Kyle Kingsbury Podcast - #467 Atomic Habits, Essentialism, and The Ruthless Elimination of Hurry

Episode Date: August 14, 2026

In this EP I decided to give people a look inside The Kingdom Within- my digital community on Skool. This is my most recent lecture from Skool. I deep dive Atomic Habits, Essentialism, and The Ruthless Elimination of Hurry. 3 books that have had a profound impact on my life. This isn't an expose of the texts; rather it is some of the core teachings woven into the changes I've made personally to get more from life and live better.     If you'd like to join my community and participate in monthly lectures and Q&A click the link here for a free one week trial! https://www.skool.com/the-kingdom-within-5541/about   Brain Supreme is the best microdosing company on Earth- the Genius and the Athlete are my favorite products but all of them work incredibly well for a variety of purposes. Get 15% off everything in the store by using code "KKP" at checkout.  https://brainsupreme.co/collections/all

Welcome to today's podcast. We have a unique episode, one that I plan on doing a bit more of, at least till we get this community built fully functioning, fully up and running. Let's put it that way. A few months back, I soft launched my digital community of the kingdom within, and it's been awesome. We've got a small group of people that tune in once a month. I do a deep dive on a particular topic, and a couple weeks later, I will drop in for a peer Q&A. And I've really really, enjoyed it. It's also, I don't know if anybody's got school accounts and things like that. It's pretty cool because it's like a social media channel just for what we're talking about. And what I'm talking about, I guess, is pretty broad-stroked. I think if there's any

one issue with people asking what the hell is it, it's me teaching. And that can mean a lot of things, just like this podcast. You know, what's the podcast about? Well, it started with human health and optimization. And then it went all over the place. We went into sex optimization and relationships and fucking God and spirit and everything else you can think of and plant medicines and everything in between. And so it's hard to narrow down exactly what it is that I'm teaching there. But I can't say this. It is the things that I've mentioned. It is about just being a better human. My life has been one of a seekers, one of a student first. And I always come with a student's mind. It is something that has paid dividends in my life is that I really care to learn. I want to learn.

I want to try things on for myself and know them. through the wisdom of experience. And as I've built that up, I have continued to relay that back. This is what I've done as a coach for the last seven years, both in fit for service and otherwise. And the podcast is great. Podcast is great because I can drop a solo cast or I can get somebody on who I'm super excited about and want to learn from and build a relationship with them.

And I've been super grateful for that. The community offers me something different. You know, it gives me a back and forth with people. and this is the lowest price point I've ever coached for, which is awesome. I want to get more people in there and I want more people to be able to afford it. And I want people who can't afford it to not be able to get in. I haven't offered this yet, but we will have scholarships for this as well. It's $150 a month.

You can email me a one pager on why you should be in and why you can't afford it. And we will potentially get you in, just as we had done with Fit for Service. Anyway, this episode is a recording done just a couple days ago. on from the kingdom within it's the fourth day of school so like i said every every uh every month to a drop in that's first day of school so on and so forth this is our fourth month together and um we're starting where we've continued along the path of what it looks like to view your life holistically what is lifestyle change look like and then how do we get that practical right because you can get real airy-fairy and out there and you get real nitty-gritty and specific and we're

starting to bridge these two worlds. So three of the most important books I've ever read are, especially as it comes to changing your life, have to do with habits and work-life balance, and time itself, right? Do you rush everywhere? Are you always in a hurry? That's how I grew up and it did not bode well for me. It doesn't feel good. These aren't long reads. All three of these books are under six hours on Audible, on one-x speed. So Atomic Cabot's James Clear, essentialism, Greg McCown. And then last but not least,

a book, my homie, Uncle Dr. Nathan Riley, sent my way called The Ruthless Elimination of Hurry. There are so many golden nuggets of truth in there. I think, you know, all three, you could read all three of these in under 16 hours. Literally, if you, you could one week,

one day, you could do it on one day on the weekend and taking notes, and all three would impact your life. Anywho, I've spoken long enough here on the intro, Let me know what you guys think. I will link to the Kingdom Within and the show notes. The About page is getting a redo. It needs to be a little bit more specific on what people are going to expect from this.

But there's a one week free trial. Here's what I tell people to do. Sign up for the week, free one week trial. Go on to the damn thing. Scroll through the posts and you'll find fourth day of school. Click the video. BFR Breakdown. Click the video and watch it.

Q&A number three. Click the video and watch it. there's great questions on this stuff. We talk God, prayer, meditation, contemplation, plant medicines, biohacking versus ancestral wisdom, grounding energy, healing with the brain, DNA, and more on the last Q&A for an hour and a half. These are chock full of tons of great stuff. And how much you guys have access to that?

And if it feels right, stick around. It's only $150 a month. If it doesn't feel right, you don't lose a damn penny, right? You've got a week to figure that out. So listen to this. If it vibes with you, clicks the link, go to the kingdom within. sign up for your free one week trial, and I'd love to see you there.

If you've ever thought about having me as a coach or being able to work with me, this is the place to do it. One-on-ones are incredibly expensive, and that's because it's like taking on an extra family member. It doesn't have to be that way. Join the community of the kingdom within, and we will have a relationship.

All right, guys, without further ado, the lecture, the fourth day of school, habits. And it's the fourth day of school. We're going to be talking habits, and all sorts of fun stuff. Through the classics here. Atomic Habits by James Clear and Essentialism by Greg McCown. They look thick, but they're not.

These are, I think, five hours, six hours. Font sizes change, but I think it's about six hours on Audible for essentialism. It's a smaller font. Five hours for atomic habits. These are two of the most important books when we talk lifestyle design, which is a greater picture of how we look at ourselves and what we're creating in the world. the ruthless elimination of hurry. That book is fantastic.

James, he's back, baby. Let's go. Yo! Let's go. I love it, man. Good to see you, brother. You too, you too. It's been a minute.

Yeah, man. It's too long. Too long. Happy to be back. I'm glad you hear. Totally. Yeah, I just had a little breakfast, so I'm going for my post-meal walk.

There you go. Yep. Do you see that article I say? set on post-nele walking? Was it? It's just on walking for, you know, post-meal, basically. It's just like talking about that set. I mean, it's kind of shit we know, but I like, I really like what they did with it.

It's from, yeah, what's the name of these guys? They have a, you know, they're a telemedicine company based in Houston that's, you know, upper echelon, bioidentical hormone replacement and custom-made supplements, peptides, that kind of shit. I like him because they're the only place in the states that uses young plasma, which is funny because, like, you know, that conspiracy theory, adrenachrome shit aside, young plasma, you know, like people between 18 and 22 go and they donate this and it's right down the street from me. It's 40 minutes away from us in Nebraska, where Schlitterbun is. That's where they have this young plasma. Well, it's just a blood, it's a blood clinic, but they take the young plasma from 18 to 22

year olds there. And they check for spike proteins as long as there's no spike proteins. They buy that young plasma for five grand a liter. And then the main course is basically you get one liter a day for three days. It's a $30,000 procedure. But if you're 60, 70 years old and you're getting 18, 19 year old plasma put in your body, it has the same effect as the baby dust as Mel Gibson's dad called it, baby dust stem cells down in Panama. It just it enlivens everything in the body. And what's cool about plasma is that it's spherical. There's never your body just sees it as its own.

It never says, is that mine? Is that someone else's? Even a blood transfer, your body can be like somewhat aggravated by that. You get a, you know, an organ transfer that a lot of times those don't take. But plasma goes in and your body just says, that's me, use it. And so that's pretty cool how that stuff works. I'm always curious with shit like that. Yeah, so I'm going to interview this guy coming up, but he did some complimentary blood work for me.

And he just, his team was like, oh, you know, we've got a licensed therapist. We got this and that. It's all bougie and shit. So they sent me over some of that stuff. But I was like, these are actually, these are pretty cool. I want to share these on the post exercise walking, super cool, you know, a little bit on the mindfulness and just, you know, the importance of recentering ourselves. They had some really good tips there that they put together that are kind of common knowledge. if you listen to like podcasts like mine or Pauls or Hubermans or whoever,

but then it's like it's nice to just have it one little spot there. No doubt. What's the name of that clinic? Oh, God, I got to find, I got to find out. It is, um, Dr. Rett Langley. Dr. Rett Langley is his name. If you punch that in, Dr. Rett Langley, Houston, it'll, it'll pull up. Okay, cool.

It actually might say it. If you go to the end of that PDF, it should be there. It should, they should have the name at the end of the PDF on that, on the walking post. So for people, just tuning in. What's up, Daniel? But we're going to talk habits. We're going to talk essentialism. We're going to talk the ruthless elimination of hurry. And really, you know, this is one of our final, I shouldn't say final, because there's no finality anything. But the way I see this year going, this is one of the last pieces that really is broadstroke,

holistic way of viewing your life and taking inventory and saying like, where is it most important for me to make changes? And then from there, what are my action steps to make? And then from there, what are my action steps to make those changes. This is the last big picture. After this week, you know, in the months that follow, we're going to get very granular. Like we're going to have just Dr. Movement Day, just Dr. Diet Day. We're going to talk probably supplements at least on one or two of these. And, you know, how to decide am I spending too much money?

Am I putting in the right places? Is it better for me to save up for a sauna rather than spend all this money on NAD? Right. Those are all questions we can ask later. and diving it was going to get very granular and nitty-gritty and much more like, you know, foot hitting the pavement kind of stuff, whereas like today is kind of one of our final overarching viewpoints

of how we set up our ways of working both in this community, but really just working on yourself. You know, like, this is it. Like what you want to get changed, it's not going to come from listening to me. It's going to come from the ways in which you set up your systems after this call that lead to better habits and effective integration, effective change.

That's all it boils down to. Have you talked about the Ziba meditation here in Kingdom Within yet? I have not talked about Ziva meditation yet. No, that is, what questions do you have from that, though? Because I'm down to talk about that. I can answer questions while we wait for more people. That's a better use to talk. Yeah, I haven't.

I've been highly curious about it. And I even bought the course semi-recently. though, honestly, the barrier for me, like, diving into it has been the fact that you meditate as soon as you wake up. And that's like, I think it's in, it's an align me with the conversation today with habit change and things of that nature. But here's, here's great. This actually tees us up perfectly, James.

Perfect. This is perfect fucking setup. For those they don't know, Ziva meditation is what Emily Fletcher created. Emily was my first real meditation coach that really taught me how to meditate and meditate well. For a long time, we would have her, we partnered with her for full temple reset. So we would practice her meditation style daily and then we'd get a one hour call with her during our fast with me and Gatsi, where she'd break down and answer any and all questions and then guide us through meditation. And people just for the price of signing up would have access to the course that James just bought.

what we learned over three or four years was that if it's free, people don't fucking do it. So we were paying on our end, you know, with the proceeds that we charged from Poltable Reset to pay for that. It wasn't free to us. We were paying for it because it was free to other people. People didn't care about it or use it. Now, all that aside, where does Ziva come from? If you go back 6,000 to 8,000 years, somewhere along the lines, you have the rig Veda that's written. And then you have, you know, if you follow.

