The Tim Ferriss Show - #182: Jason Nemer - Inside the Magic of AcroYoga

Episode Date: August 24, 2016

My guest on this episode of the podcast is Jason Nemer, co-founder of AcroYoga. Jason is an incredible character, who travels the world with next to nothing. He introduced me to my latest obsession -- AcroYoga. Along with Gymnastic Strength Training, I've been doing AcroYoga -- and I think about doing it all the time. AcroYoga is closer to partner acrobatics: Cirque du Soleil routine meets sensual-but-not-sexual contact. Even if you have no interest in doing AcroYoga yourself, there are many takeaways and recommendations in this episode that can benefit your life. And for those of you that are interested, we even do a couple of video demos, which can be found here. But don't feel like you need to step away from the purely audio experience of this podcast to follow along. Incidentally, the video was recorded at Creative Live, my favorite place to learn online. I've taken hundreds of courses there, but the one I'll recommend is Six Months to Six Figures by Peter Voogd. Enjoy the show! Show notes and links for this episode can be found at www.fourhourworkweek.com/podcast. This podcast is brought to you by Audible. I have used Audible for years, and I love audiobooks. I have two to recommend: The Graveyard Book by Neil Gaiman Vagabonding by Rolf Potts All you need to do to get your free 30-day Audible trial is go to Audible.com/Tim. Choose one of the above books, or choose any of the endless options they offer. That could be a book, a newspaper, a magazine, or even a class. It's that easy. Go to Audible.com/Tim and get started today. Enjoy. This podcast is also brought to you by Wealthfront. Wealthfront is a massively disruptive (in a good way) set-it-and-forget-it investing service led by technologists from places like Apple. It has exploded in popularity in the last two years and now has more than $2.5 billion under management. Why? Because you can get services previously limited to the ultra-wealthy and only pay pennies on the dollar for them, and it's all through smarter software instead of retail locations and bloated sales teams. Check out wealthfront.com/tim, take their risk assessment quiz, which only takes 2-5 minutes, and they'll show you for free exactly the portfolio they'd put you in. If you want to just take their advice and do it yourself, you can. Well worth a few minutes to explore: wealthfront.com/tim.***If you enjoy the podcast, would you please consider leaving a short review on Apple Podcasts/iTunes? It takes less than 60 seconds, and it really makes a difference in helping to convince hard-to-get guests. I also love reading the reviews!For show notes and past guests, please visit tim.blog/podcast.Sign up for Tim’s email newsletter (“5-Bullet Friday”) at tim.blog/friday.For transcripts of episodes, go to tim.blog/transcripts.Interested in sponsoring the podcast? Visit tim.blog/sponsor and fill out the form.Discover Tim’s books: tim.blog/books.Follow Tim:Twitter: twitter.com/tferriss Instagram: instagram.com/timferrissFacebook: facebook.com/timferriss YouTube: youtube.com/timferrissPast guests on The Tim Ferriss Show include Jerry Seinfeld, Hugh Jackman, Dr. Jane Goodall, LeBron James, Kevin Hart, Doris Kearns Goodwin, Jamie Foxx, Matthew McConaughey, Esther Perel, Elizabeth Gilbert, Terry Crews, Sia, Yuval Noah Harari, Malcolm Gladwell, Madeleine Albright, Cheryl Strayed, Jim Collins, Mary Karr, Maria Popova, Sam Harris, Michael Phelps, Bob Iger, Edward Norton, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Neil Strauss, Ken Burns, Maria Sharapova, Marc Andreessen, Neil Gaiman, Neil de Grasse Tyson, Jocko Willink, Daniel Ek, Kelly Slater, Dr. Peter Attia, Seth Godin, Howard Marks, Dr. Brené Brown, Eric Schmidt, Michael Lewis, Joe Gebbia, Michael Pollan, Dr. Jordan Peterson, Vince Vaughn, Brian Koppelman, Ramit Sethi, Dax Shepard, Tony Robbins, Jim Dethmer, Dan Harris, Ray Dalio, Naval Ravikant, Vitalik Buterin, Elizabeth Lesser, Amanda Palmer, Katie Haun, Sir Richard Branson, Chuck Palahniuk, Arianna Huffington, Reid Hoffman, Bill Burr, Whitney Cummings, Rick Rubin, Dr. Vivek Murthy, Darren Aronofsky, and many more.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

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routines, tools, favorite books, etc. that you can use and test and apply to your own life. And the topics we explore, the experts we interview, range from people in the military to entertainment, sports, and everything in between. And this is an everything in between episode. My guest is Jason Niemer, co-founder of Acro Yoga. You can find him on Instagram at Jason Niemer, N-E-M-E-R. And my apologies for the sucking in the background. That's my dog obliterating a Kong. This is audio verite for you folks. And Jason is an incredible character. He's a vagabond. He travels the world with next to nothing and has introduced me to my obsession for the last six to 12 months. Now, along with gymnastic strength training,

I've been doing acroyoga and I think about doing it all the time. It is not what you think in your mind of as yoga. It is totally different because I, of course, have found yoga historically for me very boring and I always strain a hamstring. It's not fun. This is the opposite of all of those things. It is closer to partner acrobatics, a Cirque du Soleil routine meets sensual but not sexual contact, if that makes any sense. And if it doesn't, it will in this episode. There are lots of takeaways, lots of recommendations. It was also videotaped. We do a couple of demos and you do not need the video because we walk through it in audio. So you can definitely just listen to this podcast. But if you want to see some of the demos visually, you can go to youtube.com forward slash Tim Ferriss, two R's and two S's to see it.

And it was filmed at CreativeLive, my favorite place to learn online, creativelive.com and go to creativelive.com forward slash success. I asked them of all of their courses, they have hundreds, I've done a lot with them. What would they recommend that I share with you guys? And they brought up six months to success, which is actually six months to six figures by Peter Vught. So six months to six figures by Peter Vught, V-O-O-G-D, has incredible reviews. Just check out creativelive.com forward slash success. But I want to keep this as short as possible. It's already long because I've had a lot of caffeine. I've done a lot of thinking on acro yoga today. When I'm not doing it, I want to be doing it. And by the end of this episode,

you will know why, and hopefully you will get a chance to try it yourself. So please enjoy. Jason, welcome to the show. Thank you. What are we drinking here? What a great way to start. I enjoyed the label. I enjoyed the label so much, I have to share it with the world. It's a duck shit woolong tea. Duck shit woolong tea. It's true. What is the story behind the duck shit portion of that? Well, back in the day, I hear in a region in China, there was this amazing tea and it was so good that they had to play it down. So they called it duck shit tea and it was played down for however many centuries until it's been discovered as an excellent tea.

It's not bad, I've got to say. I'm enjoying the Dutchish fragrance, Oolong tea, and it is almost as odd-sounding as our first encounter. And I remember the dinner at which we met, and this was in L.A, probably Venice, maybe Santa Monica. Santa Monica. And it was at, who's home? Was it Andrew's? Dean's home.

Dean. And I was with my buddy, Travis Brewer. The Ninja. The Ninja, who is very much worth checking out for those people who have not seen him in action, American Ninja Warrior and so on. And we were sitting somewhere close to each other, maybe next to each other. We'd captured a bunch of photographs of the day, just running around doing craziness. At the Santa Monica Green and elsewhere. And of course, you are the co-founder of Acra Yoga, but I didn't have much in terms of exposure to Acra Yoga. So I said, what is Acra Yoga? And he said, I'll show you.

And that led to an Instagram photo that I posted, which was something along the lines of, just another Saturday night, not sure how I ended up here. And I was in reverse bat position. Well done. You know exactly the pose. In what I used to call butterkanasana. Butterkanasana.

I'm not good with this such and such an asana memorization of terms. But the now what is what is that? How would you describe what that looks like? And maybe we'll do a quick demo on what that looks like. Well, basically, if you were a human bat and you were hanging upside down and you were holding your ankles, that's pretty much what it looks like. Kind of a Spider-Man position. Yeah.

Spider-Man upside down monkey business.-Man, upside down, monkey business. Right, upside down with your feet together, sort of in a butterfly position. Exactly. And then the person who's supporting you, you, the base, are on your back, legs roughly straight up in the air in an L-base position. And your feet would be basically right on top of my upper thighs. Correct. And those are upper thighs. Correct. And those are the shelves.

Yeah. And I remember being spun around, felt like I was in a washing machine of sorts, which is actually a term, of course, used in acro. And it just blew my mind. What are the origins of acro yoga? How did it come to be? Well, you know, anytime we talk about origins, there's my version of my experience of the story. There's the historical perspective. So what I'll do is I'll share from my perspective what and how this all came together. Basically,

I had a lot of acrobatic experience. I started when I was 12 and I competed in sports acrobatics, which is basically like gymnastics and figure skating put together. It's a routine with partners, music, dance. So I competed in that for many years, found yoga in college, and then ended up in San Francisco where I met Jenny, the co-founder. And Jenny had a background in the therapeutic flying. So what you were describing, being upside down and being massaged, that's something that I learned from Jenny. She learned it from other people. So AcroYoga, to me, was me and Jenny meeting and pretty much putting together our bag of tricks. And that bag of tricks, so I will say just in terms of personal experience, has been incredible

because you have not just the sort of acrobatic and this is a term that maybe you would not use i don't know but a very kind of yang driven strength athleticism component which is the the the acrobatics but then you have the very yin very restorative therapeutic thai massage right there's more to it, of course. But my hips, after now doing this reasonably consistently, particularly the last two months, but for the last however long since we met. Year plus, yeah. Yeah, yeah, year plus. Good Lord.

I realize today that I've been a professional rider for 10 years. Wow. Almost to the dot. Wow. I was like, man, that explains the hair loss. It's been a long fucking time. But my hips, my knee issues, ankle flexibility, my progress from grumpy baby position, for those of you who know yoga at all, imagine you're laying on your back,

kind of holding onto your big toes and pulling your knees under like into your armpits yeah uh historically very uncomfortable for me still not my favorite place to be but much improved and i feel years younger i mean athletically speaking more mobile than i was even when i was competing in wrestling and judo and whatnot uh what. What was the birth moment of AcroYoga per se? Like when did that meeting turn into Acro which is now practiced, I don't know, in how many countries would you say? We have 55, I went up and counted it recently, 55 countries that there are certified teachers but it doesn't mean that the reach isn't bigger than that. Right. But it's definitely a global practice at this point. The creation story is actually pretty magical. Jenny and I had been hearing about each other and we were training at the same circus center. She was doing

contortion during the day. I was teaching trampoline at night. So we kept orbiting around each other and had a lot of common friends, but just didn't meet, didn't meet. When we finally met, we got together at a party and I immediately put her into a hand-to-hand where she's doing a handstand on my hands. And then she put me in folded leaf, which is, you would say, the down dog of therapeutic flying. It's where my body's in a hanging, surrendered position, my head's in her belly, and she's supporting my weight. And that was the first time as an acrobat that I felt what it was like to be inverted, but not be engaged because acrobats are very controlling and controlled in their body, but to surrender, it was amazing. Just those two poses. And then we were up until 5am talking about this practice that would use all these different skill sets.

