Mind Pump: Raw Fitness Truth - 480: Paul Chek- Controversial Fitness Pioneer on Fitness, Health & the Meaning of Life

Episode Date: March 27, 2017

In this episode Sal, Adam & Justin interview Paul Chek of the C.H.E.K. Institute. Paul is an internationally-renowned expert in the fields of corrective and high-performance exercise kinesiology. For over twenty-five years, Paul’s unique, holistic approach to treatment and education has changed the lives of countless people worldwide. By treating the body as a whole system and finding the root cause of a problem, Paul has been successful where traditional approaches have consistently failed. Paul is a sought-after presenter and has consulted for organizations such as the Chicago Bulls, Australia’s Canberra Raiders, New Zealand’s Auckland Blues, the US Air Force Academy and other elite organizations. Get access to a free lesson at www.chekinstitute.com/mindpumphlc Get our newest program, Kettlebells 4 Aesthetics (KB4A), which provides full expert workout programming to sculpt and shape your body using kettlebells. Only $7 at www.mindpumpmedia.com! Get MAPS Prime, MAPS Anywhere, MAPS Anabolic, MAPS Performance, MAPS Aesthetic, the Butt Builder Blueprint, the Sexy Athlete Mod AND KB4A (The MAPS Super Bundle) packaged together at a substantial DISCOUNT at www.mindpumpmedia.com. Make EVERY workout better with MAPS Prime, the only pre-workout you need… it is now available at mindpumpmedia.com Have Sal, Adam & Justin personally train you via video instruction on our YouTube channel, Mind Pump TV. Be sure to Subscribe for updates. Get your Kimera Koffee, Mind Pump's first official sponsor, at www.kimerakoffee.com, code "mindpump" for 10% off! Add to the incredible brain enhancing effect of Kimera Koffee with www.brain.fm/mindpump 10 Free sessions! Music for the brain for incredible focus, sleep and naps! Please subscribe, rate and review this show! Each week our favorite reviewers are announced on the show and sent Mind Pump T-shirts! Get Holistic Lifestyles Coach Level 1 Online- FIRST LESSON FREE HERE! Introduction to discussion with Paul Chek (8:24) Ego is the enemy (9:49) What does Paul think of people’s perception of him? (16:34) Paul talks about all the things he originated and got no credit for – ie: gut health, bulletproof coffee and the swiss ball (26:00) How did Paul get into the wellness/fitness industry? How his childhood/military/boxing days changed his life? (29:34) What advice does Paul give a team/athlete he takes on? (52:52) Paul talks about flow state (1:03:21) Chek Institute: Coach programs, Training programs and courses offered / Becoming a Chek Practitioner (1:13:28) Not selling out and sticking to his principles (1:17:00) What is Paul doing with social media to keep up with Generation Z? (1:31:20) What are some key things someone can take away from Paul’s knowledge? / 4 day rotation diet / Program design (1:39:36) What frustrates Paul the most about the state of the fitness industry? (1:51:21) Does Paul communicate differently depending on who he is talking to? (2:03:32) Discussion into dogmas / Final thoughts (2:05:30) Related Links/Products Mentioned Chek Institute Special for Mind Pump listeners! Get Holistic Lifestyles Coach Level 1 Online (First course for FREE!) Old school Swiss ball training video (Paul Chek) Nutrition: A Holistic Approach – Rudolf Hauschka (book) How to Eat, Move and be Healthy! – Paul Chek (book) Movement that Matters – Paul Chek (book) Huston Smith – The Roots of Fundamentalism (Documentary) Paul Chek vs. David Driscoll Debate People Mentioned: Dr. Clifford Oliver Ben Greenfield Mike Salemi Daniel Siegel Laird Hamilton David Driscoll

Hey, check this out. Go to mindpumpmedia.com. We are still offering still 30 days of free coaching 30 days of coaching by mind pumps right there It's free. There's no catches all you got to do is go to the site Optin and you will get 30 every day for 30 days. You're gonna get some coaching for mind pump again mind pump media.com It's still free. It feels like Christmas, but it's 30 days If you want to pump your body and expand your mind, there's only one place to go. Mind, mind, up with your hosts. Salta Stefano, Adam Schaefer, and Justin Andrews. We are going to take our audience to the moon and back today.

We're gonna go on a ride, ladies and gentlemen. We need to do a proper intro for For this guest that you're about to hear stuff We need to do a proper intro for this guest that you're about to hear. Do we do like, is this conduct, do you like one of those warnings or it's like warning? Warning, yeah. Well, so a little history, Paul Check is, he's like the godfather of combining wellness

and strength training and, you know, different types of... He's a straight up pioneer. He's a pioneer for all these things. He's a pioneer and he's out there. I guess that's the best way. I mean, Adam said, what do you call him Adam? Crazy, crazy Uncle Bull. Yeah.

He's definitely out there, but this guy, I love the guy, but yeah, it gets crazy. I'm a, he's extremely controversial. Like if you talk to people, this is why I love him though. I mean, we're definitely gonna ruffle some feathers with him, which I think that he knows that. He's not afraid of that.

Yeah. He was saying things about the gut way before anybody else was. That's the thing. If you talk to people that know of check, you're gonna get one of two answers, either one, he's a brilliant genius or two, he's out there and crazy. And Paul is just one of those guys,

he's definitely very polarizing, but he is, like people don't realize this, he was using physio balls or Swiss balls for exercise and teaching people how to work out on them in the 80s. This is way before any of us had ever even seen one, oh Jim, he was talking about gut health and its impact on fat loss, muscle gain, moods,

emotions, brain activity, way back when we didn't even know that it really even existed and it was called crazy for it, like people back then. He's definitely ahead of his time, let's be honest. Way ahead of his time. And then on top of it, he's kind of a badass. Like if you see the guy, when we met him, he was, you know, how do you say 55?

Yeah. 55 years old and the guy is like. Oh, it's physical. He's as 20s, yeah. He's built. He's impressive. And he could probably kick our ass. I mean, a guy boxed for years,

and he's just a tough son of a guy. I think one of the things that we have to point out too that I was, I was at least incredibly impressed with. So one of my things I always do when we get invited to somebody's home. So we got an opportunity to go to his home which they is called the Heaven House. And it's the most-

It's this working office, but it's a house. Yeah, it's just beautiful. So on top of a mountain down in San Diego and overviews this huge valley, he's got like I think nine acres or things what they said. But I love to go to people's houses and just go straight for their library and see a library and eat those library.

It's like a library. Yeah, it's something like the same thing. Hey, you're a librarian. Look at you. My lip. So I love to go straight to somebody's library and check out what they are reading, right? And he. His whole house is a library.

Yeah, the whole thing. Fucking books. And what is so impressive about what he does, because here's what happens to a lot of times when I look at somebody's like bookshelf, as you see a lot of the same type of books, right? They get, you know, and this is where I talk about people,

you know, box and dogmatic, you know, all the same philosophers or all the same, you know, methodology or ideologies. This dude is reading and astrophysics. And conflicting people. People that don't necessarily do it. It is them. And then, yeah.

Oh, yeah, I mean, everything from all the different across the spectrum, all the different religions, to all the different scientists, to all the different philosophers, to all, I mean, just. He's, I mean, God, I found now, after we had talked to him, that he's self, much of his education is, of most of itself educated. Yeah.

And he's one of, on certain subjects that we had covered, on an offer, as many of you never talked to. I mean, he, he, he knows the human body at an incredible, incredible detail. And then there's some stuff that he says to us, you'll hear in the podcast, well, we're just like, what the fuck just happened? Where do we go? Like, I get super deep, like really quick. And we were like, whoa, and we put my seat below. And weird, like, like, you will start the conversation about gut health or exercise

and it goes into the male and female energy of the spirits and you know quantum physics and how crystals have certain energy charges. Well I tell you what, if you can make it through the first 10 minutes. The first 10 minutes, you'll see that right away. Ironically we dove into a topic right out the gates that will probably lose a handful of people if not more when they first listen. But if you actually let him get in his groove and us start talking to him,

I mean, once you start getting, once you get beyond that first intro, we get into some really, really great talk. And he says some really punctual things at the end that are just like very impactful. So I mean, just give it a chance is my sort of forewarning with that. He's just, again, he's one of those people

that he's a trailblazer. He's a trailblazer in many different areas of fitness. Many of your fitness gurus and coaches that you look up to, learned what they learned from people who learned from check. There's a lot of big names out there, and I won't name them, who were students of his who went out and developed their own things He's responsible for a lot of the stuff that we are now starting to put together. Oh your level of risk

I think what you said really sums it up well when you you said man, I'll tell you what People can say what are they want to say about Paul? But if I was diagnosed with cancer or some sick, oh, I'm going to Paul. He's the first guy. If I had something wrong with me and nobody could figure it out, I would definitely go to Paul. The guys worked with some, some huge celebrities and sports teams and done some incredible things.

He's part of the Chicago Bulls during the fucking Michael Jordan. Yeah. That is like, it's just cool on its own. But again, keep in mind when you hear him, he's going to talk about things that you're just gonna be like, what is he talking about? And then he's gonna say things like, oh my God, that's insane, that makes so much sense.

So he's just one of those people, very, very interesting, probably one of the most interesting people I've ever really met. You can find, let's see, what do we have up here, Doug? What do we have for plugging here Paul? It's the check institute and

Is he giving our listeners a first free lesson? Yeah, they have a course called the holistic lifestyle coach level one online course and he's giving all mine pump listeners a free First lesson on that course and you can find that at first lesson on that course and you can find that at www.checkinstitute.com check is spelled CH-E-K so checkinstitute.com forward slash mind pump H-L-C write that down and go on there. Well this will be in our show notes so you go straight to our website go to the show notes and there'll be a direct link right to this so there we go. If you driving, you don't have to write it down. First course is absolutely free.

You'll get some great information. That's the first lesson of the course. It's absolutely free. Now, if you want the full course, it's 15 lessons, and for the next seven days, you can get it for a substantial discount of $197. That's $150 off the full price. So that's for the next seven days until April 2nd.

And then after that, it goes up to the full price of $347. Some of the most respected trainers that I know have gone through his courses and just talked about them. Two of the elite trainers that we are bringing under in MindPult Media. They work Stephanie and Mike both are. They both worked under him for a little while. And so great information. Check it out. Buckle your seat belts. Yeah. This interview gets weird and awesome. Fantastic.

And you're not going to understand some of it. So meet Uncle Paul. Have a good time listening to a mind pump interviewing. Paul check. Chicago Bulls were the first professional sports team to hire me to integrate Swiss Ball training into their conditioning for their team in 1991. When you see millions of dollars being made of things that you originated, for example,

the whole concept of putting butter and coffee started right here in this room. So I got up, I ran across the ring and I hit him so hard it felt like my hand went right through his head and I knocked him out and detached his retina and he could never fight again after that. If you're doing, for example, CrossFit and your body's out of balance, you have muscle recruitment problems and you've got core problems and you're doing what now is highly specific

strengthening, you have skipped 4 key stages of development and you're going to get hurt. You're just going to be a good looking hurt person. I don't have anything against the sport. That would be like having something against a knife. I would just say before you start juggling knives, you ought to start with oranges. You have to go test an idea to see if it works before you can have an honest opinion about it. But if you don't test the idea and you think you have an honest opinion, you don't have an honest opinion, you have a fear-based dogma. There's people right now that are listening to the show that have already turned it off

because they heard spiritual, they heard this, they heard that, and then right away they're turned off by that. I'd be excited if it stirs up a lot of controversy, I'd be excited if people find themselves being triggered because using them were triggered, someone put their finger right on our growth potential. We had the therapist come in we did a we did a whole test on air and she'd like just psychology or so yeah test and it was great because it was actually really interesting to get into narcissism and the difference the different levels of it like that it's not all bad like everybody makes it sound like it's so bad to be

someone there's different types of narcissism, right? So I thought it was pretty fast. In fact, this is- The whole process is pretty revealing. I mean, it was like pretty accurate, I felt. Oh yeah, no. Well, they picked in each one of us. She was saying how you need to have a good healthy level

of narcissism if you want to be an entrepreneur or a leader, because you kind of have to believe in yourself for a little better than, you know, and that you can do those types of things. Right. I had no idea. Well, the ego is paradoxically that something that a huge amount of old and new religious and spiritual literature tried to get rid of, right?

It's all about abolishing the ego. The ego is the bad guy, but what people don't realize if you had no ego there would be no mechanism for love If I didn't know who I was, how could I know who you were? And if I don't know who I am and who you are, then where do I send love? How does love move, right? Love requires a subject object relationship. If you had no ego, then you're pure subject so metaphorically, God can't love as God, because God is everything, everyone, and therefore there is no sense of other. Can you understand?

So the ego creates the illusion of other. The more spiritually evolved a person becomes with the more enlightened they are, the more they realize that the ego is a functional illusion that allows me to love, sell, add them, Justin, Doug, or my wife. But if my wife and I were one organism, it would be like the left hand and the right hand of an organism. And I don't think your left hand and right hand spend a whole lot of time making love to each other because they're part of the same organism. When know, when you're walking your left leg has to go back.

So the right leg can go forward, right? So the organism's all part of itself. But if I say to you, hold this up in front of yourself, go ahead and do that. Now tell me what you're looking at. My hand. There you go. You just used a possessive, right? We all do.

My hand, my back hurts, my body's tired. Instead of saying a hand. Or just hand. Yeah. Right? So the point that I'm making is even in our relationship to our body, we perceive ourselves consciously as separate from that which we possess as a body. So the ego is what actually perceives that it has a hand or a body and perceives that it has somebody or something to love that creates the subject object relationship. I say, love is the flow of energy and information from self to other, through empathic or compassionate connection.

