The Joe Rogan Experience - #601 - Katy Bowman

Episode Date: January 14, 2015

Katy Bowman is a biomechanist, heavy on the bio, and author of books on natural movement & human development, solving diseases of captivity. http://www.katysays.com/

The Joe Rogan Experience. Train by day, Joe Rogan Podcast by night, all day. Experience. Train by day, Joe Rogan podcast by night, all day. Katie Bowman, ladies and gentlemen. Move your DNA. You can find her on Twitter, Aligned and Well. She's friends with Rob Wolf, so she must be cool.

And you're here. What's up? How are you? I'm doing well. How are you? Good. I didn't want to talk to you too much before the show because we were talking about something that I'm very interested in, about how you live in Washington State. You found some clever area where it's in Washington, but it's not rainy every day.

Right. And you actually get sun. That's true. How'd you do that? Magic. You know, I followed my family there. Someone else found the magic. And like, it always happens, I decided to go up there too.

And you can see like Vancouver and Vancouver island right from where you're at yeah i could row a boat to canada if i had to if the hit the fan hit the fan and i got my out well that's what you started talking about you started talking about like living off the wild and and that's something that you're really concerned with like are you a prepper i'm not i i'm not really concerned with? Like, are you a prepper? I'm not. I am not really concerned with it, but it kind of goes hand in hand with what I teach about natural movement. Like, I'm trying to put back these isolated pieces of how you eat and how you move and how you think and where you spend your time and even where you spend your money of going, well, if we all just kind of go spend a little bit more time out in in nature but I mean more than the park I mean I really mean wild you can see how it's been done for a long period of time so trying to figure out how to get more movement goes naturally with trying to figure out how to acquire your own food so I thought well I'm a parent of two little kids

I have a limited amount of time so what if our food acquisition is our movement is our teaching our kids is our family time is everything and it's the same hunk of time and we're just out there in the wild I love it then you're in an area that's particularly like dense with wilderness with trees animals, and that whole area, the Pacific Northwest. It's such a... We were talking about how you come to California and everything's so dry. It's almost like, where's the life?

But if you go up there, there's so much life, it's ridiculous. I went up there with my friend Duncan. We were hunting for Bigfoot for a TV show. And we went wandering through the woods. But the thing... Oops. That's my computer. The sound wasn't working up until then? for a TV show. And we went wandering through the woods, but the thing that you... Oops. That's my computer.

The sound wasn't working up until then? Hmm. We had an issue with Ustream. We have a totally new setup. So we're in HD now. So you look lovely in HD. We were... We just got this new computer

and this whole jazz. Maybe we should just run the show for like a minute before we go live. That's what we'll do next time. But anyway, when we went up there, like when you're wandering around through the forest up there, the thing that is so shocking is how many animals there are and how much life there is. You see elk crap everywhere and all these birds and rodents and just so many so many so much variety of life up there and that's the big stuff you can see underneath every footprint there's like one or

200 organisms living in every foot footprint that you take there because it's just it's so deep yeah it's just dense dense is it's the densest place on the planet it is dense of of a plant and animal stuff. Yeah, and you don't have to worry about drought up there. No. Well, not this millennia. Well, not like we do here, you know, in California. We need 11 trillion gallons of water just to balance out what's been lost over the last three years.

Yeah, and even more, I guess, alarming to me is less the total water, but the amount of organization amongst people it takes to get it here. Like that, you know, that's always what I was worried about failing here. Yeah, the water supply, food supply. The infrastructure, the infrastructure, the delivery system, because none of it is actually here. structure, the delivery system, because none of it is actually here. Like, like I'm just thinking of something like a power outage where so much of your water is dependent on it being cleaned. And all of that is depends on energy that requires a bunch of people like my, my in-laws who live here in California, their house has been without power for like two weeks. And they live in an area of Orange County and they had to bring a generator. They brought a generator into a neighborhood

because they're like, well, we got to dig for it. And frankly, we don't have the manpower right now. And like when I start hearing stuff like that, that's when I flee to the Pacific Northwest. So there's an issue with their lines. The power lines are down or something like that. And so they have to dig for the lines to put them back up. Yeah.

So they're living like they're camping for two weeks. Yeah, camping in a very affluent area in orange county i mean this is like you know a nice neighborhood a really nice neighborhood now where you live do you have neighbors i do i mean i have two and a half acres and but there are there are some neighbors you know but it's not within the whole town the whole town is pretty small and you can get to a place to see nobody you know within 10 minutes which I like yeah that is nice if you want to get to nobody in 10 minutes but do I find that like when you're in small towns and small areas the real issue is finding a cool small town with a good sensibility, a nice, intelligent small town.

Because you can find some small towns. If you drive from Southern California up to Northern California, you can drive through some spots where you have these giant Mitt Romney signs that are still up. And there's weird religious signs and these are strange really sketchy communities you're like oh you know boy you got a pretty view but fuck these neighbors yeah it's a retirement community but you know where you are where i am it's a retirement community because it was a it used to be a um a logging town so it's got this waterway there it's next to some ports and so they've been moving wood there and milling it up, and there's some paper mills. But a lot of that business has shut down as people are buying stuff from overseas.

And then, of course, as the wood is not being able to be replenished as fast as they've been taking it down. So I think in Sunset Magazine, somebody wrote an article about this town that you could buy a few acres and that it was in this what they call a rain shadow so it's in the banana belt it's sunny almost every single day totally different than any other place in Oregon or Washington and you could buy an acre for I don't know if it was like sixty thousand dollars or seventy thousand dollars so a whole bunch of people went out there there's not there's no work or anything but they bought their homes and they built them up, but they're all kind of dying now. The people.

The people who originally were there. So it's not that ideal, small, kind of funky ideal town yet, but I decided, well, I can make that happen. You are going to make it happen. Sure. I can do that. You're going to pull people in. I'm not really about waiting around for the ideal to happen.'ll just build it from the ground up sure katie i like it there you go and so um this area that you're at do you take your kids out fishing and take them out

gathering food and all that jazz yeah so it's huge a huge reservation land where we are so the salmon is unreal um i live on the dungeoness river so all the crab like all the crab that you i'm here from dungeoness that's where it comes from so the the um the first nation peoples that live there the food was so abundant like that's all the things like um totem poles and big dugout canoes that you see that came about because they didn't have to really worry about food it's like let's just have today. Let's just sit here until one walks by. Wait till a bear just walks by. You know, the berries and the fruit and the wild greens. And then again, the fish, you could, you know, depending on the time of year, just grab one out of the water. You know,

if they're spawning, it's just not hard to eat there. So I thought, what a great place. There's so many elk up there. I took a photograph of an elk standing in front of a no hunting sign pose because it was like right right when we were driving uh these elk were just wandering across the road and they were just standing in front of this no hunting sign like this is ridiculous that was the first elk I'd ever seen in a while too those things are huge they're huge yeah like have you ever hit one with your car? I have not. No. Come close. I've been waiting, waiting for that to happen. They don't seem that bright. They seem smarter than a lot of people. I know. Maybe that shows the area that you're living. That's true. That's true. They're cautious. They are. Yeah. They're fleeting.

There's a little herd of them that lives in our town. They're the mascot of this little town. And so there's a herd and they've got collars around their neck and we've got elk flashing lights. Collars? They're collars because they just kind of, maybe they are dumb. Maybe they just kind of stumble across the freeway every now and then. So they flash up when they're close to the highway on either side as they're moving back and forth from the ocean. So the collars are like GPS collars? A collar that the government, the local government, has fitted them with

so that they can kind of track where they're going to be and light the sign up. When the collar comes close to these signs, you know that's where the elk are. So you can sometimes look up and see the whole herd sitting in the pasture or, you know, maybe walking across the freeway. That seems weird. You know, I feel like I kind of like the idea that they know where they are, but to put a collar on them and be able to track them, it seems like that's not wild anymore.

Then you're just roaming pets. Yeah, maybe. Well, they're mascots. They're wildish roaming mascots. Wildish. Wildish. Are you allowed to eat them? No.

No. I mean, allowed by whom? No. Well, like hunting laws. No, no. i don't i don't know if all of them are collared i think maybe just a couple of the males are so then no you wouldn't be allowed so when they're collared you can't eat them you can't shoot them i don't know they're not they're not really in like hunting area they're like in these kind of

like the neighborhoods maybe they're dumb maybe they're totally dumb well you'd be amazed at some areas that you can hunt in like uh there's an there's an area called Evergreen, Colorado. And, uh, one of the issues that they have is the local laws allow you to essentially hunt in your backyard. If you have more than like X amount of land, it's not much. It's like two acres or something like that. I, I might be butchering this law, but I remember was uh some sort of uh um an issue online people debating it because people were firing off guns in their backyard like shooting at elk and deer and they're like uh this is kind of fucked up like we're not we're not really in the woods man like my swing set is 100 yards to the right you know so um but they have so many animals up there it's

such a rich abundance of animals and the people that rely on them for a large part of their food. Moderate income or lower income families, if they get an elk, boy, that is a year's worth of meat. You've got a 1,300-pound animal. You're going to get 400-plus pounds of meat from that. That's 400 meals. So for a lot of people that is literally a year's worth of meat for your family so they'll just shoot that fucker right in the backyard be damned all the swing sets yeah everybody's got a duck for a

couple minutes and right come on over I'll give you a ham I'll trade you the salmon fishing up there must be amazing amazing amazing actually went does we're just going down you know they there's that there was a dam up there must be amazing. Amazing. Amazing. I actually went, we were just going down, you know, there was a dam up there for a really long time, like 100 years that they've just taken down. You can actually watch the deconstruction of this dam over a couple years. And we were walking around at the bottom of what has been, you know, this dammed up body of water. And some friends of ours who are biologists took us upstream because they're doing a lot of salmon restoration. You know, they're trying to get everything back to what it was a couple hundred years ago because it's very different because of this dam. And he just,

our friend Keith, he just reached down and he picked up the salmon like right out of the water. This huge thing. I mean, the thing the thing was i don't know a foot and a half more it was 15 pounds and he just picked it right up and he was like here's where the eggs are and then he then it turned out to be a male and he just grabbed it and just shot all of the salmon semen just all through the river because they're spawning and he just he just deals with salmon all day long it was amazing now was he pulling it out of a weir like a salmon weir or was he pulling it just out of the river itself? Out of the river. Was it a retarded salmon? No,

because they're spawning. Oh. So when they're spawning, they just rub up against anything? Well, they're just, when they're spawning, you know, they're trying to get to kind of shallow water, so a lot of them are just kind of, you know, they have to make it up through the river even as the river changes in terms of volume, so where it's a little low, they just

kind of walk up. Wow. They kind of take themselves out of the water. They're amazing. Which is how bears get them, right? Well, I mean, I've seen bears pull them out on TV, like in deeper waters because they're jumping. These ones are actually on the ground, but they're just...

Sort of wiggling on the ground. They're wiggling, yeah. Barely in the water. He said the females would be way more scratched up. You can tell during spawning season a male versus a female because the female is just really desperately trying to get her eggs to some place. And I guess the male will just drop his load kind of wherever. He's less intense about it. What a goofy design by nature, huh?

Yeah, or just amazing. And what I find interesting is, so salmon that they're raising in whatever they call it, like in the fisheries, you know, in the hatcheries, they identify them because they remove what they will call like a vestigular fin. I think it's called an adipose fin. So that they can recognize which ones are wild and which ones are introduced. so that they can recognize which ones are wild and which ones are introduced. And I was talking to some biologists, and part of a lot of stuff that I do is kind of redefining what's actually vestigial and what's just we don't know what it is, so it must not be necessary anymore. And he said, well, it's interesting, because he was explaining it's kind of like the appendix of the fish.

It's not really necessary. And I was like, well, it turns out that our appendix isn't really as vestigial as it was once thought. You know, it's a little bit more necessary. Is it really? It is, yeah. It's not, it has a role. Whether that role is challenged by modern living,

that's really more what the issue is. It still is harboring, I can't remember exactly what it is. still is harboring, I can't remember exactly what it is. It's harboring some sort of bacteria depending on the exposure you have to different food stuff. So I'm going to have to look it up a little bit more. But he said it's interesting that you say that because they're wondering why these fish don't do really, really well. So perhaps it's because they're removing the fin.

And as I did a little bit more research on that fin, that fin in particular deals with assisting swimming through very particular types of turbulence. And so it is, it's not something that you use 100% of the time, but it's used over the lifetime of a salmon. Can't they just put like a tag on that thing instead of cutting it off? I don't know, maybe too much drag? Too much drag. I don't know. Tattoo them? No? I don't know. maybe too much drag? I don't know. Too much drag. I don't know. Tattoo them? No?

I don't know. There's so many problems to solve in so little time. Well, so many problems to solve when you're people and you want to fuck with animals. That's true. You want to cut their fins off

and put collars on their elk. That's true. You know? This area that you live in sounds like idyllic. It sounds beautiful. It is. And does this have anything to do

with what you do for a living? Does it have anything to do with what you do for a living? Does it have anything to do with, like, you're all about movement and alignment and, like. I'm all about natural movement and alignment being a component of that. But I would say that the reason we moved up there is we were just unable to execute our life the way that we wanted here. Like there's a physical blockage to moving in the way that we need to move. And I was like, well, the only way to remove that blockage is to take ourselves away from the environment that's limiting this way of moving, which is larger than it sounds.

It's not like, you know, make sure you get these seven exercises into your workout. It's very broad, and it has to do with the loads that your body experiences, and then that goes for light and noise and all the different ways your cells are deformed by your habitat. So when you talk about, when I talk about movement, I really liken the way that we move to be similar to animals that are in zoos like if you ever go to a zoo and check out that kind of unfortunate thing you'll see these animals and they have movement you know they have cages or habitats designed for them but the way that they use them is pretty narrow and and it goes for us as well. So that's why the move.

I just wanted less people, more space, less rules, less noise, more water. Yeah, and when you say, like, we're being deformed, like, in what way? Well, in the book, the analogy that I use, because I think it's easiest to understand, is if you look at orcas in a place like SeaWorld, have you seen their folded over fin? That's the kind of deformation that I'm talking about. I'm talking about like you are shaped really by the forces that you experience all the time. Your mechanical environment is 100% of the time. And so the resultant shape of your body is based on this exposure in the same way that this orca was missing input. It was missing mechanical input and it was exposed to high levels

of mechanical input that, you know, gets this resultant shape. You know, and the difference between with the orca is when you look at an orca, it's like clearly it's not supposed to be at SeaWorld. And clearly that shape doesn't seem conducive to swimming, you know, at least in a straight line. So we don't see that in ourselves very well, though, because we are the orca in the tank and everyone else is in the tank with us. So it's really hard to see how you would have been shaped. how you would have been shaped. And it's really hard to imagine what the resultant shape of us would be culturally if there were more examples of people who moved in drastically different ways,

which there are not. Well, I know posture is a big issue with Americans. It's a big issue with anybody in all parts of the world that have to sit at desks all the time. You know that expression, sitting is the new smoking. I do. We've tried really hard in this place

to change that up. We've got these desks or these chairs from Ergo Depot. These are called Kapiskos. I had a couple different ones before. I started off

with regular chairs like that. But by the end of the podcast, my back, I've had some back issues with jujitsu. I had a bulging disc at one point in my cervical spine.

And that's all healed up now, but if I sit in something like that, and I kinda have that hunch thing that you get from a chair, by the end of the show, I just get stiff in my back. But with these things, nothing. So something that forces you to sit erect, you realize how few of us actually do that, and how many people have that weird hunch spine thing going on which constantly puts pressure on your spine and i never thought

anything of that until i started doing this fucking podcast and i'm like sitting down all the time all day and it just it really puts into perspective how many people are doing it not like me for three hours a day they're doing eight nine ten hours a day even more staring at computers all day everyone's going blind early right you know i'm my my vision sucks it used to be really good but now i need i need um reading glasses to read stuff that's close up and i know it it has something to do with age but it definitely has something to do with staring at monitors too it's just not good for you no and it's the distance you know um i i try to talk about casts. You know, casts, when you break your arm, those are really easy to see. There's like a physical

structure that you can't move your arm. It's really harder to see these invisible casts. So distance, the distance of something from your eye is a cast upon the lens. So when you look at something, what allows you to focus on that is the distance that you're looking at, your mind, your musculature of the eye will change the shape of your lens so that that distance is what you're looking at. When you want to see something farther, you look up and you look at it and then these muscles, these ciliary muscles in the eye will change the lens shape of the eye and allow you to focus that to that distance. But humans, modern humans in the places where we live, very rarely look beyond 20 feet. I mean, you're not looking at anything. I mean, so like you can say that it's the screen because the screen is two feet away and there's certainly a much greater frequency of screen use,

like by the time you look at your iPod or your iPhone, and you're looking at your computer, and doing whatever work that's on that, that number has gone up. But what's always been high is that you don't see much beyond the walls of your house. So that's another reason you don't have the ability to look very far. Indoors does not allow you to look very far. And so right now with that vision, with kind of understanding, like, why is myopia, which is that nearsightedness, coming up with such great frequency? There used to be one kid in school with glasses, right? And now there are seven or eight.

You have one third of the classroom who can't see at ages six and seven. Kids are starting now to be put in glasses like in four and five years old because they've been looking. They don't even have outdoor playtime. You know, they're not even going outside. And so they know that outdoor time is a factor in those that have less myopia. So then they're trying to test it. Like, is it the near work? And I wrote a piece about this, that there's a difference between going outside. So they're like, is it the vitamin D? Is it the light exposure? But they were able to figure out by isolation that it wasn't that. And so then I, my contribution is, well, what about distance looking? That distance looking

itself is a different variable in something that you don't, it's not a load to the eye that we're very experienced with. But if you had to, again, go out and get your food and you're moving around, it's not just that you're outside more. It's that you need to be able to see things kind of far away. If you've ever gone hunting, hunting is, especially if you're doing like spot and stalk type hunting, being able to look at long distances and seeing and spotting animals, you know, before you make your way over there, that's a skill to be able to look 30 or 40 or 60 feet to the top of a tree to kind of see what's up in there. That's just a, it's a part of your workout that you're missing, so to speak. You're not cross-training your eyes with enough types of exercise. You do two feet and you do however far your television is. And then maybe the bumper of the car in front of you.