And we saw how things like partner yoga would help people communicate and that the basic therapeutic flying that's not very advanced teaches people acrobatics in a soft way. And we put really all the pieces together that night. So it came together. I mean, it was orbiting, orbiting, orbiting, and then... Collision. Collision and synthesis.

Yeah. Let's rewind just for a second to go back to the, and I want to get the term right. The acrobatics, sports, sports acrobatics, which I believe is also what Andre Bondarenko from Cirque du Soleil, who I spent a bit of time with in Los Angeles when he was there, also did. What are the categories? Because you have what? It's like two men, two women, and then mixed gender. How does it work? It's the pairs. You have three different pairs, men's pair, women's pair, mixed pair. You have women's trio, and you have men's four. That's the partner acrobatics. And part of sports acrobatics is also platform tumbling. This is when you have a 100-foot-long strip, and people run full speed and do crazy flipping and twisting.

I saw a, I think it was a quadruple backflip from Russia. It was on my feet. Did you see it? I think it was probably from your feet or Coach Sommer's feet. I'd never seen a quad tumbled. I'd never even imagined it was possible. He did it easily. It was nuts. So the men's four, let's talk about that because I think this is something people may have seen in performances in Vegas or elsewhere, very often by people from Eastern Europe or former Soviet Union. What does that involve? Men's four usually have two bases that are about the same height, same build, a middle, which is, I would be a good size for a middle on a men's four.

I'm 5'9", 160. And then the flyer, varying sizes, always the smallest one. And basically, if you know cheerleading basket tosses, they do a lot of tempo skills is what it's called, where the flyer does flips and twists and lands back on the basket. And there are two, actually three different routines. There's a balance, a tempo, and a combined. Balance routines in men's four is just a pyramid.

It's no music, and it can be that the bass is doing a back bend for yogis in Urdhva Dhanurasana, and then the three people are standing on this guy's belly, and the guy on the top is doing a one-arm handstand, cray-cray. That would have been Andre. Yeah. That would have been Andre. Yeah. That would have been Andre. He was a flyer. Yeah, he was a flyer.

I don't know if he did men's four or men's pair. I don't remember. I'm almost positive he did men's four. You could correct us, of course. Andre Bondarenko, you should check him out on Instagram. Such a nice guy. Sweetheart of a guy, and just a monster. Yeah, a badass.

Certified badass. sweetheart of a guy and just a monster yeah a badass certified badass uh the and for those people who as i didn't uh know uh basket case no not basket toss basket basket toss it's like basket case is me basket toss sounds like something pornographic and it might be but in this case it's effectively is it further down you Further down. You hold your wrist. You hold your wrist. And you're basically, with other people, weaving a human trampoline with your forearms. And it just blew my mind when I first saw, at Cirque du Soleil, you were there. Yeah.

When, with Andre, we went behind the scenes and we saw them warming up. Yeah. When, with Andre, we went behind the scenes and we saw them warming up. Yeah. And they're just getting launched, you know, 20, 25 feet, and then landing on this human trampoline that is effectively the size of the top of a stool. Yeah. It's just incredible. And I remember Andre and I were having tea and he was talking about, at some point, and I'm going to paraphrase this, obviously, and maybe butcher it, in the Ukraine, when he went to some type of regional championship, and there were a bunch of people warming up, different teams. And one of the teams had a flyer who was super aggressive and wanted to make an impression on everyone and tried something really outrageously hard. And it was a concrete floor, and he just took a headfirst spill on the concrete floor. Those folks got carted out and the competition continued. And that was his path

and all of their paths out of sort of that world and into one of prosperity and sort of economic feasibility for careers. I heard a very similar story, and this is something that I see as the pitfall of acrobatics, a potential pitfall. I trained in Bulgaria when I was 15 with the Bulgarian national team. The year before, we brought them to California, took them to Disneyland, blew their minds, and learned from them. And I heard a few years after that that the men's four, same thing, wanted to intimidate the other men's four so what i was describing these four high pyramids they were doing a four high one arm pyramid and they fell and the kid broke most of his bones he didn't die but it was the end of his career and i think also for the 2008 olympics in beijing there were a number of chinese gymnasts that died trying vaults

trying to do these very difficult vaults. And yeah, the dark side of acrobatics can be when your body is an obstacle to your goal. And this is where the yoga and the acrobatics can weave so intelligently the dynamic power of acrobatics, but the reality that you've got your body for your whole life. And how do you make these educated steps towards what you want? And this comes back to the surrender component, which may sound very woo-woo to some people listening. And that's okay because we're in San Francisco, so suck it up and take it. We're not going to get too crazy. Maybe we will.

But flashing all over the place, I know this is a bit like memento, but one of my other influences, this coach named Jersey Gregorek, who's the Polish Olympic weightlifting coach I've mentioned a few times, 62, leaner, stronger, more mobile than I am by many, many factors, and he's probably 135, 140, can get on an endo board, like a balance board, and hit a perfect snatch with a barbell loaded full of weight, ass to the floor, and then stand up and put it back on the floor. He just didn't, with effectively no warmup, like, he's just an extremely impressive athlete. And his longevity is phenomenal. And he said to me at one point, because my habit, of course, is push, push, push, brake. You? Push? I know. Stop everything for a while because I'm incapacitated. Push, push, push, brake. And he said, you have a Ferrari engine, and paraphrasing here, but he said, you have to remember, you have a Ferrari engine in a Hyundai body. You're going to just blow yourself apart. Or it's like your mind is willing, but your body is not adapted. So you need to, not his words, mine, but chill the fuck out and play the long

game, which I'm becoming better at. And part of what has aided that is the therapeutics. And something as simple as, you mentioned surrender, so in the type of training that I'm focusing on right now, I'm actually doing the gymnastic bodies work with Coach Summer, the former national team coach for men's in the US. He was on the podcast as well. But that is not a surrender type of training. And it can't be. I mean, to do it properly. And I really, really enjoy it. But if I'm doing that, say, two days of stretching, two days of strength training

per week, I might then be doing, and I have been doing, acro on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays for an hour to an hour and a half in the mornings. And just the traction alone that you're able to get from the, and for those people who are wondering what the hell traction is, I mean, simply put, and chiropractors may disagree with this, but let's just imagine you're on an inversion table and you get flipped to a point where your head is below your feet and you feel your spine is being decompressed. Think of that as one form of traction. You can get traction on your wrists, traction on your ankles. And so I thought what

might be fun, and this is going to be a visual component, we'll try to describe it, but you mentioned a couple of things. You mentioned folded leaf. And would you say that is a good place for people to start with acro? There are a lot of good places to start. Therapeutic flying, what I like about it is it's very soft and gentle. If there's extreme mobility issues, I think there are other things that people can do to gain confidence and to learn how to communicate what they need. The way that we teach the practice is base flyer spotter. So the spotter can not only keep it safe, but they can also make sure that the base is in the correct alignment. So it's too hard to say that this pose is the exact place to start.

But it's one place to start. Now when you say bass, flyer, spotter, that is simply to say that generally you're practicing in groups of three. Yes. Right. Let's just show, and for those people who are listening to audio, I'm sure I mentioned it in the intro, and I probably mentioned it in the outro. If not, you can check in the show notes for our workweek.com forward slash podcast, but we're capturing this on video. So we might as well do some stuff that's well-suited to video, and we'll talk through it. But let's just go to this mat here. Oh, wait. We've got to do it the right way.

My Dutch friends are going to catch you. My Dutch friends would kill me. At the end, then I lay in back. Then we bring the partner down. Apparently, the Dutch acrobats get very upset if you don't do that. I've got to the point where I'm like, you know what? I've had enough with the Dutch. I love the kickboxing.

Ernesto Hoost, love you, but from all the jiu-jitsu, I'm just like flop. I'm not going to say enemies. that doesn't really happen in acro. So I am standing with my feet reasonably close to your hips. I wanna be able to touch my flyers feet. My feet are turned out just below the hip bones. I am standing straight up.

It's almost as if you've seen the UFC. You're like open guard on your back. Here we go. This would be where I try to punch you and then you kick me in the face, but that's not acro. It's almost as if you've seen the UFC. You're like open guard on your back. This would be where I try to punch you and then you kick me in the face, but that's not acro. That's MMA. All right. And then flyer, fingers forward. You got it. You got the acronyms and everything. Just so people, I learn. I'm a young Padawan just learning what I can. Bring it. So the most important thing is that you understand when to be water and when to be earth and what parts of your body. So I'm going to be watery with my arms and really sturdy with my legs. So we'll take a deep breath on the exhale. I receive with everything. And then I push up with

the legs here. A lot of times the flyer will want to put the hands down and practice their handstand training. That means their control fleek. Yeah. So you fold their top, the top of their hands down the floor. So at this point, those people listening, I am supported on Jason's feet. I'm completely upside down. I'm basically in a L-straddle position, for those of you who know anything about gymnastics. And so this is folded leaf. Sometimes in hushed tones, jokingly referred to as leaf blower. Oh my God, I didn't know that was going to come out of the podcast.

I'm trying to help people with the images here. So this is scarecrow. It's a scarecrow. Basically what I do as a base is I try to let your body unwind patterns. So as I bounce and shake, a lot of times our mind is connected to muscle groups and flexing them when they don't need to be. So the true therapist is gravity, which helps to let your spine hang like a plumb line. And, uh, and can we show, for instance, uh, let's see here, super Yogi. Sure. So, so Tim likes traction. So what I can do is I can let my legs come off

my 90 degree. His weight will start falling back. We'll take a deep breath together. On the exhale, my legs go back and then I resist with the arms. It's okay. Two more. Inhale. Exhale. So I'm pushing the legs back and giving resistance. You got a little wrist traction there. One more time. Inhale. And exhale. And then where I love to go is to open up your triceps and your shoulders. So I'm going to place my hands under his elbows,

and he can bend the elbows and the knees at the same rate. And can you bring the elbows closer? Does that feel okay on your shoulder yeah i'm gonna be a little careful on the left just had it reconstructed but yeah this feels fine and in general where the body can be vulnerable and the flying is in the shoulders and the lower back so communication is is really important and just listening to your body all good all good sweet side bending is also a thing that can really help the health of the lower back. And what's different with the therapeutic flying from yoga is your body doesn't have to be engaged.

You're not using your muscles as the flyer. So you don't have to work uphill, basically. Yeah, I'm on. So those are some basics of therapeutic flying and some people who heard a bunch of grunting and weird noises and just don't know what the hell is happening or for people who might have seen the video i have actually let's demonstrate one more thing because i uh was in south america doing an immersive which was great experience, meaning a two-week intensive of acro yoga training. First week was dedicated to the acrobatics.

Second week to the therapeutic flying and time massage. And I was visiting a friend of mine named Chris who has developed some lower back and hip issues from a lot of sitting. He's a former high-level athlete. And I gave him what is sometimes referred to in the Acra community as leg love, which is typically done, for those of you who just saw it or I'll just describe it. So Jason was on his back basing me, supporting all of my weight on his legs. In effect, that can get tiring. And so after you've received, effectively, massage being floated on someone's feet, you then help to release the tension in their legs and restore their legs a bit. Exactly.

And so I did that to, actually, you know what? My life didn't work. All right. Bring it. This podcast is getting better and better. Yeah, yeah. So what I did for Chris, and this is something I've done for a number of people now, and obviously a consult your qualified acro yoga professional.

