The Rich Roll Podcast - Tony Riddle Wants To Rewild Your Life

Episode Date: August 26, 2019

Screens and cubicles. Shoes and chairs. Fluorescent lights and air conditioned offices. Processed foods. Netflix and chill. Disconnecting us from our essential human nature, modern living isn't making us happier. Ironically, it's driving an existential crisis of unprecedented proportions — rendering us more sick, immobile, lonely, depressed, and unfulfilled than ever. It's time to stop. It's time we reconnect with that which is most essential. Nature. Movement. Community. Love. To do that, we must adopt a more naturalistic approach to lifestyle. This week's guest calls it rewilding. Meet Tony Riddle – a natural lifestyle coach and barefoot running enthusiast who has devoted his life to studying what makes us human and how to live naturally in the modern world. Through the adoption of simple practices — many of which defined humanity for millennia — he aids people in living healthier and more connected lives by changing our relationship to ourselves, to others and our personal environments. Putting his life philosophy into action, Tony is attempting to run the entire length of Great Britain, barefoot. Beginning September 1 at Land’s End, he will run 900 miles — 30 miles a day for 30 consecutive days — until he reaches John O'Groats, convening with sustainability experts along the way. To learn more, join him for a segment or otherwise get involved, visit tonyriddle.com. I was initially introduced to Tony through The Happy Pear twins. Enamored with his instructional Instagram tutorials on natural lifestyle practices, I knew he’d make for a fun and highly instructive podcast. My day with Tony began with a running technique tutorial, followed by a trail run (which Tony did barefoot of course, to my amazement given the sharp rocky terrain), and culminated in this conversation. As an aside, please check out the fun and informative video we created from my run with Tony. It's called You've Been Running Wrong. Shout out to Ali Rogers for a bang up job directing and editing This is a conversation about the importance of getting back to what works best for our bodies by deepening our natural and ancient connection to ourselves, to others and our environments. It begins with getting outdoors. But it extends from there — to movement, to food (of course), sleep, digestion, parenting, play, and even the re-configuration of our homes and workplaces. Tony's Tutorials: As a gesture of thanks for listening, Tony set up a special discount on his squat and running video tutorials. Visit vimeo.com/thenaturallifestylist and use the discount code: RICHROLL50. As a disclaimer, I am not an affiliate and have no financial interest. I'm just sharing information I think you will find helpful. In addition to the vlog, you can watch our entire conversation on YouTube. And the episode is of course available on Apple Podcasts and Spotify. May Tony's wisdom and experience leave you inspired to live more naturally and mindfully. Enjoy! Peace + Plants, Rich

In your current state of what you're doing, how many times do you wake up the next day and you've got a niggle or an injury? You know? If that was the case for persistent hunters, we probably wouldn't be here. Do you know what I mean? Oh no, I can't do that today. I've got a bit of runner's knee or I've got Achilles tendonitis, plantar fasciitis, all my back's out.

You know? Well, you have to then say, well, okay, what is it I'm doing? What is it that I'm doing that's then leading to the niggle because then nature's way of punishing you for that poor level of skill is the tweak the injury or disease right because it's not just running it's there's a natural way of doing things you know which is a holistic approach that we look at and the closer I can get to what is the biological norm the less likely the injury, the disease. Yeah, it goes back into what I said earlier, like we can't all live in nature, but it doesn't mean we can't live naturally. That's Tony Riddle, this week on The Rich Roll Podcast.

The Rich Roll Podcast. Hey, everybody, how you guys doing? What's happening? Rich Roll here. Today, we're gonna talk about how to live more naturally, how to essentially rewild our daily experience and why a more naturalistic approach to lifestyle, a lifestyle more attuned to nature's rhythms, ancient practices that defined humanity for millennia, but have disappeared from modern life can aid us in living healthier and more connected lives. Our tour guide for this exploration is Tony Riddle.

A natural lifestyle coach, Tony has devoted his life to studying what makes us human and how to live naturally in the modern world. And with simple practices, he basically helps people heal and improve by changing our relationship to ourselves, to others and our personal environments. In addition, beginning on September 1st,

this is crazy, Tony will be running the entire length of Great Britain from Land's End in the South to John O'Groats in the North, which is 30 miles a day for 30 consecutive days for a total of 900 plus miles, whatever it is. And he's doing it all, here's the thing, barefoot. Barefoot running the length of Great Britain while also convening with

and interviewing sustainability experts along the way. It's quite an adventure he's about to embark on. Tony's message is powerful. His backstory is fascinating. And it's all coming up in a few. But first... We're brought to you today by recovery.com. I've been in recovery for a long time. It's not hyperbolic to say that I owe everything good in my life to sobriety. And it all began with treatment, an experience that I had that quite literally saved my life.

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To find the best treatment option for you or a loved one, again, go to recovery.com. Okay, Tony. So I was introduced to Tony initially through my friends, Dave and Steve Flynn, the happy pair of twins. I started following him and I got really into his regular Instagram tutorials on natural lifestyle practices. I knew he'd make for a fun and highly instructive podcast. Tony agreed. He flew to LA from his home in London. And this conversation is the product

of an almost entire day that I spent with him. A day that started with a barefoot running and basically a general running technique tutorial that he hosted just for me at my home, followed by a trail run at nearby Malibu Creek State Park, which Tony did entirely barefoot, which blew me away given the sharp rocky terrain. And I did in solidarity,

I did it in my Vivo barefoot shoes. I got to tell you, Tony kicked my ass and my calves are still recovering from that one. I should say that if you haven't seen it already, we created a really fun and informative video out of Tony's tutorial and our trail run. It's entitled Rewild Your Running. Allie Rogers, who works with me on photography and video projects, did a great job directing and editing that. And you can see it on my YouTube page at youtube.com forward slash Rich Roll.

In any event, our day culminated in this podcast, which is essentially a conversation about rewilding ourselves, getting back to what works best for our bodies by deepening our natural and ancient connection to ourselves, to others, to our families, and our environments. And this is something that begins with getting outdoors, but it extends from there to everything from movement to food, of course, sleep also, of course, digestion, parenting, play, and even the reconfiguration of our homes and our workplaces. In addition to

Tony's backstory, we cover why Tony removed all the chairs and the furniture from his home. We talk about the difference between treating the physiological versus treating the spiritual, We talk about the difference between treating the physiological versus treating the spiritual, how Tony's journey was driven by parenthood, his becoming and his being. We discuss his take on diet and individual dietary needs and many other subjects. If you want to follow Tony's impending barefoot attempt on crossing Great Britain, or if you would like to join him for a segment, which you are welcome to do, you can find information on that on his website at TonyRiddle.com.

Also, Tony asked me to let you guys know that he has a special discount code set up for you guys for his squat and running tutorials, which you can get from his Vimeo channel. And to do that, go to Vimeo.com forward slash The Natural Lifestylist and use the discount code RICHROLL50, in all caps, RICHROLL50, which will work for both the squat and the running tutorials. They're really great, so check them out. As a disclaimer, I'm not an affiliate.

I have no financial incentive or interest here. It's just me sharing good, helpful information. Okay, so this is me and Tony Riddle. Let's do this thing. Good to see you, Tony. Good to see you, Rick. So- Less sweaty. Yeah. Hence, if you're watching on YouTube with the wet hair, we just got back from a trail run and a little bit of a running tutorial. We're going to make a little video. It's going to be up on YouTube of you putting me through my paces and showing me what I'm doing wrong and how I can improve with my technique. So I really appreciate that. And we were joking before the podcast. And I've said this before,

but I always like to go into these conversations in a pristine way. Like the ideal would be, you sit down, we haven't even said hello to each other and we just go. And then it's very organic and authentic, but we spent half a day together talking, getting to know each other a little bit, which has been beautiful. Nice to make a connection first.

Yeah, for sure. But I'm probably gonna have to make you repeat a few things that we already talked about today. Thank you for coming to Los Angeles. That makes it more difficult remembering it. Yeah, well, no, we're just gonna- It'll be fine. Look, man, I'm here.

I'm present for the experience. That's all I care about. And I've been looking forward to this for a very long time. You've cut a very unique path in the fitness world. And I think that the knowledge and the wisdom and the information that you're putting out there is not only important, but unique. What do you think?

Unique? Maybe now, you know? But a lot of it's. Maybe now, you know. But a lot of it's been gathered from, you know, peoples or people that are living a natural existence and going into looking at the natural environments around the world and looking at the natural beings and seeing how they're doing it. I mean, that's really the core of everything that you teach. I mean, that's really the core of everything that you teach. It's all rooted in natural practices that we can trace back to civilizations over the ages and how humanity kind of acclimated to the environment and made it work for them in a holistic way,

as opposed to the kind of cloistered way that we live today as essentially zoo animals who have become prisoners of the very comfortable environments that we've created for ourselves. Yeah, I worked with a company called Wild Fitness. They used to hold retreats and their big presentation was zoo humans and wild humans and so they take people along this path of what it is to be a wild human but at the same time they then say well we're zoo humans but for me it was just it was just too much too jarring for people and almost it's an insult in a way you know so really it's about again making small

little changes i don't want to return to the wild you know i wouldn't survive five minutes none of us would really but it's certainly looking at areas around a natural lifestyle and seeing what i can incorporate into my everyday lifestyle so what came out of that was we can't all live in nature but it doesn't mean we can't live naturally so there's a as we discover there's a natural way of running which is just finding the natural posture within running because natural runners and natural beings aren't compromised by you know seated furniture a sedentary lifestyle or compromising footwear so they can then perform the appropriate task of running without the risk of injury like we have a risk of injury yeah um so they haven't changed the forms and if that's running then running is just a micro element of movement so then for me then it was to discover ah there's a natural way

of moving it's not just running running is just a micro element what about all the other movement disciplines and so if you heard of move now have you discovered moving out here now what is that so moving that's a friend of mine not um you have the discovered MoveNAT here? No, what is that? So MoveNAT is a friend of mine. You have the store Erwan, whose name is Erwan, Erwan Lekor. And he set up a system called MoveNAT, which is then looking at running being a natural movement, but then there's others. There's balancing, there's jumping, there's lifting, there's carrying,

there's throwing, there's swimming, as we were discovering swimming earlier, defending. And so that's a movement system that we have um that he's then coaching in and then we and then beneath that i was like well that's again that that's we could be teaching zoo humans into moving that way but without dealing with the compromise posture to begin with you know dealing with a sedentary lifestyle and compromising footwear and shapes surely we're still heightening the risk of injury so then for me it was like what are these natural beings doing that are different the ones that are running naturally the ones that are moving naturally well again you just remove the chair so like we were

saying earlier i just removed all the furniture from my home yeah you took all the chairs out of your house you don't have one chair in your house no we don't we just we ground live so we ground live and that's been amazing because you suddenly discover there's like a hundred different rest positions that you can choose on the ground and we have one we're sitting down now right yeah but there's like a hundred different rest positions so what are the main complaints i get to see when i'm when i'm coaching somebody in movement or any other discipline and it's i've got lower back pain i've got knee pain, I've got neck pain. And you realize that they're all the areas that really should be more stable.

They have a mobility role, but they have a stability role. And then you have areas that are designed specifically to be more mobile than they are stable. So the ankle joint mobility, the hip joint mobility, and the thoracal spine more mobility. And so they're the areas that should be mobile but unfortunately when we when we sit down and we sit in couches and the posture that you get within a couch is you slouch right so we turn into a slouching couching typing swiping organism

and the problem is there that then it wipes out those areas that are designed for mobility and they get stiff and then the areas that should be stable are now getting more mobility into them so when we talk about lower backs essentially when the hip and the mid-back have kind of lost perception or you've lost perception of their role and therefore the lower back gets attacked so the way that we address it is just take it to the ground man and then suddenly it's like wow look at what look at all these different positions i can be choosing and that wipes out even things like standing desk because loads of hype around a standing desk at the moment. But it's just as detrimental to stand all day with crappy posture

as it is to sit with crappy posture, you know? Yeah, if you're standing, but you're not adopting proper form, then you're doing harm. Yeah, but, you know, when we talk about form, the danger is where we talk about form, people start thinking, I have to tense my core and squeeze my glutes and all this stuff, but that's not it. It's basically going back to what is a wild posture. Hunter-gatherers do not tense their core and squeeze their glutes while they're moving around, nor does any other animal on the planet. What dogs might do, they just can't communicate. Oh, I'm tensing my core right now and squeezing my glutes. I just feel it's not happening it's that again what hasn't changed for them is their environment the environment is still the same they're still moving the same through a landscape and they hunter

gatherers specifically move through a landscape they don't usually move for it they become the landscape you know i mean they don't see themselves as separate from it it's not the standing or the sitting it's the fact that those are things that we do for extended periods of time, right? Like even the most fit, and I plead guilty to this, like I'm fit, I work out every day, I train, but then I'm sitting at a desk. Even if I'm sitting in an ergonomic chair,

I'm still sitting for hours and hours and hours, and sometimes I don't get up and move around that much. And so, yeah, I have lower back issues. I have some sciatic issues. You know, if you're scrolling and looking at your phone, your neck is tensed up. Like, I know what that feels like. Like, these are, you know, things that I think every single human being is experiencing on some level. No matter how fit you are, we're all sitting too much, right? Well, it's every, again, because it's almost like we've fitting two groups here,

but every single human being would mean also hunter-gatherers, you see. I'm just saying, I'm talking about like, I'm talking about like modern Western civilization. Yeah, exactly. So that's like, I have this thing, there's 83% of the UK are living in urban environments. And there's a stat that's like, they 90 95 of their time indoors so that's like wow okay you guys are

blessed here because i mean we've just been on that amazing trail and you have that outdoor experience in london it's like sometimes people are just sheltering you know they've got to get away from what they see is um the elements let's say but let's say they're 90% of their time indoors so 90% of their time indoors how do we how do we flip it how do we make the indoors more nourishing again and so that for me it has to be uh if 95 90% of my time is indoors how much of that is am i spending sedentary how do what how do i change that and so that that's been the biggest cue for me i went into Santander and did a talk in there with the asset management team and it was the same thing as soon as I arrived I met

the head of the team and I said it's your responsibility the first thing is the air quality in here it's terrible clean up the air it's probably worse indoors than it is outdoors so put air purification systems in here and then to the people that had this their desk area I said this is your responsibility you either create a growth promoting desk area or a compromising desk area it's a choice right but here's how you can make the changes to start with because a lot of it people don't understand that there is another way there is another choice that they can be making so then it was the okay your hr department here they wouldn't even let people hug in you know they're not allowed to hug in the office and i was like imagine all the happy hormones you're getting like oxytocin you

hug for longer you get serotonin well hugging's tricky these days yeah it's really tricky i guess it's how long you hold it for and how uncomfortable it becomes but it is it's a tough one and and so that was for me that was like right so one thing okay let's strip that but we can't do that that's that's okay are we allowed standing desks and there was one person in that whole office that had a standing desk and i said okay let's just go through what you can be doing if you have to sit right we set a timer 20 minutes ding timer goes off you just push your chair back and you hold your desk and we just squat and you do like three squats at the desk to reset the posture and then i want you to walk from one end of the building to the other and then come back

to your desk done and every 20 minutes every 20 other and then come back to your desk. Done. Every 20 minutes? Every 20 minutes. And then said to the guy who leads the floor, Mehdi, are you okay with that? He's like, yeah, man, this is cool. And then the next day I want you to all have a plant. A piece of lily is really easy to keep. So easy.