I mean, we're not distance lookers at all anymore. So have ophthalmologists and optometrists, have they sort of just accepted the fact that people, their eyes are just going to go bad because this is the environment we live in. So this is just an inevitable fact of aging. And is that something that can be avoided by like spending a lot of time outdoors, looking at long distance stuff and looking at things that are be avoided by like spending a lot of time outdoors looking at long distance stuff and looking at things that are 100 yards away 500 yards away and focusing your your vision on those things yeah well i don't i don't think that they want you to accept it it's

not i mean it's not an inevitable thing that's why they're working on the literature for it so the actual researchers in eyes are trying to find like what it is do we need more supplementation but clearly they're like kids really do need to be outside a lot more because the shape of your the size of your eye is changing and so when the eye freezes or is cast by something near and then your eye starts growing but the lens has to stay the same size then you have this mismatch between the size of your eye and the lens and so that's why this childhood myopia kind of starts moving with you into adulthood. And you become an adult that needs glasses.

So yes, they are calling for that intervention. And then there's a lot of eye exercise programs. You know, people trying to create some sort of corrective. My recommendation is you've got to get yourself near a window if you're an office worker and you have to just take an eye break you need to look as far away as possible just to it's like if you did a bunch of curls bicep curls and you never ever put your your arm down it's like you did them all and then when you were done you tied it up there you can imagine what the shape of the bicep would look like and the function of the elbow and the shoulder and how eventually that bicep would look like and the function of the elbow and the shoulder and how eventually that bicep would not just pull your lower arm up to your upper arm, but would start to pull

your shoulder in towards your upper arm. Same thing goes with the eyes. You know, first the muscles that move the shape of the lens do that, but then the tighter they are, the more they begin to pull the whole structure of the eyeball down itself. And then you're starting to look at, well, how does that affect the pressure of the eye? And so many things that occur in the body are mechanically sensitive. You know, all your pressures depend on all your pressures everywhere else. And when you start deforming the shape of structures, it does start affecting those functions that are position dependent, which is almost all of them. Sort of like when people wear a wallet in their pocket and they get bulging discs.

That's a really common thing with folks. You don't know. If you have a wallet and you put it in your back pocket, please stop doing it. I recently, I used to get mocked because I had a wallet chain because I lost my wallet twice. Okay, relax people. Plus they look kind of sweet. But I got my wallet twice okay relax people plus they look kind of sweet but I got this wallet recently it's a front pocket wallet it just keeps a few credit cards and my driver's license and that's it I went minimalist and ever since I did that I just I'm aware that I can just sit down and I

have to pull because I would always take my wallet out of my pocket and then sit down you know which is one of the reasons why I wanted it attached to a chain because I'm absent-minded. But people that have these big fat wallets, everybody gives you a business card. Oh, let me just stick that in there. You're sitting on a brick. You're sitting on an encyclopedia. Stuff that sucker into your pocket and you've got this weird angle that you're at all the

time. You're always sitting in a weird lump and soft tissue is very pliable. And that's something that, it's also something that really frustrated me about um getting a back injury was how many people were like well you're gonna have to get surgery i was like whoa what the fuck like is there's no way to fix this slow down there's no way to stretch this out there's no way to it's compressed right i've suffered is there a way to decompress it and then i went to other people and they're like yeah of course we do decompression therapy like okay what the fuck well how come this doctor's telling me you got to cut my back Is there a way to decompress it? And then I went to other people and they're like, yeah, of course, we do decompression therapy.

Like, okay, what the fuck? Well, how come this doctor is telling me you got to cut my back? And then there's, have you ever heard of the reverse hyper machine? Yes. Louis Simmons, this guy from Westside Barbell in Columbus, Ohio, created this amazing machine that I have in the back now that I use almost every day. It's fantastic because it offers decompression and this incredible strengthening of the back. It's this amazing machine that as you're lifting up, you're flexing your back in this very unusual way that it's really hard to work out any other way.

And then on the release, it's actually actively decompressing your spine. So it's because of guys like him, Louis Simmons is this power lifter, genius sort of biomechanic dude who figured out he had an injury and they wanted to fuse his discs. And he was like, fuck that.

You know, let me figure out a way around this. And he figured out a way and he fixed it. And he fixed it through this, just using what he knows about exercise and the mechanics of the body and coming up with some sort of machine that would allow the decompression of that soft tissue. And that's something that I think we all have to be aware of when it comes to posture. Like posture is a giant one with

people. I had terrible posture, like most of my life until I started getting back issues. And one of the things that I realized is even though I was healthy and strong, I was able to avoid a lot of pain that was associated with that bad posture. The bad posture was still screwing me up. And like just being able to sit up straight, it feels odd when you do it. But if you do it and like you force your, it's like an active exercise. You force yourself to do it. You want to slump because it's like you feel like you're using less energy, but you're really screwing your body up when you do it. And you're it's like an active exercise you force yourself to do it you want to slump because it's like you feel like you're using less energy but you're really screwing your body up when you do it and you're using less energy yeah which is which is fine in some cases i mean using less energy is good in some cases but i think it has it has less to do with like with good posture the thing with the thing with posture is posture is this modern construct that has arisen

in a culture that doesn't move at all right so it's really like what's the optimal way to be still i was like that's the wrong question we're asking kind of the wrong question yes that's the first question the first question is to assume that there's nothing you can change about your life that you can't move to a wonderful place and cultivate a wonderful city to live in. But right now, if you feel stuck in your job, the tendency is to make that environment better. But I always like to point out that posture isn't something that you would be as concerned about if you were moving a lot more in general, that the resting tensions of your body would be doing all the things that,

you know, we're trying to do in small blips on, on different machines and posture classes, you know, in posture books that you just got to move more to. And, um, also,

um, even standing up though, even if you are moving, like there's a lot of people that move and they kind of have that hunch forward thing going on. And even if you're out there doing stuff, like, especially like when you're exercising you you put a tremendous amount of pressure on your back in really weird ways if you don't use proper posture like squats and things

along those lines it's so super important yeah form form is huge during your workout and all the other times too yeah and form for everything not just for lifting weights right for martial arts of course it's gigantic you know doing things correctly if you do things incorrectly the other times too. Yeah. And form for everything, not just for lifting weights, for martial arts, of course, it's gigantic, you know, doing things correctly. If you do things incorrectly, you put a lot of load on weird areas of your joints and your hips and your back. And so many people want to be healthier. So many people want to be, they want to like get out of this rut they're in and get there. But it seems like just the modern life that most people either have found themselves in by circumstance, by lack of understanding, whatever it is, you find yourself in this way of life,

which it almost makes it incomprehensibly difficult to like be healthy, to be fit, to be, to have, you know, a body that functions correctly. If you're sitting in a desk all day, like what are the things that people should be concentrating on? If they find themselves stuck in a work environment, you're in a cubicle, like, is there a way to mitigate that? There is. Um, I think one of the things that I'm known for most is that thinking, if you think about in terms terms of your exercise, a lot of people will try to figure out healthy to them is what are you doing for exercise time in which you are getting your work done, and you can make that healthier too. So, like, you know, you were talking about your wallet, for example, and I was thinking, you know, you put this big hunk under one hip,

and so you take it out. Well, a lot of people put two big hunks of wallet-ish type stuff under their feet every single day, and they call them shoes. You know, they'll put like a big wedge. High heels. Well, I'm not even talking about high heels. I'm talking about trainers, you know. Like your athletic shoe could have an inch and a quarter as standard.

A man's dress shoe is almost two full inches. It's just not thin and spiky and fashion-y, but that is the equivalent to the wallet. It's just because it's symmetrical, we think of, well, it's symmetrical. Like the thing, your wallet under your hip, it's not just that it's asymmetrical. If you had a wallet in each hip, the problems of having something underneath under that soft tissue would still be there. It would just, it would be more subtle. You wouldn't have this big torque there as well. It would just be kind of continuous pressure.

you wouldn't have this big torque there as well. It would just be kind of continuous pressure. But people put stuff on their feet every single day that affects every other joint north of their ankle, and then you compensate all day long. Your whole entire life you've been compensating, and over time you lose parts to your body. You lose the little contractile components that make up muscle, like the sarcomeres that make up your muscle length.

Those just go away. You cannibalize those, which means you lose range of motion, which means even when you go to move your parts during this part of your life that you've set aside to move, which is different than the rest of your life that you've set aside to not move, you're moving less. You're moving less of you. So that's always a huge one. Like what if I told you your whole body would work better if you fix what you were putting on your feet every day? You're just going to put shoes on anyway.

Like what does it matter what they are? If you could put on a pair of shoes that allowed your whole body to function in a different way, it would be the equivalent to saying I got this new workout, like this new cross-training piece. Your workout is stale. You're not as strong as you should be or that you'd like to be for the thing that you're doing, that you can introduce whole new load spectrum to your body just by changing your shoes. What do you think about those?

What are they called, MBTs? Is that what it was called, the barefoot technology? The rocker bottom ones? What's the deal with those? Are those stupid? Well, they're a rocking chair for your feet. So if you ever sit down in a rocking chair, that's called momentum. And that's not something you want in your gait pattern.

You don't want your shoes to be throwing you forward so that you don't have to expend as much energy to do it. Well, the idea was that you balance yourself constantly on those things. And in doing that, you're using all those little muscle groups. Is that all BS? I don't know if it's all BS. it's just it doesn't mostly bs it's mostly bs mbs isn't they're almost called mbs mbt um it's just this bigger like i don't know i always think a lot larger than that i'm thinking about like there is a cellular environment there is a nutritious movement it's the equivalent to nutritious food is that there is a way to move that is nutritious to your body and you're missing some huge nutrients so you should wear flat shoes all the time right are these okay i got like

skateboard shoes flexible flexible no there's a little bit of a bottom to that right yeah there's there's more on the bottom if you grab them at the top if you grab them and and bend them over what do they do bend them over what do you mean like here's my shoes you wear like flip-flops that's it yeah but also but decidedly not flip-flops because if you put if it's just flip-flops then you have to grab to hold them and that's not good then you've got all this tension in in your foot and your gait patterns all messed up from natural just to hold on the thing on your foot. So it's kind of like your movement is very reflexive. You are an animal. You're a primate.

And your movement should be much more reflexive than it's happening right now. And one of the reasons it makes it so difficult is because of all of these casts, these things that we put on. I think it's fascinating that you refer to a cast for your eyes because I never thought about it that way, but as soon as you said it, I was like, oh, that totally makes sense. Your house is kind of a cast. Your house is a cast. The TV is a cast.

Being in a work environment, an office is a cast. Not looking at things for large distances, that is a cast. The shoe thing, I wear Converse All-Stars most of the time because of that, because they're flat and they're really flexible and light. Those are okay? Those would be helpful. Can you spread your toes out wide? But then there's this whole other level. Spread your toes out wide. Is that important? Yeah, there's muscles in there. 25% of the number of muscles in your body are from your ankle down. Maybe you, maybe not me. No, you might have more muscles. Not muscle mass. Not muscle mass. I'm just talking

shit. What about those toe shoes? Toe shoes? I like the toe shoes. You get a little bit more for that, but you have to transition pretty hard. It's like you've been wearing casts. Like, if you broke your arm, you wouldn't cut it off and then start doing cartwheels and stuff. Well, I do all my

workouts barefoot. Oh, that's great, I do all my workouts barefoot. Oh, that's great. I do all my weightlifting barefoot. All my martial arts stuff is, of course, barefoot. But sometimes I'll take pictures of gym workouts and they're like, what are you doing barefoot, man? Are you crazy? Are you going to drop things on your feet? Guess what, man?

You drop things on your feet, normally you're fucked anyway. If you're lifting 400 pounds, if you have shoes on, you're still fucked. It's going to smush your toes. Just don't drop things on your feet, normally you're fucked anyway. If you're lifting 400 pounds, if you have shoes on, you're still fucked. It's going to smush your toes. Just don't drop things in your feet, dummy. How often do you drop things in your feet? I don't drop things on my feet. I pay attention. Well, that's the thing. If you go barefoot, you learn how to pay a lot of attention. Yeah. Little kids, man. My kids stomp on my feet all the time when I'm barefoot around the house. They do. And they love it.

stomp on my feet all the time when I'm barefoot around the house. They do, and they love it. They think it's funny. While I'm teaching my six-year-old daughter, I teach her kickboxing, and so now she thinks it's funny to just run up on me and leg kick me, and it's starting to get hard. She's six, and she knows how to whip her body into it now. She's a little athlete.

She knows how to turn her hips because I've taught her how to really generate force. So the other day she came up to me and she did this perfect pivot and whack! And just dug one right into my calf. I was like, oh, you little fucker. It was good. It was good. I was proud of her. Proud parenting moment. But I didn't see it coming.

Well, when they're six, they feel like you're invulnerable. So they just tee off on you whenever they want. You can't hit them. No. But, but I mean it doesn't really hurt yet but it's like hey you got it we've got about four more years of that before we're gonna have an issue when you get to like 13 14 you can really hurt somebody so don't we do it to me we have like rules in our house we're only allowed to hit daddy and you know you can't hit each other but you can hit daddy and so we would play all right so i just feel like the best way to teach the martial arts is to show them the techniques but then actually have them hit a person because you can hit

punching bags and stuff all you want but i want them to like specifically target areas like this is the area you're supposed to hit like this is why you're supposed to hit this area so i let them hit me i like it a lot of barefoot stuff point is yeah and a lot of people don't don't do anything barefoot so if you're doing you know the bulk of your movement with barefoot that's great but you could also do your podcast barefoot really why would that help why does it help your workout um but i'm moving my feet around i'm just sitting here well move around i would suggest that you move around so i should do this like wiggle my toes around?

People are weird when they're sitting around barefoot, though. Somehow or another, with girls, it doesn't bother me. But like if I'm sitting, like Eddie Bravo, I love Eddie Bravo to death. He's a good buddy of mine. That dude's always barefoot. He's always playing with his feet and stuff. Like, come on, man. Puts his bare feet up on tables at a restaurant.

Well, he's always stretching. He's a jiu-jitsu master so he's always like got one foot here and one foot here he's always pushing his weight down stretching himself out he's always barefoot that's why he's a master maybe yeah well that the 10 000 hours thing sure you know it's got a lot of years of choking people and thinking about it too but the he's always barefoot like so there's probably something to that. And he lifts weights with Converse All-Stars at the gym. They don't let you lift weights at a gym gym most of the time barefoot. But those toe shoes, wasn't there like a class action lawsuit that said those toe shoes were bullshit?

No, the class action lawsuit was that the woman who brought about the class action said that the advertising implied that all you had to do was buy the shoes that you didn't that you didn't have to figure out how to use your body differently so it had nothing to do with how they how they performed it was about their their claim so the way she interpreted it was that she just had to put them on her feet and that she would be healthier and have less injuries america. Right there. That's America. Yeah. Jesus Christ. Class action lawsuits. Some of them are just so goddamn goofy.

Like, oh, come on. Really? You thought you could put shoes on and you would become a super person? I know. Imagine if it was true, though. I know. Imagine if they... But that's the real issue. If they do one day come up with something that you just put it on and it makes you a way

better athlete. Like, then what's the point of being... Yeah, it's like steroid shoes. You know, like all of a sudden people are running faster. She's like, didn't that South African guy who shot his girlfriend, what's his name? The guy with the blades? Oscar Pistorius. Pistorius, yeah, that guy.

Those blades, like, a lot of people feel like you can actually run faster with those things on because they offer some sort of a spring that you could with just your regular feet. So if they get to that with shoes, then we've got an issue. Do you think people will be taking their own feet off just to get those to win? We've actually discussed that. What we've discussed is not for those blades, but there's going to come a time where there was a guy that we um we talked about on the podcast once he had gotten his leg and his arm bitten off by a shark and he had replaced them with these really high tech replacement hands that articulate and his his leg was perfectly suited to his body and he walked

around with no limp it was so strange and you see the guys they're talking and he's you know having a conversation and talking about that and he's using his his artificial hand and his real hand to gesture and they're like well what they're gonna get better at those like the old days it was like I went to school with this girl and she lost her arm like really early on in life and it was always you know everybody was always weirded out by her She had a hook. It's a very nice girl, but she was

Like if she had like this artificial hand that looked exactly like a real hand is just a different color well what how much different would people react to her then a Decade later if she has an artificial hand that has some sort of an artificial skin component to it that actually has if she has an artificial hand that has some sort of an artificial skin component to it that actually has sensitivity built into it that interacts with her nerves, that allows, I mean, they have some that allow you to pick up pieces of glass and not break them. I mean, they have like really, they allow you to feel pressure, like really sensitive ones that they're developing. One day they're going to get one that's better than your actual legs.

So if you have these regular legs, we can give you an operation, and it'll make you run like Usain Bolt. You're going to have some artificial legs. You're going to go through a rehab process. You won't be able to walk for a couple weeks because we're going to cut your fucking legs off and stuff these carbon fiber jammies in there and put the joint endings in and fuse them with this new thing that we've created.

Yeah, someone's going to do that. Totally. Absolutely. Just a matter of time. Mm-hmm. joint endings in and fuse them with this new thing that we've created. Yeah, someone's going to do that. Totally. Absolutely. Just a matter of time. Mm-hmm. Just a matter of time before we have artificial bodies. Yeah.

Someone's going to just suck your head right out of your brain right out of your head and stuff it into this thing and boom, you're just going to be like piloting around this crazy body. Right? Don't you think? I absolutely think that. That's kind of beyond the point though right until then we got to deal with what we have it well yeah well i would say i mean i'm a biomechanist so a lot of the colleagues that i work with are in uh orthopedic development and stuff that you're

talking about so it's kind of my my territory just to to see what people are coming up with but the the big thing that you can't really get around yet is that your parts are doing other parts than just moving you around. That's always kind of the limitation. If you lose a part, you know, that's the loss, and you can replace it. But to voluntarily take off healthy parts, those parts do things other than just be those parts.