Sri Yukdaswar and the 26,000 year cycles, the great year, we were descending, right? We were moving from golden age to silver age, silver to bronze, and then bronze to Kaliuga. And some smart people at India realized we're going to lose all of our knowledge here if we don't write it down. And so they started writing. And this is where we get the Vedas. And from there, there was a division in how people meditated.

Originally, you had to, you know, you just had to go and meditate like a monk. And if you want to devote yourself to God, that was your path. If you were a householder, meaning you had a wife and kids, a job, you were in the world, then you're kind of fucked, right? You can meditate the way they do or else, you know, that's it. And so, you know, one of the masters, and I forget his name, but he basically had just stated like, no, these guys deserve a cheat code. And that's where we enter the mantra, right? Mantra-based meditation.

That can be anything. That could be om. It can be, you know, Omani, Poddome. may whom it could be any any lines in sanskrit it could be a single sound right like a vowel like any of that stuff's fine it could be a mantra in english now i prefer sanskrit but it could be a mantra in english and either way that is a vehicle that is that you're drawing your focus to that draws you away from mind deeper into deeper states of awareness until you hit what emily calls the bliss field now you know the traditionalist said fuck that you can't do that that's cheating this guy was

smart enough to say, give them the cheat code anyways. And so that was created. And then from there, there was another branch. You had one branch, which was very formal. That's transcendental meditation. Many people have experience with TM. The other side of that was akin to transcendental meditation, but less formal. This is the side that Ziva meditation follows and the side that Emily comes from. So it's kind of like looking at a jihitsu background, you know, of lineage here to see where it comes from and why it works. And so the things that I love about Ziva meditation are that you have a series of videos to watch. Some, I think the maximum length is like 17 minutes or something like that for each of these

videos. A lot of them are short, three to five, seven minutes. And each day you watch a video and each day is a new lesson that is just peeling layers, just like they talked about in Iowa score, peeling layers. Sometimes you revisit the same thing. You don't want to. We're just peeling layers, right? And so we keep working through these layers.

And the unfolding of those layers are what brings us closer and closer to having the ability to meditate well, understanding what the practice is. It's a practice, right? And what it's not. And this is what I love about the videos from Emily and why I think she's such a great teacher is because she really outlines, first let's decide what does meditation mean? Because there's thousands of apps out there. There's a hundred different ways to do it. Am I looking at a candle? Am I listening to binaural beats? Like, what is actual meditation and what is it not? And then really getting into, you know, what is it? What are we trying to do versus what are we not trying to do? And so she said one of the biggest mistakes, you know, that got lumped into meditation as a

practice is somebody saying we're trying to quiet the mind or turn off the mind. Like the mind's job is to think and it will always do its fucking job. And you could argue, you know, if consciousness is eternal, you know, and that we are eternal awareness that even upon death, the thinking doesn't stop, okay? That awareness doesn't stop. So, but she jokes that the only way you get, you know, the only way you get a, if you, if you realize that a low resting heart rate means you're in better shape, so you make that your single focus, I want a resting heart rate of zero. You're only going to have the resting heart rate of zero when you're dead, right? You're not going to have a better resting heart rate than, you know,

40s, 50s, you know, when you're in great shape, nor should it be. So the point on the mind isn't to say, you're bad, chew you away, that kind of thing. It's to actually look at it that as, oh, this is just a natural part of my existence. How do I work with that? And what tools do I have that allow me to move away without pushing away, without averting, without getting angry or judging and just saying like, oh, there's the mind again. Okay. And so, you know, she used a lot of examples that I love.

But great analogies. She was a Broadway actress, you know, tall, can dance, beautiful, very well spoken. She's a great teacher. And one of the things she said is like, if you were. hosting a party and, you know, it's invite only. And this one guest shows up that you don't want there. That's the mind, right? You wouldn't make a big scene and be like, who the fuck let this guy in here? Get him out. Security. You know, you'd very gently just come over and say, oh, hey, it's you again. All right. Yeah, let's go this way. You know, and you might escort him over to the corner or try to

hide him or something, that effect. But you wouldn't throw a big shit fit, right? So, but yet we do that meditation, right? Well, we're like, fuck, I was thinking again, oh, man, I suck at this. And we have all these judgments and add-ons that we're layering in that aren't necessary. Another thing I'll take from my dad's experience, which is hilarious, is when he was, you know, in sales most of his life, general contractor construction guy, but also physical guy, you know, he has a black belt and full-contact karate, a wrestler. He ended up getting his jihitsu black belt later on in life. but the whole life worked with his hands, that kind of thing. And he gets into golf when he's in sales in the Silicon Valley because that's the thing

people are doing, right? Everybody's golfing. And he would get so mad when he'd miss a shot. He was decent. He was a good athlete. So, like, he was decent. He could hang with a lot of guys. He wasn't great at it at all.

But he'd be like, fuck, you know, he's like cursing. He missed the shot, that kind of thing. And one of his buddies, he was a really good golfer, pulls him over. And he was like, Rick, I don't mean to be a dick, but you're not good enough. to be mad at missing that shot. He said it was like a dagger and he was like, oh, oh. And he's like, fuck, okay. And it just reframed the whole thing.

Then he could golf after that without being pissy because he realized he had no business being angry. He just wasn't that good at it, right? He hadn't earned the right to be that mad about missing shots. And so take that back into meditation. When we're first beginning with meditation, or we're seeking a new form to try out, come as the Buddha does, come with a beginner's mind, right?

Open, expand your awareness, pretend you suck because we do, right? Admit that much, and then it's just a learning process. And more importantly than that, it is a practice. So one last analogy on this, and then I promise where I'm going to swing this back into habits and everything else here, because that's what today's talk is about. In the book, Easy Strength, Paul Tottsulin reframes movement in many, many different ways. I'm going to really break this down when we talk movement, because I think, it's important. One of the things he says is, look, you can have the goal of losing weight or getting a

six-pack or having bigger arms or a 400-pound bench press. All those are fine goals. But they're not the why we move, right? Movement is a practice. I am in the practice of perfect movement. Even if bench press is my goal, I'm in the practice of a perfect press in all directions. Overhead, straight ahead. I'm in the practice of perfect rows. I'm in the practice of a great squat. I'm in the practice of a perfect hinge where that's through deadlift, sumo dead left, broad jump, kettleball swing. I practice this movement. And the more often I practice that, the better I get at the movement

because neurons that fight together wire together. I'm greasing the groove. That's another paville term, okay? So when we're in the practice of meditation, we're in the practice of quieting the mind and coming to a singular focal point that allows me to move beyond the thinking mind. That's a practice every single time. Every time I meditate, my first five, ten minutes, I'm in that.

I'm fucking thinking about the shit that I don't want to think about. I'm letting all the feelings come up. And now that I'm really good at it, that time period gets shorter and shorter because I can just let it fucking go. Yep, fuck that guy. Yep. I don't know if I'm going to have enough money next month. Yep, yep.

All that's true. Yeah, eat like shit on my last vacation. Okay. Oh, and then boom, I'm there, right? The mantra just, it settles me in. and the better we get at that practice, the better we start to feel from it, the more we extract from it,

the more there is to harvest. The better I get at gardening, the better my fruit becomes, right? The better my vegetable garden becomes because now I'm a better gardener, I have a better relationship with the thing that I'm doing. Same is true for meditation.

It took me years and years of being the office, getting you pig on it, trying this device, this technology, that bioroneurubes thing, this fucking bed you lay in, all the different things

and some of it works some of the time, but I never understood meditation without noise, without any technology. Could I do something like that and drop me into a different state? Didn't think it was possible until Emily. So I give her a lot of credit for bridging that gap for me.

Like I said, she's a great teacher. I think it's $300. James, you just bought it. What was the cost of the Ziva or online course? Yeah, I think it was like $2 or $300. Yeah. Okay, so

things are going to cost money. Right? That's just plain and simple. But what I like about it is you have daily videos to watch that aren't just telling you to meditate. They're telling you what this is about. What is this practice that I'm engaging in? What am I trying to do with the practice? What am I not trying to do? Is it okay for me to react angrily? Probably not. I'm not that good at meditate. I'm not good enough in meditation to be mad that I was thinking. Okay? I'm just not, right? Just like my dad in golf. And then if we can be lighthearted about these things, the odds of us getting better at it and will rapidly become far, far easier to attain. And then it's just about the practice. So today we're going to talk habits, specifically atomic habits, James Clear. And we're going to talk essentialism, Greg McKeown, as we get into that in a second here. But we're also going to talk the ruthless elimination of hurry.

And I'll preface, you know, before I get to dive into these books, the importance of them and why and how to navigate them. They're very, all three of these are very different books, but all of these stacked perfectly well with today's conversation. So one of the things James makes perfectly clear, and that's a pun for my boy, Gadsie, is that don't let someone's rule be the thing that fucking prevents you from doing it. So Emily's rule is start each day with this, right? Now, when I learned her stuff, I did it first thing in the morning and I did it again in the early afternoon.

It was always twice a day. it was five minutes twice a day until it was 10 minutes twice a day. And then it was 10 minutes twice a day until it was 22 minutes twice a day. And then a lot of days I realized I couldn't do the 22 minutes twice a day. Or if I did it first thing in the morning, I sucked. And it was twice as hard and way less fruitful because when I wake up, my mind is ready. Like I'm, I roll out of bed like, let's fucking get after it. And I have a nice morning routine and all these things that bring me back into my body,

sipping on the coffee, doing the things, hitting a lap with the dogs, getting full spectrum. from light, the juve, the vibe plate, all the things, right? I love my morning routine. Those are stacks. We'll talk about stacks, as I mentioned those before, but stacks are important when we think of habit, habit formation. But as I meditate now, I haven't missed a day in a long time. If I, if I miss maybe two days a month, I meditate damn near every day. And a lot of times I'll meditate for an hour. It is almost always in the early to mid-afternoon, almost always. when I feel like I need a second, like I feel like I need more caffeine, that's my cue. Let's finish off this task and go fucking meditate because if I can meditate then,

I'm in the bliss field. I'm just zend out like I'm fucking gone. I have no problem releasing. I have no problem clearing the mind. And like I said, first 10 to 15 minutes, I'm still going through all the activities of the day, all the shit that I judge myself on. The difference in how I meditate now versus before is I'm not pissed off at my, there's no reaction to it, right? I expect it. It's like, oh, yeah, that's there. Oh, yeah, that's there.

And it is there because I haven't addressed it yet, right? This is what we talk about reflection and things like that. These periods are super important, whether it's a morning walk to see my day ahead of time or an evening walk to review my day after the fact. Those are really good before I hit the sheets because I'm processing, right? All the things that we do in the day require processing. It's no different than, you know, if I swallowed food whole like a snake, it would take something chewing that up and helping it break down for me to process, digest and eliminate, right, and taking what I need. The same is true for everything that happens in our lives. We have to digest process and eliminate or hold what we like and eliminate what we don't. Reflection and contemplation really help with that.