You can go away for two weeks. They might be a bit droopy when you come back, but just a little bit of water and then they're up again. And that will remove benzene, xylene, flameldehyde from this environment again. So put that right on your desk so then two women just rushed out immediately went out bought two pieces put them on their desk just just simple little adjustments and again it gives them something living in that environment that they can then nurture and they have to look after what about lighting

lighting's a you know it's a big one for me um we as well as not having any furniture in our house we switched to remote control bulbs and amber lighting i should point out you have three daughters yeah right lola million so they're like yeah what are their ages nine just about turned 10 just about to turn eight a three-year-old and a new one on the way so so they're they're young enough that getting rid of the chairs is like a game and probably fun but we were joking earlier. Like fast forward to them, you know, being 25, 30 years old, telling their therapist that their dad made them take all the chairs out of the house. Well, it's funny because when we moved to Ibiza,

we were just like hippies there anyway. It was fine. And then other people were doing the same. And now I have that. Every time I move into a new place, I go and buy a table from somewhere and I just take the legs off. Cut the off yeah it's a very japanese where'd you get that where'd you get that table from and i showed them a video that's what i did so there's people now instagramming me to say i've taken the legs off my table so therapy might go off there might be a

new field for this right the trauma of the ground living population but um so you just squat around the the dinner table or again there's because we again we see one rest position there's there's multiple we're going to go through them later because it helped just unravel stuff from our run but there's kneeling positions there's positions called shin boxes and you can just flip from one to the next like a mobility session so rather than us going to yoga and doing flexibility work we just ground live because again i don't see hunter gatherers doing mobility work and yoga but they're amazing specimens again so it's what are they doing so you strip it back oh the ground live okay so let's

ground live and what's been different is each child that's been growing for so lola was familiar with city seating furniture sitting furniture millie was about two when we ditched the furniture so for her it's not really in there but l Lola, there is kind of, you know. Whereas Tallulah was born without any furniture in the home. We carried her everywhere. She never had a car seat, never had a stroller, always in a carrier. We did no nappies with her, so she had no nappy. How did you do that?

We have more trust in, like with dogs and cats, we have loads of trust in them, right? We get them litter trays and they poop in it and then they're done. With our babies, we keep them in nappies for four years man it's like the most intelligent species we perceive ourselves the most intelligent species yet we don't put any trust in our babies and it's a relationship between katarina to start with and the baby katarina's my wife by the way and um and and she built this amazing relationship that whenever the baby would make a signal,

she'd know the baby needs to go to where Tallulah needed to go to the toilet. And then eventually that's then passed on to all of us because we can see her signals. And given the chance, that innate ability, because the baby's picking, oh, they're listening to me, oh, they're listening to me, the signal gets stronger. And the signal gets so strong that the baby knows, oh, I know to go to the toilet. And then eventually, I think about 10 months she stood up super strong like boom not a toddler not rolling around but strong and then occasionally well we again we lived out in the sun so we had

terracotta tiles on the floors occasionally she'd do a poop on the floor but at 10 months already she was going off grabbing a cloth and then wiping up her mess you know it was just just again another level that i think i could see it in their movement because obviously we removed the furniture she was rock climbing at 12 months it's like people were like what's going on it's like child's insane um and barefoot running they can all barefoot run they run over anything just like i do and again it's not again it's just their innate abilities. I haven't dumbed it down in a way, haven't domesticated their movement. I've always just nurtured it. And instead of saying, get down from there,

I teach them how to climb. My fear doesn't get in the way. Katerina occasionally had it, you know, oh my God, they're really close to the edge. And I'd say, no, we have to go to the edge with them and we have to guide them and explain things to them. But don't hit them with oh what's near the edge because guess what i'm gonna want to know what's over the edge if someone reacts like that do you know what i mean so katarina's totally on board did you meet her when you were already like well on this

path or you know like what's her relationship with all the stuff that you do um i met katarina she blew my mind because i had a pilates practice years ago in a health club. I had a big space and Pilates practitioners and then I had a separate reception. It was in the health club and then there was the main reception of the health club. So every now and then I'd come out to my reception, check what was going on with a diary and who was in.

And then I looked across and there was this beautiful woman standing behind the desk. I was like, ah, my friend, who's that got I've got to go and ask her who she is you know and um he said I think she's new okay so I went over and I just said look hey um can you go and get a piece of paper and a pen and she was like yeah okay off I go and obviously went and got a piece of paper and a pen I just came back I said can you just write your number down I'll take you out and that was it and we went out to dinner and I took her to, this is a while back now, and I didn't know at the time, I took her to Gaucho Grill.

So I took her to Gaucho Grill and we sat on cowhide chairs and ordered a ridiculous steak, as I was doing at that particular time. When was that? 11 years ago. And she looked really uncomfortable. And i said okay she said yeah i'm a vegan and i know false move number one okay can you imagine what have i done um so then we got around it i ordered some amazing caramelized onion um mushrooms and a dish and that was fine and we and and we hit it off and it was amazing and then over time i'd always said that katarina was far more

connected than i was and i was almost trying to get to a position where she was so um she was heavily influenced by yoga um but there were things going on with her in within her own digest digestion through what i'd say was a poor vegan diet at that time, loads of grains and pulses and that was it. And guided by, I think, her student life, she was studying psychology at the time. She's from Slovakia, so she was converting her Masters in Psychology into a UK degree and was working behind reception while studying and being a nanny.

So she was like, I was just in awe, you know, this is incredible. And yeah, as I say, I've always felt like I was having to, I was trying to get to her level. Yeah. That's cool, man. Well, I got a heavy dose of your movement expertise when we were out on the trail. And, you know, I knew that you were a barefoot runner. I figured when I took you out into Malibu Creek State Park that you might wear sandals, though. I couldn't wrap my head around the fact that you were actually going to do it barefoot, but you did it. We ran like six and a half miles or something like that. And there's a lot of wide sandy trail, but there was also significant portions of it

that are almost like a dry creek bed where there's not just boulders, but tons of tiny little sharp rocks. And you just gracefully ran across all of that, like in perfect form. I was amazed, I was super impressed. And I'm just trying to keep up. And in tribute to you, I put on my Vivo barefoot shoes, which I will admit, freely admit that I don't wear that often. And it was quite an experience, man. It's pretty amazing that

you're able to do that. Well, again, it is an experience I'm experiencing. it is an experience I'm experiencing. But again, I see it as a biological norm to me. If we look back, I mean, imagine what's in our DNA right now. My Y-chromes on my paternal line goes right back to 270,000 years in East Africa. So imagine the terrain I would have been traversing at some stage, the most hostile environments and terrains and you know we'd have all been these incredible movers over that terrain now we look at well tim for instance right

ninja warrior or parkour legend or any of these amazing athletes and yet we would have all been doing something of that nature somewhere you know whether that's arboreal in the trees from persistent hunting or something along those trails we would have all been doing it so it's not like I'm doing anything different it's just over time I've managed to tune into what is again what I see as an innate ability to be able to run like that and talking of stories starting out I mean I was I was born one of the longest babies in history in Reading Hospital. So much so there was not enough room in the womb.

So I managed to create this weird and wonderful shape by tucking my feet underneath my armpits in the womb. And so when I was born, I was born with a deformity. So my feet were completely turned and almost crippled in a sense. So I then had, I think the first 12 weeks was then put into cast each week so they reshaped my feet and then put me into plaster cast every week for the first 12 weeks and then beyond that i then had these leather boots with a metal bar that run across them where they'd prize my feet open and do the bars up and that then continued they're like a little leather boot and you can see my feet

the print of my feet inside them it's incredible so when i went into that then there's there's the i met with a trauma coach and they sat down and said if we go through childbirth with you what's the first thing that come up and i remember doing this ayahuasca ceremony in the ceremony i was asking about freedom and freedom came up as this um freedom in a in a beautiful woman's voice and it said um freedom is innate in all of us you know again freedom like anything else is innate ability but we're handed all this stuff we get given this this this all this materialism and it just takes our freedoms away bit by bit by bit by bit. And that's like the domestication process until we don't have anything left. And then it's up to the parent's responsibility to ensure that with those things

is there isn't attachment. So then it was for me is to understand not to become attached to anything. And then suddenly these boots just appear in my vision, my boots with this metal bar. During the therapy session or during the ayahuasca? During the ayahuasca ceremony. That's the first part. And then this voice came, and the thing is, Tony,

with freedom, it can be gone in a moment. And then the medicine wore off, and I then sat there for two hours while everyone else is in an ayahuasca ceremony and i learned not to become attached to the ayahuasca so that was my last ceremony was that going back to the therapy session i'm sitting there with a therapy guide who says about um the trauma what's the first thing and it was the same boom it was the image of these boots that came up immediately and so then it's almost like the the boots that then shape me into what i'm doing today and everything so in the trauma itself there's all those positives within trauma that

we don't really discuss you know that's super interesting taking it back you grew up you grew up in the uk but not in london right like in a in like a village in a village called langley yeah wow yeah out in the middle of nowhere well it's in berkshire is it when we were growing up there there's not a great deal going on there and there's a lot of boredom going on there so it was um yeah for me there were moments in amongst that where we'd get out into a little bit of nature and that was punctuated in a in an existence of a concrete village with just linear boxes you know going from one as we were saying earlier going from one linear box to the other and unfortunately i had parents that were working really, really hard. My dad had a business that just wasn't successful but put everything into it.

And their favorite activity was TV. And, you know, so we used to basically sit there and be in front of a box the majority of the time. And I need to move. I'm one of these people that just has to move. So I had what would be classes like ADHD. I'd be tapping. I'd be, you know, I need to get out and do stuff do stuff and then my dad would be saying what's wrong with him why

does he have to keep tapping you know as if i wasn't in the room so it's like this weird position and every now and then i'd i could get out and we'd go to this place called um the gravel pits it was like a wreck for us and to get to it there's there's the crazy intercity trains into cities like bullet trains and we'd go across a bridge with our fingertips balancing on the edge of it to get into this place called the gravel pits and then it was shoes off and it was doing exactly what i'm doing today but that was probably when i was at my most happiest it was my escapism from that zoo existence but that zoo existence, but that zoo existence was still quite, it was trauma for me.

It was like I had, I mean, there was lots of issues growing up for me. I was in and out of trouble with the police a lot, and it was really just signs of, hey, I'm over here. I'm suffering here. I'm not in a happy space. You probably had difficulty sitting in a classroom, right? Like what was the school experience like for you? My school experience was terrible. I spent a lot of time looking out the window and tapping

and a lot of time on the school roof. So we used to figure out how to get up the drain pipes onto the school roof and what's called parkour today, but it was just like kids running around crazy. And then we had a, there's a a do you know the film what's the film in between us i haven't seen that there's a there's a there's a the head in it is called greg his real name is greg davids he's like uh he's a comedian today but he was actually my english teacher at school so well his his teaching method was this he'd have a set of headphones on

like you you do now and we had Walkmans then. So we had a Walkman. He had his Walkman on and his headphones on. He'd sit with his feet up on the desk and we all just left to be crazy in the class. That was it? That was my school. That was probably good for you though. And the school got closed down in the end.

It was closed down because it was just really super rough in a village and just really- Rough like- Poor behavior. Right. Okay. Yeah, like gang. People people going in tooled up. You could be sitting at your desk and someone would be getting underneath the desk with a compass and jabbing you in the back of the legs and stuff like that.

Kids just left to- kids suffering, I guess, and then being left to just behave how they want to behave in that environment. And so drugs and alcohol enter the equation at some point? Yeah, I think, I mean, I started smoking weed quite early. We were already at the age of 14, I think we were smoking weed at school and going into class stoned and just, that was the obvious.

And then alcohol came into the scene very early. I never really classed myself as having a problem with alcohol until I did a big ceremony where I smoked toad venom. It's like this Sonoran Desert Toad, Bufo Various. Yeah, I've heard of that. It's like a super powerful dose of DMT, right? It's 5-MeO DMT, so it's the strongest DMT experience there is. But natural, again, so it comes off the back of this toad and they go out

and they collect the venom they dry it on glass sheets and then it's like crystal and then you smoke it and there's a guy that works with his name's um octavia who worked with me he's a doctor and um a study with all the traditional tribesmen um and then in that experience after that i had no attachment after. There was no attachment. I come out of it. And then it highlighted, ah, I don't need a drink. And then I realized, ah, I had a problem with drink. And it kind of went into the role of highlighting like a real show

of all the things that I'd basically done in my life up until that moment of these are the things that have led you here and there is no good or bad or anything within it they're just all experiences but these are the things you can do without and it's kind of i could leave everything and it was almost trippy because it was selective in i can keep all these things because these these are okay it's great for you but this stuff you need to leave behind so again with alcohol i didn't realize i had a problem with it and i was in the military and it was quite the norm there so people were just right very boozy and again it was people suffering so people dealt with their suffering and to remove suffering we we use drugs

or we use alcohol in this modern world we are today and i think the army's full of suffering right there's a lot of kids that probably had the same upbringing as today. And I think the army's full of suffering, right? There's a lot of kids that probably had the same upbringing as I did that migrate to the army because it's a form of escapism. Yeah. So your decision to join the army, was that just like, look, this is the only way that this is the only path for me? What was the thought process and enlisting? I think there was a few. I think one of them was i mean i didn't really have much of a relationship with my dad because he was very much out the home working running a business and we used to see him probably on sundays and if we did it's kind of dipping in

and out because he's really stressed angry frustrated at the world nothing's working out and it wasn't the best example i would say of a masculine you know for me anyway and i found myself we one of my uncles called us latchkey kids where my parents were just so loose you just just drift in and out and i just found myself in the wrong tribe of people so i again with drugs and with alcohol and then the drugs turned from just weed into doing cocaine and ecstasy and lsd and we literally tried everything and then but again removing suffering i think it's like understanding what is the suffering i think to begin with and then the army came along i just think it was just it was almost like a savior at that moment. If you don't go and do this, who knows what the path is going to be, right?

Like some even unconscious drive to get some discipline into your life. Yeah, I think. And also just wanting some kind of tribe. And I probably think a masculine tribe, some think that rather than me going out joyriding cars and smoking weed and just getting in trouble constantly and police turning up at the house i need to figure i need to figure out how am i going to get out of this and i had a cousin who was in the ref at the time and then my dad was saying why don't you you know why don't

you think about doing the rs i tried to get in the ref and i went into the ref recruitment center i was already in a i joined the air cadets funny enough we were in air cadets and that was a that was on our school grounds and they were called 2424 squadron and that highlighted it for me so then that gave me an opportunity we were camping we were going out shooting rifles flying gliders and things like that but again it may enable me to to tap into what I love most when I was growing up in that village and I could get to the wreck it was was supporting that. So it was enabling me to get out and explore my physicality and make a connection to nature again, I guess. So then I could see that could happen.

Ah, the army, and I loved all the physical side of it. I loved all the assault courses and stuff like that. So after going into the recruitment center, the RAF, they just said, oh, you're too young. Come back in a year's time. But the army recruitment was next door. So it seemed like an obvious thing for me. So off i went

i just knocked on the door and at that time yeah we need um we need people for um the rlc which the raw logistics core and we're looking for driver radio operators so it meant i got to have a mic and some earphones and um learn code and stuff like that and have a five seconds life expectancy of war if i went to war and um and i did what i was in there for a period of time in a holding unit and in the holding unit um again everything about it up until that point was amazing because i get i really got to explore the physicality i i loved every part of it just the the assault courses, as I say earlier, and going out on exercise. It was great. It was feeding me.

Again, it was a tribe. It's like a rite of passage also. Exactly. But when you understand it, post that, looking back on it, you realize it's a pseudo rite of passage. Like going to prison or something like that. The pseudo rites of passage is a rite of passage, and it enables you to then view everything differently again.

But there's an element of of such conditioning that goes in there and i would go home every now and then because i was posted it was so close to me so every now and then i'd dip in and out the same behavior so the rave scene was on this scene right so we were out and then eventually our families i'd go clubbing and then we were popping pills and doing trips and stuff like that. And then I'd go back into the army and it was like, and I remember reading in the papers at that time

and it said, stoned up to their teeth and armed out their brains, right? Armed up to their teeth and stoned out their brains, sorry. And then they had these compulsory drug testing wagons would come around the military bases. It was like, wow, man, this is tough. This is like, again, trying to to separate living in two worlds almost and then i had a i had a car accident and we were basically meant to be on base and i'd saved every bit of money i had for this car it was like my pride and joy it meant that i could go back and i could

still connect to this world so it was it was me, I think, the car at that moment. And we weren't meant to be off base, but we knew the guy on the gate, so we were like, oh, we're going to go. So it was a car full of people. We drive into the town, we rock up in the town. And on the way back to the base, I overtake like a parcel delivery van and I see the guy. He basically jumps into the van from the sliding

door on the side gets behind the wheel and just accelerates but at that time i've already just started overtaking but he just turns right and hits the back of my car flips my car over and we slide like 100 feet on the roof i put my hand through the through the sunroof and cut through my fingers and then it's all a blur after that and the next thing i find myself in the hospital and then from the hospital i'm then told that i nearly hit a woman with a pram um that um i'm looking at being charged because it was seen as my fault but all i've done is overtake a van and the van's turned but it was just the witnesses and everyone around it so i and then i was immediately back just the witnesses and everyone around it.

