visit troops right baseball players had never been to um the middle east or in a active war zone we hadn't been an active war zone since korea and the marlins were like hey you need to do a twitter um so that you can communicate with the fans i'm like what's twitter okay so yeah pick a name i'm like well as an enormous south park fan and it was kind of right after the al gore episode and i thought it was hilarious man bear pig episode you can't put pig wolves are way cooler um and i got a bear and a wolf tattoo on my back for my grandfather because he was russian you know it's russian mythology and it came easy man bear wolf my first three tattoos and and a shout out to south park and poor al gore and side note

my son's name is bear and uh got that from an ayahuasca vision our next child will be a daughter and her name will be wolf i love wolf i like female wolf yeah yeah brother i like female wolf and then you can also i do instagram too but that's not really interesting as it's at see john learn and that's just i take pictures of things i learn generally uh books or my experiences in life i'm not as good as the instagram at the instagram as i am um i like the twitter's always been a good medium for me because I like having conversations and I like, I like dealing with people that are outraged. That's one of my favorite. If you want to, if you want to get your daily source of people being ridiculously outraged or, or finding ways to be offended, you can, you can log onto Twitter and it's like my reality television. You know, you watch reality television to feel better

about yourself, where you are in life. I sometimes read twitter to feel better about how i think about life fuck yeah great food for thought we got a lot done awesome thank you for joining thank you so much for having me it's great to see you hell yeah thank you guys for listening to the on it podcast with john baker i know y'all love this podcast John Baker is a savage Please give him a shout out online We've linked to his social medias In the show notes And thanks for tuning in