Meditation, where I stop thinking is the superpower that unlocks all this shit. It makes you better at productivity. It makes you better, more emotionally intelligent. It makes you a clearer head in the second half of your workday. All these things are potentiated if you give yourself space from within, which is the practice of meditation. So tying this into the habit formation, do not let that its first thing in the morning be the thing that derails you. There's a few things that I'll get into here that I really like from James. You know, like make it obvious, make it attractive, make it easy and make it satisfying, right?

when we're trying to build this. And then we just reverse direction if we have a bad habit, right? Don't make it obvious. Don't make it attractive. Make it ugly. Don't make it very difficult to do kind of thing. And then make it dissatisfying. Where you have like any,

again, we'll dive into this deeper here on habit contracts and accountability coaches and shit like that. But the main piece of this is if you want to do it, make it easy for yourself, right? If it's really hard to do first thing in the morning because you already have that set, then, but you still want to try twice a day,

then I'd say figure your first break is right at lunch before you eat, and then another one could be, you know, late afternoon. The thing about Ziva meditation, and she'll explain this, is that it's such a deep meditation, you don't want to do it right before bed. Most people will say, like, if you follow Joe to Spenza, right when you wake up and right before you go to sleep, those are the twilight hours.

Those are the hypnagogic phases where we're kind of one foot in this world, one foot back in the other. and they're a great place to program the subconscious, right? So from a manifestation standpoint, excellent place. They're also a great place to meditate from and then program the subconscious. So one last piece on Emily before we shift gears entirely is that she taught me something called the 3Ms. Mindfulness. Mindfulness is the very first two minutes of my meditation.

It's where I'm actually reviewing my body. Like is there anything sore? Am I stiff? Do I feel like I need, I should have gone for a run today? should have gone for a run today. I got a lot of energy. Okay, I could acknowledge that. Oh, I'm kind of stiff in my hips. I should stretch. I should do the super couch stretch later. Okay, I'll acknowledge that. I got a kind of an itch here. Okay, I'll scratch that. You fucking lean into all that in the first two minutes. If you feel like your breath is too fast,

you know, you're going to slow my breathing down. I'm going to take really big breaths and hold at the top and push through and squeeze all the muscles and then release, right? I can do that in the mindfulness portion. The middle piece, which is the biggest piece, that's meditation. That's where we practice the mantra-based meditation. One thing I'd offer in addition to that, I want you to learn it the way that you're going to do through Ziva, James, but I will offer that one of my other coaches that came after her,

Michael Holt taught me about the three-pointed object, which many of you heard me talk about, which comes from Dan Brown. It is the focal point of the inhale, the exhale, and the pause in between. It's just staring at that object, the inhale, the exhale, and the point in between. And I just watch that object over and over again. My thoughts come up. Cool.

When I remember, I'm thinking or I remember, oh, three-pointed object. Back to my inhale, my exhale, and my point in between. And that three-pointed object, I just look at over and over and over again until it ceases to be looked at. Right. Now I'm in the space. As Wayne Dyer has a great book called Getting Into the Gap. It's one of my favorite definitions of meditation because he's explaining like, this is where we want to be, right?

The gap between thought. So in his book, he would use a mantra and he could do this internally or externally. But if he started to think, as soon as he'd catch it, he'd go, ah, and he would let a full chant out. And if more thoughts came in, ah, and he would keep chanting awe. And he uses that very particularly because of God. Allah, Yahweh, like, ah, is in a lot of the names for Great Spirit. And it's a fine, it's a fine mantra to use. So that's what he would use.

And then as he'd finish that, a lot of times, he'd notice he's in the gap. And he'd just go back to his breathing. And he would allow himself to be breathed, right? He's not focusing on anything. He's just being breathed. Now he's in the space. And he'll stay there as long as he can unless the thought comes back up. and then he catches it, ah, and then he's back in the space.

He's getting into the gap. That's what we're practicing, whether we're doing that out loud or not. We are practicing getting into the gap. And the gap is where the sweet sauce is, right? Like Emily says, like if you chase the bliss field where you feel fucking zend out, it's always going to be out in front of you, you know, carrot in front of the horse's mouth. You can't make that your primary goal. The primary goal must be to practice meditation.

And the side effect of great meditation is the bliss field. I find that I come across that side effect at least one point every fucking meditation if I give myself long enough to. If I limit myself to 20 minutes, I may or may not get it. That's okay. I'm still practicing. One last tidbit for everybody that I think is really important. Emily said is that if you have a 20 minute meditation, 18 minutes, your mind is racing,

thinking about all the shit you have to do, all the stuff you've done wrong. It's just think, think, think, mental chatter. you're even arguing with yourself, you're in it, you're full on in, your thinking mind. And then 18 minutes in, you're like, oh shit, I'm supposed to be meditating. Mantra, mantra, mantra. And you start to use the mantra again. And you get 90 seconds of just hitting the mantra and attempting to get into the gap. That is a success.

That is a huge success because you practice meditation today for 20 minutes. what the scoreboard looked like doesn't matter. You're not going to look back. I don't look back on my first years of meditating with her and grade myself. I'm not like, well, 60% of the time I really was in my thinking mind. I was only getting like 40% of it, right? None of that matters, right? There's no grades there.

So as soon as we can move past that and into just the repetition of practicing, the practice of meditation, then it starts to become more autopilot. And this is a habit, right? We are building the habit of meditation. How we meditate is also a habit, right? It's a routine from the two-minute intro into whether it's mantra or three-pointed object. And then finally, the third M is manifestation. So she's a fan of dispenses as well.

And she says, we do mindfulness. We hit our bulk as our meditation. And from that completely clear zeroed out state, now with a couple minutes left, we start to visualize everything that we're creating as if it is already so. I'm in the fucking Bahamas with my family and we're playing in water and I'm swimming with my little girl and I look down and I can see my toes wiggling at the bottom of the water because six feet deep, it's still that clear. It doesn't matter, right?

I make it as real as possible. I make the sensory as real as possible. I make love to my wife after the kids go to bed in a nice king mattress because we're in a dope suite. everything becomes as real as possible. Taste the food, smell the sea salt in the air, and make it real as if it's already happened. Those are all, you know, that's a short block of some of dispenses teachings.

But these really land when they come from a place of having been zeroed out. So again, later on, you know, I will have, dispensas going to have his own day for damn sure. But for now, let's talk habits. Is that good for you, James? On that, on Ziva? No, it's a slow, man. Yeah, thanks so much.

which I was most curious about what the manifestation piece look like, because I've done mindfulness and meditation for over a decade now. So, you know, I have some proficiency in that, though, have flirted with the art and science of manifestation rather than just like the vague idea that gets tossed around. And I think that's what pulled me in the most, Ziva is cultivating a genuine practice for approaching manifestation in that way. and just hearing about all the benefits and everything that you've received from it.

You know, you talked about on multiple podcasts. That's what hooked me in. And so, yeah, that explanation really helps a lot. I appreciate it, man. Cool, brother. Absolutely. And like I said, we're going to really dive into that final M, the manifestation piece coming up. I want to make sure we've got, you know, like if you're new here, I am trying to build a holistic viewpoint of how to change our lives.

then we're going to get real meat and potatoes in the coming months. And then after that, once we have our foundation set, and there's no questions around diet, supplement, sleep, or any of this stuff. And we actually have been in a state of elevated health, elevated presence. Everything's working 80% of it's there, right? We've got it. Now we're just fine-tuning. Now we can start to look at manifestation.

And, you know, because it's really challenging to, I used to say, like, there's no, there's no, there's no, there's no no tropic that can override a bad night's sleep. Right. So for people that are like, ah, I need the neutrophics. Some more my brain to work better, but they're still sleeping like shit. It's like, no, no, no, no, fucking fix your bed. Organize this part first. And then that piece is an add-on, right?

It's not the meat and potatoes. It's the, it's the seasoning, right? It's not even dessert. It's just seasoning. So we're going to get all these foundational pieces set. And then we're going to, from that place, we are more capable of creating and manifesting exactly we want. So that's what we'll start to work towards the end of the year. I also like kind of following, you know, the

Native American spirit will. Winter is the time of spirit, right? It's the time of stillness, but that's the time we connect to spirit. It's a great time to call in our prayers and our manifestations and then spring, plant the seeds of new beginnings and start to create in the world. So this is going to follow that same trajectory. Yeah, I've got to be honest. I was, I re-listened to this book in the last 48 hours on one and a half X. I've read this. several times. I interviewed James Clear right when this book came out, Atomic Habits.

It was an overnight sensation. You know, I agree with everything other than his stance on vaccines. But, you know, he's got a lot of good shit in here. He's got a ton of good stuff in here. And, you know, Tiny Change's Remarkable Resorts. Really, what he's talking about is Atomic. You know, he reads two different definitions of Atomic. One, Atomic is the smallest of small. Right? When you break something down to the Atomic, Subatomic, obviously smaller, but like we're looking at something that is fucking imperceivable with the naked eye. That's how tiny it is. And there is the potential energy to atomic bombs, right?

There's their, all of that is held at the finest level still possesses that much energy. So when we consider change in our lives, it doesn't need to be big giant steps. I've said this before. Lou Holtz football quote, inch by inch, life's a cinch, yard by yard, life is hard. I love that quote because of lifelong football. football player. My son's in it now, but like that translates inch by inch life's a inch, yard by yard life is hard. So when we have these new goals and we get really excited about things, we want to just fucking just go for it. Big step, big step, big step. And that can lead to

burnout, injury or just missing the mark, right? But it's the person who shows up each day, baby step, baby step, baby step that starts to build the habit of doing it, right? You're just showing up. he says in this book, and I'm going to dive into a ton of things on it, but one of the things he says, the difference between, you know, the champion and the runner-up is that the champion just shows up. Dan John says it an easy strength.

Same exact quote, the champion just shows up. What does that mean? That means the champion's burnt out just as much as the non-champion is, right? The champion's tired of doing the same fucking lift, the same run, the same whatever, being in the same gym,

listening to the same playlist while I'm boxing today, and I'm like, I really need a new playlist. the champion just shows up. The champion shows up when they're run down. My hips are super tight. I ran a 5K for the first time in months over the weekend. And my hips are really stiff from it, right? So like it didn't feel good kicking the bag,

but I still kicked it anyways. It felt better moving around. I didn't want to do a lot of jump rope and things like that, but I just showed up to the workout because I knew it would make me better. So champions just show up. And one of the things that James points out is that by just showing up, you're not losing the compounding gains of showing up each day. Whereas if you totally take the day off or if I go off the wagon and got shit face drunk

or something like that, which I haven't done in years, that would actually take me back a couple steps, right? But by just showing up each day, I'm participating in the never ending compounding benefits, which is nonlinear, right? This is how we get the hockey stick, horseshoe effect, or that the hockey stick effect, rather, is going to happen where the rate increases because of compounding benefits of just showing up each day. going back to meditation with James, if you don't have the time to do it,

make it one minute, right? He's like, I know it sounds stupid, but make it one minute thing. You know, do one pushup. If your goals do 100 pushups a day and you start trying to go for it, and you're hitting max effort every single day, and day four or five, you're like, fuck, man, I'm so sore. I can barely open my arms up. I can barely reach overhead and everything's pulled forward.