I'm no doctor. Don't play one on the internet. But is, so let's say we just came down, right? So we came down, and we're here. There are a couple of very easy things you can do. So just from this squat position, I'll get his legs straight. And I'll actually just hold his feet in between the crease of my leg and my upper body and then lean backwards. So I'm giving him traction at the hip and the lower back,

even though I'm not holding onto anything. So good on my ankles too. Yeah, and a lot of traction on the ankles and external rotation. Other things that are pretty easy to do would include, you can do a little bit more traction. So you step in, and I'm just gonna shake the legs, get them to relax a bit, and then turn the feet in put them

behind my hips and lean back and what's great about this pose is the therapeutic flying is an external rotation this is a counter pose it's an internal rotation so that's where some of the yoga intelligence starts sneaking in is how do you counter the muscles that you've been working and for those people who are say you know crossfitters who are afraid of seeming too crunchy to their buddies, whatever it might be, this is an excellent complement to any type of Olympic lifting or lifting that involves squatting. For sure. I found this to just be a huge performance enhancer.

To have this done just for... Can I get you on my feet for one second in a bird? Sure. Just to show what my theory is of why your hips are a lot more evolved now. Squatting flexibility... Yeah, look at this guy's hips. It gets increased when you have 170, 180 pounds on top of you. So it doesn't just warm the body, but it lets us access new flexibility. That's one that you need to watch the video for. Yeah, if you want to see freakish hip mobility. I have open hips.

It's true. Open hips, good birthing hips, then you should watch the video. So I'll just demonstrate a few more. Sure. They're super simple. There are many, many options. We could do bus driver. That's what this one's known as.

And they all look really silly, and they are as profound, I think, for athletic performance or just general health as they are, in some cases, ridiculous looking. Another that I found just incredibly helpful is just swinging. So this type of movement. And I won't do too many more. You can get fancy and do like the circle eights and stuff. But I'll show one more, and then we'll get back to the interview.

So in this position, feel free to correct me if I'm messing this up. But you can effectively push down on the feet and get the hips off the ground and then use the hand or not to loosen up this entire lower leg and hip region. And literally just doing those few things. Amazing. I was able to alleviate Chris's lower back pain significantly. I mean, symptoms, you know, 40, 50% decreased. Awesome. And that is, in my experience, not just a Band-Aid. It's not like you swallowed a bunch of ibuprofen.

With regular use, the effect seems to be very persistent. My hips feel great. And it's like I never thought in my entire life I would ever say that. That makes me so happy. That is the goal of the practice is that you can find a way to interact with AcroYoga that will affirm who you are now and who you're going to be for the rest of your life. And one of the really cool things that I've seen is acrobats, yogis, and healers, all three lineages, people can do it until they're 90, 100. Gymnasts, not true. I have not seen 100-year-old high-level gymnasts just because it's very high impact.

But there are styles of acrobatics, styles of yoga, and styles of healing that are really affirming who you are so you're not depleting yourself as you're learning these cool things. Well, Coach Summers said, I think it was, I know in the world of high-level gymnastics, I know a lot of stupid people and I know a lot of old people. I don't know a lot of stupid old people who have made it that long. But speaking of some older folks, you've mentioned to me, of course, a number of your teachers, a number of your influences. Could you talk about Lu Yi and your experience with your healing teacher and just give some context on who these people are? Sure. So Lu Yi is a Chinese acrobatic master. He's a circus master. He traveled throughout the world back in the 50s. He was actually telling me a story about when he performed in Africa,

and they had this act where you throw these big pots around, and the pots land on your head, and the Africans carry things on their heads. So they weren't impressed. They didn't clap. They had to take it out. So he's just a treasure trove of really amazing stories about circus, and he's been in the Bay Area for quite some time now. I met him about 13 years ago.

We have a little short story about this. I met him. I go into the circus center. I'd competed high level acrobatics, but I hadn't trained high level in a while. And I see him training people in one arm handstands. And I, as a base, never learned how to do a one arm handstand on the ground by myself. So I'm like, Mr. Lu Yi, you look like such an amazing teacher. I would be so honored to work with you. I just did a yoga teacher training and yoga is a four-letter word. I might as well just spit in his face. So literally for the next three years, every day I would see him in the Cirque Center. Mr. Lu Yi, I'd love to work with you. Oh, you have too much experience. Oh, you very old. My way, different way. And when I speak with my pretend Chinese accent, it's so much love.

It's still pretty good. I mean, I haven't spent a lot of time in China. Oh, my God. This is Liu Yi, and Liu Yi has been a mentor in a lot of ways. And he has a lot of different techniques. He's right when he says that because he came from circus and I came from sports acrobatics. One day I go into the circus center and he's teaching a kid how to ride on a bicycle backwards by sitting on the handlebars. Like he knows so many random things.

And recently, just this year, he has sciatica and he got into a car accident and it got worse. And he's basically been out of commission now for quite a while. And I've been trying to connect him with one of my other master teachers, who's Scott Blossom, who's an amazing Chinese medicine doctor, acupuncture, Ayurveda, which is an Indian science of medicine, and he's also a shadow yoga teacher. And in the world, I think there are 20 certified shadow yoga instructors. That's a whole other conversation. But he's basically a triple threat, amazing human.

And today, before this interview, I finally, I went to Louie's house. I picked him up. I took him over to Scott's office and Louie doesn't speak English very well. And I understand him and we have a good rapport. So it was really good to be there. And for about, I don't know, six to eight minutes, he was just reading his pulses, just feeling his hands. And from there, he basically did needles, did a lot of different techniques. And before he got him on the table, I was in a moment where I just sat on the floor when they were doing the pulses. I closed my eyes and I did a metta practice. Metta means loving kindness. And this comes from Thai massage. Thai massage is an amazing practice that weaves

spirituality and healing. So as I closed my eyes and I'm meditating, my heart's pumping, my hands are getting hot. I'm just basically cultivating all this chi. And I didn't think I was going to be able to lay hands on Lu Yi at all. But then when he got him on the table, he's like, Jason, feel here. Okay, put an elbow there. So I got to do, you know, I have two of my masters here and I get to give love basically to this man who with his hands has sculpted my handstand, my one arm handstand. So it's just a really cool thing to feel how acrobatics is really powerful, but nothing is more important than your health

until you start losing your health. And to have these tools to help people feel better, there are very few things in life that I think are more noble to dedicate to than learning techniques to help people. And metta, loving kindness, compassion, meditation, these are things that are very easy for everyone on the planet to start practicing

as soon as they build the desire. And I think human nature is such that we have the desire that we want to help people. We want to make people feel better. So, yeah, that was an amazing way to start my day, to see these two masters come together. I've been very struck by a few things just related to what you just said. The first is that a lot of people who come into healing have a history of being injured themselves or even injuring other people. A lot of judoka in Japan end up then going into bone setting or just traditional, let's just call it, not traditional, but Western

medicine. And the second piece is that I was very surprised when I did the immersive. I hadn't had any real in-depth exposure to the therapeutic flying that having been so aggressive in all of my individual sports to date, I've always, since I was introduced to acro been obsessed with the more dynamic violent perhaps uh fast the shiny objects the shiny squirrel yeah which are uh yeah that's my story my life but uh that i was astonished to find that when i did the immersive i was actually in many ways more drawn to the therapeutics yeah And I think that's because I've just overdeveloped or over-focused on the hard driving aspect to such an extent that I don't have a rate limiter. It's like I have no, on my tachometer, I don't have any red zone. I don't

even see it. It just blows apart. And that helps me to start to calibrate and pay more attention. By paying attention to someone else's body, I feel like you learn to pay attention and listen to your own body. For sure. Especially if you have good guidance. That is a very strong principle from a lot of my teachers, body comfortable. If you're not comfortable as a giver of healing arts, you're violating the first thing. So you actually get to be, and unfortunately in English, there's not a good term for this, selfish. And to be a good healer, you have to be very selfish. You have to really listen to who you are, to where you are. And from that place, if you really understand,

you have the potential to give in a way that's not depleting, give in a way that's not going to hurt you, because that's going to be a very short healing career. What is the handstand approach that you thought of this morning? So you mentioned this, and I said, save it for the podcast. I don't want to hear about it. So tell us. A lot of people listening are interested in handstands. There are a lot of crappy handstands out there. I've seen most of them in different shapes and forms. Well, this is where, again, I feel like the acrobatics and the yoga start to mix. I've been doing shadow yoga for about six years now, and there are three prelude forms. Does Ra's al Ghul run? He's the bad guy in Batman.

He doesn't run shadow yoga. Sounds like something out of Marvel Comics. Out of like the Avengers movie. Kind of. Xander Remete is a Hungarian martial artist who came up with this. Sounds like Ra's of Marvel Comics. Out of like the Avengers movie. Kind of. Xander Remete is a Hungarian martial artist who came up with this. Sounds like Ra's al Ghul. Yeah, there's some darkness to it. We'll come back to that.

Okay, so we'll dig into shadow, but please continue. Well, it came from my shadow practice this morning. So there's a pose where I'll just do it real quick. All right. There's a sequence, and one of the poses is with the fingers interlaced. And so you're down like this. You can just. So you're standing feet shoulder-width apart, roughly, hands flat on the floor with your fingers interlaced. Yep, and I would never think to do a handstand like this,

and I was doing my practice this morning, and I'm like, huh, I wonder how hard that would be. It was really fucking hard. So 30 years of acrobatic training, I've never seen anybody do that handstand. I'm sure it's been done. And I tagged a few people on Instagram this morning. Andre is one of them. Miguel Handbalancer is another.

And my third attempt, I figured a couple things out. Basically, if you let the pinky go wider and you let the thumb go wider, you have a big enough base and you got to start using the pinky and the thumb. But it was just, you know, as much as I feel like acrobatics is very fixed, gymnastics is very fixed, as long as the mind is not fixed and if you have playfulness and you have a ritual of discovery, this practice keeps expanding. I love the cross-pollination when you expose yourself to different physical disciplines. So you have yoga. We have acrobatics.

Then you have sports acrobatics. Circus. Olympic gymnastics. For simplicity's sake. Artistic for the people that really know. Sure. Okay. So very interrelated but different disciplines. Break dancing. So for instancerelated, but different disciplines. Breakdancing. So for instance, that position you had right here reminds me of, I believe it's called a 2000 in breakdancing. So, well, you have a 1990, which is a one-armed spinning handstand, which is generally on this portion of the palm. Mechanically speaking, very similar to a pirouette.

Even the way they go into it with their legs and then bring their legs together. But a 2000, if you found somebody who's very good at teaching or performing a 2000 and explaining it, they would probably have a lot to add to that conversation. So if any

b-boys out there, b-girls, want to add some commentary on how to do 2000s properly, you will assist me in, at some point, having too much to drink and injuring myself. So that is that. I have to just ask, what on earth is shadow yoga? Can you describe this, please? Sure. I love describing this because it's something in my recent past, I'd say five years, it's the thing that's affected my life the most positively. As a gymnast and acrobat, I would have lower back pain. It would come and go, but it was a constant teacher. And as soon as I found the shadow practice for over five years, I wouldn't say I've been back pain free, but if I wake up and I have back pain, I know if I do my practice and I do a number of things that are

conducive to my health, I can clear it. So shadow yoga is Jeanne de Rametay's martial artist. He was in the army. I'm not sure which army. He's a certified badass and he's such a deep yoga practitioner. I've actually never met him, but But Scott my teacher has told me a lot of things One of the things he did in a demo is he he took a deep breath And then he sat and then he took another deep breath and he sat and then he looks at the big smile He's like do you know what I did? I ate the breath and he starts laughing Basically, he can just metabolize a breath. He doesn't need to exhale. He's a yoga master, full-blown.