So I, and then I was immediately back at the base. And instead of dealing with the trauma of having a car accident and the fact I've nearly hit a woman over pram, I got put in jail. So immediately the response was let's put the guy in jail. And how, there were other people in your car though, right? Were they injured? They were all fine, nothing wrong with them.

And so I- You were kind of AWOL also, right? We were basically AWOL just for a matter of hours, like four hours. But yeah, we were AWOL, yeah, absent without leave, you know. So that was the way it was treated, regardless of the fact I've had a car accident, regardless of the fact I'm going to wipe this woman out, I'm still AWOL. You've hit the nail on the head, that's it. And that's the way it's treated. So off the back of that, I just,

it left a really bad taste in my mouth. And I was traumatized by the accident. My car's written off, there's all this stuff around it. And it just changed my perception of the army in that moment, you know, it was done. In what way? So you were just, I need to get out of here. Yeah, it was like someone had lifted this veil

and it's like, oh my God, all the brainwashing, everything that had gone in, all the conditioning was all gone. And I'm left in this space like, oh my God, what am I doing here? And what did that feel like? Terrible, man. It was like, again, it was just supporting, again, the need to want to get back to this relationship over here. So I'd find myself back into the same group of people,

the same behavior. And then it was a matter of getting out of the army. So it took me a year of that kind of feeling of being lost in this world, but probably even more lost over here. So how do you see your way through that? I guess, again, dealing with the way that i would normally dealt with suffering which was to do drugs and alcohol that's what i was doing you know that was supporting it and and i i feel again once i could work out what what is what is the suffering it took me that period of

time to get there i feel but. But that wasn't it. You know, it didn't end there. So I'd find myself in and out of trouble again, same relationship with police. So I'd almost go from one form of Her Majesty's service to another one, do you know what I mean? It was just like an impossible journey and how do I get myself out of this? And a family member said, look, you're in amazing shape.

And I was bodybuilding, right? So I got to, I think it was about 13 and a half stone at one point. And they just said, look, why don't you just go and become a personal trainer? Why don't you just, have you thought about that? You love the physical side of things. You love training. And it keeps you on the straight and narrow.

Why don't you just, have you thought about it? So I just went and did an intensive. I did like a quick one month intensive personal training qualification. Got my like level one, level two, level three PT. And are you in London at this point or where are you? No, I'm back in the village with my parents, right? Wow.

Living the guilt and the shame and everything. Early twenties, you're jacked up, you're high. Jacked up, yeah. You're like- Jacked up. And looking for a fight. Yeah, not really losing the fights inside, of course. That's where it really is.

And so I take up this personal training qualification. And this cousin said, look, I've got this gig, and it was at a metal trading company called Mammer Hayden at the time. And it's in Knightsbridge um anyway so he's got this idea of setting me up with it didn't didn't manifest straight away but it was just I've got this gig I think I think it will suit you I find myself in a in a place in Beckinsfield

which is another village outside where I'm from at 12 and a half miles. So it's the cycling 12 and a half miles. It's a personal training studio. The client base were women really around 40 plus. Their husbands were making money in the city and it was on that commuter belt outside. So they're interested. I mean, they're not into bodybuilding. They might like looking at the jacked up 20 something year old. But it was a very different method of training at that stage.

So the woman who was running it, Linda Mosley, she was training premiership footballers and it was a very different method of training at that stage so the woman who was running it linda mosley she was training premiership footballers and it was very much about core stability you know we're talking about core stability earlier so something was like cool what and then swiss balls what and then foam rollers what and then all this stuff was coming forward but there was no resistance machines which i loved so it meant right you really had to work at giving someone a training session and then out out of that, working with core stability, I found Pilates. And someone else said, right, okay, I've got this Pilates studio. You thought about Pilates.

So I had this thing in London going on, Mara Hayden, Pilates. I'm working in this space over here. And so now I'm thinking, right, I'm really interested in this stuff. And it brought on this absorbent moment for me where I was just sucking up information. I was loving it, and it made perfect sense to me and I and then within this space in Beaconsfield the woman just said you're great at this stuff and we're not going to put you on a payroll we want you just freelance and it would be an incentive for you to get more clients and so I built up a big business in there wow and then in a short window of time as well it was just something that I could I gravitated towards and

it made sense and then pilates came along so i learned 34 positions of mat work by joseph pilates but joseph pilates was a radical dude but he's primary yeah the pilates primer so that was returned to life through controlology and he had a whole philosophy so even standing it would be about getting the weight on the balls of the feet so the bof which is the same as we're discussing earlier it was about how your posture would be aligned for standing but you know he was an internee in the war and so he fled and went to new york he got on a ship from germany when they asked to enroll him in the german police and off he went and he met his what was the white what was to be his wife clara and she had a uh she was a nurse so she gave some kudos to the fact there was a qualification there

medical qualification, and he set up his first studio with a New York City ballet. So then I think it changed. It suddenly become there was a lot of rehab for dancers within that. And so are you a dancer? Am I a dancer? So for me, I think it lost a little bit within there. It's like a repertoire of 650 movements that you can learn within Pilates.

And what I started to do was select specific patterns would be appropriate for standing that we could use for running and all those things so i started to it was like prescription for pilates really what i was getting into and then i started to do like an apprenticeship in london and i was doing this i'd work over this space for a period of time and then I'd be into London for a couple of days and and took on the whole Pilates philosophy of equipment-based Pilates and rehab Pilates working with reformers and and um the trapeze and stuff the Cadillac trapeze and stuff like that and a chair the wonder chair um and then this Manor Hayden gig came up and it just changed my life because I suddenly found myself in this gym space and I only had to train the three guys that own the space. It's like three traders and they hardly wanted to train. It was like bizarre. So they were paying me a ridiculous amount of money just to sit in this space three days a week. And it just meant I could just suck up information. So just absorbing more and more around my craft. so just absorbing more and more around my craft and then the occasional hour thrown in that i'd have to train these guys and then they really look after you they take you out to lunches and

it wasn't a single thing really out to pay for and it just opened my eyes a bit to london you're like this is pretty cush it was pretty situation yeah so why not just ride that out i was riding out for a while and then know, just the call of the Pilates, I had a cousin running a Pilates studio and said, look, you should come over, have a look at it. And so I was doing more and more in that space. And then I became full-time in there and I loved it. It made sense to me.

It made sense if I could prescribe it, you know, rather than it be this set repertoire of movements and you go for a routine, it was more like, okay, there's a way of rehabbing someone. There's a way of looking for specific posture types let's say you could be a head chaser or a pelvis chaser or have a lordosis and you could iron out and figure out and it was almost like a system theory in a way you could really see it and i think maybe my dad's engineering background came in i could just analyze things differently and it just made sense what is the core idea

behind pilates well his original thing was like in 10 sessions you feel the difference in 20 you see the difference and in 30 you have a whole new body um the core thing around it again there was a philosophy in there which was about returning people back to what i would say was a biological norm again how they should be moving um standing um and there being this feeling of rehab behind it as well so i could again you could look at postural types and then iron out the areas where they most needed it but i think the flaw almost and still, is that it's like this generational amnesia. I think Peter Kahn calls it environmental generational amnesia. We were talking about running coaching earlier, with Arthur Lyddiard's model from the 50s and 60s.

It's very different to where today, try and put the same discipline through someone that's from the 50s, 60s. The physiology can't cope. It breaks down because we're living, going back to the conversation we started with which is a sedentary lifestyle so um for me the same thing happened with pilates i feel it it got to a point with me where i felt people were rocking up to do reformer workouts and trapeze workouts and wanting to get stronger in their core. But yet they, on the way out, they put the same compromising shoes on and go and sit in the same compromising chair to drive

their car back, to sit at the same compromising dinner table in the evening, to get up and repeat the same process again. So I had to look into, again, it's everything outside the studio really that counts, you know? Yeah, you have to telescope out and look at it you are starting to see things more holistically and that's it a holistic approach right julie uh my wife has gotten really into pilates, which I never would have expected. She's always been a yoga person. And I was telling you before how we're splitting our time downtown and there's this amazing yoga slash Pilates studio

right across the street from our apartment. And she's been going in there and she's just like had a transformation. Like she's gotten super strong. She's really into it. And she keeps telling me like, you gotta go in and do it. I just haven't had time. She's really into it. And she keeps telling me, like, you got to go in and I just haven't had time, but I really want to check it out. I've never done it before. I've never explored that methodology. Yeah. I, um, I just fell out of love

of it. I fell out of love of it because I, I understood eventually what the biomechanics should be and what the shapes that we should be making due to the forces that are out there. So explain that. So I met this guy called Nicholas Romanoff, who was a track and field coach in the Soviet era. He designed something called the pose method. And it's what we were kind of discovering earlier with running.

So he discovered there's a specific posture that everyone goes to when they run. And's almost like there was it's standing on one leg like you were hopping on one leg earlier and provided you hit that posture it means you can deal with the external forces and create the appropriate shape to do with the forces and this is kinetics being the study of the forces and kinematics is the shapes you make due to the forces, essentially biomechanics. So we train muscles and tendons and stuff like that. But really they're just almost like a slave to that system.

And given the right shape, the muscles and the tendons know what to do. And what we tend to do, which can come in with Pilates, is we train the muscles and the tendons and we train the muscular activity, which is like bodybuilding in a way. We train muscles for aesthetics or just to make us stronger,

but really we don't understand this whole system is that those muscles and tendons should understand their role. And you can't remove a hamstring, just work specifically on a hamstring, and then insert it again and expect it to understand its role within the whole organism. So with pose, it was about basically understanding these influences with nature.

The appropriate posture would mean the appropriate shape, which means you can deal with the forces appropriately. Lots of appropriate there. And so it then applies to everything. It applies to any movement that I could look at, I could analyze, and say right okay that's that you could be more efficient if you just did that you could be more efficient if you did that and you remove the risk of injury and once i discovered that it didn't make sense

to teach pilates anymore right it made sense to teach the appropriate postures for things and then almost find the micro elements of those macro postures the things that running for instance is a macro skill what are the micro elements of that macro skill do i need to get physically stronger and improve the technique i understand the kind of umbrella philosophy behind this, I think, but I'm trying to wrap my head around how that becomes teachable. Like, how do you break that down into specific things that you can have people do to work on? Well, again, I would look at, right,

what makes the wild posture that you would need for running how do i achieve that so i then now know that i look to again the best runners in the world what is it they're doing uh they're not sitting in chairs they live on the ground there's ground rest positions so we could say the squat is probably one of the prime positions to be able to get into if you want to know how to stand because observing all my kids and observing Tallulah growing she had to do all these amazing little rest positions on the ground to get to a squat once she could squat she could stand up so when you said just just to be clear when you say squat you're not talking about squatting in the gym you're talking about

just literally squatting on the ground. Like a rest position. Yeah, flat-footed, completely rested, with a good shape, a good posture. And so that the ankles aren't compromised, the knees aren't compromised, the hips aren't compromised. And once you have that, then I would say then you can stand. And I could see people that go into multiple disciplines and this could be a lot of yogis that I see, martial artists that I see, boxers that I see,

runners that I see, just athletes that can't perform the squat. And we have to look at, right, how old is yoga, right? How old are these martial arts? So again, if we look at that generation generational amnesia model is we know that in those original disciplines those guys weren't sitting in furniture they were ground living they were performing amazing things on the ground and amazing squats therefore their ankle their knee and their hip can deal with the ranges and the

forces we put through it so the modern western body if we shove yoga into it and the forces we put through it. So the modern Western body, if we shove yoga into it and the martial arts and there isn't the ankle, the knee or the hip functions, we end up with a lot of knee injuries and lower back injuries. And it's torsion in the knee is one of the most compromising ones I see with yogis that have been in Ashtanga for many, many years. But it's a simple fix.

Again, I'll just take them back to the ground and we go through ground positions and get them back into squatting. And then once they have that, then again they have the appropriate shape and then they're away. And then they can put the discipline back in again. So what is it that the squatting teaches the body? Provided you have the right foot shape, so there's a micro element of squatting, but the squat will teach the dorsiflexion you need in your ankle,

like the appropriate angle teach the approach the the dorsiflexion you need in your ankle like the appropriate angle angle in the ankle here um which will then create like a neutral ankle and neutral ankle will create like a neutral knee position and then you can have hip mobility so it teaches you this that the foot then becomes a stable foundation the ankle becomes mobile the knee becomes stable the The hips become mobile. And then that's the true relationship of joint actions. And then you have a stable pelvis and a lower back. So just by squatting, it's almost like a wild state of nature's cure about resetting your posture. So even from a run or hours sitting at the desk is always just take

it back to the squat, reset things before walking off even. So if you were going to pull out a prescription pad and write a prescription for me, short of getting rid of all the chairs in my house and knowing me as a runner and a multi-sport athlete, what is the prescription around squatting or other things that I could be doing or somebody who is like me could be doing? And there's many people like you, I get to see a lot of people like you. I wouldn't go as extreme to taking your furniture away.

It would be too much. Don't worry, it's not gonna happen. Your family wouldn't handle it. It'd be too much of an emotional crash. Julie might be into it, I don't know. I think, again, you have to take it back to say, after a certain amount of time, like after this, immediately after, I'd be taking things. I think again, you have to take it back to say, right, after a certain amount of time, like after this immediately after I'd be taking things

to the ground again, just because of the length of time you're sat here. I feel bad that we're not sitting on the ground doing this podcast. Again, we can squat after, that's the beauty of it. Like I was on a flight for 11 and a half hours, right? And I'd get up, I'd get up up regularly go to the back of the plane do the mobility sequence open my hips up do some shoulder mobility squat you know i saw that on instagram

and then i hope you had an aisle seat and then i'd go back to the seat no i managed to get extra leg room and i had a window seat oh you did so you have to climb over somebody every time you wanted to get up every 20 minutes yeah and i explaining earlier, the lady next to me was really demonstrating the behavior that was encouraging me even more. It was like, oh, wow. So, yeah, I would, again, just look at what you're doing within the environment and try and make small changes within it rather than add too much to your day. And I think that's where a lot of things fall down is we think, oh, when are we gonna find the time to do that? So it's very simple to be able to slide a chair away, hold the edge of the desk,

do a few squats lifting your chest up, and use the desk as an anterior support. A lot of the people I see just don't have the ankle function, ankle mobility to perform a squat. So allow the heel to come up and just keep the shape and just drop onto your haunches. So it's almost like a straight body. Your butt will be resting on your heel and your knees will be forward

you just do a few rhythm little bounces in that position then stand again and then you're ready to walk um other disciplines that we're going to we will cover just go through a few kneeling positions that you can do on the ground and a little mobility sequence that you can play with within that and again they're just rest positions like long sits or straddle sits and things like that. The other thing for the upper body, as I recommend for everyone to do, is put a bar up to hang off. So hanging is even more ancient, if you think, than running, right? So it goes back into what would be a primate foundation.

So say if we were primates for, say, 35 million years, hominids for six million years, and then hunter-gatherers for say 400,000 years, and then farmers for 10,000 years, and then the last 150 years zoo humans, and now we're in this like human laboratory experiment, so we're like lab rats now. So if we go right down, climb down that phylogenetic tree,

we get to the brachiating apes, to how to restore and open up the rib cage and open up the lungs would be to basically just hang, simple hanging systems. So due to being over Venice beach, we get to do a fair bit of that at the moment. Yeah, there's plenty of that down there. So you go through different hanging positions

and we have in the wrist, the elbow, the shoulder, and your scapula, your shoulder blade, we have all the same brachiating abilities as all the other apes. And I find people, just some people have trouble changing light bulbs now. So it's really important to just keep nourishing that. 80% of shoulder injuries, I'd say,

is through the lack of brachiation. And then we try and do things like dips in the gym, but the scapula is internally rotated and raised, and again, it's just blowing up the shoulder. So hanging will help reset all straight arm strength forget about bent arm strength forget about pulling patterns just get used to being completely straight in the arm then your posture hang from it again that will help mobilize the shoulder but it will also open up the tendons the ligaments

everything and even the arteries through that pathway. You'll lift your rib cage, which will then make your breathing clearer. And then you can play once you're in that position. You can start to go through active hangs, so trying to keep your arms straight whilst lifting your chest up into your hands so there's no bend in the elbow. And that starts to strengthen the lower trapezius,

which is in the mid-back. A lot of the disciplines that we see are about mobilization and flexibility. And you can do all the flexibility training you like, you can do amazing work for the mid back, but if you don't have the strength to hold it there through the lower trapezius, gravity is gonna take over. What about doing pull-ups and chin-ups?