My neck hurts, right? It's because we're taking these giant steps. yard by yard. Whereas if we just baby step it and say, I'm going to hit a pushup every hour today while I'm at work, you know, we get our 12, 8 to 12 pushups, and then we start to magnify that. Now I'm doing two, then I'm doing five, then I'm doing 10. If I hit 10 pushups an hour, odds are they're going to be really good pushups, right, because I'm not tired. And if I do that every hour of the course of 10 hours, there's my 100 pushups, right? And still getting me closer to being able to do 100 pushups in a row, but it's not kicking my.

in the process, right? So shrink it. If it's still too tough, shrink it. If it's still too tough, shrink it. And guess what? If it's still too tough, shrink it again. Keep shrinking it until you can actually do it every day. Prime example is I did a post on Instagram talking to a total true story. I had found a really good jitza school that I still train at. I coached my kids at. And I was training with a buddy of mine from Sheet Dog Response who, you might be a black belt now. He was a brown belt at the time. He's too inches shorter than me, 240 pounds. He's an Austin SWAT PD guy. Okay, so he's on the SWAT team. He was a military special forces dude. He's 6-1-2-40. He makes me look like a twig. Okay. And I'm rolling with this guy. And I was doing a lot of back squats, but I had been negating

mobility. Why? Because I don't like mobility. I don't like stretching through painful muscles. I just do it because I have to now. Back then, I was avoiding it because I didn't like doing it. And so I go to jit-sue and we're rolling he doesn't do anything crazy he does like a modest half-guard pass my heel goes to my ass like it should be able to and my knee goes and just crunches up and like oh shit he goes you okay and i was like what the hell was that he was like oh it was just a half-guard i was like not you i mean yeah i know the half-guard pass but like what the hell happened there why did my knee just crunch like that and i realized i had made myself incredibly stiff by focusing on strength only and not mobilizing the body. That came at a cost to my athleticism via mobility. And that was a torn meniscus.

And even with stem cells at 41, 42, whenever it happened, it took me eight months to be able to get back on the mat. That's a pretty serious length of time because of me being fucking lazy, right? So initially I was like, all right, I'm doing an hour or day of mobility. I'm like, oh, that, you know, one week goes by, I can't do that. All right, 30 minutes a day. And I know the exact exercise I'm going to do. That becomes too much. And I kept narrowing it down and narrowing it down until I realized because we sit all day long, when this comes from Dr. Kelly Sturrette, because we sit all day long, one of the most important things to open up my body, which will feed into everything else, if you study anatomy trains, is I got to open up the

anterior chain. Post-eer chain is always flexed forward, right? It's rounded out. So I got to open up the front side of my body, and the super couch stretch is the most effective way for me to do that. It gets my quads, my hip flexures, my soaz. If I've done correctly, it's going to get all those things that'll unlock it. My neck pain goes away. My low back pain goes away. My thoracic gets freed up. My whole back moves better if I had the super couch stretch. And thanks to Dr. Kelly Sturret, we know that fascia takes at least two minutes to change. So you can't do a 30 second stretch and have to change anything. You need to spend two minutes in each position. So I said, all right, two minutes on my left, two minutes on my right, that's four minutes. Well, that one hour

routine that went down to 30 minutes and then went down to 20 and 15 and so on, it became a four minute routine. And guess what happened when I made it four minutes? I was able to hit it every single day. And as I hit it every single day, I would ask myself when I finished it, do I have any time to do any other mobility? Sure. Is anything else stiff? Sure. Let me sit on my ass and I'll go, you know, left hand over right foot, right hand over left foot, and start to build two minutes of time into a routine. Oftentimes, I'd be there for eight to 10 minutes, but many times I'd stay for 30 or 45 when we throw a family movie on with the kids. If I make the decision to hit super couch right at the beginning of that movie, I'll oftentimes stretch for at least an hour and foam roll while

the movie's on, and then I'll jump into bed with them and hang and watch the second half of that. I'm still watching the movie. I'm still enjoying it, but I'm opening my body at the same time. Okay, that came from making the habit smaller and smaller and smaller until it was so easily achievable, then only a fool wouldn't say yes to it, okay? Especially when you understand how beneficial mobility is, especially to an athlete or somebody that considers themselves an athlete. All right, guys, quick break to tell you about brain supreme.com. Brain Supreme is the very best mushroom company ever.

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They also have Sheila-Gite pearls, which are oddly incredible and probably the most convenient way to take in Sheeley-G. Check it all out at brainsoprein.com. and now back to the podcast. All right. So we've got into some of the nitty gritty here. Something I really want to back up and hit is in the beginning of the book, you know, he talks about Q, the craving, the response, the reward, all that stuff. I'm going to leave that to James.

That comes from Thorndyke. Change your beliefs about yourself. This is where we get real, this is where we get into like the real sweet sauce. When we're talking about habits, we're talking about three different ways that we can change. Outcome change. Outcome change is what? It's the end result, right? And outcome change is goals. Right? When we set a goal, we're generally not setting, some people might set a goal like me, instead of goal to do mobility every single day with no actual like, I want to hit the middle splits. But most of us set goals was I want to do the middle splits or I want to be able to hold a handstand for two minutes.

That's okay. But that's an outcome change. That's the end result, right? That will give us, a particular type of change, but not everything. Process change. This is where we look at systems. How do I change my morning routine? How do I change my evening routine? Even if it's not, I'm going to read and do red light and all this other bullshit. But I'm just going to go to bed every night at the same time each night.

And that started for me at 11 o'clock. That was my cutoff. And then it became 10.30. And then we had kids, it became 9.30. And then in the wintertime, I'm asleep sometimes at 8.30. It's just easier to as a tired parent. But all that said, it took years of fine-tuning, me giving a shit about sleep and just dialing it back a little bit, a little bit each time, over time. And there's still, you know, twice a week on average, me and the misses get to be intimate and hook up.

And I'll probably go to bed around 11, 11, 15 then. And I probably won't fall asleep until midnight. And I feel it the next day. But I'm also riding the high of oxytocin and true connection, right? And you can't replace that. So it's not to say, like, I'm so diligent on sleep that I forego. sex, that's also not the right move, right? But at the same time, you know, that's nuances a part of all this conversation.

All that said, though, the process change is really important. Now, here's the biggest one of the three. We have outcome change. We have process change, and we have identity change. Most important by far. Does anybody have a guess why that might be? Don't all speak at once. It's all right.

Go ahead, James. That would be like the deepest level of like core. So everything else would be downstream. from that. Exactly right. It's how you view yourself. Right. And we, we live in a society, and I'm not going to, you know, go too far off topic here, but we live in a society where people are like, I like dudes. I like girls. Or I'm a woman. I'm a man. I'm somewhere in between. I'm not sure. Right. We have all these labels we want people to address us as you're not that thing. right but your identity will make everything else fall into line there whether other people

buy into it or not so how you identify with yourself is the whole thing okay now ultimately as spiritual beings we are i am i am that i am right we participate in that i am we're made in the image and likeness of i am and we recognize that anything other than i am is just synodon right we're talking about in taoism we have the world of 10 000 things you can name everything in the world of Tao a thousand things, but the Tao cannot be smoking. It can't be spoken because it's beyond words, it's beyond mind. And we're a part of that piece, too, even though we're also in the world of 10,000 things.

We're a part of the ineffable. What we claim is anything we identify with, right? And I love the movie Fight Club. I was 18 when it came out. I saw it twice in theaters. You know, you're not your clothes. You're not your job. You're not the car you drive.

You're not the house you have. You're not the friends you hang out with. all that shit hit me like a Mac truck because I was a freaking senior in high school and I was like, damn, like it just resonated on a soul level. That's still true to this day. And also, how I identify is going to set up every decision I make in my life. Right. So what are the ways in which I identify as myself is Kyle Kingsbury right now?

Not just via goals. I changed my goals a while ago to be more process change than outcome change. But even as a goal as a 44-year-old dad, I have the goal of being the best athlete. I can be for the rest of my life. That's going to change between now and 54, 54 and 64. I was just chatting with Paul Check, who's turning 65 in a couple weeks. And Paul can still probably lift me into the table. But his back's been under it.

He's been lifting a lot of heavy stones. Now he's got the pain teacher telling him to sit down. Right? And at 65, things change. 75 things will change. And you've got to be okay with that. But still, can I be the best athlete at every single. age, yes, I can be the best version of myself at every age. And what does that mean? To me,

an athlete isn't just somebody who's strong or fit or has a six-pack. An athlete's somebody who moves well. An athlete is somebody who knows how to get themselves pain free. An athlete is somebody who flows, you know, in and out with their body and has complete control over their, their internal environment as well as their external environment, right? How I move in space and how I feel inside are up to me as an athlete. So identify in that way. I identify. I identify as an athlete. I'm not a pro. I haven't been a pro athlete for years, but I am an athlete. My wife is an athlete. She's 41. She's a great athlete. And we're also, as a byproduct of that, we're in shape. As a byproduct of that, and a side effect, we move well. We're relatively strong. All those things

come as a side effect of how we identify. Another piece on this, when it comes to body, you know, everything, Gadsie does a really good job of this with the Dharma artist collective where he tries to get people to envision the fact that your Dharma is art, no matter what it is. If your Dharma is building houses, that can be how you do it. It's not what you do. It's how you do it, right? That can be artistic. That can be the art that you deliver to the world. At the potential backlash of being called narcissistic or egotistical, I've said in the past, and I'll say right now, that my body is a work of art, not because of what other people think of it, but because of how I treat. it. I treat my body like a work of art. It's the only one I have this go-around. And I'm very

fucking blessed to be six foot three and five-eighths and all the fucking things. But it's how I treat it as a work of art. And it's not just an aesthetic thing. It's a work of art in how I move. It's a work in how I jump, how I land, how I run. It's a work of art in my mobility, my capabilities of being able to go palms to the floor right when I wake up. All of these things are a part of the artwork that is me on a physical level. And then there's an internal art. work to who I am as a father, as a husband, as a teacher. All of that is art in and of itself. I love, you know, Michael, and whether he said it or not, I just like the idea that Michelangelo said that David was always in there. How did he create this thing, this masterpiece, David?

And he said, he was always in there. I just had to reveal him. Right. I think there's, that resonates with me about my physical stature. This being that I see of myself inside is there at all times. I just need to reveal it. Right? And that is, that is. And that is, doesn't mean just take my shirt off. It means like I got to chip away and do the painstaking work that's necessary to create the work of art that I see myself as. It's a responsibility. Okay. So this is like ultimate identity. How we really look at ourselves is what sets up all the other things. I think it cannot be overstated. All right. Another ways to think about this stuff. Again, I encourage you guys to read these books. Like I can give you so much in a, in a lecture.

But atomic habits is like five hours and change on one X. It's not a long, it's not a long list. and not a big read. Essentialism, same thing. We'll shift gears to essentialism here in a minute. But one of the mind games that I love playing is to think in a year from now, what will I regret not starting today? So I fast forward a year. And now you may say, like, I don't know.