And what he did is he studied in Pune from Iyengar. Iyengar is one of those. What is Pune? Pune is a place. Okay. Pune is a place in India where Iyengar, who's a man who basically, other than Krish Macharya, the father of modern yoga, I would say Iyengar is one of the most influential people

who has come to the practice of yoga. So he studied with Iyengar is one of the most influential people who has come to the practice of yoga. So he studied with Iyengar for a number of years. And he also went to the South to study Ayurvedic medicine. And in Kerala, they have temple dancers, Bhartanakti temple dancing, and they also have Kalari martial artists. And the martial artists and the temple dancers were moving much more in circles. And he was watching them and he was learning Ayurvedic science. And he basically started to fuse all these things. So if I were to give a couple sentences, the elevator speech of what shadow yoga is, it's based in Iyengar technique for the asanas.

And it's got a Tai Chi feel. And there's definitely a lot of circular movements. So you start with warming up all the joints of the body and he said you know paraphrased that the martial artists and the temple dancers for one year just did joint mobilization and if you understand how to move all of your joints very intelligently then the more complicated moves right on the back of that intelligence so it one of the things that makes shadow yoga unique as far as I've experienced yoga, they say if you squeeze the muscle, you block the prana. So if you're engaging your muscle, you're not letting the energy flow. So what you do is you try to have your muscles as soft as

possible and you really put your attention into the bone layer and you stack your body in ways that the bones are taking the weight, the muscles are soft, and you start circulating the energy through the body. Well, the bone stacking is a pretty good segue into all sorts of topics. For people who want to learn more about shadow yoga, is there a particular resource other than Google that you would suggest? It's shadowyoga.com, I believe. They have a DVD. The unfortunate reality is I think there are like 20 certified teachers in the world.

So he's very, very strict on certification. I mean, talk about Mr. Miyagi. This guy is the definition of yoga, Mr. Miyagi. Salty old dog. Yes. I like those. I know it's inevitable that, well, I aspire to be a salty old dog myself. So I like hanging out with the cantankerous, opinionated, but highly

competent, salty old dogs. He's a guy for you. Although, yeah, he might not put up with me. That's a separate issue altogether. Bone stacking. Let's talk about handstands for a second again. And I always mess this up. Is it ATB? ATB. Oh, look at me. Well, you also learned it in Spanish. That was AIB. AIB. That's right. That was Well, you also learned it in Spanish. That was A-E-B. A-E-B. That's right. That was a whole thing in and of itself. I did my entire immersion in South American Spanish. There were a number of people translating for a handful of folks who only spoke English,

but I found it more entertaining to see how badly I could mangle things by running on the Spanish alone. So let's talk about ATB. Should we just do a little demo of what that means? Maybe I'll talk a little bit first. I'll paint an analogy. So I like the analogy of bridges. So the alignment is basically... So ATB stands for what? Alignment, tightness, and balance. And I like it in that order because until the body gets aligned in the most efficient way possible, you are losing energy for every second you're attempting the handstand. So alignment is the holy grail of all acrobatics. And what's great about these ideas, the ideas are really simple. The practice is a pain in the ass. It takes

sometimes decades to get a straight handstand. But alignment is straight. Straight is strong. So if you learn how, and our bodies are not made straight. Our cells are circular. Our bones are not two by fours. So it's an impossible task that we try to do to turn our bodies into these knives that cut through gravity. What are some of the things that Lou Yi says is like short expressions when people are doing handstands?

Well, so today his leg isn't working very well. One of his legs, he can't walk up the stairs very well. And I joked at him, I said, Louis, your body's not one piece. Because he says, make body one piece. One piece, one piece. He likes the body to be unified. And then I have a Russian coach who says,

make body one bone. Same, same. It's basically unifying the body. And that's the second part of the ATB. It's tightness. It's integration. And if you see, for instance, I know you've seen this, but for people listening or watching, if you see a photograph of a gymnast mid-air, or a diver for that matter, they're not relaxed. No. Look at how tight they are. They're usually like...

Yeah. The legs. And a cool experiment for those of you at home that are interested is you can hard-boiled an egg and take a raw egg, try to spin them both. Well, I don't want to spoil it. Yeah. Well, you can try that. That's also if you're an idiot like me and you hard-boil some and you forget which ones are raw, spin it. And you'll see very quickly which ones are hard-boiled, because they'll fly off the counter probably. Another good Lu Yi-ism, and this is good for anyone to put in their back pocket, and I'm

so happy that Coach Summers also agrees with me on this, Malt Extension. Malt Extension. M-O Extension. Malt Extension. And what he's talking about there is it comes back to Newtonian physics, action-reaction, the second law of motion. If you push into something, it pushes back. So as you push down into the floor, there's basically a rebound,

and this rebound is what makes your handstand light, and it's what makes the body a lot more unified. Exactly. So it also, if we're going to look at sort of the hierarchy, right, if you were to do one, and I'm not saying you have to choose one, but if someone could not somehow wrap their head around the alignment piece, right? They didn't have somebody to help them, but I just said, okay, you know what? Forget that.

More extension. Like, more, well, no, I'm just going to say it helped me with my alignment to focus on the extension because it took effectively one piece out of the puzzle because it locked it in place. But, of course, having someone to help with the alignment is a huge resource. But you were talking about bridges. Yes. So a bridge basically can be the analogy of the body. The metal is the bone structure. So the first thing they do when they're building a bridge is they got to get the pylons in place and they have to get the metal in the right alignment. From there, they pour the cement and

the cement is basically your muscles and the muscles, just like the cement, can harden onto those pieces of metal. So basically you align the metal, you like the cement, can harden onto those pieces of metal. So basically you align the metal, you pour the concrete. As the concrete hardens, it gets super stable. I haven't really figured out the part of the analogy of the balance. Maybe it has something to do with the tension of the cables. But at least the first two have a picture for you to think about. And there was a point in gymnastics

history in the 70s where the Japanese gymnasts were dominant and they had a lot of techniques that none of the other world had seen yet. And one of my friends was very connected to that lineage. And he said that at the Olympics, they had a big interview with this guy and like, you have to tell us your secrets. How are your gymnasts doing? They're just blowing us all away. He says It's two things strength and flexibility and that was pretty much the end of the conversation and There's actually a third thing in my experience It's technique and my one of my definitions of technique is how skillfully use your strength and your flexibility

So if somebody doesn't have a lot of shoulder mobility, they're doing handstands. They want to get as much mobility as they can. So Coach Sommer calls it compression strength. Well, in this particular case, he would want, now I'm always dangerous speaking for Coach Sommer, one of my favorite salty old dogs. So he can slap me on the internet if if i get this wrong but if i had to guess i would say that he would argue that

you shouldn't if you're going to practice handstands correctly you would want to get to the point where this type of shoulder flexion is comfortable so that you're not using a lot of muscle to get i would agree and if you don't have whatever flexibility you have, you want to access it. So you want to eventually have a surplus of shoulder flexibility. I was born with circus shoulders. So if you have a surplus of the shoulder flexibility, being vertical is very easy. That's what you want. But if you're stiff, you don't want to not get that one inch of flexibility utilized. So basically the technique is using your strength and flexibility as skillfully as you can with

what you have. In one day you can't get stronger or more flexible, but in one day you can affect your approach and affect how skillful you are cutting through gravity with the line of your body by finding these little hinges and taking as much of those hinges out. So let's, what do you think about doing a little demo? Yeah. All right, so let's look at ATB and I'm thinking what might make sense is, I'll do it first. And suffice to say, I don't think I have great handstands.

I disagree. They're trending in the right direction. They're getting better, which is all I care about. I'm no Bondarenko at this point. Also weigh 100 pounds more. That's not true. But I digress. All right.

So foundation. You want to have your hand shoulder width so you can put the hands down and I'll just inspect your foundation. This is definitely where Lou Yi will spend a lot of time. Ideally, you're tenting so this knuckle comes up. And what that does is that puts a vector to root the knotty knuckle. This is also very Spider-Man-like. So if you ever see a close-up of Spider-Man like this on a cover,

he's tenting his fingers. It's hard to do without the ground. But in other words, if your fingers are completely flat on the ground, you're popping up the second knuckle. Exactly. While keeping the knuckle of the palm on the ground, because if this pops up, what's it called? The naughty knuckle. The naughty knuckle, which is this index that constantly pops up.

Okay, so let's say... Your hands look great. All right. And they're the right distance apart. So you can go up however you like. I'll support you on the way up. Okay. And I want you to have your head neutral. His head is down.

I step in between the hands, hug his thighs and bring the ribs in. Domesticate the well. Good. Are you breathing? Elbows in more. Elbows in. Yep. Good. Look down with your eyes. Fall towards your fingers a little bit. Fall towards right there. Right there. Yep. Bingo. Keep the hands strong. Keep the breath. Keep falling towards me. Yes. Right there. Right there. Yep. Bingo. Keep the hand strong. Keep the breath. Keep falling towards me. Yes. Right there. Right there. How are you feeling? Good. I think I'll come down. So what I'd love to see also is, so if you could go up in a handstand and I'm not going to do a great job of spotting. I'm working on that also.

But I'd love for you to show some examples of common mistakes. Yeah, I love that. Well, I'm not going to do the most common mistake, is taking my hands wider than shoulder width. I want to have a vertical line, so I'm not going to compromise that. Do you personally point your middle fingers forward? I do. Some people, quite a few gymnasts do index, but you prefer middle

finger. Well, and I don't believe in right and wrong until you define where you want to go. And what I teach is partner acrobatic handstands. So if you're practicing with the hands turned out as a base, I'll have to have my hands turned in. Super awkward. So the techniques I'm teaching, we're going to be here. So This is hand-to-hand grip? It is. Reverse hand-to-hand. You can practice with yourself. Yep.

You can't practice hand-to-hand by yourself. Hand-to-hand's pretty tough. Because you need a right hand with a right hand, and not many people have that. Yeah. But, okay, so right. Train as you want to compete, so to speak. Exactly.

Okay, so I'll let you, instead of placing them too wide. Okay, ready? Yep. So for those people wondering, that was a straddle jump, basically. Okay, so from here, now if I were to just practice my coaching here, so we have... Before anything, I'd bring the head down. Head down, okay.

Yep, because then I have more access to a straight line in my spine. You can turn one of your feet to the side. Yep. Hug around my thighs with one of your arms. Yep. Find my ribs with the other hand. I'll pull everything up and in. Yep. That's it. That's the electrical difficulties. The pinkie is big. Tightness. Yep. I could pull your feet apart. You can also push me down. Strong. From the thighs.

Yeah, push me down. Push you down? No, not that way. Oh, down into the ground. Yep. Got it. Got it. Push you down.