So if there is no self and other, then where would love go? So the point I'm making is that narcissism is a term that actually means too much amplification of the ego process, too much self orientation, too much over focus on the self, but it all stems from a subjective value system. When is too much love and not enough love? I'm just going to ask you, how do you define where's the point, the breaking point where it's too far, right? Well, the breaking point is very simple. You have to clearly establish what your dream is. So, what is your dream for yourself? Maybe, what does that mean? What is my dream for the next six months of my life?

What is my dream for my career? What is my dream and my relationship with my partner? Maybe it my wife or my husband, right? Once you know what your dream is, then you have to have established values. So my contribution and the relationship is my values on spirituality are, my values on spirituality are my values on food are my values on rest are my values on movement are Once you have those values, that's a statement of what's valuable and important to you and then they have their values. So if your focus on the relationship is so overly oriented toward your values that you cannot

engage their values, then you have narcissism as a pathology that creates separation in relationship. If you have so much focus on your body, that you actually lose touch with the soul or the spirit of the consciousness within it. In other words, if everything is all about your muscles, but you're not aware that the person that's looking at the muscles is what's really the thing that's the most important, because until you get to know that, all you have is muscles. Right? So, if the narcissism takes you away from an integrated experience of the spirit or the soul or the consciousness of yourself, the dreamer, and you get trapped in the dream. All I can think about is

my next workout and my 32 servings of turkey a day and my pills and anything that gets in the way of that, that pisses me off. That's narcissism. But if you say, well, this is my goal and you make that clear to my partner, how do you any train this much in the gym? I'm trying to win this bodybuilding or this athlete competition or whatever it might be. This is how much time I can devote to our self. What would you like to do on these days?

And she says, well, this will work for me this. And then anytime there's a relationship, there's gotta be a compromise, or there's no relationship. So if narcissism is pathological, it stops that process of relationship where you actually harmonize, identify what's important for your partner because it's their individual dream, identify what's important for you because that's your individual dream, and then identify what's important for the relationship, which is the collective dream. If either individuals behavior is exiting their ability

to influence the flow of energy into the relationship, then the relationship starts to die to the degree that you're not present in the relationship because you're still in the gym or still looking in the mirror or dot, dot, dot. Yeah, in my experience, I found a lot of people who talk about the disillusion of ego or getting rid of ego, it becomes that that's actually reflection of big ego.

Where they identify so much with eliminating ego, eliminating all these things that they identify with it. And it's actually the opposite. It becomes their own dog. It becomes the opposite. I probably no better way to open this episode than going right into some of that. And I'll tell you that.

Super deep right away. Right away. Whoa, you're just plucking into the matrix. Let's be honest, I mean that defines Paul, I mean, such a unique guy for sure. Well, Paul, you've been at this. You've been in the industry of fitness and wellness for a very, very long time.

32 years. 32 years, very, very long time. 32 years. 32 years, very, very long time. You, from what I know of you, you've talked about things before other people did gut health and the influence, your emotional health and how that connects your body and pain, all these things. And at the times when you were talking about them, we're talking about in the 80s and 90s,

it was very polarizing, I can imagine. You were, you know, I'm sure people called you, you know, woo-woo or a quack or everything. Everything. And you still, even to this day, when I bring up your name, I will get to one of two responses, either very extreme sides, right? Very polarizing, either brilliant individual, who's a trailblazer in wellness, or crazy, has no idea, it's just all over the place. How do you feel about that? I feel that that's quite to be expected. If you look at a rainbow as a scale of consciousness, the bottom of the

range. Not a lot of people do. Not a lot of people look at a rainbow go of consciousness. So that takes some skill set or some understanding. It's really looking at it from as a vibrational reality, right? An enlightenment experience is one where the male and female, the opposite polarities like light and dark, for example, female dark male light, which is the basis of the Tai Chi symbol, you know, Yin emptiness, Yang fullness, something measurable, wayable, a house amount and a car that would be a Yang expression of projection of energy in form, Yin would be the womb, so the concept, the archetype, the idea of, and the space with which to create it. Okay? But in the womb of Yin comes the production of something tangible as Yang. So my point in prefacing that is that consciousness is only possible when you have those two polarities. To quote Edward Edinger,

a famous union analyst in psychiatrist, consciousness is a psychic substance created not blindly, but in living awareness of opposites. So you could say that there's two kinds of consciousness. For lack of a better term, God consciousness, which is the all, and that consciousness is like a flat line. So if you draw a line, that would represent the absolute. The absolute is everywhere and nowhere simultaneously. It's like an infinity is everywhere and nowhere simultaneously. But the absolute contains all possible infinities. There's can be lots of infinities, you know, the infinite life of an ant versus the infinite life of a star, for example. So consciousness is the unmoved mover, but anything that's oscillating up and down as a polarity, like your heartbeat, oscillates up and down. Your inhalation is yang, you fill up your exhalation in. So if you were to sign wave your breath, it would look just like a heartbeat, wouldn't it?

If you look at an electron sephilogram, when someone's thinking, you have oscillation of polarities. So consciousness cannot be aware of something and become conscious of it, unless it's moving and changing its state from relatively positive to relatively negative and interestingly if your eye, if an eye doctor, paralyzes the muscles of the eye, you can't see because the eye has to keep moving in cicades in order for you to consciously pick up something from your environment. What I'm saying is that consciousness, if you just use a vibrational structure, goes from completely unconscious at the bottom, I can only think about my immediate survival needs, food, sex, water, safety, all the way up to the highest level, which is consciousness of what is

important for the survival and the sustenance of all living beings, not only in the world, but the world as a participatory element in a cosmic play of reality. In other words, the earth can't be separate from the sun. Where do you find most people fall in that range? Well, studies show that about 70% of people fall Studies show that about 70% of people fall into what's called the magical, mythical level, which relates to traditional religious ideas, which is based on what is written is the word of God, harsh judgments. This is, for example, why we have Donald Trump in presidency because the majority of the

people that voted for him are polarized to these harsh ways of relating. Get rid of the Mexicans, close down the borders, keep drilling for oil. Nationalism, nationalism, which is segregation, right? So it's not integration, it's segregation. It's a move backwards, really, in the evolution of consciousness, which always produces pain, which produces more consciousness, right? So it's not integration, it's segregation, it's a move backwards really in the evolution of consciousness, which always produces pain, which produces more consciousness, right? So to answer the question is how do I deal with how well I just am aware that anybody is going to have a different viewpoint of my teachings based on what their belief system has room for based on their own development. And I'm sure every one of you at this table could tell me, if I asked you, what were your opinions on any number of topics 10 years ago, and have any of those opinions changed now,

you'd probably be able to write me quite a little laundry list of things that you no longer would put energy into as a belief that you did 10 years ago, because you've just become more enlightened and realized I was not adequately informed or I wasn't aware enough. So my reaction to those people is, one, I feel sad because a lot of the negative opinions come even when I'm talking about simple things like food, water, sleep, balancing, and exercise program rebuilding your body. I'm talking about simple things like food, water, sleep, balancing, and exercise program,

rebuilding your body, which is really just scratching the surface. The topics like this, you're not even getting into that. Well, I mean, like a lot of what you're saying is going to go way over the head of a lot of people who are interested in making themselves feel better, lose weight, build muscle, whatever. And hearing you talk, for those are listeners who don't know what you look like, they're probably thinking that you look a lot different than you do. You're actually a very well built, very strong gentleman. You lift weights quite a bit. We actually... How old are you? 55. So he looks 35. And he's very, very built more like a a body builder than a yogi,

which the way you're talking would make someone picture that. We walk through your gym and 200 pound dumbbells. Well, we would love, I mean, it's a place we'd love to work out. And it's like, it's almost like dichotomies, you know, like, and that I think, do you think maybe that's where it's coming from where you'll talk about things that people will connect with. And then you're going to talk about these other things that say, okay, though, that's okay, so that's totally.

How's this person talking about both things? How's it giving weight to both of these things? For example, let's talk about, now it's much more popular, much more accepted now when people talk about gut health. But you were talking about gut health when? I started doing a lot of work with gut issues and everything involved with it from food intolerance testing and food allergy testing and digestion elimination whole food eating in 1989. In 1989. I still have records from all my original tests on people. And let's be honest,

if we could go back in time, if we had time machine, we went back in time, and we brought up gut health, and how the gut communicates to the brain and influences our emotions, and could make us feel anxious or stressful, and how the internal microbiome influences everything from chemicals to hormones in our body, they would have laughed. And you probably did.

How were you able to communicate that? And were you able to communicate it in terms like, for example, today we know it's the microbiome. We know that there's a, you know, the lymphatic system connects the brain. Or did you understand it through different means? Or did you give a shit? Because you had your, your mindset on what you wanted to learn and where you were. Well, I had to give a shit because I'm a professional therapist. So, and I'm also an educator. So my, my give a shit because I'm a professional therapist. I'm also an educator. My give a shit is that when people come and pay me money for help because they need help and they're investing money in it, then it's my job to use analogies and to frame the

information in a way that is meaningful to them. So if I'm talking to an electrical engineer, I'll use electrical type explanations for how things are happening. If I'm talking to a plumber, I'll use plumbing analogies. If I'm talking to a race car driver, then I'll try to correlate things that are happening in his body, how does hydraulics work? Well, that relates to circulation.

How does internal combustion work? That relates to metabolism. If your fuel ratio is wrong, then you're dropping performance. And so if your fuel ratio is wrong in here, then you drop performance because metaphorically, the fire is not optimally balanced. So, you know, I want to just take a brief segue on this topic and say, I went through just as much bullshit and stress and Accusations when I brought the Swiss ball into the exercise industry. I was the first guy to develop this This is true by the way now we all we've all been in fitness for I've been in fitness professionally for 20 years

These guys almost just almost as long and I we remember when the Swiss balls came into the gym Poppular and it was like this big deal. I started that. Then that was how, when did you start using those? I started using 90 something. No, I started all my research and development on Swiss balls in 1988 and produced my first videos. Chicago Bulls were the first professional sports team to hire me to integrate Swiss ball training into their conditioning for their team in 1991.

So, if you- This is way before we even knew that they existed. Okay, so this makes me want to take a little bit of a left here because we've had a chance to tour with you and already the house and I kind of knew a bit about you because of all the YouTubes I've watched, the things I've read on you, but I had no idea how many things that you played a huge role in in this industry now, that being a guy who was a part of that

and seeing that, I didn't even know that was connected to you. How much does that bother you? That you started a lot of these really good movements, and you don't get credit for it. Well, the ego part of me can bleed a little bit now and then, mostly because I have to make a living like everybody else. Takes a lot to admit that. When you see millions of dollars being made off,

things that you originated, for example, the whole concept of putting butter and coffee started right here in this room. Oh, get the facet. See, this is the thing. I developed all that. I taught Lerid Hamilton that. He talked all over about it, and then he

got into a relationship with bullet proof, and it just boomed from there. But I've been teaching athletes that since 1990. I did all sorts of research into how to slow caffeine down and studied this extensively. And only after I developed all this, did I find out, for example, that they use yak oil and teas in Tibetan places like that.

So I just got confirmation. But what I was really trying to bring up is, we're talking about gut health, but when I brought the Swiss ball into the industry, I literally had guys walking up into me in the gym, telling me I was a fag. Well, but people criticizing me, I had gym owners telling me to get that fucking play ball out of the gym.

That's for pussies. And, you know, I had very well-canned answers for people like that. You know, I'd say, okay, look, I just did 20 reps with a 180 pound dumbbell over that Swiss ball right there. Let me see how many you can do. Well, most of them wouldn't even try, the ones that did Couldn't even hold the weight usually They fall right I have to watch them that fall off the ball like a kid that couldn't walk I met constant resistance, but remember there's three phases an idea goes through first. It's violently opposed Then it's accepted with scorn

Then it's used as if it was theirs. And I have watched many of my ideas. That's going through this. That's got to be crazy. You were listing more than I had no idea. Like the bulletproof coffee and stuff. I mean, Dave Asprey makes it seem like it's something that he creates. Well, I mean, and some of the stuff can be confirmed. There's some old videos of you doing squats on Swiss balls that are baited way before gyms

had these things. I saw some cable machines out there too and you're describing like your involvement with that. We see that now in free motions and that's a pretty common place. Let's talk a little bit about you. How did you get into this? How did you start with this? I saw a picture of you at 12 years old with a better physique than I've ever had in my entire life. You've been doing this for a long time. Yeah. How did you get into this?

What motivated you to be so passionate or even some people would even say obsessive about learning the body and the mind and how they all integrate together? I'll have to give you a synthesized version of that, but my real father died when I was eight, but my mother and father had split up three years before that. Unfortunately, my father was quite an abusive man. He was a professional drag racer and a competitive dancer and used to take off with all his dance partners and treat my mother very poorly.

My mother had three children by the time she was 18 and then was left on her own and then married another man who turned out to be a very, very dangerous and scary man. And we were raised on a farm, and he was very, very physically abusive and very, very dangerous. I mean, visits to the hospital were not uncommon. And he pointed his finger,

and if you didn't get it done immediately, and there was any back talk or anything else, it was scary. So what happened was as I lived in this pressure cooker of an environment where I was work physically, extremely hard. As a young man, I could outwork multiple grown men and anybody that ever came to my farm and worked with us was immediately shocked that these kid little kids could outwork the adults, like lifting hay bales, for example. The paradox of all this is that I had so much survival fear and the need to protect

my mother that I felt I had to make myself strong and I got myself into boxing and martial arts as quickly as I could. And it was really my fear, my survival fear, that not only drove me to make myself stronger, but my mother's a yogi. So my mother's mode of coping with all this was the practice of yoga and meditation. So my mom's extremely holistic and artistic, you've seen her sculptures, and on the other side, my father was very violent, but also a genius. He was a special effects man for universal studios. He can build anything. He's a master farmer, he's a master with animals. I mean, he's got a lot of talents. He's just a dangerous farmer, he's a master with animals, I mean he's got a lot of talents, he's just a dangerous dude, right?