And those are pulling. But great, but on a straight arm strength to begin with. So there's Ido Portel's work. So he has like a hanging tutorial thing. And I would suggest that you basically set a timer. So you can have a timer. I work with clients, they might start with 10 seconds hanging

and then they're off the bar. And then I give them 30 seconds rest, then they go back up. And then that will turn to 20 seconds, 30 seconds and a minute. And back up. And then that will turn to 20 seconds, 30 seconds, and a minute. And the way this then starts to unravel is you start to build a relationship. It becomes a new habit. So I'll give you an example of someone who I coach who's 78. He's an old guy, called Yehudi.

He rocked up at my gym door when he was 72, so six years ago. And he was completely stooped scrunched up old posture um he brought natural birthing into the uk wrote a book called birth and beyond a real manual for childbirth amazing guy um but gravity and age were taking over and so i really want to learn how to walk and i was, so it's a good place. Let's get you off on the treadmill. And so at the age of 72, you want to learn how to walk.

So interesting, right? So while people up, he went on the treadmill, just recorded him, showed him his posture. Oh my God, I can't believe I look like that.

You know, I'll bend over. And these are these boxes that I was introduced by a coach called Lee. And basically you have like the, it's the conscious competency model. So I showed him the video and up until, until sorry i record them up until that point they're unconsciously incompetent and then i show them the video and now they're consciously incompetent and then i go through the drills they need and then they become consciously competent

and then over time doing the same drills and the same method, which you're wanting me to break down what would I do, that then becomes unconsciously incompetent, and that's how you learn the skill. But remembering the next time you get recorded, you'd still be unconsciously incompetent, so you keep feeding that. So he basically just wanted to learn how to walk. We go through walking, go through that model with him, and I prescribe footwork for rewilding the feet how

to get the feet in the foot shape rather than a shoe shape so his feet were compromised by 72 years of inappropriate footwear that were compromised in the shape of the foot get that back then ground rest positions so we then went through the various different ground positions what i would prescribe for him and then hanging and that was it and then he had a hanging bar in his home so this guy now since then has climbed Everest Base Camp Bhutan Mount Kenya Atlas Mountains and and basically this is his morning routine so he wakes up now in an air purified room trots downstairs, gets to the office on the second floor, hangs from the bar,

goes into the office, gets on the mat, does his mobility sequence, has a standing desk, answers his emails, go downstairs, preps his smoothie, prebiotics, probiotics, symbiotics, puts his Vivos on, walks down to the tube, gets to the tube, doors open, he gets on. People usually say, because he's 78, would you like a seat? He's like, no, I'm okay. And up he doors open he gets on people usually say because he's 78 would you like a seat he's like no i'm okay and up he goes he hangs on the bars he hangs on the bars while the tube's moving feet off the floor tube stops doors open right next one next time the doors

close then he squats and he squats and then he does breath work so he does between breath work hanging squatting and a bit of surfing so surfing you don't hold on to anything you just try and get your support on the train and that's at the age of 78 and he just made small changes all the way along and he's using his commute he's in incredible shape now you know and his spine straightened out straighter now it's completely upright wow but looks so the difference is it's how he how he looks now so he doesn't look like the 72 year old he looks you know he looks now. So he doesn't look like the 72-year-old. He looks great. He looks in amazing shape and he's a newfound confidence within it.

It's kind of a beautiful act of humility to walk into your gym and say, teach me how to walk too. I think that takes courage. Most people wouldn't do that. And it's interesting to think about walking as something that we might have to learn or relearn. Like we were talking about this in the do need to formally learn how to run. that I could be doing better because I'm unconsciously incompetent

in certain aspects of what I do, even though I've been doing it for a long time and I've done it at a decent level. Yeah, man. A really decent level. But there's still so much to learn, you know? And I know that I'm not, you know, working at my capacity

because I've never had anybody formally instruct me in anything. What about swimming? Well, swimming's different, yeah. And we were talking about the similarities between swimming and running. Swimming is something that is more technique, non-intuitive, like you really do have to learn it.

And if you learn it at a young age and you learn it from somebody who really knows what they're doing and you dedicate yourself to honing that technique, then it becomes a situation in which you are unconsciously competent. Like I don't think about it, but I'm always working on my stroke and my technique.

And when I see, when I go to the pool and I see other people swimming, it's just alarming to me how bad most people's technique is and how unwilling they are to address it or deal with it because they're more concerned with their fitness. They have a certain amount of time. They just want to make sure that they get their heart rate up, and they don't want to step down off the pedestal and kind of build a new foundation. And that's something you were talking about with running. Like if you're doing it incorrectly, you really do have to hit pause and start over with like, okay, how do you stand up? How do you squat? How do you stand on one leg? Like how do you jump up and down before we can even get to how you're going to carry your

body when you run? Yeah. I think you hit the nail on the head about, you know, with coaching, if you want to play golf, you get a coach. Yeah. You know, you want to play tennis, you get a coach. Swim, you get a coach. Yeah. I think of a swim stroke is very much like a golf stroke. People spend their whole lives trying to perfect their golf stroke. I think of a swim stroke is very much like a golf stroke. People spend their whole lives trying to perfect their golf stroke. I think you can do that with swimming. It's less intuitive to think that that would be required in running. But the more I learn, the more I realize it's no different.

Yeah, what I was explaining earlier, you know, there's that box, isn't there? Nicholas taught me this. There's the skill and this could be anything. So you can put running in the box as the skill. And then underneath that skill, you have these three pillars. One is technique the box as the skill, and then underneath that skill, you have these three pillars. One is technique, one is the mind,

and one is the physiology. You know, so without the technique, unfortunately, over time, the physiology can break down. You know? So if you just keep working on technique over time, physiology and the mind will just get stronger with the discipline anyway. There's strength conditioning you can do around it,

but then that's only feeding the strength of the technique and the shape that you make due to the forces again. But I think the problem is, as humans, when we're working on technique, we don't feel like we're making progress because it's so slow. I agree, and I think it's then, from a coaching perspective, it's trying to find things that you can keep uploading to the run, like I was saying earlier. Rather than stripping it right back, you have that they can you can keep uploading to the run like i was saying earlier rather than stripping it right back you have that amazing bit of concrete here

by the pool is to do certain jumping drills and things that will just keep feeding the shape and then you just go for your run and you just keep doing these drills and that will just keep feeding into the run and it will enable you to just think even on the heels those little cues on the hill are enough to go ah posture little tiny pulling actions and it will just make you lighter on the run as well and the senses and the feeling and the hearing you know bring those into the run as well but it's again it is about stripping it back you know as i said earlier i've worked with fell runners and to explain to fell runners killing it with mileage right yeah but guys you're injured we need to take things back. It's easy. I mean,

people can wrap their head around like, look, you got to run a hundred miles a week. Like, yeah, no problem. I'll go do that. But you tell them, look, you got to stop what you're doing and you got to jump up and down on one leg. They're going to be like, I'm not doing that. Yeah, exactly. And keep feeding that posture. But without it, it's almost like, I think one of them, I just said, how long do you want to run for? How long do you want to keep running for? Well, I always want to keep running. I said, well, if it's the long game in longevity,

we need to stop and we need to do this because that will enable you to keep running forever. But in your current state of what you're doing, how many times do you wake up the next day and you've got a niggle or an injury? You know? Again, going back to that evolutionary model. Evolutionary model is, if that was the case for persistent hunters, we probably wouldn't be here. Do you know what going back to that evolutionary model evolutionary model is if we if that was the case for persistent hunters we probably wouldn't be here do you know what i mean oh no

i can't i can't go i can't do that today i've got a bit of runner's knee or i've got achilles tendonitis plantar fasciitis all my back's out you know so it's we we have to then say well okay what is it i'm doing what what is it i'm doing that's then leading to the niggle because then nature's way of punishing you for that that poor level of skill is the tweak the injury or disease right yeah because it's not just running it's there's a natural way of doing things you know which is a holistic approach that we look at and the closer I can get to what is the biological norm, the less likely the injury, the disease, that model. So there's a lot of runners that listen to this. And I'm interested in trying to, you know, provide people with practical takeaways. So let's start with some of the main things that you see

when you just see people out running, like it must be glaring to you like, oh my God, they're doing this wrong, they're doing that wrong. Like what are the common mistakes that most runners are making that are easily rectified through a few simple things to think about in practice? Posture. So head position.

So the head's a huge weight, say 5, 5.5 kilos of weight. If the head position is too far forward, then you have to overstride. You have to land way ahead of your body or your hip alignment. Otherwise, you'd face plant the pavement. So if your foot isn't there underneath the head, you'd fall over. So if you try and firstly just keep the head up above you, so thinking that you're looking ahead, not down at the ground,

and always looking almost down the end of the trail because you can visualize the whole trail. If I run with my head down, I can only see a short part of the trail and also can see, you can visualize the whole trail. If I run with my head down, I can only see a short part of the trail and also have to react off everything. If I keep my head up and my chest up, I can see everything and I can make these, I can trust that innate system

to make the calculations of what it needs to do. And if your head is down, then that's thrusting your hips backwards. Hips fall backwards, yeah. So you create like a K shape. And that K shape means that the chance are you gonna be be landing on your heel and it's it's more aligned with walking that posture you know there's a heel striking walking then we roll through the foot to the big toe and then you have a pendulum effect of the leg it swings to the next heel through to the big toe

and running as we went through earlier is more like a series of jumps so you it's almost like you're jumping on learn to jump on two feet first with an with a with an upright posture so it's a great little tool that for everyone is to keep your head up your chest up and your pelvis and imagine a plum line so there's someone run a line through your body or even set up an iphone's great for that just get a an app called coach's eye and with coach's eye you can set it up on profile and record yourself um and then you can set it up on profile and record yourself um and then you can draw fancy lines on it so you can draw for plum lines that's cool i'm really cool about um and so you can draw a line and you'll see where your head is in relation to your

hip so imagine you wanted your head your chest your hip and then the foot that you're landing on all in one line yeah and then that's jumping on two feet and then try and keep that line going and there's a nice little rhythm to it like ding ding ding try and land flat footed not on the balls of your feet not on your heels but try and get completely flat in your feet and then just repeat that and go you know just choose a length like a strip we had earlier what 10 meters you could hop 10 minutes turn around come back again and then jump on one leg so hop on one foot and again trying to find that same flat footed landing with the same shape and have the other leg pulled underneath you so your ankle is almost directly underneath your hip and your knee is slightly forward right and then repeat

the same process jumping because running is a series of single-legged hops alternate hops so hop on one leg so we just jump on the one leg and then you turn you come back again on the other leg and then you can build a rhythm in like one two three four and then switch and pull the other leg up so alternate alternating positions and that gives you an understanding that running is actually there's a pulling cycle in running that's what your hamstrings are there their hamstrings a huge pulling muscle and its role is to get that ankle underneath your hip so you're not driving your knees up you're thinking about getting your ankles up underneath you.

And they're just some simple postural cues. And then, again, just taking things back to squatting. So what do we see? The classic is that it's more like this head position being forward and promoting a heel strike. I think the other thing is this world of footwear, and we discussed this earlier, is for me, the more and more information I put between me and the earth, the more I dumb down my senses. And the more I dumb down my senses, the less feedback I get, the less chance

I have of dealing with the forces and creating the right shape to deal with those forces. So it just dumbs down the signal to your movement brain to make the appropriate shape again you uh you're now able to just run barefoot on all manner of surfaces but that doesn't happen overnight right like how long did it take you to kind of build up to the place where you can handle that kind of you know terrain under your feet um i guess again i think it goes back into that original conversation about the original trauma like when i was born and my my mom would say i just had incredibly strong legs i just i was doing like hamstring curls with this metal brace on my feet lying on my front constantly doing this and so for running for me when I was in my first

school was going in I was written winning like 400 meter races by 200 meters as a young kid but I was doing that barefoot and we had a concrete playground that we running on I used to run around that barefoot so I guess it was already going in a very early age that's crazy a lot of football best this all goes back to like way early for you. And then that then gets put to one side and then this big chunk of just craziness in between, which is dealing probably with that initial stuff that wasn't dealt with the way it should have been, guess but um and then and then when i started with pose method i think at that stage i then started to realize there was a form i should say and then we met vivo barefoot and then vivo barefoot had a shoe you know it's like we got the shoe and it was like yeah but you need a technique without the technique people are going to get injured wearing a shoe you know um vivo in

like the very early days yeah they were called terraplana then so before they were vivo barefoot so then it was then it then it became more about rather than just nicholas's model of the posture we then started to look at what about the feet and so already i wouldn't wear anything else after meeting vivo suddenly become very clear that I had to be in minimal shoes. And believe me, we were like guinea pigs. People were looking at my shoes. What the fuck have you got on your feet, Tony? They were like these really massive wide toe boxes, really wide.

They were like clown shoes, basically. They were proper clown shoes. And I was quite stylish up until that point. What are you doing, man? I was like, once you've worn these, you won't turn back. And I couldn't because I knew too much. It was like, why would I mess my feet up? But you got to like, why would I call the guys up at Vivo?

Come on, you got to at least make these things look a little bit better. And I guess that was driven by, you know, why would I compromise my feet? And I guess knowing that what it was truly to have compromised feet, you know what I mean? It must have been that, that must be in there somewhere. And so then running and I started, you know, I just started doing my, I just started doing the mileage in vivos to start with.

And then it was like, right, okay, well, if that feels that great and that's minimal, that's like three millimeters originally. And that meant that anything above three minutes was dumbed down the information you receive.

I then started to, on retreats, I'd then take people through what was barefoot running and i go through the protocols of barefoot running and then it got to the point right see that i'm gonna run on that and then i guess it's a bit like whim with breath work and the ice it suddenly became this thing for me that ah that's crazy that i but i know i can run on it why why is it i can run on it? Right. And again, it doesn't hurt. And it just got to this point where, ah, okay, I'm just really relaxed. I'm just super relaxed.

And again, we would have all been doing that. I'm not doing anything different to what we would have been doing at some stage. It's just my feet have now, I've rewilded my feet. I've rewilded the behavior of the foot. I've rewilded my feet, I've rewilded the behavior. One of the things I noticed when we were out running was how quiet your feet were on the ground. And I'm running in the vivos, you're barefoot, and my feet are just like boom,

I'm landing, I'm such a heavy foot. And you were telling me focus more on, don't focus on like landing the foot, focus on the light touch and then the pull upwards, which I'd never really thought about before. Yeah, like there is no touch. I'm not even thinking there is a ground. I'm just thinking about I've got to get, I just got to get my feet underneath me. So there's no recognition of ground. It's just off, off, off, off, off, off, off.

How quickly can I get my feet off that ground? So there is a recognition of ground. I was thinking about it and trying to work on that, and I still was landing like really heavy-footed, like boom, boom, like a clod hopper. But that's where, again, working by the pool, as I said earlier, you just keep working on just the action of getting your feet off the ground. And on a really smooth surface is be barefoot.

Yeah. You know? So how did you like become this guy? Like we're still, you know, we were kind of tracking this chronologically for a minute. We went off on a tangent. Is that what we're doing? But you were like, you were the Pilates guy for a while.

Then you found who's the Russian, what's the name of the Russian guy? Dr. Romanov. Romanov. So you kind of, you know, start falling under this philosophy, but how do you then, you know, kind of blossom into, you know, the natural lifestylist? Like what's the in-between phase here? Okay, it's a big chunk this, you ready? Yeah.

So I go, once I discovered Nicholas's work, I can't have a studio, a Pilates studio anymore. So I closed the Pilates studio and I kind of lost in a bit of limbo. And a cousin of mine, Lee, another guy, Matt, and myself decide that we're going to go into business together because it's a great idea to go into business with friends and family. So that's what we do, right? And we find this disused railway building. Beautiful. It was on the Tube Line.