Yeah, stronger. Way stronger. Way stronger. Yep. And I remember there was another. Now I'm just going to do some rotation stuff. Also doing this kind of stuff. Yep.

And then, let's see. Tightness, balance, and then we can do just kind of a hop to. All right, so now what other, you can either come down or we could still demo, what are some of the most common mistakes? I'd say elbows are one of the most. Bent? Yeah. Pointing the wrong way? Both. So saying a straight arm is a very undescriptive way to talk about how to position these bones. So when you're down here, basically you can spin the eyes of your elbow forward towards each other or back. And what you want to find in a handstand is the eyes of the elbows are squeezing towards each other. This gives you a lot of integrity in your handstand. So I'd say elbows from there,

probably the head being really far away. Because that also just leads to the cascade of piking at the shoulders and then bending too much at the lumbar, trying to use the legs to correct, and then you're done. So bring the arms up, that's another good one. Beginner acrobatics, relax. Yeah, intermediate, advanced, expert is when the shoulders touch the ears. So bring the arms up. That's another good one. Beginner acrobatics, relax.

Intermediate, advanced. Expert is when the shoulders touch the ears. Yeah, I can't get that high. I'm getting better, but not quite. So if people get the shoulders and the ears even close to each other, the arms in a straight line, that's going to take care of a lot of the problems. You really shouldn't coach above the shoulders for the first several months. Shouldn't coach above the shoulders? There are a lot of misalignments.

You mean just coaching from basically here to the fingertips? Yeah. From here down is where most of the big problems come from. So if you're looking at why are they arching, probably has something to do with something that's happening from here down. Well you've said to me also, there's a lot of magic in the hand and the foot placement. Yes. So paying attention to that pays dividends. And the next question I wanted to ask you was actually one thing I wanted to just throw

out there that I found helpful. And this was at a place called Athletic Playground in the East Bay here in Northern California. A serious place in Emeryville. That's right, in Emeryville. Great place. And I took a handstand class ages ago with a teacher. Sam. Sam.

Amazing teacher. Sam was amazing. Yeah. And I remember what she had us do at one point, and it was just such a simple idea. And it was this. Basically, she had us traversing the room, going back and forth. I'm not going to do it right now, but I like to walk. She had us in rows and going back and forth. And we were supposed to go up into a handstand. Now, it could be only 45 degrees. Like, if you're a

beginner, like, don't try to, lest you topple over, just go 45 degrees. And if I went up with this leg, I would come down with this leg. So it's sort of like a scissor at the top. And what she noticed is that people would go, they would walk like this, and then they'd put their hands out kind of like Frankenstein and then go into it. And she said, all right, let's try something different because people were flipping and flopping everywhere. She said, I want you to do the same thing again. But instead of that, you're going to start with your arms way up over your head, shoulders elevated. This doesn't move at all, and I want you to do the exact same thing.

And all of a sudden, it's just stability 10x. It was incredible. And that's basic tumbling, and that's lunge, lever lunge is how I knew it as. It's basically you make a straight line, you bring a leg up, and nothing hinges. Your body just falls forward. You hit that line and on the way out as well. So the ability to keep the body, again, in one piece is what you're looking for. Yeah.

Yeah. One bone. One bone. What other teachers or mentors have had a big impact on you? Dharmamitra, yogically, has been an amazing teacher. He's a Brazilian yoga teacher. He was born and raised in Brazil, and he came to New York and met his guru, Yoga Gupta,

in, I want to say, the 70s, the mid-70s. And out of everyone that I've met in the yoga world, he does the practice. He's super deep. He teaches psychic development techniques. Psychic development techniques? Yeah. What are we talking about here? I mean, there are things that he learned from his guru. The practice is a lot of visualization and breathing techniques, some humming sounds that unlock vibration in the head. And I was studying with him for... A numb trippy thing to do in a sensory deprivation tank, actually, which I've experimented with a bit.

I bet. That is a full-blown psychedelic auditory experience without psychedelics, but that's maybe for a different podcast. You know, vibration is vibration. There's a lot of ways to unlock those things. Hitachi magic wand. Exactly. You have one too. Which, by the way, was recommended to me by a Russian medical massage expert and not in

the red light district for relaxing hypertonic forearms. Yeah. The original version, plug-in version, which you can get at your friendly neighborhood sex store, on high, as it turns out. But, so, was that, no, is that, I'm going to get my terms wrong here, not Swami, Guru, no, something Gupta.

Yoga Gupta. Yoga Gupta. That was, Are you referring to, His guru. His guru. Who's an Indian guy. Yeah, got it.

It's basically a lot of really ancient knowledge that, to some degree, a lot of the yoga knowledge is able to be accessed on the web. You can really look... Acrobatic still is not. It's still really hard to find any valuable acrobatic written texts but the really the thing that's valuable about yoga masters is they communicate things energetically they they this is a saying that comes from dharmamitra that came from his guru once blessed is a student that can copy the teacher physically twice blessed is a student that can copy them physically and mentally three times blessed is a student that can copy them physically mentally and spiritually and there blessed is a student that can copy them physically, mentally, and spiritually. And there was a day where the guru was gone and somebody said,

when is he coming back? And Dharma said, he started to move as the guru does and started to speak with the same tone of voice. The guru will come back on May 31st. Are there 31 days in May? Let's just pretend there are. And sure enough, he came back. So he's a teacher of these very mystical aspects of yoga. And at the same time, he does all kinds of crazy asanas or poses. He has a poster of 908 yoga postures. And so when I saw this poster, I was like, I have to meet this guy. And when I finally met him, the types of teachings were much more fulfilling and deep than physical poses. It was really philosophies on life, the way that he interacts with the world.

I just watch how he eats a salad. He looks at every piece of food before he puts it in his mouth, the mindfulness practice and the compassion. So, yeah, Dharmamitra. Big influence. And he's 77, the same age as Lu Yi. The two of them haven't met, but I've got my 77-year-old masters. Do you think they would love each other or kill each other? No, they would love each other, for sure.

And I've seen Lu Yi with a Thai massage master, and I was really interested to see how that would go. And, you know, it's kind of like in Star Wars Return of the Jedi when you've got the party at the end and you've got Anakin and Obi-Wan and basically all the dead Jedi masters hanging out in spirit. When I see masters together, I swear that's what it seems like. These magical spirits are getting together and just celebrating life together. What are some, well, actually, before we get back to the acrobatics, I want to ask you about contemporary yoga, as it were. Just the state of yoga in the United States, popular yoga. I was put off by yoga for a very, very long time. And maybe this is going to be like speaking out against the church. I don't know. I don't want

to create any problems. But I'm curious, what are things that you see in the yoga world that drive you crazy? Well, yoga can be like... Aside from not pointing their feet when they do handstands. No, it's job security for me. The worse they do at handstands, the more clients I'm going to get. So I'm not upset of their handstand technique. That's actually great. I feel just like religion. Yoga can get very one-wayed. It's my way or the highway. This is the right way and everything else is wrong. That's challenging to me about some yoga systems and people. I also feel that there's a ceiling on yoga and the ceiling is you have all this amazing knowledge and all this amazing practice, but how are you bringing that into the world? What happens when you're in traffic? How are you with

your mom? Do you talk to your mom? Do you tell her the truth? So I feel like acroyoga and acrobatics and other partner practices help to take that wisdom that people spend so long cultivating, and they give it life. They give it access. That's a good point. Yeah, you get to rehearse the human interaction element. It's like, well, that's great that you're listening to a Dharma talk and sitting on a floor and doing your poses and listening to a speech about compassion but like when you go to a restaurant like flip out at your server because they didn't get you water in two minutes instead of instead of their normal five or whatever it might be uh i never really thought about that but it does the the community aspect and the communal practice of acro has been one of the things that has kept me with it, quite frankly, because in many worlds, there is a high degree of skepticism or even aggression towards outsiders

or visitors, right? And you see this not always, but in, for instance, some, not all, jujitsu schools. An exception would be something like Marcelo Garcia Jiu-Jitsu in New York, where they're very welcoming, but they have a zero tolerance for bullshit or machismo or bullying. But in the acro community, it's like wherever I land, if there is an acro community, I have, it feels like to me, and maybe this is just delusional, but like a built-in group of friends. And the fact that what it sounds like you were alluding to

that the acro helps you to practice things that otherwise might be compartmentalized to a bunch of poses by yourself on a yoga mat. And I think that that group practice or partner practice also has led to, I don't have any involvement with the non-acro yoga community, but a lot of the acro folks, they do almost everything together. It's not just the yoga. It's like they have group meals. They cook. They do fundraisers.

They help each other's companies. That sort of tribal cohesion is something that I think, and this was driven home for me when I interviewed Sebastian Younger on the podcast, is something that I think we need as social creatures. But I could go on and on. I'm so happy you're going on and on. For you, when I first met you, I felt that I really hope that you actually step towards the Acro community because I feel like people that are celebrity status, people that are very good at what they do, it's really hard for

a lot of those people to really let their guard down and to feel accepted as the human they are versus the titles that they are. So the fact that you're reflecting this means that what we've done to build this community is working because everyone's a freak in so many ways. And what happens when you practice Acra Yoga is you still are practicing yoga. You still are doing solo practices and you're understanding where your blockages are. And if you're a big asshole, the community is a self-regulating machine. If there's one person that keeps standing out in the community,

they're going to get told from many different people. So we really hold a standard of evolution and the way that we interact with each other gives us the potential to keep evolving in the direction that we want to as a community, which is the counterculture to the iPhones, to the Instagram, to the Instagram, to the Facebook. And I think those things are all amazing. I think it's really important that we learn how to use technology in a way that leverages more connection to tea. And I feel

like there's a big hunger for real, authentic, wholesome human connection. And I feel like that's what we offer. What do you think about doing a little bit of, I guess you would call it solar? Acrobatic flying? Acrobatic flying. You basing or flying, or both? Either, I'll fly.

Okay. I've only been doing basing for the last couple of months. This ought to be entertaining. I'll be the spry flyer, but I don't know what you think would be of interest to folks. What I will say, I'm just going to demo something really quick. I don't know which primary. What I'd encourage people to think about, just so we have some shared vocabulary here, is think of bending at the hips as piking. All right? If your legs, this is very oversimplified. Legs apart, straddle, okay?

So this is going to be a very sort of common position. And you can think of it just as like sitting down on the floor with your legs spread and back straight. This gives you a 90-degree angle here. This is shelving. It is going to be used a lot in acrobatics. So just so they don't have to explain that when I'm upside down. With that great description,

I think we should play with corkscrews. Corkscrews. Okay. Have you done corkscrews? I've based it. I don't know if I've flown it. Today's your lucky day. Today's my lucky day.

Let's go star. Star? Yep. So hand-to-hand grip. I'm going to have these two fingers on the wrists. So basically I want to keep the arms strong and the legs receptive, and you can jump when you're ready. Okay. And let's do up and down to straddle bat a few times just to calibrate.

Sure. All right. Let's go 180 to the front plank. Uh-huh. Good. That's it. Arms strong. We'll switch the hands. Switch again. Straddle and go slow. I gotcha.

Look at you, twinkle toes. Nice one. Thanks. Awesome. One more time? Sure. Good. Arms strong. Thanks. Awesome. One more time? Sure. Good. Yep. Arms strong, belly down. Switch the hand.