So through my mother, I was getting all this education on food, nutrition, and a balanced lifestyle, and our teacher was Paramahansa Yogananda, who believed in exercise, and a lot of the things that I teach today were part of my foundation. And from my father, I got the discipline to get shit done and learn to solve problems practically and effectively, immediately. But the drive to survive that and the pain of being controlled like that and like almost living in a prison camp environment, when I went to play sports, when I was in boxing, when I was in football, when I was in motocross, when I was in hockey,

all that emotion, now I had a place where I could hit back, and now I had a place where I could do stuff that was legal. So paradox, my anger and fear, channelled into athletics, got me to be a celebrated athlete, and that's one of the problems. If we use our anger and fear, and it carries us too far, we come to the point in our life where we're realizing it's causing us more harm than good on the inside,

but we're afraid to let go of it because it's got us so much love and so much success. And that's one of the... You connect with it. That's one of the crises I have to help a lot of athletes through. So what I'm sharing with you is that my drive to be fit and to be strong came from two things,

one, the need to protect myself from my father, but two, the desire to win and also was fueled by the fact that my anger and emotion channeled into boxing and knocking people out, which is really what I wanted to do to my dead, but I got to practice on someone for when the big day might come, made me a successful athlete, and to be a successful athlete means you want to keep winning. And for me, that meant study every damn thing you need to study. Whether training, diet, meditation, I don't care what it is, find out how it works, test it, and if it works, put it to use, and keep doing that.

When did you free yourself from those chains? When did you free yourself from that being a major motivator and you elevated from that being a major motivator and you elevated from that. The big change came when I joined the United States Army and I was going through basic training. And I watched how, you know, in my basic training cycle, four guys tried to commit suicide because they couldn't deal with the stress. People were getting sick left, right, and center, breaking down of complete exhaustion and, you know, just literally dying on the vine.

I was always getting in trouble for trying to help these guys. I'm sorry for them, but basic training for me was I got fat and basic training. I gained eight pounds. I'm like Jesus Murphy, I'm getting out of shape in here, and I thought it came here to be with the tough guys. So that was the beginning of it. Then I went into the 82nd Airborne Division,

which is the same shit, but twice as intense. And even then, they were dropping like flies, and they couldn't kill me, and I were always trying to do it. And I had a realization. My father prepared me for the toughest situations in life, like nobody's business. And these mamas boys here, and the kids that grew up in households where everything was just so rosy can't deal with the realities that they just signed on the dotted line to go face in the name of the United States military. And they're mentally unprepared, they're emotionally unprepared, they're physically unprepared. Also, I learned over the years that I had a unique way of

seeing and relating to information and problem-solving that was very, very practical but very, very integrated, which my father was the prime source of. And my mother's also quite intelligent and very artistic, so you put those two together. And I woke up one day and just realized it was a painful internship, but it gave me everything I needed to fulfill what I came to this planet to do, which was to help people find what health really is, meaningfully. So at that moment, you shifted your motivation from almost like the resentment and anger toward your father to almost being grateful that you went through all those trials and

tribulations as a kid. Yes, there was a... It's a hard thing thing to go how old are you at this point? It was 22. There was an event that I'll share that really was the pinnacle moment to this. I fought on the Army boxing team but I also fought in the 82nd Airborne Division Championship of the 30 fighters on our boxing team which was ranked the third best team in the 82nd Airborne Division Championship of the 30 fighters on our boxing team, which was ranked the third best team in the world only Buton beaten by Cuba and Russia at the time of the 30 guys 29 of them were paratroopers. So once you enter into the 82nd Airborne Division boxing contest, you've got to fight all the guys in your own boxing team if they're in your way class. And it's a tough go. It's against the military law for an officer to box in competition because if he gets beat by an enlisted man, it destroys morale and respect.

So somehow, some way, a captain got approved by the general of the 82nd Airborne Division to enter into the 82nd Airborne Division boxing tournament. And none of us knew who this guy was. Did they feel like they were the confident he was going to whoop everyone's ass? Of course they were. And so as the story would happen, you know how tournaments go, a big huge tournament with like 150 fighters, you're watching who keeps moving up the pyramid, right? So I keep noticing this guy, I can't remember his name, but he's knocking everybody out before the second round's over.

And I started watching him. And every time I would knock someone out, he would knock someone out. This went on for like three days. And sometimes we'd fight two or three times in a day for this tournament. So I got all the way up there and I thought, oh my God, man, this is gonna,

so the main event was me against this guy. And this guy was a very skilled fighter. And he gave me a flash knockdown in about the first round. And he hit me so hard that I didn't even know where it was at. And my whole left arm went completely numb. I couldn't move it and I thought I am in trouble here and I'm fighting on one of the best boxing teams in the world and sparring three weight classes up and three weight classes down. And this guy just hit me as hard as a heavyweight boxer and I'm like I have to do something and I knew lots of generals were betting on me. My wife was there, the whole boxing team was there.

So, the moral of the story is, I got up and it was the first time in my life I felt like my life might be at risk because this guy could hit so hard, I didn't know he might just take my head off, right? And so, the week before we'd been practicing a technique that's rarely ever used because it's dangerous, but if it works, it works. And that is when they ring the bell, and especially we use it if you get taken down and get counted out because that's when they least expect this out of you, as soon as they ring the bell, you sprint from your corner across the ring and hit them with the hardest right

hand or whatever you want to throw at him but make sure you don't miss. So it's very unconventional to run in a boxing ring. But instinctively I knew I had to knock this guy out right away because I didn't think I could take too many more hits like that from him and he was really fast. So I got up, I ran across the ring and I hit him so hard it felt like my hand went right through his head and I knocked him out very bad and detached his retina and he could never fight again after that holy shit and so When I went into the changer and I had a complete emotional breakdown because for the first time in my life I felt I crossed the line of sportsmanship and hunted a man and

I realized that the intensity with which I hunted him was the same intensity that my father had developed in me as a survival mechanism and that he had just gotten hit by my father. And I had a spiritual crisis because I could no longer distinguish between survival necessity and sportsmanship because my life was in survival mode in a sporting event. Does that make sense? Absolutely.

So I couldn't find the distinction anymore and it scared me so bad because I could have killed the guy. I mean, it took him about three minutes to wake this guy up and he was convulsing three feet off the ground. He was in such shock. And I knew it was scary even for me. I'd never really hurt someone that bad in a boxing match before.

And I broke down and cried. I just, and I promised myself, and it's even emotional for me to talk about it. I just said, I'm never going to box again. I have to convert this energy into helping people. I cannot, I cannot let fear govern my actions, govern my choices, force me to exercise and do all these things which are ultimately only energizing more fear. And I told the coaches I was

going to leave and they said we want you to stay and be the trainer because however you see I also represent the United States Army in triathlon while I was fighting on the boxing team. So I actually was on two military teams. I trained six hours a day in a boxing ring and trained four hours a day for triathlon. And they could never figure out how the hell I could do that because the boxers couldn't handle the boxing training. And the way I ate was different. The way I lived was different.

And they always just thought I was like some weird hippie dude that could hit really hard. So they weren't about wrong. They weren't about wrong. Yeah. So they said stay and we'll make you the trainer. And we'll let you run the boxing, all the training, all the fitness, all the nutrition.

And I asked them if I could do massage for the fighters because I wanted to do that because it had been so helpful in my triathlon training. So I actually took on the role of caring for the fighters, organizing their diets, managing all their gym training, working with the team physician to care for all the acute sports injuries and chronic injuries we had. So I studied with an osteopathic physician for two years and I did all their massage therapy and no one had ever been a massage therapist for a boxing team before. So there was all sorts of criticisms called gay and people messing with me and I'd be working on guys and they'd walk by and stick their fingers up athletes, rectums, just to kind

of be silly. So it really created like this turmoil in the military because it was so unusual. What year is this? 1984. That pinnacle moment where I hurt that guy was the day that I had to make a decision about what I was gonna let govern my sense of who I am

and what I use my life force energy for and what I'm going to create in the world. And that's the day I realized not only did my father give me everything I needed to protect myself. He gave me the motivation to learn to protect myself. He gave me the discipline to get a job done and not complain and to stay focused under pressure. not complain and to stay focused under pressure, but I also realized that spiritually I had to channel that energy into creating more connection, more harmony and more unity because the pain

that it caused in me to face the fact that I just ended a guy's boxing career and could have killed him just because he scared me. It sounds like you had, you had, you had 22, you had trained half your life to become tougher, to protect yourself, to become aggressive, to be fierce, and it expressed itself fully, and you did it, you did it, and afterwards you realized, well, that's not what I thought it would be, and that's probably why, I mean, that sounds like,

well, you can also see too, I mean, that sounds like... Well, you can also see too. I mean, you can just tell the emotions it brings up when you share the story. You know, how much of this do you still feel that you have to work through? Like, is this something... I don't feel like I have to work through it. It was a very, as you said, a complete experience. It was kind of like an orgasm of self-realization that was full of both awakening, but the realization of all the pain that I had caused myself to try to

accomplish things that ultimately were not taking me in the direction of a greater sense of unity with the whole of your life. Closing your door, opening of another thing. Yeah, I was getting more and more trapped into individualism. If I'm stronger, I can do this, if I'm faster, I can do this. But I work with power animals, and one day I was working through some challenges,

and my first shock or power animal is the bee family. And I went to my bee spirits, and I said, you know, this is the problem I'm having. And what do you suggest? And the bees gave me an image of the whole hive working together to make honey. And the the bee spirit said to me, just this few words, nobody can make honey alone. And that was the message. No one can make honey alone. And I realized that the further you go into individuality, the more you believe you can handle issues with strength, power, and show.

But the further you go into making honey or sweetness in your life or something meaningful, the more you have to let go of individuality and enter into relationship with others because you can't accomplish anything truly meaningful by yourself or we wouldn't be here right now, would we? Now, knowing that and knowing what you came from, how hard is that? Because, you know, being someone who had kind of a rough childhood myself, you know, it kind of forces guys like this to be very independent. You know, now you, you, you had this happen to you, you're making this transition.

Was it a smooth transition? I mean, did you, this boom, that happened? And you totally like, oh, I'm going to all of a sudden align myself with it. They're like, my, did people and grow and continue this path? Or did you struggle with this, you know, you know, wanting still to do things your own or your own way and independent and not allowing others to or let go like you said It was a shift in intention It wasn't the case where I had To then go find out how to live in that new way because my mother raised me that way, right? I watched my mother get beat up and

My mother get beat up and Go sit and meditate and not lose her composure and and do her best to have empathy and compassion Knowing that this man himself was broken and that that was the partnership she'd committed to so she spent 24 years doing her best to credit create light in the darkness and to create light in the darkness and use her art to express herself and her creative pursuits to move that energy. So I learned that and I learned about the importance of diet and the importance of exercise and the importance of meditation and she sent me away to spend time with the monks on my

15th summer. So I spent a summer with monks going deeper into the techniques. And so by the time this event happened, I already had the the spiritual foundation and the awareness, but I just hadn't reached a pivotal point where I made the switch and orientation from exercising and living well and succeeding in sport or in academia or in my career where before my orientation was man I could make a lot of money and I can buy a big house and you know if I'm stronger no one's going to kick my ass and you know fuck all these tough guys I got something for them and you know just kind of that that harsh young man need to feel safe and feel meaningful in the world.

You know when you're young like that power says something right. So for me it was just a realization that I saw clearly that if I continued to project myself in that direction it would take me into more and more having to hurt people or more and more having to win at the expense of somebody else becoming a loser per se. And I'm not against competition, but there's a time when winning actually turns out to be losing in the long run. I'll give you a good example of that, a painful one.

My brother and I used to fight a lot. And my brother didn't handle our upbringing as well as I did. And he committed suicide when he was 34. And when my brother died, I spent a lot of days and a lot of nights crying and remembering all the times when we were fighting and I beat the shit out of them, but I could have stopped because I knew I had the situation under control. And so when you see that that quest for individuality, if you look at it as a knock-on effect, it leads that person into isolation and separation and fear. He was heavy.

And he could not bridge to the spiritual side. He got too isolated and too alone and too trapped in drugs and became part of the hell's angels and went at downhill from there. And so when I saw that I had the chance to use the same amount of life force and I could still keep myself fit and I could still compete, but that my intention was to use my knowledge and my experiences to help other people have positive experiences that would enhance their life instead of detracting from their life and their relationships. It was almost as though I had to go through that experience to kind of knock me into the

next quantum shift of where I needed to go through that experience to kind of knock me into the next quantum shift of where I needed to go to fulfill my life legacy. If I would have been too successful as a, I was very successful as a stock car racer. I could have gone pro, but spirit guided me out of that. I was very successful motocross racing. I was successful in sport. I was successful enough in boxing, but I was not good enough fighter to turn pro without getting my brain scrambled because I like to fight too much and I started late.

Most of the guys I was fighting had 320 fights under the belt by the time there were 20. So I started boxing at 12. So that's a huge difference. That's like trying to ski against someone who's really good that started when there were three and you started when you were 12. That's a lot of important years you're missing out on. So it really, what I'm sharing is if it's not clear is that I already had the background training, but I still was using the fear as the motivation at an unconscious level and still trying to succeed by being better and stronger and pushing the underdog down.

And I realized that in order for me to really get a meaningful message to people and help people heal, that I had to help them over the same problems many times that I had. And the first thing I did when I really made this realization, as I said, all the boxers down in a circle, this is when I really made this realization as I sat all the boxers down in a circle. This is when I was their trainer. And they all had a lot of respect for me because one, they watched me competing and training for triathlon and I won the Army triathlon at Fort Bragg and my wife won the Women's Division.