It's not me. I'm not 45-year-old Kyle, right? Like, how could I figure that out? Well, use hindsight as foresight. As a 44-year-old, I don't have a lot of. goals of shit that I haven't done. I have one goal, just one, one goal of something that I wish I had started when I was younger and never did. And usually that's accompanied with, well, my parents never made me and I had no interest in it, whatever. And then I got really busy because I was a professional

athlete, whatever, all in the 40-hour work week, all excuses. All excuses. The one thing that I haven't started that I would be pissed about in a year is the same thing. I was mad that I didn't start a year we go today. And that's that I'd never learn music. I never picked up a musical instrument. So today's day two on Simply Piano. It's an app you get on iPad. I've watched my six-year-old master it, my 11-year-old, they're playing with both hands. They're striking chords. They're learning Rushie. If you know, have you ever heard Rushie, punch it down on Spotify, it'll blow your fucking mind. They're nowhere near there yet, but it's like, it's inspiring. And so for my six-year-old little girl, to be able to get on there and play with two hands, it's like, oh,

She's using the same app brother. It's okay, you just punch it in. You say your experience. I'm two days in. It's awesome. I'm still only playing with one hand. I get to go to left hand next. But most importantly, that's something I need to just show up to every day.

The framework in a year from now, what will you regret not starting today? Music, that's it for me. I can tell you right now, that's the only thing that I'd be pissed about. Because when I look back a year, I'm mad that I didn't start a year ago. Music became very important to me in my, in my first. work with ayahuasca. As soon as I had someone, as soon as I went from hearing, you know, an MP3 player during medicine journeys to hearing somebody sing to me face to face on medicine, whole different respect, whole different understanding of a frequency, whole different understanding

of sound, the ability for sound to move the experience, to shift people to heal people. It was visceral, right? It was, it was no longer just, you know, the rational thinking mind. I had a felt experience, It's a nosis that there's before the experience and after the experience. And the differences between those are night and day. So from that point on, I said, I got to know music. I also said my kids have to know music because there's something special about it. I can't put my finger on it, but there's something special about it. And so now I get to walk to walk.

Another great thought process for people to work on. Watch the movie, everything everywhere all at once. Who's seen it? Show a hands. All right. James seen it. David, give me a hand wave or something. and it's just your picture right now.

Everything everywhere all at once is a mind fuck, first time you watch it. But if you watch it again, maybe a third time, there are some core principles we can draw from that movie that really get us thinking, whether you believe in the multiverse or not doesn't matter. Dispenza talks about, you know, the ancient seafarers.

You know, think Milana, think the New Zealanders, right? As they would set out, they would chart their course based on the stars and set sail and, and pull themselves to the island. They weren't pushing themselves there with the wind. They were pulling themselves to the island. They knew where their place was and they pulled themselves there.

I love the visual of that. And I love the visual of, you know, the boat out on the ocean because one degree can change you from hitting the right continent or the wrong continent can make a huge difference over time. Right. So in the movie, everywhere, everywhere all at once, you have these people run into themselves from different earths, kind of like if you're old enough,

sliders or Quantum Leap with Scott Bacula, if you're really old. They run into themselves in different areas and they see that this was a person who never quit Kung Fu as an eight-year-old. And now they're fucking master of it. This guy can, I've always worked fanny packs. This guy's a fucking fanny pack master.

He starts beating all the bad guys of this fanny pack. It's really ridiculous. And it's also like, that is such a fucking funny thing to think about. And it's so true. You could learn how to beat someone's ass with a fanny pack.

if you really practiced it over and over again. You can learn anything being a weapon, right? So, but over and over again, they're faced with coming across a version of themselves that didn't stop doing something they wanted to do, but quit, right? And so when you see the trajectory of that 30, 40 years down the line, and you're like, oh, why is this person so good at?

Why can this person speak eight languages? I'm capable of all those things. Every one of us is capable of all those things. if we but put our attention and intention into it and show up each day. All the ceilings we have for ourselves are made of glass. They don't fucking exist. You smash right through every glass ceiling you put above your head, every single one. And yes, as James talks about in the atomic habits,

there are gifts that we have genetically and we have genetic drawbacks. If your goal is to dunk a basketball, it's a great thing to be seven feet tall. If your goal is to do a gymnastics routine, seven feet tall will fuck you up. That is not the move as a gymnast, right? So can we lean into our strengths? Sure. Do we need to try to split a square peg in a round hole? Probably not.

It's probably going to lead to, you know, no matter what habits, creating, it's going to lead to some frustration. And there's still guys like that are five foot six that gets time dunk of basketball. So don't let that, you know, derail you if that's your whole goal. But understand, we can lean into these things if we put our mind to it. and it's a good thing to understand where our strengths are. Be honest with yourself. As Paul says, stop bullshitting yourself. So think about that as an experience.

Watch that movie. Think about the thing that you gave up or something you've always wanted to try. And imagine coming across yourself in another realm and another earth and seeing they've mastered that fucking thing that you wanted to do. And the only difference is they just started it.

They started doing it. They created the habit of doing it. And they just did it every day. And they became that version of themselves. and you're still a version of yourself you are right now. It's not to shit on who you are right now. It's just to say, let's let a fire under our ass and actually start marching little by little inch by inch

towards the goal that we want to create in our lives. And the life we want to live, right? Beyond the goal, what are the practices that I want to have that make me a better person? I don't have the goal of being a master meditator. I have the goal of meditating every single day. Right. And that repetition may make me a master meditator

by the end of my life, that's not the point. The point is to be able to practice it every day so I have the benefits of it as a regular meditator. So that makes sense? David, I see you popped on here. Do you got a question or anything? I'm almost done with this little spurt on the habit piece. No, I'm just going to say that on the identity side, really good classic book is Psycho Cybernetics by Maxwell Maltz. kind of it's like it's like so it's called psychocyberetics

by Maxwell Maltz I think it's M-A-L-T-Z he was a just really briefly he was a plastic surgeon like old school like in the 50s probably I think the book came out in the 60s but he would notice that like it's all about self-image which is basically

another way of saying identity and he would notice in his patient sometimes that you know he would do a plastic surgery and their entire personality would change. And, you know, so he got interest in that and then, like, the mind. And the thing is, like, so many subsequent, like, books and self-help stuff kind of just steals stuff from him and repeats it. So he kind of, like, you know, I mean, for sure, there's, like,

like, you're talking about with, like, the Hinduism and, like, the meditators got all, you know, they definitely got, they were ahead of that and they go deeper. But just on the identity piece, self-image piece, It's a really good book. I think the only thing is, like, there's a newer version because Matt Fury, I think it is, bought the rights. And he has, like, he changed it. And so, like, on Audible, there's only the newer versions, but apparently the classic one, which is the one that I read is a lot better.

So if you want, like, see if you can find, like, if you're going to read it, which I think is only, like, physical copy, at least it was when I checked, like, get the, they try to modernize it and whatever, even though it's kind of old, like, it's just, I think it's better the original version. The OG stands the test of time. All right, I like that. Yeah. That's dope, brother. I wrote that down so I can put this into the show notes as well.

I'm going to podcast this. And then also, obviously this is going to, you know, this is recorded so we can post it here to the group after the fact. So I'm going to put that into the resources pages here. All right, here's another mind test. I think either Abundance 10,000, Sean Clayton, somebody, I think it was Sean Clayton who said this. Now, he's not the first guy to say this by any means, but I love this as a mind exercise.

What if we have the ability, not just to reincarnate, but the ability to redo this exact lifetime as many times as we want? And what if we keep trying again and again in this exact lifetime in hopes of becoming the best version of ourselves, but somehow don't? that's a tough pill to swallow, right? It's one thing to think like, this is it for Kyle Kingsbury, never before, never again, but when you really think outside of space and time, you know, as a divine being,

you could say, I want to go to this exact moment in time and space. I want to go to this not linear, right? The Kosher record is fucking full of everything that was ever was and ever will be all compressed into a single space. So if you think about that, what is the one thing that you would keep trying to get yourself to do, right? And that all flows back to authenticity. It all flows back to am I myself? Am I being myself or am I bending to fit in? Am I bending to somebody else's idea of me? Am I bending? Am I really myself with my wife? Or am I, you know,

walking on eggshells trying to be the thing I think she wants? Am I really myself in my job? Or am I trying to fit, just fit in, right, to keep the money? That's okay if you are. That's prostitute architect, which we'll get into in a later discussion. There's a right way and a wrong way to use the prostitute archetype. But all that said, like this is the self-inquiry we're talking about here. I think this is important.

All right. Another good quote from the book, walk slowly but never backward. Okay, this has to do with habits. This has to do with just showing up each day. Walk slowly but never backward. This also flows into one of the books. I'm going to mention here in a second. And then repetition, not perfection.

Okay, just get your fucking reps. When you are first starting a new habit, it's all about getting the reps. It's all about showing up each day and doing a little bit. It's not about how well you did, and it's not about getting the exact time that you think, 10,000 hour rule. So I'm starting a day, you know, one hour a day,

I'll be there in three years. No, no, no, no. Don't do it that way. Just show up. Get the reps. Get more reps. Get more reps. And if you can,

as an easy strength, right, from a greasing the groove standpoint, I can sprinkle this in. If you don't have an hour, but you want to do an hour, give 10 minutes spread out every hour, right? Just devote a little bit of chunk of your time at various intervals throughout the day, and by the end of the day, you might have gotten that hour, right? But every time you do that, you're greasing the groove. You're getting neurons of fire together to wire together, right? You're creating new habits through new neuronal pathways through the repetition of the act. Yeah, Hebslaw, neurons are fire together, wire together. Follow the two-minute roll.

If you're first starting out with something and you're like, oh, man, I can't do it. You know, think about my mobility practice. I couldn't do an hour each day. I can't expect anybody else to do that either. Couldn't do 30 minutes a day. Couldn't do 20, couldn't do 15. I could do the two minutes each leg. I could do four minutes.

So I followed that two-minute rule. One minute, you know, start to a, associate the habit with just the beginning of the thing. So he's like, you can even break it down to a one-minute meditation or just put your running shoes on. You know, like reward yourself for putting your running shoes on because you put them on. How far you run after that doesn't really matter. You just put your running shoes on, associate that as a victory. Check the box. So this is really crunching shit down. And master the art of showing up. Consistency is king. there are a couple of resources here that I'll put into into our page here

Atomichabits.com slash journal. Helps you to journal things. He's got Atomichabits.com slash media where there's charts, a lot of the things he brings up in the book that are awesome. But get the book. It's very good. All right. Shifting gears here to Greg McCown, the discipline of the disciplined pursuit of less. Hands down, one of the most important books I've ever come across.

I was actually at Paul Checks in 2018 before a big, big mushroom journey and I was explaining, you know, what life is like and how it seems like it just never stopped speeding up. Every time I adjust to the new speed, there's more, and it's coming in faster and faster and life's just coming at me.

And I know, I'm asking him in his library. I'm like, tell me about Lao Tzu and tell me about this book. And, you know, he's got like a stack of six books for me to get. And he's like, have you read essentialism? And I was like, no, he goes, make that your first. book. And I was like, but all these other books I just said, these sounds so much better.