Then the second. Straddle wide, nice and slow. Nice. We've got to bust a hand-to-hand. We're here. Hand-to-hand? Yep. Straighten your arms.

Don't think about it. Strong arms. Even stronger elbows. Fall towards my feet. Right there. Mr. Tim Ferriss doing a hand-to-hand elbows in more arms in more yep newton push down push down yes yeah buddy that was good need to save the day all right you're a flyer now thanks Thanks, man. I'm trying. I'm trying.

I need to stop drinking gallons of cream every day. Take some weight off these thunder thighs. That was good. Your fat is my fit. Your fat is my fit. That's true. I was saying, I was actually working with a flyer, very, very gifted

flyer. I don't know if you've met Kiplin. No. Kiplin Sagmiller. At Kiplin on all the social. K-I-P-L-I-N-N. Very gifted. And I said to her at one point, I said, Kiplin, you realize that

this routine is starting to get easy. I need you to eat more. If this is going to be progressive resistance for me, I need you to gain like 10 pounds a month for the next three to five months. Maybe she should just get pregnant. It's an expensive way to train. True. So a couple of questions for you.

I want to talk about challenging times, just getting out of some of the technical stuff. And I apologize for having a very flat hand. I know I was thinking about the hand. I haven't flown in a while. So one of the things, actually, I might as well explain this. So if we're here, figuring out, you want to explain it? Sure. So basically, actually, let's stand up for this one.

So the way that humans connect is the hardest part in acrobatics we have more bones in our hands and feet than the rest of our bodies so finding all these micro angles is it's like wine it gets better with age and practice so if we have a straight arm line if we go really flat what that means is it's like we're doing it on the ground and we feel a lot of compression in the wrists. If we go really steep, just like a steep angle, we'll feel it in the thumb girdle and we find that Goldilocks, that happy medium. A little more flex. Yep. A little flatter. Good. And we lean into each other and we really feel not only our body is one piece, but our collective arm line is one piece.

That's where the money's at. You can calibrate that. You want to do a quick calibration? Yeah. Just like a tuck. I'll tuck it on you? Sure. You got a base.

You got to earn your paycheck. Okay, I'm going to not drop this very heavy thing right ahead. Drop the mic right on my front teeth. That'd be great. Okay, so what's great about this is there's not a lot of risk involved as I just bring my feet up a little bit, testing the water. If that goes well, a little more advanced can be a tuck. If that goes well, you can baby hand to hand. Arms more forward, forward, yep, keep coming, right there, better. Awesome, your quality of grip is nice, steepness is nice. Let's get Right there. Better. Awesome. Your quality of grip is nice.

Steepness is nice. It's getting there. Yeah. So the testing here and picking your feet off the ground, and you can also do little movements just to help activate the stabilizers in the shoulder. And what's cool about the way that we train with humans is there's no machine in a gym that can teach you how to unify your body. There's no machine that can teach you how to have a really strong line because it takes human chaos to create the stability to match that chaos. There's a rig that I'm pretty sure I came up with, but who knows?

Theraband rig? Well, actually, hold on a second. That could work. So the way that I put it together, so I was chatting with Coach Sommer, who helped me set up this incredible rings contraption that we were talking a little bit about, which includes something called a 50-50. You call it the dream machine. Thank God for the dream machine. It's Yeah. So imagine you have a... Thank God for the dream machine. It's incredible. Yeah. So imagine you have a harness around your waist. It looks something like a rock climbing harness.

This one's from Sam, I think it is. And a lot of Sam in this episode. And you clip that to a cable that then goes up over a pulley and then down to the rings. And that allows you to work with effectively half of your body weight, let's just call it. And therefore, you can progress in movements that you might not be able to even attempt safely, such as an Iron Cross or a Maltese or a Victorian, a Vic, or any number of things,

back lever, et cetera. But let's just say that's too intense, right? Because right now I have medial epicondylitis in both elbows. I also have severely inflamed right elbow bursa. This is olecranon bursa on the right side. And putting aside all the weird drugs and injections and so on that we might explore, I'm going to put that as a footnote for a future episode. The device that Coach Summer helped me to install

involves power levers. So power levers, and I'll put out some photos and videos of this at some point for people to check out, are awesome. So now it's in combination with the 50-50. And you'll see some people mimic this by using straps.

Or they'll fuss with the rings in such a way that the rings are effectively mid-forearm. And the power lever looks like a RoboCup glove. I already like it. Yeah, and it's made out of metal. There's a strap that goes around the forearm. And on top of the forearm, you have basically a uniform ridge of, let's just call it a half inch, that goes down to the top of the forearm you have basically a uniform ridge of let's just call it a half inch that goes down to the top of the hand and then perpendicularly you have these holes drilled

let's just call it 10 holes that go from the elbow to the fist now what does this allow you to do it allows you to take off the rings and then clip in the ring strap at your elbow. So now the point of support is closer to the fulcrum of the shoulder. Makes life even easier. Much, much easier. But over time, you can then just move it out one notch at a time or two notches at a time. And that's a little off topic related to the handstands, but it's just been an incredible boon for training. Yeah. Especially if you're, let's just say you're trying to attempt a movement like a proper ring dip with a support position at the top with your hands really externally rotated.

Surprisingly hard to do. I mean, there are people who can do 20, 30 dips who cannot do two proper gymnastics ring dips. So if you can only do two or three, you're doing a max effort set effectively. It makes it hard to get the skill practice of that movement. So you could do something like a 50-50 to allow you to do maybe it's 10, 15 total reps, 20 in a workout. The handstand rig that I was trying to figure out came out of a problem.

The problem was if I were kicking up to a wall or facing a wall and then losing my balance and coming out of it. Even worse. Exactly. My total time in the handstand position for practicing the alignment, tightness, and balance was really minimal. It was kind of like surfing where it's like, okay, I want to get good at surfing, meaning standing on the board and carving, but 99% of your time is spent paddling. Swimming. Yeah, swimming and paddling. And that's fine.

It's part of the sport. But what if you could use a wave pool or what if you could use wake surfing? Suddenly, you're able to really accelerate your progress in some very interesting ways. So we were chatting a little bit earlier. I didn't tell you about the rig, but you were like, does it involve just touching your toes on something, which is what Coach Summer calls a Chinese handstand. So you're underneath a bar of some type, and you're just touching with the tippy-tippy tips of your toes,

which requires you to maintain a lot of extension. The issue, though, that I would have with that as a novice is that if I lose the extension for a split second, I'm fucked. I'm going to fall one way or the other. And then I have to get the hell back up there, which is very, very nuanced. So what I realized is that I have a squat rack. It's a rogue rack.

And there's a dip attachment that goes on the side. And the dip attachment is, let's just call it, it's literally about this big. And what I'm doing, for those people who can't see me, is my arms are bent 90 degrees, elbows at the sides, and my hands are straight out, kind of like a Lego figure. And it's roughly this big. And what I realized is the actual grips were big enough for an Olympic weight plate collar. And I had some TheraBands, so I could put a TheraBand around the very end

and then lock them on with collars. I could kick up, get my feet inside, and then that allows me to be that one bone, one body, and use my wrists and my shoulders to correct. As I get fatigued, of course, I'm going to make mistakes. I'm going to start correcting by piking and doing all these bad things that I'll get chastised for later by Coach Summer in some hilarious emails that I hope to publish at some point.

But then you just... The Summer Diaries. The Summer Diaries, the notebook featuring Coach Summer and Tim Ferriss. You just tuck down and then you're out. Awesome. And it's just been an incredible accelerator in terms of getting just mileage in in that proper position, right? Well, this doesn't surprise me because in the year plus that I've known you, you've asked me so many seemingly gentle questions that have rocked my world.

And one of them that you asked recently was, is there a sequence that basically puts together all of the important poses in acroyoga? And I don't know if you know Bolero. Do you know that? I do. It's a classical song. Oh, I do. Is Bolero the one that's played in 10?

It's the one that's played in 10 with Dudley Moore and Bo Derek. And also Caveman, if you've seen that movie. But basically, the guy that wrote that, I think, is Ravel. He wrote that to educate people in all the different pieces of the orchestra. So it starts with violin and viola, and it's actually a beautiful song. But I thought, okay, I have to make this sequence that basically strings together every pose that I can think of in acroyoga.

I want to put bolero in the background. This is a very educational thing. It is going to be beautiful. It's not about the sequence. And basically what I've done is I've made these grids with front plank, reverse front plank, back plank, all these different things on one column, and then all at the top, and then I cross-reference. What is it like to go from a throne to a reverse front plank, reverse front plank, back plank, all these different things on one column and then all at the top and then I cross-reference. What is it like to go from a throne to a reverse front

plank? Is it beginner, intermediate, advanced or an expert or not possible? So basically what I want to do is go in the lab which is with me and a friend and just do all these different transitions and then basically try to get a unified field theory of Acra Yoga basically. So Einstein's one of my heroes and he worked on this most of the end of his life. He was trying to see how the strong nuclear force, the weak nuclear force, gravity and electromagnetism were all related. And I feel like something that I want to do with Acra Yoga in my life is to keep pulling

out these equations, pulling out these similarities between these seemingly unrelated things that once you crack the code, and this is very Tim Ferriss because you asked the question, once you crack the code, if I can come up with a five-minute sequence that has all these very important basic moves, that's what unlocks the human potential for very complicated flying transitions. So, yeah. And it also provides, well, number one, I can't wait to try it. Number two, it also provides motivation for the student.

And I think that if you look at, for instance, and this is part of where the thinking came from because the frustration was born of, and frustration I think in many cases is a good thing. It just, it gives you an itch that needs to be scratched. You need to figure out how to scratch it. And in this particular case, in any physical practice that is not regulated in some way by high stakes competition, which has its own kind of filtering and self-selection,

but it's totally different. Because let's say you're in China and you're putting together a national gymnastics team. You don't care if you completely destroy 999 athletes to find the one who can tolerate just an unhuman amount of workload and has free choice. And that's how the Chinese train. Exactly. And it's also how, I mean, a lot of military trained dogs, for instance, like they don't care if 99 of the dogs get completely messed up as long as they find the

one that's going to save a hundred lives in the field or whatever it might be. I shouldn't say they don't care, but it's just an unfortunate common side effect. But when you're dealing with recreational practitioners and you don't have, say, a national championship in that vetting process, like anyone who wants to participate can participate, I think it's more akin in some ways to like child's martial arts. So how do you keep kids interested in martial arts? You have belts. How do you get the belt? You have a kata.

You have a set form that, at least in theory, incorporates all the requisite skills that would represent that level of competence or mastery. And another analogy would be skiing slopes. So you have the green circle, I guess the blue square. I might be getting this wrong. And then the black diamond. And those are based on the characteristics of the slope, the steepness, the terrain features, moguls and so on. So I was thinking to myself, well, would it be possible, and this would also help the business

or the organization of AcroYoga in terms of retention, if people want to get to the next belt, i.e. master the next five-minute sequence. It's not only, it's a mutually beneficial construct because it keeps these students motivated and it keeps the entire ecosystem thriving. And so I remember thinking to myself, if you look at whether it's jiu-jitsu or judo or acroyoga, it's very common, you go into a class and it's whatever the teacher might want to work on that day or whatever occurred to them on the drive over. Maybe it's something they want to practice themselves.