So they already knew this guy some kind of weirdo because for him to train like that plus do what we do in the gym. He's from another planet. So I sat down with the boxers and I said, and there was 30 of them at that time. I said, how many of you right now have painful, unresolved issues with your father and really wish you could have kicked his ass when you were at home. Guess how many hands went up? Probably most of them. All of them. 29. Only one guy did not have those issues. So as I started looking into this I saw all of us were there for reasons of fear and all of us were there to try to create safety but we were empowering ourselves to create safety with fear.

And the problem is, is when the ego gets too narcissistic, you get what we had on the boxing team, we regularly had problems with them going out at night, going to bars, getting drunk, and beating the shit out of everybody in the bar. And the next thing you know, the cops are showing up at the boxing arena, looking for these key people, and we often had to try to hide these guys so they didn't get put in jail. And this is a big problem because now you're using highly evolved fighting skills to go to a bar where people don't really have a chance against. You'll be like fighting someone with no gun when you have a machine gun. And so you see that it doesn't know how to contain itself without spiritual awakening, without meaningfulness,

without an understanding of the importance of relationships. And so we're right back to how do you make honey where you can't do it alone. So knowing this, we have a ton of athletes and competitors of all different sports that listen to the show. And we've already learned so much of all the athletes that you've impacted. What advice do you give when you take on a team or you take on an individual athlete in this what we're talking about right now? Since that's probably true to about 80 plus percent of people. A lot of the motivator is fear driven.

What do you say to them? Well, there's a number of pathways I take. I do a very comprehensive assessment to see what their belief systems are and what their most stressful events in their life have been to see how their, their psyche got formed. So, will you, will you change your message then if, if I'm, if I'm somebody who's like, for me, I have, I love listening to someone talk like this. I'm not close minded, a very open-minded to hearing almost anyone speak about anything,

but that's not common. A lot of people, there's people right now that are listening to this show that have already turned it off because they heard spiritual, they heard this, they heard that, and then right away, they're turned off by that. So when you meet an athlete or a person like that,

how do you deal with that? Well, what I do is I look at where their structure stage of conscious development is at. So there's several different models you can use, but there's also what are called values memes, which are a meme means ideas, an idea about values that's been studied in their strata, just like a rainbow.

Again, the rainbow strata. So all the way down at the bottom, you have beige in Claire Gravesves model which is just pure survival. Someone who's got a disease and in bed is in beige. Anytime you're wounded and can't take care of yourself you're at the beige values level. The next level is purple which is family and tribe. The next level level is red which is personal power. So here you see someone going against the chief or against the parents or against the military a rebel someone who says screw You I'm doing it my way and this is where a lot of gangs are centered in the red values me

Then you go out of there to blue which is where all organized business and religion is So people that are in red usually create so much stress and so many enemies and so much fear that they have to turn to Jesus Because they are afraid they're gonna die and they need to make sure that they're not going to go burn in hell. So you see a lot of the gangsters jumping up this, why you see all this talk about Jesus for example. And even in athletes, you see a lot of talking about Jesus and God, but they don't realize it because their fear of what they're creating makes them hope that God is up there and that God is this or God is that. But the point that I'm making is that I can tell by talking to somebody and hearing what's important to them where they're at,

where their value structures are at, where their psyche's at in their own psychic development, and therefore I have a saying I develop for my students, always tell a person exactly what they want to hear, but give them what they need. So if you say to me, Paul, my dream is to win a kickbox in contest. We'll call that the red values meme. I might be aware that they're too self-oriented or narcissistic and it's causing problems in their relationships. Maybe they're not getting along with their girlfriend or they're not getting along with their coach, which is very common. So the next level up is blue, which requires a lot of people to work together and to have systems in place to accomplish things so that energy flows efficiently.

So I simply say to them, okay, well, if you want to accomplish this, who's cooking your food? Oh, my girlfriend, okay. Who's boxing gym are you training at? Sam's boxing gym. Who's your coach? This guy. Who's your trainer?

This guy. Do you use massage therapy? Yeah, I love massage. Good. So what I do is I show them in a few minutes. They cannot accomplish the dream. I say, well, if you had no coach and you had no trainer and no one cooking your food, and dot, dot, dot.

Could you accomplish this objective? Well, most of them would say no. Well good. So you see now you need to be aware of the fact that the way you've been managing yourself is producing a lot of pain in all these key relationships because you're so self oriented that you're actually defeating your own objective which is to achieve a championship. So I take them one step up and say, look, this is how the next level of consciousness works. These are the people you have to have on your dream team. They need to each be aware of what your dream and goal objective is so that when they're working with you, they're also contributing and you need to be aware of what their dreams are. Because then you know what you're contributing to. So if this guy's dream is to become a celebrated trainer, well, you know if you become a celebrated

athlete with his support that you can shine some light on him and say he was one of the keepable to help me make it. Now you're inspired to train because the better you do, the better they do, and you know what makes them feel good, you know what makes them feel loved. So now the athlete's orientation goes from totally self and screw everybody else that won't sustain my narcissistic childlike attitude Very typical of a professional athlete and you go to say wow now I realize that without the guy that makes the boxing gloves and about the guy that runs the gym without the lady that cooks the food and without Dot dot dot I got nothing. Yeah, and these are the people I've been shitting on So I take them there.

And each level up comes with its own unique set of challenges. Spiritual growth and development is no different than physical growth and development. If you walk in the gym and you've got three plates of side and you're supposed to deadlift eight to twelve, but you can do twenty, it's time for more weight on the bar. Well, when you're growing spiritually, if you get to the level of narcissism and you learn how to handle that like I described, then God says, if you get to the level of narcissism and you learn how to handle that, like I described, then God says, now you get to deal with the challenges of real relationships. Instead of just telling everyone to fuck off and punching them in the face, now you've got to do the work to create honey together. And so now the spirit bar gets heavy. Now you have to go from,

you have to make an interesting transition from willpower to won'tpower. Where I used to say, fuck you, get out of my way, I'll smack you. Now I have to slow down and say, wait a minute, what's my dream? And is that going to create what I want? What's the idea of that? So you have to learn to use the brake pedal. First, we start off with the gas pedal, we crash into everything. Then we have to learn to use the brake pedal, slow down, think ahead a little bit, and be really clear on what our destination is, so we're

not going sideways to the destination, but narcissism as a concept means I'm only interested in what I want, but I forget there's several other people in this bus with me who also want to go places, right? So it's a transition. And I did want to kind of go back to, you know, now you're the boxing trainer for your division. United States Army boxing. Now, where do you go from there? Because obviously now you've got courses and issues. So there's a process. At this point, are you developing your theories? and did you know that this is something that you were going to eventually put together and to a business and teach others and certifications or where did you go from this from this point?

I always had a strong intuitive sense that my life's work would be oriented around exercise and health because of there there were the only things that I exercise and health because there were the only things that I truly felt passionate about. In fact, I hated school. I never finished the ninth grade, never... Which is ironic from a guy who's surrounded by books and loves to read and research. Well, I'm going to tell you a funny story on that. When I was 22 on the way back from the Army AUSA-10 Mile Run at the Pentagon, which is a big competition amongst Army running teams. All of a sudden on the bus I stood up and screamed, Hallelujah! Woo! And they looked at me and they said, what's the big

deal? The race is over. And I held up the book. What was it? Nutrition, Nutrition, a holistic approach by Rudolph Ballantine. 479 pages. It was the first book I read covered a cover in my whole life. Oh, wow. And so they said, what's the fuss all about? I said, I just finished my first book and they all thought I was just completely lunatic, right? They couldn't even believe it, right?

And they said, well, what is it? And I showed them they go, you're really sick, man. And I found that when I was studying, this is how the soul works. You get that charge when you're moving in the direction you're supposed to be moving, your heart turns on and you lose track of time. What do you think it's already interrupted? But what do you think about people that refer to that as like the flow state, right?

When you get it. Well, that's what it is. Okay. The flow is when the consciousness of the individual, the heart of the individual and the instincts of individual are all dancing in harmony. So when your gut instinct is in line with your heart's love and your ideas are polarized to those motives, you lose your sense of separateness, you lose your sense of time, you know many times I thought I'd only been studying something for an hour

And it had been eight hours and I hadn't even eaten and I forgot I even needed to eat crazy, right? So you're you know, you're deeply in this state of Oneness with something that's far greater than your ego could perceive but it only take sometimes it takes longer for people to be aware for, throughout running and they have a one-nest state, they think it has something to do with just running and they like to run. But when you pay attention and you learn to induce one-nest states with other things, be it painting or studying or yoga or preparing food or whatever it might be for you, you realize that the knock on effect of being in those states is that you have greater sensitivity to when you're moving toward or away

from what your heart is pulling you to do and as long as you live true to that and you're honest about what your needs are in a relationship, you find that everything starts to harmonize around you that people get along better and they appreciate what you're doing, where if they don't appreciate what you're doing, it's like, oh, he's addicted to studying or he's addicted to exercise and then it becomes a painful in relationships. So my point is those one-ness states actually go from something you induce with exercise or X or Y or Z to something that brings you into a state where all of a sudden you realize that your questions are answered very quickly in that state. For example, if I'm in a one-ness state or a peak flow state when I'm painting,

and I look at the diagram or the thing that I'm painting or I'm working on stuff from my work, and I just hold the intention of asking my soul, what's next? And all of a sudden I get a vision that I realize that in that one-n-estate, I can get answers to questions that might have taken me a year looking through books and doing research on the internet to find the answer to. Or I get pointed in the right direction and I know, oh, wow, I got to go look under that rock. I never realized that I needed to go there. Now did you start feeling this with that first book? Is that when you start to? No, I felt it. I felt it in meditation with the monks many times. And they're so powerful. 15 years old. He's getting to go hang out with monks.

So where are they? Where are they located? Yeah, what is this? Well, my parent, my mother switched from Christian science to the Self-Realization Fellowship, which is Paramahansa Yogananda's gift to the west of yoga. That's a philosophy based in Eastern yoga, the principles of yoga, but yoga for the mind, yoga for the heart, there's several yogas, but they're all mixed together. We would travel to the temple in Vancouver from Vancouver, and it was a whole day over,

and then stay overnight and come back. So we often do that on the weekends. So I got this week by week, just like going to church and indoctrination, but learning to meditate, learning to breathe, learning how to move your body, the importance of moving and breathing, the importance of diet, things that are very pinnacle to my whole system now. But then when I was 15, my mother sent me away to a summer camp where I got to spend several weeks with them on a daily basis, and that's all you did all the time. You lived with them all day.

You meditated with them, you ate with them, you worked in the fields with them, you did everything with them. I had very deep meditative experiences, even as a young child. And interestingly, my first full-blown Samadhi, which means total union with all that is, happened when I was 35 in a sort of a strange and unusual situation. I was teaching check practitioner level three and two of my students from Australia said,

Paul, we'd really appreciate it if you could show us how to meditate while we were here. We're having a hard time meditating and wanting to know if you'd be willing to teach us. So I said, well, the Self-Realization Fellowship Gardens are right a mile away. We're yoga on to actually wrote the book, The Autobiography of Yogi, and where the monks go and live and train each other and offer services to the public. And there's a phenomenal meditation garden there sitting benches on a cliff

overlooking the ocean with surfers and dolphins and everything else. So I intuitively knew I'm gonna take them there because there's a bench that I like to meditate on there. And it's right overlooking the ocean. So I took these two guys who had never meditated before, spent, you know, 10 or 12 minutes just talking them through the basics about breathing

and how to work what you do with your mind and things like that. And it was on our lunch hour, we entered into meditation together and I went full blown into a state of complete super consciousness, but no identity of self. I was just one with everything and all of a sudden I realized with conscious awareness, oh my God, I am one with everything and I got afraid. Like, where's my body? And I realized that my body was sitting on this bench. So I was, you can't really describe and words the experience, but it was as though the whole universe was looking back at the bench as opposed to me looking out at the universe. And I came back into my body with just bone, and I shook like in it.

It was like I didn't know what reality I was in for a minute. It took me a second. I was actually almost panicked. It was such a shocking experience. And right when I jumped, those two jumped, and they both looked at me and said, they're twin brothers, and they said it simultaneously, Paul, what just happened? We were completely gone, one with the universe. And we don't even know what that is.

And it scared the hell out of me. And they realized that right when I came back, they came back. So the paradox of it is I had my first samadhi, which takes people sometimes years of meditation to get to. And at the same day I had one, these guys on their first try to meditate with me had that experience,

but typically when you meditate, this is why people meditate in groups. They would say this would be group flow. Well, it would. The ability of, because I know how to meditate, it just happened that the fruits of my practice brought me to to show we say the orgasm of it all, the very day that

they were there. So they got swept along in the current. And it was a very profound experience. So that you know, that's beyond the peak state because in a peak state, you're still there. Do you know where those guys are at currently now? Have you communicated with them? One of them I know, unfortunately, the other one committed suicide and had some challenges and the one that committed suicide was a bodybuilder and it was, shall we say very deeply caught in narcissism. And the one that committed suicide was the one that wasn't very academic. He was more, shall we say, kinesthetic in his natural way of learning.

His other brother was very academic. So his other brother could handle the depth of my training and could ingest it and digest it. But his brother felt so inferior because he had a hard time understanding it and they were constantly measuring themselves off each other. So he kind of drifted away from practicing the things I was teaching, and got more and more into bigger muscles, more power, and never really could follow the flow. It was just the world wasn't the right place for him to make it into that. Do you find this is somewhat of a common theme with people in search of this? Because it's almost like there's this fine line when you start talking about spirituality and flow and consciousness. It's almost like this pain drives them, but it can many times it can succumb to it.