He's like, I don't know, I'll start with essentialism. He was bang on, as per usual. And I read it twice. It's a short read. There are a ton of spiritual, just gems layered in through that book for people with the eyes to see and the ears to hear where you're just like, ping, like, wow, that goes well beyond my work-life balance, right? But if we think about What stands in the way of us creating good habits? A lot of times it's how much do you work, right? Those are responsibilities we have. And so finding what is essential is a really unique skill set to have because not only does

that work for my work life balance, it'll tell me this is what I need to focus on at work. It'll tell me what's the number one priority for me in the gym right now. What's the number one priority for me to give into my family rather than just providing for them? my kids don't give a shit how much money I make. They want me, right? So what is the number one priority there? In the book Essentialism, Greg talks about the Greek word priority when it first came out was just that.

It wasn't plural. It was one thing that mattered more than everything else. Singular priority. It wasn't a to-do list. It sure shit didn't look like this with lines crossed out on it and stuff like that. It was just one thing that mattered more than everything else. and if you were if you were to focus on your priority until it's done then everything else is secondary you may come up with a new priority after that first priority's done that's fine but we have to

prioritize what are the things that matter and we can systematically do that right if we're systems based thinking we can say all right i have a singular priority at work i have a singular priority in my relationship i've a singular priority with my body and physical health and we really focus on mastering those things, make habits to that one priority that get us moving in the right direction. And these are things that create big change. Going back to atomic habits, one of my favorite analogies he uses, he brings up the 1980s L.A. Lakers with Pat Riley. And I was a huge basketball fan growing up.

They had Magic Johnson, you know, all James Worthy, Kurt Ramis, their team was stacked. They were arguably one of the greatest teams ever. and they were touted as the best team ever, and they didn't even make it to the finals in one of the years. And so Pat Riley brought him back, and he thought, how can we start to just get 1% better at all the things that matter? So they went through it.

They did statistics from the past all the way back to high school stats to see what a player was their average, you know, assists, goals, all the points, all the things. And they took that with them so they'd know. And then what was your average year after year in November? Let's compare November this year to November last year. They got really into the statistics to hold each other accountable. But all it was about was getting 1% better in the things that matter.

So he broke that down, I think, into passing, dribbling, shooting, rebounding, defense, something along those lines, right? He just picked his five most important pieces of basketball. And then they started a track. And they started to require that, hey, you don't have to win the game for us, but you need to get 1% better in all these things. and they went on to win back-to-back championship. First time in 20 years that a team won back-to-back NBA titles

was right after they implemented this stuff. And he uses a lot of sports examples in the book, but I think that's a very critical piece to take with us as it partners with the centralism because now we have, you know, the priority can have a small mixed bag of, you know, which system am I thinking of, right? And there may be a total priority. Like if your total priority is, fuck, I'm broke, I need to make money,

that might be the total priority and then everything else relationships and stuff is secondary that for someone like myself money can never be the singular priority because nothing's more important than my wife and my kids nothing and also nothing's more important than my physical health because I can't make money if I'm in pain if I'm not you know doing doing the things that I love I'm not going to be worse than everything else that I do for that so all that said uh essentialism is a great book teaching us how to refine what we say yes to and the power of no And it's, again, it's a short read, very important. Finally on this, and then I'll shut up when we can get into Q&A,

is a book I just listened to by John Mark Comer called The Ruthless Elimination of Hurry. Have you heard of it? It too is a short, short book. Five hours and 20 minutes onaudible. So all three of these, you can finish in under 16 hours, right? I've got stacks of Sanderson books that are like 30 hours apiece. This stuff you fly through. And ideally, you know, it was your first time through, don't listen at one and a half X.

Listen at one X. Take notes, write in the book, do whatever you can to really iron that out. Now, I will say this, the ruthless elimination of hurry is also its career success, it's Christian living and Christianity. Those are the three categories that it's under. Mark or John Mark Comer is a youth pastor. So he threads a lot of Christian stuff into this book. that can be hard for some people. For me, I generally laugh at times when I think it's over the top and disagree with it,

but I've a firm believer in don't throw the baby out with the bathwater. I've said this many times it's the reason I'll still pay attention to Jack Cruz. I think Jack Cruz has a lot to offer the world. And I think he can do better in the way he communicates with people. Let me just put it plainly like that, okay? I also feel like at times he tries to go out. He's in the habit of going after people and he goes, after people that are on the same fucking team he's on, right? And that's foolish. But all I said,

don't sort of the baby out of bathwater. Can I learn from this guy? Absolutely, I've learned a ton from Jack Cruz. And I've learned even more from Dr. Alexis Jasmine Cowan, who's a PhD at Princeton and an understudy of his, who has a lot of his qualities and understanding minus the extras. So if you listen to this book and you have a hard time with, you know, Christians, Bible thumpers, quotes from the Bible, that kind of shit. Just table that. But take in, what he has to say about eliminating hurry and the point behind that. If you are a spiritual person like myself and you have a place for Christ in your heart and you also have a place for Buddha and the other great teachers,

then you can take what he's saying and just take it in as, okay, that works. That works in some circumstances. In some circumstances, I still might go, eh, I'd say it differently, but it's fine. The rules of elimination of hurry cannot be overstated either, right? Because when we think about what we do to live a better life, hurry is not one of them yet it is baked in to what we're taught to do growing up produce more create more be more of yourself more more more do more right don't sit down I'll sleep my buddy not dead yet like I'll sleep when I'm dead like that was his clothing

company not dead yet I don't fucking get it man um the jocco willings of the world right like uh sleep is a gift and we should treat it as such it's also where we recharge and bring our best self forward the next day. I don't want to chronically take that away from myself. So, but even beyond the sleep piece, we get, I frequently get into a state of rush, rushing energy, because it's how I grew up. And it's also, it brings me online, right? If I'm in a rush, shit matters now, right?

All right, I'm going to make sure that there's not a single detail is missed. it's only like 40 minutes under one airplane flight with my family or am I like, all right, we made the flight. Now I can just de-stress and let all that cortisol dump. And that sucks. I'd rather get there early, mosey around, grab coffee, make sure the kids have had a bite to eat. Everyone goes to the bathroom before we board the plane, get on the plane early, set the

iPads up, throw on my book, recline, and just go. You know, like, and so there's a difference there. If I approach life with a little bit more intention, I can. can eliminate hurry. But if I'm flying by the seat of my pants ungrounded, then I'm going to find myself in situation after situation that requires a rush. And as the spenza teaches, this is going to be a big point as we dive into a dispenza in a couple of months, is that we become addicted to negative emotions. When he first said that, I was like, fuck are you talking about. I'm not addicted to being angry. I'm not addicted to, you know, to fear. Why would I be addicted to being afraid, right?

When you think about what are some of the number one movies in the box office? Weirdo horror films, right? Why wouldn't even pay to see that? Because they want to feel afraid because fear makes them feel alive because they genuinely enjoy it. Okay. There's a part of me that enjoys rushing because all of a sudden it matters now. It matters how quick I get to the chiropractor. It matters that I make it to the airport on time.

Right. It turns everything up. It's like watching a sports game with no money on. on the line or watching a sports game with $1,000 on the line. You tend to give a shit when there's $1,000 in the line, okay? But I don't need to bet on every sports game to enjoy it, and I certainly don't need to rush everywhere I go in life to make it matter. Right?

So there's much more to this book than what I've mentioned here, but I just want to lay that out that as a culture, we have been hoodwinked into a state of rushing. And because of the way Hebs law works and the arms of fire together, we've unfortunately baked that in to who we, we are. We've baked in the need to rush, the need to go get shit done. And it takes a careful excavating of one's own personal habits to be able to see where we're doing that still and then ruthlessly eliminate that. Work tirelessly to get rid of that. Another piece that he gets into

and then I'll shut up finally for the lecture today is if we are to live in the way of the Christ, or if we are to live in the way of the Buddha, if we're going to live in the way of any of the great spiritual teachers. It's not just listening to what they say. It is actually doing what they did, in a sense, right? It's living by that standard. And what the standard is is slowing down. It doesn't mean that you don't go to work or you don't spend your hours, full hours in the day, because they certainly did that teaching and healing and all the other things. It's that we begin to slow down. There's no peace in a state of rush. There's no joy in a state of rush. I might feel alive, but there's no joy, right? When they really think of what joy is. And there's no love in a state

of rush. Right? When I go to make love to my wife, like, it is all things but rush. It cannot be rushed. That's not love, right? If we are like, you know, it's funny being parents, this might be TMI, but, you know, like when we go to get a quickie because it hasn't been a while it's like it works and it also is like frustrating because i want to slow down i want to i want to just make the whole thing fucking exquisite and just let's take it slow and do the whole thing i love it that way um but there's a time and a place for the other part i guess what i'm getting at though is is when we really think about cultivating love joy and peace you cannot focus on cultivating those things with hurry in in the ballroom you can't you can't you can't get there by rushing so i think

All of these things are super important. We've got essentialism. We've got atomic habits and the ruthless elimination of hurry. And then now we'll open it up here for some Q&A. All right, y'all, quick break to tell you about my brand new community, The Kingdom Within. It is launched on school right now. If you join, you get a free one-week trial.

You'll have access to any videos we've recorded in the past. We call them days at school. So first day of school, second day of school. All this stuff is available. Like I said, we just launched. The community is small, which is absolutely great because if you join now, you will have all your questions answered. I mean, there's just no competition.

So the community is about body. It's about mind. It's about connection. It's about family, nature, psychedelics. Everything is on the table. And right now, I'm just walking people through some of the most important things, I think, in the key takeaways from the books that I've read and the people I've befriended and learned under guys like Paul Chek, Mark Sisson, and so many others. And I've broken it down into very easy-to-use practical sense.

steps on how to optimize the body. And with that, lay the foundations for a successful life, for better productivity, for better emotional intelligence with your kids, with your wife, with your girlfriend, for better connection, which is really what it's all about. And then how do I connect to myself? What does that internal relationship look like? How do I connect to nature? I get it. Not all you're going to have a farm. Most people listening this don't. That's fine. How do I reconnect to nature? How do I build out my eco field in my own little backyard? If I got an apartment, what are the plants that I bring in? How do I respect nature and make communion with it? And then how do I do that with God? There are so many paths that lead us up the mountain. And I've spent, you know, the last 20 years of my life, really researching, digesting, and breaking this down. So I am so excited to be able to share this with you. I love the back and forth. It's something I just don't get on the podcast. I don't get to hear from you guys and get to go back and forth with you and learn about what's going on in your lives. I do in the community on school. It's called The Kingdom Within. And you can go click on it in the

show notes and it'll take you right to the about page. And like I said, we cover all the basis. So it's really hard to kind of say like, this is my niche. This is what we're doing. Optimization. All this other. Just join. Join us for one of the school days and see what it's like. I guarantee you it will change your life for the better. All right, guys, back to the podcast. Any questions on these books and things like that or lifestyle design before we've just opened up to like to ask me anything portion? Hello, Kyle. You recommended essentialism whenever I, first jumped in the community and I listened to the audio book. Truly paradigm shifting.

It's like, thank you so much for that, man. Listen to effort lists as well. That one's taking more time to sink in. My question when it comes to this, though, is did you cultivate your own essential intent from the book? Because that was something that really stood out to me, specifically how it relates to, So with Czech's teaching, having one's dream as we could say like chief, all goals are subsequent to that, right?