They're participating in the system. It's like kind of the same thing, like you can't take an animal out of an ecosystem because all the other animals collapse without it because they're expanding out of control and something else is dying off. It's the same thing. The part has a role as a part,

but it also has a role within the system. And so that'll be the backfiring on that. The balance, just like putting an invasive species into an ecosystem screws everything up there's a balance there's a relationship between everything else that took a really long time to establish and when you start messing around that around you're playing cleanup for like the rest of your life yeah now when you like when you think about human movement movement, besides the shoes that you wear, what are the other big issues that people have in how they get through this life with their body? Well, people don't walk enough. There's a whole group of people who don't eat any fat

there's a lot of people who don't eat any fat as a whole category of a micronutrient and then they're slowly introducing it back in and they're like i had all these health problems because i was missing um fat or maybe i didn't need any protein or maybe i didn't need any animal products you know like they've got these big kind of voids in their diet. And then there are diseases that show up when you have some void. Like vitamin C, no one even knew you needed vitamin C until you have this group of sailors, you know, in this case. Population that went without it. And it's like, well, they had adequate food, so it's not calories they're missing. And it took, you know, 40 years before someone realized it's vitamin C.

We figured out that we can get them their connective tissue to stop bleeding profusely if we give them oranges or lemons. And then it took another 60 or 70 years for someone to identify that as vitamin C. It's essential. Your body can't live without it. And so walking is really one of those things that your body can't function as it should without it, that there are these other byproducts that go along when you walk in a particular way. So that's where alignment comes in, that there's this series of loads that are created by using your body.

And walking would have been the thing that you would be doing most often. Out of all the moves that your body has done through the millennium, walking is is the load maker that you would do the most and there's people who just don't walk at all they work out they're fit they run they do everything but they don't walk that's huge so just walking alone just important just to balance out your body just to be a normal healthy person yeah it's a it's a it's an input it's an input to your to your body it's and we person? Yeah, it's an input. It's an input to your body. We don't think of movement as an input, but it's a squash. Like your cells are squashed by

the way that you move and then the way that the cells express themselves, their genetic expression comes about by the mechanical environment. It's one of the important environments. And right now for a lot of people, it's walking free. So just walking, it doesn't really have any purpose in our life any longer because you don't have to walk anywhere to get anything done. But like this orca fin, you know, the way that an orca swims in the wild is what maintains its structure.

There's nothing that the orca can do now with this flopped over fin. It can't do opposing fin curls. It can't foam roller out the floppy side. The structure has been set by the fact it swims in a circle. So it softens, all fins soften as the orca goes from its juvenile through its teenager to adulthood. But coupled package with that is swimming in a particular way at depths where the forces are such that it maintains and shapes this structure, this end result that we call an orca. So we are swimming metaphorically just counterclockwise all of the time.

And so our structure, our definition of fit and healthy is like the the peak that this orca with the flopped over fin would ever get swimming in a circle at sea world and you can see the vast difference between any possible swimming program he can be put on there compared to how he would swim in the ocean getting food every day which is like 100 miles of swimming every day fast you know sprints when they have to get something. There's mating. There's social time. There's all these things that go on in the wild.

That is the necessary input for being an orca. And then you just say, well, then what necessary inputs are we missing kind of as humans? Because so much of our physiology depends on how we move and how we don't. physiology depends on how we move and how we don't. So to use an analogy that you used earlier, like the Orca in that pool is kind of in a cast. Correct. Because in the atrophy of like, I had my arm broke once and I had a cast.

And when I took my arm out of the cast, it was like this little shriveled up thing, you know, and everybody knows that when you don't use your muscles, they just decide, Oh, we don't need these. And they shrink down.

And so that's, what's happening to this, this poor things. Yeah. And, and everyone that, you don't use your muscles, they just decide, oh, we don't need these, and they shrink down. And so that's what's happening to this poor thing's fin. And everyone that you know. Even people that you know who have a ton of muscle mass, it's just compared, the distribution of muscle mass that you see is just compared to people who don't do those particular things that you do to get that muscle mass. but there is a whole other mass distribution that would come about were you to do other things. And so I'm, I'm mostly concerned with disease. What I, what I work on most are human diseases and basic human functions. What I'm most interested in is, um, like, uh, getting pregnant, maintaining your delivery, and then delivering this child. We're having some serious fertility and delivery problems,

which are, you know, like the level one for a species, like the survival of a species. Like, what do you mean people can't get pregnant or they can't birth their children anymore? Like, they need special equipment and medical intervention. Like, these are big signs for a species that the same thing happens in zoos, right? Like, animals don't breed well in zoos because they are missing things. And so it's the same thing that we're experiencing. That's an interesting way to put it. Animals don't breed well in zoos because they're missing.

Their environment has been radically changed. And that's the same thing with people. Well, they're supposed to be interacting with other animals. I mean, like there's so much. Well, they're supposed to be interacting with other animals. I mean, like, there's constant what they call night lighting so light beyond the sun and then there's metal noises the loud clanging plus there's all these biological cues that if you ever go camping you know you hear the bugs the bugs let you know the birds let you know where everything else is and that there are cultures who understand who have this input of of noise and from a scientific perspective you know there's like these things all of the data that we have on humans really comes from the last maybe like 60 to 100 years

and so there's like these basic in psychology tests like you've probably seen them where they've got the arrows the outside arrows point outward on the tips and then on the other tip of the other arrow they point inward it's like which line is longer it's kind of an optical illusion and you get it wrong like everyone says that the arrows that point in is longer or whatever and it was like so this is how the human brain works and there's all this data like that only it turns out if you take that test to a culture that actually needs to judge distance for survival, they don't have a problem seeing.

It's not an optical illusion to them. It's just poor skill when we look at it. So all of these hypotheses on humans are studying college-aged humans. Like you're looking at orcas with floppy fins and then are just making all these judgments on whales. And so, with this realization that so much of our, like, your human physiology textbook, that's not human physiology. That shape that you're looking at of a skeleton, that's modern guy who's worn shoes his whole life and walked on flat and level. Flat and level ground, that's another cast.

You're not supposed to walk. Like, flat and level is the most weird, abnormal texture for you to ever walk on. And yet, you've probably only walked on flat and level for like 99% of your life. Your ankle joint has a different shape than someone who has walked in the wilderness their whole entire life. Because they use more parts just to get walking done you use almost nothing to walk walking is falling like that's our that's our saying it's like sure for someone who sits in the chair most of the time and walks on flat and level in shoes that's falling yeah some people have an incredibly difficult time going up hills sure

different muscles and yeah it's different well i uh one of the first times uh i went hunting i went hunting in montana and we were climbing up these hills. It used to be the Great Western Inland Sea. It's the Missouri Breaks. And so it's this weird clay-like material that covers all the ground. And when you're walking uphill, you're sliding a lot down, and everything is kind of slippery. So everywhere you're going, you're constantly counterbalancing and catching yourself and it's not like us

and you get exhausted like you think you're in shape like you could do all kinds of crazy workouts and cross fit your brains out but then you go up these hills all day and you're fucking tired and by the end of the day you're starving you have this weird hunger for animal protein, too. For animal protein and fat. Like fatty things and even pasta or any high-calorie things. There's intense craving for it because your body's just doing all this breaking down of tissue all day long. You're stressing your body in a weird way that you just don't get walking around the city.

No, we've gotten rid of everything anything The only variable that we have less to play with is like intensity like it's like well I'm walking on this I'll have to go faster I'll have to go harder because that's the only thing that you that's left to respond to like that's the thing with cast is if you if you've removed any other Movement that would allow you to do any sort of cross training or use new parts in different ways, then all you have left to do is the same thing harder or faster. But yeah, texture for people who study, you know, the human kinetic chain, like things like walking and like the foot skin.

Like you're going up hills in shoes probably. and shoes probably but if you if you didn't have shoes on that first level of traction would be at the skin which means your skin has to be strong enough to carry the load of your body your hands you know people do a ton of work with their upper body but they won't actually bring the hand skin along to the strength of the rest of their body because everything's a bar right it's like this flat uniform level never occur in naturecur-in-nature bar, as opposed to picking up things with texture. In nature, there's texture that kind of bites into the skin, and then your skin strengthens, and then your arms are stronger,

because that first level of carrying or picking up or hauling out or doing anything is traction. Traction between you and the earth, human and the earth, animal and the earth, whether it's a hand or a foot. Yeah, one thing I've never understood is, I mean, I understand it, but I've never done it. I never agreed with it. It's guys who put wrist straps on and do all these exercises. So you're carrying weight that your hands can't support, but you're kind of doing your body a disservice or you're overloading your joints when you're doing that, aren't you? Yeah. Because what's happening is they can't

get any stronger to carry that because it's, again, it's this limited flat and round thing. Like, you know, you can pick up your kettlebell or whatever, but as it's getting heavier, it's the same handle. So there's parts of you that are left out of getting stronger because the environment is repetitive. So if you go out and hang from a tree, if you're holding on to something that kind of bit in a little bit, then you would be able to carry with your hands whatever you were also able to carry with for the rest of the body.

There's gotta be some sort of cross training for the hands. It can't just be that same thing. So instead of just gripping like this all the time, you should do some stuff like this and you should pull things and you should be. And texture. Texture. Like texture is, it's not musculoskeletal.

It has nothing to do with the amount your joints flex. So girth of a bar is one thing. You know, the size and the shape of the bar and the angle, that's one way of cross training the hands. But there's also the skin. You know, like your skin is just not strong enough because the things that you are exercising with are these kind of smooth man-made fake things or not anything that you

would actually like this is the weight of a log it's like great go pick up a log so we should pick up logs you should pick up logs pick up some some rocks or something or at least haul yourself up out in a tree every now and then instead of on a chin-up bar like in a gym. Hmm. We need trees to climb up. But if you fall down from the tree, you're fucked. Yeah, or are you? I don't know. Maybe you've never really loaded. That's another thing with bones.

You are. You're fucked if you fall from a tree, aren't you? Well, you know what? Same thing about dropping something on your foot. You become a little bit more mindful. You become more mindful. My friend Cameron does this workout. I think he does it once a week where he takes a rock.

It's a 135-pound rock, and he carries it up to the top of a mountain. And he does it one of two ways. Like sometimes he throws it in his backpack. He has like one of those big oversized Tenzing backpacks with all the straps on it that you would use for carrying game out of the woods. He's a big elk hunter. And to train his body to carry heavy loads, he just takes this 135-pound rock, throws it in his backpack, and goes up hills.

Or sometimes he just picks this rock up and puts it on his shoulder and goes up hills and just rotates shoulders. And I think in his eyes, anything you do that's unusual or difficult and training your body and straining it in some way that's going to sort of mimic what he's going to have to do if he's hunting and carrying an elk out of the forest. It's like similar to that. Yeah. It's like a lot of specificity. You want to get to it as close as possible. But he's also still carrying this awkward weight and doing things in a way that makes you your body like compensate and but that's but see that's that's the thing with posture why it's a modern construct like to say that there's a right safe way to carry a rock really means that if I'm only doing this one thing and then sitting down the rest of the time that the only way that my whole body is going to be trained is if I do my training time symmetrically.

whole body is going to be trained is if I do my training time symmetrically, if you were just moving all of the time, kind of in nature, you would balance out naturally because you'd never incur, you'd never encounter the same load twice, really. Right. So I have kids, I have a two-year-old and a three-year-old. We've never had a stroller. We've carried those 30 and 40 pounders exclusively miles. And so that was, that was our big thing, right? You know, so everyone's like, you're, when you have kids, a lot of times your workout changes, because there's just, there's no more time anymore. It's like, well, you carry them and then they're, they're dynamic and they're moving, which means the, it's not like, it's not holding a 30 or 40 pound ball, right? It's, it's a different load because they're for 30 and 40 pounds is distributed at their whim

based on what they want to look at and where they want to go, and they want to go to this side now. So they are strong little shits. Like, they're strong. They're really strong. But they've been carrying themselves, and we've been carrying them. So it's like this relationship between I'm always strong enough to carry them five miles, no problem. Wow, five miles. Let me see no problem. Wow, five miles. Let me see the guns.

Damn, five miles. Wow. That's very impressive carrying anything that's 30-plus pounds, five miles. That you can't put down when you're tired. Like, that's the thing. It's like we've committed. We are in the wilderness. We will have to come out.

Now, do they, like, wrap you? Like, my six-year-old is awesome at it. She, like, pulls full guard on you. She'll wrap her legs around you. Sure. And she essentially almost carries her whole weight. Well, and that's part of it, right? So since they've never been in a stroller, they know how to hold on.

And they could hold on. I mean, when they were, like, six or seven months, they were strong enough to hold on. They could hang from their own hand weight, no problem. But you had to give them the environment to do that, which was never put them in anything. So you, like, have engineered this in a way. Well, I think it was, it's been around for a really long time, but yeah, like that's like in your own personal, in my own personal life. I've just, I, I really do everything that I recommend. I've just done myself. I do it as a workout. I carry both of them. Like when we go places and they get tired, I carry both my kids, a six-year-old and a four-year-old. I hoist them up. I have an 18-year-old,

but I don't care. A six-year-old and a four-year-old, I hoist them up on my shoulders and haul them around. Yeah, that's great. But yeah, it is a really good workout. You know, you're carrying 70 pounds in some sort of a weird way. You know, you got like 40 on one hand and 30 on the other and you're sort of balancing them out but it balances out over time i mean i guess that's a thing with with loads to the body they should balance out over time they don't always have to balance out over an hour i found out something recently that disturbed me um i always throw my backpack i throw it over my right shoulder like this and I walk around and it just sits there.

But then when I throw it over my left shoulder, it slumps down and it's awkward. Like I can't carry it on my, I can right now, but you know, like my left shoulder doesn't know how to keep it up. And I was like, well, what the fuck is going on? Why does it keep doing this? Why does it keep falling over my left one? When I put on my right one, boom, it just locks in place and there it's effortless. But over my left one when I put on my right one boom it just locks in place and there it's Effortless but over my left one. It's like a lot of extra work So I started carrying it only on my left one like you know pick up the slack bitch and But it's odd. Yeah, like I think I'm in balanced in some sort of strange way Yeah, well, you know the shape of your body is it's down on the cellular level

You know they look at bones of people. They could tell who was right-handed. Like, you'll be able to tell you're right-handed or left-handed. That's how all that anthropological data just, yeah, it's bone robusticity. The size and the shape of your bone lets people know what you did with your body while you were here. Well, that's also why balancing, like, certain exercises, like pitchers and stuff, they get imbalanced because they're always throwing with the right hand.

Like my friend Steve Maxwell, he's worked with a lot of people that have issues with their back and stuff. And like one of them was a kicker. And he fixed it all by making him kick with the left leg. Like it was like you're only kicking with your right leg all the time. Do you ever kick with your left leg? The guy was like, no. Like, well, you need to do that. Like you're loading up one side of your body constantly all day,

and the other side is getting virtually no movement in the same direction. So it's just you're going to have to start doing it, and all of his problems went away. Yeah, you can't just do heavy, high loads on one side all day long as your sport. That can't be your sport. It has to have a little bit better balance. But isn't that incredible? Because I don't think pitchers, I really don't know what they do about that now i

think it's probably more people like you now that are interacting with these guys and teaching them things but i think for the most part they just throw the one arm they do and the thing with the thing with the pitcher data like in the ctcns um it's not just muscle like it's easy to correct a muscle imbalance it's like oh you clearly you can see that there's more muscle mass on one side. Their bone, the bone itself is torqued now. So that the reason that you, you know, if you have enough, if you wind up, if you imagine winding up, there's this great need for range of motion behind you. And your body's very efficient.

If you're going to keep challenging the muscles to get longer to stretch to that position, it will just move the bone there so that the muscles can go back to kind of their regular length. So now you have the same range of motion in both arms, but the range of motion is in a different location on your pitching arm because you've twisted the bone there. So that phenomenon of your bones being shaped by what you do is happening to all of us all the time. People will say like, I have tibial torsion, you know, like in my lower leg, it's like, yes, your gait pattern has slowly wound your bones so that your foot is no longer in the same plane as it once was or would have been. So you are, are an entirely

different shape than you would have been had you are are in entirely different shape than you would have been had you been moving differently throughout your life you're you're you're not just like more or less muscle like in shape or out of shape you're an entirely different shape whoa so um i started doing martial arts when i was a young boy and did it all throughout my adolescent years through puberty. So probably my body sort of developed to do those movements. That's one of the reasons why when you take people, one of the big issues with martial arts is some martial arts that are really difficult for older people to learn. And kicking seems to be one of the hardest ones.

For whatever reason, your body just does not want to learn that as an older person. But as a young person like my six-year-old, her little hips are just so like loose. She knows that she can just throw her legs around. There's no resistance. But old people, it's very difficult getting them to kick properly with enough speed and to have impact. But if you get someone that's the same age, has been doing it since they were a child, they could do it really quickly. It's like there's something about the body developing,

doing those movements. Yeah, you know, zero to five is the most, where you're the most malleable. Like your skeleton isn't even set yet. But then when you go from five to 15, probably all the way up to 20, then you are much more malleable than you will be after your bone. We say bone density because it's easiest to measure,

but your bone shape and all that it entails is set really for life at that point. So, you know, if you would squat, so you probably squat a lot more, at least if you're in a martial art, a lot of times there's squatting put into it. But if you take someone who's been sitting at their office, you know, using a toilet their whole entire life, their hips have never articulated to that degree that you're asking them to. And in the tradition of the martial art, the people who came up with the martial art oftentimes live an entirely different lifestyle where their shape, there are shapes that facilitate sports better and and the

and the shape that facilitates it tends to come from the areas that create whatever the sport is that you're talking about because anthropometric dimensions are the size and the shape of your body sports and leverages that you create are heavily dependent on anthropometric dimensions and so your pelvis you might not be able to kick because your pelvis is shaped by not kicking. Like you have a not kicking pelvis because you were a non-kicker. You can't just all of a sudden start to be a kicker any more than the pitcher can decide to not have a twisted bone in his arm anymore after throwing his whole entire life. So if you develop your whole life as a non-kicker and then someone tries to show you kicking techniques is it a there's there a way to open you up and make you more pliable and make your body adapt

to those movements better i i think that there is because you are malleable really as a structure throughout your entire life i just think that it's larger than do this kick over and over and over again there are ways to facilitate the mobility of the entire structure so if it were me and i was trying to teach a martial art it wouldn't just be the kick i'd be like what what do these that are good at kicking like what are the other lifestyle things it's it's about frequency it's not enough it's not enough load like not kicking you're constantly adapting to not kicking so the amount that you kick is mean, how many kicks are you going to practice? A hundred?