It was a ticket hall originally in West hampstead back to brick and it just was wow this is like a 1950s boxing movie scene you know we can let's let's open up a boxing gym so off we went we flew to pasadena in texas to train with this amazing boxing coach who had something like 360 golden glove winners he was a technical genius in boxing very much like nicholas is in running we managed to discover one in boxing and he blew our minds and he blew our minds in the way that we could suddenly take anyone and just put them through these fundamentals of footwork and timing and rhythm and turn lawyers into excellent boxers in a very short window of time.

And it just fed the same thing. What's the skill? Here's the skill, it's boxing. What's the technique? Here's the technique. Then we could build the physiology and the mind exactly the same as Nicholas's model. He didn't know the language.

He used to call it fiber muscle and stuff like that, which he meant tendon action, but he called it fiber muscle. And he could pick apart any boxer. And suddenly you realize that okay there's the real technical boxers the technical geniuses out there and i mentioned one earlier which is like bernard hopkins we could talk about mayweather and they're just they've been doing it at such an early age but they've been honing their techniques the whole time rather than it just be raw talent and physiology because that again doesn't it breaks down and these guys get spanked

over time boxing's really ruthless like that it just suddenly shows people Their age if they haven't been working on technique So we bring that back and we set up this 1950 style boxing club with a 1950 style of boxing It looks like a movie set people want to hire it And we also had this running model within it. And then we suddenly start to move in a different tribe of natural movement influencers like Erwan Akor and this company called Wild Fitness. And we bring a model in that was then around how you move naturally. And was Ido Portal around? No, he wasn't on the scene for us at that point.

So this was, I think, 13, something like 13 years ago, I guess, maybe 14 years ago. And we basically, we were almost ahead of the time with natural movement, which sounds bizarre, with natural movement. We were ahead of the time. We were ahead of the time bringing this evolutionary model in. Ahead of it being like all zeitgeisty yeah and

then people would come in like we had chris mcdougall rock up from born to run with he had a plantar fasciitis injury from doing the books and my cousin then sorts his plantar fasciitis injury out he had plantar that then explodes um that model and then we wait he had plantar fasciitis after the book no i think it came in, I think he returned, I think the story was that he returned back to wearing a conventional running shoe or something. After writing the book? No, I think it's within it.

And I think he gets plantar fasciitis in there. So my cousin Lee then fixes his plantar fasciitis by going through what we're talking about, the posture and the rhythm and the timing. And then I think he goes back into writing the book and then he's fixed. It was very quick. It was just a simple cueing technique where he spent too long on the ground um easily done so it's not a fault of his running it's just i think it was just going back to wearing a sneaker with rubber which meant he then spent too long on the ground which means the

planty server does foot can't understand its tendon action so it gets stiff and then you end up with um so that that was rocking around and then vivo barefoot then offer lee a deal to be their barefoot running coach so he then says i'm jumping ship then my friend matt who's a strength conditioning coach and it was amazing strength and he got it bronze in kettlebells at that time for the uk incredibly strong he's like do you know what this isn't for me anymore i think i'm out and unfortunately i'd inherited this crazy position from my dad where i'd stay in there and my ego got the better of me as i can do this work i'm gonna make this business work you're sitting on some crazy lease crazy lease that the three of us were struggling with and i took the whole thing on but i had a really strong coaching um one-to-one business and then my coaching

one-to-one business kind of paid for everything. And then we had members coming in and using the space. And then over time, the rent and the lease were going up because we'd signed a deal that way. So it didn't matter what members were coming in. And it was always this idea that I'm going to stay in there. Just like what should my dad do with his business? And his business went down the pan.

And then I saw his breakdown and I business went down the pan and and then i saw his breakdown and i saw it just turn into just it was just a nightmare for all of us and he was never the same being after that but somehow i was going along this path it was crazy and i was actually just observing myself doing it and couldn't get out of it but then we had lola we had lola and we had millie and i was like wow okay I need to this this I can't what's going on and I remember I was holding a workshop and I had um personal trainers yogis entrepreneurs just a room full of just very different people and I'm teaching them about a philosophy which is around a natural lifestyle but I've got it under the umbrella of natural movement and I'm

saying that there's a physical social social, spiritual need, needs. And if they're met, then we have emotional wellbeing, which is then a holistic approach. So the closer I can get my physical, social, and spiritual needs to nature, the more healthy the organism's going to be. Yeah, I'm this guy. You're living in dissonance with that. Totally, man.

And this train just went past the building as we're on the tube line and the doors went and it hit me man i just had this just oh my god i'm a fraud and it was like one of those really deep deep moments where it's a proper epiphany and i'm looking at the guys in the room and i'm moment you know and i get through the workshop and one of the guys who I've been working with in Ireland for quite some time, I know really influenced him along the way and it enabled him to go and open studio. He said, you're right. And I said, I think I'm going to close the gym then. He's like, what? I said, yeah, I think I'm going to close it. Within a month I'd wrap things up, but we lost everything, you know, went bankrupt, had no money. And yet we had two kids, a wife.

up had no money and yet we had two kids um a wife and yeah but this is your divine moment yeah that like dismantling forced you to confront yourself and figure out what was important yeah man i got to see everything i've got to see all the pain i've got to see all the trauma everything all the suffering all highlighted within a year of trying to somehow get through a breakdown and turn it back into a breakthrough so I could rebuild Tony, wherever Tony is. You know what I mean? Is this where the ayahuasca comes in? Yeah, man.

All right. I want to hear about this. You know, this is like, it comes up with alarming regularity. Like, as somebody who's in recovery for many years for drugs and alcohol, I have this internal dialogue around this, like this internal conflict about it. Because on the one hand, it's undeniable to me, I know people like yourself who've had these experiences. They're better for it. I can tell that it has given them something that has enriched their lives. But at the same time, if you tell a drug addict

that the solution to their problems lies in a mind-altering substance, that's a very dangerous, tricky, intoxicating thought to plant in my mind. And so it scares me at the same time. But I've talked to so many people, both on this podcast and off it, who've had really kind of incredible experiences.

And I've had Gabor Mate on the show who is telling me like, this is something that could be helpful with, you know, the addiction issues that I struggle with. So it's to be tabled. I sort of am interested in it, but also kind of cautious about it as well. I think along my path this year that I'd taken, I think it just, again, it highlighted the suffering.

And then you understand that the suffering is what I'm basically using substance for to get away from instead of really facing it. basically using substance for to get away from instead of really facing it and um and that's also within the tribe of influence the people that have influenced me and made and enabled me to get my first templates in life so the first six years of life that i've observed in my tribe i've then learned to suffer within those first six years somehow. There's some kind of emotional suffering there. And then this was an opportunity to suddenly I could see all my templates and I could see everyone's behaviors and I could see,

ah, okay, there's something not great here. What is it? What is happening here? Because I've done all the work. I've become this amazing physical specimen, right? I can move well. I can do this. I can do that.

But it's just a facade. And so I look at my physical self, my social self, and then I realize I haven't been doing any work over here in the spiritual model. You know, what's my connection over here? And I suddenly start researching. I find a bit of meditation. I find breath works i'm playing with those and then um my wife's like yeah we're okay aren't we you know

and i'm properly taking a year out you know and i think i'm gonna go to peru and i think i'm gonna go and um stay with a shaman you're gonna do what i said this thing ayahuasca keeps popping up in the middle of like you know we don't know how we're going to pay the bills. Yeah, yeah, exactly. And I'm throwing that one out there. And she's like, well, okay, so what's going on? I said, well, just I've been researching it. Three people in the same week I've been researching it

suddenly just send me a message saying, Tony, have you heard about this ayahuasca? And first of all, I don't know how to pronounce it. I'm like, ayahuasca, you know? So anyway, I'm going off this path and I said i said look i'm 40 in a year's time i think for my 40th birthday i'm gonna basically go and do i'm gonna go and do this ceremony i'm gonna go to peru i think gives me plenty of time but in the meantime i'd basically hired a i was looking at hiring a friend's house which was in the cotswolds and i for my same 40th birthday birthday yeah but would have meant the same social tribe the same alcohol the same drugs the same people yeah rocking up at the same events i'm like i've got to cancel this thing i've got to explain to this couple i'm not coming

and they're friends of mine right so i just thought i'm sorry messing you around i'm going to cancel the house i'm not going to use it for the 40th. And they're like, what's going on, Tony? What's happening? I said, I'll just – Got a different kind of party in mind. Yeah, I just said, I'm going to go to Peru, man. I'm going to go and stay with a shaman and drink ayahuasca.

Tony's lost the plot. And they were like, no, you don't need to do that. No, we've got a guy. He's here. And we're doing a ceremony in six weeks' time. At the same house? No, somewhere else. And they're like, but we don't worry about it, it's on us.

Right, wow. And you can come. Anyway, in between that period of time, this guy rocks up at my door and he's from LA and he has- Of course has foot injuries, right? Stuff going on with his feet and he's just in trauma around his feet. I've heard you're the guy to come to. So we do two hours together.

And this little guy rocks up and he's got like ginger hair and a ponytail and he arrives in the room and he's got a coffee and a cookie for the guy. And the guy says, thanks, man. And they just look at and a cookie for the guy and the guy says thanks man and they just look each other he nods and the guy leaves and i'll say he said yeah it's just my driver like that he says he's the driver okay okay just carry on the session like nothing happened the guy leaves another guy rocks up and he said oh i've got your details from the guy he's just come in is there a chance i can squeeze an appointment from you he lives in ibiza this guy so yeah yeah okay so we do a session together we move around for a bit so look if you're ever thinking about coming to ibiza

let me know i have a house and we can do a retreat and so and so and i said yeah i've looked at doing a retreat in ibiza i found this guy and they have an amazing house um but i just i'm just not ready to do it yet so anyway six weeks fly by and I'm then turned up at this house. They give me the details of this house. And it's down this country lane, and these electric gates open up. And it's like this mile-long drive, go through this country estate to get to this massive pad in the country. And I walk in.

The first person I bump into is the guy from Ibiza. The guy with the cookie? No, this is another guy. So this is the Ibiza guy, and he's the one who says, oh, if you're thinking about holding a retreat, come over. And then he introduced me to another guy who turns out to be the house that I was going to rent in Ibiza, right? So there's two people.

It's like all coincidences, right? They're all there at this space. Then I walk through, and then everyone's like, oh, have you seen so-and-so? This is the guy that owns the house. And they're like, no, no, he's not very well. He's gone to oh, have you seen so-and-so? This is the guy that owns the house. And they're like, no, no, he's not very well. He's gone to bed and he's not feeling very well. And I'm like, okay, I'm going to go and crash. I'm feeling a bit, just a little bit edgy about the ceremony, a little bit of nerves there. It's my first ceremony. And I'm

with all these seasoned ayahuasca, spiritual kale drinkers. And I'm thinking right i kind of gonna have to sleep i feel feel great in the morning wake up in the morning i walk back into the house and they're like ah so this guy's up so i call him s right oh s up he's awake in comes s and he's the guy it's his house he's the little guy with the coffee and the cookie it's his space his space the driver the driver incredible right, right? Yeah. So then the whole thing was already, it was set up around, it just felt like coincidences and there are no coincidences. It's all just perfectly aligned.

Then we go into a ceremony, the first ceremony I walk into and I am pretty nervous at this point. I'm sat kind of in a line and then you have the shaman here and he has this the shaman here and he has this whole troop of singers and his band with him and just the performance alone I would recommend you know they were incredible musicians incredible songs all night and we drink a first cup basically and you set an intention going in and my intention to go in was just to find honesty. I think I was looking for the term honesty.

And then I just got to see in that first ceremony a boy, actually. But it wasn't me, the man. I got shown the boy, the innocence of the boy, and I'm innocent despite all this stuff I've done. All the trouble with the police all the drink the alcohol the stress I've given anyone in my life the poor decisions I've made um the stuff that I'm disgusted with to this day I mean it was just oh you're underneath it all you're just an innocent boy you know you've just been shaped that way it's the environment that's

done it but that's honesty you know just and then got shown just me behind this completely clear mirror but it also highlighted lots of stuff around my dad and my relationship with my dad and it was very much like um i've never i'd never felt like i'd hugged my dad or had that kind of relationship. And this voice was so clear and precise that it was, you know, that's what he's inherited, but you're the position of change. So if you want to hug your dad, why are you waiting for him to hug you? So immediately after the retreat, that was the first thing I did. I went round to their home and gave my dad a hug.

So that was the first thing I could try and think about. That's good. Rebuilding that relationship that relationships out of anything it's probably the changing the pattern the most that was the start i'd say from that ceremony was the change in the pattern then we did a second night and in the second night it was a bit more i would say hallucinogenic for me i was seeing some crazy i was riding a lizard at one point just on the lizard's back and we were going along like this lizard. And then the guy who's the shaman, he's like the head of the lizard. And he's on stirrups like this.

And all the band members are sat behind him. Right. And they're all playing. And I'm just like, whoa. What's the lesson here? Yeah, exactly. What was the lesson here? It was just like this nice and incredible ride, man.

And again, then I'd go and then I'd experience all these different doors. So the lizard would stop me and I'd open a door and it would show me again. died man and and and again just then i'd go and then i'd experience all these different doors so the lizard would stop me and i'd open a door and it would show me again like a it was basically just highlighting all this stuff i'd done in my life like a movie set like show me real after real after real like a christmas carol style that's kind of style but riding a lizard right and um a psychedelic christmas but it's very interesting and and stuff like um this thing when i was saying earlier about my dad saying about why does he keep tapping that came up for me in a ceremony it was just i was writhing around i couldn't sit still and then this voice saying that i was a

dragon basically you're a dragon animal you know imagine trying to sit still you're a dragon how the fuck are you gonna sit still why does he keep tapping you have to say why no why why not i'm just i'm just i'm in this cage you've imprisoned me in this thing and i need to be able to move and then so i started then after that ceremony it highlighted i need to move more but not through strength training more through types of play and dance and try and revive something. And that came this amazing movement of the lizard. And I realized the lizard wasn't a lizard at all, it was a dragon. So the takeaway from this whole experience is you have this sort of clarity or epiphany about this direction that you want to take, like taking movement and translating it

in a way that you can teach and be of service, right? Like this lizard dragon energy. So in certain respects, you're crediting this experience with providing you with that kind of sensibility, like that clarity of what to do next. Yeah, I think it's just think it highlights, I believe, what you already know,

but it just, again, strips back all the conditioning, I believe, and enables you to see things, again, through the honest, pure eye of yourself, like the innocence within you, without the physiological armor or, as I say, conditioning. of yourself, like the innocence within you without the physiological armor or as I say, conditioning. But that's just one ceremony. That was kind of a moment in change. I felt probably it was the start of something.

And then I did another two ceremonies after that. And within each ceremony, something even more profound was happening, like the one that i discussed about freedom right um and then a friend of mine at a particular house said i just want to show you a video and so he showed me this video and i said what is it and he said that's me and i said what and he's on he's basically curled up on the ground and he's just like clawing at the earth and screaming clawing at the earth and screaming clawing at the earth and he's doing this crazy stuff like it looks like he's throwing stuff off of him

and then eventually he stands up and he's just like this and like roaring like this primal roar but with his chest shooting up and i was like what the fuck what is this and he was like oh i've went i've i this? And he was like, oh, I smoked this venom. Oh, it's the toad energy. I smoked this toad. And he said, and I know this guy. I've worked with him for a period of time. And he had this like kyphosis in his mid-back.

So he had this quite strong curvature. And it didn't matter what we did. We do as much mobility work, as many thoracic extension things, hanging, overhead squatting. There was still this bit that needed to unravel. And so his explanation of what's going on in the video, because someone's just recording it, is that he just, the moment he inhaled, he went off to this space and he was just surrounded by tribesmen of thousands of years all around him. And they're pinning him down on

the ground and holding him down. And he was trying to throw them off him. And then he's clawing at the earth and trying to make his way out and then eventually he stands up and he's thrown them all off and he's just there roaring and they accept him into the circle so he's had this amazing masculine rite of passage at that stage and before that he would have said he had a problem with masculinity and it was almost that's what he needed within that exact moment. That's what he got through that ceremony. And his back altered. His back altered in a 20-minute experience with 5-MeO-DMT. He straightened out his back. Straightened out his back.