And we can break it down with our mission and vision and values. But I saw the parallel with the essential intent being a simplified, concise summary of that. And that really resonated with me. and I've been chewing on how to, how, how I can really boil down these more complex ideas with the mission vision into this simplified, spacious statement of an essential intent. And I've got some rough draft versions, but I was curious if you've chewed on that yourself. I've chewed on it in a couple of ways. First, it was very, it's very like linear, not big picture, right?

And so when I read that book, I was working on it. It was, I came from, you know, as a professional fighter, I made my own schedule. You know, we had obviously team training every day at noon was a thing where we'd all say yes to is that way all the best fighters would show up at noon for the pros, that kind of thing. And then whenever you had to fight on that specific date and time, obviously I had to be there contractually for that date and time. But for the most part, I chose my own schedule. I could say yes to a fight or no to a fight, even though it was complex and more of a pain in the ass to turn one down. And I could take time in between fights to get better, right? So I really enjoyed the fact of being in control of my own schedule.

I also worked at a strip club. I was bouncer and bartender on the weekends and that helped pay the bills when I had my orbital blown out or a broken neck or fill in the blank of many injuries. That put food on the table. We lived in my mom's attached garage, as many of you know, and had very low overhead. It was 500 bucks a month to live in Northern California in the Silicon Valley. That's the only way we could afford it. And so I basically worked two days a week, you know, and then the rest was play.

Me fighting was play to me. It wasn't work. It was hard work. It was hard play, but it was play. When I retired from fighting, I didn't know what I was going to be when I grew up. I had plant medicines telling me just keep following, keep reading the things that you're enjoying. It'll somehow pan out, and it did. It became a podcast, and they became a job in on it.

But I was very accustomed to only working those two days a week. When my son was born, a year after I retired, he saw me five days a week. We'd go to Santa Cruz. We'd go hike. We'd do a whole ton of shit, me, my wife and Bear. And that was the norm. And even when I went to work, it was like 3.30 in the afternoon. I'd still nap with them every day.

We'd nap and then I'd go to work till 2 or 3 a.m. Come back. You know, I'd wake up when the sun came up with him. I'd nap with him during the day. And then I'd leave for work a few hours later, only twice a week. And so it was like Tim Ferriss's four-hour work week. And he was adjusted to that for almost the first three years of his life. move to Vegas.

Vegas you move to here, get the job, it on it. And now, you know, I have a 40-hour-a-week job with a fucking cubicle. It's not all that bad. I've got Jiu-Satts 20 yards from me. I've got a cold bath and a sauna and all the weights and all the things and great people to train with and fighters and also people coming into town that I get to want and dine and have fun with. But the more I was away from my desk, the more it pissed off the other people that were around. You know, like, why does Kyle get to do this?

It doesn't have to stay at his desk, you know? So I had at least appear to be at my desk quite a bit and I had to appear to stick around eight hours a day. And that really took its toll on my son. It took a huge toll on my son. And for me, it was like first time having this and like the whole rest of the world's doing this. Like I understand we had a different growing up, but like, dude, you got to adjust.

Like you got to use this. How do you explain that to a three year old? You can't. Right. I couldn't explain it to my wife. She understood, but she still said that doesn't matter. Like this matters. right? And so for a long time, I didn't get it. And I got swept up. And I got to go, go, go. I got to make sure I keep this job. I got to try to impress everybody. I got to go above and beyond. Right. And then I saw a check in 2018 about a year after getting hired it on it. And I read essentialism. And I'm like, oh, shit. Like, how do I apply this to my life right now? Well, number one, I need to stop doing all this shit that I didn't come here for. And so that's when I first started using the power of no. That didn't. That didn't.

go over very well with a lot of people. It didn't. But I was steadfast in my understanding of it. Like, this is why I was hired to design supplements, to be in part of a face of this company, to be the office guinea pig and to fucking try all the things and say what works and what doesn't, you know, to apply this at the professional level, because I still felt like a pro athlete. I still trained like one. And to give this to other pro athletes, whatever we're trying out, cooking up in the lab, like let's have them tested out and see what they think before we release it to the public. That's why I was there. I also ran the podcast and I made their podcast a success, a huge success.

That was the reason for me to be there. There were other things that were piled on on my desk as for normal, but through essentialism, it was my job to say no to that and to be able to say, this is what I'm here for and I'm going to do my best to be good at the thing that I'm here for. You know, in the end, that wasn't a great fit in the end. You know, so, you know, we went to service. We did other things. And, you know, now through the learning of all that, when I think about, you know,

what is the goal that leads to all goals. I simplify, simplify, simplify, back no different than a habit. And so it comes, you know, Paul Chek taught me this. It comes from the law of one, the raw contact. On a soul level, we are here for two reasons,

to learn, teach, and teach, learn. Right? And that's it. I always consider myself a student first. I want to know. I'm a seeker. I want to know about health because I want to live it and experience it.

I want to know about athleticism because I want to fucking move freely and be strong and fit and fast. I want these things for myself, so I'm going to learn about them. And then I'm going to experience them. And through my own experience, that's going to become wisdom. And I can't hold all this in. I've got to give that back.

I've got to teach the things that I know through my own experience, my own wisdom. And that's the learn teach, teach, teach, learn. That's my grand vision of my entire life. I want to continue to learn until the day I fucking die. And I want to continue to teach what I know, right? So it's very simple. It's overly simple. But if I really am to think about that, what is the legacy I love?

leave behind. It's to learn, teach, teach, learn. That's it. And that goes for my kids. It goes with my wife. I'm constantly learning from my wife, constantly learning about what it means to be married 15 years in, right? We've done all sorts of shit in our marriage that most people wouldn't and have found, you know, the best freaking best marriage I could ever ask for, you know, I'd really, truly believe that. And never been in a better place. And that came through a lot of rocky spots and a lot of fireworks together. But that came from me looking at this as a way to grow, looking at this as a way to learn, to grab more. I'm never a finished product. I always come with a beginner's mind, right, into everything. A relationship I've been in for 15 years, I'm still learning. My kids,

you think you're mastered your kids at a certain age and they shift. They're in a different phase. Puberty hits something else and you're like, ah, I don't know what I'm doing again, right? I got to learn more. What does it, you know, I'm reading books on teenagers and shit like that. That's going to be coming up next. You know, I couldn't be happier with a life of learning and teaching. I couldn't be. That's the thing that really drives me in life. I geek out on shit like that. And so I think that, what is the most essential act for me? It's that. What stands in the way of that, and this goes back to the habits, are things that would potentially capture more of my time than I'm willing to give under the fallacy of a lie, right? Like we were taught growing up, go to college, get a degree,

get a job with IBM or someplace, work for 40 years, bust your ass, don't get fired. You'll have a 401k, and you'll be happy when you've got the wife, the kids, the white picket fence house, and you're retired at 65, and you can travel the world and do what you want to do then. That's a lie. We all know that bubble burst a long time ago. So if I was to say, what would I do in retirement right now if I had more time and then actually do that, well, now I'm pulling myself towards my goal. Right now I'm just.

saying, I've cast out where the North Star is and I'm going to pull myself to it right now. If I was on vacation, what would I do right now? I'd get out in nature. Okay, well, I'm not on vacation. Can I get out in nature right now? Yes. So I take a couple laps right before this talk, right? Let me go outside with my shirt off. Let me listen to a good book or let me just listen to the sounds of the birds in nature and maybe see the red deer. I can do that on this land. The more I participate in that, the more I get to touch the thing that I'm actually desiring without actually having to leave the country or go have the big vacation. Right.

So I'm backtracking from what the end goal ought to be to making that a part of my life right now consistently. I'm doing that in every way, shape, and form possible. What is somebody, you know, if you look at like near-death experiences and what people say on their deathbed, I thought a lot about this because my grandma just passed. My dad is turning 75 this year. So it's a topic of concern. He's going to be our first parent that probably goes.

and not concerned in a bad way, you know, like it's just a part of life. He's going to move on at some point. Not going to have him forever. And so I'm really enjoying my time with him now and asking him questions and things of that nature. But no one ever says on their deathbed, I wish I worked more. Universally, no one has ever said that on their deathbed. I'm willing to bet even though not every person has been recorded in recorded history, I would bet my fucking arm that no one has said I wish I worked more.

right what would they wish more for i wish i spent more time in my family i wish i listened to my kids better i wish i was kinder i wish i was softer in my relationships and less with the need to be right right so if that's what people have on their deathbed how do i deploy that right now in my life and microdose that as often as possible right give me my inch of kindness giving me my inch my baby step of better listening, giving my my slow walk forward, but never a step backward in being more compassionate and, you know, softening for the people that I'm around. Hardening when necessary, but softening for the most part. I think that those are all different ways in which we can see that main goal made a reality right now, right? And what I would offer, you know,

when we talk Dr. Happiness since we're on Paul Checks' teachings, Dr. Happiness is multifaceted It is that North Star. It's your legacy. It's why you're here. It's your vocation in life. And it's all the way down to the shit that makes you happy on a daily basis. It's tickling my kids. It's dancing with my daughter.

It's wrestling with my son. It's wrestling with both of them, honestly. It's watching them play football. It's hitting the gym and getting a good sweat. It's hitting the sauna with my wife. And we're talking about life. And I'm listening to all the shit that she's going through. And I'm hearing it I'm holding it as the mountain.

and offering what I can in return. That's the sweet spot. That's the shit that brings me joy on a daily basis. And as often as I can, I don't want a little bit of that. I will sacrifice however much money I could be making, working 40, 50 hours a week to have that. So the last story I'll leave you guys with, and I'll still answer a question to you, David.

But when I first got out of fighting, remember I had no money. I owed the IRS $50,000. And I lived in my mom's detached garage. So no medical insurance, no retirement, no nothing. And I had a job at a tini bar twice a week. So I didn't have much, but I can make ends meet. I also didn't know what I wanted to be when I grew up.

There was a guy I was training in Jiu-Jitsu who would give me $100 cash every time we train. At the time, it was a lot of money. And he'd always give me a $100 bill, a $100 bill. A few times when he had to cancel, he'd still give me the $100 bill. And I was like, oh, shit, thanks, but you don't have to do that. He's like, no, no, I took your time. I was like, all right. Then there was a couple times where I had to cancel on him,

and he still gave me the $100 bill. And I was like, hey, dude, you can't pay me if I got to cancel. He's like, no, no, it's okay. And I was like, look, Matt, you know, I was like, can I ask? Like, what do you do for work that allows you to just fucking hand me $100 bill for no transaction whatsoever and just in good faith? And he said, oh, I'm a pipeline inspector. Now, at the time, I had been working a lot with psilocybin and ayahuasca and indigenous cultures,

and I was not down with big oil. You know, that was the last place I wanted to go. But understanding what that job meant, and understanding oil is not going away in her lifetime, that's for damn sure. You know, free energy can come along, but oil's going to be here, period. The inspector makes sure there isn't a spill. A good inspection job makes sure something's built correctly, then you don't have a problem down the road, theoretically.

So it would be a way to work in an industry that I don't want to be in, but can potentially bring some good to it. And, you know, these are all hardworking, good old boys. Maybe, you know, some of my ayahuasca and fruginess can fucking linger in and help these guys out in some way, shape, or form, right? So I really thought about it. And he put me through school. I went through school and ended up going to Houston.