A hundred. Like it's so, it's so, it's so, it's too small. It's so small what you're asking to adapt to that there are ways to create change in shape and bones. And there's evidence that it really does happen throughout a lifetime. It's just the exercise paradigm is so small. The training paradigm is so small. It's like, if you want to become more malleable, you have to change everything that you do all of the time and you will adapt to that.

Do people have a built-in limitation as far as their flexibility or is it simply a matter of the amount of time and effort you spend trying to expand your flexibility? I don't think humans have a built-in limitation from birth, but I think that your range of motion gets set really, really early. And we are in a mobilizing culture. Like we immobilize our babies really like our whole culture really doesn't work unless your kids are quiet and still in some place at the time in which you're the most dynamic. um now people now you know we used to roll around in the back of our station wagon but now kids are like locked in even more for a longer period of time and they have more casts on them now so they're very very inflexible extremely inflexible

or their ranges of motion are in way different planes than they would be. So like you can still have 50 degrees of hip motion, but it's all in front of you instead of part of it being behind you. Right. Yeah. That's one of the weird ones in teaching is teaching people to lift their leg up and to move it like in this range, like whether it's a cross or this one is even weirder, lifting your leg up. It's called a hook kick.

You lift your leg up and bring it across this way. It's just a different movement and looseness of the hips. And I've talked to people about it. And one of the big cop-outs is people go, I'm not naturally flexible. You're naturally flexible. And I'm like, man, I don't know about all that. I don't seem naturally flexible. I see my mom. I see my sister. Like they're not, they're not any, but I've done it my whole life. So I've become, but there was this guy that used to work out at our gym. And he was really like, very dedicated athletes, a pro football player who retired and started getting into jujitsu. And he had massive flexibility issues for a while,

but this guy was such a dedicated athlete that he would get after practice, he would do his training, and then he would stretch, like painful stretches. You could see that guy putting way more time in it. And then like a year later, he's doing the splits. And I pointed it to everybody in the class, I go, I don't want to hear anybody tell me

you can't get flexible. Because this fucking guy got flexible in a year. I go, I don't want to hear anybody tell me you can't get flexible. Because this fucking guy got flexible in a year. Like in a year, this guy was this giant 250 pound, like giant quads, like all stiff from all these years of dead lifting and all that jazz. And this guy figured out like, hey, in order to get good at jujitsu, I'm going to have to really stretch. And we all used him as an example. Okay, now I know. Like it can be done, but you've got to really do it and you got to do it it's gonna suck and so I'm gonna feel comfortable it's gonna you're gonna have to stretch that tissue out yeah it's

frequency I mean I think the easiest way to say is it's it's all changeable but you have to be super diligent it's about the amount of time that you're asking your body to do something and if you imagine the shape of whatever kick you can do now, like whatever small circle it is, and then you imagine this kick that you want to have, your kicks just have to, you have to coax the edge of it. Like it's like your, your body's like clay, right? You're just, you're just doing the slow reshaping. You're slowly reshaping and, and you want to just be imagining the shape that you're trying to make and you're just pushing the limits of the tissue because you you've been doing it so long you have the parts your muscle mass becomes longer and shorter as necessary the the orientation of the

bone in its socket and all the support tissues like those it takes a while to adapt it takes a year it's not like i've been doing this for six weeks when is it going to get better it's like you've been not doing it for 40 years. So you just have to look about it. You have to look at it more in terms of time, like realistic time in physiology. And I think anyone can really accomplish some serious physiological, physical transformations. But, again, not in that one hour that they allow themselves three times a week. It's got to be bigger.

Well, everybody wants a pill. Sure. You know, I mean, it's fucking Dr. Oz. Every time you see him on TV, he's pushing some goddamn diet pill. They dragged him in front of Congress because of that shit. He was lying about miracle diet pills. But that's the real issue with our culture is we want to eat things to lose weight. Yeah.

You know, we want to put more food in our fat faces. And we just want, oh, this diet is going to make you lose weight. Oh, okay. But what you're doing by telling people that you can have a pill and lose weight is what you're doing is denying the reality of change and that change requires time and effort

and you can't just pop something in there and get a shot and everything goes away and all your fat shrinks away and like people that want to like there's this friend just she got liposuction and didn't need it I mean she might have been 20 pounds overweight like maybe if that like that's a few months of dedication that's it just a few months of dedication. That's it. Just a few months of, let's watch our diet. Let's, you know, and, you know, she's got kids and blah, blah, blah.

And she, you know, has a business and blah, blah, blah. She just doesn't have that much time. But you had a fucking vacuum stuffed under your skin and they sucked all the fat out. And now you got to wear a girdle and they got to wear these compression shorts and shit. And everything's all fucked up and lumpy. And like, it's crazy. Ooze and pus just a drain on her leg. Because the fat that they suck out of it.

Like everything gets infected. And it's all fucking pussy and shit. Like, you're going to go through two months of rehabilitation. You're going to recover. It's going to take you. Like, yeah, you look slightly thinner right away, but at what cost? But the instantaneous nature of the gratification of just going to the doctor, all right, you're going to suck it all out, right? Like the same thing as

the doctor telling me, oh, you're going to, we're going to have to fuse your disc. Like you're going to what? Like, wait a minute, I'm moving around. Everything seems to be, there's no way to fix this. It's just going to get worse. Like to fix this. It's just going to get worse. Like, they always say it's just going to get worse. Well, if I continue to do the same shit that made it bad, it's just going to get worse, right? Well, isn't there some sort of a way to change that? But nobody thinks about it that way. Everybody wants instantaneous gratification. wants instantaneous gratification. We're in a weird space right now where we want to be better in the very same habit,

doing the same things that got us to where we are in the first place. It's so weird. It's like, when does that work anywhere else? This is what has happened. This is the ramifications of all those things that you did. So the solution, the pill is really so that I don't have to change any of those things that got me there. It's like, everyone should take a class

in human physiology or something. Well, there's also the reality of life, though, of work. You know, most people have a job that requires them to stay in a spot. And it's really difficult to do anything about that. I have this Jarvis desk, not this one, but over there in the other room that Jamie set up. You press a button and it stands with you.

So, like, as you're at your office, you can do this and you can just go back and sit down and you move around. The idea is to give yourself, like, a couple of minutes sitting, a couple of minutes standing and keep moving. Like, is that effective? That's good. That's amazing. So, there's, like, a whole, if you just talk about your office, I'm not, I like the standing workstation, right? So the sitting kills stuff. Sitting's worse than smoking.

Then everyone's like, I'm never going to sit down ever. It's not worse, right? I don't know. What if you chain smoke? Well, you've been chain sitting for a long time. Well, if you chain smoke and chain sit, then you're fucked. Well, maybe smoking's been saving your life by going outside for a smoke break. Those small walks.

The literature is like, make sure you take a small walk every 20 minutes. That times perfectly with a cigarette break. Since it's the old smoking, it's the old smoking. But could you imagine someone telling you, I'll work in your office but I've got to take a walk every 20 minutes. Fuck off. You're not going to get anything done.

You know what? I tell people all the time that they should do their phone calls walking like like make your save up your phone calls and then just go out and just take a 20 minute stroll or whatever and then you'd be like gotta stop right here because i don't have service if i keep walking yes yeah living in the city it's all different now yeah i don't know where these things well will you where you live and you get cell phone service? I do. Do you? Yeah, everywhere has cell phone service now.

Even China, right? Everywhere. That can't be good. Is that bad? It's bad for bees. Cell phone service? Yeah. You know what?

That whole EMF thing, they wanted to put some EMF weapons up in our woods there. So it's like there's no literature that shows that they're bad for the body, so we're going to put some EMF weapons. And it's like, what? That's crazy. Yeah, I've seen some interesting studies. Clearly, it's doing something. So the easiest tissue to test is sperm because you can get as much sperm to test,

and it's uh ethical i guess to expose it to emf so they can take you know just gonna throw it away anyway so you can take a two sperm samples and you can put one next to a phone or you can have a guy wear a phone on his hip and the sperm is different after having it so they don't know if it's the heat of the device because there's a device in your pocket. You know, a lot of people carry it right there in their pocket or right there in their shirt pockets, you know. Whether it's the heat or the EMF, they haven't really broken it down.

And I've seen some other smaller studies on fetuses, you know, where they make a mother have a device and wear a device to see what the cells look like so the data isn't the data is pointing that there is some sort of change all with all that kind of stuff it's like the dose that makes the poison how much what is is the change significant like what's going to happen with that sperm that's different nobody knows any of that so i guess just they just say, use your phone. I turn my phone off of, um, air, I put it on airplane mode if it's going to be by my head, like head when I go to sleep. And other than that, I don't keep it on my body or near my body.

Why do you keep it by your head to wake you up? Well, yeah. Like if it's, if it's my alarm or whatever. So I tell people like, you can use it for an alarm to turn, you can turn it off so that it's not transmitting anything. Right. But is it still generating heat? Well, it's not touching me anymore, so it's not on my skin. But if you're carrying it in your pocket? If you're carrying it in your pocket, it would still be, it generates heat more, I think, when it's transmitting.

Imagine if people just show up like years from now, everyone has ass cancer in your back pocket area. Their hips are all aligned, but now they have ass cancer. I think like Sheryl Crow has brain cancer. And she was saying that they were trying to attribute it to, or possibly attribute it to, when she was doing press for her first CD, it was the old days of cell phones, and she did all of it through her mobile phone. She had it up to her head the entire time and it's that side of her head that she has the issue with. I think that we do a lot of stuff that we have no idea how it's going to trickle down later on. Well, if you think about it, everywhere we go

you're experiencing Wi-Fi signals, radio signals. I don't know, how does the satellite thing work? I mean, you have to kind of like have a an antenna or a dish that points up to where the satellite is sending the signal but i mean is that signal somehow or another getting here whether it hits your dish or not is it getting to bodies i don't know it's we know that cell phone signals fuck with bees like that's one of the things um that they figured out when they were trying to figure out what's killing off all these honeybees. Most things point towards pesticides and disease, but there's also some issue that we might be constantly fucking with their navigation and

their ability to communicate. It's almost like living next door to people that are just playing loud rock music all day. Do you survive? Yes, you do. But does it fuck with the quality of your life? Yeah, it does. Yeah. You know, and because bees have this weird way of communicating with each other that seems to be interfering. Or, you know, the cellular systems that we have seems to be interfering with that. Well, and like they've shown it with sonar and the whales, you know.

Everything is just messed up by these signals that we're creating for whatever, you know, they're, they're tangible, they're invisible. I think it's just because they're invisible. We just don't think of visible things having any sort of impact. Like wrap me up in something. I want to have pounding against my head, but if I can't see it, how much could it really be harming me? my head but if I can't see it how much could it really be harming me meanwhile everyone's writing out this huge list of things that are wrong with them and what they're searching for and we're just flapping on a well it's just idiopathic or genetic or or whatever has no cause no known cause it just happens it's normal and it's like yeah but so our cell phone towers so our chairs and all this other

stuff well there's a weird feeling that you get when you get to a completely deserted place, like a real wilderness place with total quiet, no cell phone service, no nothing. Yeah. There's this weird like absence of input that you feel different. You're like, wow, this feels weird. Like I got to get out of here. It feels like desolate. It feels like so so it's so just

unforgiving it just doesn't give a fuck if you're around or not around it's like that silence for whatever it's almost like people that are afraid to be alone like you have to be out in parties all the time you got to constantly be talking to people on the phone when you're alone then you have to deal with your own bullshit when you go to those will true wilderness areas with no cell phone service it's like like, oh, okay. It's a little scary. This is real. Yeah.

We try to go dark like two days a week. Dark? Dark. In the family? Tech dark. The Bowman family? Yes. The Bowman family goes dark two days a week,

and you just go out and spend more time outside than inside, and that's the great thing about having the wilderness there is like huge trees old growth trees have been around for a long time and one time it was windy and trees were falling down it's like trees are falling down we are in the wilderness it's insane don't get hit by them well if it happens it happens yeah you say that until you get hit by a tree well then you're like how the fuck could I have avoided that? You don't have that laissez-faire. No. If it happens, it happens. Whatever.

Maybe, maybe. You need to run. Yeah. Yeah. Fuck getting hit by an old growth tree. What a way to go. Yeah, we were out and one fell. And it sounded like a gunshot went off.

And we had determined that it was a tree that fell. It was up in Canada. Yeah. But it was like, boom. We were like, is somebody out here shooting? Like, what the fuck is that? And the guy that we were with was like, I don't think so. I think that's a tree.

Were they felling trees? No. It was just on its own. It just fell. Just fucking had its time. That's what happens. The wind was blowing. It's like, that's enough.

I'm tapping out. Boom. And it just came down. I mean, you find them all over the place. Right. There are so many trees. just came down. I mean, you find them all over the place. There are so many trees, but that, that reality that this, this thing has been there before Columbus ever get near America. I mean,

especially where you are in the Pacific Northwest, you're dealing with, you know, some of those trees are like a thousand years old. Well, almost the whole planet used to be wooded, right? We've cut everything down. It was almost all wooded. You couldn't even, you couldn't even walk, um, like up in, up british columbia up there it was so thick the all of the trees you know falling down for years all that moss and stuff that you're walking on is just old mushed up rotted trees but you couldn't even just walk through the woods there are just trees everywhere yeah they've cut i mean everything down and so much of the the desert that's in the middle of the United States are from the fires, like when they started using lumber for ocean ships.

Like all of the British military ships came from lumber from the Pacific Northwest. Once they realized that they had that commodity, they were using, like, was it mink? Mink and otter furs were what brought everyone to the Pacific Northwest. They cleaned all them out and then, like, what brought everyone to the Pacific Northwest. They cleaned all them out and then like, what can we ship now? It's a wood. And then they shipped it out and they were making, they were milling it. So when you mill it, you know, the mass of the tree is lost in between the boards. So it's sawdust. And so sawdust was clogging all the rivers and there was a big fire. And then the fire just went across the United States because there was no natural water barriers anymore. It just burnt it down, kind of like your cartilage, right?

You can use some cartilage that grows back, but if you take it all the way down to the bottom to the base cells, no more is coming back. So that's really where that rock comes from. They use a lot of sawdust now. It's really cool. Have you ever used a pellet grill? Do you know what a pellet grill is? I know. Oh, they're amazing.

There's a bunch of companies make them, but one of them that I'm friends with is Green Mountain Grills. And these pellet grills, they take hardwood pellets, and it's basically sawdust, and they press it. And the natural sugars allow it to maintain the shape of like it's almost like kitty litter if you have a cat i have a cat we use this pine litter it looks real similar to the stuff that you you put it in this pellet grill it's all digitally regulated so it can keep the temperature like 200 degrees can keep it for like seven hours with this like pot of of pellets and it's like super efficient and it's a smoker it's essentially a grill slash smoker but instead of like have you ever used an old school smoker like one of those big barrel smokers

those are pain in the ass like you got to like regulate the openings the valves and make sure you get the right amount of temperature you got to keep thermometers in there and in the old days it was super difficult to figure out how hot everything was you know and then they figured out how to put meat thermometers actually in the meat and have digital ones that come outside and give you a reading. But these pellet smokers, essentially they take all that hardwood sawdust that used to be just waste and compress it into these little pellets and then use it to cook with. Smart. Yeah, it's pretty cool. And it, you know, it tastes really good too when you cook it with it

because you're actually, it's real, it's not – like that's the big issue with using any sort of lighter fluid or anything like those ones that are like easy match charcoal briquettes. Those are all chemicals in those things. You can taste it. You can taste it. You smell it. Yeah, but this stuff, you don't smell any of it. So they're – but it is – this is the reality of chopping down trees. It just looks gross and it makes you feel sad when you see it.

But your house is warm. Because you chop down trees. Well, I mean, it's, yeah, it's cutting. It's sad to be up there and to drive by a forest that's not there anymore. Yeah, those cut blocks, those gigantic chunks. But they kind of regulate that, right? Like they only allow you to do it in certain spots, then they regrow them.

Well, but they're regrowing them. It's the same thing with any sort of management. Like they're being replanted with stuff that's going to be cut down into a different kind of tree. It's like a non-native kind of tree. It's the fast-growing kind, right? So it's trying to get it up. It's like a commodity.

It's just a commodity. So get it planted and get it back up so we can cut it down again. But that old wood, there's nothing like old growth. It's just been around forever. Yeah, there's nothing like being in those forests too because you really do get that sense that, wow, this was here long before the wheel or long before, rather, the engine or long before boats came over here. I mean, this stuff, not before the wheel. There's no 6,000-year-old trees, right? No, I don't think so.

What's the oldest tree? I don't know. Let's find out. What do you guess, if you had to guess? Be like a sequoia or redwood or something. How old do you think it would be? There's trees, whoa. Methuselah, a brittle cone pine tree from California's White Mountains, is thought to be 5,000 years old.

Oh, there you go. The oldest non-clonal tree in the world. The exact location of the Narl Tristan is kept secret for its protection. Huh. There's a tree that people are so gross, you have to not tell them where the old tree is. Because they'll go cut it down. I'm going to make my smoking chair out of that tree. Yeah, some asshole will go and use it to make his headboard of that stupid tree.

Huh. 5,000 years old, so that's a good answer. That's a goddamn old tree. That's really old. That's probably the wheel. That's a goddamn old tree. That's really old. That's probably the wheel. There's probably wheels, circles all around it. Yeah. Yeah. But that's just being around something that predates most of human history.

Just knowing that this thing was a seed and that seed became this tree. And it's just seeing this entire world change during the time that it's been living and breathing in carbon dioxide and breathing out oxygen. It's very freaky. That's something you get with old growth trees that you're not going to get with those cut blocks that are refurbished with these new little shitty pine trees that are little tags on them and stuff. It's kind of fucked.

That's just a weird thing about people we just we we if we don't put regulations on stuff that's why it's really cool like a place like uh have you ever been to boulder colorado they don't really allow people to build like you don't see any apartment buildings in the mountains you don't see like they they have a very strict amount of uh construction that they allow in. And they're very strict about it. And they buy up space. When people have, like, space, land that's for sale,

like Boulder County will actually buy that land and make sure that it remains open space so they don't ever build on it. We kind of have to do that to keep people from fucking the whole thing up, you know? I wonder why no one wants to go to Alaska. It's like the last frontier. There's some space up there.