And that's where we always treat things on a physiological level. We look at things only on a physiological level. And we think we know yogi practice. And we think we know these things about the forms and the postures, but really in that real deep spiritual component, you can address so much as well. His physical shape just changed. It was just unbelievable.

So for me, I just needed to know when I can do it. How did you, yeah, so you're like, give me the toad. No way I can do it. How did you, yeah, so you're like, give me the toad. How do you make sense of that experience and the kind of three-dimensional impact that it had like on his spine? Like how do you- Trauma again.

I think I see it in, so I can only coach it through what I know because I don't personally work in that realm. I don't work with medicine. So I can't explain it from their side. I can explain it in stuff that I teach, like play. So I was teaching at a big yoga festival and I was headlining, so there was a speaker coming in and then he wanted me to put this session on. So I rock up with my girls, so I rock up with Lola and Millie.

And Tallulah, I think, was young then um baby in the sling and i walk into this what was a converted barn and i go into the barn and i have to address the the yogis who put all their mats out everything really pristine and they've lined everything out and they put their cushions out and everything's all their shoes are at the back and and i said, I hate to disappoint you all, but I'm not a yoga teacher. I don't do yoga, but this festival is called Yoga Connect, and let's put yoga to one side, and I'm going to teach you all about connect and how to connect and how to find connection through movement and play. So I said, if you can roll your mats back up and put them to the back of the room,

and then when you've done that, I just want you to meander around the room in any shape any form and they're walking around the room in all different directions and then they keep going give them two minutes just to figure out what what's going on and just to calm a bit and I said right okay now what you do is just as you as you walk past someone I want you to take a direct look in their eye and then I want you to walk on again and then make eye contact every person you pass make eye contact and then make eye contact and then they go around the room and leave it another couple of minutes so just the same practice okay now what you do is brush shoulders when you go past someone so then they brush shoulders and then laughter starts to come in already so they start to make a connection already

and they're building already trust and they're starting to move as a collective rather than a bunch of individuals meandering around the rooms the energy changes and then my kids are in there because they can feel the vibes changing and the energy's changed and it's now not strict serious adults there's play coming in and then i asked them then to hug when they walk past someone so they start hugging and then they go past and have to keep walking around the room right when i clap my hands i want you to say um when i say yoga you say connect connects and they were like walking around the room when i say yoga you say connects and they connects and then they were hugging and just starts to turn into this movement festival right and then i then ask them

to then embrace lock heads forehead to forehead make eye contact and now one of them leads and the other one has to just follow and they just start moving in pairs around the room in different shapes and different forms so rather than what can become quite linear in forms and strict postures you have to find within yoga suddenly enable them to start expressing that flexibility but through play and what we got to see was some incredible patterns and forms. And I always ask them to show me stuff I've never seen before. Don't go back to the same safe movements. I want you to really just keep exploring. And then the idea is, right, I want you to just keep head contact so you can roll your heads around, but you do not take your heads away, your contact ahead. So then they're

like moving in these incredible forms and spirals and all kinds of things. And this woman just comes up to me halfway through and she says, I don't know what's going on, but I've had knee injury for two years and I haven't been able to get into certain ranges and it's been really a problem on the mat for me, but there's no pain anymore and I can do this. So I was like, okay. She said, can you tell me what's going on?

So I joke about this and I said, yeah, I put my hands on her head and I said, praise the Lord. But I didn't, I just said, no. tell me what's going on? So I joke about this. I said, yeah, I put my hands on her head and I said, praise the Lord. But I didn't. I just said, no, it's starting a new religion. It's play the Lord. And it's basically within play enabled her to just suddenly just put everything to one side and start to go into ranges because she's focused on the partner in the activity. So it overrides the emotional trigger within the injury which creates the tension so the mind goes

i'm going to get injured doing this creates tension which creates inappropriate action there's the word again tension which then can lead to further injury so it's a way of overriding the injury you can suddenly start moving in ways that you're not you you previously didn't perceive possible so i guess within the spiritual realm, it's a much deeper version of that. But with him, there would have been some kind of trauma in that mid-back that would have come from, I guess, very early years. And it was an opportunity to lift the lid off that intellectual brain and allow the emotional trauma to get out. That's my perception of it.

Yeah. I mean, when I was listening to you tell that story, I'm thinking about the rigidity with which we, you know, kind of live our lives and, you know, we're up in our heads, you know, 95% of the time. And in order to get people, you know, out of that modality and operating differently to let go of kind of that protective armor, you have to turn the heat up very slowly, right? First, it's just walk around and you have to get them used to that before, you know, you're slowly, you know, boiling that frog over time, right? And then before they know it, it becomes an unconscious thing, right? But you have to override the intellect in order to like connect with, you know, the heart in a deeper way yeah and then you get all the

amazing happy hormones right in this like almost i call it like the happy the happy hormone shaker like the cocktail shaker and you shake it around and pop out comes a happy human so it's like oxytocin serotonin it was amazing little hormones that are kicking off in that whole experience and that's the collect it's a collective emotion they start to tap into so i guess going back into that so going back into his experience i think that's he's basically again an intellectual lid gets lifted off and i think it enabled him to just go in and unravel whatever trauma was residing in there and since that moment i think think within period of time, not six months, I think his partner then got pregnant.

They got married very quickly. His businesses just went through the roof and took off. His confidence was completely different. He was just suddenly just a very different being. And so I just needed to find out what it was. Yeah, you gotta get with the tone. And I think it was the rite of passage that really did it for me.

It was kind of like, right, okay, I've been having all these pseudo rites of passage throughout my life. I need a rite of passage. And I felt that's probably something that was missing. This is a big theme in your life. Yeah, I think it was definitely missing. I think it came down to that,

the masculine in my life, my father, and me not feeling like I'd had those rites of passage or something. Most people don't. You know, that's been sort of eliminated from the way that we grow up. Culturally, yeah. And I think that's, medicine aside, I think these ceremonies are doing that. I think that's, and even with Wim, you know, with ice baths. Right.

It's a ceremony. I take people in the ice and some that have trauma and some that just emotionally in pieces the day before on the phone to me, I'm not sure I can go through this. And you're like, wow, we're doing an ice bath, but it's huge for them. And they have a massive breakthrough within that process. Well, I think whether it's what you do or Wim Hof or ayahuasca or like Spartan races, like people are looking for whether you want to call it a rite of passage or just an authentic experience where they're challenged in a visceral way out in nature. That's just something that we're hardwired to gravitate towards that,

like I said, we have eliminated from the way in which we mature as human beings. And I think we need to find ways of building that back in. I feel like now it's not until we reach some level of maturity and have some kind of crisis, whether it's emotional, spiritual, or existential, that we then avail ourselves of those opportunities. But what we need to do is find ways to bring that back to the youth so that they're experiencing that as they mature and don't then set off on that trajectory that leads to that crisis later in life. Yeah, and I think that comes from our behavior again. So part of this journey for me has really, a lot of it was driven by parenthood becoming a father myself and wanting to become the best example i have three daughters so how do i become the best example of a masculine if i haven't if i haven't seen one do you know what i mean or i haven't

felt like i've been exposed to one so part of that process especially with the toad it felt like this is an opportunity to become a better masculine example to become a better man so what the toad teach you Wow man everything come on there was at one point when I when I spoke to a friend I said it's all toad after that but anyway we I fly to ibiza to be with this guy octavia and with my friend who's been through this ceremony and there's five of us it's like a very intimate ceremony for the five of us and the guy says he wants to go first and i'm like you're kidding me i'm going first like this and um and and the moment i inhale there is nothing that's all i can say it's a bit like that white box up there i basically just enter that but like mike tv in a white box but i can't recognize

t or tony or anything because there is no tony anymore i'm just part of the whiteness and i've just immersed into the whole thing any sense of of individuality or separateness all gone and um i'm just a frequency and then i hear a frequency and i think that's the first thing i start to recognize as something is a frequency that starts coming in and there's no oh fuck moment or what the hell's going on or any of that no fear there is nothing and then suddenly i start to feel like i'm going through an evolution so it's like i felt like a water phase and i felt like i'm in water but i'm almost drowning and i'm trying to get this water out of me and then i go through more of a reptilian phase, and I feel like I'm then moving through that. And then I wound up like this, like I was in shackles, like I'm shackled,

but half bear, half human in a way, like really interesting. And I tried to find an image of it after that, and I came up with like a white human man, polar bear type thing, like really interesting. And then in the video that I get to anyway so then i'm roaring like this and in in my head and i and i break three of these shackles and there's a roar that comes out of me that i felt almost like a really satisfying burp like oh it feels amazing that but it was the roar and the roar was like, and then every time I did it, it just felt so amazing.

It was something I didn't know I could even do, or almost I wasn't allowed to do it. Suddenly someone's now given me the freedom to roar. It's suppressed or something, which I guess aligns with the shackles, or whether they're reincarnations or something, I don't know, incarnated as a bear or something, I don't know. Incarnated as a bear or something. I don't know. Lives maybe.

And I've gone all the way through this evolutionary model and experienced every little detail of it as growth. And then I get to see the video and the video was very terrifying because you can see the moment I inhale and I'm a strong guy, but I suddenly, I just crumple into this, just almost like a

like i've died on the ground my hands are curled up my feet are curled up and i guess i've gone back into that fetal position but the trauma of the fetal position all curled in with my feet in my hands and so that i think was the trauma already just dissolving and working through that which is fascinating that it goes into that deep layer of the brain and so right into i guess the reptilian store the brain stem let's say where the first initial traumas i think are in the first thousand days right so anything that happens in that most instances stuff that we don't we can't consciously remember any of that but it's stored somehow and will govern how we perform throughout the rest of our lives, I guess.

So in that moment, I got to see it. And in the video, then you can see me coming around, and then he's pouring water trying to get me to breathe. And in the video, I realize I'm not breathing. And then he almost looks like he's almost resuscitating me in a way. And then I start to make my way up and then i'm like like this but i can't see at that moment i wouldn't know i'm looking at anything or seeing anything and then i stand and then you can see then i'm going through this process of these arms

out and then looking up my chest is exposed to the sky and i'm screaming almost at that point and then off i go and I go off into the woods and I'm grabbing trees and like this and having this real nuts relationship with nature. It's a short-lived experience though, isn't it? That was probably in, I'd say, 12 minutes, that experience. But I've gone through evolution at that stage and I've turned into different beings

and had shackles and broken free of them and then died clearly and had a full rebirth. So that was my first experience with it. Okay. How many of these have you done? Two now. Two? And then, and so, and when I arrived back from that,

Katerina said there's two, there was two Tonys in her life. The Tony I am now and the Tony she met. And she said, it's just like but it's like it was like it's like being so what is it what is the difference um again I just don't have the attachments to things so there's no there's no alcohol there's there's no I switched to a plant-based diet I um there's no drugs there's no connection to any of that um and my approach is much softer whereas i think i was i was frustrated at the world previously and i had someone come in to see me um who had a stomach cancer and they had um they were given a matter of days to live and they

removed like a huge 80 of of his stomach or something. And he survived it. And he said that, I said, well, how traumatic is that? What do you, I mean, what was the experience for you? So it was really interesting. I said, you go into like proper suffering and, you know, because you can go both ways with that. And he said, no, I suddenly had a real breakthrough again. And it made me look at simple things like the leaf or the stone with a different

eye i saw beauty in every little detail every little thing there was i could experience it as i'm part of it rather than separate of it so i'm i saw saw his wife and he and he said the thing is though um i don't know what's the matter with everyone everyone's so miserable he said you know i just see all this beauty and everything in my wife she's so bloody miserable like this and just i was like wow man okay i get it i said i was, I was there, I was there, I had that. I reached the frustration stage. And I said, and then eventually you just have to be the change and be the appropriate behavior for other people to observe, but also have compassion for their trauma and their first six years

and the suffering that they have inherited, that could have been inherited from their parents, from their their grandparents from post-traumatic stress disorder whatever we've inherited along the path and you have to have compassion and when you see it that way then again you'll see the beauty in their behavior and that's i think that's what came through that first experience was to just i could i became everything so i would walk along the street and I'd be amazed that I could hear so much. I could hear leaves and the birds and everything. I could hear literally every little detail I was absorbing, which I think I'd maybe locked out and dumbed out previously.

Right. And also at the same time letting go of the trauma. And letting go of trauma. And detaching yourself from. And then between that ceremony and the next ceremony, I did a family constellation. Have you done any family constellation work? No, what's that?

So family constellation is, this is incredible because it goes, there's a spiritual box, there's the physiological box, then there's a social box, and this is where I put family constellation. So I attend this place with this woman amazing practitioner and i go into a room and there's um i think 16 people all sitting around in a circle and there's a chair available for me so i go up and i sit in the chair and i'm he said welcome everyone um we have five issue holders today can you put your hands up and i'm like the issue holder and i still don't know what i'm what i'm in for what is the issue holder i'm going to explain because i don't even know at this stage

and um and then they have the rest of theirs representatives so basically the issue holders will be whatever your issue is and i have psoriasis so for me it was like i have this issue with psoriasis and i can't understand it because i have i because I'm so aligned with my physiology now. There isn't a physical thing I haven't aligned with to create what I perceive as a biological norm. So it has to be residing somewhere else. I've done this spiritual work over here. So why do I have it? There's got to be this line of ancestry that's coming in somewhere.

So that's my issue. And then what she would do, she then arranges the room with all these people sitting around in a circle so before i go i'm like number five within the issue holders so there's four people to go before me the first one goes in and she says she's sitting in this chair available next to the lady and she's that's right okay she calls her up and she sits next to and she says okay so tell me your heart's desire. She says, I really, you know, I just, oh, she starts crying immediately. She says, I just want to get pregnant and my family hate my partner and it's just life's terrible.

And anyway, so she says, okay, okay, I think I know. Okay, go and pick someone to represent you. So the representatives, you pick people to represent who it is in your family which is the constellation so she picks someone to represent her and she positions them wherever she feels in the circle and then i went to go and pick someone to represent your parents so she goes off she picks this woman she puts her there and she picks me so i'm now the dad so i'm now standing next to her mum we're side by side and the daughter is opposite me and then she picked someone to represent her partner so her partner's next to

her who's now opposite the mum and the daughter is opposite me being the dad and then i'm going to pick someone who is the symptom so the not being not being pregnant wanting to get pregnant that's the symptom and they get put in the circle as well so there's a four of us plus the symptom and then the lady's still sitting next to the facilitator and she says right okay um how is everyone asking us how we are first one bit tripped out by what's going on i've got my first experience of this and everyone else is really conditioned that they just want to go to be representatives and suddenly i feel like really awkward and i'm sweating it was like really why am i sweating and then i'm looking at the woman next to me i just can't bear to be next to her and i was oh my god she's like god just and so i start moving away from who is the wife in this

situation who's the mother and i get further and further away and i'm the further away i start i start to level off a bit and then i there's a woman that's sitting over here that I'm really drawn to. So the lady stops the whole thing. She says, hold on, did your father have an affair to the woman? She says, no, he didn't, but he was madly in love with this woman, and she died. Wow, okay, so it's clearly her. Let's bring her in. So let's bring her in.

It's like a show. So she asks the lady to stand up. And as she stands up, I collapse on the floor. I can't stop crying. My chest is just completely broken. I haven't ever felt grief and heartbreak like I felt in that moment. And I just can't speak. And so she comes over and she says, okay, okay.

So then she puts her hand on me and she asked me to say um to the lady i love you very much and i'm really sorry our time together was cut short um but i'm with my family now and hopefully we get to meet one day but i'm now with this woman who i love and then it enabled me to stand up and that was all gone and then the lady sits down again and then i'm put back in the ceremony that was all gone. And then the lady sits down again and then I'm put back in the ceremony here and I can now stand next to the woman who I just couldn't bear to be next to.

This couple over here and then the issue, the symptom feels better and the symptom can come into the circle. And basically it's just a way of stripping things that have happened emotionally within your family constellation, within your social tribe. So what do you make of that

when you had that visceral emotional experience channeling you know this other human being through your body well i firstly i wanted to know how she was going to clear it yeah like so there's any smudging over here can i have it you legitimately collapsed in grief yeah so she basically just goes through clearing with you but then you see suddenly within the room that that's i mean for the pros the next four people that's the same thing until it's my turn to rock up you know and so in the lunch break i remember these people i felt like they had so much trauma going on around them so in the lunch break i'm off and i'm and i came back in and i said to the facilitator i said you know i just don't think i've got the trauma like these guys i think maybe you should let

someone else go it would make more sense someone that really needs it i just don't think I've got the trauma like these guys. I think maybe you should let someone else go. It would make more sense. Someone that really needs it. I just don't feel it. And she went, we'll see. And then I'd sit next to her. The moment I sit next to her, she said. The person who says that is the person who's repressing the most.