And there's a lot of benefit to that. But at least for an OCD perfectionist idiot like myself, I need to know where I'm aiming. And so the idea of the sequence was really fun. That's what, as you know, I've been working on for the last eight weeks or so. And ended up getting the entire sequence, except for one, which everybody had trouble with, even the teachers, so I don't feel that badly about it, the London spin. Yeah, that one's hard.

That's a motherfucker. Yeah, that one's hard. I mean, we were able to do it 80% of the time. But it ain't pretty. Right. But the rest of it, it was really fantastic to have. This is something that Josh Waitzkin, who's been on the podcast, so the inspiration for the book and the movie,

Searching for Bobby Fischer, considered a chess prodigy. But I don't think that applies. Even though he has incredible talents, he can take his learning system, his approach, and apply it to just about anything. Jiu-jitsu, his first black belt under Marcelo Garcia, who's like the Michael Jordan of jiu-jitsu. Six, ten-time world champion? I don't know. There's no close second place. He's also applied it to a number of other fields. Tai Chi, he's applied it to now surfing.

He would call it learning the macro from the micro. Oh, I like that a lot. Right. So, for instance, you can learn a lot about someone's body awareness just by having them do an ATB drill. Oh, for sure. And if you want to learn, let's say, how someone is in language well, you could just offer them two pages of dialogue that include idiomatic jokes. Humor, that's a high bar. You can figure out a lot by seeing how they interact with foreign language humor. And in acro, like the corkscrew, that's a really good diagnostic tool. You have to

do a lot in the corkscrew. You have to have a lot of proprioceptive ability. And the thing that's unique with acro yoga is you've got two people or three people. So it's also one of my definitions of an advanced practitioner is somebody that can have a success with anybody. And my first master teacher I ever saw was a Bulgarian guy named Demetar Menchev. And he would literally pick up a six-year-old kid, hold him in his hands, chuck him up in the air and do this thing called a dislocate, push him to a high hand-to-hand and hold them in a one-arm handstand. And I saw this when I was 12, 13, and I was like, yeah, I want to get that good. And the ability to really support any different person and a lot of... Dislocate sounds terrible.

Now, is that where you come here and they jump through the middle? That's inlocate. That's inlocate. Yeah. Okay. is that where you come here and they jump through the middle? That's inlocate. That's inlocate. Yeah, okay. So dislocate's the other way. Dislocate's the other way, where the arms are here and they go like that. Oh. Yeah, you've got to have some mobility for that.

I need to work on that. I'm not earning it. You're never doing that. You can base it. You're never flying it. I don't say never that often. I'm happy to save my shoulders. They've had enough abuse.

Left shoulder already has pins in it. I don't need more of those. I really implore people, and you can find, I'm sure, synopses of this online, but get a hold of the meta-learning section of The 4-Hour Chef because it talks about how to work on one skill to develop it in such a way that it transfers to many other skills. So, for instance, if we're looking at sequencing and role-switching, I think this is really helpful for any type of partner practice.

In the world of tango, when I was in Argentina, I learned the female role before I learned the male role. That seems really weird. But working with Alicia Monti, who's an incredible world-class dancer, learning the female role because we had to. We didn't have enough women in the class. That's how it came about. And it was like, hey, when Buenos Aires was being populated by immigrants, the dudes would dance with one another. And it's like, hey, this isn't just for the Castro. Actually, there's a functional purpose here. And after learning the female role, it made it infinitely easier for me to learn the male role. Now, in acro, it's not a strictly male-female thing, as we just saw.

But very often, because men are sometimes, are often bigger than the women they end up facing. And they're just not very flexible. Oftentimes, you are. But guys will be like, I have strong legs. I'll just hold you on my legs. And even though I'm kind of chunky by acro standards, as a flyer, I try to fly whenever possible when there's someone like you or Justin Bent or Daniel Scott or some of these guys who are just incredibly solid bases. I want to fly because it helps my ability to base. It also, one step further than just understanding is compassion. If you're always basing and you're saying to the flyers, why are you so scared? And then you fly, you're like, oh, my God, this shit is scary. Or vice versa, if you're the flyer and you base a little bit, you're like, why are you so wobbly? And then you try like, oh, I understand why you're wobbling. It's hard.

Well, in South America, there's this one woman, very nice, very super flexy flyer who was, and I take it that this is a common term, bossy flyer. Yeah. Just like berating the shit out of every other bass. And it was just like, okay, why don't you try it? We were doing hand to hand. It's like, let you try it. Let you try the bass.

I bet that was a humble pie. Yeah, and that remedied the situation pretty quickly. And it's not that one is harder than the other. They're at any respectable level. They're both. They involve enough complexity and physical demand to be a humdinger, I think, and not very humbling. So for people who are listening or watching, it's like, we've talked about the acrobatic flying. We've talked about the therapeutic flying. The most interesting

is not treating those two as separate practices. But in the case of, for instance, when I'm practicing now, doing say 45 minutes of acrobatic and then 15 minutes of therapeutic. And it's, for me, it's like having two extra days of recovery. And it was reminiscent in a way to what I used to experience when I was training at this place called Fairtex here in San Francisco for Muay Thai. And the Thai trainers would do, I mean, very rough, but nonetheless, therapeutic Thai massage by just like whoa ish i mean technically they were tired they were massaging me so i guess it was time massage but they were just they would walk on you

right and before and after and that was just part of the warm-up and the cool down yeah and uh this just reminded me that that self-care what people might dismiss if they're kind of hard-edged males, especially as too soft and new agey and whatever, is actually a performance enhancer for the hard aspects in part. For sure. And this is the term Hatha Yoga. A lot of people hear it. It means sun and moon. Ha is sun, tha is moon. So a lot of the physical practices of yoga is about getting the masculine and the feminine energy to balance. So if you are on either side of the spectrum, we are all on one side or the other unless we're super balanced between strength and flexibility. Some people naturally are more strong. Some people naturally are more flexible.

Wherever you are as an athlete, as an acrobat, and even as a yogi, my belief is that you want to get towards that 50-50. So somebody like you is not going to expand their acroyoga or their yoga practice as intelligently until you get more mobility. And so being able to put in these therapeutic poses at the end of a practice, it's not just to make your body feel better in that moment. It's to set you up better for your next practice because if you're building strength and you're not building range of motion, you're basically making a time bomb.

When things go off, then you really need some deep healing. If you do homeopathic doses of healing along the way, unwinding the tension that you built up in your practice, It's just intelligent training. The Princess Bride method, Iocane powder. Exactly. Did you put it in? The Dread Pirates, Roberts. Training curriculum. Inconceivable. Yeah, exactly. And the simplest, perhaps, incentive that I had very early on to base, because I was watching it. Cause I was like,

I was watching and I'm like, that's cool. I think that'd be really helpful for jujitsu. And in fact, I mean a lot, there's a fair, I've seen a fair amount of crossover people who want to, who are,

who have good, uh, kind of rubbery guards are, are really effective basis. And if they want to improve one or the other, they're very symbiotic. Right. But what I realized very quickly after my first or second attempt,

because I was like, ah, it looks cool. The flying looks like a little bit more fun, but I'm too chunky. And the basing looks like a lot of work. But then I did it, and what I realized was when we're sitting down like this, so I had developed some back and hip issues. We're sitting like this a lot, and I'm sure Kelly Starrett, PT extraordinaire, could comment on this more intelligently, but you're effectively pushing the head of your femur forward.

You're sitting down. Your femur is getting set or pressured in an unnatural direction over extended periods of time. When I lay on my back, put my legs straight up in the air and support weight, I'm reseating the femur in the proper place. And it's that alone, I feel like just basing someone, even if it was just basing someone in folded leaf or bird, which we did, you know, jack I'm flying kind of thing earlier, for a few minutes at the end of the day is just incredibly beneficial. Let me ask some rapid-fire questions, the usual. So when you think of the word successful, who is the first person who comes to mind or people?

I got a tie. Gandhi, super successful, and Einstein, and from very different spectrums of humanity. And they actually met in South America while they were both alive. I would have loved to been the fly on the wall for that one. What I see in Einstein that I really appreciate is he had all the proof he needed to just keep moving forward with the way that people understood the world. And he basically stopped listening to everybody. He really went inside. He thought about things. He worked them out.

And he changed the world just from his mind. And the ability to be self-reliant, to believe in yourself, and to change the world because of how brilliant you are and how open your mind is, that's a high bar. And I've read more about his life, and he writes about love beautifully. And some of his quotes, one of my favorite quotes of his, I'm not going to say it right because it's in German. He says, I like to cut wood because I can see the fruits of my labor. Just a lot of really simple things, like as much as he was in the stars,

he was very pragmatic. And Gandhi, similarly, he didn't see the world in the box that he was born into. And when I see people that really don't take the world as it's being presented, and they have a vision of how things can be, and just that resolve, I feel like both of them were so committed to their vision and had so much resolve,

and both of them changed the world in such big ways. So that's a big definition of success for me. I want to highlight something you just said because the ability of Einstein to comment on beauty is something that I think, or to speak on the qualitative aspects of life with the razor sharp perception of a trained

scientist is something that's underappreciated I think by people who might be inclined to be scientists. It's very clinical and dry. Richard Feynman, another great example, physicist, but phenomenal teacher. Surely you must be joking. Mr. Feynman is one of my sort of favorite books of all time. Do you have any particular books you've gifted most to other people? The Prophet. The Prophet.

Yeah. The Prophet. These are lessons from Jesus? No, he's a Lebanese guy. I don't remember exactly his name. It's with the K, first name with the K, last name with the G. I cannot pronounce it. He's actually, yeah. And it's basically, he says, he's this guy who is speaking to a crowd, and somebody in the crowd will say, speak to us of pain, and he'll say, pain is the blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Speak to me of love.

Speak to me of being a father. And there's this, I love really, the hairs are standing up as I think about it, I love really accurate, condensed, Shakti-filled, energy-filled statements. Something that you can read in a few minutes or you can read for your whole life. So the Tao Te Ching would be a close second. And I feel like they have similar things where there's so much energy in each passage that you can sit down and speed read it. But the depth of these ideas and these concepts, that's actually the book that I have on my traveling altar, because all I do is travel.

So I have the Tao Te Ching, and oftentimes I'll just, before meditation, open it up randomly to a page and read about something, and then just have that be what I steep in as I sit. So I have to ask, because you just reminded me of it, you are constantly traveling. You have a very nomadic existence. Not very. I am fully nomadic. Fully nomadic.