Yeah, but everyone's scared of bears. That's true. Alaska's freaky. Alaska is the, it's like the Wild West. It is like the Wild West up there. The people are really cool, though. Have you spent time in Alaska? No.

My husband did a big motorcycle trip. They did, like, a big motorcycle trip, like, all around there, and they were just in some kind of back country, and it was like, motorcycle trip. They did like a big motorcycle trip, like all around there. And they were just in some kind of back country. And it was like, everyone here is just like hearty. They are like the cowboys, whatever that spirit is. They're going there because there's just less rules, more space, more quiet. We went to the movies at midnight and it was bright outside.

Yes. This is fucking strange. It was the middle of July. It was really weird. Like we Like, this is fucking strange. It was the middle of July. It was really weird. Like, we did a comedy show up there. We got out of the show. It was 2, 3 o'clock in the morning. Bright out.

See everything. It's very strange. And the people up there, they're so, it's like there's a sense of community, even in a city like Anchorage, that you don't really see in a lot of cities down here because their reality is yeah well every now and then a moose comes into town and kicks the shit out of some people at a supermarket or a bear attacks someone that's in the wrong place at the wrong time or you know it's just this is the reality that they live in they all have to kind of band together because every now and then if you see a car broken down the side of the road like

you get out and help that person because that could be you right whereas if you're leaving here and you get on the 101 you see some guy broken down you don't even think for a second let me pull over there's a hundred million people driving by no one's thinking let me go help that guy but if you're in alaska and that's the only car you've seen for 20 minutes you pull over hey you okay like what's going on? Like, you need a call? There's a sense of community because of their harsh conditions because of the environment they're in. Yeah, you need people.

I mean, you really do need a tribal situation. Even if you're spread out a little bit, you know, you have your claim or your space. But when you need help, it's going to have to be some other person that's going to have to come help you. But don't you think it's kind of healthier to be in a place where there's like, you know the term diffusion of responsibility, the idea being that it's easier to attack someone

in front of a thousand people than it is in front of one person because one person feels obligated to help whereas a thousand people say, someone should jump in and do something. But nobody does anything because they don't feel like they have to because there's so many other folks isn't that kind of like what you get if you're in a big city as opposed to like maybe where you live or maybe alaska or just a there's a there's a number that's manageable yeah i mean i i like i like the town that we live in. I grew up in a small

town, and then I was in Southern California for a long time and never really felt connected is the easiest word. But now that I'm out there in a little bit more rugged or wilderness, you know, I feel safe knowing that there are neighbors or community members. I feel more safe there, I think, than I feel in the big city. Yeah, it totally makes sense. I think big cities are a new thing. As far as human beings, like our DNA, we've only had them for a few hundred years. Yeah, what's the biggest city?

It's probably something in China, like as far as population-wise. I mean, L.A. is kind of huge, but it's really spread out. It's not, I mean, it's a city, but it's a weird thing. It's like a giant suburb. I mean, to look at the city aspect of L.A., you've got like downtown L.A. is what we think of as a city, but because of the fact there's earthquakes, everything's only one level out here or two levels at most, except for downtown. And you have a few office buildings here and there, but if you look at like the landscape, it's a lot of like flat things. I would say probably the biggest

is like Singapore or something like that. What is it? Hong Kong? Delhi, India's got, it says at least 25 million. Jesus Christ. Do you know your neighbors really well? My neighbor's a douchebag. So you do. I know one neighbor. I know a couple neighbors. There's a few people that live on my block that I know that I'm friendly with. People don't go outside.

I think it might even be less about numbers and more about how many people go outside or not because it seems to me like in big cities or even suburbs of big cities like everyone just pulls their car into their garage they close their garage and then they're in their house and then if they're outside they're in their backyard with their you know small family that there's not these large communities of people that are interacting outside so maybe maybe you could have that kind

of that safety or, you know, everyone taking responsibility for people that you live with, because you consider yourself living with them because you see them and you're next to them. Right. In some, in some place. But, um, like if you're in Alaska, I imagine that even if you were in your, even if you're up there by yourself, you're still spending so much time outside because, like, you still have to get so much for yourself, I imagine. Yeah. Or at least get out to go pick it up wherever it's being shipped in. Well, there's definitely that. It's much more expensive to get things up there.

Yeah. You know, get food and groceries and things along those lines, especially the more rural you get, the more problematic it is to get things delivered. You know, I say my neighbor's a douchebag. He's not a bad guy. He's just kind of goofy. But there's some people in my neighborhood that are very cool. And, you know, I see them and it's nice. It's nice to have a community where, you know, you go up the street and you see Bob.

Hey, man, what's going on? What are you doing? You still working on that? Oh, that's cool. Blah, blah, blah. And it's nice. Like you have like this little sort of relationship with. But I didn't choose these people. I just moved in and got lucky that some of them were okay.

Became friends with some of them along the way. But it's like, ideally I've always said the really smart thing to do would be get together with all your friends and loved ones and say, Hey, let's all live in this area. Let's all move to this one street. Is that possible to do? Like, let's get together. But nobody ever really does that. They always say, like, I've had 15 of those conversations with my friends. And with my friend Brian, he just moved out in my neighborhood. And I'm like, come look on my block. And this, like, fucking guy moved, like, 10 miles away.

I'm like, why'd you move over there, dummy? Oh, my wife likes to be close to the grocery store. Like, fucking grocery store. You're going to get in your car anyway, dummy. If you get in your car for 30 seconds or three minutes, is it really that much of a difference? And maybe that was the idea, like with neighborhoods that you would be living with people like you, like you're all going to the same place for work and everyone goes to the same school. And, but now your neighborhood is just full of all, like, it's such a, it's such a transient time and also big houses. I think,

you know, in New York, I have friends who they go out to eat for most of their meals, right? Their houses aren't large. And so they're forced by a lack of space. Again, it's kind of one of those just space things where you have to go out and commune with other people. And you have your seven favorite places. And then by default, those become your little community. and then by default those become your little community. But here you can sustain yourself entirely within your house and your compound and it's just made it so we don't have to really interact with anyone anymore.

Yeah, that's a big thing with people. They like to be sustained and they like to have all of their stuff that they need. I mean, that's the prepper instinct, right? I've got enough food here for a year. Everybody's got this idea that if the shit goes down, I'm gonna be fine I'm gonna just stockpile and just have a gun turret on my roof. I'm gonna be fine But I living in New York City, I think is the worst case scenario because people like I have a friend who lives in New York He can't even put his golf clubs in his apartment. He's got no room. He's to put it all in storage

so if he wants to play golf has to go to this storage place and open up his little spot with a key and go in and get his junk. And like, what are you doing? Like you're living in a box. Yeah, my post-apocalypto is less about hoarding, you know, like food or whatever. I'm more about assembling a team. Like I'm looking for skill sets because a skill set you can take on the road and produce something with that skill set that is necessary. So I don't really care how much what you got in your garage or how much canned food you have. I care about like show me how fast you can clean a fish. Who can make medicine out of herbs? Like that's that's kind of more my that's those are the applications.

Who can make medicine out of herbs? Is there any medicine any good that you can make out of herbs? You just farm laying around? Sure. What have you ever made out of herbs? Well, I mean there are there's all any good that you can make out of herbs that you just find laying around? Sure. What have you ever made out of herbs? Well, I mean, there are, there's all sorts of things you can make out of herbs. Can you make a mud pack? Like, do you know, do you know of the things that are in nature that you can, that you can take? What can you eat? What's edible? That's a big one. Like basic stuff like that.

Like what is out here that people have known about for forever that no one knows about anymore? Like how much of people, how many Irish people starve with a potato famine because no one knew anything about the plants that were sitting right there that they could have sustained themselves on the entire time? Really? Sure. They could have eaten other stuff? They had plenty of edible stuff. They just didn't have the thing that they had always eaten beforehand. Really?

Sure. That seems like ridiculous. There was plenty of food mass there to eat, but if the skill set is gone, then it's really easy to kill yourself trying to figure it out for the first time. I'm sure you've seen Survivor Man. You've seen that show? Les Stroud, good buddy of mine. That guy opened my eyes. Boy, watching that show, watching how easy it is to not get food, like you think, wow,

the guy's in the woods, plenty of stuff to eat out there. And you see him, like, foraging for food and trying to figure out how to, like, kill a squirrel with some sort of a rock that drops, you know, a little thing that, you know, he hits the switch and the rock falls on his head. Yeah, not so good. Doesn't really work that well.

No, and who is that guy that, is it John McClannis, the guy who went out in the woods and then died in the bus? They made a movie out of it, Into the Wild. And so everyone's hypothesizing about his death and like, oh, he must have eaten this particular plant and got poisoned. And all the wild food experts are like, he starved to death. It's very simple. He starved himself to death. One of the reasons humans have such a long juvenile period compared to any other primate is getting food is hard and it takes a really long time to be taught how to get it, like to have this information handed down and to get the skill, the muscle, if you will,

to be able to do it. And you expend so much energy trying to get it that you have to eat not only to cover that energy, but enough to go beyond that a little bit. And then if you're making kids or whatever, then there's all this extra stuff. And it's very hard. And no one here has ever done it, ever. Yeah, we really got soft when it comes to that. Right. The ability to feed yourself without a supermarket.

Right. It's a very monumentally difficult task to do for the average person. It is. That movie really pissed me off because they twisted the Into the Wild, they twisted the ending. Because in the movie, he eats a poisonous plant and he gets sick and he dies. He misidentifies the wrong plant and is liver toxic and he dies. But the reality is he did starve to death. Right.

Because it's fucking hard to get food. Right. Like if you've ever gone hunting like this, one of the things that my friend Brian Cowan and I first realized the first hunting trip that we went on. Lucky we went with this guy, Steve Rinello's his famous hunter. And we but we're like, Jesus, like how the fuck did they do this before they had guns? Like we have guns and it's hard. We have guns and scopes and binoculars and a trained hunter and we know the territory and we have we have um uh tags which like so they know there's deer in the area there's all these like things that are on our side and still fucking for days with no success like if

you didn't have food with you and you were going on these days with no success, you would be fucked. Like, you would starve. Like, it could be really easy to starve to death. Yeah. And that's with a gun. Like, with a gun, it's easy to starve to death. Without a gun, when you hear about someone that's, like, survived in the woods by themselves for, like, 20 years, like, eating frogs and shit, you're like, what? How did that guy do it? Like, that had to be, like, frogs and shit. You're like, what? How did that guy do it?

Like, that had to be, like, touch and go almost every day. Very few stockpiles, like, very, I mean, how much could you store? You can only store, like, a couple days' worth of vegetables or plant matter before that starts to go bad. Meat, depending on the temperature, usually only good for, unless it's freezing cold out, you know, it's not good for more than a couple of days like you you have to constantly be on the move and which is why cities weren't really figured out until we figured out how to stockpile shit once they figure out a stockpile shit and like okay we have a grain silo we have enough food for a week hey

somebody should invent a way to make music out of a box. You know, let's make a piano. We got so much free time on our hands. Yeah. Yeah, no, it is the container. Container. I think of container-free life is kind of like my goal. But isn't it kind of a catch-22? It's like you need society and culture in order to figure out how to make a computer

which allows you to learn about how to live in the wild. Yeah. You know, I mean, you need education in order to figure out what's going wrong with the human body by living in this sedentary lifestyle that you have to go through this sedentary lifestyle to get that education to figure out that it's not good for you. Yeah. Well, we've even begun to, I mean, that's what academia is. Like, we're stockpiling information. Right. And now we've got to figure out a way to distribute it.

So it requires a whole new, I mean, society. That's part of what civilization is, too, is someone knows something that you don't know and that you might want to know that you find valuable so you can go do some of his work for him so he'll tell you. that like smoking is like really bad for you and we should try to phase that out and try to or do you think we're so caught up in this idea of achievement and and our momentum is so in that direction that will never pull away from it no I think I think that we will I mean I think that like you with European countries playing around with things like four-day work weeks, you know, how much work, it doesn't take as much time. As much time as you're going to work, you're probably not working. At some point, someone, I hope, is going to stand up and say, I could do my job like in

three hours a day. And I think as people are, you know, as businesses are laying off people or are doing enforced furloughs, you know, where they're saying, well, you now have four days to get the same job done and you're going to have to take a 20% pay cut. I think people are accepting that because now they get this extra day. They're actually better for it. They might have less money, but at home, you know, I think that if you've had some health issues, you usually end up valuing your health a little bit more. It's always after. I don't know if the up andand-comers will see it that way.

But then for the up-and-comers, there's not a lot of jobs for those up-and-comers. There's not even the option for 9-to-5 work for so many people now who did what they were supposed to, you know, and they went to school or whatever and they got a trade or a job. There's no place for them. So then they're going, well, I'll go back to school and try to get a better job. So I think everything, we're in a transition. A lot of things are going to change.

And I think the work day in general with the commute, with the digital commute, people being able to work from their computers wherever they are, eventually corporations will see that it's cheaper. It's cheaper for them to still make the same products, paying people less, but people get more free time. Yeah. But people are always going to want more. That's the thing. It's like, I think if you could tell someone, Hey, I could do the same job for three hours a day, they will be like, Hmm, good. That way I save money. Like, no, but wait, I'm doing the same job. If I'm doing the same job, you're making the same amount of money. Yeah, but you're only working three hours a day. You used to be working eight

hours a day, but I'm getting the same shit done. But we don't really reward people sort of, well, some jobs do, but most jobs, it's about the amount of hours you put in. Yeah. Well, I think that that person though, who said I can do it in three hours a day is going to be replaced by someone who does like you'll just keep working. You'll find someone who can do the job faster and for less. And the only thing keeping people who don't do that in their seats is maybe the law at a certain point, like who you can fire and who you can't fire if people are tenured or whatever. Hasn't that been the transition for like the last 30 or 40 years where you're just paying people less relatively speaking you know the dollar is is different than what it was but

aren't we paying people less who are working way like who doesn't work like seven days a week who goes home and doesn't still have their email on and still answering emails i think that they're getting i think that they're getting a lot more work out of people for what they used to pay and that they are paying people less. That is an issue. I have a friend who has an issue with his work because once he's done working, he will not answer emails. He's like, when I'm done, I'm done. And he's successful enough so that he can kind of pull this off, but it's a real issue. They're like, well, we were trying to reach you all day.

He's like, I was done. I'm done working. When I'm done, I shut my email off, and I go places without cell phone service. And, like, you know, he's like, well, what's going on? Am I working for you guys 24 hours a day? Like, if they send him an email at, like, 10 o'clock at night, they get upset if you respond to it in the morning.

Like, I sent you this at 10 o'clock at night. He's like, fuck you. Like, you don't own me, all right? This is what we're doing. I mean, he's in a weird position because he's uh without outing him he's he's a big wig so his his situation is very strange but his stance is not his stance is like the the stance that a lot of people would like to take like when the fucking day's over it's over you don't own me all through the night with email but that's like sort of creeped into people's life space yeah yeah do you ever work with a company

like is every company ever come to you and said hey like we would like to ultimately like from the beginning of our company we would like to engineer this thing to be like a healthier environment for our employees like what is a way we can get the most amount of productivity but also keep people as healthy as possible and give them an environment that's more conducive to just being an active, healthy person. Yeah, sure. You know, like what are the, I mean, there are simple things that people can do, employers can do to provide their employees with a healthier version, I guess, of the nine to five.

You don't have to sit like roving desks. That was a big one, I guess, of the 9 to 5. You don't have to sit, like, roving desks. That was a big one. Not having everyone at the same desk. It's like going into the same desk every single day is an environmental killer. Like, you're looking at the same walls. You're looking at the same. But I got a picture of my dog up here. And I got my wife over here.

And there's my golf club. I got my thing I put here. It's all about the things. Like you just, people are just so attached to their way. That's what keeps people working. Yeah. What keeps you working is buying new shit and like the thing at the end of the week, I'm going to get that purse. Woo. That watch I've got my eye on. Yeah. That's what keeps people going. Otherwise they're like, why the fuck am I doing this? Especially jobs they don't like. Right. Rewards are critical. Right? But then it turns out that they don't even like their reward that much because it's just on to the next reward.

How do we fix this, Katie? I have a community that I am taking applications for. Someone's opening a cult. Your community up in North? Yeah. You take applications for your community? Well, applications are for my post-apocalypto team, but... Oh.

Yeah, you're really banking on that, huh? Well, you know what it is? I really feel like... It's like with shoes. I wore regular shoes my whole entire life, and then you switch to something minimal, and you didn't even know how your feet were feeling all day long. It's very hard to sense how something is limiting you until you take yourself out and away from it. It's like going camping. Like everyone feels better when they go camping and they're out on a hike. It's like, I feel so good. This thing that I had, this chronic headache,

this vision problem, this irritation with my family or whatever it is, when you go outside and you camp, like all of a sudden it's's different you've changed it up enough where it's so different well I feel like that indoors now after being outside so much um after spending so much time um like I can feel this chair right now just I haven't sat in a chair continuously in probably two years what this is the only time you've sat now? I don't have furniture. Like, I got rid of my couch, right? What? Yeah.

Oh, you're crazy. I know. Okay. Now you know. This show just took a turn. You're a crazy person. You don't have a couch. I don't have a couch.

How do you watch Netflix? Sitting on the floor in front of my laptop. What? You sit on a floor like some sort of barbarian? Yeah. For real? For real. Okay. Do you have cable TV at home or are you just one of those weirdos?

No. We're one of those weirdos. Hmm. I get everything in. I mean, I like Netflix and stuff. Right. But I don't have... A guest with Netflix. I just took a guess. I love Netflix. I love it.

Me too. You can watch anything. You don't need cable TV. Pretty close to anything. You can find just about anything that you want to watch. But, you know, I'm a worker. Like, I work a lot. I'm very busy. I participate in society. So it's like, how can I do all those things

and keep the pelvic shape and the low back shape that I wanted and the strength without having to go to do those things separately from my regular life. So I just sit on the floor. I mean, you've outsourced the work of your muscular system to your couch. Now you have books. How did you write those books? On my laptop. How'd you sit? In many different ways. Not in one, just cross-legged, laying on my stomach. Sometimes

I'll sit in a chair or I'll stand at the counter. Laying on your stomach? Yeah. That seems like it would be bad for your back. It would if you worked that way exclusively, but not if you spent 20 minutes there. You go do that and call it a yoga pose, right? I would not call this a yoga pose. Well, someone would.