Yeah. So she puts her hand on my knee and she just said, tell me about your dad. I was like, wow, this is incredible. So I just said, look said that you know we have this relationship and i love him i love him very much but we just didn't have this real connection and okay that's enough um go and pick someone to represent you someone to represent your mother your father and the symptom so we arranged this thing where i'm next to my mom like this and my dad's here and the symptoms here and they're opposite and so then she then

says right okay how does the symptom feel and the symptoms like well i feel i feel like he's not really on a lonely island over here so she starts to then say okay let's bring the parents in the grandparents of my dad so they bring the grandparents in and my grandmother then is standing next to my dad like this and his dad's over here so they're not connected but then my my mum i've then hidden behind me so my mum doesn't have a direct line to my grandmother and there was some grief there between my grandmother and my mother somehow anyway my grandmother has psoriasis my dad has psoriasis and they're like okay let's bring two more people in two more people in it goes all the way back until eventually there's one person

at the back here and i suspect it's something to do with being a Nordic kelp. But anyway, whoever it was, there was something going on between the paternal line that they'd got someone pregnant. Now, it could have been anything at that particular time. But it looked like they're the one with psoriasis, and psoriasis was the paternal proof within the family that it went through this constellation. That's what came out of that ceremony but you're still dealing with it yeah but not to what it was you see it went into

i think within a week of that it went into full remission i didn't have any make sure you're talking to that so um there was no there was nothing and um and did that woman get pregnant i don't know oh you gotta find out no because, because it's one of those things that you basically step away from and don't have any connection afterwards. So then between that, I then go to, I then rock up at the next Sonoran Desert Toad ceremony, which, ah, so from that that ceremony from the family constellation it's like the relationships in my family got a bit shifted after that so my relationship my mom wasn't so intense

it was much more relaxed and the relationship my dad softened my sister and my mom suddenly really connected more than ever so they're now living a very different life where they're very involved together which they weren't before it was kind of like my mum smothered me you know and whereas that kind of broke that loose and my sister now has a window so it says stuff changes within that which is quite interesting wow you can you can heal that social tribe again through ceremonies like that. So it's a form of psychotherapy, basically. Yeah.

And it has ties to Zulus where they'd ask ancestors for permission for things. And so, yes, going back to then the next ceremony with the toad, it was at a friend's estate. And there was a large number of people there. So it's like we'd arranged a ceremony for like 20 people and all different things happening. And so they then said, you know, who wants to go up? And I was like, are you kidding me?

Yeah, I'll go. And so this time everyone in that ceremony pretty much hit the deck so they go through the same process of being on the floor and then evolving. But I didn't. I stood through the whole ceremony and this dragon thing came up again, where I turned into a dragon in the ceremony. And on the video, I'm standing there doing a full-on hacker, like a proper tongue out, my eyes had crossed. I'm doing stuff in my body that i've tried to this day to replicate i can't even get near it just this rhythm of my spine it was almost like my spine rippling

my shoulder blades are bouncing like the like the new zealand tribal dance i'm doing something like that but it's roaring all the way through and and to the point where, it's that primal roar coming through that is about, I now see it as it was about finding my voice and creating a space for me to be able to speak and be able to roar. And doing work since then, I worked with a crystal healer who, I was really sick. i was flying back to ibiza it was like a weekend and um it was my birthday and it was talula's birthday and my anniversary all wrapped into one thing and i'm on a flight and it was a crowded flight because it

was it was season and so there's chaos all around people getting drunk they're smashed and popping pills and gone as what else was going on on a flight. And I'm just sitting there, just want to get back to my family. And this woman kept leaning over me and breathing like God knows what in my face. And I just, I just want to get through this. I'll just put blindfold on. I go to sleep. But I didn't say anything.

You see, I didn't speak. I didn't say a word. And I stepped off that flight and my throat was oh my god I can't can hardly swallow and I so I called Katarina said we got plenty of ginger in the place I've got something going on my throat by the time I got back to the house full-on temperature throat was closing up felt like tonsillitis and I'm wrecked but I wake up the next day feeling worse every footstep I made was like a shudder of that horrible fever-type feeling coming through me, all my joints aching.

And I was determined because it was my birthday anniversary and Tallulah's birthday just a day before that we're going to go to this place called Wild Beats. It's this amazing plant-based restaurant, and we'll have some raw cake. We're going to do that. And I rock up. My friend Jamie's sitting outside, and he's like this, all smiles, and I'm feeling so rough. And says Tony you're okay no man I feel I feel like I'm gonna

die but I'm here because we need to do this it's okay what's up oh don't even ask man don't worry about it he said have you been to see Abby I was like who's Abby he said you know Abby I said oh Abby Dixon he said yeah yeah why would I go and see Abby so well she's doing crystal healing she's incredible I was like okay and I know Abby I know her as teaching yoga and doing this stuff i hadn't ever connected with her being a healer let's say so for me i was like yeah okay i'm just gonna go and do this no i think you should go and see her i was like you know man i don't have the energy right now to go and see her he said just think of what you'd say to me if it was me he said i'll tell you what yeah um i'm gonna pay for it you're going so he

books this appointment with abby the healer that i arrive at her place in the afternoon and i step down the steps and there's a swimming pool and she set up this mandala of crystals and she says right okay so tell me about um your throat what's going on with your throat and i said i don't know what's going on as it just happened on the fly explain the thing and then she said right whatever's going on with your throat, can you think? And I said, yeah. I remember my parents taking me to see a speech therapist

when I was really young because I wouldn't talk. And she's like, oh, that's funny. What was that about? And I said, I don't know. But apparently they just said, oh, my parents walked in and went, he's not talking. And that's all I seem to remember from the situation. But I don't remember a conversation happening in around it. So I

wouldn't have known what was going on, just he's not talking and pointing. And I remember through school, I had trouble even getting up and speaking to anyone or reading aloud or any of these things. And so I lay down on this ceremony and she puts all these crystals on me. She puts one on my throat and I could feel this heat coming in here. And then this voice of, right, it's your turn to speak now. All the animals have their voice. And then as I hear all the animals have a voice, I can hear peacocks and birds and dogs barking all around me,

all these noises coming in of all the animals. And then she just lifts this crystal off and it was like this, just this energy coming off my throat i can't explain it i can't even put it into context where words don't really do it justice put it that way just this feeling of something being pulled off of me not pulling out of me and it was almost in that moment that i realized that the trauma is going right back into those boots that I was wearing. I was probably screaming, crying, and it was all still happening to me. And nobody was stopping it. So I think I maybe stopped crying in that moment and stopped screaming.

And that's to do with me finding my voice was dealing with that trauma. Yeah, and the whole thing has been this journey to you reclaiming that voice. Isn't that amazing? And having conscious awareness of that. And being able to do the work and then being able to sit back and analyze it and go, oh my God, okay, I see it now. I see the work. And that's kind of what came in with becoming the dragon and becoming the roaring

and then meeting this crystal healer. And then since then, it's enabled me to then step forward and do things like this which would never have even been on my radar before yeah you know it just wasn't ever gonna happen meaning doing what specifically being able to talk or being able to talk yeah you don't have any problem at all no but do you know what i mean it's been because it was there was something just were you do you have do you remember being a quiet kid i remember i remember being quiet and what people would call shy but at the same time i was really um cheeky and i and i really used to behave badly, do you know what I mean? Which I guess was another way of speaking. Right.

Well, in the, you know, kind of in retrospect, looking back at all these experiences that you've had and the healing that's taken place and the self-awareness and everything that you've experienced, like how do you then take all of that and like condense it and channel it into you know becoming the kind of person that you've become and the things that you do now well i think that's the easiest part because it's just about becoming and being you know and once you strip all that stuff

away then then realize that you can live authentically you can actually be it so i had all the i had all the knowledge i had. There wasn't a thing I didn't know about this physical, social, spiritual experience. It's about removing. It's not, it's deleting from your experience as much as it is anything else. Being them, being the, it sounds like cliche, being the change I want to see in the world,

being the best example as a human being and experiencing everything. So almost like I went through this path of being a guinea pig, right? Trialing all these things to get to this point where I could then speak the truth and be the truth, you know? It's cool, man. It's cool what you're doing now. I mean, it's been fun like watching your journey. I mean, you came on my radar,

I think initially through the Happy Paraguays. Yeah, yeah. And they're like, you gotta check this guy out. And I started following your stuff and I've seen you, you know, you've done stuff with Tim Sheaf and you're up in like, you live in Camden, but you're up in like Hampstead all the time. No, I live in Hampstead.

Oh, you live in Hampstead now. And I have a studio space that I coach out of in Camden. Okay. That's gonna be moving with, I'm involved with a property developer and we're doing a conscious co-working kind of space that he said, what would you do with a space if it was yours?

So I presented this whole model around physical, social, spiritual needs and creating a building where you go into and you feel like those needs are being met so you're it's a place it's unlike a typical co-working space where you just go in and work like it's it's oriented around right interesting so that you want to go back to it rather than you know it's basically going back to this thing that 83 of the uk live in urban environments and they spend 90 of their time indoors. So what, they spend 10% of their day outside if they're lucky. So that's 2.24 hours.

What do you do in those hours? Eight hours might be in the bedroom. So you've got to clean up the bedroom, right? You've got to get the air purification plants in there, change the materials, not breathing in and out crap, and change the lighting, get amber lighting in so at least you're getting that natural experience of light which means all metabolism hormones and everything can be regulated but then the daytime what are we doing in the rest of that time and how do we again get those needs met so it's basically making that kind of connection to a building so we're doing that

there's we got the probably by i think september october probably the time I get back off my run. Right. That'll be time to open that. So yeah, we live in Hampstead. I live probably about 12 minutes away from the ponds. It's pretty cool up there. Yeah, I was up at, I've never been to the actual park, but I was up when I was in London, I went to go see Brian Rose who lives pretty close to there. Yeah.

As well. It's like, it's super nice up there. It's beautiful. Yeah. It's, we're blessed, man. Yeah i i don't think i could live in london if it wasn't for that area yeah because the village has you jump in that pond all year long yeah man we were there um i think it's down to minus one is it oh my god and we were cracking the ice there's like a little dock too you can jump off of yeah there's there's the mixed pond, the male pond, and the female pond. So male pond is open all year round.

Then you have a mixed pond. And we do like a Sunday swim rise. So we have a group of people that rock up, men and women. So we meet on a Sunday morning. Every Sunday morning we're there doing our swim rise. It doesn't freeze over? Yeah. So over the Christmas period, there was a week of like minus temperature

so there was one of the days when we rocked up and we're like i'm gonna break the ice to get in and one of the women were there and she's like why are you so excited i said this is what it's all about you're kidding me so i didn't know how many people show up she said and i was like oh okay all right how many people it depends man like the the men's ponds um just the other day was rammed i mean to the point yeah the whole changing area was full people were spilling out onto the heath behind um and then it can be there's sometimes just two of us you know in the really early mornings when it's freezing like that and then it's just a matter of you don't really swim you just climb down the ladder and you hold on to the ladder you just do you just get to get find that calm space and

almost i was writing about the other day that we did a swim in the in the ocean it was freezing it was in brighton there was a group of us like influencers met up and we did some breath lit a fire and got in and then went for some food afterwards and i i i found that roaring again and i and it felt so great in the sea because i'd suddenly realized oh there's a different body of water here and you almost have to take on the water and rather than feeling really insignificant in amongst the waves i've become like the within it was amazing i really just dumped loads of stuff in there it was great and then with the ponds it's different because this the water's so still there so in that space you become the water in a different way it's much more calm and peaceful and it sometimes just doesn't feel

right to swim there it just feels right to just sit there and find that happy space until suddenly you move and you go ah I'm in the water that's the amazing place to get to so this summer you're gonna run from the southern tip ofland to the to the north yeah northern end that's land's end to john o'groats right 30 miles a day for 30 days straight that's right barefoot barefoot yeah man where did this idea come from um i think way back there in childbirth probably back in childbirth and then brought to the surface by the toad and everything along the way yeah um i i again i did and i wrote another piece about it i called it losing the shoes so i think it's about losing those shoes i've been thinking about it for a few years um and i don't know how you feel about with ultra and i just felt that I almost didn't feel mature enough to go and do something like this.

Does that make sense? I didn't feel like I was going to go and do it in my 30s. I felt like I'd start doing stuff like this in my 40s. You had to burn in the fire a little bit. And I'm always, and I can run. I mean, I just see run. I don't see running as exercise again. I see it as a form of play and I love doing it.

don't see running as exercise again i see it as a form of play and i love doing it and we're at this point now with sustainability and the environment that i needed i felt to do more and to be more for my kids again comes down to children and to raise awareness for an environment that's we're at this crisis point right now right right? So I thought, what better platform to be able to do that? I could basically run. I think I addressed it originally, like I'm going to do a marathon a day for however many days. And then every day I can sit down with a sustainability expert and record them. And I just had this idea, and I know that's what I'm going to do. And then it was just, right, that's what I'm doing.

It's not, I know I'm going to do it. I'm now doing it, and I'm going to meet with whoever, and I'm going's what I'm gonna do. And then it was just, right, that's what I'm doing it. It's not, I know I'm gonna do it. I'm now doing it and I'm gonna meet with whoever and I'm gonna contact whoever. And then whoever I've contacted so far, you say, are you kidding me? Of course we're in. And it's just growing that way organically really, just in that seed, that original thought of.

Have you lined up some cool sustainability experts to talk to? Actually, I contacted Zach after listening to Zach. So we're gonna do, of course, I'm not expecting to fly over for a sustainability talk. So we're going to do a virtual one with him. Nice. I also want to now get Greta on board.

You know, it's Greta Thunberg. I think that would be amazing to be able to get her on the path. I think for my kids as well because they're really inspired by her. We listened to her EU Parliament talk and the girls are like oh this is amazing we went straight to extinction rebellion after that took the girls they could experience that and experience the energy of it and then extinction rebellion so they're coming on board um surfers against sewerage which is hugo um and i've got some sustainable fashion experts. I want to kind of cover that.

So I'm going to go really everywhere with it. Are you going to document it, video the whole thing? Yeah, and then I had a lady approach me through Instagram, DM me, and just said, oh, I've got this film producer, friend of mine, film director, and he wants to make a documentary out of it. He loves the idea and the concept of it so that's what's happening and then i've got a few sponsors and then vivo are on board as well so vivo beth are on board which is a strange sponsor as i'm not wearing any

shoes but as we've sat down and discussed it's not really about the shoes it's about it's all about for me it's lifestyle outside that so it's almost like don't run in their shoes live in their shoes because the idea of living in their shoes means that your feet aren't going to be compromised when it does come to you running whereas most people have this feeling that i can just wear whatever footwear and i'll put a pair of barefoot shoes on and i can expect to run like hunter gatherer so it's the opposite it's almost like you're better off just ditching that and wearing shoes that are going to create a foot shape. Is Ross Edgley going to come out and run a little bit with you?

I'm going to contact Ross. A happy pair, of course, I'm going to invite. Of course, yeah. And I'm hoping you're going to come over as well. Yeah, yeah. So what are the dates? When are you kicking this thing off? It's the 1st of September.

Oh, okay. Until the 30th. Gotcha. Yeah, man. Might be able to make that work. Please do. Yeah. I got to pop in on Mike Posner's walk across America first.

Yeah. So I told him I would do that at some point this summer. I don't know. But like, that's pretty tempting. That sounds cool. I hadn't heard of Mike Posner until your interview. He's so great. And we've been playing his albums ever since.

He's incredible. He's really great. What a musician, huh? He's a beautiful guy. Yeah. And he just started his walk. Like I think he's in New Jersey or just left New Jersey. I don't know.