Yeah. It's like you either totally make it or go the other way opposite, right? You can, but you know, those are the extremes. Like if you look at statistics, right? Well, if you're doing a statistical analysis of what's the effects of 79 grams of white turkey meat on bodybuilders. Will you study 500 of them and you'll have a bell curve? Three of them said it made no difference at all or made them worse and 37% said they felt much better and gave them better mass and then you have some range of everything in between.

So humans are the same way. better mass, and then you have some range of everything in between. So humans are the same way. Some are on the left of that curve, some are on the right of the curve, and some are somewhere in between in that rainbow spectrum again. So there's always a range of receptivity and a range of readiness. And then there's also the real issue that freedom, Oshos says, freedom's the most dangerous thing you'll ever experience. So when you have an experience like that and you realize you are more than your body and you realize that God is unconditional of and you realize that God doesn't want anything from you because God has everything including you, right?

You know, one of my favorite sayings to say to people is people used to ask St. Francis of Assisi all the time what is God? And you would say what you are looking for is what's looking. Okay, so when you get that and you truly get that, then there's no need to ask questions about God anymore, but it really brings up the importance of this thing called love and this thing called we, because if you realize what God is, you realize that everything that you're looking at is the physical manifestation of that thing we call God. And to look for God is an admission that you really don't understand. The word means yet. So the point I'm making here is that with an experience like that comes a level of awareness that if you embrace it makes you so radically different than almost everybody else

that you now have to go the path of a pioneer. Pioneers are easily identified by the arrows in their backs. So what do you do when you go back and tell your mom and dad that you don't have to go to church to find Jesus because I found them on the cliff looking at the seals with Paul. What do you do when you find that you don't believe in things like maybe you were anti-gay and all of a sudden you realize God loves being gay, is God loves being homosexual or heterosexual or transsexual and you used to stand at rallies and scream at people and be abusive to them.

So if a person's not... It could be very scary for somebody who's not ready for that. If a person doesn't have enough spiritual courage to transition from one behavior and belief system to another, and they have a lot of self-judgment because if they transition, now everybody that they were Cluclux clanting with says wait a minute. What are you doing? You're Now now you're the outcast and now if you don't have enough confidence to be at peace with yourself as your best friend and Love yourself and meet your own needs and not have to have mom and your daddy or someone rescuing you

Then the journey into spirituality and freedom is extremely hard to endure. Just reminds me of a message that we always like to give with working out. Sal says this a lot, which is, you know, don't work out because you hate yourself, but work out because you love yourself. Yeah. And how many people are really motivated, honestly, when going to the gym, because they're disgusted in how they look or how they feel. And that's really the main motivator. And really the main motivator should be because you actually love yourself, you want to take care of yourself.

Paul, when did you start formulating and putting together what you teach now that's organized together? When you teach the check practices or the check institute or training? Yeah, I have the check practitioner program which focuses on the first three phases of it focus on proper physical assessment anatomy physiology functional anatomy Digestive everything you need to know about the basics of how the body works and how to design exercise programs for every level from injured people all the way up You know, it's very comprehensive and then the holistic lifestyle coaches. how do you focus on diet and lifestyle, how people organize their lives? What are their dreams and goals?

Do they have goals? What are they eating? What is their body's unique individual needs? Do they know how to have a relationship with their gut? So they know when their body is saying, don't eat more of that versus just reading a recipe and eating it because it says someone paper or reading a pill prescription and taking it instead of checking in with what the body wants because the body will guide you to health. So the HLC goes into all the things that you need to know in order for corrective or

high performance exercise to actually work. So you can't have one without the other, but our culture isn't ready for fully holistic integration. So I had to keep the two apart. So the first three years of training, I teach you to be a master mechanic, but then I blow your head right off on the fourth year and say, now guess what, I need you to forget everything I taught you because you're believing in numbers too much. Now we've got to look at why that rib hurts, why the heads forward, why the penis prematurely

ejaculates or won't stand up and get to the real issues and to do that, you have to go out of your intellect and into intuitive relationship and into a relationship with the person sitting across you. In other words, instead of them being an object, you're working on, you have to develop a relationship with them and get inside and see where their hearts really wounded and what their real needs are and what their real fears are and what their beliefs are and why they're having a hard time creating something that isn't so painful all the time. Now what percentage of people do go one, two, three and then just say I'm not doing four,

like that's just... I would say only about 2%. Well, there's tests that you have to go through. You have to send in case histories, live case histories that I can follow up on to demonstrate your effective use of the training to get into level three, because it's a very, very advanced course.

And then level four, you have to do the same thing or I won't let you in the course. And most people aren't disciplined enough to do the actual work and study, and they don't have enough bravery to stand alone as a check professional when what they're doing is so radically advanced and different than everybody else because people criticize it. Whenever they're insecure about someone that has that much knowledge and power, they attack them. So if a check practitioner or a HLC practitioner isn't rooted enough and doesn't have enough connection

to other check professionals, they often fall back into the fold because they can't take the pressure of being different. In other words, they would have just stopped using a Swiss ball when they started getting criticized as what I'm saying. Over the years, how many people would you say have taken your courses?

Probably now, 12, I don't know, 12 or 13,000, the advanced training courses, but countless thousands in my lectures and workshops. Now, we've talked off-air, and we've talked about dogma and how that's not good, that's bad, in any form or any way of thinking. And a lot of the people that follow your courses will refer to themselves as checkies and do develop these groups.

And from the outside looking in, sometimes it can almost seem like they're identifying so strongly with it that it comes across that way. Do you find any challenges with that, with seeing that or hearing that, or is it just interpreted wrong? Well, like any program, just like we talked about that rainbow values, I have people in my program all the way up to level 3 that are at any level of those values. So maybe they're taking this training to be a bad ass and to show everybody else how smart they are and to make a lot of money versus someone who's at a higher level, which would

be the ones that typically make it to level four, which have already crossed through the realization that there is no eye without we. And therefore, what I should be doing is not only working to create my own dreams, but to support others in creating theirs. So you see that there's a sort of stratification of consciousness and the ones that are at the level where they realize that in order to fulfill their own needs to achieve and to create, they need more information than they climb up until they reach that sense of satiation or realize that Paul put a package together and there's none of it that's useless because it's all there for a reason. So those are the more tapped in.

But I'd say only about 3% make it to level four, probably only about 15 or 20% make it to level three, probably about 60% make it to level two in the check practitioner program. It's like a pyramid, you know, each level gets narrower as you go up. I've had friends who were from the medical field, physical therapists and, you know, doctors who've taken, you know, level one, two, and it's very based on, like you said, measurable, tangible,

physical things, you know, it definitely wouldn't be out of place in Western medicine. But then like you're saying, when you get to four, it's very, very different. It's completely different. Do you think that maybe why some people don't go into that? No, the real problems level three, because it takes a fair bit of discipline of using the materials that I teach to be effective enough to turn in a case history that shows me that you're actually applying everything, but our culture has a fast food education mentality. So they take courses and they dilute themselves into thinking that they're an expert, the week they walk home with a certificate, put it on the wall, but then they don't actually do the work to practice that, to change their practice, to

do the evaluations and do the real work that produces authentic experience. So what happens is they operate on the intellectual kite of the certificate, but don't do the real work of integrating that, and the first person I challenge them all to integrate it with is themselves. And I'm watching that very, very carefully. And so those people distinguish themselves as separate from the others because they, when they turn their case histories into try to get to level three, it's as obvious to me in 10 seconds where they're at. And if they don't want to do the work to do another case history,

which means go out and practice it, then they won't come to the class. So a good example is one year I had 39 people apply for check level three, and I only accepted nine. So as my wife, as the numbers woman reminded me that's something like 3,600 bucks ahead. I just lost, you know, probably about 100 grand. And I said, honey, I know we need money, but I refuse to sell my soul. I may not be here to educate the masses, but I am here to create masters. And I know any one of the check level four practitioners in the world has the power to not only educate, but help countless thousands of people,

and anybody that didn't do the work is usually still struggling to try to make a living and can't figure out why they're not making it, you know? Do you often find yourself at odds with the business side of this? Yeah. But you said, didn't you get offers from supplement companies

and like major money came your way to kind of be involved with, but just decided to pull out? I wouldn't get involved because, you know. You name dropped people like Bill Phillips and so I mean these are big, some of the big movers. Yeah, I didn't have any offers like Bill Phillips. I mean, these are some of the big movers. Yeah, I didn't have any offers from Bill Phillips. I wrote for muscle media. Dr. Conley offered to build an entire gym at my design.

This is metrics. Yeah, that metrics is very good. So that I could oversee the rehab and conditioning of all the metric sponsored athletes, which is many millions of dollars at the time. But I could not ethically align myself with a company using Aspertain because I had done tons of research on it. So in my meeting with him, I said, I'm willing to work with you under one condition. You need to take Aspertain out of all your products. And I said, I can give you a stack of research as high as you're ceiling showing it does things like burn holes in people's brains.

And he said that's all bullshit. I'm not going to take that stuff out of there. And I said, well, it isn't bullshit because 150 scientists can't be wrong and none of them are on the payrolls of an Aspertain company. So they're not, you know, prostitutes scientists are considered the modern prostitutes because you can pay them to get any result you want. So I just got up and walked out and that was it. And there's been other opportunities just like that,

but I can't let money dictate my moral principles or ethical principles. Yes, I have to make a living. Yes, I have a business to run. But the reality of it is if I wanted to get rich I could repackage my material and just make it all about having flat abs and big muscles and being a badass and I'd sell truckloads of stuff. But I can't.

I don't, that something inside me starts to die, the instant that I move in that direction. Well, I also think that you're, your level of awareness and understanding. You know already that even if you made all that crazy amount of money, you wouldn't be fulfilled. It wouldn't be rewarding. It wouldn't, it wouldn't be short-lived, you know. I've always, I've always trusted in whatever word you want to use.

The universe will, will use that. But my life experience has brought me into many painful and scary places. And when I felt trapped and alone and got very still and asked for help and for guidance from whatever it was that was listening, I always got it. I always got the direction. I always came up with

ways to make money. I've had money come to me in large sums when I never expected it from places I never expected it. You know out of the blue I'll have some rich athlete or something hire me for you know fifty thousand dollars where the therapy or something. And I found that the universe is always there to support me as long as I am sticking to the principles of supporting people in the world. And I don't have to resort to challenging my ethics in order to get money.

So my spiritual relationship is that we're not alone, and we are part of a much, much bigger process, which is ultimately driven by the grand total need for collective awareness of what we all are. Once we come to the realization that we are all expressions of the same thing, I mean even if you use a standard scientific model, if the big bang is correct, which I don't believe in at all, but since it's a standard model, you realize we were all in bed together at the beginning of all of us. I'm serious, right? We were packed together with a density that the whole universe itself could fit into a teaspoon, right? So if that's not incestuous, and so all

I'm saying is when everything blew apart, incest is best. Came a partners. You understand the concept? Everything blew apart in this big bang, but everything that seems to be separate, that planet over here, it all came from one point. And so even if you use an outdated old materialistic model, if you look at it from a spiritual perspective, that materialistic model is actually a model of spiritual unity that says everything that is or can be known or will be came from one point in space time and one location and that means every one of us is brothers, sisters, aunts, uncles, whatever the hell you want to call it. We're all relatives.

We're not different. And so when you realize that you have a choice to either contribute to the illusion of separation and meanness or money, money, money, or focus on doing the things that make you feel love because power and position and money without connection is a death sentence. And I work with a lot of very rich people. At one time, I had 10 billionaires flying their own jets to see me for help. So I'm very indoctrinated to the spiritual challenges and the real challenges of wealth and abundance. And they're as deep and painful as poverty. It's just the whole thing flipped over back and deeper.

Maybe deeper, right? It can be deeper because you have more choices. So there's more to confuse yourself with. Is that, you know, bringing it back to the business, is that, is that still a challenge for you in the sense that several times now you've brought up ideas or concepts that you originated that are now that became bigger you talked about the coffee we talked about the Swiss ball and yeah another things and it's it sounds like maybe someone's listening can say wow he sounds like he's angry that he didn't get credit for it no No, I'm not angry. It's You know, I or is that a struggle? Is that a struggle for you to see it and go? Oh God I should get credit for that or I couldn't it is emotional at times because I

Only expect the kind of respect that I would give somebody else if you study any of my courses There is a long trail of references. I reference reference reference. I made a habit of always sending any new courses to the people who were key contributors because I referenced their material to ask, am I misrepresenting you? Are you at peace with how I'm sharing? And always got amazing positive responses from all over the world. So my philosophy is never cap a knowledge well. Right. Don't be disrespectful to the source of your own abundance and to the source of your own personal growth or intellectual growth or professional growth and Penny and I spent probably 35 to $50,000 a year on lawyers just to write cease and to cis letters of people writing making videos, and starting programs that were just ripped off right out of my stuff. But there's

lawyers always said, you know, they'll cost you more to sue them. Most of these people aren't, they don't have enough means to make it worth the lawsuit. Does that happen a lot? Does that happen a lot from people who take your courses and then go off and... Yes, it does. It happens at a very alarming rate. And what do you want from them? Because you do see some dissess, do you just want either accuracy or credit or reference? Just all I want them to do is to follow the standards that are given in academia if you're in a university for referencing appropriately, for respecting copyright laws.

For example, I've seen many books published that have art that I created and paid for to have an artist's draw based off my own drawings. And it's in their work, but it has no reference to me. And they know who I am because I know who some of these people are. But the key point that I'm trying to drive home here is that Penny and I reach the point. And my wife's always been the one to kind of be my chief medicine woman. She says, you know, plagiarism is as fine as form of flattery. She said, be happy that they're stealing your stuff.