Someone would call it some animal's name. Right. Downward praying mantis or something, you know. Yeah. So you just move around always in different ways. Nothing completely sedentary or static. Yeah. And it's because I don't think that we're, you know, we say we're too sedentary.

And it's like I would say that you have too much repetitive geometry, which is different, you know. So it's like you got to get out of your couch and exercise. I would say that you have too much repetitive geometry, which is different. So it's like, you got to get out of your couch and exercise. I would say, maybe you just get out of your couch. Maybe you keep watching Netflix. Just sit cross-legged on the floor. Just put your legs out in front of you because that is movement. That is exercise. It's just not in a special clothing, in a class, in a gym.

Do your kids like, Mommy, I go over to my friend's house and they have chairs. No, my kids. Why are we freaks? No, they are. They my kids are freaks no they are they're a little freaky from like for everyone else but they are no they've never been sick your kids have never been sick no what is that you got alien kids you don't bring them anywhere that doesn't make any sense travel all over the world how are they not getting sick because you are a filtration system and movement is your biggest filter changer. And most people don't move at all.

They're too busy trying to figure out how to not be sick with these clogged up filters. Like your whole lymphatic system depends on movement to function. Like the biggest physical movement portion of your immune system depends on movement. It doesn't have its own pump. It uses the musculoskeletal pump. Explain that. What do you mean by that? Like your immune system relies on movement. It doesn't have its own pump. It uses the musculoskeletal pump. Explain that. What do you mean by that? Like your immune system relies on movement. Yes, your lymphatic system, right? So that's what's taking your cellular

waste and then moving it out of your body. It's laying right next to your arterial and venous system. So as muscles work, they pump blood over to the working tissues, and then it kind of washes everything away. So your lymphatic system doesn't need a pump because why would it need a pump? Why would you not be moving? Why would a human not be moving? Why would an orca not be swimming in the ocean? It's because you have these parts of your body that are movement- because movement is something that a human should be doing all the time.

It's only in recent times that we have it needed to move. So then these systems that are movement dependent just kind of fail. Yeah, but my kids get sick and my kids move a lot. They do gymnastics classes and they do dance classes and they're do dance classes, and they're in school, and they're doing... I mean, are your kids going to school? No. Yeah, I mean, my three-and-a-half-year-old started in preschool, but he's in a nature school, right? So it's all outside.

A nature school. All outside. Oh, you people are freaks. We're going deep here. Yeah. What does this mean, a nature school? Nature school. It's been around for, like, 15 years where they don't have a building.

They do all their work outside. They don't have a building? No. So what happens when it rains? You go to school. You go to school and you use an umbrella. Same thing that happens when you're humans. What happens when people live in the woods?

So you just use an umbrella? No. And you read under a tent? No. They're not doing like that traditional kind of sitting and reading and working with paper. They're learning edibles and they're learning, I mean, they're hiking and they're moving and they're doing their math, you know, by get this many branches and how to build a

fire and- So you teach any kids to be Grizzly Adams? Kind of, yeah. This is fascinating. How many kids go to your school with your kids? Well, I think there's 10, 12. 10, 12 woodsy people that come down with leaves in their hair and drop their kids off? They're not really woodsy.

I am the woodsy-est. You're the woodsy-est? I am the woodsy-est. They are not. You're not very woodsy. You seem totally normal to me. I'm totally almost normal. Yes, I'm totally normal.

I just, like, kids move, like, movement. There's movement and then there's exercise and they're two different things and you know like Gymnastics and like taking these movement classes is not the kind of movement that I'm talking about You know like recess and stuff that that's a certain amount of movement, but you know you Like the like my kids move all day long. I know everyone's like, yeah, my kids, they're active, they're kids. I'm like, no, I'm talking about like my kids will walk two to three miles a day.

And they could hang and climb and suspend themselves, you know, by the time they're one. They move more like monkeys. They're very confident and strong and capable because they've been put into challenging environments and they have never, they don't have chairs or anything. They don't have chairs in your house? What do you guys eat? We eat at a low table.

A low table? Set on the floor with a low table. So like Japanese style? Yeah. The bulk of the world doesn't have furniture. I know it seems radical that I don't have furniture, but the bulk of humans right now on the planet don't have furniture like you have furniture. It's a real, you're the weirdo. Yeah, but we also rule the world. Well, that's the thing.

That's true. Isn't that why? Yeah. Because we have TV. Probably. And couches. Yeah. So you really do have no furniture in your house?

Well, I mean, I have decor, but no, I don't have couches. What about the way you sleep? We sleep on pads on the floor. Pads on the floor? No pillows. Pillows. No pillows. Your pillow's a cast.

Do you think your head should be out in front of you like that the whole entire time? How is it? Right? You have a pillow underneath your head between your shoulders? Well, how do you lie down? Do you sleep on your back? I sleep. I move constantly because it's never really comfortable.

So in that way, I move at night just like any other animal. Wow. You're going deep. I'm going back to the roots. Is that good? I think for disease and health, yeah, it is. I think it's required. Do you ever go on the road and stay in a bed and go fuck this is awesome i do and the couch is galore when i'm on

vacation my husband's like turn on the television yeah i love it but it's like dessert it's like dessert yeah but we don't have this at home we're just gonna have this when we're on the road right you know like any other sensible thing intake of sensible thing is there a way around it i mean can't you have a bed that's like semi-comfortable is there a is there like a medium ground or a middle ground yeah well i mean i think it all just depends on how your your state like i'm looking for really strong cells head to toe so like it just comes from the loads that you expose them to like you're if you think of like what is the natural environment for your body like you go to a massage therapist like to push on you and give you pressure it's like because you're it's a it's a

input you are missing well i get it every night on the ground so i'm not missing i'm not missing all of that movement and and helping those tissues become unstuck because the floor does that for you for free while you sleep. Wait a minute. You think that going and lying on the ground on the floor is the equivalent to going and getting like deep tissue massage? Well, pressure wise, it's the same. It's the same thing. It's, it's pressure. That's what makes sleeping on the floor so uncomfortable, right? Have you ever gone camping and slept on the ground and everyone's like hurting the next day? Like you don't have the strength really to do that. You don't have the suppleness of the tissues.

And so you stiffen and react to it kind of like if someone pushes on you really hard, like too deep at first, you tense your muscles in response. pushes on you really hard, like too deep at first, you tense your muscles in response. Well, with time, the way, how you're probably imagining sleeping on the ground feels is not how it feels to me anymore. It's how it felt to me at the beginning, but not how it feels to me anymore. Well, I've camped a bunch of times, especially over the last couple of years, I've done it several times, five, six days in a stretch and it sucks. It's just not comfortable, but it doesn't feel like deep tissue massage. Like the difference between massage, especially sports massage,

is you're kneading out knots and different scar tissue and blockages that have happened from strenuous exercise. I just don't see how laying on the ground would do that. Well, your massage is targeted and in local to whatever area someone is applying it so in that way the sensations are different because this is just kind of whole body all at the same time but mechanically speaking it's the same it's the same thing it's pressure it's pressure being applied to tissue something pushing on it and moving it around and it's uncomfortable at first because it's such a large surface area of your body. It's not you being comfortable everywhere

else. And then someone working on, you know, three inches or. Well, I have a pad at all then. It seems like that's like a mini bed. Well, cause it's hard. Cause I mean, too hard is not natural either, right? If you're going to sleep, just imagine what. You'd sleep on dirt. You'd sleep on sleep on something soft yeah you'd always be seeking something comfortable it's just that you your bed is so comfortable what it does is it doesn't reveal your discomfort so you just assume one position again the same geometry almost all night long so in that, your movement is less, where I move much more during that eight hours. So that eight hours, my cells have a different experience than someone who's sleeping in a bed and on a pillow. And when I'm uncomfortable, I change position, which is movement.

All the time. No, it was at first, yeah. How long have you been doing this for? It was at first, yeah. How long have you been doing this for? I've been probably 18 months without a bed, something smaller. How long did it take to get used to it? Oh, man, it took me like a year to get rid of my pillow.

It took me a year to get rid of my pillow, right, because it was tight through the neck. Even though I did all the same neck mobilization and got massaged all the time, the bulk of my day was doing the same thing. How often do you have to turn your head and look up or look down? There's no need for actually using the muscles of your neck anymore. But finally, I was like, you know, after doing the stretch, I was like, where, why am I doing this stretch? Like, where would this stretch happen naturally? It's like, okay, well, if I was laying on my side curled up, you know, if you look at your dog or your cat sleeping, they're, they're like doing these weird positions and poses. And then I found the literature on it in, in the journal. It's like, yeah,

we think that a lot of low back pain is coming from these repetitive sleeping positions on, on beds. And here's how all these humans sleep. Here's all these other primates and other animals sleep. There seems to be some weird way about the way we sleep, so I just cleaned up that environment for myself. What about a hard mattress? You could do a hard mattress. If you have a soft one now, a hard one would give you more pressure. Yeah, I mean, it's definitely gradual.

It's not with a pillow. I took my pillow size and then over a year just came down to a smaller and smaller pillow and eventually a t-shirt until I didn't need it. And with the bed, the bed was more organic because we had little kids. And so it seems like you're never sleeping in your own bed. Like everyone's always moving around beds. And I slept in a different mattress. Like this mattress sucks. And then I was like, that's ridiculous.

Like it's mattress. My body should have enough give where, you know, a slightly different baby pressure isn't stressing my body out. And then that's when I just started to explore this kind of stuff. Is this a movement? Is there a lot of people that are doing this? They're sleeping on the ground and having no couches? I think furniture-free takes a while. You don't have to give up your couch.

How about just sitting on the floor instead of it? It's just with the sitting is the new smoking stuff. The thing that that research really showed is that you can be this like really great exerciser or it was a new category of sedentary active, that all of the active, the fittest people within our culture are still sedentary. They're like moving like 4% of the day. And since your body, again, is movement dependent, their systems in the fittest people

are like 4% better than the people who don't move at all. So there's like all this space to get better physically. And again, when I say better, I'm really talking about basic biological things like procreating, digesting food. Some people can't even go to the bathroom. Like their guts and their bathrooming doesn't work and like these are again basic human functions they can't sleep well and like they're not being like their humanness is impaired in the same way that you would see again like in zoo animals like just pacing and they're not they're not on their their bio rhythms all messed up so i thought well i can get myself back on track i don't need a couch it turned out to be better and all these other things that we're talking about like and their bio rhythms all messed up. So I thought, well, I can get myself back on track. I don't need a couch.

It turned out to be better. And all these other things that we're talking about, like consumerism for our family and space and having little kids, you know, and run around and it's less to clean and just less. It's just less. So you're just all about minimalism. Minimalism, which ends up being maximalism for your biology. Wow.

I'm still tripping out of the fact that your kids don't get sick. I'm trying to figure out how that's possible. Their little immune systems are subject to so many different little bugs and stuff when they're hanging out with other little kids. I know, but they just have the strength to push it right through. I think that with a lot of illness, it's the delay, right? It's like you're making the mucus. It sits around for so long it just takes

like what we vision being sick is is the coping mechanism it's like a sluggish immune system so it's not that my kids don't interact with it but it just happens faster i don't know i mean we again we travel all over uh united states canada and europe for six weeks. They just, they're very robust. Are your kids vaccinated? No, not yet. None? Mm-mm. Whoa.

Not yet. I'm not anti-vaccination. I just, again, I have a particular timeline and a development that I want them to explore first that I don't want encroached with any of that stuff and so I I maximize lots of other things how so well so like look with I'm also an extended breast feeder so like my children have been breastfed like the oldest one he stopped when he was three and a half years so a lot of people don't have that going on and then you know with my younger one she's just two and so she's still

breastfeeding so there's lots of other things that I do I'm not really a don't doer I'm more like here's all the things that um that end up improving their immune system. You know, they play in dirt. They've never been exposed to antibiotics or antibacterial products, you know, things that now are showing up to accumulate in the system. And so I think that has a lot to do with it. Do you have any issue or any worry or concern about your kids catching measles or mumps or one of these dangerous diseases that have had a resurgence because of a lack of vaccinations. I mean, that's a big issue on the East Coast is the measles and mumps and things along those lines that used to be kind of knocked down. Now, because a lot of

people don't want to vaccinate their kids, you're seeing this mega resurgence. Yeah. Well, I mean, like I said, I'm not anti-vaccine. The reason you're really vaccinating is for the benefit of weaker people, for the most part, because measles as a whole is not something that is that dangerous. I mean, there are very few incidences, even when it was really bad, that it would cause death or whatnot. So they'll be vaccinated at a certain point for the benefit of the community. I just am not loading really their systems with anything. I'm not particularly worried about exposure. They don't go to places where measles occurs like they're not in doctor's

offices but you say they travel all over the world well they travel all over the world that's the other thing but i mean as as far as as i spend time detecting where like there was a there was someone who was exposed to measles in washington who came from Disneyland. So I got a notification saying this person went from Disneyland to the SeaTac airport, who then went to this place. If you've been at any of these three places, which is what our, you know, the government put out. That was really recently, right? That was recently like in, I mean, the last week and a half. November or something? No, this is, I just got, I got it like in the last week and a half. So there are those cases, yeah. So you're not concerned with that.

It's interesting that we have these ideas about what diseases we need to be gravely concerned about. Measles is one. Chickenpox is another. Rebellion. All the different ones that people are terrified of. The one that kills everybody, the flu. I mean, the flu fucking kills the shit out of people there's so many people that die every year of the flu but most people don't get a flu shot yeah i don't get a flu shot yeah well i just again from like a biological standpoint i think we're looking at problems from we're all sick in this

zoo like we don't see that like you're you. The way that you are interacting with the disease has a lot to do with the state of the being that you're bringing to the disease. So I'm working to maximize the state of the being. What about nutrition? What kind of nutrition do you guys follow? Well, that's the same thing. So my kids, I'm much more scared by what other people feed their family, I think, than I am about diseases that they'll pick up. So we don't really eat any processed food on a regular basis.

Mostly, I think, for the first couple years of their life, they had exclusively proteins and vegetables. Exclusively? Yeah, like they never had a goldfish cracker you mean not like a goldfish like swallowing a live fish i've been talking about the goldfish cracker they never had any Cheerios or goldfish crackers or any of that kind of stuff but um yeah like we i make cookies i make desserts they have sweets and and i'm more lenient now but like in that first hunk of time you know when they're when they're developing so much, but you know, like they had popsicles,

like they're, they're regular kids. You wouldn't even know because I want them to fit. I want us all to fit in society as weird as my life sounds. You wouldn't even really know it. We throw great parties at our house and everyone it's a house is just decorated kind of like Moroccan style. It just looks like, wow, they have like a lot of cool floor pillows or whatever the whole, it's not just like you walk into a house going, where's all the furniture. This is weird. It just looks like wow they have like a lot of cool floor pillows or whatever the whole it's not just like you Walk into a house going where's all the furniture? This is weird. It's not like that

It's just it's just slightly. It's just this kind of our our odd our oddness And we are the only friends in our group that are like this You know so to them. We're kind of freaky It's like no one likes the desserts that I make for kids birthday parties or whatever but that all being said you know everyone's kids are like they're like oh there are kids are just melting down because of xyz and i was like yeah but our kids we don't have that i mean they have kid meltdowns or whatever but they just they just sleep regularly they're they're healthy they're pretty healthy well they it sounds they're they sound ridiculously healthy they sound ridiculously healthy.

They're ridiculously healthy. I mean, they've never been sick. I've never heard of anything like that before. That's really shocking to me. Yeah. I mean, I thought that that was just like a natural part of being a child. You get sick, your immune system rebounds. It strengthens it.

It's actually good to expose your kid to sick kids. They might be. I mean, and we don't keep them away from sick people. They just, if they get sick, it's just, it doesn't look like what getting sick would look like. I mean, they're still interacting with any pathogens and they're responding to it. I see what you're saying. So if they get sick, it's a minor thing that their body processes and you don't even register. Well, you don't even know that they're, I mean, I wouldn't even know that they're sick. Because it never, they never get to't even know that they're sick. Because they never

get to an overload point where they're overwhelmed. What is sick? Sick to me is I think my son had, he just had his second fever at almost four in four years. And they were just low overnight.

Well, he just went to bed with a fever and he woke up. Okay. So for me, like, sick is like they've been to the doctor, they've taken a medication. Okay. Okay, I see what you're saying. So you think sick is like he needs medical attention.

Yeah, or, you know, had to stay home from school or had, you know, something running down out of his nose or whatever. Like, to me, like, just sick. Like, the fever that he had was, like, he's just hot, and then it was just gone. So you slept it out. Yeah, well, I don't know. I guess I compare it to myself. Like, I was at the pediatrician's office a lot as a kid.

I remember taking antibiotics once a quarter, like, a lot. And do you find yourself sick less as well? Yeah. I mean, all of us as a family. That's so unusual. All my friends that have young children around my kid's age, everyone's battling colds all the time because your kid's a little petri dishes. Yeah, and that's the same thing.

So I thought, I mean, I just thought the same thing. Like I, compared to our group of families who all have little kids, I would say that they're sick a lot. And so, you know, it's like this person's sick, this person's sick, this person's sick, and we always just go to the party. It's like, whatever, because I want my kids. I know that they get healthier through interacting with it, but I just had my first cold in, I don't know, like two years maybe i mean i've had kids for almost four what is your

diet like like what do you eat same thing as the kids a lot of fat a lot of um do you i mean this is engineered i mean yeah it's on purpose it's on purpose you know i try not to i try not to eat a lot of um processed foods and then a lot of like we don't do a lot of bread we don't eat a lot of processed foods and then a lot of like we don't do a lot of bread you don't eat a lot of bread but we're not totally grain free like I like amaranth you know like in kind of like different grains amaranth just a grain or teff which is a Ethiopian grain they're just they're just eating freak food what is this talk what about white white bread? Yeah. What about Wonder Bread? There's no Wonder. No peanut butter and jelly sandwiches in your house? We have our version.