He's five days into it or something like that. It's pretty cool. So where does the, we got to wrap this up soon, but where does the whole plant-based diet thing fit into all of this for you? Where does the whole plant-based diet thing fit into all of this for you? Well, basically, I went down a path of when I went into my retreats to start with and the space I had and the gym facility I had. And it was all around finding what works in nature in theory.

What is the natural beings of the planet? What is it they're doing and so we went down this theory of primates hominin hunter-gatherer farmer zoo human human laboratory experience and then going through that as a nutritional guideline as well what were they doing so primate is say 95 plant base 5% chimpanzees and bonobos the ones that are closest cousins let's say they still eat insects and they occasionally hunt for monkey right it's like a spiritual thing social thing that they gather and they do and it creates social order and their roles are established it's quite an interesting one there's a book called hunting apes and then as a hominin, we became scavenging primates.

So there was nothing around. And we'd go to the carcass, whatever was left, and we'd take the ligaments, the tendons, the marrow, and whatever was available. And then as hunter-gatherers, then it's seen as we were hunting. But from the more research I do around it, it depends on geographic location, where you are around the globe, that there were sacred animals. And this is where we're in a bit of a mess. So they used to have

an experience with the animal and they believed that animals were sometimes as higher beings and there were burial sites for animals, not human beings at certain stages. So they used to ask permission from the animals and say that we're going to, we will invite you and give you a ceremony. And so some of those native tribes, there's lots of woven in stories around that process, but what we did, we then came in and we wiped out their main master species, let's say. Right.

So that's when farming came in, it disturbed a lot of that. So with farming, whereas now we see in the zoo human and the human laboratory, people are so disconnected from what would have been sacred animals at some stage and wild meat and wild animals and living a wild existence that people talk about being paleo today. They have no connection to what paleo really truly meant. So they're eating domesticated industrialized meats that are fed on antibiotics

and sick and depressed animals that are abused and whatever else is in that chain. So at some stage, we went down this paleo path, and it was basically because of this model. So it was still having a connection to the animal and what we were doing. And so my retreats became about that where we'd have wild meat and we'd honor, anyway, a process. And we'd eat a predominantly plant-based diet. And then as time went on, I did a retreat

and there was a raw-based chef called Diego Castro that came. And Diego's amazing and a beautiful being. And he just said look you know if you thought about this and try this so we they went down this path of trying to be raw and of course going from what was a clean plant-based primate kind of diet I would say to a hominin diet to undergab a diet and then going straight into a raw based diet it made sense just my digestion wasn't ready for it so it had to be like to change things and then work on digestion so i started then go really deeper into what digestion

is and then take it back to what i perceived as like a primate diet so i've kind of gone through this path of primate to hominin to hunter-gatherer to firstly seeing what a domesticated hunter-gatherer was because I was on a primate diet and then realizing that, hold on a minute, you're eating this crap, man. And then I discovered who was it? Terry Wall, the Wall's Protocol, which I thought was fascinating. I thought it was fascinating from the perspective she'd healed herself with MS. And then you realize that it's basically just, again,

she's predominantly plant-based within that plan but there were meats in there like she's doing grass-fed grass slaughter and she's got wild meats in there so we went to um diego's work we then started to bring on retreats so we then did plant-based retreats then we lived in abisa and then we turned full plant-based in abisa and then we came back into london and then occasionally we would then supplement with a little bit wild meat and live predominantly plant-based yeah so real plath right yeah but i guess where i'm going with that is um i came to this conclusion that i didn't want to i didn't want anything to be about an ism or become attached to i'm a paleo i'm a plant-based i'm a

vegan i'm this and so i see things differently within the nutrition world now i see things like a um i wanted to get to a point where i understood what i needed to eat innately almost and it was what i what i feel is what those hunter-gatherers i'm talking about had these ceremonies and sacred rituals, they were predominantly plant-based again, but they would understand what it is they needed. So in foraging, it's the same experience. They're moving through a landscape, becoming in the landscape and being these amazing beings and connecting to exactly what they need,

a bit like any other animal that will eat another animal's poop because it needs some kind of bacteria within it. So they innately know what they need given the chance, given the opportunity to be wild. So it became about fasting for me. It was the quickest way to kind of achieve that. So I went for a bit of fasting. And then I did my sensory genomics test.

My genomics test, sorry. 23andMe I did and then I had someone read that. And there was some obvious stuff in there. And then I did some blood work. And then I had someone read that and there was some obvious stuff in there and then I did some blood work and then I did my microbiome and then I did my dosha so I kind of got an understanding what the energy type needs what the bacteria needs what the cells need and what have I done there for me I've tried to get this understanding of what Tony needs and so if each and every person understood exactly what they needed, I think it'd be very different and we wouldn't have labels for anyone and we wouldn't have thousands of books on shelves trying to basically

convince people what they should and shouldn't be eating. And I think it's short, sheer arrogance to tell someone what it is they need to eat because nobody knows what an individual person needs to eat because we're so almost removed from it so I think is for me it was about getting the cleaner I could get my diet the more I understood exactly what it felt like I needed to eat and the more in tune I could become with that innate ability so I think for everyone to move towards a plant-based diet to clean their diet up and fasting if it works for you're not going to tell anyone right now i'll go

and fast because it's a protocol and i think you have to have someone with you and guiding you almost and understanding it or go and see someone that can coach you through that process but i personally feel that those are probably the best things you can do for yourself is to have an understanding of what it is directly you need as an individual. And that works around the way that you move, the way that you sleep and the way that you eat and your own individual digestive system.

Long answer. Yeah, no, but what I would, why am I not able to talk? What I want to say is that level of intuition is contingent upon you being a fully integrated person, like somebody who has done the work, who is, you know, connected to yourself in a very holistic way as a result of all the things that you described that you've gone through. Like, I feel like you're somebody who is in a position to trust that impulse as it arises. Like, this is what I need. This is what I don't need. I think most people are not in that situation. They're utterly disconnected from who they are. They're not even consciously aware of the patterns that they're running. And I don't need to tell you this, you know this. And so for that person to say, well, I need this, like that's a very untrustworthy impulse. Oh, well, yeah, because again, going back into those first six years,

the emotional attachments to food really start back there. So if you, let's say for instance, Rich, you fell over and your mama and your papa say, oh, here you go, here's a chocolate bar and what you really needed was someone to either brush off your knee pat you on the back and say it's going to be fine or give you a hug and show you some love so already the mars bar represents something else much deeper so it's no longer even a food group it now has an emotional attachment to something else and we have that for foods. Parents use foods for bribery.

You know, grandparents especially, they're very good at that. They go, aren't you very good? Let's have some of this or let's do this. And they use praise and use punishment and they use guilt and use bribery. They use very interesting tools of, it's manipulative. But the problem with that is again, it misaligns us again. It moves us off the path of, again, what would be an innate ability and an emotional ability to deal with food. So how do we strip that back? And that's where I think things like fasting really, I think they do really benefit.

I think it's innate. It enables us just to step back. I think also just going through simple things like, get off the food groups that are hugely addictive right that these sugars and just move just try and step back a bit recognize that's what they are to begin with and then fast and then try and find a way of fasting even if it's through a particular food group or something you identify my thing was salt and vinegar crisps yeah why my dad used to go out on a Friday night.

We didn't used to see him the whole time. We'd go and play snooker with his pals down the pub. After not seeing him all week, we still could manage to go down the pub, play snooker. We had no money, but he still had enough money to go and drink, smoke, and play snooker, and buy salt and vinegar crisps, and leave them under my pillow.

So I'd wake up in the morning, I'd have salt and vinegar crisps. And it was in that one moment, those salt and vinegar crisps meant love, right? Do you understand? So the hardest thing on my whole path was actually salt and vinegar crisps. Well, they're also just the perfect combination of salt and fat and texture. Yeah. But it's fascinating. It's like all wrapped up in one thing, you see, because it means so much. All right, well, we got to end this,

but let's leave people with just a couple things that they can build into their lives that could perhaps shift their perspective on how we're living, how we're moving to make things a little bit healthier. Yeah, it goes back into what I said earlier. We can't all live in nature, but it doesn't mean we can't live naturally so um the bedroom we spend a large portion of our time in that one room um i have one person i spoke to and they've had their house for 30 years they've been sleeping in the same room for 30 years. That's the same linear experience. Zach's work, same microbiome experience

in that same environment. So I would look at that one space to begin with. How do you clean it up? How do you bring more nature into that space? So yeah, you can have plants, you can put air purifiers in there. Clean up the air, I think, is one of the biggest things you can do for yourself

because there's stuff that's being kicked out from the paints, the mastics, the glues, the carpets, the mattress, all the soft furnishings that are all neurotoxins, right? And if you understand sensory genomics, you understand that depression, Alzheimer's, dementia, all these things that basically can be coming through neurotoxins. So that's one thing. I would look at cleaning that up. Then obviously the materials that you use in your bedroom. So if you have the money, go and buy stuff that's more of a natural fiber, if you can do it. Lighting. There's some

really great stuff out there. You can buy, even just for bedside lamps, you don't have to do your main bedroom light, but you could do bedside lamps. There's one company called Aura Glow, and it's just a simple remote control. Pop them in. You can put them on strobe for the kids so they can party. You can have blue light, amber light, purple light, whatever you want. But my advice is to put them on amber. Why is that important?

So we could look at three geographic locations of hunter-gatherers and study them. I think there was one study of 33 members of a tribe studied over 222 days. How long do you think they're all asleep together? It's like 18 minutes, right? Over that length of time, 33 members. So not one of them is getting eight hours sleep. They sleep between 5.7 and 7.1 hours. And they do, through the polyphase, it's almost like they're in their real REM sleep, which is the most important stuff.

But in the lightest part of their sleep, they're up. And they're tending to the fire, looking after the young, fixing tools, smoking and partying. And then they go back to sleep again. And then they reach the REM. So they do that throughout the night. It's like a polyphasic approach exactly and that's in three separate geographic locations they've studied that um and so what's different what's different is air temperature right you're sleeping in tents we know that's the air temperature is different the lighting is different the air quality is different right their daily activities are

different so they get up before activities are different. So they get up before the sun comes up. So they're already moving at that stage. When the sun goes down, it's not like, no, the light's gone off, I go to sleep. That doesn't happen. It's around about 10 p.m., 9 and 10, they go to sleep. So trying to look at things like that, what's the natural environment for sleep? What happens in nature? Rather than looking at scientific studies that are formed in a laboratory, because that only gives you the laboratory experiment. That's not how it works. You need to look at nature to understand what a natural circadian rhythm is, not a circadian rhythm in a laboratory. So I'd go down that path, just try and bring nature in and try and make that more of a natural experience.

Movement. Okay. So if you're in an office and you your hr department won't allow you to have a standing desk again you slide your chair away you do some squats i have a whole squat tutorial that we can we can send out to the listeners as well yeah it's great like uh i'll put a link in the show so we can do that and then that gives you some tips as well with what you can be doing behind the desk. 10,000 steps. Everyone loves banging on about 10,000 steps. But for me, if you have 10,000 poor steps that might lead you to an injury, it's probably not the best model.

If you're wearing compromised footwear with a dodgy heel and a pointed toe box, it's not the best model. So I would go. Most people are wearing those kind of shoes. I would cut back and just say, okay, what's the more natural environment for a foot? It's nature. It's creating a foot-shaped shoe. So go to minimal footwear.

There's some amazing brands out there. Vivo's one, but there's others. There's some primal office wear that's come through. And it's trying to basically even get into the feeling that it's not about running in those shoes. It's about living in those shoes. And that will give you a great, amazing foundation. So if you're into all your disciplines, it could be Pilates, yoga, it could be running, what we're talking about. And it will only enhance that. Those disciplines will just get better because you'll be moving in the appropriate

systems and creating the right muscle action, tendon actions for them, which means the next day you can get up and do the same thing without the tension. So there's movement and sleep. Clean up your diet. Again, high vibrational foods. Keep it really clean. The cleaner it gets, the more innate things will become for you.

There's another. Yeah, sleep, rest. I think that's a good list. I think that's a good list already. Yeah, I mean, if you could master just that, you're way ahead of the curve. But I'm doing a book with all this. I'm basically- a good list. I think that's a good list already. Yeah, I mean, if you could master just that, you're way ahead of the curve. But I'm doing a book with all this. I'm basically-

You should be. Yeah, at the moment, I'm just trying to find the right publisher, man. But it's basically- Do you have a title? I do, but I don't want to let it go. No. Because I know what the publishing world's like.

I hear you. As long as you tell me after we start recording. I'll tell you after, yeah. Pleasure, my friend. That was amazing. Awesome, man. Thank you so much. I'll tell you after, yeah. Pleasure, my friend. That was amazing. Awesome, man. Thank you so much. Beautiful, thank you.

If people want to learn more about this impending multi-day run or just what you're up to in general, where's the best place for them to go? My Instagram, at thenaturallifestylist. And my website is TonyRiddle.com. And for the run, are you going to have a skip? Like can people come out and run with you?

Yeah, that's what we're working on. We're working on depending on what sustainability experts coming in and what part of the journey they're going to be on. Then we can map out the full route, stick the itinerary up and then people can come in and jump on board. All right, man. And definitely everybody check out his Instagram. He's always up to like crazy cool stuff and I always learn something there.

So I appreciate you, appreciate your time today. I've already learned like so much and come back again and share with me some more. Definitely. Well, you're going to come over to, yeah, September. Yeah, yeah, yeah. We can do something. All right, man.

Cool. Thanks, man. Peace. Take it easy. Let's. Good stuff. I love that dude. I hope you guys enjoyed that conversation. Do me a favor. Please make sure you watch the video that we created, not only of the podcast, which is of course available on my YouTube channel as always, but also the additional video that we created called rewild your Running, which is basically Tony taking me

through some barefoot running techniques and general running techniques, our trail run in Malibu Creek State Park. It's really fun. It's really great. And you can find that at youtube.com forward slash Rich Roll. In addition, please check out the show notes on the episode page at richroll.com

to explore Tony's world a little bit more in depth and let Tony know how this one landed for you by sharing your thoughts with him directly. You can find him on Twitter at Feed the Human and on Instagram, which is basically where he does most of his stuff at The Natural Lifestylist. And for more on his upcoming Barefoot Run

and to join him or support him, visit TonyRiddle.com. If you are struggling with your diet, if you are really desiring of once and for all mastering your nutrition, but you feel like, I don't really know how to cook all that well. I don't have a lot of time. My budget is constricted. I am telling you, check out our Plant Power Meal Planner, we created this amazing digital platform to solve one very basic need, which is how to make healthy, nutritious, delicious eating affordable and accessible for everybody. It really is an extraordinary product. I'm super proud of it. When you sign

up at meals.richroll.com, you get access to literally thousands of delicious and easy to prepare plant-based recipes. And we're always adding and creating new recipes and versions of everything there. So it's constantly being updated. Everything is customized based on your personal preferences. You get unlimited grocery lists. You get grocery delivery integrated into your recipes and that's available in most metropolitan areas.

Plus you get access to a team of amazing nutrition coaches who are available to you seven days a week to answer all your questions. And you get all of this for just $1.90 a week when you sign up for a year, literally the price of a cup of coffee. So learn more and to sign up, go to meals.richroll.com

or click on Meal Planner on the top menu on my website. If you'd like to support the work we do here on the podcast, just tell your friends about the show or your favorite episode, share it on social media, take a screen grab, do what you do. Hit that subscribe button on Apple Podcasts, on YouTube, on Spotify, on Google Podcasts. That's actually perhaps the most helpful thing

that you can do, just make sure that you're subscribed. Leave a review on Apple Podcasts, always very helpful. Leave a comment underneath the YouTube version of the show. And you can also support us on Patreon at richroll.com forward slash donate. I wanna thank everybody who helped put on the show today. Jason Camiolo for audio engineering, production, show notes, interstitial music.

Blake Curtis and Margo Lubin for filming and editing today's podcast. Jessica Miranda for her graphics, Ali Rogers for portraits, and also the video that we created with Tony today that accompanies the podcast. DK, David Kahn for advertiser relationships and theme music by Analemma.

Appreciate the love you guys. I will see you back here next week with another great conversation with therapist, Lori Gottlieb. It's really great. Until then, go outside, rewild yourself, get rid of those lousy chairs in your house, squat more, go hiking, breathe in the natural air

and be reborn. Peace, plants. Namaste. Thank you.