I aced my nace exam. And we started talking about, like, what's next? Interviews, that kind of thing. Where do you take the job? And he's like, listen, you're going to start at 200 to 250 grand a year. And I was like, yes. full family medical and dental, full 401k plan, all the things. And he goes, but I got to warn you.

You can make a lot of money. I'm sorry, you said you got to warn me. I can make a lot of money. You know, like, what's the problem here? He goes, let me just put it this way. If you get called out to a job in the middle of nowhere, you know, some guys work six months and then take the whole rest of the year off, right? But that six months is brutal.

You go to North Dakota, you go somewhere like you're out in the middle of nowhere. You're living in a shitty little, you know, pop-up container, and you're working 60 hours a week. That's how you make the extra money as you work overtime. So you can get time and a half or 2x. You might make 450, 500 grand in a year, right? It's a lot of money. And I was like, okay, where's the problem?

And he goes, well, think about it this way. He goes, you love your partner, right? You guys aren't married yet, but I love Natasha to pieces. I know I wanted to be married to her. And I was like, yeah, I love her to pieces. He goes, listen, I brought six guys into this job. All six of them did what you did. They said, let's make the extra money now.

And there's a lot of good reasons for that. Let me work my ass off now. I'll make extra money. It'll make life easy. We'll own our house outright. We'll own our cars. We'll have investments. Our money will make money.

We can go travel the world and do all the fun shit we want. But all six of those guys ended up divorced. 100% of them. Six out of six. It's fucking unreal, right? And I'm like, damn, dude. why. He goes, well, all of them chose the money, which meant all of them chose overtime and all of them chose to be away from their partner. Six months at a time, like, you're going to grow apart.

It doesn't matter how much money's in the bank. It doesn't matter. Cheating, that kind of stuff, open marriage, none of that matter. They just grew apart from each other, right? It's not enough to just make money. So that's not the thing. Right. The thing isn't the money. The thing is the freedom to do something with that money. The thing is, do I have time to be around my partner? Do I have time to be around my kids? Do I have time to choose and freedom to choose what I want to do each day? Do I give myself the time to work out regularly? Do I give myself the time to walk and reflect and be in nature? Do I give myself an hour to meditate, which I'm going to do here in a minute? Fuck yeah. That's more important than the money, to me at least. But we all have to make that

decision for ourselves. All right, that's my long rant on that. Excellent question, James. Thank you brother. David, you got anything for us before we wrap? I actually have a bunch of stuff swarrowing around, but I have a short, really short, practical question, and then maybe something else will settle. But in terms of, like, your book consumption, you've talked a lot about using audible, and I like audiobooks, too. Do you just do it, like, I guess it's because of your job, like, on the farm, so you can just be, you can just have headphones in and you're listening while you're doing other stuff? I'm just I mean I used to listen a lot on drives that's what got me into it was podcast first

and then books via audible because I had a long commute when I lived in the Bay Area and then even in Austin I drive around a lot to different places now I really only drive like one day a week I'll drive into town and then I drive my son to football football practice or jihitsu practice we're talking the whole time or we might listen to like load of the rings together something like that I have to make space to listen to books But yeah, I can walk in the morning and listen. I can listen while I'm working out, doing like Zone 2 cardio. I can find ways to get that in that make it a little easier.

We clean the house a few days a week when I like to vacuum. I throw my headphones on while I'm vacuuming. The kids know I'm in my own little world, you know, listening to the book for 45 minutes to vacuum the house. And it's awesome. It's meditated for me and it's a way to bring in more information. if I really want to study something, you know, I'll listen to it more than once. I'll also get the physical copy.

And a lot of times I'll go through it the way, if you've ever seen Paul Checks books, there's every fucking page as underlines and highlighters with different things. There's 20 flaps on the top of it, you know, telling you which book is, you know, which page is where I'm not that meticulous, but there is something to having a physical copy and underlining something or highlighting it or writing it down. So I'm a big, big note taker. I have tons of little books like this. I've got this shit right here, you know, which I'm on, you know, many, many pages D.

I go, I fly through these yellow notepads. And it just helps me organize things better. It helps the way I learn the way my mind works. I am an auditory learner. But writing something down kind of grounds it here in my understanding. And then if I can put lists together, now I can start to see like, I can see these things, you know, coupled together. and see them as systems. And so that does it for me, you know,

and then like, you know, little stick it notes, stickies and post-it notes, things like that, I think are really valuable to have for the way that I learned stuff. It looks a little sloppy, to be honest, but, I mean, it's just the way that I learned. So I think if it's worth study, there's a difference between listening to a book, consuming something, agreeing with it,

and taking a piece of it with you, and then actually saying like, oh, this is actually really valuable. I want to take notes on this. Like I said, I've read, How do you move Be Healthy 13, 14 times. I never marked that book once, and I always printed out the sheets to fill them out.

I read that book each time gave me something else, gave me something more. A new works by Eckhart Tolle, at least 12, 13 times. I've even listened to the audible book like six or seven times, which is painful for many people because of how slow Eckart Tolly speaks. You know, like he's his own,

it's his own thing to be able to, But the power of that book changed my life. And so I could fall into his slow cadence and actually appreciate it. That's who he is. Yeah, I think that's it. I think that answers you. I make time for it. I don't have as much time as I used to.

I used to just fly through fucking book. But when I was it on it, I was listening to books all day long, all day long. And I would chew through many of them. And that, that too was like, hey, I got to interview James Clear in a week. He just sent me his manuscript. It's not even on a book yet. You know, I got to read the e-book, right? So I'd sit at my computer and read it until it's done.

I was paid to learn in that sense. And in many ways, I'm still paid to learn, but it's more of, you know, genuine curiosity, right? Some people I have on and they have a new book and I haven't read it. And I'll say it on the podcast. Like, dude, I'm sorry. I didn't have a chance to read your book. Let's talk about it, though.

And then later I'll go back and read the book if it calls to me. So that's it on the audible piece. And, you know, how do I digest stuff? What else you got, brother? Um, it's not really a question, but when you were talking about music and, uh, and also mantras and meditation, um, um, talking about the music, uh, you know, starting learning it now and for your kids. It's, it's interesting because with, just even with like basic sounds and mantras, uh, vowel sounds, I've been playing a lot in terms of like, um,

just like making the toning and like the different sounds, like feeling where they resonate and And like, it's like literally you can actually like do bodywork on yourself in a way through sound. I mean, it's just, it's interesting just how like, and like I don't have experience with ayahuasca, but just like, you know, just like the, it's just funny how like there's like a class of stuff that's really basic. It's like way preverbal like in terms of how we evolved, which is like rhythm, breathing, movement and sound. are all like kind of like underneath like organ, you know, they both like reflect, you know, mental state, emotional state, physical state, and they can change it. And they're like, you know, and it's like not like it's not our culture stuff at all to like focus on those things. I mean, people do breathwork too, but they're doing it also mostly from the point of like

trying to change something, which is often like exactly, it's like that rushing energy that you were talking about. Like that, that like fixing, you know, like, you know, coming at something being already wrong is actually like what keeps you stuck. Right. Well, I mean, I would offer on breathwork, like if you're in the rushing energy of Wimhoff breathing, right, like, and then you say, let's expand that to holotropic breathwork, which is very similar, but it's much.

longer duration, right? You are trying to, you're not saying, I'm, maybe you're saying I'm broken and need healing. That's possible too. But you're shooting for a state change, right? The state change comes from the changing of pH of the blood, it comes from the flooding of oxygen, and the dumping of carbon dioxide, and potentially a little DMT being produced naturally, right? That's how we have an altered state of consciousness via breathwork. And it's a very specific goal, right? On the opposite end of that spectrum, kind of trying to remember the guy's name, he was Bucenko, right? He was the opposite. Breathe all the way out, let a little bit in, and then let it back out. It would take a, take out. Yeah. Equal in, equal out. You know,

one point in, one point out, two points in, two points out, but small, right? It's like the Zen master, a Zen master, you don't, you can't see breathing, right? There's no. accessory muscles, you don't even see their chest dries. You don't even know that they're breathing if they're a true Zen master. They're just, it's that quiet? You can't hear it and you can't see it, right? That's on the opposite end. That would be, you know, the elimination of hurry, right? If it flows with that. And that's a very different state of being. One that has a lot of fruit, right? There's a lot to harvest from that state of being. This is the equal in, equal out is what heart math figured out, It's what raises HRV, but also raises heart coherence.

So if you want to expand your heart, your energy field, you start coming into that rhythmic one in, one out, and very small from the belly, that has a profound effect on the body, on the neurochemistry, on the heart, on all of it. And it's just a different goal, right? So I would say they're both valuable tools to have in your toolbox. It's just how you deploy it.

There was something that looked, the chanting piece, though, that can't be overstating. I mean, like chanting, toning, when we understand the power of the vagus nerve and how much it is interrelated into the entire physiology of the body, the entire central nervous system, all of that, neurochemistry. Like, if we, you know, and I love this about human when human first started, was that he was studying these ancient, you know, Ayurvedic understandings of the body and trying to map that to Western science at Stanford.

It's like, can I do mantras or tone? before sleep to tone the vagus nerve and then double my exhale to my inhale to slow down and become more relaxed and then does that improve my sleep? And it did. Right? He was doing all this shit instead of that was really cool back in the day. I like, you know, when it's not that I'm waiting for science to say if it works or not, but I like it when they go and research the shit that we've already known as work for thousands of years. And they're like, yes, it is working and here's how it's working. I think that's really cool. Widera wants that, one of our fit or service events did all the vowels and coordinated to exactly where it was in the

body with chakra and it was mind-blowing. And we went all the way up and all the way back down. And, you know, if you read another great book from Paul's is Stalking the Wild Pendelon by Ishtak Bentov, you know, it's his theory of everything. Something he mentions at the beginning is like sound or light are basically, you know, the same thing, right? Octaves. Sound and light have physical shapes and dimensions based on frequency, but you could say the entirety of the universe is sound, or the entirety of the universe is light, or the entirety of the universe is frequency.

All three of those are correct, right? All of them are. And so I think that's really cool when you really think about things like that. It's like, that changes my relationship to sound. It changes my relationship to light, how I view it, right? Because all of it has an impact. And then when you,

you have had that experience for yourself where it's now visceral, a visceral understanding of state change, mood change, healing, any of these things via a modality like light or sound. And if it's amplified because you yourself, David, have been going through a Kodlin Awakening or maybe you microdose, right? So you're more perceptive to these things. And then you have somebody who's a skilled professional that is singing to you or you're on this very specific light bed or the light mask that's that's going through all the different you know frequencies of light and you have a blast off experience you can't deny that like that's that's that's that's a true thing right and it shifts shifts people what you do with that that that actually

matters you know but the experience in itself that's something that can put all the importance in the world on wanting to know more about sound and light um and then the integration piece that's habit change that's the nature of this entire talk you know what do we take from there then we actually use to create change in our lives. All right, you guys, eating a little bit over here today. I appreciate you guys. Great questions.

Thank you guys for jumping on for this one. And we'll post this here to the school account and I'll get this up on the podcast as well. Thanks, guys. Thanks, Kyle. Thanks, brother. Thank you.