Oh, Christ. I know. I know. I know. I know. Good Lord. It's really weird. Yeah.

Real weird. When we take you to Disneyland, they see soda and popcorn and shit like that. Do they freak out? They freak out about food and packages it's like it seems to be the packaging more than anything else like what is that thing with the knob that they have you know like the other kids have that and and we'll let them you know like if we're going i'm not going to be like no you can't have that you know if someone's handing out something to everybody it's like of course you know you're you're a kid this is your community this is your

time but i don't go out of my way to make it, to put it in there for them. I remember when I was a kid, TV dinners had a very special appeal to me. Like there's something about the TV dinner, like all of it in that little tray. Yeah. Like the little potatoes were like molded to the little tiny little spot where the potatoes go. And the brownie was baked right in it. I remember. Salisbury steak with the stuff on the.

Meanwhile, if you had to eat that now, you'd be like, Christ, what am I putting in my body? But as a kid, it was so, like all those foods. I look at all the foods and all the sitcoms that I watched as a TV and it's constantly, you know, as a parent, you're going, am I going too far with this a little bit? Do I want my kids, you know, to have, you know, I really liked my childhood my childhood was awesome the only thing that I was just playing with here is biological function because I think I you know that the difference between our kids and Oz is that we grew

up in a different time like there were no computers like I didn't really sit down in front of a computer until I was maybe 20. You know I had a typewriter and you know I take typing in high school but you were running around you know after school for the most part and and now you know my my one year old had my iPhone like and she's just swiping through picking the game that she wants to play and you're like, God, like it's, she is going to be casted so much earlier by, by this because zero to five is so important and it's going to be just, it's going to be interesting that, that it's going to be more than what we think it's going to be. It's going to affect more than her eyes. It's going to affect more than,

than her hips. You know, it's going to be really how she thinks, how they both think is just going to be so impacted by the age of information. How did you find this freaky nature school thing? Like, how did that, is that something that you knew about before you moved to the location you live in? It just started. It's its first year.

So it's a model that they've had in Germany for a long time. They've had this kind of what they call forest kindergarten for maybe 10 years. So it's popular in Europe. It just started coming over here. If you look online, you could find maybe 100 schools already operating like this. And they're just outdoor preschools although they're starting to go up higher you know where they're they're doing the curriculum just based on child-led interests you know I like I remember my son came home and we're just like taking a

hike sometime and he was telling me the names of the trees and stuff like stuff that I didn't even know and and so it's not it's not like doing block. You're not sitting out in the forest, you know, stacking blocks, you're not coding colors or you're not doing any, I think they call them schema. Like, like you're not doing any sort of structured schema, but it's, it happens all very organically. You just start to notice, you know, it's, I think it's definitely lends itself to a scientific kind of outcome because you know my son's like hey look at the frost patterns on this versus this like here's how you can tell you know where it was frosty and like this is clearly underwater so they're they're just starting to recognize and observe deed data and details about things so I like

that you know I'm a scientist so I like that, you know, I'm a scientist, so I like that. I see things that way. So, you know, I don't know if it'll work for both my kids, but it definitely works for my son, who's more kind of like me. I'm fascinated by the fact that you, you know, as a scientist and as someone who is an expert in human movement and biomechanics and all that, you've decided to try to engineer your children from the jump. You know, I don't know anybody that's done that.

And then it's done that to such a degree that you've done it where you've gotten rid of your couch and you sit on the floor and you got your kids in some fairy woods school. Yeah. Yeah. They were born at home. Right. I mean, they were born at home. Oh, Christ woman.

Now you're going crazy. What would you do if it was a breach? If you had to spin the kid around in the box? Well, I mean, good midwives can do a lot of stuff, but I was very close to a hospital. I know it would freak you out. Yeah. Yeah. It didn't freak me out. No?

No. I have watched and been at lots of births. Pelvic floor mechanics was my whole undergraduate biomechanics work. So when you know a lot about something, there's not a lot of fear there. Oh, that makes sense. There was a healthy dose of emergency preparedness to make sure that everything was going to be okay, but there wasn't a lot of tension or stress in me because I was pretty cool with it.

What about if you need stitches or any of the things along those lines? They can do all that. I had a midwife. I didn't do it myself. The midwife can stitch you up? Yeah. Oh, Christ. Some amateur lady down there. It's not an amateur lady.

Digging in you with a needle and thread. Oh, Christ. With her knitting needles. Ooh, yeah. Dirty fingernails and no soap. Don't use soap. We want to keep everything biological. No, no.

It's not like that. Did you use a tub? Did you give birth to the kid in the water? One everything biological. No, no, it's not like that. Did you use a tub? Did you give birth to the kid in the water? One, yes, one, no. The water thing is a freaky one. That's a lot of people that I've known that have tried to do the birth in-house have done it in the tub. I think it's very strange.

Well, it makes it very comfortable and supported, you know, while you're laboring. A lot of people get out, though, you know, to actually do the birth. They climb out of the tub. It's just, you know, there are certain laboring. A lot of people get out, though, you know, to actually do the birth. They climb out of the tub. It's just, it's a, you know, there are certain positions it's really hard. You know, you're teaching people how to kick. And you're like, you don't have the hip range of motion to kick. Well, like, what if you don't have the hip range of motion to squat? These necessary positions that open all the bones up.

A lot of people can't get into them. Well, I've always wondered about people that need cesarean sections. Like women with very narrow hips. And, you know, they have a large husband, and the baby's got a giant fucking head. Like, what would you do in the wild? Like, you would die. No, I think that, again, there's a lot of things like the growth rate of the baby that are diet and movement related.

Again, that— The growth rate of the baby? Yes. Like, your baby is not this arbitrary size it just pops out like in its dna you're going to be 8.8 pounds or whatever it's not it's not like that there is a relationship in gestation that has to do with that like for a while they couldn't figure out like what's what's the signal for a woman you know start giving birth and they're like oh it's got to be something to do with the size of the head and the and the and the pelvis and there was some signal in the lungs like they're

trying to figure it out like we still don't know a lot of basic things about how this species works we've kind of like gone right out into like advanced technology and no one's really done a lot of work just going how does this how does this species work before we go over and look at other animals like how does this one work again? Right. And so the big thing was, like, narrow hips. Like, narrow hips is one of my pet peeves. Like, telling women that they're too small to give birth, but then they look at data of women who are up and move more through their pregnancy and head circumference, you know, that the shape of the baby, again,

is based on movement of the vessel in which it's in. That it's becoming more understood to be very mechanoregulated. Mechano meaning like any sort of mechanical forces on the embryo. And the embryo is sensing movement and there's pressure on the uterus. And that's an environment. It's in a mechanical environment. It affects foot position, the ability for it to move and twist and to start that developmental phase. And there's a lot of things that we do that limits developing human movement

because we are so still. So the more active your child is, or the more active you are, rather, it changes the shape of your child in the womb, the size of your child, rather, in the womb. Well, it affects their spacing. It affects their space and the pressures that are on them that are their mechanical environment. And how does that affect a woman having narrow hips? I mean, is it possible that a baby would be small enough that it would pass through if she's really active, whereas if she's sedentary and she has narrow hips, the baby's just going to be too big and fat?

Is that what it is? Well, it's not. I mean, narrow hips, like your hip, the obstetrical conjugate, the space, you know, where the baby is coming out is not a set structure. You have hinges in there where things articulate and become bigger or smaller as needed. you have hinges in there where things articulate and become bigger or smaller as needed. But those hinges being able to articulate depends on how fluid you yourself, like how much movement did you do?

You know, were you squatting for a long period of time? So like squatting is something that's totally natural for humans, and humans would have to do it, you know, a few times a day to bathroom, but also getting up and down off of the floor so you imagine what the shape of the pelvis would be in the mold the the mobility of the hips and the sacrum and all these joints that play a role in birth and then you go how but how natural are they not when you want to take them to something like birthing that everyone does so i'm a natural birthing advocate but at at the same time, I'm more an advocate for, like, if you want to have, like, a vaginal delivery instead of a cesarean, there's work to do in the same way that if you want to do a certain kick,

you know, for your martial arts class, it takes training to reestablish this shape and mobility so that you don't have too small of a space. So what do you do to stretch out your quote-unquote space? Well, you just become more mobile through the hips in general. Yoga or something? Well, more specifically, like furniture. Again, look at your relationship with your furniture.

So getting pregnant women off the couch and onto a floor. And what happens when you get on the floor? When you get on the floor, you're essentially doing something that looks like the exercise that you go to a class to do for an hour, right? So all the things that you do, if you go to prenatal yoga, they give you hip opening exercise. I'm like, just sit on the floor. You can go to the classes too, but don't go back onto the couch, which is putting you back into the position that you're adapting to. You don't adapt anymore to your class than you do to sitting on the couch. You adapt to what you do 100% of the time.

So just sit on the floor in that position that you're doing. So how is sitting on the floor more beneficial? Because you're supporting your weight on a flat structure or a flat surface? Well, you can't physically assume the same geometry in the couch that you are in the chair, right? So you automatically have to rotate your hips and drop your knees and shift your pelvis. Now you're engaging your core muscles are working, so the baby's getting bigger, but you're on the couch. So even though the baby's getting bigger, that weight weights never put on the muscles that hold the baby so then you have to start you know tucking your pelvis under wearing like a baby support belt because you're not training your muscles relative to the natural mass accumulation of having a

baby you have to be up and moving around with that weight in order to adapt to it you can't put a kettlebell in your lap right train to it you have to move it and swing it around you got to move and swing around your pregnancy weight to adapt to it. And women that have naturally small hips and they can do all this, you think it would aid them and they would have like a normal birth or would they still have like a huge issue? I know a lot of women, like especially in Western medicine, they get to a point where they're like, look, we got to cut you. We can't, the baby's not going to come out. There's a lot of factors that affect the birthing process. And I don't think that there is as much evidence for space being a factor as it is used as a casual reason to like, I mean, if you're at the point

where you've tried to labor and it's not happening, you move to a cesarean, that's pretty normal. But the situation in which that labor has happened is usually in a, is in a position where the forces aren't necessarily in your favor, right? Like if you're on your back the whole entire time, it's like the baby's not moving down. It's like, well, what could you do to help bring it down? Like you could be more upright. There's so many things you can do, but they don't necessarily happen well in a hospital that have their own set of rules and equipment in which they have to be monitoring you with. So a lot of the trade-off for constant monitoring and emergency care is the optimal process is sometimes compromised. I have two uncomfortable questions.

Okay. One, the placenta. Okay. What do you do with that? Well, with my son, it went in the ocean. With my daughter, it went into the woods when I was done. It usually just goes into a bag in the freezer. A bag in the freezer?

I mean, you freeze it until it's hard. Why? I mean, it becomes hard after you put it in the freezer. Yeah, but why do you do that? Why do you put it in the freezer? Well, it's bloody and goopy. Right, but why don't you just... You can't really throw it in the trash.

I mean, it has to have some place where it can safely break down away from people. You can, I don't know. Safely? Well, I mean, it's biomass, right? Right, but isn't it like food scraps in that sense? It is. It's like a takeout bag.

You don't eat it, though? No, I didn't eat it, no. Okay, that's the uncomfortable question. Oh, is that what the question is? No. Some people do. Some people do. That's a big thing because, you know, that's what animal, I'm more of a biomechanic.

So like movement and geometry, like as opposed to like eating my placenta, I didn't do that. Some people boil it down and make a tea or dehydrate it and make a powder. I've heard people eat it, like scramble it like eggs. Well, I think the thought is right. So most animal mothers eat it. Yeah, but the reason is not to avoid off predators because the smell attracts predators. Who knows? That's what you've been told.

Well, that's definitely what it is with certain animals like deer. Yeah, but also... They don't even eat biomass. I mean, they don't eat animal protein other than that. Well, but because they've been doing it for a long time, other than that well but but because they've been doing it for a long time there can be something that's consumed in that movement of or that in that choice of doing so that comes along with it there's a lot of in in biology there's a lot of naturally occurring byproducts just because of the relationship of how something's been done for a long period of time so like i use bees pollinating

as an example it's like bees aren't they're not actively pollinating they're just eating but their structure is is pollinating by default just because it happened to be the right structure that had some static electricity because of the way that the wings flew around and then it happened to be hairy instead of smooth so that the pollen could stick in there and then it just brushes up against it and it becomes this vessel but that's a byproduct the pollination is just something that occurs because of a structure so if you eat something to keep a predator from coming coming up and but you've always done it then there can be some sort of compound that

triggers milk production like who knows right who knows what it's in so when you there's when you look at a population of people who are having kids and it's like wow there's a very large percentage of this population that's struggling just after having a baby could we be missing some sort of naturally occurring nutrient and I think that's why people take the placentas because they're just trying to hedge their bets. Like, well, maybe inside the placenta is something that keeps me from feeling whatever, whatever issue like they're diagnosed with, you know, if it plays some sort of role in hormonal regulation afterwards, is it part of the input that changes how your physiology starts going back to what it was before. There's so much

that we don't know that things are very easily dismissed as like we know the reason or that's no longer a necessary structure just because it doesn't fit into our tank. And so you don't really want to approach biology and physiology and anatomy with that heavy bias that the way humans are doing it right now in LA is really an indication of what humans need to be doing. Right. Is that sort of like how people have a natural instinct to suck on wounds? Like if you cut your finger, you like naturally do that. And then people would tell you not to do that for the longest time. But then they found out that no, saliva has actually like very strong healing properties yeah like we have an instinct to suck on wounds because it actually does help yeah it's

it's just like that it's just part of the part of the reflexes that we come with that have kept us alive for so long uncomfortable question number two okay do you guys have toilets we do regular old toilets regular squat platforms around them i knew it yeah squat platforms around there but regular toilets yeah and the squat platform what do you build that well you can build it but you can just buy it and just bought a squatty potty and you just throw it up and does that make loud noises when someone drops no it doesn't because the height you mean your butt's at the same altitude okay you can you can actually just still sit on the toilet and just put your feet up. So your hips and knees are just a different angle.

You don't even have to work any muscles differently. You don't actually have to do a squat. So a normal person without a squatty potty can do that? Any person. Sit down and you put your feet up like. Just take like if you have a stack of books or if you have like a waste paper basket, just flip it over and put your feet up on it. Okay. Just get your hips and your knees to a different joint angle because it turns out again that the tubes of elimination line up

better when you do that, that it's part of the system. And without that, then you have to start bearing down and adding forces into the system that aren't so good for you. They're good to accomplish that task, but they're not good for maybe the whole structure, like all that intra-abdominal pressure over time, if that's how you're forcing it to get out, moves things in other ways. Yeah, I've found that when you have to poop in the woods, it comes out real quick. Whereas if you're sitting down on a toilet, it's like sometimes you can read a book or go answer a few tweets.

It takes a while. Yeah, because you have to work against the technology of a toilet it's like sometimes you can read a book or go answer a few tweets it takes a while yeah because you have to work against the technology of a toilet that's interesting hmm how did we get into toilets then where'd that come along women from toilet that was just uncomfortable question number two no but i mean how did we as human beings how did we get to this this throne that you sit down on how come nobody figured out that a long time ago? Well, I think that, you know, with civilization, part of another inherent component of civilization is you have to be better than someone else, you know? And so a lot of the things that we do, um, are, are, are ways of delineating ourselves from what we would call savages or more primitive people. Like you wore shoes. You didn't want your skin to be too dark or tan.

You wanted to show that you had more affluence, that you weren't as barbaric. You didn't have to poop on that. You could just poop it and push it flusher and it went away. And that just comes. Soft hands and cultured demeanor. You were less animal moving away from it less animal and you're trying to be more animal uh the word is primitive i am a primate yeah what advancements does society make that you think has society made that you think are beneficial well gosh i mean i think medicine, I mean, I think medicine is beneficial.

I mean, I think everything is beneficial. It's just that what I'm more concerned about is what's, what has been, what is no longer needed that is still essential. So it's, it's my, it's, I don't, I don't have really an aversion against civilization and technology. It's just that vitamin C is still necessary. Like we can't get around the fact that vitamin C is still necessary. So I'm just trying to figure out diseases. So when you're trying to figure out diseases, you have to kind of boil down to could this disease be arising because of some non-input, some essential input that we're not getting.

And so as people get more and more advanced the our our health again in the terms of biological sense isn't getting better with us and so what happens to a species that advances itself right out of being a species you know like that that's that's more what i'm i'm interested in so i like it all i like all technology netflix netflix might be my favorite technology it just seems to me that you you're you're in this really weird state of uh of sort of primitive re-engineering i don't want like a primate re-engineering I mean, that's that seems like what you're doing like you're you're looking at all the various Various components of society that you feel like are non-beneficial

You're eliminating them and you're you're doing it from the jump with your children. I find that very fascinating. Yeah. Well, I mean is a bed Like the things to sound radical, but again as far as humans on the planet right now, they're really not. So they might be more radical because they're decidedly non-American. But I don't think I'm really going out of my way that much to be more animal-like. It's just, like, I don't feel my life is enhanced with a bed. I don't think my life is enhanced with, bed I don't think my life is enhanced with like I'm obviously letting go the things that I can't live without there are certain things that that I you know I still have a car when I like some weird thing that you sit in in your car you sit on a log I just try to I just try to sit as little as possible in it. I try to walk as many places as I can.

Right. Do you not sit in a weird way or anything? I'll sit, you know, across. I mean, I'll sit in as many different ways in the car as long as I'm not driving. Do you, like, sometimes hit the gas in the pedal with your left foot to balance it out? No, I don't play around with that kind of stuff. Oh. Now, that could be dangerous, right?

That'd be weird. Like, sensory input is huge. You're driving. You're using a lot of motor memory when you're driving. I don't know if I would start playing around with that kind of stuff. Yeah. I've used my left foot to brake sometimes and it's amazing how dumb my left foot is. Like my right foot is, Ooh, it's so like, it's interesting that we figured out a way to use the foot for input, you know? And the other thing you find out is that your left foot gets tired.

If you ever try to drive the gas or your left foot like hurt my right knee once and i was driving with my left foot like your left foot gets tired it gets tired just pressing down the gas pedal this makes you think like what what muscles are being programmed by my right foot that are not being programmed by my left like there's a lot of things that i do really good with my right side that i don't do so good with my left side yeah it's weird like hold your bag yeah hold the bag that's a lot of things that I do really good with my right side that I don't do so good with my left side. It's weird. Like hold your bag. Yeah, hold the bag.