That's very true. She says, your material done poorly is better than most of what's taught out there. So, it's hard when you have an overhead and it can get tough at times and you don't have, you know, big money supporting you and it can be stressful when you see people. I remember one girl was making like $20,000 a month off of an ebook that she was very good at marketing, but it was just stolen right out of my material almost for batom. And so we both reached a sort of a situation where we made an agreement to just stop spending money on lawyers and just focus on doing what we do best and that's taking what spirit gives me and what I can cultivate and teaching people how to use it, putting it into play and putting our energy on abundance instead of lack. So yes, there was a fair bit of pain to get to that point of realization.

But was that one of your more recent, I guess, growth periods? That was probably, I don't know where she's at that's probably been since about Probably around 2005 I think we just realized it was an endless stream of stress and expense and Could see that lawyers were the only ones winning Well, that makes sense of I mean around the internet boom when it would probably became yeah super apparent Right, I was happy probably left and right. And it was probably getting thrown in your face all the time.

Yeah. Well, what's interesting too, just moving, you know, with technology, you know, copywriting and patenting things at good luck, you know, you're not gonna be able to anyway, moving ahead, so, you know, business is finding ways around it. Yeah, and business is trying to, you know,

find ways to, you know, for business is trying to find ways to, you know, for example, one of the models now, I know you have a YouTube channel, for example, is just to give out information, which I always have. And gain a large audience, and then that can be monetized quite easily, and it doesn't matter if people copy or whatever.

Yeah, and that brings up an important point. One of the challenges, probably the biggest challenge to my system is two things. One, I require that the individual do the work on themselves as an essential element of coaching or guiding other people, or you really don't know what you're trying to get people to do. If you've never gotten yourself off sugar, gluten, or caffeine, and you're telling someone else to do it, you haven't really got any idea how hard this can be and how it affects

your relationships, your every part of you is touched by these things for many reasons. It takes a real commitment and a real discipline. So if someone's taking the training, like I said, for the wrong reasons, if they're looking for a, you know, ego paper, they're not going to make that transition. They're just interested in controlling people for money. But if you're interested in helping people, then you have to have that sense of confidence within yourself that you're authentically offering them something that works, and it is possible to make that transition off a gluten-office sugar or out of a screwed-up marriage or whatever it is. Very few people are willing to do that, so that's my first barrier to my system is I heavily emphasize do not go out and do things to people that you are not willing to do for yourself or you're actually putting them and you in jeopardy and you will have very false expectations of these people and you will often think that they're not complying or that they're you'll blame it on the client when really it's not that the client's not trying the client's scared to death and doesn't know how to do it and you're making them go too fast and you're not giving them nearly the support they need to make a transition of that significance.

The second thing is that it is a lot of work to do this amount of study and grow yourself with the understanding of anatomy, physiology, diet, lifestyle, hormonal, limbic, emotional, psychological. I mean, one has to be fairly honestly interested in the depth of what a human being is and what human life is about, and not just dealing with it at superficial levels, which already separates a grand majority of the people that could be my students out there, just like you see a strata from religions of heavy polarity like Christianity, Islam and Judaism, but by the time you get up to Zen Buddhism, which there is no God, and there's no one going to rescue you, and there's no one going to burn you in hell either, right? But either, right? But the transition from a daddy in the sky, which means your psychological development is out of a child, to nothing in the sky but pure potential that says whatever you create is what you get back. Be wise about how you use your awareness and your intention is a transition of significance. So, you know, you've got a few people up there. We'll call

the Dalai Lama, the leader of that consciousness. And then down at you know, you've got a few people up there. We'll call the Dalai Lama, the leader of that consciousness. And then down at the bottom, you've got all the people preaching in church that Jesus is going to come burn you in hell, but as long as you pay us enough, you'll be safe. So, Salis made a comment about, you know, your YouTube channel stuff. You know, Generation X is proven that, you know, social media is going to drive the future of business. Generation Z is going to demand it. What are you currently doing within your company right now to handle that? A lot. We are faced with a pretty monumental task because

most of the work that we teach requires hands-on training with an instructor. And the cost of flying and the trouble of flying and the cost of food and the cost of hotels and the cost of time-off work is quite prohibitive for the model that I kind of developed, you know, many years ago. So we've been working with web-based technologies on, and I've been working with live online seminars, where you can see me and I can see you the student, and I teach you just like I was in a classroom, except you're sitting in your house in Germany or Switzerland or Australia, and I'm sitting in my office right here, and we've broken up, like we did each move on the health, we did HLC1 online, which is

a comprehensive version of how to eat moving the health. And we broke it into 15 shorter lessons. So a person could sit there, do that little lesson, get whatever they needed. And if they have questions, they can either contact the institute or hire a mentor or whatever. And I've been finding that I can do just as good a job. The only exception is I can't show you how to mobilize an atlas or check the integrity of the anterior cruciate ligament hands on.

So what we've been doing is we've been taking as much of the education as we can, putting it into either prepackaged online training sessions, and then we have mentorship meetings with instructors, or they come in for hands-on training for the material that they covered online. So now that you've gone through the theory of it, and you've seen us demonstrate this, you've tried a few of them with your partner at home, we're going to come put you through the training hands-on and test you, but that brought the number of hands-on group meetings down significantly because they can do about 90% of the training remotely.

So I'm also running mastery groups now where people that want to develop themselves to their capability, whether it be a holistic lifestyle coach or a check for quadrant coach, which is my most recent and most comprehensive program, or a patient I do, I probably do 90% of my work through Skype, and I've been doing that for years all over the world, and people come to see me maybe once every three to six months, usually for two to four days at a time. And then I do deep personal work, such as healing work or shamanic work, or the things that I can't do without them here, but I do all the development and the progressive day-by-day growth in development through Skype. And so I am just feeling overjoyed because I, Penny and I traveled the world for 20 plus years non-stop,

giving hundreds of presentations worldwide, making it around the globe at least twice a year every year for a very long time, and I just became completely and utterly exhausted of moving so much, and also just got tired of constantly outputting and being in front of so many people all the time, and having to really struggle to do my Tai Chi and find a tree in the middle of some cement disaster of a city like New York to meditate with or trying to find food and so the technology timing is beautiful because right now the technology works well enough that I can do a fantastic job coaching people at a distance and it's at a time when I don't want to travel, but I've been testing these groups and the

results are phenomenal. It literally is like I'm just coaching you right here, but you're just through an electronic window. And so we're all working to make our courses much more accessible and easier in smaller chunks. One of the things about my courses, they're very intensive. You know, they range from five to nine days long and you're getting more information sometimes in a day

than you get in a university in a year when it comes right down to rock solid stuff. You gotta know not just theory and fluff. This allows people more time to digest and we set up these mentorship groups to guide people along and forum so they can talk to each other and get questions answered. So it's a it's a transition but I'm excited because the technology is there to support it and I'm working at getting more of my core information out to the public

things like my book, how to eat, move and be healthy, movement that matters, you are what you eat, audio books, the last four doctors, ebook, I got piles and my whole PPS success master program is 12 online lessons, helping you address the 12 most common challenges that stop people from achieving their dreams and being healthy in life. So I'm excited because it's a time that I'm ready to stop moving and

output and on my own terms and the world is ripe for that right now. So we're digging it. What are a few just key things you could tell someone like a listener who is not familiar with your courses and your philosophies that you can tell them on let's say nutrition. What would be it because you mentioned sugar, glutinous, glutinous, and I know you use those for illustrated purposes and I do know you talk a lot about those things but what are some key things that you could tell someone like okay here's some easy take away when it comes to diet. And if you would compare it to what most of the

industry is talking about, because I feel like You know a lot of it is different and it's hard for you hearing some a lot of it now I mean, you know avoiding gluten now is kind of gone mainstream But I mean how long have you been talking about avoiding gluten for yeah, but even the people I feel that are doing that It's like a fad versus yeah with 90 98 yeah, exactly. I mean what are some good key things that someone could take away? Just sort of... Well, I start with what Western price identified to be the very source of what caused disease and native tribes that first made contact with white man.

And that's what we call the four white devils. So, pasteurized dairy, white sugar, processed sugar, white flour, and sodium chloride, white table salt. Those are the four, I call them the four devils, that's my name for them. So if you get rid of, if you get off of pasteurized dairy and onto raw dairy, then you're getting food with enzymes in it, and that's important. If you get off of processed table sugar and start using natural sources of sweetener, whether it be stevia or fruit juice or honey, or there's many things you can use. I mean, I could give you a long list of them, but switching from synthetic or highly processed to natural is critical because there's nutrition in it.

And there's a whole rainbow of options, you know, from hardcore healthy to somewhere in between. And then if you switch from sodium chloride, which is actually a poison to the body, so, you know, sea salt, salt in its natural state, has typically got at least 40 different minerals in it, and up to 40 plus trace minerals, trace elements, nutritional elements from the ocean itself. So when you take sodium chloride, you're actually using one molecule. There's nowhere in nature you can find a sodium chloride molecule all by itself and eat it. So when someone goes to tables from sea salt, high quality sea salt, they're

getting a wide variety of minerals and they're getting a wide variety of trace elements that help regulate the hormonal system for one in the body and it actually becomes a source of nutrition. So because those four are kind of the foundation of the standard American diet, which we call SAD standard American diet, Crap, carbohydrates, refined foods, additives, and preservatives. So the standard American diet is sad crap. That's great. Is that yours? That worked out too well.

You know, I don't know. I've had that in my slideshow. It might have come from Dr. Oliver, who's a great physician and nutritionist, and who's helped me build my programs years ago. But it's a fact. And so do you see that the simple transition is stop eating pasteurized dead anything because it's dead. Milk is the first one because that's one of the most common food allergies and intolerances in the world actually, not just the United States. Go from dead salt to real minerals because those are critical hormone regulators and many other things. Go from white flour to whole grain, but now I would say get a

food intolerance test to make sure that you don't put gluten containing grain in there, and if you have a gluten intolerance, you better take all grains out to your gut heels because once your gut starts to leak then you will create antibodies against any food you're eating because there's nothing keeping them from moving into the bloodstream. The gut wall is permeable, right? I actually did a gut, I actually did a food intolerance test during a period of time when I was having very bad autoimmune issues. And I was intolerant to, oh, whole array of foods. And I took a test later after I had taken them all out,

I allowed my gut to heal. And I was surprised to find that there were only a few left over. And I did not have intolerances to many of the foods anymore. I had experienced exactly what you're talking about. And the ones that last the longest, in other words, if you were to stay on a four day rotation diet like I teach and then retest yourself in another six months,

you might find another one of them, or two of them drop off, and then another six months later. But sometimes you reach the point where the immune system, like for example, eggs, dairy, beef, chicken, eggs, dairy, beef, chicken, the more of rice is the most common thing that people are allergic to in Japan, for example. The more a person eats any food, the more likely they are to develop immune reaction to it if their gut's leaking. The number one cause of leaky gut syndrome is stress, which is out through the roof today. So the point I'm making is you can reach a point

where the immune system becomes so sensitized that no period of time will allow you to ever eat it again. It's just like it's too indoctrinated. You've gone too far. You've gone too far. And then now there are some energy medicine techniques that have been tried and some people claim

that they work well, I've just never seen any evidence of it in my practice. What is the four day rotational diet that you're talking about? That's in my book how to eat moving me healthy. Basically because it takes on on average 56 to 72 hours for a food stuff to go from mouth to anus. So you have two types of timing. You have retention time which is if you eat red beets the last time you see red in the toilet would be how long you retained the beat. The first time you see the red beats in the toilet would be a measure of transit time. How long it took to get from mouth to anus, but once

you eat something, it gets strung out through the digestive process as the body works with it and, you know, manipulates it and some things move faster. So that red beat, if you take a red beat, chew it up, it'll first show up in about 14 to 16 hours in a normal body and in the last show up in 56 to 72 hours. And while it's in your body, your immune system can react to it for as long as one atom of that stuff in your body, your immune systems shall we say monitoring it? So a four-day rotation diet is built so you can eat Anything you want from a list of foods on day one so you might have a pork day on day one And I have genetically Developed it through taxonomy

So that in the four days each of the foods on any one of the four days has no genetic similarity to the foods on the other days. I see, okay. So you eat, let's call it chicken on day one, beef on day two, pork on day three, fish on day four, and only then do you go back and eat any of the meats or vegetables on any of those other colors. You can eat beef all day on beef day. You can eat eggs all day on beef day. You can eat eggs all day on egg day. You can eat squash all day on squash day and your favorite romaine lettuce all day on the day that it fits with

the flesh that you're on. That way because of that it's a four day rotational cycle but the the retention cycle ends in 56 to 72 hours so it means that your immune system gets a 24 plus hour break from exposure to any genus of food, and that calms the immune system down, so it doesn't keep on putting posters all over the wall, wanted, bad guy named chicken, right? The more you stimulate the immune system, the more it becomes like the FBI putting pictures of your face all over, wanted with a reward, because it wants to get you out of there, because it's considered a threat to your own survival. And the longer that goes on, the longer it takes in rehabilitation to get those foods back, but many people have overstimulated, so they reach a critical point you can't come back anymore.

So you must cringe at the way bodybuilders eat with the same foods six times a day every day. Yeah, bodybuilders and everyone else. You know, I saw research once, I saw two independent research studies years ago and it was very shocking. And this is the kind of way I work. I look at a lot of different angles on things. One research was looking into exercise.