What belongings do you travel with? Well, I have a rolling suitcase, a backpack, and an ukulele. In the backpack, I have my computer, a bunch of notes that are going to turn into a book sometime probably this year. And it's really dangerous. Nonfiction? And it's acroyoga. Acroyoga stuff. I have my altar items in my backpack. What are in your altar items? Different things from different places. Things that I've been gifted from students. Like what? Rocks. I've got some earrings from a girl that I'm her godfather. I've got a Mexican flag. The box is actually from Lebanon because I was

born in Mexico, but I have Lebanese heritage. So it's just a lot of mementos that remind me. It's photos as well. I have a photo of Dharmamitra. I have a photo of myself when I was in China competing at world championships when I was 16. And it's just things that feel important to me that keep me grounded. So in a sense, would you say, and I don't want to put words in your mouth, but I was going to ask what is the function of the altar, but is it your mobile sense of home? I mean, is that effectively what it is? Yeah. Yeah. And to a large degree, because of my life and lifestyle, my home is my community. And I have friends all over the world that if I, if and when, it's's a when it's not an if when I stop traveling full time I'm gonna not have that part of my life anymore so to be able to go

to Germany and hang out with Julia and Pascal and their daughter Leah who I love to death and I've seen the baby since it was in the belly and done acrobatics with them for many many years that's really what home is but having the the altar the unpacking the altar ritual is just, you know, like when I was a kid, I had Star Wars toys and games and I would love to set up my Star Wars stuff. It's the same thing where it's like, this is my magic kit. This is what makes me feel like a kid. It makes me feel excited. I put a candle on it a lot of times when I'm meditating. It's just, it's my happy place, my traveling happy place. What else do you have? I have some throwing knives. Throwing knives?

Yes. Any particular type of throwing knife? I've had many types. Throwing knives are easy to lose. Pretty much every time I roll through Sacramento, there's a place that I know that has them. So that's where my family is. Can you mention it?

Or is it like a wild sports? Wild sports throwing knives. Yeah, they've got guns, they've got worms, and they've got throwing knives. You're ready for the zombie apocalypse. You never know. Have you ever been stopped in customs for the throwing knives? I haven't. The knives were lifted out of my bag in Panama.

Lifted meaning permanently borrowed. Permanently borrowed, yes. When I was in Bali, I don't know if you've been. Have you been to Bali? So you know if you have drugs, we're going to kill you. Yeah, yeah. Well, another thing on the customs form is, do you have anything with any pointy objects? And I was like, I really don't want to give them up.

So I smuggled in some throwing knives to Bali. I've said it out loud. The Balinese police might hunt me down. The Balinese Mossad are on their way. That's a small impression. If so, that's a huge budget misallocation. Yeah, I'm a small fish. Niebuhr's not the biggest threat out there.

Anything else that comes to mind? Frisbee. I'm a Frisbee golfer. I saw a photo of that. Yeah. I love Frisbee golf. Basically, I love training in many different ways and hand-eye coordination. Do you have any go-to Frisbee for Frisbee golf it's basically i love training in in many different ways and hand-eye coordination do you have any go-to frisbee for frisbee golf i guess it'd be disc golf disc golf yeah it's it's

not a sport it's a pastime i correct people when they get really serious because there are people that have caddies or people that have like 20 for real for real those people think it's a sport it's a pastime no matter how hard you work at at it, it's a piece of plastic and you're throwing it around. I like, there's one called the Rock. It's a mid-range disc. It's very even flying. Not super good with distance. And the T-Bird is my go-to driver.

Wow. So, I mean, it really is like having a set of clubs. Yeah, you got your nine iron, you got your pitching wedge. And the discs fly differently. First of all, you have to get a repeatable swing before you have any success, just like golf. But once you have a repeatable swing, you can feel the nuance of this one fades left, this one fades right, this one goes straight. Is there anything that you've learned in acro that has translated to helping the Frisbee golf or vice versa? Well, I mean, I think every practice that I do,

they are relatable. How well I can listen to you at the podcast, how well I can do any number of things, it's all sensitivity, confidence, clarity, repeatability. So I'm always training and I'm always playing. And playing and training, for me, I figured out a way for them to be synonymous so I don't work hard at things I do things that I'm passionate about and I love what I do so that's everything is related what is now this is a funny question coming up on your very minimalist kit that you travel with.

But what is the purchase of $100 or less that has had the biggest positive impact on your life in the last memorable space of time? Yeah, we've already got it. It's the Frisbees for sure. The Frisbees. And I was hanging out with my two brothers and my dad. We decided to drive up the coast. And the three brothers, or me and my two brothers, we dad. We decided to drive up the coast. And the three brothers, or me and my two brothers, we've played frisbee golf our whole lives. So we love it. My

dad, not so much. But we got a bunch of discs. And then we went really high up on Highway 1 and threw them out into the ocean. And my older brother doesn't like it. He's like, oh, you're putting plastic in the ocean. But to watch a disc fly for like you know about a minute it's magical and it's in yoga there's this philosophy swaha i call it you know fuck it whatever let go so when i throw discs off of i've thrown it off machu picchu i threw it off chichen itza they did not like it in chichen itza but i like to throw frisbees off of really high objects. And when I'm in those very ceremonial places like Machu Picchu, it's like, what am I releasing? So it's an intentional act. It's like burning something on a piece of paper in the flames of a fire.

Yeah. But then you get to watch it fly. Then you get to watch it fly. Yeah. What do you believe that other people think is insane? That you can trust people. You can trust a lot of people. That you don't have to live in fear of strangers. Strangers are just people you haven't flown yet. And I've been all over the world. My mom was not happy when I was going to go to the Middle East for the first time. And I was

actually in Boston about to lead a teacher training. And this is when the Boston Marathon bomber happened. And I had 15 students that were on lockdown for 24 hours. And this is when the Boston Marathon bomber happened. And I had 15 students that were on lockdown for 24 hours. And I got on the phone to my mom, like, look, mom, you think Israel is dangerous. I'm in Boston. Like you cannot, you cannot hide from danger, but I don't think that's a reason to not trust people. I'm a very trusting person. I've traveled the world in some very sketchy places and I've never had anything bad happen to me. And I assume the best in people. I assume that I can trust them until they prove me wrong. And I think a lot of people think that's crazy. But when you do this practice enough, trusting is like a muscle that you flex. And it doesn't mean that I'm a cowboy with it. Like I

have really good credit assessment. You know, I can tell, is this person trustworthy for this engagement I'm about to have? But just in general, having an open mind, having an open heart, believing that people have good intentions. Yeah. How much of that do you think is bad things not happening to you versus seeing things in the most positive light, right? Because you had your throwing knives left in panel. True. So like shit happens. Yeah. I'm imagining. Yeah. Well, one of the, one of the things that happened to me that was really amazing was I had all of my objects liberated from me. I was living in a van in San Francisco and I had my 30th birthday party. I basically, I didn't want to work in restaurants. It's like, I'm a Yogi. I'm going to do this. I don't care how hard it is. I love this. Boom. So I was living in my van.

My 30th birthday, my friend throws me a party. And that night I got a book on Buddhism, a case of coconuts, hung out with my friends. The next day, my van's gone. My home's gone. Everything is gone. So I go crack a coconut and start reading about Buddhism because what the fuck else am I going to do? And page four is talking about homelessness and wandering. I'm like, that's what I'm going to do. And that started my nomadic traveling. And if I stayed in San Francisco and tried to make it as a yoga teacher, acroyoga wouldn't be a worldwide practice. So the ability to let go of what's not working and really assess what is working and what can I be

excited about. It's true. It's not that bad things don't happen to me. I don't label a lot of things good, bad. Can I evolve from this? What do I want now? Where is my center now? And this is all from yoga. Well, not all. My parents, a lot of other things, but yoga is the daily practice that helps me bring this wisdom into action steps in my life. So you mentioned something that I've never heard you talk about and we've never talked about before, but the restaurants and then the decision, fuck it, I'm going to do this full time. Walk me through like the 24 hours that led to that decision. Because at the time, did you realize it was financially feasible or was it just a Hail Mary, this is what I'm meant to do? Walk me through like 24 hours before you're like,

all right, I'm pulling the trigger. This is what I'm doing. Well, I made up my resume for restaurants and I was living in San Francisco. We had a rent-controlled house that three yogis were living in because the people that had the rent control left town and I was dirtbagging it. But at that point, all I needed was yoga and food. Like I didn't need money. I didn't have other ambitions. I wasn't traveling the world. So if

I had enough money to take yoga classes and to eat well, that's all I needed. When I got to that point of do I get a job or do I really dedicate to the yoga thing, it really wasn't a choice. It was such a big thing that happened in my life when yoga really hit me over the head. This is all I want to do. And if I do these other things, I'm not being true to the practices that I've been learning about. This is time for me to really dedicate to this. And my mom had a van and she didn't need it. I'm like, huh, I never thought I would live in a van.

But San Francisco was and still is super competitive with yoga. And yoga teachers are some of the most underpaid people on the planet because they have the potential to really bring a lot of beauty to people's lives. And they get paid $30 to $100 a class depending on what city you're in. So if I didn't live in the van, there really weren't a lot of other solutions I saw. And until the van was liberated, then I saw the other solutions. And living on the road, actually, you know, you're never really successful, at least I haven't been, in the cities where you start things. It's, you know, you go further away from

where things started and you're more luxurious and more exotic. San Francisco is still a difficult city to fill a room for me. So if I would have kept hitting my head against that wall, I wouldn't be here. The practice wouldn't be here. So I love it. I love that. So we're going to wrap up with just, just a few last questions. Uh, suppose this is as good a place as any to ask if you had a billboard, you could put anything on it. What would you put on it? Play. Play more. Play. Yeah. I feel like people are so serious and it doesn't take much for people to drop back into the wisdom of a childlike playfulness. So I think that's, that's, if I had to prescribe two things

to improve health and happiness in the world, it's movement and play those two things. Cause you know, you can't really play without moving. So they're kind of intertwined. Um, but if you're just moving and you're not enjoying yourself as you move, if you're on a treadmill, treadmills kill your spirit. I mean, not, there are reasons and times to do treadmills, but if you're just moving and you're not enjoying yourself as you're moving, if you're on a treadmill, treadmills kill your spirit. I mean, there are reasons and times to do treadmills but if that is your only way of moving your body, you're selling yourself short. There are way cooler ways to move your body, way more fun things and I just happen to have the good fortune to learn a lot of these really cool things and yeah, so play. Awesome. Jason, where can people find you online?

What would you like them to check out? Acroyoga.org is the website. And there are free learning opportunities. Acroyoga International is the name of the company that I run. And on YouTube, you can go there and see a bunch of free videos that get you started. What is the handle on YouTube? Acroyoga International. Okay, Acroyoga International.

And we'll put all this in the show notes, folks, so you can find everything else. Anything on social you'd like to mention? Instagram, Twitter, Facebook, where are you? It's all Acroyoga and it's all Jason Niemer. So jasonniemer.com, jasonniemer on Instagram. I try to keep it simple because I like to keep things simple if I can. Awesome, man. So much fun. Always great to hang.

Right on. And more flying and basing in the future. What a weird grip. That's not very useful. There we go. Oh, man. Good stuff. Thank you, Tim. Thanks. And everybody listening and everybody watching, as always, you can find the show notes at 4hourworkweek.com forward slash podcast. I'll have links to everything that we talked about. And until next time, thank you for listening and thank you for watching. Signing off. Yeah, I'm on.

Yeah, I'm on. That was fun. Hey, guys. This is Tim again. Just a few more things before you take off. Number one, this is Five Bullet Friday. That was fun. Bullet Friday is a very short email where I share the coolest things I've found or that I've been pondering over the week. That could include favorite new albums that I've discovered. It could include gizmos and gadgets and all sorts of weird shit that I've somehow dug up in the world of the esoteric as I do. It could include favorite articles that I've read and that I've

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