That's a big one. Throw kicks is another one. There's certain kicks I just don't do as well with my left side. And it's just I wonder now, especially after talking to you, like what other chains of things are not working as well because of that imbalance? Yeah, well, I think that brings up that notion of alignment. things are not working as well because of that imbalance. Yeah, well I think, I mean that brings up that notion of alignment. An alignment is when you're moving,

you know, alignment in your car is like when you're, when the relationship of all of the parts are where they should be, and then the way that you drive optimizes the longevity of the structure of the car as a whole like you don't like you don't have any one wheel getting its job done as a wheel is wearing down the brake on that side where it's costing you something that it shouldn't so it's the same thing with the body you're trying to figure out your alignment which is how can i be using you know my arm without wearing down my shoulder prematurely because the muscles between

the two are tighter than they should be because I always do the same thing with my left arm. So I think it's less about, I mean, muscle balancing is one way to look at it, but also just look at what are the movements you do in your life? Like if you had to make a list of the top 10 moves you do in your life outside of your exercise program, like what are they? It's sitting from like getting up and down out of a chairs is a thing that you do most often. But we don't do very much with our body at all when it's not exercising. Almost nothing. What kind of exercise do you do?

none really in that I have really eliminated structured exercise time out of my life. But if you plotted my body on a graph, what you would see is probably five miles of walking a day, carrying something almost always while doing that but you know it's in different arms all of the time um working you know working on the house my stillness is on the computer time but really it's just that getting up and down off of the floor sitting on the floor in different ways which would which would look like stretching i would say to most people right so i'm always working on some sort of stretch, but it's really just to get something accomplished. So no lifting weights, no squatting, no deadlifts? I squat because I don't have furniture. So I probably do 200 squats a day, but I don't do them

repetitively. They're distributed throughout the day and they're held sometimes for three or four minutes while I'm doing something. So I would say that my moves, if you loaded up my moves and put them in, it wouldn't look that much different than a workout. It would probably look most like like a cross like a crossfit kind of workout you know um as far as you know the variation of moves i mean my kids are heavy so like you're packing them around and moving them around but it would it would just it just looks like regular living but you're never exhausted you're never breathing heavy you're never at a rapid heart rate so your cardiovascular improvement from something like that is probably pretty minimal, right? Well, I mean, but I also go out. Like, so we're actually going out and hiking.

So if you go out and hike a couple miles, again, carrying or hurting kids, like, it does stay. You got a little something out of that. Yeah, you do. Like, your heart rate is elevated. I still practice recovery. Yeah, you do. Like your heart rate is elevated. I still practice recovery. You know, again, one of the reasons you do cardio is you do cardio because this idea that you want to keep your heart strong enough to do what? It's supposed to be to distribute oxygen. Your cardiovascular system distributes oxygen. Eating faster, working harder is not accomplishing whole body oxygen distribution. In fact, it's pulling blood away from anything not doing that thing that you're doing in the moment. So even that idea of cardio comes from being still all the time.

What can I consume in a short period of time that keeps my heart muscles strong? Instead of going, how can I take the resistance away from my heart and distribute my oxygen all the time like my cardiovascular system is working all of the time because I'm moving all the time I think what we're talking about probably two different things I'm talking about like what you're trying to accomplish whether or not you're trying to push your body to an optimum state if you're looking to optimize your body's performance you're really not going to get that just by carrying kids and doing you know sitting down on the ground like your your body like the difference between exercise a lot of people are thinking of exercise as being something where i guess you're just trying to lose

a little weight or stay active or sweat a little bit what i'm talking about is like optimizing your physical body like strengthening your body, like strengthening your body, you know, strengthening your cardiovascular system, strengthening your physical structure. Like I'm a big believer in especially resistance exercises. I think that it's very important for bone density. It's very important to resist the aging process and, you know, muscles, keeping muscle density, keeping bone density. Like you're not doing anything like that.

Well, again, I think it's about how you're using the word optimization. So optimization to me, if you're optimizing the fitness performance tests, like one rep max or a strength goal, whether it's a aesthetic or physics, like a physical performance, like how much weight can I move with this body part and can I get more and more? That's fine as long as your body is also being successful at getting biological tasks done. And I think that in a lot of cases, people can have very high levels of this fitness optimization for performance, for athletic performance, but not be performing 100% biologically speaking. How so? What do you mean by that? Well, I think of like in the book I use cycling as an example

where you can have people who have huge vo2 max capacity because they're training they're doing a ton of endurance training but the bone density in their hips and most competitive cyclists is lower than what it should be like they actually have like the hips of of an 70 year old woman with osteoporosis why is that because they're not carrying any weight they're just sitting on that bike? Because they've isolated the variable that they're training for. Bone density is not necessary. It's a waste, actually, of bone density.

So there's a lot of health tradeoffs that occur when we train for performance without keeping our eye constantly on biology. So I would say that my bone density, the bone density of like hunter-gatherer populations is way higher than it is in even like heavy lifters because bone density is a whole head-to-toe phenomenon. And you know, like people who've worn shoes their entire time, like the bone density in their feet's pretty low.

Like the size and shape of your bones is small already. Even if you do a lot with it that that the the size and the shape is is is limited by the fact that you don't move all the time even though you do a ton of work to optimize your fitness level in that hour you're sedentary 96 percent of the time so that the physical cap for optimization is just different. It's just a different set of variables by which to assess yourself.

But they're not mutually exclusive. Someone could be doing everything that you're doing and also lift weights and improve their bone density and muscle density. But I think you can be too strong. I think that you can be too tight. So again, in the birthing community there's this there's this thing of you know why are women who um doing a lot of exercise like

their muscles get to the point where the tension the resting tension is higher than what it should be like say in their pelvic floor and then they're having to generate way more force or their tissues will tear or give because the tension is greater than what is natural okay because you can because you can get stronger and stronger and stronger but at what point is your tension higher than natural because of the context of doing nothing else the rest of the time like i like we'll carry our kids but then there's like huge like very fit guy and he up to us like, if I had to carry my kids, there's no way my back could tolerate it for more than 20 minutes. And I've been following you guys around all day.

And you've had these kids for hours. He's like, I can't, I couldn't even do it. So who's stronger? That guy sounds like a pussy. Yeah. I don't think we should go by that guy. No. Can't carry his kids for 20 minutes.

That's ridiculous. Yeah, well, his back, I mean, he was, he worked out a lot, but he obviously had some sort of weak leak in his system. And, of course, you can mitigate that, right, by better training practices. Yeah, I think he's a bad example because I think anyone can overload their system in an unnatural way, and that's a huge issue with weightlifting, especially with people who do isolation exercises. I'm a big proponent of functional strength exercises like full body weight

or full body movements and things along those lines. And that's something that for a long time people just weren't even aware of. This sort of CrossFit type Olympic body weight or Olympic lifting style full body exercise thing, that's like fairly recent as far as trends. Yeah. You know, for the longest time, everybody was doing like preacher curls, which was just ridiculous. Yeah. You know? Yeah. There was, it's, it's, it has come in the last 10 years to a whole different level of functional. So I think I'm just calling for it to become even more functional, like real functional, like stuff that you would actually do in life.

Yeah. I mean, I'm fascinated by your approach, but I just wonder how practical it would be for the average person. I mean, you seem to have engineered your life in order to do it this way, and it's great. It's wonderful. But I just wonder how many other people could sort of apply that to their lives unless they had some sort of, I mean, you have to have a lot of freedom to do what you're doing, you know? What does your husband do? Does he have a job job? He works with you? I mean, we just run our company from online, you know?

I have a podcast and a blog and write books and stuff. What is your podcast? Katie Says. Katie Says. Yeah, so it just blog and write books and stuff. What is your podcast? Katie Says. Katie Says. Yeah, so it just talks about this kind of stuff, breaking it down, though, in much smaller bites. So, yeah, we were very fortunate. We worked hard to get to this point, though,

where just managing me and what I produce and speaking. I do a lot of speaking. So he's sort of like a manager, co-works with you, and sort of helps you along with what you're doing? Yeah, but we're both also raising the kids, right? So we're like, we're sharing. So there's just like,

you're just constantly jumping in and tagging in and tagging out and taking turns working at night. And someone works early in the morning and just getting all the things done. What did he used to do? Before you guys became the Grizzly Adams family? He was an editor, like a magazine article editor.

So he's a copy editor and just kind of a jack of all trades, just writing, so it's helped me a lot, producing writing and stuff. Well, also I bet that sitting down writing all this, he's probably really aware of what you're talking about and the issues that people that do that kind of thing face. That's probably attractive to him to sort of pursue what you're advocating. Yeah. And it's funny because he was actually, he was total barefoot guy, you know, you know, just now I didn't know this about him when he was in college here in LA. He's kind of like, he's kind of like the big Lebowski. My husband is very similar to, if you know who

the character of the big Lebowski is, he's kind of like, he's kind of like that guy. He's kind of like the Big Lebowski. My husband is very similar to, if you know who the character of the Big Lebowski is. He's kind of like that guy. He's like the dude. He's just kind of a cool kind of hangout kind of guy. And he was barefoot, like in a bathrobe a lot of the time. So he was already had this barefoot component. And then he worked in New York City. He was barefoot in a bathrobe? I think a lot of the time. Getting in ingredients for his white Russians. Like the Big Lebowski. Like the dude. Yeah. Russians. Like the big Lebowski. Like the dude.

Yeah. It's not the big Lebowski, right? It's the dude. He's like the dude. He's a stoner then. Yeah. Yeah. That's a good place for you.

Be the Pacific Northwest. It's a good place for stoners. That's right. It's everywhere up there. It's growing wild. Washington, man. Yeah. Well, Washington is one of the few states that had the courage to make it legal.

Now it's Oregon now and a couple of other places it's going to become legal too. I think what you're doing is really fascinating. Like I said, I just wonder how many people could actually apply it to their life. But I think it's really cool that you're doing it. I think it's really cool that you're sort of documenting it and explaining it. And do you talk about this kind of stuff a lot? And Katie says, I do. I do. People have questions. I think their questions are like, how do I, how do I do it? You know, some people tweet me their pictures of like, here's, here's me sitting on the floor in front of my couch. You know, the couch is still there, but they're just sitting on the floor in front of it. Or we have indoor monkey bars. So there, so that even if we're inside, you know, the kids can still train, we can all monkey bars so they're so that even if we're inside you know the

kids can still train we can all train so they just kind of swing your way to the kitchen yeah wow you guys are freaks yeah but but so are lots of other people now yeah listen people come over my house they think i'm a freak too i mean we're all freaks in our own little weird ways sure but i think your freakiness is a very healthy and conscientious freakiness. It's pretty obvious that you're thinking. This is not just something you're just jumping into. No. You put a great deal of thought into this.

Yeah. What kind of criticisms do you get? I mean, I'm sure you must get criticisms because of the anti-vaccine. Well, not even your anti-vaccination. Yeah. The fact that you have not yet vaccinated your kids. Well, I don't know.

It's the first time I ever told anyone publicly that I don't. Really? Yeah. No one's ever asked me before. I'm not anti, I'm not an anti, I'm not an anti-vaccinator. I believe in, in vaccines.

I just, I just, there's a, there's just a timeline. Like I'm, I, what I didn't do was do early, you know,

vaccines. I have a lot of, I work with a lot of people in medicine, a lot of people on a regular basis. And so I just have the way that I'm doing it. But yeah, I guess it is a big. It's a hot topic. It is a hot topic. Yeah, it's a hot topic in terms of criticism as well like people love to jump on people that aren't vaccinating their kids or jump on anyone who's trying to connect any vaccinations towards any sort of ailments and diseases and you know i i've talked to many doctors and that are pro vaccine

that think that the protocols that we instill as far as like everyone being subscribed to the same protocol like that's probably not the best way to deal with anything biological because people have so much biodiversity there's so much difference between one thing that will make someone terribly ill and the same exact substance won't affect someone at all whether it's allergies or sensitivities to certain medications. And it's, uh, you're going to run the risk, especially when you're, you're introducing a lot of chemicals into a very young immune system, a very young child. Yeah. I mean, I, I, I would agree there's, there's a timing, there was a timing issue for us and the way that we wanted to do it, I don't think I'm not really even a, I don't really believe that the vaccinations are tied to any ailment or anything.

Like that's not my bag at all. It's just more like there is, I think it's a load. I think of just a load to the body as a whole and watching, as a whole and watching, wanting my children to process and develop certain things first, where, you know, the risk of any overload or mismatch, as you call it, like in terms of biology and medicine, where it's just less of a new thing. You know, the structure is a little bit more more formed and more able to process anything that you put into it it seems like there's an issue with uh... some parents

where uh... some parents want to criticize people that are raising their kids in a different way and they do it for either because they don't like the way it makes them examine the way they're raising their kids so they get they do it defensively or they're judgmental or you know that everybody thinks they're doing it the right way and everybody else is doing it the wrong way do you face a lot of that because you you this is a very unconventional way of raising children it is and that's I think out of all if I got any criticisms it would be for for

that for the way that we want to raise our kids and I and I I don't have any problem with the way anyone wants to raise their kids like this is just what we're this is just what we're doing this is what we're trying I just happen to be in a more public format and I'm writing about it I mean I'm making there's very conscious biomechanical choices of why I'm doing what I'm doing like I go here's the process of mechanotransduction and here's the list of diseases and here's the known environments

and so here's the environments that we're changing. So in that way, it's kind of like an experiment in current process, right, that we're doing. But yeah, it's, I think the worst thing I was ever called by someone, you know, in a comment section and I don't spend, I spend almost zero time reading comments or whatever it's not my it's not my thing is that smart yeah I was just like I feel like the the quality of interaction isn't someone who is really wanting to have a thoughtful discussion

with me it's just unless you really I mean it's hard to manage those things too if you can no one who wants censorship, but you've got to eliminate assholes. It's not like censorship as far as the way the ideas are expressed or the ideas themselves. It's the way they're expressed. The insulting manner in which people can do it anonymously. Yeah, and I think the anonymously, if there was some reason to not, if there's some way to not have it be anonymous, I think you would see a change. Even that. Then all of a sudden you're interacting with some person.

And what's lacking is the social cues. Like there's things that people will tell you things online that they would never tell you. Right. Like just looking at you in front of you. And if they did, they would be completely socially retarded to do that. But just there's no consequence. You're just typing something shitty. to do that, but just it's, there's no consequence to just typing something shitty. And the one thing that you can glean that you can get from that is that all those people are socially retarded.

Anyone who does that, like, okay, your input is, it's not valid because your input, like this insulting thing that you've written, you've written that because you're an idiot. Like, that's it. That's the only reason why you do it. If you're a sensitive person, or if you're a person that considers that person the other right, unless that person obviously is doing something horribly racist or sexist or whatever, you know, whatever, in some way that victimizes other people. You're just talking about someone's opinions and ideas. Yeah.

And you're doing so in a very insulting way. You're doing so because you're an emotionally stunted fuckhead. Like, that's what you are. And so that's why you're drawn to this anonymous contribution in the first place. that's why you're drawn to this anonymous contribution in the first place. Whereas the large majority of people when they watch a YouTube video will not leave a comment. Right. The large majority.

And the people that do, the overwhelming number of negative comments. It represents way more than I think the average population because you're dealing with sort of a stunted group in the first place. Yeah, I think there's already a certain type of person who will comment. So you're not looking at, you're not looking at a good cross section of humanity. I don't think when you're looking at YouTube comments. I have a message board and it's, it's amazing. I mean, I've had it since 1998 and there's always going to be assholes. There's a certain amount of assholes. You're just going to get, there's a certain amount of people that just want attention so they just want to be

shitty and insulting but the the intelligent discussions that the large majority of intelligent discussions and and interesting different viewpoints and once people get away from this idea of just a demanding attention by by just being just shitty which is like what a lot of people do in these social network forums whether it's Twitter or Facebook they get more attention by being shitty but once you get past that like you can find communities you can cultivate communities but it's hard to do without some form of regulation and when you regulate your sensor and so it becomes it's like you know what's going on in france right now of course right with this this uh cartoonists uh these people that were killed well now france has arrested like 60 people for making facebook posts that they thought were either

in in support of terrorism or criticizing their government they They arrested a comedian recently for some comment that he's made about the relationship between terrorism and this horrible tragedy. It's really kind of fucked up because it's kind of counterintuitive to the whole idea that you're supposed to be supporting in the first place.

But the communities that we have online right now i think a big part of it is they don't feel the interaction they just send it out there almost like a message in the bottle and you're on the other hand receiving it do you read all your a lot of your comments on your board still i read a lot of the comments on the board i read a lot of comments on twitter i still interact with people yeah but it's like i believe it's like snake venom like you get a if you if you just get bitten by a snake, you've never been bitten before, you're kind of fucked. But if you get snake venom all the time, you go, oh, I know what that is.

Yeah. Some fucking weirdo. That's a good way to say it. You can feel the, I don't, I have a very kind kind of group of people who read and follow and tweet. Very rarely do I get, you know, the kind of person you're talking about. But you occasionally get mean people. Well, I mean, the biggest one was someone who said that I was racist.

I was raising my children as colonists because I didn't have furniture. Like, you don't even want to sit in your own culture's furniture and stuff. Sit in your own culture's furniture? Yeah. What is that, like plantation furniture? Well, I was like, what? It was just such a random irritation for this person? Yeah, you can't read that.

No. Katie Bowman, you're awesome. I really enjoyed this conversation. This was a lot of fun. Thank you. Very educational. I learned a lot from this. I'm going to have to think about a lot of things you said.

I'm going to have to really go over it. I'm going to listen to your podcast, too. So it's Katie Says. Is it available everywhere? iTunes, the whole deal? Yes? Yes. And your books, people can get them?

Bookstore, Amazon. And your website? katiesays.com. katiesays.com. Yeah. Thank you very much for doing this. I really appreciate it. Thanks, Joe.

It was a lot of fun. All right. Bye, everybody. Big kiss. Mwah. Mwah. Mwah. Mwah.

Mwah. Mwah. Mwah. Mwah. Thank you.