How many exercises did the average person know? They found the average person. If they interviewed them and had them demonstrate how many exercise they know, the average person in society knew 10 to 12 exercises. Found a completely different study that looked at thousands of people's diets and found the average person only eight, 10 to 12

different foods their entire lifetime. So there you see the mind's capacity to handle novelty. It's very limited, unless your parents or your elders or your influencers guided you there. So once a society gets programmed into this kind of minimalistic thing, and if you talk to Ben Greenfield, you probably, I'm sure he talked about, we need a lot of variety for nutrients. We have to have a wide number of varieties. We used to eat with the seasons, you know, you, you, if you're,

if there's a pheasant, there you get it. You don't say, well, I'm waiting for the duck. You take the pheasant, right? So we're constantly getting a flow of nutrients and we moved a lot for a long time in human history. We're in nomadic. So we're constantly getting a flow of nutrients, and we moved a lot for a long time in human history. We were in nomadic, so we weren't eating from the same soils. Here, if you go to Safeway and you buy pork, it was probably raised in the same commercial farm for the last 100 generations of that animal, eating commercially raised farm animal foods that are full of fungal micotoxins that are the

low-grade foods that can't be sold to human because they're too nutritionally deficient. So you're eating an animal that's already sick and already deficient. Now, if you keep eating from the animal, it would be like a farmer who never checks the composition of his soil and checks the microorganism population to see where the imbalances are and adjust it. So the food gets less and less and less and less nutritious. And so how do people expect to be healthy with those kinds of nutrition problems? Then they go get drug by doctors and get surgeries instead of looking at the real deal. So the importance of the rotation diet is not just about excluding

foods. It's about, I love it when people have a lot of food intolerances because I say fantastic. Now you get to go to Hindu markets and Chinese markets and Japanese markets and find out all sorts of vegetables and fruits and meats that you never ate before. I think, oh, I can never do that. Okay, good. If you don't want to do that, then you don't need my help. You're committed to being sick and just take the drugs and go that path. I'm cool with that if that's what you want. But you either take this as an opportunity to learn grow and become wiser or you take an opportunity to become less conscious, more drug and more disabled. Right? And so many people are blown away when they find out, you know, what ostrich tastes like or what

eel tastes like and all these things and all these neat vegetables they never heard of and their health gets great and they learn that there's so much more out there and they get so excited and I say good now let's just look at that same principle in the rest of your life and it makes it obvious. It's okay. I've been being dogmatic and restricted with my spiritual beliefs, my exercise beliefs and practices dot dot dot right. So a health crisis is actually probably the greatest spiritual opportunity you'll ever have because pain is a great awakening of consciousness because you have a real motive to change your behavior and be observant. Excellent.

Yeah, that makes sense. You follow that same philosophy with exercise rotating? Yes, it's much more scientific than that, but as a general rule of thumb for a general population, yes, you'd want to, like if you look at my book, Howdy, Move and Be Healthy, I have example exercise programs that are, so when you do your question here, is the more total stress you're under, the easier your exercise program should be in the more oriented it should be towards balancing your internal systems or harmonizing biological oscillators, which are the brain, the heart, and the gut. The more fit you are, the more vital you are, the more healthy you are, the less you're total stressed, the more oriented you are to being able to work out, which means to spend resources, right? To work out literally means to spend, to push energy and resources out of you. Like, if you're going to light a fire, you've got to have some gasoline to run it with. And the more the fire burns, the more gasoline it takes.

Gasling being fuel. But if your diet and lifestyle is not replenishing the fire and you keep the fire burning, well, then the fire just burns out. And that's called adrenal fatigue or chronic fatigue or any number of chronic diseases. So the orientation that I have toward exercise is one, the best exercise in the world is the one you'll do regularly. So we've got to start there, right? If you can't get someone to do something they like to do, the exercise is really another task or another item on their to-do list, which is irritating.

So first I get them to do something that they love enough to do regularly. Once they've gotten the habit of exercising and they know how important it is and how good it feels, then I see now let's improve that and look at exercises that will bring you movement nutrition or that would be better for your internal state or would be better for you to increase muscle strength or muscle mass because you need it because

you're a park ranger or a police woman or a policeman or a nurse for example who's got to move people off of gurneys all the time. Depending on the level that the individuals at, whether they be a seriously injured person, or whether they be a seriously competitive athlete, those two need the highest levels of complexity of exercise science. And Mike Sulemi is an example of someone who had a very, very complex challenge, one because the sport is brutal and requires very, very intense training that most people, if you want to do what Mike did and where, you know, a world championship type event,

there's no room for farting around. So it takes tremendous discipline. And you have to learn a lot and you have to learn a lot of self-management tactics. And so I taught him about monitoring his morning heart rate, which is technique that I developed, and how to read that, and how to adjust his food every day, based on his feedback. I taught him my system for managing his hormonal system, everything that he talked to you guys about. That's the basic system that I developed over years from monitoring and managing elite level athletes, and even serious amateur athletes.

So I put all that together, but the key point that I'm making is I can make it very simple when simplicity is the first and most important thing. But if you're injured, sick, or you're trying to achieve high ranking positions such as an Olympic medal or world level competition, then the complexity has to be there to meet the demands of the environment. Paul, when you look at the current state of the fitness industry right now, what frustrates you the most? First of all, you know, some consider me the father of functional exercise because I

was one lecturing on all this stuff back in the day where there's nothing in machines, Jim's but machines, and I was showing them the science of human movement and how this would ruin athletes and how it did. In fact, one of the professional rugby teams in Australia when I got there and analyzed their whole team because there were the top 10 players injured, I took one look at these athletes and I said, I need to see your gym.

They said, why? I said, because these guys have all the common motor problems and injuries that come from machine training and not functional exercise And they both the two guys that were the doctor and the therapist. I mean the strength coach both stern white And I go, okay, just hit the nail on the head. So we walked out in their gym and they had Quarter of a million dollars of sidebacks and you know, what was it? Nautilus and and One of the the lever lever ones I can't remember. Hammerster, yeah.

Oh, yes. And they were so proud of that. And I said, this is all shit. This is why you're getting your ass kicked. And this is why your athletes aren't rehabilitating. And I gave them demonstrations to prove it. I did things at 185 pounds that the strongest athletes on their team couldn't even come close to doing. I aww. And it freaked them right out. And they said, how the hell are you doing that?

I said, because I know how to train. And this is not how you train. This is how you make poor investments in expensive athletes. And they said, what should we do? I said, well, my advice to you would be call your, the team that gives you the most trouble, tell them you're expanding your facility and you're bringing in a bunch of new equipment and offer them this equipment at half price. And that's exactly what they did.

Lo and behold, that team bought it. It did. It's this true story. It's awesome. And so then we moved in a bunch of custom-built cable columns, Olympic platforms, Swiss balls, medicine balls, dumbbells, and I taught not only their professional team, but their entire farm team how to lift weights properly. And taught them every basic lift as part of my consultation for the team.

And, you know, so the frustrating thing is that we now have gone from using machines and very, very functionally inept exercise technologies to using highly complex functional technologies that require very careful preparation with mass people that are not ready for it So maybe they crossfit well, you know crossfit is One of the categories where people do not know what they're getting into but they get swept into the hype and to the group thing and the raw raw raw the go-go-go and and there's the ego needing to establish safety for itself,

right? That's in our story, that's me when I was still trying to learn to beat my dad up to feel safe, right? So there's always some kind of ass kicker motive in there, but that comes at the expense of not being prepared in the human body's very complex. So when you take a bunch of people eating four white devils and shit food and can this and microwave that and fast food this and steel bars and metrics and all this bullshit,

really poison, and then trying to exercise at a level that requires professional preparation. You have to go through the stages. And technique, too, right? I got pictures of people in classes like that, CrossFit or otherwise, that look like they're about to die, yet they're in competitions, and everyone's cheering them on. I'm like, this giving birth is less painful than what I'm watching here with these clean and presses. So I, to make sure you're clear, I don't have anything against

the sport. That would be like having something against a knife. I would just say before you start juggling knives, you ought to start with oranges. Right? Great analogy. And then go to a knife juggling contest, right? And so CrossFit and some of these, you know, even programs like PX90, they're very, very dangerous to do if you're not developed.

So you get, you know, a term I coined actually is the fit sick person. You get people that are very fit and look good in the mirror, but on the inside they're exhausted, burnt out, and they're a functional medicine field day, right? And they make functional medicine. We see people like that all the time. Well, that's because the world's full of them. So my point is, the pendulum looks like it went from here to way over here. Yeah, yeah. So we went from people not even knowing

what a medicine ball was or how to use dumbbells properly to riding down the road in the back of a push up truck doing a Swiss ball push jacks on top of four balance boards while holding the kettlebell bottoms up and calling that exercise and you know it's just like you know so Contorted but it's so classically American. I mean only Americans could take yoga and turn into combat yoga You know just like completely inverted have to body weight through heat. Yeah, just you know

You know, it's just like completely inverted. It is halfway through heat. Yeah, just, you know, it seems as though our culture has an affinity for self-inflicted torture. And it's almost like the more you can show someone else how much torture you can take the more of a hero. It's a marvelous syndrome, yeah. You know, it's just like, this is non-productive and it leads to a lot of problems,

but the good news for a guy like me is it always brings a spiritual crisis. Because what do you do when you're, when you can't get your muscles to keep growing, when your dick won't stand up, and you could squat a thousand pounds, but you still can't get along with your wife and kids, right? Now, there's no answer for you in the gym anymore. And if the church counselor can't straighten you out, then your health gets worse and worse and your sense of self-esteem gets worse and worse because the sort of, I'm a bad-ass, you're a house of cards. You're a paper boat, as Oshawa would say, right?

And so it brings a spiritual crisis. And that's the perfect time for me as a teacher to have my hands on somebody because they've already thoroughly tested bad ideas. So it's easy to show them that there's better ways to do it. I get called out a bit because I get frustrated when I see you brought up the machines and there's this wave in this generation now and especially with social media that anybody can become insta-famous or they have a million people following them because they look sexier, whatever. And it's tough being professionals in the industry

and seeing some of these people providing information to the masses, you know, teaching them how to do a sideways chest press on a fucking hammer strength machine. Like, what are you doing, you know, and then I go in the gym and you start seeing it duplicate all over And I'm like, oh my god, we're going backwards. Yeah, and but you know that the paradox of that is is that if you study Consciousness and you study physics and quantum physics Only the people that resonate with that are attracted to it

Understand that like if we start talking about deep spiritual practices that are a long ways away from Christianity, Islam, or Judaism, we're going to lose a lot of people because they're not there yet. So the point I'm making is consciousness is stratified. So the same way people grow to be more enlightened in how to love their partner or more enlightened in how to garden or more enlightened in what God really is. They grow more enlightened with what exercise really isn't how to use it. So the, you know, pain is the chief motivator. It's just a fact. So when people are at the level of, I got to be somebody different. I got to make sure everyone in the gym sees me. I'll dye

my hair red. I'll shave half my head, and I'll do the double back-sided dog twister with a twipple, fuck on it. Or something, you know. Can I write down something I want to try that? You know, so the point that I'm making is you see there's that real need for attention, which is using indication of a broken family situation like I described my own to be.

And then they come to an impasse where that doesn't work anymore So that you're saying the next time that I see a kid doing a sideways chess process I should walk up and say how's your relationship with your mom? Just fucking just right breaking down right there Start crying inside the gym. I'll tell you what Paul talking to you You just carry those with you when you do. Talking to you, do you find it difficult to... Because I got to imagine you blow people out of the water sometimes.

Like, you've got answers to simple questions and then you get very complex. And do you find people go, okay, I don't want to listen. You might just, I just blowing me out of the water. Is it, is that, do you find that difficult with a lot of people? Or do you communicate differently to depending on the individual that you're talking to?

Yeah. Yeah, are we having a different conversation right now because of who we are, what we are searching versus. Yeah, to some degree, it depends, you know, as many types of conversations, if I'm having a conversation with a client, then I have to be very careful to make sure that the conversations most likely to inspire the person to move in the direction that they have come to me to move, which is what

I call their dream. If I'm talking to a group of people and I'm giving an electron how to eat, move them be healthy, and I say, I got news for you, the way you're eating could be the biggest factor in whether or not your spine is stable and your abdominals are ever going to be visible. And they might think that's pure bullshit. All you got to do is exercise like hell and you'll have a great washboard, but they don't seem to realize that they've been doing that for years and it hasn't worked. Or they have the washboard, but they can't shit. Or they, you know, or their dick don't stand up, you know, which is very common. So the, the, yes,

you do get this stratification. And you know, when I start talking on deeper concepts in conferences, you'll see three or four or five people just get up and walk out of the room. But I just know that they're not. Do you say some shit to them on their way out? Or do you just want to go? No, I, I don't, I don't want to minimize the chance of them coming back when they're ready. You don't say something like your mom loves you. Yeah. No.

There's deeper meaning in the world. Yeah. No, I say. It's not your fault. I say dragon poking for those that want to poke this dragon. You know, so when people get cocky and concoctures and thinking they know it all, I usually ask them questions that if answered honestly make it clear to everybody in the room. They don't really know what they're no at all. I usually ask them questions that if answered honestly, make it clear to everybody in the room, they don't really know what they're talking about.

Who's speaking to that? Who has challenged you most? What interview? What conversation? Who is, who is, oh, there was a guy named Dave Driscoll in Australia who's got like three PhDs. Oh, you know, we all know Dave Driscoll. Is that where Dave Driscoll is?

I think, did I get the right name, Dave? Yeah, I think so. Yeah, yeah, Dave is all right. Yeah. I think so in Australia, yeah. Yeah, that's right. Yeah. I think so in Australia. He works for Met, no, Gatorade. He was violently opposed to my system and worked for, I can't remember the name of the big

personal training organization over there. Already we have motive, right? Yeah. And so he was upset because there were about 60% of the education that this company was using and they have 2,000 trainers at the time was coming by way of the check institute, but he was trying to sell their educational system.

So he kept going to the owners and saying how bad my system was and it was really upsetting my instructor, my chief instructor over there, Donald Carr, because the owners were actually starting to believe the guy. And he was telling him how much money you could make if you just would sell this stuff and get rid of this check stuff and stop the trainers from thinking that way blah blah blah. So we had a meeting where Donald said, Paul, I'm really worried because the owners are now telling me they want me to cut back on the check education and take more of this guy's education. But this guy's stuff is everything we teach not to do. I don't want this to happen.

What do I do? I said, no problem. If he's so confident in himself, ask him if he will be a willing to debate me publicly and we'll make it an event and we'll invite people and we're going to film it. And if he beats me on film, then we'll share it with the world. If I beat him on film, we'll share it with the world if I beat him on film we'll share it with the world what we had the debate and he asked me did you film this?

yes oh fuck yeah we need this yes we have to be all the I'll finish this all the way yeah yeah yeah this will be the show now show now yeah so I

I and he contacted me by email and asked could he bring five other PhDs with him shut the fuck up oh no I said bring 50 oh yes bring 50 bring everyone Alan asked, could he bring five other PhDs with him? Shut the fuck up. Oh no, I said bring 50. Oh, yes.

I said bring 50. Bring everyone. Yeah. I don't care. You know, I'm, I didn't say this out loud, but inside myself, I am not debating debatable principles. Water is fucking necessary. Food needs variety.

I mean, nothing that I, nothing I'm debating is rocket science, right? It's just everything that's so important that nobody wants to pay money to learn in a university. So they bury it under a pile of bullshit and fluff and occasionally some good stuff. But anyhow, so none of his guys showed up. We had 250 something people show up to the debate. And I won at a vote.

I think it was 83% voted that I was the winner and the rest voted for him. And then he rescinded, he had a lawyer rescind his contract so that we couldn't show the video. Oh damn it. Oh damn it. So Paul, a lot of people say that you are dogmatic about health and fitness, that you got to do everything perfect, and this is the way it's gotta be. Yeah, define dog health. What is that? No, define dogma first.

Yeah, right? Well, a dogma is a fixed set of beliefs. So if you study the science of mind, you can look into Dr. Daniel Seagull's work. He's probably the psychiatrist who's done the most to help us understand the mind of anybody so far. First one, to give a definition of mind. He says, mind is an embodied process that regulates the mind of anybody so far. First one to give a definition of mind. He says mind is an embodied process

that regulates the flow of energy and information. And in his teachings of mind, in the middle, he shows a river and a boat going down the river, or yeah, that's one of his models. And he says, in the middle of the river of mind is integration, one bank is rigidity and the other bank is chaos. So rigidity and dogma mean the same thing.

So fixed ideas that are not adaptable to changes in the environment, or remember, the only universal constant there is is change. So when someone's ideas do not leave enough flexibility to adapt to a changing environment, they become rigid, dangerous, and that's a dogma. But I want you to know that the actual function of dogma comes from all the way back in the beginnings of religion, and it's attempt to keep that which must be practiced as a pure

form, pure. There is some purity in human. Yes. Okay, so there's some there is some purity in yes, yeah, if you if you want to study There's a documentary by Houston Smith on the The nature of fundamentalism which is dogma and and so what Houston Smith who is one of the most respected Experts in world religion and someone who I studied extensively shows is that dogma in its original form was the church, fathers, and mothers being very clear about what must be practiced authentically in order for you to get the spiritual growth and development that the religion intended for its people, the growth and development and

integration of people. So when people say I'm dogmatic, yes, there are certain things I'm dogmatic about if you take anybody and you do not restore optimal flexibility and make sure that they have adequate stability for the tasks or exercises or practices or sports they want to engage in and then progress them into baseline levels of strength, into functional strength

and then to sport specific strength, somewhere in there, if you're doing, for example, CrossFit and your body's out of balance, you have muscle recruitment problems and you've got core problems, and you're doing what now is highly specific strengthening, you have skipped four key stages of development, and you're going to get hurt. And you're just going to be a good looking hurt person. Wow, did we just become best friends? I know. Okay, so the... Finally, somebody said that. Yeah. Okay, so do you see that my dogma is based on a lifetime of study and treating

thousands of people from fat old ladies to yogis and meditators to the best athletes in the world with world records and taking people out of medical retirement and hard evidence that my techniques work, undeniable, and many, many letters and books and you know read Laird Hamilton's book, he talks about my work with him right in there and many others. So I am dogmatic about that which must be kept pure. Like drinking half your body weight announces a water and realizing the best solution for pollution is dilution and water is nature's chief solvent is something you can't get around. You know, if you want a party good party, but eat good food and drink good water so that the party doesn't kill you or you don't get

to party more, you get to party less. So if you want to party, let's do it right. And let's get clear on what you need to be dogmatic about Monday to Friday. So you can enjoy the weekend, right? So a dogma actually has a very specific function of stabilizing concepts, ideas, or energetic structures that need to be in place. You could say carpenters are dogmatic about having a good foundation. Well, anybody that says you don't need a foundation is either living in a bubble, theoretically,

or literally. Or a shitty house. Or they don't know why they, why their doors don't fit and their windows don't fit, but they got a million dollar chandelier hanging over their dinner table, right? But they got a cheese whizandelier hanging over their dinner table, right? But they got cheese whizz as a foundation on their house. So I am dogmatic about what is important to be dogmatic about and when it comes to assessing people's bodies and designing exercise programs properly and assessing what's wrong in people's lives, there are certain necessary steps. And if they're missed, no matter what you fantasize you're missing essentials and

Basics or basics because they have to be adhered to and when you look at UFC fighters and the best boxers in the world and the best athletes in the world In interviews after they've won the championship or the world record or the medal How many times have you heard him say I stuck to the basics? of the metal, how many times have you heard him say, I stuck to the basics. Yeah, every time. Right. The greatest fighters always say, I stuck to the basics. They didn't say, oh, I learned the double twisted dogfucker and practiced that until I could impress everybody.

I said, I need to do that. It's level four. It's level four. They say, I drilled the basics. When I was a boxer on the Army boxing team, we used to spend hours to your arms were dying, doing the same thing, same thing you do in a beginning boxing class with the best fighters in the world. JAP, they called out numbers. One, JAP, two, one, two, three, one, two, three, four. And we did this information for hours. I'm like, it's like the old saying, the young kid says,

I go to a martial arts mastery, he says, I wanna become a badass. And the master says, okay, fine. Today we're gonna begin with the front snap kick. He teaches him a front-cut snap kick and he says, I want you to do a hundred of those. He does a hundred. He waits and waits and waits.

The master comes and the master says, how did it go? He said, good, let me look. Okay, you need to do some more. Another hundred. Well, he does this about five times. Then next day, the kid comes back. He does the same thing. The third day, the kid says to the master,

he said, can we do something else? I'm just sick and tired of these front snap kicks. The master says, no, 100 front snap kicks. I'll be back in a while. And the kid says, well, this is just bullshit. I'm not learning anything. And the master grabs him by the next stuff's his head in the fountain and waits till he's about to drown, pulls his head out of the fountain and says, when you're as hungry to learn

as you are for air, come back. I think that was Mr. Miyagi, right? Who was it? Who was it? Mr. Miyagi was that aggressive? Who was it? Bruce Lee that said, I don't fear the man that knows 3,000 kicks. I fear the man that knows one kick, 3,000 different't fear the man that knows 3,000 kicks. I fear the man that knows one kick, 3,000 different ways or something like that. Bruce Lee said, I do not fear the man who's tried a thousand kicks once.

I fear the man who's done one kick a thousand times. That's the one right there. Very good. So that's a dogma. What is he saying? You must do something 10,000 times to be a master of it. And if you're not, then you don't have a good dogma as a foundation. So you know how to throw 48 different kicks, but you don't have subconscious mastery of them.

And when someone's moving faster than your nervous system can process, if you don't have unconscious mastery, then you can only be out consciously. Well, I got news for you. You don't have time. A good fighter will hit you three times before that impulse gets from your brain to your hands. Now knowing that and explaining that very well, how do you not become dogmatic or so attached to that dogma where you allow yourself to have a cheeseburger and a french fry ever once

a while because you're not so hell bent on everything has to be this. How do you allow flexibility or what does that look like to you? Well, what explain that? Well, that that really really goes to what it means to be a healthy person. And if a dog must stop you from living and being creative and playful, then you are losing the essence of life itself. So everything becomes outcome oriented. I have to do this. Everything's A squared plus B squared equals C squared,

and there's no creative impulse in there. There's no, everything's always trying to become a work toward an objective, but it takes all the awareness away from the process, and life is a process. Life is not an outcome, but it takes all the awareness away from the process. And life is a process. Life is not an outcome, it's a process. So if a person needs the freedom of eating donuts once in a while, and the stress of not eating the donuts is actually more detrimental to their overall psychology and physiology than

the stress of eating donuts within a range of manageability than I say eat the donuts. But when the donuts are actually stopping you from accomplishing your dreams, goals, and objectives, then it's no longer a functional dogma or it's no longer even functional play. It's now some form of So, some form of distraction, some form of addiction, or some form of medication. In other words, what was playful now becomes some sort of medication, and then you always have to look for what is it that they're medicating. And that's where the deep work that I teach the more advanced practitioners comes in, because that really all behaviors are the expressions of beliefs, so you have to get to the beliefs.

So in other words, when someone's using things for reward and play to the degree that it's stopping them from achieving their objective, it's no longer reward or play, it's a delusion. So my philosophy is you can do anything you want. And a healthy person is not someone who has a perfect body or a perfect skin or any idea like that. A healthy person is someone who realizes that the way they manage themselves either increases their ability to engage life and create meaningful relationships and meaningful outcomes in their pursuits or it's getting in the way of them. So if drinking a glass of wine at night makes you feel rewarded for your day and gives you a little loosening and a little sense of freedom or smoking a joint that's good.

But if it gets to the point where you're smoking joints and drinking wine for breakfast and your body starting to fall apart and your dick doesn't work or your sex drive is gone or any of the things that are meaningful to make life go, now you're not healthy anymore. I feel like you've seen a lot of non-working dicks. Well, you know, if you look at it. Well, that's party. I mean, I think that's a sign, man. It's a sign of sympathetic stress. It's sympathetic overload.

It's a key indicator that a male is under too much stress. A woman loses her sex drive. So she doesn't have a dick to stand up. But if a male is under too much stress, it shuts down the reproductive system as a coping mechanism because why would you want to reproduce another living organism in an environment where the parent organism cannot survive? I literally just talked about this. The only thing that will affect my libido is poorly is stress.

The only thing. Everything else is no problem. I connected that, for sure, once I hit my 30s, I totally noticed that. In fact, it's something that I know if I ever noticed that in our relationship, I always tell Katrina, like, take me away. It's time for a vacation. We need to get away. My dick's not working.

I need to be stressed. I know that and I can feel it. I can sense it and that's something that I make sure that I get away and do that reset, you know. Well, I have to say, Paul, you're easily one of the most interesting people that we've interviewed and that I've met. And I know we have a lot of listeners who are,

like it, just like I thought, very polarizing. We're gonna have listeners that are gonna be like, oh my God, great information, awesome. He gets it, and we're gonna have listeners that are gonna be like, what is he talking about? And I appreciate that. I actually appreciate that quite a bit because it's gonna spur conversation,

it's gonna spur debate. We welcome it. It's going to spur conversation, it's going to spur debate. We welcome it. You know, a lot of what you say, especially in regards to things resonates with us for sure. Well, especially in regards to exercise and nutrition, there's a lot of stuff that we've talked about on the show. A lot of the other stuff that you go on is definitely beyond the scope of some of the things we talk about, but I found also very fascinating and thought-provoking whether people agree or not. I think it's important that we provoke thought, debate, and discussion with them people because that's where we're growth happens. So it's

been pleasure having you. Thank you for letting us into your home. We truly appreciate it. My pleasure. And just to close, you know, people don't realize this, but conflict is an important part of a healthy relationship. Like if we don't really explore each other's ideas and work on each other in order to make us demonstrate evidence that those ideas work, then there is no legitimate growth, right? You know, you have to go test an idea to see if it works before you can have an honest opinion about it. But if you don't test the idea and you think you have an honest opinion, you don't have an honest opinion, you have a fear-based dogma, right? If he's right, then I'm wrong.

Well, what if you're both right? What if what you're doing is right for you and what he's doing is right for him, but until you talk about enough and experiment enough, in other words, open yourself to the natural conflict as long as the conflict is in the spirit of higher intelligence or higher wisdom or growth and development. But if the conflict is all about screw you, you're wrong and I don't like you, then you might as well just go back to the Christian crusades, and now we're back to damaging kind of dogma. So my only reason for saying that is I'll be excited if it stirs up a lot of controversy. I'd excited if people find themselves being triggered because using when we're triggered, someone put their finger right on our growth potential.

Excellent. Well thanks, we'll sign off with that. Listen, if you like Mind Pump, leave us a five star rating review on iTunes. If we like a review and we pick it, you'll get a free Mind Pump T-shirt. Also, go to YouTube, check out Mind Pump TV. We put out a new video every single day. You can also find us on Instagram at Mind Pump Radio.

You can find me at Mind Pump Sal, add them at Mind Pump Adam, and Justin at Mind Pump Justin. Thank you for listening to Mind Pump. If Adam at Mind Pump Atom and Justin at Mind Pump Justin. Thank you for listening to Mind Pump. If your goal is to build and shape your body, dramatically improve your health and energy and maximize your overall performance, check out our discounted RGB Superbumble at Mind Pump Media dot com.

The RGB Superbumble includes maps on a ballad, maps performance and maps aesthetic. Nine months of phased, expert exercise programming designed by Sal Adam and Justin to systematically transform the way your body looks, feels and performs. With detailed workout blueprints in over 200 videos, the RGB Superbumble is like having Sal Adam and Justin as your own personal trainers, but at a fraction of the price. The RGB Superbundle has a 430-day money back guarantee and you can get it now plus other valuable free resources at MindPumpMedia.com. If you enjoy this show, please share the love by leaving us a fine star rating and review on iTunes

and by introducing MindPump to your friends and family. We thank you for your support and until next time, this is Mind Pump.